Quan - Readingtopics.bbc - Future (3) 2

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reading
Tổng hợp bởi Quân – lớp IELTS 03 của Thầy Vinh IELTS
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CONTENTS
Topic 1. Improve your memory in 40 seconds........................................................................ 1

Topic 2. Is another human living inside you? ......................................................................... 2
Topic 3. The best (and worst) ways to spot a liar ................................................................... 4
Topic 4. How to learn 30 languages ....................................................................................... 8
Topic 5. The mystery of the female orgasm ......................................................................... 13
Topic 6. The suprising downsides of being clever ................................................................ 19
Topic 7. Why do babies laugh out loud ............................................................................... 23
Topic 8. Why do we intiutively believe we have free will?..................................................... 25
Topic 9. I can predict the weather with my nose................................................................... 27
Topic 11. The geniuses who invented prothetic limbs .......................................................... 33
Topic. 12. If alien life exists on exoplanets, how would we know?........................................ 36
Topic 13. To find aliens, we need to build a giant space parasol.......................................... 37
Topic 14. What is it like to have never felt an emotion?........................................................ 41
Topic 15. The submarines that revealed a mysterious world ................................................ 45
Topic 16. The air that makes you fat ................................................................................... 48
Topic 17. The future of medicine is testing our body fluids at home ..................................... 51
Topic 18. Dose it pay to be kind to strangers ....................................................................... 54
Topic 19. How much would you payt to live for an extra year ............................................... 58
Topic 20. The secret codes you’re not meant to know ......................................................... 61
Topic 21. Are any foods safe to eat anymore? Here’s the truth ............................................ 64
Topic 22. Is beer better (or worse) for you than wine? ......................................................... 68
Topic 23. Does mixing alcoholic drinks cause hangover? .................................................... 71
Topic 24. Does coffee really sober you up when drunk ........................................................ 73
Topic 25. How to live forever................................................................................................ 74
Topic 26. The real reason germs spread in the winter.......................................................... 77
Topic 27. Why do we laugh inappropriately?........................................................................ 80
Topic 28. One of science’s most baffling question? Why we yawn ....................................... 84
Topic 29. How muc would you pay to live for an extra year?................................................ 87
Topic 30. The nasa team keeping tabs on intergalatic death rays ........................................ 90
Topic 31. The private investigator who spies using drones .................................................. 92
Topic 32. Why do women live longer than men? .................................................................. 95
Topic 33. Why the US hides 700 million barrels of oil underground...................................... 98
Topic 34. How do you dismantle a nuclear submarine? ..................................................... 102
Topic 35. The secret of the desert aircraft “boneyards” ...................................................... 106
Topic 36. The dystopian lake filled by the world’s tech lust ................................................ 110
Topic 37. Have you ever felt “Solastalgia”? ........................................................................ 113
Topic 38. Wernher von Braun’s Bold plan for space exploration ........................................ 115
Topic 1. Improve your memory in 40 seconds
Ever had the feeling your past is slipping away? There’s a simple trick that should
reinforce your recollections.
 By David Robson
 11 November 2015
Have you ever seen or heard something amazing – a scene in a film, a joke or a song – only
to forget it later on? Instead of the crystal clear images you wanted to recall, you’re instead
left with scraps of images and mangled sentences, or more frustratingly still, nothing at all.
Even monumental events, like meeting a film star, can sometimes fade surprisingly quickly.
There may be a disarmingly simple way to cement those memories, however. According to
research by Chris Bird at the University of Sussex, all it requires is a few seconds of your
time and a bit of imagination.
Bird recently asked some students to lie in a brain scanner and view a series of short clips
from YouTube (involving, for example, neighbours playing practical jokes on each other).
Straight after some of the clips, they were given 40 seconds to replay the scene in their
minds and describe it to themselves. For the others, they just moved onto a new video.
By simply describing the event to themselves, they were able to remember twice as many
details a week or two later
It turned out that simply describing the event to themselves massively improved their
chances of remembering it accurately a week or so later: on average, they were able to
remember twice as many details. Want to prove it for yourself? Take a look at the short video
below to test this simple principle of memory improvement, and you will see how powerful it
can be.
Bird also found that his brain scans appeared to reflect the strength of the memory: when the
activity during their descriptions closely mirrored the activation as they watched the video
itself, the students seemed to have built particularly strong foundations for later recall.
That may, perhaps, be a sign of just how much effort and detail they were imagining as they
described the scene. It could also be that it allowed the students to peg the events to other
memories; one student compared a character in the clips to James Bond, for instance –
instantly making him more memorable.
In other words, if you want to make sure something sticks in your mind, just take a minute or
so to describe it to yourself, consciously and deliberately picking the most vivid details.
ielts.vinh@gmail.com
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Bird can see how it might be particularly important in the courtroom. “The findings have
implications for any situation where accurate recall of an event is critical, such as witnessing
an accident or crime,” he says. “Memory for the event will be significantly improved if the
witness rehearses the sequence of events as soon as possible afterwards.” But it could be
equally helpful for anyone hoping to cling to something worth remembering.
Interested to learn more ways to boost your memory? Here are BBC Future's guides on
"How to learn like a memory champion" and "How to learn 30 languages" .
Topic 2. Is another human living inside you?

You may think your body and mind are your own. In fact, you are a fusion of many
organisms - including, potentially, another person. Words by David Robson,
photography by Ariko Inaoka.
By David Robson
18 September 2015
Once upon a time, your origins were easy to understand. Your dad met your mum, they had
some fun, and from a tiny fertilised egg you emerged kicking and screaming into the world.
You are half your mum, half your dad – and 100% yourself.
Except, that simple tale has now become a lot more complicated. Besides your genes from
parents, you are a mosaic of viruses, bacteria – and potentially, other humans. Indeed, if you
are a twin, you are particularly likely to be carrying bits of your sibling within your body and
brain. Stranger still, they may be influencing how you act.
“A very large number of different human and non-human individuals are struggling inside us
for control “
“Humans are not unitary individuals but superorganisms,” says Peter Kramer at the
University of Padua. “A very large number of different human and non-human individuals are
all incessantly struggling inside us for control.” Together with Paola Bressan, he recently
wrote a paper in the journal Perspectives in Psychological Science, calling for psychologists
and psychiatrists to appreciate the ways this may influence our behaviour.
That may sound alarming, but it has long been known that our bodies are really a mishmash
of many different organisms. Microbes in your gut can produce neurotransmitters that alter
your mood; some scientists have even proposed that the microbes may sway your appetite,
so that you crave their favourite food. An infection of a parasite called Toxoplasma gondii,
meanwhile, might just lead you to your death. In nature, the microbe warps rats’ brains so
that they are attracted to cats, which will then offer a cosy home for it to reproduce. But
humans can be infected and subjected to the same kind of mind control too: the microbe
seems to make someone risky, and increases the chance they will suffer from schizophrenia
or suicidal depression. Currently, around a third of British meat carries this parasite, for
instance – despite the fact an infection could contribute to these mental illnesses. “We should
stop this,” says Kramer.
Infiltrating siblings
In this light, it becomes clear that our actions are not entirely our own. It’s enough to make
you question your sense of identity, but the idea of infiltration becomes even more eerie
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when you realise that your brain has not just been invaded by tiny microbes – but also by
other human beings.
Even non-conjoined twins could be sharing organs without realising it
The most visible example might be a case of conjoined twins sharing a brain, says
Kramer, but even regular twins could have shared organs without realising it. During early
development, cells can be passed between twins or triplets. Once considered a rare
occurrence, we now know it is surprisingly common. Around 8% of non-identical twins and
21% of triplets, for example, have not one, but two blood groups: one produced by their own
cells, and one produced by “alien” cells absorbed from their twin. They are, in other words, a
chimera – a fusion of two bodies – and it may occur in many organs, including the brain.
Developing together in the womb, twins may swap cells, making them even closer than we'd
previously realised (Credit: Ariko Inaoka)
Brothers from another mother
Women accidentally carrying a "twin's" child
Lydia Fairchild’s paternity test was meant to be straightforward, proving to the courts that her
two sons’ father was the person she said he was. When the test came back, however,
Fairchild herself came up as a blank: there was no trace of her DNA in her own children.
The courts threatened to convict her of illegal surrogacy – they assumed it was a scam to
gain benefits. Luckily, at around the same time, a scientific paper reported a similar case in
which a woman was apparently not the biological mother of two of her three children. The
reason was that she was a chimera: a case in which two twins had merged into one body
early in development. Being the product of two different cell lines, some of her eggs carried a
genome that was different from the rest of the body.
Needless to say, the discovery has caused Fairchild to question her own identity. “Telling my
sons about this was the hardest part because I felt that part of me hadn't passed on to them,”
she told the website Jezebel. “I thought, ‘Oh, I wonder if they'll really feel that I'm not quite
their real mother somehow because the genes that I should've given to them, I didn't give to
them.’”
A chimera brain could have serious consequences. For instance, we know that the
arrangement of different brain regions can be crucial for its function – but the presence of
foreign tissue, being directed by different genes carrying a different blueprint, may throw that
intricate design into disarray. This may explain, for instance, why twins are less likely to be
right-handed – a simple trait that normally relies on the relative organisation of the right and
the left hemispheres. Perhaps chimerism has upset the balance.
Even if you do not think you ever had a twin, there are many other ways you might be
invaded by another human’s cells. It’s possible, for instance, that you started off as two
foetuses in the womb, but the twins merged during early development. Since it occurs at
such an early age of development, the cells can become incorporated into the tissue and
seem to develop normally, yet they are carrying another person’s genetic blueprint. “You look
like one person, but you have the cells of another person in you – effectively, you have
always been two people,” says Kramer. In one extreme case, a woman was surprised to be
told that she was not the biological mother of her two children (See “Brother from another
mother”, left). Alternatively, cells from an older sibling might stay around the mother’s body,
only to find their way into your body after you are conceived.
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However it happens, it’s perfectly plausible that tissue from another human could cause the
brain to develop in unexpected ways, says Lee Nelson from the University of Washington.
She’s currently examining whether cells from the mother herself may be implanted in the
baby brain. “A difference in the amount, cell type, or the time during development at which
the cells were acquired could all result in abnormalities,” she says.
Nelson has found that even as an adult, you are not immune from human invaders. A couple
of years ago, Nelson and William Chan at the University of Alberta in Edmonton took slices
of women’s brain tissue and screened their genome for signs of the Y-chromosome. Around
63% were harbouring male cells. “Not only did we find male DNA in female human brains as
a general observation, we found it to be present in multiple brain regions,” says Chan. In
other words, their brains were speckled with cells from a man’s body. One logical conclusion
is that it came from a baby: somehow, her own son’s stem cells had made it through the
placenta and lodged in her brain. Strangely, this seemed to decrease the chances that the
mother would subsequently develop Alzheimer’s – though exactly why remains a mystery.
Some researchers are even beginning to wonder whether these cells might influence a
m other ’s m indset dur ing preg nancy.
Our knowledge of the human “superorganism” is still in its infancy, so many of the
consequences are purely theoretical at the moment. Kramer and Bressan's aim with their
paper was not to give definitive answers, but to enlighten other psychologists and
psychiatrists about the many entities that make us who we are today. “We cannot understand
human behaviour by considering only one or the other individual,” Kramer says. “Ultimately,
we must understand them all to understand how ‘we’ behave.”
For instance, scientists often compare sets of twins to understand the origins of behaviour,
but the fact that even non-identical twins may have swapped bits of brain tissue might have
muddied those results. We should be particularly careful when using these twin studies to
compare conditions such as schizophrenia that may arise from faulty brain organisation,
Bressan and Kramer say.
In general, however, we shouldn’t feel hostile towards these invaders – after all, they made
you who you are today. “I think it is now clear that our natural immigrants are with us for the
long-term, for better or for worse,” says Nelson. “And I would think “for better” outweighs ‘for
worse’.”
Topic 3. The best (and worst) ways to spot a liar

Forget body language or eye movements. There are much better ways to identify the
deceitful.
 By David Robson
7 September 2015
Thomas Ormerod’s team of security officers faced a seemingly impossible task. At airports
across Europe, they were asked to interview passengers on their history and travel plans.
Ormerod had planted a handful of people arriving at security with a false history, and a
made-up future – and his team had to guess who they were. In fact, just one in 1000 of the
people they interviewed would be deceiving them. Identifying the liar should have been about
as easy as finding a needle in a haystack.
Using previous methods of lie detection, you might as well just flip a coin
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So, what did they do? One option would be to focus on body language or eye movements,
right? It would have been a bad idea. Study after study has found that attempts – even by
trained police officers – to read lies from body language and facial expressions are more
often little better than chance. According to one study, just 50 out of 20,000 people managed
to make a correct judgement with more than 80% accuracy. Most people might as well just
flip a coin.
Ormerod’s team tried something different – and managed to identify the fake passengers in
the vast majority of cases. Their secret? To throw away many of the accepted cues to
deception and start anew with some startlingly straightforward techniques.
When it comes to spotting liars, the eyes don't have it (Credit: Thinkstock)
Over the last few years, deception research has been plagued by disappointing results. Most
previous work had focused on reading a liar’s intentions via their body language or from their
face – blushing cheeks, a nervous laugh, darting eyes. The most famous example is Bill
Clinton touching his nose when he denied his affair with Monica Lewinsky – taken at the time
to be a sure sign he was lying. The idea, says Timothy Levine at the University of Alabama in
Birmingham, was that the act of lying provokes some strong emotions – nerves, guilt,
perhaps even exhilaration at the challenge – that are difficult to contain. Even if we think we
have a poker face, we might still give away tiny flickers of movement known as “micro-
expressions” that might give the game away, they claimed.
The problem is the huge variety of human behaviour – there is no universal dictionary of
body language
Yet the more psychologists looked, the more elusive any reliable cues appeared to be. The
problem is the huge variety of human behaviour. With familiarity, you might be able to spot
someone’s tics whenever they are telling the truth, but others will probably act very
differently; there is no universal dictionary of body language. “There are no consistent signs
that always arise alongside deception,” says Ormerod, who is based at the University of
Sussex. “I giggle nervously, others become more serious, some make eye contact, some
avoid it.” Levine agrees: “The evidence is pretty clear that there aren’t any reliable cues that
distinguish truth and lies,” he says. And although you may hear that our subconscious can
spot these signs even if they seem to escape our awareness, this too seems to have been
disproved.
Despite these damning results, our safety often still hinges on the existence of these mythical
cues. Consider the screening some passengers might face before a long-haul flight – a
process Ormerod was asked to investigate in the run up to the 2012 Olympics. Typically, he
says, officers will use a “yes/no” questionnaire about the flyer’s intentions, and they are
trained to observe “suspicious signs” (such as nervous body language) that might betray
deception. “It doesn’t give a chance to listen to what they say, and think about credibility,
observe behaviour change – they are the critical aspects of deception detection,” he says.
The existing protocols are also prone to bias, he says – officers were more likely to find
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suspicious signs in certain ethnic groups, for instance. “The current method actually prevents
deception detection,” he says.
If only body language revealed deception (Credit: Getty Images)
Clearly, a new method is needed. But given some of the dismal results from the lab, what
should it be? Ormerod’s answer was disarmingly simple: shift the focus away from the subtle
mannerisms to the words people are actually saying, gently probing the right pressure points
to make the liar’s front crumble.
Ormerod and his colleague Coral Dando at the University of Wolverhampton identified a
series of conversational principles that should increase your chances of uncovering deceit:
Use open questions. This forces the liar to expand on their tale until they become
entrapped in their own web of deceit.
Employ the element of surprise. Investigators should try to increase the liar’s “cognitive
load” – such as by asking them unanticipated questions that might be slightly confusing, or
asking them to report an event backwards in time – techniques that make it harder for them
to maintain their façade.
Watch for small, verifiable details. If a passenger says they are at the University of Oxford,
ask them to tell you about their journey to work. If you do find a contradiction, though, don’t
give yourself away – it’s better to allow the liar’s confidence to build as they rattle off more
falsehoods, rather than correcting them.
Observe changes in confidence. Watch carefully to see how a potential liar’s style changes
when they are challenged: a liar may be just as verbose when they feel in charge of a
conversation, but their comfort zone is limited and they may clam up if they feel like they are
losing control.
Liar vs liar
It takes one to know one
Ironically, liars turn out to be better lie detectors. Geoffrey Bird at University College
London and colleagues recently set up a game in which subjects had to reveal true or false
statements about themselves. They were also asked to judge each other’s credibility. It
turned out that people who were better at telling fibs could also detect others’ tall tales,
perhaps because they recognised the tricks.
The aim is a casual conversation rather than an intense interrogation. Under this gentle
pressure, however, the liar will give themselves away by contradicting their own story, or by
becoming obviously evasive or erratic in their responses. “The important thing is that there is
no magic silver bullet; we are taking the best things and putting them together for a cognitive
approach,” says Ormerod.
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A psychological experiment in an airport revealed new tricks to spot liars (Credit: Thinkstock)
Ormerod openly admits his strategy might sound like common sense. “A friend said that you
are trying to patent the art of conversation,” he says. But the results speak for themselves.
The team prepared a handful of fake passengers, with realistic tickets and travel documents.
They were given a week to prepare their story, and were then asked to line up with other,
genuine passengers at airports across Europe. Officers trained in Ormerod and Dando’s
interviewing technique were more than 20 times more likely to detect these fake passengers
than people using the suspicious signs, finding them 70% of the time.
“It’s really impressive,” says Levine, who was not involved in this study. He thinks it is
particularly important that they conducted the experiment in real airports. “It’s the most
realistic study around.”
The art of persuasion
Levine’s own experiments have proven similarly powerful. Like Ormerod, he believes that
clever interviews designed to reveal holes in a liar’s story are far better than trying to identify
tell-tale signs in body language. He recently set up a trivia game, in which undergraduates
played in pairs for a cash prize of $5 for each correct answer they gave. Unknown to the
students, their partners were actors, and when the game master temporarily left the room,
the actor would suggest that they quickly peek at the answers to cheat on the game. A
handful of the students took him up on the offer.
One expert was even correct 100% of the time, across 33 interviews
Afterwards, the students were all questioned by real federal agents about whether or not they
had cheated. Using tactical questions to probe their stories – without focusing on body
language or other cues – they managed to find the cheaters with more than 90% accuracy;
one expert was even correct 100% of the time, across 33 interviews – a staggering result
that towers above the accuracy of body language analyses. Importantly, a follow-up study
found that even novices managed to achieve nearly 80% accuracy, simply by using the right,
open-ended questions that asked, for instance, how their partner would tell the story.
Are police any better at spotting lying suspects than anyone else? (Credit: Thinkstock)
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Indeed, often the investigators persuaded the cheaters to openly admit their misdeed. “The
experts were fabulously good at this,” says Levine. Their secret was a simple trick known to
masters in the art of persuasion: they would open the conversation by asking the students
how honest they were. Simply getting them to say they told the truth primed them to be more
candid later. “People want to think of being honest, and this ties them into being
cooperative,” says Levine. “Even the people who weren’t honest had difficulty pretending to
be cooperative [after this], so for the most part you could see who was faking it.”
Another trick is to ask people how honest they are
Clearly, such tricks may already be used by some expert detectives – but given the folklore
surrounding body language, it’s worth emphasising just how powerful persuasion can be
compared to the dubious science of body language. Despite their successes, Ormerod and
Levine are both keen that others attempt to replicate and expand on their findings, to make
sure that they stand up in different situations. “We should watch out for big sweeping claims,”
says Levine.
Although the techniques will primarily help law enforcement, the same principles might just
help you hunt out the liars in your own life. “I do it with kids all the time,” Ormerod says. The
main thing to remember is to keep an open mind and not to jump to early conclusions: just
because someone looks nervous, or struggles to remember a crucial detail, does not mean
they are guilty. Instead, you should be looking for more general inconsistencies.
There is no fool-proof form of lie detection, but using a little tact, intelligence, and persuasion,
you can hope that eventually, the truth will out.
Topic 4. How to learn 30 languages

Some people can speak a seemingly impossible number of tongues. How do they
manage it, asks David Robson, and what can we learn from them?
 By David Robson
 29 May 2015
Out on a sunny Berlin balcony, Tim Keeley and Daniel Krasa are firing words like bullets at
each other. First German, then Hindi, Nepali, Polish, Croatian, Mandarin and Thai – they’ve
barely spoken one language before the conversation seamlessly melds into another.
Together, they pass through about 20 different languages or so in total.
Back inside, I find small groups exchanging tongue twisters. Others are gathering in threes,
preparing for a rapid-fire game that involves interpreting two different languages
simultaneously. It looks like the perfect recipe for a headache, but they are nonchalant. “It’s
quite a common situation for us,” a woman called Alisa tells me.
It can be difficult enough to learn one foreign tongue. Yet I’m here in Berlin for the Polyglot
Gathering, a meeting of 350 or so people who speak multiple languages – some as diverse
as Manx, Klingon and Saami, the language of reindeer herders in Scandinavia. Indeed, a
surprising proportion of them are “hyperglots”, like Keeley and Krasa, who can speak at least
10 languages. One of the most proficient linguists I meet here, Richard Simcott, leads a team
of polyglots at a company called eModeration – and he uses about 30 languages himself.
With a modest knowledge of Italian and some rudimentary Danish, I feel somewhat out of
place among the hyperglots. But they say you should learn from the best, so I am here to try
to discover their secrets.
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Most of us struggle with the simplest phrases - but it needn't be that way (Credit: Thinkstock)
When you consider the challenges for the brain, it’s no wonder most of us find learning a
language so demanding. We have many different memory systems, and mastering a
different tongue requires all of them. There’s procedural memory – the fine programming of
muscles to perfect an accent – and declarative memory, which is the ability to remember
facts (at least 10,000 new words if you want to come close to native fluency, not to mention
the grammar). What’s more, unless you want to sound like a stuttering robot, those words
and structures have to make it to the tip of your tongue within a split second, meaning they
have to be programmed in both “explicit” and “implicit” memory.
Speaking extra languages delays dementia by five years or more
That tough mental workout comes with big payoffs, however; it is arguably the best brain
training you can try. Numerous studies have shown that being multilingual can improve
attention and memory, and that this can provide a “cognitive reserve” that delays the onset of
dementia. Looking at the experiences of immigrants, Ellen Bialystok at York University in
Canada has found that speaking two languages delayed dementia diagnosis by five years.
Those who knew three languages, however, were diagnosed 6.4 years later than
monolinguals, while for those fluent in four or more languages, enjoyed an extra nine years
of healthy cognition.
If you want to stay sharp in old age, learning a language could be the best neural workout
(Credit: Getty Images)
Those lasting benefits are a stark contrast to the failure of most commercial “brain training”
games you can download – which generally fail to offer long-term improvements in
memory or attention.
Learning a new language as we age is easier than you might assume
Until recently, however, many neuroscientists had suggested that most of us are too old to
reach native-like fluency in a fresh language; according to the “critical period hypothesis”,
there is a narrow window during childhood in which we can pick up the nuances of a new
language. Yet Bialystok’s research suggests this may have been exaggerated; rather than a
steep precipice, she has found that there is a very slight decline in our abilities as we age.
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Certainly, many of the hyperglots I meet in Berlin have mastered languages later in life.
Keeley grew up in Florida, where he was exposed to native Spanish speakers at school. As
a child, he used to tune into foreign radio stations – despite not being able to understand a
word. “It was like music to me,” he says. But it was only as an adult that he started travelling
the world – first to Colombia, where he also studied French, German and Portuguese at
college. He then moved on to Switzerland and Eastern Europe before heading to Japan. He
now speaks at least 20 languages fluently, almost all of which were learnt as an adult. “The
critical period hypothesis is a bunch of crap,” he says.
Polyglots tend to "inhabit" a language and its culture (Credit: Getty Images)
The question is, how do hyperglots master so many new tongues – and could the rest of us
try to emulate them? True, they may just be more motivated than most. Many, like Keeley,
are globe-trotters who have moved from country to country, picking up languages as they go.
It’s sometimes a case of sink or swim.
Yet even with the best intentions, many of us struggle to speak another language
convincingly. Keeley, who is currently writing a book on the “social, psychological and
affective factors in becoming multilingual”, is sceptical that it’s simply a question of raw
intelligence. “I don’t think it’s a major factor, although it does make it faster to have the
analytical ability,” he says.
Cultural chameleons
Instead, he thinks we need to look past the intellect, into the depths of our personality.
Keeley’s theory is that learning a new language causes you to re-invent your sense of self –
and the best linguists are particularly good at taking on new identities. “You become a
chameleon,” he says.
Psychologists have long known that the words we speak are entwined with our identity. It’s a
cliche that French makes you more romantic, or Italian makes you more passionate, but
each language becomes associated with cultural norms that can affect how you behave – it
could be as simple as whether you value outspoken confidence or quiet reflection, for
instance. Importantly, various studies have found that multilingual people often adopt
different behaviours according to the language they are speaking.
Building friendship is the primary motivation for most hyperglots (Credit: Getty Images)
Different languages can also evoke different memories of your life – as the writer Vladimir
Nabokov discovered when working on his autobiography. The native Russian speaker wrote
it first in his second language, English, with agonising difficulty, finding that “my memory was
attuned to one key – the musically reticent Russian, but it was forced into another key,
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English”. Once it was finally published, he decided to translate the memoirs back into the
language of his childhood, but as the Russian words flowed, he found his memories started
to unfurl with new details and perspectives. “His Russian version differed so much he felt the
need to retranslate to English,” says Aneta Pavlenko at Temple University in Philadelphia,
whose book, The Bilingual Mind, explores many of these effects. It was almost as if his
English and Russian selves had subtly different pasts.
Resisting the process of reinvention may prevent you from learning another language so
well, says Keeley, who is a professor of cross-cultural management at Kyushu Sangyo
University in Japan. He recently ran a survey of Chinese speakers learning Japanese to
examine their “ego permeability” – with questions such as “I find it easy to put myself in
other’s shoes and imagine how they feel” or “I can do impressions of other people”, and
whether you can change your opinions to suit the people you are near. As he suspected, the
people who score highly on these traits had much greater fluency in their new language.
It is not just about the amount of time spent learning and using languages
How come? It’s well known that if you identify with someone, you are more likely to mimic
them – a process that would effortlessly improve language learning. But the adopted identity,
and the associated memories, may also stop you from confusing the language with your
mother tongue – by building neural barriers between the languages. “There must be some
type of home in your mind for each language and culture and the related experiences, in
order for the languages to stay active and not get all mixed together,” Keeley says. “It is not
just the amount of time spent learning and using the languages. The quality of the time, in
terms of emotional salience, is critical.” Indeed, that might explain why Keeley could switch
so effortlessly between those 20-odd languages.
Of all the polyglots, Michael Levi Harris may demonstrate these principles the best. An actor
by training, Harris also has an advanced knowledge of 10 languages, and an intermediate
understanding of 12 more. Occasionally, his passion has landed him in some difficulty. He
once saw an online ad for a Maltese meet-up. Going along, he hoped to find a group of
people from Malta, only to walk into a room full of middle-aged women and their white lap
dogs – an experience he recently relayed in a short film The Hyperglot. You can see a
trailer below.
When I meet him in a cafe near the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, he
effortlessly slips into a rather posh, “received pronunciation” English accent, despite being a
native New Yorker. As he does so, his whole posture changes as he melds into the new
persona. “I’m not really trying to consciously change my character or my persona. It just
happens, but I know that I am suddenly different.”
Importantly, Harris thinks that anyone can learn to adopt a new cultural skin in this way – and
he has a few tips for how to begin, based on his experiences of acting. The important thing,
he says, is to try to imitate without even considering the spelling of the words. “Everyone can
listen and repeat,” he says. You may find yourself over-exaggerating, in the same way that
an actor may be a little over-the-top in their performance to start with – but that’s a crucial
part of the process, he says. “In acting first, you go really big, and then the director says OK,
now tone it down. And you do the same with a language.” He also suggests looking carefully
at things like facial expressions – since they can be crucial to producing the sounds.
Speaking with slightly pouted lips instantly makes you sound a little bit more French, for
instance.
Finally, he says you should try to overcome the embarrassment associated with producing
"strange" noises – such as the guttural sounds in Arabic, for instance. “You have to realise
it’s not foreign to us – when you are disgusted, you already say ‘eugh’. And if you
acknowledge and give your subconscious permission to do it in speech, you can make the
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sound.” That may sound a little silly, but the point is that all this should help you to get over
your natural inhibitions. “It’s all to do with owning the language, which is what actors have to
do to make the audience believe that these words are yours. When you own words you can
speak more confidently, which is how people will engage with you.”
Can thespians teach us all a better way to learn? (Credit: Thinkstock)
There’s one big factor that stops people learning languages efficiently…
Even so, most agree that you shouldn’t be too ambitious, particularly when starting out. “If
there’s a single factor that stops people learning languages efficiently, it’s that we feel we
have to be native-like – it’s an unreachable standard that looms over us,” says Temple
University’s Pavlenko. “The ease of expression is what matters to me a lot – finding a better
way to express myself, colloquially.”
Along these lines, you should also practice a little and often – perhaps just for 15-minute
stints, four times a day. “I think the analogies with exercise are quite good,” says Alex
Rawlings, who has developed a series of polyglot workshops with Richard Simcott to
teach their techniques. Even if you are too busy or tired to do serious study, just practising
a dialogue or listening to a foreign pop song can help, says Simcott.
In the UK, Australia and US, it is easy to believe that we don’t need to make that effort.
Indeed, before I met the hyperglots, I had wondered if their obsession merited the hard work;
perhaps, I thought, it was just about bragging rights. Yet all of the hyperglots I meet are
genuinely enthusiastic about the amazing benefits that can only be achieved by this full
immersion in different languages – including the chance to make friends and connections,
even across difficult cultural barriers.
Harris, for instance, describes living in Dubai. “As a Jewish person living in the Middle East, I
faced challenges. But it turns out that one of my best friends was from Lebanon,” he says.
“And when I moved away, he said ‘when we first met I didn’t think I could be friends with you
and now you’re leaving, I’m distraught’. It’s one of the most precious things to me.”
As Judith Meyer, who organised the gathering in Berlin, tells me, she saw Ukrainians and
Russians, Israelis and Palestinians all conversing at the gathering. “Learning another
language really does open up whole new worlds.”
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Topic 5. The mystery of the female orgasm
From the existence of the G-spot to the origin of multiple orgasms, female sexuality once
mystified scientists. But as Linda Geddes discovers, radical experiments are finally revealing
some answers.
 By Linda Geddes
 26 June 2015
On my washing machine, there is a lock. To activate it, you must hold down the start button
for a particular length of time at just the right intensity; too soft and nothing happens, too hard
and the machine beeps angrily at you. Once you’ve mastered the technique, it’s easy; the
lights switch on, things start moving and the cycle ultimately climaxes in a shuddering
whirling crescendo of noise. Finally, an entangled heap of damp but refreshed clothes
tumbles out at the other end. But for the uninitiated, it’s a perplexing mystery.
Consider now the female orgasm. JD Salinger once wrote that “a woman’s body is like a
violin; it takes a terrific musician to play it right”. Pressed or caressed the right way, a woman
can be transported to such ecstasy, that for a few seconds, the rest of the world ceases to
exist. But get it wrong and pain, frustration, or dull nothingness can ensue. It’s a stark
contrast to a man’s experience; so long as they can get an erection, a few minutes of
vigorous stimulation generally results in ejaculation.
Why are orgasms so intensely pleasurable? How come women can experience multiple
orgasms? And does the fabled G-spot even exist? These are some of the most enduring
mysteries of medicine. “We are able to go to the moon, but we do not understand enough
about our own bodies,” says Emmanuele Jannini at the University of Rome Tor Vergata –
one of those who has spent his career trying to unravel it. Recent years have seen a flurry of
studies by these real-life Masters of Sex, and they are finally getting some answers.
Brains on fire
Perhaps the scientists’ greatest skill is in persuading women to sweep aside their inhibitions,
and masturbate – or even copulate – under the full glare of scientific research, including the
uncomfortable environment of the fMRI scanner. One of the leaders of this research has
been Barry Komisaruk at Rutgers University in New Jersey, who wanted to probe whether
brain differences can explain why women and men experience sex so differently.
What we see is an overall activation of the brain – it’s all systems go
It turns out that despite their varied experiences, both men and women show roughly the
same neural activity during orgasm. “The similarities between men and women at orgasm
are far greater than the differences,” says Komisaruk. “What we see is an overall activation
of the brain; basically it’s like all systems go.”
This may explain why orgasms are so all-consuming – if the whole forest is blazing, it’s
difficult to discriminate between the different campfires that were there at the start. “At
orgasm, if everything gets activated simultaneously, this can obliterate the fine discrimination
between activities,” Komisaruk adds. It is maybe why you can’t think about anything else.
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Women's brains still receive signals from the genitals after orgasm, allowing them to climax
multiple times (Credit: Getty Images)
There are hotspots in this furnace, however. One is the nucleus accumbens, a brain region
that deals in pleasure and reward through the release of a neurotransmitter called dopamine.
Given the choice, rats will choose electrical stimulation of this brain region over food - to the
extent that they would allow themselves to starve to death. Besides sex, it’s also activated by
cocaine, amphetamine, caffeine, nicotine and chocolate. No wonder orgasms make you want
to keep on going back for more.
After orgasm, however, some important differences do emerge, which might begin to explain
why men and women react so differently after climax. Komisaruk, with Kachina Allen, has
found preliminary evidence that specific regions of the male brain become unresponsive to
further sensory stimulation of the genitals in the immediate aftermath of orgasm, whereas
women’s brains continue to be activated: this may be why some women experience multiple
orgasms, and men do not.
Anatomy of pleasure
If these brain scans have generated some controversy, it has been nothing compared to the
attempts to pin down the anatomy of the orgasm. The penis has just one route for carrying
sensations to the brain, the female genital tract has three or four. At the seat of female
sexuality is the clitoris: familiar to most as a small, pebble-shaped nubbin, plonked in an
awkward position, a centimetre or so in front of the vaginal opening. Precisely who
discovered the importance of this structure is up for debate. Ice-age clay models, known as
“Venus figurines”, depict a faceless woman with large breasts, a rounded belly, a prominent
vagina and labia – and on one model, a clitoris.
It wasn’t until the 16th Century that the clitoris began to be described as a distinct physical
structure, common to all women, with the function of inducing pleasure. In his book, De re
anatomica, published in 1559, Realdo Columbo described the clitoris as “the seat of a
woman’s delight”. Yet in subsequent centuries, female pleasure took a back seat, and the
clitoris was largely forgotten – at least by anatomists and physicians. It re-emerged in the
20th Century, but was still regarded as inferior by many. Though Sigmund Freud at least
acknowledged that women can experience orgasm, he believed that clitoral responsivity is
superseded by vaginal orgasm in mature women. The inability to experience vaginal
orgasms is associated with psychosexual immaturity, he wrote.
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Can science reveal why women and men experience sex differently? (Credit: Getty Images)
If that were true, then there would be an awful lot of women out there who just aren’t realising
their sexual potential. Between thirty and forty percent of women claim never to have
experienced an orgasm through vaginal penetration alone – though many more can orgasm
through clitoral stimulation.
The suggestion that the vaginal orgasm is somehow superior has irked many feminists. It
sounds as if women who don’t experience vaginal orgasms just aren’t trying hard enough. So
should vaginal orgasms be a rite of passage for all women, or just a privileged few? Is it even
possible to have an orgasm in the absence of a clitoris?
As soon as I touched the cervix, the rats would become rigidly immobile – Barry Komisaruk
Barry Komisaruk took the first steps to answering these questions by chance, while he was
studying mating behaviours in rats. One day, while inserting a rod into a female rat’s vagina,
he triggered a bizarre response: “As soon as I touched the cervix, the rats would become
rigidly immobile,” he says. Not only that, but during this kind of stimulation, the rats became
apparently insensitive to pain. Soon afterwards, he switched his rats for women, and noticed
the same thing: vaginal stimulation blocked the transmission of pain. But how?
The vagina and clitoris have many direct routes to the brain (Credit: Science Photo Library)
To find out, Komisaruk conducted a study with Beverly Whipple that looked at women with
varying degrees of spinal cord injury. They found that even when their injuries blocked the
known nerve pathways in the spinal cord from the genitals to the brain, these women could
still feel when their vagina and cervix were being touched. Some even experienced orgasm
from it, despite the pudendal nerve – which carries sensations from the clitoris to the brain –
being cut. “Women with spinal cord injury who could not feel their clitoris, nevertheless had
orgasms from vaginal stimulation,” says Komisaruk. “That’s probably the best evidence that
vaginal orgasms exist.”
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The reason is that from the vagus nerves, which are situated outside the spinal cord, carry
sensations from the vagina to the brain. “Women describe clitoral orgasms as more localised
and external, and vaginal orgasms as being internal and involving the whole-body; that’s
probably because the nerves that carry sensations from the clitoris are different from the
nerves from the vagina,” Komisaruk adds. And as for the puzzling fact that vaginal orgasms
can block pain, the nerves connected to the spinal cord may inhibit the release of the
neurotransmitter involved in pain perception. Once signals reach the brain, they could also
trigger the release of neurotransmitters like endorphins that also relieve pain.
So if different nerves can carry sensations from different regions of the female genitalia – and
both can trigger orgasm – are some regions of the vagina more sensitive than others? Where
should couples go hunting for the elusive vaginal orgasm?
G marks the spot
The famed “G-spot” was, for a long time, the prime target. The term was first coined in the
early 80s, for the German obstetrician and gynaecologist, Ernst Gräfenberg. In 1950, he
described an erogenous zone on the anterior, or front wall of the vagina, which correlated
with the position of the urethra on the other side of that wall. Subsequent studies revealed a
complex of blood vessels, nerve endings and remnants of the female prostate gland in the
same area; and suggested that in a minority of women – particularly those with strong pelvic
floor muscles – stimulation of this area could trigger powerful orgasms and the release of a
small amount of fluid from the urethra that was not urine.
Word soon began to leak out about this magic button on the front wall of the vagina. Couples
invested time, and - often fruitless - effort into finding it. Some feminists, meanwhile, claimed
that the publicity surrounding the G-spot was an attempt by men to recoup the importance of
vaginal penetration, after the spotlight had shifted to the clitoris during the sexual revolution
of the 60s and 70s.
The hunt for the fabled G-spot has revealed more complex anatomy (Credit: Getty Images)
Evidence to support or refute the existence of the G-spot is patchy, and often overhyped.
One study ‘disproving’ the existence of a G-spot was based on an MRI scan of just one
woman. The debate is further obscured by a dispute about the correct terminology for
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various inner r eg ions of women’s private par t s , and also where one structure
starts and another ends.
However, there do seem to be physical differences between women who claim to experience
vaginal orgasm and those who don’t. In 2008, Jannini published a study involving nine such
responders, and 11 who said they’d never climaxed during penetrative sex alone. Ultrasound
scans revealed a thicker area of tissue in the space between the vagina and the urethra in
those that could.
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At the time, Jannini concluded that this might well be evidence for the fabled G-spot. But
further studies have prompted a rethink. “The word spot suggests a button; something that
you can push to obtain an orgasm or pleasure,” he says. “It implies a concrete structure
that’s either there or it’s not. No-one has been able to clearly describe such a structure as a
spot.”
The clitoris could also be described as a two-headed penis; both are derived from the same
embryonic tissue
So if it’s not a button, what else could it be? For a growing number of researchers the answer
is simple: the clitoris. Although to most people, the clitoris is just a pea-shaped bobble under
the surface of the skin, recent MRI studies suggest that the clitoris is far from diminutive.
They reveal a large, bulbous structure around 9cm in length, which somewhat resembles a
wishbone. It snakes its way around the outside of the vagina and up inside the pelvis
alongside the urethra.
At the head of that wishbone is the glans – the external part that most people feel as the
clitoris, and the most sensitive part. But the legs straddle the vaginal opening and extend into
the labia.
It could also be described as a two-headed penis. Both the clitoris and the penis are derived
from the same embryonic tissue; a swelling called the tubercle which emerges during the
early stages of embryogenesis and then branches into either the clitoris and vulval tissue in
girls, or the penis and scrotum in boys. But there are important differences: for one thing, the
penis doesn’t grow in response to hormones like testosterone once puberty ceases, whereas
the clitoris does. “It is not simply a little penis,” Jannini says. The vagina also responds to
hormones, including oestrogen, which helps explain why women’s sexual response varies
throughout their lives.
This complexity may explain why it has been so difficult to prove – or disprove – the
existence of the G-spot; it’s not easy to stimulate the frontal wall of the vagina in isolation.
You’re also likely rubbing up against the internal portions of the clitoris and the urethra as
well.
Women's sexuality has been a source of controversy throughout the ages (Credit: Getty
Images)
Indeed, further research by Jannini and Odile Buisson at the Centre d’échographie in Saint
Germain en Laye, France, has demonstrated this. They persuaded three women to either
stimulate the front wall of their vaginas using a lubricated tampon, or use their fingers to
stimulate the external parts of their clitoris - while using ultrasound to image what was
happening beneath the skin. Vaginal penetration caused the internal parts of the clitoris and
the tissue around the urethra to move and become engorged, whereas during manual
masturbation, only the external parts of the clitoris were stimulated.
It gets even more complicated; in yet other women, vaginal penetration might simultaneously
be stimulating both the external and the internal parts of the clitoris.
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The woman had been born without a bladder, and had undergone extensive reconstructive
surgery. The silver lining? She has incredible orgasms
In 2009, a 42-year-old woman presented at the clinic of Rachel Pauls, a urogynecologist

based in Cincinnati, Ohio. The woman had been born without a bladder, and had undergone
extensive reconstructive surgery to correct some of these problems. There is a silver lining to
this cloud, however; “she has incredible orgasms,” Pauls says. Indeed, she told Pauls that
she averages two orgasms every time she has sex – one through manual stimulation of her
clitoris; the other through vaginal penetration alone. Pauls was particularly fascinated by her
story, because the women’s urethra – and therefore the associated bundle of nerves and
structures usually labelled the G-spot – wasn’t in the usual place. Additionally, the woman’s
clitoris was positioned on the very edge of her vaginal opening. “It seemed likely that this was
part of why she had such good orgasms,” Pauls says. The penis would brush against it with
every thrust.
Does size matter?
This sparked an idea. Pauls wondered if the size, and location of the clitoris in healthy
women might influence the ease with which they orgasm during penetrative sex. So she and
her colleagues recruited ten women who claimed rarely or never to achieve orgasm during
sexual encounters, and twenty women who said they climax almost every time, and used an
MRI scanner to take a detailed look at their clitorises. They found that the smaller the size of
the pea-shaped glans, and the further the clitoris was from the vagina, the harder they
found it to achieve orgasm.
There is no recipe for good sex (Credit: Getty Images)
Taken together, these studies imply that there are multiple routes by which women can
experience an orgasm, be it through vaginal stimulation, clitoral stimulation, or both at once.
Further studies by Komisaruk have revealed that projections from different regions of the
female genitals – and indeed the nipples – all converge on the same general region of the
brain, albeit in slightly different areas. “There’s a good neuro-anatomical basis for different
types of orgasms and different types of sensations,” Komisaruk says. “This could account for
why combining clitoral, vaginal and cervical stimulation seems to produce these more
intense, complex and pleasurable orgasms that women describe.”
As for women who find it difficult to climax during penetrative sex – or indeed any sex – the
message is simple: experiment.
As for women who find it difficult to climax during penetrative sex – or indeed any sex –
Paul’s message is simple: experiment. “Women come to see me as patients and they’ll say ‘I
can’t have vaginal orgasms, so there must be something wrong with me’. There’s nothing
wrong with them. Everyone is a little different, so some women will have a lot of clitoral
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stimulation during sex, while for others it’s a little harder - so their partner may have to use
their hands or a toy. But women should know that if they don’t have orgasms with straight out
vaginal penetration, then that that’s normal.”
Jannini has an additional message for women: “Not only enjoy sex, but also enjoy knowing
yourself and understanding who you are today, because probably tomorrow you will be
different.” And don’t underestimate the infinite variety that’s on offer. “Do not think of the
female body as a machine that can always deliver the same,” he says.
Topic 6. The suprising downsides of being clever

Can high intelligence be a burden rather than a boon? David Robson investigates.
 By David Robson
 14 April 2015
If ignorance is bliss, does a high IQ equal misery? Popular opinion would have it so. We tend
to think of geniuses as being plagued by existential angst, frustration, and loneliness. Think
of Virginia Woolf, Alan Turing, or Lisa Simpson – lone stars, isolated even as they burn their
brightest. As Ernest Hemingway wrote: “Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I
know.”
The harsh truth is that greater intelligence does not equate to wiser decisions
The question may seem like a trivial matter concerning a select few – but the insights it offers
could have ramifications for many. Much of our education system is aimed at improving
academic intelligence; although its limits are well known, IQ is still the primary way of
measuring cognitive abilities, and we spend millions on brain training and cognitive
enhancers that try to improve those scores. But what if the quest for genius is itself a fool’s
errand?
Anxiety can be common among the highly intelligent (Credit: Thinkstock)
The first steps to answering these questions were taken almost a century ago, at the height
of the American Jazz Age. At the time, the new-fangled IQ test was gaining traction, after
proving itself in World War One recruitment centres, and in 1926, psychologist Lewis Terman
decided to use it to identify and study a group of gifted children. Combing California’s schools
for the creme de la creme, he selected 1,500 pupils with an IQ of 140 or more – 80 of whom
had IQs above 170. Together, they became known as the “Termites”, and the highs and lows
of their lives are still being studied to this day.
The Termites’ average salary was twice that of the average white-collar job
As you might expect, many of the Termites did achieve wealth and fame – most notably Jess
Oppenheimer, the writer of the classic 1950s sitcom I Love Lucy. Indeed, by the time his
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series aired on CBS, the Termites’ average salary was twice that of the average white-collar
job. But not all the group met Terman’s expectations – there were many who pursued more
“humble” professions such as police officers, seafarers, and typists. For this reason, Terman
concluded that “intellect and achievement are far from perfectly correlated”. Nor did their
smarts endow personal happiness. Over the course of their lives, levels of divorce,
alcoholism and suicide were about the same as the national average.
It's lonely being smart (Credit: Thinkstock)
As the Termites enter their dotage, the moral of their story – that intelligence does not equate
to a better life – has been told again and again. At best, a great intellect makes no
differences to your life satisfaction; at worst, it can actually mean you are less fulfilled.
That’s not to say that everyone with a high IQ is a tortured genius, as popular culture might
suggest – but it is nevertheless puzzling. Why don’t the benefits of sharper intelligence pay
off in the long term?
A weighty burden
One possibility is that knowledge of your talents becomes something of a ball and chain.
Indeed, during the 1990s, the surviving Termites were asked to look back at the events in
their 80-year lifespan. Rather than basking in their successes, many reported that they had
been plagued by the sense that they had somehow failed to live up to their youthful
expectations.
Early achievers don't always go on to be successful (Credit: Thinkstock)
That sense of burden – particularly when combined with others’ expectations – is a recurring
motif for many other gifted children. The most notable, and sad, case concerns the maths
prodigy Sufiah Yusof. Enrolled at Oxford University aged 12, she dropped out of her course
before taking her finals and started waitressing. She later worked as a call girl, entertaining
clients with her ability to recite equations during sexual acts.
Sufiah Yusof, a child prodigy, enrolled at Oxford aged 12 but later dropped out and worked
as a call girl
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Another common complaint, often heard in student bars and internet forums, is that
smarter people somehow have a clearer vision of the world’s failings. Whereas the rest of
us are blinkered from existential angst, smarter people lay awake agonising over the human
condition or other people’s folly.
Constant worrying may, in fact, be a sign of intelligence – but not in the way these armchair
philosophers had imagined. Interviewing students on campus about various topics of
discussion, Alexander Penney at MacEwan University in Canada found that those with the
higher IQ did indeed feel more anxiety throughout the day. Interestingly, most worries were
mundane, day-to-day concerns, though; the high-IQ students were far more likely to be
replaying an awkward conversation, than asking the “big questions”. “It’s not that their
worries were more profound, but they are just worrying more often about more things,” says
Penney. “If something negative happened, they thought about it more.”
(Credit: Thinkstock)
Probing more deeply, Penney found that this seemed to correlate with verbal intelligence –
the kind tested by word games in IQ tests, compared to prowess at spatial puzzles (which, in
fact, seemed to reduce the risk of anxiety). He speculates that greater eloquence might also
make you more likely to verbalise anxieties and ruminate over them. It’s not necessarily a
disadvantage, though. “Maybe they were problem-solving a bit more than most people,” he
says – which might help them to learn from their mistakes.
Mental blind spots
The harsh truth, however, is that greater intelligence does not equate to wiser decisions; in
fact, in some cases it might make your choices a little more foolish. Keith Stanovich at the
University of Toronto has spent the last decade building tests for rationality, and he has
found that fair, unbiased decision-making is largely independent of IQ. Consider the “my-side
bias” – our tendency to be highly selective in the information we collect so that it reinforces
our previous attitudes. The more enlightened approach would be to leave your assumptions
at the door as you build your argument – but Stanovich found that smarter people are
almost no more likely to do so than people with distinctly average IQs.
People who ace cognitive tests are more likely to see past their own flaws
That’s not all. People who ace standard cognitive tests are in fact slightly more likely to have
a “bias blind spot”. That is, they are less able to see their own flaws, even when though they
are quite capable of criticising the foibles of others. And they have a greater tendency to fall
for the “g am bler’s f allacy” – the idea that if a tossed coin turns heads 10 times, it will be
more likely to fall tails on the 11th. The fallacy has been the ruination of roulette players
planning for a red after a string of blacks, and it can also lead stock investors to sell their
shares
before they reach peak value – in the belief that their luck has to run out sooner or later.
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Members of high IQ society Mensa are not immune to belief in the paranormal (Credit:
Thinkstock)
A tendency to rely on gut instincts rather than rational thought might also explain why a
surprisingly high number of Mensa members believe in the paranormal; or why someone
with an IQ of 140 is about twice as likely to max out their credit card.
Indeed, Stanovich sees these biases in every strata of society. “There is plenty of
dysrationalia – people doing irrational things despite more than adequate intelligence – in our
world today,” he says. “The people pushing the anti-vaccination meme on parents and
spreading misinformation on websites are generally of more than average intelligence and
education.” Clearly, clever people can be dangerously, and foolishly, misguided.
People with an IQ above 140 are twice as likely to overspend on their credit card (Credit:
Thinkstock)
So if intelligence doesn’t lead to rational decisions and a better life, what does? Igor
Grossmann, at the University of Waterloo in Canada, thinks we need to turn our minds to an
age-old concept: “wisdom”. His approach is more scientific that it might at first sound. “The
concept of wisdom has an ethereal quality to it,” he admits. “But if you look at the lay
definition of wisdom, many people would agree it’s the idea of someone who can make good
unbiased judgement.”
In one experiment, Grossmann presented his volunteers with different social dilemmas –
ranging from what to do about the war in Crimea to heartfelt crises disclosed to Dear Abby,
the Washington Post’s agony aunt. As the volunteers talked, a panel of psychologists judged
their reasoning and weakness to bias: whether it was a rounded argument, whether the
candidates were ready to admit the limits of their knowledge – their “intellectual humility” –
and whether they were ignoring important details that didn’t fit their theory.
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High achievers tend to lament opportunities missed in their lives (Credit: Thinkstock)
High scores turned out to predict greater life satisfaction, relationship quality, and, crucially,
reduced anxiety and rumination – all the qualities that seem to be absent in classically smart
people. Wiser reasoning even seemed to ensure a longer life – those with the higher scores
were less likely to die over intervening years. Crucially, Grossmann found that IQ was not
related to any of these measures, and certainly didn’t predict greater wisdom. “People who
are very sharp may generate, very quickly, arguments [for] why their claims are the correct
ones – but may do it in a very biased fashion.”
Learnt wisdom
In the future, employers may well begin to start testing these abilities in place of IQ;
Google has already announced that it plans to screen candidates for qualities like
intellectual humility, rather than sheer cognitive prowess.
Fortunately, wisdom is probably not set in stone – whatever your IQ score. “I’m a strong
believer that wisdom can be trained,” says Grossmann. He points out that we often find it
easier to leave our biases behind when we consider other people, rather than ourselves.
Along these lines, he has found that simply talking through your problems in the third person
( “ he” or “she”, r ather t han “I ”) helps create the necessary emotional distance,
reducing your prejudices and leading to wiser arguments. Hopefully, more research will
suggest many similar tricks.
The challenge will be getting people to admit their own foibles. If you’ve been able to rest on
the laurels of your intelligence all your life, it could be very hard to accept that it has been
blinding your judgement. As Socrates had it: the wisest person really may be the one who
can admit he knows nothing.
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Topic 7. Why do babies laugh out loud

Babies can't possibly get a joke, so what causes their giggles? The answer might reveal a lot
about the making of our minds, says Tom Stafford.
 By Tom Stafford
 28 July 2015
What makes babies laugh? It sounds like one of the most fun questions a researcher could
investigate, but there's a serious scientific reason why Caspar Addyman wants to find out.
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He’s not the first to ask this question. Darwin studied laughter in his infant son, and Freud
formed a theory that our tendency to laugh originates in a sense of superiority. So we take
pleasure at seeing another's suffering - slapstick style pratfalls and accidents being good
examples - because it isn’t us.
The great psychologist of human development, Jean Piaget, thought that babies’ laughter
could be used to see into their minds. If you laugh, you must 'get the joke' to some degree - a
good joke is balanced in between being completely unexpected and confusing and being
predictable and boring. Studying when babies laugh might therefore be a great way of
gaining insight into how they understand the world, he reasoned. But although he proposed
this in the 1940s, this idea remains to be properly tested. Despite the fact that some very
famous investigators have studied the topic, it has been neglected by modern psychology.
If you want to make a baby laugh, then tickling is the surefire method (Credit: Getty Images)
Addyman, of Birkbeck, University of London, is out to change that. He believes we can use
laughter to get at exactly how infants understand the world. He's completed the world's
largest and most comprehensive survey of what makes babies laugh, presenting his
initial
results at the International Conference on Infant Studies, Berlin, last year. Via his website he
surveyed more than 1000 parents from around the world, asking them questions about when,
where and why their babies laugh.
The results are - like the research topic - heart-warming. A baby's first smile comes at about
six weeks, their first laugh at about three and a half months (although some took three times
as long to laugh, so don't worry if your baby hasn’t cracked its first cackle just yet). Peekaboo
is a sure-fire favourite for making babies laugh (for a variety of reasons I've written about
here), but tickling is the single most reported reason that babies laugh.
Babies are far more likely to laugh when they fall over, rather than when someone else falls
over
Importantly, from the very first chuckle, the survey responses show that babies are laughing
with other people, and at what they do. The mere physical sensation of something being
ticklish isn’t enough. Nor is it enough to see something disappear or appear suddenly. It’s
only funny when an adult makes these things happen for the baby. This shows that way
before babies walk, or talk, they - and their laughter - are social. If you tickle a baby they
apparently laugh because you are tickling them, not just because they are being tickled.
What's more, babies don't tend to laugh at people falling over. They are far more likely to
laugh when they fall over, rather than someone else, or when other people are happy, rather
than when they are sad or unpleasantly surprised. From these results, Freud's theory (which,
in any case, was developed based on clinical interviews with adults, rather than any rigorous
formal study of actual children) - looks dead wrong.
Although parents report that boy babies laugh slightly more than girl babies, both genders
find mummy and daddy equally funny.
26
27
Babies find us funny - even if they're too young to understand why we're funny (Credit: Getty
Images)
Addyman continues to collect data, and hopes that as the results become clearer he'll be
able to use his analysis to show how laughter tracks babies' developing understanding of the
world - how surprise gives way to anticipation, for example, as their ability to remember
objects comes online.
Despite the scientific potential, baby laughter is, as a research topic, “strangely neglected”,
according to Addyman. Part of the reason is the difficulty of making babies laugh reliably in
the lab, although he plans to tackle this in the next phase of the project. But partly the topic
has been neglected, he says, because it isn't viewed as a subject for 'proper' science to look
into. This is a prejudice Addyman hopes to overturn - for him, the study of laughter is
certainly no joke.
If you have an everyday psychological phenomenon you'd like to see written about in these
columns please get in touch@tomstafford or ideas@idiolect.org.uk. If you are a parent you
can contribute to the science of how babies develop at Dr Addyman’s babylaughter.net
(specialising in laugher) or at babylovesscience.com (which covers humour as well as
other topics).
Topic 8. Why do we intiutively believe we have free will?

Free will experiments may not explain whether we are in charge of our destinies – but
they can nevertheless reveal just how little we know about our own minds, says Tom
Stafford.
 By Tom Stafford
 7 August 2015
It is perhaps the most famous experiment in neuroscience. In 1983, Benjamin Libet

sparked controversy with his demonstration that our sense of free will may be an illusion, a
controversy that has only increased ever since.
Libet’s experiment has three vital components: a choice, a measure of brain activity and a
clock.
The choice is to move either your left or right arm. In the original version of the experiment
this is by flicking your wrist; in some versions of the experiment it is to raise your left or right
finger. Libet’s participants were instructed to “let the urge [to move] appear on its own at any
time without any pre-planning or concentration on when to act”. The precise time at which
you move is recorded from the muscles of your arm.
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The measure of brain activity is taken via electrodes on the scalp. When the electrodes are
placed over the motor cortex (roughly along the middle of the head), a different electrical
signal appears between right and left as you plan and execute a movement on either the left
or right.
You may think you are in charge of your actions, but is that just an illusion? (Credit: Getty
Images)
The clock is specially designed to allow participants to discern sub-second changes. This
clock has a single dot, which travels around the face of the clock every 2.56 seconds. This
means that by reporting position you are reporting time. If we assume you can report position
accurately to 5 degree angle, that means you can use this clock to report time to within 36
milliseconds – that’s 36 thousandths of a second.
Putting these ingredients together, Libet took one extra vital measurement. He asked
participants to report, using the clock, exactly the point when they made the decision to
move.
The brain activity showed that the decision had often already been made, before the
participants were aware of having taken action
Physiologists had known for decades that a fraction of a second before you actually move
the electrical signals in your brain change. So it was in Libet’s experiment, a fraction of a
second before participants moved, a reliable change could be recorded using the electrodes.
But the explosive result was when participants reported deciding to move. This occurred in
between the electric change in the brain and the actual movement. This means, as sure as
cause follows effect, that the feeling of deciding couldn’t be a timely report of whatever was
causing the movement. The electrode recording showed that the decision had – in some
sense – already been made before the participants were aware of having taken action. The
brain signals were changing before the subjective experience of taking a decision occurred.
We struggle to describe our thoughts and feelings accurately, making it difficult to tell when
we have made a decision (Credit: iStock)
Had participants’ brains already made the decision? Was the feeling of choosing just an
illusion? Controversy has raged ever since. There is far more to the discussion about
neuroscience and free will than this one experiment, but its simplicity has allowed it to
capture the imagination of many who think our status as biological creatures limits our free
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will, as well as those who argue that free will survives the challenge of our minds being firmly
grounded in our biological brains.
Part of the appeal of the Libet experiment is due to two pervasive intuitions we have about
the mind. Without these intuitions the experiment doesn’t seem so surprising.
The first intuition is the feeling that our minds are a separate thing from our physical selves –
a natural dualism that pushes us to believe that the mind is a pure, abstract place, free from
biological constraints. A moment’s thought about the last time you were grumpy because you
were hungry shatters this illusion, but I’d argue that it is still a persistent theme in our
thinking. Why else would we be the least surprised that it is possible to find neural correlates
of mental events? If we really believed, in our heart of hearts, that the mind is based in the
brain, then we would know that every mental change must have a corresponding change in
the brain.
The second pervasive intuition, which makes us surprised by the Libet experiment, is the
belief that we know our own minds. This is the belief that our subjective experience of
making decisions is an accurate report of how that decision is made. The mind is like a
machine – as long as it runs right, we are happily ignorant of how it works. It is only when
mistakes or contradictions arise that we’re drawn to look under the hood: Why didn’t I notice
that exit? How could I forget that person’s name? Why does the feeling of deciding come
after the brain changes associated with decision making?
There’s no reason to think that we are reliable reporters of every aspect of our minds’
contents
There’s no reason to think that we are reliable reporters of every aspect of our minds.
Psychology, in fact, gives us lots of examples of where we often get things wrong. The
feeling of deciding in the Libet experiment may be a complete illusion – maybe the real
decision really is made ‘by our brains’ somehow – or maybe it is just that the feeling of
deciding is delayed from our actual deciding. Just because we erroneously report the timing
of the decision, doesn’t mean we weren’t intimately involved in it, in whatever meaningful
sense that can be.
More is written about the Libet experiment every year. It has spawned an academic industry
investigating the neuroscience of free will. There are many criticisms and rebuttals, with
debate raging about how and if the experiment is relevant to the freedom of our everyday
choices. Even supporters of Libet have to admit that the situation used in the experiment
may be too artificial to be a direct model of real everyday choices. But the basic experiment
continues to inspire discussion and provoke new thoughts about the way our freedom is
rooted in our brains. And that, I’d argue, is due to the way it helps us confront our intuitions
about the way the mind works, and to see that things are more complex than we instinctively
imagine.
Topic 9. I can predict the weather with my nose

A strange condition means that one patient smells burnt wood and skunks every time there’s
a storm brewing. Helen Thomson meets a human barometer
 By Helen Thomson
 18 September 2015
Max Livesey was on holiday when he suddenly noticed the smell of burning leaves. He
glanced around his hotel room but saw nothing that could have caused the strange aroma.
Over the next few weeks, the smell intensified, ranging from burnt wood to an oniony-gas.
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Eventually, he was convinced there was a family of skunks around. “My eyes started to
water, and I had this strange sensation in my throat that I couldn’t get away from,” he says.
Livesey (not his real name), now a 72-year-old software engineer, blamed the weird smell on
the musty hotel room. But the phantom smells returned when he was back home, increasing
throughout the day and persisting for hours.
Livesey went to see Alan Hirsch at the Smell and Taste Treatment and Research Foundation
in Chicago, who specialises in smell disorders. Hirsch tested his general olfaction by getting
him to smell different odours at a range of intensities. He discovered that Livesy’s ability to
sense ordinary smells had been impaired. This was not entirely unexpected: Livesey had
Parkinson’s disease, and a poor sense of smell is a common symptom. This is likely due to
the disease causing damage to the olfactory nerves, which are cells that transmit information
about sense of smell from the nose to the brain.
The human barometer
But why the hallucinations? Occasionally, we all get what’s known as “spontaneous olfactory
discharge” where our olfactory nerves become briefly active. Normally, this discharge is
inhibited by other neurons sending out information about real smells, and so it doesn’t
amount to anything. However, an impaired ability to smell stops these olfactory discharges
from being suppressed, which means they are consequently perceived as phantom
odours. (For a similar reason, some people with hearing difficulties can start to notice
haunting strains of music that are purely the product of their mind.)
An oncoming storm can smell like a family of skunks (Credit: Getty Images)
“My eyes started to water, and I had this strange sensation in my throat that I couldn’t get
away from”
However, Livesey had started to notice something even more peculiar: his hallucinations
would get worse just before a storm. Two to three hours before clouds gather, his
phantosmia intensifies and persist throughout a storm. Sometimes, he says, he can predict a
storm coming up to ten hours before it starts.
Hirsch says this is the first case of weather-induced phantosmia he has ever come across.
It’s not, however, the first time that weather and human ailments have been linked.
My knees hurt... it must be about to rain
Over two thousand years ago, Hippocrates observed a link between neurological complaints
and the weather. In 1887, researchers first investigated this relationship and found a
significant link between temperature and humidity and the intensity of joint and muscle aches
in people with chronic pain. Since then, links between the weather and migraines, as well as
the weather and pain in people with multiple sclerosis have been well documented.
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Less well-known is the fact that our sense of smell is also known to decrease with a drop in
air pressure, says Hirsch. Since a drop in barometric pressure that precedes a thunderstorm
would reduce Livesey’s olfactory ability even further, it may serve to further increase his
phantosmia.
Of course, Livesey’s phantom smells may simply be a case of recall bias, where a selective
memory may lead him to notice the times that his phantosmia gets worse before a storm
than when it fluctuates at other times. Or it could be that he’s already been primed by a
weather forecast beforehand. Livesey doesn’t believe this is the case – on many occasions
he has not seen a forecast, yet was still able to predict the onset of bad weather.
Broken nerves from the nose may cause the brain to make up its own phantom smells
(Credit Getty Images)
Hirsch also believes that a real link between weather and phantosmia exists. He says that
you also see phantosmia when you put someone – say a mountaineer training for a high
altitude environment – into a hypobaric chamber, where they experience low ambient air
pressures. “We also see phantosmia in people who are on long excursions in high altitude
areas of Antarctica,” he says.
Since meeting Livesey, Hirsch has treated a few other individuals with similar complaints:
“Everyone we’ve seen so far has a somewhat impaired sense of smell in normal conditions
and describes how the hallucinations are most intense right before a storm,” he says.
Going up?
It’s a difficult problem to investigate objectively. In one preliminary experiment, Hirsch tried to
induce the hallucinations by getting his patients to travel in the express elevator up to the top
of the John Hancock Centre – a 100-story, 1,127-foot tall skyscraper in Chicago. Although it
had little effect on Livesey’s phatosmia, Hirsch says that the resulting change in pressure did
increase the intensity of some of his patient’s phantom smells, which suggests that the
problem may well be sensitive to subtle changes in air pressure.
When they’re at their most intense they can smell like excrement
Unfortunately, there’s no permanent treatment. A few years ago, Livesey added L-dopa to
his drug regime for Parkinson’s, and for a couple of months his hallucinations were barely
noticeable. Recently, though, they’ve had some bad weather in Chicago and his phantosmia
has returned.
32
Filling your nose with fragrant scents may put an end to the nasty hallucinations that come
with "phantosmia" (Credit: Getty Images)
One idea was that he might be able to reduce the hallucinations by boosting his remaining
sense of smell. A few months ago, on Hirsch’s recommendation, he started sniffing three
different scents, three times a day – these fragrant scents appear to replace the hallucinated
smell. “It seems to be helping,” he says, “but maybe that’s just wishful thinking.” Mostly, he
just tries to ignore the smells. Focusing on work helps, he says, as does laughing and eating.
Livesey’s hallucinations aren’t painful but they are annoying, he says. “When they’re at their
most intense they can smell like excrement – that’s rather distracting.”
The smell sometimes changes but he says it’s almost always unpleasant. “There are also the
physiological effects that I get from the smell, like watery eyes,” he says. “I read about some
people who hallucinate the smell of roses. I’d like to know who that is – I’d prefer that!”
I wondered whether anyone ever asks him what the weather’s going to be. He laughs. “No,
it’s not 100% accurate. I’m not the national weather service. If they do, I tell them to go look
at their iPad!”
Topic 10. The noise we’re creating in the sea can be deadly
Researchers are decoding a secret world of underwater chatter – and discovering the
plight of animals harmed by our noise.
 By Chris Baraniuk
 19 October 2015
Some years ago, Michel Andre found himself staring at the body of a dead sperm whale on
a beach in the Canary Islands. It was obvious that the animal had collided with a ship – but
why? Only later, after methodically surveying the whales which lived in the area and
measuring the increase of sound pollution from ships did it become clear that there was a
link.
There’s a world of sound and animal communication never observed with such clarity before
The whales had become desensitised to the noise of approaching boats and were being
struck by them, often fatally. “We never thought that this could be something that could kill,”
recalls Andre, who is the director of the Laboratory of Applied Bioacoustics at the Technical
University of Catalonia, Barcelona.
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Whales can be protected by changing shipping routes (Credit: Thinkstock)
Andre has spent 20 years developing an advanced system for listening to subsea noise in
order to better understand why incidents like this happen. His underwater microphones, or
hydrophones, have exposed a world of sound and animal communication never observed
with such clarity before.
Watch Andre collecting and decoding the sounds in the video below:
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The elaborate listening apparatus developed by Andre for detecting sound in the ocean is
dubbed “smart ears”. It not only detects the voices of whales, dolphins and other creatures,
but also the deafening whirr of boats, propellers and other marine machinery.
It was not an easy task. Sound waves don’t travel through water in the uniform, predictable
way they do through the air. Instead, the temperature, salinity and flow of the water column –
among other things – dramatically impact their path.
Michel Andre has an elaborate listening apparatus for hearing ocean noise (Credit: Michel
Andre)
There’s a lot of distortion, so Andre and his team had to develop algorithms that could
analyse the sounds in real-time and match them to a database of known ocean noises:
everything from whale song to dolphin-speak. No two sounds are the same, but the
algorithms are clever enough to pick out similarities in the audio waves and match them with
a reasonable degree of accuracy.
Andre’s system can also estimate how far away the sound source is by interpreting how
distorted the sound itself has become – partly an indicator of how much water it has travelled
through before reaching the hydrophone. The quality of sound, of course, is also dependent
on the movement of the animal that made it. “If the animal turns its head you will not get the
same sound or the same intensity,” he says.
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The noise of our efforts to exploit the ocean can be heard for hundreds of miles (Credit:
Thinkstock)
After taking tissue samples from the ears of beached whales, evidence of harm was found in
the cells of those sensory organs
A range of hydrophones, on buoys monitored by Andre, is now picking up audio signals in

seas all around the world. And the computer analysis is done extremely quickly – according
to Andre there’s just a three-second delay between picking up the sound and predicting
algorithmically what it is. Then, the result is transmitted back to the shore.
“We are overloaded with information,” he says. “It’s 24/7 – data coming from over 100
channels around the world.”
The Genius Behind
Inside innovative minds
This is part of the series The Genius Behind: telling the stories of the most amazing and
sometimes little-known technological and scientific breakthroughs of modern times, and the
innovative minds behind them.
Andre’s team aren’t just listening – they have also studied the physiological damage caused
to animals by noise. After taking tissue samples from the ears of beached whales, evidence
of harm was found in the cells of those sensory organs. This, then, was why creatures had
lost their ability to detect the noise of ships.
“If there are some missing structures of these cells, it means that the animal cannot codify
any more the sound that corresponds to this specific cell,” he explains.
The kind of noise that whales and other marine animals have to contend with is not trivial,
ranging from ship sounds to loud explosions.
Shipping can be cacophonous (Credit: Thinkstock)
Christopher Willes Clark, a bioacoustician at Cornell University (who is not involved with
Andre’s work), says ships easily drown out the noise of whale songs and the animals are
also exposed to deafening explosions caused by subsea oil and gas exploration surveys.
35
“We set off extremely loud explosions every 10 seconds for months at a time such that I can
hear a prospecting survey going on near Ireland – I can hear that off Virginia,” says Clark.
One solution is to divert shipping routes to courses where ships are statistically less likely to
encounter marine mammals
What can be done? One solution is to divert shipping routes to courses where ships are
statistically less likely to encounter marine mammals. It’s also possible, sometimes, to slow
down to 10 knots an hour (18km/h) or less, which is less likely to fatally injure a whale. Clark
explains that this leads to a “significant” reduction in the chances of an animal collision.
"We never thought that this could be something that could kill" - Michel Andre on the noise
caused by shipping and other human noises (Credit: Getty Images)
As for tackling the root cause of the problem, the UN’s International Maritime Organisation
(IMO) has already published guidelines on how to quieten ships, but it will be a while
before the impact of such changes might be observed in the wild. Plus, businesses and
vessel operators will have to co-operate.
“The ocean is not our world,” comments Andre. But it is ours to look after. And thanks to his
work, we can better understand the impact of subsea sound pollution.
“The fact that now we have access to the sound, it is completing the picture that we have,”
he says. “This is the only way we can understand what is going on.
Topic 11. The geniuses who invented prothetic limbs

Moments of genius can strike at unexpected times. Here we look at some of the
fearless inventors who pushed forward prosthetic technology.
2 November 2015
Easton LaChappelle's brainwave for building a new prosthetic arm came after he was bored
in class.
He stumbled across a cheaper alternative to the expensive prosthetic limbs currently

available, as the video below shows.
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The history of prosthetic limbs is littered with such masterstrokes.
The world’s earliest functional prosthetic body parts are thought to be two examples of
artificial toes from Ancient Egypt. These toes predate the previously earliest known
prosthesis – the Roman Capula Leg – by several hundred years. What makes them unique is
their functionality. Early prostheses were mostly decorative, but these Egyptian toes are an
early example of a true prosthetic device.
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“The big toe is thought to carry some 40% of the bodyweight and is responsible for forward
propulsion,” said Dr Jacky Finch, then at the University of Manchester. Modern prosthetic
toes would be produced only after intensive study of an individuals 's gait using cameras and
other monitoring equipment.
This Egyptian toe may be one of the earliest prosthetics made (Credit: Dr Jacky Finch)
Dr Finch selected two volunteers to test replicas of the toes and to their surprise they were
very comfortable: “My findings strongly suggest that both of these designs were capable of
functioning as replacements for the lost toe and so could indeed be classed as prosthetic
devices. If that is the case then it would appear that the first glimmers of this branch of
medicine should be firmly laid at the feet of the ancient Egyptians.”
Dark Age design
In general, artificial limbs moved forward little up to this point. However, this iron prosthetic,
belonging to Gotz von Berlichingen (1480-1562), a German knight who served with the Holy
Roman Emperor Charles V, shows how they came to incorporate hinges.
Medieval artificial limbs allowed amputees to continue their fighting careers (Credit: Science
Museum London / Science and Society Picture Library CC BY 2.0/Wikimedia)
Artificial limbs like these were expensive but allowed wearers who had lost a limb to continue
a fighting career. The articulated fingers could be used to grasp a shield, hold reins or even a
quill. This limb was manufactured for von Berlichingen by a specialist armourer.
Centuries later, huge number of casualties in the American Civil War caused demand for
artificial limbs to skyrocket. Many veterans turned to designing their own prosthetics as a
response to the limiting capabilities of the limbs on offer.
James Hanger, one of the first amputees of the war, patented the ‘Hanger Limb’. Samuel
Decker (pictured) also designed his own artificial arms and became a pioneer of modular
limb design.
(Credit: National Museum of Health and Medicine CC BY 2.0)
37
In the design pictured, Decker has a spoon attached to his mechanical arms, recognising the
need to be able to perform everyday activities with his prosthetics. Designs now needed to
do more than replace the lost limb, they needed to offer the young amputees some of their
former abilities back. For the first time, a generation of young men would now lead lives as
amputees. Decker went on to become the official doorkeeper at the US House of
Representatives.
Around 1900, the pioneers of prosthetic design had begun the idea of specialised artificial
limbs. Limb design looked to more than just decorative uses and became increasingly more
specialist.
As technology improved, artifical limbs became more sophisticated (Credit: Wellcome

Images CC BY 2.0/Wikimedia)
Wide spread fingers, index, middle and ring finger smaller than normal, and padded tips on
the thumb and little finger, the above prosthetic had one specific purpose. This is an example
of an artificial arm for a pianist who would go on to perform at the Royal Albert Hall, London,
in 1906. The spread fingers allowed her to span one entire octave.
Despite her moment of fame, the name of the female pianist is now unknown. The Science
Museum, where this limb is now kept, has done their best to discover her identity. If you
know who it could be, get in touch.
Modern methods
For the first time, artificial limbs were being mass-produced in response to the enormous
number of casualties in World War One. In the US, the Walter Reed Army Hospital produced
a large number of artificial limbs for the returning veterans. This example is of a welding
attachment and other tools integrated into the limbs for amputees to return to work after the
war.
Post-WWI, new prosthetics allowed people to perform previously impossible tasks, like
welding or driving a car (Credit: National Museum of Health and Medicine CC BY 2.0/Flickr)
It wasn’t all work, however. Also in the collection of the National Museum of Health and
Medicine, USA, is an attachment for playing baseball. The Walter Reed Army Hospital is still
a centre for artificial limb production in the US, 100 years later.
The technology continued to develop after WW1. DW Dorrance invented the split hook
artificial hand shortly before World War I. It became popular with labourers after the war who
were able to return to work using the attachment because of its ability to grip and manipulate
objects. It’s one of the few designs that have remained relatively unchanged over the past
century. Dorrance demonstrated its multi-functionality in the 1930s by driving a car using the
arm.
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Queen Mary’s Hospital, Roehampton became an important centre for manufacturing limbs
(Credit: Imperial War Museum CC BY 2.0/Wikimedia)
In the UK, Queen Mary’s Hospital, Roehampton, became a centre for manufacturing artificial
limbs in the World War Two. It opened in 1939. In its first year, 10,987 war pensioners
attended the centre, with an additional 16,251 limbs being sent by post. At the outbreak of
war, the factory was expanded because of the realisation that 40,000 UK servicemen had
lost limbs in WW1.
However in WW2 there was around half the number of amputees. As Leon Gillis, QMH
Consultant Surgeon from 1943-1967, observed, advances in surgical techniques, treatment
of infections and the availability of blood transfusion after WW1 all reduced the need for
amputation
Topic. 12. If alien life exists on exoplanets, how would we know?

9 November 2015
Staring at the twinkling stars in the night sky, it’s easy to forget that those faint, distant lights
are all suns. And, just like the fiery orb blazing away at the centre of our Solar System, those
suns may have orbiting planets.
It’s not like we can zoom in to look at the surface of an alien planet
“We think there are upwards of hundreds of billions of planets in our galaxy alone,” says
astrophysicist Sara Seager. She is a born explorer, dedicating her life to the hunt for
exoplanets far, far away with Earth-like conditions that could harbour life.
But how will we ever know what planets outside the Solar System might support life? It’s not
like we can zoom in to the surface to look – the distance is simply too great – and if an alien
species wasn’t intelligent, it wouldn’t be broadcasting either.
Seager, however, believes she has a way to spot biological signatures on exoplanets – and it
involves a giant flower-shaped spacecraft capable of blocking out the light of an entire star.
Watch the video above to see what it takes to achieve this seemingly impossible task.
Seager has been described as an "astronomical Indiana Jones"
39
Seager has said in the past she only has one goal in life, besides raising her children: to find
a second Earth
Exoplanets need to live in the Goldilocks zone – not too hot, not too cold, but just right for
life, says Seager
To find life, we will need to launch an enormous 'starshade', says Seager
The video above is part of a series called The Genius Behind: The most amazing and
sometimes little known technological and scientific breakthroughs of modern times, and the
innovative minds behind them.
Topic 13. To find aliens, we need to build a giant space parasol

Could the light from stars be hiding evidence of extraterrestrial life? A giant
“Starshade” could soon reveal answers.
 By Marcus Woo
Alien hunting isn’t just tabloid fodder anymore. Over the last few years, astronomers have
discovered thousands of planets outside the Solar System, suggesting that the galaxy is
teeming with worlds – at least as many as one planet per star, on average.
The existence of so many planets raises the odds that at least one of them has life – and it’s
possible there may even be an Earth “twin” – making alien-hunting a bona fide scientific
endeavour. “We’re now ready to make the transition from ‘are there planets?’ to ‘is there life
on these planets?’” says Nick Siegler, the chief technologist of Nasa’s Exoplanet Exploration
40
Program. “That’s a huge shift in how Nasa’s thinking about the search for life and what’s next
in the world of planetary science.”
It’s harder than it seems to spot life from millions of miles away, especially if it’s not intelligent
The trouble is, it’s harder than it seems to spot life from millions of miles away, especially if
it’s not intelligent. Last week in our series “The Genius Behind”, we told the story of Sara
Seager, a scientist looking for signs of life on second Earths, who believes that the key is to
scrutinise the atmospheres of these alien worlds. Find out why in the film below:
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One of the technologies that could help researchers like Seager achieve their goal is a
seemingly crazy flower-shaped contraption called Starshade. It’s a sort of giant space
parasol designed to block light from a star, allowing a telescope to avoid the star's glare and
peer into the planets in orbit – and, possibly, reveal signs of alien life.
The part-built structure supporting the Starshade, unfurled on Earth (Credit: Nasa)
“If we want to find a true Earth twin in the near future – like in the next decade or two – then
yes, we definitely need to do the Starshade,” says Seager, who is based at Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT).
That’s because a Sun-like star is 10 billion times brighter than an Earth-sized planet. The
only hope astronomers have for glimpsing any hint of life – likely some form of
microorganism – would be to somehow block the light from such a star, allowing a telescope
to directly observe the planet itself. It’s a strategy radically different from the main way
astronomers have discovered and studied planets so far.
Because planets are so distant, small, and faint, astronomers have mostly probed them
indirectly – for example by detecting dips in starlight when a planet passes in front of its star
or by measuring how the star wobbles when a planet’s gravity tugs on it. But alien-hunting
demands a new tactic.
Scientists hope to identify the gases in the planet’s atmosphere, and detect chemicals that
suggest the presence of life – chemicals like oxygen, which comprises 20% of Earth's
atmosphere.
The glare of a distant light in Starshade tests illustrates how hard it is to see anything in
detail close to a star (Credit: Northrop Grumman)
“Without life – plants or photosynthetic bacteria – we would have virtually no oxygen,” Seager
says. Which is why oxygen is one of the most promising so-called biosignatures. But life on
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Earth produces all kinds of gases, and alien life could be even more diverse. The challenge
is in determining whether these chemicals are biological in origin.
Although no-one’s found any signs of life yet, astronomers have already sniffed out some
atmospheres
Although no-one’s found any signs of life yet, astronomers have already sniffed out some
atmospheres. When a planet passes in front of its star, the starlight penetrates the gaseous
layer enveloping the planet. The molecules in the atmosphere absorb specific wavelengths of
light, depending on what the chemical is. By measuring which wavelengths are absorbed,
astronomers can identify the gases.
Bigger telescopes like the James Webb Space Telescope, slated for launch in 2018, will be
able to use this transit technique to resolve atmospheric chemistry in greater detail. It could
even conceivably detect biosignatures. “It could get lucky,” Siegler says. But this method is
only good for planetary systems around small stars called M dwarfs – not around Sun-like
stars.
Which is why astronomers like Seager want to make Starshade a reality. The video below
shows how it might work in space, as well as a timelapse of the instrument unfurling on
Earth.
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The Starshade is launched with a telescope, and when it reaches its position in deep space,
it will unfurl and expand to a diameter as wide as 34m (112ft). The petals, which will likely be
razor-sharp, remove the effects of diffraction, in which light waves bend around the edge of
the shade and produce unwanted glare. The shade and telescope will then separate by as
much as 50,000 kilometres (31,250 miles) – almost four times the diameter of Earth.
Suffice to say, this isn't easy. But researchers have shown the idea to work with experiments
in the desert, using a lamp, a model Starshade, and a camera. Jeremy Kasdin of Princeton
University, one of the leaders of the Starshade project, is conducting lab tests with a
miniature model to scale – the setup stretches for 78m (257ft), with a Starshade about five
centimetres wide.
A test Starshade much smaller than the final version was used to explore the technique in
the desert (Credit: Northrop Grumman)
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You may be able to see a pinprick of light in the distance, designed to simulate a star in
desert tests (Credit: Northrop Grumman)
If the project gets enough funding and all goes well, Nasa could launch Starshade as early
as 2026. “We don’t see right now any technical impediments to complete a Starshade and
flying it in the 2020s,” Kasdin says.
But Starshade isn’t the only way to block starlight. Its launch could coincide with WFIRST, a
next-generation space telescope that’s planned to be fitted with an instrument called a
coronagraph, which blocks starlight from inside the telescope. “We want multiple approaches
in case one doesn’t work,” Siegler says.
A coronagraph is a tried-and-tested technology – first developed in the 1930s to study the

outer layers of the sun called the corona – and could also find Earth’s twin. But, Siegler says,
the technology isn’t there yet.
This is a simulation of how the Starshade would see our Solar System if millions of miles
away (Credit: Robert J Vanderbei)
Coronagraphs are complex and fragile instruments, which make them susceptible to the
Sun’s heat and vibrations from things like the telescope’s reaction wheels used to orient the
spacecraft. Anything that can knock the telescope off-kilter means stray starlight gets into the
camera, ruining the observations. Deformable mirrors can cancel out some distortions, but
the current systems can’t pick out an Earth-sized planet awash in starlight.
Watch how coronagraphs work in this animation:
The Genius Behind
Be inspired by great minds and ideas
This is part of a series called The Genius Behind, about the most amazing and
sometimes little known technological breakthroughs, and the innovative minds behind
them.
With Starshade, however, the starlight never even reaches the telescope. All you need is a
relatively simple and small telescope, which is cheaper and easier to build. Alternatively,
Starshade may not even need its own telescope, and instead rely on WFIRST.
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In the meantime, the hunt for Earth’s twin is heating up. “There’s a lot of great science to be
had by looking at planets of all size scales, but ultimately, most of us really want to find an
Earth-like planet,” says Kasdin. If that happens, calls will surely grow for answers about
whether it is inhabited – the Starshade and projects like it may turn out to be our best
chance.
Topic 14. What is it like to have never felt an emotion?

Some people seem to lack the capacity to feel joy, sorrow or love. David Robson
discovers the challenges and surprising advantages of “alexithymia”.
 By David Robson
 19 August 2015
Caleb is telling me about the birth of his son, now eight months old. “You know you hear
parents say that the first time they looked at their kid, they were overcome with that feeling of
joy and affection?” he asks me, before pausing. “I didn’t experience any of that.”
His wedding day was equally flat. To illustrate his point, he compares it to a Broadway show.
In front of the stage, he says, the audience are transported by the drama. Look behind the
scenes, however, and you will find the technical engineers, focusing on analysing the
technicalities of the event.
People with the condition call themselves “alexes”
Despite taking centre stage at the ceremony, he felt similarly detached from the tides of
emotion swelling up in the people around him. “For me, it was a mechanical production,”
says Caleb (who asked us not to use his full name). Even as his wife walked down the aisle,
the only sensation he felt was his face flushing and a heaviness in his feet; his mind was
completely clear of joy, happiness, or love in its conventional sense.
In fact, Caleb claims not to feel almost any emotions – good, or bad. I meet him through an
inter net f or um f or people wit h “ alexit hym ia” – a kind of emotional “colour-blindness”
that prevents them from perceiving or expressing the many shades of feeling that normally
embellish our lives. The condition is found in around 50% of people with autism, but many
“alexes” (as they call themselves) such as Caleb do not show any other autistic traits such as
compulsive or repetitive behaviour.
When you struggle to feel any emotions yourself, others' behaviour can seem alien to you
What does it mean to fall in love, when you lack the capacity to feel affection?
Getting to the bottom of this emotional blindness could shed light on many serious illnesses,
from anorexia and schizophrenia to chronic pain and irritable bowel syndrome. More
personally, stories from the “alex community” lead you to re-examine experiences that you
might think you know so well. How can you fall in love, for example, when you lack all the
basic tender feelings of affection that normally spark a romance?
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Shells of feeling
To understand that emotional numbness, it helps to imagine emotions as a kind of Russian

doll, formed of different shells, each one becoming more intricate. At the heart is a bodily
sensation – the skip in your heart when you see the person you love, or the churning
stomach that comes with anger. The brain may then attach a value to those feelings – you
know if it is good or bad, and if that feeling is strong, or weak; the amorphous sensations
begin to take a shape and form a conscious representation of an emotion. The feelings can
be nuanced, perhaps blending different types of emotions, such as bitter-sweet sorrow, and
eventually we attach words to them – you can describe your despair, or your joy, and you
can explain how you came to feel that way.
When alexithymia was first described in 1972, the problem was thought to centre on this last,
linguistic stage: deep down people with alexithymia felt the same as everyone else, but they
just couldn’t put the emotions into words. The scientists hypothesised that this may result
from a breakdown in communication between the two hemispheres, preventing signals from
the emotional regions, predominantly in the right, from reaching the language areas,
predominantly in the left. “You need that emotional transfer in order to verbalise what you’re
feeling,” says Katharina Goerlich-Dobre at RWTH Aachen University. This could be seen,
most dramatically, when surgeons tried to cure epilepsy by cutting the fibres that connect the
two hemispheres; although it reduced the seizures, the patients also appeared emotionally
mute as a result. Less sensationally, Goerlich-Dobre’s brain scans have found that other
people with alexithymia seem to have abnormally dense connections in that neural bridge.
This might create a noisy signal (a bit like a badly tuned radio) that prevents emotional cross-
talk, she thinks.
When surgeons cut the dense connections between the two hemispheres, patients become
emotionally mute and unable to express their feelings (Credit: Science Photo Library)
Today, it seems clear that there may be many types of alexithymia. While some might have
trouble expressing emotions, others (like Caleb) might not even be conscious of the feelings
in the first place. Richard Lane, at the University of Arizona compares it to people who have
gone blind after damage to the visual cortex; despite having healthy eyes, they can’t see the
images. In the same way, a damaged neural circuit involved in emotional processing might
prevent sadness, happiness or anger from bursting into consciousness. (Using the analogy
of the Russian doll, their emotions are breaking down at the second shell of feeling – their
bodies are reacting normally, but the sensations don’t merge to form an emotional thought or
feeling.) “Maybe the emotion gets activated, you even have the bodily responses, but it
happens without you being consciously aware of the emotion,” he says.
Along these lines, a few recent fMRI scanning studies have found signs of a more basic
perceptual problem in some types of alexithymia. Goerlich-Dobre, for instance, found
reduced grey matter in areas of the cingulate cortex serving self-awareness, potentially
blocking a conscious representation of the emotions. And André Aleman at the University
Medical Centre in Groningen, the Netherlands, detected some deficits in areas
associated
with attention when alexithymics look at emotionally charged-pictures; it was as if their brains
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just weren’t registering the feelings. “I think this fits quite well with [Lane’s] theory,” says
Aleman – who had initially suspected other causes. “We have to admit they are right.”
The more extreme the emotion I should be feeling, the more it should be colouring how I’m
thinking. In reality I have a clearer head, I become more analytical – Caleb
Caleb himself describes a “conscious disconnect” that prevents emotions from breaking
through into his mind. For instance, one day at school he was working with the student
theatre. All week he had been struggling to produce the right sound effects, but it just wasn’t
coming together. Eventually, his boss lost his cool and started ripping into him. “My response
was that something weird was happening with my body,” he says. “I could feel a tension, like
my heart was racing, but my mind was distracted… It was an academic curiosity, and then I
completely forgot about the whole situation,” he says. It seems that almost no event can
penetrate that indifference. “The more extreme the emotion I should be feeling, the more it
should be colouring how I’m thinking. In reality I end up having a clearer head – I become
more analytical.”
Contrary to the stereotype, autistic people do not all suffer emotional or social difficulties
(Credit: Science Photo Library)
I can put up with unpleasant experiences because I know I won’t have memory associated
with it – Caleb
There is one, slim advantage: he finds it easier to cope with medical procedures, since he
doesn’t attach the fear, sadness or anxiety to it. “I can put up with an awful lot of pain or
unpleasant experiences because I know very shortly I won’t have an emotional memory
associated with it,” he says. “But it means that positive memories get washed away too.”
Neural short circuit
It is a small pay-off, however: alexithymia seems to be linked to various other illnesses,

including schizophrenia and eating disorders, perhaps because emotions normally guide us
to take better care of our physical and mental health. Better defining alexithymia could
therefore offer insights into these disorders. It could also give us a more nuanced
understanding of autism. Despite the stereotypes, Geoffrey Bird at Kings College London
points out that around half of autistic people are perfectly capable of perceiving and
responding to others, and those with social problems tend to also be suffering from
alexithymia. For this reason, he thinks that distinguishing the two, distinct, disorders could
therefore lead to better guidance. At the moment, misunderstandings can often stand in the
way of some autistic people getting the help they need. “One autistic adult I worked with
wanted to be a carer, but she was told ‘you don’t have empathy so can’t have the job’,” he
says. “Our research shows that lots of people with autism are fully okay with emotions.”
They are hypersensitive to bodily perceptions, and not able to focus on anything else, which
might be one reason why they develop chronic pain
Further work could also pin down the puzzling link to so-called “somatic disorders”, such as
chronic pain and irritable bowel syndrome, that seem to be unusually common in people with
alexithymia. Lane suggests it’s down to a kind of “short-circuit” in the brain, created by the
emotional blindness. Normally, he says, the conscious perception of emotions can help
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damp down the physical sensations associated with the feeling. “If you can consciously
process and allow the feeling to evolve – if you engage the frontal areas of the brain, you
recruit mechanisms that have a top down, modulatory effect on bodily processes,” says
Lane. Without the emotional outlet, however, the mind could get stuck on the physical
feelings, potentially amplifying the responses. As Goerlich-Dobre puts it: “They are
hypersensitive to bodily perceptions, and not able to focus on anything else, which might be
one reason why they develop chronic pain.” (Some studies, have in fact found that alexes
are often abnormally sensitive to bodily sensations, although other experiments have found
conflicting evidence.)
People with alexithymia often travel a lonely road as they try to connect to their emotions
Physical sensations certainly seem to dominate Caleb’s descriptions of difficult events, such
as periods of separation from his family. “I don’t miss people, as far as I can tell. If I’m gone,
and don’t see someone for a long period, it’s a case of out of sight, out of mind,” he says.
“But I do feel physically a kind of pressure or stress when I’m not around my wife or my child
for a couple of days.”
Reconnecting to lost feelings
The hope is that eventually, doctors may be able to track down the origins of alexithymia and
stop the effects from snow-balling. Caleb thinks his alexithymia emerged at birth and could
be genetic. Upbringing – and the emotional fluency of your parents – may also play a role,
while for others, it may be caused by trauma that shuts down people’s ability to process
some or all of their emotions.
Lane, for instance, introduced me to one of his patients, Patrick Dust, who was the subject of
violent abuse from his alcoholic father – experiences that put his life in danger. “One night,
when he came home, my mother and he had another intense verbal argument. He said 'I’m
going to get my shotgun and kill all of you'… We ran to a neighbour’s house where we called
the police.” For decades afterwards, he found it difficult to interpret and understand his
emotions, particularly the fear and the anger he still felt towards his parents. He suspects this
resulted in his fibromyalgia – chronic diffuse pain and tenderness across the whole body –
and an eating disorder.
I discovered the tremendous anger I had felt, without much awareness of it. It’s the most
important thing I’ve done in my life – Patrick Dust
With initial guidance from Lane and later by himself, Dust was able to revisit the past and
reconnect to the emotions he was locking away, which he thinks also brought some relief to
the fibromyalgia. “I discovered the tremendous anger I had felt, without much awareness of
it,” he explains. “It’s the most important thing I’ve done in my life.” He has just finished writing
a book about the process.
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By making a conscious effort to love, alexithymic people may offer stability in a relationship
Caleb, too, has visited a cognitive behavioural therapist to help with his social understanding,
and through conscious effort he is now better able to analyse the physical feelings and to
equate it with emotions that other people may feel. Although it remains a somewhat
academic exercise, the process helps him to try to grasp his wife’s feelings and to see why
she acts the way she does.
Not everyone with alexithymia may have his determination and patience, however. Nor may
they find a life partner who is willing to make the allowances his condition requires. “It takes a
lot of understanding on my wife’s part… She understands that my conceptions of things like
love are a bit different,” he says. In return, she may benefit from his stability – he is not
swayed by the fickle tides of feelings. “The trade-off is that my relationship with my wife is a
conscious choice,” he says – he is not acting on a whim but a very deliberate decision to
care for her. That has been particularly helpful in the last eight months. “It means that if we’re
going through a difficult situation – if the kid’s up all night crying – for me that doesn’t affect
our relationship at all, because the connection isn’t built on emotion,” says Caleb.
Caleb may not have been transported to ecstasy by his wedding or the birth of his child, but
he has spent most of his life looking within, striving to feel and understand the sensations of
himself and the people around him. The result is that he is certainly one of the most
thoughtful, and self-aware, people I have ever had the pleasure of interviewing – someone
who seems to know himself, and his limitations, inside out.
Ultimately, he wants to emphasise that emotional blindness does not make one unkind, or
selfish. “It may be hard to believe, but it is possible for someone to be cut off completely from
the emotions and imagination that are such a big part of what makes us humans,” he says.
“And that a person can be cut off from emotions without being heartless, or a psychopath.”
Topic 15. The submarines that revealed a mysterious world

As we discovered in our Genius Behind series, oceanographer Sylvia Earle plans to
venture into the very deepest depths with a new submersible. Her vessel joins an
impressive list of underwater explorers that have required some extreme
engineering…
Bathysphere (1930)
The very deepest parts of the ocean were an unknown world until the first half of the 20th
Century. Vessels such as HMS Challenger could measure the depths from the surface, but
what lived in the abyss could only be guessed at. In 1928, Otis Barton began designing a
vessel that could dive far deeper than any submarine – and bring the midnight world of the
deep oceans into view. Barton was inspired by British naturalist William Beebe’s need to
construct a vessel strong enough to chart the deepest seafloor near Bermuda for a science
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mission. He built a spherical vessel – strong enough to withstand the crushing pressure –
and made windows out of quartz so Beebe could peer out at the strange life lurking in the
gloom. (Credit: Getty Images)
Pioneering plunge
In 1930, Barton and Beebe made the first dives – the first only 45 feet (14m) below the sea to
make sure the vessel was watertight. More ambitious dives followed over the next four years.
On 15 August 1934, the pair descended to 3,028 feet (923m), more than half-a-mile below
the surface of the sea. It was a record that would remain until 1949. The Bathysphere’s
successful dives proved Barton’s hunch that a sphere was the best shape to keep the
enormous undersea pressure at bay. (Credit: Science Photo Library)
FNRS (1948)
After World War II, it was the Belgians who came up with the most important new
development in underwater exploration. Submarine technology had come along in leaps and
bounds during World War II: military submarines like the German Type XXI could descend to
800ft (244m) below. The FNRS-2 set records for the deepest dive; unlike Barton and
Beebe’s bathysphere, these vessels did not have to be tethered to a cable that could winch
them back to the surface. Auguste Piccard designed a vessel in two parts; a spherical
bathysphere for the crew, and a submarine-shaped float filled with gasoline that could be
emptied to bring the vessel back to the surface. The FNRS-3 broke the world depth record in
1954 when it descended 13,290ft (4,050m), 160 miles off the coast of Senegal. (Credit: Esby
CC BY 2.0/Wikimedia)
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Trieste (1960)
The holy grail for undersea explorers was the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the
world’s oceans. It is almost 11,000m deep – more than six-and-a-half miles. If you dropped
Mount Everest into the trench, it would sink without trace, and you would still have more than
a mile of water between its peak and the surface. The Swiss-designed Trieste resembled a
larger version of the FNRS; it was designed by Auguste Piccard’s son Jacque and piloted by
himself and US submariner Don Walsh. The pair would attempt to reach the very deepest
part of the trench – Challenger Deep – which had never been reached by a man-made
object. (Credit: Getty Images)
Journey to the abyss
On 23 January 1960, Piccard and Walsh undertook their mission to reach the bottom of our
watery world’s deepest abyss. The vessel descended at the rate of around a metre a second.
At about 30,000ft (9,000m), one of the vessel’s outer windows cracked; but Trieste reached
its target after four hours and 47 minutes. The pair spent around 20 minutes on the bottom,
observing flounder and sole swimming amidst the viscous sediment at the bottom of the
ocean. Trieste is now exhibited at the US Navy Museum in Washington DC; Piccard was
honoured by the creators of Starship Enterprise, who named the starship’s captain Jean-Luc
Picard in his honour. (Credit: Getty Images)
Alvin (1964)
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Launched in 1964, the three-man submersible Alvin has taken part in some of the most
impressive deep sea missions. Resembling a cross between a bath toy and a squat tugboat,
the US Navy vessel has carried out more than 4,400 dives to observe marine life far below
the surface. More nimble than bathyscaphe designs like the Trieste, Alvin was designed to
split into two if it got into trouble, with the manned compartment floating back to the surface.
In 1976, Alvin observed ‘black smokers’ in the Galapagos – superheated columns of volcanic
water that are home to extreme forms of life. But it’s best known for visiting the wreck of the
Titanic in 1986 – giving scientists their first view of the ship since it sank in 1912. (Credit:
Taollan82 CC BY 3.0/Wikimedia)
Mir (1987)
During the Cold War, Soviet scientists developed various models of deep sea submersibles
as well. In 1987, they created the Mir 1, a deep-roving sub designed by Soviet scientists but
built in Finland. Mir 1 and its sister vessel Mir 2 can take a crew of three down to depths of
20,000ft (6,000m); deep enough to explore 98% of the world’s oceans. Like Alvin, Mir 1 is
best known for missions involving Titanic; filmmaker James Cameron used the Russian
vessel to film the wreck. (Credit: Getty Images)
Topic 16. The air that makes you fat
Some puzzling studies appear to show that tiny airborne particles may contribute to
obesity, diabetes and heart disease. Should we be concerned?
 By David Robson
 8 December 2015
Take a deep breath, and exhale. Depending on where you live, that life-giving lungful of air
might just be pushing you towards diabetes and obesity.
Two people can eat the same foods, and do the same exercise, but one may put on more
weight thanks to the air around their home
The idea that “thin air” can make you fat sounds ludicrous, yet some extremely puzzling
studies appear to be showing that it’s possible. Two people can eat the same foods, and do
the same exercise, but over the course of a few years, one may put on more weight and
develop a faulty metabolism – thanks to the atmosphere around their home.
Traffic fumes and cigarette smoke are the chief concerns, with their tiny, irritating particles
that trigger widespread inflammation and disrupt the body’s ability to burn energy. While the
short-term effects are minimal, over a lifetime it could be enough to contribute to serious
disease – besides the respiratory illnesses more commonly associated with smog. “We are
starting to understand that the uptake and circulation of air pollution in the body can affect
more than just the lungs,” says Hong Chen, a researcher at Public Health Ontario and the
Institute of Clinical Evaluative Sciences in Canada.
How strong is the evidence from these studies, and should you be concerned?
Without any other change in your lifestyle or diet, polluted air may be causing you to pile on
the pounds (Credit: Getty Images)
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Laboratory mice offered some of the earliest concrete clues that the effects of air pollution
may penetrate far beyond the lungs. Their breeder at the Ohio State University, Qinghua
Sun, had been interested in studying why city-dwellers seem to be at a particularly high risk
of heart disease compared to country folk. Lifestyle, of course, could be one reason: in most
major cities a fast food chain is rarely more than a block away, for instance, which might
encourage unhealthy eating. Nevertheless, he wondered if another answer may be hanging,
invisibly, in the air we breathe.
To find out more, he started to raise laboratory mice in the kinds of conditions you might find
across various cities. Some breathed filtered, clean, air, while others were funnelled the
kinds of fumes you might find next to a motorway or busy city centre. Along the way, his
team weighed the mice and performed various tests to study how their metabolism was
functioning.
After just 10 weeks, the effects were already visible. The mice exposed to the air pollution
showed greater volumes of body fat, both around the belly and around the internal organs; at
the microscopic level, the fat cells themselves were around 20% larger in the mice inhaling a
fine mist of pollutants. What’s more, they seemed to have become less sensitive to insulin,
the hormone that signals to cells to convert blood sugar into energy: the first step towards
diabetes.
Tiny particles irritating the lungs may set off a cascade of reactions throughout the body,
disrupting the hormones that control appetite (Credit: Science Photo Library)
The exact mechanism is still debated, but subsequent animal experiments suggest the air
pollution triggers a cascade of reactions in the body. Small particles, less than 2.5
micrometres wide, are thought to be primarily to blame – the same minuscule motes of
pollutant that give city air its gauzy haze. When we breathe in, the pollutants irritate the tiny,
moist air sacs that normally allow the oxygen to pass into the blood stream. As a result, the
lungs’ lining mounts a stress response, sending our nervous system into overdrive. This
includes the release of hormones that reduce insulin’s potency and draws blood away from
the insulin-sensitive muscle tissue, preventing the body from tightly controlling its blood sugar
levels.
Pollution may trigger inflammation that interferes with the hormones and the brain processing
that govern appetite
The tiny irritating particles may also unleash a flood of inflammatory molecules called
“cytokines” to wash through the blood, a response that also triggers immune cells to invade
otherwise healthy tissue. Not only does that too interfere with the tissue’s ability to respond to
insulin; the subsequent inflammation may also interfere with the hormones and the brain
processing that govern our appetite, says Michael Jerrett at the University of California,
Berkeley.
All of which knocks the body’s energy balance off-kilter, leading to a constellation of
metabolic disorders, including diabetes and obesity, and cardiovascular problems such as
hypertension.
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By disrupting insulin sensitivity, air pollution may contribute to diabetes and other serious
(and life-shortening) cardiometabolic disorders (Credit: Getty Images)
Large studies from cities across the world suggest that humans might be suffering the same
consequences. Chen, for instance, examined the medical records of 62,000 people in
Ontario, Canada over a 14-year period. He found that the risk of developing diabetes rose by
about 11% for every 10 micrograms of fine particles in a cubic metre of air – a troubling
statistic, considering that the pollution in some Asian cities can reach at least 500
micrograms per cubic metre of air. Across the Atlantic, a Swiss study saw a similar signs of
increased insulin resistance, hypertension, and waist-circumference in a sample of nearly
4,000 people living among dense pollution.
Children growing up in the polluted areas were twice as likely to be considered obese
The scientists have been particularly concerned about the effects on young children, with
some concern that a mother's exposure to these pollutants may alter the baby's metabolism
so they are more prone to obesity. Consider the work of Andrew Rundle at Columbia
University, who studied children growing up in the Bronx. During pregnancy, the children’s
mothers had worn a small backpack that measured the air quality as they went about their
daily business, and over the next seven years the children’s health was monitored at regular
intervals. Controlling for other factors (such as wealth and diet), the children born in the most
polluted areas were 2.3 times more likely to be considered obese, compared to those living
in cleaner neighbourhoods.
Jerrett, meanwhile, has found that the risk can come from inside as well as outside the
home: parental smoking, he showed, also led to faster weight gain among Californian
children and teens. “It interacts synergistically with the effect of the air pollution,” he says – in
other words, the combined risk was far greater than the sum of individual risks.
Living in a highly polluted city doubled the chance that a child would grow up obese,
according to one study (Credit: Getty Images)
Despite these troubling findings, we should be cautious about reading too much into them.
“They only draw a link between exposure and outcome, but can’t prove that one factor
causes another,” says Abby Fleisch at Harvard Medical School. Even so, her own findings
would seem to agree with the general trend – she has shown that even in the first six
months, babies of mothers living in polluted areas appear to put on weight more rapidly
than
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those in cleaner areas – but she stresses that we still can’t be sure we haven’t neglected
some other factor, besides pollution, that could explain the apparent link.
As the smog descended, signs of insulin resistance and hypertension peaked
Fortunately, a few teams are already searching for the missing pieces to fill those gaps in our
knowledge with more detailed studies. Robert Brook at the University of Michigan and
colleagues in China, for instance, recently tested a small group of subjects in Beijing over a
two-year period. They found that whenever the city’s infamous smog descended, giveaway
signs of developing problems like insulin resistance and hypertension peaked – providing
more concrete evidence that the air quality was indeed driving changes to the metabolism.
Cleaning up these exhaust fumes could save millions of people from a lifetime of illness
If the link is proven, how concerned should we be? The scientists stress that the individual,
short-term risk to any one person is relatively small, and certainly shouldn’t be used as an
excuse for obesity by itself, without considering other aspects of your lifestyle. But given the
sheer number of people living in cities with high pollution, over the long term the total number
of casualties could be enormous. “Everyone is affected by pollution to some degree,” says
Brook. “It’s continuous, involuntary exposure, across billions of people – so the overall impact
becomes much greater.”
The solutions are familiar, if difficult to implement: restrict traffic pollution by promoting
electric and hybrid vehicles, for instance. Jerrett suggests streets could also be redesigned to
reduce the exposure to pedestrians and cyclists. In the short term, he points out that air
purifiers could be added to more homes, schools and offices to filter out some of the harmful
particles.
Brook agrees that action needs to be taken internationally, both in the developing world and
in cities like Paris and London that superficially, might seem to have their pollution under
control. “In North America and Europe the pollution levels have been trending in right
direction – but we shouldn’t rest on our laurels,” he says. “From the standpoint of improving
health across the world, it should be one of our top 10 worries.”
Topic 17. The future of medicine is testing our body fluids at home
From earwax to faeces, your secretions have secrets.
 By Linda Geddes
 14 December 2015
Blood, sweat, tears: what do they say about you? Scientists and doctors have long turned to
body fluids for clues about our health, but now they’re finding that they can reveal more
about the hidden workings of our bodies than once realised – and what’s more, it’s becoming
ever-easier to test them ourselves.
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Last week, for instance, BBC Future covered the story of a Star Trek-like tricorder that
promises to diagnose fatal diseases like Ebola before people are even aware they’re
infected, and without them needing to travel long distances. Watch the video below to find
out more:
Jump media player

Media player help
It’s not the only technology that allows for complex testing outside hospitals either: devices
like the Cue are being marketed that will enable self-testing for fertility, flu and signs of
inflammation. And the X-Prize Foundation is currently running a prize to discover the next
generation of medical tricorders, capable of diagnosing various illnesses.
The next five to 10 years is expected to yield many more such tests, as well as the
recruitment of new sources of information – including some our more embarrassing
excretions.
As you might expect, many of these kits will involve the testing of blood. “In blood you can
detect just about everything that you’ve eaten, or that’s going on in your body,” says Guy
Carpenter, reader in oral biology at Kings College London.
But it’s possible that technology will emerge to measure other excretions, says George Preti
at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. He is currently investigating what
your earwax can say about you. Unlike blood, earwax is a fatty substance, which means
certain molecules may concentrate there and be easier to detect than in more watery fluids.
“If you have a certain group of metabolites that like to dissolve in lipids (fats), we may be able
to look at them in earwax,” Preti says.
The earwax of people of East Asian descent smells different to that of European, African or
American descent
For example, maple syrup urine disorder, a genetic condition in which people can’t break
down certain parts of proteins, can be diagnosed by sniffing earwax: “It smells of maple
syrup,” says Preti. He recently published research revealing that the earwax of people of
East Asian descent smells different to that of European, African or American descent, as
does their body odour. “We already have an indication that there is some disease-related
information in earwax; there’s also information about where you’ve been and what you’ve
eaten.” Whether earwax will turn out to be more useful than blood and other body fluids for
diagnosing certain conditions remains to be seen, but “we don’t know unless we investigate
it,” Preti points out.
Then there’s sweat. For decades it has been used to screen newborns for cystic fibrosis,
which alters the balance of sodium and chloride in their sweat. Now, wearable patches are
being developed that could alert athletes to changes in the balance of electrolytes that might
signal that they’re about to “crash” because of dehydration or physical exertion. One
advantage of monitoring sweat is that it could be done passively – you don’t have to stick
yourself with a needle, or even mess about with swabs - an electronic sweat-sensor could be
58
worn under clothing that transmits information wirelessly, without you even having to think
about it.
But there may also be limitations. “Sweat contains marker molecules, but they are very, very
variable, which will probably preclude their direct clinical use,” cautions Jeremy Nicholson,
chair in biological chemistry at Imperial College London. Its composition is also influenced by
the activity of microbes living on our skin. Blood, on the other hand, tends to provide a more
accurate picture of what’s happening inside the body, as it infiltrates every tissue, and the
body keeps its basic composition in strict check.
Even within a drop of blood, there’s still a great deal more information that might be gleaned
than is currently possible. For instance, Manfred Kayser at Erasmus University Medical
Centre in the Netherlands is currently developing new DNA tests that might enable a
59
per son’s ag e, physical appearance, and g eographic to be predicted from a blood
orig in,
sample, which could help police identify criminal suspects or badly decomposed bodies.
Some of the greatest excitement surrounds the potential predictive power of the micro-
organisms living within and upon us. “We think that at least a third of the metabolites in our
blood are being produced by our microbes,” says Tim Spector, professor of genetic
epidemiology at Kings College London and author of The Diet Myth. And it’s becoming
apparent that they are influencing our health in hitherto unimaginable ways. For instance, the
mood-altering chemical serotonin isn’t only produced by your brain cells; it turns out that
certain gut bacteria produce it too, and they may therefore play a role in depression.
I’d be able to tell much more about you from your poo than your DNA – Tim Spector,
researcher
The best place to look for changes in your bacterial flora though, is poo. “If you gave me
your poo sample and your DNA sample, I’d be able to tell much more about you from your
poo than your DNA,” says Spector. This is because although the genes of any two people
are approximately 99.9% similar, we only have 10-20% of our microbes in common. And
recent research suggests the type of microbes in our guts – and therefore our poo – are
influenced by what we eat, and where we’ve been living. “We can identify the differences
between Europeans, Africans and South Americans, and we have some early data from
twins showing differences between those who live in Scotland and those that live in
England,” Spector says.
Not only could analysing our poo for microbes and the chemicals they produce help tease
apart complex diseases like depression and obesity and diabetes, it could also provide an
early warning that an elderly person is becoming dangerously frail and needs additional
support. “As elderly people go downhill, they have a marked rise in certain gut microbes, or a
lack of others,” says Spector.
As these new sources of information mature, and the cost of analysis decreases, more self-
testing kits are inevitable. Some believe this will democratise healthcare, reducing the need
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for people to travel, and enabling them to monitor and take greater responsibility for their own
health. But it could also result in unnecessary worry and false leads. “We can give people
tests for various things, but the interpretation of those tests will still require the guidance of a
health professional,” Carpenter points out. Issues of privacy may also come to the fore. For
now at least, few of us pay much regard to what happens to our secretions and emanations
once they leave our bodies.
Yet for better or worse, soon a small sample of your blood, sweat, and even your earwax will
be all that’s necessary to reveal a great deal about your behaviour, health and more.
Topic 18. Dose it pay to be kind to strangers

Generous people are happier and healthier, yet acts of kindness are often met with
suspicion and scorn. Why? David Robson talks to a psychologist who set out to find
the answer.
 By David Robson
You’d have thought Sandi Mann was offering people a slap in the face – not a steaming cup
of coffee. She’d been visiting her local cafe with her children, where they often enjoyed a
cheap and cheerful breakfast as a treat before school. The youngest didn’t want the coffee
that came with his toast, so she thought she might as well take it round and see if the other
customers would like a free treat instead.
What could possibly go wrong? “I thought they’d be delighted – that everything would be
warm and cuddly,” she says today. “Instead, I just got stares of bewilderment. There was this
suspicion: Had I spat on it? Is it poisoned?” She ended up feeling that she had somehow
acted wrongly – when all she wanted to do was offer a free gift.
It wasn’t meant to be like this. Mann, a psychologist at the University of Central Lancashire,
had just embarked on a new project to explore the phenomenon of “paying it forward” – a
popular philosophy of being generous to a stranger, in the hope they will pass on the
kindness to someone else. “The idea is to create a chain – a domino effect,” Mann explains.
As part of the "paying it forward" movement, some coffee shops have seen chains of
hundreds of customers buying each other's drinks (Credit: Getty Images)
Could a single act of kindness have a “butterfly effect”, sending ripples of goodwill through
the world?
Mann’s idea was to try it herself for a couple of weeks and observe the way people react.
After all, most people might have the intention of being a little bit kinder, yet we feel that we
are unable to muster up the willpower. So why is it so difficult to both give, and accept,
kindness? And would it really pay off in the real world – or are we just too cynical in today’s
society? Mann recorded the pleasures, and embarrassments, of that journey in her recent
book – Paying It Forward : How One Cup of Coffee Could Change the World. (In the spirit of
the book’s contents, Mann’s royalties from the book go to a charity for patients with muscular
dystrophy.)
Like many people, Mann’s interest in everyday kindness started with a heart-warming post
on her Facebook feed. Her American friend Debbie had been visiting a drive-through coffee
shop only to find that the person ahead had already settled her bill. “She was so chuffed – it
made her day,” says Mann. Straight away, she was intrigued by the philosophy’s potential –
the idea that a single act of kindness could “have a knock-on effect, like the butterfly effect”,
sending ripples of goodwill through the world.
As Mann started reading up on the subject, she found that the principle has a deep history. In
Italy, wealthier Neapolitans have long embraced the tradition of buying a “caffe sospeso” in
addition to their own, for someone who is less able to pay for the luxury. Benjamin Franklin is
one of the most famous proponents of the idea. While lending some money to a friend, he
explained: “I do not pretend to give such a deed; I only lend it to you; when you meet with
another honest man in similar distress, you must pay me by lending this sum to him,” he
wrote. “This is a trick of mine for doing a deal of good with a little money.”
Brown left a note with the returned phone – ‘Don’t worry about the money, just do something
nice for someone else’
Today, “paying it forward” has become a popular and far-reaching movement – it has even
spawned a novel and film. Google the term, and you will read heart-warming stories of
grandiose acts of goodwill – like the generous philanthropists anonymously calling hospitals
to pay for expensive operations, without expecting so much as a simple thank you.
But often it is the smaller deeds that are most touching. Mann points to the case of Josh
Brown, a 12-year-old who found a stranger’s lost phone on a train. The owner was so
pleased, she offered him a small reward for the trouble. Instead, he sent a note attached to
the returned phone: “Don’t worry about the money, just do something nice for someone else.”
Proponents of "random acts of kindness" believe that even the smallest acts can send ripples
of goodwill around the world (Credit: Flickr/Heath Brandon/CC-BY-2.0)
Across all countries – rich or poor – on every continent, people who give tend to be happier
people – Michael Norton
These everyday altruists may not get an immediate payback (besides the “giver’s glow”), but
people like Brown tend to reap their rewards in terms of general life satisfaction. Michael
Norton at Harvard Business School has offered some of the most convincing evidence,
repeatedly finding that people who spend a bigger proportion of their income on others tend
to be far happier, in the long run, than those spending it on themselves.
Crucially, this is not just the result of the comfortable Western lifestyle: Norton has tested the
concept with data from more than 130 countries, from the US to Uganda. “Across all
countries – rich or poor, and in every continent – people who gave more tended to be
happier people,” he says. For this reason, he thinks the joy of giving appears to be a
“psychological universal” – a trait that lies at the core of human nature, independent of your
culture.
Taking time to help others may even protect you from disease, Mann says. Over a 30-year
study, women who volunteered for a charity were 16% less likely to suffer a major illness
during that period – perhaps because it lowers stress levels, which may also, in turn, boost
the immune system.
Despite our hunger for social connections, we often reject genuine acts of generosity, such
as an offer to share an umbrella on a rainy day (Credit: Flickr/DncnH/CC-BY-2.0)
In the same way that we hunger for fat or sugar – we may nurture a natural desire to help
other people
There are many possible reasons why acting selflessly may soothe the body and mind in
these ways. Giving to others can increase your social connection (who isn’t grateful after
they’ve received a nice present) and your sense of purpose in life; you feel like you’ve made
a difference, and there is a point in getting out of bed in the morning. Given that humans are
social animals, this may be part of our evolved nature, says Norton. In the same way that we
hunger for fat or sugar – we may all nurture a deep desire to help other people, he says.
Helper’s high
At least, that’s the theory – yet Mann found that the “helper’s high” was often difficult to earn.
Having read the research, she had decided to spend two weeks trying simple, generous acts.
“I was very determined that it shouldn’t cost lots of money,” she explains. “So I set myself the
challenge that it had to cost less than a pound.”
Her first task should have been simple enough. The setting was familiar – her local coffee
shop – and she was accompanied by her (“cringing”) children. All she wanted to do was to
give away her seven-year-old’s unwanted cup of coffee. Yet as she walked among the
tables, she was just met with suspicion rather than gratitude. “I felt like saying ‘I’m only trying
to do something nice.’”
It was only once she framed the act differently, so that it seemed more logical, and less
altruistic, that their attitudes changed. “Suddenly it was a different story altogether – it made
perfect sense that my kid won’t drink coffee.” They still refused, but “the suspicion vanished,
and there were smiles, and thanks”. Eventually it was accepted by a lady named Rochel,
who subsequently found an opportunity later in the week to treat someone else.
Suspicion was the strongest reaction throughout
That initial mistrust was a common theme for each of the following 13 days – in which she
tried to offer strangers an umbrella on a rainy day, pay for someone’s parking ticket, and let
fellow shoppers jump ahead of her in checkout queues. “Suspicion was the strongest
reaction throughout,” she says. Each time, it was only when she offered a rational
explanation – such as the fact she was waiting for someone at the checkout – that people
would accept her offers. Looking back, Mann now explains it as “stranger danger”. “We’re
brought up to expect strangers to put one over us,” she says.
One common "random act of kindness" is to leave motivational messages for strangers to
read (Credit: Flickr/Jill Allyn Stafford/CC-BY-2.0)
Yet there were also moments when she genuinely touched people’s lives. “One man
accepted the chocolates, and told me that it’s a great thing spreading love instead of hate,”
says Mann. “When you know you’ve given someone’s mood a lift and made a difference –
there’s nothing like it.” She even earned a good friend from the experience – she’s still
regularly in touch with Rochel, the woman who accepted her coffee on that first day.
If anything, the occasional hostility has only made Mann more determined to persevere. She
points to research showing that people have become individualistic over the last few
decades, and score about 40% lower on tests of empathy than those brought up in the
1970s. Perhaps we’re just less used to being kind, and receiving kindness in return.
“It’s a sad society if that’s what we’ve become,” she says. “There’s so much hate, negativity,
and suspicion, and with everyone’s individualism, we feel like we’re all fighting just for
ourselves, but we need to counteract this and start a kindness movement. It sounds cheesy,
but I think we need it.”
Spite and meanness are more likely to ripple through a population than goodwill
Critics of the “paying it forward” movement may balk at its artificiality; they may even see it as
somewhat coercive, guilt-tripping others into acts of charity they may resent. They may also
point to evidence that goodwill does not spread quite as quickly as its proponents would like
to believe. Norton’s own research, for instance, has found that spite and greed are far more
likely to ripple through a population than generosity. “If someone is stingy, we are much more
likely to pay forward that negative behaviour to next person,” he explains.
Giving doesn't have to cost a penny - it can be as simple as complimenting a stranger or
offering a hug (Credit: Flickr/Still Wanderer/CC-BY-2.0)
Yet you could also argue that this is only one more reason why we need a bit more kindness
in the world – to neutralise those bad apples. What’s more, even though these random acts
of kindness may seem artificial to start with, there is some evidence that they can
permanently change you for the better – so that kindness becomes your norm. “You can
cultivate habits of virtue,” says David Rand at Yale University, who has found that subjects
encouraged to perform good deeds tend to be kinder in subsequent tasks, a kind of
“psychological spillover”. Indeed, he thinks that even the most astonishing acts of altruism –
such as the heroism during the recent Paris shootings – all grew from tiny seeds of
deliberate goodwill that eventually grew into an automatic desire to help others.
Mann, for one, is convinced that we can all change for the better. As a clinical psychologist,
she has even started advising people with depression to try and incorporate small acts of
generosity or kindness into their therapy. “Depressed people say they have a lack of
meaning in life, and that they don’t feel valuable,” says Mann. She emphasises that it isn’t a
“cure” – their other therapy is still very important. “But it gives a way to contribute back to
society – and that makes them feel good, like they are something useful.”
Start with something in your comfort zone, maybe just smiling at someone in the street, or
talking nicely to shop assistants
If you are inspired to give it a go, she suggests you should develop a thick skin. “It takes
some courage and guts,” she says. For this reason, she would advise setting the bar low at
the beginning. “I wouldn’t recommend standing in the street giving [out] free chocolates –
start with something in your comfort zone, maybe just smiling at someone in the street, or
talking nicely to shop assistants.” Simply complimenting people she encountered turned out
to be one of the easiest, and most warmly received, acts of kindness.
Ultimately, she hopes that her book will help remind us all that sometimes being kind can be
a reward in and of itself. “That’s the view I’d like to change; that there doesn’t always have to
be ulterior motive. You can be kind just for the sake of being nice.”
Topic 19. How much would you payt to live for an extra year
We all strive to forestall death – but at what cost does it become too expensive? BBC
Future explores the attempts to value the price of life.
 By David Robson
 2 December 2015
Human life is so precious, it seems crass to put a price on it. How can a pile of coins, paper
or gold bars match a year on Earth? Life should be, quite literally, invaluable.
Yet that is the morbid question that health services, everywhere, inevitably have to ask. They
have limited money to spend on sick and dying people, and whenever a new drug becomes
available, they have to make a choice: will the few stolen months, or years, be worth the
money it costs?
Our gut instincts may seem obvious: we should do all that we can to buy more time for the
people we love. Yet Dominic W ilkinson, an intensive care doctor and ethicist at the
University of Oxford’s Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics recently wrote a thought-provoking
article questioning these assumptions and asks us all to consider just how much we should
be willing to pay for a longer life.
Intrigued, BBC Future phoned him to explore his argument, and to better understand the
ways we currently calculate the price of life.
Hi-tech treatments mean that we can survive many of the diseases that would have killed our
ancestors - yet they come at a huge cost (Credit: Getty Images)
At the moment, drugs for terminal illnesses tend to be judged on two things – by how much
they extend the lifespan, and the quality of life of the patient, using a scale known as the
Quality Adjusted Life Year-saved (QALY). A drug that helps you live for an extra year, at half
your general quality of life, would score about 0.5 years on this scale, for instance.
“Alternatively, a drug that improved your quality of life for a year from a level of half normal,
to full health would also score 0.5,” explains Wilkinson.
The UK recommends paying about £20,000 to £30,000 for each additional year of good
health
From these calculations, a health service can then start to set a price on whether a drug is
worth the cost. The UK’s recommendations, for example, are about £20,000 to £30,000
($30,000 to $45,000) for each additional year of good health, once it has been adjusted to
take into account the quality of life. So a drug that achieved 0.5 on the QALY measure would
only merit £10,000-15,000 ($15,000 to $22,500).
This inevitably means that some drugs have been rejected by the National Health Service
(NHS), because they are simply too expensive: the breast cancer drug Kadycla, for instance,
only extends the lifespan by about six months for a cost of £95,000. Even if the quality of life
during those few months is equal to that of a healthy person, it still hugely overstretches the
limit. (Other healthcare providers may have different criteria, of course – but they all have to
weigh up the costs and benefits in some way, before offering to fund a treatment.)
Campaigners argue that the pharmaceutical companies should lower the costs of such
treatments, and that health services should also invest more and more money in drugs that
will buy terminally ill patients some more precious time. Given these strong and emotive
arguments, the UK recently considered increasing the threshold for terminal illnesses – to as
much as £80,000 ($120,000) for each “quality-adjusted year saved”.
Should we pay more for drugs that will extend a life, if it means cutting off treatment that
could improve the lives of those not in danger (Credit: Getty Images)
As doctors looking after patients, we are ethically driven to say that ‘I know it is expensive but
my first duty is to help my patient – Dominic Wilkinson
Wilkinson says this attitude is completely understandable – and it’s often the doctors, as well
as the patients themselves, who argue the case. “As doctors looking after patients, we are
ethically driven to advocate for patients, to say that ‘I know it is expensive but my first duty is
to help my patient,’” he says.
But the inevitable sacrifice is that this money will be taken away from other areas of care,
such as mental health services or help for people with disabilities – measures that may be
crucial for improving the quality of life for people at the start or middle of their lives.
Is it worth forfeiting one person’s comfort to buy another a few more months at the end of
their life? When making these decisions, it’s important to gauge public opinion. And although
you might assume that most people would pay infinite sums to buy a few extra years, recent
research suggests we do not all place such a high value on the sheer length of the lifespan.
When surveyed, many people said they would prefer to pay for treatments that improve
palliative care, rather than new drugs that would buy extra years (Credit: Getty images)
Wilkinson points to a detailed UK study of 4,000 people that clearly explained the different
ways the health service’s limited resources could be spent, and asked the participants for
their preferences. “They clearly indicated that they weren’t comfortable with giving more
money to people who were terminally ill, compared with people who might benefit at other
stages of their lives.”
Perhaps most surprising were the results from a study in Singapore, which questioned
elderly, but otherwise healthy, citizens as well as those suffering from terminal cancer. “The
striking thing from that is that they were prepared to pay an awful lot more money for
palliative care so they could be treated in their own home, than drugs that would extend life,”
says Wilkinson.
Many participants would pay just £5,000 to extend life by a year
On average, the participants would pay £5,000 ($7,500) for a treatment to extend life by a
year. But they were willing to pay about twice that amount – £10,000 ($15,000) – on better
palliative care, such as better nursing that would allow them to die in the relative comfort of
their homes, rather than a hospital. “It seemed to provide a fresh way of thinking about
difficult decisions.”
Doctors are increasingly arguing that we should maximise the quality of our time on Earth,
rather than extending the length of the lifespan (Credit: Getty Images)
Clearly, these studies are not the final answer; it is hard to know if these opinions are shared
among different people in different cultures and facing different illnesses; there are also
questions about just how effectively a calculation like the QALY scale can really, objectively
assess a treatment’s potential. But Wilkinson thinks that we should at least consider these
different opinions before devoting more and more money to extending lifespans.
“Although it’s very understandable to want to buy more expensive drugs for the terminally ill, I
don’t think it reflects the view of the general public or those of the patients,” he says. “Nor is it
clearly the right ethical approach.”
As the population ages, and healthcare grows ever more advanced, and expensive, these
issues will only become more pressing. The eminent American surgeon Atul Guwande has
long questioned whether it is better to stretch out the lifespan, instead of increasing the
comfort of our available years. Ezekiel Emanuel, the former director of the Clinical Bioethics
Department at the US National Institutes of Health, has even claimed that he would refuse
all life-extending healthcare at the age of 75, rather than entering a cycle of ever more
intense treatments to draw out his last few years.
Few of us may decide to take such a drastic decision, but anyone, at any age, may do well to
consider the value of their time on Earth and what we are doing to make the most of it.
Topic 20. The secret codes you’re not meant to know

All over the world, there are hidden messages in city streets, hospitals, and on public
transport. Why do they exist?
 17 December 2015
“Inspector Sands to the control room, please.” If you ever hear that at a British train station,
don’t panic. But you might appreciate knowing that this is a codeword meant to inform staff
that there is an emergency somewhere in the building. The idea is to avoid causing alarm
among commuters, but still get the message out to those trained to deal with the problem.
The subject of secret codewords like this was raised this week on Reddit, and the
discussion has attracted thousands of examples. But what codewords and signs are really
out there in the wild?
A good place to start is hospital emergency codes. These are often colour-coded, and one
health centre in Canada has published its list online. “Code red” announces a fire, “code
white” indicates a violent person while “code black” means a bomb threat is active. Some
phrases might simply be used euphemistically. It’s been reported that hospital staff
sometimes refer to the morgue as “Rose Cottage”, in order to avoid upsetting relatives of a
recently deceased patient.
Seafaring vessels have their own codewords. One of these, “Mr Skylight”, is a general
emergency code that may be announced over the tannoy on a cruise ship. The crew used it
during the sinking of the MS Estonia in 1994, which killed 852 people. As the disaster
unfolded, a cryptic announcement was made: “Mr Skylight to Number One and Two” –
indicating that crew were to shut watertight doors to seal parts of the hull.
Before the ferry MS Estonia sunk on 19 November 1994, the "Mr Starlight" audio code was
broadcast throughout the ship (Credit Getty Images)
“I can see very good reasons for having these codes,” says Paul Baker, a linguist at the
University of Lancaster. “It may be that people are unsure when they’re giving the code so
there’s no point upsetting [members of the public].”
It’s not just institutions and services that come up with codewords for things, though. Many
contributors to the Reddit thread give examples from their own lives – such as retail workers
who came up with specific knowing phrases to communicate special messages to staff.
Several users gave the example of “Pebkac”, a derogatory acronym used by IT specialists to
refer to certain individuals reporting a fault with their computer. It stands for, “Problem Exists
Between Keyboard and Chair”.
Not all codes are alphanumeric. Some are visual, intended to be hidden in plain sight
There are lots of examples of these phrases in specific communities. BBC Trending recently
reported on a special phrase used by scientists online to share copies of journal articles – “I
can haz PDF”, a riff on the popular “I can haz cheezburger” meme.
And online daters might want to use their profiles to alert potential partners to the fact that
they have a sexually transmitted infection, but to do so discreetly. There’s a codeword for
that, too: 437737. On a telephone dialing pad with letters associated with numbers, the
number spells out “herpes”.
Visual codes
Not all codes are alphanumeric. Some are visual, intended to be hidden in plain sight. As
BBC Future discovered earlier this year, many banknotes feature a specific pattern of dots
called the EURion constellation, placed there to prevent people from photocopying money.
Many copiers and scanners are programmed to spot it.
The ‘constellation’ of circles recurs across different currencies; it’s shown here, on the right,
on a £10 note (Credit: BBCW)
Other visual codes are scrawled in the landscape around us. One surprising example is the
series of signs known as “hoboglyphs” – a collection of symbols meant to provide information
to travelling workers and homeless people. Among other things, these could indicate the
quality of a nearby water source, or suggest whether the occupant of a house is friendly or
not.
Graffiti gangs have also been known to develop esoteric glyphs which which they might
scribble over the graffiti of rival groups. Discover magazine listed some examples in 2012.
These included “SS” meaning “South Side” – a faction within a specific gang in Indianapolis;
and a lazy red “X” over someone else’s graffiti – a visually jarring mark of disrespect.
Known as “hoboglyphs”, these nondescript graffiti tags highlight safe areas, water sources
and information about police between the homeless (Credit: Flickr/Everfalling/CC BY 2.0)
Amazingly, as Discover reported, software is now helping police decipher these symbols
automatically. Such programs are even available as smartphone apps.
And finally, the spray-painted squiggles you see on pavements in towns and cities all over
the world adhere to codes understood by construction workers and engineers. A BBC News
Magazine report recently revealed the meaning of many of these in the UK, and pointed out
that different colours related to different types of cable or pipe. Blue meant a water system
while yellow indicated gas lines and green labelled CCTV or data wiring.
In construction worker code; red means electricity, blue signals water, green can be CCTV or
cable networks and white, telecommunications (Credit: Flickr/Rory Hyde/CC BY 2.0)
All of these codes have a purpose – to avoid causing panic, to transmit subtle signals in
social groups, or to provide technical information quickly and easily. But once you know
about them, it’s difficult to shake off that sense of intrigue and conspiracy – if only a
conspiracy of knowledge. It’s no wonder online discussions about these codes are so
popular.
“People don’t like secrets, do they?” says Baker. “There is a drive to have as much
information as possible – we do live in the information age,” he adds.
Topic 21. Are any foods safe to eat anymore? Here’s the truth
Is bacon really as bad for you as cigarettes? Will coffee give you a heart attack? Do
wheat-eaters suffer “brain fog”? BBC Future examines the foods, the fears – and the
facts.
 By David Robson
 30 October 2015
Food was once seen as a source of sustenance and pleasure. Today, the dinner table
can instead begin to feel like a minefield. Is the bacon on your plate culinary asbestos, and
will the wheat in your toast give you “grain brain”? Even the bubbles of gas in your fizzy
drinks have been considered a hazard.
Worse still, the advice changes continually. As TV-cook Nigella Lawson recently put it:
“You can guarantee that what people think will be good for you this year, they won’t next
year.”
Many of our favourite foods are not the ticking time bomb we have been led to believe
This may be somewhat inevitable: evidence-based health advice should be constantly

updated as new studies explore the nuances of what we eat and the effects the meals have
on our bodies. But when the media (and ill-informed health gurus) exaggerate the results of a
study without providing the context, it can lead to unnecessary fears that may, ironically,
push you towards less healthy choices.
We’ve tried to cut through the confusion by weighing up all the available evidence to date.
You may be pleased to learn that many of your favourite foods are not the ticking time bomb
you have been led to believe.
The WHO warns against bacon, but how worried should you be? (Wendy/Flickr/CC BY-ND
2.0)
The food: Bacon
The fear: Processed meats are as dangerous as cigarettes.
The facts: While the World Health Organisation has announced overwhelming evidence
that bacon (and other kinds of processed meat) can contribute to colorectal cancer, the real
dangers are not quite as worrying as the subsequent headlines would have us believe.
As Cancer Research UK points out in an astute blog, colorectal cancer is itself relatively
rare. If you eat barely any meat, there is a 5.6% risk of developing the disease over your
lifetime; even if you pig out on bacon and ham every day, it only rises to about 6.6%. In other
words, for every 100 people who stop eating bacon, only one will have avoided cancer. To
put that
in perspective, consider the figures for tobacco: for every 100 smokers who give up, 10-
15 lives may be saved. The two are hardly comparable.
Even so, you may want to reconsider a 20-rashers-a-day habit. The UK government advises
that an average of 70g a day is still healthy – about three rashers, or two sausages.
In a nutshell? The odd English breakfast may not do you as much good as a bowl of
granola – but nor is it gastronomic asbestos.
Should you avoid a daily cup? (Guwash999/Flickr/CC BY 2.0)
The food: Coffee
The fear: Our caffeine addiction will drive us to a heart attack.
The facts: There is very little evidence that a cup of Joe will send you to an early grave; in
fact, the opposite may be true. In 2012, the New England Journal of Medicine reported on
the health of 400,000 Americans over the course of 13 years. The scientists found that
people who drank between three and six cups a day were around 10% less likely to die
during the 13-year period, with lower rates of heart disease, stroke, diabetes and infections.
Considering a string of studies examining the health of more than a million individuals, a
review in 2014 painted a similar picture: people who drank four cups a day were around 16%
less likely to die at any one time.
Note that these were only observational studies. Although they tried to account for other
factors, there’s no way of knowing if the coffee itself was protecting the heart, or if there’s
some other, hidden, explanation. Perhaps healthier people are just more likely to be drawn to
coffee. But as “addictions” go, it’s pretty harmless.
In a nutshell? It’s probably not the elixir of life that some claim, but based on this evidence,
you can at least savour that morning espresso with impunity.
We've been eating wheat for 10,000 years (Glory Foods/Flickr/CC BY 2.0)
The food: Wheat
The fear: So-called “grain brain” could contribute to Alzheimer’s disease.
The facts: First things first: a very small number of people – around 1% of the population –
do have a genuine gluten allergy known as celiac disease, that can damage their intestines
and lead to malnutrition. Others may not suffer from celiac disease, but they may instead be
“sensitive” to wheat; although they don’t suffer symptoms if they only eat a small amount,
they may experience some discomfort if they eat too much bread.
Explanations for this “non-celiac gluten sensitivity” are controversial: rather than the gluten in
wheat specifically, it may instead be caused by a range of sugars and proteins that are also
found in many other foods, including fruit and onions. If so, simply cutting wheat would not
relieve the symptoms.
Then there are the people going gluten-free even without experiencing definite symptoms at
all, because wheat itself is seen as being toxic. As Peter Green at Columbia University
commented recently: “People who promote an anti-grain or anti-gluten agenda sometimes
cite our work in celiac disease, drawing far-ranging conclusions that extend well beyond
evidence-based medicine.” One popular claim, for instance, is that wheat-based foods
t r igg er inf lamm ation t hr oug hout t he body, which could cont r ibut e t o “ brain fog” and
increase
t he r isk of ser ious condit ions lik e Alzheim er’s . But while diets heavy in
carbohydrates and sugars may, over time, lead to neural damage, whole wheat is still
better than other energy sources, such as potatoes, since it releases its sugars more
slowly.
In a nutshell? Humans have been eating wheat for at least 10,000 years – and unless you
have been tested for an allergy, there seems little reason to stop until we have far more
evidence.
Cheese is bad for your heart, right? Not so fast (jeffreyw/Flickr/CC BY 2.0)
The food: Butter, cheese and full-fat milk
The fear: Dairy products will clog up your arteries and contribute to heart disease.
The facts: For decades, the message has been simple: “saturated” fats from cheese, butter,
and full-fat milk will raise the cholesterol in your blood and put you in danger of a heart
attack. For this reason, many health organisations had encouraged us to lubricate our diets
with margarine and vegetable oils, replacing the saturated fats with “poly-unsaturates”
typically found in the (famously healthy) Mediterranean diet.
Yet over the last few years, we’ve seen a stream and then a torrent of deeply puzzling
findings that contradict the accepted wisdom. Taking all the evidence into account, one major
review in the Annals of Internal Medicine recently concluded that “high levels of saturated fat
intake had no effect on coronary disease”. Again, these were only observational studies, but
one team decided to put it to a test with a carefully planned intervention, feeding their
participants 27%-fat Gouda cheese every day for eight weeks. At the end of the trial, they
had lower cholesterol than controls asked to stomach a zero-fat alternative.
The oddest finding? Despite the fact that full-fat milk and butter are packed with calories,
people eating full-fat dairy were no more likely to be obese than those drinking semi-
skimmed milk; 12 separate studies have in fact found them to be leaner. It’s possible that the
fat itself could help regulate the metabolism, meaning that you burn off energy more
efficiently; or it could be that full-fat dairy keeps our hunger locked away for longer, making
us less likely to fill up with unhealthy snacks later on.
In a nutshell? We still don’t understand why, but “full-fat” may be the new “skinny”.
Pasteurisation of milk has many benefits (Intrinsic-Image/Flickr/CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
The food: Pasteurised milk
The fear: Pasteurisation could contribute to eczema, asthma and other immune disorders.
The facts: It’s not just full-fat milk that has come under fire. A common assumption is that
the more “natural” a food is, the healthier it must be, and this has led some to shun
pasteurised milk. Proponents claim that pasteurisation damages many of the useful nutrients
in milk, including proteins that may protect us from allergies. The process of pasteurisation,
they believe, also kills “f r iendly” m icr obes in t he m ilk t hat could add t o t he m icr
obiome in our gut, aiding digestion, strengthening the immune system and even protecting
against cancer.
Many doctors, however, believe this is premature. The mild heating involved in
pasteurisation should leave almost all the nutrients intact, and it seems unlikely that the
friendly bacteria in raw milk will bring many benefits: its colonies would need to be thousands
of times bigger for enough of the bacteria to survive digestion and make their way to the
intestine. And although there is some tentative evidence that people who drank raw milk as
children tend to have fewer allergies, it’s hard to be sure this was caused by the milk itself,
and not just the fact
that many of these children mostly grew up on farms. Living among so many animals, their
body may have been trained to deal with allergens at a young age, making them less likely to
suffer as adults. What’s more, drinking raw milk could be potentially dangerous: we
pasteurise the drink for good reason, to kill microbes that could cause serious disease, like
tuberculosis, Salmonella and E coli.
In a nutshell? Before you risk a nasty infection, you might want to wait for the evidence to
match the extravagant claims.
How many eggs is too many? (Tom Fassbender/Flickr/CC BY-ND 2.0)
The food: Eggs

The fear: A heart-attack in a shell.
The facts: Like full-fat milk, eggs were once thought to cake our arteries in cholesterol and
increase the risk of heart disease. There may be some truth in these claims, but provided
you are otherwise healthy, eating up to seven eggs a week seems to come with no ill-
consequences.
In a nutshell? Besides the risk of flatulence and constipation, eggs are a safe and valuable
source of protein.
Many fear the health effects of sweeteners in diet drinks (Ze’ev Barkan/Flickr/CC BY 2.0)
The food: “Diet” soft drinks
The fear: Artificial sweeteners can contribute to cancer risk.
The facts: We already know that too much sugar leads to obesity, diabetes and heart
disease – but what about the artificial sweeteners we add to “diet” drinks to try to lessen the
impact? One common fear is that they promote the growth of tumours. But as Claudia
Hammond recently explained on BBC Future, the risks may have been exaggerated; a vast
study conducted by the US National Cancer Institute found no increase in the risk of brain
cancer, leukaemia or lymphoma in people consuming aspartame, the most common
sweeteners, and the same seems to be true for other sugar alternatives. There is, however,
a chance that they might contribute to glucose intolerance, and type 2 diabetes – though it
has yet to be proven. (Incidentally, Hammond has also punctured the idea that the bubbles in
soft drinks are themselves a hazard, debunking claims that it could harm your stomach and
weaken your bones.)
In a nutshell? Artificial sweeteners may be the lesser of two evils – they may carry some
risks, but are still healthier than the full-sugar alternatives.
Topic 22. Is beer better (or worse) for you than wine?
From health benefits to hangovers, there are some important differences between hop
and grape that only science can explain.
Few drinks (save tea or coffee) divide the world so spectacularly as beer or wine. There’s no
accounting for taste, of course – but there are subtle differences in the way they affect your
body and determine your health. Is one more fattening than another? How do their heart
benefits compare? And which gives the worse hangover?
BBC Future has combed through the data to bust some of the myths surrounding two of the
world’s favourite drinks.
Which gets you drunk more quickly?
A pint of lager and a medium glass of wine both contain around the same alcohol content –
two or three British units (16-24g). However, your descent into inebriation relies on that
alcohol passing into your blood stream – and the speed at which this happens can depend
on the type of drink.
The speed at which you get inebriated can depend on the type of drink
Mack Mitchell at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Centre recently asked a
group of 15 men to imbibe different drinks on different days. He made sure that the alcohol
content was precisely matched to their body weight – and ensured they drank the alcohol at
precisely the same rate, over a 20 minute period. Unsurprisingly, spirits entered the blood
stream quickest, leading to the highest peak in blood alcohol content – followed by wine
(reaching a peak 54 minutes after drinking) and then beer (which peaked 62 minutes after
the drink was finished). In other words, a glass of wine will go to your head more quickly than
a pint of beer.
Verdict: Beer is less likely to lead to embarrassment
What drink is the more fattening? (Credit: iStock)
Which gives you the biggest paunch?
At face value, the myth of the beer belly should be true. Alcohol itself contains calories, not to
mention all the sugars that make our favourite drinks so tasty. And at around 180 calories, a
pint of beer has 50% more energy content than a small glass of wine – enough to cause you
to pile on the pounds.
For moderate drinkers, however, the differences seem to be minimal. A recent review of
studies concluded that neither wine nor beer drinkers tend to put on weight over the short-
term. The authors noted, however, that the longest study had lasted just 10 weeks. The
studies could have missed minor weight gain – and even 1kg (2.2lbs) over that period would
eventually add up to a beer belly weighing 25kg (55lbs) over five years. That’s the equivalent
to carrying 10 full-term babies.
(On the plus side, the commonly held view that beer may cause men to develop breasts
is almost certainly an unfounded myth.)
Verdict: Slim differences, but wine may have the edge
Hops or grape... which is the worst the following morning? (Credit: iStock)
Which gives the worst hangover?
Despite their best efforts, scientists have yet to conquer the drinker’s most formidable foe:
the hangover. We don’t even fully understand what causes it. Dehydration is likely to be an
important factor (alcohol makes us pee more liquid than we take in) but it may also be
caused by some of the byproducts of fermentation. Called congeners, these organic
molecules give each drink its unique flavour and aroma, but they may also be toxic to the
body, resulting in the throbbing head and nausea that usually follows a night of excess.
In general, darker drinks are thought to contain more congeners. In fact, the evidence so far
is ambiguous. Although certain dark spirits like bourbon do seem to produce a worse
hangover than crystal clear vodka, different types of beer and wine so far seem to be
equal. So provided you haven’t turned to the hard stuff, you can’t blame your choice of drink
for your agony.
Verdict: Too ambiguous to call
Red wine contains polyphenols, which soothe inflammation and provide other health benefits
(Credit: iStock)
Which is better (or worse) for my health?
We are often told that a glass of wine a day could help rejuvenate the body, reducing our risk
of heart disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes. This life-giving sustenance is thought to
come from “polyphenols” (found especially in red wine) that soothe inflammation and mop up
damaging chemicals in the body.
If drank in moderation, a glass a day really may keep the doctor away
Beer is conspicuously absent from these health bulletins, but it too contains a fair share of
polyphenols, and seems to offer modest benefits, akin to white wine but less than red
wine. ielts.vinh@gmail.com
Clearly, none of this gives you a free pass to binge drink, but if drank in moderation, a glass
a day really may keep the doctor away.
Verdict: Red wine wins hands down, but beer may be better than no drink at all
Overall verdict: When it comes to health benefits, wine edges it as the best medicine.
However, beer drinkers can at least respond that their drink has the more illustrious
history. In fact, some anthropologists have suggested that our taste for beer might
have planted the seeds of agriculture, and therefore civilisation itself. That’s
something to contemplate the next time you’re waiting at the bar.
Topic 23. Does mixing alcoholic drinks cause hangover?

Many people believe that mixing wine, beer and spirits causes nasty hangovers. Are
they right? Claudia Hammond studies the evidence.
"Grape or grain, but never the twain." So runs the old folk wisdom that advises against
drinking wine or beer on the same night. It is far from uncommon to hear people who have
woken up feeling sick, dehydrated and with a splitting headache blaming their hangovers on
having unwisely mixed their drinks.
Then there are the theories about the order in which to consume different tipples. One
version suggests: “Wine before beer and you’ll feel queer. Beer before wine and you’ll feel
fine.” Or is it the other way round? After a couple of drinks it’s not always easy to remember.
All of which begs the question of how reliable these sayings are. Is there any evidence
beyond the anecdotal that drinking wine followed by beer or vice versa makes hangovers
worse?
A review of previous research published in 2000 confirms that the causes of the main
symptoms of hangovers are dehydration, changes in the levels of hormones such as
aldosterone and cortisol, and the toxic effects of alcohol itself. In addition ther e’s
evidence that the immune system is disrupted and that this could be the cause of the
headache, the nausea and the fatigue.
The first of the two main ingredients of a drink that affect the severity of a hangover is
obvious. The higher the alcohol content, and the faster you drink it, the worse the hangover.
This is however just an average. The same quantity of alcohol does not always result in the
same severity of hangover. Many report that they don’t get hangovers and no one quite
knows why. In a study of young Danes on holiday, almost a third of those who consumed at
least 12 units of alcohol (roughly equivalent to four pints of lager or four 250ml glasses of
wine) avoided hangovers.
Many drinkers report that they don't get hangovers at all, but it's unclear why (Thinkstock)
Mixing drinks needn’t necessarily increase the overall amount of alcohol consumed, but it
may do with cocktails. If combining three or four measures of spirits alongside other
ingredients, a throbbing head and dry throat is probably just the result of consuming more
alcohol in total.
Beyond the ethanol that triggers intoxication, the other key ingredients that affect hangovers
are what the beverage industry calls congeners. These are the other substances produced
during fermentation, such as acetone, acetaldehyde, fusel oil and the best-known, tannins,
which give darker drinks their colour and part of their flavour. Bourbon whisky, for example,
contains 37 times the quantity of congeners as vodka.
To find out the effect of these substances on hangover severity, researchers in the US
recruited university students who were regular drinkers, without alcohol problems. On
different nights they were given either bourbon and cola, vodka and cola or a placebo which
consisted of cola mixed with tonic, with a few drops of either bourbon or vodka to make it
taste similar to the real stuff. They drank anything between three and six drinks, however
much was enough to give them a concentration of 0.11g of alcohol per 100ml of breath. This
would put them two to five times over the drink drive limit, depending which country they
were in. They then spent the night in the clinic and were woken at 7am for breakfast before
taking part in a battery of tests. For this they were paid a rather generous $450. The
researchers found the students who drank bourbon rated their hangovers as worse, but
interestingly they performed just as well on tasks such as reaction time tests.
Whisky contains high levels of 'congeners', which can make hangovers worse than paler
drinks (Thinkstock)
Clear drinks such as white rum, vodka and gin tend to cause fewer and less severe
hangovers because they contain relatively low levels of congeners. Perhaps those who mix
their drinks are more likely to choose a dark-coloured drink containing higher levels of these
substances simply by virtue of their wider drinking range, but again it isn't the mixing in itself
that causes the problem.
No scientist seems to have done the perfect counter-balanced study where people are
randomly assigned to drink beer followed by wine or wine followed by beer. But perhaps it’s
not the grape or the grain that matters, but the effect that the strength of those drinks has on
judgement. Beer is only between a third and half the strength of wine, so starting on it leads
to less intoxication if followed by the stronger stuff. But if a person starts on wine or spirits,
then their judgement may be impaired enough to drink more heavily later. There’s certainly
evidence that people are not good at judging their own drunkenness. At low levels people
overestimate the amount of alcohol in our blood, but after a few drinks they start to
underestimate it.
So, the existing evidence suggests that hangovers can't be blamed on mixing drinks. It's
probably down to the high congener count of the booze, or over-drinking. As for hangover
cures, scientists have looked into those too, and the British Medical Journal published a
review of trials of everything from borage to artichoke and glucose to prickly pears in 2005.
The bad news for drinkers is that none of them work.
Topic 24. Does coffee really sober you up when drunk

It’s an appealing idea that caffeine can cancel out the effects of too much alcohol.
Sadly, studies reveal it is not that straightforward.
A few years ago I went to a play at my local theatre with some friends. My husband arrived
late and a little jolly, having been to his office Christmas lunch and spent most of the
afternoon drinking wine. Luckily it was a comedy, but he laughed so much that even the cast
looked surprised at his enthusiasm.
During the interval I bought him a coffee to help sober him up before the second act. By the
end of the play he was a bit quieter, but was I right to assume it was the coffee that had done
the trick?
The sedative effects of large quantities of alcohol are well-established. For the first hour-and-
a-half or so, when blood-alcohol concentrations are high, people become more alert. From
two hours after alcohol consumption to around six hours, objective measures of sleepiness
increase . Caffeine does the opposite, making people more alert, which has led to the
appealing idea that a cup of coffee can cancel out the effects of a pint of beer.
Sadly it’s not that straightforward. Historically, studies of the effect of caffeine on people’s
driving abilities when drunk (in the lab, not on the roads) have had contradictory results.
Some have found it reverses the slowing of reaction times caused by alcohol, others have
found it doesn’t.
More recently, a study published in 2009 was designed to tease out in more detail the effects
of combining alcohol and caffeine. Mice were given alcohol followed by the human equivalent
of eight cups of coffee. After the caffeine they seemed more alert, but they were still much
worse than sober mice at getting round a maze.
So caffeine can counteract the tiredness induced by alcohol, which might explain why a cup
of coffee is popular in many places at the end of a meal. But it can’t remove feelings of
drunkenness or some of the cognitive deficits alcohol causes. The reason is that we have to
metabolise the alcohol we drink in order to diminish its effects. The body processes it in
several ways. Mostly it ’s brok en down in t he liver by two enzymes, alcohol
dehydrogenase and aldehyde dehydrogenase. After several steps the alcohol is eventually
excreted as water and carbon dioxide.
It takes approximately an hour for the body to metabolise one unit of alcohol, although some
people do it faster and some slower, depending on their genetic make-up, how much food
they’ve eaten and how often they drink. Caffeine doesn’t speed up the process. However its
effects vary according to which function you’re looking at. One study, for example, found a
large dose of caffeine can counteract the negative effects of alcohol on memory, but that
feelings of dizziness remain.
There are also suggestions that caffeine can make matters worse. If you feel tired you are
more likely to realise that you must be drunk, but if the caffeine takes away some of that
fatigue you might believe you’re sober when you’re not. This might explain the findings of
a study of American college students from 2008. Those who chose drinks containing both
alcohol and caffeine, such as vodka and Red Bull, were twice as likely to get hurt in an
accident and more than twice as likely to accept a lift with a driver who was over the limit.
This effect was independent of the amount of alcohol consumed. This is an early study on
the topic in which the students choose their own drinks and reported themselves how much
they’d drunk. But it does illustrate how caffeine could fool people into thinking they’re
sobering up, and some of the potentially disastrous consequences.
So if I go to a play on the day of my husband’s office party this year, I’ll know that only time
will make a difference. I’ll have to hope it’s a production with a third act then.
If you would like to comment on this article or anything else you have seen on Future, head
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You can hear more Medical Myths on Health Check on the BBC World Service.
Disclaimer
All content within this column is provided for general information only, and should not be
treated as a substitute for the medical advice of your own doctor or any other health care
professional. The BBC is not responsible or liable for any diagnosis made by a user based
on the content of this site. The BBC is not liable for the contents of any external internet sites
listed, nor does it endorse any commercial product or service mentioned or advised on any of
the sites. Always consult your own GP if you're in any way concerned about your health.
Topic 25. How to live forever
If more and more people are living past 100, how much older can we survive to, in
theory, asks Frank Swain. And what would it take to achieve this in practice?
 By Frank Swain
 21 April 2014
On the Art of Prolonging Life was penned by a Dr Huseland (“one of the soundest minds in
Germany”) in 1797, concluding eight years of study on the topic. He identified among the
many factors associated with long life: a moderate diet that was rich in vegetables and short
on meat and sweetened pastries; an active lifestyle; good care of your teeth; weekly bathing
in lukewarm water with soap; good sleep; clean air; and being born to parents who
themselves lived long lives. Toward the end of his essay, translated for the American
Review, the doctor wistfully speculated that “human life may be prolonged to double the
extent of what is supposed to be its present limits, without losing activity and usefulness.”
By Huseland’s estimates, half of all children born would die before their tenth birthday, an
alarmingly high mortality rate. However, if the child could run the gauntlet of youth fraught
with smallpox, measles, rubella, and other childhood diseases, they stood a fair chance of
making it all the way to their mid-thirties. In ideal circumstances, Huseland thought it possible
that a lifetime could stretch for two hundred years.
Is there more to these claims than the fanciful imagination of an 18th century doctor? James
Vaupel doesn’t think it’s out of the question. “Life expectancy is increasing two-and-a-half
years every decade,” he says. “That’s twenty five years every century.” As director of the
Laboratory of Survival and Longevity at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research
in Rostock, Germany, Vaupel studies longevity and survival in human and animal
populations. He tells me that the pattern of improvements to mortality has shifted greatly in
the past 100 years. Before 1950, most of the gains in life expectancy were made by
combating the high infant mortality that Huseland noted. Since then, however, it’s been the
over-60s and most recently the over-80s who’ve seen the greatest decreases in mortality.
In other words, we are not just surviving childhood in greater numbers, we’re living longer – a
lot longer.
Age complex
Worldwide, the number of centenarians – people over the age of 100 – is predicted to
increase 10-fold between 2010 and 2050. As Huseland testified, a strong component in
whether you’ll live to see this milestone lies in the age of your parents; that is, there is a
genetic component to long life. But the rise in centenarians can’t be explained by genetics
alone, which clearly haven’t changed much in the last couple of centuries. Rather, it’s a host
of improvements to our lives that cumulatively improve our chances of living longer and
stronger, many of which echo the factors identified by Huseland. The reasons include better
healthcare, improving medical treatments, public health measures like cleaner water and air,
better education, and improved standards of living such as houses that are warm and dry.
“Mostly it’s down to having more medicine and money,” says Vaupel.
Recent decades have seen significant improvements in life expectancy for the elderly
(Thinkstock)
Nonetheless, the gains offered by better healthcare and living conditions still leave many
people dissatisfied, and the appetite for life-extension therapies shows no sign of abating.
One popular approach is caloric restriction. In the 1930s, researchers noticed that mice fed
on a near-starvation diet lived far longer than those allowed to eat until full. A subsequent
study on rhesus monkeys also showed this, but this was contradicted by a 20-year-long
study by the US National Institute on Ageing, which found that although rhesus monkeys
kept on a calorie-restricted diet developed age-related diseases slightly later than controls,
they did not live longer on average. The authors noted that though caloric restriction in long-
lived animals conferred some benefits, these were subject to a complex interplay of genetics,
nutrition and environmental factors.
Another great hope is resveratrol, a chemical produced naturally by plants, notably in the
skin of grapes. Whether vineyards can be said to hide the fountain of youth, however,
remains doubtful. The chemical has been noted to produce similar health benefits to caloric
restriction in animal models, but as yet, no study has shown that taking resveratrol can
increase human lifespan.
No limits
But why do we age at all? “Every day we suffer damage and don’t perfectly repair it,”
explains Vaupel, “and this accumulation of unrepaired damage is what causes age-related
disease.” It’s not a trait that is shared by all living organisms. Hydra for example – a group of
simple, jellyfish-like creatures – are able to repair almost all the damage they suffer, and
readily slough cells that are too injured to heal. In humans, it’s damaged cells like these that
can give rise to cancerous tumours.
“Hydras allocate resources primarily toward repair, rather than reproduction,” says Vaupel.
“Humans, by contrast, primarily direct resources toward reproduction, it’s a different survival
strategy at a species level.” Humans may live fast and die young, but our prodigious fertility
allows us to overcome these high mortality rates. Now that infant mortality is so low, there’s
really no need to channel so many resources into reproduction, says Vaupel. “The trick is to
up-regulate repair instead of diverting that energy into getting fat. In theory that should be
possible, though nobody has any idea about how to do it.” If the steady accretion of damage
to our cells can be arrested – so-called negligible senescence – then perhaps we won’t have
an upper age limit. If that’s the case, there isn’t any reason why we should have to die at all.
Hydra can repair almost all its damaged cells, shedding any that are too injured to heal
(Science Photo Library)
“It would be wonderful to get to a world where all death is optional. Right now, essentially all
of us are sentenced to the death penalty, even though most of us have done nothing to
deserve it.” So says Gennady Stolyarov, transhumanist philosopher and author of Death Is
Wrong, a controversial children’s book that encourages young minds to reject the fatalist
notion that death is inevitable. Stolyarov is fervently opposed to what he sees is simply a
technological challenge waiting for the appropriate level of money and manpower to solve it.
Agents of change
One focus for technological intervention are telomeres. These caps on chromosomes
shorten every time your cells divide, putting a hard limit on the number of times your cells
can reproduce themselves. Not all animals experience this telomere shortening, the hydra
being one of them. However, there are good reasons to have these limitations in place.
Occasional mutations can allow cells to divide without shortening their telomeres, giving rise
to “immortal” cell lines. However, in an uncontrolled situation, these immortal cells would be
very bad news for the person they are in, bloating into cancerous tumours.
“One hundred and fifty thousand people in the world die each day, two thirds of those die
from causes related to senescence,” Stolyarov tells me. “So even if we can hasten the arrival
of these technologies to achieve negligible senescence by one day, we will have saved a
hundred thousand lives.” The author quotes geronotology theoretician Aubrey de Grey –
something of a celebrity in the world of life extension – as stating that there is a 50% chance
of achieving negligible senescence in the next 25 years. “There’s a good chance that it will
happen in our lifetimes, before we experience the most deleterious effects of senescence,”
says Stolyarov.
“Achieving negligible human senescence in 25 years is possible,” says Vaupel, “but highly
unlikely.” He concedes that it might be possible to rapidly accelerate life expectancy through
medical breakthroughs. But he warns that equally, there may be difficulties in the future that
we don’t anticipate. “Disease, economic crisis, and climate change might cause increases in
mortality,” he says.
Telomeres, the protective ends of chromosomes, are linked to ageing of cells (Science Photo
Library)
Stolyarov is hoping to kindle a small spark of hope into an eternal flame. “What I think is
necessary right now is a determined push to dramatically accelerate the pace of
technological progress,” he says. “We have a fighting chance right now, but in order to make
it happen we have to be the agents of change.”
For now, readers will have to take comfort in the knowledge that there are well-documented
ways to try to avoid the Western world’s two biggest killers – heart disease and cancer –
through a combination of exercise, healthy eating, and moderation when it comes to alcohol
and red meat. Very few of us actually manage to live by these criteria, perhaps because we
think a shorter life filled with rich food and wine is a worthy trade. Which leads to the
conundrum – if eternal life was possible, would you be willing to pay the price?
Topic 26. The real reason germs spread in the winter

Flu season is a fact of life – but until recently, no one knew why. The answer hinges on
the disgusting ways that germs pass between people.
 By David Robson
 19 October 2015
It begins as surely as the leaves dropping off the trees. As the mercury drops and the
sunlight fades, the sniffles set in. At best, it’s just a cold that leaves us with the strange
feeling that we’ve swallowed a cheese grater; if we’re unlucky, our body is wracked with a
high fever and aching limbs for up a week or longer. We have flu.
The flu season arrives so predictably, and affects so many of us, that it’s hard to believe that
scientists have had very little idea why cold weather helps germs to spread. Over the last five
years, however, they have finally come up with an answer that might just offer a way to stem
the tide of infection – and it revolves around a rather grim fact about the ways that your
sneezes linger in the air.
The fact that it is simply colder in winter can’t explain the yearly flu season
A new understanding of influenza couldn’t come quickly enough; worldwide, up to five million
people catch the illness each flu season, and around a quarter of a million die from it. Part of
its potency comes from the fact that the virus changes so quickly that the body is rarely
prepared for the next season’s strain. “The antibodies we’ve built up no longer recognise the
virus – so we lose our immunity,” says Jane Metz at the University of Bristol. It also makes it
harder to develop effective vaccines, and although you can engineer a new jab for each
strain, governments often fail to persuade enough people to take it up.
Germs can linger for a long time on an underground train (Credit: Getty Images)
The hope is that by understanding better why flu spreads in winter, but naturally fades in
summer, doctors could find simple measures to stop its spread. Previous theories had
centred on our behaviour. We spend more time indoors in the winter, meaning that we’r e
in closer contact with other people who may be carrying germs. We’re more likely to take
public transport, for instance – and as we’re pressed against spluttering commuters, misting
up the windows with their coughs and sneezes, it’s easy to see how this could send us over
a
tipping point that allows flu to spread through a population.
Without much sunlight, we may run low on Vitamin D, weakening the immune system
Another popular idea concerned our physiology: the cold weather wears down your body’s
defences against infection. In the short days of winter, without much sunlight, we may run
low on Vitamin D, which helps power the body’s immune system, making us more vulnerable
to infection. What’s more, when we breathe in cold air, the blood vessels in our nose may
constrict to stop us losing heat. This may prevent white blood cells (the warriors that fight
germs) from reaching our mucus membranes and killing any viruses that we inhale, allowing
them to slip past our defences unnoticed. (It could be for this reason that we tend to catch a
cold if we go outside with wet hair.)
While such factors will both play some role in transmission, analyses suggested that they
couldn’t completely explain the yearly emergence of flu season. Instead, the answer may
have been lying invisible in the air that we breathe. Thanks to the laws of thermodynamics,
cold air can carry less water vapour before it reaches the “dew point” and falls as rain. So
while the weather outside may seem wetter, the air itself is drier as it loses the moisture. And
a steady stream of research over the past few years has shown that these dry conditions
seem to offer the perfect environment for the flu virus to flourish.
In winter, we’re more likely to take public transport, pressed against wet windows and
spluttering commuters (Credit: iStock)
Lab experiments, for instance, have looked at the way flu spreads among groups of guinea
pigs. In moister air, the epidemic struggles to build momentum, whereas in drier conditions it
spreads like wildfire. And comparing 30 years’ worth of climate records with health records,
Jeffrey Shaman at Columbia University and colleagues found that flu epidemics almost
always followed a drop in air humidity. In fact, the overlap of the graphs was so close, “you
could pretty much put one on top of each other,” says Metz, who together with Adam Finn,
recently reviewed all the evidence for the Journal of Infection. The finding has now been
replicated many times including analyses of the 2009 Swine flu pandemic.
In winter, you are breathing a cocktail of dead cells, mucus and viruses from everyone who
has visited the room recently
Should I wear a facemask?
What studies say
Anytime you walk into a public place, you are breathing in a fine mist of other people’s
coughs and sneezes – which can hang around in the air for days. Face masks are a common
precaution to stop you breathing in the germs – but do they work?
To find out, one Australian study targeted the families of people turning up at hospital with
influenza. Relatives who wore surgical masks were 80% less likely to become infected
themselves.
Although later papers have mostly confirmed the results, it seems that it is only effective
alongside hand-washing and generally good hygiene. Otherwise, it’s a little like locking all
your windows while leaving the front door wide open – you are missing the most obvious line
of defence.
That’s counter-intuitive – we normally think that the damp makes us ill, rather than protects
us from disease. But to understand why, you need to grasp the peculiar dynamics of our
coughs and sneezes. Any time we splutter with a cold, we expel a mist of particles from our
nose and mouths. In moist air, these particles may remain relatively large, and drop to the
floor. But in dry air, they break up into smaller pieces – eventually becoming so small that
they can stay aloft for hours or days. (It’s a bit like the mist you get when you turn a hose
pipe to its finest spray.) The result is that in winter, you are breathing a cocktail of dead cells,
mucus and viruses from anyone and everyone who has visited the room recently.
What’s more, water vapour in the air seems to be toxic to the virus itself. Perhaps by
changing the acidity or salt concentration in the packet of mucus, moist air may deform
the
vir us’s surf ace, meaning that it loses the weaponry that normally allows us to attack our
cells. In contrast, viruses in drier air can float around and stay active for hours – until it is
inhaled or
ingested, and can lodge in the cells in your throat.
There are some exceptions to the general rule. Although the air on aeroplanes is generally
dry, it does not seem to increase the risk of catching influenza – perhaps because the air
conditioning itself filters out any germs before they have a chance to circulate. And although
the dry air seems to fuel the spread of flu in the temperate regions of Europe and North
America, some contradictory results suggest the germs may act somewhat differently in
more tropical areas.
In particularly warm and wet conditions, the virus may end up sticking to more surfaces
within a room
One explanation is that in particularly warm and wet conditions of a tropical climate, the virus
may end up sticking to more surfaces within a room. So although it can’t survive in the air so
well, the flu virus could instead be thriving on everything that you touch, making it more
likely to pass from hand to mouth.
To understand why dry air makes us ill, you need to understand the peculiar dynamics of our
coughs and sneezes (Credit: Getty Images)
But in the northern hemisphere at least, these findings could offer a simple way to kill the
germs while they are still hanging in the air. Tyler Koep, then at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester,
Minnesota, has estimated that simply running an air humidifier in a school for one hour could
kill around 30% of the viruses flying around the air. Similar measures could (almost literally)
pour cold water on other disease hotspots – such as hospital waiting rooms or public
transport. “It would be a way of curbing the large outbreaks that occur every few years as the
flu virus changes,” he says. “The potential impact in the cost of work days missed, schools
days missed, and healthcare, would be substantial.”
Can wearing a surgical mask help prevent a cold? Not always (Credit: Getty Images)
Shaman is now working on further trials, though he thinks that it will involve a tricky balancing
act. “Though higher humidity is associated with lower survival rates for influenza, there are
other pathogens, such as pathogenic mould, that thrive at higher humidity,” he says. “So
care must be taken with humidification – it's not solely beneficial.”
The scientists are keen to emphasise that measures like vaccines and good personal
hygiene are still the best ways to protect yourself; using water vapour to kill the germs would
just offer an additional line of attack. But when you are dealing with an enemy as mercurial
and pervasive as the flu virus, you need to use every possible weapon in your arsenal.
Topic 27. Why do we laugh inappropriately?

We often find ourselves laughing at the strangest of moments. As psychologists are
discovering, those helpless giggles might be one of our most important and profound
behaviours, says David Robson.
My conversation with Sophie Scott is nearly over when she spins round in her chair to show
me a video of a near-naked man cannonballing into a frozen swimming pool. After a minute
of flexing his muscles rather dramatically, he makes the jump – only to smash and tumble
across the unbroken ice. The water may have remained solid, but it doesn’t take long for his
friends to crack up.
“They start laughing as soon as they see there isn’t blood and bones everywhere,” says
Scott. “And they are SCREAMING with mirth; it’s absolutely helpless.” (If you want to see the
video in question, you can find it here – though it does contain some swearing.)
Why do we get such an attack of the giggles – even when someone is in pain? And why is it
so contagious? As a neuroscientist at University College London, Scott has spent the last
few years trying to answer these questions – and at TED2015 in Vancouver last week, she
explained why laughter is one of our most important, and misunderstood, behaviours.
Scott’s work has not always met the approval of her straight-laced colleagues. She likes to
point out a handwritten note she once found stuck to the top of her printouts. “This pile of
paper seems like rubbish (because of the nature of the material) and will be disposed of if not
collected,” the note read. “Is this science?” In an ironic nod to the criticisms, Scott is now
wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the question, ready for a comedy gig she is hosting later
in the evening.
She started out her career by examining the voice more generally, and the rich information it
offers about our identity. “You can get a good shot at my gender, my age, my socioeconomic
status, my geographical origins, my mood, my health, and even things to do with
interactions,” she says.
One of her experiments involved scanning professional impersonator Duncan Wisbey to

explore the way that he comes to adopt the subtle mannerisms of other people’s speech (see
video, below). Surprisingly, she found that the brain activity seemed to reflect areas normally
associated with bodily motion and visualisation – as he, almost literally, tried to work his way
under the skin of a character. More generally, the work on impersonations has helped her pin
down the regions involved in things like accent and articulation – important aspects of our
vocal identity.
But it was a study in Namibia that made Scott begin to realise laughter is one of our richest
vocal tics. Previous research had shown that we can all recognise six universal emotions
across cultures – fear, anger, surprise, disgust, sadness, happiness – based on facial
expressions. Scott, however, wanted to see if we encode more subtle information in our
voice. So she asked indigenous Namibians and English people to listen to recordings of each
other and rate the emotions represented – including the six accepted universals, as well as
relief, triumph, or contentment.
Laughter was the most easily recognisable emotion across both groups. “Almost
immediately, it started to look different from the other positive emotions,” she says.
The more she probed, the more she became fascinated by its intricacies. For instance, she
soon found out that the vast majority of laughs have nothing to do with humour. “People
genuinely think they are mostly laughing at other people’s jokes, but within a conversation,
the person who laughs most at any one time is the person who is talking,” she says. Instead,
she now sees laughter as a “social emotion” that brings us together and helps us to bond,
whether or not something is actually funny. “When you laugh with people, you show them
that you like them, you agree with them, or that you are in same group as them,” she says.
“Laughter is an index of the strength of a relationship.”
Infectious giggles
That might explain why couples can roll about laughing at each other’s apparent wit – while
onlookers fail to be infected. “You’ll hear someone say ‘he’s got a great sense of humour and
I really fancy him because of it’. What you mean is ‘I fancy him and I show him I like him by
laughing when I’m around him.’”
Indeed, mirth might be the primary way of maintaining relationships; she points to research,
for instance, showing that couples who laugh with each other find it much easier to dissipate
tension after a stressful event – and overall, they are likely to stay together for longer. Other
recent studies have shown that people who laugh together at funny videos are also more
likely to open up about personal information – paving more common ground between people.
Even the hilarity at the German man falling in the frozen swimming pool may have united the
friends. “It’s interesting how quickly his friends start laughing – I think it’s to make him feel
better,” says Scott. Along these lines, Robin Dunbar at the University of Oxford has found
that laughter correlates with increased pain threshold, perhaps by encouraging the release of
endorphins – chemicals that should also improve social bonding.
Scott is now interested in picking apart the differences between the “posed” giggles we might
use to pepper our conversation – and the absolutely involuntary fits that can destroy a TV or
radio broadcast, like this:
For instance, she found that the less authentic tones are often more nasal – whereas our
helpless, involuntary belly laughs never come through the nose.
Her fMRI scans, meanwhile, have looked at the way the brain responds to each kind of
laughter. Both seem to tickle the brain’s mirror regions – the areas that tend to mimic other’s
actions. These areas will light up whether I see you kicking a ball, or if I kick it myself, for
instance – and it could be this neural mimicry that makes laughter so contagious. “You are
30 times more likely to laugh if you’re with someone else,” she says. An important difference,
however, is that the less spontaneous, social laughs, tend to trigger greater activity in areas
associated with “mentalising” and working out other people’s motives – perhaps because we
want to understand why they are faking it.
You may think it is easy to tell the difference between involuntary and more artificial laughs,
but Scott thinks the skill develops slowly across the lifespan and may not peak until our late
30s. For this reason, she has recently set up an experiment at London’s Science Museum,
where her team will be asking visitors of different ages to judge the authenticity of different
clips of people laughing and crying. After all, she points out that crying is an infant’s primary
way of communicating, whereas laughter gains more importance the older we get.
Although we may tend to dislike certain people’s “fake” laughs, Scott thinks it probably says
more about us, and the way we are responding to their social signals, than anything
particularly irritating about them. She tells me about an acquaintance who had frequently
irritated her with a persistent, fluting, laugh. “I always thought that she laughed so
inappropriately, but when I paid more attention to it I saw that what was odd was simply the
fact I didn’t join in. Her laughter was entirely normal.” If she hadn’t disliked the person
already, she says, she would have laughed away and wouldn’t have even noticed.
Why not listen to some of Scott's clips and judge your own abilities to read people’s laughter:
Beside probing the bonds in our closest relationships, Scott’s curiosity has also taken her to
comedy clubs. “What’s interesting about laughter in the situation of stand-up is that it’s still an
interaction,” she says. In a way, the audience is having a conversation with the comedian.
“I’m interested in what happens when the audience starts laughing and how it dies away –
whether are you in sync with people around you or whether you don’t care, because the
experience is just between you and the person on the stage.”
Paradoxically, she says, comedians often find it easier to work in large venues, perhaps
because the contagious nature of laughter means that waves of mirth can catch on more
easily when there are more people. She recalls a video of comedian Sean Lock reducing the
audience to fits of hysterics simply by saying the word “cummerbund” occasionally, thanks to
the infectious laughter spreading through the audience.
So far, she has tried to equip audience members watching comedians with sensors to track
the outbreak of laughter, with limited success – the audience froze under the attention. But
she hopes to continue the work with a high-profile comedian like Rob Delaney, who may be
able to break through the awkwardness.
Scott occasionally takes up the microphone herself at comedy nights in London, and I ask
her if her insights have fed her stage persona? She disagrees that science has offered her a
fast track to comic genius, though as I discover at a charity gig the following evening, she is
very funny.
As her “Is this science?” T-shirt reminds us, her more uptight colleagues might disapprove of
her flippant attitude – but then, Scott understands just how powerful a tool that laughter can
be to express ourselves, and get people to listen. “Laughter seems trivial, ephemeral,
pointless,” she says. “But it is never neutral – there’s always a meaning to it.”
Share this story on Facebook, Google+ or Twitter.
Laughter increases the pain threshold and may send endorphins shooting through our veins.
Topic 28. One of science’s most baffling question? Why we yawn
Yawning has puzzled scientists for more than two millennia. But could a new theory
settle the question once and for all? David Robson investigates.
 By David Robson
 12 August 2014
Mid-conversation with Robert Provine, I have a compelling urge, rising from deep inside my
body. The more I try to quash it, the more it seems to spread, until it consumes my whole
being. Eventually, it is all I can think about – but how can I stop myself from yawning?
Provine tells me this often happens when people are talking to him; during presentations, he
sometimes finds the majority of his audience with their mouths agape and tonsils swinging.
Luckily, as a psychologist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and author of
Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccupping, and Beyond, he isn’t offended. “It makes
a very effective lecture,” he says. “You talk and then the audience starts yawning. And then
you can ask people to experiment on their yawns – like closing the lips, or inhaling through
clenched teeth, or trying to yawn with the nose pinched closed.”
It is through experiments like these that Provine has tried to explore a millennia-old mystery:
why do we yawn? We all know that tiredness, boredom, or the sight of someone else can all
bring along the almost irrepressible urge – but what purpose does it serve the body? When
he first started work on so-called “chasmology” in the late 80s, Provine wrote that “yawning
may have the dubious distinction of being the least understood, common human behaviour”.
Nearly three decades later, we may be closer to an answer, but it’s one that has split the
field.
Does infectious yawning ensure that we all go to bed at the same time? (Getty Images)
Arguably the first studier of yawns was the Greek physician Hippocrates nearly 2,500
years
ago. He believed that yawning helped to release noxious air, particularly during a fever. “Like
the large quantities of steam that escape from cauldrons when water boils, the accumulated
air in the body is violently expelled through the mouth when the body temperature rises,” he
wrote. Different incarnations of the idea lingered until the 19th Century, when scientists
instead proposed that yawning aids respiration – triggering a rush of oxygen into the blood
supply, while flushing out the carbon dioxide. If that were true, you would expect people to
yawn more or less frequently depending on the oxygen and carbon dioxide concentrations in
the air. Yet when Provine asked volunteers to breathe various mixtures of gases, he found
no such change.
Many theories have instead focussed on the strange, contagious nature of yawning – a fact
that I know only too well from my conversation with Provine. “Around 50% of people who
observe a yawn will yawn in response,” he says. “It is so contagious that anything associated
with it will trigger one… seeing or hearing another person, or even reading about yawning.”
For this reason, some researchers have wondered if yawning might be a primitive form of
communication – if so, what information is it transmitting? We often feel tired when we yawn,
so one idea is that it helps set everyone’s biological clocks to the same rhythm. “In my view
the most likely signalling role of yawning is to help to synchronize the behaviour of a social
group – to make them go to sleep more or less at the same time,” says Christian Hess, at the
University of Bern in Switzerland. With the same routine, a group can then work together
more efficiently throughout the day.
Danario Alexander of the San Diego Chargers yawns before the start of a American football
match (Getty Images)
Yet we also yawn during times of stress: Olympic athletes often do it before a race, while
musicians sometimes succumb before a concert. So some researchers, including Provine,
believe that the strenuous movements might have a more general role in rebooting the brain
– when you are sleepy they make you more alert, or when you are distracted they make you
more focussed. Spreading through a group, contagious yawns could then help everyone
reach the same level of attention, making them more vigilant to a threat, for instance. The
mechanism is somewhat hazy – though one French researcher, Olivier Walusinski, proposes
that yawning helps to pump cerebrospinal fluid around the brain, which could trigger a shift
in neural activity.
With so many competing and contradictory ideas, a grand unifying theory of yawning may
seem like a distant speck on the horizon. But over the last few years, one underlying
mechanism has emerged that could, potentially, appease all these apparent paradoxes in
one fell swoop. Andrew Gallup, now at the State University of New York at Oneonta, was first
inspired with the idea during his undergraduate degree, when he realised that yawning might
help to chill the brain and stop it overheating. The violent movement of the jaws moves blood
flow around the skull, he argued, helping to carry away excess heat, while the deep
inhalation brings cool air into the sinus cavities and around the carotid artery leading back
into the brain. What’s more, the strenuous movements could also flex the membranes of
sinuses – fanning a soft breeze through the cavities that should cause our mucus to
evaporate, which should chill the head like air conditioning.
The most obvious test was to see if people are more or less likely to yawn in different
temperatures. In normal conditions, Gallup found that around 48% felt the urge to yawn, but
when he asked them to hold a cold compress to their foreheads, just 9% succumbed.
Breathing through the nose, which could also cool the brain, was even more effective,
completely dampening his subjects’ urge to yawn – potentially suggesting a handy trick for
anyone facing embarrassment during a tedious conversation.
Can yawning give you a brain boost? (Thinkstock)
Perhaps the best evidence comes from two troubled women who approached Gallup soon
after he first published his results. Both were looking for relief from pathological yawning
attacks, sometimes lasting an hour at a time. “It was extremely debilitating and interferes with
any basic activity,” says Gallup. “They’d have to walk away and go to a secluded area – it
affected their personal and professional lives.” Intriguingly, one of the women found the only
way to stop the yawning attack was to throw herself into cold water. Inspired, Gallup asked
them to place a thermometer in their mouths before and after the attacks. Sure enough, he
saw a slight rise in temperature just before the yawning bouts, which continued until it
dropped back to 37C.
Importantly, this brain chill might underlie the many, seemingly contradictory, events that lead
to yawning. Our body temperature naturally rises before and after sleep, for instance.
Cooling the brain slightly might also make us more alert – waking us up when we are bored
and distracted. And by spreading from person to person, contagious yawns could therefore
help a whole group to focus.
Does this picutre make you yawn? (Thinkstock)
Gallup’s unified theory has been somewhat contentious among yawning researchers.
“Gallup’s group has failed to present any convincing experimental evidence to support his
theory,” says Hess. In particular, his critics point out he hasn’t made direct measurements of
temperature changes in the human brain, though Gallup says he has found the expected
fluctuations in yawning rats. Provine is more positive, however – believing that it could be
one way in which yawning helps the brain change state, and focus.
Even if Gallup has managed to find that unified theory, many mysteries remain. Why do
foetuses yawn in the womb, for instance?
It could just be that they are practicing for life outside, or perhaps the yawn plays a more
active role in guiding the body’s growth – by helping to develop articulation in the jaws joints,
for instance, or by encouraging the growth of the lungs, says Provine. If so, Provine suggests
that yawning’s functions in the womb may be more important than our attacks as adults.
Provine also points out that yawning – and perhaps other bodily functions, like sneezing –
shares some strange parallels with sex. The facial expressions involved are surprisingly
similar, he says – just take a look at this picture and you can see where he’s coming from.
(Thinkstock)
Like sex, yawns and sneezes involve a build-up that ends in a pleasant climax. “Once
initiated, they go to completion – you don’t want a yawnus interruptus,” is how Provine puts it.
For these reasons, he wonders if a shared neural machinery underlying these different
feelings. “Mother Nature does not reinvent the wheel,” he says. As evidence, he points to the
fact that certain anti-depressants can lead some patients to orgasm during a yawn – a rare
side effect that could quickly lose its appeal.
Eventually, the temptation to yawn just proved too irresistible during my conversation with
Provine. It was a warm summer day, so perhaps my yawns were stopping my brain from
over-heating during our stimulating conversation. Whatever function it was serving, the relief
was almost worth the agonising wait.
I’m willing to bet you’ve been stifling a few yawns yourself by this point – as Provine points
out, reading or even thinking about yawning can be enough to set us off. So go ahead, let it
out – and do so in the knowledge that you are enjoying one of life’s most enduring mysteries.
Topic 29. How muc would you pay to live for an extra year?
We all strive to forestall death – but at what cost does it become too expensive? BBC
Future explores the attempts to value the price of life.
Human life is so precious, it seems crass to put a price on it. How can a pile of coins, paper
or gold bars match a year on Earth? Life should be, quite literally, invaluable.
Yet that is the morbid question that health services, everywhere, inevitably have to ask. They
have limited money to spend on sick and dying people, and whenever a new drug becomes
available, they have to make a choice: will the few stolen months, or years, be worth the
money it costs?
Our gut instincts may seem obvious: we should do all that we can to buy more time for the
people we love. Yet Dominic W ilkinson, an intensive care doctor and ethicist at the
University of Oxford’s Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics recently wrote a thought-provoking
article questioning these assumptions and asks us all to consider just how much we should
be willing to pay for a longer life.
Intrigued, BBC Future phoned him to explore his argument, and to better understand the
ways we currently calculate the price of life.
Hi-tech treatments mean that we can survive many of the diseases that would have killed our
ancestors - yet they come at a huge cost (Credit: Getty Images)
At the moment, drugs for terminal illnesses tend to be judged on two things – by how much
they extend the lifespan, and the quality of life of the patient, using a scale known as the
Quality Adjusted Life Year-saved (QALY). A drug that helps you live for an extra year, at half
your general quality of life, would score about 0.5 years on this scale, for instance.
“Alternatively, a drug that improved your quality of life for a year from a level of half normal,
to full health would also score 0.5,” explains Wilkinson.
The UK recommends paying about £20,000 to £30,000 for each additional year of good
health
From these calculations, a health service can then start to set a price on whether a drug is
worth the cost. The UK’s recommendations, for example, are about £20,000 to £30,000
($30,000 to $45,000) for each additional year of good health, once it has been adjusted to
take into account the quality of life. So a drug that achieved 0.5 on the QALY measure would
only merit £10,000-15,000 ($15,000 to $22,500).
This inevitably means that some drugs have been rejected by the National Health Service
(NHS), because they are simply too expensive: the breast cancer drug Kadycla, for instance,
only extends the lifespan by about six months for a cost of £95,000. Even if the quality of life
during those few months is equal to that of a healthy person, it still hugely overstretches the
limit. (Other healthcare providers may have different criteria, of course – but they all have to
weigh up the costs and benefits in some way, before offering to fund a treatment.)
Campaigners argue that the pharmaceutical companies should lower the costs of such
treatments, and that health services should also invest more and more money in drugs that
will buy terminally ill patients some more precious time. Given these strong and emotive
arguments, the UK recently considered increasing the threshold for terminal illnesses – to as
much as £80,000 ($120,000) for each “quality-adjusted year saved”.
Should we pay more for drugs that will extend a life, if it means cutting off treatment that
could improve the lives of those not in danger (Credit: Getty Images)
As doctors looking after patients, we are ethically driven to say that ‘I know it is expensive but
my first duty is to help my patient – Dominic Wilkinson
Wilkinson says this attitude is completely understandable – and it’s often the doctors, as well
as the patients themselves, who argue the case. “As doctors looking after patients, we are
ethically driven to advocate for patients, to say that ‘I know it is expensive but my first duty is
to help my patient,’” he says.
But the inevitable sacrifice is that this money will be taken away from other areas of care,
such as mental health services or help for people with disabilities – measures that may be
crucial for improving the quality of life for people at the start or middle of their lives.
Is it worth forfeiting one person’s comfort to buy another a few more months at the end of
their life? When making these decisions, it’s important to gauge public opinion. And although
you might assume that most people would pay infinite sums to buy a few extra years, recent
research suggests we do not all place such a high value on the sheer length of the lifespan.
When surveyed, many people said they would prefer to pay for treatments that improve
palliative care, rather than new drugs that would buy extra years (Credit: Getty images)
Wilkinson points to a detailed UK study of 4,000 people that clearly explained the different
ways the health service’s limited resources could be spent, and asked the participants for
their preferences. “They clearly indicated that they weren’t comfortable with giving more
money to people who were terminally ill, compared with people who might benefit at other
stages of their lives.”
Perhaps most surprising were the results from a study in Singapore, which questioned
elderly, but otherwise healthy, citizens as well as those suffering from terminal cancer. “The
striking thing from that is that they were prepared to pay an awful lot more money for
palliative care so they could be treated in their own home, than drugs that would extend life,”
says Wilkinson.
Many participants would pay just £5,000 to extend life by a year
On average, the participants would pay £5,000 ($7,500) for a treatment to extend life by a
year. But they were willing to pay about twice that amount – £10,000 ($15,000) – on better
palliative care, such as better nursing that would allow them to die in the relative comfort of
their homes, rather than a hospital. “It seemed to provide a fresh way of thinking about
difficult decisions.”
Doctors are increasingly arguing that we should maximise the quality of our time on Earth,
rather than extending the length of the lifespan (Credit: Getty Images)
Clearly, these studies are not the final answer; it is hard to know if these opinions are shared
among different people in different cultures and facing different illnesses; there are also
questions about just how effectively a calculation like the QALY scale can really, objectively
assess a treatment’s potential. But Wilkinson thinks that we should at least consider these
different opinions before devoting more and more money to extending lifespans.
“Although it’s very understandable to want to buy more expensive drugs for the terminally ill, I
don’t think it reflects the view of the general public or those of the patients,” he says. “Nor is it
clearly the right ethical approach.”
As the population ages, and healthcare grows ever more advanced, and expensive, these
issues will only become more pressing. The eminent American surgeon Atul Guwande has
long questioned whether it is better to stretch out the lifespan, instead of increasing the
comfort of our available years. Ezekiel Emanuel, the former director of the Clinical Bioethics
Department at the US National Institutes of Health, has even claimed that he would refuse all
life-extending healthcare at the age of 75, rather than entering a cycle of ever more intense
treatments to draw out his last few years.
Few of us may decide to take such a drastic decision, but anyone, at any age, may do well to
consider the value of their time on Earth and what we are doing to make the most of it.
Topic 30. The nasa team keeping tabs on intergalatic death rays
A space mission tracking the most violent explosions in the Universe has just
celebrated its 10th anniversary. Richard Hollingham discovers how Swift has changed
our view of the cosmos.
You do not want to get in the way of a gamma ray burst.
“They’re the most luminous, high energy explosions that have happened since the Big Bang,”
says Neil Gehrels, principal investigator at Nasa for the Swift mission. “It’s like a beam of
gamma radiation that’s flying through the Universe.”
What would happen if one of these cosmic death rays of high frequency electromagnetic
waves hit the Earth?
A gamma radiation burst could extinguish life on Earth (Credit: Science Photo Library)
“For a planet 1000 light years away, it would destroy the ozone layer. If it was just 100 light
years away it could blow the atmosphere off,” says Gehrels matter-of-factly.
“The chances of that happening to the Earth is fairly small, about once in a billion years,” he
adds. “It’s certainly not as great a threat as a giant asteroid hitting our planet.” Still, it
probably pays to keep an eye on them.
Round-the-clock detection
Gehrels leads the international team of scientists – with members in the US, UK and Italy –
operating the Swift satellite, which they use to study the behaviour and origins of these
cosmic events . In orbit since November 2004, the spacecraft is named after its ability to
respond instantly to any of the 90 or so high-energy flashes of radiation it detects each year.
As soon as Swift detects a gamma ray burst somewhere in its field of view, the satellite
rotates to point its X-ray and optical telescopes in that direction. Meanwhile back on Earth,
within a few seconds of the blast going off, the science team are notified by text message.
“Immediately – even if we’re on the road somewhere – we’ll go to our laptops, log in and then
get on the phone to teleconference with other members of the team,” says Gehrels. Within
15 minutes of the burst, they will have issued an alert so that other observatories on the
ground can point their telescopes towards the source.
Like being a doctor on call, duty scientists working on Swift even get woken up in the middle
of the night to react to an event on the other side of the cosmos. “It’s really exciting, you’re
making discoveries and learning something new at all hours of the day and night.”
Black holes and revelations
However, not everyone agrees with this assessment. “My wife was amused by this at the
beginning, pretty soon it got to be annoying,” says Gehrels. “As more time went on, she’d just
sleep right through it.”
Before Swift was launched, no one knew for sure what caused gamma ray bursts. Now
astronomers are fairly certain that the longer bursts – that is anything over two seconds – are
caused when the centre of massive stars collapse in on themselves forming black holes.
When the stars subsequently explode into oblivion, a jet of gamma rays is blasted out across
space.
The second type of these explosions (anything shorter than two seconds) is categorised as
short bursts. The Swift team has concluded that these are caused by the collision of two
dense neutron stars. These cosmic bodies are just a few kilometres across but have a similar
mass to the Sun. Which helps explain why the resulting explosion is so phenomenal.
What the Swift scientists have also discovered is that gamma ray bursts are vitally important
to the evolution of the Universe. “When a gamma ray burst goes off near a star with a
planetary system, it can have a very important and destructive influence,” says Gehrels.
Time warp
The explosions that result in gamma ray bursts might even have provided all the gold in the
Universe. “There was a burst that had an unusual afterglow that told us that a lot of heavy
elements like gold had been produced,” Gehrels says. “It certainly gives us a clue where gold
comes from.”
Because light from the other side of the Universe takes so long to reach the Earth, some
gamma rays bursts spotted by Swift actually began their journey towards us shortly after the
Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago. When a blast goes off, it illuminates that particular region of
space enabling astronomers to get a glimpse back in time to the birth of the very first stars
500 million-or-so years after the Universe came into existence.
The alerts give astronomers time to direct telescopes onto areas of gamma ray activity
“We’ve learnt what the early Universe was like,” says Gehrels. “When the Universe was born,
the only elements were hydrogen and helium but explosions started to seed the galaxy with
higher elements like carbon, nitrogen and iron – the elements that make up our bodies.”
Not only do we owe our very existence to cosmic explosions, there is some evidence that the
Earth’s ecosystem has been directly affected by these bursts of energy. Research published
in 2013 suggested that a blast of radiation that hit our planet in the 8th Century may have
been the result of a gamma ray burst, though Gehrels is inclined to reserve judgement.
Swift could continue its mission for another five years (Credit: Nasa)
After 10 years of observations, he reckons Swift is good for at least another five years but it
has already transformed how astronomers see the Universe.
“Before Swift, astronomers used to think the Universe was a steady set of stars and
galaxies,” he says.
Topic 31. The private investigator who spies using drones

Aerial vehicles are the latest tool for private detectives – but for how long? Rose
Eveleth reports.
Chris Wright is a problem solver. Her clients come to her with an issue, a question, a
mystery, and she figures out the best way to find the answer – using whatever tools she can.
“I use a combination of new technology and old technology, because I have to solve a
problem. So I’ve used everything from geese and dogs to Roombas to drones to GPS.”
Wright is a private investigator – and owner of the Wright Group – based in Anaheim,
California. She’s worked in the business for more than 40 years, and has seen the tools
available to investigators change dramatically. Early on, stakeouts in vans were important.
More recently new technology in the form of tiny cameras and social media has begun to
play a role. And she’s embraced those changes. Today, when the problem calls for it, she
uses drones to do her work.
She gives me a few examples. If two people are meeting in a public place, a drone can be a
helpful way to discreetly watch them. “We stay at about 50-75 feet [15-23 metres] above so
nothing can be heard.” Drones are also helpful for aerial surveillance of locations that are
hard to access on foot. And if a school or church is worried someone might be stealing or
vandalising property, drones or small off-road vehicles (“Roombas on steroids” as she calls
them) can film the property.
Chris Wright relies on gamers to pilot her snooping drones (Credit: Thinkstock)
In one case, Wright was asked to figure out whether or not a soda salesperson was crossing
county lines and cheating on his contract. California is one of many states in which
salespeople have regional contracts – for instance, Bob sells Pepsi in Los Angeles County
and Nancy sells Pepsi in Orange County. If Nancy arrives at her usual businesses to sell her
Pepsi and finds the soda supply has already been topped up, there’s a good chance that
someone (perhaps Bob) has crossed county lines and sold illegally.
Hi-tech toys
Wright was asked to figure out whether this was happening. To do so meant visiting every
major soda wholesaler from San Luis Obispo to San Diego – about 300 miles (480km) of
California coast – and checking whether any were selling soda from the wrong salesperson.
When there was illegal soda on sale, she would use a drone to follow the soda delivery
trucks back to their depots. In one case, the warehouse the truck led her back to was out in
the desert and would have been impossible to approach by car or foot without being noticed.
But the drone was able to spy on the trucks covertly. “We could see between the warehouse
door and the truck loading.”
Wright gets her drones from high-end toy stores, for about $200 each. They’re an expensive
investment: not only do you have to buy the device, you also have to pay one or two people
to pilot and spot the thing. And if you lose one during a mission, you’re out a good chunk of
your budget. But it can be worth it, because for the cases in which they’re useful, they can be
very useful indeed.
Wright doesn’t pilot the drones herself. “I try to hire gamers. I go to the colleges and high
schools and I find out who the geeks are, and then I hire them.” She said that her pilots are
more skilled than she would ever be – and they like the challenge. Some of them are working
towards their own private investigator licences, and their hours piloting the little devices can
count as hours towards their certification. (None of Wright’s gamer pilots were willing to talk
for this article. “They’re introverts,” she told me. “Not shy, but introverts.”)
Understandably, the idea of using drones to spy on people isn’t something everybody is
comfortable with. In a case in Seattle in 2013, a woman reported that someone was using a
drone to spy on her. “This afternoon, a stranger set an aerial drone into flight over my yard
and beside my house near Miller Playfield,” she told the Capitol Hill Seattle Blog. “I initially
mistook its noisy buzzing for a weed-whacker on this warm spring day. After several minutes,
I looked out my third-story window to see a drone hovering a few feet away.” Her husband
asked the drone operator, who was standing nearby, to move along – but the operator
claimed to be acting within his legal rights.
Tightening regulations
Whether that’s true isn’t always clear. According to the National Conference of State
Legislatures, 35 states considered adding drone bills to the books last year, and 10 states
actually did add new laws. In Iowa, for example, it’s now illegal for the state to use drones to
enforce traffic laws. In North Carolina, no one can use a drone for surveillance of a person or
private property. And Tennessee now specifies that it’s a misdemeanour to use drones for
surveillance of people who are hunting or fishing.
Wright’s drone operations might soon become legally questionable too. Earlier this month, a
California senator introduced a bill that would extend property rights into airspace, meaning
that drones flying over private property would be considered trespassers. Just a few days
before that, President Obama and the Federal Aviation Administration announced new drone
regulations as well, requiring – among other things – that drones must be under 55lb (25kg)
and that operators must keep the flying vehicles in sight at all times.
Many states in the US are already clamping down on the use of drones (Credit: Thinkstock)
Because the laws are murky, many private investigators steer clear of drones. “The use of
drones for surveillance is highly restricted by law,” said Kelly Riddle, a private investigator in
Texas. “There are air space regulations as well as privacy laws that can easily be violated.
Obtaining video using a drone has thus far been something that we have been advised is
illegal.” That’s because drones are often used to observe activities that can’t be seen via a
direct line of sight at ground level. Going out of your way to spy on such activities is
considered an invasion of privacy, says Riddle. A lot of Wright’s work sidesteps this privacy
question, because it involves helping schools and churches monitor their own property.
In all likelihood, the use of drones will be restricted under a more comprehensive set of rules
and regulations in the United States sooner than later. But in the meantime Wright will
continue to use them when they can help with her work. But she also says that regardless of
the legality, if someone thinks their privacy is being compromised, they’re going to do
something about it. That can mean shooting down drones – another activity that may or
may not be legal. “I think a lot of my colleagues have lost them and realised that it is a tool,
and if you invade someone’s privacy, well, if they can hit it they will.”
Topic 32. Why do women live longer than men?

All across the world, women enjoy longer lifespans. David Robson investigates the
reasons why, and whether men can do anything about it.
 By David Robson
 2 October 2015
As soon as I was born, I was already destined to die earlier than half the babies in my
maternity ward – a curse that I can do little to avoid. The reason? My sex. Simply due to the
fact that I am male, I can be expected to die around three years earlier than a woman born
on the same day.
What is it about being a man that means I am likely to die younger than the women around
me? And is it possible for me to break the curse of my gender? Although this puzzling divide
has been known for decades, it is only recently that we have started coming close to some
answers.
One early idea was that men work themselves into an early grave. Whether working in a
mine or ploughing the land, they put extra stress on their bodies and amassed injuries that
caught up with them later in life. Yet if that were the case, you might expect the gap to be
closing, as both men and women converge on the same, sedentary jobs.
Women live longer, and the gap isn't closing either (Credit: Getty Images)
The survival advantage of women is seen in every country, in every year, for which reliable
records exist
In fact, the difference in lifespan has remained stable even throughout monumental shifts in
society. Consider Sweden, which offers the most reliable historic records. In 1800, life
expectancy at birth was 33 years for women and 31 years for men; today it is 83.5 years and
79.5 years, respectively. In both cases, women live about 5% longer than men. As one
recent article put it: “This remarkably consistent survival advantage of women compared with
men in early life, in late life, and in total life is seen in every country in every year for which
reliable birth and death records exist. There may be no more robust pattern in human
biology.”
Nor has it been easy to prove that men are more abusive of their bodies. Factors such as
smoking, drinking, and overeating may partly explain why size of the gender gap varies so
widely between countries. Russian men are likely to die 13 years earlier than Russian
women, for instance, partly because they drink and smoke more heavily. But the fact is that
female chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, and gibbons also consistently outlive the males of
the group, and you do not see apes – male or female – with cigarettes hanging out of their
mouths and beer glasses in their hands.
Instead, it would seem like the answer lies in our evolution. “Of course, social and lifestyle
factors do have a bearing, but there does appear to be something deeper engrained in our
biology,” says Tom Kirkwood, who studies the biological basis for ageing at Newcastle
University in the UK.
If lifestyle choices are to blame, it's difficult to pin them down (Credit: Getty Images)
There are many potential mechanisms – starting with the bundles of DNA known as
chromosomes within each cell. Chromosomes come in pairs, and whereas women have two
X chromosomes, men have an X and a Y chromosome.
A woman’s heart rate increases during the menstrual cycle, offering the same benefits as
moderate exercise
That difference may subtly alter the way that cells age. Having two X chromosomes, women
keep double copies of every gene, meaning they have a spare if one is faulty. Men don’t
have that back-up. The result is that more cells may begin to malfunction with time, putting
men at greater risk of disease.
Among the other alternatives is the “jogging female heart” hypothesis – the idea that a
woman’s heart rate increases during the second half of the menstrual cycle, offering the
same benefits as moderate exercise. The result is delayed risk of cardiovascular disease
later in life. Or it could also be a simple matter of size. Taller people have more cells in their
bodies, meaning they are more likely to develop harmful mutations; bigger bodies also
burn more energy, which could add to wear and tear within the tissues themselves. Since
men tend to be taller than women, they should therefore face more long-term damage.
Eunuchs were 130 times more likely to reach 100, compared to other men. Even the
pampered kings did not come close
But perhaps the true reason lies in the testosterone that drives most other male
characteristics, from deeper voices and hairier chests to balding crowns. Evidence comes
from an unexpected place: the Imperial Court of the Chosun Dynasty in Korea. Korean
scientist Han-Nam Park recently analysed the detailed records of court life from the 19th
Century, including information about 81 eunuchs whose testicles had been removed before
puberty. His analyses revealed that the eunuchs lived for around 70 years – compared to
an average of just 50 years among the other men in the court. Overall, they were 130 times
more likely to celebrate their hundredth birthday than the average man living in Korea at the
time. Even the kings – who were the most pampered people in the palace – did not come
close.
Although not all studies of other types of eunuch have shown such pronounced differences,
overall it seems that people (and animals) without testicles do live longer.
Differences between male and female chromosomes may influence how cells age (Credit:
Getty Images)
The exact reasons are elusive, but David Gems at University College London speculates
that the damage may be done by the end of puberty. For speculative evidence, he points to
the sad cases of mental health patients, institutionalised in the USA in the early 20th Century.
A few were forcibly castrated as part of their “treatment”. Like the Korean eunuchs, they too
lived for longer than the average inmate – but only if they had been sterilised before the age
of 15. Testosterone might make our bodies stronger in the short-term, but the same changes
also leave us open to heart disease, infections, and cancer later in life. “For example,
testosterone might increase seminal fluid production but promote prostate cancer; or it might
alter cardiovascular function in a way that improves performance early in life but leads to
hypertension and atherosclerosis later,” says Gem.
Ageing differences may be down to testosterone (Credit: Getty Images)
Not only do women escape the risks of testosterone – they may also benefit from their own
“elixir of youth” that helps heal some of the ravages of time. The female sex hormone
oest r og en is an “ ant ioxid ant ”, meaning that it mops up poisonous chemicals that
cause cells stress. In animal experiments, females lacking oestrogen tend not to live so long
as those who have not been operated on – the exact opposite of the male eunuch’s fate. “If
you remove a rodents’ ovaries, then the cells don’t repair against molecular damage quite
as well,” says Kirkwood.
Once the children are born, the men are more disposable
Kirkwood and Gem both think of this as a kind of evolutionary pay-off that gave both men
and women the best chances of passing on their genes. During mating, women would be
more likely to go for alpha males, pumped up on testosterone. But once the children are
born, the men are more disposable, says Kirkwood. “The welfare of offspring is intimately
connected with welfare of the maternal body. The bottom line is that it matters more for the
children that the mother’s body should be in good shape, rather than the father’s.”
That’s cold comfort for men today. As it is, the scientists admit that we need to keep on
looking for a definitive answer. “We really have to retain an open mind as to how much the
difference can be explained by hormonal differences and other factors,” says Kirkwood. But
the hope is that eventually, the knowledge may provide some hints to help us all live a little
longer.
Topic 33. Why the US hides 700 million barrels of oil underground
The world’s superpowers store an enormous stockpile of oil in secure caverns and
tanks around the world. So why can’t we use it?
Something important, and valuable, has been quietly hidden along America’s Gulf Coast.
Across four secure sites in unassuming locations lies nearly 700 million barrels of oil – buried
underground. A total of 60 subterranean caverns, carved into rock salt beneath the surface,
constitute the United States’ massive “Strategic Petroleum Reserve” (SPR).
The facility was set up 40 years ago and there are now many other huge oil stockpiles dotted
around the world. In fact, a whole host of countries have poured billions of dollars into
developing such facilities and more are on the way. But what are these reserves – and why
would anyone want to bury oil back into the ground in the first place?
The answer lies in the energy crisis of 1973. Arab oil exporters had cut off the W est from
their supplies in response to US support for Israel during the Yom Kippur War. The world
was so dependent on oil from the Middle East that prices skyrocketed and petrol was soon
being rationed at US filling stations. In some cases, it dried up completely. People feared that
any petrol they had might be stolen and a few even took to protecting their cars with firearms
(see photographs taken during the crisis, below).
Protect the oil
The US oil crisis in the 1970s sparked fear - and a giant stockpile (David Falconer/The US
National Archives/Flickr)
A couple of years later, the US began building its SPR, filling caverns full of crude oil. Were
oil supplies to be severely disrupted in the future, now the US would have its own stores to
tide them through a price spike and alleviate pressure on global markets. As a government
website boasts, “The SPR's formidable size… makes it a significant deterrent to oil import
cutoffs and a key tool of foreign policy.” It’s a neat, but expensive, idea. The current year’s
budget for maintaining the SPR is $200m.
The reserve's formidable size makes it a significant deterrent to oil import cutoffs and a key
tool of foreign policy
Bob Corbin at the US Department of Energy is the person in charge of making sure that
money is spent wisely. “All of our sites are located in what we call salt domes,” he explains.
“The salt is impervious to the crude oil, there’s no mixing, no breaking down, so it’s a great
storage facility.” Corbin, who served for 22 years with the military in the US Coast Guard, is
proud of the four sites, which stretch from Baton Rouge, Louisiana to the largest of the four,
near the tiny city of Freeport, Texas. He refers to the vast salt storage chambers as “my
caverns”. “The sites themselves,” he says, “are very impressive.”
China has ploughed funds into their own reserves (Credit: Corbis)
But there’s not much to see above ground – merely some wellbore heads and pipelines. The
wellbores themselves plunge thousands of feet into the caverns below and can push water in
at high pressure in order to retrieve the oil through a process of displacement. Corbin adds
that managing such infrastructure comes with unique challenges. The salt caverns are not
completely stable, for example. Sometimes bits of the walls or ceilings may crumble away,
causing damage to machinery which has to be carefully replaced. It’s not possible for
workers to enter the caverns physically so, like drilling oil out of a natural well, it has to be
done remotely.
International agreements state that member nations must hold oil stocks equivalent to 90
days’ imports (Credit: Getty Images)
However, special tools can be used to give a little visibility. “Periodically when caverns are
empty you can actually shoot sonar images of the caverns,” says Corbin. “And that gives you
a three-dimensional way of looking at them.” Some have interesting shapes, he adds. The
outline of one chamber, for example, would resemble a large flying saucer.
America has, in the past, relied on the SPR to help get it out of sticky situations
America has, in the past, relied on the SPR to help get it out of sticky situations. Take the
first Gulf War for example, in which oil distribution in the Middle East was disrupted. Or
Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when requests for emergency oil were approved within 24 hours
of the storm's landfall.
Global stockpiles
The US is far from the only country which has invested heavily in strategic oil reserves.
Japan has a series of sites where well over 500 million barrels of oil are stored in large
above-ground tanks. The facility at Shibushi, for example is just off-shore. Following the
catastrophic earthquake and tsunami which struck Japan in 2011, calls were made to
expand the country’s oil stocks in case of crises in the future which might hamper oil
distribution again.
The tanks at Shibushi in Japan, which some fear are vulnerable to earthquakes (Credit:
Google)
The International Energy Agency (IEA) oversees the release of oil from a wide range of
reserves internationally. Martin Young is head of the body’s Emergency Policy Division:
“When a country signs up to the IEA there are various obligations,” he says. “One of the key
obligations is to hold oil stocks equivalent to 90 days’ imports.”
But not all countries have salt domes to store oil underground. Nor do all countries even
have large, specialised storage facilities for SPR purposes. The UK, for instance, has
neither. “What the UK has is an obligation on industry to hold oil at their existing sites above
what they would normally do,” explains Young. That oil is quietly kept aside by firms so that
the government can access it immediately, if and when it’s needed.
100
1001
Two nations which are not members of the IEA, India and China, have in recent years
ploughed funds into their own SPRs. The Chinese in particular have ambitious plans. A
diverse array of storage locations, dotted across the land will, it is hoped, eventually store
almost as much as the Americans in a combination of state-owned facilities and commercial
stockpiles. The Chinese don’t have the luxury of salt caverns and have to opt instead for
much more expensive storage above ground in tanks. They’re easy to spot on Google Earth
and in satellite photos – just look for the rows of large white dots. The SPR site in Zhenhai is
just one of these and it currently holds its full capacity of 33 million barrels. “It was big,” says
Young, who visited the location a few years ago. “What you see is a whole load of oil tanks
co-located with a couple of oil refineries.”
The Chinese have opted for storage above ground in tanks, as the geology is less suitable
(Credit: Corbis)
No modern superpower is complete without a Strategic Petroleum Reserve to call its own
Narongpand Lisapahanya, an oil and gas analyst at investment group CLSA, says that
spending money on developing an SPR is all part of China’s plan to be treated seriously as a
global superpower. “If you’re going to be a superpower, you’re going to have to have the
reserve,” he says with a laugh. “It helps you become part of treaties globally. If another
superpower, during energy events, asks for a release of reserves then China can now take
part.”
No modern superpower, then, is complete without an SPR to call its own. While the growth of
reserves around the world is generally welcomed, there are some who worry that countries
outside the IEA could use their reserves to manipulate global oil prices by selling off stocks at
opportune moments. Of course, mitigating nasty price spikes is exactly why SPRs were
invented in the first place, as Carmine Difiglio at the US Department of Energy explains:
“Protecting the US economy from sharp increases in domestic petroleum product prices was
the purpose of the SPR in 1975 and it remains the purpose of the SPR today,” he says.
But there’s an important line to draw between that and using an SPR for ad hoc manipulation
of the world’s markets. On this point, Martin Young is emphatic: “The oil stocks are not there
for price management as such,” he explains, “they’re there to correct a shortage in the
market because of a supply disruption.”
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In the US, caverns in salt are filled to the brim with crude oil (Credit: Getty Images)
There’s a continual debate about how SPR stocks should be used, though. Some people
think releases could be more aggressive while others question whether the US has always
taken full advantage of its SPR oil, which is valued at roughly $43.5bn. “For some folks, 700
million barrels in the ground just looks like a gigantic pot of money,” comments Sarah
Ladislaw, at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC.
The US oil reserve is valued at roughly $43.5bn
Few, though, would support initiatives to fundamentally change how SPRs are used – in the
US or elsewhere. The emphasis is definitely on planning for emergencies and mitigating
supply problems. Governments and the IEA prepare for such situations by working out how
they would draw oil from SPRs in the event of a crisis. There are even specialist firms which
help with this sort of planning, such as EnSys, which has developed a sophisticated
computer model to simulate future pricing fluctuations in the oil industry.
This expertise helps EnSys to advise groups which control SPRs as to when and why they
might consider distributing oil to local refineries. As CEO Martin Tallett explains, it’s a
numbers game. By how many barrels will your imports be short during a given crisis? How
much would have to be released from an SPR to ease that?
South Korea has access to the reserve of Japan in an emergency (Credit: Getty Images)
As governments continue planning for the worst, oil stockpiles only look set to get bigger and
bigger
“What we would do is sit down with somebody and say, OK, there’s disruption in the Middle
East, maybe North Africa as well,” he says. “And we really start from the numbers rather than
spending a lot of time understanding in-depth the geopolitical machinations that could have
caused the disruption.”
As governments and energy bodies continue planning for the worst, oil stockpiles only look
set to get bigger and bigger. It’s obvious that the US and many other countries believe their
SPRs are a good investment.
Despite all the preparations, it’s still possible that, during a future crisis, oil might not be
distributed quickly enough from the strategic reserves. Would we get a repeat of 1973? Bob
Corbin, for one, won’t say: “I wouldn’t want to speculate on what could or could not occur,” he
comments. “We’re prepared to deliver whenever we need to.”
Topic 34. How do you dismantle a nuclear submarine?

When nuclear-powered submarines reach the end of their lives, dismantling them is a
complicated and laborious process. Paul Marks investigates.
 By Paul Marks
 30 March 2015
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Nuclear submarines have long been a favourite in popular fiction. From movies such as The
Hunt for Red October to long-running TV series like Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, they
have always been portrayed as awesome instruments of geopolitical power gliding quietly
through the gloomy deep on secret, serious missions.
But at the end of their useful lives the subs essentially become floating nuclear hazards,
fizzing with lethal, spent nuclear fuel that's extremely hard to get out. Nuclear navies have
had to go to extraordinary lengths to cope with their bloated and ageing Cold War fleets of
hunter-killer and ballistic missile nuclear subs.
As a result, some of the strangest industrial graveyards on the planet have been created –
stretching from the US Pacific Northwest, via the Arctic Circle to Russia’s Pacific Fleet home
of Vladivostok.
These submarine cemeteries take many forms. At the filthy end of the spectrum, in the Kara
Sea north of Siberia, they are essentially nuclear dumping grounds, with submarine reactors
and fuel strewn across the 300m-deep seabed. Here the Russians appear to have continued,
until the early 1990s, disposing of their nuclear subs in the same manner as their diesel-
powered compatriots: dropping them into the ocean.
Rusting remains
The diesel sub scrapyard in the inlets around Olenya Bay in north-west Russia's arctic Kola
Peninsula is an arresting sight: rusted-through prows expose torpedo tubes inside, corroded
conning towers keel over at bizarre angles and hulls are burst asunder, like mussels
smashed on rocks by gulls.
The Soviets turned the Kara Sea into "an aquarium of radioactive junk" says Norway’s
Bellona Foundation, an environmental watchdog based in Oslo. The seabed is littered with
some 17,000 naval radioactive waste containers, 16 nuclear reactors and five complete
nuclear submarines – one has both its reactors still fully fuelled.
Russian reactors have been stored in the harbour at Vladivostok (Credit: Bellona
Foundation)
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The Kara Sea area is now a target for oil and gas companies – and accidental drilling into
such waste could, in principle, breach reactor containments or fuel rod cladding, and release
radionuclides into the fishing grounds, warns Bellona's managing director Nils Bohmer.
Official submarine graveyards are much more visible: you can even see them on Google
Maps or Google Earth. Zoom in on America's biggest nuclear waste repository in Hanford,
Washington, Sayda Bay in the arctic Kola Peninsula, or the shipyards near Vladivostok and
you'll see them. There are row after row of massive steel canisters, each around 12m long.
They are lined up in ranks in Hanford's long, earthen pits awaiting a future mass burial, sitting
in regimented rows on a Sayda Bay dockside, or floating on the waters of the Sea of Japan,
shackled to a pier at the Pavlovks sub base near Vladivostok.
Drained and removed
These canisters are all that remain of hundreds of nuclear subs. Known as "three-
compartment units" they are the sealed, de-fuelled reactor blocks produced in a
decommissioning process perfected at the US Department of Defense's Puget Sound Naval
Shipyard in Bremerton, Washington.
It’s a meticulous process. First, the defunct sub is towed to a secure de-fuelling dock where
its reactor compartment is drained of all liquids to expose its spent nuclear fuel assemblies.
Each assembly is then removed and placed in spent nuclear fuel casks and put on secure
trains for disposal at a long-term waste storage and reprocessing plant. In the US, this is the
Naval Reactor Facility at the sprawling Idaho National Laboratory, and in Russia the Mayak
plutonium production and reprocessing plant in Siberia is the final destination.
Although the reactor machinery – steam generators, pumps, valves and piping – now
contains no enriched uranium, the metals in it are rendered radioactive by decades of
neutron bombardment shredding their atoms. So after fuel removal, the sub is towed into dry
dock where cutting tools and blowtorches are used to sever the reactor compartment, plus
an emptied compartment either side of it, from the submarine's hull. Then thick steel seals
are welded to either end. So the canisters are not merely receptacles: they are giant high-
pressure steel segments of the nuclear submarine itself – all that remains of it, in fact, as all
nonradioactive submarine sections are then recycled.
Russia also uses this technique because the West feared that its less rigorous
decommissioning processes risked fissile materials getting into unfriendly hands. At
Andreeva Bay, near Sayda, for instance, Russia still stores spent fuel from 90 subs from the
1960s and 1970s, for instance. So in 2002, the G8 nations started a 10-year, $20bn
programme to transfer Puget Sound's decommissioning knowhow to the Russian Federation.
That involved vastly improving technology and storage at their de-fuelling facility in
Severodvinsk and their dismantling facility, and by building a land-based storage dock for the
decommissioned reactors.
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Floating menace
Safer land-based storage matters because the reactor blocks had been left afloat at Sayda
Bay, as the air-filled compartments either side of the reactor compartment provide buoyancy,
says Bohmer. But at Pavlovks, near Vladivostok, 54 of the canisters are still afloat and at the
mercy of the weather.
Decommissioning this way is not always possible, however, says Bohmer. Some Soviet subs
had liquid metal cooled reactors – using a lead-bismuth mixture to remove heat from the core
– rather than the common pressurised water reactor (PWR). In a cold, defunct reactor the
lead-bismuth coolant freezes, turning it into an unwieldy solid block. Bohmer says two such
submarines are not yet decommissioned and have had to be moved to an extremely remote
dockyard at Gremikha Bay – also on the Kola Peninsula – for safety's sake.
When nuclear submarines reach the end of their lives, some of their hulks remain
dangerously radioactive (Credit: Science Photo Library)
Using the three-compartment-unit method, Russia has so far decommissioned 120 nuclear
submarines of the Northern Fleet and 75 subs from its Pacific Fleet. In the US, meanwhile,
125 Cold War-era subs have been dismantled this way. France, too, has used the same
procedure. In Britain, however, Royal Navy nuclear subs are designed so that the reactor
module can be removed without having to sever compartments from the midsection. "The
reactor pressure vessel can be removed in one piece, encased, transported and stored,"
says a spokesman for the UK Ministry of Defence.
However Britain's plans to decommission 12 defunct submarines stored at Devonport in the

south of England and seven at Rosyth in Scotland won't happen any time soon as the
government still has to decide which of five possible UK sites will eventually store those
pressure vessels and spent fuel. This has raised community concerns as the numbers of
defunct nuclear-fuelled subs is building up at Devonport and Rosyth, as BBC News
reported last year.
Water fears
Environmental groups have also raised concerns about fuel storage in the US. The Idaho
National Lab has been the ultimate destination for all US Navy high-level spent fuel since the
first nuclear sub, USS Nautilus, was developed in 1953. "The prototype reactor for the USS
Nautilus was tested at INL and since then every scrap of spent fuel from the nuclear navy
has ended up in Idaho. It is stored above the upstream end of the Snake River Aquifer, the
second largest unified underground body of water on the North American continent," says
Beatrice Brailsford of the Snake River Alliance, an environmental lobby group.
"The spent fuel is stored above ground, but the rest of the waste is buried above the aquifer
and that practice may continue for another half century. It is a source of concern for many
people in Idaho." It's not only the aquifer's fresh water that's at risk: the state’s signature
crop, potatoes, would also be affected.
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(Credit: AFP/Getty Images)
Even with high security, radioactive material can occasionally escape – sometimes in bizarre
ways. For instance both INL and Hanford have suffered unusual radiation leaks from
tumbleweeds blowing into waste cooling ponds, picking up contaminated water, and then
being blown over the facility's perimeter by the wind.
The expensive, long-term measures that have to be taken to render a defunct nuclear sub
safe don’t seem to deter military planners from building more vessels. "As far as the US is
concerned there is no indication that the Navy believes nuclear submarines have been
anything less than a stellar success and replacements for the major submarine classes are in
the works." says Edwin Lyman, nuclear policy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists,
a pressure group, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The Russian Navy is planning to launch several new submarines (Credit: Science Photo
Library)
The US is not alone: Russia has four new nuclear subs under construction at Severodvinsk
and may build a further eight before 2020. "Despite limited budgets Russia is committed to
building up its nuclear fleet again," says Bohmer. China is doing likewise.
The submarine graveyards and spent fuel stores, it appears, will continue to be busy.
Topic 35. The secret of the desert aircraft “boneyards”

What happens when an aircraft is no longer needed? In the desert dry of the south-
western US, vast ‘boneyards’ are homes to thousands of aircraft, Stephen Dowling
writes.
 By Stephen Dowling
If you find yourself driving down South Kolb Road in the Arizona city of Tucson, you’ll find the
houses give way to a much more unusual view; rows of military aircraft, still and silent,
spread out under the baking desert sun. On and on, everything from enormous cargo lifters
to lumbering bombers, Hercules freighters and the F-14 Tomcat fighters made famous in Top
Gun.
This is Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, run by the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and
Regeneration Group (309 AMARG). It’s home to some 4,400 aircraft, arranged over nearly
2,600 acres (10.5 sq km). Some look like they were parked only a few hours ago, others are
swathed in protective coverings to keep out the sand and dust. Inside the facilities' hangars,
other planes have been reduced to crates of spare parts, waiting to be sent out to other
bases in the US or across the world to help other aircraft take to the air again. To those who
work here, Davis-Monthan is known by a far less prosaic name, one more in keeping with the
Wild West folklore from Arizona’s earlier days. They call it The Boneyard.
Davis-Monthan is not the only aircraft boneyard in the world, but it is by far the biggest. The
climatic conditions in Arizona – dry heat, low humidity, little rain – mean aircraft take a lot
longer to rust and degrade.
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An aerial view of Davis-Monthan, including partly disassembled B-52 bombers (SPL)
What’s more, underneath the top six inches of dirt topsoil is a clay-like sub layer called
caliche. This extremely hard subsoil allows the planes to be parked in the desert without the
need to construct expensive new parking ramps, according to the 309 AMARG.
Planes are expensive things to build and maintain, but even at the end of their flying lives
they still have their uses. But it takes a lot of room – and a lot of money – to store these
unused planes in the kind of hangars needed to keep them warm and dry. It’s much cheaper
to store them in the kind of conditions found in Tucson. That’s the reason why many of the
world’s biggest aircraft boneyards are found in the dry deserts of the south-western US.
But it’s not simply a case of landing a plane at Davis-Monthan, parking it in one of the rows
and handing someone the keys. Many of the aircraft are considered inactive, but have to be
able to be brought back into service if need be. That takes a lot of work.
Broken bombers
The Boneyard’s workers have an exhaustive checklist. Any planes that have served on
aircraft carriers have to be thoroughly washed to get rid of corroding salt. All aircraft have
their fuel tanks and fuel lines drained, and flushed with a light, viscous oil similar to that used
in sewing machines to ensure all the moving parts are lubricated. Then they must have any
explosive devices – such as the charges that activate ejection seats – safely removed. Then,
any ducts or inlets are covered with aluminium tape and the aircraft are painted over with a
special easily strippable paint – two coats of black, and a final white layer to help deflect the
fierce desert sun and keep the aircraft relatively cool.
Jets like these F/A-18s may be used to provide spare parts to keep other aircraft flying (US
Air Force)
Aircraft are kept at various levels of restoration – some are kept in as close-to-working order
as possible if they are deemed to be needed to fly at a later date, while others are partially
dismantled. Some of the aircraft stored at Davis-Monthan include retired B-52 bombers,
aircraft capable of carrying nuclear weapons. As part of strategic arms limitation treaties with
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the Soviet Union, the B-52s were stored with their wings removed and placed next to the
plane – allowing Soviet satellites to verify that the bombers had been taken out of service.
Others are used for spare parts, with the components sitting in the aircraft until they’re
needed. On site is a smelter, where some of the surplus aircraft are shredded and totally
recycled.
And with the original assembly lines of most of these aircraft long-since mothballed, Davis-
Monthan is home to some 400,000 piece of tooling and machinery needed to create specific
aircraft parts. Aircraft all over the world, not just those flown by the US, contain parts from the
base’s enormous stockpile.
Post-Soviet boneyards
“As long as there are aircraft flying, military and commercial aircraft boneyards will always be
necessary to keep other planes in the air,” says aviation author Nick Veronico, who has
visited Davis-Monthan as well as the Mojave facility and other boneyards in the desert states.
After the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, irradiated Soviet helicopters like this Mil Mi-6 were stored
in a giant boneyard (Phil Coomes/BBC)
“Each of the storage yards typically performs a variety of functions from storing aircraft that
are temporarily out of service but expected to return to the fleet, to reclaiming useable parts
which are inspected, overhauled, and then held until needed by active aircraft, to dismantling
of the aircraft carcasses. These functions go hand-in-hand and are part of the lifecycle of an
aircraft.
“I have flown on aircraft that have gone to the boneyard and provided parts to the fleet,” he
says. “I’ve had the opportunity to watch parts being removed from a plane, and then having
flown on an aircraft flying with salvaged parts – the exact parts I saw being removed,
preserved, and installed.”
There are boneyards in Russia that contain some of the old Soviet Union’s military aircraft,
but it’s fair to say the aircraft here are not in any fit state to return to the skies. The former
bomber base at Vozdvizhenka, some 60 miles north of Vladivostok in far-eastern Russia,
used to be home to Soviet supersonic bombers. After the end of the Cold War the aircraft
were surplus to requirement – and simply left where they were parked. The once-secretive
base in now abandoned, and this ghostly bomber fleet now poses for photographers who
clamber through the rusted fences.
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At Mojave Airport, more than 1,000 airliners ended up in the California desert after their flying
days (Getty Images)
Another post-Soviet boneyard is in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone – the area evacuated after
the 1986 nuclear disaster in Ukraine. The vehicles used to help clean up the disaster area
were contaminated with radiation. A line of giant Soviet helicopters has been left to rust in the
fields. BBC News pictures editor Phil Coomes visited the site in 2006, on the 20th
anniversary of the disaster. “After the nuclear accident at Chernobyl, many of the
contaminated vehicles used in the clean-up operation were placed in graveyards in the vast
exclusion zone around the reactor. Some remain there today,” he says. “The largest
graveyard, Rassokha, [is] where the remains of helicopters, military and civilian vehicles and
fire engines are slowly rusting away. It’s a vast site, but over the years parts have been
reclaimed for spares but contamination levels vary, so souvenir hunters would be wise to
keep away.” Despite the danger of radiation poisoning, many of the helicopters have been
stripped of useful parts; their skeletal remains dwindle with every passing year.
In eastern California, Mojave Airport carries out a similar role for civilian aircraft that have
reached the end of their operational lives. Airliners have been flown here for decades, and
stored in the dry desert heat until broken up for scrap.
Some aircraft end their days being hacked to pieces to be sold as scrap, like these Russian-
built Ilyushins in Belarus (AFP/Getty Images)
“Driving across California’s high desert, the airliner boneyard at Mojave airport is visible from
miles away,” writes aviation photographer Troy Paiva, who photographed airliners here in the
1990s and 2000s before security concerns made it a no-go area. “The long rows of faded
tails seem to stretch to the horizon.”
The Royal Aeronautical Society’s Keith Hayward says aircraft are less of a headache to
dismantle than other heavy transport. “I’m not sure how easy an aeroplane is to dismantle,
but what goes together comes apart, and there’s a lot less heavy or dangerous materials
associated with aircraft than ships.” But as less and less recyclable metal goes into making
modern planes, the epic scale of the desert boneyards may be reduced. “In the future, the
use of composites may make life more difficult to deal with final disposal, but there are
industry protocols that are addressing the issue. But bone-yard parking will still be useful
when demand fluctuates. Indeed, the numbers of parked airliners is often a good sign of
slump or recovery, and is monitored by analysts.”
Back in Tucson, the long rows of planes at Davis-Monthan sit in the Arizona heat. For some,
the sun-baked desert is a kind of aviation retirement home. For others, their flying days are
not quite over.
If you would like to comment on this article, or anything else you have seen on Future, head
over to our
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Topic 36. The dystopian lake filled by the world’s tech lust
Hidden in an unknown corner of Inner Mongolia is a toxic, nightmarish lake created by
our thirst for smartphones, consumer gadgets and green tech, discovers Tim
Maughan.
 By Tim Maughan
 2 April 2015
From where I'm standing, the city-sized Baogang Steel and Rare Earth complex dominates
the horizon, its endless cooling towers and chimneys reaching up into grey, washed-out sky.
Between it and me, stretching into the distance, lies an artificial lake filled with a black,
barely-liquid, toxic sludge.
Dozens of pipes line the shore, churning out a torrent of thick, black, chemical waste from the
refineries that surround the lake. The smell of sulphur and the roar of the pipes invades my
senses. It feels like hell on Earth.
Welcome to Baotou, the largest industrial city in Inner Mongolia. I'm here with a group of
architects and designers called the Unknown Fields Division, and this is the final stop on a
three-week-long journey up the global supply chain, tracing back the route consumer goods
take from China to our shops and homes, via container ships and factories.
You may not have heard of Baotou, but the mines and factories here help to keep our
modern lives ticking. It is one of the world’s biggest suppliers of “rare earth” minerals. These
elements can be found in everything from magnets in wind turbines and electric car motors,
to the electronic guts of smartphones and flatscreen TVs. In 2009 China produced 95% of
the world's supply of these elements, and it's estimated that the Bayan Obo mines just north
of Baotou contain 70% of the world's reserves. But, as we would discover, at what cost?
Element of success
Rare earth minerals have played a key role in the transformation and explosive growth of
China's world-beating economy over the last few decades. It's clear from visiting Baotou that
it's had a huge, transformative impact on the city too. As the centre of this 21st Century gold-
rush, Baotou feels very much like a frontier town.
Workers in a factory in Shenzhen make MP3 players (Credit: Kate Davies/Unknown Fields)
In 1950, before rare earth mining started in earnest, the city had a population of 97,000.
Today, the population is more than two-and-a-half million. There is only one reason for this
huge influx of people - minerals. As a result Baotou often feels stuck somewhere between a
brave new world of opportunity presented by the global capitalism that depends on it, and the
fading memories of Communism that still line its Soviet era boulevards. Billboards for
expensive American brands stand next to revolution-era propaganda murals, as the
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disinterested faces of Western supermodels gaze down on statues of Chairman Mao. At
night, multicoloured lights, glass-dyed by rare earth elements, line the larger roads, turning
the city into a scene from the movie Tron, while the smaller side streets are filled with drunk,
vomiting refinery workers that spill from bars and barbecue joints.
Even before getting to the toxic lake, the environmental impact the rare earth industry has
had on the city is painfully clear. At times it’s impossible to tell where the vast structure of the
Baogang refineries complex ends and the city begins. Massive pipes erupt from the ground
and run along roadways and sidewalks, arching into the air to cross roads like bridges. The
streets here are wide, built to accommodate the constant stream of huge diesel-belching coal
trucks that dwarf all other traffic.
A coal mine in Baotou (Credit: Liam Young/Unknown Fields)
After it rains they plough, unstoppable, through roads flooded with water turned black by coal
dust. They line up by the sides of the road, queuing to turn into one of Baotou’s many coal-
burning power stations that sit unsettlingly close to freshly built apartment towers.
Everywhere you look, between the half-completed tower blocks and hastily thrown up multi-
storey parking lots, is a forest of flame-tipped refinery towers and endless electricity pylons.
The air is filled with a constant, ambient, smell of sulphur. It’s the kind of industrial landscape
that America and Europe has largely forgotten – at one time parts of Detroit or Sheffield must
have looked and smelled like this.
Quiet plant
One of our first visits in the city is to a processing plant that specialises mainly in producing
cerium, one of the most abundant rare earth minerals. Cerium has a huge number of
commercial applications, from colouring glass to making catalytic converters. The guide who
shows us around the plant explains that they mainly produce cerium oxide, used to polish
touchscreens on smartphones and tablets.
Inside a rare earth mineral processing plant (Credit: Kate Davies/Unknown Fields)
As we are wandering through the factory’s hangar-like rooms, it’s impossible not to notice
that something is missing. Amongst the mazes of pipes, tanks, and centrifuges, there are no
people. In fact there’s no activity at all. Apart from our voices, which echo through the huge
sheds, the plant is silent. It’s very obviously not operating. When asked, our guide tells us the
plant is closed for maintenance – but there’s no sign of that either: no maintenance crews, no
cleaning or repairs being done. When pushed further our guide gets suspicious, wonders
why we are asking so many questions, and clams up. It’s a behaviour we’ll encounter a lot in
Baotou – a refusal to answer questions or stray off a strictly worded script.
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As we leave, one of our party who has visited the area before suggests a possible
explanation: could local industry be artificially controlling market scarcity of products like
cerium oxide, in order to keep rare earth prices high? We can’t know for sure that this was
the case the day we visited. Yet it would not be unprecedented: in 2012, for example, the
news agency Xinhua reported that China’s larg est r are ear t h producer was
suspending operations to prevent price drops.
One of Baotou’s other main exports is neodymium, another rare earth with a variety of
applications. Again it is used to dye glass, especially for making lasers, but perhaps its most
important use is in making powerful yet lightweight magnets. Neodymium magnets are used
in consumer electronics items such as in-ear headphones, cellphone microphones, and
computer hard-drives. At the other end of the scale they are a vital component in large
equipment that requires powerful magnetic fields, such as wind farm turbines and the motors
that power the new generation of electric cars. We’re shown around a neodymium magnet
factory by a guide who seems more open than our friend at the cerium plant. We’re even
given some magnets to play with. But again, when our questions stray too far from
applications and to production and associated environmental costs, the answers are less
forthcoming, and pretty soon the visit is over.
The refinement of rare earth minerals, like that done in this factory, can cause toxic
byproducts (Credit: Kate Davies/Unknown Fields)
The intriguing thing about both neodymium and cerium is that while they’re called rare earth
minerals, they're actually fairly common. Neodymium is no rarer than copper or nickel and
quite evenly distributed throughout the world’s crust. While China produces 90% of the global
market’s neodymium, only 30% of the world’s deposits are located there. Arguably, what
makes it, and cerium, scarce enough to be profitable are the hugely hazardous and toxic
process needed to extract them from ore and to refine them into usable products. For
example, cerium is extracted by crushing mineral mixtures and dissolving them in sulphuric
and nitric acid, and this has to be done on a huge industrial scale, resulting in a vast amount
of poisonous waste as a byproduct. It could be argued that China’s dominance of the rare
earth market is less about geology and far more about the country’s willingness to take an
environmental hit that other nations shy away from.
(Credit: Liam Young/Unknown Fields)
And there’s no better place to understand China’s true sacrifice than the shores of Baotou
toxic lake. Apparently created by damming a river and flooding what was once farm land, the
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lake is a “tailings pond”: a dumping ground for waste byproducts. It takes just 20 minutes to
reach the lake by car from the centre of the city, passing through abandoned countryside
dominated by the industrial architecture on the horizon. Earlier reports claim the lake is
guarded by the military, but we see no sign. We pass a shack that was presumably a guard
hut at one point but it’s abandoned now; whoever was here left in a hurry, leaving their
bedding, cooking stove, and instant noodle packets behind when they did.
(Credit: Liam Young/Unknown Fields)
We reached the shore, and looked across the lake. I’d seen some photos before I left for
Inner Mongolia, but nothing prepared me for the sight. It’s a truly alien environment,
dystopian and horrifying. The thought that it is man-made depressed and terrified me, as did
the realisation that this was the byproduct not just of the consumer electronics in my pocket,
but also green technologies like wind turbines and electric cars that we get so smugly excited
about in the West. Unsure of quite how to react, I take photos and shoot video on my cerium
polished iPhone.
You can see the lake on Google Maps, and that hints at the scale. Zoom in far enough and
you can make out the dozens of pipes that line the shore. Unknown Fields’ Liam Young
collected some samples of the waste and took it back to the UK to be tested. “The clay we
collected from the toxic lake tested at around three times background radiation,” he later tells
me.
Watch the black byproduct of rare earth mining pouring into the lake at Baotao (Credit:
Richard John Seymour/Unknown Fields)
Unknown Fields has an unusual plan for the stuff. “We are using this radioactive clay to
make a series of ceramic vessels modelled on traditional Ming vases,” Young explains, “each
proportioned based on the amount of toxic waste produced by the rare earth minerals used
in a particular tech gadget.” The idea is to illustrate the impact our consumer goods have on
the environment, even when that environment might be unseen and thousands of miles
away.
After seeing the impact of rare earth mining myself, it’s impossible to view the gadgets I use
everyday in the same way. As I watched Apple announce their smart watch recently, a
thought crossed my mind: once we made watches with minerals mined from the Earth and
treated them like precious heirlooms; now we use even rarer minerals and we'll want to
update them yearly. Technology companies continually urge us to upgrade; to buy the
newest tablet or phone. But I cannot forget that it all begins in a place like Bautou, and a
terrible toxic lake that stretches to the horizon.
Topic 37. Have you ever felt “Solastalgia”?

Ever feel unease that the natural environment around you is changing for the worse?
There’s a word for that.
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Every few months, Oxford Dictionaries makes global headlines when it adds new words to its
online vocabulary – the most recent updates include ‘hangry’ (anger resulting from hunger)
and ‘manspreading’ (sitting with legs wide apart).
At the same time, researchers are coining new words that never quite make it into the
popular lexicon – but perhaps they should.
While you won’t find it in the Oxford English Dictionary, philosopher Glenn Albrecht once
coined one such word while working at the University of Newcastle in Australia. 'Solastalgia’
– a portmanteau of the words ‘solace’ and ‘nostalgia’ – is used not just in academia but more
widely, in clinical psychology and health policy in Australia, as well as by US researchers
looking into the effects of wildfires in California.
It describes the feeling of distress associated with environmental change close to your home,
explains Albrecht.
Ever felt distress that the natural world around you was changing for the worse? That's
solastalgia (Credit: Thinkstock)
Solastalgia is when your endemic sense of place is being violated – Glenn Albrecht,
philosopher
While at the University of Newcastle, he was contacted by local people concerned about
opencast coal mining and power station pollution. “People would ring me at work pleading for
help with their cause. Their distress about the threats to their identity and well-being over the
phone was palpable.”
These calls, and seeing the effects of mining on the landscape, led him to create the word.
“Solastalgia is when your endemic sense of place is being violated.”
Medical journal The Lancet’s 2015 Health and Climate Change report discusses how
solastalgia is connected to ‘dis-ease,’ or a lack of ease due to a hostile environment that a
person is powerless to do anything about.
Meanwhile, Justin Lawson from Melbourne’s Deakin University explains solastalgia in less
academic terms, saying The Eagles’ song No More Walks in the Wood can help people
understand it, which laments the disappearance of a forest associated with powerful
memories. “It really is about redefining our emotional responses to a landscape that has
changed within a lifetime.”
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"No more walks in the wood / The trees have all been cut down", sang The Eagles (Credit:
Phil Hearing/Flickr/CC BY 2.0)
It really is about redefining our emotional responses to a landscape that has changed –
Justin Lawson, researcher
These changes to the landscape can come from natural processes (such as drought and
bushfires) or human-induced processes such as climate change and urbanisation. Like
Albrecht, Lawson and his team are working on other terms to encapsulate these thoughts
and feelings. But, while Albrecht is combining words that are predominately derived from
Latin or Greek roots, Lawson is looking to indigenous cultures and their languages “to find a
voice that discusses our relationship with nature in a more comprehensive manner.”
Solastalgia is not just a first-world concept. Sri Warsini, a researcher at James Cook
University in Cairns, Australia is looking into instances of solastalgia that occur in developing
countries such as Indonesia, following natural disasters such as volcanic eruptions, finding
that the loss of housing, livestock and farmland, and the ongoing danger of living in a
disaster-prone area, challenge a person’s sense of place and identity and can lead to
depression.
Yet, despite its meaning, the man who coined solastalgia isn’t despairing. “I am an optimistic
person and I do a lot to reverse the push for development that will create more climate
change and by implication, more solastalgia,” concludes Albrecht.
Topic 38. Wernher von Braun’s Bold plan for space exploration
The man who designed the V2 rocket also helped America reach the Moon. And he
had a plan for deeper space exploration that was ahead of its time, it appears.
On 9 March 1955, 42 million Americans – around a quarter of the total US population at the
time – tuned in to watch a new Disney TV series. It featured no dancing mice, princesses in
peril or orphaned ungulates. Man in Space was fronted by a handsome, warm and engaging
rocket engineer setting out his vision for the future exploration of the cosmos.
Surrounded by beautifully sculpted spacecraft models and futuristic artwork, Wernher von
Braun addressed the viewer, talking through his plan for a practical passenger rocket
achievable, he claimed, within 10 years. The programme included spellbinding dramatic
animations and a suspenseful orchestral score, full-sized spacesuits and detailed diagrams.
Ten years earlier, von Braun had been leading t he developm ent of Hit ler’s V2 r ock
ets – ballistic missiles built by slave labour and targeted at civilians across Europe. Now he
was the poster child for the American space programme and being welcomed into homes
across the nation.
The rockets von Braun built for the Nazis became the first stage of the American space
programme (Credit: Science Photo Library)
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Opinion on the German rocket engineer is probably even more divided today than it was in
the 1950s. Some historians suggest he was an amoral opportunist – exploiting Hitler’s desire
for a futuristic weapon, to further his own ambitions for space exploration. For many others
he remains a hero – a space visionary that won the race to the Moon and presented America
with a roadmap to the stars.
Whatever you feel about the man, the fact is that 60 years after those first broadcasts people
still refer to the von Braun Paradigm. Put simply, it’s the steps the engineer set out to take
mankind into space, with a shuttle and a space station, followed by missions to the Moon and
Mars.
He was obsessed with the Moon, that was his childhood ambition – Michael Neufeld
“What he was trying to do was lay out an architecture for how spaceflight might be possible,”
explains Michael Neufeld, senior curator at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space
Museum in Washington DC and author of three books and numerous articles on von Braun.
“He was obsessed with the Moon, that was his childhood ambition.”
“The plan was very influential in the 60s and it lived on,” Neufeld says. “When going straight
to the Moon became the project he was enthused by that and didn’t necessarily adhere to
this rigid shuttle, Moon, Mars scheme but for a lot of engineers at Nasa that was the logical
programme for human space exploration.”
Shuttle without a station
Throughout the 1960s, von Braun pursued the development of the giant Saturn 5 rocket that
would take men to the Moon. But, in the minds of some in the American space agency, this
was just a diversion.
“Nasa kept trying to come back to the script,” says Neufeld. “At the end of the 60s, the Space
Task Group tried to recommend to [President] Nixon that we need to build a space shuttle
and a space station and then we’ll prepare for expeditions back to the Moon and onto Mars.”
After Nasa landed astronauts on the Moon, the agency's budgets were slashed (Credit:
Nasa/Getty Images)
With the Moon race won and space budgets slashed, all that emerged was the space shuttle
programme – a reusable vehicle conceived to service a space station. But without a space
station. “Not so much a space policy as an excuse not to have one,” says Neufeld. However,
the von Braun Paradigm remained close to the hearts of many.
Von Braun died of cancer aged 65 in 1977, four years before the first Space Shuttle flight.
But his plan lived on. “Nasa returned to the idea of a space station and then President Bush
stood on the steps of this museum in 1989 and said we’re going back to the Moon and
Mars,” says Neufeld. “That also was a failure.”
Our charter is to continue what he began – Les Johnson
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In the minds of many, however, von Braun’s stepping-stones to Mars have never gone away.
“Nasa keeps coming back to it,” says Neufeld. “’What do we do now?’ is a perennial problem
with Nasa because the future of human spaceflight has been a lot less than the dreams of
the believers.”
But there are still plenty of believers out there and, right now, they perhaps have every
reason to feel optimistic. In fact there is still a whole department at Nasa dedicated to these
future footsteps.
Von Braun became enthused with a plan to land on the Moon, but he had envisaged it being
part of a great plan (Credit: Science Photo Library)
“Von Braun started this office back in the 1960s,” says Les Johnson, technical advisor for
advanced concepts at Nasa’s Marshall Space Fli g ht Cent er in Alabama and owner of
a DVD copy of the original Disney series. “Our charter is to continue what he began – it is a
direct linear descendent of what he did.”
“I have a conference report from 1964 looking beyond the Moon – and this was before even
Project Gemini – and he was already telling his folks to start planning that Mars trip,” says
Johnson. “If I was to compare it to what we do today, most of the issues we’re wrestling with
were things he outlined in 1964.”
Strong leadership
The parallels are striking. Johnson’s office has recently been grappling with the challenges of
building the new Space Launch System (SLS) – the first rocket since von Braun’s Saturn 5
capable of taking humans beyond low-Earth orbit and, potentially back to the Moon and onto
Mars.
Johnson believes that as well as von Braun’s visionary concepts we should also admire his
leadership. “Whenever you have a team of people working towards a common objective –
whether that’s a team of 10 in a small business or tens of thousands with project Apollo to go
to the Moon – you’ve got to have someone who keeps it all on track, who has that big vision,”
says Johnson.
The Space Shuttle was built without the space station it was designed to resupply being in
orbit (Credit: Nasa/Getty Images)
“It’s the difference between a leader and a manager, unless you have a leader articulating
the vision, the manager doesn’t have anything to manage.”
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If you ignore the inconvenient truth that America jumped a couple of steps by going to the
Moon early, it now appears we are back on track with the von Braun Paradigm. We have
done the shuttle and space station, now we push on to the Moon and Mars.
This was certainly the official narrative during last year’s launch of the new Orion spacecraft
and when I visited the factory where the SLS is taking shape. The new head of the
European Space Agency, Jan Worner, also told BBC Future recently of his vision for a
village on the Moon.
Unlike in von Braun’s day any deep space exploration is likely to be international in nature
In fact Johnson too, has something of the visionary about him. “Space is the future,” he tells
me. “We’ve got to move out, we’ve got to explore and move beyond the Earth.”
Johnson cautions, however, about the whole vision thing. “A person who’s a visionary is a
single point failure, so I’m always nervous when someone says ‘the great leader will get us
out of this’.” And, realistically, unlike in von Braun’s day any deep space exploration is likely
to be international in nature – involving the US, Europe, Russia, Japan, Canada and maybe
even China and India. A shared vision is likely to be a much more solid foundation for the
future.
It is, nevertheless, remarkable that we are still talking about von Braun 60 years after those
Disney shows and almost 40 years after his death. Even private space rivals Jeff Bezos and
Elon Musk refer to von Braun and his name was invoked recently in their recent ‘m ine is
bigg er t han your s’ spat over who has built the best reusable rocket.
Any future space stations are likely to be the product of complex international cooperation
(Credit: Esa/Nasa/Getty Images)
“I’m surprised he’s not been forgotten more,” admits Neufeld. “It’s partly the space visionary
dimension and partly the Nazi question – either he’s a bad Nazi or he’s our space hero, it’s
hard to hold in your head that he could be both of them simultaneously.”
“He was the space populariser of the 50s and 60s,” says Neufeld. “He remains among space
buffs the one with a vision for a future space programme.”
Wernher von Braun would doubtless be pleased people are still following his vision but even
more pleased that a Mars mission is a serious prospect. As someone who understood the
price of these gargantuan undertakings, however, he would also probably point out that no
mission to the Moon or Mars is yet properly funded.
Still, to adopt that old Disney adage: When you wish upon a star, your dreams come true.
Eventually.
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Topic 1. Improve your memory in 40 seconds........................................................................ 1

Topic 2. Is another human living inside you?

Even non-conjoined twins could be sharing organs without realising it

Brothers from another mother

Women accidentally carrying a "twin's" child

Topic 3. The best (and worst) ways to spot a liar

If only body language revealed deception (Credit: Getty Images)

It takes one to know one

The art of persuasion

Another trick is to ask people how honest they are

Topic 4. How to learn 30 languages

Speaking extra languages delays dementia by five years or more

Learning a new language as we age is easier than you might assume

Can thespians teach us all a better way to learn? (Credit: Thinkstock)

What we see is an overall activation of the brain – it’s all systems go

G marks the spot

In 2009, a 42-year-old woman presented at the clinic of Rachel Pauls, a urogynecologist

Does size matter?

There is no recipe for good sex (Credit: Getty Images)

Topic 6. The suprising downsides of being clever

Anxiety can be common among the highly intelligent (Credit: Thinkstock)

It's lonely being smart (Credit: Thinkstock)

Early achievers don't always go on to be successful (Credit: Thinkstock)

Mental blind spots

Share this story on Facebook, Google+ or Twitter.

Topic 7. Why do babies laugh out loud

Topic 8. Why do we intiutively believe we have free will?

It is perhaps the most famous experiment in neuroscience. In 1983, Benjamin Libet

Topic 9. I can predict the weather with my nose

The human barometer

My knees hurt... it must be about to rain

Jump media player

A range of hydrophones, on buoys monitored by Andre, is now picking up audio signals in

The Genius Behind

Inside innovative minds

Shipping can be cacophonous (Credit: Thinkstock)

Topic 11. The geniuses who invented prothetic limbs

He stumbled across a cheaper alternative to the expensive prosthetic limbs currently

Jump media player

The history of prosthetic limbs is littered with such masterstrokes.

Dark Age design

(Credit: National Museum of Health and Medicine CC BY 2.0)

As technology improved, artifical limbs became more sophisticated (Credit: Wellcome

Topic. 12. If alien life exists on exoplanets, how would we know?

Seager has been described as an "astronomical Indiana Jones"

To find life, we will need to launch an enormous 'starshade', says Seager

Topic 13. To find aliens, we need to build a giant space parasol

Jump media player

Jump media player

A coronagraph is a tried-and-tested technology – first developed in the 1930s to study the

Watch how coronagraphs work in this animation:

The Genius Behind

Be inspired by great minds and ideas

Topic 14. What is it like to have never felt an emotion?

People with the condition call themselves “alexes”

To understand that emotional numbness, it helps to imagine emotions as a kind of Russian

Neural short circuit

It is a small pay-off, however: alexithymia seems to be linked to various other illnesses,

Reconnecting to lost feelings

Topic 15. The submarines that revealed a mysterious world

Journey to the abyss

Topic 16. The air that makes you fat