Science Headlines for October 3, 2009

Over 65s Should Take High Dose Vitamin D To Prevent Falls, Say Researchers

A daily supplement of vitamin D at a dose of 700-1000 IU reduces the risk of falling among older people by 19 percent according to a new study. But a dose of less than 700 IU per day has no effect.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Oct 2009 | 3:00 pm

Using Synthetic Evolution To Study The Brain: Key Part Of Neurons Modeled On Computer

The human brain has evolved over millions of years to become a vast network of billions of neurons and synaptic connections. Understanding it is one of humankind's greatest pursuits. But to understand how the brain processes information, researchers must first understand the very basics of neurons -- even down to how proteins inside the neurons act to change the neuron's voltage. To do so requires a balance of experimentation and computer modeling.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Oct 2009 | 3:00 pm

Gene With Possible Link To Infertility In Mice Identified

Researchers have identified the role of a gene in regulating molecular signals involved with ovarian follicle development, which may one day help shed light on some of the causes of fertility issues in humans.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Oct 2009 | 3:00 pm

Is Garbage The Solution To Tackling Climate Change?

Converting the rubbish that fills the world's landfills into biofuel may be the answer to both the growing energy crisis and to tackling carbon emissions, claim scientists in Singapore and Switzerland. New research reveals how replacing gasoline with biofuel from processed waste could cut global carbon emissions by 80%.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Oct 2009 | 3:00 pm

Ancient Earth's Magnetic Field Was Structured Like Today's Two-pole Model

Scientists have shown that, in ancient times, the Earth's magnetic field was structured like the two-pole model of today, suggesting that the methods geoscientists use to reconstruct the geography of early land masses on the globe are accurate. The findings may lead to a better understanding of historical continental movement, which relates to changes in climate.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Oct 2009 | 3:00 pm

Teen Attitudes Toward Smoking Linked To Likelihood Of Drinking And Using Drugs

New research looks at the specific ways parents and peers influence teenagers to smoke, drink and use marijuana in combination.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Oct 2009 | 3:00 pm

New Study Resolves The Mysterious Origin Of Merkel Cells

A new study resolves a 130-year-old mystery over the developmental origin of specialized skin cells involved in touch sensation.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Oct 2009 | 9:00 am

Quick Rebound From Marine Mass Extinction Event, New Findings Show

Researchers have done the most detailed analysis ever of a layer of sediments deposited during and immediately after the asteroid impact 65 million years ago that wiped out the dinosaurs and 80 percent of Earth's marine life. They found that at least some forms of microscopic marine life -- the so-called "primary producers," or photosynthetic organisms such as algae and cyanobacteria in the ocean -- had recovered within about a century after the mass extinction.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Oct 2009 | 9:00 am

Protein That Enhances Long-term Memory By Controlling Rest Intervals Identified

Repeated learning sessions produce long-lasting memory when they are spaced out between rest intervals. Neuroscientists have discovered that this so-called "spacing effect" is controlled in the brain by a molecular timer -- a protein that determines how long rest intervals need to last for long-term memory to form.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Oct 2009 | 9:00 am

Leg Movement Training In Preterm Infants Demonstrates Positive Changes In Motor Skills

Preterm infants who receive leg movement training display feet-reaching behaviors similar to that of full-term infants, according to a randomized controlled trial. This finding supports feet-reaching play as an early intervention strategy to encourage interaction with physical objects in preterm infants who have movement problems within the first months of postnatal life.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Oct 2009 | 9:00 am

The nation's weather (AP)

AP - Cold air was expected to bring rain Saturday to the Northeast and an autumn chill to the Northwest and Northern Midwest.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 Oct 2009 | 3:16 am

Tongan banker rescues people, cash from tsunami (AFP)

AFP - A Tongan woman not only saved people's lives on the tsunami-battered island of Niuatoputapu but rescued their life savings as well, according to a report here Saturday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Oct 2009 | 10:58 pm

No US climate bill before December talks: Obama aide (AFP)

AFP - A top aide to US President Barack Obama said there was virtually no chance Congress would have a climate and energy bill ready for him to sign before negotiations on a global climate treaty begin in December in Copenhagen, The New York Times reported Saturday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Oct 2009 | 10:37 pm

Todd Palin resigns from oil job on North Slope (AP)

AP - The husband of former GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin has quit his oil field job on the North Slope. Todd Palin's resignation as a production operator for oil giant BP PLC comes almost two months after his wife stepped down as Alaska governor and shortly before the release of her highly anticipated memoir in a deal rumored to be worth millions.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Oct 2009 | 9:48 pm

Lone llama rescued after month on Pikes Peak (AP)

AP - A lone llama wandering near the summit of Pikes Peak for a month has been captured and is heading to a new home.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Oct 2009 | 9:32 pm

NASA, Disney Celebrate Buzz Lightyear's Return From Space (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - A well-traveled, 12-inch Buzz Lightyear action figure received a homecoming on Friday worthy of any full-size astronaut who returned after more than a year spent onboard the International Space Station (ISS).
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Oct 2009 | 4:32 pm

BLOG: Triton's Ice Doesn't Mix

Different types of ice on Triton appear to be distributed separately and vary with the seasons.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 2 Oct 2009 | 4:00 pm

SLIDE SHOW: The Week's Top Stories

Take a look at the past week's top news in the Flashback Slide Show.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 2 Oct 2009 | 4:00 pm

SLIDE SHOW: Top 10 Transgenic Animals

Foreign genes placed in animal DNA can yield some surprising -- and colorful -- results.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 2 Oct 2009 | 4:00 pm

Sulfur Scrubbing Gets A Boost As China Cracks Down On Pollution (Investor's Business Daily)

Investor's Business Daily - Last year's Olympics in Beijing brought China to the verge of global embarrassment over its pollution problem. Only shutting down some of its factories temporarily stopped the city from choking the tourists and athletes.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Oct 2009 | 3:44 pm

Knuckle-Cracking Gets (Ig) Nobel Prize

Ig Nobel Prizes spotlighted scientists whose work walks the fine line between silly and significant.
Source: Livescience.com | 2 Oct 2009 | 3:07 pm

Harvest Moon This Weekend: Late But Still Gorgeous (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - This weekend's full moon will be a somewhat special one in that it will also carry the title of "harvest moon" for those living in the Northern Hemisphere.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Oct 2009 | 2:31 pm

Mesa, Ariz., is 1,000th signer for climate change (AP)

AP - Mesa, Ariz., is the 1,000th city to sign the U.S. Conference of Mayors' climate change agreement.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Oct 2009 | 2:28 pm

Drink From the Fountain of Youth With a Grain of Salt

Two studies announced today could make you downright giddy, but you'd be wise to take them with a grain of salt.
Source: Livescience.com | 2 Oct 2009 | 2:04 pm

Science Nation

Science for the People: Surprising discoveries and fascinating researchers.
Source: Livescience.com | 2 Oct 2009 | 12:31 pm

High-Tech Tongues Give Disabled Total Control

A new technology allows disabled people to control everything from wheelchairs to computers with their tongue. A small magnet is pierced into the person's tongue which traces the movement of the tongue and sends the signals to a computer.
Source: Livescience.com | 2 Oct 2009 | 12:28 pm

TIMELINE: 'Ardi' and the Human Family Tree

The finding of the oldest known human ancestor sheds new light on human evolution.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 2 Oct 2009 | 12:05 pm

Paleo-Case Solved: Ancient Sharks Fed on Giant Reptile (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - Some 85 million years ago in a shallow ocean, a handful of what amount to miniature great white sharks were pigging out on the carcass of a giant marine reptile called a plesiosaur, a new study suggests.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Oct 2009 | 12:04 pm

Supermassive Black Holes Bringing Universe Closer to Death

For all its tumult — erupting stars, colliding galaxies, collapsing black holes — the cosmos is a surprisingly orderly place. Theoretical calculations have long shown that the entropy of the universe — a measure of its disorder — is but a tiny fraction of the maximum allowable amount.

A new calculation of entropy upholds that general result but suggests that the universe is messier than scientists had thought — and slightly further along on its gradual journey to death, two Australian cosmologists conclude.

An analysis by Chas Egan of the Australian National University in Canberra and Charles Lineweaver of the University of New South Wales in Sydney indicates that the collective entropy of all the supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies is about 100 times higher than previously calculated. Because supermassive black holes are the largest contributor to cosmic entropy, the finding suggests that the entropy of the universe is also about 100 times larger than previous estimates, the researchers reported online September 23 at arXiv.org.

Entropy quantifies the number of different microscopic states that a physical system can have while looking the same on a large scale. For instance, an omelet has higher entropy than an egg because there are more ways for the molecules of an omelet to rearrange themselves and still remain an omelet than for an egg, notes cosmologist Sean Carroll of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

A black hole is the entropy champ because there are myriad ways for all the material that has fallen into it to be arranged microscopically while the black hole retains the same numerical values for its observable properties — charge, mass and spin.

Researchers who previously calculated the cosmic sum of black hole entropy had assumed that, on average, each galaxy houses a 10 million solar-mass black hole at its center. Under this assumption, researchers had determined that supermassive black holes contribute an entropy of about 10¹⁰², in units derived from a quantity known as Boltzmann’s constant.

In contrast, Egan and Lineweaver relied on new data that included a fuller range of the masses of supermassive black holes rather than just using the average mass. “The upshot was that much more entropy is contributed by a smaller population of much larger, 1-billion-solar-mass black holes,” Egan says.

Carroll says that the team’s calculation looks sensible. “I see no reason to doubt their numbers,” he says.

Having a more reliable entropy estimate is important, says Egan, because for life or other complex phenomena to exist, the entropy of the universe must be less than the maximum possible value. Consider, he notes, when hot water is poured into a cold bath. Initially the hot and cold water are separate and the system is orderly — it has low entropy. But once the hot and cold water are thoroughly mixed, the entropy is maximized and no further heat flow is possible.

In the case of the universe, Egan says, “we’d like to know [when and] if the entropy will eventually reach a maximum value, marking the end of all dissipative processes, including life.” Physicists have dubbed that maximum entropy “heat death.”

Egan and Lineweaver’s new value for the entropy of the universe is still a billionth of a billionth the maximum possible entropy that researchers have estimated. Nonetheless, the new value “indicates that that the universe is a bit closer to the heat death than previously computed,” comments theorist Paul Davies of Arizona State University in Tempe.

Not everyone agrees that the higher entropy contributed by supermassive black holes puts the universe closer to heat death. Theorist Ned Wright of the University of California, Los Angeles says that because the extra entropy is locked inside the black holes, the rest of the universe should have lower entropy and be further away from heat death.

The new entropy calculation also highlights a cosmic puzzle, Carroll says. The entropy was relatively small in the early universe (10⁸⁸), bigger now (10¹⁰⁴), but still falls far short of the maximum (10¹²²). No known physical principle can explain why the cosmic entropy is so low. But it’s a good thing because the low value “is responsible for everything we experience about the [unidirectional] flow of time — breaking eggs, growing older and dying, remembering the past but not the future,” notes Carroll. “The universe is incredibly more orderly than it has any right to be. Egan and Lineweaver have shown that it’s just a bit more disorderly than we thought.”

Image: A supermassive black hole “blows” gas bubbles in the bottom left. NASA.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 2 Oct 2009 | 11:55 am

Paleo-Case Solved: Ancient Sharks Fed on Giant Reptile

Teeth provide evidence of sharks scavenging on and ancient reptile.
Source: Livescience.com | 2 Oct 2009 | 11:53 am

'Mini-Colosseum' Excavated in Rome

A 'mini-Colosseum' that lies beneath an airport may have hosted Roman emperors.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 2 Oct 2009 | 11:45 am

Teen’s DIY Energy Hacking Gives African Village New Hope

Some people see lemons and make lemonade. William Kamkwamba saw wind and made a windmill.

This might not seem like a mighty feat. But Kamkwamba, who grew up in Masitala, a tiny rural farming village off the grid in Malawi, was 14 years old in 2001 when he spotted a photo of a windmill in a U.S. textbook one day. He decided to make one, hacking together a contraption from strips of PVC pipe, rusty car and bicycle parts and blue gum trees.

Though he ultimately had big designs for his creation, all he really wanted to do initially was power a small bulb in his bedroom so he could stay up and read past sunset.

But one windmill has turned into three, which now generate enough electricity to light several bulbs in his family’s house, power radios and a TV, charge his neighbors’ cellphones and pump water for the village’s fields and household use.

Now 22, Kamkwamba wants to build windmills across Malawi and perhaps beyond. Next summer he also plans to construct a drilling machine to bore 40-meter holes for water and pumps. His aim is to help Africans become self-sufficient and resolve their problems without reliance on foreign aid.

“The problem we have is electricity and water problems,” he says. “I want to be tackling all of them at once.”

In a country steeped in superstition and wracked by crushing hardship and government corruption, Kamkwamba’s story is remarkable for its ingenuity and persistence.

Kamkwamba wasn’t a natural-born over-achiever. Before windmills, his biggest ambition was to be a car mechanic. But when he was ejected from public school at 14 because his family couldn’t afford the $80 tuition, his life seemed destined for the planting fields and back-breaking labor of his father, an impoverished maize and tobacco grower. Even that fate fell into question when drought and severe famine struck Malawi, one of Africa’s poorest nations, in 2001 and 2002. It whittled away at Kamkwamba’s already thin frame and killed off neighbors and friends, which he recounts with journalist Bryan Mealer in an engaging and spirited new book, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind.

Rain and crops slowly returned the following season, but Kamkwamba still couldn’t afford tuition. So with time on his hands, he began visiting a rural library where he found two textbooks — Explaining Physics and Using Energy — that detailed the marvels of electricity. The cover of the latter book featured a long row of towering windmills planted on brown hills, which “appeared so powerful that they made the photo itself appear to be in motion.”

Malawi was short on many resources, but not wind. A windmill, Kamkwamba thought, would solve many problems for his parents and six sisters. Not only could it generate free electricity — saving his family the economic costs and health hazards of burning kerosene — but it could also pump deep well water to the family’s maize and tobacco crops, releasing them from the tyranny of weather patterns and allowing them to add a second growing season to their harvest year.

“With a windmill, I could stay awake at night reading instead of going to bed at seven with the rest of Malawi,” he writes. But more importantly, “with a windmill, we’d finally release ourselves from the troubles of darkness and hunger. . . A windmill meant more than just power, it was freedom.”

He started with a small prototype. Then, with help from a cousin and friend, spent many weeks scrounging makeshift parts to construct the real thing.

The plan was to attach blades to the back axle of a bicycle and generate electricity through a bike dynamo. When the wind blew the blades, the sprocket and bike chain would spin the bike wheel, which would charge the dynamo and send a current through wire to the house.

For windmill blades, Kamkwamba slit a bathhouse PVC pipe in two, then heated the pieces over hot coals to press the curled edges flat. To bore holes into the blades, he stuck a nail through half a corn cob, heated the metal red and twisted it through the blades. It took three hours to repeatedly heat the nail and bore the needed holes.

He then attached the long plastic blades to the shorter metal blades of a large tractor fan found in a dumpyard, and stripped out the piston from a large shock absorber to serve as the windmill shaft. To secure the plastic blades to the metal ones, he used proper nuts and bolts. But standing in for washers were 16 Carlsberg beer bottle caps, collected from outside the Ofesi Boozing Centre.

The dynamo, connected to a hand-crafted transformer, was sufficient to power a 12-volt battery that fed a current to a small light in his bedroom, where he fashioned an outlet and push button wall switch using the AC socket from a radio, copper wire, a plastic wall mount made from flattened PVC pipe and parts from a rubber flip-flop.

When it was all done, the windmill’s wing span measured more than eight feet and sat atop a rickety tower 15 feet tall that swayed violently in strong gales. He eventually replaced the tower with a sturdier one that stands 39 feet.

The windmill brought Kamkwamba instant local fame. Villagers who called him a pot-smoking madman when he was scrounging for parts made pilgrimages to marvel at the wind shrine in action. But in 2006 when the maize crop failed and drought and famine were on the horizon again, some blamed his windmill witchcraft for blowing away the rainclouds. The talk only died down after the government and aid groups began distributing food.

Despite Kamkwamba’s accomplishment, he still was unable to return to school because of the cost. But this began to change in late 2006. An education official who’d heard about the windmill came to visit and was amazed to learn that Kamkwamba had been out of school for five years. He arranged for Kamkwamba to attend secondary school at the government’s expense and brought journalists to the farm to see the windmill. A story published in the Malawi Daily Mail caught the attention of bloggers, which in turn caught the attention of organizers for the Technology Entertainment and Design conference.

In 2007 Kamkwamba spoke at the TED Global conference in Tanzania and got a standing ovation. Venture capitalists stepped forward with offers to fund his education and projects, and with money donated by them, he was able to put his cousin and several friends back into school, pay for some medical needs of his family, drill a borehole for a well and water pump, and install drip irrigation in his father’s fields and solar panels on his and other homes in the 60-family village.

The water pump has allowed his family to expand its crops. They’ve abandoned tobacco and now grow maize, beans, soybeans, potatoes and peanuts.

The windmills have also brought big lifestyle and health changes to the other villagers.

“The village has changed a lot,” Kamkwamba says. “Now the time that they would spend going to fetch water, they are using that time for doing other things. And also the water they are drinking now is clean water.”

The villagers have also stopped using kerosene, which means they no longer breathe in the toxic fumes and can use the money previously slated for fuel to buy other things. Kamkwamba’s example has now inspired other kids in the village to pursue science. Where previously they had no futures, Kamkwamba says they now see that if they put their mind to something, they can achieve.

“It has changed the way people think,” he says.

Kamkwamba is moving forward with his own education now and plans to teach other villagers how to build windmills. He’s currently a senior in high school at the African Leadership Academy, a pan-African prep school in Johannesburg, South Africa, and is studying for his SATs to apply to colleges in the United States. A documentary about his achievements is in the works.

Image: Tom Rielly/TED

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 2 Oct 2009 | 11:32 am

Making people move in slow motion

Scientists use electrodes to make people move in slow motion and to unravel how brain waves affect movement.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 2 Oct 2009 | 11:16 am

Religious Experience Linked to Brain’s Social Regions

Brain scans of people who believe in God have found further evidence that religion involves neurological regions vital for social intelligence.

In other words, whether or not God or Gods exist, religious belief may have been quite useful in shaping the human mind’s evolution.

“The main point is that all these brain regions are important for other forms of social cognition and behavior,” said Jordan Grafman, a National Institutes of Health cognitive scientist.

In a study published Monday in Public Library of Science ONE, Grafman’s team used an MRI to measure the brains areas in 40 people of varying degrees of religious belief.

People who reported an intimate experience of God, engaged in religious behavior or feared God, tended to have larger-than-average brain regions devoted to empathy, symbolic communication and emotional regulation. The research wasn’t trying to measure some kind of small “God-spot,” but looked instead at broader patterns within the brains of self-reported religious people.

The results are full of caveats, from a small sample size to the focus on a western God. But they fit with Grafman’s earlier work on how religious sentiment triggers other neural networks involved in social cognition.

That research, published in March in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, suggested that the capacity for religious thought may have bootstrapped a primitive human brain into its current, socially sophisticated form.

Grafman suspects that the origins of divine belief reside in mechanisms that evolved in order to help primates understand family members and other animals. “We tried to use the same social mechanisms to explain unusual phenomena in the natural world,” he said.

The evolution of our brains continues, said Grafman. “The way we think now is not the way we thought 3,000 years ago,” he said. “The nature of how we believe might change as well.”

Citation: “Neuroanatomical Variability of Religiosity.” By Dimitrios Kapogiannis, Aron K. Barbey, Michael Su, Frank Krueger, Jordan Grafman. Public Library of Science ONE, Vol. 4 No. 9, September 28, 2009.

See Also:

Brandon Keim’s Twitter stream and reportorial outtakes; Wired Science on Twitter. Brandon is currently working on a book about ecosystem and planetary tipping points.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 2 Oct 2009 | 10:56 am

New film seeks answer to mystery of vanishing bees

LONDON (Reuters) - A new documentary seeks to unravel the mystery of why billions of honey bees have been disappearing from hives across the United States, and concludes that the chief suspect is pesticides.

Source: Reuters: Science News | 2 Oct 2009 | 10:52 am

Dinosaur-killing Space Rock Barely Rattled Algae

The identification of molecular fossils from algae in the so-called K-P boundary point to a very fast recovery of these organisms following the meteorite impact that killed the dinosaurs.
Source: Livescience.com | 2 Oct 2009 | 10:26 am

Circus Billionaire Clowns Around in Space

Circus founder Guy Laliberte arrives at the space station and plays the entertainer.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 2 Oct 2009 | 10:21 am

Reader Photo Gallery: More Stunning DIY Astrophotos

aa2_jellyfish

This gorgeous image of the Jellyfish Nebula leads off our second installment of reader-contributed astrophotography.

Also known as IC443, the Jellyfish in the upper right of the image is about 5,000 light years away in the constellation Gemini. It is the remnant of a supernova that exploded around 30,000 light years ago.

This image was captured by Mel Martin with an SBIG STL-11000 astronomical camera and a Takahashi 5-inch refractor telescope, from his backyard observatory near Tucson. The image took three hours of total exposure, 2 hours through a hydrogen-alpha filter, and one hour of color data.

“What I find interesting in all these images are the subtle differences in star colors sprinkled around the field of view,” Martin wrote in an email to Wired.com. “Our eyes are attracted to the red hydrogen nebula, but the stars are really quite varied and pretty.”

Below, this view of the Whirlpool galaxy 23 million light years away was captured by Stem cell researcher Alexander Boiko from his backyard in Menlo Park, California with an SBIG STL-11000 astronomical camera and telescope.

More images from Martin, Boiko and reader Iain Melville on the following page.

aa2_whirlpool

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 2 Oct 2009 | 10:03 am

Robotic ducks and radio waves

Who now remembers the first person to document a dinosaur fossil, the pioneers of radio astronomy, the inventor of the world's first robots? Simon Singh sets the record straight ... and he has 20 copies of an excellent memoir to give away

I am just as happy as the next nerd that Charles Darwin is in the spotlight this year. However, we mustn't overlook all the other anniversaries of great scientific innovators that have come around in 2009.

For example, Edward Lhuyd died three hundred years ago, yet nobody seems to be celebrating the fact that he was the first person to scientifically document a dinosaur fossil, namely a sauropod tooth.

And in that same year, 1709, there was the birth of Jacques de Vaucanson, the Frenchman who essentially invented the first robots, including a robotic duck with over 400 moving parts.

Le Roboduck (as I have now dubbed it) could eat, drink, flap its wings and even defecate. In reality, the duck had a secret compartment containing duck poo, so the digestion process was not completely genuine. Nevertheless we should be celebrating de Vaucanson's three hundredth birthday.

And we should also be raising a glass to Emil Christian Hansen, who died a hundred years ago. While working for the Carlsberg Laboratory in Copenhagen, he cultivated the yeast that is now the basis for brewing modern lager. Known as Saccharomyces carlsbergensis, it is probably the best yeast in the world.

My favourite anniversary this year is that of Stanley Hey, born in 1909, who was one of the pioneers of radar and had a knack for making serendipitous discoveries. Hey was a grammar school teacher whose attempts to become a researcher had been thwarted. During the second world war, however, he was seconded to the Army Operational Research Group to work on the British radar research programme.

In late February 1942, he was asked to look into what appeared to be German attempts to jam British radar. Operators were complaining that their screens were lighting up like Christmas trees, which would have made it easy for enemy bombers to hide among the multitude of signals.

Hey's investigations revealed that the jamming signal was coming from the east at dawn, from the south around lunchtime, from the west at dusk and then stopped at sunset. Its origin was not a Nazi secret weapon but rather the sun.

Hey contacted the Royal Greenwich Observatory to find out why the sun was suddenly so problematic, and discovered that it was undergoing a peak in sunspot activity.

Sunspots are hubs of intense magnetic activity and they trigger solar flares that launch charged particles, X-rays, ultraviolet radiation and radio waves at the Earth. It was solar radio waves that were interfering with the radar systems.

While researching radar, Hey had serendipitously discovered that the sun emits radio waves. In 1944 he made another accidental discovery. Having developed a radar system aimed at a steep angle for spotting incoming V2 rockets, he began to detect apparently random sets of radio waves that seemed to come from any direction at any time.

In this case the cause was meteors burning up as they entered the atmosphere. Meteors travel at roughly 30km/s, collide with molecules in the air and dislodge electrons, which can reflect radio waves.

These discoveries laid the foundation for modern radio astronomy. After the war, Hey teamed up with fellow radar researcher Bernard Lovell and embarked on a whole series of observations using a former army mobile radar unit. Lovell went on to set up a radio observatory in Manchester, but radio interference from nearby trams eventually forced him to move to Jodrell Bank.

To mark the hundredth anniversary of Hey's birth (and help ensure we do not forget his scientific discoveries), I am giving away 20 copies of his memoirs. I will send copies to the first 20 UK residents who email their address to simon@simonsingh.net.

The Secret Man includes a description of Hey's contribution to the war effort, but my favourite part is an account of a childhood incident that occurred when he was walking to school with his friend Edward Watson.

He suggested that the two boys could defy gravity by lifting each other off the ground: "We must have presented a strange sight as we swayed about in the road clutching and trying to lift each other in our vain attempt at levitation until we eventually abandoned the experiment baffled that the idea had failed."

Simon Singh is an author, journalist and TV producer specialising in science and mathematics

Terms and conditions

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2. The Prize Draw is not open to employees or agencies of Guardian News & Media Limited ("GNM"), their group companies or family members, freelance contributors to GNM, or anyone else connected to the Prize Draw.
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Simon Singh

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Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 2 Oct 2009 | 9:54 am

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