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Submarine on Titan
BRENT STIRTON/GETTY/WWF-CANON
UPFRONT
Drillers quit Africa’s Eden THERE will be no drilling in paradise. Soco International, a British oil company, has abandoned plans to drill for oil in Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The park is a World Heritage Site, and UNESCO says it is Africa’s richest trove of natural beauty and biodiversity. Soco will leave in about a month, after completing a seismic survey of the park’s Lake Edward, where drilling was to have commenced. Tens of thousands of local people depend on the lake for fish, and it is also home to thousands of hippopotamuses. Soco has vowed not to drill in the park without permission from UNESCO, and to keep out of all the world’s 981 World Heritage Sites. The firm was under pressure after
an expert report last month on the status of the park. French company Total pulled out last year. “The champagne was flowing on Monday,” says Alona Rivord of WWF, which has long campaigned against Soco’s plans to exploit Virunga. “It’s very exciting to see another company go in that direction.” However, the park is still not entirely safe. The DRC government has yet to remove overall permission for oil companies to search and drill for oil. “There’s no active oil threat now, but 85 per cent of the park has concessions covering it, so the next step is to get the DRC’s government to withdraw them,” says Rivord. The World Heritage Committee meets in Doha, Qatar, next week, and may put pressure on the government.
Pandemic panic?
a few mutations enabled it to spread just as well as 1918 flu (Cell Host & Microbe, DOI: 10.1016/j.chom.2014.05.006). “Viruses with genes closely related to the 1918 virus still circulate in nature,” says co-author Colin Russell of the University of Cambridge. That suggests a similar virus could emerge. In 2011, Kawaoka made an H5N1 bird flu that transmits between mammals. Fears about such viruses escaping led to rules controlling this kind of research, but they do not apply to flu in the 1918 virus’s family.
–Fishers’ paradise regained–
radio waves don’t get very far in water. That may not be such a problem on Titan, since the hydrocarbons should be transparent to radio waves. Another winner is a greenhouse capsule that will land on the Red Planet, pull in some soil and see if it can support hardy microbes carried from Earth. It could be the first small step towards agriculture on Mars. And a team hoping to send a small craft to the far reaches of the solar system double-quick – and using little fuel – has devised a way for it to grab on to a passing comet.
Submarine on Titan NASA is dreaming of methane seas and farming on Mars. A submarine to scour the hydrocarbon lakes of Saturn’s moon Titan, a greenhouse on Mars and a spacecraft that hitches
rides on comets are just a taste of 12 futuristic projects that have won development funding under the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts programme. Each will receive $100,000 for a ninemonth study, with the possibility of a further $500,000. “The hydrocarbon lakes on Titan are unique in the solar system,” says Steven Oleson of NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, who is leading a proposal for an autonomous submarine to explore their depths. Some hope that alien life may have sprung up there. Submarines on Earth must surface to communicate because 6 | NewScientist | 14 June 2014
CERN
“The hydrocarbon lakes of Saturn’s giant moon are unique in the solar system – and may harbour life”
HERE is something we could do without: a flu pandemic on the scale of the one in 1918, which killed over 50 million people. Gene sequences like those of the pandemic have been found in flu viruses from wild birds. Yoshi Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and colleagues have now assembled them into a 1918-like flu. Unlike the real virus, the labgrown strain didn’t kill, nor did it spread between ferrets. But Kawaoka found that giving it
Particle fever rises THE world’s largest particle smasher may be sleeping, but the hunt for fresh physics continues. Hints of what may be a brand new particle have appeared in data generated by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, before it shut down for upgrades at the start of 2013. The standard model of particle physics says that a particle called a Z boson should decay into –LHCb: Preparing for the next hunt– electrons just as often as it does
UPFRONT
Drillers quit Africa’s Eden THERE will be no drilling in paradise. Soco International, a British oil company, has abandoned plans to drill for oil in Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The park is a World Heritage Site, and UNESCO says it is Africa’s richest trove of natural beauty and biodiversity. Soco will leave in about a month, after completing a seismic survey of the park’s Lake Edward, where drilling was to have commenced. Tens of thousands of local people depend on the lake for fish, and it is also home to thousands of hippopotamuses. Soco has vowed not to drill in the park without permission from UNESCO, and to keep out of all the world’s 981 World Heritage Sites. The firm was under pressure after
an expert report last month on the status of the park. French company Total pulled out last year. “The champagne was flowing on Monday,” says Alona Rivord of WWF, which has long campaigned against Soco’s plans to exploit Virunga. “It’s very exciting to see another company go in that direction.” However, the park is still not entirely safe. The DRC government has yet to remove overall permission for oil companies to search and drill for oil. “There’s no active oil threat now, but 85 per cent of the park has concessions covering it, so the next step is to get the DRC’s government to withdraw them,” says Rivord. The World Heritage Committee meets in Doha, Qatar, next week, and may put pressure on the government.
Pandemic panic?
a few mutations enabled it to spread just as well as 1918 flu (Cell Host & Microbe, DOI: 10.1016/j.chom.2014.05.006). “Viruses with genes closely related to the 1918 virus still circulate in nature,” says co-author Colin Russell of the University of Cambridge. That suggests a similar virus could emerge. In 2011, Kawaoka made an H5N1 bird flu that transmits between mammals. Fears about such viruses escaping led to rules controlling this kind of research, but they do not apply to flu in the 1918 virus’s family.
–Fishers’ paradise regained–
radio waves don’t get very far in water. That may not be such a problem on Titan, since the hydrocarbons should be transparent to radio waves. Another winner is a greenhouse capsule that will land on the Red Planet, pull in some soil and see if it can support hardy microbes carried from Earth. It could be the first small step towards agriculture on Mars. And a team hoping to send a small craft to the far reaches of the solar system double-quick – and using little fuel – has devised a way for it to grab on to a passing comet.
Submarine on Titan NASA is dreaming of methane seas and farming on Mars. A submarine to scour the hydrocarbon lakes of Saturn’s moon Titan, a greenhouse on Mars and a spacecraft that hitches
rides on comets are just a taste of 12 futuristic projects that have won development funding under the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts programme. Each will receive $100,000 for a ninemonth study, with the possibility of a further $500,000. “The hydrocarbon lakes on Titan are unique in the solar system,” says Steven Oleson of NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, who is leading a proposal for an autonomous submarine to explore their depths. Some hope that alien life may have sprung up there. Submarines on Earth must surface to communicate because 6 | NewScientist | 14 June 2014
CERN
“The hydrocarbon lakes of Saturn’s giant moon are unique in the solar system – and may harbour life”
HERE is something we could do without: a flu pandemic on the scale of the one in 1918, which killed over 50 million people. Gene sequences like those of the pandemic have been found in flu viruses from wild birds. Yoshi Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and colleagues have now assembled them into a 1918-like flu. Unlike the real virus, the labgrown strain didn’t kill, nor did it spread between ferrets. But Kawaoka found that giving it
Particle fever rises THE world’s largest particle smasher may be sleeping, but the hunt for fresh physics continues. Hints of what may be a brand new particle have appeared in data generated by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, before it shut down for upgrades at the start of 2013. The standard model of particle physics says that a particle called a Z boson should decay into –LHCb: Preparing for the next hunt– electrons just as often as it does