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Giant Particle Collider Struggles

2009-08-08T10:44:12Z

Giant Particle Collider Struggles

Valerio Mezzanotti for The New York Times

Many of the magnets meant to whiz subatomic particles around the 17-mile underground Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva have mysteriously lost their ability to operate at high energies.

The biggest, most expensive physics machine in the world is riddled with thousands of bad electrical connections.

Many of the magnets meant to whiz high-energy subatomic particles around a 17-mile underground racetrack have mysteriously lost their ability to operate at high energies.

Some physicists are deserting the European project, at least temporarily, to work at a smaller, rival machine across the ocean.

After 15 years and $9 billion, and a showy “switch-on” ceremony last September, the Large Hadron Collider, the giant particle accelerator outside Geneva, has to yet collide any particles at all.

But soon?

This week, scientists and engineers at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, are to announce how and when their machine will start running this winter.

That will be a Champagne moment. But scientists say it could be years, if ever, before the collider runs at full strength, stretching out the time it should take to achieve the collider’s main goals, like producing a particle known as the Higgs boson thought to be responsible for imbuing other elementary particles with mass, or identifying the dark matter that astronomers say makes up 25 percent of the cosmos.

The energy shortfall could also limit the collider’s ability to test more exotic ideas, like the existence of extra dimensions beyond the three of space and one of time that characterize life.

“The fact is, it’s likely to take a while to get the results we really want,” said Lisa Randall, a Harvard physicist who is an architect of the extra-dimension theory.

The collider was built to accelerate protons to energies of seven trillion electron volts and smash them together in search of particles and forces that reigned earlier than the first trillionth of a second of time, but the machine could run as low as four trillion electron volts for its first year. Upgrades would come a year or two later.

Physicists on both sides of the Atlantic say they are confident that the European machine will produce groundbreaking science — eventually — and quickly catch up to an American rival, even at the lower energy. All big accelerators have gone through painful beginnings.

“These are baby problems,” said Peter Limon, a physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., who helped build the collider.

But some physicists admit to being impatient. “I’ve waited 15 years,” said Nima Arkani-Hamed, a leading particle theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. “I want it to get up running. We can’t tolerate another disaster. It has to run smoothly from now.”

The delays are hardest on younger scientists, who may need data to complete a thesis or work toward tenure. Slowing a recent physics brain drain from the United States to Europe, some have gone to work at Fermilab, where the rival Tevatron accelerator has been smashing together protons and antiprotons for the last decade.

Colliders get their oomph from Einstein’s equivalence of mass and energy, both expressed in the currency of electron volts. The CERN collider was designed to investigate what happens at energies and distances where the reigning theory, known as the Standard Model, breaks down and gives nonsense answers.

The collider’s own prodigious energies are in some way its worst enemy. At full strength, the energy stored in its superconducting magnets would equal that of an Airbus A380 flying at 450 miles an hour, and the proton beam itself could pierce 100 feet of solid copper.

In order to carry enough current, the collider’s magnets are cooled by liquid helium to a temperature of 1.9 degrees above absolute zero, at which point the niobium-titanium cables in them lose all electrical resistance and become superconducting.

Any perturbation, however, such as a bad soldering job on a splice, can cause resistance and heat the cable and cause it to lose its superconductivity in what physicists call a “quench.” Which is what happened on Sept. 19, when the junction between two magnets vaporized in a shower of sparks, soot and liberated helium.

Technicians have spent most of the last year cleaning up and inspecting thousands of splices in the collider. About 5,000 will have to be redone, Steve Myers, head of CERN’s accelerator division, said in an interview.

The exploding splices have diverted engineers’ attention from the mystery of the underperforming magnets. Before the superconducting magnets are installed, engineers “train” each one by ramping up its electrical current until the magnet fails, or “quenches.” Thus the magnet gradually grows comfortable with higher and higher current.

All of the magnets for the collider were trained to an energy above seven trillion electron volts before being installed, Dr. Myers said, but when engineers tried to take one of the rings’ eight sectors to a higher energy last year, some magnets unexpectedly failed.

In an e-mail exchange, Lucio Rossi, head of magnets for CERN, said that 49 magnets had lost their training in the sectors tested and that it was impossible to estimate how many in the entire collider had gone bad. He said the magnets in question had all met specifications and that the problem might stem from having sat outside for a year before they could be installed.

Retraining magnets is costly and time consuming, experts say, and it might not be worth the wait to get all the way to the original target energy. “It looks like we can get to 6.5 relatively easily,” Dr. Myers said, but seven trillion electron volts would require “a lot of training.”

Many physicists say they would be perfectly happy if the collider never got above five trillion electron volts. If that were the case, said Joe Lykken, a Fermilab theorist who is on one of the CERN collider teams, “It’s not the end of the world. I am not pessimistic at all.”

For the immediate future, however, physicists are not even going to get that. Dr. Myers said he thought the splices as they are could handle 4 trillion electron volts.

“We could be doing physics at the end of November,” he said in July, before new vacuum leaks pushed the schedule back a few additional weeks.

“It’s not the design energy of the machine, but it’s 4 times higher than the Tevatron,” he said.

Pauline Gagnon, an Indiana University physicist who works at CERN, said she would happily take that energy level. “The public pays for this,” she said in an e-mail message, “and we need to start delivering.”

Scientists Use Curvy DNA to Build Molecular Parts

2009-08-08T10:39:42Z

Observatory

Scientists Use Curvy DNA to Build Molecular Parts

Science/AAAS

A 12-tooth gear, about one-tenth of a micrometer in diameter, assembled from strands of DNA.

You can’t build a machine without parts. That’s true for large machines like engines and pumps, and it’s true for the tiniest machines, the kind that scientists want to build on the scale of molecules to do work inside the body.

Researchers at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard University have taken a step toward creating parts for molecular machines, out of DNA. In a paper in Science, Hendrik Dietz (who is now with the Technical University of Munich), Shawn M. Douglas and William H. Shih describe a programmable technique for twisting and curving DNA into shapes.

Dr. Shih said the method used strands of DNA that self-assemble into rigid bundles, with the individual double helixes joined by strong crosslinks. Manipulating the base pairs in the helixes — using more or fewer of them between crosslinks — creates torque that causes the bundles to twist and bend in a specific direction. The researchers were able to control the degree of bending, and were even able to make a bundle bend back on itself.

The researchers built several structures, including a 12-toothed gear and a wire-frame ball. Dr. Shih said that while it was possible that a future molecular machine might use parts like these, the work was meant to demonstrate that “if you want to make a machine, you are going to need very precise fabrication ability.”

The goal, he added, is to make objects that are far more complex, in order to eventually build a machine that could, say, deliver a tiny amount of a drug to a precise spot in the body.

Dr. Shih likened the work to the development of integrated circuits, where complexity has roughly doubled every 18 months for the past 40 years. “We’re motivated to improve the technology,” he said. “If you want to do amazing things, you are going to need to be able to build very complicated devices.”

Structure of HIV genome 'decoded'

2009-08-08T10:37:17Z

Structure of HIV genome 'decoded'

The team hope their work will pave the way to new treatments

Scientists say they have decoded the entire genetic structure of HIV-1 - the main cause of Aids in humans.

They hope this will pave the way to a greater understanding of how the virus operates, and potentially accelerate the development of drug treatments.

HIV carries its genetic information in more complicated structures than some other viruses.

The US research, published in Nature, may allow scientists the chance to look at the information buried inside.

HIV, like the viruses which cause influenza, hepatitis C and polio, carries its genetic information as single-stranded RNA rather than double-stranded DNA.

The information enclosed in DNA is encoded in a relatively simple way, but in RNA this is more complex.

We are also beginning to understand tricks the genome uses to help the virus escape detection by the human host

Ron Swanstrom
study author

RNA is able to fold into intricate patterns and structures. Therefore decoding a full genome opens up genetic information that was not previously accessible, and may hold answers to why the virus acts as it does.

The team from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill said they planned to use the information to see if they could make tiny changes to the virus.

"If it doesn't grow as well when you disrupt the virus with mutations, then you know you've mutated or affected something that was important to the virus," says Ron Swanstrom, professor of microbiology and immunology.

"We are also beginning to understand tricks the genome uses to help the virus escape detection by the human host."

Deep inside

Dr David Robertson from the University of Manchester welcomed this "definitive analysis".

"What this may reveal is some of the proteins operating at a level below the structures, which may have all sorts of functions within the virus.

"More generally, if we can unpick the structures then we can compare the systems of different viruses and gain new understanding of how they work."

Keith Alcorn of the HIV information service NAM added: "Encouraging the virus to mutate is not a new idea, but it is one of a number of options on the table.

"How important this information will be for the development of new drugs remains to be seen, but it is a useful addition to what we know."

Cannibal theory over early Briton

2009-08-08T10:34:24Z

Cannibal theory over early Briton

By Judith Burns
Science reporter, BBC News

Kents Cavern has a long history of human occupation

A fragment of bone from a Devon cave may hint at cannibalism by early Britons, according to archaeologists.

Researchers say the 9,000-year-old bone carries cut marks made by a stone tool which are consistent with the act of dismemberment.

Scientists believe the bone is evidence that Britons from the Mesolithic period engaged in complex burial rituals and possibly cannibalism.

Human remains from this period are extremely rare in Britain.

The bone was found at Kents Cavern in the late 19th century and was being stored at Torquay museum where curator Barry Chandler noticed the cut marks on it.

He showed the bone to Dr Rick Schulting from Oxford University who concluded that it belonged a human adult.

Dr Schulting told BBC News: "The cuts are along the top of the ulna, the top of the bone of the lower arm, right at the elbow. They look like they're made by stone tools rather than metal tools."

"They're just a series of fine parallel cuts as though you're trying to dismember, to remove the lower arm."

"The person must have been already dead at this time. So you're looking at post-mortem dismemberment for some reason."

Dr Schulting says the marks could be evidence of a complex mortuary treatment. Or, he says, "the other possibility is that this is done for quite another reason, the consumption of the individual as part of cannibalism."

Fresh break

The bone is also fractured and according to scientists this probably happened when it was still fresh, which might provide some support for the cannibalism theory - but Dr Schulting urges caution.

Carbon dating put the bone in the Mesolithic period, between the end of the last Ice Age and the start of farming.

Dr Schulting hopes to resolve the cannibalism question by searching Kents Cavern for other human and animal bones remains from this period to see if they were treated in the same way.

Dr Silvia Bello, a palaeontologist at London's Natural History Museum, told BBC News: "Cannibalism amongst [Homo] sapiens and pre-sapiens humans has always been a taboo topic. Whilst the presence of cut marks on faunal remains is usually referred to as a direct manifestation of butchery activities, cut marks on human remains are not usually considered to be un-equivocal evidence of cannibalism.

"The presence of butchery cut marks on human remains is generally interpreted as ritual practice, such as de-fleshing, scalping, dismembering, without consumption of the body. However, although difficult to prove, cannibalistic practices cannot be completely dismissed."

"The newly described human remains from Kent's Cavern are clearly an important development in the reconstruction of the complex funerary behaviour of Mesolithic people in Britain."

In the UK, the only other bones with cut marks were discovered in Gough's Cave, Somerset and are 5,000 years older.

This bone was dug up by in 1866 by archaeologist and geologist William Pengelly. He discovered it in the upper levels of Kents Cavern which are less studied than the lower levels as the items here are generally more recent.

It was being stored alongside some fragments of animal bone from the same area when Barry Chandler spotted it.

He was surprised that the carbon dating showed it as being so much older than the rest of the collection which are from the Bronze Age or late Neolithic era.

The Developing Child

2009-03-22T08:43:41Z

The Developing Child

With a new interdisciplinary center, Harvard turns its focus to the earliest years of life—in an approach that combines science, policy, and practice.

by Elizabeth Gudrais

Aldo Benincasa

A classroom in Peñalolén (a neighborhood of Santiago, Chile) where “Un Buen Comienzo” is being implemented

Extra

Helping Those Most in Need

In other CDC projects, Harvard scholars are trying to help former child soldiers, abuse victims, and children growing up in poor neighborhoods with rampant violence.

Sidebars

“Connections Across Continents,” March-April 2009
“Centered on Children,” March-April 2009

At a school in Peñalolén, a working-class neighborhood in Santiago, Chile, kindergarten teacher Patricia Pérez is reading to her class. The story involves a pig who wants to impress a lady friend so she’ll agree to go on a picnic with him. From a fox, a zebra, and a lion, he borrows items to spiff himself up: a tail, stripes, and a mane. When Mr. Pig arrives at his intended’s house, she doesn’t recognize him and refuses to go with him; he saves the day by coming back unadorned, prompting the lady pig to exclaim with delight: “¡Qué romántico!”

When the story ends, Pérez works with her pupils on vocabulary words such as consejo (“advice”—which Mr. Pig got from his friends, but should not have heeded), asking students to sound them out and write them on the board. In a nearby classroom, different kindergartners listen to their teacher reading; others read on their own, choosing from books strewn across tabletops.

Aldo Benincasa

Catherine Snow

To American visitors, these are unremarkable kindergarten scenes. In Chile, however, such scenes are less ordinary. Chilean children typically do not learn to read, or even begin working with the full alphabet, until first grade. “Early-childhood education has not, in Latin America in general, been thought of as education,” says Graham professor of education Catherine Snow. “The approach is: Let the kids play, get them used to being in groups, and we’ll worry about teaching them starting in first grade. But then in first grade, the expectations for progress are suddenly very high, and none of the preparatory work has been done. Kids kind of get dropped into the deep end.”

The hands-on approach to books in the Peñalolén classrooms is part of Un Buen Comienzo (UBC; “a good start”), a program designed with guidance from Snow and Harvard colleagues. It aims to improve the quality of early-childhood education in Santiago, increasing literacy and school success for the young participants. UBC is a project of the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE); a Chilean philanthropic foundation is underwriting and implementing it, and researchers from a Chilean university will evaluate its effectiveness.

Un Buen Comienzo reflects a recognition of early childhood as a crucial time for the development, both emotional and cognitive, that influences children’s later lives. Chile’s expansion of preschool programs, integrated into the existing school system, offered a unique opportunity to reach children at a younger age. Past efforts tended to focus on later childhood, but “the cost-benefit ratio is more favorable in early childhood than at any point in the life cycle,” says HGSE dean Kathleen McCartney. In the case of some skills and abilities, in fact, by the time a child enters school it’s too late to have maximum impact. Children’s vocabulary at age five very reliably predicts the number of words they know in sixth grade (see chart below). “We know from a number of studies that a very good predictor of success in literacy is oral language skills,” says Snow. “So if kids are limited in the oral language skills that enable them to understand a story that’s read aloud, or to tell a story about an event in their own lives, then they will have difficulty accessing meaning in the texts they learn how to read in the first grade.

Snow et al., 2007. Is literacy enough? Pathways to academic success for adolescents. Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes.

Each line in the graph above follows a child’s vocabulary growth from kindergarten through sixth grade. Note that the lines do not cross—the children with the largest vocabularies in kindergarten still had the largest vocabularies six years later. This is why it is crucial that preschool programs focus on building vocabulary and making up for the deficit that children in low-income families already face, says Graham professor of education Catherine Snow.

Because UBC incorporates rigorous evaluation of the strategies on trial, “I think countries across the world will be interested in the findings from this project,” says McCartney. “Most times, government education policy is driven by opinion, rather than data—by people’s best guesses about what will work.”

This dual approach—implementation and evaluation—is characteristic of Harvard’s aim to play a much larger role in improving the lot of children, in the United States and the world, through the interdisciplinary Center on the Developing Child (CDC; www.developingchild.harvard.edu), founded in 2006 with the goal of “advancing the scientific foundations of health, learning, and community well-being.” The center funds research by faculty and students and helps them take their findings out into the world—into the classroom, but also to the state and national capitols where policies are made. Even where a solid knowledge base exists, says CDC director and Richmond professor of child health and development Jack Shonkoff, “we don’t take it as a given that science speaks for itself in the policy world.” These efforts are already paying off for children, in Chile and elsewhere.

Teaching the Whole Child

Harvard has long had eminent faculty in child development —prominently including Julius Richmond, the late Harvard Medical School professor who served as founding director of Head Start and later as U.S. surgeon general (and who advocated for the CDC’s creation). But the University lacked a place where these researchers could combine efforts and share what was happening in their labs. President Neil Rudenstine created the Harvard Project on Schooling and Children in the early 1990s (see “Promoting a National Love of Children,” November-December 1996, page 52). But when Steven Hyman became provost in 2001, those leading the initiative recommended that it disband, Hyman recalls: “It was a volunteer, part-time effort—it wasn’t structured or funded in a way that it could be anybody’s full-time job. It was a labor of love tacked onto the day job of busy people, and that just wasn’t sustainable.”

Tired of waiting for a more effective umbrella organization, McCartney, Snow, and colleagues had begun work on UBC before Shonkoff arrived at Harvard and the center’s creation was announced. Now it is a flagship project in the center’s emerging global portfolio, reflecting the University’s fundamental interest in making a tangible difference in the lives of children. Snow is on the center’s steering committee. HGSE professor Hirokazu Yoshikawa, who is overseeing evaluation of UBC, is involved with multiple center initiatives. And UBC director Andrea Rolla, Ed.D. ’06, is a scholar in residence at the center this year.

Photograph by Aldo Benincasa

Andrea Rolla (third from left) and Hirokazu Yoshikawa visit a UBC school in Peñalolén.

And the interdisciplinary nature of the Santiago effort epitomizes the center’s approach. UBC combines professional development for teachers with workshops for parents, literacy with health, lesson content with a concern for classroom design. Says Rolla, “Children’s problems are interdisciplinary.” Training sessions prompt teachers to update their instructional methods to reflect current knowledge about how children learn: introduce reading through familiar words (instead of phonetic exercises that ask children to spell independently of context) and teach new vocabulary through stories instead of memorization. To expose children to as many letters and words as possible, hang posters and signs all over the classroom, label classroom objects, keep books accessible instead of hidden away in a cupboard, and post the letters of the alphabet at child’s-eye level, instead of near the ceiling.

For both teachers and parents, there is an emphasis on using “sophisticated vocabulary”—defined as anything beyond the 3,000 most commonly used words in the language. (Instead of saying “Eat your peas,” a parent might say, “You need to eat your peas because they have vitamins in them,” introducing an unfamiliar word in context.) The training also encourages the adults to be more verbal at every opportunity: if a child asks, “How do I tie my shoes?” the parent should talk through the steps—“first you make a loop. Then, you wrap the other lace around…”—instead of merely demonstrating.

The program’s designers quickly realized that making sure children learn means making sure they attend school consistently. In Santiago, where the Andes trap smog over the city and the air quality in winter is abysmal, children often get respiratory infections and parents may keep them home for weeks on end. In low-income comunas (districts of Santiago), winter attendance rates in preschool classrooms commonly drop to 50 percent or lower. (The average absence rate in the pre-UBC classrooms was more than 25 percent.) UBC teaches that children should attend school if at all possible (and donated hand-sanitizer dispensers hang in each classroom).

Parental engagement doesn’t happen automatically. In Latin America—and particularly in poor communities where parents lack advanced education—“families traditionally do not get involved in their children’s education,” says Rolla, the child of Argentine émigrés who grew up in Massachusetts, attended Princeton, and is married to a Chilean. At the entrance of each school, she says, “there’s a fence”—literal enough, but with symbolic value, too. “Parents drop their children o and pick them up.” Parents have told Rolla that before UBC, they thought that they were responsible for their children’s basic needs, but that education was solely the job of teachers. In a survey of UBC parents, 52 percent reported having 10 or fewer books at home. One quarter reported never reading to their children; another quarter reported reading to their children just once or twice a month.

After a pilot year, UBC’s second year has just concluded. The evaluation team is now measuring whether the program met its goals of enlarging students’ vocabulary, reducing respiratory infections, increasing school attendance, and getting all children to have annual physicals. It is examining children’s language use in journals and watching videotapes from the classrooms (professional development isn’t worth much if the teachers don’t use the new methods, Rolla notes). Says Yoshikawa, “We think that, with rigorous evaluation, you have a chance of influencing policy not just in Chile, but throughout South America—in fact, in middle-income countries everywhere.”

The program is focusing on poorer neighborhoods, at least to start, aiming to compensate for what is presumed to be a vocabulary-poor environment at home. At a cost of 45,000 Chilean pesos (about $75) per child per year, UBC is reaching 500 children already, and another 500 through less intensive intervention (see below). It will expand beyond Peñalolén to two other comunas this year, and by 2010 should reach almost 10,000 Chilean children.

Although the program is locally supported and run—critical elements for its credibility—there are frequent visits between Cambridge and Santiago. During an October trip to Chile, Snow, Yoshikawa, and MaryCatherine Arbour, M.D. ’05 (a clinical fellow in medicine at the Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital who is overseeing the health portion of UBC), visited one school in which the full program was being implemented, and one control school, which received five donated books per classroom (as opposed to 70 books for two or three classrooms to share with the full program), and self-care workshops to help the teachers avoid burnout.

At the first school, words and letters were everywhere. A single classroom contained a bulletin board with vocabulary words; the alphabet; a poster with days of the week; and posters of colors bearing their names. Outside the classroom hung drawings the children made, each one a scene from a book they read. On the door hung a poster listing the normas y reglas de la sala (the rules of the classroom) in the children’s own handwriting, not the teacher’s. Each element reflected the teachers’ new training. Above the school’s entrance gate hung a banner with a UBC-inspired message: Niño o Niña que no Asiste a Clases no Aprende (“Boys and girls don’t learn if they don’t go to school”).

When the program leaders met with teachers, one expressed amazement that her students were capable of the work the program assigns; she hadn’t believed it until she’d seen it. Another said, “Before, we would work on vocabulary words and then forget about them. Now, I hear the kids use them in conversation.”

At the second school, classroom walls displayed little written material. Books were nowhere to be seen, and certainly nowhere the children could access them easily. The pupils were gluing yarn to irregular shapes on paper, working on eye-hand coordination. There’s nothing wrong with this kind of exercise, Rolla explained, but it falls well short of engaging the full abilities of four- and five-year-olds. Absent language and literacy activities, the children miss opportunities for more rapid development.

How Stress Becomes Biology

Beyond bringing Harvard’s scholarship to bear on programs for children, the Center on the Developing Child’s brief also includes creating new knowledge. CDC director Jack Shonkoff explains that the center aims “to build a very strong science core that focuses on increasing our understanding of the underlying science of disparities”—of the factors that contribute to healthy development for some children and less good outcomes for others.

A center-funded study on the biology of early adversity will use recent advances in genetics and molecular biology to learn more about how stressors such as child abuse and neglect, or just growing up poor, affect physical and mental health across the lifespan. The researchers, six professors from three different Harvard faculties conducting human and animal research, are studying biomarkers, including telomere length and oxidative stress.

The telomere is a region found at both ends of every chromosome in cells throughout the body. Each time DNA replicates, the telomere shortens slightly: older people have a shorter average telomere length than younger people. This shrinkage is thought to be a natural part of aging—and perhaps even a physiological cause of the debility and disease that accompany it.

Intriguingly, recent studies have found a link between stress and accelerated telomere shortening—one documented especially short telomeres among adult caregivers for children with chronic problems such as autism. “By one estimate, they had lost 10 years of life through the chronic stress of taking care of these kids,” says professor of pediatrics Charles A. Nelson III, who holds the Scott chair in pediatrics at Children’s Hospital Boston and is one of the principal investigators.

Oxidative stress—also implicated in aging, and measured through a molecule in the blood—is the process by which free radicals, byproducts of the body’s use of oxygen, damage cell components including DNA. A diet of foods high in antioxidants (which neutralize free radicals) bolsters the body’s own antioxidant production; lifestyle factors such as smoking, exposure to pollution, and stress may overwhelm these natural defenses to bring about disease.

Nelson, who is also a member of the faculties of education and public health, is studying telomere length and oxidative stress in a population he knows well: Romanian orphans raised in institutions under heartbreaking conditions. Infants, for example, were left in cribs all day, except when being changed or fed. “No one responds to them if they cry, and as a result, no one cries,” he says. “The weirdest thing when you walk into this room for the first time is how quiet it is. There’s no talking, there’s no crying, there’s nothing.” Older children showed severely stunted growth and indiscriminate friendliness, sitting in the laps of complete strangers or happily walking off with them.

Michael Carroll

Children in Romanian orphanages are raised in conditions of social and cognitive deprivation. In many cases they receive no adult attention other than being fed and taken to the toilet as a group a few times a day.

Charles Nelson

This 11-year-old girl, raised in an orphanage in Romania, was only as tall as an average four-year-old child when the photograph was taken.

Charles Nelson

In these brain “heat maps”—seen from above, with the triangles at the top indicating the front of the head—red corresponds to high activity and blue connotes no activity. The different frequency bands (left-hand scale) reflect different types of brain activity, but across all frequencies, the level of activity was lower for children raised in Romanian orphanages (left column) than for those who grew up with their parents (right column).

To explain these disturbing observations, Nelson in 2000 began an exhaustive study of a cohort of children born that year and abandoned to orphanages, compared to a control group of children living with their families in Bucharest. He found a much higher incidence of mental illness among the children who grew up in the social and cognitive deprivation of the orphanage, as well as major differences in brain activity (see chart at left) and IQ. Half the orphans were placed in foster care, while the other half remained institutionalized; Nelson found that those placed in foster care before the age of two recovered about half of the IQ deficit, but orphans placed later had IQ scores nearly identical to those of children who stayed in the orphanage. He concluded that the first two years of life are crucial for normal development of language, cognition, and mental health—diverse faculties that develop apace in a normal family environment, but not in an institution with minimal interaction. These findings have already led to action: in 2003, in response to his work, the Romanian government passed a law forbidding the institutionalization of any child younger than two unless the child is severely handicapped.

In the current study, Nelson will examine the biological toll of early adversity by testing whether institutionalized children have shorter telomeres and more evidence of oxidative stress than children raised with their families. Colleagues will examine the same dimensions in two American samples—a large national longitudinal study and a group of youths with posttraumatic stress disorder—in hopes of quantifying the relationships among early adversity, elevated oxidative stress and shortened telomeres, and poor emotional, physical, and cognitive outcomes. The overarching goal is to get a better idea of how stress becomes biologically embedded, and precisely when intervention is most effective.

Takao Hensch

Takao Hensch (professor of molecular and cellular biology and of neurology) uses a contrast test to assess vision in mice. Mice that receive no visual input (for instance, because they are blindfolded) during a critical period will almost certainly be permanently blind—but Hensch has found a way around this. Using drugs approved for other uses in humans, he has induced plasticity in the visual system later in life, making blind mice see (and, conversely, making seeing mice blind by removing visual input after administering the drugs).

It is well established that in humans, critical periods exist for vision and some components of language (most notably, acquiring the syntax of a first language). Such sensitive periods in brain development are the specialty of Takao Hensch, professor of molecular and cellular biology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and professor of neurology at the Medical School (HMS). Building on the work of David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel (the Nobel Prize-winning HMS researchers who demonstrated the concept of critical periods for brain development by studying vision in cats), Hensch has identified the cell type that controls brain plasticity for the visual system. “Plasticity” refers to the capability of the brain to adapt its structure in response to experience; some parts of the brain remain malleable through adulthood. The visual system, on the other hand, is “wired” early in life, and then plasticity ends. Humans and animals that receive no visual input during the critical period (say, because they are blindfolded) typically are permanently blind, but recently, Hensch has induced plasticity in adult mice using drugs already approved for other uses in humans.

Much work remains to be done on whether plasticity could be induced in humans. But in the CDC study, Hensch and assistant professor of neurology Michela Fagiolini are investigating whether such complex and varied phenomena as autism and schizophrenia might also be critical-period disorders. Their hypothesis is that stress can cause abnormalities in basic brain systems and processes—specifically, in the formation of the myelin coating that allows neurons to transmit electrical impulses, and in the functioning of GABA, the chief inhibitory neurotransmitter in the brain.

Autism, says Hensch, “smacks of a critical period gone awry. It’s identified around three years after birth. Parents report that their children were normal up to that age, and then suddenly they’ve gone o track.” The search for genes involved in the disorder has led to many different candidates. The fact that such different genetic signatures manifest themselves the same way—“there’s an imbalance between excitation and inhibition,” in Hensch’s words—has led him and others to wonder whether autism stems not from the DNA, but from something about the way genes are expressed and the brain architecture is laid down. “Maybe different parts of the brain are becoming plastic either too fast or too slow,” he says. “We know that different brain regions feed into other brain regions, and so either degraded or accelerated maturation will cause the next stage to develop better or worse.” (For more on Harvard scientists’ research on autism, see “A Spectrum of Disorders,” January-February 2008, page 27.)

Hensch notes that scientists in Scotland have induced Rett syndrome, an autism-spectrum disorder, in mice by removing a single gene, and have also engineered mice in which the gene was dormant early, but could be switched on during adulthood—at which point, the second set of mice became normal. “This was tremendous,” says Hensch. “It suggests that this one mutation could produce something as severe as Rett syndrome, and yet all of brain development is lying dormant and could be rekindled.”

Meanwhile, research by associate professor of psychiatry Martin Teicher suggests that sexual abuse affects children differently depending on the age at which it happens. And Nelson’s research points to critical periods for other cognitive and emotional faculties. In addition, Nelson is running a study of autism risk in infants whose older siblings have the disease. Convergences like these explain the scientists’ excitement at working together. “I think we’ll find that many of the psychiatric disorders in humans will have a critical-period origin,” says Hensch, “that an early insult around birth or a genetic defect…will predispose brains to wire incorrectly.”

Practicing Good Policy

Translating scientific advancements into policy requires creating programs that incorporate cutting-edge science—and then testing those programs to see if they work. But such translational efforts have lagged behind. In reality, most contemporary proposals for early-childhood education depend on four fundamental studies begun decades ago: the Perry Preschool Study, begun in Ypsilanti, Michigan, in the 1960s; the Abecedarian Project, undertaken in North Carolina in the 1970s; the Brookline Early Education Project, begun in Massachusetts in the 1970s; and the Chicago Child Parent Centers launched in the 1980s. These studies “are still the foundation for government investment in preschool education all over the world,” says Hiro Yoshikawa of HGSE. “There’s a great need for conducting these kinds of rigorous evaluations on early-childhood education now.”

To that end, he is working on a program the Center on the Developing Child is launching in Tulsa. Although its context is utterly different from the program in Chile, the questions asked and concerns considered in program design are similar. Tulsa was chosen not only because it has “some of the worst health statistics in the nation,” according to Jack Shonkoff, but because of willing partners: the University of Oklahoma School of Community Medicine, the George Kaiser Family Foundation, and Tulsa’s Educare Center.

Involving faculty members from Harvard’s schools of education, medicine, and public health, this project envisions going even further than UBC in addressing multiple facets of a child’s life. Besides school readiness and health, the initiative will wrap in workforce development (job training and placement for parents) and behavioral economics (from explaining why check-cashing and payday-loan services that charge steep fees are a bad deal, to trying to pass laws that ban predatory financial practices).

Of the nascent project, Shonkoff says, “What’s distinctive about it is that it truly integrates cutting-edge thinking in early literacy, child and parent mental health, and economic security for low-income families.” These aims mirror his own Harvard appointments, in the schools of education, public health, and medicine. The Tulsa team reflects that range of skills, too. Among the participants are Richard Frank, Morris professor of healthcare policy, who specializes in healthcare finance and, in particular, in evaluating claims that specific policy changes will generate enough cost savings to pay for themselves; Bill Beardslee, Gardner-Monks professor of child psychiatry, who has examined how to protect children from the harmful effects of parental depression; Catherine Snow; and Yoshikawa, who has coedited a book on improving outcomes for children of low-wage workers.

From such innovative programs and watertight evaluation will come new knowledge about how best to help children. If this knowledge reaches a wide, influential audience, Shonkoff hopes the tide will turn in the direction of supporting early-childhood programs across the United States—programs that he says are “grossly underfunded.” Nearly 45 years after its founding, Head Start “is serving half of the kids it is meant to serve”: about one million American four- and five-year-olds were enrolled in 2006, but nearly two million live in families poor enough to meet the income guidelines. (The program costs $7 billion a year; to serve all eligible children, the government would need to double that amount.)

Early Head Start is in even worse straits. That program (which costs $11,000 per child) reaches just 96,000 children age three and younger—less than 3 percent of those who qualify. “With a few exceptions, every developed country in the world has a better system of publicly supported early care and education than the United States has,” Shonkoff says. “The concept of shared responsibility for each other’s children is not part of our political culture.”

Questions about these programs’ effectiveness also hold up efforts to allocate more funding. “There is tremendous variability in the quality of the implementation of Head Start,” he acknowledges. The challenge is to identify the features that successful providers share, to get more providers to incorporate those practices—and to develop new approaches with even greater impact.

Another challenge: convincing politicians and the public that “early childhood development is economic development,” in the words of Arthur Rolnick, who spoke last year at a CDC colloquium at the Business School. Rolnick is senior vice president and director of research for the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, which is helping coordinate an experimental preschool program in St. Paul. The most successful preschool programs provide a large return on public money, Rolnick noted: for instance, evaluations have shown the Perry Preschool program returned $17 on each dollar invested. And the biggest return, he said, is savings associated with crime (not just on prison budgets, but also on judicial and law-enforcement expenses, and costs to communities to repair damage from criminal acts). This type of investment equips the next generation to succeed in school, to graduate instead of dropping out, and to find jobs.

What’s more, says Provost Hyman, the stakes are huge for keeping the United States competitive. Providing children with supportive environments and making sure they have what they need to succeed in school, he says, are tasks “central to the success of our society.”

A generous gift to support international reporting, from a friend of Harvard Magazine, enabled associate editor Elizabeth Gudrais to travel to Chile in October to learn about the educational projects involving Harvard faculty and staff members reported in this article. Her earlier dispatch from that trip, “For Santiago’s Poor, Housing with Dignity,” appeared in the January-February 2009 issue.

The Next Dimension

2009-03-22T08:33:27Z

The Next Dimension

By Josh Quittner Thursday, Mar. 19, 2009

Cameron, center, revolutionized the 3-D business with his Fusion high-definition video cameras.

Art Streiber for TIME

3-D is all the rage in Hollywood, and Steven Spielberg and James Cameron are at the forefront of the technology

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The lights dim in the screening room. Suddenly, the doomed Titanic fills the screen--but not the way I remember in the movie. The luxury liner is nearly vertical, starting its slide into the black Atlantic, and Leonardo DiCaprio is hanging on for life, just like always. But this time, I am too. The camera pans to the icy water far below, pulling me into the scene--the sensation reminds me of jerking awake from a dream--and I grip the sides of my seat to keep from falling into the drink.

Most of us have seen the top-grossing film of all time. But not like this. The new version, still in production, was remade in digital 3-D, a technology that's finally bringing a true third dimension to movies. Without giving you a headache. (See the 100 best movies of all time.)

Had digital 3-D been available a dozen or so years ago when he shot Titanic, he'd have used it, director James Cameron tells me later. "But I didn't have it at the time," he says ruefully. "Certainly every film I'm planning to do will be in 3-D."

Digital 3-D, which has slowly been gaining steam over the past few years, is finally ready for its closeup. Just about every top director and major studio is doing it--a dozen movies are slated to arrive this year, with dozens more in the works for 2010 and beyond. These are not just animations but live-action films, comedies, dramas and documentaries. Cameron is currently shooting a live-action drama, Avatar, for Fox in 3-D. Disney and its Pixar studio are releasing five 3-D movies this year alone, including a 3-D-ified version of Toy Story. George Lucas hopes to rerelease his Star Wars movies in 3-D. And Steven Spielberg is currently shooting Tintin in it, with Peter Jackson doing the 3-D sequel next year. Live sports and rock concerts in 3-D have been showing up at digital theaters around the U.S. nearly every week.

With the release on March 27 of Monsters vs. Aliens, Jeffrey Katzenberg, the head of DreamWorks Animation SKG, is betting the future of his studio on digital 3-D. While he's not the first to embrace the technology, he has become its most vocal evangelist, asserting that digital 3-D is now good enough to make it--after sound and color--the third sea change to affect movies. "This really is a revolution," he says.

Over the past few years, Katzenberg has repositioned DreamWorks as a 3-D-animation company. From Monsters on, all its movies will be made, natively, in 3-D. (Many animation studios create the 3-D effect in postproduction.) That's a pretty big commitment since 3-D involves even more computer power than usual. The DreamWorks crew invokes "Shrek's law," which holds that every sequel takes about twice as long to render--create a final image from models--as the movie that preceded it. Authoring the movie in 3-D effectively doubles the time called for by Shrek's law.

That requires an extreme amount of horsepower--the computational power of DreamWorks' render farm puts it roughly among the 15 fastest supercomputers on the planet. The studio partnered with Hewlett-Packard and Intel and built an enormous test bed on more than 17,500 sq. ft. in California. The Silicon Valley companies are hot on 3-D because they believe it's how people will navigate the Web and the desktops of their PCs and that it will be standard on computers and HDTVs.

See pictures of the best animated movies.

See the best and worst Super Bowl commercials of 2009 including 3-D spots.

At DreamWorks, I watched a Monsters filmmaker peer through an elaborate camera rig that allowed him to "previsualize" a scene before shooting it. As he panned across the room we were standing in, he flew over a computer-generated 3-D image of the White House war room--the set for a scene in which the President (voiced by Stephen Colbert) meets with his staff to discuss an alien invasion. The camera let the director precisely manage the z-axis and decide which elements in the background, midground and foreground needed to be lit and focused.

Katzenberg says going 3-D adds about 15% to his costs--which is nothing compared with the profits studios anticipate as the digital transformation takes hold. Digital 3-D movies usually gross at least three times as much as their flat-world counterparts--thanks in part to the higher ticket prices and longer runs they garner. Another benefit: 3-D films are far more difficult for digital-camera-toting moviegoers to pirate. (See pictures of movie costumes.)

Beyond the venal, however, filmmakers say that 3-D, like sound and color, really breaks down the barrier between audience and movie. "At some level, I believe that almost any movie benefits from 3-D," Lord of the Rings director Jackson says. "As a filmmaker, I want you to suspend disbelief and get lost in the film--participate in the film rather than just observe it. On that level, 3-D can only help."

3-D Movies, Take 8
If the return of the 3-D movie sounds like a rerun, that's because it is. By some counts, this is 3-D's eighth incarnation, and to date, it hasn't exactly revolutionized the industry. The first stereoscopic movies appeared in the U.S. before the last Great Depression, disappeared, then enjoyed a schmaltzy revival in the 1950s with such blockbusters as House of Wax (1953). They've cropped up intermittently ever since, typically attached to high-camp vehicles like Andy Warhol's Frankenstein (1973).

"To me, 3-D has always been the circus coming to town," says Daniel Symmes, a 3-D historian and film-industry veteran. Symmes worked on the soft-core 3-D hit The Stewardesses, which was produced in 1969 for around $100,000. It grossed more than $27 million, making it the most profitable 3-D movie ever. Symmes scoffs at today's digital 3-D and its big budgets and says it's déjà vu. "Does the circus stay around?" he says. "No. If it does, attendance drops off, the novelty is gone and the circus goes away."

But proponents say digital 3-D is a different animal from the analog stuff that came before 2005. Viewers often wore cardboard glasses with red and cyan cellophane lenses (similar to but somewhat different from what you see in this magazine). As just about everyone knows, old-school 3-D was less than awesome. Colors looked washed out. Some viewers got headaches. A few vomited. "Making your customers sick is not a recipe for success," Katzenberg likes to say.

It was cumbersome to produce too. In the old days, two 65-mm, 150-lb. film cameras--each shooting the same scene in sync--were used to make a 3-D picture. The gap between the lenses simulates the space between our eyes, adding space perception. But with film, you never knew how the shot would turn out until later.

The birth of high-definition, digital filmmaking changed all that. Cameron and an associate, Vince Pace, developed the 3-D-capable Fusion camera system, which is cheaper, smaller--13 lb. each--and way more versatile than the old film rigs. "Every movie I made, up until Tintin, I always kept one eye closed when I've been framing a shot," Spielberg told me. That's because he wanted to see the movie in 2-D, the way moviegoers would. "On Tintin, I have both of my eyes open."

Read "3-D Movies: Coming Back at You."

A Beverly Hills company called Real D took the lead on the theater side. It leases out a kind of digital shutter system that sits in front of digital projectors, alternating the two views of each frame 144 times per sec.--fast enough to achieve stereovision. The new system uses polarization, rather than color-coding. Gone are the completely cheesy cardboard glasses, replaced with slightly less cheesy disposable plastic-frame glasses that have gray lenses. "Someday," predicts Katzenberg, "people will buy their own movie glasses, which they'll take to the movies--like people have their own tennis rackets."

Even if you're willing to grant him the glasses, there's still one problem. For digital 3-D to work, the movie theater must first convert from analog to digital--that is, from reels of film to data feeds. Theaters have been slow to do it, citing the expense and security. Disney chairman Dick Cook is credited with breaking the initial logjam with Chicken Little in 2005. About 75 theaters converted to digital to show the film, and a surprising thing happened: 3-D theaters reported three to four times the box-office gross as those that showed the 2-D version. (All 3-D movies can easily be stepped down to 2-D and are typically shown in both forms.) That was the jump start digital 3-D needed. Katzenberg predicts that more than 2,000 theaters will be 3-D-ready by this week. (See the top 10 movie performances of 2008.)

But in this economy, will people spend as much as $15 a ticket for a movie? Katzenberg is optimistic, pointing out that consumers are cutting back on everything but cheap entertainment. "The movies have been the greatest beneficiary of this," he says. "So to offer a new, exciting premium version of a bargain will be a big winner."

The Future of 3-D
Cameron's Avatar, due in December, could be the thing that forces theaters to convert to digital. Spielberg predicts it will be the biggest 3-D live-action film ever. More than a thousand people have worked on it, at a cost in excess of $200 million, and it represents digital filmmaking's bleeding edge. Cameron wrote the treatment for it in 1995 as a way to push his digital-production company to its limits. ("We can't do this," he recalled his crew saying. "We'll die.") He worked for years to build the tools he needed to realize his vision. The movie pioneers two unrelated technologies--e-motion capture, which uses images from tiny cameras rigged to actors' heads to replicate their expressions, and digital 3-D.

Avatar is filmed in the old "Spruce Goose" hangar, the 16,000-sq.-ft. space where Howard Hughes built his wooden airplane. The film is set in the future, and most of the action takes place on a mythical planet, Pandora. The actors work in an empty studio; Pandora's lush jungle-aquatic environment is computer-generated in New Zealand by Jackson's special-effects company, Weta Digital, and added later.

I couldn't tell what was real and what was animated--even knowing that the 9-ft.-tall blue, dappled dude couldn't possibly be real. The scenes were so startling and absorbing that the following morning, I had the peculiar sensation of wanting to return there, as if Pandora were real.

Cameron wasn't surprised. One theory, he says, is that 3-D viewing "is so close to a real experience that it actually triggers memory creation in a way that 2-D viewing doesn't." His own theory is that stereoscopic viewing uses more neurons. That's possible. After watching all that 3-D, I was a bit wiped out. I was also totally entertained.

The original version of this story misstated the cost of the film Avatar as being in excess of $300 million. The correct figure is in excess of $200 million.

See TIME's 1953 cover about 3-D Movies.

See TIME's Pictures of the Week

'Brain decline' begins at age 27

2009-03-22T08:24:53Z

'Brain decline' begins at age 27

Mental abilities decline at a relatively young age, experts suspect

Mental powers start to dwindle at 27 after peaking at 22, marking the start of old age, US research suggests.

Professor Timothy Salthouse of the University of Virginia found reasoning, spatial visualisation and speed of thought all decline in our late 20s.

Therapies designed to stall or reverse the ageing process may need to start much earlier, he said.

His seven-year study of 2,000 healthy people aged 18-60 is published in the journal Neurobiology of Aging.

To test mental agility, the study participants had to solve puzzles, recall words and story details and spot patterns in letters and symbols.

The natural decline of some of our mental abilities as we age starts much earlier than some of us might expect

Rebecca Wood of the Alzheimer's Research Trust

The same tests are already used by doctors to spot signs of dementia.

In nine out of 12 tests the average age at which the top performance was achieved was 22.

The first age at which there was any marked decline was at 27 in tests of brain speed, reasoning and visual puzzle-solving ability.

Things like memory stayed intact until the age of 37, on average, while abilities based on accumulated knowledge, such as performance on tests of vocabulary or general information, increased until the age of 60.

Professor Salthouse said his findings suggested "some aspects of age-related cognitive decline begin in healthy, educated adults when they are in their 20s and 30s."

Rebecca Wood of the Alzheimer's Research Trust agreed, saying: "This research suggests that the natural decline of some of our mental abilities as we age starts much earlier than some of us might expect - in our 20s and 30s.

"Understanding more about how healthy brains decline could help us understand what goes wrong in serious diseases like Alzheimer's.

"Alzheimer's is not a natural part of getting old; it is a physical disease that kills brain cells, affecting tens of thousands of under 65s too.

"Much more research is urgently needed if we are to offer hope to the 700,000 people in the UK who live with dementia, a currently incurable condition."

Maggot therapy hope 'premature'

2009-03-22T08:22:14Z

Maggot therapy hope 'premature'

There has been increasing interest in use of maggots in wound healing

Maggots may not have the miracle healing properties that have been claimed, a UK study suggests.

Researchers comparing maggots with a standard "hydrogel" in treating leg ulcers found little difference.

Recent excitement over using maggots to speed up healing and even reduce MRSA infections in leg ulcers seems to have been premature, they said.

The British Medical Journal study is the first to compare maggots with standard treatment.

Leg ulcers can be very difficult to treat and after use of high-compression bandages only about half are healed within 16 weeks.

One common treatment is to use a water-based gel to keep the wound moist and promote the natural healing process.

Maggots, or larval therapy, are another option - but it can be more tricky to place them in the wound and they have to be specially ordered which takes a few days.

The theory has been that maggots are effective because they "clean out" dead tissue - a process called debridement - stimulating healing and getting rid of bugs such as MRSA in the process.

But although larval therapy is being used more and more, it has only been tested in one randomised controlled trial of 12 patients, the team said.

Healing

In the latest study, 270 patients with leg ulcers from around the UK were treated either with maggots or hydrogel and progress followed for up to a year.

There was no significant difference in the time it took the ulcer to heal between the two treatments or in quality of life.

Maggots were not more effective than hydrogel treatment at reducing the amount of bacteria present or in getting rid of MRSA and were, on average, associated with more pain.

It comes down to the aim of treatment, if for some reason rapid debridement is important, then you would choose larval therapy

Professor Nicky Cullum, study leader

The only benefit seemed to be that the dead tissue in the wound was cleaned out more quickly

A separate study looking at cost-effectiveness estimated there was little to choose between the two therapies.

Study leader Professor Nicky Cullum, deputy head of health sciences at the University of York, said the resurgence in interest in using maggots had been "premature".

"The ulcers treated with larval therapy did get cleaner - which is not surprising as they're an active debriding agent - but that rapid cleaning did not lead to rapid healing."

She said it would be up to clinicians to decide which was the most appropriate for their patients, but in general there was no extra benefit from maggots over standard therapy.

"It comes down to the aim of treatment. If for some reason rapid debridement is important, then you would choose larval therapy - for example if someone was having a skin graft.

"This will help them make more informed decisions."

Gene 'has key schizophrenia role'

2009-03-22T08:21:14Z

Gene 'has key schizophrenia role'

Schizophrenia can have devastating symptoms

Two studies have pinpointed a single gene as key to the development and treatment of schizophrenia.

A US team from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute found that a mutated version of the DISC1 gene disrupts the growth and development of brain cells.

And a team from the University of Edinburgh showed that the gene affects how patients respond to treatment.

Both studies, published in the journals PLoS One and Cell, raise hopes of more effective treatment for schizophrenia.

DISC1 GENE

Linked in the early 1990s to mental illnesses prevalent in a large Scottish family

Over five generations many family members had developed schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and other mood disorders

Each family member diagnosed with mental illness also carried a mutated copy of DISC1

The condition is a common form of mental illness, affecting up to 1% of adults worldwide.

Symptoms tend to appear in late adolescence or early adulthood, and can include delusions, hallucinations, paranoia, and depression.

The US team showed that DISC1 plays a key role in normal brain development and the growth of individual neurons. However, carrying the wrong version of the gene can make this process go awry.

Working on mice, they showed that DISC1 was active, both in cells taken from embryos and in brain stem cells taken from adult mice.

When DISC1 levels were reduced in adult mice their brain cells failed to divide, and the animals developed symptoms mimicking schizophrenia in humans.

Further tests showed that DISC1 acts like lithium, a drug commonly prescribed as mood stabiliser to patients with mental illness, inhibiting the action of a key chemical in the brain.

When mice with depressed levels of DISC1 were treated with this chemical, their symptoms began to improve.

Lead researcher Dr Li-Heui Tsai said: "We need to get a handle on the genetics of schizophrenia, but now we know how DISC1 probably contributes to the disorder, which is a big step."

Impact on treatment

The Edinburgh researchers analysed data generated by the Human Genome Project, set up to decode the complete genetic blueprint of humans.

They showed DISC1 affects a number of other genes current medications are designed to target.

Dr William Hennah, who led the Edinburgh team, said: "We know that disorders such as schizophrenia have a genetic element and that this specific gene, DISC1, is important to that process.

"This research helps us to understand exactly how it affects brain development and provides clues about how to solve problems when that process goes wrong."

The charity Rethink, which campaigns on severe mental health issues, described the research as an important step forward in understanding schizophrenia - but only a small step.

A spokesperson said: "With mental illness receiving just 6.5% of research funding in the UK, we can expect it to be a very long time before these findings are developed into major breakthroughs.

"If we really want to unravel the complex causes of schizophrenia and deliver more effective treatments we need a level of research investment proportionate to the enormous human and economic costs of the illness."

Online game gets banking licence

2009-03-22T08:20:14Z

Online game gets banking licence

Entropia has regularly mixed real and virtual finances.

Online game Entropia Universe has been granted a licence to be a bank.

Issued by the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority, the licence means the game can be more closely tied to the real world finances of players.

Mindark, the developers of the game, said it aimed to launch a fully-functioning in-game bank within the next 12 months.

At current exchange rates, 10 PED (Project Entropia Dollars) are worth one US dollar.

Unlike many other online games, which charge a monthly subscription fee, the software for Project Entropia is free to download and install.

However, players pay real money to get at in-game items, such as guns, armour and other gear, and the micro-payment system pays for Entropia's running costs.

The licence will make it easier for players to convert real world cash into PEDs and sustain their characters in the game, said Mindark in a statement.

"We will be in a position to offer real bank services to the inhabitants of our virtual universe," said Jan Welter Timkrans, boss of Mindark. It plans to offer players interest-bearing accounts, let them deposit their salaries and pay bills or lend cash via the in-game bank.

The licence also means that each account is backed by deposit insurance to the value of $60,000 (£42,000).

Regulators will get oversight of financial transactions carried out in the game world, so they can spot if criminals are using it to launder money.

Mindark claims that more than 800,000 people have registered to play the game and 80-100,000 are regular players. About $420m of player-to-player transactions were carried out during 2008, according to Mindark figures.

Fossil hints at fuzzy dinosaurs

2009-03-22T08:17:50Z

Fossil hints at fuzzy dinosaurs

By Victoria Gill
Science reporter, BBC News

Dinosaurs may have been more fuzzy than previously thought

A discovery in China has prompted researchers to question the scaly image of dinosaurs.

Previously, experts thought the first feathered dinosaurs appeared about 150 million years ago, but the find suggests feathers evolved much earlier.

This has raised the question of whether many more of the creatures may have been covered with similar bristles, or "dino-fuzz".

The team describe the fossil in the journal Nature.

Hai-Lu You, a researcher from the Insitute of Geology in Beijing, was part of the team that discovered the fossil.

Maybe all dinosaurs, even the predominantly scaled ones, had fuzzy parts

Lawrence Witmer
Ohio University

He told BBC News he was "very excited" when he realised the significance of what his team had found.

He described the filaments seen on the body of the new dinosaur, which the team has named Tianyulong confuciusi, as "protofeathers" - the precursors of modern feathers.

"Their function was probably display, as well as to keep the body warm" he said.

Dr You's team noticed that the filaments on the base of their dinosaur's tail were extremely long.

These, they suggest, might have evolved for show, and may even have been coloured.

"The world of dinosaurs would [have been] more colourful and active than we previously imagined," he said.

Muddying the water

Dinosaurs can be categorised into two large families - the Saurischia and the Ornithischia.

The filaments or 'protofeathers' are clearly visible on the fossil

The Saurischia family includes the theropods - thought to be the ancestors of modern birds. Fossils of these dinosaurs have revealed that some of them were feathered.

But the newly-discovered dinosaur is a member of the Ornithischia group - all previously thought to have reptilian scales.

Professor Lawrence Witmer, a paleontologist from Ohio University, says this "really muddies the waters" of what researchers know about the origin of feathers.

It suggests that their origin might go right back to the earliest ancestors of all dinosaurs - more than 200 million years ago.

"The bad news is that something we thought was neatly wrapped up is now not so neat," said Professor Witmer.

"We now need to rethink what the coat of the ancestral dinosaurs actually was."

He added: "But the good news is that we can now look at existing evidence with new eyes - going back to old fossils and asking if there is evidence of any of these filaments."

The small dinosaur is housed at Tianyu Museum of Nature in Shandong, China

The team, who named the dinosaur after the Tianyu Museum of Nature, where the fossil is housed, also dedicated part of its name to the philosopher Confucius to reflect how it has changed the modern view of dinosaurs.

"Maybe all dinosaurs, even the predominantly scaled ones, had fuzzy parts," added Professor Witmer.

"And if they were covered in a fuzzy coat, what does that tell us about their physiology? Perhaps they were warm-blooded.

"We now need to think completely differently about the evidence we already have."

Advice on Art and Life from Yo-Yo Ma

2009-02-22T10:31:03Z

Advice on Art and Life from Yo-Yo Ma

February 9, 2009

At a symposium on arts careers last Friday, February 6, Yo-Yo Ma ’76, D.Mus. ’91, started and ended his remarks with a composition—and he encouraged listeners to think of their lives, too, as compositions, with underlying themes that develop across time, through new and unexpected elaborations. For her part, President Drew Faust advanced the first small steps toward implementing an expanded embrace of the arts at Harvard—measures ultimately intended to help students pursue their passion for creativity and performance (see details below).

“Never lose your passion,” the cello virtuoso told his Sanders Theatre audience, undergraduates interested in pursuing careers in the arts. “It’s a rare gift to have a passion…. You want to keep it alive.” Ma, who has recorded more than 50 albums and won 15 Grammy awards, said that to stay engaged in his career, he’d had to reframe his reasons for doing what he did. In his twenties, when he was traveling the world for the first time, everything was new and exciting, he said; but in his thirties and forties, as the novelty faded, he had to find a new approach. (For a detailed profile, see “Yo-Yo Ma’s Journeys,” from the Harvard Magazine archives.)

One of the selections Ma played was a Bach sarabande—a dance that originated in North Africa and wended its way through Spain (where it was banned due to its sensuality), into France (where it became a courtly dance), and then into the oeuvre of this German composer. “Who owns this?” Ma asked. “All of the places the dance has traveled through have part ownership.” Similarly, research about the origin of his instrument revealed that his Italian cello contained components from Africa, Croatia, India, and Indonesia, and that his French bow was made of wood from Brazil and horsehair that could only have come from Canada or Mongolia. Such explorations of lineage led to his founding of the Silk Road Project, a nonprofit that broadly supports international and intercultural art exchange.

Ma has also found additional depth in his work by learning about the composers. When he realized that Bach’s compositions for the cello were polyphonic, although the instrument could play only one melodic line at a time, Ma said this changed his approach to the music—and to life: he realized the importance of striving for impossible goals. Attainable goals too often turn out to be disappointing and anticlimactic when reached, he said: “You might as well go for moments that you can’t reach.”

Ma spoke of learning to play in an entirely new style in his forties, and of journeying outside his comfort zone to experiment with improvisation through collaboration with Bobby McFerrin (well known for his 1988 pop hit, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” but a serious and acclaimed musician in his own right, having won 10 Grammies). It is this continuous quest for intellectual renewal that keeps the spark alive, in music or any other vocation, Ma said.

Ma’s appearance inaugurated the implementation of a report from a University task force on the arts, released in December. Friday’s event was one of a pair of panels, together titled “Passion for the Arts,” that Diana Sorensen, dean of arts and humanities in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, said she envisioned as analogous to the sessions held to inform students about jobs in finance and consulting. “We have nothing against finance, the professions, or management,” Sorensen told the University Gazette, “but it seems there are more models to be considered.”

(The next morning in the Science Center, three more speakers told students about their careers in the arts and humanities. Noah Feldman ’92 outlined his path to becoming Bemis professor of law at Harvard Law School; the author of several books about the Islamic world and the role of religion in American government and life; and a regular contributor to the New York Times Magazine. Washington Post sports columnist Sally Jenkins and screenwriter, director, and producer Gary Ross discussed their careers and their current collaboration on a forthcoming film and book about a group of radical Unionists—both black and white—from Mississippi who fought against the Confederacy.)

Introducing Ma, President Faust noted that the majority of Harvard undergraduates report some involvement in artistic practice, and art-making is the focus of more than half of all registered student groups. Even if students decide against trying to become professional artists, Ma urged them to keep practicing outside of work: “You can’t predict what’s going to happen five years from now…. Maybe you can’t do it now, but don’t forget.”

Faust foreshadowed Ma’s message by saying the University must not treat artistic practice as a mere hobby or diversion: “The arts can instill in us the very skills and habits of mind that are essential to finding solutions to the challenges of this age.”

From Recommendation to Action on the Arts

Reiterating the task-force report’s call to bring art-making from a tangential place in campus culture to the center, Faust said on Friday that, given mounting financial challenges, “we all recognize that this report has not appeared at the most propitious of times.” But, she said, “I have no doubt that we can make significant progress even in current circumstances.”

She proceeded to announce the first concrete steps Harvard will take to enrich students’ arts experiences, including her own commitment of presidential discretionary funds (given last year as part of a $100-million gift from David Rockefeller ’36, G ’37, LL.D. ’69) to expand fellowships for student artists through the Office for the Arts at Harvard and to bring more visiting artists to campus. Faust took the opportunity to name the first two: jazz musician Wynton Marsalis, who will coordinate a series of lectures by musicians; and the minimalist composer John Adams ’69, M.A. ’72, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for his piece commemorating those who died on September 11, 2001. (Arrival dates for both are still being worked out, the Harvard News Office said.) Among other measures:

She announced the development of a new architecture track within the history of art and architecture concentration, designed to prepare students to work in architecture or gain admission to graduate programs in the field.
She set a goal of offering at least five freshman seminars that incorporate art-making, and another five courses in the undergraduate general-education curriculum, next year, as well as arts opportunities during the new “January experience” period created by moving final exams into December. She offered one example of a concept being developed: a course co-taught by Kenan professor of English and of visual and environmental studies Marjorie Garber and American Repertory Theatre (ART) artistic director Diane Paulus, studying in depth the journey of a single play from text to performance (and working with one of the plays to be performed at the ART next year).
A new Web portal for event listings—performances, exhibitions, lectures—will launch this spring, creating a central place to post, and find out about, arts happenings at and around Harvard.
Harvard students will now have free admission to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and the Institute of Contemporary Art, as well as to the Museum of Fine Arts (a preexisting perk).
Turning to longer-term goals, Faust said a committee is being formed to examine the creation of an undergraduate concentration in the dramatic arts; she has also asked Graduate School of Arts and Sciences dean Allan Brandt to explore master of fine arts degree programs. Both were task-force recommendations. Finally, a University-wide advisory body will be formed to carry forward the work the arts report envisioned.

Also during Friday’s panel, Cogan University Professor Stephen Greenblatt, who chaired the arts task force, said he was thrilled to hear such a long list of developments already under way; he said he had feared, especially in light of financial constraints, that the report would go “where most task-force reports go: directly to the bottom of the sea, never to be heard from again.”

The report’s more expensive recommendations will evidently have to wait. While Faust repeated the task force’s commitment to create new campus spaces for the arts, she did not mention the proposal for a major new facility in Allston. Rather, she focused on one reuse of existing space that is already operational: student artworks on display for visitors in the main corridor of Massachusetts Hall (where the president and her senior staff work).

The panel itself, Faust proclaimed, was “the first large-scale event that Harvard has ever hosted to encourage students to pursue careers in the arts and humanities.” She added: “I hope that this becomes a tradition.”

Who Was Lincoln, Really?

2009-02-22T10:28:49Z

Who Was Lincoln, Really?

February 10, 2009

In American lore, the name Abraham Lincoln stands for many things: gifted orator; champion of black rights; courageous leader who kept a bitterly divided nation from splitting apart entirely.

As Lincoln the symbol has become a rhetorical staple, Lincoln the man has gotten lost, says Fletcher University Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. On Monday evening, with Gates as moderator, a panel of Lincoln scholars gathered at the Harvard Kennedy School. In the week of the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth, they shared knowledge gleaned from their studies of Lincoln’s speeches and letters and other contemporary sources. They painted a picture of a man who, though extraordinary, was also ordinary—a mere mortal, not a divine, infallible figure.

The panel consisted of:

President Drew Faust, a Civil War historian whose most recent book, This Republic of Suffering, explores that war’s massive death toll and how it changed the way Americans thought about death. (Read an excerpt in the Harvard Magazine archives.)
John Stauffer, professor of English and of African and African American studies, whose most recent book is Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln
Playwright Tony Kushner, whose credits include the Pulitzer Prize-winning Angels in America, and who is writing a screenplay about Lincoln’s life in collaboration with Steven Spielberg
New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik, whose book Angels and Ages—about how the world changed during the lifetime of Lincoln and Charles Darwin (who were born on the same day)—was published last week
Allen Guelzo, a historian who directs the Civil War Era Studies Program at Gettysburg College and has written multiple books on Lincoln
David Blight, a professor of American history at Yale whose focuses include the Civil War, slavery and its legacy, and Frederick Douglass, and
Gates, who edited Lincoln on Race and Slavery, a collection of the sixteenth president’s writings and speeches (out in hardcover this week), and produced Looking for Lincoln, a documentary airing on many PBS affiliates this week.

Gopnik recounted how he began to see patterns in Lincoln’s prose because he was examining the speeches and writings so closely. Lincoln would lay out an argument in a precisely logical, legalistic fashion, then “slam it home” with a simple, memorable, compelling turn of phrase. And he said Lincoln’s love of reading showed through—in those speeches, Gopnik said he detected echoes of Shakespeare and the King James Bible.

Lincoln’s public-speaking skills, and the importance of his presidency for African Americans, have drawn comparisons to the current president. Although Lincoln and Obama may have some political and personal similarities, Blight said—Obama is “also a complicated thinker and a reader”—he would hold back on comparing 2009 to 1861. The present situation is probably more similar to 1933, he suggested; although “Obama does face a profound set of problems,” the United States is not at war with itself.

In response to Gates’s question about how Lincoln had dealt with the Civil War’s death toll, Faust said his coping mechanisms certainly did not include denial. She said Lincoln had visited battlefield sites and hospitals filled with wounded soldiers. “He didn’t turn away from the costs”—and, she said, he wasn’t unaffected. “I think Lincoln was depressed by what he had to do.”

Lincoln was not the most personally forthcoming of presidents—his writings contained very little personal reflection, Kushner noted. He said this made it difficult, without taking too much license, to create a character vivid enough for audiences to relate to. But some degree of inscrutability, he added, was true to who Lincoln was: “To make him easily understandable is to lose him completely.”

Responding to a question about what would have happened if Lincoln had lived, Gopnik wondered if perhaps he would not have secured such an esteemed place in history. He recalled President Kennedy’s disappointment upon meeting Jawaharlal Nehru for the first time and finding him to be a mere shell of the brave leader who had agitated for an independent Indian state. Faust had a different take: throughout his life, she said, Lincoln adapted to his surroundings, rather than withdrawing. Noting his changing attitudes toward military service and religion, she said Lincoln “was a learner—he continually evolved.”

The panelists also considered—and debated—Lincoln as symbol. His true commitment to freeing the slaves is questioned by those who argue that ending slavery crippled the Confederate economy and gave the Union army the manpower it needed to win—and who wonder if these were Lincoln’s main motivations for signing the Emancipation Proclamation. Stauffer questioned the efficacy of the proclamation itself, saying, “Slaves freed themselves, first and foremost.”

Other panelists disagreed. Without a legal framework designating the former slaves as people, not property, “all the running away in the world” would not have done any good, Guelzo said. And Kushner said Lincoln’s final speech, given three days before his death, may qualify as the first black-rights speech ever given in the United States. On April 11, 1865, a crowd gathered outside the White House, rejoicing over the news that General Lee had surrendered. Eager to hear from their president, the crowd began chanting Lincoln’s name. Lincoln gave few extemporaneous speeches, preferring to give thoughtfully prepared remarks, but on that night he spoke off the cuff. With mentions of voting rights for blacks and even integrated schools, said Kushner, “It’s obvious he’s moving in a more radical direction, it seems to me.” John Wilkes Booth was in the crowd that night; four days later, Lincoln was dead.

Guelzo, too, agreed that Lincoln really did oppose slavery on principle—but he believed just as strongly in democracy, he said: government by the people had been in vogue in the late eighteenth century, but “then came Napoleon.” By the mid nineteenth century, a different idea had taken hold: “Democracy is weak and unstable….If you just give it a little push, it will collapse in on itself.” Winning the war, then, meant not just preserving the union; it meant keeping alive the idea that democracy could work as a form of government. The symbolic use of Lincoln that rings truest of all, he said, is Lincoln as defender of democracy.

Accidental Genius: Why a Stradivarius Sounds So Good

2009-02-22T10:16:30Z

Accidental Genius: Why a Stradivarius Sounds So Good

By Eben Harrell Sunday, Feb. 15, 2009

The sound of Stradivari's violins has never been fully explained by modern research.

Brendan McDermid / Reuters

Classical musicians and music lovers believe that prized string instruments are enriched by the generations of virtuosi who have played on them. In the case of the great Cremonese instrument maker Antonio Stradivari, whose violins and cellos have been the choice of the world's best musicians for three centuries, this belief is coupled with the theory that Stradivari was an inimitable genius on the scale of Mozart and Beethoven. What else could explain why Stradivari's instruments remain the best in the world so long after the death of their creator?

Try varnish. That's the theory of Joseph Nagyvary, a professor emeritus of biochemistry at Texas A & M University. In a study published last week in the scientific journal Public Library of Science ONE, Nagyvary argues that Stradivari probably had no idea what made his instruments special because the crucial factor, an externally applied varnish on the wood, was beyond his apprehension or control. (See pictures of things money can buy, including a violin.)

Using the ashes of minute wood samples, Nagyvary analyzed the chemical makeup of violins made by Stradivari and a contemporary Cremonese maker Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesù, whose violins are thought to be near equals to Strads. The ashes of the Strad's wood contained numerous chemicals — most notably borax and chromium — that suggest it had been aggressively treated with a varnish designed to protect against infestation. The analysis also found that the organic matrix of Stradivari's wood was damaged and weakened, almost certainly by the application of the mineral preservative, leading Nagyvary to speculate that the wood's porous quality allows Stradivari instruments to resonate with a rich, powerful tone.

"There is a possibility here that Stradivari received the wood pre-treated and so did not even know these minerals in his wood were the crucial factor for the sound, and this is why, despite almost surely having apprentices, the art of his instrument making was not passed on," he says.

Nagyvary believes this evidence upends the widespread belief among instrument makers that only the strongest wood can produce a lush, full sound. According to Nagyvary, the opposite is true. He also says it casts doubt on the working hypothesis of many scientists that Stradivari worked during Europe's "little ice age" of the 15th-17th centuries, in which low summer temperatures led to slow but uniform growth in the Spruce trees used for instruments, and that the wood's uniform density explains the instruments' high quality of sound. Last year, researchers in The Netherlands and the U.S. used medical imaging technology to confirm that the wood came from slow-growing trees, and researchers in Sweden have argued that Swedish Spruce in the country's cold North are the closest specimens Europe now holds to the wood of the Stradivari era. But Nagyvary doesn't believe the growing conditions of local forests to be an important factor.

"The problem with the Little Ice Age Theory," he says, "is that the same wood was available to French, German and other violin makers in Europe, but only instruments made in Cremona were any good. I believe that's because of the special, preservative varnish used there."

Perhaps. But American concert violinist James Ehnes says that while varnish may be one of the keys to Stradivari's greatness, it can't be the only one, for the simple reason that not all Strads sound the same. Ehnes recently released a DVD, Homage, in which he performed on 12 instruments in the Fulton Collection in Seattle — probably the greatest collection of Stradivari and Guarneri violins in the world. Each Strad had its own voice, he says, although there also existed a "family resemblance" throughout the collection. "When I played these instruments I got the feeling that there were a thousand reasons why they were so great. There will never be one secret," he says.

For musicians, the debate over what defines the Stradivarius sound and the underlying causes for this uniqueness may soon be academic, as private collectors drive the price beyond their reach. "The era when musicians could afford their own Strad is coming to an end," Ehnes says. The concert violinist Cho-Liang Lin says the Stradivarius he bought for $300,000 25 years ago is probably worth $3 million now. He points to the sale of recently deceased cellist Mstislav Rostropovich's Duport Stradivarius, which trade publications recently put at $20 million. "There's no way even a highly successful young musician could afford that," he says.

But Lin's dismay is tempered by excitement over a new generation of instrument makers who, utilizing research by Nagyvary and others, are producing violins, cellos and violas almost indistinguishable in quality from a Stradivarius. Lin himself often plays on a violin made by a Brooklyn-based luthier, Sam Zygmuntowicz. Idaho-based cello maker Christopher Dungey has made instruments for the world's top cellists. Lin says, "We don't know whether the modern instruments we're using will be, after 100 years of vigorous playing, equal to Stradivarius. They already sound pretty darn good right now."

Yet even if scientists were to establish a unified theory for Stradivari's greatness, musicians will always be inclined to spiritual explanations that reflect the numinous and otherworldly qualities of classical music itself. In October 1987, my father, Lynn Harrell, a cellist, performed at London's Royal Festival Hall a week after the death of Jacqueline du Pre, the beautiful and extravagantly talented British cellist whose career was cut short at 28 when numbness in her fingers turned out to be Multiple Sclerosis, a disease that eventually killed her. It was an emotional experience: by that time, my father was playing one of du Pre's cellos — a 1674 Stradivarius — and he was due to use it to perform Edward Elgar's Cello Concerto in E Minor, a piece of barely restrained mourning that took on added power in the memory of du Pre's playing. "I dedicated the performance to her," my father recalls. "For years after I bought the Strad I could hear Jackie's [artistic] voice when I played, especially when I played Elgar. Perhaps all the hours she spent working on projecting a certain coloring and style minutely warped and changed the wood so that it more readily put forth her particular style. I don't know. But I'm sure of this: her musical presence remained in that instrument."

Top 10 Scientific Discoveries

2009-02-22T10:09:33Z

1. Large Hadron Collider

By Jeffrey Kluger

Jean-Pierre Clatot / AFP / Getty

Good news! The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — the massive particle accelerator straddling the Swiss-French border — didn't destroy the world! The bad news: The contraption didn't really work either. In September, the 17-mile collider was switched on for the first time, putting to rest the febrile webchatter that the machine would create an artificial black hole capable of swallowing the planet or at least a sizeable piece of Europe — a bad day no matter what. No lucid observer ever thought that would really happen, but what they did expect was that the LHC would operate as advertised, recreating conditions not seen since instants after the Big Bang and giving physicists a peek into those long-vanished moments. Things looked good at first, until a helium leak caused the collider to shut down after less than two weeks. Repairs are underway and the particles should begin spinning again sometime in June.

2. The North Pole — of Mars

By Jeffrey Kluger

NASA / AFP / Getty

For all the times robot probes have orbited or landed on Mars, none had ever visited its polar region — where the greatest concentrations of ice and water (and arguably the most evidence of life) are to be found. That changed in May when NASA's Phoenix lander touched down in Mars's far north and began scraping, sampling and sniffing its surroundings. Phoenix found nothing that yet changes the picture of Mars as a dead world, but it reinforced the planet's image as a once-wet place that could have teemed with organisms. The ship was not expected to survive the punishing climate for long and in November, the encroaching darkness and cold of the Martian winter silenced it for good.

3. Creating Life

By Jeffrey Kluger

Michel Euler / AP

Living things don't get a whole lot humbler than a bacterium, with its few hundred thousand genetic base pairs and its stripped-down physical design. Still, you try inventing one. That's what geneticist J. Craig Venter — one of the two men credited with mapping the human genome — managed to do. Venter stitched together the 582,000 base pairs necessary to invent the genetic information for a whole new bacterium. Step two is to boot up that DNA programming in a living bacterium to see if it takes charge of the organism. That's next on Venter's agenda — and he has little doubt it will work. As any software designer will tell you, once you know how to write the code, you can make it do almost anything.

4. China Soars into Space

By Jeffrey Kluger

Xu Haihan / ChinaFotoPress / Getty

China put astronauts in orbit. So what, right? The U.S. has been doing it since 1962. Here's what: The Chinese launched their first manned mission in 2003, their second in 2005 and their third this year. They began with a one-person ship, then a two-seater, then a three-man version, and during that last mission they completed a successful spacewalk. By all spacefaring measures, that's impressive — going from a standing start to a sprint in five years. What's more, China's unmanned Chang'e spacecraft is currently orbiting the moon and Beijing wants to have humans on the lunar surface by 2020. Think it can't pull off something that big? Then you didn't see the Olympics.

5. More Gorillas in the Mist

By Jeffrey Kluger

Frans Lanting / Corbis

A rare bit of good news for the beloved — and beleaguered — western lowland gorilla: New surveys this summer by the Wildlife Conservation Society put the species' numbers far higher than scientists had thought. The forests and swamps of the northern Republic of Congo are now thought to be home to 125,000 gorillas, or up to twice the previous estimates. But the good news was, as so often happens, followed by bad. War in the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo has spilled into the Virunga National Park there, threatening the tiny and far more fragile population of 350 or so mountain gorillas — half of the world's total.

6. Brave New Worlds

By Jeffrey Kluger

NASA / Getty

It's getting crowded out there. Scientists have always been certain that the universe was aswarm with planets orbiting stars other than our own little sun, but it wasn't until 1995 that they started to find these so-called exoplanets. Most of them were huge worlds lying too close to their parent stars to harbor life. In June, Swiss astronomer Michel Mayor found 45 much smaller worlds, one only 4.2 times as big as Earth. All of them inscribe small, scorchingly hot orbits too, but Mayor's instruments — which detect planets by the gravitational wobbles they cause their suns — should be sensitive enough to find ones with larger orbits that place them out in cooler, arguably habitable regions. In November, two teams of astronomers from the U.S. and Canada got four exoplanets to sit still for their photographs, producing the first ever images of alien worlds in visible and ultraviolet light.

7. The Power of Invisibility

By Jeffrey Kluger

Berkeley, Calif., did nothing to change its rep as one of America's flakier places when scientists on the local campus of the University of California announced they'd invented an invisibility cloak. But it was hard physics and complex optics at work, not something illegal or brain-altering. Using nanowires grown inside a porous aluminum tube to create a sheeting 10 times thinner than a piece of paper, they proved that they could wrap an object in the material and bend light waves around it, making it effectively invisible. All of the usual caveats apply: the process is experimental, the cloaking is fantastically fragile, the costs would be prohibitive for anything remotely approaching practical use. Still, we now live in a world in which invisibility is a possibility. That's a good thing, right?

8. Cenozoic Park?

By Jeffrey Kluger

Steven W. Marcus / Mammoth Genome Project / AP

It's not often that a hairball makes headlines. But that's what happened this November, when Penn State biochemistry professor Stevan Schuster announced that he had reconstructed 80% of the genome of the long extinct woolly mammoth, using clumps of hair from the remains of several of the giant critters. The job involved not just piecing together more than 3 billion DNA sequences, but making sure none of the material that was used came from bacteria or other organisms clinging to the fur. The work raises the inevitable Jurassic Park question and the answer is, no, we won't see wooly mammoth–populated theme parks any time soon. But the key word is soon. Stephan doesn't rule out the possibility forever.

9. Can You Spell Science?

By Jeffrey Kluger

Randy Faris / Corbis

Think Americans haven't gotten smarter? Think again. Between 1979 and 2006, the percentage of scientifically literate adults doubled — to 17%. This year, a survey by a professor of political science at the University of Michigan found that that dismal showing may have improved, but only a little. Currently, 25% of the population of the U.S. — the country that invented the airplane and the light bulb and landed men on the moon, remember — qualify as "civic scientifically literate." In practical terms says the investigator, that means that only one in four adults can read and understand the stories in the weekly science section of The New York Times. And this comes at a time when the U.S. electorate is being asked to grapple with — and reach informed consensus about — such complex questions as global warming and stem cell research. Meantime, in November, Beijing announced a new high in scientific literacy scores for the Chinese. So let's at least raise a glass to China. It's somewhere in Europe, right?

10. First Family

By Jeffrey Kluger

Juraj Liptak / State Office for Heritage Management and Archaeology Saxony-Anhalt / AFP / Getty

Americans may boast of family values, but they've got nothing on the folks of Saxony-Anhalt in central Germany. That's the home region of what might be the most traditional — or at least the oldest — nuclear family ever uncovered. Researchers there excavated 4,600-year-old graves of a group of Stone-Agers who appeared to have been killed together in a raid — judging from the defensive wounds many of them bore and the projectile point embedded in the vertebra of one female. Among the remains was a foursome interred together — an adult male and female and two boys, one of them 8 to 9 years old, the other 4 to 5. Analyzing molecular DNA evidence, the investigators confirmed what the tableau suggested: This was a family. Certainly this is not the oldest one that ever existed, but merely the oldest ever unearthed. Still, for now it is, to scientists at least, the true First Family.