Why we're building a €1 billion model of a human brain

The Human Brain Project has just won a €1 billion research prize. Its director Henry Markram says the initiative will unify our understanding of the brain

Your project aims to recreate the human brain in a supercomputer. Why?
We want to reach a unified understanding of the brain and the simulation on a supercomputer is the tool. Today you have neuroscientists working on a genetic, behavioural or cognitive level, and then you have informaticians, chemists and mathematicians. They all have their own understanding of how the brain functions and is structured. How do you get them all around the same table? We think of the project as like a CERN for the brain. The model is our way of bringing everyone, and our understanding, together.

What do you hope will come of the project?
There are three goals. As the model becomes more accurate and behaves more like a brain, we could couple it to a robot and see the robot learning. Then we'll be able to trace the chain of events from molecules to cognition.

Second, we plan to collect data from hospitals around the world to search for biological signatures of disease. We believe this will give us a new classification of brain disease, which can be used to diagnose people objectively - not solely based on their symptoms.

And finally, we want to build neuromorphic computers, which would have processors that can learn, mimicking the way the brain does.

How close are you to recreating a brain?
We've developed an algorithm to work out some of the rules for how to reconstruct the brain. We can now make thousands of predictions that when tested are accurate, and we can reconstruct small brain circuits of up to about 1 million rat neurons. Now we've got to connect those groups of neurons to make brain regions, then connect the regions to make a computer model of a whole brain. Once we've modelled a rat brain, then we update the rules and gradually move towards a human model.

Could the model be too detailed?
People are afraid of detail and complexity. But a drug is a molecule. It doesn't hit a cell, or the brain, it hits other molecules. There's no reason why we shouldn't try to explain how all the molecules are interacting with one another. Sheer numbers do not equal complexity. One hundred billion neurons is numbers, not complexity.

What about criticisms that it drains funds from more readily achievable neuroscience?
That is an incredibly short-sighted view of how a big science project impacts the rest of the field. Take the Human Genome Project - you can criticise them for all the promises they made at the time, but we would be in the dark ages now if we hadn't done that project. It has benefitted every biologist and geneticist on the planet today.

Once completed, could the simulated brain ever become conscious?
When we couple the model to a robot, the robot will behave, and we'll see this in the way its neurons are firing. Does that mean it's conscious? That's a philosophical question - and an unresolved one.

This article appeared in print under the headline "One minute with... Henry Markram"

Profile

Henry Markram is the director of the Human Brain Project at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). The project just won a €1 billion European research prize

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Time to rinse! AI assistant helps clean your teeth

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

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

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

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

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

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Crowds prowl Google Street View to speed road repairs

POTHOLES, cracks, gnarly tree roots - the streets are full of nasty obstacles when they fall into disrepair. But an army of online workers could soon fix that, by whizzing virtually through neighbourhoods and earmarking encumbrances for a quick response from the local council.

Jon Froehlich and colleagues at the University of Maryland in College Park have developed software that allows untrained crowdsourced workers from Amazon's Mechanical Turk service (AMT) to zoom through the streets using Google Street View and find and label the potholes, obstructed pathways, broken kerbs and missing ramps that can stymie street access, particularly for those using a wheelchair or a walking aid. A report that includes images of highlighted problem areas can then be generated for the local council's road-mending crews to act on.

The researchers built a prototype following interest in the idea from officials at the US Department of Transportation, who said that the project could save municipalities precious time and resources by telling repair teams the precise nature of the problem before they head into the field. This would aid scheduling and ensure that crews take the right amount of materials - such as concrete or flagstones - to the site.

The team tested the labelling software using six volunteers - three members of the research team and three wheelchair users - and then set the task to 400 AMT workers. After viewing a short instructional video, which showed how to identify problem areas by labelling them with coloured shapes, the workers accurately spotted access issues 93 per cent of the time. Froehlich will present the work in April at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Paris, France.

In the next version of the system, the team wants to automate the process using computer vision algorithms. The researchers also hope to access the precise laser range-finding data that the Street View camera cars acquire as they comb the streets. Such information would increase accuracy when assessing the sizes and shapes of obstructions.

"It sounds like this project has a lot of parallels with FixMyStreet," says Myfanwy Nixon of mySociety, a non-profit organisation in London that runs FixMyStreet.com, where people can report street problems. "Online technologies are very good for people with limited mobility or a disability that prevents them from getting their voice out via other means."

This article appeared in print under the headline "Online eyes see the way to an easier amble"

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Today on New Scientist: 6 February 2013

Open Richard III DNA evidence for peer review

A good case has been made that a skeleton unearthed from a car park is that of the last Plantagenet king of England - it's time to share the data

Universal bug sensor takes guesswork out of diagnosis

A machine that can identify all bacteria, viruses and fungi known to cause disease in humans should speed up diagnosis and help to reduce antibiotic resistance

Choking China: The struggle to clear Beijing's air

As pollution levels return to normal in China's capital after a record-breaking month of smog, what can be done to banish the smog?

Genes mix across borders more easily than folk tales

Analysing variations in folk tales using genetic techniques shows that people swap genes more readily than stories, giving clues to how cultures evolve

Sleep and dreaming: Slumber at the flick of a switch

Wouldn't it be wonderful to pack a good night's sleep into fewer hours? Technology has the answer - and it could treat depression and even extend our lives too

Closest Earth-like planet may be 13 light years away

A habitable exoplanet should be near enough for future telescopes to probe its atmosphere for signs of life

Lifelogging captures a real picture of your health

How can lifelogging - wearing a camera round your neck to record your every move - reveal what's healthy and unhealthy in the way we live?

Musical brains smash audio algorithm limits

The mystery of how our brains perceive sound has deepened, now that musicians have broken a limit on sound perception imposed by the Fourier transform

Magnitude 8 earthquake strikes Solomon Islands

A major earthquake has caused a small tsunami in the Pacific Ocean, killing at least five people

Nuclear knock-backs on UK's new reactors and old waste

Plans to build new reactors in the UK are stalling as yet another company pulls out, and there is still nowhere to store nuclear waste permanently

Amateur astronomer helps Hubble snap galactic monster

An amateur astronomer combined his pictures with images from the Hubble archive to reveal the true nature of galactic oddball M106

Nightmare images show how lack of sleep kills

Fatigue has been blamed for some of worst human-made disasters of recent decades. Find out more in our image gallery

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Today on New Scientist: 5 February 2013

Engineering light: Pull an image from nowhere

A new generation of lenses could bring us better lighting, anti-forgery technology and novel movie projectors

Baby boomers' health worse than their parents

Americans who were born in the wake of the second world war have poorer health than the previous generation at the same age

New 17-million-digit monster is largest known prime

A distributed computing project called GIMPS has found a record-breaking prime number, the first for four years

Cellular signals used to make national rainfall map

The slight weakening of microwave signals caused by reflections off raindrops can be exploited to keep tabs on precipitation

NASA spy telescopes won't be looking at Earth

A Mars orbiter and an exoplanet photographer are among proposals being presented today for how to use two second-hand spy satellites that NASA's been given

China gets the blame for media hacking spree

The big US newspapers and Twitter all revealed last week that they were hacked - and many were quick to blame China. But where's the proof?

Nobel-winning US energy secretary steps down

Steven Chu laid the groundwork for government-backed renewable energy projects - his successor must make a better case for them

Sleep and dreaming: Where do our minds go at night?

We are beginning to understand how our brains shape our dreams, and why they contain such an eerie mixture of the familiar and the bizarre

Beating heart of a quantum time machine exposed

This super-accurate timekeeper is an optical atomic clock and its tick is governed by a single ion of the element strontium

A life spent fighting fair about the roots of violence

Despite the fierce conflicts experienced living among anthropologists, science steals the show in Napoleon Chagnon's autobiography Noble Savages

Challenge unscientific thinking, whatever its source

Science may lean to the left, but that's no reason to give progressives who reject it a "free pass"

Need an organ? Just print some stem cells in 3D

Printing blobs of human embryonic stem cells could allow us to grow organs without scaffolds

Ice-age art hints at birth of modern mind

An exhibition of ice-age art at London's British Museum shows astonishing and enigmatic creativity

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Challenge unscientific thinking, whatever its source

Science may lean to the left, but that’s no reason to give progressives who reject it a “free pass”

IF SCIENCE could vote, who would it vote for? Ask scientists, and a clear answer comes back: science leans to the left.

A 2009 survey conducted by Pew Research in the US found that 52 per cent of scientists identified themselves as liberal, and slightly more believed the scientific community as a whole leaned that way. The corresponding figures for conservatism? Just 9 per cent and 2 per cent respectively.

This association between science and left-leaning politics can only have been reinforced by the disdain with which vocal right-wing politicians, particularly in the US, have treated scientific evidence in recent years. That contrasts with the Obama administration's endorsement of it - although words always come more readily than actions (see "How Obama will deliver his climate promise").

Certainly, some conservatives conspicuously reject those parts of science that clash with their world views - notably evolution, climate change and stem cell research. But this doesn't mean those on the left are automatically and unimpeachably pro-science. In "Lefty nonsense: When progressives wage war on reason", Alex Berezow and Hank Campbell put forward their view that unscientific causes and concerns are just as rife among progressives as conservatives. Conservatives may sometimes be blinkered by their enthusiasm for what they see as moral rectitude, but progressives can be overcome by "back to nature" sentiments on, say, food or the environment.

Berezow and Campbell further claim that progressives who endorse unscientific ideas get a "free pass" from the scientific community. The suspicion must be that this is because scientists themselves lean towards the left, as does the media that covers them. (Both friends and critics of New Scientist tell us we lean in that direction.)

Is there any substance to that suspicion? We should go to every possible length to ensure there isn't. Unreason of any hue is dangerous; any suggestion of bias only makes it harder to overcome. Science and liberalism are natural allies, but only in the literal sense of liberalism as the pursuit of freedom. That means freedom of thought, freedom of speech and, above all, freedom from ideology - wherever on the political spectrum it comes from.

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Bug protects itself by turning its environment to gold

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deep purple gold

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

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

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

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

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

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Sneaky ninja robot silently stalks its prey

MOVE over David Attenborough. A robot that moves only when it won't be seen or heard might make it easier to sneak up on animals and film them in the wild.

Defence labs have built robots that track people through cities, avoiding well-lit areas. But cities are noisy, so if a robot keeps a certain distance it's unlikely to be heard. Tracking and filming animals in the wild is tougher because they often have keen hearing and the environment is usually quieter. Matthew Dunbabin and his collaborator Ashley Tewes at the CSIRO Autonomous Systems Laboratory in Brisbane, Australia, are teaching a four-wheeled robot to move only when intermittent sounds - like bird or frog calls - will mask its movements.

In tests, the robot picked up the sounds of things like fork-lifts, cellphones and birds, and was able to predict whether they were likely to persist long enough to cover its movement. The robot can also identify its own noise, and guess how it will vary at different speeds and turning angles - calculating what this will sound like to a target up to 50 metres away.

With the help of a camera, laser scanner and the right algorithm, the robot can figure out which vantage points will provide the best cover so it can skulk in the shadows.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Sneaky ninja robot silently films its prey"

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Astrophile: A scorched world with snow black and smoky

Astrophile is our weekly column on curious cosmic objects, from the solar system to the far reaches of the multiverse

Object: Titanium oxide snow
Location: The hot-Jupiter planet HD 209458b

There is something magical about waking up to discover it has snowed during the night. But there's no powdery white blanket when it snows on exoplanet HD 209458b. Snow there is black, smoky and hot as hell – resembling a forest fire more than a winter wonderland. Put it this way: you won't be needing mittens.

HD 209458b belongs to a family called hot Jupiters, gas-giant planets that are constantly being roasted due to their closeness to their sun. By contrast, the gas giants in our immediate neighbourhood, including Jupiter, are frigid, lying at the solar system's far reaches.

HD 209458b is also noteworthy because it is tidally locked, so one side is permanently facing towards its star while the other is in perpetual night. On the face of it, these conditions wouldn't seem to invite snow: temperatures on the day side come close to 2000° C, while the night side is comparatively chilly at around 500° C.

Snow made of water is, of course, impossible on this scorched world, but the drastic temperature differential sets up atmospheric currents that swirl material from the day side to night and vice versa. That means that any substances with the right combination of properties might be gaseous on the day side and then condense into a solid on the night side, and fall as precipitation. Say hello to titanium oxide snow.

Stuck on the surface

Although oxides of titanium make up only a small component of a hot Jupiter's atmosphere, these compounds have the right properties to fall as snow. But there was a snag that could have put a stop to any blizzards. Older computer models of hot Jupiters suggested that titanium oxides condensing in the air on the night side would snow – and remain on the relatively cool surface forever. "Imagine on Earth if you had no mechanism to evaporate water, it would never rain," says Vivien Parmentier of the Côte d'Azur Observatory in Nice, France.

Now he and colleagues have created a more detailed 3D computer model that shows that the snow can become a gas again as it falls and the temperature and pressure increase. Strong updraughts can then blow the titanium oxides back to the upper atmosphere. "The gas can come back on the top layers and snow again and again," says Parmentier.

Snowfall on HD 209458b would be like none you've ever seen. Though titanium dioxide is white and shiny, for example, the snowflakes would also contain silica oxides from the atmosphere, making them black. Since the atmosphere is also dark, snowstorms on the planet would be a smoky affair, the opposite of the white-outs we get on Earth. "It would be like being in the middle of a forest fire," says Parmentier.

Although the team studied a particular hot Jupiter, their model should apply equally to other planets of this type, suggesting hot snow is a common occurrence. Parmentier says we may have already spotted snow clouds on another hot Jupiter, HD 189733b, as spectral analysis of the planet suggests the presence of microscopic particles in its atmosphere.

David Sing of the University of Exeter, UK, who helped identify such particles on HD 189733b, says the team's new model goes a long way to explaining how titanium oxides behave on hot Jupiters. "We're pretty used to water condensing on Earth; there it is titanium because the temperatures are so much hotter."

Hot, black snow – now that would be something to wake up to.

Reference: http://arxiv.org/abs/1301.4522

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Mind-meld brain power is best for steering spaceships

TURNS out two heads really are better than one. Two people have successfully steered a virtual spacecraft by combining the power of their thoughts - and their efforts were far more accurate than one person acting alone. One day groups of people hooked up to brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) might work together to control complex robotic and telepresence systems, maybe even in space.

A BCI system records the brain's electrical activity using EEG signals, which are detected with electrodes attached to the scalp. Machine-learning software learns to recognise the patterns generated by each user as they think of a certain concept, such as "left" or "right". BCIs have helped people with disabilities to steer a wheelchair, for example.

Researchers are discovering, however, that they get better results in some tasks by combining the signals from multiple BCI users. Until now, this "collaborative BCI" technique has been used in simple pattern-recognition tasks, but a team at the University of Essex in the UK wanted to test it more rigorously.

So they developed a simulator in which pairs of BCI users had to steer a craft towards the dead centre of a planet by thinking about one of eight directions that they could fly in, like using compass points. Brain signals representing the users' chosen direction, as interpreted by the machine-learning system, were merged in real time and the spacecraft followed that path.

The results, to be presented at an Intelligent User Interfaces conference in California in March, strongly favoured two-brain navigation. Simulation flights were 67 per cent accurate for a single user, but 90 per cent on target for two users. And when coping with sudden changes in the simulated planet's position, reaction times were halved, too. Combining signals eradicates the random noise that dogs EEG signals. "When you average signals from two people's brains, the noise cancels out a bit," says team member Riccardo Poli.

The technique can also compensate for a lapse in attention. "It is difficult to stay focused on the task at all times. So when a single user has momentary attention lapses, it matters. But when there are two users, a lapse by one will not have much effect, so you stay on target," Poli says.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California, has been observing the work while itself investigating BCI's potential for controlling planetary rovers, for example. But don't hold your breath, says JPL senior research scientist Adrian Stoica. "While potential uses for space applications exist, in terms of uses for planetary rover remote control, this is still a speculative idea," he says.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Two brains, one mind"

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Keep rainforests – they drive the planet's winds

WHAT creates the wind? Anyone will tell you that temperature differences are key. Hot air rises and is replaced by cooler air surging in beneath. Except that maybe the explanation found in every textbook is too simple.

What if, instead, the winds that drive atmospheric circulation are mainly created by the condensation of moisture? Much of this occurs over rainforests as water evaporates or is transpired from the trees. The physicists and foresters behind this controversial idea say that if we chop down the forests, we will lose the winds - and the rains they bring with them.

The physical process itself is not in dispute. Whenever water vapour condenses to form droplets, its volume is reduced, lowering the pressure. Air moves in, creating wind.

Climate scientists have always regarded this as a trivial effect. Criticism has been heaped on the theory since it was first aired four years ago. "This is not a mysterious effect. It is small and included in some atmospheric models," says Isaac Held of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Princeton, New Jersey.

But physicist Anastassia Makarieva of St Petersburg University in Russia says the pressure gradients it would create "have never received a theoretical investigation". Her calculations suggest that the condensation of billions of litres of water above giant forests produces a giant effect (Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, doi.org/kbx).

Co-author Douglas Sheil at Southern Cross University in Lismore, Australia, says critics have yet to explain why they think Makarieva is wrong. Until they do, he said, "this looks like a powerful mechanism that governs weather patterns round the world".

Judith Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology, an author of the standard textbook Thermodynamics of Atmospheres and Oceans, is encouraging. "The process they describe is physically correct," she said. "The main question is its relative magnitude compared with other processes." She thinks it could explain why climate models do not get monsoons and hurricanes right.

Nobody doubts that forests recycle rain through evaporation and transpiration. But this is the first suggestion that this recycling process also whips up the winds that suck moist ocean air across continents.

The implications are huge. "In standard theories, if we lose forests the rainfall in the continental interiors generally declines by 10 to 30 per cent. In our theory, it is likely to decline by 90 per cent or more," says Sheil.

But it is not all bad news. If lost forests are replanted, the theory suggests, then the winds they generate could return rain to even the most arid lands. After all, the Sahara was lush swampland 6000 years ago.

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

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The 10,000-year bender: Why humans love a tipple

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Iran launches monkey into space

Lisa Grossman, physical sciences reporter

Last summer, the Iranian Space Agency announced their plan to send a monkey into space - and now they've apparently done it.

According to Iranian state-run television, a press release on the space agency's website, and photos of the event, Iran sent a live rhesus monkey into sub-orbital space aboard a small rocket called Pishgam, or Pioneer. There's even a video posted on YouTube that appears to be of the launch (though New Scientist could not confirm its authenticity).

The report has not been confirmed independently, however, and the US air force's North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) has not reported seeing any missile launches from Iran.

But independent observers say the launch looks legitimate.

"Really, I see no reason not to take their word for it," says Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who also keeps a log of space launches. He says he's convinced by the photos and discussions he's had with several knowledgeable source in online forums.

In photos released on the Iranian Space Agency's website, the rocket looks like the same kind the agency has launched before, but with a larger nose cone designed to fit a small chamber that can support life. Images also showed a live rhesus monkey strapped to a small seat.

The reports say the rocket went straight up 120 kilometres, which McDowell says qualifies as outer space, but not high enough to reach orbit, and came back down with a parachute.

It's unclear exactly when the launch took place. The press release says that the launch happened on the birthday of Mohammed the Prophet, which is celebrated by Shiites on 29 January, but was celebrated last week elsewhere in the world.

Some countries worry that Iranian rockets capable of carrying animals or people could also carry weapons. Iran has denied any military intention.

"This is not a scary thing because this is not a big new rocket that could hit America or anything like that," McDowell says. "There's nothing military to this. It's purely for propaganda. Nevertheless, it advances their science and their technology by being able to do it."

Iran says the launch is a first step towards sending humans into space, which they intend to do in the next 5 to 8 years. To do that, McDowell says, they'll need to build a larger rocket. The country currently has a vehicle called Safir that has successfully put satellites in orbit, and is developing a more powerful launcher called Simorgh.

The next step will probably be to either launch Safir to carry a human to sub-orbital space, or an unmanned Simorgh flight into orbit to make sure mission controllers can return it to the ground safely.

"They don't want to repeat what the Soviets did" in 1957, McDowell says, "which is put a living being in orbit before you figure out how to get it back."

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Is Obama about to blow his climate credentials?

The US president could be poised to approve the doubling of imports of tar sands oil, one of the filthiest fuels on Earth

FACED with rising anger from environmentalists last year over his plans for a transcontinental pipeline to deliver treacly Canadian tar sands to Texas oil refineries on the Gulf of Mexico, the CEO of TransCanada, Russ Girling, expressed surprise. After all, his company had laid 300,000 kilometres of such pipes across North America. "The pipeline is routine. Something we do every day," he told Canadian journalists.

But that's the point. It is routine. The oil industry does do it every day. And if it carries on, it will wreck the world.

We need not rely on climate-changing fossil fuels. Alternative energy technologies are available. But fossil fuels, and the pipelines and other 20th-century infrastructure that underpin them, have created what John Schellnhuber, director of Germany's Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, describes in a new paper as "lock-in dominance" (PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1219791110). Even though we know how harmful it is, the "largest business on Earth" has ossified and is proving immovable, he says.

The question is how to break the lock and let in alternatives. Schellnhuber, a wily and worldly climate scientist, has an idea, to which I will return. But first the tar-sands pipeline, known as Keystone XL in the parlance of outsize clothing. Proponents say it would create jobs and improve US energy security. But for environmentalists in the US, the decision - due any time - on whether it should go ahead is a touchstone for Barack Obama's willingness to confront climate change in his second term.

Superficially, Keystone XL doesn't look like a huge deal. Since 2010, there has been a cross-border pipe bringing oil from tar sands in northern Alberta to the US Midwest. But this second link would double capacity and deliver oil to the refineries of the Gulf for global export. It looks like the key to a planned doubling of output from one of the world's largest deposits of one of the world's dirtiest fuels. And because the pipe would cross the US border, it requires state department and presidential sign-off.

Environmentalists are up in arms. They fear leaks. No matter what its sponsors suggest, this is no ordinary pipeline. The tar-sands oil - essentially diluted bitumen - is more acidic than regular oil and contains more sediment and moves at higher pressures. Critics say it risks corroding and grinding away the insides of the pipes. The US National Academy of Sciences has just begun a study on this, but its findings will probably be too late to influence Obama.

If there is a leak, clean-up will be difficult, as shown by the messy, protracted and acrimonious attempt to cleanse the Kalamazoo river in Michigan after tar-sands oil oozed into it in 2010.

To make matters worse, the pipeline would cross almost the entire length of the Ogallala aquifer, one of the world's largest underground water reserves, from South Dakota to Texas. Ogallala is a lifeline for the dust-bowl states of the Midwest. While TransCanada has agreed to bypass the ecologically important Sand Hills of Nebraska, where the water table is only 6 metres below the surface in places, a big unseen spill could still be disastrous.

Climate change is still the biggest deal. Extracting and processing tar sands creates a carbon footprint three times that of conventional crude. Obama would rightly lose all environmental credibility if he were to approve a scheme to double his country's imports of this fossil-fuel basket case. Yet he may do it. Why? Because of fossil-fuel lock-in. Changing course is hard. Really hard.

Part of the reason for the lock-in is the vast infrastructure dedicated to sustaining the supply of coal, oil and gas. There is no better symbol of that than a new pipeline. Partly it is political. Nobody has more political muscle than the fossil fuel industry, especially in Washington. And partly it is commercial. As Schellnhuber puts it: "Heavy investments in fossil fuels have led to big profits for shareholders, which in turn leads to greater investments in technologies that have proven to be profitable."

The result is domination by an outdated energy system that stifles alternatives. The potential for a renewable energy revolution is often compared to that of the IT revolution 30 years ago. But IT had little to fight except armies of clerks. Schellnhuber compares this lock-in to the synapses of an ageing human brain so exposed to repetitious thought that it "becomes addicted to specific observations and impressions to the exclusion of alternatives". Or, as Girling puts it, new pipelines become "routine".

What might free us from this addiction? With politicians weak, an obvious answer is to hold companies more financially accountable for environmental damage, including climate change. But Schellnhuber says this won't be enough unless individual shareholders become personally liable, too.

Here, he says, the problem is the public limited company (PLC), or publicly traded company in the US, which insulates shareholders from the consequences of decisions taken in their name. Even if their company goes bankrupt with huge debts, all they lose is the value of their shares. The PLC was invented to promote risk-taking in business. But it can also be an environmental menace, massively reducing incentives for industries to clean up their acts.

"If shareholders were held liable," he says, "then next time they might consider the risk before investing or reinvesting." More importantly, it could prevent us being locked into 20th century technologies that are quite incapable of solving 21st century problems. Fat chance, many might say. But just maybe Keystone XL and its uncanny ability to draw global attention will help catalyse growing anger at the environmental immunity of corporate shareholders.

Fred Pearce is a consultant on environmental issues for New Scientist

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Get cirrus in the fight against climate change

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The digital map is not the territory

WHEN Google Maps launched in 2005, the reaction in some quarters was puzzlement. Why was a search engine getting into cartography? The answer became apparent as it rapidly enhanced the service with navigation, Street View, local business listings and so on. Google doesn't just want to catalogue the online world; it wants to know where everything is in the physical world, too.

Eight years on, that goal looks within reach. Google and its competitors now offer maps of the depths of the oceans and the far side of the Moon. They help their users to navigate everywhere from side streets to shopping malls. And they have revolutionised the way we think about location - putting us, rather than some culturally significant but geographically arbitrary prime meridian, at the centre of the map (see "Uncharted territory: Where digital maps are leading us").

This innovation has made digital maps all but indispensable to millions of people. They provide an alternative view of the world: one that offers suggestions about directions and places. They are also becoming one of the primary tools for exploring the wealth of civic data now available about our surroundings, from crime statistics to traffic flows.

When the maps turn out to be wrong, though, we feel betrayed: witness the rare bloody nose dealt to Apple when it recently unveiled a buggy iPhone map app.

Such trust issues hint at bigger battles to come. Many of today's wondrous maps are powered by deep-pocketed companies, each claiming to offer the ultimate in verisimilitude. But many details of their construction are trade secrets. This matters because all maps have their quirks and biases. Consider the Mercator projection, breakthrough mapping of a different age: it helped make global exploration possible, but grossly distorts the land area of different countries.

More than 80 years ago, the philosopher Alfred Korzybski observed that "the map is not the territory". A representation of reality, no matter how faithful it may seem, is not the same thing as reality itself. We should be mindful of that distinction as digital mapping evolves.

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Greek economic crisis has cleared the air

EVEN the darkest cloud may have a silver lining. The sharp drop in air pollution that accompanied Greece's economic crisis could be a boon to the nation's health.

Mihalis Vrekoussis of the Cyprus Institute in Nicosia and colleagues used three satellites and a network of ground-based instruments to measure air pollution over Greece between 2007 and 2011. Levels of nitrogen dioxide fell over the whole country, with a particularly steep drop of 30 to 40 per cent over Athens. Nitrogen monoxide, carbon monoxide and sulphur dioxide also fell (Geophysical Research Letters, DOI: 10.1002/grl.50118).

Pollution levels have been falling since 2002, but the rate accelerated after 2008 by a factor of 3.5, says Vrekoussis. He found that the drop in pollution correlated with a decline in oil consumption, industrial activity and the size of the economy. "This suggests that the additional reported reduction in gas pollutant levels is due to the economic recession," he says.

In Athens, a combination of heavy car use and lots of sunshine have created serious health problems, so city dwellers should see real benefits. Sunlight triggers chemical reactions that make the car exhaust pollution more harmful, for instance by forming small particulates that cause respiratory diseases. "Hospital admissions for asthma should decline," says Dwayne Heard of the University of Leeds in the UK.

It's not all good news: despite the drop in pollutants, levels of ground-level ozone - another cause of respiratory disease - have risen. Ozone would normally be suppressed by nitrogen oxides, but those have declined. That will take the edge off the benefit, says Heard.

Greece isn't the only country where air pollution has dropped. Nitrogen oxide levels fell across Europe after the 2008 financial crisis (Scientific Reports, doi.org/j74). In the US, nitrogen dioxide levels fell between 2005 and 2011, with the sharpest fall at the height of the recession (Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, doi.org/j75).

Such declines can be one-offs, or governments can help make them permanent, says Ronald Cohen of the University of California, Berkeley, who led the US study. "A time of crisis is a real opportunity to initiate change." After the 2008 financial downturn, for instance, the US and Europe committed to pollution cuts. "In 10 years, there will be an end to air pollution in the US and Europe," says Cohen. "It's an incredible success story."

Greece, however, is not seizing the current opportunity, says Vrekoussis. "Investments in clean technologies and low-carbon green strategies have been abandoned," he says. "I'm afraid that in the long run the negative effects will override the positives."

Global greenhouse gas emissions initially fell in the wake of the financial crisis, but not by much. Emerging economies like China and India continued their economic growth, so a small emissions drop in 2009 was followed by a huge rise in 2010 which continued in 2011.

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To spot a fit partridge, check out its 'necklace'

HOW do you spot a fit partridge? Check out the fractals round its neck.

Fractal geometry is used when a pattern is too complex to be described by Euclidean geometry. It has been applied to coastlines, plant structures and animals' foraging patterns. Lorenzo Pérez-Rodríguez at the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Madrid, Spain, and colleagues wanted to see if it could also be helpful when analysing the complex plumage patterns of birds.

Using images fed into software, the team found that red-legged partridges with a more gradual transition between the plain and spotted areas of their bib have a higher fractal dimension (FD) - a measure of a pattern's complexity.

To see if this was linked to the bird's fitness, they compared the bibs of 68 birds of both sexes, half of which were on a restricted diet. After six months, the bibs of undernourished birds had a lower FD than before their food was reduced. Low FD also predicted poorer immune responsiveness.

Pérez-Rodríguez thinks that a fractal-rich bib could be used to advertise the health of the bird to potential mates. "Birds have quite a different visual system to ours," says Thanh-Lan Gluckman at the University of Cambridge, so the work could also help us understand what one bird sees in another.

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MIT website hacked in tribute to Aaron Swartz

Hal Hodson, technology reporter

A tribute to internet activist Aaron Swartz replaced the homepage for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology today, in an apparent act of protest over the university's role in the legal case that led up to Swartz's suicide on 11 Jan.

For a short time, visitors to the MIT.edu home page found a message that read: "R.I.P. Aaron Swartz. Hacked by grand wizard of Lulzsec, Sabu. God Bless America. Down With Anonymous." The background was watermarked with words from a blog post, written by Swartz, titled "Immoral".

Attributing the defacement to "grand wizard of Lulzsec, Sabu" lent the page a sarcastic air, as it's widely known that the former Lulzsec leader was outed as an FBI informant last year.

The attack on MIT's website came amid widespread criticism of how the university handled the case against Swartz, including an article in The New York Times that quoted Swartz's father as saying: "We don't believe [MIT] acted in a neutral way. My belief is they put their institutional concerns first."

According to MIT's service status page, network service was restored within the university as of 1:30 pm EST. The university had not yet returned New Scientist's request for comment when this story was published.

This is the second time since Swartz' death that the MIT site has been the target of attacks. Previously, an MIT sub-domain was replaced with a manifesto for reform of computer and copyright laws. The authors claimed to be operating as a part of the online activist group, Anonymous.

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A theory of everything won't provide all the answers

We shouldn't be obsessed with finding a theory of everything, says Lisa Randall, one of the world's most prominent theoretical physicists

Doesn't every physicist dream of one neat theory of everything?
There are lots of physicists! I don't think about a theory of everything when I do my research. And even if we knew the ultimate underlying theory, how are you going to explain the fact that we're sitting here? Solving string theory won't tell us how humanity was born.

So is a theory of everything a myth?
It's not that it's a fallacy. It's one objective that will inspire progress. I just think the idea that we will ever get there is a little bit challenging.

But isn't beautiful mathematics supposed to lead us to the truth?
You have to be careful when you use beauty as a guide. There are many theories people didn't think were beautiful at the time, but did find beautiful later - and vice versa. I think simplicity is a good guide: the more economical a theory, the better.

Is it a problem, then, that our best theories of particle physics and cosmology are so messy?
We're trying to describe the universe from 10²⁷ metres down to 10^-35 metres, so it's not surprising there are lots of ingredients. The idea that the stuff we're made of should be everything seems quite preposterous. Dark matter and dark energy - these are not crazy ingredients we're adding.

Did the discovery of the Higgs boson - the "missing ingredient" of particle physics - take you by surprise last July?
I was surprised that the Large Hadron Collider experiments reached that landmark. I thought the teams would say something very affirming but the announcement of the discovery was amazing. It was a feat of engineering that they got the collision rate up to what it had to be, and the experiments did a better job at analysing the data.

Are you worried that the Higgs is the only discovery so far at the LHC?
I'm not worried that nothing else exists. But I am worried that the LHC might have too low an energy. Had the Superconducting Super Collider been built in Texas, it would have had almost three times the energy. There is a distinct possibility we'll discover things when the LHC's energy is nearly doubled next year. But it's too early to see signs of warped extra dimensions - they will take longer to find.

What would an extra dimension look like?
The best signature of the warped extra dimensions would be seeing a so-called Kaluza-Klein particle. These are partners of the particles that we know about but they get their momentum from extra dimensions. They would look to us like heavy particles with properties similar to the ones we know, but with bigger masses.

What if we don't see one? Some argue that seeing nothing else at the LHC would be best, as it would motivate new ideas.
I don't know what dream world they are living in. It would be very hard to make the argument to build a higher energy machine based on the fact that you didn't see something.

Profile

Lisa Randall is a professor of physics at Harvard University. Her recent books are Knocking on Heaven's Door (Vintage) and Higgs Discovery: The power of empty space (Bodley Head)

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