TWDK and World Space Week 2013

Today, space is a veritable hotbed of science, and we've already posted a good number of space science posts. There's certainly no shortage of Things We Don't Know about space, but there's also a lot of science that takes place in space. So this year, we're offering a unique opportunity to anybody who'd like to try their hands at science writing. Write an article about science in one of the below categories, and TWDK will publish the best throughout World Space Week, October 4-10. Entrants can be scientists, students, school pupils or just members of the public - we'll consider anything by anyone, provided it's accurate, well written, about ongoing research and related to space!

As an added bonus, we'll do our very best to review early submissions and provide feedback, so authors can improve their article before the deadline.

Categories
Looking Up - science connecting to space but done on here on Earth. This includes astronomy, the development of new rocket engines, and much more.

Looking Down - science done in space, looking down at the Earth. This includes weather satellites and environmental monitoring, or even archaeology.

Floating Around - science done in space, without looking down. Astronauts on board the International Space Station have conducted a huge number of experiments, from psychology to biology to plasma physics and crystal growth.

Getting Outta Here - science done away from the Earth. NASA, ESA, RosCosmos and JAXA have all sent probes into deep space to conduct science well away from home. Upcoming missions from Europe include ExoMars, and LISA Pathfinder - and NASA is planning many more.

Applications must be received by Friday, 27th September 2013. Articles should be sent in .doc or similar format, by email to wsw@thingswedontknow.com

Other WSW activities
If you'd like to know more about what's going on in World Space Week, there's a full list of UK events on the British Interplanetary Society's website. If you're not in the UK, you can find out who your national co-ordinator is here.

Autism: There's Still So Much We Don't Know

Even though autism undoubtedly has biological underpinnings and the brains of those with autism may share some form of common structures (neuroanatomy) or function (neurophysiology), we still don't have a good working definition for it - or at least, nothing that everyone can agree upon. In the field of cancer research, even though scientists disagree about the primary causes of a tumour developing, they can all generally agree that uncontrolled cellular growth is a good working definition. If you see a tumour, you know it's following some sort of poorly-regulated growth process, even when it's benign (non-cancerous). Which makes finding causes of tumour promotion considerably easier. If you know the end result in terms of cell biology, that limits the number of variables you're searching for as instigators of that process.

How people see autism. Image credit: Hepingting

But not so for autism. Even though the well-known psychiatrist, Leo Kanner, described the condition well over 70 years ago, the only thing people can seem to agree upon is a behavioural definition. (And even still, we argue over that!) We have done so much research and have published so many papers reporting correlations with things that may influence the occurrence of autism, ranging from the presence of one or more other disorders or diseases, down to associated genes. But unlike cancer, we have no general definition for what defines autism at the level of the cell nor at the level of the brain. We're still wandering around our research somewhat blindly.

Ultimately, that means we study just about everything that appears to have an association with the condition without much understanding of whether the relationship is causal or simply correlational in nature. An excellent example of this comes from studying autism genetics. Over 3,000 genes have found to have minor-to-strong association with the condition, both those which currently have no known cause (idiopathic) and conditions which are characterized by the association of several clinically recognizable features which tend to go together (syndromic), such as Fragile X Syndrome. While all roads may have once led to Rome, not all genes lead to autism. Those thousands of genes represent at least 12% of the genes within the human genome, a staggering proportion. It's highly unlikely that all or most converge onto a single behavioural trait.

Celebrating 10 years of Mars Express

At the beginning of June, the European Space Agency (ESA) celebrated the 10 year anniversary of the Mars Express mission. The spacecraft, launched in 2003, has had ten successful years of operation and has resulted in the publication of over 600 scientific papers. To help mark this occasion, our intern Cait interviewed Olivier Witasse, the mission's Project Scientist, about some of the key discoveries the spacecraft has made and what the future of the mission looks like.

Mars Express has had ten very successful years in orbit around Mars. Image credit: ESA

One of the key themes of space exploration is the search for life. We base our search for past or current life on the presence of liquid water – it's vital for life like ours so it's one of the first conditions we look for. Direct evidence of past water on Mars is one of the key findings and surprises of the Mars Express mission:

"...from what we have been discussing with the scientists over the last year, there is one result which I think is really on top of the others - the discovery of the so called hydrated minerals."

Before the discovery of hydrated minerals, scientists at ESA were expecting to find carbonates on what may have once been a sea bed. Finding carbonates would imply that there were once large oceans on Mars. Carbonates can form in one of two ways - a purely chemical reaction where carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is dissolved by the surface water of an ocean or as a result of the shells of past marine creatures. If the oceans were absorbing atmospheric carbon dioxide then further reactions with minerals (i.e. magnesium, calcium) in the ocean would produce carbonates which would settle onto the ocean floor. The atmosphere on Mars is mostly carbon dioxide, so if there were once oceans on Mars we would expect the formation of these carbonates. The shells of some marine animals also contain carbonates, so when the creatures die, their shells sink to the bottom of the ocean to form carbonate deposits with the possible preservation of fossils. These carbonates would remain even when the ocean faded away.

Why don’t we know more about causation?

You’ve seen them – every week a new story about genes for this or that, or the environmental cause of some effect or other. Often the stories say opposite things; red wine is good for us in one article, bad in the next, depending on the study. Or it might be about coffee, eggs or vitamin supplements, and health advice to pregnant women is often contradictory. The gene for autism or dyslexia or asthma is found one week, but the finding can’t be replicated the next. Does hydraulic fracturing of rocks to mine natural gas and oil contaminate ground water? Are GMO foods good or bad for us? You’d think figuring out these things would be easy – genes do something, they make us what we are, while people who eat a given food get sick and those who don’t stay well, so what’s the problem?

The problem is complexity. Modern scientific methods are very good at finding cause when an effect is large or clear-cut – the fact that smoking causes lung cancer was easy to see once the question was asked, the genetic variant that causes cystic fibrosis was relatively straightforward to find because the effect of the mutation is so major. But determining causation gets thorny when a disease or effect is caused by multiple genes, or genes plus some environmental factor, or when there are many pathways to the same outcome - all of which are common scenarios. The fact that everyone is unique to start with makes it even thornier.

When an object casts a shadow, we know it's not the shadow causing the light or creating the object. Cause and effect are easy to determine. But sometimes causality can be a lot trickier to determine. Image credit: Dhilung Kirat

What must women avoid during pregnancy?

Pregnancy can be an anxious time full of contradictory advice: exercise is healthy, but don't overdo it. It's safe to use your mobile phone, but perhaps don't make too many calls. Don't drink too much caffeine, but the occasional cup of tea probably won't do any harm. No hot baths or hot tubs, although swimming is probably good for you. Eat a balanced diet… but no goat's cheese, shellfish, runny eggs, pâté or rare meat, and we're not completely sure about ham, tuna and salami.

Contradictory advice for pregnant women often sounds like "out of the frying pan, into the fire".
Image credit: waferboard

It can leave you feeling as though you might be better off locking yourself in a padded room for the duration with nothing but bread, water and pregnancy vitamins. This isn't helped by newspaper headlines such as the ones following the recent publication, by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG), of a scientific impact paper on chemical exposures during pregnancy. The headlines ran the full gamut from “Pregnant women warned over household product chemicals” to the flat-out hysterical “Pregnant women told to avoid painting the nursery, buying new furniture or going near non-stick FRYING PANS as they may expose their unborn baby to dangerous chemicals”.

However, perhaps the most striking thing about the original paper is its title: “Chemical Exposures During Pregnancy: Dealing with Potential, but Unproven, Risks to Child Health”. In other words, they've compiled a long list of things that might be harmful, but which they're not really sure about. Do a little web searching for "things to avoid in pregnancy" and you will quickly find that many, many people have already written similar lists. However, this paper wasn't written by just anyone. It was written by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, and unlike many commentators they did take the trouble to reference their comments thoroughly, reviewing the literature and assessing what evidence they found. The report examined a number of issues; let's look at them in a bit more detail.

Can we meet the water demand of future generations?

Water - we all need it, but is there enough?
Image credit: fox_kiyo

Approximately one in eight of the world's population don't have access to clean water^[1]. The situation is only expected to worsen with increasing water demand and diminishing sources. Population growth and higher water consumption per capita are to blame for greater consumption. The amount of water most of us use has grown mainly due to changes in diet, the increase in use of water intensive biofuel crops, and acceleration of energy demand which in turn requires water. Water is such an essential part of life it's thought to be one of the main reasons why the Earth is the only planet we've found to be inhabited so far (but we're still searching).

It's hard for anyone to try determining how bad our water shortage is or will be when basic things about water sources still remain a mystery. For example we are clueless about how much water is available and how the water supplies that are obtainable to us may reduce in the future.

Currently most of the water on our planet is not available to us, although it is still not known how much fresh water may be available to us. The water that is available is derived mainly from two origins - surface water such as lakes and river, or groundwater which is stored in underground reserves known as aquifers. On-going work involves exploring how large these reserves may be and how deep we may hope to extract water. For example recent surveys of Africa show there may be extensive groundwater reserves^[2], and the first attempt to map water reserves was made a year ago^[3]. In the future improved and more detailed maps are expected as scientists try to answer the basic question of how much water is left? Without this knowledge it is impossible to try and understand fully the extent of water scarcity.

Simulations, Svalbard and the Solar System

It's been a busy couple of weeks of inspiring science! I've had a couple of days wow-ing other people with talks and tours of the things we know and I've been working here and been amazed, inspired and slightly concerned about some of the things we don't.

Cait Percy in our London office.
Photo ©TWDK.

Most of the last week or two has been spent exploring dreams, parallel universes, how much life there really is in the oceans and the questions to which radio astronomy may soon provide the answers. I spent a lovely afternoon pondering the Universe and trying to decide if we were all just part of a very large computer simulation and whether we'd know if we were. Almost everyone I've chatted to this week has had some variation of the above brought up in conversation for discussion so I really feel I've been doing my bit to share my passion for science.

Media violence and criminal behaviour

Between science and policy making

On March 11, 2009, 17-year-old Tim Kretschmer entered the Albertville junior high school in the small town of Winnenden, Germany, armed with a 9mm Beretta semi-automatic pistol and 200 rounds of ammunition. In less than an hour, he shot nine former schoolmates and three teachers; on the run from the police to Wendlingen, he highjacked a car and killed three more people, before he finally committed suicide. The tragedy left his and the victims' relatives, teachers, and the general public petrified with questions regarding the motive for this attack, and how a young man developed into a mass homicide perpetrator.

The debates about the influence of media violence on behaviour show no sign of ending.
Photo credit: arker from morguefile.com

The debate about the causes of Kretschmer's rampage went on in the media for weeks, involving politicians and professionals, as well as witnesses and relatives expressing different theories of the decisive factors, ranging from failure in parenthood to insufficient gun control (even though the German Weapon Act already contains one of the strictest gun control laws in the world). And as with other similar tragedies that happened at different places around the world, violence in digital games was offered as a potential explanation for his actions as well. Winnenden citizens formed a group that called for a public disposal of all "killer games" in a large trash bin they placed in the city centre of Stuttgart. In an unparalleled reaction to such an event, the large department store chain Kaufhof decided to stop selling any movies or games with an age rating of 18+ nation-wide.