Image copyright Christine Cassidy Volunteers are being sought to survey 120 woods in Northern Ireland for a protected mammal.
They are being asked to help gather information about red squirrels.
Experts claim that, without intervention, the animals could be extinct with 35 years.
Grey squirrels out-perform reds for food and carry a disease __that can kill them. They have spread rapidly since their introduction a century ago.
The volunteers will be trained to monitor feeders and set up camera traps to record sightings as part of a conservation programme.
And they will be asked to report greys in areas which are currently strongholds for reds.
Workshops are being organised by Ulster Wildlife in March to train the volunteers.
The data gathered will contribute to the work of Red Squirrels United, a UK-wide network set up to protect the endangered species.
Conor McKinney from Ulster Wildlife is leading the project in Northern Ireland.
He said numbers of red squirrels had "declined dramatically" since greys were introduced to Ireland in 1911.
"To ensure __that future generations can continue to enjoy these special animals, we need volunteers to help us monitor squirrels in their local area, so we can target our conservation efforts," he said.
Reds are currently found in the Mournes, south and west Tyrone, parts of County Londonderry, the Glens of Antrim and Fermanagh.
Experts believe there are only about 140,000 red squirrels left in the UK.
The project is being supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund.
The phrase "reinventing the wheel" usually means someone is wasting time and effort trying to fix something __that isn't broken. The same could be said for reinventing straws, which is something __that McDonald's has half-jokingly tried to do with its new STRAW (Suction Tube for Reverse Axial Withdrawal).
On February 24, the fast food corporation will be giving out 2,000 J-shaped, holey straws in select locations across the country, and they're only good for one thing:
"This straw has no purpose other than allowing you to drink a milkshake that has two distinctive layers," says fluid dynamicist Nicole Sharp. She runs a blog called F**k Yeah Fluid Dynamics that highlights awesome examples of flowing fluids in the world around us, so we reached out to her to get her thoughts on the new straw design.
"Me and my friend that I'm staying with—an MIT professor—we watched the McDonalds' video laughed a lot," she says.
And that is mostly the point, it seems. A McDonald's press release admits it's an "utterly frivolous reinvention" designed for the new milkshake they're touting—a two-layered chocolate and mint concoction.
Still, many of us here at Popular Science are recovering scientists, so Commerce Editor Billy Cadden and I decided to test it out.
Why not use a straight straw?
Let's be clear about something: if you want customers to be able to taste two flavors at once, the most practical thing to do would be to blend the two flavors together. But if that results in an ugly green-brown color—or if you want to make a splash in the media—another option is to stack the two flavors in layers. Très chic!
Now, a regular, boring old straw with just one measly hole at the end will not allow you to taste both of those layers at once. So what's a brand to do? Call in some rocket scientists and robotic engineers to design a new type of eating utensil that will mix the two flavors together as the person drinks. (Because, again, stirring things with spoons is just too straightforward.)
The rocket scientists probably knew that a straight straw with two holes in it wouldn't work very well. If you've ever tried to use a straw with a hole in it, you know why, says Sharp. "It works fine until the top hole is exposed—then all you get is air."
The genius of the J-shaped design is that the hole nearest the mouth of the straw sits at the very bottom of the cup, so it should always be pulling from the delicious bottom layer of the milkshake. Meanwhile, holes punched along the shorter arm simultaneously draw from the top layer, allowing you to drink two flavors at once without sucking in a bunch of air. Theoretically.
Plus, the longer J-shaped straw provides more distance for the flavor to mix over, says Sharp.
The iPhone of straws
The employees at our local McDonald's gathered around to admire our straw. I don't know about Billy, but I felt pretty fly sliding it out of its box as if I were unveiling the new iPhone, to the admiration and curiosity of the crowd.
We asked our cashier to make two milkshakes: one with the chocolate and mint layered, to test out the J-shaped straw, and one where the chocolate and mint were blended together with a spoon—we sampled that one with an old-fashioned straight straw. We wanted to see whether there was any point to the layered milkshake (and therefore the straw). We suspected that there was not.
Billy, who is slightly less lactose intolerant than I am, was the lab rat. Here is our scientific report:
"More sucking power is needed."
First, the test subject started with the layered milkshake, which had mint on the bottom and chocolate on the top. First reaction: "It's good." Second reaction: "It's a lot mintier than I was expecting. I don't know if the top hole [positioned in the chocolate later] is working as well as the bottom hole [in the mint layer]."
The subject reported tasting about 80 percent mint, 20 percent chocolate in those first few sips. That's a far cry from the 50/50 ratio that Micky D's was aiming for. For customers who like mint, this may be desirable. However, our test subject preferred the blended milkshake, which was more like 40 percent mint and 60 percent chocolate.
Over time, as the layered milkshake began to melt and mix together, it began to taste similar to the blended milkshake.
From the beginning of the test, the J-shaped straw was "a lot harder to drink from," our test subject reported. "More sucking power is needed." This may have been because the J-shaped straw is longer, which meant the milkshake made more contact with the straw walls, which would increase friction, according to Sharp.
Things started to go downhill rather quickly as the milkshake level went below the first set of holes cut into the side of the straw's shorter arm. When the test subject attempted to drink more, the straw made a hollow slurping sound as if he were trying to suck up the last dregs of a milkshake, despite the fact that approximately half of the milkshake remained in the cup.
After allowing the milkshake to melt a little, the test subject tried again, but to no avail. Eventually, he gave up and used a regular straight straw to finish the milkshake, and the experiment ended.
Why didn't it work?
You'd think that because the hole closest to the mouth of the straw is buried in milkshake, you could still get a mouthful of sugar even after the holes on the short end of the straw are exposed to air. But something else is clearly going on. Sharp has a hypothesis as to why the STRAW crapped out on us, but she cautions that she hasn't tested it yet.
She suspects a Saffman-Taylor instability may be forming in the straw. Essentially, that's when a less viscous fluid (like air) intrudes on a more viscous fluid (like milkshake). Basically, the air may be beating the milkshake to the mouth because it flows so much easier.
Conclusion and discussion
If it worked properly, the J-shaped straw would allow you to determine the optimal flavor ratio for your layered milkshake. Like more mint? Move the straw more into the minty layer. Or the flavor of your milkshake could evolve as you depleted one layer more than the other.
In practice, though, the straw did not achieve an even mixing of flavors, and it stopped working about two-thirds of the way through the milkshake. Our experiment, did, however, only have a sample size of one. More research, and more milkshakes, are needed to determine the validity of this design.
The following is an excerpt from Power Play: How video games can save the world by Asi Burak and Laura Parker.
One of the most successful examples of citizen science is Lab in the Wild, an experimental platform for conducting online behavioral experiments. It was launched in 2012 by Krzysztof Gajos, an associate professor of computer science at Harvard University’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, with the help of one of his postdoctoral researchers, Katharina Reinecke. The platform administers game-like tests online to unpaid volunteers. At the time of launch, Gajos was interested in observing how humans interact with computational systems, particularly how online interfaces can better accommodate people’s varying abilities to see, hear, and interact.
Lab in the Wild launched with three studies, the most successful of which asked participants to rate a number of websites, on a scale of 1 to 9, based on visual appeal; more than 40,000 people from some 200 countries participated in the study, varying in age from 6 to 99. “We had everyone from scientists to plumbers take part,” Reinecke said. The results of the study supported Reinecke’s theory __that what users perceive as “good” design is subject to individual and cultural preferences. For example, the level of colorfulness and visual complexity people prefer varies wildly: according to the study, women like colorful websites more than men, while a highly educated person generally prefers less color. Russians prefer lower visual complexity, while Macedonians like highly intricate designs. Later, Gajos and Reinecke published a paper on Lab in the Wild, in which they compared three experiments performed on the platform with similar studies done inside the lab, concluding __that the online results replicated the in-lab studies with “comparable data quality.” They concluded: “In comparison to conventional in-lab studies, Lab in the Wild enables the recruitment of participants at larger scale and from more diverse demographic and geographic backgrounds.”
Some people would argue that games like Foldit and the activities found on Testmybrain.org and Lab in the Wild aren’t really games. Not in the traditional sense, anyway. Few people would choose to play Foldit over Tetris based on technical elements and entertainment value, for example. But that doesn’t necessarily exclude Foldit and the others from the category of games. The boundaries of game design have been slowly shifting and stretching over the last five years to include more experimental and innovative projects. Could a game like Foldit be better designed? Undoubtedly. But the fact that the game needs to deliver on a very specific objective—in this instance, a scientific one—limits what the game can be in the end, and it’s therefore hard to say how much better, from a pure gaming standpoint, it could be.
However, if these games could be designed to be more entertaining, that would certainly increase their impact, because even more people would want to play them. “I don’t want my documentary to be boring. It may have to be boring in parts to make a point, but that’s never the goal,” said Nicholas Fortugno, lead designer of the wildly popular game Diner Dash and the co-founder of the New York City–based game development studio Playmatics. “Better design makes better games, and the better the game is, the more it’s played. If the game has social impact, then of course you want it played as much as possible. The fact that a lot of people played it is a triumph that shouldn’t be overlooked, but it didn’t live up to its potential if better design would let [even] more people access it.”
Fortugno believes that many of these games would benefit from the touch of a professional game designer. This isn’t to say that good games never come from amateurs—rather, that game expertise can make a game more appealing. Whether the games should be commercial is a different question. “I think that the question of money has little to no bearing on how fun the experience is. A good, serious game should make the high-end goal itself fun to achieve through [its] mechanics.”
Reinecke didn’t go out of her way to attract people to Lab in the Wild; instead, participants had the option of sharing the results of their tests online, which many did, inspiring others to take the test. Today, the site averages around 1,000 participants per day. There are usually only six to nine studies live on the site at any one time; researchers can submit their studies for preapproval, after which Lab in the Wild posts the studies to its Facebook page and asks users for their feedback. If the response is positive, the study goes up. The only rule is that studies have to be fun, simple, and shareable. One of the site’s most popular studies was a test that guessed users’ ages based on their clicking speeds; it attracted more than a million participants in its first two months. The site also provides users with personalized feedback, allowing each participant to compare him or herself with users in other countries. This is probably why Lab in the Wild has had so much success on social media—currently, the majority of the site’s traffic comes from Facebook. (The top user countries are usually the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Romania, and Hungary.) “I know of other successful citizen science and crowdsourcing projects where the people involved are really in it to help the world,” Reinecke says. “With us, it’s the opposite. It’s less about altruism, and more about personal motivation— but hey, whatever works, right?”
Excerpt from Power Play: How video games can save the world by Asi Burak and Laura Parker. Copyright © 2017. Available from St. Martin's Press Popular Science is delighted to bring you selections from new and noteworthy science-related books. If you are an author or publisher and have a new and exciting book that you think our readers would love, please get in touch! Send an email to books@popsci.com.
Today, the seeds of 49,000 varieties of crops—including cabbages, wheat, lentils, sweet peas, and many others—will be wheeled into a vault in a mountainside. There they will lay in in sturdy black plastic boxes in a frigid underground vault high above the Arctic Circle, an insurance policy for the entire world’s food supply.
Remarkably, some of the packets being deposited today are descendants of seeds __that were removed in 2015, when the remnants of a Syrian-based seed bank withdrew the first seeds from the Svalbard vault, in order to re-establish crops lost during civil war.
Svalbard Seed Bank
The Svalbard seed bank is nine years old, and is located at the ends of the Earth, in Svalbard, an island in Norway far above the Arctic Circle. The low temperatures will help keep the seeds safe for decades, if not centuries. The vault holds 930,821 varieties of agricultural crops from around the world, with a mission to preserve the biodiversity of plants used in agriculture.
“This natural resource is too important to be left to uncertainty,” says Marie Haga, executive director of Crop Trust, the nonprofit __that operates the seed bank.
Seeds from thousands of varieties of wheat, rice, vegetables, grasses, and other crops from all around the world rest on the shelves, all backup copies for national and international seed banks just like this located around the world.
While the national seed banks constantly use seeds for research and to provide farmers with seeds for crops, these seeds' main purpose is to sit and wait, ready to be recalled by those national groups in case one of their samples is destroyed.
“Losing a sample means extinction, and extinction means losing a trait that might have been essential to the evolution or adaptation of the crop in the future,” Cary Fowler, agriculturist and senior advisor to the trust says.
With a changing climate increasingly threatening farmers with unusual temperatures and water availability, farmers are looking for hardy, high yield crops. In addition to changing climate, food producers the world over must continue to grow food for an expanding human population while fighting salinity levels in soil, migrating pests and diseases, and myriad other threats, including armed conflict.
In those circumstances, having a backed up library of genetic traits from all around the world means more options for an uncertain future. And in at least one case, the seed bank has already proven its usefulness.
First Withdrawal
When the Arab Spring began in Libya in 2011, Fowler called up the head of a seed bank in Syria and asked if he might consider putting some of their already prepared duplicate copies of their seeds into the Svalbard repository. Initially, the counterpart said that Syria was so stable, that it wasn’t immediately necessary. Fowler, who had seen the gleaming state-of-the-art facilities there agreed that it was incomprehensible that anything should happen there.
“I said yeah, I’m sure you're right, but just in case.” Fowler is quiet for a moment, remembering the war that broke out in Syria soon after that telephone call in 2011. “Just in case pretty much summed up why we had a seed vault,” he says.
Even though initially it didn’t look like the unrest in the Middle East would reach Syria, the regional seed bank, the International Center for Agriculture Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) took Fowler up on the insurance policy. Just in case.
In Fowler’s words, “just before all hell broke loose” in Aleppo, and the seed bank there shut down, the last shipment of duplicate seeds made it safely to the seed bank in Svalbard. Then, in 2015, ICARDA re-established itself in Morocco and Lebanon, and asked for its seeds back, the first withdrawal from the seed bank.
“They have lot of diversity of those crops that are very important if you want to have a heat or drought tolerant varieties,” Fowler says.
Now, less than two years later those seeds have helped re-establish that critical seed bank, and copies are being transferred back into the Svalbard seed bank as an insurance policy that everyone hopes they will never need to use again.
Funding ‘Just In Case’
“It only takes 34 million United States dollars [per year] to conserve the diversity of the major crops in the world,” Haga says.
That money goes to support 11 national and international collections of seeds, informational systems to tie together the system, and of course the seed vault in Svalbard *. It takes electricity, and therefore, money, to cool the vault to precisely 18 degrees Celsius. That’s easier in the frigid climate above the Arctic Circle, but still takes energy to keep the temperatures consistently low. Other money is needed to transport seeds from around the world into (and out of) the vault, a process that happens only a few times a year to minimize temperature fluctuations in the seed bank.
The money comes from an independent endowment still in the process of being funded. “A modern soccer stadium costs more than a billion dollars,” Haga says. By comparison, she estimates that the $34 million needed to run the seed bank annually could be generated by a $850 million endowment invested conservatively over time. “We can afford that,” Haga says.
Fundraising efforts for the 9-year-old seed bank are underway, to ensure that the mission keeps going for years to come. One partnership with camera company GoPro produced the short documentary below, showing an inside look into what the seed vault is and why it operates. They hope to raise awareness and add more money to the $170 million already in the endowment.
Haga knows that many people have never thought about the biodiversity of the world’s crops. But she is unequivocal about the importance of biodiversity in agriculture for every human on the planet.
“For heaven's sake, it's about your breakfast and your lunch and your dinner. You want it to be the food that you want and you want there to be enough of it,” she says.
Whether natural or human disaster, Haga and Fowler hope that the worst will never occur, but they want to be ready when it does.
“I would love to go down in history as being involved with one of the greatest boondoggles in history that ever was.” Fowler laughs before becoming serious again. “You never want an insurance policy to be used.”
But, he adds that rosy vision of the future is unlikely to unfold. “My guess is that in the future we’ll be returning more seeds more often.”
- Update 2/23: This article has been updated with more details about how the money in the Crop Trust budget is allocated.
Most galaxies in the universe have at least one thing in common: supermassive black holes tend to sit in their centers, silently gorging on interstellar gas and dust and obliterating anything __that comes within range of their event horizon. But scientists know very little about the origin of these behemoths or how they got to be so supermassive.
"We don't understand particularly well how black holes grow," says James Mullaney of the University of Sheffield. "Especially how they grew back in the early universe, when the first stars were starting to form."
But Mullaney and his colleagues may have accidentally stumbled upon a major clue.
In a study published Monday in Nature Astronomy, they report evidence __that black holes might tear apart and "consume" entire stars much more commonly than was previously assumed.
"The results came out purely by chance really, quite like a lot of scientific discoveries," Mullaney says. "We were initially looking to find out what happens when galaxies collide."
But when his team observed 15 galaxies in 2015, they noticed that one of them had changed since a previous survey in 2005. They saw a strong flash of light—the fingerprint of a Tidal Disruption Events, or TDE. It sounds like something a surfer might grouse about, but a TDE is when a star strays too close to a black hole and gets totally torn apart. It's lights out for the star and dinner time for the black hole.
A TDE isn't inherently surprising. But finding it in a random batch of 15 galaxies was pretty strange. "Until now, such events have only been detected by surveying thousands or tens of thousands of galaxies," Mullaney explains. "And even then, you might not always find one."
Of course, it's possible the team just got really, really lucky. But Mullaney says they've calculated the odds of such an event being purely due to chance, and they found them to be something like one in 100. What's more likely, he explains, is that they've stumbled upon a circumstance—galaxy collision—that makes TDEs happen more frequently.
"It’s a little bit like if you surveyed a population of non-smokers—you might only identify that one had lung disease in a pretty large group. Whereas if you sampled a population of smokers, you’d find one in fifteen had lung disease, because smoking causes lung disease," he says. "We found one of these events taking place in a much smaller group than we'd expect," so it seems likely that colliding galaxies are at risk for TDEs in the way that smokers are more likely to have lung disease.
More research is needed, especially since there is the possibility—however slight—that Mullaney's team simply got really lucky. But the group hopes to look at many more colliding galaxies in the hopes of raising their confidence level. If they really have landed on something that makes a TDE more likely to occur, they should be able to find loads more.
"It's not going to affect the human race or anything like that," Mullaney says. "But it could help us finally understand how these black holes are growing."
It's generally been assumed that black holes consume interstellar gas and dust for the most part—not stars themselves. But Mullaney now believes black holes could get as much as a quarter of their bulk from swallowing stars. "If these events are happening as frequently as our study suggests," he says, "then actually swallowing stars suddenly becomes a feasible way for black holes to grow."
Image copyright Getty Images The UN’s new climate chief says she’s worried about President Donald Trump - but confident __that action to curb climate change is unstoppable.
President Trump said he’d withdraw from the UN climate deal and stop funding the UN’s clean energy programme.
But former Mexican diplomat Patricia Espinosa told BBC News __that the delay in any firm announcement suggests the issue is still unresolved.
She travels to US this weekend to try and meet the new US secretary of state.
'World will carry on'
Ms Espinosa said it would be more damaging for the US to leave the on-going climate talks process altogether than to stop funding the clean energy programme.
The US pays approximately $4m (£3.2m) towards this programme every year - and often an extra $2m in voluntary funding.
But she said the rest of the world would carry on tackling climate change without the US, if necessary.
She said China’s stated willingness to lead the world in curbing emissions might cause American diplomats to ponder the implications of allowing China a role of global moral leadership.
“We are of course worried about rumours that the possibility of the US pulling out of the Paris agreement and the convention on climate change,” she said.
“It would be very bad if there were a change of position in the US. That’s why I’m looking forwards to engaging with the US as a partner.”
She did not explain how the US would be able to remain within the Paris framework whilst scrapping action on its own emissions strategy that helps underpin that process.
Embracing green action
But she drew hope from the vast number of firms and cities looking towards a low-carbon future - in the US and around the world: "A lot of US businesses are really going into the agenda of sustainability and some are making their own commitments in emissions reductions in their own operations."
“An incredible amount of cities have embarked on ambitious goals; some states like California have been for many years in the forefront of this agenda.
“In International Petroleum Week, I was very encouraged to hear how much some of the oil and gas companies are realising that the future of their industries is in a transformation into clean energy companies - and they have embraced this in their own interest.
“The transformation has started. I think it’s unstoppable.”
Ms Espinosa smiled at the irony of dealing with Mr Trump as a Mexican, a woman, and someone who works in climate change.
She said her trip to the US would include meeting businesses and civil society groups and - hopefully - a senior member of the administration. She is anticipating a meeting with the new secretary of state Rex Tillerson.
The former CEO of the oil giant Exxon Mobil warned recently that climate change is a genuine risk, and said the US should stay at the table of UN talks.
Other nations have responded differently to the new situation presented by Mr Trump. China has offered to lead and India has surprised many with its new level of ambition.
Saudi Arabia has expressed support for a slower rate of decarbonisation and Russia - the fifth largest emitter - has not yet ratified the climate deal from Paris.
Follow Roger on Twitter @rharrabin.
Image copyright Warner Bros Astronomers have discovered a small planet around Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Sun. But how do astronomers decide whether a planet is hospitable to life?
In the science fiction film Interstellar, astronauts leave a dying Earth in search of a hospitable planet for the human race to settle.
But the first two worlds on their shortlist - deemed "potentially habitable" from a distance - turn out to be nightmarishly hostile on closer inspection. The crew's first stop is an ocean planet lashed by 1km-high tidal waves, while the second is a deep-frozen world choked by toxic ammonia.
While Christopher Nolan's movie is fantasy, it draws on a real-life aspect of the work done by astronomers who study exoplanets - worlds beyond our Solar System.
The search for planets capable of supporting life could answer an age-old question: are we alone in the Universe? But what do astronomers mean when they refer to distant worlds as potentially habitable, or Earth-like?
Earth-sized planet orbits neighbouring star
"When we say 'potentially habitable' exoplanets, that's a term __that refers to measurable qualities of a planet __that are necessary for habitable conditions," says Prof Abel Méndez, from the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) at Arecibo.
These are, then, promising targets where nothing is guaranteed. But two criteria dominate popular discussions of planetary habitability: first, whether it is within Earth's general size range (and therefore has a chance of being rocky) and, second, whether it resides in what's known as the habitable - or Goldilocks - zone.
This is the range of distances around a host star where there's just enough starlight to keep water in liquid form on a planet's surface. Too close to the star, and the heat will cause water to boil off; too far away and any water will freeze.
These are useful rules of thumb, but a host of factors influence how hospitable planets are. And some are excluded from the conversation because of limitations in technology.
"As we learn things about what makes the Earth habitable, things like the magnetic field become really important," says Prof Don Pollacco, who researches exoplanets at the University of Warwick.
"We can't measure the magnetic field of an exoplanet, so we just forget about it."
But other measurable properties are relevant to the life question. To begin with, most "potentially habitable" exoplanets orbit red dwarfs, the name for a category of stars that are smaller, cooler and dimmer than our Sun.
Red dwarfs are the most numerous star type - making up some 75% of stars in our galaxy - but that's by-the-by. The main reason they predominate is that it's easier to find low-mass planets there.
Astronomers hunt for exoplanets in two principal ways: the radial velocity - or wobble - method relies on detecting the gravitational pull a planet exerts on its host star, while the transit method makes use of the dip in brightness when a planet crosses in front of its star.
For the wobble method, it's easier to detect a small planet tugging on a similarly small star, than tugging on an object many times its size.
In the transit method, a small exoplanet passing in front of a small red dwarf blocks out more of that star's light, while the signal of an Earth-sized world passing in front of a bigger, brighter Sun-like star will be drowned out by its glare.
But because red dwarfs are dimmer than the Sun, planets need to be located closer in order to receive sufficient energy for water to pool.
The nearer a planet is, the stronger the tidal forces exerted by the host star. This can cause the world to be tidally locked, which means the time it takes to spin on its own axis equals the time taken to complete a revolution of its star. Tidally locked planets always present the same side towards their stars.
The Moon is tidally locked to the Earth, explaining why we always see the same "face". Unlike the Moon, planets tidally locked to their stars would have a permanent day side and a permanent night side.
"The only way heat can get to the cold side is either through the planet itself or through an atmosphere if it has one. Some people have postulated - if it's hot on one side and cold on the other, somewhere in the middle there must be a temperate zone," Don Pollacco explains.
"Stand five feet one side and you get fried, stand five feet the other side and you freeze," he jokes.
A range of opinions exist on the likely effects of tidal locking on habitability. But lower mass stars tend to be more violent and unpredictable than their more imposing counterparts.
Prof Pollacco and colleagues from Warwick, Queen's University Belfast and Denmark's Aarhus University have studied some of the habitable systems discovered by Nasa's Kepler space telescope.
They found that one host star, Kepler -438, produced "superflares" - bright outbursts which can hurl torrents of charged particles into space. Scientists think these giant eruptions could strip away the atmospheres of nearby planets and barbecue any life that happened to be on the surface.
But Don Pollacco comments: "On Earth, we have life in rocks and 20,000ft under the sea… If you're that much closer to a major flare, you're going to know about it. What that means is you have to evolve in a different way."
"We've got one system we know where life is and we're using that as our exemplar... but we have used this reasoning before and found things we didn't expect to find. Going in armed with a vision of life as it is here on Earth is likely to be wrong."
Dr Jon Jenkins, a co-investigator on the Kepler mission, echoed this view, saying the jury was still out on whether life was more likely to arise in the habitable zones of low-mass stars or those of brighter stars like the Sun.
"In the search for life we really need to be turning over every rock, to see what crawls out," he told BBC News.
Prof Abel Méndez, who leads the Planetary Habitability Laboratory at UPR, says the new planet around Proxima Centauri - which is a red dwarf star - could act as a testbed for different theories.
"If we eventually find out that these stars are so bad for life, it means that 75% of stars in our galaxy are no good… That's useful to know."
But not all the potential targets for life orbit dim, low-mass stars. In 2015, Nasa announced the discovery by Kepler of a planet somewhat larger than Earth orbiting a star belonging to the same class as the Sun, and with an orbital period very similar to that of our own planet - 385 days.
It's not surprising many think Kepler-452b is the closest match to Earth yet, but Dr Jenkins says the team had to work hard to make their detection.
First, they had to account for data "noise" coming from their sample of Sun-like stars, which turned out to be twice as active as expected. But they also had to contend with interference in the images, which was caused by the way the telescope's main instrument responded to the heat environment aboard the spacecraft.
While planets in the habitable zones of Sun-like stars are difficult to detect at present, in time astronomers will almost certainly be able to study a large sample of such systems.
This will be made possible by the suite of ground-based and space-based observatories set to go online in coming decades, including the Europe's PLATO mission, Nasa's James Webb Space Telescope and the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) in Chile.
"It's quite breathtaking to think that 30 years ago - when I was in college - the notion of just detecting an extrasolar planet seemed like science fiction," says Dr Jenkins, from Nasa's Ames Research Center in California. "It's going to be very exciting to see what unfolds in the next 30."
One approach to finding life with the next generation of instruments is to look for gaseous signatures of biology in exoplanet atmospheres - something Abel Méndez calls "the big next step".
He says this might allow us "not only to say that the planet is habitable, but also say that it is inhabited". Prof Méndez thinks a signature of oxygen and methane from a habitable zone planet could provide tantalising hints of biology, but says it won't be enough to claim a discovery.
However, a tell-tale sign of life that astronomers can agree on is the presence of gases produced only by artificial means - pollution, in other words. Prof Pollacco calls this "demoralising", but explains: "It must indicate something - probably a technologically capable society."
It's sobering to think that our first indication of intelligent life could come from a civilisation in the process of ravaging its own planet. But there's an upside according to Don Pollacco.
"There'll be someone to talk to eventually that we have something in common with."
Follow Paul on Twitter.
Astronomers have detected a record seven Earth-sized planets orbiting a single star.
The researchers say __that all seven could potentially support liquid water on the surface, depending on the other properties of those planets.
But only three are within the conventional "habitable" zone where life is considered a possibility.
The compact system of exoplanets orbits Trappist-1, a low-mass, cool star located 40 light-years away from Earth.
The planets were detected using Nasa's Spitzer Space Telescope and several ground-based observatories are described in the journal Nature.
Where should we look for alien life?
Lead author Michaël Gillon, from Belgium's University of Liège, said: "The planets are all close to each other and very close to the star, which is very reminiscent of the moons around Jupiter."
"Still, the star is so small and cold __that the seven planets are temperate, which means that they could have some liquid water - and maybe life, by extension - on the surface."
Co-author Amaury Triaud, from the University of Cambridge, UK, said the team had introduced the "temperate" definition to broaden perceptions about habitability.
Are Earth-like planets actually like Earth?
Three of the Trappist-1 planets fall within the traditional habitable zone definition, where surface temperatures could support the presence of liquid water - given sufficient atmospheric pressure.
But Dr Triaud said that if the planet furthest from the parent star, Trappist-1h, had an atmosphere that efficiently trapped heat - a bit more like Venus's atmosphere than Earth's - it might be habitable.
"It would be disappointing if Earth represents the only template for habitability in the Universe," he told the BBC News website.
Analysis - David Shukman, BBC Science Editor
So many planets have been discovered in planetary systems beyond our own that it's easy to become inured to their potential significance. Nasa's latest tally is an impressive 3,449 and there's a danger of hype with each new announcement.
But the excitement around this latest discovery is not only because of its unusual scale or the fact that so many of the planets are Earth-sized. It is also because the star Trappist-1 is conveniently small and dim. This means that telescopes studying the planets are not dazzled as they would be when aiming at far brighter stars.
In turn that opens up a fascinating avenue of research into these distant worlds and, above all, their atmospheres.
The next phase of research has already started to hunt for key gases like oxygen and methane which could provide evidence about whatever is happening on the surface.
Coverage of exoplanets can far too easily leap to conclusions about alien life. But this remote planetary system does provide a good chance to look for clues about it.
The six inner planets have orbital periods that are organised in a "near-resonant chain". This means that in the time that it takes for the innermost planet to make eight orbits, the second, third and fourth planets revolve five, three and two times around the star, respectively.
This appears to be an outcome of interactions early in the evolution of the planetary system.
The astronomers say it should be possible to study the planets' atmospheric properties with telescopes.
"The James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble's successor, will have the possibility to detect the signature of ozone if this molecule is present in the atmosphere of one of these planets," said co-author Prof Brice-Olivier Demory, from the University of Bern in Switzerland.
"This could be an indicator for biological activity on the planet."
But the astrophysicist also warns that we must remain extremely careful about inferring biological activity from afar.
Some of the properties of cool, low mass stars could make life a more challenging prospect. For example, some are known to emit large amounts of radiation in the form of flares, which has the potential to sterilise the surfaces of nearby planets.
In addition, the habitable zone is located closer to the star so that planets receive the heating necessary for liquid water to persist. But this causes a phenomenon called tidal locking, so that planets always show the same face to their star.
This might have the effect of making one side of the planet hot, and the other cold.
But Amaury Triaud said UV light might be vital for producing the chemical compounds that can later be assembled into biological systems. Similarly, if life emerges on the permanent night side of a tidally locked planet, it might be sheltered from any flares.
But he said the Trappist-1 star was not particularly active, something it has in common with other "ultra cool dwarfs" the team has surveyed.
"It is fair to say there is much we don't know. Where I am hopeful is that we will know if flares are important, we will know if tidal locking is relevant to habitability and maybe to the emergence of biology," he explained.
"Many of the arguments in favour or disfavour of habitability can be flipped in that way. First and foremost we need observations."
In addition to the Spitzer observations, astronomers gathered data using Very Large Telescope in Chile, the Liverpool Telescope in La Palma, Spain, and others.
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The following is an adapted excerpt from A Big Bang in a Little Room: The Quest to Create New Universes by Zeeya Merali, available in stores now. In the book, Merali explores the possibilities of creating an infant universe in a laboratory. In this excerpt, she meets with noted futurist Anders Sandberg to discuss the ethics of potentially creating new intelligent life in a baby universe, or the possibility of sentience evolving in a computer simulation.
When Anders Sandberg was a kid in the 1980s, he enjoyed making simulations on his Sinclair ZX81, mocking up mini solar systems. Later, he graduated to designing artificial neural networks __that use learning algorithms inspired by the brain. “Some people relax by watching television. I program simulations while listening to philosophy lectures,” Sandberg chuckles. One day back in 1999, he recalls, he deleted a copy of a neural network on his computer and got a “tinge of bad conscience.” He couldn’t help worrying: “Have I just killed a little creation?”
After feeling __that pang of guilt at the loss of his neural network, Sandberg shifted gears toward philosophy, and now he writes about the ethics of simulations at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University. He argues that people will have to tackle questions about how to treat machine entities with compassion sooner than they might think. Yet, he notes, there is a general reluctance to face these issues, not only among the broader population but among scientists too.
I have come up against that reticence when talking to physicists involved in universe building. Some have tried to evade questions about the moral implications of creating life in a lab-made cosmos, saying that such issues are beyond their purview. “Most people have a weirdness budget and you’re not really allowed to use up too much of that, because if you are overdrawn on the weirdness account, then obviously you can’t be taken seriously,” says Sandberg. “So a lot of people keep quiet about considerations that might actually matter.”
Sandberg can conceive why a super intelligent race might have created a simulation and put us in it; many of the reasons are the same sorts of mundane justifications we currently have for running simulations. For instance, we are struggling to identify the most efficient way to spend limited money for health care. Is it better to have a world in which the overall health of the general population is higher but healthcare is unequally distributed, so you have a minority suffering horribly? Or is it better to aim for a fairer society where everybody has access to the same level of health care, even though that level may actually be quite low? Simulating these two worlds may help you decide. As long as none of the simulated beings have conscious experiences, that’s fine. But if they evolve intelligence and feelings, then you may have accidentally created a lot of suffering in your artificial world.
Sandberg believes it is possible that we could be part of a relatively small simulation that’s monitoring the outcomes of different spending policies by the National Health Service across the British population, for instance. In that case, the point of focus would be the individuals in the United Kingdom who use these resources, while the rest of the simulated universe might just be sketched in for color.
But now I want to examine what moral responsibilities we have as programmers of our own simulated universes. First, is there a serious danger that someone’s health care policy simulation could develop sentient life? “It’s less likely that artificial intelligence would arise accidentally than if someone deliberately set out to make it, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it could happen in principle,” says Sandberg. If it did occur, it would most likely be because we are creating increasingly smart pieces of software, which individually would not develop sentience but are being designed to interface with other pieces of smart software. The danger is that when linked together, the whole may become more than the sum of the parts.
Let’s say this does happen inadvertently and our health care beings develop experiences. Should we intervene, or should we pull the plug and end their lives? In terms of the health care simulation, Sandberg says, one suggestion for assuaging our guilt at forcing some of our creations to live through poverty and poor access to health care would be to reward them when the simulation is over by transferring them into another simulation where they can lead pleasurable lives.
“That sounds a lot like sending people to heaven,” I say.
“It is a stolen idea,” Sandberg concedes. But making an artificial heaven to compensate your beings raises a new problem: which version of your mistreated simulated entity do you upload to paradise? It would seem unfair to upload a person after her memories and brain function have been ravaged by Alzheimer’s disease, say, so perhaps you should upload a younger version. But it is difficult to decide at what point that entity should be transferred, and which life events should be regarded as crucial to the development of its identity and which should be wiped from its memory. Should you upload that entity from a point in its life before or after religious conversion, falling in love, having a child, or experiencing a traumatic incident? “If you think you have a moral responsibility for simulated entities, where it ends is a bit unclear,” says Sandberg. “Maybe you should resurrect copies of them at all points in their life.”
It would be a coup to make a universe in a particle accelerator. But it seems unlikely that we could wield the level of control in the lab that Sandberg refers to when talking about computer-simulated universes, given our current capabilities. In the LHC, for instance, researchers mainly employ a hit-and-hope strategy, with little room for nuanced tinkering with the products of particle collisions. In that case, we may give rise to life inadvertently, with our beings able to experience its accompanying pains and pleasures, but we would have no control over their well-being afterward. So should we go ahead and do it anyway?
Though this is a classic problem that philosophers have thought long and hard about in the context of simulations, Sandberg notes that there’s no consensus. Perhaps the easiest answer is just to plainly say no. If there is any chance that your universe will involve the production of a sentient being who will suffer pain, you should not make it. Others will say that it’s the total sum of experiences within the universe that matters; if you add up the happy people, subtract the unhappy people, and come up with an overall positive answer, then go ahead and do it. Still others have argued that you need to have some measure of the average level of happiness in the universe. But there’s no clear mathematical answer for what constitutes a good universe. We’re back to the health care puzzle again, slightly restated: would a universe where almost everyone is mildly happy but a few people are being horrifically tortured be better or worse than one where half the population is deliriously happy and the other half is slightly miserable? “Any way you try to argue it, you can make a case, but then someone will come up with a counterexample showing why it’s bad,” says Sandberg.
There may also be a case to make that creating intelligent observers would continually amplify the amount of good in the universe, even if we lose control of our creations. “One argument I would make is that intelligent life tends to try to take control of its environment to make things better for itself,” says Sandberg. “So you should actually expect that a universe that is overrun with intelligent observers would tend to become slightly better to live in than universes that don’t have any.”
It’s honestly a view that I hadn’t considered. Maybe we are morally obliged to try to bring more life into being. I thank Sandberg and say goodbye, feeling reassured. I hope that he is right, of course, because the stakes are, quite literally, astronomical.
Adapted excerpt from A Big Bang in a Little Room: The Quest to Create New Universes by Zeeya Merali. Copyright © 2017. Available from Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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I get it—we’re all still bitter about Pluto. We wanted it to stay a planet, so we’ll cling to our righteous anger until the day we die. Scientists are always changing their minds about all these categories and designations, and it sometimes seems totally unnecessary. Does it really matter if Pluto is a planet, or if there are eight continents instead of seven?
Yes. Yes it does.
The real problem with this argument is __that it’s based on a valid premise—that all categories are arbitrary—and yet draws a false conclusion. It is all arbitrary. But it's not unnecessary or meaningless.
Almost all of the categories __that you use in life, including scientific ones, are arbitrary because we invented them. Categories are just a way of making sense of the world. We’ll call these seals and these sea lions, and we’ll note that they’re pretty similar to each other but very different from any of the various elephant species (even, confusingly, the elephant seal). And we’ll denote that by saying that they’re in the same superfamily, whereas elephants are not. Species names and superfamilies and genera are all categories we’ve imposed on the natural world so that we can talk about it coherently. There’s no universal definition of species, but that doesn’t make the idea of a species meaningless. And the same goes for continents.
You grew up thinking there were seven continents. Everyone suddenly seems very precious about them, even though I’m betting plenty of people couldn’t name all seven. Because now some geologists are telling you that there might have been eight all along, we just didn’t realize it. That southwestern chunk of the Pacific Ocean around New Zealand meets all of the generally accepted criteria for a continent, so maybe we should call it one. We could name it Zealandia.
“WHO CARES!?” you scream into the internet void. “You know, there’s no governing body that decides what is or is not a continent anyway,” you say, proving that you bothered to read past at least one headline. And to be fair, you’re right. Geologists have come up with some guidelines for what makes a continent a continent, but without a strict definition this all boils down to general consensus. The problem arises when we leap straight to the assumption that because there’s no hard and fast rule, that the whole thing is meaningless.
Identifying Zealandia as its own continent doesn’t change anything about its actual geology, but recognizing it as separate could help us understand how the native plants and animals there evolved. The way continents move over time helps determine the ecology of those areas, plus we could learn something new about how continental crust can be reshaped. Maybe those aren’t interesting endeavors to you, but to some geologists (and ecologists and evolutionary biologists) they are not just interesting, but important.
And maybe it is true that the term “continent” doesn’t mean very much. As one geologist pointed out, that’s an important thing to talk about. If we can’t decide on what makes a continent, perhaps we should think harder about what it is that’s significant about the idea of continents. Maybe “continent” isn’t a useful term. Maybe it doesn’t do a good job of describing what components of our Earth’s crust are important. Maybe we need new terms: one that's strictly geological and a separate one that’s strictly geographical. Maybe thinking about the way we categorize parts of the Earth is a useful exercise precisely because it gets us thinking about the different parts of the Earth.
Take a moment and think about the scientific systems you learned about in school. Cellular structures, organ systems, chemical names and reactions, electrical systems, types of foods—they’re all just arbitrary. We call some chemicals “phenols” and others “alkanes” because they have different structures that make them react certain ways. We say that some things are fruits and others are vegetables and still others are nuts or legumes (and we can argue forever about where tomatoes fall in that spectrum) but at the end of the day it’s still just a categorization system that we came up with because it’s useful to talk about food in those terms. And if it’s not useful, we should change the system.
The very act of categorizing is meaningful because it influences how we think about and study those categories. When biologists debate whether a particular species of giraffe is actually two distinct species, they’re really arguing about whether there are meaningful differences between two groups of animals. And when some geologists spend a decade arguing that there’s actually an eighth continent, what they’re really saying is that there’s something useful about identifying this particular chunk of the Earth as distinct from the rest. Other geologists are free to disagree, but that debate is important in and of itself.
I get it that each individual discussion feels pretty meaningless. One species or two, seven continents or eight—what do those things matter? Individually, maybe they don’t. But the sum total of those little, meaningless debates adds up to a whole system of scientific thought. Whether you call some giraffes “northern” and some “southern” might not be all that crucial. But in the long run, the way we think about categorizing giraffes determines how we think about categorizing other animals and how we think about the way the animal kingdom all fits together.
Whine all you want about those darn scientists switching up the categories on you. Categories are meaningful. Complaining about them isn’t.
Image copyright NSF/LIGO The UK and US are in talks to extend their "special relationship" in science after the UK leaves the European Union, the BBC understands.
British institutions are in talks with their US colleagues to try to make it easier for scientists to travel, collaborate and share facilities.
Research Councils UK said it would deliver benefits for both countries.
UK research groups are currently marketing themselves at the US's largest scientific meeting in Boston.
Thirty-three researchers are speaking at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) conference and over 200 scientists and science policy specialists are also attending.
Prof Philip Nelson, chair of Research Councils UK and part of the British delegation, told BBC News: "We all reap the social and economic benefits when the best researchers in the world can freely collaborate and share ideas, knowledge and facilities.
"The US and the UK are two of the world's preeminent science, research and innovation nations".
The hope eventually is to develop ways to make it easier for researchers in the US and the UK to work together on big flagship projects.
The impetus for the deal came following the UK referendum result to leave the European Union.
British universities, in collaboration with small businesses, receive £850m in research grants each year from membership of the EU's research programmes. EU membership also makes it easy to form collaborations.
But there are fears __that much of the funding and collaborative work with EU scientists will be in jeopardy once the UK leaves the union.
British researchers are being encouraged to foster links with other nations. While most, if not all, research leaders are still dismayed by the referendum result, some are beginning to become excited by what they see as an opportunity for greater collaboration with America.
A spokesman for Britain's Department for Business Enterprise and Industrial Strategy, which overseas science, said __that developing scientific collaborations with countries outside the EU was a priority: "As we prepare to leave the EU, we are determined to secure the best possible outcome for our world-leading research base.
"Our international relationships make us a global centre of excellence and we want to enable UK researchers to partner with the best in the world, gaining access to large-scale facilities with unique resources."
James Wilsdon, professor of research policy at the University of Sheffield welcomed the new initiative.
"We need to lift our sights and look beyond Europe, for opportunities to deepen and extend the collaborative networks that are so central to 21st Century science and innovation.
"The US and UK remain two of the world's science superpowers, and researchers in both countries will grab with open arms any measures that can better enable fast and frictionless collaboration.
"I hope this is the first in a wave of new bilateral agreements, involving both EU and non-EU countries, that can restore vital connective tissue between UK and international research networks, that may otherwise be ripped apart by Brexit."
Prof Venki Ramakrishnan, the current president of the Royal Society, is in Boston for the AAAS meeting.
He told BBC News: "Science is becoming increasingly international and the UK and US are already at the forefront of that.
"Greater cooperation between our two countries would undoubtedly be a good thing and would benefit everyone but it should be regarded as an addition to, rather than a substitute for, cooperation with our European colleagues.
"The prime minister has already highlighted the importance of continuing to collaborate with the EU in science and there is enough top quality research in the UK to expand collaboration with other international partners."
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Between the eighth and second centuries BCE, potters in the kingdom of Judah (near Jerusalem) made a bunch of jars with official state seals on the handles. They needed to hold supplies, and they wanted people to know who those supplies belonged to. Simple, right?
The jars themselves are fairly non-descript but for thousands of years they've hidden important information about the Earth’s geomagnetic history.
In a study published Monday in PNAS, Israeli researchers announced __that they had turned the fragmented artifacts into an archive on Earth’s magnetic field, something __that the people making the pottery would have known nothing about.
Earth’s magnetic field—generated by movement of liquid metal at the Earth’s core—has two poles, north and south, which currently correspond with the general regions of the geographic north and south poles. But they can wander widely or even flip entirely. Like the Earth itself, it's only roughly spherical.
“In some ways it's more of a rotten apple, it sags in some areas and pooches out in others,” says Eric Blinman, the director of the New Mexico Office of Archaeological Studies.
On the ocean floor, changes in the field’s direction and intensity are recorded as molten rock erupts and cools, giving researchers a detailed long-term view of the situation. But for a more detailed look—on the scale of a few thousand years vs a few hundred thousand years—physicists have to turn elsewhere.
Enter the ancient jars.
“Human beings heat dirt regularly,” Blinman says. Blinman was not involved with the new study, but also researches the interaction between Earth’s magnetic field and archeology. He studies the geomagnetic signature left in hearths in the Southwestern United States dating back 2,000 years.
Whether its clay for pottery, or the dirt around the hearth, the basic principle is the same.
“‘Dirt’ includes minerals that have magnetic properties. When these minerals are heated, the magnetic orientation of the fields of those minerals are freed up to line up with the prevailing orientation of the earth's magnetic field,” Blinman says.
If the object in question can’t be moved—like a fire pit or hearth dug into the earth—then the archeological feature can give researchers information about what direction the Earth’s magnetic field was pointing in during the time period that that feature was last in use.
But if it’s a portable piece of pottery, the direction of the magnetic field it recorded when it was fired becomes useless as soon as someone picks it up and moves it. Luckily, heated dirt can also record the intensity of the magnetic field, which also varies.
In this case, lead researcher Erez Ben-Yosef and colleagues were able to show not only that the Earth’s magnetic field went through fluctuations in intensity during the six centuries that the jars were being manufactured, but that early during the 8th century, the geomagnetic field spiked dramatically—then went into a sharp decline.
If they were to happen today, the changes might be noticed by our power-grid-hungry societies. But back then, when there were no satellites or electronics to go wonky, the spike in magnetic activity would likely have passed unnoticed.
Potters certainly would have had no idea that the seals bearing the marks of their ruling government would later help geophysicists precisely track changes to the magnetic field around the entire planet. Because the seals correspond to meticulously documented historical records, researchers like Ben-Yosef can use them to accurately date the readings they get from the artifacts.
“For the geophysicists, it's like someone opened up a locked door to a library that they didn’t know existed,” Blinman says.
More and more often, artifacts are providing information not just about human history, but also about the history of the Earth.
“I would only expect this sort of contribution to become increasingly common,” Blinman says.
Blinman hopes that as collaborations between geologists and archeologists become more common, researchers might be able to build up a global analysis of archaeomagnetic data within the next couple of generations. When we can combine intensity data based on pottery with the kind of hearth data Blinman collects, he says, we'll have a truly multidimensional view of the 3D magnetic field that surrounds our world.
In China, the famed man in the moon is a bunny. Confused? So, it seems, are our eyes, according to a new study in the journal PLOS ONE. The study looks at why people see so many different images when we stare at Rorschach inkblots.
Since their inception, Rorschach ink blots—named after Hermann Rorschach, the Swiss psychoanalyst who invented them—have been known to confuse the visual cortex. We tend to see what we want to see in them. And although their use in psychology has been debunked (whether you see a butterfly or a dancing clown in the above image is not a reliable indication of your mental state) why we see different things at all remains a puzzle.
The idea for the new study came about because physicist Richard Taylor is developing bionic eyes to cure blindness in people who have had diseases of the retina. “In order to do that,” said Taylor, “we have to understand what normal vision is doing.”
To understand why Rorschach inkblots have this enigmatic effect, Taylor and his team at the University of Oregon took lots of blots and analyzed them to see if they were fractals. Fractals are patterns __that repeat themselves across different scales.
Taylor suspected the blocks might be fractals because of the way in which Rorschach initially produced them—by smearing ink on the top of a sheet of paper, folding the paper in half and pushing down hard on it so __that the ink would penetrate the fibers.
“Scientists who study fluids they know that produces fractal patterns,” said Taylor.
Once he confirmed that they were fractals, he ran a test that enabled him to quantify how complicated the fractal patterns were—1 is a not-very-complex fractal and 2 is highly complex. He did this because his team had a wealth of historic data from when Rorschach tests were used to as a psychological exam—they could compare the fractal complexity of a Rorschach blot with the number of images people tended to see in them. What they found was that the more fractal complexity an image had, the fewer images people claimed to spot.
Why does this matter?
Because fractals are all over nature: trees, coastlines, clouds—are all fractal.
So, when a Rorschach blot has a simple fractal pattern, it could in theory look like a lot of different things that we see in the natural world. As the image gets increasingly complex, the number of things it might resemble goes down. But what’s puzzling is the fact that our brain does this at all.
“A lot of our research focuses on what we call fractal fluency,” said Taylor. Over time our visual system—our eyes and brains—has adapted the ability to identify things in an image that is incredibly fractal rich. Think seashells, Romanesco broccoli, ferns, leaves, lightning, snowflakes, and waterfalls. In fact, studies have shown that when you look at nature’s fractals, your stress levels go down.
“Given that we have this intimate relationship with nature's fractals and we can easily process them, it's kind of strange that these fractals are fooling the visual system,” said Taylor. “if you're looking at a fractal forest the last thing you want to do is see a tiger that is not there.”
The electronic chips in Taylor’s bionic eyes don’t take in as much visual information as our natural eyes do, so misinformation is a real concern.
“I’m really interested from that point of view. Why is our natural eye getting fooled by this? We have lots of visual information, so quickly you can look up at that cloud and say, oh I understand that dog is not really there in that cloud. If you have a bionic eye, the bionic eye is struggling to see if that thing is a cloud in the first place.”
As for the man in the moon—why do Americans tend to see a man while people in China see a bunny? The scattering of craters are fractals that evoke similar responses to the ink blots. We see what our eyes think is closest to that pattern filtered through the lens of experience and culture. One could consider the moon to be the original Rorschach test.
In January of last year, drones captured video of houses perched perilously on rapidly-eroding cliffs along California’s coast. Those houses in Pacifica, California weren’t alone, as waves driven by El Niño tore away huge chunks of the shoreline over the winter of 2015-2016.
Now, researchers have had a chance to take stock of the damage, and found __that in many places, the shoreline eroded far past the normal beating taken during winter storms.
In a study published Tuesday in Nature Communications, researchers found __that the shorelines eroded 76 percent more than normal, a dramatic increase.
“Typically, we have larger waves in the winter and you lose about 20 meters of beach, then in the calmer summer and fall, the beach builds back up,” Patrick Barnard says. Barnard is a coastal geologist with the United States Geological Survey (USGS) and the lead author of the Nature Communications study.
He found that last winter, some beaches lost as much as 35 meters (114 feet) of sand. Long-buried bedrock and pilings from old piers reappeared as sand was swept away, exposing cliffs like the ones in Pacifica to the full fury of the waves.
Along with high sea surface temperatures and other climatic factors, those waves made the El Nino event of 2015-2016 one of the largest in recent history, ranking with El Niño heavyweights of 1982-1983 and 1997-1996. In the paper, Barnard and colleagues show that this was one of the strongest events in the past 145 years.
Gary Griggs (no relation to the author), is another coastal geologist who studies the erosion along the coast, and wasn’t involved with the current study. Griggs is more hesitant to compare the events of 2015-2016 with events so far back in the past. Wave strength data has only been collected for about 40 years, and while early settlers in California might have enjoyed the beach, they weren’t mapping it seasonally. “We don’t have 100 years of beach profiles,” Griggs says. But, the unavailability of longer data sets notwithstanding, “I think they’ve done everything they can with the data available.” Griggs says, agreeing that this was a very large and powerful event that affected the entire West Coast.
Both Barnard and Griggs worry that the future of the beaches could be grim.
“During the last very large El Niño in 1997-1998 the beaches took a decade to recover,” Barnard says.
After last winter, the beaches only bounced back by about 60 percent in the summer, as calmer seas pushed some of the sand that had been excavated back towards shore. Beaches also get a helping hand from the land.
Sediment and sand to replenish the beaches is washed out to sea by rivers, and California's unusually wet winter this year is helping in that regard. Griggs says that flooding just a few weeks ago in some areas was powerful enough to sweep cars down onto a beach. Anything that carries SUV's can also carry sand.
But recovery is a slow process. While strong storms sweep sediment towards the beach from the land, they can also bring powerful waves that eat away the coast even more. While runoff from recent storms could be a boon to the beaches, the shorelines remain vulnerable, and could get more vulnerable in the future.
“The science is settled,” Barnard says emphatically. “The climate is changing, and it's changing more rapidly. Sea levels are rising they’re rising more rapidly.”
“The big question for us is what's going to happen when we have an El Niño event like this and a meter of sea level rise."
Even without a strong El Niño event like last year’s, a meter of sea level rise could have a significant impact on coastline and people that live on the coasts around the world.
“There are about 150 million people living within 3 feet of high tide,” Griggs says, adding that eight of the 10 largest cities in the country are located along coasts. While natural systems like mangroves or seagrasses might eventually respond to sea level rise, “You can't move cites very easily,” Griggs says.
“In some sense this is an indication of what's to come,” Barnard says. “With sea level rise it wouldn't take as much of an El Niño event to have this kind of impact.”
Image copyright Dr Alan Jamieson, Newcastle Uni Chemicals banned in the 1970s have been found in the deepest reaches of the Pacific Ocean, a new study shows.
Scientists were surprised by the relatively high concentrations of pollutants like PCBs and PBDEs in deep sea ecosystems.
Used widely during much of the 20th Century, these chemicals were later found to be toxic and to build up in the environment.
The results are published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.
The team led by Dr Alan Jamieson at the University of Newcastle sampled levels of pollutants in the fatty tissue of amphipods (a type of crustacean) from deep below the Pacific Ocean surface.
The animals were retrieved using specially designed "lander" vehicles deployed from a boat over the Mariana and Kermadec trenches, which are over 10km deep and separated from each other by 7,000km.
Not broken down
The pollutants found in the amphipods included polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), which were commonly used as electrical insulators and flame retardants.
PCB production was banned by the US in 1979 and by the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, a UN treaty signed in 2001.
From the 1930s to when PCBs were banned in the 1970s, the total global production of these chemicals is estimated to be in the region of 1.3 million tonnes.
Released into the environment through industrial accidents and discharges from landfills, these pollutants are resistant to being broken down naturally, and so persist in the environment.
In their paper, the authors say it can be difficult to place the levels of contamination found below the Pacific into a wider context - in part because previous studies of contamination gathered measurements in different ways.
In the food chain
But they add __that in the Mariana trench, the highest levels of PCBs were 50 times greater than in crabs from paddy fields fed by the Liaohe River, one of the most polluted rivers in China.
Dr Jamieson commented: "The amphipods we sampled contained levels of contamination similar to __that found in Suruga Bay [in Japan], one of the most polluted industrial zones of the northwest Pacific."
The researchers suggest that the PCBs and PBDEs made their way to Pacific Ocean trenches through contaminated plastic debris and via dead animals sinking to the sea floor.
These are then consumed by amphipods and other deep sea creatures.
The authors of the study say that the deep ocean can become a "sink" or repository for pollutants.
They argue that the chemicals accumulate through the food chain so that when they reach the deep ocean, concentrations are many times higher than in surface waters.
Katherine Dafforn from the University of New South Wales in Australia, who was not involved in the study, said: "Although the authors were able to quantify concentrations of PCBs and PCBEs in crustacean scavengers from the hadal zone [deep ocean trenches], the source of [persistent pollutants] to these areas and also the mechanisms for delivery remain largely unknown.
"Furthermore, the toxic effects of these pollutants and their potential to biomagnify up the food chain still need to be tested."
But she added that the team members had "provided clear evidence that the deep ocean, rather than being remote, is highly connected to surface waters and has been exposed to significant concentrations of human-made pollutants."
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Image copyright Axel Hochkirch The first comprehensive assessment of Europe's crickets and grasshoppers has found __that more than a quarter of species are being driven to extinction.
According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the insect group is the most threatened of those assessed so far in Europe.
Europe harbours more than 1,000 species of grasshopper and cricket.
If we don't act now the sound of crickets could become a thing of the past, said the IUCN.
Crickets, bush crickets and grasshoppers - a group known as Orthoptera - live on grassland.
They are an important food source for birds and reptiles, and their decline could affect entire ecosystems.
Their habitat is being lost due to wildfires, intensive agriculture and tourism development.
Jean-Christophe Vié, deputy director, IUCN Global Species Programme, said to bring these species back from the brink of extinction, more needs to be done to protect and restore their habitats.
"This can be done through sustainable grassland management using traditional agricultural practices, for example," he said.
"If we do not act now, the sound of crickets in European grasslands could soon become a thing of the past."
The assessment took place over two years and involved more than 150 scientists.
Axel Hochkirch is chair of the IUCN invertebrate conservation sub-committee and lead author of the report.
"If we lose grasshoppers and other Orthoptera like crickets and bush crickets, we will lose diversity," he told BBC News. "They are very good indicators of biodiversity in open ecosystems."
The experts are particularly concerned about species __that occupy small ranges, such as the Crau plain grasshopper, which lives only on the Crau plain in the South of France.
Some populations are also being lost through wildfires, particularly in Greece and on the Canary Islands.
"The results from this IUCN Red List are deeply worrying," said Luc Bas, director of the IUCN European Regional Office.
The report recommends the setting up of a monitoring programme across Europe to obtain information on population trends.
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Hailed as the King of grains, quinoa doesn’t need more hype to cement its position as a superfood in the American supermarket. But now scientists have a hold of quinoa’s real identity—and what underlies the grain’s nutritious profile —thanks to its newly-sequenced genome.
“There are a lot of things __that can be done to improve quinoa. And understanding the genome of it is the first step,” says Mark Tester, the leader of an international team __that just published the first genome sequence of quinoa in Nature.
Tester, a plant scientist at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, originally started studying quinoa to investigate the grain’s salt tolerance. “Quinoa is an amazing plant. It could grow beautifully in very difficult environments, like the Middle East [or] Northern Sahara, where you have salty soil and salty irrigation water,” says Tester. He and his colleagues planned to figure out how quinoa tolerates the salt, then transfer that tolerance to other crops like rice and barley so they too can thrive in less desirable soils.
Quinoa is different from rice and barley. It is still mainly grown by hand in South America. It serves as a staple crop for nearly a million people, but modern agriculture has not yet touched quinoa fields in the highlands of Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru. The appearance of the quinoa plant reflects that: the grain grows tall and fragile.
Recognizing quinoa’s potential to provide food in marginal lands, Tester hopes to change those traits—making quinoa shorter and more compact—so it’s easier to grow on large modern farms. “[The goal is to] move this crop from its current status as a crop of importance in South America, and a crop of novelty in the West, to become a true commodity in the world,” says Tester.
In other words, he says, “I want it out of the health food section.”
To improve quinoa and achieve that goal, Tester needed to sequence the quinoa genome. Having a genome sequence—the complete assortment of genes that make up an organism—will provide scientists with a basic blueprint for future breeding efforts, just like researchers did with rice in 2005.
In collaboration with scientists from the United States, Germany and Australia, the team produced high-quality genome sequences of different quinoa varieties.
“The assembly is very good. It's right up there with the standards of other major commodity genomes that have been published before in Nature and other journals,” says Joshua Udall, a plant and wildlife scientist at Brigham Young University. “It will be a good resource for quinoa workers and also the scientific community in general.”
In addition to sequencing quinoa’s genome, the authors also pinpointed the evolutionary history of quinoa. “[The authors] resolved the mystery to a certain extent,” says plant evolutionary genomicist Jonathan Wendel from Iowa State University. “They shed light on who the best models are of the parents, and how long ago those parents hybridized to give rise to what nowadays is the modern quinoa plant. It will serve as a reference for everybody’s work from now on.”
There are many potential agricultural applications for the new research. The study authors have already identified one gene that they believe makes quinoa bitter by prompting the production of a chemical called saponin.
On small farms, saponin could be used to naturally reduce predation from birds. But saponin is not only bitter. It’s also toxic, and removing it requires a lot of work and water. So for the “net benefit of the environment,” says Tester, breeders might want to grow quinoa with low saponin. But first, more work is needed to confirm that they've found the right gene to tinker with. Traditionally, such studies have been hard to fund.
“Most of the countries that use quinoa for [food] don't have the scientific infrastructure to make any improvement in the genetics of quinoa. But in the US, it's not a commodity crop, or even an orphan crop, so many of the federal agencies really have no interest in funding it,” says Udall. “Understandably so, as science funding is in short supply for every plant or crop.”
“I was really excited about [quinoa], and it has many unique properties. But it's hard to keep our research program going because of the lack of domestic attention,” says Udall. “That might be changing now with this Nature article.”
Udall believes that “a lot of breeding and a lot of improvements can happen as modern agriculture uses [quinoa] in places that have great soil.” It’s just that “some adaptation has to happen before quinoa can be widely grown throughout the world.”
So Tester’s plan to bring quinoa out of the health food section is not a long shot. “I’d like to see quinoa changed into a crop that can be grown much more widely and become much cheaper,” Tester says. “I want the price to come down by a factor of five.”
Nearly 1,000 Dead Sea Scrolls—the oldest known biblical manuscripts—were found scattered throughout 11 caves in the Judaean Desert between 1946 and 1956. Now scientists think they've found a 12th cave where scrolls were stored—but the texts themselves seem to have been stolen decades ago.
The evidence __that the cave, found near the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea in the West Bank, once contained a precious scroll is compelling: Researchers from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Liberty University in Virginia found storage jars and lids from the Second Temple period (530 BC to 70 CE) __that are identical to some of those that stored known Dead Sea Scrolls. They also found blank scraps of parchment that came from the same era, according to their analysis, and pieces of leather the likes of which would have been used to tie scrolls shut.
But the evidence of a scroll heist seems even more certain. Broken jars are one thing, but the pickaxe heads found inside the cave—the kind that would have been used by Bedouin looters in the 40s or 50s, just as the scholarly world became aware of the precious manuscripts—practically scream "looters".
"I imagine they came into the tunnel. They found the scroll jars. They took the scrolls," Oren Gutfeld, an archaeologist at the Hebrew University’s Institute of Archaeology and director of the excavation, told the BBC. "They even opened the scrolls and left everything around, the textiles, the pottery."
It's likely that many scraps of Dead Sea Scroll, which contain first-person historical accounts, biblical text, and priceless information about the customs of the people who once lived in these mysterious caves, were plundered and sold. Smithsonian Magazine reports that a fingernail-sized fragment of text could sell for $1 million today.
“Thank God they took only the scrolls,” he told The Washington Post. “They left behind all the evidence that the scrolls were there.”
The finding actually calls the origin of the currently held scrolls into question. The very first scrolls were only brought to academic attention after Bedouin shepherds sold them. They reported finding them in some of the 11 caves that would eventually be excavated by archaeologists, but the existence of a 12th cave opens up the possibility that some of the texts came from other, yet unknown locales.
There could be dozens more caves holding scrolls—or at least holding evidence that they were once stored there. Gutfeld and his colleagues will continue to search the region as part of an initiative called "Operation Scroll".
For now, you can peruse the scrolls found half a century ago from the comfort of your own home. In 2011, Google (in partnership with the Israel Museum in Jerusalem) digitized high-resolution photos of some of these intriguing texts.
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