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THE yEAR IN ScIENcE

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DISCOVER
DISCOVER

100
Science, Technology, and The Future

KILLER
FLU
THE YEAR IN SCIENCE 2009 ASTRONOMY EVOLUTION MEDICINE BRAIN PHYSICS TECHNOLOGY

ToP STorieS
of 2oo9 EINSTEIN’S GENIUS

HUMAN ORIGINS
ASTRONOMY
Alien Super-Earths,
Dawn of the Galaxies
EVOLUTION
Dino-Mummy,
First Animal
on Land
MEDICINE
Vaccine Phobia,
Gene Therapy
Triumphant
BRAIN
Depression
Cure, Reading
the Mind
PHYSICS
Black Holes
in the Lab,
JANUARy/FEBRUARy 2O1O

Fixing Traffic
JANUARY/FebRUARY 2010

with Math
$5.99 U.S.

PLUS The biggest news

in energy, environment,
technology, and more. DiSplAY UNTil Feb 8, 2010
 worldmags

contents J A N U A R Y/ F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 0

YEAR IN
SCIENCE
2 0 0 9

THE TOP TEN STORIES Vaccine phobia becomes a

public-health threat 18, NASA braces for course
correction 20, Meet your new ancestor 22, Stem
cell science takes off 23, Interview: astronomer
Alan Dressler 24, Swine flu outbreak sweeps the
globe 26, The graphene revolution 27, Earth-like
worlds come into view 28, Experimental power
plant takes the CO2 out 30, Interview: economist
George Loewenstein 32.

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DV0110TOC3A_WC C2 11/13/09 8:41:39 PM

 worldmags
The space shuttle
Endeavor, docked with
the International Space
Station, crosses the face
of the sun.

On the Cover
Corot-7b, a rocky
exoplanet, suggests
that Earth-like worlds
may be common around
other stars. Insets, from
left: Einstein cogitating,
humans evolving, a
swine flu virus lurking.

A special report on 100

astonishing discoveries from DISCOVER ON THE
WEB Videos, breaking
the past year—the news, and more
—the latest is online at
ideas and breakthroughs discovermagazine.com

that are reshaping our

understanding of the world.

AND AMONG THE REST BIOLOGY Cut calories and extend your life 39,
The smell of fear 66, Chimps plan ahead 70 SPACE Water on the moon
35, A space-junk collision 54, Venus’s secret past 66 EVOLUTION The ALSO IN THIS ISSUE
next stage in Darwin’s revolution 50, An ancient croc-eating super-
snake 62, The world’s oldest octopuses 77 ASTRONOMY Twin black Mail 6
holes 53, Titan: cloudy with a chance of storms 57, Jupiter takes a hit 72
ENVIRONMENT Arctic scientist Mark Serreze 60, Species relocation 80 Contributors 7
MEDICINE Hope for HIV vaccine 34, Craig Venter’s synthetic biology 40,
Cancer genes go to court 55 ENERGY Smart grid powers up 48, Editor’s Note 8
Building the sun in the lab 68, Microbial batteries 82 MIND Brain shock
therapy 38, Decoding the Jefferson cipher 64 ANTHROPOLOGY Ancient Vital Signs 10
flutes 54, Lake Huron hides Ancient civilization 82 PHYSICS Black hole An elderly couple visit
in a lab 70 TECHNOLOGY Theory-generating computer 39 EARTH Origins their doctor to find out
of oxygen 77 OBITUARIES 86 . . . and a complete index on page 88. which one of them has
Alzheimer’s.
By H. Lee Kagan

The Brain 14
Neuroscientists begin
to figure out how we
experience fear.
By Carl Zimmer

20 Things
You Didn’t Know About
Dwarf Planets 96
3
By Andrew Moseman

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DV0110TOC3A_WC 3 11/13/09 8:41:45 PM

 ‘‘
worldmags

From our home on Earth, we look out into the

distances and strive to imagine the sort of world
into which we were born…. The search will continue.
The urge is older than history. It is not satisfied
and it will not be suppressed.
‘‘
—Edwin P. Hubble

NASA/ESA. PREVIOUS PAGES: THIERRY LEGAULT/WWW.ASTROPHOTO.FR. ON THE COVER: ESO/L. CALCADA; IMAGNO/GETTY IMAGES; IAN TATTERSALL/MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE; ALFRED

A towering pillar of gas and dust enshrouds newborn stars in the Carina nebula,
captured by the Hubble Space Telescope’s new Wide Field Camera in July.

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DV0110TOC3A_WC 2 11/13/09 8:41:50 PM

 worldmags
CHECK OUT

THE YEAR IN SCIENCE

SPECIAL YEAR-END FEATURES ON D I S C OV E R M AG A Z I N E . C O M
(DON’T PEEK BEFORE NEW YEAR’S EVE!)
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Niftiest New Robots Solar Cars

discovermagazine.com/web/robo2k9 Race Across
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BAD ASTRONOMY’S Eliza Strickland brings you

Top Astronomy a remarkable slide show

of solar-powered vehicles
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and Scientists
Team Up to
Humans vs. Animals: Our Fiercest Battles With Invasive Species
Save the Planet
From Burmese pythons to Galápagos goats, these animals are threatening a hostile takeover of the
Chris Mooney discusses
planet unless we can find ways to stop them.
the new book A Climate
discovermagazine.com/web/invasivesmackdown
for Change: Global Warm-
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PHOTO GALLERY Decisions.
Treating Disease With Nature’s
Deadliest Toxins RECENTLY ON
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turning biology’s weapons into lifesaving treatments.
discovermagazine.com/web/deadliestmedicines I Am Shiva,
Destroyer of
HENRY ROE (LOWELL OBSERVATORY) AND GEMINI OBSERVATORY; ISTOCK; JACK PERLMUTTER/NASA

Proteins
Carl Zimmer sheds light
Will Nanoparticle Drugs Change
WEB EXCLUSIVE on the science of autophagy,
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Researchers are now using tiny, drug-carrying balls of sugar to deliver medication themselves to live again.
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discovermagazine.com/web/NASAartschool
Phil Plait examines NASA’s
official app, which contains
information on missions,
3
pictures, videos, and more.

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DV0110WEBTOC1A_WC 3 11/13/09 12:56:09 PM

 worldmags

J A N U A R Y / F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 0

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A RT
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DV21002.indd 1 11/10/09 5:48:29 PM


Mail
Darwin and His Discontents
I have enjoyed the straightforward, clearly
written articles in DISCOVER for years, but
never before have I laughed out loud while
being informed on an important scientific
topic. Bruno Maddox’s “Deconstructing
Darwin” [November, page 38] was fascinat-
ing in its attempt to show Charles Darwin
as a scientist of incredible vision and forti-
tude but also as a man with human foibles.
Informative writing is always welcome, but
to be able to enjoy some of the nimblest
prose I’ve read in a long time in the process
was an unexpected treat. It’s as if Dave
Barry suddenly jumped over to serious sci-
ence. What a blast! Cathy Anderson
Tampa, FL
Maddox’s article substantially reduces the
quality of your magazine. Portions of the
article were demeaning to Darwin, spe-
cifically the comments about his “dumb
beard” and “dumb theories.” I would also
like to know who keeps calling the theory
“Darwinism” instead of evolution. As an
anthropologist, I never used the term in
my college classes. Maddox gets his his-
tory wrong too. The concept of evolution
was in the air for some time prior to the
publication of On the Origin of Species;
Darwin never “created” it. Maddox has
constructed a straw man that glorifies his
writing and so-called wit at the expense of
a great scientist. John L. Mori
Morton, IL
In “Deconstructing Darwin,” Charles
Darwin is brought “back down to earth”
in hopes of elevating his theory. However,
Darwin was a man, and as such one can-
not expect perfection. Attempting to make
him more human just seems to degrade
his theory. Instead of focusing on the man,
we should be focusing more on educating
those who have yet to accept evolution.
If the proper facts were brought to the
people, it wouldn’t matter whether Darwin
was cast as a simple person or the great
bearded man. Philip Hlasny
Mississauga, Ontario
Human-Neanderthal Relations
“Brothers in Arms” [November, page 46]
suggests that humans cannibalized Nean-
6 | DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
worldmags
DV0110MAIL1A_WC 6
derthals because Neanderthal remains
show scars made by human tools. But
there may be other explanations. A Nean-
derthal could have gotten the short end of
the stick in a fight over territory or a kill, or
a trade meeting between nomadic groups
could have gone bad. Brandon C. Nuttall
Frankfort, KY
Given humans’ well-known propensity
to view other, different-looking humans
with hatred and disgust, it would be
utterly surprising if early humans reacted
to Neanderthals with anything other
than fear and loathing. I think it’s highly
probable that our ancestors exterminated
them, or at the very least outcompeted
them for resources, and felt no remorse at
their disappearance. Steve Weston
Cottonwood, MN
History tells us that when cultures meet,
they both murder and marry each other,
so probably the few Neanderthals got
blended with the many humans. If they
could mate, though, doesn’t that mean
they were really the same species? Were
Neanderthals really just a race, a biological
variety of humans? Jim Heldberg
Pacifica, CA
Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that
the lack of Neanderthal DNA in the current
gene pool implies only that there were no
fertile offspring from any human/Neander-
worldmags
thal mating? Given our present-day sexual
habits, I would think it highly likely that
such mating occurred whenever the two
populations met. John Phoenix
Fredericksburg, VA
The editors respond:
Whether or not Neanderthals and humans
were of the same species—a question that
hinges partly on the definition of “species”
—closely related organisms, such as
wolves, coyotes, and dogs, can often
produce fertile offspring. Differences in the
number of chromosomes can lead to infer-
tile progeny (like mules, the product of don-
keys and horses), but scientists are unsure
whether Neanderthals had 23 chromosome
pairs like us or 24 like the great apes.
Give W Some Stem Cell Credit
In “The Super Cell” [November, page
30], the author suggests that the Bush
administration’s barring of federal funds for
embryonic stem cell research negatively
impacted progress. Yet in the very next
paragraph she expounds on break-
throughs for obtaining stem cells without
human embryos involved—“even with the
restrictions in place.” A fair article would
have acknowledged that the removal of
federal funds for human embryonic stem
cell research might have spurred these
valuable advances. Scott Anderson
Centennial, CO
Send e-mail to editorial@discovermagazine.com.
Address letters to DISCOVER, 90 Fifth Avenue,
New York, NY 10011. Include your full name,
address, and daytime phone number.
E R R ATA
On page 33 of “The Super Cell” in
the November issue, we misstated
President Bush’s funding restrictions
for embryonic stem cell research.
Funding was permitted, but only for
studying existing cell lines.
On page 59 of “Seeing the Forest
for the Lichens” in the November
issue, we misstated the location
of the Ozark Plateau. It stretches into
the eastern edge of Oklahoma,
not the western edge.
11/5/09 8:32:30 PM
 worldmags

contributors
MICHAEL ABRAMS, a freelance FRED GUTERL, former deputy
THE TOP 100 SCIENCE STORIES OF 2009

MICHAEL D. LEMONICK, who ALINE REYNOLDS is a

writer in New York, is the author of
Birdmen, Batmen and Skyflyers.
MARCIA BARTUSIAK is a
professor of science writing at MIT
and author of five books. Her latest
is The Day We Found the Universe.
ALLISON BOND, a science and
medical writer living in New York,
has also written for Scientific Ameri-
can Mind and Popular Science.
JANE BOSVELD, a contributing
editor to DISCOVER, is studying for
a certificate in botany from the New
York Botanical Garden.
DARLENE F. CAVALIER is the
founder of ScienceCheerleader.
com and an advocate for public
engagement in science.
JANET FANG is a DISCOVER
intern who studies natural history
and uses marine geochemistry to
research the paleoclimate of Africa.
DOUGLAS FOX is a freelance
writer whose work has also
appeared in New Scientist,
Popular Mechanics, and the 2009
Best American Science and
Nature Writing anthology.
editor of Newsweek International,
recently joined DISCOVER as a
senior editor.
ADAM HADHAZY is a science
writer whose work has also
appeared in Popular Mechanics and
on Scientific American’s Web site.
MONICA HEGER is a Brooklyn-
based writer whose work has also
appeared in IEEE Spectrum and
USA Today’s Science Fair blog.
JEREMY JACQUOT, a graduate
student at the University of Southern
California, also writes for Popular
Mechanics and The Huffington Post.
SAM KISSINGER is a former
DISCOVER intern who is now
fighting childhood illiteracy in
Central Arizona.
LINDSEY KONKEL is a freelance
journalist who has also written for
Popular Science, Natural History,
and OnEarth.
JEREMY LABRECQUE is a
freelance science writer based
in Montreal who also studies
spatial patterns in rheumatic
diseases.
was a science writer at Time for
more than 20 years, recently joined
the staff of Climate Central.
JEANNE LENZER is a frequent
contributor to the British Medical
Journal who also writes for The
Atlantic, Slate, and The Scientist.
HEATHER MAYER is a DISCOVER
intern who has reported on health,
science, and other topics for
CNN.com, Health.com, and the
Associated Press.
KATHLEEN MCGOWAN is a
former senior editor at Psychology
Today and is a contributing editor
to DISCOVER.
CYRUS MOULTON has also
written for the Island Journal and
The Huffington Post.
JILL NEIMARK, who covers
science and medicine, received
the Autism Society of America
award in 2007.
STEPHEN ORNES is a
Nashville-based writer who
also writes for CR Magazine,
Technology Review, and
Science News for Kids.
DISCOVER intern who also writes
for Manhattan Media newspapers
and Dan’s Papers.
JOCELYN RICE is a science writer
in Kansas whose work also appears
in Technology Review, CR Magazine,
and Popular Mechanics.
JESSICA RUVINSKY is a former
editor at DISCOVER who has also
written for Science, The Economist,
and U.S. News & World Report.
NAYANAH SIVA is a freelance
journalist based in London whose
work also appears in The Lancet,
Nature Medicine, and Science.
ELIZABETH SVOBODA is a
Popular Science contributing editor
based in San Jose, California.
MEGAN TALKINGTON recently
began her career in science
journalism after working as a
researcher studying ribosomes
and viruses.
CARL ZIMMER, a contributing
editor to DISCOVER, also writes
for The New York Times. His latest
book is The Tangled Bank: An
Introduction to Evolution.

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Editor’s Note
In
the 12 years I
have been at DISCOVER, the scientific understanding of
the world has undergone staggering transformations.
A look back through our annual top 100 lists richly illus-
trates those changes. In January 1998 human embry-
onic stem cells had not yet been isolated. There are no
stories about brain-scan studies in that issue, since the
key technology—functional magnetic resonance imag-
ing, or fMRI—was still in its infancy. Also absent: news
about planets orbiting other stars, since only a handful
of them were known at the time.
More sobering are the truly fundamental discoveries that
have taken place in the intervening dozen years. Just
days after the 1998 issue hit newsstands, astronomers
announced the first evidence of dark energy. This invisible
worldmags
DV0110EDNOTE1A_WC 8
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force is causing the expansion of the universe to acceler-
ate, controlling the fate of the entire cosmos. By current
reckoning, dark energy outweighs conventional matter (the
stuff that you and I are made of) by about 15 to 1. At the
other end of the scale, biologists had not yet sequenced
the human genome. Efforts to treat disease with gene
therapy had barely begun; the idea of creating synthetic life,
as Craig Venter is now preparing to do, back then seemed
more like something from the imagination of Mary Shelley.
All of this calls to mind Shakespeare’s oft-quoted words,
in which Hamlet addresses his friend Horatio: “There
are more things in heaven and earth,” he says, “than are
dreamt of in your philosophy.” Time and again we think we
have reached a near-final understanding of the world, but
then along comes an out-of-the-blue result that shakes
up our intellectual order all over again. Time and again we
think we have finally hit an unanswerable question, but then
along comes a clever new experiment that exposes the
hubris of thinking we are the ones who have finally reached
science’s outermost limits.
But there is also another kind of humility I feel looking
back through the old pages of DISCOVER. For every story
that makes me shake my head in amusement at how little
we knew in 1998, there are others—many others—that
highlight just how slow and incremental the discovery
process is. Efforts to find a cure for AIDS. Debates about
the shape and significance of the human evolutionary tree.
The quest to understand the deeper meaning of quantum
physics. The hunt for life on Mars.
As I kept reading I thought of another, very different
Shakespeare quote, this one from A Midsummer Night’s
Dream: “Lovers and madmen have such seething brains/
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend/More than cool
reason ever comprehends.” In the popular stereotype, sci-
entists land solidly, solely on the side of cool reason. Their
actions say otherwise. Anthropologists spend lifetimes
chipping away at African outcrops in hopes of gleaning
a little more information about the origin of our species.
Medical researchers invest years developing vaccines, and
then years more proving that they are safe. The engineers
who labored on Apollo will most likely never live to see
humans set foot on Mars, yet many of them continue to
work tirelessly toward that goal.
These are not acts of cool reason alone. They embody
love and, in truth, more than a bit of madness. And we are all
the better off for it. Read on and I hope you will marvel—as
I constantly do—at what is possible when the world’s great
rational minds embrace a little of their fantastical side.
Corey S. Powell
11/13/09 9:03:31 PM
 worldmags

ADVERTORIAL BROUGHT TO YOU BY SHELL & DISCOVER MAGAZINE

POWERING In October DISCOVER teamed up with Shell

and the Stevens Institute of Technology to

TOMORROW’S explore the future of energy. The resulting

panel discussion, titled “Fossil Fuels in the
Year 2050,” was moderated by DISCOVER’s

WORLD editor in chief, Corey S. Powell, and

held on the Stevens campus in Hoboken,
New Jersey.
MIT visiting scientist Richard Sears,
formerly a geophysicist with Shell, out-
lined the challenge ahead. “In the hour
that we’re sitting here tonight, the world
will go through about 150 million gallons
of crude oil, 14 billion cubic feet of natural
gas, and almost 2 billion pounds of coal,”
he said. “Anything that we talk about
moving to in 2050 is going to have to
replace energy use at that scale.”
The panel went on to discuss emerging
technologies such as carbon sequestra-
tion and an interactive, “smart” energy
distribution system. “The smart grid
and some related considerations—
perhaps the off-peak powering of electric
vehicles—give us an opportunity to
stabilize our power plants, how they
interact with the demand side, and
achieve higher efficiencies in power pro-
duction,” said Anthony Cugini, director
of the Office of Research and Devel-
opment at the National Energy and
Technology Laboratory. “It will have a
significant impact.”
Renewable energy sources will be
important, but “revolutionary devel-
opments do not happen overnight,”
cautioned Turgay Ertekin, a professor
of petroleum and natural gas engi-
neering at Penn State. “We have to look
at all of the possibilities—from nuclear
energy to hydroelectric power to solar
energy —and then make sure that they
take their proper places in the world’s
overall energy budget.”
And Paul Winstanley, director of
energy initiatives at Stevens, empha-
sized that the challenge ahead is not just
“We have to look at all of the one of finding the right technology. “How
do we sustain the availability of fuel while
possibilities, from nuclear we continue to search for credible alter-

to hydroelectric to solar, and natives?” he asked. “There’s a huge gap

that we’re facing in terms of education
make sure they take their and training and preparing the workforce
for the energy transition we’ve got to
proper places.” —TURGAY ERTEKIN go through.”

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DV0110ENERGYAD1A_WC 9 11/13/09 9:44:16 PM


Vital Signs by H. Lee Kagan
After 50 years together, it should be easy to recognize signs
that your spouse has Alzheimer’s. But sometimes dementia
expresses itself in truly confounding ways.
I
t was near the end of a routine office visit when my patient, Sam,
told me he needed to talk to me about his wife. I closed his chart
and gave him my full attention. “Ruth’s just not the same,” he said.
“She tells me the same thing three times. She forgets when we have
plans to go somewhere. I don’t know, but I think she might have that
Alzheimer’s disease.” Concern and frustration were evident in his
voice. “Can you check her out the next time she’s in here?” I shook
his hand and promised I would.
I had known Sam and Ruth, both in their late seventies, for more
than two decades, and apart from the usual infirmities of the golden
years, they had managed to dodge serious illness. I saw them both
regularly, and neither one had struck me as having suffered a signifi-
cant decline in intellectual functioning. But it wouldn’t be unusual for
early dementia to sneak in under the radar. Its first symptoms may
be subtle and impossible to distinguish from the normal decline in
memory that occurs with aging.
If you ask people over 60 what they dread most, dementia is almost
always in the top three on their list of health concerns. After all, it is
memory that makes us who we are; without it we are forever trapped
in the moment, with no window on the past or the future.
There is some discussion among experts over what exactly consti-
tutes early dementia, but they generally agree that it includes both a
decline in memory (learning and recalling new information like “Where
did I put those keys?” or “What did we do yesterday?”) and a decline
10 | DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
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in at least one other area of intellectual functioning. Among those
areas are language (breadth of vocabulary, complexity of sentences),
calculation (balancing a checkbook, figuring a tip), judgment (Is this a
legitimate bill or a mail scam?), and visual-spatial orientation (becom-
ing disoriented while walking or driving). Faulty memory alone is not
enough to diagnose dementia, and the cognitive impairment must be
a decline from a previously higher level of functioning.
Two weeks later as I entered the exam room and opened Ruth’s
chart, I found the note I had written to remind myself to check
her memory. Mindful of her husband’s concerns, I asked her
how things were going.
“Dr. Kagan,” she said, “I’m worried about Sam.”
I waited for more and watched as she frowned.
“I think he might have Alzheimer’s.”
I couldn’t help smiling to myself. After 50 years, is this where
marital bickering had brought them? “What makes you think
that?” I asked.
“Well, I say things and he keeps correcting me. And then he
gets angry. He’s so short-tempered lately. It’s not like him.”
I told her I would look into it the next time I saw her husband.
After reviewing her vital signs and performing a basic physical
exam, I proceeded to test her. Extensive formal testing tools exist
to evaluate memory, but most clinicians rely on the Mini-Mental
Status Exam (MMSE) in their offices to screen for dementia. The
test takes just a few minutes and is commonly used for detect-
ing cognitive impairment. It includes a series of questions that
test orientation to place and time, recall, calculation, reading,
and executive function—carrying out a complex task, such as
copying a drawing of two overlapping pentagons.
Amused through much of the testing, Ruth offered an excuse
or a dismissive laugh whenever she failed on some component
of the exam. She was unable to recall any of three named objects
after three minutes. She struggled with simple math and was unable
to spell the word world backward. When we were done, her score was
well below normal, placing her in the early dementia range. Depres-
sion in some cases may mimic dementia, especially when patients
become withdrawn and disengaged, but Ruth showed no evidence of
that melancholic state. A careful neurological examination disclosed
no abnormalities to suggest prior strokes or other disorders, such as
Parkinson’s disease, that may be associated with dementia.
I sent Ruth to have blood drawn and then walked over to my secre-
tary, Carina. I asked her to schedule Ruth for an MRI of the brain.
“What’s the indication?” Carina asked. The radiologists would want
to know what I was looking for.
“Put ‘Evaluate dementia’ on the request.”
She nodded and mumbled, “Oh, that explains her cookies.”
MILLENNIUM IMAGES, UK
“Her cookies? What about her cookies?” I began to wonder if one
of us was in need of a dementia workup, too.
Carina reminded me that for years Ruth, a kindhearted woman, had
been bringing home-baked cookies to every appointment. Known
11/13/09 1:31:10 PM
 worldmags

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 worldmags

Vital Signs

among my staff as the Cookie Lady, she always made sure everyone
got his or her own little bag. But for the past year, whenever Ruth
came in the staff would politely wait for her to leave and then deposit
the cookies in the trash. “They’re terrible,” she said, “but no one wants
to say anything to her. Too bad. They used to be good.”
After Ruth left I tried one of her dry, tasteless cookies and agreed
that they would not have earned anyone the affectionate nickname
Cookie Lady. I saw it as one more example of how she had changed.
I made sure that her MRI got scheduled.
Within a week I had all of Ruth’s results back. Her scan showed mild
brain atrophy, or shrinkage, a common but very nonspecific finding in
older people. There was no tumor, no evidence of a past stroke, and
no fluid accumulation. Her lab tests showed no metabolic derange-
ments or any deficiencies, such as inadequate amounts of thyroid
hormone or vitamin B12, that can cause symptoms of dementia.
Based on her impaired cognitive functions and the absence of any
other explanation, I concluded that, unfortunately, Sam was right.
His wife had early Alzheimer’s disease. The diagnosis is a clinical
one, meaning there is no specific test, either analyzing the blood or
imaging the brain, that can identify the disease. Indeed, the only way
to confirm Alzheimer’s conclusively is to biopsy the brain. But this
invasive and risky test is seldom done because the diagnosis can be
reliably established on clinical grounds alone.
That same week I saw Sam in my office and, as I had promised
Ruth, evaluated him. He had no problem with the MMSE, and there
were no neurological abnormalities. What he did have, however, was
a wife of more than half a century who had begun to slip away from
him mentally. It frightened him and left him feeling frustrated and help-
less. He had responded by becoming short-tempered and demand-
ing. But being short-tempered and demanding is not dementia.
Ruth had correctly observed a distinct change in her spouse, and
with her limited capacities she had decided that the problem lay with
him, speculating that he might have early dementia. “He keeps cor-
recting me,” she had complained, demonstrating no insight into her
own diminished mental faculties. Sam, in turn, was showing how
Alzheimer’s disease affects more than the person who has it.
In fact, Ruth’s marked lack of insight into her deficits is character-
istic of true dementia. Patients forget what they don’t know and so
gain no self-awareness. The corollary is that patients who come to
me worried that they might have Alzheimer’s generally do not. (There
are exceptions, of course.) Alzheimer’s is the illness that is most often
brought to a doctor’s attention by family members and friends rather
than by the patients themselves.
There is currently no way to reverse Alzheimer’s disease. There are,
however, drugs that can treat its symptoms. I prescribed these medi-
cations for Ruth after having a lengthy discussion with her and her
husband about the nature of the illness and what they could expect
down the road. I also suggested an Alzheimer’s support group for
Sam to help him gain some understanding of how his wife’s disease
was affecting him. There was no way to predict the tempo of Ruth’s ill-
ness, but her general health was good, and I told them that a program
of physical activity and mental engagement would work in her favor.
They left my office hand in hand. I was confident that after 50 years
they would find a way through this, too.
H. Lee Kagan is an internist in Los Angeles. The cases described in Vital
Signs are real, but patients’ names and other details have been changed.

DISCOVER & THE NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION



   :

Robotics
A roundtable discussion of the future of the machine:
How will robots transform industry, health care, and warfare?
And will they ever be our equals?

Carnegie Mellon University

January 28, 2010, at 7 

Moderated by  editor in chief Corey S. Powell

E-mail events@discovermagazine.com
for more information
Watch for full coverage online at discovermagazine.com

National Science Foundation

DISCOVER
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DV0110VITAL2A_WC 12 11/13/09 1:31:13 PM

 worldmags

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DV90907.indd 1 6/30/09 4:34:47 PM


The Brain by Carl Zimmer
Are you a man or a mouse? No matter how you answer, you
experience fear the same way in your brain.
F
ear: See also dread, panic, terror, fright, trepidation, anxiety,
worry, phobia, disquietude, angst, foreboding, the creeps, the
jitters, the heebie-jeebies, freaking out.
Any halfway decent thesaurus will provide a long list of syn-
onyms for fear, and yet they are not very good substitutes. No
one would confuse having the creeps with being terrified. It is
strange that we have so many words for fear, when fear is such
a unitary, primal feeling. Perhaps all those synonyms are just lin-
guistic inventions. Perhaps, if we looked inside our brains, we
would just find plain old fear.
That is certainly how things seemed in the early 1900s, when
scientists began studying how we come to be scared of things.
They built on Ivan Pavlov’s classic experiments on dogs, in which
Pavlov would ring a bell before giving his dogs food. Eventually
they learned to associate the bell with food and began to salivate in
anticipation. Psychologists set up experiments to see if the same
kind of learning could instill fear as well. The implicit assumption
was that fear, like hunger, was a simple provoked response.
In one of the most famous (and infamous) of these experiments,
American psychologist John Watson decided to see if he could
teach an 11-month-old baby named Albert to become scared of
arbitrary things. He presented Albert with a rat, and every time the
baby reached out to touch it, Watson hit a steel bar with a ham-
mer, producing a horrendous clang. After several rounds with the
rat and the bar, Watson then brought out the rat on its own. “The
instant the rat was shown, the baby began to cry,” Watson wrote
in a 1920 report. “Almost instantly he turned sharply to the left, fell
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DV0110BRAIN2A_WC 14
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over on his left side, raised himself on all fours and began to crawl
away so rapidly that he was caught with difficulty before reaching
the edge of the table.”
The “little Albert” study, besides being cruel, was badly
designed. Watson did not control it carefully to rule out a wide
range of possible interpretations. In later decades, other scientists
got much more rigorous in their study of fear, in many cases turn-
ing to rats rather than people as their test subjects. In a typical
experiment, a rat was placed in a cage with a light. At first the light
came on a few times so the animal could get accustomed to it.
Later the scientists would turn on the light and then give the rats
a little electric shock. After a few rounds, the rats would respond
fearfully to the light, even if no shock came.
Further research revealed that the amygdala—an almond-shaped
cluster of neurons deep within the brain—plays a pivotal role in the
fear-association response in rats. Brain researchers discovered that
the amygdala orchestrates human fear as well. The sight of a loaded
gun, for example, triggers activity in this part of the brain. People
with an injured amygdala have dampened emotional responses and
so do not learn to fear new things through association. Science had
identified a nexus of fear, it seemed.
Although this line of research yielded some major insights, it had
an obvious shortcoming. In the real world, rats don’t spend their
lives in cages waiting for lights to turn on; these experiments don’t
capture the complex role that fear plays in a wild rat’s life.
In the 1980s Caroline and Robert Blanchard, working together
DIMITRI VERVITSIOTIS/GETTY IMAGES
11/2/09 7:45:43 PM
 worldmags

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DV21006.indd 1 11/9/09 4:42:27 PM


The Brain by Carl Zimmer
at the University of Hawaii, carried out a pioneering study on
the natural history of fear. They put wild rats in cages and then
brought cats gradually closer to them. At each stage, they care-
fully observed how the rats reacted. The Blanchards found
that the rats responded to each kind of threat with a distinct
set of behaviors.
The first kind of behavior is a reaction to a potential threat, in
which a predator isn’t visible but there is good reason to worry
that it might be nearby. A rat might walk into a meadow that looks
free of predators, for example, but that reeks of fresh cat urine. In
such a case, a rat will generally explore the meadow cautiously,
assessing the risk of staying there. A second, more concrete type
of threat arises if a rat spots a cat at the other side of the meadow.
The rat will freeze and then make a choice about what to do next.
It may slink away, or it may remain immobile in hopes that the cat
will eventually wander away without noticing it. Finally, the most
active threat: The cat glances over, notices something, and walks
toward the rat to investigate. At this point, the rat will flee if it has
an escape route. If the cat gets close, the rat will choose either to
fight or to run for its life.
Dean Mobbs, a neuroscientist
at the Medical Research Council in
Cambridge, England, wondered if
Fear, the new results suggest, is not a single thing
humans have similarly layered fear after all. It is a complex, ever-changing strategy
responses. He and his colleagues
were not about to send people into
mammal brains deploy in order to cope with danger.
tiger-infested meadows, so they
designed a clever alternative: They
programmed a survival-themed video game that subjects could
play while lying in an fMRI scanner. The game is similar to Pac-
man. You see yourself as a triangle in a maze and press keys to
maneuver through it. At some point a circle appears. This is a
virtual predator being guided by an artificial intelligence program
to seek you out. If the predator captures you, you receive a small
electric shock on the back of your hand.
This deceptively minimalist predator-prey game triggers some
remarkably intense feelings. Mobbs measured the skin conduc-
tance of his players by rigging them up to a device similar to a lie
detector. He found that when the predator was bearing down on
players, they often experienced the same changes to their skin
as those seen in people having panic attacks. Mobbs unleashed
two kinds of predators on his players, a less adept one that was
easy to escape, and a smarter one that was more likely to capture
its victim. When people were chased by the better predator, they
showed a stronger panic response in their skin, and they also
crashed into the walls of the maze more often.
Meanwhile, striking changes were happening inside the brains
of the players. The predators would first appear on the far side
of the maze. While they remained at a distance, the same brain
regions tended to become active in the players, a network that
included parts of the amygdala as well as some other structures in
the front of the brain. But when the predator was closing in, those
brain regions shut down and a network of previously quiet regions
farther back in the midbrain became active.
Mobbs’s results mesh nicely not only with the work of the
Blanchards but also with some other, more recent studies of rat
neurology. For example, one of the midbrain regions that Mobbs
and his colleagues observed becoming active in humans when
a “predator” was close is an area called the periaqueductal gray
16 | DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
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DV0110BRAIN2A_WC 16
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region. This area showed higher activity in the people who
crashed into the walls more often, providing further evidence that
it plays an important role in panic. Researchers have explored the
anatomy of fear more directly in rats; by manipulating different
areas of the rat brain, they are able to alter parts of the stan-
dard fear-driven sequence of behavior. When neuroscientists put
electrodes into the periaqueductal gray region of rat brains and
stimulated the neurons there, the creatures immediately started
to run and jump uncontrollably.
Fear, the new results suggest, is not a single thing after all. Rath-
er, it is a complex, ever-changing strategy mammal brains deploy
in order to cope with danger. When a predator is off in the distance,
its prey—whether rat or human—powers up a forebrain network.
The network primes the body, raising the heartbeat and preparing
it for fast action. At the same time, the forebrain network sharpens
the brain’s attention to the outside world, evaluating threats, moni-
toring subtle changes, and running through possible responses.
Another important job it performs is keeping the midbrain network
shut down so that, instead of fleeing at top speed, a prey ani-
mal keeps very still at first. As the predator gets closer, however,
the forebrain’s grip on the midbrain loosens. Now the midbrain
becomes active, orchestrating a powerful, quick response: fight or
flight. At the same time it shuts down the slower, more deliberative
forebrain. This is no time for thinking.
It may be unsettling to find that our brains work so much like a
rat’s. But the amygdala and the periaqueductal gray are ancient
parts of the brain, dating back hundreds of millions of years. Our
small hominid ancestors probably faced the same kinds of threats
that baboons do today from leopards, eagles, and other predators.
Even after we evolved the ability to use weapons and became
predators ourselves, this ancient brain circuit still offered a useful
defense against members of our own species.
Unfortunately, our exquisitely sophisticated brains may make
this predator-defense circuit vulnerable to misfiring. Instead of
monitoring just the threats right in front of us, we can also imagine
threats that do not exist. Feeding this imagination into the early-
warning system may lead to crippling chronic anxiety. In other
cases, people may not be able to keep their periaqueductal gray
and other midbrain regions under control. As we perceive preda-
tors getting closer, our brains normally make the switch from the
forebrain to the midbrain regions. People who suffer panic dis-
orders may misjudge threats, seeing them as far more imminent
than they really are.
To test these possibilities, Mobbs and his colleagues are begin-
ning to study people who suffer from fear-related disorders as they
play the predator game. Such work may not uncover a biological
distinction between angst and the heebie-jeebies, but it may show
how much better we can understand ourselves—and tame our inner
demons—once we appreciate the many dimensions of fear.
11/2/09 7:45:46 PM
 worldmags

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DV21008.indd 1 11/13/09 4:31:50 PM
 worldmags

Y E A R IN S C I E N C E 2 0 0 9

1OO
THE

DISCOVERIES
THAT ARE
CHANGING
THE
WORLD 1
The question will not go away:
Do vaccines cause autism?
Some 1 million to 1.5 million
adults and children in the
United States have received
autism diagnoses, and there is
no clear insight into its causes.
What surprises many scientists
is that their findings against a
vaccine connection keep fail-
ing to quell the debate, giving
the antivaccine movement the
potential to become a genuine
public-health problem.
In February the U.S. Court
of Federal Claims attempted
to provide some clarity, ruling
that a widely used vaccine
and a vaccine preservative,
both targets of concern over
the past decade, do not cause
autism spectrum disorders.
That decision put a stamp
of approval on what multiple
peer-reviewed studies have
concluded for years: The MMR
(measles-mumps-rubella)
vaccine and the mercury
additive thimerosal (which
was removed from nearly all
vaccines by 2001) are not
responsible for the rise in
autism diagnoses. “I think
the tide clearly turned this
year, and the court decision,
more than anything else, was
responsible,” says Paul Offit,
a pediatrician at the Children’s
Hospital of Philadelphia and
a vocal vaccine advocate. “It
showed that good science
does win in the end.”
Environmental attor-
ney Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
responded to the ruling by

18 | DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
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DV0110SECI11A1-5,7-11_WC 18 11/12/09 9:21:36 PM


VACCINE PHOBIA BECOMES
A PUBLIC-HEALTH THREAT
comparing government-spon-
sored vaccine safety studies to
cigarette research conducted
by Big Tobacco. In the ruling’s
wake, conspiracy theories
and false claims continued to
dominate some autism Internet
forums, while television shows
featured lengthy interviews
with antivaccine stalwarts.
Fueling all this confusion
is the complicated nature
of autism, which encom-
passes a range of neurologi-
cal disorders characterized
by “social impairments,
communication difficulties,
and restricted, repetitive,
and stereotyped patterns of
behavior,” according to the
National Institutes of Health
(NIH). Those symptoms
usually appear at around
18 months of age, precisely
when children receive many
of their vaccinations.
In October Michael D. Kogan
of the U.S. Department of
Health and Human Ser-
vices (HHS) and colleagues
announced that about 1 of
NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/NEWSCOM. OPPOSITE: RUBBERBALL/GETTY IMAGES
every 91 American children
has a disorder on the autism
spectrum. A 2008 study
by the California Depart-
ment of Public Health found
that the number of chil-
dren receiving services for
autism in the state has risen
steadily, despite a decrease
to trace levels of mercury
T E X T B Y A N D R E W
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DV0110SECI11A1-5,7-11_WC 19
in their inoculations. Many
experts attribute the growing
prevalence to new diagnosis
guidelines and increased
awareness among doctors.
Meanwhile, the reluctance
of some parents to immunize
their children can lead to the
return of vaccine-preventable
diseases such as a measles,
which broke out this past
summer in Brooklyn, New
York. According to Christo-
pher Zimmerman, medical
director of the New York
City Health Department’s
Bureau of Immunization, the
virus spread quickly among
children who were not fully
vaccinated, including those
whose parents put off the
shots because of concern
about the autism-vaccine link.
“Measles can be a serious
and life-threatening disease,”
he says. “Parents are putting
their children at risk by not
vaccinating on time.” Across
the United States, reported
measles cases shot up from
43 in 2007 to 140 in 2008,
and more than 90 percent of
those reported in 2008 were
among children who were
unvaccinated or had unknown
vaccination status.
In the midst of the ongoing
controversy, scientists have
made notable progress in
understanding autism. A May
study in Nature found that 65
percent of autistic children
G R A N T
·M E D I C I N E
share a set of mutations that
may regulate genes known
to influence communication
among brain cells. Many sci-
entists say that environmental
exposures, perhaps even in
the womb, may activate such
genetic vulnerabilities. Over the
past three years the NIH has
spent about $100 million annu-
ally on autism research. One
possible trigger it has studied
exhaustively and dismissed:
vaccines. “Exploring the broad
question of vaccines and
autism is not fruitful. The ques-
tions have been answered,”
says University of Utah pedia-
trician Andrew Pavia, chairman
of the vaccine-safety working
group at HHS.
Pavia nevertheless believes
it would be worth further
investigating a link between
vaccines and autism once
specific biological pathways
are identified. To that end,
his committee recommends
researching whether some
children, including those who
may be genetically predis-
posed to autism, are at higher
risk following certain vaccina-
tions but in numbers too small
to have shown up in previously.
“There are some who sug-
gest that scientists shouldn’t
bring up vaccines and autism
in the same breath, but I think
we should keep an open mind
until we understand the biol-
ogy better,” Pavia says. Offit
disagrees. The evidence has
spoken, he argues, and pur-
suing additional research only
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wastes resources and gives
false hope. “Parents are being
horribly misled by leaving the
door open,” he says.
One positive side effect of
the media frenzy is that autism
science is finally getting its
due. In September the NIH
committed nearly $100 million
in additional funding from the
stimulus package to study-
ing autism. Scientists also
For years some families of
autistic adults and children have
blamed a mercury preservative
in vaccines for the disorder.
hope to gain crucial insights
into autism’s risk factors from
several large new studies,
including the federally funded
Early Autism Risk Longitudinal
Investigation, which will enroll
1,200 mothers of autistic
children at the start of a sub-
sequent pregnancy and then
track the newborn child’s first
three years of development.
“This issue will not go
away until there is a clear
cause,” Offit says. “But the
important story you never
hear is that the research is
evolving very quickly.”
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2010 | 19
11/12/09 9:21:38 PM

ÚS P A C E
2
Norman Augustine is a
well-known critic of wasteful
government programs. As for-
mer CEO of Lockheed Martin,
he is also a grizzled veteran
of the aerospace industry.
That explains why the Obama
administration chose Augus-
tine to head a commission on
the future of NASA’s human
spaceflight program—and
why the space agency was so
shaken by his conclusion.
NASA “appears to be on
an unsustainable trajectory,”
Augustine and company
began their report. Its plan to
return to the moon by 2020 is
out of the question. To keep
the International Space Station
aloft past 2016 (the program’s
premature end date) and
maintain a viable human space
exploration program, NASA
will have to scrape up another
$3 billion per year—hard to
imagine in a time of trillion-
dollar deficits. “The choice is
to lower aspirations or increase
the budget,” says John Logs-
don, a space policy expert at
George Washington University.
One way to cut costs,
cautiously endorsed by
Augustine’s commission, is to
give private firms a bigger role
in providing launch services.
Contractors like Lockheed
Martin and Boeing have
T E X T B Y F R E D
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NASA BRACES FOR
COURSE CORRECTION
always built the hardware, but
NASA has kept close watch
on each step in design and
construction. That method
worked for the Apollo program,
but it has been a disaster ever
since. For instance, the space
shuttle, originally intended to
provide cheap and reliable
transport to low Earth orbit,
has turned out to be roughly
1,000 times more dangerous
and 100 times more costly to
launch than first promised.
In classic bureaucratic style,
NASA diluted the original idea
by trying to make the shuttle
all things to all people: a satel-
lite launcher for the military
as well as a pickup truck to
space for the civilian program.
Private companies, the
panel’s reasoning goes, would
be better at reining in costs
and keeping their eye on the
ball. In addition, NASA would
not have to pay the huge
up-front costs of development
and construction. Instead, it
would give seed money to
private firms and guarantee
a market for their services.
NASA has already begun to
work this way in the develop-
ment of a cargo vessel for the
space station. (When the shut-
tle is mothballed, currently set
for the end of 2010, NASA will
have to rely on Russia’s Soyuz
G U T E R L
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spaceship to get astronauts to
the station.) The agency has
given small grants to SpaceX,
the aerospace firm founded
by PayPal mogul Elon Musk,
and Orbital Sciences, a firm
that builds missile-defense
Ground test and
artist’s mock-up
(inset) of NASA’s
Ares I rocket,
which is five
years behind
schedule. It may
be replaced with
systems; each company is private rockets.
developing its own launchers
and capsules.
Pursuing this path would
mark a huge change in NASA’s
way of doing business. It
would mean entrusting the
safety of its crew to third
parties. In terms of hardware,
though, it would be a cinch.
SpaceX and Orbital rockets
could accommodate astro-
nauts with minor modifica-
tions. And scrapping NASA’s
new Ares I booster program
could save billions of dollars
over the next few years. “We
think this is the time to create
a market for commercial firms
to transport both cargo and
humans between the Earth
and low Earth orbit,” Augustine
said at a press conference
accompanying the report’s
release. “NASA would be bet-
ter served to spend its money
on going beyond Earth orbit
rather than running a trucking
service to low Earth orbit.”
That would free the agency
to focus resources on the Ares
ATK. INSET: NASA/MSFC
V rocket—now on the drawing
board—or another heavy-lift
rocket that could carry crews
into deep space. Mars is “the
11/12/09 9:21:38 PM

ultimate destination” for
human exploration, but the
commission recommends
first tackling more attain-
able yet exciting intermedi-
ate goals, such as visiting
asteroids and the two small
Martian moons.
If NASA cannot find a
way to squeeze more out
of its budget, it will have to
deep-six some programs.
A big question mark is the
fate of the space station.
Terminating the program
early in 2016, as currently
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DV0110SECI11A1-5,7-11_WC 21
scheduled, would help
release NASA from its
fiscal straitjacket, but it
would “significantly impair
U.S. ability to develop and
lead future international
spaceflight partnerships”
while wasting 25 years of
investment, Augustine’s
group warns. Europe, in
particular, would not take a
cancellation kindly, having
already committed billions
of euros for the Columbus
space-station module. And
the robotic exploration pro-
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gram is already providing a
big bang for NASA’s buck,
discovering hidden water
on the moon, possible signs
of life on Mars, and tropical
storms on Titan just in the
past year (see pages 35,
38, and 57, respectively).
Cutting future unmanned
missions would cause
uproar among the scientific
community while freeing up
only modest funds.
NASA is in a tough spot.
But from necessity, it is
poised to reinvent itself.
11/12/09 9:21:39 PM

LA N T H R O P O L O G Y
3
Anthropologists are suddenly
tearing up their long-held origin
tale—that modern humans
evolved from hunched, proto-
human apes roaming the
wide-open savannas of old.
The discovery of a 4.4-mil-
lion-year-old hominid named
Ardipithecus ramidus (fondly
shortened to “Ardi”) suggests
that for a stretch during the
early Pliocene, our ancestors
instead lived in lush wood-
lands and walked on two feet.
In fact, Ardi’s unexpected traits
put to rest the whole idea of a
chimplike missing link at the
root of the human family tree.
Ardi and fossil bones from
at least 35 other children and
adults were uncovered in the
Afar desert in Ethiopia by
the Middle Awash research
group. Toiling in volcanic ash,
the group collected fossil-
ized remains of more than
6,000 creatures ranging from
antelopes to bats, as well as
seeds and geologic samples.
“This gave us a series of
fantastic, high-resolution
snapshots across an ancient
landscape—a true picture of
what Ardi’s habitat was like,”
says University of California
at Berkeley paleoanthropolo-
gist Tim White, a codirector of
the team. “It tells us that long
before hominids developed
tools or big brains or ranged
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worldmags
MEET YOUR
NEW ANCESTOR
the open savanna, they were
walking upright.” The evi-
dence suggests Ardipithecus
is ancestral to the early homi-
nid Australopithecus, widely
considered a forerunner of our
own genus, Homo.
White’s findings, published
alongside related articles from
more than 40 researchers,
appeared in a special issue of
Science in October. Together
they present the picture of a
fantastical, mosaic hominid
—one with pelvis and feet
adapted for walking but with a
divergent big toe splayed out
like those of modern apes for
climbing and grasping. She
had a small brain, about the
size of a chimp’s but posi-
tioned more like a human’s.
Most striking, Ardi’s upper
canine teeth were close in size
to those of modern humans.
Analysis of tooth enamel sug-
gests Ardi ate nuts, fruits, and
tubers, supplemented by small
mammals and bird eggs.
“How does one account
for this strange creature?”
White asks. In one of the
other Science papers, noted
biological anthropologist C.
Owen Lovejoy of Kent State
University speculates that
pair-bonding may have been
the trigger. Perhaps females
Ardi weighed began to prefer males who
about 110 could walk, gather food, and
pounds and carry it home, he suggests.
stood four
feet high. Her
Of course, given the conten-
hand was tious nature of the field, some
T. WHITE 2009, FROM SCIENCE OCT. 2 ISSUE
longer than experts insist the jury is still
a human’s,
out on Ardi’s evolutionary role.
but her gait
probably But to White, the evidence
resembled overwhelmingly places her
our own. at “the first phase of human
evolution.” Move over, Lucy.
Ardi may just be the hominid
CREDIT
T E X T B Y J I L L N E I M A R K find of this century.
11/13/09 2:15:53 PM

4 For eight years, stem
cell researchers chafed at
restrictions limiting govern-
ment funding to a handful of
preexisting cell lines. Then
on March 9, 2009, President
STEM CELL SCIENCE TAKES OFF
Obama signed an executive
order freeing federal funds for
work on any type of stem cell,
including cells derived from
unused embryos at in vitro
fertilization clinics. Stem cell
PHOTO COURTESY OF JUAN CARLOS IZPISUA BELMONTE, SALK INSTITUTE FOR BIOLOGICAL STUDIES AND CENTER OF REGENERATIVE MEDICINE, BARCELONA
research, already in high gear,
has taken off since then.
The first clinical trial using
embryonic stem cells to treat
paralysis was approved by
the Food and Drug Admin-
istration even before the
new order. At the same
time, other researchers have
found ways to bypass the
embryo, spurred in part by
the earlier restrictions. Recent
studies have shown how to
reprogram adult cells into
non-embryonic stem cell
lines called induced pluripo-
tent stem cells—“pluripotent”
meaning that they could
give rise to almost any cat-
egory of cell.
• In January, the FDA gave
the biotech company Geron a
green light for the first human
clinical trial of a paralysis
treatment using embryonic
stem cells. The trial is based
on work from University of
California at Irvine neuro-
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BIOLOGY q
scientist Hans Keirstead,
who enabled paralyzed rats
to walk again by coaxing
embryonic stem cells to dif-
ferentiate into the spinal cord
cells that the rats had lost
during injury.
• In March, a University of
Wisconsin team repro-
grammed skin fibroblasts
into embryonic stem cells
without incorporating the viral
or other foreign DNA that can
lead to complications like
cancer. Instead of manipulat-
ing the cells with a virus, as
other researchers had done,
the Wisconsin team used so-
called circular DNA, loops of
DNA that exist outside of the A colony of
induced pluripotent
primary genome. “When the stem cells used
cells proliferate, they lose the to treat Fanconi
circular DNA naturally because anemia.
it’s not very stable,” says Jun-
ying Yu of Cellular Dynamics,
treat X-linked adrenoleuko- defective gene was eradi-
coauthor of the study.
dystrophy (ALD), a fatal brain cated with chemotherapy,
• This summer, three separate
disease caused by a mutation stem cells with the healthy
teams of researchers—two
of the gene coding for the gene were transplanted back
in China, one in California—
ALD protein. As reported into the patients, and the
reported the birth of healthy
in Science in November, progression of the disease
mice generated solely from
the researchers removed was stopped.
induced pluripotent cells. The
patients’ bone marrow (which The ultimate goal is to
most prolific cell line, made at
contained stem cells with the produce pluripotent cells
the Scripps Research Institute
damaged gene) and repaired by purely chemical means
in La Jolla, produced live baby
the cells with healthy genes within the body to regenerate
mice 13 percent of the time.
delivered by a retrovirus. After damaged parts and to treat
• Combining stem cells with
bone marrow containing the disease.
gene therapy, an international
collaboration announced the
success of a pilot study to T E X T B Y M O N I C A H E G E R
11/13/09 8:48:35 PM
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±I N T E R V I E W

5 Astronomer ALAN DRESSLER

Sets Off on the Trail of the
First Galaxies in the Universe

What did the universe look like in its toddler years? To find out,
astronomer Alan Dressler of the Carnegie Institution of Wash-
ington and his team are training some of the world’s largest
telescopes on a small swath of sky in the constellation Sextans.
Their aim is to detect “Lyman-alpha emitters,” distant gas clouds
enclosing primordial stars. The blobs hail from a crucial moment
What’s so interesting about
the Lyman-alpha blobs?
I would call them building
blocks of galaxies, mostly gas
and stars. That’s where the
Lyman-alpha radiation comes
from: the glowing hydrogen
gas that’s being lit up by the
when those first stars flooded the cosmos with energy, setting
off a chain of events that led to the formation of modern galaxies. young stars that are in these
building blocks. The question
Last year Dressler’s colleague Masami Ouchi found the king of
we are trying to get at is, as
the blobs: Nicknamed Himiko, it is 55,000 light-years in diameter,
you go fainter, how many more
making it the largest object ever seen so early in the universe. of them are there? It turns out
Dressler spoke with DISCOVER about what it all means. that the number of objects
goes up steeply: When you go
a factor of 10 fainter, you see
Why are you interested in Lyman-alpha objects. Out of all 100 times as many objects.
what happened 12 billion those things that Masami was
years ago? doing, this rather extraordinary When we study these early
Our research program started object stood out. objects, what do we learn?
with galaxies: Why are there We know a lot about our
so many different types, what What is Himiko? galaxy today—chemical abun-
are their histories, and how I don’t know. I don’t think we dance, how it has been built
did we get the structures we have a good explanation for up over time. There’s a “fossil
see today—spiral, elliptical, it—and that was what was record” in our galaxy of what
and so forth? Why are they interesting about it. It is a happened. But it would be hydrogen gas could exist.
so different? We have a very unique object in terms of size great to see a movie of what From that point it was electri-
tentative grasp on that. and output, which is not the was going on deep in the past. cally neutral, until something
way my scientific inclinations In astronomy, we can do that. came along to light it up.
How did your Carnegie col- tend to go. What we’ve really We can look back and observe People used to think, well,
league find Himiko? been trying to do is to find the the universe at that time. maybe quasars did it, but there
The technique by which we’re more typical galaxies from the just weren’t enough of them
seeing this is Lyman-alpha era about a billion years after How much do we know around. Then they said maybe
emission. The light comes out the Big Bang. To do that, we about conditions in the very it was young galaxies.
in the ultraviolet, then there’s have to tune up an instrument early universe?
this big redshift [as the light and expose it for 20 hours At the beginning there was so So now you think the first
is stretched by the expan- under extraordinary conditions. much energy that electrons galaxies sculpted the
sion of the universe], which My colleague Crystal Martin and protons went their own cosmos, paving the way for
puts it in the more detectable, and I are trying to push a factor way. Then, 400,000 years after more galaxies to evolve?
far-red part of the spectrum. of 10 times fainter than what the Big Bang, the universe We’ve now found about 50 of
Himiko came out of a survey of people had been doing. cooled to the point where these very, very faint building
blocks of galaxies. We have a
big enough sample to say we
text by FRED GUTERL photograph by SPENCER LOWELL know how common they are.

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It looks like there are enough
of them to explain why the uni-
verse went from being neutral
to being full of ionized gas.
What are you trying to
understand now about these
galactic building blocks?
We’re trying to figure out how
massive they are, how they
spin, what their structures and
compositions are, so we’ll
know how the first heavy ele-
ments started to come about.
And then we’ll start to under-
stand the crazy diversity of
modern galaxies?
Yes. The interaction among
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DV0110TALKI2A_WC 25
these building blocks deter-
mines what shape a galaxy
takes. The universe started off
smooth, and then it began to
get lumpy. Our best bet is that
in the places where the density
of the blobs is highest, they
merge together very early and
form stars more rapidly, creat-
ing elliptical galaxies. In the
places that are less dense the
building blocks take longer to
develop; those come together
later and make spirals.
What’s next—will you look
even further back in time?
No. You don’t really want to
look further. You want a more
complete picture of the aver-
age time, rather than always
going for the big, “Oh, I’ve
got the most distant object in
the universe.” That’s kind of
meaningless, actually.
Because not much was hap-
pening that early?
If you’ve got a picture of your
child at 6 months, you’re
not going to learn a lot from
another one from when she
was 5 months and 13 days.
What you want to see is when
things are changing. Astrono-
mers are always selling the idea
that we’ve pushed further than
ever before, but it’s a bit of a
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fraud. We’ve seen something,
but it’s very sketchy. What
we’re mostly aiming toward is
to get a picture of how ordinary
galaxies come about.
What’s next?
We have pushed Magellan
[the 6.5-meter telescope in
Chile] as much as we could.
I am working toward using
the James Webb Space
Telescope—the Hubble
replacement that should be
up by 2014—to look at the
formation of galaxies in much
greater detail. We’ll get a first
look at galaxies forming in the
first billion years.
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2010 | 25
11/12/09 9:01:47 PM
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·M E D I C I N E

6
When swine flu emerged
in Mexico last April, it was
dubbed a “killer virus”
because of its apparent high
mortality rate. By mid-June
the flu had spread to 73 other
SWINE FLU OUTBREAK
SWEEPS THE GLOBE

countries, infecting 30,000

people and prompting the
World Health Organization to
issue its highest warning, a
Phase 6 pandemic alert. In
the United States, concern
took off in late August, when
the President’s Council of
Advisors on Science and
Technology said the virus
could infect up to 150
million Americans and kill
30,000 to 90,000. And then, A Mexico City subway
on October 23, President in the midst of the H1N1
outbreak last May.
Obama declared swine flu a
national emergency, noting
that “the potential exists for demic. First, cases of swine for Disease Control and emergency, according to the
the pandemic to overburden flu broke out before the usual Prevention (CDC), says that CDC, and about 4,000 of
health-care resources in flu season; and second, a her group is preparing for the those people died. Each year
some localities.” disproportionate number of worst. “In certain situations seasonal flu kills approxi-
The current strain of swine young people were reported such as 1918, there was a mately 35,000 people in the
flu, formally known as the to be sickened by it. rather mild spring season of United States alone. Without
2009 H1N1 flu, is a mutated By September five pharma- disease followed by a much extensive immunization,
cousin of the 1918 Span- ceutical companies had prom- more severe fall wave,” she the H1N1 flu is on track to
ish flu, which affected both ised to produce 250 million says. “There’s a seasonality surpass that toll, says Dean
humans and pigs. That virus doses of 2009 H1N1 vaccines, component that caused the Blumberg, associate profes-
took 50 million to 100 million and experts assured the public virus to spread more rapidly sor of pediatric infectious
lives worldwide, according that these inoculations were and more deeply into the disease at the University of
to Jeffery Taubenberger, the safe. But as of the first week population.” California at Davis Children’s
pathologist who sequenced of November, only 26 million An estimated 22 mil- Hospital. Because this virus
its entire genome. doses had been distributed to lion American citizens were is so novel, few people
MARCOS FERRO/AURORA PHOTOS

Fears that this year’s virus
would behave like its 1918
relative were heightened
when two characteristics of
the new flu were noted as
similar to the earlier pan-
hospitals and doctors’ offices. infected with the new H1N1 are protected by preexist-
Nancy Cox, head of the virus in the months before ing immunity. “Pretty much
flu division at the Centers Obama declared the national everyone is going to get it,”
Blumberg says, “so we’re
expecting more deaths and
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Ô TECHNOLOGY
7 THE GRAPHENE
Graphene’s atom-thin sheets,
shown here in an artist’s
rendering, let electrons pass
through rapidly.
Under a transmission electron microscope it looks deceptively
simple: a grid of hexagons resembling a volleyball net or a section of
chicken wire. But graphene, a form of carbon that can be produced
in sheets only one atom thick, seems poised to shake up the world
of electronics. Within five years, it could begin powering faster and
better transistors, computer chips, and LCD screens, according to
researchers who are smitten with this new supermaterial.
Graphene’s standout trait is its uncanny facility with electrons,
which can travel much more quickly through it than they can
through silicon. As a result, graphene-based computer chips
could be thousands of times as efficient as existing ones. “What
limits conductivity in a normal material is that electrons will scat-
ter,” says Michael Strano, a chemical engineer at MIT. “But with
graphene the electrons can travel very long distances without
scattering. It’s like the thinnest, most stable electrical conducting
framework you can think of.”
In 2009 another MIT researcher, Tomas Palacios, devised a
graphene chip that doubles the frequency of an electromagnetic
JANNIK MEYER
signal. Using multiple chips could make the outgoing signal many
times higher in frequency than the original. Because frequency
determines the clock speed of the chip, boosting it enables faster
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REVOLUTION
transfer of data through the chip. Graphene’s extreme thinness
means that it is also practically transparent, making it ideal for
transmitting signals in devices containing solar cells or LEDs.
The big limitation of graphene is that it is not a true semicon-
ductor. Unlike silicon, it cannot be switched on and off to create
circuits, which will limit its use in electronics. “In mainstream
digital applications, you will not see graphene displace silicon,”
Columbia University electrical engineer Ken Shepard insists. But
other researchers are already expanding graphene’s capabilities.
In June materials scientist Feng Wang of the University of Califor-
nia at Berkeley announced a method to tune the material electri-
cally to give it switching properties. That would enable graphene
to form extremely small, fast transistors.
Even without switching, Strano thinks graphene will find many
uses—as a flexible conductor in thin-film batteries or roll-up LCD
screens, for instance. “I’m most excited about the applications
we have yet to discover,” he says. “Graphene is an out-of-the-box
material, so we shouldn’t try to hammer it into existing boxes.”
T E X T B Y E L I Z A B E T H S V O B O D A
11/12/09 9:21:44 PM
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Ç
ASTRONOMY

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EARTH-LIKE WORLDS
COME INTO VIEW
In the race to find planets around other stars, the grand
prize would be to find a world like Earth orbiting a star like
the sun—and astronomers closed in on that trophy in 2009.
The first known exoplanets were huge and gassy. Then in
February a European group led by Alain Léger of the Institut
d’Astrophysique Spatiale in Paris and Daniel Rouan of the
Paris Observatory used the Corot space observatory to find
a planet less than twice the diameter of Earth, the smallest
confirmed exoplanet ever seen.
Actually, “seen” is misleading. What Corot detected was the
subtle, repeated dimming of the star Corot-7, 500 light-years
away in the constellation Monoceros. This dimming, the team
concluded, was caused by a planet orbiting so that it passed
directly between the parent star and Earth, a so-called transit.
“They’ve gone to great lengths to rule out any other explana-
tions,” says David Charbonneau of the Harvard-Smithsonian
Center for Astrophysics, a friendly rival of the Corot scientists.
The amount of dimming—less than one-thirtieth of a percent
—tells the astronomers that their new world, provisionally
named Corot-7b, is about 15,000 miles wide. Its “year” is just
20.4 hours long because it orbits so close to its star, with day-
time temperatures nearing 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. By Sep-
tember, Didier Queloz of the Geneva Observatory had weighed
Corot-7b. Using the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet
Searcher, or HARPS, at the European Southern Observatory
in Chile, his team measured the planet’s gravitational influence
on its parent star. The verdict: The planet is five times the mass
of Earth and has about the same density, suggesting it is made
of rock. In raw form, the new planet resembles our own world.
Other enticing discoveries soon followed. Planet hunter
Michel Mayor of Geneva University trained HARPS on the near-
by star Gliese 581, 20 light-years away, and in April reported
that it, too, has a little planet, possibly smaller than Corot-7b.
The same set of observations indicated that another of Gliese
581’s planets—this one seven times the mass of Earth—orbits
at the right distance for liquid water, making it the first alien
world that could plausibly support life. In October the HARPS
scientists announced that about 40 percent of the sunlike stars
they have examined have small, potentially Earth-like com-
panions. Also that month, Queloz’s team described a second
super-Earth circling Corot-7. “Low-mass planets are every-
where, basically,” Mayor’s coworker Stephane Udry declared.
And the real jackpot may not be far off. In March NASA’s
Kepler satellite went into an unusual, Earth-trailing orbit looking
for transiting planets. Its telescope is bigger than Corot’s, its orbit
is more stable, and it is slated to scan 100,000 stars, while Corot
is limited to 12,000. “If other Earths are out there,” says Kepler
team member Charbonneau, “we’re going to find them.”
ESO/L. CALCADA

An artist’s vision of a
boiling lava sea covering
the rocky planet Corot-7b. T E X T B Y M I C H A E L D . L E M O N I C K

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2010 | 29
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p ENERGY How to Stash the C arb on

9
1. CAPTURE IT AT THE SOURCE
A coal-fired power plant in Spremberg, Germany, is using the
same carbon capture and storage method planned for Future-
Gen. Engineers are having no trouble capturing the carbon diox-
ide, but efforts to store it in underground rock formations in
eastern Germany have run into local opposition.
2. GRAB IT WITH ARTIFICIAL TREES
To corral widely dispersed CO2 emissions from cars, “artificial
trees”—towers filled with carbon-absorbing materials—could line
roadways, pulling the gas from the air and compressing it into
a storable form. Several companies, including Global Research
Technologies in Tucson, are testing prototypes.

EXPERIMENTAL
3. BURY IT UNDER THE SEA
Some research groups have tried fertilizing the ocean with
iron to encourage massive plankton blooms that suck carbon
dioxide from the air. When the plankton dies and sinks to the

POWER PLANT seafloor, it should bury the carbon, but early results have not
been impressive. Proposals to pump CO2 directly to the ocean
bottom also seem unlikely to move forward, as the piped-in

TAKES THE CO2 OUT carbon could have nasty environmental consequences.
4. TURN IT INTO CHARCOAL
Wood or other biomass heated slowly in a chamber without
oxygen will transform into charcoal that does not decompose
for thousands of years. In addition to locking away carbon, this
“biochar” makes a good fertilizer. Carbonscape in New Zealand
and a few other companies are now working on economical
biochar-producing ovens.
5. TURN IT INTO ROCK
Certain types of minerals naturally combine with carbon diox-
ide. In the right locations, CO2 injected into the ground at high
pressure would react with those minerals to form stable car-
bonate rock. This approach is currently being tested in Oman
and at other sites around the world.

into a near-liquid state, and for sequestering human-

Coal is a dirty business, one
of the leading sources of car-
bon emissions in the United
States. But coal is also a big
business, generating 51 per-
cent of the nation’s electricity.
With that in mind, in June the
Obama administration revived
FutureGen, an advanced-tech-
nology coal-fired power plant
axed by the previous adminis-
60 percent of its carbon diox-
ide emissions deep under-
ground, the 275-megawatt
FutureGen plant, to be built in
Mattoon, Illinois, seeks to show
that coal can be, if not exactly
clean, then at least cleaner.
Once FutureGen is up and
running—now scheduled to
happen in 2014—the carbon
dioxide gas it produces will
piped at least a mile down into
porous sandstone capped by
a layer of impermeable shale.
Engineers will essentially be
trying to duplicate the geologic
circumstances that trapped
natural gas deposits under-
ground for millions of years.
Energy Secretary Steven
Chu has called FutureGen “a
flagship facility” that will dem-
onstrate how to capture and
store carbon on a commercial
scale; that technology would
generated carbon (see above).
But FutureGen has drawn
criticism from left and right.
Some environmentalists say
America should shift from coal-
generated electricity entirely;
others believe the goal of cap-
turing 60 percent of emissions
is too modest. Meanwhile,
some fiscal conservatives
disapprove of spending so
much money (the Department
of Energy has committed
$1 billion) on an unproven
FRANS LANTING/CORBIS

tration in 2008. By burying be siphoned off, compressed allow us to rein in greenhouse- technology for an established
gas emissions while still burn- industry. Their nickname for
ing coal. The project could the behind-schedule and over-
T E X T B Y E L I Z A S T R I C K L A N D also help spur other proposals budget project: NeverGen.

30 | DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
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±I N T E R V I E W

1o Economist GEORGE LOEWENSTEIN

explains the psychology behind the
current financial meltdown—and how
we can overcome our dark side.

Classical economics is based on the premise that people act

rationally, making logical decisions about how and why they
spend their money. But a year that brought economic panic and
the worst downturn since the Great Depression showed how
wrong that assumption can be. Often we are self-defeating, irra-
tional, and just plain foolish. More complete explanations of why
deal with immediate threats.
It’s not very good at deal-
ing with gradually unfolding
threats, like inflating market
bubbles or global climate
change. The smiling Bernie
Madoff doesn’t seem scary,
business school; and oth-
ers, we scanned people’s
brains and saw that regions
responsible for feeling pain
activate when people confront
prices they feel are too high.
When we use a credit card, it
people act the way they do are provided by behavioral econom- even though he should. He’s anesthetizes the pain of pay-
ics, an emerging field that incorporates insights from cognitive giving impossible returns year ing because it doesn’t feel like
after year, but it’s not the kind we’re spending money. Anoth-
and social psychology and neuroscience. George Loewenstein,
of thing that triggers fear. er nasty feature of credit cards
Herbert A. Simon Professor of Economics and Psychology at is that it doesn’t feel like you
Carnegie Mellon University and a leader in this field, spoke to Why are some people far are taking on debt, because
DISCOVER about why smart people sometimes act so dumb. more likely than others to there’s always the possibility
buy into a bubble? of paying it off at the end of
Pessimists take longer to get the month. How many people
persuaded that there really is who end the year with $1,000
Is the central insight of housing prices would always a boom. Some sit out the of revolving debt on their card
behavioral economics that rise. That’s particularly amaz- whole boom-and-bust cycle would have agreed to take out
people don’t always act in ing because in the 1990s we and feel relieved at the end, a $1,000 loan to fund miscel-
their own best interest? had a stock market bubble and but others capitulate at a late laneous purchases? Very few.
Absolutely. Behavioral eco- bust, and during the bubble, stage, with results that rein-
nomics provides a framework commentators had been say- force their pessimism. Another Some say high executive pay
for explaining why people ing that the old rules of stock part of the answer lies in differ- is needed to stimulate top
behave in a self-destructive valuation don’t apply. Less ences in tastes for taking risks. performance, but you found
fashion. It’s more realistic than 10 years later, people Some people can’t sleep at something very different.
about human behavior. became convinced again night if they take on too much Our belief was that very high
that an asset—in this case, real estate debt. Others seem levels of executive compensa-
The economic collapse housing—would indefinitely go utterly undisturbed by financial tion couldn’t be justified on a
was in part precipitated by up in value, and commenta- risk or even thrive on it. motivational basis. We gave
people taking on mortgages tors were again saying the old subjects seven different tasks,
they couldn’t afford. They rules don’t apply. That tells you Why do people charge things some of which were simple
stood to lose a lot of money. about the failure to generalize. they can’t pay off? but effort-dependent, like
What makes people do that? Another part of the explana- Credit cards have pernicious adding strings of numbers. For
It points to a very important tion has to do with a kind of psychological properties. It mundane tasks, high incen-
property of the human brain: herd mentality. There is an doesn’t feel like you’re spend- tives motivate people in an
We are not dispassionate infor- instinctual feeling of safety in ing money. You’re just swiping almost unlimited fashion. But
mation processors. If we want numbers. the card; you’re not giving with tasks that require creative
to believe something, we’re anything up. In research with solutions, as well as with ath-
amazingly adept at persuading Why don’t we perceive these Stanford psychologist Brian letic endeavors, people actu-
ourselves that what we want to kinds of looming problems? Knutson; Scott Rick, now at ally started to do badly when
believe is true. People thought Our fear system evolved to the University of Michigan compensation was increased.
When stakes are high, the
brain tends to narrow its focus.
text by KATHLEEN MCGOWAN photograph by ETHAN HILL This impairs performance on

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the types of creative tasks that
involve expansive thinking,
such as drawing novel con-
nections between disparate
things. People can also
become too focused on how
much money they stand to
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DV0110TALKII2A_WC 33
gain or lose, to the detriment of
focusing on the task itself.
But shouldn’t we reward
ambition—the “greed is
good” argument?
We view greed as a form of
desperation. Hypermotivation,
we call it. Greed is actually
the antithesis of self-interest,
because you’re so motivated
to achieve some goal that you
do it at the expense of other
things that might be more
worldmags
important to you: values you
cherish or your own long-term
self-interest.
We think that the reason
is a phenomenon called loss
aversion. In a lot of competi-
tive situations, people look at
others whom they perceive
to be at a higher level, which
forms their reference. They
feel themselves to be in the
domain of losses, and they are
desperate to get out. Much
cheating, it seems, occurs
not because people just want
more but because they feel “in
a hole” that they can get out
of only by cheating.
How can we outwit our own
self-destructive tendencies?
In the last several years,
behavioral economics has
started to offer solutions for
a wide range of problems:
obesity, addiction, failure to
take medications, even global
climate change. People are
very shortsighted; they have
what behavioral economists
call “present bias prefer-
ence.” Nowadays there are
a lot of wellness programs in
which people are incentivized
to engage in exercise and
other healthy behaviors. Small
incentives can have a large
impact on behavior if they are
immediate, because they play
on present bias preferences.
Or take what is called the
default effect: People tend
to be lazy decision makers,
taking the path of least resis-
tance. And defaults are often
unhealthy: At McDonald’s, for
example, if you order a combo
meal, the default includes a
soda. We did field research at
a fast-food restaurant showing
that if you make the healthy
options just slightly more
convenient—for example, with
an “express menu” that has
healthy options but requires
turning the page to see the full
menu—you can get people
to eat more healthily. You can
use laziness to help people.
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2010 | 33
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MEDICINE || EVOLUTION || MIND || SPACE

11 The Age of
Genetic Medicine Begins
In 2009 gene therapy rebounded from years of high-
profile failures—including unexpected deaths and
cancers—to produce startling triumphs. By fixing
defects written into patients’ DNA, medical researchers
treated two serious genetic disorders. “At last we are
on the brink of fulfilling the promises that gene therapy
made two decades ago,” says geneticist Fabio Can-
dotti of the National Institutes of Health.
In February molecular biologist Alessandro Aiuti of
the San Raffaele Telethon Institute for Gene Therapy
in Milan reported that his team had cured nine of ten
infants born with bubble baby disease, a devastating
disorder caused by a single defective gene. Newborns
with the condition, also known as severe combined
immunodeficiency disease, lack a functioning immune
system. Aiuti and his team harvested stem cells from the
infants and then infected those cells with an engineered
virus carrying healthy copies of the missing gene. When
the modified stem cells were injected back into the
newborns, they spawned a normal immune system.
Candotti has reported similar success establishing a
functioning immune system in two bubble babies.
Just months earlier, molecular geneticist and physi-
cian Jean Bennett and her husband, retinal surgeon
Albert Maguire of the University of Pennsylvania School
of Medicine, reported that gene therapy had improved
vision in a teenage boy with Leber congenital amau-
rosis (LCA). A mutation in any of 13 genes causes this
rare condition, which progressively leads to blindness.
Bennett and her team injected a benign virus carrying a
corrected copy of the gene into the boy’s retina, where
it helped the eye make rods and cones. Even receiv-
ing only modest doses, other young patients given a
working version of the gene in one eye were also able
to see better. In a phase 1 clinical trial, published in The
Lancet, all the children involved gained enough vision
to walk independently. “The results are better than any-
thing I could have dreamed of,” Bennett says.
The remarkable turnaround in gene therapy is largely
due to scientists’ increasingly refined ability to engineer
the viruses used to deliver healthy genes to the cells
that need them. Using new viruses and better tech- Top: LCA eye prior
to therapy. Bottom:
niques, gene therapists have begun tackling cancer and
Healthy eye.
HIV. Clinical trials are under way on both. JILL NEIMARK

These sponges from

the Eocene may
resemble the earth’s
first animals.
12 Oldest Animal
Fossils Uncovered
The origin of animals has long perplexed scientists.
DNA studies of creatures living today suggest that
their common ancestor appeared nearly 800 million
years ago, yet the fossil record contains no clear
evidence of animals more than 555 million years
three miles beneath the deserts of Oman. Sponges
are the only organisms known to produce appre-
ciable amounts of this steroid, and geochemist Gor-
don Love of the University of California at Riverside
interprets the chemical signature as evidence that
spongelike animals had evolved by then.
Another team reported in Geology in May that
they had found meshlike patterns suggestive of
sponges in 850-million-year-old rocks. They turned

old. Two new discoveries are starting to resolve
that apparent conflict. Together they push the fossil
record of animals back another 300 million years.
In a study published in Nature in February,
researchers reported finding a steroid compound
(called 24-isopropylcholestane) in 675-million-year-
old stone cores, drilled from former seabeds up to
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: DR. JEAN BENNETT; NASA/JPL/UCLA; D. HURST/ALAMY; SINCLAIR STAMMERS/PHOTO RESEARCHERS
up in an ancient reef built by cyanobacteria, says
Fritz Neuweiler of Laval University in Quebec. The
earth’s early oceans initially contained little oxygen,
but cyanobacteria produce it as a by-product of
photosynthesis. “Here we have a local oxygenated
environment,” Neuweiler says, “and this would have
supported these early animals.” DOUGLAS FOX

13 Hope for
HIV Vaccine
An international team of
researchers announced in Sep-
tember that for the first time, an
AIDS vaccine has demonstrat-
ed some real ability to prevent
HIV infections in a large clinical
trial, reducing the odds of infec-
tion by about 31 percent.
The trial followed more than
16,000 people (who initially
tested HIV-free) for three and a
half years. They received either
a combination of two potential
vaccines or placebo shots. By
the end, 74 placebo recipients
had acquired HIV infections,
compared with 51 vaccinated
individuals. The trial report,
published in October, included
alternative analyses that put the
vaccine’s effectiveness slightly
lower, at around 26 percent,
leading some to question the
reliability of the results. The
researchers reply that all of the
analyses consistently support a
modest protective effect.
AIDS researcher Jay Levy at
the University of California at
San Francisco finds the results
encouraging, but notes that the
vaccines seemed to have no
effect on the amount of virus in
the bloodstream of people who
contracted HIV during the study.
Nelson Michael of the U.S.
Military HIV Research Program,
which helped run the trial, is
more optimistic: “We’ve shown
that this 26-year global effort
has not been in vain.” NAYANAH SIVA

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14 Intact
Tissue Found
in Dinosaur
When scientists uncovered a
68-million-year-old Tyranno-
saurus rex fossil in Montana
sandstone in 2000, they never
expected to find traces of
tissue. So when paleontolo-
gist Mary Schweitzer’s initial
analysis of the fossil showed
delicately preserved collagen
protein, skepticism reigned.
But in May, Schweitzer, of
North Carolina State Univer-
sity, replicated the results
and also announced a bigger
find: a collection of even
larger protein fragments
from an 80-million-year-old
duck-billed dinosaur called
Brachylophosaurus canaden-
sis. The fragments revealed
more evidence of collagen
The Moon:
and suggested the presence
of two proteins—laminin and
elastin—found in the blood
vessels of animals.
Cold, Wet, and
“This type of preservation
isn’t supposed to be pos-
sible,” Schweitzer says, “but
Breathing
here it is.” Her new discovery
It is our closest neighbor
addressed many issues raised
in space, yet the moon con-
by critics of the T. rex work.
tinues to surprise us as new
For instance, her team adopt-
lunar missions overturn old
ed painstaking tactics to avoid
ideas about Earth’s satellite.
contamination. In the lab, they
In October NASA inten-
used sterilized tools to sample
tionally crashed the 2.8-ton
the sandstone-encrusted
upper stage of a Centaur
thighbone, and specimens
rocket into a crater near the
were quickly sealed in jars.
lunar south pole. Four minutes
“Obtaining amino acid
later, the Lunar Crater Observa-
sequence data can show
tion and Sensing Spacecraft
where extinct animals fit in the
(LCROSS) followed, analyzing the
tree of life,” she says. “It’s a
dust kicked up by the impact. NASA
work in progress, but molecu-
anticipated a debris plume 30 miles
lar paleontology might show
high, which should have been visible
us how dinosaurs are related
from Earth with a 10-inch telescope. The
to each other and even provide
smashup proved more whimper than bang for
some physiological insights if
amateur observers, but LCROSS team members
we’re really lucky.” AMY BARTH
were thrilled. “We got wonderful measurements from
all phases of the impact: the flash, the ejecta plume, and the
resulting crater formed by Centaur,” says LCROSS principal
investigator Anthony Colaprete of NASA’s Ames Research

15 Model Solves
Fundamental Packing Problem
Center. He and colleagues are still analyzing the data
from ultraviolet, visual, and infrared spectroscopy
to measure the chemical composition of the lunar
material. “We’re looking for water vapor or ice, as
well as hydrocarbons and other volatiles,” he says.
The county-fair challenge of guessing how many gum balls are
The LCROSS results will flesh out the surprise
in a jar is far more than just a game for kids; understanding how
announcements in September that three other
objects pack into a particular volume is a fundamental problem
spacecraft—India’s Chandrayaan-1 and NASA’s
of physics and engineering. A team of physicists at New York
Deep Impact and Cassini—detected traces
University recently loosened the problem a bit, producing a simple
of water on the moon’s surface by studying
model that predicts the arrangement of randomly packed spherical
reflected infrared light from the sun. The water’s
particles, even when the objects are of different sizes.
origins are unclear. One possibility is that hydro-
Theorists had previously calculated that each particle touches
gen ions from the solar wind bond with oxygen
an average of six neighbors, and that packed spheres of uniform
in the lunar soil, says University of Maryland
size fill about 64 percent of the total available space. Jasna Brujic
astronomer Jessica Sunshine, deputy principal
and colleagues experimentally verified both of those claims using a
investigator on Deep Impact. Results like these belie
three-dimensional microscope—which examines many horizontal
the moon’s image as an inert rock, Colaprete says. “It
layers of a sample and then stacks those images to create a 3-D
is an active, breathing body.”
image—to analyze oil droplets tightly packed in water. The
The moon might have more water deposited by icy
physicists also studied how changing the mix of droplet
comets landing in cold, permanently shadowed craters
sizes affects their arrangement.
at the south pole. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO),
“If you give us the distribution of particle sizes, we
circling the moon at an altitude of 31 miles, recently sent back
can tell you about their geometry,” Brujic says. The
the first global temperature maps of the surface (at right). Some
research, published in Nature in July, could inspire bet-
of those craters dip to around –400 degrees Fahrenheit, the coldest
ter ways to stock vending machines, prepare products
places ever measured in the solar system. LRO’s neutron detector
for shipping, grind drugs for pills, and extract petro-
suggests the presence of water in deep freeze there. The orbiter is also
leum from porous rocks. But so far Brujic has modeled
measuring radiation, looking for good spots for future exploration, and
only spheres; contestants dealing with gumdrops or
mapping the moon’s topography to 100-meter resolution. JENNIFER BARONE
M&M’s will have to wait for future studies. STEPHEN ORNES

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MEDICINE || MIND || TECHNOLOGY

17 The
Common
18 Rise of the Mind Readers
Magnetic resonance imaging, or silence between tracks, indicat- University College London, who
Cold Is MRI, has become a powerful tool ing anticipation. When we hear scanned subjects who were navi-
Decoded for evaluating brain anatomy, but a
newer incarnation of the technol-
music we do not know, our brains
are relatively inactive because
gating a virtual reality simulation.
Just from the pattern of activity in
If knowing your enemy
ogy called fMRI (the f stands for we cannot anticipate the song. the hippocampus—a part of the
is half the battle, we may
functional ) can probe even more The prefrontal cortex, premotor brain instrumental to our ability to
yet defeat the common
deeply. In studies published over cortex, and basal ganglia, which navigate—the researchers could
cold. A paper published
the past year, neuroscientists signal the body to act and move, determine where each subject
last April in Science
have shown that fMRI can peel seem to direct this response. was located within the simula-
detailed how geneticists
away the secrets of emotion and tion. “Different spatial positions
sequenced the RNA
thought; in fact, some of their find- w Other fMRI studies show how are associated with different pat-
from 100 strains of
ings are almost like mind reading. the brain discerns true state- terns of activity in the hippocam-
rhinovirus—all the known
ments from false ones. According pus,” Maguire says. JANE BOSVELD
types of the leading
w Using fMRI, New York Uni- to researchers at the University
cause of the cold.
versity neuroscientist Elizabeth of Lisbon and at Vita-Salute in
Pulmonologist
Phelps has identified two brain Milan, false statements activate a
Stephen Liggett of the
regions—the amygdala and the section of the brain’s frontal polar
University of Maryland
posterior cingulate cortex, asso- cortex, which is related to prob-
School of Medicine
ciated with emotional learning lem solving. True statements trig-
says his team found
and decision making—that are ger the left inferior parietal cortex
regions of the genome
crucial in forming first impres- and the caudate nucleus, areas of
that are similar across
sions. “Even when we only briefly the brain related to memory.
all strains. Those
encounter others, these regions
sequences, presumably
are activated,” Phelps says. w The work closest to mind
essential to survival, are
reading comes from Demis Has-
prime targets for new
w At Georgetown University sabis and Eleanor Maguire at
drugs. Equally notable
Medical Center, a team used fMRI
are the bits of RNA
to study how we mentally encode
that differ, which may
music. When we hear a sequence
explain why some bugs

3D4MEDICAL.COM
of familiar songs, our brains show
are nastier than others.
high levels of activity during the
Rhinoviruses can
instigate asthma or
trigger severe wheezing
episodes in asthmatics,

but it is unclear whether
only certain strains of the
virus are to blame. Look-
ing at large numbers of
rhinovirus genomes may
provide answers. “Just
saying it’s rhinovirus is
not sufficient, because
there is so much diver-
sity,” Liggett says.
And don’t throw out
your tissues just yet: No
one knows how to defeat
any of the strains, and
Liggett’s group believes
there are many more to
be identified. The team
is now sequencing 3,000
samples collected from
patients at the University
of Wisconsin at Madison.
MEGAN TALKINGTON
19
New Battery Tech
Could Transform the Car
Last year the car battery turned glamorous: Hybrid
hysteria invigorated the faltering auto industry, and
General Motors touted its upcoming plug-in hybrid,
the Chevy Volt, at every opportunity. For decades
researchers have labored to make batteries smaller,
cheaper, and more efficient. At last some of those proj-
ects are yielding encouraging results.
The latest electric vehicles use lithium-ion batter-
ies, in which lithium ions move from anode to cathode
(negative to positive), transforming chemical energy
into electric current. These batteries are smaller, light-
er, and more robust than their nickel-based or lead-
acid predecessors. IBM announced in June that it is
pursuing a new kind of lithium battery that uses the
surrounding air as a cathode, making it even lighter
and more compact than existing designs.
Traditional lead-acid batteries (like the one that starts
your car) produce energy for as little as one-tenth the
cost of lithium batteries, but they wear out more quickly
and are heavy. Blended battery packs, pioneered this
year by Indy Power Systems of Noblesville, Indiana,
strike a balance. Software switches between lead-acid
and lithium-ion batteries, offering a transitional technol-
ogy until lithium energy storage gets cheaper.
Engineers are also finding ways to shorten recharg-
ing times. In March an MIT team unveiled technol-
ogy that could theoretically charge an electric car in
five minutes rather than the eight hours that is typi-
cal today. MIT’s battery contains a vast number of
microscopic particles that have a lithium center and a
glassy phosphate coating. The coating allows lithium
ions, which travel quickly in the core of the battery
but slowly at the surface, to maintain their speed and
to be shed quickly. “The coating allows the lithium to
get to the right place on the phosphate very fast,”
says Gerbrand Ceder of the MIT team. “We fixed the
bottleneck at the surface.” One company has already
licensed the technology. JOCELYN RICE

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© 2008 JupiterImages Corporation.

How Has Christianity Changed over 2,000 Years?
In the first centuries after Christ, there was no “official” New Tes- Lost Christianities: Christian Scriptures
tament. Instead, early Christians read and fervently followed a
wide variety of scriptures—many more than we have today.
and the Battles over Authentication
Taught by Professor Bart D. Ehrman,
Relying on these writings, Christians held beliefs that today would The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

be considered bizarre. Some believed that there were 2, 12, or as Lecture Titles
many as 30 gods. Some thought that a malicious deity, rather than 1. The Diversity of Early Christianity 13. The Acts of John
the true God, created the world. Some maintained that Christ’s 2. Christians Who Would Be Jews 14. The Acts of Thomas
3. Christians Who Refuse To Be Jews 15. The Acts of Paul and Thecla
death and resurrection had nothing to do with salvation while oth- 4. Early Gnostic Christianity— 16. Forgeries in the Name of Paul
ers insisted that Christ never really died at all. Our Sources 17. The Epistle of Barnabas
5. Early Christian Gnosticism— 18. The Apocalypse of Peter
What did these “other” scriptures say? Do they exist today? How An Overview 19. The Rise of Early
could such outlandish ideas ever be considered Christian? If such 6. The Gnostic Gospel of Truth Christian Orthodoxy
7. Gnostics Explain Themselves 20. Beginnings of the Canon
beliefs were once common, why do they no longer exist? These 8. The Coptic Gospel of Thomas 21. Formation of the New
are just a few of the many provocative questions that arise from 9. Thomas’ Gnostic Teachings Testament Canon
10. Infancy Gospels 22. Interpretation of Scripture
Lost Christianities: Christian Scriptures and the Battles over
11. The Gospel of Peter 23. Orthodox Corruption of Scripture
Authentication, an insightful 24-lecture course taught by Pro- 12. The Secret Gospel of Mark 24. Early Christian Creeds
fessor Bart D. Ehrman, the Chair of the Department of Religious
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author and editor of 17 books, including The New York Times best-
seller Misquoting Jesus.
Offer Expires Friday, February 12, 2010
This course is one of The Great Courses®, a noncredit, recorded Lost Christianities: Christian Scriptures
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MIND || ASTRONOMY || ENVIRONMENT || TECHNOLOGY || ANTHROPOLOGY || BIOLOGY
20 Can a
Shock to the
Brain Cure
Depression?
For years, deep-brain stimulation—
in which a neurosurgeon drills a hole
in the skull and inserts an electrode
far into a patient’s brain tissue—was
considered a radical treatment,
reserved for the most severe cases
of Parkinson’s disease. Now neurol-
ogists are exploring the treatment for
disorders ranging from depression to
Alzheimer’s disease.
In 2009 two clinical trials began
testing deep-brain stimulation
(DBS) to ease intractable depres-
sion. The process was given a green
light by the Food and Drug Admin-
istration to treat the worst cases of
obsessive-compulsive disorder after
a small pilot study showed promis-
ing results. Mount Sinai School of
Medicine neurologist Giulio Pasinetti
is in the early stages of testing DBS
for Alzheimer’s disease, and neuro-
surgeon Bomin Sun of the Center of
Functional Neurosurgery at Shanghai
Jiao Tong University is harnessing it
to treat anorexia.
Across a range of disorders,
deep-brain stimulation works much
the same way: A pacemaker-like
device in the chest transmits a signal
to the implanted electrode via wires
that run underneath the scalp. The
device is thought to modulate elec-
trical activity in the circuitry of the
dysfunctional brain, explains Oxford
University neurosurgeon Tipu Aziz,
who is exploring DBS as a treatment
for cluster headaches.
The new studies build on work by
Emory University neurologist Helen
Mayberg. In 2005 she showed
that direct modulation of specific
brain circuits could help severely
depressed patients who had not
responded to other treatments. “The
concept of tuning brain circuits is a
new strategy,” she says. Neuroimag-
ing can pinpoint regions of dysfunc-
tional brain activity, making it pos-
sible to understand the underlying
biology of a disorder and correct
abnormal rhythms of the brain.
K ATHLEEN MCGOWAN
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21
ogy.” But the search is on. In 2011 NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory will touch
down to sniff out evidence for methane, other organics, and life.
22 Clear-
Cutting Has a
High Cost
For people living in poverty
in the Amazon, cutting down
the rain forest often appears
to be the only way to thrive
economically—first by selling
the lumber, later by farming and
ranching on the land. A study
published in Science in June
indicates otherwise. Despite
gaining some temporary bene-
fits, communities that clear-cut
their forests end up no better
off than those who do not.
Ana Rodrigues of the
Centre for Functional and
Evolutionary Ecology in
France and her colleagues
found that Amazonian towns
in the midst of a deforestation
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Fresh Hints of Life on Mars
For scientists hunting for life on Mars, the new buzzword is
methane. In 2003 a group studying the Red Planet saw the spec-
tral signal of methane gas, often a sign of biological activity on
Earth. Since then, Michael Mumma, director of NASA’s God-
dard Center for Astrobiology, has monitored Mars closely.
In January he announced his results: Broad plumes of
methane emanate from the planet’s surface, “funda-
mentally changing our understanding of Mars.”
To track the methane, Mumma dispatched
observers to NASA’s InfraRed Telescope Facility
and the W. M. Keck Observatory, both in Hawaii.
The astronomers expected to find the gas spread
uniformly. Instead they detected localized clouds
that appeared only at certain times—once in
2003 and again in 2005, during the Martian
northern summer and southern spring. “We have
found plumes that exist only in warmer periods,
when methane is released along with water,”
says physicist Robert Novak of Iona College in New
Rochelle, New York. The variability of the methane
suggests that the gas may be spewed by an ongoing
geologic process like volcanism, or possibly through the
metabolic activity of microbes. If underground life is the
source, methane might be released during the warmer months
as the ice melts. “If life existed on Mars, it would break down
chemically and methane would be a product,” Novak says.
Mumma remains cautious: “We wouldn’t dare say we’ve detected biol-
HEATHER MAYER
binge initially see higher life
expectancies, literacy rates,
and incomes. But once the
local forest is gone, income
from timber typically dries up,
erty, and contributes to global
warming by eliminating trees
that would absorb and store
carbon dioxide. “The challenge
now is to create a development
the researchers believe; many path that is win-win-win.” One
farms and cattle ranches are possibility, Rodrigues suggests,
abandoned after a few years could be to create a provision in
because the nutrient-poor soil the next international climate-
rapidly becomes depleted. change treaty requiring wealthy
“The current development countries with high carbon
strategy results in a lose-lose- emissions to pay Brazilians for
lose situation,” Rodrigues the environmental benefits of
says. It destroys the rain forest keeping their forests standing.
habitat, fails to alleviate pov- ELIZA STRICKLAND
11/9/09 12:49:12 PM
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23 Computer Learns to Reason
Like Isaac Newton
Describing the basic laws of physics occupied Sir Isaac Newton for decades.
In April scientists unveiled a computer program that can analyze data and
independently derive those fundamental physical laws within a matter of hours.
This program could relieve major logjams in scientific research. Modern instru-
ments like space observatories, particle colliders, and gene chips produce vast
amounts of data, and mining that data is a slow, laborious process. Smart soft-
ware—a synthetic scientist, in essence—could greatly speed it up.
Cornell University roboticist Hod Lipson and his Ph.D. student Michael
Schmidt developed their system to analyze data from the kinds of mechanics
experiments that college students encounter in introductory physics courses:
observing the motion of a swinging pendulum or of two weights bouncing on
connected springs, for instance. An automatic camera fed data directly to
their computer program, which then tried millions of mathematical expres-
sions to identify which ones held true from one experiment to the next. Using
an evolutionary algorithm, the program randomly varied the winning equations
to match the data more closely. In this way it “discovered” a handful of natural
laws, including conservation of energy and momentum. Complex experiments
required as much as 40 hours, simple ones as little as 10 minutes.
The Cornell program “won’t replace scientists anytime soon,” Schmidt says.
“But it will let them look in a more efficient way at what might be interesting.” Gene
chips, for instance, can measure the expression of thousands of genes at a time,
but the important question is how one gene regulates others within that incred-
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: TRENT SCHINDLER/NASA; TYLER BOLEY/GETTY IMAGES; MASTERFILE; RICARDO FUNARI/BRAZILPHOTOS/PHOTOSHELTER
Skip a Meal,
Extend Your Life?
To stave off aging, Americans spend billions of dollars every
year on supplements, gyms, even therapists. But a report
released in July suggests that the secret to a longer life may
simply involve a new twist on an old adage: Watch what you eat.
A study of adult rhesus macaques showed that the mon-
keys were one-third as likely to die from age-related diseases
if they consumed 30 percent fewer calories than they did
in their regular diet. Previous, well-publicized research had
shown that restricting calories can increase the life span of
creatures ranging from fruit flies to dogs, for reasons still
unclear. But the latest trial, led by geriatrics expert Richard
Weindruch at the Wisconsin National Primate Research Cen-
ter and published in Science, is the first to show that caloric
restriction can improve survival in primates.
This kind of research takes enormous patience. Weindruch
has spent 20 years studying his monkeys. In that time, the dieting
ones have shown reductions in diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular
disease, and even brain atrophy. They are also visibly fluffier and
sturdier compared with their fully fed counterparts. “Slowing the
aging process through calorie restriction spills over to primates
and probably people,” Weindruch says.
Pharmaceutical companies are
now seeking a drug that mim-
ics the benefits of a restrictive
diet without the sacrifice. In
July an independent team

ibly complex web of relationships. Smart software could rapidly flag interesting reported in Nature that rapa-
patterns—such as the way that levels of one protein depend on six others—so that mycin, an immune-suppress-
researchers could then follow up with targeted experiments. DOUGLAS FOX ing drug, increases longevity
in elderly mice by up to 38
percent. At the Jackson Labo-
ratory in Maine, gerontologist

24
World’s
First Grain Silos
Discovered in
Jordan
In June archaeologist Ian Kuijt at the
University of Notre Dame and colleagues
reported that they had uncovered the
world’s earliest known granaries, locat-
ed at the Dhra archaeological site on the
shore of the Dead Sea in Jordan. In a
paper published in Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, the team
describes food storage structures dating
back 11,000 years, a millennium before
humans were thought to have domesti-
cated crops. Analysis of grains from the
site suggests that settlers there stored a
mix of wild and cultivated barley, along
with an early variety of wheat.
“The surprise is not only that they were
storing food but that they were storing it
in such a sophisticated way,” Kuijt says.
The granary floors at Dhra were elevated,
most likely to keep out mice and to pre-
vent spoilage from dampness; they were
also slightly sloped, perhaps for drain-
age. By providing a buffer against famine
and allowing larger groups of people to
settle together, these storehouses may
have fostered the cultural transition from
bands of hunter-gatherers to complex,
cohesive societies.
“Stored food can be used as a form
of social currency,” Kuijt notes. “It liter-
ally changes everything.” LINDSEY KONKEL
David Harrison and his team
chose to test rapamycin,
which is already approved
for use in procedures such
as kidney transplants,
because previous
research showed that the
drug increases the life span of
flies and may reduce cancer in
mammals. “We’re not claiming
to achieve immortality,” Har-
rison says, “but rapamycin is a
step toward expanding healthy
life span by about 10 years.”
AMY BARTH

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26 J. CRAIG VENTER on biology’s next leap:

digitally designed life-forms that could
produce novel drugs, renewable fuels,
and plentiful food for tomorrow’s world.

J. Craig Venter keeps riding the cusp of each new wave in biol-
ogy. When researchers started analyzing genes, he launched
the Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR), decoding the
genome of a bacterium for the first time in 1992. When the
used, so we have defined
a separate field that we call
synthetic genomics—the
digitization of biology using
only DNA and RNA. You start
The initial challenge there
was straightforward: Could
we construct pieces of DNA
large enough to make up
a chromosome? When we
government announced its plan to map the human genome, by sequencing genomes and looked in the literature, the
he claimed he would do it first—and then he delivered results putting their digital code into answer was no. DNA syn-
in 2001, years ahead of schedule. Armed with a deep under- a computer. Then you use thesizers, which have been
standing of how DNA works, Venter is now moving on to an the computer to take that around for 30 years, made
information and design new only short pieces. That was
even more extraordinary project. Starting with the stunning
life-forms. the basis of all the work we’d
genetic diversity that exists in the wild, he is aiming to build done in DNA sequencing.
custom-designed organisms that could produce clean ener- How do you build a life- When you get beyond 20 or
gy, help feed the planet, and treat cancer. Venter has already form? Throw in some mito- 30 nucleotides [the “letters”
transferred the genome of one species into the cell body of chondria here and some of DNA—each gene is made
another. This past year he reached a major milestone, using ribosomes there, surround of hundreds or thousands of
it all with a membrane— nucleotides], the error rate
the machinery of yeast to manufacture a genome from scratch.
and voilà? gets larger and larger.
When he combines the steps—perhaps next year—he will We started down that road,
have crafted a truly synthetic organism. Senior editor Pamela but now we are coming from So making larger sections
Weintraub discussed the implications of these efforts with the other end. We’re starting of DNA required a different
Venter in DISCOVER’s editorial offices. with the accomplishments of approach?
three and a half billion years Right. In 2003 we made our
of evolution by using what first synthetic virus, and it
we call the software of life: was 100 percent accurate.
Here you are talking about in reductionist biology— DNA. Our software builds We did it by taking viral DNA
constructing life, but you getting down to the genetic its own hardware. By writing and putting it in a cell, in
started out in deconstruc- code, interpreting what it new software, we can come this case E. coli. The E. coli
tion: charting the human meant, including all 6 billion up with totally new species. was able to read the genetic
genome, piece by piece. letters of my own genome. It would be as if once you code and make proteins that
Actually, I started out smaller, Only by understanding things put new software in your self-assembled to form the
studying the adrenaline at that level can we turn computer, somehow a whole virus. At that point we knew
receptor. I was looking at one around and go the other way. new machine would material- we could accurately make
protein and its single gene for ize. We’re software engineers DNA pieces of 5,000 base
a decade. Then, in the late In your latest work you are rather than construction pairs, the size of the small
1980s, I was drawn to the trying to create “synthetic workers. viruses. The goal was to make
idea of the whole genome, life.” What is that? a 600,000-base-pair bacterial
and I stopped everything It’s a catchy phrase that But the DNA software works chromosome. We thought
and switched my lab over. I people have begun using to only if you can use it to piece we could do that by putting
had the first automatic DNA replace “molecular biology.” together an actual genome serial pieces together, but
sequencer. It was the ultimate The term has been over- outside the machine, right? solving the chemistry was a
huge challenge. We exhaust-
ed the genetics of E. coli and
text by PAMELA WEINTRAUB photography by MACKENZIE STROH found we could grow these

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2010 | 41
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large pieces of synthetic DNA
only by harnessing yeast.
What made you realize that
yeast could help you?
We’d been studying Deinococ-
cus radiodurans, the Conan
the Barbarian of bacteria. You
can expose it to more than
3 million rads of radiation and
it won’t be killed. Its chromo-
somes get blown apart into
hundreds of small pieces, but
then over 12 or 24 hours it
reassembles its DNA exactly
as it was before. We were
trying to capture that system
when we discovered that yeast
does the same thing, only not
with radiation: Yeast can take
the pieces of DNA that we
make and do the assembly
work for us.
Last August you reported
cloning the entire genome
of a bacterium, Mycoplasma
mycoides. What’s next?
Now we add the yeast centro-
mere [the section of yeast DNA
involved in reconstruction]
to the DNA of the organisms
we are synthesizing. It’s like a
jigsaw puzzle. We throw in the
pieces and the yeast compo-
nent automatically assembles
them the right way. It thinks it’s
just assembling and repairing
one of its own chromosomes.
Then you have to boot up
the genome in a living cell to
generate the hardware, the
life-form itself. How will you
do that?
In one of our most important
experiments, we took the DNA
from one bacterial cell and
treated it with harsh enzymes
to destroy any proteins. We
found that if we transplanted
that naked DNA into another
bacterial species, along with
associated restriction enzymes
42 | DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
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DV0110TALKIII1A_WC 42
[molecular scissors that cut
DNA in specific places], the
cell’s original DNA would be
destroyed. The transplanted
DNA would take over instead.
So now we had the cell of one
species containing the DNA
of another species. In a short
time, all the original proteins
disappeared, and we ended
up with a cell that had totally
transformed from one species
into another.
So you have transplanted
a natural genome, and you
have created a synthetic
one. How close are you
to combining these steps,
transferring a synthetic
genome so it takes over a
foreign cell?
I now joke that I predict it’s
going to happen this year,
but I’ve done that for the last
two years. It’s a technicality
in one respect because what
we’re showing is that DNA
is DNA. But truly being able
to make a working synthetic
genome—I think it’s a proof
that’s important.
Once we have the power to
create new life-forms, how
will we benefit?
We could synthesize cells that
use carbon dioxide and make
other things from it. If this desk
and that plastic chair protector
were made from CO2, it would
solve the problem of how to
sequester CO2 from the atmo-
sphere and would totally solve
the question of paper versus
plastic. You’d absolutely want
plastic bags if they could be
made from carbon dioxide and
not from oil.
What else could we do?
We could solve the problem of
fuel production. In theory, we
could replace fuel that comes
out of the ground with things
made from carbon dioxide on
a new scale. We could make
small-scale microbial fuel cells
that use human waste to make
drinking water, electricity, or
both. Could algae be used for
food? Imagine using algae to
make artificial steaks. Look at
all the bacteria in the oceans;
they have far more sophisticat-
ed chemicals than our chem-
istry industry can produce. A
lot of these are antibacterial or
antiviral compounds, because
that’s how bacteria protect
themselves in the environment.
If we’re ever going to have a
chance of using these com-
pounds, we’re going to have to
make them synthetically.
What about safeguards and
risks? As with computer
hacking, some people are
itching to do these “bio-
logical hacking” experiments
with synthetic life in their
basements and backyards.
You can buy a DNA synthe-
sizer off eBay, and an enter-
prising person could build a
DNA synthesizer from plans
they can get off the Internet.
We don’t try to downplay the
risk. Because these tools are
so powerful, somebody could,
just by ordering a handful of
chemicals, pretty cheaply
make viruses that could cause
a lot of damage or death to a
large number of people. We
don’t want kids trying to be the
first one on their block to build
a virus, so I think there should
be laws for simple screening.
The synthetic DNA companies
that make these products
should be required to screen
them against a list of infectious
agents. It would be easy to
screen someone trying to copy
Ebola, for example. A lot of
the companies do it voluntarily
now, but they don’t all do it,
and on a global basis they
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definitely don’t all do it. Maybe
we can’t prevent somebody
really dedicated to doing harm,
but we can prevent the frivo-
lous uses of this technology.
Could synthetic biol-
ogy extend all the way to
humans? Could we use the
technology to make better
versions of ourselves?
We have no clue of how to do
it now. We’re still struggling
with the smallest bacterial
cell, in which we don’t know
what even one-fifth of the
genes do. We do not have
the computing power on the
planet to make a synthetic
human genome. We don’t
have any way of collecting the
data to do it right now. So the
notion of trying to change our
genome, I find at this stage
of our knowledge almost an
immoral discussion. It would
have to be blind human
experimentation, not caring
what the outcome would be.
But one day we’ll know
more—what then?
History will view these first
synthetic genomes as a bright
dividing line, just like the line
before and after the reading
of the genetic code. Through
these experiments we have
been able to write the genetic
code while we’re continuing to
read it more and more quickly.
Advances in biology should
continue at a phenomenal,
exponential pace. We could
learn more next year than we
learned in the entire prior his-
tory of science. Twenty years
from now, the things we’re
doing now will look frighten-
ingly primitive. My view of
humanity is that we will find
it irresistible to try to use
these technologies to change
ourselves. I confess, I think
we’ll do it, but perhaps not we
ourselves.
11/5/09 8:27:46 PM
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‘‘
‘‘ History will view these first synthetic
genomes as a bright dividing line, just like the line before
and after the reading of the genetic code.

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BIOLOGY || SPACE || MIND || ENVIRONMENT || MEDICINE
27
Genetic
Disease Cured
With Two Moms
Mitochondria are the powerhouses
that provide our bodies’ cells with
28Mercury’s
the energy they need to function.
So when mitochondrial genes go
awry, the result is hereditary disor-
ders that wreak havoc on organs
with high energy requirements, like
the brain and the heart. In Septem-
ber, researchers announced that
they had demonstrated a way to
replace defective mitochondria with
healthy ones. Moreover, they were
able to perform the repair before an
egg cell was even fertilized.
Geneticist Shoukhrat Mitalipov of
Oregon Health and Science Univer-
sity and his team took the nucleus
out of an egg from a macaque
monkey, removing almost all of the
genetic material but leaving the mi-
tochondria and their DNA. The re-
searchers then injected the nucleus
of an egg from a second macaque,
fertilized the cell with sperm, and
implanted it in the second monkey’s
womb. The technique has yielded
four healthy babies. The same
procedure could be used to trans-
plant DNA from a human egg with
mitochondrial disorders into one
with healthy mitochondria.
“This offers real treatment for
many diseases,” Mitalipov says.
“And not in 20 years. It can be
used now to prevent thousands of
birth defects.” The process would
yield a baby with two biological
mothers, raising prickly legal and
ethical questions. But Mitalipov
points out that only 37 mitochon-
drial genes would be replaced; the
25,000 nuclear genes that make
up an embryo’s DNA and define all
of a person’s external traits would
remain unchanged. AMY BARTH
A mitochondrion
44 | DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
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29
Probe Shows Another Baby
Boom Hits
Rich Nations
Population dynamics are
Hidden Face m o re c o m p l e x t h a n w e
thought. Fertility rates generally
decline as development rises,
and this has indeed been hap-
Three preliminary flybys of Mercury by NASA’s Mes-
pening in most industrialized
senger spacecraft have given scientists a vast amount
nations. Birthrates in Italy, Ger-
of new information about the solar system’s small-
many, and Japan, for instance,
est, hottest planet. The only other spacecraft to visit
have dipped to 1.3 children
Mercury—Mariner 10, which swung past in 1974 and
or fewer per woman. But
1975—left nearly half of the surface unseen. Messenger’s
recently a team of sociologists
new maps fill in most of the gaps and show that about 40
in the United States and Italy
percent of the landscape has been shaped by volcanism,
revealed a twist in this pattern.
indicating widespread geologic activity in Mercury’s past.
When development—mea-
Peering down into impact craters, the probe’s cameras
sured by income, education,
have seen evidence that the planet was shaped by sev-
and life span—improves past
eral massive floods of lava billions of years ago.
a certain point, they find, fer-
The most recent flyby, this past September, also
tility picks up again. The study
clarified why Mercury still has a slight atmosphere even
was published in August in the
though its gravity is too weak to maintain one for long.
journal Nature.
THIS PAGE, FROM LEFT: PROFESSORS PIETRO M. MOTTA & TOMONORI NAGURO/PHOTO RESEARCHERS; NASA. OPPOSITE, FROM TOP: MICHAEL MELFORD/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC; MASTERFILE
Powerful solar winds press through Mercury’s magnetic
The anticipated boost in fer-
field to blast away material from the planet’s surface.
tility rates is not large enough
That material replenishes the atmosphere as it continu-
to alter projections that the
ously drifts away into space. Sodium is prominent in
global population will level
the atmosphere at the poles (where the solar wind pen-
off by midcentury, says study
etrates most easily), suggesting that the surface there
coauthor Hans-Peter Kohler,
contains sodium-rich rocks. Nearer the equator calcium
a sociologist at the University
predominates, and magnesium is everywhere.
of Pennsylvania. In fact, birth-
All of this is just a preview of the full Messenger mis-
rates in most highly developed
sion that begins in March 2011, when the spacecraft
countries are still too low to
will settle into orbit for at least a year of continuous,
maintain the national popula-
close-up observations. At that point, the trickle of data
tion. (The United States is an
on Mercury will become a flood. “It has been wonder-
exception, with fertility rates
ful,” says principal investigator Sean Solomon of the
near the replacement level of
Carnegie Institution of Washington, “but this is just
2.1 births per woman.) But
the beginning.” MICHAEL D . LEMONICK
the new analysis may provide
some relief for nations that
fear they soon will not have
enough middle-aged workers
to support their growing elderly
population.
The researchers are now
investigating why a wide
range of developed coun-
tries, despite their differing
social structures, appear to
be experiencing a similar and
unexpected uptick in birth-
rates. “There is clearly not a
one-size-fits-all set of institu-
tions and policies that facili-
Sunbaked Mercury, captured by Messenger
during the spacecraft’s September flyby, reveals tate higher fertility,” Kohler
previously unseen craters and lava flows. says. MEGAN TALKINGTON
11/9/09 12:49:16 PM
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30 Hunters
Accelerate the
Pace of Evolution
Humans are powerful agents of evolu-
tionary change: Wild animals and plants
that are hunted or harvested evolve three
times as quickly as they would naturally,
according to a study from the University
of California at Santa Cruz. In our quest
to bag the biggest and the best, we intro-
duce selective pressures that favor less
desirable creatures, such as those with
smaller bodies or less majestic horns.
Hunting also gives a competitive advan-
tage to animals that have babies when
they are younger, before they become
tempting targets for humans.
bighorn sheep, caribou, marine inver-
tebrates, and two plants. (“Hunters
also want the biggest ginseng,” Dari-
mont says.) Animals that are routinely
subject to pursuit are, on average, 20
percent smaller and reproduce at a
25 percent younger age than what would
be expected without human influence,
the researchers determined. Predation
is not the only way that people affect
populations. Creatures that are exposed
to environmental influences like pollution
also experience accelerated evolution,
although the effect is less dramatic.
The resulting changes have ripple
effects, Darimont notes. Smaller and
earlier breeders often produce fewer
offspring, for instance. “Size really
matters,” he says. “If a harvested ani-

2 Fake DNA
A team led by biologist Chris Dari- mal keeps shrinking, it may no longer

3Fools
mont combed through data on dozens be prey to its predator. The whole food
of species—predominantly fish but also web can be altered.” AMY BARTH

31 Sun’s Changes Have Surprise

Crime Lab
DNA evidence has become a stan-
Effects on Earth’s Weather dard forensic tool because it can
pinpoint one individual out of mil-
Scientists have long suspected that the sun affects climate on Earth, but that
lions. But the Israeli company
connection has proved hard to pin down. Researchers recently demonstrated that
Nucleix has shown that it is
the 11-year cycle of solar activity influences weather in the tropical Pacific Ocean.
distressingly simple to make a
Even then the exact cause remained obscure, since the sun’s brightness varies by
phony DNA fingerprint.
just one-tenth of a percent. Two studies from 2009 are filling in the gaps.
In Nucleix’s experiment,
In August an international team led by Gerald Meehl, a climatologist with the
researchers took a small
National Center for Atmospheric Research, announced that the sun’s outsize
bit of DNA (which can be
influence results from its combined effects on our atmosphere and oceans. When
collected from an object like
the sun is at its most intense, ozone in the stratosphere absorbs more ultraviolet
a cigarette butt) from a test
energy, making areas near the equator warmer than usual. The added heat changes
subject, replicated it millions
wind patterns, bringing more rain to the western tropics. At the same time, the
of times over, and used it to
extra sunlight causes more evaporation off the ocean, which adds to downpours
build an artificial DNA sequence.
in the western tropics. Simulations that modeled just one of these effects failed to
They then added the built-up DNA
match the real world. Meehl saw that the two mechanisms “feed off each other,
to blood that had been processed to
producing a stronger response than either can alone.” His results should help
remove the original, DNA-containing white
climatologists predict monsoons in Asia and overall climate in North America and
blood cells. When analyzed by a leading foren-
might someday allow them to estimate seasonal rainfall years in advance.
sics lab, the mixture was indistinguishable from
Meanwhile, Henrik Svensmark of the Technical University of Denmark and his
real blood and natural genetic material. Going a
colleagues are exploring a broader climate impact of solar activity. He believes
step further, the researchers fabricated artificial
that cosmic rays—energetic subatomic particles from outer space—help seed
DNA using only sequence data and added it to a
cloud-forming water droplets in the lower atmosphere. During peak solar activ-
saliva sample. This fake also passed inspection.
ity, eruptions from the sun spew out huge clouds of plasma that shield Earth from
Although the experiment was done entirely
those cosmic rays. After examining cloud cover and cosmic ray fluxes, Svensmark
with commercial technology, DNA expert Larry
concluded that declines in cosmic rays lead to fewer clouds, implying that an
Kobilinsky of John Jay College of Criminal
active sun could lead to warmer surface temperatures. Following the strongest
Justice in New York doubts that most criminals
solar eruptions, he found that the sky lost 7 percent of its cloud water. Many sci-
would have the skills to pull it off. Just in case,
entists doubt the significance of these cosmic ray effects, but Svensmark sees the
though, Nucleix has developed a test that can
question as ripe for investigation. “The sun is doing natural experiments on Earth’s
screen for fake DNA. BOONSRI DICKINSON
atmosphere, giving us the opportunity to test these ideas,” he says. JANET FANG

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2010 | 45
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EVOLUTION || TECHNOLOGY || MEDICINE
3 34
Blast of Biodiversity
It might seem that biologists
have already canvassed every
bit of our planet. In reality, by
tapping the latest genetic and
molecular techniques they are
identifying new species at an
unprecedented pace. To draw
attention to this fast-growing
catalog of biodiversity, the Arizo-
na State University International
Institute for Species Exploration
created a top 10 list of the most
amazing species discovered in
2009, including:
Tahina spectabilis: A palm
native to northwest Madagascar,
the species is so huge that single
trees can be spotted via Google
Earth. The plant’s trunk grows
to 60 feet high and its leaves to
more than 15 feet across. After
30 to 50 years, the palm pro-
duces hundreds of flowers that
drain its nutrients completely,
causing it to die in a few months.
Fewer than 100 specimens have
been found, but the plant is now
being cultivated.
Phobaeticus chani: The world’s
longest stick insect, measuring
two feet from antennae to tail,
was discovered in Borneo, Malay-
sia. This creature resembles a
small branch with six twiggy legs.
Hippocampus satomiae: This
pygmy sea horse, which lives off
the coast of Derawan Island in
Borneo, is the smallest of its kind,
about half an inch long.
Leptotyphlops carlae: Also
among the incredibly small is the
world’s most minuscule snake:
Found in Barbados, it measures
only four inches long.
Coffea charrieriana: Producing
the first known coffee bean that
is naturally caffeine free, this
plant from Cameroon could lead
46 | DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
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DV0110SECII9B8,9_WC 46
to commercial coffee trees that
produce their own decaf.
The exaggerated nature of the
newfound species illustrates the
rich and complicated ways in
which organisms adapt to their
unique environments.
Many plants, insects, and
vertebrate animals are com-
pletely dependent on endangered
ecosystems. A March 2009
study by biologist Paul Ehrlich of
Stanford University and biologist
Gerardo Ceballos of the National
Autonomous University of Mexico
found that 81 percent of the 408
new mammal species discovered
Clockwise from top left: Leaf and
flowers of the giant palm Tahina
spectabilis, and the tiny snake
Leptotyphlops carlae. Both species
were discovered in 2009.
in the last 15 years are yoked to
local ecosystems and likely to
become extinct. One capuchin
monkey inhabits only a single
200-hectare slice of forest ringed
by sugar plantations.
People rely on biodiversity, too.
The earth’s dazzling biological
cornucopia helps regulate carbon
dioxide levels, protects crops and
humans from pests and disease,
recycles nutrients, and holds a
still largely unfathomable genetic
bounty. “The human economy is
a wholly owned subsidiary of the
economy of nature,” Ehrlich says.
JILL NEIMARK
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Computers Go
Quantum
Atomic-scale computers that
exploit the bizarre rules of quan-
tum physics have the potential
to process enormous quanti-
ties of data far more quickly
than today’s devices. In June,
researchers at Yale University
announced progress toward
this goal, creating the first quan-
tum processor that is built into a
conventional silicon chip.
Quantum computers pro-
cess information using bits that
behave like atoms, so even the
slightest disturbance would ruin
the process. Previous experi-
ments had required complicat-
ed lasers or magnets to keep
the system stable, but the Yale
team’s processor was designed
into computer chips. With one
calculation, the device solved a
math problem that would take
an ordinary computer as many
as four steps. The key difference
is that quantum bits can take on
fuzzy values: not just 1 or 0, but
in some sense everything in
THIS PAGE, FROM TOP: NATHALIE METZ (2); S. BLAIR HEDGES/PENN STATE. OPPOSITE, FROM LEFT: J. L. CARSON/CMSP; JAN WOITAS/DPA/CORBIS
between at the same time.
While the Yale research
focuses on hardware, a team
from MIT and the University
of Bristol in England is finding
better ways to use quantum
computations. In October the
group described a new algo-
rithm that could rapidly solve
the complex linear equations at
the heart of many key process-
es, including image processing
and gene analysis.
Turning the Yale experi-
ment into a useful computer
will require adding many more
quantum bits and managing
how those bits interact. “It just
seems so difficult to make a
large-scale quantum comput-
er,” says Steven Girvin, a Yale
physicist who coauthored the
findings. “But five years ago I
never thought we’d be where
we are now.” ANDREW GRANT
11/12/09 5:00:17 PM

35
Neanderthals
Get Personal
Did humans and Neanderthals
ever lie under the moon, mak-
ing love? Could Neanderthals
talk? Do we have any of their
genes? We diverged from our
hominid cousins as long as
400,000 years ago, and by
30,000 years ago they were
gone, leaving the particulars of
any intertwined history seem-
ingly lost forever.
We are beginning to revisit
those ancient days, however,
due to a draft of the Nean-
derthal genome created by
Svante Pääbo and colleagues
at the Max Planck Institute for
Evolutionary Anthropology in
Leipzig, Germany. The draft,
announced in February, covers
about 63 percent of the roughly
3.2 billion base pairs in the
Neanderthal genome. Pääbo
created it by sequencing DNA
from fragments of bone (most
36 Diarrhea
Vaccine Could
Save Millions
Nearly 1.5 million children,
the vast majority of them in
the developing world, die of
diarrheal diseases each year.
In April, Mahdi Saeed, an epi-
demiologist at Michigan State
University, announced a new
vaccine that could substan-
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DV0110SECII9B8,9_WC 47
of it from the Vindija cave in
Croatia) to get 3 billion Nean-
derthal base pairs essentially
uncontaminated by human
DNA or by microbes.
To perform this stunning feat,
Pääbo and his team used new,
high-throughput DNA technolo-
gies—developed in part by the
companies 454 Life Sciences
and Illumina—to analyze hun-
dreds of thousands and even
millions of DNA fragments at
the same time.
With the ability to sequence
DNA at warp speed, the re -
searchers could finally decon-
struct the genomic relationship
between Neanderthals and
modern humans. Although
our DNA sequences are more
than 99.5 percent identical,
our genetic cousins did not
contribute any mitochondrial
DNA to us, and probably little
genetic material overall. (It is
still possible that we donated
genes to them, however.) “We
Micrograph
of E. coli,
a leading
cause of
diarrhea.
tially reduce that number.
Although vaccines already
exist for some causes of diar-
rhea, finding a fix for entero-
toxigenic E. coli, the leading
bacterial cause of diarrhea
in children in the developing
world, has proved to be diffi-
cult. The toxin produced by E.
coli is too small to be recog-
nized effectively by the human
immune system, meaning that
one round of infection does
not provide immunity against
Pääbo and a
Neanderthal
skeleton.
are now analyzing whether
there was any interbreeding”
at all, Pääbo says.
In studying the reconstructed
genome, he learned that, like
modern humans, Neander-
thals may have used the spo-
ken word. Indeed, they have
two mutations in a language-
associated gene called FOXP2,
mutations that are not found in
chimpanzees. Such changes
seem to be associated with
vocalization. “From the data we
have so far, there is no reason
to assume that Neanderthals
future exposure.
As a result, a person can
experience multiple bouts
of diarrhea, which can lead
to dehydration, malnutrition,
and even death. Children are
especially vulnerable because
they have a higher density of
chemical receptors susceptible
to the E. coli toxin than adults
do. That toxin is also a leading
cause of traveler’s diarrhea,
which annually affects millions
of visitors to developing coun-
tries around the world.
In order to alert the
immune system to the pres-
ence of the tiny toxin mol-
ecule, Saeed attached it to a
larger molecule that did not
alter its properties. Trials in
mice showed that this piggy-
back approach increased the
ability of the immune system
to recognize the toxin.
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could not speak like we do,”
Pääbo concludes.
What lies ahead? Pääbo
will continue sequencing Nean-
derthal DNA until he has a
genome that is similar in com-
pletion and quality to the exist-
ing map of the chimpanzee
genome. Ultimately, comparing
Neanderthals, humans, and
chimpanzees will help us find
“those few genetic changes that
are crucial for modern human
behavior and ability,” he says,
and that reveal what makes us
uniquely human. JILL NEIMARK
A separate set of trials in
rabbits, which concluded
in April, demonstrated that
the doubled-up molecule
provoked the animals’
immune system to produce
antibodies. And when these
antibodies were tested in
mice, researchers found that
they made the mice immune
to the effects of E. coli.
The new vaccine, 25 years
in the making, could proceed
to human clinical trials by the
beginning of 2010, accord-
ing to Saeed, who has been
studying E. coli toxin since he
was in graduate school. A vac-
cine could also reduce E. coli
deaths among farm animals.
“E. coli is a killer,” Saeed
says. “A vaccine would be a
true lifesaver for children in
the developing world.”
LINDSEY KONKEL
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2010 | 47
11/12/09 5:00:21 PM

ENERGY || MEDICINE
37 Algae
Make Clean,
Renewable
Diesel Fuel
When researchers conceived of
turning algae into diesel fuel three
decades ago, the idea sounded
like something out of the old
sci-fi movie Soylent Green. But in
July, ExxonMobil teamed up with
biologist Craig Venter’s Synthetic
Genomics to take algae biofuel to
the marketplace. ExxonMobil has
invested $600 million to design bet-
ter strains of algae and to convert
them into fuel. Meanwhile, several
start-up companies—including
Aurora Biofuels and Solix Biofuels
—have built pilot plants that prove
it is possible to brew algae-derived
diesel fuel in large quantities. “At
the beginning we’d tell people, ‘I
know this sounds crazy,’ ” says
Bryan Willson, a Colorado State
University engineer and cofounder
of Solix Biofuels. “But with the
ExxonMobil investment, algae is
entering the mainstream.”
Traditional biofuel crops such
as soybeans yield 50 to 150
gallons of fuel per planted acre
per year, but Solix’s facility near
Durango, Colorado, is producing
more than 2,000. The centerpiece
is a sealed growth chamber, or
photo-bioreactor, made from
a clear polymer to let sunlight
through; inside is a strain of algae
selected for its high rate of oil
production. (Closed reactors are
less susceptible to contamination
by outside algae than are open-
pond systems.) After the algae are
harvested, their oils are extracted
and refined into renewable diesel.
Besides sunlight, the algae require
little more than carbon dioxide
from nearby power plants, so
operating expenses should be low.
Willson predicts his company’s
algae fuel (and its coproducts,
which are to be sold for animal
feed) will be cost-competitive with
petroleum diesel within five years.
“It represents a large-scale solu-
tion to a global problem,” he says.
ELIZABETH SVOBODA
48 | DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
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A Smart Makeover
for the Electrical Grid
This may go down as the year when all the
talk about creating a next-generation “smart
grid” turned into action. The basic technology
that transports electricity around the United
States is more than a century old. So in Octo-
ber, spurred by concern over the cost and
reliability of the present system, President
Obama announced $3.4 billion of economic
stimulus funds for smart grid projects and
almost $5 billion more in private investment.
“We’ve paid attention to individual compo-
nents of the power system for so long, but
now we have to look at the system itself,”
says Dan Kammen, director of the Renew-
able and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at
the University of California at Berkeley.
These smart grid proposals would create
a flexible, interactive relationship between
energy producers and consumers. “The grid
needs to evolve from one-way wires and
cables to something where each power line
would send power in either direction—to or
from homes, businesses, or industry,” Kam-
men says. “We need the marriage of energy
technology and information technology.”
39
Math Could Fix
Traffic Jams
During rush hour, maddening traffic jams can
arise without an obvious cause. In May mechani-
cal engineer Morris Flynn of the University of
Alberta produced a model that shows how these
“jamitons,” or phantom jams, develop.
Traffic jams have been represented mathemat-
ically as waves of alternating heavy and light car
density. When Flynn analyzed these equations,
he noted striking similarities to the detonation
waves that radiate outward from an explosion. As
in a detonation, jamitons divide the surrounding
space into upstream and downstream regions.
Downstream drivers are the ones caught in the
congestion; upstream drivers are the ones who
are unaware of the jam they are about to hit.
Improving data flow could provide an easy
worldmags
38
The stimulus package will fund 100 proj-
ects nationwide, ranging from the installation
of smart meters in homes so that customers
can manage their energy use to the improve-
ment of power substations and transformers.
Utilities could monitor demand in real time
and adjust supply accordingly. Customers
could track their consumption and opt to buy
more energy during off-peak hours, when it
is cheaper and more plentiful. A grid that can
store and redirect large quantities of power
will also be crucial if the United States gener-
ates more than about one-fifth of its power
from renewables such as wind or solar, which
deliver an intermittent supply of electricity.
Ford announced in August that its planned
plug-in hybrid vehicles would be able to
communicate with a smart grid. The batter-
ies in these vehicles could serve as backup
storage, soaking up excess energy at night
and giving it back when demand surges.
“If we can monitor and understand what’s
going on at all times, then we can reap the
reward we want,” Kammen says. “And that
is reliable, green power.” ANDREW GRANT
TOP: ROBERT LLEWELLYN/AGE FOTOSTOCK. BOTTOM: NICHOLAS EVELEIGH/GETTY IMAGES. OPPOSITE: COURTESY MBARI
fix. “Since many cars are outfitted with GPS,
you could interactively convey this information
to drivers,” Flynn says. Drivers approaching
a forming jam could then slow down well in
advance, lowering traffic density: “It reduces
the severity of a jam, and it reduces the likeli-
hood of accidents in the jam.” STEPHEN ORNES
11/13/09 1:36:30 PM
 worldmags

40 Quantum Freakiness
Leaks Into the Big World the beryllium ions. Now the researchers could use
42
Infection as
If the rules of the tiny quantum world applied to
ordinary objects, all sorts of strange things could
lasers to transfer the entangled state of the beryllium
ions to the motion of the new beryllium-magnesium
It Happens
One of the challenges
happen: An object like a car or a person might be in pairs. Those pairs began to form two separate oscil-
in fighting infectious
two places at once, or two clocks could “entangle,” lating systems, analogous to a swinging pendulum or
disease is that re-
moving in synchrony as if they were physically con- a vibrating weight on a spring. “We were motivated
searchers cannot watch
joined even when miles apart. In June researchers at by pure curiosity to look at mechanical oscillators;
individual pathogens
the National Institute of Standards and Technology no one had ever entangled them before,” says David
inside living animals.
(NIST) reported on their effort to see how far quantum Hanneke, a member of the NIST team.
Did the drug kill the mi-
behavior can be extended into the everyday realm. The experiment will help scientists explore why
crobes? Did pathogens
First they coaxed a pair of beryllium ions to small objects follow the weird rules of quantum
escape to the brain?
entangle, such that their physical properties remained mechanics but large ones do not—one of the great-
Now imaging tech-
bound together even when they were far apart. To est enigmas in physics. In this case, sets of oscillat-
niques are providing
do this, the scientists flashed lasers at a frequency ing ions can be made to act as if they are connected,
answers by following
that encouraged the ions to adopt complementary even though equivalent human-scale objects, like
microbes on the move.
spin. Next the team split up the beryllium duo so that pendulums and springs, “certainly don’t behave in
An approach de-
each was now matched with a magnesium ion, and this entangled way,” Hanneke says. “So where does
scribed in PLoS Patho-
those new pairs were moved to separate areas. The the breakdown happen? It’s somewhere between
gens in July allowed
heavier magnesium ions helped cool and slow down four ions and a pendulum clock.” ELIZABETH SVOBODA
British researchers
to peer inside fruit fly
embryos to track fluo-
rescent versions of the

Strange Gaze of the bacterium Photorhab-

dus asymbiotica. Using
high-resolution confocal

See-through Fish microscopy, the scien-

tists discovered that the
microorganism thwarts
the immune system by
emitting a toxin and im-
mobilizing hemocytes,
cells that would nor-
mally kill it. Meanwhile,
at the Scripps Research
Institute and New York
University, researchers
looked inside mouse
skulls to learn how viral
meningitis can cause
seizure. By recording
moving images of
the cells using two-
photon microscopy,
they discovered an
unexpected class
of immune cells
that damage ves-
sels in the brain. Also
at NYU, researchers
are capturing images
of fluorescent Lyme
disease spirochetes
The barreleye fish has eyes that gaze upward right through a transparent shield
moving into the brain,
covering its head. This year ecologists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute
hoping to chart infec-
studied the first-ever underwater video of the strange fish. They also managed to recover
tion and document the
one alive and get a good look at that shield, which may protect its eyes as it steals
moment of cure.
prey from stinging jellyfish. JANET FANG
MEGAN TALKINGTON

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EVOLUTION
Charles Darwin would have
turned 200 in 2009, the same
year his book On the Origin of
Species celebrated its 150th
anniversary. Today, with the
perspective of time, Darwin’s
theory of evolution by natural
selection looks as impressive
as ever. In fact, the double
anniversary year saw progress
on fronts that Darwin could
never have anticipated, bring-
ing new insights into the origin
of life—a topic that contrib-
uted to his panic attacks,
heart palpitations, and, as he
wrote, “for 25 years extreme
spasmodic daily and nightly
flatulence.” One can only
dream of what riches await in
the biology textbooks of 2159.
1. Evolution happens on the
inside, too. The battle for sur-
vival is waged not just between
the big dogs but within the
dog itself, as individual genes
jockey for prominence. From
the moment of conception, a
father’s genes favor offspring
that are large, strong, and
aggressive (the better to court
the ladies), while the mother’s
genes incline toward smaller
progeny that will be less of a
burden, making it easier for
her to live on and procreate.
50 | DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
worldmags
DV0110DARWIN2B1_WC 50
Darwin’s Nex
Genome-versus-genome
warfare produces kids that are
somewhere in between.
Not all genetic conflicts are
resolved so neatly. In flour bee-
tles, babies that do not inherit
the selfish genetic element
known as Medea succumb to
a toxin while developing in the
egg. Some unborn mice suffer
the same fate. Such spiteful
genes have become wide-
spread not by helping flour
beetles and mice survive but
by eliminating individuals that
do not carry the killer’s code.
“There are two ways of winning
a race,” says Caltech biologist
Bruce Hay. “Either you can be
better than everyone else, or
you can whack the other guys
on the legs.”
Hay is trying to harness the
power of such genetic cheat-
ers, enlisting them in the fight
against malaria. He created a
Medea-like DNA element that
spreads through experimental
fruit flies like wildfire, permeat-
ing an entire population within
10 generations. This year
he and his team have been
working on encoding immune-
system boosters into those
Medea genes, which could
then be inserted into male
mosquitoes. If it works, the
modified mosquitoes should
quickly replace competitors
who do not carry the new
genes; the enhanced immune
systems of the new mosqui-
toes, in turn, would resist the
spread of the malaria parasite.
2. Identity is not written just
in the genes. According to
modern evolutionary theory,
there is no way that what we
eat, do, and encounter can
override the basic rules of
inheritance: What is in the
genes stays in the genes. That
single rule secured Darwin’s
place in the science books.
But now biologists are finding
that nature can break those
rules. This year Eva Jablonka,
a theoretical biologist at Tel
Aviv University, published a
compendium of more than
100 hereditary changes that
are not carried in the DNA
sequence. This “epigenetic”
inheritance spans bacteria,
fungi, plants, and animals.
For example, rats exposed
to certain fungicides during
pregnancy give birth to male
progeny with lower sperm
counts and an increased
chance of developing diabetes
and cancer. In each gen-
eration that follows, none
of which were exposed to
fungicides directly, the male
offspring continue to suffer the
same fate. Jablonka argues
that environmental expo-
sures—toxic substances, diet,
and even stress—can affect
the genome (see page 62). In
extremely high-stress cases,
they could possibly rearrange
it enough to create new spe-
cies. Eventually, she says,
“evolution will have to yield.”
3. Mutations reveal surpris-
ing branches on the tree of
life. Darwin would have been
dumbfounded to find that
our genes are littered with
changes that have no effect on
our form or function. Mutations
give rise to new genes, but
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only some of those produce
discernible changes that
improve (or reduce) fitness.
Many of them do nothing
much at all. Those do-nothing
mutations are a major force for
discovery today, because they
accumulate at a measurable
rate. Generally, the more silent
mutations two species have
in common, the more closely
related they are. If you could
just sequence all the genes in
all the organisms in the world,
in principle you could uncover
the complete tree of life.
That is what evolutionary
biologist Casey Dunn of Brown
University is trying to do, and
his initial findings are con-
founding expectations. Dunn
compared the genomes of
71 animal species and found
that the common ances-
tor of all the animals on the
planet may not have been as
simple as a sponge, as previ-
ously thought. Instead, Dunn
identified the more complex
comb jellyfish—a carnivorous
ocean drifter—as the earliest
to diverge from the animal
family tree. The idea that the
simplest organism may not
have come first upends the
popular notion of an evolution-
ary march toward complexity.
This past year Dunn has been
busy expanding his revamped
family tree, starting with Acoe-
lomorpha, a flatworm that was
long considered one of the
most difficult animals to put
in its evolutionary place. With
the help of a supercomputer,
Dunn’s team showed that the
AKG-IMAGES
worm is a product of the first
split among bilateral animals
11/11/09 9:32:25 PM

Revolution was the social switch
from aggressive
male to attentive
mate, says C. Owen
Lovejoy, an anato-
mist at Kent State
University. By the
time Ardi appeared,
our ancestors had
stopped fighting over
mates—as sug-
gested by the small
canines and wood-
land diet of the male
Ardipithecus—and
started providing for
their females and
offspring instead.
Walking upright,
according to Lovejoy,
is an adaptation to
carrying food through
the forest as gifts for
potential mates.
Not everyone
agrees. “The whole
profession of
paleoanthropology
is undergoing a big
bout of indigestion
right now because
they’ve had a lot of
material dropped
on them,” says
Ian Tattersall, an
anthropologist at the
American Museum
of Natural History.
more than half a billion years million-year-old Ardipithecus 5. We are closing in on how
ago—a discovery that will ramidus, known as Ardi, and life began. Gerald Joyce is not
help biologists understand the it was not what anyone was saying that he reproduced the
origins of the digestive and expecting (see page 22). origin of life, but by some defi-
nervous systems. Behaving more like modern nitions that is exactly what he
monkeys than like chimps, has done. In 2009 he and his
4. The “missing link” is not Ardi walked on two feet with graduate student Tracey Lin-
missing. In October paleon- opposable toes and scam- coln at the Scripps Research
tologists unveiled the earliest pered through the branches Institute in La Jolla, Califor-
Transmission
known skeleton of micrograph
electron a potential on all fours. This find suggests nia, engineered a system of
human ancestor, the
of infl 4.4-virus.
uenza that what made us human molecules that can sustain-
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ably replicate themselves and
undergo Darwinian evolution in
a test tube. Now Joyce wants
to see “if we can get the mol-
ecules to invent novel function
for themselves,” he says.
So where would the first life
on earth have picked up RNA,
the simple hereditary molecule
that is notoriously hard to syn-
thesize? Two papers published
in 2009 propose plausible
chemical routes. In Science a
July report discusses a “helper
molecule” to RNA, which the
author was able to construct
in his lab, that shows the
basic properties necessary
for evolution (see page 83).
And a separate experiment,
published in Nature in May,
showed that it is possible for
the building blocks of RNA to
emerge spontaneously from
simple molecules thought to
have been present on the early
earth. John Sutherland and his
colleagues at the University
of Manchester in England
argue that the precursors
came together in a warm-
water solution, reminiscent of
Charles Darwin’s notion that
life began in some “warm little
pond.” In the meantime, 2009
Nobel laureate Jack Szostak
of Harvard Medical School
has been packaging prebiotic
chemistry into simple mem-
branes to see how protocells
could have self-assembled
out of fatty acids.
The huge strides from the
past year significantly clarify
how life could arise from the
laws of chemistry. “If Darwin
were around now,” Sutherland
says, “maybe he would have
been an organic chemist.”
JESSICA RUVINSKY
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SPACE || MEDICINE || ENVIRONMENT || EVOLUTION

44
Spaceport
Breaks Ground
in New Mexico
Drive an hour northeast of
Las Cruces, New Mexico,
then another 25 miles along a
dirt road, and you can watch
the construction of Spaceport
America—the nation’s first
commercial hub built specifi-
cally for spaceships. Right
Dawn at Spaceport America—an artist’s preview.
now the facility’s 10,000-foot
runway is being formed out
of a mountain of gravel, but
by 2011 it is expected to host
the takeoffs and landings of
space-tourism flights oper-
ated by its anchor tenant,
Virgin Galactic.
The $200 million project,
underwritten by the state of
New Mexico, broke ground in
June not far from the restricted
airspace of the White Sands
Missile Range. The location
was chosen carefully. It is
unhampered by commercial
jet traffic and benefits from the
same advantages that drew
the U.S. Army there: abundant
clear weather and a 4,700-foot
elevation, which drops the
cost of reaching Earth orbit by
up to $90 million, compared
with launching at sea level.
“Space tourism isn’t the
spaceport’s only purpose,”
says Steven Landeene, its
executive director. Private
companies like Lockheed
Martin are already sending
up rockets from the facility’s
vertical launchpads, located
several miles from the runway.
Other sites around the United
States also support commer-
cial launches, but these are
mostly carved out of existing
government facilities.
“Dreams are becoming a
reality,” Landeene says. He
envisions a day when Virgin
Galactic’s $200,000 flights will
come down in price and start
to change the way we fly on
Earth, with business travelers
Reconstruction of Dakota
reaching Asia or Europe in less shows the dinosaur’s heavily
than two hours. muscled haunches.
BOONSRI DICKINSON

45 Eye Drops Could

Cure Glaucoma
Scientists in Italy have discovered a simple eye drop that
may reverse glaucoma, the disease caused when pres-
sure builds in the eye, injuring nerve cells and ultimately
47
leading to blindness. Ophthalmologist Stefano Bonini at
the University of Rome Campus Bio-Medico and his col-
laborators applied drops containing nerve growth factor (a
protein involved in neural development) to the eyes of rats
with induced glaucoma. The drops protected the animals’
retinal ganglion cells and optic nerves, both of which are
generally damaged by the disease. The team’s report
appeared in the August 11 issue of PNAS.
In the study Bonini also had success applying nerve
growth factor to humans with advanced glaucoma.
Two of three patients given the eye drops exhibited a
remarkable improvement in visual acuity and sensitivity
to contrast after three months. “I cannot say that we
El Niño’s Cousin
have found a cure for glaucoma,” Bonini says carefully,
“but we have something that worked in a few patients.
It will be interesting to test more.” LINDSEY KONKEL Spurs Hurricanes
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Dino Mummy Spills Its Secrets

In 1999, while fossil hunting in the Badlands of North
Dakota, 16-year-old Tyler Lyson stumbled upon a mummi-
fied dinosaur: not just a skeleton, but a fossil that turned
out to include naturally preserved soft-tissue structures.
infrared imaging to the fossil, nicknamed Dakota. He found
that its mummified remains appear to include some of
the creature’s original amino acids, although there are no
traces of whole proteins or DNA. The results were pub-
48 Twin
Black Holes
This year a group of scientists published the first in-depth lished online in July in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Found
analysis of this rare find from 67 million years ago. The generous surface area of Dakota’s skin suggests Black holes are weird
The dinosaur—a hadrosaur, or duck-billed plant-eater that there was a lot more muscle packed into the animal’s enough, but in March
—apparently died in a soggy spot. Minerals precipitated tail than previously believed. On the basis of the new infor- astronomers found
rapidly in its skin, forming a replacement framework mation, researchers now estimate that this hadrosaur could signs of something even
before the soft organic tissues decomposed. “We actually have run roughly 27 miles per hour. That is “a lot faster than stranger: twin massive
have a three-dimensional organism preserved,” says study a T. rex,” Wogelius’s colleague Phil Manning says. black holes orbiting
coauthor Roy Wogelius of the University of Manchester Manning suspects that skin and soft tissue may have tightly around each other.
in England. Scales are visible to the naked eye; more been overlooked in other fossils and that they could yield Such objects have been
remarkable, electron microscopy reveals double-layered startling new insights about ancient creatures. “I think there long predicted but
skin similar to that of modern animals, and possibly even are specimens in museums today that are time capsules,” never verified.
the outlines of cells. Wogelius, a geochemist who analyzes he says. “We could go back to these specimens and breathe Todd Boroson and Tod
mineral surfaces, was asked to apply his expertise in new life into those old bones.” MEGAN TALKINGTON Lauer at the National Opti-
cal Astronomy Observa-
tory in Tucson found what
they think is a dual black
hole while examining more
than 17,000 quasars in the
Sloan Digital Sky Survey,
which obtained data,
images, and spectra of
more than one-fourth of
the sky. The two objects (a
20-million-solar-mass hole
and a billion-solar-mass
partner) seem to be sepa-
rated by just one-third of
a light-year, less than one-
tenth the distance from the
sun to the closest star.
In theory the universe
should be littered with
To forecasters trying to anticipate extreme recent phenomenon, which explains why black hole multiples. All
weather and avert disasters, the 2004 hur- researchers were unaware of its effects. sizable galaxies are thought
ricane season looked like nature thumbing During a typical El Niño, the Pacific Ocean to be born with black
her nose at us. That year, 15 major storms warms up in a long band that extends holes at their centers, and
developed in the North Atlantic—including from the coast of South America toward each time galaxies collide
Hurricane Ivan, which caused $14 billion in Polynesia. The second, less familiar pattern and merge the expanded
damage in the United States. And yet the involves a more isolated, extensive patch of galaxy should collect a new

CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: COURTESY OF VYONYX; NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC; REUTERS/NOAA

best models had called for a quiet season
because it was a year of El Niño, a recurring
pattern of warm water in the eastern Pacific
Ocean. That pattern is associated with
lower-than-average tropical storm activity
in the North Atlantic. Atmospheric scientist
Peter Webster at the Georgia Institute of
Technology set out to determine what went
wrong, and now he has some answers.
Last spring, Webster discovered that
his colleagues had lumped together two
distinct weather patterns under the name
of El Niño. Those patterns “have a very, very
different impact on the tropical climate and,
most important, on hurricane formation,”
he says. The divergence appears to be a
warmer water in the central Pacific. one. But binary black holes
After examining more than six decades’ are difficult to find. Astrono-
worth of ocean surface temperatures mers have found dozens of
and tropical storm data, Webster and quasars with similar double
his collaborators realized that the lines of emission, but the
newly identified warming in the central signatures are usually
Pacific produces more hurricanes than a attributed either to a single
traditional El Niño. It did not show up in black hole or to two galax-
the data until three decades ago, leaving ies passing close together.
Webster unsure whether the new weather Boroson and Lauer are
pattern is part of a long-term oscillation optimistic that they have
or a result of climate change. Regardless the real deal this time.
of the root cause, though, the discovery “We’re convinced it is
of the central Pacific hot spot should lead different from every other
to better hurricane predictions and fewer object we’ve studied,”
surprises. ELIZA STRICKLAND Boroson says. STEPHEN ORNES

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SPACE || ASTRONOMY || ANTHROPOLOGY || MEDICINE

49 Space
Trash Causes
Orbital Crash
In February, about 500 miles above
Siberia, a U.S. communications
satellite smashed into a defunct
Russian orbiter at 25,000 miles per
hour, annihilating them both. It was
the first wreck of its kind—two intact
spacecraft accidentally plowing into
each other at hypervelocity—in the
half-century that humans have been
launching objects into space.
Initially the crash left behind some
1,500 pieces of wreckage bigger than
four inches in diameter, along with Computer simulation
hundreds of thousands of smaller of sunspot structure; vertical
fragments, estimates Nicholas John- magnetic fields appear dark.
son, chief scientist of the Orbital

50
Debris Program Office at NASA’s
Johnson Space Center in Houston.
cool and so look dark against of 76 trillion calculations per
The debris clouds, initially distrib-
the 10,000-degree Fahren- second. The result closely
uted along the orbital paths of the
satellites, are spreading to enshroud Magnetic heit solar surface. (They still
blaze at temperatures near
matched observations of
how plasma flows from a
the entire planet, joining the roughly
19,000 large chunks of orbiting space
Mysteries 7,500°F, however.) sunspot’s central dark region
junk (below) already tracked by the of Sunspots Scientists at the National
Center for Atmospheric
into the surrounding turbulent
zone, according to lead
Department of Defense.
Even if we stop launching objects
Decoded Research in Boulder, Colo- researcher Matthias Rempel.
In July the first complete 3-D rado, simulated a typical pair This model exposes new
into space, the amount of trash will
sunspot simulation illuminated of sunspots, which usually details of stellar physics and
continue to grow. “Things will keep
long-standing questions about appear in tandem with oppo- could make it easier to predict
running into each other at a faster
these disturbances on the site polarity. Mimicking the violent “space weather” before
rate than debris will fall out of orbit,”
solar surface. Sunspots are twisted magnetic fields and it affects Earth. Sunspots
Johnson says. Another major colli-
strong magnetic regions that fast-moving plasma in these often spawn solar flares that
sion is certain to happen eventually,
disrupt the outward flow of 20,000-mile-wide maelstroms can knock out radio communi-
he adds. In March, a 5-inch fragment
heat from the sun’s interior. As required a month of work on cation, damage satellites, and
from a spent rocket engine whizzed
a result they are comparatively a supercomputer capable zap power grids. ADAM HADHAZY
closely past the International Space
Station. Scientists and policymakers
are exploring ways to prevent future
accidents by removing large, defunct
objects from orbit. JOCELYN RICE

51 Oldest Musical
Instrument Found
More than 35,000 years ago, our ancestors
living in present-day southwestern Germany
were playing sophisticated music, according to
University of Tübingen archaeologist Nicholas
Conard. In June he announced that he and his
colleagues had unearthed an ancient bone flute
in Hohle Fels, a cave in the Swabian mountains.
The sound produced by the flute “is almost
identical to tones of the major scale played on
today’s flute,” says Nikolaj Tarasov, a recorder
specialist at the Music University of Karlsruhe
in Germany. The five-holed instrument—carved
from the bone of a griffon vulture—might be
capable of expressing greater harmonic variety
than the modern-day flute, he says.
Conard’s group discovered fragments
of three ivory flutes in their 2008 digs. Four
other bone and ivory flutes were previously
found in the same area. Collectively, these
are regarded as the oldest known musical
instruments. The researchers conjecture
that music was important in the geographic
expansion and cultural development of humans
during the Upper Paleolithic era. “We can now
state that our ancestors had a developed
culture,” Tarasov says. “Not only were they
surviving, but they had time to do something
that required superior skill.” ALINE REYNOLDS

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52 Fight
Rages Over
Cancer Genes
When Lisbeth Ceriani, a
43-year-old Massachusetts
woman, was diagnosed
CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: ESA/POLARIS; MATTHIAS REMPEL/UCAR/NCAR;
ian cancer, but we feel sure
she had it after reviewing her
symptoms,” Ceriani says.
When Ceriani’s doctors
submitted her blood to Myr-
iad Genetics—the only com-
pany that offers a sequencing
test for BRCA mutations—the
BRCA mutations because
Myriad controls the BRCA
genes. The U.S. Patent and
Trademark Office awarded
the company its first patent
in 1997; by 2000 the patent
office had awarded it eight
more, in effect giving Myriad
the genes related to breast
cancer and knew where the
genes were likely to be,” says
Arupa Ganguly, a geneticist at
the Hospital of the University
of Pennsylvania and one of
the plaintiffs in the ACLU
suit. “Essentially the work

with breast cancer last year, company refused to process ownership of the genes. was done for Myriad already.
PHOTO RESEARCHERS; STEVE GSCHMEISSNER/PHOTO RESEARCHERS

her doctors recommended
that she undergo genetic
testing to see if she carried
mutations in the BRCA1 and
BRCA2 genes that increase
risk of breast and ovarian
cancers. She had several risk
factors for inherited cancer,
including relatives who had
died from breast and ovarian
cancer. “My dad’s mother
wasn’t diagnosed with ovar-
it, saying that Myriad did not
accept Ceriani’s health insur-
ance. She could not afford
to pay for the test herself
(it costs nearly $4,000), so
she did not have it done. If
there had been a cheaper test
or a company that took her
insurance, she would have
known quickly what her best
treatment options were.
There is only one test for
Illustration of
cancer in glandular
breast tissue and
lymph nodes. Inset:
Breast cancer cells.
Accordingly, the company is Everyone knew where the
allowed to decide who may gene was.” Myriad has refused
study the genes and has to comment and in July filed a
written cease-and-desist let- motion to dismiss the lawsuit.
ters to university geneticists That motion was denied by a
working on alternative BRCA New York federal district court
sequencing tests. in November.
This year Myriad’s patent Robert Cook-Deegan,
was challenged in court by director of the Institute for
the American Civil Liberties Genome Sciences and Policy
Union on behalf of 20 plain- at Duke University, does credit
tiffs, including the American Myriad with discovering spe-
College of Medical cific mutation sequences and
Genetics, the Asso- building a public database
ciation for Molecular of genetic variations—both
Pathology, and various valuable contributions. But
individuals, including he says that many scientists
believe Myriad’s control has
slowed or blocked research,
and it “certainly has made
researchers more cautious in
how they report relevant find-
ings.” At the least, geneticists
in the United States do not
have the option of making
a more accurate screening
test because doing so would
infringe on Myriad’s patent.
The ACLU argues that gene
Ceriani. The lawsuit patents as a whole inhibit the
charges that the BRCA free flow of ideas and should
patents—and gene pat- not be awarded. “Gene
ents in general—violate patents defy common sense,”
established laws that says Chris Hansen, one of the
prohibit the patenting ACLU lawyers handling the
of products and laws of case. “If you’re at a cocktail
nature. According to the party and you tell people
ACLU, “Human genes, human genes are patented,
even when removed almost everyone will say that
from the body, are still can’t be right.”
products of nature.” Right or not, about 20
Critics also argue percent of all human genes
that the process of already have been included in
locating specific genes patent claims. Whether that
does not warrant the number will stand or even
awarding of patents. “A grow will depend on how
number of researchers the ACLU suit is decided.
had been looking for JANE BOSVELD

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MEDICINE || EARTH

54 Seismic
Waves Clarify How
Continents Move
Plate tectonic theory does a marvelous

53
job explaining how sections of Earth’s
crust shift about, moving continents and
reshaping oceans. Still, the underly-
ing structure that makes all this motion
possible was poorly understood until
Catherine Rychert and Peter Shearer
of the University of California at San
Lose Weight With Diego dug through 15 years’ worth of
seismic data from around the world.

Brown Fat? As seismic waves cross through differ-

While millions of Americans are trying
to shed fat, in the past year three research
teams announced that the adult body
contains a peculiar kind of fat that we might
prefer to hold on to. Called brown fat, it burns
energy rather than storing it. Activating this
improbable tissue might provide a new way
to rev up the body’s metabolism and acceler-
ate weight loss.
Packed with mitochondria (the energy-
generating units in cells), brown fat produces
heat in response to cold temperatures, con-
suming a lot of calories in the process. Brown
fat is present in newborns, whose bodies use
it to keep warm because they cannot shiver,
but it was thought to vanish by adulthood.
So it came as quite a shock when scientists
at five Boston-area biomedical institutes
studied thousands of archived PET/CT scans
and found deposits of brown fat around the
ent materials, they change speed and
direction. By analyzing such effects,
the researchers were able to locate the
boundary below the earth’s rigid tec-
tonic plates where they meet the hot,
pliable asthenosphere beneath.
The base of the tectonic plates
appears to lie 44 miles beneath the
oceanic islands, on average, and 50
miles below young parts of the conti-
nents, the team reported in Science.
They also found a boundary 60 miles
below the oldest continental regions
but are not certain that it represents the
base of the plates. Previous evidence
had suggested that these parts of the
continents were at least 120 miles thick.
Rychert notes that some of the data
that generated the 60-mile estimate
The Arabian plate (lower left) collides with
the Eurasian plate (upper right) at the Persian
Gulf, driving Iran’s Zagros Mountains upward.
might have come from seismic stations
near thin edges of continents; she plans
to examine data from additional sta-
tions in those areas to confirm her find-
ings. In the other environments, though,
the evidence seems clear, she says: “We
don’t know of any other mechanism that
can explain the sharp, globally pervasive
boundary we’ve seen.” Pinpointing the
location of that boundary will help clarify
how continents formed and why certain
parts of those continents are particularly
stable today. JENNIFER BARONE

55
neck and collarbone in about 5 percent of the
people examined. C. Ronald Kahn, the head
of obesity and hormone action research at
Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston, believes that
Virus Linked to Chronic Fatigue
brown fat is actually present in most adults Chronic fatigue syndrome, which affects 17 million people worldwide, has finally

FROM LEFT: PATRICK RYAN /GETTY IMAGES; JACQUES DESCLOITRES/MODIS/NASA; M. E. HARDUS

and that the only reason it did not show up in
the majority of the PET/CT scans was because
it had not been activated.
In a separate study, conducted in Finland
and Sweden, adult volunteers were kept in
cold rooms or subjected to ice-water footbaths
to spur any brown fat into action. Follow-up
PET/CT scans and biopsies then confirmed
that the fat was indeed present. Meanwhile,
researchers in the Netherlands documented
that lean young men have more brown fat than
their overweight counterparts.
All three reports appeared in the New
England Journal of Medicine in April. “Adults
do have brown fat,” Kahn says. “Now the
question is to find out how active it is in
controlling metabolism.” K ATHLEEN MCGOWAN
been linked to a specific pathogen: XMRV (xenotropic murine leukemia-related
virus). XMRV is one of only three known human retroviruses, infectious agents that
slip into our genome and become a permanent part of our DNA. Cancer biologist
Robert Silverman of the Cleveland Clinic isolated XMRV three years ago in men
suffering from prostate cancer. The men had an immune defect that allowed the
virus to proliferate, much like a defect documented in patients with chronic fatigue.
Seizing upon that clue, cell biologist Judy Mikovits of the Whittemore Peterson
Institute in Reno, Nevada, tested 101 chronic fatigue patients. In October she
reported that 67 percent of them had the virus, as opposed to only 3.7 percent of
healthy people. Tests on another 200 patients revealed that more than 95 percent
of people with chronic fatigue carry antibody to the virus, Mikovits says.
For Mikovits these statistics raise new questions. Is XMRV the cause of chronic
fatigue, or just an opportunistic infection? More ominously, does XMRV increase
the risk of cancers, as HIV—another retrovirus—does? A blood test to detect
XMRV antibodies is now available through VIP Dx Labs in collaboration with
Whittemore Peterson. “This discovery could be a major step in the development of
vital treatment options for millions of patients,” Mikovits says. JILL NEIMARK

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56
Earth-like
Storms Seen on
Saturn’s Moon
With its thick atmosphere, rippling
lakes, and eroded landscapes, Sat-
urn’s giant moon Titan has a lot in
common with Earth. In August scien-
tists added another similarity shared
by these unlikely siblings: stormy
weather. Using the NASA Infrared
Telescope Facility and Gemini North
Observatory, planetary scientist
Emily Schaller of the University of
Arizona identified a massive storm
that appeared near Titan’s equator.
“For so long, it was cloud-free,” says
Schaller, who devoted her doctoral
research to a largely fruitless search
for Titanic clouds. “Then, all of a sud-
den, they dramatically appeared.”
Schaller’s team could not confirm
whether precipitation fell, but other
studies have offered strong evi-
dence that methane clouds on Titan
dump methane rain in a cycle much
like the exchange of water between
the atmosphere and the surface of
Earth. The scientists are now trying
to determine whether Titan’s storm
resulted from atmospheric condi-
tions or from surface activity, such
as methane-spewing geysers or
volcanoes. ANDREW GRANT
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57 Robots
Learn to Walk
Last year, robots got off their
behinds and began walking
upright. Inspired perhaps by
the success of drone aircraft
in Iraq and Afghanistan, the
U.S. Department of Defense
is funding projects to build
machines that walk like
us—machines that could
carry loads, perform search
and rescue, or even assist
in combat.
One of the greatest
challenges for a bipedal
robot is navigating com-
mon obstacles like curbs
and stairs. Keith Buffinton,
a mechanical engineer at
Bucknell University, recently
received a $1.2 million Navy
grant to tackle the problem.
He video-taped students
58
An orangutan changes its voice with a leaf.
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regaining their balance after
a shove and realized that
walking is actually a type of
atory walks. This robot not
only stands like a person
but also simulates human
controlled falling, with each gestures, body warmth,
step an act of recovery. and—creepiest of all—it
That insight inspired new can sweat. Those traits
algorithms for managing are important to the Army,
hips, knees, ankles, and which wants to use Petman
toes. Collaborating with for testing chemical-pro-
the Institute for Human tection gear in battlefield
and Machine Cognition in conditions starting in 2011.
Florida, Buffinton’s team Anybots of Mountain
has built a partial bipedal View, California, is trying
robot (torso, legs, and feet) something different with
that could soon walk over Dexter: It incorporates self-
simple obstacles, allegedly teaching software to help
with better balance than a the robot learn how to walk.
person. In 2010 the group Dexter recently began its
will add arms and a head first tentative movements.
with stereoscopic vision. That’s one small step for a
Boston Dynamics, an robot, but if this approach
offshoot of MIT, is taking succeeds, a giant leap for
a similar approach with robotkind. It would certainly
Petman, which struck out beat anything with wheels.
this year on its first explor- FRED GUTERL
Orangutans Invent
New Warning Calls
Five wild orangutans in Borneo—nick-
named Sam, Henk, Rambo, Kondor, and
Sultan—have learned to create a new
kind of distress signal, using leaves
to lower the pitch of their common
warning call, known as a kiss-squeak.
The leaf-produced kiss-squeaks seem
intended to make the orangutans sound
bigger and more threatening. “Primates
were assumed to have no control over
their calls,” says Madeleine Hardus, a
behavioral biologist at Utrecht University
in the Netherlands, who classifies the
orangutans’ ability to alter their stan-
dard call as “a cultural innovation.”
Hardus and her colleagues discovered
that the orangutans had developed leaf-
assisted calls to identify humans (and
probably predators as well). She hypoth-
esizes that the technique is passed
down from one orangutan to the next.
Researchers have rigorously documented
leaf adaptation in the cluster of five but
have also observed the behavior in the
wider orangutan population. JANE BOSVELD
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In September
the European Southern
Observatory released
one of the most
spectacular views ever
created of our home
galaxy (left). This edge-
on perspective offers a
good view of what the
Milky Way would look
like from the outside
because in a sense we
are on the outside: Our
solar system resides in
one of the peripheral
outer arms of our flat-
tened spiral galaxy.
The central bulge
is packed tight with
old red stars and an
invisible black hole
some 4 million times
as massive as the sun.
Thick clouds of gas and
dust create the spidery
dark markings. Two of
the Milky Way’s satellite
galaxies, the Large
and Small Magellanic
Clouds, appear toward
the bottom right. The
800-megapixel image
comprises nearly 1,200
photos, but no high-
powered telescopes
were involved—just
the dark, clear skies of
the Chilean desert and
Canary Islands and a
Nikon D3 digital camera.
In a separate view
zooming in on the
galactic center (bottom),
a giant black hole at the`

59
Milky Way’s core (white
area at center) gobbles
up matter and spews
X-rays. Nearby,
large stars erupt in
cataclysmic supernova
explosions, sparking
additional emissions
from gas heated to
millions of degrees. This
image, captured by the
Chandra X-ray Observa-
tory, shows X-rays
ranging from relatively
low (red) to high (blue)
energy. ANDREW GRANT

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6o Geographer MARK SERREZE says

a big Arctic melt is inevitable
and readies us for what comes next.

When Mark Serreze first traveled to the Arctic, in 1982, he was

hit with a thrilling expanse of white. “It was just the most incred-
ible, beautiful thing I had ever seen. I was hooked,” he says.
Returning many times, he got a Ph.D. in Arctic science and for 25
years has studied the region’s snow and storms. Serreze recently
you had asked me just a few
years ago, I would have said it
would disappear somewhere
around the year 2070. But we
seem to be on the fast track
Will we be able to cross the
fabled Northwest Passage?
You’re already seeing a
busier Arctic. Instead of taking
a boatload of Toyotas through
now. Climate models are tell- the Panama Canal or around
recognized that current climate trends mean that the seasonal ing us that we might lose that Cape Horn, shippers will take
Arctic ice could melt in 20 years or less. He is now trying to help summer ice by the year 2030. them right from Tokyo across
the world prepare for a very different Arctic: a place of dimin- the Arctic Ocean to Boston or
Is there any way we can even New York, at great sav-
ished species, increased vegetation, and easy travel through the
reverse the changes? ings in time and fuel.
Northwest Passage. Director of the National Snow and Ice Data We’re already committed. A
Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Serreze spoke year ago I was focusing on What will the impact be
to DISCOVER about the future of the place he loves. understanding why we’re los- beyond the Arctic?
ing the ice cover so fast. But By losing the sea ice cover
my research has shifted now we’re changing the energy
to understanding the impact. budget of the Arctic. It’s cold
How did you come to study We’re seeing areas of formerly You can think of it as throwing there because the sun’s rays
the Arctic? treeless, windswept tundra up my hands and saying, well, strike the surface at a much
I went up there with my transition into shrub vegeta- all right, we’re going to lose the shallower angle than they do
adviser to measure an ice cap tion as the climate warms and summer ice cover, so get over at the equator. Also, snow and
on northern Ellesmere Island. different things grow. it, and let’s start thinking about ice are so reflective that much
I remember flying in on an old what it really means. of the solar radiation you do
Twin Otter. There were sap- Can you determine when this get is reflected right back up
phire blue skies—it was the process began? OK—so what will be different into space. This means that
pristine beauty of the place, We’ve been able to accurately about a warmer Arctic? we set up a gradient in tem-
the whiteness of the snow measure the extent of Arctic Shifts in the sea ice are going perature in the atmosphere
and ice and the visibility of sea ice from satellites since to have cascading effects with the higher temperatures
100 miles in any direction. As I 1979. What we’ve seen is through the food chain, from in the lower latitudes and
came back again and again, I an awesome loss of ice, 40 the top predators all the way the colder temperatures in
realized that the Arctic was as percent of what we used to down to the plankton in the the Arctic. The temperature
much a feeling, a smell, as it have in the 1970s. That’s about sea. We’ll see more coastal gradient creates atmospheric
was a place. equal to the area of all of the erosion. Before, a big storm circulation, which transports
states east of the Mississippi. would come through in sum- heat from areas of equato-
What do you feel when you It’s a lot of real estate. mer but sea ice would limit the rial excess to the cold polar
visit the Arctic today? size of the waves. As we lose regions. When we lose the
Now you can see the hand Will all the Arctic sea ice the ice, the wind has what we sea ice, we start to change
of man. As we lose the ice, eventually vanish? call a big fetch over the open the nature of the temperature
the very color of the Arctic Even in a greenhouse world, water, and you get big waves. gradients, and the rest of the
is changing from pure white it’s cold in the Arctic in winter. Villages in Alaska and coastal system must respond.
toward the blue color of the We’ll have ice, but we will lose Siberia are eroding into the
ocean breaking through. the summer sea ice cover. If ocean because of this effect. What kinds of responses do
you foresee?
There are going to be shifts in
text by PAMELA WEINTRAUB photograph by BETH WALD storm tracks and the inten-

60 | DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
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sity of the cold air outbreaks

that you get in the winter. We
won’t have as many problems
with damaged citrus crops in
Florida. But talk to the farmer
who wants to grow winter
wheat, which requires that win-
ter precipitation. Think about
the American West, where our
whole water supply system is
strongly dependent on the win-
ter snowfall. You start to see
how these changes can have
real economic impact.

Will the shifts add to the

greenhouse effect?
The looming environmental
consequence, the one that’s
really global in scope, has to
do with the carbon cycle. The
issue here is that if we go up
to the Arctic and if we dig into
the soil, we’ll find it is peren-
nially frozen—permafrost,
with a great deal of carbon
from past plant and animal life
locked inside, roughly twice
what is in the atmosphere to
date. A big concern is that if
we start to thaw that perma-
frost, microbes living in the
soil will become active. As
they metabolize, move, and
reproduce, they’ll disturb the
soil, releasing the locked-in
carbon. Now we’ve initiated a
feedback loop. Put this stuff
in the atmosphere and you’ve
got even greater warming. The What do your studies tell you in itself isn’t always that bad. you can say good-bye to a
circulation of the atmosphere about the earth of the future? Look at the great ice ages of lot of species that we have
will spread that warmth out It’s unknown. The Arctic is the past. The key here is how today. We’re looking at a
across the land. There’s grow- a wickedly complex sys- rapidly the change will unfold. different world. That world is
ing evidence that this effect is tem, and there are all these Do I fear for the extinction of coming fast, and the Arctic
going to be quite strong. cascading effects. Change the human species? No, but is leading the way.

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MEDICINE || ASTRONOMY || EVOLUTION || SPACE

61 Abuse Asteroid Strike Predicted

62
Leaves Its Mark
on Victim’s DNA

CLOCKWISE FROM FAR LEFT: ED CUNICELLI/GLASSHOUSE IMAGES; M. SHADDAD & P. JENNISKENS; ESA/DLR/FU BERLIN; MICHAEL HAEGELE/CORBIS; JASON BOURQUE/UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA
Childhood trauma may leave a last-
ing imprint not just on the psyche
but also in the DNA. This news
comes from McGill University and
the Suicide Brain Bank, a Quebec-
based organization that carried out
autopsies on suicide victims who
had been abused as kids. Across
the board, their brains showed DNA
modifications that made them par-
ticularly sensitive to stress. Although
gene variations are primarily inherit-
ed at conception, the findings show
that environmental impacts can also
The meteor’s trail over Sudan, captured by cell phone.
introduce them later on. “The idea
that abuse changes how genes
For the first time, astronomers predicted when exploded 23 miles above Sudan’s Nubian
and where an asteroid would strike Earth—and Desert, exactly as was expected.
recovered pieces of the rock to prove it. By study- The story did not end there, however.
ing the orbit of the asteroid and examining its Meteor astronomer Peter Jenniskens of the SETI
remains, researchers hope to reconstruct more Institute in California suspected that chunks of
details about conditions in the early solar system. the rock might have survived the fiery descent.
The work also serves as a dress rehearsal for He enlisted a team of local Sudanese students
efforts to discover larger, potentially deadly to comb the desert of northeastern Sudan and
incoming asteroids before they hit. managed to recover almost 300 fragments total-
function opens a new window for Astronomers with the Catalina Sky Survey ing 10 pounds. In a March paper published in
behavioral and drug therapy,” says in Arizona spotted a car-size object headed our the journal Nature, Jenniskens reported that the
study leader and neuroscientist Pat- way on October 5, 2008, when it was about as rocks were part of a porous asteroid that formed
rick McGowan. far away as the moon. After quickly deter- rapidly during Earth’s infancy, some 4.5 billion
During periods of adversity, the mining that the rock was too small to cause years ago. The fragility of the asteroid explains
brain triggers release of cortisol, a damage, scientists at the Minor Planet Center why it exploded so high up in Earth’s atmo-
hormone responsible for the fight- at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory sphere. “By looking at this trail of bread crumbs,”
or-flight response. Due to differen- calculated its trajectory. Less than a day later Jenniskens says, “we can go back in time and
tial gene expression associated with the asteroid—now classified as a meteor— see how the asteroid evolved.” ANDREW GRANT
stress, the brains of child-abuse vic-
tims had lower levels of glucocor-
ticoid receptors, McGowan found.
Cortisol normally binds to these Titanoboa as
receptors; with fewer of them pres- reconstructed by
an artist.
ent, there is more cortisol and less
resilience to feelings of stress.
In his study, McGowan reviewed
medical records and police reports
and interviewed family members to
determine whether a subject was
abused early in life. He then exam-
ined the subjects’ brain tissues
and found that among those who
had been abused, glucocorticoid-
receptor expression was reduced
by 40 percent. “If we can identify
how these changes occur, we can
identify those at high risk and ulti-
mately find ways to treat them,”
McGowan says. AMY BARTH

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64 DEET Might
Harm the Brain
DEET is great at keeping away mosquitoes—200
The steep cliffs of million people around the world rely on it—but this
the Martian polar
ice cap. common insect repellent may also interfere with the
human nervous system, a group of European sci-
entists warn. Their widely covered study, published

63
cold, about –90 degrees Fahrenheit.
in August, shows that DEET can disrupt nerve cells
In successive images, the drops seem
and enzymes in insects, mice, and people.
to flow downward and darken, as if
Did they are melting. “I think there is liquid
Vincent Corbel of the Institute of Research for

NASA’s Phoenix water on Mars right now,” Rennó says.

Find Liquid
Water on Mars?
Self-portraits taken by a NASA probe
on the surface of Mars may have pro-
vided our first glimpse of liquid water
on another planet. The Phoenix Mars
Lander, which touched down near the
planet’s north pole, was designed to
look only for ice frozen into the Martian
soil. But University of Michigan space
scientist Nilton Rennó says probe
images show blobs of liquid water
clinging to the lander’s titanium legs.
In an October paper in the Journal of
Geophysical Research, Rennó theorizes
that as Phoenix landed, its thrusters
displaced topsoil and splashed small
droplets of brine onto the probe’s legs.
Sodium and magnesium perchlorate
salts in the Martian soil may allow water
to remain liquid despite the extreme
Development in France, who led the research,
cautions that the conditions in his experiment did
In a follow-up, he confirmed that under
simulated Martian atmospheric condi-
not mirror real-world use of the chemical. “We
tions, sodium salts do absorb water
directly exposed specific neural cells to high
concentrations of DEET,” he says. He estimates
vapor and form a liquid solution.
that the risks from applying it as recommended—
Michael Hecht of the Jet Propulsion
sprayed onto the skin, with no more than three
Laboratory disagrees with Rennó’s
applications per day at a concentration of no more
assessment, saying the blobs could
than 50 percent—are far lower than the dangers
merely be frost; Phoenix principal
from mosquito-borne diseases, especially in the
investigator Peter Smith of the Univer-
tropics. Nevertheless, Corbel believes that DEET
sity of Arizona in Tucson thinks there is
deserves further investigation: “It’s funny that
not yet enough evidence to evalu-
after 60 years, there are still many things we don’t
ate the claim. “Whether you believe
know about this compound.” CYRUS MOULTON
Rennó’s case or not, though, he’s
created some interesting ideas that are
very relevant to future Mars research,”
Smith says. One intriguing possibility:
If fluid water does persist on Mars, life
that might have thrived there millions
of years ago, when the climate was
warmer and wetter, could be hang-
ing on in thin layers of salty water just
beneath the surface. ANDREW GRANT

65
Giant Snake Hints
at Life in Hot Times
In February researchers announced that they had uncovered the
60-million-year-old remains of Indiana Jones’s greatest nightmare:
Titanoboa, the biggest snake of all time. The bones of this 43-foot,
one-ton, crocodile-munching behemoth—found amid the remains
of an ancient rain forest—are helping scientists understand what
the earth was like when the climate was much warmer.
Snakes rely on external heat to regulate their body temperature,
and their size depends directly on the climate where they live. So
when a team of paleontologists unearthed several huge fossilized
snake vertebrae in a Colombian coal mine, the scientists were able
to deduce not only how big the creature was but also what the
temperatures were like in its era. Assuming the monster snake’s
metabolism was similar to that of its living relatives—anacondas
and boa constrictors—lead author Jason Head of the University of
Toronto at Mississauga estimates that equatorial Colombia must
have hovered around 90 degrees Fahrenheit on average, about
10 degrees warmer than the region is today.
The team’s findings, published in Nature, support the idea that
during warming periods, temperatures rise across the globe.
An opposing viewpoint holds that equatorial temperatures stay
roughly constant while excess heat accumulates in higher lati-
tudes. “Most climate models favor a hot equator,” says Paul
Koch, a paleontologist at the University of California at Santa
Cruz, who did not participate in the research.
Neither scenario would be particularly good news in the con-
text of modern climate change. Head notes that an overheated
equator could threaten a sizable portion of the earth’s biodiver-
sity and its people. “These areas are home to much of the earth’s
population,” he says. On the other hand, Titanoboa also shows
that rain forests can thrive at substantially higher temperatures
than they do in the modern Amazon. ANDREW GRANT

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ASTRONOMY || MIND || BIOLOGY || TECHNOLOGY
66 Girls Hit
Puberty Earlier
Around the
World
The average age of puberty
is falling, according to a study
of 20,654 healthy Chinese girls
aged 3 to 20. On average the
girls developed breast buds by
9 and pubic hair by 11, notably
earlier than what used to be
the norm. A 15-year Danish
study similarly concludes that
girls today experience initial
breast development a year
earlier than they did in the early
1990s. Both reports are in sync
with a landmark 1997 study of
17,000 girls by the American
Academy of Pediatrics, which
found that Caucasian girls
were developing breasts 6 to
12 months earlier than they did
40 years ago.
Better nutrition—leading to
taller, heavier girls who mature
younger—probably plays a
role. Environmental exposure
to hormone-mimicking chemi-
cals may have an effect too.
Pediatrician Barbara Cromer of
Case Western Reserve Univer-
sity notes that many pesticides
and plastics contain synthetic
estrogens, and that cattle fat-
tened with estrogen have up to
five times as much of it in their
tissue as do untreated cattle.
“Early puberty could represent
a ‘canary in the coal mine’
for excessive estrogen in our
environment,” she says. If so,
the next generation of young
women are at greater risk of
health problems. Elevated
exposure to estrogen over
a long period is linked with
higher breast cancer rates in
adulthood and earlier onset of
risky sexual activity. JILL NEIMARK
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Giant Geysers 67
From a Tiny Moon
Saturn’s moon Enceladus seemed like a boring ball of
rock and ice—“until we figured out that it was spewing out
its insides,” says Hunter Waite, a space scientist at South-
west Research Institute. The first major hint came in 2005,
when NASA’s Cassini spacecraft detected magnetic field
distortions along with plumes of water vapor and ice erupt-
ing from its south pole. Last summer, two papers published
in Nature bolstered the possibility that the plumes originate
from buried reservoirs of liquid water (modeled below).
Waite and his colleagues reported that Cassini’s mass
spectrometer had caught a whiff of ammonia—an anti-
freeze that could keep water in a liquid state. Another
group, led by Frank Postberg of the University of Heidel-
berg, described finding sodium in the ice grains of Saturn’s
E ring, which is composed of material released by Enceladian
eruptions. Their discovery suggests the moon may have
68 200-Year-Old
Cipher Solved
a liquid ocean that, like Earth’s, picked up salt from rock,
In 1801 American mathematician
Postberg says. A third team using Earth-based telescopes to
Robert Patterson sent a letter contain-
look for sodium near Enceladus came up empty, however.
ing an encrypted message to Thomas
Some scientists believe that pools of water lurk thou-
Jefferson. The president never figured it
sands of feet below the frozen surface, while others think
out, but this past March, mathematician
the eruptions might be released directly from ice. More
Lawren Smithline of the Center for Com-
FROM LEFT: ADAM GAULT/GETTY IMAGES; NASA/JPL/SPACE SCIENCE INSTITUTE; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. OPPOSITE: UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN MUSEUM OF PALEONTOLOGY
answers should come soon: Cassini is scheduled to loop
munications Research in Princeton, New
by Enceladus several more times. MEGAN TALKINGTON
Jersey, finally cracked the code.
Patterson and Jefferson shared an
interest in cryptography. In his letter,
Patterson wrote that he had devised
the perfect cipher: simple, yet impossi-
ble to break without the key. It entailed
writing a message in vertical columns
on a grid, scrambling the grid’s horizon-
tal rows, and then inserting nonsense
letters at the start of each row. The key
consisted of numbers listing the proper
order of the rows and the number of
nonsense letters in each. Patterson
claimed that his message would stump
humanity “to the end of time.”
Smithline took on the challenge,
writing a computer program to test
different arrangements of rows and vari-
ous quantities of nonsense letters, and
zeroing in on options that produced the
most promising two-letter pairs. Pairs
like “qu” and “nt” suggested he was on
the right track, while combinations that
produced impossible neighbors like “vj”
and “dx” were rejected. After a week,
he exposed the mystery message as
words that Jefferson would have easily
recognized: the Preamble to the Decla-
ration of Independence. STEPHEN ORNES
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69 Prize-Driven
Research Takes Off
A growing number of organizations are taking a cue
from reality TV, offering prize money for successful
solutions to science and technology problems.
Three major prizes are currently up for grabs from
the X Prize Foundation, which aims to spur innovation.
The $10 million Archon X Prize will reward any group
or person who can sequence the human genome in
10 days or less for no more than $10,000 per genome.
So far, eight teams have registered. The $10 million
Progressive Automotive X Prize, recognizing high-
efficiency, commercially viable vehicles, completed
two rounds of judging this past year. Performance tests
will start in the spring of 2010, with winners announced
in September. And 21 teams are vying to land a pri-
vately funded rover on the moon in pursuit of the
$30 million Google Lunar X Prize. Last October a small-
er X Prize–operated contest, the Northrop Grumman
Lunar Lander Challenge, awarded $1 million to Masten
Space Systems and $500,000 to Armadillo Aerospace
for their progress in building a commercial rocket capa-
ble of safe vertical takeoff and landing, as demonstrat-
71 First
Ground
ed by successful tests in the Mojave Desert.
Other groups were also busy in 2009. Entries poured
Animals
in for the £10 million ($17 million) Saltire Prize, to be Borrowed
awarded by the government of Scotland for wave or
tidal energy technology that can produce a continuous
Shells
Some of the first
output of 100 gigawatt-hours for two years. More than
animals to venture onto
100 teams will begin competition this month. In Septem-
land commandeered
ber, the DVD rental company Netflix paid out a $1 mil-
empty seashells for pro-
lion purse to a seven-member team that developed an
tection, according to an
algorithm to improve its predictions of customers’ movie
April report in Geology.
preferences. Netflix plans to announce a sequel early
Amherst College geolo-
this year. Meanwhile, a company called InnoCentive
gist Whitey Hagadorn
is hosting hundreds of open questions in science and
came to this realization
technology. Rewards range from $5,000 to $1 million.
while studying imprints
X Prize founder Peter Diamandis thinks prize-based
in a 500-million-year-old
innovation is much more than a fad: “Investments where
sandstone formation in
sponsors pay only for results are efficient, effective, low-
central Wisconsin. These
risk mechanisms to solve problems.” DARLENE CAVALIER
markings resembled oth-
er tracks thought to be

70
made by an early arthro-
pod, Protichnites, as it

Ancestral Whales May Have dragged itself across an

ancient beach. But the

Given Birth on Land

While digging for fossils in Pakistan, about 50 million years ago. The pregnant
impressions exhibited
curious diagonal notches
between the leg prints
that puzzled Hagadorn.
paleontologist Philip Gingerich of the Uni- specimen, Maiacetus inuus, was found He showed them to Yale
versity of Michigan discovered the fossil near what was once a coastline. It probably geologist Dolf Seilacher,
skeleton of a 47-million-year-old pregnant looked like a long-snouted sea lion, with who noted that the
whale with her fetus positioned for head- flipperlike limbs and a long, muscular body. pattern resembled the
first delivery—a surprise since modern- This intermediate species may have spent tracks created by mod-
day whales are born tail-first to prevent most of its time in the water, coming onto ern hermit crabs as they
drowning. The clear implication: Ancestral land to rest, mate, and give birth. A second, drag their shells.
whales may have given birth on land. even more complete Maiacetus fossil was Hermit crabs carry
“Virtually all of mammal evolution has found nearby; it appears to be a male, shells on their backs
occurred on land,” says Gingerich, who in slightly larger. for protection and to
2001 described fossil evidence that whales Gingerich and team nearly overlooked store water. Protichnites
descended from split-hoofed mammals, a the two skeletons. “There was just a trace probably used shells to
finding that compounded earlier indications of chalk dust on the ground,” he says. “I keep their abdominal
of a genetic relationship between whales and thought it was nothing at first, but when we gills moist, Hagadorn
hippos. Fossils indicate that whales started came to the mother’s skull, I knew this was speculates. That would
to make the transition from land to sea something special.” LINDSEY KONKEL have allowed the animals
to breathe and forage on
land for longer periods.
“Shells increased the
range of conditions
they could withstand,”
he says. Hagadorn is
following up on a related
development, the dis-
covery of a fossil of the
A ventral view lobsterlike creature that
of the skull may have created the
of Maiacetus tracks. JEREMY LABRECQUE
inuus.

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75
ASTRONOMY || MEDICINE || EVOLUTION || ENERGY

72 Tiny
Robots
Prepare for
Surgery
Nobody is yet plotting to
shrink Raquel Welch and
inject her into your veins, but
engineers are making notable
progress toward the Fantastic
Voyage vision: creating
miniature probes that could
dart around in your blood and
treat disease from the inside.
This past year, mechani-
cal engineer James Friend
of Monash University in Aus-
swimming robot. Inserted
into a patient, such a device
could transport catheters and
guide wires, carry a camera,
or deliver drugs to the site of
an injury. “It will increase the
ability of the doctor to see
and control what is happen-
ing during surgery,” Friend
says. His group is testing the
mini-motor in silicone models
of human arteries and plan-
ning even smaller versions.
Meanwhile, engineers at
Technion, the Israel Institute
of Technology, debuted Virob,
a buglike microbot that needs
no internal power source.
74
Hydrogen Energy
Gets Two
Big Boosts
Hydrogen fuel cells, which
expel only water and heat as
waste, are an appealing way to
generate clean electricity, but
the present technology relies on
expensive platinum catalysts.
Moreover, most of the hydrogen
available today is derived from
fossil fuels, so hydrogen is not
nearly as clean as it may seem.
This year, researchers made
notable progress in transcend-

tralia crafted a robot motor
just a quarter of a millimeter
in diameter and 2 millime-
ters long, smaller than the
head of a pin. It is built out of
piezoelectric materials that
vibrate when exposed to an
electric field. Those vibrations
can be converted into rotary
motion to propel a miniature
Instead, a magnetic field out-
side the body induces vibra-
tions in its legs, propelling it
forward. The Technion team
hopes to deploy Virob into
the ears of people suffering
from hearing loss, stimulating
nerve cells that lie beyond the
reach of cochlear implants.
BOONSRI DICKINSON
76
ing both limitations.
Looking for an alternative
to platinum, Jean-Pol Dodelet
of the National Institute of
Scientific Research in Quebec,
found inspiration in the human
body, which uses iron-based
molecules to extract energy
from food. In April his group
described an enhanced
iron-based catalyst for fuel
cells. It works just as well as
platinum-based ones but could

73 Venus Has a Secret Past

The first detailed infrared map of Venus, unveiled by the Euro-
be considerably less costly.
Chemist Daniel Nocera at MIT
is also looking to nature, trying to
find a renewable way to generate
pean Space Agency (ESA) in July, suggests that Earth’s nearest hydrogen. He has developed
planetary neighbor may have had a watery past. In size, density, a different catalyst—one that,
and composition, Venus is the most Earth-like planet in the when coupled with a photovol-
solar system, but it is a hellish domain: Ground tempera- taic cell, splits water into hydro-
tures settle around 860 degrees Fahrenheit beneath a gen and oxygen using energy
crushingly dense atmosphere laced with from sunlight,
a sulfuric acid haze. Thick clouds pre- just as plants
vent direct observation of the surface of do during
Venus, but its heated rocks emit infra- photosynthe-
red radiation that hints at their composi- sis. Nocera
tion. Captured by ESA’s Venus Express is working
orbiter, this radiation indicates that the to scale up
highlands of the planet’s southern hemi- the system in
sphere resemble granite, the same mate- hopes that it
rial that makes up terrestrial continents. To will bring clean,
form, granite requires water, which does not abundant energy
currently exist on Venus. It also requires plate tec- to poor people living off
tonics and volcanism—neither of which seems to be active at the grid. “With this,” he
this time either. The finding suggests that the young Venus might says, “the only thing
have been much like Earth, with oceans surrounding its extensive you’re tied to is the
Illustration of how a pterosaur
landmasses, before a runaway greenhouse effect condemned it sun.” JOCELYN RICE might have launched using
to its bleak fate. ADAM HADHAZY all four limbs.

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Yes, You Really Can 77 Did an Early

Smell Fear
“The smell of fear” turns out to have a foundation in science. All sweat
Pummeling of Asteroids
Pave the Way for Life
smells—and some sweat screams anxiety to the world, according to a study on Earth?
published in June in PLoS One. “The chemical transfer of anxiety may cause a The “late heavy bombardment” of asteroids that
feeling of discomfort in the perceiver. It’s like a sixth sense,” says psychologist clobbered Earth and the rest of the inner solar
Bettina Pause of the University of Düsseldorf in Germany, one of the authors of system for 20 million to 100 million years, ending
the paper. Pause and her colleagues collected sweat from 49 students at two 3.85 billion years ago, is generally regarded as
times—right before a university exam and during exercise. The researchers one of the most hostile eras in our planet’s his-
then had other students sniff the samples and scanned their brains with fMRI, tory. Collision after collision would have blasted
which registers activity. Sniffers’ brains responded to sweat made during an and heated the surface, wiping out any primordial
anxious period differently from sweat produced through physical exertion. In organisms trying to eke out an existence. New
humans, anxious sweat activates a cluster of brain areas known to be involved studies are turning this view on its head, however,
in empathy. “That suggests,” Pause says, “that anxiety—and maybe also other hinting that the ancient rain of asteroids may actu-
emotions—can be chemically transferred between people.” JANE BOSVELD ally have established a more congenial environ-
ment for biology to take hold.
There already were clues that the late heavy
bombardment was not the full-on killer it was
Giant pterosaurs were masters of the says. “Together the wings could withstand once thought to be, says planetary scientist Oleg
air from 108 million to 70 million years more than 2,000 pounds of force in launch Abramov of the University of Colorado. The ear-
ago. The biggest ones weighed 500 position. They would crouch down on all liest evidence for living organisms dates back
pounds, had a wingspan of 34 feet, flew fours, vault, and push off.” Once airborne, almost exactly to the time when the rain of aster-
40 miles an hour, and covered hundreds of the giant creatures would snap their wings oids ended. Unless life appeared nearly instantly,
miles a day. They were unable to launch into flying position and eventually soar. it must have survived the onslaught. Abramov’s
themselves like modern birds, though, so Habib used CAT scans to analyze study, published in the May 21 issue of Nature,
how did these prehistoric giants get off bone strength in a number of species shows how that could have happened. Certain
the ground? Common sense suggests they of living birds and compared them to modern bacteria thrive deep underground; their
must have run a long distance, built up measurements taken from 12 species of ancestors may have done the same, he argues.
speed, and then leaped into the air. pterosaurs. He could find no evidence to In fact, some scientists think life might have
Wrong, says Michael Habib, a paleontolo- support the idea that large pterosaurs got originated in subsurface hydrothermal sys-
gist at Chatham University in Pittsburgh. off the ground using only their hind legs tems. “Nobody had calculated how far steriliza-
“My findings suggest there was no running to launch. In this regard they resembled tion would have extended below the surface,”
involved.” According to his analysis, vampire bats, which use a “quadrupedal Abramov says. He and his coauthor, geochemist
published in the European journal Zitteliana, launch” to accelerate quickly, Habib says. Stephen Mojzsis, also of the University of Colo-
pterosaurs folded their wings so they could This kind of launch allows the bat to rado, found that if early bacteria were living more
act as arms and then used all four limbs to employ its strongest muscles (in forelimbs than 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) down, the impacts
shove themselves aloft. “Pterosaur arms and chest) for takeoff. JANE BOSVELD could have helped life by creating more hot-water-
were much stronger than their legs,” he filled cracks for microbes to inhabit.
Soon after, the late heavy bombardment might

FROM FAR LEFT: ERIK EDQVIST; JOSE ISELIN/VISUALS UNLIMITED; DORON GILD; (C) JULIA MOLNAR
have aided life on the surface, too. Back then the
sun was so dim that Earth should have frozen solid,
and yet geochemical evidence indicates the pres-
ence of oceans 4 billion years ago. One proposed
explanation is that heat-trapping greenhouse
gases kept things balmy, but it was not clear
where those gases could have come from.
In August, geochemist Richard Court of
Imperial College London published
a report showing that impacting
rocks would have shed tremendous
quantities of carbon dioxide and
water vapor, both of which effectively
trap heat. “People had always known that the bom-
bardment would have changed the atmosphere’s
chemistry,” he says, “but nobody had really done
the experimental work.” MICHAEL D . LEMONICK

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ENERGY

In the heart
of the National
Ignition Facility
78 Star Power Comes to California
(NIF), a techni-
cian inspects the
optics assem-
bly where 192
powerful laser
beams will zap a
pellet filled with
deuterium and
tritium, two
heavy forms
of hydrogen.
The pellet will
immediately
implode, reaching
a temperature of
more than 100
million degrees at
a pressure
100 billion times
that of Earth’s
atmosphere.
Under those
conditions the
hydrogen will
fuse into helium,
releasing a vast
amount of
energy and creat-
ing the kinds of
nuclear processes
that occur deep
inside the
sun. The NIF,
dedicated in May
in Livermore,
California, will
also mimic the
detonation of
nuclear weapons
and will perform
astrophysics
experiments.
Research at
the facility
could speed the
development of
abundant, clean
JACQUELINE MCBRIDE/LLNL

fusion power
—literally the
stars brought
down to Earth.
AMY BARTH

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PHYSICS || MEDICINE || BIOLOGY || ANTHROPOLOGY

79
Black Hole
80 Chimps
Plan Ahead
As a group, humans know
how to think about the future.
We are the species of agendas,
versity in Sweden, posits that
Santino may be showing off his
strength to human visitors and
other chimps. “He has a great
time scaring visitors,” Osvath
says, “and as the group’s
Côte d’Ivoire. Boesch and his
fellow researchers found that
male chimps frequently had
sex with the females they had
previously shared meat with,
thus increasing their mating

Created in Lab delayed gratification, and five-

year plans. But this year two
dominant male, he is showing
the other chimps that he can
success. The female chimps,
for their part, thrived because
In June researchers at Technion, studies found that chimpan- protect them.” of their increased caloric intake.
the Israel Institute of Technology, zees premeditate too. A kind of Darwinian quest The way the chimps hoard food
announced they had made an earth- In one study, a chimp named for survival underlies the makes Boesch suspect that
bound analogue of a black hole. Not to Santino—the dominant male at second thread of evidence as the animals plot such trades
worry: Instead of a superdense object Furuvik Zoo in Gävle, Sweden well. That study comes from ahead of time. “But we want to
from which no light can escape, their —was observed collecting and behavioral ecologist Chris- know more about their planning
more docile version merely prevents piling caches of stones, then tophe Boesch of the Max abilities,” he says. “How long
sound waves from getting out. returning later to hurl them Planck Institute for Evolution- ahead and how detailed is this
Constructing a sonic black hole at people who had come to ary Anthropology, who spent planning, and is there some
was first proposed by Canadian look at him. Mathias Osvath, a years observing wild chimpan- kind of hierarchical way that
physicist William Unruh nearly 30 cognitive scientist at Lund Uni- zees in the Taï National Park in they plan?” JANE BOSVELD
years ago, but the Israeli team was
the first to successfully create one.
They cooled 100,000 rubidium atoms
to a few billionths of a degree above
absolute zero and used a laser to cre-
ate a void in this tiny cloud. As the
atoms, attracted to the breach, zipped
across it at more than four times the
speed of sound, they gave rise to a
black hole effect. Under such con-
ditions, no sound wave could travel
against the flow of the racing fluid.
“It’s like trying to swim upstream
in a river whose current is faster

FROM LEFT: ISTOCKPHOTO; CRISTINA M. GOMES. OPPOSITE: CENTRO UCM-ISCIII DE EVOLUCIÓN HUMANA; MO LI, WOLFRAM PERNICE, HONG TANG
than you,” says team member Jeff An adult male
chimp (right)
Steinhauer. The boundary between
offers meat
the subsonic and supersonic flows to a female
mimics a black hole’s event horizon, carrying her
the point of no return. infant.
The discovery could potentially
provide a way to test Stephen Hawk-
ing’s prediction that a real black hole
should slowly evaporate as it emits
radiation generated in the quantum
turmoil at its event horizon. A sonic
black hole ought to act in the same
way by releasing phonons, or packets
81 Human Gene
Changes Mouse Talk
experiment: He inserted the human version of
FOXP2 into mice and studied the effects on the
creatures’ brains and vocalizations.
How important was a single gene in the evolu- Enard and his collaborators found that neu-
of sound energy. Finding phonons
tion of human language? Scientists have been rons in the brains of mice with human FOXP2
would provide strong evidence that
asking that question since linking a mutation showed greater plasticity, the ability to change
black holes “ain’t so black,” as Hawk-
in a gene called FOXP2 with a rare hereditary the strength of their connections with one
ing likes to put it. MARCIA BARTUSIAK
speech disorder seen in a British family. Other another. Such plasticity might be involved in
animals possess their own versions of FOXP2, vocal learning, he suspects. Mice endowed with
suggesting that it might be possible to deter- the human gene also expressed themselves with
mine which evolutionary changes to the gene’s lower-pitched sounds. Those deeper squeaks
DNA sequence are most closely related to our provide additional evidence of FOXP2’s central
ability to talk. This year molecular biologist role in spoken language. “We have no clue which
Wolfgang Enard of the Max Planck Institute for mechanisms could cause such a change,” Enard
Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, says, “but we don’t know of any other gene so
explored that possibility with an extraordinary directly linked to speech.” ALLISON BOND

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83
Light Can
Bend Itself
In July engineers demonstrat-
ed that beams of light can be
made to repel each other, much
like repulsive electric charges.
The discovery could help
control data transfer through
the Internet and enable cell
phones to work more quickly
while drawing less power.
The findings from Yale Uni-
versity electrical engineer Hong
Tang and his team build on
discoveries they announced in
late 2008, in which they dem-
onstrated the opposite effect:
attraction between light beams
confined within a silicon chip.
Together, the attraction and
repulsion effects make up
Computer reconstruction of an ancient deformed skull shows that the what is known as the “opti-
child to whom it belonged must have been nurtured. Such a brain cal force,” a phenomenon
deformity would have made the child unable to surive without assistance.
that theorists first predicted in
2005. The force acts along an
axis perpendicular to the direc-
tion in which light is traveling.
Parallel beams can therefore
be induced to converge or
diverge.
Tang proposes that the opti-
cal force could be exploited
in telecommunications. For
example, switches based on
the optical force could be
used to speed up the routing
of light signals in fiber-optic
cables, and optical oscillators
could improve cell phone sig-
nal processing. Unfortunately
for amateur physicists, the
optical force effect becomes
imperceptible for larger light
sources, so flashlight beams
cannot tug on one another.
“You need a transistor-size
object to see it,” Tang says.
STEPHEN ORNES

82
Early Humans
Tended the
Disabled
The 530,000-year-old de -
formed skull of a child found
in Spain indicates that some
early humans must have nur-
tured and cared for disabled
members of their tribe.
This child, estimated to be
10 years old at the time of
death, had a debilitating birth
defect called craniosynosto-
sis, in which joints in the skull
fuse before the brain has fin-
ished growing. The disorder
increases pressure in the skull,
impairing brain development.
“It is amazing that this child
was able to survive until 10
years old. This is the most
ancient proof of social care of
the handicapped,” says Ana
Gracia, a paleoanthropologist
based in Madrid, who pub-
lished an analysis of the skull
in March in Proceedings of the
Light-wave
circuit
enables
engineers
to study
the newly
National Academy of Sciences. discovered
Many mammals kill burden- optical force.
some offspring, she points out.
The child, unearthed in the
Atapuerca Mountains of Spain,
belonged to the species Homo
heidelbergensis and was prob-
ably part of a small tribe of
hunter-gatherers who migrat-
ed in response to food and
weather. “Survival would have
been difficult even for healthy
individuals,” Gracia says. “The
incredible part of this story is
that the parents must have
looked after this child.”
The discovery was made in
Sima de Los Huesos—“the Pit
of Bones.” Located at the bot-
tom of a 137-foot-deep chim-
ney inside a cave, the pit is
littered with remains of ancient
animals and also includes
about 28 hominid skeletons
dating back to the Middle
Pleistocene. AMY BARTH

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85
ASTRONOMY || ENVIRONMENT

Plankton
Record
Earth’s CO2
History
Trace elements trapped in ancient plankton reveal that
atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have been largely stable
over the last 2.1 million years. In a study published in
Science in June, paleoceanographer Bärbel Hönisch and
colleagues at Columbia University examined the remnants
of planktonic foraminifera—single-celled creatures with
elaborate shells—buried beneath the seafloor off the coast
of Africa. The plankton incorporate different forms of boron
into their shells, depending on the seawater’s acidity, so
each shell serves as a chemical record of the ocean’s pH
during its occupant’s brief life. The sea’s acidity, in turn,
reflects how much carbon dioxide was present in the
atmosphere at the time. By analyzing boron in shells accu-
mulated over more than 2 million years, Hönisch was able
to reconstruct in unprecedented detail how atmospheric
carbon dioxide levels have changed over time.
As expected, carbon dioxide fluctuated with variations
in local temperature, with higher levels corresponding to
warmer epochs. But despite major shifts in the climate
over the period she studied, Hönisch found that overall con-
centrations of the gas remained remarkably constant. That
makes today’s sky-high readings look even more anoma-
lous. “It really shows how much we have interfered with

NASA, ESA, AND H. HAMMEL (SPACE SCIENCE INSTITUTE, BOULDER, COLO.), AND THE JUPITER IMPACT TEAM; (C) MANFRED KAGE/PETER ARNOLD, INC.
the environment,” Hönisch says. “This goes way beyond
anything that earth has seen in a really long time.” The
researchers now want to dig deeper below the seafloor,
where plankton have been piling up for some 100 million
years, to study times when carbon dioxide levels were as
high as they are today. JOCELYN RICE

Plankton
On July 19, 15 years after the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet slammed shells show
into Jupiter, Australian amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley noticed that CO2
a dark spot near the planet’s south pole that resembled marks he levels have
never been
had seen after the 1994 crash. NASA scientists took a closer look so high in
and concluded that another comet or asteroid had slammed into 2 million
Jupiter with the force of 2 billion tons of TNT. The Hubble Space years.
Telescope snapped this photo four days later, showing an enigmatic
cloud spread out by Jupiter’s turbulent atmosphere. ANDREW GRANT

84
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Jupiter Gets
Comet-Whacked
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ADVERTISEMENT
Scientists have made significant contributions to
the safety and well-being of the human race. They
have identified laws of nature that explain the
functioning of the universe, Earth’s flora and fauna,
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DV21010.indd 1
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1906-1989
are just symbols. The law is the final arbiter: Right
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11/9/09 4:43:32 PM
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86 The world’s greatest particle-smasher

gears up for a second try. Physicist
JOHN ELLIS previews what will happen
when the fireworks resume.

The biggest particle accelerator ever made—the Large Hadron

Collider in Geneva—spectacularly fizzled shortly after scientists
turned it on in September 2008. What felled the gargantuan
machine was a single badly soldered connection. When the
powerful electrical currents running through the LHC came to
collisions before the end of
2009. That would require
quite a lot of luck. It’s like
NASA’s launching a space
probe. If you discover a faulty
valve reading somewhere or
consists of something you
can’t see. So the way you
would detect it is by observing
events in which some particle
carries away energy invisibly.
You observe something by its
bear on that tiny piece of solder, the resulting heat set off a other, you have to go back and absence, so to speak. That
cascade of events, ending in a sudden release of helium that check it. It’s one thing to make is pretty delicate because
blew aside several of the collider’s massive superconducting collisions; it’s another to under- you have to make sure you
stand what’s going on and find couldn’t possibly have missed
magnets. The staff at the European Organization for Nuclear
new physics. anything more conventional.
Research, or CERN, spent the past year repairing the damage,
You have to demonstrate
inspecting tens of thousands of connections, and bolting down Will you be able to do nota- that you can see and mea-
the magnets in case of another accident. By the end of 2009, ble science at half power? sure accurately all the known
CERN scientists were ready to start again, using the LHC to Already at half power, particles particles—muons, quarks, and
investigate the deepest mysteries in physics—including why will be colliding at energies so on. When the experiment-
beyond what has been ers have demonstrated that
matter has mass. John Ellis, a theoretical physicist at CERN
achieved with any previous they can measure all those
who has been involved in the project for 25 years, talked with accelerator. Just to put this things accurately, then they will
DISCOVER about the repairs and the prospects for the LHC. into perspective, the energy be able to start convincing us
distance between half power that they can really measure
and the Tevatron accelerator whether there’s any miss-
There’s been a lot of We’ve been analyzing other [at Fermilab in Illinois] is greater ing energy. There have been
downtime at CERN. What possible failure modes and than the difference between false alarms in the past, when
have you been doing—long making sure none of them the Tevatron and the previous people have thought they were
lunches in the cafeteria? would have unfortunate con- collider. As soon as we make seeing missing energy. So you
People are working their butts sequences. Most of that work half-power collisions, we’ll have to be very, very careful.
off, bashing away on their is done, but there are still some be seeing beyond what the
computers. Experimentalists other precautions people Tevatron can see. That should What about supersymmetric
are using this time to work on want to take. Those would be be enough to start looking for particles—hypothetical parti-
the alignments of their detec- necessary before we go to high-profile items on the shop- cles that are like weird twins
tors, the data acquisition sys- maximum energy. For 2010 ping list, like dark matter. The of the known ones? Will the
tem, and all that. There haven’t the plan is to start up at half Higgs boson [the hypothetical LHC look for those, too?
been any idle moments. One energy, then in a few weeks or particle that endows other Supersymmetry is one
upside of the delay is that the months go to about three- particles with mass] would not example of something that
experiments are really ready to quarters energy. Full energy be seen immediately. That’s a could explain dark matter. But
take collision data. won’t be possible until 2011. real tough cookie. the two are not equivalent.
You could imagine a scenario
What happens next? When will you start making How will the LHC aid the in which supersymmetric par-
The damage that occurred in particles collide again? search for dark matter? ticles do not produce missing
2008 has been fully repaired. We might see some half-power Dark matter by definition energy and do not make dark
matter. So if you do see miss-
ing energy, you have to ask if
text by FRED GUTERL photography by ROBERT HUBER it’s a result of supersymmetry;

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the energy might also be going

into extra dimensions, or there
might be some other explana-
tion. There would be a long
period in which you would try
to figure it out. You can also
imagine supersymmetry sce-
narios that don’t involve miss-
ing energy at all. Those would
be quite tricky to look for.

Could you find some sign of

the Higgs boson early on,
while operating at half or
three-quarters energy?
Finding the Higgs boson is
a question of seeing a signal
against a background. It’s
not as if you would produce
an event so distinctive that it
couldn’t possibly be anything
other than the Higgs. So
you would have to build up
statistics to convince people
that the signal you’re seeing
is the real deal. At half or
three-quarters power, we will
be able to start looking for the
characteristics of the Higgs
boson, but it will take quite a
bit of time to find.

If there were another big fail-

ure of the LHC, would that be
the end of particle physics?
If we never got the thing run-
ning reliably, that would be the
end, because nobody would
trust us to build anything else.
I don’t see that happening.
What happened on the day of
the first start-up was not typi-
cal—it was just one of those
things. You drive a new car
and get a punch in a tire, but
that doesn’t mean you’ll get a
punch every five miles. You put
on a new set of tires, and after
that the car normally works. It’s
worth remembering that the
problem didn’t arise in some
high-tech component. It was a
simple soldering problem.
The lengthy repairs must be
agonizing to people like you,
who have waited so long for
results from the LHC.
You bet. It has been even more
frustrating for the accelerator
guys, who, when they started
up, thought they would be
able to produce collisions very
soon. It has also been frustrat-
ing for many of the experimen-
talists, who thought they were
going to be able to start doing
physics, many of them having
spent 10 years in preparation.
The atmosphere has been very
subdued. Now I can feel the
fever mounting a little bit.

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MEDICINE || EARTH

87
Mockingbirds
Know Who
You Are
Don’t mock the mockingbirds,
because they can recognize you...
and they hold a grudge. Doug
Levey, a biologist at the University
of Florida, found that the birds
could easily pick out a threatening
person from a crowd.
Levey sent students, called
“intruders” in the paper he
published last May in the journal
PNAS, to perturb nests of mock-
ingbirds. The intrusion constituted
standing by an egg-filled nest for
15 seconds, then touching it for
an additional 15 seconds. This
aggressive loitering, which was
repeated over four days, elicited
an increasingly intense response.
The mockingbirds ignored the
approach of other, nonthreaten-
ing students, but every time the
intruder student swung by, the
birds quickly and sneakily left
the nest and eventually dive-
bombed the malefactor. “The
first time a male mockingbird
Alzheimer’s Genes Located
This past September, a pair of research
teams announced that they had identified
three new genes associated with Alzheimer’s
disease. The scientists also tagged another
12 gene variants as promising candidates for
further study. Previously, only four genes were
known to be linked to Alzheimer’s, which
affects an estimated 5 million Americans.
Both reports appeared in Nature Genetics.
To pinpoint the new genes, the two groups
conducted studies looking for differences
between the DNA of people who have Alz-
heimer’s disease and those who do not. Epi-
demiologist Philippe Amouyel of the Pasteur
Institute of Lille in France and his colleagues
closed in on genes called CR1 and CLU. The
precise function of these genes is unknown,
but previous research suggests they may be
involved in removing a protein fragment called
beta-amyloid from the brain. In people with
Alzheimer’s, beta-amyloid molecules clump
together and form destructive plaques.
The other team, led by medical psychol-
ogist Julie Williams of Cardiff University
in Wales, noted the same CLU gene and
identified another Alzheimer’s-related gene,
PICALM. This gene is thought to help main-
tain the health of synapses, the connection
points between neurons, and it, too, may
regulate beta-amyloid levels in the brain.
These findings mark “the first time any
novel Alzheimer’s gene has been identified
in genomewide studies,” says Washing-
ton University geneticist Alison Goate, one
of Williams’s coauthors. Previous studies
had examined small numbers of people to
confirm already-known genetic risk factors.
Locating new Alzheimer’s genes will aid
efforts to understand the chemical pathways
that drive the disease, Amouyel says, and
might eventually point the way to effective
drugs to keep it at bay. BOONSRI DICKINSON

drew blood on the back of my
neck, I was shocked,” says
intruder Monique Hiersoux.
Mockingbirds’ strong aware-
ness of their surroundings makes
them well suited for living so
close to humans, Levey con-
cludes. “We might be walk-
ing along on campus and see
a mockingbird perched on a
branch and think, ‘Oh, that bird
is minding its own business,’ ” he
says. “But what we don’t realize
is that we are its business.”
MICHAEL ABRAMS
89
Radiation Is What
Turns Your Hair Gray
Sooner or later almost everyone’s hair goes gray, but the
cause has never been clear. Last spring a team of Japa-
nese researchers said they think they have found the trigger:
radiation-induced stress.
Within every hair follicle is a population of melanocyte stem
cells. Over time these cells split into two populations. One pro-
duces pigment for the hair before dying off, while the other
becomes a new melanocyte stem cell. In a stress-free world,
these cells would replenish themselves indefinitely and we
would keep our youthful hair color until our dying day (baldness
notwithstanding). But stress free this world is not—nor is the lab
of dermatologist Emi Nishimura at Kanazawa University. There,
she and her colleagues bombarded brown- and black-haired
mice with DNA-damaging radiation. The consequences, as
described in a paper published in Cell this June: The melano-
cytes that originally went on to rejuvenate instead only matured
and died. The brown- and black-haired mice soon went gray.
Researchers posit that the melanocyte die-off may be a
way for the body to shed potentially cancerous, radiation-
stressed cells. It is too early to blame your spouse for your
silver strands, though—emotional stress has not yet been
shown to harm stem cells. MICHAEL ABRAMS

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90 Oldest
Octopus Unveiled
Ninety-five million years ago, five octo-
puses met their end in the waters covering
what is now Lebanon. The lack of oxygen
on the local seafloor kept the area free of
bottom-dwelling scavengers, and sediment
quickly covered the animals’ corpses, pre-
serving them in unprecedented detail. Last
January paleobiologist Dirk Fuchs of the
Free University of Berlin and his colleagues
released their analysis of these fossils—the
most ancient octopods known.
Due to their delicate construction, octo-
puses have left almost no evolutionary trail
to follow. “The preservation of these soft-
bodied creatures is the result of a chain of
lucky chances,” Fuchs says. Previously
only a single species of prehistoric octopus
had turned up in the fossil record, so the
new finds represent an explosion of informa-
tion about the animals’ history.
The five individuals include three previ-
ously unrecorded octopus species: Keuppia
hyperbolaris, Keuppia levante, and Sty-
letoctopus annae. Each specimen shows
the animal’s head, eight arms, ink sacs, and
suckers. The two Keuppia species appear
primitive, but Fuchs was surprised to find
that Styletoctopus’s anatomy places it in the
same family as Octopus vulgaris, the living
common octopus. “Its appearance indicates
that modern octopods developed much
earlier than previously thought,” he says. A rare octopus fossil from
the time of the dinosaurs,
SAM KISSINGER
seen here in ultraviolet light.
FROM FAR LEFT: ISTOCK; VERA ANDERSON/WIREIMAGE; DR. DIRK FUCHS; MARK BARLEY/UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA

91 Oxygen’s
Odd Origin
Roughly 2.4 billion years ago,
a rapid buildup of oxygen in the
atmosphere set in motion big
changes that allowed multicellu-
lar life to emerge. Most scientists
believe photosynthetic bacteria
produced the oxygen. The driv-
ing force behind the transition
has been unclear, though.
In April, new research showed
that our planet itself might have
been the primary cause: Today’s
oxygen-filled atmosphere may
owe its existence to a dramatic
decline in nickel in the world’s
oceans. In a study published in
Nature, a team led by geomicro-
biologist Kurt Konhauser of the
University of Alberta in Canada
examined rocks from around the
world known as banded iron for-
mations (right), which contain a
sequentially layered record of
the concentrations of various
elements in the ancient oceans.
Their analysis showed a drop
of almost 50 percent in oceanic
nickel levels between 2.7 and
2.5 billion years ago.
According to Konhauser,
this “nickel famine” coincided
with the cooling of the earth’s
mantle, which curtailed volcanic
eruptions of nickel-rich lava.
Deprived of this source of nick-
el, marine methane-producing
bacteria known as methano-
gens—which require nickel to
function—would have been
sidelined, paving the way for
the rise of photosynthetic, oxy-
gen-producing cyanobacteria.
Konhauser marvels at the
interdependence of geology,
chemistry, and biology that the
research reveals. “It links vol-
canism and trace elements in
seawater to changing popula-
tions in the biosphere,” he says,
“which in turn led to changes
in the earth’s atmosphere that
made the rise of complex life-
forms possible.” JEREMY JACQUOT

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ENVIRONMENT

Nowhere Getting away from it all is harder than ever, according to a new map
EUROPEAN COMMUNITIES, 2009 -
JOINT RESEARCH CENTRE (JRC)

developed by Andy Nelson for the European Commission’s Joint Research

to Hide
Centre and the World Bank. An ever-expanding network of roads, railways,
rivers and shipping lanes means that only 10 percent of the earth’s surface is
now remote, defined as being at least 48 hours away from a major city. More
than half of the world‘s population lives within an hour of a major city, largely
because “accessibility is a precondition for the satisfaction of almost any

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92

economic or social need,” Nelson says. “The main story of the map is connec-
tivity. It brings home how important it is to manage our resources, lifestyles,
and economies in a sustainable manner, since we are all interdependent, and
shows the remote places left behind. It also reminds us that the price of connec-
tivity is that there is little wilderness left.” The brightest areas of the map represent
the most densely populated and accessible regions; the darkest areas are the
sparsest and most remote. Spanning lines show shipping lanes. HEATHER MAYER

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ENVIRONMENT || MIND

93
Einstein’s Brain Re-Analyzed
There has been yet another attempt to identify the unique traits
of Einstein’s brain, this one by anthropologist Dean Falk of Florida
State University in Tallahassee. Falk did not have access to the
actual brain, so she used techniques developed for the examina-
tion of fossils and applied them to photographs of Einstein’s brain
taken after his death. In a study published in Frontiers in
Evolutionary Neuroscience last May, Falk reports that
the brain exhibited “an unusual mixture of sym-
metrical and asymmetrical features” that may
have contributed to Einstein’s genius.
For one thing, the parietal lobes of the great scien-
tist’s brain were wider than normal (something that other research-
ers have noted in the past), and its grooves and ridges were oddly
patterned. These details are important, Falk says, because the
brain’s parietal lobes process numbers; they also integrate sensory
information from different parts of the body. She believes that the
novelties in Einstein’s lobes may have contributed to his “prefer-
ence for thinking in sensory impressions, including visual images
rather than words.”
Falk also observed a small, knoblike structure coming off the
right motor cortex, an area of the brain that controls the fingers of
the left hand. This knob is sometimes seen in the brains of right-
handed string players who train from a young age. Einstein was
an avid violinist from childhood on. “It tickled me,” Falk says, “that
the knob may well have been tied to Einstein’s musical ability.”
The cognitive connection between music and mathematics has, of
course, been noted for many years. JANE BOSVELD

Species Transplant Two colonies of butterflies

flapped their wings in north-
ern England and the resulting
debate was felt around the
because temperature increas-
es are outpacing the butter-
flies’ ability to compensate by
spreading northward.

Succeeds world. In February a group led

by biologist Stephen G. Wil-
lis of Durham University in the
U.K. reported that they had
introduced two butterfly spe-
cies—known as the mar-
bled white (left) and the
small skipper—into
new habitats about
40 miles and 22 miles,
respectively, from their
homes. The move was a
success, Willis’s six-year
study showed. The trans-
Months earlier, marine biolo-
gist Ove Hoegh-Guldberg and
colleagues, writing in the journal
Science, proposed a broader
program of relocating organ-
isms that are facing extinction
due to climate change. Dis-
mayed scientists raised the
alarm, pointing to the devas-
tating effects of species intro-
ductions such as the invasive
kudzu vine. But Willis notes that
he chose two thoroughly stud-
ied species that were unlikely to
FROM TOP: KEYSTONE/GETTY IMAGES; STEPHEN WILLIS

planted species increased become invasive. “It would not

their populations at the same
rate as they would have in their
current territory, proving that
the team’s models accurately
predicted habitats suitable for
the insects. Willis says that
he undertook the experiment
have been good for our careers
if we introduced the next cane
toad,” he says. That unpopular
creature was brought to Austra-
lia to control agricultural pests
and quickly became a pest
itself. CYRUS MOULTON

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ANTHROPOLOGY || ENERGY || EVOLUTION || BIOLOGY || MIND
95 Hidden
Civilization
Found Under
Lake Huron
Traces of an ancient caribou
hunting ground lie buried beneath
Lake Huron, according to archae-
ologist John O’Shea at the Univer-
sity of Michigan. Modern Siberian
herders manage reindeer migra-
tion by chopping down trees and
laying them on the ground, he
noted; the animals instinctively
follow these “drive lanes.” O’Shea
has found evidence that Paleo-
Americans did the same thing
thousands of years ago, when the
climate around the Great Lakes
was similarly Arctic-like.
On land, old drive lanes would
be quickly disrupted and become
unrecognizable. In the middle of
Lake Huron, however, such lanes
could have been buried when
lake water levels rose rapidly
about 7,500 years ago, after the
end of the last ice age. Equipped
with sonar and remote-operated
underwater vehicles, O’Shea and
a team of University of Michigan
colleagues plunged through the
dark waters to look around. They
found thousand-foot-long lines of
rocks peppered with large boul-
ders, which strongly resemble the
drive lanes used by prehistoric
hunters in the Canadian Arctic.
The rocks have been buried there
for more than 7,000 years.
“This has potential to fill an
important gap in knowledge of
cultural development,” O’Shea
says. The discovery also leaves
him wondering what other relics
lie hidden beneath Lake Huron.
“The features are subtle,” he
says. “I’m sure people have
passed over these areas with
sonars running and not recog-
nized them for what they are.”
O’Shea plans to send divers back
to the 28-square-mile site in pur-
suit of further evidence, including
stone tools and preserved animal
remains. AMY BARTH
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96 Microbes
Build Better
97 Tropical Heat
Speeds Up Evolution
Batteries
In the never-ending search
If alien biologists were on an expedition to Earth, it would
not take long for them to realize that there are a lot more
for improved ways to store
energy, two groups are
species in the tropics than there are in temperate regions.
“It’s the biggest, most obvious pattern in nature,” says Len
looking to biology, enlisting
Gillman, an evolutionary ecologist at Auckland University
microbes to produce methane
of Technology in New Zealand. Why that pattern exists has
and viruses to build batteries.
been a long-standing puzzle. This year, however, Gillman
Penn State environmen-
found a possible answer: A warm climate makes life evolve
tal engineer Bruce Logan
more quickly.
and his colleagues identi-
Gillman and his colleagues compared 130 closely related
fied microorganisms called
pairs of mammal species. In each case, one species
methanogens that efficiently
lived at a higher latitude or elevation than the other. The
reduce carbon dioxide to
researchers tallied the number of mutations each species
methane. When the microbes
had accumulated in the same stretch of DNA since it split
receive an electric jolt, Logan
from a common ancestor. On average, mammals living
reported in March, they use
in warmer climates collected mutations 50 percent more
the electrons to combine
OPPOSITE: CYRIL RUOSO/MINDEN PICTURES. BELOW: LUKE LEMAN
quickly—that is, they evolved 50 percent more rapidly—
CO2 and protons, creating
than their sister species in cooler regions.
methane gas. Methane can
These results matched up with Gillman’s earlier study
be stored and later used to
on plant evolution, as well as with independent research
fuel a vehicle or run a genera-
on cold-blooded animals. Gillman thinks that a warm
tor. Exploiting the microbes’
climate accelerates evolution by raising the metabolism of
chemistry might be a way
organisms. A higher metabolism produces more mutations,
to make inconsistent energy
which in turn provide the raw material for evolutionary
sources like wind and solar
change. To confirm this hypothesis, he says, scientists will
more practical.
have to make year-round measurements of the metabolism
Along the same lines, MIT
of many different species. “Boy, that will be a big job,” he
materials scientist Angela
warns, “even for one species.” CARL ZIMMER
Belcher has engineered
viruses to help store electric-
ity. Her genetically modified Right: Ring-tailed lemurs in tropical Madagascar.
bacteriophages (viruses
that infect bacteria) cloak
themselves in iron phosphate,
a metal salt, then attach to A model of tPNA,
carbon nanotubes to produce a molecule that can
assemble itself; it
a framework of microscopic may resemble the
conductive wires that can precursor of life’s DNA.
hold a charge just like a car
battery. Genetic tweaks
enabled the virus to bind
tightly to the carbon nano-
tube, creating a high-powered
battery, as she described in a
May issue of Science. Unlike
traditional battery manufac-
turing, the process requires
no toxic chemicals and
can be set up very cheaply.
Belcher is working to improve
the batteries’ storage capac-
ity further by experimenting
with different virus-coat
materials.
ELIZABETH SVOBODA
11/13/09 3:39:30 PM
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99 God
Lives in
Your Head
Religion can cause wars,
unify communities, and
help us rationalize our
world, but does thinking
about God activate par-
ticular areas of the brain?
Cognitive neuroscientists
at the National Institute of
Neurological Disorders
and Stroke sought the
answer through function-
al magnetic resonance
imaging, or fMRI.
The researchers asked
religious and nonreligious
test subjects to ponder
God as a savior, a for-
giver, and a moral guide.
The fMRI scans revealed
activation of particular
neural pathways, includ-
ing those in the anterior
prefrontal cortex. But this
brain region is not used
only for religious thought.
Investigator Jordan Graf-
man says it is also a cen-
ter for empathy and for
the perception that others
have thoughts and feel-
ings of their own. “People
were using established
cognitive processes to
try to understand the
Ghadiri posited the existence of a helper molecule: actions of a supernatural
a kind of prebiotic template that might have enabled being,” he says.
RNA to spawn more complex organic compounds. The prefrontal cortex is
Then he actually constructed a version of the mol- the most recently evolved
ecule in his lab. Called tPNA (thioester peptide nucleic region of the human brain,
acid), it comprises the same four base pairs as DNA. much larger in us than in
The amazing thing about tPNA is that it adapts, apes. It is thought to have
chameleon-like, as it interacts with other molecules. benefited us by allowing
When Ghadiri poured tPNA molecules into a soup of humans to explain myste-

98
DNA bits, the tPNA base pairs reshuffled until they rious phenomena and by
matched the sequence of a DNA strand. When he bringing groups of peo-
First Molecule of mixed tPNA with a single strand of RNA, it conformed
to RNA’s structure. And when he let tPNA mingle with
ple together. “You would
persuade others that
Life Discovered? its own kind, the molecules danced until their struc- the way you think about
In the beginning there was RNA. RNA begat DNA, tures became stable. In short, Ghadiri says, it “exhib- something was the way
and DNA begat lipids, carbohydrates, and proteins: its the most basic properties needed for evolution.” they should think about
That is Genesis according to the “RNA world” The next challenge for Ghadiri is to show that tPNA it too,” Grafman says. “It
hypothesis, a leading but still sketchy picture of can self-replicate, crucial for a DNA precursor. If so, creates group cohesion,
how life began. In June, chemist Reza Ghadiri of the RNA world—and the whole field of biogenesis—will and that’s important for
Scripps Research Institute started filling in details. look a lot more credible. BOONSRI DICKINSON survival.” ALLISON BOND

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ASTRONOMY

1OO

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Hubble’s Amazing New Vision

The Hubble Space Telescope demonstrated its newly enhanced capabilities with this stunning image of
the Butterfly nebula. In May astronauts docked the space shuttle Atlantis onto the 19-year-old telescope to
make repairs and add new instruments. For astrophotography buffs, the most important upgrade is Wide
Field Camera 3 (WFC3), whose predecessor captured many of Hubble’s iconic images, including the Pillars of
Creation in the Eagle nebula. The latest version boasts higher resolution and an expanded field of view.
This WFC3 shot captures strands of superheated gas that were expelled by a dying star almost 4,000
light-years away. The Butterfly nebula’s distinctive shape results from a ring of dust that prevents the gas
NASA, ESA, AND THE HUBBLE SM4 ERO TEAM

from spreading uniformly in all directions. Its wings stretch more than two light-years across—equivalent
to about half the distance between our sun and the nearest star. ANDREW GRANT

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2010 | 85
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OBITUARIES
1O1IN
MEMORIAM
A powerful idea
far outlasts a brilliant
mind. We remember
some of the giants
we lost in 2009
and look forward
to standing on their
shoulders.
BY HEATHER MAYER
Willem Kolff
(Feb. 14, 1911–Feb.
11, 2009): During World
War II, the pioneering
biomedical engineer
created a dialysis
machine from sausage
casings and an auto-
motive water pump.
Kolff later built the first
artificial heart.
Jacob Schwartz
(Jan. 9, 1930–March 2,
2009): A prolific math-
ematician, Schwartz
made significant
contributions to parallel
processing, com-
puter programming,
logic, robotics, and
bioinformatics.
Hidesaburo Hanafusa
(Dec. 1,1929–March
15, 2009): His discov-
ery of cancer-causing
genes, or oncogenes,
earned Hanafusa the
1982 Lasker Award for
basic medical research.
It was his insight that
viruses can turn normal,
healthy cells into malig-
nant ones by activating
those oncogenes.
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Jean Dausset
(Oct. 19, 1916–June 6,
2009): Dausset shared a
Lawrence Slobodkin
(June 22, 1928–Sept.
12, 2009): The
1980 Nobel Prize for the renowned ecologist
discovery of human leu- argued in a 1960 paper,
kocyte antigens (HLAs), dubbed “The World Is
the immune-regulating Green,” that because
gene complex that must vegetation is abundant,
be “matched” for organ predation—and not the
transplants to succeed. availability of food—is
the primary check on
Sir John Maddox the herbivore popula- Leon Eisenberg
(Nov. 27, 1925–April tion and a key influence (Aug. 8, 1922–Sept.
12, 2009): The editor Wallace Pannier on ecosystems. 15, 2009): A child
of Nature for 22 years, (Aug. 22, 1927–Aug. 6, psychiatrist and human
he reestablished the 2009): He was a trail- rights advocate, he
influence and reputation blazer in the study of brought scientific
of that august British biological weapons. In Malcolm Casadaban rigor to psychological
weekly science journal. one top-secret project (Aug. 12, 1949–Sept. studies, scrutinizing
He was also the father in 1966, Pannier staged 13, 2009): This treatment for autism
of DISCOVER contribu- a mock attack on the molecular geneticist as early as the 1950s
tor Bruno Maddox. New York subway. His devised techniques to and conducting the first
team threw light bulbs study the genes of dis- randomized clinical trial
filled with microbes ease-causing microbes. in psychiatry.
onto the tracks and He died after being
Herbert York monitored the swirl of exposed to a weakened
(Nov. 24, 1921–May the released bacteria as strain of Yersinia pestis
19, 2009): After work- trains sped past. (the bacterium that Sheldon Segal
ing on the Manhattan causes bubonic plague), (March 15, 1926–Oct.
Project to construct the which he was studying. 17, 2009): He devel-
first atom bomb and oped Norplant, a
supervising missile and hormonal form of birth
space research under control that is implanted
President Eisenhower, Mahlon Hoagland under the skin of the
York became an impor- (Oct. 5, 1921–Sept. 18, arm; it can prevent
tant figure in arms con- 2009): The molecular pregnancy for up to five
DR. LEON EISENBERG: LIZA GREEN/HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL MEDIA SERVICES. NORMAN BORLAUG: MICHELINE PELLETIER/CORBIS
trol. He was involved biologist described a key years. Wyeth stopped
in launching Lawrence step in the way proteins selling the implant in the
Livermore National are synthesized from United States in 2002.
Laboratory and was the amino acids. He also
first chancellor of the codiscovered transfer
University of California RNA, an essential player
at San Diego. in gene expression. Claude Lévi-Strauss
(Nov. 28, 1908–Oct.
30, 2009): The French
Norman Borlaug anthropologist was a
(March 25, 1914–Sept. pioneer of structuralism,
12, 2009): The Nobel arguing that diverse cul-
laureate was dubbed tures share underlying
the “father of the Green similarities and that the
Revolution” for devel- human mind is funda-
oping high-yield crops mentally predisposed to
and modern agricultural think in terms of binary
techniques that have opposites: black and
greatly increased the white, hot and cold. His
global food supply and writing influenced social
prevented starvation. science, philosophy,
comparative religion,
literature, and film.
11/12/09 9:23:13 PM
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DV21013.indd 1 11/10/09 5:55:57 PM

 worldmags
INDEX

YEAR IN Algae Make Clean,

Renewable Diesel Fuel . . . . . . . . . . .48
MIND
Interview: George Loewenstein . . . . . . . . .32

SCIENCE A Smart Makeover for

the Electrical Grid . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .48
Rise of the Mind Readers . . . . . . . . . . . . .36
Can a Shock to the Brain

2 0 0 9 Hydrogen Energy Gets

ANTHROPOLOGY
Meet Your New Ancestor . . . . . . . . . . . . . .22
World’s First Grain Silos
Discovered in Jordan . . . . . . . . . . . .39
Another Baby Boom Hits Rich Nations . . . .44
Neanderthals Get Personal . . . . . . . . . . . .47
Oldest Musical Instrument Found . . . . . . .54
Early Humans Tended the Disabled . . . . . .71
Hidden Civilization Under Lake Huron . . . .82
ASTRONOMY
Interview: Alan Dressler . . . . . . . . . . . . . .24
Earth-like Worlds Come Into View . . . . . . .28
Fresh Hints of Life on Mars . . . . . . . . . . . .38
Twin Black Holes Found . . . . . . . . . . . . . .53
Magnetic Mysteries of
Sunspots Decoded . . . . . . . . . . . . . .54
Earth-like Storms Seen
on Saturn’s Moon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .57
Milky Way Panorama . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .58
Asteroid Strike Predicted . . . . . . . . . . . . .62
Giant Geysers From a Tiny Moon . . . . . . . .64
Did an Early Pummeling of Asteroids
Pave the Way for Life on Earth? . . . .67
Jupiter Gets Comet-Whacked . . . . . . . . . .72
Hubble’s Amazing New Vision . . . . . . . . . .84
BIOLOGY
Stem Cell Science Takes Off . . . . . . . . . . .23
Skip a Meal, Extend Your Life . . . . . . . . . .39
Genetic Disease Cured With Two Moms . . .44
Fake DNA Fools Crime Lab . . . . . . . . . . . .45
Blast of Biodiversity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .46
Strange Gaze of the See-through Fish . . . .49
Lose Weight With Brown Fat? . . . . . . . . . .56
Orangutans Invent New Warning Calls . . . .57
Girls Hit Puberty Earlier
Around the World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .64
Yes, You Really Can Smell Fear . . . . . . . . .66
Chimps Plan Ahead . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .70
Human Gene Changes Mouse Talk . . . . . .70
Mockingbirds Know Who You Are . . . . . . .76
Radiation Turns Hair Gray . . . . . . . . . . . . .76
EARTH
Seismic Waves Clarify
How Continents Move . . . . . . . . . . . .56
Two Big Boosts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .66
Star Power Comes to California . . . . . . . . 68
Microbes Build Better Batteries . . . . . . . . .82
ENVIRONMENT
Clear-Cutting Has a High Cost. . . . . . . . . .38
Sun’s Changes Have Surprise
Effects on Earth’s Weather . . . . . . . .45
El Niño’s Cousin Spurs Hurricanes . . . . . .52
Interview: Mark Serreze . . . . . . . . . . . . . .60
Plankton Record Earth’s
CO 2 History. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .72
Map Tracks Remote Places . . . . . . . . . . . .78
Species Transplant Succeeds . . . . . . . . . .80
EVOLUTION
Oldest Animal Fossils Uncovered . . . . . . . .34
Intact Tissue Found in Dinosaur . . . . . . . .35
Hunters Accelerate
the Pace of Evolution . . . . . . . . . . . .45
Darwin’s Next Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . .50
Dino Mummy Spills Its Secrets . . . . . . . . .52
Giant Snake Hints at Life in Hot Times . . .62
Ancestral Whales May Have
Given Birth on Land . . . . . . . . . . . . .65
First Ground Animals Borrowed Shells . . . .65
Leaping Flying Lizards . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .66
Oldest Octopuses Unveiled . . . . . . . . . . . .77
Tropical Heat Speeds Up Evolution . . . . . .82
First Molecule of Life Found? . . . . . . . . . .83
INTERVIEWS
Astronomer Alan Dressler . . . . . . . . . . . . .24
Economist George Loewenstein . . . . . . . . .32
Geneticist J. Craig Venter . . . . . . . . . . . . .40
Geographer Mark Serreze . . . . . . . . . . . . .60
Physicist John Ellis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
MEDICINE
Vaccine Phobia Becomes a
Public-Health Threat . . . . . . . . . . . . .18
Swine Flu Outbreak
Sweeps the Globe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .26
The Age of Genetic Medicine Begins . . . . .34
Hope for HIV Vaccine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .34
The Common Cold Is Decoded . . . . . . . . .36
Interview: J. Craig Venter . . . . . . . . . . . . .40
Diarrhea Vaccine Could Save Millions . . . .47
Infection Seen as It Happens . . . . . . . . . . .49
Eye Drops Could Cure Glaucoma . . . . . . . .52
Cure Depression? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .38
Abuse Leaves Its Mark
on Victim’s DNA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .62
200-Year-Old Cipher Solved . . . . . . . . . . .64
Einstein’s Brain Re-Analyzed . . . . . . . . . . .80
God Lives in Your Head . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .83
PHYSICS
Model Solves Fundamental
Packing Problem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .35
Math Could Fix Traffic Jams . . . . . . . . . . .48
Quantum Freakiness Leaks
Into the Big World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .49
Black Hole Created in Lab . . . . . . . . . . . . .70
Light Can Bend Itself . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .71
Interview: John Ellis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
SPACE
NASA Braces for Course Correction . . . . .20
The Moon: Cold, Wet,
and Breathing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .35
Probe Shows Mercury’s Hidden Face . . . .44
Spaceport Breaks Ground
in New Mexico . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .52
Space Trash Causes Orbital Crash . . . . . .54
Did NASA’s Phoenix Find
Liquid Water on Mars? . . . . . . . . . . .63
Venus Has a Secret Past . . . . . . . . . . . . . .66
TECHNOLOGY
The Graphene Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . .27
New Battery Tech Could
Transform the Car . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .36
Computer Learns to Reason
Like Isaac Newton. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .39
Computers Go Quantum . . . . . . . . . . . . . .46
Robots Learn to Walk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .57
Prize-Driven Research Takes Off . . . . . . . .65
DECEMBER WHAT IS IT?
HONEYBEE EYE
Each of a honeybee’s eyes
comprises 6,000 hexagonal
units for capturing light.
The eyes are attuned to
rapid movement—useful for
keeping up with a speedy
queen during her mating
flight—and geometric
patterns. Bees prefer radial,
symmetrical arrangements
MANFRED KAGE/PETER ARNOLD

typical of flowers. They

Oxygen’s Odd Origin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .77
ENERGY
Experimental Power Plant
Takes the CO 2 Out . . . . . . . . . . . . . .30
Fight Rages Over Cancer Genes . . . . . . . .55 respond to many colors and
Virus Linked to Chronic Fatigue . . . . . . . . .56 can see ultraviolet light; UV
DEET Might Harm the Brain . . . . . . . . . . .63 patterns on flower petals
may help them distinguish
Tiny Robots Prepare for Surgery . . . . . . . .66 among plant species.
Alzheimer’s Genes Located . . . . . . . . . . . .76

88 | DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
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20 THINGS YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT

DWARF PLANETS
1 Pluto—once the ninth
planet, now infamous as the
first dwarf planet—was dis-
covered by Clyde Tombaugh
at the Lowell Observatory
80 years ago this month, in
a series of photos taken in
January 1930.
2 The news was kept
quiet until March 13, the 75th
birthday of the observatory’s
founder, Percival Lowell, who
was obsessed with finding a
planet beyond Neptune.
3 Lowell was also obsessed
with the idea that thirsty
aliens had built enormous
networks of irrigation canals
on Mars. That one didn’t pan
out quite so well.
4 Gotta start early: Tom-
baugh was a 24-year-old
staff observer who had not
attended college when he
was assigned the tedious
task of scanning the sky for
Lowell’s “Planet X.”
tia Burney, an 11-year-old as far out as Pluto, making a swarm of objects circling
British girl whose grandfa- it the most distant known between Mars and Jupiter,
ther had connections to the object in the solar system. and they reclassified it as
Royal Astronomical Society. an “asteroid.”
12 My, how time flies: Hau-
6 Pluto was regarded as a mea spins so quickly that 17 But Ceres weighs nearly
planet for 76 years, until the its “day” is only 3.9 hours as much as all the other
International Astronomical long, probably the result of asteroids combined and has
Union (IAU) created the des- a tremendous impact. enough gravity to pull its
ignation “dwarf planet.” surface into a sphere—a key
13 Makemake is covered criterion that earned it new
7 The IAU recognizes five in frozen methane, and like respect as a dwarf planet.
dwarf planets: Pluto, along a comet, it may develop
with Eris, Ceres, Makemake an atmosphere only 18 Designed by a kid?
(“MAH-kay MAH-kay”), and when it approaches most According to the latest
Haumea (“ha-ooh-MAY-ah”). closely to the sun and studies, the surface of Ceres
vaporizes slightly. consists of clay, and it may
8 Caltech astronomer Mike be wet and muddy on
Brown’s 2005 discovery of 14 Pluto probably does the the inside.
Eris, which is bigger than same thing. Perhaps we
Pluto, helped bring about should call these things 19 A good year for dwarf
the downfall of Pluto’s plan- “obese comets” planets: In 2015
etary status. instead of dwarf NASA’s Dawn
planets. spacecraft will
9 Brown now Tweets under swing by Ceres
the user name “Plutokiller.” 15 More identity and the New
issues: When Horizons probe will
10 Brown also led the team Italian monk reach Pluto, giving
that found Makemake and Giuseppe Piazzi us our first good look
Haumea, making him the discovered Ceres on at each one.

NASA, ESA AND G. BACON (STSCI)

5 Tombaugh considered
many names for his new
planet, including “Percival”
and “Lowell.” The winning
suggestion came from Vene-
only person in history with January 1, 1801, it too was
three planets—albeit dwarf hailed as a new planet. 20 New Horizons will
ones—to his credit. arrive bearing a special
16 By the 1850s astrono- cargo—some of the ashes
11 Eris is 10 billion miles from mers realized that Ceres of Tombaugh.
the sun, roughly three times was just the largest among Andrew Moseman

DISCOVER® (ISSN 0274-7529) is published monthly, except for combined issues in January/February and July/August, by Discover Media LLC, 90 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10011.
Volume 31, number 1; copyright 2010 Discover Media LLC. Periodical postage paid at New York, NY, and at additional mailing offices. In Canada, mailed under publication mail
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DISCOVER PRESENTS COMING DEC 29

ON NEWSSTANDS

EXTREME UNIVERSE
ONLY!

The universe is a wild place.

DISCOVER’s EXTREME UNIVERSE,
featuring special guest editor and
Bad Astronomy blogger Phil Plait,
explores the big and the small of
it, from violent stellar explosions to
supercharged subatomic particles.

W Roger Penrose challenges

quantum mechanics
W Build a fusion reactor in your basement
W Scan the night sky like the pros
W The greatest unsolved mysteries
of physics
W Why the Big Bang may have
been nothing special
W The glue that holds us together,
and the energy that pulls us apart
FLASH CENTER/ARGONNE NATIONAL LABORATORY

W Simulating the universe’s

most extreme environments
W Brian Greene on the elegance
of string theory
W Envisioning extra dimensions and
multiple universes
W The frustratingly elusive neutrino
W Phil Plait picks the best and worst
science moments at the movies
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