Dissolving your earthly remains will protect the Earth 

11:04 19 August 2010 by Wendy Zukerman

Want to leave a light footprint on this Earth when you die? Perhaps you should consider "aquamation", a new eco-alternative to burial and cremation.

With land for burials in short supply and cremation producing around 150 kilograms of carbon dioxide per body – and as much as 200 micrograms of toxic mercury – aquamation is being touted as the greenest method for disposing of your mortal remains.

The corpse is placed into a steel container and potassium is added, followed by water heated to 93 °C. The flesh and organs are completely decomposed in 4 hours, leaving bones as the only solid remains.

This is similar to what's left after cremation, where the "ashes" are in fact bones hardened in the furnace and then crushed.

Low-energy funeral

Aquamation uses only 10 per cent of the energy of a conventional cremation and releases no toxic emissions, says John Humphries, chief executive of Aquamation Industries in Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia, who developed the technology. The decomposition process, called alkaline hydrolysis, "simply speeds up the natural way that flesh decomposes in soil and water", he says.

Similar methods for decomposing corpses have been developed elsewhere, but they decompose corpses at much higher temperatures. For example, Resomation, based in Glasgow, UK, dissolves bodies in sodium hydroxide at 180 °C.

By decomposing pig carcasses at different water temperatures, Humphries found that the higher heat was unnecessary and that 93 °C was the most efficient temperature for body decomposition.

Life from death

There are recycling possibilities too. Humphries says that aquamation, unlike cremation, will not destroy artificial implants such as hip replacements, allowing them to be reused. And after the body is decomposed, "the water is a fantastic fertiliser", he says.

Since his company began offering the process last month, 60 people in Australia have nominated aquamation for the disposal of their own corpse.

"This is a great initiative," says Barry Brook, a climate scientist at the University of Adelaide, South Australia. "It's easy to dismiss these small-scale technologies as trivial, but if you add enough small-scale solutions together they can add up to something meaningful."

Darwinian medicine: Does intensive care kill or cure?

19 August 2010 by Dan Jones 

We've evolved ways to come back from the brink of death – and doctors' efforts to help may just be getting in the way

NOTHING epitomises cutting-edge medicine so much as a modern intensive care unit. Among the serried ranks of shiny chrome and plastic surrounding each bed are machines to ventilate the lungs and keep failing kidneys functioning, devices to deliver drugs intravenously and supply sedatives, tubes to get food into a patient and waste out, and countless gizmos to monitor blood composition, heart rate, pulse and other physiological indicators.

This environment is home to Mervyn Singer, director of the Bloomsbury Institute Centre for Intensive Care Medicine at University College London. So you might expect him to wax lyrical about the wonders of medical technology. Instead, he has this to say: "Virtually all the advances in intensive care in the past 10 years have involved doing less to the patient." And he goes further, arguing provocatively that modern critical care interferes with the body's natural protective mechanisms- that patients often survive in spite of medical interventions rather than because of them.

It is a counter-intuitive idea, to say the least, yet there is an underlying logic. Taking an evolutionary perspective, Singer points out that the human body is adapted to deal with the types of threats to which our ancestors were exposed and those include critical illness. Our immune system can fight off infections, our blood clots so that we don't bleed to death with every cut, tissues regenerate and bone fractures heal, if imperfectly, over time. "We have evolved to deal with temperature extremes, starvation, trauma and infection," says Singer. "We haven't evolved to cope with being sedated, put on a ventilator and pumped full of drugs."

The human body is adapted to deal with the types of threats to which our ancestors were exposed

Such Darwinian thinking about health and illness is not new. It has been popular in certain quarters for more than a decade but it is still not a part of mainstream medicine and is especially rare in intensive care. "The application of evolutionary thinking in critical care medicine has been surprisingly lacking," says Randolph Nesse, a pioneer of Darwinian medicine at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. "Much of critical care medicine is based on a tacit theory that is rarely examined- namely, that almost all of the changes seen in severe illness are pathological." With his evolutionary approach, Singer holds this assumption up to scrutiny, and asks whether the changes are actually coping strategies, meaning that modern medicine might be interfering with the body's natural protective mechanisms.

Patients can end up in an intensive care unit for many reasons: they may have survived an accident, succumbed to a serious infection or undergone major surgery. Yet, once there, their condition often follows a similar clinical path because the body responds to trauma and infection in similar ways. Both elicit a strong local inflammatory immune response at the site of injury or infection. This helps fend off microorganisms that might enter the body, and also rallies immune cells to break down damaged tissue. While these responses cause local tissue damage prior to healing, they protect the body as a whole.

In severe cases, however, a localised reaction can become a body-wide systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS). If infection is the trigger, this response is called sepsis. In the first "acute" stage of sepsis or SIRS, the immune system ramps up its activity, stress hormones are released and metabolism increases. Patients typically experience abnormal body temperature, a high heart rate and increased breathing. In the best-case scenario, they return to normal, but in many patients severe inflammation progresses over a period of hours or days and begins to affect the normal functioning of the body's organs. If equilibrium cannot be restored, multiple organ failure can set in.

This is the leading cause of death for critically ill patients in ICUs, accounting for more than two-thirds of deaths after the first week. The initial trauma often involves blood loss, severe vomiting, diarrhoea and excess sweating. Later, the overblown inflammatory response can cause fluid to leak out of the circulation and into the tissues. This fluid loss means less oxygen reaches organs, causing cells to die. That, at least, is the accepted view. Singer is not convinced.

He points to evidence from post-mortem studies on patients who have died after multiple organ failure, whose organs in fact look normal, with little sign of damage from a lack of oxygen (Critical Care Medicine, vol 27, p 1230). In addition, where patients survive multiple organ failure, normal function is rapidly restored, even in organs with little capacity for regeneration (Anaesthesia, vol 56, p 124). After acute renal failure, for example, only 1 per cent of sufferers need lifelong dialysis. There is also evidence that during the "multiple organ dysfunction" phase of sepsis and SIRS, oxygen still reaches the organs- they just use less of it for metabolism (Critical Care Medicine, vol 22, p 640).

 In light of these findings, Singer concludes that organs do not fail so much as shut down in an adaptive response to the extreme physiological stress of critical illness. His interpretation of the process goes as follows: during the first hours and days after major trauma or infection, the body enters an inflammatory "fight mode", burning energy and pumping out stress hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol, as well as chemicals that modulate the immune response such as cytokines and the gas nitric oxide. If this doesn't work, metabolism starts to drop, triggered by a decrease in energy production by the mitochondria, the cell's powerhouses. This happens because the hormones and immune chemicals produced during severe, prolonged inflammation inhibit and damage mitochondria, and changes in gene expression limit the production of new ones. Under these conditions, attempts to maintain normal functioning can trigger cell death. To avoid this fate, cells switch to a dormant metabolic state, causing organs to shut down.

In Singer's view, multiple organ dysfunction is a strategic and temporary functional change, comparable to hibernation or torpor. Far from being a catastrophic development that must be mitigated at all costs, it is the body's ultimate attempt to save its organs. By slowing metabolism right down, organs have a better chance of resuming their normal function, if and when the critical illness passes. It's a risky strategy, but then desperate times call for desperate measures.

Singer's thesis isn't just a novel way of interpreting multiple organ failure, it could also explain one of the big mysteries of intensive care- why many drugs and interventions have been linked to a worse outcome for critically ill patients. For example, certain types of antibiotics and sedatives damp down energy production by mitochondria (PLoS Biology, vol 2, p e167), so if given early they might interfere with the high-energy requirements of the acute phase of critical illness. What's more, antibiotics and sedatives interfere with immune functioning and can also cause problems for patients who survive organ shutdown and need to re-establish normal metabolism. This is because the drugs keep energy production low and also prevent the formation of new mitochondria to replace those lost during organ shutdown.

Singer recently published the definitive statement of his hypothesis (Current Opinion in Critical Care, vol 15, p 431). And earlier this year, he presented the idea at the conference Evolutionary Approaches to Disease and Health, held at Brunel University, London, where it generated considerable interest among an audience of evolutionary-minded researchers. Nesse, who was at the meeting, is enthusiastic. "Singer's work is a fine example of the value of evolutionary thinking in medicine," he says. He has long campaigned for trainee doctors to be taught evolutionary biology as a foundation for understanding what the human body is and how it works.

Intensive care specialists are also open to Singer's views, if only to invigorate the discipline. "It's time for some new ideas," says Falco Hietbrink, at the University Medical Center in Utrecht, the Netherlands. "Although we've tried hard over the past 40 years to improve patient outcomes, mortality rates have dropped only slightly." Nevertheless, some clinicians will require more convincing. "I love imaginative hypotheses, and this is a fascinating possibility," says Luciano Gattinoni of the Institute of Anaesthesia and Intensive Care at Ospedale Maggiore Policlinico in Milan, Italy. However, he points out that there is scant autopsy evidence on whether multiple organ dysfunction causes cell death or serves a protective role. "Really, we don't have enough data to settle these questions, which is quite surprising."

Last-ditch response

Another obvious criticism of the idea that multiple organ dysfunction is adaptive is that it is not tremendously successful as a survival strategy. Not only is organ failure a principal cause of death among people in intensive care, the more organs that fail, the more likely a patient is to die. And among patients who survive, the severity of multiple organ failure correlates with quality of life in the long term.

Singer acknowledges that, at best, it is only a partially successful strategy- though one that may allow the hardy to survive to fight another day, an obvious evolutionary advantage. In fact, he is impressed by how effective it is, given that it is a last-ditch response. Witness the high survival rates among injured soldiers in the days before sophisticated medical interventions (see "Battle hardened"). For Singer's money this points to a remarkable capacity for coping with extreme trauma.

The key issue, of course, is what all this means for treatment. "If some aspects of the condition are adaptive, then clinicians should work with them, not against them," says Singer. For starters, doctors might want to reconsider the doses and course durations of antibiotics and sedatives. Likewise for interventions designed to enhance oxygen delivery to tissues. These may prove beneficial when given early, but could be ineffective or even harmful later on if the extra oxygen bumps up metabolic activity that cannot be supported by the mitochondria and so leads to cell death. In addition, critically ill people might benefit from the timely administration of therapies that protect mitochondrial function, such as antioxidants. Likewise treatments that stimulate the production of new mitochondria, including hormones like oestrogen and the gas nitric oxide. The precise therapeutic implications of re-thinking organ dysfunction will depend on acquiring clinical evidence about what works and what does not. "Evolutionary medicine does not prescribe what treatment is best," says Nesse. "[It] suggests what we should think about and what studies we should do." But if the upshot is that intensive care becomes less intensive that might not actually be so revolutionary - there is already a trend to reduce levels of intervention in critical care (see "Less is more").

Singer may not be correct in every detail, but in the long run being provocative could be more important than being right. "Singer will get people thinking in new ways and doing new studies," says Nesse. In terms of improving the care of critically ill patients, that's got to be what the doctor ordered.

Battle hardened

Records from historical battles provide evidence for the remarkable capacity of the human body to cope with massive trauma. The Battle of Trafalgar, which took place on 21 October 1805, was a particularly bloody affair: by the end of the day there were more than 450 British fatalities, while the Spanish and French forces suffered the loss of more than 3200 soldiers. Thousands more were wounded. William Beatty, the physician on the British flagship HMS Victory recorded 102 wounded soldiers on board. Despite having none of the medical technology available to today's intensive care patients and performing 10 amputations, only six of the wounded subsequently died of their injuries.

Ten years later, a similarly high survival rate was recorded among the 13th Light Dragoons in the Battle of Waterloo. Only three of the 52 wounded soldiers later died of their wounds.

Medical records from the American Civil War between 1861 and 1865 tell the same story. Approximately 15 per cent of all mortalities occurred on the battlefield, with around twice as many soldiers dying from diseases as a result of poor sanitation and living conditions.

Amputation was the main treatment for injuries, with surgeons working around the clock to remove limbs and digits. Operations often took no more than 10 minutes and, with little water available, hands and instruments went unwashed between procedures. Despite all this around three-quarters of amputees survived.

Less is more

Intensive care medicine is only about 50 years old. In the early days the logic of treatment seemed commonsensical. "We thought, 'antibiotics are good, so more antibiotics are better. Breathing is good, so more air is better'," says Luciano Gattinoni at Ospedale Maggiore Policlinico in Milan, Italy. "We were doing the right things conceptually, but exaggerating everything." Nowadays, the trend is for less intervention, not more.

Perhaps the biggest advance in the past decade has been in the way patients are mechanically ventilated. Pumping air into the lungs can damage them, because they are normally inflated by inhalation, in which negative pressure draws in air. By reducing the volume of air pumped in each breath cycle and increasing the frequency of artificial breaths, mechanical ventilation has become much more successful.

Doctors also recognise that even essential interventions can cause problems. Entry points for tubes can become infected, which can prove fatal for patients in a weakened state. Sedatives have been linked to poor patient outcomes in some studies (The Lancet, vol 371, p 126). Working on the assumption that intensive care should support patients while not adding to the stress that their bodies are under, the idea that less is more is increasingly mainstream.

Dan Jones is a science writer based in Brighton, UK

POT KETTLE POT KETTLE POT

China’s well-hidden, ill-gotten gains

Aug 13th 2010, 11:55 by S.C. | HONG KONG

WOULD you lie about how much you earn? Would you lie about how much you spend? Would you, ultimately, fib about how much you spend on abalone and shark’s fin? If you are a well-connected member of China’s new rich the answers are yes, probably not, and no, according to professor Wang Xialou of the National Economic Research Institute at the China Reform Foundation. He is making waves with new estimates of China’s “shadow income”: the vast sums that richer households keep off the books and under the table. A piece in Caixin yesterday drew on his own study released by Credit Suisse on August 6th (summarised and posted in full on Sinocism). Mr Wang calculates that the disposable income of China’s households is 9.3 trillion yuan ($1.4 trillion) higher than official estimates suggest. That’s equivalent to 30% of China’s 2008 GDP.

Mr Wang asked his team of researchers to interview people they knew (over 4,000 families) in the hope that familiarity would breed honesty. The families were asked about their income and spending patterns. Their answers were truthful, Mr Wang assumes, but they may not have been representative of China as a whole. 

He therefore had to match his sample of families with the much bigger sample in the official household survey carried out by the National Bureau of Statistics. Food provided the link. As people get richer, they spend a smaller share of their dosh on nosh, according to Engel’s law, an economic regularity named after Ernst Engel. In Mr Wang’s survey, for example, the poorest people devoted 48% of their outlays to food, whereas the richest spent only 29% (an Engel’s coefficient of 0.29).

Mr Wang matched families from the two surveys according to their Engel’s coefficients. He would, for example, take the 565 families in his survey who spent 29% of their outlays on food, and line them up with families in the official survey with the same coefficient of 0.29. In theory, their incomes should match. But in practice, it was quite different. In the official survey, these people say their disposable income is 43,614 yuan. But in Mr Wang’s survey, such families admit their income is really 139,000 yuan.

The fibs get bigger as families get richer. The richest 10% of urban families underreport their income by about 69%, he finds. They are about 26 times better off than the bottom tenth, not merely nine times, as the official figures suggest. Indeed, China appears less egalitarian on this measure than America. The top 10% of Chinese households nationwide take home 51.9% of the income, whereas their counterparts in America hog only 47.2%, according to calculations by Credit Suisse, which sponsored the study.

If China is earning 9.3 trillion yuan of "grey income", does that mean the country’s economy is 30% bigger than we thought? Not quite. China’s GDP figures do not rely on the NBS household survey, but on “flow-of-funds” data collected from enterprises. And some of the shadow income pocketed by Chinese families may already show up elsewhere in the national accounts, as corporate income or government income—it may be misreported, not unreported. The upshot is that China’s economy was about 10% bigger in 2008, according to Credit Suisse.

These shocking results rely on a number of assumptions. Engel’s law, for example, is not absolute. As Mr Wang admits, lots of other factors can interfere with it. So it’s possible that two families with the same Engel’s coefficient really do have different incomes, because of where they live, their family circumstances or their gastronomic passions. Mr Wang’s results suggest, for example, that the people of Beijing, Shandong, Hubei, Guangdong, Chongqing and Henan are China’s foodies, spending more on dining than the national average. Mr Wang does his best to control for such things. But there’s still plenty of play in Engel’s law that he cannot explain or control for.

Mr Wang also assumes that people lie about how much they earn, but not about how much they spend or eat. Or if a household does underreport its spending, he assumes that it also downplays its food expenses proportionately, so that their Engel’s coefficient is unaffected. 

If people underreported their overall spending, but told the truth about their food spending, their Engel’s coefficients will be artificially high. Mr Wang would therefore have paired them with the poorer households in his survey. In those circumstances, their underreported income would go undetected. If that’s the case, then 9.3 trillion may be an underestimate! China’s shadows may be even deeper than they seem.

CONTEMPORARY CAPITALIST CONTROL SYSTEMS - A BIG STICK!

Bangladesh Arrests 21 After Rallies

By VIKAS BAJAJ and JULFIKAR ALI MANIK

Published: August 16, 2010

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MUMBAI, India — The police in Bangladesh have arrested three garment industry labor leaders and 18 other people on charges that they organized and participated in violent protests last month.

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Andrew Biraj/Reuters

Garment workers demonstrated July 30 in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh and a center of the growing garment industry.

International advocacy groups likeHuman Rights Watch and the International Labor Rights Forum have criticized the arrests, calling them a tactic for intimidating workers in a powerful industry that supplies Western retailers like Wal-Mart Storesand H&M. The protesters were angry over a recent increase in the minimum wage, calling it inadequate.

The arrests, made over the last several weeks, came after street protests in the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka, and other hubs of the fast-growing clothing industry. Garment-making, with about three million workers, employs more people than any other industrial segment in Bangladesh, a largely agrarian country of 160 million.

The labor tensions are playing out at a crucial juncture for Bangladesh’s largest export industry, which has been growing as a lower-cost alternative to China. With nearly 70 million people of working age, Bangladesh could probably absorb many more of China’s 20 million garment industry jobs. But there are evidently limits to the Bangladeshi work force’s willingness to undersell their Chinese counterparts.

Last month, a government-appointed wage board raised the minimum wage in Bangladesh’s garment industry to 3,000 taka a month, or $43. That was up from 1,662.50 taka and was the first increase since 2006.

The country’s labor groups had sought an increase to 5,000 taka — or nearly $72. Even that amount would be well below the minimum wages in China’s coastal industrial provinces, which range from $117 to $147 a month.

While some labor groups agreed to accept the 3,000 taka wage, which will take effect in November, several other organizations have not and tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets at the end of July.

Factory owners in Bangladesh assert that a big increase in wages would make them uncompetitive against Vietnam and other rising garment exporters, which have higher labor costs but also have better power grids and other infrastructure and are more efficient producers.

The July protests were much more violent than in the past. Police shot rubber bullets and tear gas into the crowds. Protesters set cars ablaze and attacked factories and stores in several Dhaka neighborhoods, including the affluent Gulshan area, which is home to the city’s elite and many foreigners.

The police said they arrested several workers after identifying them in television news film and in newspaper photographs. When questioned about the violence, workers identified several leaders, who were then arrested in the following days, said Molla Nazrul Islam, a deputy police commissioner.

The three leaders arrested were Montu Ghosh, an adviser to Garment Sramik Trade Union Kendra; Babul Akhter, the executive director of the Bangladesh Garment and Industrial Workers Federation; and Kalpona Akhter, the executive director of the Bangladesh Center for Workers Solidarity. Associates of the arrested labor leaders could not be reached for comment.

“We arrested the leaders of the garment workers on charges of instigating violence and rampage by the factory workers in the garment factories and other business centers,” Mr. Islam said.

But labor and human rights advocacy groups said at least one worker has told his colleagues that he was tortured into giving false evidence against himself and other labor leaders before he escaped from custody. Advocates also said that they were worried about the safety of people arrested in recent days.

Mr. Islam, the police official, denied that the authorities tortured workers and said those arrested were being held for interrogation under court order.

In a statement, several Western labor-rights groups including the International Labor Rights Forum and the Clean Clothes Campaign said the arrests “were part of a strategy by the government of Bangladesh to deal with recent riots among garment workers by scapegoating peaceful worker advocates rather than addressing the true underlying cause of such turmoil: the country’s abysmal working conditions.”

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has previously expressed sympathy for the workers. Before the recent increase, she said their wages were “not only insufficient but also inhuman.” But she said last month that her government would not tolerate further violent protests.

Vikas Bajaj reported from Mumbai, India, and Julfikar Ali Manik from Dhaka, Bangladesh.

SOME WONDERFUL THEORY...

20 new ideas in science

Michael Brooks

Published 16 August 2010

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Today’s most cutting-edge scientific thinking: from switching off ageing to “enhancing” our babies; understanding consciousness to finding dark matter. You read it here first.

Humans are still evolving

The modern world hasn't stayed evolution's hand. Comparisons of different genomes show that natural pressures are still doing their thing. The gene for digesting lactose, for example, is slowly spreading from European populations to the rest of humanity. A gene that appears to enhance fertility is also becoming more common across Europe. Disease is still a big driver of human evolution: people with particular genetic arrangements are more likely to survive malaria and HIV, for example. And almost all humans have lost the caspase 12 gene from their genomes, probably because those who have it are more susceptible to bacterial infections. It happens slowly, but we're still changing.

There's no such thing as time

Physicists searching for the ultimate "theory of everything" have a big problem with time. They have to stitch quantum theory - our description of how very small things behave - together with relativity - the theory behind the way space, time and matter interact. The biggest stumbling block to this is that time works in different ways in these theories.

In relativity, the passage of time is different for people moving relative to one another, so there is no absolute measure of time. In quantum theory, it's even less well defined: time doesn't even figure as something that gets measured. Quantum theory might be able to tell you where an electron is, but it can't tell you how long it's been there. One radical solution to the problem is to view time as a concept that humans have made up. If it doesn't play a fundamental, well-defined role in the processes of the universe, maybe our theories can do without it altogether.

This is one of many universes

Physicists like to know why things are as they are. Which makes it frustrating that some facts about the universe appear inexplicable. There are certain constants of nature - the numbers that determine how strong forces such as gravity are - that seem to be "just so" for no good reason. That wouldn't be so bad if they weren't so exquisitely perfect for allowing life to develop in our universe. Naively speaking, it looks as if someone designed the universe. That doesn't seem like a satisfying explanation to most physicists, so they have come up with a better one: that there are many universes, all with different properties. It is impossible to move from one to another, so we can't test this idea, but it does take away the "specialness" of the conditions we find ourselves in. Of course the universe is perfect for us: if it were any different we wouldn't be here to observe it.

We might be able to turn off ageing

Can we flick a switch in our genome that will greatly extend our lifespan? Experiments on worms, mice and fruit flies indicate that stopping certain genes from functioning, or altering others so that they flood the body with particular combinations of chemicals, can dramatically slow the rate at which an organism ages. It can even be done by more low-tech means: changing the chemical environment of the body by altering the diet or by injecting certain hormones can slow ageing, too. It's an alluring avenue of research, but it is also controversial.

Plenty of biologists still say it's a mirage because we will never overcome the biological programme whereby cells die after a certain time, or indeed the rigours of wear and tear on the genome. Add that to the dangerous genetic copying errors that occur as cells divide and, for these naysayers, growing old remains an unavoidable future for humanity. Nevertheless, the consensus is that the fight against biological ageing has moved from impossible to enormously difficult, and that is exciting progress.

Enhanced humans are coming

The next generation of humans -- or perhaps the one after that -- will face a difficult choice: do they equip their children with "enhancements"? A group of researchers, led by Ray Kurzweil, is suggesting that we are approaching "the Singularity", where technologies will enhance our mental and physical capabilities to produce a giant leap in what human beings can do. Most of these technologies were initially developed to help those with health problems, but they are now being co-opted for those looking to get past their normal limitations. Drugs developed to help children with ADHD are already in common use in academia as concentration improvers. Retinal implants that help the partially sighted are being developed as bionic eyes. Brain implants, such as those developed to fight neurological problems such as Parkinson's disease, are paving the way for neural enhancement and plug-in memory upgrades. Genetic diagnosis of IVF embryos has enabled the selection of babies that are equipped to donate to an ill sibling; selecting for other kinds of advantage is not far behind. The big worry is it may leave us with a new enhancement-free underclass. Discuss.

Everything is information

If you had a magic microscope that could see how things work on the tiniest scale in nature, you might get a bit of a surprise. Right at the bottom, holding everything together, is something we think of as abstract: information. The idea that has big thinkers all worked up is that everything in physics is made up of atoms of information. Any experiment or observation can be boiled down to asking a yes/no question, and the answer is a piece of information analogous to the 0 and 1 binary digits (bits) that computers process.

Ultimately, the universe works as a giant computer, with answers to questions such as "Did the photon pass through this point?" providing the digital information to be processed. Constructing the full range of binary answers to questions the universe might pose will take a while, but it might provide an entirely new way to simplify - and thus understand - the fundamentals of how everything works.

Understanding consciousness is no longer an impossible dream

How do the few kilos of spongy stuff in our skulls create the experience of being human? A combination of imaging techniques, computer models and an ever-increasing understanding of the biology of the brain means that we are in a good position to get an answer. Even if a good understanding of consciousness is another century away, there will be spin-offs that make the journey worthwhile. The quickest route to understanding the brain is to watch what happens when small bits of it go wrong. Many illnesses, such as depression, schizophrenia, autism and dementia, result from breakdowns in small component parts; researchers looking for clues to the root of consciousness are studying these malfunctions - and hope to learn as much about curing them as they do about consciousness.

Most of the universe is missing

Ninety-six per cent of the universe is in a form we can't fathom. Observations of galaxies show they are rotating too fast to hold all their stellar material in place: the outer stars should be flung out. The only explanation is that there is an extra gravitational pull from something unseen, holding them in place. The unseen stuff is known as dark matter, and accounts for just under a quarter of the mass in the universe. Around three-quarters is "dark energy", which creates a force that is speeding up the expansion of the universe. Physicists have yet to come up with a plausible explanation for the source of either of these dark entities. Dark matter requires the existence of particles with properties unlike anything else we have discovered. We are looking for what they might be, and the Large Hadron Collider might even create some. Dark energy is even more of a challenge: it comes neither from known particles nor from the empty space between them. Researchers are literally clueless about its source.

We may be close to understanding mass

Physics is becoming ever more exciting as Cern's Large Hadron Collider ramps up the energy of its colliding particles. That's because the collisions might give us a fleeting glimpse of the Higgs boson. This is the final piece of the puzzle in our best theories of particle physics. The Higgs boson creates a field that exerts a drag on certain types of particles. The result of this is that the particles feel mass, the property of matter that responds to gravity. If the Higgs boson does show up, physicists will breathe a sigh of relief, because it is a central pillar of particle physics. If it doesn't, physicists will have a lot of explaining to do. And not just about the source of mass.

Prepare for aliens

Space agencies are identifying hundreds of planets outside our solar system that could harbour life. Biochemists have a firm grasp on the conditions that make life possible, and the traces that such life would leave in their vicinity. What's more, our imaging technologies are getting better at detecting the signatures of life in the atmospheres that surround the potential homes of extraterrestrial life. It looks as if people alive today might well hear the news that we have discovered life elsewhere in the universe. It is unlikely to be intelligent life - more likely to be in the form of microbes - but it will still cause a fundamental shift in our view of life on earth. It would show that life has probably evolved more than once, and that the universe is likely to be teeming with other life forms. Scientists, ethicists and philosophers are now rushing to work out what action - if any - we should take if and when we make the discovery.

Humans are not special

So far, researchers have found only three genes unique to humans. The likelihood is that, in total, fewer than 20 of our 20,000 or so genes are not found in any other creature. Other primates have brain cells exactly like ours, and our seemingly unique mental capacities are, it turns out, more developed versions of tricks that other animals can pull off. Killer whales and dolphins show distinct cultural groups within their populations. Crows use tools and chimps display morality. Elephants show empathy, and even salamanders and spiders show a range of personalities. Though nothing in the animal kingdom is using what we think of as language, gestures used by bonobos and orang-utans come close. We are top of the class, perhaps, but not in a class of our own.

We are born believers

It takes a lot of effort to be an atheist, and not just because you now have to find new ways to fill Sunday mornings. The human brain evolved to attribute a living cause to every phenomenon - if the rustling of a bush in the forest wasn't a predator, then it was probably an evil spirit. Those who instinctively assumed something was there were the ones who survived when it actually was a predator. And those people - and they alone - are our ancestors. Neuroscience experiments show that belief in invisible entities interacting with the physical world has become the default state of the human brain.

Most of the earth is unexplored

Covering 70 per cent of the planet, with an average depth of 4km, the ocean is the largest habitat on earth, and it is largely virgin territory. Whenever researchers go into the deep, they almost always discover new species. The oceans are also throwing up new geology, and surprising us about the conditions under which life can thrive, redefining what we think of as habitable zones. As it turns out, we probably know very little about life on earth.

The tree of life is a web

Darwin's tree of life is evolving. No longer do we think one creature leads to another down an ever-branching path, while at the base of everything stands Luca, the Last Universal Common Ancestor of all living things. Genetic analysis is showing that life is much more complex than that: all kinds of hidden mechanisms have allowed speciation to occur as a wandering from branch to branch. Life is a web, not a tree, which means he future of biology is much more interesting than anyone had dared to hope. Rather than just cataloguing the differences between species and looking for ways in which natural selection has acted, we can explore the plethora of mechanisms and revel in the inventiveness of life.

There's more than one path to the final theory

The ultimate aim of physics is, as one wag put it, to be able to write all the equations of the universe on a T-shirt. This snappy, self-contained final theory will encompass all other explanations of phenomena - the forces of nature, the way particles come together to form atoms, planets and stars - and offer a single, simple explanation. For years, the only game in town was string theory, an attempt to describe the stuff of the universe as arising from the vibrations of loops of energy. Now some serious competitors have turned this into a race.

They have suitably exotic names, such as loop quantum gravity, causal dynamical triangulations and quantum graphity. More important, though, they provide the prospect of testing and elimination through experiment - the acid test of any theory. Biology doesn't have exclusive rights over 
the survival of the fittest.

We can do big physics in small labs

Not all physics is sexy. There are physicists who work in dingy basements, following electron movements through slivers of metallic crystal or spending hours watching the swirling patterns in vats of liquid helium. These physicists have often looked at their colleagues working on huge, expensive particle accelerators with envy. But not for much longer, perhaps. It turns out that particles in crystals and bubbles in liquid helium follow the same laws as some of the fundamental particles of nature. That makes them excellent ways of simulating much bigger systems, and perhaps even replacing the mega-machines of physics. They can even make artificial black holes. How sexy is that?

The graphene revolution is here

A discovery made from pencil lead is promising to change the future of the electronics industry. In 2004, Andre Geim at the University of Manchester made a pencil scrawl on a sheet of paper, then used a length of Sellotape to pull off the graphite deposits. They came off as sheets of carbon atoms linked together in a hexagonal array, rather like microscopic chicken wire. Tests have shown that these "graphene" sheets have extraordinary properties. Graphene is ten times stronger than steel. Where copper wire and semiconductors lose a lot of electrical energy as heat, resulting in the average computer chip wasting 75 per cent of its power, graphene conducts electricity with little loss of energy.

Researchers have now refined the production technique and are busy turning graphene into low-power electronic components such as transistors. It gets better: graphene's optimum electronic performance comes in the high-frequency range. This has phone manufacturers, eager to squeeze ever more information through their circuits, falling over themselves to get graphene components into handsets. And, as if its future wasn't bright enough already, graphene is also transparent to visible light. That makes it the ideal material for transferring information between optical fibres and the electronic devices they link. Because of this, graphene-based telecommunications devices are already on the laboratory bench, as are graphene-based TV screens and high-efficiency solar cells. The humble pencil just made good.

Language is the key to thought

We used to think that all human languages arose from brain programming that existed, fully formed and ready for action, at birth. This idea, put forward by Noam Chomsky in the 1960s, is no longer unchallenged. Ethnographic research has thrown up so many exceptions to the "universal" rules of language that some researchers are rejecting Chomsky's dominance and suggesting that nothing is pre-programmed: instead, different cultures' ways of thinking and their languages are intertwined. It may even be that the restrictions of a primitive language are a barrier to creating complex thoughts.

DNA origami could change our inner world

First take a few hundred strands of DNA, then chemically alter them so they will bond at various points. Now put them all together and use every technique available to chemistry to get those bonds to stick to each other. If you do it right, you'll end up with all kinds of tiny shapes. The highlights so far are "toothed gears", a nanoscale tetrahedron and a lidded box that can be locked or unlocked with a key made of a short strand of DNA. It looks like chemists messing around, but could be the best way to get drug doses delivered into the heart of a cell, and build DNA-based computers and micromachines that work on the same scale as standard biological machinery. 
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