RR: How did you become a science writer?

JO: It was the cosmic joke, because I wasn’t a science-minded person. I was an English major, and had never thought about being a science writer – I didn’t even know the profession existed. But I moved to New York City after college and got a job with the American Physical Society. I started with society news at first, then interviewing physicists. After a few years, I suddenly realised I was a science writer. So I fell in love with physics very belatedly.

Maths is one of the greatest academic phobias. What inspired you to address it?

I had seen a demonstration of the classic coin and feather in a vacuum, showing how objects fall at the same rate regardless of mass. I asked a physicist friend: “I get that it’s true, but why is it true, and how did physicists figure it out?” He said it would be perfectly obvious if I would let him run me through the equation. My initial reaction was ‘I don’t like maths’. Eventually he guilt-tripped me into it and he was absolutely right. You have the big ‘M’ for the mass of the Earth in the equation, you have these two little ‘m’s for the masses of the two objects, and as you go through the derivation, they cancel out; they are irrelevant to the answer. It was a defining moment, because I realised [maths allowed you to] see the underlying reality. Nature can fool you.

Do you think it’s a failing of education that so many of us are so afraid of maths?

There’s no easy answer to that. It’s very easy to say it’s the education system, it’s our lazy students, it’s the patriarchy – it’s all of those things. But for me, it came down to not being willing to fail. We assume that things should come easily to us – I certainly did. So when I encountered something I found difficult, my immediate reaction was ‘I must be bad at this’. It didn’t occur to me to think, ‘I’m bad at this, but if I work really hard, maybe I’ll get better.’ I got a black belt in jujitsu in my thirties. You don’t develop a martial art skill overnight – you have to go to the dojo three or four times a week and you have to sweat, bleed, screw up, fall down, get back up and keep at it until you get it right. I realised I was willing to do that for jujitsu but not for maths. I saw that it was a question of persevering and being willing to take the time to take risks and fail until I broke through the wall.

You put to bed the belief that maths has no use to anyone who isn’t an engineer. What made you realise this wasn’t the case?

In real-world applications, you can have systems that seem very different, but if you look at the underlying mathematical functions they’re surprisingly similar. I was fascinated by these hidden connections, and you don’t see those until you start looking at the real-world context, because most of us just don’t think abstractly. So to me, it was just a useful way to take the most common calculus functions and build each chapter around one unique application of them. I went to Vegas and learned to shoot craps, and I was able to talk about probability distributions and why the only way to win in Vegas is not to play. We went to Disneyland and rode the rides, and the freefall ride is a parabola. I went to Hawaii and took a surfing lesson, and that became the sine wave. It ended up being a lot of fun; it gave me good stories to tell, which I think is important when you’re trying to appeal to an audience that might be resistant to or afraid of your topic.

Do you still see the world in mathematical terms?

It’s definitely stuck with me. The point of the book was not to make me a whiz at calculus – I’m still very much at the baby calculus, ‘see Jane run’ stage. But even baby calculus is better than nothing, and I think what I mostly gained is not having that knee-jerk negative reaction of fear and revulsion when I saw an equation. Now, when I see an equation, I know that if I walk through it, it will make sense – and it’s worth doing. To me, that’s a significant change in my attitude and it seems to have been permanent.

A zombie apocalypse is a concern for many of us. How can maths help us survive it?

This ties in with the exponential growth curve and epidemiology of how disease spreads. I was inspired by a mathematical model of a zombie outbreak. The first thing it showed was that if we do nothing and let the disease run its course, there will be nothing but zombies within three days – it spreads that fast. Then the model looked at different strategies to stop this. The classic ‘hiding out in a mall’ isn’t effective, because sooner or later they’ll find you. The only thing that will stop the spread is to kill as many zombies as possible, as fast as possible. If you don’t, you’ll never be able to get ahead of the disease. This became the basis for a policy paper [recommending this strategy for funding] HIV prevention.

What will your next book be about?

It’s related to the question of how I got the idea that I was bad at maths – how we decide who we are. This affects our choices – maybe I would have studied more science in college, thinking I could be a science writer, rather than being (happily) surprised by it. So the new book, called Me, Myself and Why: Searching for the Science of Self, is about how we become who we are. I did a personal genotype test; I had my brain scanned; I took personality tests. I hung out in Second Life because there’s a chapter on avatars as an extension of self in the digital realm. We dropped acid – that chapter kicks off a meta discussion of how we construct a self, because acid breaks that down and you can see that you’re a construct. The final chapter is about how we construct our personal story as a way of making meaning out of what happens to us. It ends where the journey began – how ‘being bad at maths’ became part of my identity. Once you understand that it’s a story, you can change it. It’s empowering that we can alter how we think of ourselves.

Image credit: Ken Weingart

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From these rather diminutive ancestors, whales have evolved to become awesome beasts indeed. All but the smallest adult whales outweigh the African elephant, the heftiest land animal alive today. And in the case of the largest modern-day cetacean, the blue whale, the lengthiest specimens easily exceed 30 m and tip the scales at more than 190 tonnes, dwarfing 74-tonne Argentinosaurus, the most massive dinosaur yet discovered.

“I like to think of whales as ‘mammals from space’,” says Nicholas Pyenson, a palaeontologist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. “They’re totally unlike any other mammals we see today,” he notes.

Whales live in all seas, come in many shapes and sizes, and fill a variety of ecological niches, eating everything from giant squid to small fish, crustaceans and zooplankton at or near the base of the ocean’s food chain. So what are the secrets of the group’s evolutionary success? Diversity, obviously, is one. Useful adaptations and behaviours bestow advantages as well. Toothed whales can find prey via echolocation, and many species use a broad variety of chirps and clicks to communicate with other members of their species. Orcas – often called killer whales, but actually the largest species in the dolphin family – are highly social, typically live in family groups, and pass hunting habits and dialects down through generations. Sperm whales, the toothy bane of Captain Ahab, often roam the seas alone, but recent research suggests that small groups of adults can cooperate when hunting.

In the case of rorquals, a subgroup of filter-feeding baleen whales, scientists are just beginning to gain hints of how some of these species – including humpback, fin and blue whales – evolved to achieve gargantuan proportions. Researchers have long observed rorquals near the ocean’s surface and know their dietary preferences, but by tagging whales with various sensors, they are now gaining surprising insights into their distinctive feeding behaviours at depth. And dissections of rorqual carcasses made available to scientists at a remote Icelandic whaling station have brought to light what may be a previously unrecognised sensory organ that plays a major role in capturing their prey.

“It’s amazing what we don’t know about creatures that we nearly killed off,” says Pyenson, referring to the historic over-exploitation of whales that saw over one million whales killed since the development of industrial whaling in the 17th century.

New analyses show that, ironically, the energy-efficient feeding strategy that allowed rorquals, especially the larger species, to evolve to immense size may now serve as a constraint on their ultimate growth. As a result, some researchers say, today’s blue whales may be the largest creatures ever to have graced the Earth.

THE FAMILY TREE of modern-day whales stretches back some 55 million years, and is rooted in the coasts and floodplains of southern Asia. Although the earliest known ancestors retained fully functional limbs, they obviously spent a good fraction of their time in the water, possibly foraging for prey in rivers and streams, because the structure of their ears hints that they could hear well when they were submerged (see ‘Going for growth’).

As has often been noted for animal groups that have invaded new ecosystems – or for creatures that have survived dramatic shifts in global ecosystems due to sudden climate change, planet-smashing extraterrestrial impacts or massive volcanic activity – evolution yields a diversification of both shapes and sizes. Whales are no exception to this rule, but research shows that on average they’ve grown in size much faster than other types of mammals.

By analysing the fossil record, Alistair Evans, an evolutionary biologist at Monash University in Melbourne, and his colleagues could assess long-term trends in the maximum size of species in 28 major groups of mammals on four continents and in seas worldwide during the past 70 million years.

Before the dinosaur die-offs that occurred about 65 million years ago, the dominant mammals – a group of rodent-like creatures known as multituberculates – were, on the whole, relatively small. “They weighed around 3 kg, about the size of a house cat,” says Evans. Once their reptilian competition was removed from the landscape, however, mammals diversified and grew at a near-exponential rate for the next 35 million years. Then, for some reason, the largest terrestrial mammals reached a plateau of about 15 tonnes, he says.

Even though most mammalian lineages got a 10-million-year head-start, cetaceans have blasted past the rest of the pack. On a generation-by-generation basis, the largest whales have become heftier about twice as quickly as mammals in general, Evans and his colleagues reported in 2012 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. That is, while it took about 10 million generations for terrestrial mammals to become 5,000 times more massive, whales became 1,000 times weightier in just three million generations.

The reasons behind this faster rate of growth aren’t clear, the researchers say. But one notion is that whales, living in an aquatic environment, didn’t have to build big bones or otherwise fight the force of gravity to support their bulk, so they suffered fewer constraints on long-term growth. Another idea, says Evans, is that it’s easier for marine mammals to glean abundant quantities of high-quality food.

Regardless, he notes, “there’s something special about living in water versus on land”.

ONE WAY FOR LARGE predators to gain enough nourishment is to tackle large prey, but another route is to consume large numbers of small prey closer to the base of the food chain. While sperm whales often dine on giant squid, one of the largest invertebrates in the seas, baleen whales – and particularly rorquals – have taken the latter tack to the extreme.

All rorquals gulp large mouthfuls of prey-laden water, then extract the bounty by filtering the water out through the frayed, Venetian-blind-like plates of baleen that line their upper jaws. The diets of smaller rorquals include small fish, such as herring and sardines, but larger rorquals dine almost exclusively on krill. These paper-clip-sized crustaceans teem in groups that sometimes stretch several kilometres across the ocean surface and include as many as 750,000 individuals per cubic metre of seawater, says Jeremy Goldbogen, a biomechanicist at the Cascadia Research Collective in Olympia, Washington State. “These swarms are so large and so thick, they sometimes show up on satellite images,” he notes.

To take advantage of such prey concentrations, rorquals have evolved a technique called lunge feeding – a process that Goldbogen and his colleagues describe as “the world’s largest biomechanical event”. Observations of lunges at or near the surface, along with data gathered from instrument packages that have been temporarily suction-cupped to hundreds of blue whales, provide fresh insight into this feeding method and its energy efficiency.

Like all rorquals, blue whales have an accordion-like throat pouch that extends from their snout to their navel.

For a 24 m long blue whale, that’s as much as 60% the length of the animal, Goldbogen noted in February 2013 in Boston at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The team’s data reveal that, during the earliest phase of a lunge, blue whales accelerate over the course of four to six seconds from a speed of about 2.5 m per second to a brisk 3.7 m/s. Then, the whales drop their lower jaws – sometimes down to an angle approaching 90 degrees, creating a maw with a cross-section as large as 12 m2. Hydrodynamic drag created by water surging into the whale’s mouth pops open the throat like a drogue parachute trailing behind a jet or car.

After gleaning an 80 m3 mouthful of prey – a schoolbus-sized volume that temporarily more than doubles the whale’s size – and closing its mouth, the formerly streamlined whale is shaped more like a bloated tadpole. It takes about 55 seconds for the whale to expel a mouthful of seawater through its baleen. Then, almost immediately, the whale begins another lunge.

Each mouthful can contain millions of krill. And if a krill patch is sufficiently dense, the whale can garner almost two million kilojoules in a single gulp – more than 230 times the energy it took to execute the lunge, the researchers estimate.

Moreover, the bigger the whale species, the longer the jaws are in proportion to the creature’s length and the more energy-efficient lunge feeding becomes. These trends are likely just a couple of reasons why rorquals rapidly evolved from modest size, less than 10 m long just a few million years ago, to their behemoth proportions today, researchers suggest.

BESIDES BEING THE largest biomechanical event on Earth, a rorqual’s lunge is a complicated manoeuvre that requires intricate timing. For biologists, the biggest questions are: How does the whale locate the krill, and, once it has done so, how does it open and shut its vast mouth to optimise the intake of prey? The answers may lie in a newly discovered organ in the chins of fin and minke whales caught during commercial whaling operations in 2009 and 2010.

During each field dissection, Pyenson and his colleagues found an unusual, gel-filled cavity within the cartilaginous tissue connecting the left mandible to the right mandible at the creature’s chin. (In all baleen whales, the left and right mandibles in the lower jaws aren’t fused together where they join.) Tissue in the cavity is filled with blood vessels and seems to be a communication centre for nerves that connect to the vibrissae – sensory hairs akin to a cat’s whiskers – on the whale’s chin, and run to and from the throat pouch, and to the brain. The researchers described this purported organ in the journal Nature in 2012.

The team suggests that the sensory organ helps coordinate many aspects of lunge-feeding. Besides helping the whales sense prey, it likely monitors rotation of the jaws during mouth opening and closure, and senses expansion of the throat pouch.

Despite the energy efficiency of lunge feeding – and the rapid growth in the size of large rorqual species in the past few million years – data suggests the feeding technique may be reaching its limits.

“That’s the paradox,” says Robert Shadwick, a marine biologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. “Lunge feeding is high payoff in the end, but there are high costs in the short term to get it,” he notes.

To wit: during a feeding lunge, the burst of energy needed to accelerate a blue whale’s bulk – as well as that needed to resist hydrodynamic drag when its mouth is wide open and full of prey-laden water – causes the creature’s metabolism to skyrocket to about 50 times normal. Even if only for the 10 seconds or so needed for a whale to complete a lunge, that’s a big burden – one that burns oxygen at a rate much higher than blood cells and tissues can typically provide it, Shadwick and his colleagues reported in the journal PLoS ONE in 2012.

That oxygen debt, although brief, may prove a restriction on size. The team’s analysis suggests that the larger a whale is, the greater the oxygen debt it experiences during a feeding lunge. For a 33 m long blue whale – the size of the largest blue whale caught during the whaling era – the metabolism rate during a lunge would approach 80 times normal, the researchers estimate.

The notion that lunge-feeding rorquals might experience oxygen limitations isn’t new to scientists. Previous studies show that humpbacks that performed more lunges during foraging dives spent more time at the surface afterward, and took breaths more often, than those that made fewer lunges. It’s as if the whales were panting, just as sprinters do immediately after a race, says Shadwick.

Also, results of a field study by Pyenson, Goldbogen, Shadwick and others reveal that while humpback whales perform about nine feeding lunges per dive on average, the larger fin and blue whales perform only about four and three lunges per dive, respectively. As a result, even though bigger rorquals can engulf more water with each lunge, the whales eventually reach a plateau in the total amount of water they filter – and therefore the amount of krill they can capture – during each dive.

So, biophysical restrictions imposed by the lunge-feeding technique itself, not by the energy-efficiency of the feeding strategy or the overall availability of food, might spell the end to the evolutionary growth spurt among rorqual species.

“It’s theoretically possible for baleen whales to evolve to larger body sizes, but there may be practical energetic limitations to what works in the real world,” says Erich Fitzgerald, a palaeontologist at Museum Victoria in Melbourne. “That, in turn, raises the question of whether the living blue whale is not just the largest animal known to exist in the history of life, but the largest animal possible.”

*****
TIMELINE:
GOING FOR GROWTH
From dog-sized progenitors, whales have evolved to become the largest animals that have ever lived.

~55 million years ago
Ancestors of whales headed back to the water, likely to forage in the rivers of what is now southern Asia.

48–53 million years ago
A variety of whale progenitors, including the Labrador-retriever-sized Pakicetus, the sea-lion-sized Rodhocetus and the fox-sized Indohyus, roamed southern Asia. All retained well-developed limbs, but had adapted to hear well when submerged.

47 million years ago
Although undoubtedly successful in the water, some protowhales were still tied to the land. One fossil of Maiacetus, a 2.6 m-long creature that lived in coastal southern Asia, included a foetus that likely would have been born headfirst – a strong sign that birth would have occurred on shore.

~35 million years ago
The whale family tree splits into the two groups known today, the toothed whales (odontocetes, including sperm whales, orcas and porpoises) and the baleen whales (mysticetes, including fin whales, humpbacks and blue whales). Although all mysticetes today are filter-feeders and have no teeth, the earliest members of this lineage were toothed.

35–18 million years ago
A variety of toothed baleen whales filled the ecological roles of today’s seals and small toothed whales. Some grabbed prey as odontocetes do, some suctioned food from the sea floor, and others gulped mouthfuls of prey-laden water and filtered them through gaps between their teeth, as their modern-day, baleen-sporting kin do.

28  million years ago
The first known mysticetes without teeth (and therefore presumed to have sported baleen) cruised the seas.

8–10 million years ago
All known baleen whales of this era measured less than 10 m long, despite having adaptations that enabled lunge-feeding.

5–7 million years ago
Baleen whales experience a growth spurt, with the largest species more than 20 m long. This may have resulted from dramatic increases in ocean productivity, enabling lunge-feeding whales to take advantage of an energy-efficient mode of catching their prey.

Today
Blue whales are the largest creatures ever to have lived on Earth – not as long as the longest dinosaurs, but they outweigh the heftiest known dino by more than 50%.

Tomorrow
Will whales evolve to gain even greater size, or have humans seen the largest whales ever to swim the seas? Some analyses suggest that the energy efficiency of lunge-feeding in blue whales, the largest species to use the technique, may be approaching its limit.

Sid Perkins is a Tennessee-based science writer who specialises in Earth and planetary sciences and palaeontology.

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Well, I am serious, and hundreds of studies back me up. This is because in cognitive science we think about animal intelligence a little differently. For one thing, when judging the intelligence of animals, we measure their reproductive success. In some cases, like cockroaches, this doesn’t have much to do with intelligence: they are just very hardy and excellent reproducers. But with other animals, surviving takes a little more intellect, and a very specific kind of intellect.

With this as our starting point, dogs are arguably the most the successful mammals on the planet, besides us. They have spread to all corners of the world, including inside our homes and in some cases, onto our beds. While the populations of most mammals have declined steeply as a result of human activities, there have never been more dogs on the planet than today.

In the industrialised world, people are having fewer children than ever, but are providing a lavish lifestyle for a growing population of pet dogs. Meanwhile, dogs are increasingly assisting people with disabilities, finding bombs, doing guard duty, and detecting illegally imported goods, bed bugs and even some types of cancer.

I am fascinated with the kind of intelligence that has allowed dogs to be so successful. Whatever it is, this must be their genius.

SO, WHAT IS GENIUS? A cognitive approach tells us there are different kinds of intelligence. Someone can be gifted with one type of cognition while being average or below average in another.

Consider Steve Jobs. One biographer asked: “Was he smart?” No, not exceptionally. Jobs dropped out of college, went to find himself in India, and was forced out of Apple, the company he co-founded, when sales were slow in 1985. Few could have predicted the level of success he reached by the time he died in 2012. Jobs may have been average or unexceptional in many domains, but his vision and ability to think differently made him a genius.

The Cognitive Revolution changed the way we thought about intelligence. In the 1960s, rapid advances in computer technology allowed scientists to think differently about the brain and how it solves problems. Instead of the brain being more or less full of intelligence, like a glass of wine, it was seen more like a computer, where different parts work together and many parts are specialised for solving different types of problems.

Many definitions of intelligence compete for attention in popular culture. One of the best-studied cognitive abilities is memory. Someone having an extraordinary memory for facts and figures is what we usually think of as a genius, since these people often score off the charts in IQ tests. But just as there are different types of intelligence, there are different types of memory: for faces, navigating, events that occurred recently or long ago – the list goes on.

The definition of genius that has guided my research is a simple one. There are two criteria: first, a mental skill that is strong compared to others, within a species or in closely related species; and second, the ability to spontaneously make inferences.

Experiments by author Brian Hare (pictured) have demonstrated dogs’ ability to make inferences. Credit: Dognition

GENIUS IS ALWAYS relative. Certain people are considered geniuses because they are better than others at solving a specific type of problem. In animals, researchers are usually more interested in what a species as a whole is capable of, rather than individual animals.

Arctic terns have a genius for navigation. Each year, they fly from the Arctic to Antarctica and back. Whales have an ingenious way of cooperating to catch fish. They create a massive wall of bubbles that traps schools of fish, netting a much heartier dinner than if they hunted alone (see ‘Animal smarts’, p44).

Even though animals cannot talk, we can pinpoint their particular genius by giving them puzzles. These can teach us about how they think: they need to make choices, and those choices reveal their cognitive abilities. By presenting the same puzzle to different species, we can identify different types of animal genius.

Since any bird would seem like a genius at navigation compared to an earthworm, it helps to compare closely-related species. That way, if one species has a special ability that a close relative does not, we can identify genius and also, more interestingly, ask why and how that genius exists.

By giving different types of memory puzzles to these closely-related species, scientists have been able to discern each species’ unique form of genius. And by observing the problems each species encounters in the wild, scientists have also been able to understand why two species show different types of genius.

As with people, just because a species looks like a genius in one area, doesn’t mean it is a genius in others. Ant species are impressive in how they cooperate, for instance. Army ants can form living bridges over water, enabling others to cross over on their back. But ants have one severe limitation – they are not always very flexible.

Most ants are programmed to follow the scent trails of the ants ahead of them. In the tropics, you can find what is called an ant mill where hundreds of thousands of ants walk in a perfect circle that resembles a crawling black hole. Ant mills have been observed up to 365 m in diameter, with a single lap taking up to 2.5 hours to complete. These ant mills are also known as ant death spirals, because often the ants mindlessly follow each other in tightening circles until they exhaust themselves and die.

This leads into the second definition of genius – the ability to make inferences. Humans make inferences constantly. Imagine speeding toward an intersection. Even without seeing the traffic light, you can infer it is red when you see cars entering the intersection from the cross street.

Nature is far less predictable than traffic. When an animal encounters a problem in the wild, there is not always time to slowly find a solution through trial and error. One mistake can mean life or death. Hence, animals need to make inferences – fast.

Even when animals can’t see the correct solution, they can imagine different solutions and choose between them. This leads to a lot of flexibility. They might solve a new version of a problem they have seen before, or they might solve new problems they’ve never seen before.

YOYO IS A CHIMPANZEE living at Ngamba Island Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Uganda. In an experiment, she watched as someone put a peanut through the opening of a long transparent tube. Yoyo’s fingers were too short to reach the peanut, there were no sticks to use as a tool to reach it, and the tube was fixed and could not be turned upside down. Undaunted, Yoyo made an inference. She collected water in her mouth from the drinking fountain and spit it into the tube. The peanut floated to the top and she happily gobbled it up. Yoyo realised she could make the peanut float even though no water was visible when she thought of her solution. In the wild, her ability to make an inference like this could mean the difference between a good meal and starvation.

John Pilley, a retired psychology professor, adopted an eight-week-old border collie named Chaser. Typical of the breed, Chaser loved to chase and herd, she had intense visual concentration, she loved to be petted and praised, and she had limitless energy. Pilley had read of Rico, a border collie who knew at least 200 German words, previously studied by Julianne Kaminski, and he was interested in whether there was a limit to the number of names a dog could learn. Or if the memory of some of the older objects would fade as Chaser learned the names of new objects.

Chaser learned the names of one or two toys a day. Pilley would hold up the toy and say: “Chaser, this is… Pop hide. Chaser find…” Pilley did not use food to motivate Chaser. Instead he used praise, hugs and play as rewards for finding the right toy.

Over three years, Chaser learned names for more than 1,000 objects: 800 stuffed toys, 116 balls, 26 Frisbees and more than 100 plastic objects. There were no duplicates, and the objects differed in size, weight, texture, design and material.

She was tested every day, and to be sure she wasn’t ‘cheating’ by getting hints from anyone, every month, she did a ‘blind’ test, where she had to fetch objects in a different room, out of sight of Pilley and her trainers.

Even after Chaser learned more than 1,000 words, there was no decrease in the rate at which she learned new words. Even more impressive, the objects Chaser had learned were organised in a variety of categories in her mind. The objects came in different shapes and sizes, but Chaser could distinguish between objects that were her toys and objects that were non-toys.

Chaser and Rico seemed to be learning words in a way similar to human infants. Dogs infer that a new word belongs to a new toy. Rico and Chaser knew the new word could not refer to their familiar toys since they already had names. That left only a toy without a name as the possible answer.

This process of making inferences is critical to understanding how dogs think. In an experimental game, dogs were shown two cups. Only one cup hid a toy and the dogs were only given one chance to find it. When the experimenter briefly showed the cup where the toy was not hidden, some dogs spontaneously inferred the toy must be in the other cup.

UNTIL RECENTLY, SCIENCE hasn’t taken the genius of dogs very seriously. Dogs’ abilities to learn new words could have been discovered as early as 1928. That year, C.J. Warden and L.H. Warner reported on a German shepherd named Fellow. Fellow was something of a film star, and his most memorable role was saving a child from drowning in the movie Chief of the Pack.

Fellow’s owner contacted the scientists and reported that Fellow had learned almost 400 words, and that he understood “these words in much the same manner as a child under the same circumstances would”. He had raised Fellow almost from birth and talked to him the way you would to a child.

Warden and Warner went to examine the dog. They had his owner give commands from another room, so he would not unwittingly give Fellow any extra cues. They found that Fellow knew at least 68 commands, (some of them helpful to a canine movie star) such as ‘speak’, ‘stand close to the lady’, ‘take a walk around the room’. Others were more impressive, such as ‘go into the other room and get my gloves’.

The scientists concluded that, although Fellow had nowhere near the abilities of a child, more research was needed to understand this type of intelligence in dogs. Unfortunately, this call was not answered until Kaminski undertook her research on Rico in 2004.

In the intervening 75 years, dogs were largely ignored. When scientists began studying animal cognition in the 1970s, they were more interested in our primate relatives. Eventually, enthusiasm extended to other animals, from dolphins to crows. Dogs were mostly left out because they were domesticated, and seen as artificial products of human breeding.

In 1995, I began testing dogs’ intelligence. I discovered that instead of domestication making our best friends stupid, our relationship with dogs gave them an extraordinary kind of intelligence. Almost simultaneously, on the other side of the world, Adam Miklosi conducted a study similar to ours and independently came to the same conclusion.

These studies caused an explosion in the field of dog cognition. Suddenly, people from all sorts of disciplines realised what had been under our noses the whole time – dogs are one of the most important species we can study. Not because they have become soft and complacent compared to their wild cousins, but because they were smart enough to come in from the cold and become part of the family.

This is an edited extract from The Genius of Dogs: How Dogs Are Smarter Than You Think, published by Penguin, by evolutionary biologist Brian Hare and author Vanessa Woods, both from Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

The post A different kind of genius appeared first on COSMOS magazine.

But what if you get some stripey mice like zebras? How do you explain that? All parts of the mouse have the gene that can make black fur but the blackness only occurs in some places. Think of dalmatian dogs, or of giraffes or leopards.

Epigenetics is about turning genes on or off. It’s also about doing this stably; a leopard doesn’t change its spots even if it sheds its fur each year. So epigenetics is about stable cellular memory that persists after cell division and, in some cases, even through sexual reproduction.

Epigenetics, then, concerns the mechanisms that make organisms or parts of organisms look different, despite the fact they have the same genes and are in the same environment.

The beginning of epigenetics

Epigenetics is also involved in regulating genes at different times.

Episodes of disease are a relevant example. Recently, there was an interesting article about herpes. That disease is caused by a virus that infects nerve cells. When the virus is inactive and its genes are not expressed, there are no symptoms. But, for reasons that are not fully understood, the virus occasionally comes alive, its genes are expressed and symptoms occur.

This example is interesting because it reflects some of the earliest work on epigenetics. Researchers worked on viruses called bacteriophage, which infect bacteria. The viral DNA integrates into the bacterial genome.

If it is active, the virus expresses its genes, which make more viruses, and the cell bursts, releasing viral progeny. But sometimes, the viral genes remain unexpressed. The bacteria can divide and multiply for many generations, all the time carrying their deadly viral cargo, but the viral genes are not expressed.

Then, eventually, the virus may awake, express its genes, make progeny, and burst the cell.

These patterns of viral genes being on or off – sometimes for eons in terms of bacterial generations – fascinated early geneticists, such as Francois Jacob, Jacques Monod, Francis Crick and Mark Ptashne, who was once the head of biochemistry at Harvard.

The viral genes were not changing – the virus progeny were the same when they burst from the cell. But the expression of the genes was changing – off then on. There was some sort of change in state that could be inherited.

If the genes were not changing by mutation, then something on top of the genetics was changing – there was a change in epigenetic state.

Similarly, the white stripes in the zebra are not thought to be due to mutations. Something has settled down on top of the gene and silenced it – in some places or at some times and not others. What could this be?

Epigenetic regulators

The answer is a repressor, such as a DNA-binding protein. At Harvard, Mark Ptashne identified the first repressors.

Today Keith Shearwin and colleagues at the University of Adelaide continue this work and have mathematical models elegantly describing how complex control circuits of repressing or activating DNA-binding proteins with different binding affinities and half-lives can explain the stable epigenetic states of bacterial viruses.

When humans and plants were studied, another mechanism associated with epigenetic control was observed. This new mechanism is fascinating and widespread. And it appears to be displacing the original broader definition.

In humans and plants, the major new epigenetic mechanism concerns chemical modifications of particular genes – typically the marking of certain genes with methyl groups.

The methyl groups are either attached to the DNA itself – this mostly leads to silencing of the gene – or to proteins that coat the DNA, called histones. The patterns of marks can be stable over time and the DNA marks at least can be replicated, so epigenetic states can affect parts of the organism for life or can even cross generations.

But there is some controversy here because it is not certain that histone marks can be directly inherited when a cell divides or when a new organism is formed via sexual reproduction. It seems more likely that DNA-binding proteins or functional RNAs resident in the cell are involved in re-establishing the epigenetic marks in each new daughter cell.

A recent commentary on epigenetics in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) triggered two spirited responses, one in PNAS and one in Current Biology.

The reason was simple: enthusiasm for the histone code – the modification of proteins coating DNA – was obscuring the usual view that feedback loops generated by DNA-binding transcription factor proteins, and their allies functional RNAs, are the primary mediators of stable patterns of gene expression.

The important point that the review in PNAS failed to acknowledge was that epigenetics isn’t just about methylation, it’s more about control proteins and RNAs laying down the methylation marks.

In fact, it’s well known that epigenetic control occurs in organisms that have either no DNA methylation or no histones. So clearly methylation could not be an essential mediator of epigenetic control.

Epigenetics and Lamarckian inheritance

So why is epigenetics so exciting and controversial?

The field attracted public attention in part because it provided a mechanism for Lamarckian inheritance. The idea that we can learn from our environment and pass characteristics to our offspring has long been popular but the understanding of modern Darwinian mechanisms left little room for such ideas.

But in some special cases, acquired characteristics, such as viral infections or epigenetic marks imposed by DNA-binding proteins that respond to the environment, could be passed from one cell to its offspring. The total contributions of such mechanisms to human biology are not known. And while most researchers would consider them small, there are others who are invigorated by the possibilities.

Epigenetics and the inheritance of stable states is important in normal development, in disease, in ageing and in explaining wondrous things such as zebra’s stripes and butterflies’ wings. Research in the broader world of epigenetics will provide fascinating and important insights for many years to come.

Merlin Crossley is Dean of Science and Professor of Molecular Biology at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.

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RR: Why do you write science fiction?

CJC: Science fiction is what I read. As a child, I liked adventures, exploration, ‘what-ifs’ and fairy tales. I liked sea stories and memorised all the parts of a clipper ship before I was eight. And this was in landlocked Oklahoma. Before I was nine, I wanted to see mountains taller than the Wichitas and I wanted to see an ocean. I wanted to see a narwhal. I wanted to ride camels and explore the desert. I halfway believed in lost worlds.

Around that year, some fireworks blew up at a county fair display, so the show was cancelled. My father and I walked toward the parking lot, and I was dejected about the loss of the fireworks. And then my dad said urgently: “Look up!” He pointed to a shooting star. There was immediately another. And another. “Celestial fireworks,” he said, and we sat out there and watched the most magnificent meteorite fall I’ve ever seen. That was when I became aware of the heavens.

And when I was 10, at a summer camp, and needed a packet from home, my dad bought me a paperback book and included it with Mum’s gifts of cookies and the practicalities of clean underwear. It was Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan and the City of Gold. I was hooked. I read everything Burroughs wrote… and it was a short hop to John Carter of Mars, Flash Gordon, and to the wide universe. I became hooked on Flash Gordon – the Buster Crabbe version – and when the series ended, I was so bereft, I started writing my own stories with my own characters – because I had heard about plagiarism. I never stopped after that. I wrote obsessively, every day. And still do.

You’ve been praised for building intricate, believable worlds. How do you incorporate science into this process?

My academic background is in linguistics and the ancient world. I’ve studied geology, climatology, planetary weather, archaeology, history, anthropology and animal behaviour. When I build a world, it’s from the core outward, and evolution upward.

Your characters are often outsiders – the last of their kind, or separated from their species. Is this deliberate?

I like writing about other cultures… but you don’t [necessarily] get to know them if you place them in conflict, or have only one individual from that culture under a microscope. First contact is an interesting scenario, but in the real world of science, if it’s going to go well, it will take time. The Foreigner books, for instance, have the initial contact scenario – but the action starts two centuries later. And travelling about the world, often with only one companion, I’ve found myself in the outsider’s position, having to use my skills at interpretation and having to solve problems, while knowing very little about the language.

How would you describe your writing process, and do you have any writing tips?

My most basic hint is – study everything. Nothing on or off a planet, inside or outside of a star system, is irrelevant to your study. Even bubblegum pop is a phenomenon worth understanding. Think cosmically, and make it understandable for John and Jane Smith, householders, with a mortgage, and a life grown perhaps more sedentary than they ever wished. Give them adventures. Make them think. Carry them to places they need to go and make their lives happier. Writing? I can do that lying on a hillside watching the clouds go by.

You’ve made a strong push to provide e-books without digital rights management to your fans. What challenges have you faced?

It’s a continually moving target: formats change, formats die, new devices arrive, rights are in question, pirates try to claim your work as theirs, and getting your readers to know where to find your work is a challenge. But my readers are clever folk, and very good people. I maintain an online presence where I can talk and listen directly to readers, and they are beyond supportive and good-hearted. I always feel happy when I’ve been exchanging ideas with them.

Apart from Foreigner, what’s on your horizon?

I’ll be doing another in the Cyteen universe – and I’ll be looking, too, at some of my ‘orphaned’ series, series that one publisher brought out, and then that publisher evaporated, changed focus, or otherwise dissipated on me: and of course none of the other publishers want to take up an abandoned series in today’s market – and that has left a whole set of stories untold. So I’ll be putting out some new things in e-format only, under my own imprint. I’ll be thinking up new things. And I’ll be working steadily… three house moves in seven years kind of slowed me down, but I’m settled now in a very nice place – we’ve even built a koi pond – and life is good.

Image credit: Sharon Reynolds/Wikimedia

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British-born Peter Pringle spent 30 years as a foreign correspondent, writing for magazines and newspapers such as The New York Times, The Observer and The Atlantic. Now based in New York City, he has authored or co-authored eight books, most recently a story of a famous scientific rip-off that followed the discovery of a cure for tuberculosis. He chats to COSMOS reviews editor Rivqa Rafael about the controversy.

RR: Why did you write Experiment Eleven?

PP: About 10 years ago I started writing books about science and politics. I got the bug for investigative journalism – about politics, war and corruption. I thought I could take on Margaret Mead’s memorable phrase about adding to the sum of accurate information in the world. A friend of mine who’s a dean of environmental sciences at Rutgers University said: “Why don’t you come and have a look in the archives in the basement – there’s a good story about discovery and about relationships between the professor and the student.” It’s not a new genre, but it was a very good story.

It must be quite a common story, where credit for research is taken unfairly.

One could go through the list. Did Pythagoras come up with his theorem or the Babylonians? Did Charles Darwin come up with the idea of evolution or was it Alfred Russell Wallace? Did Marconi invent the radio? I would say no – Alexander Popov, definitely. Yes, it’s a well-trodden field. And then there’s a law, Stigler’s law of eponymy: “no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer”. It’s named for Stephen Stigler, a professor of statistics at the University of Chicago; but the idea was sociologist Robert Merton’s.

Selman Waksman was a Russian Jew who fled tsarist Russia in 1910 and took his degree at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He went to California for his PhD and came back to the department of microbiology, which in those days was a very young science. Up the road from Rutgers was the headquarters of Merck, the pharmaceutical company, and they were engaged in producing penicillin for gram-positive [bacterial] infection. They were desperate for something to treat gram-negative infections and gave Waksman a small stipend to set up a lab and search for it. He found several, but they were all too toxic. Along came Albert Schatz, also of Russian Jewish background, and he started working with Waksman as a graduate student. In 1943, he was searching around in a petri dish for something that would produce a decent antibiotic and he found one. And there came streptomycin.

Stealing the credit may be common, but a court case is a much less frequent outcome…

Absolutely. Some say it was the first. In 1944, it became clear that streptomycin was the first effective cure of tuberculosis. Until then, Waksman and Schatz’s relationship had been like that of a father and son. But Waksman began to exclude Schatz from reporters wanting to write up the miracle cure. Waksman wanted Schatz out of the way so he could claim sole credit for the discovery of streptomycin.

But then there’s a knotty question of the patent and the royalties. Initially, Merck was going to get the patent in return for funding Waksman, but for various reasons they couldn’t. So Rutgers took the patent back and, because Schatz was indeed one of the discoverers, there was this famous meeting between professor and student where the professor says “now sign this piece of paper, we’re signing it over to the university and we agree that neither of us will profit from this and it will all go to the good of mankind”. Several years later Schatz found out that Waksman had done a deal to get 20% of the royalties. Schatz had a street-smart uncle, who was a dentist. And he said: “Sue them. Sue the university, sue your professor, get your rightful place in history.” And he did. Schatz was recognised by the court as a co-discoverer of streptomycin and was given a percentage of the royalties and a lump sum – most of which went to his lawyer. Nonetheless, he got about US$12,000 a year for the life of the patent. So he came off OK, except two years later when Waksman alone received a Nobel Prize “for the discovery for streptomycin”.

Was it anything more than oversight?

Well, basically, yes. The prize is given for published papers on the particular topic. They don’t look at back-and-forth disputes between the discoverers, they just judge who was the most important person in that discovery. It’s a bit of that old European hierarchical tradition of the professor taking the credit. Schatz was nominated the same year with Waksman by somebody else, but they didn’t look at it. They regarded Schatz as a bench worker, under the direction of the maestro. In his acceptance lecture, Waksman did not mention Schatz, except in a list of his researchers in an appendix.

Does this kind of thing still happen?

There are lots of disputed Nobels still, aren’t there? The Nobel is the ultimate accolade in science. It separates receivers of the award from all other scientists like no other prize. It creates role models. It’s a very tricky business. The Nobel Committee as set up has a difficult choice to make; in the first place by selecting the right discovery, but then in the second, because the Nobel can still only be awarded to three people. And in biology, particularly now, many more than three people might be involved in the evolution of a discovery.

Coming from a broader journalistic background, how did you come to write about science?

My original degree was a science degree; I was a geologist for a year. I went on a quasi-expedition with a friend, and we drove from London to Tehran. The idea was that there were these ammonites in Dorset in the Jurassic, and if you could find them in the Alborz Mountains, north of Tehran, then you knew that during the Jurassic period, the sea extended across that landmass. And we found them. However, this momentous discovery was not what I thought I ought to be doing with the rest of my life. I’d always wanted to be a journalist. But I retained this love of science and, having written about politics and wars for 30 years as a foreign correspondent, I was very happy to go back to it. I’ve never been to Australia and I’ve always tried to get something to work on there. It might just work out with the next book. I hope so.

Image credit: Bloomsbury

The post In conversation with Peter Pringle appeared first on COSMOS magazine.

The first array zilched the couple’s electrical bill. The second freed them from the petrol pump. Both, he estimates, will pay for themselves in about 6.5 years, thanks to tax credits and a California law that lets them sell home-generated power to the grid at market rates. That means that on summer days, when owners of less-efficient homes are dialling up the air conditioning, they can sell power at peak rates… buying back in the evenings what they need for such uses as laundry or charging the cars, at as little as one-fifth the daytime price.

Parrott’s and Iwahashi’s lifestyle is a model for a decentralised energy future in which people generate their own energy, much as our ancestors once raised their own vegetables. But is it realistic?

Futurist and science-fiction writer Brenda Cooper, based in Seattle, Washington, thinks that such energy self-sufficiency is indeed the wave of the future. In part, she says, it will be driven by the desire to insulate us from the worst effects of climate change. “Bigger and broader storm systems are knocking out our old power grid pretty easily,” she says. “More self-sufficiency will allow households and businesses to be free of the grid. In a climate-change challenged world, this will be seen as a smart move.”

But if we’re striving for a carbon-neutral future to put the brakes on climate change, rooftop collectors may not be enough. Even Parrott and Iwahashi aren’t completely off the grid. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, residential needs account for only 22% of American energy use. It takes energy to build the couple’s cars, run the offices where they work, pave the streets they drive on, and build their energy-efficient house.

By 2063, it’s projected that the world will have more than nine billion people, all demanding developed-world standards of living. And while there is much to be gained from conservation, history says we find ever-new ways of using energy. Thom Mason is director of Tennessee-based Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which carries out much of America’s energy research. “Our standard of living is defined by energy consumption,” says Mason. “Standard of living equals energy use, and vice versa.”

Meeting this need will be difficult with conventional energy sources. “You can’t make the numbers add,” Mason says. “The demand will exceed what we can support and the environmental consequences would be pretty infeasible.”

This can be seen as an incredibly pessimistic point of view: a prescription for war, poverty, and – if we continue relying on fossil fuels – global environmental collapse. It’s also a challenge. “That’s why we need better alternatives,” Mason says.

HAPPILY, THERE ARE several alternatives, of which solar is one of the leading contenders – especially in Australia, where the nation’s entire electrical needs could be met by a perfectly efficient 50 x 50 km solar array in the sunniest portion of the desert. “Land is not an issue,” says Wes Stein, renewable energy manager at the National Solar Energy Centre, in Newcastle, north of Sydney. “There’s certainly enough to go around.”

Today, there are two basic solar technologies in use: photovoltaics, which generate electricity directly from light; and concentrated solar power (CSP), which uses mirrors to produce heat by focussing light.

Currently, photovoltaic cells are the primary form of solar power. Although they still represent less than 0.1% of total global energy production, they’re a proven technology that has been steadily dropping in price ever since NASA and other space agencies realised they were a good way to produce electricity for satellites and spacecraft.

For years, though, photovoltaics were viewed as too expensive for anything but specialised uses such as powering instruments at remote weather stations. However, just as the computer industry boasts Moore’s Law, which states that computing power doubles every two years, photovoltaic technology has Swanson’s Law. Named for Richard Swanson, founder of a California solar-panel manufacturing company, this rule-of-thumb holds that solar-panel prices drop 20% with each doubling of the industry.

That’s still not enough to let everyone live like Parrott and Iwahashi – their home-energy system is affordable only because of the fortuitous mix of California sunshine, tax breaks, and the state’s buy–sell law that allows them to take advantage of the difference between peak and off-peak rates. But the day is drawing nearer when solar might be able to stand on its own. According to data collected by energy market research group Bloomberg New Energy Finance, solar cell prices have fallen by a factor of more than 100 since 1997.

THE OTHER PRIMARY solar energy technology is CSP. The concept is simple… and ancient. As far back as 213 or 214 BC, Archimedes reputedly used the same principle to set fire to invading warships by having the defenders of his city focus sunlight on the ships using handheld mirrors. Modern attempts to replicate this feat have cast doubt on whether it was truly possible with the technology of his era, but the theory is well established. It’s the same one used by scouts the world over to start a fire with a magnifying glass or construct a solar oven for baking bread. With a large enough array of mirrors, CSP technology can be ramped up sufficiently to build large power plants that could replace their fossil-fuel counterparts. The only thing that’s different is the source of heat.

The hold-up comes from the combination of construction costs and thermodynamics. CSP ‘fuel’ – sunlight – is free, but the high-performance mirrors used to concentrate it are expensive. So to compete with fossil fuels, CSP plants need to be more efficient. That, in turn, requires temperatures at the focus to be quite hot.

“Thermodynamic theory says that if you increase operating temperature, you increase efficiency,” says Stein. In theory, the solution is simple: just focus the heat more intensely. But it turns out that if you do this, things start to burn up like Archimedes’s invading warships – not literally, but chemically, as the heat takes a toll on turbine blades and pipes.

One solution is to wait for metallurgists to develop alloys that can better withstand extreme conditions. Another is to make the turbine more efficient without changing the temperature – a boon not only to CSP, but also to existing fossil-fuel plants. Current turbines use two ‘cycles’ for tapping heat for electricity. Steam turbines boil water, then use the expanding steam to spin the turbine blades. Unfortunately, they lose large amounts of energy in the process of converting the steam back to water for the next cycle. Gas turbines bypass this by using hot gases that never have to be re-liquified, but lose comparable amounts of energy by having to re-compress the gas at the start of each cycle.

An alternative that’s drawing increasing attention is using supercritical carbon dioxide instead of water or gas – which, like the materials used in existing turbine cycles, is continuously reused, not released into the atmosphere to contribute to global warming. A supercritical fluid is a substance normally thought of as a gas, held at a combination of high temperatures and pressures that give it the characteristics of both a gas and a liquid. Since it doesn’t have to be re-liquified after each cycle, there’s no energy lost. Nor is there any need to waste energy re-compressing it.

The result might be a 25% to 35% increase in efficiency. “The coal, nuclear and CSP industries are all starting to look at that cycle,” Stein says, though the greatest benefits might be to CSP because it has the highest-cost source of energy, due to the expense of the mirrors.

Shifting to supercritical carbon dioxide can also be done at temperatures common for conventional steam or gas turbines. “You need only 700°C to 800°C, and that’s pretty doable with the metals available today,” Stein says.

WHAT WILL THE energy world of 2063 look like? “Who knows? There may be things we can’t even envision,” says Alan Krupnick, environmental and resource economist with Resources for the Future, a think tank based in Washington, DC. He lists hydrogen fuel cells, and improved battery technology “because that’s a possible game-changer”. But it’s just as likely the mix will be much like 2013’s – including wind, nuclear, biomass and old-fashioned fossil fuel.

Wind is the poster child for alternative-energy success. Every summer day, in America’s Pacific Northwest, a parade of giant trucks heads out along the freeway from Portland, Oregon, carrying giant pylons and turbine blades into the sagebrush steppes of the eastern Columbia River Gorge, which funnels gale-force winds from the Pacific Ocean into the inland desert. In Oregon, wind power already accounts for around 10% of electrical needs. Other places have done even better. In Spain, wind energy now supplies 16% of national electricity demand. In Denmark, it’s more than 25%.

Australia currently lags at just 2%, says Jonathan Whale, a wind-energy researcher at Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia. But wind farms, he says, will be the nation’s “go-to” form of renewable energy if it plans to meet its renewable energy target of 20% by 2020. And greater progress might come in the future, he says, if wind farms move offshore, where larger components can be brought in by barge.

Wind power has its disadvantages. Like solar, it’s fickle. There are two ways to deal with that. One is to interconnect numerous wind and solar plants onto a single large grid, thereby averaging out the fluctuations. But that can make one city’s power dependent on another region’s weather. If the wind changes dramatically in the Baltic (where much of Europe’s wind power is generated) the electricity supply in the Czech Republic becomes unstable, notes Mason. “And they’re a pretty long way from where the wind is.”

The other solution is to find ways to store energy for later use. When most people think of storing electrical power, they think of batteries. But at gigawatt levels these would be enormous, and absurdly expensive. A better way to do it, says Stein, is through “thermal storage” – a method that’s particularly appealing for heat-based generators such as CSP facilities.

This works by storing excess heat in well-insulated vaults of… well, anything hot. Ideally, the material would also be dense, so it wouldn’t require vats the size of supertankers to hold enough of it. “Molten salt is an example,” says Stein. “Nearly all of the CSP projects in Spain and the U.S. are integrating molten salt storage. When the clouds come over, or it’s night-time, you use the heat to generate steam.”

Another way of storing energy would be via thermochemistry, in which excess heat is used to drive high-energy chemical reactions uphill – that is, in the direction in which energy is added, rather than released. “So, you store the energy as chemical energy rather than straight-out heat,” Stein says. One advantage, he notes, is that you can store energy that way indefinitely. “You don’t have to worry about heat leaking out.”

Similar chemical processes can be used to produce solar fuels. In the early 2000s, there was much talk of a hydrogen economy in which hydrogen fuel cells replace petrol. Hydrogen does have a major advantage in that it’s pollution-free. When you burn it, the only byproduct is water. There’s just one problem: hydrogen is a beast to handle. It’s explosive. Its tiny molecules easily permeate out of storage containers. It can turn pipeline metals brittle. And to use it in a car, you need to either liquefy it or compress it, either of which takes a lot of energy.

Better, argues Ellen Stechel, deputy director of Lightworks, a solar-power project at Arizona State University in Tempe, is to take that hydrogen, and produce something easier to use – such as solar-derived petrol. Stechel’s work grew out of an interest in finding ways to make synthetic aviation fuels, other than via biofuels (fuels derived from biomass), which cannot be generated in sufficient quantities to power the world if we still want to grow crops to eat.

But nobody’s going to make a commercially feasible, electric jetliner in the near future. Even electric cars have their disadvantages. No matter how cheap batteries become, the ones we have don’t recharge quickly and their weight reduces energy efficiency except in cars used solely for short-range commuting.

“The fuels we use today have really nice properties,” Stechel says, “high-energy density both by mass and volume.” They are also very convenient. “We can fuel very fast, whether it’s a big truck, an airplane, or a car. You can’t do that with hydrogen and you can’t do that with electricity.”

There’s also an advantage to using fuels we are already equipped to handle. “We have an enormous amount of infrastructure,” she says.

There are several ways to make such fuels from air, water, and sunlight, but Stechel’s focus is via CSP. If sunlight is focussed on a metal oxide, such as zinc or tin oxide, that oxide will give up its oxygen. In a reaction chamber, once this is cooled back down and exposed to a mix of steam and carbon dioxide, the metal atoms will “steal back the oxygen”, Stechel says, producing the original metal oxide (ready for reuse), plus carbon monoxide and hydrogen: “building blocks to make any hydrocarbon you like”. It’s not a far-out technology. “We believe it could be pushed to market in about a decade,” she says.

In the interim, it might be possible to make solar-hybrid fuels. These start with a fossil-fuel source, then add solar energy to make that fuel even better. An example, says Stein, is using solar energy to split natural gas into syngas – the same combination of hydrogen and carbon monoxide Stechel’s group is looking at making into pure solar fuels. “The solar-energy proportion is only 20% or 30%,” Stein says, but it’s a starting point. “Without even knowing it, consumers would be using solar energy.”

MORE PROBLEMATIC is the role of nuclear power. “My personal feeling is that we are suffering from a massive case of ‘Fukushima shock’,” says Krupnick. He’s referring to the Japanese reactor that, in the wake of a 2011 earthquake and tsunami, produced the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. It hasn’t helped, he adds, that ‘fracking’ technology, where high-pressure steam is used to fracture rock strata and release trapped gas reserves previously believed to be unobtainable, has produced a new boom in fossil-fuel production. “With low natural gas prices, there’s just no interest in nuclear.”

Mason believes the nuclear future (if we let it happen) will belong to small modular reactors and generation III nuclear plants. Small reactors are just that. They’re placed underground and produce 50 to 300 megawatts of power, which is far less than the thousands of megawatts derived from current reactors – more like the reactors long used on submarines and aircraft carriers. Because they’re smaller and underground, they’re safer, especially because they don’t need to keep large supplies of fuel on hand.

Generation III reactors are designed to be more failsafe than their predecessors. For example, the cooling system might be in a gravity-fed reservoir on the roof of the containment building. Cooling water would flow into the reactor via gravity, then heat to steam that would rise back to the roof, where it would cool and condense back into water for the next cooling cycle. The entire system is a continuous, passive loop relying only on the fact that water flows downhill and steam rises. “That’s a passive safety feature,” Mason says. “There is no need for operators or pumps.”

Another improvement, Mason says, is the use of “accident-tolerant fuels”. He says old-style fuels were encapsulated in zirconium alloys, which had the advantage of not absorbing neutrons (an impediment to reactor performance) but that, when overheated, cause water to disassociate into hydrogen and oxygen – the source of the explosion behind the Fukushima accident.

New-generation fuels are encapsulated in materials that don’t have this property. “If something happens and the system heats up, you don’t compound the problem by having this release of hydrogen,” Mason says. “It gives you a much greater safety margin.”

There’s more on the drawing board to massively reduce the quantities of nuclear waste, while increasing the efficiency of fuel. One of these is fuel recycling. “In the current fuel cycle, it’s only a [small] percentage of the potential energy that you’ve really used,” Mason says. “That means the waste volume per unit energy is large. You can do a whole lot better.”

One option is the breeder reactor, known since the 1940s, in which uranium-238 (which comprises 99% of natural uranium, but isn’t usable as reactor fuel) is converted to plutonium-239, an artificial, usable fuel. Another is the thorium fuel cycle, which converts thorium-232 into uranium-233, which doesn’t occur in nature but is a perfectly usable fuel source. “Because thorium is more abundant than uranium, there’s been renewed interest in this,” Mason says.

With these approaches, he adds, all of the world’s electricity could be generated from nuclear sources. But he continues, “I’m not sure that would be valuable or desirable. There’s a value in diversity of energy supply. I’m not sure you would want to put all your eggs in one basket.”

Nor does he expect fusion power to suddenly step up and fill the clean-energy gap, even in the next 50 years. “You
might hope that by the end of that timeframe, you’ve answered the scientific questions and are beginning to answer the engineering problems,” he says.

WHAT THIS MEANS is that the future will need a mix of energy facilities: centralised and decentralised – residential, commercial and industrial.

Few of the likely changes, however, will come quickly. Your mobile phone might be obsolete in two years, your laptop in five, but power plants are vastly more expensive, and designed to operate for decades. “The energy industry is very conservative and generally working with technologies that have 20, 30 or 40-plus-year asset lives,” says Stein.

Mason agrees. “Fifty years sounds like a long time, when you think about healthcare and information technology. But in ‘energy space’ 50 years is not very long. If you look at the time it’s taken for previous transitions – nuclear power, petroleum, before that, coal – each took half a century, and in some cases longer. You’re talking about capital investments that persist for 50-year timeframes. It can’t happen fast because the system has so much inertia in it.”

What this means is that new technologies may infiltrate the present power-generation system, but fossil fuels are likely to continue in use for a long time, at least until today’s plants wear out.

If more rapid shifts do occur, Stein says, they will probably be driven by climate change. “We just had a fairly severe heat wave on the east coast of Australia,” he says, “and we’re getting significant, abnormal climate events around the world. If something did happen, where significant heating led to significant drought that led to significant socionomic change, we could see a drastic acceleration in the move to these new technologies. But if it’s business as usual, you’ll probably wind up with a slow shift.”

If change does happen slowly, our lives may not be all that radically affected. “Ultimately, I don’t see that lifestyle should be affected,” Stein says. “If we do these technologies correctly, the consumer should not see any difference when they turn the switch or start their car. They should still get their electricity. They should still get from A to B in their vehicle. There should not be any noticeable effect at the end of the day except that, perhaps, the climate is cleaner.”

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THE AUSTRALIAN SPECULATIVE fiction (an umbrella term for science fiction, fantasy and related genres) community is small but perfectly formed. At Conflux 9, writers, artists, editors, publishers and fans mingled on largely equal footing. It’s Australia’s 52nd such convention, and the ninth in Canberra. Held from 25 to 28 April 2013 with some 270 attendees, it offered insights into the hearts of the genre and its people.

A window into humanity

According to Melbourne-based writer Claire McKenna, “science fiction is technology as a metaphor for the human condition”, and numerous panels explored such themes. ‘Am I not human?’ flitted between discussion of humanity’s biological basis, whether Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was more human than some of the ‘real’ people he encountered, and whether we’ll remain human as we continue to outsource our brains to Google. Here was literature as a window into the depths of psychology – relationships, body horror and fear of mortality.

Fear of death is a recurring theme, reappearing on a panel on ‘The ethics of immortality’. Panellists examined why people desire immortality and the costs of never dying. What might it mean for the planet – or even for science, with the suggestion that it might take one obsessive scientist a hundred years to cure cancer. The consequences of uploading yourself: How many copies should you make? Will you still be human? In place of answers, we had book suggestions; Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy and Iain Banks’s The Hydrogen Sonata were two of many.

The once and future genre

A panel on ‘What was great about SF when we were young?’ explored the genre’s future as well as its past. A recurring contention was the notion that science fiction is being displaced by fantasy because we are now living in the technological future of our past. But science fiction (in concert with science itself) is still our best guidebook for the future, and as such retains its value.

In later discussion, Perth-based librarian Grant Stone agreed, noting that Hugo Gernsback included science fiction in his science magazine in the early 20th century because he realised that it was a “nexus to keep the brain active and agile, and thinking about the potential for the future”, and was the only way prepare for the future and turn ideas to reality.

Optimism about the industry was obvious. “This is the most exciting time to be writing science fiction – or any speculative fiction – in Australia; it’s just booming here at the moment,” said Sean Williams, a writer based in Adelaide. “You can tell by walking around Conflux – the number of published authors has got to be at an all-time high.” Stone agreed, and pointed out that there’s quality as well as quantity. “I’ve never been to a con with so many book launches,” he exulted. “The literature is being raised to such a standard, and being praised by people who know. It’s a very healthy time.”

Publisher and editor Russell Farr, of Perth-based Ticonderoga Publications, noted that “people with good science knowledge can write amazing things”, but that Australian sci-fi writers tend to be snapped up by large publishers, mainly overseas, perhaps giving an impression that the nation produces less science fiction. He also pointed to a culture less likely to venerate science and its achievements: “We don’t put up statues of scientists, despite being proud of the things Australians invent. But our science fiction writers put us on the world stage first – people like Greg Egan, Damien Broderick, A. Bertram Chandler.”

We the people

Conflux 9 might have brimmed over with ideas, but the people expressing these thoughts and drinking them in were what made the event. Co-chairperson and writer Donna Maree Hanson noted that what struck her when she was new to conventions was the egalitarian feel; at these events, writers, publishers and fans mix freely at the bar and elsewhere, discussing big ideas and sharing knowledge as friends and colleagues. “Some of us only get to see each other once a year,” writer and COSMOS fiction editor Cat Sparks said. “It’s like a family reunion.”

Con highlights

* On the first evening, COSMOS fiction editor’s first short story collection, The Bride Price, was launched by Sean Williams to a packed-out room. By early accounts, it’s a dark collection of science fiction and some fantasy.

* The Ditmars award ceremony, which featured real-time Lego building, and cheeky hosting and live tweeting.

* The sense of home felt while in a panel where most panellists and audience members seemed to know every Doctor Who episode by heart.

* Some confusion about the difference between science and science fiction – from other hotel guests.

Old fella in the bar: Bloody busy in here. Me: Yeah, sorry. It’s the National Science Fiction Convention. Him: Bloody scientists! #Conflux9

— AlanBaxter (@AlanBaxter) April 27, 2013

The post The state of flux appeared first on COSMOS magazine.

It’s early January 2013, and these experts from across the globe have come to Australia’s southerly island state for a meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Hobart’s weather generally tends toward mild and damp; cold winds from Antarctica regularly bring snow to the rocky peak of nearby Mount Wellington. Over the past century or so, the city’s average January maximum has been just 21°C.

Yet, during the previous week, Hobart had experienced its hottest day on record, with the temperature soaring above 40°C. Instead of clouds, the sky was wreathed in smoke. In the nearby fishing village of Dunalley, 80 homes, some 30% of the town, were destroyed by bushfires. Hundreds of residents were evacuated by boat from the Tasman Peninsula.

The scientists are here to help finalise sections of the IPCC’s latest and massively complex assessment report, the fifth such mammoth document released over the past 25 years. Part of their job is to outline the range of possible future climates humanity can expect over the coming decades.

A few weeks earlier, a draft version of the report was leaked on a blog by a climate sceptic who was also one of the experts engaged in the review process. The report is due to be released in three stages, beginning in September 2013, and wording may change. As it is, the draft suggests that 50 years from now, average surface air temperatures could be between 1°C and 2°C warmer than they were in the early 2000s. This is on top of a warming of about 0.8°C already recorded since the Industrial Revolution.

Other organisations have released more worrying forecasts. In November 2012, a report for the World Bank compiled by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany warned that, if governments fail to meet current mitigation pledges and commitments, the average global temperature could rise 4°C above pre-industrial temperatures by as early as the 2060s. In line with the IPCC, most of the experts I spoke with for this story said while this kind of hike was possible, by mid century, rises of the order of 1°C or 2°C were more likely, with further increases to follow.

Even this kind of rise approaches a level of warming that governments agree would risk dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. During a coffee break at the Hobart meeting I chatted with Andy Pitman, a climate modeller who directs the ARC Centre for Climate System Science at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney. A straight-talking man, he’s more than a little exasperated as he explains that much of the fundamental understanding of climate science is settled.

“There is zero disagreement over whether the Earth will warm if we continue to put nine billion tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year,” he says. “That’s just not up for discussion, which is why we find the debates with the sceptics so tedious. It’s like arguing the toss over whether the average car has four wheels or not.”

As the scientists begin filing back into their meeting rooms, I ask Pitman how likely we are to stay under the 2°C limit this century. “We’ve got,” he answers quickly, “a snowball’s chance in hell”.

A WEEK AFTER THE meeting, I arrange to meet Pitman for a longer talk. He makes me coffee and ushers me into the sort of office that could easily belong to a historian or psychiatrist. Pitman’s experiments take place not in a lab but amid millions of lines of computer code. He uses elaborate climate models to help pose the question: what is our climate future? Based on fundamental laws of physics, these models work at grid-level scales, using a 3-D array of ‘cells’ of regional zones to artificially generate all the complexities of a climate system: the swirling clouds and flooding rivers, dynamic oceans and polar ice caps. These cells and all their variables – including data on the rate of change of temperature, humidity, and the flow of energy in and out of the system – are enmeshed in mathematical relationships played out in supercomputers.

I ask him how these models work on a practical level. “We take the Earth as a sphere, and break it up into a chessboard pattern, and up into multiple levels – like the 3-D chessboard Spock plays on in Star Trek,” he explains. The model maps the climate now and mathematically predicts the next step of progress – perhaps just half an hour later – to see how the whole system changes. The model then solves the equations again for the next half hour – and so on, for however long he wants it to run. Just one of these simulations might take six to nine months in real time, and the output is a mathematical representation of the entire globe, inscribed in perhaps a million gigabytes of data.

Scientific groups around the world operate different versions of these virtual worlds. When several of their models agree, scientists can state with what level of confidence – statistically speaking – they can be sure their model is correct in its predictions. Where more models agree, there’s more certainty.

Among the most certain repercussions of a warming climate is that extremely hot days will become more frequent. So when the Tasmanian emergency services minister reassured Hobart residents that the bushfires of 2013 were the result of catastrophic weather conditions that occur “once in a generation”, he was making an assertion that may not still be true 50 years from now.

In climate terms, 50 years isn’t that far into the future. Chris Field, founding director of the Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institution for Science in California, says much of the change we can expect over the next five decades is already in train.

“We’re looking now at consequences of things that have already been baked into the system, consequences of emissions that have already occurred,” he says. “Even if we started tomorrow with aggressive emissions reductions, it would only mean a few per cent difference the first year and a few more for the second year and so on.” Some of the consequences of today’s emissions won’t even have kicked in by mid century, he adds.

IN THE MIDDLE OF a hot spell in Sydney in the southern summer, when temperatures in the mid 40s have forced many folks into shopping malls and cinemas for relief, I call Lisa Alexander, an expert in extreme weather events at the Climate Change Research Centre at the UNSW, to discuss what ramifications global warming could have over the next 50 years.

“What we consider today to be an extreme of temperature, that’s going to become the norm by the middle of the century,” she says. “The sort of temperatures we’ve had in Sydney this week, rather than happening once in a summer, will start to occur a lot more often.”

In November 2011, consultancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers Australia compiled a report for the Australian Government, looking specifically at the question of extreme events. “By 2050, an extreme heat event in Melbourne alone could typically kill over one thousand people in a few days if we don’t improve the way we forecast, prepare for and manage these events,” it warned. For Victorian residents who lived through the ‘Black Saturday’ fires in 2009, when drought and temperatures over 45°C led to 173 people dying in bushfires, these are alarming words.

It’s not only Australia that will see these kinds of extreme events more often. By the middle of the century, extreme highs will become more common across the globe, according to a special report released by the IPCC in March 2012. Temperatures historically hit once every 20 years could become 10 times more common in some places. Nearly everywhere on the planet will be hit by heatwaves, says Alexander. Europeans learned the impact such events could have in 2003, when an estimated 70,000 people died during the hottest summer on record since 1540.

AS THE TEMPERATURE rises, it will disrupt patterns of rainfall and snowfall, making heavy downfalls more common on a global scale. Trying to predict what will happen to rainfall at a regional level in the next 50 years is harder. “Broadly, we could say the wet places will get wetter and the dry places will get drier,” Alexander says. “But there are quite a few places where we’re not getting the majority of models agreeing on what will happen in individual regions.” Other areas could change from wet to dry, or vice versa, she says.

In China, for example, “data indicate that some of the traditionally dry areas will actually become slightly wetter, and in some of the relatively wet areas, the precipitation will be reduced,” says Yiqi Luo, co-director of the Fudan Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in Shanghai.

Heavy downpours could mean an increased risk of flooding in some areas, perhaps similar to the floods that turned three quarters of the Australian state of Queensland into a disaster zone in 2010. On the other hand, changing rainfall patterns could also lead to an increased risk of drought. The climate change report for the World Bank estimated that a 2°C increase in global average temperatures could cut annual runoff by 20% to 40% in vital river basins such as the Amazon, the Mississippi and the Murray–Darling, while increasing runoff by around 20% in the Nile and the Ganges.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, changes in rainfall patterns and temperatures will also have an impact on the risk of forest fires by 2063, scientists say. In Amazonia, for example, the World Bank report estimates that forest fires could as much as double by 2050 with warming of approximately 1.5°C to 2°C above pre-industrial levels.

Meanwhile, rising temperatures are also expected to raise sea levels, by melting glaciers and polar ice caps and causing ocean water to expand. The oceans have an enormous capacity to absorb the warming caused by rising greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, and the rise in sea levels is expected to happen slowly, explains John Church, a lead IPCC author from Australia’s national research agency CSIRO. “By 2063, there would be a growing but at this time relatively small impact on sea level change,” he says. He estimates a rise of about 20 to 50 cm from the sea level in 2000.

It’s long been postulated that climate change will also cause more severe storms. “It’s really the intensity of the cyclone that’s the problem, rather than the frequency,” says Alexander. “If you get low-category cyclones, they’re much less of a problem than if you get the large, intense cyclones.”

The costs of such an increase could be enormous. In 2012, the costliest natural catastrophe for the U.S. insurance industry was Hurricane Sandy, which caused overall losses that giant insurer Munich Re put at US$50 billion including in excess of US$25 billion in insured losses. And as Munich Re pointed out in January 2013, recent years have already seen a “strong upward trend in insured losses” related to thunderstorms in the USA.

Yet the cost of Hurricane Sandy could pale in comparison to the trillions of dollars required for coastal defences to protect cities from rising sea levels. “If there is half a metre of sea level rise, followed by 1 m, then, for sure, most of China’s major cities along the coast regions will be affected,” says Luo. “In China, 80% of people live in relatively low elevation areas in coastal regions.”

FOR ALMOST TWO DECADES, Nick Rowley has had a ringside seat to the bruising politics of climate change. In recent years, the British policy consultant has advised companies and governments on sustainability. Before that, he was a climate advisor to New South Wales premier Bob Carr, then British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Over that time, Rowley says, he has watched climate experts become resigned to the inevitability of dangerous climate change. “When I was working with Tony Blair seven years ago, there was a level of energy and focus among scientists, advocates and policy professionals addressing the problem.”

Today, that enthusiasm and motivation has been lost, he says. “Their tone is one of accepting that this world is going to change fundamentally over the coming 50 years because of the climate problem.”

Rowley is far from alone in that dismal assessment. David Karoly, a senior climate change researcher at the University of Melbourne, worries that meaningful political action will come about only when the gradual accumulation of disaster upon disaster – floods on fires on ‘Frankenstorms’ – make it impossible for the status quo to continue.

“For there to be a switch from political inaction to political action, there will have to be some very, very major climate-related disasters,” he says. “Many people will call those cataclysmic.” Karoly’s guess is that political change will start happening around 15 years from now. “But my view is that emissions won’t start to fall until 2050.”

An important part of that delay is the economic commitments countries are making right now to build coal-fired power stations. “It’s a kind of inertia that’s really important for the global economy,” says Field. “If we have to start retiring power plants that are only half their retirement age, or 10% of their retirement age, then we’re imposing both the early retirement costs and the extra costs of the renewables. And that’s when it starts getting really expensive.”

IN THIS VERSION OF 2063’s climate, “survival and adaptation would be the name of the game”, says Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, founding director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “It would be a world on the edge of despair… but people would still feel they can adapt. A world that would be manageable, but there would still be heavy losses.”

Adaptation would be one priority: adjusting the way we organise our lives, cities and industries to cope with the changed conditions. Another would be fighting to minimise more disruptive change. By 2063, simply cutting emissions may not be enough to achieve this. Indeed, by the middle of the century the world may well have already dabbled with various technological fixes to try to cool the Earth and strip carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

“I think the key point is that we will face continuing impacts and will face even worse impacts after we’ve realised that the problem needs to be solved,” says Field. There are profound issues with the gamut of geoengineering concepts aiming to mitigate climate change, he says. “If we want to know how well any of those things are going to work, and especially how well they are going to scale, we should be studying them real hard, right now.”

The kind of radical schemes that can garner headlines – shielding the Earth from sunlight with giant mirrors in space, or with reflective aerosols in the upper atmosphere – may have been tested at smaller scales, but most have failed or been banned because they are too expensive or risky, says Schellnhuber. “Solar radiation management is dangerous nonsense.”

Field, Schellnhuber, Karoly and others are more optimistic that over the next 50 years we will get better at capturing carbon dioxide emissions from power stations, or from the atmosphere itself. Some of the most promising approaches are a return to natural mechanisms, says Schellnhuber. “I would say the natural method of geoengineering would be best: planting trees.” Maintenance of tropical forests and bans on land clearing would also help reduce the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide.

Others think these natural approaches will not be enough and that new technologies will also be needed, some of which may already be on the horizon. In Queensland, for example, a pilot scheme by Australian energy company MBD Energy uses algae to capture carbon dioxide emissions from a power station in the town of Tarong, northwest of Brisbane, and grow feedstock. And in July 2012, global tech company Panasonic said it had developed a relatively efficient artificial photosynthesis system to convert carbon dioxide into fuels.

Fifty years from now, humanity is bound to have tools at its disposal that are just as unimaginable as smartphones and the Internet were in 1963. In predicting the future of climate change, “I think one of the weaknesses we often see is an expectation that in 50 years people are going to be using the same technology we have now,” says Field. “It’s interesting, when you look at 1963, some things have not really changed at all… but other things have changed drastically.”

IF THE CLIMATE OF 2063 does change substantially, it is unlikely to yet be enough to threaten civilisation, or usher in widespread ecosystem destruction. It is likely, however, that both temperatures and carbon dioxide concentrations will keep rising for another 50 years or more. “We could go to a 3°C increase over current levels by 2100,” says Schellnhuber.

By this time, seas could be a metre higher than they were before the industrial revolution, says Karoly. By 2150, a 2 m rise is possible. If this comes to pass, hundreds of millions of people could be displaced.

The scientists I spoke with worry that the citizens of 2063 will rue our failure to act on climate change today. “Sadly, in 2063 people are likely to look back at this generation and be damning of it,” says Rowley. “They will say that on the basis of the evidence presented to you, by the very best minds who have devoted their lives to understanding this complexity, you as societies were not willing to make the decisions and implement the policies to reduce the climate risks and costs that we now endure.”

After a couple of hours chatting with Pitman, our conversation takes a turn in the same direction. In 2063, he points out, it will be our children and grandchildren left to deal with the consequences of climate change. “I think they will look back and curse the current generation of political leaders. One of the cruel realities is that every one of those leaders will be dead, and not be held accountable.”

Stephen Pincock is a science journalist, editor and author and a regular COSMOS contributor.

The post Another day in paradise appeared first on COSMOS magazine.

But Prabhjit’s next morning ritual is different. Moving into the living room, she passes her henna-tattooed hand over a picture of her 15-year-old daughter. Apoorva’s image dissolves and eight farm grids sprout onto the screen, their colours every bit as vivid as Prabhjit’s sari. Her practised eye homes in on the scarlet dots – in-field sensors, sitting among the crops like tiny one-eyed metal scarecrows – that alert her to two patches on the northwest corner that are in distress. They’ll need a little more water. Then she zooms out to scan the satellite data from the entire area of Odisha state in eastern India. Some other farms have already begun their harvest; Prabjit begins ruminating about the implications. But the sound of an alarm clock pushes these thoughts to the back of her mind. Time for Apoorva to get ready for school.

IT’S 8 AM, AND PRABHJIT is sitting in front of her data screen in the small office to the side of her living room. Her husband has taken their daughter to the village high school, and himself to the office; he is the chief hydraulic engineer at Ganjam city council. Prabhjit calls her foreman to tell him to increase the flow rate in the drippers for fields NW1 and NW2. He also needs to service the rice harvester ahead of next weeks’ harvest, and while he’s at it, the rice-transplanter and tractors, to ready them for leasing to her neighbours. She arranges to meet him for an onsite visit at 11 am.

There’s a knock at her door. It’s expected – the two-monthly visit from Anil, her ‘ag-service’ provider. She puts on a pot of chai and asks politely about Anil’s family before they move on to some local gossip. Who’s planting what, what are the pests like, and what’s his take on the market? Then she steers the conversation to rice. Anil confirms what she already knows. Some farmers have started to harvest a bumper crop. But her crop needs another week to reach its peak. With plenty of rice on offer, will she get still get a good price? Or should she store her rice? Prabhjit weighs Anil’s opinions, and decides to silo her harvest in the village granary and wait for the price to rise.

Then they chat about vegetables. Prabhjit’s three-year contract for lentils and eggplants with the Bhubaneshwar grocery store is about to run out. Again, she gently questions Anil to find out what sorts of deals are being made. She decides to renew her contract, but on Anil’s advice will try the latest variety of Ganesh BT+ eggplant, with its promise of a four-week shelf life.

Anil taps his briefcase, prompting a holographic display of the latest upgrade for satellite and field data. Prabjit can’t resist and signs up. At 10.30 am, she heads to her meeting with the foreman. As she emerges from the cool of her rice husk-cement composite home, the Sun is beating down hard. She unplugs her car from the socket and eases herself into the drivers’ seat… just in time to receive a call from her mother. After inquiring whether Apoorva remembered her morning prayers, Prabjit’s mother reminds her that tomorrow is the anniversary of her grandmother’s death – she and Apoorva should light a special incense stick. Prabhjit signs off a little abruptly. Yes mother – I need to meet with the foreman now. Talk to you later.

Prabhjit had intended to spend the 10-minute trip planning her conversation with the foreman. But as she cruises down the paved road, an unbidden image projects itself onto the swaying green fields on either side of the car. Shin-deep in a muddy paddy, Grandmother and Mother (then just 12 years old) are bent over, shuffling backwards. They are in the Punjab, far from home, labourers in a team of women who spend day after day poking rice seedlings into the mud. Weeks later they will make their way back home, exhausted, huddled under blankets waiting at the foggy, smoke-filled train station in Ludhiana.

Another image replaces this one. Grandmother and Mother are transplanting rice again, but this time it is their own paddy. And this time it is a special crop; it will change their future.

GRANDMOTHER MAY NOT have been able to read, but she could sense the winds of change. Her husband had long ago left the farm to work at a brick factory: the tiny payment the government broker provided for their rice harvest wasn’t enough to make ends meet. Yet, the government was urging farmers in Odisha to plant more rice because the wells of the Punjab, as everyone knew, were running dry. Odisha was usually blessed with ample rain, but there could be drought. Or floods. Both had struck in the year before Grandfather left.

One year, Grandmother was given some seeds when she attended a meeting at the village. The government woman in her fine blue silk sari had explained that the seeds, which had been developed in the Philippines and were called Sub1, were very strong. If a drought came, the seedlings would not shrivel up. And if the floods came, they would extend their tips, reaching up like tiny mouths above the water to breathe.

As Grandmother and Mother transplanted each seedling, they held it as tenderly as if it were a leaf of gold. Their efforts paid off: that first year, the floodwaters covered their crop for two weeks, but the crop had not drowned and, unlike many of the other farmers in Odisha, they had made a nice profit. Three years later, Grandmother went to another meeting. This time, the lady in the fine sari introduced her to a new type of rice – she said it was the daughter of Sub1. But this daughter was ‘smarter’ than her mother, so they called it Super Sub1. Not only would this plant survive drought and flood, but it could also extract phosphate from the soil, so Grandmother would not have to spend so much on costly fertiliser.

Grandmother’s profit rose steadily each year. She decided that, just as Super Sub1 was smarter than its predecessor, her daughter would be smarter than her. She could have put the profits toward her daughter’s dowry as her husband and his family had told her to. But she didn’t. Against their thundering disapproval she used the money to send her daughter to the agricultural college in Bhubaneshawar – the first of her family ever to finish high school, was now being sent for a college degree! Grandmother simply closed her ears to the cries that her daughter would never marry.

They were wrong. Mother married a man she met at the college. While looking after her babies, she also managed the farm accounts and read farming journals, sharing the latest news with father while the family feasted on her delicious curry and chapati. Prabhjit grew up hearing the story of the smart rice that had paid for Mother to go to college.

In Prabhjit’s teens, the winds of fortune brought more changes. One was the land reform. A new law allowed the formation of small farming corporations, up to 40 hectares in size. Prabhjit’s father took his two hectares and joined up with Grandmother’s two. It wasn’t hard to rent more blocks – many of the families had moved to the city, leaving their old folk to work the paddies. It took years to finalise the negotiations; Prabhjit recalled Father tearing his hair and moaning: “It’s just molasses, this Indian bureaucracy.” By the time she graduated from college, Father left the running of the farm to her. She took a loan on microcredit to build up the farm to its present 24 hectares – and took the wheel.

THE OTHER REVOLUTION for Prabhjit was the genetically modified seed that allowed rice to ‘fix’ its own nitrogen from the Earth. She recalled her parents’ eyes glowing as they told her about it. Like Super Sub1, this was a very clever seed. A worldwide project, funded by the legendary Lord Bill and Lady Melinda Gates, had taken nearly 50 years to develop it. As Mother loved telling the wide-eyed young Prabhjit, “these rice grains are the children of Lord Lakshmi, benevolent goddess of light, and Vishnu, the restorer”. When Prabhjit reached high school, her mother gave her the scientific explanation. The rice plants had been genetically engineered to carry the powerful photosynthetic engine of a corn plant. But they also carried the nitrogen-fixing genes of a legume. Truly magical plants, they produced rice grains that were double the size using half the amount of fertiliser.

Vegetable seeds improved too: eggplants, cauliflowers, cabbages like the family had never seen. Best of all, they could throw away the most toxic pesticides because these seeds produced their own pesticides borrowed from the genes of a species of bacteria known as Bacillus thuringiensis, or BT for short. These vegetables were so powerful at resisting pests and raising profits, they earned the name ‘Ganesh’ after the elephant-headed son of Shiva, who was also the god of good fortune. Mother said they could have had Ganesh seeds years before. She never understood why the government delayed them; BT cotton had already saved millions of cotton farmers from pesticide poisoning and raised their yields. And BT was so safe, it was the stock-in-trade for organic farmers who sprayed the bacteria directly on their plants.

Prabhjit never forgot that gleam in her parents’ eyes. And she never forgot Grandmother. She passed away when Prabhjit was 20; a shrunken 57-year-old. Now, not so far from that age herself, the realisation shook her. Grandmother withered from the backbreaking work planting rice and spraying pesticides from a perforated spout of two tin cans yoked across her neck, barefoot. She had told Prabhjit how they would come back from the spraying, sick with headaches and shakes. In her final years, she still suffered from them. Lying on pillows on the cot, she told Prabhjit her stories; the ending was always the same. Prabhjit clearly heard Grandmother’s voice: “You will be like the rice grains that grow smarter in each generation.” Grandmother, I will light the incense stick for you tomorrow and I will tell you how smart I have become, Prabhjit answered silently.

* * * * * * * *
YOU MIGHT SAY Prabhjit’s story is a dream. And you’d be right. It is the dream of plant pathologist Robert Zeigler, director of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Los Baños, Philippines. It’s a dream that he has spent the best part of his career trying to turn into a reality. Many of Prabhjit’s farming tools are in the development pipeline, and some have already emerged.

The flood- and drought-tolerant rice variety (named Swarna Sub1 by IRRI researchers) is already available. The variety that can mine its own phosphate from the soil (referred to as Super Swarna Sub1) is due for release in the next couple of years. It carries a gene called PSTOL1, which IRRI breeders managed to isolate from a traditional Indian rice variety that performs well in soils with low phosphate levels. Both these new rice varieties were developed through a 20-year process of shuffling genes from semi-wild or old-fashioned farmers’ rice varieties into modern high-yielding ones by conventional breeding techniques.

The next cabs off the rank will take longer. Rice that can double its production by using the supercharged photosynthetic engine that naturally belongs to a corn plant is a tough ask – but one that’s on the cards, and known as the C4 rice project. It involves retrofitting a whole assembly line of corn genes and redesigning the infrastructure of the rice plant to accept them. Another very tough ask is to ferry the genes of a legume into a cereal grass such as rice, maize or wheat, enabling the plant to ‘fix’ its own nitrogen. A crop like this would truly usher in the next Green Revolution; doubling yields but using far less fertiliser than today’s rice requires. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, enamoured of bold challenges, is funding both projects.

What’s the chance of success? I ask Zeigler. “Undoubted,” he says. “When I proposed the flood- and drought-tolerant rice project 20 years ago, I was laughed off the stage. The tools we have now for genetically tweaking plants are vastly superior.”

Not all the tools that might be available to someone like Prabhjit come from the whiteboards of IRRI. The satellite from which she downloads data traces its origin to European Space Agency Sentinel satellites, the first of which is scheduled to launch in 2013, and whose microwave beams penetrate through clouds, meaning they can provide data about rice crops in Asia throughout the cloudy monsoon season. But IRRI is developing the software to enable farmers like Prabhjit to benefit. And it won’t just enable individual farmers to maximise their market opportunities – this type of data could help prevent a food price spike, says Zeigler. “With time to adjust to a shortage, they can import ahead of time, avoiding a panic.”

Prabhjit also uses drippers to irrigate and fertilise her fields. Punching tiny holes in tubing to deliver water and fertiliser at a slow rate more than halves a crop’s water requirements. Israeli inventor Daniel Hillel won the 2012 World Food Prize for developing it. Outside water-starved Israel, the fastest adopters to date have been China and India, countries that have increased their usage around 100-fold in the past 20 years.

In 2063, Prabhjit’s world is a happy place. By and large, the Malthusian spectre that haunted the world 50 years before – that the population would outgrow its food supply – failed to materialise. The challenge, then, was to feed an anticipated extra two billion mouths using existing agricultural lands. And it’s quite a challenge. In 2013, 38% of the world’s ice-free surface area is already under the yoke of agriculture, about a third of it for cropping, the rest for grazing. This land is also being lost to erosion and salty soils, smothered by roads, houses and golf courses; and chunks of it are being carved off to grow biofuels rather than food. Add to that the threats to agriculture from climate change, declining water supplies, flattening yields for wheat and rice, dwindling sources of phosphate, rising costs of nitrogen fertiliser, poor commercial incentives for farmers – and it’s clear why many are worried that the mid-21st century will be an age of mass famine.

But in Prabhjit’s world, mass starvation has been averted – and the ecological health of the planet is improving. In 2013, agriculture is the planet’s biggest polluter. Clearing chunks of the Amazon for farming (and losing carbon sinks), burning fossil fuels to make fertiliser (using up to 1% of the world’s energy); methane released by microbes fermenting in rice paddies and belching cows; and the nitrous oxide released by overuse of fertiliser, account for 35% of global greenhouse gas emissions. The same fertiliser running off fields into waterways causes algal overgrowths, sucking oxygen out of the mouths of the world’s major rivers and creating ‘dead zones’ for fish. This and overfishing threaten the imminent collapse of the world’s fisheries.

So can we address and remediate these problems? In October 2011, scientists led by Jonathan Foley, director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota, published a manifesto in Nature entitled ‘Solutions for a cultivated planet’. Foley’s group offered a five-point plan to feed the planet without destroying it (see ‘Saving the world‘).

As Foley concluded in an article in Scientific American published in November 2011: “Feeding nine billion people in a truly sustainable way will be one of the greatest challenges our civilisation has ever faced. It will require the imagination, determination and hard work of countless people from all over the world. There is no time to lose.”

IT WILL TAKE MORE THAN the insight of farmers like Prabhjit’s grandmother to bring this vision to a reality. In the scenario painted here, Prabhjit is environmentally aware and government incentives encourage her to employ ‘best-practice’ techniques. For instance, she drains her fields at the midpoint of the growing season rather than the end because (as IRRI research shows) this dramatically reduces methane emissions. For her trouble, she receives a carbon credit.

Elsewhere, highly mechanised and automated megafarms are the order of the day. For a taste of what’s to come, take a look at the rain-fed wheat farms of Western Australia (WA), which stretch over tens of thousands of hectares. Here today, 500 horsepower, GPS-guided harvesters cut 25 m swathes of wheat, measuring the yield in each square metre as they go, and informing next season’s fertiliser requirements. Unskilled drivers simply need to tell the harvester to turn around when it gets to the end of the field. But it’s not hard to see an end to that requirement, says Mick Keogh, executive director of the Australian Farm Institute. Like the three-storey-high robot trucks that remotely mine the iron ore of WA, in 2063, robotic harvesters will dutifully bring in the wheat harvest.

Further north, like other countries with vast rangelands, Australia sports thriving cattle farms – because here, the beef and dairy cows graze on lands useless for cropping. Here again, genetic resources could herald a revolution. In 50 years’ time, the cows roaming the vast outback stations of Australia’s northwest won’t look terribly different, except for the tiny chips embedded in their necks to monitor their health and movements. But genetically they will be a breed apart. Improved methods of marking genes and the mapping of the cow genome will lead to breeds that easily withstand heat stress, thrive on grass and belch less methane. Meanwhile, pampered in their barns, healthy herds of dairy cows, freed of mastitis and other diseases of the past, are milked robotically, produce 50% more milk, and deliver a calf each year without birth complications.

Yes indeed, this version of 2063 is a happy place. But there is also a nightmare scenario that many experts fear is equally likely (see ‘The dark side’). Let’s hope the world instead follows Foley’s prescription. There is, indeed, no time to lose.

Elizabeth Finkel is the associate editor of COSMOS Magazine.

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SAVING THE WORLD
In 2011, a group of scientists published a bold five-point plan to meet the world’s future food security and sustainability needs.

1 Stop expanding agriculture
Land that is now covered in tropical rainforest, which is being cleared at a rate of around 5–10 million hectares annually, offers little yield when converted to agriculture. Protecting this crucial carbon sink from slash and burn agriculture for quick gains requires economic incentives such as carbon credits and market certification.

2 Close the yield gap
By bringing under-performing farms in Central America, Africa, Asia and Europe up to speed with judicious use of fertiliser, irrigation and improved seed, Foley estimates that the yield of the world’s top 16 food crops could be increased by 58%.

3 Use resources more efficiently
Employ technologies such as drippers and so-called ‘precision agriculture’ where water and fertiliser are meted out in response to the day-to-day needs of the crop.

4 Eat less grain-fed beef
Thirty-five per cent of crops are grown to feed animals, but when it comes to beef this is a terribly wasteful use of food: every kilogram of deboned steak comes at the expense of 30 kg of grain.

5 Reduce waste
Roughly 30% of food is wasted. In affluent countries, it’s mostly left uneaten on the dinner plate; in poorer countries, food spoils in the fields or in silos. The solution is to reduce portion sizes and improve storage and distribution systems. Smartphones could also help farmers reduce losses. In the past, with their crop in danger of rotting in the field, farmers were hostage to middlemen. With smartphones, they’re free to search out the best price.

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THE DARK SIDE

Overuse of fertilisers and pesticides can wreak havoc on nearby ecosystems. Credit: iStockphoto

MANY EXPERTS think food production will keep pace with population growth. What they fear is what will be done to the environment to achieve it.

The worst-case scenario sees large chunks of existing farmlands lost to erosion, salinity and urban development. The Amazon Rainforest will be lost to agriculture, accelerating the build-up of greenhouse gases. Farmers will be forced to use ever-higher levels of pesticides to control disease and pest outbreaks worsened by a cooking climate. Waterways polluted by fertiliser and pesticides will cause the collapse of fisheries.

There are plenty of factors conspiring towards this scenario. Despite rising food prices, farmers continue to operate on very slim margins, holding out for that fortunate year when they reap both a bumper crop and a good price. That means they need to keep their costs as low as possible, which means shortcuts. Richard Roush, dean of land and environment at the University of Melbourne frames this problem as “the tragedy of the commons”. Farmers focus on short-term individual gain rather than the long-term common good. It’s a predicament exacerbated by low food prices. Roush and colleagues at the University of California at Davis calculated that if farmers could charge just 10% more, they could afford to use the best environmental practices.

Fixing the economic settings for farmers is a global challenge. Take Australia’s biggest grain farmer, John Nicoletti – long an icon as a successful farmer–entrepreneur. In 2011, he owned 180,000 hectares. In January 2013, it was down to 142,000 hectares and he was angling to sell a further 81,000. “There’s just not enough money in the farming game anymore,” he told Farm Weekly.

Another source of alarm is the declining investment in public sector research – the driving force for technologies that would enable a small-scale farmer like Prabhjit to farm more productively with a smaller environmental footprint. Philip Pardey, agricultural economist and director of the International Science and Technology Practices and Policy Centre at the University of Minnesota, St Paul, is worried that countries such as the U.S. and Australia have cut spending on research and development. “Australia is in trouble,” he says. “Fifty years ago it ranked eighth in the world for R&D spending; now it’s 16th.” Pardy points out that it was the investments of 50 years ago that gave us the Green Revolution and averted the widespread famine predicted in the 1960s by ecologists like Paul Ehrlich. His research shows that 50 years is about the lag time before the investment in agricultural R&D fully delivers. In 2063, when climate change and bursting populations will make dire demands of agriculture, he worries we will not have “primed the knowledge pump”. The signs are the pump is already running dry. “For years we saw rice and wheat yields rising,” he says. “Surprise, surprise; now they have almost stopped.”

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