Superbright supernova is first of its kind

A superbright supernova found in a dwarf galaxy by a robotic search is the first confirmed example of a pair-instability supernova, the result of the partial core collapse and thermonuclear detonation of an enormously massive star, like the earliest stars in the universe.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 5 Dec 2009 | 3:00 pm

Hyperactivity associated with shorter nights for young boys

Hyperactive boys don't get enough sleep, which can worsen their condition according to new research. The study is the first to examine a large sample of children and to study the link between lack of sleep and hyperactivity.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 5 Dec 2009 | 3:00 pm

Marine life collected to inventory DNA sequence of all Pacific island's living species

Researchers are collecting marine invertebrates on the French Polynesian island of Moorea as part of a massive effort to inventory the DNA sequence of every living species there.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 5 Dec 2009 | 3:00 pm

FDA-approved drug may slow beta cell destruction in type 1 diabetes patients

Researchers suggest that a drug already used to treat autoimmune disorders might also help slow the destruction of insulin-producing cells in patients recently diagnosed with insulin-dependent (type 1) diabetes.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 5 Dec 2009 | 3:00 pm

Soy peptide lunasin has anti-cancer, anti-inflammatory properties

Two new studies report that lunasin, a soy peptide often discarded in the waste streams of soy-processing plants, may have important health benefits that include fighting leukemia and blocking the inflammation that accompanies such chronic health conditions as diabetes, heart disease and stroke.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 5 Dec 2009 | 3:00 pm

Novel carbon-trading scheme could stop large-scale extinctions

Spatial distribution of biodiversity should be taken into account when calculating carbon credits in order to achieve conservation goals as well as greenhouse gas mitigation, argue researchers.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 5 Dec 2009 | 3:00 pm

'Smell of old books' offers clues to help preserve them

Scientists may not be able to tell a good book by its cover, but they now can tell the condition of an old book by its smell. In a new report, they describe development of a new test that can measure the degradation of old books and precious historical documents based on their smell.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 5 Dec 2009 | 9:00 am

Nicotine levels higher in children exposed to secondhand smoke in the home

New research published in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research, supports the World Health Initiative's efforts for a home smoking ban, according to researchers at Johns Hopkins University.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 5 Dec 2009 | 9:00 am

'Killer petunias' should join the ranks of carnivorous plants, scientists propose

Scientists believe that carnivorous behavior in plants is far more widespread than previously thought, with many commonly grown plants -- such as petunias -- at least part way to being "meat eaters."
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 5 Dec 2009 | 9:00 am

Chicken pox vaccine reduces shingles risk in kids

A new study found the chicken pox vaccine also reduces the risk of shingles among children. The study used electronic health records to identify and follow 172,000 vaccinated children for two-plus years and found that herpes zoster, known as shingles in adults, is very rare among children who have been vaccinated for chicken pox. This is the largest study of its kind.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 5 Dec 2009 | 9:00 am

Obama shifts Copenhagen trip as prospects brighten (AP)

AP - President Barack Obama is shifting the timing of his visit to an international climate summit in Copenhagen as prospects for a political agreement at the event seem more likely.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 5 Dec 2009 | 3:26 am

The nation's weather (AP)

AP - Early season snow was expected across the Appalachians on Saturday as an intense, low-pressure system developed off the Eastern Seaboard.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 5 Dec 2009 | 3:06 am

Climate protests ahead of summit

Demonstrations are being held across the UK to demand action on climate change ahead of the Copenhagen summit.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 5 Dec 2009 | 2:40 am

Obama boosts climate talks with change of plans (AFP)

AFP - US President Barack Obama has delivered a boost to UN climate talks in Copenhagen, agreeing to delay his visit until the end of the meeting, when the drive for a global warming pact will climax.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 5 Dec 2009 | 12:48 am

Forest-saving deal could lift climate summit hopes (AP)

AP - In a potentially valuable boost to fighting climate change, rich and poor countries are close to an agreement to end the destruction of the world's forests in 20 years, government negotiators said.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 4 Dec 2009 | 11:43 pm

Beware the great 'greenwashing' con, experts warn (AFP)

AFP - Eco-conscious customers who flock to one Washington store say they have chosen the environmentally friendly living shop because they know they are in little danger of being "greenwashed."

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 4 Dec 2009 | 10:56 pm

Huge UK Cave spiders 'sent' home

A group of huge cave spiders that have been squatting in a house in the Yorkshire Dales are repatriated underground by National Trust staff.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 4 Dec 2009 | 7:45 pm

Tiger Woods Crash a Boost for Physics Book

Science writer John Gribbin is seeing an unexpected upturn in sales of an old physics book after Tiger Woods' unfortunate encounter with a fire hydrant and a tree.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 4 Dec 2009 | 6:59 pm

05.12.09: Martin Rowson on the climate change sceptics

PM leads a chorus of condemnation against climate change sceptics who have tried to derail the Copenhagen summit

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 4 Dec 2009 | 6:02 pm

Virgin Galactic Poised to Unveil Suborbital Space Liner (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - All is in readiness for next Monday's unveiling of SpaceShipTwo – the first-class space tourist's wonder machine at the core of the space tourism firm Virgin Galactic's suborbital fleet.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 4 Dec 2009 | 6:00 pm

Barack Obama shifts Copenhagen travel plans to boost climate change deal

US president bows to international pressure to join other world leaders in crunch negotiating sessions

Barack Obama has bowed to international appeals for America to demonstrate commitment to action on global warming, and said he will join other world leaders for the crunch negotiating sessions of the Copenhagen climate change summit.

The White House, in a statement from the press secretary, Robert Gibbs, last night said Obama would adjust his original travel schedule, under which he would have dropped in on the summit on 9 December, en route to receiving his Nobel peace prize in Oslo.

"The president believes that continued US leadership can be most productive through his participation at the end of the Copenhagen conference on December 18th," the statement said. "There are still outstanding issues that must be negotiated for an agreement to be reached, but this decision reflects the president's commitment to doing all he can to pursue a positive outcome."

The decision avoids a potentially awkward situation which would have seen Obama arrive in Copenhagen a ahead of even senior negotiators or ministers, let alone prime ministers and heads of state. The timing would have created an embarrassing American absence on the last day of negotiations which nearly 100 other world leaders are expected to attend.

The US otherwise was planning to put on a major presence at Copenhagen, with appearances from half a dozen cabinet secretaries and senior officials.

The new schedule for Obama reinforces a building sense of optimism in recent days after the biggest emitters, the US and China, agreed for the first time to some action on global warming. The White House said last week that Obama would call for cutting US emissions by 17% from 2005 levels – far less than the levels dictated by the science, but welcomed by negotiators as a good first step.

In its statement last night, the White House acknowledged that world leaders, including Gordon Brown, the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, and the Australian prime minister, Kevin Rudd, had spoken about the summit with Obama this week.

Sarkozy, in comments to reporters at the Commonwealth talks in Trinidad last week, was especially blunt – accusing Obama of disrupting the summit.

"We can't allow the presence of one single head of state to stymie the world's affairs," Sarkozy told reporters. "The decisive moment is December 17 and 18. If some come at the beginning and others at the end, when will we be able to take decisions?" he asked.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 4 Dec 2009 | 5:43 pm

This column will change your life: With friends like these... | Oliver Burkeman

We know our best friends almost as well as know ourselves, right? Maybe not...

I like my close friends a lot – that's the point of close friends, surely – and yet, on an almost daily basis, they appal me. I have a friend who thinks voting is a waste of time, and one who believes, sincerely, that musical theatre is a legitimate art form; I have another friend who treats any arrangement to meet at a given time and place as an amusing hypothesis, an approximation of something he might, or might not, actually end up doing. What's especially odd is that every time I encounter these traits, I'm shocked afresh.

It's generally held that friends are people with whom we choose to forge relationships because we find their specific personalities agreeable, or similar to our own, and yet experience regularly contradicts this. What is a friend, really? "All that one can safely say… is that a friend is someone one likes and wishes to see again," writes Joseph Epstein, fumbling for a definition in his book Friendship: An Exposé. "Though," he adds archly, "I can think of exceptions and qualifications even to this innocuous formulation."

The truth is that we don't know our friends nearly as well as we imagine. Numerous studies show that we tend to assume our friends agree with us – on politics, ethics, etc – more than they really do. The striking part is that the problem doesn't appear to lessen as a friendship deepens: when the researchers Michael Gill and Bill Swann questioned students sharing rooms, they found that, as time passed, people became ever more confident in the accuracy of their judgments about the other, and yet, in reality, the judgments grew no more accurate. Two people might become dear friends (or romantic partners), yet remain ignorant about vast areas of each other's inner lives.

This seems strange, until you consider, as Drake Bennett put it in the Boston Globe, that "many of the benefits that friendship provides don't necessarily depend on perfect familiarity; they stem instead from something closer to reliability". Friendship may be less about being drawn to someone's personality than about finding someone willing to endorse your sense of your own personality: in agreeing to keep you company, or lend an ear, a friend provides the "social-identity support" we crave. You needn't be a close match with someone, nor deeply familiar with their psyche, to strike this mutual deal. And once a friendship has begun, cognitive dissonance helps keep it going: having decided that someone's your friend, you want to like them, if only to confirm that you made the right decision. We don't want to know everything about our friends, Gill and Swann suggest: what we seek is "pragmatic accuracy". We don't base friendships on what we learn about people; we decide what to learn about people, and what to ignore, based on having decided to be friends.

Perhaps this sounds chillingly narcissistic – friendship exposed as a self-serving ruse in which it doesn't matter who your friends are so long as they agree to the role, presumably for their own equally egotistical reasons. Or perhaps there's something moving about the notion of friendship as an agreement to keep each other company, overlook each other's faults and not probe too deeply in ways that might undermine the friendship. It's somewhat lacking in the cheesy proverb department, but perhaps a true friend is someone who doesn't ask many awkward questions.

oliver.burkeman@guardian.co.uk

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 4 Dec 2009 | 5:10 pm

Making contact with a helping hand

Here is a mystery. Rom Houben, a Belgian, was diagnosed as being in a coma for 23 years, and he has now made a partial recovery. This has been demonstrated via a series of recently developed brain scanning techniques (whose predictive value is not entirely known, but they are promising), and he is opening his eyes.

But the story goes further. It was claimed that Houben was conscious all along yet unable to move, affected by the phenomenon of "locked in syndrome".

This was reported as a news story around the world, in the Sun, Sky news, CNN, BBC, Telegraph (repeatedly), Der Spiegel, Australian TV News, the Guardian (in four separate pieces) and in hundreds more places.

But one thing raises alarm bells. Houben has been describing his experience of locked in syndrome using "facilitated communication" (FC); that is, someone holds his finger, can sense where his hand wants to go on a screen, and helps him type.

So it doesn't seem unreasonable to look at what is known about FC. Many have compared it to ouija boards, in the sense that facilitators may fully believe they are following an external force, when, in reality, they are generating purposeful movements themselves.

While there is no space here to describe all the studies ever conducted (and I wouldn't claim to have read them) I can tell you about some large reviews of the literature which seem competent.

The practice was popular in the 1980s and 1990s, and used mostly in cases of severe autism, so that is where much of the work is found. You might feel this is not entirely applicable to someone with locked in syndrome, but equally you would not ignore it. A research review on educational interventions in autism, commissioned by the Department for Education and Employment in 1998, found that in FC "almost all scientifically controlled studies showed that the facilitator was the author of the communication" and concluded that it would be hard even to justify further research.

An academic review in 2001 looked at more recent studies, updating two reviews with negative conclusions from 1995. It found overall, again, the claims made for FC were unsubstantiated.

If you prefer authorities to studies, the National Autistic Society says that five US professional bodies now formally oppose the use of FC, including the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, and the American Association on Mental Retardation. The American Psychological Association issued a paper on FC in 1994 saying studies had "repeatedly demonstrated that facilitated communication is not a scientifically valid technique" and calling the technique "a controversial and unproved communicative procedure with no scientifically demonstrated support for its efficacy".

My concern about this is pretty simple. If you watch the video of Houben's facilitated communication in action – and I encourage you to do so, at http://qurl.com/coma – you will see the facilitator looking at the screen and the keyboard and moving Houben's finger at remarkably high speed to type out a message, while both of Houben's eyes are closed, his head slumped sideways across the chair. Perhaps this was due to bad video editing. It has also been reported that the facilitated communicator was able to correctly identify objects shown only to Houben in private, although that is a less taxing task than the very rapid one-fingered typing shown on TV.

But all of these claims can only be assessed in the context of the overwhelmingly negative research on FC.

Journalists and religious commentators are already writing lengthy moral screeds on the implications of this case for our treatment of people in a coma. Houben's typing may well be genuine, and therefore atypical: nobody can have a meaningful opinion, because newspapers are no place to communicate breakthroughs which are incompatible with large swaths of current knowledge, and based on what seems to be weak and even contradictory evidence.

Now that the amazing case of Houben's facilitated communication has been made the subject of huge media sensation around the world, and extensive ethical speculation, I think we can all look forward to seeing it formally assessed and presented in an academic paper by his doctor, Professor Steven Laureys, of Belgium's Coma Science Group. I've made a note in my diary for this date next year. Just to check.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 4 Dec 2009 | 5:06 pm

Undeniable truths about climate change

Anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are created by economic activity: industrial production, agriculture, transportation and material consumption. Therefore to reduce emissions to the degree mandated by scientific evidence, it is inescapable that we must curtail economic activity. To do that requires us to move away from the perpetual economic growth paradigm (Countdown to Copenhagen, 3 December).

This is not just a policy question; it challenges economic interests, social relationships, ideology, and the world-view of individuals. Polluting industries have to be dismantled. Social relationships have to change from the isolation of rampant consumer-driven individualism toward more community-oriented relationships. Individuals have to re-evaluate their relationship with the people around them and the natural world.

This is extremely confronting to conservatives, who by definition prefer the status quo. When presented with this reality, it is easier for them to deny the existence of global warming outright. The light version of denial is adopted by the techno-fix crowd, who believe that new technologies or an alternative energy source will allow us to maintain growing economies indefinitely. The laws of physics, chemistry and biology dictate that proponents of both positions are fundamentally mistaken. The only viable solutions are ones which acknowledge the obvious limits of the Earth as a closed, finite system. Unfortunately this is a practical, psychological and spiritual task for which conservatives are ill-prepared.

Benjamin Habib

Visiting fellow, Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia

• Your leader (Inconvenient truths, 3 December) should distinguish more clearly between uncertainty and risk.

Climate change deniers use the inherent uncertainty of scientific data to suggest that risk is therefore equally uncertain and in some way balanced. But it isn't. Acting unnecessarily on carbon reduction risks a few percent of GDP. Not acting risks catastrophe, global economic warfare, starvation and bloodshed.

Not everyone understands Bernoulli's principle, or demands proof that aeroplane wings create lift. Planes are flying, after all. So why deny climate change? Polar ice is melting, after all. Each of 20 other streams of evidence is equally compelling. And if some climate change is from natural CO₂ sources, why exacerbate the problem, using oil which will run out anyway, just as we ruin the planet?

Professor emeritus Peter Gardiner

Ringmer, East Sussex

• I read John Vidal's article (Long flight? Worry not, a new carbon offset scheme is born, 3 December) with a growing sense of unease. While population offset schemes may grab headlines, in isolation they will do little to address climate change and may do much harm to the rights of the poorest people in the poorest countries – those who are already paying the highest price for climate change.

Voluntary family planning has an important role to play in climate change responses. But it must be guided by a commitment to human rights and equity. Schemes that offset unsustainable consumption in industrialised countries through funding voluntary family planning in developing countries are inequitable and will do little to advance an integrated response to climate change.

Meeting the needs of the 250 million women worldwide who want but cannot access family planning will help families adapt to the changing environment around them, while also fulfilling their right to health and equitable, sustainable development. It should never be used as justification for western Europeans to take a flight to Australia nor to changing their patterns of consumption.

Dr Gill Greer

Director general, International Planned Parenthood Federation

• The Danish ambassador says (Letters, 23 November) his government has no intention of suppressing peaceful protest and that the new "anti-riot" legislation introduced for the climate conference will only target violent protesters. This is disingenuous. The new law will impose a mandatory minimum sentence of 40 days in prison for anyone charged with "obstructing police work". It will also impose a minimum fine of about £500 for anyone charged with "disorderly conduct" or for not leaving immediately after a demonstration has been broken up. These regulations effectively criminalise a wide variety of peaceful protest and anyone participating in a demonstration.

Carsten Agger

Solbjerg, Denmark

• Negotiations in the run-up to Copenhagen are moving painfully slowly. This global poker game is being played for extraordinarily high stakes, and risks leaving no winners and 6.5 billion losers. But there is still the potential for a climate-saving deal to be secured. Gordon Brown must work with other European leaders to break the stalemate.

China, the US and the EU are deadlocked, with China and the US pointing the finger at each other, and some EU leaders now using the impasse to justify Europe's weak position. EU leaders must commit at their meeting next week to a unilateral 30% cut in emissions by 2020, rising to 40% in the event of a global deal, and commit to a legally binding deal based on an amended Kyoto protocol. This could influence China and the US as well as injecting the negotiations with the necessary sense of urgency. Alongside this, Europe must commit at least €40bn a year in additional public funds to finance a climate deal up to 2020.

The EU heads of government meeting on 10-11 December is the time and the place for these commitments to be made.

Andy Atkins Friends of the Earth, Barbara Stocking Oxfam, Camilla Toulmin International Institute for Environment and Development, Chris Bain Cafod, Daleep Mukarji Christian Aid, David Nussbaum WWF UK, Graham Wynne RSPB, John Sauven Greenpeace, Matthew Frost Tearfund, Nick Mabey E3G, Richard Miller ActionAid, Stephen Hale Green Alliance

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 4 Dec 2009 | 5:06 pm

Mephedrone and the problem with 'legal highs'

The key side-effect of the mephedrone scare has been a spike in sales – and a government policy now close to breaking point

The unintended consequence of this week's media coverage of mephedrone, a legal drug openly sold on the internet which may be implicated in the death of Gabrielle Price, a 14-year-old girl who collapsed at a party in Brighton last month, is that lots of suppliers have sold out. Several I call don't have any in stock. "We've had loads of free publicity," says one. You must be pleased, I say. "You think I'm pleased that kids are buying a potentially dangerous drug?" he says angrily, then puts the phone down. Which is a curious response when he is the one supplying them, but then he, like many other mephedrone sellers, seem to exist in a strange world of non-truths. You can buy mephedrone over the internet with a credit card and have your little bag of white powder delivered the next day (or on the same day in some areas), although when you buy it, you do so on the understanding that it is "not for human consumption" – which every website selling it will tell you – and is instead a plant fertiliser. "I sell strictly for horticultural use," says one supplier. "A lot of orders are for just a few grams, so this is obviously intended for the customer's own garden." Right.

Even though what they are doing is not strictly against the law – under medicines legislation, it is illegal to sell mephedrone for human consumption, but not for customers' gardens – they really are a wary lot. One only agrees to speak by email and under condition of anonymity after deciding not to meet me at a service station just north of London after all. Michael is 39, runs three small "regular" businesses and used to be an IT director for a retail chain. He set up a website selling mephedrone, imported from China, three months ago.

"Someone mentioned it in passing and I was intrigued," he says. "I knew it was an opportunity and I realised on the first day it was going to be a success. Now, I'm seeing silly growth, 10 to 20% every week."

This week he put his prices up, mainly to try and stem the interest because he was receiving more orders than he could handle. He makes all his sales through his website – "I've heard of a few cases recently of robberies taking place at sales meet-ups" – so he says it is hard to know who is buying mephedrone, but he does supply bulk orders to people who clearly plan to sell it on. He says he can almost see it spreading throughout the country. "A month ago it reached London," he says. "I went from rare orders there to a lot. A week ago it reached Manchester and Birmingham. I was wondering why I never got orders from there, but now there are suddenly lots." Does he take it? "No, never have and never will."

Last month, the European Union's drug agency found the UK was the European capital for the online trade in legal highs – nearly half of the websites selling these drugs are based here. Tackling legal highs is a growing challenge for governments. Synthesised in laboratories, often based in China, to mimic the effects of illegal drugs such as cocaine and amphetamines, they fall outside most drug control laws and are openly sold online or in "headshops", those dingy stores you find in most towns that smell of incense and sell smoking paraphernalia and cannabis seeds labelled as "souvenirs".

Mephedrone, which also has street names including meow (after its shortened chemical name MM-cat), is cheap, easy to buy, and doesn't come with the risk of a criminal record. Its status as a "legal high" gives it an air of safety, though this could be misleading. One user tells me it really took off this year among regular drug users because it has become harder to find MDMA, and mephedrone, which gives similar effects such as a sense of euphoria and energy, filled that void. Maggie, a 20-year-old student from London, says, "I've done mephedrone a few times at house parties and club nights. I didn't have that much of a comedown the day after, but I felt spaced out and a bit stupid – I couldn't do any work for a few days." Another student in London says he is planning to buy mephedrone in bulk now so he can sell it on when it becomes illegal – as most predict it will – and make a profit.

Ask people – from users to medical and drugs experts – whether it is safe and they will tell you they just don't know. It is the illegal aspect of other drugs that is putting people at risk by encouraging them to seek out legal drugs instead, says Professor David Nutt, who was the chair of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) until he was sacked in October by the home secretary, Alan Johnson, for criticising government drugs policy. "I know it's controversial to say it, but people are better off taking ecstasy or amphetamines than those we know nothing about," he says. "Who knows what's in [mephedrone] when you buy it? We don't have a testing system. It could be very dangerous, we just don't know. These chemicals have never been put into animals, let alone humans."

Nutt first became aware of mephedrone a year ago, and he says "legal highs" are something he has been concerned about for a while. More reports, particularly from music festivals this summer, of its use and often frightening side effects started to reach the ACMD, bolstered by reports from hospitals, the police and researchers who take an interest in what gets put into amnesty bins in clubs.

On an internet drugs forum, where thousands of people from all over the world share information and experiences, mephedrone users report experiencing vomiting, nosebleeds (the drug is often snorted), chest pains and high heart rate, breathing problems and panic attacks. One user describes how it turned him blue, another describes "electric shocks in the head". One user writes about a friend going to hospital after taking it and finding the emergency doctors had never heard of mephedrone and didn't know about its effects or how to treat them. The theme throughout many of the threads is the unknown risk aspect.

Mephedrone has already been banned in Sweden (where it was linked to the death of a young woman last year), Denmark and Israel. A spokeswoman for the Home Office says "the ACMD are looking into [mephedrone] as a priority as part of their review into legal highs. They will report back next year and their advice will inform our response". This month, three "legal highs" – BZP, GBL and a cannabis substitute known as spice – will be banned after they were linked to several deaths.

But banning individual substances long after they have appeared doesn't seem like a reasonable long-term response to legal highs, which are easily and quickly manufactured and distributed on the internet. Nutt believes we should follow the model adopted in New Zealand, whereby new drugs are immediately put into a new "class D" category, where it is not illegal to sell or possess but its effects are monitored. "The manufacturers and suppliers can define the dosage, do quality control, make sure it is not contaminated. You can also monitor sales and use this data to see how much is out there – from that you can work out the use/harm ratio." Nutt proposed this to the government as a way of dealing with legal highs in the first instance. "They turned it down. They said they didn't want to take that route at the moment; they wanted to legislate for specific compounds." 

Martin Byrne, chief executive of Drugscope, the national drugs information charity, says "we should avoid panicky, knee-jerk responses. To respond that the law should ban [mephedrone] is a blunt instrument. The important issue is education; people need to have access to reliable information. At the moment, it is all word-of-mouth and what people read on internet chat rooms."

As for the suppliers, the feeling appears to be that a ban is inevitable. "I think mephedrone will be made illegal within a year, but there will be other products that will replace it," says Michael. Recipes change – new drugs are made by tweaking a molecule here or there – sidestep the law. "The law will always be one product behind the market."

Additional reporting by Kieran Hill

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 4 Dec 2009 | 5:06 pm

Books of the decade

The world was rocked by terrorism, climate change became an emergency, celebrity culture moved from our TVs to our bookshelves, and a boy wizard held millions spellbound. Love them or hate them, these are the 50 books that defined the decade

2000

Julian Barnes on White Teeth, by Zadie Smith (Penguin)

When I began to read White Teeth (as a judge for the Guardian First Book award) my preponderant feeling was one of relief. Relief that, despite the loudest hype for a first novel in my lifetime, the book itself was very good. Relief that its author, despite ticking all the boxes of promotability, was a serious writer. Relief that, despite being touted as "the multicultural novel for our time", it also spread more widely, and was as much about religion and faith as about race. Relief, too, that as a novel it was far from perfect – which might have been unbearable – and accorded to someone's definition of the novel as "a long piece of prose with something wrong with it". Even at the level of surface fact, there are numerous errors, especially in the war section (where tanks suddenly turn into jeeps and pistol bullets produce shrapnel).

The almost preposterous talent was clear from the first pages. You can't teach a writer ear: White Teeth is a feast of aurality, of overlapping, interweaving, interbreeding modes of speech. You can't teach a writer eye, or curiosity about what they aren't interested in: Smith's appetite for subject-matter is gluttonous. You can't teach a writer tone of voice: Smith's is tremendously assured, controlling, veering towards the bossy – though also at times yielding to the first novelist's nervous weakness for putting in stuff just so that the reader will not be in any doubt that he or she knows stuff.

What the novel gives off, with and beyond all this, is the sheer excitement of literary creation. Most practitioners of the arts have moments when they doomily, self-pityingly feel that the form they work in is about to collapse: because of rival technologies, consumer apathy or lack of interest from the next generation. So Smith's traditionalism – her implicit belief that prose fiction is still the best way of describing and understanding the world – was perhaps the greatest relief.

Cheek is also a useful attribute of the first novelist. One page of White Teeth that I especially enjoyed contains a long, rich riff on school smoking habits. All the cool kids favour dope, or at least something of an illegal nature, whereas the school's dullards gather in nerd-herds to share boringly legal cigarettes. The typical fag smoker, according to this page, is "a little featureless squib called Mart, Jules, Ian". When introduced to the author at the award ceremony, I sternly informed her – speaking for the other two as well – that this page had not escaped our attention, and that "we" would be keeping our eye on her. We have been ever since, with continuing admiration. •

✒ No Logo, by Naomi Klein (Fourth Estate)

Bestselling exposé of the nefarious activities of Nike, Shell and other corporations, which became an inspiration for the anti-globalisation movement.

✒ The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell (Little, Brown)

First book from the pop sociology phenomenon, which seeks to explain why small changes can have a big impact on social trends.

✒ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, by Dave Eggers (Picador)

A heartbreaking account of his parents' deaths from cancer, with footnotes and tricks. Gave the misery memoir literary credibility.

✒ The Amber Spyglass, by Philip Pullman (Scholastic)

Final part of the magisterial Northern Lights trilogy, which created its own mythology while setting new standards in crossover fiction.

✒ How to Be a Domestic Goddess: Baking and the Art of Comfort Cooking, by Nigella Lawson (Chatto & Windus)

Kickstarted the cupcake revolution and became the bible for the yummy-mummy generation.

✒ Experience, by Martin Amis (Vintage)

The messiness of a life backlit by celebrity is poignantly detailed in a scrupulous and candid memoir by a writer incapable of writing a dull sentence.

2001

Joshua Ferris on The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen (Harper Perennial)

It was the book you had to read. And by "you" I mean not just you, writer of fiction, follower of literary trends; I mean also your father-in-law, your little sister. If you were an American, certainly, or for that matter any citizen of a first-world, late-capitalist nation, The Corrections had your number. How often does the spectrum of praise run from Pat Conroy to David Foster Wallace? It was a phenomenon that seemed to come out of nowhere. Franzen had written two previous novels, but in 10 years only a few provocative essays, and nothing to indicate that here would be the writer to tell us – if every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way – how the American family was unhappy.

Which is not to suggest the book was bleak. It was merciless, it was skewering, the family at its heart full of bicker, betrayal, and many other varieties of familial sport – but the artist assembling and synthesising it all for the pleasure of the reader was possessed, thank God, of a voracious emotional intelligence, capable of mollifying all that was ugly and unlikable in his individual characters with empathy and humour. Oh, it's compulsive reading! The copy I have is a hardback containing 568 pages, and not one of them flags. The sentences are rollicking flickers of genius, one brilliant-dense paragraph meeting another, narratives vectoring into the outlandish and the unexpected while remaining ever committed to the realist's agenda. We might have forgotten, by the time the book landed, that a literary doorstopper of the first order of seriousness could also be unabashed entertainment. More likely Franzen simply knew that all comedy is deadly serious, and that the fraudulent online sale of post-Soviet Lithuania, for example, or a stolen salmon fillet sliding down the hero's underpants, was the low-brow fallout, the comic carryover, of a writer dividing the sadness of a declining family by the sadness of a declining culture. The book was a howl: against greed, against selfishness, against the axiom of American happiness, finally against the tyranny of family holidays.

It stirred a specious controversy when Franzen, possessed of so fine a sense of ambivalence towards the commercial ends of things that he could write a book like The Corrections in the first place, was caught discomfited by the book's popular embrace. But now that dust-up seems squarely of its time and place, while the book has achieved timelessness. Told in the expansive tradition of Dickens and Tolstoy, fluent, uncompromising, accessible, expressive of an awesome amount of contemporary experience that remains all too familiar today, The Corrections continues to be the exemplary novel of postwar American family life. •

✒ Atonement, by Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape)

Second world war country-house love story indebted to The Go-Between that made McEwan a household name.

✒ Austerlitz, by WG Sebald (Penguin)

Melancholy, genre-bending novel of a 20th-century Jewish life from one of the decade's most admired writers.

✒ A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother, by Rachel Cusk (Fourth Estate)

The first and most uncompromising example of the new focus on motherhood.

2002

Polly Toynbee on Nickel and Dimed: Undercover in Low-Wage USA, by Barbara Ehrenreich (Granta)

Images of brutalising work will linger a lifetime for all who read Barbara Ehrenreich's journey through the circles of low-wage hell. She lifts the carpet to look at the humanity working beneath the shiny public face of the United States. Read this and you will forever find yourself asking who is cleaning your hotel room. Is that smiling Have-a-Nice-Day waitress living in a homeless shelter? In that bright nursing home, is one exhausted care assistant all alone on a double shift with a room full of demented old people? Has that Walmart sales assistant had nothing to eat all day but a packet of Doritos?

Here, on $7 an hour, are America's working poor – too poor to rent a flat or even a room, sharing run-down motel rooms and mobile homes on the far outskirts of cities where buses hardly run. They do essential work in the unseen services that oil the wheels of society. These jobs can't be globalised: no one's granny can be bathed in Lahore. No one's office can be cleaned from a call centre in the Philippines. This is work that must be done by someone, cleaning, caring, catering or at the checkout, unnoticed hands toiling beyond exhaustion, without healthcare if they fall sick. Their daily existence is as perilous as any Dickens described.

Ehrenreich is one of the great American reporters. Taking on these jobs herself across the States, her hawk's eye for detail swoops down on the petty tyrannies of martinet supervisors and the bullying contempt that accompanies contemptuous pay rates. She has an intellectual depth of analysis on this malfunctioning economy that Orwell never attempted in Down and Out in Paris and London or The Road to Wigan Pier. She explores the great failure in the market forces still celebrated by classical economists cleaving to notions that Adam Smith's invisible hand of the market will always produce the best of all possible worlds, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

In many US cities there is a shortage of people to do these jobs, as property developers take over anywhere cleaners, carers or cashiers can afford to live. In Minnesota labour is scarce, so why don't wages rise? Because the market doesn't work like that for the low-paid. Cartel group-think sees hotels, restaurants and office cleaning companies conspire to keep local wages low and suffer staff shortages, rather than compete for labour and all pay more.

The Maids is a cleaning company keeping up appearances in suburban executive homes. Ehrenreich and her crew speed-clean with only a regulation half bucket of dirty water – no time to change it – sprinting from house to house all day, wearing on their backs a vacuum-cleaner pack the weight of a heavy machine gun. The life-support systems of the affluent rely on crippling this army of underpaid starvelings. British readers will recognise the syndrome and its economic dysfunctions – but for us it is also a timely reminder of the life-saving value of a welfare state where at least housing benefit pays the rent, tax credits pay for children and the NHS is free. •

✒ London Orbital: A Year Walking Around the M25, by Iain Sinclair (Penguin)

High-strung account of circumnavigating the metropolis from the phrase-making guru of psychogeography.

✒ Fingersmith, by Sarah Waters (Virago)

Raising historical fiction, lesbian characters and mystery plotting up to the literary high ground.

✒ Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood and the Story of a Return, by Marjane Satrapi (Jonathan Cape)

The Iranian revolution in comic strip.

2003

Mark Lawson on The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown (Corgi)

It's a tempting metaphor for literary pessimists that, in 1968, John Updike appeared on the cover of Time magazine, while, four decades later, the bestselling novelist given this symbolic accolade was Dan Brown. If, as many American writers and critics now claim, serious writing is dead, then it's Brown who must be taken down to the station for questioning. He somehow convinced almost 90 million people around the world to read a book which has an opening sentence that sounds like scribbled notes for a screenplay – "Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum's Grand Gallery" – and then becomes progressively less literate.

So how did the writer of three little-noticed thrillers become, with his fourth book, the only novelist in the 21st century to challenge the sales of JK Rowling's seven-volume Potter sequence? The most obvious explanation is that this story of a conspiracy lasting two millennia – the Catholic church's brutal and cunning cover-up of the fact that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had children – chimed with a time of paranoid suspicion about official institutions and religions, as the American government fought a war against terrorism in which both sides were led by those of strong religious faith.

There's surely also a clue to Brown's success in two other literary genres that have flourished during this decade. This was a period in which factual books containing arcane information – biographies of 15th-century mathematicians and the Do Wasps Have Prostates? school of popular science – jostled novels off the bookshop shelves, creating a readership likely to be drawn to fiction which tells you things.

It's also likely that many of those who were given the volume as a gift – what a boon for birthdays and Christmas finally to have a book suitable for those who don't read! – will also have been given copies of sudoku or other brainteaser books, another publishing phenomenon of the Noughties. Regular fiction readers find it implausible that dying people, serial killers and architects can be bothered to hide Fibonacci numbers on their walls or their bodies; once-a-year fiction-tasters may find it reassuringly non-literary.

The book brought Brown the life that tends to come with a global readership now: living reclusively in a mansion, hiding from plagiarism suits and weird communications from readers. The Da Vinci Code was a slow-burner, reaching peak sales a couple of years after publication, but it was followed in 2009 by a fast-blazer: The Lost Symbol, reputed to have the biggest initial print-run in fiction history. It was more or less the same book again, with his symbologist discovering that the founding fathers of the USA had turned Washington into a crossword puzzle which a sinister cult didn't want solved 200 years later. But why shouldn't Brown write The Da Vinci Code again when so many other authors had? His legacy has been shelves of opportunistic thrillers with titles like The Galileo Codex and The Michelangelo Matrix.

The only consolation from John Updike's death in January 2009 was that he missed the latest book and film (Angels and Demons) from his degenerated successor as Time frontman. Is this what fiction in the 21st century has become? A novel by someone who doesn't know how to write for people who don't much like reading? •

✒ Landing Light, by Don Paterson (Faber)

All early promise confirmed in a collection that saw Paterson elevated to the front rank of contemporary poets.

✒ The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, by Mark Haddon (Vintage)

Crossover novel about autism and family breakdown that didn't censor itself for children or infantilise adult readers.

✒ The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini (Bloomsbury)

The novel that made Afghanistan the talking-point of every book group.

✒ Eats, Shoots & Leaves, by Lynne Truss (Profile)

Pedant's revolt against bad grammar that became the ultimate posh loo book.

2004

Jonathan Freedland on The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (WW Norton)

There are few more wounding insults in the literary arsenal than the one that says "written by committee". We know what such books are like: bland, diluted where they should be strong, stodgy where they should be lean. Those keen to pile on the insults might further damn a book by saying it "reads like a government report". Translation: mind-sappingly boring.

How odd, then, that one of the most critically acclaimed and bestselling books of the century's first decade was a government report written by committee. The 9/11 Commission Report had everything against it. Instead of a single authorial voice, it is credited to the 10 members of the commission and their staff of 80. What's more, those 10 commissioners were all former politicians, chosen on strict partisan lines: five Democrats, five Republicans. (At least the current Chilcot inquiry into Iraq includes two published historians.) Less propitious still, the report was timed to appear in time for the 2004 presidential election. Surely it would be both rushed and timid, fearful of offering any conclusions that could help one side over the other. To cap it all, the commission's chairman, the former New Jersey governor Tom Kean, was set on delivering a unanimous verdict, which had to mean firm judgments would be driven out by fudge and that sharp sentences would make way for windy, convoluted ones.

All those preconceptions were blown away more or less at once on 22 July 2004 – the day the report was handed to President Bush and put on commercial sale in bookstores around the US. Sceptics only had to read the first sentence to know they were not holding any ordinary government report: "Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States. Millions of men and women readied themselves for work."

The first, narrative section of the report continued in that vein, telling the story of 9/11 as if it were the darkest of political thrillers. There were cuts between locations, cliffhangers to end chapters, a sinister villain brooding in the shadows. It was less royal commission, more 24. Except in this story, there were no good guys to save the day.

The book shot to the top of the New York Times bestsellers' list and was nominated for the National Book award for non-fiction. Reviewers praised the restraint of the prose. "The dominant tone is wise and sad, not angry," said the Washington Post. "Rhetorically, the knowing shake of the head trumps the angry clench of the fist." One review noted the similarity of the language – spare and bare – to that of the "misery memoir". The report was written, it said, in the "language of American pain".

The commission's recommendations may well not survive close scrutiny in the decades to come. Several experts believed the commissioners fell foul of the very error that afflicted the intelligence agencies before 9/11: they were able to imagine only what had already happened, and so could not advise America on how to protect itself from a danger as yet unknown and with no precedent. But even if The 9/11 Commission Report does not endure as a policy statement, it may well live on as a narrative account of the defining event of the early 21st century. As Kean said at the time: "I wanted this to be a document that, 100 years from now, when some child wanted to know about 9/11, they're going to pull this off the library shelf and be able to read it." On that measure, he surely succeeded. •

✒ Small Island, by Andrea Levy (Headline)

An affectionate and historically important portrayal of the struggles of the Windrush generation that won the Orange prize.

✒ The Line of Beauty, by Alan Hollinghurst (Picador)

Booker-prizewinning story of a gay Oxford graduate who navigates the hedonism and hard-heartedness of the Thatcher era.

✒ Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell (Sceptre)

Global-ranging, genre-busting novel in six parts that made Mitchell a cult hit.

✒ Being Jordan, by Katie Price (John Blake Publishing)

The queen of the celebrity memoir – Price's novel Crystal outsold the entire Booker shortlist in 2007.

✒ Earth: An Intimate History, by Richard Fortey (Vintage)

Literary consolidation of the revolution in earth sciences that began in 1965, chronicling an astonishing shift in how we see the world.

2005

Vince Cable on Freakonomics, by Steven D Levitt & Stephen J Dubner (Penguin)

Like a lot of people who studied economics and call themselves economists, I often feel frustrated with my own subject. I didn't embark on economics to become an applied mathematician or model builder. I wanted to understand how the world around me worked; why people behave the way they do. Traditional economics has helped to answer a few interesting and important questions, such as why and how countries trade with each other, why prices go up and down and why we get inflation or unemployment. But most aspects of human behaviour have remained unexplained or have fallen into the domain of social anthropology or psychology.

Steven Levitt has changed social science fundamentally by opening up a wide range of social and individual behaviour to economic analysis. His key tool is understanding incentives. Economists have traditionally seen incentives in terms of price (or price as a trade-off against leisure or risk aversion or other components of a utility function). Levitt looks at all aspects of behaviour and tries to understand the individual motivation that drives it. Another tool is the use of information: who has it and how they use it. Freakonomics provides a wide range of problems which it is possible to solve using these tools. And others – such as Tim Harford, the FT's "Undercover Economist" – have added to the richness of this new approach.

Levitt's best-known insight arises from his attempts to explain crime, and in particular the remarkable decline in violent crime in the US in the 1990s. He examines all the popular explanations – more capital punishment, longer prison sentences, economic growth, stronger gun-control laws and better policing. He finds that, while each hypothesis may be superficially plausible and go some way to explaining a small part of the change, the evidence suggests that there is another, deeper explanation: the legalisation of abortion following Roe v Wade.

Following this ruling, large numbers of unwanted children were no longer born to poor mothers in neighbourhoods with the highest incidence of violent crime. Levitt's hypothesis was tested with positive results over time and across states (and internationally). He makes no moral or political judgment on abortion, but identifies from evidence a key set of motives and incentives: the positive commitment (or not) of a woman to having children and raising them well.

A lot of Levitt's work satisfies his own intellectual curiosity but isn't of any practical value. But the work that is of practical value is often counterintuitive and shocking, and all the more valuable for that. He establishes that home swimming pools are more dangerous than handguns, for example. His most interesting work involves explaining cheating behaviour, corruption, criminality, especially with drugs. Here there are many myths and prejudices, and Levitt forces us to consider evidence, not preconceived doctrine, as a basis for policy.

Much of his work ventures very far from what we normally call economics and for that reason may produce a sniffy reaction from the professionals (and those from other disciplines who may fear a territorial raid). But as the introduction acknowledges, Levitt is returning economics to its roots, in particular to Adam Smith. Smith's two great books, The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments, tried 250 years ago, using objective evidence, to understand the links between individual motives and the working of society. Levitt helps return our discipline to its proper purpose. •

✒ Untold Stories, by Alan Bennett (Faber)

Delicately finessed personal revelations ensured we loved him even more. But do we know him any better?

✒ The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion (HarperCollins)

Devastating personal account by America's classiest non-fiction writer of her attempt to come to terms with the sudden death of her husband and the fatal illness of her only daughter.

✒ Postwar, by Tony Judt (Pimlico)

The first vivid, detailed study of the continent's post-1945 recovery to take in all of Europe, east and west.

✒ Saturday, by Ian McEwan (Vintage)

The march against the war in Iraq, a cameo for Tony Blair in Tate Modern and a lovingly assembled fish stew – the novel that summed up New Labour.

2006

Christopher Hitchens on The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins (Black Swan)

There are numberless reasons for regarding The God Delusion as a modern classic and one of these reasons, I would propose, is its relative superfluity. Richard Dawkins has already introduced millions of people to the rigour and beauty of the scientific worldview and shown in exquisite detail the ways in which we, like all our fellow creatures, have evolved and were in no meaningful sense "created".

Before the arid term "scientist" was coined in the last century, men such as Newton and Darwin were reckoned as "natural philosophers": a term that suits Dawkins very well. Another scholar deserving of the same title of honour was the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, and The God Delusion can be read as a response to Gould's conciliatory and wishful proposition that "science" and "faith" (or religion) occupy "non-overlapping magisteria".

Dawkins's energy, industry and wit, in disputing this idle view and in showing the hard, historic incompatibilities between the two, have led to his being caricatured as a dogmatist in his own right, even as a "fundamentalist". What empty piffle this is. A senior teacher in the vital field of biology finds his discipline under the crudest form of attack, and sees government money being squandered on the teaching of drivel in schools. What sort of tutor would he be if he did not rise to the defence of his own profession? Thus the appearance of a secondary work that ought not to have been needed at all, but is in fact required now more than ever.

The God Delusion is, like Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell, quite respectful of the human origins of religion and of the ways in which it may have assisted people in spiritual and even material ways. We are pattern-seeking primates, and religion was our first attempt to make sense of nature and the cosmos. This does not give us permission, however, to go on pretending that religion is other than man-made. And the worst excuse ever invented for the exertion of power by one primate over another is the claim that certain primates have God on their side. It is not only justifiable to be impatient and contemptuous when such tyrannies are proposed; it's more like a duty.

The atheist does not say and cannot prove that there is no deity. He or she says that no persuasive evidence or argument has ever been adduced for the notion. Surely this should place the burden on the faithful, who do after all make very large claims for themselves and their religions. But not a bit of it: we are somehow supposed to regard the profession of "faith" as if it were a good thing in itself. This is too much to ask, and it was high time to say so.

I regret to say that I have just noticed a tiny mistake on page 177. It is not true to say that the Virgin Mary "ascended" into heaven. She was "assumed" into that place, by a ruling of the Roman Catholic church that dates back all the way to the mid-19th century. Dawkins really must be more careful, but he may have been busy, as in the chapter of Climbing Mount Improbable in which he described the 20 or so separate evolutions of the eye. Readers of The God Delusion ought to press on and buy all the other Dawkins volumes too. •

✒ The Road, by Cormac McCarthy (Picador)

The novel that crystallised our era's fears of environmental apocalypse – and may just terrify us into action.

✒ The Looming Tower, by Lawrence Wright (Penguin)

Pulitzer-prizewinning investigation into the origins of al-Qaida and the runup to 9/11.

✒ The Weather Makers, by Tim Flannery (Penguin)

Acclaimed, influential study of the dire consequences of global warming, and possible solutions.

✒ The Revenge of Gaia, by James Lovelock (Penguin)

No longer a prophet in the wilderness, Lovelock and his theory of a living planet are now cornerstones of the environmental debate.

2007

Alison Lurie on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by JK Rowling (Bloomsbury)

Why are these books such a worldwide phenomenon? Yes, they are very good, but many equally good books have appeared without causing near-riots on publication day. The best explanation I can come up with is that, like the popular dramas of Shakespeare's time, they excel in many genres simultaneously. As Polonius puts it when recommending the company of travelling actors that visits Elsinore, they are outstanding "either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, [or] tragical-comical-historical-pastoral". Something for everyone, all of it first-rate.

The Harry Potter books can be enjoyed by readers who like jokes and puns and original, often outsize comic characters such as Hagrid. At the same time, they are exciting tales of adventure, mystery and detection. And they are also classic boarding-school stories, full of admirable and hateful teachers, thrilling sports competitions, midnight feasts, loyal friendships and bitter rivalries between houses. They are fantasies, too, and like Shakespeare contain witches, wizards, elves, ghosts, spells and transformations. They also have affinities with speculative fiction, being full of original supernatural inventions and devices. All this gives pleasure to many kinds of readers. But the books are serious, too; in them good people as well as bad ones die, giving their lives for the sake of a greater cause, like many heroes of Elizabethan drama. Some of the most admirable adult characters, as in Shakespeare, are also revealed to have a tragic flaw that causes them to hesitate to act, to make foolish errors of judgment, to lie, or even to commit murder.

As in the best juvenile fiction, the novels' young heroes are not perfect beings. Harry is good at Quidditch, but his eyesight is poor, he is only an average student, and his unhappy childhood has made him something of a loner. Hermione is intellectually brilliant, but also opinionated, bossy and a grind. Ron is loyal and brave, but sometimes clueless. Had it not been for the necessities of plot, the Sorting Hat would surely have made him a Hufflepuff and Hermione a Ravensclaw.

Moreover, though the prevailing style of Rowling's books is lively and upbeat, there are darker undertones. As the author put it in a recent interview: "My books are largely about death. They open with the deaths of Harry's parents. There is Voldemort's obsession with conquering death and his quest for immortality at any price." Even in this magical world it is a quest in which none can succeed. Evil, too, is never totally defeated. In the epilogue at the end of the series, 19 years later, there is still a Slytherin House at Hogwarts, and some of the students boarding the train at platform 9¾ are bound for it. •

✒ The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, by Kate Summerscale (Bloomsbury)

More genre-blurring: this social history reads like a murder mystery and deserved its enormous success.

✒ The Blair Years: Extracts from the Alastair Campbell Diaries (Arrow)

Compelling portrait of power in action from an irascible insider.

✒ Half of a Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Harper Perennial)

The first great African novel of the new century, detailing the horrors of the Nigerian civil war.

✒ The Reluctant Fundamentalist, by Mohsin Hamid (Penguin)

A spare, unsettling portrayal of the uneasy relationship between east and west as a Pakistani Muslim relates his experiences of living in post-9/11 New York.

2008

Lorrie Moore on Change We Can Believe In, The Audacity of Hope and Dreams from My Father, by Barack Obama (Canongate)

In 2008 Obama's new book was Change We Can Believe In, but for most of the reading public all of his books were new, and his early memoir, reissued, had begun to be read widely that same year. Unlike Change We Can Believe In and The Audacity of Hope, Dreams from My Father was not about policy. It was written before the politician who wrote the others had even been hatched (hatched as a plan rather than as a creature). Dreams from My Father contains Obama's most spellbinding writing. It was the book most Americans were talking about in 2008. Within its pages is a vulnerable portrait of the boy who became the man; resilience is its theme. First published in 1995 when Obama was 33 and selling very few copies (the bulk of its first printing was pulped), a signed first edition now sells for five figures or sometimes six. For those of you who missed out on this deal, get in line, and we will pool our dimes for a cheap hypnotist who will rid all financial regret from our minds so that we can concentrate on what is more important – or at least more literary.

Dreams from My Father is surely (ironically, via its partially telescoped pacing and its storytelling licence generally) one of the truest glimpses into Obama the young man and boy. Written when he wanted to be a writer (rather than when he was contemplating the burdens of being commander-in-chief) and when he was thinking of readers rather than voters, it offers a candour and vividness one will not see in a more ordinary political memoir. There is sex, there is drugs, but they are completely unsensational. He is matter-of-fact and unself-pitying even as self-pity is a thematic corollary to his subject of identity.

Dreams from My Father is less about idealism than about boulders in the road: does one smash them, rope and haul them, go around them? Napping or retreating aren't options. What Obama offers is an intriguing portrait of family restlessness, which afflicted both his parents and his grandfathers as well as Obama himself – a restlessness that caused him not to shy from challenges but to use boredom and frustration and good intentions to step up and over them. In Dreams from My Father, family yarns are unspooled and analysed, as if they were indeed dreams, with a dream's strange fleeings, chases and believable changes. One of the most memorable is of his four-year-old Kenyan father running away with his older sister, who was running away to find their mother, who had also run away; it is a heart-stopping tale of African village life. Equally stunning is the stoical story of the Indonesian stepfather who attempted to toughen the young Barack by boxing him in the face. If one is wondering who this new leader of the western world really is, Dreams from My Father addresses it best. •

✒ The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, by Alex Ross (Harper Perennial)

Contemporary classical music found its voice in the age of the blog.

✒ Netherland, by Joseph O'Neill (Harper Perennial)

Cricket, gangsters and mid-life crisis in post-9/11 New York.

✒ The Forever War, by Dexter Filkins (Vintage)

Hardhitting dispatches from the frontline in Iraq and Afghanistan that have already achieved classic status.

✒ Home, by Marilynne Robinson (Virago)

Proved it's still possible to write a best-selling novel about religious doubt. Winner of the Orange prize.

✒ The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, by Richard Holmes (Harper Press)

Cultural history of science that delighted both lay readers and the scientific establishment.

2009

John Mullan on Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel (Fourth Estate)

As Booker judges this year, we found ourselves shortlisting six historical novels. Yet suggestions of quaintness and self-consciousness remained attached to the genre. Not now. With Wolf Hall, the richly deserving winner, Mantel redeemed historical fiction from archaism and undigestible "research". Intensely pleasurable, it is also a work of technical audacity. It is told in the third person, but entirely through the thoughts of Thomas Cromwell, a courtier who acquires power in ways that sometimes surprise even himself. Mantel makes him her accomplice in the art of noticing things, the precious points of light in a darkened world – "the flashes of fire from Wolsey's turquoise ring", "the spinning of sparkling dust in empty rooms" – and the small gestures by which men and women give themselves away.

It is a big book, but to get at its brilliance you need to isolate passages, even sentences. In one typical sequence of paragraphs, we observe with Cromwell the attempts of his kitchen boys to make spiced wafers on hot irons, while he muses on his attempts to manipulate rancorous politicians and restrain Anne Boleyn's status-hungry father. Domestic detail and political manoeuvre are interleaved, as the protagonist watches one thing and thinks of another. It is learnt from the stream-of-consciousness narrative of Virginia Woolf and her imitators, but it is also something sharp and idiosyncratic. Cromwell's mind does not flit from one thought to another: it tirelessly works to separate experience into its categories, to make the chaos of human needs intelligible.

The novel makes Cromwell its hero and Sir Thomas More its villain. Cromwell is a tolerant, enlightened servant of power, who attempts to limit the violence it can do. More is a chilly fanatic, bent on achieving religious rectitude by torture and terror. You can understand the suspicions of some historians, for, on this showing, Mantel could persuasively rewrite history in any way she fancied. Yet she also allows the reader to see this – to know on every page that we are exercising our imaginations.

When she wants us to see something, we do. The novel's representations of violence are extraordinary. In one episode that you would like to forget but cannot, an old woman – an obdurate Protestant – is burnt at the stake. Writers and film-makers have often enough reimagined for us what this terrible exhibition would have been like, but never as here. It is made real because it is percolated through Cromwell's mind as he recalls the spectacle from his boyhood: "They had said it would not take long, but it did take long."

This year many novels adopted the present historic tense, as Wolf Hall does. In most cases, the technique flourishes its literariness. Here it seems just and inevitable. There is no vantage point beyond the unfolding of events. Mantel's protagonist is a man of restive intelligence, but not able to see beyond this here, this now. We experience his here and now with him. We think we "know" this history, but we un-know it again as we read this novel. •

✒ 2666, by Roberto Bolaño (Picador)

Novel in parts from the decade's biggest fiction discovery, which combines literary playfulness with visceral reports of the murders in Ciudad Juárez.

✒ Brooklyn, by Colm Tóibín (Viking)

Elegant, heartbreaking novel about Irish girl who emigrates to New York in the 1950s.

The best of the rest written by the Review team.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 4 Dec 2009 | 5:05 pm

Laurie Engel Fund: After the sky fell in

Four years ago Matthew Engel wrote in the Guardian about his son, Laurie, who had died of cancer. As a new children's ward opens – paid for by donators touched by his story – he tells of his mixed emotions

I have had many pieces of good fortune in my life, and one of them is that I write by a window that has one of the best views in England: the eastern ridge of the Black Mountains, which divides Herefordshire from Wales.

My mountain never looks the same twice, changing with the seasons, the weather and the light. As I write now, a layer of mist is moving south, sleet is falling, and the outline is vague, ethereal. Often I think of the ridge, with only slight geographical inaccuracy, as Housman's Blue Remembered Hills.

That is the land of lost content /

I see it shining plain /

The happy highways where I went /

And cannot come again.

It is six years now since my son Laurie was his happy, original self, well enough to force me regularly out of window-gazing and into a game of football, and nearly four and a quarter years since the cancer that lurked in his body finally killed him, aged 13.

And it is four years ago to the week since Guardian Weekend published my article about Laurie (The day the sky fell in, 3 December 2005), which transformed our early, unfocused fundraising efforts on behalf of Teenage Cancer Trust and made possible next week's astonishing event: the handing over of a new £2.5m unit for teenage patients in Birmingham.

There are, to put it mildly, mixed emotions for us: my wife Hilary, my daughter Vika and myself. I think a great deal about the land of lost content, but it doesn't shine plain any more. The memories of Laurie also grow vague and ethereal. It gets harder to hear his voice and recall his gestures. That's true of everyone we lose: my grandparents have all been gone for 40 years and more now, and of them only the blurriest mental snapshots remain. Vika was seven when Laurie died and for her, he is already becoming blurry. We have to imagine what Laurie would now be doing: A-levels, we presume; his Ucas form; planning a gap year that I hope would have been more original than going to Machu Picchu to send emails.

We are lucky too that I had videoed Laurie's life fairly obsessively: 50 hours of tape that a friend boiled down to a snappy half-hour for his memorial service. But the passage of time does what it does.

What it hasn't done is erode the pain. Every parent knows by instinct that the loss of a child is not to be compared with other forms of grief. But I had no idea how deep the wounds would be or how permanent the scars. I have been able to make use of the cathartic process of writing: I have not felt so creatively energetic in years. I am also good at superficial blitheness. Hilary – an editor not a writer, a mother not a father – has found it far harder.

We cannot know the effect on Vika. She's now 11: athletic, bubbly, imaginative rather than cerebral. She has just started at the local high school, Fairfield, that Laurie adored and which has its own memorial to him, Laurie's Well. And she loves it too. But we know we are not the parents we might have been.

Still, we have at least hung in there together. After the Guardian piece appeared and the fund went whoosh, I began to receive emails – dozens of them – from people who had lost children but had not had the opportunity to tell their story in a national newspaper. These would often finish with a similar line: "Sadly, the pressure was too great for our relationship, and we have now separated." Mourning is an individual process, not a communal one, because no two people grieve in synch. Yet parents have to try.

And a surprising number of friends and acquaintances have told us something else: that they had lost siblings in their childhood – cot deaths, cancer, accidents, whatever. The punchline of these stories tends to be different: that their parents – in those tight-lipped days – stayed together all right but never referred to the dead child again. And that they themselves were only now, as adults, coming to terms with the dim recollections of their loss.

The Engels have not gone in for stony-faced silence. We talk about Laurie constantly, repeat his jokes, and have private rituals, like toasting him whenever we have a special dinner. And the public success of the Laurie Engel Fund has forced us into the open.

Heaven knows what we thought we were doing when we started. Birmingham Children's hospital, where Laurie was treated, had a Teenage Cancer Trust (TCT) unit on its wish list. But it was a long wish list, and there was no obvious means of delivering it, given the constraints of budgeting, and of building on its hemmed-in city centre site.

We had stumbled on TCT as a charity in the weeks before Laurie died. And we quickly realised its goals represented the aggregate of his needs during his illness: it builds hospital wards that don't feel like institutions; places that can offer privacy and self-respect during the bad times, but also the opportunity for fun in the good times; places that friends will visit out of something more than duty; places which recognise that older kids, suffering long-term illness while on the cusp of maturity, have needs that cannot be met in either traditional children's wards or adult ones.

And we also stumbled on a novel relationship. The Laurie Engel Fund would exist solely to raise money for TCT, thus obviating the need to register as a charity with all the attendant bureaucracy. TCT in return would spend the money we raised only for the specific project we wanted – ie a new unit in Birmingham. But no one had even said there would be such a unit.

Luckily again, Paul O'Connor, then the chief executive of the hospital, was among those who read the Guardian article. He knew already how his staff felt about the cramped and ill-designed conditions in the existing ward for cancer patients. Now he grasped that something had to be done sooner rather than later, or sometime never.

So we all began to look for a solution. The first meeting concocted a possible scheme, using a couple of rooms belonging to the haematology unit, which would be kicked out into a prefab. The second meeting had an extra participant, someone I could not immediately identify, who sat there looking daggers. That was the haematology consultant. And he wasn't going anywhere without a fight.

Gradually, a more ambitious plan took wing. There might not be an inch of spare ground, but there was just enough spare sky. So it was decided to build up – putting a steel-clad extension over the ambulance bay, nuzzling up to the operating theatres, and then linking through to the old ward.

All this while, the scheme was gaining impetus by sheer force of money. When Laurie died, we talked of raising £10,000; in the Guardian I mentioned £100,000. We soon left that behind, as readers' donations poured in. More followed, as other papers picked up the story. Then came the local efforts, from our friends in Herefordshire. Then these rippled outwards.

By the summer of 2006, an extraordinary range of people were running, cycling, rowing, canoeing, climbing, walking, skydiving, swimming, eating, singing, dancing, playing cricket, playing football … all to raise money for our fund. Big cheques came in from Singapore and Australia. There was a quiz night on Mallorca. Laurie's old schoolfriends in Maryland, where we lived for two years, sold homemade lemonade for us. One friend, with a phobia about motorways, raised £400 by forcing herself to drive four miles down the M54.

Our three biggest single sources of funds all came about through extraordinary flukes. An old schoolmate of mine, Simon Silver, was someone I had seen, ooh, at least twice in the previous 35 years. He is no Guardian reader but glimpsed a copy of the Weekend cover lying round a hotel lounge while on holiday. He says the expression on Laurie's face was exactly the same as mine aged 13, and he divined at once whose son this boy in the beanie must be – and also what the story might tell him.

Simon is a director of property company Derwent London, which already had connections with TCT. The upshot was a lunch for the fund at the Savoy in November 2006, when Derwent's business contacts (luckily again) were still feeling flush. It was the most elegant shakedown imaginable. I told the gathering that Simon owed me £128,000 from a dice game during a Spanish lesson when we were 15, something I remember vividly although he – curiously – does not. I urged them to give enough money to redeem his reputation. They more than doubled it.

Then a complete stranger, a businessman called Nigel Williams, stopped for petrol at our local garage, which was selling copies of the book about Laurie that Hilary had put together. He spotted one by the till, bought it and, a father of teenage boys himself, was captivated. His company, Parkhill Estates, had a woodland site near Peterborough which could not be developed, and donated it. This sold for £100,000.

Finally, there was Otto Putland, a year younger than Laurie and living in another Herefordshire village. Otto read the story in the Hereford Times and was struck by the similarities between the two of them: both sport-mad boys, homebaked themselves, whose parents had then adopted younger girls from overseas at the same time. His sister, Nicky, comes from the Philippines; Vika was born in Siberia.

Otto's sporting achievements outstripped Laurie's: he is a champion junior swimmer with Olympic aspirations. I think he's wasted on swimming. He marked his arm with a 6 – to represent the number of UK teenagers diagnosed with cancer each day – and, still a 13-year-old himself, went round the swim clubs, challenging and cajoling them. He raised £26,000.

Through 2006 and 2007, the fund grew exponentially and the plans moved ahead rapidly. In 2008, the drumbeats from Birmingham grew fainter; there were mutterings about "difficulties"; the price tag rose as the technical complexities of the aerial site became clearer. Finally, there was a breakthrough, and word came that the planning application was in and then that it had gone through.

Last Christmas, Vika sprained her ankle ice-skating: it's the sort of thing she does. In January, we had to take her to the orthopaedic consultant at the children's hospital. The place was now a building site. The other parents were probably rather irritated.

Now it is almost ready, and I have seen the nurses peering through the glass from the old ward into the new one, as though gazing on the promised land. At the moment four very sick kids, plus four parents sleeping on camp beds, have to be shoehorned into a room measuring only 6 metres by 5½. There is double the bed-space in the TCT unit plus the TV-space, pool-table-space, computer-space, gaming-space and schmoozing-space.

We have collected about £890,000. The Maria Watt foundation, run by another bereaved family, has produced £100,000. The TCT's regional fundraiser has delivered something like £500,000. But even my maths cannot get that to add up to £2.5m. So we will keep going.

At £890,000 there are two very tantalising figures on the horizon. And everything we raise will leave TCT's central funds that much better placed for their next projects: at the Royal Marsden near London, in Southampton, Manchester and Scotland. In any case, we want to hold back some spare cash to ensure that the Birmingham unit does not look sumptuous on day one and NHS-tatty by year three. And I suppose we still need the therapy of doing something, of ensuring that Laurie's life – brimming with unfulfilled promise – makes some kind of sense.

The mountain is covered in snow now, the wind is bitter, and I find myself thinking of Housman again.

Into my heart an air that kills /

From yon far country blows:

I have nothing that could be described as faith, but I do keep wondering whether there is a far country where Laurie and I might be able to carry on where we left off. Dying does not seem such a big deal if your child has achieved it.

Our lives here are still punctuated by the dates of Laurie's crisis: 20 April, when he was diagnosed; 13 June, when we were told – 14 months later – that the cancer had returned and must be presumed incurable; 22 September, when he died. And coming up, sodding 25 December which, to bereft parents, looms each autumn like a mountain that somehow has to be endured and conquered.

But we now have another date too: 4 January. That's when the first patients are tentatively scheduled to move in. And that's amazing.

TCT Laurie Engel Fund, Fair Oak, Bacton, Hereford HR2 0AT. laurieengelfund.org. Matthew Engel is a columnist on the Financial Times.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 4 Dec 2009 | 5:05 pm

Sleep disorder: When the lights go out

Last month Brian Thomas was acquitted of strangling his wife – because he was asleep when he did it. But how does a sleep disorder turn an innocent man into a violent killer, and will the case open a loophole for the guilty?

For years, Brian and Christine Thomas rarely went to bed together. They had decided to sleep in separate rooms because his chronic sleepwalking disrupted her rest. But they were still emotionally very close. "Each night, we'd have a kiss and cuddle first and then I'd go to my room, and the same in the morning," he said recently. "If she woke first, she'd come to my bed, and if I woke first, I'd go to hers. We never got up without being in each other's beds first."

Thomas, now 59, had been sleepwalking since he was a child. He would sometimes wake up with cut feet and stones in his bed. He once even swam in a nearby canal while asleep. His wife was so worried by these incidents that she took to locking the house at night and taking the keys to bed so Thomas could not sleepwalk out of the house.

His sleep disorder became so bad in recent years that he was prescribed antidepressants. He would come off the drugs, which he believed made him impotent, every two months so he could make love with his wife. "A side-effect of coming off them was hallucinations," he said. "Now, when I think about it, I realise that most of my problems came when I was off the drugs."

Last July, the couple went on an impromptu holiday to west Wales in their camper van, to cheer up Christine after a cancer scare. Brian had come off antidepressants a week before they went away, and they slept in the same bed.

On the last night of their holiday, they stopped the camper in a car park in the seaside village of Aberporth. They had dinner at a pub, saw a beautiful sunset and then went to bed. "I always slept with her back towards me and my right arm under her neck and my left arm over her," Thomas said.

Later in the night they were woken by what Thomas described as "boy racers" doing hand brake turns in the car park near where they were sleeping. "As I went to sleep, it must have been on my mind that the camper wasn't secure. Then – I don't know how much later it was – I recall seeing Chris in bed over the other side of the camper and someone on top of her. All I said was: 'You bastards, you got in here.' I grabbed this man round the neck and pulled him off."

The following morning Brian woke up next to Christine's strangled body. He rang 999 and said: "I think I've killed my wife. Oh my God. I thought someone had broken in, I must have been dreaming or something. What have I done?"

Last month Thomas, a retired steel worker, was acquitted at Swansea Crown court of strangling Christine, 57. Lawyers prosecuting Thomas originally argued for a verdict of "not guilty by way of insanity", but then dropped the case, and Thomas was found simply "not guilty".

Judge Nigel Davies concluded that Thomas was "a decent man and a devoted husband". And Thomas has since said, "I'll never forgive myself, ever. It's like a hatred – a hatred of myself. Why did I do it?" But the case raises uncomfortable questions. Can a sleep disorder qualify as insanity? Could other, guilty, defendants use a similar claim to get away with murder? And what turns a chronic sleepwalker into an unwitting killer?

Dr Chris Idzikowski has been a sleep specialist for 30 years. When I meet him at the Edinburgh Sleep Centre he is still trying to understand the complexities of the Thomas trial, at which he was an expert witness for the defence. "The court accepted that this was a case of automatism," he says. "Meaning you have a condition that can lead to automatic behaviour, be that epilepsy, hypoglycaemia or – as in Thomas's case – a sleep disorder. In such cases you can't be held responsible for your actions." However, the plea of automatism is a complicated and controversial one.

Idzikowski tells me he typically receives one inquiry a week from lawyers seeking to use automatism as a defence for clients charged with offences ranging from assault to rape and murder. He first met Thomas before the trial and did two sleep studies on him, first at the Birmingham sleep centre and then at Swansea Prison, to test his claim that it was a parasomnia, or sleep disorder, that had led him to kill his wife.

"The recordings show that he had a condition that was consistent with night terrors," says Idzikowski. "But there's more than just a history of sleepwalking. There is a problem of him not breathing properly in the night, which can be a trigger for sleep behaviours."

Thomas proved particularly difficult to diagnose. "Initially we thought it was a case of REM [rapid eye movement] disorder behaviour, brought on by withdrawing from his drugs." REM is the more shallow form of sleep, during which we dream, so that made sense, Idzikowksi says. "He seemed to be acting out his dream of fighting with an intruder, and acting out dreams is a classic REM sleep disorder." But Thomas's night terrors and sleepwalking are both parasomnias associated with deeper, dreamless non-REM sleep.

Non-REM sleep disorders happen when your cognitive functions are not engaged, but your behavioural patterns are. "They often start because of an abrupt arousal like a car backfiring, or being too hot or too cold," explains Professor Colin Espie of Glasgow University's Sleep Centre. "That trigger rockets them to wakefulness. But thinking, planning and memory formation activities are still asleep."

Idzikowski is still unsure which form of sleep disorder caused Thomas to kill his wife, but he supports the court's decision. "The prosecution withdrew their case, which was right." Is Thomas insane? "No: it's a legal definition, not a medical one. Legally, there's non-insane automatism and insane automatism. The former is used if you've had a blow to the head, or you withdraw from drugs, and that creates the condition. Insane auto–matism is when it's intrinsic to the person's behaviour. Thomas withdrew from his drugs, but he also had a history of sleep disorders. So you could argue either non-insane or insane automatism. But to call him medically insane is not right."

An estimated 10 million Britons have sleep problems. A small proportion of those suffer from parasomnias, which are a range of sleep disorders that involve abnormal movements and behaviours during sleep. Two per cent of us suffer from sleepwalking (most are children, but for some the condition persists into adulthood). In 2005, a teenage sleepwalker had to be rescued after being found asleep on the arm of a 130ft crane.

Andrew, 27, has suffered from sleep disorders for as long as he can remember. "A lot of people have parasomnias in childhood and grow out of it. I didn't. My parents say that when I was a child I would cry out in my sleep a lot, but they didn't think it was treatable.

"When I started living with other people it became a problem. I had a flatmate who kept a rosary above her bed because she thought the noise was being made in the night by some sort of howling ghost." One night, his flatmates found him in his attic bedroom screaming and trying to prop up the roof with his arms. "The next morning, I had no memory of what I'd done."

Night terrors must make long-term relationships difficult. "Absolutely. The worst thing was that I wouldn't remember what I'd done in the night, which made me feel terribly guilty. I would never be aggressive to people – it's more of an inward aggression and fear – but there was always a danger I would lash out in my sleep and hurt someone I cared about."

It was only last year that Andrew sought treatment. "My fiancée nagged me because she was worried she was going to get hurt." Andrew's GP referred him to St Thomas's Hospital in London where his sleep patterns were monitored overnight. "I remember my consultant showing me the results. He pointed to one part of the graph for what's called 'fourth stage non-REM sleep' and said to me, jokingly, 'This is the automaton stage... as it would be described in court.' That's where I'd get off with murder, because the things you do in your sleep at that point, you don't know you're doing."

The first case in which the defence of automatism was successfully argued is thought to be that of Albert Tirrell, who in 1846 was accused in Boston, Massachusetts, of murdering his lover, a prostitute called Maria Bickford. His lawyer, Rufus Choate, convinced the jury that Tirrell did not cut Bickford's throat – or, if he did so, did it while sleepwalking; under the "insanity of sleep".

Since then, the controversial defence has been used in murder trials more than 60 times. In 2005, for example, Jules Lowe, 32, was found not guilty of murdering his 83-year-old father Edward after claiming the attack at his home in Walkden, Greater Manchester, took place while he was sleepwalking. Edward suffered 90 separate injuries which Manchester Crown court heard were consistent with being punched, kicked and stamped on, but his son had no memory of the attack.

Dr Irshaad Ebrahim, director of the London Sleep Centre, was called in to carry out a series of overnight sleep studies on Lowe to test his claim, measuring brain waves, muscle activity and breathing activity. He also looked at factors that trigger sleepwalking episodes, such as alcohol and stress. "We think this was the first sleepwalking murder in the UK," he says. "Mr Lowe had a history of sleepwalking, and this was generally worse when he drank alcohol, but he had never been violent before the night of this offence. However, his stepmother had just died and there were several other stressful factors occurring in his life."

This was, however, an unusual case. "Extreme forms of violence, of sleepwalking or automatism, are extremely rare, so we usually view them with suspicion."

Rare, perhaps, but such cases often receive a great deal of publicity. One especially famous criminal case of automatism didn't involve a sleep disorder, but still made headlines. When REM guitarist Peter Buck attacked two cabin staff during a 2002 British Airways flight from Seattle to Heathrow, it was seen initially as a case of a boozed up rock star behaving badly.

Buck covered the cabin crew in yogurt, knocked over a trolley, tried to steal a knife and swore at the captain. But he was acquitted of common assault and damaging property. The court accepted he had no recollection of the incident because he was suffering from non-insane automatism at the time, brought on by combining alcohol and a sleeping pill at the start of the flight. After the verdict, pilots' union Balpa said the jury decision sent out "all the wrong signals".

Similar scepticism has inevitably greeted rape cases in which automatism has been used as a defence. In 2007, 26-year-old RAF serviceman Kenneth Ecott was found not guilty of raping a 15-year-old girl in Poole, Dorset. He told Bournemouth Crown court he had a condition called "sexsomnia". During a friend's birthday party, Ecott climbed into a bed with the girl and had sex with her. She awoke to find him naked on top of her. She screamed and then watched him get up slowly and go into the garden. Ecott told the court he had no memory of the rape. The girl's mother told reporters after Ecott's acquittal, "I worry that there are a lot more people who will get off lightly using the same defence. They could harm someone else and use sexomnia as an excuse."

How can someone unknowingly commit a violent act such as rape? "If sexual activity is a habitual behaviour, then it is possible," Professor Espie says. He points out that we carry out many tasks unconsciously every day. "It's only when you learn something new that you do it fully consciously. For example, when you're learning how to drive, you can't imagine that you'll ever be able to do it automatically. But eventually you do, with no memory of having got from A to B. It's similar with sleepwalkers. Often you'll find they carry out tasks – boiling a kettle, making toast – on automatic." Espie believes this automatic behaviour can stretch to making sexual advances. "We've had couples come in for sleep studies, with one partner complaining of unwanted sexual attention in the night from their sleeping partner."

Cases of sexsomnia, though, are unusual. Dr Adrian Williams of the London Sleep Centre says that most court cases involving defendants with sleep disorders are accidents involving sleepy drivers. In one case, in 2005, Colin Kane, 36, from Bishopton, Renfrewshire, was driving a truck that crashed into a tailback near Alexandria, Dunbartonshire. Three people died in the accident. "This driver managed to convince the court that he was not responsible for the crash because his sleep apnoea [disturbed breathing during sleep] meant he was not in control of his vehicle at the time," Dr Williams says.

Kane had reportedly experienced a blackout just before the crash, which may have been caused by his sleeping disorder. The jury found the case not proven. "So far, sleep apnoea hasn't been successfully used as a defence in such cases," Dr Williams says.

Most parasomniacs don't end up in court. Usually they seek help and, in most cases, their behaviour is brought under control. For the past year, Andrew has been taking varying doses of antidepressants, trimipramine and the muscle relaxant clonazepam. The side effects of the parasomnia have almost gone and he sleeps much better, "but I worry that I'm developing a tolerance to the drugs". For many parasomniacs, these drugs and their side-effects are a reality of life. In the Thomas case, his defence rested on the fact that he had come off his anti-depressants.

But should parasomniacs take more responsibility for their condition? "If, during sleepwalking for example, you regularly drive, shouldn't you or someone in your family take steps to hide the keys so you can't?" asks Professor Espie. "Say you killed a pedestrian by driving while asleep and you had a history of sleepwalking, shouldn't you deserve to be found culpable?"

So far, though, there have been no such convictions in Britain. Courts have, however, attempted to stop the circumstances that led to a sleep-disorder-related death recurring. "There was a case in Edinburgh in the 19th century in which a sleeping man thought his son was being attacked by wild animals," Dr Idzikowski says. "He thought he'd thrown him to safety, but in fact he threw him against the wall and killed him. The judge and jury accepted the defence of automatism, with the proviso that he could no longer sleep with anyone again."

Sleep-related automatism is controversial partly because there is a worry that even sleep experts can be hoodwinked by cunning defendants. "I have certainly seen people who I think are trying it on," Espie says. "It's very difficult to tell the difference between a genuine and a bogus case, and I've been in sleep research for 30 years. At one extreme you might have a lying psychopath who wants to get off, and at the other extreme an innocent who invariably admits to what they have done." How then do you tell them apart? "One sign is that the innocents are generally not defensive at all, because they can't remember it happened. They readily admit to what happened, and say it wasn't their fault."

"One judge said that automatism is the last refuge of the scoundrel," Dr Idzikowski says. "I'm sure there are people who have the disorder, commit a crime, and try to lean back on it to get away with it."

Could that have happened with Brian Thomas? "I'm convinced he was not guilty. That said, you never know. Maybe he's a genius who's tricked me and everybody else and is now going to claim lots of insurance money for his wife's death. Perhaps, but I don't think so."

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 4 Dec 2009 | 5:05 pm

Decision soon on closing lock to stop Asian carp (AP)

AP - A decision could come within days on whether to temporarily close a vital Chicago area shipping waterway in an increasingly desperate bid to stop the invasive Asian carp from reaching the Great Lakes, an Obama administration adviser said Friday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 4 Dec 2009 | 4:56 pm

Hammerhead Sharks Have Stereo Visionw

The unique head structures of these creatures allow them to see 360 degrees.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 4 Dec 2009 | 4:20 pm

7-Foot NBA Center Wins eBay Auction to Name Shrimp Species

A shrimp that lives on southwest coast of Australia has a new name, thanks to an Australian graduate student, eBay and former NBA basketball player Luc Longley.

It all started when Anna McCallum, now a doctoral student at the University of Melbourne, discovered a previously unknown shrimp while working as an assistant on a research boat. Instead of naming it herself, she decided to auction the right to name the shrimp on eBay and donate the proceeds to the Australian Marine Conservation Society.

The bidding got hot and heavy with sea-life lovers like Bob Rosenberry, publisher of Shrimp News International, bidding up to $2,000. Still, the winning bid of $2,900 came as a shock.

“It was a total surprise that a basketballer would be interested in this little deep-sea shrimp,” McCallum told The Scientist.

Longley, who had participated in marine conservation efforts before, named the shrimp Lebbeus clarehanna after his 15-year-old daughter, Clare Hanna Longley.

The auction took place in March, and the description and name of the shrimp appeared in a recent issue of Zootaxa.

Surprisingly, the shrimp auction is not the first sale of a species naming right, nor the most lucrative.

In 2007, a black-tie charity auction in Indonesia fielded the naming rights of 10 fish go for more than 2 million dollars. Two years before, a Bolivian monkey’s naming rights were sold for $650,000. Now, it’s almost a common fundraising tactic for conservation groups and universities.

One thing you can’t say for previous auctions, though: Their winning bidders did not include any 7-foot NBA champions of the tall white-guy variety that opposing fans love to hate. Longley was part of three championship Chicago Bulls teams led by Michael Jordan. And now he has a shrimp too? Hardly seems fair.

Via The Scientist.

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter, Google Reader feed, and green tech history research site; Wired Science on Twitter and Facebook.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 4 Dec 2009 | 3:46 pm

Obama to attend climate forum end

President Obama will now attend the end of the Copenhagen climate summit after "progress" in talks, the White House says.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 4 Dec 2009 | 3:43 pm

Beloved panda born at National Zoo headed to China (AP)

AP - A young giant panda who became a major attraction after his birth at Washington's National Zoo will leave for China early next year for breeding.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 4 Dec 2009 | 3:36 pm

The Killer Tomatoes Have Returned

I'm an avid tomato gardener -- a REALLY avid tomato gardener. Even though there are just three of us in my family -- and one refuses to even taste a tomato (guess how old that one is) -- I plant ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 4 Dec 2009 | 3:34 pm

Copenhagen Climate Summit: What You Need to Know (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - The question of how to address global climate change is one of the most confounding on the planet. Experts and world leaders plan to wrestle with the scientific, political and social issues surrounding the topic at an upcoming conference in the Danish city of Copenhagen next week. Here's what you need to know.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 4 Dec 2009 | 3:11 pm

Controversial Signs of Mass Cannibalism

At a settlement in what is now southern Germany, the menu turned gruesome 7,000 years ago. Over a period of perhaps a few decades, hundreds of people were butchered and eaten before parts of their bodies were thrown into oval pits, a new study suggests.

Cannibalism at the village, now called Herxheim, may have occurred during ceremonies in which people from near and far brought slaves, war prisoners or other dependents for ritual sacrifice, propose anthropologist Bruno Boulestin of the University of Bordeaux 1 in France and his colleagues. A social and political crisis in central Europe at that time triggered various forms of violence, the researchers suspect.

“Human sacrifice at Herxheim is a hypothesis that’s difficult to prove right now, but we have evidence that several hundred people were eaten over a brief period,” Boulestin says. Skeletal markings indicate that human bodies were butchered in the same way as animals.

Herxheim offers rare evidence of cannibalism during Europe’s early Neolithic period, when farming first spread, the researchers report in the December Antiquity. Artifacts found at Herxheim come from the Linear Pottery Culture, which flourished in western and central Europe from about 7,500 to 7,000 years ago.

Two archaeologists who have studied human bones unearthed a decade ago at Herxheim reject the new cannibalism hypothesis. In a joint statement to Science News, Jörg Orschiedt of the University of Leipzig in Germany and Miriam Haidle of Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum in Frankfurt say that Boulestin’s evidence better fits a scenario in which the dead were reburied at Herxheim following dismemberment and removal of flesh from bones. Evidence of ceremonial reburial practices has been reported for many ancient societies.

If further work confirms large-scale cannibalism at Herxheim, “this would be very surprising indeed, simply in terms of the scale involved,” remarks archaeologist Rick Schulting of the University of Oxford in England.

Until now, the only convincing evidence of Neolithic cannibalism came from 6,000-year-old bones in a French cave, Boulestin holds. A 1986 report concluded that the remains of various animals and at least six people were butchered and discarded there. Again, Orschiedt and Haidle say, reburial rather than cannibalism may explain those findings.

Herxheim was first excavated from 1996 to 1999, yielding remains of a large structure, pottery and what appeared to be two parallel ditches encircling the settlement. Closer inspection revealed that the ditches had been formed by overlapping pits that had been dug over several centuries, apparently not exclusively to hold the dead.

Initial excavations of these pits yielded deposits of large numbers of human and dog bones.

Work from 2005 to 2008 — led by Andrea Zeeb-Lanz and Fabian Haack of the archaeology division of Germany’s Directorate General for Cultural Heritage — unearthed additional human bones, mainly skulls and limb bones bearing incisions. Remains of an estimated 500 people have been found so far.

Pottery resting among the bones accumulated over no more than a few decades, the researchers say. Some pieces came from Neolithic sites located 400 kilometers from Herxheim.

The pits that surrounded Herxheim provided no protection from invaders but may have marked a symbolic boundary for a ceremonial settlement, Boulestin proposes. At first, Boulestin’s team, like Orschiedt and Haidle, thought that the dead were brought to Herxheim for ceremonial reburial.

But Boulestin and his colleagues’ opinion changed after they analyzed 217 reassembled human bones from one deposit, representing at least 10 individuals.

Damage typical of animal butchery appears on the bones, including that produced by a technique to separate the ribs from the spine, the scientists say. Heads were skinned and muscles removed from the brain case in order to remove the skullcap. Incisions and scrapes on jaws indicate that tongues were cut out.

Scrape marks inside the broken ends of limb bones indicate that marrow was removed.

People most likely made the chewing marks found near intentionally broken ends of hand and arm bones, Boulestin says.

Ongoing work at Herxheim has found signs of cannibalism on the bones of hundreds of other individuals, with only a few exceptions, he adds.

But proving that ancient Europeans consumed human body parts “is nearly impossible,” Orschiedt and Haidle assert. The absence of lower jaws and skull bases from the new Herxheim material favors a reburial scenario, the researchers say, in which these components were ritually removed before skulls were placed in pits.

Boulestin’s notion of a Neolithic social and political crisis rests on generally accepted evidence of massacres of dozens of people at three central European sites approximately 7,000 years ago. Other regional settlements, including Herxheim, were abandoned around that time.

Planned chemical analyses of bones from Herxheim will indicate whether some individuals grew up eating foods from distant regions, a sign that they were transported to the site. Such evidence would support either a cannibalism or reburial hypothesis.

It’s not yet clear that a widespread crisis actually affected early Neolithic peoples, comments archaeologist Nick Thorpe of the University of Winchester in England.

Whatever actually happened at Herxheim, facial bones were smashed beyond recognition, “giving an impression of the destruction of individual identity, a kind of psychic violence against the person,” Thorpe says.

Image: Left: Neolithic vase found among the human remains./Pascal Disdier, CNRS, Universite Marc Block Strasbourg 2. Center: Human bones./F. Haak, GDKE Rheinland-Pfalz, Direktion Archaologie, Speyer. Right: Human skull caps./F. Haak, GDKE Rheinland-Pfalz, Direktion Archaologie, Speyer

See Also:

• If Climate Didn’t Doom Neanderthals, Did Humans?
• Bogosphere: The Strangest Things Pulled Out of Peat Bogs
• Mummy Scans Show Heart Disease Was Rampant
• Why Pygmies Are Small
• Mathematical Model for Surviving a Zombie Attack

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 4 Dec 2009 | 2:25 pm

Cave-dwelling spiders going home after 10-year vacation

Spiders that took a ride on scientists' equipment and colonised a derelict orchid house are to be taken back to a Yorkshire pothole

A unique colony of spiders is to be rehoused this weekend after proving the power and adaptability of nature in a singular way.

More than 150 of the cave-dwelling species Meta menardi and Meta bourneti are being collected individually and taken in plastic bags to a pothole in the Yorkshire Dales.

The journey returns them to their original home, which they left – unnoticed – 10 years ago on the clothes and equipment of a party of university scientists. Exceptionally for cave spiders, which have adapted to live underground, they resettled and flourished in a derelict orchid house which the scientists were using as their base.

Less than a mile from Chapel Fell cave, near Malham, which the team from Bradford University was surveying, the ramshackle building had just the dark, dank conditions which the bronze, long-legged spiders – among Britain's biggest – need to thrive.

"They clearly took to it immediately, although we only realised that they were there a couple of years ago," said Mike Collins of the National Trust, which runs the former mansion of Malham Tarn House, North Yorkshire, as a field centre.

The big move home follows the trust's decision to convert the orchid house into a classroom, with facilities such as warmth and light, which the spiders loathe. Familiar from their cave roof cocoons, from which they sally to find prey, they measure up to 8cm (3.1in) across and will nip if repeatedly provoked.

A "spider room" is to be incorporated into the restored building, which originally housed the exotic plants of James Morrison, a draper who was one of the wealthiest men in Victorian Britain.

Visitors will be able to learn about spiders generally, the Meta species and the story of the Malham migration, while the descendants of the original travellers get on with life in the dark back at Chapel Fell.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 4 Dec 2009 | 1:50 pm

New Device Gets a Better Grip on Gaming

Keyless keyboard invented for carpal tunnel, now used by gamers.
Source: Livescience.com | 4 Dec 2009 | 1:35 pm

Natural Gas Power Without the Emissions

MIT scientists have developed technology that could transform power generation, providing electricity without burning fuel, and without the emissions. But there's a catch. ChemE professor Paul Barton and postdoc Thomas Adams propose a power plant mashup that uses existing tech ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 4 Dec 2009 | 1:18 pm

Science Nation

Science for the People: Surprising discoveries and fascinating researchers.
Source: Livescience.com | 4 Dec 2009 | 1:14 pm

Bird Courtship

Gail Patricelli studies the courtship behavior of the endangered sage-grouse. She has a robotic female sage-grouse (fembot!) rigged with cameras to get right up close to courting males.
Source: Livescience.com | 4 Dec 2009 | 1:10 pm

Study: Slowdown in warming last year not permanent (AP)

AP - Climate researchers say cooler temperatures in North America last year do not mean global warming is easing.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 4 Dec 2009 | 1:07 pm

Copenhagen Climate Summit: What You Need to Know

The essential background on the upcoming climate conference in Copenhagen.
Source: Livescience.com | 4 Dec 2009 | 12:44 pm

British Cavemen Didn't Eat Reindeer

The image of reindeer pulling Santa's Christmas sleigh dates to at least 1822, when Clement Clarke Moore wrote his famous "Twas the Night Before Christmas" poem. Go back hundreds of years, and the image is quite different: sizzling reindeer steaks ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 4 Dec 2009 | 12:00 pm

Settlement Site Hints at Mass Cannibalism

Were humans on the menu at a village in Germany 7,000 years old?
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 4 Dec 2009 | 11:30 am

Top 10 Craziest Solutions to Global Warming

Here are some of the wackiest solutions proposed to curb Earth's global warming.
Source: Livescience.com | 4 Dec 2009 | 10:10 am

Were Dinosaurs Warm or Cold Blooded?

New research has heated up the debate over whether dinosaurs were ectothermic (cold-blooded) or endothermic (warm-blooded like us). The topic is addressed in this week's Johns Hopkins News-Letter and a recent PLoS One paper. The prevailing view for decades was ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 4 Dec 2009 | 9:51 am

Expert slams 'tabloid' e-mail row

A colleague of the UK professor at the centre of the climate e-mails row says "sceptics" have embarked on a "tabloid-style character assassination".
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 4 Dec 2009 | 9:25 am

Could Christmas Lights Destroy Your Holiday?

Here’s some sour eggnog to go with your holiday cookies… This week the European Commission came out with a report saying 30% of the Christmas lights they sampled in parts of Europe pose a “serious safety risk.” And by “serious ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 4 Dec 2009 | 9:16 am

Scavenger Hunt Could Net You 40 Grand

Be the first to find ten tethered red weather balloons and you could win $40,000. DARPA, the central research and development organization for the Department of Defense, is sponsoring a Network Challenge in order to "explore the roles the Internet ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 4 Dec 2009 | 9:15 am

To Deflect an Asteroid, Try a Lasso, Not a Nuke

To save the world from the real threat of a major asteroid impact, one engineer has imagined a scheme similar to George Bailey’s wish to lasso the moon for his sweetheart in “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

The plan is to attach a gigantic weight to an Earth-bound asteroid using an enormous cord. This crazy-sounding contraption would change the asteroid’s center of mass and subsequently its trajectory, averting a potentially catastrophic scenario.

Aerospace engineer Major David French of the Air Force Institute of Technology mathematically modeled how different weights and lengths of tether would affect a killer asteroid’s orbit over time. The results are in the December issue of Acta Astronautica.

He found that, in general, longer tethers and larger masses would more significantly change the asteroid’s orbit. The alteration would occur slowly, taking anywhere from 10 to 50 years.

The technique would require no simple mission. The cosmic counterweight would tip the scale at billions of pounds, while the rope would range anywhere from six miles (about the height of Mount Everest), to 60,000 miles (long enough to wrap around Earth two and a half times).

This solution may sound unrealistic, but the threat is real. To date, NASA’s Near Earth Object Program, which tracks asteroids and comets that could approach the planet, has cataloged more than 5,500 objects. About 1,000 of these are classified as “potentially hazardous,” meaning they could wipe out a city, spawn giant tsunamis or, in the worst case, eradicate life with a planet-shrouding cloud of debris.

To guard against this, scientists have produced many dramatic proposals, each with its own merits. French thinks his technique stands out for its relative ease.

“What interested me was that there is no active control system needed,” he said. Once the rope and weight were installed, the asteroid would get nudged through nothing but the laws of gravity.

However, the method is not lacking critics.

“This tether-deflection idea is an interesting intellectual exercise,” said astronomer David Morrison of the Asteroid and Comet Impact Hazards Group at NASA’s Ames Research Center. “But it is of no practical value.”

Morrison points out that putting enormous objects, such as a heavy tether and ballast, in space is far beyond the entire human race’s launch capability. Furthermore, the cost of designing and building a strong enough rope makes the solution intractable.

“From a practical point of view, the technique is a mess,” agreed Russell Schweickart, former Apollo astronaut and co-founder of the B612 Foundation, a group dedicated to protecting the Earth from asteroid strikes. He is concerned that no one knows how to hook a tether to a spinning asteroid and, once attached, there is no guarantee the line won’t get tangled up.

Schweickart and Morrison offer a much simpler idea that uses current technology: Change the asteroid’s orbit by crashing something into it. Even a relatively small satellite would alter the orbit enough to stave off certain doom, if we did it far enough in advance.

French understands these criticisms and thinks they are well-founded. But, he said Earth will still need protection from asteroids in the next century, and the next millennium. If our technology and expertise isn’t enough to lasso an asteroid right now, we have time.

“The last extinction-level asteroid strike was 65 million years ago,” he said, “I think it’s important to take the long view and maybe dig into technology that is not quite ready.”

Image: Painting of the Chicxulub impact, 65 million years ago. Donald E. Davis/NASA/JPL.

See Also:

• The Real Twitpocalypse: Asteroid Alerts Come to Twitter
• Asteroid Impact Craters on Earth as Seen From Space
• Giant Asteroid Impact Could Have Stirred Entire Ocean
• Hunting Arctic Asteroid Impact With Hovercraft
• How to Defend Earth Against an Asteroid Strike
• First-Ever Asteroid Tracked From Space to Earth
• Anatomy of an Asteroid
• NASA Falling Short of Asteroid Detection Goals

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 4 Dec 2009 | 8:39 am

Dinosaurs Get Fleshed Out

In 1993's groundbreaking Jurassic Park, several unfortunate souls (Samuel L. Jackson! Newman! That whiny accountant guy on the john!) got to see the inside of a dinosaur ... the hard way. But on Discovery Channel's new show Clash of the ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 4 Dec 2009 | 8:15 am

Study measures ocean's CO2 uptake

There are substantial variations in the amount of carbon being absorbed by the North Atlantic Ocean, a study shows.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 4 Dec 2009 | 7:20 am

Ancient Volcano's Devastating Effects Confirmed

A massive volcanic eruption that occurred in the distant past may have pushed humans to the brink of extinction.
Source: Livescience.com | 4 Dec 2009 | 6:50 am

Galapagos Islands are transformed

The Galapagos archipelago has already been transformed by global climate changes and human activity, a report concludes.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 4 Dec 2009 | 5:12 am

Glacier threat

Bolivia's urban sprawl threatens water supplies
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 4 Dec 2009 | 5:02 am

Iron Curtain kept out alien birds

During the Cold War, the Iron Curtain prevented many alien bird species from colonising Eastern Europe, suggests a study.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 4 Dec 2009 | 3:03 am