Wanted: A Bob Geldof for climate change

EAST Africa is no stranger to crisis: who can forget the Ethiopian famine of the mid-1980s that killed about half a million people?

But the drought that struck in 2011 was different – it was caused, at least in part, by climate change, the first time a humanitarian disaster has been directly linked to global warming (see "Humanitarian disaster blamed on climate change"). It won't be the last.

If that wasn't bad enough, our climate now seems to have passed one of the abrupt changes known as tipping points. This is another first (see "Arctic thaw may be first in cascade of tipping points").

These stories are a depressing reminder of how we are damaging the planet. But they also remind us that change is possible. The famine of the mid-1980s was a tipping point of sorts too, because it thrust hunger onto the global agenda. We need a new hero. Is there a climate change Bob Geldof out there?

This article appeared in print under the headline "Holding out for a climate hero"

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Herbal Viagra actually contains the real thing

IF IT looks too good to be true, it probably is. Several "herbal remedies" for erectile dysfunction sold online actually contain the active ingredient from Viagra.

Michael Lamb at Arcadia University in Glenside, Pennsylvania, and colleagues purchased 10 popular "natural" uplifting remedies on the internet and tested them for the presence of sildenafil, the active ingredient in Viagra. They found the compound, or a similar synthetic drug, in seven of the 10 products – cause for concern because it can be dangerous for people with some medical conditions.

Lamb's work was presented last week at the American Academy of Forensic Sciences meeting in Washington DC.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Herbal Viagra gets a synthetic boost"

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Space gold rush should not be a free-for-all

We need a consensus on regulations surrounding space mining if it’s to enrich us all

EVER since we took our first steps out of Africa, human exploration has been driven by the desire to secure resources. Now our attention is turning to space.

The motivation for deep-space travel is shifting from discovery to economics. The past year has seen a flurry of proposals aimed at bringing celestial riches down to Earth. No doubt this will make a few billionaires even wealthier, but we all stand to gain: the mineral bounty and spin-off technologies could enrich us all.

But before the miners start firing up their rockets, we should pause for thought. At first glance, space mining seems to sidestep most environmental concerns: there is (probably!) no life on asteroids, and thus no habitats to trash. But its consequences – both here on Earth and in space – merit careful consideration.

Part of this is about principles. Some will argue that space's "magnificent desolation" is not ours to despoil, just as they argue that our own planet's poles should remain pristine. Others will suggest that glutting ourselves on space's riches is not an acceptable alternative to developing more sustainable ways of earthly life.

History suggests that those will be hard lines to hold, and it may be difficult to persuade the public that such barren environments are worth preserving. After all, they exist in vast abundance, and even fewer people will experience them than have walked through Antarctica's icy landscapes.

There's also the emerging off-world economy to consider. The resources that are valuable in orbit and beyond may be very different to those we prize on Earth (see "Space miners hope to build first off-Earth economy"). Questions of their stewardship have barely been broached – and the relevant legal and regulatory framework is fragmentary, to put it mildly.

Space miners, like their earthly counterparts, are often reluctant to engage with such questions. One speaker at last week's space-mining forum in Sydney, Australia, concluded with a plea that regulation should be avoided. But miners have much to gain from a broad agreement on the for-profit exploitation of space. Without consensus, claims will be disputed, investments risky, and the gains made insecure. It is in all of our long-term interests to seek one out.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Taming the final frontier"

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Bacteria defeat antibiotics they have never met before

BACTERIA that resist antibiotics are a growing problem worldwide, but one we thought we could limit or even reverse by better control of the drugs. This may be a forlorn hope: some bacteria that have never seen an antibiotic can evolve resistance, and even thrive on it.

Bacteria usually become resistant if they are exposed to drug levels too low to kill them off, but high enough to favour the survival of resistant mutants. Such resistance is growing and could make TB and other diseases untreatable again.

The prevailing notion was that bacteria acquire and maintain resistance genes at a cost. So by carefully controlling antibiotics, resistance should not emerge by itself – and should die out as soon as the antibiotic is withdrawn and resistance is no longer an advantage.

Maybe not. Olivier Tenaillon at Denis Diderot University, Paris, and colleagues were studying bacterial evolution by exposing Escherichia coli to high temperatures and little food. Unexpectedly, some bacteria spontaneously became resistant to the antibiotic rifampicin, even though they had never encountered it. The mutation that helped them deal with environmental stress just happened to confer resistance to the drug, used to treat TB and meningitis (BMC Evolutionary Biology, doi.org/kks).

"Our work suggests that selective pressure other than antibiotics may drive resistance," says Tenaillon.

Moreover, bacteria with the mutation grew 20 per cent faster than otherwise-identical bacteria – a first for a resistance mutation.

It only had this beneficial effect in the heat-adapted strain, says Arjan de Visser of Wageningen University in the Netherlands, who was not involved in the study. But, he adds, "these results are a cautionary tale for the use of antibiotics – resistance may come without costs [to bacteria]".

This article appeared in print under the headline "Bacteria defeat antibiotics they have never met"

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We need a piece of Mars to continue search for life

THERE'S no need to cry over spilt chemicals. Thanks to an accident inside one of its instruments, NASA's Curiosity rover has detected the presence of a substance called perchlorate in Martian soil (see "Curiosity's spills add thrills to the Mars life hunt").

Not exactly earth-shattering, you might think. But it adds a new twist to the most controversial chapter in Martian history: did the Viking landers detect life?

This is a question that has divided the Viking missions' researchers for almost three decades. One group has resolutely stuck to its guns that the landers detected signs of life. Equally adamant is a second group who say they absolutely did not – a view that has always been the official version of events.

The unexpected discovery of perchlorate supplies a legitimate reason to reopen the debate. Perchlorate is an oxidising agent that destroys organic molecules. Its presence could finally explain the disputed results.

The episode highlights another important issue. Curiosity is a sophisticated machine, but there is only so much soil chemistry we can do from millions of kilometres away. A sample return mission must be a priority.

This article appeared in print under the headline "We need a piece of Mars"

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The man who's crashing the techno-hype party

Jim Giles, consultant

Get your big data groove on at an "I ♥ Facebook" party - or don't (Image: Stefano Dal P/Contrasto/Eyevine)

Evgeny Morosov does a good job of dispelling "big data" hype in To Save Everything, Click Here, but fails to explore the way we shape the tech we use

IF SILICON VALLEY is a party, Evgeny Morozov is the guy who turns up late and spoils the fun. The valley loves ambitious entrepreneurs with world-changing ideas. Morozov is, in his own words, an "Eastern European curmudgeon". He's wary of quick fixes and irritated by hype. He's the guy who saunters over to the technophiles gathered around the punch bowl and tells them, perhaps in too much detail, how misguided they are.

Morozov should be invited all the same, because he brings a caustic yet thoughtful scepticism that is usually missing from debates about technology. Remember the claims that Facebook and Twitter, having helped power the Arab Spring, would lead to a more open and democratic world? If you heard a dissenting voice, it was probably Morozov's: in his 2011 book The Net Delusion, and also in New Scientist, he pointed out that dictators can use social media to spread propaganda and identify activists. The web is a medium for both liberation and oppression.

Now Morozov is crashing another party. This one is in full swing, filled with feverish talk of algorithms and the cloud and big data. Here's Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, describing how his site tracks our personal interests so that it can serve up the news we most care about. And that's computer pioneer Gordon Bell holding forth on "life-logging". For about a decade he has worn a digital camera that takes frequent shots of his surroundings, which helps supplement his memory.

Enter the curmudgeon. Morozov says people like Zuckerberg and Bell espouse Silicon Valley philosophies that are pervasive but shallow. Bell's desire to catalogue everything, for example, is an example of "solutionism": the relentless drive to fix and to optimise; to take problems - in this case an imperfect biological memory - and propose solutions. This rush for solutions prevents us from thinking about the causes of the problems, and whether, in fact, they are problems at all.

Morozov's right: a digital catalogue of the books we have read and scenes we have witnessed is not, as Bell claims, the basis for more truthful recollections, unless your primary concern is the colour of the socks you wore one day in 2007. There are many things that are important - the mood in a room, a person's demeanour - but too intangible to be captured by a camera, or any other form of technology. Even if they could be, it is far from certain that our future selves would benefit from being able to "recall" these things.

His other bugbear is "internet-centrism": the belief that the internet has inherent properties that should dictate the form of the solutions we pursue. Take the idea that governments should publish data on issues like crime and court cases. To an internet-centrist, this data should be as open and searchable as possible. Morozov wants to know why. Maps of crime data can drive down house prices, worsening a cycle of decline. And publicising the names of trial witnesses can lead to intimidation. The desire for openness requires real trade-offs, and it is naive to assume that a technology can tell us how to handle them. "To suppose that 'the Internet', like the Bible or the Koran, contains simple answers... is to believe that it operates according to laws as firm as those of gravity," he writes.

It is important that someone is countering techno-hype, yet this book lacks the punch of Morozov's earlier writings. It reads like he really did imagine himself crashing a Silicon Valley party and lecturing the attendees, because the book, essentially, is a series of rebuttals of prominent technologists. There is little in the way of practical alternatives. By my count, Morozov dedicates 317 pages to attacking solutionism and internet-centrism, and 33 pages to thinking about how to move beyond them. By taking aim at the technologists, Morozov averts his gaze from something more important: the way that technologies are actually used.

This is most clear in the chapter on the media, in which he worries about technology that allows news organisations to track what people read. The result, he fears, will be a whittling away of less-popular but important types of news, like reporting on poverty. Meanwhile, sites like Facebook are profiling us and using algorithms to feed us news they think we will enjoy, limiting serendipitous discoveries that open us up to new events and ways of thinking.

These are legitimate fears, but they predate the internet. Newspapers and magazines have long used focus groups to gauge reactions to content, sometimes culling and expanding sections in accordance with this feedback. The feedback on digital media may be more rapid and fine-grained, but that does not mean that editors are now slaves to it. A good editor knows that readers want to be challenged as well as entertained; to read about topics they love, and those they may come to love. This involves balancing audience feedback with an instinct for a story. It is nothing new.

This is true even at sites that embrace the algorithmic approach. At Buzzfeed.com, stories are designed to maximise the chances that they will be shared on social media (one headline as I write: "Here Is A Horse Playing A Recorder With Its Nose"). In 2011, the site hired a notable political reporter and tasked him with generating scoops - about politics, not horses. Last year, in a move headed by a different editor, the site began publishing long-form features. Will these new sections generate as many hits as cat videos? Probably not. But Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti, whom Morozov dismisses as the "king of memes", presumably knows that the site will be stronger with this richer content added, regardless of what the page-view figures say.

This is the way that technologies are used in real life. They are shaped and adapted by people that use them, based on personal needs and histories. Editors can make use of new audience data without bowing to the algorithms. People can log aspects of their lives - perhaps miles run, or calories consumed - without signing up to Bell's eccentric ideas. Many of us like the connectivity that Facebook brings, but that does not mean we swallow Zuckerberg's self-serving philosophy. Technology shapes us, for sure, but we shape it, too. That process is extremely complex, and it cannot be critiqued by focusing solely on the hype.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Crashing the techno-hype party"

Book information
To Save Everything, Click Here by Evgeny Morozov
Allen Lane/PublicAffairs
£20/$28.99

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Take my taxi to the moon

Susmita Mohanty, the founder of India’s first private space company, Earth2Orbit, wants India to claim bigger piece of the space-launch pie

How active is India's space programme?
The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), which was founded in 1969, launches rockets, builds and uses satellites extensively for earthly applications and has recently started planetary exploration. It tested its first astronaut capsule for atmospheric re-entry in 2007, and is planning to build a residential astronaut training facility. ISRO is also planning a lunar lander mission for 2014 and will launch a mission to Mars this year.

How does your company, Earth2Orbit, fit in with this programme?
We want to commercialise India's space capabilities, in particular the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle. It is one of the world's most reliable in its class. I want to make it the rocket of choice for international satellite-makers looking to get to low Earth or sun-synchronous orbits. India could build and launch up to six each year, but currently launches only two. We need to step up to full throttle. The same goes for satellites and ground equipment. Over the next decade or two, I think India should be aiming for at least a quarter of the multibillion-dollar global space market, if not more.

What do you think of the way spacecraft for carrying humans are currently designed?
The way the world aerospace industry is set up, it is closely linked to the defence sector – they share the technology, the tooling and the cumbersome contractual processes. Unlike commercial automobile or consumer-product companies, where the end user is the primary design driver, aerospace companies tend to please government customers. As a result, we often end up with over-engineered, under-designed crew craft with an exorbitant price tag.

How can we improve on these designs?
I want us to push the boundaries of technology and design and build intelligent spaceships – spaceships that think. Imagine if an international consortium of companies such as Apple, Samsung, Pininfarina, Space X and MIT Media Lab got together to design and build a spaceship! What would it look like? Could it think? Could it self-repair or self-clean? Would it challenge the crew?

The private sector is changing how we get into space. How has the X Prize contributed?
It created a tectonic shift in mindsets and showed how we can accelerate innovation in space exploration without having to spend taxpayer money. The first X Prize led to the first privately funded and designed spaceplane built by Burt Rutan. Then Richard Branson seized the opportunity: if all goes well, Virgin Galactic could fly more people to space in a year than the Russians or Americans have over the past 50 years!

What is next for space travel?
It barely takes 10 minutes to reach low Earth orbit. It probably takes longer for most urbanites to commute to work. I want to be able to "cab it" to low Earth orbit. I am dreaming of private astronaut taxis. The first generation will take paying passengers into orbit. The second generation will ferry us to the moon and Mars.

This article appeared in print under the headline "One minute with... Susmita Mohanty"

Profile

Susmita Mohanty is CEO of Earth2Orbit, which recently launched its first client satellite. She has worked at NASA and Boeing, and holds a PhD in aerospace architecture

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New blood test finds elusive fetal gene problem

A NEW non-invasive blood test for pregnant women could make it easier to catch abnormalities before their child is born.

Human cells should have two copies of each chromosome but sometimes the division is uneven. Existing tests count the fragments of placental DNA in the mother's blood. If the fragments from one chromosome are unusually abundant, it might be because the fetus has an extra copy of that chromosome. But triploidy, where there are three copies of every chromosome, is missed, since the proportion of fragments from each chromosome is the same.

California-based company Natera uses an algorithm to calculate the most likely genotype for the fetus. To do this it looks at single letter variations called SNPs in the parents and compares this to a database of the most common SNPs patterns in the population. This genotype is then compared with placental DNA.

This approach can catch triploidy since the whole fetal genotype is the reference rather than a single chromosome. The method was presented last week at the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine in San Francisco.

This article appeared in print under the headline "No hiding place for fetal gene errors"

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People in a vegetative state may feel pain

IT IS a nightmare situation. A person diagnosed as being in a vegetative state has an operation without anaesthetic because they cannot feel pain. Except, maybe they can.

Alexandra Markl at the Schön clinic in Bad Aibling, Germany, and colleagues studied people with unresponsive wakefulness syndrome (UWS) – also known as vegetative state – and identified activity in brain areas involved in the emotional aspects of pain. People with UWS can make reflex movements but can't show subjective awareness.

There are two distinct neural networks that work together to create the sensation of pain. The more basic of the two – the sensory-discriminative network – identifies the presence of an unpleasant stimulus. It is the affective network that attaches emotions and subjective feelings to the experience. Crucially, without the activity of the emotional network, your brain detects pain but won't interpret it as unpleasant.

Using PET scans, previous studies have detected activation in the sensory-discriminative network in people with UWS but their findings were consistent with a lack of subjective awareness, the hallmark of the condition.

Now Markl and her colleagues have found evidence of activation in the affective or emotional network too (Brain and Behavior, doi.org/kfs).

Her team gave moderately painful electric shocks to 30 people with UWS, while scanning their brains using fMRI. Sixteen people had some kind of brain activation – seven only in the sensory network but nine in the affective network as well.

These results question whether some diagnoses should change from UWS to minimally conscious, which is characterised by some level of awareness.

"I don't think this paper alone will change the clinical approach to people with diagnoses such as UWS," says Donald Weaver at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, who was not involved in the work. But it will encourage future study, he says.

Changing a diagnosis depends on whether neurologists are ready to accept alternative ways of diagnosing disorders of consciousness, says Boris Kotchoubey at the Institute of Medical Psychology and Behavioural Neurobiology in Tübingen, Germany, who worked on the study.

Nonetheless, Kotchoubey is confident that the way people with UWS are cared for will change, even if their diagnoses remain the same. "I know that many doctors working with such patients have been instructed to treat their patients as if they can understand them and perceive at least something in the environment, perhaps pain, pleasure, or emotion," he says.

But not all people are treated this way. Prior to the study, one of the people in Markl's study was given no anaesthesia before a tracheotomy, which involves an incision in the neck to allow breathing without using the nose or mouth. As people with UWS are clinically considered unable to understand pain, doctors do not have to give an anaesthetic.

This article appeared in print under the headline "What if people in a coma feel pain..."

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Spidey-sense suit tingles when someone gets too close

FOR Peter Parker, it was a tingling sensation that alerted him to an imminent threat. Now anyone can pretend to be Spider-Man by simply donning a suit that lets you feel how close you are to a nearby object. It can even let the wearer navigate with their eyes closed.

The suit, called SpiderSense and built by Victor Mateevitsi of the University of Illinois in Chicago has small robotic arms packaged in modules with microphones that send out and pick up ultrasonic reflections from objects. When the ultrasound detects someone moving closer to the microphone, the arms respond by exerting a growing pressure on the body. Seven of these modules are distributed across the suit to give the wearer as near to 360 degree ultrasound coverage as possible.

"When someone is punching Spider-Man, he feels the sensation and can avoid it. Our suit is the same concept," says Mateevitsi. SpiderSense could help blind people to find their way more easily, he says.

Mateevitsi tested the suit out on students, getting them to stand outside on campus, blindfolded, and "feel" for approaching attackers. Each wearer had ninja cardboard throwing stars to use whenever they sensed someone approaching them. "Ninety five per cent of the time they were able to sense someone approaching and throw the star at them," says Mateevitsi.

"I'm very excited about this," says Gershon Dublon of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who also works on augmenting parts of the human body. Mateevitsi's work is a step on the road to giving humans truly integrated extrasensory perception, says Dublon.

Mateevitsi wants to use the suit, or just a few sensors on the arms and back, to boost cyclists' awareness of other traffic on the road. SpiderSense is due to be presented at the Augmented Human conference in Stuttgart, Germany, in March. The team now plans to add more sensors to the suit to increase its resolution.

"We humans have the senses that we are born with and we can't extend them," Mateevisti says. "But there are some threats which are very deadly, but we can't sense them, like radiation. Electronic sensors can feel those threats."

The team also plans to begin trials of SpiderSense with visually impaired people.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Back off, my Spidey senses tell me you're too close"

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Today on New Scientist: 19 February 2013

Doctors would tax sugary drinks to combat obesity

Hiking the price of fizzy drinks would cut consumption and so help fight obesity, urges the British Academy of Medical Royal Colleges

Space station's dark matter hunter coy about findings

Researchers on the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, which sits above the International Space Station, have collected their first results - but won't reveal them for two weeks

Huge telescopes could spy alien oxygen

Hunting for oxygen in the atmospheres of distant exoplanets is a tough job, but a new wave of giant telescopes should be up to the task

Evolution's detectives: Closing in on missing links

Technology is taking the guesswork out of finding evolution's turning points, from the first fish with legs to our own recent forebears, says Jeff Hecht

Moody Mercury shows its hidden colours

False-colour pictures let us see the chemical and physical landscape of the normally beige planet closest to the sun

LHC shuts down to prepare for peak energy in 2015

Over the next two years, engineers will be giving the Large Hadron Collider the makeover it needs to reach its maximum design energy

Insert real news events into your mobile game

From meteor airbursts to footballing fracas, mobile games could soon be brimming with news events that lend them more currency

3D-printing pen turns doodles into sculptures

The 3Doodle, which launched on Kickstarter today, lets users draw 3D structures in the air which solidify almost instantly

We need to rethink how we name exoplanets

Fed up with dull names for exoplanets, Alan Stern and his company Uwingu have asked the public for help. Will it be so long 2M 0746+20b, hello Obama?

A shocking cure: Plug in for the ultimate recharge

An electrical cure for ageing attracted the ire of the medical establishment. But could the jazz-age inventor have stumbled upon a genuine therapy?

Biofuel rush is wiping out unique American grasslands

Planting more crops to meet the biofuel demand is destroying grasslands and pastures in the central US, threatening wildlife

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3D-printing pen turns doodles into sculptures

Free yourself from the tyranny of paper and boring 2D. With a $75 pen you can draw in thin air.

The 3Doodle pen, developed by US start-up WobbleWorks, works much like a handheld 3D printer. It contains a mains-powered heater that melts the plastic beads used in such printers.

You can draw normally using the colourful plastic as your ink – but with a fantastic twist. Lift the nib in the air and a length of plastic exudes from the nib and solidifies, allowing you to create 3D objects by building up multiple wispy strands of plastic.

The pen's key component is a tiny fan that cools the plastic as it leaves the nib. "This makes it solidify very quickly," says company spokesman Daniel Cowen. Intricate "drawings" of a peacock and the Eiffel Tower in the launch video show how well it works (see video).

The firm launched a Kickstarter campaign to crowdfund $30,000 towards its development programme this week. If it raises enough money, the 3Doodle should be ready for sale later this year. A battery-powered version should follow, says Cowen. "It's power usage means that a lot of work is needed for a wireless version - but that is in the works."

Still, you need to be careful: although using it is child's play, the pen is a craft tool rather than a toy. Its nib melts plastic at a toasty 270 °C – as hot as a soldering iron.

In the future, WobbleWorks might also make a version for creating food, letting people make lattice-structured sweets and candies. "We could in theory use the pen to melt sticks of sugar," says Cowen. "But we don't want to get into food safety issues just yet. We will be running some [food] tests soon - and we'd have to lower the temperature in the pen, too."

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Nuclear waste: too hot to handle?

Cumbria's decision to veto an underground repository for the UK shows how hard it is to find a long-term solution

THERE are 437 nuclear power reactors in 31 countries around the world. The number of repositories for high-level radioactive waste? Zero. The typical lifespan of a nuclear power plant is 60 years. The waste from nuclear power is dangerous for up to one million years. Clearly, the waste problem is not going to go away any time soon.

In fact, it is going to get a lot worse. The World Nuclear Association says that http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf102.html 45 countries without nuclear power are giving it serious consideration. Several others, including China, South Korea and India, are planning to massively expand their existing programmes. Meanwhile, dealing with the waste from nuclear energy can be put off for another day, decade or century.

It's not that we haven't tried. By the 1970s, countries that produced nuclear power were promising that repositories would be built hundreds of metres underground to permanently isolate the waste. Small groups of technical experts and government officials laboured behind closed doors to identify potential sites. The results - produced with almost no public consultation - were disastrous.

In 1976, West German politicians unilaterally selected a site near the village of Gorleben on the East German border for a repository, fuelling a boisterous anti-nuclear movement that seems to have no end in sight.

In the UK, the practice of choosing candidate sites with little public input was lampooned as "decide, announce, defend". In the US, backroom political manoeuvring led to the 1987 selection of Yucca Mountain in Nevada, at the time an under-populated gambling Mecca with no political muscle. Nevadans have been fighting what they call the "Screw Nevada Bill" ever since. The Obama administration pulled funding from Yucca Mountain to appease Senate majority leader Harry Reid, who is from Nevada, but the decision is still being battled in the courts and Congress, and the site is not completely off the table.

It took a while, but governments began to catch on that the top-down approach wasn't working. Time for a new strategy: look for a community willing to host a repository, using lots of touchy-feely language such as consent-based, transparent, adaptive, phased and terminable. On paper, it is win-win. Sweden and Finland, those paragons of Nordic cooperation and efficiency, are now in the home stretch for opening the world's first nuclear waste repositories, and are held up as proof-positive that the new policy can work.

Yet finding a volunteer community is the relatively easy part, because nuclear waste repositories bring jobs and money. But this doesn't mean their neighbours, or the regional powers that be, are going to go along with it.

This unfortunate aspect of policymaking became readily apparent in the UK last month. Everything seemed a sure shot for taking the next exploratory steps toward a nuclear waste repository in west Cumbria. Located next door to Sellafield, the granddaddy of the UK's nuclear facilities, two local communities comfortable with nuclear matters were in favour. The bugles and bunting were practically being unfurled when Cumbria County Council, concerned about tourism in the Lake District and possible future leaks, vetoed the plan. No other volunteers are in line as a backup.

The US recently announced its own volunteer-based policy, including promises to have an interim storage site up and running within eight years and a repository by 2048. It should know better. Is it forgetting its own track record, even with interim storage facilities?

In the 1980s, the community of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, agreed to host an interim facility. Statewide opposition shut it down. In the 1990s, the Skull Valley Band Of The Goshute Nation, a recognised Native American sovereign nation, volunteered to host an interim facility on its reservation in Utah. Last December, after more than 15 years of legal sparring with the state, the utilities working with the Goshute finally gave up.

The most recent volunteer community to be snubbed is Nye County, where Yucca Mountain is situated. After a commission chartered by the Obama administration recommended a new "consent-based" approach to break the deadlock over the site, Nye County officials wrote to US energy secretary Steven Chu giving their consent to host the repository at Yucca Mountain. Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval subsequently informed Chu that the state of Nevada will never consent to a repository.

It's now over half a century since the dawn of nuclear energy and dangerous and long-lived waste continues to pile up all over the globe. Something needs to be done. Although touted as the solution, finding a consenting community is merely the first step. The harder part is getting everyone else to sign on.

And then comes the real challenge - to determine if the ground beneath a volunteer community is geologically suitable for a repository. This daunting endeavour requires a decades-long process that is both politically sensitive and technically complex. Inevitably, surprises occur as studies go underground. Here, the public needs an independent, technically savvy group whom they trust to address their concerns and interpret the scientific results.

The difficulties of finding a happily-ever-after triad of volunteer community, consenting neighbours and geologically suitable site cannot be lightly dismissed. Replacing a top-down approach with a consent-based one is a step in the right direction, but it doesn't fundamentally solve the problem.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Down in the dumps"

William M. Alley oversaw the US Geological Survey's Yucca Mountain project from 2002 to 2010

Rosemarie Alley and William M. Alley are authors of Too Hot To Touch: The problem of high-level nuclear waste (Cambridge University Press)

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False memories prime immune system for future attacks

IN A police line-up, a falsely remembered face is a big problem. But for the body's police force – the immune system – false memories could be a crucial weapon.

When a new bacterium or virus invades the body, the immune system mounts an attack by sending in white blood cells called T-cells that are tailored to the molecular structure of that invader. Defeating the infection can take several weeks. However, once victorious, some T-cells stick around, turning into memory cells that remember the invader, reducing the time taken to kill it the next time it turns up.

Conventional thinking has it that memory cells for a particular microbe only form in response to an infection. "The dogma is that you need to be exposed," says Mark Davis of Stanford University in California, but now he and his colleagues have shown that this is not always the case.

The team took 26 samples from the Stanford Blood Center. All 26 people had been screened for diseases and had never been infected with HIV, herpes simplex virus or cytomegalovirus. Despite this, Davis's team found that all the samples contained T-cells tailored to these viruses, and an average of 50 per cent of these cells were memory cells.

The idea that T-cells don't need to be exposed to the pathogen "is paradigm shifting," says Philip Ashton-Rickardt of Imperial College London, who was not involved in the study. "Not only do they have capacity to remember, they seem to have seen a virus when they haven't."

So how are these false memories created? To a T-cell, each virus is "just a collection of peptides", says Davis. And so different microbes could have structures that are similar enough to confuse the T-cells.

To test this idea, the researchers vaccinated two people with an H1N1 strain of influenza and found that this also stimulated the T-cells to react to two bacteria with a similar peptide structure. Exposing the samples from the blood bank to peptide sequences from certain gut and soil bacteria and a species of ocean algae resulted in an immune response to HIV (Immunology, doi.org/kgg).

The finding could explain why vaccinating children against measles seems to improve mortality rates from other diseases. It also raises the possibility of creating a database of cross-reactive microbes to find new vaccination strategies. "We need to start exploring case by case," says Davis.

"You could find innocuous pathogens that are good at vaccinating against nasty ones," says Ashton-Rickardt. The idea of cross-reactivity is as old as immunology, he says. But he is excited about the potential for finding unexpected correlations. "Who could have predicted that HIV was related to an ocean algae?" he says. "No one's going to make that up!"

This article appeared in print under the headline "False memories prime our defences"

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False memories prime immune system for future attacks

IN A police line-up, a falsely remembered face is a big problem. But for the body's police force – the immune system – false memories could be a crucial weapon.

When a new bacterium or virus invades the body, the immune system mounts an attack by sending in white blood cells called T-cells that are tailored to the molecular structure of that invader. Defeating the infection can take several weeks. However, once victorious, some T-cells stick around, turning into memory cells that remember the invader, reducing the time taken to kill it the next time it turns up.

Conventional thinking has it that memory cells for a particular microbe only form in response to an infection. "The dogma is that you need to be exposed," says Mark Davis of Stanford University in California, but now he and his colleagues have shown that this is not always the case.

The team took 26 samples from the Stanford Blood Center. All 26 people had been screened for diseases and had never been infected with HIV, herpes simplex virus or cytomegalovirus. Despite this, Davis's team found that all the samples contained T-cells tailored to these viruses, and an average of 50 per cent of these cells were memory cells.

The idea that T-cells don't need to be exposed to the pathogen "is paradigm shifting," says Philip Ashton-Rickardt of Imperial College London, who was not involved in the study. "Not only do they have capacity to remember, they seem to have seen a virus when they haven't."

So how are these false memories created? To a T-cell, each virus is "just a collection of peptides", says Davis. And so different microbes could have structures that are similar enough to confuse the T-cells.

To test this idea, the researchers vaccinated two people with an H1N1 strain of influenza and found that this also stimulated the T-cells to react to two bacteria with a similar peptide structure. Exposing the samples from the blood bank to peptide sequences from certain gut and soil bacteria and a species of ocean algae resulted in an immune response to HIV (Immunology, doi.org/kgg).

The finding could explain why vaccinating children against measles seems to improve mortality rates from other diseases. It also raises the possibility of creating a database of cross-reactive microbes to find new vaccination strategies. "We need to start exploring case by case," says Davis.

"You could find innocuous pathogens that are good at vaccinating against nasty ones," says Ashton-Rickardt. The idea of cross-reactivity is as old as immunology, he says. But he is excited about the potential for finding unexpected correlations. "Who could have predicted that HIV was related to an ocean algae?" he says. "No one's going to make that up!"

This article appeared in print under the headline "False memories prime our defences"

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Comet rain took life's ingredients to Jupiter's moons

Dust made from pulverised comets may have seeded Jupiter's moons with the raw ingredients for life. That includes Europa, which is thought to harbour a liquid ocean beneath its icy crust.

Jupiter has two kinds of natural satellites: large spherical moons and smaller lumpy bodies that follow elongated orbits. Chemical analysis of the irregular bodies suggests they are made of the same stuff as asteroids and comets. This means they are probably rich in the carbon-containing compounds that are key to life on Earth.

It is thought that a gravitational reshuffling of the planets some 4 billion years ago shook up distant belts of space rocks and sent many of them hurtling towards the sun. Some got caught in Jupiter's orbit and became the irregular satellites. The objects frequently collided as they settled into their new orbits, creating dust as fine as coffee grounds.

Blanketed moons

Models say that Jupiter should have captured about 70 million gigatonnes of rocky material, but less than half that amount remains as irregular moons. "So what happened to all the stuff?" asks William Bottke of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

His team ran simulations of the irregular moons' evolution and found that their ground-up material would have fallen towards Jupiter, dragged by gravity and blown by the solar wind. About 40 per cent of it would have hit Jupiter's four largest moons. Most of this landed on Callisto (Icarus, doi.org/kff). The rest hit Ganymede and then Europa.

That's roughly consistent with images from the Galileo spacecraft, which show dark material on Ganymede and Callisto. "Callisto literally looks like it's buried in dark debris," says Bottke, while Ganymede has a lot of similarities but less dark stuff on its surface.

Sinking carbon

But the surface of Europa is relatively clean. Cracks cover the moon's crust, which suggests it has cycled material from deeper inside, so the carbon-rich debris may have been incorporated into the ice and even made it into the ocean, says Bottke. "Would it be important in Europa's ocean? It's hard to say," he says. "But it is kind of interesting to think about."

Bottke's calculations only set a lower limit on the amount of carbon-rich material that could have ended up in Europa's ocean, says Cynthia Phillips of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, who studies Europa.

"This could potentially be an even larger source of astrobiologically interesting material for the ocean layer than the authors of this paper estimate," she says.

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Largest fake prime number holds 300 billion digits

A 300-billion-digit number is the biggest known pseudoprime, a number which looks like a prime but isn't. The techniques used to find this behemoth could help keep online transactions secure.

The first 10 digits are 1512269972 – but we can't give you the rest as the new number is so large that typing out the full thing eats up around a third of a terabyte. "I've got an external drive holding it," says co-discoverer Andrew Shallue of Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington. It dwarfs the largest known true prime, a 17-million digit monster announced last week.

Prime numbers can only be divided by themselves and 1. Figuring out which numbers are prime can be tricky, so mathematicians have developed various algorithms to speed up the search. One simple test is based on an observation by 17th-century mathematician Pierre de Fermat, who said that for any prime number p and whole number a, if you divide a^p – a by p, the remainder is 0. Unfortunately, that is sometimes also true when p is not a prime.

Finding fakes

There are just 43 of these Fermat pseudoprimes in the first million numbers, compared to nearly 80,000 primes. Primes form the building blocks of modern cryptography, so mistaking a pseudoprime for the real deal would make it easy for someone to steal your secrets. Mathematicians have developed more sophisticated tests since Fermat's that reduce these mistakes, but pseudoprimes still crop up unexpectedly.

To hunt out the fakes, Shallue and colleague Steven Hayman created an algorithm that looks at a list of numbers to find a subset that, when multiplied together, produces a particular target – in this case, a pseudoprime that passes Fermat's test. Finding the largest known pseudoprime shows that the algorithm is dramatically better than previous techniques, says Shallue, who presented it last month at the Joint Mathematics Meeting in San Diego, California.

"Finding this number is indeed an achievement," says Graham Jameson of the University of Lancaster, UK. However, the practical advance is the new algorithm, which could tell mathematicians and cryptographers more about the general properties of pseudoprimes, he says. "The more important problem is to establish just how uncommon these numbers are."

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Night-vision rat becomes first animal with sixth sense

Douglas Heaven, reporter

The latest bionic superhero is a rat: its brain hooked up to an infrared detector, it's become the first animal to be given a sixth sense.

Developed by Miguel Nicolelis and colleagues at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, the system connects a head-mounted sensor to a brain region that normally processes touch sensations from whiskers. As shown in this video, the rat's brain is tricked when infrared light is detected, giving it a new sense organ. "Instead of seeing, the rats learned how to touch the light," says Nicolelis.

Even though the touch-processing brain area acquires a new role, the team found that it continues to process touch sensations from whiskers, somehow dividing its time between both types of signal. "The adult brain is a lot more plastic than we thought," says Nicolelis.

The finding could lead to new brain prostheses that restore sight in humans with a damaged visual cortex. By bypassing the damaged part of the brain altogether, it might be possible to wire up a video camera to a part of the brain that processes touch, letting people "touch" what the camera sees.

According to Nicolelis, it could also lead to superhero powers for humans. "It could be X-rays, radio waves, anything," he says. "Superman probably had a prosthetic device that nobody knew of."

If you enjoyed this post,watch a robot and human swap brains to learn teamwork or see a body-sharing robot that lets you experience another place.

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Algorithm learns how to revive lost languages

Like living things, languages evolve. Words mutate, sounds shift, and new tongues arise from old.

Charting this landscape is usually done through manual research. But now a computer has been taught to reconstruct lost languages using the sounds uttered by those who speak their modern successors.

Alexandre Bouchard-Côté at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and colleagues have developed a machine-learning algorithm that uses rules about how the sounds of words can vary to infer the most likely phonetic changes behind a language's divergence.

For example, in a recent change known as the Canadian Shift, many Canadians now say "aboot" instead of "about". "It happens in all words with a similar sound," says Bouchard-Côté.

The team applied the technique to thousands of word pairings used across 637 Austronesian languages – the family that includes Fijian, Hawaiian and Tongan.

Tracking human history

The system was able to suggest how ancestor languages might have sounded and also identify which sounds were most likely to change. When the team compared the results with work done by human specialists, they found that over 85 per cent of suggestions were within a single character of the actual words.

For example, the modern word for "wind" in Fijiian is cagi . Using this and the same word in other modern Austronesian languages, the automatic system reconstructed the ancestor word beliu and the human experts reconstructed bali.

Reconstructing ancient languages can reveal details of our ancient history. Looking at when the word for "wheel" diverges in the family tree of European languages helps us date the human settlement of different parts of the continent, for instance.

The technique could improve machine translation of phonetically similar languages, such as Portuguese and French.

Endangered languages could also be preserved if they are phonetically related to more widely spoken tongues, says Bouchard-Côté. He is now working on an online version of the tool for linguists to use.

Journal: PNAS, 10.1073/pnas.1204678110

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