Scientific American - December 2011 UK Edition

NeuroscienceHidden Mind SwitchesAnimal BehaviorAnts and the Art of WarSpace ScienceThis Way to MarsPERENNIALDecember 2011CROPSI.D.IN YOURHANDNANOTECHANTIBIOTICS10LIQUID-FUELEDELECTRICCARSScientificAmerican.comWorldChangıngIdeasSELF -AWARECIRCUITSE-MONEYPERMANENTHEALTHMONITORSMICROBEMINERS© 2011 Scientific American

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DEPARTMENTS4 From the Editor5 Letters7 Science AgendaStop the genetic dragnet. By the Editors98 ForumWho will save humanity from killer asteroids?By Edward T. Lu9 AdvancesFeel without touch. Microwave physics. Cell circuits.Food and genes. Coffee fluidics. The arc of Steve Jobs.Brainy gifts. Speedy neutrinos. Pollen to polyester.19 The Science of HealthAn effective treatment for intestinal ailments may fallvictim to regulatory difficulties. By Maryn McKenna21 TechnoFilesThe phone turns into a looking glass. By David Pogue78 RecommendedNature’s time machine. Magical mathematics.Neurogastronomy. Our unique Earth. By Kate Wong1979 SkepticResearch on self-control explains the link betweenreligion and health. By Michael Shermer80 Anti GravityHow to prove the existence of pudding. By Steve Mirsky82 50, 100 & 150 Years Ago84 Graphic ScienceScience aficionados have odd and surprising interests.By Mark FischettiON THE WEB79Where to for NASA?In conjunction with the article in this issue by DamonLandau and Nathan J. Strange, outlining a bold new proposalfor manned interplanetary exploration, we look atwhat NASA’s future holds—and what could have been.Go to www.ScientificAmerican.com/dec2011/deep-spaceScientific American (ISSN 0036-8733), Volume 305, Number 6, December 2011, published monthly by Scientific American, a division of Nature America, Inc., 75 Varick Street, 9th Floor, New York, N.Y. 10013-1917. Periodicals postagepaid at New York, N.Y., and at additional mailing offices. Canada Post International Publications Mail (Canadian Distribution) Sales Agreement No. 40012504. Canadian BN No. 127387652RT; TVQ1218059275 TQ0001. PublicationMail Agreement #40012504. Return undeliverable mail to Scientific American, P.O. Box 819, Stn Main, Markham, ON L3P 8A2. Individual Subscription rates: 1 year $39.97 (USD), Canada $49.97 (USD), International $61 (USD).Institutional Subscription rates: Schools and Public Libraries: 1 year $72 (USD), Canada $77 (USD), International $84 (USD). Businesses and Colleges/Universities: 1 year $330 (USD), Canada $335 (USD), International $342 (USD).Postmaster: Send address changes to Scientific American, Box 3187, Harlan, Iowa 51537. Reprints available: write Reprint Department, Scientific American, 75 Varick Street, 9th Floor, New York, N.Y. 10013-1917; fax: 646-563-7138; reprints@SciAm.com. Subscription inquiries: U.S. and Canada (800) 333-1199; other (515) 248-7684. Send e-mail to sacust@sciam.com. Printed in U.S.A.Copyright © 2011 by Scientific American, a division of Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved.© 2011 Scientific AmericanDecember 2011, ScientificAmerican.com 3

Science Agenda by the EditorsOpinion and analysis from Scientific American’s Board of EditorsStop theGenetic DragnetPolice currently collect samples of DNAfrom detainees—retaining the DNA evenif a suspect turns out to be innocentIn 2009 the San Francisco police arrested Lily Haskell whenshe allegedly attempted to come to the aid of a companionwho had already been taken into custody during a peace demonstration.The authorities released her quickly, withoutpressing charges. But a little piece of Haskell remained behindin their database.Haskell is one of hundreds of thousands who have had theirDNA extracted as part of an enormous expansion of what wereonce categorized as criminal data banks. Police in about 25 statesand federal agents are now empowered to take a DNA sample afterarresting, and before charging, someone. This practice occurseven though many of those in custody are never found guilty.If they are cleared, their DNA stays downtown, and they must undergoa cumbersome procedure to clear their genetic records.Courts nationwide are now wrestling with the civil-libertiesimplications. Some have held that the practice violates the FourthAmendment protection against “unreasonable searches and seizures.”Other courts, including one that heard a legal challengebrought by Haskell, have agreed with law-enforcement officialsthat lifting DNA is no different from taking a fingerprint, an establishedroutine even for those not convicted. Ultimately the U.S.Supreme Court will probably decide this matter.The ability of DNA technologies to match a tiny sliver of tissueleft at a crime scene to a suspect gives them an undeniable allureto law enforcement. For critics, the unreasonableness of this“search” relates to the information-rich nature of DNA. It doesmore than just ID people. It also has the potential to furnish detailsabout appearance, disease risk and behavioral traits. Thelaws establishing DNA databases attempt to guard privacy bylimiting inspection to only 13 relatively short stretches of DNAamong the billions of “letters” of code that make up the genome.Yet that protection may not be enough. Once those 13 markers areextracted, law-enforcement agencies continue to store the largerbiological sample. Civil-liberties organizations worry that officialsmay eventually mine these samples for personal details ormake them available for medical research without consent.New genetic technologies are opening up possibilities thatdid not arise when the samples were first collected. For instance,a technique called familial searching can match DNA from thecrime to someone in the database who is not a suspect but possiblya close relative of one—the database hit would be a near butnot identical match to the DNA at the crime scene. The policewould then have a whole new set of potential leads who wouldcome under scrutiny as possible perps.Although this process may nab criminals who would otherwiseelude capture, it may also ensnare the innocent. Most ofthe possible leads produced by searches in partial databasematches will have done nothing wrong. These persons of interestare likely to be concentrated in minority communities whosedenizens represent a disproportionate fraction of the databases.Moreover, the seeming infallibility of DNA may prompt policeto place too much reliance on familial search methods insteadof considering nongenetic evidence that may steer an investigationtoward other leads, notes New York University School ofLaw professor Erin Murphy.The need is acute for legislative safeguards that protect privacywhile also allowing police to solve crimes using these powerfultools. DNA samples should not be taken until a suspect is convicted,and even then the original DNA sample should be destroyedonce the relevant markers are in the computer to guard againstany future temptation to delve into someone’s private life. Finally,familial searches should be undertaken only as a last resort afterother investigative leads have been tried—an approach that Californiahas adopted and that other states should follow.DNA is not just a technological progression from fingerprinting.It is qualitatively different. As such, it needs to be treated asmore than a mere formality of a police booking procedure.SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ONLINEComment on this article at ScientificAmerican.com/dec2011Illustration by Edel Rodriguez© 2011 Scientific AmericanDecember 2011, ScientificAmerican.com 7

Forum by Edward T. LuCommentary on science in the news from the expertsEdward T. Lu is a former NASA astronaut andchair of the B612 Foundation, a nonprofit groupthat is developing programs to detect anddeflect asteroids. From 2007 to 2010 he wasmanager of Advanced Projects at Google.Stop the Killer RocksThe job of saving humanity from extinction currently falls to no one.NASA and other organizations should take it onOver the past couple of years the U.S. space program has gonethrough a huge shake-up, leaving the nation’s goals in space unclear.I have a suggestion. NASA, working with other nationalspace agencies and private organizations, should take on the jobof ensuring that no destructive asteroid ever hits Earth on ourwatch. What project is more worthwhile in the long term or aweinspiringin the short term than protecting humanity from ruin?At first glance, asteroids may seem like a distant threat. Butthe hazard is well documented, and the consequences could notbe more severe. The history of life on Earth has been shaped byasteroid impacts. One million of them wider than 40 meters in diameterorbit the sun in our vicinity, by some estimates. An asteroidof that size struck Earth over Siberia in 1908 and laid waste anarea 150 times larger than the Hiroshima atomic bomb did. Theodds of a repeat in this century are about 50 percent. On the largerend, asteroids greater than about one kilometer across wouldhave global effects that threaten human civilization.The first step in prevention is prediction. We must find, trackand predict the future trajectory of those million near-Earth objects.Astronomers have already catalogued the orbits of most ofthe kilometer-scale objects they think are out there, and noneare known that will hit Earth in the next 100 years. Yet the greatmajority of smaller ones, those big enough to destroy a countryor unleash a tsunami that devastates coastal cities, remain untracked.This unfinished business should be tackled next.Asteroids are warmer than the background skyand therefore stand out in the infrared. Telescopeshave blind spots, however: they cannot look in thedirection of the sun, which limits the effectivenessof telescopes stationed on or near Earth. The NationalResearch Council recommended in 2009 thatNASA place an infrared survey spacecraft in a Venuslikeorbit around the sun. As it looked outward,away from the sun, the observatory would spot asteroidsthat go unseen from Earth. Once completed,such a survey would remain valid for about a century—thetimescale on which the measured orbits beginto change because of gravitational interactionswith planets—before we would have to do it again.The cost of such a mission would be several hundredmillion dollars—expensive, to be sure, but abargain compared with NASA’s current budget, letalone the damage of an asteroid strike.Should astronomers find an asteroid on a collisioncourse, our task would be to reach out and alterits orbit to prevent that impact. If we find the asteroid earlyenough (decades ahead of its projected impact), several existingtechnologies might work: tow it, ram it, nuke it or employ somecombination. (My colleagues and I used to advocate pushing onthe asteroid with a rocket [see “The Asteroid Tugboat,” by RussellL. Schweickart, Edward T. Lu, Piet Hut and Clark R. Chapman;Scientific American, November 2003], but recent resultson asteroid properties and orbits have made us reconsider.)Yet no one is really sure whether these options would actuallywork. Surely the time to test them is before they are neededfor real. NASA and other organizations should build and try out asystem to deflect a nonthreatening asteroid in a controllableway. Given that astronomers have not even begun a completeasteroid survey, there is a real risk they will find an incoming asteroidbefore we have time to do a dry run. So this work mustbegin now. It would not take large increases to NASA’s budget.All civilizations that inhabit planetary systems must eventuallydeal with the asteroid threat, or they will go the way of the dinosaurs.We need to predict in advance when impacts are goingto occur and, if necessary, shift the orbits of threatening asteroids.In effect, we must change the evolution of the solar system.Asteroid ErosSCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ONLINEComment on this article at ScientificAmerican.com/dec2011COURTESY OF NASA/GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER’S SCIENTIFIC VISUALIZATION STUDIO8 Scientific American, December 2011© 2011 Scientific American

ADVANCE SDispatches from the frontiers of science, technology and medicineNEUROSCIENCECan’t TouchThis FeelingPrimates can now move and sense thetextures of objects using only their thoughtsMacaquemonkeyWhen real brains operate in the real world, it’s a two-waystreet. Electrical activity in the brain’s motor cortex speedsdown the spinal cord to the part of the body to be moved;tactile sensations from the skin simultaneously zip throughthe spinal cord and into the brain’s somatosensory cortex.The two actions are virtually inseparable: absent the feel ofa floor under your feet, it’s awfully difficult to walk properly,and lacking the tactile sensation of a coffee mug, yourbrain cannot sense how tightly your fingers should grasp it.Until now, attempts to help paralyzed patients move a pros -thetic have addressed only half of our interaction with theworld. A new study offers hope of expanding that capacity.Scientists led by Miguel Nicolelis, professor of neurobiologyat Duke University Medical Center, have reported thefirst-ever demonstration in which a primate brain not onlymoved a “virtual body” (an avatar hand on a computerscreen) but also received electric signals encoding the feelof virtual objects the avatar touched—and did so clearlyenough to texturally distinguish the objects. If the technology,detailed in the journal Nature, works in people, itwould change the lives of paralyzed patients. (ScientificAmerican is part of Nature Publishing Group.) They wouldnot only be able to walk and move their arms and hands,Nicolelis says, but also to feel the texture of objects theyhold or touch and to sense the terrain they tread on.Other research groups are working on similar advances.At the University of Pittsburgh, neuroscientists led by AndrewSchwartz have begun recruiting patients paralyzed byspinal cord injury into a similar trial that would allow themto “feel” the environment around them thanks to electrodesin the somatosensory cortex that receive informationfrom a robot arm.Nicolelis hopes to bring his research to fruition by 2014,when he plans to unveil the first “wearable robot” at theopening game of soccer’s World Cup in his home country ofBrazil. Think Iron Man, a full-body, exoskeletonlike prosthetic.Its interface will be controlled by neural implantsthat capture signals from the motor cortex to move legs,hands, fingers and everything else. And it will be studdedwith sensors that relay tactile information about the outsideworld to the somatosensory cortex. Buoyed by the advancesso far, Nicolelis predicts that the device will be readyin time. “It’s our moon shot,” he says. —Sharon BegleyJANA LEON Getty Images© 2011 Scientific AmericanFURTHER READINGS AND CITATIONSScientificAmerican.com/dec2011/advances

ADVANCESASTRONOMYUniversal AlignmentCould the cosmos have a point?Galaxies may move fasterin certain directions.The universe has no centerand no edge, no special regionstucked in among the galaxiesand light. No matterwhere you look, it’s the same—or so physicists thought. Thiscosmological principle—one ofthe foundations of the modernunderstanding of the universe—hascome into questionrecently as astronomers findevidence, subtle but growing,of a special direction in space.The first and most well-establisheddata point comesfrom the cosmic microwavebackground (CMB), the socalledafterglow of the bigbang. As expected, the afterglowis not perfectly smooth—hot and cold spots speckle thesky. In recent years, however,scientists have discovered thatthese spots are not quite asrandomly distributed as theyfirst appeared—they align in apattern that points out a specialdirection in space. Cosmologistshave theatricallydubbed it the “axis of evil.”More hints of a cosmic arrowcome from studies of supernovae,stellar cataclysmsthat briefly outshine entiregalaxies. Cosmologists havebeen using supernovae to mapthe accelerating expansion ofthe universe (a feat that garneredthis year’s Nobel Prize inPhysics). Detailed statisticalstudies reveal that supernovaeare moving even faster in aline pointing just slightly offthe axis of evil. Similarly, astronomershave measured galaxyclusters streamingthrough space at a millionmiles an hour toward an areain the southern sky.What could all thismean? Perhaps nothing. “Itcould be a fluke,” says DraganHuterer, a cosmologist at theUniversity of Michigan at AnnArbor, or it could be a subtleerror that has crept into thedata (despite careful efforts).Or, Huterer says, perhaps weare seeing the first signs of“something amazing.” Theuniverse’s first burst of expansioncould have lasted a littlelonger than we thought, introducinga tilt to it that still persiststoday. Another possibilityis that at large scales, the universecould be rolled up like atube, curved in one directionand flat in the others, accordingto Glenn D. Starkman, acosmologist at Case WesternReserve University. Alternatively,the so-called dark energy—thebewildering stuff acceleratingthe universe’s expansion—mightact differentlyin different places.For now, the data remainpreliminary—subtle signs thatsomething may be wrong withour standard understanding ofthe universe. Scientists are eagerlyanticipating the datafrom the Planck satellite,which is currently measuringthe CMB from a quiet spot930,000 miles up. It will eitherconfirm earlier measurementsof the axis of evil or show themto be ephemera. Until then,the universe could be pointingus anywhere. —Michael MoyerNASA/CXC/IOA/A. FABIAN ET AL. (x-ray); NRAO/VLA/G. TAYLOR (radio); NASA/ESA/HUBBLE HERITAGE/STSCI/AURA AND A.FABIAN University of Cambridge/IoA (optical): COURTESY OF GILL PRATT Olin College (bee)PHYSIOLOGYFrom Pollento PolyesterA materials scientistexplains how her researchinto bees could help usmake sturdy recyclablecontainers in the futurePolyester bees are all over theNortheast. The interesting thingabout them is that they dig undergroundtunnels, about thewidth of your pinky finger, wherethey lay their eggs. To protecttheir larvae from heat, cold, fungus,bacteria and other dangers,the bees line these chambers witha clear, cellophanelike substance.The larvae then live undergroundfor most of their lives in these reinforcedcells.I kind of stumbled on polyester,or Colletes, bees somewhere on theInternet and eventually got samplesof their nest cells from theAmerican Museum of Natural Historyin New York City. We haven’tpublished our work yet, but wehave been looking at these cellsand trying to figure out whatthey’re made of.The bad news is that these cellsare really hard to study becausetheir job is to be hard to breakdown. We found ourselves in thiscatch-22: anything nasty enough tobreak them down was too nasty toput into our equipment and anythingwe could put into our equipmentwouldn’t break them down.But what we did show was thatit’s not just plastic. There are actuallysilk fibers that the bees lay downfirst, and the plastic is put down ontop of the fibers—like fiberglass—and that makes it really durable.We’re working with bacteriologiststo see if we can find a bacteriumthat will break down the plastic.We care about this materialfor two reasons. The official reasonis that it’s a fascinating biologicallyderived material thatisn’t biodegradable. So I don’tknow if you ever do this, but I occasionallyforget about spaghettiin the back of my fridge. You windup with a sealed plastic containerthat has decomposing stuff inside.You don’t want your container toalso be part of the decomposingstuff, but we also don’t want tokeep filling our landfills with containers.This could be a materialthat’s robust under normal circumstancesbut can be brokendown and reused.The second reason I careabout this is that it’s emblematicof the fact that there’s an enormousamount we don’t knowabout the world around us. ItPROFILEnameDebbie ChachratitleAssociate professor ofmaterials science, Franklin W.Olin College of EngineeringlocationNeedham, Mass.Colletes beemakes me wonder how manyother things there are like this. —As told to Rose Eveleth© 2011 Scientific AmericanDecember 2011, ScientificAmerican.com 11

BUSSE YANKUSHEV Alamy (rice); ANTHONY BRADSHAW Getty Images (coffee)PHYSIOLOGYVitamins, Mineralsand MicroRNAThe food we eat may control our genes“You are what you eat.” Theold adage has for decadesweighed on the minds of consumerswho fret over responsiblefood choices. Yet what ifit was literally true? What ifmaterial from our food actuallymade its way into the innermostcontrol centers of ourcells, taking charge of fundamentalgene expression?That is in fact what happens,according to a recentstudy of plant-animal micro-RNA transfer led by Chen-YuZhang of Nanjing University inChina. MicroRNAs are short sequencesof nucleotides—thebuilding blocks of genetic material.Although microRNAs donot code for proteins, they preventspecific genes from givingrise to the proteins they encode.Blood samples from 21volunteers were tested for thepresence of microRNAs fromcrop plants, such as rice, wheat,potatoes and cabbage.The results, published inthe journal Cell Research,showed that the subjects’bloodstream contained approximately30 differentmicroRNAs from commonlyeaten plants. It appears thatthey can also alter cell function:a specific rice microRNAwas shown to bind to and inhibitthe activity of receptorscontrolling the removal ofLDL—“bad” cholesterol—fromthe bloodstream. Like vitaminsand minerals, microRNAmay represent a previously unrecognizedtype of functionalmolecule obtained from food.The revelation that plantmicroRNAs play a role in controllinghuman physiologyhighlights the fact that ourbodies are highly integratedecosystems. Zhang says thefindings may also illuminateour understanding of co-evolution,a process in which geneticchanges in one speciestrigger changes in another.For example, our ability to digestthe lactose in milk afterinfancy arose after we domesticatedcattle. Could the plantswe cultivated have altered usas well? Zhang’s study is anotherreminder that nothingin nature exists in isolation.—Anne-Marie C. HodgePHYSICSFluid Dynamics in a CupScientists puzzle out when and why coffee spillsAt a recent math conference, Rouslan Krechetnikov watched his colleaguesgingerly carry cups of coffee. Why, he wondered, did the coffeesometimes spill and sometimes not? A research project was born.Although the problem of why coffee spills might seem trivial, it actuallybrings together a variety of fundamental scientific issues. These includefluid mechanics, the stability of fluid surfaces, interactions between fluidsand structures, and the complex biology of walking, explains Krechetnikov,a fluid dynamicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.In experiments, he and a graduate student monitored high-speed videoof the complex motions of coffee-filled cups people carried, investigatingthe effects of walking speed and variability among those individuals.Using a frame-by-frame analysis, the researchers found that after peoplereached their desired walking speed, motions of the cup consisted of large,regular oscillations caused by walking, as well as smaller, irregular andmore frequent motions caused by fluctuations from stride to stride, andenvironmental factors such as uneven floors and distractions.Coffee spilling depends in large part on the natural oscillation frequencyof the beverage—that is, the rate at which it prefers to oscillate, much asevery pendulum swings at a precise frequency given its length and thegravitational pull it experiences. When the frequency of the large, regularmotions that a cuppa joe experiences is comparable to this natural oscillationfrequency, a state of resonance develops: the oscillations reinforce oneanother, much as pushing on a playground swing at the right point makes itgo higher and higher, and the chances of coffee sloshing its way over theedge rise. The small, irregular movements a cup sees can also amplify liquidmotion and thus spilling. These findings were to be detailed at a Novembermeeting of the American Physical Society in Baltimore.Once the key relations between coffee motion and human behavior areunderstood, it might be possible to develop strategies to control spilling,“such as using a flexible container to act as a sloshing absorber,” Krechetnikovsays. A series of rings arranged up and down the inner wall of a containermight also impede the liquid oscillations. —Charles Q. Choi© 2011 Scientific AmericanDecember 2011, ScientificAmerican.com 13

ADVANCESMILESTONEFreedom FighterWhich side was Steve Jobs on?In 1977, 22-year-old Steve Jobsintroduced the world to one ofthe first self-contained personalcomputers, the Apple II. Themachine was a bold departurefrom previous products built toperform specific tasks: turn iton, and there was only a blinkingcursor awaiting further instruction.Some owners wereinspired to program the machinesthemselves, but otherscould load up software writtenand shared or sold by othersmore skilled or inspired.Later, when Apple’s earlylead in the industry gave wayto IBM, Jobs and companyfought back with the now classicSuper Bowl advertisementpromising a break from the allegedOrwellian ubiquity of BigBlue. “Unless Apple does it, noone will be able to innovate exceptIBM,” said Jobs’s handpickedCEO John Sculley.In 1984 Jobs delivered theMacintosh. The blinking cursorwas gone. Unlike prior PCs,the Mac was useful even withoutadding software. Turn iton, and the first thing it did,literally, was smile.Under this friendly exterior,the Mac retained the essenceof the Apple II and the IBMPCs: outside developers couldwrite software and share it directlywith users.The rise of the Internetbrought a new dimension tothis openness. Users could runnew code within seconds ofencountering it online. Thiswas deeply empowering butalso profoundly dangerous.The cacophony of availablecode began to include virusesand spyware that can ruin aPC—or make the experience ofusing one so miserable that alternativesseem attractive.Jobs’s third big new productintroduction came 30 yearsafter his first. It paid homageto both fashion and fear. TheiPhone, unveiled in 2007, didfor mobile phones what theMac did for PCs and the iPoddid for MP3 players, setting anew standard for ease of use,elegance and cool. But theiPhone dropped the fundamentalfeature of openness.Outsiders could not programit. “We define everything thatis on the phone,” Jobs said.“You don’t want your phone tobe like a PC. The last thing youwant is to have loaded threeapps on your phone, and thenyou go to make a call and itdoesn’t work anymore.”Being closed to outsidersmade the iPhone reliable andpredictable. In that first yearthose who dared hack thephone to add features or tomake it compatible with providersother than AT&T riskedhaving it “bricked”—completelyand permanently disabled—on the next automatic updatefrom Apple. It was a far cryfrom the Apple II’s ethos, andit raised objections.Jobs answered his criticswith the App Store in 2008.Outside coders were welcomedback, and thousands of appsfollowed. But new software hasto go through Apple, whichtakes a 30 percent cut, alongwith 30 percent of new contentsales such as magazine subscriptions.Apple reserves theright to kill any app or con -tent it doesn’t like. No moresurprises.As goes the iPhone, so perhapsgoes the world. The nerdsof today are coding for cool buttethered gizmos, like theiPhone, and Web 2.0 platforms,like Facebook and GoogleApps—attractive all, but controlledby their makers in away even the famously proprietaryBill Gates never achievedwith Windows. Thanks toiCloud and other services, thechoice of a phone or tablet todaymay lock a consumer intoa branded silo, making it hardfor him or her to do what Applelong importuned potentialcustomers to do: switch.Such walled gardens caneliminate what we now takefor granted and what Jobsoriginally represented: a worldin which mainstream technologycan be influenced, evenrevolutionized, out of left fieldand without intermediation.Today control increasinglyrests with the legislators andjudges who discipline platformmakers. Enterprising law-enforcementofficers with a warrantcan flick a distant switchand turn a standard mobilephone into a roving mic oreavesdrop on occupants of carsequipped with travel assistancesystems. These opportunitiesare arising not only inplaces under the rule of lawbut also in authoritarian states.Curtailing abuse will requireborrowing and adaptingsome of the tools of the hidebound,consumer-centric culturethat many who love theInternet seek to supplant. Afree Net may depend on somewisely developed and implementedlocks and a communityethos that secures the keysto those locks among groupswith shared norms and a senseof public purpose rather thanin the hands of one gatekeeper.In time, the brand namesmay change; Android maytighten up its control of outsidecode, and Apple couldease up a little. Yet the corebattle between the freedom ofopenness and the safety of thewalled garden will remain. Itwill be fought through informationappliances that are notjust products but also services,updated through a network bythe constant dictates of theirmakers. Jobs, it seems, left hismark on both sides on the tugof-warover Internet openness.—Jonathan ZittrainJIM WILSON Redux Pictures14 Scientific American, December 2011© 2011 Scientific AmericanCOMMENT ATScientificAmerican.com/dec2011

Courtesy COURTESY OF of ACU ACu ÑA ÑA FOTOGRAFÍA fotogrAfÍA AND And GIJÓN gijÓn AQUARIUMAquAriumWhat WHAT Is IS It? IT?Attack of the jellyfish: As predators, jellyfish appear to be slow and passive. Unable to swim to and chase their prey, most drift along, creating tiny eddies to guide food towardtheir tendrils. Yet in waters from the Sea of Japan to the Black Sea, jellyfish, like those pictured here, are thriving as many of their competitors are eliminated by overfishing and otherhuman impacts. How have these drifters reversed millions of years of fish dominance, seemingly overnight? Writing in the journal Science, biologist José Luis Acuña of the University ofOviedo in Spain and his colleagues suggest that jellyfish are just as effective at catching prey and turning it into energy as fishes. In fact, they have set the stage for a takeover—dubbedthe “gelatinous ocean” by some scientists. “We need research to be sure of what new ecological scenarios are arising,” Acuña says. “It is time to take [jellyfish] seriously.” —David BielloPublishing the latest inscience and technologyfor more than 165 yearsA site license provides online access toScientifi c American, Scientifi c American Mindand Special IssuesRecommend site license access to your library today:www.nature.com/libraries/scientificamericanTM Scientifi c American, Inc.© 2011 Scientific AmericanDecember 2011, ScientificAmerican.com 15

more open-ended because the connector densityis higher.”9 SHARK IN A JAR—SQUALUS ACANTHIAS$29 at theevolutionstore.comThis real baby shark taken from an adult caughtby a commercial fisher “offers a launching pointfor discussions about the differences betweensharks and bony fish, the diverse ways sharksbear their young, and the importance of conservationfor threatened shark species,” N.Y.U.’s Kirshenbaumsays.10 SCIENCE KITSFROM THAMES & KOSMOSFrom $13.95 at thamesandkosmos.com; ages 5 and upChristof Koch, a professor of cognitive and behavioralbiology at the California Institute ofTechnology, grew up playing with these designersets, many made by a 189-year-old German company.“These days kids see computer simulationsand watch YouTube but don’t do that much withtheir own hands anymore,” he says. More than60 different kits are available for various agesand specialties—from chemistry and biology toenergy and forensics.11 NON-STOP TOP WITHBUILT-IN LIGHT SHOW$14.99 at amazon.comThis battery-powered top has a motor with an eccentricweight inside that keeps it spinning until thebattery runs out. Matt Moses, who just earned hisPh.D. in mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins,asks these questions when showing it to students:“1. Would the top work if you spun it on a frictionlesssurface?“2. Suppose you were in orbit inside the InternationalSpace Station. If you spun it in midair,would it still work?“3. If the weight inside were not eccentric—thatis, if it were perfectly balanced on the motor—would the top still work?“4. Does the weight spin in the same direction thetop is spinning in or in the opposite direction?”12 GIANT MICROBESFrom $8.95 at giantmicrobes.comThese fuzzy replicas of human cells, virusesand bacteria include the common cold(rhinovirus), neurons, and red and white bloodcells. “The large size and kid-friendly plush helpstudents visualize microscopic structures,”says Emory’s Shepard.RYAN MATTHEW SMITH Modernist Cuisine LLCFOODMicrowaves andthe Speed of LightNew physics tricks for themost underestimated ofkitchen appliancesYou can find a microwave oven innearly any American kitchen—indeed, itis the one truly modern cooking toolthat is commonly at hand—yet theseversatile gadgets are woefully underestimated.Few see any culinary action more sophisticatedthan reheating leftovers or popping popcorn.That is a shame because a microwave oven,when used properly, can cook certain kinds offood perfectly, every time. You can even use it tocalculate a fundamental physical constant ofthe universe. Try that with a gas burner.To get the most out of your microwave, ithelps to understand that it cooks with lightwaves, much like a grill does, except that thelight waves are almost five inches (12.2 centimeters)from peak to peak—a good bit longer inwavelength than the infrared rays that coals putout. The microwaves are tuned to a frequency(2.45 gigahertz, usually) to which molecules ofwater and, to a lesser extent, fat resonate.The water and oil in the exterior inch or soof food soaks up the microwave energy andturns it into heat; the surrounding air, dishesand walls of the oven do not. The rays do notpenetrate far, so trying to cook a whole roastin a microwave is a recipe for disaster. But athin fish is another story. The cooks in our researchkitchen found a fantastic way to maketilapia in the microwave. Sprinkle some slicedscallions and ginger, with a splash of rice wine,over a whole fish, cover it tightly with plasticwrap and microwave it for six minutes at apower of 600 watts. (Finish it off with a drizzleof hot peanut oil, soy sauce and sesame oil.)The cooking at 600 W is what throwsSUSPECT SCIENCEmany chefs. To heat at a given wattage, checkthe power rating on the back of the oven (800W is typical) and then multiply that figure bythe power setting (which is given either as apercentage or in numbers from one to 10 representing10 percent steps). A 1,000-W oven,for example, produces 600 W at a power settingof 60 percent (or “6”). To “fry” parsleybrushed with oil, cook it at 600 W for aboutfour minutes. To dry strips of marinated beefinto jerky, cook at 400 W for five minutes, flippingthe strips once a minute.If you are up for slightly more math, youcan perform a kitchen experiment that AlbertEinstein would have loved: prove that light reallydoes zip along at almost 300 million metersper second. Cover a cardboard disk from afrozen pizza with slices of Velveeta and microwaveit at low power until several meltedspots appear. (You don’t want it rotating, so ifyour oven has a carousel, prop the cardboardabove it.) Measure the distance (in meters) betweenthe centers of the spots. That distance ishalf the wavelength of the light, so if you doubleit and multiply by 2.45 billion (the frequencyin cycles per second), the result is the velocityof the rays bouncing about in your oven.—W. Wayt Gibbs and Nathan MyhrvoldMyhrvold is author and Gibbs is editor ofModernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking(The Cooking Lab, 2011).“The subjects’ brains responded to the sound oftheir phones as they would respond to thepresence ... of a ... family member.”—From an October op-ed piece in the New York Times describing a brain-imagingstudy purporting to show that iPhone users “loved” their phones. The Times later publisheda letter signed by 45 neuroscientists explaining that “there is rarely a one-to-onemapping between any brain region and a single mental state.”Do you have a recent suspect science statement to submit? E-mail it, along with source material, to submit@sciam.com© 2011 Scientific AmericanDecember 2011, ScientificAmerican.com 17

ADVANCESBest of the BlogsPHYSICSWhy Neutrinos Might Wimp OutParticles that go beyond light speed? Not so fast, many theoretical physicists sayIn case you missed the news, ateam of physicists reported inSeptember that the tiny subatomicparticles known as neutrinoscould violate the cosmicspeed limit set by Einstein’s specialtheory of relativity. The researchers,working on an experimentcalled OPERA, beamedneutrinos through the earth’scrust, from CERN, the laboratoryfor particle physics near Geneva,to Gran Sasso National Laboratoryin L’Aquila, Italy, an undergroundphysics lab. According tothe scientists’ estimates, the neutrinosarrived at their destinationaround 60 nanoseconds quickerthan the speed of light.Experts urged caution, especiallybecause an earlier measurementof neutrino velocity had indicated,to high precision and accuracy,that neutrinos do respectthe cosmic speed limit. In a tersepaper posted online on September29, Andrew Cohen and SheldonGlashow of Boston Universitycalculated that any neutrinos travelingfaster than light would loseenergy after emitting, and leavingbehind, a trail of slower particlesthat would be absorbed by theearth’s crust. This trace would beanalogous to a sonic boom leftbehind by a supersonic fighter jet.Yet the neutrinos detectedat Gran Sasso were just as energeticas when they left Switzerland,Cohen and Glashow pointout, casting doubt on the veracityof the speed measurements.“When all particles have thesame maximal attainable velocity,it is not possible for one particleto lose energy by emittinganother,” Cohen explains. “Butif the maximal velocities of theparticles involved are not allthe same,” then it can happen.An effect of this type is wellknown in cases where electronshave the higher speed limit (lightspeed), and light itself has thelower one because it is sloweddown by traveling in a medium,such as water or air. Electrons,then, can move in the medium ata speed higher than the maximumspeed of photons in thesame medium and can lose energyby emitting photons. Thistransfer of energy between particleswith different speed limits isBEHAVIORYawn ofthe TortoiseSleepiness and boredomaren’t always contagiousThe following post is from a series about theannual Ig Nobel Prizes in science, whichhonor “achievements that first make peoplelaugh and then make them think.” They wereawarded in September in Cambridge, Mass.called Cherenkov radiation, and itmakes the reactor pools of nuclearpower stations glow with abluish light.In the neutrinos’ case, Cohenand Glashow calculate that thewake would mostly consist ofelectrons paired with their antimattertwins, positrons. Crucially,the rate of production of theseelectron-positron pairs is suchthat a typical superluminal neutrinoemitted at CERN wouldlose most of its energy beforereaching Gran Sasso. Thenagain, perhaps they were not superluminalto begin with.“I think this seals the case,”says Lawrence M. Krauss, a theoreticalphysicist at Arizona StateUniversity. “It is a very good paper.”So was Albert Einstein rightafter all? Einstein’s relativity supersededIsaac Newton’s physics,and physicists will no doubt keeptrying to find glitches in Einstein’stheories, too. “We never stop testingour ideas,” Cohen says. “Eventhose that have been establishedwell.” —Davide CastelvecchiNow we come to the Ig Nobel Physiology Prize. Yawns are notoriously contagious in humans and in other social animals,especially primates. In humans, yawning has been thought to do various things, including cooling the brain, increasingarousal when you’re sleepy and, possibly, helping to synchronize group behavior.Could yawning be a form of unconscious empathy? This would mean that in order to have a contagious yawn, the animalsinvolved would have to be capable of empathy, of fellow feeling. We know that dogs and primates, and humans,probably are, but that means we can’t really test for whether it’s empathy or not. We need a species that is social but probablycan’t feel for its compatriots.That’s where tortoises come in. To test whether yawning requires empathy and thus get at the real purpose thatyawning might serve, Anna Wilkinson of the University of Lincoln in England and her colleagues took a group of redfootedtortoises that lived together and trained one of them to yawn when exposed to a red square. Then they had tortoiseswatch the trained tortoise in action and checked them for yawns. The researchers also checked for yawns when no othertortoise was present and when the trained tortoise had no red square and so wasn’t yawning.What they got was a big, fat negative. The test tortoises showed no notice of the other animals’ huge yawns. This maymean that contagious yawning is not just the result of a fixed-action pattern triggered when you see someone else yawn.If that were the case, the tortoises would have yawned right along with their compatriots. Contagious social yawning mayrequire something more, a social sense or a sense of empathy resulting from complex social interactions. Of course, itcould also mean that tortoises are just a really bad choice for contagious yawning. But the social explanation seems a littlemore supported. —From the Scicurious Brain at http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/scicurious-brainPAUL A. SOUDERS Corbis18 Scientific American, December 2011 COMMENT AT ScientificAmerican.com/dec2011© 2011 Scientific American

The Science of Healthseveral others have drafted a trial design to submit to the NationalInstitutes of Health for grant funding. Yet an unexpected obstaclestands in their way: before the NIH approves any trial, thesubstance being studied must be granted “investigational” statusby the Food and Drug Administration. The main categories underwhich the FDA considers things to be investigated are drugs,devices, and biological products such as vaccines and tissues. Fecessimply do not fit into any of those categories.The physicians performing the transplants decry the regulatorybottleneck because new treatments for C. difficile infectionare critically needed. C. diff, to use the common medical shorthand,has risen in the past 30 years from a recognized but toleratedconsequence of antibiotic treatment to a serious health threat.Since 2000, when a virulent new strain emerged, cases have becomemuch more common, occurring not only in the elderly butin children, pregnant women and people with no obvious healthrisks. One study estimated that the number of hospitalized adultswith C. diff more than doubled from about 134,000 patients in2000 to 291,000 patients in 2005. A second study showed that theoverall death rate from C. diff had jumped fourfold, from 5.7deaths per million in the general population in 1999 to 23.7deaths per million in 2004.C. diff has also become harder to cure. Thanks to increasingantibiotic resistance, standard treatment now relies on twodrugs: metronidazole (Flagyl) and vancomycin. Both medicationsare so-called broad-spectrum antibiotics, meaning that they workagainst a wide variety of bacteria. Thus, when they are given tokill C. diff infection, they kill most of the gut’s friendly bacteria aswell. The living space that those bacteria once occupied then becomesavailable for any C. diff organisms that survive the drugs’attack. As a result, roughly 20 percent of patients who have hadone episode of C. diff infection will have a recurrence; 40 percentof those with one recurrence will have another; and 60 percent ofthose who experience a second bout are likely to suffer severalmore. Some victims with no other options must have their colonremoved. (A new drug, fidaxomicin, which was approved for C.diff infection by the FDA in late May, may lead to fewer relapsesbecause it is a narrow-spectrum antibiotic.)A SIMPLE PROCEDUREThe details of how the transplantation of microbes eliminatesC. diff infection have not been well studied, but Alex Khoruts, agastroenterologist and immunologist at the University of Minnesotawho has performed two dozen fecal transplants over thepast two years, has demonstrated that the transplanted bacteriado take over the gut, replacing the absent friendly bacteria andoutcompeting C. diff. In 2010 he analyzed the genetic makeup ofthe gut flora of a 61-year-old woman so disabled by recurrent C.diff that she was wearing diapers and was confined to a wheelchair.His results showed that before the procedure, in whichthe woman received a fecal sample from her husband, she harborednone of the bacteria whose presence would signal ahealthy intestinal environment. After the transplant—and hercomplete recovery—the bacterial contents of her gut were notonly normal but were identical to that of her husband.Most clinicians who perform fecal transplants ask their patientsto find their own donors and prefer that they be a child, sibling,parent or spouse. “For me, it’s aesthetic,” says Christina Surawicz,a professor of medicine at the University of Washington,who has done transplants on two dozen patients and publishedan account of the first 19. “There’s something very intimate aboutputting someone else’s stool in your colon, and you are already intimatewith a spouse.”To ensure safety, the physicians performing the procedure requirethat donors have no digestive diseases and put themthrough the same level of screening that blood donation wouldrequire. That process imposes a cost in time and logistics becausestandard rules for medical confidentiality require a donorto be interviewed separately from the potential recipient. It alsocarries inherent financial penalties. The donor’s lab work mostlikely will not be covered by insurance; the transplant proceduremay or may not be covered by the patient’s insurance.Proponents have come up with work-arounds for those possiblebarriers. Khoruts no longer uses related donors—which requiresfinding a different individual for every case—but insteadhas recruited a cadre of “universal donors” from among localhealth care workers. (He has seen no change in how often thetransplants “take.”) Last year Michael Silverman of the Universityof Toronto boldly proposed a yet more streamlined solution:having patients perform the transplants at home with a drugstoreenema kit. A drawback, he cautioned in Clinical Gastroenterologyand Hepatology, is that too much of the stool solutionmight leak out for the transplant to take. Nevertheless, seven patientswith recurrent C. diff have safely performed the home version,he wrote, with a 100 percent recovery rate.NEXT STEPSEven without large-scale rigorous investigations of fecal transplants,the medical community appears to be coming around tothe practice. The Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology editorializedin September 2010 that “it is clear from all of these reportsthat fecal bacteriotherapy using donor stool has arrived as a successfultherapy.” Albert Einstein’s Brandt recently suggested inthe same journal that fecal transplants should be the first treatmenttried for serious C. diff infection rather than a last resort.Increasing research interest in the influence of gut flora on therest of the body—and on conditions as varied as obesity, anxietyand depression—will likely bring pressure for transplants to beadopted more widely.Currently three clinical trials of fecal transplants have begunin Canada. In the U.S., however, the research logjam persists. AnFDA spokesperson said in an interview that there is no way to determinehow the agency might rule on an investigational applicationuntil the application is brought. That tosses the initiativeback to Kelly and her collaborators, who include Khoruts andBrandt. They hope to file with the FDA before much longer, butKelly admits to being apprehensive over the possible outcome.“We hope they will not ask things that we cannot answer,” shesays. Medical centers need to be able to study the procedure, Kellyargues, “because people are trying it on their own.”SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ONLINEComment on this article at ScientificAmerican.com/dec201120 Scientific American, December 2011© 2011 Scientific American

TechnoFiles by David PogueDavid Pogue is the personal-technology columnistfor the New York Times and an Emmy Award–winningcorrespondent for CBS News.How to See the InvisibleAugumented-reality apps uncover the hidden reality all around youEverybody’s amazed by touch-screen phones. They’re so thin,so powerful, so beautiful!But this revolution is just getting under way. Can youimagine what these phones will be like in 20 years? Today’siPhones and Android phones will seem like the Commodore64. “Why, when I was your age,” we’ll tell our grandchildren,“phones were a third of an inch thick!”Then there are the apps. Right now we’re all delighted todo simple things on our phones, like watch videos and playgames. But the ingredients in the modern app phone—camera,GPS, compass, accelerometer, gyroscope, Internet connection—makeit the perfect device for the next wave of software.Get ready for augmented reality (AR).That term usually refers toa live-camera view with superimposedinformational graphics.The phone becomes amagic looking glass, identifyingphysical objects in theworld around you.If you’re color-blind likeme, then apps like Say Color or Color ID represent a classic exampleof what augmented reality can do. You hold up thephone to a piece of clothing or a paint swatch—and it tells youby name what color the object is, like dark green or vivid red.You’ve gone to your last party wearing mismatched clothes.Other apps change what you see. When a reader sent me alink to a YouTube video promoting Word Lens, I wrote back,“Ha-ha, very funny.” It looked so magical, I thought it was fake.But it’s not. You point the iPhone’s camera at a sign or headlinein Spanish. The app magically replaces the original textwith an English translation, right there in the video image, inreal time—same angle, color, background material, lighting.Somehow the app erases the original text and replaces it withnew lettering. (There’s an English-to-Spanish mode, too.)Some of the most promising AR apps are meant to helpyou when you’re out and about. Apps like New York NearestSubway and Metro AR let you look down at the ground andsee colorful arrows that show you which subway lines are underneathyour feet. Raise the phone perpendicular to theground, and you’ll see signs for the subway stations—how faraway they are and which subway lines they serve.When you’re in a big city, apps like Layar and Wikitudelet you peer through the phone at the world around you.They overlay icons for information of your choice: real estatelistings, ATM locations, places with Wikipedia entries,public works of art, and so on. Layar boasts thousands ofsuch overlays.There are AR apps that show you where the hazards are ongolf courses (Golfscape GPS Rangefinder), where you parkedyour car (Augmented Car Finder), who’s using Twitter in thebuildings around you (Tweet360), what houses are for salenear you and for how much (ZipRealty Real Estate), how goodand how expensive a restaurant is before you even go inside(Yelp), the names of the stars and constellations over yourhead (Star Walk, Star Chart), the names and details of themountains in front of you (Panoramascope, Peaks), whatcrimes have recently beencommitted in the neighborhoodsaround you (Spot-The phone becomesA MAGIC LOOKING GLASS, IDENTIFYING Crime), and dozens more.physical objects in the world around you.Several of these apps arenot, ahem, paragons of softwarestability. And many, likeLayar, are pointless outside ofbig cities because there aren’t enough data points to overlay.As much fun as they are to use, AR apps mean walkingthrough your environment with your eyes on your phone,held at arm’s length—a posture with unfortunate implicationsfor social interaction, serendipitous discovery and avoidingbus traffic.Furthermore, there’s already been much bemoaning of oursociety’s decreasing reliance on memory; in the age of Google,nobody needs to learn the presidents, the state capitals or theperiodic table. AR apps are only going to make things worse.Next thing you know, AR apps will identify our friends usingfacial recognition. Can’t you just see it? You’ll be at a party,and someone will come up to you and say, “Hey, how are you —”(consulting the phone) “—David?”But every new technology has its rough edges, and somehowwe muddle through. Someday we will boggle our grandchildren’sminds with tales of life before AR—if we can remembertheir names.SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ONLINEAugmented-reality apps that don’t exist but should:ScientificAmerican.com/dec2011/pogue© 2011 Scientific AmericanDecember 2011, ScientificAmerican.com 21

22 Scientific American, December 2011© 2011 Scientific American

TECHNOLOGY SPECIAL REPORTWorldChangıngIdeas10 new technologies that will make a differenceRevolutions often spring from the simplest of ideas. When a young inventornamed Steve Jobs wanted to provide computing power to “people who haveno computer experience and don’t particularly care to gain any,” he usheredus from the cumbersome technology of mainframes and command-lineprompts to the breezy advances of the Macintosh and iPhone. His ideahelped to forever change our relationship with technology.What other simple but revolutionary ideas are out there in the labs, waitingfor the right moment to make it big? We have found 10, and in the followingpages we explain what they are and how they might shake thingsup: Computers that work like minds. Batteries you can top off at the pump.A crystal ball made from data (the focus of a feature on page 32). Considerthis collection our salute to the power of a simple idea. —The EditorsPhotographs by Dan Saelinger© 2011 Scientific AmericanDecember 2011, ScientificAmerican.com 23

MEDICINEThe ForeverHealth MonitorYour smartphone can monitor your vital signs in real time,alerting you to the first sign of troublemost people head to their doctors if they have chest painor a suspicious lump, but signs like these often appeartoo late. Catching symptoms earlier requires ongoingmonitoring—the kind of thing a cell phone might do.Health-scanning systems that exploit the continuousflow of data from cell phones could help eliminate theperilous lag time between the onset of symptoms and diagnosis.Mobile devices could alsohelp care providers identify andtreat problems before they becometoo serious—and too expensive—toaddress effectively. In theory, suchalways-on warning systems couldslash the 75 percent of health carespending used for chronic diseasemanagement and extend life spansby staving off millions of potentialhealth crises.The mobile marketplace is gluttedwith health apps that are littlemore than gimmicks, but a few standout systems promiseto help users manage chronic conditions or identify redflagsymptoms. AliveCor’s iPhone ECG, a plastic phonecase that is slated for U.S. Food and Drug Administrationapproval in early 2012, has two metal electrodes on theback of the case that record heart rhythms whenever usershold the device in both hands or press it against theirchest. This real-time electrocardiography (ECG) data canbe beamed wirelessly to patients, family members anddoctors, alerting them to any heart rhythm irregularities.“It doesn’t just give people an early warning but also givesit without the cost associated with conventional ECGtools,” says the device’s developer, biomedical engineer DavidAlbert. Similarly, French company Withings has developeda blood pressure–monitoring device that works withthe iPhone. After users don the sleek white cuff, a readingpops up on the phone’s screen within 30 seconds; if thereading is abnormal, a warning also appears. And Well-Doc’s FDA-approved diabetes application, DiabetesManager,allows patients to enter a variety of real-time datainto their phones, such as blood glucose levels, carbohydratesconsumed and diabetes medicines taken. The softwareanalyzes all these factors and supplies patients with arecommended action to keep sugar levels in a healthyrange (take insulin, eat something). A trial published inSeptember showed that DiabetesManager users have significantlybetter long-term glucose control than nonusers.24 Scientific American, December 2011Beats to go: AliveCor’siPhone ECG systemmonitors heart rhythms.So far the new systems are largely disjointed from oneanother, and many remain in development. Yet wirelesshealth experts say they represent the beginning of an erawhen mobile health-monitoring systems will work seamlesslyand in concert, giving consumers and their doctorsa comprehensive, data-fueled picture of their overallhealth. “It’s technically possible to press a button [on yourphone] and say, ‘I want to look at myvital signs in real time,’” says EricTopol, director of the Scripps TranslationalScience Institute.The big roadblock is sensor technology.Traditional blood glucosemonitors must pierce the skin towork, and few people want to weara blood pressure cuff or a taped-onelectrode everywhere they go. Butmore convenient alternatives are imminent.Scientists in Japan recentlycreated injectable fluorescent fibersthat monitor blood glucose. Topol says a future array ofnano particle-based sensors that interface with smartphonescould achieve more reliable monitoring for vitalsigns and, most enticingly, earlier detection of diseasemarkers such as antibodies. Sensors that can detect socalledtumor markers, for instance, could send immediatealerts to mobile devices, giving patients the option to startpreventive che mo therapy before cancerous cells can getentrenched. Moreover, the simpler mobile health monitoringbecomes, the more likely consumers will be to signup. A 2010 survey found that 40 percent of Americanswould pay a monthly subscription fee for a mobile devicethat would send blood pressure, blood glucose or heartrate data to their doctors.Paul Sonnier, a vice president at the Wireless-Life SciencesAlliance, points out that resolving health issues earlyon will be even easier when mobile health monitoring is integratedwith genetic analysis. If a patient has a gene thatpredisposes her to diabetes or cancer early in life, for example,she could potentially wear an unobtrusive sensor thatsends word of any unusual developments to her phone.“You’d have an embedded nanosensor to be ahead of thefirst attack on the islet cells of the pancreas, the first cancerouscell that shows up,” Topol says. Should mobile healthmonitoringsystems reach their potential, they will serve asever present sentinels that protect people before they knowthey’re in danger. —Elizabeth Svoboda© 2011 Scientific AmericanPROP STYLING BY LAURIE RAAB, FOR HALLEY RESOURCES; BRAIN CHIP MODEL: MAKOTO AOKI Swell NYC; GROOMING AND SPECIAL EFFECTS: JANE CHOI Stockland Martel;COURTESY OF ALIVECOR (iPhone)

COMPUTINGA ChipThat ThinksLike a BrainNeural computers will excelat all the tasks that makeregular machines chokeDHARMENDRA S. MODHA is probably theonly microchip architect on the planet whoseteam includes a psychiatrist—and it’s not forkeeping his engineers sane. Rather his collaborators, aconsortium of five universities and as many IBM labs,are working on a microchip modeled after neurons.They call their research “cognitive computing,”and its first products, two microchips each made of256 artificial neurons, were unveiled in August. Rightnow all they can do is beat visitors at Pong or navigatea simple maze. The ultimate goal, though, isambitious: to put the neural computing power of thehuman brain in a small package of silicon. The program,SyNAPSE, which is funded by the U.S. DefenseAdvanced Research Projects Agency, is building amicroprocessor with 10 billion neurons and 100 trillionsynapses, roughly equivalent in scale to onehemisphere of the human brain. They expect it to beno bigger than two liters in volume and to consumeas much electricity as 10 100-watt lightbulbs.Despite appearances, Modha insists he is nottrying to create a brain. Instead his team is trying tocreate an alternative to the architecture common tonearly every computer constructed since its invention.Ordinary chips must pass instructions and datathrough a single, narrow channel, which limits theirtop speed. In Modha’s alternative, each artificial neuronwill have its own channel, baking in massivelyparallel processing capabilities from the beginning.“What we are building is a universal substrate, aplatform technology, which can serve as the basis fora wide array of applications,” Modha says.If successful, this approach would be the culminationof 30 years of work on simulated neural networks,says Don Edwards, a neuroscientist at GeorgiaState University. Even IBM’s competitors are impressed.“Neuromorphic processing offers thepotential for solving problems that are difficult—some would say impossible—to address throughconventional system designs,” says Barry Bolding,vice president of Cray, headquartered in Seattle.Modha emphasizes that cognitive-computing architectureswill not replace conventional computers butcomplement them, preprocessing information fromthe noisy real world and transforming it into symbolsthat conventional computers are comfortable with.For example, Modha’s chips would excel at patternrecognition, like picking a face out of acrowd, then sending the person’s identity toa conventional computer.If it all sounds a little too much like therise of the machines, perhaps it is smallcomfort that these chips would be bad atmathematics. “Just like a brain is inefficientto represent on today’s computers, the veryfast addition and subtraction that conventionalcomputers are good at is very inefficienton a brainlike network. Neither can replace theother,” Modha says. —Christopher Mims© 2011 Scientific AmericanDecember 2011, ScientificAmerican.com 25

MONEYThe Walletin Your SkinForget cell-phone paymentsystems—just wave your handto charge itWHEN STUDENTS in Pinellas Countyschools fill up their lunch trays in thecafeteria and walk over to the cash registers,they just wave their hands andmove on to have lunch with theirfriends. Schools in this Florida county have installed squareinchsensors at the registers that identify each student bythe pattern of veins in his or her palm. Buying lunch involvesno cards or cash. Their hands are the only wallets they need.The Fujitsu PalmSecure system they are using allowsthese young people to get through the line quickly—waittimes have been cut in half since the program started—animportant consideration in a school where lunch is only 30minutes long. The same technology is used by CarolinasHealthcare System, an organization that operates more than30 hospitals, to identify 1.8 million patients, whether or notthey are conscious. It is also used as additional authenticationfor transactions at Japan’s Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ.Many physical characteristics can allow a machine toidentify an individual, but only a few of them are bothunique and accessible enough to be this straightforward touse. Fingerprints and faces are not as unique as we havebeen led to believe and can result in false positives. They arealso easy to fake. Although irises are unique, capturing themrequires someone to peer into a reading device and stareunblinking for several seconds, which is easy to flub andfeels intrusive. The three-dimensional configuration of veinsin the hand varies highly from person to person and is easyto read with harmless near-infrared light. So why are we stillpaying for everything with credit cards?The only barrier to such a “digital wallet” is that banksand technology firms are slow to adopt it, says security guruBruce Schneier. “All a credit card is, is a pointer to a database,”Schneier says. “It’s in a convenient rectangular form,but it doesn’t have to be. The barriers to entry are not security-based,because security is a minor consideration.”Once a large retailer or government agency implementssuch a system—imagine gaining access to the subway withjust a high five—it has the potential to become ubiquitous.The financial industry already handles substantial amountsof fraud and false positives, and switching to biometrics is notlikely to change that burden. It will make purchasing as simpleas waving your hand. —Christopher Mims26 Scientific American, December 2011 Photograph by Tktk Tktk© 2011 Scientific American

COMPUTINGComputers ThatDon’t Freeze UpPeople have to manage their own time. Why can’t our machinesdo the same? New software will keep them hummingjim holt’s smartphone is not all that smart. it has a mapping application he uses to find restaurants,but when he’s finished searching, the app continues to draw so much power and memory that hecan’t even do a simple thing like send a text message, complains Holt, an engineer at FreescaleSemiconductor.Holt’s phone highlights a general problem with computing systems today: one part of the systemdoes not know what the other is doing. Each program gobbles what resources it can, and the operatingsystem is too stupid to realize that the one app the user cares about at the moment is gettingsqueezed out. This issue plagues not only smartphones but personal computers and supercomputers,and it will keep getting worse as more machines rely on multicore processors. Unless the variouscomponents of a computer learn to communicate their availabilities and needs to one another, the futureof computing may not be able to live up to its glorious past.Holt and his collaborators in Project Angstrom, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology–led researchconsortium, have come up with an answer: the “self-aware” computer. In conventional computers,the hardware, software and operating system (the go-between for hardware and software)cannot easily tell what the other components are doing, even though they are all running inside thesame machine. An operating system, for example, does not know if a video-player application isstruggling, even though someone watching the video would certainly notice the jerky picture.Last year an M.I.T. team released Application Heartbeats, research software that monitors how allthe different applications are faring. It can tell, for instance, that video software is running at a pokey15 frames per second, not an optimal 30.The idea is to eventually make operating systems that can detect when applications are runningunacceptably slowly and consider potential solutions. If the computer had a full battery, perhaps theoperating system would direct more computing power to the app. If not, maybe the operating systemwould tell the application to use a lower-quality but more efficient set of instructions. The operatingsystem would learn from experience, so it might fix the problem faster the second time around. And aself-aware computer would be able to juggle complex goals such as “run these three programs but givepriority to the first one” and “save energy as much as possible, as long as it doesn’t interfere with thismovie I’m trying to watch.”The next step is to design a follow-on operating system that can tailor the resources going to anyone program. If video were running slowly, the operating system would allocate more power to it. If itwas running at 40 frames a second, however, the computer might shunt power elsewhere becausemovies do not look better to the human eye at 40 frames per second than they do at 30. “We’re able tosave 40 percent of power over standard practice today,” says Henry Hoffmann, a doctoral student incomputer science at M.I.T. who is working on the software.Self-aware systems will not only make computers smarter, they could prove essential for managingever more complex computers in the future, says Anant Agarwal, the project’s lead scientist. Overthe past decade computer engineers have added more and more basic computing units, called cores,to computers. Today’s computers have two to four cores, but future machines will use anywhere fromdozens to thousands of cores. That would make the task of splitting up computational tasks amongthe cores, which programmers now do explicitly, nearly impossible. A self-aware system will take thatburden off the programmer, adjusting the program’s core use automatically.Being able to handle so many cores may bring about a whole new level of computing speed, pavingthe way for a continuation of the trends toward ever faster machines. “As we have very large numbersof cores, we have to have some level of self-aware systems,” says John Villasenor, a professor of electricalengineering at the University of California, Los Angeles, who is not involved in Project Angstrom.“I think you’ll see some elements of this in the next couple of years.” —Francie Diep© 2011 Scientific AmericanDecember 2011, ScientificAmerican.com 27

MONEYCurrencywithout BordersThe world’s first digital currency cuts out the middleman and keeps users anonymousimagine if you were to walk into a deli, order a club sandwich,throw some dollar bills down and have the cashier say to you,“That’s great. All I need now is your name, billing address, telephonenumber, mother’s maiden name, and bank accountnumber.” Most customers would balk at these demands, andyet this is precisely how everyone pays for goods and servicesover the Internet.There is no currency on the Web that is as straightforwardand anonymous as the dollar bill. Instead we rely on financialsurrogates such as credit-card companies to handle our transactions(which pocket a percentage of the sale, as well as your personalinformation). That could change with the rise of Bitcoin,an all-digital currency that is as liquid and anonymous as cash.It’s “as if you were taking a dollar bill, squishing it into yourcomputer and sending it out over the Internet,” says Gavin Andresen,one of the leaders of the Bitcoin network.Bitcoins are bits—strings of code that can be transferred fromone user to another over a peer-to-peer network. Where as moststrings of bits can be copied ad infinitum (a property that wouldrender any currency worthless), users can spend a Bitcoin onlyonce. Strong cryptography protects Bitcoins against would-bethieves, and the peer-to-peer network eliminates the need for acentral gatekeeper such as Visa or PayPal. The system puts powerin the hands of the users, not financial middlemen.Bitcoin borrows concepts from well-known cryptography programs.The software assigns every Bitcoin user two unique codes:a private key that is hidden on the user’s computer and a publicaddress that everyone can see. The key and the address are mathematicallylinked, but figuring out someone’s key from his or heraddress is practically impossible. If I own 50 Bitcoins and want totransfer them to a friend, the software combines my key with myfriend’s address. Other people on the network use the relation betweenmy public address and private key to verify that I own theBitcoins that I want to spend, then transfer those Bitcoins using acode-breaking algorithm. The first computer to complete the calculationsis awarded a few Bitcoins now and then, which recruitsa diverse collective of users to maintain the system.The first reported Bitcoin purchase was pizza sold for 10,000Bitcoins in early 2010. Since then, exchange rates between Bitcoinand the U.S. dollar have bounced all over the scale likenotes in a jazz solo. Because of the currency’s volatility, only therare online merchant will accept payment in Bitcoins. At thispoint, the Bitcoin community is small but especially enthusiastic—justlike the early adopters of the Internet. —Morgen PeckMATERIALSMicrobe MinersBacteria extract metals and clean up the mess afterwardmining hasn’t changed much since theBronze Age: to extract valuable metal froman ore, apply heat and a chemical agentsuch as charcoal. But this technique requiresa lot of energy, which means that itis too expensive for ores with lower metalconcentrations.Miners are increasingly turning to bacteriathat can extract metals from suchlow-grade ores, cheaply and at ambienttemperatures. Using the bacteria, a miningfirm can extract up to 85 percent of ametal from ores with a metal concentrationof less than 1 percent by simply seedinga waste heap with microbes and irrigatingit with diluted acid. Inside the heapAcidithiobacillus or Leptospirillum bacteriaoxidize iron and sulfur for energy. Asthey eat, they generate reactive ferric ironand sulfuric acid, which degrade rockymaterials and free the valued metal.Biological techniques are also beingused to clean up acidic runoff from oldmines, extracting a few last precious bitsof metal in the process. Bacteria such asDesulfovibrio and Desulfotomaculum neutralizeacids and create sulfides that bondto copper, nickel and other metals, pullingthem out of solution.Biomining has seen unprecedentedgrowth in recent years as a result of the increasingscarcity of high-grade ores. Nearly20 percent of the world’s copper comesfrom biomining, and production has doubledsince the mid-1990s, estimates miningconsultant Corale Brierley. “Whatmin ing companies used to throw away iswhat we call ore today,” Brierley says.The next step is unleashing bacterialjanitors on mine waste. David Barrie Johnson,who researches biological solutions toacid mine drainage at Bangor Universityin Wales, estimates that it will take 20years before bacterial mine cleanup willpay for itself. “As the world moves on to aless carbon-dependent society, we have tolook for ways of doing things that are lessenergy-demanding and more natural,”Johnson says. “That’s the long-term objective,and things are starting to move nicelyin that direction.” —Sarah Fecht28 Scientific American, December 2011© 2011 Scientific American

AGRICULTURECrops ThatDon’t NeedReplantingYear-round crops can stabilize the soil and increase yields.They may even fight climate changeCOURTESY OF JIM RICHARDSONbefore agriculture, most of the planet was covered with plants that lived yearafter year. These perennials were gradually replaced by food crops that have to bereplanted every year. Now scientists are contemplating reversing this shift by creatingperennial versions of familiar crops such as corn and wheat. If they are successful,yields on farmland in some of the world’s most desperately poor placescould soar. The plants might also soak up some of the excess carbon in the earth’satmosphere.Agricultural scientists have dreamed of replacing annuals with equivalent perennialsfor decades, but the genetic technology needed to make it happen has appearedonly in the past 10 or 15 years, says agroecologist Jerry Glover. Perennialshave numerous advantages over crops that must be replanted every year: their deeproots prevent erosion, which helps soil hold onto critical minerals such as phosphorus,and they require less fertilizer and water than annuals do. Whereas conventionallygrown monocrops are a source of atmospheric carbon, land planted withperennials does not require tilling, turning it into a carbon sink.Farmers in Malawi are already getting radically higher yields by planting rows ofperennial pigeon peas between rows of their usual staple, corn. The peas are a muchneeded source of protein for subsistence farmers, but the legumes also increase soilwater retention and double soil carbon and nitrogen content without reducing theyield of the primary crop on a given plot of land.Taking perennials to the next level—adopting them on the scale of conventionalcrops—will require a significant scientific effort, however. Ed Buckler, a plant geneticistat Cornell University who plans to develop a perennial version of corn, thinks itwill take five years to identify the genes responsible for the trait and another decadeto breed a viable strain. “Even using the highest-technology approaches available,you’re talking almost certainly 20 years from now for perennial maize,” Glover says.Scientists have been accelerating the development of perennials by using advancedgenotyping technology. They can now quickly analyze the genomes of plantswith desirable traits to search for associations between genes and those traits.When a first generation of plants produces seeds, researchers sequence youngplants directly to find the handful out of thousands that retain those traits (ratherthan waiting for them to grow to adulthood, which can take years).Once perennial alternatives to annual crops are available, rolling them out couldhave a big impact on carbon emissions. The key is their root systems, which would sequester,in each cubic meter of topsoil, an amount of carbon equivalent to 1 percent ofthe mass of that dirt. Douglas Kell, chief executive of the U.K.’s Biotechnology and BiologicalSciences Research Council, has calculated that replacing 2 percent of theworld’s annual crops with perennials each year could remove enough carbon to haltthe increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. Converting all of the planet’s farmland toperennials would sequester the equivalent of 118 parts per million of carbon dioxide—enough, in other words, to pull the concentration of atmospheric greenhouse gasesback to preindustrial levels. —Christopher MimsWinter sun: This sunflower isa hybrid of an annual crop flowerand a wild perennial relative.© 2011 Scientific AmericanDecember 2011, ScientificAmerican.com 29

ENERGYLiquid Fuelfor ElectricCarsA new type of battery couldreplace fossil fuels withnanotech crudeBETTER BATTERIES are the key to electriccars that can drive for hundreds of milesbetween rechargings, but progress on existingtechnology is annoyingly incremental,and breakthroughs are a distant prospect.A new way of organizing the guts of modern batteries,however, has the potential to double the amountof energy such batteries can store.The idea came to Massachusetts Institute of Technologyprofessor Yet-Ming Chiang while he was onsabbatical at A123 Systems, the battery company heco-founded in 2001. What if there was a way to combinethe best characteristics of so-called flow batteries,which push fluid electrolytes through the cell, with theenergy density of today’s best lithium-ion batteries, thekind already in our consumer electronics?Flow batteries, which store power in tanks of liquidelectrolyte, have poor energy density, which is a measureof how much energy they can store. Their one advantageis that scaling them up is simple: you just builda bigger tank of energy-storing material.Chiang and his colleagues constructed a workingprototype of a battery that is as energy dense as a traditionallithium-ion battery but whose storage mediumis essentially fluid, like a flow battery. Chiang calls it“Cambridge crude”—a black slurry of nanoscale particlesand grains of energy-storing metals.If you could visualize Cambridge crude under anelectron microscope, you would see dust-size particlesmade of the same materials that make up the negativeand positive electrodes in many lithium-ion batteries,such as lithium cobalt oxide (for the positive electrode)and graphite (for the negative one).In between those relatively large particles, suspendedin a liquid, would be the nanoscale particles made ofcarbon that are the secret sauce of this innovation.Clumping together into a spongelike network, theyform “liquid wires” that connect the larger grains of thebattery, where ions and electrons are stored. The resultis a liquid that flows, even as its nanoscale components30 Scientific American, December 2011© 2011 Scientific American

constantly maintain pathways for electrons to travelbetween its grains of energy-storage medium.“It’s really a unique electrical composite,” Chiangsays. “I don’t know of anything else that is like it.”The fact that the working material of the batterycan flow has raised some interesting possibilities, includingthe idea that cars equipped with these batteriescould drive into a service station and fill up on Cambridgecrude to replace their charge. Chiang’s collaboratoron the project, W. Craig Carter of M.I.T., proposesthat users might be able to switch out something resemblinga propane tank filled with electrolyte ratherthan recharging at an outlet.Transferring charged electrolyte into and out of hisbatteries is not the first commercial application thatChiang is pursuing, however. Along with Carter andentrepreneur Throop Wilder, he has already founded anew company, called 24M Technologies, to bring theteam’s work to market. Carter and Chiang are guardedabout what the company will release first, but they emphasizethe suitability of these batteries for grid-storageapplications. Even a relatively small amount of storagecan have a significant impact on the performanceof intermittent energy sources such as wind and solar,Chiang says. Utility-scale batteries based on his designwould have at least 10 times the energy density of conventionalflow batteries, making them more compactand potentially cheaper.Cambridge crude has a long way to go before it canbe commercially viable, however. “A skeptic may saythat this new design offers significantly more challengingproblems to solve than benefits a potential solutionmay offer,” says the head of a major researchuniversity’s energy-storage program, who spoke oncondition of anonymity so as not to offend a colleague.All the extra machinery required to pump the fluidthrough the battery’s cells adds unwanted mass to thesystem. “The weight and volume of the pumps, storagecylinders, tubes, and the extra needed weight andvolume of the electrolyte and carbon additives couldmake [the technology heavier than] the state of theart.” These batteries may also not be as stable, acrosstime and many cycles of charging and discharging, asconventional lithium-ion batteries.A more fundamental issue is that charge times forthese new batteries would be slower—two to fourtimes slower, Carter says, than conventional ones. Thiscreates a problem for cars, which require rapid transfersof power. One work-around could be pairing itwith a conventional battery or an ultracapacitor, whichcan discharge its energy in a matter of seconds, to buffertransfers during braking and acceleration.The new design has promise, however. A systemthat stores energy in “particulate fluids” should becompatible with almost any battery chemistry, saysYury Gogotsi, a materials engineer at Drexel University,making it a multiplier on future innovations in thisarea. “It opens up a new way of designing batteries,”Gogotsi says. —Christopher MimsMEDICINENano-Size GermKillersTiny knives could be importantweapons against superbugsdrug-resistant tuberculosis is roaringthrough Europe, according to the WorldHealth Organization. Treatment optionsare few—antibiotics do not work on thesehighly evolved strains—and about 50 percentof people who contract the diseasewill die from it. The grim situation mirrorsthe fight against other drug-resistant diseasessuch as MRSA, a staph infection thatclaims 19,000 lives in the U.S. every year.Hope comes in the form of a nanotechknife. Scientists working at IBM Research–Almaden have designed a nanoparticle capableof utterly destroying bacterial cellsby piercing their membranes.The nanoparticles’ shells have a positivecharge, which binds them to negativelycharged bacterial membranes. “The particlecomes in, attaches, and turns itself insideout and drills into the membrane,”says Jim Hedrick, an IBM materials scientistworking on the project with collaboratorsat Singapore’s Institute of Bioengineeringand Nanotechnology. Without anintact membrane, the bacterium shrivelsaway like a punctured balloon. The nanoparticlesare harmless to humans—they donot touch red blood cells, for instance—becausehuman cell membranes do not havethe same electrical charge that bacterialmembranes do. After the nanostructureshave done their job, enzymes break themdown, and the body flushes them out.Hedrick hopes to see human trials ofthe nanoparticles in the next few years. Ifthe approach holds up, doctors could squirtnanoparticle-infused gels and lotions ontohospital patients’ skin, warding off MRSAinfections. Or workers could inject the particlesinto the bloodstream to halt systemicdrug-resistant organisms, such as streptococci,which can cause sepsis and death.Even if it succeeds, such a treatment wouldhave to overcome any unease over the ideaof nanotech drills in the bloodstream. Butthe nastiest bacteria on the planet won’tsuccumb easily. —Elizabeth Svoboda© 2011 Scientific AmericanDecember 2011, ScientificAmerican.com 31

TECHNOLOGY SPECIAL REPORTThe Machine ThatWould Predict theFutureIf you dropped all the world’s data into a black box, could it become a crystal ball thatwould let you see the future—even test what would happen if you chose A over B?One researcher thinks so, and he could soon get a billion euros to build itBy David WeinbergerIn the summer and fall of last year, the Greek financial crisis tore at the seams of the global economy.Having run up a debt that it would never be able to repay, the country faced a number of potentialoutcomes, all unpleasant. Efforts to slash spending spurred riots in the streets of Athens,while threats of default rattled global financial markets. Many economists argued that Greeceshould leave the euro zone and devalue its currency, a move that would in theory help theeconomy grow. “Make no mistake: an orderly euro exit will be hard,” wrote New York Universityeconomist Nouriel Roubini in the Financial Times. “But watching the slow disorderly implosionof the Greek economy and society will be much worse.”No one was sure exactly how the scenario would play out,though. Fear spread that if Greece were to abandon the euro,Spain and Italy might do the same, weakening the central bondof the European Union. Yet the Economist opined that the crisiswould “bring more fiscal-policy control from Brussels, turningthe euro zone into a more politically integrated club.” Fromthese consequences would come yet further-flung effects. Migrantsheading into the European Union might shift their travelpatterns into a newly affordable Greece. A drop in tourism couldlimit the spread of infectious disease. Altered trade routes coulddisrupt native ecosystems. The question itself is simple—Should Greece drop the euro?—but the potential fallout is sofar-reaching and complex that even the world’s sharpest mindsfound themselves unable to grasp all the permutations.Questions such as this one are exactly what led Dirk Helbing,a physicist and the chair of sociology at the Swiss Federal Instituteof Technology Zurich, to propose a €1-billion computing systemthat would effectively serve as the world’s crystal ball.32 Scientific American, December 2011 Photograph by Dan Saelinger© 2011 Scientific American

© 2011 Scientific American

Helbing’s system would simulate not just one area of finance orpolicy or the environment. Rather it would simulate everythingall at once—a world within the world—spitting out answers to thetoughest questions policy makers face. The centerpiece of thisproject, the Living Earth Simulator, would attempt to model global-scalesystems—economies, governments, cultural trends, epidemics,agriculture, technological developments, and more—usingtorrential data streams, sophisticated algorithms, and asmuch hardware as it takes. The European Commission was somoved by Helbing’s pitch that it chose his project as the toprankedof six finalists in a competition to receive €1 billion.The system is the most ambitious expression of the rise of ”bigdata,” a trend that is striking many scientists as being on a parwith the invention of the telescope and microscope. The exponentialgrowth of digitized information is bringing together computerscience, social science and biology in ways that let us addressquestions we just otherwise could not have posed, says NicholasChristakis, a social scientist and professor of medicine at HarvardUniversity. As an example, he points to the ubiquity of mobilephones that create oceans of information about where individualsare going, what they are buying, and even traces of what theyare thinking. Combine that with other kinds of data—genomics,economics, politics, and more—and many experts believe we areon the cusp of opening up new worlds of inquiry.“Scientific advance is often driven by instrumentation,” saysDavid Lazer, an associate professor in the College of Computerand Information Science at Northeastern University and a supporterof Helbing’s project. Tools attract the tasks, or as Lazerputs it: “Science is like the drunk looking for his keys under thelamppost because the light is better there.” For Helbing’s supporters,the ranks of which include dozens of respected scientists allover the world, €1 billion can buy a pretty bright light.Many scientists are not convinced of the need to gather theworld’s data in a centralized collection, though. Better, they argue,to form data clouds on the Internet, connected by links to makethem useful to all. A shared data format will give more people theopportunity to poke around through the data, find hidden connectionsand create a marketplace of competing ideas.NEXT TOP MODELfinding correlations in sets of data is nothing out of the ordinaryfor modern science, even if those sets are now gigantic andthe correlations span astronomical distances. For example, researchershave amassed so much anonymized data about humanbehavior that they have begun to unravel the complex behavioraland environmental factors that trigger “diseases of behavior”such as type 2 diabetes, says Alex Pentland, director of the MassachusettsInstitute of Technology’s Human Dynamics Laboratory.He says that mining big data this way makes the seminalFramingham study of cardiovascular disease—which, starting in1948 followed 5,209 people—look like a focus group study.Yet Helbing’s FuturICT Knowledge Accelerator and Crisis-Researchers plan to build a computingsystem that would model the entireworld to predict the future.The project would be powered by theenormous data streams now availableto researchers.IN BRIEFDavid Weinberger is a senior researcher at HarvardUniversity’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society andco-director of the Harvard Library Innovation Laboratoryat Harvard Law School. His latest book is Too Big to Know,which is being published in January 2012.Relief System, as it’s formally known, goes beyond data mining.It will include global Crisis Observatories that will search fornascent problems such as food shortages or emerging epidemics,as well as a Planetary Nervous System that aggregates data fromsensor systems spread around the globe. But the heart of theFuturICT project is the Living Earth Simulator, an effort to modelthe myriad social, biological, political and physical forces atwork in the world and use them to gain insight into the future.Models have been with us for generations. In 1949 Bill Phillips,an engineer and economist from New Zealand, unveiled amodel of how the U.K. economy worked that he had constructedout of plumbing supplies and a cannibalized windshield-wipermotor. Colored water simulated the flow of income based on“what if” adjustments in consumer spending, taxes and othereconomic activities. Although it is of course primitive by today’sstandards, it expresses the basics of modeling: stipulate a set ofrelations among factors, feed in data, watch the outcome. If thepredictions are off, that itself becomes valuable information thatcan be used to refine the model.Our society could no more function without models than withoutcomputers. But can you add enough pipes and pumps to modelnot only, say, the effect of volcano eruptions on short-term economicgrowth but also the effect of that change on all the realmsof human behavior it touches, from education to the distributionof vaccines? Helbing thinks so. His confidence comes in part fromhis success modeling another complex system: highway traffic. Bysimulating the flow of vehicles on a computer, he and his colleaguescame up with a model that showed (again, on a computer)that you could end stop-and-go delays by reducing the distancebetween moving vehicles. (Unfortunately, the distance is so smallthat it would require cars driven by robots.) Likewise, Helbing describesa project he consulted on that modeled the movement ofpedestrians during the hajj in Mecca, resulting in a billion dollarsof street and bridge rejiggering to prevent deaths from trampling.Helbing sees his FuturICT system as, in essence, a scaled-up elaborationof these traffic models.Yet this type of agent-based modeling works only in a verynarrow set of circumstances, according to Gary King, director ofthe Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard. In thecase of a highway or the hajj, everyone is heading in the same direction,with a shared desire to get where they are going as quicklyand safely as possible. Helbing’s FuturICT system, in contrast,aims to model systems in which people are acting for the widestYet models are not perfect; many researchersthink they will never be ableto capture the world’s complexities.A better knowledge machine mayarise out of Web-like principles such asinterconnection and argument.PROP STYLING BY LAURIE RAAB, FOR HALLEY RESOURCES (preceding pages)34 Scientific American, December 2011© 2011 Scientific American

FROM “THE STRUCTURE OF BORDERS IN A SMALL WORLD,” BY C. THIEMANN, F. THEIS, D. GRADY, R. BRUNE AND D. BROCKMANN, IN PLOS ONE, VOL. 5, NO. 11; 2010variety of reasons (from selfish to altruistic);where their incentives may vary widely (gettingrich, getting married, staying out of the papers);where contingencies may erupt (the death of aworld leader, the arrival of UFOs); where thereare complex feedback loops (an expert’s financialmodel brings her to bet against an industry,which then panics the market); and where thereare inputs, outputs and feedback loops from relatedmodels. The economic model of a city, forexample, depends on models of traffic patterns,agricultural yields, demographics, climate andepidemiology, to name a few.Beyond the problem of sheer complexity,scientists raise a number of interrelated challengesthat such a comprehensive system wouldhave to overcome. To begin with, we don’t havea good theory of social behavior from which tostart. King explains that when we have a solididea of how things work—in physical systems,for example—we can build a model that successfullypredicts outcomes. But whatever theoriesof social behavior we do have fall far shortof the laws of physics in predictive power.Nevertheless, King points to another possibility:if we have enough data, we can buildmodels based on some hints about what createsregularities, even if we don’t know what thelaws are. For example, if we were to record thetemperature and humidity at each point overthe globe for a year, we could develop fairly accurateweather forecasts without any understandingof fluid dynamics or solar radiation.We have already begun to use data to tease out some of theseregularities in human systems, says Albert-László Barabási,director of the Center for Complex Network Research at NortheasternUniversity and an adviser to the project. For example,Barabási and his colleagues recently unveiled a model that predictswith 90 percent accuracy where people will be at 5 p.m.tomorrow based purely on their past travel patterns. Thisknowledge does not assume anything about psychology, or technology,or the economy. It just looks at past data and extrapolatesfrom there.Yet sometimes the volume of data needed to make these approacheswork dwarfs our capabilities. To get the same accuracyin a problem that requires you to consider 100 different interactingfactors as you would in a two-dimensional problem, thenumber of data points required goes up into the number-ofstars-in-the-universerange, according to Cosma Shalizi, a statisticianat Carnegie Mellon University. He concludes that unlessyou resign yourself to using simple models that fail to capturethe full complexity of social behavior, “getting good models fromdata alone is hopeless.”FuturICT will not just rely on one model, however complex.Helbing says it will combine “computer science, complexity science,systems theory, social sciences (including economics andpolitical sciences), cognitive science” and other fields. Yet combiningmodels also creates problems of exploding complexity.“Let’s say weather and traffic each have 10 outcomes,” King says.Disease Follows the MoneyImagine a novel in which a deadly flu virus emerges. Where will it spread?Physicists and epidemiologists have begun to tap enormous data streams tomake predictions about how a pandemic might play out—and what can bedone to stop it. Scientists took data from the Where’s George project, whichtracks the location of millions of dollar bills as they move across the U.S., tomodel how 2009’s H1N1 flu virus would likely spread. Other researchers usedair and land traffic patterns in the same way. The studies demonstrated boththe promise and problems of big data: they accurately predicted where the fluwould spread, but they severely undercounted the number of people whowould end up infected.The flow of dollar billsacross the U.S. mirrorsthe movement of humans—and viruses.PUBLIC HEALTH APPLICATIONS“And now you want to know about both. So how many things dowe need to know? It’s not 20, it’s 100. That doesn’t make it hopeless.It just means the data requirements go up very quickly.”To further add to the challenge, news of a model’s conclusionscan alter the situation it is modeling. “This is the big scientificquestion,” says Alessandro Vespignani, director of the Center forComplex Networks and Systems Research at Indiana Universityand the project’s lead data planner. “How can we develop modelsthat include feedback loops or real-time data monitors that let uscontinuously update our algorithms and get new predictions”even as the predictions affect their own conditions?The models also have to be incredibly intricate and particular.For example, if you ask an economic model if your city should reclaimsome land and if the model does not take account how thatdecision affects the food chain, it can generate a result that mightbe good economics but disastrous for the environment. With 10million species, simply learning which one eats what is a dauntingtask. Further, relevant variances in food do not stop at thespecies level. Jesse Ausubel, an environmental scientist at theRockefeller University, points out that by analyzing the DNA ofthe contents of the stomachs of bats, we can know for sure exactlywhat bats eat. But the food source of bats in a specific cave mightbe different from the food source of bats of the same species a fewmiles away. Without crawling through the guano-coated particularitiescave by cave, experts relying on interrelated models mayencounter unreliable and cascading effects.© 2011 Scientific AmericanDecember 2011, ScientificAmerican.com 35

It is not at allclear that humanbrains willbe capable ofunderstandingwhy thesupercomputershave come upwith the answersthey have.So while in theory wemight be able to constructmodels of complicated phenomenaeven when we do nothave any underlying laws onwhich to build them, the practicaldifficulties quickly turnexponential. There is alwaysanother layer of detail, alwaysanother factor that may provecritical in the final accounting;without a prior understandingof how humans operate,we cannot know when our accounting is final.Big data have given rise to many successes in genomics andastrophysics, but success in one field may not be evidence thatwe can succeed when fields are interdependent in highly complexways. Perhaps we can make stepwise progress. Or theremay be a natural limit to the power of models for systems ascomplex as those that involve human activity. Human systems,after all, are subject to the two hallmarks of unpredictability:black swans and chaos theory.KNOWLEDGE WITHOUT UNDERSTANDINGon december 17, 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor in thesmall Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid, set himself on fire in a protestagainst the local culture of corruption. That singular act setinto motion a popular revolution that burned across the Arabworld, leading to uprisings that overthrew decades of dictatorialrule in Egypt, Libya and beyond, upending forever the balanceof power in the world’s most oil-rich region.What model would have been able to foresee this? Or the attacksof September 11, 2001, and the extent of their effects? Orthat the Internet would go from an obscure network for researchersto a maker and breaker of entire industries? This is theblack swan problem popularized by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his2007 best seller of the same name. “The world is always morecomplex than models,” Ausubel says. “It’s always something.”What’s worse, the social, political and economic systems thatHelbing wants to understand are not merely complex. They arechaotic. Each depends on hundreds of unique factors, all intricatelyinterrelated and profoundly affected by the state fromwhich they started. Everything happens for a reason in a chaoticsystem, or, more exactly, everything happens for so many reasonsthat events are unpredictable except in the broadest of strokes.For example, Jagadish Shukla, a climatologist at George MasonUniversity and president of the Institute of Global Environmentand Society, told me that while we can now forecast the weatherfive days ahead, “we may not be able to get beyond day 15. [No]matter how many sensors you put in place, there will still be someerrors in the initial conditions, and the models we use are notperfect.” He adds, “The limitations are not technological. Theyare the predictability of the system.”Shukla is careful to distinguish weather from climate. Wemay not be able to predict whether it will rain in the afternoonexactly 100 years from now, but we can with some degree of reliabilitypredict what the average ocean temperature will be.“Even though climate is a chaotic system, it still does have predictability,”Shukla says. And so it would be for Hel bing’s models.“Detailed financial-market moves are probably much less predictablethan weather,” Helbing wrote in an e-mail, “but the factthat a financial meltdown would happen sooner or later could bederived from certain macroeconomic data (for example, thatconsumption in the U.S. grew bigger than incomes over manyyears).” But we don’t need a set of supercomputers, galaxies ofdata and €1 billion to know that.If the aim is to provide scientifically based advice to policymakers, as Helbing emphasizes when justifying the expense,some practical issues arise. For one thing, it is not at all clearthat human brains will be capable of understanding why the supercomputershave come up with the answers that they have.When the model is simple enough—say, a hydraulic model ofthe British economy—we can backtrack through a model runand realize that the drawdown of personal savings accounts wasan unexpected effect of raising taxes too quickly. But sophisticatedmodels derived computationally from big data—and consequentlytuned by feeding results back in—might produce reliableresults from processes too complex for the human brain.We would have knowledge but no understanding.When I asked Helbing about this limitation, he paused beforesaying he thought it likely that human-understandable generalprinciples and equations would probably emerge becausethey did when he studied traffic. Still, the intersection of financialsystems, social behaviors, political movements, meteorologyand geology is orders of magnitude more complex than threelanes of traffic moving in the same direction. So humans maynot be able to understand why the model predicts disaster ifGreece goes off the euro.Without understanding why a particular course of action isthe best one, a president or prime minister would never be ableto act on it—especially if the action seems ridiculous. VictoriaStodden, a statistician at Columbia University, imagines a policymaker who reads results from the Living Earth Simulator andannounces, “To pull the world out of our economic crisis, wemust set fire to all the world’s oil wells.” That will not be actionableadvice if the policy maker cannot explain why it is right. Afterall, even with scientists virtually universally aligned aboutthe danger of climate change, policy makers refuse to preparefor the future predicted by every serious environmental model.NERDS ARGUING WITH NERDSthese and other practical problems arise because FuturICT asHelbing currently describes it assumes that such a large, complexeffort requires a central organization to take charge.Helbing would oversee a global project that would assemble thehardware, collect data and return results.It’s not what John Wilbanks, vice president of science at CreativeCommons, would do. Wilbanks shares Helbing’s enthusiasmfor big data. But his instincts hew to the Internet, not theinstitution. He is a leading figure in an ongoing project to organizevarious “data commons” that anyone can make use of. Theaim is to let the world’s scientists engage in an open market ofideas, models and results. It is the opposite approach to planningout a formalized institution with organized inputs andhigh-value outputs.The two approaches focus on different values. A data commonsmight not have the benefits of up-front, perfect curationthat a closed system has, but Wilbanks believes it more than36 Scientific American, December 2011© 2011 Scientific American

makes up for that in “generativity,” a term from Jonathan Zittrain’s2008 The Future of the Internet: “a system’s capacity toproduce unanticipated change through unfiltered contributionsfrom broad and varied audiences.” The Web, for example, allowseveryone to participate, which is why it is such a powerful creativeengine. In Wilbanks’s view, science will advance most rapidlyif scientists have access to as much data as possible, if thatinformation is open to all, is easy to work with, and can bepulled together across disciplines, institutions and models.Over the past few years a new “language” for data has emergedthat makes Wilbanks’s dream far more plausible. It grows out ofprinciples enunciated in 2006 by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor ofthe World Wide Web. In this “linked data” format, informationcomes in the form of simple assertions: X is related to Y in somespecified way; the relation can be whatever the person releasingthe data wants. For example, if Creative Commons wanted to releaseits staffing information as linked data, it would make itavailable in a series of “triples”: [John Wilbanks] [leads] [Scienceat Creative Commons], [John Wilbanks][has an e-mail addressof] [johnsemail@creativecommons.org], and so forth.Further, because many John Wilbanks live in the world andbecause “leads” has many meanings, each element of these tripleswould include a Web link that points at an authoritative or clarifyingsource. For example, the “John Wilbanks” link might pointto his home page, to the page about him at CreativeCommons.orgor to his Wikipedia entry. “Leads” might point to a standard vocabularythat defines the type of leadership he provides.This linked structure enables researchers to connect datafrom multiple sources without having first to agree on a singleabstract model that explains the relations among all the pieces.This lowers the cost of preparing the data for release. It also increasesthe value of the data after they have been released.A linked-data approach increases the number of eyeballsthat could in theory pay attention to any particular data set,thus increasing the likelihood that someone will stumble acrossan interesting signal. More hypotheses will be tested, moremodels tried. “Your nerds and my nerds need to have arguments,”Wilbanks says. “They need to argue about whether thevariables and the math in the models are right and whether theassumptions are right.” The world is so chaotic that our bestchance to make sense of it—to catch a financial meltdown intime—is to get as many nerds poking at it as we can. For Wilbanksand his tribe, making the data open and interoperable isthe first step—the transformative step. Among the groups enteringthe fray certainly will be institutions that have assembledgreat minds and built sophisticated models. But the first andprimary condition for the emergence of the truth is the fray itself.Nerds arguing with nerds.Wilbanks and Helbing both see big data as transformative,and both are hopeful that far more social behavior can be understoodscientifically than we thought just a few years ago.When Helbing is not trying to persuade patrons by painting apicture of how the Living Earth Simulator will avert nationalbankruptcies and global pandemics—as Barabási observes, “Ifyou want to convince politicians, you have to talk about the outcomes”—heacknowledges that FuturICT will support multiplemodels that compete with one another. Further, he is keen ongathering the biggest collection of big data in history and makingalmost all of it public. (Some will have to stay private becauseit comes under license from commercial providers or becauseit contains personal information.)Nevertheless, the differences are real. Helbing and his data architect,Vespignani, do not stop with the acknowledgment thatthe FuturICT institution will support multiple models. “Evenweather forecasts are made with multiple models,” Vespignanisays. Then he adds, “You combine them and get a statistical inferenceof what the probabilistic outcome will be.” For Helbing andhim, the value is in this convergence toward a single answer.The commons view also aims at convergence toward truth, ofcourse. But as a networked infrastructure, it acknowledges andeven facilitates fruitful disagreement. Scientists can have differentmodels, different taxonomies, different nomenclatures, butthey can still talk with one another because they can follow theirshared data’s links back to some known anchor on the Internet orin the real world. They can, that is, operate on their own and yetstill communicate and even collaborate. The differences won’t resolveinto a single way of talking about the world because—Wilbanksargues—there may be differences of culture, starting point,even temperament. The data-commons approach recognizes, acknowledgesand even embraces the persistence of difference.WHAT KNOWLEDGE ISthe obvious question is the practical one: Which approach is goingto work better, where “working better” means advancing thestate of the science and producing meaningful (and accurate)answers to hard questions about the future?The answer may come down to a disagreement about the natureof knowledge itself. We have for a couple of millennia in theWest thought of knowledge as a system of settled, consistenttruths. Perhaps that exhibits the limitations of knowledge’s mediummore than of knowledge itself: when knowledge is communicatedand preserved by writing it in permanent ink on paper, itbecomes that which makes it through institutional filters andthat which does not change. Yet knowledge’s new medium is nota publishing system so much as a networked public. We may getlots of knowledge out of our data commons, but the knowledge ismore likely to be a continuous argument as it is tugged this wayand that. Indeed, that is the face of knowledge in the age of theNet: never fully settled, never fully written, never entirely done.The FuturICT platform hopes to build a representation ofthe world sufficiently complete that we can ask it questions andrely on its answers. Linked data, on the other hand, arose (inpart) in contrast to the idea that we can definitively representthe world in logical models of all the many domains of life.Knowledge may come out of the commons, even if that commonsis not itself a perfect representation of the world.Unless, of course, the messy contention of ideas—nerds arguingwith nerds—is a more fully true representation of the world.MORE TO EXPLOREThe Semantic Web. Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila in Scientific American,Vol. 284, No. 5, pages 28–37; May 2001.Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren’t the Facts, ExpertsAre Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room. David Weinberger.Basic Books (in press). www.hyperorg.com/bloggerThe FuturICT Project: www.futurict.euSCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ONLINEWhat big data means for knowledge: ScientificAmerican.com/dec2011/big-data© 2011 Scientific AmericanDecember 2011, ScientificAmerican.com 37

By adapting ideas from robotic planetary exploration,the human space program could get astronautsto asteroids and Mars cheaply and quicklyBy Damon Landau and Nathan J. StrangeBeing there: An asteroid, Mars’s moon Phobos and the Red Planet’s surface are all on the proposeditinerary. The moons are exaggerated in this artist’s fanciful conception.38 Scientific American, December 2011 Illustration by Patrick Leger© 2011 Scientific American

© 2011 Scientific AmericanDecember 2011, ScientificAmerican.com 39

Damon Landau is an outer-planet mission analyst at the NASA JetPropulsion Laboratory (JPL). He helped to design the trajectory forNASA’s recently launched Juno mission to Jupiter and worked on theagency’s survey of near-Earth asteroids that astronauts might visit.Nathan J. Strange is a JPL mission architect. He was on the navigationteam for the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and collaboratedon the design of the gravity-assist tour of Saturn’s moons.He has worked on technical blueprints for future human missions.*In october 2009 a small group of robotic space explorationgeeks decided to venture out of our comfort zoneand began brainstorming different approaches to flyingpeople into space. We were spurred into actionwhen the Augustine com mission, a blue-ribbon panelthat President Barack Obama set up earlier that year to reviewthe space shuttle and its intended successor, reportedthat “the U.S. human spaceflight program appears to be onan unsustainable trajectory.” Having worked in an excitingrobotic exploration program that has extended humanity’sreach from Mercury to the edge of the solar system, wewondered whether we might find technical solutions forsome of NASA’s political and budgetary challenges.Ideas abounded: using ion engines to ferry up the componentsof a moon base; beaming power to robotic rovers on theMartian moon Phobos; attaching high-power Hall effect thrustersto the International Space Station (ISS) and putting it on aMars cycler orbit; preplacing chemical rocket boosters alongan interplanetary trajectory in advance so astronauts couldpick them up along the way; using exploration pods like thosein 2001: A Space Odyssey rather than space suits; instead ofsending astronauts to an asteroid, bringing a (very small) asteroidto astronauts at the space station. When we crunched thenumbers, we found that electric propulsion—via an ion drive orrelated technologies—could dramatically reduce the launchmass required for human missions to asteroids and Mars.It was like being back in the NASA of the 1960s, minus thecigarette smoke. We talked about what we can do and avoidedgetting mired in what we cannot. After our initial analysis, weput together a lunchtime seminar for our colleagues at the NASAJet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) that synthesizedthese notions and calculations.Throughout the following spring and summerwe met other engineers and scientistswho were interested in our approach andgave us ideas to make it better. We learnedabout experiments that people inside andoutside NASA had been conducting: fromtests of powerful electric thrusters to designsfor lightweight, high-efficiency solararrays. Our discussions have grown and becomepart of a larger groundswell of inventivethinking across the space agency and aerospace industry.We have now combined the most promising proposals withtried-and-true strategies to develop a plan to send astronauts tothe near-Earth asteroid 2008 EV5 as soon as 2024 as preparationfor an eventual Mars landing. This approach is designed tofit within NASA’s current budget and, crucially, breaks the overalltask into a series of incremental milestones, giving the agencyflexibility to speed up or slow down depending on funding. Ina nutshell, the aim is to apply lessons from the robotic scientificexploration program to renew the human exploration one.SMALL STEPS MAKE A GIANT LEAPthe augustine commission’s report ignited a mighty politicalfight, culminating in the decision to delegate much of the taskof launching astronauts into orbit to private companies [see“Jump-Starting the Orbital Economy,” by David H. Freedman;Scientific American, December 2010]. NASA can now focus onIN BRIEFSpace policy in the U.S. has gone through an upheaval.NASA has retired the shuttle, given up the Constellationprogram that was to have replaced it and outsourcedorbital launches. It is supposed to return to what it doesbest—going where no one has gone before. But how?The authors argue that engineers need to assume thatthe political process will continue to be unpredictable—and plan for it. They must design mission options thatcan be ramped up or down as circumstances change.Deep-space vehicles propelled by ion drives canmount progressively more complicated expeditions tolunar orbit, near-Earth asteroids and eventually Mars.40 Scientific American, December 2011© 2011 Scientific American*The views expressed in this article are those of the authors, not NASA or JPL.

FLEXIBLE PATHMore Than One Way to Reach into SpaceIn the past the U.S. human space program took an all-eggs-inone-basketapproach: it focused on a specific target and a singlesystem to get there. As of last year, it does things differently. Itnow has the broad goal of venturing into interplanetary space inprogressively more complicated missions, such as the authors’proposed program (green arrows) and variants (blue arrows). Thedestinations are listed here in rough order of difficulty. Vehiclescan be repurposed to reach different destinations, follow differentsequences or use different technologies if technical problems ariseor politicians fail to come through with the required funding.EarthMoonEarthLunarorbitLagrangianNearest-More distantLunarpointsEarthnear-Earth surface(red dots)asteroidsasteroidsMars orbit;Phobos andDeimosMarssurfaceMODIFIED FROM NASA’S REVIEW OF U.S. HUMAN SPACE FLIGHT PLANS COMMITTEE; NASA (Earth, moon and Mars)transformative technology and push human exploration on tonew frontiers. But how can the agency move forward withoutthe political support and resources it enjoyed during the glorydays of the Apollo moon landings?The established approach in robotic exploration is incremental:develop a technology portfolio that enables increasinglyambitious missions to take place. Rather than relying on anall-or-nothing development path to a single target, the roboticexploration program makes use of novel combinations of technologyto reach a variety of targets. To be sure, the robotic programhas suffered its own mistakes and inefficiencies; nothingis perfect. At least it does not grind to a halt when the politicalwinds change or when technological innovation lags. The humanprogram can borrow from this strategy. It need not commencewith “one giant leap” as with Apollo. It can embark on aseries of modest steps, each building on the one before.For some, the real lesson of robotic exploration might be thatwe should not send people at all. If NASA’s only goal was scientificdiscovery, robotic probes would certainly be cheaper and lowerrisk. Yet NASA is tasked with more than just science; science isonly one aspect of a broader human impulse to explore. Spaceexploration has wide appeal because of a desire for ordinarypeople to experience it firsthand someday. Robotic probes arejust the first wave of solar system exploration. Governmentfundedhuman missions will be the second wave, and the thirdwill be private citizens seeking their fortune and adventure inspace. NASA’s past investments developed the technology that isfueling today’s commercial space race, with capsules launchingto the space station and space planes jetting over the MojaveDesert [see “Blastoffs on a Budget,” by Joan C. Horvath; ScientificAmerican, April 2004]. NASA can now develop the technologythat we will need to push deeper into the beyond.FLEXIBILITY IS THE WATCHWORDthree basic principles govern the course we recommend. Thefirst is the “flexible path” approach that the Augustine commissionadvocated and that President Obama and Congress accepted.This strategy replaces the old insistence on a fixed path fromEarth to moon to Mars with an extensive selection of possibledestinations. We would begin with nearby ones, such as the Lagrangianpoints (locations in space where an object’s motion isbalanced by gravitational forces) and near-Earth asteroids.The flexible path calls for new vehicle technologies, notablyelectric propulsion. We propose using Hall effect thrusters (atype of ion drive) powered by solar panels. A similar systempropelled the Dawn spacecraft to the giant asteroid Vesta andwill, by 2015, carry it onward to the dwarf planet Ceres [see“New Dawn for Electric Rockets,” by Edgar Y. Choueiri; ScientificAmerican, February 2009]. Whereas traditional chemicalrockets produce a powerful but brief blast of gas, electric enginesfire a gentle but steady stream of particles. Electric powermakes the engines more efficient, so they use less fuel. (Thinkspace Prius.) Because the price of this greater efficiency is lowerthrust, some missions can take longer. A common misperceptionis that electric propulsion is too slow for crewed spaceflight,but there are ways around that. The idea that emerged atour first brainstorming session was to use robotic electric propulsiontugs to place chemical boosters at key points in a trajectorylike a trail of bread crumbs; once the trail is laid, astronautscan set out and pick up the boosters as they go along. Inthis way, missions get the fuel efficiency of electric propulsionwhile keeping the speed advantage of chemical propulsion.Crucially, electric propulsion saves money. Because the shipdoes not need to lug around as much propellant, its total launchmass drops by 40 to 60 percent. To first order, the price tag ofIllustration by Pitch Interactive© 2011 Scientific AmericanDecember 2011, ScientificAmerican.com 41

space missions scales linearly with the launch mass. Thus, slimmingthe mass by half could cut the cost by a similar fraction.Many space enthusiasts wonder why we would bother visitingan asteroid when Mars is everyone’s favorite destination. Actuallyasteroids are the perfect targets for an incremental approachtoward reaching Mars. Thousands are sprinkled throughthe gap between Earth and Mars, providing literal steppingstonesinto deep space. Because asteroids’ gravity is so weak,landing on one takes less energy than reaching the surface ofthe moon or Mars. It is hard enough to mount a long interplanetaryexpedition—six to 18 months—without also having to developelaborate vehicles to touch down and blast off again. Asteroidmissions let us focus on what, in our estimation, is the mostcomplex (and still unsolved) problem for humans ever to venturefar from Earth: learning how to protect astronauts fromthe deleterious effects of zero gravity and space radiation [see“Shielding Space Travelers,” by Eugene N. Parker; ScientificAmerican, March 2006]. As NASA gains experience dealing withthe hazards of deep space, it will be in a better position to designvehicles for Mars surface missions.Several scientifically interesting asteroids could be visited byastronauts with flight times rangingfrom six months to a year anda half using a 200-kilowatt (kW)electric propulsion system, whichis a reasonable advance over ourpresent capability; the ISS currentlyhas 260 kW of solar arraysinstalled. Such a missionwould break the deep-space barrier,while taking a crucial steptoward the two- to three-yearflight times and 600-kW systemsthat would be needed forMars exploration.The second governing principleof our plan is that NASA doesTo get to anasteroid, NASAdoes not haveto inventcompletelynew systemsfor everything,as it did inthe 1960s.not have to invent completely new systems for everything as it didin the 1960s. Some systems, most notably zero-g and deep-spaceradiation protection, will require new research. Everything elsecan derive from existing spacefaring assets. The deep-space vehiclecan be assembled by combining a few specialized elements. Forinstance, the structure, solar arrays and life-support systems couldbe adapted from designs that have been implemented on thespace station. And many private companies and other nations’space agencies have expertise in these areas that NASA could tap.The third principle is to design a program that can maintainforward momentum even if one component runs into problemsor delays. This principle should be applied to the most debatedcomponent of the space policy adopted by Congress: the launchvehicle that will ferry the crew and exploration vehicles fromthe surface of Earth into orbit. Congress directed NASA to build anew heavy-lift rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS). As announcedthis past September, NASA plans to develop this vehiclein steps starting at roughly half the capacity of the Apollo SaturnV and working up to just beyond the full launch capabilityof that rocket. The first SLS launcher, plus the Orion capsulenow in the works, could carry astronauts on three-week excursionsto lunar orbit and the Lagrangian points but can take astronautsno farther without the development of a new system.Fortunately, journeys to deep space do not need to wait forthe SLS to be completed. Preparations could begin now with thedevelopment of the life-support and electric propulsion systemsthat will be needed for trips beyond the moon. By making thesesystems an early priority, even while the new rockets are stillunder development, NASA would be better able to refine detailsof the SLS design to make it better suited to deep-space missions.These components could even be designed to fit on commercialor international launchers and then assembled in orbit,just as the ISS and the Mir space station were. The use of existingrockets would generate momentum toward deep-space exploration.With the flexibility from a portfolio of options, NASAcould fit more exploration into its increasingly limited budget.MISSION: 2008 EV5in our plan, nasa’s renaissance begins by constructing the meansfor people to travel between the planets—the deep-space vehicle.A solar-powered ion drive provides the oomph, and a new transithabitat provides a safe haven away from home. The most basicdeep-space vehicle would consist of two modules that could bothbe lofted into low Earth orbit with a single launch of the smallestof NASA’s new SLS rockets. Alternatively, three commerciallyavailable rockets could do the trick, two for the vehicle componentsand one with supplies for the trip.The maiden voyage is, ironically, its most boring. For twoyears the ship, without crew, is remotely piloted to follow a slowspiral from low Earth orbit through the Van Allen radiation beltsand up to a high Earth orbit—a trip that goes easy on propellantbut is too long and radioactive for astronauts. Once the spaceshipis poised on the outer edge of Earth’s gravity well, just onepush away from interplanetary space, it can undertake lunar flybysand other maneuvers to reshape the orbit for efficient departure.The astronauts then fly up from the ground on a conventionalchemical booster.For a test flight, astronauts steer the vehicle into an orbitthat almost always remains above the south pole of the moon.From there they could control a fleet of robotic explorers andinvestigate the composition of ancient ice deposits in the forever-darkcraters of the Aitken basin. Such a mission puts longdurationexploration through its paces with the safety of Earthjust a few days away. After the crew returns to Earth, the deepspacevehicle remains in high Earth orbit, awaiting refuelingand refurbishment for its first asteroid mission.We have investigated a wide range of such missions. Somewould take astronauts to small objects (less than 100 metersacross) just beyond the moon and back to Earth in under sixmonths. Others would venture to large objects (bigger than a kilometer)almost out to Mars and back in two years. Focusing only onan easier mission could stunt exploration by setting a dead end fortechnological capability. Conversely, striving for a harder missioncould perpetually delay any meaningful exploration by setting targetstoo far out of reach. Our design baseline falls between thesetwo extremes. It is a one-year round-trip that launches in 2024,with 30 days spent exploring asteroid 2008 EV5. This object, about400 meters across, appears to be a type of asteroid of great interestto many planetary scientists—a type C carbonaceous asteroid, apossible relic from the formation of the solar system and perhapsrepresentative of the original source of Earth’s organic material.42 Scientific American, December 2011© 2011 Scientific American

EV5, we can choose another target.Likewise, if we encounter technical difficulties,we will improvise. For instance,if high-performance propellantsare too hard to store in deepspace, we can switch to lower-performingpropellants and revise the missionaccordingly. Nothing in the mission islocked in.COURTESY OF NASA/JPL-CALTECH/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDAThe most efficient way to get there is to use Earth’s gravityfor an old trick known as the Oberth effect. It is the reverse ofthe orbit-insertion maneuvers that robotic space probes routinelyundertake. To prepare for it, mission controllers outfitthe deep-space vehicle with a high-thrust chemical rocketstage, carried up from Earth by an electrically propelled resupplytug. After the stage is attached and the crew is onboard, thedeep-space vehicle free-falls from the vicinity of the moondown to just above Earth’s atmosphere to build up tremendousspeed. Then, at just the right moment, the high-thrust stagefires, and the vehicle frees itself from Earth’s grasp in a matterof minutes. This maneuver works best at the moment when thevehicle is traveling at top speed near Earth because the amountof energy the ship gains is proportional to how fast it is alreadytraveling. The Oberth effect is an exception to the rule that iondrives are more efficient than chemical rockets; you need a lotof thrust, quickly, to take full advantage of the gravitationalkick start from Earth, and only high-thrust rockets can provideit. Together the ion-propelled spiral and chemical-poweredOberth effect cut the amount of fuel it takes to escape Earth’sgravity by 40 percent compared with an all-chemical system.Once the astronauts escape Earth, the Hall effect thrustersturn on and steadily push the vehicle toward its destination.Because ion drive provides continuous thrust, it lends itself toflexibility. Mission planners can develop a robust set of aborttrajectories should a malfunction occur at any point in the mission.(The Japanese robotic asteroid mission Hayabusa wasable to recover from several mishaps because of its ion drive.) Iftechnical or budgetary problems prevent us from getting thedeep-space vehicle ready in time to reach the asteroid 2008100 kilometersAsteroid Vesta is currently being orbited by NASA’s Dawn robotic spacecraft. Themission is remarkable for using hyperefficient ion engines, as human interplanetarymissions someday could. (You can use red-blue glasses to view this image in 3-D.)THE PLUSES OF PODSin our plan, the astronauts have amonth at the asteroid for exploration.Rather than donning space suits, theycan take a lesson from deep-sea submersiblesand use exploration pods.Space suits are basically big balloons,and an astronaut constantly fights airpressure for every little movement,making space walks hard work andlimiting what can be accomplished. Apod with robotic manipulator armsnot only alleviates this problem butalso provides room to eat and rest. In apod, an astronaut could zip around forseveral days at a time. NASA is alreadydeveloping a Space Exploration Vehicle(SEV) that can be used as a pod atasteroids, and the same design couldlater be adapted for a surface rover for the moon and Mars.The astronauts conduct a full survey, looking for unusualmineral outcrops and other promising places to dig for samplesthat might date to the earliest days of the solar system. NASAwill want to send a crew that is half Indiana Jones and half Mr.Scott: astronauts with both the scientific background needed tospot precious samples hidden in the dust and the engineeringbackground needed to fix any problems along the way.When the month is up, the ion drive nudges the deep-space vehicleaway from the asteroid and onto a six-month trajectory backhome. A few days before reaching Earth, the crew climbs into acapsule, separates from the main ship and sets course to splashdown. The empty deep-space vehicle remains on an orbit aroundthe sun. It performs a flyby of Earth and continues thrusting withthe ion drive to lower its energy with respect to the Earth-moonsystem, so that when it comes back to Earth a year later, it can usea lunar flyby to reenter high Earth orbit and await its next mission.Its ion drive and habitat module could be reused multiple times.After several yearlong asteroid missions, incremental improvementsto life-support systems and radiation shielding willpave the way to Mars. The first Mars mission might not actuallytouch down on the planet. Instead it will likely explore its twomoons, Phobos and Deimos [see “To Mars by Way of Its Moons,”by S. Fred Singer; Scientific American, March 2000]. Such anexpedition is essentially an asteroid mission stretched out to atwo-and-a-half-year round-trip. At first glance, it might seem sillyto go all the way to Mars and not land on it, but landingwould enormously complicate the mission. Missions to theMartian moons allow astronauts to become adept at travelingthrough interplanetary space before attempting the challenge© 2011 Scientific AmericanDecember 2011, ScientificAmerican.com 43

HOW TO GET TO AN ASTEROID2T I B R O H T R A E H G H I34AstronautsE T HR B I T5Breaking theDeep-Space BarrierThe authors’ proposed new paradigm for human interplanetaryexploration emphasizes flexibility and sustainability. Rather thanone-shots like the Apollo moon landings and most previous interplanetarymission designs, NASA and its partners would build adeep-space vehicle that can be used and reused (employing lessonsfrom the space shuttle and the International Space Station). Itcould be good to go by 2024. Assembling, testing and sendingit on its way would be a multistage process. In betweenflights, the ship would be parked in a high-altitude orbit.8Powered byHall effection driveVehicle stands byin high Earth orbit6Ion drive booster1Habitation moduleSuppliesIon drive tugChemical boosterSupplies and podWO LAstronauts710E A R T H O R B I TE A R T HO R BI T44 Scientific American, December 2011© 2011 Scientific AmericanIllustration by Pitch Interactive

9Asteroid2008 EV512345678Two modules—the solar-powered ion drive and the transithabitat—are launched separately into low Earth orbitonboard existing government or commercial rockets,such as the Delta IV Heavy. Ground controllers remotelyassemble them into a kind of mini space station. A thirdlaunch lays in supplies for the journey ahead.Ion drive is too weak to break out of Earth orbit in oneshot but slowly pushes the ship outward like a carswitchbacking up a mountain. To avoid the radiationand boredom of the two-year trip, the astronauts donot need to be onboard yet.Low Earth orbitOnce the ship has reached an extremely high altitudeorbit, with almost enough energy to escape Earth’sgravity, the astronauts fly up on a small, fast rocket.To put the ship through its paces, the astronauts steer itinto a lunar orbit. Though mainly an engineering testflight, this voyage would also let the astronauts do someuseful science, such as remote-controlling a fleet of rovers.After a test flight of, say, six months, astronauts steerthe deep-space vehicle back into a high Earth orbit,then continue back to Earth and splash down in anApollo-style capsule.To prepare for breaking out of Earth orbit, groundcontrollers send up fresh supplies and a small chemicalrocket booster using an ion-propelled interorbital tug.Once the stage is attached to the deep-space vehicle,another crew of astronauts flies up on a conventionalrocket, as before.The deep-space vehicle moves into a highly ellipticalorbit and, at the moment it is closest to Earth, fires thebooster—thereby reversing the orbit-insertion maneuverroutinely used by planetary orbiters. Away it goes.Low Earth orbitEarthEarthMoonSpacecraft trajectoryHigh Earth orbitSpacecrafttrajectoryHigh Earth orbitof touching down on Mars, traveling around and lifting off again.Engineers have already come up with various tactics to maximizethe flexibility and minimize the cost of a Mars surface mission.The most compelling begin by preplacing habitats and explorationsystems on the surface so that the astronauts have abase ready for them when they arrive. This equipment can go byslow (ion) boat. Once there it will produce propellant on Mars itself,either by distilling carbon dioxide from the atmosphere andmixing it with hydrogen brought from Earth to generate methaneand oxygen or by electrolyzing water from the permafrost tomake liquid hydrogen and oxygen. By sending an empty returnrocket that can be fueled in situ, mission planners reduce thelaunch mass from Earth dramatically [see “The Mars DirectPlan,” by Robert Zubrin; Scientific American, March 2000].The relative motion of Earth and Mars gives the astronautsabout one and a half (Earth) years on the surface before the planetscome back into alignment, so they will have plenty of time toreconnoiter. At the end of their stay, they board a launch vehiclefilled with locally manufactured fuel, blast off to Mars orbit, rendezvouswith a deep-space vehicle derived from the asteroidcampaign and return to Earth. The vehicle could even be placedon a cycler trajectory that shuttles back and forth between Earthand Mars, using gravity slingshots to provide all the propulsionfor free [see “A Bus between the Planets,” by James Oberg andBuzz Aldrin; Scientific American, March 2000].Even with the advance placement of matériel, a Mars landerand return rocket are extremely heavy and will need the largestplanned SLS launcher to send them on their way. But the firstdeep-space missions can be built from smaller parts that arelaunched on the first SLS or even on existing rockets. The gradualistapproach we recommend will maximize the resilience of theprogram and let NASA concentrate on solving the truly hardproblems, such as radiation shielding.NASA now has the best opportunity in a generation to refocusitself on new types of space vehicles that reach into interplanetaryspace. The greatest barriers to space exploration are nottechnical but a matter of figuring out how to do more with less. IfNASA plans an incremental sequence of technology developmentand missions of steadily increasing ambition, human spaceflightcan break free of low Earth orbit for the first time in 40 years andenter its most exciting era ever. With flexible planning, NASA canforge a path to wander among the wandering stars.910Ion drive takes over and slowly pushes the ship towardits first target, perhaps asteroid 2008 EV5. Theoutbound trip takes six months. The crew spends amonth exploring in 2001: A Space Odyssey–style pods.DepartSunArrive 2008 EV5ThrustSpacecrafttrajectoryReturn Depart EarthThe ship turns on its ion drive and heads home. Sixmonths later the crew splashes down in the capsule itused to fly up. The ship is remote-piloted back to highEarth orbit using gravity-assist maneuvers.NASA (Earth and moon)MORE TO EXPLOREPlymouth Rock: An Early Human Mission to Near Earth Asteroids Using Orion Spacecraft.J. Hopkins et al. Presented at the AIAA Space 2010 Conference & Exposition, August 30–September 2, 2010. http://tinyurl.com/PlymouthRockNEOTarget NEO: Open Global Community NEO Workshop Report. Report of a workshopheld at George Washington University, February 22, 2011. Edited by Brent W. Barbee. July28, 2011. www.targetneo.orgNear-Earth Asteroids Accessible to Human Exploration with High-Power Electric Propulsion.Damon Landau and Nathan Strange. Presented at the AAS/AIAA Astrodynamics SpecialistConference, Girdwood, Alaska, July 21–August 4, 2011. http:/tinyurl.com/ElectricPath300-kW Solar Electric Propulsion System Configuration for Human Exploration ofNear-Earth Asteroids. J. R. Brophy et al. Presented at the 47th AIAA/ASME/SAE/ASEE Joint PropulsionConference & Exhibit, San Diego, July 31–August 3, 2011. http://tinyurl.com/300kWSEPSCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ONLINEFor a special report on how engineers are reimagining NASA from the inside out,including the little-known story of how Apollo-era engineers planned a Venus flyby,visit ScientificAmerican.com/dec2011/mars© 2011 Scientific AmericanDecember 2011, ScientificAmerican.com 45

BIOLOGYDAZZLINGMINIATURESSmall worlds writ largeunder the microscopeBy Gary Stix, staff writerMicroscopy remains one of the few areas of science inwhich enthusiastic amateurs can make others takenotice. Nonprofessionals routinely produce stunningimages of creatures and objects too tiny for theeye to resolve. This crowdsourcing of microscopicimagery arrived long before the invention of the smartphone andnetworked communications: the amateur has long made a markwith the microscope—in the early years, by hand drawing imagesthat appeared underneath the lens, and, in more recent times,with the added realism brought by the photograph.This noble tradition continues in our pages, as we offer a selectionof photographs from the Olympus BioScapes InternationalDigital Imaging Competition—a magnet for hobbyists as well asscientists who wish to show off their picture-taking skills. Thisyear’s entries feature the work of a lay microscopist who found hissubject while hiking on a mountain in Greece. To produce anotherentry, a cell biologist took a sophisticated microscope acquired atan auction to snap a shot of a translucent zooplankton skeleton.The photo session had nothing to do with his work but served tomemorialize the skeleton’s sheer structural beauty. Inspect foryourself the hypervivid color and intricate geometry of these Lilliputianneighbors that we too seldom get a chance to meet.Stinkbug eggs: Amateur photographer Haris S. Antonopoulosfound these eggs on top of a mountain near Athens, Greece. Hetook a series of images of the 1.2-millimeter-diameter eggs andcombined them with photo-editing software. The white halosoutline the lids through which nymphs emerge.46 Scientific American, December 2011© 2011 Scientific American

© 2011 Scientific AmericanDecember 2011, ScientificAmerican.com 47

Hoverfly leg: A section of the leg of a female hoverfly,stretching several hundred microns across,bears two pulvilli, adhesive structures that enablethe insect to stick to a surface. The pulvilli, seenhere as large, orange appendages at the upperright that form a V shape, are connected to theleg by a spring system (blue areas), which consistsmainly of the protein resilin. Jan Michels of KielUniversity in Germany made the photograph ofEristalis tenax as part of a study on the potentialof confocal laser scanning microscopy to furnishthree-dimensional images of resilin-containinginsect body parts.Prickly scorpion’s tail: This thin, twisted, fivecentimeter-longpod resembles the tail of a scorpion,giving the plant that produced the pod itsname. Viktor Sýkora of Charles University’s FirstFaculty of Medicine in Prague does microphotographyof plants as a hobby and has published abook on the topic.48 Scientific American, December 2011© 2011 Scientific American

Slime molds: Ultraviolet light causes the mushroomlikefruiting bodies of myxomycetes, orslime molds, to luminesce with a ghostly aura.Dalibor Matýsek, a mineralogist at the TechnicalUniversity of Ostrava in the Czech Republic whoimages biological objects as a hobby, used “focusstacking,” combining more than 100 scannedimages to form a three-dimensional picture ofthe 4.4-millimeter-tall Arcyria stipata.Rotifer: Two lobes of the corona of the rotiferFloscularia ringens, spanning 300 microns,emerge from a protective tube. The cilia at theedge of the corona move in a fast, steady, wavelikemotion called a metachronal wave, creating watercurrents that move food to the rotifer’s mouth.The tube consists of reddish-brown circular pelletsthat the rotifer forms in a cilia-lined socket.A new pellet forms at the center of this first-prizephotograph taken by Charles Krebs of Issaquah,Wash. Once the pellet reaches the appropriatesize, the rotifer retreats into its tube and, on theway down, quickly but carefully “plants” the newpellet along the top edge of the tube.© 2011 Scientific American

© 2011 Scientific AmericanImmune cell: A single mast cell has infiltrated the eye surface in response to a perceived invasion by a foreign substance. Mast cells,which contain vesicles of histamine (red specks), are among the immune system’s first responders, attracting other immune cells tothe site of an infection. Here the release of histamine is helping to separate collagen fibers through which the mast cell is migrating.Donald W. Pottle of the Schepens Eye Research Institute in Boston took this confocal microscope image.50 Scientific American, December 2011

Bay scallop: Kathryn R. Markey has a thing about scallop eyes. So she setabout recruiting a spat bay scallop from the Luther H. Blount ShellfishHatchery at Roger Williams University in Bristol, R.I., to show the rest ofthe world their “majestic eyes”—the blueberrylike circles at the bordersof the shell. This exemplar of Argopecten irradians went under a stereomicroscopein the university’s Aquatic Diagnostic Laboratory, whereMarkey works, to have its portrait taken.Radiolarian skeleton: Radiolaria, single-celled, amoebalike creaturesthat inhabit all the world’s oceans, sport radially arranged protrusionscalled axopodia that here resemble buttons. The axopodia help the crittersto float and ingest food. To produce the picture of this 120-micron-longradiolarian skeleton, Christopher B. Jackson of Ikelos in Switzerland took15 light-microscope images, captured each one at a different focal planeand then combined the set to achieve a sharp image.MORE TO EXPLOREFor more information about the Olympus BioScapes competition, visit www.olympusbioscapes.comSCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ONLINESee related videos and more images at ScientificAmerican/dec2011/bioscapes© 2011 Scientific AmericanDecember 2011, ScientificAmerican.com 51

CLIMATE CHANGEAFTERJohn A. Carey is a freelance writerand former senior correspondentfor BusinessWeek, where he coveredscience, technology, medicineand the environment.THEDELUGEA spate of floods, droughts andheat waves is prompting city andstate leaders to take bold steps toprotect their people and propertyBy John A. CareyFor a century workers flocked to dubuque, iowa. as theyraised new generations of laborers, they built houses,shops and streets that eventually covered over the BeeBranch Creek. The water gurgled through undergroundpipes out of sight and largely out of memory.Until the rains came. On May 16, 1999, 5.6 inches of rain fellin 24 hours. The creek pipes and storm sewers overflowed, blowingout manhole covers and turning streets into chest-deep ragingrivers. Hundreds of homes and businesses were flooded.Mayor Roy Buol vividly recalls the neighborhood meetingheld a few weeks later. “Everyone was upset,” he says. By 2001 thetown had devised a master plan to solve the flooding: turn thesubmerged creek back into an open stream with graded banks capableof handling floodwaters. Of course, that would require tearingdown scores of homes. “The plan was not well received,” saysDeron Muehring, a civil engineer for the city. Planning stalled.Then, in June 2002, more than six inches of rain fell over twodays, sending storm water back into the same homes and buildingsthat had just been laboriously renovated. That helped tobreak the political logjam and united city leaders on a $21-millionplan to remake the neighborhood, which called for razinghomes and adding a verdant park with a stream running throughit, along with two water retention basins. Their decision did nothinge on language about climate change or the need to save theplanet for future generations. Residents were fed up, and localleaders worried that the neighborhood would irreversibly decline.The city began buying up 74 properties, and groundbreakingtook place after yet another drenching in 2010. Engineershave now restored about 2,000 feet of the Bee Branch Creek.When the project is finished in 2013, the city should even be ableto withstand repeats of a 10-inch-plus deluge this past July,which caused several million dollars in damage.Dubuque’s actions are a microcosm of a larger tale unfoldingacross the U.S. Federal policies to combat climate change arestalled, and some members of Congress accuse scientists of makingthe whole thing up. But cities, towns, water authorities,transportation agencies and other local entities are not interestedin debating whether or not climate change is real: they areacting now. Like Dubuque, they are already facing unprecedentedfloods, droughts, heat waves, rising seas, and the death anddestruction these events can impose. “We’ve got to get seriousabout adapting,” says Iowa State Senator Rob Hogg.Indeed, about 16 U.S. states have climate adaptation plans orare developing them, according to the Georgetown Climate Centerin Washington, D.C., which works with states. [Disclosure:the author’s wife, Vicki Arroyo, is executive director of the center.]Although no one has tallied exact numbers, hundreds ofcommunities and agencies are reacting to increasingly severeweather. Those that are not “are going about business as usualwith blinders on,” says city planner Mikaela Engert, who helpedto develop plans for Keene, N.H.COURAGEOUS INDIVIDUALSthe emerging tapestry of adaptation efforts is being held togetherby several common threads. The first is that nothing focusesattention more than flooded homes or dried reservoirs in one’scommunity. Even in Dubuque, in conservative Iowa, the argumentthat climate change is a hoax faded as floods kept coming.“How many of these 500-year events happening every few yearsdo you have to have before you realize something is changing?”Mayor Buol asks. “Whether man is contributing or not, the climateis changing at a faster pace than any time in history.”The second thread is that “all adaptation is local,” as MichaelSimpson, chair of environmental studies at Antioch University, observes.The San Francisco Bay Area’s response to rising seas, whichthreaten airports, seaports and coastal communities, must obviouslybe different from Chicago’s plan to build “green” roofs, planttrees and install “cool” pavement to tamp down its heat waves. Nationaland regional efforts certainly can play important roles. Butadapting to local problems depends on “courageous individuals”GETTY IMAGES52 Scientific American, December 2011© 2011 Scientific American

Impasse: Flooding like thisby the Delaware River isforcing towns to planfor severe weather.© 2011 Scientific AmericanDecember 2011, ScientificAmerican.com 53

who will step up to the challenge, says climateadaptation consultant and StanfordUniversity fellow Susanne Moser.Those individuals have their work cutout for them because of the final thread:adaptation is difficult. “It’s not a priorityfor enough people,” Senator Hogg says.The planning process itself is challengingbecause it must bring together many parties.Even when effective steps can be taken,plans often run into budgetary, politicalor regulatory barriers. Adaptation getseven harder when the threats are uncertain.Although diversifying water suppliesin the face of predicted droughts, asDenver Water is doing, seems clear, it isless clear how to adapt to, say, widespreadcrop failures such as those in Texas and Oklahoma.The complexities explain why responses are mixed. On theone hand, “we have made amazing progress in a relatively shortperiod,” says Steve Adams, managing director of the ClimateLeadership Initiative in Eugene, Ore. A few examples: the SouthernNevada Water Authority is digging a $700-million waterintakesystem deeper under Lake Mead so that water will stillflow to the Las Vegas Valley when the lake’s water levels drop belowthe two current intakes, which is likely to happen soon. Torontohas built a new network of storm-water basins and drainsin response to a series of recent intense deluges. Maryland isbuilding higher docks and is targeting land for acquisition thatcan act as buffers against sea-level rise and storm surges.Vermont, reeling from unprecedented damage from HurricaneIrene, plans to rebuild stronger and better. “Before, we werethoughtfully changing our codes and standards to make our infrastructuremore resilient to changing weather from global climatechange,” says Gina Campoli, environmental policy managerat the Vermont Agency of Transportation. “Now we are just doingit. We can’t be putting things back the same way if they will justblow out again. We’ve upped the ante here.”On the other hand, these impressive-sounding developmentsbarely scratch the surface of what is needed. Only a tiny percentageof the nation’s communities are tackling adaptation, Mosernotes. Looking at the overall situation, “we are really in badshape,” argues economist Robert Repetto, author of America’sClimate Problem. “We’ve only experienced a portion of thechange that we’ve already committed ourselves to because ofpast greenhouse gas emissions—and emissions are still rising. Idon’t think we can adapt.”Banking on it: Dubuque, Iowa, openeda buried creek so that it will absorb waterduring storms instead of flooding town.MORE RAIN, MORE DROUGHTmore action seems warranted because science is painting anincreasingly certain picture of a climate being altered by humanactions. For instance, climate models predict a rise in averagenighttime temperatures, and measurementsnow unequivocally show thatis happening. The phenomenon may becausing a drop in corn yields becauseplants respire (give off carbon dioxide)more during warmer nights, burning fuelthey could otherwise use to plump uptheir kernels.The models predict that as the earth’stemperature rises, heat and drought willincrease in bands across the AmericanSouthwest and the Middle East and thatheat waves will become more common athigher latitudes, in places ranging fromthe upper Midwest to Russia. That is happening,too.Finally, the models predict more delugessuch as the ones that struck Vermont and New York thispast summer. For each one degree Celsius rise in temperature,the atmosphere can hold 7 percent more moisture. That means 2to 3 percent more rain in general but 6 to 7 percent more extremerainfall events.Without a big cut in greenhouse gas emissions, “these eventswill become more common,” says Michael Wehner, a staff scientistat Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “I don’t thinkanyone disagrees with that.” Work by Peter Stott, head of climatemonitoring and attribution at the U.K. Met Office, shows that theodds of a heat wave like the one that struck Europe in 2003 havejumped fourfold compared with preindustrial days.Even though it is impossible to say that any extreme weatherevent was directly caused by climate change, that “doesn’tmatter, because this is what climate change looks like, and wehave to prepare,” says David Behar, climate program directorfor the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. A projectSimpson worked on used New Hampshire rain-gauge data toshow that 10 of the state’s 15 biggest floods since 1934 have occurredin the past 15 years—and that the torrential amounts ofrain in what used to be 200-year storms now occur in 25-yearstorms. Yet most town engineers in New England still designculverts, drains and bridges based on rainfall data from the1920s to 1950s. “A lot of the infrastructure going in right now isundersized,” Simpson says.FIRST STEPSthe highly politicized term “climate change” does not even needto be invoked to convince communities to revise their practices.Cities and towns that have experienced the worst disasters tendto be on the forefront of adaptation, where local leaders can rallycommunity support to overcome the barriers. A good exampleis Keene. In October 2005, three days after Simpson presenteda report to the city council identifying culverts and roads vulnerableto a major storm, the region was hit by 11 inches of rain.Frustrated by political gridlock in Washington, D.C.,over climate change policy, cities and states are changinginfrastructure on their own to counteract severe weatherthat is killing more people and destroying more property.IN BRIEFDubuque, Iowa, has exhumed a buried creek to reducestorm flooding. Southern Nevada is digging new intakepipes under Lake Mead to offset drought. Keene, N.H.,is replacing roads with permeable pavement that al -lows heavy rain to seep through instead of rising.Adaptation is best planned by municipalities becausesolutions must be tailored to local problems, but courageousleaders are often needed to rally support.COURTESY OF THE CITY OF DUBUQUE54 Scientific American, December 2011© 2011 Scientific American

The water destroyed those culverts and roads, as well as homesand bridges, shut down the water treatment plant and causedseveral deaths. The disaster prodded the city, with a little outsidehelp, to develop one of the nation’s first and most far-reachingadaptation plans, led by planning director Rhett Lamb, andto find funding for improvements. Sidewalks along one of thecity’s main roads—Washington Street—have just been replacedwith porous concrete, and side roads have been lined withgrassy borders instead of curbs, so that in both cases rainwatercan spread out and seep slowly into the surrounding ground insteadof rising on the road, causing floods.In Charles City, Iowa, the tipping point was a devastating2008 flood in which the Cedar River crested nearly three feethigher than its previous record. When people see their homesfull of water, “they think about how the number of big rains weget has really changed,” says city administrator Tom Brownlow.“It’s up to us in leadership to say, ‘This is a long-term issue thatwe need to address.’” The city has. It has torn up 16 blocks ofstreets and installed permeable pavement atop a thick bed ofrock and gravel. The system allows water to pass through intothe ground below instead of running off the surface, triggeringflooding. In addition, the area under the pavement hosts microorganismsthat eat oil and other contaminants before the watersinks through and ultimately reaches the river. The city hasalso transformed the waterfront with amenities such as aworld-class white-water kayaking course. Now “we could get a100-year rain and not have any standing water in the streets,”Brownlow says.Iowa corn farmers have also responded to the state’s increasedrains. They have spent tens of thousands of dollars toinstall more drainage tiles to keep fields from getting too soggy,which can delay planting and stunt crop growth. Ironically, theyare also planting up to three times as many seeds per acre, takingadvantage of increased spring soil moisture to grow morecrops in the same fields. Even though the farmers largely denythat humankind is changing the climate, “they are already adaptingand making money at it,” says Gene Takle, professor of meteorologyand global climate change at Iowa State University.Floods are an immediate threat of climate change. Yet certaincommunities are adapting to longer-term ramifications. The SanFrancisco Bay Area, for instance, plans to spend $20 million to$40 million retrofitting 16 sewer outfalls in the bay to preventrising seas and storm surges from pushing water back up theoutfalls and into sewage treatment plants.One persistent individual has instilled a long-term view inHayward, Calif., on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay. WhenBill Quirk, a former NASA climate modeler and nuclear arms expert,won a seat on the city council in 2004, he repeatedly tried toget the city to pay attention to the threat of sea-level rise. No luck.“I was new and didn’t know how to get things done,” he says.Then, on New Year’s Eve 2005–2006, storm waves at hightide crashed over the city’s protective levees, causing heavydamage. At Quirk’s behest, the Hayward Area Shoreline PlanningAgency scraped up $30,000 to study solutions. In centuriespast, sediment washing down creeks and streams built up wetlandsalong the bay, creating buffers against storm waves. Butonce the streams were channeled into culverts and pipes, thesediment began flowing out into the bay instead, where it fills inmarinas and shipping channels. The agency hopes to start pilotprojects that would allow some water and sediment to onceagain wash back out into the wetlands to help sustain them.The case for adaptation is harder to make when people arenot facing overtopped levees or flooded basements, especiallywhen budgetary and political winds oppose action. In Iowa,Senator Hogg has been pushing a wetlands restoration planthat would slow runoff into rivers, reducing the flooding in citiesdownstream. But not only has his proposal failed to pass thestate legislature, the state’s existing programs are being cut.“There are times that feel like I am beating my head against thewall,” Senator Hogg says, “but we’ve got to keep plugging.”FINDING RESILIENCEnascent efforts could use greater federal help. More may becoming. In 2009 President Barack Obama signed an executiveorder that requires government agencies to develop their ownclimate adaptation plans—due in mid-2012. Among those takingthe task seriously is the Department of Defense, which worriesabout many installations along vulnerable coasts. The Departmentof Transportation aims to identify roads, bridges andother infrastructure that could be affected. And wildlife agenciesare struggling with ways to keep species, ecosystems andwildlife refuges healthy in the face of shifting climatic zones.Another push for action could come from the private sector.Reinsurance giant Swiss Re has been working with McKinsey &Company and environmental groups on the economics of climateadaptation. Case studies show that it is far cheaper for alocality to spend some money now to become more resilientthan to pay for damages from weather disasters later—an approachthat obviously benefits insurers as well. The oil industryhas already upped standards for drilling-rig strength to combatmore intense hurricanes. Similarly, Joyce Coffee, a vice presidentat Edelman, who had previously helped develop Chicago’sadaptation plan, is trying to convince companies that adaptationcould create huge opportunities. A shopping mall ownerthat chips in for a community’s storm-water system upgrades,for instance, earns local goodwill, reduces the property’s risk ofdamage from flooding and boosts the chances that people willstill be able to shop when bad weather strikes.Adapting to climate change is certainly paying off for Du b u que.Unemployment is low, and the renovation is expected to liftproperty values and create jobs. The city has been named one thetop five most resilient cities in the nation, one of the 10 smartestcities on the planet and one of the world’s most livable communities.“Cities that get in early on sustainability will have economicadvantages, and we are seeing that,” Mayor Buol says.MORE TO EXPLOREProgress Report of the Interagency Climate Change Adaptation Task Force: RecommendedActions in Support of a National Climate Change Adaptation Strategy. WhiteHouse Council on Environmental Quality, October 5, 2010. www.whitehouse.govOur Extreme Future: Predicting and Coping with the Effects of a Changing Climate. JohnCarey in Scientific American. Published online June 30, 2011. www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=extreme-future-predicting-coping-with-the-effects-of-a-changing-climateThe Georgetown Climate Center’s Adaptation Clearinghouse (information on state and localadaptation plans): www.georgetownclimate.org/adaptation/clearinghouseSCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ONLINEFor an in-depth report on extreme weather and climate change,see ScientificAmerican.com/dec2011/extreme-weather© 2011 Scientific AmericanDecember 2011, ScientificAmerican.com 55

© 2011 Scientific American

NEUROSCIENCEH I D D E NS W I T C H E SI N T H EM I N DExperience may contribute to mental illness in a surprising way:by causing “epigenetic” changes—ones that turn genes on or offwithout altering the genes themselvesBy Eric J. NestlerPhotograph by Plamen Petkov© 2011 Scientific AmericanDecember 2011, ScientificAmerican.com 57

Eric J. Nestler is Nash Family Professor of Neuroscienceand director of the Friedman Brain Institute at the MountSinai Medical Center in New York City. His laboratoryfocuses on uncovering the molecular mechanisms ofdrug addiction and depression.Matt is a history teacher. his twin brother, greg, is a drug addict.(Their names have been changed to protect their anonymity.) Growingup in the Boston area, both boys did well in high school: theywere strong students in the classroom and decent athletes on thefield, and they got along with their peers. Like many young people,the brothers snuck the occasional beer or cigarette and experimented with marijuana. Then, incollege, they tried cocaine. For Greg, the experience derailed his life.At first, he was able to function normally—attending classesand maintaining connections with friends. But soon the drug becameall-important. Greg dropped out of school and took on a seriesof menial jobs in retail and fast-food joints. He rarely held aposition for more than a month or two, generally getting fired formissing too much work or for arguing with customers and coworkers.His behavior became increasingly erratic—sometimesviolent—and he was arrested repeatedly for stealing to supporthis habit. Multiple efforts at treatment failed, and by the time thecourts sent Greg, then 33 years old, to a psychiatric hospital forevaluation, he was destitute and homeless: disowned by his familyand a prisoner of his addiction.What made Greg so susceptible to the siren song of cocaine—to the point that the drug essentially destroyed his life? And howdid his identical twin, who shares the exact same genes, escape asimilar fate? How can exposure to a drug set up some individualsfor a lifelong addiction, while others can move past their youthfulindiscretions and go on to lead productive lives?These questions are not new, but neuroscientists are beginningto take a fresh approach to finding the answers, borrowingfrom discoveries first made in other fields. Over the past 10 yearsbiologists studying embryonic development and cancer have uncoveredan extensive array of molecular mechanisms that allowthe environment to alter how genes behave without changingthe information they contain. Instead of mutating genes, these“epigenetic” modifications mark them in ways that can alter howactive they are—in some cases for a lifetime.Now my laboratory and others in the field are finding signsthat epigenetic changes caused by drug use or chronic stress canchange the way the brain responds to experience: priming an individualto react with resilience or to succumb to addiction, depressionor a range of other psychiatric disorders. Although weare still at the earliest stages of understanding this powerfulmolecular interplay between genes and the environment, we arehopeful that what we learn may lead to improved treatments forthese devastating conditions—and may even offer new insightsinto how mental illness can pass from generation to generation.BEYOND GENESour efforts to untangle the epigenetic influences on mental illnessare helping to fill in blanks left by decades of earlier researchinto the genetic roots of addiction, depression, autism,schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders. Like most commonmedical conditions, these neurological afflictions are highlyheritable: roughly half the risk for addiction or depression is genetic—whichis greater than the genetic risk for high blood pressureor most cancers. But genes are not everything. As we sawwith Greg and Matt, even having identical genes is no guaranteethat two individuals will contract the same illness. Instead psychiatricdisorders are precipitated in genetically susceptible individualsby environmental inputs—exposure to drugs or stress,say—and can even be influenced by random molecular eventsthat occur during development. No two people will have exactlythe same experiences or developmental history.So the question becomes: By what mechanisms can such inputslead to mental illness? At one level, the answer is obvious:nature and nurture come together in the nerve cells in thebrain. These cells process everything we experience—whetherit is watching a movie, getting a hug, snorting cocaine or thinkingabout what is for dinner—and then share information withNew findings suggest that experiences can contributeto mental illness by adding or removing “epigenetic”marks on chromosomes. These tags are particularchem­icals that can influence gene activity withoutchanging the information encoded in the genes.IN BRIEFStudies in mice demonstrate a role for long-lastingepigenetic modifications in such disorders as addictionand depression.Epigenetic changes can also affect maternal behaviorsin ways that reproduce the same behaviors intheir offspring, even though the changes are not passeddown through the germ line.Researchers hope the new findings will lead to bettertreatments, although the path to those treatments isnot yet obvious.58 Scientific American, December 2011© 2011 Scientific American

one another by releasing and recognizing chemicals called neurotransmitters.Neurotransmitters can activate or inhibit individualnerve cells and switch a range of responsive genes on oroff. Which genes a particular neurotransmitter affects will helpto determine how a nerve cell will respond to an experienceand ultimately shapes the way an individual behaves.Many of these effects last only briefly. For example, exposureto cocaine will activate the reward center in the brain, leadingto transient euphoria. That feeling soon fades, and the systemresets itself. Still mysterious is how drugs, stress or other experiencescan engender longer-term effects, causing an individualto succumb to depression or addiction. That, many neuroscientistsare starting to think, is where epigenetics comes in.MAKING MARKSto understand why epigenetics has attracted our attention, ithelps to know a little something about how gene activity is regulated.A gene, in simplified terms, is a stretch of DNA that typicallyspecifies the makeup of a protein; proteins carry out mostprocesses in cells and thus control cell behavior. This DNA isnot tossed haphazardly into the cell’s nucleus. Rather it iswrapped around clusters of proteins called histones—likethread on a spool—and then further bundled into the structureswe call chromosomes. The combination of protein andDNA in chromosomes is known as chromatin.This packaging of DNA does more than keep the nucleustidy. It also helps to regulate the behavior of the resident genes.Tighter packing tends to keep genes in an inactive state, preventingaccess by the machinery that turns genes on. In a nervecell, for example, genes that encode liver enzymes are tuckedaway in densely packaged chromosomal regions. When a geneis needed, however, the section of DNA on which it resides unfurlssomewhat, making the gene accessible to cellular machinerythat transcribes the DNA into a strand of RNA. In most cases,that RNA will then serve as a template for producing the encodedprotein. Stimulating a neuron, for example, mightprompt that cell to boost the transcription of genes coding forcertain neurotransmitters, leading to increased synthesis ofthose messaging molecules.Whether a segment of chromatin is relaxed (primed for activation)or condensed (shut down either permanently or temporarily)is influenced by epigenetic marks: chemical tags that areattached to the resident histones or to the DNA itself. Thesetags can take various forms and together create a kind of codethat indicates how tightly packed the chromatin should be andwhether the underlying genes should be transcribed [see box atright]. An individual gene may be more—or less—active, dependingon how its chromatin is marked.Epigenetic modifications are made by a variety of enzymes,some of which add the chemical tags and some of which removethem. C. David Allis of the Rockefeller University, a leaderin the field, has dubbed these enzymes the “writers” and “erasers”of the epigenetic code. For example, an enzyme known as ahistone acetyltransferase, which attaches an acetyl group to ahistone protein, is a writer, and a histone deacetylase, which removesthis mark, is an eraser. The marks then attract other proteinsthat act as “readers.” Readers bind to specific epigenetictags and can loosen or condense the surrounding chromatin byrecruiting other regulatory proteins that stimulate or repressGenetics vs. EpigeneticsMany new insights into mental illness have come from studyingepigenetic modifications of genes, which differ from geneticmutations (below). Both kinds of alterations can disturb thefunctioning of the brain and other tissues.RNA readoutof geneActive gene(pink)MethylgroupEncoded proteinAberrant proteinMutationActive geneBASICSEnzymeNucleotideEpigenetic Changes Alter ActivityChemical tags known as epigenetic marks sit atop genes, eitheron the DNA itself or on the histone proteins around which DNA iswrapped (below). Changes in the mix of these marks can alter agene’s behavior, turning the gene off, so that protein synthesis isinhibited, or turning it on—all without changing the informationthe gene contains.Epigenetic marksGenetic MutationsOften Alter MeaningA gene’s nucleotides (code letters)form a blueprint for a protein(top). A wrong letter or othermutation can derange the resultingprotein (bottom) or cause toomuch or too little to be made.HistoneproteinsGene off: Some epigenetic marks inhibit genes by inducing tight folding ofchromatin (DNA complexed with histones and other proteins) and thus keepinggenes from being read; methyl groups sometimes play that role.Inactive geneDNAHistone tailChromatinGene on: Other marks, such as acetyl groups, tend to spur gene activity byhelping to unfurl the chromatin.ProteinAcetyl groupIllustrations by AXS Biomedical Animation Studio© 2011 Scientific AmericanDecember 2011, ScientificAmerican.com 59

FINDINGSEpigeneticsof AddictionControl (no cocaine)abExperimental (cocaine)Studies of mice have shown that chronic cocaineexposure shifts the balance of epigeneticmarks on genes in the brain’s reward center.This shift renders the animals more sensitiveto the drug’s effects and more prone to becomingaddicted.What Changes Exactly?Even a single dose of cocaine can alter the epigeneticlandscape of genes in the nucleus accumbens, a part of thereward center. In the absence of drugs ( a ), methyl markspredom­inate, keeping the affected chromatin tightlywound and its genes quiet. Cocaine causes acetyl groups topredominate and chromatin to loosen ( b ). Then manygenes encoding proteins involved in the pleasurableresponse to the drug become active.Inhibited geneMethyl groupActive geneAcetyl groupProteinNucleus accumbensNo cocaineInitial cocaine exposureChronic exposureActivityHighLowA B C DGeneLasting EffectsThe initial exposure to cocaine transiently elevates the activity of many genes (representedschematically by changes in B, C and D, near right), but activity soon returns to baseline.Chronic exposure, however, has more complex effects: it renders some genes less sensitiveto the drug (B, far right), while boosting the activity of others even higher than before(C and D). Some of those genes remain overactive for an abnormally long time.A B C DOne drug-free weeklater: Gene activityreturns to normalA B C DA B C DOne drug-free weeklater: Some genesremain overactiveA B C Dtranscription of the resident genes. Histones that are highlyacetylated, for instance, attract readers that tend to open upthe chromatin and other proteins that promote gene activation.Histones carrying an abundance of methyl groups, in contrast,attract readers that can either suppress or stimulate transcription,depending on the exact location of the methyl marks.The environment can influence gene activity by regulatingthe behavior of epigenetic writers and erasers—and thus thetagging, and restructuring, of chromatin. Sometimes the tagspersist for just a short time, say, to allow a nerve cell to respondrapidly to intense stimulation by producing a sustained wave ofneurotransmitter release. Often the tags stay put for months oryears—or even for the life of the organism: strengthening orweakening the neural connections involved in laying downmemories, for example.The addition and removal of acetyl and methyl groups—andother marks—can thus help the brain to respond and adapt toenvironmental challenges and experience. My lab and others arenow finding in animal studies, however, that these beneficial epigeneticprocesses can go awry in conditions such as addictionand depression, where alteration of the normal array of modificationsmay serve to activate cravings, induce feelings of defeator otherwise predispose an animal to a lifetime of maladaptivebehavior. Examination of human brain tissue, retrieved postmortem,suggests that the same may be true in people.PRIMED FOR ADDICTIONthe findings related to addiction build on past insights into howdrugs of abuse usurp the brain’s natural reward center. Manystudies, for instance, have identified sweeping changes in the ac-60 Scientific American, December 2011© 2011 Scientific American

tivation of genes in response to cocaine, opiates or other addictivesubstances. Some of these changes in gene “expression”were shown to persist even after months of abstinence, althoughresearchers have been hard-pressed to explain the mechanismunderlying the persistence. Given the long-lasting effects thatepigenetic changes can have, about 10 years ago my lab set outto examine whether cocaine could alter the activity of genes inthe brain’s reward center by changing their epigenetic tagging.Cocaine is a powerful drug that is as addictive in animals as it isin people. Hence, its long-term influences can be readily studiedin a lab setting.A single dose of cocaine induces robust and widespreadchanges in gene expression, as measured by concentrations ofmessenger RNA—a direct readout of gene activation. One hourafter mice receive their first injection of cocaine, nearly 100 genesget newly switched on. Even more interesting is what happenswhen animals are chronically exposed to the drug. A handful ofthe genes turned on by acute exposure to cocaine fall silent if it isgiven every day. These genes become “desensitized” to the drug.A much larger number of genes, however, do just the opposite:although they become transiently active in response to the initialexposure to cocaine, chronic exposure to the drug boosts their activitylevels even higher—in some cases for weeks after an animal’slast injection. What is more, these genes remain highly sensitiveto cocaine even after the animal has had no exposure to thedrug for some time. Chronic use of cocaine thus primes thesegenes for future activation—in essence, allowing them to “remember”the rewarding effects of the drug. This priming also setsup the animal for relapse, paving the way to addiction. Theheightened sensitivity, it turns out, stems from epigenetic modificationsof the genes.Using powerful techniques for cataloguing the epigeneticmarks across the entire mouse genome, we have been able todemonstrate that chronic cocaine administration selectivelyreconfigures the collection of acetyl and methyl tags on hundredsof genes within the brain’s reward center. Collectively,these changes tend to loosen the chromatin structure, renderingthese genes more prone to activation by subsequent exposureto cocaine. Again, many of these changes are transient—lasting only a few hours after the animal receives the drug.Some last much longer, however: we have recorded changesthat persist for at least a month, and we are beginning to lookat even longer periods.We are also starting to get a handle on the mechanisms thatunderlie these persistent changes. In our lab, we find that chroniccocaine administration dampens the activity of certain erasersthat remove acetyl groups, as well as of particular writers thatadd inhibitory methyl groups. Chromatin that is more highlyacetylated—or less methylated—remains in a more open, relaxedstate, making its resident genes more amenable to activation.Chronic cocaine exposure also manipulates the activity of otherwriters and erasers in the brain’s reward center, leaving in itswake an array of epigenetic marks that favor gene activation. Insupport of this observation, we find that when we artificiallytweak the activities of these writers and erasers to mimic the effectsof chronic drug use, without actually administering theabused drug, we cause animals to be more sensitive to the pleasurableeffects of cocaine—one of the hallmarks of addiction.The changes in writer and eraser activity following chroniccocaine use are also long-lasting, which may account for thelong-term changes in the activities of the marked genes—and theway the animal will respond to a range of future experiences. Becausethe brain’s reward center reacts to such a wide variety ofstimuli—including food and sex—manipulating the activity ofneurons in this center can fundamentally alter the way an animalbehaves.MARKED FOR DEPRESSIONneural adaptations that affect long-term behavior also underlieone of the most chronic, debilitating and common psychiatricconditions: depression. Like addiction, aspects of this disordercan be readily studied in animals. In my laboratory, we workwith mice that have been subjected to chronic social defeat.Mild-mannered male mice are paired off with more aggressiveanimals. After 10 days of being bullied, the docile mice displaymany of the signs of human depression: they no longer enjoypleasurable activities (sex, eating sweets), and they become moreanxious and withdrawn and less adventurous; they can evenovereat to the point of becoming obese. Some of these changeslast for months and can be reversed by chronic administration ofthe same antidepressants used to treat depression in humans.Looking more closely at the mice’s DNA, we saw changes inepigenetic modification across some 2,000 genes in the brain’sreward center. For 1,200 of these genes, we measured an increasein a particular epigenetic mark—a form of histone methylationthat represses gene activity. So it seems that depression may shutdown genes important to activating the part of the brain that allowsan animal to feel good, creating a sort of “molecular scar.”Many of these stress-induced changes, we found, could be reversedby treating the mice for one month with imipramine, awidely prescribed antidepressant. Similar epigenetic changeshave been detected in human brain samples obtained from individualswho were depressed at their time of death.Although depression is a common problem in the humanpopulation, not all people are equally vulnerable. And we foundthe same is true for mice. Roughly one third of the males that receivea daily “dose” of social defeat appear to be resistant to depression:despite being subjected to the same relentless stress,they show none of the withdrawal or listlessness displayed bytheir susceptible peers. This resiliency reaches down to the levelof their genes. Many of the stress-induced epigenetic changes wesee in susceptible mice do not occur in the resilient mice. Insteadthese animals show epigenetic modification of an additional setof genes in the reward center that are not similarly modified inthe mice that become depressed. The findings suggest that thisalternative pattern of modification is protective and that resiliencyis more than just an absence of vulnerability; it involves an activeepigenetic program that can be called on to combat the effectsof chronic stress.We also found that the protective genes that are epigeneticallymodified in resilient mice include many of the same oneswhose activity is restored to normal in depressed mice treatedwith imipramine. A subset of these genes are known to boostthe activity of the brain’s reward center and, hence, to ward offdepression. These observations raise the possibility that, in people,antidepressants may work in part by activating some of thesame protective epigenetic programs that function in individualsless prone to depression. If so, in addition to searching for© 2011 Scientific AmericanDecember 2011, ScientificAmerican.com 61

NEW MODE OF INHERITANCEMy Mother, MyselfStudies in rats have shown that epigenetics can influence maternalbehavior and that this effect can be passed from one generationto the next by acting on the pup’s brain alone, without alteringgerm cells. When pups are born, genes involved in regulatingthe animals’ responses to stress are decorated with inhibitorymethyl marks, which enhance sensitivity to stress. If the pups areraised by a relaxed and nurturing mother, many of their methylgroups will melt away, leaving the animals calmer. When thesepups mature, they, too, will be easygoing, attentive parents. If thepups, however, are raised by a fearful, passive mother, their geneswill gain methyl marks. They grow up to be nervous and neglectfulcaretakers.Pup grows up tobe an attentive,relaxed motherPup grows up tobe an anxious,inattentive parentAttentive motheringcauses methyl marksto be removedPup is born with methylmarks on particulargenesInattentive motheringcauses methyl marksto be addeddrugs that block the bad effects of chronic stress, we should alsobe able to identify drugs that boost the brain’s natural mechanismsof resilience.A MOTHER’S LEGACYthe effects I have discussed so far have been seen to persist fora month—the longest time period we have examined. But epigeneticmodifications can promote behavioral changes that lasta lifetime, as has been demonstrated by Michael Meaney of Mc-Gill University and his colleagues. Meaney has examined the effectsof maternal care on epigenetic modification—and on thesubsequent behavior of the offspring.The researchers observed that some rat mothers displayhigh levels of nurturing behavior, licking and grooming theirpups. Others are less diligent. The offspring of more activemothers are less anxious and produce less stress hormonewhen disturbed than pups cared for by more passive mothers.What is more, females raised by nurturing mothers becomenurturing mothers themselves.Meaney’s group went on to show that the effects of maternalbehavior are mediated, at least in part, through epigenetic mechanisms.Pups raised by passive mothers show more DNA methylationthan aggressively groomed pups in the regulatory sequencesof a gene encoding the glucocorticoid receptor—a protein, presentin most cells in the body, that mediates an animal’s responseto the stress hormone cortisol. This excessive methylation—detectedin the hippocampus, a brain region involved in learningand memory—causes nerve cells to make less of the receptor. Becauseactivation of the glucocorticoid receptor in the hippocampusactually signals the body to slow production of cortisol, theepigenetic reduction in receptor number exacerbated the stressresponse in the animals, making them more anxious and fearful—traitsthat persisted throughout their lifetime. The effects atthe glucocorticoid receptor may be just part of the story. FrancesChampagne of Columbia University and her colleagues havefound similar epigenetic differences at the gene encoding the estrogenreceptor in pups raised by active and passive mothers. It islikely, then, that epigenetic marking of many other genes will turnout to be involved in programming responses to, and thus inheritanceof, something as complex as maternal behavior.In this situation, it seems, epigenetic changes produced in agene in one generation can, in effect, be handed down to thenext generation, even though the changes are not passedthrough the germ line. A mother’s behavior changes the epigeneticregulation of genes in a pup’s brain, and then the pup displaysthe same behavior, which alters the epigenetic markingsand behavior in its pup, and so on.EPIGENETIC CUREa key challenge in the coming decades will be exploiting what weare learning about epigenetic modifications and behavior to developimproved methods for treating various psychiatric disorders.Our lab and others, for example, have found that drugs that keephistones coated with acetyl groups—by inhibiting the enzymesthat erase those marks—have potent antidepressant effects. Furthermore,although passive mothering is associated with changesin DNA methylation, Meaney has found that the same drugscan promote nurturing behavior (because enhanced acetylationcan counter the repressive effects of too much methylation).Although these results are promising, the inhibitors cur-62 Scientific American, December 2011© 2011 Scientific American

ently on the market are not likely to be useful for combatingmental illness. The acetyl erasers—histone deacetylases—regulateepigenetic markings in cells throughout the brain and allover the body, so drugs that disable them indiscriminately haveserious side effects and can be toxic. One alternative would beto generate medicines able to selectively inhibit the forms ofhistone deacetylases that are enriched in areas of the brainmost affected in specific psychiatric conditions—the rewardcenter, for example. Another option would be to identify novelproteins involved in epigenetic modification in the brain. In theend, though, the most fruitful approach might be to determinewhich genes are the subjects of epigenetic modification in depressionor addiction: the genes for specific neurotransmitter receptorsor signaling proteins, say, that are involved in neural activation.We can then focus our efforts on designing drugs thattarget the activity of those particular genes—or the protein productsof the genes—directly.PASSING IT ONone intriguing question that remains to be settled is: To whatdegree are the epigenetic changes that accompany neuropsychiatricconditions heritable? In Meaney’s experiments, rats“inherit” certain behavior patterns—and the accompanyingepigenetic profiles—from their mothers. But those changes,which are directly influenced by behavior, occur in the brain.They are not conveyed by marks on genes in the germ cells thatform a new embryo. A more provocative question is: Can suchexperiences cause epigenetic changes in sperm and egg cells,which can then be passed directly to an individual’s progeny?It is certainly not farfetched to think that chronic stress or adrug of abuse could alter the activity of genes in sperm or eggs;after all, stress hormones and drugs are not confined to thebrain but flood the entire body, including the testes and ovaries.What is hard to understand, however, is how such a change insex cells could be maintained across generations. Acquired epigeneticmodifications are erased during the type of cell divisionthat gives rise to sperm and eggs. Also, how would the alterations,if present in an embryo, wind up influencing the activityof genes in only select parts of the brain or in the endocrine organsof an adult?Nevertheless, intriguing work hints that some epigeneticmodifications may be heritable. Several groups have found thatchronically stressed rodents give birth to offspring that are particularlysensitive to stress. For example, Isabelle Mansuy of theUniversity of Zurich and her colleagues subjected mouse pupsto maternal separation during their first two weeks of life andfound that, in adulthood, the male offspring exhibit signs of depression.When these males are bred with normal female mice,the resulting offspring also show similar depressionlike behaviorsas adults, even though they were not subjected to stressduring their upbringing. This transmission of vulnerability tostress correlates with altered levels of DNA methylation of severalspecific genes in both sperm and brain.We performed a similar study in our lab. Using our model ofsocial defeat, we subjected male mice to chronic stress. We thenwaited one month, let these males mate and discovered thattheir offspring showed a profound increase in their susceptibilityto depression. Then we took the experiment one step further.If the epigenetic modifications that make mice susceptibleto depression were truly heritable, then the changes shouldreach the animals’ sex cells. So we took sperm from our bulliedmales and used it to fertilize eggs from a normal female. Theoffspring of this artificial union, we discovered, were almostcompletely normal: they showed only slight indications of thewithdrawn behavior and anxiety evinced by their fathers.This experiment is not definitive, because epigenetic marksmight somehow be stripped from sperm during the in vitro fertilizationprocess. The results, however, suggest that the femalesthat had physically mated with intimidated males treatedtheir pups differently than females that mated with normalmales—or that never met the fathers of their pups. Consequently,the offspring’s depression may have stemmed from an earlybehavioral experience and not from a direct epigenetic inheritancecarried through sperm or eggs.That is not to say that such transgenerational transmissionis impossible. Currently, though, we have no definitive evidenceto indicate that it occurs. To address that question, we must developexperimental tools that will enable us to identify the relevantepigenetic modifications in germ cells—and to establishthat these modifications are both necessary and sufficient to inducethe transmission of traits observed.Eighteenth-century biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck wasknown for his theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics.According to this idea, traits that organisms pick up over alifetime—a well-exercised musculature, for example—can bepassed on to their offspring. Of course, we now know that anindividual’s genes play the dominant role in determining physiologyand function. At the same time, scientists are increasinglycoming to appreciate that exposure to the environmentand to different experiences (including random occurrences)throughout development and adulthood can modify the activityof our genes and, hence, the ways these traits manifest themselves.And we know now that epigenetic mechanisms mediatethis interplay between nature and nurture. We still have muchmore work to do to fully understand how, and to what extent,epigenetics influences our behavioral traits and susceptibilityto mental illness and whether such vulnerabilities can bepassed to future generations. No doubt Lamarck and his criticswould have delighted in debating the possibilities.MORE TO EXPLOREEpigenetic Regulation in Psychiatric Disorders. N. Tsankova, W. Renthal, A. Kumar andEric J. Nestler in Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Vol. 8, pages 355–367; May 2007.Epigenetic Programming of Phenotypic Variations in Reproductive Strategies inthe Rat through Maternal Care. N. M. Cameron et al. in Journal of Neuroendocrinology,Vol. 20, No. 6, pages 795–801; June 2008.Why DNA Isn’t Your Destiny. John Cloud in Time, Vol. 175, No. 2; January 18, 2010.­www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1952313,00.htmlEpigenetic Regulation of Genes in Learning and Memory. T. L. Roth, E. D. Roth and J. D.Sweatt in Essays in Biochemistry, Vol. 48, No. 1, pages 263–274; September 2010.Epigenetic Transmission of the Impact of Early Stress across Generations. T. B. Franklinet al. in Biological Psychiatry, Vol. 68, No. 5, pages 408–415; September 1, 2010.The Epigenetic Landscape of Addiction. I. Maze and Eric J. Nestler in Annals of the NewYork Academy of Sciences, Vol. 1216, pages 99–113; January 2011.Epigenetics at the University of Utah’s Learn.Genetics site:­http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/epigeneticsSCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ONLINEListen to an interview with the author and learn more about epigeneticsat ScientificAmerican.com/dec2011/epigenetics© 2011 Scientific AmericanDecember 2011, ScientificAmerican.com 63

Mark W. Moffett is a research associate at the SmithsonianNational Museum of Natural History, where he studies antbehavior. Moffett has traveled throughout the tropical regionsof the Americas, Asia and Africa to document ant societiesand discover new species for his book Adventuresamong Ants (University of California Press, 2011).ANIMAL BEHAVIORAnts &the Artof WarTheBattles among ants can be startlingly similar tohuman military operations By Mark W. Moffett64 Scientific American, December 2011raging combatants form a blur on all sides. the scale of theviolence is almost incomprehensible, the battle stretching beyondmy field of view. Tens of thousands sweep ahead with a suicidal single-mindedness.Utterly devoted to duty, the fighters never retreatfrom a confrontation—even in the face of certain death. The engagementsare brief and brutal. Suddenly, three foot soldiers grab an enemyand hold it in place until one of the bigger warriors advances andcleaves the captive’s body, leaving it smashed and oozing.© 2011 Scientific American

Marauder antsfrom one colony attacka member of a rivalmarauder colony,slowly tearing itlimb from limb.Illustration by John Dawson December 2011, ScientificAmerican.com 65© 2011 Scientific American

I back off with my camera, gasping in the humid air of theMalaysian rain forest, and remind myself that the rivals are ants,not humans. I have spent months documenting such deathsthrough a field camera that I use as a microscope, yet I still find iteasy to forget that I am watching tiny insects—in this case, a speciesknown as Pheidologeton diversus, the marauder ant.Scientists have long known that certain kinds of ants (andtermites) form tight-knit societies with members numbering inthe millions and that these insects engage in complex behaviors.Such practices include traffic management, public health efforts,crop domestication and, perhaps most intriguingly, warfare:the concentrated engagement of group against group inwhich both sides risk wholesale destruction. Indeed, in these respectsand others, we modern humans more closely resembleants than our closest living relatives, the apes, which live in farsmaller societies. Only recently, however, have researchers begunto appreciate just how closely the war strategies of ants mirrorour own. It turns out that for ants, as for humans, warfare involvesan astonishing array of tactical choices about methods ofattack and strategic decisions about when or where to wage war.SHOCK AND AWEremarkably, these similarities in warfare exist despite sharp differencesbetween ants and humans in both biology and societalstructure. Ant colonies consist mostly of sterile females thatfunction as workers or soldiers, occasionally a few short-livedmales that serve as drones, and one or more fertile queens. Membersoperate without a power hierarchy or permanent leader. Althoughqueens are the center of colony life because they reproduce,they do not lead troops or organize labor. Rather coloniesare decentralized, with workers that individually know littlemaking combat decisions that nonetheless prove effective at thegroup level without oversight—a process called swarm intelligence.But although ants and humans have divergent lifestyles,they fight their foes for many of the same economic reasons, includingaccess to dwelling spaces, territory, food and even labor—certainant species kidnap competitors to serve as slaves.The tactics ants use in war depend on what is at stake. Someants succeed in battle by being on the constant offensive, callingto mind Chinese military general Sun Tzu’s assertion in his sixthcenturyb.c. book The Art of War that “rapidity is the essence ofwar.” Among army ants, species of which inhabit warm regionsaround the world, and a few other groups, such as Asia’s marauderant, hundreds or even millions of individuals proceedblindly in a tight phalanx, attacking prey and enemies as theycome across them. In Ghana I witnessed a seething carpet ofworkers of the army ant species Dorylus nigricans searching togetheracross an area 100 feet wide. These African army ants—which, in species such as D. nigricans that move in broadswathes, are called driver ants—slice flesh with bladelike jawsand can make short work of victims thousands of times theirsize. Although vertebrate creatures can usually outrun ants, inSome kinds of ants live in tight-knitcolonies containing thousands or millionsof individuals that go to war withother colonies over resources such asterritory or food.The diverse tactics these insects use in1IN BRIEFGabon I once saw an antelope, caught in a snare, eaten alive by acolony of driver ants. Both army ants and marauder ants willdrive rival ants from food—the sheer number of troops is sufficientto overrun any rivals and control their food supply thereafter.But army ants almost always hunt en masse with a more maliciousaim, storming other ant societies to seize the colony’s larvaeand pupae as food.The advancing phalanxes of army and marauder ants arereminiscent of the fighting formations that humans have usedfrom ancient Sumerian times to the regimented fronts of theAmerican Civil War. Marching together in this way, without aspecific target, as humans sometimes did, makes every raid agamble: the ants might proceed over barren ground and findnothing. Other ant species send a far smaller number of workerscalled scouts out from the nest to search separately for food. Byfanning out across a larger area while the rest of the colony stayshome, they encounter more prey and enemies.Yet colonies that rely on scouts may kill fewer adversaries intotal because a scout must return to its nest to assemble a fightingforce—usually by depositing a chemical called a pheromonefor the reserve troops to follow. In the time it takes a scout to assemblethose troops for battle, the enemy might have regroupedor retreated. In contrast, the workers of the army ants or marauderants can immediately summon any help they require becausea slew of assistants are marching directly behind them.The result is maximal shock and awe.ALLOCATING THE TROOPSit is not just the huge number of fighters that makes the armyand marauder ants so deadly. My research on marauder ants hasshown that troops are deployed in ways that increase efficiencyand reduce the cost to a colony. How an individual is deployeddepends on the female’s size. Marauder ant workers vary in sizemore than workers of any other ant species. The tiny “minor”combat can be remarkably similar tohuman war strategies, varying accordingto what is at stake.The ants’ capacity for warfare is enhancedby their unbreakable allegianceto their colony.CONSULTANT: STEFAN COVER Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University (preceding s)66 Scientific American, December 2011© 2011 Scientific American

2On the battlefield: Highlyterritorial weaver ants spreadeaglea much stronger armyant, eventually tearing it topieces (1). Smaller honeypot antstands on a pebble to look larger,a tactical deception thatscares its bigger foe away (2).Minor worker of the marauderspecies rides on the head of amajor worker of the same species;minors catch enemies,whereas majors kill them (3).Reddish suicide bomber antruptures its own body to spray atoxic yellow glue on its enemy,killing both instantly (4).4MARK W. MOFFETT Minden Picturesworkers (the foot soldiers of my opening description) movequickly to the front lines—the danger zone where competing antcolonies or prey are first encountered. A single minor has nomore chance against the enemy than would an equally smallscout of a lone-hunting species. But their sheer numbers at thefront of a raid present a commanding barricade. Although somemay die along the way, the minors slow or incapacitate the enemyuntil the larger workers, known as the medias and the majors,arrive to deliver the deathblow. The medias and the majorsare much scarcer than the minors but far more lethal, with someindividuals weighing 500 times as much as one minor.The minors’ sacrifices on the front lines assure a low mortalityfor the medias and the majors, which require far more resourcesfor the colony to raise and maintain. Putting the easilyreplaced fighters at greatest risk is a time-honored battle technique.Ancient river valley societies did the same thing with conscriptedfarmers, cheaply obtained and available in droves, whoabsorbed the worst of the warfare. Meanwhile the elite soldiers,who received the best training and the finest weapons and armor,remained relatively safe within these hordes. And just ashuman armies may defeat their enemies by attrition, destroying3unit by unit rather than attacking a whole force at once—a tacticknown to military strategists as “defeat in detail”—so, too, do marauderants mow down enemies a few at a time as a raid advancesinstead of engaging the enemy’s entire strength.In addition to killing other enemy species and prey, marauderants intensely defend the areas around their nests and food fromother colonies of their own kind. The medias and majors hangback while each minor grabs an opponent’s limb. These confrontationslast for hours and are deadlier than the jostles that occurbetween the marauder and its other competitors. Hundreds oflittle ants become interlocked over a few square feet as theyslowly tear one another asunder.This insect variant of hand-to-hand combat represents thecommon mode of killing among ants. Mortality is nearly certain,reflecting the cheapness of labor in a large colony. Ants that areless cavalier about loss of troops employ long-range weaponsthat allow them to hurt or impede the enemy from afar; for example,stunning their enemy with a Mace-like spray, as Formicawood ants from Europe and North America do, or droppingsmall stones onto enemy heads as Dorymyrmex bicolor antsfrom Arizona do.Research conducted by Nigel Franks, now at the University ofBristol in England, and his colleagues has demonstrated that theorganized violence practiced among army ants and marauders isconsistent with Lanchester’s square law, one of the equations developedin World War I by engineer Frederick Lanchester to un-© 2011 Scientific AmericanDecember 2011, ScientificAmerican.com 67

derstand potential strategies and tactics of opposing forces. Hismath showed that when many fights occur simultaneously withinan arena, greater numbers trump individual fighting power.Only when dangers become extreme do the larger marauder antsput themselves at risk—for example, workers of all sizes will rushan entomologist foolish enough to dig up their nest, with the majorsinflicting the most savage bites.Still, just as Lanchester’s square law does not apply in all situationsfor warring humans, neither does it describe all the behaviorsof warring ants. Slave-making ants offer a fascinatingexception. Certain slave makers steal the brood of their targetcolony to raise as slaves in the slave maker nest. The slave makers’tough armor, or exoskeleton, as it is termed, and daggerlikejaws give them superior fighting abilities. Yet they are greatlyoutnumbered by the ants in the colonies they raid for slaves. Toavoid being massacred, some slave makers release a “propaganda”chemical that throws the raided colony into disarray andkeeps its workers from ganging up on them. In so doing, asFranks and his then University of Bath graduate student LucasPartridge have shown, they are following another LanchesterTERRITORIAL CONTROLother humanlike military strategies emerge from observationsof weaver ants. Weaver ants occupy much of the canopy of tropicalforests in Africa, Asia and Australia, where colonies mayspan several trees and contain 500,000 individuals—comparableto the enormous populations of some army ants. Weaversalso resemble army ants in being highly aggressive. Yet the twohave entirely different modi operandi. Whereas army ants donot defend territories because they stay packed together whileroaming in search of other ant species to attack for food, weavercolonies are entrenched at one site, spreading their workerswide within it to keep competitors out of every inch of their turf.They handily control huge spaces within the trees by defendinga few choke points such as the spot at which the tree trunkmeets the ground. Leafy “barrack nests” placed strategically inthe crowns distribute the troops where they are most needed.Weaver ant workers are also more independent than armyant workers. Army ant raids function by stripping away theworkers’ autonomy. Because the army ant troops confine themselvesto the close quarters of their advancing pack, they requireShut the front door: Door-making ant of the genus Stenamma (middle) uses a pebble to block an army ant (left) from entering its nest.strategy that at times applies also for humans. This so-called linearlaw holds that when battles are waged as one-on-one engagements—whichis what the propaganda substance allows—victory is assured for the superior fighters even when they areoutnumbered. In fact, a colony besieged by slave makers will oftenallow the invaders to do this plundering without any fightingor killing.Among ants, a fighter’s value to its colony bears on the risks theant takes: the more expendable it is, the more likely it is to end upin harm’s way. The guards lining marauder foraging trails, for instance,are usually elderly or maimed workers that often struggleto stay upright while lunging at intruders. As Deby Cassill of theUniversity of South Florida reported in Naturwissenschaften in2008, only older (months-old) fire ants engage in fights, whereasweeks-old workers run off and days-old individuals feign death bylying motionless when under attack. Viewed from the ant perspective,the human practice of conscripting healthy youngsters mightseem senseless. But anthropologists have found some evidencethat, at least in a few cultures, successful human warriors tend tohave more offspring. A reproductive edge might make combatworth the personal risk for people in their prime—an advantageunattainable by ant workers, which do not reproduce.relatively few communication signals. They respond to enemiesand prey in a highly regimented way. Weavers, in contrast, wandermore freely and are more versatile in their response to opportunitiesand threats. The differences in style call to mind thecontrasts between the rigidity of Frederick the Great’s armiesand the flexibility and mobility of Napoleon Bonaparte’s troops.Like army ants, weaver ants take similar tacks in dealingwith prey and destroying an enemy: in both cases, a weaver deploysa short-range recruitment pheromone from its sternalgland to summon nearby reinforcements to make the kill. Otherweaver ant communiqués are specific to warfare. When a workerreturns from a fight with another colony, it jerks its body atpassing ants to alert them to the ongoing combat. At the sametime, it deposits a different scent along its path, a pheromonereleased from the rectal gland that its colony mates follow to thebattlefield. Moreover, to claim a previously unoccupied space,workers will use yet another signal, defecating in the spot, muchas canines mark their territory by urinating on it.A MATTER OF SIZEfor both ants and humans, the propensity to engage in true warfareis related at least in a rough way to the size of a society.MARK W. MOFFETT Minden Pictures68 Scientific American, December 2011© 2011 Scientific American

Small colonies seldom conduct protracted battles except in defense.Like human hunter-gatherers, who are often nomadicand tend to live hand to mouth, the tiniest ant societies, whichcontain just a few dozen individuals, do not build a fixed infrastructureof trails, food stashes or dwelling places worth dyingfor. At times of intense conflict between groups, these ants, liketheir human counterparts, will often choose flight over fight.Modestly sized societies will likely have more resources todefend but are still small enough to be judicious about jeopardizingtheir troops. Honeypot ants of the southwestern U.S.,which live in medium-size colonies containing a few thousandindividuals, provide an example of danger mitigation by theseinsects. To harvest nearby prey unchallenged, a honeypot colonymay stage a preemptive tournament near a neighboring nestto keep the enemy busy rather than risking deadly battles outright.During the tournament the rivals stand high on their sixlegs and circle one another. This “stilting” behavior mirrors themostly bloodless, ceremonial displays of strength commonplacein small human clans, as biologists Bert Hölldobler of ArizonaState University and E. O. Wilson of Harvard Universityfirst suggested. With luck, the colony with the smaller stiltingants—typically from the weaker colony—can retreat withoutloss of life, but the winning side will wreak havoc on their enemiesgiven the opportunity, devouring the loser’s brood and abductingworkers called repletes that are swollen with food theyregurgitate on request for hungry nest mates. The honeypotvictors will drag the repletes back to their nest and keep theseliving larders as slaves. To avoid this fate, reconnaissance workerssurvey the tournament to assess whether their side is outnumberedand, if necessary, set in motion a retreat.Full-bore conflicts appear to be most common for ant specieswith mature colonies composed of hundreds of thousands of individualsor more. Scientists have tended to consider these largesocial insect societies inefficient because they produce fewernew queens and males per capita than smaller groups do. I seethem instead as being so productive that they have the option toinvest not only in reproduction but in a workforce that exceedsthe usual labor requirements—much like our bodies invest in fattytissue we can draw on in hard times. Different researchershave posited that individual ants have less work to do as coloniesgrow larger and that this leaves more of them inactive at any onetime. Colony growth would thereby amplify the expansion of adedicated army reserve that can take full advantage of Lanchester’ssquare law in its encounters with enemies. Similarly, mostanthropologists see human warfare as having emerged only afterour societies underwent a population explosion fueled by the inventionof agriculture.SUPERORGANISMS AND SUPERCOLONIESultimately the capacity for extreme forms of warfare in antsarises from a social unity that parallels the unity of cells in anorganism. Cells recognize one another by means of chemicalcues on their surface; a healthy immune system attacks any cellwith different cues. In most healthy colonies, ants, too, recognizeone another by means of chemical cues on their body surface,and they attack or avoid foreigners with a different scent.Ants wear this scent like a national flag tattooed on their bodies.The permanence of the scent means ant warfare can never endwith one colony usurping another. Midstream switches in allegianceare impossible for adult ants. With perhaps a few rare exceptions,each worker is a part of its natal society until it dies.(Not that the interests of ant and colony always coincide. Workersof some species can attempt to reproduce—and be thwarted—muchas conflicts of interest between genes can occur withinan organism.) This identification with their colony is all antshave because they form anonymous societies: beyond distinguishingcastes such as soldiers from queens, ant workers donot recognize one another as individuals. Their absolute socialcommitment is the fundamental feature of living as part of a superorganism,in which the death of a worker is of no more consequencethan cutting a finger. The bigger the colony, the less asmall cut is felt.The most breathtaking example of colony allegiance in theant world is that of the Linepithema humile ant. Though nativeto Argentina, it has spread to many other parts of the world byhitching rides in human cargo. In California the biggest of these“supercolonies” ranges from San Francisco to the Mexican borderand may contain a trillion individuals, united throughout bythe same “national” identity. Each month millions of Argentineants die along battlefronts that extend for miles around San Diego,where clashes occur with three other colonies in wars thatmay have been going on since the species arrived in the state acentury ago. The Lanchester square law applies with a vengeancein these battles. Cheap, tiny and constantly being replacedby an inexhaustible supply of reinforcements as they fall,Argentine workers reach densities of a few million in the averagesuburban yard. By vastly outnumbering whatever nativespecies they encounter, the supercolonies control absolute territories,killing every competitor they contact.What gives these Argentines their relentless fighting ability?Many ant species, as well as some other creatures, including humans,exhibit a “dear enemy effect,” in which, after a period ofconflict, death rates sharply decline as the two sides settle on aboundary—often with an unoccupied no-man’s-land betweenthem. In the floodplains where Argentine ants originated, however,warring colonies must stop fighting each time the watersrise, forcing them to higher ground. The conflict is never settled;the battle never ends. Thus, their wars continue unabated,decade after decade.The violent expansions of ant supercolonies bring to mindhow human colonial superpowers once eradicated smallergroups, from Native Americans to Australian Aborigines. Luckily,humans do not form superorganisms in the sense I havedescribed: our allegiances can shift over time to let immigrantsin, to permit nations to fluidly define themselves. Althoughwarfare might be inescapable among many ants, it is, for us,avoidable.MORE TO EXPLOREThe Ants. Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson. Belknap Press, 1990.Individual versus Social Complexity, with Particular Reference to Ant Colonies.C. Anderson and D. W. McShea in Biological Reviews, Vol. 76, No. 2, pages 211–237; May 2001.Arms Races and the Evolution of Big Fierce Societies. Graeme P. Boswell et al. in Proceedingsof the Royal Society B, Vol. 268, No. 1477, pages 1723–1730; August 22, 2001.Supercolonies of Billions in an Invasive Ant: What Is a Society? Mark W. Moffett inBehavioral Ecology (in press).SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ONLINEMore ant photos are available at ScientificAmerican.com/dec2011/ants© 2011 Scientific AmericanDecember 2011, ScientificAmerican.com 69

Colleen Fitzpatrick is a forensic genealogist,who has traced hundreds of peoplearound the world for both civilian andmilitary organizations. She is based inHuntington Beach, Calif.FORENSICSARM IN THE ICENew fingerprint- and DNA-identification techniquessolve a mystery from a 60-year-old plane crashBy Colleen FitzpatrickOn march 12, 1948, at 9:14 p.m. pacific standard time, northwest airlines flight 4422crashed into Mount Sanford, a peak in the remote Wrangell Mountains in easternAlaska. All 24 passengers—merchant mariners returning to the U.S. fromShanghai, China—along with six Northwest crew members, probably died onimpact. The debris, too difficult to reach, was quickly covered by snow andeventually entombed by ice.There it remained until 1999, despitemany failed efforts to find it. In that yearKevin McGregor and Marc Millican, twoformer U.S. Air Force pilots who like tosolve forgotten aviation mysteries, havingdetermined that the glacier containingthe plane was retreating, gained permissionfrom the National Park Service to recoverparts of the wreckage if they couldfind it. After an arduous climb, they discoveredscattered debris, along with adesiccated left arm and attached hand inthe ice. As McGregor explains, “Thatchanged the entire project. We becamecompelled to find out to whom the armand hand belonged.”McGregor and Millican’s quest toidentify the remains eventually led to anunusual collaboration of DNA experts,fingerprint analysts and forensic genealogists,including myself. Our challengingand ultimately successful effort may benefitmany more families than just those ofthe doomed men onboard the Northwestflight. Some of the laboratory techniquesdeveloped during our investigation mayone day prove helpful in identifying victimsof mass disasters and more than 800unknown soldiers who died during theKorean War.INITIAL SETBACKSthe discovery of human remains broughtAlaska law-enforcement agencies into thepicture. A state trooper carefully freedthe arm and transported it to the medicalexaminer’s office in Anchorage, some 200miles away. After taking impressions ofthe finger pads, the medical examinerembalmed the remains.Because the arm and hand bore no distinguishingmarks, fingerprinting andDNA analysis were the only possibilitiesfor making a conclusive identification. Afterthree years, however, it became clearthat standard methods would not solve themystery. An extensive search for fingerprintrecords turned up only 22 so-calledten-print cards, leaving no records foreight victims, including the six crew members.Even had there been a full set of referenceprints for each victim, however, thedried-out hand was so badly damaged byexposure to the elements that the Alaskamedical examiner’s office would have beenunable to make a positive identification.Investigators were stymied on the DNAfront as well. In 2002 the medical examiner’soffice sent a tissue sample to a commercialDNA laboratory. Alas, the lab reportedthat the biological material had “degradedto a point where the DNA strandswere too small to get intelligible results.”McGregor and Millican—now joined byRandall Haslett, the son of the flight’s purser—decidedto search for a research scientistwho specialized in making identificationswith ancient DNA. Their quest ledTragedy: It took nine years to identifythe arm recovered from the wreckage ofNorthwest Flight 4422. No one knows whatcaused the crash. The plane was off coursebefore it slammed into the mountain.MICHAEL S. QUINTON Getty Images (mountain); COURTESY OF NORTHWEST AIRLINES HISTORY DEPARTMENT (airplane);COURTESY OF KEVIN A. McGREGOR, © 1999 (man with camera); COURTESY OF ROY WITTOCK (arm);ALASKA STATE TROOPERS/AP PHOTO (van Zandt); COURTESY OF MIKE GRIMM, JR. (fingerprint)70 Scientific American, December 2011© 2011 Scientific AmericanIllustration by Mario Wagner

Illustration by Kyle Bean© 2011 Scientific AmericanDecember 2011, ScientificAmerican.com 71

first to Ryan Parr of Genesis Genomics(now Mitomics) and then, in 2006, to OdileLoreille of the Armed Forces DNA IdentificationLaboratory (AFDIL) in Rockville,Md. Loreille is known for analyzing highlydegraded DNA. Rather than looking at theDNA found in the nuclei of cells, however,she studies the DNA in mitochondria, thetiny organelles that cells use to create energy.Because cells have so much more mitochondrialDNA (mtDNA) than nuclearDNA, mtDNA offers a better chance ofidentifying very degraded remains.Loreille was interested in the NorthwestAirlines project because she thoughtit might help her solve the mystery thatbrought her to AFDIL: how to identify theremains of more than 800 unidentifiedU.S. soldiers from the Korean War. Mostof these men are interred in Hawaii in theNational Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific,otherwise known as the Punchbowl.The formaldehyde used to embalm theservicemen’s remains had substantiallydamaged their DNA. If Loreille could usethe Northwest case to develop new techniquesfor analyzing embalmed tissue, itwould be another step in her efforts tohelp the armed forces identify the remainsof these Korean War veterans.All in all, Loreille knew, the best chanceof success was to obtain DNA from thearm’s bone tissue, which is usually betterprotected from contamination by the environmentand from the DNA of anyonewho handled the remains. She had recentlydiscovered how to more efficiently separateformaldehyde residue from bone. Buteven that process was unlikely to generateenough material. During the course of ourinvestigation, however, Loreille developeda demineralization process that completelydissolved the bone matrix, providingjust enough mtDNA for analysis.Of course, DNA extraction was onlyhalf of the story. To make an identification,the mtDNA from the decades-oldtissue would have to be compared withthat of a family reference for each candidateuntil a match was obtained. BecausemtDNA is passed to each child only fromthe mother, any male or female relativecould serve as a reference as long as he orshe was linked to the candidate throughan exclusively matrilineal line. This requirementoften makes it difficult to locatedistant relatives who can providemtDNA, given that a woman’s familyname typically changes at marriage. Thatis where I came in. As a forensic gen e-alogist, I have traced hundreds of peopleworldwide for many reasons, includingDNA referencing for the military and inconnection with historical projects.Unofficial fingerprint records anda marriage certificate provided the finalclues that led to a positive identification.PARALLEL EFFORTSin trying to narrow the possibilities whilespeeding up the identification process,Loreille turned for help in 2007 to TedRobinson, an assistant professor of forensicscience at George Washington University.Although the earlier fingerprint analysishad not been successful, a second attemptwith new techniques might con -ceivably rule out some of the candidates.Then it would not be necessary to locateliving relatives to provide DNA referencesfor all 30 men.The fingerprint analysis, performed inparallel with the mtDNA identification,quickly presented its own challenges. Fingerprintidentification relies on three levelsof detail. Level 1 takes into account thegeneral pattern of the skin’s friction ridges,which allow an individual to grip objects.This pattern falls into one of three categories—loops,whorls or arches. (There isonly one type of ridge pattern per finger.)Level 2 details are known as minutiae, orGalton points, in honor of Sir Francis Galton,whose work laid the foundation in1892 for the current system of recordingand identifying fingerprints. Minutiae includeplaces where the line of an individualridge splits into two, develops a spur, includesa dot or simply comes to an end. Onthe finest scale, level 3 describes the characteristicsof individual ridges, such astheir thickness and their level of convexityor concavity. It also includes the locationsof sweat pores. Comparing level 1 details intwo sets of fingerprints is sufficient to rulesomeone out as a match; however, it is notspecific enough to use for a positive identification.Level 2 and 3 details must be usedfor such determinations.By this point, the epidermal layer ofskin was no longer present on the fingers—it had sloughed off since the arm’s removalfrom the ice, and the underlying dermiswas almost smooth. Furthermore, only 16of the original 22 ten-print cards fromNorthwest Flight 4422 could now be located,so there were no reference prints for 14of the victims. Nevertheless, Robinson persevered.He attempted to restore the pliabilityof the skin by bathing it in speciallyformulated rehydration fluids. Forensicscientists refer to this process as fingerprintrejuvenation. Coincidentally, Robinsonhad just met Michael Grimm, a retiredsupervisor from the state of Virginia’s Departmentof Forensic Science, at a conference.Grimm gave Robinson a sample of anew rejuvenation fluid that had been employedin the identification of victims ofHurricane Katrina in 2005 and that couldpossibly produce results within hours.The fluid did the trick. Robinsonsoaked the hand at 122 degrees Fahrenheit(50 degrees Celsius), checking the resultshourly as finger-ridge detail slowlyemerged on all five fingers. After photographingthe results, Robinson took castsof the prints using two types of siliconerubber. When he removed the finger padsand soaked them separately, the fingerprintdetail improved even more. AfterGrimm photographed the finger pad castsand imported the digital images into aphoto-enhancing software program, theprints were so clear that even the sweatMore than 50 years after the 1948 crash of a NorthwestAirlines plane killed all onboard, a desiccatedarm and hand were retrieved from the scene.IN BRIEFInitial fingerprint examination and DNA analysis ofthe arm and hand were unable to determine the identityof the remains.Researchers finally identified the remains after developingnew techniques that may one day be usedfor disaster victims and unknown soldiers.72 Scientific American, December 2011© 2011 Scientific American

pores were visible on the 60-year-old hand.Ironically, the high quality of the photographscreated a new problem. As Robinsonexplains, “A lot of [the mariners’ cards]were overinked, smudged and just poorlydone. The fingerprints from the hand werenow better than the prints from the tenprintcards. Because of the poor quality ofthe ten-print cards, identification couldnot be made.” Still, Robinson knew that allfive fingers of the hand from the crash sitehad loops, so he was able to rule out 10 victimsby discerning that each had at leastone finger with an arch or a whorl on hisleft hand. Grimm eliminated four morebased on the finer details in the loops.IDENTIFICATION AT LASTin the meantime, forensic genealogistChriss Lyon and I worked to find livingrelatives who might provide the necessaryreference samples for the remaining victims.By September 2007, 13 of the 30men had been ruled out by mtDNA, ninehad been ruled out on the basis of fingerprintsalone, and five had been ruled outby both mtDNA and fingerprints. Thatleft three men: purser Robert Haslett andmerchant mariners Francis “Frank” Josephvan Zandt and John V. Elkins.Unfortunately, the fingerprint recordsfor Haslett were illegible, and there wereno living matrilineal relatives for him whocould provide mitochondrial DNA for comparison.(A mitochondrial DNA samplefrom Haslett’s son, Randall, could prove arelationship only to Randall’s mother andher relatives.) But father and son did, ofcourse, share their Y chromosome, so Loreilleused advanced laboratory techniquesto amplify the amount of DNA from thenuclear material in the arm to create a partialprofile of the unknown victim’s Y DNA.It did not match Randall’s.Only two candidates remained. JohnElkins’s relatives declined to give samplesof their DNA, and his fingerprint recordswere too smudged to be of use. Fortunately,our luck was about to change, finallygiving our team what we needed to determinewhether the arm had belonged toElkins or van Zandt.According to vital records, Frank vanZandt was born on October 21, 1911, inBennington, Vt., the youngest child of Orvillevan Zandt, Sr., from New York Stateand Margaret Conway from Ireland. Frankhad one sister, named Elizabeth (whosechildren might have served as mtDNA references),but we found no trace of her orany possible descendants after the 1910U.S. census. Going back a generation, thesearch for collateral female-linked Conwaylines in the U.S. also ran into trouble. Ilearned that Margaret Conway immigratedwith two sisters (and three brothers) tothe U.S. in the 1890s. Unfortunately, onesister never married, and the other sisterdid not have any surviving female lines.Perhaps Margaret had left sisters behindin Ireland? I had done 40 years ofIrish genealogical research, and so I knewthat Irish civil and church records are organizedby county. To find Margaret, Ihad to discover her county of origin. Aftersearching through thousands of records,I got a lucky break from Bill Budde, thearchivist at the Bennington Museum.Budde discovered that the 1936 marriagerecord of Frank’s brother, Orville, Jr., recordedhis (and therefore Frank’s) mother’sbirthplace as “Limerick.” A search ofIrish birth registrations revealed thatMargaret was born September 14, 1871, toJohn Conway and Ellen Drumm fromCounty Limerick. There was more goodnews: Margaret had left three sisters anda brother in Ireland. But finding their descendantsmore than 100 years later wasnot going to be easy.During my painstaking search for Conway-Drummdescendants, I was eventuallyreferred to Maurice Conway, the patriarchof the Conway family of the village of Askeaton.He did not initially recognize any ofthe names we had of van Zandt’s Conwayancestors. Ultimately, however, I learnedthat Maurice’s maternal great-great-grandmother,Elizabeth, was Ellen Drumm’s sister—thatis to say, he and van Zandt shareda common maternal ancestor. BecauseMaurice was a matrilineal relative, therefore,a sample of his mitochondrial DNAcould be used for the identification.Loreille compared the mtDNA fromthe arm against all 19 of the referencesamples that were now available for themen onboard Flight 4422. The DNA sequencefrom the remains matched onereference only, that of van Zandt’s maternalcousin, Maurice Conway. For addedconfirmation, we located van Zandt’sbrother’s son, who agreed to serve as aY-DNA reference. The partial Y-DNA profilethat had ruled out Robert Haslettmatched that of van Zandt’s nephew at everylocus.Robinson and Grimm had meanwhilediscovered that in their search for fingerprintrecords, they had been asking thewrong question. Instead of requesting “official”fingerprint records, they should havebeen asking for “any” fingerprint records.They were surprised to learn that the NationalMaritime Center had extra fingerprintrecords of many of the merchantmariners that had been taken when theysigned on to a new ship. These new recordsgave us van Zandt’s prints for the first time,allowing Robinson and Grimm to matchvan Zandt’s fingerprints to those takenfrom the 60-year-old hand. Their effortsproduced the oldest postmortem fingerprintidentification on record.We now had independent, corroboratingresults from both DNA and fingerprintanalysis identifying the arm in theice as having belonged to Francis Josephvan Zandt. As for the unknown soldiers ofthe Korean War, Loreille continues her researchto identify their remains. Her workon extracting DNA from embalmed tissuesuggests that it may be possible to recoverenough mtDNA from the Korean-era remainsto identify them. She is now workingwith newly developed DNA-sequencingtechnologies that, in the next fewyears, might make identifications feasibleusing extremely small amounts of DNA—whether from long-dead soldiers or victimsof mass disasters.Our results also showed the importanceof working across disciplines. WhereasDNA experts, fingerprint analysts andforensic genealogists often try to answerthe same questions about identity and relationships,we typically confine our effortsto our respective professional domains.Our highly collaborative investigation ofNorthwest Flight 4422 shows that crossdisciplinaryefforts can produce robust results,especially in very difficult cases.MORE TO EXPLOREIntegrated DNA and Fingerprint Analyses in the Identificationof 60-Year-Old Mummified Human RemainsDiscovered in an Alaskan Glacier. Odile Loreille et al. inJournal of Forensic Science, Vol. 55, No. 3, pages 813–818;May 2010. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20384910To learn about the Korean War accounting effort: www.dtic.mil/dpmo/koreaFor more information about forensic genealogy: www.identifinders.comSCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ONLINEListen to Kevin McGregor describe the questto find the wreckage of Northwest Airlines Flight4422 and view a slide show of photographs atScientificAmerican.com/dec2011/plane-wreck© 2011 Scientific AmericanDecember 2011, ScientificAmerican.com 73

Q & ASCIENCE TALKEDUCATIONSpeakingOut on the“Quiet Crisis”Strengthening science education is the keyto securing our energy future, saysRensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s presidentInterview by Brendan BorrellIN BRIEFShe also worked at other research institutionsin the early 1970s, including Fermilabin Batavia, Ill., and CERN near Geneva. In1995 President Bill Clinton appointed herchair of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.Four years later she took the helm of RensselaerPolytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, N.Y.—making her the first female African-Americanpresident of a top-50 research university.Since then, RPI has raised more than $1 bilwhoSHIRLEY ANN JACKSONline of workAdvocate in chief for buildingthe reputation of a majorresearch universitywhereRensselaer Polytechnic Institutebig pictureScience literacy will play a vital role inaddressing major national challengessuch as formulating energy policy.on energy and education“If we don’t have the right talent,we’re not going to be able to meetour energy needs.”When shirley ann jackson was in elementary school in the 1950s, shewould prowl her family’s backyard, collecting bumblebees, yellowjackets and wasps. She would bottle them in mayonnaise jars and testwhich flowers they liked best and which species were the most aggressive.She dutifully recorded her observations in a notebook, discovering,for instance, that she could alter their daily rhythms by putting them under the darkporch in the middle of the day. The most important lesson she took away from these experimentswas not about science but compassion. “Don’t imprison any living thing for verylong,” she says in a mellow drawl that belies her reputation as a lightning-fast thinker andinfluential physicist. “I have never been a fan of dead insect collections.”Jackson came of age during the civilrightsmovement. She was valedictorian ofher graduating class at Roosevelt HighSchool in Washington, D.C., in 1964 andwent on to study particle and high-energyphysics. In 1973 she became the first African-Americanwoman to receive a Ph.D.At AT&T Bell Laboratories (now BellLabs), Jackson studied materials for thesemiconductor industry from 1976 to 1995.74 Scientific American, December 2011© 2011 Scientific American

Photograph by Spencer Heyfron© 2011 Scientific AmericanDecember 2011, ScientificAmerican.com 75

Q & ASCIENCE TALKlion in philanthropic donations, set upnew departments, such as the ComputationalCenter for Nanotechnology Innovations,and attracted a Nobel laureate andmembers of the National Academies.Jackson has strong views about theimportance of science education andthe underrepresentation of minoritiesin academia. Her inspiring life story haseven been published as a children’sbook. In a recent interview, Jacksonspoke about how a “quiet crisis” in sciencetraining is threatening our nation’senergy security in the face of challengessuch as global warming and the Fukushimanuclear disaster. Excerpts follow.Scientific American: Growing upin Washington, D.C., at a time whenthere was so much turmoil, how wereyou able to focus on science?jackson: My parents believed verystrongly in education and in helpingeach of their children pursue their interests.My father, who was in charge ofmotor vehicle operations for the U.S.Postal Service, would work with me onscience projects, and he actually helpedmy sister and me design and build gokarts.He had a natural mechanical andmathematical capability even thoughhe was not col lege- educated. My mother,meanwhile, taught her children toread early.I also benefited from great teachers.Before desegregation, the teachers thatI had were quite good and focused onnurturing talent, but afterward theschool system brought in a uniquegroup of African-American teachers.They thought it was a great experiment,so they wanted these special teachers tocome in. I tested into an accelerated academictrack and had relatively smallclasses with just seven to 10 students.So that, coupled with having more accessto more resources and, frankly,more competition, helped us to growand think more broadly about careeroptions.How did you make the leap frombees to physics?To be honest, I didn’t think about physicsper se until I was in college. As Iwent along from grade school to middleand high school, I got progressivelymore interested in mathematics andhow it could help describe physical phenomena.I went off to college with mathin mind, but then I took a physicscourse when I was a freshman at M.I.T.called PANIC, which stands for Physics:A New Introductory Course. I also hadan inspiring professor named TonyFrench [who worked on the ManhattanProject], and I kind of loved quantummechanics.Is there a particular discoveryyou are most proud of?In the late 1970s engineers wanted tocreate new semiconductor devices, andat Bell Labs we knew that the quantumphysics of two-dimensional structureswas going to govern their electrical behaviors.I created mathematical modelsof these systems, and I guess the work Iam best known for is studying polaronson the surface of liquid-helium films.People refer to the polaron as a particlethat digs its own grave. It can be anelectron or any kind of charged particlethat distorts the structure that it is movingthrough. This creates a feedbacksystem, slowing, for instance, thosesame electrons, and I found that undercertain conditions the conductivity of amaterial could quickly drop to zero.This phenomenon, later seen in experiments,is what got me elected as a fellowof the American Physical Society.Your physics education came inhandy as chair of the NuclearRegulatory Commission in the 1990s.Do you think the Fukushima disasterwill affect the debate over nuclearpower and energy policy?It is a complex picture. Countries seemto be reexamining their nuclear programsin three ways: some, like Germany,are looking at whether they want tocontinue down the nuclear power path.Others, such as the U.S., are continuingto extend the license terms of nuclearplants but are having discussions abouthow to strengthen the safety of existingreactors and how to anticipate and mitigatethe effects of natural disasters.Then there are those in developingeconomies and in ones that have nothad nuclear programs that are continuingright on down the line of buildingnew reactors. Iran, for instance, recentlyconnected its reactor to its grid. Ithink Japan is going to continue its programeven though there is some pressureto scale back. There will be a pauseand then a continuation of nuclear powerin most countries.Are the challenges for the industrydifferent today than when you werechairing the commission?The overall performance of nuclearplants has improved over time. The designsof the newer, more evolutionaryplants have anticipated certain kinds ofaccidents. Some of the things we didwhen I was chair of the NRC, includingthe promulgation of risk-informed, performance-basedregulation, sharpenedour focus on where the greatest safetyproblems are. But we are still faced withthe Achilles’ heel of nuclear waste disposalat the back end of the fuel cycle.What do you think the answer is forspent-fuel storage?There are broader policy issues that societymust address. One is whether tobury the fuel in a geologic repository,such as Yucca Mountain [in Nevada],within the matrix of other radionuclides,which some feel deters nuclearproliferation. Alternatively, there couldbe reprocessing of the spent fuel to extractplutonium and make mixed-oxidefuel. The point is that any discussion ofnuclear power should be in the largercontext of an overall energy securityplan for the country.What do you mean by “energysecurity plan”?We tend to lurch from sector to sector.We talk about nuclear and what weshould do with nuclear. We talk about oiland gas and who the bad guys are andwho the good guys are. But if we don’tdevelop a comprehensive energy securi-76 Scientific American, December 2011© 2011 Scientific American

ty plan, we’re going to be having thesediscussions until the cows come home.In the end, energy security is abouthaving adequate supplies of energy atrational prices across a spectrum ofuses: transportation, residential andcommercial uses.Is this what you have called“intersecting vulnerabilities”?It’s exactly what I call it. If we do nottake account of intersecting vulnerabilities,we tend to lurch one way and thenthe other. The oil spill in the Gulf ofMexico and the Fukushima disaster tellus there is vulnerability when we arelook ing at any given energy source.With Fukushima, the plants shut downthe way they should have, but theyneeded water, and that requires theability to pump water, and that requireselectricity that doesn’t come from thereactor. The power outages that we haverecently had here in the Northeast comingfrom Hurricane Irene tell us aboutthe vulnerabilities in terms of our infrastructure,certainly for electricity transmission,if not for generation itself.These things tell us that we need a diversityof energy sources.Do you see renewable energy as asignificant part of that equation?As we look to newer technologies, wealso have to think about how we optimizewhat we have with less environmentalimpact. We have to think aboutenvironmental sustainability and conservation.A watt saved is de facto a wattgenerated. But we’d also better thinkabout full life-cycle costs. If we want tohave compact fluorescent lightbulbs,how are we going to dispose of the mercuryin the bulbs in an environmentallysound way? If we are going to have electriccars, what infrastructure do weneed to make that happen? There areno easy solutions, and we are addictedto easy solutions. If we commit to lookingat the whole energy life cycle, it canhelp us make choices, particularly if wethen play into the markets where thereshould be transparency of pricing andconsistency of regulation.In the end, what we seem to havelost focus of is this: if we’re going tohave energy security, we’re going tohave to innovate. I’ve never seen anyinnovation yet that just popped out ofthe air. It comes from people’s ideas. Soif we don’t have the right talent, we’renot going to be able to meet our energyneeds.Is the U.S. losing its edge when itcomes to investing in innovation?Yes, we are underinvesting in peopleand in R&D in the energy sector andmore generally. We can see that peopleare leaving science and engineering. Wehave a group of people who are beginningto retire, the number of retirementswill continue to grow and we donot have students to replace them. Ourperformance on international tests andachievement in things like math andscience are slipping. We see where othercountries are generating more intellectualproperty or having their work citedfrequently. You can pick your metric,but in combination you see a slippage.This is what I call the “quiet crisis.”The biggest evidence in some ways isthat other countries are investing morein the very areas that we are backingaway from. And they are trying to emulatethe model that has made us successful.A huge part of our GDP growth afterWorld War II in America came from scientificdiscovery and technological innovation.It came out of government investmentin infrastructure. Google’s entirebusiness would not exist withoutgovernment-funded R&D. They havearmies of smart people writing algorithms,thinking about how to do everbetter things in their space. But they areriding on top of an infrastructure—theInternet, GPS and integrated circuits—that was funded by the government.The private sector also has to play aleadership role because it, too, needs toinvest in research. And that is somethingthat has dropped off in recentyears quite a bit.Which brings me to the three-leggedstool: government, industry and academia all have a role in providing infrastructural,financial and human capitalto produce the innovations we need.Has the slow rate of growth ofunderrepresented minorities inscience affected our competitiveness?Regarding the issue of minorities beingunderrepresented, I see many factors.We have to begin with K–12 education.That affects all of us overall, but it obviouslyhas disproportionately affectedminorities. We need better math andscience teachers. We need programs atthe K–12 level to really get young peopleengaged early and give them the fundamentalgrounding and the preparationrequired. If they do not have that, thenthey do not have as many options furtherdown the educational pipeline.For those who become students inscience and engineering, we need tosupport them financially and nurtureand mentor them, whether they arewomen, minorities or majority males.If people see people who are like themselvesas faculty or in significant positionsin corporations, these things willhelp.My message is that if we want innovation,we need the innovators. We haveto tap the complete talent pool. SometimesI think a mistake we make is this:because the problems are so serious, wewant to separate out underrepresentedminorities and women from the largerissues. They do need special attention,but I think there would be more urgencyabout it if people understood that womenand minorities are key parts of thecomplete talent pool. We need to educatepeople for their career, for their life,and not just for their first job. We needto invite, excite and prepare young people.And teachers make a difference.Brendan Borrell, based in New York City, fre quentlywrites for Scientific American and Nature.MORE TO EXPLOREStrong Force: The Story of Shirley Ann Jackson. DianeO’Connell. Joseph Henry Press, 2006.SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ONLINERead a chapter from Strong Force atScientificAmerican/dec2011/jackson© 2011 Scientific AmericanDecember 2011, ScientificAmerican.com 77

Recommended by Kate WongRelics: Travels in Nature’s Time Machineby Piotr Naskrecki. University of Chicago Press, 2011 ($45)Atewa dinospider(Ricinoides atewa)from West AfricaTake a photo safari through the world as it used to be, as revealed by living organismslittle changed from their ancient ancestors. Naturalist and photographerPiotr Naskrecki gives creatures ranging from horseshoe crabs on the eastern shoresof the U.S. to three-toed sloths in the forests of Guyana their due.Magical Mathematics: The MathematicalIdeas That Animate Great Magic Tricksby Persi Diaconis and Ron Graham. Princeton University Press,2011 ($29.95)The Riemann hypothesis, the Mandelbrot set, Fermat’s last theorem—these mathematical notions and others underlie all manner of magictricks. Mathematicians Persi Diaconis—also a card magician—and RonGraham—also a juggler—unveil the connections between magic andmath in this well-illustrated volume.Neurogastronomy: How the Brain CreatesFlavor and Why It Mattersby Gordon M. Shepherd. Columbia University Press, 2011 ($24.95)Making the case that the role of humans’ sense of smell in producingflavor has been vastly underappreciated, neuroscientist Gordon M.Shepherd lays out the new science of food perception and upends thereceived wisdom that the sense of smell diminished over the courseof human evolution.Alone in the Universe: Why Our Planet Is Uniqueby John Gribbin. Wiley, 2011 ($25.95)“There may be more habitable planets in the Galaxy than there arepeople on planet Earth. But ‘habitable’ does not mean ‘inhabited.’ ”Astrophysicist John Gribbin describes the cosmic events that have madeEarth special and argues that ours is almost certainly the only intelligentcivilization in the Milky Way.STATEMENT OF OWNERSHIP, MANAGEMENT, AND CIRCULA-TION 1. Publication title: Scientific American. 2. Publication number:509-530. 3. Filing date: 9/30/2011. 4. Issue frequency: monthly.5. Number of issues published annually: 12. 6. Annual subscriptionprice: U.S. and its possessions, 1 year, $39.97; Canada, 1 year,$49.97; all other countries, 1 year, $61. 7. Complete mailing addressof known office of publication: Scientific American, 75 Varick Street,9th Floor, New York, NY 10013-1917, USA. 7a. Contact person: KarenDawson; telephone: 212-726-9369. 8. Complete mailing addressof the headquarters or general business office of the publisher: ScientificAmerican, a division of Nature America, Inc., 75 Varick Street,9th Floor, New York, NY 10013-1917, USA. 9. 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(2) free or nominal rate incountycopies included on PS Form 3541: average number of copiesof each issue during preceding 12 months: 0; number of copiesof single issue published nearest to filing date: 0. (3) free or nominalrate copies mailed at other classes through the USPS (e.g., First-Class Mail): average number of copies of each issue during preceding12 months: 0; number of copies of single issue published nearestto filing date: 0. (4) free or nominal rate distribution outside themail (carriers or other means): average number of copies of eachissue during preceding 12 months: 8,089; number of copies of singleissue published nearest to filing date: 8,079. e. Total free or nominalrate distribution (sum of 15d (1), (2), (3) and (4)): average numberof copies of each issue during preceding 12 months: 9,570; numberof copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 9,564.f. 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Skeptic by Michael ShermerMichael Shermer is publisher of Skepticmagazine (www.skeptic.com). His newbook is The Believing Brain. Follow him onTwitter @michaelshermerViewing the world with a rational eyeSacredSalubriousnessNew research on self-control explainsthe link between religion and healthEver since 2000, when psychologist Michael E. McCullough, nowat the University of Miami, and his colleagues published a metaanalysisof more than three dozen studies showing a strong correlationbetween religiosity and lower mortality, skeptics havebeen challenged by believers to explain why—as if to say, “See,there is a God, and this is the payoff for believing.”In science, however, “God did it” is not a testable hypothesis.Inquiring minds would want to know how God did it and whatforces or mechanisms were employed (and “God works in mysteriousways” will not pass peer review). Even such explanations as“belief in God” or “religiosity” must be broken down into theircomponent parts to find possible causal mechanisms for the linksbetween belief and behavior that lead to health, well-being andlongevity. This McCullough and his then Miami colleague BrianWilloughby did in a 2009 paper that reported the results of a metaanalysisof hundreds of studies revealing that religious people aremore likely to engage in healthy behaviors, such as visiting dentistsand wearing seat belts, and are less likely to smoke, drink,take recreational drugs and engage in risky sex. Why? Religionprovides a tight social network that reinforces positive behaviorsand punishes negative habits and leads to greater self-regulationfor goal achievement and self-control over negative temptations.Self-control is the subject of Florida State University psychologistRoy Baumeister’s new book, Willpower, co-authored with sciencewriter John Tierney. Self-control is the employment of one’spower to will a behavioral outcome, and research shows that youngchildren who delay gratification (for example, forgoing one marshmallownow for two later) score higher on measures of academicachievement and social adjustment later. Religions offer the ultimatedelay of gratification strategy (eternal life), and the authorscite research showing that “religiously devout children were ratedrelatively low in impulsiveness by both parents and teachers.”The underlying mechanisms of setting goals and monitoringone’s progress, however, can be tapped by anyone, religious or not.Alcoholics Anonymous urges members to surrender to a “higherpower,” but that need not even be a deity—it can be anything thathelps you stay focused on the greater goal of sobriety. Zen meditation,in which you count your breaths up to 10 and then do it overand over, the authors note, “builds mental discipline. So does sayingthe rosary, chanting Hebrew psalms, repeating Hindu mantras.”Brain scans of people conducting such rituals show strongactivity in areas associated with self-regulation and attention.McCul lough, in fact, describes prayers and meditation rituals as “akind of anaerobic workout for self-control.” In his lab Baumeisterhas demonstrated that self-control can be increased with practiceof resisting temptation, but you have to pace yourself because, likea muscle, self-control can become depleted after excessive effort.Finally, the authors note, “Religion also improves the monitoringof behavior, another of the central steps of self-control. Religiouspeople tend to feel that someone important is watching them.” Forbelievers, that monitor may be God or other members of their religion;for nonbelievers, it can be family, friends and colleagues.The world is full of temptations, and as Oscar Wilde boasted, “Ican resist everything except temptation.” We may take the religiouspath of Augustine in his pre-saintly days when he prayed toGod to “give me chastity and continence, but not yet.” Or we canchoose the secular path of 19th-century explorer Henry MortonStanley, who proclaimed that “self-control is more indispensablethan gunpowder,” especially if we have a “sacred task,” as Stanleycalled it (his was the abolition of slavery). I would say you shouldselect your sacred task, monitor and pace your progress towardthat goal, eat and sleep regularly (lack of both diminishes willpower),sit and stand up straight, be organized and well groomed(Stanley shaved every day in the jungle), and surround yourselfwith a supportive social network that reinforces your efforts. Suchsacred salubriousness is the province of everyone—believers andnonbelievers—who will themselves to loftier purposes.SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ONLINEComment on this article at ScientificAmerican.com/dec2011Illustration by Gary Musgrave© 2011 Scientific AmericanDecember 2011, ScientificAmerican.com 79

Anti Gravity by Steve MirskyThe ongoing search for fundamental farcesSteve Mirsky has been writing the Anti Gravitycolumn since atmospheric carbon dioxide levelswere about 358 parts per million. He also hoststhe Scientific American podcast Science Talk.Respectfor EvidenceThe proof is in the pudding only ifyou concede the fact of the puddingThe leaves are turning as I write in early October. Also turning ismy stomach, from the accounts coming out of something calledthe Values Voter Summit in Washington, D.C. According to SarahPosner writing online in Religion Dispatches, talk-radio host BryanFischer went out of his way to attack me. And probably you.Anybody, really, who accepts science as an arbiter of reality. Fischertold the assembled that America needs a president who will “rejectthe morally and scientifically bankrupt theory of evolution.”Evolution is a strange process indeed, to cobble together organismswho so completely and emotionally reject it. Well, evolutionconcerns itself only with differential survival, and brainpowermay not be a crucial factor. Fischer may as well have gottenout of a car at the convention center and proclaimed thatthe car had not brought him there and did not in fact exist. Tothunderous applause. One’s only reasonable response to thiswhole scene is to bring forefinger to mouth and rapidly togglethe lips while humming, so as to produce a sound roughly in accordwith a spelling of “Blblblblblblblblblb.”A few days before the summit, over in the rational world, SaulPerlmutter won a share of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics. He andhis fellow laureates, Adam Riess and Brian Schmidt,showed that the universe is not only expanding, the expansionis accelerating. (On hearing this news, my brotherasked me if there was a limit. I told him yes, no morethan three people can share any one Nobel Prize.)Perlmutter’s Nobel led to an additional, highly covetedprize. His University of California, Berkeley— hometo 22 Nobelists over the years—gives newly minted laureatesa campus-wide parking permit. And, if asked, everytime Perlmutter exits his car he will no doubt respondthat he arrived in it and that it exists.Perlmutter the driver also surely has the good sense toknow that alcohol impairs judgment and neuromuscularskills. Contrast that mind-set with Miami Herald reporterJose Cassola—well, former Miami Herald reporter now—who ran a stop sign shortly before Perlmutter was gettingnews of his Nobel and then told the cop who pulled himover, “You can’t get drunk off of vodka.”As Cassola explained to the arresting officer: “I’m fat, Iwon’t be able to get drunk from only seven shots.” He laterexpounded on his unique theories about alcohol and itseffects to media-watch reporter Gus Garcia-Roberts of theMiami New Times: “Dude, I go to Chili’s all the time and have twofor-onemargaritas, and then I get in my car. Am I drunk? No!”The disoriented mind pronouncing itself whole is always awonder to behold. Which brings us back to the Values VoterSummit. Oddly, Fischer’s enraptured audience may have beenmorphologically identifiable. That notion appears in an article inthe June 25, 1885, issue of the journal Nature by Charles Darwin’shalf cousin Francis Galton. (It’s probably a good example ofour information inundation that less than an hour after I discoveredthis 126-year-old article, I cannot re-create the steps bywhich I wound up reading it. E-mail? Twitter? Link within alink? It’s all part of the mystery.)Galton found himself at a boring lecture and decided to studythe sea of heads in front of him. He noted that “when the audienceis intent each person ... holds himself rigidly in the best positionfor seeing and hearing.” In other words, they sit up straight. Whenthe talk got tedious, “the intervals between their faces, which lieat the free end of the radius formed by their bodies, with their seatas the centre of rotation varies greatly.” In other words, they lean.By all accounts, the audience at the Values Voter Summit wassitting ramrod straight, indicating great engagement with thematerial being presented. Although a scientific mind-set requiresa consideration of another possibility: that x-rays wouldreveal in each attendee a stick responsible for the vertical attitudeand in desperate need of removal.SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ONLINEComment on this article at ScientificAmerican.com/dec201180 Scientific American, December 2011© 2011 Scientific AmericanIllustration by Matt Collins

BRIGHT HORIZONS 15OCTOBER 25 – NOVEMBER 5, 2012 ✸ E. MEDITERRANEAN ✸ www.InsightCruises.com/sciam15CLIMATOLOGYPrioritizing Land for NatureConservation: Theory and PracticeFacing a New Mega-Fire RealityNUCLEAR ASTROPHYSICSA Hitchhiker’s Guide to the UniverseNuclear Cooking ClassWeighing Single AtomsPanning the Seafloor for Plutonium:Attack of the DeathstarBEEN THERE, DONE THAT? ITALY, TURKEY, ISRAEL, AND GREECEhave drawn explorers over the span of 5,000 years. Bright Horizonsis heading in to experience the region through new eyes, new data, andnew discoveries as classical cultures and cutting-edge science convergein the Eastern Mediterranean. Share in the new thinking required by achanging world on Bright Horizons 15 aboard the Costa Mediterranea,roundtrip Genoa, Italy, October 25–November 5, 2012.NEUROSCIENCE MEMORYHow the Brain WorksMemory and All That JazzLosing your MemoryUse it or Lose it!HUMAN EVOLUTIONHuman Evolution: the Big PictureThe First HumansThe Neanderthals:Another Kind of HumanThe Rise of Homo SapiensCST# 2065380-40TM Scientifi c American, Inc.Face the challenges posed by conservation planning and wildfiremanagement, guided by Dr. Yohay Carmel. Dive into discoveries in astroparticlephysics with Dr. David Lunney. Glimpse the neuroscience behindsensory perception and visual illusions with Dr. Stephen Macnik andDr. Susana Martinez-Conde. Focus on developments in the nature andmaintenance of memory with Dr. Jeanette Norden. Take in evolving thoughton humankind’s emigration from Africa with Professor Chris Stringer.Discover the possibilities in environmental and neuroscience, particlephysics, and anthropology. Visit archaeological sites and imagine thefi nds to come. Soak in the Mediterranean lifestyle. Savor the cuisine ofGenoa. If you’re game for fi eld trips, we’ve designed behind-the-scenesexperiences to extend your fun, from the European Organization forNuclear Research, known as CERN, in Geneva to fascinating Herodiumin Palestine. Send your questions to concierge@insightcruises.com orcall 650-787-5665. Please join us!Cruise prices range from $1,299 for an Interior Stateroom to $4,499 for a Grand Suite,per person. (Cruise pricing is subject to change.) For those attendingour Educational Program as well, there is a $1,475 fee. Governmenttaxes, port fees, and Insight Cruises’ service charge are $299 perperson. Gratuities are $11 per person per day. For more info pleasecall 650-787-5665 or email us at concierge@insightcruises.com.COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCEHow the Brain Constructsthe World We SeeWindows on the MindChampions of IllusionSleights of MindINSIDER’S TOUR OF CERNPre-cruise: October 22, 2012—From thetiniest constituents of matter to the immensityof the cosmos, discover the wondersof science and technology at CERN. JoinBright Horizons for a private full-day tourof this iconic nuclear-research facility.Whether you lean toward concept or application, there’s much to pique yourcuriosity. Discover the excitement of fundamental research and get an insider’slook at the world’s largest particle physics laboratory.Our full-day tour will be led by a CERN physicist. We’ll have an orientation, visitan accelerator and experiment, get a sense of the mechanics of the Large HadronCollider (LHC), make a refueling stop for lunch, and have time to peruse exhibitsand media on the history of CERN and the nature of its work.The price is $899 per person (based on double occupancy). This trip is limited to50 people. NOTE: CERN charges no entrance fee to visitors.EPHESUSSPEAKERSYohay Carmel, Ph.D.David Lunney, Ph.D.Stephen Macknik, Ph.D.Susana Martinez-Conde, Ph.D.Jeanette Norden, Ph.D.Chris Stringer, Ph.D.November 1, 2012—Many civilizationshave left their mark at Ephesus. It’s acomplex and many-splendored history,often oversimplifi ed. Bright Horizonspulls together three important aspectsof understanding Ephesus that arerarely presented together. You’llmeander the Marble Road, visit thelegendary latrines, check out theLibrary, and visit the political andcommercial centers of the city. A visitto the Terrace Houses will enhance your picture of Roman-era Ephesus.We’ll take a break for Mediterranean cuisine in the Selcuk countryside, then visitthe Ephesus Museum in Selcuk, where city excavation fi nds are showcased, andyou’ll get a fuller look at local history, from the Lydians to the Byzantines.

50, 100 & 150 Years Ago compiled by Daniel C. SchlenoffInnovation and discovery as chronicled in Scientific AmericanDecember1961ProteinStructure“We looked at somethingno one beforeus had seen: a three-dimensional pictureof a protein molecule in all its complexity.This first picture was a crude one, and twoyears later we had an almost equally excitingexperience, extending over many daysthat were spent feeding data to a fast computingmachine, of building up by degreesa far sharper picture of this same molecule.The protein was myoglobin, and ournew picture was sharp enough to enableus to deduce the actual arrangement inspace of nearly all of its 2,600 atoms.—John C. Kendrew”Kendrew shared the 1962 Nobel Prizein Chemistry for this work.Milgram on Conformity“My objective was to see if experimentaltechniques could be applied to the studyof national characteristics, and in particularto see if one could measure conformityin two European countries: Norway andFrance. Conformity was chosen for severalreasons. First, a national culture can besaid to exist only if men adhere, or conform,to common standards of behavior;this is the psychological mechanism underlyingall cultural behavior. Second,conformity has become a burning issuein much of current social criticism; criticshave argued that people have become toosensitive to the opinions of others, and thatthis represents an unhealthy developmentin modern society. Finally, good experimentalmethods have been developed formeasuring conformity. —Stanley Milgram”The complete article is available atwww.ScientificAmerican.com/dec2011/milgramDecember1911PresidentialLetter“To the Editor of theScientific American:Until peaceful means of settlingall International Controversiesare assured to theWorld, prudence and patriotismdemand that the UnitedStates maintain a navy commensuratewith its wealthand dignity. —Wm. H. Taft.Letter from President Taft,Commander-in-Chief ofthe U.S. Navy.”Printed in the special issueon the Navy.GnathologicalObservation“To determine the averagestrength of the jaws, Dr. G. E.Black, president of the ChicagoDental University, devisedan instrument of very simpledesign but with a name thatwould put the average jaw toa severe test—the gnathodynamometer.With this instrumenthe made tests of thebite strength of a thousandpersons. The average showed171 pounds for the molarteeth and much less for bicuspidsand incisors. The listof subjects includes men and womenof all classes, from a blacksmithto a Chinese laundryman.”December1861A Mighty Wind“One of the great forcesnature furnished toman without anyexpense, and in limitless abundance, isthe power of the wind. Many efforts havebeen made to obtain a steady power fromthe wind by storing the surplus fromwhen the wind is strong. One of the latestand simplest of these is illustrated in theaccompanying engraving. A windwheel isemployed to raise a quantity of iron balls,and then these balls are allowed to fallone by one into buckets upon one side ofa wheel, causing the wheel to rotate, andthus to drive the machine.”Harness the wind: Rube Goldberg in form,basic physics in function, 1861. The iron balls themachine used would have made a fearsome din.Patents“From inquiries repeatedly made ofus as to who are the legitimate ownersof inventions issued under variouscircumstances, a few items of informationunder this head will interestour inventor readers at least. In regardto inventions made by slaves, ithas been the practice of the PatentOffice to reject such applications, asthey are considered legally incompetentalike to receive the patent and totransfer their interest to others. Inreference to free colored men, we believethem also to be incompetent toreceive a patent, as under the UnitedStates Laws they are not regarded ascitizens, and could not therefore defenda patent against infringers in theUnited States courts.”The Dred Scott decision of 1857 thatlegalized this situation was nullified bythe Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenthamendments to the Constitution.SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, VOL. V, NO. 25; DECEMBER 21, 186182 Scientific American, December 2011© 2011 Scientific American

Special Advertising SectionMalaysian biotechnology attracting investorsfrom east and westDuring a recent interview I had with Dr. Nazlee,he was able to give me a clear pictureas well as a realistic assessment on whereMalaysia is headed with respect to Biotech.Dr Nazlee after all is an academician, scientist,innovator and entrepreneur and was recentlyappointed to head the leaddevelopmental agency for biotechnology inMalaysia – Malaysian Biotechnology Corporation(BiotechCorp).There are three implementation phases inthe National Biotechnology Policy (NBP).The first phase from 2005 to 2010 was forcapacity building. At present, Malaysia is inthe second phase (2011 to 2015) and thiswill be for commercialization or “science tomarket.” The third phase from 2016 to 2020will focus on globalization.Dr. Nazlee stated “that the success we enjoyedunder the first phase of the NBP providedus with a solid foundation from whichto work on. We will grow the momentumas we move forward into the commercializationphase. The ecosystem we created forthe development of the industry underPhase 1, will start bearing fruit.”Foreign investors identify with the hard andsoft infrastructure that Malaysia has put inplace, and the ecosystem that it has created.The BioNexus program packaged with a setof competitive incentives creates an enablingenvironment for both foreign as well domesticinvestors. To date the BioNexus program hasa total of 204 companies under its wings, 28%of which involve foreign shareholding.In supporting the infrastructure and ecosystemfor the biotechnology industry, the Governmentof Malaysia has completed thesetting-up of the National Institutes ofBiotechnology; namely the MalaysianGenome Institute, The Institute of Pharma-ceuticals and Nutraceuticals and the AgribiotechnologyInstitute. This is part of thegovernment’s firm commitment in providingboth world class infrastructure as well opportunitiesfor cutting-edge research to supportthe growing industries.Malaysia has also risen in terms of its competitiveposition in the global market. A report bythe World Economic Forum on global competitivenessranks Malaysia in 21st position,which sets a strong base and is essential inprojecting Malaysia in the global marketplace.In our Worldview Scorecard (publishedin June 2011), Malaysia ranks third inthe world for the best enterprise supportof its biotech industry. The countryhosts a business friendly environmentand significant venture capital availability.With strong scores for enterprisesupport, Malaysia is a biotech hubwhere industries thrive with access to abroad collection of business resources.Apart from manufacturing expertise,Malaysia is a cost effective destination forglobal companies to expand into bio-processingand bio-manufacturing. LPG, petroland diesel rates in Malaysia are among thecheapest in the world, industrial electricityand water rates are regionally competitiveand average sewage tariffs are the cheapestin South East Asia.In terms of investment, there are two recentsignificant projects that BiotechCorp has secured:the RM 2 billion CJ Arkema project forthe construction of the world’s first bio-methionineplant and Asia’s first thiochemical platformin Kertih Polymer Park in Terengganu, within theEast Coast Economic Region (ECER). This projectis the largest investment in the biotechnologysector for Malaysia to-date.Another significant investment was fromIndia’s Biocon, the largest project in thehealthcare sector, which will see the commencementof a RM500 million biopharmaceuticalmanufacturing and R & D plant inBio-XCell, Malaysia’s first dedicated biotechnologypark and ecosystem in IskandarMalaysia, Johor. To date Bio-XCell has managedto attract more than RM750 million(USD241 million) of investment from India,France and US.When asked about what are the pull factorsattracting investment here Dr Nazlee respondedby citing remarks from potential investorssuch as "very impressed with theinfrastructure" and “a perfect location in themiddle of Asia which can act as a corridorto emerging markets." He went on to cite "ahigh level of education and political stability,"as equally important.Nazlee was very bullish on the strict IP lawsin Malaysia, noting that he had seen the lawin action when violations had been committed."We are optimistic that things will turn outwell. With the incentives provided by thegovernment for the biotechnology sectorand given Malaysia's resources such as manpowerand water supply, we are confident ofmeeting our targets," he added.Perhaps nothing says it better than Biocon’schairman Kiran Mazumdar-Sha with her endorsementof Malaysia: "In short, Malaysia,with its business friendly environment, wastoo good to resist."

Graphic ScienceThe Links We LoveScience aficionados have odd and surprising interestsChemistryReligionPeople who are intrigued with physics are somewhat intrigued with computerscience, too, but they are crazy about fashion. Who knew? Hilary Mason did.At Scientific American’s request, the chief scientist at bitly (www.bitly.com),which shortens URLs for Web users, examined 600 science Web page addressessent to the company’s servers on August 23 and 24. Then she tracked6,000 pages people visited next and mapped the connections (below).The results revealed which subjects were strongly and weaklyassociated. Chemistry was linked to almost no other science. Biologywas linked to almost all of them. Health was tied moreto business than to food. But why did fashion connectstrongly to physics? And why was astronomylinked to genetics? Check out the interactivegraphic at www.ScientificAmerican.comand tell us what you make of it.—Mark FischettiTravelLawCurrent NewsTechnologyPhysicsEducationFashionEngineeringArtsAstronomyGeneral ScienceMediaPoliticsBusinessGeneticsBiochemistryDisastersWeatherBiologyEnvironmentStatisticsOne Day’s Web TrafficNumber of clicks between topics1 13,385Greater distance reflectsweaker connectionsFoodHealthHomeComputer ScienceSportsSCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ONLINEDo you see surprising or humorous patterns?Tell us at ScientificAmerican.com/dec2011/graphic-scienceMath84 Scientific American, December 2011 Graphic by bitly Science Team© 2011 Scientific American

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A unique database of healthybrainscans may help distinguishnormal aging from dementia...Helping to make better diagnosesPositron Emission Tomography (PET) may becomean even more powerful tool for distinguishingbetween normal aging and dementia, such asAlzheimer's disease— thanks to a unique databaseand analytics being developed by Hamamatsu.For a number ofyears Hamamatsuhas been buildingan unusual database.We now have PETbrain scans fromover 6,000 normal, healthy individuals, both menand women, in a wide range of ages. And ourresearchers have learned a lot about how healthybrains look and how they change over time.So, in the future, doctors may be able to spotHamamatsu is openingthe new frontiersof Lightmore subtle anomalies in brain health by comparingtheir patients' PET scans with Hamamatsu'sdatabase—specifically by sex and age!Hamamatsu's aim is to provide clinicians withnew tools, to help them distinguish more clearlybetween normal aging and the early stages ofdementia. Because earlier diagnoses may givedoctors more options for treatment.And though there are no cures for Alzheimer'sdisease at present, starting treatment earlier maygive patients and their caregivers precious extratime to enjoy their quality of life.It's one more way Hamamatsu is opening thenew frontiers of light to improve our world.http://jp.hamamatsu.com/en/rd/publication/PET brain scan images (color) overlay MRI images (gray) to provide a comprehensiveview of the brain's health. The upper row shows brain changes associated with normalaging. The lower row shows the onset of dementia, one form of which is Alzheimer'sdisease. Orange-to-yellow coloring indicates regions with reduced glucose metabolism.