new scientist - june 21 2014

POWER STRUGGLECHEAP. CLEAN. RELIABLE.

CAN WE HAVE ALL THREE?

WEEKLY 21 June 2014

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3.80 US/CAN$5.95 No2974

SHARKS VS SERIAL KILLERS The secret mathematics that unites species

UNIVERSAL CLOCKSet your watch to quantum standard time

HEAD SPACEMicro bubbles open new route to brain

CONSUMPTIONS GIFTDid tuberculosis help us evolve intelligence?

DARK LIFE DISCOVEREDMysterious bugs lurk deep underground

21 June 2014 | NewScientist | 3

CONTENTS Volume 222 No 2974This issue online newscientist.com/issue/2974

News6 UPFRONT ISIS in Iraq. E-cig users are young, and heavy

smokers. Brazil violates nature reserve8 THIS WEEK

First surveys of life deep underground. Oil poisons Peruvian Amazon. Quantum standard time. Bionic pancreas. Saturns snowball moon. X-ray machine blasts off to space

16 IN BRIEF Coral culprits fingered. Vast ocean inside

Earth. Predicting antidepressant success

Coming next weekThe wrong universeIt looks different depending where you stand

The Old Bailey files Londons oldest court brought to life

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Head spaceMicrobubbles open a new route to the brain

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Power struggleCheap. Clean. Reliable. Can we have all three?

Dam nationKenyas priceless lake doomed by river dam

Technology19 Next generation hearing. Hacking the NSAs

bugs. Street safety gauged by the crowd. Gardening robots. Gloves that teach Braille

News

On the cover

Features

36 Sharks vs serial killers Maths that unites species

10 Dark life discovered Mysterious bugs lurk deep underground

28 Consumptions gift Did tuberculosis help usevolve intelligence?

8 Head space A new route to the brain

11 Universal clock Quantum standard time

Opinion26 No place for killing Marc Bekoff and Daniel

Ramp on compassionate conservation27 One minute with Andrei Linde Why

cosmic inflation theory is still looking good 28 Brain gain Did TB help human intelligence

evolve, ask AdrianWilliams and Robin Dunbar30 LETTERS Ethical stand. GM chestnuts

Features32 Power struggle (see above left)36 Sharks vs serial killers The secret

mathematics that unites species38 Sonic boom Are sound waves jeopardising

your smartphones security?42 Dam nation (see left)

CultureLab46 Counting them in When it comes to

numbers, its easy to deceive the ignorant47 Nature hunting Two tales of lost

biodiversity are both a joy and a heartbreak

Regulars5 LEADER We need to manage demand

forelectricity as well as supply56 FEEDBACK Website disclaimers57 THE LAST WORD Why do we lie?48 JOBS & CAREERS

Aperture24 Tumbling weeds invade the US


LEADERS

2014 Reed Business Information Ltd, England

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GETTING dark? Switch on a light. Its the most mundane of actions: so mundane, in fact, that we often forget just how formidable a task it is to keep the lights on. To achieve it, power stations, pylons and cables must work around the clock and in all weathers, and supply everything from smelters to hairdryers while theyre at it.

Not everyone takes access to electricity for granted. Less than a quarter of Ethiopias people are on the grid, according to the World Bank. The country wants to get 30 million more wired up but to do so, it risks killing off the rich ecosystem of Lake Turkana, the so-called Jade Sea (see page 42).

Quite the dilemma. Such quandaries are not confined to the developing world. The West, too, has tricky choices to make

WE USED to think our relationship with bacteria was simple: there were good ones that kept our digestive tracts healthy and there were bad ones that made us sick.

In recent years, this distinction has blurred. We know that many

Keeping the lights off

Industry is already worried about power failures; domestic users may soon share their concerns

Hackers vs spooks

Me and my microbiome

We must manage demand for electricity, as well as supply

when it comes to electricity supply. In the UK, successive governments shilly-shallying has led to older power stations being closed faster than newer ones are being built. Industry is already worried about the potential for power failures; domestic users may soon share their concern.

Suppliers are on the horns not of a dilemma, but a trilemma. Reliable power doesnt come cheap; but rising bills are hugely unpopular. Cheap power isnt green, but emissions must fall. And green power isnt reliable but the lights must stay on.

Is there any way out? The UKs National Grid proposes to tackle demand, rather than supply, by rewarding industrial customers for relieving the load on the grid at peak times (see page 32).

Its a neat idea. But we can go further. Rather than exhorting people to turn off the lights as smart meters seek to do smart switches should do it for them, while smart storage smooths supply and smart grids ensure it flows only as needed.

These elements are falling into place. But large-scale adoption requires political will that has been absent on the supply side. Economic incentives are a good way to encourage uptake; more, please. Better that we learn how to turn the lights off than relearn how to live without them.

bacteria can play both roles, living happily in us or on us as part of a healthy microbiome, but capable of turning nasty under certain conditions.

Now there are claims that a truly villainous bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which causes TB is actually symbiotic and helped us evolve our large brains (see page 28).

This is just a theory, but it is clear there is still a lot to learn about the interactions between us and our microbes.

The effect of microbiomes on health is already one of the fastest moving areas of biomedicine. As resistance to antibiotics drives us to re-evaluate them, a similar look at diseases like TB could uncover life-saving knowledge.

COMPUTER hackers usually get a bad press. But the mass surveillance now known to have been undertaken by the US National Security Agency and its allies may go some way towards changing that. The reason? To protect ourselves from snooping, we need to understand how it is done and few people outside the intelligence services are better equipped to do so than hackers.

Last year, German news magazine Der Spiegel published details of a confidential catalogue of hardware and software that the NSA used to extract information from our computers.

We now report how computer-security researchers have started to reverse-engineer the spying gadgets listed in the catalogue to work out how they operate (see page 20).

Thanks to their skills, we now know how the NSAs novel bugs capture and transmit the images being viewed on computer screens, send keystrokes as they are typed and ensure viruses that monitor PC use can never be removed.

What the hackers are doing is unlikely to win any high-profile accolades like Pulitzer prizes. Nonetheless, their efforts are just as important as whistle-blower Edward Snowdens leaks in protecting us from overbearing intelligence agencies.

6 | NewScientist | 21 June 2014

UPFRONT IRAQ

Stability, but at what cost?

DOES the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) plan to use water against enemies in Iraq?

ISIS already controls key dams on the Euphrates river, captured as its forces swept south-east from Syria into Iraq. With last weeks occupation of Mosul, ISIS took control of important dams on Iraqs other major river, the Tigris.

The rivers were the lifeblood of humanitys first civilisation, and remain crucial for farming. Damage to one dam north of Mosul could cause destruction as far as Baghdad, while water diversion could cause problems for Iraqs southern Shiites, which ISIS considers enemies. In late April, ISIS stopped flow through the Nuaimiyah dam in Fallujah, reportedly with the aim of depriving Baghdad of water. Instead, the river flooded the surrounding area.

The fall of Mosul

COLONIAL meddling a century ago has been blamed for the violence now racking the Middle East. In 1916, under the Sykes-Picot agreement the governments of France and the UK divided the Ottoman Empire into states that included Syria, Iraq and Lebanon.

The arrangement was made with scant regard for ethnic and religious differences. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), says it wants to restore the ancient Sunni Muslim caliphate across Iraq and Syria.

Some commentators have blamed Sykes-Picot, but Elias Muhanna of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island disagrees. The violence in Syria is not some messy centrifugal separation of an artificial state into its primordial ethnic or

Water as a weapon

sectarian ingredients, he says. John Breuilly of the London School of Economics says former colonial empires were carved into multi-ethnic states partly because people were intermixed and ethnic groups ill-defined, and partly to avoid conflict by privileging particular groups.

With prosperity and even-handed government, multi-ethnic

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states are viable, for example, Belgium and Malaysia. Recently in Syria and Iraq, however, governments have favoured particular ethnic or religious groups over others, and invasion or armed repression has shattered prosperity and security. Under these conditions people may revert to networks of kinship or religion to protect and organise

themselves, says Muhanna.Geography matters. If people

separate into ethnic enclaves that are too small to feel secure or are surrounded by other potentially antagonistic groups, then conflict and intense violence can result, according to modelling by Yaneer Bar-Yam and colleagues at the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts (PLoS ONE, doi.org/s74). Larger enclaves seem to work better: despite the unrest to its south, the area controlled by the Kurdish Regional Government in northern Iraq is peaceful and cross-border trade is thriving.

Getting rid of colonial borders will not lead to stability. The models suggest two alternatives. Countries with diverse populations can be stable if their governments can guarantee security to everyone. The alternative is reshuffling the regions people into ethnically or religiously defined states, such as the one ISIS wants. However, the migration and ethnic cleansing that would follow is likely to be considerable and violent.

Violence in Syria is not centrifugal separation intoethnic or sectarian ingredients

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VAPERS are likely to be young, and heavy smokers who are trying to quit. Thats the conclusion of the largest study yet of electronic-cigarette use in Europe.

Constantine Vardavas at the Harvard School of Public Health and his team analysed survey data collected from 26,500 people across 27 countries in Europe in 2012. Based on this, they estimate that 29 million Europeans have used an e-cigarette.

Use was highest in smokers aged 15 to 24, but the study found scant evidence that e-cigarettes

are encouraging those who dont smoke to pick up the habit. It also found that 20 per cent of smokers had tried an e-cigarette, 4 per cent of ex-smokers had and just 1.1 per cent of non-smokers had.

People who had tried to quit smoking in the previous year were twice as likely to have vaped as other smokers, and vaping was more common in those smoking at least six cigarettes a day than in those who smoked five or fewer (Tobacco Control, DOI: 10.1136/tobaccocontrol-2013-051394).

The study verifies that e-cigarette use does not renormalise smoking, says

Profile of a vaper

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GM kerfuffleON THE same side at last. Backers and opponents of genetically modified crops in Europe both object to new rules governing their growth.

The deal, agreed on 12 June, will let individual countries decide whether GM crops can be grown within their borders. It is meant to break a system that has allowed countries opposed to GM crops, such as France, to block them being grown elsewhere in Europe.

Anti-GM states will no longer be able to block Europe-wide approval of new GM crops, so pro-GM governments will be able to grow them. And member states would be able to ban GM crops from their farms without evidence that they harm the environment or human health.

Greenpeace, which opposes all GM crops, says the new system will allow biotech companies to legally challenge any bans that anti-GM countries impose.

The biotech industry isnt happy either. Trade association EuropaBio says the deal breaches a key principle: that crops should be allowed everywhere if the European Food Safety Authority decides they pose no risk.

The new rules face one more reading in the European parliament before becoming law. Electrifying impact

60 SECONDS

Get some fish inThe people in Europe and the US with the lowest levels of vitamin D are more likely to die from any cause, finds an analysis of eight studies that looked at vitamin D in 26,000 people. Vitamin D is made by the skin on exposure to strong sunlight and also found in foods such as oily fish (BMJ, DOI: 10.1136/bmj.g3656).

Gas shut downRussias state-controlled energy supplier Gazprom cut off gas to Ukraine on 15 June, a day after a Ukrainian military aircraft was shot down by pro-Russia separatists. Gazprom says Ukraines failure to pay $1.95 billion towards a $4.5billion debt is the reason, but Ukraine criticised the move as yet another attack on its independence.

Beyond PlutoDesirable destinations on the fringes of the solar system are hard to find. So NASA has enlisted the Hubble telescope to search for a body that its New Horizons probe can visit after it flies by Pluto in 2015. The plan is to find an icy lump left over from the solar systems birth, lying on the probes trajectory.

Eye for the ancient skyThe last of 66 huge dishes has arrived at the ALMA Observatory in Chile. It is the final piece of a network that will soon perform as one giant telescope. From its home 5000 metres up on Chajnantor plateau in the Atacama desert, it will observe some of the oldest, most distant galaxies in the universe.

Imperilled wondersAustralias Great Barrier Reef and Argentinas Iguaz waterfalls could both win extra protection at a meeting of UNESCOs World Heritage Committee in Doha, Qatar, this week. They are among several World Heritage Sites under threat, so thecommittee will seek new commitments from governments totackle the threats.

Amazonian power line strugglePOWER to the people but what about the wildlife? A power line threatens to cut a swathe through Brazils Amazon, including a vital nature reserve.

The Tucuru-Macap-Manaus line brings much needed energy from the Tucuru dam to the city of Manaus, which lies in the heart of the Amazon region.

But it is now being extended 750 kilometres north, cutting across the Adolfo Ducke Forest Reserve, run by the National Institute for Amazonian Research (INPA). Ducke is one of the worlds best rainforest research sites. It is the source of much of what is known about Amazonian ecology.

The line is suspended above the canopy on pylons, but to allow for

maintenance, a path up to 70 metres wide is being cleared under it.

Nocturnal animals such as jaguars, and prey species, including rodents like the agouti and paca, are unlikely to risk crossing such open land. This will isolate animals in the reserve and lead to species loss, says William Laurance at James Cook University in Queensland, Australia.

INPA researchers are also concerned, and are preparing a petition to say the reserve is simply too important to jeopardise.

Although shifting the line just a couple of kilometres would bypass the reserve, Brazilian firm Eletrobras has refused to consider measures to minimise the projects impact, says the INPA.

Konstantinos Farsalinos, a cardiologist at the Onassis Cardiac Surgery Center in Athens, Greece.

The study coincides with a letter to the World Health Organization from 129 doctors urging the WHO

to regulate e-cigarettes as tobacco products. It is a riposte to a letter sent earlier this month by another group of scientists, accusing the WHO of overlooking vaping as a low-risk alternative to smoking.

UPFRONT

Smokers trying to quit are most likely to use e-cigs, suggesting they dont renormalise smoking


Helen Thomson

KULLERVO HYNYNEN is preparing to cross neurosciences final frontier. In July he will work with a team of doctors in the first attempt to open the blood-brain barrier in humans the protective layer around blood vessels that shields our most precious organ against threats from the outside world.

If successful, the method would be a huge step in the treatment of pernicious brain diseases such as cancer, Parkinsons and Alzheimers, by allowing drugs to pass into the brain.

The blood-brain barrier (BBB) keeps toxins in the bloodstream away from the brain. It consists of a tightly packed layer of endothelial cells that wrap around

every blood vessel throughout the brain. It prevents viruses, bacteria and any other toxins passing into the brain, while simultaneously ushering in vital molecules such as glucose via specialised transport mechanisms.

The downside of this is that the BBB also completely blocks the vast majority of drugs. Exceptions include some classes of fat and

lipid-soluble chemicals, but these arent much help as such drugs penetrate every cell in the body resulting in major side effects.

Opening the barrier is really of huge importance. It is probably the major limitation for innovative drug development for neurosciences, says Bart De Strooper, co-director of the Leuven Institute for Neuroscience and Disease in Belgium.

Hynynen, a medical physicist

THIS WEEK

Breaking and enteringBreaching the brains protective sheathing could help cure brain diseases

SPL

Identifying effective and safe ways to open the blood-brain barrier has been a major goal for years

No longer impenetrable


at Sunnybrook Research Institute in Toronto, Canada, thinks the answer lies in gas-filled microbubbles. These were discovered accidentally in the 1960s when radiologists noticed that tiny bubbles in blood made ultrasound images clearer. More recently, they have been investigated as a way to help treat hard-to-reach cancers.

Hynynens trial will involve

10 people with a cancerous brain tumour. First, the volunteers will be given a chemotherapy drug that does not usually cross the BBB. They will then receive an injection of microbubbles, which will spread throughout the body, including into the blood vessels that serve the brain.

Next is a treatment called high-intensity focused ultrasound. The volunteers will wear a cap that contains an array of transducers that direct ultrasound waves into their brain. Just as the suns rays can be focused by a magnifying glass, ultrasound waves can be concentrated inside the body to get the microbubbles to vibrate.

The vibrating bubbles will expand and contract about 200,000 times a second, which will force apart the endothelial cells that form the BBB. The idea is that this will allow the chemotherapy drug in the bloodstream to sneak through the gaps in the barrier and into any nearby tumour cells (see diagram, above right).

The ultrasound will be on for a maximum of 2 minutes, during which time it will perforate the BBB in nine sites around each volunteers tumour. To confirm that this happens, the team will inject a fluorescent marker and watch it move from the blood stream into the tumour using fMRI scans. Shortly after, the volunteers will have surgery to remove the

In this section First surveys of life deep underground, page 10 Bionic pancreas in real-world trials, page 12 Next-generation hearing aids, page 19

For example, trastuzumab (sold as Herceptin) is an effective treatment for some breast cancers but it cannot cross the BBB to reach tumours that have metastasised and travelled to the brain, so opening the BBB could help. It could also make it feasible to produce highly tailored drugs for a whole spectrum of brain receptors, says De Strooper, meaning potential treatments for conditions such as schizophrenia or clinical depression.

Alzheimers would be another possible target. In brain tissue grown in a dish, antibodies that cannot easily cross the BBB have been shown to wipe out the

protein plaques that are characteristic of Alzheimers (Experimental Gerontology, doi.org/s79). We think trials of these antibodies in humans failed because researchers havent managed to get a high enough dose into the brain, says Hynynen. So we hope to try these drugs in humans in the future, maybe as soon as a year, depending on how well this first trial goes.

One stumbling block might be what happens to the drugs once they are in the brain, says Matthew Wood at the University of Oxford, as most drugs wont spread between brain cells unaided. This could mean having to open up the BBB throughout the brain for diseases like Alzheimers, where the damage is widespread, he says.

Hynynen doesnt envisage this being a big problem. We have disrupted whole hemispheres in animals without any negative consequences, he says. In Alzheimers you would most likely target areas which had the largest volume of plaques first where the impact of the disease is greatest and eventually zap the whole brain over several sessions. Its a slow-progressing disease so you have lots of time to divide up the brain into sections, open them up one by one and let each section recover before moving on to the next area, he says.

tumour, which will be sampled to compare the concentration of the chemotherapy drug in areas zapped by ultrasound with those that remained unzapped.

The BBB starts to close almost immediately after the ultrasound is turned off, says Hynynen, and should be back to normal about 6 hours later. Although opening up the BBB to drugs also opens it up to unwanted toxins, animal experiments have shown few side effects and no long-term effects on behaviour or health (PLoS One, doi.org/p9n).

Youre not exposing the brain to any more bacteria than you are when you do open brain surgery, says Hynynen. Importantly, the treatment is non-invasive and painless. Theoretically, the patients could go straight home, says Hynynen.

Identifying effective and most importantly safe and reversible methods for opening the BBB has been a major goal in the development of neurological treatments for many years, says Eleanor Stride, who studies drug delivery at the University of Oxford. This is very exciting news indeed. If the results can be replicated in people this will be a huge step forward for treating a wide range of diseases.

SNEAKING PAST THE GUARDSWhile researchers are gearing up to disrupt the blood-brain barrier (BBB)using sound (see main story), others are trying to sneak drugs into the brain using more subtle approaches.

For example, a team led by Matthew Wood at the University ofOxford wants to exploit natural nanoparticles called exosomes. Think of these as your bodys own taxi fleet; tiny lipid-soluble vehicles that can ferry their contents across the BBB. Animal studies have shown that it ispossible to fuse exosomes with proteins that make them home in on certain brain cells. Fill these exosomes with genetic material that can switch off genes implicated in brain diseases

such as Alzheimers, and they will deliver them for you. We dont fully understand the underlying biology yet, but its promising because we arecapitalising on a natural pathway that already exists, says Wood.

Another route into the brain involves antibodies molecules thatare normally too large to pass through the BBB. Researchers at Swiss pharmaceutical firm Roche have developed what they call a brain shuttle antibodies that bind to a receptor on the surface of the BBB. The antibody and anything attached a drug for Parkinsons disease, say gets dragged across the barrier into the brain.

A real breakthroughMicrobubbles injected into the blood and then vibrated by ultrasound can force apart the protective endothelial cells that line the blood vessels in the brain. This enables drugs targeting tumour cells to breach the blood-brain barrier

Endothelial cells

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Brain cellThe treatment is non-invasive and painless. Theoretically, the patients could go straight home


Catherine Brahic, Sacramento

THE strange organisms that eke out a living deep beneath our feet are finally being revealed by genetics. Many of them are small, co-dependent and fuelled by mysterious sources of energy.

We know that billions of microorganisms inhabit the earth, the underground aquifers that supply our drinking water, and even the deep nether regions of Earths crust, far beneath the seabed. But we know nothing about what most of these microbes are and how they live. Some of them, in the so-called dark energy biosphere, are the deepest living organisms, somehow surviving hundreds of metres underground, far from the suns life-giving light.

We know there are microbes living down there, but we have no idea what they do, says Beth Orcutt of the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in East Boothbay, Maine. We want to go after them.

At the Goldschmidt conference in Sacramento, California, last week, Orcutt and Jill Banfield of the University of California, Berkeley, presented separate detailed surveys of these microbes, revealing what kinds of organisms live in such strange habitats and offering tantalising hints about their lifestyles. It is our first close look at an utterly alien world.

Banfield is using a brute-force approach called metagenomics. Essentially, she sequences the genomes of every organism in a given water or soil sample en masse; an entire community at once. Its a kind of genetic census, and gives a sense of the richness of an ecosystem and how its members interact.

Metagenomics has already

been used to sequence peoples gut flora, and the geneticist Craig Venter famously tried to sequence the uncounted microbes living in the ocean. But sequencing the full genomes of dozens or hundreds of species in one hit has proved challenging, so studies tend to focus on simple communities with relatively few species, or to settle for random chunks of DNA rather than complete genomes (Science, doi.org/s7m).

To solve this problem, Banfield is using sophisticated algorithms to digitally reassemble snippets of DNA into entire genomes. Her team has used this method to identify the microbes living in an aquifer near the Colorado River in Rifle, Colorado. They say they can now reliably get complete genomes from hundreds of

organisms in one go, including rare ones that make up less than 0.1 per cent of the ecosystem.

People have wanted to do that for ages, says Orcutt. Whatever computational approach they are using is revolutionary.

The analysis has revealed some known microbes and many completely unstudied ones. Many of these mystery microbes are very small cells, with small genomes laced with unfamiliar genes. Fifty per cent of the genes in these genomes have no known

function, says Banfield an unusually high proportion.

Some of the microbes seem to lack a metabolism, so cannot feed themselves and may be reliant on other species for survival. As a result, they could never be grown in isolation in the lab, which helps explain why

they have never been seen before.Banfield has now used the DNA

sequences to draw a family tree of all the microbes her team found in the aquifer. They found lots of completely unknown organisms, unrelated to anything that has ever been grown in a lab. All of these cryptic organisms clumped into one branch of the family tree.

Meanwhile, Orcutt is focusing not on aquifers but on hidden rivers flowing deep beneath the seabed, through cracks in the Earths crust. These channels may connect seemingly separate parts of the underworld.

To access them, she uses boreholes that have been drilled into the Juan de Fuca ridge in the north-eastern Pacific, where the Pacific plate dives beneath the North American plate.

The boreholes have been in place since 2010, sealed off at the top. In 2013, Orcutts team used a remotely operated underwater vehicle to collect water from observatories attached to the boreholes (pictured). This water should all have seeped up from the subsurface rivers below, rather than washing in from the ocean above. These are probably the most pristine samples weve ever got from the deep marine biosphere, says Orcutt.

Rather than sequencing all the microbes at once, Orcutts team picked out individual cells, broke them open, then collected and sequenced their DNA. Like Banfield, they found many organisms new to science.

Orcutt says the first question is how they survive. Their genes suggest they consume methane, which by itself is not surprising, as many other microbes use this as a source of energy. But earlier studies found hardly any methane beneath the Juan de Fuca ridge, says Orcutt.

We already knew that life in the deep subsurface is sparse. It may be that what does survive down there is scraping by on a larder that is virtually bare, effectively pushing at lifes lower limits.

Light cast on deep, darkbiosphere

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Borehole sentinel

THIS WEEK


TIME for clocks to get a quantum boost. With the help of the spooky property of entanglement a series of atomic clocks could be turned into one ultra-precise world clock.

Such a feat would allow all countries to agree on an exact measurement of time in real-time. This would be a boon for GPS services and for lightning-fast financial transactions, which need to agree on the time at different locations to be accurate. The clock could also create a massive quantum sensor for probing cosmic mysteries.

Atomic clocks measure the microwave or optical frequency needed to make a single electron in an atom jump from one energy level to another. The standard clock uses caesium atoms, which emit microwaves exactly 9,192,631,770 times per second. The signal is so reliable that the latest caesium clock to come online in the US will not lose or gain a second in about 300 million years. So why do we need a quantum clock? Because there is no real-time measure of a

universally agreed standard time.Timekeeping institutes around

the world each have their own caesium clocks. They submit their time signal measurements to the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Paris, France, which averages them and publishes a monthly newsletter that sets Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).

UTC is a month in arrears, and there is a big drive to a real-time formulation, says Leon

Lobo of the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, UK.

Eric Kessler at Harvard University and his colleagues think that quantum entanglement could be the answer. When quantum objects such as atoms are entangled, measuring one has a direct and predictable effect on the other. If you were to entangle atomic

clocks around the world and on orbiting satellites, it would help them to tick together.

If you consider the individual clocks as pendulums, then entangling the different clocks causes the different pendulums to swing perfectly in unison, says Kessler.

His team evaluated existing clocks around the world and proposed a blueprint for a hypothetical network (Nature Physics, doi.org/s7k). The team calculates that their global quantum clock would be about 100 times more precise than any individual clock. It would also be naturally protected from hackers, as the laws of quantum mechanics would immediately alert you to any attempts at eavesdropping.

But entanglement is a very delicate state, so it may be a while yet before such a large quantum network could come online. Such a clock would involve links between scores of atoms, and the record for entangling these kinds of atoms is just 14.

There is no doubt that it is an ambitious proposal, and has a long way to go, says Kessler. Substantial technological advances are needed, although all the different building blocks have, in principle, been demonstrated in a small scale.

The quantum network is a worthy goal, says Ruxandra Bondarescu at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, because it could double as a sensor for conducting fundamental physics experiments. A highly sensitive global clock could be used to measure minute variations in Earths gravitational field, for instance, based on changes to its ticking speed predicted by general relativity. The clock could also hunt for ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves, which would briefly shift its tick.

It has been hard to get funding for relatively impractical applications, says Bondarescu. Such a network of clocks would be amazing. Jacob Aron

THE Peruvian Amazon, home to many remote tribes some uncontacted by globalised civilisation is also the site of widespread contamination from oil.

For decades, oil companies in Peruhave dumped toxic fluid extracted from oil wells into rivers, instead of injecting them back into thedrill sites in accordance with international protocols.

Demonstrations and lawsuits by indigenous peoples in the last decade have exposed the failure of oil companies to clean up their spills. But only a handful of studies have offered any data on contamination levels.

The latest study, presented last week at the Goldschmidt conference in Sacramento, California, may be the most comprehensive to date. It covers 30 years and 18 different dumping sites on three watersheds.

Antoni Rossell-Mel of the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain and colleagues collated data on pollutant levels in water samples taken from rivers around drilling sites. The data had been collected since 1983 by government agencies, some non-governmental organisations and the oil companies, but no one had collated and analysed it, says Rossell-Mel.

Rossell-Mels team showed that 68 per cent of the samples were above Perus current limits for lead concentration and 20 per cent were above cadmium limits although pollution levels fell significantly after 2007, when regulations were introduced to stop drilling companies dumping toxic waste into rivers.

Rossell-Mel notes that frequent oil spills are also a concern, particularly as local communities rely on game hunting and fishing for food. No one knows how widespread the spills are. The pipelines cut through the Amazon are frequently rusty and almost impossible to monitor. These places are very, very remote, he says. Its difficult to know what happens everywhere. Catherine Brahic

Build the ultimate world clock with quantum cogs

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For daily news stories, visit newscientist.com/news

Universal time is a month in arrears, so there is big interest in a precise, real-time world clock

Toxic oil works are polluting Perus Amazon


THIS WEEK

Bob Roehr

ED DAMIANOS son was 11 months old when he was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. By the time he heads off to college in 2017, his father hopes to have freed him and millions of others from the burden of managing the disease.

Damiano, a biomedical engineer, has created a digital pancreas that automatically regulates sugar levels in the blood via a smartphone. The latest clinical trials of the device suggest he might just hit his deadline.

Type 1 diabetes occurs when insulin-producing cells in the pancreas die off. Without insulin, the body cannot regulate blood sugar, and levels can skyrocket. The disease can be managed with careful control of what food is eaten and when, modifying physical activity, and the use of pumps or injections to deliver insulin and the glucose-raising hormone glucagon.

Controlling diabetes is all-consuming, requiring attention around the clock. Damiano, who works at the University of Boston, says the device his team has developed with colleagues at the

Massachusetts General Hospital offers hope of a more normal life for people with diabetes.

The digital pancreas takes over the task of monitoring and regulating blood sugar levels. Every 5 minutes, a signal is sent wirelessly from a glucose monitor under the users skin to an iPhone app. The app calculates the amount of insulin or glucagon needed to balance blood sugar and then sends a signal to pumps carried by the user to administer

the required dose via a catheter. Having performed well in

hospital-based clinical trials in 2010, the digital pancreas is now being tested in a real-world environment. In the latest study, 20 adults wearing the device were put up in a hotel for five days but were otherwise free to spend their time as they pleased, including eating in restaurants and going to the gym. Thirty-two young people, aged 12 to 20, were also monitored for five days at a camp for children with diabetes.

For both groups, the results were compared with five days of the participants usual method of controlling the disease finger-prick blood tests and a manual insulin pump.

The device performed beyond expectation, it did a wonderful job of controlling their blood sugar, says Damiano. High and low sugar levels were both better controlled using the device than when the participants managed on their own, he says (NEJM, doi.org/s7w).

In many cases, the participants were reluctant to give the devices back, says Damiano. They got a glimpse of life without diabetes, and that is pretty profound.

Its fantastic that research on the artificial pancreas is forging ahead, both in the US and in the UK, says Alasdair Rankin, director of research at Diabetes UK, a charity that is supporting the development of a similar device with researchers at the University of Cambridge. There is now real hope that this technology has the potential to transform the lives of people within a generation, he says.

Damiano hopes that a series of longer trials starting this month and next year will pave the way for the device to be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration. With any luck, this will happen before his son (pictured in 2011) goes to college in three years time.

The results of Damianos study and those of several other groups working on artificial pancreases were presented at the American Diabetes Association meeting in San Francisco last week.

Bionic pancreas cuts diabetes stress

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If Titans methane levels dropped by a factor of 100, temperatures would fall and its lakes would freeze

Hope for a normal life

SATURNS largest moon may once have been a giant snowball.

Titan is already a frigid moon made mostly of ice. But methane gas in its atmosphere keeps the surface just warm enough for a scattering of lakes filled with liquid hydrocarbons.

Scientists have puzzled over Titans atmospheric methane because the molecule is easily broken down by

Snowball Titan solves methane mystery?

sunlight. Calculations suggest that all the methane Titan seems to possess should have been used up within tens of millions of years a blip in the moons roughly 4-billion-year lifetime.

Adding to the mystery, the methane breakdown creates other compounds that rain over the surface, helping to fill the lakes. If used-up methane was replaced, this process would happen constantly, so Titan should be covered not by lakes, but by a global ocean hundreds of metres deep.

Michael Wong at the California Institute of Technology says snowballs may be the missing piece (Icarus,

doi.org/s7z). Scientists suspect Earth went through a snowball phase about 2 billion years ago, when the planet became covered in ice.

A similar event could have taken place on Titan, says Wong. Methane levels may rise and fall if the gas is periodically released from inside themoon. If at some point the methane dropped by a factor of 100, temperatures would fall, and surface

liquids would freeze over. A different mix of compounds would also be produced in the atmosphere. So this cold snap would mean the moons surface should host lots of compounds called nitriles, which would be solid rather than creating an ocean.

The New Horizons mission to Pluto could offer early clues, says Wong: Like Titan, Pluto has an atmosphere that is mostly nitrogen with some methane. Plutos atmosphere is much thinner and colder, but the physics are similar enough that examining its composition could boost the snowball model. Jeff Hecht


Aviva Rutkin

MAKE no bones about it: the International Space Station is about to get its first medical X-ray scanner.

Astronauts will use the device to study the effects on rodents of extended periods of time spent in microgravity.

Bones deteriorate quickly in space, losing about 1 to 2 per cent of their mass for every month away from Earth. Muscles and organs also suffer in low gravity.

No astronaut has spent more than six months at a stretch on the ISS, so direct medical studies only cover relatively short-term effects. A good diet and strenuous exercise minimise the damage, but no one knows how the human body will fare on long-term missions to an asteroid, for example, or Mars.

Mice have been kept aboard the ISS for up to 91 days, during which time they were used to study a loss in blood quality called flight

anaemia, and the effects of cosmic radiation on fertility.

The condition of individual astronauts is routinely studied before and after a mission, but this can only reveal so much. Whats needed is research while travellers are actually in orbit.

Previous research was a lot more limited than what were now able to support, says Mike Roberts at the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS), which manages science experiments on the ISS and helped fund the new scanner. This device will enable investigators to track bone loss in real time.

Astronauts are now being trained in how to care for and handle rodents in space, and a training video on how to use the X-ray scanner will be sent to the crew before the device arrives.

But building an X-ray scanner that can operate in space is no mean feat. The machine needs to be safe to use, robust enough to survive the rattles of the launch

vehicle, and straightforward to fix when something goes awry.

Having a radiation source on board the station is something that has never been done before, says Rich Boling, a vice-president at Techshot in Greenville, Indiana. The firm spent the last two years developing the scanner, which it calls the Bone Densitometer.

The Techshot team started with a device called a dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry scanner, a common lab tool about the size of a microwave oven. Engineers went

over NASAs safety guidelines and stripped out any materials that could pose a fire or health risk.

For example, the scanners wires are normally insulated with polyvinyl chloride. This material can produce a toxic gas when heated, a serious hazard in the cramped quarters of the ISS. The space-ready scanner uses Teflon instead. And stainless steel components replaced any made of tin or zinc, as these metals can grow slender crystalline whiskers that might break off

and cause damage. The team redesigned the

scanner to be foldable, so it can be stowed when not in use. They also made it easier to swap out certain parts, for ease of repair.

The finished machine will travel on the next cargo run by private firm SpaceX of Hawthorne, California. Due to lift off in late August, the mission will also carry SpaceXs first mammalian passengers 20 mice and rats that will spend six months on the station in specially designed habitats. They will be used in a variety of medical experiments to assess the effects of microgravity on the body. For instance, one experiment will look at changes in the blood-brain barrier to learn more about why space travel can cause cognitive and visual problems.

The first X-ray experiments are slated to begin in December, once the animals have become accustomed to their new home and the astronauts are comfortable with their care. During a scan, they will be isolated in containers to prevent urine or faeces from floating free. To keep the animals themselves from drifting around, the X-ray tray has a sticky surface, which Techshot chief scientist Eugene Boland likens to the back of a Post-it note.

As well as providing data for future space missions, the findings might be useful back on Earth, to help people with skeletomuscular diseases, says Roberts.

For example, one study will focus on mice that have been bred to have a muscle-wasting disease tied to a particular gene. The experiment was designed by pharmaceutical firm Novartis, which will use the data to design drugs to combat the disease.

NASA is looking for all sorts of diagnostic technology that will help with a trip to Mars, says Roberts. CASIS is looking for Earth benefits. This payload does both.

X-ray medicine blasts off to space

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Rats do their bit for space flight

THIS WEEK


ENTER the hunter. An extinct fish called Megamastax, which prowled the oceans 423 million years ago, is the earliest fish known to be a top predator.

The find supports the idea that animals like us, with jaws and backbones, evolved in southern China. It could also help pin down when oxygen in the atmosphere first reached modern levels.

Brian Choo, now at Flinders

University in Adelaide, Australia, and colleagues studied a lower jaw and part of an upper jaw from south-west China. They say Megamastax was 1 metre long, with a 16-centimetre-long jaw. It had sharp teeth along the front to grip slippery prey and blunt teeth in the back to crush their shells (Scientific Reports, doi.org/s64).

It could have eaten just about anything it wanted, says Choo.

Megamastax adds to the evidence that jawed vertebrates first evolved in what is now southern China, between 420 and 360 million years ago, before going global. Southern China was the cradle of life for jawed vertebrates, says Choo.

Megamastax is three times the size of other fish from the time. That suggests the air must have been oxygen-rich 20 million years before we thought. Otherwise, the fish couldnt have grown so big.

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Bacterial suspects identified in death of Caribbean corals

THREE bacteria seem to be responsible for a disease that has killed most of the Caribbeans reef-building corals.

White band disease causes the outer layer of corals toturn white and peel off. Since the 1970s it has swept through the Caribbeans staghorn and elkhorn corals. Both are now critically endangered. This disease has taken out the key ecosystem architects, says David Smith of the University of Essex in Colchester, UK.

Now some likely culprits for white band disease have been identified. Michael Sweet of the University of Derby in the UK and colleagues treated diseased corals with

antibiotics and tracked whether they recovered. They also monitored changes in the microorganisms present. This allowed them to find the bacteria thought to trigger the disease.

Three bacteria were consistently present in diseased corals, but not healthy ones: Vibrio charchariae a long-suspected offender, Lactobacillus suebicus and anunidentified species of Bacillus. One or more seems toberesponsible for white band disease (Proceedings ofthe Royal Society B, DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2014.0094).

Getting this smoking gun really provides you with conservation options, says Smith. It might be possible to identify where the bacteria are coming from and target the site human activity, such as sewage dumping, may have boosted the bacteria, for example.

Oldest predator fish hailed from China

Choose what floats with a sound sieve

SIEVES made of sound could one day ramp up the power of nano-manufacturing and cell therapy.

Ultrasound waves have been used before to levitate and mix small objects or droplets. A team led by Hairong Zheng of the Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology in China has now used sound wave pressure to lift and sort many objects at once.

The team etched a thin brass plate and placed it in a tank of water. Ultrasound blasted from above sends acoustic waves through the water that cause the plate to resonate with the surface below. The resulting sound pressure lifts objects placed in the tank according to size and density (Physical Review Applied, doi.org/s68).

The team sorted small glass beads from larger ones and glass beads from tin. Zheng says the device could be tuned to sort a range of nano-scale objects.

Our humming brain helps us learn fast

OUR ability to learn rapidly may lie in the hum of our brainwaves.

The growth of new connections in the brain helps memories form, but this is too slow to explain rapid learning. To see if brainwaves play a role, Earl Miller at MIT observed brain activity in monkeys taught to categorise dots into two groups. At first, they memorised which dots went where, but as the game became harder, they shifted to learning rules behind the game.

The team found that, initially, brainwaves of different frequencies were produced in two areas involved in learning. But as the monkeys learned the rules these synced to the same frequency. Miller believes this is a precursor to anatomical changes in brain connections (Neuron, doi.org/s7n).

IN BRIEF


Vast ocean found deep inside Earth

STILL waters run deep. A reservoir of water three times the volume of the worlds oceans has been found towards Earths core. It could explain where the seas came from.

The water is hidden in a blue rock called ringwoodite that lies 700kilometres down in the mantle, between Earths surface and core.

Steven Jacobsen of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and colleagues used seismometers to study the seismic waves from more than 500 earthquakes. By measuring the speed of the waves at different depths, the team could determine which types of rocks they passed through. The water layer revealed itself because the waves slowed down it takes them longer to get through soggy rock than dry (Science, doi.org/s66).

The finding supports a recent study by Graham Pearson of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. He studied a diamond from the transition zone, between the upper and lower mantle, that was carried to the surface via a volcano, and found that it held water-bearing ringwoodite (Nature, doi.org/s6h).

The reservoir throws light on the origin of Earths water. Some geologists think it arrived in comets, but the new finding suggests the oceans oozed out of Earths interior.

Its good evidence Earths water came from within, says Jacobsen.

Depression drug success foretold

PEOPLE starting antidepressants must wait for weeks until they find out whether the drug works for them. A newly identified molecule in the blood could speed things up.

Micro-RNAs are small molecules that help turn genes on and off. Gustavo Turecki of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, compared levels of 1000 miRNAs in the brains of people who had committed suicide with levels in people who had died from other causes. A molecule called miRNA-1202 was significantly lower in the suicide group.

Blood samples taken from people

about to start treatment with citalopram, one of the most widely used antidepressants, showed that those who responded to the drug had about half the levels of miRNA-1202 as those who didnt respond. Another drug called imipramine, which belongs to a different class of antidepressants, had similar effects on miRNA-1202 to citalopram, when applied to neurons grown in the lab.

Measuring levels of the moleculein a person might predict whether or not the treatment will be effective, says Turecki (Nature Medicine, doi.org/s5v).

ROUND and round a pulsar goes, but add dark matter and its spin starts to slow.

Pulsars are dense stellar cores left over when massive stars blow up. They rotate very fast, shining light from their poles that we see as regular flashes on Earth. Their strong magnetic fields gradually slow their spin, but over the past 15 years, astronomers have noticed that many pulsars are slowing more than we would expect.

Chris Kouvaris at the University of Southern Denmark thinks a form of dark matter with a tiny

electric charge may be putting on the brakes.

Kouvaris and Maria ngeles Prez-Garca at the University of Salamanca in Spain crunched the numbers and found that this charged dark matter may get trapped by a pulsars magnetic field (Physical Review D, doi.org/s6j).

When enough like charge builds up, the pulsar expels the excess from its poles as standard charged particles. The banished particles flow along the stars magnetic field, generating an electric current. Interactions between the

magnetic field and the current then impede the pulsars spin.

In this scenario, the pulsar will slow down more when it is surrounded by larger amounts of dark matter. Dense concentrations of the stuff are thought to lurk near the centre of the galaxy and in globular star clusters. If pulsars in these regions are slowing down at different rates than elsewhere in the universe, it could indicate that dark matter does carry charge. This would help us refine direct detectors on Earth, says Kouvaris.

Dark matter puts the brakes on spinning corpse stars

Lasers reveal chilly water weirdness

FIRING lasers at supercooled water has given us a first glimpse into a no-go area that has never been explored before.

Water is an unusual liquid with many strange properties. For one, it gets less dense as the temperature falls, which is why ice floats. But oddities of liquid water at very low temperatures have long been impossible to study, because below about -45 C, drops quickly develop ice crystals that cloud the measurements.

Anders Nilsson at Stanford University and his team found a way to take snapshots of liquid water cooled to -46 C. They shot a jet of liquid through a vacuum, creating water drops that rapidly chilled due to evaporation. Some of the drops remained ice-free for about a millisecond just long enough for the team to hit them with X-ray laser pulses (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature13266).

When the laser encounters a water drop, its light is scattered, creating patterns that reveal the drops structure and density. In addition to uncovering new water physics, the insights might prove useful for atmospheric studies, as high-altitude clouds contain lots of supercooled water drops.

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For new stories every day, visit newscientist.com/news

Issue two of New Scientist: The Collection is

dedicated to the amazing science of cosmology.

Where did it all come from? Why is reality like it is? Do

dark matter and energy exist? What are black holes? Is

time an illusion? How will it end?

The Unknown Universe is a collection of some of the

best New Scientist articles from recent years about

the birth, life and death of the universe.

Buy your copy now from all good newsagents

or digitally. Find out more at:

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Explore the mysteries

of the cosmos


For more technology stories, visit newscientist.com/technologyTECHNOLOGY

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Now hear thisThe first iPhone-compatible hearing aids allow audio streaming and boast smart fine-tuning. One day everyone will want one, says Frank Swain

WHEN it comes to personal electronics, its difficult to imagine iPhones and hearing aids in the same sentence. I use both and know that hearing aids have a well-deserved reputation as deeply uncool lumps of beige plastic worn mainly by the elderly. Apple, on the other hand, is the epitome of cool consumer electronics.

But the two are getting a lot closer. The first Made for iPhone hearing aids have arrived, allowing users to stream audio and data between smartphones and the device. It means hearing aids might soon be desirable, even to those who dont need them.

A Bluetooth wireless protocol developed by Apple last year lets the prostheses connect directly to Apple devices, streaming audio and data while using a fraction of the power consumption of conventional Bluetooth. LiNX, made by ReSound (pictured), and Halo hearing aids made by Starkey both international firms use the iPhone as a platform to offer users new features and added control over their hearing aids.

The main advantage of Bluetooth is that the devices are talking to each other, its not just one way, says David Nygren, UK general manager of ReSound. This is useful as hearing aids have long suffered from a restricted user interface theres not much room for buttons on a device the size of a kidney bean.

This is a major challenge for hearing-aid users, because different environments require different audio settings. Some devices come with preset programmes, while others adjust automatically to what their programming suggests is the

best configuration. This is difficult to get right, and often devices calibrated in the audiologists clinic fall short in the real world.

Now Starkey and ReSound have developed iPhone apps that give users the ability to adjust their own hearing aids without needing to visit an audiologist. With these tools, users can fine-tune audio settings for different acoustic environments, and geotag these profiles so that the hearing aids automatically switch to the appropriate program depending on whether the owner is in the office, at home, or their local Starbucks. A paired smartphone can also act as a directional

microphone, picking out the voice of a friend from the hubbub of a busy restaurant, say.

Bluetooth-linked hearing aids are already on the market, but these models rely upon an intermediary device, typically a dongle worn around the neck. These are a hassle, they use batteries, and people dont want to carry an additional device, says Nygren.

Jason Galster, a research audiologist at Starkey, says users can expect to get nine to 11 days of battery life from the iPhone-linked Halo, although those who use it for streaming lots of music or podcasts would get less.

Once paired with a tablet or a smartphone, the hearing aids connect automatically once they get within about 7 metres.

What excites us about apps are the limitless possibilities, says Nygren. Innovations include a finder app that tracks down misplaced devices by following the wireless signal. One day hearing aids connected wirelessly to a users computer could allow audiologists to adjust or repair the devices remotely. For people with good hearing, the aids would function as wireless headphones

that could be worn continuously, controlled via the app.

There seems to be a public appetite for smart, in-ear earphones. This year, German start-up Bragi secured more than $3.3 million on crowdfunding site Kickstarter more than 10 times its target to create Dash, a pair of wireless headphones that play music, track body metrics like heart rate, and integrate with a smartphone.

These new aids dont come cheap. The ReSound LiNX has a price tag of 1995 to 2495 per hearing aid, though this is comparable with existing top-end hearing aids. ReSound is already poised to bring the technology to cochlear implants and there is a superpowered version planned, for those with profound hearing loss. A smartphone-linked hearing aid is a particular advantage as these people tend to rely on video-calling apps, which provide additional visual speech cues.

The makers hope Apple can lend some of its brand value to hearing aids, a huge leap in a world where stigma means it takes an average of 10 years for people to go from needing one to actually using one. Something is different about this technology which people engage with, says Nygren.

Theres not much room forbuttons on a device the size of a kidney bean, so the iPhone adds control


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Opening a can of bugsNSA spy gadgets built using info leaked by Edward Snowden

Paul Marks

RADIO hackers have reverse-engineered some of the wireless spying gadgets used by the US National Security Agency. Using documents leaked by Edward Snowden, researchers have built simple but effective tools that can be attached to parts of a computer to gather private information in a host of intrusive ways.

The NSAs Advanced Network Technology catalogue was part of the avalanche of classified documents leaked by Snowden, a former agency contractor. The catalogue lists and pictures devices that agents can use to spy on a targets computer or phone. The technologies include fake base stations for hijacking and monitoring cellphone calls and radio-equipped USB sticks that transmit a computers contents.

But the catalogue also lists a number of mysterious computer-

implantable devices called retro reflectors that boast a number of different surreptitious skills, including listening in on ambient sounds and harvesting keystrokes and on-screen images.

Because no one outside the NSA and its partners knows how retro reflectors operate, security engineers cannot defend against their use. Now a group of security researchers led by Michael Ossmann of Great Scott Gadgets in Evergreen, Colorado, have not only figured out how these devices work, but also recreated them.

Ossmann specialises in software-defined radio (SDR), an emerging field in which wireless devices are created in software rather than constructed from traditional hardware such as

modulators and oscillators. Instead of such circuits, an SDR uses digital-signal-processing chips to allow a programmer to define the wave shape of a radio signal, the frequency it uses and the power level. It operates much like a computers sound card, but instead of making sounds or processing incoming audio, it makes and receives radio signals. And a single SDR can be changed to any band instantly, including AM, FM, GSM and Bluetooth.

SDR lets you engineer a radio system of any type you like really quickly so you can research wireless security in any radio format, says Ossmann.

An SDR Ossmann designed and built, called HackRF, was a key part of his work in reconstructing the NSAs retro-reflector systems. Such systems come in two parts a plantable reflector bug and a remote SDR-based receiver.

One reflector, which the NSA

Computer-implantable devices the NSA calls retro reflectors boast a range ofsurreptitious skills

Turn on, tune in, sneak out

called Ragemaster, can be fixed to a computers monitor cable to pick up on-screen images. Another, Surlyspawn, sits on the keyboard cable and harvests keystrokes. After a lot of trial and error, Ossmann found these bugs can be remarkably simple devices little more than a tiny transistor and a 2-centimetre-long wire acting as an antenna.

Getting the information from the bugs is where SDRs come in. Ossmann found that using the radio to emit a high-power radar signal causes a reflector to wirelessly transmit the data from keystrokes, say, to an attacker. The set-up is akin to a large-scale RFID- chip system. Since the signals returned from the reflectors are noisy and often scattered across different bands, SDRs versatility is handy, says Robin Heydon at Cambridge Silicon Radio in the UK. Software-defined radio is flexibly programmable and can tune in to anything, he says.

Ossmann will present his work in August at the Defcon hacking conference in Las Vegas. Other teams will be there as well, unveiling ways to usurp NSA spy technology. Joshua Datko of Cryptotronix in Fort Collins, Colorado, will reveal a version of an NSA device he has developed that allows malware to be reinstalled even after being dealt with by antivirus software. It works by attaching its bug to an exposed portion of a computers wiring system called the I2C bus on the back of the machine. This means you can attack somebodys PC without even opening it up, says Ossmann.

Having figured out how the NSA bugs work, Ossmann says the hackers can now turn their attention to defending against them and they have launched a website to collate such knowledge, called NSAPlayset.org. Showing how these devices exploit weaknesses in our systems means we can make them more secure in the future, he says.


For more technology stories, visit newscientist.com/technology

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Create and send a scent via iPhone appProud of that beef bourguignon youre slaving over? Snap apic, tag it with the smells from your kitchen and send it to your friends. Thats the idea behind oNotes, a system that uses an app to add smells to messages. These are sent to a receiver where they are created chemically. Up to eight of the receivers 32 base aromas, such as smoky or oniony, can be combined in one scent, recreating more than 300,000 possible smells. One can produce many scents, from steak au poivre to chocolate cake to a glass of red wine, says creator David Edwards of Harvard University. An Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign for oNotes launched this week.

To the naked eye at speed there isno way that would or could have been given. Technology is the way aheadEnglish referee Graham Poll praises goal line technology on Twitter after it was used to award a goal to France in their match against Honduras in the football World Cup in Brazil this week

Echoing baby created in reverb roomReady to be creeped out? We uploaded the sound of a baby crying to be played inside the acoustic reverberation room atthe National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, UK. Researchers there have hooked the room up to the web, allowing anyone to upload a sound and have it bounce around for 30 seconds before receiving a recording back. You can listen to the haunting baby recording at bit.ly/echobaby.

Quantified self meets Fantasy FootballArmchair sports fans playing online games like Fantasy World Cup need encouragement to take a bit of exercise, believes Arlen Moller of the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. He has filed a US patent that links their prospects in fantasy sports games to the amount of exercise they do, as measured by apps like step counters. The more exercise they do, the higher their player budgets in the games, for example.

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Safe as houses

HOW safe does your street look? Arethere off-putting cracked pavements, boarded-up windows ordark alleys? Now an algorithm called StreetScore can decide all by itself, creating a perceived safety mapof a city. The idea is not to createno-go areas, but to locate areasof inequality.

StreetScore, developed by Nikhil Naik at the Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology and his team, is built oncrowdsourced data. It uses a web survey called Place Pulse, which asks people to choose which looks safest out of two images of Boston or New York taken from Google Streetview. Once each image has been scored by humans, an algorithm spots features that correlate with high safety scores, allowing it to look for those features inother streetscapes. It can then create a map of the city, colour-coded by perceived safety. The team is also applying the software to Chicago and Detroit.

We have found that things like highways, big infrastructure projects and waterfronts tend to create regions that are perceived to be unsafe. They isolate neighbourhoods, says Naik.

The team is now inviting people to rank images of cities around the world based on their perceived liveliness, beauty and wealth, as well as safety. There are already apartment-finding

tools that rank addresses based on their surroundings, like WalkScore, and the team envisions similar tools that use StreetScore.

James Evans, a sociologist at the University of Chicago imagines other possibilities: Youcould plug [StreetScore] into GoogleMaps and push the button thatsays Give me the scenic route, which would be cool. Butthe value is in how these criteria interact with political boundaries, policing routes and traffic, he says. He thinks StreetScore could be

adapted to provide an objective measure of inequality between cityorstate districts.

Most of our measures of inequality rely on data collected by organisations like the International Monetary Fund, says Csar Hidalgo of the MIT Media Lab, who works on StreetScore. Youdont need to read a report from the IMF to see that Rio De Janeiro is unequal, you can see it from the taxi window, he says.

This is really going to shed some light on inequality, light that could be used intelligently, says Evans.

You can try Place Pulse at pulse.media.mit.edu. Hal Hodson

City safety maps made by spot the difference

Highways and big infrastructure projects tend to create regions that are perceived to be unsafe


For more technology stories, visit newscientist.com/technologyTECHNOLOGY

Green robo-fingersRobot gardeners are taking the strain out of agricultural work

HACKNEY Nursery in northern Florida has just hired its first fleet of robots.

The nursery specialises in woody ornamentals and perennials, heavy plants that grow in large tubs across several hundred hectares of land. Atypical day at the nursery might require carrying as many as 5000 ofthese plants around. In the past, thistedious and back-breaking work took four men the better part of a working day.

Now, four HV100s nicknamed Harveys by Harvest Automation, the Boston company that makes them work just nine hours a day. The robots zip autonomously around the nursery, spacing plants farther apart as they grow and then scooping them back together when its time for a sale. Aperson monitors their work.

Hackney is one of 20 nurseries andgreenhouses in the US that have started using Harveys this year. Its another example of agricultures enthusiastic shift towards automation. While other sectors are concerned that robots might take their jobs, many farmers are greeting technology with open arms.

Our experience has been fantastic. I think its the way of the future, says

Joseph Hackney, who works at the nursery. The robots are doing jobs that people dont want to do.

In the past, agricultural work in the US was generally carried out by low-paid immigrants. But their numbers have dwindled, a shift thats been attributed in part to stricter border enforcement, but also an improving economy in Mexico, where most immigrants are from. This shortage willworsen over the coming years, suggests a 2012 study by Edward

Taylor and colleagues at the University of California-Davis and The College of Mexico in Mexico City.

Enter the robot farmers. Last year, the US Department of Agriculture spent $4.5 million funding research onautomated farm work. The projects will create robots that can harvest berries and citrus fruits, drones that can sample water in remote areas, andsensors to detect early signs of plant disease.

One team, headed by Manoj Karkee

at Washington State University, will spend the next five years developing an apple-picking robot. The state of Washington alone produces 17 billion apples a year, each one picked by a human. Thats 17 billion times somebody has to move their hand, says Karkee. In 10 years, because ofdecreasing labour supply and increasing labour cost, it will be really difficult to harvest apples this way.

One challenge is making the robots cost-effective. Agrobot, a start-up based in Huelva, Spain, has created a device about the size of a tractor that can spot and pick ripe strawberries. But before the robot can hit the fields, it needs to be much cheaper to produce, says founder Juan Bravo.

These improvements cant come soon enough. In December, the United Nations said that the world will need to produce about 70 per cent more food by the year 2050 to feed a growing population. Robot farmers may be able to help us produce better and faster, says John Kawola, CEO of Harvest Automation.

We can see this as the standard way things will be done in this industrya few years from now, hesays. Aviva Rutkin

Our experience of working with robots has been fantastic they are doing jobs no one wants to do

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VIBRATING gloves could help children learn Braille. At the moment, just 10per cent of blind school-age kids in the US learn it, partly because there are so few teachers.

The gloves created by Caitlyn Seims team at Georgia Tech have vibrating motors at the knuckle of each finger. When one of them vibrates, the wearer presses the corresponding key (see picture, below), and audio feedback tells them what letter they are typing.

In tests, a group of people who had never used Braille before wore the gloves while typing a set phrase. The group was then distracted by playing a game for 30 minutes. During this time, half of the participants gloves kept pulsing in time to continuing audio cues, a concept called passive haptic learning, which has also been used to teach piano in the past. The pulses stopped for the rest of the group, while the audio carried on.

Afterwards, those who received the passive haptic training were much more adept than those who didnt, making 30 per cent fewer errors. They remembered and could read more than 70 per cent of the Braille phrase, while the control group only managed 22 per cent. The gloves will be presented at a wearable computing conference in Seattle in September. Hal Hodson

INSIGHT Plant production Learn Braille through good vibrations

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APERTURE


Tumbling weedsTHIS is what an alien invasion looks like. Giant balls of tumbleweed are causing problems across the western US, where prolonged drought and high winds have led to a boom in their numbers.

The most common tumbleweed, Kali tragus, isnt native to the US it is an invader from Eurasia, and is also known as Russian thistle. The alien hitched a ride in seed shipments to South Dakota in the 19th century, just in time to spread west and become a handy metaphor in cowboy movies for the desolation of ghost towns onthe frontier.

The plant grows in the normal way until it is mature and dry, when it breaks from its roots androlls away, scattering seeds as it does so. Thisisafantastic method of dispersal in an arid environment.

This picture was taken in east Los Angeles, and shows a highway maintenance crew removing tumbleweed from a road. LA isnt the only city under siege: Colorado Springs had its own tumbleweed invasion in March, as have parts of New Mexico and Texas. Some people have a tumbleweed phobia, which isnt ideal when you are driving through a rolling invasion of the stuff. Rowan Hooper

Photographers Diane Cook and Len Jenshelcookjenshel.com


OPINION

Cruel to be kind?Killing in the name of conservation is not just unethical, it is counterproductive, say Marc Bekoff and Daniel Ramp

EARLIER this year, a hunter based in Texas paid $350,000 for the dubious privilege of being allowed to kill a male black rhino in Namibia. The rhino, Ronnie, was past reproductive age and deemed to be a danger to other wild rhinos. Profits from the hunting permit are supposed to be ploughed back into conservation in the country.

A few weeks later, keepers at Copenhagen Zoo in Denmark killed Marius, a healthy young male giraffe, publicly dissected him and fed his remains to the zoos carnivores because he didnt fit into their breeding programme. Several offers to rehouse him were declined on the grounds that the facilities were unsuitable.

The same zoo later killed four healthy lions because a male lion they wanted to introduce to a female may have attacked them. Then Dhlhlzli zoo in Bern, Switzerland, killed a bear cub over fears his father would kill him.

These cases made headlines and caused global outrage. But they are just the tip of the iceberg. Zoos often kill healthy animals considered surplus to their needs: around 5000 a year in Europe alone. This isnt euthanasia, or mercy killing, but zoothanasia.

The killing of surplus animals is just one example of people making life-and-death decisions on behalf of captive and wild animals. These are difficult decisions and various criteria are used, but almost without exception human interests trump those of the non-human animals.

Often, for example, animals are harmed or killed in the name of

conservation, or for the good of their own (or other) species. The result is unnecessary suffering and, commonly, a failure to achieve sustainable and morally acceptable outcomes.

Increasingly, scientists and non-scientists are looking for more compassionate solutions. Compassionate conservation, a rapidly growing movement with a guiding principle of first do no harm, is just such an approach. It is driven by a desire to eliminate unnecessary suffering and to prioritise animals as individuals, not just as species. It is also a route to better conservation.

Although one of us, Marc Bekoff, has been writing about the

growing is that conservationists are questioning the ethics of producing captive pandas as ambassadors for their species. These animals have no chance of living in the wild and their existence is increasingly seen as indefensible.

Biologists are also re-evaluating the merits of reintroduction projects. The reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone National Park, for example, resulted in numerous wolves dying or being killed for the good of other wolves. The surviving wolves also lack protection, especially when they leave the park. As a result, scientists are concerned that the project is failing.

Other reintroduction projects are being similarly reappraised. A team at the University of Oxford assessed 199 such programmes and found potential welfare issues in two-thirds of them, the most common being mortality, disease and conflict with humans.

Urban animals also get into the mix. Marc was recently asked to apply the principles of compassionate conservation to a project in Bloomington, Indiana, which proposed to kill numerous deer even when no one knew if they were causing a problem. In Cape Peninsula, South Africa, non-lethal paintball guns are being used to reduce conflicts between baboons and humans.

Compassionate conservation is also offering solutions to previously intractable conflicts. Innumerable wolves, coyotes, dogs, foxes and dingoes are killed by livestock farmers, often by trapping or poisoning. A recent

Animals are often harmed or killed in the name of conservation or for the good of their species

importance of individual animals in conservation for more than two decades, it took an international meeting at the University of Oxford in September 2010 for compassionate conservation to get a big push. There have since been three more meetings. NGOs are becoming interested and a Centre for Compassionate Conservation has been established at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia.

One sign that the influence of compassionate conservation is


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study showed that poisoning dingoes by dropping tainted meat from aeroplanes changes the dynamics of the ecosystem and reduces biodiversity.

Management of this problem is being revolutionised by the use of guard animals such as Maremma sheepdogs, donkeys and llamas. These guardians bond with the livestock and protect them, not only reducing losses but also costing considerably less than shooting programmes. Even colonies of little penguins in Australia are now protected from foxes by Maremma sheepdogs.

Compassionate conservation is also changing the way researchers tag animals. This is an integral part of conservation as it enables scientists to identify individuals and estimate population sizes. But it is often harmful or painful and can reduce the animals fitness, which compromises the usefulness of the data collected. More researchers are now using methods that dont stress animals or alter their behaviour, such as unobtrusive tags or remote camera traps.

There is often conflict between those interested in animal welfare and those interested in conservation, with the latter viewing concern for the well-being of individuals as misplaced sentimentalism. It is not.

Compassion for animals isnt incompatible with preserving biodiversity and doing the best science possible. In fact, it is a must. Mistreatment of animals often produces poor conservation outcomes and bad science. It is also immoral. Only through compassion can we advance global conservation.

Marc Bekoff is professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology at theUniversity of Colorado, Boulder. He edited Ignoring Nature No More: The case for compassionate conservation (University of Chicago Press). Daniel Ramp is director of the Centre for Compassionate Conservation at the University of Technology, Sydney

Making cosmic wavesGrowing doubts about evidence for ancient gravitational waves dont undermine cosmic inflation, says its originator Andrei Linde

PROFILEAndrei Linde is a physicist at Stanford University in California. He is a founder of cosmic inflation theory. The apparent detection of primordial

new scientist - june 21 2014

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