1. Moderate amount of exercise every day is better than few intense gym sessions a week. Anything outdoors from walking to gardening is good enough to be considered moderate. Most exercises only have beneficial effects that last for 12-24 hours after exercise.

2. Coffee helps caffeine addicts to keep working at normal levels. This conclusion is a bit simplified because there may be a genetic component in the equation, which might mean the some people need it to keep working at normal levels not just because they are used to it.

3. Fatty foods are probably not going to cause acne or make it worse. Chocolate, or similar sweet things, might do. The science is scant.

4. E-cigarettes seem to be definitely better than cigarettes. But beyond the obvious harm of nicotine addiction, the jury is still out if they are harmless.

5. Less salt may not lower blood pressure, but it wouldn’t be harmful to eat less of it. What you should eat more, however, is potassium—found in broccoli, spinach, apricot and bananas.

6. Most claims about the benefits of omega-3 aren’t that strong. Eating fish, though, is beneficial to reducing heart attacks. But replacing fish with pills as a source of omega-3 does not have the same effect. This might be the case because it is a combination of nutrients in fish that provide the real benefits.

7. Best painkiller to start with is paracetamol, which can be taken in combination with caffeine, ibuprofen, codeine, or all together.

8. Instead of caffeine, chewing gum can increase alertness and sage pills can give a cognitive boost. Both of those might be beneficial without the downsides associated with caffeine (see point 2).

9. Cold pasta changes the structure of starch such that some of the carbs are converted into dietary fibre. It means you don’t get the high-carb load in the blood normally associated with pasta. Reheated pasta is even better than cold pasta, and it is tastier too.

10. Acupuncture may actually have a pain-relief effect. We don’t know how but studies are showing positive results!

11. UV-A, which we can get from the sun, lowers blood pressure and has a lasting effect. The decrease is only 2mm Hg, which is not much but still lowers chance of stroke by 10% and heart attack by 7%. For people with red hair, or if you burn instead of tan, or if you have a family history of melanoma, the sun may not be a solution for you. But for the rest (that is, most of us), the sun is beneficial.

12. It’s impossible to avoid BPA in plastics (bisphenol-A). There is little evidence that the concentration we consume it in is harmful.

13. Saturated fats in certain foods such as nuts or milk might be good. But jury is still out.

14. Vitamin C may not help fight a cold, but zinc supplements taken within first 24 hours can help (beware of side-effects though).

15. Vitamin D supplements work, so does fish and of course sun. But use supplements only when at risk of deficiency.

16. Energy drinks don’t have any more caffeine than normal coffee drinks that millions consume every day. Those with palpitation problems should avoid both.

17. Cold packs are for use on sudden injuries and can help reduce inflammation. Hot packs are for use to treat ongoing pains, such as neck or back pain, to relieve symptoms.

18. Meats after the use-by date should be thrown, but other foods could potentially be consumed. Remove the mouldy bits on breads, cheese and fruit, and you’re good to go. Consuming slimy food items, on the other hand, including those found on vegetables, are a bad idea. The slime tends to be of harmful bacterial origin, not benign fungal origin.

19. Two squares of dark chocolate every day is enough to get the benefits from flavonoids. You can rightly feel guilty if you eat more.

20. When it comes to added sugar in our diet, it is clear that it should be treated as a luxury item. Cutting down sugary drinks will go a long way to help, so would noticing hidden sugar in food items such as chocolate bars and cereal.

21. Waxing pulls the hair out from the follicles, which is why when they grow back it feels as if they are thinner. Shaving only cuts the hair, which makes them appear thicker and harder. However, if one leg is waxed and the other is shaved, you will find no difference between them 12 weeks on.

22. Garlic, beetroot and green leafy vegetables are quite good at reducing blood pressure.

Here are links to lessons I learnt from the 2013 series and the 2015 series of “Trust Me, I’m a Doctor”.

Image by grasper. Published under a CC-BY-NC-ND license.

Even when I had enough money of my own to spend, my aversion for new tech remained. It was clear to me that future-generation devices are always much better than the first-generation ones. After removing the inevitable kinks and adding the much-needed features that the first device missed, the second device does the job significantly better.

Another reason for not wanting to upgrade to a new device is the result of a wider trend, and it has only become more obvious to me in recent years. The new devices on offer won’t make my life that much easier. My first smartphone was a touchscreen Pocket PC device, and it was tonnes better than any Nokia phone on offer at the time. I could look at full-sized images, browse the internet on Wi-Fi, manage a planner and use Google Sync.

Then I bought a Blackberry 8320, which seemed like a step in the past. But it wasn’t. Although I missed the touchscreen, the ease of using a full keyboard was quite something. Finally came the iPhone 4S, which changed my life in more ways than any phone had.

Now we have the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. Sadly, they are nothing but the same old iPhone with a bigger screen. Apart from tiny upgrades in the operating system, which is available on older devices, there is nothing about the new iPhones that is attractive to those not part of the cult. There are Android phones which offer a lot more, but none of those features are enough to change my mind.

The Apple Watch may be gorgeous, but I won’t be buying a first generation device. Mostly, though, a smartwatch seems to be nothing more than an additional layer of distraction right now. This is true of Google Glass, too.

There is hardly a profession where reading and replying to every text message, email, Facebook or Twitter notification as soon as you can is important. Most things can wait, and they must if we are to do anything productive in life. The suggestion here is not to become a Luddite, but, when a screen is only a wrist-flick away or in your eye, the temptation is too high.

The only reason I may end up buying a new internet-enabled device is if I am forced to. This could happen either because the device stops working, gets destroyed or doesn’t perform as I need it to. My nearly three-year-old iPhone 4S runs iOS7 and I have no complaints whatsoever (I won’t be upgrading to iOS8, because that would be suicide. Reviews suggest that the user experience becomes choppier.) My nearly four-year-old iPad2 runs iOS7 and works perfectly well. My four-year-old MacBook Pro 17″ runs Mac OSX Mavericks and runs like a leopard. My four-year-old Kindle 3G does everything I need it to.

I love you, gadget-makers, but to get me to actually buy something new you will have to do a lot more.

Winners, it is said, are not born but made. That, however, is not the whole truth, as David Epstein, an investigative reporter with Pro Publica, shows in his book The Sports Gene.

In recent decades, the role of genes in causing diseases has been elucidated time and again. So it should not be surprising that they must also play a role in creating gifted individuals. And, yet, the science to support the latter hypothesis is limited and more recent. The reason for this disparity is not because we don’t have the tools to find evidence for that hypothesis, but because the message it supports is not one that society is ready for.

Epstein make his case through many examples. These are not just of rare individuals with extraordinary achievements. He also looks at physiological characteristics of all players at the international level across various sports. Consider, for instance, the average male basketball player. Had he lived at the time, he would not have made a good candidate for Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. That is because a professional basketball player won’t fit in da Vinci’s circle—the length of the player’s outspread arms is greater than his height. Those two measures were considered to be equal in an “ideal human”. But Epstein’s calculations show that if you want to be an internationally successful basketball player, you need to be an exception—you need to be tall and have longer arms still.

This phenomenon is true of other sports. Be it sprinting, where those endowed with the ability to draw more oxygen from the air than the average are more likely to win. Or be it high jump, where rare jumpers with excessively long Achilles tendon end up succeeding. Or be it marathons, where most winners come from within a single tribe in western Kenya. The story is clear—to sculpt an elite athlete, the roll of nature’s dice must be played in their favour.

Teasing apart the role of genes on complex human traits is no simple task. But recent studies have identified a handful genes that can make or break an athlete. Take the EPOR gene, for instance. Those who have the gene, also tend to have exceptionally high haemoglobin levels in the blood. This improves the efficiency with which oxygen is consumed, creating some remarkable athletes if they choose that path. Or take the HCM1 gene. It causes one of the chambers of the heart to grow in size without any apparent symptoms. This puts an athlete with HCM1 at the risk of falling dead on a track without a warning. On average one such athlete dies every other week in the US.

In general, however, the interaction of genes that creates such remarkable athletes is too complex to breakdown. For instance, hundreds of genes are involved in determining someone’s height. So, even if genetic engineering is available today, a designer baby can’t be created to make an “ideal athlete”. But, to be sure, neither can the natural bounty of genes alone ensure great athletic feats. And, yet, there is no doubt that Epstein’s thorough analysis raises uncomfortable questions for the long-held view—recently made famous by Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours rule—that talent is nothing and practice is everything.

The nature vs nurture debate is not new, but genetics is providing the tools to take the debate forward. The evidence, as Epstein puts it, appears to be that the contribution of both is equally important.

Nurture alone is not going to turn a Pygmy into an NBA player, and that is not a fact that we must shy away from. If anything, genes could help people find which sports would be a good fit for them. Society must not fear these inherent differences. Rather, such inequalities make human life interesting and worth living.

Image credit: piers_nye, CC-BY-NC

1. The project is using eight specially made tunnel-boring machines (shown below), each with a female name, such as Elizabeth, Mary and Victoria.

2. One of the biggest challenges has been tunnelling under Tottenham Court Road station. It is where the tunnel-boring machine needed to pass through very crowded space. The tunnellers have labelled it “the eye of the needle”. There the 900-tonne tunnel-boring machine has had to pass through a space where 30cm above it was a live escalator and 85 cm underneath was the active Northern Line.

3. When drilling under London, tunnellers need to ensure that all the buildings above ground remain as they were. This is tricky because during the operation, there is every possibility of disturbing the earth beneath some ancient buildings, causing them to tilt or, worse, crash down. To monitor the balance, they have installed laser sensors which measure any movement. When the building starts sinking, the alarms ring.

4. The building then needs to be brought back to its previous stable state, which is done by injecting grout just at the right place to fill up any spaces that are causing the sinking. To do that, they have created 22 massive shafts throughout London, which have small pipes originating from them spreading through the ground beneath as a spider web. Whenever there is a disturbance that the laser monitors spot, they insert a tube through the right pipe that goes under the building and pumps grout in that area, which we are assured stops the building from sinking. Some shafts operators spend 16 hours a day doing this.

5. The Thames river is the first river in the world to have a tunnel built underneath it. That first 400m tunnel, opened in 1843, needed 16 years of work to build. The design of the boring machine built then by Marc Isambard Brunel is still in use. In the modern version the actual digging work is done by robotic arms rather than people. The tunnel under the Thames near Woolwich of about the same length as the 1843 one took only 8 months.

6. Despite nearly two centuries of expertise boring under the tunnel, it’s still quite a challenge. One of those difficulties is a tunnel near the Custom House station. Where they had to block the river, drain the area and work on expanding an already existing tunnel to fit the wide Crossrail trains.

7. When tunnellers use the word “breakthrough” they are literally breaking through something. And when they use the phrase “seeing the light at the end of the tunnel”, they actually see light at the end of the tunnel.

8. The Crossrail’s Canary Wharf station (shown below) is going to cost £500 million. Similarly, the new Farringdon station’s cost is £440 million.

9. Station constructions have 22-week period allowed for archaeological investigation, if an opportunity shows up. In an old city, it almost always does. Shown here is the remain of someone who died from bubonic plague, or Black Death, in the 14th century. More than 20 other such bodies were found in the same spot near Farringdon station.

10. Underground trains form an almost perfect air seal, pushing all the air in front of it at the same speed as it travels. Each underground station has to build ventilation systems to accommodate the pressure such pushed air can create. So next time you see a ventilation shaft outside a station, remember that is built not built to keep you cool underground but to make sure the air pressure created by trains doesn’t break things.

After all these years, science communication in India hasn’t changed much. But the problem kept nagging me all along. So now, with fellow nerd Vasudevan Mukunth, I’ve started a weekly newsletter to address that problem in a small way. The aim of the weekly newsletter would be to become a place where you can come to find interesting stories from global publications covering science, technology and data that have their focus not on the West.

Here is this week’s edition (our second). If you enjoy it, you and your friends can subscribe here.

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1. Warheads at supersonic speeds… on the ground
India’s defence research organisation has installed five 4-km long rails at a research lab in Chandigarh for propelling missile warheads at supersonic speeds. Could this be useful for India’s space programmes, too? The timing is suggestive. In July this year, the space agency is slated to launch an unmanned “Orbital Vehicle” that is at the heart of India’s human spaceflight program. The rails can be used to simulate re-entry of crew capsules. (3 min read)

2. In the unfortunate event that New Delhi is nuked…
On the Doomsday Clock, which is a countdown to global catastrophe, the world has come 12 minutes closer to midnight since 1991. Recently, Nitin Gadkari, now a minister in the new Indian government, was exchanging nuclear threats with a Pakistani analyst on TV. This spurred a journalist to look at the government’s emergency plans to deal with a nuclear fallout. Hint to civilians: “To begin with, nothing that can be dug without the help of E. Sreedharan—the Metro Man—is likely to be deep enough.” (8 min read)

3. Are tiger poachers really trying to hack radio-collar data in India’s sanctuaries?
The more we resort to technology to protect something, the more its failings become liable for abuse—except when it’s animal poaching. There was a scare about a Pune techie trying to hack into data transmitted by radio-collars around some tigers. It turned out to be false, but not before conservationists reasoned that poachers relied on simpler, ground-based techniques to trap animals, and that’s why they get away. (4 min read)

4. 101 suicides in two months: is Marathwada the new Vidarbha?
Freak hailstorms in March flattened orchard crops in Maharashtra’s Marathwada region. In the two months since, 101 suicides have been reported. The reason? Faulty agriculture and irrigation policies have driven farmers to orchard farming that is submissive to failing, because of the time and capital investment it requires. (5 min read)

5. Call for action to prevent millions of “invisible” deaths
More than 780,000 babies less than 28 days old die every year in India. The cost of preventing these deaths is a meagre $1.15 (₹ 68) per person. Why then aren’t these deaths prevented? Because these are “invisible deaths”. Parents don’t seek to register their child’s birth or death because they don’t think it can make a difference. This silence perpetuates the myth that newborn deaths and stillbirths are inevitable. (6 min read)

6. Video: Putting hardy small millets back on the menu
Decline in food diversity is driving malnutrition around the world, and the hardy millet is one casualty. This cereal crop can be cultivated in a variety of ecosystems, from coastal areas in South India to mountainous terrain in the Himalayas, but it has become a niche crop. A Canadian agency wants to redress this imbalance in India, Nepal and Sri Lanka, and to put women farmers in the centre of its approach. (5 min watch)

Chart of the week

If you divide China into two, one half will have 94% of its population (nearly 20% of world’s population). This geographic divide hasn’t changed in last 80 years despite the population tripling. In 1935, a Chinese geographer noticed the divide and drew an imaginary line, called Heihe–Tengchong Line, that no one seems have crossed over to settle. Yet, what this map hides is the fact that China has recently seen the largest migration in human history: 160 million people have moved from rural areas to urban ones in the last 30 years, no doubt within Eastern China.

Please email curiousbends@gmail.com with suggestions or feedback. We’d love to hear from you. For more such stories, find curators Vasudevan Mukunth and Akshat Rathi on Twitter. Enjoy the week!

In his brilliant book, A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson shows through many examples how history often credits the wrong person. They show how being in the right place at the right time or publishing your ideas in the right publication so that the right people notice them is some times more important than having the idea.

For instance, today the great astronomer Edward Hubble is credited to have discovered that we live in an ever-expanding universe. However, it was an astronomer with the cheerily intergalactic name Vesto Slipher who should have got the credit.

Or take the example of Carl Scheele, a Swedish chemist, who discovered eight new elements—oxygen, nitrogen, chlorine, fluorine, manganese, barium, molybdenum and tungsten—and received credit for none of them. His work was either overlooked or made it late to publication after someone else had made the same discovery independently. The credit instead went to chemists of the English-speaking world.

And, if you’re still not convinced, try Josiah Willard Gibbs, who Bryson calls the “most brilliant person that most people have never heard of”. Between 1875 and 1878 he produced a series of papers on the thermodynamic principles of nearly everything but published them in the Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Science, a journal that “managed to be obscure even in Connecticut”. Although Gibbs was recognised later in life, most of the work he did remained hidden for too long at great cost to the scientific enterprise.

Information games

The reason I am telling you all this is not just because it is interesting, but also because there is a lesson we can learn from these examples. All three scientists who got scooped lived in the age when information was scarce and the fastest it travelled was at the speed of a moving vehicle. 

We live in the age of information excess and the fastest it travels is the fastest it will ever travel (ie at the speed of light). However, we are still stuck with one problem that those gentlemen of the 19th century faced and perhaps it has become worse—who receives what information matters even more today. With the internet throwing up interesting things on our screens every day, are we getting the information we really need?

I’ll explain the problem with two examples. The first comes from how we learn history. This came to my attention during my first months in Oxford. Ask any non-Indian what they thought about British colonisation of India and you got a view that was quite different to what I was taught in school in India.

Partisan views

Most people acknowledged that there was imperial excess. They bemoaned the human cost of the partition between India and Pakistan, for instance. But they, particularly British friends, also praised how the British gave Indians railways, law and order, the English language, and, some even suggested, the Indian identity. Most importantly, they saw Indian independence as British leaving India. This was a time, one said, that Britain was relinquishing control of other colonies too following the troubles that World War II had caused for Britain domestically.

This wasn’t what I was taught in school. Indian textbooks glorify the independence struggle, it seemed. I was surrounded by some of the smartest people I had ever met, and instead of questioning them I had to go back and read history. What I realised soon though was that neither my British friends nor I had quite the balanced view that one ought to have of this important period in world history.

I wasn’t expecting my British friends to know about Mangal Pandey or Bhagat Singh, but I thought they would be aware of the Quit India Movement and Jallianwallah Bagh massacre. That they would recognise the importance of the role of freedom fighters, such as Sardar Patel, in accelerating India’s independence. Equally, I suspect my British friends thought I should have more appreciation for the things the British left in India.

The point here is that where the information came from changed how people viewed the world. In this case the topic was a well-studied period of history, and so I was able to educate myself enough to get a balanced view. But what about more recent events?

History’s value

In The Sceptical Patriot, Sidin Vadukut analysed history textbooks used by Indian kids today. He found that none of them devote any space to post-Independence period. Beyond a little bit on the Indian constitution, there is nothing about the wars with Pakistan and China or about the Naxal movement, which is considered the greatest threat to India’s internal security.

Why should Indian kids learn about this stuff? Vadukut’s story might give you an answer:

Sometime in 2002 or 2003, a group of Japanse Hibakusha, or atomic bomb survivors, visited Chennai. The city was a stop on what I think was a global tour to promote peace and condemn nuclear weapons. They decided to visit a primary school and tell the students why the idea of nuclear weapons was a bad one.

I read about the school visit in one of the local newspapers. I don’t recall which one, and no amount of searching online has thrown up the original news report. But the broad details of what happened are seared into my mind.

After the presentation, the Hibakusha asked the children:  should countries go to war? No, they all said in chorus. Should countries use nuclear weapons? No. Should India use nuclear weapons? Never. What if the enemy is Pakistan? Oh, Pakistan is a special case, the kids said, we should totally nuke them.

Every time I retell this story at a public forum, there is an explosion of laughter followed by an awkward silence.

Absence of proper facts

This brings me to the second example, which is closer to me—science journalism. The media landscape of the west is changing. The old media houses are losing audience and revenue at such a pace that it feels like a crisis. The first to lose their jobs in such cases tend to be specialist journalists such as those covering science, environment and health. Sometimes the sections live on, but they shrink in size and depth. The reporting gets done by general reporters instead.

There have been some positive changes with new media organisations trying to fill the gap. And despite all that, even with shrinking newsrooms, western media’s science coverage remains so much better than Indian media’s. A survey I did a few years ago of Indian newspapers gives the same results today—proper science reporting doesn’t exist.

This is a problem. Most of the time if you come across a science story in Indian newspapers, it happens to be one from an international wire service, such as AP, Reuters or The Guardian. Despite the international nature of science, Indian readers are fed the writing of western journalists. The stories become less relevant and thus less interesting. While the hard-science stories are still somewhat valuable, those about the environment, health or even technology aren’t.

This matters because policy depends on the quality of information that decision-makers get. One more example from Vadukut’s book makes that case absolutely clear. In March 2008, Daggubati Purandeswari, the then minister of state for human resource development, when talking about India’s education system, parroted “facts” about Indians abroad, which had been forwarded in a hoax chain email.

“Sir, as rightly pointed out by the honourable member, our students have been placed very well globally. For example 12% scientists in the United States are Indians. We have 38% if the doctors in the US who are again Indians. 36% of NASA scientists are again Indians. So, the students are doing very well, and they are reaching places which again reflects on the quality of education that is being provided to our children in the country.”

All of these “facts” can be easily verified as being false, but the honourable MP did not think she needed to do that. Her words were then reported in Times of India the next day as “facts”. And that is how facts get made up.

Science suffers

That aside, had there been good science journalists writing about the achievements of scientists in India, perhaps Daggubati would not have relied on information from dodgy sources. India’s premier institutes, such as the Indian Institutes of Technology, never figure in the world university rankings. From the information available to the minister today, she won’t be able to figure out whether the absence of IITs in such rankings says something about the poor quality of research or the lack of communication of that research.

There is also another side to this story. In my time at Oxford, whenever there was a paper published in an Indian or Chinese journal, I was explicitly advised not to give it too much value. The suggestion was that research in these journals was not reliable, which in other words means that the researchers were making up data.

This kind of opinion may have been formed by experience. But mostly this opinion was the result of western media reporting negative science stories emerging from China and India, which make academics wary of trusting such research. This, I believe, must lead to missing out on genuinely good research being produced in these countries.

The solution, of course, is one that will require change from the big editorial houses. In my conversations with Indian journalists, I’ve been told many times that there is thirst for good science content but no publication is ready to provide it.

A different solution that a friend and I are pursuing is to collate good science stories from around the web that have their focus on the other side of the world. While this doesn’t solve the need for more science reporting, at least it provides a central place to find good content related to India. Some of it exists, but sadly it tends not to be at one place but spread across different publications. (You can sign up for our newsletter here.)

Those gentlemen in the 19th century suffered personal loss because key information didn’t reach the right audience. Today’s tragedy is the same but the reason is different—key information is not reaching the right audience because either there is too much information and very poor filters or there aren’t enough people to collect and present the information that is so desperately needed.

Lead image: teresaling. Thanks to Deeksha Sharma and Vasudevan Mukunth for reading drafts of this post.

Now, Oliver Pike of Imperial College London and his colleagues have found a way to achieve this dream, 80 years after US physicists Gregory Breit and John Wheeler explained the theory. This group hopes to use high-energy lasers aimed at a specially designed gold vessel to convert photons into matter-antimatter particle pairs, recreating what happens in some exceptional stellar explosions.

Pike, who led the research published in the journal Nature Photonics, said, “The idea is that light goes in and matter comes out.” To be sure, the matter created won’t be every day-objects; instead the process will produce sub-atomic particles.

“To start with, the matter will consist of electrons and its antimatter equivalent positrons,” Pike said. “But with higher energy input in the lasers, we should be able to create heavier particles.”

Pike concedes this won’t be the first time light has been converted into matter. In 1997, US researchers at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Centre (SLAC) were able to do so, albeit in a different way.

The SLAC experiment used electrons to first create high-energy light particles, which then underwent multiple collisions to produce electrons and positrons, all within same chamber. This is called the multi-photon Breit-Wheeler process, named after the two physicists who came up with the theory in 1934.

“The key difference in the SLAC experiment and the one we propose is that our process will be more straightforward,” Pike said. In the new proposal, the laser beam will still be generated using free electrons, but it will be separated from the electrons.

Why create light using matter and then convert it back? Apart from showing that the Breit-Wheeler process can happen without the multiple photons the SLAC experiment needed, Pike thinks their process provides a clean way of doing particle physics experiments.

Current particle-physics experiments involve smashing sub-atomic particles at great speeds and sorting through the mess of new particles that are created in the explosion. This is how the Higgs boson was found in the Large Hadron Collider.

The new experimental design will be similar. Rather than involving a complicated mix of particles and photons, the laser beam will be sent into a small gold hohlraum (German for “empty room”). There, individual photons can interact with the radiation field that’s generated when the hohlraum is excited by a laser, creating the electron-positron pairs.

“While physicists have excellent methods to sift through such data, our process has the advantage that it will be easier to analyse,” Pike said. “Light will go in from one end of the hohlraum and particles created will come out from the other end.”

Pike and colleagues are now working to secure time on high-energy laser beams to carry out the experiment. The two likely candidates are Aldermaston, Berkshire in the UK or Rochester, New York in the US.

Andrei Seryi at the University of Oxford found the work interesting, but warned it is still too far away from being used in particle-physics experiments. “Theoretically, however, it would be great if we are able to create particles from only light.”

“With such high energy lasers, we may not need to build big particle colliders, such as the Large Hadron Collider, which is a 22km underground tunnel,” Seryi said.

Even if we do manage to create a photon collider, we would only be catching up with the natural world, where a specific type of supernova, called “pair instability,” involves the creation of proton-antiproton pairs. If Pike is able to achieve this phenomenon, he will essentially be creating a supernova in a bottle.

First published on The Conversation.

But Neelesh Patankar, professor of mechanical engineering at Northwestern University, believes that this measure has only limited benefit. Instead, with his colleagues, he has come up with a new measure that allows comparison of animals as small as bees or zebrafish with animals as large as albatrosses or blue whales.

The new measure has two implications. First, among those that have typical swimming and flying actions, which includes most fish and all birds, each animal is as energy efficient as it can be. This means that, given their size and shape, each animal is able to spend the least amount of energy to move the most distance. Second, this measure confirms a previous finding that jellyfish are unusually energy efficient, beating all the thousands of fish and birds Patankar studied.

“Put another way, a whale and a tuna are equally energy efficient,” Patankar said. “Except jellyfish, which have an unusual action that makes them more efficient.”

A new measure

To understand why jellyfish are special, we need to first answer the question why we need a new measure for energy efficiency. Patankar offers an analogy: if there are two cars that are of equal weight, would you expect them to have the same mileage? Just as in cars, animals’ motion will vary based on factors other than their weight.

John Dabiri, professor of aeronautics and bioengineering at California Institute of Technology, said, “It is not immediately obvious how to compare the swimming efficiency of a bacterium and a blue whale, for example, but Patankar and colleagues have developed one.”

To make the comparison, Patankar borrowed from a well-known concept in physics called the Reynolds number, which explains the relationship between two forces that act on any body that is moving through a fluid. The first is viscous force, which is, crudely put, the push you feel when you put your hand out of a moving vehicle. The second is inertial forces, which is the tendency of a moving object to keep moving (or that of a stationary object to remain stationary).

Depending on the size of a body and the speed at which it travels, the body faces either a low Reynolds number, where the forces acting on a body are mostly viscous forces, or a high Reynolds number, where inertial forces dominate. This creates a natural difference in how much energy is spent countering these forces.

Reynolds number was developed to look at the aerodynamics of stiff bodies, such as aeroplanes and ships. But Patankar reckoned he could use it to help compare animals of different sizes. He gathered data from thousands of birds and fish to come up with a metric called the energy-consumption coefficient, which he has described in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Using it, he found that all the animals he looked at (except jellyfish) are as energy-efficient as they can be.

“The idea that animals are tuned for energy-efficient locomotion is not surprising, but the authors have devised a fresh approach to the issue of how to compare the efficiencies of different animals,” Dabiri said.

Patankar finds, as he had hoped, that small animals find themselves in low Reynolds number situations, and large animals find themselves in high Reynolds number situations. This means they expend energies differently, which is what Patankar’s coefficient represents. Using the coefficient, one can compare the energy efficiency of bodies weighing few grams to many tonnes.

The coefficient also indicates that animals that fly are less energy-efficient than those that swim. This, Patankar thinks, must be because those in flight have to expend more energy to counteract gravity than those in water.

Jelly’s secrets

While working on the energy-consumption coefficient, he came across recent work done by Dabiri and his colleagues which showed that the unique contract-and-relax action of jellyfish allowed it to recapture some of the energy it spends on motion. This means a jellyfish can travel a lot more distance for the same amount of energy spent by other animals adjusted for its weight and size.

When Patankar used Dabiri’s data and plotted it on his energy-consumption coefficient chart, he found that the only animals that were more energy efficient than he had predicted were jellyfish.

“We found that each swimming or flying animal can spend all the energy it has at its disposal. However, our coefficient is a fair way to conclusively show that indeed jellyfish are more efficient,” Patankar said.

Dabiri is already working on exploiting jellyfish propulsion. However, he thinks that, apart from providing a new metric to compare different types of animals on the energy-efficiency scale, Patankar’s measure could be a used for evaluating the performance of aerial and underwater drones that are being developed, especially those with designs that are inspired by flying and swimming animals.

First published on The Conversation.

Astronomers who hope to search for these biosignatures in expolanets, however, may be in for a disappointment. New research finds that there is no way we can confirm that such a signature is actually the result of extraterrestrial life. The problem, it turns out, is that an exomoon’s atmosphere will be indistinguishable from the one of the planet it orbits.

Finding E.T.

Searching for extraterrestrial life is no easy feat. Astronomers have to first search for a star that has planets. Then they have to ensure that there is at least one planet that orbits this star in the habitable zone, which is a region around the star in which we might expect liquid water. Finally, they have to record the faint light that originated from the bright star and was reflected off the exoplanet after having passed through its atmosphere.

This faint light, even if only a handful of photons, when compared with light from the parent star is enough to give some indication of the chemicals in the atmosphere of this planet. Life as we know it creates two gases that wouldn’t naturally be present in an atmosphere at the same time – oxygen from photosynthesis and methane from microbes.

Both oxygen and methane can be created independently by non-living processes, so their individual presence is of little interest. What scientists are looking for is both of them in the atmosphere of a single body. If these reactive gases are not constantly replenished by living things, they will react with each other, creating carbon dioxide and water. As a result, we should not observe them in the same atmosphere without a large, living source.

False hopes

In the new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Hanno Rein at the University of Toronto and his colleagues wanted to know whether anything else could mimic this biosignature. While working through potential false positives, which are signals that would show signs of life but in reality there isn’t life, he found a big one: exomoons. Rein found that observers on Earth will not be able to tell whether the signs of methane and oxygen originate from a single celestial body, or come from two nearby worlds.

This could happen because, just as Earth has a moon, there is a chance that exoplanets will have exomoons. While we have yet to find an exomoon, looking at the various moons of our solar system’s planets suggests that exomoons ought to be plentiful. However, even if they are plentiful, chances are that exomoons will be difficult to spot.

If both these celestial bodies have an atmosphere and in their atmospheres the exoplanet has oxygen and the exomoon has methane (or vice-versa), then an observer on Earth will record an oxygen-methane biosignature. This might seems like evidence for life, whereas in reality both these gases are being produced by non-living processes on two separate celestial bodies. Since they can’t react with each other, they will be able to build up to high levels.

Futile technology

“Even if we somehow developed ways of finding exomoons, we won’t be able to tease out the difference between their atmospheres given the limited amount of light that reaches us,” Rein said. This fundamental limit on the light that reaches us is called photo noise.

Rein limited his analysis to biosignatures coming from Earth-like planets orbiting a sun-like star, which is the combination that astronomers are betting has the greatest chance of hosting life. The American space agency NASA recently announced that they had found such an Earth-sized planet less than 500 light years away, although the star it orbits isn’t sun-like.

While their analysis might seem quite restrictive and involves a number of assumptions, it does not really matter: interpretation of biosignatures needs to be flawless. According to David Cullen at the University of Cranfield, “This study seems to highlight a real issue that will needed to be considered when interpreting biosignatures.”

Rein himself was surprised to find such a limitation. However, he sees the results of his work in positive light. “Finding such a limitation tells us what we should focus on in the future. Rather than a restricted search for Earth-like planets orbiting sun-like stars, we should broaden our search,” he said.

What this research shows is a need to move away from a highly focused search for extraterrestrial life that is currently in place. Rein points out that the chances of eliminating such false positive biosignatures increases as the star becomes dimmer or larger planets are considered. Perhaps alien life is not just unlike that on Earth, but it is also resides in a place that is unlike Earth.

First published on The Conversation. Image credit: bflv.

In doing so, I was leaving behind a world that I had tremendous respect for. Dedicating one’s life to pursuing hard questions in a narrow field of knowledge enriches the world in countless ways. That enrichment is the result of two things: production of new knowledge and new knowledge-bearers (ie students). What you read in popular press about universities is mostly what new research has found about the world. A less talked about, and perhaps greater, contribution that universities make is in educating new students.

Teaching the same course year after year sounds boring to me, but I’ve been assured by many that it is one of the reasons they enjoy being academics. This yearly practice of coming up with new and better ways of explaining fundamental concepts combined with the struggles on the edge of knowledge in a particular field gives these academics the power of conveying the meaning of complex concepts in simple and powerful ways.

A new experiment

If I were asked to give one reason for choosing science journalism, it would be that I get to learn new things about the world all the time. Hardly a days goes by when there isn’t something awesome in science news to read and write about. That is why when I was offered, a year ago today, to be the launch editor for the science and technology section of The Conversation’s UK edition, I wasn’t going to let the job go.

But there was another reason why the job appealed to me: the idea was to get academics to write for the public. The hope was that, with their expertise and skills at explaining ideas, they would help put news in broader context and convey the “meaning” of events to help improve public dialogue on important topics.

While the scientist in me was dancing with joy, the journalist was sceptical. What academics usually write is meant for fellow academics. Their use of passive tense and jargon can put off even the most interested non-experts. They also work on vastly different timescales. Journal articles can take from months to years to get published. News articles usually take only few hours or days to get to the reader.

Marrying the two professions for a public service project was a great idea, but would it work? Could the third major contribution of universities be educating the public (not just a promise, but a reality)?

Is there demand?

“Professors, we need you!” said Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times. The Conversation Media Group, founded in 2011 in Australia, got to work before Kristof made the public demand. By the time it launched in the UK in May 2013, it had shown that the Australian public had an appetite for this experiment.

The success down under was swift for one more reason—The Conversation represented a “third choice”. Until 2011, most newspapers and online news websites were owned by either Fairfax or News Corp, which allowed The Conversation to tap into a readership eagerly looking for alternatives.

The UK was different. It had (and still has) some of the most respected publications in the world. There was plenty of choice for an average reader across the political divide. Yet, it seemed that The Conversation stood a chance. Many of the best publications were under financial constraints, cutting staff, especially specialist reporters in science, environment and health. There was scope for explaining news better, and bringing new stories that journalists missed or didn’t have the time to cover.

Readership figures show that the experiment has been successful so far. For the last few months, which is less than a year since launch, the UK edition alone has been reaching more than 2 million readers, and that number is growing quickly. All this with a small team (seven editors at launch, then 14 since February) and no marketing budget.

As a Creative Commons publisher, The Conversation’s authors and their articles have featured in some of the top publications worldwide, which have different aims and leanings—The Guardian, Washington Post, New York Times, The Independent, The Hindu, Daily Mail, New Statesman, The Week, The Atlantic, Quartz, Business Insider, Scientific American, Popular Science, Discover Magazine, Ars Technica and Slate, among others.

Much of my scepticism about this job was reasonable. But, right from the start, I was pleasantly surprised at the both the quality and the speed of writing. When given a brief and a deadline, academics usually delivered. Sure first-time authors needed (and still need) lots of help, but most of them were also prepared to learn and improve in this form of communication. What surprised me the most was their enthusiasm. Whoever thinks academics don’t like to engage with the public should spend just one day in our office.

For the first few months, about four in five stories were those where I had to approach an academic with an idea and commission them to write an article. But as The Conversation’s name started spreading, I started getting in more pitches. This was what I was waiting for. Academics who understand what The Conversation does, who get what the public reads, and who were willing to spend the time to write such articles. These academics were bringing through new stories or new angles to old stories, all of which journalists had missed. Here, I realised, were the true wonks.

What is true wonkery?

Recently Felix Salmon of Reuters asked, “Is there a wonk bubble?” In answering that question, he mainly referred to the launch of two websites Vox.com, which wants to “explain the news”, and FiveThirtyEight.com, which wants to use data to tell news stories. I agree with Salmon that both these experiments are great for journalism, but I don’t think that they represent “wonkery” in the true sense.

The new publications are being built on the back of the wonkery of its Editors-in-Chief: Ezra Klein (politics and economics wonk) and Nate Silver (data wonk). The rest of the editorial staff, while quite capable and of high calibre, can’t all be classed in the same category as wonks, definitely not in Salmon’s narrow definition of journalists who know their subject really well and built their reputation through blogging (mostly about policy and politics).

Wonk’s definition as “a person who is obsessively interested in a specified subject” is actually much more accurate for academics (or even PhD students). That is why I class them as the true wonks. Being able to tap into this wonkery, or expertise (as most people would call it), can bring through stories that journalists would just not find on their own.

Economists such as Tyler Cowen, Paul Krugman, Simon Wren-Lewis and David Blanchflower command large audiences already. Scientists have had a long tradition of popularising science, be it Carl Sagan or Brian Cox. Now, beyond promoting the good work of already engaged academics, what The Conversation provides is a platform for new and diverse voices with fresh ideas, which would have otherwise remained in the ivory towers. More than 11,000 academics from over 700 institutions have already contributed to this new conversation.

To give you a flavour of what I mean, I have selected some of my favourite science stories on The Conversation from the past year. They have been split into four categories: the first is explanatory (The Contextual) and the other three are stories that journalists missed or couldn’t dig up  (The Newsworthy, The Amazing and The Strange). I trust you can judge for yourself whether the experiment is worth it.

The Contextual

• Albert and Adam rewrite the story of human origins
• Devastating earthquake in Pakistan creates a new island
• Mystery solved: meteorite caused Tunguska devastation
• DNA ‘evidence’ for Himalayan yetis doesn’t bear scrutiny
• Might some of Doctor Who actually be possible?
• There may be plant DNA floating in your blood (but that’s OK)

The Newsworthy

• Could the Higgs Nobel be the end of particle physics?
• The not-so-noble past of the Nobel Prizes
• I bet it’s biased: one easy step to squash expert opinions
• Biodiversity can flourish on an urban planet
• The seven deadly sins of health and science reporting
• The science of anatomy is undergoing a revival

The Amazing

• Scientists make ‘impossible material’ … by accident
• Jellyfish born in space aren’t happy on Earth
• We have ‘species’ thanks to Noah’s Ark
• Space exploration can drive the next agricultural revolution
• The little-known science that improved everything around us
• Chemists show life on Earth was not a fluke

The Strange

• Fathered by the dead: Guppies push the extremes of reproduction
• The parasite a cricket’s nightmares are made of
• As they spread, folktales evolve like biological species
• Meet Phronima, the barrel-riding parasite that inspired the movie Alien
• Invertebrates inject a bit of romance during sex – by stabbing each other
• Meet the enemy of killer fungus that turns ants into zombies

Image credit: Lucas Warren