Time to rinse! AI assistant helps clean your teeth

FOR most of us, brushing our teeth is just a tedious part of the daily grind. But for people with dementia or learning difficulties, such tasks can be difficult. They could soon gain more independence thanks to an AI designed by Christian Peters at Bielefeld University in Germany and his colleagues.

Peters has already come up with a system that guides people when washing their hands. Brushing teeth is more complicated because it involves many steps - such as putting toothpaste on the brush, filling a glass with water or rinsing the mouth.

The TEBRA system uses a video camera to monitor someone brushing their teeth and checks that each step happens at the right time. It prompts them via a screen on the washstand if they forget a step or if they get stuck. The idea is not to dictate a routine, but to adapt to that of the user, says Peters.

TEBRA is being tested at a care home in Bielefeld for people with learning disabilities. Caregivers there reported that the system was less distracting for some people than a human carer. The work will be presented at the International Conference on Health Informatics in Barcelona, Spain, next week. Peters also plans to adapt his system to tasks such as shaving.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Time to rinse! An AI to help you clean your teeth"

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Sooty ships may be geoengineering by accident

GEOENGINEERING is being tested - albeit inadvertently - in the north Pacific. Soot from oil-burning ships is dumping about 1000 tonnes of soluble iron per year across 6 million square kilometres of ocean, new research has revealed.

Fertilising the world's oceans with iron has been controversially proposed as a way of sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to curb global warming. Some geoengineers claim releasing iron into the sea will stimulate plankton blooms, which absorb carbon, but ocean processes are complex and difficult to monitor in tests.

"Experiments suggest you change the population of algae, causing a shift from fish-dominated to jellyfish-dominated ecosystems," says Alex Baker of the University of East Anglia, UK. Such concerns led the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) to impose a moratorium on geoengineering experiments in 2010.

The annual ship deposition is much larger, if less concentrated, than the iron released in field tests carried out before the moratorium was in place. Yet because ship emissions are not intended to alter ocean chemistry, they do not violate the moratorium, says Jim Thomas of the ETC Group, a think tank that consults for the CBD. "If you intentionally drove oil-burning ships back and forth as a geoengineering experiment, that would contravene it."

The new study, by Akinori Ito of the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, is the first to quantify how shipping deposits iron in parts of the ocean normally deficient in it. Earlier models had assumed that only 1 to 2 per cent of the iron contained in aerosols, including shipping emissions, is soluble in seawater, so the remaining 98 to 99 percent would sink to the bottom without affecting ocean life. But Ito found that up to 80 per cent of the iron in shipping soot is soluble (Global Biogeochemical Cycles, doi.org/kdj). As this soot rapidly falls to the sea surface, it is likely to be fertilising the oceans.

In the high-latitude north Pacific - a region that is naturally iron-poor and therefore likely to be most affected by human deposits - ship emissions now account for 70 per cent of soluble iron from human activity, with the burning of biomass and coal accounting for the rest. Shipping's share will rise as traffic continues to grow and regulations restrict coal and biomass emissions.

Can we learn anything from this unintentional experiment? Baker thinks not. "The process isn't scientifically useful," he says, because the uncontrolled nature of the iron makes it difficult to draw meaningful comparisons.

The depositions are unlikely to be harmful at current levels, he says, but "given the uncertainties, I just don't know how much these iron emissions would have to increase before there was demonstrable harm to an ecosystem, or benefit in terms of carbon uptake, for that matter".

This article appeared in print under the headline "Ships inadvertently fertilise the oceans"

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Webcam and CCTV security flaw shows us to prying eyes

A networking loophole has made it easy to have a peek at what everyone else is doing by accessing cameras connected to the internet

UNIVERSAL Plug and Play was never meant to be quite so universal. UPnP software was designed to let cameras, printers, digital video recorders and games consoles automatically discover each other's presence on a network, saving users the hassle of setting them up separately. But last week it emerged that it has instead been quietly making tens of millions of such devices accessible - and in many cases controllable - via the internet.

It means, for instance, that video feeds from CCTV cameras or webcams can be watched at leisure by anybody from peeping Toms to burglars. Scanned documents can be read by strangers and mischievous hackers with a grudge against an organisation can repeatedly send huge jobs to its printers. In a gift to criminals, CCTV footage recorded on digital video recorders can even be deleted, too.

UPnP's exposure was highlighted last week when information-security company Rapid7 in Boston reported on a six-month research programme. Between June and November last year, a team continually scanned for signals from any UPnP-enabled devices announcing their availability for internet connection.

Their findings were astonishing in their breadth. Some 6900 network-aware products from 1500 companies at 81 million internet protocol (IP) addresses responded to their requests. "About 80 per cent of those were home routers, and the rest were devices like cameras and printers that should not have been internet-facing at all," says lead researcher H. D. Moore. An open router could give an attacker access to its owner's personal files.

As the news spread, tech websites began running page after page demonstrating just what kinds of things UPnP is making available online: video of babies in their cots at home, a dog being operated on in a veterinary surgery, people working in offices, cafes and shops who do not know that their employer is inadvertently broadcasting their every move.

Developed by the global UPnP Forum, the software add-in was first embedded in Windows XP a decade ago - so that a laptop automatically connects to a wireless network printer, for example. "The problem is that the UPnP protocol has no built-in security. The goal was to make it easy for devices to discover each other without confusing the user - to get them up and running," says Moore.

The affair highlights the tension inherent in providing ease-of-use on one hand and security on the other. One solution would be for internet service providers (ISPs) to modify their routers to prevent their subscribers' UPnP traffic being accessed, says Moore. Rapid7 has also written a free, downloadable Windows program that lets people check if their devices are internet facing, notes Jay Abbott of Advanced Security Consulting in Peterborough, UK. "Their one-click check lets you see if this issue affects you or not, so make use of it," he says.

Like Abbott, Boldizsár Bencsáth at the CrySys Lab in Budapest, Hungary, thinks only time will cure the problem, perhaps as ISPs gradually issue broadband routers secured against UPnP data extraction. "People do not really care to fix vulnerabilities unless it does something like slow down internet access. So I think a lot of vulnerable UPnP devices will remain on the internet for a long time," he says.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Windows on the world"

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Today on New Scientist: 7 February 2013

Light-taming window conjures Turing's image

Watch how a surface can be manipulated to cast images, allowing designers to paint with light

New map pinpoints cities to avoid as sea levels rise

Sydney, Tokyo and Buenos Aires are in for some of the biggest sea-level rises by 2100, finds one of the most comprehensive predictions to date

Tour of the body hardly gets under the skin

Anatomies by Hugh Aldersey-Williams aims to reveal the body's workings, but devotes too much space to cultural connotations and too little to science

The dragon that evolved into a pterosaur

A closer look at a taxidermied dragon has debunked the creationist theory that it proves pterosaurs died out just a few hundred years ago

Faith leaders belong at the forefront of conservation

Dekila Chungyalpa, director of WWF's new Sacred Earth programme, says it's time for religious leaders to start preaching for the environment

Radical reforms might not save Europe's fish stocks

Major reforms to the Common Fisheries Policy promise to rescue European fisheries, but quotas may still be set too high

Parcel sensor knows your delivery has been dropped

The Droptag sensor could prevent you having to accept delivery of smashed goods that you've ordered online

Crowdsourcing grows up as online workers unite

Employer reviews, a living wage, and even promotions: crowd-working on sites like Amazon's Mechanical Turk is shaking off its exploitative past

Light Show tricks meaning out of physics and biology

A new exhibition plays with the physics of light to show just how important it is to our perception of the world

Widespread high-tech doping blights Australian sport

"Blackest day" for sport as a new report finds perfomance-enhancing drug use is rife in Australia

Three-legged robot uses exploding body to jump

Watch a rubbery robot leap into the air thanks to an internal blast of burning gases

How should we use the keys to sleep?

Technology now lets us manipulate the stages of sleep, potentially giving us a fast track to blissful rest, but we meddle with sleep at our own risk

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Choking China: The struggle to clear Beijing's air

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Engineering light: Pull an image from nowhere

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Lefty nonsense: When progressives wage war on reason

Conservatives rightly get a bad rap for anti-science policies. But progressives can be just as bad, say Alex Berezow and Hank Campbell

Editorial: "Challenge unscientific thinking, whatever its source"

IN 2007, fresh off an election victory in both chambers of Congress, the Democratic party set out to fulfil its campaign promise to make the US more sustainable - starting with the building they had just gained control of.

With their "Green the Capitol" initiative, the Democrats planned to make the building a model of sustainability and an example to us all. They replaced light bulbs and bathroom fixtures, but perhaps most significantly, they took the step of greening the congressional cafeteria. Cost was no object. Good thing, too.

The problem, as they saw it, was an excessive reliance on environmentally wasteful styrofoam containers and plastic utensils. And so they issued a decree: from now on, the cafeteria would use biodegradable containers and utensils.

They claimed science was on their side: the utensils could be composted, and would thus be better for the environment. The result was a miracle of sustainability, at least according to internal reports, which claimed to have kept 650 tonnes of waste out of landfill between 2007 and 2010.

The only problem was that the "green" replacements were worse for the environment. The spoons melted in soup, so people had to use more than one to get through lunch. The knives could barely cut butter without breaking. And instead of composting easily, they had to be processed in a special pulper and then driven to Maryland in giant trucks.

In 2010 an independent analysis found that the saving was equivalent to removing a single car from the road - at a cost of $475,000 per year. Wary of disappointing their environmentally concerned supporters, Democrats waited until the Republicans regained control of the House of Representatives in 2011 - and then suggested that the programme be killed. Republicans duly instructed the cafeteria to revert to using utensils and containers that actually worked.

Deposed Democrat speaker Nancy Pelosi saw an opportunity, and took it: "GOP brings back Styrofoam & ends composting - House will send 535 more tons to landfills," she tweeted.

Did progressives call her to account? No, but they should have. According to the Democrats' own figures their programme only saved about 200 tonnes of waste per year. Where did Pelosi get 535 tonnes from?

This anecdote is both illuminating and chilling: if an environmental story is being told about people on the right of the political spectrum, anything goes. But if progressives play fast and loose with the facts, they are given a free ride.

Conservatives' sins against science - objections to stem cell research, denial of climate science, opposition to evolution and the rest - are widely reported and well known. But conservatives don't have a monopoly on unscientific policies. Progressives are just as bad, if not worse. Their ideology is riddled with anti-scientific feel-good fallacies designed to win hearts, not minds. Just like biodegradeable spoons, their policies often crumble in the face of reality and leave behind a big mess. Worse, anyone who questions them is condemned as anti-science.

We have all heard about the Republican war on science; we want to draw attention to the progressive war on reason.

We recognise that the term "progressive" is potentially troublesome, so let us lay our cards on the table. In the US, "progressive" and "liberal" are often used interchangeably. But the two should not be confused.

Liberalism, as defined by John Locke, means the pursuit of liberty. By that definition progressives are not liberal. Though they claim common cause with liberals (and most of them are Democrats because very few progressives are Republican), today's progressive movement is actually socially authoritarian.

Unlike conservative authoritarians, however, they are not concerned with banning "immoral" things like sex, drugs and rock and roll. They instead seek dominion over issues such as food, the environment and education. And they claim that their policies are based on science, even when they are not.

For example, progressive activists have championed the anti-vaccine movement, confusing parents and causing a public health disaster. They have campaigned against animal research even when it remains necessary, in some cases committing violence against scientists. Instead of embracing technological progress, such as genetically modified crops, progressives have spread fear and misinformation. They have waged war against academics who question their ideology, and they are opposed to sensible reforms in science education.

We do not want not to demonise all progressives. Some are genuinely pro-science. We recognise the huge value some progressive ideas have had, and that vilifying an entire philosophy based on the actions of its radical ideologues would be unfair.

But we do want to demonise the lunatic fringe. We contend that there is a disturbing and largely unreported trend among influential progressive activists who misinterpret, misrepresent and abuse science to advance their ideological and political agendas.

Of all of today's political philosophies, progressivism stands as the most pressing problem for science. Progressives, not conservatives, are the ones most likely to replace scientific research with unscientific ideology.

Conservatives who endorse unscientific ideas are blasted by the scientific community, yet progressives who do the same get a free pass. It is important the problem be recognised, and that free pass revoked.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Science left out"

Alex Berezow is editor of RealClearScience.com

Hank Campbell is founder of Science 2.0. Berezow and Campbell are authors of Science Left Behind: Feel-good fallacies and the rise of the anti-scientific left (PublicAffairs, 2012)

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Bug protects itself by turning its environment to gold

Mythical King Midas was ultimately doomed because everything he touched turned to gold. Now, the reverse has been found in bacteria that owe their survival to a natural Midas touch.

Delftia acidovorans lives in sticky biofilms that form on top of gold deposits, but exposure to dissolved gold ions can kill it. That's because although metallic gold is unreactive, the ions are toxic.

To protect itself, the bacterium has evolved a chemical that detoxifies gold ions by turning them into harmless gold nanoparticles. These accumulate safely outside the bacterial cells.

"This could have potential for gold extraction," says Nathan Magarvey of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, who led the team that uncovered the bugs' protective trick. "You could use the bug, or the molecules they secrete."

He says the discovery could be used to dissolve gold out of water carrying it, or to design sensors that would identify gold-rich streams and rivers.

The protective chemical is a protein dubbed delftibactin A. The bugs secrete it into the surroundings when they sense gold ions, and it chemically changes the ions into particles of gold 25 to 50 nanometres across. The particles accumulate wherever the bugs grow, creating patches of gold.

Deep purple gold

But don't go scanning streams for golden shimmers: the nanoparticle patches do not reflect light in the same way as bigger chunks of the metal – giving them a deep purple colour.

When Magarvey deliberately snipped out the gene that makes delftibactin A, the bacteria died or struggled to survive exposure to gold chloride. Adding the protein to the petri dish rescued them.

The bacterium Magarvey investigated is one of two species that thrive on gold, both identified a decade or so ago by Frank Reith of the University of Adelaide in Australia. In 2009 Reith discovered that the other species, Cupriavidus metallidurans, survives using the slightly riskier strategy of changing gold ions into gold inside its cells.

"If delftibactin is selective for gold, it might be useful for gold recovery or as a biosensor," says Reith. "But how much dissolved gold is out there is difficult to say."

Journal reference: Nature Chemical Biology, DOI: 10.1038/NCHEMBIO.1179

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Two worms, same brains – but one eats the other

IF TWO animals have identical brain cells, how different can they really be? Extremely. Two worm species have exactly the same set of neurons, but extensive rewiring allows them to lead completely different lives.

Ralf Sommer of the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, Germany, and colleagues compared Caenorhabditis elegans, which eats bacteria, with Pristionchus pacificus, which hunts other worms. Both have a cluster of 20 neurons to control their foregut.

Sommer found that the clusters were identical. "These species are separated by 200 to 300 million years, but have the same cells," he says. P. pacificus, however, has denser connections than C. elegans, with neural signals passing through many more cells before reaching the muscles (Cell, doi.org/kbh). This suggests that P. pacificus is performing more complex motor functions, says Detlev Arendt of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany.

Arendt thinks predators were the first animals to evolve complex brains, to find and catch moving prey. He suggests their brains had flexible wiring, enabling them to swap from plant-eating to hunting.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Identical brains, but one eats the other"

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Zombies take over the museum

Clare Wilson, features editor

(Image: Science Museum)

If a friend was secretly a zombie, would you know? Believe it or not, the living dead feature in several thought experiments that explore the neuroscience of consciousness. Imagine an intelligent being that could react to its environment and plan for the future, yet lacked conscious self-awareness. If such a zombie could do everything we do, then why did consciousness evolve in the first place?

That is only one of the intriguing questions raised by the London Science Museum’s latest event, Zombie Lab. Its take on the science of zombies encompasses everything from hard-core neuroscience to animal parasitology and mass experiments to study crowd movements during evacuations.

The event is held this weekend, but in the Wednesday night preview the museum embraced its theatrical side, unleashing on the crowd hordes of realistic, groaning zombies, along with their biohazard-suited handlers and campaigners for zombie rights. 

You see, these weren’t dead zombies. These were the victims of a new virus that causes skin necrosis, cognitive deficits and an insatiable hunger for raw meat. That premise invited us to consider, in a mock jury trial, just what it takes to deserve human rights, an important issue when it comes to moral and legal questions surrounding abortion and how we treat people locked into coma-like states.

(Image: Science Museum)

Some of the games and interactive exhibits did have queues, so those planning to visit should get there early. There was standing room only at a curator’s talk on Luigi Galvani’s first demonstration of “animal electricity”, when he used primitive batteries to make frog legs twitch. The connection to zombies is that Galvani’s followers progressed to sticking their electrodes up the rectums of recently hanged criminals, giving the alarming appearance of reanimating the dead. Such grisly experiments were the inspiration behind Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Sometimes the theatrics spiced up the serious science, as when protestors from the Zombie Liberation Front broke into the lecture theatre during talks by neuroscientists from the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science in Brighton, UK. Anil Seth had been explaining how our consciousness is intimately embodied in our corporeal selves, using cases ranging from the famous rubber hand illusion to phantom limb syndrome. Such cases show, said Seth, that our perception of inhabiting our bodies is “maybe just the brain’s best guess at reality”.

The audience probably enjoyed the interruption, as a good fraction had come dressed as zombies themselves. Those wanting to get into the spirit could take advantage of the zombie make-up stall, have their photo taken with zombie props or learn the steps to Michael Jackson's Thriller. I passed on that opportunity, as once they saw my moves, no one would have been seen dead on that dance floor.

Zombie Lab lives on this weekend at the Science Museum, London

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First time-travel movies reveal surreal universe

Sandrine Ceurstemont, editor, New Scientist TV

Time travel in the real world isn't yet possible. But thanks to new physics flicks, you can now experience an alternate universe to see what it might look like.

Developed by Wolfgang Schleich and colleagues at the University of Ulm in Germany, these first time-travel videos mathematically recreate the weird world of Gödel's universe. In the first clip, a camera is placed at the centre of this cylindrical universe, simulating what an Earth-like object would look like. Because light behaves differently in this space, as the sphere moves away from you, you see an image of both the front and the back. If it moves above you, it appears as a collection of slices. During its orbit, you see many versions from different time periods all at once.

The video gets even more trippy as it simulates what you would see when looking up at a ball. Because the universe is rotating, light rays move in spirals, creating circular echoes around the object. If a single ball is replaced by a stack, you see all the balls at once.

Of course the visualisation isn't complete without a taste of time travel. The last clip follows a bizarre ball as it meets a younger version of itself, then ages.

For more about the simulation, check out our article "First real time-travel movies are loopers".

If you enjoyed this post, see how to build a time machine or check out how the universe emerged from nothing.

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Minimum booze price will rein in alcohol abuse

Binge drinking and preloading – drinking cheap shop-bought alcohol before going to a bar – are two behaviours the UK government hopes to curb by imposing a minimum price for alcohol. A 10-week consultation period for the policy, which could see a ban on alcohol being sold at less than 45 pence per unit in England and Wales, ends on 6 February. Meanwhile, Scotland is considering a minimum of 50 pence. But will the policy succeed in tackling alcohol overconsumption and its consequences?

"There's a huge amount of evidence that pricing is linked to consumption," says John Holmes at the University of Sheffield, UK, whose research into the link between alcohol pricing and public health was used by the government in framing the proposed pricing policy.

The government hopes that the impact of a minimum price will be felt mainly by those who drink more than is recommended, since they tend to drink cheaper alcohol. In the UK, the recommended limits are 21 units for a man and 14 units for a woman, per week. A unit is equivalent to 10 millilitres of pure alcohol.

The government claims that the policy could lead to a 3.3 per cent fall in consumption across all alcoholic drinks. This will in turn lead to at least 5200 fewer crimes, 24,600 fewer alcohol-related hospital admissions and over 700 fewer alcohol-related deaths per year after 10 years, it says.

Holmes and his colleagues used spending data from 9000 UK households to model how different demographics respond to price changes. The model shows that a minimum price of 35 pence per unit would lead to a significant cut in the amount that people drink. For "hazardous drinkers" – men who drink over 50 units and women who drink over 35 units a week – a 40 pence minimum price would reduce consumption by 4 per cent; 60 pence would reduce it by 16 per cent.

The team also used epidemiological evidence to link consumption with risk of harm. "The specific numbers can be debated, but most would agree that lower consumption generally leads to lower rates of harm," says Holmes. He estimates that reductions in public health costs and crime resulting from the new policy could lead to savings of about £4 billion over 10 years. However, the policy will not help people with an alcohol dependency, he says, since they are likely to buy alcohol even at higher prices.

Canadian backing

Holmes's model is backed by evidence from Canada, which has set a minimum price for alcoholic drinks in British Columbia and Saskatchewan on several occasions – most recently in 2010. Tim Stockwell at the University of Victoria in British Columbia and colleagues looked at data from both provinces over a 20-year period. On average, there was a 3.4 per cent fall in total alcohol consumption across the population for every 10 per cent increase in minimum price.

In Canada, the immediate effects of a higher minimum price included fewer acute hospital admissions and fewer deaths caused solely by alcohol, such as alcoholic gastritis. After two to four years there were also fewer cases of alcohol-related diseases.

The pricing model in Canada is not the same as that proposed for the UK. Rather than setting a minimum price per unit of alcohol, the Canadian policy sets prices for each type of alcoholic drink.

Stockwell thinks the UK's approach is preferable, since it takes the strength of the drink into account. "In my opinion, the model being proposed in the UK is perfect from the public health and safety point of view."

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Drug reduces enlarged prostate with few side effects

Relief from the constant call of nature is the aim of a new drug, tested in rats, which can shrink an enlarged prostate and is likely to have few side effects.

By the age of 60 an estimated 70 per cent of men have prostate enlargement. Treatment involves surgery or drugs that block testosterone, a hormone that drives unwanted growth. Side effects can include loss of libido and erectile dysfunction.

The new drug, RC-3940-II, developed by Andrew Schally of the Miami Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Florida and colleagues works by blocking gastrin-releasing peptide – another potent growth factor.

In rats, a six-week treatment shrank prostates by 18 per cent. It also shrank human prostate cells by 21 per cent. Importantly, fewer side effects are likely as testosterone pathways are avoided.

Journal reference: PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1222355110

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Davos: Persuading big business to act on climate change

There was good news and bad news from Davos this year. Dire warnings were issued about the dangers of climate change, but a new report argued that big businesses can limit the temperature rise – if only governments can unleash their potential.

Movers and shakers from business and government gathered in Davos, Switzerland, last week for the annual World Economic Forum (WEF). They discussed global risks like financial instability, rising food prices and climate change.

The new president of the World Bank, Jim Yong Kim, highlighted a recent report that predicted global temperatures could rise by 4 °C within decades. "My children could be living in a world that doesn't even resemble the one we live in now," he said.

Green money

It would take $700 billion of investment every year to cut greenhouse gas emissions to a safe level, while allowing continued economic growth.

That's according to the Green Investment Report, issued by the WEF during the meeting.

"We just don't have that much public money," says Dominic Waughray, a senior director of the WEF in Geneva, Switzerland, and one of the authors of the report. The 2008 financial crisis has slashed public funds, he says.

However, Waughray says governments can encourage the private sector to step up. Currently, the world's governments spend $96 billion a year tackling climate change. The WEF report estimates that if they increase that to $130 billion, governments could unleash $570 billion a year of private capital.

To do this, the public money must be used to encourage private investment in green technologies. Rather than funding projects like wind farms outright, Waughray wants the money used to reduce the risk for private investors.

Major infrastructure projects often receive this sort of support. If a company wants to build a power plant in a developing country, but is worried that the country could become unstable, it can buy a form of insurance from the World Bank's Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency. If the host country becomes unstable and stops buying power from the plant, MIGA covers the lost income.

"The public money is the buffer so the private company feels comfortable with the project," says Waughray.

Stepping up

One such fund was launched in Davos. The International Finance Corporation, part of the World Bank, has started a Catalyst Fund to help companies that are tackling climate change by, for instance, building renewable power plants or boosting energy efficiency. It has already raised $280 million.

There are also signs that businesses are paying attention. In the run-up to the meeting, the Carbon Disclosure Project in London surveyed 2415 companies and found that 70 per cent believed climate change could significantly affect their revenues.

Their major concern is extreme weather events, which can disrupt supply chains. Nearly 700 of the companies were already investing in emissions cuts, and 63 per cent of those companies said they were doing so because climate change was a physical risk to their business.

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DNA privacy: don't flatter yourself

The secrets contained in our individual genomes are less valuable than we like to believe

IMAGINE donating your DNA to a project aimed at discovering links between genes and diseases. You consent to your genome sequence being released anonymously into the public domain, though you are warned there is a remote possibility that it might one day be possible to link it back to you.

A few years later, that remote possibility comes to pass. How should you feel? This is no longer a hypothetical scenario. About 50 people who participated in a project called 1000 Genomes have been traced (see "Matching names to genes: the end of genetic privacy?").

The researchers' intentions were honourable. They have not revealed these identities, and the original data has been adjusted to make a repeat using the same technique impossible. All they wanted to do was expose privacy issues.

Consider them exposed. It is clear that genomics has entered a new phase, similar to that which social media went through a few years ago, when concerns were raised about people giving away too much personal information.

What happens when the same applies to our DNA? Having your genome open to public scrutiny obviously raises privacy issues. Employers and insurers may be interested. Embarrassing family secrets may be exposed.

But overall, personal genetic information is probably no more revealing than other sorts. In fact there are reasons to believe that it is less so: would an insurance company really go to the trouble of decoding a genome to discover a slightly elevated risk of cancer or Alzheimer's disease?

The available evidence suggests not. In 2006, Harvard University set out to sequence the genomes of 100,000 volunteers and make them publicly available, along with personal information such as names and medical records. One of the goals was to see what happens when such data is open to all. The answer seems to be "not a lot". So far this Personal Genome Project has published 148 people's full genomes. Not one volunteer has reported a privacy issue.

This is not a reason for complacency, but it suggests that our genomic secrets are less interesting to other people than we might like to believe.

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Get cirrus in the fight against climate change

FEATHERY cirrus clouds are beautiful, but when it comes to climate change, they are the enemy. Found at high-altitude and made of small ice crystals, they trap heat - so more cirrus means a warmer world. Now it seems that, by destroying cirrus, we could reverse all the warming Earth has experienced so far.

In 2009, David Mitchell of the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada, proposed a radical way to stop climate change: get rid of some cirrus. Now Trude Storelvmo of Yale University and colleagues have used a climate model to test the idea.

Storelvmo added powdered bismuth triiodide into the model's troposphere, the layer of the atmosphere in which these clouds form. Ice crystals grew around these particles and expanded, eventually falling out of the sky, reducing cirrus coverage. Without the particles, the ice crystals remained small and stayed up high for longer.

The technique, done on a global scale, created a powerful cooling effect, enough to counteract the 0.8 °C of warming caused by all the greenhouse gases released by humans (Geophysical Research Letters, DOI: 10.1002/grl.50122).

But too much bismuth triiodide made the ice crystals shrink, so cirrus clouds lasted longer. "If you get the concentrations wrong, you could get the opposite of what you want," says Storelvmo. And, like other schemes for geoengineering, side effects are likely - changes in the jet stream, say.

Different model assumptions give different "safe" amounts of bismuth triiodide, says Tim Lenton of the University of Exeter, UK. "Do we really know the system well enough to be confident of being in the safe zone?" he asks. "You wouldn't want to touch this until you knew."

Mitchell says seeding would take 140 tonnes of bismuth triiodide every year, which by itself would cost $19 million.

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Hagfish gulped up in first video of deep-sea seal hunt

Sandrine Ceurstemont, editor, New Scientist TV

We no longer have to imagine elephant seals feasting in the deep sea. An underwater camera has filmed one slurping up a hagfish, the first sighting of seal predation on the sea floor.

The event was captured by a Neptune Canada live video stream in the north-east Pacific Ocean and spotted by a teenager who was watching the feed. Marine mammal experts later identified the moustached face in the corner of the frame as an elephant seal, one of the few seal species that spends most of its time underwater. In this case, it was observed at a depth of 894 metres, but the animals can descend more than 1500 metres below the surface, holding their breath for longer than 100 minutes.

The sighting shows the value of citizen science: Steven Mihály from Ocean Networks Canada, based in Victoria, British Columbia, says that although data-mining techniques could be used to sift through the reams of underwater video, human observers are still most effective at picking out events of interest.

If you enjoyed this post, see a submerged hippo stay upright in a water tank or watch an underwater volcano spew exotic lava.

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'If the Royal Institution is sold, that's the end'

We must find a way to save the Royal Institution from having to sell its historic London home, says Nobel laureate Harry Kroto

Why is it important to save the Royal Institution (Ri)?
It is of tremendous historical importance. It's an iconic building not just for the UK but for the world, a focal point for the public understanding of science and a laboratory where people like Lawrence Bragg and Michael Faraday did cutting-edge research. It should be a world heritage site.

Could the Ri continue to exist if the building was sold?
No. It's impossible to move it out. You can move the National Gallery or the British Library, but not the Royal Institution. The institution is the building, and the building is the institution. If the building is sold, that's the end.

How bad is the Ri's financial plight?
I don't think people fully appreciate the problems that the institution faces, partly because the financial details haven't been divulged. People are bandying about numbers that are probably significantly lower than what is needed. As far as I can see we don't have a lot of time; it looks as though the plug is being pulled.

How did it come to this?
The problem has arisen partly because the Ri got into significant debt. But it has had two years to find a strategy to convince credible sponsors and it hasn't done it.

How much money is required?
Just to keep the doors open will require at least £2 million a year, meaning an endowment of £60 million. That doesn't include paying off the debt.

In the grand scheme of things, that's not a huge amount of money.
That's correct, but the question is whether we can put together something credible to pull in that sort of funding. The only viable solution I can see is for the Royal Society to enter into some sort of partnership which would provide a level of credibility that potential funders might find acceptable.

You have started a campaign to save the Ri...
Yes. I'm doing it as a private individual, but one who knows pretty much everyone who was involved in the institution prior to 2000, when the strategy that led to this demise was put in place.

How has the response been so far?
Amazing. I've received messages from all over the world. People recognise that the institution has global significance. Many see it as a shrine to electricity, the lifeblood of the modern world. But we can't just rely on that.

What does the Ri need to do to reinvent itself?
The institution has not moved with the times as much as it could have done, by recognising it could have a global role to play rather than a provincial or UK one. Its position as a central point for UK public understanding of science is already pretty healthy, but it doesn't bring much money. So it must become the platform for 21st-century educational science outreach on a global scale, by exploiting the potential of the internet.

Profile

Harry Kroto is a professor of chemistry at Florida State University. He won the Nobel prize for chemistry in 1996. His campaign to save the Ri is at Save21AlbemarleStreet

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Pure colour mixing gets laser power

Jeff Hecht, consultant

(Image: Alexander R. Albrecht, University of New Mexico)

The three coloured jets aren't what they seem. They look like fluids dyed different colours mixing to make a clear liquid. But all the water is clear: the colour comes from red, green and blue lasers. This photo won Alexander Albrecht of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque first prize in the 2012 After Image photo contest run by Optics & Photonics News.

The colours seem to be flowing through the jets because an effect called total internal reflection is confining the laser beams. Each laser is aimed along the centre of a jet. As the jet bends, the light hits the boundary between water and air at a glancing angle, so it is reflected back into the water and travels further along it. If the light is to travel all the way down the jet, the surface of the jet must be smooth and even to keep the light and the water from breaking up in turbulence. Some light passing through the water jet scatters out of it by bouncing off water molecules, an effect called Rayleigh scattering.

Physicist Daniel Colladon first demonstrated light guiding along a water jet in 1841. Another physicist, John Tyndall, later repeated the demonstration in his popular lectures at the Royal Institution in London. The effect is credited with inspiring concepts from illuminated fountains to fibre optics.

The red, green and blue laser beams mix together to make white light because they are the same intensity and match the human eye's three colour receptors. Combining different blends of these three primary colours can produce the whole range of colour visible to the human eye, including colours such as pink and brown which are not in the rainbow or solar spectrum. Video displays produce images in the same way, by modulating the brightness of tiny red, green and blue emitters across the whole screen.

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Did Mars hide life in its watery pockets?

Signs of the most recent life on Mars may have sprung up from underground. Because they would have been protected from harsh conditions on the surface, such as radiation, pockets of underground water may be where Martian life existed most recently.

Sulphates, made through interaction with briny water, lie all over Mars. As water underground is also briny, this suggested frequent upwellings.

But Joseph Michalski of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, and colleagues found that most basins, where groundwater would have pooled, are free of sulphates. The deep McLaughlin crater is instead rich in clays and carbonates which also formed through contact with water.

Search those basins

As water bearing these minerals would be more life-friendly than sulphate-rich water, which is more acidic, McLaughlin may be a good place to look for signs of life that pooled there from underground.

"The stuff we see in McLaughlin could have been very good at preserving life and could have been habitable," says Michalski.

He suggests that future Mars missions should search such basins for signs of habitability, such as the organic molecules that NASA's Curiosity Mars rover is currently seeking. "Perhaps we need to re-emphasise and redirect our attention to the subsurface environments," Michalski says.

Horton Newsom at the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque, who was not involved in the new work and who works on Curiosity, thinks the idea sounds reasonable. "Given the low elevation location of McLaughlin crater… it is quite reasonable that it was flooded by deep groundwater."

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