Talk with a dolphin via underwater translation machine

A DIVER carrying a computer that tries to recognise dolphin sounds and generate responses in real time will soon attempt to communicate with wild dolphins off the coast of Florida. If the bid is successful, it will be a big step towards two-way communication between humans and dolphins. Since the 1960s, captive dolphins have been communicating via pictures and sounds. In the 1990s, Louis Herman of the Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Laboratory in Honolulu, Hawaii, found that bottlenose dolphins can keep track of over 100 different words. They can also respond appropriately to commands in which the same words appear in a different order, understanding the difference between "bring the surfboard to the man" and "bring the man to the surfboard", for example. But communication in most of these early experiments was one-way, saysDenise Herzing, founder of the Wild Dolphin Project in Jupiter, Florida. "They create a system and expect the dolphins to learn it, and they do, but the dolphins are not empowered to use the system to request things from the humans," she says. Since 1998, Herzing and colleagues have been attempting two-way communication with dolphins, first using rudimentary artificial sounds, then by getting them to associate the sounds with four large icons on an underwater "keyboard". By pointing their bodies at the different symbols, the dolphins could make requests - to play with a piece of seaweed or ride the bow wave of the divers' boat, for example. The system managed to get the dolphins' attention, Herzing says, but wasn't "dolphin-friendly" enough to be successful. Herzing is now collaborating with Thad Starner, an artificial intelligence researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, on a project named Cetacean Hearing and Telemetry (CHAT). They want to work with dolphins to "co-create" a language that uses features of sounds that wild dolphins communicate with naturally. Knowing what to listen for is a huge challenge. Dolphins can produce sound at frequencies up to 200 kilohertz - around 10 times as high as the highest pitch we can hear - and can also shift a signal's pitch or stretch it out over a long period of time. The animals can also project sound in different directions without turning their heads, making it difficult to use visual cues alone to identify which dolphin in a pod "said" what and to guess what a sound might mean. To record, interpret and respond to dolphin sounds, Starner and his students are building a prototype device featuring a smartphone-sized computer and two hydrophones capable of detecting the full range of dolphin sounds. A diver will carry the computer in a waterproof case worn across the chest, and LEDs embedded around the diver's mask will light up to show where a sound picked up by the hydrophones originates from. The diver will also have a Twiddler - a handheld device that acts as a combination of mouse and keyboard - for selecting what kind of sound to make in response.

Laws of physics may change across the universe

New evidence supports the idea that we live in an area of the universe that is "just right" for our existence. The controversial finding comes from an observation that one of the constants of nature appears to be different in different parts of the cosmos. If correct, this result stands against Einstein's equivalence principle, which states that the laws of physics are the same everywhere. "This finding was a real surprise to everyone," says John Webb of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. Webb is lead author on the new paper, which has been submitted to Physical Review Letters. Even more surprising is the fact that the change in the constant appears to have an orientation, creating a "preferred direction", or axis, across the cosmos. That idea was dismissed more than 100 years ago with the creation of Einstein's special theory of relativity. Sections of sky At the centre of the new study is the fine structure constant, also known as alpha. This number determines the strength of interactions between light and matter. A decade ago, Webb used observations from the Keck telescope in Hawaii to analyse the light from distant galaxies called quasars. The data suggested that the value of alpha was very slightly smaller when the quasar light was emitted 12 billion years ago than it appears in laboratories on Earth today. Now Webb's colleague Julian King, also of the University of New South Wales, has analysed data from the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, which looks at a different region of the sky. The VLT data suggests that the value of alpha elsewhere in the universe is very slightly bigger than on Earth. The difference in both cases is around a millionth of the value alpha has in our region of space, and suggests that alpha varies in space rather than time. "I'd quietly hoped we'd simply find the same thing that Keck found," King says. "This was a real shock."

Liquid crystals could detect contaminated water If you've ever dropped your mobile phone in dishwater, you can now claim you were testing the water for bacterial contamination. It seems liquid crystals, ubiquitous in electronic displays, are the best way to detect water-borne toxins. When suspended in water, the molecules in a liquid crystal droplet normally form chains that wrap around the droplet like the lines of longitude on a globe. But in the presence of endotoxins, disease-causing molecules produced byEscherichia coli bacteria, they rearrange to form a pattern that radiates from the drop's centre. Previously, coating a droplet's entire surface with toxins was thought to be necessary to produce the change, called an "ordering transition". Now Nicholas Abbott at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and colleagues have shown that only the "poles" of the droplet, where the longitudinal chains of its molecules meet up, need to contact the toxins to produce the realignment. That suggests liquid crystals can detect endotoxins at concentrations 10 times as low as currently possible, Abbott says. "The surprise was that we could trigger this ordering transition with such a small number of molecules," says Abbott. "It's a wonderful piece of work," says Oleg Lavrentovich at Kent State University in Ohio, who was not involved in the research. "In order to trigger the ordering transition, one needs a much smaller amount of stimuli than one might normally think." Liquid crystal droplets could one day help ensure the safety of saline and other injectable medical fluids.

America celebrates top 10 health advances Despite the oft-heard bad-news stories about public health from rampant obesity to antivaccine activists the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says we can in fact celebrate 10 great public health successes in the US from the past 10 years. Topping the list come a quintet of vaccines. Since 2001 the US has introduced or expanded the use vaccines for diarrhoea-causing rotavirus,bacterial meningitis, chickenpox, pneumococcus and the virus that causescervical cancer. Ram Koppaka and colleagues at the CDC, who compiled the statistics, report that the pneumococcus vaccine alone saved 13,000 lives between 2000 and 2008. Lethal complications Chickenpox is normally a mild virus of childhood, but it can sometimes trigger lethal complications. Routine vaccination has now cut such deaths in the US from 1 in 1.5 million people to 1 per 50 million. Meanwhile, the boost in public health funding after the anthrax attacks of 2001 has yielded more practical benefits than stopping imagined bioterrorists, by catching more incidents of tuberculosis. This has led to a 30 per cent fall in cases. The CDC also figures that better preparation for public health emergencies speeded the response to the 2009 swine flu pandemic, saving 1500 lives. "What these statistics really show is return on investment," says Koppaka. "These are areas that have been priorities for public health, not just for the past decade but before, and this is the pay-off." Quitting smoking In 1999, 35 per cent of Americans under the age of 18 smoked; now only 20 per cent do although this decline stalled in 2003. Less smoking among the population as a whole and better medical care have helped demote stroke from the third to the fourth most common cause of death, and has cut deaths from heart disease by a third since 2001. And that's not all: in the past 10 years, safer roads halved road deaths among child pedestrians, while stronger seat belt and child car-seat laws cut car-related deaths of children by 26 per cent, and injuries 37 per cent. In 1980, 88 per cent of American children under 5 had dangerous levels oflead in their blood; now less than 1 per cent do. That equates to a reduction in harm, mainly brain damage, which the CDC calculates is worth $213 billion a year to the US economy. Finally, in 2004, a 60-year effort to eliminate rabies from dogs in the US finally succeeded.

Milky Way faces mid-life crisis Our home galaxy is in the midst of a mid-life crisis, with the bulk of its star-formation behind it, a new study suggests. An impending merger with another galaxy will provide only a brief flurry of activity in an otherwise dull future. Most galaxies fall into one of two camps: blue galaxies that form stars vigorously and are full of young, blue stars, and red galaxies that produce stars sluggishly or not at all and are dominated by older, red stars. Galaxies of intermediate colour, called "green valley" galaxies, are relatively rare. They are thought to be in the process of changing from blue to red, with star-formation waning. A new study by Simon Mutch of the Swinburne University of Technology in Hawthorn, Victoria, Australia, and colleagues suggests our own galaxy is experiencing such a decline. It appears to have entered the green valley, with a future as a red, dead galaxy looming on the horizon. Blind spots The Milky Way's overall colour is difficult to determine from our position inside it, as dust clouds create "blind spots" that block visible light from many of its regions. However, infrared observations, which can penetrate dust, have revealed that its star formation rate is unexceptional, too low to put it clearly in the blue group and too high to be unequivocally red. To figure out what stage of life our galaxy is in, Mutch's team simulated the formation and evolution of 25 million galaxies and selected those similar to the Milky Way in terms of their star formation rate, shape and the total mass of their stars. The researchers found that these simulated Milky Ways were mostly green valley galaxies, suggesting that the real Milky Way is in this transitional state too, the team reports in a paper to appear in the Astrophysical Journal.

Genetics
No field of science has changed more, or changed the world more, in the last 50 years than genetics - the study of how our physical and behavioural traits are inherited. The field's crowning achievement may have been the spelling out of our genetic secrets by the human genome project, but scientific and technological advances in genetics have forever transformed agriculture,biology, medicine, zoology, and even fields such as anthropology and forensic science. Why certain features of parents and even more distant relatives appear or do not appear in individual people, plants, parasites and protozoa has fascinated and confused people for millennia. This observation has also spawned a remarkable variety of theories of heredity, from pangenesis to Lamarckism. Modern genetics, however, can trace its lineage to pea plants in the garden of an Augustinian monk, Gregor Mendel. By studying the inheritance of traits such as plant height and wrinkly peas, he discovered that most hereditary traits are carried by discrete factors, later called genes. Dominant and recessive These experiments illuminated many of the key principles of genetics. For example, they revealed that most organisms have two copies of each gene, one from each parent, and that a gene comes in a variety of different forms, oralleles. A purebred tall pea plant has two tall alleles of a gene for height (often abbreviated as TT), and the short plants have two short alleles (tt). Their offspring have one of each (Tt). This first generation is tall because the tall allele is dominant. Recessive traits, such as shortness in pea plants, are only expressed when two recessive alleles meet up. This is also a good example of how organisms of the same appearance, or phenotype (the tall parent and their offspring), can have different genotypes, or combinations of genes (TT versus Tt). It was nearly 100 years after Mendel published his work that scientists discovered genes are composed of the double-helical molecule DNA, which is built from four chemical letters, or bases: adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine. The discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953 immediately suggested a simple mechanism for DNA replication: the two strands of the helix could unzip and allow enzymes to enter and synthesise two new strands. The goal of the human genome project was to use DNA sequencing to reveal all three billion DNA letters in our chromosomes and find all our genes. By comparing our genetic make-up to the genomes of mice, chimps and a menagerie of other species (rats, chickens, dogs, pufferfish, the microscopic worm Caenorhabditis elegans, the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster and manybacteria), scientists have learned a great deal about how genes evolve over time, and gained insights into human diseases. Another powerful technology leading the genetics revolution is the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), which allows large quantities of DNA sequence information to be derived from tiny and highly damaged samples. PCR has become the linchpin in many criminal investigations, now that traces of blood, semen or skin left at a crime scene (even decades previously) can condemn a criminal or exonerate innocent suspects. This technology is also reshaping notions of both human ancestry and the evolutionary history of many species, by harvesting genes from ancient remains, including fossil DNA. Other new techniques could prove even faster than PCR.

Super-accurate clocks emerge from 'heat haze'

Clocks that gain or lose no more than a fraction of a second over the lifetime of the universe could be on the way, thanks to a technique for cutting through the "heat haze" that compromises the accuracy of today's instruments. The most accurate atomic clock we have now is regulated by the electrons of a single aluminium ion as they move between two different orbits with sharply defined energy levels. When an electron goes from the higher energy level to the lower it emits radiation of a precise frequency. That frequency is used to mark out time to an accuracy of better than 1 part in 1017, or 1 second in 3 billion years. That's pretty good, but it could be better. Infrared photons emanating from the background cause the two energy levels to shift by slightly different amounts, says Marianna Safronova at the University of Delaware. That affects the frequency of the emitted radiation to an unknown extent, adding a small uncertainty to the clock's tick. Safronova reported this month at a conference in Baltimore, Maryland, that by combining two different mathematical approaches, she and her colleagues have now managed to calculate how much the energy gap between the two levels changes. Using this information to correct an atomic clock could in principle increase its precision to around 4 parts in 1019, or about 1 second per 80 billion years. Such a clock could test whether the fundamental constants of nature are changing, Safronova suggests.

Human Evolution
The incredible story of our evolution from ape ancestors spans 6 million years or more, and features the acquirement of traits from bipedal walking, large brains, hairlessness, toolmaking, hunting and harnessing fire, to the more recent development of language, art, culture and civilisation. Darwin's The Origin of Species, published in 1859, suggested that humans were descended from African apes. However, no fossils of our ancestors were discovered in Africa until 1924, when Raymond Dart dug up the "Taung child" - a 3-million to 4 million-year-old Australopithecine. Over the last century, many spectacular discoveries have shed light on the history of the human family. Somewhere between 12 and 19 different species of early humans are recognised, though palaeoanthropologists bitterly disputehow they are related. Famous fossils include the remarkably complete "Lucy", dug up in Ethiopia in 1974, and the astonishing "hobbit" species,Homo floresiensis, found on an Indonesian island in 2004. Walking tall Humans are really just a peculiar African ape - we share about 98% of our DNA with chimpanzees, our closest living relatives. Genetics and fossil evidence hint that we last shared a common ancestor 7 to 10 million years ago - even if we continued hybridising long after. At around 6 million years ago, the first apes to walk on two legs appear in the fossil records. Despite the fact that many of these Australopithecines and other early humans were no bigger than chimps and had similar-sized brains, the shift to bipedalism was highly significant. Aside from our large brain, bipedalism is perhaps the most important difference between humans and apes, as it freed our hands to use tools. Bipedalism may have evolved when drier conditions shrank dense African forests. It must have allowed our ancestors to spot predators from further away, reach hanging fruit from the ground, and reduce exposure to sunlight. Evidence that Australopithecines walked upright includes analysis of theshape of their bones and fossilised footprints. One famous member of the species Australopithecus afarensis is the remarkably complete fossil found by palaeaoanthropologist Donald Johanson in Hadar, Ethiopia in 1974. The 3.2million-year-old fossil was named Lucy, after the Beatles' song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. She stood around 1.1 metres (3.5 feet) tall and although she walked on two legs, she probably had a less graceful gait than us, since she walked with them bent. Scientist's have modelled her gait using computers. Their characteristic long arms and curved fingers suggest that at least some Australopithecines were still good climbers. Hundreds of other fossils of Australopithecus afarensis have now also been discovered. Other related early human species include Australopithecus africanus - such as the Taung child - 3.5-million-year-old Kenyanthropus platyops, 5.8-million to 4.4-million-yearold Ardipithecus, 5.8-million-year-oldOrrorin tugenensis and 6 million year old Sahelanthropus tchadensis.

Baby apes' arm waving hints at origins of language

Actions speak louder than words. Baby chimps, bonobos, gorillas and orang-utans our four closest living relatives quickly learn to use visual gestures to get their message across, providing the latest evidence that hand waving may have been a vital first step in the development of human language. After a long search for the origins of language in animal vocalisations, some evolutionary biologists have begun to change tack. The emerging "gesture theory" of language evolution has it that our ancestors' linguistic abilities may have begun with their hands rather than their vocal cords. Katja Liebal and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have found new evidence for the theory by studying how communication develops in our closest living relatives. They discovered that all four great apes chimps, bonobos, gorillas and orang-utans develop a complex repertoire of gestures during the first 20 months of life.

Look at me
Those gestures included the tactile pokes and nudges that are expected to effectively capture another's attention in any situation, but they also included visual gestures such as extending the arms towards another ape or head shaking. To be effective communication tools, these visual gestures require that a young ape be aware that another individual is paying attention before using them, if they want to get their message across. "Given that purely visual gestures require more advanced social cognition we would have expected them to appear later in the apes' lives," says Liebal. "Their early presence in all four species is really surprising." Human babies also quickly learn to use visual gestures. Liebal's team argues that this puts great apes and humans on a different evolutionary branch from monkeys, which typically do not learn to use visual gestures until later in life. Michael Corballis at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, agrees. "In monkeys, intentional arm movements are dedicated mainly to grasping," he says. "Communicative gestures probably emerged in apes, and began to assume grammatical forms in hominins."

Got a point
Shadows of the differences that emerged in hominins can still be seen by comparing the type of visual gestures used by young great apes with those that young children use. "The apes did not use a single gesture systematically, either within a species or across all species that's in striking contrast to human infants," says Ulf Liszkowski at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen in the Netherlands. Liszkowski has just completed a study of gesture use by young children in seven different cultural settings, including Indonesia, Japan, Mexico and Peru. In all cases children had learned to point with their index finger by 14 months (Cognitive Science, in press). "Interestingly, it is exactly that indexfinger-pointing gesture which did not emerge naturally in any of the ape species in the Liebal study," he says. Beyond these broad patterns, however, Corballis says it is unlikely that the great ape study will ultimately lead to an evolutionary tree of gestures that reveals exactly how language appeared in humans. "I suspect apes have evolved their own idiosyncratic gestures since they diverged from hominins," he says.

Briefing: Can ecosystems show how to fix the euro?

14:46 10 November 2011 by Debora MacKenzie
The eurozone, like the rest of the world economy, is a complex networked system. That gives it properties economists rarely consider but which could help us understand the current crisis. New Scientist takes a closer look What is a complex network? Complex networks have many interconnected components which influence each other's behaviour. These changes then feed back on each other. A famous example is the numbers of predators and prey in a given environment, which vary in a complex interdependent way. The eurozone the 17 countries that share a common currency, the euro is similarly interdependent, with similar feedback mechanisms. All complex networks are governed by a balance between negative feedback, such as interest rates, which is stabilising, and positive feedback, such as the self-reinforcing erosion of trust in markets, which is destabilising, says physicist Len Fisher at the University of Bristol, author of Crashes, Crises and Calamities: How we can use science to read the early-warning signs. How does that help us understand economic crises? In certain circumstances, one type of feedback can end up dominating the system, causing it to change so dramatically that it flips to another state. Examples include the way animal populations can suddenly collapse or the way economies can slip into recession. These tipping points tend to be highly unpredictable. Even so, Fisher says computer models of the system can still show how the system can change. Yet leading economics journals, he says, do not accept computer-modelling studies. "Mainstream economists have not considered these non-linear effects," agrees Oonsie Biggs of Stockholm University's Stockholm Resilience Center in Sweden. Can we understand complex systems well enough to control them? Maybe. The diversity of a network's components and the density and strength of its connections called its connectivity affect the system's resilience, or resistance to change. More connections make a system more resilient: if one component fails others can fill in. But only up to a point. Go past a certain threshold and more connectivity makes the system less resilient because a single failure can cascade to every other component. The trick is to get the balance right. "Cascades of failure may be controlled by changing the nature and strength of the links between various parts of the networks," says Fisher. Much current research in complex systems focuses on assessing connectivity correctly to enable that. Other work aims to detect behaviour that indicates an imminent collapse. So turning 17 separate currencies into one eurozone was a cascading failure waiting to happen? Yes. That is why Greek debt is a crisis, even though Greece accounts for only 2.5 per cent of the eurozone's GDP. News of its debts caused the trust that markets placed in Greek government bonds to plummet. Its creditors are mainly in the eurozone, so a Greek default is causing markets to lose confidence in other members, such as Italy which is too big to bail out. Could the crisis have been avoided? Complexity theory shows what went wrong. Yaneer Bar-Yam of the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, says his still-unpublished studies show that investors profited by driving down the value of Greek government bonds, triggering the crisis. And, he suspects, they have now moved on to Italy. If instead of national bonds issued by sometimes weak economies, the eurozone had one common bond backed by powerhouses such as Germany, such an attack could not have happened.

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Germany rejects eurobonds. But, says Bar-Yam, complex systems such as multicellular organisms show that "if you are going to accept common risk, you have to invest in defences that extend to the weakest member". Either that or make sure an attack on a weak member cannot spread, a technique that ant colonies have perfected: the death of a single ant has little effect on the colony as a whole. "Biology has solved this problem several ways," says Bar-Yam. If connectivity is a risk, why create the euro? Connectivity is also profitable as it makes economic production much more efficient. And it can adapt to problems: connectivity allows other eurozone countries to help Greece, and to build better common defences. Trade-offs between efficiency and resilience may mean we need to sacrifice efficiency to make systems more stable, by pruning connectivity or paying for defence measures. "We now have the quantitative, analytical tools to do that," says Bar-Yam. Such models may also show when shortterm costs that reduce a system's efficiency may be warranted because of the long-term benefits of increased system resilience. Some connectivity problems could be hard to prune, though. Biggs says close coupling between major global hubs, such as the eurozone and the US, is a big source of instability; strong contributors to a network, like France and Germany in the eurozone, can be as well. Why don't economists know this? They are starting to. Some economic theorists have drawn parallels between financial networks where bank failures are prevented, and forests where small fires are always put out. Such forests accumulate deadwood fuel and lose patchiness, increasing connectivity. When a fire eventually breaks out, it becomes huge. That's why forest managers now encourage regular, small burns. Similarly, banking networks may need low-level failures to prune connectivity and risk.

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'Lethal' radiation doses can be treated with drugs

MICE can survive a dose of radiation that should have killed them when given a doubledrug therapy - even if they get the drug cocktail 24 hours after exposure. Radiation damages rapidly dividing cells in the intestine, allowing harmful bacteria to leak into the bloodstream. Eva Guinan at Harvard Medical School found that boosting levels of a protein involved in the immune response against the bacteria - while simultaneously giving an antibiotic - helped 80 per cent of mice survive (Science Translational Medicine, DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.3003126). The protein and antibiotic are both safe to use in people, and could be stockpiled in case of a nuclear accident, says Guinan.

Forget antibiotics, try nanoparticles instead

FORGET antibiotics, let's try nanoparticles. That's according to DARPA, the US military's research arm, which says that rather than spend money on new antibiotics, which only work until bacterial strains grow resistant, "readily adaptable nanotherapeutics" can fight infection instead. The agency has called for proposals to find ways to use small interfering RNA(siRNA) to fight bacteria. These scraps of genetic code seek out their mirror image within cells, such as bacteria, and silence them. This stops protein production and leads to cell death. DARPA is seeking ideas for adaptable nanoparticles that can be "reprogrammed on the fly" by loading up specific siRNA to deal with outbreaks among troops. As with GPS systems and the internet, this innovation might benefit the military initially, but eventually become a model for mainstream medication.

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What the latest LHC revelations say about the Higgs

16:34 09 February 2012 by David Shiga and Celeste Biever For similar stories, visit the The Large Hadron Collider Topic Guide In December 2011, the elusive Higgs boson was back in the limelight whenhints of the particle emerged in the wreckage of proton collisions at the world's most powerful particle smasher the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland. There have been no new collisions since, but researchers from the LHC's two main detectors have given the existing data a more careful look, culminating in two fresh Higgs analyses released on Tuesday. Here New Scientistdisentangles what we can and can't conclude about the particle that is swiftly becoming the people's favourite Remind me: what was the scoop in December? The Higgs boson is the missing piece of the standard model of physics, the leading theory for how particles and forces interact. The Higgs is thought to endow others with mass but has yet to be positively observed, so its mass and existence are still unconfirmed. In December, the LHC's two main particle detectors, CMS and ATLAS, each reported excesses of events, such as the appearance of a pair of photons in the shrapnel from particle collisions. These excess events could be due to a Higgs with a mass of around 125 gigaelectron volts (GeV; particle masses and energy can be treated interchangeably). Great. End of story? Far from it. Since more mundane reactions can produce such events too, they do not provide definitive evidence for the Higgs. By convention, researchers only declare a discovery when an anomaly reaches a statistical significance known as 5 sigma, which means there is less than a 1-in-a-million chance it is just a fluke. The size of the anomalies reported by the two detectors in seminar in December was 1.9 sigma for CMS and 2.5 sigma for ATLAS, which indicate a probability of a fluke of roughly 1 per cent. So what's the latest? After taking a closer look at the data, ATLAS finds little need for revision,reporting the same 2.5 sigma significance as before. But the CMS analysis reports some extra events that were not analysed in time for LHC's December announcement. These events could be due to a Higgs boson of around 125 GeV decaying into a pair of photons after being produced from the collision of two particles called W and Z bosons, that transmit the weak force. Adding these events to the December analysis gives a small boost to the overall statistical significance of CMS's Higgs hint, which now stands at 2.1 sigma. "It's not a radically different picture," says Greg Landsberg of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, who works on CMS. What's this about 4.3 sigma, then? A blog post on the Nature website on Tuesday states that an unofficial synthesis of the two results gives a significance of 4.3 sigma. But Pauline Gagnon of ATLAS says it would be premature to reach that conclusion before the Moriond conference in La Thuile, Italy, in March. "Combining the two experiments may happen after the first week of March but not before," she says. "Until then, it is anyone's guess." Will combining the CMS and ATLAS results boost the significance? Not necessarily, Landsberg says. The two detectors do not see an excess at exactly the same mass: CMS sees one at 124 GeV, ATLAS at 126 GeV. That might be due to errors in mass measurements by at least one of the detectors, in which case further analysis could bring the two masses into line. The other possibility is that they are both seeing flukes that happened to show up at nearly the same mass. "You have to carefully sift through different sources of uncertainties," warns Landsberg, to figure out which answer is more likely.

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When will we know whether the Higgs is out there? More data will be needed. The LHC will start up again in late March or early April after its winter shutdown. CERN officials are still trying to decide whether to boost the energy of this year's collisions from 7000 GeV to 8000 GeV. A decision could be announced as early as Friday, says Laurent Serin of the French National Institute of Nuclear and Particle Physics (CNRS/IN2P3). If the Higgs exists, collisions at the higher energy would produce more Higgs particles, making it easier to spot. Either way, the LHC will confirm or rule out the Higgs by the end of 2012, says Landsberg. "It's a very exciting year, and hopefully a year from now I can point to discovery papers."

We have breached Lake Vostok, confirms Russian team

Updated 15:18 08 February 2012 by Gabrielle Walker and Michael Marshall Update: Russian scientists have now confirmed that they have indeed breached Lake Vostok. It is the first time one of Antarctica's subglacial lakes has been penetrated. According to an official statement [in Russian], the drill entered the lake at 20.25 Moscow time on 5 February. Thirty to forty metres of water rose into the borehole, confirming that the drill had reached the lake itself and not a small pocket of liquid water above the lake surface. Original story (7 February 2012): A Russian drilling team is trying to confirm that they have finally hit Lake Vostok, a vast subglacial body of water hidden 3.5 kilometres beneath the surface of the Antarctic ice sheet (see map and diagram). A spokesperson for the Russian Antarctic Expedition in St Petersburg toldNew Scientist this morning that the drill made contact with water late last week and then automatically withdrew up the borehole, as planned. That suggests the lake has been breached, but the team are now checking the level of water in the borehole and readings from pressure sensors to confirm that the water did come from the lake and not a pocket of water in the ice above the lake. Ice temperatures rise as you go deeper into the ice sheet, and approach melting point just above the lake, so the fact that the team hit liquid water doesn't necessarily mean they've reached the lake. "For the time being we are waiting for official confirmation," said the spokesperson. An announcement is expected within the next two days.

No more drilling
Drilling stopped on 5 February and most of the team, led by Valerii Lukin, have left the area. Two team members have remained to monitor the borehole over the Antarctic winter. Even if Lukin's team have broken through the ice sheet to the lake, they will still need to wait nearly a year to sample its secrets. To avoid contaminating Vostok with drilling fluid Lukin and his team planned from the start to pierce the roof of the sealed ice cave which encases the lake and then let pressure in the lake force water into the drill hole. The plan is to leave the lake water to freeze in the borehole and create a plug, preventing contamination. The team will return to sample it during the following austral summer.

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Life, or nothing
Lake Vostok has been isolated from the surface for millions of years, and many hope it contains bizarre new life forms. At present, however, that seems unlikely. The drillers have already sampled wedges of accretion ice lake water that has naturally frozen onto the underside of the ice sheet and although some researchers claim it contains bacteria, others write this off as contamination. Moreover, the ice above is loaded with bubbles of trapped air. That air has accumulated in the lake for millennia, boosting the oxygen concentrations in the water and creating a potentially toxic environment. Some say that as a result, it is likely that the lake is completely sterile. That could be just as interesting. If Lake Vostok turns out to be sterile, that will make it the only place on Earth where there is water but no life.

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