Issue 73 THE SCIENCE OF EVERYTHING FebMar 2017

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The Good Earth

Agriculture is vital to our planets future.

It helps feed a growing population
while helping to manage the environment,
generate wealth and lift the quality of life
for millions of people.
An agricultural education opens the door
to this exciting sector with
a wealth of opportunities for
a high-tech, science-rich career.

www.careerharvest.com.au
COSMOS CONTENTS 3

COSMOS 73
COVER STORY & FEATURES

CONTENTS

PAGE 34

The big data telescope

The Square Kilometre Array will give us
unprecedented views of the early universe.
ELIZABETH FINKEL reports.

48 56 26

CAN CRISPR SAVE ROSS GARNAUTS HOLODECK:

BEN DUPREE? BRIGHT IDEA LESSONS FROM MARS

ANTONIO REGALADO reports Climate advocate believes the Our picture of the Red Planet
on the hopes of new cures from private sector is the answer. has never been clearer, by
gene therapy 2.0. LINDA MARSA reports. JAMES MITCHELL CROW .
4 CONTENTS Issue 73

COSMOS 73
DISPATCHES, ESSAYS & REVIEWS

UPFRONT

PUBLISHERS NOTE Ringing the changes in 2017 6

EDITORS NOTE The project that gives us an edge 7

DIGEST

NEWS A closer look at the big stories in science 8

TECHNOPHILE On our way to magical powers 16

FROM THE FRONT LINE Satellite crop monitoring 18

PAGE 65 VIEWPOINT

BODY TALK Good ideas or not? 22

Zeitgeist ASTRO KATIE The mystery of fast radio bursts 23

Were ancient monuments PHILOSOPHERS CORNER The meat-free burger 24

elaborate memory devices?
By JIM ROUNTREE ORIGINS Toolmaking monkeys 25

SPECTRUM

ZEITGEIST Memory monuments 65

SNAPSHOT The crystal cave 68

REVIEWS Books, television, gadgets, collections 70

ABACUS Imaginary numbers 76

WHY IS IT SO? Why is the sea salty? 78

DIGEST 8
MIND GAMES Puzzles and prizes 80

PORTRAIT Ivy Wong, astrophysicist 82

WHY IS IT SO? 78
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6 UPFRONT Issue 73

PUBLISHERS NOTE

Ringing in the New Year EDITORIAL

Editor-in-chief ELIZABETH FINKEL
Managing editor APRIL REESE
Contributing editor JAMES MITCHELL CROW
THE PAST YEAR has been an exciting one at Cosmos, as we Online editor BELINDA SMITH
have continued to develop new ways to bring you all the Art director ROBYN ADDERLY
most important and exciting developments in the world of Contributors CATHAL OCONNELL, JAKE PORT,
AMY MIDDLETON, ANTHEA BATSAKIS
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our website and through our newsletters and social media
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COSMOS UPFRONT 7

EDITORS NOTE

Giving us the edge set halfway to the edge of the universe; SKA-low
is aiming for the very edge. To do so, it needs
technology yet to be developed. Thats because its
THE TELESCOPE that goes by the name Square a software telescope. Not majestic dishes like those
Kilometre Array will be the largest global, to be deployed in the Karoo, but a forest of antennae
collaborative science project ever. If all goes to plan, whose signals are combined to achieve sensitivity
in 2018 the first of 130,000 antennae will be rolled and resolution. Together they will multiply into
out on a remote red plain a few hundred kilometres a telescope 168 times more powerful than current
north-east of Geraldton, Western Australia. A sister equivalents such as LOFAR in the Netherlands.
ELIZABETH FINKEL telescope will be built on another remote red plain, To get a clear image of the early universe,
Editor-in-chief the Karoo, about 600 kilometres north-east of Cape SKA-low will have to crunch data at an
Town, South Africa. unprecedented scale greater than the entire
Overall, this is a complex, vast, daunting global internet traffic per day.
project. Myopic journalists struggle to get its Thats the second reason we should be falling off
measure. Its the elephant problem; heres a tail, our chairs. The innovations that will emerge from
theres a tusk, but what is this entire monstrosity this big data project promise huge windfalls. The
all about? Thats a concern because this is an Word Wide Web was the spin-off when CERN the
extraordinary beast: we should all be falling off home of the Large Hadron Collider needed to find
our seats in excitement. a way to manage its big data problem. Wi-Fi was
There are at least two reasons. First, theres the offshoot when CSIRO researchers learnt how
the sheer audacity of it SKA-low, the telescope to realign the scrambled signals from black holes.
to be built in Australia, will fill in a missing chapter Which is why companies are already flocking
in the history of the universe: how did we get from to Western Australias capital city, Perth. Cisco,
a featureless sea of neutral hydrogen to galactic Woodside, Google and Chevron are getting
islands separated by a thin sea of ionised hydrogen? involved.
Theorists have had free rein to model elaborate This conglomerate of astronomers, computer
scenarios on their computers. The SKA-low data, geeks and industry is a far cry from the romance of
expected to come online in 2021, will at last put Galileo, grinding his lenses into a telescope, gazing
these models to the test. heavenward and discovering the moons of Jupiter.
SKA-low is the most ambitious of the two But how he would have swooned to see the first
telescopes. SKA-mid, in the Karoo, has its sights images from the edge of our universe.

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8 DIGEST Issue 73

NOTHING IS TOO WONDERFUL

TO BE TRUE IF IT BE CONSISTENT
WITH THE LAWS OF NATURE.
MICHAEL FARADAY (1792 1867)
CREDIT: HULTON ARCHIVE / GETTY IMAGES
COSMOS DIGEST 9

A CLOSER LOOK AT THE BIG STORIES

DIGEST

LIFE SCIENCES

Evolving a human brain

How did our brains get so big?
Researchers are beginning to find out.
ELIZABETH FINKEL reports.

About six million years ago our human

ancestors branched off the primate family
tree, leaving their cousins the ancestors
of chimpanzees in the African dust.
They made simple tools and, thus
equipped, eventually travelled out of Africa.
The evolutionary leap that started the
journey was the mushrooming of the human
brain. A modern human brain is three times
larger than a chimps; the most enlarged
region is the six-layered neocortex, a part
of the cerebral cortex that is the seat of
reasoning and language. PHYSICS Was light faster at the beginning of the universe? 11

EARTH SCIENCES Impact reveals how crater ring formed 12

The folding on the right side of this mouse LIFE SCIENCES Lucy, social climber 13
embryos cortex reflects the increased growth
EARTH SCIENCES Earths spin is slowing 14
stimulated by the insertion of a human gene into
that side of the brain. LIFE SCIENCES Glimpse into how feathers evolved 15
CREDIT: MARTA FLORIO / WIELAND B. HUTTNER / MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE
TECHNOPHILE The eyes have it 16
OF MOLECULAR CELL BIOLOGY AND GENETICS
10 DIGEST
How did this circuit upgrade take place?
For the past decade, scientists have
been comparing the DNA of chimpanzees
and humans to look for clues. The most
recent discovery comes from Wieland
Huttners lab at the Max Planck Institute
in Germany. Remarkably, they showed
that just a single letter change in the
DNA of one gene triggered an increase
in a population of stem cells called basal
radial glia. These cells are thought to have
powered the expansion of the human
cerebral cortex. The finding was published
in Science Advances last December.
The dramatic finding is the latest in
a series of revelations about the DNA
upgrades that delivered the human brain.
Human and chimpanzee genomes are
98.8% the same.
Intriguingly, within many of the
regions that differ, it looks as if chunks
of DNA in the human had been Xeroxed
meaning humans acquired back-up
copies of particular genes, That made
them ripe for some evolutionary tinkering;
if the copy happens to acquire a few coding
errors, theres no drama theres still
the functioning original. Once in a while
however, a copying error might lead to
a new function that is useful.
Six million years ago, around the time
our ancestors were branching off from
non-human primates, there was a burst of
these gene duplications. Smoking guns!
Problem is, there were thousands of them.
To get a clue as to which ones might
be involved in the human brain upgrade,
researchers tested to see whether related
genes in mice were involved in the
development of their brain.
One success came in 2012, when
Ccile Charrier at the Scripps Research
Institute in California and her colleagues
took a closer look at a duplicated human
gene named SRGAP2C. It was a slightly
altered copy of the original found in
chimps and mice, and it was active in their
developing brains. The scientists came
up with an irresistible experiment: they
genetically engineered the human copy
into embryonic mice.
As neurons develop, they acquire
spines that act like antennae for receiving
messages from other neurons. But the
spines stop sprouting once the neurons
UPGRADING An increase in the number of stem cells known as basal
THE HUMAN BRAIN radial glia is thought to have powered the expansion of the
human neocortex.
Subventricular zone
Mouse neocortex
KEY apical radial glia
basal intermediate progenitor
mature. Charrier and her team found
that introducing the human backup gene,
SRGAP2C, delayed the maturation so
spines kept sprouting, which enabled them
to make more connections. The experiment
showed how, through the copying and
then tweaking of a single gene, evolution
increased the circuit complexity of the
human brain.
HUMANS ACQUIRED BACK-UP COPIES
OF PARTICULAR GENES, THAT MADE
THEM RIPE FOR SOME EVOLUTIONARY
TINKERING.
The latest work follows a similar
plot line. Marta Florio, a PhD student in
the Huttner lab studied another backup
copy of a gene that is present in humans
but absent from chimps and mice. It is
called ARHGAP11B. When the human
version was introduced into developing
mice, it caused a particular population
of brain stem cells basal radial glia to
increase their rounds of multiplication.
Not only did mice double the number
of these stem cells in some cases their
ballooning brains started folding to fit
Issue 73
Human neocortex
basal radial glia
migrating neurons
into the skull just as the brains of
primates do.
That finding was reported in Science in
2015. The latest finding is that just a single
letter change in the ARHGAP11B DNA is
able to increase the multiplication of basal
radial glia.
So are these mice any smarter? The
German team has yet to test them. But at
least one strain of mice are smarter today
for having acquired a human gene.
The FOXP2 gene is needed to turn
thoughts into speech; human families who
lack the functional gene show defects in
language and vocalisation. According to
a paper published in 2014 by Christiane
Schreiweis at the Max Planck Institute and
colleagues at MIT, when the human form
of this gene was introduced into mice, they
got better at learning mazes and squeaked
more often.
As stunning as these results are,
researchers are still far from providing a
manifest of the upgrades that delivered the
human brain. Evolution went through
a process of trial and error over millions
of years, says neuroscientist Seong Sen
Tan of the Florey Institute in Melbourne.
There will be numerous switches.
COSMOS DIGEST 11

The colour of light is a direct measure

PHYSICS
Was light faster
at the beginning
of the universe?
A new explanation for cosmologys greatest
conundrum. CATHAL OCONNELL reports.
They dont make light like they used
to. Todays light, chugging along at
299,792,458 metres per second, would
have been blown away by photons of the
early universe or so says a newly beefed-
up theory of physics.
In 1998, Portuguese physicist Joo
Magueijo of Imperial College London
first proposed superfast light, travelling
of temperature. That means that when BY THE NUMBERS
the CMB was emitted, 300,000 years after
the Big Bang, the entire universe must
have had the same temperature. How
could that be if the universes horizons
RECORD
were so far apart that no light and POWER
therefore no heat could have travelled
between them? PINCERS
Unless, thought Magueijo back in
1998, light once travelled faster than it
does today. Then it could have spread from
edge to edge quick enough to even out the
temperature. Magueijos idea was clever
but as it contradicted Einsteins rule about
the speed of light being constant across all
space and time, it never quite caught on.
Instead, most physicists favoured the
theory of cosmic inflation, which says
the universe went through an incredible
growth spurt in its first fraction of a second
a rapid stretch that smoothed out the
universes temperature end to end.
Yet physicists still dont have the CREDIT: TOBIAS BERNHARD RAFF / GETTY IMAGES

trillions of times faster than lights current foggiest about what caused inflation, nor

speed to explain the even temperatures
measured across the early universe.
Imagine switching on a heater in a cold
concert hall and having the whole space
warm instantly. A similar cosmic-scale
effect has been puzzling physicists since
the 1960s, when the the cosmic microwave
background (CMB), the oldest light in the
universe, was found to be the same colour
in all directions.
why it stopped. And physicists havent
found any direct evidence to back it up.
Now, writing in Physical Review D,
Magueijo and colleague Niayesh Afshordi,
have hit back with a refined superfast light
theoryalong with a testable prediction
that seems right on the money.
The refinement proposes that at first,
light travelled far faster than gravity before
settling down to its current speed.
The new theory spits out an exact
prediction for a feature of the cosmic
microwave background called the spectral
index. Although the CMB is pretty much
the same in all directions, there are some
slight variations--the picture is a teensy
bit splotchy. The spectral index captures
these variations. The prediction proposes
30
Weight, in kilograms, the coconut crab
(Birgus latro) the worlds largest
land-dwelling crustacean
can lift with its powerful claws.
Until recently, no one knew
exactly how much force
those pincers could exert.
3,300
The newly calculated pinching force,
in newtons, of a coconut crabs pincers,
according to a November PLOS One
study by Japanese biologists.

A conundrum: the even temperature of
the early universe, evidenced by this map
of the cosmic microwave background,
suggests light once trarvelled much faster
than it does today.
CREDIT: ESA / THE PLANCK COLLABORATION
2,200
a precise number for the spectral index.
Laying out a testable prediction
is a badge of honour in the somewhat
A tigers average bite force, in newtons.
nebulous world of theoretical physics,
And humans? Our maximum bite force
where theories can often be retrofitted
is a measly 900 newtons.
to match the latest data. Their predicted
splotchiness is close to the latest data
from the Planck satellite. But Magueijo
and Afshordi know better than to get
too excited: Improved observations will
soon vindicate or disprove this model,
they note.
12 DIGEST
EARTH SCIENCES
Rock from dino-killing
impact reveals how
crater ring formed
Scientists drilling deep beneath the ocean
pull up clues as to how the dust settled
just after impact. BELINDA SMITH
and APRIL REESE report.
Scientists have long wondered why craters
created by asteroids often have a ring of
hills around the centre. These circular
ridges, called peak rings, are common in
craters throughout the inner solar system.
They have been found on the Moon, Mars
and Mercury.
There is only one good place to study
peak rings on Earth: the Chicxulub crater
Impact craters often display peak rings as this artists impression of Mexicos Chicxulub
shows. A new study explains. CREDIT: D. VAN RAVENSWAAY /SPL / GETTY IMAGES
in what is now the Yucatan Peninsula in
Mexico. It formed 66 million years ago
when an asteroid slammed into Earth,
triggering a series of events that wiped
out three-quarters of all species on the
planet, including the non-avian dinosaurs.
New evidence from the site holds clues
to the origins of the craters mysterious
ring of mountains and others like them
around the solar system.
Though the 180-kilometre-wide
crater contains Earths best-preserved
peak ring, studying it is complicated: the
ring, along with much of the rest of the
crater, is deep below the sea in the Gulf
of Mexico.
Geologists discovered the Chicxulub
craters peak ring in 2000 using seismic
sensing, which measures how seismic
waves travel through the Earths layers,
revealing their composition. Ever since,
researchers have wanted to get at the
ring and figure out its story.
One explanation for the rings
formation, known as the dynamic
collapse theory, holds that the impact
that the dynamic collapse theory is correct:
Issue 73
Chicxulub rock cores suggest the impact
turned the rock into a geyser that created
the circular ridges.
CREDIT: RONALDO SCHEMIDT / AFP / GETTY IMAGES
caused an eruption of rock from the lower
regions of the planets crust that then
fell back to earth. A competing theory
suggests the ridges formed from melting
in the upper crust.
In mid-2016, scientists got the chance
to settle the debate. An international team
led by geophysicists Joanna Morgan of
Imperial College London and Sean Gulick
of the University of Texas at Austin used
a deep-sea drilling rig to burrow into the
site and pull up cylindrical sections of
rock core. At first, they found layer upon
layer of limestone as would be expected
in ocean sediments. But then, about 620
metres down, bits of pinkish-white rock
appeared in the cores: granite. It was
far closer to the surface than the rock is
usually found, meaning it must have got
there through some sort of disruption.
The granite was also unusually weak,
indicating it had undergone significant
stress, and the rocks retained the coarse
crystalline structure of deeper material.
THE DYNAMIC COLLAPSE THEORY
HOLDS THAT THE IMPACT CAUSED AN
ERUPTION OF ROCK FROM THE LOWER
REGIONS OF THE PLANETS CRUST.
All of which suggests, the researchers
reported in Science in November 2016,
the powerful impact blasted granite from
COSMOS DIGEST 13

deep in Earths crust to the surface and Then the researchers compared the
made it behave like a liquid, shooting up models with bone scans of other early
into the air like a geyser before collapsing hominins, modern humans and modern
LIFE SCIENCES
into the basin and settling out into chimpanzees.
a circular ridge around the centre. Lucys arm bones, it turns out, were
The study adds to a small but growing much stronger than her leg bones, and
body of evidence in support of the dynamic Lucy, social climber the weaker structure of the leg bones
collapse theory of peak ring formation in meant she probably had a somewhat
craters. Last October, scientists reported awkward, inefficient gait compared to later
The early hominins strong arms suggest
that the peak rings within Mare Orientale, hominins. It seems likely, then, that she
a life lived aloft. APRIL REESE reports.
a crater on the moon, formed in a similar lived a primarily arboreal life, relying more
way. on her arms to get around than her legs,
Geophysicist Penny Barton from Lucy, the worlds most famous early the researchers conclude.
the University of Cambridge, who was hominin, may have walked on two legs Although bipedal when on the
not involved in the study, writes in a but she preferred to climb among the ground, the limb bone structural
Science commentary on the discovery trees, a recent study suggests. proportions of [Lucy] provide evidence
that it appears to validate the collapse In the decades since the 1974 for substantially more arboreal, i.e.
models while also posing many new discovery of the 3.18-million-year-old climbing behaviour than either modern
questions for further work on these Australopithecus afarensis fossil, scientists humans or Homo erectus, the researchers
exciting samples. have debated whether Lucy lived primarily write in the study, published in PLOS One
on the ground or in the trees. in November.
Hoping to settle that debate, Staying off the ground would have
THE PEAK RINGS WITHIN MARE
a team led by Christopher Ruff at Johns helped keep Lucy safe from predators,
ORIENTALE, A CRATER ON THE MOON,
Hopkins University in the US scanned but it also posed its own risks: an earlier
FORMED IN A SIMILAR WAY.
Lucys arm and leg bones to create study found that she died by falling from
detailed 3-D models of their structure. a tree.
One of those questions is how the
rocks were weakened enough to behave
like a fluid. The team is now attempting
to find out.
How the Chicxulub peak ring formed
isnt the only question researchers
involved in the US$10 million core
drilling project hope to answer. They
also aim to glean other insights into
Earths most famous cataclysm and its
effect on the planet.
Four labs are testing core samples for
iridium, a metal that asteroids sometimes
leave behind. While the space rock would
have vaporised on impact, bits of it likely
settled into the crater.
So far, the search for iridium in the
cores has come up empty, but in December
researchers told a meeting of the American
Geophysical Union they had the next best
thing: nickel, which behaves similarly to
iridium and serves as a kind of proxy for
the presence of asteroid dust.
Researchers hope the hundreds of
metres of core samples from the site will
also reveal more about how the crater
formed, how the material it churned up
was dispersed and how long it took life Recent scans of Lucys skeleton showed the bones of her arms were stonger than those
to rebound at the site. of her legs she was therefore probably a tree-dweller. CREDIT: DAVE EINSEL / GETTY IMAGES
14 DIGEST Issue 73

The end result is that the orbits of the two

IN BRIEF bodies will eventually lock face to face,
rotating once every 47 days. The Moons
EARTH SCIENCES
distance from the Earth will move from
TO HEAL 380,000 km now to about 500,000 km.
Locked orbits are the ultimate fate
A BROKEN Earths spin is slowing of every planet and moon; pseudo planet

but not as much as Pluto and its moon Charon, with their
HEART predicted
smaller masses, are already there. Physics
equations tell us Earth will realise this fate
billions of years from now.
But the British astronomers wanted
Scientists used ancient records to calculate
something a little more precise. So they
the slowdown BELINDA SMITH reports.
spent four decades scouring records of
historical eclipses including those of 8th
When ancient astronomers carved century BCE Babylonians, the 2nd century
cuneiform figures recording solar eclipses Almagest penned by the Greek astronomer
on to clay tablets, little did they know they Ptolemy, centuries of Chinese dynastic
were providing baseline data for an epic records and observations from Arab
science experiment. astronomers from about 830 CE to
Some 2,700 years later, a trio of 1020 CE.
British scientists from the University Some of these observations timed
of Durham and Her Majestys Nautical how long it took for the Moon to cross
CREDIT:K H FUNG / SPL / GETTY IMAGES Almanac Office used these and other the path of the Sun a measure of the
historic records to calculate that an Earth Earths rotation speed. They found that,
day grew by an average of just under two- on average, the length of Earths day
A zebrafish is unlikely to die of
thousandths of a second each century. increased at a rate of 1.8 milliseconds
a broken heart. The fish, about the
Their findings appeared in the Proceedings per century somewhat lower than the
size of your pinky, can lose a fifth
of the Royal Society in December 2016. predicted value of 2.3 milliseconds. This
of its heart and grow it back. Now
Earths slowdown is due to a transfer discrepancy, they suggest, may be due to
William Chen and colleagues from
of rotational momentum to the moon; melting glaciers or fluxes in the deepest
the University of Pittsburgh have
it also gives the Moon a little thrust, layers of the Earth, which mitigate the
traced its secret, as reported in
speeding up its orbit and causing it to forces contributing to the slowing of the
Science Advances last November.
recede from Earth by about 4 cm per year. planets spin.
It lies not with the heart cells but
the scaffolding that supports them,
known as extracellular matrix (ECM).
Mice that suffered heart attacks
made a remarkable recovery once
injected with a powder of zebrafish
heart ECM. Normally, mouse heart
cells rarely multiply, but they kicked
in, repopulating the damaged heart
muscle and restoring its elasticity.
Some of the powders properties
appear attributable to neuregulin-1
and ErbB2, proteins which regulate
cell proliferation.
The powder also stimulated
human heart cells growing in a dish
to proliferate. The authors are now
testing to see if the zebrafish powder
can mend the hearts of larger animals.
The Moons pull is slowing the Earths orbit, but not as much as the maths predicts.
CREDIT: NASA / DSCOVR EPIC TEAM
COSMOS DIGEST 15

A close-up view of the first intact feathered dinosaur tail ever to be found.
CREDIT: ROYAL SASKATCHEWAN MUSEUM / R.C. MCKELLAR

completely intact, feathered dinosaur tail. of modern birds, were fused.

In the past, feathers have been
found in amber, but their source animals
LIFE SCIENCES
have been difficult to pin down, says
palaeontologist Lida Xing of the China
University of Geosciences, who was
Dinosaur tail offers tipped off about the sample by an amber
The well-preserved dinosaur tail,
which likely belonged to a juvenile
coelurosaur, reveals new details about
how feathers evolved.
A CT scan of the specimen showed
feathers ran down the tail, but they

glimpse into how dealer. Xing and his team described the
find in Current Biology in December.
lacked the well-developed central shaft,
or rachis, found in feathers used in flight.
feathers evolved The tail was flexible, with eight That supports the theory that animals
articulated vertebrae. This ruled out the first developed feathers not to fly but
possibility that it belonged to an ancestor perhaps for camouflage, or attracting
The amber-encased specimen is the
of birds, whose tail vertebrae, like those mates.
first confirmed to be from a dino.
APRIL REESE reports.

About 99 million years ago, in what is

now northern Burma, a tiny dinosaur
about the size of a sparrow met its end,
its tail ensnared in tree sap.
But what was a fatal misstep for the
Cretaceous-era dinosaur turned out to
be a gift to science. The amber-encased
tail, extracted from its resting place in
the Hukawng Valley by gem miners, has
offered scientists the first 3-D view of a Eight jointed vertebrae show the tail belonged to a tiny dinosaur, not a bird. CREDIT: LIDA XING
16 DIGEST
TECHNOPHILE
The eyes have it:
looking to the future
Soon well all have powerful looks.
By CATHAL OCONNELL .
I did it with my eyes, Matilda said. I was
staring at [the glass] and wishing it to tip and
then my eyes went all hot and funny and some
sort of power came out of them
Who hasnt daydreamed about moving
things with their eyes, like the young
heroine in Roald Dahls novel Matilda
discovered she could do? Soon, we could
all possess that magical power at least
when it comes to our digital devices.
New advances in eye-tracking
technology mean controlling computers
and smartphones with our eyes
could become as routine as tapping a
touchscreen is today.
As futuristic as it sounds, digital
technology to track gaze has been around
since the 1990s, but the bulkiness and cost
of the equipment limited its use to niche
research applications. Psychologists used
it to study eye movement during reading,
for example, or how a persons eyes scan
a new face. Supermarket chains and other
stores employed it to check out what
products catch a customers eye as they
scan shelves.
Now the technology has advanced
enough to be used on a home computer.
The latest generation eye-tracking
technology is not only much cheaper,
but considerably smaller, says Andreas
Bulling, a technology researcher at the
Max Planck Institute for Informatics in
Saarbrcken, Germany.
Take EyeX, a device that allows you
to move your mouse cursor around using
your eyes. Created by Swedish company
Tobii, this eye-mouse is a thin black
bar, about the length of a ruler, placed just
below your computer screen. The device,
costing just 109 (about A$145), works
by bouncing near-infrared light (so you
cant see it) off your eyes to detect your
pupils and work out where youre looking.
Its not pixel-perfect. At best, devices
such as these can pinpoint where on the
screen youre looking to an accuracy of
about one centimetre. If typing, you could
highlight a particular word but not a single
letter; and to achieve even that level of
accuracy, new users must go through a
labourious series of calibration steps to
enable the device to follow their eyes.
Bullings team, along with researchers
at Lancaster University hope to ease that
burden. They developed software that
rapidly and automatically calibrates to
new users by observing how the users eyes
pursue a series of moving targets.
A more challenging issue with existing
eye-tracking technologies, Bulling says,
is the so-called Midas touch problem.
Our eyes naturally jump around as we
continually scan our environment,
meaning eye-trackers can pick up
unintended commands. Holding down
a designated key is one way to let the
device know when to pay attention,
though that limits the technologys
hands-free appeal.
Despite the limitations, there is plenty
early adopters can do with todays devices.
Combined with keyboard clicks, they are
good enough to control a web browser,
for example, and play games.
Tobii markets the EyeX primarily
as a gaming accessory. Some of the latest
games promise an immersive experience,
detecting where you are looking and
panning the view in that direction. You can
even use your eyes to target your weapon.
The EyeXs gaming emphasis isnt
surprising when you consider that much
of the recent progress in eye-tracker
technology was fuelled by research into
virtual reality and augmented reality
headsets (Cosmos issue 62 p32; issue 67,
p26). By tracking your eyes, VR devices
can figure out which parts of a scene
they should render in high resolution.
The background only needs a cursory
Issue 73
treatment, saving a huge amount of
processing power.
Tobii rival Oculus sells similar
technology to the EyeX geared more
for commercial use. Its system, recently
purchased from Danish company Eye
Tribe, can analyse how people navigate
websites, generating a heatmap showing
how the eyes scoot around from pictures to
text and, of course, adverts.
The technology can also interface with
the front-facing camera on a smartphone
or tablet to monitor your gaze. You could
set up the device to automatically scroll
down a web page as your eyes approach the
bottom of the screen. Or you could pause
or rewind a video with your eyes useful
for following a recipe with your hands full
in the kitchen. The software could soon
add to the simple head-tracking features
already creeping onto smartphones such
as the Samsung Galaxy, which can auto-
pause a video when you look away from
the screen.
The technologys most life-changing
uses, though, will be in health care, where
eye-tracking is already beginning to help
people with disabilities control computers,
and could soon enable them to operate
their own wheelchair.
It may not be Matildas mystical
power, but thats still pretty magical.
ILLUSTRATION: ANTHONY CALVERT
EYEX SPECIFICATIONS
SIZE: 32 x 2 x 1.5 centimetre
sensor bar
WEIGHT: 90 grams
SENSORS: Three infrared sensors
PRICE: US$139
OCULUS SPECIFICATIONS
SIZE: 20 1.9 1.9 centimetre
sensor bar
WEIGHT: 70 grams
PRICE: US$199
COSMOS
THE EYE-TRACKER
A thin bar attached beneath the
screen houses a projector that
bathes the user in invisible infra-
red light, and also contains the
infrared cameras that pick up the
reflected image.
DIGEST 17
GAZE POINT
Eye-tracking software looks for the glints of
infrared light reflected from the users cornea and
pupil. Matching this data with the known shape of
the human eye, the device can calculate where each
eye is in space, the angle at which the pupils are
directed, and the gaze-point on the screen.
HEAD-TRACKING
To gain even more
information from the
user, some systems
also monitor where
the head is pointing.
Combined with signals
from the eyes, turning a
wheelchair could become
as simple as looking to
the left or right.
18 DIGEST
BROUGHT
TO YOU BY
UNIVERSITY OF
NEW ENGLAND
FROM
THE
FRONT
LINE
The faces of remote
sensing innovation
A unique combination of research expertise
and strong industry engagement puts a
university research team at the global
cutting edge of agricultural innovation.
ANGUS BEZZINA reports .
Andrew Robson, Muhammad Moshiur
Rahman and Jasmine Muir. Remember
these names, because they belong to three
very talented scientists who form the core
of the Agricultural Remote Sensing Team
(ARST) within the University of New
Englands Precision Agricultural Research
Group (PARG).
The trio, with support from other
PARG members David Lamb, Derek
Schneider and Ashley Saint, have
established themselves as the leading
agricultural remote sensing group in
Australia. The team currently leads or
collaborates in remote sensing projects
that span nine Australian agricultural
industries (sugar, rice, avocado, mango,
macadamia, banana, peanut, pineapple
and multiple vegetable crops).
PARG, established in 2002, offers
cutting-edge research and learning
that supports the development and
implementation of modern technologies
such as satellite and ground-based remote
sensing, geographic information systems,
sensor networks and livestock tracking.
Its mandate is to evaluate technologies
and practices that benefit the agriculture
sector and to work with industry partners
to see them implemented appropriately.
in the Riverina, before being employed
GROWERS CAN OPEN A COMPUTER
OR SMARTPHONE FROM ANYWHERE
IN THE WORLD AND MONITOR CROPS.
Remote sensing is a key technology
for PARG and ARST. It allows growers
to assess crop performance without
physically making contact with it.
Essentially, it means growers can open
a computer or smartphone from anywhere
in the world and monitor crops, assess
pests and diseases, nutrient levels
Issue 73
Muhammad Moshiur Rahman, Jasmine Muir
and Andrew Robson prepare a sensing
drone. CREDIT: THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW ENGLAND
and projected yield. The implications
of this research are relevant to all
agricultural commodities, both in
Australia and abroad.
Before joining the UNE PARG
group three years ago, Robson started
his agricultural career picking oranges
by the Queensland and New South
Wales departments of primary industry
for nearly 20 years. The majority of his
research has focused on the development
of remote sensing applications specific
to agriculture.
Rahman joined the group in 2015
after completing a doctorate in precision
agriculture at UNE. Before settling
in NSW, he had completed a Masters
degrees in farm power and machinery
in Bangladesh and agricultural and
COSMOS
bio-resource engineering in the
Netherlands. His expertise in plant
growth modelling using remote sensing
technologies is an extremely beneficial
skill-set for the team.
Muir brings to the ARST 15 years
experience in the spatial industry,
predominantly through her employment
with Queenslands Department of Science,
Information Technology and Innovation,
as well as private industry. Her expertise
in remote sensing, including radar and
LiDAR analysis, computer programing
and ecological field sampling are of great
value to the team.
Having the ability to engage and
listen to industry, to identify what are the
relevant issues to production and farming
efficiencies and then to ultimately work
with them to evaluate and adopt new
technologies is a what separates the PARG
team from other agencies, Robson says.
The teams project portfolio has
increased significantly in the last 18
months. Highlights include a $7.2 million
national Horticulture Tree crop project,
jointly funded by the federal governments
Rural Research and Development
for Profit scheme and Horticulture
Innovation Australia (HIAL) and a $1.3
million sugarcane project funded by Sugar
Research Australia.
Although led by the UNE, the national
tree project includes collaborators such as
the University of Queensland, University
of Sydney, Central Queensland University,
QDAF, DSITI, AgTrix and Simpson Farms.
The national sugar project aims to
automate the processing and delivery
of crop vigour, derived yield and foliar
nitrogen maps to more than 80,000
individual sugar crops annually as well
as provide training to growers on better
nitrogen management.
The project is a direct collaboration
between UNE and the agricultural
company Farmacist.
To complement these projects, ARST
is just about to kick off another major
national project, funded by HIAL and
led by the Queensland Department of
Agriculture and Fisheries. The project
worth $4.7 million aims to increase the
vegetable industrys adoption of precision
agricultural technologies.
Good crop, bad crops
Orchardists could soon benefit from space
age technologies, allowing them to increase
yields and manage crops more efficiently.
ANGUS BEZZINA reports .
Mapping our food from space will soon be
the norm. Scientists from the University
of New England, in New South Wales,
are testing satellite technologies as a way
to track the health and growth of tropical
tree crops, including avocados, mangoes,
macadamia and bananas.
The scientists Andrew Robson,
Muhammad Moshiur Rahman and
Jasmine Muir from the Agricultural
Remote Sensing Team within the
universitys Precision Agricultural
Research Group are investigating
whether satellite-based remote sensing
technology can provide accurate measures
of crop yield, fruit size and quality.
If successful, growers will have access
to up-to-date parameter-specific maps
within a growing season to help them
identify areas performing poorly. This
will allow them to better manage crop
inputs and make more informed decisions
regarding harvest scheduling.
At present, yield forecasting of tree
crops such as avocado is undertaken by
counting the fruit of a small number of
trees, then extrapolating that figure across
the entire farm. An initial evaluation
of satellite imagery shows it to be more
accurate for both avocado and macadamia
Satellite imaging of an avocado orchard
block. CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF NEW ENGLAND
DIGEST 19
crops. Satellite imagery shows differences
in individual tree health across an orchard.
The UNE team, in collaboration
with the University of Queensland,
University of Sydney, Central Queensland
University and Queensland Department
of Agriculture and Fisheries, is sampling
mango, banana, macadamia and avocado
orchards across four Australian states
as part of a project funded by the federal
Rural Research and Development For
Profit program and the grower-owned
Horticulture Innovation Australia.
The scientists use satellite imagery,
ground and airborne sensors, to measure
the health or vigour of individual tree
canopies via their spectral characteristics.
From this information, measures such as
the Normalised Difference Vegetation
Index (NDVI), a scale commonly used
to determine the amount of live green
vegetation in a given area, is used to select
specific trees for targeted field sampling.
The varying yield parameters are
correlated against additional vegetation
indices to identify that which produces the
strongest relationship.
MAPPING OUR TREE CROPS FROM SPACE
HELPS BETTER TO TARGET HARVESTS
For avocados in Bundaberg,
Queensland, the team identified a
correlation between a number of
vegetation indices and fruit weight, both
as tree yield and for individual fruit.
These results are being validated across
other regions and across seasons. Satellite
sensing might also enable farmers to better
determine the quality and maturity of fruit
across an orchard. This will lead to greater
efficiencies at harvest time.
The strong correlation between
satellite imagery and fruit size over three
seasons allows growers to adopt targeted
harvesting to pick only those areas of an
orchard that bear large fruit.
Although further research is needed
to validate these results, if confirmed
the technologies investigated through
the entire project have the potential to
revolutionise the Australian tree-cropping
industry, and potentially other agricultural
sectors as well.
 ACCESS MORE THAN
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COSMOS VIEWPOINT 21

OPINIONS, IDEAS &

PERSPECTIVES

VIEWPOINT

WE CAN NO LONGER ASSUME

FLAKES WERE A TOOL MADE BY
A HUMAN ANCESTOR
DARREN CURNOE PALAEONTOLOGY

NORMAN SWAN KATIE MACK LAURIE ZOLOTH DARREN CURNOE

BODY TALK ASTRO KATIE PHILOSOPHERS CORNER ORIGINS
22 VIEWPOINT
NORMAN SWAN is a doctor and multi-award winning
producer and broadcaster on health issues.
BODY TALK
Big ideas,
small returns
Two hot new trends in medicine may be
overhyped and overfunded.
THE PAST COUPLE of decades have
seen a major emphasis on translational
medicine, the idea that promising
treatments need help to transition more
quickly from the lab bench to the bedside.
The biggest beneficiaries have been two
big ideas: personalised medicine using
a persons genome to offer tailor-made
treatments and regenerative medicine
using stem cells to repair their organs.
But are these lofty ideas delivering
on their promise? In an opinion piece
published in the Journal of the American
Medical Association in October 2016, three
prominent researchers argue they may
not be. Epidemiologists John Ioannides
from Stanford University and Michael
Paneth from Michigan State University,
with physiologist Michael Joyner from
the Mayo Clinic, say these big ideas are
soaking up resources at the expense of
others that may have a bigger impact on
health, such as finding new methods to
curtail smoking. They call for a wholesale
re-evaluation of the way forward in
biomedical research.
Personalised medicine was the
promise of the Human Genome Project,
completed in 2003. The idea is that
reading your genome, plus access to
electronic medical records to keep tabs on
a persons health, will deliver tailor-made
prevention strategies. For instance, if
you carry a high-risk breast cancer gene,
the recommendation would be to have a
HEALTH Issue 73
mastectomy. Personalised medicine will
also deliver tailor-made therapies, usually
drugs, as well as gene therapy to correct
the faulty gene.
Regenerative medicine, born in 1998
when researchers mastered the art of
growing human embryonic stem cells,
promised a new era of spare parts for
ailing bodies.
According to the critics, about
60% of research funding in the US is
now funnelled into these fields, with a
huge upswing in the number of papers
published.
But does having your genome read
really help? Common conditions such
as type 2 diabetes, depression and heart
disease involve hundreds of different failure is par for the course. The critics
genes. Pinning down a faulty gene that can dont deny that. But with so much
be targeted with a drug has proved elusive. competition for research grants, these big
Cancer has been another area of great ideas may be strangling other great ideas.
promise with limited returns. The idea is The solution, say the critics, is two-
that reading the DNA of a persons tumour pronged. On one hand, the funding
should reveal its Achilles heel. There have formula needs to be reset, with a higher
been some stunning successes where rogue proportion going to high-risk blue sky
genes that drive a tumours growth or help ideas. On the other, the mechanisms to
it evade the immune system have been evaluate the performance of big ideas need
matched with drugs that can disable those to be reviewed. Relying on the number of
genes. But so far, weve not seen benefits studies published is self-serving, they say,
on a large scale. because publications tend to follow fads.
Gene therapy has also been
disappointing. Even simple disorders, such
THESE BIG IDEAS MAY BE STRANGLING
as sickle cell anaemia that results from a
OTHER GREAT IDEAS.
single wonky version of the haemoglobin
gene, have not benefited from attempts to
replace the faulty gene. After several decades of substantial
There is also another downside to investment, the fundamental question is
personalised medicine, say the authors whether these big ideas have improved
of the JAMA article: The inevitable quality of life and life expectancy, by how
overdiagnosis and overtreatment that much, for how many, and for whom, write
follows from more intensive monitoring. Ioannides, Paneth and Joyner. These
The authors also cast doubt on the are public dollars that should benefit the
likely impact of stem cell therapy and many, not the few.
regenerative medicine. Even some of the It is not an argument to stop funding
most promising trials in heart disease, they research in the areas of personalised and
say, may be flawed. regenerative medicine. These big ideas
So what? you may ask. may yet deliver. But perhaps it is time for
We know it takes decades to turn other ideas to be given a place in the sun.
discoveries into treatments. We know The debate is worth having.
COSMOS
KATIE MACK is a theoretical astrophysicist who focuses on finding
new ways to learn about the early universe and fundamental physics.
ASTRO KATIE
Fast and
infuriating
Solving the mystery of fast radio bursts.
THE BEST SCIENCE STORIES are mystery
stories. Something unexplained occurs,
the detectives gather their clues, theories
are proposed and shot down. In the end,
if all goes well, the mystery is solved at
least until the next time something goes
bump in the night.
One of the most perplexing mysteries
in astronomy today is the fast radio burst,
or FRB. Almost 10 years ago, astronomer
Duncan Lorimer at West Virginia
University noticed a shockingly bright,
incredibly quick signal in data collected by
the Parkes radio telescope observatory in
New South Wales a few years before. Only
a few milliseconds long, the burst was as
brilliant as some of the brightest galaxies
radio astronomers had ever observed.
Intriguingly, the signal swept across
radio frequencies, mimicking the
behaviour of bright flashes of radiation
from very distant pulsars ultra-dense
stars that emit regular pulses of light.
A signal that spreads across frequencies
usually indicates that cosmic matter is
dispersing the light, in the same way a
prism spreads white light into a rainbow.
But while the burst looked a lot like
a pulsar blip, it didnt repeat the way
pulsar signals do, and no other telescope
detected it. Dubbed the Lorimer Burst,
it stood for years as a one-off event.
Given its uniqueness, some suggested
it must have been some kind of Earth-
based interference, or perhaps simply
a glitch in the Parkes telescope.
ASTROPHYSICS VIEWPOINT 23
Today, fast radio bursts are no longer
anomalies. With a hint of what to look
for very short, bright events
astronomers have scoured data from
the Parkes telescope and other radio
telescopes around the world. FRBs are
now so numerous its hard to keep up with
their discovery.
Yet FRBs are a study in contradictions.
So far, only one source repeats, but at such
irregular intervals that astronomers have
not been able to determine a pattern. Only
two bursts have coincided with emissions
in visible or any other kind of light, which
is necessary to pinpoint the source of the
FRB since the radio telescopes cant give
an exact location. data for super-short-duration events.
However, one of those two bursts Just as every new observing wavelength
now appears more likely to be a chance we try or instrumental technique we
alignment than a true correlation, and develop opens a new window on to the
the other paints the picture of an explosion universe, this new frontier may allow
with such odd characteristics it is hard us to see an entire zoo of cosmic events
to reconcile with any known model. that were happening all along, unseen.
Careful analysis of different FRB It wouldnt be surprising to find that
signals has suggested explosions of FRBs represent a diverse family of cosmic
young stars, or old stars, or even collisions explosions rather than one kind of thing.
between stars, but none of those fit with
an FRB that repeats.
THANKS TO FRBS, WE ARE NOW
One of the biggest open questions
LOOKING AT THE UNIVERSE IN A NEW
is exactly how far away FRBs are.
WAY, REDESIGNING OUR OBSERVATION
Every attempt to work out their distance
STRATEGIES AND SCOURING THE DATA
has been inconclusive. Even the pattern
FOR SUPER-SHORT-DURATION EVENTS.
of their locations in the sky is odd.
If theyre all far beyond our own galaxy,
we would expect them to appear at The key to solving this mystery will
random places in the sky. If theyre all in be to catch an FRB in the act and, at the
our galaxy, we should see them mostly same time, see its fingerprints on a signal
along the plane of the Milky Way, where detected with another kind of light, thus
most of the stars are. In actuality, weve allowing us to see the galaxy it came from.
found them to lie somewhat more often Astronomers are already designing
above or below the plane of the galaxy, not surveys that watch for FRBs with radio
randomly like distant sources, and not in telescopes and scour the sky with optical,
the plane like close ones. But with only infrared, or gamma ray telescopes around
20 or so seen so far, it is hard to draw the world simultaneously. Once we have
a conclusion. a handful of real-time FRBs along with
Thanks to FRBs, we are now looking at their host galaxies, we will start to close
the universe in a new way, redesigning our this case and, more likely than not, open
observation strategies and scouring the several exciting new ones.
24 VIEWPOINT
LAURIE ZOLOTH is a professor of medical ethics and
humanities at Northwestern University, Chicago.
PHILOSOPHERS
CORNER
Bloodless
coup
One mans quest to create the perfect
meat-free burger.
WHEN I FIRST MET Stanford biochemist
Pat Brown in 2000, he was already a star.
The one-time pediatrician had shifted
gear to study how the activity of thousands
of genes can go awry in cancer. That
work had made him a Howard Hughes
Investigator a membership only given
to the most driven and creative individuals
in basic medical research.
Brown was also an activist. That
year, along with Nobel Prize winner
Harold Varmus and biologist Michael
Eisen, he began a movement to free up
scientific literature. In 2003, that led
to the creation of the Public Library of
Science (PLOS). Anyone can read research
papers published by seven different PLOS
journals for free.
This was a Big Idea. But that is not
the reason Brown is the hero of the
Philosophers Corner this month; it is
for his next Big Idea.
I ran into Brown in November 2016
at a US National Academies seminar
where he described his newest project.
It involved no less than, well, saving
the world.
About 41% of all arable land, he said,
is used to grow grain for livestock, while
one-third of our fresh water consumption
goes to meat production. Add in the use
of chemicals and fuel, and the meat we
ETHICS
consume represents one of the largest
contributors to carbon, pesticides and
pollutants on the planet. As our population
swells to 10 billion over the next few
decades, meat-eating will simply be
unsustainable. This is in addition to the
problem of animal suffering.
But I like meat, a small voice inside
you is saying now. Pat knows that too.
Only 2% of the global population is
vegetarian. We are creatures designed
to like meat.
Figuring it would be useless to do
what I do try to convince people to
simply act morally Brown quit his job
at Stanford to work full-time, along with
80 other scientists, on figuring out how to
engineer a hamburger-like patty that could
replace beef.
Rather than take the route of growing
vats of animal-derived muscle stem cells,
as some other alternative meat companies
have, he and his colleagues opted to go
100% plant.
Life is chemistry. Burgers are
chemistry too.
The red meat colour and much
of the flavour comes from haem, a
molecule at the core of the blood protein
haemoglobin. Soybeans make a version
too, leghaemoglobin, and it is this protein
that makes Browns burgers so bloodily
realistic. His team has engineered yeast
cells to manufacture it by the bucketload
by inserting the soybean gene for
leghaemoglobin into the yeast genome.
The blood red protein is mixed with a
precision formula of wheat protein and
other chemicals to mimic the texture and
taste of beef.
Your intrepid philosopher tried one of
these burgers at a vegan restaurant in Los
Angeles called Crossroads. It looked and
tasted exactly like a burger from a fast food
place. But the so-called Impossible Burger
uses one-ninth the water, one-twelfth
Issue 73
the land and produces one-quarter of the
greenhouse gases of a beef burger.
Is it possible to change such a
deeply entrenched industry as meat
production? The history of my home
town, Chicago hog butcher to the
world is underpinned by rolling herds
and feedlots; and, to be sure, there will be
vast dislocation due to jobs lost if Browns
plan to make meat obsolete succeeds. But
potato, wheat and coconut farmers will
surely gain enormously.
IT LOOKED AND TASTED EXACTLY
LIKE A BURGER FROM A FAST FOOD
PLACE.
Brown likens the change to the
introduction of automobiles: When
the first car raced a horse, the horse
would win, but then it never did again.
He has made that argument to dozens of
Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, who have
backed him with millions, because if he
can get this right, there is a fortune to
be made in efficient and more cheaply
produced meat.
To turn your lab and your life to saving
the planet is a remarkable act of ethics.
Pat Brown and his colleagues should have
our support.
COSMOS
DARREN CURNOE is an paleoanthropologist with an insatiable curiosity
for understanding the kind of creature we are and how we came to be this way.
ORIGINS
Accidental
tool makers
Monkey business forces a rethink on
human evolution.
WHEN DID A HUMAN-LIKE mind first
emerge, setting its owner on a path distinct
to that of other apes?
We paleoanthropologists have
long looked to tool use as the marker
particularly the appearance of a cutting
tool known as a flake.
It now seems we were wrong.
Recent research published in Nature
by a team led by Tomos Proffitt at the
University of Oxford shows that capuchin
monkeys regularly produce sharp-edged
flakes indistinguishable from those made
by early hominins.
Could these South American
simians be taking the same first steps
that eventually delivered the spanner,
wheel and smartphone? As it turns out,
no. The flakes are produced by accident
when the monkeys smash rocks together.
Nonetheless, the capuchins have thrown
a spanner in the works for archaeologists.
Since the flakes they make are not tools
at all, we can no longer assume the flakes
found in the archaeological record are
tools either.
We know that monkeys can make tools
of other kinds, of course. Ever since British
primatologist Jane Goodalls pioneering
work in the 1960s, we have known our
chimpanzee cousins use tools to shell nuts
and to fish for termites.
PALAEONTOLOGY
Nor is tool use confined to primates.
Other mammals, birds, snails, octopuses
and even insects all turn out to be tool
wielders. In fact, back in the 19th century
an American husband and wife team,
Elizabeth and George Peckham, first
documented tool use outside human
beings. They observed wasps hammering
dirt with pebbles to build their burrows.
Nevertheless, the one tool weve never
seen in any animals kit is the flake. One
of archaeologys most famous couples,
Louis and Mary Leakey, first found flakes
in the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. The
artefacts are associated with Homo habilis,
an early human ancestor who lived close
to 2 million years ago. H. habilis made
the flakes, it was believed, by selecting
a piece of rock called a core and using
a stone hammer to strike off a thin wedge.
The resultant edge, sharp as surgical steel,
enabled H. habilis to butcher animals.
Telltale cut marks on ancient bones
attested to their use as ancient tools.
Archaeologists argued that making
a flake required sophisticated mental
machinery such as the ability to plan
and an understanding of the physical
properties of raw materials. This was
coupled with uniquely human hand-eye
co-ordination that, for instance, allows
us to thread cotton through the eye of
a needle.
Flake making was also thought
to be associated with the beginnings
of language, since to develop such
a sophisticated technology implied
individuals who could communicate
and collaborate, pass on knowledge and
create culture.
Now it seems that flakes per se may
not represent what we thought they did.
Capuchins pound rocks together to crack
them open and lick the powdered quartz,
probably to access dietary minerals.
The process sends flakes flying in every
VIEWPOINT 25
direction. But the monkeys dont use
the flakes as tools; they just leave them
lying about.
So what these clever monkeys show us
is that, if we find ancient flakes, we can no
longer assume they were a tool made by
a human ancestor.
WE CAN NO LONGER ASSUME FLAKES
WERE MADE BY A HUMAN ANCESTOR.
The discovery of flakes at the Lomekwi
archeological site in Kenya, which dates
to 3.3 million years ago, led researchers
to propose in 2015 that early humans
appeared about 700,000 years earlier
than previously thought. Now, however,
without other evidence, such as cut marks
on bones, we can no longer assume the
flakes are evidence of a human presence.
One thing is clear: the capuchins
have forced us to set the bar higher.
A flake alone is not enough. The hunt
now begins to find a new kind of artefact
that is quintessentially human in its style
of manufacture and use as a tool. Perhaps
something like the hand axe that we see
with Homo erectus much later, 1.6 million
years ago.
It is a very exciting time to be an
archaeologist.
26 HOLODECK Issue 73
COSMOS HOLODECK 27

HOLODECK:
COMPILED BY JAMES MITCHELL CROW

LESSONS
FROM MARS

THE SCHIAPARELLI PROBE made headlines in

October 2016 when it crash-landed on Mars. It wasnt
a disaster, though, it was mainly a practice run for
the European Space Agencys next mission to the red
planet: delivery of a craft bearing the science station
and rover, scheduled for 2020. The main game of the
Schiaparelli probe the ExoMars mission was to
deploy the mothership, the 13th of an international
fleet of ships spying on Mars. Known as the Trace
Gas Orbiter (TGO), its goal is to sniff out methane,
a potential signature of life. The gas has been
detected by previous orbiters, the Curiosity Rover
and Earth-based telescopes. But where the plumes
came from was impossible to say. TGOs instruments
will pinpoint the source with a thousand-fold greater
accuracy than ever before.
CREDIT: ARTISTS IMPRESSION / ESA / D. DUCROS
28 HOLODECK Issue 73
COSMOS HOLODECK 29

FOLLOW THE WATER

In September 2015, NASAs Mars Reconnaissance
Orbiter had a better reason to grab headlines: it
found evidence of flowing water. MROs spectrometer
showed that dark streaks on the slopes of some
craters and canyons were composed of salts left by
evaporating water. It also identified clay sediments
on a canyon floor in the Nili Fossae region (far left),
a candidate site for a future landing mission.
Two older orbiters, the 2001 Mars Odyssey and
Mars Global Surveyor, identified ancient lakes and
snowmelt-fed streams in the Arabia Terra region
(left: white represents lowest elevation, yellow
highest). Based on the number of craters, scientists
estimate they held water until 2-3 billion years ago
a billion years later than previously thought.
CREDIT: (LEFT) NASA / JPL-CALTECH / UNIV. OF ARIZONA

(RIGHT) NASA / JPL-CALTECH / ASU

30 HOLODECK Issue 73

STOLEN BY THE SUN

So what happened to Mars ancient lakes and
streams?
In November 2015, NASAs MAVEN (Mars
Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission) orbiter
revealed the answer: the solar wind blew away most
of the atmosphere. Without its protective blanket,
the planets water evaporated.
Dipping into the thin Martian atmosphere, just
1% as thick as Earths, MAVEN measured wisps of
ionised gas streaming away from the planet at a rate
of 100 grams per second. The rate increased 20-
fold when a solar storm struck. Thats shown in this
simulated image: white streaks are the solar wind and
the coloured streaks show the energy of escaping
Martian gases. The hottest colours have the highest
energy and are concentrated at the pole.
CREDIT: NASAS SCIENTIFIC VISUALIZATION STUDIO / MAVEN SCIENCE TEAM
COSMOS HOLODECK 31
32 HOLODECK Issue 73
COSMOS HOLODECK 33

GRAVITY MAP
Mars is pockmarked by towering mountains such
as Olympus Mons three times the height of
Mount Everest and craters 9 km deep. The mass
differences in the crust mean spacecraft experience
tiny changes in gravitational tug as they orbit Mars.
These wobbles are measurable and can be used
to calculate the changing gravity and mass. For
instance, they revealed that the mass of the CO2
icecaps varies seasonally by 4 trillion tons.
Scientists pooled measurements from three
orbiters to build this gravity map of the planet
in 2016. Low-gravity canyons like Valles Marineris
in blue (centre) stand out from the high-gravity reds
and whites of Tharsis Montes, the three aligned
volcanoes left of centre and Olympus Mons, above
and left. This gravity map will help future craft chart
their orbit with greater precision.
CREDIT: NASAS SCIENTIFIC VISUALIZATION STUDIO
34 COVER STORY Issue 73

01
SKA will not only take us to
the edge of the universe, it will
revolutionise computing.
COSMOS COVER STORY 35

THE
BIG DATA
TELESCOPE

The eyes of the world are on outback Western Australia

as it prepares to build the most powerful radiotelescope
ever conceived, the Square Kilometre Array.
ELIZABETH FINKEL reports.
36 COVER STORY
ON A FLAT, RED MULGA PLAIN in the
outback of Western Australia, preparations
are under way to build the most audacious
telescope astronomers have ever dreamed of
the Square Kilometre Array (SKA).
NEXT-GENERATION TELESCOPES usually aim
to double the performance of their predecessors.
The Australian arm of SKA will deliver a 168-fold
leap on the best technology available today, to
show us the universe as never before. It will tune
into signals emitted just a million years after the
Big Bang, when the universe was a sea of hydrogen
gas, slowly percolating with the first galaxies.
Their starlight illuminated the fledgling universe
in what is referred to as the cosmic dawn.
It is the last non-understood event in the
history of the universe, says Stuart Wyithe,
a theoretical astrophysicist at the University of
Melbourne in Australia.
Like any dream, realisation is the hard part.
In 2018, when the first of 130,000 Christmas-
tree-like antennae is deployed on the sandy plains
of Murchison, an almost uninhabited district of
50,000 square kilometres, it will mark 28 years
since its conception.
Epic battles have brought the project to this
point most famously the six-year contest between
countries to host the telescope. Australia and
South Africa ended up sharing the prize. The SKAs
telescope in South Africa will be built on another
flat, red flat plain the Karoo region of the North
Cape. It has somewhat less lofty ambitions its
dishes will probe only halfway to the edge of the
universe. Its moniker, SKA-mid, denotes the mid-
range frequencies of radio waves stretched across
this distance.
Australias SKA-low, by contrast, will tune into
the low frequencies emanating from the extremities
of the cosmos. Together the two telescopes will
represent the largest science facility on the planet,
says SKA director-general and radio astronomer
Phil Diamond, who is based at Jodrell Bank
Observatory in the UK.
The game-changing technology that will allow
Issue 73
us to hear the whispers of newborn stars against the
cacophony of the universe doesnt involve grinding
mirrors to atom-thin smoothness or constructing
dishes the size of sports fields. The disruptive
technology here is supercomputing.
Once SKA-low is running, it will generate more
data every day than the worlds internet traffic.
Dealing with this deluge is a challenge being tackled
by hefty global collaborations of academia and
private enterprise and it is by no means clear how
it will be solved. Its a scale no one has attempted
before, says Peter Quinn, a computational
astrophysicist at the University of Western
Australia, and director of the International Centre
for Radioastronomy Research (ICRAR) in Perth.
While international mega-science projects
have been tackled before think the European
Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), which
operates the worlds largest particle accelerator, the
Large Hadron Collider when it comes to the SKA,
the potential world-changing spin-offs have never
been so blazingly obvious.
CERN didnt just find the Higgs boson
computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee created
the World Wide Web to manage its information
sharing. Wi-Fi was the spin-off when Australian
CSIRO astronomers developed ways to realign
scrambled radio signals from black holes.
Mega-corporations such as CISCO, Woodside,
Chevron, Rio Tinto and Google are already
positioned to collaborate with SKA astronomers
around the world.
A science project of this grandeur, managed
across 10 countries, involving dozens of specialist
technical consortia and thousands of people, is
challenging enough. The question of how to divvy
up the pie for construction contracts and the
commercial spin-offs that follow adds a whole new,
complicated layer.
COSMOS
But astronomers have a great track record
when it comes to teasing their way through gnarly
collaborations to deliver triumphs such as the
Hubble Space Telescope and the Atacama Large
Array. After nearly 25 years of wrangling, the
signs are that the first binding SKA treaty will be
signed early next year, committing the 10 member
countries Australia, Canada, China, India,
Italy, New Zealand, South Africa, Sweden, the
Netherlands and the UK to funding and contracts
for the 2018 rollout.
Even with the treaty, SKA will remain a
confusing beast: not one telescope but two, located
in two countries, with headquarters in a third
the UK. Despite the name, neither of the Phase 1
telescopes slated for construction actually boasts
a square kilometre of collecting area. That wont be
realised until Phase 2 of the project, negotiations for
which have yet to begin.
02
The 200 dishes of SKA-mid to be rolled out in South Africa will probe half way
to the edge of the universe. (Artists impression)
Nevertheless, as the gears of the vast project
slowly grind into action, Australia is bracing to host
its first global mega-science project. It will be our
CERN downunder, says CSIRO astronomer Sarah
Pearce, Australias science representative to the
SKA board. But, she adds, dont expect a tour. Its
here precisely because there are very few people.
COVER STORY 37
AN IDEA TAKES ROOT
The curious thing about astronomy is that
telescopes, as they grow more powerful, turn into
time machines. When Galileo peered at Jupiter,
he saw it as it appeared some 42 minutes earlier
the time it took for its light to reach him. Hubbles
iconic image of the Horsehead Nebula in the
constellation of Orion is a snapshot of how it looked
1,500 years ago.
The astronomers who conceived the SKA had
their sights set way beyond the 100,000-light-year
dimensions of our own galaxy. The faint signals they
seek began their journey more than 13 billion years
ago, just a few million years after the Big Bang.
At that point, the hot plasma of electrons
and protons had cooled enough to fuse and form
the simplest atom hydrogen. Except for a slight
ripple here or there, our universe was a featureless
IT WILL
GENERATE
MORE DATA
EVERY DAY
THAN THE
WORLDS
INTERNET
TRAFFIC.
sea of it. Today, things are different the sea
is dotted with galaxies. But how did these
galactic islands form? To find out requires a
telescope that can look back to the rippling
hydrogen sea of 13 billion years ago. Thats
why the SKA was originally called the hydrogen
telescope, Quinn says.
38 COVER STORY
Those who imagined the SKA had a lust for
hydrogen. Their appetite had been whet by the Very
Large Array (VLA), 27 dishes lying 80km west of
Socorro, in New Mexico.
Now known as the Jansky VLA, the telescope
generated some of the first detailed maps of atomic
hydrogen. The bond between hydrogens electron
and proton emits a unique 21-centimetre radio
wave. Because the universe is expanding, the waves
emitted from outer space have stretched by the
time they reach us. The futher away, the greater
the stretching; hydrogen waves emanating from
the edge of the universe measure 1.5m by the time
they reach Earth. Its known as the Doppler effect;
on Earth, we experience it when we hear the sound
ALGORITHMS of an ambulance siren deepen as it speeds away, its
DEVELOPED sound wave stretching as it goes.
In 1990, on the 10th anniversary of the VLA, the
TO PURSUE worlds radio astronomers met to celebrate one of
SKAS GOALS the New Mexico facilitys crowning achievements
mapping hydrogen in nearby galaxies. Ron Ekers,
MAY BE THE an Australian former director of the array, recalls
NEXT WI-FI. that everyone was on a high.
Not content to rest on their laurels, a small
group of visionary astronomers wondered how far
the technology could be pushed. Egged on, Peter
Wilkinson from the University of Manchester in
Britain pitched the idea of reaching out to galaxies
at the edge of the universe. A total collecting area of
one square kilometre, he figured, should do the job.
The audacity of the proposal was amazing,
Quinn says: Most telescope improvements aim
for a two-to-three-fold increase; this proposal
represented a 10,000-fold increase. That figure
reflected a 50-fold increase in sensitivity multiplied
by a 200-fold increase in field of view. The goal
was to see a milky way at the edge of the universe,
Quinn adds and to scour the entire southern sky.
The breakthrough technology needed to enable
this leap did not lie in fancy new telescope designs,
but in the explosion of computing power and
techniques able to handle massive amounts of data.
The receivers themselves could be little more
than antennas. Tuned to radio wavelengths, they
would pick up the extra-long waves of distant
hydrogen coincidentally the same wavelength
used by many FM radio stations. This is where the
early universe is broadcasting, says Quinn. You
just cant hear it because its buried in the crackle.
The more antennae, the greater the sensitivity
hence the planned one square kilometre of
collecting surface. But the antennae dont need to
be all in one spot. Indeed, the more spread out they
are, the sharper the focus.
Issue 73
How does a forest of radio antennae figure
out where in the sky a signal has come from?
Interferometry, a technique developed by British
and Australian radio astronomers in the 1940s, is
the key. It relies on the principle that each antenna
in an array receives a signal at a slightly different
time. For instance, radio waves coming from
the easterly part of the sky hit the eastern-most
antennae earlier than those lying further west.
By electronically tweaking the delay on each, the
entire forest could be made to point in a particular
direction of the sky.
But using interferometry to tune into signals
from the edge of the universe would have required
filtering astronomical amounts of data; and that was
a challenge yet to be mastered.
THE TUSSLE
In 2000, a SKA steering committee led by Ekers
invited proposals for a home for the telescope.
Five countries responded. To help their bid, some
built serious prototypes known as pathfinders.
It resulted in an astronomical bonanza. Australia
built the majestic dishes of the Australian Square
Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) and the
antenna forest of the Murchison Widefield Array
(MWA). South Africa built the seven dishes of
KAT-7 and is building the larger MeerKAT. China
began work on a prototype which paved the way for
the Five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical radio
Telescope (FAST), the largest single radio dish in
the world.
Geography worked against some of the
contestants. The Chinese site wasnt flat enough.
The joint Brazilian-Argentinian bid was let down by
a turbulent ionosphere the uppermost layer of the
atmosphere which distorted the sought-after low
frequency radio waves.
By 2006, Australia and South Africa were
the last countries standing. Both laid claim to
vast unpopulated regions, free of radio wave
interference and with relatively placid ionospheres.
The South African sites higher elevation was
in its favour. Australia, on the other hand, had an
impressive track record in radio astronomy. It
boasted some of the worlds first interferometers,
built in the 1940s at Dover Heights south of Sydney,
and the iconic CSIRO Parkes telescope, operating
since 1961.
The contest was fierce, and for good reason:
SKAs benefits clearly stretched far beyond
astronomy. The devices and algorithms developed
COSMOS COVER STORY 39

03
Like a forest of metal pine trees:
an artists impression of some of
the 130,000 antennae of SKA-low
to be assembled on the red plains
of Murchison. They will probe to
the edge of the universe.
40 COVER STORY Issue 73

A SKA: THE WORLDS MOST

CLOSER
LOOK POWERFUL RADIOTELESCOPE
Designed to scan the far reaches of the universe,
SKA comprises two telescopes. SKA-mid will
scan the mid-range frequencies arriving from
half way across the universe. A traditional
dish design, SKA-mid will be based in South
Africa. SKA-low will detect the low frequencies
broadcasting from the very edge of the universe. Karoo region, South Africa
This unusual-looking telescope, know as an SKA-mid site
aperture array, will be built in West Australia.

SKA-MID MID-FREQUENCY INSTRUMENT

350 MH z
14 GH z
frequency range

DATA
STATS

150
2
kilometres
200 distance between dishes
Number of dishes
terabytes of raw data
(Including MeerKAT
per second.
dishes already

340,000
operational)

Number of average laptops filled

with content every day.
COSMOS COVER STORY 41

Murchison, Western Australia

SKA-low site

SKA-LOW LOW-FREQUENCY INSTRUMENT

50 mH z
350 MH z 130,000
frequency range
Number of antennas.
They will be spread
across 500 stations.

65 kilometres
the distance between
each station

DATA
STATS

157
terabytes of raw data
per second.

27 million
Number of average laptops filled
with content every day.
42 COVER STORY
to pursue SKAs goals may be the next Wi-Fi, the
next multi-trillion dollar technology market,
says Steven Tingay, the former director of the
MWA who now leads Italys SKA involvement.
Whichever country hosted the SKA would be at the
heart of the action, attracting and training the next
generation of engineers and scientists in advanced
manufacturing, telecommunications and high-
performance computing.
Accompanied by the sort of media attention
usually reserved for a football grand final, a
competitive and secretive bidding process ensued.
In May 2012, members of the SKA organisation
voted to split the array between the Australian and
African sites. The South African telescope would
WE BELIEVE observe radio waves from 350 MHz to 14 gigahertz,
WE KNOW enabling it to detect signals up to six billion light-
years away a still sparse chapter in the universes
HOW TO DO life story. It would use dishes like those of the JVLA,
IT, BUT IM but dramatically increase speed and sensitivity.
Australias array would detect frequencies in
NOT HIDING the range of 50 to 350 MHz ideal for detecting
THE FACT hydrogen signals from the edge of the universe.
Both would rely on the development of
THAT ITS A disruptive new computation techniques.
CHALLENGE. We believe we know how to do it, but Im not
hiding the fact that its a challenge, Diamond says.
BUILDING IT
Getting to the Australian site of the SKA gives
the words isolation and quiet whole new optic fibre ferries the pre-filtered data from the
meanings. First, you make your way to Perth, itself
one of the most isolated cities in the world. Then its
another one-hour flight to the 35,000-strong port
town of Geraldton. From there, bump around for
four dusty hours in a four-wheel-drive until finally,
on the horizon, you see a succession of towering
white 12-metre telescope dishes.
You have arrived at the Murchison Radio-
astronomy Observatory. The 36 dishes comprise
ASKAP. Despite the name, they are not the
prototype for SKA-low. That honour goes to the
MWA, a rather less majestic affair that lies hidden
in the nearby mulga scrub: 2,048 squat, wiry
antennae, resembling a swarm of giant spiders.
Unlike ASKAP, the MWA has no moving parts to
point to different parts of the sky. Thats because
this is a software telescope. It relies on a computer
to program different delays into the antennae so
signals from the same patch of sky are collected
at the same time.
Amid great fanfare, MWA first came online
Issue 73
in mid-2013. According to director Randall Wayth,
it has blazed the trail for SKA-low. It is tuned to
receive signals from the early universe within the
bandwidth of 60 to 250 MHz. It does not have the
sensitivity to detect features of the cosmic dawn,
but its impressive 30-degree field of view allows it
to map the entire visible sky over a few nights. The
Galactic and Extragalactic All-sky MWA (GLEAM)
survey, for instance, mapped bubbles of ionised
hydrogen gas and quasars from up to six billion light
years away.
Two trail-blazing aspects of its operation are
key to SKA-low. The first is that it has pioneered
methods to adjust for the distorting effects of the
ionosphere above Murchison. Its like trying to
see something at the bottom of a rippling pool,
explains Wayth. Luckily for us, its usually just
small ripples.
Filtering out the ripples of the ionosphere is
just one step in a multipronged data-processing
operation whose ultimate aim is to deliver sharp
images of the ancient universe.
Another early step reduces the noise inherent in
the system. The heart of every radio telescope is an
onsite computer known as a correlator. Developed
through a partnership with IBM and Cisco, the
MWAs correlator compares signals from each of
the 2,048 antennae. Noise is random; real signals
are correlated. By accepting only correlated signals,
this step reduces the data to a manageable 1% of the
initial deluge.
The next phase takes place off-site. An 800 km
desert to the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre in
Perth. A mirror link also takes it to collaborators
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in
Boston, and Victoria University of Wellington
in New Zealand, to be used by some 35 different
science projects.
Just as a human brain must process vast
amounts of data into a meaningful representation
of the world, these supercomputers turn the MWA
radio wave signals into pictures of the universe.
There are data from across different regions of the
sky, and across tens of thousands of frequencies.
It is sifted by setting windows to extract cubes of
information. Like pixels on a screen, they provide
an image of the universe.
The MWAs coarse resolution means its cubes
cant produce a sharp image. SKA, with its 100-
fold greater sensitivity and 40-fold increase in
resolution, will provide more cubes to show us what
is actually there. But in order to do that, it must
solve the data deluge problem.
COSMOS COVER STORY 43

A TWO DIFFERENT
CLOSER
LOOK TELESCOPES
RADIO TELESCOPE DISH

Like a lens, a radio telescopes dish relies on

physical curvature to focus signals and trace their
source. To look at different bits of the sky, it must
physically swing around it takes thousands of
hours to map the entire sky.

APERTURE ARRAY AND INTERFEROMETRY

The aperture array can trace the source By introducing different electronic
of a signal by measuring the delay with delays at each antenna, they can be
which it arrived at each antenna. focused on the same part of the sky.

Arrives Arrives Arrives Arrives Delay >0 >1 >2 >3

4th 3rd 2nd 1st

Interferometer

Signals arrive at different times All signals arrive at the same time
44 COVER STORY Issue 73

04

The Murchison Widefield Array is the prototype for the SKA-low. This image from the GLEAM
survey shows how the Milky Way appears at radio wavelengths.

05

The Pawsey Supercomputing Centre in Perth, transforms

huge amounts of raw data into images of the universe.
COSMOS
SCALING UP TO SKA
The antenna design selected for SKA is not
the MWAs squat spider, but one that
resembles a pine tree the so-called log periodic
design. Different rung lengths on the tree enable
it to resonate in a wide range of frequencies
from 50 to 650 MHz. (MWA typically manages
60 to 250 MHz.) SKA will deploy 130,000
of them.
But that wont deliver the eponymous square
kilometre of collecting area. The 650 million
(about US$690 million) funding for phase 1 will
only deliver four-tenths of that. Nevertheless, it
should have the sensitivity to detect primordial
galaxies across large patches of sky.
The first phase of SKA-low will churn out
raw data at a daily rate greater than the worlds
internet traffic; impossible to store, or for human
minds to process in real time. Ingenious algorithms
will be needed to sift valuable nuggets from the
deluge.
The University of Cambridge leads a consortium
of 23 organisations, including Perths ICRAR,
to develop new hardware and software systems
for the task. One of ICRARs major software
contributions goes by the name DALiuGE an
acronym for data activated logical graph engine.
Its also a bilingual play on the word deluge: liu
is a Chinese character meaning flow.
Last June, an ICRAR team successfully ran
the prototype of DALiuGE on the second-most
powerful supercomputer in the world, Tianhe-2,
in Guangzhou, China. Next, the team hopes to
test it on the most powerful, Sunway TaihuLight
in Wuxi, eastern China.
The computing challenges may be huge, but
its not the first time the global community has
taken on something so big. To solve CERNs
problem of distributed processing and information
sharing, its researchers ended up developing
the World Wide Web. That changed our world
forever, Quinn says. I suspect the SKA will do
the same.
SKAs rewards are already reaching beyond
science into industry. Besides CISCO and IBM,
other big-name collaborators on the project
include British-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto,
international gas and oil company Chevron,
Amazon and Intel. All are highly attuned to new
ways of solving their big data problems whether
it is crunching data to make images of oil, gas and
mineral deposits below the ground, or finding
patterns in vast databases.
COVER STORY 45
CONSTRUCTION IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE
The computational challenges of the SKA are
formidable; so too are those involved in building
and rolling out the infrastructure in the middle
of the Australian outback. Its a perfect job for
a former army tank officer.
Tom Booler has been project manager for
the MWA and part of the SKA-low team since
2011. His mission is to plan the construction and
deployment of 130,000 antennas in the desert
absent a local workforce, with no construction
equipment and no power grid. And thats only the
first phase of SKA-low. The second, slated for the
mid-2020s pending funding, will see the number
of antennas swell to about a million. The scale,
cost and remoteness of the site make it one of the
toughest science projects ever undertaken.
Supplying power is a major hurdle. The MWA
is powered by a 1.6 MW hybrid solar-diesel power
station, parts of which must be shielded to stop the
radio waves it creates from interfering with the
THE WORLD
telescope. Phase 1 of SKA-low will need 2.25 MW. WIDE WEB
Phase 2 will need the power supply of a small city.
Extreme weather also has to be factored in.
DEVELOPED
In 2015, nearby Milly Milly Station bore a years BY CERN
worth of rain in five months. While cattle grazers
welcomed it, road closures disrupted plans at the
CHANGED
observatory. Besides sudden downpours, Booler THE WORLD
also has to reckon with temperatures soaring over
40 C in the summer months and then theres the
FOREVER.
desert death adder. I SUSPECT
But one thing the shire of Murchison has going
for it and a reason it won the bid for the SKA
THE SKA WILL
is the quiet. Population density is extremely low DO THE SAME.
just 115 people spread over an area the size of the
Netherlands. There are no mobile phone towers or
radio and television transmitters. The shire is also
hushed by regulations enforced by the Australian
Communications and Media Authority.
Within the observatory, every appliance
gets stripped of wi-fi hardware before it arrives.
The observatory control centre, which houses
computers that crunch data from the existing
telescopes, is the radio equivalent of an airlock, with
radio-wave-proof double doors and no windows.
Inside a radius of 70km around the observatory
authorities can order mobile phones be turned off.
Out to 260km emissions are regulated in key radio
frequency ranges.
The entire area is more than six times bigger
than the US National Radio Quiet Zone, home to
the Green Bank radio telescope and a population
running into hundreds of thousands.
46 COVER STORY
BIG BANG COSMIC DAWN
400 million years - first stars
380,000 years - CMB
A sea of
neutral hydrogen
BACK TO
THE COSMIC
DAWN
WE KNOW SOMETHING of the first few
moments after the violent birth of our
universe. A split second after the Big
Bang, it was a tiny mushrooming fireball,
10 billion degrees hot and filled with a
plasma of frenetic charged particles.
Over the next 380,000 years, the
expanding universe cooled. Charged
particles electrons and protons
lost enough of their youthful energy
to bond with each other and form the
first hydrogen atoms. In this more staid
universe, light from the Big Bang could
at last move in uninterrupted straight
lines. As space continued to expand, the
light waves stretched to the length of
microwaves which we see today as the
cosmic microwave background.
This much we know. The next episode
remains a mystery.
At 380,000 years old, the universe
was a peaceful sea of hydrogen. A billion
years later, most of it was gone. We know
a small percentage snowballed under
the influence of gravity to form stars and
galaxies. But the vast intergalactic sea of
Issue 73
1 billion years
reionisation complete
EPOCH OF REIONISATION
hydrogen gas disappeared, reionised into a
plasma of protons and electrons. The era is
known as the epoch of reionisation.
How did this happen? It turns out
there are lots of theories, and they are
almost completely unconstrained by data.
Traces of dark matter laid down
in the Big Bang, slightly denser than
their surrounds, may have triggered
the snowballing of hydrogen into stars.
But why did the intergalactic hydrogen
disappear?
The leading theory is ultraviolet
radiation from the first hot stars stripped
the surrounding hydrogen of its electrons.
Swiss cheese model of ancient universe:
But there is another contender: quasars.
neutral hydroden (red), reionised hydrogen
Quasars (quasi-stellar radio sources) are
(holes), galaxies (white). CREDIT: STUART WYITHE
among the brightest and oldest objects
in the universe. They are powered by
black holes; the source of their light is the possibility is that it was quasars that
radiation emitted by accelerating gases reionised the universe, says astrophysicist
as they are sucked towards the accretion Stuart Wyithe, at the University of
disc. Quasars can be surprisingly ancient, Melbourne, who specialises in trying
appearing just 770 million years after the to recreate this unknown period of the
Big Bang. history of the universe. The theory also
Its controversial, but one exciting suggests that massive black holes may
COSMOS
MODERN UNIVERSE
13.7 billion
Timeline of the hiostory of the universe.
By detecting neutral hydrogen SKA-low will
trace the evolution from the cosmic dawn to
the end of the epoch of reionization.
CREDIT: ESA / C. CARREAU
have played a far greater role in shaping
our Universe than previously thought.
In Wyithes computer modelling, the
ancient universe resembles Swiss cheese.
The cheese is neutral hydrogen and the
holes are where it has been eaten away,
leaving an ionised plasma. Over a period
of about 300 million years, the holes grow
larger until, by about a billion years after
the Big Bang, theres almost no cheese left.
SKA-low is designed to supply
theorists like Wyithe with hard data. It
will have the resolution and the wide angle
to map the distribution of hydrogen in the
early universe and trace how it changed
over time. He will combine these images
with those from the Hubble telescope to
try and detect whats at the centre of those
cheesy holes: stars or quasars.
COVER STORY 47
The quiet zones do not extend to high altitudes,
so planes communicating with air traffic control
could present a problem. To tackle that issue,
CSIRO researchers have begun to investigate ways
to measure the interference and remove it from the
telescope observations.
FINAL STRETCH
As difficult as building the SKA will be, coming
up with the money to bankroll it is trickier.
Negotiations with the 10 participating
governments for the first phase have been underway
since late 2015.
But theres a new sense of ease pervading
THE MOST
the SKA community as it looks to an April IMPORTANT
2017 sign-off on a binding treaty known as an
International Government Organisation (IGO).
ADVANCES
Once signed, ministers of each country will have MAY BE IN
a year to ratify it.
Once ratified, researchers are confident
AREAS WE
things should roll out smoothly. There is a strong CANNOT
precedent: CERN is governed by an IGO, with
22 member states. Its a well-tested model, says
EVEN
Pearce, who previously worked on computing IMAGINE.
challenges for the LHC as part of a multinational
collaboration.
With SKA-low expected to come online in
2021, and be fully operational in 2024 astronomers
are at last allowing themselves to get excited.
Until we can put a radio telescope on the moon,
it will be the greatest advance in low-frequency
radio astronomy, says Elisabeth Mills, a radio
astronomer at San Jos State University in
California. With such a great leap in technical
capabilities, the most important advances from this
telescope may be in areas we cannot even currently
predict or imagine.
ELIZABETH FINKEL is the editor-in-chief
of Cosmos magazine.
IMAGES
01 Dragonfly Media / CSIRO
02 SKA Organisation / Eye Candy Animation
03 SKA Organisation / Eye Candy Animation
04 MWA / Hurley-Walker et al. (2016)
05 Pawsey Supercomputing Centre
ILLUSTRATIONS
Anthony Calvert
48 FEATURE Issue 73

CAN CRISPR
SAVE
BEN DUPREE?

Scientists are rushing to figure out

how to use the gene-editing tool
to stop devastating diseases.
ANTONIO REGALADO reports.
COSMOS FEATURE 49

01
50 FEATURE
AT 24, BENJAMIN DUPREE has outlived many
people with Duchenne muscular dystrophy.
It was diagnosed 15 years ago, after he struggled
to get up the stairs without using the banister.
DOCTORS SAY THE DISEASE is terminal, but they
tell you less about living with it. About the girls
who dont see past your wheelchair, or how the
phone stops ringing. Its you and Mum counting the
birthdays and figuring out what you cant do this
year. Dupree says he got by in high school, but in
college depression gripped him. I didnt know
how I could keep going, he says.
The problem is that Duprees body doesnt
make dystrophin, a protein in muscle fibres that
acts like a shock absorber. Without it, your biceps,
calf muscles and diaphragm slowly turn to a fat-like
substance. You end up on a ventilator, and then your
heart stops.
Dystrophin is manufactured by a gene that
is among the largest in the human genome. It
consists of 79 components known as exons, each
an instruction for one ingredient of the protein.
Duprees problem, he says, is a pseudo exon possibilities, such as designer babies engineered
as though in the middle of this epic recipe someone
added an instruction that read: Stop the cooking.
There are thousands of ways a gene this size can go
wrong, and Duprees mutation a single letter of
DNA that reads G instead of T is unique, CRISPRs most compelling, if still distant, promise.
so far as scientists know.
Dupree, who majored in biochemistry and hopes
to become a genetic counsellor, has sometimes
imagined what life would be like if that small error
were not there.
A year ago, in December 2015, he learnt
how a technology called CRISPR might make
that possible. A scientist named Eric Olson had
requested some of Duprees blood a few months
earlier, and Dupree had agreed. Soon he was rolling
through the lab on his TiLite wheelchair so Olson,
a biologist at the University of Texas Southwestern
Medical Centre, could show him the results and
what some scientists now predict is the likeliest way
to cure Duchenne.
Using CRISPR, which makes it possible to snip
DNA open at a precisely chosen spot, a team at
Issue 73
the hospital had modified Duprees cells in a dish,
cutting through the extra exon. The editing process
required only a single step and had taken three days.
In an image taken with a microscope, Duprees
cells were clouded with green puffs of perfect
dystrophin.
I try to be realistic with my expectations,
he says. But that gave me a sense of, Wow, this
is here.
The potential to precisely and easily edit
any genome using CRISPR is changing the way
we think about nature. The CRISPR technique is
often likened to a search and replace function
for DNA. To laboratory scientists, it might better
be compared to the discovery of fire. Every day
they publish an average of eight scientific articles
describing new uses of the technology or
merely reflecting on its exponentially expanding
with desirable traits and mosquitoes with DNA
programmed to make them go extinct.
Among these possibilities, the chance to end
the pain and suffering of people like Dupree is
In early-stage lab experiments, academic scientists
are showing that gene editing offers new ways
to attack cancer, to knock out HIV and hepatitis
infections, even to reverse blindness and deafness.
Companies arent far behind. Three startups in the
Boston area have already raised a combined
US$1 billion and partnered with some of the
worlds biggest drug companies such as Bayer and
Novartis. None of us can anticipate where this
technology will end up, says Olson. Im operating
under the premise that it will take us farther than
we can imagine.
Scientists know the gene errors responsible for
about 5,000 inherited disorders and sequencing
labs discover some 300 more each year. Some
are one-in-a-billion syndromes. Duchenne is at
the other extreme; it is one of the most common
COSMOS
inherited diseases, affecting 1 in 4,000 boys. Girls
are affected rarely and to a lesser degree.
Gene editing could be a way to erase such
diseases with a one-time, permanent alteration of a
persons DNA. Its a step beyond conventional gene
therapy the 30-year-old idea of inserting entire
replacement genes into a persons cells, usually
using a virus. That approach is impractical for some
diseases. The gene for dystrophin, for instance, is
too large to fit inside a virus, as CRISPRs DNA-
snipping proteins can. Sometimes a faulty gene
thats doing harm needs to be silenced, so adding a
new one wont help. CRISPRs ability to delete and
swap out genetic letters makes a huge new range of
treatments possible.
02
Wheelchair bound Ben Dupree is cautiously hoping that the results being cooked up in the lab
will one day help him.
Some doctors are now calling CRISPR gene
therapy 2.0. To be sure, even gene therapy 1.0
has yet to fully arrive. After 30 years of research,
scientists are still learning how to use viruses to
move genetic instructions into a living persons
cells. Only two gene-replacement treatments for
inherited disease have ever been approved, both
in Europe.
But Olson says he is convinced CRISPR is the
most plausible way to stop Duchenne. Early this
year, he showed he could repair mutations in mice
with muscular dystrophy after sending viruses
stuffed with CRISPR ingredients into their veins.
A mouse is not a boy, but we think we know exactly
what needs to be done, Olson says. If it works, he
adds, this is a cure, not a treatment.
FEATURE 51
Olson says the very first human test of a CRISPR
therapy in a patient with Duchenne could begin
in two years in what would be a small, exploratory
clinical trial involving just a few boys. Working with
Jerry Mendell of Nationwide Childrens Hospital in
Ohio, a centre for gene-therapy studies, they expect
to give the treatment to monkeys during the next 12
months, a prelude to human tests. The researchers
will also be looking to see whether the CRISPR gene
therapy has unexpected effects. Accidental edits are
a particular concern.
Dupree, who is following events in the lab, says
hes not expecting much for himself. He knows
the studies could take years and since his mutation
is unique, hed need a therapy tailored just for
I AM MORE
EXCITED
ABOUT THE
IMPLICATIONS
SCIENTIFICALLY
THAN ANY
TREATMENT
FOR ME
him. I am more excited about the implications
scientifically than any treatment for me, he says.
But his mother, Debbie Dupree, says chat boards
and Facebook pages where parents gather are
already alight with questions. There is a lot of
talk. People want to know when it will be available,
she says.
Duchenne patients and their families wont
be the only ones anxiously asking that question.
Countless others facing deadly cancers or HIV,
as well as sickle-cell anemia and numerous other
genetic diseases, could soon be watching the fate of
those CRISPR-altered cells in Olsons lab. Are they
the beginning of a new era of medicine or merely
one more promising research result that will never
make it out of the lab? In particular, researchers
52 FEATURE Issue 73

will need to solve the next challenge: safely Just as bacteria spot and slice the viral genetic
and effectively editing DNA in cells throughout material, CRISPR can zero in on specific stretches
a human body, thus turning CRISPR from an of human DNA. The only ingredients needed are
invaluable lab tool into a medical cure. an editing enzyme one named Cas9 is used most
often and a short guide, or length of genetic
CRISPR EVOLVED INSIDE BACTERIA , over billion- letters, to tell it where to cut.
year time scales, as a form of immunity against
viruses. Bacteria collect and store short snippets of 03
DNA from viruses that have invaded them, spacing
the segments out through their own genome in
a pattern called clustered regularly interspaced
short palindromic repeats the term that gives
CRISPR its acronym. When reinfected with one
of these viruses, bacteria can create copies of these
genetic snippets, which zip up letter for letter with
the new viruss DNA signalling to a specialised
cutting enzyme that it should attach itself and close,
pincer-like, onto the viral genome and sever it.
By 2013, teams of scientists in Boston, Berkeley
and Seoul separately showed this naturally
occurring bacterial immune process could be
simplified and repurposed to cut DNA in human
cells. Though scientists had previously created
gene-editing proteins, these were difficult to design
and build compared with the solution bacteria had A virtuoso gene editor: CRISPR-Cas9 (3d model)
devised. Instead of version 2 or version 3, it was at work on a strand of DNA.
version 3 trillion, says Tom Barnes, chief scientist
of the CRISPR startup Intellia Therapeutics in It seems simple, but using it to create human
Cambridge, Massachusetts. It went from no labs treatments is anything but. And theres one
working on it to everyone working on it. hitch thats often overlooked: editing is a bit
Intellia is one of a trio of startups that have set of a misnomer. Scientists have mastered cutting
up shop around Boston and raised about into DNA, which gives them something akin to
US$300 million each to create CRISPR treatments; a delete key for genes, in addition to the add
the others are Editas Medicine and CRISPR function offered by traditional gene therapy. But
Therapeutics. Barnes says CRISPR vastly simplifies they cant as easily rewrite genes letter for letter,
gene editing because of the way the cutting works. an aspect of the technology still being developed.

A TIMELINE OF GENETIC MODIFICATION

197173 1978 1990 1999

Development of A team at Genentech Doctors in Pennsylvania Teenager Jesse

recombinant DNA allows adds the human attempt gene therapy Gelsinger is the first
researchers to cut and insulin gene to on a four-year-old girl. person to die in a gene-
paste genes in bacteria. bacteria, launching the A gene is added to her therapy experiment.
biotechnology industry. body using a virus. Commercial interest
slows dramatically.
COSMOS FEATURE 53

For now, that mostly limits them to situations
where deleting genes, or parts of them, is useful.
Duchenne is one of those. Another is sickle-cell
disease, a condition that in the United States affects
mostly African-Americans. Medical researchers
have given it relatively little attention in the past,
but theres an obvious DNA cut that might solve it,
meaning a potentially elegant cure.
Now Mitchell Weiss, a haematologist who treats
people with sickle-cell at St. Jude Childrens
Research Hospital in Memphis, says every
gene-editing company is calling him. The interest
right now is incredible, he says. Before, no one
was interested. No one cared. But they need a proof
of principle, and this is a good one.
In addition to finding the kind of genetic
problem to which CRISPR offers a solution,
companies need a way to get the CRISPR
instructions into the body. Most are counting on
viruses for that job, but Intellias strategy is to
package CRISPR into fatty blobs that liver cells
suck up, just as if they were cholesterol. In August
2016, at the annual CRISPR meeting in Cold Spring
Harbor, New York, researchers from the company
showed that a single dose could alter the genomes of
at least half the cells in a mouses liver. If Intellia can
successfully edit liver cells in a person, that may let
the company treat a slew of previously unassailable
metabolic conditions like a form of hereditary
amyloidosis, in which painful plaques build up in
the body.
Whats obvious is that it will be easier to get
CRISPR to work in some parts of the body than
others. The easiest task is probably deleting genes
in blood cells, since these cells can be removed from
a patient and then put back. Already, a Chinese drug
company has opened a study to create supercharged
immune cells to battle cancer, and scientists at the
University of Pennsylvania have announced similar
plans with the financial backing of the billionaire
internet entrepreneur Sean Parker.
If youre looking for gene editings Everest, its
probably rewriting DNA in the human brain say,
to treat Huntingtons disease. Editing muscle cells
lies somewhere in the middle of the difficulty scale.
Genetically, its a good candidate. Even with just
a delete key, Olson says, up to 80% of muscular
dystrophy cases could be treated. Initially, the
editing treatment hes working on will target a hot
spot in the dystrophin gene exon 51, in which
Editas has also signalled an interest. Deleting that
exon could treat about 13% of Duchenne cases.
The most significant unknown is whether it will
be possible to edit enough muscle cells and make
enough dystrophin in a human body. I think this
represents the most promising strategy, Olson
says. But the thing that has to go right is that it has
to be efficient. Muscles, including the heart, glutes,
and biceps, make up 40% of a persons body mass
billions and billions of cells. So far, in his mice,
Olson has succeeded in producing dystrophin in
5-25% of muscle fibres. Its half calculation and half
speculation, but he thinks that editing 15% of the
muscle cells in a boy will be enough to slow, if not
halt, muscular dystrophy.
When I last spoke to Olson, he was rushing to
a phone meeting to drum up commercial support
for his idea of starting a human test for a Duchenne
treatment. He has been talking with several
companies including Editas, probably the
best-known of Bostons trio of CRISPR startups.
It has Bill Gates and Google as investors.

2009 2013 2014 2015 2016

US biotechnology firm
Sangamo BioSciences
initiates an effort to cure
HIV with blood cells from
which it has, for the first
time, deleted a human
gene.
Scientists in the US and
South Korea demonstrate
CRISPR as a new,
much easier method
of changing human
genes. Editas Medicine
is founded in Boston
to develop CRISPR
treatments.
Adding CRISPR to muscle Chinese scientists edit First human tests of
cells in a lab dish, a the DNA of human CRISPR, as part of
team at Duke University embryos. Within cancer treatments, win
eliminates a mutation months, the worlds initial approval in the
that causes Duchenne scientists condemn US and China.
muscular dystrophy. as irresponsible any
attempt to make
gene-edited babies.
54 FEATURE
The company, founded by several of the inventors
of CRISPR technology, also declared an early
interest in Duchenne, licensing work done at Duke
University. But its chief operating officer, Sandra
Glucksmann, says it isnt providing updates on the
Duchenne program.
In fact, Editas has been lying low. CRISPR could
potentially treat so many different diseases that the
company has been reluctant to announce what its
do-or-die project will be, and proving any CRISPR
drug is effective could easily take a decade.
That puts Glucksmann in a tough position.
On weekends she answers emails from desperate
parents: Could CRISPR cure my child?. In theory
the answer may be yes, but about a quarter of the
IT MAY TAKE time Glucksmann has never even heard of the
A LOT LONGER illness before. The answer Editas has been giving
to the parents of boys with muscular dystrophy has
THAN WE been particularly disappointing: I am very sorry to
THINK, BUT hear about your son. Unfortunately, we are still in
the very earliest stages of research.
SOONER OR
LATER, GENE ONE THING THATS ALREADY APPARENT is
that many inherited genetic diseases will require
EDITING WILL tailoring a CRISPR treatment to very specific
CHANGE WHAT mutations those affecting small subsets of
patients or even individual people. Take Dupree,
MEDICINE who lives less than a mile from Olson in a Dallas
LOOKS LIKE. suburb. His mutation is unique, and its not near
exon 51, so he wouldnt be helped by the first
CRISPR treatment Olson is developing.
But theres no question in Olsons mind that
Duprees mutation is correctable too, given the
technique can potentially target any spot on the
genome. Dupree now sees at least a glimmer of
a chance that someone could make a CRISPR
treatment just for him. Its only given once, and
maybe its not that expensive, he says. It made
me think about how it could be done, because I see
things moving closer.
Paediatrician-in-chief Ronald Cohn at Torontos
Hospital for Sick Children, who is also a muscular
dystrophy doctor, is certain that with CRISPR
one-of-a-kind treatments are possible and even
likely. Last December, he published a paper
showing corrections of several rare mutations
again in cells in a lab dish, including some taken
from a child with dwarfism and others from another
boy with Duchenne. That boy, 14-year-old Gavriel
Rosenfeld, is the son of close friends of Cohns in
London. They run a charitable foundation that
Cohn advises.
Cohn is a newcomer to CRISPR. A few years
ago, he was studying hibernating squirrels. They
Issue 73
dont move for months, yet their muscles arent any
worse for it. That is the sort of we might just find
something approach favoured in basic-research
labs. Now, with gene editing, he sees a direct path
to curing someone he knows. Since correcting
Gavriels cells, Cohns lab has also created a mouse
model that shares his mutation. Like Duprees, the
mutation is one of a kind, and within a few weeks
Cohns lab will start treating the mice.
But then what? Cohn says he doesnt know.
How would you even test a drug designed for one
person? Who would pay for it? He says he visited
Health Canada, the countrys regulator, and was
told to come back if he cured the mice. This is
going to require a significant rethinking, he says.
The fact that you and I are having this conversation
is the beginning of the paradigm shift.
04
If CRISPR can reach enough of these wasted
muscle cells a one-off treatment could work.
Cohns approach of correcting individual
mutations has stirred hope among parents of boys
with Duchenne. This is a CURE!!! one wrote on
the web. His lab has used CRISPR to fix mutations
in cells taken from several boys he knows, and
a waiting list he keeps in a spreadsheet currently
lists 53 children with muscular dystrophy. The
parents of all of them want to know if their child
could be helped by gene editing.
If a gene-therapy study like the one Olson plans
is successful, and if CRISPR reaches enough muscle
cells, there might be a strong argument that a one-
off treatment would work. After all, to aim at a new
mutation all you would do is tweak the component
of CRISPR that zeroes in on a specific DNA
sequence. The price of manufacturing a single
COSMOS
dose also might not be an obstacle. Two existing
gene therapies approved in Europe cost
US$1 million and US$665,000. Even if it cost twice
that, a one-time gene fix with CRISPR would be
cheaper than a lifetime of costly drugs, wheelchairs
and dependency.
In holding out the hope of individual cures,
Cohn admits he has created some new problems.
He has invited parents to the lab, and little boys
have tottered among the lab stools. But he and
his students have decided to stop referring to
Gavriels cells or Jakes cells and use numerical
code names instead. They still know who is who, but
this gives them space to be impartial. I know in the
back of my head, but you want to stay unbiased,
says a graduate student in the lab, Tatianna Wong.
I cant work on this case just because I feel bad for
him. I have scientific questions to answer.
SOME VETERANS OF GENE THERAPY roll their
eyes when they hear what newcomers think
CRISPR will do. I visited the vector development
centre at St. Jude, touring a cramped L-shaped lab
with Byoung Ryu, an expert in making viruses, who
chops the air above his head and says, peoples
expectations are up here. Ryu warns that basic,
unresolved biological problems remain. One is
whether editing will work often enough in cells such
as those in the bone marrow, the type that need
to be changed to correct sickle-cell disease. If too
few cells end up edited, the treatments wont be
effective. Its a numbers game, he says.
Ryu was the first employee at a Boston-area
gene-therapy company, Bluebird Bio, whose stock
price staggered down the chart after its first few
patients didnt all respond the same way. Im not
negative on CRISPR, but there is a reality check,
Ryu says. Its not coming to people next year. It
works in the petri dish every single time, but my
perspective is that genome editing may happen in
the future but not in the near term.
CRISPRs future as a treatment depends heavily
on the skills of gene therapists like Ryu. Theyve
been making progress, yet so far only two gene
therapies the kind that add an entire gene
have reached the market to address an inherited
disorder. One, called Strimvelis, provides an
outright cure for a fatal immune deficiency and was
approved in 2016 in Europe. It took 15 years to
test it on 18 children, and similar trials had failed.
What I learned about gene therapy is that the
rabbit does not win the race, says Weiss, who leads
the St. Jude effort to apply gene editing to sickle-cell
disease. The tortoise wins the race.
FEATURE 55
Side effects could also be an obstacle. CRISPR
has the potential to cause accidental, unwanted
edits that could not be erased if they ended
up written into a persons genome. Currently
researchers rely on academic computer programs
to predict such effects. But a program cant predict
everything. Two early tests of gene therapy in the
2000s accidentally caused leukemia in several
children. No one had anticipated that consequence
of changing the genome. Although Olson says
he has not seen ill-effects in his mice, he allows
that CRISPR can cause inadvertent changes in
DNA that are important for life. Editing billions
of individual cells in a persons body, scientists
acknowledge, will be the surest way to discover how
CRISPR can go wrong.
It may take a lot longer than we think, but
sooner or later, gene editing will change what
medicine looks like. The biotechnology industry
began in the 1970s when someone grafted insulin
into E. coli, showing that a human protein could be
manufactured outside the body. Now theres a way
to change DNA where it lies, inside your genes.
When he looked through a microscope at his
own cells in Olsons lab, Dupree tried to take the
rational view: here was a solution for the next
generation of boys. His mother, however, allowed
herself to hope. I was ecstatic. I remember
thinking: this could be something that works,
Debbie says. Duchenne is a ticking clock. Parents
cant help making the calculations: this long for
animal studies, this many years for the first human
trial, that much more time until they know if it
really works. Luckily, Duprees disease is the
slow-moving kind. The doctors said hed be gone
by 19, but hes still here. Maybe hell still be here
in 10 years, says his mother, so they can try it
on him.
ANTONIO REGALADO is the senior editor for
biomedicine for MIT Technology Review.
CREDIT
MIT technolgy Review, Copyrighted 2016.
126775:1216SH
IMAGES
01 d1sk / Getty Images
02 Supplied by Benjamin Dupree
03 Hao Jiang / Getty Images
04 CMEABG-UCBL-CHAPON / Phanie /
Getty Images
56 PROFILE Issue 73

ROSS
GARNAUTS
BRIGHT IDEA

The septuagenarian is quietly

orchestrating an energy revolution
in the private sector. LINDA MARSA ONCE A GOVERMENT ADVISER, Ross Garnaut
now believes the private sector is the place to
reports. battle climate change.
COSMOS PROFILE 57

01
58 PROFILE
AT AN AGE when most people have traded in the
corporate world for the golf links, Ross Garnaut
is taking on what may be the biggest challenge
of his long and storied career.
LAST JULY , shortly before his 70th birthday,
Garnaut took the reins of one of the most ambitious
renewable energy initiatives in the world: a A$100
million (about US$75 million) solar energy fund,
part of a larger plan to sink $A1 billion into solar
infrastructure in Australia by the end of this decade.
The year before, the Perth-born economist became
chairman of clean tech outfit ZEN Energy, based
in Adelaide.
A decade ago, as an adviser to the Australian
government, Garnaut authored a ground-breaking
report on the economic impact of climate change
that catapulted him to national prominence.
Now determined to steer his country towards
a low-emissions future, the grandfather of seven
believes the private sector is the best place to
channel his energies.
The stakes could not be higher: Australia has
been whipsawed by extreme weather throughout
its history, but global warming is amplifying these
fluctuations. Witness the increased incidence and
intensity of natural disasters including floods, heat
waves, and bushfires of unimaginable ferocity.
Warming has also worsened coral bleaching on the
Great Barrier Reef and threatens unique terrestrial
species, from Western Australias banded hare
wallaby to Queenslands Lumholtzs tree kangaroo.
Yet despite the obvious dangers, Australia
remains heavily reliant on coal: domestic
consumption accounted for more than 61% of
electricity generation in 2015, according to a
2015 report from the Australian Department of
Energy and Science. Australia is the worlds largest
exporter of this dirtiest of all fossil fuels.
With such deeply entrenched vested interests,
Garnaut has no illusions about the difficulty of
turning the tide. But he will spend the rest of his
life trying.
No other developed country is as vulnerable to
the effects of climate change as Australia, he warns,
and the consequences if humanity fails to deal with
this issue are very severe.
Issue 73
TALL AND SLENDER with a corona of thinning
gray hair and wire-frame glasses that give him
the appearance of a bookish academic, the mild-
mannered Garnaut has become one of the southern
hemispheres most respected and sought-after
climate advocates, keynoting conferences where
he is often surrounded by a scrim of reporters.
Yet just a decade ago, environmental rock star
is something he never thought would be on
his resume.
Back then he was a trusted economic advisor
to a succession of prime ministers. As a respected
researcher and lecturer at the Australian National
University in Canberra, Garnaut was in convenient
proximity to the nations seat of power. He had
served on the board of nearly a dozen different
companies, organisations and academic journals,
and chaired four of those businesses, including
a gold mining outfit headquartered in Papua
New Guinea.
Hardly the profile of a sandal-wearing
tree hugger.
But in 2007, in the midst of a harsh, decade-
long drought that turned the grasslands of the
agricultural heartland into dust bowls and forced
water rationing in coastal cities, Kevin Rudd,
the head of the Australian Labor Party, and state
and territorial leaders asked Garnaut to put
together a report on the economic fallout from
a rapidly warming planet. When Rudd became
prime minister in December 2007, the report was
sanctioned by the Australian government.
Garnaut was aware of climate change, but
he thought of it as merely one of thousands of
pressing issues jostling for attention. In the course
of researching the report, he had a life-altering
epiphany: if we failed to mend our carbon-chugging
ways, we were headed for catastrophic disruption,
he remembers thinking. The failure of our
generation on climate change mitigation would lead
to consequences that would haunt humanity until
the end of time.
COSMOS
While Garnaut is a late-comer to the
complexities of climate change, he has always
had an aptitude for science. As a student at Perth
Modern School in the early 1960s, he was torn
between pursuing economics or physics, a career
path that would have allowed him to explore the
complexities of the universe. He participated in
a summer school for top science students at the
University of Sydney and loved it. But he was
also captivated by the developing nations of Asia;
he even took lessons in Malay after school.
Ultimately, economics won the day a decision
he has never regretted.
Garnauts lifelong fascination with the region
beyond Australias borders is part of what drives
his now relentless push for climate protection.
In a career spanning more than 40 years
including an early stint helping Papua New Guinea
transition to independence and four years as
ambassador to China in the 1980s, he has watched
the developing nations of the Pacific basin undergo
wrenching upheavals.
I spent my life working on questions of
development, he says, and that taught me that no
matter how bad things are, things can get worse.
He recalls his days as a PhD candidate working
in Indonesia in the late 1960s in the aftermath of
the overthrow of the Sukarno regime by General
Suharto, witnessing the country teeter on the
precipice of chaos: Often, it is good people who
give up. Thats when the bad people have a very
big win.
Such experiences have given Garnaut a special
sense of urgency in trying to thwart the worst
consequences of climate change. South and
Southeast Asia are particularly vulnerable, he says.
The biggest damage wont come from the effects
of drought or flood or extreme weather; the biggest
damage will come from the destabilising effects of
unmitigated climate change when the institutions
that keep a society together fall apart.
Australia, with its strategic relations with
Indonesia and other South Pacific island nations
likely to be profoundly impacted by climate change,
is not immune to these problems. As the largest
developed country in the Oceania region, Garnaut
says, Australia is a big part of the climate problem,
but it can also be a major part of the solution.
The irony is that while Australia continues
to burn its extensive fossil fuel reserves, it is also
blessed with what Garnaut calls an exceptionally
rich endowment of largely untapped renewable
energy sources. Across southern Australia, even
in my home town of Perth, youve got a wonderful
PROFILE 59
combination of wind and solar, Garnaut says.
Up the northeast coast, even in a place like
Brisbane, and just inside the Great Divide on the
Eastern Highlands, there is the combination of solar
and bio-energy fuel derived from sugarcane
waste and other organic materials.
Yet Australia has been a global laggard: while
almost a quarter of the worlds electricity now
comes from renewables, according to a 2017 report
from the International Renewable Energy Agency,
they account for just 14% of Australias electricity
mix. Germany, which is hardly known for abundant
sunshine, gets about a third of its electricity from
renewables, and its wind farms churn out so much
power that the state has to pay companies to switch
off their turbines to avoid overloading the grid.
Garnaut is convinced Australia could be no less
a renewables leader. In a speech this past October
at a renewable energy summit in Adelaide, he
said South Australia, in particular, could be a
superpower of the low carbon world economy.
OFTEN,
THE ROAD TO THIS TURNING POINT has IT IS GOOD
been decidedly bumpy. When Garnaut dove
into climate change policy a decade ago, there
PEOPLE WHO
was bipartisan support for action to reduce GIVE UP.
Australias carbon emissions. Both major parties
went to the 2007 election promising to introduce
THATS
an emissions trading scheme, which would allow WHEN THE
emitters to buy and sell carbon dioxide permits
to stay within an overall limit. In his report, called
BAD PEOPLE
the Garnaut Climate Change Review, published HAVE A VERY
in September 2008, he calculated the national
economic costs of failing to take action and laid
BIG WIN.
out market-based policies to cut emissions
at the lowest possible cost.
But by 2011, when Garnaut undertook an
update of the review, consensus had evaporated.
The Rudd governments attempt to enact emissions
trading had been thwarted by opposition in the
parliament, and his successor, Julia Gillard, was
forced to embrace an alternative scheme a carbon
tax. Garnauts update again provided a roadmap,
which included a proposed starting price for a
carbon tax and an analysis of how the scheme could
help reduce emissions.
Opposition was fierce. Fossil-fuel interests
launched a well-funded campaign warning of dire
economic consequences. If youve got a problem
that requires a difficult and costly response, he
says, choosing his words carefully, some people
would prefer not to think about it.
Garnaut, who was still on the ANU faculty,
found himself the target of death threats and
60 PROFILE Issue 73

astroturfing slick PR campaigns designed
to create an artificial grassroots opposition
movement. It was deeply contentious and I was
under huge pressure, he recalls. Thousands of
emails condemning the report were sent to every
journalist and politician to create the impression
of a movement in opposition.
Garnaut soldiered on, continuing to support
the carbon tax. At the end of 2011, parliament
passed the carbon tax package, which included
$13 billion in funding to encourage innovation
in clean energy technology. It also established the
Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA)
to support early stage research and development.
But the tax did not last long. After the Liberal
National coalition, led by carbon-price opponent
Tony Abbott, won government in 2013, it promptly
set about dismantling the scheme, and in 2014
it was abolished, much to Garnauts chagrin.
The tax seemed to be working: carbon emissions
had declined by about eight percent, he notes
(though some of the decline may have been due
to the economic downturn). We went for a couple
of years where emissions were falling, Garnaut
says, but now its all gone in reverse.
Frustrated, Garnaut sought other ways to
hasten the move away from fossil fuel dependency
and harness Australias vast reservoir of affordable
renewables. Id have dinners with chief executives
of major energy companies and talk about what
they could do to position themselves and make
happen the things that could lead the Australian
energy transition. Id get a very polite hearing
and have a nice dinner but there wasnt any
interest, he recalls.
He began to think about what he could do
himself. A friend, Raymond Spencer, who had spent
20 years in Chicago building up an information
technology business, had returned to his native
South Australia and bought into ZEN Technologies,
a company that has supplied solar and storage
systems since 2004. A proposed spin-off, ZEN
Energy, had ambitious plans to scale up renewables
generation from residential and small businesses
to a level that could provide energy to entire
communities and industries. I felt the company
could be part of the story of innovation in the
energy sector, Garnaut says of his decision to help
launch ZEN and become chairman. My motive is
to provide a vehicle that can smooth the Australian
transition to zero emissions.
The centerpiece of ZEN Energys effort are
massive battery banks that function a bit like
mini-power stations. About 200 lithium-ion

CLEAN ELECTRCITY IN AUSTRALIA Globally, renewables account for 23.5% of electricity generation.
At 14.6% Australia is lagging behind.

Proportion of electricity from renewables Annual electricity generation

14.6%
12.1% 4.4% Renewables
Western
Queensland
Australia

7.7%
New South
Wales
41.3% 85.4%
South Australia 12.1% Fossil fuels
Victoria
99.9%
Tasmainia
DATA: CLEAN ENERGY COUNCIL, AUSTRALIA 2015
COSMOS PROFILE 61

cells are stacked inside a 40-foot-long shipping
container and generate about one megawatt of
power enough to power up to 1,000 homes.
For comparison, the capacity of coal-fired power
stations in Australia ranges from 300 to 2,880
megawatts.
While these battery powerhouses may not
look quite as impressive as an array of sleek, shiny
solar panels, theyre key to overcoming a long-
standing challenge in making renewables such as
solar and wind reliable. Power has to be available
on demand at any time, and sunshine and wind are
not constant.
The ZEN Energy system combines community-
scale battery arrays that can store up solar surpluses
during the day and wind energy at night with
intelligent software to distribute the banked supply
during times of peak demand. A major advantage
of ZENs approach, Garnaut says, is that it can
integrate diverse sources of renewables, including
hydro and biomass energy, into customised systems
that improve energy security and cut energy costs,
allowing some users to meet their needs completely
off-grid. It works for homes, businesses and even
large scale industrial operations, such as farms or
sheep or cattle stations even mining companies
like the one he once worked for.
In July 2016, the South Australian government
awarded ZEN Energy contracts to install
battery storage demonstration systems at three
government-owned buildings in Adelaide, with
the intention to show that the buildings carbon
footprint could be reduced while saving money in
the long term. If successful, these types of projects
could lay the groundwork for the large-scale rollout
of sustainable energy systems.
The geniuses who oppose action on climate
change like to broadcast their discovery that the
wind doesnt blow all the time and the sun doesnt
shine all the time so you cant rely on it, Garnaut
dryly observes during an interview early one
Saturday morning from his home in Melbourne,
where he is on the faculty of the University of
Melbourne. But the right combination of diverse
renewables and storage in different places can
give you a reliable supply, and at a lower cost than
building a new coal-fired power station.
Batteries themselves are becoming more
efficient and affordable. In the past decade, as
battery storage technology has matured, prices
have tumbled by 70% for lithium-ion batteries.
Teslas second-generation Powerwall, unveiled
late in 2016, is a sleek closet-sized battery with
twice the capacity of the original model released

Types of renewable energy Progress towards 2020 energy target

33,000
GWh
2020 target
Hydro Wind Solar < 100 kW Large-scale solar >100 kW
5.9% 4.9% 2.4% 0.12%
of total electricity of total electricity of total electricity of total electricity
generated generated generated generated

15,200
GWh
as at 2015
Bioenergy Marine Geothermal Solar water heating
1.3% 2 1 958,000
of total electricity operational operational total installations
generated plants plant
62 PROFILE
less than 12 months before at about the same price.
The battery provides enough backup power to keep
the lights on and appliances humming in a typical
two bedroom home.
Similar to Tesla, CSIRO has deployed its own
version of a smart battery system. The federal
science research agency has teamed up with
Evergen, a Sydney-based startup, to sell and
manage home energy systems based on CSIRO-
developed technology. The systems analyse
weather forecasts along with snapshots of typical
household energy-use patterns to select the most
efficient and economical energy source. If you like
to turn on the air-conditioner at 8am on summer
mornings but the system knows it will be cloudy
THE US tomorrow, it can charge its battery overnight,
WITHDRAWING drawing power from the grid at the cheaper
off-peak rate.
FROM PARIS, This is what we call a managed battery system,
OR PLAYING says Glenn Platt, director of CSIROs Grids and
Energy Efficiency Systems Research Program
DEAD, and Evergens former chief executive. Evergen
SHOULDNT has an automatic system that learns when you use
electricity in your house, forecasts what the sun
STOP THE is going to do later in the day and then selects the
STRONG most efficient energy source to minimise home
energy costs.
MOMENTUM Whats more, several major projects are on
TOWARDS the drawing boards or that are scheduled to break
ground some time this year, that will help form the
MUCH LOWER scaffolding of a 21st century sustainable, reliable
EMISSIONS energy infrastructure.
ARENA has teamed up with one of Australias
largest electricity suppliers, AGL Energy, to create
the worlds largest battery storage virtual power
plant. The $20 million project harnesses the
output of 1,000 batteries in homes and businesses
in South Australia. The 1,000 systems, which are
connected through centralised monitoring and
management software, have a combined storage
capacity of 5 megawatts.
On the generation front, ARENA is funding a
dozen new large-scale solar projects in Queensland,
New South Wales and Western Australia that will
triple the energy output from large-scale solar in
Australia to about 727 megawatts. ARENA also has
launched demonstration projects that use hybrid
systemscombining solar, wind and diesel
to power remote islands and hamlets in the bush.
Garnaut also has a hand in large-scale solar,
as chairman of a fund established by the Impact
Investment Group that plans to acquire and
manage up to A$100 million in solar investment.
The fund has rights to three large-scale solar farms
Issue 73
under construction one in Karratha, Western
Australia, and two near Canberra. The largest of
the projects, the 11.2 megawatt Williamsdale Solar
Farm, is expected to generate enough electricity for
3,600 households.
Were expecting 2017 to be the year when
large-scale solar really takes off in Australia, says
Darren Gladman, director of smart energy for the
Clean Energy Council, an industry trade group
headquartered in Melbourne.
ENCOURAGED BY THE MOMENTUM thats
beginning to build, Garnaut believes the dream
of a low-carbon Australia is achievable within
his lifetime. The share of renewables is steadily
climbing there was a 20% increase in wind and
solar generation in 2015 and costs for solar are
expected to plummet at least 35% in the next couple
of years. Tasmania already has the capacity to
generate all its electricity from renewables (thanks
to hydropower), and more than 40% of electricity
in South Australia comes from sustainable sources.
In states such as Queensland and New South Wales,
though, the percentage of electricity generated by
renewables remains in the single digits.
Garnaut believes the world is well on the way
to a zero carbon future, even with Donald Trump,
who threatened to scrap the Paris climate change
agreement that went into force last year, in the
White House. The US withdrawing from Paris,
or playing dead, shouldnt stop the strong
momentum towards much lower emissions in
China, Europe and other countries in which it
is now well-established, he says though he
adds that the absence of US leadership might be
decisive in countries still making up their minds
about strong action.
But anything less could be cataclysmic, which
is why Garnaut feels so compelled to push for a
carbon-free future. I worry about the fate of our
species, he says. I think all of us are capable of
doing bad things, but Abraham Lincoln had it right:
this will only work when we appeal to the better
angels of our nature.
LINDA MARSA is a Los Angeles-based journalist and
contributing editor at Discover. She is the author
of Fevered: Why a Hotter Planet Will Harm Our
Health and How We Can Save Ourselves.
IMAGES
01 David Geraghty / Newspix
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COSMOS SPECTRUM 65

PEOPLE, CULTURE
& REVIEWS

SPECTRUM

ZEITGEIST

More than
memory
The true purpose of the worlds great prehistoric sites were to act
as vast repositories for cultural knowledge, argues Australian oral 01
history researcher Lynne Kelly. JIM ROUNTREE reports.
66 SPECTRUM
ZEITGEIST
More than memory
Most of us know a place where sculptured rocks,
majestic trees or perhaps the light give us a feeling the
place is special. We sense something mysterious and
wonderful beyond the normality of everyday life.
Now, imagine you are young and visiting such a place.
It is in the land of your people, a clan of hunter-gatherers.
Your parents tell you the story of the place. You can see the
marks left as mythical ancestors fought and played, acting
out momentous, tragic events.
You will never forget this story, and you will never
forget the place. They are locked together in your mind.
But the story doesnt stop there. The ancestors
roamed clan territory, leaving traces at every point.
Its easy to remember their bizarre, dramatic acts, which
become inseparable from the marks they left behind on
the landscape. Story and land merge in a mental map that
means you always know where you are and what lies in
every direction.
Now you are older and ready to be initiated. Back
at the special place you learn there is more to the story.
The ancestor turned into a millipede leaving those marks
one for each verse of a song you must now learn; many
generations old, it holds vital information you cant afford
to get wrong.
Time passes you are an elder. You know a thousand
songs, chants, stories and dances. They tell about the
animals their life cycles, how they feed and breed, how
to hunt them and the rules for dividing the kill. You know
which plants you can eat and how to prepare them. The
songs tell you the clues, on land and in the night sky, of
the passing seasons, so you know when to move as game
becomes abundant or plants fruit. The songs tell you the
laws of your people and the gods and spirits you must
appease. They contain your peoples history and relations
with neighbouring groups.
As an elder you have authority, with others, to create
new stories for events worthy of memory.
With so much to remember you have songs to list and
a ceremonial cycle mapped to each of the locations you
visit, so you can be certain that every story is regularly
rehearsed.
Spread through your mind and the minds of others
in your group is the total knowledge of your people. It is
a repository of incredible detail, containing information
of practical importance as well as the beliefs that define
your understanding of the universe and your place within
it. Without a written language, you must keep it ever
alive and pass it on completely and accurately. So of
course, you use the method by which it came to you,
in interwoven branches of story and song that emanate
Issue 73
from the landscape myths you learnt as a child. The whole
of your country serves as a gigantic mnemonic device for
this knowledge.
The trick of using stories tied to features in a location
as a memory aid is no secret. Modern speed-memory
competitors use the technique, linking each card in a deck
to locations within a familiar place pictured in the minds
eye a so-called memory palace, a mnemonic device first
used in ancient Greece and Rome.
Ethnologists have known for some time how
preliterate societies told stories linked to their
environments. We can see the method in oral cultures of
Native Americans, Africans, Polynesians and Australian
Aborigines.
Once all peoples must have used systems of this kind.
In the Western tradition, for example, the Iliad was
recited from memory.
02
Prehistoric animal outlines such as this one on
Perus Nasca Plain may have helped early
peopes pass down knowledge.
In her latest book, The Memory Code, Australian
science writer and La Trobe University oral history
researcher Lynne Kelly stresses the effectiveness of
the method to accurately remember and transmit vast
amounts of knowledge. This sets the ground for her
main thesis: that numerous prehistoric sites around the
world had a primary function as memory aids, serving as
knowledge centres for peoples transitioning from hunter-
gatherer to settled agricultural lifestyles. Her list includes
henges, cairns and standing stones in Western Europe,
Gbekli Tepe in Turkey, Neolithic temple complexes in
Malta, Pueblo great houses in the southwestern United
States and the giant, geometric animals cut into the Nasca
Plain in Peru.
COSMOS
The basic idea is simple. If you no longer cover all
of your territory on a regular basis but need to retain
knowledge via stories linked to specific locations, you
have to transfer the stories into objects closer to hand.
Take henges as an example: rough, dissimilar rocks with
pits, grooves and natural markings will do the actions
of the ancestors can be imagined into these. So much
the better if the rocks are from where the original story
was set, thereby retaining a spiritual connection to it.
Spacing the rocks so you encounter them separately and
in sequence aids their use.
Small objects, well suited to be mnemonic devices,
have also been found at all of these sites. These include
bones, patterned chalk plates, stone balls, pottery and
wooden plaques. Current oral cultures encode knowledge
into objects like this, so its fair to attribute the same use
to the ancient artefacts.
In addition, all of the sites have performance spaces
essential to this method of knowledge retention. The
songs and stories have to be ritually rehearse so they
are not forgotten, and so the young can learn them.
Larger henges were surrounded by segmented ditches.
Stonehenges ditch had 60 elongated pits two to five
metres wide. Kelly imagines one in use: dancers in masks,
flickering flame-light, chanting and drums reverberating
off the white chalk walls while an audience watches. Such
performances would have added to the memorability of
the stories enacted.
NUMEROUS PREHISTORIC SITES
AROUND THE WORLD HAD A PRIMARY
FUNCTION AS MEMORY AIDS
Common to almost all the sites are pathways serving
no apparent practical use. These might have served
processional chanting. By using such tracks, story
lines covering hundreds of kilometres might have been
condensed into hundreds of metres. The abstract animal
designs on the Nasca Plain are the prime example of this;
in every case the outline is a continuous path that could be
walked, chanting appropriately for each section.
Kelly acknowledges that spiritual belief must have
been entwined throughout the stories of these peoples,
but her focus is on the practical.
We will have to wait and see how her claims about
these sites work for which she recently received her
PhD stand up to ongoing academic scrutiny.
In the meantime she gives weight to her arguments
with more than 30 personal memory projects. When
she says that the Inca arrangements of strings and knots
known as quipus are excellent mnemonic devices, she
knows it to be so because she has used one for the history
of art. She has all the countries of the world told into
SPECTRUM 67
03
Lynne Kelly has used prehistoric mneomonic systems
in more than 30 of her personal memory projects.
objects around her house and garden, and the Earths
geological history in the houses, fences and letterboxes on
the block where she walks the dog. More than 400 local
bird species are told into a small block of wood with glued-
on buttons and shells, copying African lukasa still in use.
Kelly describes how effective and easy the method is
once youve got the hang of it, and how it inspires her to
fill gaps in her knowledge. She notes the strong emotional
attachment she has to her stories and songs, and how,
although she cannot explain it clearly, it constitutes for
her a completely different way of knowing.
So, even putting aside her thesis about ancient sites,
Kellys book still offers plenty to consider. For one, we
can see contemporary oral cultures as less different to our
own. Perspectives of peoples oral traditions are often
shot through with condescension. Kelly offers a new
viewpoint, showing us people who, faced with a problem,
developed an effective way of overcoming it.
Theres also food for thought when we consider that
this way of remembering possibly emerged not long after
the development of language itself. So it could well be that
our brains are wired in a way particularly suited to it. If so,
why not continue to use it? Imagine children on their first
day of school being taken by the teacher for a walk around
the grounds, telling stories.
In this age when information can be easily sourced
online, there is still a case for memory. There is value in
having information already in our minds, where we can
ponder it, turn it over and find unexpected, interesting
new connections. Perhaps preliterate societies might offer
us valuable lessons.
JIM ROUNTREE is editor of Cosmos Lessons.
IMAGES
01 Eurasia Press / Getty Images
02 Martin Bernetti / AFP / Getty Images
03 Michelle Ransom-Hughes / ABC Radio
68 SPECTRUM Issue 73

SNAPSHOT

An Icelandic
crystal cave

THIS FROZEN PALACE is a cave running beneath

Icelands Vatnajkull, or Vatna Glacier. At 3,100
cubic kilometres, Vatnajkull is the largest
European ice cap by volume and averages 400
metres thick.
This means its ice is so densely packed that any
air bubbles are squeezed out, giving the ice a crystal
clarity and its blue hue. Air bubbles normally scatter
sunlight, giving ice a white sheen; without them,
water molecules absorb red, orange, yellow and
green light and reflect only blue and violet.
The ground beneath Vatnajkull runs red hot,
with volcanic vents bubbling hot springs to the
surface. Running water from ice melting beneath
the glacier or meltwater from the surface sculpts the
caves scalloped ceiling the same phenomenon is
also seen in limestone caves carved out by streams.

IMAGE
Stanson / Getty Images
COSMOS SPECTRUM 69
70 SPECTRUM
REVIEWS
Hiking through the neon forest
Neon the combination of an inert gas and an electrical current has expressed our
basest desires and highest aspirations for more than a century. JACK CONDIE discovers
that even in todays LED-soaked world, neon still shines bright.
THE NEON FOREST is lighting up my
brain, Iggy Pop.
Neon is trendy again, Kim Koga,
executive director of the Museum of Neon
Art (MONA) in Los Angeles, recently
declared. Thirty-five years after two LA
artists established MONA to preserve and
celebrate their citys iconic, and rapidly
disappearing, illuminated neon signs, Koga
flicked on the lights at the museums first
permanent home in early 2016.
But for neons many fans, was this
marriage of science and art ever out of style?
Even as it disappears from its traditional
commercial applications, neon continues to
evoke a certain aesthetic: shady motels on
desert highways, emotionally cold beacons
in the urban jungle, or gaudy bling calling
the punters to prayer on nightlife strips
from Las Vegas to Kings Cross.
The hunger to put neon in the context
of 20th century cultural history remains
strong, judging by the popularity of
MONAs Neon Cruise a night-time bus
tour through downtown and Hollywood
that has been running since 1985.
Its a stubborn, utilitarian and seedy
nostalgia which today transforms into
art that simultaneously transgresses and
reassures.
Its not just LA where neons uniquely
contradictory character is celebrated. Las
Vegas boasts its own Neon Museum, with
a carefully curated neon boneyard of old
illuminated signs. Across the Atlantic, the
London district of Soho once contained
more garishly lit strip-club doorways
than anywhere else in Britain. These days
its all a bit more gentrified, and neons
role has moved rather more upmarket.
Local art gallery Lights of Soho teamed
up with long-standing signage business
Gods Own Junkyard to produce a series
of illuminations for the Christmas period.
Actor Joanna Lumley did the switch-
flicking honours.
Neon, an invention of 19th century
chemistry, may have acquired a certain
respectability with age, but one place where
neon retains its dangerous edge is in fiction,
especially 20th century American fiction,
from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Joan Didion.
Its evocative attraction to novelists never
wanes; witness John Kennedy Tooles The
Neon Bible (1954), John D. MacDonalds
The Neon Jungle (1984), and James Lee
Burkes The Neon Rain (2005).
It has always provided a rich seam of
atmospherics to be mined, as Christoph
Ribbat notes in his 2013 book Flickering
Light: A History Of Neon. In the world of
neon, he writes, writers found what they
were looking for: the would-be-naked,
seemingly authentic existence of drunks,
Issue 73
hookers, gamblers and small-time crooks.
Neon in itself is an unremarkable inert
gas making up just 0.00046% of the air
we breathe. But if you send an electric
discharge through its ionised form,
something remarkable happens: it glows
red-orange. Technically, this quality is no
different from the other noble gases; argon,
helium, krypton, and others can be made to
glow if you zap them. It was neon, however,
that became emblematic of the birth of the
technological era. Its very name is drawn
from neos, the Greek word for new.
The science of neon is understood and
stable. The culture of neon, on the other
hand, is anything but.
It definitely goes through cycles,
says MONAs Koga, noting that neons
popularity among visual artists last peaked
in the 1980s. It was a time when Melrose
[Avenue] was happening and there were a
lot of new neon signs being created there,
she told the LA Times in June 2016. That
triggered a second comeback. The industry
introduced some new colours.
The first neon light was developed by
George Claude, a Parisian engineer and
chemist, in 1910. It soon became a cheap
and attractive option for advertisers and
architects. Creating the most dazzling
spectacle in neon tubing became something
of a competitive sport.
NEON ALWAYS SYMBOLISED
THE CHANCE FOR POWER
AND MONEY TO THOSE
WHO HAD NEITHER
As the world continued on, through
two global conflicts and economic crises,
the American city shining beacon of
consumerism was abandoned by wealthy
middle classes who flocked to suburban
hubs, leaving the neon-lit urban centres to
the underclass.
It is within this world that modern
Vegas was born. Workers building the
Hoover Dam needed somewhere to
unwind. Nevada had recently legalised
gambling, and was more than happy to
welcome the cashed-up visitors. In Vegas
the neon light found its zenith, a vision
shouting Look at me! Look at me!.
COSMOS SPECTRUM 71

NOTED READING

Los Angeles relationship with neon,

Koga suggests, was born of similar purpose. NON-FICTION
In a city built on spectacle and image, neon Aliens and the Unexplained
communicated the message the clearest and by ROSE INSERRA
the loudest.
The lights, thus, developed two Rockpool Publishing (2016)
meanings in the late 20th century. The first RRP $24.99
was an unironic proclamation of attention-
seeking and hedonism, the glamour
ROSE INSERRA isnt a scientist, so this book doesnt offer
and glitz that never quite left American
any new insights in biology or physics that might shed new
capitalism. The second was as a mechanism
light on aliens and UFOs. Shes in metaphysics, and here
by which artists could examine the first.
she collects ideas several from the radical fringe and
In his 1947 collection of short stories,
many you know to join the dots in explaining some of our
The Neon Wilderness, Nelson Algren
unexplained history. Like many mythologies theres some
juxtaposes the survival of the underclass in
basis in fact (or at least material evidence we cant account
Chicago with the vision of the city conjured
for any other way). But in the end, it should be taken as just
by neon signage. It creates a world in which
a bit of fun and a reminder that, when the truth might be
neon lights illuminate the lives of poor and
little more than confirmation bias, science will save us.
marginalised communities.
Elsewhere, in the visual arts, Tracy
Emins neon works a medium she
adopted in the early 1990s emblazon NON-FICTION
personal feelings in humming brightness, The Mathematics of Secrets
breaking down the barrier between public by JOSHUA HOLDEN
and private. Neon has always illuminated
societys shadows. Princeton University Press (2017)
Hanging in the Smithsonian American RRP US$29.95
Art Museum, Nam June Paiks 1995
installation Electronic Superhighway:
THIS IS A FASCINATING TOUR of the mathematics behind
Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii constructs
cryptography, showing how its principles underpin the
the boundaries of modern America entirely
ways that different codes and ciphers operate. Holden starts
out of neon tubing. Each state is filled in
with simple substitution ciphers and goes on to explore
with television sets playing video imagery,
polyalphabetic substitution ciphers and transposition
drawn from friends, collaborators and
ciphers. While its all about maths, the book is accessible
classic movies. The work is an expression
basic high school algebra is all thats needed to understand
of modern culture and identity, carried in
and enjoy it.
visual form across state boundaries, yet all
built on the foundations of neon. Perhaps
it is this reading of neon that has led to
NON-FICTION
suggestions that the gas is trendy again.
Deep Life
Economic inequality has not gone away,
by TULLIS C. ONSTOTT
and neon always symbolised the chance for
power and money to those who had neither.
Princeton University Press (2016)
Neons glowing light may disappear
RRP US$35.00
from the real world of advertising in favour
of jumbotrons and LED, flickering on only
within museums and galleries, but as long LIFE CAN THRIVE in the most inhospitable places. And
as it continues to both symbolise social finding out just how inhospitable has been the lifes work
problems and illuminate them by its light, of Tullis Onstott, professor of geosciences at Princeton
neon will continue to shine. University. While rooted in the earth, the study may also
help in the quest to find life in the solar system and beyond.
This amazing journey takes us from deep in a South African
IMAGE gold mine, to the ancient seabed below a desert floor to
Lulu Blewitt / EyeEm / Getty Images travel deep beneath the frozen Arctic tundra.
72 SPECTRUM Issue 73

REVIEWS

NON-FICTION
A World of Information
by JAMES BROWN and
RICHARD PLATT

Walker Studio (2016)

RRP $29.99

IT MIGHT NOT contain

absolutely everything you
need to know but what this
elegantly produced book
lacks in comprehensiveness,
it make up for with style and
diversity.
From the description of
the various shapes of artists
brushes and their uses to the
organs of the body and a table
of Roman numerals there are
30 subjects to peruse in this
volume of facts and figures.
Its design led and visually
stunning, so even topics that
may not be of special interest
come alive on the page.
Wide-ranging British
author Richard Platt wrote
the words in collaboration
with illustrator James Brown.
Platts writing is clear and
to the point while Browns
lineage as a skilled print and
linocut maker shines through
in the illustration and design.
While theres something
for all the family here, it is the
perfect volume to satisfy the
curious younger mind.

BILL CONDIE
COSMOS
THEORETICAL PHYSICISTS are an idealistic
lot. Theirs is the noble struggle to understand
the nature of the universe: to know, as Stephen
Hawking put it, the mind of God. Yet physicists
are human too subject to the whims of fashion,
dogmas of unquestioning faith and flights of
unadulterated fantasy.
These human flaws have led to the present
impasse in physics, warns Sir Roger Penrose. His
penetrating new book is the long anticipated follow-
up to three eponymous lectures he gave at Princeton
in 2003. In those talks, he called out the problems,
NON-FICTION both sociological and technical, in the way physics
Fashion, Faith and is done today. In particular, he calls string theory a
Fantasy in the New fashion, quantum mechanics faith, and cosmic
Physics of the Universe inflation a fantasy.
by ROGER PENROSE Penrose is well placed to make such sweeping
judgements. He has been a giant of physics and
Princeton University mathematics for five decades, making many deep,
Press (2016) original insights into topics ranging from black hole
RRP $29.95 physics and the origin of the universe to art and
fundamental geometry. For example, his exploration
of impossible objects, such as the Penrose Stairs,
inspired the artist M.C. Escher to create some of his
most famous woodcuts, including Ascending and
Descending and Waterfall. In the estimation of the
Perimeter Institutes Lee Smolin, there is no one
who has contributed more to our understanding of
the general theory of relativity, save Einstein himself,
than Roger Penrose.
Penrose is renowned as a fiercely independent
thinker, even a maverick, and its in this role as
iconoclastic outsider that he tackles the big problems
facing physics today. Fashion has long played a
role in science. To remind us of how spurious ideas
can achieve a status of dogma, he describes several
once-fashionable theories of history. For example,
Ptolemys theory of epicycles (the idea that the orbits
of the planets could be described by circles upon
circles) was kept alive through 14 centuries of mental
gymnastics by proponents who placed Earth at the
centre of the universe.
Todays modern equivalent, perhaps, is string
theory, the idea that all of physics is based on
fundamental vibrating strings, far tinier than any
quark or electron. The idea, so tantalising in its
simplicity and scope, has dominated theoretical
physics for two decades despite making no testable
predictions. Joseph Polchinski, a leading string
theorist has said there are no alternatives all good
ideas are part of string theory.
For Penrose, on the other hand, string theorys
stranglehold on developments in fundamental
physics has been stultifying. He exposes a series
SPECTRUM 73
of technical holes in the theory, questioning, in the
tone of a bemused schoolmaster, why they have not
been seriously addressed.
His next target is an even larger one: quantum
mechanics, the best-tested theory in physics, and its
most perplexing. For Penrose, quantum mechanics
is faith because its mathematics uses assumptions
that could never be logically justified and nobody
really understands the theory anyway. For example,
we dont know why the laws of physics seem to have
two regimes, one for the very small and another for
the very large. For Penrose, this disconnect is a sign
that quantum physics is incomplete, and we must
search for something deeper.
Fantasy is how Penrose refers to the wild notions
describing the universe at the largest scales. Here we
run through some of the strangest ideas in physics
(concerning, for example, what is inside a black hole,
or what happened before the Big Bang). Penroses
true quarry is the theory of inflation, a description of
the universes faster-than-light expansion in the first
moments after the Big Bang, which he argues has as
many serious flaws as its competitors.
When Penrose describes a theory as fantastical
he is not necessarily being disparaging. The universe
is full of apparently fantastic notions that are
demonstrably valid the Big Bang origin of the
universe, for example, or the existence of black holes.
Wild ideas can be appropriate; but only when they
describe our observations better than rival ones.
In the final chapter, Penrose lays out two wild
theories of his own. The first, conformal cyclical
cosmology, is his self-described crazy theory
that the universe has no beginning or end; rather
it iterates through infinite cycles. The heat death
of one universe becomes the Big Bang of the next.
Meanwhile, twistor theory is Penroses stab at
linking general relativity and quantum mechanics.
The twist comes from the idea that quantum spin is
tied up in spacetime. Though Penrose first suggested
the theory in the 1960s, it has seen a surge in interest
in recent years.
For technically minded readers keen to achieve
a deep appreciation of the problems facing physics,
this is an enlightening book. Just dont expect the
spoon-feeding of popular science; there are more
equations than metaphors. (For a more digestible
account, Lee Smolins 2006 book The Trouble with
Physics covers much of the same ground.)
This book is a reminder that the universe is a
weird and wonderful place, and a mind-bending tour
of one of physics most original and radical minds.
CATHAL OCONNELL
74 SPECTRUM
REVIEWS
JOHN PICKRELL ISNT VERY HAPPY with the latest
iteration of the Jurassic Park movie franchise, and
the Sydney-based science writer makes no attempt
to hide it in his new book Weird Dinosaurs, which
explores hundreds of new dino-discoveries made
in the past couple of decades. In Pickrells previous
book, Flying Dinosaurs (Cosmos, Issue 58, p89), he
examined our new awareness that a vast array of the
dinosaurs assumed to be scaly were actually fluffy,
like modern-day Bantam chooks.
In his introduction to Weird Dinosaurs, Pickrell
describes visiting Londons Natural History
NON-FICTION Museum and being chuffed to see its famous life-size
Weird Dinosaurs animatronic Velociraptor had sprouted feathers, in
by JOHN PICKRELL line with the latest science. Jurassic World, released
in 2015, didnt show the same responsiveness.
NewSouth Publishing Jurassic World didnt take on board any of the
(2016) really exciting new science and I think that was a
RRP $29.99 missed opportunity, Pickrell tells me. Not to show
dinosaurs as we now know them to have appeared is
spreading misinformation.
Feathers aside, Weird Dinosaurs tells us there
has been a boom in dinosaur finds in the past two
decades, including 150 new species uncovered
in China alone. About half of all known dinosaur
genera have been found in the past 10 years, and
three-quarters since 1990. The explanation is pretty
simple. We have started to look for dinosaurs in
earnest in parts of the world where we havent spent
much time looking for them before, and there are
also more people looking, Pickrell explains.
Broadly, this dinosaur discovery boom is what
Weird Dinosaurs is about new animals being added
to our prehistoric awareness. More specifically,
though, the book is a charming collection of short
stories, depicting the most unique and surprising
dinosaurs, and the weird and wonderful people who
study them the true Indiana Jones characters of the
palaeontology world.
One story starts with a Transylvania aristocrat,
Franz Baron Nopcsa, who among his many
adventures roamed Austria-Hungary on motorbike,
became a World War I spy, and put in a bid to become
king of Albania before shooting himself and his long-
time boyfriend in 1933, just after the rise of Hitler.
After discovering fossils on his lavish family
estate estate in the 1890s, Nopcsa immersed himself
in study until he was qualified enough to analyse
them himself. He is credited with describing a suite
of miniature dinosaur species found around his
hometown of Haeg. These include a cow-sized
version of a sauropod that in other parts of the world
reached 70 tonnes in weight.
Nopcsa hypothesised that dinosaurs confined
Issue 73
to an island would have experienced different
evolutionary pressures than their mainland
counterparts, and that perhaps the land on which
the bones were found had once been isolated by
water. Food and space are often scarce in island
environments, which means their inhabitants can be
naturally selected for dwarfism, because the smaller
animal needs less food to survive.
In 2010, researchers analysed the internal detail
of the bones to establish beyond doubt that Nopcsa
had been right these were dwarf versions of some
of the larger dinosaurs found in other parts of the
world, and Transylvania was indeed an island in the
late Cretaceous period.
Weird Dinosaurs is full of these fascinating tales,
delivered with descriptive aplomb. Pickrell is the
editor of Australian Geographic (and a former deputy
editor of Cosmos), and his background in science
journalism allows him to describe prehistoric scenes
in vivid colour and minute detail.
In the chapter Monster from the Cretaceous
Lagoon, for example, he brings us to a riverbank in
northern Africa 95 million years ago the buzzing
insect soundscape, the beat of the midday sun, and an
enormous predator lurking beneath the water.
A fizz of bubbles hints at the presence of giant,
car-sized coelacanths and lungfish lazily moving
through the waters, he writes. None of these fish
has noticed what is stealthily gliding towards them
below the water with a flick of its great tail. Made
obvious above the water by a great red sail, which
slices through the surface, this killer moves almost
silently and invisibly through the murky waters.
From Alaska to Australia, Pickrell describes
in vibrant detail the thrill of discovering fossils
and ponders the question, what marvels are lying
undiscovered in dark cabinets around the world?
And if weve only just discovered three-quarters of
the dinosaurs known to science, what might be next?
Pickrell says there could be whole new dinosaur
fauna waiting to be discovered.
This book does its part to pique the interest of
this nascent army of dinosaur-hunters. Pickrell says
it was his pleasure to take the stories of experts and
translate them for a broad general audience.
I spent a lot of time meeting palaeontologists
in countries all over the world, getting them to tell
me about dinosaurs and their own exciting tales of
discovery, he says. I found that a great privilege and
huge fun. The enthusiastic dinosaur hunter is alive
and well with this writer. He isnt the first, and this
book suggests he will not be the last.
AMY MIDDLETON
COSMOS
Playing their parts
EXHIBIT
Robots
SCIENCE MUSEUM, LONDON
8 February 3 September, 2017
IN OUR VISION of the future, the world
seems to be crawling with robots. From
the terrifying cyborg played by Arnold
Schwarzenegger in Terminator (1984)
to the dutiful android portrayed by
Michael Fassbinder in Prometheus (2012),
humanoid robots have starred in sci-fi
cinema for decades.
In fact, mechanical men (and women)
have been alive in our imaginations for half
a millennium. This blockbuster exhibition
at Londons Science Museum explores the
fascinating history.
Featuring more than 100 robots, the
exhibition gives visitors a chance between
February and September to witness the
evolution of robotics, moulded over the
years by religious beliefs, the industrial
revolution and, of course, pop culture.
The exhibition features historic robot
relics dating back to the 16th century, such
as a clockwork monk built for King Philip
II of Spain; it still works, though is rarely
wound up for the sake of preservation.
Also showcased is Cygan (pictured
above) an eight-foot tall aluminium
humanoid created in 1957 that originally
had the ability, thanks to 13 electric
motors and about 300,000 parts, to
walk, turn its head and lift its arms.
It was controlled by radio signals and
rudimentary voice commands.
These rarities are strictly look
but dont touch. There are, however,
12 working models in the exhibition that
visitors can interact with.
With modern-day research labs and
3D-printed working models exhibited,
visitors can see how far the robotics
industry has come, and that as the pace
of robotic engineering accelerates, the
talking, thinking feeling robots of science-
fiction are fast becoming a reality.
ANTHEA BATSAKIS
SPECTRUM 75
GADGET
DRONE
AirSelfie
AIRSELFIE HOLDINGS, LONDON
IT CAN OFTEN BE HARD to get the
perfect selfie, especially when you have
lots of friends. A new microscopic drone
called AirSelfie, however, puts a flying
camera in your pocket, ready to enable
you to take the perfect shot no matter
where you are.
Offered as a Kickstarter project,
the AirSelfie is a quadcopter drone
that conveniently fits inside a charging
dock that attaches to your smartphone.
There it charges, lying in wait for its
moment to fly up and capture you and
your friends.
It features a case that protects
fingers from its propellers, allowing it
to be plucked from the air, a 5 megapixel
camera, gyroscopes and Wi-Fi. Three
control modes allow the user to simply
make it move away for a bigger image or
fully control its motion.
A half-hour charge gives 3 minutes
of flight time and AirSelfie is packaged
with a 1-hour charge pack to avoid
draining your phone.
Images or video, once taken, can be
viewed and edited on the phone, ready
for upload.
JAKE PORT
bit.ly/cos73gadget
76 SPECTRUM
PAUL DAVIES is a theoretical physicist, cosmologist,
astrobiologist and best-selling author.
Abacus
The gleam
in the i
Imaginary numbers make the
universe real
THE OLD APHORISM my enemys
enemy is my friend has a mathematical
equivalent: multiplying two negatives
makes a positive. In monetary terms,
where a negative number is definitely
the enemy, it is the same as saying that
reducing a debt is equivalent to making
a gain.
The simplest case of two negatives
making a positive is:
-1 x -1 = 1
Multiplying a number by itself is
known as squaring the number, so the
square of -1 is 1, the square of -2 is 4,
and the square of -3 is 9, etc. However,
the square of 1 is also 1, the square of 2 is 4
and so on. The square is the same whether
the number is negative or positive.
Going backwards, a procedure
called taking the square root reverses
the result. The square root of 9 is 3, but
it is also -3; there are two solutions to any
square root calculation.
All this is well and good, and drummed
into most of us in school, but what happens
if you try to take the square root of a
negative number, such as -9? No ordinary
number, when multiplied by itself, yields
-9, so how can you do the reverse?
This question stymied mathematicians
for years. What they finally figured out was
the need for a new type of number entirely.
By the 18th century, they extended the
number system to include the square root
of negative numbers.
Issue 73
This is what they did:
i x i = -1
which, rearranged, reads:
i = -1
The new species of number here is
symbolised by i because in the early days it
was considered an imaginary number
rather than a real number.
Many mathematicians were suspicious
and even derisory about it. The name
has stuck, even though today we accept
imaginary numbers are just as real as real
numbers. You can get more imaginary
numbers by multiplying i by real numbers
2i, 3i, 4i and so on and there is no
problem combining real and imaginary
numbers. For example, 5 + 3i is a perfectly
good number. Such combinations are called
complex numbers, though the rules for
manipulating them are very simple.
What are imaginary numbers good for?
It turns out that by embracing i, the scope
and power of mathematical manipulations
is enormously broadened, opening the way
to a plethora of new shortcuts and tricks.
Exponential growth and decay (which
I explained in Cosmos issue 71, p76) when
raised to the power of i superimposes a
wave-like oscillation on to the pattern of
growth or decay. The world is replete with
quantities that oscillate and either grow
or decay at the same time. For an example
of how this works, think of a swinging
pendulum that gradually slows it
oscillates as it decays. Using i also greatly
simplifies the mathematical description of
systems that use complicated oscillating
waveforms, such as acoustic and electronic
signals.
But imaginary numbers are not
just a computational convenience.
Mother Nature got there long before
mathematicians. We have known since
Einsteins theory of relativity that
space and time are not independent but
fundamentally tied together by the speed of
light into a unified spacetime.
Though related, space and time are not
the same: it is i that allows us to combine
COSMOS
ILLUSTRATIONS: JEFFREY PHILLIPS
them. To measure the spacetime interval
between two cosmic events, for instance,
you have to express the time interval in the
same units as spatial distance achieved
by multiplying by i. One can therefore
say that space is imaginary time (in the
technical sense of imaginary numbers),
a term popularised by Stephen Hawking
in A Brief History of Time. Hawking
discusses a theory of the Big Bang in which
the universe started out with four space
dimensions, so time was imaginary (in the
-1 sense) at the outset.
Nature also uses complex numbers in
quantum mechanics. If you were the Great
Cosmic Designer and tried to come up
with laws for atomic processes using only
real numbers, the resulting properties of
atoms would be very different from what
we observe.
Theres another reason to appreciate
the number i: its elegance. It won a public
SPECTRUM 77
beauty contest earlier this year when the
BBC asked people to vote for the most
elegant mathematical relationship of all
time. The winner was declared to be
ei +1=0
where e stands for exponential. This
formula was discovered in 1748 by the
brilliant Leonhard Euler, known as the
Mozart of mathematics. By invoking i,
Euler was able to combine e with three
of the most basic elements of the entire
number system: 0, 1 and . Eulers formula
is a profound relationship that seems
to be speaking to us from some sort of
mathematical nirvana.
All of which raises the question of
how much mathematical beauty still
remains hidden from us because of
limitations on our existing number system.
Is there a future Euler out there who (to
borrow another aphorism) will help us to
behold it?
78 SPECTRUM Issue 73

WHY IS IT SO?

WHY
IS THE SEA
SALTY?
The water on the Earths surface was once fresh.
JAKE PORT explains how that changed.
COSMOS
IT IS ESTIMATED there is enough salt in the worlds
oceans to cover all the planets land surfaces with
a layer about 40 stories thick. But seawater wasnt
always so salty; when the Earths oceans first formed
about 3.8 billion years ago, as the surface of the planet
cooled enough to allow water vapour to liquify, the
oceans were mostly fresh water. So where did all the
salt come from?
It came from rock, laden with elemental salts
including sodium, chlorine and potassium, that
was spewed forth as magmatic material by massive
volcanos from the depths of the planet.
Enter erosion, the process liberating these salts
from their rocky prison, thanks to an atmosphere
dominated by gases including nitrogen and,
importantly, carbon dioxide.
When mixed with water (H2O), carbon dioxide
(CO2) can form carbonic acid (H2CO3), a weak but
corrosive acid. This carbonic acid rained down
on salt-rich rock, slowly breaking through and
releasing the trapped salt into rainwater. The
runoff slowly carried the salt to nearby lakes and
rivers, which in turn carried it to the seas. Although
the amount deposited by any one outlet was small,
the contribution of millions of outlets over millions
of years gradually riased the salinity of the oceans.
The process continues.
Along the way from rock to sea, a fair proportion
of the salt released from rock is used by living things.
Salt is crucial to both plant and animal life, regulating
the amount of fluid in cells and neuron function.
When an organism dies and decomposes, the salt
is freed to continue its seaward journey.
Acid rain isnt the only way the seas are fed with
salt. Ongoing volcanism still has an important role
to play. Hydrothermal vents allow seawater that has
seeped though the rock of the oceanic crust to return
to the surface. The water is superheated from magma
below, and as it travels up it dissolves minerals locked
in the crust, erupting as mineral-rich steam.
SPECTRUM 79
A similar process involves the interaction of
submarine volcanoes with surrounding seawater.
Submarine volcanoes are comparable to their
above-ground relatives except that their lava cools
much more rapidly, allowing for speedy growth.
Magma erupting through submarine fissures boils
the surrounding water, which then dissolves salts
in the cooling rock to escape in a manner similar to
hydrothermal vents. Many of the worlds islands were
formed by this process, releasing thousands of tons
of salt in the process.
While seawater contains, on average, about
35 grams of salt per litre, the oceans and seas are not
uniformly salty; generally the closer you get to the
poles the less saline the water becomes, as fresh water
released from the ice of the frozen poles dilutes the
concentration of the salt.
There is still one question left: if most of the salt
in the sea comes via rivers and streams, why are they
not also salty? The simple explanation is that they do
contain salt, but the concentration is much lower, and
the salt flows rather than accumulates. It is estimated
that each year four billion tons of dissolved salts are
carried to the sea by rivers.
So is the ocean getting saltier? The answer right
now is probably not. The input of salts is balanced by
salts being buried underground by the movement
of tectonic plates, the flow of freshwater and a host
of other processes.
JAKE PORT , a Melbourne-based writer,
contributes to the explainer series on
cosmosmagazine.com
IMAGE
Tommy Clarke / Getty Images
ILLUSTRATIONS
Jeffrey Phillips
80 SPECTRUM Issue 73

WHERE IN THE COSMOS? MIND GAMES

Quiz
Q1. Coconut crabs were found to be able
to lift how much weight, in kilograms,
with their claws?

Q2 . How many years ago did our human

ancestors branch off from the primate
family tree?

Q3. What is the name given to the

gene required to turn thoughts
into speech?

Q4. The colour of light can be a direct

measure of what?

Q5. How much larger is a human brain

compared to that of a chimp?

Q6. What is the name of the oldest light

Anusha Lazzari from Nightcliff in Northern Territory
was captured kicking back after a steamy trek
exploring the magnificent Manning Gorge in the
Kimberleys, Western Australia, reading Cosmos
Magazine.
What better spot to watch our fabulous world
in action and enjoy science?
in the universe?
Q7. What led researchers to establish
that Lucy, the name given to a 3.18
million-year-old hominin fossil, most
likely spent large amounts of her time
climbing amongst the trees?

Q8. What is the name of the circular

ridges of hills that surround craters
created by asteroids?
COMPETITIONS

Q9. Which country is home to the

QUESTION
What is the main protein that
makes up spider silk?
Email your answer to
competitions@cosmosmagazine.com
with your name and address by
23 February. Five correct entries will win
a Cosmos prize pack.
WHERE IN THE COSMOS
Send a photo of yourself reading a copy
of Cosmos Magazine in an interesting
place anywhere in the universe to
competitions@cosmosmagazine.com.
Tell us your name, the names of others
in your picture, your address, what
youre doing and why youre there.
If published you will receive a Cosmos
prize pack.
180-kilometre-wide crater that was
formed 66 million years ago when
an asteroid slammed into earth?
Q10. The amber-encased dinosaur tail
extracted from the Hukawng Valley
in Burma most likely belonged to
what kind of dinosaur?
Q11. Which stem cells are thought to have
powered the expansion of the human
cerebral cortex?

Q12. What did scientists recently

discover was growing by just
SUBSCRIBE AND WIN under two-thousandths of
The winner of the whale shark swim at Nigaloo reef for two valued at $2,770 in the a second each century?
Subscribe and Win promotion was drawn on 23 December 2016. We are just waiting
for confirmation from the prizewinner to claim their whale shark adventure. Answers will be published in issue 74.
COSMOS
Cosmos crossword
ACROSS
3. Amphibians split from the
groups that would give rise
to mammals, birds, and
reptiles during the end of
this geological period.
5. A neutron star with an
extremely powerful
magnetic field, born from
a supernova.
6. The ampullae of _ is a shark
sensory organ that detects
electrical currents.
10. The name of the planetoid
that collided with earth
around 4.5 billion years ago
which led to the formation
of the moon, according the
Giant Impact hypothesis.
12. Alongside humans and
short-finned pilot whales,
the only other species that
undergoes menopause.
13. Single layers of pure
carbon atoms bonded in
a honeycomb formation.
15. Just enough starlight
reaches planets located
in the _ zone to allow
liquid water to form on
their surface.
16. Words that sound identical
but mean different things.
17. An antibiotic belonging
to the beta-lactam subset
of antibiotics, used to
treat infections caused
by multidrug-resistant
bacteria.
DOWN
1. A greenhouse gas 28 times
more powerful than carbon
dioxide.
2. The part of the brain
responsible for higher
cognitive function, such
as language.
4. Part of the brain associated
with fear and emotion.
5. Immune cells in the brain
that consume waste and
debris.
7. One of the two primary
chemicals used in
deodorants that acts to
kill bacteria.
8. Families of particles
identical to those of matter,
but with opposite charge.
9. Chemical compounds
that enhance the complex
flavours of aged red wine.
11. A group of over 50 galaxies
in which our own galaxy,
the Milky Way, is located
(5, 5)
14. The name given to the
robot with the highest
robotic vertical jumping
agility ever recorded.
Answers will be published in
issue 74.
SPECTRUM 81
SOLUTIONS: COSMOS 72
CROSSWORD
QUIZ
1. 67P/Churyumov-
Gerasimenko
2. The Rosetta stone,
a tombstone-sized
slab of granite that let
archaeologists translate
Egyptian hieroglyphs.
3. Papua New Guinea
4. 37,000 years
5. Autophagy
6. Lysosome
7. United States
8. Rotaxane
9. Beta amyloid
10. Four
11. Black Sigatoka fungus
12. Damage suppressor
or Dsup
WINNERS
COMPETITION
The year NASA plan to
send another rover to Mars
is 2020.
Congratulations to our
winners for answering
correctly: Andrea Stone,
Arrawarra, NSW and
Matthew Seery, Beaumont
Hills, NSW. Each will
receive a copy of
The Best Australian Science
Writing 2016, courtesy of
New South Books.
82 SPECTRUM Issue 73

PORTRAIT

Ivy Wong,
astrophysicist

ASK AN ASTRONOMER what hooked her

on the field and shell likely tell you about
gazing at the night sky as a kid.
Not Ivy Wong.
Growing up, she set her sights on
becoming a veterinarian. But when she
began biology classes at the University of
Melbourne, she couldnt quite stomach
dissecting animals. I was more squeamish
than I thought I would be, she recalls, so
she switched to maths and physics.
Wong wasnt sure where her new
majors might lead until she landed a
vacation scholarship to work at the Parkes
radio telescope in central-west New South
Wales. I knew nothing about astronomy
back then, she says. It captivated her.
Today at the International Centre
for Radio Astronomy Research at the
University of Western Australia, Wong
uses radio telescopes to study galaxies
forming from vast clouds of cold gas, and
the supermassive black hole that can lurk
within them.
She watches these galaxies furiously
churn out stars until they run out of fuel
or are strangled by warming radiation
spewing from their black hole.
Wong still spends time with animals,
but in a less nauseating way. She fosters
cats with a little help from her permanent
kitty companions, Pippa and Finn.

BELINDA SMITH

IMAGE
f22 Photography
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