The tsunami that struck Samoa yesterday has the potential to be the biggest tsunami disaster since the Boxing Day (26 December) 2004 tsunami that devastated coasts around the Indian ocean and took nearly 300,000 lives. The death toll this time will be much less than that, but it seems likely to rise as more reports are gathered and it may exceed the 550 killed on 17 July 2006 when a tsunami hit southern Java and will certainly be worse than one that hit Sumatra in September 2007.

Like those, this tsunami was caused by an undersea earthquake, at a subduction zone where one tectonic plate is being pushed down below another. In this example, the floor of the Pacific ocean is being pushed westwards below the Tonga island arc. Plates do not slide past each other smoothly. Instead, strain builds up until the deformation is relieved in a major jerk. In this case, the 'jerk' began at a relatively shallow depth of about 18 km, and the seafloor above it was probably jolted upwards by several metres. This sudden displacement caused a series of waves on the sea surface, which became higher and steeper when they ran ashore. Local reports speak of waves reaching more than 5 metres above sealevel and rushing 100 metres inland.

Unlike the situation in the Indian ocean back in 2004, the Pacific ocean has a pretty good tsunami warning system, and evacuation of Samoa's capital, Apia, did occur although I am not sure whether this was achieved before any tsunami waves were likely to hit it, because the earthquake was so close by that the waves would arrive in less than an hour. Also the earthquake happened so early in the day, just before 7am local time, that many people may not have been aware of the situation.

Students of the Open University short course Volcanoes, earthquakes and tsunamis , which is supported by the book Teach Yourself Volcanoes, Earthquakes and Tsunamis will doubtless soon be discussing the issues and implications raised by this event. There are many current news reports, and already a rather good entry on Wikipedia.

Samoan region of the Pacific ocean
[data courtesy of US Geological Survey]

Earthquakes in the Samoa region in the 24 hours before the time stated at the top (there were none in the previous week). The largest blue square locates the epicentre of the magnitude 8.0 quake that caused the tsunami. The others are smaller aftershocks.  Samoa is the group of islands north of the earthquake swarm, Tonga lies to the south, and the outlying islands of the Fiji group are visible near the western edge of the map. The map covers a 10 by 10 degree block, approximately 1000 km across. Data courtesy of USGS.

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Volcanoes, earthquakes and tsunamis

Teach Yourself Volcanoes, Earthquakes and Tsunamis by David Rothery
published by Hodder Education

About the author

Dave Rothery is a volcanologist and planetary scientist at the Open University. His current research includes studying volcanic eruptions on the Earth and characterising planetary surfaces, especially Mercury.

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Breaking Science

The Breaking Science team come to BBC Radio Five Live to break open this week's science stories.

The Breaking Science team met two researchers who’ve been following the hum of insect wings

Chris Smith: In some countries it’s traditional to woo or serenade a woman by singing beneath her balcony. Well now it turns out that things aren’t so different in the insect world. Here’s Lauren Cator.

Lauren Cator: I’m interested in how mosquitoes choose their mate, and my hypothesis is that they may use flight tone as a way to get information about the quality of potential mates.

Chris Smith: So in other words how fast the wings are flapping?

Lauren Cator: It’s not a direct relationship but that sound that’s created by the wings flapping, yes.

Chris Smith: So what was the big unknown then that you were trying to investigate here?

Lauren Cator: There was a paper published in 2006 by Gibson and Russell, and they found that in Toxorhynchites, a large non-blood feeding mosquitoes, that a similar behaviour was occurring, and, as a medical entomologist, I was interested in seeing if medically important mosquitoes, mosquitoes that feed on human blood and transmit pathogens that infect people, were doing similar things.

Chris Smith: Well this seems like a very good time to bring in Ben Arthur who’s another researcher on this paper. Ben, how did you actually investigate what was going on with these mosquitoes to see how they were tuning into each other’s wing beat frequencies?

Ben Arthur: Well it was a two-part study. We had behavioural methods and some physiological data as well. In the behavioural data, what we did was we tethered individual mosquitoes to a fine insect pin with some glue and positioned them next to a special microphone which could sense the wing flight tone very finely and just listened to what they were doing.

[Sound of mosquito]

So what you’re listening to right now is a male mosquito singing along at around 600Hz, and he’s next to a microphone. And we’re going to bring in a female here.

[Sound of mosquito]

And she’s singing at 400Hz. And the higher harmonics at 1200Hz, the shared harmonic, if you listen real close, you can hear the beats produced because those two frequencies are so close together. And that’s what’s happening when they’re courting.

Chris Smith: So which sex is changing its wing beats in response to the other?

Ben Arthur: They both do. So if the male’s relatively stationary and the female comes in she’ll modulate her tone up or down to match his, or if the female is stationary and then the male can move his and they’ll just synchronise to actively both match each other.

Chris Smith: You’re saying it’s not actually the frequency the wings are beating at, but the harmonics, the multiples of the frequency the wings are beating at, which seems to be important?

Ben Arthur: That’s right. So the natural occurring frequency of the female wing beat is at 400Hz and that of the male’s at 600 and those are different enough that they don’t try to match the fundamental but rather the shared harmonics are the integer multiple at 1200Hz.

Chris Smith: How does the mosquito that’s the recipient of these frequencies, how does it actually detect them, and how do you know that it’s actually responding to the frequencies, and then how does it then know, right now I need to mate?

Ben Arthur: Right, well it has these very plumose antennae, and these antennae sense the movements of the particles in the air, and there’s a sensory organ at the base of the antennae called the Johnston’s organ which transduces that movement of the antennae into an electrical voltage that the nervous system can then use to detect where the sound is, and what it is and whether it’s a mate or not.

And the second part of our study then recorded from the Johnston’s organ and saw these electrical voltages and we found that we could measure electrical voltages all the way up to 2kHz which includes that shared harmonic at 1200Hz.

Chris Smith: Wasn’t there some claim previously by other people though that mosquitoes a) were deaf anyway and b) that they couldn’t hear sounds that high in frequency, so you’ve really scuppered both those myths haven’t you?

Ben Arthur: That’s right, exactly, and we’ve shown it with both behavioural data and physiological data in the same paper.

Chris Smith: Lauren, what do you think that the major impacts - apart from obviously this being academically very interesting - what do you think the main other impacts are from a medical point of view?

Easy to repel - but how would you attract a mosquito?
[image © copyright Jupiterimages]

Lauren Cator: Well just generally we know very little about mosquito mating behaviour, and we have no idea who’s choosing who or how they’re choosing them, and one of the control strategies that’s been proposed is to create transgenic mosquitoes - so mosquitoes that through genetic manipulation are either unable to transmit pathogens or are sterilised. The idea would be that if you release these into the wild that males carrying your desired genotype would be able to compete with wild males for female mates, and drive the genotype through the population. Unfortunately we have no idea what constitutes a sexy male mosquito.

Chris Smith: Hopefully they’ll find out soon. That was Lauren Cator and before her Ben Arthur. They’re both based at Cornell University, and they’ve published that work in this week’s edition of the journal Science. And if you’d like to read a bit more about how animals use sounds to track down a mate or find their way around there are links to a number of articles about those subjects on the Breaking Science website.

You can hear the mosquitos - and the whole programme - on the Breaking Science website. This interview was originally broadcast in January 2009 on BBC Radio Five Live

Find out more

Margi Clarke explores the science of love

How can you research animals we can’t see or hear?

How do we listen in to the animal kingdom?

How do mosquito repellents work?

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Breaking Science

The Breaking Science team come to BBC Radio Five Live to break open this week's science stories.

The Breaking Science team discussed the latest thinking about an unusual condition

Chris Smith: Talking about genes and how they’re linked to different conditions, there’s one very exciting condition which I’ve always wished I had just to be able to experience it, and that’s synaesthesia - the mixing of the senses - and scientists now reckon they’ve got one of the genes for that.

Kat Arney: Yes. Synaesthesia is a really fascinating neurological condition and it manifests itself in a range of ways. And it’s reasonably rare, it affects fewer than one in a hundred people, and it’s really described as if the sensory wires were crossed in your brain.

So for example, people with synaesthesia can smell colours or taste sounds, and now researchers in London, Cambridge and Oxford have tracked down specific regions of the genome that harbour genes that are linked to audiovisual synaesthesia. And we do know from previous research that this condition can run in families, but researchers haven’t been able to pinpoint the genes that might be involved. But now writing in the American Journal of Human Genetics, Dr Julian Asher and his team used new genome scanning technology to hunt for genes that were linked to synaesthesia, and they used 43 families that had this condition in the family.

Tasting the colours? A woman with a lollipop.

[image © copyright Jupiterimages]

Chris Smith: And what have they found in those families?

Kat Arney: So far they’ve found four regions of the genome that are linked to synaesthesia. These were on human chromosomes 2, 5, 6 and 12. Now they haven’t found specific genes, they’ve just tracked down some general regions, and the regional chromosome 2 is probably the most intriguing, as it’s also been linked to autism and people with autism often have differences in their perception and their senses.

Chris Smith: But in what they did find, was there anything of interest in there?

Kat Arney: Well of the regions that they did find there are some very interesting genes in there, such as genes for epilepsy, genes that have been linked to dyslexia, learning and memory in some of these regions which obviously need a lot more investigation. And so far, although they haven’t found any specific genes, there’s a lot of candidates which we could look at in future.

Chris Smith: As they say, nature normally reveals her workings through her mistakes because it gives us an insight into the molecular clockwork of how things like the brain actually work.

Kat Arney: Absolutely.

Episode originally broadcast February 2009 on BBC Radio Five Live. Listen to the full programme online.

Find out more

Synaesthetes discussed their condition as part of our coverage of the 2003 Reith Lectures

Synaesthesia is at the heart of the novel Astonishing Splashes Of Colour

Are you ready to start studying psychology with The Open University?

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Breaking Science

The Breaking Science team come to BBC Radio Five Live to break open this week's science stories.

In this extract from episode six of Breaking Science, Doctor Chris Smith and Helen Scales discuss a scientific development which might, one day, lead to the ability to ‘zap’ memories

Helen Scales: Have you seen a film called The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? I quite enjoyed it, actually.

Chris Smith: I haven’t. Who’s in it?

Helen Scales: Jim Carey and Kate Winslet, and what happens is she wants to have the memories of an ex-boyfriend taken out of her brain. But,  this kind of fantastical idea might not be confined to the realm of make-believe, because one day this could be a human reality. A team of scientists, led by Joe Tsien from the Brain & Behaviour Discovery Institute at the Medical College of Georgia in the States, have developed a way of rapidly and specifically erasing memories from mice.

The study is in this week’s edition of the journal Neuron, and it revolves around an enzyme called calcium/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II. A big mouthful but otherwise known as CaMKII, and this has been linked to many different aspects of learning and memory. And they used mice that have actually been genetically modified to have an over-expression of this CaMKII gene, but they also were able to turn it on and off for specific lengths of time, by injecting a specific inhibitor molecule into the brains of these mice.

Chris Smith: So what exactly did they do in this study, and how did they prove that they were able to erase these memories?

Helen Scales: They took these mice, and they did various different things to them, but one of the main things was they gave them a shock. They put them in containers and put a really loud noise in them, and then later on you can look and see if that mouse has actually remembered that shock and that fear by something called the freezing response. You can put them back in the same container, and if they stop and don’t move, except for breathing, then that gives you the idea that they’ve actually remembered that shock from before.

Chris Smith: And they’re frozen because they’re anticipating it might be going to happen again?

A mouse sits on top of a computer mouse.

Helen Scales: Exactly, and so what the scientists did was having exposed these mice previously to that fear, to that shock, they put them back into the container, up to a month later, and then they turned this gene back on again so that what they think actually is linked to the erasure of that memory. It turned out, by doing that, the mice didn’t actually freeze so much. They didn’t freeze, they didn’t remember that fear memory from before.

Crucially, it was at the point of recall that they were doing this, switching on and off of the gene, and by doing that, it only affected that specific memory that they were trying to remember. They were in that box thinking ‘you know, I know this, I’ve been here before and I’ve been shocked before, something about this I remember’, but by putting the gene on at that exact point, that’s the only memory that’s affected. It leaves all the other ones alone.

Chris Smith: And you can see why that would be really helpful, because there are lots of human conditions like post traumatic stress disorder where people remember certain memories too well and they experience all the stress that goes with it. So if you could selectively abolish a memory, in that way, that could be therapeutically very useful?

Helen Scales: It is the exactly sort of thing they’re looking to apply this to, but Tsien and his colleagues are really eager to point out this is very early stage and you won’t be seeing memory-wiping pills on pharmacy shelves any time soon.

Chris Smith: Well hopefully people won’t erase their memory of what you’ve just told them - fingers crossed.

Listen to the full episode of Breaking Science - originally broadcast October 2008

Conferences take a lot out of you. No, really, they do. It’s hard work concentrating so hard for so long and I’m beginning to find my mind wandering more often in the talks. Which usually means I miss some critical piece of information and then I’m lost. Or, more interestingly, I enter that odd, semi-conscious state in which my brain is partly asleep but also concentrating hard and the physical things around me momentarily take on unexpected properties. I’m beginning to wonder if the likes of Hunter S. Thompson and William Burroughs spent a lot of time going to five-day conferences. When I manage to keep my mind on the task in hand, today’s talks are very interesting (even without the perceptual enhancement through sleep-deprivation). John Thompson from the University of California, Santa Cruz, gave this morning’s plenary lecture and a cracking tour de force it was too, as you can hear from my interview with him. He took us through the current thinking on how evolution acts not directly on organisms themselves but on the interactions between them. Species eat other species or otherwise depend on each other (where would insect-pollinated flowers be without their co-evolved partners-in-fertilisation?) and evolution can make its presence felt here. But don’t take my word for it; listen to John Thompson himself – he tells it much better.

After John’s talk I was looking forward to the session on Early Evolution, not least because my colleague from Sussex, Joel Peck, was speaking. But since the acoustics in the lecture theatre made the talks muffled and indistinct, I reluctantly decided to go elsewhere in search of a session that was interesting and easy to hear. I don’t think I was in much of a receptive state though. I feel sorry for anyone scheduled to speak on the last day of a long conference: you have your talk hanging over you the entire time; nobody hears what you’ve got to say until it’s too late to talk about it over a beer or three; and no matter how interesting your material, the audience will struggle to take it in simply because the previous few days are starting to make their physical influence felt.

And that - other than the final social event in the form of the conference ‘banquet’ - was it. If there’s a general impression I’m taking away from the conference it’s how willing evolutionary biologists currently are to re-examine previously rejected ideas. Take the Levels of Selection issue these blogs started with. Rather than rejecting ideas of group selection outright, a growing number of biologists seem comfortable with the suggestion that such a maligned idea might not apply under certain, particular conditions after all. Or the concept, discussed by Richard Palmer in his interview, that the genome might somehow be able to hijack variation that is solely due to the environment (such as the handedness of lobsters) and impose a genetic basis upon it (such as handedness of fiddler crabs). Previously this might have been instantly dismissed as Lamarckianism (and probably still is by many), but that doesn’t stop some asking if, after all, it might not occasionally happen in some modified form and if so, wouldn’t it be something if we could find out how?

Investigating the limits of ideas is exactly what science and scientists ought to be doing. It may be that the conditions under which a process works turn out to be too restrictive for it ever to occur. So be it. Or those conditions may be restrictive but may occur occasionally. So be it: as mentioned in the discussion on The Origins of Life on the Darwin Forum, rare events in the history of life have sometimes been exceptionally important. Or it may be that new or resurrected ideas are very necessary to gain a fuller understanding of evolution. So be that too. The advances over the last few decades have changed a lot of things in biology and caused us to question what we have taken for granted. That can only be a good thing. Question, experiment and then accept what the results of those experiments tell you – there’s the rational recipe.

Maybe I was lucky with the people I talked to and the sessions I attended - other experiences of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology conference may well be different. Leaving it though, I feel encouraged and completely unable to concentrate on another talk for a day or two.

About the author

Paul Craze is an evolutionary ecologist based at the Universities of Bristol and Sussex. He's an invited contributor to our Darwin and Evolution forum and contributes to The Open University's Evolution course. Paul also performs in an unusual band with some editors of Nature.

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Once upon a time I did some molecular biology. I wasn’t very good at it. I guess some people have the knack of working meticulously and imaginatively with tiny amounts of chemicals and some don’t. I don’t. Plus, I wanted to collect my data in the open air and the opportunities for al fresco molecular biology are a bit limited to say the least. The aim of my failed attempt at molecular biology was to better understand ‘transposable elements’ and what they mean for evolution and, despite my sometimes spectacular inability to discover anything about the little buggers at the laboratory bench, I’ve kept up an interest in them.

So I was very pleased to see that the plenary lecture of Day Four of the conference was by Cristina Vieira, from the University of Lyon in France, on Transposable Elements and Genome Evolution. You can hear a lot more about them in the interview I did with Cristina after her lecture but just to fill in a bit of the background: transposable elements are part of the so-called ‘junk’ DNA that’s been found to occupy huge parts of the genomes of many organisms. In fact, 50% or more of the human genome turns out to be transposable elements or bits of transposable elements. It’s not completely clear where they come from but many seem to be the result of viruses that have found their way into the genome and have taken up permanent residence. All a transposable element does is jump from one place in the genome to another, sometimes by cutting itself out and reinserting, or making a copy of itself and having the copy insert somewhere else, depending on which type of transposable element it is - hence their nickname of ‘jumping genes’.

Of course, having these things jumping around your genome, inserting themselves all over the place like the ultimate molecular parasite, is going to cause a lot of disruption and mutation. That’s why most species have evolved ways of stopping transposable elements from moving. These mechanisms tend to involve changing the scaffolding of the DNA (not the sequence itself) so that it shuts down; something that can change the genome even further. So, as you can hear directly from Cristina, both the transposable elements and the counter attacks a body’s cells mount against them can generate very large amounts of variation. And, since it’s variation that evolution works on, that makes them interesting for evolutionary biologists.

About the author

Paul Craze is an evolutionary ecologist based at the Universities of Bristol and Sussex. He's an invited contributor to our Darwin and Evolution forum and contributes to The Open University's Evolution course. Paul also performs in an unusual band with some editors of Nature.

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One of the frustrating decisions to make in a big conference like this is whether to stick to talks that might help your own research or to go to ones that just sound, oh you know, fun and interesting. After dithering a little yesterday my curiosity got the better of me and I decided to have a ‘brain holiday’ from my own stuff, and went to the session of talks entitled Advances in Macroevolutionary Approaches to Evolutionary Studies. I’m glad I did. I had a very nice time; learned some exciting things; got a cognitive suntan; wished you were here and all that.

The first speaker’s name (John Wiens from Stony Brook University, New York) sounded familiar but it wasn’t until he started his presentation that I remembered why - he was lead author on a smashing little paper I use in one of my lecture courses. John’s talk, and incidentally, the paper that had captured my imagination, was about the use of phylogenies to help understand biological diversity and large-scale patterns of ecology.

A phylogeny is one of those tree diagrams that, thanks to the Darwin material, everyone must have become familiar with over the last year. The Open University’s Tree of Life poster, for example, shows a phylogeny of the major groups of organisms - it’s like a family tree for groups of organisms, with the pattern of branches based on the evolutionary relationships between groups of organisms. Just as in a family tree, the more closely two groups are related, the closer they are in the branching phylogeny. While the Tree of Life poster shows the big picture, you can also focus closer onto the tips of the branches and split them down further and further into the tiny twigs that represent individual species. The patterns in which all these species and groups of species fit together in phylogenies can, according to John and others, tell us a lot about the ecological patterns of diversity we see in the world today.

This is what I enjoy so much about science at its best and why science is so important. Like the most imaginative art, literature or music it can fundamentally change the way you look at the world. It can take the everyday, familiar things around us and, by shifting our perspective, make them seem exciting and astonishing - as if we were encountering them for the first time. Seeing the interactions between organisms and their environment (the stuff of ecology) through the lens of phylogenies opens up a new, exciting and potentially very useful way of thinking. Thanks to all the phylogeneticists in the session - the statistical methods were pretty neat, too, although my interest in them might not be shared by many!

About the author

Paul Craze is an evolutionary ecologist based at the Universities of Bristol and Sussex. He's an invited contributor to our Darwin and Evolution forum and contributes to The Open University's Evolution course. Paul also performs in an unusual band with some editors of Nature.

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Bang Goes The Theory

Science: Prime-time and full-on. Bang goes the theory.

Imagine you had a big box of dark matter. What would it look like?

You’re probably imagining a big black cube, aren’t you? Actually, it would be perfectly transparent. That’s because it’s not really "dark" at all.

OK, it doesn’t emit light, but it also doesn’t absorb light either, or we’d be able to see it as shadows against the background.

You also can’t touch it. If you tried to scoop up a handful of dark matter, it would pass right through your hand. The only way we can tell dark matter is there is from the gravitational pull it has.

Right now, dark matter is streaming through your body. Our Sun and all the solar system is travelling through our galaxy, with the dark matter wafting past us and through us.

Now, we can’t see dark matter with our eyes, or touch it with our fingers, but sometimes a dark matter particle will still manage to collide with a particle of ordinary matter.

These collisions are very rare, but scientists have made dark matter detectors to look for these collisions as the dark matter streams through. It’s a bit like holding your hand out of a window of a moving car and feeling the breeze.

 A lot of the evidence for dark matter is that the visible matter seems to be moving too quickly, like the spinning of spiral galaxies, or the movement of galaxies in a galaxy cluster. There has to be some unseen matter tugging at the visible matter, to explain how quickly it’s moving. 

In fact, the discrepancy is so big that most of the matter in the Universe has to be dark matter! Everything you see around you is just a tiny fraction of what’s really there.

Not only is dark matter wafting through you right now, but you’re also warping the space around you.

 According to Einstein, every object causes some curvature in the space around it. The curvature from a person is too small to measure directly, but galaxies and clusters of galaxies cause so much warping that background things look distorted.

From that distortion we can figure out how much matter there is - which is another line of evidence for dark matter.

Some scientists have argued that Einstein got it wrong about gravity, and that what we’re calling evidence for dark matter is just a sign that we’ve got gravitational tugs from the visible matter wrong.

But an image of two galaxy clusters in a middle of a collision have made the case for dark matter very strong. The Hubble Space Telescope took a picture, and from the distorted background galaxies, the scientists figured out where the matter was. In the picture, this is shaded in blue.

[image © copyright:
X-ray: NASA/CXC/CfA/M.Markevitch et al.; Optical: NASA/STScI; Magellan/U.Arizona/D.Clowe et al.; Lensing Map: NASA/STScI; ESO WFI; Magellan/U.Arizona/D.Clowe et al.]

Meanwhile, the Chandra X-ray space telescope (there are lots of space telescopes!) took a picture and found out where the gas is. This is red in the picture. Now, when gas collides with gas, you get all sorts of messy turbulence and mixing and maybe shock waves. But when dark matter meets dark matter, it just passes right through.

So, even if your hand was made of dark matter, you still wouldn’t be able to scoop up a handful!

What the astronomers saw in the galaxy cluster collision is that the gas (red) got stuck in the middle, while most of the matter (blue) passed right through and out the other side. This is very hard to explain in any way, unless most of the matter is dark matter.

Find out more

Find out more about the photo above: 1E 0657-56 - NASA finds direct proof of dark matter

You can’t touch dark matter, but you can get to know it - and other fundamental parts of our universe - by studying with The Open University: How the Universe works

From LearningSpace from OpenLearn: What contributes to the spectra of galaxies?

If you've been pitting your wits against the Bang challenges, you'll be pleased to hear that after a number of weeks caught in caves, lairs and labs, you finally get to head out into the open air today.

Only trouble is, your mate Mike has somehow got himself trapped, too. He's stuck on an island but - as luck would have it - some maths and wood are all you need to rescue him...

Try the island hopping challenge.

Technological progress is a ruthless business and the road is littered with must-have gadgets that fell by the wayside. Let's take a look at some of the false starts and the factors that led to obsolescence.

Instant cameras – The iconic Polaroid SX-70 came out in 1972. It was the first really useable instant camera with prints that developed as you looked at them rather than having to hold under your arm and peel apart. That was when Polaroid took off, but it went bankrupt in 2001 as digital cameras took off.

Digital watches – In the 70s everyone wore a newfangled digital watch. But not for long. In 1979 Douglas Adams wrote about lifeforms so primitive they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. They didn’t win on function, just on being new and different. Digital watches never took over as everybody thought they would. Ultimately they were a failure because you had to fiddle with little buttons and work out what time 19:56 is.

Sandwich toaster – Sandwich toasters were introduced by Breville in 1974 and soon found their way to the back of the kitchen cupboard, where they reside to this day. It was an interesting development because it was dependent on Teflon. It was new, exciting but only does one thing. And once you’ve done that a few times it loses its appeal. Unless you’re a student.

A sandwich toaster.
[image by Nomad Tales, some rights reserved]

VCR – We think of video recorders as technological winners because every 1980s home had one. But whether VHS or Betamax, video cassettes were ultimately too complicated to survive. Long term they are losers because the technology required to read a video cassette is more complex than that required to read a CD or DVD – which may lose out to solid state storage.

Sinclair C5 – History has not been kind to Sir Clive Sinclair’s C5. The notorious mid-80s electric runaround has become a byword for failed technology. But why? It was neither meat nor fish nor fowl. It was too small and slow compared to cars but too bulky compared to bikes. It didn’t have the range either. If the world was full of things about the size of the Sinclair C5, it would have caught on. But it was a not very visible or fast vehicle and it wouldn’t go far.

Fax machines – Once a vital business tool, the fax machine is now largely redundant in the workplace. They took off in the 80s, largely driven by Japanese script. There are more than 10,000 basic characters in Japanese so typewriting is almost impossible and they needed a way to send handwritten messages. It has been overtaken by the relentless spread of English and computer things like Unicode which allows much more complicated emails.

Pagers – Before the mobile phone became a status symbol sometime in the mid-90s, a pager told the world how important you were. Clipped to the belts of doctors and executives, these matchbox-sized electronic devices relayed simple messages to their wearers. Pagers had all the appeal of text messaging but you couldn’t send messages. As soon as cellphones’ SMS allowed you to send, paging just collapsed and died.

Minidiscs – The Sony Minidisc and its late-90s rival the Philips Digital Compact Cassette stored compressed music but both lost out to MP3 players. They lost out to more robust technologies. What the Minidisc is up against is either solid state storage which has no moving parts and is therefore easy and reliable, or things like the iPod which is nice and sealed.

Rabbit phone – A very limited mobile handset introduced in 1992 which succumbed to marketplace myxomatosis and disappeared within a year. It was like having a cordless phone in your house but with base stations around shopping centres and train stations so you could make calls but not receive them. Completely pointless. But in a sense the idea is coming back with BT Home Hub and Fusion – a home phone that works like a cellphone when you go out.

The Rabbit Phone.
[image © copyright Jmb, some rights reserved]

BSB satellite TV – The British Satellite Broadcasting ‘Squarial’ proved a failure from the outset and by 1990 had brought down an entire company. It was the failure that never even succeeded temporarily. They used a different satellite to Sky and thought they could get by with a smaller dish with a cunning square aerial. But the elements had to be precisely spaced and they never managed to make them precisely enough.

Find out more

Discover more with the following Open University courses:

• Engineering the future
• Networked living: exploring information & communication technologies
• Data, computing and information
• Environment: journeys through a changing world
• Innovation: designing for a sustainable future
• Technologies for digital media
• Design and designing

About the author

Ian Johnston has been with the Open University since 1991, as a staff lecturer in the technology department.

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Digital Planet: BBC World Service

Let us guide you through a world of digital revolutions around this Digital Planet.

Once the realm of national geographical surveys, the increasing availability of affordable GPS devices means that it is increasingly possible to 'crowdsource' cartographic information (that is, map information) and generate maps that rival professional maps from user uploaded data. Where local infrastructure is such that you are more likely to find a dirt track than a recently laid motorway, local maps produced by tracking the daily movement of local travellers means that crowdsourced maps may in fact be more accurate than formally surveyed ones.

OpenStreetMap, or OSM, is the result of an international collaborative effort in which individuals can view, edit and maintain an increasingly accurate map of the world as it is today. In the same way the Wikipedia relies on the activity of volunteers, so too does OpenStreetMap.

OpenStreetMap follows a five step process in the production of its maps. First, data is collected using GPS devices; the GPS traces are then uploaded to the OSM website, and transformed into the representation used by OSM. The next step is to label the routes so that they can be rendered correctly. The final step is to generate the actual graphical map tiles.

Other approaches to collaboarative mapping, such as Google's MapMaker, allow you to edit maps directly without the need to upload GPS data.

The following video shows how OSM maps can become increasingly detailed over time; in this case, we see how the Dutch port of Antwerp was mapped over a period from 2007 to 2009.

A second key feature that distinguishes OSM from commercial maps is that the data used to generate the maps is available under an open license. What this means, among other things, is that it is far easier for you to use the data for your own purposes. So for example, one service that I particularly like is called CloudMade, that makes it possible to add you own 'skin' (that is, your own colour theme or design style) to a map and share it as well. (So if you create your own Digital Planet for CloudMade/OSM, why not share a link to it on Twitter, using the #digitalplanet and #open2 hashtags?!:-).

So, wherever you are in the world, why not check out OpenStreetMap. And if you notice that the map isn't quite as accurate as it could be where you live, if you have a GPS device, why not consider uploading some of your own data to the map? Alternatively, why not try out Google MapMaker - it's currently open for editing locations in much of the southern hemisphere.

Or if you're looking for an even easier way in, why not try Google MyMaps? Google MyMaps let you annotate a Google map on your own map overlay with markers that identify points of interest to you. If you're fortunate enough to have an Android phone, the Google MyMaps app makes it one-click asy to add markers corresponding to your current location. But even without such a device, it;s possible to edit your own MyMap through any modern web browser. Even if you only add one or two points a day, it's amazing how quickly you can create a richly annotated map.

About the author

Tony Hirst is co-founder of the OU Robotics Outreach Group and a lecturer in artificial intelligence at the Open University. Far too much of his time is spent playing with web technologies, developing tools and applications that he claims will be OUseful, one day...

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A conversation with Aneil Agrawal about how evolution works in a fragmented population.

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Paul Craze: Okay, so one of the themes of this year’s European Society for Evolutionary Biology meeting is how evolution and selection works in subdivided or fragmented populations. So, populations where the organisms are in small groups, something like fragments of woodland in agricultural landscape where the species that exist in the woodlands are fragmented and they’re not in a single population. That can influence how evolution works, and one of the people who has been looking at that is Aneil Agrawal from the University of Toronto, and you’ve been looking at how deleterious mutations are affected by this subdivided population structure, so what are these deleterious mutations and why are they important?

Aneil Agrawal: Well a deleterious mutation is any mutation that reduces the fitness of an organism, and we know that the vast majority of mutations that affect fitness at all are deleterious. Now, one might tend to think that these things are going to be removed by selection, and they tend to be, but they’re constantly occurring, so all populations contain deleterious mutations at some frequency. And we, as humans, are well aware of this and we all know people that have genetic diseases that are obvious, but also we know that there are genetic factors that contribute in more subtle ways to things like problems with eyesight or high blood pressure or obesity, etc.

Paul: Okay. So these always occur in populations. So how does the structure of those populations, how does this fragmentation of the populations, how does that affect them?

Aneil: Well, it affects them in two ways. So, the first way is that because of stochastic processes we know that the frequency of deleterious mutations is not the same in all subpopulations.

Paul: Okay, can I just jump in there, so a stochastic process, what’s that?

Aneil: That’s any kind of random process. In evolutionary biology we refer to genetic drift, which is changes in allele frequency that occur just by chance. So, for example, when an offspring inherits alleles from its parents, it receives one from its mum and one from its dad, but which one it receives from its mum and which one it receives from its dad…

Paul: Okay, this is the sort of classic thing of taking coloured balls out of a bucket or something?

Aneil: Exactly.

Paul: And you don’t know if you’re going to get red ones or green ones and…?

Aneil: Exactly. And so because of that allele frequencies will differ a little bit among populations, so not all populations will be exactly identical genetically. And one consequence of this means that deleterious alleles will be at a higher frequency in some populations than others, and that means you’ll tend to see them as homozygotes more often than you’d expect.

Paul: So that’s when you’ve got two alleles, two of the same alleles together and not two different ones?

Aneil: Exactly, and when that happens, so that’s the first effect of population structure, it creates an excess of homozygosy, and when you have homozygotes it’s easier for selection to see those alleles and more efficiently remove them.

Paul: Oh this like the thing with very rare human diseases that are recessive; they’re usually not seen but in very small populations you can get two of them together, they become homozygous, and then suddenly you’ve got that disease appearing?

Aneil: Exactly, or it’s really the same process that you see with inbreeding that you expose these deleterious alleles when you have inbred offspring. So that’s the first effect of population structures, it creates homozygosy that allows selection to be more efficient at removing these things and thus reducing the effect of these deleterious mutations on the population in general.

Paul: Oh so once they’ve gone from the population, then that selection’s removed them.

Aneil: That’s right.

Paul: It’s a better way of removing them from the population?

Aneil: Exactly, so that’s one effect of population structure; however, there’s potentially this other effect which is local competition. In many populations, individuals compete for resources, and it might not be so bad to have a deleterious allele if you're competing against other individuals that also carry that deleterious allele.

Paul: Okay. So if you're all bad, if you're a little bit better than all of them then, then you do well?

Aneil: Yes, exactly.

Paul: Okay.

Aneil: But this second effect of the population structure really depends on the ecology of selection, so, and it’s rated to classic ideas of what’s known as hard selection and soft selection. So, hard selection is the type of selection where the fitness of an individual depends only on its genetic quality, and it doesn’t depend on who its neighbours are. With soft selection, the fitness of an individual depends on its genotype relative to its neighbours, and this is what we sort of normally think of as competition; it doesn’t matter if you're a bad competitor if the individuals you're competing against are also bad competitors. So that’s soft selection. So, the difference between hard selection and soft selection really is whether your fitness is independent of your local surroundings or very dependent on your local surroundings.

Paul: Okay, could you maybe give an example of each of those?

Aneil: Sure. So, a good example of hard selection would be a gene that affects whether you will successfully hatch out of your egg. So that kind of a gene, it’s not going to matter what other eggs are around you, whereas a gene that affects how quickly you're able to find food will have a big effect on your fitness if you're in an environment with others who are quickly removing resources from the environment. But, if you're in an environment where other individuals are also bad at finding food then there should still be lots of food to find and it won't affect you so much. So, that type of gene we might expect to experience soft selection.

Paul: So soft selection is the thing which is important in these fragmented…?

Aneil: That’s right, so if ecological circumstances cause this soft selection then you can get these deleterious alleles being sheltered from selection and increasing in frequency as a result of population structure, rather than decreasing as you would expect from that inbreeding or homozygosy effect that I first described.

Paul: Okay right, so putting this back into the broader context, so there is this mechanism then, for allowing soft selection to maintain these higher levels of deleterious alleles in these divided populations. So what’s that going to mean, ultimately?

Aneil: What it can mean is that the average genetic quality of individuals in subdivided populations can be considerably lower than one would get in a well mixed population, in a population that wasn’t so fragmented.

Paul: Okay, and this could have conservation implications or, for extinction or…?

Aneil: It certainly could in, so one case is if a population gets fragmented, and you get this kind of thing where the average genetic quality of an individual declines, and then is exposed to competition from an external, from some second species that, say an invasive species, then it’s in a situation where the native species is starting off in a state of being in reduced condition because of the population structure making it easier for that invasive species to get in and potentially displace it.

Paul: Okay, well thanks very much. It looks pretty clear that we’re going to have to really start thinking about the fine detail of ecology and how populations are put together if we’re fully going to understand evolution. Thanks very much.

Aneil: Thank you.

About the author

Paul Craze is an evolutionary ecologist based at the Universities of Bristol and Sussex. He's an invited contributor to our Darwin and Evolution forum and contributes to The Open University's Evolution course. Paul also performs in an unusual band with some editors of Nature.

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The Institute of Mechanical Engineers (IMECHE) has published a report suggesting the geo-engineering could help provide a 'breathing space' while the world decarbonises the global economy. James Warren offers a first response.

The geo-engineering report gives readers of IMECHE's ideas some food for thought. The report selects three possible ideas which might help us lower CO₂ emissions, but all three are proven at large scale stages, and all three won't necessarily help us change our behaviour.

In fact, this is probably the one big worry here - even if geo-engineering, or what I would call a "pure techno-fix" could reduce our historical emissions to nil, we may find ourselves polluting even more.

The report does make some allusions to the rebound effect but probably not enough for my liking. One of the three ideas put forward is that of artificial trees which capture CO₂ which seems very interesting indeed.

Geo-engineering voice the opinion that we ought to get on with something, rather than wait for drawn-out multinational agreements which are sometimes not met anyway... these arguments to some extent are convincing. We might ask ourselves, just like other forms of basic science research, even if emissions capture or reflective materials don't hugely reduce our overall historic CO₂, might we still learn something useful from this exercise? I suspect the answer to this is yes, and to some extent, even if these ideas seemed very far-fetched, and don't significantly reduce CO₂ without other energy penalties, we may still gain something from them which is very important indeed.

We may learn which options to go for in a big way in terms of easy gains for example, and which are much harder to achieve with engineering, whether it be mechanical or social. With respect to reflectivity and countering the urban heat island effect, we also ought to be thinking much more deeply and widely about how we can lower the current overall energy use in heating homes.

Some estimates say that more than 50% of UK building stock needs to be torn down in order to start this new lower consumption process - so how does this square with the urban heat effects.

The one thing which still comes across is the rebound effect; if we reduce a typical UK citizen's 12 or 13 tonnes of CO₂ per year to, say, half that - by whatever means - what will we be doing to keep it at six, or even - if possible - to lower it further and further? The report describes artificial trees as eventually being decommissioned, but who will police emissions to ensure that the growth of artificial forests doesn't take over?

Even the idea of artificial trees, or bio-algae buildings is a good start to get people thinking about their own use of energy - but we need to be careful: too many techno-fixes may result in a strong but unwanted backlash in further emissions.

Find out more

Discover more about The Design Group at The Open University

Explore The Open University course Environment: Journeys Through A Changing World

The University of Melbourne's Jon Morris explains Urban Heat Islands

In-depth guide to the rebound effect

Have you been following the Bang challenges? The fourth is now live: having struggled against slumbering snakes, locked rooms and airless chambers, this time you find yourself infected with a deadly virus. Can you solve the problems and become a survivor?

Also this week, there's the science that keeps helicopters aloft, microwave surprises, rockets and how MRI can reveal if brain-training has any effect. Follow the science inside Bang with us.

To borrow a concept from evolutionary biology itself, I’m beginning to encounter that old, familiar conference cost-benefit trade off. Is the benefit of staying up drinking and talking about interesting biology with articulate, thinking people worth the cost of falling asleep the next day during interesting seminars by other articulate, thinking people? The trouble is, every time I’m called upon to make that decision I’m already dinking and talking about biology and the next day’s formal sessions seem a long way off. Again, taking my inspiration from evolution, I usually end up making the decision that seems to offer the best reward at the time, without considering the long-term consequences.

Now, on the morning of Day Three, there are consequences to suffer but, as usual, the effort in concentrating is worth it. The first lecture of each morning at the European Society for Evolutionary Biology is an overview of a particular field and so far they have all been at least clarifying, often fascinating and sometimes provocative. Today’s, by Ian Tattersall of the American Museum of Natural History, was no exception and gave an overview of human origins in the context of one of the remaining big questions of evolution; how humans developed a symbolic, internal representation of the world.

While Ian was the first to admit that he didn’t have anything like an answer to this, his perspective as a palaeoanthropologist does at least mean he can examine the biological context in which such a thing might evolve. His analysis suggests that the development of human symbolic and linguistic culture didn’t evolve gradually, generation by generation but rapidly, as an emergent property once all the component parts (each of them advantageous on their own, of course) were already present, echoing some of the ideas from complexity theory that are staring to be used to help understand the origin of other complex biology. While sure to be controversial, this idea is at least an attempt to start formally addressing one of the difficult problems with which evolutionary theory needs to get to grips. And that’s not going to happen without enlightened science funding.

That’s one of the most exciting things about a conference like this: you get to hear what some of the brightest and hard working minds are thinking right at the moment; you get to see their work in progress. That was underlined by yesterday’s morning lecture by Massimo Pigliucci from Stony Brook University, New York. He discussed whether there is a new evolutionary synthesis just over the horizon.

This idea of a scientific synthesis is pretty key to how we understand evolution. When Darwin and Wallace put forward their theory of evolution by natural selection (arguably itself a synthesis of ideas that were current at the time) our understanding of the natural world was fundamentally changed, probably for good. But there was something missing. Darwin and Wallace didn’t have a coherent theory of heredity, how evolving traits are passed down from one generation to another, and that was a major missing piece.

It is one of the most famous ironies in science that Mendel published his work on inheritance very soon after the publication of The Origin of Species, as anyone who has seen any of the BBC’s coverage of Darwin Year must know by now, his work was largely ignored until it was rediscovered at the turn of the 20^th Century. The putting together of Darwinism with Mendel’s findings about inheritance is an example of a synthesis, and what an example it is. The coherent theory it produced has become an enormously powerful explanatory force in biology and is essentially what is generally understood as “The Theory of Evolution”.

But scientists question, scientists explore. Seventy years of questioning and exploring this so-called Modern Synthesis of evolution has developed it and strengthened it but at the same time has brought its limits into sharper and sharper focus. Its principal limiting factor is that it is a theory of genes. Not only that, it is largely based on an idea of genes that pre-dates the enormous advances that have occurred in genetics in the last couple of decades. Is it time to look at what we have and see if it needs a good shake?

Massimo Pigliucci clearly thinks so. A short time ago he brought together sixteen of the leading evolutionary theorists in one place and let them do what biologists most love to do; talk about biology. The result of this was not a new synthesis (that would have been remarkable!) but a mapping out of the ideas at and just beyond the limits of the Modern Synthesis that have been gradually emerging since the middle of the last century. To quote directly from Massimo’s lecture, the questions we now need to look at are these:

• How do we factor development into evolutionary biology?
• Is evolution always gradual?
• Is selection the only organising principle?
• What are the targets of selection?
• Is there a discontinuity between micro- and macro-evolution?
• Is the question of inheritance settled?
• Where do evolutionary novelties come from?
• And what role does ecology play in evolution?

(Interestingly enough, these are just some of the questions that have come up through discussions on the Darwin Forum). It is too early to say if there is a new synthesis on the way and in a very large sense it doesn’t matter if there is or not. What is more important is that these questions are being asked honestly and productively. It certainly is a very interesting time to be an evolutionary biologist.

About the author

Paul Craze is an evolutionary ecologist based at the Universities of Bristol and Sussex. He's an invited contributor to our Darwin and Evolution forum and contributes to The Open University's Evolution course. Paul also performs in an unusual band with some editors of Nature.

Subscribe to Paul Craze's posts