The insect survival guide

Rowan Hooper, news editor

INSECTS make up 75 per cent of all known animal species. That's about 900,000 of them, with at least 3 million yet to be identified. It's a vast subject area, but veteran entomologist Gilbert Waldbauer brings it to life by exploring insect warfare - the strategies these creatures employ to protect themselves from predators.

There are times when How Not to Be Eaten feels like one long list of examples, but on the whole this is a rich and detailed book that roams across time and space. Waldbauer cites the work of Victorian naturalists alongside recent studies - examples include the way tiger moths generate ultrasonic sounds to repel hunting bats just as butterflies display don't-eat-me colours.

The book describes insects from all over the world, interspersed with anecdotes from Waldbauer's own field trips. Some of my favourites include the spider in South America that catches moths by swinging a bolus of sticky glue on the end of a silk thread - humans are the only other species to use a similar weapon. Then there are the burrowing owls in southern Florida that hunt beetles by scattering lumps of cattle dung as bait. Or the Burnet moth, common in Europe, which secretes deadly hydrogen cyanide stored in its exoskeleton.

Chemical warfare, camouflage, ambush. Sun Tzu could have learned a lot from insects when he wrote The Art of War.

http://www.newscientist.com/

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Eat rich or die trying: just desserts

Helen Thomson, biomedical news editor

I can’t quite describe what’s in my mouth. It’s sort of savoury, but with a hint of sour, a bit oat-like too. It’s overwhelmingly delicious. Luckily for me, this is the first of six puddings that not only use science to boost my sensations, but are also designed to reveal to me my true love and even how many years it will be until I marry.

I’m at Eat Rich or Die Trying, a quarterly dining club dedicated to desserts, located at the Kemistry Gallery in Shoreditch, London. Given it’s just around Valentine’s Day, they’ve pointed cupid’s arrow into the kitchen to produce a sugary feast that promises to guide diners from love at first sight to romance’s bitter end.

And that’s why words are failing me. My first course has been created by Blanche and Shock, a design studio and catering company in London who describe their dessert “as tingly and difficult to pin down as the first inkling of love.” By incorporating an umami element into the concoction – in this case using porcini crème fraiche – these clever chefs designed a puzzling plate that is disconcertingly delicious but difficult to work out why. Umami is the taste of glutamates and nucleotides that is now widely accepted as the fifth sensation alongside bitter, sweet, sour and salty. Together with a spiced cox apple, tea bread and honey, the mixture creates a blend of flavours that everyone around my table agrees cleverly mirrors the experience of being attracted to someone, though none of us quite knows why.

As your granny will tell you, any decent relationship must next involve “courtship”. Andrew Stellitano from food design company Astarism is fascinated by the evolution of the love story. Tonight, for the second course, he incorporates a selection of ingredients prized for their power to stimulate or attract love. Central to the plate is a rice milk ice cream. Experiments in rats have shown that a chemical found in rice called cadmium mimics the effect of oestrogen in women, and females with high levels of oestrogen are perceived as more healthy, feminine and attractive, so perhaps he’s onto something here.

Stellitano’s dessert is garnished with a tuile, which I am encouraged to shatter and count the pieces – apparently to reveal how many years I will wait until marriage. Delicately, I tap my tuile. It cracks into four. I glance to my right, just in time to see my dining partner Sarah smash her spoon into the dessert, her tuile splitting into a thousand tiny pieces. Some fly off her plate and scatter across the tablecloth, others land on the floor. Snorts of laughter erupt around the table.

One after another, more love-themed desserts are placed in front of us. A soot and salt drop scone by ‘The Curious Confectioner’ is a highlight. With the prospect of six puddings on the menu, I’m pleased to hear that its ingredients include activated charcoal, a highly absorbent element thought to help aid digestion.

“Is it weird that I’m slightly nervous?” asks Sarah as we move onto the fourth desert, called ”The Marriage”, before tucking into the fifth, which supposedly represents the bitter sufferings of love. While spiced chocolate ganache does give a bitter twist to the meal, chocolate has another connection with love and attraction. Early in a relationship dopamine-rich brain regions associated with motivation and reward become highly active, and supposedly the more intense the relationship the greater the activity. The same regions are active when a person enjoys chocolate, according to Helen Fisher, an anthropologist from Rutgers University in New Jersey. It appears tonight’s molecular sorcerers have at last hit upon a dessert that really might entice feelings of love and attraction. It’s certainly very tasty.

Like all good fairy tales, my dessert reverie ends as the clock strikes midnight. The final treat is cookie dough cooked three ways, including sous-vide, in which the food is placed in a vacuum bag and heated gently in water. The chef says the idea is that the dough is cooked but retains much of the experience of eating dough from the bowl. Unfortunately the overwhelming flavour of aniseed and the resemblance of scrambled egg on my plate were just too much for my stomach to handle this late into the night.

For someone with a sweet tooth, love of science and food, and an overactive imagination, the majority of this evening was a delight. It’s just a shame this love story, like many in the past, left me tired, emotionally drained and with a bitter taste in my mouth.

http://www.newscientist.com/

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A little bit of sin does you good

Jamie Condliffe, contributor

FORGIVE me, reader, for I have sinned: I overslept, argued, and stuffed my face with food.

The concept of sin is so ingrained in our culture that it is difficult for most people, myself included, to go a day without indulging in one of the seven deadliest. But in The Joy of Sin, Simon Laham aims to convince us that, contrary to what folklore, Christianity or even Hollywood may tell us, activities often branded sinful may in fact be good for us.

His evidence draws largely on experimental psychology, and it is clear that Laham has an impressive understanding of the material. In particular, he has a knack for describing complex social science with great lucidity. His writing is witty, edgy, itself almost sinfully provocative at times, promoting the occasional wince and, more frequently, an approving chuckle.

The only problem is that sometimes you feel his case studies have been shoehorned in. While some chapters provide a convincing argument, leaving you in little doubt that a small dose of anger or greed is good for you, others read like a round-up of research loosely related to the sin under discussion, and end up providing no firm conclusions. Laham certainly encourages us to reject a simplistic approach to sin - but at times, just a little too much is left to the reader.

Ultimately, this struggle to convince isn't a function of any sloth on Laham's part; rather, it's the result of the need for the content to fit the title.

Fortunately, even if such ambition makes for a slightly dissatisfying read at times, the enviably good writing and thorough research make this book difficult to dislike.

http://www.newscientist.com/

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Tiger Valentine: Zoos' erotic perfume tempts big cats

The renowned London Zoo in Regent's Park has released some suitably erotic photos in time for Valentine’s day. Starring in the images are Raika and Lumpur, the zoo’s Sumatran tigers, a subspecies so endangered that only a few hundred still exist in the wild - a situation which, to judge from these pictures, isn’t the tigers’ fault.

In fact the zoo is trying hard to get the pair to breed successfully. In new film footage, they certainly seemed in the mood, going crazy over bits of fabric scattered with Valentine hearts. “Raika, the female, rubbed her face and body all over the hearts, which seemed to make her irresistible to Lumpur,” says zoo spokesperson Rebecca Smith.

No wonder. They were laced with Calvin Klein’s Obsession for Men, which in the 1980s became famous (or infamous) for over-the-top erotic advertising. It probably wasn’t the ad campaigns that inspired Lumpur this morning - more likely, it was an animal he would regard as lunch.

In their quest to make caged animals’ lives less boring, zoos spritz perfumes around the enclosures of species whose sensory world is dominated by smell - and every cat owner knows how odd scents perk up a puss. (I had an otherwise fastidious Siamese who drooled off-puttingly on the collars and cuffs of anyone who wore certain top-of-the-range perfumes.)

The Bronx Zoo in New York discovered a few years ago that big cats adore Obsession for Men. Researchers now even use it in the jungle to bait camera traps, which take pictures in response to motion, and are getting lots more shots of inquisitive, otherwise secretive cats like jaguars and ocelots. It must work pretty well if the wildlife crowd will spend research budgets on it: a 200 ml bottle of that stuff will set you back fifty bucks.

It turns out that these romantic human scents pack chemicals of great interest to species that regularly sniff their friends’ anal glands. In many species, these glands secrete grease containing chemicals used for scent marking, and a wide range of animals, from muskrats to musk ox to musk deer - note the recurring theme - pack a chemical with a ketone ring structure that smells like what humans call, well, musk.

Civets, a relative of the mongoose (which also eat, then poop, the world’s most expensive coffee), produce especially powerful stuff containing a musk-related molecule called civetone, with a rank odour comparable to faeces, or very unpleasant cheese.

And our ancient olfactory brain circuits recognise it. Diluted, the stuff apparently smells great. It is perhaps the world’s oldest perfume - the Queen of Sheba is said to have given some to King Solomon, just before they disappeared into the king’s bedroom. It sells for around $500 a kilo.

Civetone can be made artificially from plant oils. But around a tonne of the natural stuff is harvested yearly, mainly by Ethiopian farmers, who hold captive civets in squalid wooden cages, and scrape out their anal glands with a horn spoon every week or two. It isn’t a great life for the civets. The World Society for the Protection of Animals investigated in 1998, and recommended that perfume makers switch to artificial civetone.

More recent studies by wildlife conservationists advise instead making the trade more humane and sustainable, by moving to captive-bred, well-treated civets. This seems reasonable: impoverished farmers aren’t likely to stop, as current production doesn’t begin to cover demand.

Which is odd, as 31 leading perfume companies, including Calvin Klein, told the WSPA in 1998 that they don’t use the real stuff. Only Chanel, Lancôme and Cartier admitted it. Last year Calvin Klein described its civet as “synthetic”.

Real or fake, as far as Raika and Lumpur are concerned, the stuff works fine. It’s not clear what this means for the future of Africa’s civets, which are not endangered - yet. The zoo says it will let us know if Calvin Klein’s Valentine’s gift to the world is a litter of baby Sumatran tigers.

http://www.newscientist.com/

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Morphonano: Interactive sculpture goes nano

Casey Rentz, contributor

ZERO@WAVEFUNCTION, 2002, by Victoria Vesna with James Gimzewski

Blue geometric buckyballs float back and forth on a 15-metre black screen, like soap bubbles from Tron. I watch for a minute, mesmerized. I step in front of the computer projection, and my fast-moving shadow blows the buckybubbles around in a mad frenzy. I gently raise my hand to nudge the edge of one of them, and it bends slightly.

The artwork, called Zero@wavefunction, is a part of the Morphonano exhibit at the Beall Center for Art and Technology at the University of California, Irvine. It is a collaboration between artist Victoria Vesna and nanoscientist James Gimzewski. The interactive projection mimics the careful process of manipulating molecules on a nano scale. I play around with it for a while, cupping my hands around each molecule while sensors pick up my slow, deliberate motions and translate them into forces on the screen.

But, there’s more to see. I turn the corner to check out a piece called Kaleidoscope and quickly realize that the whole time I was waving my hands like a t'ai chi instructor, I was being filmed. Anyone who had been looking into its long, hexagonal mirrored tube five minutes earlier would have seen my flailing body at the end, reflected in all one hundred or so facets of a buckyball-like sphere that the mirrors make. I don’t know where they put the cameras. But, if you turn your head left or right, you see infinite mirrors of yourself. If you look straight ahead, you’re hovering in Nanoland, with a giant molecule sun in front of you. You could call Kaleidoscope the meta-work in the exhibit: it embodies the human scale/nano scale juxtaposition that is at the heart of Morphonano, both on the representational level, and through your experience of the way it works.

As much as I was sucked in by Kaleidoscope, I was absolutely entranced with the next work, Nanomandala. It’s a circular sandbox, 2.5 metres in diameter, with an image projected on top. If you sit there for 15 minutes, you’ll see the image change from a scanning electron microscope (SEM) view of a grain of sand, zooming out further until you see an optical microscope view and even further until you see a human-scale digital photograph of sand. You can play with the sand while you zone out.

Then it got a little weird. As the work’s title suggests, in the final digital photograph the sand appears as part of the coloured pattern of a Tibetan mandala, but it felt a bit like the reference to Eastern culture was just thrown in at the end (of course, this is California). Looking more closely at the written material for the exhibit, I noticed that most of the artworks had some reference to “mindfulness” and things like “creating a sublime reversal of space-time” (whatever that is). Curator David Familian explained, “mindfulness leads to more embodiment, which I believe is an essential aspect of the future of interactive works”. If “embodiment” means the same thing as “viewer immersion” in art, then I get it. Immersion successful.

The last piece in the exhibit was also immersive - and fun. To experience Blue Morph, the gallery intern instructed me to sit down on a hexagonal platform and put on a crazy looking knitted hat attached to giant fuzzy pupae. On the wall in front, I saw my face, layered on top of SEM images of butterfly wings. All around me I heard sounds of a butterfly coming out of its chrysalis that must have been recorded by a very small, very sensitive microphone. It sounded like awkward orca calls. I laughed.

Science, art and the mindfulness movement - just another day in California.

http://www.newscientist.com/

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The dark side of the personalised internet

Andrew Keen, contributor

JOSEPH TUROW'S invaluable The Daily You is a warning about the impact of the "Web 3.0" revolution - though he doesn't use the term - on individual freedom and privacy.

Coined by Reid Hoffman, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist and co-founder of LinkedIn, the term Web 3.0 defines our digitally networked age of "real identities generating massive amounts of data". It is via this avalanche of personal data, available through networks like Facebook, Foursquare, Google and The Huffington Post that, Turow warns, "the new advertising industry is defining your identity and your world".

It wasn't supposed to turn out like this, Turow, a professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, wryly notes. In the first flush of the digital revolution, optimists like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Nicholas Negroponte and Harvard University's Yochai Benkler were promising a web of "The Daily Me" in which the consumer would be empowered to "define themselves" through the democratic openness of the internet. But the bright promise of The Daily Me has been eclipsed by the dark reality of The Daily You - an online world in which we are being persistently "peeked" at and "poked" by data mining and analytics companies like Rapleaf, Next Jump, Acxiom, Daily Me and Medicx Media.

The root of the problem, Turow explains, is the disappearance of boundaries between advertising and content that shaped 20th-century media. Because it is hard to generate significant revenue through selling online banner advertising, web publishers now cosy up to advertisers by offering them access to the personal data we reveal every time we go online.

"It's a new world and we are only at the beginning," Turow writes of this creepy set-up in which the consumer, rather than being king, has become the serf of an increasingly seductive and coercive advertising industry. And it is only going to get creepier, he warns, as television and the internet merge, and services like Google TV transform the 20th-century viewer into 21st-century data points that are bundled up and sold on to advertisers.

So what is to be done? Here, Turow is at his least convincing. "The train has already left the station," he writes, ominously, before falling back on anodyne solutions like to "teach our children well - early and often" and encouraging the US Congress to pass "Do Not Track" legislation, which limits gathering consumer data online.

No, what really needs to be done is for all of us to buy Turow's book. In guiding us through the ways in which, whether we know it or not, we are generating massive amounts of personal data online, The Daily You is required reading in today's Web 3.0 age.

http://www.newscientist.com/

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Dangerous ideas on screen

Liz Else, associate editor

 

(Image: Sony Pics/Everett/Rex Features)

A Dangerous Method, the latest film from director David Cronenberg, explores the complex relationship between two men who helped shape 20th century thinking: Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) and Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender).

The tangle and later clash between Freud and Jung is ironically interwoven with the stories of Jung’s relationships with the underrated women in his life: a Russian Jew called Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), Jung’s patient, lover and subsequently a well respected analyst in her own right; and Emma Jung (Sarah Gadon), the rich but understandably insecure wife who must endure both the great man’s angst and his affairs.

The fifth player, fellow psychiatrist Otto Gross (Vincent Cassel) is the man Freud originally wanted to succeed him. A libertine who believes that monogamy should be subverted, Freud sends Gross to Jung to be treated for his drug addiction - and he encourages Jung to become Spielrein’s lover, thereby violating the doctor-patient relationship.

In many ways, the film is a well-made hybrid of ideas movie, masterly costume drama, and, frankly with Knightley onboard and some spanking sex, a touch of S&M soap.

But the real danger in this drama lies in the fact that it is a story about real people, two of whom had a defining effect on the 20th century and beyond.

The film is based both on the play The Talking Cure by British playwright Christopher Hampton, and the 1994 non-fiction book, A Most Dangerous Method, by John Kerr. The book charts the course of the development of the theory of psychoanalysis, through the letters and writing of Freud and Jung. It also, for the first time, explained the role played by Spielrein, whose arrival in 1904 at Zurich’s Burghölzli hospital where Jung worked is the opening shot of the movie.

So the film - as well as works it is based on - are purveyors of ideas that neuroscience and cognitive science are revealing to be wrong. And we are already finding it hard to dig ourselves out from under the weight of Freud’s ideas about the unconscious, id, ego and dreams - or to slough off Jung’s notions of, among other things, the collective unconscious (while apologising for his anti-Semitism).

Since the so-called Freud Wars of the 1980s and 90s, which debated the Viennese psychoanalyst's reputation, scholarship and impact on the 20th century, critics ranging from J. Allan Hobson to neuroscientist Eric Kandel have been at pains to point out that Freud‘s aims may have been scientific, but his methods definitely weren’t.

Freud set out with the vision of developing a neurobiological view of how the brain worked, but when the limited knowledge of the 1890s made this impossible, he abandoned the idea.

Frank Cioffi, a professor of philosophy at the University of Essex, argued that Freud’s writings had more in common with Renaissance poetry and the mystical parts of the Bible than with scientific research. Freud, he wrote, first had inspiration and insights, then voiced them through the stories of his patients - whether they reflected their real stories or not.

Jung, too, clearly had scientific aspirations. But despite his eventual status as founder of analytical psychology, he ended up wandering far from standard science, making strange excursions into arcane areas such as occultism, alchemy and astrology. Just before the first World War, Jung set out on what he was to describe as his “confrontation with the unconscious", and documented the awful dreams and visions that were tormenting him. He eventually recopied it all, using a gothic script, into a single big, red, leather journal, complete with fancy borders and paintings.

Lost for years, The Red Book: Liber Novus caused a literary sensation in 2009 when it was reissued. As its editor, Sonu Shamdasani, a specialist in the history of Jung at University College London explained at the time, the work “offers us an important insight into a time before the intellectual divide between art and psychology made such a work of inner exploration, of psychology-as-literature (and maybe even as art), less thinkable”.

Cronenberg is known as the master of “body horror”, exploiting our fear of bodily transformation and infection, and cleverly showing how the psychological ends up inextricably interwoven with the physical. He has a long history of exploring psychological and scientific themes in his films: scientists have modified human bodies (Shivers, Rabid), created inner chaos (The Brood, Scanners), and terminally altered themselves through experimentation (The Fly, Dead Ringers). And since about 1990, his films have been more overtly psychological, sometimes exploring the nature of subjective and objective realities (eXistenZ, M. Butterfly, Spider, Crash). Personally I love his films, and would insist some solar powered method of watching them all were I ever to be exiled to a desert island.

But as a work of art, A Dangerous Method does signal a break with his previous work - and form. I am troubled by the question of whether it is fair to expect a film maker to grapple with the scientific provenance and current status of ideas he choses to turn into a narrative. Either way, there are risks.

Meanwhile the work of rethinking the true legacies of Freud and Jung continues apace. And the most dangerous method of all will be working out how to honestly tackle the mess of half-truth and egotism surrounding the two men - and see what it is left.

http://www.newscientist.com/

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Glowing sushi and 3D-printed cricket nuggets

Cormac Sheridan, contributor

 

Artist Andy Best in Gas Bag (Image: Patrick Bolger)

Food can be a tricky subject. Bombarded by conflicting messages from advertisers, health promotion agencies, scientists and celebrity chefs, it’s hard to know which is the right food or the wrong food, and even those elusive definitions are shaped as much by economic interests as by biological evidence. And overshadowing those considerations is the stark fact that almost a billion people do not get enough to eat.

I was a bit wary, then, when I approached the Dublin Science Gallery's latest exhibition, Edible: The Taste of Things To Come. Yet the show, curated by Cathrine Kramer and Zack Denfeld of the Center for Genomic Gastronomy, adroitly sidesteps many of the exhaustive - and exhausting - debates on food. It follows the curators’ own gleefully subversive agenda on issues such as food biotechnology and plant breeding. The results are satisfying, flavoursome and not at all stodgy.

Glowing sushi (Image: Jason Sherwood)

Unlike the gallery's last show, Surface Tension, which explored the future of water, Edible does not have any major visual show-stoppers. The most eye-catching exhibit, Andy Best and Merja Puustinen's Gas Bag, a huge, colourful, inflatable stomach complete with sound effects, resembles a bouncy castle more than an artwork. Yet it encapsulates perfectly the tone of this exhibition, which is one of playful exploration rather than scientific dissection. There is a little of the latter too, though, in the form of lab demonstrations and exhibits such as Centrifuged Food by Seattle Food Geek Scott Heimendinger. Centrifuged peas make delicious butter, it turns out.

As the title suggests, Edible is primarily a taste, rather than visual, experience. Our introduction to the show was a light lunch, inspired by the same aesthetic that Kramer and Denfeld have already exhibited in their online cooking programme, The Glowing Sushi Cooking Show, which demonstrates how to make sushi using transgenic zebrafish expressing green fluorescent protein.

Here, they served up black bean and kimchi quesadilla, a Korean-Mexican fusion dish - and early Twitter phenomenon - invented in Los Angeles and usually served from taco trucks. It was followed by a vegan version of the notorious French dish ortolan that has been banned from commercial establishments. It involves capturing and blinding the ortolan (Emberiza hortulana), a small migratory bunting, which is then force-fed to twice its bodyweight before it is drowned in Armagnac and roasted and eaten whole. Diners place a napkin over their heads while eating, to concentrate the aromas - and to conceal any accompanying shame.

The vegan version - the full recipe is supplied in the exhibition - contains tofu, hop flowers, preserved lemon, umeboshi (Japanese pickled plum), Shiitake mushroom, and seaweed, among many other ingredients. Figs soaked in Armagnac stand in for the head, and sesame sticks for the bird's bones. It had quite a delicate flavour, though it's impossible to say how close it was to the real thing. Denfeld refused to confirm or deny whether he himself had done the full monty. "Ortolan is like Fight Club - you don't talk about it," he declared. (Someone forgot to tell Jeremy Clarkson.)

Visitors to Edible can sample a range of dishes on offer from a menu that changes every three days. Later this month Heather Julius, from the Special Snowflake Supper Club in the US, will host the first of a series of "curated" dinners that will be held during the run of the show.

Several exhibits offered more virtual dining experiences: Steam Cells, for example, comprises a series of dining scenarios devised by postgraduate students from the National College of Art & Design in Paris and inspired by stem cell research at the I-Stem laboratory in Evry, France.

Insects Au Gratin, by a group of British artists, suggests that 3D printing is the technology that could make entomophagy (the consumption of insects) catch on. It has an ecological dimension - crickets take four times less energy to produce than beef - even if it also has a pretty strong yuck factor. But extruding the insect protein into alternative shapes could help to eliminate that. Given what we already do with foods the idea of munching on cricket nuggets may not be as far-fetched as it sounds.

Even if you’re not ready to tuck into a plate of insects at home just yet, Edible has plenty of ideas to whet the appetite for whimsical and delicious food of the future.

Edible opens today at the Science Gallery in Trinity College Dublin, Ireland and runs until 6 April

 

http://www.newscientist.com/

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Face-stealing robots at Kinetica Art Fair

Kat Austen, CultureLab editor

 

Getting tunnel vision with Tunnel View at the Kinetica Art Fair (Image: Hans Kotter)

Face-stealing robots, strobe lighting and steampunk all lie in wait at this year’s Kinetica Art Fair. Opening today in London, the fair transforms its basement location into a playground for grown-ups who harbour a fascination for technology.

The fair greets you with a large digital sculpture - Titia Ex’s interactive Flower from the Universe, a giant neuron at the heart of LED-lit arms that change hue to mirror colours detected in their vicinity. My green skirt caused a cascade of the same colour to ripple through the tentacles and prompted the neuron to flash red.

At the other end of the spectrum, the fair plays host to a whole menagerie of cute kinetic sculptures made of reclaimed materials. Norwegian artist Christian Blom’s al Khowarzimi’s mechanical orchestra is a feat of electrical engineering that, among other tricks, passes electrical impulses through charged copper coils to propel metal rods into bells.

The fair has a history of showcasing a wide variety of experimental works, and this year is no exception. An interesting inclusion is the flashing light in a giant silver box created by neurologist Dirk Proeckl and clinical psychologist Engelbert Winkler. The TravellerUnlimited project, based on their Lucia N°03, was developed for therapeutic purposes, but Winkler says that it also enables participants to create their own art as they experience visions of colours and shapes.

I collared a couple of the lucky few who had tried the experience, and was told that the flashing could at times be disturbing. “I thought: if it goes on for too long, it might make me feel disorientated,” one guinea-pig told me. Though he had not seen changing colours, he had experienced “patterns of different shadings of light”. His fellow participant described it as “like looking at your retina and seeing them on fire”.

Paying tribute to the man who first asked if computers can think, a booth at the fair was devoted to a preview of Intuition and Ingenuity - The Legacy of Alan Turing. Curated by artist Anna Dumitriu, the full exhibition will tour the UK this year in celebration of the centenary of the birth of Alan Turing, the man who created the eponymous test for machine intelligence. Amusingly, the exhibition includes an automated confessional alongside other computer- and algorithmically-generated artworks.

 

All this and more whirly-clicky excitement is on at the Kinetica Art Fair at Ambika P3 in London until 12 February.

http://www.newscientist.com/

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Drones vie with supersonics for the future of flight

Paul Marks, senior technology correspondent

 

(Image: David Crump/Daily Mail/Rex Features )

What do you expect of aviation as flight technology advances? More than a century after the Wright Brothers triumphed on a wind-beaten North Carolina beach, aviation researchers have the technology to take flight in any number of directions.

With advanced autopilots and drones as evidence, some are predicting the end of human pilots. Others say hybrid engines and ever-lighter plastic planes are the obvious, green way ahead. Will suborbital hypersonic planes whisk us from London to Sydney in a few hours, or are Zeppelin-like blimps (the aviation equivalent of the slow food movement) about to make flying civilised again with a triumphant comeback?

The Future Skies discussion at the Dana Centre - the sci-tech speakeasy at London’s Science Museum - addressed just these questions earlier this week, guided by a team of flight experts from around the country. Hypersonics expert Ben Thornber of Cranfield, the aeronautical university near Bedford, UK, was joined by uncrewed flight experts Jonathan Masters and Daniel Smith of planes-to-submarines maker BAE Systems of Warton, Lancashire. And the whole thing was chaired by Tim Robinson, editor of the Royal Aeronautical Society’s Aerospace magazine.

Before the discussion kicked off, the audience, a crowd of eager plane enthusiasts, was asked to vote on their highest hopes for the future of aviation. “Faster journeys” was a clear winner, but would they hear anything from the panel that would change their mind?

The speed of achievable supersonic flight topped out at just over twice the speed of sound with Concorde in the 1960s. Nothing even slightly more affordable has approached since that millionaire’s vehicle ran its course and was scrapped. The expense, Thornber explained, comes from fuel costs and tough materials required to deal with the temperatures and pressures of hypersonic flight - if speeds of five times the speed of sound (Mach 5 - or one mile per second) are to be attained.

“I don't believe that there has been a great shift in the cost of high speed flight,” Thornber says. “However, there are now many more wealthy individuals - thus potentially creating a critical mass of customers for niche services. Of course, this also relies on mitigation of the sonic boom problem.” When reminded of the cost and noise factors, and that the richest one per cent would likely be the only passengers, the Dana Centre's audience deflated slightly.

Still, today’s more common flight experience is “a far cry from Wilbur and Orville Wright hanging on for dear life”, Robinson reminded us. We fly in air-conditioned, pressurised comfort with “reasonably nice food”, in-flight movies, duty-free shopping and - increasingly - Wi-Fi and cellphone connections.

But the cost is the emissions. One possible solution is greener “open rotor” jet engines (see video, above), Another is the use of new lightweight materials, if aircraft makers can iron out their persistent problems. Both the heavily composite Boeing 787 and Airbus A380 have exhibited worrying problems, and are right now in for urgent checks.

Smith and Masters cheered the audience's spirits, though, when they talked through some of the exciting non-military applications of unmanned planes. Upcoming civil airspace law changes are about to make uncrewed aircraft something we can all use - whether it's for cargo, pollution monitoring, crop spraying or aerial photography.

One audience member wondered if the panel believed, as some conspiracy theorists do, that it was a large Global Hawk UAV that hit the Pentagon on 9/11, rather than the passenger-packed jet. That absurdity was given short shrift and, back in the land of sense, sensing came up. For this is the biggest issue facing drones: how to sense and avoid crewed aircraft.

“We’re not allowed to fly them over people yet,” Smith said. “Because we’re not very good at it.”

But the technology is coming. In the US, former navy fighter pilot and MIT automation expert Mary Cummings is predicting that cargo airlines will be first  to switch planes to automatic, without pilots. Listen to her speak about the idea on NPR's Science Friday radio programme last week.

As the Dana Centre event closed, another vote was taken. The mood had switched from a wish for sheer airspeed to a clear majority now looking forward to novel pilot-less planes taking to the air - creating new business and employment opportunities without breaking the bank, or the climate.

But don’t get too carried away, said one audience member. “Just in the interests of balance, I’d like to see a UAV land on the Hudson like the US Airways pilot did in that miracle landing. I don’t think it would succeed.”

http://www.newscientist.com/

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Searching for the algorithm of happiness

Liz Else, associate editor

THIS may be a book's best ever summary of itself: "when fishing for happiness, catch and release".

With a title that inverts one of the inalienable rights established by the American Declaration of Independence, The Happiness of Pursuit is for fans of enquiries into the nature of brain, mind - and happiness itself.

When the author Shimon Edelman was 8, he came upon Christopher Logue's poem Epitaph, which asks: "What is the greatest happiness on earth?" The poem was embedded in a story which turned on the possibility of writing a happiness algorithm.

As a computer scientist and psychology professor, Edelman could not rest until he had made the case for happiness to be given a scientific, perhaps even algorithmic, explanation.

He begins this search with the observation that "the mind is inherently and essentially a bundle of ongoing computations". Over two millennia, he argues, we have come to realise that our notion of self is partly a construct of those computations, and partly a distributed entity that he believes is "best thought of as a network of cause and effect that transcends the boundary between the individual and the environment, which includes society and the material world". It's comforting to think that our experiences can help us achieve the kind of gradual self-change that might promote happiness.

In the end, Edelman does not deliver an algorithm for happiness, but offers a happy addition to the classic recipe of "self-knowledge, self-improvement, and, eventually, selfless conduct" - a coherent notion of the self.

http://www.newscientist.com/

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