English newspapers

Amateur astronomers join the ranks of the planet hunters

Oct 1st 2011 | from the print edition

IN AN age of professionals, the ability of amateur scientists to make meaningful contributions has almost vanished. Almost, but not quite. The internet allows professionals to make their data available for analysis by anyone, and some are happy to take advantage of the free labour this promises. This approach has proved particularly fruitful in astronomy, a science with a long history of amateur contributions. Armchair astronomers have already helped classify galaxies seen by Hubble, the main orbiting telescope of America’s space agency, NASA. They have also looked for interesting asteroids, and kept an eye out for solar storms. The latest project to involve them, called Planet Hunters, allows amateurs to search for extrasolar

planets—those that orbit stars other than the sun. It was set up by a group at the universities of Oxford and Yale, and links 40,000 participants with data gathered by Kepler, another NASA space telescope that is specifically designed to hunt for planets. On September 26th the group announced, in a paper posted to arXiv, an online database, that its participants had discovered two probable exoplanets, one a Jupiter-like gas giant, and the other, possibly, a smaller, rocky world about twice the diameter of Earth.

Kepler works by monitoring the thousands of stars in its field of view for tiny changes in brightness. Mostly, these are natural fluctuations, but particularly sharp and regular changes might signify a planet passing in front of a star. The raw data are sent to computers on Earth, converted into graphical form and made available to the Planet Hunters. After logging onto the project’s website, its users are given a brightness graph from a random star and asked to mark anything of interest. If several people flag the same star, the result is checked against the computer-derived results produced by the main Kepler team. Promising candidates are then checked again by ground-based telescopes.

That allows Planet Hunters’ participants both to act as a benchmark for the star-detection algorithms and to discover planets the computers have missed, says Chris Lintott, an astronomer at Oxford who helps to run the project. What people lack in speed (the computers have already notched up over 1,200 candidate planets since Kepler was launched) they make up for in judgment. Some stars being watched have very variable brightness. That is confusing for computers, but for human eyes is less of a problem. And input from the human planet hunters is used to refine the algorithms, improving their performance. Planet Hunters grew out of Galaxy Zoo, which was set up in 2007 to help researchers classify galaxies spotted by Hubble—just the sort of fuzzy task that machines struggle with but humans excel at. Galaxy Zoo spawned the Zooniverse, a collection of science projects that harness the power of amateurs. Although astronomical projects still dominate, other sciences are starting to adopt the idea. One Zooniverse project aims to reconstruct weather records from old Navy logs; another is helping to transcribe a cache of Egyptian papyri dating from the 1st century AD. Dr Lintott and his colleagues have asked researchers in other fields to submit more ideas, and hope to announce the shortlist in a few weeks’ time.

Migrating violence in Mexico

Herding cockroaches

Sep 29th 2011, 17:17 by T.W. | MEXICO CITY

PEOPLE who follow the decades-old “war on drugs” speak of governments trying to “squeeze a balloon”, meaning that efforts to clamp down on the trade in one

country often lead to problems popping up elsewhere. Colombia’s crackdown on the cocaine business coincided with an increase in cocaine production in Peru and Bolivia; the stifling of the Caribbean trafficking route led to more drugs moving through Mexico, and so on.

In Spanish, the same phenomenon is sometimes called the “cockroach effect”, presumably because no matter how hard you try to shoo the problem away, it emerges somewhere else. An article in yesterday’s Reforma, a daily newspaper, suggests that the cockroach effect is happening on a regional level in Mexico. According to the paper’s own “executionometer”, a daily body count of victims of organised crime, violence is falling in some of the most dangerous states. But at the same time, previously quiet states are becoming rougher.

First, the (relatively) good news: Chihuahua, home of the murder capital Ciudad Juárez, has clocked up 1,468 homicides so far this year—sickening, of course, but a substantial improvement on the 3,185 killings in all of 2010. Sinaloa, the next most violent state, has fallen from 2,028 killings in 2010 to 1,035 this year. And Baja California fell from 315 to 101. If present trends continue, each of these states

should end the year with lower totals than last, for the first time since Mexico began its crackdown in 2007.

Now, the bad. Nuevo León, Mexico’s richest state and previously among its safest, has leapt from 610 cases in all of 2010 to 1,359 so far this year. Guerrero, home of Acapulco, a beach resort, has seen 1,290 killings so far, up from 984 in 2010.

Coahuila is up from 199 to 381, Veracruz from 52 to 208, and Zacatecas from 21 to 123.

The successes in some states show that driving out the cockroaches is not impossible. But it remains to be seen if Mexico can force them out of the country entirely, rather than just shuffling them around. And even if Mexico does eventually manage to rid itself of this plague, there are plenty of signs that the pests are already scuttling off to new homes elsewhere.

The world economy Be afraid

Unless politicians act more boldly, the world economy will keep heading towards a black hole

Oct 1st 2011 | from the print edition

IN DARK days, people naturally seek glimmers of hope. So it was that financial markets, long battered by the ever-worsening euro crisis, rallied early this week amid speculation that Europe’s leaders had been bullied by the rest of the world into at last putting together a “big plan” to save the single currency. Investors ventured out from safe-haven bonds into riskier assets. Stock prices jumped: those of embattled French banks soared by almost 20% in just two days.

But those hopes are likely to fade, for three reasons. First, for all the breathless headlines from the IMF/World Bank meetings in Washington, DC, Europe’s leaders are a long way from a deal on how to save the euro. The best that can be said is that they now have a plan to have a plan, probably by early November. Second, even if a catastrophe in Europe is avoided, the prospects for the world economy are darkening, as the rich world’s fiscal austerity intensifies and slowing emerging economies provide less of a cushion for global growth. Third, America’s politicians are, once again, threatening to wreck the recovery with irresponsible fiscal brinkmanship. Together, these developments point to a perilous period ahead. Slipping and grasping

Most of the blame for this should be heaped on the leaders of the euro zone, still the biggest immediate danger. The doom-laden lectures from the Americans and others in Washington last week did achieve something: Europe’s policymakers now recognise that more must be done. They are, at last, focusing on the right priorities: building a firewall around illiquid but solvent countries like Italy; bolstering Europe’s banks; and dealing far more decisively with Greece. The idea is to have a plan in place by the Cannes summit of the G20 in early November.

That, however, is a long time to wait—and the Europeans still disagree vehemently about how to do any of this (see article). Germany, for instance, thinks the main problem is fiscal profligacy and so is reluctant to boost Europe’s rescue fund; yet a far bigger fund is needed if a rescue is to be credible. The most urgent solutions, such as restructuring Greece’s debt or building a protective barrier around Italy, require the most political courage—something that Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy et al have yet to exhibit. The chances of a bold enough plan will shrink if markets stabilise. The less scared they are, the more likely Europe’s spineless policymakers are to jump yet again for a plan that does just enough to stave off catastrophe temporarily, but lets the underlying problem get worse.

Much of the world is now paying for their timidity: witness the increasingly dark economic backdrop. A slew of recent indicators suggests the euro area is slipping into recession, as Germany’s exports slow, the fiscal screws tighten, confidence slumps and the banks’ travails imply tighter credit. Even if the euro-zone crisis were to be solved tomorrow, the region’s GDP would probably shrink over the coming months. America’s economy is still limping along, though the summer slump in share prices and consumer

confidence suggest future spending will weaken further. The Federal Reserve is trying new ways of support, somewhat half-heartedly. Whatever it does, America is currently on course for the most stringent fiscal tightening of any big economy in 2012, as temporary tax cuts and unemployment insurance expire at the end of this year. That could change if Congress came to its senses, passed Barack Obama’s jobs plan and agreed on a medium-term deficit-reduction deal by November. If Democrats and Republicans fail to hash out a compromise on the deficit, draconian spending cuts will follow in 2013. For all the tirades against the Europeans, America’s economy risks being pushed into recession by its own fiscal policy—and by the fact that both parties are more interested in positioning themselves for the 2012 elections than in reaching the compromises needed to steer away from that hazardous course.

What about the cushion the emerging markets provide? That, too, is getting thinner. Their growth is slowing (as it needed to, since many economies were overheating). Recent falls in emerging-world currencies and stock prices show that financial panic can afflict the periphery too (see article). Some emerging economies, including China, have less room to repeat their 2008-09 stimulus because of the debts that splurge left behind. Monetary policy can be loosened: several central banks have cut rates. But, overall, the emerging world will be less of a buoy to global growth than it has been hitherto.

Some of these constraints are unavoidable. Many governments have less room to support weak economies than they did in 2008. Some caution, too, is understandable from central bankers who have waded ever deeper into unconventional monetary policy. But governments are not just failing to act: they are exacerbating the mess.

Lacking conviction and courage

In the aftermath of the Lehman crisis, policymakers broadly did the right thing. The result was not a rapid return to prosperity in the West, but after such a big balance-sheet recession that was never going to happen. Now, more often than not, policymakers seem to be getting it wrong. Their mistakes vary, but two sorts stand out. One is an overwhelming emphasis on short-term fiscal austerity over growth. Fixing that means different things in different places: Germany could loosen fiscal policy, while in Britain the reins should merely be tightened more slowly. But the collective obsession with short-term austerity across the rich world is hurting.

The second failure is one of honesty. Too many rich-world politicians have failed to tell voters the scale of the problem. In Germany, where the jobless rate is lower than in 2008, people tend to think the crisis is about lazy Greeks and Italians. Mrs Merkel needs to explain clearly that it also includes Germany’s own banks—and that Germany faces a choice between a costly solution and a ruinous one. In America the Republicans are guilty of outrageous obstructionism and misleading simplification, while Mr Obama has favoured class warfare over fiscal leadership. At a time of enormous problems, the politicians seem Lilliputian. That’s the real reason to be afraid.

Wealth, poverty and compassion

The rich are different from you and me

They are more selfish

Jul 29th 2010 | from the print edition

LIFE at the bottom is nasty, brutish and short. For this reason, heartless folk might assume that people in the lower social classes will be more self-interested and less inclined to consider the welfare of others than upper-class individuals, who can afford a certain noblesse oblige. A recent study, however, challenges this idea. Experiments by Paul Piff and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, reported this week in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, suggest precisely the opposite. It is the poor, not the rich, who are inclined to charity.

In their first experiment, Dr Piff and his team recruited 115 people. To start with, these volunteers were asked to engage in a series of bogus activities, in order to create a misleading impression of the purpose of the research. Eventually, each was told he had been paired with an anonymous partner seated in a different room. Participants were given ten credits and advised that their task was to decide how many of these credits they wanted to keep for themselves and how many (if any) they wished to transfer to their partner. They were also told that the credits they had at the end of the game would be worth real money and that their partners would have no ability to interfere with the outcome.

A week before the game was run, participants were asked their ethnic backgrounds, sex, age, frequency of attendance at religious services and socioeconomic status. During this part of the study, they were presented with a drawing of a ladder with ten rungs on it. Each rung represented people of different levels of education, income and occupational status. They were asked to place an “X” on the rung they felt corresponded to where they stood relative to others in their own community.

The average number of credits people gave away was 4.1. However, an analysis of the results showed that generosity increased as participants’ assessment of their own social status fell. Those who rated themselves at the bottom of the ladder gave away 44% more of their credits than those who put their crosses at the top, even when the effects of age, sex, ethnicity and religiousness had been accounted for. The prince and the pauper

In follow-up experiments, the researchers asked participants to imagine and write about a hypothetical interaction with someone who was extremely wealthy or extremely poor. This sort of storytelling is used routinely by psychologists when they wish to induce a temporary change in someone’s point of view. In this case the change intended was to that of a higher or lower social class than the individual perceived he normally belonged to. The researchers then asked participants to indicate what percentage of a person’s

income should be spent on charitable donations. They found that both real lower-class participants and those temporarily induced to rank themselves as lower class felt that a greater share of a person’s salary should be used to support charity.

Upper-class participants said 2.1% of incomes should be donated. Lower-class individuals felt that 5.6% was the appropriate slice. Upper-class participants who were induced to believe they were lower class suggested 3.1%. And lower-class individuals who had been “psychologically promoted” thought 3.3% was about right.

A final experiment attempted to test how helpful people of different classes are when actually exposed to a person in need. This time participants were “primed” with video clips, rather than by storytelling, into more or less compassionate states. The researchers then measured their reaction to another participant (actually a research associate) who turned up late and thus needed help with the experimental procedure. In this case priming made no difference to the lower classes. They always showed compassion to the latecomer. The upper classes, though, could be influenced. Those shown a compassion-inducing video behaved in a more sympathetic way than those shown emotionally neutral footage. That suggests the rich are capable of compassion, if somebody reminds them, but do not show it spontaneously. One interpretation of all this might be that selfish people find it easier to become rich. Some of the

experiments Dr Piff conducted, however, sorted people by the income of the family in which the participant grew up. This revealed that whether high status was inherited or earned made no difference—so the idea that it is the self-made who are especially selfish does not work. Dr Piff himself suggests that the increased compassion which seems to exist among the poor increases generosity and helpfulness, and promotes a level of trust and co-operation that can prove essential for survival during hard times.

There was a neutrino named Bright

Sep 23rd 2011, 10:15 by J.P.

Who travelled faster than light

NEUTRINOS possess a seemingly endless capacity to discombobulate. First the elusive particles, which theorists believe to be as abundant in the universe as photons, but which almost never interact with anything, turned out to have mass. That discovery, made at Japan's Super-Kamiokande detector in 1998, flew in the face of the Standard Model, a 40-year-old rulebook of particle physics which predicted they ought to be massless (and which has since been tweaked to accommodate the result). Now researchers at CERN, the world's main particle-physics laboratory, report that their neutrinos appear to confound what is, if anything, an even bigger theoretical colossus: Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity. They did it by apparently travelling faster than the speed of light.

Physicists from OPERA, one of the experiments at CERN, send beams of neutrinos from the organisation's headquarters on the outskirts of Geneva, through the Earth's crust to an underground laboratory 730km away underneath Gran Sasso, a mountain in the Apennines. They use fancy kit like high-precision GPS and atomic clocks to measure the distance the neutrinos travel to within 20cm and their time of flight to within ten nanoseconds (billionths of a second). The neutrinos in question appear to be reaching the detector 60 nanoseconds faster than light would take to cover the same distance. That translates to a speed 0.002% higher than the 299,792,458 metres per second at which light zaps through a vacuum.

The result, published in arXiv, an online database, is based on data from 15,000 neutrinos detected at Gran Sasso over three years. If it holds up it would be the first chink in what has until now been the impenetrable armour of special relativity, a theory which has been tested—and confirmed—time and again since its publication in 1905. The theory states that as an object speeds up, time slows down until it stops altogether on hitting the speed of light. Anything going faster than light would, in other words, be moving backwards in time.

A violation of special relativity that affects only neutrinos would be very weird indeed. To confuse matters further, observations of neutrinos emitted by a supernova observed in 1987 established that the particles travel at just below the speed of light through the vacuum of space to a precision four orders of magnitude better than the OPERA claim. That means that the OPERA neutrinos would have to be interacting with matter in some bizarre way that violates special relativity.

The odds, it must be admitted, are that a mistake has been made somewhere in the long chain of timing measurements required to compare the moment when neutrinos are created at CERN by smashing a beam of protons into a target, and their detection in Gran Sasso, though OPERA's researchers have done their best to account for all possible instrumental quirks. What makes the result slightly less than incredible is that an experiment in America, called MINOS, detected a similar anomaly in 2007. MINOS's researchers dismissed that result as a mismeasurement. Now, though, the experiment has ten times more data than it did four years ago, as well as ideas about how to make the necessary calculations more accurate. (A proposed

upgrade called MINOS+, which could start collecting data in 2013, might be able to determine the flight time to within one nanosecond.)

Physicists working on another neutrino experiment in Japan, known as T2K, are holding a meeting next week and the OPERA result will be high on the agenda. The effect may be too small to spot in the data recorded before T2K was damaged by the earthquake in March. Moreover, T2K's detector is located just 295km from the neutrino source, so the effect would be just 25 nanoseconds, if it were real. T2K hopes to start taking data again in 2012.

If the Japanese and American experiments do see the same strange result, it would be the greatest revolution in physics since, well, special relativity burst onto the scene. And it would be fair to say of a neutrino what a wag once quipped about a lady named Bright: that it went away, in a relative way, and came back on the previous night.

The bare essentials

A new form of minimalist movie is making big waves

Jan 20th 2000 | copenhagen | from the print edition

DOGMA is the name for a stripped-down approach to making movies that is a million miles removed from the current big budget Hollywood blockbuster of the same name. What began as the casual, slightly tipsy rant of a couple of Danish directors in 1995 is on the verge of becoming the standard “unplugged” version of film making. And in time, dogma will almost certainly find itself commercialised by the very Hollywood moguls that it set out to subvert.

Lars Von Trier, the acclaimed director of “Breaking the Waves”, had the initial idea and put it to his friend Thomas Vinterberg, a promising young director. Together, the two men drew up a plan of how they felt a film should be made. “It was easy,” says Mr Vinterberg, “we just listed all the things we hated about modern cinema.”

Two more Danish directors joined them, and a “vow of chastity” to which all dogma films have to comply was formulated. Among other things, the vow pledged that shooting should be done on location; the sound should never be produced separately from the images; the film should be shot with a hand-held camera; and shooting should take place where the film takes place. In addition, the film must not contain “superficial action” (there must be no violence, for instance); it must be made in 35mm format; there can be no flashbacks, no props and no make-up; and the director must not be credited.

Dogma was a rescue operation, Mr Vinterberg says. “We wanted to purge film so that once again the inner lives of the characters justified the plot.” Thomas Vinterberg’s “Festen” (“The Celebration”), the first dogma film, does just that. It depicts a banquet celebrating the 60th birthday of the Klingenfeldt family’s puffed-up patriarch, Helge. Guests pile into a palatial country hotel and have barely begun to enjoy the sumptuous spread laid on for them when the eldest son, Christian, is invited to make a toast. He reveals that his father’s sexual abuse of both him and his twin sister drove her to suicide and him to despair.

“Festen” is a deeply disturbing film, but it also looks and feels very different. The camera work is jittery and grainy. The sound—as dogma rules demand—is stripped of any musical score. It was shot for little money, on videotape, in Danish, and with a cast unrecognisable outside Scandinavia. Yet it is so compelling that audiences often sit in silence after watching the film, stunned by the emotional violence of it all. Dogma films make no presumption of what an audience will like; the audience itself, Mr Vinterberg points out, doesn’t know what it wants.

Dogma also offers some financial hope to European cinema. Instead of expensive pyrotechnics, stunt men and special effects, a dogma production needs only the basics: a camera, a cast, and a script. But it has its risks. To succeed at all, a dogma film has to be exquisitely crafted.

For Mr Von Trier, dogma offers a structure that he was never given in his “humanistic, cultural-leftist upbringing”. The framework, he says, liberates him from unnecessary choice. It also helps make the final cut more intimate. Mr Von Trier reckons that 80-90% of “The Idiots”, his first dogma film, was footage he shot himself with his own hand-held camera. But he was no conventional cameraman. One morning, for instance, he greeted the cast naked and announced that “today is to be a nude day”.

The four original dogma directors worked together on an interactive production that was broadcast on Danish television on new year’s day. The four separate 70-minute films, each the work of one of the directors, were shown simultaneously by Denmark’s four television stations. Viewers were able to surf back and forth to create their own film.

The stories were shot in real time with actors and a theme chosen to symbolise Denmark entering the new millennium. Over a third of Denmark tuned in and most, especially the young, deemed it a success. The 280 minutes of film are now being edited down for release in the cinema.

But can dogma transcend Danish tastes? The signs are good. “Festen” received considerable international acclaim, including the Prix du Jury at the Cannes film festival, and a dozen or so dogma productions are currently under way in Europe alone. When Mr Vinterberg met Steven Spielberg in Hollywood recently, the great narrator of popcorn sagas is said to have expressed an interest in proving that he still has the real directorial stuff by making a dogma film himself—Spielberg, as it were, revealed.

The nuclear option

A new way to create pluripotent human stem cells

Oct 8th 2011 | from the print edition

A PARTICULAR sheep has haunted stem-cell researchers for years. In 1996 Ian Wilmut, of the Roslyn Institute, in Edinburgh, removed the nucleus of an ovine egg cell and replaced it with that of an adult cell. The resulting hybrid was grown into a tiny embryo known as a blastocyst, implanted into the womb of a surrogate mother, and went on to become Dolly, the world’s most famous ewe.

This trick—cloning an adult mammal by nuclear transplantation—has never, as far as anyone knows, been repeated on humans. Apart from the technical difficulties, the ethical objections have dissuaded most serious researchers from even trying. But those researchers would like to get to the blastocyst stage, because that would allow them to make what are known as pluripotent stem cells, which are cells that can go on to turn into a wide variety of other cell types. In the immediate future, such cells might be used (because they are genetically identical to known individuals) to screen drugs for gene-specific side effects. In the longer term they might yield transplantable organs with the same genotype as the recipient, thus eliminating the problem of rejection.

This week Scott Noggle of the New York Stem Cell Foundation, a charitable research institute, and his colleagues report a step towards that goal. In a paper in Nature they describe a way of creating pluripotent human stem cells (albeit imperfectly, since the cells in question end up with two sets of chromosomes) by nuclear transplantation. Intriguingly, they seem, at the same time, to have dealt with one of the ethical objections to this sort of work. This is: how do you get your hands on enough human eggs to do it in the first place?

Doing well by doing good

In America, fertile women sometimes sell eggs to sterile members of their sex for reproductive purposes. Such sales are not frowned on if no coercion is involved. Bioethicists have, however, been reluctant to sanction egg sales for research. Indeed, California and Massachusetts, two important centres of stem-cell science, forbid the practice. Dieter Egli, one of Dr Noggle’s co-authors, once tried to get round this restriction by asking women in Massachusetts to donate eggs to a project he was undertaking in that state. He and his colleagues advertised extensively and received many calls. But when the inquirers learned what was involved, most of them shied away. The main deterrent, it turned out, was the lack of payment.

In 2006 the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) suggested a possible solution. Scientists might pay for eggs, they opined, so long as a suitable committee monitored the exchange. The money, the ISSCR suggested, should not be enough to provide “undue inducement” for women to sell their eggs. In the study they have just published, Dr Noggle and Dr Egli tested this idea out. They worked in New York state, which has, since 2009, allowed the use of public funds to buy eggs for research. And, to be sure there

was no undue inducement, they approached only women who had already decided (in order to help another woman’s fertility) to sell an egg. They offered these women the same price, $8,000, to sell their eggs for research instead.

It worked. And, armed with 270 eggs, the researchers got down to business. They swapped some of the eggs’ nuclei with those of adult male skin cells—basically, the same procedure Sir Ian used to create Dolly. Using a pulse of calcium ions as a stimulant, they persuaded the cells to start dividing. However, the process of division stopped abruptly when between six and ten daughter cells had been created.

That, Dr Noggle and Dr Egli reasoned, might be caused by problems linked either to the adult cell nucleus, or to the process by which the egg’s nucleus was extracted. To test this, they took some of the remaining eggs and did a different experiment. Instead of enucleating them, they kept them intact and inserted the adult cell’s nucleus alongside the original one. In this case, development proceeded apace, resulting in a blastocyst. Dr Noggle and Dr Egli were then able to create pluripotent stem cells from their tiny embryo—but these had chromosomes both from the egg and the skin cell, making them useless for therapy.

Despite that wrinkle, this piece of research marks a turning point. The next step is to try to create stem cells without the leftover chromosomes from the egg. If that can be done, the new method may take over from the existing lash-up by which pluripotent stem cells with the genomes of particular individuals are made using transcription factors. A transcription factor is a molecule that regulates gene activity, and a particular combination of four of them has been found to turn ordinary body cells into something that looks

remarkably like a pluripotent stem cell. “Remarkably like”, however, is not the same as “identical”. The route Dr Noggle and Dr Egli are taking may deal with that distinction.

Which is not to say that there will be no further controversy—at least, in the United States. The laws in California and Massachusetts, for example, have not been changed, so in those states eggs will continue to be in short supply. Moreover, America’s National Institutes of Health will not pay for research on stem cells, such as these, that are derived from embryos created for research. Other countries may not be so squeamish. China, for one, is particularly interested in stem-cell research. No doubt its scientists are reading Dr Noggle’s paper with interest