A charge that sticks

The road to dusty death

THE widespread use in recent years of nets, insecticides and new drugs has helped to bring malaria under a measure of control—but evolution is constantly pushing back by generating resistant strains of both the parasite that causes the disease and the mosquito that spreads it. Even resistant mosquitoes, however, can take only so much chemical abuse, and Marit Farenhorst, a researcher at In2Care, a Dutch mosquito-control firm, and her colleagues think they have devised a way to dish out more of it.

Their method, as they report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is a version of the party trick of making a balloon stick to a wall by imbuing it with static electricity. Substituting mosquito nets and insecticide particles for walls and balloons, Dr Farenhorst believes, yields a way of delivering more, and more diverse, insecticides, and really making them stick where they are needed—on the cuticle of the target insect.

Current mosquito nets are woven from fibres impregnated throughout with an insecticide. This permits them to be washed and used...

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Drugs that live long will prosper

WHATEVER ails you, if you have to take two pills a day for it instead of one, you can blame metabolic clearance. Before they can get busy, drug molecules must run a biochemical gauntlet as the body’s machinery tries to break them down. As a result, much of what is in a pill may be excreted in useless pieces before it has had a chance to work its wonders.

Last month, though, America’s pharmaceutical regulator, the Food and Drug Administration, received a request to approve a drug, currently called SD-809, that could change this. SD-809 is intended to treat the palsy caused by Huntington’s chorea—a rare and terrible genetic illness. If approved, it will open the gates for a new type of drug that, thanks to a few well-placed atoms of a variant of hydrogen called deuterium, is able to evade metabolic clearance, and thus remain active longer.

An atom’s chemical properties are determined by its electrons, which interact with those of other atoms. Those electrons are equal in number to the protons in an atom’s nucleus (electrons are negative and protons positive, so the atom’s overall charge is zero), and this number in turn defines an atom’...

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Slippery customers

THE flip side of evolution is extinction. The fossil record is replete with groups, once mighty, that are no more. But sometimes the Darwinian reaper misses a species or two within such a group and these, the last of their kind, cling on to existence to remind the world of the way it once was.

The coelacanth, a fish from the Indian Ocean; the tuatara, a reptile from New Zealand; the pearly nautilus, a tentacled mollusc of the tropical seas—all are “living fossils” of this sort. And so is Trichoplax, a flat, sheet-like creature about half a millimetre across that is the only known member of a phylum called the Placozoa. This species seems little changed from the Ediacaran period, before the Cambrian explosion of animal life.

The Ediacarans are a mystery, not least because none of those known from fossils has any sign of a gut, or any other obvious way of feeding itself. But a study of Trichoplax, just published in PLOS One, by Carolyn Smith of the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Stroke, in Bethesda, Maryland, and her colleagues, may explain how they...

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Drawing the line

OCEAN fishermen are constantly on the lookout for new places to ply their trade, as they exhaust the old ones. Thus, in the 1970s, Europe’s trawlermen turned to the deep seabed of the north-east Atlantic to replace the shallow continental-shelf fisheries closer to home that they had stripped near-bare.

But those replacement grounds, too, are not what they were. A study published in 2009 suggested that in all but the deepest of their waters—those with a seabed closer than 1,500 metres to the surface—yields had dropped by 70% over 25 years. Even in the abyss below that depth, the fall was 20%. To try to stem this decline the European Union, which regulates fishing in much of the area, is proposing to limit the depth at which trawling can take place. This would, in effect, create a marine reservoir below that level, a form of protection additional to the system of species-specific quotas that already exists. The question is where the line below which trawl-gear is forbidden should be drawn. And, until now, there have been few scientific data to inform that decision.

This has just changed, however, with the timely publication, in...

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Grand illusions

YOUR correspondent stands, in a pleasingly impossible way, in orbit. The Earth is spread out beneath. A turn of the head reveals the blackness of deep space behind and above. In front is a table full of toys and brightly coloured building blocks, all of which are resolutely refusing to float away—for, despite his being in orbit, gravity’s pull does not seem to have vanished. A step towards the table brings that piece of furniture closer. A disembodied head appears, and pair of hands offer a toy ray-gun. “Go on, shoot me with it,” says the head, encouragingly. Squeezing the trigger produces a flash of light, and the head is suddenly a fraction of its former size, speaking in a comic Mickey-Mouse voice (despite the lack of air in low-Earth orbit) as the planet rotates majestically below.

It is, of course, an illusion, generated by a virtual-reality (VR) company called Oculus. The non-virtual reality is a journalist wearing a goofy-looking headset and clutching a pair of controllers in a black, soundproofed room at a video-gaming trade fair in Germany. But from the inside, it is strikingly convincing. The virtual world surrounds the user. A turn of the...

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Glider spiders

AS FAR as biologists can tell from the fossil record, only four groups of animals have...

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What goes around, comes around

Murano eat your heart out

GLASSMAKING began 4,500 years ago, in Mesopotamia. The industry’s first products were trinkets, such as beads and pendants, cast from moulds and carved by hand. But craftsmen quickly worked out how to make more practical stuff, such as jugs, bottles and drinking vessels, by coiling strands of molten glass around a sand or clay core of appropriate shape, which could then be shaken or scraped out after the glass had cooled.

Since those early days, many other ways of forming glass have been invented. These range from blowing forcefully through a tube to inflate a hot gob of the stuff, creating a hollow vessel, to floating it as a liquid on a bed of molten tin to produce perfectly flat window panes. But ancient wisdom often still has value, and now a group of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have had another look at the coiling method, pronounced it good, and modernised it. Their principal updating is to dispense with the core. Instead, they have turned to the field of 3D printing—or additive...

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Bringing up baby

IT IS a long way from the western Pacific Ocean to the flooded streets of Buenos Aires where, this month, the city’s Good Samaritans have been distributing food and candles by kayak after some unseasonably heavy rain. But there is a link. Its name is El Niño.

El Niño (Spanish for “The Boy”) is a Pacific-wide phenomenon that has global consequences. A Niño happens when warm water that has accumulated on the west side of the Pacific floods eastward with the abatement of the westerly trade winds which penned it up. (The long, dark equatorial streak on the map above, which shows sea-surface temperatures for August 10th-16th, indicates this.) The trade winds, and their decrease or reversal, are part of a cycle called ENSO (El Niño Southern Oscillation—see article).

The consequences of this phase of ENSO include heavy rain in south-eastern South America, western North America and eastern Africa, and drought in Australia, India and Indonesia. Another consequence, around Christmastide, is the sudden...

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Childbirth

EL NIÑO is part of a wider climate system called El Niño Southern Oscillation, in which the Pacific Ocean and the atmosphere above it influence each other. This interaction drives the warming and cooling of the equatorial Pacific, which in turn affects the weather elsewhere in the world.

The process starts with surface water, propelled westward across the ocean by trade winds and heated by the sun as it travels, running into the Philippines, the Malay Archipelago and New Guinea. Over the course of between two and seven years the pool of warm water thus created grows into something with an area of about 12m km{+2} (4.6m square miles). Balmy, humid air rises from the pool, cooling and shedding rain as it does so, as part of a phenomenon called the Walker circulation (see chart). Some of this air travels west, where it irrigates Indonesia with its precipitation. Some travels east, discharging its load on the Pacific, and then sinks back to the surface near the coast of South America, replacing the air that has travelled west as the trade winds.

Below the surface things are happening, too. The movement of warm water towards...

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Crowdsourcing the galaxy

A nameless planet (top left) and its star

THE names of the planets reflect the history of the Earth. Five—Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn—were known in antiquity. The titles they now bear were chosen by the most powerful and influential civilisation of the classical era, Rome. The others, Uranus, Neptune and, until its demotion in 2006, Pluto, were discovered by Westerners, who saw themselves as Rome’s heirs and decided they would carry on the tradition (though Uranus is named after a Greek god, rather than a Roman one).

In 1992, however, astronomers discovered their first exoplanet—one that orbits a star other than the sun. Nowadays they are swimming in the things. Almost 2,000 have had their existence confirmed. Nearly 5,000 possible others await verification.

None has a name so poetic as those in the solar system. Most people use the prosaic labels assigned by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the group of celestial bureaucrats which decided that Pluto should no longer be counted as a planet. The IAU’s names are more functional than memorable: 51 Pegasi b, for instance, or Kepler-186f...

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We’ll see you, anon

FREQUENT visitors to the Hustler Club, a gentlemen’s entertainment venue in New York, could not have known that they would become part of a debate about anonymity in the era of “big data”. But when, for sport, a data scientist called Anthony Tockar mined a database of taxi-ride details to see what fell out of it, it became clear that, even though the data concerned included no direct identification of the customer, there were some intriguingly clustered drop-off points at private addresses for journeys that began at the club. Stir voter-registration records into the mix to identify who lives at those addresses (which Mr Tockar did not do) and you might end up creating some rather unhappy marriages.

The anonymisation of a data record typically means the removal from it of personally identifiable information. Names, obviously. But also phone numbers, addresses and various intimate details like dates of birth. Such a record is then deemed safe for release to researchers, and even to the public, to make of it what they will. Many people volunteer information, for example to medical trials, on the understanding that this will happen.

But...

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Tiny balls of fire

MOST scientific discoveries are the result of deliberate experiment. A few, though, occur by chance. One such piece of serendipity has just happened to Wang Changan of Tsinghua University, in Beijing, and Li Ju of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Its consequence may be batteries that last up to four times longer than those currently on sale.

Dr Wang and Dr Li are materials scientists, and they have been working on tiny particles (known as nanoparticles, because they are mere nanometres, or billionths of a metre, across) made of aluminium. This metal is a good conductor of electricity, but its effectiveness is reduced by the thin coat of oxide which forms on its surface when it is exposed to the air. For large lumps of the stuff this does not matter much. For tiny particles of it, though, it matters a lot, so the two researchers were experimenting with a way to get rid of the nanoparticles’ oxide coats.

Their method was to soak the particles in a mixture of sulphuric acid and titanium oxysulphate. This replaces the aluminium oxide with titanium oxide, which is more conductive. However, they accidentally left one...

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Tentacles that think

ALMOST all intelligent creatures, be they parrots, sharks or human beings, are vertebrates. This is inconvenient for anyone trying to understand the nature of intelligence because it means, by and large, that he can study only how it has developed down a single evolutionary path. But there is an important exception. Molluscs branched off to form their own lineage before any organism had a spine—and one particular class of them, the cephalopods, has since become smart enough to rival some vertebrates.

Modern cephalopods are octopuses, squid, cuttlefish and an unusual shelled creature called the nautilus. Octopuses, in particular, are rated as intelligent. Some carry coconut shells across the seafloor to assemble shelters. Other have worked out that fishing boats offer easy pickings. There have even been cases of them climbing out of aquarium tanks to raid a neighbouring tank that contained a tasty morsel. Many researchers would like to know whether these behaviours have come about in a different way from vertebrate intelligence, or if there are common traits that are necessary for smart creatures of any sort.

Caroline Albertin,...

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Summon the comfy chairs!

WALT DISNEY’S film version of “Mary Poppins” features a scene in which, at a click of the protagonist’s fingers, cupboards, drawers, bedside tables and trunks fly open and her young charges’ clothes and toys leap inside them. Self-tidying clothes and toys are still some way away, unfortunately. But furniture that collaborates, Poppins-like, with its owners may be just around the corner. If groups of researchers working on the idea in America and Europe have their way, you may soon be able to call a robot footstool, so that you can put your feet up at the end of a long day, make use of a robotic toolbox when doing-it-yourself of a weekend and even—yes—install a robot toybox in the nursery that will encourage your children to tidy up after themselves.

These devices and others like them will, their inventors hope, plug a gap in the market between basic robotic appliances such as Roomba, an autonomous vacuum cleaner made by iRobot, and multipurpose ’droids like Pepper, a humanoid domestic servant launched recently by Softbank. The secret of success, they believe, is not just to devise furnishings that will do what they are told, but to give them...

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Zoology to the rescue

MUCH is made, in academic circles, of the virtues of interdisciplinary research. Its practice is somewhat rarer. But fresh thinking and an outsider’s perspective often do work wonders, and that may just have happened in the field of antibiotic resistance.

Adin Ross-Gillespie of Zurich University is a zoologist, not a physician. But his study of co-operative animals such as meerkats and naked mole rats has led him to think about the behaviour of another highly collaborative group, bacteria. He and his colleagues have just presented, at a conference on evolutionary medicine in Zurich, a way of subverting this collaboration to create a new class of drug that seems immune to the processes which cause resistance to evolve.

Antibiotic resistance happens because, when a population of bacteria is attacked with those drugs, the few bugs that, by chance, have a genetic protection against their effects survive and multiply. As in most cases of natural selection, it is the survival of these, the fittest individuals, that spurs the process on. But Dr Ross-Gillespie realised that, in the case of bacteria, there are circumstances when the survival...

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Cluster bombing

THE outbreak of Ebola fever in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, which has killed more than 11,000 people, has dropped out of the news as it has been brought under control. Although new cases are now measured in dozens, rather than hundreds, a week, the disease has not been stamped out—and a new epidemic could flare up somewhere else at any time. A vaccine against the virus responsible would be of enormous value. And a paper in the Lancet suggests one is now available.

The vaccine, developed by the Public Health Agency of Canada and called rVSV-ZEBOV, smuggles one of the Ebola virus’s coat proteins into a person’s body in a Trojan horse called a vesicular stomatitis virus. This horse-and-cattle virus does not cause human illness, but its presence is enough to activate the immune system, which learns to recognise and react to the Ebola coat protein—and thus, the vaccine’s inventors hope, to clobber Ebola if it should encounter it.

The trial that the Lancet reports was conducted on more than 7,600 people in Guinea by a group of researchers led by Marie Paule Kieny of the World Health Organisation and John-Arne Rottingen of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health. It involved a procedure called ring vaccination, in which clusters of people who were particularly at risk were offered the chance to be...

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Quants and quaffs

“ALTERNATIVE assets” suggests a class that offers something to enjoy. Philatelists delight in rare stamps; petrol-heads in classic cars; and oenophiles in that most liquid of assets, fine wine. The wine futures market, though, is pretty inefficient. Prices hinge on tastings of stuff that is still in the barrel, long before its reaches its fullest bloom. This en primeur pricing happens on experts’ palates, not in the equations of quants. Tristan Fletcher, of University College London, is among those who would like to change that, using some of the most probing equations computer science has yet devised.

There have been a few attempts over the years to tame the fickle wine market into an equation. These have relied on using what are known as linear regression models to make a palatable blend of facts about a given vintage out of particulars of the weather that year, the vineyard’s history of medallion-winning and so on. Linear regression takes the unseemly spray of these data points and draws through them the straight line that, over the course of time, has most closely approximated the price. Pick the point on this line where a...

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Asexual discrimination

This curious fernlike fossil is a rangeomorph, a member of a group believed (though no one is quite sure) to have been sessile animals. They lived on the seabed 565m years ago, during the Ediacaran period, which preceded the explosion of animal life during the Cambrian. The specimen shown is part of a study led by Nick Butterfield of Cambridge University, just published in Nature. Dr Butterfield and his colleagues wondered if they could work out how rangeomorphs reproduced. They looked at three places in Newfoundland where large fields of the fossil creatures are exposed, and mapped the precise location of individual specimens using the global positioning system. The pattern suggested rangeomorphs lived in groups that grew, by asexual reproduction, from a single individual (as a beech tree might put out suckers that grow into a copse). The founding individuals themselves, by contrast, grew from “propagules” that drifted through the ocean, as the larvae of many modern sea creatures do.

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No assembler required

COMPUTING has always been a youngster’s game. The founders of Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft were in their teens or 20s when they started the businesses that made their fortunes. But even by the standards of Messrs Jobs, Zuckerberg, Brin, Page, Gates et al, the code jockeys of a programming language called KIBO are wet behind the ears.

KIBO is designed for those aged four to seven. Instead of arranging, as an older programmer might, a set of constants, variables, operations and expressions, all written in something resembling English, into a logical sequence, a KIBO programmer arranges wooden blocks that carry stickers bearing symbols. These symbols tell a plastic robot what to do next. A straight arrow means “move ahead by one foot”. A curved one means “turn in the direction in which the arrow is pointing”. Two semicircular arrows pointing towards each other’s tails means “perform the previous instruction again”—a command that is particularly important, because it introduces neophytes to the concept of recursion.

For more complicated commands, such as “shine a light”, “make a noise” or “wait here until I clap before moving...

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Hot stuff

ANY sufficiently advanced technology, as Arthur C. Clarke once observed, is indistinguishable from magic. And one that seems routinely to be ascribed magical properties is graphene. It has been proposed for the manufacture of transistors and light bulbs, as a replacement for bone and a way of delivering drugs, for storing power and for transmitting it, and for lubricating things and waterproofing them. Its latest suggested role, though, is to help turn heat directly into electricity.

The Seebeck effect, first seen in 1821 by a German physicist of that name, is a property of some materials whereby heating part of an object made of that material drives electrons from the hot part to the cold part, creating a current. Generating electricity from heat in this way will never substitute for creating it in a power station specially designed for the purpose but it might, some believe, permit the exploitation of heat that would otherwise go to waste—that produced by car engines, for example; or, indeed, by the power station itself.

The problem is that materials which exhibit a strong enough Seebeck effect to be potentially useful do so...

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