new scientist - 13 september 2014

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WEEKLY 13 September 2014

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No2986 3.90 US/CAN$5.95

How weird do you want it?

TOUCHY SCREENYWhen your phone knows how you feel

ROCKY RIDDLEThe crystal that shouldnt exist

COFFEE HACKERSUpgrading the worlds most popular drug

JUST FOLLOWING ORDERS?Why good people wont do bad things

BRIDGE THE GAP The woman with a hole in her brain

13 September 2014 | NewScientist | 3

CONTENTS Volume 223 No 2986This issue online newscientist.com/issue/2986

News6 UPFRONT How will Scotland vote? Japan whaling again.

BP negligent in oil spill. Universal baby size8 THIS WEEK

Hazards of comet landing. The woman with a hole in her brain. Mother of the Higgs. Waking up during surgery. Stringy fields could explain dark energy. Bone-eaters of the dinosaur era. Upgrading the coffee buzz

16 IN BRIEF Cunning trout partner with eels. Whopper of

a dinosaur. Spitting fish. How much gravity?

Coming next weekImaginary worldsWhy do we spend so much time in them?

The strangest starOur sun has rain and other wonders

34

38

Rise of thejihadisWhat science can and cannot yet tell us about radicalisation

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Quantum controlHow weird do you want it?

Rocky riddleThe crystal that shouldnt exist

Technology19 Your touchy-screeny phone knows you.

Google Glass seconds that emotion. Tracking aquatic invaders. Teaching ethics to robots. Robotic hand feels for deep-sea discoveries

News

On the cover

Features

10 Bridge the gap The woman with a hole inher brain

28 Just following orders? Why good people wont do bad things

19 Touchy screeny Your phone knows you

38 Rocky riddle The mystery crystal

14 Coffee hackers Tweaking the popular drug

Opinion26 Scottish science Stephen J. Watson says

better alone. No way, argues Andrew Miller 27 One minute with Richard Smith Why

research misconduct should be a crime 28 Just obeying orders? Alexander Haslam and

Stephen Reicher challenge key ideas on evil32 LETTERS Vital vitamins. Smart curve

Features34 Quantum control (see above left)38 The crystal that shouldnt exist (see left)42 The wander stuff RNA doesnt always stay

put in cells. Heres what it gets up to

CultureLab46 Socrates for psychopaths A tale of talking

classical philosophy in a secure unit 47 Our digital natures Exploring the deep

effects of modern media on culture

Regulars5 LEADER Our response to radicalisation is

still informed by 1960s research56 FEEDBACK Godzilla grows with buildings57 THE LAST WORD Heavy metal48 JOBS & CAREERS

Aperture24 Wide-eyed animals in the midnight hour


LEADER

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WHY do ordinary people do appalling things? This problem has vexed scholars for centuries. Early Christian theologians, for example, spent an inordinate amount of time trying to reconcile the idea of a benevolent and omnipotent God who could nonetheless allow evil to exist.

The darker side of human nature still troubles us, though nowadays we tend to seek more naturalistic explanations. This was never more true than after the second world war, which offered an unflinching and deeply distressing view of the depravity to which humans can sink.

One influential product of the research or perhaps soul-searching that followed was the concept of the banality of evil. Coined by political theorist Hannah Arendt after watching the 1961 trial of Nazi SS officer Adolf Eichmann, this spare phrase captures the idea that evil acts are not necessarily perpetrated by evil people. Instead, they can simply be the result of bureaucrats dutifully obeying orders.

That concept was supported by two infamous psychological studies: Stanley Milgrams electric-shock experiments on obedience and the Stanford Prison Experiment, both of which supposedly proved that ordinary

Not so easily led Compelling but outmoded ideas wont help counter radicalisation

people can easily be led into performing atrocious acts just following orders to hurt, humiliate or kill.

The conclusions were not universally accepted at the time. Nonetheless, the banality of evil became the dominant late-20th-century explanation for the problem of mass atrocities.

Its appeal is clear: it simultaneously offered an explanation for the worst crimes of the century while absolving the vast majority of the perpetrators.

The horrors of Hitlers Germany and Stalins Russia became largely the responsibility of their leaders.

The banality of evil remains hugely influential. It is, for example, visible in relation to the responses to Westerners who travel to the Middle East to fight for Islamic State.

In seeking explanations for the radicalisation of these recruits and how to counter it authorities in the UK and US have been quick to reach for the idea of brainwashing and coercion. Islamic States slick recruitment videos and savvy use of social

media only reinforce this view. Brainwashing is just following

orders in a different guise. But the evidence suggests that, in fact, it rarely plays a role in radicalisation (see page 8). Nonetheless, Western authorities appear to be locked into thinking it is happening to their home-grown jihadis, and that they must fight fire with fire. The US governments anti-radicalisation strategy, for example, uses social media in a bid to neutralise the messages of Islamic State.

We can do better. Despite huge ethical challenges, psychologists are starting to re-evaluate Milgrams research, and with it the whole notion of the banality of evil (see page 28). Their emerging conclusion is much more subtle and nuanced, and should be required reading for those who, rightly, seek to counter the threat of radical Islam.

This would be further helped if the veil of secrecy over US intelligence were lifted a little, giving researchers interested in understanding radicalisation access to precious hard data.

We will never banish the human propensity for atrocity. But the only way to counter it is to understand it properly, and devise strategies based on what we know, not what we want to believe.

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6 | NewScientist | 13 September 2014

YOU can go green and continue to prosper and develop, said Ed Davey, the UK secretary for energy and climate, on 9 September. And the evidence is on his side. Economists say that, despite the

expense, drastic cuts in the UKs carbon dioxide emissions will boost the countrys economy.

The finding should encourage action to reduce CO

2 levels,

which reached a new high in 2013, according to a report by the World Meteorological Organization. The growth from 2012 was the biggest jump since 1984, and may be partly down to plants and other organisms taking in less CO

2.

If climate change isnt incentive enough to cut emissions, try this: if the UK cut its carbon emissions by 60 per cent from 1990 levels by 2030, as it has promised, its GDP would be 1.1 per cent bigger than if it stuck with fossil fuels,

SCIENCE to the rescue in West Africa? The World Health Organization is launching an emergency programme to test experimental treatments on people who have Ebola, in a bid to stem the epidemic. The move will get round regulatory barriers that have so far stopped one promising drug that is almost fully tested from being used in the epidemic.

This is absolutely unprecedented, said Marie-Paule Kieny, head of innovation at the WHO, after a meeting of drug

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Low-carbon payout Attacking Ebola

UPFRONT

If the UK cut its carbon emissions by 60 per cent by 2030, its GDP would rise1.1 per cent

Only one size available

Border patrol

says a study by consultants at Cambridge Econometrics. About half the gain would come from cheap running costs for fuel-efficient cars, with 190,000 new green jobs and higher wages also helping. The average household would be 565 a year better off.

The findings chime with a study by the Institute for Public Policy Research in London. The IPPR says the European Union could end its dependence on gas from Russia through better energy efficiency. The EU pays Russia 31 billion a year for gas, much of it coming along pipelines through Ukraine.

developers and African health authorities approved the plan on 5 September in Geneva, Switzerland. We must move as fast as possible.

Ethical guidelines allow treatments that havent been fully tested and approved to be used to try and save lives as long as information is gathered to help establish whether the treatment works. The Geneva meeting agreed to test two experimental vaccines and a handful of other treatments on this basis, including giving patients blood from Ebola survivors.

BABIES come in all shapes and sizes or so you might imagine. According to new international growth charts, all newborns should be broadly the same size, regardless of ethnicity or their mothers size. Nutrition and health are the only factors that make a difference.

Standardised charts already exist for a childs growth from birth to age 5, but until now, there was no internationally agreed

All babies the same

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Taking Scotlands polls IS SCOTLAND poised to withdraw from the UK? Two opinion polls published this week suggest the yes campaign has passed the 50 per cent mark and could be on track to win the Scottish referendum on independence on 18September. But headlines aside, it is too close to call, and polling realities suggest either side could bethe true leaders at this stage.

Opinion polls are typically based ona sample of 1000 people, which means that even if the sample is randomised and representative of the voting population, statistical theories say the margin of error is 3 per cent. In other words, a 50-50 poll split could easily emerge as 47-53 in the real vote. And while many polls shoot for randomness, there may well be biases in the polled sample, meaning the

margin of error is even greater.If someone asks us for a margin

oferror well say 3 per cent, says Anthony Wells of polling firm YouGov, but he adds that a variety of factors mean that this can only be a rule of thumb. YouGov published the first yes-leading poll on Saturday, with a51-49 split.

Undecided voters are also a key factor missing from the headlines. YouGovs poll actually showed yes on 47 per cent, no on 45 per cent and dont know on 8 per cent. A TNS poll published Tuesday shows a 50-50 split with dont knows excluded, but the firm places them at 23 per cent.

Undecided voters dont usually make it into the headlines but they will probably tip the balance in determining Scotlands future.


GUILTY as charged. Last week a US court found BP grossly negligent in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, one of the worst environmental disasters in US history. It could be fined $18 billion. But the industry may not have learned any lessons.

When the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in 2010, 11 people died and millions of barrels of oil leaked into the Gulf of Mexico.

US district judge Carl Barbier found BP 67 per cent responsible for the spill, with contractors Transocean and Halliburton also partly to blame.

BPs conduct was reckless, Barbier wrote. Bob Cavnar, author of a book on the accident, says the ruling is BPs worst-case scenario. The company intends to appeal.

However, the judgment looks

unlikely to bring significant changes in the industry. I dont see anything in there that would change the way we fundamentally operate, says John Hughett, who was an expert witness for the case.

BP was negligent

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

Quantum GoogleGOOGLE has announced plans to build its own quantum computer, despite having purchased one from D-Wave of Burnaby, Canada, last year.

D-Waves computers, which are based on superconducting quantum circuits, display quantum behaviour, but it isnt clear whether their design can actually take advantage of quantum mechanics to calculate faster than an ordinary PC.

Now Google has hired John Martinis of the University of California, Santa Barbara, to build its own quantum processors, following the D-Wave approach. Martinis is also working on quantum error-correcting techniques, which are likely to be necessary for a working machine.

Google says the two projects will run in parallel. We will continue to collaborate with D-Wave scientists, said Googles Hartmut Neven in a blog post. Google plans to upgrade its D-Wave machine.

It is no surprise that Google wants to get into the quantum business. A computer that can successfully exploit its quantum nature could theoretically revolutionise certain applications, such as searching large databases very quickly. Scientific whaling?

equivalent for fetal development.The INTERGROWTH-21st project

pooled data from thousands of healthy, well-fed mothers from the US, UK, India, China, Brazil, Oman, Kenya and Italy. Each had regular measurements made of their fetus and newborn baby. These were then used to plot standard growth charts for fetuses in ideal conditions.

Provided the mother is healthy, all babies grow in a similar way and achieve a similar size at birth, says Stephen Kennedy at the University of Oxford, who led some of the research (The Lancet, doi.org/f2tx39, doi.org/f2tx4b).

60 SECONDS

The genes of OzYour genes are patentable in Australia for now. The countrys Federal Court has ruled that genes isolated from the body are patentable even though they occur in nature because the act of isolating them makes them artificial. Last year, the US Supreme Court ruled the opposite way. The Australian case may go to the country's High Court.

Aircraft was shot downA blizzard of high-energy impacts tore apart the fuselage of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over Ukraine on17 July, a preliminary Dutch air investigation report has concluded. The finding is consistent with the theory that a ground-to-air missile downed the Boeing 777 airliner, killing all 298 people on board.

Creaking musclesStarting to slow down? Blame your calves. Deficits in these muscles contribute the most to age-related movement problems, shows a studyof muscle output in old age. Hip muscle deficits also cause difficulties, but knee muscles tend to stay as efficient as they are in middle age (Journal of the Royal Society Interface, DOI: 10.1098/rsif.2014.0858).

Monstrous gibbonsGibbons are kings of gene shuffling. Their genome, now sequenced, seems to have exploded and been put back together in the wrong order (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature13679). Over time these reshuffles may have created new species by making offspring with genomes very different to those of their parents.

Smoking gateway?Tobacco experts have described theWorld Health Organizations guidelines on e-cigarattes as misguided, calling into question its claims that they act as a gateway drug to smoking (Addiction, doi.org/vjx). They warn that the stance could have negative health consequences.

More whaling please, asks JapanA BAR on whaling in the Antarctic could prove short-lived, if Japan has its way. It is drawing up a new scientific whaling scheme.

In March, the International Court ofJustice in The Hague, Netherlands, ruled that Japans scientific whaling in Antarctic waters from 2005 to 2014 was illegal. Conservationists had argued the JARPA II scheme was a front for banned commercial whaling.

The ruling will be debated next week by the International Whaling Commission in Portoroz, Slovenia. The IWC had long allowed JARPA II to proceed, but the court overruled that when it said the scheme was not for purposes of scientific research. The IWCs criteria for judging research plans are now under scrutiny.

The credibility of the whole organisation is at stake, says Vassili Papastavrou of the International Fund for Animal Welfare. Is the IWC up to the task of making sure future permits for research are legal?

Japan is trying to get around the ruling. In June it caught minke whales off its north-east coast, an area not covered by the ruling. It will ask the IWC to let four coastal communities catch 17 minke whales for local use.

It is also drafting a new research plan, JARPA III, that it hopes will comply with the March ruling. If it does, scientific whaling could resume in the Antarctic by late 2015.

But a resolution proposed by New Zealand could stop this, by making the IWCs assessment tougher.

BP was reckless. The ruling is the companys worst-case scenario and it could be fined $18 billion


Michael Bond

ITS a question being asked around the world. How can you stem the flow of foreign jihadis making their way to Syria and Iraq? As New Scientist went to press, politicians on both sides of the Atlantic were finalising their game plans to tackle the rise of Sunni jihadist group Islamic State, but the issue of homegrown fighters wont be far from their minds.

The answers will be based partly on research that a handful of counter-terrorism scientists have carried out since 9/11. But piecing together the mindset of a jihadi hasnt been easy because of a scarcity of field data, which means that much foreign policy, and media coverage, is underpinned by speculation rather than hard data. In recent months, several researchers have called on the US government to allow academics access to intelligence data, such as intercepted communications and

transcripts of interviews, to help them understand how fighters become radicalised.

Despite the shortage of first-hand material, some things seem clear. For instance, the idea that hundreds of British and other European Muslims fighting for IS were brainwashed or coerced by jihadist recruiters into joining is almost certainly wrong.

Those who study terrorist behaviour claim that the vast majority of fighters originating in the West are radicalised at home, influenced largely by their own circle of friends. The brainwashing theory is baloney,

says Scott Atran of Frances National Centre for Scientific Research in Paris. This is more about young people hooking up with their friends and going on a glorious mission.

Evidence collected by the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) at Kings College London supports this view. The ICSR has been following about 450 foreign fighters in Syria and Iraq, communicating with dozens of them through social media tools such as Facebook and WhatsApp and conducting interviews on the Syrian border. It estimates that 80-85 per cent of them mobilised with their peer group.

The vast majority go as part of clusters, says the ICSRs director

Peter Neumann. This explains why a disproportionate number of recent British jihadis have come from the same places, such as Portsmouth and Cardiff. A couple of them might go first, they stay in touch with each other, and one by one they pull their friends out there. None of the jihadis interviewed by his group were recruited in the sense of someone reaching out proactively to manipulate them, he says. That doesnt happen. No one has been indoctrinated.

This path to radicalisation is in line with what many studies on terrorist behaviour in the past decade have suggested, and is a long way from the often peddled idea of indoctrination.

So why do such myths persist? Marc Sageman, a forensic psychiatrist and consultant to various US government agencies, thinks they allow politicians and commentators to ignore wider causes of radicalisation, such as political injustice, which may be unpalatable to Western governments. You get politicians saying that IS is a bunch of psychopaths, which is not helpful.

Of course, it makes little sense to study how terrorists are radicalised without looking at the political context. It wont do just to look at the militants and assume that, if we know enough about them, were going to understand this, says Clark McCauley, a psychologist at the Solomon Asch Center for

NEWS FOCUS ISLAMIC STATE

Lifting the black mask The science behind what makes people become jihadi fighters

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The brainwashing theory isbaloney. This is about young people going on a glorious mission


Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. Were not. We need databases on how governments respond to terrorism as much as we need databases on what terrorists do.

Sageman agrees: This is political violence, and the number one assumption should be that its about politics. That means broadening the focus of terrorism research to political science, economics, sociology, social

psychology and anthropology.The need for a broader

appreciation of the factors driving Islamist extremism is underlined by an as-yet-unpublished study conducted by McCauleys team. This shows widespread sympathy among Muslims in the US for Syrias repressed Sunni Muslims.

In this section The woman with a hole in her brain, page 10 Stringy fields could explain dark energy, page 12 Your touchy-screeny phone knows you, page 19

THIS WEEK

About half those questioned said either that they wouldnt condemn anyone who joined the fight against Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, or that doing so was morally justified. McCauley expects results would be similar in the UK. The poll was conducted in July, so it isnt known how the beheadings conducted by IS since then have affected the level of support.

Only a tiny minority of those who sympathise with the jihadi cause choose to fight for it. For those who do, there are many paths by which they can become radicalised. There is no one storyline, says McCauley. But most researchers agree that, aside from the influence of peers, the following factors are important: a personal grievance, such as a crisis of identity, that opens them up to a new religious or political ideology; a sense that their cultural in-group is being persecuted; moral outrage at injustice (discrimination against a relative, for example); and access to a politically active network. While there is evidence that some have been influenced by hard-line clerics, this is rarely the principal driver.

Knowing this, is it possible to steer those on the path to radicalisation away from it? The UK governments Channel programme aims to identify vulnerable people and introduce them to a suitable role model, for example, or help them with their career or relationships. This approach is unlikely to turn hardened militants, says Neumann, but the Home Office says Channel has helped several hundred of the 2000 people referred to it since 2012.

It should be easier to develop similar programmes that could de-radicalise returning fighters if intelligence data gets released, exposing the motivations and experiences of front-line jihadis. The difficulty is not lack of ideas but lack of field knowledge, says Atran. Nobody really knows whats going on with IS. Clouded in mystery

LANDING on a comet will be even harder than we thought. The strange shape of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko does not present as many safe landing sites for the European Space Agencys Rosetta spacecraft asmission planners had hoped.

Its shape is exciting scientifically but it [creates] a lot of challenges, says project scientist Matt Taylor at the European Space Research and Technology Centre in Noordwijk, the Netherlands. He calls the comet the duck because from some angles it resembles a rubber one.

The probe arrived at 67P on 6August after a 10-year journey. The plan is to release a probe called Philae to land on the comets surface on 11November. ESA announced five candidate touchdown sites on 25August, but on 8 September at theEuropean Planetary Sciences Congress in Cascais, Portugal, the team admitted that none of the sites looked very safe. All landing sites are worse than expected because of the shape of the body, said the landers lead scientist, Hermann Bhnhardt of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Gttingen, Germany.

Worse means smaller. Philae is

designed to land within an ellipse 1kilometre in length. Of the five shortlisted sites, only site B, at the head of the duck, meets that requirement. There are some larger, smoother sites on the base of the ducks body but they are too poorly lit to let the lander recharge its batteries during its four-month mission.

New images from Rosettas high-res camera reveal what appear tobe layered cliffs across the comet. These are good for determining the comets history, but could damage Philae if it hits them.

Once Philae leaves Rosetta, there will be no chance to alter its trajectory. It will take 5 to 8 hours to drift to the surface under the comets weak gravity. Should it hit rough ground and tumble on to its side, some science may still be possible, but settling upside-down would almost certainly spell doom for the lander mission.

Meanwhile, Rosetta has captured its first grains ejected by the comet and shown that such emissions vary throughout its 12.4-hour day. 67P ejects most particles in the afternoon from the ducks neck. Examining this site could help show if the comet began life as one body or two. Stuart Clark

No easy parking spot for first-ever comet landing

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You get politicians sayingthat Islamic State isa bunchof psychopaths, which is not helpful


THIS WEEK

Helen Thomson

DONT mind the gap. A woman has reached the age of 24 without anyone realising she was missing a large part of her brain. The case highlights just how adaptable the organ is.

The discovery was made when the woman was admitted to the Chinese PLA General Hospital of Jinan Military Area Command in Shandong Province complaining of dizziness and nausea. She told

doctors shed had problems walking steadily for most of her life, and her mother reported that she hadnt walked until she was 7 and that her speech only became intelligible at the age of 6.

Doctors did a CAT scan and immediately identified the source of the problem her entire cerebellum was missing (see scan, below left). The space where it should be was empty of tissue. Instead it was filled with cerebrospinal fluid, which

cushions the brain and provides defence against disease.

The cerebellum sometimes known as the little brain is located underneath the two hemispheres. It looks different from the rest of the brain because it consists of much smaller and more compact folds of tissue. It represents about 10 per cent of the brains total volume but contains 50 per cent of its neurons.

Although it is not unheard of to have part of your brain missing, either congenitally or from surgery, the woman joins an elite club of just nine people who are known to have lived without their entire cerebellum. A detailed description of how the disorder affects a living adult is almost

non-existent, say doctors from the Chinese hospital, because most people with the condition die at a young age and the problem is only discovered on autopsy (Brain, doi.org/vh7).

The cerebellums main job is to control voluntary movements and balance, and it is also thought to be involved in our ability to learn specific motor actions and speak. Problems in the cerebellum can lead to severe mental impairment, movement disorders, epilepsy or a potentially fatal build-up of fluid in the brain. However, in this woman, the missing cerebellum resulted in only mild to moderate motor deficiency, and mild speech problems such as slightly slurred pronunciation. Her doctors describe these effects as less than would be expected, and say her case highlights the remarkable plasticity of the brain.

These rare cases are interesting to understand how the brain circuitry works and compensates for missing parts, says Mario Manto, who researches cerebellar disorders at the Free University of Brussels in Belgium. The patients doctors suggest that normal cerebellar function may have been taken over by the cortex brain scans should reveal the answer.

The woman with ahole in her brain

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The idea for the Higgs boson was borrowed from the behaviour of photons in superconductors

A WEIRD theoretical relative of the Higgs boson, one that inspired the decades-long hunt for the elusive particle, has been properly observed for the first time.

The Higgs field, which gives rise to its namesake boson, is credited with giving other particles mass by slowing their movement through empty space. First proposed in the 1960s, the boson finally appeared at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, in 2012.

First sighting of mother of Higgs boson

But this mass-giving mechanism was borrowed from a mathematically analogous process that happens with photons in superconductors metals that, when extremely cold, allow electrons to move without resistance.

Near absolute zero, vibrations are set up in the superconducting material that slow down pairs of photons travelling through, making light act as though it has a mass.

This effect is the inspiration behind the Higgs mechanism giving particles mass the mother of it, actually, says Raymond Volkas at the University of Melbourne in Australia.

The vibrations are mathematically equivalent to Higgs particles, says Ryo Shimano at the University of Tokyo,

who led the team that has now observed them. In superconductors, the mechanism explains how light can appear to have mass when travelling through such materials, while in particle physics it explains the mass ofW and Z bosons in the vacuum.

Physicists had expected to find Higgs-like vibrations in all superconductors. But they had only been seen before by imposing a different kind of vibration on the material first.

To find the vibrations in a

superconductor in its normal state, Shimano and colleagues shook one with a pulse of light. Shimano says it is similar to how the real Higgs boson is created with energetic particle collisions. They first created the superconducting Higgs last year, and have now shown that, mathematically speaking, it behaves almost exactly like the particle physics Higgs.

Noting the similarities between the two systems could help in studying the real Higgs boson, Shimano says. One can really do the experiments ina table-top manner, which would definitely reveal new physics and hopefully provide some useful feedbacks to particle physics. Michael Slezak

aA hole at the back (left) where the cerebellum should be


IF YOURE facing surgery this may well be your worst nightmare: waking up while under the knife without medical staff realising.

The biggest-ever study of this phenomenon is shedding light on what such an experience feels like and is causing debate about how best to prevent it.

For one year, starting in 2012, an anaesthetist at every hospital in the UK and Ireland recorded whenever a patient later told a staff member that they had been awake during surgery. They investigated 300 cases by

interviewing the patient and doctors involved.

One of the most striking findings, says lead author Jaideep Pandit of Oxford University Hospitals, was that pain was not generally the worst part of the experience it was paralysis. For some operations, paralysing drugs are given to relax muscles and stop unconscious reflex movements. Pain was something they understood, but very few of us have experienced what its like to be paralysed, says Pandit. They thought they had been buried alive.

I thought I was about to die, says Sandra, who regained consciousness but was unable to move during a dental operation when she was 12 years old. It felt as though nothing would ever work again as though the anaesthetist had removed everything apart from my soul.

The audit, carried out by the Royal College of Anaesthetists and the Association of Anaesthetists of Great Britain and Ireland, found that most episodes of awareness were brief and

happened before or after the surgery took place. But waking still caused distress in 51 per cent of cases (bit.ly/1pKRJcn). As well as paralysis, people reported sensations of pain and choking.

The audit found a much lower incidence of waking up than previous studies 1 case per 19,000 general anaesthetics. Smaller studies had suggested the rate could be as high as 1 in 500.

The latest study only recorded volunteered reports, but older studies questioned everyone who underwent surgery. This proactive questioning could overestimate the problem by picking up moments of awareness that patients would not have reported unasked, says Pandit.

But John Andrzejowski, an anaesthetist at the Royal Hallamshire Hospital in Sheffield, thinks the latest audit probably missed many non-trivial cases. The true figure is probably somewhere in the middle, he says.

The audit confirmed that waking when paralysing agents were used, such as during abdominal, heart and brain surgery, was more likely to be reported, because they stop patients from alerting medical staff to their plight. The audit team are urging anaesthetists to use a low-tech device called a nerve stimulator to enable them to give the minimum dose. A lower dose should be enough to stop spontaneous movements yet still allow the patient to move if they became conscious enough to feel pain, says Pandit.

Sometimes complete paralysis is essential to avoid severing a nerve, points out Andrzejowski, who advocates using monitors that record brain activity through scalp electrodes. But Pandit argues that these give no clear signal of consciousness and are hard to interpret. Clare Wilson

Paralysis, not pain, panics waking surgery patients

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For daily news stories, visit newscientist.com/news

It felt as though the anaesthetist had removed everything apart from mysoul

GlaxoSmithKline Prize Lecture given by Dr Nicholas Lydon FRS

Tuesday 23rd September 2014, 6.30pm

The Royal Society 6 9 Carlton House Terrace, London, SW1Y 5AG

Free admission doors open at 6pm

For more information visit royalsociety.org/events

Targeting the human kinome: cancer drug discovery


THIS WEEK

Jacob Aron

DARK energy, the mysterious force thought to be responsible for the fact the universes expansion is accelerating, might come from a series of exotic fields. This notion, which has its origins in string theory, could explain why it was only after galaxies formed that the rate of expansion began to increase.

Dark energy could simply be a property of space-time, called the cosmological constant, which appears as a term added into the equations of general relativity. But, the trouble is that to make the equations balance, the constant should be 120 orders of magnitude larger than observations of the universe suggested it actually is.

This gigantic discrepancy is a major headache for cosmologists, so some have turned to more complex explanations. One invokes a field called quintessence that supposedly fills the universe and provides the energy necessary for expansion. Crucially, this field changes strength over time, which would explain why cosmic expansion hasnt always been accelerating.

But it leaves another problem: why did acceleration switch on precisely when it did? One explanation is that if it hadnt, we wouldnt be here to see it. But counting up the other equally probable options makes our universe just one of 10120 possibilities, a fine-tuning that physicists find equally unsatisfactory.

Now Marc Kamionkowski of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and his

colleagues say they have an explanation that solves both problems, thanks to something called the string axiverse. String theory, an overarching term for theories with more than three dimensions, suggests there could be hundreds of so-called axion fields that permeate the universe. In the early universe these fields wouldnt have an effect, but one by one, they would turn on, giving rise to particles of different masses.

Kamionkowski says each field has a chance of becoming quintessence and accelerating cosmic growth, but the chance any particular field has decreases with the total number of fields. All the fields exist at all times,

but in the beginning they are frozen, just sitting on the bench. It is a bit like rolling a series of dice if you roll a six, it is unlikely to be the first six to occur if many other dice have been rolled already.

The team calculated that it would have to be the 44th axion field to turn on that became quintessence. The odds of this happening are 1 in 500, they say (arxiv.org/abs/1409.0549). In other words, our universe was still unlikely, but much less so than in a scenario without axions.

The other fields could become ordinary and dark matter, thus explaining everything in the universe, says Kamionkowski although the team is still working out the details. Were going to keep busy with this for a little while. Telescopes looking for changes in the energy density of space could provide hints that dark energy is indeed from the string axiverse, he adds.

John March-Russell of the University of Oxford, who helped conceive the string axiverse, agrees it could explain dark energy, but doesnt quite solve the fine-tuning problem. Kamionkowski admits the model rests on assumptions that are just one of many possible choices, but thinks that the arguments for different assumptions are mostly philosophical. Its turtles all the way down!

String fields speed cosmic growth

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After fish pick the carcass clean, bone-eating zombie worms feast on blood oozing from the remains

Not quite one universe in a million

A FOSSIL marine reptile, marked by the critters that gnawed its remains, may reveal how corpse eaters changed during the dinosaur era.

When modern whales die and fall to the ocean floor, their corpses sustain teeming ecosystems for decades. But before whales evolved, reptiles such as the dolphin-like ichthyosaurs ruled the oceans. Now it seems a 3-metre

Fossil reptile reveals Jurassic corpse eaters

ichthyosaur from 157 million years ago supported a similar community.

This is the first time anybody has described the ecological succession inthe Mesozoic equivalent of a whale fall in detail, says Richard Twitchett of the Natural History Museum in London, who led the study.

Modern whale falls go through three stages. First, scavengers like fish pick the carcass clean of flesh. Then snails and bone-eating zombie worms feast on blood and fluid oozing from the remains. Last, when only the skeleton is left, microbes eat the bone lipids, animals like tube worms live off

them, and the zombie worms eat on.Twitchett and his colleagues

examined tiny fossils on and inside anichthyosaurs bones to find out what happened after it died. They found bite marks and grooves left by scavengers on the bones. They also found many molluscs similar to those from the second, slime-eater phase.

But there was no sign of that final stage. Instead, microbes in the fatty

skeleton supported a different set ofanimals, including sea urchins and oysters (Nature Communications, DOI:10.1038/ncomms5789).

In 2008, Andrzej Kaim of the Institute of Palaeobiology in Warsaw, Poland, found a modern final phase in a fossil from later in the dinosaur era (Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, doi.org/bmz82c). The community may have changed by then, says Twitchett.

We cant know that, says Steffen Kiel of the University of Gttingen in Germany, as the ichthyosaur died in shallow water, but modern whale falls are deeper. Shaoni Bhattacharya

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Penny Sarchet

IT GETS you up in the morning and powers you through the day. Now coffee aficionados have been given a new tool in their quest for the ideal cup the coffee genome.

Scientists have sequenced the genome of robusta coffee (Coffea canephora), uncovering many genes involved in making caffeine and aromas (Science, doi.org/vh5).

Armed with this knowledge, growers and blenders could make higher quality, tastier varieties of coffee, and help protect the plants from climate change and disease.

Its like somebody turned on the lights, says Tim Schilling, executive director of World Coffee Research, a collaboration formed by the coffee industry and based at Texas A&M University, College Station. He says coffee lovers could taste the fruits of these labours in around five years. Traditional methods for breeding new varieties can take 12 years or more to reach farmers.

The first item on the agenda is protecting the coffee crop. Climate change is a big problem for the farmers. Coffea arabica, closely related to robusta, makes up most of the worlds crop but only grows within a certain temperature range. As warming kicks in, arabica farming is being pushed up the mountains, and the total area suitable for it is shrinking.

We have seen the average temperature increase, says Alejandro Martinez, who owns a coffee farm in El Salvador. Ideally, [the genome] will accelerate the development of varieties that can

[cope with] the dramatic impact of climate change on the crop.

Coffee is also threatened by diseases like coffee rust fungus. Coffee breeders should be able to use the genome to quickly breed resistance into the coffee crop.

Then there is the caffeine level. For years scientists have been searching for a decaffeinated coffee that tastes as good as high-caffeine varieties, and the genome could help make one.

The sequencing team found a set of genes probably involved in making caffeine. The expression of these genes could be tweaked to alter the caffeine content of the coffee, says team leader Philippe Lashermes of the Institute of Research for Development, Montpellier, France.

The genome will speed up research, says Paulo Mazzafera at the University of Campinas in So Paulo, Brazil. He studies proteins called transcription factors that regulate caffeine production by switching other genes on or off.

This coffee genome will give us more information on [how] the transcription factor genes we have selected work, he says.

We could also make better-tasting coffee, says Christopher Hendon of the University of Bath, UK, who studies coffee as a hobby.

When you buy ordinary coffee on the high street, it is usually a mix of arabica for flavour, and

robusta, which doesnt taste as good but gives the high-caffeine kick customers have come to expect. Hendon suggests boosting the caffeine content of the robusta bean. You could substitute less robusta into the same blend, and get the same amount of caffeine, says Hendon. Non-speciality coffee could then include more arabica and taste better, without losing its punch.

Hendon says the robusta genome could also help make new flavours of speciality coffee. For instance, around 5 per cent of a coffee bean is chlorogenic acid, which doesnt taste very nice. So he proposes getting rid of it.

That would be a very powerful tool, says Hendon. The resulting coffee would be incredibly sweet and very floral, because the acid would probably be converted into substances like sugar and citric acid. That would be cool!

The genome could unlock new flavours in coffee, says speciality coffee roaster James Hoffmann of Square Mile Coffee Roasters in London. He says it also offers the opportunity to improve coffee yields and pest resistance without compromising quality.

Tweak the genes for better beans

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The coffee genome could unlock new flavours and improve yields and pest resistance Chase the taste

THIS WEEK

RIGHT IONS HELP YOU SAVOUR THE FLAVOURThe coffee genome might help create new flavours, but its not just genes that dictate taste. I have tasted coffees that come from the same varietal but taste different depending on where they are grown, says coffee farmer Alejandro Martinez in El Salvador.

Another key determinant of flavour is how the bean is roasted. Speciality roaster James Hoffmann of Square Mile Coffee Roasters in London collects data on bean moisture content, roast temperature and the colour of ground coffee, and tracks their effects on the flavour. The aim is to improve quality and also increase consistency, he says.

This is being taken a step further

by Morten Mnchow of the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. He is trying to determine the effects of roast temperature and time on the flavour of speciality coffees. Im trying to map out the parameter space of speciality coffee, he says.

The water you use is also key, says Christopher Hendon of the University of Bath, UK. He spends his weekends studying coffee with the 2014 UK barista champion Maxwell Colonna-Dashwood. This year they found that the relative levels of various ions in the water affects the flavour. Calcium and magnesium ions bring out the flavour of coffee, while bicarbonate kills it (Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, doi.org/vhq).

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IT MAY be possible to treat the symptoms of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in very young infants, finds a small pilot study.

Sally Rogers and Sally Ozonoff at the University of California, Davis, taught parents of seven infants aged 6 to 15 months with ASD symptoms how to interact through play, bathing and diaper-changing to overcome developmental delays. These were

based on positive-reinforcement strategies effective at reducing symptoms in older children.

By 18 months of age, the developmental rate of six of the infants in the programme had started to accelerate and by the time they were 3 years old, their development was in the normal range, says Rogers. In contrast, four infants who qualified for the study but whose

parents chose not to participate continued to show a worsening of ASD symptoms.

Rogers speculates that the reason for such a dramatic change is that the programme intervenes when infants brains are most plastic, as babies are establishing social skills. She cautions that a large, randomised trial is needed to prove that the intervention works (Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, DOI: 10.1007/s10803-014-2202-y).

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Crafty trout use eels as accomplices to catch prey

TO COOPERATE or not, that is the question, and trout know the answer. Coral trout have joined the exclusive club of species, including humans and chimps, that can decide whether to work with animals of another species on a task.

Coral trout (Plectropomus leopardus) are fast so easily catch prey in open water, but work with moray eels to catch fish on Australias Great Barrier Reef. The eels ferret out prey hidden in reef crevices that trout cannot enter.

Alex Vail of the University of Cambridge and his team wanted to find out if the trout intentionally cooperated with the eels, and if they chose the most helpful ones.

So they built a fake reef, complete with artificial moray eels that they could control (pictured, above). The trout only solicited help from the eels by shimmying and flicking their tails when the prey was hidden.

The trout were also choosy about which eels they worked with. They were given a choice of two eels, one ofwhich would dislodge prey while the other unhelpfully swam away. They quickly learned to choose the reliable eel (Current Biology, DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2014.07.033).

Chimps also learn to choose the most reliable partners, according to a 2006 study by Alicia Melis at the University of Warwick, UK (Science, doi.org/b8qnjt). The trout chose equally well, but Melis says that doesnt mean they are as clever. The trout were performing a natural behaviour, while the chimps had to learn something new.

Early autism intervention shows promise

Feel the gravity to tell which way is up

MOONWALKING astronauts often lost their balance, but they werent clumsy it was gravitys fault. It turns out that the moons gravity is not enough to help them distinguish up from down.

Laurence Harris of York University in Toronto, Canada, and his colleagues spun volunteers on a giant rotating arm to simulate different strength gravitational fields. As the volunteers spun, they saw images of a landscape or the letter p, which they read as a p or a d, depending on which way they felt was up.

The study shows that humans need to feel at least 15 per cent of the gravitational force on Earth to figure out which way is up (PLoS One, doi.org/vhw). The moons gravity is 17 per cent of Earths, but it is also a strange environment; low gravity and unusual scenery explain why astronauts fell down even though they didnt report feeling out of sorts.

Intense rays raise aircrew cancer risk

AIRLINE pilots and cabin crew are at increased risk of melanoma skin cancer, probably due to the sunlight streaming through aircraft windows.

Martina Sanlorenzo at the University of California, San Francisco, compiled data from 19 studies examining aircrews risk of developing skin cancer. Both pilots and cabin crew had twice the risk of the general public.

A separate study found that aircrew are no more likely to take sunny holidays, sunbathe too much or use sunbeds. This leaves exposure in the air as the likely cause. Typical plane windows admit only tiny amounts of UVB sunlight, but some admit over half of the UVA that hits them (JAMA Dermatology, doi.org/vhp).

IN BRIEF


Alien tectonics on Jupiters icy moon

JUPITERS moon Europa sports a chilly version of plate tectonics. Sections of its icy shell slide beneath each other in a similar way to Earths continents and ocean floors which could provide nutrients to any life that might live under the ice.

Europas global ocean is encased in an icy shell, 20 to 30 kilometres thick. Ice appears to form in areas called growth zones, but since the moon itself isnt growing, no one knew where this new ice went.

To find out, Simon Kattenhorn atthe University of Idaho in Moscow studied images taken by the Galileo spacecraft. In the same way that geologists match up Earths geological features to map past mega-continents, he shifted ice around to match up Europas truncated lines and ridges.

Once done, he found a piece roughly the size of Massachusetts was missing. The best explanation is that it was forced under the icy crust, in a subsumption zone similar to Earths subduction zones (Nature Geoscience, doi.org/vh4).

This could be good news for any life under the ice: such movements would deliver organic molecules onthe surface to oceans that areotherwise completely sealed off. This could make Europa an inside-out twin of Earth, where tectonics helps harbour life inside the crust, instead of on its surface.

Largest dino yet makes T. rex look tiny

THEY just keep getting bigger. The latest dinosaur to be discovered was 26 metres long and around seven times as heavy as Tyrannosaurus rex. Named Dreadnoughtus schrani, it is the largest known land animal whose size can be reliably calculated.

The 77-million-year-old fossil was found in Argentina in 2005. While other huge sauropods are known from handfuls of bones, almost half of its skeleton has been recovered.

This meant Kenneth Lacovara of Drexel University in Philadelphia and his team could estimate the beasts weight precisely. At 59.3 tonnes, it

dwarfed the 42.8-tonne Elaltitan lilloi, the next-largest dino (Scientific Reports, doi.org/vhr). By comparison, Brachiosaurus and Diplodocus are minnows, at just 34and 15 tonnes.

The bones also show where muscles attached, so we can figure out how they moved, says Lacovara.

Dreadnoughtus may be able to help us understand the upper size limits to life on land, says Paul Barrett at the Natural History Museum in London.

In life Dreadnoughtus may have been even larger than the fossil, as it was still growing when it died.

IS IT a mushroom? Is it a jellyfish? No, its Dendrogramma, a new animal so bizarre in appearance that it has defied attempts to place it in the vast animal kingdom.

The two mushroom-shaped species of Dendrogramma were dragged up from the seabed off south-east Australia in 1986 by Jean Just of the Natural History Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen, and his colleagues. They have only now been studied.

They belong somewhere in the lowest branches of the animal evolutionary tree, perhaps related

to jellyfish or another primitive group called the comb jellies. But unlike jellyfish, Dendrogramma lacks stinging tentacles, and unlike comb jellies it is missing a comb of hairs.

According to Just, they most closely resemble the Ediacarans, a group of enigmatic organisms that most biologists think disappeared half a billion years ago, before the rise of animals (PLoS One, doi.org/vht).

Their internal system shows a branching pattern similar to some of the Ediacaran fossils, says Just.

Others say the similarities with Ediacarans may be superficial. Dendrogramma has a relatively simple shape and so any similarities with the external shape of Ediacaran taxa could well be coincidental, says Guy Narbonne at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, who studies Ediacaran fossils.

DNA analysis might help to settle the matter, but will require new specimens. The chemicals used to preserve the animals have rendered their DNA unsuitable for study.

Weird creatures may be relics from dawn of animal life

Archerfish spit turbo water jets

ARCHERFISH are the sharpshooters of the animal kingdom. They spit jets of water into the air to fell flying insects with startling accuracy. Now it seems they fine-tune their jets to pack an extra punch.

The water jets made by archerfish can bring down prey up to 2 metres above the surface of the water they live in even small lizards perched on foliage.

Stefan Schuster of the University of Bayreuth in Germany and his colleagues trained nine banded archerfish (Toxotes jaculatrix) to spit at their prey in view of a video camera.

They found that the back of the water jet catches up with the front just before it hits the unfortunate prey, ensuring that the force is concentrated into one hard whack (Current Biology, doi.org/vhv). The fish do this by changing the shape of their mouth as they expel the water.

The archerfish must be accurately gauging their preys distance from the water to ensure their jet coalesces at just the right height, says Schuster. If the jet became focused too early, it would probably fall apart in mid-air before hitting the prey.

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For more technology stories, visit newscientist.com/technologyTECHNOLOGY

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Phone in your feelings An experiment using phones to track the lives of university students has had some remarkable results, finds Paul Marks

EARLIER this year, two students at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire who were due to be failed for skipping lectures and not completing assignments were spared the academic axe.

Why the leniency? According to an automated analysis of their smartphone data, both had stress and health-related issues they hadnt told their professors about. So instead of Fs and a terms suspension, they were given a chance to complete the coursework over the summer and have now returned to campus.

The students have Andrew Campbell, a computer scientist at Dartmouth, and his colleagues to thank. The students, and 46 others, were enrolled in an experiment to see if data gathered from their phones could be used to guess their state of mind.

Campbells team set out to discover why, out of a group of students arriving at university with similar qualifications, some excel while others miss lots of classes or even drop out entirely.

The researchers suspected that factors like the amount of sleep students get, their sociability, mood, workload and stress levels all played a role. So they built an app, called StudentLife, that monitors readings from smartphone sensors, and then recruited volunteers to use it over a 10-week term.

The app recorded almost every aspect of life that it was possible to measure, including physical activity levels, frequency and duration of conversations, and GPS location. The camera even watched for when the lights went out each night.

By crunching this data, the app could infer each students levels of happiness, depression, loneliness and stress. Thats possible because flourishing students, as the team calls them, are often with other people and have longer conversations, while depressed students interact less

with others and have disrupted, or excessive, sleep. Loneliness is marked in part by mainly indoor activity, the team says, and the combination of disturbed sleep and short conversations is a predictor of stress.

The researchers compared these mental states with each

students performance, including grades for assignments and their grade-point average for the term.

We found for the first time that passive and automatic sensor data, obtained from phones without any action by the user, significantly correlates student depression level, stress and loneliness with academic performance over the term, Campbell says. It also let them see how behaviour like gym usage and sleep times changed when students were faced with assignments or exams.

The results showed that students generally started the term in chipper moods, with most having lots of conversations, healthy sleep levels and busy activity patterns. As the term went on, workload increased, stress shot up and sleep, chat and physical activity all dropped off. Daily interviews with volunteers confirmed that the automated analyses were accurate. Campbell will present the teams results at UbiComp in Seattle this week.

He believes the results are good evidence that phones will be able to provide continuous mental health assessment much better than occasional questionnaires filled out when someone feeling depressed visits a doctor. And the app could work for people from all walks of life.

But accessing data on someones every move will be controversial, even if it saves them their university place or job. Privacy is the big issue here, says Cecilia Mascolo, who studies mobile sensing at the University of Cambridge. You need to constrain this to a very specific application that will benefit people, and with the user always in control of their data. Still, she says, with proper protections in place, stress or depression could not only be detected, but also mitigated using information derived from phone sensors.

People wont be given a prescription, she says. They will be given an app.

The app could infer each students levels of happiness, depression, loneliness and stress

Spot the ones needing help


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Dont worry, be GlassyCan Google Glass put us in better touch with our emotions?

Hal Hodson

AS SOON as its on my head, Google Glass picks up my pulse. Late for a meeting, Id had to scramble up to the third floor of the MIT Media Lab for this demo, and my racing heart shows it. I huff and puff while Javier Hernandez, the projects leader, explains how it works. As he talks, my heartbeat settles down before my eyes: 79 beats per minute, 73, 69.

Hernandez has taught Glass to measure vital signs like pulse and respiration using just the headsets built-in gyroscope, accelerometer and camera. They pick up the subtle head motion caused by the beating of the heart, and tease out the rise and fall of breaths from other movements.

Together with contextual data captured by Glass, Hernandezs algorithms aim to give the wearer a window into their emotional state. Its just one aspect of a new

system, called SenseGlass, that is designed to make us more aware of our mental well-being, and ultimately control it better.

The work represents a leap forward in the field of affective computing, which seeks to build technologies that measure, respond to and influence our emotions. Rosalind Picard, who works with Hernandez, says Google Glass could be a powerful tool for making computers more emotionally attuned. Its always been a challenge to have a computer understand something about your stress but not make it worse in the moment, she says. Its been hard to get it right because we havent been able to monitor it in real time in a comfortable way until now. Whats really groundbreaking is that my ordinary eyeglasses could have that capability.

Powerful as it is to see your heart rate floating before you in

a head-up display, biological data alone is not sufficient to infer emotion context is also vital. For that, the researchers use Glasss camera to record what the wearer is seeing. The researchers can analyse the visual data using apps they are developing, such as Smile Catcher, built by Niaja Farve, also at MIT, which counts the number of smiles flashed in the wearers direction each day. Such visual, social clues are combined with the wearers biological information.

Other apps exist that attempt to use Google Glass to discern emotions. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute in Erlangen, Germany, have just released an app called Shore, which identifies the emotions being expressed on the faces of people around you,

Its a challenge to have acomputer understand your stress but not make itworse in the moment

She spies a happy chappy

while the start-up firm Emotient of San Diego, California, wants to use similar technology to let retailers measure your feelings.

SenseGlass is different, says Hernandez, in that the teams goal is to help users take an active role in modulating their own emotions. Say you want to avoid depression, he says. Low variation in heart rate in response to events that should make people excited or nervous has been associated with depression, so a user might benefit from looking back on the systems recordings. Its about helping you to reflect on your daily life in a meaningful way, Hernandez says.

Jim Rehg of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, who has worked on the SenseGlass project, says those who have trouble recognising or expressing their emotions, such as people with autism, might benefit by being able to use the devices measurements to communicate how they are feeling to others. Tech like this might be used to let a care provider better understand what is going on with the person theyre caring for, he says.

Rehg co-authored a paper on BioGlass, the aspect of SenseGlass that monitors pulse and breathing. He will present the work at the MobiHealth conference in Athens, Greece, in November.

The current version of the system has limitations. The sensors cant pick up on pulse or breathing rate while the wearer is running or dancing, for instance, as such large movements drown out subtle motions. But the team say later versions should overcome this problem.

What theyre putting together has the potential to address all the challenges that come with real-world emotional monitoring, says Julien Penders, who directs the wearable healthcare programme at Imec, a medical company in San Francisco. In a single platform they managed to get context and physiological data, and not only to sense but also to deliver feedback. Thats very unique.


For more technology stories, visit newscientist.com/technology

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Soft-bodied robot is hard to killBurn it, freeze it, run it over this robot just keeps squirming. Created by Michael Tolley of Harvard University and his team, the air-filled robot has no rigid skeleton. In experiments, the robot survived a snowstorm with temperatures reaching -9 C, withstood flames for 20 seconds, resisted acids and had its limbs driven over by a car. Its ability to handle extreme conditions could come in handy on search and rescue missions, says Tolley, where soft bodies are useful for their ability to squeeze into tights spaces.

3%The Netflix Tax to be imposed on audiovisual content broadcast over the internet to people in Buenos Aires, Argentina

Fabric circuits pave way for wearablesMost wearable tech isnt washable but a team at the Institute of Textiles and Clothing in Hong Kong, China, has hit on a stretchy fabric formulation that can withstand multiple washes. Xiao-Ming Tao and colleagues have created a fabric circuit board, in which filaments of elastic yarn are woven with polyurethane-coated copper fibres. Tests show the material can be stretched by 20 per cent about a million times before the fibres start to fail, and it can be washed as normal.

Phone snap spots jaundice in babiesParents wondering if their newborn is developing jaundice could soon use their phone to find out. Lilian de Greef and Mayank Goel at the University of Washington in Seattle have developed an app called Bilicam that seeks out the telltale yellow skin discolouration. An eight-colour calibration card isplaced in the frame to calibrate the camera, and parents take a snap. The app then tells users to phone a doctor if something looks wrong.

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TIME to flex our muscles against mussels. Since they first arrived inNorth America in 1988, zebra musselshave made themselves at home. The small molluscs, which attach themselves to boats and clog underwater pipes, cost the US billions of dollars in pipe cleaning and repair, lost hydroelectric power, damaged boat hulls and other headaches.

In a bid to stem the tide of invasive aquatic species like these, a team atthe University of Notre Dame in Indiana have designed software to identify hubs in the global shipping network that have outsized roles in spreading interlopers. All told, invasive species are estimated to cost the US $120billion a year.

The paths of ships, their ballast discharge, and ecological and environmental factors all influence the spread of species, says Nitesh Chawla, a leader of the project. By analysing all of these factors across hundreds of ports worldwide, the team has shown which places are the biggest spreaders of species and thus which would be best to target.

Singapore alone contributes to 26per cent of total species flow among the 818 ports in the Pacific, says Chawla.

Asking every port to implement strict control measures, like testing and treating ballast water, could drag

down productivity but focusing on just those places most likely to spread invaders would have a large effect, say the researchers. By assuming species-control policies were implemented on the top 20per cent ofthe most connected ports, we showed that it would be at least twice as difficult for species to propagate, says Chawla.

Whats more, says the team, container ships are more likely to transport invasive species than passenger carriers or barges. That

means that in some areas, only large, bulk carriers need to be subject to the strictest inspection andprevention measures, and other ships can pass unhindered.

Kelly Pennington, who studies invasive species at the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, says the work could inform global policies, and be adapted to the regional or state level as well.

The team presented a paper ontheir work last month at the Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining in New York City. Lakshmi Sandhana

Pinpoint key ports to stop aquatic invaders

Singapore contributes to 26per cent of total species flow among the 818 ports in the Pacific


For more technology stories, visit newscientist.com/technologyTECHNOLOGY

The robots dilemmaEthics dont come easy to automatons, as Aviva Rutkin discovers

CAN we teach a robot to be good? Fascinated by the idea, roboticist Alan Winfield of Bristol Robotics Laboratory in the UK built an ethical trap for a robot and was stunned by the machinesresponse.

In an experiment, Winfield and his colleagues programmed a robot to prevent other automatons acting as proxies for humans from falling into ahole. This is a simplified version of IsaacAsimovs fictional First Law of Robotics a robot must not allow a human being to come to harm.

At first, the robot was successful inits task. As a human proxy moved towards the hole, the robot rushed in to push it out of the path of danger. But when the team added a second human proxy rolling toward the hole atthe same time, the robot was forced to choose. Sometimes, it managed to save one human while letting the other perish; a few times it even managed to save both. But in 14 out of 33 trials, the robot wasted so much time fretting over its decision that both humans fell into the hole. The work was presented on 2 September at theTowards Autonomous Robotic Systems meeting in Birmingham, UK.

Winfield describes his robot as an

ethical zombiethat has no choice but to behave as it does. Though it may save others according to a programmed code of conduct, it doesnt understand the reasoning behind its actions. Winfield admits he once thought it was not possible for a robot to make ethical choices for itself. Today, he says, my answer is: I have no idea.

As robots integrate further into oureveryday lives, this question will need to be answered. A self-driving car, for example, may one day have to

weigh the safety of its passengers against the risk of harming other motorists orpedestrians. It may be very difficult to program robots with rules for suchencounters.

But robots designed for military combat may offer the beginning of asolution. Ronald Arkin, a computer scientist at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, has built a setof algorithms for military robots dubbed an ethical governor which is meant to help them make smart

decisions on the battlefield. He has already tested it in simulated combat, showing that drones with such programming can choose not to shoot, or try to minimise casualties during a battle near an area protected from combat according to the rules of war, like a school or hospital.

Arkin says that designing military robots to act more ethically may be low-hanging fruit, as these rules are well known. The laws of war have been thought about for thousands of years and are encoded in treaties. Unlike human fighters, who can be swayed by emotion and break these rules, automatons would not.

When were talking about ethics, allof this is largely about robots that are developed to function in pretty prescribed spaces, says Wendell Wallach, author of Moral Machines: Teaching robots right from wrong. Still, he says, experiments like Winfields hold promise in laying the foundations on which more complex ethical behaviour can be built. If we can get them to function well in environments when we dont know exactly all the circumstances theyll encounter, thats going to open up vastnew applications for their use.

A self-driving car may have to weigh the safety of its passengers against that of a pedestrian or motorist

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TOUCH first, ask questions later. Thats the motto a robotic deep-sea explorer lives by as it examines the depths by touch. Shaped like a three-fingered hand, the robot could be used to fix problems at deep-sea oil and gas wells.

Underwater visibility is impaired by impurities or sediments in the water, says Achint Aggarwal at theGerman Research Center for Artificial Intelligence in Bremen. In such conditions, it is very difficult to find or manipulate objects.

To cut through the murk, Aggarwal and his team created a robot hand that could be attached to an undersea vehicle. Built-in sensors track changes in pressure, texture and movement as the hand explores an object. Software uses the sensor readings to create a digital map of the object and make an educated guess about what it might be.

The team tested the hand at a pressure equivalent to 6 kilometres under water. It probed several objects, including a mug, chess piece and toy shark and was right about 90 per cent of the time (Journal of Field Robotics, doi.org/vh9).

Theyve developed a technology thats basically pressure-proof, says Dennis Schweers of Nuytco Research, which develops underwater exploration equipment in Canada. Im very impressed. Aviva Rutkin

INSIGHT Ethical machines Robotic hand to feel for deep-sea discoveries

A robot may not injure a human

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In the midnight hourREADY to explore the dark side of life? Nocturnal animals have been around for hundreds of millions of years, and today they make up around half of all mammal species, but because most of us are active during the day we rarely encounter these night dwellers.

Artist and photographer Traer Scott has bridged that gap, capturing images of 42 animals that become active at night. Inspiration came from a childrens book belonging to her daughter in which a boy takes the moon for a walk at night. There were illustrations of moths and bats and it occurred to me that no one has done a collection of photos exploring the whole family, so to speak, of nocturnal animals, she says.

Her subjects range from cockroaches to big catsby way of rodents like this North American kangaroo rat (left) , primates including the small-eared galago (below left) and larger carnivorous species like the North American river otter.

All of the animals featured live in captivity some in wildlife rehabilitation centres, others in zoos. Scott photographs them in the dark conditions the animals are most at home in. I have a wonderful little black box I use to photograph smaller animals, she says. The animals go inside and theyre immediately put back into darkness, which makes them more at ease.

Scotts book, Nocturne: Creatures of the night, is published by Princeton Architectural Press. Colin Barras

Photographer Traer Scott traerscott.com


Scotlands science futureWould Scottish science benefit from going it alone? Not a doubt, says Stephen J. Watson. Not a chance, argues Andrew Miller

OPINION

Stephen J. Watson

ON 18 September, the people of Scotland have a precious chance to vote for independence. There are many reasons to vote yes: I believe the health of Scottish science is one of them.

For now, Scotlands science and technology funding is delivered primarily by UK national departments. But according to 2011 figures, Scotland receives about 17 per cent less of such UK expenditure than its share of the UK population would warrant. Furthermore, Scotlands gross expenditure on R&D is just 1.3 per cent of its GDP, less than the UKs 1.7 per cent and woefully below

the EU average of about 2 per cent.This comes against a backdrop

of cuts in the UK science budget. According to the Campaign for Science & Engineering, by 2016 the annual budget will have been eroded by 1.1 billion since 2010, about 20 per cent of the total. This erosion is not consistent with high-quality, curiosity-driven research that drives economic success. An independent Scotland would have the ability to provide a fresh approach.

Scotland has an enviable scientific history, and Scottish science is still very strong. An independent Scotland will be better placed economically to further support it. In an analysis of Scotlands potential, the

Financial Times concluded Scotland would be one of the worlds top 20 richest countries. Credit-ratings agency Standard & Poors calculates that Scotland would have a higher GDP per capita than Germany and the UK.

Independence will permit Scotland to further advance its existing strengths, such as in biomedical sciences. It will also open up opportunities in sustainability science to support a blue economy based on the 421,000 square kilometres of sea around Scotland, which contain incredible fish stocks, oil and gas reserves and vast renewable-energy potential.

Voting yes to independence would provide a constitutional blank slate on which science can be written into the heart of government. Furthermore, there is good evidence emerging through the grassroots yes movement that the creative skills of the Scots would be unleashed by self-determination.

Reaching out to those who harbour some anxieties about the effect on research, Michael Atiyah, former president of both the UK Royal Society and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, wrote in The Times in July: with mutual goodwill there will be solutions to a host of technical problems.

I urge those who care about the future of Scottish science to follow Atiyahs lead and say: I intend to vote yes to independence for Scotland.

Stephen J. Watson is a mathematician at the University of Glasgow and chair of Academics for Yes

Andrew Miller

AS PART of the UK, Scotland is a global leader in research. This success is based on substantial UK funding and unhindered collaboration within the most efficient research system in the world. As active and influential members of the UK research community, scientists in Scotland enjoy an enviably fertile and productive environment. Separation would break this up and create barriers to collaboration and quality-enhancing competition.

The environment we currently share produces 14 per cent of the worlds most highly cited papers. The intense competition and easy

flow of researchers among leading UK universities and laboratories drives up standards, while the UKs global reach allows us to maintain facilities anywhere from Antarctica to West Africa.

Scotlands crucial contribution to the worlds sixth-biggest economy allows us to build major facilities such as the Diamond Light Source synchrotron near Oxford and the UK Astronomy Technology Centre in Edinburgh, while playing a leading role in international collaborations such as CERN and the European Space Agency.

Talented and creative Scots are influential in UK research, benefiting both the UK and

There is good evidence that the creative skills of the Scots would be unleashed by self-determination


ONE MINUTE INTERVIEW

For more opinion articles, visit newscientist.com/opinion

Scotland. Separation would harm this synergy. It would be crazy to pull out of this community in which resources and personnel are shared cooperatively. Of course small countries can succeed, but the full-spectrum of UK capabilities would be lost.

The yes campaign makes some incredible claims that research would somehow be improved by negotiating to keep what we already enjoy. The legal and practical realities mean that a yes vote is a vote to walk away from the UK research councils. In addition, major UK science charities such as the Wellcome Trust and the Association of Medical Research Charities have concerns that medical research would be particularly at risk.

The Scottish National Party asserts that somehow everything will continue, even though no precedent exists for such a cross-border system. The experts and the evidence are making it apparent that this is wishful thinking. Concerns have been expressed by Nobel laureate Paul Nurse, 16 leading medical researchers in Scotland, nine former principals of Scottish universities and a former chief medical officer of Scotland.

Uncosted promises have been made and researchers assured that funding will not fall despite there being no clarity on what currency an independent Scotland would adopt. How clinical trials could work if split across multiple jurisdictions, ethical bodies and populations has also not been addressed.

To settle for less than being a global leader in science is to sell Scotland short. Scottish research is thriving as part of the UK, and its future is brightest as part of it. For these reasons I will be saying no thanks to this ill-judged proposal for separation.

Andrew Miller is a former principal of the University of Stirling and a member of Academics Together, part of the Better Together campaign JU

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Lawless labs no moreResearch misconduct degrades trust in scientists and causes real-world harm. It should be a crime, argues Richard Smith

PROFILERichard Smith edited the BMJ from 1991 to 2004. He is a founding member of the Committee on Publication Ethics, a former trustee of the UK Research Integrity Office and author of The Trouble with Medical Journals (CRC Press, 2006)

Why should research

new scientist - 13 september 2014

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