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J A N U A R Y/ F E B R U A R Y
2 0 1 0
YEAR IN SCIENCE 2 0 0 9 THE TOP TEN STORIES Vaccine phobia becomes a public-health threat 18, NASA braces for course correction 20, Meet your new ancestor 22, Stem cell science takes off 23, Interview: astronomer Alan Dressler 24, Swine flu outbreak sweeps the globe 26, The graphene revolution 27, Earth-like worlds come into view 28, Experimental power plant takes the CO2 out 30, Interview: economist George Loewenstein 32.
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worldmags The space shuttle Endeavor, docked with the International Space Station, crosses the face of the sun.
On the Cover Corot-7b, a rocky exoplanet, suggests that Earth-like worlds may be common around other stars. Insets, from left: Einstein cogitating, humans evolving, a swine flu virus lurking.
A special report on 100 astonishing discoveries from the past year—the ideas and breakthroughs that are reshaping our understanding of the world.
AND AMONG THE REST BIOLOGY Cut calories and extend your life 39, The smell of fear 66, Chimps plan ahead 70 SPACE Water on the moon 35, A space-junk collision 54, Venus’s secret past 66 EVOLUTION The next stage in Darwin’s revolution 50, An ancient croc-eating supersnake 62, The world’s oldest octopuses 77 ASTRONOMY Twin black holes 53, Titan: cloudy with a chance of storms 57, Jupiter takes a hit 72 ENVIRONMENT Arctic scientist Mark Serreze 60, Species relocation 80 MEDICINE Hope for HIV vaccine 34, Craig Venter’s synthetic biology 40, Cancer genes go to court 55 ENERGY Smart grid powers up 48, Building the sun in the lab 68, Microbial batteries 82 MIND Brain shock therapy 38, Decoding the Jefferson cipher 64 ANTHROPOLOGY Ancient flutes 54, Lake Huron hides Ancient civilization 82 PHYSICS Black hole in a lab 70 TECHNOLOGY Theory-generating computer 39 EARTH Origins of oxygen 77 OBITUARIES 86 . . . and a complete index on page 88.
DISCOVER ON THE WEB Videos, breaking news, and more —the latest is online at discovermagazine.com
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE Mail 6 Contributors 7 Editor’s Note 8 Vital Signs 10 An elderly couple visit their doctor to find out which one of them has Alzheimer’s. By H. Lee Kagan The Brain 14 Neuroscientists begin to figure out how we experience fear. By Carl Zimmer 20 Things You Didn’t Know About 3 Dwarf Planets 96 By Andrew Moseman
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‘‘
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A towering pillar of gas and dust enshrouds newborn stars in the Carina nebula, captured by the Hubble Space Telescope’s new Wide Field Camera in July.
NASA/ESA. PREVIOUS PAGES: THIERRY LEGAULT/WWW.ASTROPHOTO.FR. ON THE COVER: ESO/L. CALCADA; IMAGNO/GETTY IMAGES; IAN TATTERSALL/MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE; ALFRED
—Edwin P. Hubble
‘‘
From our home on Earth, we look out into the distances and strive to imagine the sort of world into which we were born…. The search will continue. The urge is older than history. It is not satisfied and it will not be suppressed.
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Drug companies and scientists are turning biology’s weapons into lifesaving treatments.
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I Am Shiva, Destroyer of Proteins Carl Zimmer sheds light on the science of autophagy, or how our cells destroy themselves to live again.
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NASA Launches an iPhone App Phil Plait examines NASA’s official app, which contains information on missions, 3 pictures, videos, and more.
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Mail Darwin and His Discontents I have enjoyed the straightforward, clearly written articles in DISCOVER for years, but never before have I laughed out loud while being informed on an important scientific topic. Bruno Maddox’s “Deconstructing Darwin” [November, page 38] was fascinating in its attempt to show Charles Darwin as a scientist of incredible vision and fortitude but also as a man with human foibles. Informative writing is always welcome, but to be able to enjoy some of the nimblest prose I’ve read in a long time in the process was an unexpected treat. It’s as if Dave Barry suddenly jumped over to serious science. What a blast! Cathy Anderson Tampa, FL Maddox’s article substantially reduces the quality of your magazine. Portions of the article were demeaning to Darwin, specifically the comments about his “dumb beard” and “dumb theories.” I would also like to know who keeps calling the theory “Darwinism” instead of evolution. As an anthropologist, I never used the term in my college classes. Maddox gets his history wrong too. The concept of evolution was in the air for some time prior to the publication of On the Origin of Species; Darwin never “created” it. Maddox has constructed a straw man that glorifies his writing and so-called wit at the expense of a great scientist. John L. Mori Morton, IL In “Deconstructing Darwin,” Charles Darwin is brought “back down to earth” in hopes of elevating his theory. However, Darwin was a man, and as such one cannot expect perfection. Attempting to make him more human just seems to degrade his theory. Instead of focusing on the man, we should be focusing more on educating those who have yet to accept evolution. If the proper facts were brought to the people, it wouldn’t matter whether Darwin was cast as a simple person or the great bearded man. Philip Hlasny Mississauga, Ontario Human-Neanderthal Relations “Brothers in Arms” [November, page 46] suggests that humans cannibalized Nean-
thal mating? Given our present-day sexual habits, I would think it highly likely that such mating occurred whenever the two populations met. John Phoenix Fredericksburg, VA The editors respond: Whether or not Neanderthals and humans were of the same species—a question that hinges partly on the definition of “species” —closely related organisms, such as wolves, coyotes, and dogs, can often produce fertile offspring. Differences in the number of chromosomes can lead to infertile progeny (like mules, the product of donkeys and horses), but scientists are unsure whether Neanderthals had 23 chromosome pairs like us or 24 like the great apes. derthals because Neanderthal remains show scars made by human tools. But there may be other explanations. A Neanderthal could have gotten the short end of the stick in a fight over territory or a kill, or a trade meeting between nomadic groups could have gone bad. Brandon C. Nuttall Frankfort, KY Given humans’ well-known propensity to view other, different-looking humans with hatred and disgust, it would be utterly surprising if early humans reacted to Neanderthals with anything other than fear and loathing. I think it’s highly probable that our ancestors exterminated them, or at the very least outcompeted them for resources, and felt no remorse at their disappearance. Steve Weston Cottonwood, MN History tells us that when cultures meet, they both murder and marry each other, so probably the few Neanderthals got blended with the many humans. If they could mate, though, doesn’t that mean they were really the same species? Were Neanderthals really just a race, a biological variety of humans? Jim Heldberg Pacifica, CA Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that the lack of Neanderthal DNA in the current gene pool implies only that there were no fertile offspring from any human/Neander-
Give W Some Stem Cell Credit In “The Super Cell” [November, page 30], the author suggests that the Bush administration’s barring of federal funds for embryonic stem cell research negatively impacted progress. Yet in the very next paragraph she expounds on breakthroughs for obtaining stem cells without human embryos involved—“even with the restrictions in place.” A fair article would have acknowledged that the removal of federal funds for human embryonic stem cell research might have spurred these valuable advances. Scott Anderson Centennial, CO Send e-mail to [emailprotected]. Address letters to DISCOVER, 90 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10011. Include your full name, address, and daytime phone number.
E R R ATA On page 33 of “The Super Cell” in the November issue, we misstated President Bush’s funding restrictions for embryonic stem cell research. Funding was permitted, but only for studying existing cell lines. On page 59 of “Seeing the Forest for the Lichens” in the November issue, we misstated the location of the Ozark Plateau. It stretches into the eastern edge of Oklahoma, not the western edge.
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contributors MICHAEL ABRAMS, a freelance writer in New York, is the author of Birdmen, Batmen and Skyflyers. MARCIA BARTUSIAK is a professor of science writing at MIT and author of five books. Her latest is The Day We Found the Universe. ALLISON BOND, a science and medical writer living in New York, has also written for Scientific American Mind and Popular Science. JANE BOSVELD, a contributing editor to DISCOVER, is studying for a certificate in botany from the New York Botanical Garden. DARLENE F. CAVALIER is the founder of ScienceCheerleader. com and an advocate for public engagement in science. JANET FANG is a DISCOVER intern who studies natural history and uses marine geochemistry to research the paleoclimate of Africa. DOUGLAS FOX is a freelance writer whose work has also appeared in New Scientist, Popular Mechanics, and the 2009 Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology.
THE TOP 100 SCIENCE STORIES OF 2009
FRED GUTERL, former deputy editor of Newsweek International, recently joined DISCOVER as a senior editor.
MICHAEL D. LEMONICK, who was a science writer at Time for more than 20 years, recently joined the staff of Climate Central.
ALINE REYNOLDS is a DISCOVER intern who also writes for Manhattan Media newspapers and Dan’s Papers.
ADAM HADHAZY is a science writer whose work has also appeared in Popular Mechanics and on Scientific American’s Web site.
JEANNE LENZER is a frequent contributor to the British Medical Journal who also writes for The Atlantic, Slate, and The Scientist.
JOCELYN RICE is a science writer in Kansas whose work also appears in Technology Review, CR Magazine, and Popular Mechanics.
MONICA HEGER is a Brooklynbased writer whose work has also appeared in IEEE Spectrum and USA Today’s Science Fair blog.
HEATHER MAYER is a DISCOVER intern who has reported on health, science, and other topics for CNN.com, Health.com, and the Associated Press.
JESSICA RUVINSKY is a former editor at DISCOVER who has also written for Science, The Economist, and U.S. News & World Report.
JEREMY JACQUOT, a graduate student at the University of Southern California, also writes for Popular Mechanics and The Huffington Post.
KATHLEEN MCGOWAN is a former senior editor at Psychology Today and is a contributing editor to DISCOVER.
NAYANAH SIVA is a freelance journalist based in London whose work also appears in The Lancet, Nature Medicine, and Science.
SAM KISSINGER is a former DISCOVER intern who is now fighting childhood illiteracy in Central Arizona.
CYRUS MOULTON has also written for the Island Journal and The Huffington Post.
ELIZABETH SVOBODA is a Popular Science contributing editor based in San Jose, California.
LINDSEY KONKEL is a freelance journalist who has also written for Popular Science, Natural History, and OnEarth.
JILL NEIMARK, who covers science and medicine, received the Autism Society of America award in 2007.
MEGAN TALKINGTON recently began her career in science journalism after working as a researcher studying ribosomes and viruses.
JEREMY LABRECQUE is a freelance science writer based in Montreal who also studies spatial patterns in rheumatic diseases.
STEPHEN ORNES is a Nashville-based writer who also writes for CR Magazine, Technology Review, and Science News for Kids.
CARL ZIMMER, a contributing editor to DISCOVER, also writes for The New York Times. His latest book is The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution.
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Editor’s Note
In
the 12 years I have been at DISCOVER, the scientific understanding of the world has undergone staggering transformations. A look back through our annual top 100 lists richly illustrates those changes. In January 1998 human embryonic stem cells had not yet been isolated. There are no stories about brain-scan studies in that issue, since the key technology—functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI—was still in its infancy. Also absent: news about planets orbiting other stars, since only a handful of them were known at the time. More sobering are the truly fundamental discoveries that have taken place in the intervening dozen years. Just days after the 1998 issue hit newsstands, astronomers announced the first evidence of dark energy. This invisible
force is causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate, controlling the fate of the entire cosmos. By current reckoning, dark energy outweighs conventional matter (the stuff that you and I are made of) by about 15 to 1. At the other end of the scale, biologists had not yet sequenced the human genome. Efforts to treat disease with gene therapy had barely begun; the idea of creating synthetic life, as Craig Venter is now preparing to do, back then seemed more like something from the imagination of Mary Shelley. All of this calls to mind Shakespeare’s oft-quoted words, in which Hamlet addresses his friend Horatio: “There are more things in heaven and earth,” he says, “than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Time and again we think we have reached a near-final understanding of the world, but then along comes an out-of-the-blue result that shakes up our intellectual order all over again. Time and again we think we have finally hit an unanswerable question, but then along comes a clever new experiment that exposes the hubris of thinking we are the ones who have finally reached science’s outermost limits. But there is also another kind of humility I feel looking back through the old pages of DISCOVER. For every story that makes me shake my head in amusement at how little we knew in 1998, there are others—many others—that highlight just how slow and incremental the discovery process is. Efforts to find a cure for AIDS. Debates about the shape and significance of the human evolutionary tree. The quest to understand the deeper meaning of quantum physics. The hunt for life on Mars. As I kept reading I thought of another, very different Shakespeare quote, this one from A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “Lovers and madmen have such seething brains/ Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend/More than cool reason ever comprehends.” In the popular stereotype, scientists land solidly, solely on the side of cool reason. Their actions say otherwise. Anthropologists spend lifetimes chipping away at African outcrops in hopes of gleaning a little more information about the origin of our species. Medical researchers invest years developing vaccines, and then years more proving that they are safe. The engineers who labored on Apollo will most likely never live to see humans set foot on Mars, yet many of them continue to work tirelessly toward that goal. These are not acts of cool reason alone. They embody love and, in truth, more than a bit of madness. And we are all the better off for it. Read on and I hope you will marvel—as I constantly do—at what is possible when the world’s great rational minds embrace a little of their fantastical side. Corey S. Powell
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“We have to look at all of the possibilities, from nuclear to hydroelectric to solar, and make sure they take their proper places.” —TURGAY ERTEKIN
In October DISCOVER teamed up with Shell and the Stevens Institute of Technology to explore the future of energy. The resulting panel discussion, titled “Fossil Fuels in the Year 2050,” was moderated by DISCOVER’s editor in chief, Corey S. Powell, and held on the Stevens campus in Hoboken, New Jersey. MIT visiting scientist Richard Sears, formerly a geophysicist with Shell, outlined the challenge ahead. “In the hour that we’re sitting here tonight, the world will go through about 150 million gallons of crude oil, 14 billion cubic feet of natural gas, and almost 2 billion pounds of coal,” he said. “Anything that we talk about moving to in 2050 is going to have to replace energy use at that scale.” The panel went on to discuss emerging technologies such as carbon sequestration and an interactive, “smart” energy distribution system. “The smart grid and some related considerations— perhaps the off-peak powering of electric vehicles—give us an opportunity to stabilize our power plants, how they interact with the demand side, and achieve higher efficiencies in power production,” said Anthony Cugini, director of the Office of Research and Development at the National Energy and Technology Laboratory. “It will have a significant impact.” Renewable energy sources will be important, but “revolutionary developments do not happen overnight,” cautioned Turgay Ertekin, a professor of petroleum and natural gas engineering at Penn State. “We have to look at all of the possibilities—from nuclear energy to hydroelectric power to solar energy —and then make sure that they take their proper places in the world’s overall energy budget.” And Paul Winstanley, director of energy initiatives at Stevens, emphasized that the challenge ahead is not just one of finding the right technology. “How do we sustain the availability of fuel while we continue to search for credible alternatives?” he asked. “There’s a huge gap that we’re facing in terms of education and training and preparing the workforce for the energy transition we’ve got to go through.”
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Vital Signs by H. Lee Kagan After 50 years together, it should be easy to recognize signs that your spouse has Alzheimer’s. But sometimes dementia expresses itself in truly confounding ways.
I
voice. “Can you check her out the next time she’s in here?” I shook his hand and promised I would. I had known Sam and Ruth, both in their late seventies, for more than two decades, and apart from the usual infirmities of the golden years, they had managed to dodge serious illness. I saw them both regularly, and neither one had struck me as having suffered a significant decline in intellectual functioning. But it wouldn’t be unusual for early dementia to sneak in under the radar. Its first symptoms may be subtle and impossible to distinguish from the normal decline in memory that occurs with aging. If you ask people over 60 what they dread most, dementia is almost always in the top three on their list of health concerns. After all, it is memory that makes us who we are; without it we are forever trapped in the moment, with no window on the past or the future. There is some discussion among experts over what exactly constitutes early dementia, but they generally agree that it includes both a decline in memory (learning and recalling new information like “Where did I put those keys?” or “What did we do yesterday?”) and a decline
in at least one other area of intellectual functioning. Among those areas are language (breadth of vocabulary, complexity of sentences), calculation (balancing a checkbook, figuring a tip), judgment (Is this a legitimate bill or a mail scam?), and visual-spatial orientation (becoming disoriented while walking or driving). Faulty memory alone is not enough to diagnose dementia, and the cognitive impairment must be a decline from a previously higher level of functioning. Two weeks later as I entered the exam room and opened Ruth’s chart, I found the note I had written to remind myself to check her memory. Mindful of her husband’s concerns, I asked her how things were going. “Dr. Kagan,” she said, “I’m worried about Sam.” I waited for more and watched as she frowned. “I think he might have Alzheimer’s.” I couldn’t help smiling to myself. After 50 years, is this where marital bickering had brought them? “What makes you think that?” I asked. “Well, I say things and he keeps correcting me. And then he gets angry. He’s so short-tempered lately. It’s not like him.” I told her I would look into it the next time I saw her husband. After reviewing her vital signs and performing a basic physical exam, I proceeded to test her. Extensive formal testing tools exist to evaluate memory, but most clinicians rely on the Mini-Mental Status Exam (MMSE) in their offices to screen for dementia. The test takes just a few minutes and is commonly used for detecting cognitive impairment. It includes a series of questions that test orientation to place and time, recall, calculation, reading, and executive function—carrying out a complex task, such as copying a drawing of two overlapping pentagons. Amused through much of the testing, Ruth offered an excuse or a dismissive laugh whenever she failed on some component of the exam. She was unable to recall any of three named objects after three minutes. She struggled with simple math and was unable to spell the word world backward. When we were done, her score was well below normal, placing her in the early dementia range. Depression in some cases may mimic dementia, especially when patients become withdrawn and disengaged, but Ruth showed no evidence of that melancholic state. A careful neurological examination disclosed no abnormalities to suggest prior strokes or other disorders, such as Parkinson’s disease, that may be associated with dementia. I sent Ruth to have blood drawn and then walked over to my secretary, Carina. I asked her to schedule Ruth for an MRI of the brain. “What’s the indication?” Carina asked. The radiologists would want to know what I was looking for. “Put ‘Evaluate dementia’ on the request.” She nodded and mumbled, “Oh, that explains her cookies.” “Her cookies? What about her cookies?” I began to wonder if one of us was in need of a dementia workup, too. Carina reminded me that for years Ruth, a kindhearted woman, had been bringing home-baked cookies to every appointment. Known
MILLENNIUM IMAGES, UK
t was near the end of a routine office visit when my patient, Sam, told me he needed to talk to me about his wife. I closed his chart and gave him my full attention. “Ruth’s just not the same,” he said. “She tells me the same thing three times. She forgets when we have plans to go somewhere. I don’t know, but I think she might have that Alzheimer’s disease.” Concern and frustration were evident in his
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Stevens Institute of Technology
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Vital Signs among my staff as the Cookie Lady, she always made sure everyone got his or her own little bag. But for the past year, whenever Ruth came in the staff would politely wait for her to leave and then deposit the cookies in the trash. “They’re terrible,” she said, “but no one wants to say anything to her. Too bad. They used to be good.” After Ruth left I tried one of her dry, tasteless cookies and agreed that they would not have earned anyone the affectionate nickname Cookie Lady. I saw it as one more example of how she had changed. I made sure that her MRI got scheduled. Within a week I had all of Ruth’s results back. Her scan showed mild brain atrophy, or shrinkage, a common but very nonspecific finding in older people. There was no tumor, no evidence of a past stroke, and no fluid accumulation. Her lab tests showed no metabolic derangements or any deficiencies, such as inadequate amounts of thyroid hormone or vitamin B12, that can cause symptoms of dementia. Based on her impaired cognitive functions and the absence of any other explanation, I concluded that, unfortunately, Sam was right. His wife had early Alzheimer’s disease. The diagnosis is a clinical one, meaning there is no specific test, either analyzing the blood or imaging the brain, that can identify the disease. Indeed, the only way to confirm Alzheimer’s conclusively is to biopsy the brain. But this invasive and risky test is seldom done because the diagnosis can be reliably established on clinical grounds alone. That same week I saw Sam in my office and, as I had promised Ruth, evaluated him. He had no problem with the MMSE, and there were no neurological abnormalities. What he did have, however, was a wife of more than half a century who had begun to slip away from him mentally. It frightened him and left him feeling frustrated and help-
less. He had responded by becoming short-tempered and demanding. But being short-tempered and demanding is not dementia. Ruth had correctly observed a distinct change in her spouse, and with her limited capacities she had decided that the problem lay with him, speculating that he might have early dementia. “He keeps correcting me,” she had complained, demonstrating no insight into her own diminished mental faculties. Sam, in turn, was showing how Alzheimer’s disease affects more than the person who has it. In fact, Ruth’s marked lack of insight into her deficits is characteristic of true dementia. Patients forget what they don’t know and so gain no self-awareness. The corollary is that patients who come to me worried that they might have Alzheimer’s generally do not. (There are exceptions, of course.) Alzheimer’s is the illness that is most often brought to a doctor’s attention by family members and friends rather than by the patients themselves. There is currently no way to reverse Alzheimer’s disease. There are, however, drugs that can treat its symptoms. I prescribed these medications for Ruth after having a lengthy discussion with her and her husband about the nature of the illness and what they could expect down the road. I also suggested an Alzheimer’s support group for Sam to help him gain some understanding of how his wife’s disease was affecting him. There was no way to predict the tempo of Ruth’s illness, but her general health was good, and I told them that a program of physical activity and mental engagement would work in her favor. They left my office hand in hand. I was confident that after 50 years they would find a way through this, too. H. Lee Kagan is an internist in Los Angeles. The cases described in Vital Signs are real, but patients’ names and other details have been changed.
DISCOVER & THE NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION
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The Brain by Carl Zimmer
Are you a man or a mouse? No matter how you answer, you experience fear the same way in your brain.
ear: See also dread, panic, terror, fright, trepidation, anxiety, worry, phobia, disquietude, angst, foreboding, the creeps, the jitters, the heebie-jeebies, freaking out. Any halfway decent thesaurus will provide a long list of synonyms for fear, and yet they are not very good substitutes. No one would confuse having the creeps with being terrified. It is strange that we have so many words for fear, when fear is such a unitary, primal feeling. Perhaps all those synonyms are just linguistic inventions. Perhaps, if we looked inside our brains, we would just find plain old fear. That is certainly how things seemed in the early 1900s, when scientists began studying how we come to be scared of things. They built on Ivan Pavlov’s classic experiments on dogs, in which Pavlov would ring a bell before giving his dogs food. Eventually they learned to associate the bell with food and began to salivate in anticipation. Psychologists set up experiments to see if the same kind of learning could instill fear as well. The implicit assumption was that fear, like hunger, was a simple provoked response. In one of the most famous (and infamous) of these experiments, American psychologist John Watson decided to see if he could teach an 11-month-old baby named Albert to become scared of arbitrary things. He presented Albert with a rat, and every time the baby reached out to touch it, Watson hit a steel bar with a hammer, producing a horrendous clang. After several rounds with the rat and the bar, Watson then brought out the rat on its own. “The instant the rat was shown, the baby began to cry,” Watson wrote in a 1920 report. “Almost instantly he turned sharply to the left, fell
Although this line of research yielded some major insights, it had an obvious shortcoming. In the real world, rats don’t spend their lives in cages waiting for lights to turn on; these experiments don’t capture the complex role that fear plays in a wild rat’s life. In the 1980s Caroline and Robert Blanchard, working together
DIMITRI VERVITSIOTIS/GETTY IMAGES
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over on his left side, raised himself on all fours and began to crawl away so rapidly that he was caught with difficulty before reaching the edge of the table.” The “little Albert” study, besides being cruel, was badly designed. Watson did not control it carefully to rule out a wide range of possible interpretations. In later decades, other scientists got much more rigorous in their study of fear, in many cases turning to rats rather than people as their test subjects. In a typical experiment, a rat was placed in a cage with a light. At first the light came on a few times so the animal could get accustomed to it. Later the scientists would turn on the light and then give the rats a little electric shock. After a few rounds, the rats would respond fearfully to the light, even if no shock came. Further research revealed that the amygdala—an almond-shaped cluster of neurons deep within the brain—plays a pivotal role in the fear-association response in rats. Brain researchers discovered that the amygdala orchestrates human fear as well. The sight of a loaded gun, for example, triggers activity in this part of the brain. People with an injured amygdala have dampened emotional responses and so do not learn to fear new things through association. Science had identified a nexus of fear, it seemed.
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The Brain by Carl Zimmer at the University of Hawaii, carried out a pioneering study on the natural history of fear. They put wild rats in cages and then brought cats gradually closer to them. At each stage, they carefully observed how the rats reacted. The Blanchards found that the rats responded to each kind of threat with a distinct set of behaviors. The first kind of behavior is a reaction to a potential threat, in which a predator isn’t visible but there is good reason to worry that it might be nearby. A rat might walk into a meadow that looks free of predators, for example, but that reeks of fresh cat urine. In such a case, a rat will generally explore the meadow cautiously, assessing the risk of staying there. A second, more concrete type of threat arises if a rat spots a cat at the other side of the meadow. The rat will freeze and then make a choice about what to do next. It may slink away, or it may remain immobile in hopes that the cat will eventually wander away without noticing it. Finally, the most active threat: The cat glances over, notices something, and walks toward the rat to investigate. At this point, the rat will flee if it has an escape route. If the cat gets close, the rat will choose either to fight or to run for its life. Dean Mobbs, a neuroscientist at the Medical Research Council in Cambridge, England, wondered if humans have similarly layered fear responses. He and his colleagues were not about to send people into tiger-infested meadows, so they designed a clever alternative: They programmed a survival-themed video game that subjects could play while lying in an fMRI scanner. The game is similar to Pacman. You see yourself as a triangle in a maze and press keys to maneuver through it. At some point a circle appears. This is a virtual predator being guided by an artificial intelligence program to seek you out. If the predator captures you, you receive a small electric shock on the back of your hand. This deceptively minimalist predator-prey game triggers some remarkably intense feelings. Mobbs measured the skin conductance of his players by rigging them up to a device similar to a lie detector. He found that when the predator was bearing down on players, they often experienced the same changes to their skin as those seen in people having panic attacks. Mobbs unleashed two kinds of predators on his players, a less adept one that was easy to escape, and a smarter one that was more likely to capture its victim. When people were chased by the better predator, they showed a stronger panic response in their skin, and they also crashed into the walls of the maze more often. Meanwhile, striking changes were happening inside the brains of the players. The predators would first appear on the far side of the maze. While they remained at a distance, the same brain regions tended to become active in the players, a network that included parts of the amygdala as well as some other structures in the front of the brain. But when the predator was closing in, those brain regions shut down and a network of previously quiet regions farther back in the midbrain became active. Mobbs’s results mesh nicely not only with the work of the Blanchards but also with some other, more recent studies of rat neurology. For example, one of the midbrain regions that Mobbs and his colleagues observed becoming active in humans when a “predator” was close is an area called the periaqueductal gray
region. This area showed higher activity in the people who crashed into the walls more often, providing further evidence that it plays an important role in panic. Researchers have explored the anatomy of fear more directly in rats; by manipulating different areas of the rat brain, they are able to alter parts of the standard fear-driven sequence of behavior. When neuroscientists put electrodes into the periaqueductal gray region of rat brains and stimulated the neurons there, the creatures immediately started to run and jump uncontrollably. Fear, the new results suggest, is not a single thing after all. Rather, it is a complex, ever-changing strategy mammal brains deploy in order to cope with danger. When a predator is off in the distance, its prey—whether rat or human—powers up a forebrain network. The network primes the body, raising the heartbeat and preparing it for fast action. At the same time, the forebrain network sharpens the brain’s attention to the outside world, evaluating threats, monitoring subtle changes, and running through possible responses. Another important job it performs is keeping the midbrain network
Fear, the new results suggest, is not a single thing after all. It is a complex, ever-changing strategy mammal brains deploy in order to cope with danger. shut down so that, instead of fleeing at top speed, a prey animal keeps very still at first. As the predator gets closer, however, the forebrain’s grip on the midbrain loosens. Now the midbrain becomes active, orchestrating a powerful, quick response: fight or flight. At the same time it shuts down the slower, more deliberative forebrain. This is no time for thinking. It may be unsettling to find that our brains work so much like a rat’s. But the amygdala and the periaqueductal gray are ancient parts of the brain, dating back hundreds of millions of years. Our small hominid ancestors probably faced the same kinds of threats that baboons do today from leopards, eagles, and other predators. Even after we evolved the ability to use weapons and became predators ourselves, this ancient brain circuit still offered a useful defense against members of our own species. Unfortunately, our exquisitely sophisticated brains may make this predator-defense circuit vulnerable to misfiring. Instead of monitoring just the threats right in front of us, we can also imagine threats that do not exist. Feeding this imagination into the earlywarning system may lead to crippling chronic anxiety. In other cases, people may not be able to keep their periaqueductal gray and other midbrain regions under control. As we perceive predators getting closer, our brains normally make the switch from the forebrain to the midbrain regions. People who suffer panic disorders may misjudge threats, seeing them as far more imminent than they really are. To test these possibilities, Mobbs and his colleagues are beginning to study people who suffer from fear-related disorders as they play the predator game. Such work may not uncover a biological distinction between angst and the heebie-jeebies, but it may show how much better we can understand ourselves—and tame our inner demons—once we appreciate the many dimensions of fear.
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Y E A R IN S C I E N C E 2 0 0 9
THE
1OO
DISCOVERIES THAT ARE CHANGING THE WORLD
1
The question will not go away: Do vaccines cause autism? Some 1 million to 1.5 million adults and children in the United States have received autism diagnoses, and there is no clear insight into its causes. What surprises many scientists is that their findings against a vaccine connection keep failing to quell the debate, giving the antivaccine movement the potential to become a genuine public-health problem. In February the U.S. Court of Federal Claims attempted to provide some clarity, ruling that a widely used vaccine and a vaccine preservative, both targets of concern over the past decade, do not cause autism spectrum disorders. That decision put a stamp of approval on what multiple peer-reviewed studies have concluded for years: The MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) vaccine and the mercury additive thimerosal (which was removed from nearly all vaccines by 2001) are not responsible for the rise in autism diagnoses. “I think the tide clearly turned this year, and the court decision, more than anything else, was responsible,” says Paul Offit, a pediatrician at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a vocal vaccine advocate. “It showed that good science does win in the end.” Environmental attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. responded to the ruling by
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·M E D I C I N E
VACCINE PHOBIA BECOMES A PUBLIC-HEALTH THREAT
NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/NEWSCOM. OPPOSITE: RUBBERBALL/GETTY IMAGES
comparing government-sponsored vaccine safety studies to cigarette research conducted by Big Tobacco. In the ruling’s wake, conspiracy theories and false claims continued to dominate some autism Internet forums, while television shows featured lengthy interviews with antivaccine stalwarts. Fueling all this confusion is the complicated nature of autism, which encompasses a range of neurological disorders characterized by “social impairments, communication difficulties, and restricted, repetitive, and stereotyped patterns of behavior,” according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Those symptoms usually appear at around 18 months of age, precisely when children receive many of their vaccinations. In October Michael D. Kogan of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and colleagues announced that about 1 of every 91 American children has a disorder on the autism spectrum. A 2008 study by the California Department of Public Health found that the number of children receiving services for autism in the state has risen steadily, despite a decrease to trace levels of mercury
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in their inoculations. Many experts attribute the growing prevalence to new diagnosis guidelines and increased awareness among doctors. Meanwhile, the reluctance of some parents to immunize their children can lead to the return of vaccine-preventable diseases such as a measles, which broke out this past summer in Brooklyn, New York. According to Christopher Zimmerman, medical director of the New York City Health Department’s Bureau of Immunization, the virus spread quickly among children who were not fully vaccinated, including those whose parents put off the shots because of concern about the autism-vaccine link. “Measles can be a serious and life-threatening disease,” he says. “Parents are putting their children at risk by not vaccinating on time.” Across the United States, reported measles cases shot up from 43 in 2007 to 140 in 2008, and more than 90 percent of those reported in 2008 were among children who were unvaccinated or had unknown vaccination status. In the midst of the ongoing controversy, scientists have made notable progress in understanding autism. A May study in Nature found that 65 percent of autistic children
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share a set of mutations that may regulate genes known to influence communication among brain cells. Many scientists say that environmental exposures, perhaps even in the womb, may activate such genetic vulnerabilities. Over the past three years the NIH has spent about $100 million annually on autism research. One possible trigger it has studied exhaustively and dismissed: vaccines. “Exploring the broad question of vaccines and autism is not fruitful. The questions have been answered,” says University of Utah pediatrician Andrew Pavia, chairman of the vaccine-safety working group at HHS. Pavia nevertheless believes it would be worth further investigating a link between vaccines and autism once specific biological pathways are identified. To that end, his committee recommends researching whether some children, including those who may be genetically predisposed to autism, are at higher risk following certain vaccinations but in numbers too small to have shown up in previously. “There are some who suggest that scientists shouldn’t bring up vaccines and autism in the same breath, but I think we should keep an open mind until we understand the biology better,” Pavia says. Offit disagrees. The evidence has spoken, he argues, and pursuing additional research only
wastes resources and gives false hope. “Parents are being horribly misled by leaving the door open,” he says. One positive side effect of the media frenzy is that autism science is finally getting its due. In September the NIH committed nearly $100 million in additional funding from the stimulus package to studying autism. Scientists also
For years some families of autistic adults and children have blamed a mercury preservative in vaccines for the disorder.
hope to gain crucial insights into autism’s risk factors from several large new studies, including the federally funded Early Autism Risk Longitudinal Investigation, which will enroll 1,200 mothers of autistic children at the start of a subsequent pregnancy and then track the newborn child’s first three years of development. “This issue will not go away until there is a clear cause,” Offit says. “But the important story you never hear is that the research is evolving very quickly.”
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2010 | 19
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ÚS P A C E
Norman Augustine is a well-known critic of wasteful government programs. As former CEO of Lockheed Martin, he is also a grizzled veteran of the aerospace industry. That explains why the Obama administration chose Augustine to head a commission on the future of NASA’s human spaceflight program—and why the space agency was so shaken by his conclusion. NASA “appears to be on an unsustainable trajectory,” Augustine and company began their report. Its plan to return to the moon by 2020 is out of the question. To keep the International Space Station aloft past 2016 (the program’s premature end date) and maintain a viable human space exploration program, NASA will have to scrape up another $3 billion per year—hard to imagine in a time of trilliondollar deficits. “The choice is to lower aspirations or increase the budget,” says John Logsdon, a space policy expert at George Washington University. One way to cut costs, cautiously endorsed by Augustine’s commission, is to give private firms a bigger role in providing launch services. Contractors like Lockheed Martin and Boeing have
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always built the hardware, but NASA has kept close watch on each step in design and construction. That method worked for the Apollo program, but it has been a disaster ever since. For instance, the space shuttle, originally intended to provide cheap and reliable transport to low Earth orbit, has turned out to be roughly 1,000 times more dangerous and 100 times more costly to launch than first promised. In classic bureaucratic style, NASA diluted the original idea by trying to make the shuttle all things to all people: a satellite launcher for the military as well as a pickup truck to space for the civilian program. Private companies, the panel’s reasoning goes, would be better at reining in costs and keeping their eye on the ball. In addition, NASA would not have to pay the huge up-front costs of development and construction. Instead, it would give seed money to private firms and guarantee a market for their services. NASA has already begun to work this way in the development of a cargo vessel for the space station. (When the shuttle is mothballed, currently set for the end of 2010, NASA will have to rely on Russia’s Soyuz
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spaceship to get astronauts to the station.) The agency has given small grants to SpaceX, the aerospace firm founded by PayPal mogul Elon Musk, and Orbital Sciences, a firm that builds missile-defense systems; each company is developing its own launchers and capsules. Pursuing this path would mark a huge change in NASA’s way of doing business. It would mean entrusting the safety of its crew to third parties. In terms of hardware, though, it would be a cinch. SpaceX and Orbital rockets could accommodate astronauts with minor modifications. And scrapping NASA’s new Ares I booster program could save billions of dollars over the next few years. “We think this is the time to create a market for commercial firms to transport both cargo and humans between the Earth and low Earth orbit,” Augustine said at a press conference accompanying the report’s release. “NASA would be better served to spend its money on going beyond Earth orbit rather than running a trucking service to low Earth orbit.” That would free the agency to focus resources on the Ares V rocket—now on the drawing board—or another heavy-lift rocket that could carry crews into deep space. Mars is “the
Ground test and artist’s mock-up (inset) of NASA’s Ares I rocket, which is five years behind schedule. It may be replaced with private rockets.
ATK. INSET: NASA/MSFC
2
NASA BRACES FOR COURSE CORRECTION
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ultimate destination” for human exploration, but the commission recommends first tackling more attainable yet exciting intermediate goals, such as visiting asteroids and the two small Martian moons. If NASA cannot find a way to squeeze more out of its budget, it will have to deep-six some programs. A big question mark is the fate of the space station. Terminating the program early in 2016, as currently
scheduled, would help release NASA from its fiscal straitjacket, but it would “significantly impair U.S. ability to develop and lead future international spaceflight partnerships” while wasting 25 years of investment, Augustine’s group warns. Europe, in particular, would not take a cancellation kindly, having already committed billions of euros for the Columbus space-station module. And the robotic exploration pro-
gram is already providing a big bang for NASA’s buck, discovering hidden water on the moon, possible signs of life on Mars, and tropical storms on Titan just in the past year (see pages 35, 38, and 57, respectively). Cutting future unmanned missions would cause uproar among the scientific community while freeing up only modest funds. NASA is in a tough spot. But from necessity, it is poised to reinvent itself.
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3 Anthropologists are suddenly tearing up their long-held origin tale—that modern humans evolved from hunched, protohuman apes roaming the wide-open savannas of old. The discovery of a 4.4-million-year-old hominid named Ardipithecus ramidus (fondly shortened to “Ardi”) suggests that for a stretch during the early Pliocene, our ancestors instead lived in lush woodlands and walked on two feet. In fact, Ardi’s unexpected traits put to rest the whole idea of a chimplike missing link at the root of the human family tree. Ardi and fossil bones from at least 35 other children and adults were uncovered in the Afar desert in Ethiopia by the Middle Awash research group. Toiling in volcanic ash, the group collected fossilized remains of more than 6,000 creatures ranging from antelopes to bats, as well as seeds and geologic samples. “This gave us a series of fantastic, high-resolution snapshots across an ancient landscape—a true picture of what Ardi’s habitat was like,” says University of California at Berkeley paleoanthropologist Tim White, a codirector of the team. “It tells us that long before hominids developed tools or big brains or ranged
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Ardi weighed about 110 pounds and stood four feet high. Her hand was longer than a human’s, but her gait probably resembled our own.
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the open savanna, they were walking upright.” The evidence suggests Ardipithecus is ancestral to the early hominid Australopithecus, widely considered a forerunner of our own genus, Homo. White’s findings, published alongside related articles from more than 40 researchers, appeared in a special issue of Science in October. Together they present the picture of a fantastical, mosaic hominid —one with pelvis and feet adapted for walking but with a divergent big toe splayed out like those of modern apes for climbing and grasping. She had a small brain, about the size of a chimp’s but positioned more like a human’s. Most striking, Ardi’s upper canine teeth were close in size to those of modern humans. Analysis of tooth enamel suggests Ardi ate nuts, fruits, and tubers, supplemented by small mammals and bird eggs. “How does one account for this strange creature?” White asks. In one of the other Science papers, noted biological anthropologist C. Owen Lovejoy of Kent State University speculates that pair-bonding may have been the trigger. Perhaps females began to prefer males who could walk, gather food, and carry it home, he suggests. Of course, given the contentious nature of the field, some experts insist the jury is still out on Ardi’s evolutionary role. But to White, the evidence overwhelmingly places her at “the first phase of human evolution.” Move over, Lucy. Ardi may just be the hominid find of this century.
CREDIT T. WHITE 2009, FROM SCIENCE OCT. 2 ISSUE
LA N T H R O P O L O G Y
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BIOLOGY
q
4 PHOTO COURTESY OF JUAN CARLOS IZPISUA BELMONTE, SALK INSTITUTE FOR BIOLOGICAL STUDIES AND CENTER OF REGENERATIVE MEDICINE, BARCELONA
STEM CELL SCIENCE TAKES OFF
For eight years, stem cell researchers chafed at restrictions limiting government funding to a handful of preexisting cell lines. Then on March 9, 2009, President Obama signed an executive order freeing federal funds for work on any type of stem cell, including cells derived from unused embryos at in vitro fertilization clinics. Stem cell research, already in high gear, has taken off since then. The first clinical trial using embryonic stem cells to treat paralysis was approved by the Food and Drug Administration even before the new order. At the same time, other researchers have found ways to bypass the embryo, spurred in part by the earlier restrictions. Recent studies have shown how to reprogram adult cells into non-embryonic stem cell lines called induced pluripotent stem cells—“pluripotent” meaning that they could give rise to almost any category of cell. • In January, the FDA gave the biotech company Geron a green light for the first human clinical trial of a paralysis treatment using embryonic stem cells. The trial is based on work from University of California at Irvine neuro-
scientist Hans Keirstead, who enabled paralyzed rats to walk again by coaxing embryonic stem cells to differentiate into the spinal cord cells that the rats had lost during injury. • In March, a University of Wisconsin team reprogrammed skin fibroblasts into embryonic stem cells without incorporating the viral or other foreign DNA that can lead to complications like cancer. Instead of manipulating the cells with a virus, as other researchers had done, the Wisconsin team used socalled circular DNA, loops of DNA that exist outside of the primary genome. “When the cells proliferate, they lose the circular DNA naturally because it’s not very stable,” says Junying Yu of Cellular Dynamics, coauthor of the study. • This summer, three separate teams of researchers—two in China, one in California— reported the birth of healthy mice generated solely from induced pluripotent cells. The most prolific cell line, made at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, produced live baby mice 13 percent of the time. • Combining stem cells with gene therapy, an international collaboration announced the success of a pilot study to
A colony of induced pluripotent stem cells used to treat Fanconi anemia.
treat X-linked adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD), a fatal brain disease caused by a mutation of the gene coding for the ALD protein. As reported in Science in November, the researchers removed patients’ bone marrow (which contained stem cells with the damaged gene) and repaired the cells with healthy genes delivered by a retrovirus. After bone marrow containing the T E X T
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defective gene was eradicated with chemotherapy, stem cells with the healthy gene were transplanted back into the patients, and the progression of the disease was stopped. The ultimate goal is to produce pluripotent cells by purely chemical means within the body to regenerate damaged parts and to treat disease.
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Astronomer ALAN DRESSLER Sets Off on the Trail of the First Galaxies in the Universe
What did the universe look like in its toddler years? To find out, astronomer Alan Dressler of the Carnegie Institution of Washington and his team are training some of the world’s largest telescopes on a small swath of sky in the constellation Sextans. Their aim is to detect “Lyman-alpha emitters,” distant gas clouds enclosing primordial stars. The blobs hail from a crucial moment when those first stars flooded the cosmos with energy, setting off a chain of events that led to the formation of modern galaxies. Last year Dressler’s colleague Masami Ouchi found the king of the blobs: Nicknamed Himiko, it is 55,000 light-years in diameter, making it the largest object ever seen so early in the universe. Dressler spoke with DISCOVER about what it all means.
Why are you interested in what happened 12 billion years ago? Our research program started with galaxies: Why are there so many different types, what are their histories, and how did we get the structures we see today—spiral, elliptical, and so forth? Why are they so different? We have a very tentative grasp on that. How did your Carnegie colleague find Himiko? The technique by which we’re seeing this is Lyman-alpha emission. The light comes out in the ultraviolet, then there’s this big redshift [as the light is stretched by the expansion of the universe], which puts it in the more detectable, far-red part of the spectrum. Himiko came out of a survey of
Lyman-alpha objects. Out of all those things that Masami was doing, this rather extraordinary object stood out. What is Himiko? I don’t know. I don’t think we have a good explanation for it—and that was what was interesting about it. It is a unique object in terms of size and output, which is not the way my scientific inclinations tend to go. What we’ve really been trying to do is to find the more typical galaxies from the era about a billion years after the Big Bang. To do that, we have to tune up an instrument and expose it for 20 hours under extraordinary conditions. My colleague Crystal Martin and I are trying to push a factor of 10 times fainter than what people had been doing.
What’s so interesting about the Lyman-alpha blobs? I would call them building blocks of galaxies, mostly gas and stars. That’s where the Lyman-alpha radiation comes from: the glowing hydrogen gas that’s being lit up by the young stars that are in these building blocks. The question we are trying to get at is, as you go fainter, how many more of them are there? It turns out that the number of objects goes up steeply: When you go a factor of 10 fainter, you see 100 times as many objects. When we study these early objects, what do we learn? We know a lot about our galaxy today—chemical abundance, how it has been built up over time. There’s a “fossil record” in our galaxy of what happened. But it would be great to see a movie of what was going on deep in the past. In astronomy, we can do that. We can look back and observe the universe at that time. How much do we know about conditions in the very early universe? At the beginning there was so much energy that electrons and protons went their own way. Then, 400,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe cooled to the point where
text by FRED GUTERL photograph by SPENCER LOWELL
hydrogen gas could exist. From that point it was electrically neutral, until something came along to light it up. People used to think, well, maybe quasars did it, but there just weren’t enough of them around. Then they said maybe it was young galaxies. So now you think the first galaxies sculpted the cosmos, paving the way for more galaxies to evolve? We’ve now found about 50 of these very, very faint building blocks of galaxies. We have a big enough sample to say we know how common they are.
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It looks like there are enough of them to explain why the universe went from being neutral to being full of ionized gas. What are you trying to understand now about these galactic building blocks? We’re trying to figure out how massive they are, how they spin, what their structures and compositions are, so we’ll know how the first heavy elements started to come about.
these building blocks determines what shape a galaxy takes. The universe started off smooth, and then it began to get lumpy. Our best bet is that in the places where the density of the blobs is highest, they merge together very early and form stars more rapidly, creating elliptical galaxies. In the places that are less dense the building blocks take longer to develop; those come together later and make spirals.
And then we’ll start to understand the crazy diversity of modern galaxies? Yes. The interaction among
What’s next—will you look even further back in time? No. You don’t really want to look further. You want a more
complete picture of the average time, rather than always going for the big, “Oh, I’ve got the most distant object in the universe.” That’s kind of meaningless, actually. Because not much was happening that early? If you’ve got a picture of your child at 6 months, you’re not going to learn a lot from another one from when she was 5 months and 13 days. What you want to see is when things are changing. Astronomers are always selling the idea that we’ve pushed further than ever before, but it’s a bit of a
fraud. We’ve seen something, but it’s very sketchy. What we’re mostly aiming toward is to get a picture of how ordinary galaxies come about. What’s next? We have pushed Magellan [the 6.5-meter telescope in Chile] as much as we could. I am working toward using the James Webb Space Telescope—the Hubble replacement that should be up by 2014—to look at the formation of galaxies in much greater detail. We’ll get a first look at galaxies forming in the first billion years.
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·M E D I C I N E
When swine flu emerged in Mexico last April, it was dubbed a “killer virus” because of its apparent high mortality rate. By mid-June the flu had spread to 73 other countries, infecting 30,000 people and prompting the World Health Organization to issue its highest warning, a Phase 6 pandemic alert. In the United States, concern took off in late August, when the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology said the virus could infect up to 150 million Americans and kill 30,000 to 90,000. And then, on October 23, President Obama declared swine flu a national emergency, noting that “the potential exists for the pandemic to overburden health-care resources in some localities.” The current strain of swine flu, formally known as the 2009 H1N1 flu, is a mutated cousin of the 1918 Spanish flu, which affected both humans and pigs. That virus took 50 million to 100 million lives worldwide, according to Jeffery Taubenberger, the pathologist who sequenced its entire genome. Fears that this year’s virus would behave like its 1918 relative were heightened when two characteristics of the new flu were noted as similar to the earlier pan-
A Mexico City subway in the midst of the H1N1 outbreak last May.
demic. First, cases of swine flu broke out before the usual flu season; and second, a disproportionate number of young people were reported to be sickened by it. By September five pharmaceutical companies had promised to produce 250 million doses of 2009 H1N1 vaccines, and experts assured the public that these inoculations were safe. But as of the first week of November, only 26 million doses had been distributed to hospitals and doctors’ offices. Nancy Cox, head of the flu division at the Centers
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for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), says that her group is preparing for the worst. “In certain situations such as 1918, there was a rather mild spring season of disease followed by a much more severe fall wave,” she says. “There’s a seasonality component that caused the virus to spread more rapidly and more deeply into the population.” An estimated 22 million American citizens were infected with the new H1N1 virus in the months before Obama declared the national
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emergency, according to the CDC, and about 4,000 of those people died. Each year seasonal flu kills approximately 35,000 people in the United States alone. Without extensive immunization, the H1N1 flu is on track to surpass that toll, says Dean Blumberg, associate professor of pediatric infectious disease at the University of California at Davis Children’s Hospital. Because this virus is so novel, few people are protected by preexisting immunity. “Pretty much everyone is going to get it,” Blumberg says, “so we’re expecting more deaths and complications.”
MARCOS FERRO/AURORA PHOTOS
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SWINE FLU OUTBREAK SWEEPS THE GLOBE
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TECHNOLOGY
7
THE GRAPHENE REVOLUTION
JANNIK MEYER
Graphene’s atom-thin sheets, shown here in an artist’s rendering, let electrons pass through rapidly.
Under a transmission electron microscope it looks deceptively simple: a grid of hexagons resembling a volleyball net or a section of chicken wire. But graphene, a form of carbon that can be produced in sheets only one atom thick, seems poised to shake up the world of electronics. Within five years, it could begin powering faster and better transistors, computer chips, and LCD screens, according to researchers who are smitten with this new supermaterial. Graphene’s standout trait is its uncanny facility with electrons, which can travel much more quickly through it than they can through silicon. As a result, graphene-based computer chips could be thousands of times as efficient as existing ones. “What limits conductivity in a normal material is that electrons will scatter,” says Michael Strano, a chemical engineer at MIT. “But with graphene the electrons can travel very long distances without scattering. It’s like the thinnest, most stable electrical conducting framework you can think of.” In 2009 another MIT researcher, Tomas Palacios, devised a graphene chip that doubles the frequency of an electromagnetic signal. Using multiple chips could make the outgoing signal many times higher in frequency than the original. Because frequency determines the clock speed of the chip, boosting it enables faster
transfer of data through the chip. Graphene’s extreme thinness means that it is also practically transparent, making it ideal for transmitting signals in devices containing solar cells or LEDs. The big limitation of graphene is that it is not a true semiconductor. Unlike silicon, it cannot be switched on and off to create circuits, which will limit its use in electronics. “In mainstream digital applications, you will not see graphene displace silicon,” Columbia University electrical engineer Ken Shepard insists. But other researchers are already expanding graphene’s capabilities. In June materials scientist Feng Wang of the University of California at Berkeley announced a method to tune the material electrically to give it switching properties. That would enable graphene to form extremely small, fast transistors. Even without switching, Strano thinks graphene will find many uses—as a flexible conductor in thin-film batteries or roll-up LCD screens, for instance. “I’m most excited about the applications we have yet to discover,” he says. “Graphene is an out-of-the-box material, so we shouldn’t try to hammer it into existing boxes.”
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ASTRONOMY
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An artist’s vision of a boiling lava sea covering the rocky planet Corot-7b.
ESO/L. CALCADA
EARTH-LIKE WORLDS COME INTO VIEW In the race to find planets around other stars, the grand prize would be to find a world like Earth orbiting a star like the sun—and astronomers closed in on that trophy in 2009. The first known exoplanets were huge and gassy. Then in February a European group led by Alain Léger of the Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale in Paris and Daniel Rouan of the Paris Observatory used the Corot space observatory to find a planet less than twice the diameter of Earth, the smallest confirmed exoplanet ever seen. Actually, “seen” is misleading. What Corot detected was the subtle, repeated dimming of the star Corot-7, 500 light-years away in the constellation Monoceros. This dimming, the team concluded, was caused by a planet orbiting so that it passed directly between the parent star and Earth, a so-called transit. “They’ve gone to great lengths to rule out any other explanations,” says David Charbonneau of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, a friendly rival of the Corot scientists. The amount of dimming—less than one-thirtieth of a percent —tells the astronomers that their new world, provisionally named Corot-7b, is about 15,000 miles wide. Its “year” is just 20.4 hours long because it orbits so close to its star, with daytime temperatures nearing 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. By September, Didier Queloz of the Geneva Observatory had weighed Corot-7b. Using the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher, or HARPS, at the European Southern Observatory in Chile, his team measured the planet’s gravitational influence on its parent star. The verdict: The planet is five times the mass of Earth and has about the same density, suggesting it is made of rock. In raw form, the new planet resembles our own world. Other enticing discoveries soon followed. Planet hunter Michel Mayor of Geneva University trained HARPS on the nearby star Gliese 581, 20 light-years away, and in April reported that it, too, has a little planet, possibly smaller than Corot-7b. The same set of observations indicated that another of Gliese 581’s planets—this one seven times the mass of Earth—orbits at the right distance for liquid water, making it the first alien world that could plausibly support life. In October the HARPS scientists announced that about 40 percent of the sunlike stars they have examined have small, potentially Earth-like companions. Also that month, Queloz’s team described a second super-Earth circling Corot-7. “Low-mass planets are everywhere, basically,” Mayor’s coworker Stephane Udry declared. And the real jackpot may not be far off. In March NASA’s Kepler satellite went into an unusual, Earth-trailing orbit looking for transiting planets. Its telescope is bigger than Corot’s, its orbit is more stable, and it is slated to scan 100,000 stars, while Corot is limited to 12,000. “If other Earths are out there,” says Kepler team member Charbonneau, “we’re going to find them.”
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How to Stash the C arb on
9
EXPERIMENTAL POWER PLANT TAKES THE CO2 OUT
Coal is a dirty business, one of the leading sources of carbon emissions in the United States. But coal is also a big business, generating 51 percent of the nation’s electricity. With that in mind, in June the Obama administration revived FutureGen, an advanced-technology coal-fired power plant axed by the previous administration in 2008. By burying
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60 percent of its carbon dioxide emissions deep underground, the 275-megawatt FutureGen plant, to be built in Mattoon, Illinois, seeks to show that coal can be, if not exactly clean, then at least cleaner. Once FutureGen is up and running—now scheduled to happen in 2014—the carbon dioxide gas it produces will be siphoned off, compressed
S T R I C K L A N D
1. CAPTURE IT AT THE SOURCE A coal-fired power plant in Spremberg, Germany, is using the same carbon capture and storage method planned for FutureGen. Engineers are having no trouble capturing the carbon dioxide, but efforts to store it in underground rock formations in eastern Germany have run into local opposition. 2. GRAB IT WITH ARTIFICIAL TREES To corral widely dispersed CO2 emissions from cars, “artificial trees”—towers filled with carbon-absorbing materials—could line roadways, pulling the gas from the air and compressing it into a storable form. Several companies, including Global Research Technologies in Tucson, are testing prototypes. 3. BURY IT UNDER THE SEA Some research groups have tried fertilizing the ocean with iron to encourage massive plankton blooms that suck carbon dioxide from the air. When the plankton dies and sinks to the seafloor, it should bury the carbon, but early results have not been impressive. Proposals to pump CO2 directly to the ocean bottom also seem unlikely to move forward, as the piped-in carbon could have nasty environmental consequences. 4. TURN IT INTO CHARCOAL Wood or other biomass heated slowly in a chamber without oxygen will transform into charcoal that does not decompose for thousands of years. In addition to locking away carbon, this “biochar” makes a good fertilizer. Carbonscape in New Zealand and a few other companies are now working on economical biochar-producing ovens. 5. TURN IT INTO ROCK Certain types of minerals naturally combine with carbon dioxide. In the right locations, CO2 injected into the ground at high pressure would react with those minerals to form stable carbonate rock. This approach is currently being tested in Oman and at other sites around the world.
into a near-liquid state, and piped at least a mile down into porous sandstone capped by a layer of impermeable shale. Engineers will essentially be trying to duplicate the geologic circumstances that trapped natural gas deposits underground for millions of years. Energy Secretary Steven Chu has called FutureGen “a flagship facility” that will demonstrate how to capture and store carbon on a commercial scale; that technology would allow us to rein in greenhousegas emissions while still burning coal. The project could also help spur other proposals
for sequestering humangenerated carbon (see above). But FutureGen has drawn criticism from left and right. Some environmentalists say America should shift from coalgenerated electricity entirely; others believe the goal of capturing 60 percent of emissions is too modest. Meanwhile, some fiscal conservatives disapprove of spending so much money (the Department of Energy has committed $1 billion) on an unproven technology for an established industry. Their nickname for the behind-schedule and overbudget project: NeverGen.
FRANS LANTING/CORBIS
ENERGY
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±I N T E R V I E W Economist GEORGE LOEWENSTEIN explains the psychology behind the current financial meltdown—and how we can overcome our dark side.
Classical economics is based on the premise that people act rationally, making logical decisions about how and why they spend their money. But a year that brought economic panic and the worst downturn since the Great Depression showed how wrong that assumption can be. Often we are self-defeating, irrational, and just plain foolish. More complete explanations of why people act the way they do are provided by behavioral economics, an emerging field that incorporates insights from cognitive and social psychology and neuroscience. George Loewenstein, Herbert A. Simon Professor of Economics and Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University and a leader in this field, spoke to DISCOVER about why smart people sometimes act so dumb.
Is the central insight of behavioral economics that people don’t always act in their own best interest? Absolutely. Behavioral economics provides a framework for explaining why people behave in a self-destructive fashion. It’s more realistic about human behavior. The economic collapse was in part precipitated by people taking on mortgages they couldn’t afford. They stood to lose a lot of money. What makes people do that? It points to a very important property of the human brain: We are not dispassionate information processors. If we want to believe something, we’re amazingly adept at persuading ourselves that what we want to believe is true. People thought
housing prices would always rise. That’s particularly amazing because in the 1990s we had a stock market bubble and bust, and during the bubble, commentators had been saying that the old rules of stock valuation don’t apply. Less than 10 years later, people became convinced again that an asset—in this case, housing—would indefinitely go up in value, and commentators were again saying the old rules don’t apply. That tells you about the failure to generalize. Another part of the explanation has to do with a kind of herd mentality. There is an instinctual feeling of safety in numbers. Why don’t we perceive these kinds of looming problems? Our fear system evolved to
deal with immediate threats. It’s not very good at dealing with gradually unfolding threats, like inflating market bubbles or global climate change. The smiling Bernie Madoff doesn’t seem scary, even though he should. He’s giving impossible returns year after year, but it’s not the kind of thing that triggers fear. Why are some people far more likely than others to buy into a bubble? Pessimists take longer to get persuaded that there really is a boom. Some sit out the whole boom-and-bust cycle and feel relieved at the end, but others capitulate at a late stage, with results that reinforce their pessimism. Another part of the answer lies in differences in tastes for taking risks. Some people can’t sleep at night if they take on too much real estate debt. Others seem utterly undisturbed by financial risk or even thrive on it. Why do people charge things they can’t pay off? Credit cards have pernicious psychological properties. It doesn’t feel like you’re spending money. You’re just swiping the card; you’re not giving anything up. In research with Stanford psychologist Brian Knutson; Scott Rick, now at the University of Michigan
text by KATHLEEN MCGOWAN photograph by ETHAN HILL
business school; and others, we scanned people’s brains and saw that regions responsible for feeling pain activate when people confront prices they feel are too high. When we use a credit card, it anesthetizes the pain of paying because it doesn’t feel like we’re spending money. Another nasty feature of credit cards is that it doesn’t feel like you are taking on debt, because there’s always the possibility of paying it off at the end of the month. How many people who end the year with $1,000 of revolving debt on their card would have agreed to take out a $1,000 loan to fund miscellaneous purchases? Very few. Some say high executive pay is needed to stimulate top performance, but you found something very different. Our belief was that very high levels of executive compensation couldn’t be justified on a motivational basis. We gave subjects seven different tasks, some of which were simple but effort-dependent, like adding strings of numbers. For mundane tasks, high incentives motivate people in an almost unlimited fashion. But with tasks that require creative solutions, as well as with athletic endeavors, people actually started to do badly when compensation was increased. When stakes are high, the brain tends to narrow its focus. This impairs performance on
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important to you: values you cherish or your own long-term self-interest. We think that the reason is a phenomenon called loss aversion. In a lot of competitive situations, people look at others whom they perceive to be at a higher level, which forms their reference. They feel themselves to be in the domain of losses, and they are desperate to get out. Much cheating, it seems, occurs not because people just want more but because they feel “in a hole” that they can get out of only by cheating.
the types of creative tasks that involve expansive thinking, such as drawing novel connections between disparate things. People can also become too focused on how much money they stand to
gain or lose, to the detriment of focusing on the task itself. But shouldn’t we reward ambition—the “greed is good” argument? We view greed as a form of
desperation. Hypermotivation, we call it. Greed is actually the antithesis of self-interest, because you’re so motivated to achieve some goal that you do it at the expense of other things that might be more
How can we outwit our own self-destructive tendencies? In the last several years, behavioral economics has started to offer solutions for a wide range of problems: obesity, addiction, failure to take medications, even global climate change. People are very shortsighted; they have what behavioral economists call “present bias preference.” Nowadays there are a lot of wellness programs in which people are incentivized to engage in exercise and other healthy behaviors. Small incentives can have a large impact on behavior if they are immediate, because they play on present bias preferences. Or take what is called the default effect: People tend to be lazy decision makers, taking the path of least resistance. And defaults are often unhealthy: At McDonald’s, for example, if you order a combo meal, the default includes a soda. We did field research at a fast-food restaurant showing that if you make the healthy options just slightly more convenient—for example, with an “express menu” that has healthy options but requires turning the page to see the full menu—you can get people to eat more healthily. You can use laziness to help people.
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MEDICINE || EVOLUTION || MIND || SPACE
The Age of Genetic Medicine Begins In 2009 gene therapy rebounded from years of highprofile failures—including unexpected deaths and cancers—to produce startling triumphs. By fixing defects written into patients’ DNA, medical researchers treated two serious genetic disorders. “At last we are on the brink of fulfilling the promises that gene therapy made two decades ago,” says geneticist Fabio Candotti of the National Institutes of Health. In February molecular biologist Alessandro Aiuti of the San Raffaele Telethon Institute for Gene Therapy in Milan reported that his team had cured nine of ten infants born with bubble baby disease, a devastating disorder caused by a single defective gene. Newborns with the condition, also known as severe combined immunodeficiency disease, lack a functioning immune system. Aiuti and his team harvested stem cells from the infants and then infected those cells with an engineered virus carrying healthy copies of the missing gene. When the modified stem cells were injected back into the newborns, they spawned a normal immune system. Candotti has reported similar success establishing a
These sponges from the Eocene may resemble the earth’s first animals.
functioning immune system in two bubble babies. Just months earlier, molecular geneticist and physician Jean Bennett and her husband, retinal surgeon Albert Maguire of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, reported that gene therapy had improved vision in a teenage boy with Leber congenital amaurosis (LCA). A mutation in any of 13 genes causes this rare condition, which progressively leads to blindness. Bennett and her team injected a benign virus carrying a corrected copy of the gene into the boy’s retina, where it helped the eye make rods and cones. Even receiving only modest doses, other young patients given a working version of the gene in one eye were also able to see better. In a phase 1 clinical trial, published in The Lancet, all the children involved gained enough vision to walk independently. “The results are better than anything I could have dreamed of,” Bennett says. The remarkable turnaround in gene therapy is largely due to scientists’ increasingly refined ability to engineer the viruses used to deliver healthy genes to the cells that need them. Using new viruses and better techniques, gene therapists have begun tackling cancer and HIV. Clinical trials are under way on both. JILL NEIMARK
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Oldest Animal Fossils Uncovered The origin of animals has long perplexed scientists. DNA studies of creatures living today suggest that their common ancestor appeared nearly 800 million years ago, yet the fossil record contains no clear evidence of animals more than 555 million years old. Two new discoveries are starting to resolve that apparent conflict. Together they push the fossil record of animals back another 300 million years. In a study published in Nature in February, researchers reported finding a steroid compound (called 24-isopropylcholestane) in 675-million-yearold stone cores, drilled from former seabeds up to
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Hope for HIV Vaccine An international team of researchers announced in September that for the first time, an AIDS vaccine has demonstrated some real ability to prevent HIV infections in a large clinical trial, reducing the odds of infection by about 31 percent.
The trial followed more than 16,000 people (who initially tested HIV-free) for three and a half years. They received either a combination of two potential vaccines or placebo shots. By the end, 74 placebo recipients had acquired HIV infections, compared with 51 vaccinated individuals. The trial report, published in October, included
Top: LCA eye prior to therapy. Bottom: Healthy eye.
three miles beneath the deserts of Oman. Sponges are the only organisms known to produce appreciable amounts of this steroid, and geochemist Gordon Love of the University of California at Riverside interprets the chemical signature as evidence that spongelike animals had evolved by then. Another team reported in Geology in May that they had found meshlike patterns suggestive of sponges in 850-million-year-old rocks. They turned up in an ancient reef built by cyanobacteria, says Fritz Neuweiler of Laval University in Quebec. The earth’s early oceans initially contained little oxygen, but cyanobacteria produce it as a by-product of photosynthesis. “Here we have a local oxygenated environment,” Neuweiler says, “and this would have supported these early animals.” DOUGLAS FOX
alternative analyses that put the vaccine’s effectiveness slightly lower, at around 26 percent, leading some to question the reliability of the results. The researchers reply that all of the analyses consistently support a modest protective effect. AIDS researcher Jay Levy at the University of California at San Francisco finds the results
encouraging, but notes that the vaccines seemed to have no effect on the amount of virus in the bloodstream of people who contracted HIV during the study. Nelson Michael of the U.S. Military HIV Research Program, which helped run the trial, is more optimistic: “We’ve shown that this 26-year global effort has not been in vain.” NAYANAH SIVA
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: DR. JEAN BENNETT; NASA/JPL/UCLA; D. HURST/ALAMY; SINCLAIR STAMMERS/PHOTO RESEARCHERS
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Intact Tissue Found in Dinosaur When scientists uncovered a 68-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex fossil in Montana sandstone in 2000, they never expected to find traces of tissue. So when paleontologist Mary Schweitzer’s initial analysis of the fossil showed delicately preserved collagen protein, skepticism reigned. But in May, Schweitzer, of North Carolina State University, replicated the results and also announced a bigger find: a collection of even larger protein fragments from an 80-million-year-old duck-billed dinosaur called Brachylophosaurus canadensis. The fragments revealed more evidence of collagen
and suggested the presence of two proteins—laminin and elastin—found in the blood vessels of animals. “This type of preservation isn’t supposed to be possible,” Schweitzer says, “but here it is.” Her new discovery addressed many issues raised by critics of the T. rex work. For instance, her team adopted painstaking tactics to avoid contamination. In the lab, they used sterilized tools to sample the sandstone-encrusted thighbone, and specimens were quickly sealed in jars. “Obtaining amino acid sequence data can show where extinct animals fit in the tree of life,” she says. “It’s a work in progress, but molecular paleontology might show us how dinosaurs are related to each other and even provide some physiological insights if we’re really lucky.” AMY BARTH
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Model Solves Fundamental Packing Problem The county-fair challenge of guessing how many gum balls are in a jar is far more than just a game for kids; understanding how objects pack into a particular volume is a fundamental problem of physics and engineering. A team of physicists at New York University recently loosened the problem a bit, producing a simple model that predicts the arrangement of randomly packed spherical particles, even when the objects are of different sizes. Theorists had previously calculated that each particle touches an average of six neighbors, and that packed spheres of uniform size fill about 64 percent of the total available space. Jasna Brujic and colleagues experimentally verified both of those claims using a three-dimensional microscope—which examines many horizontal layers of a sample and then stacks those images to create a 3-D image—to analyze oil droplets tightly packed in water. The physicists also studied how changing the mix of droplet sizes affects their arrangement. “If you give us the distribution of particle sizes, we can tell you about their geometry,” Brujic says. The research, published in Nature in July, could inspire better ways to stock vending machines, prepare products for shipping, grind drugs for pills, and extract petroleum from porous rocks. But so far Brujic has modeled only spheres; contestants dealing with gumdrops or M&M’s will have to wait for future studies. STEPHEN ORNES
The Moon: Cold, Wet, and Breathing It is our closest neighbor in space, yet the moon continues to surprise us as new lunar missions overturn old ideas about Earth’s satellite. In October NASA intentionally crashed the 2.8-ton upper stage of a Centaur rocket into a crater near the lunar south pole. Four minutes later, the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Spacecraft (LCROSS) followed, analyzing the dust kicked up by the impact. NASA anticipated a debris plume 30 miles high, which should have been visible from Earth with a 10-inch telescope. The smashup proved more whimper than bang for amateur observers, but LCROSS team members were thrilled. “We got wonderful measurements from all phases of the impact: the flash, the ejecta plume, and the resulting crater formed by Centaur,” says LCROSS principal investigator Anthony Colaprete of NASA’s Ames Research Center. He and colleagues are still analyzing the data from ultraviolet, visual, and infrared spectroscopy to measure the chemical composition of the lunar material. “We’re looking for water vapor or ice, as well as hydrocarbons and other volatiles,” he says. The LCROSS results will flesh out the surprise announcements in September that three other spacecraft—India’s Chandrayaan-1 and NASA’s Deep Impact and Cassini—detected traces of water on the moon’s surface by studying reflected infrared light from the sun. The water’s origins are unclear. One possibility is that hydrogen ions from the solar wind bond with oxygen in the lunar soil, says University of Maryland astronomer Jessica Sunshine, deputy principal investigator on Deep Impact. Results like these belie the moon’s image as an inert rock, Colaprete says. “It is an active, breathing body.” The moon might have more water deposited by icy comets landing in cold, permanently shadowed craters at the south pole. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), circling the moon at an altitude of 31 miles, recently sent back the first global temperature maps of the surface (at right). Some of those craters dip to around –400 degrees Fahrenheit, the coldest places ever measured in the solar system. LRO’s neutron detector suggests the presence of water in deep freeze there. The orbiter is also measuring radiation, looking for good spots for future exploration, and mapping the moon’s topography to 100-meter resolution. JENNIFER BARONE
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The Common Cold Is Decoded If knowing your enemy is half the battle, we may yet defeat the common cold. A paper published last April in Science detailed how geneticists sequenced the RNA from 100 strains of rhinovirus—all the known types of the leading cause of the cold. Pulmonologist Stephen Liggett of the University of Maryland School of Medicine says his team found regions of the genome that are similar across all strains. Those sequences, presumably essential to survival, are prime targets for new drugs. Equally notable are the bits of RNA that differ, which may explain why some bugs are nastier than others. Rhinoviruses can instigate asthma or trigger severe wheezing episodes in asthmatics, but it is unclear whether only certain strains of the virus are to blame. Looking at large numbers of rhinovirus genomes may provide answers. “Just saying it’s rhinovirus is not sufficient, because there is so much diversity,” Liggett says. And don’t throw out your tissues just yet: No one knows how to defeat any of the strains, and Liggett’s group believes there are many more to be identified. The team is now sequencing 3,000 samples collected from patients at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. MEGAN TALKINGTON
18 Rise of the Mind Readers Magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, has become a powerful tool for evaluating brain anatomy, but a newer incarnation of the technology called fMRI (the f stands for functional ) can probe even more deeply. In studies published over the past year, neuroscientists have shown that fMRI can peel away the secrets of emotion and thought; in fact, some of their findings are almost like mind reading. w Using fMRI, New York University neuroscientist Elizabeth Phelps has identified two brain regions—the amygdala and the posterior cingulate cortex, associated with emotional learning and decision making—that are crucial in forming first impressions. “Even when we only briefly encounter others, these regions are activated,” Phelps says. w At Georgetown University Medical Center, a team used fMRI to study how we mentally encode music. When we hear a sequence of familiar songs, our brains show high levels of activity during the
silence between tracks, indicating anticipation. When we hear music we do not know, our brains are relatively inactive because we cannot anticipate the song. The prefrontal cortex, premotor cortex, and basal ganglia, which signal the body to act and move, seem to direct this response. w Other fMRI studies show how the brain discerns true statements from false ones. According to researchers at the University of Lisbon and at Vita-Salute in Milan, false statements activate a section of the brain’s frontal polar cortex, which is related to problem solving. True statements trigger the left inferior parietal cortex and the caudate nucleus, areas of the brain related to memory.
University College London, who scanned subjects who were navigating a virtual reality simulation. Just from the pattern of activity in the hippocampus—a part of the brain instrumental to our ability to navigate—the researchers could determine where each subject was located within the simulation. “Different spatial positions are associated with different patterns of activity in the hippocampus,” Maguire says. JANE BOSVELD
w The work closest to mind reading comes from Demis Hassabis and Eleanor Maguire at
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New Battery Tech Could Transform the Car Last year the car battery turned glamorous: Hybrid hysteria invigorated the faltering auto industry, and General Motors touted its upcoming plug-in hybrid, the Chevy Volt, at every opportunity. For decades researchers have labored to make batteries smaller, cheaper, and more efficient. At last some of those projects are yielding encouraging results. The latest electric vehicles use lithium-ion batteries, in which lithium ions move from anode to cathode (negative to positive), transforming chemical energy into electric current. These batteries are smaller, lighter, and more robust than their nickel-based or leadacid predecessors. IBM announced in June that it is pursuing a new kind of lithium battery that uses the surrounding air as a cathode, making it even lighter and more compact than existing designs. Traditional lead-acid batteries (like the one that starts
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your car) produce energy for as little as one-tenth the cost of lithium batteries, but they wear out more quickly and are heavy. Blended battery packs, pioneered this year by Indy Power Systems of Noblesville, Indiana, strike a balance. Software switches between lead-acid and lithium-ion batteries, offering a transitional technology until lithium energy storage gets cheaper. Engineers are also finding ways to shorten recharging times. In March an MIT team unveiled technology that could theoretically charge an electric car in five minutes rather than the eight hours that is typical today. MIT’s battery contains a vast number of microscopic particles that have a lithium center and a glassy phosphate coating. The coating allows lithium ions, which travel quickly in the core of the battery but slowly at the surface, to maintain their speed and to be shed quickly. “The coating allows the lithium to get to the right place on the phosphate very fast,” says Gerbrand Ceder of the MIT team. “We fixed the bottleneck at the surface.” One company has already licensed the technology. JOCELYN RICE
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How Has Christianity Changed over 2,000 Years? In the first centuries after Christ, there was no “official” New Testament. Instead, early Christians read and fervently followed a wide variety of scriptures—many more than we have today. Relying on these writings, Christians held beliefs that today would be considered bizarre. Some believed that there were 2, 12, or as many as 30 gods. Some thought that a malicious deity, rather than the true God, created the world. Some maintained that Christ’s death and resurrection had nothing to do with salvation while others insisted that Christ never really died at all. What did these “other” scriptures say? Do they exist today? How could such outlandish ideas ever be considered Christian? If such beliefs were once common, why do they no longer exist? These are just a few of the many provocative questions that arise from Lost Christianities: Christian Scriptures and the Battles over Authentication, an insightful 24-lecture course taught by Professor Bart D. Ehrman, the Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author and editor of 17 books, including The New York Times bestseller Misquoting Jesus. This course is one of The Great Courses®, a noncredit, recorded college lecture series from The Teaching Company®. Award-winning professors of a wide array of subjects in the sciences and the liberal arts have made more than 300 college-level courses that are available now on our website.
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MIND || ASTRONOMY || ENVIRONMENT || TECHNOLOGY || ANTHROPOLOGY || BIOLOGY
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Can a Shock to the Brain Cure Depression? For years, deep-brain stimulation— in which a neurosurgeon drills a hole in the skull and inserts an electrode far into a patient’s brain tissue—was considered a radical treatment, reserved for the most severe cases of Parkinson’s disease. Now neurologists are exploring the treatment for disorders ranging from depression to Alzheimer’s disease. In 2009 two clinical trials began testing deep-brain stimulation (DBS) to ease intractable depression. The process was given a green light by the Food and Drug Administration to treat the worst cases of obsessive-compulsive disorder after a small pilot study showed promising results. Mount Sinai School of Medicine neurologist Giulio Pasinetti is in the early stages of testing DBS for Alzheimer’s disease, and neurosurgeon Bomin Sun of the Center of Functional Neurosurgery at Shanghai Jiao Tong University is harnessing it to treat anorexia. Across a range of disorders, deep-brain stimulation works much the same way: A pacemaker-like device in the chest transmits a signal to the implanted electrode via wires that run underneath the scalp. The device is thought to modulate electrical activity in the circuitry of the dysfunctional brain, explains Oxford University neurosurgeon Tipu Aziz, who is exploring DBS as a treatment for cluster headaches. The new studies build on work by Emory University neurologist Helen Mayberg. In 2005 she showed that direct modulation of specific brain circuits could help severely depressed patients who had not responded to other treatments. “The concept of tuning brain circuits is a new strategy,” she says. Neuroimaging can pinpoint regions of dysfunctional brain activity, making it possible to understand the underlying biology of a disorder and correct abnormal rhythms of the brain. K ATHLEEN MCGOWAN
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Fresh Hints of Life on Mars For scientists hunting for life on Mars, the new buzzword is methane. In 2003 a group studying the Red Planet saw the spectral signal of methane gas, often a sign of biological activity on Earth. Since then, Michael Mumma, director of NASA’s Goddard Center for Astrobiology, has monitored Mars closely. In January he announced his results: Broad plumes of methane emanate from the planet’s surface, “fundamentally changing our understanding of Mars.” To track the methane, Mumma dispatched observers to NASA’s InfraRed Telescope Facility and the W. M. Keck Observatory, both in Hawaii. The astronomers expected to find the gas spread uniformly. Instead they detected localized clouds that appeared only at certain times—once in 2003 and again in 2005, during the Martian northern summer and southern spring. “We have found plumes that exist only in warmer periods, when methane is released along with water,” says physicist Robert Novak of Iona College in New Rochelle, New York. The variability of the methane suggests that the gas may be spewed by an ongoing geologic process like volcanism, or possibly through the metabolic activity of microbes. If underground life is the source, methane might be released during the warmer months as the ice melts. “If life existed on Mars, it would break down chemically and methane would be a product,” Novak says. Mumma remains cautious: “We wouldn’t dare say we’ve detected biology.” But the search is on. In 2011 NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory will touch down to sniff out evidence for methane, other organics, and life. HEATHER MAYER
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ClearCutting Has a High Cost For people living in poverty in the Amazon, cutting down the rain forest often appears to be the only way to thrive economically—first by selling the lumber, later by farming and ranching on the land. A study published in Science in June indicates otherwise. Despite gaining some temporary benefits, communities that clear-cut their forests end up no better off than those who do not. Ana Rodrigues of the Centre for Functional and Evolutionary Ecology in France and her colleagues found that Amazonian towns in the midst of a deforestation
binge initially see higher life expectancies, literacy rates, and incomes. But once the local forest is gone, income from timber typically dries up, the researchers believe; many farms and cattle ranches are abandoned after a few years because the nutrient-poor soil rapidly becomes depleted. “The current development strategy results in a lose-loselose situation,” Rodrigues says. It destroys the rain forest habitat, fails to alleviate pov-
erty, and contributes to global warming by eliminating trees that would absorb and store carbon dioxide. “The challenge now is to create a development path that is win-win-win.” One possibility, Rodrigues suggests, could be to create a provision in the next international climatechange treaty requiring wealthy countries with high carbon emissions to pay Brazilians for the environmental benefits of keeping their forests standing. ELIZA STRICKLAND
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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: TRENT SCHINDLER/NASA; TYLER BOLEY/GETTY IMAGES; MASTERFILE; RICARDO FUNARI/BRAZILPHOTOS/PHOTOSHELTER
Computer Learns to Reason Like Isaac Newton Describing the basic laws of physics occupied Sir Isaac Newton for decades. In April scientists unveiled a computer program that can analyze data and independently derive those fundamental physical laws within a matter of hours. This program could relieve major logjams in scientific research. Modern instruments like space observatories, particle colliders, and gene chips produce vast amounts of data, and mining that data is a slow, laborious process. Smart software—a synthetic scientist, in essence—could greatly speed it up. Cornell University roboticist Hod Lipson and his Ph.D. student Michael Schmidt developed their system to analyze data from the kinds of mechanics experiments that college students encounter in introductory physics courses: observing the motion of a swinging pendulum or of two weights bouncing on connected springs, for instance. An automatic camera fed data directly to their computer program, which then tried millions of mathematical expressions to identify which ones held true from one experiment to the next. Using an evolutionary algorithm, the program randomly varied the winning equations to match the data more closely. In this way it “discovered” a handful of natural laws, including conservation of energy and momentum. Complex experiments required as much as 40 hours, simple ones as little as 10 minutes. The Cornell program “won’t replace scientists anytime soon,” Schmidt says. “But it will let them look in a more efficient way at what might be interesting.” Gene chips, for instance, can measure the expression of thousands of genes at a time, but the important question is how one gene regulates others within that incredibly complex web of relationships. Smart software could rapidly flag interesting patterns—such as the way that levels of one protein depend on six others—so that researchers could then follow up with targeted experiments. DOUGLAS FOX
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World’s First Grain Silos Discovered in Jordan In June archaeologist Ian Kuijt at the University of Notre Dame and colleagues reported that they had uncovered the world’s earliest known granaries, located at the Dhra archaeological site on the shore of the Dead Sea in Jordan. In a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team describes food storage structures dating back 11,000 years, a millennium before humans were thought to have domesticated crops. Analysis of grains from the
site suggests that settlers there stored a mix of wild and cultivated barley, along with an early variety of wheat. “The surprise is not only that they were storing food but that they were storing it in such a sophisticated way,” Kuijt says. The granary floors at Dhra were elevated, most likely to keep out mice and to prevent spoilage from dampness; they were also slightly sloped, perhaps for drainage. By providing a buffer against famine and allowing larger groups of people to settle together, these storehouses may have fostered the cultural transition from bands of hunter-gatherers to complex, cohesive societies. “Stored food can be used as a form of social currency,” Kuijt notes. “It literally changes everything.” LINDSEY KONKEL
To stave off aging, Americans spend billions of dollars every year on supplements, gyms, even therapists. But a report released in July suggests that the secret to a longer life may simply involve a new twist on an old adage: Watch what you eat. A study of adult rhesus macaques showed that the monkeys were one-third as likely to die from age-related diseases if they consumed 30 percent fewer calories than they did in their regular diet. Previous, well-publicized research had shown that restricting calories can increase the life span of creatures ranging from fruit flies to dogs, for reasons still unclear. But the latest trial, led by geriatrics expert Richard Weindruch at the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center and published in Science, is the first to show that caloric restriction can improve survival in primates. This kind of research takes enormous patience. Weindruch has spent 20 years studying his monkeys. In that time, the dieting ones have shown reductions in diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and even brain atrophy. They are also visibly fluffier and sturdier compared with their fully fed counterparts. “Slowing the aging process through calorie restriction spills over to primates and probably people,” Weindruch says. Pharmaceutical companies are now seeking a drug that mimics the benefits of a restrictive diet without the sacrifice. In July an independent team reported in Nature that rapamycin, an immune-suppressing drug, increases longevity in elderly mice by up to 38 percent. At the Jackson Laboratory in Maine, gerontologist David Harrison and his team chose to test rapamycin, which is already approved for use in procedures such as kidney transplants, because previous research showed that the drug increases the life span of flies and may reduce cancer in mammals. “We’re not claiming to achieve immortality,” Harrison says, “but rapamycin is a step toward expanding healthy life span by about 10 years.” AMY BARTH
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J. CRAIG VENTER on biology’s next leap: digitally designed life-forms that could produce novel drugs, renewable fuels, and plentiful food for tomorrow’s world.
J. Craig Venter keeps riding the cusp of each new wave in biology. When researchers started analyzing genes, he launched the Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR), decoding the genome of a bacterium for the first time in 1992. When the government announced its plan to map the human genome, he claimed he would do it first—and then he delivered results in 2001, years ahead of schedule. Armed with a deep understanding of how DNA works, Venter is now moving on to an even more extraordinary project. Starting with the stunning genetic diversity that exists in the wild, he is aiming to build custom-designed organisms that could produce clean energy, help feed the planet, and treat cancer. Venter has already transferred the genome of one species into the cell body of another. This past year he reached a major milestone, using the machinery of yeast to manufacture a genome from scratch. When he combines the steps—perhaps next year—he will have crafted a truly synthetic organism. Senior editor Pamela Weintraub discussed the implications of these efforts with Venter in DISCOVER’s editorial offices.
Here you are talking about constructing life, but you started out in deconstruction: charting the human genome, piece by piece. Actually, I started out smaller, studying the adrenaline receptor. I was looking at one protein and its single gene for a decade. Then, in the late 1980s, I was drawn to the idea of the whole genome, and I stopped everything and switched my lab over. I had the first automatic DNA sequencer. It was the ultimate
in reductionist biology— getting down to the genetic code, interpreting what it meant, including all 6 billion letters of my own genome. Only by understanding things at that level can we turn around and go the other way. In your latest work you are trying to create “synthetic life.” What is that? It’s a catchy phrase that people have begun using to replace “molecular biology.” The term has been over-
used, so we have defined a separate field that we call synthetic genomics—the digitization of biology using only DNA and RNA. You start by sequencing genomes and putting their digital code into a computer. Then you use the computer to take that information and design new life-forms. How do you build a lifeform? Throw in some mitochondria here and some ribosomes there, surround it all with a membrane— and voilà? We started down that road, but now we are coming from the other end. We’re starting with the accomplishments of three and a half billion years of evolution by using what we call the software of life: DNA. Our software builds its own hardware. By writing new software, we can come up with totally new species. It would be as if once you put new software in your computer, somehow a whole new machine would materialize. We’re software engineers rather than construction workers. But the DNA software works only if you can use it to piece together an actual genome outside the machine, right?
text by PAMELA WEINTRAUB photography by MACKENZIE STROH
The initial challenge there was straightforward: Could we construct pieces of DNA large enough to make up a chromosome? When we looked in the literature, the answer was no. DNA synthesizers, which have been around for 30 years, made only short pieces. That was the basis of all the work we’d done in DNA sequencing. When you get beyond 20 or 30 nucleotides [the “letters” of DNA—each gene is made of hundreds or thousands of nucleotides], the error rate gets larger and larger. So making larger sections of DNA required a different approach? Right. In 2003 we made our first synthetic virus, and it was 100 percent accurate. We did it by taking viral DNA and putting it in a cell, in this case E. coli. The E. coli was able to read the genetic code and make proteins that self-assembled to form the virus. At that point we knew we could accurately make DNA pieces of 5,000 base pairs, the size of the small viruses. The goal was to make a 600,000-base-pair bacterial chromosome. We thought we could do that by putting serial pieces together, but solving the chemistry was a huge challenge. We exhausted the genetics of E. coli and found we could grow these
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large pieces of synthetic DNA only by harnessing yeast. What made you realize that yeast could help you? We’d been studying Deinococcus radiodurans, the Conan the Barbarian of bacteria. You can expose it to more than 3 million rads of radiation and it won’t be killed. Its chromosomes get blown apart into hundreds of small pieces, but then over 12 or 24 hours it reassembles its DNA exactly as it was before. We were trying to capture that system when we discovered that yeast does the same thing, only not with radiation: Yeast can take the pieces of DNA that we make and do the assembly work for us. Last August you reported cloning the entire genome of a bacterium, Mycoplasma mycoides. What’s next? Now we add the yeast centromere [the section of yeast DNA involved in reconstruction] to the DNA of the organisms we are synthesizing. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle. We throw in the pieces and the yeast component automatically assembles them the right way. It thinks it’s just assembling and repairing one of its own chromosomes. Then you have to boot up the genome in a living cell to generate the hardware, the life-form itself. How will you do that? In one of our most important experiments, we took the DNA from one bacterial cell and treated it with harsh enzymes to destroy any proteins. We found that if we transplanted that naked DNA into another bacterial species, along with associated restriction enzymes
[molecular scissors that cut DNA in specific places], the cell’s original DNA would be destroyed. The transplanted DNA would take over instead. So now we had the cell of one species containing the DNA of another species. In a short time, all the original proteins disappeared, and we ended up with a cell that had totally transformed from one species into another. So you have transplanted a natural genome, and you have created a synthetic one. How close are you to combining these steps, transferring a synthetic genome so it takes over a foreign cell? I now joke that I predict it’s going to happen this year, but I’ve done that for the last two years. It’s a technicality in one respect because what we’re showing is that DNA is DNA. But truly being able to make a working synthetic genome—I think it’s a proof that’s important. Once we have the power to create new life-forms, how will we benefit? We could synthesize cells that use carbon dioxide and make other things from it. If this desk and that plastic chair protector were made from CO2, it would solve the problem of how to sequester CO2 from the atmosphere and would totally solve the question of paper versus plastic. You’d absolutely want plastic bags if they could be made from carbon dioxide and not from oil. What else could we do? We could solve the problem of fuel production. In theory, we could replace fuel that comes out of the ground with things made from carbon dioxide on a new scale. We could make small-scale microbial fuel cells
that use human waste to make drinking water, electricity, or both. Could algae be used for food? Imagine using algae to make artificial steaks. Look at all the bacteria in the oceans; they have far more sophisticated chemicals than our chemistry industry can produce. A lot of these are antibacterial or antiviral compounds, because that’s how bacteria protect themselves in the environment. If we’re ever going to have a chance of using these compounds, we’re going to have to make them synthetically. What about safeguards and risks? As with computer hacking, some people are itching to do these “biological hacking” experiments with synthetic life in their basements and backyards. You can buy a DNA synthesizer off eBay, and an enterprising person could build a DNA synthesizer from plans they can get off the Internet. We don’t try to downplay the risk. Because these tools are so powerful, somebody could, just by ordering a handful of chemicals, pretty cheaply make viruses that could cause a lot of damage or death to a large number of people. We don’t want kids trying to be the first one on their block to build a virus, so I think there should be laws for simple screening. The synthetic DNA companies that make these products should be required to screen them against a list of infectious agents. It would be easy to screen someone trying to copy Ebola, for example. A lot of the companies do it voluntarily now, but they don’t all do it, and on a global basis they
definitely don’t all do it. Maybe we can’t prevent somebody really dedicated to doing harm, but we can prevent the frivolous uses of this technology. Could synthetic biology extend all the way to humans? Could we use the technology to make better versions of ourselves? We have no clue of how to do it now. We’re still struggling with the smallest bacterial cell, in which we don’t know what even one-fifth of the genes do. We do not have the computing power on the planet to make a synthetic human genome. We don’t have any way of collecting the data to do it right now. So the notion of trying to change our genome, I find at this stage of our knowledge almost an immoral discussion. It would have to be blind human experimentation, not caring what the outcome would be. But one day we’ll know more—what then? History will view these first synthetic genomes as a bright dividing line, just like the line before and after the reading of the genetic code. Through these experiments we have been able to write the genetic code while we’re continuing to read it more and more quickly. Advances in biology should continue at a phenomenal, exponential pace. We could learn more next year than we learned in the entire prior history of science. Twenty years from now, the things we’re doing now will look frighteningly primitive. My view of humanity is that we will find it irresistible to try to use these technologies to change ourselves. I confess, I think we’ll do it, but perhaps not we ourselves.
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History will view these first synthetic genomes as a bright dividing line, just like the line before and after the reading of the genetic code.
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BIOLOGY || SPACE || MIND || ENVIRONMENT || MEDICINE
Genetic Disease Cured With Two Moms Mitochondria are the powerhouses that provide our bodies’ cells with the energy they need to function. So when mitochondrial genes go awry, the result is hereditary disorders that wreak havoc on organs with high energy requirements, like the brain and the heart. In September, researchers announced that they had demonstrated a way to replace defective mitochondria with healthy ones. Moreover, they were able to perform the repair before an egg cell was even fertilized. Geneticist Shoukhrat Mitalipov of Oregon Health and Science University and his team took the nucleus out of an egg from a macaque monkey, removing almost all of the genetic material but leaving the mitochondria and their DNA. The researchers then injected the nucleus of an egg from a second macaque, fertilized the cell with sperm, and implanted it in the second monkey’s womb. The technique has yielded four healthy babies. The same procedure could be used to transplant DNA from a human egg with mitochondrial disorders into one with healthy mitochondria. “This offers real treatment for many diseases,” Mitalipov says. “And not in 20 years. It can be used now to prevent thousands of birth defects.” The process would yield a baby with two biological mothers, raising prickly legal and ethical questions. But Mitalipov points out that only 37 mitochondrial genes would be replaced; the 25,000 nuclear genes that make up an embryo’s DNA and define all of a person’s external traits would remain unchanged. AMY BARTH
29 Probe Shows
28Mercury’s
Hidden Face Three preliminary flybys of Mercury by NASA’s Messenger spacecraft have given scientists a vast amount of new information about the solar system’s smallest, hottest planet. The only other spacecraft to visit Mercury—Mariner 10, which swung past in 1974 and 1975—left nearly half of the surface unseen. Messenger’s new maps fill in most of the gaps and show that about 40 percent of the landscape has been shaped by volcanism, indicating widespread geologic activity in Mercury’s past. Peering down into impact craters, the probe’s cameras have seen evidence that the planet was shaped by several massive floods of lava billions of years ago. The most recent flyby, this past September, also clarified why Mercury still has a slight atmosphere even though its gravity is too weak to maintain one for long. Powerful solar winds press through Mercury’s magnetic field to blast away material from the planet’s surface. That material replenishes the atmosphere as it continuously drifts away into space. Sodium is prominent in the atmosphere at the poles (where the solar wind penetrates most easily), suggesting that the surface there contains sodium-rich rocks. Nearer the equator calcium predominates, and magnesium is everywhere. All of this is just a preview of the full Messenger mission that begins in March 2011, when the spacecraft will settle into orbit for at least a year of continuous, close-up observations. At that point, the trickle of data on Mercury will become a flood. “It has been wonderful,” says principal investigator Sean Solomon of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, “but this is just the beginning.” MICHAEL D . LEMONICK
A mitochondrion
Sunbaked Mercury, captured by Messenger during the spacecraft’s September flyby, reveals previously unseen craters and lava flows.
Another Baby Boom Hits Rich Nations Population dynamics are m o re c o m p l e x t h a n w e thought. Fertility rates generally decline as development rises, and this has indeed been happening in most industrialized nations. Birthrates in Italy, Germany, and Japan, for instance, have dipped to 1.3 children or fewer per woman. But recently a team of sociologists in the United States and Italy revealed a twist in this pattern. When development—measured by income, education, and life span—improves past a certain point, they find, fertility picks up again. The study was published in August in the journal Nature. The anticipated boost in fertility rates is not large enough to alter projections that the global population will level off by midcentury, says study coauthor Hans-Peter Kohler, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania. In fact, birthrates in most highly developed countries are still too low to maintain the national population. (The United States is an exception, with fertility rates near the replacement level of 2.1 births per woman.) But the new analysis may provide some relief for nations that fear they soon will not have enough middle-aged workers to support their growing elderly population. The researchers are now investigating why a wide range of developed countries, despite their differing social structures, appear to be experiencing a similar and unexpected uptick in birthrates. “There is clearly not a one-size-fits-all set of institutions and policies that facilitate higher fertility,” Kohler says. MEGAN TALKINGTON
THIS PAGE, FROM LEFT: PROFESSORS PIETRO M. MOTTA & TOMONORI NAGURO/PHOTO RESEARCHERS; NASA. OPPOSITE, FROM TOP: MICHAEL MELFORD/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC; MASTERFILE
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Hunters Accelerate the Pace of Evolution Humans are powerful agents of evolutionary change: Wild animals and plants that are hunted or harvested evolve three times as quickly as they would naturally, according to a study from the University of California at Santa Cruz. In our quest to bag the biggest and the best, we introduce selective pressures that favor less desirable creatures, such as those with smaller bodies or less majestic horns. Hunting also gives a competitive advantage to animals that have babies when they are younger, before they become tempting targets for humans. A team led by biologist Chris Darimont combed through data on dozens of species—predominantly fish but also
bighorn sheep, caribou, marine invertebrates, and two plants. (“Hunters also want the biggest ginseng,” Darimont says.) Animals that are routinely subject to pursuit are, on average, 20 percent smaller and reproduce at a 25 percent younger age than what would be expected without human influence, the researchers determined. Predation is not the only way that people affect populations. Creatures that are exposed to environmental influences like pollution also experience accelerated evolution, although the effect is less dramatic. The resulting changes have ripple effects, Darimont notes. Smaller and earlier breeders often produce fewer offspring, for instance. “Size really matters,” he says. “If a harvested animal keeps shrinking, it may no longer be prey to its predator. The whole food web can be altered.” AMY BARTH
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Sun’s Changes Have Surprise Effects on Earth’s Weather Scientists have long suspected that the sun affects climate on Earth, but that connection has proved hard to pin down. Researchers recently demonstrated that the 11-year cycle of solar activity influences weather in the tropical Pacific Ocean. Even then the exact cause remained obscure, since the sun’s brightness varies by just one-tenth of a percent. Two studies from 2009 are filling in the gaps. In August an international team led by Gerald Meehl, a climatologist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research, announced that the sun’s outsize influence results from its combined effects on our atmosphere and oceans. When the sun is at its most intense, ozone in the stratosphere absorbs more ultraviolet energy, making areas near the equator warmer than usual. The added heat changes wind patterns, bringing more rain to the western tropics. At the same time, the extra sunlight causes more evaporation off the ocean, which adds to downpours in the western tropics. Simulations that modeled just one of these effects failed to match the real world. Meehl saw that the two mechanisms “feed off each other, producing a stronger response than either can alone.” His results should help climatologists predict monsoons in Asia and overall climate in North America and might someday allow them to estimate seasonal rainfall years in advance. Meanwhile, Henrik Svensmark of the Technical University of Denmark and his colleagues are exploring a broader climate impact of solar activity. He believes that cosmic rays—energetic subatomic particles from outer space—help seed cloud-forming water droplets in the lower atmosphere. During peak solar activity, eruptions from the sun spew out huge clouds of plasma that shield Earth from those cosmic rays. After examining cloud cover and cosmic ray fluxes, Svensmark concluded that declines in cosmic rays lead to fewer clouds, implying that an active sun could lead to warmer surface temperatures. Following the strongest solar eruptions, he found that the sky lost 7 percent of its cloud water. Many scientists doubt the significance of these cosmic ray effects, but Svensmark sees the question as ripe for investigation. “The sun is doing natural experiments on Earth’s atmosphere, giving us the opportunity to test these ideas,” he says. JANET FANG
2 Fake DNA 3Fools Crime Lab DNA evidence has become a standard forensic tool because it can pinpoint one individual out of millions. But the Israeli company Nucleix has shown that it is distressingly simple to make a phony DNA fingerprint. In Nucleix’s experiment, researchers took a small bit of DNA (which can be collected from an object like a cigarette butt) from a test subject, replicated it millions of times over, and used it to build an artificial DNA sequence. They then added the built-up DNA to blood that had been processed to remove the original, DNA-containing white blood cells. When analyzed by a leading forensics lab, the mixture was indistinguishable from real blood and natural genetic material. Going a step further, the researchers fabricated artificial DNA using only sequence data and added it to a saliva sample. This fake also passed inspection. Although the experiment was done entirely with commercial technology, DNA expert Larry Kobilinsky of John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York doubts that most criminals would have the skills to pull it off. Just in case, though, Nucleix has developed a test that can screen for fake DNA. BOONSRI DICKINSON
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EVOLUTION || TECHNOLOGY || MEDICINE
It might seem that biologists have already canvassed every bit of our planet. In reality, by tapping the latest genetic and molecular techniques they are identifying new species at an unprecedented pace. To draw attention to this fast-growing catalog of biodiversity, the Arizona State University International Institute for Species Exploration created a top 10 list of the most amazing species discovered in 2009, including: Tahina spectabilis: A palm native to northwest Madagascar, the species is so huge that single trees can be spotted via Google Earth. The plant’s trunk grows to 60 feet high and its leaves to more than 15 feet across. After 30 to 50 years, the palm produces hundreds of flowers that drain its nutrients completely, causing it to die in a few months. Fewer than 100 specimens have been found, but the plant is now being cultivated. Phobaeticus chani: The world’s longest stick insect, measuring two feet from antennae to tail, was discovered in Borneo, Malaysia. This creature resembles a small branch with six twiggy legs. Hippocampus satomiae: This pygmy sea horse, which lives off the coast of Derawan Island in Borneo, is the smallest of its kind, about half an inch long. Leptotyphlops carlae: Also among the incredibly small is the world’s most minuscule snake: Found in Barbados, it measures only four inches long. Coffea charrieriana: Producing the first known coffee bean that is naturally caffeine free, this plant from Cameroon could lead
to commercial coffee trees that produce their own decaf. The exaggerated nature of the newfound species illustrates the rich and complicated ways in which organisms adapt to their unique environments. Many plants, insects, and vertebrate animals are completely dependent on endangered ecosystems. A March 2009 study by biologist Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University and biologist Gerardo Ceballos of the National Autonomous University of Mexico found that 81 percent of the 408 new mammal species discovered
Clockwise from top left: Leaf and flowers of the giant palm Tahina spectabilis, and the tiny snake Leptotyphlops carlae. Both species were discovered in 2009.
in the last 15 years are yoked to local ecosystems and likely to become extinct. One capuchin monkey inhabits only a single 200-hectare slice of forest ringed by sugar plantations. People rely on biodiversity, too. The earth’s dazzling biological cornucopia helps regulate carbon dioxide levels, protects crops and humans from pests and disease, recycles nutrients, and holds a still largely unfathomable genetic bounty. “The human economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the economy of nature,” Ehrlich says. JILL NEIMARK
Computers Go Quantum Atomic-scale computers that exploit the bizarre rules of quantum physics have the potential to process enormous quantities of data far more quickly than today’s devices. In June, researchers at Yale University announced progress toward this goal, creating the first quantum processor that is built into a conventional silicon chip. Quantum computers process information using bits that behave like atoms, so even the slightest disturbance would ruin the process. Previous experiments had required complicated lasers or magnets to keep the system stable, but the Yale team’s processor was designed into computer chips. With one calculation, the device solved a math problem that would take an ordinary computer as many as four steps. The key difference is that quantum bits can take on fuzzy values: not just 1 or 0, but in some sense everything in between at the same time. While the Yale research focuses on hardware, a team from MIT and the University of Bristol in England is finding better ways to use quantum computations. In October the group described a new algorithm that could rapidly solve the complex linear equations at the heart of many key processes, including image processing and gene analysis. Turning the Yale experiment into a useful computer will require adding many more quantum bits and managing how those bits interact. “It just seems so difficult to make a large-scale quantum computer,” says Steven Girvin, a Yale physicist who coauthored the findings. “But five years ago I never thought we’d be where we are now.” ANDREW GRANT
THIS PAGE, FROM TOP: NATHALIE METZ (2); S. BLAIR HEDGES/PENN STATE. OPPOSITE, FROM LEFT: J. L. CARSON/CMSP; JAN WOITAS/DPA/CORBIS
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Neanderthals Get Personal Did humans and Neanderthals ever lie under the moon, making love? Could Neanderthals talk? Do we have any of their genes? We diverged from our hominid cousins as long as 400,000 years ago, and by 30,000 years ago they were gone, leaving the particulars of any intertwined history seemingly lost forever. We are beginning to revisit those ancient days, however, due to a draft of the Neanderthal genome created by Svante Pääbo and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. The draft, announced in February, covers about 63 percent of the roughly 3.2 billion base pairs in the Neanderthal genome. Pääbo created it by sequencing DNA from fragments of bone (most
of it from the Vindija cave in Croatia) to get 3 billion Neanderthal base pairs essentially uncontaminated by human DNA or by microbes. To perform this stunning feat, Pääbo and his team used new, high-throughput DNA technologies—developed in part by the companies 454 Life Sciences and Illumina—to analyze hundreds of thousands and even millions of DNA fragments at the same time. With the ability to sequence DNA at warp speed, the re searchers could finally deconstruct the genomic relationship between Neanderthals and modern humans. Although our DNA sequences are more than 99.5 percent identical, our genetic cousins did not contribute any mitochondrial DNA to us, and probably little genetic material overall. (It is still possible that we donated genes to them, however.) “We
Micrograph of E. coli, a leading cause of diarrhea.
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Diarrhea Vaccine Could Save Millions Nearly 1.5 million children, the vast majority of them in the developing world, die of diarrheal diseases each year. In April, Mahdi Saeed, an epidemiologist at Michigan State University, announced a new vaccine that could substan-
tially reduce that number. Although vaccines already exist for some causes of diarrhea, finding a fix for enterotoxigenic E. coli, the leading bacterial cause of diarrhea in children in the developing world, has proved to be difficult. The toxin produced by E. coli is too small to be recognized effectively by the human immune system, meaning that one round of infection does not provide immunity against
Pääbo and a Neanderthal skeleton.
are now analyzing whether there was any interbreeding” at all, Pääbo says. In studying the reconstructed genome, he learned that, like modern humans, Neanderthals may have used the spoken word. Indeed, they have two mutations in a languageassociated gene called FOXP2, mutations that are not found in chimpanzees. Such changes seem to be associated with vocalization. “From the data we have so far, there is no reason to assume that Neanderthals
could not speak like we do,” Pääbo concludes. What lies ahead? Pääbo will continue sequencing Neanderthal DNA until he has a genome that is similar in completion and quality to the existing map of the chimpanzee genome. Ultimately, comparing Neanderthals, humans, and chimpanzees will help us find “those few genetic changes that are crucial for modern human behavior and ability,” he says, and that reveal what makes us uniquely human. JILL NEIMARK
future exposure. As a result, a person can experience multiple bouts of diarrhea, which can lead to dehydration, malnutrition, and even death. Children are especially vulnerable because they have a higher density of chemical receptors susceptible to the E. coli toxin than adults do. That toxin is also a leading cause of traveler’s diarrhea, which annually affects millions of visitors to developing countries around the world. In order to alert the immune system to the presence of the tiny toxin molecule, Saeed attached it to a larger molecule that did not alter its properties. Trials in mice showed that this piggyback approach increased the ability of the immune system to recognize the toxin.
A separate set of trials in rabbits, which concluded in April, demonstrated that the doubled-up molecule provoked the animals’ immune system to produce antibodies. And when these antibodies were tested in mice, researchers found that they made the mice immune to the effects of E. coli. The new vaccine, 25 years in the making, could proceed to human clinical trials by the beginning of 2010, according to Saeed, who has been studying E. coli toxin since he was in graduate school. A vaccine could also reduce E. coli deaths among farm animals. “E. coli is a killer,” Saeed says. “A vaccine would be a true lifesaver for children in the developing world.” LINDSEY KONKEL
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ENERGY || MEDICINE
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When researchers conceived of turning algae into diesel fuel three decades ago, the idea sounded like something out of the old sci-fi movie Soylent Green. But in July, ExxonMobil teamed up with biologist Craig Venter’s Synthetic Genomics to take algae biofuel to the marketplace. ExxonMobil has invested $600 million to design better strains of algae and to convert them into fuel. Meanwhile, several start-up companies—including Aurora Biofuels and Solix Biofuels —have built pilot plants that prove it is possible to brew algae-derived diesel fuel in large quantities. “At the beginning we’d tell people, ‘I know this sounds crazy,’ ” says Bryan Willson, a Colorado State University engineer and cofounder of Solix Biofuels. “But with the ExxonMobil investment, algae is entering the mainstream.” Traditional biofuel crops such as soybeans yield 50 to 150 gallons of fuel per planted acre per year, but Solix’s facility near Durango, Colorado, is producing more than 2,000. The centerpiece is a sealed growth chamber, or photo-bioreactor, made from a clear polymer to let sunlight through; inside is a strain of algae selected for its high rate of oil production. (Closed reactors are less susceptible to contamination by outside algae than are openpond systems.) After the algae are harvested, their oils are extracted and refined into renewable diesel. Besides sunlight, the algae require little more than carbon dioxide from nearby power plants, so operating expenses should be low. Willson predicts his company’s algae fuel (and its coproducts, which are to be sold for animal feed) will be cost-competitive with petroleum diesel within five years. “It represents a large-scale solution to a global problem,” he says. ELIZABETH SVOBODA
A Smart Makeover for the Electrical Grid This may go down as the year when all the talk about creating a next-generation “smart grid” turned into action. The basic technology that transports electricity around the United States is more than a century old. So in October, spurred by concern over the cost and reliability of the present system, President Obama announced $3.4 billion of economic stimulus funds for smart grid projects and almost $5 billion more in private investment. “We’ve paid attention to individual components of the power system for so long, but now we have to look at the system itself,” says Dan Kammen, director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley. These smart grid proposals would create a flexible, interactive relationship between energy producers and consumers. “The grid needs to evolve from one-way wires and cables to something where each power line would send power in either direction—to or from homes, businesses, or industry,” Kammen says. “We need the marriage of energy technology and information technology.”
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Math Could Fix Traffic Jams During rush hour, maddening traffic jams can arise without an obvious cause. In May mechanical engineer Morris Flynn of the University of Alberta produced a model that shows how these “jamitons,” or phantom jams, develop. Traffic jams have been represented mathematically as waves of alternating heavy and light car density. When Flynn analyzed these equations, he noted striking similarities to the detonation waves that radiate outward from an explosion. As in a detonation, jamitons divide the surrounding space into upstream and downstream regions. Downstream drivers are the ones caught in the congestion; upstream drivers are the ones who are unaware of the jam they are about to hit. Improving data flow could provide an easy
The stimulus package will fund 100 projects nationwide, ranging from the installation of smart meters in homes so that customers can manage their energy use to the improvement of power substations and transformers. Utilities could monitor demand in real time and adjust supply accordingly. Customers could track their consumption and opt to buy more energy during off-peak hours, when it is cheaper and more plentiful. A grid that can store and redirect large quantities of power will also be crucial if the United States generates more than about one-fifth of its power from renewables such as wind or solar, which deliver an intermittent supply of electricity. Ford announced in August that its planned plug-in hybrid vehicles would be able to communicate with a smart grid. The batteries in these vehicles could serve as backup storage, soaking up excess energy at night and giving it back when demand surges. “If we can monitor and understand what’s going on at all times, then we can reap the reward we want,” Kammen says. “And that is reliable, green power.” ANDREW GRANT
fix. “Since many cars are outfitted with GPS, you could interactively convey this information to drivers,” Flynn says. Drivers approaching a forming jam could then slow down well in advance, lowering traffic density: “It reduces the severity of a jam, and it reduces the likelihood of accidents in the jam.” STEPHEN ORNES
TOP: ROBERT LLEWELLYN/AGE FOTOSTOCK. BOTTOM: NICHOLAS EVELEIGH/GETTY IMAGES. OPPOSITE: COURTESY MBARI
Algae Make Clean, Renewable Diesel Fuel
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Quantum Freakiness Leaks Into the Big World If the rules of the tiny quantum world applied to ordinary objects, all sorts of strange things could happen: An object like a car or a person might be in two places at once, or two clocks could “entangle,” moving in synchrony as if they were physically conjoined even when miles apart. In June researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) reported on their effort to see how far quantum behavior can be extended into the everyday realm. First they coaxed a pair of beryllium ions to entangle, such that their physical properties remained bound together even when they were far apart. To do this, the scientists flashed lasers at a frequency that encouraged the ions to adopt complementary spin. Next the team split up the beryllium duo so that each was now matched with a magnesium ion, and those new pairs were moved to separate areas. The heavier magnesium ions helped cool and slow down
42 the beryllium ions. Now the researchers could use lasers to transfer the entangled state of the beryllium ions to the motion of the new beryllium-magnesium pairs. Those pairs began to form two separate oscillating systems, analogous to a swinging pendulum or a vibrating weight on a spring. “We were motivated by pure curiosity to look at mechanical oscillators; no one had ever entangled them before,” says David Hanneke, a member of the NIST team. The experiment will help scientists explore why small objects follow the weird rules of quantum mechanics but large ones do not—one of the greatest enigmas in physics. In this case, sets of oscillating ions can be made to act as if they are connected, even though equivalent human-scale objects, like pendulums and springs, “certainly don’t behave in this entangled way,” Hanneke says. “So where does the breakdown happen? It’s somewhere between four ions and a pendulum clock.” ELIZABETH SVOBODA
Strange Gaze of the See-through Fish
The barreleye fish has eyes that gaze upward right through a transparent shield covering its head. This year ecologists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute studied the first-ever underwater video of the strange fish. They also managed to recover one alive and get a good look at that shield, which may protect its eyes as it steals prey from stinging jellyfish. JANET FANG
Infection as It Happens One of the challenges in fighting infectious disease is that researchers cannot watch individual pathogens inside living animals. Did the drug kill the microbes? Did pathogens escape to the brain? Now imaging techniques are providing answers by following microbes on the move. An approach described in PLoS Pathogens in July allowed British researchers to peer inside fruit fly embryos to track fluorescent versions of the bacterium Photorhabdus asymbiotica. Using high-resolution confocal microscopy, the scientists discovered that the microorganism thwarts the immune system by emitting a toxin and immobilizing hemocytes, cells that would normally kill it. Meanwhile, at the Scripps Research Institute and New York University, researchers looked inside mouse skulls to learn how viral meningitis can cause seizure. By recording moving images of the cells using twophoton microscopy, they discovered an unexpected class of immune cells that damage vessels in the brain. Also at NYU, researchers are capturing images of fluorescent Lyme disease spirochetes moving into the brain, hoping to chart infection and document the moment of cure. MEGAN TALKINGTON
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EVOLUTION
Charles Darwin would have turned 200 in 2009, the same year his book On the Origin of Species celebrated its 150th anniversary. Today, with the perspective of time, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection looks as impressive as ever. In fact, the double anniversary year saw progress on fronts that Darwin could never have anticipated, bringing new insights into the origin of life—a topic that contributed to his panic attacks, heart palpitations, and, as he wrote, “for 25 years extreme spasmodic daily and nightly flatulence.” One can only dream of what riches await in the biology textbooks of 2159. 1. Evolution happens on the inside, too. The battle for survival is waged not just between the big dogs but within the dog itself, as individual genes jockey for prominence. From the moment of conception, a father’s genes favor offspring that are large, strong, and aggressive (the better to court the ladies), while the mother’s genes incline toward smaller progeny that will be less of a burden, making it easier for her to live on and procreate.
Genome-versus-genome warfare produces kids that are somewhere in between. Not all genetic conflicts are resolved so neatly. In flour beetles, babies that do not inherit the selfish genetic element known as Medea succumb to a toxin while developing in the egg. Some unborn mice suffer the same fate. Such spiteful genes have become widespread not by helping flour beetles and mice survive but by eliminating individuals that do not carry the killer’s code. “There are two ways of winning a race,” says Caltech biologist Bruce Hay. “Either you can be better than everyone else, or you can whack the other guys on the legs.” Hay is trying to harness the power of such genetic cheaters, enlisting them in the fight against malaria. He created a Medea-like DNA element that spreads through experimental fruit flies like wildfire, permeating an entire population within 10 generations. This year he and his team have been working on encoding immunesystem boosters into those Medea genes, which could then be inserted into male mosquitoes. If it works, the modified mosquitoes should quickly replace competitors who do not carry the new genes; the enhanced immune systems of the new mosquitoes, in turn, would resist the spread of the malaria parasite. 2. Identity is not written just in the genes. According to modern evolutionary theory,
there is no way that what we eat, do, and encounter can override the basic rules of inheritance: What is in the genes stays in the genes. That single rule secured Darwin’s place in the science books. But now biologists are finding that nature can break those rules. This year Eva Jablonka, a theoretical biologist at Tel Aviv University, published a compendium of more than 100 hereditary changes that are not carried in the DNA sequence. This “epigenetic” inheritance spans bacteria, fungi, plants, and animals. For example, rats exposed to certain fungicides during pregnancy give birth to male progeny with lower sperm counts and an increased chance of developing diabetes and cancer. In each generation that follows, none of which were exposed to fungicides directly, the male offspring continue to suffer the same fate. Jablonka argues that environmental exposures—toxic substances, diet, and even stress—can affect the genome (see page 62). In extremely high-stress cases, they could possibly rearrange it enough to create new species. Eventually, she says, “evolution will have to yield.” 3. Mutations reveal surprising branches on the tree of life. Darwin would have been dumbfounded to find that our genes are littered with changes that have no effect on our form or function. Mutations give rise to new genes, but
only some of those produce discernible changes that improve (or reduce) fitness. Many of them do nothing much at all. Those do-nothing mutations are a major force for discovery today, because they accumulate at a measurable rate. Generally, the more silent mutations two species have in common, the more closely related they are. If you could just sequence all the genes in all the organisms in the world, in principle you could uncover the complete tree of life. That is what evolutionary biologist Casey Dunn of Brown University is trying to do, and his initial findings are confounding expectations. Dunn compared the genomes of 71 animal species and found that the common ancestor of all the animals on the planet may not have been as simple as a sponge, as previously thought. Instead, Dunn identified the more complex comb jellyfish—a carnivorous ocean drifter—as the earliest to diverge from the animal family tree. The idea that the simplest organism may not have come first upends the popular notion of an evolutionary march toward complexity. This past year Dunn has been busy expanding his revamped family tree, starting with Acoelomorpha, a flatworm that was long considered one of the most difficult animals to put in its evolutionary place. With the help of a supercomputer, Dunn’s team showed that the worm is a product of the first split among bilateral animals
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Revolution was the social switch from aggressive male to attentive mate, says C. Owen Lovejoy, an anatomist at Kent State University. By the time Ardi appeared, our ancestors had stopped fighting over mates—as suggested by the small canines and woodland diet of the male Ardipithecus—and started providing for their females and offspring instead. Walking upright, according to Lovejoy, is an adaptation to carrying food through the forest as gifts for potential mates. Not everyone agrees. “The whole profession of paleoanthropology is undergoing a big bout of indigestion right now because they’ve had a lot of material dropped on them,” says Ian Tattersall, an anthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History. more than half a billion years ago—a discovery that will help biologists understand the origins of the digestive and nervous systems. 4. The “missing link” is not missing. In October paleontologists unveiled the earliest Transmission known skeleton of micrograph a potential electron human ancestor, the 4.4-virus. of infl uenza
million-year-old Ardipithecus ramidus, known as Ardi, and it was not what anyone was expecting (see page 22). Behaving more like modern monkeys than like chimps, Ardi walked on two feet with opposable toes and scampered through the branches on all fours. This find suggests that what made us human
5. We are closing in on how life began. Gerald Joyce is not saying that he reproduced the origin of life, but by some definitions that is exactly what he has done. In 2009 he and his graduate student Tracey Lincoln at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, engineered a system of molecules that can sustain-
ably replicate themselves and undergo Darwinian evolution in a test tube. Now Joyce wants to see “if we can get the molecules to invent novel function for themselves,” he says. So where would the first life on earth have picked up RNA, the simple hereditary molecule that is notoriously hard to synthesize? Two papers published in 2009 propose plausible chemical routes. In Science a July report discusses a “helper molecule” to RNA, which the author was able to construct in his lab, that shows the basic properties necessary for evolution (see page 83). And a separate experiment, published in Nature in May, showed that it is possible for the building blocks of RNA to emerge spontaneously from simple molecules thought to have been present on the early earth. John Sutherland and his colleagues at the University of Manchester in England argue that the precursors came together in a warmwater solution, reminiscent of Charles Darwin’s notion that life began in some “warm little pond.” In the meantime, 2009 Nobel laureate Jack Szostak of Harvard Medical School has been packaging prebiotic chemistry into simple membranes to see how protocells could have self-assembled out of fatty acids. The huge strides from the past year significantly clarify how life could arise from the laws of chemistry. “If Darwin were around now,” Sutherland says, “maybe he would have been an organic chemist.” JESSICA RUVINSKY
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SPACE || MEDICINE || ENVIRONMENT || EVOLUTION
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Spaceport Breaks Ground in New Mexico Drive an hour northeast of Las Cruces, New Mexico, then another 25 miles along a dirt road, and you can watch the construction of Spaceport America—the nation’s first commercial hub built specifically for spaceships. Right
now the facility’s 10,000-foot runway is being formed out of a mountain of gravel, but by 2011 it is expected to host the takeoffs and landings of space-tourism flights operated by its anchor tenant, Virgin Galactic. The $200 million project, underwritten by the state of New Mexico, broke ground in June not far from the restricted airspace of the White Sands Missile Range. The location was chosen carefully. It is
unhampered by commercial jet traffic and benefits from the same advantages that drew the U.S. Army there: abundant clear weather and a 4,700-foot elevation, which drops the cost of reaching Earth orbit by up to $90 million, compared with launching at sea level. “Space tourism isn’t the spaceport’s only purpose,” says Steven Landeene, its executive director. Private companies like Lockheed Martin are already sending up rockets from the facility’s vertical launchpads, located several miles from the runway. Other sites around the United States also support commercial launches, but these are mostly carved out of existing government facilities. “Dreams are becoming a reality,” Landeene says. He envisions a day when Virgin Galactic’s $200,000 flights will come down in price and start to change the way we fly on Earth, with business travelers reaching Asia or Europe in less than two hours.
Dawn at Spaceport America—an artist’s preview.
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Eye Drops Could Cure Glaucoma Scientists in Italy have discovered a simple eye drop that may reverse glaucoma, the disease caused when pressure builds in the eye, injuring nerve cells and ultimately leading to blindness. Ophthalmologist Stefano Bonini at the University of Rome Campus Bio-Medico and his collaborators applied drops containing nerve growth factor (a protein involved in neural development) to the eyes of rats with induced glaucoma. The drops protected the animals’ retinal ganglion cells and optic nerves, both of which are generally damaged by the disease. The team’s report appeared in the August 11 issue of PNAS. In the study Bonini also had success applying nerve growth factor to humans with advanced glaucoma. Two of three patients given the eye drops exhibited a remarkable improvement in visual acuity and sensitivity to contrast after three months. “I cannot say that we have found a cure for glaucoma,” Bonini says carefully, “but we have something that worked in a few patients. It will be interesting to test more.” LINDSEY KONKEL
Reconstruction of Dakota shows the dinosaur’s heavily muscled haunches.
BOONSRI DICKINSON
47 El Niño’s Cousin Spurs Hurricanes
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In 1999, while fossil hunting in the Badlands of North Dakota, 16-year-old Tyler Lyson stumbled upon a mummified dinosaur: not just a skeleton, but a fossil that turned out to include naturally preserved soft-tissue structures. This year a group of scientists published the first in-depth analysis of this rare find from 67 million years ago. The dinosaur—a hadrosaur, or duck-billed plant-eater —apparently died in a soggy spot. Minerals precipitated rapidly in its skin, forming a replacement framework before the soft organic tissues decomposed. “We actually have a three-dimensional organism preserved,” says study coauthor Roy Wogelius of the University of Manchester in England. Scales are visible to the naked eye; more remarkable, electron microscopy reveals double-layered skin similar to that of modern animals, and possibly even the outlines of cells. Wogelius, a geochemist who analyzes mineral surfaces, was asked to apply his expertise in
infrared imaging to the fossil, nicknamed Dakota. He found that its mummified remains appear to include some of the creature’s original amino acids, although there are no traces of whole proteins or DNA. The results were published online in July in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The generous surface area of Dakota’s skin suggests that there was a lot more muscle packed into the animal’s tail than previously believed. On the basis of the new information, researchers now estimate that this hadrosaur could have run roughly 27 miles per hour. That is “a lot faster than a T. rex,” Wogelius’s colleague Phil Manning says. Manning suspects that skin and soft tissue may have been overlooked in other fossils and that they could yield startling new insights about ancient creatures. “I think there are specimens in museums today that are time capsules,” he says. “We could go back to these specimens and breathe new life into those old bones.” MEGAN TALKINGTON
To forecasters trying to anticipate extreme weather and avert disasters, the 2004 hurricane season looked like nature thumbing her nose at us. That year, 15 major storms developed in the North Atlantic—including Hurricane Ivan, which caused $14 billion in damage in the United States. And yet the best models had called for a quiet season because it was a year of El Niño, a recurring pattern of warm water in the eastern Pacific Ocean. That pattern is associated with lower-than-average tropical storm activity in the North Atlantic. Atmospheric scientist Peter Webster at the Georgia Institute of Technology set out to determine what went wrong, and now he has some answers. Last spring, Webster discovered that his colleagues had lumped together two distinct weather patterns under the name of El Niño. Those patterns “have a very, very different impact on the tropical climate and, most important, on hurricane formation,” he says. The divergence appears to be a
recent phenomenon, which explains why researchers were unaware of its effects. During a typical El Niño, the Pacific Ocean warms up in a long band that extends from the coast of South America toward Polynesia. The second, less familiar pattern involves a more isolated, extensive patch of warmer water in the central Pacific. After examining more than six decades’ worth of ocean surface temperatures and tropical storm data, Webster and his collaborators realized that the newly identified warming in the central Pacific produces more hurricanes than a traditional El Niño. It did not show up in the data until three decades ago, leaving Webster unsure whether the new weather pattern is part of a long-term oscillation or a result of climate change. Regardless of the root cause, though, the discovery of the central Pacific hot spot should lead to better hurricane predictions and fewer surprises. ELIZA STRICKLAND
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Twin Black Holes Found Black holes are weird enough, but in March astronomers found signs of something even stranger: twin massive black holes orbiting tightly around each other. Such objects have been long predicted but never verified. Todd Boroson and Tod Lauer at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson found what they think is a dual black hole while examining more than 17,000 quasars in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which obtained data, images, and spectra of more than one-fourth of the sky. The two objects (a 20-million-solar-mass hole and a billion-solar-mass partner) seem to be separated by just one-third of a light-year, less than onetenth the distance from the sun to the closest star. In theory the universe should be littered with black hole multiples. All sizable galaxies are thought to be born with black holes at their centers, and each time galaxies collide and merge the expanded galaxy should collect a new one. But binary black holes are difficult to find. Astronomers have found dozens of quasars with similar double lines of emission, but the signatures are usually attributed either to a single black hole or to two galaxies passing close together. Boroson and Lauer are optimistic that they have the real deal this time. “We’re convinced it is different from every other object we’ve studied,” Boroson says. STEPHEN ORNES
CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: COURTESY OF VYONYX; NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC; REUTERS/NOAA
Dino Mummy Spills Its Secrets
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SPACE || ASTRONOMY || ANTHROPOLOGY || MEDICINE
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Space Trash Causes Orbital Crash In February, about 500 miles above Siberia, a U.S. communications satellite smashed into a defunct Russian orbiter at 25,000 miles per hour, annihilating them both. It was the first wreck of its kind—two intact spacecraft accidentally plowing into each other at hypervelocity—in the half-century that humans have been launching objects into space. Initially the crash left behind some 1,500 pieces of wreckage bigger than four inches in diameter, along with hundreds of thousands of smaller fragments, estimates Nicholas Johnson, chief scientist of the Orbital Debris Program Office at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. The debris clouds, initially distributed along the orbital paths of the satellites, are spreading to enshroud the entire planet, joining the roughly 19,000 large chunks of orbiting space junk (below) already tracked by the Department of Defense. Even if we stop launching objects into space, the amount of trash will continue to grow. “Things will keep running into each other at a faster rate than debris will fall out of orbit,” Johnson says. Another major collision is certain to happen eventually, he adds. In March, a 5-inch fragment from a spent rocket engine whizzed closely past the International Space Station. Scientists and policymakers are exploring ways to prevent future accidents by removing large, defunct objects from orbit. JOCELYN RICE
Computer simulation of sunspot structure; vertical magnetic fields appear dark.
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Magnetic Mysteries of Sunspots Decoded In July the first complete 3-D sunspot simulation illuminated long-standing questions about these disturbances on the solar surface. Sunspots are strong magnetic regions that disrupt the outward flow of heat from the sun’s interior. As a result they are comparatively
cool and so look dark against the 10,000-degree Fahrenheit solar surface. (They still blaze at temperatures near 7,500°F, however.) Scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, simulated a typical pair of sunspots, which usually appear in tandem with opposite polarity. Mimicking the twisted magnetic fields and fast-moving plasma in these 20,000-mile-wide maelstroms required a month of work on a supercomputer capable
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Oldest Musical Instrument Found More than 35,000 years ago, our ancestors living in present-day southwestern Germany were playing sophisticated music, according to University of Tübingen archaeologist Nicholas Conard. In June he announced that he and his colleagues had unearthed an ancient bone flute in Hohle Fels, a cave in the Swabian mountains. The sound produced by the flute “is almost identical to tones of the major scale played on today’s flute,” says Nikolaj Tarasov, a recorder specialist at the Music University of Karlsruhe in Germany. The five-holed instrument—carved
of 76 trillion calculations per second. The result closely matched observations of how plasma flows from a sunspot’s central dark region into the surrounding turbulent zone, according to lead researcher Matthias Rempel. This model exposes new details of stellar physics and could make it easier to predict violent “space weather” before it affects Earth. Sunspots often spawn solar flares that can knock out radio communication, damage satellites, and zap power grids. ADAM HADHAZY
from the bone of a griffon vulture—might be capable of expressing greater harmonic variety than the modern-day flute, he says. Conard’s group discovered fragments of three ivory flutes in their 2008 digs. Four other bone and ivory flutes were previously found in the same area. Collectively, these are regarded as the oldest known musical instruments. The researchers conjecture that music was important in the geographic expansion and cultural development of humans during the Upper Paleolithic era. “We can now state that our ancestors had a developed culture,” Tarasov says. “Not only were they surviving, but they had time to do something that required superior skill.” ALINE REYNOLDS
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52 CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: ESA/POLARIS; MATTHIAS REMPEL/UCAR/NCAR; PHOTO RESEARCHERS; STEVE GSCHMEISSNER/PHOTO RESEARCHERS
Fight Rages Over Cancer Genes When Lisbeth Ceriani, a 43-year-old Massachusetts woman, was diagnosed with breast cancer last year, her doctors recommended that she undergo genetic testing to see if she carried mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes that increase risk of breast and ovarian cancers. She had several risk factors for inherited cancer, including relatives who had died from breast and ovarian cancer. “My dad’s mother wasn’t diagnosed with ovar-
ian cancer, but we feel sure she had it after reviewing her symptoms,” Ceriani says. When Ceriani’s doctors submitted her blood to Myriad Genetics—the only company that offers a sequencing test for BRCA mutations—the company refused to process it, saying that Myriad did not accept Ceriani’s health insurance. She could not afford to pay for the test herself (it costs nearly $4,000), so she did not have it done. If there had been a cheaper test or a company that took her insurance, she would have known quickly what her best treatment options were. There is only one test for
BRCA mutations because Myriad controls the BRCA genes. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office awarded the company its first patent in 1997; by 2000 the patent office had awarded it eight more, in effect giving Myriad ownership of the genes. Accordingly, the company is allowed to decide who may study the genes and has written cease-and-desist letters to university geneticists working on alternative BRCA sequencing tests. This year Myriad’s patent was challenged in court by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of 20 plaintiffs, including the American College of Medical Genetics, the AssoIllustration of ciation for Molecular cancer in glandular breast tissue and Pathology, and various lymph nodes. Inset: individuals, including Breast cancer cells.
Ceriani. The lawsuit charges that the BRCA patents—and gene patents in general—violate established laws that prohibit the patenting of products and laws of nature. According to the ACLU, “Human genes, even when removed from the body, are still products of nature.” Critics also argue that the process of locating specific genes does not warrant the awarding of patents. “A number of researchers had been looking for
the genes related to breast cancer and knew where the genes were likely to be,” says Arupa Ganguly, a geneticist at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and one of the plaintiffs in the ACLU suit. “Essentially the work was done for Myriad already. Everyone knew where the gene was.” Myriad has refused to comment and in July filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit. That motion was denied by a New York federal district court in November. Robert Cook-Deegan, director of the Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy at Duke University, does credit Myriad with discovering specific mutation sequences and building a public database of genetic variations—both valuable contributions. But he says that many scientists believe Myriad’s control has slowed or blocked research, and it “certainly has made researchers more cautious in how they report relevant findings.” At the least, geneticists in the United States do not have the option of making a more accurate screening test because doing so would infringe on Myriad’s patent. The ACLU argues that gene patents as a whole inhibit the free flow of ideas and should not be awarded. “Gene patents defy common sense,” says Chris Hansen, one of the ACLU lawyers handling the case. “If you’re at a cocktail party and you tell people human genes are patented, almost everyone will say that can’t be right.” Right or not, about 20 percent of all human genes already have been included in patent claims. Whether that number will stand or even grow will depend on how the ACLU suit is decided. JANE BOSVELD
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MEDICINE || EARTH
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Seismic Waves Clarify How Continents Move
Lose Weight With Brown Fat?
While millions of Americans are trying to shed fat, in the past year three research teams announced that the adult body contains a peculiar kind of fat that we might prefer to hold on to. Called brown fat, it burns energy rather than storing it. Activating this improbable tissue might provide a new way to rev up the body’s metabolism and accelerate weight loss. Packed with mitochondria (the energygenerating units in cells), brown fat produces heat in response to cold temperatures, consuming a lot of calories in the process. Brown fat is present in newborns, whose bodies use it to keep warm because they cannot shiver, but it was thought to vanish by adulthood. So it came as quite a shock when scientists at five Boston-area biomedical institutes studied thousands of archived PET/CT scans and found deposits of brown fat around the neck and collarbone in about 5 percent of the people examined. C. Ronald Kahn, the head of obesity and hormone action research at Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston, believes that brown fat is actually present in most adults and that the only reason it did not show up in the majority of the PET/CT scans was because it had not been activated. In a separate study, conducted in Finland and Sweden, adult volunteers were kept in cold rooms or subjected to ice-water footbaths to spur any brown fat into action. Follow-up PET/CT scans and biopsies then confirmed that the fat was indeed present. Meanwhile, researchers in the Netherlands documented that lean young men have more brown fat than their overweight counterparts. All three reports appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine in April. “Adults do have brown fat,” Kahn says. “Now the question is to find out how active it is in controlling metabolism.” K ATHLEEN MCGOWAN
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The Arabian plate (lower left) collides with the Eurasian plate (upper right) at the Persian Gulf, driving Iran’s Zagros Mountains upward.
might have come from seismic stations near thin edges of continents; she plans to examine data from additional stations in those areas to confirm her findings. In the other environments, though, the evidence seems clear, she says: “We don’t know of any other mechanism that can explain the sharp, globally pervasive boundary we’ve seen.” Pinpointing the location of that boundary will help clarify how continents formed and why certain parts of those continents are particularly stable today. JENNIFER BARONE
Virus Linked to Chronic Fatigue
Chronic fatigue syndrome, which affects 17 million people worldwide, has finally been linked to a specific pathogen: XMRV (xenotropic murine leukemia-related virus). XMRV is one of only three known human retroviruses, infectious agents that slip into our genome and become a permanent part of our DNA. Cancer biologist Robert Silverman of the Cleveland Clinic isolated XMRV three years ago in men suffering from prostate cancer. The men had an immune defect that allowed the virus to proliferate, much like a defect documented in patients with chronic fatigue. Seizing upon that clue, cell biologist Judy Mikovits of the Whittemore Peterson Institute in Reno, Nevada, tested 101 chronic fatigue patients. In October she reported that 67 percent of them had the virus, as opposed to only 3.7 percent of healthy people. Tests on another 200 patients revealed that more than 95 percent of people with chronic fatigue carry antibody to the virus, Mikovits says. For Mikovits these statistics raise new questions. Is XMRV the cause of chronic fatigue, or just an opportunistic infection? More ominously, does XMRV increase the risk of cancers, as HIV—another retrovirus—does? A blood test to detect XMRV antibodies is now available through VIP Dx Labs in collaboration with Whittemore Peterson. “This discovery could be a major step in the development of vital treatment options for millions of patients,” Mikovits says. JILL NEIMARK
FROM LEFT: PATRICK RYAN /GETTY IMAGES; JACQUES DESCLOITRES/MODIS/NASA; M. E. HARDUS
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Plate tectonic theory does a marvelous job explaining how sections of Earth’s crust shift about, moving continents and reshaping oceans. Still, the underlying structure that makes all this motion possible was poorly understood until Catherine Rychert and Peter Shearer of the University of California at San Diego dug through 15 years’ worth of seismic data from around the world. As seismic waves cross through different materials, they change speed and direction. By analyzing such effects, the researchers were able to locate the boundary below the earth’s rigid tectonic plates where they meet the hot, pliable asthenosphere beneath. The base of the tectonic plates appears to lie 44 miles beneath the oceanic islands, on average, and 50 miles below young parts of the continents, the team reported in Science. They also found a boundary 60 miles below the oldest continental regions but are not certain that it represents the base of the plates. Previous evidence had suggested that these parts of the continents were at least 120 miles thick. Rychert notes that some of the data that generated the 60-mile estimate
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Robots Learn to Walk
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Earth-like Storms Seen on Saturn’s Moon With its thick atmosphere, rippling lakes, and eroded landscapes, Saturn’s giant moon Titan has a lot in common with Earth. In August scientists added another similarity shared by these unlikely siblings: stormy weather. Using the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility and Gemini North Observatory, planetary scientist Emily Schaller of the University of Arizona identified a massive storm that appeared near Titan’s equator. “For so long, it was cloud-free,” says Schaller, who devoted her doctoral research to a largely fruitless search for Titanic clouds. “Then, all of a sudden, they dramatically appeared.” Schaller’s team could not confirm whether precipitation fell, but other studies have offered strong evidence that methane clouds on Titan dump methane rain in a cycle much like the exchange of water between the atmosphere and the surface of Earth. The scientists are now trying to determine whether Titan’s storm resulted from atmospheric conditions or from surface activity, such as methane-spewing geysers or volcanoes. ANDREW GRANT
Last year, robots got off their behinds and began walking upright. Inspired perhaps by the success of drone aircraft in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. Department of Defense is funding projects to build machines that walk like us—machines that could carry loads, perform search and rescue, or even assist in combat. One of the greatest challenges for a bipedal robot is navigating common obstacles like curbs and stairs. Keith Buffinton, a mechanical engineer at Bucknell University, recently received a $1.2 million Navy grant to tackle the problem. He video-taped students
regaining their balance after a shove and realized that walking is actually a type of controlled falling, with each step an act of recovery. That insight inspired new algorithms for managing hips, knees, ankles, and toes. Collaborating with the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition in Florida, Buffinton’s team has built a partial bipedal robot (torso, legs, and feet) that could soon walk over simple obstacles, allegedly with better balance than a person. In 2010 the group will add arms and a head with stereoscopic vision. Boston Dynamics, an offshoot of MIT, is taking a similar approach with Petman, which struck out this year on its first explor-
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An orangutan changes its voice with a leaf.
atory walks. This robot not only stands like a person but also simulates human gestures, body warmth, and—creepiest of all—it can sweat. Those traits are important to the Army, which wants to use Petman for testing chemical-protection gear in battlefield conditions starting in 2011. Anybots of Mountain View, California, is trying something different with Dexter: It incorporates selfteaching software to help the robot learn how to walk. Dexter recently began its first tentative movements. That’s one small step for a robot, but if this approach succeeds, a giant leap for robotkind. It would certainly beat anything with wheels. FRED GUTERL
Orangutans Invent New Warning Calls Five wild orangutans in Borneo—nicknamed Sam, Henk, Rambo, Kondor, and Sultan—have learned to create a new kind of distress signal, using leaves to lower the pitch of their common warning call, known as a kiss-squeak. The leaf-produced kiss-squeaks seem intended to make the orangutans sound bigger and more threatening. “Primates were assumed to have no control over their calls,” says Madeleine Hardus, a behavioral biologist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, who classifies the orangutans’ ability to alter their standard call as “a cultural innovation.” Hardus and her colleagues discovered that the orangutans had developed leafassisted calls to identify humans (and probably predators as well). She hypothesizes that the technique is passed down from one orangutan to the next. Researchers have rigorously documented leaf adaptation in the cluster of five but have also observed the behavior in the wider orangutan population. JANE BOSVELD
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ASTRONOMY
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In September the European Southern Observatory released one of the most spectacular views ever created of our home galaxy (left). This edgeon perspective offers a good view of what the Milky Way would look like from the outside because in a sense we are on the outside: Our solar system resides in one of the peripheral outer arms of our flattened spiral galaxy. The central bulge is packed tight with old red stars and an invisible black hole some 4 million times as massive as the sun. Thick clouds of gas and dust create the spidery dark markings. Two of the Milky Way’s satellite galaxies, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, appear toward the bottom right. The 800-megapixel image comprises nearly 1,200 photos, but no highpowered telescopes were involved—just the dark, clear skies of the Chilean desert and Canary Islands and a Nikon D3 digital camera. In a separate view zooming in on the galactic center (bottom), a giant black hole at the` Milky Way’s core (white area at center) gobbles up matter and spews X-rays. Nearby, large stars erupt in cataclysmic supernova explosions, sparking additional emissions from gas heated to millions of degrees. This image, captured by the Chandra X-ray Observatory, shows X-rays ranging from relatively low (red) to high (blue) energy. ANDREW GRANT
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Geographer MARK SERREZE says a big Arctic melt is inevitable and readies us for what comes next.
When Mark Serreze first traveled to the Arctic, in 1982, he was hit with a thrilling expanse of white. “It was just the most incredible, beautiful thing I had ever seen. I was hooked,” he says. Returning many times, he got a Ph.D. in Arctic science and for 25 years has studied the region’s snow and storms. Serreze recently recognized that current climate trends mean that the seasonal Arctic ice could melt in 20 years or less. He is now trying to help
you had asked me just a few years ago, I would have said it would disappear somewhere around the year 2070. But we seem to be on the fast track now. Climate models are telling us that we might lose that summer ice by the year 2030.
the world prepare for a very different Arctic: a place of diminished species, increased vegetation, and easy travel through the Northwest Passage. Director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Serreze spoke to DISCOVER about the future of the place he loves.
How did you come to study the Arctic? I went up there with my adviser to measure an ice cap on northern Ellesmere Island. I remember flying in on an old Twin Otter. There were sapphire blue skies—it was the pristine beauty of the place, the whiteness of the snow and ice and the visibility of 100 miles in any direction. As I came back again and again, I realized that the Arctic was as much a feeling, a smell, as it was a place. What do you feel when you visit the Arctic today? Now you can see the hand of man. As we lose the ice, the very color of the Arctic is changing from pure white toward the blue color of the ocean breaking through.
We’re seeing areas of formerly treeless, windswept tundra transition into shrub vegetation as the climate warms and different things grow. Can you determine when this process began? We’ve been able to accurately measure the extent of Arctic sea ice from satellites since 1979. What we’ve seen is an awesome loss of ice, 40 percent of what we used to have in the 1970s. That’s about equal to the area of all of the states east of the Mississippi. It’s a lot of real estate. Will all the Arctic sea ice eventually vanish? Even in a greenhouse world, it’s cold in the Arctic in winter. We’ll have ice, but we will lose the summer sea ice cover. If
Is there any way we can reverse the changes? We’re already committed. A year ago I was focusing on understanding why we’re losing the ice cover so fast. But my research has shifted now to understanding the impact. You can think of it as throwing up my hands and saying, well, all right, we’re going to lose the summer ice cover, so get over it, and let’s start thinking about what it really means. OK—so what will be different about a warmer Arctic? Shifts in the sea ice are going to have cascading effects through the food chain, from the top predators all the way down to the plankton in the sea. We’ll see more coastal erosion. Before, a big storm would come through in summer but sea ice would limit the size of the waves. As we lose the ice, the wind has what we call a big fetch over the open water, and you get big waves. Villages in Alaska and coastal Siberia are eroding into the ocean because of this effect.
text by PAMELA WEINTRAUB photograph by BETH WALD
Will we be able to cross the fabled Northwest Passage? You’re already seeing a busier Arctic. Instead of taking a boatload of Toyotas through the Panama Canal or around Cape Horn, shippers will take them right from Tokyo across the Arctic Ocean to Boston or even New York, at great savings in time and fuel. What will the impact be beyond the Arctic? By losing the sea ice cover we’re changing the energy budget of the Arctic. It’s cold there because the sun’s rays strike the surface at a much shallower angle than they do at the equator. Also, snow and ice are so reflective that much of the solar radiation you do get is reflected right back up into space. This means that we set up a gradient in temperature in the atmosphere with the higher temperatures in the lower latitudes and the colder temperatures in the Arctic. The temperature gradient creates atmospheric circulation, which transports heat from areas of equatorial excess to the cold polar regions. When we lose the sea ice, we start to change the nature of the temperature gradients, and the rest of the system must respond. What kinds of responses do you foresee? There are going to be shifts in storm tracks and the inten-
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sity of the cold air outbreaks that you get in the winter. We won’t have as many problems with damaged citrus crops in Florida. But talk to the farmer who wants to grow winter wheat, which requires that winter precipitation. Think about the American West, where our whole water supply system is strongly dependent on the winter snowfall. You start to see how these changes can have real economic impact. Will the shifts add to the greenhouse effect? The looming environmental consequence, the one that’s really global in scope, has to do with the carbon cycle. The issue here is that if we go up to the Arctic and if we dig into the soil, we’ll find it is perennially frozen—permafrost, with a great deal of carbon from past plant and animal life locked inside, roughly twice what is in the atmosphere to date. A big concern is that if we start to thaw that permafrost, microbes living in the soil will become active. As they metabolize, move, and reproduce, they’ll disturb the soil, releasing the locked-in carbon. Now we’ve initiated a feedback loop. Put this stuff in the atmosphere and you’ve got even greater warming. The circulation of the atmosphere will spread that warmth out across the land. There’s growing evidence that this effect is going to be quite strong.
What do your studies tell you about the earth of the future? It’s unknown. The Arctic is a wickedly complex system, and there are all these cascading effects. Change
in itself isn’t always that bad. Look at the great ice ages of the past. The key here is how rapidly the change will unfold. Do I fear for the extinction of the human species? No, but
you can say good-bye to a lot of species that we have today. We’re looking at a different world. That world is coming fast, and the Arctic is leading the way.
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MEDICINE || ASTRONOMY || EVOLUTION || SPACE
Abuse Leaves Its Mark on Victim’s DNA Childhood trauma may leave a lasting imprint not just on the psyche but also in the DNA. This news comes from McGill University and the Suicide Brain Bank, a Quebecbased organization that carried out autopsies on suicide victims who had been abused as kids. Across the board, their brains showed DNA modifications that made them particularly sensitive to stress. Although gene variations are primarily inherited at conception, the findings show that environmental impacts can also introduce them later on. “The idea that abuse changes how genes
function opens a new window for behavioral and drug therapy,” says study leader and neuroscientist Patrick McGowan. During periods of adversity, the brain triggers release of cortisol, a hormone responsible for the fightor-flight response. Due to differential gene expression associated with stress, the brains of child-abuse victims had lower levels of glucocorticoid receptors, McGowan found. Cortisol normally binds to these receptors; with fewer of them present, there is more cortisol and less resilience to feelings of stress. In his study, McGowan reviewed medical records and police reports and interviewed family members to determine whether a subject was abused early in life. He then examined the subjects’ brain tissues and found that among those who had been abused, glucocorticoidreceptor expression was reduced by 40 percent. “If we can identify how these changes occur, we can identify those at high risk and ultimately find ways to treat them,” McGowan says. AMY BARTH
Asteroid Strike Predicted
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The meteor’s trail over Sudan, captured by cell phone.
For the first time, astronomers predicted when and where an asteroid would strike Earth—and recovered pieces of the rock to prove it. By studying the orbit of the asteroid and examining its remains, researchers hope to reconstruct more details about conditions in the early solar system. The work also serves as a dress rehearsal for efforts to discover larger, potentially deadly incoming asteroids before they hit. Astronomers with the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona spotted a car-size object headed our way on October 5, 2008, when it was about as far away as the moon. After quickly determining that the rock was too small to cause damage, scientists at the Minor Planet Center at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory calculated its trajectory. Less than a day later the asteroid—now classified as a meteor—
exploded 23 miles above Sudan’s Nubian Desert, exactly as was expected. The story did not end there, however. Meteor astronomer Peter Jenniskens of the SETI Institute in California suspected that chunks of the rock might have survived the fiery descent. He enlisted a team of local Sudanese students to comb the desert of northeastern Sudan and managed to recover almost 300 fragments totaling 10 pounds. In a March paper published in the journal Nature, Jenniskens reported that the rocks were part of a porous asteroid that formed rapidly during Earth’s infancy, some 4.5 billion years ago. The fragility of the asteroid explains why it exploded so high up in Earth’s atmosphere. “By looking at this trail of bread crumbs,” Jenniskens says, “we can go back in time and see how the asteroid evolved.” ANDREW GRANT
CLOCKWISE FROM FAR LEFT: ED CUNICELLI/GLASSHOUSE IMAGES; M. SHADDAD & P. JENNISKENS; ESA/DLR/FU BERLIN; MICHAEL HAEGELE/CORBIS; JASON BOURQUE/UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA
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Titanoboa as reconstructed by an artist.
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DEET Might Harm the Brain The steep cliffs of the Martian polar ice cap.
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Did NASA’s Phoenix Find Liquid Water on Mars? Self-portraits taken by a NASA probe on the surface of Mars may have provided our first glimpse of liquid water on another planet. The Phoenix Mars Lander, which touched down near the planet’s north pole, was designed to look only for ice frozen into the Martian soil. But University of Michigan space scientist Nilton Rennó says probe images show blobs of liquid water clinging to the lander’s titanium legs. In an October paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research, Rennó theorizes that as Phoenix landed, its thrusters displaced topsoil and splashed small droplets of brine onto the probe’s legs. Sodium and magnesium perchlorate salts in the Martian soil may allow water to remain liquid despite the extreme
cold, about –90 degrees Fahrenheit. In successive images, the drops seem to flow downward and darken, as if they are melting. “I think there is liquid water on Mars right now,” Rennó says. In a follow-up, he confirmed that under simulated Martian atmospheric conditions, sodium salts do absorb water vapor and form a liquid solution. Michael Hecht of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory disagrees with Rennó’s assessment, saying the blobs could merely be frost; Phoenix principal investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona in Tucson thinks there is not yet enough evidence to evaluate the claim. “Whether you believe Rennó’s case or not, though, he’s created some interesting ideas that are very relevant to future Mars research,” Smith says. One intriguing possibility: If fluid water does persist on Mars, life that might have thrived there millions of years ago, when the climate was warmer and wetter, could be hanging on in thin layers of salty water just beneath the surface. ANDREW GRANT
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Giant Snake Hints at Life in Hot Times In February researchers announced that they had uncovered the 60-million-year-old remains of Indiana Jones’s greatest nightmare: Titanoboa, the biggest snake of all time. The bones of this 43-foot, one-ton, crocodile-munching behemoth—found amid the remains of an ancient rain forest—are helping scientists understand what the earth was like when the climate was much warmer. Snakes rely on external heat to regulate their body temperature, and their size depends directly on the climate where they live. So when a team of paleontologists unearthed several huge fossilized snake vertebrae in a Colombian coal mine, the scientists were able to deduce not only how big the creature was but also what the temperatures were like in its era. Assuming the monster snake’s metabolism was similar to that of its living relatives—anacondas
DEET is great at keeping away mosquitoes—200 million people around the world rely on it—but this common insect repellent may also interfere with the human nervous system, a group of European scientists warn. Their widely covered study, published in August, shows that DEET can disrupt nerve cells and enzymes in insects, mice, and people. Vincent Corbel of the Institute of Research for Development in France, who led the research, cautions that the conditions in his experiment did not mirror real-world use of the chemical. “We directly exposed specific neural cells to high concentrations of DEET,” he says. He estimates that the risks from applying it as recommended— sprayed onto the skin, with no more than three applications per day at a concentration of no more than 50 percent—are far lower than the dangers from mosquito-borne diseases, especially in the tropics. Nevertheless, Corbel believes that DEET deserves further investigation: “It’s funny that after 60 years, there are still many things we don’t know about this compound.” CYRUS MOULTON
and boa constrictors—lead author Jason Head of the University of Toronto at Mississauga estimates that equatorial Colombia must have hovered around 90 degrees Fahrenheit on average, about 10 degrees warmer than the region is today. The team’s findings, published in Nature, support the idea that during warming periods, temperatures rise across the globe. An opposing viewpoint holds that equatorial temperatures stay roughly constant while excess heat accumulates in higher latitudes. “Most climate models favor a hot equator,” says Paul Koch, a paleontologist at the University of California at Santa Cruz, who did not participate in the research. Neither scenario would be particularly good news in the context of modern climate change. Head notes that an overheated equator could threaten a sizable portion of the earth’s biodiversity and its people. “These areas are home to much of the earth’s population,” he says. On the other hand, Titanoboa also shows that rain forests can thrive at substantially higher temperatures than they do in the modern Amazon. ANDREW GRANT
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Girls Hit Puberty Earlier Around the World The average age of puberty is falling, according to a study of 20,654 healthy Chinese girls aged 3 to 20. On average the girls developed breast buds by 9 and pubic hair by 11, notably earlier than what used to be the norm. A 15-year Danish study similarly concludes that girls today experience initial breast development a year earlier than they did in the early 1990s. Both reports are in sync with a landmark 1997 study of 17,000 girls by the American Academy of Pediatrics, which found that Caucasian girls were developing breasts 6 to 12 months earlier than they did 40 years ago. Better nutrition—leading to taller, heavier girls who mature younger—probably plays a role. Environmental exposure to hormone-mimicking chemicals may have an effect too. Pediatrician Barbara Cromer of Case Western Reserve University notes that many pesticides and plastics contain synthetic estrogens, and that cattle fattened with estrogen have up to five times as much of it in their tissue as do untreated cattle. “Early puberty could represent a ‘canary in the coal mine’ for excessive estrogen in our environment,” she says. If so, the next generation of young women are at greater risk of health problems. Elevated exposure to estrogen over a long period is linked with higher breast cancer rates in adulthood and earlier onset of risky sexual activity. JILL NEIMARK
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Giant Geysers From a Tiny Moon
Saturn’s moon Enceladus seemed like a boring ball of rock and ice—“until we figured out that it was spewing out its insides,” says Hunter Waite, a space scientist at Southwest Research Institute. The first major hint came in 2005, when NASA’s Cassini spacecraft detected magnetic field distortions along with plumes of water vapor and ice erupting from its south pole. Last summer, two papers published in Nature bolstered the possibility that the plumes originate from buried reservoirs of liquid water (modeled below). Waite and his colleagues reported that Cassini’s mass spectrometer had caught a whiff of ammonia—an antifreeze that could keep water in a liquid state. Another group, led by Frank Postberg of the University of Heidelberg, described finding sodium in the ice grains of Saturn’s E ring, which is composed of material released by Enceladian eruptions. Their discovery suggests the moon may have a liquid ocean that, like Earth’s, picked up salt from rock, Postberg says. A third team using Earth-based telescopes to look for sodium near Enceladus came up empty, however. Some scientists believe that pools of water lurk thousands of feet below the frozen surface, while others think the eruptions might be released directly from ice. More answers should come soon: Cassini is scheduled to loop by Enceladus several more times. MEGAN TALKINGTON
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200-Year-Old Cipher Solved In 1801 American mathematician Robert Patterson sent a letter containing an encrypted message to Thomas Jefferson. The president never figured it out, but this past March, mathematician Lawren Smithline of the Center for Communications Research in Princeton, New Jersey, finally cracked the code. Patterson and Jefferson shared an interest in cryptography. In his letter, Patterson wrote that he had devised the perfect cipher: simple, yet impossible to break without the key. It entailed writing a message in vertical columns on a grid, scrambling the grid’s horizontal rows, and then inserting nonsense letters at the start of each row. The key consisted of numbers listing the proper order of the rows and the number of nonsense letters in each. Patterson claimed that his message would stump humanity “to the end of time.” Smithline took on the challenge, writing a computer program to test different arrangements of rows and various quantities of nonsense letters, and zeroing in on options that produced the most promising two-letter pairs. Pairs like “qu” and “nt” suggested he was on the right track, while combinations that produced impossible neighbors like “vj” and “dx” were rejected. After a week, he exposed the mystery message as words that Jefferson would have easily recognized: the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence. STEPHEN ORNES
FROM LEFT: ADAM GAULT/GETTY IMAGES; NASA/JPL/SPACE SCIENCE INSTITUTE; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. OPPOSITE: UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN MUSEUM OF PALEONTOLOGY
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Prize-Driven Research Takes Off A growing number of organizations are taking a cue from reality TV, offering prize money for successful solutions to science and technology problems. Three major prizes are currently up for grabs from the X Prize Foundation, which aims to spur innovation. The $10 million Archon X Prize will reward any group or person who can sequence the human genome in 10 days or less for no more than $10,000 per genome. So far, eight teams have registered. The $10 million Progressive Automotive X Prize, recognizing highefficiency, commercially viable vehicles, completed two rounds of judging this past year. Performance tests will start in the spring of 2010, with winners announced in September. And 21 teams are vying to land a privately funded rover on the moon in pursuit of the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize. Last October a smaller X Prize–operated contest, the Northrop Grumman
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Lunar Lander Challenge, awarded $1 million to Masten Space Systems and $500,000 to Armadillo Aerospace for their progress in building a commercial rocket capable of safe vertical takeoff and landing, as demonstrated by successful tests in the Mojave Desert. Other groups were also busy in 2009. Entries poured in for the £10 million ($17 million) Saltire Prize, to be awarded by the government of Scotland for wave or tidal energy technology that can produce a continuous output of 100 gigawatt-hours for two years. More than 100 teams will begin competition this month. In September, the DVD rental company Netflix paid out a $1 million purse to a seven-member team that developed an algorithm to improve its predictions of customers’ movie preferences. Netflix plans to announce a sequel early this year. Meanwhile, a company called InnoCentive is hosting hundreds of open questions in science and technology. Rewards range from $5,000 to $1 million. X Prize founder Peter Diamandis thinks prize-based innovation is much more than a fad: “Investments where sponsors pay only for results are efficient, effective, lowrisk mechanisms to solve problems.” DARLENE CAVALIER
Ancestral Whales May Have Given Birth on Land While digging for fossils in Pakistan, paleontologist Philip Gingerich of the University of Michigan discovered the fossil skeleton of a 47-million-year-old pregnant whale with her fetus positioned for headfirst delivery—a surprise since modernday whales are born tail-first to prevent drowning. The clear implication: Ancestral whales may have given birth on land. “Virtually all of mammal evolution has occurred on land,” says Gingerich, who in 2001 described fossil evidence that whales descended from split-hoofed mammals, a finding that compounded earlier indications of a genetic relationship between whales and hippos. Fossils indicate that whales started to make the transition from land to sea
A ventral view of the skull of Maiacetus inuus.
about 50 million years ago. The pregnant specimen, Maiacetus inuus, was found near what was once a coastline. It probably looked like a long-snouted sea lion, with flipperlike limbs and a long, muscular body. This intermediate species may have spent most of its time in the water, coming onto land to rest, mate, and give birth. A second, even more complete Maiacetus fossil was found nearby; it appears to be a male, slightly larger. Gingerich and team nearly overlooked the two skeletons. “There was just a trace of chalk dust on the ground,” he says. “I thought it was nothing at first, but when we came to the mother’s skull, I knew this was something special.” LINDSEY KONKEL
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First Ground Animals Borrowed Shells Some of the first animals to venture onto land commandeered empty seashells for protection, according to an April report in Geology. Amherst College geologist Whitey Hagadorn came to this realization while studying imprints in a 500-million-year-old sandstone formation in central Wisconsin. These markings resembled other tracks thought to be made by an early arthropod, Protichnites, as it dragged itself across an ancient beach. But the impressions exhibited curious diagonal notches between the leg prints that puzzled Hagadorn. He showed them to Yale geologist Dolf Seilacher, who noted that the pattern resembled the tracks created by modern hermit crabs as they drag their shells. Hermit crabs carry shells on their backs for protection and to store water. Protichnites probably used shells to keep their abdominal gills moist, Hagadorn speculates. That would have allowed the animals to breathe and forage on land for longer periods. “Shells increased the range of conditions they could withstand,” he says. Hagadorn is following up on a related development, the discovery of a fossil of the lobsterlike creature that may have created the tracks. JEREMY LABRECQUE
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Tiny Robots Prepare for Surgery Nobody is yet plotting to shrink Raquel Welch and inject her into your veins, but engineers are making notable progress toward the Fantastic Voyage vision: creating miniature probes that could dart around in your blood and treat disease from the inside. This past year, mechanical engineer James Friend of Monash University in Australia crafted a robot motor just a quarter of a millimeter in diameter and 2 millimeters long, smaller than the head of a pin. It is built out of piezoelectric materials that vibrate when exposed to an electric field. Those vibrations can be converted into rotary motion to propel a miniature
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swimming robot. Inserted into a patient, such a device could transport catheters and guide wires, carry a camera, or deliver drugs to the site of an injury. “It will increase the ability of the doctor to see and control what is happening during surgery,” Friend says. His group is testing the mini-motor in silicone models of human arteries and planning even smaller versions. Meanwhile, engineers at Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology, debuted Virob, a buglike microbot that needs no internal power source. Instead, a magnetic field outside the body induces vibrations in its legs, propelling it forward. The Technion team hopes to deploy Virob into the ears of people suffering from hearing loss, stimulating nerve cells that lie beyond the reach of cochlear implants. BOONSRI DICKINSON
Venus Has a Secret Past
The first detailed infrared map of Venus, unveiled by the European Space Agency (ESA) in July, suggests that Earth’s nearest planetary neighbor may have had a watery past. In size, density, and composition, Venus is the most Earth-like planet in the solar system, but it is a hellish domain: Ground temperatures settle around 860 degrees Fahrenheit beneath a crushingly dense atmosphere laced with a sulfuric acid haze. Thick clouds prevent direct observation of the surface of Venus, but its heated rocks emit infrared radiation that hints at their composition. Captured by ESA’s Venus Express orbiter, this radiation indicates that the highlands of the planet’s southern hemisphere resemble granite, the same material that makes up terrestrial continents. To form, granite requires water, which does not currently exist on Venus. It also requires plate tectonics and volcanism—neither of which seems to be active at this time either. The finding suggests that the young Venus might have been much like Earth, with oceans surrounding its extensive landmasses, before a runaway greenhouse effect condemned it to its bleak fate. ADAM HADHAZY
Hydrogen Energy Gets Two Big Boosts Hydrogen fuel cells, which expel only water and heat as waste, are an appealing way to generate clean electricity, but the present technology relies on expensive platinum catalysts. Moreover, most of the hydrogen available today is derived from fossil fuels, so hydrogen is not nearly as clean as it may seem. This year, researchers made notable progress in transcending both limitations. Looking for an alternative to platinum, Jean-Pol Dodelet of the National Institute of Scientific Research in Quebec, found inspiration in the human body, which uses iron-based molecules to extract energy from food. In April his group described an enhanced iron-based catalyst for fuel cells. It works just as well as platinum-based ones but could be considerably less costly. Chemist Daniel Nocera at MIT is also looking to nature, trying to find a renewable way to generate hydrogen. He has developed a different catalyst—one that, when coupled with a photovoltaic cell, splits water into hydrogen and oxygen using energy from sunlight, just as plants do during photosynthesis. Nocera is working to scale up the system in hopes that it will bring clean, abundant energy to poor people living off the grid. “With this,” he says, “the only thing you’re tied to is the sun.” JOCELYN RICE
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76 Illustration of how a pterosaur might have launched using all four limbs.
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Giant pterosaurs were masters of the air from 108 million to 70 million years ago. The biggest ones weighed 500 pounds, had a wingspan of 34 feet, flew 40 miles an hour, and covered hundreds of miles a day. They were unable to launch themselves like modern birds, though, so how did these prehistoric giants get off the ground? Common sense suggests they must have run a long distance, built up speed, and then leaped into the air. Wrong, says Michael Habib, a paleontologist at Chatham University in Pittsburgh. “My findings suggest there was no running involved.” According to his analysis, published in the European journal Zitteliana, pterosaurs folded their wings so they could act as arms and then used all four limbs to shove themselves aloft. “Pterosaur arms were much stronger than their legs,” he
says. “Together the wings could withstand more than 2,000 pounds of force in launch position. They would crouch down on all fours, vault, and push off.” Once airborne, the giant creatures would snap their wings into flying position and eventually soar. Habib used CAT scans to analyze bone strength in a number of species of living birds and compared them to measurements taken from 12 species of pterosaurs. He could find no evidence to support the idea that large pterosaurs got off the ground using only their hind legs to launch. In this regard they resembled vampire bats, which use a “quadrupedal launch” to accelerate quickly, Habib says. This kind of launch allows the bat to employ its strongest muscles (in forelimbs and chest) for takeoff. JANE BOSVELD
The “late heavy bombardment” of asteroids that clobbered Earth and the rest of the inner solar system for 20 million to 100 million years, ending 3.85 billion years ago, is generally regarded as one of the most hostile eras in our planet’s history. Collision after collision would have blasted and heated the surface, wiping out any primordial organisms trying to eke out an existence. New studies are turning this view on its head, however, hinting that the ancient rain of asteroids may actually have established a more congenial environment for biology to take hold. There already were clues that the late heavy bombardment was not the full-on killer it was once thought to be, says planetary scientist Oleg Abramov of the University of Colorado. The earliest evidence for living organisms dates back almost exactly to the time when the rain of asteroids ended. Unless life appeared nearly instantly, it must have survived the onslaught. Abramov’s study, published in the May 21 issue of Nature, shows how that could have happened. Certain modern bacteria thrive deep underground; their ancestors may have done the same, he argues. In fact, some scientists think life might have originated in subsurface hydrothermal systems. “Nobody had calculated how far sterilization would have extended below the surface,” Abramov says. He and his coauthor, geochemist Stephen Mojzsis, also of the University of Colorado, found that if early bacteria were living more than 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) down, the impacts could have helped life by creating more hot-waterfilled cracks for microbes to inhabit. Soon after, the late heavy bombardment might have aided life on the surface, too. Back then the sun was so dim that Earth should have frozen solid, and yet geochemical evidence indicates the presence of oceans 4 billion years ago. One proposed explanation is that heat-trapping greenhouse gases kept things balmy, but it was not clear where those gases could have come from. In August, geochemist Richard Court of Imperial College London published a report showing that impacting rocks would have shed tremendous quantities of carbon dioxide and water vapor, both of which effectively trap heat. “People had always known that the bombardment would have changed the atmosphere’s chemistry,” he says, “but nobody had really done the experimental work.” MICHAEL D . LEMONICK
FROM FAR LEFT: ERIK EDQVIST; JOSE ISELIN/VISUALS UNLIMITED; DORON GILD; (C) JULIA MOLNAR
“The smell of fear” turns out to have a foundation in science. All sweat smells—and some sweat screams anxiety to the world, according to a study published in June in PLoS One. “The chemical transfer of anxiety may cause a feeling of discomfort in the perceiver. It’s like a sixth sense,” says psychologist Bettina Pause of the University of Düsseldorf in Germany, one of the authors of the paper. Pause and her colleagues collected sweat from 49 students at two times—right before a university exam and during exercise. The researchers then had other students sniff the samples and scanned their brains with fMRI, which registers activity. Sniffers’ brains responded to sweat made during an anxious period differently from sweat produced through physical exertion. In humans, anxious sweat activates a cluster of brain areas known to be involved in empathy. “That suggests,” Pause says, “that anxiety—and maybe also other emotions—can be chemically transferred between people.” JANE BOSVELD
Did an Early Pummeling of Asteroids Pave the Way for Life on Earth?
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AMY BARTH
78 Star Power Comes to California
JACQUELINE MCBRIDE/LLNL
In the heart of the National Ignition Facility (NIF), a technician inspects the optics assembly where 192 powerful laser beams will zap a pellet filled with deuterium and tritium, two heavy forms of hydrogen. The pellet will immediately implode, reaching a temperature of more than 100 million degrees at a pressure 100 billion times that of Earth’s atmosphere. Under those conditions the hydrogen will fuse into helium, releasing a vast amount of energy and creating the kinds of nuclear processes that occur deep inside the sun. The NIF, dedicated in May in Livermore, California, will also mimic the detonation of nuclear weapons and will perform astrophysics experiments. Research at the facility could speed the development of abundant, clean fusion power —literally the stars brought down to Earth.
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Black Hole Created in Lab In June researchers at Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology, announced they had made an earthbound analogue of a black hole. Not to worry: Instead of a superdense object from which no light can escape, their more docile version merely prevents sound waves from getting out. Constructing a sonic black hole was first proposed by Canadian physicist William Unruh nearly 30 years ago, but the Israeli team was the first to successfully create one. They cooled 100,000 rubidium atoms to a few billionths of a degree above absolute zero and used a laser to create a void in this tiny cloud. As the atoms, attracted to the breach, zipped across it at more than four times the speed of sound, they gave rise to a black hole effect. Under such conditions, no sound wave could travel against the flow of the racing fluid. “It’s like trying to swim upstream in a river whose current is faster than you,” says team member Jeff Steinhauer. The boundary between the subsonic and supersonic flows mimics a black hole’s event horizon, the point of no return. The discovery could potentially provide a way to test Stephen Hawking’s prediction that a real black hole should slowly evaporate as it emits radiation generated in the quantum turmoil at its event horizon. A sonic black hole ought to act in the same way by releasing phonons, or packets of sound energy. Finding phonons would provide strong evidence that black holes “ain’t so black,” as Hawking likes to put it. MARCIA BARTUSIAK
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Chimps Plan Ahead As a group, humans know how to think about the future. We are the species of agendas, delayed gratification, and fiveyear plans. But this year two studies found that chimpanzees premeditate too. In one study, a chimp named Santino—the dominant male at Furuvik Zoo in Gävle, Sweden —was observed collecting and piling caches of stones, then returning later to hurl them at people who had come to look at him. Mathias Osvath, a cognitive scientist at Lund Uni-
versity in Sweden, posits that Santino may be showing off his strength to human visitors and other chimps. “He has a great time scaring visitors,” Osvath says, “and as the group’s dominant male, he is showing the other chimps that he can protect them.” A kind of Darwinian quest for survival underlies the second thread of evidence as well. That study comes from behavioral ecologist Christophe Boesch of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, who spent years observing wild chimpanzees in the Taï National Park in
Côte d’Ivoire. Boesch and his fellow researchers found that male chimps frequently had sex with the females they had previously shared meat with, thus increasing their mating success. The female chimps, for their part, thrived because of their increased caloric intake. The way the chimps hoard food makes Boesch suspect that the animals plot such trades ahead of time. “But we want to know more about their planning abilities,” he says. “How long ahead and how detailed is this planning, and is there some kind of hierarchical way that they plan?” JANE BOSVELD
An adult male chimp (right) offers meat to a female carrying her infant.
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Human Gene Changes Mouse Talk How important was a single gene in the evolution of human language? Scientists have been asking that question since linking a mutation in a gene called FOXP2 with a rare hereditary speech disorder seen in a British family. Other animals possess their own versions of FOXP2, suggesting that it might be possible to determine which evolutionary changes to the gene’s DNA sequence are most closely related to our ability to talk. This year molecular biologist Wolfgang Enard of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, explored that possibility with an extraordinary
experiment: He inserted the human version of FOXP2 into mice and studied the effects on the creatures’ brains and vocalizations. Enard and his collaborators found that neurons in the brains of mice with human FOXP2 showed greater plasticity, the ability to change the strength of their connections with one another. Such plasticity might be involved in vocal learning, he suspects. Mice endowed with the human gene also expressed themselves with lower-pitched sounds. Those deeper squeaks provide additional evidence of FOXP2’s central role in spoken language. “We have no clue which mechanisms could cause such a change,” Enard says, “but we don’t know of any other gene so directly linked to speech.” ALLISON BOND
FROM LEFT: ISTOCKPHOTO; CRISTINA M. GOMES. OPPOSITE: CENTRO UCM-ISCIII DE EVOLUCIÓN HUMANA; MO LI, WOLFRAM PERNICE, HONG TANG
PHYSICS || MEDICINE || BIOLOGY || ANTHROPOLOGY
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Light Can Bend Itself
Computer reconstruction of an ancient deformed skull shows that the child to whom it belonged must have been nurtured. Such a brain deformity would have made the child unable to surive without assistance.
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Early Humans Tended the Disabled The 530,000-year-old de formed skull of a child found in Spain indicates that some early humans must have nurtured and cared for disabled members of their tribe. This child, estimated to be 10 years old at the time of death, had a debilitating birth defect called craniosynostosis, in which joints in the skull fuse before the brain has finished growing. The disorder increases pressure in the skull, impairing brain development. “It is amazing that this child was able to survive until 10 years old. This is the most ancient proof of social care of the handicapped,” says Ana Gracia, a paleoanthropologist based in Madrid, who published an analysis of the skull
in March in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Many mammals kill burdensome offspring, she points out. The child, unearthed in the Atapuerca Mountains of Spain, belonged to the species Homo heidelbergensis and was probably part of a small tribe of hunter-gatherers who migrated in response to food and weather. “Survival would have been difficult even for healthy individuals,” Gracia says. “The incredible part of this story is that the parents must have looked after this child.” The discovery was made in Sima de Los Huesos—“the Pit of Bones.” Located at the bottom of a 137-foot-deep chimney inside a cave, the pit is littered with remains of ancient animals and also includes about 28 hominid skeletons dating back to the Middle Pleistocene. AMY BARTH
In July engineers demonstrated that beams of light can be made to repel each other, much like repulsive electric charges. The discovery could help control data transfer through the Internet and enable cell phones to work more quickly while drawing less power. The findings from Yale University electrical engineer Hong Tang and his team build on discoveries they announced in late 2008, in which they demonstrated the opposite effect: attraction between light beams confined within a silicon chip. Together, the attraction and repulsion effects make up what is known as the “optical force,” a phenomenon that theorists first predicted in
2005. The force acts along an axis perpendicular to the direction in which light is traveling. Parallel beams can therefore be induced to converge or diverge. Tang proposes that the optical force could be exploited in telecommunications. For example, switches based on the optical force could be used to speed up the routing of light signals in fiber-optic cables, and optical oscillators could improve cell phone signal processing. Unfortunately for amateur physicists, the optical force effect becomes imperceptible for larger light sources, so flashlight beams cannot tug on one another. “You need a transistor-size object to see it,” Tang says. STEPHEN ORNES
Light-wave circuit enables engineers to study the newly discovered optical force.
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Plankton Record Earth’s CO2 History
Trace elements trapped in ancient plankton reveal that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have been largely stable over the last 2.1 million years. In a study published in Science in June, paleoceanographer Bärbel Hönisch and colleagues at Columbia University examined the remnants of planktonic foraminifera—single-celled creatures with elaborate shells—buried beneath the seafloor off the coast of Africa. The plankton incorporate different forms of boron into their shells, depending on the seawater’s acidity, so each shell serves as a chemical record of the ocean’s pH during its occupant’s brief life. The sea’s acidity, in turn, reflects how much carbon dioxide was present in the atmosphere at the time. By analyzing boron in shells accumulated over more than 2 million years, Hönisch was able to reconstruct in unprecedented detail how atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have changed over time. As expected, carbon dioxide fluctuated with variations in local temperature, with higher levels corresponding to warmer epochs. But despite major shifts in the climate over the period she studied, Hönisch found that overall concentrations of the gas remained remarkably constant. That makes today’s sky-high readings look even more anomalous. “It really shows how much we have interfered with the environment,” Hönisch says. “This goes way beyond anything that earth has seen in a really long time.” The researchers now want to dig deeper below the seafloor, where plankton have been piling up for some 100 million years, to study times when carbon dioxide levels were as high as they are today. JOCELYN RICE
On July 19, 15 years after the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet slammed into Jupiter, Australian amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley noticed a dark spot near the planet’s south pole that resembled marks he had seen after the 1994 crash. NASA scientists took a closer look and concluded that another comet or asteroid had slammed into Jupiter with the force of 2 billion tons of TNT. The Hubble Space Telescope snapped this photo four days later, showing an enigmatic cloud spread out by Jupiter’s turbulent atmosphere. ANDREW GRANT
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Jupiter Gets Comet-Whacked
Plankton shells show that CO2 levels have never been so high in 2 million years.
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NASA, ESA, AND H. HAMMEL (SPACE SCIENCE INSTITUTE, BOULDER, COLO.), AND THE JUPITER IMPACT TEAM; (C) MANFRED KAGE/PETER ARNOLD, INC.
ASTRONOMY || ENVIRONMENT
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ADVERTISEMENT
Scientists have made significant contributions to the safety and well-being of the human race. They have identified laws of nature that explain the functioning of the universe, Earth’s flora and fauna, and especially of the physical activities of Homo sapiens. But “why” planet Earth and its occupants exist is still an admitted mystery to them. What follows explains an important part of that mystery. For millennia great developmental progress has taken mankind from a simple desire to survive to our present complex systems of social laws and inherited customs. Most readers would agree that despite those man-made systems, human affairs are still in a state of confusion with problems and trouble growing daily. We have races pitted against one another, political groups pitted against one another, as well as individuals who pit themselves against one another in their careers, marriages, and sports to name a few obvious areas. An appropriate question is, Why? Our answer follows: From the beginning people have been living by their own laws of behavior and inherited customs, but those man-made systems contradict a natural law, causing people to get wrong, troublesome results. That natural law was identified by Richard W. Wetherill almost a century ago and was presented in his book, Tower of Babel, published January 2, 1952. It is a law of behavior that Wetherill called the law of absolute right, indicating that rightness in all human activities is required for successful outcomes. As a result of Wetherill’s identification of the law, he developed a program called humanetics to explain the wrongness of people’s attitudes and behavior and how to correct them. Wrongness has not only been destroying people’s lives but also increasingly is damaging the environment that supports the life of the planet. When scientists identify natural laws, they apply their principles to better human existence and wellbeing—that is, usually, until the nuclear age developed. Scientists could now investigate nature’s behavioral law and help to inform people of its principles. Wetherill used words to describe right behavior such as rational, honest, logical, and moral but cautioned that words
Richard W. Wetherill 1906-1989
are just symbols. The law is the final arbiter: Right begets right results; wrong begets wrong results. What are society’s results? Are people rational and honest? Or do they act on their own motives to do, be, have, get, and become whatever they desire? People know they must obey nature’s laws of gravity, friction, and all the other laws of physics, but for nearly a century scientists, religionists, educators, and the public have resisted acknowledging creation’s law of rightness. Is that sane? Albert Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. For millennia people have reasoned from manmade laws and inherited customs over and over again, expecting a different result. Instead, over and over again, humanity has been getting incalculable wrong results. Is that sane? This essay/ad provides a brief description of the behavior that natural law requires of us. Are we going to comply and get out of the muddled mess of human affairs being caused by acting on man-made laws? Visit our colorful Website www.alphapub.com where essays and books describe the changes called for by whoever or whatever created nature’s law of absolute right. The material can be read and downloaded free. As people worldwide visit our Website, they can join those who are already benefiting from adhering to the behavioral law with rational and honest thoughts, words, and action. That is creation’s way to change what is wrong until everything is made right: perfectly behaving people on the one planet in this universe that supports life as we know it! This public-service message is from a self-financed, nonprofit group of former students of the late Richard W. Wetherill.
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The world’s greatest particle-smasher gears up for a second try. Physicist JOHN ELLIS previews what will happen when the fireworks resume.
The biggest particle accelerator ever made—the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva—spectacularly fizzled shortly after scientists turned it on in September 2008. What felled the gargantuan machine was a single badly soldered connection. When the powerful electrical currents running through the LHC came to bear on that tiny piece of solder, the resulting heat set off a cascade of events, ending in a sudden release of helium that blew aside several of the collider’s massive superconducting magnets. The staff at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, spent the past year repairing the damage, inspecting tens of thousands of connections, and bolting down
collisions before the end of 2009. That would require quite a lot of luck. It’s like NASA’s launching a space probe. If you discover a faulty valve reading somewhere or other, you have to go back and check it. It’s one thing to make collisions; it’s another to understand what’s going on and find new physics.
There’s been a lot of downtime at CERN. What have you been doing—long lunches in the cafeteria? People are working their butts off, bashing away on their computers. Experimentalists are using this time to work on the alignments of their detectors, the data acquisition system, and all that. There haven’t been any idle moments. One upside of the delay is that the experiments are really ready to take collision data.
We’ve been analyzing other possible failure modes and making sure none of them would have unfortunate consequences. Most of that work is done, but there are still some other precautions people want to take. Those would be necessary before we go to maximum energy. For 2010 the plan is to start up at half energy, then in a few weeks or months go to about threequarters energy. Full energy won’t be possible until 2011.
Will you be able to do notable science at half power? Already at half power, particles will be colliding at energies beyond what has been achieved with any previous accelerator. Just to put this into perspective, the energy distance between half power and the Tevatron accelerator [at Fermilab in Illinois] is greater than the difference between the Tevatron and the previous collider. As soon as we make half-power collisions, we’ll be seeing beyond what the Tevatron can see. That should be enough to start looking for high-profile items on the shopping list, like dark matter. The Higgs boson [the hypothetical particle that endows other particles with mass] would not be seen immediately. That’s a real tough cookie.
What happens next? The damage that occurred in 2008 has been fully repaired.
When will you start making particles collide again? We might see some half-power
How will the LHC aid the search for dark matter? Dark matter by definition
the magnets in case of another accident. By the end of 2009, CERN scientists were ready to start again, using the LHC to investigate the deepest mysteries in physics—including why matter has mass. John Ellis, a theoretical physicist at CERN who has been involved in the project for 25 years, talked with DISCOVER about the repairs and the prospects for the LHC.
text by FRED GUTERL photography by ROBERT HUBER
consists of something you can’t see. So the way you would detect it is by observing events in which some particle carries away energy invisibly. You observe something by its absence, so to speak. That is pretty delicate because you have to make sure you couldn’t possibly have missed anything more conventional. You have to demonstrate that you can see and measure accurately all the known particles—muons, quarks, and so on. When the experimenters have demonstrated that they can measure all those things accurately, then they will be able to start convincing us that they can really measure whether there’s any missing energy. There have been false alarms in the past, when people have thought they were seeing missing energy. So you have to be very, very careful. What about supersymmetric particles—hypothetical particles that are like weird twins of the known ones? Will the LHC look for those, too? Supersymmetry is one example of something that could explain dark matter. But the two are not equivalent. You could imagine a scenario in which supersymmetric particles do not produce missing energy and do not make dark matter. So if you do see missing energy, you have to ask if it’s a result of supersymmetry;
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the energy might also be going into extra dimensions, or there might be some other explanation. There would be a long period in which you would try to figure it out. You can also imagine supersymmetry scenarios that don’t involve missing energy at all. Those would be quite tricky to look for. Could you find some sign of the Higgs boson early on, while operating at half or three-quarters energy? Finding the Higgs boson is a question of seeing a signal against a background. It’s not as if you would produce an event so distinctive that it couldn’t possibly be anything other than the Higgs. So you would have to build up statistics to convince people that the signal you’re seeing is the real deal. At half or three-quarters power, we will be able to start looking for the characteristics of the Higgs boson, but it will take quite a bit of time to find. If there were another big failure of the LHC, would that be the end of particle physics? If we never got the thing running reliably, that would be the end, because nobody would trust us to build anything else. I don’t see that happening. What happened on the day of the first start-up was not typical—it was just one of those things. You drive a new car
and get a punch in a tire, but that doesn’t mean you’ll get a punch every five miles. You put on a new set of tires, and after that the car normally works. It’s worth remembering that the problem didn’t arise in some high-tech component. It was a simple soldering problem.
The lengthy repairs must be agonizing to people like you, who have waited so long for results from the LHC. You bet. It has been even more frustrating for the accelerator guys, who, when they started up, thought they would be able to produce collisions very
soon. It has also been frustrating for many of the experimentalists, who thought they were going to be able to start doing physics, many of them having spent 10 years in preparation. The atmosphere has been very subdued. Now I can feel the fever mounting a little bit.
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Mockingbirds Know Who You Are Don’t mock the mockingbirds, because they can recognize you... and they hold a grudge. Doug Levey, a biologist at the University of Florida, found that the birds could easily pick out a threatening person from a crowd. Levey sent students, called “intruders” in the paper he published last May in the journal PNAS, to perturb nests of mockingbirds. The intrusion constituted standing by an egg-filled nest for 15 seconds, then touching it for an additional 15 seconds. This aggressive loitering, which was repeated over four days, elicited an increasingly intense response. The mockingbirds ignored the approach of other, nonthreatening students, but every time the intruder student swung by, the birds quickly and sneakily left the nest and eventually divebombed the malefactor. “The first time a male mockingbird drew blood on the back of my neck, I was shocked,” says intruder Monique Hiersoux. Mockingbirds’ strong awareness of their surroundings makes them well suited for living so close to humans, Levey concludes. “We might be walking along on campus and see a mockingbird perched on a branch and think, ‘Oh, that bird is minding its own business,’ ” he says. “But what we don’t realize is that we are its business.” MICHAEL ABRAMS
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Alzheimer’s Genes Located
This past September, a pair of research teams announced that they had identified three new genes associated with Alzheimer’s disease. The scientists also tagged another 12 gene variants as promising candidates for further study. Previously, only four genes were known to be linked to Alzheimer’s, which affects an estimated 5 million Americans. Both reports appeared in Nature Genetics. To pinpoint the new genes, the two groups conducted studies looking for differences between the DNA of people who have Alzheimer’s disease and those who do not. Epidemiologist Philippe Amouyel of the Pasteur Institute of Lille in France and his colleagues closed in on genes called CR1 and CLU. The precise function of these genes is unknown, but previous research suggests they may be involved in removing a protein fragment called beta-amyloid from the brain. In people with Alzheimer’s, beta-amyloid molecules clump
together and form destructive plaques. The other team, led by medical psychologist Julie Williams of Cardiff University in Wales, noted the same CLU gene and identified another Alzheimer’s-related gene, PICALM. This gene is thought to help maintain the health of synapses, the connection points between neurons, and it, too, may regulate beta-amyloid levels in the brain. These findings mark “the first time any novel Alzheimer’s gene has been identified in genomewide studies,” says Washington University geneticist Alison Goate, one of Williams’s coauthors. Previous studies had examined small numbers of people to confirm already-known genetic risk factors. Locating new Alzheimer’s genes will aid efforts to understand the chemical pathways that drive the disease, Amouyel says, and might eventually point the way to effective drugs to keep it at bay. BOONSRI DICKINSON
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Radiation Is What Turns Your Hair Gray Sooner or later almost everyone’s hair goes gray, but the cause has never been clear. Last spring a team of Japanese researchers said they think they have found the trigger: radiation-induced stress. Within every hair follicle is a population of melanocyte stem cells. Over time these cells split into two populations. One produces pigment for the hair before dying off, while the other becomes a new melanocyte stem cell. In a stress-free world, these cells would replenish themselves indefinitely and we would keep our youthful hair color until our dying day (baldness notwithstanding). But stress free this world is not—nor is the lab of dermatologist Emi Nishimura at Kanazawa University. There, she and her colleagues bombarded brown- and black-haired mice with DNA-damaging radiation. The consequences, as described in a paper published in Cell this June: The melanocytes that originally went on to rejuvenate instead only matured and died. The brown- and black-haired mice soon went gray. Researchers posit that the melanocyte die-off may be a way for the body to shed potentially cancerous, radiationstressed cells. It is too early to blame your spouse for your silver strands, though—emotional stress has not yet been shown to harm stem cells. MICHAEL ABRAMS
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Oldest Octopus Unveiled Ninety-five million years ago, five octopuses met their end in the waters covering what is now Lebanon. The lack of oxygen on the local seafloor kept the area free of bottom-dwelling scavengers, and sediment quickly covered the animals’ corpses, preserving them in unprecedented detail. Last January paleobiologist Dirk Fuchs of the Free University of Berlin and his colleagues released their analysis of these fossils—the most ancient octopods known. Due to their delicate construction, octopuses have left almost no evolutionary trail to follow. “The preservation of these softbodied creatures is the result of a chain of lucky chances,” Fuchs says. Previously only a single species of prehistoric octopus had turned up in the fossil record, so the new finds represent an explosion of information about the animals’ history. The five individuals include three previously unrecorded octopus species: Keuppia hyperbolaris, Keuppia levante, and Styletoctopus annae. Each specimen shows the animal’s head, eight arms, ink sacs, and suckers. The two Keuppia species appear primitive, but Fuchs was surprised to find that Styletoctopus’s anatomy places it in the same family as Octopus vulgaris, the living common octopus. “Its appearance indicates that modern octopods developed much earlier than previously thought,” he says. FROM FAR LEFT: ISTOCK; VERA ANDERSON/WIREIMAGE; DR. DIRK FUCHS; MARK BARLEY/UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA
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Oxygen’s Odd Origin Roughly 2.4 billion years ago, a rapid buildup of oxygen in the atmosphere set in motion big changes that allowed multicellular life to emerge. Most scientists believe photosynthetic bacteria produced the oxygen. The driving force behind the transition has been unclear, though. In April, new research showed that our planet itself might have been the primary cause: Today’s oxygen-filled atmosphere may owe its existence to a dramatic decline in nickel in the world’s
A rare octopus fossil from the time of the dinosaurs, seen here in ultraviolet light.
oceans. In a study published in Nature, a team led by geomicrobiologist Kurt Konhauser of the University of Alberta in Canada examined rocks from around the world known as banded iron formations (right), which contain a sequentially layered record of the concentrations of various elements in the ancient oceans. Their analysis showed a drop of almost 50 percent in oceanic nickel levels between 2.7 and 2.5 billion years ago. According to Konhauser, this “nickel famine” coincided with the cooling of the earth’s mantle, which curtailed volcanic eruptions of nickel-rich lava.
Deprived of this source of nickel, marine methane-producing bacteria known as methanogens—which require nickel to function—would have been sidelined, paving the way for the rise of photosynthetic, oxygen-producing cyanobacteria. Konhauser marvels at the interdependence of geology, chemistry, and biology that the research reveals. “It links volcanism and trace elements in seawater to changing populations in the biosphere,” he says, “which in turn led to changes in the earth’s atmosphere that made the rise of complex lifeforms possible.” JEREMY JACQUOT
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Nowhere to Hide
Getting away from it all is harder than ever, according to a new map developed by Andy Nelson for the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre and the World Bank. An ever-expanding network of roads, railways, rivers and shipping lanes means that only 10 percent of the earth’s surface is now remote, defined as being at least 48 hours away from a major city. More than half of the world‘s population lives within an hour of a major city, largely because “accessibility is a precondition for the satisfaction of almost any
EUROPEAN COMMUNITIES, 2009 JOINT RESEARCH CENTRE (JRC)
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economic or social need,” Nelson says. “The main story of the map is connectivity. It brings home how important it is to manage our resources, lifestyles, and economies in a sustainable manner, since we are all interdependent, and shows the remote places left behind. It also reminds us that the price of connectivity is that there is little wilderness left.” The brightest areas of the map represent the most densely populated and accessible regions; the darkest areas are the sparsest and most remote. Spanning lines show shipping lanes. HEATHER MAYER
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Einstein’s Brain Re-Analyzed
Species Transplant Succeeds
Two colonies of butterflies flapped their wings in northern England and the resulting debate was felt around the world. In February a group led by biologist Stephen G. Willis of Durham University in the U.K. reported that they had introduced two butterfly species—known as the marbled white (left) and the small skipper—into new habitats about 40 miles and 22 miles, respectively, from their homes. The move was a success, Willis’s six-year study showed. The transplanted species increased their populations at the same rate as they would have in their current territory, proving that the team’s models accurately predicted habitats suitable for the insects. Willis says that he undertook the experiment
because temperature increases are outpacing the butterflies’ ability to compensate by spreading northward. Months earlier, marine biologist Ove Hoegh-Guldberg and colleagues, writing in the journal Science, proposed a broader program of relocating organisms that are facing extinction due to climate change. Dismayed scientists raised the alarm, pointing to the devastating effects of species introductions such as the invasive kudzu vine. But Willis notes that he chose two thoroughly studied species that were unlikely to become invasive. “It would not have been good for our careers if we introduced the next cane toad,” he says. That unpopular creature was brought to Australia to control agricultural pests and quickly became a pest itself. CYRUS MOULTON
FROM TOP: KEYSTONE/GETTY IMAGES; STEPHEN WILLIS
There has been yet another attempt to identify the unique traits of Einstein’s brain, this one by anthropologist Dean Falk of Florida State University in Tallahassee. Falk did not have access to the actual brain, so she used techniques developed for the examination of fossils and applied them to photographs of Einstein’s brain taken after his death. In a study published in Frontiers in Evolutionary Neuroscience last May, Falk reports that the brain exhibited “an unusual mixture of symmetrical and asymmetrical features” that may have contributed to Einstein’s genius. For one thing, the parietal lobes of the great scientist’s brain were wider than normal (something that other researchers have noted in the past), and its grooves and ridges were oddly patterned. These details are important, Falk says, because the brain’s parietal lobes process numbers; they also integrate sensory information from different parts of the body. She believes that the novelties in Einstein’s lobes may have contributed to his “preference for thinking in sensory impressions, including visual images rather than words.” Falk also observed a small, knoblike structure coming off the right motor cortex, an area of the brain that controls the fingers of the left hand. This knob is sometimes seen in the brains of righthanded string players who train from a young age. Einstein was an avid violinist from childhood on. “It tickled me,” Falk says, “that the knob may well have been tied to Einstein’s musical ability.” The cognitive connection between music and mathematics has, of course, been noted for many years. JANE BOSVELD
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ANTHROPOLOGY || ENERGY || EVOLUTION || BIOLOGY || MIND
Hidden Civilization Found Under Lake Huron Traces of an ancient caribou hunting ground lie buried beneath Lake Huron, according to archaeologist John O’Shea at the University of Michigan. Modern Siberian herders manage reindeer migration by chopping down trees and laying them on the ground, he noted; the animals instinctively follow these “drive lanes.” O’Shea has found evidence that PaleoAmericans did the same thing thousands of years ago, when the climate around the Great Lakes was similarly Arctic-like. On land, old drive lanes would be quickly disrupted and become unrecognizable. In the middle of Lake Huron, however, such lanes could have been buried when lake water levels rose rapidly about 7,500 years ago, after the end of the last ice age. Equipped with sonar and remote-operated underwater vehicles, O’Shea and a team of University of Michigan colleagues plunged through the dark waters to look around. They found thousand-foot-long lines of rocks peppered with large boulders, which strongly resemble the drive lanes used by prehistoric hunters in the Canadian Arctic. The rocks have been buried there for more than 7,000 years. “This has potential to fill an important gap in knowledge of cultural development,” O’Shea says. The discovery also leaves him wondering what other relics lie hidden beneath Lake Huron. “The features are subtle,” he says. “I’m sure people have passed over these areas with sonars running and not recognized them for what they are.” O’Shea plans to send divers back to the 28-square-mile site in pursuit of further evidence, including stone tools and preserved animal remains. AMY BARTH
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Microbes Build Better Batteries In the never-ending search for improved ways to store energy, two groups are looking to biology, enlisting microbes to produce methane and viruses to build batteries. Penn State environmental engineer Bruce Logan and his colleagues identified microorganisms called methanogens that efficiently reduce carbon dioxide to methane. When the microbes receive an electric jolt, Logan reported in March, they use the electrons to combine CO2 and protons, creating methane gas. Methane can be stored and later used to fuel a vehicle or run a generator. Exploiting the microbes’ chemistry might be a way to make inconsistent energy sources like wind and solar more practical. Along the same lines, MIT materials scientist Angela Belcher has engineered viruses to help store electricity. Her genetically modified bacteriophages (viruses that infect bacteria) cloak themselves in iron phosphate, a metal salt, then attach to carbon nanotubes to produce a framework of microscopic conductive wires that can hold a charge just like a car battery. Genetic tweaks enabled the virus to bind tightly to the carbon nanotube, creating a high-powered battery, as she described in a May issue of Science. Unlike traditional battery manufacturing, the process requires no toxic chemicals and can be set up very cheaply. Belcher is working to improve the batteries’ storage capacity further by experimenting with different virus-coat materials.
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Tropical Heat Speeds Up Evolution If alien biologists were on an expedition to Earth, it would not take long for them to realize that there are a lot more species in the tropics than there are in temperate regions. “It’s the biggest, most obvious pattern in nature,” says Len Gillman, an evolutionary ecologist at Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand. Why that pattern exists has been a long-standing puzzle. This year, however, Gillman found a possible answer: A warm climate makes life evolve more quickly. Gillman and his colleagues compared 130 closely related pairs of mammal species. In each case, one species lived at a higher latitude or elevation than the other. The researchers tallied the number of mutations each species had accumulated in the same stretch of DNA since it split from a common ancestor. On average, mammals living in warmer climates collected mutations 50 percent more quickly—that is, they evolved 50 percent more rapidly— than their sister species in cooler regions. These results matched up with Gillman’s earlier study on plant evolution, as well as with independent research on cold-blooded animals. Gillman thinks that a warm climate accelerates evolution by raising the metabolism of organisms. A higher metabolism produces more mutations, which in turn provide the raw material for evolutionary change. To confirm this hypothesis, he says, scientists will have to make year-round measurements of the metabolism of many different species. “Boy, that will be a big job,” he warns, “even for one species.” CARL ZIMMER
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Right: Ring-tailed lemurs in tropical Madagascar.
A model of tPNA, a molecule that can assemble itself; it may resemble the precursor of life’s DNA.
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God Lives in Your Head
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First Molecule of Life Discovered? In the beginning there was RNA. RNA begat DNA, and DNA begat lipids, carbohydrates, and proteins: That is Genesis according to the “RNA world” hypothesis, a leading but still sketchy picture of how life began. In June, chemist Reza Ghadiri of the Scripps Research Institute started filling in details.
Ghadiri posited the existence of a helper molecule: a kind of prebiotic template that might have enabled RNA to spawn more complex organic compounds. Then he actually constructed a version of the molecule in his lab. Called tPNA (thioester peptide nucleic acid), it comprises the same four base pairs as DNA. The amazing thing about tPNA is that it adapts, chameleon-like, as it interacts with other molecules. When Ghadiri poured tPNA molecules into a soup of DNA bits, the tPNA base pairs reshuffled until they matched the sequence of a DNA strand. When he mixed tPNA with a single strand of RNA, it conformed to RNA’s structure. And when he let tPNA mingle with its own kind, the molecules danced until their structures became stable. In short, Ghadiri says, it “exhibits the most basic properties needed for evolution.” The next challenge for Ghadiri is to show that tPNA can self-replicate, crucial for a DNA precursor. If so, RNA world—and the whole field of biogenesis—will look a lot more credible. BOONSRI DICKINSON
Religion can cause wars, unify communities, and help us rationalize our world, but does thinking about God activate particular areas of the brain? Cognitive neuroscientists at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke sought the answer through functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI. The researchers asked religious and nonreligious test subjects to ponder God as a savior, a forgiver, and a moral guide. The fMRI scans revealed activation of particular neural pathways, including those in the anterior prefrontal cortex. But this brain region is not used only for religious thought. Investigator Jordan Grafman says it is also a center for empathy and for the perception that others have thoughts and feelings of their own. “People were using established cognitive processes to try to understand the actions of a supernatural being,” he says. The prefrontal cortex is the most recently evolved region of the human brain, much larger in us than in apes. It is thought to have benefited us by allowing humans to explain mysterious phenomena and by bringing groups of people together. “You would persuade others that the way you think about something was the way they should think about it too,” Grafman says. “It creates group cohesion, and that’s important for survival.” ALLISON BOND
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ASTRONOMY
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NASA, ESA, AND THE HUBBLE SM4 ERO TEAM
Hubble’s Amazing New Vision The Hubble Space Telescope demonstrated its newly enhanced capabilities with this stunning image of the Butterfly nebula. In May astronauts docked the space shuttle Atlantis onto the 19-year-old telescope to make repairs and add new instruments. For astrophotography buffs, the most important upgrade is Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), whose predecessor captured many of Hubble’s iconic images, including the Pillars of Creation in the Eagle nebula. The latest version boasts higher resolution and an expanded field of view. This WFC3 shot captures strands of superheated gas that were expelled by a dying star almost 4,000 light-years away. The Butterfly nebula’s distinctive shape results from a ring of dust that prevents the gas from spreading uniformly in all directions. Its wings stretch more than two light-years across—equivalent to about half the distance between our sun and the nearest star. ANDREW GRANT
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OBITUARIES
MEMORIAM A powerful idea far outlasts a brilliant mind. We remember some of the giants we lost in 2009 and look forward to standing on their shoulders. BY HEATHER MAYER
Willem Kolff (Feb. 14, 1911–Feb. 11, 2009): During World War II, the pioneering biomedical engineer created a dialysis machine from sausage casings and an automotive water pump. Kolff later built the first artificial heart.
Jacob Schwartz (Jan. 9, 1930–March 2, 2009): A prolific mathematician, Schwartz made significant contributions to parallel processing, computer programming, logic, robotics, and bioinformatics.
Jean Dausset
Lawrence Slobodkin
(Oct. 19, 1916–June 6, 2009): Dausset shared a 1980 Nobel Prize for the discovery of human leukocyte antigens (HLAs), the immune-regulating gene complex that must be “matched” for organ transplants to succeed.
(June 22, 1928–Sept. 12, 2009): The renowned ecologist argued in a 1960 paper, dubbed “The World Is Green,” that because vegetation is abundant, predation—and not the availability of food—is the primary check on the herbivore population and a key influence on ecosystems.
Sir John Maddox (Nov. 27, 1925–April 12, 2009): The editor of Nature for 22 years, he reestablished the influence and reputation of that august British weekly science journal. He was also the father of DISCOVER contributor Bruno Maddox.
Herbert York (Nov. 24, 1921–May 19, 2009): After working on the Manhattan Project to construct the first atom bomb and supervising missile and space research under President Eisenhower, York became an important figure in arms control. He was involved in launching Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and was the first chancellor of the University of California at San Diego.
Hidesaburo Hanafusa (Dec. 1,1929–March 15, 2009): His discovery of cancer-causing genes, or oncogenes, earned Hanafusa the 1982 Lasker Award for basic medical research. It was his insight that viruses can turn normal, healthy cells into malignant ones by activating those oncogenes.
Wallace Pannier (Aug. 22, 1927–Aug. 6, 2009): He was a trailblazer in the study of biological weapons. In one top-secret project in 1966, Pannier staged a mock attack on the New York subway. His team threw light bulbs filled with microbes onto the tracks and monitored the swirl of the released bacteria as trains sped past.
Malcolm Casadaban (Aug. 12, 1949–Sept. 13, 2009): This molecular geneticist devised techniques to study the genes of disease-causing microbes. He died after being exposed to a weakened strain of Yersinia pestis (the bacterium that causes bubonic plague), which he was studying.
Mahlon Hoagland (Oct. 5, 1921–Sept. 18, 2009): The molecular biologist described a key step in the way proteins are synthesized from amino acids. He also codiscovered transfer RNA, an essential player in gene expression.
Norman Borlaug (March 25, 1914–Sept. 12, 2009): The Nobel laureate was dubbed the “father of the Green Revolution” for developing high-yield crops and modern agricultural techniques that have greatly increased the global food supply and prevented starvation.
Leon Eisenberg (Aug. 8, 1922–Sept. 15, 2009): A child psychiatrist and human rights advocate, he brought scientific rigor to psychological studies, scrutinizing treatment for autism as early as the 1950s and conducting the first randomized clinical trial in psychiatry.
Sheldon Segal (March 15, 1926–Oct. 17, 2009): He developed Norplant, a hormonal form of birth control that is implanted under the skin of the arm; it can prevent pregnancy for up to five years. Wyeth stopped selling the implant in the United States in 2002.
Claude Lévi-Strauss (Nov. 28, 1908–Oct. 30, 2009): The French anthropologist was a pioneer of structuralism, arguing that diverse cultures share underlying similarities and that the human mind is fundamentally predisposed to think in terms of binary opposites: black and white, hot and cold. His writing influenced social science, philosophy, comparative religion, literature, and film.
DR. LEON EISENBERG: LIZA GREEN/HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL MEDIA SERVICES. NORMAN BORLAUG: MICHELINE PELLETIER/CORBIS
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INDEX
Algae Make Clean, Renewable Diesel Fuel . . . . . . . . . . .48 A Smart Makeover for the Electrical Grid . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .48 Hydrogen Energy Gets Two Big Boosts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .66 Star Power Comes to California . . . . . . . . 68 Microbes Build Better Batteries . . . . . . . . .82
ANTHROPOLOGY Meet Your New Ancestor . . . . . . . . . . . . . .22 World’s First Grain Silos Discovered in Jordan . . . . . . . . . . . .39 Another Baby Boom Hits Rich Nations . . . .44 Neanderthals Get Personal . . . . . . . . . . . .47 Oldest Musical Instrument Found . . . . . . .54 Early Humans Tended the Disabled . . . . . .71 Hidden Civilization Under Lake Huron . . . .82
ASTRONOMY Interview: Alan Dressler . . . . . . . . . . . . . .24 Earth-like Worlds Come Into View . . . . . . .28 Fresh Hints of Life on Mars . . . . . . . . . . . .38 Twin Black Holes Found . . . . . . . . . . . . . .53 Magnetic Mysteries of Sunspots Decoded . . . . . . . . . . . . . .54 Earth-like Storms Seen on Saturn’s Moon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .57 Milky Way Panorama . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .58 Asteroid Strike Predicted . . . . . . . . . . . . .62 Giant Geysers From a Tiny Moon . . . . . . . .64 Did an Early Pummeling of Asteroids Pave the Way for Life on Earth? . . . .67 Jupiter Gets Comet-Whacked . . . . . . . . . .72 Hubble’s Amazing New Vision . . . . . . . . . .84
ENVIRONMENT Clear-Cutting Has a High Cost. . . . . . . . . .38 Sun’s Changes Have Surprise Effects on Earth’s Weather . . . . . . . .45 El Niño’s Cousin Spurs Hurricanes . . . . . .52 Interview: Mark Serreze . . . . . . . . . . . . . .60 Plankton Record Earth’s CO 2 History. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .72 Map Tracks Remote Places . . . . . . . . . . . .78 Species Transplant Succeeds . . . . . . . . . .80
EARTH Seismic Waves Clarify How Continents Move . . . . . . . . . . . .56 Oxygen’s Odd Origin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .77
ENERGY Experimental Power Plant Takes the CO 2 Out . . . . . . . . . . . . . .30
Interview: George Loewenstein . . . . . . . . .32 Rise of the Mind Readers . . . . . . . . . . . . .36 Can a Shock to the Brain Cure Depression? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .38 Abuse Leaves Its Mark on Victim’s DNA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .62 200-Year-Old Cipher Solved . . . . . . . . . . .64 Einstein’s Brain Re-Analyzed . . . . . . . . . . .80 God Lives in Your Head . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .83
PHYSICS Model Solves Fundamental Packing Problem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .35 Math Could Fix Traffic Jams . . . . . . . . . . .48 Quantum Freakiness Leaks Into the Big World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .49 Black Hole Created in Lab . . . . . . . . . . . . .70 Light Can Bend Itself . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .71 Interview: John Ellis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
EVOLUTION Oldest Animal Fossils Uncovered . . . . . . . .34 Intact Tissue Found in Dinosaur . . . . . . . .35 Hunters Accelerate the Pace of Evolution . . . . . . . . . . . .45 Darwin’s Next Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . .50 Dino Mummy Spills Its Secrets . . . . . . . . .52 Giant Snake Hints at Life in Hot Times . . .62 Ancestral Whales May Have Given Birth on Land . . . . . . . . . . . . .65 First Ground Animals Borrowed Shells . . . .65 Leaping Flying Lizards . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .66 Oldest Octopuses Unveiled . . . . . . . . . . . .77 Tropical Heat Speeds Up Evolution . . . . . .82 First Molecule of Life Found? . . . . . . . . . .83
BIOLOGY Stem Cell Science Takes Off . . . . . . . . . . .23 Skip a Meal, Extend Your Life . . . . . . . . . .39 Genetic Disease Cured With Two Moms . . .44 Fake DNA Fools Crime Lab . . . . . . . . . . . .45 Blast of Biodiversity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .46 Strange Gaze of the See-through Fish . . . .49 Lose Weight With Brown Fat? . . . . . . . . . .56 Orangutans Invent New Warning Calls . . . .57 Girls Hit Puberty Earlier Around the World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .64 Yes, You Really Can Smell Fear . . . . . . . . .66 Chimps Plan Ahead . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .70 Human Gene Changes Mouse Talk . . . . . .70 Mockingbirds Know Who You Are . . . . . . .76 Radiation Turns Hair Gray . . . . . . . . . . . . .76
MIND
INTERVIEWS Astronomer Alan Dressler . . . . . . . . . . . . .24 Economist George Loewenstein . . . . . . . . .32 Geneticist J. Craig Venter . . . . . . . . . . . . .40 Geographer Mark Serreze . . . . . . . . . . . . .60 Physicist John Ellis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
SPACE NASA Braces for Course Correction . . . . .20 The Moon: Cold, Wet, and Breathing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .35 Probe Shows Mercury’s Hidden Face . . . .44 Spaceport Breaks Ground in New Mexico . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .52 Space Trash Causes Orbital Crash . . . . . .54 Did NASA’s Phoenix Find Liquid Water on Mars? . . . . . . . . . . .63 Venus Has a Secret Past . . . . . . . . . . . . . .66
TECHNOLOGY The Graphene Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . .27 New Battery Tech Could Transform the Car . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .36 Computer Learns to Reason Like Isaac Newton. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .39 Computers Go Quantum . . . . . . . . . . . . . .46 Robots Learn to Walk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .57 Prize-Driven Research Takes Off . . . . . . . .65
MEDICINE Vaccine Phobia Becomes a Public-Health Threat . . . . . . . . . . . . .18 Swine Flu Outbreak Sweeps the Globe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .26 The Age of Genetic Medicine Begins . . . . .34 Hope for HIV Vaccine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .34 The Common Cold Is Decoded . . . . . . . . .36 Interview: J. Craig Venter . . . . . . . . . . . . .40 Diarrhea Vaccine Could Save Millions . . . .47 Infection Seen as It Happens . . . . . . . . . . .49 Eye Drops Could Cure Glaucoma . . . . . . . .52 Fight Rages Over Cancer Genes . . . . . . . .55 Virus Linked to Chronic Fatigue . . . . . . . . .56 DEET Might Harm the Brain . . . . . . . . . . .63 Tiny Robots Prepare for Surgery . . . . . . . .66 Alzheimer’s Genes Located . . . . . . . . . . . .76
DECEMBER WHAT IS IT? HONEYBEE EYE Each of a honeybee’s eyes comprises 6,000 hexagonal units for capturing light. The eyes are attuned to rapid movement—useful for keeping up with a speedy queen during her mating flight—and geometric patterns. Bees prefer radial, symmetrical arrangements typical of flowers. They respond to many colors and can see ultraviolet light; UV patterns on flower petals may help them distinguish among plant species.
MANFRED KAGE/PETER ARNOLD
YEAR IN SCIENCE 2 0 0 9
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VOL. CLVII....No. 30,000
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The Stauer Times
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