China gains observer status on the Arctic Council

• 17:01 16 May 2013 by Sara Reardon

Water worlds bring us closer to finding Earth's twin

• 25 April 2013 by Adam Becker

How can we get more working-class women into science?

Targeting economically disadvantaged people should be our priority if we're serious about increasing diversity in science

• Tania Browne and Corrinne Burns
• guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 23 April 2013 12.24 BST

Gender interacts with class disadvantage to hold some women back from a career in science, while others go

forward.

Science needs diversity – everyone agrees on that. We all shift uncomfortably when a child, asked what a scientist

looks like, draws a picture of an elderly white man in a lab coat.

In recent years a number of entirely laudable initiatives have sprung up with the express aim of getting more

women into science. But gender diversity is a bit more complicated than it first appears.

If we focus solely on the numbers of women entering science careers, we're in danger of unwittingly encouraging

the same old values that ensure a steady stream of middle-class women from affluent homes – homes where

higher education is seen as the obvious choice.

If we don't work on the breadth of our encouragement, we're in danger of ignoring a vast pool of potential: young,

economically disadvantaged women who at the moment may well feel science is irrelevant to their lives.

Young, middle-class women are, in the main, doing fine. The Institute for Public Policy Research's recent report,  

Great Expectations – Exploring the Promises of Gender Equality claims that the gender pay gap has effectively

disappeared among 20-something professionals. Pay inequality, found the IPPR, is greater within-gender than

between men and women.

But the IPPR recommends that we should be cautious of celebrating the increasing numbers of women at the top

as a marker of equality, and instead develop "a more nuanced understanding of how gender interacts with class

disadvantage" to hold some women back, while others go forward.

We would support this argument.

Though not disadvantaged, we're both distinctly working class.

One of us never made it into a science career at all, while the other has frequently found that her social

background, not her gender, has made her the minority.

The numbers back this up. In its spring 2013 summary, King College London's ASPIRES project notes that 23% of

socially advantaged pupils aspire to scientific careers, compared with only 9% of economically disadvantaged

pupils.

So what's the solution? Targeting economically disadvantaged people of both genders should be our priority if

we're to increase the diversity of science.

Diverse role models in science, technology and engineering are a wonderful thing, but we need much more.

Indeed, the IPPR found that successful female role models don't resonate with economically disadvantaged

women – not when a professional career seems so out of reach.

Disadvantaged young people increasingly view a university education as nothing but a source of massive debt

leading to almost certain unemployment, and it will take more than a few working-class accents on TV to change that.

We need to show young people that a career in science is achievable even if you're not the smartest or wealthiest

child in your class. We also need careers advice that demonstrates to youngsters the diversity of science careers –

that it isn't all white coats and pipettes, and that a scientific education can lead to a huge range of careers outside

of the lab.

ASPIRES report that the greatest driver to a science-based career is a family environment in which science is

talked about, its role in modern life is celebrated, and where scientific hobbies or cultural activities are engaged in:

an environment where science is seen as "part of who we are".

The best "science capital" by far is to witness a close family member succeed in a scientific career.

This normalises science as a career option, making it seem both conceivable and achievable.

But if you are disadvantaged, you are far less likely to know any scientists.

You might desperately want to be a scientist when you're eight, but that interest will dwindle if all the dads you see

are manual workers, and the mums are in low-paid, part-time work.

Being a scientist may seem like something from another world, impossibly out of reach.

A love of science is widespread among youngsters of all social backgrounds, but if a scientific career is still seen

as something for "other people" then love is not enough.

Science capital requires cash. Some 33% of students surveyed for ASPIRES said their scientific aspirations were

influenced by out-of-school hobbies and activities.

Trips to cultural events, extra-curricular activities, magazines, and internet access are all a vital influence.

But for those without easy access to such things, how can we make science-based careers seem obtainable? We

can expand upon the excellent projects aimed at getting women and girls into science.

We need more attention on the initiatives targeting disadvantaged youngsters, of both genders.

Projects doing just that – the Access Project , Generating Genius, and the Prince's Trust's recently announced  

Launchbox initiative, in collaboration with the Science Museum, go a long way towards increasing diversity.

Such projects don't yet have the media profile of female-focused initiatives, although Launchbox receives the

financial support and public endorsement of Will.I.Am, which will surely help.

While arguing for more focus on economic rather than gender disadvantage, we don't claim that gender issues in

science are absent.

As soon as women have children, financial circumstances all too often force them out of the workplace – likewise

men who take on the role of primary carer. Individual cases of gender discrimination do regrettably occur, as do

cases of racial, sexual orientation, age, disability and size-based discrimination.

Focus on helping one group into science careers should never be at the cost of ignoring the needs of another.

We need to embed the idea from early on that science is for everyone. In the same way that the whole of society

benefits from science, the whole of society can contribute.

We need to assure people from poor economic backgrounds that science isn't beyond their reach or "just for

boffins".

And when they turn up at our receptions, education days and careers talks, we need to welcome them into our too-

frequently middle class enclaves and listen

Vaccine promises to cull foot and mouth slaughter

• 22:00 27 March 2013 by Andy Coghlan

 

Deepest point in the ocean is teeming with life

• 18:00 17 March 2013 by Colin Barras

 

Splash and grab: The global scramble for water

New Scientist

04 March 2013 by Fred Pearce

What we call land-grabbing is often more about access to irrigation.

We urgently need to know how much is being purloined

AS FRENCH troops battled with jihadists in Mali at the start of the year, some people had reason to be thankful for the chaos.

Two million fishers, farmers and herders live on the inner delta of the River Niger, a huge wetland on the fringe of the Sahara.

They hoped the fighting would end foreign investors' plans for irrigation projects that would suck water out of

the river and destroy their livelihoods.

Even before fighting broke out, rumours of impending insurrection had encouraged the food giant Associated

British Foods to abandon a massive sugar cane project.

Since then, "land-grabbers" from the US, Libya, China and elsewhere have departed.

The Mali government's hope of using the river to irrigate up to a million hectares of desert looks doomed.

The wetland – and the people who prosper from it – are saved. For now.

But the same is not true elsewhere.

Wetlands and the people who rely on them are under pressure across Africa.

I have interviewed Kenyans angry at a US property tycoon draining their swamp on the shores of Lake Victoria

and fencing off their wet pastures for a rice farm.

I have also heard the concerns of tribal people in a remote corner of western Ethiopia, where Indian and Saudi

agribusinesses are taking their forests and capturing the headwaters of the Nile.

Usually this is called land-grabbing, but it is as much about water.

In a world of drying rivers and plummeting water tables – and where a quarter of farm production is limited by water shortages – water is valuable stuff.

As Willem Buiter, chief economist at Citigroup, has argued: "Water will become eventually the single most

important commodity asset class, dwarfing oil, copper, agricultural commodities and precious metals."

Yet governments rarely recognise this. In a study of land-grab contracts, Lorenzo Cotula of the London-based

International Institute for Environment and Development found that land-grabbers typically demand water rights, and usually get them.

But governments rarely put a price on the water or limit how much can be taken, even in water-stressed countries.

If your dam or borehole is big enough, you can have every last drop – regardless of the impact on locals.

We urgently need to know more about the scale of this capture, not least because some of the land-grabbers'

favoured crops are among the thirstiest, such as sugar and rice.

But if information on land grabs is poor, then that on water grabs is far worse.

Most of what we know about land grabs comes from press reports collated by GRAIN, an NGO based in

Barcelona, Spain, that campaigns for peasant farmers.

This leads to some over-reporting.

For instance, many Saudi schemes in other Islamic nations have never got beyond grand ministerial declarations.

Under-reporting is a problem, too. I have flown over hundreds of kilometres of tribal lands in northern Paraguay

acquired by Brazilian ranchers but absent from land-grabbing databases.

Similarly missing are grabs by domestic companies in partnership with foreign ones, such as the sugar

plantations that have obliterated Cambodian family rice farms to supply the Tate & Lyle sugar factory in the UK.

For what it's worth, Oxfam puts the total amount of land promised to foreign companies at more than 200 million

hectares.

A network of researchers known as the Land Matrix, coordinated by Ward Anseeuw of the University of Pretoria

in South Africa, estimates that perhaps a third of these deals have been completed, with most of those now only

in the early stages of cultivation.

The first attempt to turn this land data into estimates of water grabs was made in January by Maria Cristina Rulli

of the Polytechnic University of Milan in Italy and colleagues (PNAS, vol 110, p 892).

The headline stat was that up to 450 cubic kilometres of water are "appropriated" globally by land-grabbers each year.

At least two-thirds of this is rain falling onto the grabbed land, but the rest is extracted from rivers or aquifers for

irrigation – around 5 per cent of total global extractions for irrigation.

That's a lot.

But there are two problems with this analysis.

The first concerns the land grabs that were included.

Rather than using the Land Matrix data, the researchers used miscellaneous grabs listed by GRAIN and other sources.

Their inclusion criteria are unclear, but this skews the data, turning the UK from a middle-ranking land-grabber to

the biggest of them all, for instance.

The second, bigger, problem is their conversion of land grabs into water grabs.

Land contracts merely allow access to water, albeit often unlimited access.

So the authors assessed how much water would be needed to grow the intended crop on all of the grabbed land.

The trouble with this is that few if any land-grabbers have come close to achieving that so far. And many projects,

including those listed from Mali, may never happen.

Rulli told me that she didn't consider the actual extent of cultivation in her calculations.

But that makes the claim that 450 cubic kilometres of water have already been grabbed extremely misleading.

The figure may represent a theoretical maximum, but right now it could be orders of magnitude too high.

The findings would be best ignored, except they are the only peer-reviewed global water grab assessment in existence and are already being quoted.

The authors are right to highlight that there are a huge number of water grabs, many of them in hungry and

water-stressed countries.

But the fact is we are no closer to quantifying how much water is being taken.

We must do better.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Splash and grab"

Fred Pearce is a consultant on environmental issues for New Scientist.

His latest book is The Landgrabbers: The new fight over who owns the Earth (Eden Project Books in the UK, Beacon Press in the US)

All work and no play: Why Neanderthals were no Picasso

27 February 2013 by April Nowell

New Scientist

Neanderthals had shorter childhoods than us, which profoundly affected their ability to make symbolic art

WATCHING a group of 5-year-olds chasing each other in a park it is easy to forget that child's play is a serious

business.

Through play children figure out how to interact socially, practice problem-solving and learn to innovate, skills

that will be indispensable to them as adults.

But if experiences gained during play are so crucial for cognitive development, what would it mean if a species

had a shorter childhood?

This is exactly the case for our closest relatives, the Neanderthals.

Behaviourally they were very similar to us, with some important differences which, to paraphrase Sigmund

Freud, may stem from their childhoods.

Neanderthals evolved in Europe some 250,000 years ago, spread to the Middle East and eventually went extinct about 30,000 years ago.

Much like their human counterparts they made complex tools and hunted large game animals.

But they also ate fish, tortoise, hare and a variety of plants, adapting their diets to local conditions.

They had language, created fire, at least occasionally showed compassion for others in their group and

sometimes buried their dead.

The single greatest difference between Neanderthals and humans that we can see in the archaeological record,

however, lies in both the quantity and nature of the artefacts they imbued with an obvious symbolic dimension.

Humans today live in what we call a symbolic culture.

All the objects around us have a symbolic dimension.

The clothes we wear, for instance, send out signals about us that are unrelated to their practical function.

We form symbolic relationships where no biological relationship exists, with a husband, sister-in-law, godchild,

blood-brother, for example.

Language, of course, is another key example, the relationship between the words and the objects and concepts

to which they refer is completely arbitrary and that is the essence of a symbol.

Neanderthals created few symbolic artefacts.

Before about 50,000 years ago there is very little evidence of any that stand up to scientific scrutiny.

A few Neanderthal sites dating from 50,000 to 30,000 years ago contain some beads, pigments, raptor talons and

indirect evidence for feathers – all presumably for some kind of body decoration.

Burst of creativity

But these artefacts pale next to the record of symbolic material culture created by early humans who first evolved

in Africa 200,000 years ago.

Even if we focus on just the period 50,000 to 30,000 years ago we find that early humans created bone flutes, the

breathtaking cave paintings of the Chauvet cave in France, imaginative personal ornaments such as ivory beads

carved to look like shells, and figurines incised with geometric patterns.

Two examples that stand out for me are the lion-human statues from the Swabian Jura region of Germany

(currently on display at the Ice Age Art exhibition at the British Museum, London) and the painting of a bison-

woman from Chauvet, both fantastical, imaginary creatures.

The ability to reproduce a three-dimensional form on a two-dimensional surface, or to "see" a figure in ivory,

requires a completely different way of imagining the world. Neanderthals created nothing like these artefacts and

I believe this can be explained by the games they played, or more correctly did not play, as children.

Neanderthals matured more slowly than earlier hominins such as Homo erectus, but more quickly than modern

humans.

As a result, they had a shorter childhood than us.

We know this because Neanderthals occasionally buried their dead so we have a relatively large collection of

Neanderthal infants and children from which to measure their development.

One study in particular was a game changer. In 2010, Tanya Smith from Harvard University and colleagues

studied Neanderthal and early human teeth, counting daily growth lines to calculate the exact age.

By comparing this to the individual's patterns of growth, Smith concluded that Neanderthals grew relatively

rapidly and spent less time dependant on their parents.

Why should this make a difference to the minds of Neanderthals compared to modern humans?

To understand this, we need to take a closer look at childhood. In general, species like us, with longer

dependency periods, tend to play more and engage in many more types of play.

This influences our minds, because play is an important part of the healthy cognitive development of many

animals, not just humans, and being deprived of opportunities to play can be detrimental.

For example, a study on rats demonstrated that those raised normally but without access to playmates suffered

from the same kinds of problems as rats with damage to their prefrontal cortex, a region of the brain involved in

social behaviour, abstract thinking and reasoning.

In other words, play shapes the brain. But the kind of brain we have also shapes the type of play we engage in.

Humans are unique in that we engage in fantasy play, part of a package of symbol-based cognitive abilities that

includes self-awareness, language and theory of mind. Its benefits include creativity, behavioural plasticity,

imagination and the ability to plan.

Being able to imagine novel solutions to problems and to work out their consequences before implementing

them would have been an enormous advantage for our early human ancestors – this is exactly what we are

practising when we play "what if" games. From what we can tell, it is unlikely that Neanderthals were able to

engage in fantasy play, and it is this level of imagination that underlies the differences in material culture between

Neanderthals and early humans.

We need to add one final piece to the puzzle: the Neanderthal brain.

Neanderthals experienced accelerated brain

growth compared to us, according to research by Simon Neubauer and Jean-Jaques Hublin from the Max Planck

Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, who concluded that this meant the environment has

less impact on the connectivity of their developing brains.

Taking a modern example, accelerated brain growth in children with autism lessens their ability to read social

cues and engage in fantasy play.

The same may have been true for Neanderthals.

This leads us to believe that their perception of the world, and their level of engagement with it, was different from ours.

I think that it is only through years of "training" their unique brains through fantasy play in childhood that

modern humans were able to create fantastical symbolical artworks like the Chauvet bison-woman.

The shorter Neanderthal childhood, combined with their lack of complex fantasy play, influenced the adults they

became, and the artefacts they left behind.

 

This article appeared in print under the headline "All work and no play left little time for art"

Profile
April Nowell is an archaeologist at the University of Victoria, Canada. She focuses on the origins of art, symbol use and language, and on the emergence of modern human behaviour. Her book chapter "Childhood, play and the evolution of cultural capacity in Neanderthals and modern humans" is in the forthcoming book The Nature of Culture (Springer)

The self: Why are you like you are?

28 February 2013 by Michael Bond

New Scientist 

You're so vain, you probably think your self is about you.

The truth is slightly more complicated

Read more: "The great illusion of the self"

THE first time a baby smiles, at around 2 months of age, is an intense and beautiful moment for the parents.

It is perhaps the first sure sign of recognition for all their love and devotion.

It might be just as momentous for the baby, representing their first step on a long road to identity and self-

awareness.

Identity is often understood to be a product of memory as we try to build a narrative from the many experiences

of our lives.

Yet there is now a growing recognition that our sense of self may be a consequence of our relationships with

others.

"We have this deep-seated drive to interact with each other that helps us discover who we are," says

developmental psychologist Bruce Hood at the University of Bristol, UK, author of The Self Illusion (Constable, 2012).

And that process starts not with the formation of a child's first memories, but from the moment they first learn to

mimic their parents' smile and to respond empathically to others.

The idea that the sense of self drives, and is driven by, our relationships with others makes intuitive sense.

"I can't have a relationship without having a self," says Michael Lewis, who studies child development at the

Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

"For me to interact with you, I have to know certain things about you, and the only way I can get at those is by

knowing things about me."

There is now evidence that this is the way the brain works.

Some clues come from people with autism.

Although the disorder is most commonly associated with difficulties in understanding other people's nonverbal

social cues, it also seems to create some problems with self-reflection: when growing up, people with autism are

later to learn how to recognise themselves in a mirror and tend to form fewer autobiographical memories.

Tellingly, the same brain regions – areas of the prefrontal cortex – seem to show reduced activity when autistic

people try to perform these kinds of tasks, and when they try to understand another's actions.

This supports the idea that the same brain mechanism underlies both types of skills.

Further support for the idea comes from the work of Antonio Damasio at the University of Southern California,

who has found that social emotions such as admiration or compassion, which result from a focus on the

behaviour of others, tend to activate the posteromedial cortices, another set of brain regions also thought to be

important in constructing our sense of self (PNAS, vol 106, p 8021).

The upshot is that my own self is not so much about me; it's as much about those around me and how we relate

to one another – a notion that Damasio calls "the social me".

This has profound implications. If a primary function of self-identity is to help us build relationships, then it

follows that the nature of the self should depend on the social environment in which it develops.

Evidence for this comes from cultural psychology.

In his book The Geography of Thought (Nicholas Brealey, 2003), Richard Nisbett at the University of Michigan

presented lab experiments suggesting that Chinese and other east Asian people tend to focus on the context of

a situation, whereas Westerners analyse phenomena in isolation – different outlooks that affect the way we think

about ourselves.

Researchers examining autobiographical memory, for example, have found that Chinese people's recollections

are more likely to focus on moments of social or historical significance, whereas people in Europe and America

focus on personal interest and achievement.

Other studies of identity, meanwhile, have found that Japanese people are more inclined to tailor descriptions of

themselves depending on the situation at hand, suggesting they have a more fluid, less concrete sense of

themselves than Westerners, whose accounts tend not to rely on context in this way.

Such differences may emerge at an early age. Lewis points to anthropological reports suggesting that the

"terrible twos" – supposedly the time when a child develops an independent will – are not as dramatic in cultures

less focused on individual autonomy, which would seem to show that culture sculpts our sense of self during

our earliest experiences.

These disparities in outlook and thinking imply that our very identities – "what it is that I am" – are culturally

determined.

"I'm a male, I'm an academic, I'm a senior, I'm married, I'm a father and grandfather: all of these things that I define

myself as are really cultural artefacts," says Lewis.

Clearly there is no single pan-cultural concept of selfhood. Yet Hazel Markus, who studies the interaction of

culture and self at Stanford University in California, points out that human personalities do share one powerful

trait: the capacity to continually shape and be shaped by whatever social environment we inhabit.

While the evidence for "the social me" continues to mount, not everyone is convinced that it is always helpful for

our well-being.

To the writer and psychologist Susan Blackmore, the self may be a by-product of relationships.

It may simply unfold "in the context of social interaction and learning to relate to others, which may inevitably

lead you to this sense that I am in here" while bringing some unfortunate baggage along with it.

She points out that the self can compel us to cling neurotically to emotions and thoughts that undermine our

overall happiness.

Letting it all go, however, would mean undoing the habit of a lifetime.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Why are you?"

Michael Bond is a New Scientist consultant in London

Sleep and dreaming: Why can't we stay awake 24/7?

• 08 February 2013 by Liam Drew

Shellfish reef off UK's west coast could be biggest in world
 

Clare Carswell Thursday 27 December 2012
 
The discovery of a large shellfish reef on the west coast of the UK could be the biggest find of its kind in the world, experts believe.

More than 100 million brightly coloured and rare shellfish have been found in Loch Alsh, a sea inlet between Skye and the Scottish mainland.

The reef of flame shells, or Limaria hians, was found to cover an area of 4.6 square miles (7.5 sq km) during a survey commissioned by Marine Scotland.

It is the largest known colony of flame shells in the UK and possibly the world, according to experts.

Scottish Environment Secretary Richard Lochhead said:

"The seas around Scotland are a hotbed of biodiversity and the clean and cold waters support many fascinating and beautiful species.

"With Scottish waters covering an area around five times bigger than our landmass, it's a huge challenge to try and understand more about our diverse and precious sea life.

"This important discovery may be the largest grouping of flame shells anywhere in the world.

"And not only are flame shells beautiful to look at, these enigmatic shellfish form a reef that offers a safe and productive environment for many other species."

Flame shells have a similar shape to scallops with many neon orange tentacles that appear between the two shells.

They group together on the sea bed and their nests create a living reef to support hundreds of other species.

The Loch Alsh survey was carried out by Heriot-Watt University on behalf of Marine Scotland.

Dr Dan Harries, from the university's School of Life Sciences, said:

"Too often, when we go out to check earlier records of a particular species or habitat we find them damaged, struggling or even gone.

"We are delighted that in this instance we found not just occasional patches but a huge and thriving flame shell community extending right the way along the entrance narrows of Loch Alsh.

"This is a wonderful discovery for all concerned."

Ben James, marine survey and monitoring manager at Scottish Natural Heritage, said:

"Our job has been to advise ministers on suitable places for Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) and to do that we need to have enough information about what's in the marine environment.

"Whilst we had some records of flame shells in Loch Alsh, we had no idea how big the bed was.

"We needed more certainty before recommending them as a protected feature of this MPA proposal.

"It's great to have this new information and it's yet another example of the fantastic diversity of Scotland's marine environment."

The Scottish Government applied to the European Union last month to designate an area in the north-east Atlantic as a conservation area.

Hatton Bank, near the Isle of Lewis, is around 9,752 sq miles (15,694 sq km) and features a large volcanic bank which is home to a large variety of corals.

WWF Scotland spokesman Lang Banks said: "These surveys highlight that Scotland's seas and coasts are home to a truly amazing range of stunning wildlife.

"Who needs space travel when we've still to fully explore and understand the oceans and seas here on planet Earth?

"From helping inform the appropriate deployment of marine renewables to supporting the roll out of a network of

MPAs, these survey findings will prove invaluable in helping ensure the recovery of Scotland's seas."

2012 review: The year in life science

• 18:39 21 December 2012

Biofuel that's better than carbon neutral

• 10 December 2012 by Bob Holmes
• New Scientist

 

Gut instincts: The secrets of your second brain

• 17 December 2012 by Emma Young
• New Scientist

 

The UK's new dash for gas is a dangerous gamble

• 15:10 06 December 2012 by Paul Ekins

The great thaw: Charting the end of the ice age

05 November 2012

New Scientist

by Anil Ananthaswamy

Just 20,000 years ago, ice ruled the planet.

So why did it relax its grip?

Finally, it looks like the answers are in

DURING the summer of 2008, workers excavating Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan dug right down to the bedrock.

There, they found something unexpected: a huge pothole more than 10 metres deep, the crevices around it crammed with stones of several different kinds of rock.

The consulting geologist immediately recognised these features.

The stones had been carried there from many miles away by a glacier that had ground across the bedrock.

At some point, a swirling torrent of glacial meltwater had carved out the pothole.

From potholes in New York City to forests beneath the sea, evidence of the time ice dominated the world is all around us.

The last great ice age began around 120,000 years ago.

One massive ice sheet, more than 3 kilometres thick in places, grew in fits and starts until it covered almost all of Canada and stretched down as far as Manhattan.

Another spread across most of Siberia, northern Europe and Britain, stopping just short of what is now London.

Elsewhere many smaller ice sheets and glaciers grew, vast areas turned into tundra and deserts expanded as the planet became drier.

With so much ice on land, sea level was 120 metres lower than it is today.

Britain and Ireland were part of mainland Europe. Florida was twice the size it is now, with Tampa stranded far from the coast.

Australia, Tasmania and New Guinea were all part of a single land mass called Sahul.

The planet was barely recognisable.

Then, 20,000 years ago, a great thaw began.

Over the following 10,000 years, the average global temperature rose by 3.5 °C and most of the ice melted.

Rising seas swallowed up low-lying areas such as the English Channel and North Sea, forcing our ancestors to abandon many settlements.

So what drove this dramatic transformation of the planet?

Mysterious changes

We have long known the thaw began with an increase in summer sunlight in the northern hemisphere, melting ice and snow.

It is what happened next that has remained mysterious.

Soon after the thaw began, for instance, the southern hemisphere began to warm while the northern hemisphere cooled - the opposite of what was expected from the changes in sunshine.

Now, after nearly two centuries of wrestling with seemingly contradictory findings, we think we finally understand how the ice age ended.

It all began in the 1830s, when Louis Agassiz noticed that characteristic features created by glaciers, such as scratches in the bedrock and "erratic" rocks dumped far from their place of origin, could be found far from existing glaciers.

Similar discoveries were soon being made all over the world, from Canada to Chile.

It became clear that there had been a whole series of ice ages.

What had made the ice come and go? In 1864, James Croll proposed that changes in the amount of sunlight reaching different parts of Earth's surface, due to changes in the planet's orbit, were responsible.

He also suggested that the orbital effects had been amplified by various feedback mechanisms, such as the melting of heat-reflecting snow and ice, and changes in ocean currents.

Croll got many of the details wrong, but he was on the right track.

Early in the 20th century, the Serbian astronomer Milutin Milankovitch concluded that summer sunlight in the northern hemisphere must be the crucial factor and spent years painstakingly calculating how this had changed over the past 600,000 years.

His ideas weren't accepted at the time, but in the 1970s studies of ocean-sediment cores revealed that the advances and retreats of the ice ages did indeed coincide with "Milankovitch cycles".

Yet many enigmas remained.

For starters, the changes in sunshine were tiny.

Even if they were amplified by more of the sun's heat being absorbed by the planet as snow and ice melted, it was hard to account for the scale of the global changes.

What's more, when summer sunshine increases in the northern hemisphere, it decreases in the southern hemisphere.

This had led Croll to suggest that ice ages alternate between hemispheres: when the north freezes the south thaws and vice versa.

But it had long been clear that the whole world had warmed at around the same time.

The answer to these puzzles seemed to emerge in the 1980s, when ice cores drilled in Antarctica revealed an astonishingly close correlation between atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and temperature.

"For the last million years, you see these two going up and down, up and down, together through each ice age, and it's almost in perfect lockstep," says Jeremy Shakun of Harvard University.

"It's about as beautiful a correlation as you ever get from nature."

If CO2 levels had risen soon after the thaw began in the north, it would explain why the southern hemisphere began to warm too.

It would also help to explain the magnitude of the changes.

But this promising idea ran into a major problem: by around a decade ago, it had become clear that the Antarctic starting warming a few hundred years before CO2 levels began to rise.

So while soaring CO2 levels undoubtedly warmed the planet - they are now thought to be responsible for about half of the warming as the ice age ended - they weren't the initial cause.

"Something else was causing Antarctica to warm," says Daniel Sigman of Princeton University.

Pollen puzzle

This wasn't the only mystery.

In the 1930s, studies of sediments containing the pollen of the alpine flower Dryas octopetala and other plants suggested that almost as soon as Europe began warming, it suddenly got cold again.

This cold phase, called the Oldest Dryas or Mystery Interval, lasted from around 17,500 years ago to 14,700 years ago. Ice cores later showed Greenland cooled at the same time.

Yet during this period Antarctica warmed steadily.

"On the detailed scale, the south seems to warm before the north," says Sigman.

But what would make the southern hemisphere warm even as the northern hemisphere cooled?

It could not be due to orbital changes or rising CO2 levels - but it could be due to changing ocean currents.

As the vast ice sheets began to melt 19,000 years ago, stupendous quantities of fresh water poured into the North Atlantic (see diagram).

Studies of marine sediments off the Irish Sea coast, for example, show that the sea level there rose about 10 metres in just a few hundred years (Science, vol 304, p 1141).

Today in the North Atlantic, salty water arriving from the tropics cools, becomes very dense and sinks to the bottom.

These deep, cold waters flow all the way to the southern hemisphere, while on the surface warm water - including the Gulf Stream - flows north.

This system of currents is called the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation.

The huge quantities of fresh water pouring into the ocean 19,000 years ago would have diluted the salty water, making it less dense.

Result: a slowdown in the overturning circulation.

The proof came in 2004 from a study of ocean sediments.

The ratio of two heavy elements, which indicates the speed of the deep current, showed that the overturning circulation had almost ground to a halt 17,500 years ago (Nature, vol 428, p 834).

The result was a kind of see-saw effect.

With much less heat being carried north by the surface currents, the northern hemisphere cooled.

The tropical and subtropical regions of the southern hemisphere, by contrast, began warming as they were losing less heat to the north.

This explains many puzzling findings.

The slowdown of the Atlantic current can also help explain why CO2 levels rose during the great thaw (see diagram).

By the 1990s, the search for the source of the CO2 was focusing on the Southern Ocean.

Isotopes in ocean sediments suggested that a huge reservoir of CO2 had built up in deep waters during the ice age.

It is thought that a lack of vertical mixing, along with a cover of sea ice, trapped the gas.

During the thaw, however, the ocean was "uncorked" and much of the CO2 escaped into the atmosphere.

Confirmation came earlier this year, thanks to a very detailed isotopic analysis of the CO2 trapped in ice cores from Antarctica.

"The CO2 must have come from the deep ocean," says team member Jochen Schmitt of the University of Bern in Switzerland.

Increased vertical mixing in the Southern Ocean is now widely accepted as being behind the release of CO2.

In 2009, for instance, Bob Anderson of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York reported that the Southern Ocean saw big increases in the growth of plankton with silica shells during the Oldest Dryas, when the southern hemisphere began warming (Science, vol 323, p 1443).

As the growth of these organisms is limited by how much dissolved silica there is in surface waters, the increases must be due to the upwelling of water rich in silica and other nutrients.

But what caused it?

There are two ideas.

Sigman points out that Antarctica began warming at almost the same time as the waters just south of the equator.

By itself, though, the shutdown of the Atlantic current should only have warmed waters in the tropics, not those as far south as Antarctica.

In 2007, his team proposed that when the Atlantic conveyor shut down, it was replaced by a local overturning circulation in the waters around Antarctica.

Dense surface water sank and deep water welled up, releasing both heat and CO2.

"That would explain both the Antarctic warming and the CO2 rise," says Sigman.

Anderson and his colleagues, however, think that the increased upwelling was driven by changes in winds.

Earth has distinct bands of prevailing winds, driven by the temperature differences between the poles and the tropics, coupled with the planet's rotation.

Their positions can change when the temperature differences change.

During the ice age, the band of westerlies in the southern hemisphere - which sailors call the Roaring Forties due to their latitude - would have been further north.

The see-saw effect shifted it southwards over the Southern Ocean, warming Antarctica and stirring up the sea around the frozen continent.

In particular, the wind-driven circular current would have produced more upwelling in the shallower region between South America and Antarctica.

While the details are still being debated, the big picture now seems clear.

"There is still some disagreement about the processes occurring in Antarctica as the last ice age ended," says Anderson.

"But at least the broader features are pretty well accepted."

Earlier this year, Shakun and colleagues drew together many of these strands of research with an analysis of 80 different records of temperature and atmospheric composition over the past 22,000 years (Nature, vol 484, p 49).

Their work pretty much confirms the sequence of events that ended the ice age. It goes like this:

Around 20,000 years ago, the northern ice sheets had spread so far south that just a small increase in sunshine led to extensive melting.

As fresh water poured into the North Atlantic, the overturning circulation shut down, cooling the northern hemisphere but warming the southern hemisphere.

These changes were mostly due to a redistribution of heat - by 17,500 years ago, the average global temperature had risen just 0.3 °C.

Changing winds or currents, or both, then brought more deep water to the surface in the Southern Ocean, releasing CO2 that had been trapped for thousands of years.

As atmospheric levels climbed above 190 parts per million, the whole planet began to warm.

The far north was the slowest to respond, but by around 15,000 years ago, as CO2 levels approached 240 ppm and the Atlantic overturning circulation sped up again, temperatures started to shoot up.

The recovery of the overturning circulation had the opposite effect in the southern hemisphere: warming stalled and the release of CO2 stopped.

Around 12,900 years ago, the see-saw swung again.

Temperatures in northern latitudes suddenly plummeted and remained cold for about 1300 years.

This cold snap, called the Younger Dryas, is thought to have been caused by a colossal meltwater lake in North America, which held more water than all the Great Lakes put together, suddenly flooding into the Atlantic and shutting down the overturning circulation once again.

The Southern Ocean, meanwhile, started releasing CO2 again. Levels in the atmosphere shot up to 260 ppm, causing the whole planet to warm rapidly over the next couple of millennia.

By around 10,000 years ago, Earth had been transformed.

The ice had retreated, the seas had risen and our ancestors were learning how to farm.

Technically, though, the ice age has not actually ended.

The ice has advanced and retreated many times over the past few million years, but some ice has always remained at the poles.

Perhaps not for much longer, though.

It took just a small increase in sunshine and a gradual, 70-ppm rise in CO2 to melt the great ice sheets that once covered Eurasia and America.

Since the dawn of the industrial age levels have risen by 130 ppm and counting.

If we haven't already pumped enough CO2 into the atmosphere to melt the ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica, we might soon.

Fortunately for us, it might take thousands of years for the last great ice sheets to vanish altogether.

If it does happen, though, perhaps one day builders in Antarctica will find massive potholes in the bedrock carved by meltwater, and reflect on another dramatic transformation of the planet.

Anil Ananthaswamy is a consultant for New Scientist based in Berkeley, California

Are Europe's ash trees finished?

17:31 31 October 2012

by Andy Coghlan

A fungus deadly to ash trees has just reached Britain and Ireland, after emerging 20 years ago in Poland.

Already it has devastated ash trees in mainland Europe, sweeping through more than 20 countries powerless to prevent its spread.

How did this fungus develop?

And what, if anything, can be done to stop it in countries like the UK, where ashes account for around a fifth of all trees? By the sound of it, the outlook is not good. New Scientist investigates.

Just how many ash trees have been killed?

Although there are no official figures, ash trees have effectively been wiped out in Poland, where the disease first made its appearance in 1992.

In Lithuania, 99 per cent of the ashes are gone; in Denmark, 90 per cent.

Elsewhere, the impact has been mixed, with some but not all ashes succumbing.

And now it's reached the UK?

Yes, hence the current panic.

Since February, the disease has been spotted in several English nurseries.

The outbreaks were traced to trees and seeds imported from countries that are already affected, so the response has remained low-key, although 100,000 nursery trees and saplings have been destroyed.

The alarm bells really started ringing last month when the disease was spotted in wild ash trees in East Anglia, one of the regions of England that is closest to mainland Europe.

The likelihood is that the fungus must have spread here naturally.

How did it do that?

It probably blew in from the European mainland; the fungal spores can travel great distances by wind.

Alternatively, it may have been brought here by contaminated birds, or even vehicles and people.

How does the fungus kill ash trees?

Fungal spores land on leaves, germinate and begin invading tissue.

It starts with the leaf, then moves into the leaf stalks.

Ultimately the fungus spreads into the tree's trunk.

As it spreads, the fungus chokes off all water channels in the tree, so in its wake tissues wither and die. Eventually, the tree succumbs.

Can it be stopped?

Apparently not.

Most countries where it has taken hold simply gave up.

Part of the problem is that the fungus does not spread from infected trees themselves, but from infected leaves shed in the autumn.

The fungus grows on the leaves and leaf stalks as they decay, then produces copious spores in summer which spread to uninfected ash trees, completing the life cycle.

"There's very little you can do," says Ottmar Holdenrieder of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, who in 2010 helped uncover the fungus's complete life cycle.

"It's a waste of time to chop down trees."

The infective material is all on the forest floor and cannot be removed or eradicated with fungicides without destroying countless other forms of forest life.

Which fungus causes the disease?

This is a long story. It begins in 2006, when Tadeusz Kowalski of the University of Agriculture in Krakow, Poland, identified a newly discovered fungus, Chalara fraxinea, as the cause of the disease (Forest Pathology, DOI: 10.1111/j.1439-0329.2006.00453.x).

This did not solve the puzzle.

Fungal species often exist in two forms: one that reproduces itself asexually, and one that multiplies sexually by producing spores.

It turned out that Chalara fraxinea is asexual, so the real killer remained at large.

By 2009, Kowalski had found what he thought was the sexual form of C. fraxinea: Hymenoscyphus albidus, which produces spores from tiny toadstool-like growths on ash leaf litter (Forest Pathology, DOI: 10.1111/j.1439-0239.2008.00589.x).

But this was something of a red herring.

H. albidus has been growing on the decaying leaves of Europe's ash trees for centuries, so was unlikely to be the culprit.

It has been known in the UK, for example, since the mid-19th century.

The real killer was unmasked a year later, and produced toadstools identical to those of harmless old H. albidus.

Using painstaking genetic analysis, Holdenrieder, Kowalski and others found that this doppelganger was actually a different, and lethal, species.

They named it Hymenoscyphus pseudoalbidus (Forest Pathology, DOI: 10.111/j.1439-0329.2010.00645.x).

How did this killer emerge, apparently out of the blue?

Holdenrieder and his colleagues are still investigating that, and should reveal their results next year.

For now, their hunch is that it came from Asia, either via the wind or accidentally brought in on imported ash trees.

There is circumstantial evidence: ash trees in Asia are immune to the disease.

The ideas that H. pseudoalbidus evolved from its close European relative, or that climate change made European ashes more vulnerable to a pathogen that was already there, have both been ruled out.

In short, the fungus is new to Europe, and the serious money is on it arriving from the east.

Does our identification of the culprit help in combating the disease?

Sort of.

The most important thing is that it may now be possible to breed or develop ash trees that are immune to the fungus.

These have already emerged in Lithuania, says Holdenrieder, where 99 per cent of the original ash population died out.

He says that the offspring of survivors are proving resistant.

Alternatively, it might be possible to develop a vaccine, as was developed to protect elm trees against Dutch elm disease, but this is a distant goal.

Meanwhile, now that the fungus is in Europe, it is locked in an "arms race" with the ash trees.

The fungus has the whip hand because it breeds far faster.

Can we do anything to stop the fungus evolving?

Newly published work by Holdenrieder's colleague Andrin Gross suggests that the key is to avoid importing any further variants of the fungus, as these help the fungus to continue evolving and overcoming resistance in the trees (Fungal Genetics and Biology, DOI: 10.1016/j.fgb.2012.08.008).

"Ash trees will never be able to adapt if we constantly introduce new variants of the fungus," says Gross.

What's the best hope for UK trees?

Earlier this week, the UK government banned any further imports of ash trees.

It also initiated a huge survey of forests in East Anglia to establish how far the disease may have spread.

"Once we have a handle on how big or small this issue is, we can decide whether to go for eradication or containment," says a spokesman for the UK Forestry Commission.

The best hope is that any fungus is present only in small pockets that can be cleared to prevent further spread.

The worst case is that it is everywhere, in which case it's probably goodbye to the English ash.

"If that's the case, there's nothing they can do about it," says Jim Briercliffe, business development manager of the Horticultural Trades Association (HTA) in Reading, UK, which represents suppliers of plants, seeds and gardening equipment.

The only option will be to replace dead ash with other kinds of tree.

The HTA warned the government in 2009 that the disease was rife in Danish nurseries and could easily reach the UK.

"It is annoying that our warning was ignored," he says.

How is mainland Europe coping?

"My gut feeling is that the whole of Europe will have to live with the disease in the long term," says Holdenrieder.

"Ash tree populations will be reduced to less than 10 per cent what they were originally."

Meanwhile, researchers are pooling their resources to see what can be done.

A pan-European group of Chalara specialists called FRAXBACK is meeting for the first time in November in Uppsala, Sweden

The universe: the full story

29 October 2012

by Abraham Loeb and Jonathan Pritchard

The grand sweep of cosmic history is about to be revealed in the crackle of giant radio waves

ASTRONOMERS have a great advantage over archaeologists: they can see the past.

The finite speed of light means that the further away a cosmic object is, the longer its light takes to reach us.

An image recorded by our telescopes today tells us how that object looked long ago when its light was emitted.

Using our most powerful telescopes on Earth and in space, we can now trace the universe's story back to a time when it was just 500 million years into its 13.7-billion-year life.

Meanwhile, a single flash that bathed the cosmos in light 400,000 years after the big bang provides us with an isolated exposure of the universe in this infancy.

This infant universe is, like a newborn baby, almost featureless, yet to assume the characteristics that will mark it out in later life.

When our telescopic cameras pick up its story again, however, it is recognisably its adult self - stars, galaxies and clusters of galaxies already populate its reaches.

What happened in between, during the universe's turbulent, formative adolescent years?

That has long been a matter of conjecture.

Now, thanks to a combination of new instruments and refined observational techniques, the missing reel of the universe's story is about to be slotted in - presented in the crackle and hiss of giant radio waves.

We already have a rough storyboard for the universe's missing adolescence.

Clues are encoded in the cosmic microwave background, that radiation suddenly liberated 400,000 years into the universe's life.

At this "epoch of recombination" the cosmos had cooled enough for protons and electrons to form neutral hydrogen, which scattered light in all directions.

Tiny variations in this radiation's temperature show that the atoms were spread not uniformly, but in almost imperceptible clumps.

Gravity's pull, our story goes, caused these lumps to consolidate and grow and eventually ignite into stars. These stars, in turn, felt a mutual attraction, slowly over the course of a few hundred million years forming ever-larger galaxies.

As they did so, the universe underwent a final change in its character: high-energy radiation broke down hydrogen formed at the epoch of recombination, freeing up electrons and protons.

This "epoch of reionisation", which is thought to have ended some 700 million years after the big bang, marked the coming of age of the cosmos we see today.

Convincing as this plot development is, in the absence of observational evidence it is a tale too confidently told. Many significant details of the universe's evolution remain sketchy - and in some cases wholly obscure.

For a start, what made the first galaxies?

The first stars, one might reasonably think.

But the first stars must have been oddballs.

Unlike every subsequent generation, they grew up in a pristine environment consisting solely of hydrogen and helium, the only elements the big bang forged in large quantities.

Nuclear reactions within these pioneering stars created the heavier elements, such as carbon, oxygen and silicon, that went into the mix for later stars such as our sun - and, ultimately, our planet and ourselves.

From what we can tell, these first stars were bloated monsters up to 100 times the size of our sun that lived fast, burned bright and died within a few million years.

Was that long enough to form their own galaxies, or to influence their formation - or was it their less flamboyant successors that first found safety and stability in numbers?

Cosmic monsters that have survived into our times also pose puzzles.

The centre of the Milky Way, and every galaxy like it, seems to host a black hole with a mass millions or even billions of times that of the sun.

How did they get that big?

One theory is that they began as star-sized black holes, produced when massive stars exploded and fell in on themselves, and then slowly grew by sucking in gas and surrounding stars.

Yet a typical supermassive black hole would need longer than the age of the universe to swallow enough material.

An alternative theory is that they were simply born big, produced directly by the collapse of massive amounts of primordial gas.

And was it ultraviolet light from the first stars or X-rays emitted by these black holes as they fed that caused the epoch of reionisation?

Our Milky Way was a product of the universe's dark ages - so asking these questions is again an investigation into our own origins.

We might look for answers by building even larger, more sensitive telescopes to look even further back towards the big bang (see diagram).

At least in the foreseeable future, however, that can only give us a partial view: the objects of interest are so far away that even the most gargantuan telescopes currently planned will see only the very brightest.

An alternative is to capture radio emissions from hydrogen atoms.

Neutral hydrogen gas was an abundant, if diffusely spread, feature of the cosmos between the epochs of recombination and reionisation, and it gives off a faint signal of its presence.

The lone electron and proton within each hydrogen atom act like two bar magnets that can lose energy by "flipping" so that their magnetic moments, or spins, point in opposite directions.

When an atom flips, it releases energy as a photon with a defined radio wavelength of 21 centimetres.

Equally, a hydrogen atom can flip into the higher-energy, aligned state by absorbing a passing photon of the same wavelength.

Either way, the emission or absorption of 21-cm radiation over patches of sky is a sure sign that hydrogen atoms are present.

Because hydrogen is ionised by high-energy radiation, whether from brightly burning stars or from supermassive galactic black holes, maps of where it is should provide a detailed picture of where stars and galaxies are not.

The hydrogen signal was predicted by Dutch astronomer Hendrik van de Hulst in 1942, and first picked up from the Milky Way in 1951 by Harold Ewen and Edward Purcell, who placed a horn antenna through a window of the physics department at Harvard University.

Since then it has been used to detect warm hydrogen gas in our galaxy and others nearby - for example, to measure Doppler shifts to higher or lower wavelengths and so find out what parts of galaxies are moving towards and away from us.

A similar Doppler-like shift can be used to record the evolution of hydrogen in the early universe.

As the universe expands over time, so does the wavelength of radiation that travels through it.

The further away a region is, and so the earlier in cosmic time we see it, the more stretching the radiation undergoes.

This allows us to map the ancient hydrogen in three dimensions: two across the sky and, by tuning our receivers to different stretched wavelengths, a third that is equivalent to distance or "look-back time".

The result is a film reel of the universe's missing years that can confirm - or, indeed, disprove - our general theoretical picture and answer many of those nagging questions.

Fine details in the patterns of the 21-cm signal over time should reveal whether first-generation stars were a long-lasting feature in galaxy evolution, or brief candles that flickered once never to be seen again.

Different patterns of ionisation are expected from ultraviolet and X-ray emission, so that should tell us whether stars or black holes were the main agents of reionisation.

If black holes were significant participants, the size of the ionised bubbles around them should reveal whether they were born big or ate their way to supersize.

Clues to a host of problems in fundamental particle physics might also be contained in the new hydrogen movies (see "Visible in radio"). So why have we not made them before?

Put simply, it has not been technically feasible. Hydrogen emissions from the first billion years after the big bang are stretched to wavelengths of around 2 metres, several million times longer than a typical visible wavelength.

The longer the wavelength, the larger the telescope required to capture it with the necessary resolution.

For the sort of radio telescope that springs to most people's mind - an overgrown satellite dish - the size rapidly becomes unfeasibly large.

The world's largest single radio telescope, a dish 305 metres in diameter built into a mountainside near Arecibo, Puerto Rico, does not come even close to the sensitivity required.

That is why the newest generation of radio telescopes takes a different approach. In an optical telescope, photons are generally separated by much more than their short wavelengths.

The telescope is really just a bucket in which we collect individual photons to count them. In a radio telescope, by contrast, incoming photons from a distant source overlap and are recorded as a single continuous wave.

This wave can be sampled at different points by many widely distributed small radio antennae rather as an analogue sound signal is sampled in time to make a digital recording, and the samples combined by computer algorithms into a single, coherent signal.

One such array, India's 30-antenna Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope, has been up and running since 1996, but has proved too small: it was designed in a data-starved era when we believed there was much more hydrogen in the universe than in fact there is.

The more antennas within a given area, the greater the telescope sensitivity.

The bigger the "baseline" of the telescope - the maximum distance on the ground covered by antennas - the smaller the distant objects you can resolve.

Imagine several thousand TV antennas connected to a supercomputer and you have an accurate image of a series of huge, long-wavelength radio arrays that are about to sharpen our view of the deep cosmic past (see diagram).

These arrays still won't have it easy.

Earth's ionosphere interferes with radio waves as they pass, distorting the position and shape of distant sources and creating an effect that is like trying to perform optical astronomy from the bottom of a swimming pool.

This must be corrected by referencing coordinates to a network of radio "pulsars", fast, rotating neutron stars that send regular, pinpointed pulses of radiation our way.

Individual bright radio sources and diffuse radio emissions from our own galaxy, which are 10,000 times brighter than the ancient cosmic signal, must also be peeled away - not to mention the busy noise of our own radio transmissions.

The theoretical and computational tools to overcome such difficulties are now largely in place, and the first definitive detection of hydrogen from the epoch of reionisation is expected within the next five years.

These first pictures will still be a little fuzzy.

For a finer-grained view, all eyes will be on the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), on which construction is due to start in South Africa and western Australia in 2016.

The long-wavelength (low-frequency) part of the SKA, to be completed in Australia by about 2020, will consist of around one million radio antennas, with a collecting area of a square kilometre, plugged into one of the world's fastest supercomputers.

It should help to unravel the nature of the very first galaxies that formed in the first few hundred million years after the big bang.

Looking even further ahead, NASA is examining the possibility of 21-cm experiments on the far side of the moon, thus avoiding the problems both of Earth's ionosphere and of human radio activity.

The idea is not as fanciful as it sounds. After all, in comparison to hulking a weighty conventional telescope with mighty mirrors into orbit, a simple radio array would be little more than a few wires connected to a supercomputer and a power source.

Not much for the ultimate cinematic record of the universe's history.

Visible in radio

Hydrogen's 21-centimetre radio emissions should illuminate the universe's dark adolescence (see main story), but address some deeper questions too.

What was inflation?
The 21-cm observations ultimately measure variations in cosmic density seeded at the period of inflation, a breakneck expansion of space thought to have occurred a split second after the big bang.

The cosmic microwave background radiation provides a single 2D projection of these fluctuations 400,000 years after the big bang.

The 21-cm observations will give us a far richer, 3D source of information on what physics looked like under extremely hot, dense conditions far beyond those recreated in earthly accelerators.

How massive are neutrinos?

That neutrinos have a mass comes as a surprise to the standard model of particle physics - but they do, albeit a tiny and as yet unmeasured one.

Characterising these elusive particles is important for understanding physics beyond the standard model, but it is a frustrating process using detectors on Earth.

Measuring their influence on the formation of structures in the universe is a surprisingly effective alternative.

The passage of neutrinos smoothes the distribution of matter, and the scales on which this smoothing occurs at different times tells us how far and fast neutrinos have travelled since the big bang - and hence their mass.

What is dark matter?
Invisible dark matter is thought to make up 80 per cent of cosmic matter, and is needed to explain why galaxies rotate as fast as they do. Most particles postulated to be dark matter can annihilate each other, releasing energy and heating their surrounds.

This would make an imprint in the hydrogen 21-cm radiation, so measuring its pattern across the early cosmos will narrow down where dark matter was - and possibly reveal its nature.

Abraham Loeb is director of the Institute for Theory and Computation and chair of the Astronomy Department at Harvard University.

Jonathan Pritchard is a lecturer in astrostatistics at Imperial College London

Brain circuits run their own clocks

21:00 30 October 2012

by Douglas Heaven
 
Timing is everything.

But exactly how the brain keeps time, which it does very well, has been something of a mystery.

One widely held theory suggests that a single brain region acts as a centralised timekeeper – possibly in the basal ganglia or cerebellum.

However, a study now suggests that timekeeping is decentralised, with different circuits having their own timing mechanisms for each specific activity.

The finding could help explain why certain brain conditions affect our sense of timing, and even raise the possibility of artificially manipulating time perception.

Geoffrey Ghose and Blaine Schneider, at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, investigated timing in the brain by training two rhesus macaques to perform tasks in which they moved their eyes between two dots on a screen at regular 1-second intervals.

There were no external cues available to help them keep track of time.

After three months, the monkeys had learned to move their eyes between the two dots with average intervals of 1.003 and 0.973 seconds, respectively.

The researchers then used electrodes to record brain activity across 100 neurons in the lateral intraparietal cortex – associated with eye movement – while the monkeys performed the task.

The activity of these neurons decreased during the interval between each eye movement, and the rate of decrease correlated with the monkeys' timing.

Using this information, Ghose and Schneider were able to predict the interval between eye movements by measuring the preceding decay rate.

For example, in one task, a slower rate of decrease in the neurons' activity corresponded with a macaque overestimating of the length of a second.

Likewise, if neuron activity decreased at a faster rate the monkeys moved their eyes before a second was up.

The researchers now want to study what goes on in this brain area while the monkeys are learning the task, to work out how these time intervals arise.

This may help our understanding of why people with brain lesions or Parkinson's can have difficulty keeping time, says Ghose.

As well as indicating that brain circuits may have their own ability to keep time, the results also hint at how our perception of time can be altered during high emotional states.

Stress is associated with changes in the amount of neuromodulators such as adrenalin present in the brain. Adrenalin is known to affect the rate of decay of neuronal activity.

"And in our model, a change in the activity decay rate is all you need to have a different sense of 'what time' it is," says Ghose.

It might be possible to tweak an individual's sense of timing by altering these signals, he says.

The results support the idea that local neuron populations govern timing behaviour, says Catherine Jones at the University of Essex, UK.

"Given the promising findings, it would certainly be of value to investigate human performance on this task."

Death: The evolution of funerals

23 October 2012

by Graham Lawton

When did our ancestors become aware of their own mortality?

The answer may help us understand the origin of our unique way of life, says Graham Lawton

PANSY died peacefully one winter's afternoon, her daughter Rosie and her friends Blossom and Chippy by her side.

As she lay dying her companions stroked and comforted her; after she stopped breathing they moved her limbs and examined her mouth to confirm she was dead.

Chippy tried twice to revive her by beating on her chest. That night Rosie kept vigil by her mother's side.

Pansy's death, in December 2008, sounds peaceful and relatively routine, but in fact it was highly unusual.

Captive chimpanzees are rarely allowed to die at "home"; they are usually whisked away and euthanised.

But the keepers at Blair Drummond Safari and Adventure Park in Stirling, UK, decided to let Pansy stay with her loved ones until the last so that their response to her death could be observed.

It is hard not to wonder what was going on in the minds of Rosie, Blossom and Chippy before and after Pansy's death.

Is it possible that they felt grief and loss?

Did they ponder their own mortality?

Until recently these questions would have been considered dangerously anthropomorphic and off-limits.

But not any more.

The demise of Pansy is one of many recent observations of chimpanzee deaths, both in captivity and the wild, that are leading to surprising insights about our closest living relatives' relationship with death.

This, in turn, is opening up another, deeper, question: at what point in human evolution did our ancestors develop a modern understanding of death, including awareness of their own mortality?

The answer goes much wider than our attitude to death - it may help us to better understand the origin of our unique way of life.

As far as most animals are concerned, a dead body is just an inanimate object.

Some species have evolved elaborate-looking behaviours to dispose of bodies - mole rats, for example, drag them into one of their burrow's latrines and seal it up - but these are practical acts with no deeper purpose or meaning.

Some non-human animals, though, clearly have a more complex relationship with death.

Elephants are known to be fascinated with the bones of dead elephants, while dolphins have been observed spending long periods of time with corpses.

No animal, though, arouses interest as much as chimps do.

Psychologists James Anderson and Louise Lock from the University of Stirling, who recorded Pansy's death, point out that her companions' responses were "strikingly reminiscent of human responses to peaceful death", including respect, care, testing for signs of life, attempts to revive, vigil, grief and mourning.

Similar things have been seen in the rare occasions that death has been observed among wild chimps.

Primatologists Alexander Piel of the University of California, San Diego, and Fiona Stewart of the University of Cambridge witnessed just such an event in Gombe national park in Tanzania in January 2010.

Early one morning, rangers discovered the body of a female chimp, Malaika, who had apparently fallen out of a tree.

When Piel and Stewart arrived at 9.15 am there was a crowd of chimps around Malaika's body. For the next three and a half hours the pair observed and filmed the scene as a succession of chimps visited the body, while others observed from the trees. Some seemed merely curious, sniffing or grooming the body.

Others shook, dragged and beat it as if in frustration and anger.

Dominant males performed displays of power around it or even with it; the alpha male threw it into a stream bed. Many made distress calls.

When the body was finally removed by rangers, eight of the chimps rushed to where it had lain and intensively - and excitedly - touched and sniffed the ground.

They stayed for 40 minutes, making a chorus of hooting calls before moving off.

The last chimp to visit the spot was Malaika's daughter Mambo.

What are we to make of this? According to Piel, the chimps' behaviour can be classified into three categories: morbidity, or intense interest in the body, mourning and "social theatre". And as with Pansy's death, these are very reminiscent of how we behave.

"The danger is to anthropomorphise, but much of this behaviour is still practised by modern humans," says Paul Pettitt, an archaeologist at the University of Sheffield, UK, who studies the origins of human burial.

"We see in chimps very simple behaviours that have become elaborated into more formal expressions of mourning.

It gives us a feel for what we might expect to have been practised by Miocene apes and early protohumans."

We will never know for sure, of course.

But the fossil and archaeological record contains tantalising hints of how this kind of behaviour evolved into modern rituals. And this has become a major question in palaeoanthropology.

Our treatment of the dead clearly falls into the category of "symbolic activity", akin to language, art and the other things that make modern humans unique.

These were all thought to have emerged around 40,000 years ago, but recent discoveries have tentatively pushed this back to 100,000 years or more.

Anything resembling mortuary practices predating 40,000 years ago used to be dismissed as an artefact.

But not any more, says Francesco d'Errico of the University of Bordeaux in France.

"Most archaeologists now accept that modern humans, Neanderthals and possibly other archaic hominins were engaged in mortuary practices well before 40,000 years ago."

Hominids on a hillside
The earliest signs are very old indeed. In 1975, on a steep grassy hillside near Hadar, Ethiopia, palaeontologists discovered 13 specimens of our 3.2 million-year-old ancestor Australopithecus afarensis - nine adults, two juveniles and two infants - all within touching distance of one another and apparently deposited around the same time.

How they got there is a mystery.

There is no evidence of a flash flood or similar catastrophe that could have killed all of them at once.

There is no sign that the bones had been chewed by predators.

They are, as discoverer Donald Johanson later wrote, "just hominids littering a hillside" (see diagram)

Last year, partly in light of chimp research, Pettitt proposed a new explanation: the bodies were left there deliberately in an act of "structured abandonment".

That doesn't mean burial, or anything with symbolic or religious meaning.

"It was probably just the need to get rid 0f a rotting corpse," says Pettitt.

Even so, it represents a significant cognitive advance over what is seen in chimpanzees, who leave their dead where they fall - perhaps the first stirring of something human.

"It could be recognition that the appropriate place for the corpses is not among the living - a first formal division between the living and the dead," says Pettitt.

Barring new discoveries it will be impossible to confirm that australopithecines deposited their dead in a special place.

But by half a million years ago the evidence is much clearer.

Sima de los Huesos - the pit of bones - was discovered in the 1980s at the bottom of a limestone shaft in a cave in the Atapuerca Mountains of northern Spain.

It contained the remains of at least 28 archaic humans, most likely Homo heidelbergensis, a probable ancestor of both Homo sapiens and Neanderthals.

How did they get there?

An obvious possibility is that they accidentally fell down the shaft, but that seems unlikely from the way the bones fractured. "It doesn't look like a natural accumulation," says Pettitt.

Most of the skeletons are adolescent males or young men, and many show signs of bone disease or deformity.

According to Pettitt the best explanation is that they were deliberately placed at the top of the shaft after death and then gradually slumped in.

If so, this is the earliest evidence of funerary caching, or the designation of a specific place for the dead - perhaps, in this case, for deformed outcasts - a further advancement towards the modern conception of death.

Once you have designated places for the dead you are clearly treating them as if they still have some kind of social agency.

"Once you've reached that point you're on the road to symbolic activity," says Pettitt.

What did these protohumans understand about death?

Did they know that they themselves were mortal?

Did they have a concept of an afterlife?

"We haven't got a clue," says Pettitt.

What we do know is that funerary caching became increasingly common: bodies are found in places that are hard to account for any other way, tucked into fissures and cracks, in hard-to-reach overhangs or at the back of caves.

From funerary caching it is a short conceptual leap to burial - creating artificial niches and fissures to stash the dead.

The earliest evidence we have of this is from two caves in Israel - Skhul and Qafzeh - where the skeletons of 120,000-year-old Homo sapiens were found in what are clearly human-made hollows.

There is also evidence of Neanderthal burials from around the same time.

All this adds to the evidence that humans were on their way to a symbolic culture much earlier than we thought.

"Once you start getting deliberate burials I think it's much more likely that people are thinking in formalised terms, things like life after death," says Pettitt.

Even so, these burials do not represent a point of no return.

Only a handful of such sites are known; compared with the number of people who must have died they are incredibly rare.

It appears that burial was for special occasions; most dead people were probably still cached or abandoned.

It was not until about 14,000 years ago that most people were buried in what we would recognise as cemeteries.

Around the same time people were settling in one place and inventing agriculture and religion - it is probably no coincidence that the world's oldest ceremonial building, Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, was built at that time.

Well before that, however, archaic humans appear to have had a concept of death not unlike ours.

Art, language, elaborate funerary practices - they are just expressions of the same thing, says Pettitt.

"It's part of what distinguishes us not only from other animals but from every other type of human that's gone before."

Graham Lawton is deputy magazine editor of New Scientist

The big question mark over gasoline from air

 22 October 2012

by Paul Marks

In a shipping container on a British industrial park, not far from where George Stephenson launched the world's first steam railway in 1825, another transport revolution might be beginning.

Every day the machinery inside produces half a litre of purified gasoline.

It sounds humdrum until you realise one thing: the only raw material used is air.

Last week, Air Fuel Synthesis (AFS), a company in Stockton, UK, revealed the first successful demonstration of an idea that dates back to the oil crisis of the 1970s: that carbon, hydrogen and oxygen can be plucked from carbon dioxide and water in air to be converted into methanol and then morphed into gasoline.

However, amidst the headlines, some media coverage overlooked the key point: the energy efficiency of the process has yet to be demonstrated. This matters because the technique uses electricity for key stages.

It should not require more energy input than is gleaned from burning the fuel it produces.

The big idea is to capture atmospheric CO2 and turn it into fuel so there's no net increase in CO2 from cars and trucks fuelled by such gasoline.

As long as the process is powered by renewable electricity sources such as solar, wind or tidal, using the gasoline is carbon neutral.

Snagging carbon dioxide

The AFS plant comprises a CO2 capture unit in one shipping container, with a methanol reactor and miniature gasoline refining system in another.

Air is blown into a sodium hydroxide mist, snagging CO2 as sodium carbonate.

A condenser collects water from the same air.

To make methanol – formula CH3OH – hydrogen is generated by electrolysing the water while the carbon and oxygen come from electrolysing the sodium carbonate. The methanol is then converted to gasoline.

Following tests over the last three months, AFS chief executive Peter Harrison says the demonstrator reliably produces half-a-litre of gasoline a day.

Peter Edwards ,an inorganic chemist at the University of Oxford whose team is working with a Saudi firm on similar ideas, is impressed: "I take my hat off to Air Fuel Synthesis.

They have taken a concept that has been around for 35 years and gotten the process going."

But Harrison points out the demonstrator, funded with a £1.2 million, two-year investment from private backers, was built to make gasoline, "not to prove its net efficiency or energy balances".

Douglas Stephan, a chemist at the University of Toronto, Canada, also researching fuel production from CO2, describes AFS's demonstrator as "an engineering tour-de-force".

But he too warns efficiency is the key.

"Until a detailed assessment of the energy efficiency is enunciated, I would remain sceptical about this technology," he says.

Andrew Bocarsly, chief science advisor at Liquid Light Inc, a company in Monmouth Junction, New Jersey, aiming to synthesise chemicals like methanol from CO2, points out that many researchers worldwide have so far failed to find cost-effective and efficient ways to split hydrogen from water.

Going to need a bigger plant

"I do wonder about the cost efficiency of their chemical conversion processes," he says, noting energy is required to back convert carbonate to gaseous CO2, to liberate hydrogen from water, to convert the hydrogen and CO2 to methanol and to transform methanol to gasoline.

AFS says demonstrating efficiency will have to wait for a bigger plant, which will fit into three shipping containers that can be dropped anywhere fuel is needed and produce 1200 litres of gasoline a day.

Harrison says motorsport venues, keen to reduce their fossil fuel dependence, and some remote islands have expressed an interest in these £5 million units.

"The demonstrator has given us the confidence that this next level of gasoline plant will be efficient enough," says AFS marketing manager Graham Truscott.

Harrison says the ultimate goal is to build refinery-sized plants that could compete with oil – but he says they could cost £10 billion and need serious government aid.

That in turn would need serious proof of energy efficiency.

Bocarsly adds: "This issue will be the test for commercialisation."

There's one more factor to consider, says Edwards: "The efficiency of this process would also have to be balanced against the cost of alternative measures like burying or dumping CO2 underground."

Historic British Earthquakes

 

In a low seismicity country like the UK, even moderate earthquakes are rare.

 To get an accurate picture of how often the larger events occur, we need to extend our window of observation back in history.

This means examining all available historical records for reports of ground shaking and determining if this could have been due to an earthquake.

Earthquake location and magnitude are estimated from the intensity of the shaking at different locations.

The following list is a extract of the M5+ earthquakes, given by Musson (1994), A Catalogue of British Earthquakes, British Geological Survey, Technical Report WL/94/04.

Date	Time	Lat	Lon	Depth	Mag	Region
1382/05/21	15:00:00	51.340	2.000	25.0	5.8	DOVER STRAITS
1382/05/24	05:30:00	51.340	2.000		5.0	DOVER STRAITS
1575/02/26	17:00:00	53.200	-1.600		5.0	MIDLANDS
1580/04/06	18:00:00	51.060	1.600	22.0	5.8	DOVER STRAITS
1690/10/07	07:15:00	53.000	-4.200		5.2	CAERNARVON
1727/07/19	04:00:00	51.570	-3.760	25.0	5.2	SWANSEA
1775/09/08	21:45:00	51.730	-3.810	19.0	5.1	SWANSEA
1786/08/11	01:55:00	54.530	-3.680	16.0	5.0	WHITEHAVEN
1816/08/13	22:45:00	57.430	-4.330	18.0	5.1	INVERNESS
1843/03/17	00:55:00	53.920	-3.790	17.0	5.0	IRISH SEA
1852/11/09	04:25:00	53.020	-4.300	24.0	5.3	CAERNARVON
1853/04/01	22:45:00	49.150	-1.700	21.0	5.2	COUTANCES
1863/10/06	03:22:00	52.000	-2.800	25.0	5.2	HEREFORD
1878/01/28	11:53:00	49.800	-0.600	16.0	5.0	NORMANDY
1880/11/28	17:45:00	56.190	-5.300	25.0	5.2	ARGYLL
1889/05/30	20:19:00	49.400	-0.600	25.0	5.2	NORMANDY
1892/08/18	00:24:00	51.700	-5.040	26.0	5.1	PEMBROKE
1893/11/02	17:45:00	51.810	-4.410	24.0	5.0	CARMARTHEN
1896/12/17	05:32:00	52.020	-2.550	20.0	5.3	HEREFORD
1901/09/18	01:24:00	57.430	-4.320	11.0	5.0	INVERNESS
1906/06/27	09:45:00	51.620	-3.810	13.0	5.2	SWANSEA
1925/02/01	21:52:00	49.160	-5.220	25.0	5.1	BRITTANY
1926/07/30	13:19:00	49.170	-1.620	18.0	5.5	CHANNEL ISLANDS
1926/08/15	03:58:00	52.310	-2.660	17.0	4.8	LUDLOW
1927/02/17	23:17:00	49.170	-1.620	22.0	5.4	CHANNEL ISLANDS
1931/06/07	00:25:00	54.080	1.500	23.0	6.1	NORTH SEA
1957/02/11	15:43:00	52.820	-1.330	13.0	5.3	DERBY
1958/02/09	23:21:00	53.750	1.010	16.0	5.1	NORTH SEA

Last updated: 06:40:04, Wed Oct 17, 2012 (GMT)

Date	Time	Lat	Lon	Depth	Mag	Int	Region	Comment
2012/10/13	03:24:24.3	49.103	-2.313	5	1.4		JERSEY,CHANNEL ISLANDS	17KM SW OF ST HELIER
2012/10/12	21:33:22.7	56.912	-4.752	7	1.3	2	SPEAN BRIDGE,HIGHLAND	FELT BOHUNTINE
2012/10/11	14:26:27.0	49.539	-0.346	16	2.3		ENGLISH CHANNEL	140KM SSW BRIGHTON
2012/10/11	12:31:52.0	49.574	-0.380	14	2.3		ENGLISH CHANNEL	140KM SSW BRIGHTON
2012/10/10	05:18:09.8	52.853	-1.359	11	1.8		CASTLE DONINGTON,LEICS
2012/10/08	09:28:58.9	53.219	-1.047	1	1.6	2	OLLERTON,NOTTS	FELT OLLERTON
2012/10/08	03:11:25.1	49.602	-2.929	7	2.2		ENGLISH CHANNEL	30KM NW OF GUERNSEY
2012/10/06	12:30:56.0	55.241	-3.440	2	1.1		JOHNSTONEBRIDGE,D&G
2012/09/30	06:20:30.4	56.389	-3.878	2	0.6		COMRIE,PERTH/KINROSS
2012/09/25	17:19:49.5	49.807	0.038	2	2.1		ENGLISH CHANNEL
2012/09/22	07:39:57.7	56.381	-3.981	2	1.1	3	COMRIE,PERTH/KINROSS	FELT COMRIE
2012/09/21	09:29:52.0	56.370	-3.970	2	1.4	3	COMRIE,PERTH/KINROSS	FELT COMRIE
2012/09/20	12:59:05.4	55.161	-6.629	5	1.3		COLERAINE,N IRELAND	3KM NE OF COLERAINE
2012/09/17	08:26:48.2	57.603	-5.536	2	1.2		TORRIDON,HIGHLAND
2012/09/08	19:02:54.5	55.029	-7.573	1	1.1	2	COUNTY DONEGAL,IRELAND	FELT TAMNEY
2012/09/05	16:08:10.2	53.126	-2.262	7	1.1		CONGLETON,CHESHIRE
2012/09/02	17:06:46.6	53.280	-2.324	8	0.7		OLLERTON,CHESHIRE
2012/09/01	07:04:12.4	55.728	-6.320	26	1.1	2	ISLAY,ARGYLL/BUTE	FELT ISLAY
2012/08/29	12:12:59.2	50.272	1.024	10	2.2		ENGLISH CHANNEL	75KM SE EASTBOURNE
2012/08/28	16:24:36.2	50.243	1.235	10	2.3		ENGLISH CHANNEL	90KM SE EASTBOURNE

Busted! The myth of technological progress

04 October 2012

by Laura Spinney 
New Scientist 

The history of technology holds some salutary lessons for anyone who blithely believes there is a high-tech fix for all our 21st-century problems

Editorial: "The Singularity is upon us? Not so fast"

WHEN Admiral Zheng He led his fleet out of the eastern Chinese port of Suzhou in 1405, it must have been a sight to behold.

The largest of the several hundred ships under his command were the size of modern aircraft carriers and housed 500 men apiece.

The fleet made seven expeditions in all, to advertise the might of the Ming dynasty around the Indian Ocean, but having returned to port for the last time it was dismantled, vanishing along with the engineering know-how that created it.

For the next few centuries China's seagoing vessel of choice was a much humbler junk.

It seems incredible that such an impressive, and effective, body of knowledge could have disappeared like that, yet history is full of such examples.

When archaeologists began excavating at Pompeii in the 18th century, they uncovered remains of a Roman aqueduct system that was more sophisticated than the one in use at the time.

The Egyptian pyramids still haven't given up all their construction secrets.

And going even further back, finds at Howieson's Poort Shelter in South Africa indicate that people were making highly sophisticated stone tools there until about 60,000 years ago when, for reasons unknown, they reverted to producing much simpler ones.

We tend to think of technological evolution as an exponential curve that starts out more-or-less flat in the early Stone Age and accelerates towards the present.

But the idea that we are becoming ever more inventive may be an illusion. Looked at under the magnifying glass, the apparently smooth curve breaks up into a frenetic series of advances, retreats and new advances - what Peter Richerson, who studies cultural evolution at the University of California, Davis, describes as evolution "noodling about".

In fact, over the whole of human history, we have probably lost more innovations than we now possess, says anthropologist Luke Premo at Washington State University in Pullman.

It is a sobering thought.

Just when we were pinning our hopes on producing hi-tech fixes for today's problems - climate change, overpopulation, emerging infectious diseases and so on - comes the news that we are not advancing inexorably towards technological Nirvana after all.

Nevertheless, a better understanding of how technologies evolve could hold some valuable lessons for the future. In building a more fine-grained picture of human technological history, we may identify clues as to what will work and what will not.

One of the long-standing mysteries of human technological evolution is why our Stone Age ancestors apparently showed so little inventiveness in their toolmaking.

The oldest tools discovered to date are 2.6 million-year-old stone flakes in what is now Ethiopia.

They mark the beginning of a refining process that didn't culminate in really effective stone hand axes until about 2 million years later.

This slow progress, the flat part of the technological evolution curve, has been put down to the limited cognitive abilities of early hominins.

Unable to learn from previous generations, each one had to start again from scratch, which explains why they lacked so-called cumulative culture.

Generally considered to be what separates humans from other primates, cumulative culture rests on two key skills: social learning, which is the transmission of knowledge to new members of a group, and over-imitation - the high-fidelity copying of a behaviour, including irrelevant or incidental elements, which allows the behaviour and its context to be passed along together.

Some researchers have argued that cumulative culture only made its appearance around 100,000 years ago, with Homo sapiens (New Scientist, 24 March, p 34).

But anthropologist and stone-tool expert Dietrich Stout of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, has challenged that view.

Innovation tends to happen by the introduction, deliberate or otherwise, of copying errors - the equivalent of genetic mutations in biological evolution - with those that provide an adaptive advantage being more likely to be passed on.

 Early humans might well have had what it takes cognitively to learn from their forebears, Stout argues, it is just that with the simple tools at their disposal, there wasn't much room for copying error (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, vol 366, p 1050).

Put simply, he says, "you can't change much about a hand axe if you still want it to perform all the functions that a hand axe performs".

However, as tool complexity increased, the potential for innovation grew.

Premo suggests another reason why Stone Agers' creativity may have been underestimated.

Throughout those apparently uneventful 2 million years, they were hunter-gatherers who lived in extended, itinerant family groups of between 20 and 40 adults, plus children.

"These small groups could have been exposed to fairly high chances of the whole group going extinct," he says, whether because their best hunter was incapacitated due to illness or injury, or because environmental conditions changed rapidly.

When a local population died out, all its innovations would have died with it, and sometimes that could have meant the loss of generations' worth of know-how.

In 2010, with anthropologist Steven Kuhn of the University of Arizona in Tucson, Premo developed a computer model that recapitulated the behaviour of innovative, tool-using hominin groups in a Stone Age landscape.

It showed that a period of technological innovation followed by the wiping out of the innovators and their kin looks identical, on the broad scale, to a period of technological stasis (PLoS One, vol 5, p e15582).

But if Stone Age toolmakers were innovating, then where is the evidence? The archaeological record is notoriously patchy and the further back you go the sparser it becomes.

Even so, the apparent lack of progress may be partly explained by the timeframe we choose to consider. In soon-to-be-published work, Charles Perreault at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico gathered information about 500 archaeological samples - tools, pots and other artefacts dating from the past 10,000 years and coming mainly from North America - and analysed how they changed over time.

He found that the rate of change depended on the period over which he calculated it, appearing to be rapid over short time periods and slower over longer ones.

A key reason for this is that there are many advances and retreats over the shorter term that tend to cancel each other out in the longer timeframe.

There is an intriguing parallel here with biological evolution.

Back in 1983, University of Michigan palaeontologist Philip Gingerich studied how shape and structure changed over millions of years in a wide range of animals.

He, too, found an inverse relationship between rate of change and period of measurement and, like Perreault, concluded that this is simply an illusion of perspective (Science, vol 222, p 159).

The main difference between the two studies is that, by Perreault's calculations, technological change happens approximately 50 times faster than morphological change.

As well as challenging preconceptions about the inventiveness of our Stone Age ancestors, these findings have also fuelled a growing realisation that technological innovations are highly prone to extinction.

Premo and Kuhn's model hinted that there are many reasons why even seemingly clever inventions don't catch on, or die out. In the real world, a classic example can be found on the island of Tasmania.

About 12,000 years ago, as temperatures and sea levels rose at the end of the last ice age, Tasmania was cut off from the Australian mainland and its inhabitants marooned.

Archaeological evidence shows that until the land bridge was severed, Tasmanians possessed a range of complex technologies, including cold-weather clothing, fishing nets, spears and boomerangs.

When Europeans arrived 10 millennia later, almost nothing remained.

They found people whose technology was the simplest of any known contemporary human group.

Low population density and fragile networks for knowledge transfer were the main reasons for this loss, according to Stephen Shennan, director of University College London's Institute of Archaeology.

He notes, though, that in other places and eras different influences have been at play.

For example, market forces and political or social factors can dictate rates of innovation.

A wealthy elite may be essential to sustain a community of craftspeople who need a long training period to learn to make the artefacts the elite desires.

Patents, in the modern sense of the word, were invented in the 15th century, before which craftspeople found other ways to profit from their knowledge for as long as possible - ways that influenced the development of the technologies in question.

Guilds emerged to protect skilled knowledge, for example, keeping the price high but the pool of knowledge transmitters small, and hence vulnerable to extinction if conditions changed.

Factors intrinsic to a technology may also determine its evolution.

An example of this is found in Japanese katana or samurai swords, which remained unchanged for centuries because errors in forging the blades became too costly, discouraging experimentation.

"We tend not to consider cost-benefit ratios," says Shennan, but they can be crucial.

"Something that seems like a thoroughly useful innovation may actually disappear because of the costs associated with it."

 Conversely, a technology may spread at the expense of better alternatives because once established it is too expensive to change tack.

An example is the QWERTY keyboard, which is slower to type on than other keyboard layouts, but continues to monopolise the keyboard market in English speaking parts of the world.

Rumour and gossip can shape the trajectory of a technology too.

In the past, using a new tool or medicinal herb might have got you branded as a witch, encouraging people to hide or suppress discoveries.

Religious institutions still have a special kind of power: by attaching moral or spiritual value to an innovation, they can usher it in, by denouncing it they can prevent its spread.

So, what of the future? Are things different now, enabling technological evolution to continue at an ever-faster pace?

Because of the sheer numbers of us on the planet, sparse populations and fragile transmission networks no longer pose a serious threat to innovation.

Besides, since the invention of writing, we have been able to store knowledge outside people's heads and disseminate it widely.

But we may have unwittingly introduced other brakes on progress.

According to Alex Mesoudi, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Durham, UK, technological progress - as measured by indicators such as the rate of scientific publication and patents filed - has indeed been accelerating exponentially over the past few centuries, but is now showing signs of slowing.

The trouble, he says, is that we have accumulated so much knowledge, that young people now spend proportionately more time learning from previous generations and less time innovating.

Schoolchildren and students tend to learn a subject in the order that it developed historically. For example, physics undergraduates are tested on their grasp of pre-1900 discoveries. "Only at master's level do they start learning 20th-century stuff," he says. And that lag is having an impact.

In a paper published last year, Mesoudi pointed out that the mean age at which Nobel prizewinners made their prizewinning discovery, or inventors came up with inventions that were considered worthy of entry in prominent technological almanacs, increased from 32 in 1900 to 38 a century later.

 It is in this period that he found a decrease in overall rates of innovation (PLoS One, vol 6, p e18239).

"There is some evidence that fields are slowing down," he says.

Something else is happening too.

As technologies become more complex, the associated contextual or causal knowledge is being lost.

People who build cars today do not necessarily understand how a car works, for example, since they may just assemble one part or operate a robot that does it for them.

 In Fiji, where houses have to withstand hurricanes, anthropologist Robert Boyd of Arizona State University in Tempe has found that locals have a pretty good grasp of why certain materials are better at withstanding hurricanes, but not why certain structural designs work and others do not.

"Causal understanding is a very powerful and beneficial thing," he says.

"If you are put in a different situation, due to environmental change, say, you can adapt much more quickly if you understand how a technology works than if you have to adapt as a population by trial and error."

It is not yet clear how much of a problem this is, since the information tends to be recorded and the body of people who do understand it, while relatively small, is probably still large enough to ensure preservation.

In publishing his findings, Mesoudi intended to be provocative rather than pessimistic.

He wanted to make people think about how ever-adaptable humans are adapting to the new problems that technological prowess presents.

He suggests, for example, that one way we are overcoming the problem of that long learning period is through the collectivisation of science.

What used to be a predominantly individual activity is now increasingly the occupation of groups who pool their knowledge. And there are potential benefits if it allows us to harness the power of the hive mind.

Mesoudi hopes that by building such adaptations into models of technological evolution, researchers will be able to make more accurate predictions and identify the factors that predispose an innovation to success or failure.

Not all those factors will be under the control of innovators.

Nevertheless, with better insight, they may at least be able to minimise the likelihood of repeating the experience of poor Zheng He, who lost the greatest fleet the world had ever seen.

Laura Spinney is a writer based in Lausanne, Switzerland

Geoengineering

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 

Not to be confused with Geotechnical engineering.
 
Oceanic phytoplankton bloom in the South Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Argentina.

Encouraging such blooms with iron fertilization could lock up carbon on the seabed.

The concept of geoengineering (or climate engineering, climate remediation, and climate intervention[1]) refers to "the deliberate large-scale intervention in the Earth’s climate system, in order to moderate global warming".[2][3]

The discipline divides broadly into two categories, as described by the Royal Society: "Carbon dioxide removal techniques [which] address the root cause of climate change by removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.

Solar radiation management techniques [which] attempt to offset effects of increased greenhouse gas concentrations by causing the Earth to absorb less solar radiation."

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded in 2007 that geoengineering options remained largely unproven.[4] It was judged that reliable cost estimates for geoengineering had not yet been published.

Geoengineering has been proposed as a potential third option for tackling global warming, alongside mitigation and adaptation.[5]

Scientists do not typically suggest geoengineering as an alternative to emissions control, but rather an accompanying strategy.[6]

Reviews of geoengineering techniques have emphasised that they are not substitutes for emission controls and have identified potentially stronger and weaker schemes.[7][8][9]

However, such is the lifetime of some greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, most notably carbon dioxide, that geoengineering represents the only currently known method for reducing Earth's temperature in the short term (years to decades).

To date, no large-scale geoengineering projects have been undertaken and almost all research has consisted of computer modelling or laboratory tests.

Some limited tree planting[10] and cool roof[11] projects are already underway, and ocean iron fertilization is at a beginning stage of research, with small-scale research trials and global modelling having been completed.[12]

Field research into sulfur aerosols has also started.[13]

Various criticisms have been made of geoengineering and some commentators appear fundamentally opposed.

Some have suggested that the concept of geoengineering presents a moral hazard because it could reduce the political and popular pressure for emissions reduction.[14]

 Groups such as ETC Group[15] and individuals such as Raymond Pierrehumbert have called for a moratorium on deployment and out-of-doors testing of geoengineering techniques.[16][17]

The effectiveness of the schemes proposed may fall short of predictions.[18]

The full effects of various geoengineering schemes are not well understood

Oldest dental filling is found in a Stone Age tooth 

 19 September 2012

by Colin Barras

New Scientist 

You may not want to try this at home.

A simple wax cap that was applied to a broken tooth 6500 years ago is the oldest dental filling on record.

It adds to evidence that Neolithic communities had a surprisingly sophisticated knowledge of dentistry.

The recipient of the treatment was most likely a 24 to 30-year-old man, living in what is now Slovenia.

His fossilised jawbone was found early last century near the village of Lonche.

At the time, the find – one of the oldest human bones ever found in the region – was described, catalogued and filed away in a museum in nearby Trieste, Italy.

"The jawbone remained in the museum for 101 years without anybody noticing anything strange," says Claudio Tuniz at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste.

That was until Tuniz and his colleague Federico Bernardini happened to use the specimen to test new X-ray imaging equipment, and spotted some unusual material attached to a canine.

They constructed a high-resolution 3D picture of the tooth, which revealed a long vertical crack, and an area of enamel that had worn away to create a large cavity in which the dentine was exposed.

The unusual material formed a thin cap that perfectly filled the cavity and the upper part of the crack.

Infrared spectroscopy identified the material as beeswax, and radiocarbon dating found it and the tooth to be both around 6500 years old.

This suggests the beeswax may have been used to plug the cracked and worn tooth while its owner was still alive, which would make it the oldest example of a dental filling ever found – predating gold prostheses used in Imperial Rome.

"We knew that we had hit the jackpot," says Tuniz.

Flint dentist drills

Although it's difficult to rule out the possibility that the beeswax was added for another purpose – perhaps as part of a funeral ritual – and that the tooth cracked as it dried out in the cave, Tuniz and Bernardini think this is unlikely.

They point out that the placing of the wax suggests it was purposely added to seal the exposed dentine.

Previous finds also suggest that Neolithic humans were competent dentists. In 2001, David Frayer at the University of Kansas in Lawrence and his colleagues found drill holes – probably made by a flint tip – in 11 human molars from a 7500 to 9000-year-old graveyard in Pakistan.

Four of the drilled teeth showed signs of decay, but none carried a dental filling.

"It is always difficult to make sense of manipulations of skeletons or teeth," says Frayer. "But I think [Tuniz and Bernardini's team] have made the best argument possible for the beeswax being used as a dental filling."

"Beeswax would make sense as a filling material for a number of reasons," says Stephen Buckley at the University of York, UK, who was part of a team that recently found evidence, from an analysis of teeth, that Neanderthals practised medicine.

 "The melting point of the wax is low, so it's easily melted, yet it solidifies to fit the gap when cooled to room temperature."

He adds that beeswax can contain honey and propolis, both of which have antibacterial and anti-inflammatory properties. "I used beeswax for a major project on Egyptian mummification, and it was very useful – hence its employment by the Egyptian embalmers," he says.

"The more we learn about prehistoric populations the more we appreciate their sophisticated ways," says Frayer. "They did so many interesting things, now being unlocked by careful observation and advanced technology."

Genetic study finds complexity in cradle of humanity

 21 September 2012
by Douglas Heaven
New Scientist

The melting pot of early human history has just been given a good stir.

The largest study of genetic variance across present-day populations in southern Africa suggests that there is no single place in Africa from which all modern humans emerged.

 Instead, our species is the result of mixing between numerous early human populations across a vast area.

Mattias Jakobsson at Uppsala University, Sweden, and his colleagues analysed around 2.3 million single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) – variations in DNA that are useful for comparing regions of the genome between populations – in 220 individuals from 11 southern African populations.

"When we start digging into this data, the most striking result is the deep population structure that we find," says Jakobsson.

This structure suggests that modern humans emerged from a geographically diverse group, in contrast to the "bottleneck" theory in which all humans alive today are descended from a single, relatively homogenous group of people.

"This is important," says Robert Foley at the University of Cambridge, who was not involved in the study.

"One of the big questions has always been where in Africa humans evolved.

Given the size of the continent – three times the size of Europe – saying we evolved in Africa does not really answer the question."

Genomic studies let us investigate the question more fully, says Foley. "Just as today, the earliest modern humans and their descendants lived in populations that did not have clear-cut boundaries, but existed in a world of other African populations," he says.

The study suggests that population structure continued to be complicated even after modern humans had evolved.

It showed that one group that survives to this day – the click-speaking Khoe-San of the Kalahari – was one of the earliest to separate from the rest of humanity, at least 100,000 years ago.

However, the study also found divergence within the Khoe-San themselves, with the Namibean and Angolan groups in the north having separated from those in South Africa as early as 25,000 to 40,000 years ago.

"Most astonishing to me is the deep divergence among the Khoe-San populations," says Brenna Henn at Stanford University, California.

"This really suggests we need to understand the structure of southern African populations in much finer detail."

The team also identified some of the genes that make us look the way we do – such as those affecting eyebrow ridges and the shape of the rib cage.

Since these date back to a time before the Khoe-San split from the rest of humanity, the researchers say that our modern anatomy is at least that old.

"This study is likely to have considerable impact in the field, although perhaps in unexpected ways," says Murray Cox at Massey University in Palmerston North, New Zealand.

 "It certainly tells us new things about our history, but more importantly, it highlights the complexity of that history.

In many respects, the study raises a lot of questions about our very earliest ancestors that we haven't thought to ask before."

Animals are conscious and should be treated as such

24 September 2012

 by Marc Bekoff

Now that scientists have belatedly declared that mammals, birds and many other animals are conscious, it is time for society to act

ARE animals conscious?

This question has a long and venerable history.

Charles Darwin asked it when pondering the evolution of consciousness.

His ideas about evolutionary continuity - that differences between species are differences in degree rather than kind - lead to a firm conclusion that if we have something, "they" (other animals) have it too.

In July of this year, the question was discussed in detail by a group of scientists gathered at the University of Cambridge for the first annual Francis Crick Memorial Conference.

Crick, co-discoverer of DNA, spent the latter part of his career studying consciousness and in 1994 published a book about it, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The scientific search for the soul.

The upshot of the meeting was the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, which was publicly proclaimed by three eminent neuroscientists, David Edelman of the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, California, Philip Low of Stanford University and Christof Koch of the California Institute of Technology.

The declaration concludes that "non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors.

Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness.

Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates."

My first take on the declaration was incredulity.

Did we really need this statement of the obvious? Many renowned researchers reached the same conclusion years ago.

The declaration also contains some omissions.

All but one of the signatories are lab researchers; the declaration would have benefited from perspectives from researchers who have done long-term studies of wild animals, including nonhuman primates, social carnivores, cetaceans, rodents and birds.

I was also disappointed that the declaration did not include fish, because the evidence supporting consciousness in this group of vertebrates is also compelling.

Nevertheless, we should applaud them for doing this.

The declaration is not aimed at scientists: as its author, Low, said prior to the declaration: "We came to a consensus that now was perhaps the time to make a statement for the public...

 It might be obvious to everybody in this room that animals have consciousness; it is not obvious to the rest of the world."

The important question now is: will this declaration make a difference?

What are these scientists and others going to do now that they agree that consciousness is widespread in the animal kingdom?

I hope the declaration will be used to protect animals from being treated abusively and inhumanely.

All to often, sound scientific knowledge about animal cognition, emotions and consciousness is not recognised in animal welfare laws.

We know, for example, that mice, rats and chickens display empathy, but this knowledge has not been factored into the US Federal Animal Welfare Act. Around 25 million of these animals, including fish, are used in invasive research each year.

They account for more than 95 per cent of animals used in research in the US. I'm constantly astounded that those who decide on regulations on animal use have ignored these data.

Not all legislation ignores the science. The European Union's Treaty of Lisbon, which came into force on 1 December 2009, recognises that animals are sentient beings and calls on member states to "pay full regard to the welfare requirements of animals" in agriculture, fisheries, transport, research and development and space policies.

There are still scientific sceptics about animal consciousness.

In his book, Crick wrote "it is sentimental to idealize animals" and that for many animals life in captivity is better, longer and less brutal than life in the wild.

Similar views still prevail in some quarters. In her recent book Why Animals Matter: Animal consciousness, animal welfare, and human well-being, Marian Stamp Dawkins at the University of Oxford claims we still don't really know if other animals are conscious and that we should "remain skeptical and agnostic... Militantly agnostic if necessary."

Dawkins inexplicably ignores the data that those at the meeting used to formulate their declaration, and goes so far as to claim that it is actually harmful to animals to base welfare decisions on their being conscious.

I consider this irresponsible. Those who choose to harm animals can easily use Dawkins's position to justify their actions. Perhaps given the conclusions of the Cambridge gathering, what I call "Dawkins's Dangerous Idea" will finally be shelved.

I don't see how anyone who keeps abreast of the literature on animal pain, sentience and consciousness - and has worked closely with any of a wide array of animals - could remain sceptical and agnostic about whether they are conscious.

Let us applaud the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness and work hard to get animals the protection they deserve. And let us hope that the declaration is not simply a grandstanding gesture but rather something with teeth, something that leads to action.

We should all take this opportunity to stop the abuse of millions upon millions of conscious animals in the name of science, education, food, clothing and entertainment.

 We owe it to them to use what we know on their behalf and to factor compassion and empathy into our treatment of them.

Marc Bekoff is an emeritus professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He has written many essays and books about animal emotions, animal consciousness and animal protection

Nuclear power subsidies 'could add £70 to annual household energy bills'

By Emily Gosden |

 Telegraph –
 

Subsidies for new nuclear power could add £70 to annual household energy bills, Ian Marchant, the chief executive of SSE (Frankfurt: A0RFBG - news) warns.

Ministers should refuse to subsidise EDF Energy’s plans for the first British nuclear reactors in a generation unless the French energy giant agrees to deliver them for a substantially lower price than is widely expected, Mr Marchant argues.

The government is in negotiations with EDF (Paris: FR0010242511 - news) over a long-term guaranteed price for electricity from its proposed plant at Hinkley Point in Somerset.

If the market price for electricity remains below that level, EDF will receive 'top-up’ subsidies paid for through levies on all UK electricity consumers.

EDF has so far refused to say how much the plants will cost or the level of subsidy it will seek, although last month EDF Energy chief executive Vincent de Rivaz told this newspaper the price would be less than £140 per megawatt hour (MWh) .

Writing in the Daily Telegraph on Monday, Mr Marchant calculates that the price should be nearer £65/MWh, based on estimates EDF published in 2008, and on independent estimates produced last year for the Government.

 “We will all end up bearing the cost of the opaque negotiations going on between Whitehall and Paris,” he warns.

“The difference between paying £65/MWh for new nuclear, versus £140/MWh for new nuclear, assuming we decide to build two reactors, will amount to over £2bn each and every year.

That is around £70 for every household on top of the current electricity bill.”

Mr Marchant adds: “As a country we should walk away at anything over £90/MWh, if not less.”

The huge cost estimates surrounding EDF’s nuclear plans - with some putting the price of Hinkley Point at as much as £14bn - have alarmed even pro-nuclear lobby groups.

The Supporters of Nuclear Energy (SONE) group wrote to the Government this month urging it to block any price deal “unless and until you are absolutely satisfied the nation is getting value for money”.

EDF is seeking new partners to help share the cost of the project and is thought to be in talks with Chinese state nuclear corporations, with a near-30pc stake in the project said to be on offer.

British Gas owner Centrica (LSE: CNA.L - news) has an option for a 20pc stake in the new nuclear plants but is thought to be concerned about the risk of cost overruns.

The first two new plants built with the 'EPR’ technology to be used in Hinkley Point have both seen major delays and spiralling pricetags.

Last week, Alain-Pierre Raynaud, UK chairman of the EPR’s manufacturer Areva (Munich: 890173 - news) , insisted the two most recent EPR plants were on time and on budget and that Areva was now “in a position to bring a lot of certainty in the execution of the nuclear programme”.

But, despite the apparent confidence in its capabilities, Mr Raynaud said Areva would not necessarily agree a fixed-price contract to shield EDF or consumers from any cost overruns.

“There is no specificity in terms of contract,” he told the Daily Telegraph.

“Depending on the case we have a lot of solutions. It is not yet finalised.”

The contract with Areva is likely to be the biggest single cost component of the nuclear project.

We're still on the slippery slope to peak oil

20 August 2012 by David Strahan 

Technology and exploitation of unconventional sources can't defer the long-predicted decline in global oil production

IN 2007 former US energy secretary James Schlesinger claimed the arguments in favour of peak oil - the key theory that global production must peak and then decline - had been won.

With production flat and prices surging towards an all-time high of $147 per barrel, he declared, "we are all peakists now".

Five years on and production has risen by 2.7 million barrels per day to 93 mb/d, prices have recently slumped to around $100 a barrel and those who dismissed the idea that the rate we extract oil from the ground must inevitably decline jeer in delight.

In June a much-touted report by Leonardo Maugeri - an Italian oil executive now at the Geopolitics of Energy Project, based at Harvard University and part-funded by BP - forecast that far from running out of oil, this decade will see the strongest growth in production capacity since the 1980s and a "significant, stable dip of oil prices".

So is that it, panic over, as some commentators who once agreed with the peak view have declared on the basis of Maugeri's report?

Ironically, such shifts come just as some economists - traditionally hostile to peak theory - were coming round to it. Peakonomics, if you will. Unfortunately, any reasonable reading suggests Maugeri is wide of the mark.

The recent hysteria rests heavily on the rise of shale oil in the US, which was unforeseen and is significant.

After four decades of decline, US oil production turned in 2005 and has generated the bulk of the global supply growth since then.

But to brand this a "paradigm-shifter", as Maugeri does, is wrong.

He forecast that this boom will lead to an astonishing 4 mb/d of additional US shale production capacity by 2020. By contrast, the US Department of Energy, usually optimistic, predicts total US shale oil production will peak at just 1.3 mb/d in 2027.

One reason Maugeri's forecast is so high is that he assumes production from existing shale wells will decline by just 15 per cent per year.

Industry consultant Art Berman puts decline rates at around 40 per cent. Analysis by Bob Bracket of US market analysts Bernstein Research shows similarly steep declines, and also that the average shale well takes just six years to become a "stripper well" - producing just 10 to 15 barrels a day.

Such declines are far higher than for conventional wells, effectively meaning the industry must drill furiously just to stand still. It is this factor that will limit future production growth.

It is distressing that Maugeri's report - which appears to contain glaring mathematical mistakes - got so much attention, but he insists the gist of his report is right. In contrast, an excellent International Monetary Fund working paper in May received much less attention.

The IMF's paper sets out to test the idea that the recent 10-year rise in the oil price - it hit a low of $10 a barrel in the late 1990s - can be explained by geological constraints.

The team took an approach which expresses mathematically the idea that oil becomes harder to produce, the less there remains to be produced - the basis of peak oil theory.

This is clearly right: why would we be scraping out tar sands if there were easy oil left?

When they combined this with the impact of global GDP and oil price, the results were striking.

By testing their model against historical data, they found their production forecasts were more accurate than those of both peak oilers, who are traditionally too pessimistic, and authorities such as the US Energy Information Administration, which is generally far too optimistic.

Their price forecasts were also far more accurate than traditional economic models that take no account of oil depletion, predicting a strong upward trend that closely fits what has happened since 2003.

"When you look at the oil price [over the past decade], the trend is almost entirely explained by the geological view," said Michael Kumhof, one of the authors, when I interviewed him earlier this year.

The IMF paper also slays the belief that rising oil prices will liberate vast new supplies and vanquish peak oil.

The team found that production growth has halved since 2005, and forecast that even the lower rate of growth will only be sustained if the oil price soars to $180 by 2020.

"Our prediction of small further increases in world oil production comes at the expense of a near doubling, permanently, of real oil prices over the coming decade," write the authors. In this context, shale oil is not a "game-changer" but a sign of desperation.

"We have to do these really expensive and really environmentally messy things just in order to stand still or grow a little," says Kumhof.

It is true that global oil production has not yet peaked, but that is almost beside the point.

The people who fixate on this need to wake up and smell the fumes we are reduced to running on. The IMF paper shows clearly we are supply-constrained.

The oil price itself ought to be a clue: persistently above $100 per barrel, 10 times higher than it was at the eve of the 21st century.

Price spikes in recent years and recessions are the inevitable outcome of rising competition from fast-growing developing economies for limited supplies.

Domestic consumption among major producers such as Saudi Arabia is also soaring, reducing supply to others.

While global production rose in the five years to 2010, global net exports fell by 3 mb/d, according to independent US geologist Jeff Brown.

How much worse would you like it?

In the film No Country for Old Men, two lawmen find the aftermath of a drug deal gone bad, with corpses strewn about the desert.

The deputy remarks, "It's a mess, ain't it, sheriff?", to which the sheriff replies: "Well, if it ain't, it'll do til the mess gets here."

Likewise, if peak oil has not yet arrived, what I call the last oil shock certainly has.

It'll do til the peak gets here.

David Strahan is an energy writer and author of The Last Oil Shock (John Murray, 2008)

About Joan Pye Project

Who We Are

The Joan Pye Project has been established to help balance the debate concerning the future of energy in the United Kingdom and to put the case for nuclear generated electricity.

Founded by Joan Pye, MA (Oxon), FINucE(Hon), the Project is an independent network of some 12 distant supporters: physicists, chemists and chartered engineers who have spent the major part of their careers in research and in applied areas of the nuclear power industry, and 250 other keen supporters and known supporters of nuclear power including those in the industry, numbering over 150,000.

Joan Pye associates are in direct contact with Professor Ian Fells, author of the recent Fells Associates report: “A pragmatic energy policy for the UK.” 

Joan is passionate about the contribution nuclear generated electricity can make towards a clean and reliable energy future for the UK, so the Project aims to educate and inform, allay genuinely held fears, and promote better public acceptance of the current need for energy produced by nuclear power.

Joan Pye’s experience as PA to the Head of the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, Harwell where she worked for many years, convinced her that nuclear power is indeed the “Energy for the Next Generation”.

Now in her 90’s she is still the driving force behind the project.

AREA OF EXPERTISE
The Project has a growing band of supporters, links directly with the newly formed Nuclear Institute, and a core team of some of the finest and most experienced brains in the UK today who can give expert commentary in the following fields:

* Supply of electricity and micro-electricity
* National Grid
* Development of fast reactors and cooling systems
* Uranium supply and distribution
* Vitrification – fixing nuclear waste in glass cylinders
* Safe disposal of highly radioactive waste
* Proposed Severn Barrage - See Fells report for an update
* Long term storage of intermediate nuclear waste
* Design of fuel elements for new nuclear power stations which consume their own waste

What We Do

The Project generates its own funding and is totally independent of Government departments or other political or commercial organizations.

Through media campaigns, papers written by its members, responses to Government Consultations and this website, it strives to demonstrate the enormous contribution which nuclear energy can make to sustainable and efficient “carbon free” energy production and so make a major contribution to combating global warming.

The project hopes to provide assistance and funding to students pursuing careers in the nuclear power industry and is currently working with leading people in Education to produce information which can be used in schools nationwide to educate our children and students on the science behind nuclear energy generation.

UK public confidence in nuclear remains steady despite Fukushima

Benefits of nuclear power outweigh risks,

say 41% of the British

public, according to poll

 Alok Jha
The Guardian, Friday 9 September 2011

The accident at Fukushima in Japan in March this year seems to have had little overall impact on the UK public's confidence in nuclear power, according to a poll.

The survey, carried out by Populus last month and commissioned by the British Science Association, found that 41% of respondents agreed the benefits of nuclear power outweighed the risks, up from 38% in 2010 and 32% in 2005.

 Those who said that the risks greatly or slightly outweighed the benefits of nuclear power in 2010 numbered 36%, and in 2011 this dropped to 28% of respondents.

The nuclear power plants at Fukushima in northern Japan were damaged during the magnitude 9 earthquake and the resulting tsunami that hit the country in March.

Three of the six nuclear reactors suffered meltdowns in the biggest nuclear accident since Chernobyl in 1986.

There were concerns that the event would irrevocably damage the case for nuclear power around the world – in the months after the Fukushima accident Germany announced the cancellation of its future programme.

And a referendum in Italy in June voted down the government's plan to start a programme of new nuclear reactors.

"It's genuinely surprising to me that views have returned to these early 2010 levels quite so quickly and slightly more positively," said Nick Pidgeon of the University of Cardiff, who discussed the findings of the latest poll at a briefing to mark the launch of the British Science Festival, which starts in Bradford on Saturday.

"There's been a lot of speculation about the impacts of Fukushima on public attitudes – this is the first fully independent study we've had in the UK."

Though overall support was up, there was a striking difference between men and women, with 53% of men in favour of nuclear power but only 21% of women supportive.

"If you dig into the data, you see that men in particular become much more confident about nuclear energy," said Pidgeon.

Monbiot effect

He also said that blanket media coverage and commentary – something he referred to as the "George Monbiot effect" – may have had a positive effect on public attitudes because, despite the severity of the crisis, no one has so far died.

Populus interviewed 2,050 adults between 26 and 29 August and weighted its results to ensure they were representative of the British population.

Overall, the support for nuclear power has been gradually increasing for about 10 years, said Pidgeon, and, in the past five years, the majority of people in Britain has come to support the renewal of the nuclear programme.

Pidgeon said that polls in the direct aftermath of the Fukushima accident had showed a dip in support for nuclear in the UK and elsewhere, though confidence did not collapse.

"There were still more people, even immediately afterwards, in favour of nuclear energy than against in Britain," he said.

The focus of potential concerns has also shifted in the wake of Fukushima.

 "If you asked people why they were unhappy about nuclear energy a year ago, they would have brought waste up," said Pidgeon.

"What is clear from other polling is that accidents have gone to the top of what people are now concerned about with nuclear energy, the waste has dropped further down."

Bryony Worthington, a Labour peer and environmental campaigner, said that for the general public the perception of the main cause of the Fukushima problem had not been the design of the reactor but the siting of the power plant.

"Most people said, hang on, why did you put them all on that eastern seaboard, which is a seismically unstable region?"

The withdrawal of support for future nuclear power stations by the German government, she said, was political.

"For Angela Merkel to reverse her decision and phase out the nuclear, Fukushima gave her a good opportunity to do it.

She was already under huge political pressure to do that and Fukushima was just the trigger she found politically expedient to do it."

Thorium reactors are safer

Scientists at the briefing discussed the future of nuclear power, arguing that thorium, rather than uranium, was the safer alternative fuel.

 Bob Cywinski, of the University of Huddersfield, said: "One tonne of thorium is equivalent to 200 tonnes of uranium and it doesn't need processing or enriching – 57 kilotonnes of thorium would provide the total energy need of the planet for a year, not just electricity but transport."

Though thorium has been used as a fuel in experimental reactors in the past, it was sidelined in favour of uranium.

"Why did we stop using it? It's the unfortunate fact that civil nuclear power has been so closely linked with the military.

And thorium, unfortunately, does not produce plutonium and is useless as far as proliferation is concerned.

The linking of civil nuclear with military nuclear has probably done a great disservice not just to thorium but to nuclear energy in general."

Kirk Sorensen, president of the Weinberg Foundation, a new NGO launched on Thursday to promote the cause of thorium around the world, said the design of thorium reactors had always focused on safety first.

The intent was to eliminate the root causes of danger in existing nuclear reactors, such as high-pressure coolants and chemically reactive situations.

In addition, thorium reactors only operate as long as there is a source of neutrons being beamed in to split atoms. If this is switched off, the reactor shuts down without any human intervention.

"Reasonable estimates suggest there is no more than 100 years of uranium left, maybe it is time we started turning to thorium," said Cywinski.

"Thorium is four times more abundant than uranium. In principle, there is something like 10,000 years of energy left in our thorium reserves."

The letter the Morning Star refused to publish -

The Nuclear Power Debate.

Pat Sanchez, Littleborough- (MS 18th July 2012) -has made up his mind. Nuclear Power is wrong, everything else is right, but without Nuclear Power someone will put his lights out !

Currently 18% of electricity in Britain comes from Nuclear power but by 2030 our needs will increase by 50% and current renewable sources will not meet that demand.

Pat may be happy for Britain to be totally depended on foreign power but that is a dangerous route to take.

This Government and the next will support a Nuclear Power option simply because they have no alternative.

Pat is confused in his argument, because Nuclear Power will help meet our Carbon target, and the Government has only said it is keeping its options open.

Currently there are 150 Nuclear stations across the world, but because the Japanese built theirs in the wrong place, doesn’t make them a disaster.

We need £110 billion of new investment in this countries energy needs and Nuclear Power, replacing old stations, is just what we need to help get the country back on its feet, as long as it is British labour, British design and British money being used.

"We need nuclear, we need renewables, we need clean coal, we need all of those things if we are going to make that transition to cleaner energy." says Ed Miliband, and I add to meet our energy needs."

Pat Sanchez would prefer to depend on the likes of Solar Power but when we need it most, the lights go out early in Britain

Radical

China in talks to build UK nuclear power plants

British officials talking to Chinese about plan that could see up to five reactors being built at cost of £35bn, sources say

• Terry Macalister and Fiona Harvey
• guardian.co.uk, Friday 20 July 2012 20.00 BST 
 
China is poised to make a dramatic intervention in Britain's energy future by offering to invest billions of pounds in building a series of new nuclear power stations around the country.

Officials from China's nuclear industry have been in high-level talks with the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) this week about a plan that could eventually involve up to five different reactors being built at a total cost of £35bn.

Greenpeace described the move as desperate while others warned of security threats, but the government has been courting China as the UK atomic programme has been slowed by rows over subsidies and worries that EDF – the French company with the most advanced plans to build new reactors here – could be hampered by the change of government in Paris.

China, which has operated its own atomic plants since 1994, is awash with cash from its hugely successful industrial modernisation programme and sees the UK as a potential shop window for exporting its atomic technology and expertise worldwide.

Companies from China have already invested in or taken over other key infrastructure assets in Britain, such as Thames Water, the port of Felixstowe and the Grangemouth oil refinery.

They also own businesses ranging from Weetabix to the Gieves & Hawkes tailoring brand.

The China National Nuclear Power Corporation (CNNPC), which is keen to invest in Britain, has just unveiled plans to raise about £17bn through a domestic share offering.

A team from the Shanghai Nuclear Engineering Research and Design Institute (SNERDI), an arm of the huge China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC) , met senior DECC officials over the last few days, three different sources confirmed.

The first part of the plan involves CNNC and another state-owned firm, China Guangdong Nuclear Power Corporation, bidding in two separate groups against each other for a stake in the Horizon consortium, which wants to construct new atomic plants at Wylfa in Wales and Oldbury in Gloucestershire.

But sources with close connections to the Chinese say Beijing is also interested in three other locations at Bradwell in Essex, Heysham in Lancashire and Hartlepool in County Durham.

EDF currently has the right of first refusal to operate on these sites but CNNC wants to use an existing technology tie-up with US-based nuclear engineering group Westinghouse to potentially build three more reactors.

The Chinese accept they would need to bring in a UK utility firm to operate the plants and overcome any political or public resistance to their plans.

"The Chinese have the money and the experience," said the well-placed source. "They see setting up in the UK as an opportunity to show they can operate in one of the world's toughest regulatory environments so that they can then move into other markets in Africa and the Middle East."

The DECC was unwilling to comment on whether it had met SNERDI officials this week, saying such meetings would be commercially confidential.

A department spokesman would only say: "The UK is open for business and actively welcomes inward investment to our energy sector, but any potential nuclear operator is, and would be, subject to rigorous scrutiny through the established regulatory process."

Keith Parker, chairman of the Nuclear Industry Association in London, said it was "highly encouraging" that China wanted to invest in the UK.

"They have 14 of their own reactors in operation and 25 under construction and they use both Areva and Westinghouse designs that could be used here. It was clear from my discussions with them that they have international ambitions."

In May, the energy minister Charles Hendry told the Energy and Climate Change select committee he had no objection to Chinese firms being involved in the UK.

"In China, there are different companies who have experience of building dozens of nuclear power stations on time and on budget, and so there is no suggestion that these are companies that do not have expertise in this sector.

They have extremely well-proven expertise in this sector, and in looking at how we take this forward in the United Kingdom I think we should be guided by where that expertise has already been proven."

But Greenpeace said the bid to woo China was a last throw of the dice by the government.

"This is a sign of desperation," said Doug Parr, chief scientist at Greenpeace.

"Chinese nuclear players have state backing, which could help solve the issue of financing colossally expensive new nuclear power stations in the UK.

 But this just means that the money from UK taxpayers will flow to the Chinese government, rather than to France."

The potential for political conflict has been highlighted by the former Downing Street energy policy director Nick Butler. He wrote in a recent Financial Times blogpost that Chinese involvement in the UK energy business could be a concern (subscription required):

"They will be inside the system, with access to the intricate architecture of the UK's National Grid and the processes through which electricity supply is controlled, as well as to the UK's nuclear technology.

"Perhaps that doesn't matter. Perhaps a Chinese wall exists between the Guangdong Holding company and the government in Beijing.

Perhaps we have reached a level of globalisation in which the nationality of ownership is irrelevant.

"But even if all those things are true, it seems regrettable that in return for this investment the Chinese are not being required to halt the cyberattacks and the theft of intellectual property in which they are now the world leaders."

THE NUCLEAR ENERGY OPTION IN THE UK

The government’s recent White Paper on energy policy did not endorse a programme of new nuclear power
stations at this time,

 but declared that “at some point in the future new nuclear build might be necessary if we
are to meet our carbon targets.”

 Thus, its policy on nuclear energy is “to keep the option open”.

1 Parliamentary interest in this topic is high.

This briefing analyses some of the issues associated with keeping the option open that the government and industry might need to resolve.

 It does not examine whether there is a need to keep the option open nor indeed the precise means for doing this.

Rather, it focuses on options for new reactors, the economics of nuclear energy, the knowledge base for nuclear technology, and issues related to waste management, licensing and security

Is nuclear energy justified and should it be expanded?

 
Nuclear power is any nuclear technology designed to extract usable energy from atomic nuclei via controlled nuclear reactions.

The most common method today is through nuclear fission, though other methods include nuclear fusion and radioactive decay.

All current methods involve heating a working fluid such as water, which is then converted into mechanical work for the purpose of generating electricity or propulsion.

Today, more than 15% of the world's electricity comes from nuclear power, over 150 nuclear-powered naval vessels have been built, and a few radioisotope rockets have been produced.
 
Some countries in the world currently use nuclear power.

However, high construction costs have hindered the development of nuclear power in many countries.

Yet, rising concerns regarding global warming and energy prices, however, nuclear energy has seen renewed attention as alternative form of energy.
 
The world energy demand is projected to grow by 50% by 2030.

To meet the short-term demand, the use of coal and other fossil fuels will increase.

The main question and debate is whether nuclear energy should be included as a major component of 21st century plans to combat global warming and to help us meet the growing energy demand?

Many questions frame this debate: Is nuclear power helpful in reducing greenhouse gas emissions?

Can nuclear power scale to become a serious energy replacement to coal electric power (the main source of electricity globally)?

Does the construction of nuclear plants contribute to global warming in any significant ways?

What about the mining of Uranium, and what general environmental risks might this pose?

What concerns surround nuclear waste?

Can these concerns be addressed?

How long can we expect supplies of Uranium and nuclear energy to last?

Centuries?

Even if it will run out in the future and is not "renewable", is it still worth pursuing now (particularly in the face of global warming)?

Do nuclear plants pose a risk of "melting down", or have modern nuclear plants eliminated the risk of another Chernobyl or Three Mile Island disaster?

Are there any radiation risks to local communities and to workers at nuclear plants?

What about the threat of terrorist attacks on nuclear plants?

What weapons proliferation risks surround nuclear energy?

Should this prevent the further development of nuclear energy, particularly if it is believed that nuclear energy is part of the solution to the global warming crisis?

After years of indecision and a drain of expertise,

how Britain's nuclear future (and YOUR money)

could end up in the hands of the Chinese

By Alex Brummer
PUBLISHED: 22:20, 22 May 2012 | UPDATED: 22:20, 22 May 2012

..After years of procrastination, our government has belatedly admitted that unless it urgently addresses Britain’s energy needs, there is a real risk that the lights will go out across the country over the next decade.

It took the departure of Chris Huhne from the Department of Energy and Climate Change for the Coalition to concede that we need a chain of new nuclear power plants - rather than plastering the land with wind turbines.

But the idea that £110 billion of new investment in the country’s future energy needs can be found without a government subsidy, as ministers claim, is disgraceful piece of government dissembling.

  Back on the agenda: It took the departure of Chris Huhne and the appointment of Ed Davey as Energy and Climate Change Secretary for nuclear power to be reconsidered as a solution to Britain's energy shortage

The truth is that the only way that the giant, mainly foreign-owned, global power groups who have been entrusted with Britain’s energy future will be willing to stump up the massive amounts of money to build these nuclear plants is if they are incentivised to do so.

Even then there is no guarantee that the investment will go ahead.

Already we have seen the big German power companies RWE and E.ON renege on promises to build new nuclear plants in Anglesey and Gloucestershire.

This was because of jitters among their shareholders about the scale of outlay required (some £14billion just to start with).

 
Stop-gap:

The Government must persuade French giant EDF to keep open its existing nuclear reactors, such as Sizewell B (pictured) longer than expected

The Coalition must persuade Électricité de France (EDF), the state-controlled French group and its minority partner, Centrica, that they should keep their existing UK nuclear plants operating until a new generation of power stations can take over and produce the necessary 20 per cent of our electricity needs.

In their effort to pretend that there will be no state subsidy (meaning that the costs will, yet again, fall on the poor benighted consumer), ministers have devised a complicated pricing mechanism that is nothing but a piece of shabby camouflage.

Under this scheme, the wholesale price paid for electricity from new nuclear plants will, as a rule, be artificially higher than the market price.

For without this help, foreign companies are most unlikely to invest in Britain’s energy future.

 
Burden: The Government has said companies building nuclear power plants will not receive a state subsidy, meaning the costs will fall on households

As a result, the extra costs will be added to the already escalating utility bills of British households who can be expected to pay up to £200 a year extra.

And this doesn’t include the extra cost to the National Grid of building new pylons, cables and transmission centres. In fact I’m told that these costs will be up to £200 billion.

And that is not all. Ministers have kept suspiciously quiet about the enormous costs of storing the waste from the new nuclear plants (over a period of thousands of years) or of decommissioning them when they are eventually shut. 

 More...Electricity bills to rise £160 under Energy Bill plan to pay for shift to nuclear
Are the Chinese about to take control of our nuclear power plants? Beijing piles into industry after Germans were scared off

Of course none of this is surprising since the history of Britain’s nuclear industry is one of serial mismanagement by successive governments of all parties.

From the 1950s to the 1970s, Britain was a pioneer of nuclear engineering and our skills were sought around the world. But with the availability of cheap oil and gas supplies, nuclear energy was considered too costly.

In addition there were mounting safety concerns, as demonstrated by accidents at Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania in 1979 and Chernobyl in 1986. These made nuclear power a politically toxic issue.

 
Toxic:

Governments were reluctant to support nuclear power in the wake of crises like the Chernobyl explosion (pictured)

The result was that governments drew back from fresh investment and much of the nation’s expertise moved to places like France and China where there was huge investment in nuclear power.

The final nail in the industry’s coffin was hammered in by Gordon Brown who, as Labour Chancellor, authorised the sale to Japan of UK-owned Westinghouse, one of the few companies capable of building fast-breeder reactors.

With bitter irony, Brown was forced to realise a few years later when he became prime minister that Britain faced a dire energy shortage and we needed to build several new nuclear power station very quickly.
 
Short-sighted:

As Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown allowed the sale of Westinghouse, Britain's only maker of nuclear power plants

Since British Energy, the country’s largest electricity generation company had been taken over by EDF in 2009, British Gas-owned Centrica was brought in as a minority partner in order to maintain some British element in any future nuclear building programme.

But the need is now so great that the Government is willing to allow any foreign company to join the scramble for contracts.

Energy minister Charles Hendry told me this week that the Chinese would be acceptable investors. He said they had built ‘dozens of plants on time and on budget’ and had ‘a very strong commitment to technology and safety.’

  
   
VIEW FULL ARCHIVE .

The idea, however, that control of some of our nuclear power stations, paid for by taxpayers via their energy bills, being in the hands of the Chinese government with its contempt for human rights and a totally different strategic outlook to the UK beggars belief.

In any case, new nuclear power stations take years to build.

From planning permission to construction and then bringing electricity generation on stream takes at least ten years.

In the meantime, we have little choice but to fill the gap by using more gas.

But this, too, will involve costly investment and risks Britain being dependent on Middle Eastern potentates or Russia.

The one lingering hope for the UK is the possible extraction of natural gas and oil from rock formations (so-called ‘fracking).

This process has proved very successful in America - making U.S. natural gas the cheapest in the world.

With its vast land mass, fracking carried out miles from human populations.

But in parts of Britain where it has been attempted there have been earth tremors in nearby towns.

It is time that the Government faced up to these truths.

Above all, it must stop trying to hide from consumers the fact that they will have to pay the bill for its shameful history of short-termism and its obsession with carbon emission targets and flawed renewable energy programmes

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2148370/After-years-indecision-drain-expertise-Britains-nuclear-future-YOUR-money-end-hands-Chinese.html#ixzz210Iw0opx

Nuclear Power in the United Kingdom

(Updated July 2012)

• The UK has 17 reactors normally generating about 18% of its electricity and all but one of these will be retired by 2023.

• The country has full fuel cycle facilities including major reprocessing plants.

• The UK has implemented a very thorough assessment process for new reactor designs and their siting. 

• The first of some 19 GWe of new-generation plants are expected to be on line about 2018.

In the late 1990s, nuclear power plants contributed around 25% of total annual electricity generation in the UK, but this has gradually declined as old plants have been shut down and ageing-related problems affect plant availability.

In 2010, electricity generated in nuclear power plants was 62.14 billion kWh (56.48 TWh net), or 16.4% of total electricity produced from all sources (378 billion kWh).

Gas-fired generation accounted for 46.3% of total (175 billion kWh); coal-fired 28.5% (108 billion kWh); ‘other renewables’ 3.4% (12.8 billion kWh – mainly from biomass); wind 2.7% (10.2 billion kWh), and hydro 0.95% (3.6 billion kWh).

Oil and 'other': 1.7% (6.5 billion kWh).

Net electricity imports from France – mostly nuclear – in 2010 were 2.66 billion kWh, less than 1% of overall supply and similar to 2009, compared with 12.5 billion kWh in 2008, or 3.7% of final electricity consumption.

There is a high-voltage DC connection with France with 2000 MW capacity, and a 1400 MWe link over 700 km with Norway is planned.

Per capita UK electricity consumption was 5220 kWh in 2009.  

In 2009, half of British gas was supplied from imports (compared with 32% in 2007), and this is expected to increase to at least 75% by 2015, as domestic reserves are depleted.

This has major implications for electricity generation, with the amount expected to be from gas to almost double from the 170 billion kWh in 2008.

UK generating capacity (2010) is 90 GWe, comprising 35 GWe conventional steam, 34 GWe CCGT (with 5 GWe increase in 2010), 11 GWe nuclear, 2.26 GWe wind (21.7% load factor in 2010), 4.27 GWe hydro including pumped storage, 2.0 GWe other renewables and 1.5 GWe gas turbines and oil. Peak demand is 61 GWe.

The history and development of the UK nuclear industry is covered in Appendix 1 to this paper, Nuclear Development in the United Kingdom.

Currently, there are 16 operating reactors in the UK totalling 10 GWe capacity.

The last operating Magnox reactor - Wylfa 1 - is due to shut down when its fuel runs out, in September 2014.

This will leave seven twin-unit AGR stations and one PWR, all owned and operated by Electricite de France (EdF) subsidiary EdF Energy.

Country needs new nuclear power, government insists

The Government today insisted the country needed nuclear power as it prepared to unveil plans to fast-track a new generation of nuclear power stations.

Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband acknowledged anxieties about nuclear power but said it had a "relatively good" safety record in this country.

 Is Britain's future nuclear?

"The basic message here is, we can't say no to all of the nuclear or all of the low carbon fuels that are out there," he told GMTV.

"We need nuclear, we need renewables, we need clean coal, we need all of those things if we are going to make that transition to cleaner energy."

Mr Miliband was speaking as he was due to announce a series of national policy statements which would include a list of sites deemed suitable for new nuclear developments.

Under changes to the planning laws, the Infrastructure Planning Commission (IPC) will be able to speed through the proposals for new schemes if it decided they fitted in with the policy statements.

But shadow energy secretary Greg Clark said that a simple ministerial statement on the issue was inadequate and called for a Commons vote to give the process "democratic legitimacy".

"It is a national emergency and it's been left far too late - we've known for the last 10 years that most of our nuclear power fleet would come to the end of its planned life," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

Green groups expressed dismay at the prospect of new nuclear power and warned the Government could be open to legal challenge if the statements do not properly consider climate change.

They have also raised concerns that people will not be able to influence decisions on major projects because schemes covered by the statements will not be subject to public inquiry.

But the Government insists firms will have to work closely with local regions and show they have consulted widely to gain approval.

The statements are expected to cite the finite nature of fossil fuels and the pressing demands of climate change while making the case for nuclear power stations.

Mr Miliband will also set out the financial and regulatory framework for driving forward clean coal "carbon capture and storage" technology, but Greenpeace said neither should be part of Britain's future energy mix.

Robin Oakley, head of the group's climate and energy campaign, said: "Nuclear is a dangerous and expensive irrelevance to tackling climate change and providing real energy security.

"We don't need coal or nuclear, because proven green technologies such as wind and combined heat and power stations can secure Britain's energy needs, create green jobs and slash our emissions."

Friends of the Earth executive director Andy Atkins said the battle against climate change should be at the core of all Government decisions to meet commitments on reducing emissions.

And he added: "Building new nuclear reactors is not the answer to the challenges of climate change and energy security.

"Nuclear power leaves a deadly legacy of radioactive waste that remains highly dangerous for tens of thousands of years and costs tens of billions of pounds to manage.

"And building new plants would divert precious resources from developing safe renewable power, while doing little to bring about the urgent emissions reductions that are desperately needed within the next decade."

Read more: http://www.metro.co.uk/news/765010-country-needs-new-nuclear-power-government-insists#ixzz210IdmWot

Study suggests fracking wastes could poison drinking

by: Blake Deppe
July 10 2012

According to a new scientific study, salty fluids rich with minerals in parts of Pennsylvania's Marcellus Shale are seeping thousands of feet upward, right into drinking water.

This suggests that drilling waste and chemicals caused by fracking might migrate as well.

Scientists at Duke University and California State Polytechnic University conducted the research, which involved the testing of drinking water wells across Northeastern Pennsylvania. In many instances, the water was mixed with brine that had seeped in from the Marcellus Shale.

The Marcellus Shale is believed to be rich with natural gas, and so fracking, which involves the extraction of that gas, is a top priority for the gas industry.

Fracking has been proven to pose a number of threats both to the environment and peoples' health, and the study, released July 9, concluded that deeply buried rock layers will not necessarily keep harmful fracking chemicals away from drinking water, as previously thought.

The brine that was found had moved thousands of feet to reach the well water, and while its presence had nothing to do with fracking, continuous tampering with the Marcellus Shale could change that - potentially exposing the water to toxicity.

"Everything is not black and white," said Avner Vengosh, a Duke University professor of geochemistry and one of the researchers.

"We're just at the very beginning of understanding what's going on.

The result of this study does not apply to all of Pennsylvania. It needs to be duplicated."

In a separate study conducted by some of the same Duke researchers in 2011, it was also understood that methane gas was much more likely to leak into water supplies in places that were adjacent to drilling.

"In this paper," said the study, "we evaluate the potential impacts associated with gas-well drilling and fracturing on shallow groundwater systems of the Catskill and Lockhaven formations that overlie the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania.

Our results show evidence for methane contamination of shallow drinking water systems in at least three areas of the region and suggest important environmental risks accompanying shale gas exploration worldwide."

In a report released by the Penn Environment Research and Policy Center, it's noted that fracking in the Marcellus Shale poses a significant threat to entire populations.

"From Pittsburgh to Scranton, gas companies have already drilled more than 3,000 wells," said the report, "and the state has issued permits for thousands more. Permitted well sites exist within two miles of more than 320 day care facilities, 67 schools, and nine hospitals statewide."

Whether further contamination of Pennsylvania drinking water from the effects of fracking is imminent, is yet to be seen.

"The biggest implication is the presence of connections from deep underground to the surface," said biology professor Robert Jackson, who was part of the study.

"It's a suggestion based on good evidence that there are places that may be more at risk."

Photo: Rally against fracking in the Marcellus Shale region, at the Capitol in Albany, N.Y. Mike Groil/AP

Mission to the mantle: Drilling through Earth's crust

03 July 2012 by Jheni Osman

New Scientist

Gene switch that turns bacteria into mighty Hulk

19:00 05 July 2012 by Tessa Noonan