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SC SCIENCE CE•H HISTORY S O Y•NATURE•FOR O THE CU CURIOUS OUS MIND

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WHO WANTS T LIVE TO L FOREVER? R? p 2 p52

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LIVING IN SPACE Sci-fi movies used to be based on imaginations and dreams but more recently, films like Passengers (2016) seem like a probable solution to the future when Earth is no longer a viable planet to live on. Advancement in technology and science research not only helps us improve lives on Earth, but also builds on the knowledge of space travel. This issue, we look at the latest breakthroughs and discussions in NASA and ESA. What are some common problems our body might struggle with in space, and what is needed for us to settle among the stars (p32). Within the movie, passengers had their body temperatures lowered to slow down biological processes and put into an induced hibernation mode. This technique is currently in discussion as a way to put astronauts to sleep in longdistance space flights. Alternatively, there is the method of cryogenic preservation as a way of “cheating death”. People are paying large sums of money to preserve their bodies in hope that future scientific progression will allow them to have a chance of waking up and living in another era. We look at the pros and cons of this technology (p52). Not many of us may know this but the 2017 Breakthrough Prize Ceremony took place last December and, amongst many world scientist and laureates, a Singaporean student had the opportunity to receive a prize on the coveted stage. Read more about her story on (p26). That’s all for now, keep wandering your minds and enjoy the issue.

BBC Earth Magazinne Includes selected articles from other BBC specialist magazines, including Focus, BBC History Magazine and BBC Wildlife Magazine.

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Experts in this issue…

LEWIS DARTNELL Many of us hope that one day humans will live on the Moon, Mars and beyond. Astrobiologist Lewis reveals the problems that our biology might face. p32

TOM IRELAND Tom is managing editor at the Royal Society of Biology where he oversees a range of science publications and occasionally appears on news to offer expert comments. p52

FELICITY ASTON British polar explorer Felicity Aston MBE is an author, speaker, expedition leader and former Antarctic scientist. Here, she relates her experience to The Klondike gold rush. p66

CORDELIA FINE What’s the difference between men and women? In her new book, psychologist Cordelia Fine argues that it’s time to rethink gender. p94

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CONTENTS FEATURES 30 Live and Learn in Perth Perth is a lovely city to explore for anyone interested in nature, scientific discoveries, art and culture

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32 Surviving Space What are the risks experienced by humans who visit space, and how could we solve these problems? 42 Better the Devil you know The Tasmanian devil helps protect the island against invasive species, what if they go extinct? 47 City Break in Medieval Europe Join Paul Oldfield on a tour of the 13th centuryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s thriving metropolises, from Rome to Rheims and Bologna to Bamberg 52 Who wants to live forever? Is it realistic for cryonics to exist in our current lifetime? Tom provides the breakdown of the technology needed 58 In the Bleak Midwinter When temperatures fall in Yellowstone National Park, there are still creatures living in these hostile environments 66 The Deadly Stampede Felicity Aston describes the perilous search for yellow metal in the Klondike and how the punishing cold became a battle for survival 70 The Smartest Truck on the Planet Imagine living in a high-tech home away from home, or it may even be better than home... 76 How our Solar System formed? Humans like to discover our roots, and fundamentally, it traces back to the formation of the solar system

REGULARS

UPDATE 14 The Latest Intelligence Long-ever black hole feeding frenzy recorded, clues to the evolution of birdsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; beaks found in ancient dinosaur fossils, could Martian settlers live in ice houses 83 Q&A How effective are planes in fighting wildfires, does sucking your thumb really ruin your teeth, can computer generate a truly random number, what is dark energy...

RESOURCE 94 Book Review Q&A with psychologist Cordelia Fine and the nominees for the 2017 Wellcome Book Prize 96 Time Out Crossword puzzle to stimulate your brain 4

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3 Welcome A note from the editor sharing her thoughts on the issue and other ramblings 6 Snapshot Stunning images from the fields of science, nature or history 28 Comment & Analysis Helen Czerski explains the working of LED lights 97 My Life Scientific Meet Dave Goulson, bee researcher and biologist at the University of Sussex 98 The Last Word Robert Matthews discusses the level of trust one can place in scientist

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Natural Born Killer This blue and white harlequin shrimp was snapped by photographer Aldo Costa, who spotted it while diving in the waters off Lembeh, Indonesia. The little crustaceans can grow to about five centimetres in length, and they live together as couples, with one male and one female. However, their beautiful appearance belies predatory habits that would make Bonnie and Clyde blush. The pair of shrimp go hunting for starfish, their main food source. Once they’ve found one, they’ll work together to overpower it and flip it on its back. They’ll then start consuming its tube feet, which are structures that the starfish uses for locomotion. Sometimes, they carry the unfortunate animal back to their lair, to continue eating it alive over a period of days or weeks. Incredibly, the shrimp have been recorded bringing food to the starfish, to keep it alive for even longer. The starfish underneath the shrimp in this image had better make its escape – quickly! PHOTO: ALDO COSTA

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Divided Desert In Minqin County, northwest China, farmers build grid-like structures from hay to stabilise sand dunes in an attempt to prevent the desert encroaching onto their land. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s part of an initiative by the local government, which announced that it would spend six years building a 1kmwide green barrier, measuring 500km in length. Minqin County is located between two deserts: Tengger and Badain Jaran. The area was historically an oasis, with a lake that was fed by water from the Shiyang river. But in the 1950s, the government diverted the water to boost food production elsewhere. Since then, residents have had to rely on groundwater sources, but these have also become overexploited. The lack of groundwater, combined with low rainfall, means that much of the scarce water is undrinkable. While the government previously tried to assist by planting vegetation and forests, its attempts failed and thousands of people were forced to leave the area. PHOTO: EYEVINE

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Space Station View of Mount Etna Erupting The Expedition 50 crew aboard the International Space Station had a nighttime view from orbit of Europe’s most active volcano, Mount Etna, erupting on 19 March 2017. Astronaut Thomas Pesquet of the European Space Agency captured this image and shared it with his social media followers, writing, “Mount Etna, in Sicily. The volcano is currently erupting and the molten lava is visible from space, at night!” (the red lines on the left page). PHOTO & TEXT: ESA/NASA

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HUMAN-PIG ‘CHIMERA’ EMBRYOS GROWN IN THE LAB FOR THE FIRST TIME The technique represents an important step towards growing human organs for transplant, say researchers

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PHOTO: JUAN CARLOS IZPISUA BELMONTE

MEDICINE

A team at the Salk Institute has grown the first living embryos containing cells from both human beings and pigs. To create the human-pig chimeras, the researchers injected human stem cells – master cells that can develop into any type of tissue – into pig embryos. The stem cells survived and began to integrate with the pig tissue to form a chimeric human-pig embryo. These embryos were implanted in sows and allowed to develop for up to four weeks. “This is long enough for us to try to understand how the human and pig cells mix together early on, without raising ethical concerns about mature chimeric animals,” said lead investigator Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte. However, the process is currently very inefficient – out of the 2,075 embryos created, just 186 stayed alive for the full four weeks. “It’s like when you try to duplicate a key. The duplicate looks almost identical, but when you get home, it doesn’t open the door. There is something we are not doing right,” said Izpisua Belmonte. “We thought growing human cells in an animal would be much more fruitful. We still have much to learn about the early development of cells.” Though they sound disturbing, human-animal chimeras may someday provide a means of growing human tissues and organs for transplant – potentially saving thousands of lives. “The ultimate goal is to grow functional and transplantable tissue or organs, but we are far away from that,” said Izpisua Belmonte. “This is an important first step.” The next step is to guide the stem cells into forming specific human organs within the pigs. The team has previously used CRISPR genome editing tools to

E X P E R T

ABOVE: The work of the Salk Institute team, led by Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, could pave the way for lab-grown transplant organs

C O M M E N T

PROF ROBIN LOVELL-BADGE Group leader, The Francis Crick Institute “An ability to make interspecies chimeras would be valuable in terms of providing basic understanding of species differences in embryo development and organ function. If human cells are incorporated, then this offers the possibility of using such chimeras to study not just normal development, but the causes of congenital defects; to test the effects of exogenous [outside the body] agents on human development, from chemicals to viruses such as Zika; and to test potential therapies. It would also offer the possibility of growing human tissues or organs in animals for transplants – although this is still a long way off. The goals of this study are therefore highly laudable. “There is currently much interest in these kinds of approaches, particularly with respect to animals containing human cells or tissues, and how far these should go. Experiments involving chimeras, whether they are animal to animal or animals containing human material, are subject to regulation in the UK via the Home Ofﬁce. The authors of this study, who are based in the USA, have been careful to follow guidelines issued by the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR), which match well with the UK regulations.”

delete specific genes involved with organ development in fertilised mouse egg cells and replace them with rat stem cells. As the organism matured, the rat cells filled in where mouse cells could not, forming the functional tissues of the organism’s heart, eye or pancreas. The researchers are now working on reproducing this effect in the human-pig embryos. Vol. 9 Issue 5

PHOTOS: JUAN CARLOS IZPISUA BELMONTE, CXC/M WEISS/NASA

“WE STILL HAVE MUCH TO LEARN ABOUT THE EARLY DEVELOPMENT OF CELLS”

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ASTRONOMY

LONGEST-EVER BLACK HOLE FEEDING FRENZY RECORDED

90-ish The age of Granddad, a lungﬁsh kept at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago who was euthanised after falling ill this month. He was the oldest ﬁsh kept in captivity.

6 DAYS The length of time Canadian Melissa Benoit, a double lung transplant patient, was kept alive without lungs.

31.6g The average amount of sugar in a single serving of branded soft drinks – 1.6g more than the recommended maximum daily intake. 16

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rest falls toward the black hole. As it travels inward it is ingested, heating up to millions of degrees and generating distinctive X-ray flares. It was these flares that were picked up by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and Swift Satellite, and ESA’s XMM-Newton, revealing the TDE. “We have witnessed a star’s spectacular and prolonged demise,” said lead researcher Dacheng Lin. “Dozens of these so-called tidal disruption events have been detected since the 1990s, but none that remained bright for nearly as long as this one.” The black hole will continue to ingest the star for several more years, but at a reduced rate, say the researchers.

Black hole XJ1500+0154 has been consuming a nearby star for over a decade, as shown in this illustration

PHOTOS: JUAN CARLOS IZPISUA BELMONTE, CXC/M WEISS/NASA

IN N U MBERS

Now this really is a long lunch: a team at the University of New Hampshire has found a giant black hole that has been chowing down on a nearby star for almost a decade. That’s over 10 times longer than any other instance of star death previously recorded. Dubbed XJ1500+0154, the black hole is located in a small galaxy about 1.8 billion lightyears from Earth. Its epic meal is an example of a tidal disruption event (TDE), a phenomenon that occurs when an object such as a star wanders too close to a black hole, and is captured in its powerful gravitational field. During a TDE, some of the material making up the star is flung outward at high speeds, while the

DINOSAURS

CLUES TO THE EVOLUTION OF BIRDS’ BEAKS FOUND IN ANCIENT DINOSAUR FOSSILS It looks like this dinosaur just moved up the pecking order. The discovery of several fossils belonging to a small ostrich-like dinosaur called Limusaurus inextricabilis (inextricable mud lizard) has given researchers a clue to the origin of modern birds’ beaks. A total of 19 skeletons of the dinosaur have been found in mud traps in China’s Xinjiang province. They have been dated to about 159 million years ago, during the Jurassic Period. With the unusual luxury of comparing remains of all ages, from baby dinosaurs to adults, a team from China and the US has pieced together a remarkable change that occurred as Limusaurus grew up. They found that the young dinosaurs had teeth, but by the time the animal reached its adult size of 1.5 metres in length, all of its teeth had fallen out leaving behind a bird-like beak. “This discovery is important for two reasons,” said lead researcher James Clark. “First, it’s very rare to find a growth series from baby to adult dinosaurs. Second, this unusually dramatic change in anatomy suggests there was a big shift in

Limusaurus’ diet from adolescence to adulthood.” It seems likely that the young Limusaurus enjoyed a diet that included meat, but the mature animals were vegetarian and so didn’t need sharp teeth to cut through flesh. This is also backed up by changes in the mineral content of the animals’ bones. At first sight, modern birds seem different from our mental images of dinosaurs. But as we learn more, it seems that some of the extinct beasts closely resembled our garden visitors.

W H AT W E LE A RNED T HIS M O N T H

STRESS CAN MAKE DOGS GO GREY It’s not only highly strung humans who are prone to the ‘salt and pepper’ look. A stressful life can also make your pooch’s muzzle turn grey, researchers from Northern Illinois University have found.

AFTERNOON NAPS COULD IMPROVE THINKING AND MEMORY Having a quick afternoon doze may not seem like the best way to impress your boss, but it may help improve your work. Getting 60 minutes’ shuteye in the afternoon can make your brain perform as if it were five years younger, a team at the University of Pennsylvania has found.

ANTARCTIC ICE IS ON THE MOVE A giant chunk of ice the size of Norfolk could be about to shear off from the Larsen C ice shelf, according to satellite observations by the British Antarctic Survey.

ENJOYING LIFE CAN HELP US TO LIVE LONGER

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PHOTO: PORTIA SLOAN

If the baby dinosaurs ate a different diet to the adults, there would have been less competition over food

After following the lives of 10,000 adults with an average age of 63 for four years, a team at University College London found the chance of death was up to 24 per cent lower in those reporting the highest levels of enjoyment. 17

T HE DOW NLOA D

THE MESENTERY What’s that? A Netﬂix drama set in a medieval Italian monastery? Way off. It’s a newly discovered organ found hiding in plain sight in the human digestive system by researchers at Limerick University Hospital. What is it? It’s a group of folded tissues that connects the intestines to the wall of the abdomen. For hundreds of years it was thought to be made up of several sections, but new research has found it is a single, continuous structure. What does it do? All we know so far is that it carries blood between the intestine and the rest of the body, and helps keep the intestine in the right place. So what’s next? The researchers now want to establish the exact function of the organ so that they can identify any possible diseases relating to it. This will usher in the new ﬁeld of mesenteric science, they say.

Previously thought to be just a mass of tissue, the mesentery is actually an organ in its own right 18

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ZOOLOGY

BABOON BARKS AND GRUNTS CONTAIN CLUES TO THE ORIGINS OF LANGUAGE The grunts, barks and wahoos of baboons contain distinct vowel-like sounds similar to human speech, suggesting language may have begun to evolve 25 million years ago. After analysing 1,335 spontaneous vocalisations produced by 15 male and female Guinea baboons in different social contexts, researchers from Grenoble Alpes University in France found that baboons produce five sounds that have close similarities with vowel sounds used in human speech. Humans form each vowel by precisely controlling the tongue’s “BABOONS PRODUCE FIVE position in the vocal tract. It was previously thought that SOUNDS THAT HAVE CLOSE the voice box of non-human primates such as baboons was SIMILARITIES WITH VOWEL too high in their necks to produce the distinct vowel sounds found in SOUNDS USED human languages. This would mean language must have IN HUMAN SPEECH” originated within the last 70,000-100,000 years. However, the new findings suggest that spoken language may have evolved from capacities already possessed by our last common ancestor with baboons, some 25 million years ago. By examining the vocal tracts of two baboons that died from natural causes, they also found that baboon tongues have the same muscles as human tongues. This suggests that these monkeys use similar tongue movements to humans to form each of the sounds. “Similarities between humans and baboons suggest that the vowels of human speech probably evolved from ancient articulatory precursors that were passed on and refined all along the hominid line,” said researcher Joel Fagot.

Baboons use vowel-like sounds, just like we do

PHOTOS: SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY, GETTY, NASA

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SPACE

COULD MARTIAN SETTLERS LIVE IN ICE HOUSES?

The Mars Ice House is just one of several ideas for constructing temporary shelters for astronauts on possible future Mars missions

Step aside, Nanook: NASA has announced a Mars base concept that reinvents the igloo. The variable distance between Mars and Earth means astronauts may have to stay on the surface of the Red Planet for many months. That means living quarters are required to keep the crew safe from wildly varying temperatures and radiation. Dubbed the Mars Ice Home, the new structure consists of a doughnut-shaped inflatable living area, surrounded by a dome filled with water. This freezes to form a thick wall of ice, providing more than enough protection from the dangerous levels of cosmic rays that bombard the surface of Mars – and, if split into hydrogen and oxygen, the water can double as fuel for the return rocket.

“All of the materials we’ve selected are translucent, so some daylight can pass through and make it feel like you’re in a home and not a cave,” said lead researcher Kevin Kempton. Because the structure is light plastic, this base would be easy to transport, while the heavy content – the water – could be sourced on Mars. The habitat would be sent ahead of the astronauts and gradually filled from water deposits on the planet. It’s estimated that, at a likely cubic metre a day, this would take 400 days. The Ice Home is just one of the base concepts investigated by NASA’s Langley Research Center, holding out the hope of a comfortable stay on Earth’s nearest planetary neighbour.

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Update

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COULD THE MOON HAVE FORMED FROM DOZENS OF MINI MOONS? If you were to travel back tens of thousands of years in time and look up, you may well see a sky full of mini moons. Researchers from the Technion-Weizmann Institute of Technology have proposed a theory suggesting that our current Moon may be the latest in a long line of moons that orbited Earth in the past, each created by an impact from giant asteroids. “Our model suggests that the ancient Earth once hosted a series of moons, each one formed from a different collision with the proto-Earth,” said researcher Hagai Perets. “It’s likely that such moonlets were later ejected, or collided with Earth or each other to form bigger moons. We believe Earth had many previous moons. A previously

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“OUR MOON MAY BE THE LATEST IN A LONG LINE OF MOONS THAT ORBITED EARTH IN THE PAST”

formed moon could therefore already exist when another moon-forming giant impact occurs.” The team ran almost 1,000 computer simulations of different scenarios of objects striking Earth, and found it would take around 20 collisions to get the job done. According to this model, the Earth experienced many giant impacts with other bodies during the last stages of its growth, with each contributing more material to the proto-moon until it reached its current size. “It’s likely that small moons formed through the process could cross orbits, collide and merge,” said researcher Raluca Rufo. “A long series of such moon-moon collisions could gradually build up a bigger moon – the Moon we see today.”

PHOTOS: SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY, IVAN DE ARAUJO ILLUSTRATION: RAJA LOCKEY

ASTRONOMY

NATURE

KILLER INSTINCT LOCATED IN MOUSE BRAINS Just call it a kill switch. Researchers at Yale University have isolated the brain circuitry that coordinates predatory hunting in mice. The team used optogenetics, a method of engineering specific neurons to fire when illuminated with laser light, to activate two separate sets of neurons in the mice’s amygdala, the brain’s centre of emotion and motivation. One set caused the animals to pursue prey, and another caused them to flex their jaw and neck muscles to bite and kill. When the laser was off, the mice behaved normally. But as soon as the laser was turned on they burst into action, pursuing and biting almost anything they came across, including inanimate objects such as bottle caps, toy insects and

wooden sticks. “We’d turn the laser on and they’d jump on an object, hold it with their paws and intensively bite it as if they were trying to capture and kill it,” said researcher Ivan de Araujo, While the animals did not attack other mice in the cage, the team found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that hungry mice were more aggressive in pursuing and biting the prey. “There must be some primordial subcortical pathway that connects sensory input to the movement of the jaw and the biting,” de Araujo continued. “The system is not just generalized aggression. It seems to be related to the animal’s interest in obtaining food.” The team now aims to investigate how the two behaviours – pursuing and killing – are coordinated. Once, he was ordinary Bill Mouse. But after exposure to lasers, he was transformed into Bill ‘The Killer’ Mouse

SAUNA GOERS A 20-year study at the University of Eastern Finland has found that those taking regular saunas are two-thirds less likely to be diagnosed with dementia. The effect is thought to be due to the relaxation it provides.

ODONTOPHOBES If the sound of the dentist’s drill leaves you a quivering wreck, read on. Researchers at Kings College London have found that Alzheimer’s drug Tideglusib can stimulate production of dentine, potentially removing the need for fillings.

GOOD MONTH BAD MONTH

SELFISH SO-AND-SOS Older people who care for others during their dotage live longer than their less helpful counterparts, researchers at the University of Basel have found. The effect is due to the mutual emotional support provided, they say.

MIGRATORY BIRDS The early bird doesn’t always catch the worm. Each 1°C rise in global temperature can mean birds reach summer breeding grounds a day early, a team at the University of Edinburgh has found, which may cause them to miss out on food sources.

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MEDICINE

ANTIBIOTICS COULD KILL BACTERIA WITH BRUTE FORCE Sometimes violence is the answer: a team at UCL has found that some antibiotics are capable of killing off drug-resistant bacteria if they ‘push’ hard enough into their cell structure. The discovery opens up a promising new way of overcoming antibiotic resistance and could lead to the design of even more effective drugs. “Antibiotics work in different ways, but they all need to bind to bacterial cells in order to kill them. Antibiotics have ‘keys’ that fit ‘locks’ on bacterial cell surfaces, allowing them to latch on. When a bacterium becomes resistant to a drug, it effectively changes the locks so the key won’t fit any more,” said lead researcher Dr Joseph Ndieyira. “Incredibly, we found that certain antibiotics can still ‘force’ the lock, allowing them to bind to and kill resistant bacteria because they are able to push hard enough. In fact, some of them were so strong they tore the door off its hinges,

killing the bacteria instantly!” he added. The researchers found that although the two antibiotics oritavancin and vancomycin contain the same ‘key’ and exert the same force on susceptible bacteria, the former was able to kill drugresistant bacteria by pressing itself into their cell structures with 11,000 times the force of the latter – effectively ripping them apart. The team is now working on a mathematical model that could be used to screen promising new antibiotics, identifying the drugs that can kill bacteria by using brute force. “Our findings will help us not only to design new antibiotics but also to modify existing ones to overcome resistance,” said Ndieyira. “This will help us to create a new generation of antibiotics to tackle multi-drug resistant bacterial infections, now recognised as one of the greatest global threats in modern healthcare.” This image shows bubbly formations on E. coli bacteria caused by the action of antibiotics

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One of the teams used ytterbium to create time crystals

NEW FORM OF MATTER CREATED Researchers in the US have created time crystals – substances with a structure that repeats in time. Time crystals were first proposed in 2012 by Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek and feature a structure that repeats in a regular periodic motion in a manner compared to tapping jelly repeatedly in order to make it jiggle. Now, based on the earlier work of the University of California’s Norman Yao, two separate teams of researchers have produced physical time crystals – one at the University of Maryland that involved hitting a line of ytterbium atoms with a pair of lasers, and another at Harvard University by exploiting tiny defects in diamonds. “This is a new phase of matter, period, but it is also really cool because it is one of the first examples of non-equilibrium matter,” Yao said. “For the last half-century, we have been exploring equilibrium matter, like metals and insulators. We are just now starting to explore a whole new landscape of non-equilibrium matter.” Though the applications of time crystals are as yet unclear, they could potentially be useful in the construction of quantum computers.

MARS

PHOTOS: UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON, SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY X2

MARS MAY BE HOME TO SOME OF THE OLDEST VOLCANOES IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM This rock. A team from the University of Houston has found a two-billion-year-old volcanic Martian meteorite, suggesting that some of the longest lived volcanoes in the Solar System are found on Mars. Dubbed Northwest Africa 7635, the meteorite was discovered in Algeria in 2012 and is made from a type of volcanic rock known as shergottite. It made its way to Earth around one million years ago after a large object slammed into the surface of the Red Planet, hitting a volcano or lava plain. The impact sent a large volume of rocks careering into space, some of which entered Earth’s orbit and fell as meteorites. In total, researchers have found 11 of these Martian meteorites, all with a similar chemical composition. “We see that they came from a similar volcanic source,” said lead researcher Tom Lapen. “Given

“THE LARGEST MARTIAN VOLCANO, OLYMPUS MONS, IS NEARLY 22KM HIGH”

that they also have the same ejection time, we can conclude that these come from the same location on Mars.” Previously analysed Martian meteorites have ranged in age from 327 million to 600 million years old. But research has shown that Northwest Africa 7635 was formed 2.4 billion years ago, suggesting that it was ejected from one of the longest-lived volcanic centres in the Solar System. Much of what is known about the composition of rocks from volcanoes on Mars comes from meteorites found on Earth. The shield-shaped volcanoes found on Mars are caused by lava flowing over long distances, similar to the formation of the Hawaiian Islands. The largest Martian volcano, Olympus Mons, is nearly 22km high – almost triple the height of Earth’s tallest volcano, Mauna Kea.

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Update

THE LATEST INT TELLIGENCE

When astronauts head to the International Space Station in Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner capsule next year, it looks like they will do so in some style: the company has designed new spacesuits to provide crew members with improved functionality, comfort and protection – and they also look pretty snazzy. Dubbed the ‘Boeing Blue’, the suits are around 40 per cent lighter than previous examples and feature a wide polycarbonate visor for improved peripheral vision, a built-in communications headset and touchscreen-friendly gloves. To improve comfort, the hood-like helmet simply zips on, overcoming the need for the cumbersome metal neck ring seen on previous designs. “It feels good to be walking around in Boeing Blue,” said Chris Ferguson, director of Starliner crew and mission systems at Boeing. “Spacesuits have come in different sizes, shapes and designs, and I think this fits the Boeing model, fits the Boeing vehicle.” NASA awarded contracts to Boeing and SpaceX in 2014 to develop commercial spaceships that could be used to ferry astronauts to and from the ISS. Boeing plans to carry out an unpiloted test flight of a CST-100 in Earth orbit in June next year. If successful, Boeing will then send a test pilot and a NASA astronaut for an orbital test flight in August.

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FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: NASA’s Project Mercury spacesuit; Russia’s Strizh spacesuit;; Shannon Lucid’ss training suit; the ‘Boeing Blue

PHOTO: SHUTTERSTOCK X3, BOEING, ALAMY ILLUSTRATION: RAJA LOCKEY

SPACESUITS GET STYLISH

We wonder where Boeing got its inspiration from… ?

T HE Y DID W H AT ?!

MOTHS TAUGHT TO DRIVE CARS What did they do? A team from Tokyo University got male silkmoths to drive robotic cars towards the source of sex pheromones produced by a female. The moths were tethered to a treadmill linked to optical sensors that tracked their movements and steered the vehicle. Why did they do that? The scientists hope that the research will eventually lead to the development of biomimetic robots that can sniff out odours and locate their sources. Such robots could replace dogs and other animals used for detecting explosives or drugs. What did they find? The moth drivers passed the test with flying colours, taking just two seconds longer than free-walking moths in finding the source of the scent. Though like most of us, they picked up a few minor faults.

Vol. 9 Issue 5

Update

THE LATEST INTELLIGENCE

IN WORLD NEWS

SINGAPOREAN AWARDED AT 2017 BREAKTHROUGH PRIZE CEREMONY Knowledge is humanity’s greatest asset and defines a lot of things in life. It is the collective body of knowledge assembled over centuries that help us shape the future. Yet, there are extraordinary single minds that show us the endless possibilities beyond our horizons. The Breakthrough Prizes are therefore created to honour the important and recent achievements in the categories of Fundamental Physics, Life Sciences and Mathematics. The Breakthrough Prize founding sponsors include Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, Yuri and Julia Milner, as well as Jack Ma and Cathy Zhang. The 2017 Breakthrough Prize ceremony was held on 4 December 2016 at NASA’s Hangar 1 in Mountain View, California. Host Morgan Freeman was joined by other celebrities such as Vin Diesel, Alicia Keys, Kevin Durant, Bryce Dallas Howard, 26

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will.i.am and astronauts Mark and Scott Kelly, just to name a few. The high profile celebrities were prize presenters alongside some of the founding sponsors. During the ceremony, the Breakthrough Junior Challenge prize winner was also announced. This is an annual global competition for students to inspire creative thinking about science. Students aged 13 to 18 from countries around the globe are invited to create and submit original videos that bring life to a concept or theory in life sciences, physics or mathematics. Winning pieces are selected based on the student’s ability to communicate complex scientific ideas in an engaging, illuminating and imaginative way. This year, Deanna See (aged 17) from Raffles Institution (Junior College) emerged one of two winners as she presented her video on antibiotic resistance.

EXCLUSIVE

INTERVIEW WITH DEANNA, WINNER OF THE BREAKTHROUGH JUNIOR CHALLENGE 2017 There are so many topics and concepts to explore. How did you end up picking antibiotics resistance? It was definitely a tough choice picking just one concept from Life Science. I was still deciding on it days before the deadline. Eventually, I went with antibiotic resistance as it not only illustrates two major biological concepts (genetics and evolution), it is also a pressing health issue faced today. Incidentally, I was also inspired by the story of a 25-year-old PhD student Shu Lam (which I read a week prior to the deadline), who had developed a potential way to kill superbugs without using antibiotics. How was the video made? I joined the Challenge right after our promotional exams, which left me with a mere ten days before the deadline. Five days were used for scripting, three for filming and two for editing. Drafting the script was probably the hardest part of the process as it had to be informative yet of an easy flow. To aid understanding, I also thought of analogies like video games to illustrate the idea of bacteria gaining resistance, and humans to explain the exchange of genes between bacteria cells. It took me three drafts to get the final script. As for video production, I did not have the right software to animate my ideas

freely. Therefore, I chose an old-school method of stop motion and drawings. I also picked up the talking head approach with my iPhone to elaborate on the animations and used props such as Lego figurines, antiseptics, a screaming chicken toy, whiteboard and markets for the bacteria cell drawings. Individual clips were put together using the iMovie app. Who is your main source of inspiration for this challenge? Mrs Wong Seok Hui, my biology teacher, inspired me the most. I enjoyed the way she brought biological ideas to life, even with the simple use of a whiteboard even in today’s increasing emphasis on technology. An example would be the drawing of supersized cell versions to illustrate the biochemical reactions in respiration or photosynthesis, then erasing parts of it to include our ideas. The usage of the traditional platform was what influenced my video production. Do you have any other comments? Even a month later, winning feels just as surreal. The ceremony gave me an opportunity to meet scientists at the frontiers of their fields, tech giants and celebrities. It was certainly a lot glitzier than anything I had attended before. Beyond press interviews, receiving the award from Priscilla Chan and snapping an Instagram

Story clip with will.i.am, I think my favourite part of the ceremony was chatting with all the other laureates and stars in science. As winners of the full-fledged Breakthrough Prize, they had done groundbreaking and life-changing research. Moreover, it was clear how incredibly passionate they were about their work. Their spirit has inspired me to pursue Science at a deeper level in the future, and hopefully - just as they have - do research that can improve our lives, and our understanding of the world (or even the universe - this year’s winners of the Special Prize in Fundamental Physics discovered gravitational waves!) around us. Head over to https://breakthroughjuniorchallenge.org to view Deanna’s winning video. Vol. 9 Issue 5

COMMENT & ANALYSIS HELEN CZERSKI ON… HOW DO LEDS WORK?

o be honest, I should have been better prepared. But I’d bounced out of my flat in the morning without checking the weather forecast and at 6pm, I was cursing my optimism. Torrential rain was pouring out of the dark sky, and I was wearing jeans, on a bike, without a proper raincoat. The slots in my cycling helmet were funnelling water down the back of my neck, and I was cold. I tried telling myself that Scott had faced far worse on his way to the South Pole, but the novelty of that ran out after about 30 seconds, leaving the remaining 20 minutes of my cycle filled with grumpiness. And every single traffic light seemed to be on red. Halfway home, I was squinting out through the small waterfall taking shape over my face, and became distracted by the rain in front of me. The blackness just beyond my handlebars was shot through by dashed white straight lines, with spaces exactly the same length as each dash. At the next red traffic light, it was the same: a strictly regimented pattern in the messy fluid chaos around me. My bike lights were clearly flashing, but too fast for me to see. I reckoned that each dash and each gap was about a centimetre long, and the rain was pretty heavy so the average raindrop speed was probably about 5m/s. That gives a flashing rate of about 250 times each second, or 250Hz. Why would my bike lights be flashing like that? When I got home, and after one of the most welcoming hot showers I’ve had in a long time, I took a closer look at my lights. They’re LED ones, compact but astonishingly bright. They’ve got two brightness settings, and my front light had been on ‘half brightness’, which is still shockingly intense. When you use a dimmer switch at home, you’re

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normally controlling the voltage to the light bulb. But this is a rubbish way of dimming an LED light. LEDs (light-emitting diodes) work by having two materials next to each other, one with some extra electrons and one with some extra holes where electrons could go. If you push an electric current through the junction, you effectively shove the electrons until they fall into the holes, and the extra energy left over from that process is emitted as light. But in this system, even a tiny difference in voltage causes a huge difference in current (and light), making it tricky to regulate the brightness by altering the voltage. So what manufacturers do is to pulse the current – the level of current stays fixed but it’s switched on and off hundreds of times each second. A human won’t detect any flicker in the light as long as the pulse rate is up above about 300 cycles per second, so my estimate of 250 flashes wasn’t bad. To dim the lights, the number of flashes per second stays the same, but the pulse itself gets shorter and the gap gets longer. It’s called ‘pulse width modulation dimming’, and it’s used everywhere you find LEDs with a dimming option. What’s fascinating about all this is that those lights have been flashing away for years, and I’ve never noticed. It was only when a single falling raindrop was illuminated several times on its way down that the flashes became visible. Such a low-tech way of spotting a very high-tech solution… almost (but not quite) worth getting soaked to the skin for! ß

Dr Helen Czerski is a physicist and BBC science presenter Her book, The Storm In A Teacup, is out now

ILLUSTRATION: KYLE SMART

“THOSE BICYCLE LIGHTS HAVE BEEN FLASHING AWAY FOR YEARS, AND I’VE NEVER NOTICED”

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ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE

Northbridge Piazza

LIVE AND LEARN IN PERTH Educational experiences in science, art and culture come alive in Australia’s fourth largest city Perth offers a smorgasbord of nature and wildlife experiences, from beautiful nature parks and reserves to unique wildlife encounters and world-class walking trails. There is just so much to examine and explore, here are our top picks. Penguin Island Penguin Island is easily one of Western Australia’s favourite destinations, home to an array of friendly animals such as the sea lions, dolphins and approximately 1,200 penguins. During an exhilarating Dolphins playing near Rockingham

ride onboard the adventure cruise, you will get a chance to observe the wild dolphins and other friendly inhabitants. Elsewhere on the island, a wildlife sanctuary zone was built to nest seabirds amidst white sandy beaches, limestone reefs and seagrass meadows – ideal for snorkelers and nature lovers to delve into. Do note that the island is only open from 15 September to early June (Western Australia Day Public Holiday), subject to weather conditions. The best time to visit will probably be the summer seasons, where little penguins stay ashore for six to eight weeks to grow their new feathers. Perth Zoo Traverse a world’s worth of animals when you visit the Perth Zoo, located just five minutes from Perth’s Central Business District (CBD) Area. The zoo is filled with lush gardens and naturalistic exhibits, while hosting more than 1,200 animals from all over the world, including the

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tigers, elephants, sun bears and orangutans. The African Savannah is an area that allows visitor to get in touch with the wild side and provides an up close experience with the lions, rhinoceros and giraffes. Other notable features include an eye-to-eye encounter while feeding a giraffe or coming face-to-face with a Galapagos Tortoise. For the inquisitive minds and wandering hearts, Perth is a world of nostalgia and scientific discovery with lots of secrets and information waiting to be uncovered. Enjoy a world of learning through interactive play and live examples. Nostalgia Box Australia’s first interactive video game console museum is being located in Northbridge, Perth. Experience history being written through the usage of video games and learn the history of gaming

Elizabeth Quay, Perth

consoles from the 1970s to 2000s. The museum also has a capacity for classic games such as Pong, Space Invaders, Super Mario Bros, Sonic the Hedgehog, Crash Bandicoot and many more. This area also provides the opportunity for parents to bridge the generation gap with their children by showing the old video game consoles of their childhood years. It was first opened in December 2015 and has since been used for party venue hires as well. Scitech A visit to Scitech is a mind blowing adventure of science experience for the whole family. With over 100 handson exhibits and Australasia’s largest planetarium, visitors will be treated to a variety of enthralling features, mindblowing science performances and delightful puppet shows. To bring the learning experience to a whole new level, the science centre also offers personalised school holiday programmes and a Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) lab to allow inquisitive minds the opportunities to create and experiment. This science centre operates as a not-for-profit organisation and aims to increase awareness, interest, capability and participation of all Western Australians and its visitors, in the field of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

The Art Gallery of Western Australia

Art Gallery of Western Australia Considered one of Perth’s foremost cultural icons, the Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA) houses the highlyregarded State Art Collection – one of the world’s finest collections of indigenous and pre-eminent Western Australian art and design. Established in 1895, the AGWA resides in the heart of the Perth Cultural Centre, occupying a precinct of three heritage buildings. The art gallery features a series of interactive projects including public programmes, artist talks, panel discussions and education resources. The ARTBAR also features singers, songwriters and occasionally, comedians who perform live. Remember to pop by and say hello to the world’s first art gallery engagement robot, Aggie, one that can provide humorous yet insightful information of the gallery. City of Gosnells Measuring a total of 127 square

kilometres encompassing forests, woodlands, rivers and streams, the City of Gosnells has a lot to offer in terms of cultural events and festivals. A convenient 20 minutes away from Perth’s CBD area, this is the perfect destination for visitors looking to discover the real culture of Australia, without the luxury of time to spare. From leisure programmes featuring ghost walks, abseiling and parkour to events and festivals such as the Multicultural Food Festival and Australia Day breakfast, the city comes alive to welcome you to its myriad of events and leisure tours. The city’s ghost walk events are a hot favourite amongst visitors and the locals often describe the hills to be the home of the spirits, where the Mason and Bird’s timber mill workers used to build a thriving community back in the 1860s. For those interested, the best time to visit will be between October to March annually. ß Kings Park and Botanical Garden

It is not uncommon to hear that Perth is alive with a spectacular mix of music, theatre, comedy, dance and visual art. The rich tapestry of cultural experiences is available throughout the year and there is always something for everyone here. Vol. 9 Issue 5

SCIENCE

Our exploration of the cosmos is hampered by our bodies and minds, which struggle in space. So could we ever overcome our biology and settle among the stars?

Scan this QR Code for the audio reader

Vol. 9 Issue 5

ILLUSTRATION: MAGIC TORCH

SCIENCE

ou might have thought from watching videos of astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) that spaceships were pretty benign environments. Floating around in microgravity looks like a lot of fun, and as you’re isolated from the rest of the human population you’re effectively quarantined against catching flu or any other transmissible disease. But in fact, space is pretty harmful to the human body. We evolved as social animals under the conditions on the Earth, and travelling beyond the planet has a number of negative effects on the body and mind. So what are the main risks encountered by spacefarers, and what does the latest research have to say about how to solve these problems for long-duration missions in the future?

G RAVIT Y Freefalling around the Earth in orbit, or coasting through interplanetary space on your way to Mars, gives you the sensation of weightlessness. You’re still moving under gravity, but it doesn’t load your body, and this has a whole host of knock-on effects. For example, your inner ear can no longer help you orientate yourself, and the redistribution of bodily fluids causes your face to puff up and your eyeballs to distort. But the long-term effects are more concerning. Without the loading of gravity, your skeleton loses calcium and becomes brittle (like with osteoporosis). Your muscles, especially those involved in supporting your spine and holding you upright, deteriorate and shrink. Plus, your heart becomes weaker when it doesn’t have to pump blood upwards. While you remain in a weightless environment, this isn’t too much of a problem – and in some senses your body is being adaptive in remodelling itself to life without gravity – but it can be hugely debilitating or dangerous when you return to the surface of the Earth or any other planet. In the long-term future, the solution might simply be to generate artificial gravity for yourself on a spaceship. If you rotate large sections of a spacecraft – giant turning wheels or cylinders – you can exploit the centripetal force from the inside wall that keeps you moving in a circle to create an

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“without the loading of gravity your skeleton loses calcium and becomes brittle, and your muscles deteriorate and shrink” apparent gravity. We’re well familiar with this idea from sci-fi films like 2001: A Space Odyssey, or more recently Passengers, but the problem is that the engineering required to build such a large rotating structure in space is pretty challenging. In the shorter term, spacecraft might incorporate mini-centrifuges. These wouldn’t be large enough to walk around or work inside, but they would fit within the existing structure with just enough space for a single astronaut at a time. Spinning relatively quickly, these could generate artificial gravity for short bursts while the astronaut exercises. The idea is that gravity could perhaps be dosed in small amounts; just enough to prevent the body deteriorating in space. David Green and his colleagues at King’s College London have been working with MIT and the European Space Agency (ESA) on another solution, the ‘gravity loading countermeasure skinsuit’. This skinsuit looks a bit like a triathlete’s sleeveless wetsuit, and

FAR LEFT: The Dainese BioSuit has been designed for trips to Mars LEFT: Danish astronaut Andreas Mogensen tries out the ESA skinsuit on the ISS

PHOTOS: NASA, ALAMY

RIGHT: In 2001: A Space Odyssey, apparent gravity was provided by a rotating wheel

incorporates a specific weave of elastic material that provides a graded tension between the feet and shoulders. This elastic loading on the body simulates 1g (Earth’s gravity) and is designed to help prevent stretching of the astronaut’s spine, muscle and bone wasting. The scientists are running tests on their skinsuit on Earth, and it was recently worn on the ISS by Andreas Mogensen, the first Danish astronaut. What about developing drugs that could help make exercise in zero-g more effective or stop muscle loss altogether by blocking the degenerative process? Nathaniel Szewczyk, at the University of Nottingham, has been involved in research along exactly these lines. But rather than experimenting on human test subjects, he has been using microscopic worms. Caenorhabditis elegans is a nematode worm, but it has two different muscle types that are similar to the heart muscle and skeletal muscles used for movement in humans. As C. elegans is such a simple animal we’ve already been able to work out exactly how it develops, and we’ve also sequenced its whole genome. This means that C. elegans is a perfect test case for helping scientists understand the effects of microgravity on animal bodies, and they’ve now been flown on a number of space missions as microscopic astronauts. Szewczyk and his colleagues have found changes in the cellular production of around 100 proteins during spaceflight, many of them involved in musclebuilding. “These experiments with C. elegans in Earth orbit have enabled us to track how the expression of different proteins responds to weightlessness, and so explore the genetic basis behind deterioration of the body’s muscles,” he says. “In our current ESA flight we’re specifically testing a few drugs to see if they can reduce muscle loss in worms.” So the hope is that in the future, astronauts will be able to pop a pill to help protect their heart and muscles while in space.

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RAD IATI O N Gravity isn’t the only thing that the Earth provides for our bodies. The thick atmosphere and global magnetic field that cocoons our planet protects the surface from cosmic rays. These are energetic radiation particles – spat out by flares on the Sun or accelerated to nearly the speed of light by supernova events – that are exceedingly hazardous to cells. Astronauts aboard the ISS, and in particular any future spacefarers

“WHAT WE UNDERSTAND MUCH LESS CLEARLY IS WHAT EFFECTS COSMIC RAYS MIGHT HAVE ON YOUR IMMUNE SYSTEM, OR ON YOUR BRAIN’S NEURONS” 36

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voyaging to the Moon, Mars and beyond will be exposed to this nasty space radiation. These energetic particles damage DNA causing mutations and could potentially trigger tumours and cancer, and they also turn the lenses of your eyes opaque. But what we understand much less clearly is what irreversible effects cosmic rays might have on your immune system, or on your brain’s neurons. Astronauts can be protected against cosmic rays by providing several metres of radiation shielding to absorb the particle bombardment, and this would be relatively simple on the lunar or Martian surface by burying the crew quarters underground. But providing complete shielding around a spaceship would make it impossibly massive and expensive. So instead of blocking the radiation, another countermeasure would be to reduce its harmful effects within the body. Dietary supplements and drugs could be taken to mop up free radicals produced in your cells by radiation, or to help with DNA repair. The problem, says radiation physicist Dr

Marco Durante, is that current antioxidant supplements aren’t particularly effective, whereas radioprotector drugs like Ethyol do work but are pretty toxic. Ethyol, for example, is only occasionally used with patients who have cancer in the head and neck region, where the side effects of radiotherapy are often severe. “The US Department of Defense has developed several compounds in the framework of the homeland security program, and testing these for their effectiveness against cosmic rays in astronauts would be very interesting,” Durante says. “As an alternative to drugs, one promising biomedical process is hibernation, because radioresistance seems to be increased at low temperature.” If we can work out how to keep the human body in a state of cryogenic suspension, the crew could sleep through the whole eight-month flight to Mars, and the freezing cold would also help protect their cells from radiation damage. And if the astronauts are not active, it will also mean that the demands on the life-support system,

PHOTOS: FOSTER + PARTNERS, GETTY X6

SCIENCE

and the amount of food and other consumables that will be needed, will also be greatly reduced. But perhaps we could go one better. Could it be possible to genetically modify future astronauts to enhance their radiation resistance? New research on strange microscopic animals know as tardigrades elucidates one route we might go down. Takekazu Kunieda, a molecular biologist at the University of Tokyo, has been working on these tiny ‘water bears’ which are known to be able to survive extremely hostile conditions such as the vacuum of space and punishingly high radiation levels. To try to understand which genes might be behind these prodigious survival skills, Kunieda sequenced the tardigrade’s genome and then inserted sections of this DNA into mammalian cells in a petri dish. In this way, they found a new gene dubbed Dsup (for ‘damage suppressor’) which acted to prevent the tardigrade’s DNA from breaking under radiation. And astonishingly, this gene also reduced radiation-induced DNA damage by 40 per cent in human cells.

YO U R BO DY I N S PAC E

SUBJECT 0000001 Your inner ear can’t work in microgravity, which can cause dizziness and space sickness.

SUBJECT 0000002 Without gravity, your skeleton loses calcium to become brittle and weak, like with osteoporosis.

SUBJECT 0000003 Long-term exposure to cosmic rays may also impair brain function, which could be critical in an emergency. situation.

SUBJECT 0000004 Conditions aboard spacecraft can lead to insomnia, loss of appetite, anxiety and depression.

SUBJECT 0000005 Redistribution of body fluids in zero-g makes your face puffy. Your eyeballs distort, blurring vision.

SUBJECT 0000006 As your heart no longer needs to pump blood up against gravity in zero-g, it weakens and deteriorates.

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SCIENCE

““AT AT LEAST LEAST LEAST FROM FROM FROM THE TTHE HE ISS IISS SS YOU YOU YOU “AT CAN C AN STILL S STILL TILL ENJOY EENJOY NJOY THE THE THE VIEW VIEW VIEW OF OF OF CAN TTHE HE EARTH EEARTH ARTH BELOW” B BELOW” ELOW” THE 38

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Privacy tend to be in short supply aboard the ISS

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SCIENCE

PSYC H O LOGY Long-duration space travel can take a heavy toll on your mental well-being. ISS astronauts often report problems with insomnia and loss of appetite, and it can be hard to find any privacy in the confines of the craft. Crews also have to be carefully selected to make sure that every member is easygoing – there is the constant threat of something going wrong, and you can’t risk astronauts irritating each other too much. It’s not like you can diffuse an argument by avoiding each other or stepping outside for some air! You have to spend months on end with the same people, isolated from all your loved ones at home. At least from the ISS you can still enjoy the view of the Earth below – on a mission to Mars the feeling of remoteness will be even stronger. And the signal delay time of up to 40 minutes will mean that you’ll not even be able to talk to anyone on Earth – all contact will be by email or video message. These psychological issues are tricky to detect early on, and when you’re investigating the effects on group cohesion it’s hard to think of scientific ways to measure the outcome. While medical tests might be able to reveal the physiological effects of spaceflight on your body, people might be less inclined to selfreport on psychological stresses or problems they are encountering. NASA has been paying particular attention to these psychological effects. In a 2016 report on human health risks, they highlighted several areas needing further study. These include the effects of long-term disruption to sleeping patterns and ‘circadian rhythm desynchronisation’. This is when your body’s internal cycles of temperature regulation, metabolic activity, and wakefulness, for example, are forced out of rhythm with each other – you’re probably familiar with this from jet-lag. But what are the effects of experiencing desynchronisation for months or years of a lengthy space mission? The report recommended more research into how diet and nutrition can affect these circadian rhythms, and whether the timing of meals, for example, might help solve the problem.

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ABOVE: The team at Antarctica’s Concordia Station are more isolated during winter than ISS astronauts

One of the best ways of studying psychological effects is in similarly isolated situations back on Earth. Dr Beth Healey has spent more than a year on the Concordia Station in the icy depths of Antarctica, as the ESA’s research doctor. During a polar winter you don’t see sunshine for three months, and no evacuation is possible even in an emergency – in this sense the Concordia scientists are more isolated than ISS astronauts. In one of Healey’s experiments, she got the crew to wear trackers. These monitored how mobile each person was, and who they interacted with. “This provided valuable information regarding how group dynamics changed over time and could identify critical time points in the mission where crew members may be more likely to isolate themselves or seek out social interaction, or when conflicts were most likely to occur,” she says. Healey also worked on developing a 10-part cognition test, which is now likely to be adopted into the astronauts’ routines aboard the ISS. “The test looks at lots of different variables, for example risktaking behaviour, reaction times, memory testing, and so on. The astronauts would take this regularly, and any dip in performance would prompt mission control to investigate,” she explains.

FOO D AN D N UTR ITI O N Weightlessness presents several problems for eating in space. Without gravity, crumbs are a real health hazard, floating in the air to be inhaled into your lungs. And the redistribution of bodily fluids mean tissues in your head swell and you struggle to smell or taste things properly – just like having a cold. So astronauts often prefer spicy foods, and tend to eat breads like tortillas that don’t crumble. Practically all the food on the ISS is prepackaged and is simply rehydrated and heated up – imagine eating nothing but airline food for months on end. Every six months or so a resupply vessel is launched from Earth to deliver essential stocks. It’s stuffed with food, water, spare clothes, fuel, oxygen and so on. But for longer space missions, such as a Moon base or mission to Mars, constant resupply would be prohibitively expensive or outright impossible. We’ve seen already how hibernation technologies in the future may allow crews to sleep on the way to Mars, and so relieve the necessity for a large amount of travel food, but when they wake up on arrival, food will once again be a priority. Instead of relying on deliveries from Earth, Mars colonists would need to learn to be self-sufficient – to become space farmers! In the film The Martian, Matt Damon’s character cultivates potatoes in regolith (the powdery rocky surface) mixed with his crewmates’ excrement to provide nutrients. And this isn’t too far off the truth of what space agencies are considering for habitats on Mars (minus the poo). For example, last year scientists at Wageningen University in the Netherlands made simulated Martian soil and tested which crops could be grown in it. They found that tomatoes, peas, radishes, rye and rocket grew well, but spinach struggled. They are now testing whether potatoes and beans could be cultivated on Mars. The environment is so hostile you would need to provide pressurised, inflatable greenhouses, but scientists remain hopeful that future Martians could live off the land. And what about meat? Keeping farm animals on an offworld base would be enormously difficult – they would take up a huge amount of space and resources. So instead, future space explorers are likely to be mostly vegetarian, and get small amounts of animal protein from bugs. Insects can be reared in high-density and fed on plant waste. Taikonauts on China’s Tiangong-2 space station have been raising silkworms, which could serve as a protein-rich source in the future. So perhaps future Martians will be eating bug burgers in home-grown wheat buns with lettuce and tomato! ß

RIGHT: ISS astronauts rely on deliveries of fresh food to top up their supplies, but this wouldn’t be feasible on a Mars or Moon base BELOW: From left to right, radishes grown in Moon soil substitute, Mars soil substitute, and Earth soil

“MARS COLONISTS WOULD NEED TO LEARN TO BE SPACE FARMERS!”

Prof Lewis Dartnell is an astrobiology researcher at the University of Westminster and author of The Knowledge: How To Rebuild Our World After An Apocalypse Vol. 9 Issue 5

NATURE NATUR NAT RE E

Better the

DEVIL you know

The Tasmanian devil helps protect the island against invasive species, so no wonder conservationists are doing all they can to save it from extinction, says James Fair PHOTOS BY HEATH HOLDEN

arrawah, in Tasmania’s far north-west, is truly one of those places that feel like the end of the world. Cut off from the rest of the island by an expanse of temperate rainforest and with nothing to the west but some 15,000km of Southern Ocean (until you hit Argentine), it is also one of the best places on Earth to come face to face with the devil. The Tasmanian devil, that is. Until his untimely death in 2013, beef farmer-turnedconservationist Geoff King ran the renowned ‘Devil Restaurant’ here. The menu was pretty basic: a single roadkill wallaby or wombat (staked out in front of a wooden hide, no seasoning required) that lured diners by the bus-load. “One night I saw 13 different devils,” Geoff told me when I visited the restaurant back in 2005. “The next night I saw 22. I can tell them apart by the white stripes on their chests.” My own visit to the ‘restaurant’ saw two hungry customers come to sample the cuisine – an old male with half his lower lip missing and worn fur on his backside, and a young female who almost passed for pretty. The male fed for some 40 minutes, during which time,

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Geoff said, he could have eaten 2.5kg or 25 per cent of his bodyweight. His feasting was accompanied by the sounds of cracking bones and tearing sinews that were transported into the hide by Geoff’s unconventional use of a baby monitor.

STORM WARNING But even there was a cloud on the horizon. Devil Facial Tumour Disease (DFTD), an infectious, viral-induced cancer, had taken hold, wiping out the species in many parts of the south and east of Tasmania, reducing the overall population by an estimated 80 per cent and marching north and west – towards Marrawah. “I’m not sure I want to be doing this when it arrives,” Geoff said. Back in 2005 our understanding of DFTD, first identified in 1996, was relatively poor and scientists have learned a lot in the intervening years, though this has not included any progress on how to stop the disease. Indeed the possibility that Tasmanian devils – the world’s largest surviving carnivorous marsupial, once widespread across Australia but now confined to this island state – could become

While roaming a trail at night, a curious Tasmanian devil triggers a camera-trap set beside a fallen branch

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NATURE

Tasmanian devil habitat is often intersected by small streams, which the animals seem to enjoy crossing – they are strong swimmers after all

extinct in the wild has been mooted. A captivebreeding programme was hastily established, with the idea of creating an ‘ark’ population that would ensure the survival of the species should the worst happen.

A MODERN-DAY ARK Back in 2014, the ark devils number more than 600, distributed across 33 zoos and captive-breeding facilities in Tasmania and mainland Australia, with additional ‘ambassador’ animals as far afield as San Diego, Wellington and New Zealand. According to a leading devil scientist, the total is enough to permit the conservation community a brief pat on the back. “We’re beyond panic now,” David Pemberton told me last month; he manages the state government’s Save the Tasmanian Devil Programme. “It’s generally a safe mantra in mammalian biology that if you got more than 500, you’re safe. Now we can consolidate.” Apart from that, an experimental introduction of Tasmanian devils onto the devil-free Maria Island proved more successful than anticipated. A total of 25 animals have been released in two phases – the first in October 2012, the second in 2013 – with the initial cohort of 14 giving birth to an estimated 24 offspring in their first breeding year alone. Tasmanian devils have four teats and can easily rise to independence two or three young a year. “By 2016, we could have a couple of hundred animals on Maria Island,” David says, “and we will have a nice little headache”. 44

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RIGHT: A large male devil is trapped in an industrial area BOTTOM LEFT: A vet checks its health, including looking for signs of tumours, and fits a microchip BOTTOM RIGHT: The animal is then released into bushland

FACT FILE

TASMANIAN DEVIL Sarcophilus harrisii WEIGHT 10-12kg (males), 7-8kg (females) LENGTH Head and body: 50-80cm Tail: 23-30cm ID TIPS Squat, dog-like marsupial about the size of a bulldog with distinctive white stripe across its chest. DIET Mainly carrion of dead wallabies, possums and wombats, but will also catch live animals. Young devils will take amphibians and insects. insects

weeks, but can only then suckle a maximum of four. Young devils become independent at about 10 months. Average lifespan is about five years.

HOTSPOT WOOLNORTH The extreme (and extremely windy) north-west of Tasmania, Woolnorth is believed to have the highest population density of Tasmanian devils anywhere on the island.

HABITAT Found all over Tasmania (where not eliminated by DFTD), but especially dry eucalypt forests, woodland and agricultural areas. STATUS Endangered. Wild population estimated at 10,000 – 25,000 mature individuals.

LIFE-CYCLE Devils can breedd in their first year, with m mating usually betweenn January J and March. Fem males l give birth up to 220 young after just three

Clearly no devils can leave or enter Maria Island on their own. At ssome point the population will exceed carrying the habitat’s c g capacity – the number off devils that can be sustained by the available prey: brushtail possums, pademelons (a small species of wallaby that is endemic to Tasmania) and wombats. No one quite knows what the figure is, though 150 had been suggested. In fact Save the Tasmanian Devil already has an idea of what to do with any surplus animals. Bold plans have been formulated to reintroduce them to two parts of Tasmania where DFTD has wreaked havoc, the Tasman

TASMANIA

Hobart

HOTSPOT MOUNTAIN VALLEY WILDERNESS The only place in Tasmania with regular devil-watching – lodge owners leaves roadkill outside their log cabins to attract them. This is also a good venue to observe other Australian endemics, such as the platypus, echidnas and sugar gliders.

HOTSPOT TROWUNNA WILDLIFE PARK Trowunna has the capacity for almost 40 devils and is an important cog in the insurance population created in response to DFTD. It’s also a partner in the ‘Ambassador Devil’ initiative in which animals have gone to zoos in both the USA and New Zealand. Visitors are welcomed.

HOTSPOT MARIA ISLAND The introduction of devils here was the first planned release of the species into the wild in response to DFTD. The island is renowned for (introduced) forester kangaroos and other marsupials such as pademelons, plus 11 out of Tasmania’s 12 endemic birds. Day and overnight visits are possible.

HOTSPOT TASMAN PENINSULA The location of the next planned release of devils from the insurance population, the Tasman Peninsula has been badly hit by DFTD, thought it was never a stronghold. The peninsula is also home to the Tasmanian Devil Conservation Park.

The sounds of cracking bones and tearing sinews were brought into the hide by Geoff’s use of a baby monitor

P Peninsula in the far south o the island the Freycinet of o the east coast. A quick on look at the geography of Tasmania demonstrates that these will be the likely island population, with fences (or a canal in the case of Tasman) supplementing the natural sea boundaries. Still, the question remains of whether those wild devils left on mainland Tasmania are doomed by the ongoing spread of DFTD. No one knows this either – David reports that monitoring over the next five years should resolve the issue. Nick Mooney, a former Tasmanian Parks and Wildlife official who helped Geoff set up the Devil Restaurant, believes that the declines may, in fact, have come to a natural end. “Even in the areas affected by DFTD for the longest period, devils have stabilised at above their 1950s-1970s numbers,” he says. “Increasingly it’s looking to me as if the Maria Island introduction was never needed,” he adds. “I know it was done in part because a successful colonisation would be sexy and they desperately needed a run on the board, but in my view this should have been a last resort.”

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LEFT: A cameratrap photographed these devil joeys play-fighting in an industrial area 45

NATURE

The Tarkine Wilderness Area is the last known area free of DFTD in Tasmania

The Tasmanian devil is quite shy, though it does engage in loud displays of aggression when competing for food or feeling threatened

Nick’s point is that you mess with island ecosystems at your peril. They are famously fragile – think Mauritius and its dodos. He fears the Save the Tasmanian Devil has overestimated the number of devils that can live on Maria Island, which he reckons could be closer to 30-50 than 150. Typically, he says, an introduced predator (whether by change or design) ‘overshoots’ what the habitat can sustain, eventually resulting in serious welfare issues when animals that cannot find sufficient food begin to starve. David argues, however, that they are ready to deal with this situation. “If we think the body condition of the devils is collapsing because there’s not enough prey for them, we will either take animals off or feed them,” he says.

A PATRIOTIC PROJECT It’s not hard to see why Tasmanians are desperate to save their devil. First it’s an endemic species, and a dramatic one – 10kg of compact muscle and fur that resembles a pitbull on steroids, with a growl to match. Second there’s the spectre of the Tasmanian tiger or thylacine, the larger predatory marsupial that was hunted out by white colonists in the early decades of the 20th century, with the last known individual dying in Hobart Zoo in 1936. But there’s another factor too – the devils protect the island from invasive species. Creatures such as rabbits and domestic cats and dogs that Europeans brought to Australia have wreaked havoc on native wildlife across the Bass Straits. But, on the whole, they are either absent from Tasmania or, in the case of cats and dogs, have not run feral to the same extent. This has allowed smaller, rarer marsupials to flourish. 46

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The devils protect Tasmania from invasive species which has allowed smaller, rarer marsupials to flourish

Foxes are another would-be invader. They have hitchhiked to Tasmania on ferries, and even, it’s believed, been brought in deliberately, but they have failed to become established. Scientists say that the presence of devils probably makes it impossible for any vixens to raise any young, because their dens can be easily tracked down and the cubs eaten. According to the Tasmanian Parks and Wildlife Service, an established fox population would prey on “at least 70 vertebrate species” and the annual cost to the Tasmanian economy – in terms of the damage to its ecology and loss of revenue from ecotourism – could be $15 million. It makes the state government’s funding for Save the Tasmanian Devil of $1.5 million look a bargain. It might seem like missing the point, of course, to value the Tasmanian devil in dollars and cents. This is a beast, after all, that earned its name from European settlers as a result of its unearthly screams and growls, and has a jaw strength that, pound for pound, equates to the spotted hyenas. And like hyenas and vultures in Africa, it also performs the valuable ecological role of consuming carrion, in addition to hunting for itself when the opportunity arises. While far from a conventionally beautiful wildlife experience, a Tasmanian devil with its head inside the belly of a red-necked wallaby of wombat is a captivating sight – and one that should fortunately be around for the foreseeable future. ß

Heath Holden is a Tasmanian-based wildlife and travel photographer

HISTORY

PACK YOUR BAGS FOR A

CITY BREAK IN MEDIEVAL EUROPE

GETTY IMAGES/ALAMY/BRIDGEMAN

From Rome to Rheims and Bologna to Bamberg, join us on a tour of the 12th and 13th centuriesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; bustling metropolises. Savour their sights and sounds via the accounts of those who lived in them. Your guide for our trip is Paul Oldfield

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HISTORY

BUILDINGS

Towering achievements CAPTIONS FOR IMAGES ON PAGE 31: TOP FROM LEFT: A 14TH-CENTURY DEPICTION OF THE FOUNDATION OF ROME; NAPLES IN 1482; MILAN’S BASILICA DI SANT’AMBROGIO CENTRE: ARTWORK FROM A 14TH-CENTURY LITURGICAL BOOK. BOTTOM FROM LEFT: A C1346 TOMB-SLAB DEPICTING BOLOGNA STUDENTS AT WORK; A MEDIEVAL FISH MARKET; CHARLES OF DURAZZO CONQUERS NAPLES, 1381–82

The 12th century is witnessing a major building boom – and, as you’ll see, the the results are spectacular The best way to start your tour of Europe’s medieval cities is surely to look to the heavens. Newly built cathedrals and church spires seem to be pushing cities ever upwards, nearer to God – and so are city towers. Some are constructed to defend the city, others are privately owned, adverts of a family’s power. In Metz, as an abbot tells us, you’ll have to crane your neck backwards to see the tops of towers that are lost in the clouds. If you feel fit enough, you could tick off all 361 towers that an author boasts are dotted around Rome’s city walls. A Milanese called Bonvesin reckons Milan has 120 bell-towers with more than 200 bells – so here you can also experience an amazing melody of sound throughout the day. Bonvesin also recommends Milan’s best viewing point: “Whosoever wishes to see and savour the form of the city and the quality and quantity of its estates and buildings, should ascend thankfully the tower of the court of the commune; from there, turning the eyes all round one can marvel at the wonderful sight.” For the most spectacular experience, perhaps you should go to Seville and view the huge Tower of Mary. It is said to have four spheres on top, and when the sun strikes them they radiate bright rays throughout the day. To get in and out of many cities you will have to pass through gates, often adorned with sculptures bearing religious messages. Some gates might even offer prophecies. At Naples locals tell us that a magic spell has been placed on one city gate. If you enter through it on the right-hand side, you will receive good fortune, as shown by the marble head laughing in delight. If you enter the left-hand side, near another marble head – this one weeping – it will be bad luck I’m afraid. So take care! Some cities boast monumental royal palaces, and these are certainly worth a visit. A Parisian student recommends the exceptional royal palace complex next to the Seine on the Île-de-la-Cité. Or if you want to catch a glimpse of the secretive kings of Sicily, head to Palermo. Here in the 12th century you will see the new royal palace rising above the city. But sunglasses might be necessary to fully appreciate its sparkling internal walls decorated with gold and precious stones.

Medieval must-see: Seville’s glittering Tower of Mary

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The highest buildings seem to be pushing cities ever upwards, nearer to God, and they are often adverts of a family’s wealth A painting of Naples’ Castel dell’Ovo in c1472. When entering this city, approach its gates with caution – you might ﬁnd yourself the victim of a curse

COMMERCE

Wine, wool, wax and weapons There is little you can’t buy in the biggest city markets – remember to pack your purse! Europe is in the midst of a commercial revolution, so don’t be surprised to encounter bustling, well-stocked markets whenever you visit a medieval city. Citizens are proud of the range of products that they sell, especially exotic ones. At London’s markets, a writer named William FitzStephen says that you will find Egyptian palm oil, Chinese silks, French wines and Scandinavian furs. At Genoa, a 13th-century poet claims that you can purchase anything you desire. But do note that he complains that the shops are shut on Sundays and feast days! You can get excellent wine in Rouen, while at Caen a poet tells us that you have the choice of an array of herbs, cinnamon, incense, pepper, apple, honey, wax, cumin and also dyed woollen cloths, threads of linen, soft silk, bristly wines nes,, woolly w ly sheep, p, animal sk sswi y she kins, horses and all types of food d and h y d drink. Some cities speciali d p alise in particular g goods. If we belie eve e some s p of our authors,, the awards fo or best b o wooll and go w d weapons g

to Florence, and best olive oil to Seville. Many of our writers praise the things that make this productivity possible: rivers (which are the motorways of the Middle Ages), bridges, and the surrounding countryside. The latter is well worth a visit, according to many medieval citizens who suggest the hinterland is like an earthly paradise. No wonder, given that this is where much of the raw materials for the city’s wealth are sourced. Bonvesin, whom we encountered earlier, claims that the mills in Milan’s surrounding countryside produce enough bread for the entire city and its 100,000 dogs, and that Milan boasts such an abundant grape harvest that it throws more wine away (for flies to become intoxicated on) than some cities have for their entire population. However, if all this consumerism becomes too much, you could relax in the countryside around Lisbon, where we’re told the coastal air and pure water springs will protect you from coughs and tuberculosis.

Me e Medieval must--se ee:

GETTY IMAGES/BRIDGEMAN

Caen, for its ex xtraordinary a array of exotic c goods g

A couple enjoy a meal in the countryside in this Italian illustration, c15th century. Milan’s hinterland had claimed to provide enough bread for its population and 100,000 dogs

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HISTORY

Medieval cities are widely hailed as centres of civilisation. Their citizens are praised for elegance and sophistication A teacher delivers a lecture in law at Bologna’s university – home to Europe’s best legal experts – in the 15th century

EDUCATION

Founts of all knowledge Join the intelligentsia ﬂocking to Europe’s ﬂourishing universities

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But for the supreme university experience, you must head to Paris, which leads the way in theological studies. Letters from Parisian students speak glowingly of the academic debates you can attend and of the throng of scholars. This knowledge transforms Paris (Parisius) into a Paradise (Paradisus), so you’ll find yourself in a ‘garden of delights’ (‘paradisus deliciarum’) and a ‘city of letters’ (‘civitas litterarum’). Because of this educational climate, medieval cities are widely hailed as centres of civilisation. Their citizens are praised for elegance and sophistication. A 13th-century encyclopaedia entry on Venice says it would take “too long to

recount all the goodness and virtues and wisdom and knowledge and foresight and harmony and peace and love and humility and righteousness of the people of Venice”. And our friend Bonvesin has helpfully written a book on table manners called The Fifty Courtesies of the Table. It advises people against speaking with full mouths, sneezing or coughing on the table and, worst of all, licking their fingers.

Medieval must-see: Paris, for its celebrated academic debates

GETTY IMAGES

If your tastes are a little more refined than the average tourist, you’ll be delighted to learn that medieval Europe is undergoing an intellectual revival. Schools are springing up across the biggest cities (rather than in rural monasteries), and these are now being joined by universities. So, if you’d like to mix it with students and academics, you could learn from the best legal experts at the university in Bologna, or train for a career in the civil service in Naples. Or why not devour Aristotelian philosophy at university in Toulouse? These cities boast that there is an abundance of goods to make for comfortable student living too.

RELIGION

Divine designs

Past glories

Finding God will be easier than you ever imagined

Marvel at the money-spinning potential of the cities’ ancient remains

The Christian faith has certainly made its presence felt in Europe’s medieval metropolises – and not just in their holiest shrines and vaulting cathedrals. Take a walk around any number of city centres and you’ll find that their layouts are heavily influenced by their designers’ piety. Take Chester, for example. According to the monk Lucian, its two main roads meet in the middle of the city to form a cross. At the ends of both roads you will find a city gate, each protected by a patron saint: St John, St Peter, St Werburgh and St Michael. At Bamberg, on the advice of a German imperial official, you can trace the position of the four churches located around the main cathedral and see how they create a cruciform shape at the heart of the city. Perhaps, though, you would simply prefer to marvel at the magnificent new cathedrals and shrines that are being built in many of Europe’s cities. In Milan, one 13th-century writer tells us, there are 200 saints’ shrines and around 480 altars. William FitzStephen recommends London, not only to see the wonderful cathedral of St Paul but also to soak up the piety of its inhabitants. FitzStephen claims you will see excellent holy plays, and citizens joyously ce ebrati aints and celebr b ating ti g sai ints’ t ’ days d d ch haritably offering alm p r. r a ms to the poo If bump p in I you y don’t want to bum nto any heretics, yo c y ffree from such y ur best bet is Venice, a cit tro eneti t oublemakers oub e a e s – or o so a Ven e e ian chronicler bo oasts. boas s

Finally, you might want to extend your foray into medieval cities by learning more about these conurbations’ distant pasts. Europe’s leading cities are becoming increasingly keen to understand (and manufacture) their own origins. This is part of a renewed craze for the ancient world. Rome has to be your starting point. Medieval writers marvel at the beauty of the city’s ancient remains, sometimes lamenting their decay. They encourage you to look anew at the magnificence of structures such as the Colosseum and the Baths of Diocletian, or to read the inscription at the spot where Julius Caesar is commemorated. Rome’s 12th-century rulers have even put a preservation order on Trajan’s Column so that it will remain intact for “as long as the world lasts”. You could also visit all those cities – such as Rouen and Seville – which claim to have been founded by Julius Caesar, and walk in the footsteps of one of the most famous Roman generals. If you’re looking for something even more ancient, try Trier, which maintains that it was founded by Trebeta, the son of Ninus, the king of the Assyrians. Rouen has a quirky slogan about its ancient past which is based on its Latin name: Rodomus (Romanorum domus), the dwelling place of the Romans. Other cities have developed these catchy ‘brand names’: Rheims is supposedly named after Remus, the brother of Romulus, who founded Rome. León in Spain allegedly took its name Leo (lion) in honour of its former ruler Leovigild, king of the Visigoths. You could even visit the supposed burial place of King Lud at Ludgate in London. He was an ancient mythical ruler who is said to have given his name to the city (Lundinium). No doubt you’d like to take away a souvenir of your trip. Perhaps you could

M Medieval must-se ee: London’s magniﬁ L ﬁc cent S P St Paul’s Cathedr dra al

GETTY IMAGES/ALAMY

HERITAGE

In some European cities – such as Chester, shown above in a map – the two main roads meet in the centre to form a cross

Workers make coins in a medieval illustration. You may wish to take one of these home as a souvenir of your visit

keep a coin minted in one of the cities, or furtively detach a seal from a document. Since about 1150, these have contained images of the city, local saints, or ancient mythical founders. So, don’t worry, you don’t need to read Latin to understand these cities’ rich histories – you can simply admire the visual evidence all around you.

Medieval must-ssee: e The ancient wo onders n of Rome o e

Paul Oldfield is senior lecturer in medieval history at the University of Manchester. This article is based on his current project on medieval cities, which was aided by funding from a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship

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SCIENCE

A new facility will store tens of thousands of cryogenically frozen people The hope is to one day bring them back to life, but just how realistic are its aims?

or centuries, the world’s physicists, writers and philosophers have argued over whether time travel is possible, with most coming to the conclusion that it’s never going to happen. But on an 800-acre plot of land just outside the small town of Comfort, Texas, a group of architects, engineers and scientists are building a ‘Timeship’ that they say could transport tens of thousands of individuals to a far-distant future. Their approach does not involve the use of

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flux capacitors, or zooming at light-speed through black holes. Instead, the Timeship aims to store people at such low temperatures that their bodies are preserved for a future civilisation to reanimate them, a concept known as cryonics. “Just as a spaceship allows people to move through space, Timeship will allow people to travel to another time in the future,” explains Stephen Valentine, who is the director and principal architect of the Timeship project. Valentine has been given a multimillion-

PHOTO: GETTY ETTY TTY T TY Y

WORDS BY TOM IRELAND.

Scan this QR Code for the audio reader

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SCIENCE

dollar budget from anonymous donors to develop a ‘Mecca’ for cryonics and life extension. As well as a fortress-like building that can store frozen people, Timeship plans to store other precious biological samples such as organs, stem cells, embryos, and even the DNA of rare or threatened species. The site will also house the world’s largest life extension research centre, the Stasis Research Park. The entire facility will be off-grid, using wind and solar energy to avoid potential power outages, and the location has been carefully chosen to be far from earthquakes, tornadoes, snowstorms and any other turmoil the world might throw at it in the next few hundred years. “You don’t want to be near a military base or nuclear plant either,” says Valentine, who speaks at a frantic pace with a theatrical Boston drawl. He has spent five years finding and designing the site, while studying pyramids, ancient tombs, bank vaults and medieval fortresses – “anything that has stood the test of time.” He has even consulted experts on how to protect frozen time-travellers from the effects of a nearby two-megaton nuclear bomb. The resulting design is an epic spaceshipcastle hybrid, with thick, low, circular walls surrounding a central tomb-like chamber, where thousands of storage pods will be held under high security. The exact technique that will be used to cool the bodies is not yet clear, but it is likely to involve the bodily fluids being drained and replaced with a solution that helps protect tissue from the formation of ice crystals. The storage pods will use the cooling power of liquid nitrogen to keep the bodies at around -130°C, and should be able to maintain low temperatures without power or human maintenance for up to six months,

No one would tell us what these pods are used for…

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“Cryonics is unique in that it is utterly reliant on technology that does not exist yet” says Valentine. He hopes to start testing the first prototype pods next year.

CHILLED TO PERFECTION The idea of freezing people in the hope of reawakening them is not new. Fifty years ago this month, James Bedford became the first person to be cryogenically frozen, and his body remains in cold storage to this day. Various organisations and companies have offered similar services over the past decades, often using hopelessly crude freezing techniques or failing to store the bodies properly. Today, the cryogenic freezing of human stem cells, sperm, eggs, embryos and other small tissue samples is a routine part of scientific research and reproductive medicine in many countries. Vitrification, a process that turns samples into a glass-like state rather than ice, was developed in the early 2000s as a way of overcoming the problems of ice formation in and around cells. Ice formation is an issue because it can cause dramatic differences in concentration inside and outside the cell, sucking water out and destroying it. In late 2002 and early 2003, a team led by vitrification

This concept shows how Timeship might look. The inner region is used for liquid nitrogen storage. The eight squareshaped structures house hundreds of frozen patients

PHOTOS: STEPHEN VALENTINE X2, GETTY X5

pioneer Gregory Fahy used a cocktail of antifreezes and chemicals to cryopreserve a whole rabbit kidney. The organ appeared to function normally after it was thawed and transplanted back into its donor. Several other breakthroughs have encouraged Valentine, and the wealthy entrepreneurs backing Timeship, that freezing a person properly is now feasible. In 2015, a team from the company 21st Century Medicine claimed to have developed a new vitrification technique that preserved pig and rabbit brains without any visible damage. That same year, scientists from Alcor, a company associated with Timeship, found that when microscopic worms were deepfrozen and thawed, they not only survived but could ‘remember’ associations they had learnt before they were frozen. For Valentine and the cryonics community, these studies are proof that if the most advanced scientific techniques are used, then human organs, brains, and even memories and personalities could survive being frozen. However, cryonics is unique in that it is utterly reliant on technology that does not exist yet. Even if so-called ‘patients’ are frozen perfectly after death, they are simply guessing that scientists will one day be able to reanimate them and cure their illnesses – and will want to. Prof Brian Grout, chairman of the Society for Low-Temperature Biology, says that cryonics has become more credible in recent

FIVE MORE WAYS TO CHEAT DEATH 1

Don’t fancy freezing yourself? Here are some alternative ways to prolong your life… 1

UPLOAD YOUR MIND TO A COMPUTER

Some believe that we may one day be able to recreate every detail of our brains on powerful computers, enabling our thoughts and experiences to live on without physical bodies. However, neuroscientists still struggle to simulate the workings of the most primitive animal brains, so it remains a distant prospect. 2

HIBERNATE 3

Doctors sometimes lower the body temperature of patients dying from severe injuries to buy more time while they perform emergency surgery. Lowering the body’s temperature from 37°C to around 10°C slows down all biological processes, resulting in a kind of ‘induced hibernation’. A similar technique has been proposed as a way of putting long-distance astronauts into a deep sleep. 3

BUILD YOUR OWN BODY Human tissue such as cartilage and even

simple organs, such as bladders, can now be grown in a lab using a patient’s own cells and special 3D printers. If the technology continues to develop, doctors may be able to grow new body parts to replace diseased or worn out ones. 4

BECOME A VAMPIRE After research in mice showed that the blood of young animals helped old animals’ memory, endurance and tissue repair, trials have begun to see if blood transfusions from young people can reduce or reverse ageing in older humans, too. Scientists hope to identify the blood-borne chemical components of ageing. 5

TIME TRAVEL If it was possible for a person to travel at very close to the speed of light, then time would slow down for them relative to everyone else. This means that when they return to Earth, thousands of years may have flown by. Unlike in Back To The Future, there would be no way back to the past.

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years, and that it would be “wrong to dismiss the idea of whole-body freezing.” But he does have one big problem with the central idea of the Timeship mission: the preservation of dead bodies. “The biggest difficulty is not whether it is possible to recover a whole person from ultralow temperatures – there is a reasonable chance that will happen in the future. It is the fact that they will be dead. If they were dead when they were frozen, they will still very much be dead when you thaw them out.”

FROZEN IN TIME Freezing people alive could mean they can be placed in suspended animation for, say, long-term space flights, says Grout. Technology that may be able to cure what are now incurable illnesses is also not hard to imagine, he says, but overcoming death is another matter. “The technology they will need is not cryotechnology, it’s reversing death. That’s a pretty big leap for me.” Valentine refuses to be drawn into a debate on whether Timeship would accept living patients if the authorities allowed such a thing, saying that it is a matter for the medical and legal professions. But he and others believe that various technologies such as gene editing and nanotechnology could one day change

“The technology they will need is not cryotechnology, it’s reversing death. That’s a big leap” how we perceive death, and reverse it. Other futurists believe that it may one day be possible to upload our minds onto a computer, freeing humanity from the restraints of a physical form entirely. Banking on these future technologies may seem like a pretty big gamble, especially when the costs of cryonic preservation start at around $30,000. Yet for people whose lives are cut short by illness, a miraculous breakthrough may literally be the only hope they have. An example is the 14-year-old British girl who recently made headlines around the world after writing, before she died of cancer, that she wanted to be frozen. A judge ruled that her wishes must be respected, and her body was sent to the US to be frozen. She wrote: “I’m only 14 years old and I don’t want to die, but I know I am going to. I think being cryopreserved gives me a chance to be cured and woken up, even in hundreds of years’ time.”

1940s

1962

1965

1967

1979

French biologist Jean Rostand studies how extremely low temperatures affect the properties of materials and living things – now known as cryogenics.

Inspired by Rostand’s work and science fiction, a physics teacher and war veteran called Robert Ettinger publishes The Prospect Of Immortality, proposing that humans could be frozen and awoken in the future.

As societies and companies dedicated to life extension start to form across the US, the term ‘cryonics’ is coined for the movement started by Ettinger.

Prof James Bedford is the first person to be frozen. In 1991, when removed from storage to be evaluated, his body is found to be preserved but damaged, with discoloured skin and “frozen blood issuing from his mouth and nose”.

Nine supposedly frozen patients are found decomposing in the ‘Chatsworth crypt’ in Los Angeles. In the 1960s and 1970s, cryonics pioneers struggle to maintain the temperature of their frozen patients. Bedford is the only person frozen in this era who remains frozen today.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF CRYONICS

BREAKING THE ICE

PHOTOS: GETTY X4, PRESS ASSOCIATION

What the world will look like in hundreds of years’ time is anyone’s guess, but there are many logistical challenges for anyone who is woken from the dead. For a start, all your money, friends and family would be long gone, and you’d probably struggle to find work in whatever hyper-advanced society has managed to resurrect you. And there are bigger questions about how the planet would cope with a human population living far longer than it does now. “We are not going to have to worry about all that right now,” says Valentine, frustrated by questions he sees as pointless hypothesising. “The world may have changed in ways we can’t even imagine! We could be inhabiting other planets or have modified ourselves to live in other environments.” It’s certainly hard to dismiss these ideas completely, given the remarkable progress our species has made in just the last few decades. And Valentine is confident that a

change of mindset is just round the corner. “If scientists one day freeze a rabbit and bring it back to life, then the idea will spread so fast. People will start to think: ‘why am I being buried in the ground? Why am I being cremated? I’ll get frozen, and then one day, who knows.’ There could be many of these places around the world. This might become the norm.” Valentine himself is not currently signed up to be frozen at the Timeship – he says it would distract from his architectural mission and could look like he was designing “some kind of monument for myself.” But his excitement and enthusiasm for this ambitious project is clear. Will the travellers in the Timeship find themselves alive and well in the future, freed from the limitations of today’s medical science? Or is it an expensive folly, doomed to result in several thousand bodies denied a proper burial? There’s really only one way to find out – and it involves a very long, very cold wait. ß

Tom Ireland is a science writer and editor of The Biologist. He tweets from @ Tom_J_Ireland

1980s

1999

2002/03

2015

2016

Cryonics companies start freezing people’s heads but not their bodies (known as ‘neuros’), based on the idea that our brains could be transplanted, supported by machines or uploaded to computers in the future.

The first baby is born from eggs that have been frozen. Freezing embryos, sperm and other bodily tissue soon becomes a routine part of medicine.

The first whole organ, a kidney, is successfully vitrified (turned into a glasslike state), thawed, and re-transplanted back into a rabbit, where it appears to function normally.

Experiments appear to show that microscopic worms can survive cryogenic freezing and retain memories from events that took place before they were frozen.

The Timeship project, headed up by Stephen Valentine (pictured), announces plans to store thousands of patients at a purpose-built facility in Texas. There are thought to be around 250 people currently cryogenically frozen in the world.

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NATURE

During winter in Yellowstone bison gather around the steaming hot springs at Lower Geyser Basin, Firehole Valley. On very cold nights, when the mercury drops below -20°C, the steam freezes onto their coats and forms frost. In the coldest season many bison migrate into the valleys from their higher summer ranges as the warmth from the geysers helps to melt the deep snow and some grazing areas remain accessible. The grass contains elevated levels of silica, which wears the bisons’ teeth down more quickly, and reduces their lifespans. Locals say: “In summer bison feed on cereals, but in winter they eat the box”

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BLEAK MIDWINTER IN THE

When temperatures fall in Yellowstone National Park, USA, it can be a hostile place to live in, and yet animals have strategies to survive the coldest months WORDS AND PHOTOS BY NICK GARBUTT

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NATURE

ABOVE: The reintroduction of wolves in 1995 is one of Yellowstone’s deﬁning achievements. The subsequent shifts in the ecology of the park have been dramatic. Before the wolves returned, the elk population was artiﬁcially high, riverside vegetation was overgrazed and beaver populations had declined. Now, elk numbers are kept in check, riparian areas such as Soda Butte Creek have recovered and beavers are thriving LEFT: Geothermal changes caused the Firehole Valley to become flooded with hot water from nearby geysers. This killed the lodgepole pines, which now stand in stark, ghost-like splendour. They look especially dramatic in the monochrome palette of winter

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ABOVE: Many moose move to lower elevations outside the park during winter, but they can still sometimes be seen grazing in the area where Soda Butte Creek joins the Lamar River. This bull will shortly shed his antlers, before regrowing them in time for the autumn rut. Being mainly at high elevations, Yellowstone is not ideal moose habitat: the park supports fewer than 200 animals LEFT: During the summer, bighorn sheep are found on high mountain pastures throughout Yellowstone, but in the colder months they make their way down to the valley bottoms. Where snowfall is deep, they dig away with their front legs to reveal the coarse grass beneath

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NATURE

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While bobcats are not uncommon, they are rarely seen and can be frustratingly secretive. However, during the winter, they often move to more accessible areas such as the Madison River Valley to hunt. Because the river is fed by hot water from geothermal springs â&#x20AC;&#x201C; via the Firehole and Gibbon Rivers â&#x20AC;&#x201C; it never freezes, even when the air temperature drops below -30Â°C. This makes it a regular haunt for goldeneye ducks, trumpeter swans and other waterfowl, which bobcats hunt. This individual was remarkably tolerant while I watched it patrol along the edge of the river. The feline walked through areas of deep snow, which made following it to get into a good position to take a photograph, a big challenge

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NATURE

LEFT: This sun pillar at Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone is an optical phenomenon that forms when light is reďŹ&#x201A;ected off ice crystals suspended in the atmosphere. When temperatures drop below -25Â°C at night, spray from the Lower Falls of the Yellowstone River freezes and hangs in the air. When the sun rises over the canyon rim, light hits the crystals and they twinkle in the air like fairy dust. From a particular viewpoint nearby, the beam always appears to strike the same tree that grows precariously on the cliff edge

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ABOVE: A red fox hunts in the Hayden Valley. This remote area has a lower coyote population than other places in the park and is an excellent location to spot red foxes in winter. It is possible to encounter as many as ﬁve or six individuals on the lookout for rodents that live in the labyrinth of tunnels beneath the deep snow LEFT: North America’s largest waterfowl species rests on the frozen edge of the Yellowstone River. By 1930, trumpeter swans had disappeared from 48 states due to habitat loss and hunting – Yellowstone was one of their few refuges. Today, the population on the continent has recovered to about 46,000 birds but fewer than 30 live in Yellowstone. They can be seen along the Madison River and Upper Yellowstone River

Nick Garbutt is an award-winning wildlife photographer and author with a passionate concern for biodiversity. He has been visiting Yellowstone National Park for many years to photograph the species that live there. Find out more at www.nickgarbutt.com Vol. 9 Issue 5

HISTORY

THE DEADLY STAMPEDE Scan this QR Code for the audio reader

In the 1890s, tens of thousands of people flocked to the Yukon in search of gold but were instead assailed by scurvy, bears and punishing cold. Felicity Aston relates how the Klondike gold rush turned into a grim battle for survival

Base camp ‘Stampeders’ at Sheep Creek in the Klondike. Journalists marvelled at the squalor of the mining settlements hastily erected by those dreaming of ﬁnding gold

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n the morning of Saturday 17 July 1897, the modest seaport of Seattle awoke to a sensation. The morning papers screamed the headline: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Gold! Gold! Gold! Gold! Sixty-Eight Rich Men on the Steamer Portland! Stacks of Yellow Metal!â&#x20AC;? The curious thronged through the streets towards Schwabacher Wharf where the steamship Portland had just arrived back from the Yukon. They cheered as grizzled men wearing new suits and long beards struggled to lift ashore leather satchels stuffed with gold dust and nuggets. Rumour spread through the crowd that the steamship carried â&#x20AC;&#x153;a ton of goldâ&#x20AC;? but they were wrong: the Portland carried nearer two tons. It had been nearly 50 years since the first great gold rush of northern California in 1849. Since then, persistent rumours of gold in the north had prompted a steady trickle of prospectors to set off in search of it. But the north was still a hostile wilderness of dense forest, short summers and brutal winters. There was no infrastructure and the Yukon river was the only thoroughfare. On 10 August 1896, veteran prospector George Carmack, his wife, Kate (a member of the Tagish First Nations people), her brother Skookum Jim, and his nephew, nicknamed Dawson Charlie, were on a fishing trip along the Klondike river, a remote tributary of the

Yukon, when they found a thick layer of gold in the bedrock of Rabbit Creek. Prospectors would assess the potential of a creek by scooping up dirt in a shallow pan before using running water to sift through. Gold, being 20 times heavier than water, would be left in the bottom of the pan. A good pan would yield around 10 centsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; worth of gold, but Carmack reported reaping more than four dollarsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; worth of gold flakes and fine nuggets from his very first pan in Rabbit Creek (which he promptly renamed Bonanza). When the Portland steamed into Seattle with its Yukon treasure almost a year later, the Klondike immediately became a household name around the world. One of historyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s greatest stampedes had begun.

QUITTING THE FORCE During the 18 months that followed, 100,000 people set out for the Klondike. It wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t just the poor and unemployed that rushed to the goldfields â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a quarter of Seattleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s police force are said to have resigned, the mayor stepped down in order to buy a steamboat to ferry prospectors, while a former governor abandoned his campaign to become a US senator in favour of venturing north. The majority of the stampeders were Americans but, of the significant minority that travelled from Europe, most were

The challenge wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t Ă&#x20AC;QGLQJ JROG EXW JHWWLQJ WR WKH JROGĂ&#x20AC;HOGV 100,000 GHSDUWHG EXW RQO\ HYHU DUULYHG British. Some of them, like brothers Arthur and Edward Lee, were fortune seekers but among the others whose stories Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve encountered there was also Flora Shaw, a correspondent for The Times sent to report on the stampede for a sceptical London audience, and the young aristocrat Frederick Wombwell, who was simply looking for adventure. Whatever the motivation, every stampeder discovered that the challenge was not finding gold but getting to the goldfields in the first place. Of the 100,000 that departed for the Yukon, only 40,000 ever arrived. Unwilling to delay their journey until spring, when the melting ice of the Yukon would allow passage upriver by steamboat from Alaska, most stampeders chose one of two overland routes that crossed the glaciated mountains lining the northern Pacific coast. The arduous 30-mile Chilkoot Trail climbed to a pass 1,080 metres high and included a section so steep that it

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HISTORY

LEFT: Prospectors ascend the Chilkoot Trail’s infamous ‘golden staircase’. As the saying went: “Whichever way you go, you’ll wish you would’ve gone the other” ABOVE: A man measures out gold dust to pay for his provisions in a dry goods store, 1899. Gold dust was considered legal tender in Dawson City Right: Women chop timber in Dawson City. As gold fever swept the Klondike, this frontier town’s population swelled from a few hundred to more than 20,000

became known as the ‘golden staircase’. White Pass was lower, at 870 metres but the trail longer and more rugged. “There ain’t no choice between the Chilkoot and the White Pass,” went one popular saying of the time. “One’s hell. The other’s damnation. Whichever way you go, you’ll wish you would’ve gone the other.” Very few stampeders knew anything about the wilderness they were entering. Temperatures fell below -30°C as winter advanced and the trail was buried in ever deeper snow. Would-be miners pitched flimsy camps wherever they could along the trails but as numbers swelled, so did competition for space. “There was a noticeable change in the faces of those who were less inured to hardships,” wrote American William Haskell of new arrivals on the Chilkoot Trail in 1898. “It is not pleasant

Our map shows the cruel 600-mile journey from the Alaskan coast to the Klondike 68

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7HPSHUDWXUHV IHOO EHORZ °C DV ZLQWHU DGYDQFHG DQG WKH WUDLO WR WKH .ORQGLNH·V JROGÀHOGV ZDV EXULHG LQ HYHU GHHSHU VQRZ to leave the steamer and to begin living in a tent pitched in nearly a foot of snow.” To add to the difficulty, the Canadian authorities, fearing mass starvation, introduced a law requiring all travellers to carry a ton of goods considered necessary to survive a winter in the wilderness. Those who couldn’t afford to pay for packers (people employed to carry loads along the trail) had to shuttle these goods back and forth themselves. Common loads weighed 40kg or more. Avalanches became a constant hazard, the most deadly occurring on Palm Sunday in April 1898. “In all there were over 50 dead bodies taken out, 100 being the number stated by some,” wrote a traumatised Edward Lee. “The snow slide had come down from some high steep mountains on the right-hand side of the trail and overwhelmed everything.” Once across the mountains, the ordeal wasn’t over. The stampeders now had to traverse a series of long lakes until they reached the headwaters of the Yukon. From there it was still a 500-mile journey downstream to the goldfields. Vast camps grew on the shores of lakes Bennett and Lindeman as a backlog of prospectors

settled in to wait for the spring melt. The surrounding forests were razed for timber to build rudimentary huts in the camps and to provide firewood, as well as to build boats for the onward journey. Some eager prospectors couldn’t bear to wait and judged the ice thick enough to take their weight. “Men took chances that in ordinary circumstances they would not risk,” explained Cornish émigré William Olive. “But the magic word ‘gold’ lured them on to brave both danger and destruction.”

CASES OF COLD FEET When the ice finally thawed, 8,000 craft set off across the lakes in May alone. Ahead were long sections of complicated rapids that were as deadly as the menacing isolation of the surrounding forest. Drownings, starvation, disease, scurvy, bear attacks and madness each claimed their victims, all accompanied by unbearable clouds of mosquitoes. “Many discouraged ones are selling their outfits and leaving the country,” wrote a restless Frederick Wombwell at the end of May 1898. “They hear dreadful tales of the horrors awaiting them down the Yukon, so they get ‘cold feet’, sell their outfits for practically

Ghosts of the gold rush The Klondike still bears the scars of the ‘yellow metal’ craze, says Felicity Aston

nothing, and out they go.” If the beleaguered stampeders dreamed of salvation when they eventually reached Dawson City, they were to be disappointed. “The town of Dawson, itself on a swamp, is hideous,” ranted Flora Shaw on her arrival. “All the refuse of a thousand tents flung out of doors… you feel that you are breathing poison all the time that you walk.” The boomtown that had emerged at the muddy confluence of the Klondike and Yukon rivers came into its own during the summer of 1898. What had been a prospectors’ camp of a few hundred the previous year had now mushroomed into a population of 20,000 and was still growing. Every day hundreds more arrived. They found a wildly exuberant, vice-fuelled but squalid frontier town, where the currency was gold dust and the prices higher than in any European capital. Life in the mining camps that littered the surrounding creeks was as meagre as it had been on the trail. British journalist Julius Price couldn’t believe what he saw: “One wondered at the strange fascination of gold that it could reconcile a man, and, for that matter, his wife also, to come and eke out a miserable existence in such an awful place as this, on the mere chance of perhaps someday satisfying their avaricious desires, and also so far make them forget their natural instincts as to bring children with them to share their awful hardships.” Dawson was the end of the road for many. Of the tens of thousands that arrived, just

4,000 ever went looking for gold. No more than a few hundred got rich. Edward Lee’s diary stops before he reaches Dawson but years later his family discovered $12,708.49 in gold dust deposited by his brother Arthur. Flora Shaw would spend less than six months in the Yukon but her reports led to major improvements in the tax laws on gold mining. Frederick Wombwell found gold but was generally an unsuccessful miner. The last entry in his diary reads: “We did not make much money, but by the same token we had a wonderful time without losing any.” In August 1899, barely two years after the Portland had arrived in Seattle with the treasure that sparked the stampede, news reached Dawson that a large gold strike had been found at the mouth of the Yukon river, in Nome, Alaska. Within a week nearly 10,000 had abandoned Dawson. The Klondike gold rush was over. Very few miners ever struck it rich but cities like Seattle, who served the stampeders, made their fortunes. The legacy of the Klondike gold rush is not in bullion but in opening up the far north, in the nascent Canada establishing a sense of national identity, and in the enduring (if falsely romantic) ideal of frontier life in the northern wilderness. ß

Felicity Aston MBE is an expedition leader and former Antarctic scientist. In 2012 she became the first woman to ski alone across Antarctica

High and dry: A boat abandoned by gold hunters in the Klondike

While filming a series on the Klondike gold rush for BBC Two (see below for details), I followed in the footsteps of the thousands of stampeders who undertook the odyssey from the Alaskan coast to the goldfields of the Yukon. Standing on the summit of the Chilkoot Trail – the cruellest part of that desperate journey – it is impossible not to sense ghosts. Surrounded by thick fog and buffeted by strong winds in the heart of the Klondike Gold Rush International Historic Park, a second glance at the dark shapes on the snow reveal that these are not rocks, but remnants of the stampede. Rusty tin cans, wooden cases, even shovels and leather shoes, lie abandoned. More than a century later, the hillsides around the lakes Bennett and Lindeman still bear the scars of the mass deforestation caused by the stampeders’ need for lumber. We found material elsewhere for our home-made wooden boat that we rowed 400 miles down the Yukon river to Dawson City. The town works hard to recall its riotous past but today there are only 1,000 inhabitants and the hordes that arrive every morning are tourists rather than fortune-seekers. Venturing into the creeks surrounding Dawson, it is astonishing to see the volume of earth that has been turned over in the continuing search for gold. The nuggets are long gone but anyone can still dip a pan into the Klondike and find a few flakes. Many regard the story of the gold rush as a tale of greed but I believe this is instead a story of hope. People will go to great lengths to protect their family and provide them with a future. That is a motivation I think we can all understand.

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SCIENCE

THE. SMARTEST TRUCK. ON THE PLANET. This technology-laden camper van can travel. almost anywhere on Earth â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and it was designed. for a seven-year-old girl. WORDS BY JV CHAMARY

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SCIENCE

A HIGH-TECH HOME FROM HOME . Detailing the technology and design that makes KiraVan such a unique vehicle... NAVIGATION

COMPUTERS

SENSORS

COMMUNICATIONS

COCKPIT

Receivers for global navigation satellite systems keep track of the KiraVan. But if satellite signals aren’t detected, fibre-optic gyroscopes and precise accelerometers record the truck’s position, direction and velocity to continue mapping its location.

There is an office space with two networked computers, Wi-Fi for portable devices and access to the KiraVan’s computer systems. A 4K monitor can act as a graphics terminal to view maps or edit video, while a media library and satellite TV offer entertainment.

Telescopic masts with pneumatic servos control the height of external sensors, which include long-range optics such as infrared and night-vision cameras. The tallest mast can raise those electro-optical systems to 17m above ground level.

Satellite communication provides wireless broadband at up to 10Mbps download and 5Mbps upload speeds, working in most areas globally. When satcom services aren’t available, the KiraVan uses an antenna for line-of-sight propagation via VHF or UHF radio signals.

Glass cockpits developed for aircraft can now be found in land vehicles such as the Tesla Model S. The KiraVan’s cockpit system is far more sophisticated than a passenger dashboard, with control and instrument panels across no fewer than 11 displays, including six touchscreens.

TRAILER The trailer shares power and other systems while attached to the tractor, but can also operate as an independent base station. It’s made from composite materials such as aramid and fibreglass, and its walls offer radio-frequency shielding and lightning protection. The main sleeping loft is on a balcony, below a pop-up ‘penthouse’ tent. The kitchen and bathroom areas are expandable, increasing the internal volume by 50 per cent.

ENVIRONMENT Whether it’s -35ºC or 55ºC outside, a heating, ventilation and air-con system keeps everything comfortable.

KIRABIKE

WHEELS

ENGINES S

TRACTOR R

SUSPENSION

The KiraBike is mounted on an elevator at the trailer’s rear. This motorcycle serves as a ‘dinghy’ for short trips such as grocery shopping, and features a turbo-diesel engine with 100mpg fuel economy. It can use VHF and UHF radio for communication and includes a rugged tablet for internet access.

Each Kevlar-reinforced Michelin tyre is 116cm (46in) wide and weighs 135kg. Strong yet light alloy rims allow the wheels to run flat, while a self-inflation system can refill tyres in under five minutes. Tyre chains can be deployed for traction on slippery surfaces like ice, even while the vehicle is in motion.

A six-cylinder, 260bhp turbo-diesel engine powers the tractor, while 650-litre tanks supply it with enough fuel for a 3,200km driving range. In the trailer, a quiet 25kW diesel generator transfers mechanical energy to five alternators to create electric current, helped by a solar battery charging system.

The tractor is a Mercedes-Benz ‘UniMog’ truck with a stretched and strengthened chassis. Four-wheel drive provides off-road power and a top speed of 112km/h (70mph) while on the road. A hydrostatic system can transfer power to the rear axle for six-wheel drive up to 40km/h (25mph).

Instead of conventional metal springs or shock absorbers, the KiraVan uses a nitrogen-over-oil system controlled by the truck’s computers. As in many off-road vehicles, the suspension is attached to portal axles (the tube is above the centre of the wheel hub) for high ground clearance and added torque.

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touchscreen cockpit, fibreoptic gyroscopes, night vision cameras... the KiraVan Expedition System has it all. This super-smart truck is also the ultimate all-terrain vehicle: a 4x4 that can handle sand or snow, climb hills, cross streams and explore the world’s most remote regions. Built for endurance over long distances, the truck can carry enough supplies to sustain a threeperson crew for three weeks. If satellite communication isn’t available, it can navigate via highfrequency radio signals. A 700-litre tank can be topped up with water passed through a silver-lined antimicrobial, ultraviolet filtration system, while salt water is first desalinated by reverse-osmosis. The high-tech van is the brainchild of inventor Bran Ferren, who named it after his daughter, Kira. In 2010, Ferren finished converting a Mercedes-Benz UniMog truck into a ‘MaxiMog’ with extras like cameras and videoconferencing. His daughter was born while he was planning the MaxiMog’s successor, which Ferren says inspired him to design a more child-friendly vehicle. “Upon Kira’s arrival,” he says, “the notion was, well, something that’s better suited to a family would be appropriate.” Everything is packed into a modified tractor and trailer that’s

TOP: The KiraVan can happily traverse just about any terrain our planet can throw at it ABOVE: The operator’s console houses communications equipment, with a joystick and display for operating RC vehicles LEFT: The galley has all the appliances you need to cook in the wild, and was designed with input from a chef – Kira’s mother

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SCIENCE

16m long and weighs up to 23.5 tonnes (limited to 19 tonnes offroad). It has areas for Kira to work and play, including a ‘penthouse’ in the trailer. Ferren’s daughter is closely involved in the van’s design and “constantly has input”, but the KiraVan isn’t just for family outings. It can be used for all sorts of expeditions for a variety of purposes, from geology and archaeology to filmmaking. Sensors mounted on telescopic masts can search for dig sites, for example, or capture images for a highresolution gigabit panorama. “It’s designed to support a very flexible range of activities,” says Ferren, who believes in testing tech himself. “If you’re going to actually 74

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design, engineer and build things, you need to have your own firsthand experience with them.” Ferren certainly has the experience. After producing special effects for Hollywood, which earned him an Oscar nomination, he became head of Walt Disney Imagineering, the R&D department that builds theme park rides. He is now co-founder and chief creative officer of Applied Minds, an R&D firm based in Burbank, California.

APPLIED TECHNOLOGY Ferren’s vision for KiraVan is implemented by a team of 30-40 employees, which can rise to 100 when specific skills (such as welding) are needed to bring hardware

together. Anticipating that certain things, such as computer software, will no longer be state-of-the-art by the time Kira is old enough to drive, Ferren has made the van modular so it’s easy to upgrade. If a component is likely to go obsolete sooner rather than later, it’s designed in such a way that it’s straightforward to swap out. Applied Minds is also using the KiraVan as a platform for research projects. Testing technologies might mean adapting sports car parts or creating something new. “The vast majority of the time, standard technology won’t do,” Ferren explains. “There are dozens and dozens of unique things on the vehicle, and each of them presented a creative, technical and

LEFT: In the cockpit, switches and screens over the windscreen control external sensors and lights, while the central console is for driving ABOVE: This is Bran Ferren’s sleeping area. The ladder leads to his daughter’s bedroom above RIGHT: The KiraVan has many attributes and abilities. Stealth, though, isn’t really one of them BELOW: Bran Ferren developed the vehicle for his young daughter

often aesthetic challenge.” One such challenge is balancing on-road and off-road performance, as there’s a trade-off between driving on highways, when a low centre of gravity helps, and handling cky terrain terrain, which requires high rocky ound clearance. Ferren also gro points out that, like all modes the van needs of transport, p cope to c p with turbulence. “It’ss more complicated p dessigning g g a vehicle like plane or a thiss than a p at,” he says. boa y Ferren compares F p his creation c ea o to o other luxuryy ano hicle: veh ce a cht. yac

Both are custom creations that are expensive to make because they can’t benefit from the economies of scale afforded by mass production. The KiraVan has cost millions to develop, but it’s impossible to put an exact figure on how much much, partly because the tech that A b Applied Minds develops p is licensed ce sed to o the e firm m’s clients,, which c subsidises subs d ses the e Fe erren family’s fa y personal c mper ca p van.. Applied Minds iis App preparing g to testt the KiraVan a a in th he extrem e e e heat of D o Death Va Valley,

and Ferren estimates that the truck is 80 per cent complete and should be ready to roll in about a year’s time. So once it’s finished, where does Kira want to explore first? “It’s not like she wakes up in the morning and says, ‘We need to go to the Grand Canyon’!” says Ferren. But he adds that his own parents were artists with wanderlust. “That desire to travel and see the world and experience other cultures definitely transferred to me, and hopefully it will to her as well.” ß

JV Chamary is a freelance science and technology writer based in Bristol Vol. 9 Issue 5

SCIENCE

HO W DO W E K NO W... HOW THE SOL A R SYS T EM FORMED?

PERPLEXED BY PLANETS

While we now know that the Sun is at the centre of the Solar System, scientists still aren’t entirely sure how we and our planetary neighbours formed in the ﬁrst place 76

Vol. 9 Issue 5

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H OW D O W E K N OW. . .

HOW OU R SO LAR SYSTE M FO R M E D? 'SPN PVS QSJNF QPTJUJPO PO UIF UIJSE QMBOFU PVU GSPN UIF 4VO XF SF àOBMMZ understanding how our solar neighbourhood came to be WORDS BY COLIN STUART

sking questions about where we come from is one of the traits that marks us out as distinctly human. Yet this inquisitive streak hasn’t always led us in the right direction, particularly when we think we are more important than we ultimately are. The story of our quest to discover how our Solar System formed is littered with false starts, and one that astronomers are still refining. The world’s greatest thinkers originally had the Earth at the centre of creation, with the Sun, Moon, planets and stars circling around us. It’s an idea that lasted for more than 1,000 years, dating back to the days of Aristotle and Ancient Greece. It wasn’t until the Polish astronomer and mathematician Nicolaus Copernicus challenged this idea in the 16th Century that the tide of opinion started to shift. He said that the planets – including Earth – orbit around the central Sun. Copernicus was so fearful of the inevitable backlash from religious quarters that he delayed publication of his work until after his death. Legend has it that he only saw a copy on his deathbed.

sailing, of course. Galileo famously had his own run-ins with the Church, and he was only officially pardoned in 1992. But as far as the science was concerned, the clincher came when he observed the planet Venus waxing and waning through phases, much like the Moon. This isn’t possible if both Venus and the Sun orbit around the Earth – only if both planets circle a central source of illumination. So we took our place as just another one of the Sun’s family of planets. Attention then

naturally turned to how such a system could come about. In the 1630s, the French philosopher René Descartes was one of the first to speculate. His starting point was the idea that nothing in nature could ever be empty. So if a particle in space moved position, another must move in to fill the gap, creating a series of ‘vortices’. Descartes believed that the planets were formed when material caught up in these swirling circles somehow condensed. It would take Sir

PHOTO: GETTYX2

GALILEO! GALILEO! It would take many decades for experimental evidence to confirm that we do indeed live in a ‘solar system’. It was mostly the work of the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei in the early 1600s that cemented the idea. It wasn’t all plain

Galileo Galilei, as depicted in this painting by Felix Parra, explaining his astronomical theories to a friar at Padua University

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SCIENCE

HO W DO W E K NOW... HOW THE SOL A R SYS T EM FORMED? RIGHT: Isaac Newton made the first reflecting telescope, which used a concave mirror to gather light. This replica of his design was made in the 1920s

Isaac Newton and his famous work on gravity to establish why the planets orbit the Sun. But that still didn’t explain where the Sun and its planets came from.

PICK YOUR THEORY By the mid-1700s, French mathematician Georges-Louis Leclerc was suggesting that the planets formed when a comet struck the Sun, sending vast amounts of material surging outwards. Over time, he said, gravity collected this material together to form orbiting worlds. By the end of the century, Leclerc’s compatriot Pierre-Simon Laplace had shown this to be impossible – any ejected material would have been pulled back in by the Sun’s gravity. Laplace himself then started to formulate an alternative picture. The invention of the telescope had allowed astronomers to discover a series of fuzzy blobs scattered around the night sky. They called them ‘nebulae’, which is the Latin for ‘clouds’. Laplace suggested that the Sun had formed from such a cloud. As the cloud collapsed under gravity it spun faster and faster, much like an ice skater

drawing in their arms. According to Laplace, material would have been thrown off the Sun as its rotation quickened, creating a flat disc surrounding the star. The planets were then formed when gravity gathered this material together. Yet by the turn of the 20th Century, Laplace’s idea had all but been abandoned. The main problem was that if this picture was correct, the Sun should be spinning a lot more rapidly than it is, and the planets should be revolving at a more sedate pace. Unable to reconcile this issue, astronomers such as Sir James Jeans turned to an alternative explanation. In 1917, Jeans proposed that another star was involved in the Solar System’s formation. As this intruding star buzzed past the Sun, its strong gravity would have torn off a significant amount of stellar material. That, said Jeans, provided the building blocks necessary to form the planets. But his idea didn’t last long. By 1929, it had been shown that such a close encounter was extremely unlikely due to the vastness of space. What’s more, even if it did occur, the Sun would have reabsorbed much of the lost material.

GLOSSARY

EXOPLANET Any planet which orbits a star other than our Sun. The first exoplanet orbiting a Sun-like star was found in 1995.

MIGRATION The idea that the orbits of planets in a solar system can shift considerably over time. It is thought that Jupiter migrated inwards in our Solar System.

NEBULA A large cloud of gas and dust in interstellar space. Some nebulae can be thought of as star factories. Over many millions of years, gravity slowly collapses the cloud until the temperature and pressure is sufficient to ignite a new group of stars.

PROPLYD

A young star is surrounded by a formation of dust and gas known as a ‘protoplanetary disc’, in which new planets are forming 78

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VORTEX A whirling mass of fluid or air, especially a whirlpool or whirlwind. Descartes believed a similar mechanism was responsible for why the planets orbit the Sun.

PHOTOS: GETTY, ESO

An abbreviation of ‘protoplanetary disc’. These are dark, flat rings around newly forming stars that astronomers believe will end up as planets.

TIMELINE: THE SOLAR SYSTEM Knowledge of our cosmic neighbourhood has come a long way since scientists first suggested that we may not be centre of the Universe

1543 1543

NICOLAUS COPERNICUS (1473-1543)

Copernicus publishes De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On The Revolutions Of The Heavenly Spheres) setting out his ideas of heliocentrism. It is one of the most important books ever written.

Born in Poland, Copernicus worked in many areas of intellectual thought from economics and politics to medicine, but is most noted for his work on the orbits of the planets.

GALILEO GALILEI (1564-1642) The grandfather of modern astronomy, Galileo was the ﬁrst person to point the telescope towards the night sky in a meaningful way, revolutionising our ideas about our place in space.

1796 PIERRE-SIMON LAPLACE (1749-1827)

1936 The electrically neutral component of the weak force is discovered at CERN’s Gargamelle experiment, CERN. This brings together the electromagnetic and strong forces – the core of the Standard Model.

Not content with valuable work on star formation, this inﬂuential French scientist was one of the ﬁrst to imagine the concept of a black hole – a star with strong enough gravity to prevent anything escaping.

1995 SIR JAMES JEANS (1877-1946)

1995 Astronomers discover the ﬁrst planet orbiting another star like our Sun, ushering in the era of exoplanet astronomy which has seen over 3,000 new worlds discovered.

PHOTOS: GETTY X4, CERN X2, ALAMY, ISTOCK, NASA X2

British astronomer James Jeans gave his name to the ‘Jeans mass’. If a nebula reaches this critical point it will undergo irreversible gravitational contraction and trigger star formation.

2005 2005

The ﬁrst incarnation of the Nice model is published, the most comprehensive picture to date of how our Solar System came to be. It utilises the idea of planetary migration.

MIKE BROWN (1965-)

2014

As the self-styled ‘Pluto Killer’, Brown has been one of the most proliﬁc discoverers of objects located beyond the orbit of Neptune. He is instrumental in the current hunt for Planet Nine.

The ﬁrst signs begin to emerge that there may be a ninth planet in our Solar System. Small, distant objects are discovered to have very similar objects – something unlikely to be down to chance.

2014

Vol. 9 Issue 5

SCIENCE

HO W DO W E K NO W... HOW THE SOL A R SYS T EM FORMED?

Astronoomer FFredd Hoyle thhought gh that h the h Sun couuld once have had a companion c p i star – but thhis has been disprovvedd

T H E K E Y DI S C O V E R Y

With no clear frontrunner, new theories continued to emerge as the decades rolled on. In the 1940s, British astronomer Fred Hoyle proposed that the Sun once had a much larger companion star which had exploded as a supernova. Some of the resulting shrapnel was snared by the Sun’s gravity, later coming together to form the planets. But that didn’t hold water either, partly because it struggled to explain the low masses of Mercury and Mars. It wasn’t until the 1970s that things started to make more sense, when astronomers returned to Laplace’s nebula theory. The main problem with this theory – that the observed rotation of the Sun was slower than expected – could be eliminated if drag caused by dust grains in the surrounding cloud had helped put the brakes on. This idea was then buoyed significantly in the early 1980s when astronomers spotted dusty, flat discs of material located around young stars, called protoplanetary discs or ‘proplyds’. This effectively caught planet formation in the act elsewhere in space.

Scientists: Nicolaus Copernicus Date: 1543 Discovery: Earth and the planets revolve around the Sun It is hard to see how astronomers could have formed their current picture of how our Solar System came to be if we still thought everything orbited the Earth. Copernicus’s breakthrough is rightly lauded as one of the greatest scientific revolutions in history. And yet it wasn’t inspired by astronomical observation, but by mathematical elegance. The ancient idea of geocentrism – that everything in the Universe orbited the Earth in perfect circles – ran into a problem when observing the night sky. Some of the planets appeared to double back on themselves – hardly the behaviour of worlds circling the Earth. So the Ancient Greek polymath Ptolemy introduced ‘epicycles’ which saw the planets move in smaller circles, which in turn orbited around the Earth. But this was a big leap, introduced to force our need to have the Earth at the centre to fit with what we saw in the night sky. Copernicus’s genius was to realise that switching to having the Sun in the centre would do away with the need for epicycles. Under his heliocentric model, Mars appears to double back on itself because the Earth overtakes it in its orbit around the Sun.

TOP LEFT: A chart of the Solar System, as described by Nicolaus Copernicus, with the central Sun BOTTOM LEFT: Warsaw’s Nicolaus Copernicus Monument has experienced notable history. After 1944’s Warsaw Uprising, the Nazis removed it to melt it down, but had to retreat before the atrocity was committed 80

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Observing other solar systems is now key to understanding how ours formed. But up until the mid-1990s no one had ever spotted a planet orbiting another star like the Sun. That changed in 1995 with the discovery of a world encircling the star 51 Pegasi. In the last two decades, astronomers have uncovered more than 3,000 planets in other solar systems – the so-called ‘exoplanets’. But right from the get-go it was clear that these alien neighbourhoods weren’t all perfect mirror images of our own. For example, 51 Pegasi’s planet, which has since been named Dimidium, takes just over four days to orbit 51 Pegasi. It is nearly eight times closer to its star than Mercury is to the Sun. What’s more, Dimidium is around half the mass of Jupiter, making it a much bigger planet than Mercury. Under the simple picture of planets

PHOTOS: GETTY X3

ALIEN WORLDS

Despite their distance from Earth, stars like 51 Pegasi are helping us understand more about our own Solar System

forming from the debris of a newborn star, it is incredibly difficult to get such a giant world forming in such close proximity to its host. A more viable explanation is that the planet formed much further away from the star and then migrated inwards over time. Here was compelling evidence that planetary orbits were not fixed, but could wander significantly. Bolstered by these discoveries, astronomers started to look at our own Solar System with fresh eyes. In 2005, a decade after the discovery of Dimidium, a group of astronomers proposed the Nice model (named after the city in France where it was first formulated). The crux of this idea is that the giant planets of our Solar System – Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune – started off much closer together. Over time, Jupiter moved inwards towards the Sun as the other three planets moved outwards. In some scenarios, Uranus and Neptune even swap order. The movement of Jupiter towards the Sun would have scattered many smaller bodies, much like a dog running through a crowd of pigeons. Many of these runaways would have ended up in the

inner Solar System, creating a sharp peak in the number of meteors raining down on the rocky planets and their moons. And there is indeed evidence of a surge in impact activity on the Moon between 3.8 and 4.1 billion years ago (any evidence of impacts on the Earth would have eroded away long ago). The outward movement of Neptune would also have sent smaller bodies running further from the Sun, helping to explain the Kuiper Belt and Scattered Disc – two reservoirs of smaller objects in the outer reaches of the Solar System.

A HIDDEN PLANET? However, while it was a major step forward, this original Nice model was far from perfect. When using a computer simulation to recreate the gravitational interactions between the four giant planets, astronomers only ended up with a Solar System that looked like ours around 3 per cent of the time. But with one small modification they could boost this to 23 per cent. The modification? The addition of a fifth giant planet. Yet we’ve only ever seen four giant worlds. So if we’re to take this explanation

PHOTOS: ESO, SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

Planet Nine is a huge planet that could be lurking on the outskirts of our Solar System

seriously we need to be able to say what happened to this other planet. It could well have been ejected from the Solar System entirely during the migration of its neighbours – an orphan planet left to wander the black void of space. Astronomers have already found some examples of these so-called ‘rogue planets’, so the idea is far from ludicrous. But there is an alternative, more tantalising explanation: this fifth giant planet is still right here in our own Solar System, waiting for us to find it. The buzz around this possible world, dubbed ‘Planet Nine’, has been one of the most exciting astronomical developments of recent years. Back in 2014, a team of astronomers noticed that several small objects orbiting the Sun out beyond Neptune had very similar orbits. Then in January 2016 it was announced that more objects had been found behaving in the same way. The likelihood of such shared characteristics being down to chance has been calculated at just 0.007 per cent. The leading explanation is that there is an extra planet, at least 10 times more massive than the Earth, skulking in the dark and lining the small objects up by tugging on them with its gravity. If Planet Nine does indeed exist, the reason it has escaped our notice so far is its sheer distance from the Sun. Its orbit carries it an estimated 1,200 times further from the Sun than the Earth, meaning it’s likely to appear at least 600 times fainter than the dwarf planet Pluto. Unless you knew exactly where to look, it would be easily missed. A dedicated search is now underway to hunt it down. These latest astronomical adventures show us that the story of our Solar System’s formation is still very much a work in progress. We may have come a long way since the days of Ancient Greece, but there are still many chapters left to write. ß

Colin Stuart (@skyponderer) is an astronomy writer and author of The Geek Guide to Life Vol. 9 Issue 5

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YOUR QUESTI0NS ANSWERED

Heath expert, science writer

editorial-bbcearth@regentmedia.sg

BY OUR EXPERT PANEL

Fire retardant is dropped near Clearlake, California, during the wildﬁres of August 2015

PHOTO: GETTY

HOW EFFECTIVE ARE PLANES IN FIGHTING WILDFIRES? The US Forest Service has commercial contracts for a fleet of 300 helicopters and more than 50 fixed-wing aeroplanes, which dump 40 million litres of fire-retardant sludge onto forest fires each year. But surprisingly there isn’t very good evidence that it works. A 2011 study found no correlation between the use of fire retardant and firefighting success rates. Once a wildfire is raging, airdrops seem to be more about public relations than effective firefighting. LV

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& QA CAN A COMPUTER GENERATE A TRULY RANDOM NUMBER?

DOES SUCKING YOUR THUMB REALLY RUIN YOUR TEETH? Sucking a thumb or dummy up to the age of two is fine, but several studies have shown that beyond that, there is a risk that the front teeth can be pushed outward, or the side teeth shifted so that the top and bottom sets don’t meet. A 2001 study by the American Dental Association found that about 20 per cent of children who suck their thumb beyond the age of four have a misaligned bite. LV

Computers are often required to produce random numbers as they’re useful for a host of tasks, from taking random samples of data to simulating the formation of galaxies. But computers produce these numbers using mathematical formulas, which means they aren’t truly random. This isn’t as bad as it seems, as true randomness is prone to producing bizarre patterns that can fool researchers into seeing effects that don’t exist. To avoid this, the so-called pseudo-random number generator (PRNGs) formulas used in computers undergo statistical tests to keep the risk of long ‘runs’ below a certain threshold. Even so, some computergenerated random numbers have still caused problems. Subtle patterns in the output of the so-called RANDU generator created by IBM in the 1960s is suspected to have undermined the reliability of many research projects over the years. RM

The Dark Energy Camera in Chile helps scientists study the expansion of space 84

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During the 1990s, astronomers measuring the rate at which the Universe is expanding made a shock discovery: it’s actually accelerating, as if the whole cosmos is being propelled by some invisible source of energy. This socalled dark energy and its origin is one of the deepest mysteries in science. Various explanations have been put forward, with arguably the simplest being that it’s a manifestation of so-called quantum vacuum processes. According to the laws of the subatomic world, there is always some uncertainty about the amount of energy filling even empty space. This vacuum fluctuation energy has been detected in the lab, and theorists have shown it can have the ‘anti-gravitational’ effects of dark matter. So far, however, they have struggled to produce a detailed theory of its cosmic effects. This has led to suggestions that dark energy may simply be a force-field left over from the Big Bang. Sometimes called quintessence, it’s capable of getting stronger over time, but again details remain elusive. There have even been claims that dark energy is leaking out from hidden extra dimensions of space that failed to expand following the Big Bang. Until there’s a breakthrough in the underlying theory, however, all this is little more than speculation. RM

PHOTOS: GETTY X2, SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

WHAT IS DARK ENERGY?

QUESTION OF THE MONTH

WHY DIDN’T DINOSAURS EVOLVE TO BE MORE INTELLIGENT? They did! Dinosaurs evolved into modern birds and some of them are extremely intelligent. In Japan, there are crows that have learnt to use the traffic to crack the shells of nuts that they drop – and they will wait for the lights to turn red, so they can safely retrieve them. One reason that birds still aren’t as intelligent as humans is that a heavy, energy-hungry brain doesn’t mix well with birds’ main adaptive advantage – flying. It’s important to realise that intelligence isn’t the goal of evolution, nor is it always the best adaptation to the environment. The enormous sauropod dinosaurs lasted on the planet for 100 million years, despite their tiny brains. We’ve had ‘intelligence’ for just a few million years, so it’s too early to say whether it is a better strategy. LV

Archaeopteryx was an animal that shared features of both dinosaurs and modern birds

THE THOUGHT EXPERIMENT

PHOTOS: GETTY ILLUSTRATIONS: RAJA LOCKEY

HOW COULD I SURVIVE BEING WASHED UP ON A DESERT ISLAND?

1. WATER

2. FOOD

3. SHELTER

You can only survive three days without water. Scavenge the beach for containers and set each one in the sand, at the bottom of a wide, shallow pit. Line the sides with palm leaves, arranged so that rain drips into the bottles. While you wait for rain, explore the island to look for streams.

Coconuts are a great food source. Wedge one on the ground, with the pointed end facing upwards. Find the largest rock you can lift and drop it onto the coconut to break the husk ﬁbres apart. One survivor of the 2004 tsunami ate nothing but coconuts for 25 days before being rescued. So your chances are good!

Unless you can sleep, you will lose the ability to concentrate, plan and stay motivated after just one or two nights. A bundle of small branches spread on the ground and covered with palm leaves is still better than sleeping directly on the sand. After that, build a low bed frame by tying together saplings. Vol. 9 Issue 5

& QA WHY DO WAGON WHEELS SOMETIMES SEEM TO MOVE SLOWLY IN OLD FILMS?

The percentage of amphibian species at risk of extinction. Threats are habitat loss, pollution, disease and climate change.

24,000

The number of years ago that humans first reached North America – 10,000 years earlier than previously thought.

Most fish have an immune system similar to other animals with backbones. They produce antibodies that detect and bind to substances invading the body, like viruses and bacteria, and instruct white blood cells to destroy them. Just like in humans, it’s possible to vaccinate a fish against future infections by exposing them to a less virulent strain of a disease-causing microbe. Fish also cover themselves in a layer of sticky mucus that traps microbes and contains antimicrobial chemicals. The more stressed a fish gets, the more infection-fighting goo it makes. HS

The percentage of fish that was mislabelled in Los Angeles sushi restaurants, according to DNA tests.

T O P 10

10 OLDEST PLANTS ON THE PLANET*

1. Seagrass colony (Posidonia oceanica) 100,000 years old Balearic Islands, Spain

2. ‘Pando’ Quaking aspen colony 80,000 years old Fishlake National Forest, Utah

3. ‘Jurupa Oak’ Palmer’s oak colony 13,000 years old Jurupa Mountains, California

*Including clonal colonies with interconnected root systems, but discounting plants without reliably determined ages 86

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4. Mojave yucca 12,000 years old Mojave Desert, California

5. Huon pine colony 10,500 years old Mount Reed, Tasmania

PHOTOS: GETTY X4

DO FISH HAVE AN IMMUNE SYSTEM?

Films are shot as a series of individual frames taken at around 24 per second. If the wagon wheel is rotating at precisely the right rate, then a spoke in one frame will have been taken up by another spoke in the next frame, creating the impression the wheel is stationary. If they’re slightly out of sync, however, the wheels will appear to move in slow motion. RM

IN NUMBERS

DO ALL PLANETS HAVE MAGNETIC FIELDS?

ILLUSTRATIONS: RAJA LOCKEY

HOW MUCH SLEEP DO WE REALLY NEED?

No, not all planets have magnetic fields. The four gas giants have extremely strong magnetic fields, Earth has a moderately strong magnetic field, Mercury has an extremely weak field, but Venus and Mars have almost no measurable fields. Planetary magnetic fields are formed by the interaction between the convection of interior conducting material (molten rock and metal) and the planet’s own rotation. Mercury’s field is weak because it rotates so slowly. Venus doesn’t have an appreciable field because there appears to be little convection in its molten interior. Mars doesn’t have an appreciable field – although it did in the past – because its interior has solidified. AGu

6. ‘Old Tjikko’ Norway spruce 9,550 years old Fulufjället Mountains, Sweden

7. ‘Old Rasmus’ Norway spruce 9,500 years old Härjedalen, Sweden

8. Antarctic moss 5,500 years old Elephant Island, Antarctica

The cliché is that we need eight hours a night, but the actual answer to this question is more complicated. Our sleep requirements change throughout life. Guidelines proposed by the National Sleep Foundation in 2015 recommended that newborns have 14 to 17 hours per night, teenagers have 8 to 10 hours, and adults have 7 to 9 hours. These guidelines focus largely on ‘average’ requirements, but individuals can differ greatly from one another. For example, it may be appropriate for certain teenagers to have as few as 7 hours per night, or as many as 11. If you’re not functioning your best, it’s worth considering whether you’re getting enough sleep. AGr

9. Bristlecone pine 5,066 years old White Mountains, California

10. ‘Methuselah’ Bristlecone pine 4,848 years old White Mountains, California

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& QA

DO DOGS HAVE VISUAL DREAMS? Yes. In 2001, researchers at MIT monitored brain activity in rats as they solved a maze. They found that the animals showed the same brain activity patterns during sleep. The match was so close that the researchers could tell which part of the maze the rat was dreaming about. Cats and mice show similar results, so it is likely that visual dreams are common to all mammals, including dogs. LV

WHY IS THE MOON COLOURLESS?

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HOW DO SQUID SURVIVE THE EXTREME PRESSURES OF DEEP WATER? A big challenge facing squid in the deep sea is keeping their cells working. Under high pressure, important molecules like proteins in cell membranes and enzymes become squashed and bent out of shape and either work more slowly or not at all. One way squid counteract this is by loading their bodies with trimethylamine oxide or TMAO, which helps large molecules keep their shape. For many deep sea animals, the deeper they live the more TMAO they have in their bodies. TMAO also gives rise to the distinctive fishy smell of many sea creatures – the deeper the species lives, the more it smells. HS

PHOTOS: GETTY X3 ILLUSTRATIONS: RAJA LOCKEY

Despite appearances, the Moon is not entirely devoid of colour. Apollo astronauts described its colour as ‘brownish’. Careful study shows that the dark areas, or ‘maria’, display hints of blue or brown while the highland areas have faint traces of yellow, pink and pale blue. These differences are mainly due to varying amounts of metals such as iron or titanium in the surface minerals. Unfortunately, the human eye isn’t sensitive enough to pick out these slight differences in colour from a distance. However, much of the lunar surface contains minerals that are naturally grey and these dominate the colour we perceive from Earth. AGu

It was at that point Dave wished heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d taken up a nice desk job instead

WHY DO WE SHRINK AS WE AGE? The cartilage pads between the joints in your legs and spine gradually wear away as you get older, and osteoporosis can cause the vertebrae themselves to shrink slightly. You also lose muscle as you age and all of these factors mean your skeleton slumps down a little more. Between the age of 30 and 70, this adds up to about 3cm height loss for men and 5cm for women, increasing to 5cm and 8cm by age 80. LV

IS THERE ACID SNOW (LIKE ACID RAIN)? Acid snow is produced in exactly the same way as acid rain. It all starts when sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides are emitted into the atmosphere, typically by power stations burning fossil fuels. Inside clouds, these molecules react with tiny droplets of water to form sulphuric and nitric acids. The water eventually falls as drops of acid rain, or, if it is cold enough, ice crystals form and fall as acid snow. Acid snow can be particularly damaging since it can accumulate on the ground, before abruptly releasing a large quantity of acidic water into the environment when it melts. AC Vol. 9 Issue 5

& QA CAN SOLAR PANELS BE RECYCLED?

W H AT C O N N E C T S…

...RATS AND LANDMINES?

WHY ARE FATS SOLID AT ROOM TEMPERATURE BUT OILS LIQUID? To form a solid, molecules need to pack together nicely, while in a liquid there is less order and the molecules flow around each other. Fat molecules are mostly made up of long, straight hydrocarbon chains. Because they are straight they pack neatly with their neighbours (think of the way uncooked spaghetti packs together in a jar). Oils generally have chains which are kinked, this stops them interacting so tidily and so they stay liquid (imagine the storage problems you’d have if there was a bend in the middle of every piece of spaghetti). By definition, fatty molecules that form liquids are called oils and those that form solids are called fats. ML

Panels that convert solar energy into electricity last for decades, but when they do eventually wear out, they can be turned into new products – including fresh solar panels. Most of the materials they’re made from, such as glass, aluminium and copper, has been recycled for years. The semiconductor materials in them, such as silicon and cadmium telluride, can virtually all be recovered by specialist companies. RM

The giant pouched rat is a large African rodent, only distantly related to true rats. They can weigh up to 1.5kg and measure 45cm from nose to tail.

Giant pouched rats are omnivorous, but they are particularly keen on bananas. They are also highly intelligent and can easily be tamed using a clicker, which they learn to associate with banana treats.

They are much more than just pets though, because they can smell explosives at very low concentrations. A Belgian NGO has so far trained more than 280 rats to sniff out TNT.

Fireworks propel a cocktail of chemicals into the atmosphere, many of which can harm both people and the environment. The vivid colours in firework displays come from metallic compounds such as barium or aluminium that can have negative impacts on animal and human health. Additionally, to produce the oxygen needed for an explosion, many fireworks

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contain oxidisers known as perchlorates. These can dissolve in water, contaminating rivers, lakes and drinking water. Finally, fireworks release a fine cloud of smoke and particulate matter, affecting local air quality. Some newer, ‘cleaner’ fireworks replace perchlorates with safer alternatives, or use compressed air to reduce smoke created. AC

The rats are used to detect landmines in Mozambique, Cambodia and Angola. A single rat can check 200m2 in 20 minutes – something that would take a human four days to do!

PHOTOS: GETTY X6, REUTERS

ARE FIREWORKS BAD FOR THE ENVIRONMENT?

W H AT I S T H I S ?

WHAT A GEM! This is an enormous cut topaz that weighs around 2kg. With a length of 15cm and a width of 10.5cm, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the largest gemstone of its kind. It was discovered in its raw state in Brazil three decades ago, by the British explorer Max Ostro. Naturally, topaz is colourless, but impurities and differences in structure can give it a pale blue, red or yellow colour. To make the stones look more vivid, they are exposed to heat or radiation to enhance the colours, before being cut.

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& QA W H O R E A L LY D I S C O V E R E D ?

PENICILLIN

ALEXANDER FLEMING

HOWARD FLOREY

ERNST CHAIN

It’s one of the most famous stories in medical science: Scottish bacteriologist Alexander Fleming comes into his lab in London one day in 1928, and finds that bacteria on a test dish seem to have been wiped out by some mould that had landed in the dish. Fleming discovers the mould is secreting a compound he calls penicillin – it’s the world’s first antibiotic. Antibiotics have since saved countless people from deadly bacterial infections. Yet Fleming himself was unconvinced penicillin could be turned into an effective treatment and lost interest in his discovery. Credit for turning a chance finding into one of the greatest medical breakthroughs ever should go to the Australian pathologist Howard Florey and the German-born biochemist Ernst Chain. During the late 1930s, they purified and stabilised penicillin, and in 1941 became the first to treat a patient. Despite a brief improvement, the patient died, as there wasn’t enough of the wonder drug. This led Florey to cajole the giant US pharmaceutical companies into setting up mass-production facilities. By the D-Day landings of 1944 there was enough penicillin to treat thousands of injured troops who would otherwise have died. The following year, Fleming won the Nobel – along with Florey and Chain. RM

CAN ANY PLANTS LIVE WITHOUT SUNLIGHT IN NATURE? All plants can survive for short periods without light. Obviously, they need to be able to last through the night, but they can also cope with a longer darkness in an emergency. If you leave a tent pitched on the same patch of lawn, the grass underneath turns yellow and spindly. This is an adaptation, called etiolation, which focuses the plant’s remaining resources into growing as far as possible to try and reach sunlight again. There are also some plants that have lost the power of photosynthesis altogether. The genus Orobanche (commonly known as ‘broomrape’) is an example. The plants have no

chlorophyll and get all their nutrients by parasitically attaching to the roots of nearby plants instead. Although broomrape doesn’t harness sunlight itself, it is still indirectly reliant on the Sun to provide energy to its host plant. Some other parasitic plants, called mycoheterotrophs, feed on fungi and these could theoretically survive in complete darkness for months or even years. But of course, those fungi in turn get their energy by digesting dead plants, and in a permanently dark world, this food source would eventually run out. No plant can live without sunlight forever. LV

Multiple explanations have been proposed. We may forget because we didn’t store the memory effectively in the first place. It is also possible that memories decay over time. As they have not been revisited, their biological ‘trace’ becomes weak. Another theory suggests that new memories can interfere with older ones. Or that memories have been encoded and stored but that there is a problem with retrieval. Scientists sometimes refer to ‘motivated forgetting’ too, which involves forgetting an unwanted memory such as a trauma. This is controversial as there is also evidence that such unwanted events may be particularly difficult to forget. Forgetting is not always a bad thing! It would waste cognitive resources if we remembered every last detail of the world around us. AGr 92

Vol. 9 Issue 5

PHOTOS: GETTY X4, SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

WHY DO WE FORGET THINGS?

HOW IT WORKS

SELF-EXTINGUISHING LI-ION BATTERY Lithium ion batteries contain a highly flammable electrolyte solution that allows ions to move from anode to cathode and back through a separator. However, if there is an internal short circuit, heat can build up, and the battery can potentially

burst into flame. Stanford researchers have developed a new separator made of polymer that contains triphenyl phosphate (TPP), which is flame retardant. If temperatures reach 150°C, the polymer shell melts, releasing the TPP to prevent combustion.

Cathode

At 150°C, the separator melts, releasing ﬂame retardant Separator

Electrolyte solution

Anode

TPP core

Polymer shell

PHOTO: GETTY ILLUSTRATION: RAJA LOCKEY

CAN YOU HAVE A SHOCK WAVE IN SPACE? A ‘shock wave’ is the disturbance of material that’s created when a wave moves through a medium at greater than the local speed of sound. Provided there is a ‘medium’ of sufficient density through which a shock wave can travel, there is no reason why shock waves can’t form in space. However, because most environments in space are of extremely low density, traditional shock waves involving the collision of particles, such as those that give rise to a ‘sonic boom’, are rare. But there are other kinds of shock waves that can occur in low-density environments. For example, the shock can be propagated by photons interacting with electrons, by a distribution of high energy particles

or by magnetic effects. So, shock waves are actually quite common in space. Interplanetary shock waves can occur due to solar flares. ‘Bow shocks’ are formed by the interaction of the solar wind with planetary magnetospheres. Supernovae create powerful shocks, both within the star collapsing to form the explosion and also moving through the interstellar medium itself. Interstellar shocks can also occur simply by the collision or collapse of gas clouds. Black holes, high-density objects such as pulsars, as well as merging galaxies (and even just the motion of galaxies themselves) are also known to form shock waves of various forms. AGu

Vol. 9 Issue 5

RESOURCE

A FEAST FOR THE MIND

01 RETHINK GENDER Boys will be boys and girls will be girls, right? In her new book Testosterone Rex, psychologist Cordelia Fine argues that it’s time to scrap gender stereotypes for good I use this as a nickname for the familiar story that tells us competitive, risk-taking masculinity has evolved for reproductive success, and it’s therefore built into male brains and fuelled by testosterone. I thought Testosterone Rex was a good nickname for two reasons. ‘Rex’ means king, and this view seems to give an explanation for why men still tend to have more power and wealth than women. And secondly, the set of ideas that Testosterone Rex is based on is now scientifically extinct.

What are the problems with this view? One problem is that Testosterone Rex is based on an outdated version of evolutionary biology, which assumes that sexual competition is only important for males. This idea came from the observation that reproduction is cheaper for males than it is for females. In humans, for example, the father can supply just a single sperm, while the mother will provide months of gestation, plus labour and breastfeeding. So the risks of competition for status, resources and mates are only worth it for males. But the economics of reproduction turn out to be much more nuanced than this. Sex roles are diverse and dynamic, and a female’s rank and resources can make a big difference to her reproductive success, particularly in mammals. 94

Vol. 9 Issue 5

The Testosterone Rex view also assumes that male and female ‘adaptive behaviour’ – ways of behaving that would have increased reproductive success in our evolutionary past – is locked into our sex chromosomes and hormones. But even in other species, these adaptations can disappear or even flip between ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ when something relevant in the environment changes. Consider what this means for humans. We inherit a rich culture with norms, values and expectations that can and do change over time, and the environment in which we develop is completely different to that of our ancestors. Today, we have contraception, equal opportunity legislation, paternity leave and modern technology, all of which have affected our gendered behaviour.

one of many factors that feeds into decision-making and behaviour.

What does this all mean for how we think about gender? The belief that differences between the sexes are large, fixed and deeply biological is not helpful if we’re going to have a more balanced society, whether that’s more boys playing with dolls, more dads caring for kids, or more women in science and senior leadership roles. But also, whenever we debate gender equality, in the background is always the idea that natural limits will be set by the fact that males, not females, have evolved to compete for status and resources, and females to care. The science is now showing that the fundamental assumptions behind this are under question – Testosterone Rex is dead, and it’s time to find a successor.

How important is testosterone in shaping gender differences? When we think, ‘men are like this, women are like that’, testosterone seems like an obvious explanation since males are exposed to much more of it than females. But male-female differences in ‘masculine’ traits like risk-taking and promiscuity are much smaller than differences in testosterone levels, so there isn’t a simple relationship between testosterone level and masculinity. This fits with what we know about testosterone. The levels in the blood are just one part of a complex hormonal system, and testosterone is just

TESTOSTERONE REX BY CORDELIA FINE is out now

PHOTO: GETTY

What is Testosterone Rex?

“The belief that differences between the sexes are large, fixed and biological is not helpful”

02 READ OURSELVES HEALTHY From gothic Victoriana to the future of the human race, the recently announced longlist for the 2017 Wellcome Book Prize is stuffed full of brain food. The 12 fiction and non-fiction books, covering themes

related to health and medicine, were selected by a judging panel chaired by Scottish crime writer Val McDermid. The winner of the £30,000 prize will be announced on 24 April.

HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE BY DAVID FRANCE (PICADOR, NON-FICTION)

HOMO DEUS BY YUVAL NOAH HARARI (HARVILL SECKER, NON-FICTION)

WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR BY PAUL KALANITHI (THE BODLEY HEAD, NON-FICTION)

MEND THE LIVING BY MAYLIS DE KERANGAL (MACLEHOSE PRESS, FICTION)

THE GOLDEN AGE BY JOAN LONDON (EUROPA EDITIONS, FICTION)

CURE BY JO MARCHANT (CANONGATE BOOKS, NON-FICTION)

THE TIDAL ZONE BY SARAH MOSS (GRANTA BOOKS, FICTION)

THE GENE BY SIDDHARTHA MUKHERJEE (THE BODLEY HEAD, ON-FICTION)

THE ESSEX SERPENT BY SARAH PERRY (SERPENT’S TAIL, FICTION)

A BRIEF HISTORY OF EVERYONE WHO EVER LIVED BY ADAM RUTHERFORD (WEIDENFELD & NICOLSON, NON-FICTION)

MISS JANE BY BRAD WATSON (PICADOR, FICTION)

I CONTAIN MULTITUDES BY ED YONG (THE BODLEY HEAD, NON-FICTION)

Vol. 9 Issue 5

TIME OUT

CROSSWORD PUZZLE BACK BY POPULAR DEMAND

DOWN 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 11 16 19 21 22 23 24 25 28 29 30 31 33 34

ANSWERS

ACROSS 9 10 12 13 14 15 17 18 19 20 23 96

Cool cider poured for reptile (9) Citadel is formed of faith (9) A graduate has small Syrian garments (4) Irritate at the plant (6) German inclination to get American dolphin (7) Large tome about sensitivity gauge (9) Unconventional soldier (9) Search with hesitation for a ship (7) Set nowadays has a baboon (6) Organisation drops union to improve appearance (4) Current supplier gets yet another complaint (5,4) Vol. 9 Issue 5

Diver gives old church a tuna recipe (8) Opposite force on more decorative block of ice (5,7) Line that crosses British island zone (8) Not against heater producing variable quantity (6) Start of Civil War gives advantage to ridge (8) I did good, playing – with hesitation – an instrument (10) Odd as a quark (7) It’s cordial, prepared from bacteria (10) Fuel takes pressure to make resin (5) Married a peer, getting an illness (6) Work well together treating leg (3) Enemy’s summit is about defence (6,6) Field worker constructs frame by river (6) Ditch a few inches, getting complaint (6,4) Messenger and swindler have the monkﬁsh (5,5) Parchment about luminous discharge (3) Miner managed to break bin to get some money (8) Lacking cover, like a sphynx (8) Separate tactful report (8) Thirty-one days to spread bile about volume (7) Muslim is a star in reverse (5) Racial point in moral (6)

25 26 27 29 32 34 35 36 37 38 39

Lack of oxygen or red blood cells grips bull (9) Cure using colour (4) A pungent bulb left out fungus (6) Hard to get award in identiﬁcation of primate (7) Governor is able to captivate woman (9) Solution is spicier to secondary emergency (9) Stop getting new tongue (7) At home, healthy to get some air (6) Sure to involve employer (4) Dull girl starts to be a shade military (5,4) Bankrupt, about to disintegrate (9)

Solution to crossword in the previous issue

MY LIFE SCIENTIFIC PROF DAVE GOULSON “I FOUND SOME CINNABAR CATERPILLARS WHEN I WAS AT SCHOOL. I TOOK THEM HOME IN MY LUNCHBOX” This month, bee researcher Prof Dave Goulson talks to Helen Pilcher about the importance of creating a buzz in your back garden Where does your interest in insects come from? I think I was born this way. My earliest memories involve butterflies, bees and wildlife generally. I remember finding some stripy cinnabar caterpillars when I was at primary school. I took them home in my lunchbox then reared them on the windowsill in my bedroom. When I was 12, we went on a family holiday to Sweden and saw all these elephant hawkmoth caterpillars crossing the road. They were probably looking for somewhere to burrow and pupate but I spent most of the holiday picking them up and moving them to safety. How did you come to work on bees? My PhD was on butterflies, but then I got sidetracked by bees. I was sitting in a local country park watching bees, when I noticed that they don’t always land on the flowers they approach. With the help of a PhD student, we worked out why. It turns out the insects are ‘sniffing’ for previous bee visitors. There’s no point landing if the pollen or nectar has already been taken. After that, I was fascinated. Today, I research bee ecology, behaviour and conservation.

And it matters because... ? A third of the food we eat is dependent on insect pollinators. The danger is that bees decline to a point where it affects crop pollination. This is already happening in some places. In parts of China, people have to paint pollen onto fruit trees by hand. Bees are also vitally important for wildflowers. What can we do to help the bees? It’s not all doom and gloom, there are lots of things we can do to help. Plant bee-friendly flowers like thyme and marjoram. Stop using insecticides and put up bee hotels. These don’t need to be expensive; just a bundle of bamboo sticks or a fence post with a few holes drilled in will do. If we could persuade everyone with a garden to do this, it would make a massive difference.

How often do you get stung? I get stung fairly regularly but thankfully I’ve not become allergic to the stings. I have colleagues who have had to give up their work because they developed allergies to bee stings. Where are you happiest? In my meadow in France. I have a little farm in the middle of nowhere that I have turned into a nature reserve. Every summer we go for a month and potter about. Are wasps evil? No they’re not. Wasps are lovely! A lot of people don’t realise it but wasps are pollinators too. They are also food for birds and important natural enemies of the pests that feed on our garden plants. ß

Prof Dave Goulson is a biologist at the University of Sussex. He founded the Bumblebee Conservation Trust. His new book, Bee Quest, is out now Vol. 9 Issue 5

ILLUSTRATION: TIM MCDONAGH

How are bees doing these days? Not great. There are 270 species of bee in the UK, including 26 types of bumblebee and the one and only honeybee, but they’re mostly in decline. Habitat loss, disease and the use of pesticides are all to blame. There are seven or eight species of bumblebee that are now very hard to find and overall numbers are diminishing.

THE LAST WORD ROBERT MATTHEWS ON… CAN WE TRUST SCIENTISTS IN A POST-TRUTH WORLD?

t’s the big question being asked around the world. In these post-truth, fake news, alternative-fact times, who can we trust? Most people are pretty sure of one thing: it’s not politicians or the media. For years, they’ve been at the bottom of surveys of trustworthiness. Amazingly, a recent global poll revealed that what little trust they once enjoyed has now plunged to the lowest level ever recorded. Fortunately, those same polls also highlight the existence of the ultimate source of reliable insight: science. Not surprisingly, the current crisis of trust has prompted high-minded academics to pen pieces insisting it’s time we all put our trust in the methods of science. What’s striking about these calls to arms is their naivety. While science has an impressive track record of debunking misconceptions, blunders and plain lies, it doesn’t follow that we should therefore put our complete trust in scientists. For that assumes scientists can be trusted to know what they’re doing. And sadly, that’s just not the case. Too many researchers seem to think that hard data alone is the hallmark of reliable science. Yet hard data from badly designed studies is quite capable of giving compelling support for claims that are just plain wrong. For example, imagine there’s a new idea for reducing juvenile crime: take the worst offenders to a tough jail to see what awaits them if they don’t mend their ways. To test the idea, we can simply check to see if the visits trigger a fall in re-arrest rates among those taking part. Chances are the data will show the idea works – but that doesn’t mean it actually does. That’s because of an effect that’s called ‘regression to the mean’, which rears its head when dealing with extreme cases. Those young offenders were chosen to take part

Vol. 9 Issue 5

“TOO MANY RESEARCHERS SEEM TO THINK THAT HARD DATA ALONE IS THE HALLMARK OF RELIABLE SCIENCE”

precisely because they were arrested an extreme number of times. But that’s partly the result of chance: they just ran out of luck too often. Once they’ve had their prison visit, their spate of bad luck is likely to ‘regress’ back to a more average rate. As a result, they’ll evade re-arrest – and thus appear to have mended their ways, when in reality they haven’t. This isn’t some esoteric possibility either. For decades a scheme called Scared Straight was used in the US following claims it dramatically cut re-offending rates. It’s now clear that the apparently rock-solid evidence was anything but. When the idea was tested using studies designed to cope with regression to the mean, the benefit vanished. Indeed, a major review of the evidence published in 2013 showed it was actually worse than useless, and increased offending rates. Over the years, regression to the mean has fooled researchers in fields from medicine and business to psychology and finance. Which wouldn’t be so bad, except the phenomenon has been known about since Victorian times. And that’s one of the striking things about these traps. Warnings about them have been circulating for years, seemingly with little effect. That’s because many – perhaps even most – working scientists have a surprisingly poor understanding of how to avoid the many pitfalls in turning data into reliable insights. To be fair, a lot of scientists recognise this. A recent poll in the journal Nature ranked ‘better understanding of statistics’ top among factors that would lead to more reliable science. There has never been a greater need for trustworthy evidence on issues that affect us. The scientific process is without question the best way to gather such evidence. But those claiming to use its techniques need to up their game if they are to justify our trust in them. ß

Robert Matthews is a visiting professor in science at Aston University, Birmingham

ILLUSTRATION: DANIEL BRIGHT

IN THESE TESTING TIMES, WE NEED OUR SCIENCE TO BE SOLID

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