BBC Earth October 2016

NE W

BB C SCIENCE•HISTORY•NATURE•FOR THE CURIOUS MIND

KN O W LE DG E

LO O K!

IS

NO W

BB C

EA RT H

ASIA EDITION | VOL 8 ISSUE 10

GANNETS NESTING AMONG SUN BATHERS’ p38

THE SUPERDRUGS LURKING IN THE OCEAN’S DEPTHS p50

IS A BLACK HOLE REALLY A HOLE? p91

PPS 1875/01/2016 (025609) MCI (P) 072/09/2016 ISSN 1793-9836

10

9 771793 983016 SGD 7.50 | PHP 300 THB 240 | NT 200 | RM 18

SECRETS OF THE DINOSAURS’ LAST DAYS The expedition to discover how life thrived after impact p28

WELCOME

Y Send us your letters to edittoriaal-bbccearrth@ @regeentm mediaa.s .g

FRESH LAYOUT, SAME INTRIGUING STORIES If you haven’t already noticed, we’ve given BBC Knowledge Magazine a facelift to BBC Earth. The difference you might ask? Stronger imagery, compelling stories and news beats closer to home (or heart). Our goal remains the same, to satiate the unceasing quest for knowledge and appeal to curious minds, and we are delighted to take you on this thrilling journey of discovery.

In this issue, we probe further into a popular topic of discussion: dinosaurs, and what exactly happened during the cataclysmic event that rewrote Earth’s history forever.

Over the past few months, a group of scientists and engineers have been diligently drilling beneath the seabed of the Gulf of Mexico, the landing site of the Chicxulub Crater. Read on to unravel the tantalising mystery of how the fallout managed to kill off so much life on Earth (p28).

Elsewhere this issue, we talk about ethical dilemmas.

If humans are taught to be good since young, then why do people still do bad things? We’ve invited two brain experts to share their thoughts on altruism and selfishness. At the end of the day, is it better to be the good or bad person (p66)?

We hope you enjoy the collection of inspiring stories this issue. Feel free to send us your views about the magazine, we’d love to hear from you!

BBC Earth Magazinne Includes selected articles from other BBC specialist magazines, including Focus, BBC History Magazine and BBC Wildlife Magazine.

www.sciencefocus.com www.historyextra.com www.discoverwildlife.com IMPO ORTANTT CHAN NGEE:

The licence to publish this magazine was acquired from BBC Worldwide by Immediate Media Company on 1 November 2011. We remain committed to making a magazine of the highest editorial quality, one that complies with BBC editorial and commercial guidelines and connects with BBC programmes.

The BBC Earth television channel is available in the following regions: Asia (Cambodia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, Taiwan)

SCIENCE • HISTORY • NATURE FOR THE CURIOUS MIND Know more. Anywhere.

Josmin Ong josmin@regentmedia.sg “LIKE” US ON FACEBOOK!

www.facebook.com/earthmagazine

Y We welcome your letters, while reserving the right to edit them for length and clarity. By sending us your letter you permit us to publish it in the magazine and/or on our website. We regret that we cannot always reply personally to letters.

BBC Earth Magazine provides trusted, independent advice and information that has been gathered without fear or favour. When receiving assistance or sample products from suppliers, we ensure our editorial integrity and independence are not compromised by never offering anything in return, such as positive coverage, and by including a brief credit where appropriate.

Experts in this issue…

HENRY NICHOLLS Henry is a journalist, author and broadcaster, specialising in evolutionary biology, conservation and the history of science. This issue, he talks further in depth, about the Chicxulub crater – the landing site of the meteorite that extinct all dinosaurs. p28

MICHAEL SCOTT History is so often studied in isolated chunks, but that is not how it was experienced. Instead, Michael wishes to offer an ancient global history, one that helps us understand how much we have always owed to interaction with one another. p45

HELEN SCALES Antibiotics are losing their effectiveness, putting us at risk of diseases and infection.

But according to marine biologist Helen, the rivers, lakes and oceans of the world could contain exciting new drugs. Could the cure to cancer be within the ocean beds all along? p50

PAUL NAYLOR Paul is widely recognised as one of UK’s top underwater wildlife photographers.

Over the years, he has built up a wonderful collection of images of British marine species and habitats, bringing the beauty of underwater world to new and wider audiences. p56

Vol. 8 Issue 10

3

CONTENTS VOL. 8 ISSUE 10 FEATURES 28 The day the dinosaurs died Scientists are drilling into the Chicxulub crater to find out what happened after the dinos died 38 Volrae e cantare!

Amazing photos of a pair of Gannets nesting on a fishing boat near a seaside resort 45 Global encounters of the ancient kind Trade, education, religion and politics are some of the ancient world’s most important cultural exchanges 50 Raiding the ocean’s medical cabinet Antibiotics are losing their effectiveness. Could the world’s waters offer new alternatives?

56 Glam rocks Meet Britain’s tompot blenny – the small reef fish with a big personality 60 Reign of the red terror Robert Bickers describes how Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution unleashed years of hell on China’s citizens 66 Good vs evil Two scientists go head-to-head to decide whether it’s better to be naughty or nice 74 Floods & feuds The world’s largest jaguar and its population lives in Brazil’s Pantanal, read on to find out more about these majestic big cats

UPDATE 13 The Latest Intelligence Bird wings from the Mesozoic Era, youngest-ever exoplanet discovered 81 Q&A Could global ice melt affect the Earth’s tilt, what makes a child prodigy …

REGULARS 3 Welcome A note from the editor sharing his thoughts on the issue and other ramblings 6 Snapshot Stunning images from the fields of science, history and nature

74

26 Comment & Analysis Helen Czerski explains how one can increase their finger grip

97 My life scientific Meet Dr John Roberts, a structural engineer and visiting professor at the University of Manchester

96 Witty Viewpoints Robin Ince talk about human-animal relationships and how we often anthropomorphise

98 The Last Word Robert Matthews discusses why animal experiments often fail to predict actual results

4

Vol. 8 Issue 10

RESOURCE 92 Book reviews This month’s best science books on topics with regards to cats and birds 95 Time Out Crossword puzzles are back by popular demand

28

SEND US YOUR R LETTTERS

HEREE’S S HOW TO GET IN N TOUCH

Has something you’ve read in BBC Earth Magazine intrigued or excited you? Write in and share it with us.

We’d love to hear from you and we’ll publish a selection of your comments in forthcoming issues.

PHONE

Subs scrriptiion,, ed dit ito oriall an nd adverttisin ng en nquiries s Tel: 6446 6888 Fax: 6449 9945 Te

EMAIL L

Adverrtiisiing enq quiries s sales@regentmedia.sg Sub bscrripttio on en nquirie es subscription@regentmedia.sg

POST

Subs scrriptio on,, ed dit ito orial an nd adverttisin ng en nquiries s Regent Media Pte Ltd 20 Bedok South Road, Singapore 469277

A SI A T E A M Publisher: Ben Poon Senior Writer: Josmin Ong Creative Director: Eric Wong Art Director: Tint Win Senior Marketing Manager: Tasmin Chua Marketing Executives: Karlyn Ho, Rachel Tan Finance Executive: Julie Khong HR Executive: Wendy Chua Business Directors: Kelly Koh, Marie Yeo, Thomas Leow Business Managers: Alice Ng, Joan Chua, Marina Chong

Worldwide

EMA AILL US S AT: edito oria al-b bb earrth@ bbce th@re ege entm tme media a.sgg We welcome your letters, while reserving the right to edit them for length and clarity. By sending us your letter you permit us to publish it in the magazine and/or on our website. We regret that we cannot always reply personally to letters.

BULK SUBSCRIP PTIO ON Having just one copy of BBC Earth Magazine isn’t enough to go around? Not to worry – Discounts on bulk subscriptions are now available for schools, libraries and organisations who are keen to order more than 50 copies per issue.

50

For enquiries or to place an order, email to subscription@regentmedia.sg or call us at +65 6446 6888 today!

BBC Worldwide UK Publishing Director of Publishing: Nicholas Brett Head of Publishing: Chris Kerwin Publishing Coordinator: Eva Abramik

IMMEDIATE MEDIA A COO Chairman: Stephen Alexander Deputy Chairman: Peter Phippen Chief Executive Officer: Tom Bureau Director of International Licensing and Syndication: Tim Hudson International Partners Manager: Anna Brown Syndication Manager: Richard Bentley

UK T E A M Editor: Graham Southorn Production Editor: Daniel Down Reviews Editor: Daniel Bennett Commissioning Editor: Jason Goodyer Science Consultant: Robert Matthews Contributing Editor: Emma Bayley Art Editor: Joe Eden CONT O TRIB BUTO ORS S Acute Graphics, Peter Bentley, Dean Burnett, Rita Carter, JV Chamary, Jamie Coe, Helen Czerski, Alex Duce, Isabelle de Groote, Eiko Ojala, Adam Gale, Alastair Gunn, Robin Ince, Christian Jarrett, Tonwen Jones, Pierre Daniel Kleinhouse, Raja Lockey, Orlagh Murphy, Henry Nicholls, James Olstein, Jheni Osman, Matt Parker, Chris Philpot, Helen Pilcher, Andy Potts, John Powell, Michael Reiss, Helen Scales, Kyle Smart, Secret Studio, Katie Steckles, Miquel Tura Rigamonti, Luis Villazon DIS DIS STRIB BUTTOR RS Singapore - Pansing Distribution Pte Ltd Malaysia - MPH Distributors Sdn Bhd Thailand - Asia Books Co., Ltd Philippines - Asia/Pacific Circulation Exponents, Inc. Taiwan - Formosan Magazine Press Inc Hong Kong/China/Macau - Times Publishing (HK) Ltd SUBS BSC CRIPTIO ON AGE A ENTTS Singapore - The Learning Craft Pte Ltd, Emit Asia (S) Pte Ltd, Adept Learning Pte Ltd Taiwan - JDM Books International Co. Ltd Malaysia - Worldwide Magazines Services Sdn Bhd

A publication of

60

BBC Earth Magazine, MCI(P) 072/09/2016, ISSN 1793-9836, PPS 1875/01/2016 (025609), is published by Regent Media Pte Ltd under license from Immediate Media Company Bristol Limited. Copyright © Immediate Media Company Bristol Limited. No part of this publication is to be reproduced, stored, transmitted, digitally or otherwise, without the prior consent of the publisher. The information contained herein is accurate at time of printing. Changes may have occurred since this magazine went to print. Regent Media Pte Ltd and its editors will not be held liable for any damages, loss, injury or inconvenience, arising in connection with the contents of the magazine. Regent Media Pte Ltd will not accept responsibility for unsolicited contributions. Printer: KHL Printing Co Pte Ltd (197801823M) Address: 57 Loyang Drive Singapore 508968. The BBC logo is a trade mark of the British Broadcasting Corporation and is used under licence. © British Broadcasting Corporation 1996

Persatuan Penerbit Penerbit Majalah, Malaysia Magazine Publishers Association, Malaysia

Member of Magazine Publishers Association, Singapore

Hubble peers into the storm This shot from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows a maelstrom of glowing gas and dark dust within one of the Milky Way’s satellite galaxies, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC).

This stormy scene shows a stellar nursery known as N159, an HII region over 150 light-years across. N159 contains many hot young stars. These stars are emitting intense ultraviolet light, which causes nearby hydrogen gas to glow, and torrential stellar winds, which are carving out ridges, arcs, and filaments from the surrounding material.

At the heart of this cosmic cloud lies the Papillon Nebula, a butterfly-shaped region of nebulosity. This small, dense object is classified as a High-Excitation Blob, and is thought to be tightly linked to the early stages of massive star formation.

N159 is located over 160,000 light-years away. It resides just south of the Tarantula Nebula (heic1402), another massive star-forming complex within the LMC. This image comes from Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys. The region was previously imaged by Hubble’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2, which also resolved the Papillon Nebula for the first time.

PHOTO: ESA/HUBBLE & NASA WORDS: EUROPEAN SPACE AGENCY

6

Vol. 8 Issue 10

Vol. 8 Issue 10

7

Seeing in the dark If you’re going to solve one of the biggest mysteries in science, you’ll need a suitably impressive piece of equipment. This four-tonne digital camera at the Cerro Tololo InterAmerican Observatory in Chile is tasked with revealing the nature of dark energy – the little-understood entity that’s thought to be accelerating the expansion of the Universe.

The Dark Energy Camera (DECam) boasts 74 CCDs (charge-coupled devices), totalling 570 million pixels.

Just like in conventional digital cameras, these convert incoming light into electrical signals. DECam, however, uses specially designed CCDs that are sensitive to the faint, redshifted light emanating from distant galaxies.

The camera is attached to the Victor M Blanco Telescope and has been carrying out a survey of the southern sky since 2013. By 2018, it will have recorded information from 300 million galaxies and thousands of supernovae, helping scientists to measure changes in the Universe’s expansion (and dark energy) over the past 14 billion years.

PHOTO: SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

8

Vol. 8 Issue 10

Vol. 8 Issue 10

9

STS-72 Landing The Space Shuttle orbiter Endeavour and its crew of six glide into Runway 15 at KSC’s Shuttle Landing Facility after spending nine days in space on the STS-72 mission, the first Shuttle flight of 1996. It is the eighth night landing of the Shuttle since the program began in 1981, but only the third night landing at KSC. Highlights of the mission were the retrieval of the Japanese Space Flyer Unit (SFU), the deployment and retrieval of NASA’s Office of Aeronauts and Space Technology-Flyer (OAST-Flyer), and two Extravehicular Activities (EVA’s) or spacewalks.

PHOTO: FLICKR/ NASA ON THE COMMONS

10

Vol. 8 Issue 10

Vol. 8 Issue 10

11

www.bbcasia.com BBC Earth is available in Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam and Mongolia.

Please call your cable operator for more details or check out our website.

/BBCEarth @BBCEarthAsia

THE LATEST INTELLIGENCE

Update

The Sun undergoes 11-year cycles, where it experiences low activity with few sunspots (left) and high activity with sunspots and solar flares (right)

SUN

PHOTO: NASA/SDO/SOHO

SPOT THE DIFFERENCE AS THE SUN SHOWS ITS LOWEST NUMBER OF SUNSPOTS SINCE 1906, WE ASK: ARE WE HEADING FOR A MINI ICE AGE?

Vol. 8 Issue 10

13

Update

THE LATEST INTELLIGENCE

In June, something unusual happened: the Sun went blank; it lost its spots for the first time in four years.

This is a sign that the Sun is approaching a solar minimum, a period where sunspots – darker, cooler areas on the visible surface of the Sun that are caused by intense magnetic activity – are at their least abundant.

Every 11 years, the Sun goes through a cycle during which its magnetic activity fluctuates up and down, leading to changes in the number of sunspots and solar flares. The period of most

SUNSPOT ACTIVITY IS AT ITS WEAKEST SINCE 1906, WHICH IS A SIGN IT COULD BE HEADING TO A LONG-TERM LOW

activity is called a solar maximum and the period of least activity a solar minimum.

“Solar activity is currently declining from the most recent cycle maximum, which peaked around the end of 2014,” said Prof Joanna Haigh, co-director of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and Environment.

During a solar maximum, sunspots can erupt, releasing vast amounts of radiation that can disrupt satellites and bombard astronauts with potentially dangerous radiation. During a solar minimum, the lack of solar storms results in Earth losing part of its shield against cosmic radiation coming from outside the Solar System. “Overall, the Sun’s radiation output is reduced at solar minimum so the Earth’s atmosphere shrinks slightly as it is being heated less,” said Prof Lucie Green, author of 15 Million Degrees: A Journey To The Centre Of The Sun. “This is good news for some satellites and also for the

THE SUN IN NUMBERS

STAR TYPE Yellow dwarf

RADIUS 695,508km DISTANCE TO EARTH 149,600,000km Light from the Sun takes eight minutes to reach Earth

MASS 1.989x1030kg

SURFACE TEMPERATURE 5,500°C

VOLUME 1.41x1018km3

PHOTOS: GETTY, NASA

CORE TEMPERATURE 15,000,000°C

14

Vol. 8 Issue 10

International Space Station because when the Earth’s atmosphere shrinks, these orbiting items experience less drag and so their lifetimes increase.

Unfortunately, this is also the case for space debris!”

Sunspot activity is at its weakest since 1906, which is a sign it could be heading to a long-term low that could affect the climate.

“The Sun may be experiencing a longer term decline in activity towards a Grand Minimum,” said Haigh. “The last Grand Minimum occurred in the late 17th Century and has been associated with a cooler period in northwestern Europe referred to as the Little Ice Age. “Our current understanding is that low solar activity at that time had little impact on global temperatures but may have resulted in regional effects, including colder winters in northwestern Europe. Looking ahead we might anticipate the same effects.”

ENVIRONMENT

AGE 4.6 billion years

COMPOSITION 92.1% hydrogen, 7.8% helium, 0.1% oxygen, nitrogen, silicon and others

TIME UNTIL DEATH 5 billion years

HOLE IN THE OZONE STARTS TO HEAL In 1987, virtually every nation in the world signed the Montreal Protocol.

It was a concerted effort to ban the use of CFCs in order to repair the widening hole in Earth’s ozone layer. Now, almost 30 years later, it appears to have paid off as scientists at MIT have found evidence that the hole in the ozone layer over the Antarctic is closing.

The team found that the ozone hole has shrunk by more than four million square km, or about half the area of the United States, since 2000, when ozone depletion was at its peak.

“We can now be confident that the things we’ve done have put the planet on a path to heal,” says lead researcher Susan Solomon. “Which is pretty good for us, isn’t it? Aren’t we amazing humans, that we did something that created a situation

Visualisation of the changes in the hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica from 1979 to 2011, moving from purple (low ozone levels) through to blue, green, yellow and orange (high ozone levels)

that we decided collectively, as a world, ‘Let’s get rid of these molecules’? We got rid of them, and now we’re seeing the planet respond.”

The ozone hole was first discovered in the 1950s. But concerns began to grow in the mid1980s when scientists from the British Antarctic Survey noticed it was widening.

CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons), chemical compounds once emitted by dry-cleaning processes, refrigerators, and aerosol sprays, were thought to be the main culprit because the chlorine they emit into the atmosphere eats away at ozone.

According to Solomon, if levels of chlorine in the atmosphere continue to dissipate at the current rate, the ozone hole could be closed by the middle of the century.

Vol. 8 Issue 10

15

Update

THE LATEST INTELLIGENCE

One of the amber specimens suspended in a glycerin bath and ready for photography

The tiny bird probably died when it became trapped in sticky tree sap

The feathers can clearly be seen on this image. A claw is marked with an arrow

BIRD WINGS FROM THE TIME OF THE DINOSAURS FOUND TRAPPED IN AMBER It’s two birds in one stone. Two pairs of wings belonging to hatchlings that lived alongside dinosaurs 100 million years ago have been found in Myanmar by an international research team.

The fossilised wings have been immaculately preserved in amber. Each is just two or three centimetres long and includes bones, long ‘fingers’ tipped with sharp claws, as well as individual feathers.

“These fossil wings show amazing detail,” said researcher Mike Benton. “The individual feathers show every filament and whisker, whether they are flight feathers or down feathers, and there are even traces of colour – spots and stripes.”

The anatomy of the hand indicates that the fossils come from enantiornithines, a 16

Vol. 8 Issue 10

major group of birds that died out at the he dinosaurs, 66 million years ye ears same time as the hat the birds wandered ou ut ago. It is likely that out fore becoming trapped in the t of their nest before o sticky tree sap that eventually solidified to form amber. at the tiny birds were “The fact that out in the trees suggests th hat clambering about that nced development, meaning meanin ng they had advanced y for action as soon as theyy they were ready da. hatched,” said lead researcher Dr Xing Lid Lida. d not hang about in the ne est “These birds did nest d, but set off looking for waiting to be fed, o food, and sadlyy died – perhaps because of their small size and lack of experience. rs in other amber sampless Isolated feathers d show that adultt birds might have avoided the sticky sap, or pulled themselves free.””

PHOTOS: ROYAL SASKATCHEWAN MUSEUM/R C MCKELLAR X3, SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

PALAEONTOLOGY

SPACE

MYSTERIOUS ‘DARK HYDROGEN’ MAY BE LURKING INSIDE GAS GIANTS On gas giants, hydrogen may exist in three different forms: as a gas, as a liquid and as ‘dark hydrogen’

IN N U MBERS

99.

999% The proportion of the Earth’s one trillion microbial species yet to be discovered, as estimated by a biologist at Indiana University.

89.5m The height of the world’s tallest tree: a yellow meranti discovered in the Malaysian rainforest by researchers at Cambridge University.

Does the Solar System have a dark secret?

Researchers at the University of Edinburgh have found that ‘dark hydrogen’ may be hidden under the surface of gas giant planets such as Jupiter and Saturn.

It is accepted that hydrogen exists as a gas on the surface of giant planets and as liquid metal at their core. But what lies in between?

To investigate this, the team used a laserheated diamond anvil to recreate conditions found in the interior of gas giants. They squeezed hydrogen to pressures up to 1.5 million times of that on the Earth’s surface and heated it up to 5,000°C. They found a point

between the gas and liquid phases at which the hydrogen doesn’t absorb or reflect light, which they dubbed ‘dark hydrogen’.

“A dark hydrogen layer in giant planets separates the atmosphere and the metallic interior, and neither reflects nor transmits visible light, but does allow infrared radiation to pass,” said researcher Stewart Williams. “This indicates heat can easily escape from within giant planets.

The dark hydrogen layer also weakly conducts electricity, allowing it to participate in the production of the planetary magnetic field.”

The finding may help researchers to understand how gas giants form.

15

trillion

The number of litres of helium found in a gas field in Tanzania. The discovery will help to combat the world shortage of the gas, which is used in everything from MRI scanners to deep-sea diving equipment.

Vol. 8 Issue 10

17

Update

THE LATEST INTELLIGENCE

The cockatoos made the effort to use themade tool to The cockatoos the reach to theuse high-value effort the tool to food item, even when a reach the high-value loweritem, valueeven foodwhen item a food was immediately lower value food item available was immediately available

ZOOLOGY

Who’s a clever boy, then? Researchers at the University of Vienna have devised a test to show that conscious reasoning is involved in tool use by Goffin’s cockatoos, a species native to Indonesia.

The cockatoos prefer cashew nuts to pecans: if the former are available they will disregard the latter. They have also been seen to demonstrate two forms of tool use: using a stick to rake food into reach, and dropping balls into a tube to knock out a reward. In the University of Vienna experiment, cockatoos were presented with a piece of equipment that required a tool to reach the food inside (whether a high-value cashew or a lower value pecan), a food item and a tool.

18

Vol. 8 Issue 10

“THEY CHOSE THE STICK TOOL OVER THE IMMEDIATE LOWER VALUE FOOD”

“If a lower value food or a high-value food was out-of-reach inside the apparatus and the choice was between a high-value food item and a tool, they chose the food over the tool,” said research leader Isabelle Laumer. Yet when the cockatoos had a choice between a low-value food or a tool, they picked the tool but only if it worked for the apparatus. If the wrong tool was provided, they picked the low-value food.

Yet it also seemed as if the cockatoos contemplated the variations in quality between the two rewards. “When the stick apparatus with the high-value food inside was available, they chose the stick tool over the immediate lower value food,” she added.

PHOTOS: BENE CROY, IAN BELL, NASA/JPL-CALTECH

COCKATOOS MAKE DECISIONS ABOUT TOOL USE

SPACE

YOUNGEST-EVER EXOPLANET DISCOVERED Ahh… it’s only a baby. The Kepler space telescope has found the youngest exoplanet yet discovered. K2-33b is a gas giant around six times the size of Earth that orbits star K233 in the Upper Scorpius region, some 500 light-years away, and is no more than 10 million years old.

That may not sound very ‘young’, but bear in mind that Earth is 4.5 billion years old, and that the overwhelming majority of the 3,000plus exoplanets discovered today are at least a billion years old. “Earth is a middle-aged planet – about 45 in human years,” said lead author Trevor David. “By comparison, K2-33b would be an infant of only a few weeks old.”

It is hoped that the new discovery will enable scientists to get a more accurate

T H E DOW N LOA D

picture of how planets are formed. Already, its proximity to its parent star – K2-33b is nearly 10 times closer to K2-33 than Mercury is to the Sun – has called into question our understanding of gas giants.

While such planets, which in our Solar System lie a long way from the Sun, have been found closely orbiting their parent stars before now, it was always assumed that they were formed further out then migrated inwards. K233b’s relative youth, however, suggests it must have formed more or less where it is now.

K2-33b was first detected when Kepler’s K2 mission picked up a slight, regular dimming of the light from its parent star, an observation that was later confirmed by the WM Keck Observatory in Hawaii.

Bramble Cay melomys What’s that? The latest herbal tea infusion?

Nope. It’s a small rodent that lived on the island of Bramble Cay, off the coast of Queensland, Australia.

Tell me more.

It’s thought to be the first known species of mammal to be wiped out by man-made climate change. The animals have not been seen since 2009 and have recently been declared extinct. It was considered the Great Barrier Reef’s only endemic mammal.

How did that happen?

Bramble Cay measures just 150m by 340m and sits three metres above sea level.

Experts say that rising sea levels due to climate change are to blame.

Are any others species at risk?

Yes. A recent study at the University of Connecticut has estimated that up to one in six species of animals and plants could go extinct if global temperatures rise by 4°C by the end of the century.

Exoplanet K2-33b, illustrated here, is so close to its parent star that it takes just five days to orbit it

Goodbye, little friend

Vol. 8 Issue 10

19

Update

THE LATEST INTELLIGENCE

GENETICS

“BY THE TIME 10 YEARS ROLLS AROUND, THE IDEA OF WRITING A FULL HUMAN GENOME WON’T BE QUITE SO DAUNTING” The Human Genome Project involved reading the sequence of letters in DNA. Scientists have now proposed writing DNA to make synthetic genomes. Lead researcher Prof Jef Boeke told us how they would be used

The original polio vaccine was infected with a virus. The HGP-Write project could allow scientists to create virus-resistant cells to make vaccines

20

Vol. 8 Issue 10

You’ve made designer yeast genomes. How would you synthesise human DNA? The technology for putting together short bits of DNA has been around since the early 1980s. Mature DNA is a double helix, but chemically you can synthesise 100 or maybe 200 mers [molecules made from DNA letters] in a single-stranded format.

That’s the starting material. We put them together into ever-bigger pieces, then insert those pieces right into the yeast cell. It’s conceptually possible to do something similar with human cells.

Why create synthetic human genomes?

There’s a lot we can do using model organisms like mice, worms, fruit flies and so on. I’d be perfectly happy if we simply worked in those arenas, but a lot of our science is funded by health-related agencies and they want to know what’s going on in human cells. We could write thousands of human genomes and test them in cells and compare them to each other. All humans on the planet are different from one another, such as in disease susceptibility, so that’s one important practical application. Another is that a lot of medicines are produced using mammalian cells. For example, the original polio vaccines, back in the 1960s, were actually made in

PHOTOS: GETTY X2

What is the ‘Human Genome Project-Write’ (HGP-Write)?

Just like Moore’s Law, with the cost of circuitry and computing power dropping exponentially, there’s been a drop in the cost of DNA sequencing – reading DNA – over the last 20 years. What we hope to do with this new HGP-Write project is to stimulate technology development, to increase the rate at which the price of writing DNA declines so that, by the time 10 years rolls around, the idea of writing a full human genome won’t be quite so daunting.

CHOCOHOLICS Physicists from Temple University have reduced the fat content of a Mars bar by more than 10 per cent by zapping the liquid chocolate with electricity. The effect is due to the cocoa solids clumping together.

HIGH-HEELS LOVERS For fashionistas, nothing quite matches the elegance of a high-heeled shoe. The only problem is they aren’t exactly comfy. Enter former SpaceX employee Dolly Singh who has designed a stiletto that offers more support and distributes weight more evenly. The downside: they cost US$925.

GOOD MONTH

BAD MONTH

ILLUSTRATION: RAJA LOCKEY

ABOVE: The cost of sequencing human DNA has reduced over the years, scientists now hope to reduce the costs of writing it too

monkey cells. Those monkey cell cultures were contaminated with a virus called SV40, which we now know can cause tumours. Thousands, if not millions, of people were injected with SV40, unbeknownst to them and everybody else until after the fact emerged. Luckily, no one’s detected any cancer coming from SV40, but it could have been a disaster. If you had a cell line that was resistant to viruses, you wouldn’t have to worry about that kind of scenario.

Some people worry about cloning humans from synthetic genomes. Is it really possible?

Yes, in principle. With the yeast project, we engaged an international community and made all the participants agree to a set of rules that we all believed in. By taking the lead on a project like HGPWrite, we can to some extent dictate terms like: “We all agree we are not trying to create a person here, we are doing this in cells, and that’s it.” You can manage the safety concerns and the social concerns. Before you go down a road of building something that’s even mildly controversial, you engage with multiple stakeholders to try to identify those projects that are mutually interesting to members of the public and the scientific community.

PIZZA LOVERS The University of Surrey has found that the woodburning ovens in São Paulo’s 8,000 pizzerias burn over 300,000 tonnes of wood a year, pumping out carbon and other air pollutants.

DISNEY PRINCESS FANS If your child is obsessed with Elsa, maybe encourage them to let it go. Brigham Young University found that kids who often play with Disney Princesses display more genderstereotypical behaviour and are more likely to have body image issues.

Vol. 8 Issue 10

21

HUMAN BODY

SKIN CELLS USE ‘FEET’ TO WALK TO WOUNDS It seems your skin really can crawl, and you don’t even have to look at icky pictures for it to happen.

Researchers at Washington State University have seen skin cells ‘crawling’ to a wound to repair it.

Under normal circumstances, skin cells are held in place because they are in contact with surrounding cells, while proteins bind them to the underlying connective tissue.

In the event of a wound, the team discovered that cells in the outermost layer of skin dissolve this protein glue, then reuse some of it to move to a wound site, then grow more cells to form new, healed skin. To achieve this, the individual cells crawl to the site of wounds by shuffling from side to side, using their outer edges as ‘feet’.

22

Vol. 8 Issue 10

INDIVIDUAL CELLS CRAWL TO THE SITE OF WOUNDS, USING THEIR OUTER EDGES AS ‘FEET’

MAIN IMAGE: Skin wound showing red and white cells and platelets starting to accumulate INSET IMAGE: To mend a wound, skin cells will ‘walk’ towards it (the arrows in this image show movement)

“It’s using its internal muscle-related proteins to be able to generate these forces to allow the cell to use its feet and move along in step-wise fashion,” said researcher Jonathan Jones.

With a better understanding of the process behind the cell movement, researchers hope they will be able to manipulate and enhance it to help wounds heal more quickly. “Wound healing is deficient as we get old and also among diabetics,” said Jones. “That’s why diabetics get skin ulcers.

If we could work out a way to enhance the motility of these skin cells, we could promote healing in patients that have problems with wound closure and ulceration of the skin.” To watch a video of the crawling skin cells, visit bit.ly/skin_crawl

PHOTOS: SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY, NASA/HUBBLE ILLUSTRATOR: RAJA LOCKEY

Update

THE LATEST INTELLIGENCE

Dramatic aurora on Jupiter, as detected by Hubble

T HE Y DID W H AT ?!

Budgies taught grammar JUPITER

ILLUSTRATION: RAJA LOCKEY

HUBBLE CAPTURES STUNNING AURORA IN JUPITER’S ATMOSPHERE This spectacular image of Jupiter’s aurora was taken using the ultraviolet capabilities of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.

These striking light shows are created when high-energy particles speed into a planet’s atmosphere near the magnetic poles and smash into atoms of gas, therefore knocking electrons off them.

The ionised atoms then recombine with the freed electrons and give off light.

“These auroras are very dramatic and among the most active I have ever seen,” said lead researcher Dr Jonathan Nichols from the University of Leicester.

Jupiter’s auroras were first discovered by the Voyager 1 spacecraft in 1979, and were previously observed by Hubble in 2007.

The current programme aims to investigate how various components of Jupiter’s auroras respond to different conditions in the solar wind, a stream of charged particles ejected from the Sun. On Earth, the most spectacular auroras are caused by charged particles striking the upper atmosphere and exciting the gas molecules, causing them to glow red, green and purple.

Jupiter’s auroras are much larger than those on Earth and are also hundreds of times more energetic because the giant planet’s strong magnetic field pulls in vast amounts of charged particles thrown out by volcanoes on its orbiting moon Io. Hubble scientists will continue to observe the auroras of Jupiter for several months.

What did they do?

Scientists at Duke University taught budgies to understand basic grammatical patterns, an ability previously thought to be unique to humans.

Why did they do that?

The team played budgerigars patterns of sounds made up of three parts, with a structure of either XXY or XYX. Each time they heard XXY the were given a reward if they pecked a lever. If they pecked the lever at the wrong time, the light in their cage went out.

What did they find?

Not only were the birds able to identify the pattern at the correct time, they were also able to apply the rules to previously unheard sequences, suggesting they were able to learn basic grammatical rules.

Vol. 8 Issue 10

23

Update

THE LATEST INTELLIGENCE

“Do I know you from somewhere?”

ZOOLOGY

FISH TAUGHT TO RECOGNISE HUMAN FACES Call it ‘plaice recognition’ (get it?). A team at the University of Oxford has found that archerfish are able to recognise and remember human faces.

The researchers showed archerfish, a species of tropical fish known for shooting jets of water at its prey, two images of human faces and trained them to choose one by squirting it.

The fish were then shown the familiar face alongside a series of 44 new, unknown faces and were coaxed into squirting one.

After two experiments, the fish proved to be more than 80 per cent accurate in their choices, even when more obvious details of the faces, such as colour and overall shape, were removed.

24

Vol. 8 Issue 10

The result is surprising as fish lack the sophisticated visual cortex that allows humans to quickly distinguish different faces.

“Fish have a simpler brain than humans and entirely lack the section of the brain that humans use for recognising faces,” explained lead researcher Dr Cait Newport. “The fact that archerfish can learn this task suggests that complicated brains are not necessarily needed to recognise human faces. Humans may have special facial recognition brain structures so that they can process a large number of faces very quickly or under a wide range of viewing conditions.”

HEALTH

CAN CANNABIS BE USED TO TREAT ALZHEIMER’S?

W H AT W E LEARNED THIS MONTH

SPRING COMES EARLY TO CITIES Light from street lamps causes trees to start producing leaves up to a week earlier in cities than in rural areas, biologists from the University of Exeter have found.

THE UNIVERSE IS GETTING ‘TIDIER’ Images recorded using the Herschel space telescope have shown more and more cosmic dust is being mopped up thanks to the formation of stars.

PHOTOS: CAIT NEWPORT, SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

BUTTER ISN’T UNHEALTHY A review of nine studies involving more than 600,000 people has found that butter is not linked to cardiovascular disease. Its bad reputation may be due to people spreading it on unhealthy foods such as white bread.

BELOW: Computer model of THC, the psychoactive molecule present in cannabis.

Cannabis is a class B drug in the UK, with a maximum sentence of 14 years for supply

Chemical compounds found in cannabis may help to fight the toxic proteins that build up in the brain in Alzheimer’s disease, researchers at the Salk Institute in California have found.

The team found that tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the psychoactive part of cannabis, can remove amyloid beta, a toxic protein that accumulates in the ageing brain and is considered to be a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease.

Exposing nerve cells to THC also shuts down the inflammatory response triggered by the presence of amyloid beta, a major component of the damage associated with Alzheimer’s disease.

So far, the trials have only been conducted on neurons grown in the lab, but the finding could provide clues to developing novel therapeutics for the disorder, the researchers said.

“Although other studies have offered evidence that cannabinoids might be neuroprotective against the symptoms of Alzheimer’s, we believe our study is the first to demonstrate that cannabinoids affect both inflammation and amyloid beta accumulation in nerve cells,” said lead researcher David Schubert.

However, clinical trials on human subjects are required before any therapies using THC-like compounds can be developed.

WE GET OUR BEST NIGHT’S SLEEP ON TUESDAY Data from 5,000 Brits has shown that locals sleep soundest on Tuesdays.

It is thought the effect is due to alcohol and rich food, both of which can disturb sleep, typically being consumed later in the week.

Vol. 8 Issue 10

25

COMMENT & ANALYSIS HELEN CZERSKI ON… STICKY FINGERS “BANK TELLERS MOISTEN THEIR FINGERS FOR GRIP, BUT CLIMBERS USE CHALK. WHICH METHOD WORKS?”

26

Vol. 8 Issue 10

where the bank teller’s damp sponge comes in useful. If you start with completely dry fingertips, you don’t have much grip.

But as you add tiny amounts of water, your grip improves and keeps improving right up to the point where there’s enough for the water to form a proper layer, and then it all gets worse again. What seems to be happening is that a small amount of water softens the top layer of your skin, just a tiny bit. That makes your skin more flexible, and so when you press your fingertip on to a banknote, your skin squishes more into the rough surface. That means that a greater area of your skin is in direct contact with the note. Slightly damp fingertips have much more grip than dry ones.

I am one of those people who always struggles to prise apart the two sides of plastic bags in supermarkets. But now I know the solution: slightly damp fingertips when you try to slide the two sides past each other. It may not look elegant, but science says that it works! ß

DR HELEN CZERSKI IS A PHYSICIST AND BBC SCIENCE PRESENTER

ILLUSTRATION: EIKO OJALA

H

umans spend a lot of time picking things up and putting them down again. We hardly ever think about it. But whatever we’re manipulating – pens, cake, keys, tennis balls or this magazine – it’s only possible because our fingers can grip.

Wandering round a stationery shop the other day, I spotted one of those sponge pads that you sometimes see in post offices. Bank tellers use them to moisten their fingers and improve their grip when they’re counting banknotes.

But then I remembered the years I’ve spent on climbing walls and on gymnastic equipment. In those environments, it’s exactly the opposite.

You put chalk on your hands to improve your grip, because the chalk dries your hands out and drier fingers grip better. So which method actually works?

Water is pretty sticky stuff. Water molecules are constantly forming brief alliances with the molecules around them, and those temporary bonds can be pretty strong. But we don’t think of water as ‘sticky’ all by itself, because a water molecule is very small and switches allegiance often. That’s why water isn’t very viscous – it’s easy for those molecules to flow past each other. Water will stick to lots of surfaces, but it won’t hold on to other water molecules for long periods of time. Sugar syrup has the same sorts of bonds, but the sugar molecules are far larger, and each one is attached in many places to the ones around it. That’s why sugar is thick and viscous – lots of bonds have to be broken for a molecule to move anywhere, and that takes time. But water isn’t like that. It’s thin and runny, and so it isn’t acting like glue.

It turns out that climbers use chalk precisely because water is so runny. Climbing is an intensive activity, so your hands can get quite sweaty. If there’s enough water on your fingers to form a complete layer, your fingers don’t actually touch the rock directly because of the water in the way. In this case, your fingers have almost no grip. Water sticks to the rock and it sticks to your fingers, but the water layer in between just slides over itself. If you rely on that, you’re going to fall off the rock face pretty quickly! So the chalk is there to absorb the water and prevent it ever forming a single thin layer.

The interesting bit is what happens when there’s a little bit of water, but not enough to form a complete layer. This is

SPECIAL SUBSCRIPTION OFFER! 4 EASY WAYS TO SUBSCRIBE GO ONLINE*

OR EMAIL subscription@regentmedia.sg FAX TO SINGAPORE 65-6449 9945 MALAYSIA 603-42926251 CALL HOTLINE SINGAPORE 65-6446 6888 MALAYSIA 603-79548989

GREAT REASONS S TO O SUBSCRIBE S SC • Every issue delivered direct to your door • Exclusive subscriber-only offers and discounts BBC KNOWLEDGE MAGAZINE SUBSCRIPTION OFFER

YES! I WANT TO SUBSCRIBE! PLEASE TICK ACCORDINGLY Singapore, 1 year subscription, 12 issues for S$77

MAIL TO Regent Media Pte Ltd, 20 Bedok South Road, Singapore 469277 or Unit 6.02 Level 6, Menara Maxisegar Jalan Pandan Indah 4/2 Pandan Indah 55100 Kuala Lumpur.

YOUR PAYMENT OPTIONS CHEQUE Please enclose a cheque made payable to: Singapore: Regent Media Pte Ltd Malaysia: Regent Media Sdn Bhd

Cheque No.:

Malaysia, 1 year subscription, 12 issues for RM184

Amount:

*Rates are inclusive of postage in SGP and MY

PERSONAL PARTICULARS

CREDIT CARD* (VISA & MASTERCARD ONLY) *Singapore only

Title

Surname

Debited amount under”Golf Events and Marketing” will be reflected in your credit card statement for subscribers in Singapore.

Name NRIC

DOB

Name on Credit Card:

Tel Number

Mobile

Credit Card No.:

Email Expiry Date: Address Amount:

Country

Postal Code Signature:

MY PROFILE Gender

Age Group

Occupation

Annual Income

Male

Below 30

Executive

Below $50,000

Female

31 - 40

Management

$50,001 - $100,000

41 - 50

Professional

$100,001 - $150,000

Above 50

Businessman

Above $150,000

Date:

TERMS & CONDITIONS: • This subscription offer is non-refundable • Promotion is valid till the end of October 2016 • Subscription gifts where applicable are available on a while stocks last basis • The above subscription rates are only applicable to readers residing in Singapore & Malaysia • Gifts must be taken as provided and are neither transferable nor exchangeable for cash • Company reserves the right to replace gift when stock is unavailable • All prices are inclusive of GST and taxes • Please allow 4-6 weeks for processing • Subscribers/Winners will be notified by post • Subscription gifts/lucky draw prizes are to be collected at address stated on notification letter • Other terms and conditions apply

SCIENCE

THE DAY THE DINOSAURS DIED For the first time, scientists have drilled into the heart of the Chicxulub crater – the landing site of the meteorite that killed the dinosaurs. We look at what their historic mission might find WORDS: HENRY NICHOLLS

Scan this QR Code for the audio reader

28

Vol. 8 Issue 10

Vol. 8 Issue 10

29

SCIENCE

THE STORY OF THE CRATER

C

ore 40. To the untrained eye, this three-metre section of rock winched up from a borehole beneath the Gulf of Mexico might not look like much. But for Sean Gulick, a geologist at the University of Texas at Austin, it’s a sample that holds secrets about one of the most catastrophic events in the history of planet Earth.

For Gulick, the core will tell him the story of the day the Earth shook. Sixty-six million years ago, a 14kmwide meteorite slammed into our planet. Wildfires raged, earthquakes rumbled, and a dusty curtain fell upon the Earth. It was the beginning of the end for around 75 per cent of the planet’s species, including all non-avian dinosaurs.

Travelling at 20km per second when it entered Earth’s atmosphere, the meteorite left a crater 200km across when it smashed into the planet. Today, this geological scar lies buried beneath the Yucatán Peninsula in southeastern Mexico – and now, for the first time, we’ve drilled into its heart.

Throughout April and May, Gulick was stationed on a drilling rig just off the Yucatán Peninsula. He’s the co-chief scientist on Expedition 364, the joint project

by International Continental Drilling Program and the International Ocean Discovery Program to drill down into the Chicxulub impact crater. On this boat-cumdrilling platform, 30km off the Mexican coast, his team have worked day and night to bore down to over 1.3km beneath the seabed to extract precious cores of rock.

When these cores are cracked open in September, geologists, physicists, chemists and biologists will be racing to find out what happened in the minutes, hours, days and years after touchdown. What they 30

Vol. 8 Issue 10

PHOTOS: GETTY, SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

The meteorite left a crater 200km across when it smashed into the planet. Today, this geological scar lies buried beneath the Yucatán Peninsula

In the late 1970s, the Mexican oil company Pemex was scouring the Gulf of Mexico for possible sites to drill. A ring of mountains on the ocean floor with a diameter of around 70km sparked the interest of Pemex geologist Glen Penfield. Further scrutiny of the Yucatán Peninsula revealed another concentric ring, strongly suggesting some kind of catastrophic impact, with its centre lying close to what is now the small coastal town of Chicxulub.

When a young University of Arizona graduate called Alan Hildebrand got in touch with Penfield, they teamed up and tracked down cores from three deep exploration wells that Pemex had drilled within the region (C1, S1 and Y6 in the gravity map below). In these rocks, they found evidence of a cataclysmic event at precisely the moment the dinosaurs vanished, at the end of the Cretaceous Period. Now, 25 years on, we’ve drilled deeper into the crater than ever before (Chicx-03A below). All eyes will be on the expedition scientists in September when they begin analysis of the 1,300m-long core.

find could help us to understand why this single rock had such lethal and far-reaching consequences across the entire planet, but also how life was able to recover following the impact.

INTO THE IMPACT Core 40 is of interest because this section may help explain how one asteroid (or comet) could have had such global consequences. Up to this point, the team had pulled out 39 cores of limestone all the way from 500m to 620m below the seabed. “Then suddenly we hit a layer with fragments in it,” says Gulick.

They’d found the top of a thick blanket of ‘breccia’, a jumbled layer of the shattered, melted and traumatised debris that settled in the minutes or hours after impact. “I didn’t expect it to be this nice, sharp transition from limestone into angular material with melt in it,” says Gulick.

Of particular interest are the microfossils that sit just above this breccia, which should paint a vivid picture of

ABOVE: Expedition 364 set up a scientific platform in the ocean and spent April and May drilling into the seabed to extract core samples from the Chicxulub impact crater LEFT: A foraminifera fossil. These tiny creatures proliferated and diversified rapidly after the Chicxulub impact

Vol. 8 Issue 10

31

SCIENCE

CROSS-SECTION OF THE CRATER

Sea 19m deep

0

0m Seabed.

100

503m Coring begins. As the focus of the expedition is on the impact crater, the scientists race through the first 500m of limestone before beginning to pull up cores of rock, 3m at a time.

200

300

400

620-740m The impact layer is a chaotic mix of fragmented rocks and melt that settled in the minutes and hours after the asteroid hit. It could contain microorganisms that took up residence in the aftermath to capitalise on the rich chemistry.

740-1,335m The peak ring. By paying special attention to the age and sequence of rocks in the peak ring, geologists hope to solve the mystery of how these structures form. Satellite data indicates that the rock in the peak ring is not as dense as it might be. Are there cracks and fissures, and what kind of microbes might live in these voids?

600

700

800

900

1,000

1,100

1,200

1,300 PHOTO: SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY ILLUSTRATION: ACUTE GRAPHICS

550-620m Approaching ground zero. As the drill reaches the top of the impact layer, the ecology is expected to thin out to just a few, rather simple species. By studying the chemical make-up of the very first foraminifera to colonise the site after the impact, it should be possible to infer the local conditions at the time.

500 Metres

550m Algal blooms. Around 55 million years ago, some 10 million years after the asteroid impact, the Earth was around 5°C warmer than at present. Scientists are hoping to recover black shales, the geological remnants of carbon-rich algal blooms predicted to have thrived in the warmer conditions.

1,400

TIMELINE

A planet in shock Earth in the hours, years and millennia after the impact 32

Vol. 8 Issue 10

HOURS Huge earthquakes, megatsunamis up to 300m high, winds of over 1,000km/h and rampant wildfires result in instant annihilation for many species.

WEEKS Dust from the impact and soot from wildfires block out sunlight for many years. Plants that survived the impact soon struggle.

Food webs start to unravel.

YEARS Prior to the impact, non-avian dinosaurs are already in decline, but the impact seals their fate. If any species survive the impact, it’s not for long. Over 90 per cent of all mammal species also go extinct. The largest mammals are hardest hit; the survivors are all smaller than a cat.

On land, forests and flowering plants struggle with the low light levels, resulting in a preponderance of species like ferns, algae and moss.

the local conditions in the immediate aftermath of the impact. One of those given the responsibility of studying these fossils is Chris Lowery, a post-doctoral fellow in palaeontology at the University of Texas at Austin.

“I’ve lain awake at night sometimes, wondering what we’ve got in core 40,” he enthuses. “This is the kind of thing I got into science to do. It’s so cool to be part of something like this.” Lowery’s expertise is in foraminifera, single-celled creatures that often boast beautifully complex internal shells or ‘tests’. By studying the chemical make-up of these fossilised structures, he hopes to be able to reconstruct the temperature, salinity and local productivity of the water that filled the crater, giving an insight into the kind of environment that survivors of the asteroid would have faced.

Based on work elsewhere, we know that the asteroid

300,000 YEARS Because mammals from several different groups survived, mammal diversity recovers quite quickly, soon doubling the number of species before the extinction.

1 MILLION YEARS Deciduous trees, reliant on wind pollination, begin to return. Evergreens, which rely on insects and animals for reproduction, take longer to bounce back.

impact led to the extinction of more than 90 per cent of all floating, plankton-like foraminifera. The species that survived were typically small and generalist, but within a mere 100,000 years they had diversified into dozens of different species. “I’m very excited to see here at ground zero what the properties of the ocean were that might have driven that evolution,” says Lowery.

Meanwhile, analysis of the carbon isotopes in the rock core will help us to understand how the carbon cycle was affected by the impact. This in turn will tell

ABOVE: Artist’s impression of the Chicxulub crater shortly after impact. The inner ‘peak ring’ is where scientists are focusing their efforts today

“I’ve lain awake at night sometimes, wondering what we’ve got in core 40”

3 MILLION YEARS In the oceans, there is a rapid flourishing of the plankton-like floating foraminifera. This contributes to the recovery of most marine systems.

10 MILLION YEARS The surviving reptiles are quick to diversify, with the appearance of iguanas, monitor lizards and boas. Many insect lineages survive the impact. After the event, ants and termites increase in their diversity.

Butterflies, too, spread their wings.

15 MILLION YEARS In a few million years the ancestors of most modern birds undergo a rapid evolution into the multitude of lineages and thousands of species we see today.

Vol. 8 Issue 10

33

SCIENCE

USA

Gulf of Mexico Drill Site Chicxulub crater

TOP: A clump of breccia recovered from the impact crater ABOVE: The drill site lies 30km off the coast of Mexico

us more about the response of the world’s plants to the event – and the dinosaurs that depended on them.

Similar analysis has been carried out elsewhere, but the Chicxulub cores contain large amounts of material, so it should be possible to build up a more accurate, high-resolution picture of the events that led to a mass extinction.

LIFE DOWN BELOW? There might even be signs of actual life in the rubblelike breccia and beneath – microorganisms that have been living and evolving deep underground, far from the

“I was super stressed before I got on the platform. When the super gorgeous cores began to come out of the ground, the stress vanished” 34

Vol. 8 Issue 10

human eye, for many millions of years.

“Most of life on Earth is underground,” says Charles Cockell, an astrobiologist at the University of Edinburgh. “Something like a massive asteroid impact that killed off the dinosaurs would also have dramatically disrupted the deep biosphere, particularly at the place of impact,” he says. “But it may not necessarily have been all bad.”

A decade ago, Cockell was part of a similar project in Chesapeake Bay in Virginia on the east coast of the United States, the site of a smaller and, at 35 million years old, more recent impact. This event appears to have fractured the underlying rock, improving the flow of water and creating a habitat that would have been particularly suited to microbial life, he says. “We found there was an increase in the numbers of microbes in impact-fractured rocks.”

The same may have occurred at Chicxulub. “The breccia is almost like chicken soup for microbes,” says Cockell. “It’s got everything in it that’s leaching out and providing food for microbes.”

PHOTOS: MAX ALEXANDER/B612/ASTEROID DAY ILLUSTRATION: ACUTE GRAPHICS

200km

ABOVE: This tiny grain of ‘shocked quartz’ on the screen was taken from the impact crater – the dark dots running from its top left to its bottom right are deformations that occurred when the meteorite hit ABOVE RIGHT: Checking equipment on the drilling platform

Further down, in the underlying granite, the trauma caused by the impact may have created opportunities for microorganisms. “At the immediate point of impact, everything would have been sterilised, so it was certainly bad for them in the same moment it was bad for the dinosaurs,” he says. “But in the longer term, it will have improved conditions for life.”

It’s even possible that impact craters could have been suitable spots for the origin of life on Earth more than 3.5 billion years ago. The conditions at the time of the Chicxulub impact were “radically different” from those on the early Earth, says Cockell. But the microbial ecology under the Gulf of Mexico could hint at some of the biochemical challenges that the first life forms would have faced, he says.

CRATER CONUNDRUMS In the days before drilling began, there was a lot of nervous excitement among the scientists involved.

“I was super stressed before I got on the platform,” admits Joanna Morgan, a geophysicist at Imperial

College London and co-chief scientist of the expedition along with Gulick. But as soon as the “super gorgeous” cores began to come out of the ground, the stress just vanished, adds Morgan.

That said, not everything went smoothly. Early on in the project, a 200m piece of piping fell to the bottom of the hole, putting a complete stop to drilling. “The whole thing was a good week of nail-biting before we actually got the first 50-million-year-old core just below that point,” says Gulick.

But apart from this glitch, everything went pretty much to plan, with cores being pulled up to the surface 24 hours a day, seven days a week. “Sometimes we would succeed in coring 30m a day,” says Gulick. When the money ran out and it was time to withdraw the drill at the end of May, the hole stretched for 1,335m below the seabed, just shy of the project goal of 1,500m. The deeper cores will be of special interest to geologists like Gulick and Morgan, as they should help account for the formation of the so-called ‘peak ring’, a circular mountain range that lies within the crater, roughly midway between Vol. 8 Issue 10

35

“It’s the only well-preserved large impact on Earth, so we can test the fundamental ways that impact cratering affects a planet” 36

Vol. 8 Issue 10

the centrepoint and the rim. According to Gulick, we can also see structures like this on the Moon, on Mercury and Mars, “but we haven’t gone and gotten those rocks,” he says.

At Chicxulub, on the other hand, the scientists have drilled right into the peak ring. “It’s the only well-preserved large impact on Earth, so we can test the fundamental ways that impact cratering affects a

PHOTO: GETTY

SCIENCE

WHAT REALLY KILLED THE DINOSAURS? In 1980, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Luis Alvarez and his team discovered a thin layer of iridium blanketing Earth at precisely the moment when the dinosaurs disappeared from the fossil record. As iridium is one of the rarest elements in Earth’s crust, but is found in asteroids in far higher concentrations, the scientists imagined vast quantities of dust (including extraterrestrial iridium) propelled high into the stratosphere and distributed worldwide.

“The resulting darkness would suppress photosynthesis,” they wrote in Science, which would have led to the rapid collapse of food webs and the demise of the dinosaurs. A decade later, in 1990, geologists identified Chicxulub in the Gulf of Mexico as the most likely site of this impact.

Few scientists now dispute

planet,” he explains.

The prevailing model to explain this mountainous ring is that following the initial impact there was some kind of rebound of fractured rocks at the centre of the crater, which rippled outwards before eventually coming to a stop. To picture this, think of what happens when you throw a stone into a pond.

Superficially, the rock in these deeper cores looks

ABOVE: Dust from the impact cloaked the entire planet in darkness, leading to the widespread collapse of food webs

the terminal consequences of the Chicxulub event for many species, but there is also evidence to suggest that other factors could have been part of the dinosaurs’ demise. The Deccan Traps, in what is now central India, are one of the largest volcanic features on Earth. There is some uncertainty over exactly when they formed – it could have been just before the asteroid impact or as a result of the aftershock – but the volcanic gases released would have had a chilling effect on the climate. It seems likely that the Chicxulub impact would also have triggered a wave of secondary events, like earthquakes, megatsunamis, wildfires, volcanism and acid rain, that could all have helped push Earth’s reptilian rulers over the edge.

just like normal granite, says Morgan. “Except when you look closely, it’s very highly fractured,” she says.

“It has a very strange set of physical properties.

I think it’s going to explain to us how rocks that are really hard are weakened enough to be able to move many, many kilometres during this impact event.”

The cores, and all the valuable clues they contain, are on their way to Bremen in Germany, where the scientists will regroup in September to break them open and begin the analysis proper. It seems likely that each will be dealt with in sequence, from core 1 all the way through to core 303.

For scientists like Chris Lowery, who are eagerly waiting to delve into core 40 at the top of the impact layer, “cores 1 through 39 are going to be an exercise in patience”. But if core 40 lives up to its promises, the wait will surely be worth it. ß

HENRY NICHOLLS IS A SCIENCE WRITER AND AUTHOR. HE TWEETS FROM @WAYOFTHEPANDA Vol. 8 Issue 10

37

NATURE

38

Vol. 8 Issue 10

A pair of northern gannets have chosen to nest in a boat in Baia dell’Olivo, Porto Venere, Italy, for the past four years.

Wildlife photographer Angelo Gandolfi has been observing the family and has named the male Nelson after the late Bryan Nelson, a world expert on the species, and the female Roz after a friend. The 2015 chick, shown in these photos, was named Tinetto after a tiny island nearby in the Gulf of La Spezia

PHOTOS BY ANGELO GANDOLFI

e cantare!

Gannets are meant to nest in colonies on islands and coasts, but nobody told the pair that KPW[M I Å[PQVO JWI\ VMIZ I popular Italian resort.

Jo Price reports

Vol. 8 Issue 10

39

NATURE

ABOVE: Nelson returns from a ďŹ shing trip while Roz guards the nest. The parents take it in turns to incubate the egg. According to Viola Ross-Smith of the British Trust for Ornithology, in general northern gannet numbers are growing across their breeding range and traditional breeding colonies on islands and coasts are getting full. This may explain why these birds have found an alternative place to raise their chick

40

Vol. 8 Issue 10

LEFT: Nelson and Roz bond with a greeting ceremony, which is often followed by a mutual preening session. The full gannet courtship display, including neck-biting and mock fencing, is connected to nest-site possession and never performed anywhere else.

This isn’t the only record of the species nesting in an unusual place – gannets have also been recorded using marinas in the French Mediterranean

TOP: Northern gannets usually breed in steep and windy locations that help them to get airborne. The elongated shape of the nearby island of Palmaria shelters the gannets in Baia dell’Olivo, but nesting at sea level has forced Roz and Nelson to alter their behaviour. To clear this motor yacht Nelson plunged into the water and paddled away before taking off

ABOVE: In the summer months Porto Venere becomes very busy with tourists, though the pair cope surprisingly well with life alongside speedboats, fishing boats, swimmers and fishermen. However, boat moorings are in short supply so some people hold a grudge against the gannets for occupying valuable space

Vol. 8 Issue 10

41

NATURE

LEFT: Fledgling Tinetto explores his surroundings. The larger the colony, the greater the chance of him thriving, but it is possible that a new colony can be formed by a handful of pairs. Without human help, however, Nelson and Roz would have been unable to nest successfully in the bay RIGHT: These youngsters swam from a nearby beach when the gannets’ old boat was threatened with sinking.

It was fixed by local people with the approval of the Italian League for Bird Protection and Tinetto returned to it BELOW: The young gannet will attain his full adult plumage at about five or six years old. The seabirds tolerate the presence of humans and boats in the cove as long as they do not get too close

42

Vol. 8 Issue 10

ABOVE: Nelson tried to assist Tinetto with his early flights and continued to feed him for two weeks after he had fledged, behaviour that has never been recorded before. The youngster was the only chick to fledge at Porto Venere in 2015 at 89 days old. This year Nelson and Roz have returned to the same site

Vol. 8 Issue 10

43

NATURE

ABOVE: Tens of thousands of adult and immature gannets overwinter in the Mediterranean Sea where they arrive between September and November and depart in February or March. This picture of an adult male was taken in January 2016 near the promontory of Portofino, Liguria, Italy. We don’t yet know where Nelson and Roz go when they leave Baia dell’Olivo LEFT: To the south of Porto Venere there are important coastal feeding areas for the gannets such as the protected marine area Secche della Meloria. The Porto Venere Regional Park and Cinque Terre National Park also conserve coastline waters.

Though the Mediterranean doesn’t possess prey as rich as that of the North Atlantic, the few gannets that nest here in the summer have almost no competition when they are raising their young

ANGELO GANDOLFI HAS WON MANY AWARDS SINCE HE BEGAN HIS CAREER IN WILDLIFE PHOTOGRAPHY IN 1977, AND HAS A TRUE PASSION FOR BIRDS. VISIT WWW.DISCOVERWILDLIFE.COM FOR MORE OF HIS PHOTOS 44

Vol. 8 Issue 10

HISTORY

GLOBAL

ENCOUNTERS

OF THE ANCIENT KIND

Ancient civilisations are often studied in isolation – yet from antiquity, cultures became connected like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. Michael Scott looks at five interactions between lands linked by politics, trade, war and religion PICTURE CAPTIONS: COLUMN 1 (TOP TO BOTTOM): The Parthenon; Qin Shi Huangdi, the first Qin emperor; the Great Stupa at Sanchi, a Buddhist monument built in the third century BC; human-like creatures in an illustration based on the Greek historian Ctesias’s account of India. COLUMN 2 (TOP TO BOTTOM): the Athenian statesman Solon debates with students; Nalanda monastery in northern India. COLUMN 3 (TOP TO BOTTOM): A thirdcentury AD Chinese mural of the Buddha; Indian emperor Chandragupta Maurya

Vol. 8 Issue 10

45

HISTORY

When cultures collide As our map shows, encounters between ancient civilisations created networks between places as far-flung as Greece and India

1 2

3

5

4

1 Rome to Athens 2 Greece to India 3 Eastern nomads to Greco-Bactria 4 Buddhists to China 5 Chinese to India

1 Republicans on

a political recce Romans in Athens 454 BC

PAGE 45: ALAMY/GETTY IMAGES/BRIDGEMAN/AKG IMAGES

Just over half a century after the Roman Republic was established, the Roman body politic was in trouble. The political system had been blocked for almost a decade; the Tribunes of the Plebs (officers representing the interests of the everyday people) demanded reform of the system and a rebalancing of power between patrician (aristocratic) and plebian (everyone else) groups. So in 454 BC a three man commission was appointed to travel to Athens – where the democratic revolution had occurred at about the same time as the birth of the Roman Republic – to research how the politics of that city-state worked, and to bring back possible solutions for the crisis in Rome.

By 454 BC Athens was the emerging power of the eastern Mediterranean. An Athenian empire was evolving; memories of its triumph over Persian invaders were still fresh, its people engaged in direct democracy, and the building project that would include the Parthenon was imminent. But it was not Athens’ democratic principles and processes that intrigued the Roman delegation. Rome had no interest in becoming a

46

Vol. 8 Issue 10

democracy. Instead it sought to balance rights and responsibilities among the different elements of its society – not equally, but in relation to their perceived worth and service.

The Romans had come to study the laws and reforms of Solon, who had undertaken a systematic review of the Athenian system some 150 years earlier.

We can only imagine Athenian reactions as they watched the Romans in deep discussion over reforms the Athenians themselves had surpassed long before, while ignoring the proof of the power of a direct democracy all around them.

After three years of study, the delegation presented its findings in Rome.

What followed was farcical. The first 10-man board appointed to write a new constitution failed to complete it; their successors then refused to yield power, till these new ‘Ten Tarquins’ (as they were known) were ousted. And though the legal code that emerged from this GreekRoman interaction ended the stalemate in the political system, the class strife inherent in Roman society would continue for centuries to come.

2 The success of

a slaveless society A Greek in India 300 BC

Around the end of the fourth century BC, Megasthenes was sent as the official ambassador of the Greek ruler Seleucus 1st Nicator (‘Victor’) to the court of Indian emperor Chandragupta Maurya at his capital of Pataliputra (modern day Patna). Of Megasthenes the man we know little, but excerpts from his Indika – sometimes rather creative descriptions of India drawn from his privileged position as ambassador – do survive.

In Indika Megasthenes told of giant ants that dug for gold and would take on – and kill – humans to protect it; of men whose feet were turned backwards, and others who had no mouths but fed on smells alone. He told of dogs strong enough to take on lions and flying serpents with urine that could blister human skin.

But Megasthenes also wrote about the great city of Pataliputra, defended by more than 570 watchtowers around its outer walls and with a splendour that surpassed the mighty Persian cities of Susa and Ecbatana. He g gave n the us, too, an eye on er ruler and the inner workings of the Indian court.

We’re told that

DREAMSTIME.COM/GETTY IMAGES/BRIDGEMAN

The Parthenon, on the Acropolis in Athens. Construction began in 447 BC, shortly after a Roman delegation arrived to study Athenian politics

Chandragupta spent his days hunting or hearing legal cases while being massaged with wooden rollers. This leader, Megasthenes wrote, embodied the fate of his capital city, and everything about him mattered to the people. When he washed his hair, a festival was celebrated.

Megasthenes was complimentary about the people of Pataliputra, describing them as tall and proud. He remarked with amazement that Indian society, in contrast to the Greek world, seemed to survive without slaves, and experienced little or no theft. And he explicitly intertwined the very origins, mythologies and gods of his home with those of this Indian world. The god Dionysus, he recounted, invaded India; later, the hero Heracles was born in India and even founded the great capital at Pataliputra.

Nor was Megasthenes unusual in being a foreigner in Chandragupta’s court. He wrote that an entire branch of government was dedicated to g after foreigners living in looking Pataliput Pataliputra. Clearly, this was a city at the centre of a an increasingly in inter-connected set o of ancient worlds.

This second-century BC four-drachma piece depicts the Indian trident-wielding god Siva, but also incorporates Greek script

Megasthenes wrote of men with no mouths who fed on smells – but also how Indian society survived without slaves Vol. 8 Issue 10

47

HISTORY

This tapestry from a grave in western China dating from the 3rd or 2nd century BC was probably created in Greco-Bactria – indicating early contact between the cultures

3 The ancient migrant

crisis that made headlines in the east and west

At the end of the third century BC, around the same time that Hannibal was challenging Rome, Qin Shi Huangdi – the ‘First Emperor of Qin’ – created a unified China under his rule. The construction of this empire and its firm boundaries (including the embryonic Great Wall) inevitably had repercussions for the Qin’s relationship with nomadic tribes that lived to the north and west. Decades of aggression, accommodation and appeasement followed, leading to the emergence of one pre-eminent tribe: the Xiongnu. In turn, other nomadic tribes such as the Yuezhi were forced to yield

48

Vol. 8 Issue 10

territory to the Xiongnu and themselves flee west. By the 140s BC, these migrants were arriving in central Asia and began to pour into Greco-Bactria, at the time a rich and prosperous trading kingdom on the outer edge of the Hellenistic empire of the Seleucids.

This invasion of Greco-Bactria was recorded by western sources such as Strabo and Justin, whose description of the nomadic tribes certainly echoed other contemporary accounts of the Yuezhi.

But what makes this moment all the more remarkable is that this takeover of Greco-Bactria by the nomads was also

described in the eastern Chinese sources.

In 138 BC, the Han emperor Wu sent an ambassador, Zhang Qian, west looking for allies against the Xiongnu, who were then still powerful. Returning more than 10 years later, Zhang Qian’s accounts, preserved in the great historian Sima Qian’s Shiji, told how by then the Yuezhi had Greco-Bactria completely under their sway. As a result, this event – the martial meeting of east and west in central Asia – is one of the first to be recorded in both eastern and western histories, and a key moment in the story of ancient global interconnection.

AKG-IMAGES

Eastern nomads in Greco-Bactria 140s BC

4 Lost and

found in translation Buddhists in China 2nd century AD

BRIDGEMAN/AKG-IMAGES

In the mid-second century AD, as Buddhist ideas began to find receptive audiences in China, two Buddhists from central Asia travelled east along Silk Road trading routes, settling in the great city of Luoyang, capital of the Han dynasty. The first, An Shigao, was later identified as a prince of the Parthian empire who had given up his wealth, position and claim to the throne to become a Buddhist monk and missionary, one of the earliest known translators into Chinese of Indian Theravada Buddhist texts written in Pali. This was no easy task. Few, if any, people could speak both the Chinese and Indian languages, so simultaneous translation was not possible. Instead, a Buddhist master would discuss the texts with a scribe who had some idea of both languages, creating a rudimentary version that was then polished by Chinese intellectuals. The final version, though, could not really be checked for accuracy by the original Buddhist monk.

The process was made all the more complicated by the sheer variety and number of Buddhist texts pouring into China. At the same time as An Shigao was working in Luoyang, another émigré to the city, Lokaksema, was helping translate texts of Mahayana Buddhism. There was an irony in his movements: Lokaksema was from the Kushan empire established in central Asia in the wake of the Yuezhi takeover of GrecoBactria back in the second century BC. As a descendant of the Yuezhi, Lokaksema was – in travelling to China – in some ways repeating in reverse the journey his ancestors had made centuries earlier.

5 The world’s first student exchange programme

Chinese travellers in India Fifth to seventh centuries AD The traffic in Buddhists wasn’t only eastward. In AD 399, a Chinese Buddhist monk called Faxian, then aged 65, began a journey on foot heading west along Silk Road routes, eventually arriving at the Indian capital of Pataliputra that had been visited by Megasthenes centuries earlier. Faxian described the sinister mood of the Gobi desert: “There are neither birds above nor beasts below. Gazing on all sides as far as the eye can reach in order to mark the track, no guidance is to be obtained, save from the rotting bones of dead men which point the way.”

Faxian commented, too, on the people he met at Pataliputra in terms that echoed those used by Megasthenes: “The people are numerous and happy: they have not to register their households, or attend any magistrates... the kings govern without decapitation or other corporal punishment. The criminals are simply fined. Even in the case of repeated attempts at wicked rebellion, they only have their right hands cut off.”

Faxian finally returned to China some 15 years later, accompanied by numerous Buddhist texts.

Over 200 years later, during the Tang dynasty in AD 670, another Buddhist

monk, Yijing, set out west from China.

He, too, went in search of Buddhist teaching and texts, and his journey lasted for 25 years. He travelled from Sumatra to India and north to the Buddhist monastery at Nalanda, not far from Pataliputra and Bodhgaya, where Buddha found enlightenment.

By Yijing’s time Nalanda was a famous seat of learning, with studies involving not only Buddhist texts but also grammar, logic and Sanskrit.

Yijing stayed at Nalanda for 10 years before returning to China with 400 new Buddhist texts. He wrote of his journeys, discoveries and insights, describing the strong Buddhist communities he encountered in Sumatra, Java and Bali, arguing for the early support of Buddhism by the Indian Gupta kings in the late third and early fourth centuries AD, and noting the daily schedule of meditation and study at Nalanda. In many ways, he was an early example of a university exchange student. ß

MICHAEL SCOTT’S LATEST BOOK, ANCIENT WORLDS: AN EPIC HISTORY OF EAST AND WEST, WAS PUBLISHED

BY HUTCHINSON ON 1 JULY. FIND OUT MORE AT MICHAELSCOTTWEB.COM

“No guidance is to be obtained (in the Gobi desert), save from the rotting bones of dead men which point the way” An illustration showing Xuanzang (602–64), one of a number of Chinese Buddhists drawn along the Silk Road route to India

A 7th–8th century AD mural from Turpan Oasis, a strategically significant centre on Xinjiang’s northern silk route

Vol. 8 Issue 10

49

SCIENCE

1

2

RAIDING THE OCEAN’S MEDICINE CABINET

Scan this QR Code for the audio reader

50

Vol. 8 Issue 10

3

5

4

Antibiotics are losing their effectiveness against disease. But the world’s waters could be full of new drugs, just waiting to be discovered WORDS: HELEN SCALES

M

6

8

7

9

ud and sponges probably don’t feature highly on most scuba divers’ bucket lists. But scientist and explorer Brian Murphy, based at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has his sights set on the sediments lurking at the bottom of lakes and the gooey animals clinging to submerged shipwrecks. And for good reason.

He recently brought back a blob of mud from Lake Michigan and found it contained bacteria that make two previously unknown molecules. Lab tests showed that this class of compounds is lethal to the bacterium that causes tuberculosis, a disease that existing drugs are struggling with.

“For millions of years bacteria have fought one another,” says Murphy.

“We’re just harnessing that power.”

Around the world, superbugs are on the rise. Earlier this year, two patients in the US were discovered with strains of E. coli that’s resistant to many antibiotics, including drugs that doctors only use as a last resort. It’s an alarming trend in which bacteria are gaining the upper hand in their battle against the antibiotics we use to kill them, hastened by the world’s overuse of these drugs.

“The way to combat drug resistance is to find new chemistry,” says Murphy. He’s one of many modern-day prospectors who are searching for that new chemistry underwater.

PLUMBING THE DEPTHS From icy polar seas to scorching hydrothermal vents, and from coral reefs to inland lakes, the vast, aquatic realms covering seventenths of our planet are home to Vol. 8 Issue 10

51

SCIENCE

an immense diversity of life. They include many animals that evolved complex chemical defences, along with a profusion of microbes; it is thought that around 90 per cent of oceanic life is microscopic.

From among these creatures, researchers are uncovering molecules that could form the basis for new medicines.

Tapping the natural world for pharmaceuticals is nothing new – pop an aspirin and your headache will be soothed by a substance that was discovered in willow tree bark. With the rising tide of drug resistance, the hope is that nature has plenty more in its medicine cabinet for us to dip into. The trick is sifting through all those potent chemicals to find the ones that could fight disease.

“It’s no secret that there’s an incredibly high failure rate in developing drugs,” says Murphy.

“It’s really difficult to find a set of molecules that can target a specific disease and do it within the incredibly complex environment of the human body.”

To help with this, Murphy is working to smarten up the sample collection process, as it’s one of the few steps in drug development that hasn’t seen a major revolution in recent decades. According to Murphy, looking for molecules in original places is an important part of drug development, so he decided to use a new resource altogether: the general public.

Chatting with recreational scuba divers gave Murphy the idea of searching shipwrecks for sponges.

These unprepossessing animals spend most of their lives stuck in place, sifting the water for food and taking on hordes of bacteria.

“Bacteria can constitute up to 30 or 40 per cent of sponge biomass,” Murphy explains. Freshwater sponges are a common sight across the USA’s Great Lakes

PREVIOUS PAGE: 1 Diving the Great Lakes 2 Testing antibiotics in the lab 3 Animals on coral reefs have evolved interesting chemical defences 4 One of Brian Murphy’s students leaps into the water to hunt for new drugs 5 The Great Lakes in the US are a popular dive spot as they contain hundreds of well-preserved shipwrecks 6 Michael Mullowney (left) and Brian Murphy processing deep-sea sediments 7 Gathering Icelandic algae for research 8 Brian Murphy with bacteria he’s collected – some of these colonies contain a specific group of bacteria that’s widely used in antibiotics 9 Bioprospectors first looked to coral reefs in the 1950s

ABOVE: The Great Barrier Reef spans 344,400km2 – that’s a lot of area to search for potential drugs RIGHT: Shipwrecks act as artifical reefs and become colonised with many species

The hope is that nature has plenty more in its medicine cabinet for us to dip into 52

Vol. 8 Issue 10

but almost nothing is known about them. Rather than go out himself and gather sponges – a time-consuming and expensive business – Murphy piloted a citizen science project asking divers to collect tiny samples for him while they’re out and about. Last summer he sent out collecting kits and got a great response, receiving more than 40 nubbins of sponge in the mail.

This year he’s rolling the project out across the Great Lakes and hopes to sample as many sites at possible. Ultimately, Murphy wants to map the distribution of sponges and bacteria across the lakes so that future efforts can be more effective and will zero in on fruitful spots, both in the Great Lakes and beyond.

DIVERSE OCEANS When bioprospectors first turned to the oceans in the 1950s, their initial targets were coral reefs.

These bustling ecosystems, packed with species, are a logical place to look and they’ve yielded many natural products, including some that made it to the end of the drug development pipeline.

Early on was chemotherapy agent cytarabine, approved in the US in 1969 and originally found in a sponge on a Florida Keys reef. Another cancer-fighting agent called trabectedin, from a Caribbean sea squirt, has been used in Europe since 2007 and in the US since 2015.

Elsewhere, other researchers are hunting for novel chemistry even further beneath the waves.

An international team called PharmaSea, led by Prof Marcel Jaspars, is searching for new antibiotics in the deep sea, including at the bottom of trenches – the deepest parts of the oceans.

Jaspars describes these as ‘negative islands’ sticking down into the seabed, instead of pointing up. “It’s possible there have been millions of years of separate evolution in each trench,” he says.

Jaspars and his collaborators send unmanned probes miles down into the depths to bring back

MARVELLOUS MICROBES Bacteria can help us beat disease, but they can cause problems too Microbes living in the ocean collectively weigh the equivalent of 35 African elephants for every person alive today.

=

=

US$92tn is the estimated annual cost of global inaction against antibiotic resistance by 2050.

By 2050, 10 million people could die per year (or roughly one every three seconds) if no action is taken to combat antibiotic resistance. That’s more than the death toll from cancer and diabetes combined.

72% In the US, between 1997 and 2010, 60 per cent of cases of sore throats were treated with antibiotics, even though only 10 per cent were caused by bacterial infection, at a cost of $500m.

, ,

US$92, ,

In the last 30 years, around half of all new medicines released have been based on molecules found in the natural world.

63,000 tons

Roughly half of all antibiotics used worldwide are given to food-industry animals to prevent infection and speed up growth rates.

In a survey of 139 academic studies, 72 per cent showed a link between antibiotic use in farm animals and drug resistance in humans.

In 2011, the global market in drugs initially discovered in the sea was worth around $4.8bn.

Vancomycin was introduced in 1972 against drug-resistant strains of ‘superbugs’. After seven years, bacteria began evolving resistance to the drug.

Vol. 8 Issue 10

53

SCIENCE

Brian Murphy’s researchers hunt for new antibiotics in unusual locations, such as this waterfall in Iceland

mud loaded with unique bacteria.

Techniques for keeping these extreme creatures alive in the lab have advanced in recent years, so experiments can be carried out. According to Jaspars, they’ve done around 100,000 tests, with targets including the so-called ESKAPE pathogens. This group of six bacterial strains are showing growing resistance to multiple existing antibiotics.

Ultimately, the PharmaSea

team aims to narrow down two compounds that can be produced at a larger scale and put forward for pre-clinical trials. So far, their most promising finds are compounds that could be effective against diseases of the nervous system, in particular epilepsy and Alzheimer’s disease.

BENEFITS FOR ALL? But who owns these discoveries from the deep? The word ‘bioprospecting’ usually has a PharmaSea researchers scouring through oceanic mud

Some sea squirts contain cancer-fighting agents

54

Vol. 8 Issue 10

UNDERWATER PHARMACY These creatures contain chemicals that could beat cancer, MRSA, and more

HORSESHOE CRABS The blood of these arthropods is packed with amoebocyte cells that react to tiny traces of bacteria.

Their blood has been used for the last 50 years to test equipment and vaccines for contamination.

CONE SNAILS The stings of these molluscs contain conotoxins. There is already a conotoxin-based painkiller that’s more potent than morphine. There are also cancer and diabetes treatments on the horizon.

negative connotation. At worst, it brings to mind indigenous people giving away their knowledge of traditional medicines and receiving little reimbursement. Thankfully, things have moved on, and protocols for sharing benefits are now commonplace. Prior to collecting anything, researchers will generally enter written agreements with the country of origin. In 2010, the international Nagoya Protocol came into effect, making such agreements a legal requirement. But not everyone is signed up to Nagoya – the US is notably absent.

The high seas begin 200 nautical miles from shore and don’t technically belong to anyone, making them difficult to police.

Currently, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) covers certain activities including deep-sea mining and laying cables, but it says nothing about biodiversity. Formal discussions got underway in March this year to amend UNCLOS to encompass

SPINY STARFISH This starfish’s body is covered in slime consisting of 14 per cent carbohydrate and 86 per cent protein. The substance is being investigated as a treatment for arthritis and asthma.

PUFFERFISH These fish contain tetrodotoxin (or TTX). This is what makes fugu (a delicacy made from pufferfish) a risky dinner. TTX is being developed as a treatment for the pain suffered during chemotherapy.

bioprospecting. Various views are on the negotiating table. “The G77 and China believe that it should be the Common Heritage of Mankind, which would mean everybody could benefit,” explains Jaspars. The idea is that one single nation or company shouldn’t be allowed to solely benefit.

On the other hand is the concept of Freedom of the High Seas, backed by the US and Norway, which would give any nations freedom to bioprospect in the high seas, just as anyone can fish there.

They could research anywhere and hold on to the profits. Other groups, including the EU, are keen to find a solution. It’s likely to be several years until bioprospecting in the high seas becomes regulated.

NEW WAYS AHEAD Back in the lab, Murphy’s tuberculosis-busting molecules are entering the next round of tests

MICROCOCCUS LUTEUS

DENDRILLA MEMBRANOSA

ELYSIA RUFESCENS

This bacterium produces a pigment called sarcinaxanthin that can block longwavelength UV radiation. This could be used in the development of more effective sunscreens.

This sea sponge contains a molecule called darwinolide. This substance has been found to be effective against the drug-resistant MRSA ‘superbug’, which can often cause problems in hospitals.

This species of sea slug has a wide distribution. It contains a substance called kahalalide F, which is currently under investigation as a potential tumour-fighting agent.

“It’s possible there have been millions of years of separate evolution in each trench”

to see if they could lead to new medicines. Even if they don’t, Murphy is confident they will still be useful. “They showed very selective antibacterial activity towards tuberculosis,” he says.

Other bacteria were left untouched.

Finding out exactly how these molecules selectively kill the tuberculosis bacterium could reveal vital information about the disease itself and perhaps point the way towards effective medicines.

But bioprospectors will have to hurry. This summer has seen the ailing Great Barrier Reef make headline news around the world, and human activities continue to threaten the health and biodiversity of Earth’s oceans, rivers and lakes. Let’s hope we can find the drugs and cures we need before our planet’s waters become irrevocably sickened. ß

HELEN SCALES IS A MARINE BIOLOGIST AND WRITER. HER MOST RECENT BOOK IS SPIRALS IN TIME Vol. 8 Issue 10

55

NATURE

Look for tompot blennies around the southern and western coasts of the UK and Ireland. Parablennius gattorugine grows up to 20cm in length, and has a distinctive branched tentacle above each eye

56

Vol. 8 Issue 10

GLAM ROCKS You don’t have to visit tropical climes to see LIbbTQVO ZMMN Å[P 5MM\ Britain’s tompot JTMVVa · \PM [UITT Å[P with an enormous personality WORDS AND PHOTOS BY PAUL NAYLOR

A

small fish with a punk hairdo peers out from his crevice on the reef, taking in the view of sponges and sea anemones. Bright red tentacles on his head sway gently in the swell and these, together with large, high-set eyes and thick lips, give him quite a comical appearance from our perspective.

Yet his looks belie his feisty nature. For this little tompot blenny – the species is usually under 20cm long – has defended his territory against intruders for three years now. The battles have left him scarred around the mouth, but that doesn’t seem to deter the females that enter his home to lay their eggs, which he then tends with devotion until they hatch.

From his home the blenny can see other species of fish on the reef build imposing nests of pink seaweed, change colour to greet their partners or lurk with the intention of stealing his conscientiously guarded eggs. Where is this vibrant underwater world? The Mediterranean, the Caribbean or the Great Barrier Reef, perhaps? No, it’s Devon in south-west England, within a stone’s throw of the beach. In fact the top of a reef like this almost breaks the surface on the lowest tides, so snorkellers as well as divers can enjoy its wonderfully rich marine life.

The charismatic tompot blenny is a common species around most British and continental European coasts, mainly in water 1–12m deep, where it eats a variety of seabed invertebrates – including the anemones avoided by most predators – and grazes seaweed too. Ever since I started to dive and snorkel over the shallow rocky reefs near my home just outside Plymouth in 1980, I’ve been intrigued by the assertiveness and antics of the tompots.

Vol. 8 Issue 10

57

NATURE

Whenever I encountered a tompot on repeat visits to a particular rocky crevice, I had a hunch that it was the very same fish. Then I discovered that I could reliably identify individuals from close-up photographs showing the unique markings around their heads. It meant I could go back through my photo library to track the occupancy of individual fish in different parts of a reef over several years.

This research showed that male tompots guard the same crevice for up to three years, and can also stay in the area of reef even longer, though with moves and ‘swaps’ of territory during that time. The appearance of wounds around the mouth or on the fins of males coincides with these swaps, clearly a result of territorial fights. It was heartening to see one of our longeststanding reef residents – nicknamed ‘Benny the Blenny’ – recover well from his injuries.

Stand-offs between rival males are frequently observed, though actual attacks with the mouth are seen much more rarely. One September I was astonished to spot juvenile tompot blennies, just 2cm long and recently settled from their planktonic larval stage, battling with each other like seasoned adults.

CLOCKWISE FROM ABOVE: Velvet swimming crabs prey on tompot blennies’ eggs; the species shares its habitat with ballan wrasse and snakelocks anemones; a young tompot blenny; an adult male keeps both eyes on the eggs in his crevice

A CREVICE FIT FOR A QUEEN Once a male tompot has won ownership of a rocky crevice, he cleans it and – probably with the help of pheromone secretions – invites in a female. He encourages her to attach her eggs, often to the crevice ceiling as well as its floor. Female visits are quite brief so often go unwitnessed, but, sure enough, a single layer of beautiful dark purple eggs invariably appears in a male’s home each April.

However, from then until June, the egg raft expands as more females visit, producing distinct patches of eggs at different stages of development.

Since female tompot blennies

I discovered that I could reliably identify individuals from the markings around their heads

58

Vol. 8 Issue 10

are more mobile they are harder to track, but further study of my photographic records has shown that a female will visit several males to lay eggs in a given breeding season, and that a male will also host several females. Such polygamy is well known in members of the blenny family, but what is surprising is that a male tompot will sometimes host more than one female simultaneously – in fact I recently watched three females together with a single suitor.

Over the several weeks that the eggs take to develop, the male tompot’s paternal duties include wiping them with cauliflower-like glands on his underside by wriggling across the egg raft. In other blenny species, the secretions of these glands have

been found to contain antimicrobial compounds. Male tompots also have to be fierce guardians, because there are plenty of egg thieves about.

I have seen a Connemara clingfish, which commonly live in the same crevices as tompots, sneak in to eat some eggs while the owner was distracted. Quickly realising the threat, the tompot drove the clingfish away.

But the invader installed itself in a narrow part of the crevice inaccessible to the larger tompot, and waited for further chances of a snack.

Intruding crabs are also unwelcome and dealt with sharply. Though the red-eyed velvet swimming crab is notoriously aggressive, a tompot will force one from his territory by targeting its legs or rear for a rapid biting attack while keeping away from its fearsome claws.

HUNTER AND PREY Unless a tompot blenny is unlucky enough to be caught out in the open by seals, birds, bass or cuttlefish, its other main enemies are ones shaped to enter rocky crevices. At the top of this page you can see a photo I once took of a small conger eel with a tompot blenny in its jaws; several hours later, there

FABULOUS FISH SIX OF THE TOMPOT’S NEIGHBOURS 1 CORKWING WRASSE The male has flashy breeding colours and builds a large nest from carefully selected pieces of seaweed. Some nests are so shallow that they are exposed at low tide.

2 BLACK-FACED BLENNY When he is actively courting, the male’s yellow becomes especially vibrant. But outside the breeding season he has cryptic coloration similar to the female’s (visible at bottom right).

3 TOPKNOT This is an unusual flatfish in that it lives among rocks rather than in open sandy areas. Able to enter narrow crevices, the species may be a significant predator of young fish such as blennies.

4 LONG-SPINED SEA SCORPION To help it ambush prey, this member of the sculpin family matches the colour of its surroundings, which can include bright pink and orange among encrusting algae and sponges.

was just a very full-looking conger.

Some of the many fascinating interactions between tompot blennies can be tricky to interpret. In August and October, outside the breeding season, individuals (of uncertain gender) will adopt what appears to be a submissive ‘belly display’ posture outside the crevice of a territorial male, which usually emerges to chase them off. And I once observed a large male moving an empty whelk shell around the seabed with his head under Swanage Pier in Dorset – perhaps showing off to smaller tompots?

We still have so much to learn about this feisty species, and indeed about so many other amazing animals in British waters. This is why Marine Protected Areas, promoted by The Wildlife Trusts, Marine Conservation Society and others, are so vital. Without them we risk fatally damaging our undersea ecosystems before we have even begun to understand them. ß

This tompot blenny, with red head tentacles just showing, has been unfortunate to encounter a conger eel small enough to enter its crevice home, but large enough to eat it

PAUL NAYLOR IS A MARINE BIOLOGIST AND PHOTOGRAPHER. VISIT WWW.MARINEPHOTO.CO.UK TO SEE MORE OF HIS PICTURES

1

2

3

4

5

6

5 GOLDSINNY WRASSE This little wrasse nibbles parasites off other fish – the black spot on its tail stem is thought to advertise its cleaning service.

6 CONNEMARA CLINGFISH Long and slim, this fish is superbly adapted for life in narrow crevices. Its pelvic fins are fused to form a powerful sucker with which it clings to the rocky floor or ceiling.

Vol. 8 Issue 10

59

HISTORY

REIGN OF THE RED TERROR In 1966, China’s leader Mao Zedong launched his Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in an attempt to marginalise his rivals. In this he succeeded, says Robert Bickers, but at a truly horrific cost to his country

Scan this QR Code for the audio reader

60

Vol. 8 Issue 10

W

hen Red Guards arrived at the door of Nien Cheng’s house in Shanghai on the night of 30 August 1966, it wasn’t an unexpected interruption.

Throughout ‘Red August’, organised gangs of Chinese students had indulged in acts of destruction across China in the name of effacing ‘feudal’ traditions. Yet what followed still seems astonishing to record.

More than 30 teenagers stormed into the 51-year-old widow’s home and began to smash it up, destroying clothes, antiques, records, paintings and furniture, burning books, and defacing walls and mirrors with political slogans. Nien Cheng herself was seized; she would spend the next six and a half years in captivity.

Her story was far from unusual. In Shanghai alone, tens of thousands of homes were attacked in this way, and many of their terrified residents were beaten to death or committed suicide. Red Guards also killed cats and other pets they considered a bourgeois affectation. Yet rather than being the work of a rabble, a lawless mob, this was an officially sanctioned movement encouraged by Mao Zedong and his inner circle. It was the sharp end of China’s Cultural Revolution.

By the spring of 1965 Mao, the 72-year-

old son of a small-time landowner in south-central China, had held a commanding position within the Chinese Communist party for over three decades.

He was one of its founder members in 1921, and had emerged as the core leader in the mid-1930s. After the party seized power in 1949 and established the People’s Republic of China, he had stamped his personality and his programme on the politics and policies of the new state. In the late 1950s Mao had also come to assert his own claim to leadership within the international communist movement, which had split as a result.

Mao had long been the focus of a cult of personality. One of the era’s songs – almost its national anthem – came to define his status. “The east is red,” it began, “the sun has risen, China has brought forth Mao Zedong… he is the people’s saviour.”

But the ‘Great Helmsman’, as he was also called, was now worried about the future – and he was particularly concerned about his own legacy. It was Mao who, in 1958, had steered the party into a pell-mell race to the future, a rapid process of agricultural collectivisation and a nationwide programme – the Great Leap Forward – to increase industrial production

Red peril A civil servant deemed to be a ‘political pickpocket’ is paraded through the streets of Beijing by Red Guards in 1967.

Many such ‘capitalist roaders’ were denounced and humiliated

to overtake Britain’s and match that of the US. The result was disaster: an estimated 30 million people died from starvation.

TOPFOTO

THE COLOUR OF CATS By 1965 Mao had been forced to step back from hands-on leadership as more pragmatic colleagues tried to reconstruct the economy, though he remained powerful in his position as Communist party chairman. Men such as state president Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, who managed day-to-day affairs, were also veterans of the movement, and no less ruthlessly committed to its goals.

Deng famously articulated his approach in July 1962 by quoting a pithy proverb from his home province, Sichuan: “It does not matter if a cat is yellow or black, as long as it catches mice.” During the civil war of 1946–49 the communists’ Red Army had not always fought a conventional struggle, he continued, but had adapted its strategy to the specific conditions in which it found itself. That flexibility had led to its ultimate victory. In restoring the economy after the ravages of the Great Leap, the party needed to be equally pragmatic.

The cat would change colour in the re-telling, and became white and black as

the phrase was repeated. But for Mao this thinking seemed to exemplify the approach of a new bureaucracy that was losing another, much more important tint: revolutionary red. Under the leadership of Liu, Deng and others like them at all levels in the party and state, the Chinese Communist party appeared to be in danger of losing its ideological purity and its political ambitions, instead prioritising economic growth.

Was capitalism being restored? Was the revolution being compromised by a new elite that had captured the party and government and sidelined him? These questions plagued Mao, who had also been shocked in 1956 when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had denounced and damned his own predecessor, Stalin. Was Liu Shaoqi the Khrushchev of China – and was Mao heading for

the same fate as his erstwhile Soviet counterpart?

So the chairman sprang a trap – and everybody in China was caught up in it.

He brought into play the young and the disaffected, and mobilised them to back his bid to restore the primacy of his own vision. In 1966, with strong support from the ambitious army chief, Lin Biao, Mao began a sustained assault on his own party and the state with a programme formally described as a ‘Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’.

The spark that lit the touchpaper of the Cultural Revolution was a play – or, more specifically, a critique of a play. Hai Rui Dismissed from Office was a historical drama in which the eponymous chief adviser to a Ming-dynasty emperor was dismissed for publicly criticising the ruler.

The problem was that the play came to be seen as an allegory for modern events.

A written critique was published claiming that the play was a thinly disguised attack on Mao. The emperor clearly represented Mao, it was alleged, while Hai Rui was one of China’s veteran leaders, former army commander Peng Dehuai. Peng had challenged Mao in 1959 over the disastrous results of the Great Leap Forward, and as a result had been disgraced.

Mao’s opponents were charged with attempting to suppress the critique – which the chairman had sponsored, and secretly helped prepare – and then with having commissioned the original play as part of a bid to undermine him and the revolution.

They were alleged to be ‘revisionists’, as Khrushchev was also routinely labelled.

The first victim of the movement was Peng Zhen, the powerful mayor of Beijing and Politburo member, who was toppled in May 1966 alongside other senior figures in the city. But, Mao and his supporters wondered, how far had this rot spread? The revolution was under attack from within, they believed – from somewhere inside the leadership. How else had someone as senior as Peng Zhen been allowed to act, if not without the

In Shanghai, tens of thousands of homes were attacked, and many of their terrified residents were beaten to death or committed suicide

Vol. 8 Issue 10

61

Faction fought faction. They fought with loud-speakers, pamphlets, fists, clubs, guns, tanks. Suburbs of major cities were wrecked

approval of “Persons in power taking the capitalist road”? This description was a coded way of identifying the culprits as Liu Shaoqi and other senior leaders including Deng Xiaoping.

Few pieces of theatrical criticism have had such an impact.

Between 1966 and 1976, an estimated 1.5 million people died as a result of persecution or in bloody, armed factional strife, and tens of millions would face political disgrace or have their lives permanently altered. Liu Shaoqi was toppled, dying in disgrace in 1969. The country was turned inside out, parts of it collapsing into civil war. The economy was shattered – it was better to be ‘Red’ than ‘Expert’, claimed the slogans – and China retreated into a morbidly violent isolation.

On 5 August 1966 Mao issued a manifesto calling on revolutionaries to “bombard the headquarters” and defend the party from a “white terror” launched against it by “some leading comrades”.

Answering his call with all the idealism and passion of their age came China’s young people.

Two months earlier, students at a middle school in the capital had formed a new revolutionary militia, the Red Guards, pledged to support Mao and attack his opponents. Endorsed by Mao, the new movement spread swiftly across the country as millions of young people flocked on to its trains to make political pilgrimages, to participate in mass rallies in Beijing or visit other sites of historic, revolutionary importance and to “share experiences” with Red Guards in other towns and cities.

BOURGEOIS VICTIMS For several extraordinary months China was turned upside down as its young

people launched a wave of attacks against perceived enemies in the party and in every political or social institution. Those enemies were seen everywhere – including in the homes of the ‘bourgeois’ such as Nien Cheng in Shanghai.

The widow of a former diplomat, she had become manager of the local branch of the British oil company Shell, and had recently retired from a post helping to wind up that firm’s interests.

Nien Cheng had studied in the mid-1930s at the London School of Economics, where she had met her husband, and was a cosmopolitan, cultured patriot. She had toured Britain, speaking at meetings to rally support for China during the Japanese invasion, and she and her husband had lived in Australia for five years, where their daughter Meiping had been born.

Meiping grew up bilingual, like her parents; she learned to play the piano, and became a film actress. Nien Cheng ordered English books from a London bookshop, and stocked her pleasant house with wine bought on trips to the British colony of Hong Kong, and with valuable Chinese antiquities. She employed three servants and a gardener, and had a cat.

There certainly remained a gulf between the cosmopolitan world of city residents such as Cheng and her daughter and that of the majority of China’s people, who still lived on the land. Meiping had seen this first hand in late 1965, when she had been sent to live with a village family on Shanghai’s outskirts, and had been shocked at the conditions she encountered. But a bond of solidarity had nonetheless developed between the urban sophisticate and the impoverished villagers.

Out with the ‘Old’ Red Guards at a Buddhist temple gate, Beijing, in 1966. Such symbols of ‘Old’ China were relentlessly attacked during ‘Red August’

Such ties were torn asunder in the orgy of violence and destruction that engulfed the family after 30 August 1966. In the custody of the state, Nien Cheng was subjected to ‘struggle meetings’ at which she was denounced and forced to confess to political crimes, and spent six and a half years in solitary confinement. In June 1967 Meiping was kidnapped, beaten, tortured and killed by a Red Guard gang.

The destruction of symbols of ‘Old’ (pre-revolutionary) China came to be a defining feature of the Red Guard movement. They attacked the ‘Four Olds’ – old ideas, old culture, old customs, old habits – pillaging temples and churches,

THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION: 10 KEY EVENTS 1921

1949

1958

1959–62

The Chinese Communist party is established in Shanghai, its founding members having been encouraged by foreign agents of the Communist International (Comintern).

Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist government retreats to Taiwan. On 1 October Mao Zedong proclaims the establishment of the People’s Republic of China.

Mao launches the Great Leap Forward with the aim of overtaking the economic output of the UK and matching that of the US.

Famine results in at least 30 million deaths.

As a result, Mao is sidelined by Liu Shaoqi, and some policies of the Great Leap Forward era are abandoned.

62

Vol. 8 Issue 10

1966 The Cultural Revolution is proclaimed in May. Red Guards form and, after mass rallies in Beijing, begin attacks on the ‘four olds’ and ‘class enemies’, ‘counter-revolutionaries’ and ‘bad Starving rural victims of the famine caused by Mao’s Great Leap Forward elements’.

AKG IMAGES/PRESS ASSOCIATION IMAGES

HISTORY

Liu Shaoqi Leader who instituted economic reforms but was denounced in the Cultural Revolution

Lin Biao Mao’s army chief and annointed heir, killed in a plane crash in 1971, allegedly after planning a coup

and destroying the artefacts inside. They renamed China’s streets, dispensing with ‘feudal’ names; they attacked and shamed people with western hairstyles or shoes fashionable in Hong Kong. One group announced that traffic lights should be re-sequenced, with a red light for ‘go’ – after all, was it not counter-revolutionary to believe that red meant ‘stop’?

Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, formed with him a ‘Cultural Revolution Group’ that now seized power. She took a leading role in setting an austere new cultural policy that authorised performance of only eight model plays and ‘revolutionary operas’. Foreign, ‘reactionary’ and ‘feudal’ music, art and literature were suppressed.

DISORGANISED CHAOS

REX-SHUTTERSTOCK/GETTY IMAGES/AKG IMAGES

Deng Xiaoping An economic reformer toppled in the Cultural Revolution, Deng returned to power after Mao’s death

Jiang Qing Mao’s wife was a key member of the Cultural Revolution Group that came to power in 1966

Mao Zedong applauds a parade of Red Guards in Tiananmen Square, Beijing. These young militants followed Mao’s call in early August 1966 to defend the party from a ‘white terror’

1967 Red Guards seize control of the Chinese foreign ministry, and storm and burn down the British Mission in BBC History Magazine Beijing. Mao starts to move against them, ordering in the army to restore order.

Seeing the results of the ‘red terror’, Mao’s adherents modified their endorsement in 1967, but the chaos proved difficult to control. All over China people realised that there could be no riding out this storm. If they were not involved, they could not win – and if they did not win, they stood a chance of losing everything and being damned for life as ‘counter-revolutionaries’ or ‘black elements’. So faction fought faction to seize the ‘headquarters’ and defend the chairman. From 1967 to 1969 they fought with loudspeakers, pamphlets and posters; they fought with their fists, then armed with sticks and clubs; then they fought with guns, tanks and warplanes. Whole suburbs of major cities were wrecked.

As the country collapsed into civil war, Mao called on the army to step in, and Lin Biao’s forces imposed order on the warring factions, often with further violence.

A ‘Campaign to cleanse the class ranks’ followed; hundreds of thousands more were purged and many killed, as they were in further campaigns in 1970–72.

The Red Guards, idealistic heralds of the revolution, were brutally dispensed with, and millions of them were sent from the

1969

1971

1972

1976

Chinese and Soviet military clash on their common border. Mass campaigns are launched in China to dig air-raid shelters and prepare for war. The Chinese army suppresses factional fighting.

Concerned about its international isolation, China signals its desire to re-open relations with the US. President Richard Nixon is receptive.

Nixon visits China and meets Mao. Other western powers follow suit.

The Tangshan earthquake kills 500,000. Mao dies in September, and the Cultural Revolution Group (aka the Gang of Four) is arrested.

The end of the Cultural Revolution is proclaimed.

Vol. 8 Issue 10

63

HISTORY

THE BLAME GAME The paralysing stasis that followed the exhausting events of 1966–69 ended only with the death of Mao in September 1976.

Within a month his successor, Hua Guofeng, arrested the leading figures in the Cultural Revolution Group, including Jiang Qing. Many surviving targets of the movement, including Deng Xiaoping, were later rehabilitated and regained power.

In 1981 the party issued a ‘Resolution’ on party history. This concluded that the beliefs of Mao that inspired the Cultural Revolution were “entirely erroneous” and “conformed neither to Marxism-Leninism nor to Chinese reality”. Much of the blame was laid on Lin Biao, and on a ‘Gang of Four’ including Jiang Qing, though the responsibility of Mao Zedong was also acknowledged. Even so, it was famously concluded, his contributions to building socialism in China had been seven-tenths positive and only three-tenths negative.

Meanwhile, there has never been any meaningful calling to account of the perpetrators of the terrible violence wreaked during the Cultural Revolution. Their victims were rehabilitated – but the dead can never be brought back to life. ß

ROBERT BICKERS IS PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL AND AUTHOR OF THE SCRAMBLE FOR CHINA (PENGUIN, 2012) 64

Vol. 8 Issue 10

Conflict and kitsch: Mao’s global legacy The Cultural Revolution both appalled and enthralled observers overseas. As it first unfolded it was the subject of intense but puzzled scrutiny by expert China-watchers, but in the days of destructive rage in late August 1966, when reports emerged of Red Guard attacks on temples and churches, it garnered wider public attention.

Maoist rhetoric, and the style and iconography of the Cultural Revolution, were widely adopted across the radical left in western Europe, North America and Japan. Radical students in West Germany, the Black Panthers in the US and hard-left factions in Italy all took Maoism seriously as a political programme, though the established international communist movement remained loyal to Moscow. Mao chic permeated further into popular culture, with Mao badges, Mao caps and Mao suits worn as style statements, not simply political ones.

The Cultural Revolution also came to the streets of European cities with a series of violent incidents in which Chinese diplomats and students clashed with security forces in Paris, London and Moscow.

The most significant set of events outside China took place in Hong Kong where, from May 1967, local communists organised a violent and sustained challenge to British rule. By the end of that year 51 people had lost their lives in a series of violent confrontations, shooting incidents at the border and a bombing campaign. The British authorities enacted emergency regulations to suppress leftist publications, and several editors and journalists were jailed. In response, in August 1967 Red Guards burned down the British mission in Beijing, manhandling the diplomats who were then prevented from leaving the country for a year.

The Cultural Revolution and Mao’s political thought had a violent trajectory that diverged from the course of events in China. From 1970, Europe faced the terror campaigns of the Baader-Meinhof gang and the Italian Red Brigades.

In 1980 the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) movement led by Abimael Guzmán, who had been

trained in Cultural Revolution-era China, launched a bloody Maoist insurgency in Peru. By the time Guzmán was captured and jailed 12 years later, more than 50,000 were dead. A bloody 10-year civil

Peruvian children sit near school walls daubed with slogans by Maoist Sendero Luminoso insurgents

war fomented by Maoist rebels in Nepal only ended in 2006. And the Naxalites, a Maoist group with origins in a 1967 uprising in West Bengal, still present a significant security threat to the Indian state.

In China itself the Cultural Revolution remains in political limbo. The 1981 ‘Resolution’ remains the public verdict, but there has been no detailed examination of the course of events, despite brief official endorsement of ‘scar’ literature, a genre of memoirs that emerged in the 1970s dealing with the effects of the revolution.

That openness did not last. Today, archives remain closed and most histories and museums gloss over or simply ignore the years between 1966 and 1976. At a grass-roots level, informal initiatives document victims’ stories, but the topic remains so politically sensitive that there seems little chance of any loosening of political control. Most young Chinese know very little about the Cultural Revolution. The leadership’s legitimacy today is grounded in its nationalist credentials, and in its handling of the economy. Its dark past remains hidden.

mao chic permeated western culture, with mao badges, mao caps and mao suits worn as style statements, not simply political ones

A porcelain figure of Mao flanked by uniformed ‘Red Guards’ in a Beijing store in 2012. Often kitsch or ironic, Mao iconography remains popular today

ALAMY/GETTY IMAGES

cities ‘down to the countryside’. For most of them, education had come to a halt in the heady summer of 1966. Though those days had offered unprecedented power and freedom – to travel, to criticise and to act – many of them came to find that their lives were wrecked as badly as those of their victims.

The course of the Cultural Revolution was byzantine in its twists and turns, but Mao Zedong achieved his core aims: those who he believed had been opposing him within the party were removed from office and disgraced. However, the violent energy that was unleashed threatened to tear the country apart, and order had been secured only by bringing in the army. In 1971 that order was threatened when Lin Biao – by then Mao’s anointed heir-apparent – was killed in a plane crash in Mongolia; it was claimed that he had been planning a coup, but balked and fled, dying when his plane ran out of fuel.

SCIENCE

GOOD ON THE LEFT-HAND PAGES: A growing body of evidence shows it’s physically healthy to be a do-gooder.

Rita Carter dons her halo and puts forward the case for being kind to fellow humans

ILLUSTRATOR: KYLE SMART

Remember that boy at nursery who wouldn’t share his toys? How about that flatmate who never did the washing-up? There’s no doubt about it, we’ve all encountered selfish individuals. But don’t worry, while it may seem as if these egomaniacs are getting one up on the rest of us, it turns out that the good ones will have the last laugh.

66

Vol. 8 Issue 10

V

S

EVIL ON THE RIGHT-HAND PAGES: Despite the available evidence, Dean Burnett thinks there is still a case to be made for looking after number one – sometimes it’s good to be bad All through our childhoods, it’s drummed into us that we need to be good: kind, considerate, respectful of others, and so on. Odd, then, that so many people, upon entering adulthood, abandon these principles altogether. They spend their existence being dreadful, cruel and inconsiderate. Why would they do this? One explanation is that being bad works.

Vol. 8 Issue 10

67

SCIENCE

Stories abound of people diving into the paths of cars to push stray children aside

68

Vol. 8 Issue 10

ILLUSTRATOR: KYLE SMART

In his 1965 novel The Tin Men, British writer Michael Frayn describes an attempt to develop an altruistic robot.

The first prototype, Samaritan I, was programmed to sacrifice itself in favour of others. Its designer tested it by putting it on a one-robot raft with various companions to see what happened when the raft started to sink. The robot duly chucked itself overboard with alacrity.

However, it did this to save anything from a sack of lima beans to a chunk of seaweed, and the cost of drying it out each time proved expensive.

Samaritan II was adapted to sacrifice itself only for things it judged to be as, or more intelligent than itself. In trials it threw a number of insensate objects overboard, plus one hapless sheep. Yet when it was placed on the raft with another of its kind, both machines chucked themselves overboard simultaneously, which proved even more expensive.

Lastly, the designer inserted a bit of software that stopped the robots from committing reciprocal suicide, but this final version proved to be most expensive of all.

When placed together on the raft, the two machines thought about it for a while, then, as the raft slowly sank, they bashed each other to bits.

Our species’ history of warfare suggests we are programmed like the later versions of Samaritan. Yet every so often someone behaves like one of those earlier versions: they do something spectacularly altruistic. Stories abound of people diving into the paths of cars to push stray children aside, or throwing themselves onto live grenades to contain explosions that would otherwise kill dozens, or plunging into icy waters to save drowning babies.

Millions of others do quiet acts of giving that rarely feature in newspapers. According a survey carried out by the Charities Aid Foundation, three-quarters of people in the UK gave money to a good cause in 2014, one-third gave their time and two-thirds helped a stranger. The proportion of people who reported doing altruistic acts had increased on the previous year in nearly every country monitored.

At first, all this niceness doesn’t make sense. Selfish people should flourish because altruistic types are

Not giving a damn about fellow humans and focusing solely on your own needs can have genuine benefits The social brain hypothesis is a theory about how we ended up with such powerful brains. It states that humans evolved in close-knit communities, which required the ability to recognise and process a lot of different relationships with many individuals. Rather than just looking out for ourselves and our kin, we now had to be aware of the roles, interactions, affiliations and responsibilities of the shared group, and people we had no genetic link to. To do this effectively requires the ability to process a vast amount of information, resulting in an evolutionary advantage for intelligence and abstract thinking.

Thousands of years later, here we are. And if you doubt the intense amount of information required to handle different group relationships, then try putting together a table plan at a wedding.

It’s debatable whether this social brain hypothesis is the whole story, but it’s obvious that our brains are heavily influenced by other people, even down to the neurological level. Contemplating being part of a group has been shown to produce activity in particular regions of the brain, including the cortical midline structures and temporoparietal junctions. Some experts now term this network as ‘the social brain’, which is different to the social brain hypothesis discussed earlier. Also, brain areas such as the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex show increased activity when subjects contemplate the groups or communities they’re part of, suggesting that those we interact with form a strong element of our identity.

Overall, it seems caring about others and being friendly is what made us the humans we are today.

That’s a nice thought, but it can have some serious downsides, meaning that not giving a damn about your fellow humans and focusing solely on your own needs can have genuine benefits.

For example, the informational influence. If you are around people who all share a common conclusion on an important issue or subject, then you’re more likely to agree with it.

You’ll either say you agree, even if you

Vol. 8 Issue 10

69

SCIENCE

Helping others seems to protect people’s health in stressful periods more than being helped

70

Vol. 8 Issue 10

ILLUSTRATOR: KYLE SMART

metaphorically chucking themselves overboard. Yet according to a slew of scientific studies, the explanation for the apparent proliferation of altruism is that it bestows some kind of benefit on those who practice it. Selfless behaviour appears to be good for your health, mood and even your longevity.

Most obviously, there is the rush of pleasure you get from doing good, the so-called ‘helper’s high’. Like other types of high, it is thought to come from the production in the brain of morphine-like endorphins.

As well as the feel-good effect of endorphins, they also appear to buffer people against the unhealthy ramifications of stress. In 2013, US researchers interviewed 846 people over the age of 65 about stressful events they had experienced in the past year. They also asked how much help they had given friends or family over the same period, things like doing errands, minding children, giving lifts and so on. When the figures were crunched, it turned out the unhelpful people seemed to have suffered from the stressful events in terms of increased mortality, but those who had been helpful had not. Indeed, helping others seemed to protect people’s health in stressful periods more than being helped.

So what is going on in the brains of people who behave altruistically? A study at Baylor College of Medicine in the US showed that helpful people have greater activation in the top and back of their temporal cortex that produces recognition of other people as individuals, a prerequisite for feeling empathy. Similarly, an fMRI study of kidney donors by researchers at Georgetown University found that, compared to non-donors, the donors had more activity in the right amygdala. This is an area of the brain that responds to emotional stimuli when seeing others in distress. The activation pattern is exactly the opposite of that seen in psychopaths.

Empathy, in turn, is associated with the production of oxytocin. This is best known as the ‘bonding molecule’ and is produced by the bucketload in women giving birth and by loving couples during sex. It even promotes altruistic behaviour. In one experiment, researchers from the University of Bonn asked people to either give money

By assuming that other humans exist just to inconvenience you, you might end up getting a lot more done don’t, so you don’t stand out (normative social influence), or you’ll become genuinely convinced that it’s correct, because so many people keep telling you so (informational social influence). Cultivating the ability to not be concerned with – or care about – the views and opinions of others can allow you to make more valid and accurate decisions and conclusions.

Others might describe this as ‘antisocial’, but then you probably can’t trust anything they say.

There’s also the fact that the most common type of phobia is social phobia; the unreasonable fear of doing something that results in negative judgment or embarrassment from others. This can hamper our ability to do even basic things, like give presentations or complain about poor service. None of this would be an issue if you didn’t give a jot about what other people thought of you, so by assuming that other humans are insignificant blobs who exist just to inconvenience you, you might end up getting a lot more done.

There are even those who have learned to exploit the brain’s weaknesses when it comes to caring about others. There are several methods, demonstrated repeatedly in experiments, which increase compliance.

You can use these techniques to manipulate others into doing what you want. And many people (politicians, car salespeople, cold-callers, etc) frequently use these methods.

There’s the ‘foot in the door’ technique, where agreeing to a small favour makes you more likely to agree to larger ones, if they’re of a similar nature.

A friend asks to borrow 50cents for a bus fare, then $2 to buy a sandwich, and then it snowballs until you’re paying their utility bills.

There’s the ‘door in the face’ technique, where you refuse a big request, but doing so makes you more likely to agree to a smaller one. A friend asks to borrow your car for a week, and you say no. So she asks to borrow it for the weekend, and you say yes. You feel like you’re up on the deal, but you’re not. You didn’t

Vol. 8 Issue 10

71

SCIENCE

to other volunteers, or withhold it from them, while having their oxytocin levels monitored. Those with the highest oxytocin levels gave away the most, and the act of giving raised their oxytocin levels further. Recipients also experienced a rise in oxytocin, which in turn prompted them to give away more. The escalating hormones mirrored a virtuous spiral of altruism. To add to the good news, other studies have linked high oxytocin levels to better health, including faster healing of wounds.

Putting oxytocin in the water supply is unlikely to cure society’s ills, however, because the hormone has a dark side. While high levels increases someone’s kindliness towards others that they perceive as being ‘one of them’, it makes them less well-disposed to those they see as outsiders. The same chemical that kindles the best traits in humans may also be the one that kindles the worst.

Still, let’s end on an oxytocin-rising note. People buying books in various parts of the UK were recently astonished to find £5 notes tucked between the pages of their purchases. The money was accompanied by a note saying: “Hi, if you are finding this money then know the Universe is smiling at you today. Enjoy a cuppa on me or pass it along to give another a smile to someone else!

Have a great day!”

One recipient, Chris Topping from Liverpool, said the note did indeed leave him smiling all day and he decided to do something meaningful with the money.

“We bought some sandwiches and drinks for a few homeless lads and lasses on the way home to pay it forward,” he said. “I see a few homeless people in the same spot on a regular basis, so I thought I’d buy enough for all of them.” All together now: “aaaahhhhhhh!” ß

Studies have linked high oxytocin levels to better health, including faster healing of wounds RITA CARTER IS A SCIENCE LECTURER, BROADCASTER AND WRITER WHO

ILLUSTRATOR: KYLE SMART

SPECIALISES IN THE HUMAN BRAIN

72

Vol. 8 Issue 10

The brain wants us to be liked and to stay in other people’s ‘good books’.

And as a result, we get screwed over have to let her borrow your car at all. But you have.

There’s also the ‘low ball’ technique, where you’ll agree to do something in return for a reward, then the other person removes the reward, but you go through with it anyway. A car salesman says you can have the car with a 10 per cent discount, so you agree. He goes to “speak to his manager”. It turns out you can’t have the discount, but you buy it anyway. Because your brain is stupid.

All these stem from the brain wanting us to be liked and to stay in other people’s ‘good books’. And as a result, we get screwed over. So-called self-centred or antisocial people seem to have shaken off this neurological need for people to like them, and tend to be more successful for it.

It could be argued that the brain isn’t even cut out to be altruistic. There’s a brain region, the supramarginal gyrus, which suppresses our egocentric bias and stops us from assuming everyone thinks and feels the same as us. But it only works to a certain point; it struggles to let us empathise with people who are in drastically different situations to us. This is why we can watch the plight of overseas famine victims amidst our frivolous daytime TV shows without being reduced to a blubbering mess.

Maybe this empathy and ‘compassionate’ reflex is just an evolutionary leftover, some sort of emotional appendix we’d be better off without. Because once you do abandon it and start living for yourself and nobody else, you seem to get a lot more done. Just look at any typical politician or CEO. It may not be ‘good’ to be bad, but it clearly pays well. ß

DEAN BURNETT IS A DOCTOR OF NEUROSCIENCE, PSYCHIATRY TUTOR, COMEDIAN AND WRITER. HIS DEBUT BOOK, THE IDIOT BRAIN, IS AVAILABLE NOW

Vol. 8 Issue 10

73

NATURE

FLOODS & FEUDS

Brazil’s Pantanal has one of the world’s largest jaguar populations – and some of the largest jaguars. Researcher Allison Devlin is following their every move PHOTOS BY NICK GARBUTT

Scan this QR Code for the audio reader

74

Vol. 8 Issue 10

A male jaguar wades through the shallows of a backwater of the CuiabĂĄ River in the northern Pantanal. Jaguars are very conďŹ dent around water

Vol. 8 Issue 10

75

NATURE

T

he late-afternoon sun baked the parched pastures and dirt roads of Fazenda São Bento, a working cattle ranch and our research base in the northern Pantanal. The September air shimmered on the horizon and an occasional hot breeze wafted from the banks of the Cuiabá River. The dry season had peaked, so wildlife sought the oasis offered by shaded forest beside the water.

Situated in western central Brazil, the Pantanal is the largest inland wetland on Earth and home to a breathtaking diversity of flora and fauna. Smoke from a distant fire, typical here at this time of year, billowed in the sky. In the final rays of the setting sun, a small group of 20 capybaras – the world’s largest rodents – lounged along the sandy riverbank by our headquarters, still alert to any shadowy threat.

I had returned to base after a long day of field surveys with Rafael Hoogesteijn, a veterinarian and an expert in predator–livestock conflict, and Fernando Tortato, a biologist for the Brazil programme of Panthera, the bigcat conservation organisation. As I deposited the field equipment in my room, a bell rang to signal that dinner was ready.

Barely had I left my doorstep when the capybaras erupted into frenzied flight. A lithe feline form kicked up a cloud of sand and dust as it rolled over a juvenile that reacted one fateful second too late. In the fading light, I watched the cat deliver a lethal bite straight through the skull – a signature move unique to jaguars. With dinner secured in its powerful jaws, the jaguar lifted its head and quickly hauled its prize into the nearby forest.

76

Vol. 8 Issue 10

I ran back into my room, grabbed my notebook to hurriedly record the observation, then raced to Fernando and Rafael to ask if they had also witnessed this incredible event. Could it be that the jaguar was Noca, the famed resident female that we had recently captured and fitted with a radio-collar?

BONE-CRUNCHING BITES The world’s third-largest felid and the biggest in the Americas, the typically solitary jaguar has long been a cultural icon of stealth and power. Its tawny coat is dappled with uniquely patterned rosettes that provide beautiful camouflage in a mosaic of habitats from northern Mexico to northern Argentina (all-black, or

TOP: Female jaguars have litters containing one to four cubs ABOVE: A female capybara swims with her young in a lagoon off the Paraguay River.

The rodent is key prey for the Pantanal’s jaguars

TOP AND TOP RIGHT: Jaguars (here a female) are excellent swimmers.

Rivers provide no escape for their prey, such as this capybara RIGHT: The big cat (this one is male) has such strong jaws that it can bite through the skull of its prey (here another capybara) and pierce its brain with its canines BELOW: The yacare caiman – another key jaguar prey item – is thriving in the Pantanal

The gargantuan Pantanal jaguars are well fed by a variety of large-bodied prey, including abundant capybaras

melanistic, individuals are rare). Its name is derived from the native Tupi–Guaraní word yaguará, meaning ‘beast that kills its prey with one bound’. And indeed this is a prodigious predator that stalks prey very close and, after a lightning-quick pursuit, delivers that bone-crunching bite, the strongest in the cat world.

Jaguars in the Pantanal are among the largest in the world, tipping the scales at an average of 100kg in males and 70kg in females. The heaviest males can weigh over 140kg. In contrast, males and females in Central America generally average 50kg and 40kg, respectively.

The gargantuan Pantanal jaguars are well fed by a variety of large-bodied prey, including an abundance of capybaras and yacare caiman.

Though caiman are seen sunning themselves on beaches during the day, their astonishing numbers are most apparent at night. A steady sweep of a spotlight reveals a river teeming with the shining orbs of dozens – sometimes hundreds – of the unblinking reptiles.

Armoured with bony scutes and reaching lengths of up to 3m, these crocodilians are still no match for the phenomenal bite of the Pantanal jaguars.

During the May–October dry season the Cuiabá River is tame, its languid current bound by shorelines teeming with plant life. Forest canopies

burst with the pink or yellow blossoms of tabebuia trees, while the branches of mango trees are heavy with ripening fruit. But from November to April torrential rains from the Amazon and Cerrado regions to the north, plus the constriction of the Paraguay River in the southern Pantanal, cause the swollen river to breach its banks, flooding these plains up to 3m deep. Wildlife and cattle alike flee to dry ground, wherever they can find it.

Jaguars, however, are more forgiving of these seasonal surges. Most aquatic of all of the big cats, they are powerful swimmers and will happily dive underwater to pursue a fleeing caiman or capybara.

I have watched jaguars calmly glide with the current and use the river as a highway to travel from one beach to the next. Indeed Noca once crossed this broad river five times in just seven days.

ROOM TO ROAM Jaguars roam expansive territories – the radio-collared males in our project defend an average of 100km2 (in contrast female territory averages 40km2). During the wet season their home range is relatively small, because prey gathering on the few remaining islands of exposed ground provides easy pickings. But in the dry months Vol. 8 Issue 10

77

NATURE

A male stalks along the bank of the Cuiabรก River. There may be fewer than 100,000 jaguars left in the wild

Most dominant males in the Pantanal hold their territory for just two or three years before they are ousted 78

Vol. 8 Issue 10

these animals once again freely disperse through the landscape – and the jaguars inevitably follow.

However, caiman and capybaras routinely patrol the riverbanks in any season. So, whenever possible, jaguars prefer to stalk the narrow strips of ‘gallery’ forest that border the rivers. And though the big cats are solitary, they are by no means an island unto themselves.

Territorial boundaries need defending, food needs catching and mates need finding. A dominant male secures a territory large enough to overlap with those of three or four females. Males mark their borders with strategically placed scats, scrapes or sprays of urine. If those signs fail to deter a potential usurper – perhaps a covetous neighbour, or a subordinate, lower-ranking

The Pantanal hosts a wealth of other fascinating wildlife, including these toco toucans flying across the Piquiri River at dawn

’transient’ – roars usually do the trick.

When this chesty percussion of cough-like bellows echoes through the night, the forest becomes deadly silent. Will there be a confrontation? Or was the threat enough to warn off the trespasser? Our studies have found that most dominant males in the Pantanal hold their territory for just two or three years before they are ousted by a newcomer or neighbour. This may help to keep the mating pool fresh so that future generations of jaguars are genetically diverse.

We have yet to discover exactly how females with cubs navigate this perilous landscape, and protect their offspring from the tumult of warring males and rival neighbouring females. We suspect that, like other solitary big cats, the female hides her young cubs in carefully chosen dens at the core of her home range. But what makes for an ideal den? And how do cubs survive the different challenges of seasonal flood and drought?

We hope to reveal such closely held secrets in the next phases of our work.

PLAGUED BY PARASITES

NOCA: STAR OF THE PANTANAL Now about eight years old, Noca is a long-time resident of the Pantanal’s Jofre region and the star of several US TV documentaries. She is often seen around the ranch headquarters, swimming the Cuiabá and Piquiri Rivers or sunning herself along their sandy beaches. We have tracked Noca’s movements over multiple seasons

and discovered that, unlike most jaguars, she holds a narrow territory along the rivers throughout both wet and dry seasons, probably due to the plentiful caiman prey.

In 2013 she was observed with a male cub, confirming that our conservation efforts are helping to secure a future for this amazing species.

Floods and feuds are not the only source of strife in the Pantanal. Though small, parasites are the bane of many an animal’s existence. During the dry season, the Pantanal has few mosquitoes, but its swaths of forest host a plethora of ticks and large biting flies.

Joares May, a Brazilian wildlife vet and professor at the University of Southern Santa Catarina, has captured dozens of jaguars for research purposes throughout the Pantanal. He says that though the dry season is ideal for capture campaigns, ticks are one of the most unbearable parts of fieldwork – sometimes we capture jaguars that are absolutely covered, and do our best to relieve the cats of their burden (and study the ticks for any diseases they may carry).

During the peak wet season, mosquitoes swarm in Vol. 8 Issue 10

79

NATURE

Male jaguars in the Pantanal, such as the one in this photograph, average 100kg, while females average 70kg

near-maddening quantities. Elza Silva Costa, a longtime caretaker of a remote homestead in the western Pantanal, regaled me with tales about the hardships her family endures. Mosquitoes blacken the screened windows in such great numbers that no daylight can get in, while chickens die from anaemia due to the flies’ unrelenting appetites. Jaguars and other wildlife are forced to wallow in lagoons and rivers to escape the parasites’ unrelenting harassment.

However, while there are some small villages and homesteads in these remote regions, over 95 per cent of the Pantanal is currently held by large cattle-ranching operations; less than 5 per cent is protected for wildlife.

Unfortunately, historically this great floodplain didn’t just produce beef – until the early 1970s illegally traded jaguar skins were also a major export. The region’s jaguars were saved from near-extinction by fur-trade regulations set by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) and adopted by Brazil in the mid-1970s. Nevertheless there are still retaliatory attacks by cattle ranchers.

A VERY MYSTERIOUS CAT I have spent nearly three years in the Pantanal, yet feel I have barely scratched the surface of what we need to know about its jaguars. Soon I’ll return for another two years, and together with my Panthera colleagues and many other researchers I hope to develop cutting-edge techniques to reduce the conflict with landowners.

So while the Pantanal’s jaguars remain threatened, there’s cause for hope. We’re working to develop a local economy based on both cattle and jaguars, where landowners, communities and tour guides all benefit from these charismatic cats.

We’re working to develop an economy where landowners, communities and WRXU JXLGHV DOO EHQHÀW 80

Vol. 8 Issue 10

HOW TO SEE PANTANAL JAGUARS • The Pantanal is a great place to spot jaguars. The peak season runs from mid-June to mid-October, which is cooler and drier.

A case in point is our new research base, Jofre Velho, on the opposite side of the Cuiabá River to Fazenda São Bento. Once Jofre Velho was a major cattle ranch, but over 10,000ha was declared a protected landscape in 2015, and we have opened a school here for the children of the region’s ranch hands, to demonstrate how jaguar conservation benefits local communities. Since 2006, the number of jaguars has already doubled; Fernando’s latest camera-trap study revealed 27 individuals at Jofre Velho and Fazenda São Bento, with more still in the greater Jofre area.

Today there are on average between six and eight jaguars in each 100km2 of the Pantanal, with Jofre at the higher end of the scale. Such a remarkably high concentration, combined with the presence of some jaguars that have become used to humans, has enabled a boom in ecotourism. Boat trips can offer close views of the local jaguars lounging along the riverbanks, and sometimes even swimming, hunting or fighting over territory.

Our work is full of such thrilling encounters. Though we were unable to confirm the identity of the jaguar that I watched capture the juvenile capybara, the dramatic event left me with a newfound resolution.

This cat was still hunting native prey in front of a busy ranch, which shows that if we just give jaguars the space and protection they need they can co-exist with humans and continue to survive the seasonal challenges of the Pantanal. ß

ALLISON DEVLIN IS A ZOOLOGIST WHO WORKS WITH PANTHERA’S JAGUARCONSERVATION PROGRAMMES: WWW.PANTHERA.ORG

YOUR QUESTI0NS ANSWERED

BY OUR EXPERT PANEL

&

DR CHRISTIAN JARRETT Christian is a psychology and neuroscience writer. His latest book is Great Myths Of The Brain.

DR ALASTAIR GUNN Alastair is an astronomer at the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics at the University of Manchester.

PROF ROBERT MATTHEWS Robert is a physicist and science writer.

He’s visiting professor in science at Aston University.

DR PETER J BENTLEY Peter is a computer scientist and author who is based at University College London. His latest book is Digitized.

LUIS VILLAZON Luis has a BSc in computing and an MSc in zoology. He is author of How Cows Reach The Ground.

editorial-bbcearth@regentmedia.sg

PHOTO: ALEXEY TROFLMOV/SOLENT NEWS

Could global ice melt affect the Earth’s tilt?

The Earth’s axis isn’t perfectly upright relative to its orbit, but instead is tilted at an angle of around 23.5°. This so-called obliquity has long been known to change slightly over thousands of years as a result of the gravitational influence of the Sun, the Moon and the other planets. But evidence is also emerging for effects resulting from climate change. In 2013, researchers at the University of Texas reported that satellite measurements had revealed that the Earth’s tilt is being affected by the shift in mass caused by the melting of ice covering Greenland. The team found that around 15 years ago the Earth’s

axis began to move east and then south. Earlier this year, researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory confirmed the effect, and added another cause: changes in the amount of water stored in the Earth’s continents. Lower rainfall over Europe and Asia in recent years seems to be adding to the axial drift.

So is man-made global warming to blame for these changes?

According to the JPL team, it’s probably just part of the Earth’s natural climatic rhythms.

Either way, the effect isn’t anything to lose sleep over: the recent shift amounts to less than one-millionth of the Earth’s total tilt angle. RM

Strong winds and frosts caused ice to crack on Siberia’s Lake Baikal

Vol. 8 Issue 10

81

& How far do coughs and sneezes travel?

Given the number of infections that can travel through the air, it’s horrible when someone coughs over us. But according to research by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it’s not just the person next to us we should worry about: coughing spreads droplets as far as six metres, and sneezing as much as eight metres. These droplets stay suspended in the air for up to 10 minutes. RM

Why do sheep all face the same way in a field?

Sheep tend to stand with their backs to the wind when it is cold, but even on sunny days, cows, sheep – and even deer – all tend to face in the same direction.

Research looking at satellite images

has shown that they prefer to align themselves north to south. It’s possible that they might be sensitive to the Earth’s magnetic field, but how they can sense this, or why that might be useful, isn’t currently understood. LV

Radiotherapy uses an X-ray beam to destroy tumours by dumping enough energy into their cells to break their DNA molecules. The problem is that the beam damages everything in its path, including healthy tissues, particularly if the tumour is deep in the body. Proton therapy, which uses protons instead of X-rays, is an improvement on this. As protons have mass, they decelerate as they travel through tissue and have the greatest ionising effect only once they’ve slowed down enough to interact with the

82

Vol. 8 Issue 10

electrons in other atoms.

This allows doctors to ‘focus’ the proton beam on the tumour, without affecting other tissues. Antiprotons (the antimatter version of protons) work even better because they don’t just ionise the atoms they strike, they annihilate the protons in the nucleus of the tumour atoms. This releases gamma rays, which do even more damage to the tumour cells in a targeted way. Sadly, nowhere outside of CERN currently produces enough antiprotons to make this a feasible treatment. LV

A patient wears a mask to immobilise their head while undergoing proton therapy on a brain tumour

PHOTOS: ISTOCK, SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY X2

Could we use antimatter radiation to destroy cancer cells?

Obsidian knife blades: overkill for slicing your sandwich

What’s the sharpest knife in the world?

The thinnest blades are three nanometres wide at the edge – 10 times sharper than a razor blade. These are made by flaking a long, thin sliver from a core of obsidian (volcanic glass). They have been tested for use as surgical scalpels but aren’t currently licensed for use on humans, since they could leave glass fragments in the wound. LV

What makes a child prodigy?

Prodigies are defined by their childhood ability to perform at adult professional levels in a particular area.

Some experts argue that prodigies benefit from years of intense, early practice, usually encouraged by ambitious parents. Others highlight prodigies’ innate abilities: for example, a 2014 study assessed 18 child prodigies and found that what they all had in common was a heightened attention to detail and exceptional working memory (the ability to store and process information over short time periods). Prodigiousness seems to arise from a combination of this cognitive profile with what psychologist Ellen Winner describes as a “rage to master” their craft. CJ

THE THOUGHT EXPERIMENT

PHOTO: GETTY ILLUSTRATION: CHRIS PHILPOT

Which generates more electricity: running on a treadmill or wearing solar panels?

1. RUN FOR AN HOUR If you are reasonably fit, you can generate around 700W of electricity on a treadmill. If you run on the treadmill for an hour a day, this would add up to 255kWh per year – or about 5 per cent of a typical UK household’s consumption.

2. WEAR BODY PANELS The human body’s surface area is around 1.8m2, but wearing more than 1m2 of solar panels on your clothes would make it too hard to move. Only half of this area would be facing the Sun at a time, giving an effective generating area of 0.5m2.

3. TAKE A POWER NAP Solar panels typically generate 150W per square metre in good sunshine. If you are outside from dawn until dusk every single day in the UK, this would generate 53kWh per year. If all you do is sunbathe for an hour at midday, it will be more like 10kWh. Vol. 8 Issue 10

83

& Why does sunshine make me tired?

If you spend time in the sunshine, your body must expend energy to prevent you from overheating. One way it does this is to sweat, which leads to lethargy and dehydration if you don’t drink enough. The more you exert yourself, the more work your body has to do to control your temperature, which makes

everything feel like an effort. The cold makes people feel tired for the opposite reason, as the body must consume energy to stay warm, including through shivering. Bear in mind, though, the Sun doesn’t only make you feel tired. By influencing your circadian rhythm – the body’s internal clock – it also helps you get up in the morning. CJ

How do we know the Universe hasn’t always existed?

There’s a wealth of evidence that the Universe began in a Big Bang around 14 billion years ago. We can see distant galaxies racing away from each other, and the space around them is filled with cosmic radiation whose intensity and spread are consistent with that expected from the aftermath of the Big Bang. But none of this rules out the possibility that there was another universe before ours.

According to some theorists, when Einstein’s theory of gravity is combined with quantum theory, the Big Bang could really be part of a Big Bounce, in which the collapse of a previous – and perhaps very different – universe is followed by the creation of our own. While speculative, these theories do at least resolve the otherwise tricky question of what existed before the Big Bang. RM

T O P 10

HEAVIEST LAND CARNIVORES

1. Walrus*

2. Polar bear

3. Brown bear

4. Siberian tiger

Weight: 1,200kg Diet: shellfish, occasionally seals *Walruses spend a third of their lives on land or ice

Weight: 700kg Diet: ringed and bearded seals

Weight: 680kg Diet: salmon, berries, seaweed

Weight: 318kg Diet: deer, pigs

84

Vol. 8 Issue 10

HOW IT WORKS

Breakthrough Starshot It would take standard rockets 100,000 years to reach the Solar System’s nearest star, Alpha Centauri. Breakthrough Starshot hopes to do it in 22. A spacecraft carrying 1,000 ultralight probes, weighing 10g each, would be launched into Earth orbit. The ‘mothership’ would release the tiny probes one at a time, which would then ride the beams of a colossal ground-based laser array. The project has received US$93m from entrepreneur Yuri Milner, and backing from Prof Stephen Hawking.

Light sail

Mothership

Probes are released one at a time and unfurl reflective sails.

These are 4m across but just a few hundred atoms thick.

Releases the probes.

StarChip At the centre of each sail is a chip the size of a postage stamp, containing a camera, processor, battery and transmitter.

Acceleration

PHOTOS: GETTY, SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY, ISTOCK X10 RIS PHILPOT ILLUSTRATION: CHRIS

The beams converge and shine on each probe for 10 minutes, accelerating them to between 15 and 20 per cent of the speed of light.

Laser array

22-year journey

A ground-based grid of lasers, at least a kilometre across, fires more than a gigawatt of laser energy into the sky.

The probes cannot steer or slow down, so they must be precisely aimed for a close flyby with distant planets.

5. African lion

6. Burmese python*

7. Jaguar

8. Green anaconda

9. Spotted hyena

10. Grey wolf

Weight: 250kg Diet: wildebeest, zebra, carrion

Weight: 183kg Diet: rats, deer, goats *Heaviest recorded specimen

Weight: 158kg Diet: caiman, deer, capybaras

Weight: 97.5kg Diet: fish, birds, deer

Weight: 90kg Diet: wildebeest, zebra

Weight: 80kg Diet: moose, deer

Vol. 8 Issue 10

85

&

Do all cats like catnip?

IN NUMBERS

<6 per cent The proportion of American alligator attacks that are fatal.

1/3

The fraction of the world’s population who can’t see the Milky Way.

The active ingredient in catnip is nepetalactone. This is a volatile oil, which binds to the sensory receptors in a cat’s nose that are normally used to detect sexual pheromones. This creates a ‘high’ that lasts for about 10 minutes and is perfectly non-addictive and harmless to the cat. But about a quarter of cats lack the gene that allows them to enjoy catnip, and kittens under eight weeks seem to be actively repelled by it. LV

1 million The number of clownfish taken from the wild each year.

Could you survive on vitamin pills and water alone?

Definitely not. Vitamins are micronutrients.

Your body needs them in small quantities to ensure optimum health, but they don’t comprise the bulk of the food you need to survive. For that you need the correct mixture of carbohydrates, fats and proteins.

A multivitamin tablet does normally contain a small amount of starch, and some protein in the form of brewer’s yeast. But to get

86

Vol. 8 Issue 10

enough calories to survive, you would need to eat a couple of thousand tablets per day.

And if you tried doing that, the huge dose of vitamin A would cause liver failure, long before you noticed malnutrition from the missing fatty acids. If you stuck to the recommended dose of one or two tablets per day, you would simply starve to death in about six weeks. LV

Could we send a robotic probe to Earth’s core?

It’s 6,371km (3,959 miles) to the centre of the Earth and the deepest hole ever drilled (the Kola Superdeep Borehole) was only 12km (7.5 miles) deep. We could try sending a robot probe, but it would not get very far. The pressure in the Earth’s core is more than 3,000 times the pressure at the bottom of our deepest ocean. The temperature is more than 5,000°C. Your poor little tunnelling machine would be crushed to a pea and then cooked to a bubble of gas long before it could get anywhere near Earth’s core. PB

Why do we roll our eyes when we’re exasperated?

Today, eye-rolling is frequently used as signal of covert rebellion: think of the teenager who submits to a parental reprimand while looking skyward for the benefit of her friends. But it wasn’t always so – an analysis of mentions of eye-rolling in literature shows that the modern meaning only emerged in recent decades. In Shakespeare, for example, eye-rolling is associated with lust. Unfortunately, we don’t know much more than that – psychologists have spent much time studying smiles, frowns and sneers, but they’ve mostly neglected the eye roll. One exception: a study published last year found that women frequently perform eye rolls when exposed to sexist jokes. CJ

PHOTOS: GETTY X4, SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

How fast doess ra rain ain ffall? all??

The drilling mechanism that created the Kola Superdeep Borehole

The terminal velocity of a raindrop depends on its size.

The water droplets in clouds are only around 20 microns across and fall at only 1cm per second or so. This is normally balanced by updraughts, so the cloud

stays in the sky. The droplets in a light shower are 100 times larger and fall at 6.5m/s or about 22.5km/h (14mph).

The largest possible raindrops are 5mm across and hit the ground at 32km/h (20mph). LV

Vol. 8 Issue 10

87

& W H AT C O N N E C T S…

...Seashells and Byzantine emperors?

1.

The mollusc Bolinus brandaris is a predatory sea snail that’s found in the Mediterranean. It secretes the antimicrobial substance dibromoindigotin from a gland.

The ‘mine kafon’ detonates mines as it is blown around by the wind

It’s very tricky to detect mines because they are designed to be hidden from view.

An unmanned drone is being developed for this purpose in the UK by Sir Bobby Charlton’s charity Find a Better Way. It aims to spot chemicals leaching from mines using its hyperspectral imaging of plant foliage.

However, most devices aim to safely detonate the landmines. An unusual example is the ‘mine kafon’. This giant biodegradable ball of bamboo spines is designed to be blown by the wind across a minefield, detonating mines that its spines touch, while its onboard GPS records where it has travelled. PB

2.

The secretion can be ‘milked’ from the snails and used as dye.

In daylight, the dye degrades from purple to blue, but the ancient Phoenicians first found a way to lock in the purple hue.

NO EASY ANSWER

3.

What is consciousness?

There are three main schools of thought. The higher order theory says that consciousness is the brain looking at its own activity. The brain is a machine that constructs simulations of how the outside world works and consciousness is the brain’s simulation of itself. The global workspace theories argue that consciousness is something that happens when different parts of the brain connect together to share information. And the biological theories look for a specific process or structure within the brain that creates consciousness; such as the oscillations of the signals between neurons that appear in the brain scans of conscious subjects. LV

88

Vol. 8 Issue 10

The dye became known as ‘Tyrian purple’ and actually became brighter over time. It took over 10,000 snails to make a gram of dye, so it was fabulously expensive.

4.

The imperial court of the Byzantine Empire passed laws restricting the use of the dye to the royal family only. The emperor’s children were ‘porphyrogenitus’, which means ‘born to the purple’.

PHOTOS: ISTOCK, ALAMY, WIKIPEDIA COMMONS, EYEVINE, SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

Could drones be used to detect landmines?

W H AT I S T H I S ?

Extreme insect This leggy critter, measuring up at an impressive 62.4cm, was recently crowned the longest insect in the world.

Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s so big that it would not ďŹ t on this page of the magazine! Dubbed Phryganistria chinensis zhao, the insect was discovered on a mountain in the Guangxi region in southern China by scientist Zhao Li. Li took it back to the Insect Museum of West China, where it laid six eggs. When the babies hatched, they measured 26cm.

Vol. 8 Issue 10

89

&

What starts a pulsar spinning?

Ultimately, the spin of a pulsar is derived from the spin of the star from which it formed. And the spin of the original star is a consequence of the spin of the gas cloud from which it formed. Since angular momentum is conserved, a decrease in an object’s radius will speed up the rate of rotation. And since pulsars are formed by the collapse of very large stars into very small, dense objects, the increase in spin rate for pulsars is enormous. Some of the fastest spinning pulsars (‘millisecond pulsars’) have also gained speed by accreting material from nearby companions. AG

Radiation beam

Magnetic field

Neutron star

Radiation beam

HEAD TO HEAD

Crisps

240kcal 240 0kcaal

ENERGY PER BAR/PACKET

1169kcal 699kca

530kcal 530 0kcal

ENERGY PER 100G

520kcal 5200kca

56gg

SUGAR PER 100G

2.6g 2.6g

18.5g

SATURATED FAT PER 100G

2.5g 2.5g

0.23g 0.223g

SALT PER 100G

1.22g

Both snacks have roughly the same number of calories by weight, but the calories in milk chocolate come from sugar and saturated fat, whereas crisps are mainly starch and 90

Vol. 8 Issue 10

monounsaturated fat. A packet of crisps also weighs less than even a small bar of Dairy Milk. Apart from the salt, crisps are a bit healthier than chocolate. LV

It doesn’t take much energy to bend paper, but crumpling it demands injecting so much energy into the fibrous structure of the paper that it’s not merely bent but is permanently deformed, creating sharp creases.

Researchers at the University of Chicago showed that such creases form suddenly, and release some of the energy injected in a surprisingly loud burst of noise. RM

PHOTOS: ISTOCK X2, GETTY ILLUSTRATION: CHRIS PHILPOT

Chocolate

W does paper Why m make so much noise w when crumpled?

IN NUMBERS

Does cryotherapy work?

US$12 billion The potential cost of people pulling ‘sickies’ in the UK each year.

Probably not. Whole body cryotherapy involves exposing the entire body to dry air temperatures of -100°C for two to four minutes. There have been a few studies that found it helps relieve muscle soreness after exercise, but a 2015 Cochrane review concluded that these were not welldesigned studies and the evidence was “of very low quality”. The evidence that it boosts the immune system is even weaker. LV

1

metre

The amount by which the Dead Sea’s surface level is dropping each year.

PHOTOS: PRESS ASSOCIATION, SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

Is a black hole really a hole?

No, a black hole is not really a hole at all. A black hole is an object just like any other, except that it is extremely dense. This gives it such a high gravitational field that nothing, not even light, can escape. Because no light escapes a black hole, it is invisible – or ‘black’ – although they can be detected by their effect on the material around them. The term ‘hole’ was used because whatever falls ‘into’ a black hole is trapped forever. Science fiction often depicts black holes as portals between different parts of the Universe, different times or different universes altogether.

This may be why it is often misconstrued that black holes are ‘holes’ in space-time. This concept isn’t entirely fictional, however. In 1935, Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen proposed ‘wormholes’ through space-time, which could provide a means of traversing large distances instantaneously. But a naturally occurring black hole doesn’t form a wormhole by default. In fact, there are doubts they could occur naturally at all, that they would remain stable for more than a fraction of a second or that they would be anything bigger than vanishingly small. AG

Vol. 8 Issue 10

91

RESOURCE

A FEAST FOR THE MIND

PUNISH A CAT 1 NEVER Cats learn best when they are rewarded: they don’t tend to like people who punish them.

They will try to repeat any behaviour they associate with positive feelings, so whenever a cat behaves well – whether that’s staying calm during grooming, entering their cat carrier, or responding to a ‘sit’ command – immediately offer a reward.

4 PICK THE BEST REWARDS

The biggest reward for a well-behaved cat is usually food.

Cats are carnivorous by nature, so it’s no surprise that little morsels of chicken, ham or fish are the most valued treats. Cats also love to play (it’s the perfect outlet for their hunting instincts) and some enjoy being groomed and stroked – all of which can be used as additional rewards.

THEIR MOOD 2 NOTICE It should be fairly obvious if your cat is disinterested in training – common signals include turning their head away, flopping slowly onto one side, or grooming in a rhythmic and systematic manner. Try to engage them by minimising distractions, offering tastier treats such as freshly cooked meat, or regularly switching between different types of rewards.

3

USE LURES

We all know that cats like to spend time relaxing and sleeping. If your feline friend doesn’t volunteer his cooperation, lure him to the desired location with his favourite reward. If you want your cat to enjoy entering his carrier, for instance, drag a toy or move some food to the entrance. Once inside, don’t forget to let him have his treat so that he associates entering the carrier with a positive feeling.

TRAIN OUR TABBIES Cats may have a reputation as wary, solitary creatures, but with a bit of patience even the most antisocial moggie can be trained – making life happier for both you and your cat. Feline behaviour expert Dr Sarah Ellis, co-author of a new book on the topic, reveals her top five tips...

92

Vol. 8 Issue 10

too much is expected of the cat, too soon. Break up any training goals into smaller sub-goals, offering a reward at each step. For example, if the goal is to get them used to your new vacuum cleaner, introduce them to it over several sessions, gradually increasing its volume and its proximity to the cat.

THE TRAINABLE CAT BY JOHN BRADSHAW AND SARAH ELLIS IS OUT NOW! (US$27, ALLEN LANE)

PHOTOS: GETTY, ANGELA MOORE/MUSUEM OF SCIENCE AND INDUSTRY

SUB-GOALS 5 SET Training usually fails when

REDEFINE ‘BIRD BRAIN’ Birds are cleverer than we give them credit for – that’s the central message of a new book by cognitive biologist Dr Nathan Emery. He speaks to James Lloyd BIRD BRAIN: AN EXPLORATION OF AVIAN INTELLIGENCE

BY DR NATHAN EMERY (US$27, IVY PRESS)

Which are the smartest birds?

Bird intelligence is only about 20 to 25 years old as a serious field of study, so with a lot of birds we just don’t know how smart they are yet.

But in terms of more human-like, complex cognition, the focus so far has been on parrots and corvids – crows, ravens, rooks, jays, etc.

What makes these birds particularly smart?

There are three main areas where they excel. First, there’s mental time travel – their ability to remember past events, such as what type of food they hid and where, and then use this information to

make decisions about the future.

Second, there’s what we call ‘social cognition’, which relates to their awareness of others. For example, we’ve shown that when western scrub jays cache food in the presence of other birds, they’ll take steps to prevent it from being stolen. And finally, a number of species are able to make and use tools to solve problems. There was a famous New Caledonian crow called Betty who bent a piece of wire into a hook in order to reach food, and we’ve even observed rooks, who don’t use tools in the wild, doing this in captivity. This is especially impressive, as they’re demonstrating this behaviour spontaneously. Corvids and parrots are very good at adapting to new situations – that’s what sets them apart.

What’s the most extraordinary example of bird intelligence that you’ve seen?

It can be overused – I talk about the remarkable behaviour of scrub jays when caching food. If another bird was watching, they’d try to protect their caches by moving them to a different place or hiding them behind a barrier. But what’s really interesting is that only the birds who’d been thieves themselves in the past would do this – it’s almost like their own experiences had taught them that the world is a bad place. Birds who hadn’t stolen before didn’t protect their caches, and so were more likely to have them

stolen. This thieving behaviour might be akin to a ‘theory of mind’, where the jays are able to think about the knowledge and intentions of their rivals.

Do you think we tend to underestimate the smartness of birds?

I think there are so many news stories coming out about their abilities that the term ‘bird brain’ is beginning to take on a new meaning.

Even tiny, day-old chicks have shown a limited form of intelligence, being able to distinguish between smaller and larger numbers. But there’s a broad spectrum of intelligence, and we still don’t know that much about the majority of birds.

I’m hoping to start working with ostriches, emus and rheas, but we don’t have particularly high hopes for these species – they’re the closest living relatives of the dinosaurs and are likely to have quite a primitive intelligence. But they might surprise us, as they must be reasonably capable to have survived for so long.

Vol. 8 Issue 10

93

Win! A 2-NIGHTS’ STAY* AT THE TUNE HOTEL DOWNTOWN KL FOR 2

E X T R A O R D I N A RY P L A C E S T O S TAY

Extraordinary y

MAGAZINE ASIA

places to stay WORDS JOSMIN ONG

SEPTEMBER/ OCTOBER 2016

CITY AT A GLANCE 80

A contrast of old and new in Lima

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2016

E X T R A O R D I N A RY P L A C E S T O S TAY 5

2

PERFECT ISLANDS

4

GREAT ESCAPE

AUSTRIAN ALPS

3

PHOTOGRAPHS: HOTEL ÉCLAT BEIJING, M SOCIAL SINGAPORE

Beauty shaped by nature and human hands

KEY K EY YW WEST, ES ST, U USA SA A O PO O POPULATION OPU ULAT ATIO ON 25,000 O SIZ O SIZE ZE 5 sq square quarre m miles ilees

Closer C losser to Havana Hav van na than than Miam Miami, mi, Key has always been the K ey We West h as al lwaays b een th he place abscond when things p lacce to ab bsc con nd to o wh hen thi hings much north. gget et ttoo oo mu uch h up p no orth h. In the e late 1940s, President 1 940 0s, Pre esid den nt Truman Trum man ran n the here when ccountry oun ntry ry from frrom m he ere e whe en the e his sstress tresss of of Washington Wasshin ngtton ggot ot to h is head; Hemingway h ead d; H em min ngw way y wrote wro ote hiss war novels here peace n ove elss her re iin np ea ace under un tthe he Caribbean sun C arib ibb bean n su un (in (in the the company compaany of 66 66

a six-toed cat called Snow White) aand thousands of American students flock here annually to st let off steam at the close of the le spring term. Approaching via US sp Route 1 – the solitary highway R that spans blue shallows all the th way from mainland Florida – Key w West’s escapist appeal is soon W eevident: handsome townhouses with creaking shutters and shady w verandas, boho boutiques and v

palm-lined promenades. Make for Mallory Square (on the main island, just behind Sunset Key, pictured in the foreground); this seafront open space – busy with acrobats, fire-eaters and other street entertainers – is the place to get the pulse of Key West life.

O GETTING THERE Fly to Miami from Singapore or Kuala Lumpur on Turkish Airlines (one stop in Istanbul). The island is a 3½-hour drive away.

SEPTE SEP SEPTEM SEPTEMBER/OCTOBE SE EPTEMBE EPTEMB TTEM TEMBER/OCTOBE EMBER/OCTOBE MBER/ BER/OCT R/O R/OCTOBE /O TOB OBEER OB R 20 016 16

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2016

Find your

perfect Island

MINI GU GUIDE IDE Museums in Washington DC

FROM GREECE G TO SOUTHEAST ASIA, THE INDIAN OCEAN AND THE FLORIDA KEYS

AUSTRIAN ALPS

Plan Pla Pl an your trip an 1

With iits impe impe-rial architecture ure m untains on all and mountains Innsbruck ck sides, Innsbruc uniqu claim claim to hass a unique th capital tal of the be the A (p46).

46).

Alps

2

3

Classic Tyrolean Fuel up for one scenery in the of Europe’s Zil il Zillertal’s valmost legendary leys creates a natural drives: the soaring arena are for hiking, rock- Grossglockner climbing and yodelclim High Alpine ling too (p48).

Road (p50).

4

5

Beneath the Finish your trip mountains by unwinding of Salzburgerin the Austrian land a world of fro- Lake District, zen grandeur opens where sailing boats up to explorers (p52). pass in the shadow of the peaks (p54).

Sleeping

SGD 7.50 RM 20 NT 270 RP 75.000 THB 195 9 7 7 2 0 1 0 0 8 2 0 1 7

MAP ILLUSTRATION: ALEX VERHILLLE. PHOTOGRAPHS: HS EVERETT/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK, JTB PHOTO/SUPERSTOCK, MARIHA-KITCHEN/ISTOCK/GETTY, MATT MUNRO

Sights

05

MCI (P) 079/08/2016, PPS 1747/12/2012(022909)

AUSTRIAN ALPS

Museums in Washington DC

98

branched Smithsonian Institution, America’s capital has become synonymous with worldclass museums worth planning a trip around.

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2016

Kid-friendly

NATIONAL AIR AND SPACE MUSEUM

See milestones of flight at the National Air and Space Museum

NEWSEUM

Budding journalists will love that this museum, charting the Another popular Smithsonian history of news and journalism, highlight, this museum inspires offers the chance to report ‘live kids with moon rocks, spaceships from the White House’ via the and wild simulator rides.

TV studio (and get the Everyone flocks to see the take-home video to prove it).

Wright brothers’ flyer, Amelia The rest is impressive for kids Earhart’s natty red plane and the and adults alike, with Pulitzer Apollo 11 Lunar Module. There’s Prize-winning photojournalism, also an on-site IMAX cinema and a 9/11 gallery and reams of planetarium, plus a super-size interesting footage on historic annexe 23 miles out of town news events, such as Hurricane (airandspace.si.edu; 600 Katrina (newseum.org; 555 Independence Ave SW; 10am– Pennsylvania Ave NW; 5.30pm, see website for 9am–5pm; adults/children over extended hours calendar; free).

6 US$22.95/US$13.95).

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2016

A L P S

@olivertomberry O PHOTOGRAPHS MATT MUNRO

Ruby slippers li att th tthe he National N ti l Museum of American History

NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY AND CULTURE

Art installations spill over into the streets of Sydney Art & Ab About ffor A

1

including Partake in South Korea’s Thanksgiving celebrations Gorge yourself on gourmet in Bangkok Soak in Shikoku’s autumn atmosphere Party your nights away in Singapore Critique some art in Sydney

Fold 1

5

Ganggangsullae, a Korean all-women folk song and dance, is performed on the night of the brightest full moon during Chuseok

The hilltop Frederick Douglass National Historic Site

NATIONAL MUSEUM OF WOMEN IN THE ARTS

FREDERICK DOUGLASS HOUSE

The only US museum exclusively devoted to women’s artwork fills this Renaissance Revival mansion. Its collection – more than 4,000 works – moves from Renaissance artists such as Lavinia Fontana to 20th-century pieces by Frida Kahlo, Georgia O’Keeffe and Helen Frankenthaler (nmwa.org; 1250 New York Ave; 10am–5pm Mon–Sat, from noon Sun; adults/below 18 US$10/US$8).

Escaped slave, abolitionist, author and statesman Frederick Douglass occupied this beautifully sited house from 1877 until his death in 1895. Original furnishings, books, photographs and other personal belongings paint a compelling portrait of this great man. The museum is a bus ride from the city centre, and visits are by guided tour (nps.gov/frdo; 1411 W St SE, Anacostia; free, US$1 to book online).

TURN OVER FOR MAP AND NUMBER LOCATIONS SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2016

EASY TRIPS

EASY TRIPS

Easy Trips

The newest Smithsonian museum covers the diverse experience of African Americans with exhibits that include Louis Armstrong’s trumpet. The swish new building will be open by time of publishing (nmaahc. si.edu; 1400 Constitution Ave NW; 10am–5.30pm; timed passes must be reserved online – free).

DEA MUSEUM Nuance is not on the agenda at this museum showcasing the War on Drugs, brought to you by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Exhibits cover the last century-and-a-half of drug use, including Nancy Reagan’s ‘Just Say No’ commercials from the 1980s and relics from old opium dens (deamuseum.org; 700 Army Navy Dr, entrance on S Hayes St; 10am–4pm Tue–Fri, closed Sat– Mon; free).

A U S T R I A N

WORDS OLIV OLIVER BERRY

Off the beaten track

NATIONAL MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY Egyptian mummies, a giant squid, and tarantula feedings thrill young minds at this universally loved venue. Don’t miss the 45-carat Hope Diamond (a rare blue type), the Easter Island heads and the enormous stuffed creatures in the Mammal Hall (mnh.si.edu; cnr 10th St & Constitution Ave NW; 10am– 5.30pm, see website for extended hours calendar; free).

42

Begin Be eginn yyour ourr m mountain ountain adventure a with a wander through the Baroque old tow wn of of Innsbruck.

Innnsbr bruckk. Then don your hiking boots to explore the Zillertal, before town takin ta kingg a high higgh Alpine Alp lpinee road roa trip and a tour deep into the natural wonders taking of SSalzburgerland. alz alzbburgerl gerlannd. R ound tthings off with some sailing in the Austrian Lake District. of Round

97

G R E AT E S C A P E

MINI GUIDE

Lonely Planet’s Washington NATIONAL DC (US$19.99) hasMUSEUM in-depth OF AMERICAN HISTORY coverage of DC’s museums, The centrepiece at this popular while Pocket Washington DC Smithsonian member is the flag (US$13.99) andThe Make My Day Star-Spangled that inspired Washington US(US$9.99) national Banner, theDC are more condensed guides. anthem.

Other highlights Abraham Lincoln’s include The Smithsonian app (si.edu/top hat and Dorothy’s slippers apps/smithsonianmobile ) is from a The Wizard Oz the handy tool toof search (americanhistory.si.edu; cnr institution’s collections and 14th St & Constitution Ave NW; access tours and podcasts.

10am–5.30pm, see website for Empire of Mud

by JD Dickey free). hours calendar; extended (Amazon) is an account of US HOLOCAUST tenements, slave trading and MEMORIAL MUSEUM corrupt This harrowing museum deepens politics in understanding of the Holocaust the capital’s victims, perpetrators and – its early days. The galleries use bystanders. bystanders artefacts, historic film footage and witness testimonies.

Between March and August, you will need a museum pass to see the permanent exhibition: book well ahead online (ushmm.org; 100 Raoul Wallenberg Pl SW; 10am–5.15pm; entry free, booking US$1).

Get acquainted with Sydney’s artistic side

Give thanks on Chuseok Day in South Korea A celebration of family and harvest, Chuseok (ᆓ໐) is one of the biggest and most significant holidays in South Korea, where family members from all corners of the country will come together to share food and give thanks to their ancestors. Chuseok is the Korean equivalent of Thanksgiving Day and is honoured with traditional customs and rituals encompassing dress, food and dance.

On the morning on Chuseok, family members gather to perform a memorial service called Charye to honour their ancestors. Formal Charye services are only performed twice a year: during Seollal (Lunar New Year) and Chuseok. The main difference between the two is that during Seollal the major representative food is tteokguk, a rice cake soup, while during 30

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2016

29

Chuseok the major representative foods are freshly harvested rice, alcohol and songpyeon (rice cakes).

Traditionally, Korean women of each household would gather to handmake these half-moon shaped treats filled with sweet bean or chestnut, and it was believed that those who could make pretty songpyeon would be blessed with beautiful daughters. Today, songpyeon can be store bought, and is available in elaborate floral designs, intricately wrapped and adorned.

During Chuseok, many cultural sites including Deoksugung Palace, Jongmyo Shrine and the heritage Namsangol Hanok Village will host special holiday events such as traditional games and dance performances. Palaces like the UNESCO World Heritage

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2016

Changdeokgung Palace and Huwon, Gyeongbokgung Palace, and the Joseon Royal Tombs will offer free admission to visitors wearing a hanbokk (traditional

MAKE IT HAPPEN Chuseok is held every 15th day of the eighth lunar month, or the fall equinox. This year, it falls between 14 and 16 September (Wed-Fri), which makes for a great long weekend getaway.

During the holiday season, be sure to double-check the operation hours of your desired attractions as most places of business are closed at some point during Chuseok.

Korean AIr operates daily direct flights from both

dress). At the Korean Folk Village, visitors can delve a little deeper into the meaning of Chuseok with their re-enactment of customs and ancestral rites.

Singapore and Kuala Lumpur to Seoul (koreanair.com). Public transportation within Seoul is modern and efficient; use a prepaid transit card for discounted fares on both subway and buses (eng.t-money.co.kr).

Dark, sleek and deliciously handsome both inside and out, Hotel Karashy is the hot new thing on the block, just south of the river from Itaewon (from US$180 per pax per night; karashy.com).

PHOTOGRAPH: CITY OF SYDNEY

The know-how IN MEMORIAM History FURTHER READING

PHOTOGRAPH: KOREA TOURISM ORGANIZATION

TRANSPORT N

DC is the USA’s memorial capital; Washington to Dulles airport is 24 don’t miss these: miles west st of central DC. Fly on O Lincoln Memorial Abraham Qatar via Doha or United with D Lincoln (pictured below) gazes one stopover ov in San Francisco or peacefully along the Mall from his Chicago from r Singapore or Kuala Lumpur m (united.com).

Doric-columned temple.

From Dulles, le the Silver Line O Vietnam Veterans Memorial Express bus u runs to WiehleSimple and moving, this black The George is one of the best Reston East as metro station, from wall reflects the names of the boutique hotels in Washington where it’ss possible to catch a Vietnam War’s 58,000 or more train to the h city centre, taking Americans who gave their lives.

Chester A Arthur House B&B 60–75 minutes in all (bus US$5; n O Martin Luther King Memorial Dr offers four rooms in a beautiful flydulles.com/iad/aboutc King’s likeness emerges from a An elephantine welcome row house.

The 1883 abode is washington-flyer).

A taxi from o mountain of granite. at the National Museum stuffed with crystal chandeliers, the airport rt is US$60–US$68.of Natural History O National WWII Memorial antique oil paintings, oriental rugs Fares on DC’s D metro system Soaring columns and stirring and a mahogany panelled start at US$1.70 (wmata.com).

S quotes mark this memorial smack staircase (chesterarthurhouse.

SmarTrip cards entitle users to c in the Mall’s midst. com; 23 Logan Circle NW; US$1 off the t paper metro fare.

O Franklin Delano Roosevelt US$145).

Memorial FDR’s monument is an WHERE R TO STAY Chrome-and-glass furniture oasis of alcoves, fountains and On a shady h residential street and modern art frame the bold contemplative inscriptions. in the lively ely suburb of Adams interior of The George. Its Capitol O Marine Corps War Memorial Morgan, A Adam’s Inn has inviting, Hill location is perfect for A statue group recreates the homey rooms oo in two adjacent museum sightseeing. There’s also townhouses se and a carriage house, a limited number of free bicycles famous photo showing the plus a garden rd patio (adamsinn. available for guests (hotelgeorge. capture of the Japanese Largely thanks to the heavy-hitting and multicom; 1746 6 Lanier Pl; from US$89). com; 15 E St NW; from US$309). island of Iwo Jima in 1945.

WORDS: MELISSA LORRAINE CHUA. PHOTOGRAPH: ALIVECOVERAGE

Norway r essentials

Great G rea Escape 6 MINI GUIDES LONDON X BRUSSELS X GOTHENBURG X BARCELONA X NORWAY X WASHINGTON DC COMPILED BY LORNA PARKES, WITH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM KARLA ZIMMERMAN AND REGIS ST LOUIS. PHOTOGRAPHS: JOE VOGAN/ALAMY, JAMES DI LORETO/SMITHSONIAN, ERIC LONG/NATIONAL AIR AND SPACE MUSEUM, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, RON BLUNT, SMITH COLLECTION/GADO/GETTY IMAGES

Fold 2

Tear out page here then fold along the dotted lines

82

Best B es est stt ffor or Am Americana

A unique stage for local and international artists to showcase their wit and spirit, Art & About Sydney has been a shared celebration of creativity and identity for over 13 years, flourishing year on year with avid support from the government to foster a nurturing environment for the arts through grants, public art programs, and the encouragement of expressive installations. An amalgamation of theatre, dance, film, art, photography and so much more, the Art & About Sydney program has been transformed into an ongoing yearlong calendar of creativity, and for the upcoming months of September and October, visitors to the city can look forward to three standout events: Australian Life, Little Sydney Lives, and Hidden Sydney – The Glittering Mile.

Australian Life is an outdoor gallery showcasing the unique sights that make up, well,

Australian life. Held at Hyde Park North, the exhibition will feature the work of 22 finalists, each chosen by a panel of photographers, artists and curators from work submitted by emerging and professional photographers across the country, all contending for the final prize of $10,000. From close-up moments of reflection to a wide-angle on the collective hopes and dreams of all Australians, these stunning shots are as diverse, interesting and surprising as the country that inspired them, and look beyond iconic images to reveal new insights into the Australian identity.

Get a dose of cabaret with a night at Hidden Sydney – The Glittering Mile. An immersive, exhilarating and witty experience set over four floors of The Nevada, the former Sydney brothel which once boasted the world’s biggest bed, Hidden Sydney – The Glittering Mile is a narrative filled with drag queens, madams of the

night, quick-witted bouncers, and crims, crooks and other eccentrics alike as you relive the notorious world of Kings Cross through its

MAKE IT HAPPEN After 13 years of a festivalstyle program that packed as much art as possible into a one-month schedule, Art & About Sydney now offers an ongoing yearlong calendar of creativity that still balances major projects with intimate exchanges and thoughprovoking exhibitions in unusual spaces across the city. Explore the whole program on artandabout.com.au.

Fly direct to Sydney from Singapore and Kuala Lumpur via Singapore Airlines and Malaysia Airlines respectively; both conduct multiple daily flights to this iconic Australian city. Within

heydays during the 50s, 60s and 70s. “Enter, if you dare!” Book your limited season tickets at ticketmaster.com.au.

Sydney itself, the Opal smartcard ticket can be used on trains, buses, ferries and light rail, and can be used beyond the city centre if you would like to do additional sightseeing in the Blue Mountains, Central Coast, or Southern Highlands surrounds.

Be where the cool cats are at QT Sydney, the stylish boutique joint housed within the historical theatre district. This immersive and luxurious Sydney accommodation is the perfect complement to an artistic design-centric weekend (from US$360 per pax per night; qthotelsandresorts.com/ sydney-cbd).

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2016

The village of Hallstatt in Upper Austria is a highlight of the World Heritage-listed Salzkammergut region – Austria’s Lake District

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2016

33

41

TIME OUT

CROSSWORD PUZZLE BACK BY POPULAR DEMAND DOWN 1 2

3

4 5 6 7 8 11 16 19 21 22 23 24 25 28 29

ACROSS 9 10 12 13 14 15 17 18 19 20 23

Concerning bullock having guidance problem (9) He follows on to hit gold (9) Doctor has no problem getting satellite (4) Sausage used as mail (6) Performing a trio around province (7) Bird in the pan cooked with a bit of petroleum (9) Your hands deteriorate without water (9) Athlete depicted as Roman (7) Breaking bread with Jack on Homer’s island (6) Metal oxide is contemptible (4) Drag loony out of masculine study (9)

30 25 26 27 29 32 34 35 36 37 38 39

Talk about posse using rifle (9) Get extra with a message (4) Inheritor gets iron from youngster (6) Two creatures provide waterproofing (7) New boom caught by fresh form of rule (9) Arranging to run the bar is a pain (9) Old equipment, new aim – Japanese art (7) That woman’s lad turned into an announcer (6) Officers’ room in a state (4) Establish a college (9) Way to go, having learnt the time (9)

31 33 34

Soldier reputedly lacking underwear (8) Old problem of zones solved by new road in peace (5,7) Whale has strange accent containing vowels (8) Prioritising, get air-conditioning (6) Forcefully articulate, like a buccaneer (8) I poach boar out of fear (10) Energy bound to be heard in compound (7) Boilers not affected by a few stars (6,4) Controller takes over new school first (5) Rough girl to play with unruly mob (6) Confused a year with a shorter time (3) Airplane much affected by a type of code (12) Across junction, ursuing fictional lion (6) Any osmotic form of protein (10) Old game played without elementary particle (5,5) Copper right to get a dog (3) Insect to turn to energy storage device (8) Heir gets everything but an onion (8) Metal tent with snug construction (8) Relating to hip spies following small spasm (7) Composer’s ecstasy (5) Satirist is hard on old people (6)

ANSWERS will be revealed in the next issue

Vol. 8 Issue 10

95

WITTY VIEWPOINTS ROBIN INCE ON… HUMAN-ANIMAL RELATIONS

W

e are brought up with doe-eyed flying elephants, talking hippy bears and scat-singing orangutans, so it’s no surprise that we have a tendency to anthropomorphise. We don’t merely empathise with our own, but with other species too. We see our own visages in the faces of our dogs and cats. We bless or curse other animals with our own emotional palette. But can we really make friends with other species?

The slow loris is a good example of our mistaken projections. We interpret the bigeyed creature’s outstretched arms while being tickled as a sign of joy. Actually, it’s scared, and it’s stretching out to try to gather the venom that’s found in its elbow patch.

How can we overcome these communication breakdowns?

Sometimes, like Dr Dolittle, we try to talk to the animals.

The most fluent non-human English speaker I know is my dad’s African grey parrot. It pipes up in the background when I’m giving phone interviews, but rations its vocabulary just enough for listeners to believe I am quite insane.

The research of animal cognition expert Irene Pepperberg demonstrates that this is not just mimicry. Her parrot subject, Alex, would say “wanna go back” when tired of being tested, would accept no substitute if he asked for a banana, and would apologise when appropriate. Pepperberg’s work changed our view of the intellectual capabilities of birds.

The intelligence of dolphins has been admired for considerably longer. John C Lilly was a US medic and psychoanalyst who believed that a dolphin could be taught English. His assistant, Margaret Howe, spent 10 weeks living with Peter, a bottlenose dolphin. The experiment was a failure – Peter appeared to fall in love with Margaret. Once the funding ran out, Peter was put in an isolated tank in Miami and, seemingly depressed, he sank to the bottom and made no effort to breathe.

96

Vol. 8 Issue 10

Some describe this as suicide.

Other ‘humanising’ experiments have had similarly questionable results.

Perhaps the most famous case is Nim Chimpsky – a chimpanzee who was brought up like a human child in the hope of demonstrating communication between species. The experiment was terminated when Nim attacked one of his carers. He was put back in a primate enclosure and, unsurprisingly, he struggled to adapt, never recovering from his upbringing as an ape-child. In the cases of Nim and Peter, perhaps we learnt more about our own limits of empathy than we learnt about the animals themselves.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. My favourite story involving an interspecies misunderstanding occurred in Bronx Zoo. A keeper accidentally dropped a roll of $10 notes into a silverback gorilla’s enclosure. Could he get them back by teaching the gorilla how to barter? Using a mixture of enticing fruit and complex mime, the keeper tried to negotiate a swap. But just as he thought he was getting through, the silverback placed the roll of notes in its mouth and ate them. It was another communication breakdown. While the keeper thought he was expressing, “hey, let’s swap this delicious food for that boring wad of paper”, the gorilla translated it as, “your paw contains things as delicious as this fruit. Gorge yourself.”

So perhaps we should just learn to accept our differences. Maybe John Carradine’s elderly werewolf in The Howling was right all along. Confronting the kindly, and soon to be eaten, doctor who attempted to domesticate the lycanthropes, he said, “you can’t tame what’s meant to be wild, doc.” And maybe that’s really true of humans too. I’d better go and put my son back in his cage before nightfall…ß

ROBIN INCE IS A COMEDIAN AND WRITER WHO PRESENTS, WITH PROF BRIAN COX, THE BBC RADIO 4 SERIES THE INFINITE MONKEY CAGE

ILLUSTRATION: JAMIE COE

“WE ARE BROUGHT UP WITH TALKING HIPPY BEARS. IT’S NO WONDER WE ANTHROPOMORPHISE”

MY LIFE SCIENTIFIC DR JOHN ROBERTS “WHEN TOP GEAR WAS LOOKING TO RECREATE THE CAR CHASE IN THE ITALIAN JOB, THEY CAME TO ME” Engineer Dr John Roberts talks to Helen Pilcher about rollercoasters, Top Gear stunts and his latest design project, the British Airways i360 I’m perhaps best known for my work on theme park rides and attractions. I’ve been a design engineer for most of my working life. The projects that I work on are challenging because each one is unique. There are no prototypes. You only get one chance to build them correctly and that’s what keeps me interested.

I became interested in engineering while I was still at school. I spent a summer holiday working on a construction site, digging holes in the ground and measuring the density of the soil. I worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week and made enough money to buy myself a Mini Cooper S. I was pretty pleased with that. But then I looked at the engineer driving around the site in his big, white Land Rover and wondered how much he was earning… and decided to study civil engineering at university.

I’ve designed a few rollercoasters, including the Big One at Blackpool Pleasure Beach. So when Top Gear was looking to recreate the car chase from The Italian Job, they came to me. They wanted to drive a car through a 360o rotation inside a tunnel… which is more or less the same as a rollercoaster but without the security of being clipped onto a track. I instructed the driver and even hand-painted the white line that he had to follow inside the tunnel.

This summer sees the opening of another of my projects, the British Airways i360 in Brighton. It’s a 162m-tall observation tower that carries a moving doughnut-shaped glass pod. The pod can carry 200 people at a time and takes around 20 minutes to go up and come back down. The tower diameter is less than four metres, and it’s just been awarded the Guinness Record for World’s Most Slender Tower.

The British Airways i360 sounds simple but it’s technically challenging. After all, it can be windy on the seafront in Brighton. So we’ve clad it in a specially-designed, perforated aluminium shroud that reduces the wind pressure

on the tower. And we’ve fitted 76 sloshing liquid dampers, which oppose any movement and help the tower to stand still.

I’m dubious of engineers who aren’t practically inclined. I can lay concrete, do plastering and turn my hand to woodwork. If there’s one extra skill I’d like to learn, it’s stone masonry. The thought of chipping away at a lump of rock. There’s almost something primeval about it.

I know it might sound a bit boring, but engineering is a job and a hobby. I plan to continue doing what I do for as long as I possibly can. ß

DR JOHN ROBERTS IS A STRUCTURAL ENGINEER AND A VISITING PROFESSOR AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER Vol. 8 Issue 10

97

ILLUSTRATION: ORLAGH MURPHY

I oversaw the design and construction of the London Eye. I’ve been on it hundreds of times but I’m probably a shocking person to share a capsule with. I get talking to people and then start telling them about it. They don’t get much of a chance to look at the view.

THE LAST WORD ROBERT MATTHEWS ON… ANIMAL EXPERIMENTS “ANIMAL EXPERIMENTS SOMETIMES PREDICT WHAT’LL HAPPEN WITH HUMANS, BUT OFTEN FAIL TO DO SO”

98

Vol. 8 Issue 10

“pointless and pedantic point-scoring”.

Fortunately, the research community took a more constructive approach, and set up studies to find out how reliable animal experiments are. Now the results are starting to emerge, and they’re not exactly reassuring. They suggest that while animal experiments do sometimes predict what will happen with humans, they also often fail to do so, and there’s no simple way of telling which case applies.

For example, an international team has just published a major study of whether tests on mice can predict drugs’ common side effects, like fatigue and headache. The results suggest the tests are useless at best, and sometimes positively misleading.

The study’s authors, which include scientists from leading pharmaceutical companies, say that “care should be taken” in the interpretation of animal experiments.

Certainly, care should also be taken over claims of ‘breakthroughs’ based on such experiments, or statements made by top academic institutions on the basis of no evidence at all. ß

ROBERT MATTHEWS IS VISITING PROFESSOR IN SCIENCE AT ASTON UNIVERSITY, BIRMINGHAM

ILLUSTRATION: ADAM GALE

R

eincarnation is highly unlikely. But in the event that it is possible, I know what I’m coming back as: a mouse. Hardly a week goes by without scientists announcing they’ve cured some of these furry cheese-eaters of yet another disease, from cancer and AIDS to Alzheimer’s.

So how come we humans are still succumbing to these diseases? Aren’t animal experiments supposed to be reliable signposts towards the next miracle cure?

They certainly have the backing of the Royal Society, Britain’s premier scientific academy, which insists that “virtually every medical achievement in the past century has depended directly or indirectly on research using animals”. And the Royal Society doesn’t make statements like that without evidence to back them up.

Actually, its website doesn’t give the evidence, but there’s an obvious explanation: there have been so many medical achievements over the last 100 years it would take up too much space to list all of those based on insights from animals. Yet there’s not even a reference to a research paper, or indeed any source cited at all. The claim is simply stated, as if only a hamster-cuddling moron could possibly doubt it.

Driven perhaps by my fondness for cuddling hamsters, some years ago I decided to see if I could find the evidence to support the claim. After all, if there were, it would at least suggest that the current spate of disappointment is just a temporary blip.

Yet after spending days rummaging through the academic literature, I drew a blank. Actually, that’s not quite true. I found the same statement had been made by other scientific bodies, but again with no detailed evidence to back it up.

I eventually tracked down its origins to an article in a newsletter published in 1994, attributed to the US Public Health Service. It has no author, no references and nothing but a few anecdotes to stand it up.

Frustrated, I began my own search for evidence of the reliability of animal experiments in medical research, and made a shocking discovery. Only a handful of studies had even addressed the issue. Those that did were often botched or meaningless, but the studies that made some kind of sense suggested that animal experiments are about as reliable as tossing a coin.

I published my findings in a medical journal, hoping to spur better research into the issue, and was promptly attacked by pro-vivisection campaigners. One dismissed my work as

ATTENBOROUGH BEHIND THE LENS Premieres 9 October. Sunday at 4.00pm (JKT/BKK), 5.00pm (SIN/HK/MAL/TW) GHOWáKLWP JDOW WK&&JW PWGHOWS&NJW&RDNWPGDWDHFGPWUD NOWOHMCD$WED PQNHMFW?DGHM@%PGD%OCDMDOWE&&P FDW M@WHMPDNRHDSOWSHPGW those who have worked with him. It reveals a side to David Attenborough that is rarely seen publicly.

INSIDE THE FACTORY

THE SUPERVET SERIES 3

BOY TO MAN

Premieres 7 October.

Fridays at 9.30am (JKT/BKK), 10.30am (SIN/HK/MAL/TW) Gregg Wallace and Cherry Healey get exclusive access to some of the largest factories in Britain to reveal the secrets behind food and snacks production on an epic scale.

Every Wednesday at 9.45pm (JKT/BKK), 10.45pm (SIN/HK/MAL/TW) This series follows Professor Noel Fitzpatrick and the team at Fitzpatrick Referrals, sharing with the world the highs and lows of a working veterinary practice.

Premieres 14 October.

Fridays at 8.40pm (JKT/BKK), 9.40pm (SIN/HK/MAL/TW) @RDMPQNDNW M@WáKLL JDNW HLW &&M MW embarks on a solo journey to worlds beyond his imagination to try and unlock the mysteries of what it means to be the ultimate man. Throughout PGHOWDBHCWODNHDO$W &&M MWáNOPWG OWP&W earn the trust of some of the world’s least known tribes.

www.bbcasia.com BBC Earth is available in Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam and Mongolia.

Please call your cable operator for more details or check out our website.

/BBCEarth @BBCEarthAsia

ICE TOWN: LIFE ON THE EDGE Premieres 25 October Tuesdays at 9.45pm (SIN/HK) BBC Earth is available in Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam and Mongolia.

Please call your cable operator for more details or check out our website.

www.bbcasia.com /BBCEarth @BBCEarthAsia