new scientist - 15 november 2014

THOUGHT CONTROL Activating genes with the power of the mind

WEEKLY November 15 - 21, 2014

KILLING MACHINESShould we let robots fight our battles?

IN HOT WATEROcean warming hits an all-time high

BLASTS FROM THE PASTNow thats what I call prehistoric music

THE MAN WHO HEARS WI-FIAudio hack reveals a hidden world

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15 November 2014 | NewScientist | 3

CONTENTS Volume 224 No 2995This issue online newscientist.com/issue/2995

News6 UPFRONT Obama talks climate in China. Comet landing?

Genetics immortalises first-world-war soldier8 THIS WEEK

Ghosts are all in your brain. Shattered DNA reforms into cancer-causing monsters. Tracing Europes hybrid ancestry. Human thoughts switch on mouse genes. Twisted light transmits record distance

14 INSIGHT Why extending breast cancer screening

iscontroversial16 IN BRIEF Bats jam each others sonar. Circuits made of

frozen atoms. Star seen making planets

Coming next weekYou versus the universeHow to bend the laws of physics

The sounds that shape usHear your way to health and happiness

Cover image Simon C. Page

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Worlds oceans are hottest everIt looks like the global warming pause is over

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Why some people cant lose weight......and others cant put it on

Blasts from the pastNow thats what I call prehistoric music

Technology19 The man who can hear Wi-Fi. Drones that

melt away. Online disputes bypass courts. Headset lets blind people see with sound

News

On the cover

Features

12 Thought control Mind-activated genes

19 Man who hears Wi-Fi Hack to a hidden world

44 Blasts from the past Now thats what I call prehistoric music

38 Killing machines Should we let robots fight our battles?

8 In hot water Ocean temperature high

Opinion26 Divestment dilemma Paul Younger and

Tim Ratcliffe argue the pros and cons of getting out of fossil fuels

27 One minute with Victor Zykov Building a vehicle to explore the deepest ocean

28 Quantum simplicity A healthy dose of weirdness can make the world less complex

30 LETTERS Ebola. The invention of sewing

Features32 Why some people cant lose weight...

(see above left)38 Killing machines Should we let robots

fight our battles?44 Blasts from the past (see left)

CultureLab48 Ready for quantum biology? This idea

willtake proof as well as enthusiasm49 Toothpaste and roller coasters A history

of the 19th-century consumer revolution50 Rothko rescue LEDs restore faded artworks

Regulars5 LEADER The false promise of breast cancer

screening needs to be made clear56 FEEDBACK Will not work if switched off57 THE LAST WORD Tense situation52 JOBS & CAREERS

Aperture24 Psychedelic pollution as art


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LEADERS

A red line on robot war

CANCER screening sounds like the ultimate in preventive medicine. Spot a tumour early and it is easier to treat and cure.

Thats the theory, anyway. But it ignores the potential problem of overdiagnosis finding tiny tumours that would never have caused any harm, yet get treated aggressively. The big question for any programme is whether the harms outweigh the benefits.

This is answered most clearly for prostate cancer. Most trials show that men who have regular tests live no longer than those who do not. This evidence stopped the introduction of routine prostate screening in the UK.

There is now a growing body of evidence suggesting that breast

Worse than the diseaseThe false promise of cancer screening needs to be made clear

cancer screening has the same shortcoming. Yet breast screening is an established part of many health systems. Anyone arguing for a rollback is up against entrenched interests.

In the UK, the government is actually considering widening the age range for breast screening despite growing evidence that it puts the age groups concerned at risk (see page 14). The only way to get a reliable assessment of the idea is through a large clinical trial, which the UK is carrying out.

However, the information leaflet given to participants does not tell them they may be at higher risk of overdiagnosis. It does not even clearly state that they are part of a trial, a deficit

of informed consent that breaches a basic tenet of medical research. Considering this is the largest ever randomised clinical trial, involving 3 million women, these omissions are shocking.

Attitudes may be changing. Earlier this year, the Swiss Medical Board said breast screening should cease altogether. And a recent report from UK MPs questioned the age extension.

The UK government does not have to accept the report, but it should use the opportunity to halt the trial until its many flaws have been addressed. At the very least, the information given to women needs to be corrected so that they are not being misled or used as unwitting guinea pigs.

ANYONE who witnessed the sea of 888,246 ceramic poppies surrounding the Tower of London could not fail to have been moved by their sheer number. Figures like 888,246 the number of British military fatalities in the first world war do not come easily to mind. They must be seen to be grasped (see above).

The industrial-scale slaughter of the first world war is often

blamed on a clash of 19th-century tactics and 20th-century weapons, including tanks, aircraft, modern artillery and machine guns.

In the early 21st century, military tech is going through a revolution for which the world is similarly ill-prepared. Lethal autonomous weapons systems robots capable of targeting and killing people are already here. For now, though, humans make

the kill decisions (see page 38).Discussions are under way

at the UN to discuss if and how such robots should be regulated. The talks are likely to be fraught. Killer robots do have redeeming features. And because they can replace human combatants, some argue they are a moral imperative.

The risks, however, seem enormous. The first world war is history now, but it should be a reminder of the dangers of mass, uncontrolled experimentation with new killing machines.

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6 | NewScientist | 15 November 2014

KEIKO, the orca star of the film Free Willy, would approve. Last week, 120 countries signed up to consider banning the capture of wild dolphins and whales for display in zoos and aquaria.

The resolution, signed at the triennial meeting of the UN Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals in Quito, Ecuador, isnt legally binding, but it commits the signatories to contemplate laws banning the capture of wild cetaceans for commercial display.

Danny Groves of the Whale and Dolphin Conservation lobby group says the move is symbolic and a recognition that taking dolphins and whales into captivity is not a good thing. Some may just pay lip service to the resolution, but the big thing is getting it officially on to the political agenda, he says. Its a starting point for

IT WAS the rocket science after all. A failed rocket propellant pump was the likely cause of the explosion of an Antares rocket taking cargo to the International Space Station (ISS) on 28 October, says the rockets maker, Orbital Sciences of Dulles, West Virginia.

The firm says the evidence it has collected suggests a failure in the turbopump part of the ageing engines it uses that were built for the Soviet moon programme in the 1970s led to the loss of thrust that saw the rocket plummet back

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Countries have pledged to contemplate laws banning the capture of cetaceans for commercial display

Has it happened?

-Carbon on their hands-

possible legislation banning it in the future.

Even stronger measures were adopted to protect 31 other iconic species, including sharks, giant rays and polar bears. Threatened by shrinking Arctic ice cover, polar bears were added to the conventions appendix II which obliges signatories to coordinate transboundary conservation as were hammerhead, thresher and silky sharks.

Stricter appendix I protection, which legally restricts the capture of species, was granted to manta rays, devil rays and sawfish.

to the launch pad 14 seconds after lift off. The Soviet engines are modified with steerable nozzles by Aerojet Rocketdyne to make them usable but Orbital says it will now fast-track the engines replacement with newer models.

The crash destroyed the Cygnus cargo freighter that was carrying astronaut supplies, science experiments and a raft of CubeSat mini satellites, including 26 Earth observation satellites.

Orbitals next two Cygnus freighters for the ISS will fly on rockets from a rival possibly SpaceX or Europes Arianespace.

MISSION accomplished? As New Scientist went to press, mission controllers with the European Space Agency were making final preparations for their probe to touch down on a comet, the first time such a landing has been tried.

If all has gone to plan, by the time you read this the Philae probe will have sunk its harpoons into comet 67P/ChuryumovGerasimenko and sent back images from the surface, after

Touching distance

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Presidents talk climateA WARMING talk? US president Barack Obama met his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, in Beijing this week, and climate change was expected to be high on the agenda. Jointly, their countries are responsible for 36 per cent of global carbon emissions, and are seen as the main driversof and obstaclesto tackling climate change.

This is an important meeting for them to signal how they will work together and how they can drive the ambition of each other and others, says Jennifer Morgan of the World Resources Institute in Washington DC.

The conversation was scheduled for Wednesday, at the close of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference, just weeks before the next round of UN climate talks kick offin Perus capital, Lima. The talks in

Lima are the final preparation for the2015 climate summit in Paris, at which nations are expected to agree on a new legally binding treaty to regulate carbon emissions. The US and China still havent made any pledges on cutting carbon emissions under the UN process, but their cooperation with each other is seen as inspiring other nations.

Weve seen US-China cooperation changing substantially over the lastfive years, says Joanna Lewis ofGeorgetown University in WashingtonDC. For example, the nations are carrying out joint R&D into clean energy.

Thelevel of dialogue were seeing isvery different from what we had inthe lead-up to [the climate summit in] Copenhagen, Lewis says.


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THE open internet just got some serious backing. On Monday, US president Barack Obama asked the Federal Communications Commission to adopt rules to preserve net neutrality, the idea that all data on the internet should be treated equally. It would prevent internet service providers (ISPs) charging for preferential access to their networks.

The rules would see ISPs such as Comcast reclassified as public utilities, forced to provide internet access like other utilities provide electricity or water. Phone

companies already have this classification, but ISPs have been information services since the late 90s, subject to the same loose regulation as internet companies like Netflix and Facebook.

If brought in, the rules would stop ISPs speeding up, slowing down or blocking connections to any online service. They will not be allowed to offer prioritisation of traffic in exchange for money.

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Cig-packet supportDISEASED lungs, gangrenous feet, close-ups of tumours Australian smokers seem to be adjusting to the gruesome images that cover most of their unbranded cigarette packs, with more now supporting the packaging than opposed to it.

In 2012, Australia was the first country to make it illegal to sell cigarettes in branded packaging, aiming to make smoking less attractive, especially to young people. The size of the health warnings was also increased.

Before the initiative began, 56 per cent of smokers opposed the change, while 28 per cent supported it. Two years later, much of that opposition has gone up in smoke, with 35 per cent against and 49 per cent in favour of it. The strongest support was among smokers who intended to quit (Tobacco Control, doi.org/w3n). Separate figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics show that in the first quarter of this year, tobacco consumption was at an all-time low, implying the move had the desired effect.

Any forlorn hopes the tobacco industry might have had about convincing other governments that plain packaging is immensely unpopular will be dashed by this study, says Simon Chapman from the University of Sydney. We will remember

a nail-biting 7 hour descent from the orbiting Rosetta spacecraft.

Philae has just over two days to drill into the comet and analyse the pristine material below the surface before its batteries run out. ESA is hopeful the probe will survive for many months longer using its solar panels, but there is no guarantee they will receive enough sunlight to work.

Whatever happens to Philae, Rosetta will continue orbiting 67P until the comet reaches its closest approach to the sun in August next year. For updates on Philaes progress and the Rosetta mission, visit bit.ly/rosettacometlanding.

60 SECONDS

Im wearing big spotsBush brown butterflies change their dress code to suit the season. Small spots help them avoid hungry birds in the dry season. But larger, brighter spots help them evade praying mantises in the wet season (Proceedings of the Royal Society B, DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2014.1531).

E-cigarettes on TVYou know that feeling you get when somethings great? So purred the sultry women in one of the first smoking adverts shown on UK TV for half a century this week. The vaping ad the first to show e-cigarette use has been criticised for glamorising smoking. In two years, a European Union ruling will make such adverts illegal.

Robot takeoverOne in three UK jobs will be lost to computers and robots within the next 20 years, according to a study by Deloitte and the University of Oxford. Jobs most at risk were in admin and offices where people earn less than 30,000. Individuals in these roles have five times the riskof being replaced than those earning 100,000.

Drat, where am I?Homing pigeons may be using gravity to help them navigate. Experiments with 26 trained birds inUkraine showed pigeons got disoriented when flying over an old crater, where gravity was lower (Journal of Experimental Biology,

DOI: 10.1242/jeb.108670).

LAquila acquittalSix geologists sentenced in 2012 tosix years in prison for allegedly downplaying the risk of an earthquake that struck the Italian town of LAquila have been acquitted. The 2009 quake killed 309 people. Stefano Gresta, head ofItalys National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology, said the ruling restores credibility to Italys scientific community.

Genetic tribute to dead soldierAS THE world commemorated the centenary of the first world war, science paid its own small tribute.

Ernest Cable was a British soldier who died in 1915 from dysentery caught in the trenches of northern France. The bacteria that killed him, Shigella flexneri, has now been genetically sequenced and compared with three recent strains. Cable is almost like the unknown soldier in that he has no known relatives, but now everyone will remember him, sohes been immortalised in a sense, says Kate Baker of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK.

The bacterial strain was collected in 1915 by a military bacteriologist in a hospital where Cable was treated in Wimereux, France. It was the first

sample added to the UK National Collection of Type Cultures, which today holds 5100 strains.

Cable died before Alexander Fleming discovered the worlds first antibiotic, penicillin, but the analysis shows it wouldnt have helped the bacterium was resistant. Nor would he have been saved by erythromycin, discovered in 1949. The work found that the DNA of more recent strains is98 per cent the same, but they have gained extra genes and mutations to give them resistance tomany modern antibiotics.

The institute also produced a shortfilm describing the project, andan account of how Cable was identified and traced (The Lancet, doi.org/f2v7jk).

The rules would prevent internet service providers charging for preferential access


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THE worlds oceans are the hottest theyve ever been in the modern record. An analysis shared exclusively with New Scientist suggests that the global slowdown in the rise of air temperatures is probably over, and we are entering another period of rapid warming.

Since the last big El Nio event in 1998, when ocean temperatures last peaked, they have remained relatively stable. Such periods are not unexpected, but research is increasingly indicating that the recent slowdown in global surface air temperature rise is down to heat being absorbed by the worlds deep oceans, leaving the surface, and therefore also the air, cool.

But when Axel Timmermann of the University of Hawaii in Honolulu analysed the most recent publicly available monthly data from the UK Met Office, he found that the ocean surfaces are now the hottest they have been since records began. In July this year,

ocean surfaces were 0.55 C above the average since 1890, just beating the previous record of 0.51 C in 1998. In the North Pacific, the temperatures were about 0.8 C above average, which is 0.25 C warmer than the 1998 peak.

Its a remarkable situation and Ive never seen warming

of the North Pacific like that, Timmermann says. The sea surface temperatures could drop back to what theyve been recently, he says, but unless there is a dramatic drop soon, it will mean the end of the current hiatus in warming. This will bias the trends over the next two or three years, says Timmermann.

Land surface temperatures are much more variable than ocean

temperatures. The ability of the worlds oceans to absorb extra heat is believed by many to be behind the recent pause in global warming. Now some researchers say the increased ocean surface temperatures are a strong sign that this hiatus could be coming to an end.

In the North Pacific, the hiatus is definitely finished, says Wenju Cai from the CSIRO, Australias national research agency in Melbourne. He says that while the global surface temperatures which include land temperature too arent at record highs yet, the slowdown in warming is more-or-less over: In our mind the hiatus is already finished, because oceans are 70 per cent of the surface.

But some are cautious about linking the peak to an upward trend. Beware of single peaks, says David Checkley of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego. He doesnt interpret

the data as showing a return to consistent warming.

Warmer seas are expected to affect marine ecosystems, including commercially valuable fish. Many marine species have a strong association with specific temperature ranges, so if there is warm water, they move with it, says Nate Mantua at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Santa Cruz, California. Subtropical fish species like tuna have already moved further north. On the other hand, fish that do well in colder water, like Pacific salmon, typically grow more slowly and are less likely to survive in warmer waters, says Mantua.

Coral reefs could be hit too. When corals are stressed, they expel their symbiotic algae, turn white and die. When ocean temperatures were last at their highest, coral bleaching happened around the world. Although fewer coral reefs fall within the warmest regions this time, Timmermann says many corals are already being bleached in Hawaii.

THIS WEEK

Oceans get into hot waterExtreme temperatures in the North Pacific are cancelling out El Nio and wreaking their own climate havoc. Michael Slezak reports

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The North Pacific is heating upData since August shows sea surface temperatures in many areas are well above the average of the past three decades

Seasonal temperature anomaly03 August 01 November 2014 (C)

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Most climate scientists had expected the slowdown in global warming to be brought to an end by a large El Nio. These events happen when warm waters deep in the Pacific burst to the surface and raise global air temperatures.

But although a large El Nio was predicted for this year, we havent had even a small one yet.

False forecast?For an El Nio to develop you need the atmosphere to play ball, says David Jones at the Bureau of Meteorology in Melbourne. Temperature differences across the Pacific Ocean are needed before an El Nio can kick in, so the consistently warm temperatures this year could be why the event forecasted for 2014 doesnt seem to be happening.

The warmer oceans make El Nio forecasts difficult, because they rely on looking at past events. This is a flawed strategy when the climate is changing, says Kevin Trenberth at the National Center for Atmospheric

In this section Tracing Europes hybrid ancestry, page 11 Human thoughts switch on mouse genes, page 12 The man who can hear Wi-Fi, page 19

Research in Boulder, Colorado. Even though a large El Nio is

yet to materialise, the warm Pacific temperatures mean some El Nio-like effects are occurring, says Trenberth. This includes more hurricanes in the Pacific, as well as more storms curling over into mainland US. Meanwhile, there have been fewer hurricanes in the Atlantic, just as happens during El Nio. Elsewhere, dry conditions have occurred across Australia, and the Indian monsoon was delayed effects all arising from warm oceans, despite the lack of an El Nino event.

Cai compared recent temperature maps (see left) with historical patterns for New Scientist to see what to expect over the coming months. He found a correlation with rainfall changes that roughly matches those seen during El Nio, and so predicts that there may be increased rainfall over drought-stricken California. But unlike during El Nio, he says there should be drier than usual conditions in western Canada.

Its looking warm out there

GHOSTLY presences the feeling of someone near you when no one is there could be your brains attempt to make sense of conflicting information. For the first time, the brain regions involved in such hallucinations have been identified and a ghost presence induced in healthy people.

The work sheds light on why some people with conditions such as schizophrenia and epilepsy feel an alien presence nearby, and may also explain why mountain climbers often report being accompanied bythe presence of what is called the third man.

This condition, called feeling ofpresence (FoP) has no visual component, unlike out-of-body experiences. [Its] more mystical, says neurologist Olaf Blanke of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. You are convinced that there is something, but you dont see anything, you dont hear anything.

By studying people with epilepsy who had reported feeling a presence nearby, Blankes team found damage in three brain regions: the temporoparietal junction (TPJ), the insula and the frontal-parietal cortex. Based on this, he believes that FoP involves disruption not just to the integration of external and internal sensations in the TPJ and insula, but also in signals related to movementthese are processed in the frontal-parietal cortex.

Blankes team then used a robot to see if they could disrupt the normal brain processes and induce a feeling of presence. The robot had two components: a master and a slave. The volunteers were blindfolded and asked to move an arm of the master robot with one hand. This caused the slave robot, behind them and touching their back, to move. In essence, they were able to make the slave robot stroke their own backs. The volunteers also received tactile feedback as they moved the master robot it applied a force back that the

volunteers could feel in their fingers. This enhances the sense that the robot is a being with its own volition.

The presence made itself felt when the slave robot moved after a delay of 500 milliseconds, so that the volunteers hand movements were out of sync with the touch on their backs. Five of 17 people spontaneously reported feeling a presence behind them without even being asked about it. It means the illusion is pretty striking, says team member and robotics expert Giulio Rognini.

When the team removed the tactile feedback the master robot applied to the fingers of their volunteers, the illusion appeared more consistently (Current Biology, doi.org/wzb).

It seems that the brain, confoundedby the mismatch betweeninternal bodily signals related to the movements of their arms and the out-of-sync sensation oftouch on their backs, attributed

thetouch to someone standing behind them. The experiment shows that the illusion occurs when people have a disturbed sense of agency the sense that they are initiating bodily movements. This distortion may occur in people with schizophrenia, and may explain why they attribute, for instance, their own actions to other people. A lot of people with schizophrenia claim to feel a presence, says Judith Ford, a schizophrenia expert at the University of California in San Francisco.

Peter Brugger, a neuropsychologist at University Hospital Zurich, Switzerland, says the argument is convincing. The leap from the robotic experiments to explain complex psychiatric phenomenology is certainly not too big, he says. Anil Ananthaswamy

Felt a ghostly presence? Now we know why

Five people spontaneously reported feeling a presence behind them without even being asked


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THIS WEEK

Michael Slezak

WHEN chromosomes shatter, they sometimes reform into giant circular monsters. These beasts gobble up cancer genes, incorporate them into their DNA, and seed aggressive tumours. They are an example of the giant leaps of evolution that cancer can take, but they could also lead to drugs that stop the process.

In the 1950s, researchers saw that some cancer cells contained chromosomes that were unusually large and sometimes circular. Called neochromosomes, theyve since been found in about 3 per cent of all cancers and in almost a quarter of fat and bone cancers, but nobody has known how they form or what they do.

Now for the first time, David Thomas from the Garvan Institute in Sydney, Australia, and his colleagues have sequenced these giant chromosomes and reconstructed their evolutionary history. They looked at three different sets of lab-grown

liposarcoma cells a cancer of fat and connective tissues. In some of the neochromosomes, they found DNA from every other chromosome. Whats more, genes known to be important for cancer were repeated between 60 and 100 times in the monster, massively amplifying their effect. Some of the neochromosomes had three times as much DNA in them as the largest normal chromosomes.

Modelling showed that the main changes to the structure of these chromosomes dont

occur incrementally. Rather, it suggests a bizarre developmental process. First a chromosome is catastrophically shattered when it loses the caps on its ends, known as telomeres, that hold it together. Natural DNA-repair mechanisms then kick in and put the pieces

back together, but in a complete hotchpotch, which usually means the cell will die. This process, discovered in 2010, is called chromothripsis. Occasionally, though, these chromosomal oddities survive and, without telomeres, their ends join together in a ring (see diagram, right).

Then you have the makings of the monster, says Thomas. Each subsequent time a cell divides, these circular chromosomes are torn apart unevenly. One chunk gets a bigger section than the other, meaning it loses some genes and picks up repeats of others. Over thousands of divisions, it grows. It also picks up bits of DNA from any other chromosomes that also happen to have shattered.

But the team found the monster is much more likely to pick up repeats of genes known to be important to cancer. Theres selection going on, says Thomas. To test whether those cancer genes help the cell survive, they tried blocking them. When the genes were blocked, the cell died (Cancer Cell, doi.org/w3h).

The monsters dont stay circular for ever. At a certain point, the circle stops growing and becomes linear. It does that by grabbing telomeres from other chromosomes, which makes it straight and stable again.

The evolutionary path of the neochromosomes is amazing, says Charles Swanton from Cancer Research UK in London. He says its like the picture described by Jeff Goldblums character in Jurassic Park. Life finds a way, Swanton says, quoting the movie.

Andrew Wagner at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston likens the approach of sifting through shattered chromosomes to archaeology. It provides great insight into how cancer cells can select for elements of DNA that help their proliferation and survival, he says.

Its not the whole story of the cancer, because not all cancers have these chromosomes in them, and its not the only step these

cancers need, says Thomas. But it could be an important process in understanding cancer development, he says, much as the discovery of the BRCA breast cancer mutations was.

Because the genes that are massively amplified in the neochromosomes are essential for the cells survival, drugs that turn those off are an obvious target for research. Thomas says there are already human trials of drugs that seem to do that.

Evolution of a genetic monster

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Cancer cells collect chromosomes

Birth of a monsterA chromosome can grow by breaking and sucking up other genes

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Chromosome shatters when it loses its telomeres

DNA fragments reform in a different order in a process called chromothripsis.

Sometimes they form in circles

Each time the cell it is in divides, the chromosome breaks unevenly and

picks up other bits of shattered DNA

If it obtains telomeres, it stabilises as a linear giant chromosome

Telomere

Sifting through shattered chromosomes is like archaeology, and it shows how cancer survives


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EUROPEANS are a mixed bunch a hybrid of ancient hunter-gatherers and early farmers with elements of Native American thrown in. How did this strange genetic cocktail come to be? The DNA from the fossilised bones of a 37,000-year-old man found in southern Russia the oldest European genome sequenced so far provides new clues for teams trying to crack this mystery.

According to the leading proposal, modern Europeans hail from three separate populations that migrated into the continent at different times and then interbred (see map, above). If this theory proves correct, the so-called Kostenki man belonged to the very earliest of these populations a group of hunter-gatherers who left what is now the Middle East perhaps as early as 40,000 years ago.

Until now, the only genetic traces of these people came from two Stone-Age hunter-gatherers: an 8000-year-old man found near Loschbour in Luxembourg and a 7000-year-old man found near La Brana, Spain. Together, they revealed that early European

hunter-gatherers tended to have dark skin and blue eyes.

The Kostenki mans 37,000-year-old DNA, sequenced by the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, pushes the existence of this population back tens of thousands of years and shows that it extended across Eurasia (Science, doi.org/w2v).

Eske Willerslev and colleagues analysed his genetic markers and found that he was closely related to the Loschbour and La Brana hunter-gatherers, contemporary Europeans and some contemporary Siberians. This shows some level of continuity in European populations across almost 30,000 years, says Iosif Lazaridis at Harvard University, another proponent of the theory that Europeans are a mix of three distinct populations.

What the Kostenki team did not find was any relationship to East Asians, suggesting that by the time the man was born, the European and Asian lineages had already split from each other. By contrast, another ancient genome published just a few weeks ago, belonging to a 45,000-year-old

west Siberian known as Ust-Ishim, was related to both Europeans and Asians. That suggests the two groups parted ways between 45,000 and 37,000 years ago and makes the Kostenki man the oldest European to have his genome sequenced.

The latest study also further narrows when early humans interbred with their now-extinct cousins, the Neanderthals. The recent study of Ust-Ishim narrowed these encounters down to sometime between 50,000 and 60,000 years ago (New Scientist, 25 October, p 7). Calculations based on the Kostenki mans genome now suggests they took

The ancestry clues in the oldest European genome

Genome sequencing of ancient humans is finally tracing the diverse ancestry of modern Europeans

Kostenki, Russia37,000 years ago

Motala, Sweden8000 ya

Stuttgart, Germany7000 ya

Loschbour, Luxembourg8000 ya

Malta, Siberia24,000 ya

La Brana, Spain7000 ya

Hunter-gatherers Mystery north Eurasians FarmersFossil find

Out of Africa 50-100,000 ya

Ancestral populationin the Middle East

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place about 54,000 years ago.If early hunter-gatherers

provided the first component of the European genome, it was farmers from the Middle East who provided the next component. In a study published in September, Lazaridis and colleagues showed that these farmers arrived around 8500 years ago, probably bringing with them agricultural traditions from the Levant, while mating with hunter-gatherers along the way (Nature, doi.org/w2w). By 7000 years ago they had made their way to what is now Stuttgart, in Germany.

The final and most mysterious component of the European genome first came to light in a study that showed modern Europeans were somehow related to Native Americans. That was very strange because they are a long way from Europe, says Lazaridis. It suggested that there existed a population that

contributed to North Americans and to Europeans, but there was no concrete evidence for that.

The discovery of a young boy in Malta (see map), who died 24,000 years ago and was related to both modern Europeans and modern Native Americans, confirmed theories that this mystery population lived in Siberia.

Studies are now focusing on how this ghost population made its way west from Siberia into Europe. The genes of an 8000-year-old Swedish man suggest they had reached northern Europe by then. But the DNA of the mystery population is otherwise absent from western Europeans until around 5000 years ago. Further clues to how this mystery group completed Europes rich genetic ancestry are expected in 2015. Catherine Brahic

Modern Europeans hail from three separate populations that interbred

Kostenki smile


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THIS WEEK

Helen Thomson

COULD a futuristic society of humans with the power to control their own biological functions ever become reality?

Its not as out there as it sounds, now the technical foundations have been laid. Researchers have created a link between thoughts and cells, allowing people to switch on genes in mice using just their thoughts.

We wanted to be able to use brainwaves to control genes. Its the first time anyone has linked synthetic biology and the mind, says Martin Fussenegger, a bioengineer at ETH Zurich in Basel, Switzerland, who led the team behind the work.

They hope to use the technology to help people who are locked-in that is, fully conscious but unable to move or speak to do things like self-administer pain medication. It might also be able to help people with epilepsy control their seizures.

In theory, the technology could be used for non-medical purposes, too. For example, we could give ourselves a hormone burst on demand, much like in the Culture Iain M. Bankss utopian society, where people are able to secrete hormones and other chemicals to change their mood.

Fusseneggers team started by inserting a light-responsive gene into human kidney cells in a dish. The gene is activated, or expressed, when exposed to infrared light. The cells were engineered so that when the gene activated, it caused a cascade of chemical reactions leading to the expression of another gene the one the team wanted to switch on.

Next, they put the cells into an implant about the size of a 10-pence piece or a US quarter, alongside an infrared LED that could be controlled wirelessly. The implant was inserted under the skin of a mouse. A semi-permeable membrane allowed vital nutrients from the animals blood supply to reach the cells inside.

With the mouse part of the experiment prepared, the team turned to the human volunteers. Eight people, wearing EEG devices that monitored their brainwaves, were taught how to conjure up different mental states that the device could recognise by their distinctive brain waves.

The volunteers were shown meditation techniques to produce a relaxed pattern of brainwaves, and played a computer game to produce patterns that reflected deep concentration. They also used a technique known as

biofeedback, in which they learned by trial and error to control their thoughts to switch on a set of lights on a computer.

By linking the volunteers EEG device to the wireless LED implant in the mouse, they were able to switch on the LED using any of the three mental states. This activated the light-responsive gene in the kidney cells, which, in turn, led to the activation of the target gene. A human protein was produced that passed through the implants membrane and into the rodents

bloodstream, where it could be detected. We picked a protein that made an enzyme that was easy to identify in the mouse as a proof of concept, but essentially we think we could switch on any target gene we liked, says Fussenegger (Nature Communications, DOI: 10.1038/ncomms6392).

The possibilities this could open up extend as far as your imagination. For example, the implant cells could produce hormones, so how about giving yourself a burst of oxytocin before a stressful social event just by concentrating on a computer game?

Thats possible in principle, Fussenegger says, but for now his team is focused on creating a device to help people who are locked-in, or those with chronic pain, medicate themselves. For people with epilepsy, a similar device could potentially pick up the specific electrical patterns that appear in the brain just before a seizure. It might be possible to engineer cells to react to this pattern and release drugs to lessen the seizure.

While the applications are futuristic, the work itself is very interesting, says Florian Wurm, head of cellular biotechnology at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland. He says it shows for the first time that you can link together two really important ideas synthetic biology and mind control.

But we have to consider the ethical and legal challenges associated with this kind of technology, Wurm says. The moment you can control genes by thought you might be able to interfere with human behaviour, perhaps against someones wishes. He doesnt want to paint a negative picture, though. We shouldnt close our eyes to these inventions. Its not going to be made into a medical device any time soon but its interesting to consider who it could help.

Fussenegger says he would like to start a clinical trial within 10 years.

Genes controlled by human thought

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The applications are futuristic, but it shows you can link synthetic biology and mind control together

Wirelessly linked to cells in a mouse


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In the space of a few thousand years we have

transformed the planet and created a technological

civilisation the likes of which has never been seen.

We have come a very long way from our origins.

This issue of New Scientist: The Collection is

dedicated to The Human Story. A compilation of

classic articles from New Scientist, it explains how

an ordinary ape evolved into the most remarkable

species the Earth has ever known.

Buy your copy now from all good newsagents

or digitally. Find out more at:

newscientist.com/TheCollection

The evolutionof a genius ape


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THIS WEEK

Clare Wilson

BREAST screening is at the centre of controversy once again. An influential group of British MPs has called on thegovernment to provide evidence justifying a planned expansion of screening. The government is already trying to measure the benefits of wider screening, in a trial that critics say is unethical and should be stopped.

In the UK, breast screening is already offered to women aged between 50 and 70. The government

wants to expand the age range to between 47 and 73, and has started a massive clinical trial involving women in the added age bands.

Critics say these women are not being told that the dangers of screening may exceed those of not being screened. Indeed, the women are not even being clearly told they are taking part in a trial. At a time when the whole question of screening is thrown into doubt, it seems utterly absurd to extend it, says Michael Baum of University College London,

who gave evidence to Parliaments science select committee.

Screening sounds like a no-brainer: regular breast X-rays should catch cancers earlier and save lives. Yet there is growing evidence suggesting that screening does more harm than good, even in those aged 50 to 70, who are most at risk. The main concerns are false positives and overdiagnosis detecting and treating small cancers that, if left alone, might in fact regress or grow so slowly as to do no harm. So some women are having their breasts removed and receiving radio and chemotherapy unnecessarily.

Many countries are questioning their breast-screening programmes. In 2009, the US Preventive Services Task Force said women should be screened when they reach 50, not 40 as now

happens. In the UK, the problem of overdiagnosis has been taken more seriously since the Marmot review of 2012. That led to an overhaul of health leaflets to make the downsides of screening clearer. They now state that for every 200 women screened, one life will be saved from breast cancer, and three women will be diagnosed with cancer that would not, in fact, have harmed them if left untreated.

Critics of screening say the overdiagnosis figure is higher. As for the proposed widening of screening, they point out that women under 50have denser breast tissue, making false positives more likely, and that those over 70 are more likely to die from other causes. That makes it even less likely that removing a small tumour in the breast will be lifesaving.

The information given to women taking part in the trial doesnt mention such issues, says Susan Bewley of Kings College London. Nowhere does it use the word trial, she says. This is the biggest-ever human experiment and its completely unethical.

A spokeswoman for Public Health England, the body running the trial, told New Scientist : This trial has fullethics approval and will prove internationally important to show whether screening in the extended age ranges saves lives.

The trial got the go-ahead before the Marmot review put out its findings. Bewley thinks it has too much momentum to be stopped, as it will involve 3 million women and runs until 2026. Its a juggernaut, she says.

Unwitting women in cancer scan trial

INSIGHT Breast cancer screening

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The benefits arent black and white

Its really amazing that they were able to send quite faithful images of Mozart and Schrdinger

MOZART and Schrdinger flew through the air over Vienna recently. Their digital images were encoded in twisted green light, marking an important step towards long-distance communication in free space.

Light offers the best way to communicate between Earth and orbiting satellites, but atmospheric turbulence can destroy the signal.

Twisted light transmits over record distance

Polarised light is resistant to the effects of turbulence, but polarised photons can carry only one bit of information apiece. So researchers have looked for other properties of light that could boost the bit rate.

One solution is twisted light, in which the wavefront of light spirals around a central axis as it travels. There is no limit to the number of twists for each photon, so they can theoretically store boundless amounts of information. Now, Mario Krenn, Anton Zeilinger and their colleagues at the University of Vienna in Austria have transmitted photons with four levels

of twists, giving them the ability to transmit four bits of information.

After digitising images of Mozart, Schrdinger and physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, the team encoded the data in twisted green laser light. Then they transmitted the beam from the top of a radar tower to a receiver 3kilometres away a record for twisted light transmission in the openair where software read the

patterns of light and decoded the images (arxiv.org/abs/1402.2602).

Its a huge technological achievement, says Jonathan Leach, who studies twisted light at Heriot- Watt University in Edinburgh, UK. Its really amazing that they were able to transmit these quite faithful images across whats quite a long free-space distance.

The effective thickness of Earths atmosphere is only about 6kilometres, so the demonstration is a big step on the way to using twisted light to communicate with satellites. Anil Ananthaswamy


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MOVE over, electrons circuits could one day be powered by frigid quantum matter.

Ultra-cold clouds of atoms called Bose-Einstein condensates act as a single quantum object, and the goal has been to build circuits with them. But the condensates delicate quantum state can easily fall apart.

Now Changhyun Ryu and Malcolm Boshier of the Los

Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico have found a way to do it. Their circuits are built from two laser beams, one that creates a horizontal sheet of light to act as a circuit board, and another vertical laser that traces out the path of the circuit. The condensate, which is made from around 4000 cooled rubidium atoms, is trapped inside the beams by the same forces used to create optical tweezers,

which can manipulate particles on a small scale.

The team ran the condensate along straight lines, in a circle and through a Y junction all essential components of a circuit (arxiv.org/abs/1410.8814).

The advance could one day be used to build a navigation system that measures the rotation and acceleration of the condensate. This could be used as a backup for a device that loses contact with GPS satellites.

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Bats intentionally jam each others sonar to steal meals

ITS frustrating when your phone loses its signal. But for bats, a sudden loss of sonar means missing out on an insect meal in mid-flight. Now there is evidence to suggest that bats are sneakily using sonar jamming todeprive their fellow hunters of their tasty targets.

Like other bats, the Mexican free-tailed bat uses echolocation to pinpoint prey insects in the dark. When many bats hunt close by, they sometimes interfere with each others echoes if they use the same frequency, but they can avoid the problem by switching to a different pitch. Previous work suggests such jamming is

inadvertent, but Aaron Corcoran of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, now has evidence of intentional sabotage. The jamming is on purpose and the jamming signal has been designed by evolution to maximally disrupt the other bats echolocation, he says.

With William Conner of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Corcoran compared flight-path calculations with audio and video recordings. They found that the bats emit special ultrasonic signals covering a broad range of frequencies that interfere with other bats attacking insect prey (Science, doi.org/wx3).

This is distinct from the accidental interference. This jamming signal covers all the frequencies used by the other bat, so theres no available frequency to shift to, says Corcoran.

How to build a circuit with frozen atoms

An inheritance you might not want

ITS a real gut-buster. Your genes influence everything from your eye colour to your risk of disease. Now it seems they shape the collection of bacteria in your gut. So adjusting that menagerie of microbes might help treat inherited diseases that would otherwise involve tweaking genes.

Tim Spector of Kings College London and his colleagues looked at the gut bacteria in the faeces of 977 twins. Some groups of bacteria were more similar in identical than in non-identical twins. In other words, some components of this microbiome are heritable (Cell, doi.org/w2q).

The most heritable bacteria is Christensenella, says co-author Andy Clark at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Those with higher levels of Christensenella bacteria in their guts were more likely to have a lower body mass index than those with low levels, so it may protect against obesity.

Gulls develop a taste for trash

WHATS for dinner? For glaucous-winged gulls, the answer is trash.

Louise Blight at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and her colleagues analysed 270 feathers from the gulls collected between 1860 and 2009 from the Salish Sea region off the coast of south-west Canada and the north-west US. Changes in the ratios of carbon and nitrogen isotopes indicated a shift from fish-based to terrestrial diets, and to less nutritious food (Global Change Biology, doi.org/wx5).

Researchers believe that these changes in isotopes, which coincided with over-fishing in this region, could reflect a switch to eating garbage, as gull populations have grown with increasing availability of trash.

IN BRIEF


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Essence of eau de blood pinpointed

ITS attractive to killers noses, butithardly rolls off the tongue. Trans-4,5-epoxy-(E)-2-decenal has been identified as the chemical that gives blood its distinctive odour. Carnivores are mad for it.

It was isolated by Matthias Laska of Linkping University in Sweden and his colleagues. They were helped by odour experts, who sniffed the compounds in blood thatcan evaporate, one by one, inasearch for the substance that most typifies blood (PLoS One, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0112694).

The aldehyde, which gives blood in meat its faintly metallic odour, forms when animal fat breaks down.Laska believes it is likely tobepresent in all mammal blood.

Laskas team found that when the compound was smeared on wood, Siberian tigers and three species of wild dog at the nearby Kolmrden Wildlife Park found itjust as attractive as the meat theyare usually fed with. (Unsurprisingly, the carnivorous animals showed virtually no interest in wood smeared with a substance that smells like bananas.)

This compound was as interesting to all four species astheodour of real blood, saysLaska. In fact, African wild dogswere even more interested inthe substance than they were inreal horse blood.

Young star shows up models flaws

ITS good to see that our computer models are right well, nearly. The worlds largest telescope array has glimpsed exoplanets being born, showing that simulations are accurate except in one key detail.

Planets form out of the disc of dust and gas surrounding a star, when gravity causes material to clump together. These clumps grow by sweeping that material up, eventually creating planets and leaving behind gaps in the disc.

When astronomers aimed the 66radio antennas of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array

in Chile at the star HL Tauri, 450 light years away, they saw concentric rings around it the first such sighting for any star. It was almost too good to be true, says ALMA scientist Catherine Vlahakis. Previously our best images looked like unresolved blobs.

But models predicted that these gaps should form relatively late in a stars life, and HL Tauri is still young. ALMAs observations suggest planets can spring up more quickly than we thought. At least we now have new data to feed into simulations, giving us a clearer picture of our solar systems past.

ITS time for Martian rovers to put the pedal to the metal. A system that lets rovers handle more of their own navigation could spell more speed for interplanetary explorers.

Its badly needed: the Curiosity rover, our best on the Red Planet, only covers about 200 metres per day. Thats because when a rover encounters an obstacle it cant negotiate by itself, it must wait for instructions from its minders on Earth a huge waste of time.

To get around this, Mark Woods of the Autonomy and Robotics

Group at SCISYS in Bristol, UK, and colleagues have built Seeker. With the software loaded onto a rover, engineers can simply input desired waypoints for the rover to reach, and the system figures out the route using stored satellite images of the terrain.

Along the way, the rovers on-board cameras scan for rocks that are too small for the satellites to catch. If any are spotted, Seeker automatically adjusts the route to skirt around them. The system also uses the cameras and satellite images to monitor progress.

In 2012, Seeker was tested for the first time in the Atacama desert in Chile, a landscape similar to that of Mars. There, it guided the RoboVolc rover, built to traverse the edge of volcanoes, over several kilometres in a single day. The most recent trial, carried out last month, tested Seekers ability to pilot a robot at night.

If all goes well Seeker could help the European Space Agencys ExoMars rover, which is planned for launch in 2018, find its way across vast stretches of Martian soil.

Rover navigation system feels the need for Martian speed

Hunt for longevity gene refuses to die

WHAT does it take to live to a 110? If supercentenarians have a magic gene that helps them reach this age, it is lying low. A thorough search for longevity gene variants in 17 supercentenarians average age 112 (the oldest was 116) has drawn a blank.

Previous studies identified genes coding for proteins that might play an important role in longevity, including insulin-like growth factor-1. Some people have a variant of IGF-1 that becomes less active over time, and this can slow the ageing process.

But when Stuart Kim of Stanford University in California and his colleagues compared the genomes of 16 women and one man aged 110 or older with those of 34 people aged 21 to 79, they found no significant differences in IGF-1 or any other gene (PLoS One, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0112430). Ironically, one supercentenarian woman had a gene variant known to raise the risk of sudden death through irregular heart rhythms.

Nevertheless, Kim thinks genetic differences will be found. Were continuing our search with more supercentenarians and more complex analyses, he says.

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For more technology stories, visit newscientist.com/technologyTECHNOLOGY

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I can hear Wi-FiFrank Swain has been going deaf since his 20s. Now he has hacked his hearing so that he can hear the sounds of our digital infrastructure

I AM walking through my north London neighbourhood on an unseasonably warm day in late autumn. I can hear birds tweeting in the trees, traffic prowling the back roads, children playing in gardens and Wi-Fi leaching from their homes. Against the familiar sounds of suburban life, it is somehow incongruous and appropriate at the same time.

As I approach Turnpike Lane tube station and descend to the underground platform, I catch the now familiar gurgle of the public Wi-Fi hub, as well as the staff network beside it. On board the train, these sounds fade into silence as we burrow into the tunnels leading to central London.

I have been able to hear these fields since last week. This wasnt the result of a sudden mutation or years of transcendental meditation, but an upgrade to my hearing aids. With a grant from Nesta, the UK innovation charity, sound artist Daniel Jones and I built Phantom Terrains, an

experimental tool for making Wi-Fi fields audible.

Our modern world is suffused with data. Since radio towers began climbing over towns and cities in the early 20th century, the air has grown thick with wireless communication, the platform on which radio, television, cellphones, satellite broadcasts, Wi-Fi, GPS, remote controls and hundreds of other technologies rely. And yet, despite wireless communication becoming a ubiquitous presence in modern life, the underlying infrastructure has remained largely invisible.

Every day, we use it to read the news, chat to friends, navigate through cities, post photos to our social networks and call for help. These systems make up a huge and integral part of our lives, but the signals that support them remain intangible. If you have ever wandered in circles to find a signal for your cellphone, you will know what I mean.

Phantom Terrains opens the

door to this world to a small degree by tuning into these fields. Running on a hacked iPhone, the software exploits the inbuilt Wi-Fi sensor to pick up details about nearby fields: router name, signal strength, encryption and distance. This wasnt easy. Reams of cryptic variables and numerical values had to be decoded by changing the settings of our test router and observing the effects.

On a busy street, we may see over a hundred independent wireless access points within

signal range, says Jones. The strength of the signal, direction, name and security level on these are translated into an audio stream made up of a foreground and background layer: distant signals click and pop like hits on a Geiger counter, while the

strongest bleat their network ID in a looped melody. This audio is streamed constantly to a pair of hearing aids donated by US developer Starkey. The extra sound layer is blended with the normal output of the hearing aids; it simply becomes part of my soundscape. So long as I carry my phone with me, I will always be able to hear Wi-Fi.

Silent soundscapeFrom the roar of Oxford Circus, I make my way into the close silence of an anechoic booth on Harley Street. I have been spending a lot of time in these since 2012, when I was first diagnosed with hearing loss. I have been going deaf since my 20s, and two years ago I was fitted with hearing aids which instantly brought a world of missing sound back to my ears, although it took a little longer for my brain to make sense of it.

Recreating hearing is an incredibly difficult task. Unlike glasses, which simply bring the world into focus, digital hearing aids strive to recreate the soundscape, amplifying useful sound and suppressing noise. As this changes by the second, sorting one from the other requires a lot of programming.

In essence, I am listening to a computers interpretation of the soundscape, heavily tailored to what it thinks I need to hear. I am intrigued to see how far this editorialisation of my hearing can be pushed. If I have to spend my life listening to an interpretative version of the world, what elements could I add? The data that surrounds me seems a good place to start.

Mapping digital fields isnt a new idea. Timo Arnalls Light Painting Wi-Fi saw the artist and his collaborators build a rod of LEDs that lit up when exposed to digital signals, and carried it through the city at night. Captured in long exposure photographs, the topographies of wireless networks appear as

Distant signals click like hits on a Geiger counter, while the strongest bleat in a looped melody

Listening in

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TECHNOLOGY

a ghostly blue ribbon that waxes and wanes to the strength of nearby signals, revealing the digital landscape.

Just as the architecture of nearby buildings gives insight to their origin and purpose, we can begin to understand the social world by examining the network landscape, says Jones. For example, by tracing the hardware address transmitted with the Wi-Fi signal, the Phantom Terrains software can trace a routers origin. We found that residential areas were full of low-security routers whereas commercial districts had highly encrypted routers and a higher bandwidth.

Despite the information gathered, most people would balk at the idea of being forced to listen to the hum and crackle of invisible fields all day. How long I will tolerate the additional noise in my soundscape remains to be seen. But there is more to the project than a critique of digital transparency.

With the advent of the internet of things, our material world is becoming ever more draped in sensors, and it is important to think about how we might make sense of all this information. Hearing is a fantastic platform for interpreting dynamic, continuous, broad spectrum data.

Its use in this way is being aided by a revolution in hearing technology. The latest models, such as the Halo brand used in our project and ReSounds Linx, boast a specialised low-energy Bluetooth function that can link to compatible gadgets. This has a host of immediate advantages, such as allowing people to fine-tune their hearing aids using a smartphone as an interface. More crucially, the continuous connectivity elevates hearing aids to something similar to Google Glass an always-on, networked tool that can seamlessly stream data and audio into your world.

Already, we are talking to our computers more, using voice-activated virtual assistants

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such as Apples Siri, Microsofts Cortana and OK Google. Always-on headphones that talk back, whispering into our ear like discreet advisers, might well catch on ahead of Google Glass.

The biggest challenge is

human, says Jones. How can we create an auditory representation that is sufficiently sophisticated to express the richness and complexity of an ever-changing network infrastructure, yet unobtrusive enough to be overlaid

on our normal sensory experience without being a distraction?

Only time will tell if we have succeeded in this respect. If we have, it will be a further step towards breaking computers out of the glass-fronted box they have been trapped inside for the last 50 years.

Auditory interfaces also prompt a rethink about how we investigate data and communicate those findings, setting aside the precise and discrete nature of visual presentation in favour of complex, overlapping forms. Instead of boiling the stock market down to the movement of one index or another, for example, we could one day listen

to the churning mass of numbers in real time, our ears attuned for discordant melodies.

In Harley Street, the audiologist shows me the graphical results of my tests. What should be a wide blue swathe good hearing across all volume levels and sound frequencies narrows sharply, permanently, at one end.

There is currently no treatment that can widen this channel, but assistive hearing technology can tweak the volume and pitch of my soundscape to pack more sound into the space available. Its not much to work with, but Im hoping I can inject even more into this narrow strait, to hear things in this world that nobody else can.

Headphones that whisper into our ear like discreet advisers may catch on ahead of Google Glass

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This image shows the wireless networks heard by Frank as he walked through the Camberwell Green area of south London. Hisexact route is shown as a white line

2. Each dot is connected to the area it could be heard by aline. In open areas, distant routers are clearly audible

3. In a narrow street, buildings block distant Wi-Fisignals

4. Shaded areas denote the strongest Wi-Fi networks. The larger the area, the stronger the signal

1. The locations of individual routers are represented by dots, coloured according to the channel theyare broadcasting on

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Bitcoin factory goes up in flamesIts money to burn. Looks like a warehouse in Thailand full ofBitcoin-mining machines caught fire. Local media and Bitcoin websites suggest that the facility, packed with over 2000 computers connected to the Bitcoin network, went up in flames on 7 November. Equipment worth an estimated $2million was destroyed. The machines mined Bitcoins by solving cryptographic puzzles. The fire has been blamed for asudden slowdown in activity on the Bitcoin network.

$8 million The amount that dark net website Silk Road 2.0 was making each month from the sale of drugs and other illicit goods and services, according to the FBI, which shut it down last week

Smart CCTV removes the humansMake yourself invisible. Thats the idea behind software that removes moving objects from video imagery. The uncensored images are then only viewable when an authorised person watches the recording. Developed by Prism Skylabs, based in San Francisco, the system uses machine-learning to identify movement belonging to foreground elements, like a person walking across the cameras field of view. The software recognises the stationary background and can then paint over foreground objects to neatly hide human activity.

Cyborg cockroaches hunt for soundsCall it roach-and-rescue. Alper Bozkurt at North Carolina State University built sound-sensing backpacks that can bestrapped to Madagascar hissing cockroaches. With a computer processing the microphone data, the cockroaches are guided towards the sound source via automated electric pulses to their antennae: the nerve stimulation causes the insects to turn left or right. Such roaches might be used to look for disaster victims under rubble, the team suggests.

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Made by fungi and bacteria

ITS alive! Well, almost. The first biological drone, an autonomous vehicle stitched together largely with materials from living things, made its inaugural flight earlier this month.

Drones have proved invaluable for those who want to explore remote locations, from storm-chasers to the military. But a crash in such a location can not only blot a sensitive environment, it also lets everyone know that youve been spying. A bio-drone could potentially avoid that by degrading away in a puddle of inconspicuous goo.

No one would know if youd spilled some sugar water or if thered been an airplane there, says Lynn Rothschild of NASAs Ames Research Center in California, who created the drone.

The bulk of the prototype is made of a root-like fungal material called mycelium. It was cultivated in a custom drone shape by Ecovative Design, a company in Green Island, New York, that grows the stuff as a lightweight sustainable alternative for applications like wine packaging and surfboard cores.

The fungal body has a protective covering of sticky cellulose leather sheets grown by bacteria in the lab. Coating the sheets are proteins clonedfrom the saliva of paper wasps usually used to waterproof their nests. Circuits were printed in

silver nanoparticle ink, in an effort to make the device as biodegradable as possible.

There are definitely parts that cant be replaced by biology, says team member Raman Nelakanti of Stanford University. For example, for its first short flight at the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition in Boston, the bio-drone was equipped with propellers and controls borrowed from a regular mechanical quadcopter. It also has a standard battery.

The next part the team hope to make safe to degrade are the drones sensors, and they have already started studying how to build them using E. coli bacteria.

Ella Atkins, an aerospace engineer at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, is enthusiastic about the bio-drones but warns of trouble if onestarts to break down too soon. We dont want biodegradable drones to rain down from the sky and we dont want to litter the land and seas with crashed drones even if they will eventually biodegrade, she says. Aviva Rutkin

Bio-drone just melts away if it crashes

No one would know if youdspilled some sugar water or if there had been an airplane there


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Digital courts ruleStung by an online buy? Get even online too, says Chris Baraniuk

WE ARE the law. The great e-commerce boom has had an unexpected side effect the rise ofdigital courts.

eBay has long relied on its Resolution Centre to solve petty disagreements between buyers and sellers, and the model has become surprisingly popular among others who do business online. So much so, in fact, that one Swedish company has applied it to all kinds of consumer complaints.

Swiftcourt, based in Lund, allows individuals to file small claims. For oneclient who wishes to remain anonymous Swiftcourt turned out tobe very handy. After receiving a second-hand motorbike from an online sale, he realised that it was not as described. It was 450cc, not 540cc, and some parts were missing.

Initially, the seller refused a refund, but the two had previously agreed to use Swiftcourt as an arbitrator in the event of a dispute. A few weeks after the arbitration process was started on the Swiftcourt website, both parties were handed a verdict the plaintiffs case was upheld and a full refund following return of the bike was arranged. The seller also had to payboth parties Swiftcourt fees.

The client was relieved: Ive been telling my friends about it at every dinner I go to. Ive been recommending it to everyone.

Johan Hultgren and his co-founder are both qualified lawyers who run the service full-time. He says the popularity of online shopping has created a burgeoning market for services like Swiftcourt that can sort out problems quickly. Were doing more private transactions than we used to do. Since theres no physical contract,

more conflicts will arise and these will be over lower amounts, he says.

This allows consumers to avoid costly and time-consuming court processes. Swiftcourt aims to reach a settlement or verdict within six weeks and costs 100 to 450. Crucially, when Swiftcourt issues an arbitration verdict it is final and enforceable by Swedish debt-collection authorities.

eBay-style resolution centres arenow an integral feature of the so-called sharing economy.

Accommodation broker Airbnb has its own version, which helps users of the service request refunds or additional payments, or claim damages from security deposits.

Swiftcourt is not the only onlinearbitration service out there. eQuibbly.com, based in Toronto, Canada, puts people in disputes in touch with attorneys or retired judges via an online interface where users upload supporting documents or photographic evidence.

Jan Kleinheisterkamp at the London School of Economics says the growth of these services has been rapid. He says online portals for filing disputes are particularly appealing for consumers who dont have the time orresources to take traditional legal action. Its a new generation of consumer dispute settlement, he says. It feels closer to the consumer, being on his or her laptop or smartphone instead of them having togo and physically file documents.

Kleinheisterkamp adds that there is no legal difference between dealing with a disagreement online compared with a courtroom. It doesnt change anything from a legal perspective, hesays.

Swiftcourt issues an arbitration verdict that is final and enforceable by debt-collection authorities

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I AM blindfolded and the world goes dark. Luckily, I have a special guide by my ears. Its just a gentle pulse and a series of clip-clops but it tells me Im going in the right direction. IfI turn my head the pulse stops, and I know Im facing the wrong way.

The new Microsoft-designed headset for blind people has two plates that sit on the cheekbones just next to the users ear canals and transmit sound via the skull bones. Location information is beamed tothe users smartphone from nearby beacons, and delivered tothe headset via Bluetooth.

Plug your route into Microsofts Bing Maps and the headset lets you know if youre going the right way. The system tricks you into thinking the pulse comes from a certain direction. For example, if you are facing away from your desired destination, the sounds appear to be coming from behind you. And thebone-conducted sound system means your ears are not blocked. A synthesised voice also delivers info on nearby shops or buses.

Microsoft has developed the device as part of a project called Cities Unlocked, alongside partners such as UK charity Guide Dogs.

I was really impressed with its potential, says Jennifer Bottom, a vision-impaired volunteer tester. Chris Baraniuk

INSIGHT Online shopping Headset lets blind people navigate with sound

Out of reach, out of touch

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Psychedelic pollutionThe Gowanus canal is no great beauty. The waterway stretches through 3 kilometres of New York City, thoroughly polluted over the years with sewage from local factories. The US Environmental Protection Agency has called the Gowanus one of the most contaminated bodies of water in the country. Scientists have even discovered new species of microbes in the canal, evolved to thrive in a soup of chemicals and garbage.

But when artist Steven Hirsch looked at the canal, he saw something different. Hirsch, a Brooklyn native, visited the Gowanus in the early mornings before workers arrived. The pockets of oil and slime on the surface, photographed in the dead light of the new day, revealed a dizzying mixture of purples, oranges, greens and blues. Though he intensified the colours later, all originated in the canals toxic sludge.

The photographs will be on show for the rest of the month at the Lilac Gallery in New York. Hirsch says the exhibition isnt intended to draw attention to environmental issues, he just found the canal an unusually rich source of powerful colours and shapes. Similar sites nearby like Newtown Creek, a heavily polluted estuary along the border of Brooklyn and Queens havent turned up the same results.

I couldnt find anything like what I was trying to do at the Gowanus, he says. The palette is there for me. Its like a studio. I just need to go back to the same studio again. Aviva Rutkin

Photographer Steven Hirsch, Chronos, 2014. Digital C-print stevenhirsch.com


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Tim Ratcliffe

WE ARE at a crucial crossroads. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has reaffirmed that keeping global warming to 2 C is feasible and economically viable if we take immediate steps towards a low-carbon economy. That requires a huge shift in investments. The panel estimates that a $30 billion a year decline in fossil-fuel investments is needed, alongside a $147 billion a year increase in low-carbon energy, and a $100 billion a year boost for energy efficiency.

Its simple maths: we can emit another 565 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide and stay below 2 C global warming. However, the coal, oil and gas that corporations have in their reserves add up to 2795 gigatonnes of CO2. In other words, 80 per cent of their carbon reserves cannot be burned if we are to avert irreversible climate change. Yet, they are not only intent on burning reserves, but are also spending billions every year to discover and develop more. ExxonMobil and Shell openly dismiss the 2 C target. Simply put: their business plan and a liveable planet are

OPINION

Paul Younger

TO HAVE to dissent publicly from the governing body of my own university is excruciating. But I felt compelled to do so last month when I read a self-congratulatory report that the University of Glasgow had decided to withdraw its financial investment in fossil fuels. It was not the divestment per se that riled me. Rather, I am appalled by the mistaken assumptions that underlie this posturing.

The divestment movement is premised on the idea that fossil fuels can be abandoned immediately, which assumes that there are alternatives already available on sufficient scale to displace them. This is simply

untrue. We do not yet have viable alternatives at anything close to the scale required for many of the key uses of oil, gas and coal.

For example, they are vital to the production of most food we eat, grown using fertilisers made with fossil fuels. Plastics and many other synthetic materials, demand for which is soaring, rely on fossil fuels. Space heating, which overwhelmingly uses natural gas, is another stumbling block since there is insufficient plant or animal waste to create the biogas to replace it. Steel production from iron ore requires coke made from coal. Transport fuels are highly reliant on oil, and

we have already seen the impact on food prices and ecosystems of a dash for biofuels at modest scale. Then theres electricity production on demand, for which gas and coal are ideally suited.

The impression given by the divestment lobby is that the ascendancy of alternatives is hindered only by the evil machinations of some climate-change-denying Dr Evil in the fossil-fuel sector. But the real world is not so simple.

In Scotland, households with access to the gas grid have a 1-in-4 chance of being in fuel poverty; in regions off the gas grid it is a 2-in-3 chance. It will not be possible to demonstrate that climate change killed a single person in Glasgow this winter, but I can reliably predict that fuel poverty will kill. We can envisage heat pumps replacing gas-fired central heating but that presupposes a tripling of electricity production to power the pumps. How can we do that with only weather-dependent sources of generation?

Our challenge as scientists is to solve these conundrums, but we cant do so if we simply turn our back on heritage technologies. Surely a wiser use of fossil fuel investments would be to exploit the access they give to company leaders. This would let us encourage the acceleration of renewable technology transfer, and insist that fossil fuels be used as efficiently as possible in the meantime, capturing and storing the carbon arising.

Paul Younger is a professor of energy engineering at the University of Glasgow

Its do or divestUN head Ban Ki-moon has urged divestment from fossil fuels. Premature posturing, says Paul Younger. No, its vital and timely, insists Tim Ratcliffe

A wiser use of fossil fuel investments would be to exploit the access they give to company leaders


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ONE MINUTE INTERVIEW

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incompatible. Public institutions that continue to fund this are complicit in wrecking our climate.

The IPCC made it clear that we have the solutions at hand to move to a low-carbon economy. The cost of renewable energy technologies has dropped dramatically and is projected to continue to decline, opening up huge potential to tackle energy poverty through decentralised, community-owned projects.

Carbon capture and storage has not been deployed on a large scale and is not economically viable. But the question of whether the world will keep within the remaining carbon budget is not one of technological or economic feasibility. It is all about power.

The fossil fuel industry is the most profitable in history. It has lobbied to block action on climate change for years. Every institution that divests weakens its stranglehold over our political process. That is why more and more leading figures from Archbishop Desmond Tutu, to World Bank President Jim Yong Kim, to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon call on institutions to divest. Many have heeded this call: the Rockefeller family, who made their fortune from oil, the World Council of Churches, the British Medical Association and numerous cities and universities.

Divestment from fossil fuels is not only a moral imperative, it is also financially advisable. The International Monetary Fund and the Bank of England are just a few of the voices warning that carbon assets are grossly overvalued and risk becoming stranded assets. Instead of fuelling climate change, public institutions have a duty to take a long-term stewardship approach to the money they are entrusted with. They have a responsibility to support a just transition to a low-carbon economy.

Tim Ratcliffe coordinates the divestment campaign for climate activist group 350.org in Europe

Deep-sea explorerDesigning a vehicle that can explore the deepest ocean means knowing how to cope with pressure, says engineer Victor Zykov

PROFILEVictor Zykov is director of research at the Schmidt Ocean Institute in Palo Alto, California. He heads a team developing a remotely operated, full ocean depth robotic vehicle. They aim to improve on a similar vehicle

new scientist - 15 november 2014

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