The statistical analysis, published yesterday in The Lancet¹ by researchers at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington in Seattle, nearly doubles the World Health Organization (WHO) estimate of global malaria deaths in 2010, revising the figure upwards from 655,000 to 1.24 million.

But Bob Snow, of the Malaria Public Health & Epidemiology Group at the Centre for Geographic Medicine in Nairobi, Kenya, who was one of the paper’s peer reviewers, says that there are considerable weaknesses in the researchers’ methodology.

For example, because official cause-of-death reports in developing countries are often unreliable or nonexistent, the IHME team used ‘verbal autopsies’, conducted with friends and family of the deceased, to compile the death-toll estimate (see Verbal autopsy methods questioned).

“Verbal autopsy is a very blunt tool — in some cases it is about as good as flipping a coin for working out the cause of death,” says Snow. “It can be useful if somebody has died of an obvious cause, such as being run over by a bus, but it’s not very useful for the mixed bag of symptoms malaria is associated with. But in this study, they have essentially taken most deaths from fever and assumed they are due to malaria — that’s a fundamental problem.”

Kevin Marsh, chairman of the WHO’s Malaria Policy Advisory Committee, who works with Snow in Nairobi, shares his concerns. “They present these numbers as though they are ‘real’ numbers, making rather immodest statements such as ‘these data show’ rather than ‘we believe these indicate’ — it’s a language issue,” he says. “Overall, it’s always useful and stimulating to have new estimates of disease, but it can be a sterile argument over whose numbers are best.”

The authors acknowledge that there are problems with the use of verbal autopsies, but say that it is better than other methods. “Verbal autopsies are simply useful interim tools for where death registration doesn’t exist,” says Stephen Lim, professor of global health at IHME and a co-author on the paper.

“I don’t think either the IHME or the WHO know how many people die of malaria worldwide — the truth is that nobody really knows. But that’s not going to get the headline news,” says Snow.

The research did attract considerable attention in the media, and was hyped by Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of The Lancet, who wrote in a 27 January Twitter post that “a revolution is about to strike”.

Some of the authors’ conclusions are indeed revolutionary. They suggest that, contrary to mainstream medical wisdom, large numbers of adults die from malaria: the new figures indicate that 42% of malaria deaths worldwide were people over the age of five, eight times higher than the WHO’s figures. In areas where malaria is endemic, it is believed that children suffer infections frequently, and that those who do not die before the age of five will be highly immune for the rest of their lives.

“Our figures don’t mean that immunity in adults doesn’t exist — that is an important distinction. It simply means that the extent of immunity is lower than previously thought,” says Lim.

The IHME, the WHO and most researchers do agree on a few points: deaths from malaria are declining, following a peak in 2004 — which the IHME pegs at 1.8 million, double the WHO’s estimate. This is attributed to the boom in funding from organizations such as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, for prevention measures, such as bednets, targeting children and pregnant women. Such funding increased from US$250 million in 2001 to more than $2 billion in 2009, and deaths in Zambia and Tanzania, for example, fell by 30% between 2004 and 2010, according to the IHME.

Richard Feachem, founding executive director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and member of the IHME scientific oversight group, says that this work to reduce infections among children could explain the higher rate of malaria in adults: without frequent infection during childhood, many adults may not have the same degree of acquired immunity that previous generations had.

“There may be more malaria deaths than we thought, but we are still winning the battle — deaths are coming down dramatically,” says Feachem. “That should be taken as endorsement of the efforts that we’ve all been making, and this should be a clarion call to continue those investments.”

Yasuo Yoshikuni and his colleagues at the Bio Architecture Lab in Berkeley, California, engineered the bacterium Escherichia coli so that it could digest brown seaweed and produce ethanol. Their work is published in Science today¹.

Yoshikuni says that his group chose brown seaweed because it was both sustainable and scalable. “Seaweed is already produced in huge quantities around the world without taking up any fresh water or arable land.” Brown seaweed also grows faster than red or green seaweed, with varieties such as the giant kelp, found off the coast of California, growing by up to a metre a day.

Many researchers are exploring ways to produce ethanol without using food crops such as sugar cane or maize (corn), and have turned to different feedstocks including switchgrass, the succulent plant jatropha, cyanobacteria and green algae. However, producing biofuels from sugar cane or maize not only detracts from food supplies, but also takes up huge areas of arable land. In the case of maize, more energy is required for growing and harvesting the crop than can be gained from the ethanol produced.

But producing biofuels from seaweed has so far proved difficult for bioengineers. Seaweed produces four kinds of sugars — laminarin, mannitol, alginate and cellulose. The biggest fraction in brown seaweed is alginate, which is a complex polysaccharide and tricky for microbes to digest.

“The carbohydrates are rather exotic compared to traditional terrestrial sources like corn or sugar cane,” says Yoshikuni. “Alginate is the key to unlocking the potential of brown seaweed.”

Seaweed solution

So using Vibrio splendidus, a marine microbe that can digest brown seaweed, Yoshikuni and his team isolated a biochemical pathway that breaks down alginate. They inserted the genes responsible into a strain of E. coli, which could then digest the alginate into simple sugars. The team also engineered the strain so that it could convert those sugars into ethanol, enabling the direct production of ethanol from brown seaweed. This strain of E. coli could, in theory, be engineered to produce a variety of other useful chemicals and fuels.

“This is very impressive work — it really is a groundbreaking achievement,” says Yong-Su Jin of the Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, who also studies biofuel production from seaweed. Jin works with red seaweed, which is less abundant in the world’s oceans than brown seaweed, but “relatively easy to ferment using yeast”, he says, because of its lower alginate content².

Stephen Mayfield, director of the San Diego Center for Algae Biotechnology at the University of California San Diego, calls the work “a very sophisticated engineering feat”, but adds “so far this has almost nothing to do with bioenergy production”. The main challenge in biofuels is not the ability to degrade complex carbohydrates and turn them into simple sugars, he explains: “It’s the rest of the steps involved in the lifecycle of growing and transporting the biomass.”

Scalability remains the big problem: people have farmed seaweed for hundreds of years, but only produce several thousand tonnes a year for food. Biofuel production would require billions of tonnes. “We still face a huge technical gap for large-scale cultivation,” says Jin.

That’s the next step, says Yoshikuni: this year his team will demonstrate the feasibility of their ethanol-production process at a pilot plant being built in Chile.

And the bass would be very, very loud.

It’s an unusual event—and that’s exactly the point, says Ronald Ligtenberg, director of Skyway Foundation, which produces Sencity: a series of club nights for deaf people.

“I needed a new challenge, so I asked myself: What is impossible in the world of music?” The result: a lush, super-sensory evening, attended by both the hearing and the deaf. Roughly a third of the audience at Sencity’s first event in London, England, last month could hear normally. This is singular: the deaf and the hearing worlds seldom collide, and almost never outside a formalised, educational context.

Born in the Netherlands in 2003, Sencity has staged 36 nights around the globe, including Mexico, Brazil, Finland, Spain, and South Africa, and have 12 events planned for 2012, including one in Montreal. Crowds have reached more than 2,000. In this silent world, the audience explores music using all their senses: “See, hear, feel, taste, smell the music” runs the tagline. Translation: “aroma jockeys” waft clouds of essential oil infusions into the crowd while massage therapists provide free sessions.

“The main purpose is to inspire people by showing how you can make the impossible possible,” says Ligtenberg, noting that integration—of hearing and deaf worlds—is beside the point. “If you take a so-called disability as a source of inspiration, you may discover whole new areas for innovation.”

Take Signmark, who raps with his hands, headlined London’s Sencity, and is the first deaf person to be signed to a major record label. Or the prosthetic-legged athlete and activist Aimee Mullins, who opened her TED talk with an assault on the definition of “disabled.” Says Mullins: “The only true disability is a crushed spirit.”

Spirits are well in evidence at Sencity, where every corner bristles with animated, signed conversations, every exchange alive with visible emotion. “Body language, in a way, is a much more honest way of communicating than speech,” says Ligtenberg. “Deaf people are very expressive, so when they are having fun, it really shows.”

These unique properties of sign language – and deaf culture itself – are fading with the rise of cochlear implants, which allow congenitally deaf people to hear sound to a limited degree. They are one of the most lauded forms of prosthesis available, but are reviled by large portions of the deaf population; Tim Bonham-Carter, one of Sencity’s organisers, says there’s massive concern that cochlear implants will erode deaf cultural identity. Meanwhile, Sencity is flaunting it.

And these raves for the deaf are for more than the deaf. They make revelations about the nature of music itself, a nature not purely acoustic, but three-dimensional, multi-faceted, immersive.

“A lot of our understanding of music comes through the body,” says Dr Frank Russo, Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Ryerson University. “We can think of all music as movement, because all music requires movement. We all subconsciously move rhythmically when we hear music; we need to move our vocal chords to sing. Music is something we feel and see as well as hear; when all those modalities are combined, the sensation of music is richer, and our understanding of the emotional nuances is expanded.”

Russo is also a professional musician and the inventor of the Emoti-Chair, devised to enhance the experience of music for deaf people by creating vibrations along the back of the chair in descending frequencies, high notes by the neck, and bassy tones at the bottom of the spine. “It enriches the experience of music for everyone,” he says. “For the congenitally deaf, the chair can be more of an acquired taste. At first it feels simply like a jumble of sensations, but over time they can experience music.”

Once you have experienced music with your full body, at Sencity, or in an Emoti-Chair, will you ever hear it the same way again?

With every series the BBC’s Natural History Unit produces, one has to wonder what they could possibly do next; when Planet Earth came out several years ago, spanning tropical jungles, African deserts and also these frozen poles, it was hard to imagine what earthly material they could have left to astound us with. Yet, as the latest series proves, there is always more to bring to our screens, in huge part because technology grows more sophisticated every year.

Still, as stunning as the images are, one cannot help but notice a paucity of factual detail, huge gaps in the script, a lack of scientific elaboration and the occasional cringe-worthy line.

It is tempting to ask: Is the BBC dumbing things down?

For anyone who has followed the Life saga since the beginning, comparison with earlier series is striking. Get your hands on a copy of the very first series, 1979’s Life On Earth, and the contrast is absolutely jarring (not simply because the grandfatherly form of Attenborough as we know him today is replaced by a rosy-cheeked, lithe and dandyish young man).

It is impressive to see how far filmmaking has come in three decades: the monochrome, pallid, grainy tones of the old footage seemed so vivid with life and colour when we watched them a quarter century ago. Deep sea fishes, which dazzle with bioluminescence and astound under the high powered lights of today’s submersibles, are barely perceptible in the old footage – some of the rarest specimens are only shown with grainy, still photographs. Vast plains of coral reefs, which in real life would have been a brilliant rainbow of blues, reds and yellows, are rendered dull by the era’s primitive underwater equipment. Even birds of paradise and shimmering iridescent butterflies, which should make for effortlessly impressive filmmaking, appear to be cast in sepia.

Even the music strikes in different chords: the oboes, flutes and French horns of the orchestral scores play in minor harmonics, almost mournful in tone, a stark contrast to the gushing, rousing, celebratory scores of the modern series.

But get past the initial shock of the unimpressive imagery, overcome the shortness of our modern attention spans, and the complexity of the narration will begin to impress.

Attenborough – who, remember, is a classically educated biologist and should be addressed as “Sir” in accordance with his standing in the Order of the British Empire – bandies about words that seldom (if ever) would have passed his lips in the past decade on air: Trilobite. Polyp. Cilia. Nautilus. Paramecium. Bryophyte. Placoderm.

The structure of DNA, the workings of the genetic code and the nature of amino acids are explained. The practicalities of successful fossil hunting are laid bare. The relationships between comb jellies, sponges, amoebae and the other gooey denizens of our planet are teased apart. The importance of cyanobacteria – blue-green algae that produce much of the world’s oxygen – is celebrated. The restriction that diffusion imposes on the anatomy of butterflies is elucidated.

The contrast with the aerial shots of bear cubs trundling about the Arctic snow we meet in the first episode of Frozen Planet couldn’t be more striking. Obviously the camera crew cannot change what the cubs look like (nor our instinctive reaction to melt at the sight of them), but the anthropomorphized tone is undeniable – jaunty music and trilling flutes at times create a rather saccharine air. And several lines read by Attenborough – the driving force behind a series that began by attempting to explain natural selection and the detective work of evolutionary biologists – are enough to make old devotees flinch. “It’s the naughty corner for you,” he chirps over footage a chastised bear cub. The cuddly tone is particularly noticeable to those familiar with Attenborough’s history at the BBC (he is reputed to have been a legendary curmudgeon during his days as controller).

So why the drastic departure from the series’ unabashedly nerdy roots? It was only 15 years ago that 1995’s Private Life of Plants revealed the stunning, subtle workings of the unassuming green foliage of our world. Blue Planet still astounded with scientific detail.

Charitable apologists might surmise that the producers wished to expand the appeal of the program to as wide an audience as possible. Practically, they need to justify the enormous expense of their series’ (reputedly £16 million over four years). But perhaps they also wish to inspire awareness and concern for the future of the poles, which are one of the regions of this planet that will change the most in coming years with our warming atmosphere.

This week however the The Telegraph reported that the BBC has chosen not to include the seventh episode in the series, which deals with climate change, in the Frozen Planet package sold around the world. The newspaper reports that of 30 networks who have bought the series, a third have opted not to pay for the episode, bundled as an optional “extra” among out-takes and additional behind the scenes footage.

It will be clear to life-long Attenborough fans that the intellectual volume of the new series has been cranked down several notches. Is the BBC simply broadening the appeal in order to justify costs? Putting in a greater effort to make the content accessible to children, perhaps inspired by the success of March of the Penguins? Have the producers come to the pragmatic conclusion that not everyone is enamoured with the subtleties of cyanobacteria?

Or, is the simplest answer the most likely? Perhaps the images are just so powerful that they speak for themselves.

It is not exactly your average venue. The concrete cobblestones were cold, spare couch cushions served as chairs, winter winds wafted into the room. Police sirens blared. There were tents everywhere. And, every hour, loud bells would gong in the cathedral towering overhead.

But the small cinema at the Occupy London Stock Exchange, at the foot of St Paul’s Cathedral, has been screening films since the inception of the sit-in over a month ago.

“There is a lot of talk about the financial crisis, but we have to ask: how were we so uncritical about what was going on? Finance has been able to dominate our lives in part because we have stopped imagining that other worlds are possible. Tent City University, and Occupy in general, is about creating an open, participatory space where these possibilities can be explored,” says Christopher Fraser, who runs the cinema at the camp.

But the British début of the new US documentary Growthbusters at the camp might seem puzzling, counterintuitive and even offensive to anti-poverty campaigners at the camp and the millions of people worldwide who have lost their homes and jobs, hard-hit by the fallout from the global recession.

When the economy is in free fall, who would be against growth? Intuitively, growth symbolizes health and prosperity – the London camp is itself growing, spread now to Finsbury Square and an abandoned UBS building – surely a sign of its resilience, and potential longevity.

Supporting growth seems like a universal point of agreement: British Prime Minister David Cameron’s pledge to kickstart the economy by building 450,000 new affordable homes for first-time buyers, announced this weekend, seems hard to argue with.

Affordable homes for new families, jobs for labourers, more income in their pockets to spill in the rest of the economy – what could be more sensible?

A generation of ecologists, demographers, and a few unorthodox economists, however, have together built the case that growth is not the solution – it is part of the problem, and a core component of an economic model that needs to be changed.

“We need to learn to embrace the end of growth, or go down fighting,” says Dave Gardner, the film’s director.

His words might seem hyperbolic, coming from the mouth of a filmmaker from Colorado who unsuccessfully runs for local government in his community on a platform opposed to more growth (he exposes the whole amusing saga, including uncomfortable and cantankerous moments at City Hall, in the film). But to those familiar with the subject, it is notable that Gardner bagged interviews with all the heavyweight thinkers in this field, whose arguments are woven into the film to support his case.

The hitlist: Canadian scientist Professor William Rees, the very founder of the concept of the ‘ecological footprint’ who made popular the notion of the earth’s “carrying capacity” (which, by the way, we are already overshooting by 30 per cent); retired economist Paul Ehrlich, author of the Population Bomb, who first raised the alarm over human expansion back in 1968; Herman Daly, a former economist with the World Bank; Bill McKibben of 350.org; Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved; the list continues.

Essentially, they all argue that we need to de-link the connection in our economic and financial system between prosperity and the GDP growth, and achieve a sustainable economy (also called a ‘steady state’ system). But though the idea has been bandied about for decades, the system remains unchanged.

“There are individuals and companies who profit from growth – it is in their interest to keep us hooked on growth,” says Gardner. “These ‘growth-pushers’ [financial institutions, energy companies, and so on] profit, while society and future generations pay. They make easy short-term profits, dependent on us encouraging and even subsidizing them to plunder our communities.”

The term “subsidize” might jump out at most readers, having watched the banks deemed ‘too big to fail’ propped up with public funds.

“Documentaries can be an important source of evidence in challenging conventions, and Growthbusters is a fantastic example of this,” says Fraser. “The ‘growth-pushers’ it talks of help perpetuate the idea that growth will deliver prosperity. But perhaps the core myth of our time is that deliberation of these matters is pointless – or best left to experts. Neither is true.”

In a darkened hall in London, a 20-metre high eulogy plays to a hushed crowd. A giant egg spans the floor to the ceiling. A mountain stands in a foggy sea, it’s peak towering over us. Red dots hover over the steps of an escalator. A snail slides across a pile of leaves.

Suddenly, a child runs across the room, up to the screen, and pokes it. This is Film, a career-defining piece by artist Tacita Dean, which will flicker in silence on an 11-minute loop until the end of March, inside the great Turbine Hall of London’s Tate Modern gallery.

Since 2000, more than 26 million people have visited the gigantic showcase pieces of this hall, always with free admission. Invariably one of the UK’s most talked about annual exhibits, it takes centre stage at what is one of the world’s largest and most famous modern art galleries. Less than a dozen artists have been chosen to create a once-in-a-lifetime magnum opus here.

Often they’re spectacular: Rachel Whiteread, known for casting the interiors of buildings (such as her Holocaust Memorial in Vienna), filled the room with rabble dabble mountains of white boxes. Olafur Eliasson created an homage to the sun, using just a semi-circle of white fabric backed with orange neon lights, the entire ceiling lined with mirrors. Simple, but massively crowd-pleasing: visitors would lie on the floor basking in the sun’s warm light for hours, forming snowflakes with each other and watching their reflections on the ceiling.

Sometimes they’re more philosophical, or political: Columbian artist Doris Salcedo spanned the hall’s floor with a 160-metre long crack to, as the artist said, “represent borders, the experience of immigrants, the experience of segregation, the experience of racial hatred.” Outspoken Chinese dissident Al WeiWei (currently under investigation in China for “tax crimes” and more recently investigated for creating “pornographic” images) covered the floor with millions of hand-painted ceramic sunflower seeds, a metaphor and commentary on the turbo-charged industrialisation of the country and the phenomenon of mass-produced commodities “Made In China”.

Dean’s film, like Whiteread’s sun, is a big draw: daily crowds of people huddle together in the dark, sitting quietly on the concrete floor, watching the flickering images. Spanning floor to ceiling in the empty, echoing cavern of what was once the main turbine hall of a  coal-fired power plant, the looped movie celebrates another vanishing technology: 35 mm photographic film.

“This beautiful medium, which we invented 125 years ago, is about to go,” she said. “How long have we got? I hope we’ve got a year left. It’s that critical,” she told the Guardian, which described her work as “an act of mourning and an argument for the future.”

So endangered is photographic film that the exhibit at the Tate almost didn’t happen. The staff at the Dutch studio that cut the film apparently introduced flaws into it, due to an erosion of the staff’s film-handling techniques; white flashes would have appeared throughout the film. A 52-year-old editor had to drive to the Netherlands in person to cut the film by hand with Dean and drive it back to London in time for the launch the next morning. Few professionals like him would have been up for the task, and there are fewer than a dozen labs worldwide which can print the medium. Manufacturing declines inexorably every year.

The virtues of working with film versus digital are debatable, but one thing isn’t: in an age when our lives are steeped in pixels, print media disappears from the shelves, and everyone gets a camera with their phone (and can bombard us with dimly-lit grainy images through Facebook), images created with traditional techniques can’t help but be striking. Photographers who never stopped using film have suddenly found found themselves back in vogue. For example, the 64-year old, Italian-born Parisian fashion photographer Paolo Roversi, whose contrast-heavy, dramatic portraits shot on Polaroid 8×10” are back in high demand after years of being obscured by younger photographers wielding new cameras and the latest software. Same goes for American art photographer Sally Mann, whose stark, haunting black-and-white images of the naked body are more popular than ever. Some, such as Edward Burtynsky, never went out of style, and remain giants of their trade. The revelation that his epic landscapes of bright orange rivers and rusting ships in muddy wrecking yards, are shot on film renders them far more impressive.

“No matter how much you re-touch a digital image, when you see it printed you can see that it has no integrity, and you know it’s not real,” says London photographer and street artist Walter Hugo. For him, working with film is a natural choice, because each frame is a “one off” image that can never be replicated, making it more of a tangible object. This year he has taken his work a step back even further, working with 19th-century lenses, and more recently, silver nitrate solutions, “resurrecting” the almost forgotten photographic techniques of the Victorians.

His portraits, created by coating concrete walls with silver nitrate solution, and using a battery powered projector to cast the image, have popped up as street art on buildings throughout east London and stand in stark contrast to digital photography. Most recently he exhibited his “photographic frescoes” at the Cobb Gallery in Camden.

This is the second in a tryptic of work that celebrates lost photographic techniques – the first being a walk-in camera obscura built earlier this year and exhibited at the Showstudio in Soho. Other artists in that show included the works of American photographer T. R. Ericsson, who created photographic silkscreen portraits using cigarette smoke in honour his mother, who died from her addiction.

Ericsson’s previous images are equally tangible in their materiality – other collections have included photographic images using powdered graphite on paper.

“The surface of a photograph is somewhat changeless, whereas the nicotine and graphite images appear unstable: smoke shouldn’t produce an image; an image trapped in powder should blow or fall away,” he says. “That’s the point for me: images are in fact unstable, their meanings are not fixed. They are secretive things, their meanings are always manifold. The materials I choose are meant to emphasize the unreliability of photographic images.”

While the norm of modern digital photography has become flawless, crisp, linear, flat images, now new forms of software are spreading that mimic traditional photography techniques, such as the three colour gum process, cyanotype and hand tints. If good for nothing else, the ubiquity of vintage-lens-effect iPhone apps betrays our thirst for the real thing.

“I think more traditional photographic processes are more inline with the way we see, feel and think as human beings,” says Hugo. “The digital is just so flat, blatant, blunt and generally unmysterious and unromantic. All photo-based everything is pure nostalgia. The old film stuff just does nostalgia better: it is dreamier, more filled with desire.”

Japanese researchers have developed a probe for ovarian cancer that can be sprayed onto tissue during surgery, fluorescing where malignant cells are present — allowing surgeons to identify and remove scattered bits of tumour.

Ovarian cancer has a tendency to spread, leaving small tumours of less than a millimetre in diameter throughout the abdominal cavity, which can be hard for surgeons to spot and remove — being able to find all the malignant cells is crucial for a good survival outcome.

In September, I reported on a similar use of fluorescent labels to identify cancer cells during surgery (see Glowing cells guide cancer surgeons). Researchers at the Technical University of Munich in Germany used a probe for ovarian cancer in human patients, which targeted ovarian tumours by binding to a folate receptor expressed only on the surface of diseased cell.

But that probe was administered through injection — and can take hours to appear.

“Our probe is actuated in minutes or even seconds — that’s very important for the surgeon, who can’t necessarily wait 20 minutes,” says Hisataka Kobayashi of the University of Tokyo, author of the new study published in Science Translational Medicine.

“Beware of bears. Send food and supplies. Xo”

Most that followed struck the same chord.

“We are here and we are having fun. Come and join us, come and join us, now.”

“So here we are, trying to talk to you, but you never call or write, what is that all about?”

Some chimed more in tune with current Zeitgeist.

“Are there any jobs out in space??? I am looking for work.”

Quite a few discussed (and apologised for) what’s on the telly.

“Hullo, Hope you’re well. Maybe you’ve seen some previous transmissions from our planet. Just to say, please don’t judge us too harshly for Hollyoaks. Many of us hate it. Ta muchly. Jim.”

“If Jeremy Kyle is your first experience of Earth, I am not sorry! We are not all crazy, I promise! ☺”

And a few were far from frivolous.

“Mum. I hope you are looking down on me.”

Each of the 47 messages left by our guests at the Astronomers’ Ball at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich said something, in its way, about the very odd thing that is the human condition. And every one will be sent into deep space from a parabolic dish antenna in Cape Canaveral, Florida. Using satellite broadcasting equipment with redundant high-powered klystron amplifiers connected by a traveling wave-guide to a five-meter parabolic dish antenna, owned and operated by the Deep Space Communications Network, these messages will travel for four years from Earth at a frequency of around 6,250 MHz.

Professor Izzat Darwazeh, head of the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, donned his suit and tie, and joined us to explain to our costumed guests how radio waves will carry their messages into the deep unknown.

“What I found most fascinating is how interested people were. Astronomy itself is interesting to most people – but people were asking in general about my work, and about what do we do in communications engineering.” he says. “People from non-scientific backgrounds were asking quite sensible questions: ‘How could you send a message so far? Will these messages get anywhere? Would these be sent direct or through another mode? When might we get a message back?’” he says.

What would you say if you had one chance to speak to the stars? We still have plenty of space in the package that we will send out: email your thoughts to zoe@guerillascience.co.uk and we will add them to our interstellar chatter.

Remember, this is for posterity, so be honest. Those messages kept to a succinct 140 characters or less will be re-broadcast on our terrestrial Twitter feed. If so inclined, please record your microblog moniker with your note – who knows, our galactic followers may receive it. Alternatively, you can send us an illustration, as a few at the Astronomers’ Ball chose to. Or – if you are feeling extra communicative – you can send us a short video less than 20 seconds in length.

Will our message reach a receptive audience? And might we get a reply?

Almost certainly absolutely not. The sheer size of space, and the distance between the stars, reduces the chance of making contact to virtually zero.

Yet could there be intelligent civilizations out there – even some with the right equipment? Almost certainly absolutely yes.

As Jill Tarter, director of the Center for SETI Research (and the inspiration for Jodie Foster’s character in Carl Sagan’s Contact) argues in her TED talk, the number of stars that we have inspected, compared to all the lights in the universe, is equivalent to a glass of water in the sea. “And nobody would decide the ocean was devoid of fish on the basis of a single glass of water,” she says.

SETI, the search for extra terrestrial intelligence, has scoured the skies with radio telescopes for four decades, listening for signs of life – more precisely, the electronmagnetic transmissions that would be given off by a species with technological capacities like our own.

There have been some false positives: when the first pulsar was discovered in 1967 (the year of the summer of love no less), its rhythmic trills sounded so regular, astronomers concluded that it must have been created by artificial means fashioned by intelligent beings, and the cluster was deemed LGM – for little green men. You can hear it on the 8th track of the Guerilla Science Sounds of the Stars audio tour here.

But despite hope, and false hopes, all our listening has turned up nothing. But then, who are we to complain that the phone never rings, unless we dial up the networks ourselves? Contact will never be made if everyone simply listens.

The first deliberate attempt to shout a message to the stars took place exactly 37 years ago today, from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, aimed at the M13 globular star cluster more than 25,000 light years away. This is still the strongest signal we have ever broadcast to space.

What on earth is a species to say in its first shout out to the stars? And in what language?

The now famous Drake message, crafted by astronomer Frank Drake with advice from science fiction writer Carl Sagan (author of Contact), went with the basics: the numbers 1 to 10, a graphic figure of our solar system, an outline of a human figure, chemical denotation of the elements that make up DNA, and so on – seven pieces of basic information to give a snapshot of our planet. Binary was the chosen tongue, because it lends itself easily to encoding: shifting the frequency of the signal up or down a notch could denote 1 or 0.

Exactly 1679 bursts of noise were broadcast – the number 1679 chosen because it is a semiprime number, the product of 73 by 23, which can be arranged into a rectangle to create the image.

This, our first message, will reach it’s target in 25,000 years – if received, and if a reply is made, we will not hear back for 50,000 years. Responders would need to not only have the equipment to receive the signal, they would also need to speak binary,and have the intuition to turn the 1679 notes into a grid. Not surprisingly, the intention was to demonstrate the technological sophistication of the equipment, rather than an earnest effort to make contact.

Symbolic or not, this was not to be the last snapshot of life on earth sent to intergalactic receivers: five years later the Voyager probes launched into space, with a more low-fi (and easily decoded) mode of delivery. It carries with it still a golden record of sounds and images of life on our planet, including whalesong and Mozart, Chuck Berry and string quartets, pictures of frogs, leaves, snowflakes, airplanes, people eating cheeseburgers, the moon, and this very famous image of a man and woman saying a friendly hello with a graphic of the origin of the probe – the third satellite from the sun.

This image, in fact, annoyed many representatives of half the human population: it is the male who waves, as though his status as interstellar ambassador is a given.

The female form however provides the first piece of information that finally reached another star: the sounds of vaginal contractions reached Epsilon Eridani in 1996. These were recorded and broadcast in 1986 by artist Joe Davis, who felt that all previous messages sent to space lacked depictions of human reproduction, and thus failed to really portray the human condition. These sounds, he felt, would best portray the essence of our species.

“If anything is going to inspire an alien civilisation to come running, surely that would be it,” noted Pigalle Tavakkoli of Contemporary Vintage, our guest that night.

There have been other attempts to craft universal messages. The “Cosmic Calls” in 1999 and 2003, sent from the Ukraine, broadcast what is known as the Interstellar Rosetta Stone – similar to the Arecibo message, but much larger, depicting the chemistry of DNA, the geology of the Earth, and basic mathematical principles. In 2009 Joe Davis broadcast the code for RuBisCo – the plant enzyme responsible for photosynthesis, and the most abundant protein on earth; not as salacious as the sounds of a ballerina’s vagina, but certainly an admissible ambassador for life on earth.

Some messages have been less philosophical: in 2008 Doritos broadcast a commercial for its nachos towards Ursae Majoris, the winning entry to an open contest for amateur filmmakers. The first ad sent to space, a stop-motion film of nacho chips performing a pagan ritual is, actually, rather impressive.

Nacho chips, prime numbers, plant enzymes and audible vaginas aside – is there any point in broadcasting our message to space? Many scientists would argue that it is a waste of time and energy. Others would go so far as to say that it is outright reckless, most notably Dr Stephen Hawking (a scientist so serious we might never expect him to turn his mind upon this subject). He very rationally argues that any civilization with the capacity to receive, interpret and respond to our messages will undoubtedly be far more powerful and advanced than our own – and likely to come here at all speed to harvest our resources. We might as well tweet “come and get us” into space.

But, the point remains: contact will never be made if we only listen. As Jill Tarter of SETI counter-argues: if there is intelligent life out there, and if we have the capacity to speak to them, we have a moral obligation to let them know that they are not alone.

‘Aroma jockeys’ at a Sencity night in the Netherlands. Photo Courtesy of Heikki Kynsijärvi.

Clouds of fragrant smoke wafted from the stage, crafted by the “aroma jockeys” with bubbling vessels of frozen nitrogen and futuristic fans, blasting the audience with heady mixtures of bergamot, lavender and sandalwood.

Hula hoops twirled round waists. Light shows twinkled. And the dance floor vibrated – literally –from an array of mechanised transducers synchronized with the (very) loud bass.

You’d easily mistake Sencity, held last month in London, for simply an opulent club night – until you saw the hands waving in the air. Everywhere the crowd bristled with conversations, fingers dancing as their owners looked expressively at each other, speaking with their eyes. Animated conversations were undisturbed by the music booming from the speakers.

Sencity, born in the Netherlands in 2003 – and which has since held nights in Brazil, Sydney, Spain, Jamaica, Finland, South Africa and Mexico – is a night tailored for the needs of the Deaf: around 35 per cent of the crowd is profoundly deaf, and another third are hearing impaired to some degree.

With music nights geared for those who cannot hear, Sencity claims to “make the impossible possible” – and challenges what the rest of us might think about the Deaf community. Most Deaf people can still perceive some level of sound, and all still have the capacity to appreciate music. But even those who live in a fully silent world can still experience the tactile qualities of sound (especially when the bass is cranked up).

But Sencity is not, its organizers stress, to be confused with a ‘Deaf rave,’ which is designed solely for the Deaf community. Those, say Sencity’s London promoter Timothy Bonham-Carter, simply reinforce divisions that exist between the Deaf and the hearing worlds.

“The idea is to bring the hearing and Deaf communities together but not in a way that is deemed exclusive,” says Bonham-Carter.

With the tagline ‘see, hear, feel, taste, smell the music’, the result is an event that caters to everyone’s senses – and which can hopefully break down perceived barriers not just between the Deaf and the hearing but also within the Deaf community itself.

“Sencity is about making the impossible possible: people often live in a protected environment and therefore do not look at what they can achieve with their talents,” says Bonham-Carter.

Take the night’s top-billed performer, Finnish rapper Signmark, the first Deaf person in the world to be signed to a major international record label. According to his website: “With his music Signmark wants to change attitudes towards the Deaf… he feels that the society should not treat the Deaf as handicapped, but as a linguistic minority with their own culture, community, history and heritage.”

Rapper Signmark at a Sencity night in the Netherlands. Photo Courtesy of Heikki Kynsijärvi

It was only several days later, in the middle of the night, when I was woken by piercing shrieks and death wails that I twigged it: cock fighting. In Leslieville. I never found the exact source of the noise, but all summer my weekend nights were plagued by unholy screeching, always preceded by several days of contented, unwitting clucking.

Leslieville was a very different place then. I spent the first 20 years of my life there (I now call London, England my home), and I return to it every four months or so for a stay at my brother’s house, just off Pape. (I can’t stay in England for more than four months at a time—otherwise I start to lose my mind a bit. All ex-pats agree.) Every time I return to Leslieville, there is a new bistro, another up-market recycled furniture store. It’s one of the city’s trendiest places to live, especially for young families—and for good reason. Stocked with gorgeous homes, many of them shaded by row after row of soaring maples, it’s picturesque, well-serviced by streetcars, and within walking distance of the lake.

But when I was growing up there, it definitely wasn’t chic. Not by any stretch of the imagination.

The cock fighting incident was, though a bit alarming, mostly just amusing. There were other things I saw and heard things daily that were far from funny. Like the crack house bordering our backyard. I found pipes in the alleyway all the time. We could always tell what they were up to by the music they played. Rolling Stones? Smoking crack. Country music? Drinking.

They didn’t scare me, but it did freak me out a bit when the cops raided this old furniture store at the corner of Jones and Gerrard (across the street from my high school, Riverdale Collegiate) and found a pile of guns.

I often find it overwhelming to see the scale of change happening in Leslieville today. Walking down Queen East I barely feel at home.

Gone is the crumbling Bollywood theatre Gerrard Cinema—in its place stands the trendy, alt-cinema outfit the Projection Booth. Several doors down, where Gerrard meets Marjory, the crumbling Riverdale Cyber Café (an internet cafe without the coffee or working computers) has been replaced by the rustic Grinder Coffee, with mismatched wooden furniture and faux typewriter font emblazoned on the cups. Just south, Queen East now boasts an array of artisanal latté joints—Mercury Coffee, Te Aro (next to our Baby on the Hip), Dark Horse Coffee and Merchants of Green—all within blocks of each other.

Peckish? Get out early—Lady Marmalade, Bonjour Brioche, Hello Toast, Edward Levesque’s Kitchen all have mammoth lineups every weekend morning. Or a nighttime tipple? Queen between Broadview and Greenwood is thick with groovy cantinas, a vast departure from the days when the neighbourhood had little to wet your whistle save for or Jilly’s strip club. The Avro and Table 17 will have the ale for the discerning palate, while Rasputin and The Comrade can satisfy one’s cravings for Soviet chic.

Vestiges of the area’s working class roots remain. Across the street from Te Aro and the hip baby boutique, one can still divest oneself of unnecessary belongings at the Queen & Jones Pawn Brokers, and then pop next door with the newly acquired coin for a Molson’s at Queens Bar & Grill. Tasty Chicken House still reliably stands several storefronts down. Dangerous Dan’s—a cornerstone of east end coronary abuse—will hopefully never fall. No amount of retail face-lifts will ever render Gerrard Square anything less than the eye sore that it is.

Gentrification happens everywhere, all the time. But what’s happened to Leslieville makes me wonder if there is more to it. Is the shifting scene in this little corner of the city emblematic of the city’s increasing sophistication as a whole? It’s undeniable that Toronto’s roots can seem razor-sharp square—it was dubbed “The Good” for good reason. Only recently, really, could we rightfully claim to be considered a “world class city,” whatever that means. Before the Montreal exodus and the immigrant influx, Toronto was largely beholden to Presbyterian insipidness. But things are different now. We have Nuit Blanche and LED tennis. I’m oversimplifying, but you get my drift. And it’s not only cultural: When I was a child, I couldn’t even dip a toe in the polluted lake (my dog came out in blisters after every swim). Now I can enjoy a beer after a swim on the island’s nudist beach.

These changes to Leslieville were bound to happen. Stroll down Pape and you’ll see homes equal in beauty to anything you might find in the Annex. In retrospect, the neighbourhood was destined to turn into a modish enclave. Maybe the seeds were sown two decades ago with the arrival of Tango Palace (forever my chosen caffeine purveyor—I went on a date with my first boyfriend there when I was 15), Joy Bistro, Altitude Baking and a heady brew of antique shops, which all began to sprout in the early 1990s.

Gentrification has its annoying aspects, but it’s infinitely preferable to the crumbling deterioration the area suffered during my childhood. Or what I see happening in some parts of England now, where gorgeous Georgian terraced homes are left crumbling and squatted, and the unemployed, bored youth obliterate themselves with riots and horse tranquilizer, seemingly for lack of anything else to do.

The area is far more enjoyable now. There was something profoundly depressing about the east end 20 years ago. Riven by unemployment, it possessed the inescapable despair of a neighbourhood on the decline. Nothing looked on the up, everything seemed to have seen better days. The area couldn’t even support a Dairy Queen, formerly at Gerrard and Glenside (now it’s a Coffee Time).

Peaceful, leafy, turn-of-the-century neighbourhoods began to decay. Near my home was Blake Street, with one of the highest crime rates in the country. When I was 19, the only bars within walking distance were dimly lit, odd-smelling pits, like the Maple Leaf Tavern. Or the Ulster Arms Tavern.

“Leslieville” felt like a nowhere area, going nowhere. To the north was the Danforth—solidly middle class. To the south and the east, the Beaches—wealthy and perhaps a little too serene and relaxed. In between was our neighbourhood, branded “Leslieville” in what seemed like an attempt by city planners to lend character to what was only an interstitial filling, bisected by the unflinchingly gritty Coxwell.

My clearest memory illustrating the area’s deterioration is of a disused theatre. When my Dad, a rock promoter, walked me to school we’d pass by the unassuming building at 1298 Gerrard St. The storefront looked like any other, but empty.

“It’s a real shame,” he would say. “Inside there is a fantastic theatre. It hasn’t been used for years. Nobody seems to even remember it.”

Today, it’s the Centre of Gravity Vaudeville Circus, where children and adults can learn to juggle, fence and soar. And regularly home to adult circus content.

And that, unambiguously, is an improvement.

So, for that matter, is the transformation of a cinema into a haven for foreign films and documentaries. In fact it’s the oldest movie theatre in the city. Its conversion to a space devoted to classic films seems apt.

It’s far too easy to poke fun at cilantro garnished brekkies. But while gentrification may be irksome, it also represents an improvement in living standards. Is there actually anything objectionable about the sustainably sourced meat available at Rowe Farms or thoughtfully crafted furniture?

Still, concerns remain. I think, for example, of all the times my mother, an avid gardener, exchanged homegrown fruit and vegetables with an elderly Chinese woman from a few doors down who spoke no English. They kept up this wordless, friendly trading for years. My English teacher asked that I write a story about this, and I did. “That there is the very picture of what Toronto is supposed to be about,” he said.

So what will happen to the working class families, or the Chinese, Vietnamese and Indian communities, as property values are driven up? Is the neighborhood simply going to be homogenized?

On my most recent visit home, I saw a Starbucks on the corner across the street from my high school, Riverdale Collegiate, and I nearly lost my breath. It stood exactly where the sketchy burger shop Duk Shing once was, where you could get a chicken sandwich smothered in Kraft Italian dressing for $2, while downstairs piles of guns and cocaine were traded between the local mafia. That place was a part of my childhood.

I accept that nothing stays the same forever. And I like good coffee. But I will always miss something about Duk Shing.

Thanks to fluorescent labels that help them to spot cancerous tissue, surgeons have removed ovarian tumour cells that might otherwise have been left behind.

Most malignant ovarian tumours express high numbers of receptors for the molecule folate (also known as vitamin B9), so by attaching the fluorescent molecule fluorescein iso-thiocyanate to folate, researchers created a cancer-cell probe. After injecting this into patients, labelled cells were made to glow white with a special camera and light, allowing surgeons to spot cancerous tissue even when cells were otherwise indistinguishable from their healthy counterparts.

“This provides more accuracy and more certainty for clinicians to remove cancerous cells in real time during surgery,” says study leader Vasilis Ntziachristos of the Technical University of Munich in Germany. The results are published today in Nature Medicine¹.

Of all the gynaecological cancers — ovarian, vaginal and uterine — ovarian is the greatest killer of women in both the United States and Europe. Removing as much cancerous tissue as possible during surgery is crucial to giving post-operative chemotherapy the best possible chance to kill the remaining cancer cells.

“This advance represents a real paradigm shift in surgical imaging,” says Ntziachristos. “Until now we could only rely on the human eye to find carcinogenic tissue, or non-specific dyes that would colour the vascular tissue as well as particular cancer cells. Now we are going after precise molecular signals and not simply physiology.”

As a result, in this preliminary study, surgeons were able to remove tumours less than one millimetre in size. In principle, Ntziachristos says, the technique could locate spots of carcinogenic tissue as small as 50 micrometres.

Proof-of-principle

During the past decade, molecular-imaging techniques have been hailed as the “next big thing” Ntziachristos says. Although X-rays, magnetic resonance imaging, computed tomography and ultrasound can all be used to help surgeons determine the size and location of tumours, they cannot differentiate a cancerous cell from a healthy one, limiting the precision of surgical removal. So researchers have turned their attention to optical-imaging techniques and the development of tumour-specific fluorescent probes. This is the first time that such tools, originally developed in mice, have been tested in humans.

At this point, says Ntziachristos, this study only constitutes a proof-of-principle. The probes used apply only to ovarian cancer, and one patient’s tumour did not fluoresce after being injected with the label. This is to be expected, because folate receptors are only overexpressed by 90–95% of ovarian cancers. To tag 100% of cases might require the use of two different probes.

John Primrose, director of the scientific programme of the Association of Surgeons of Great Britain and Ireland, welcomed the advance, but was doubtful of its wider applications. “This is a significant small step — it’s not a paradigm shift, but a significant step,” he says. “The problem in its use is that there are not many cancers in which this approach will be helpful.”

The next step is to demonstrate that the technique improves outcomes for patients after surgery, and the only way to do that is with a large, randomized clinical trial. “For now we shouldn’t celebrate this as an advance — it may not yet be,” says Primrose.

I did not expect to be deemed less attractive than an orangutan.

“You will never live this down,” my best friend grinned.

The things we do for science.

At the Feast of Stenches at the Secret Garden Party this past July, we presented our audience with an array of human scents for them to sample, judge and rate: two boys, a woman (myself), and an ape (Hannah, a female orangutan, only revealed to be non-human after the judging).

More than 50 eager noses took turns sniffing our Smell Stations, plastic boxes containing ripped shreds of fabric from t-shirts worn by our four research subjects.

Taking it all in. Photo Credit: Mike Massaro

This was a Guerilla Science take on the famous t-shirt experiments, which investigate the molecular basis of attraction and by examining how humans preferentially rate the smells of other people.

“We humans usually think that we pick our mates according to how they look – we think of ‘love at first sight’ – we don’t appreciate the importance of smell,” says Dr Leslie Knapp, an immunogeneticist at the University of Cambridge and a global authority on the relationship between smell and attraction in primates. “But studies of primates and even studies of humans have shown that our ability to smell is very important, even in present day society – how we perceive the smell of someone has an influence on how we react to them, and there is good evidence to suggest that it has important influences on how we choose our mates.”

Anyone who has ever known the smell of a lover may be able to relate: the scent of that certain someone is utterly distinct, wholly individual, and – when it belongs to the right person – completely intoxicating. Once upon a time, it was the smell of someone that lay in the crease between his nose and his face that made me weak in the knees.

The mysterious charm and allure of a particular person’s scent is seemingly impossible to put into words, though a few have uttered some rather poignant phrases: Napoleon is reputed to have written to Josephine, “Will return to Paris tomorrow evening. Don’t wash.”

Canadian gay gospel outfit The Hidden Cameras croon in The Smell of Happiness, from the album The Smell Of Our Own, “Happiness has a smell I inhale… I feed my own face when I soon crave a taste of the neck of a boy.” The rest, um, gets a bit dirty – read full lyrics here.

The influence of smell over our hearts and our bodies is undeniable, if you have ever felt that way, and yet exactly why seems mysterious: why should one person smell so sweet?

Scientific research, wielding the modern tools of genetic analysis, has uncovered some fascinating clues. Remarkably, studies have shown that our preferences for smells are partly determined by subconscious genetic cues. The same genes that determine how we smell – known as the “MHC cluster” in animals and the “HLA” in humans – also play a key role in programming how our immune systems operate by determining what innate and individual resiliences we all possess.

Lab animals as well as people will preferentially chose mates who possess MHC clusters that are different from their own, which most scientists believe acts as a subconscious mechanism that protects against inbreeding, as well as confers a greater spread of protection to their children.

Dr Knapp’s own research on mandrills has demonstrated that individuals will use smell to “identify potential partners with the appropriate genes,” as she puts it.

In humans, some fascinating studies (such as this one) have found that when women are shown photographs of men and given a selection of smell samples from the same men (though without knowing which smell belonged to which man), their choices frequently matched: the scents they deemed sexy often came from faces they declared handsome. Remarkable.

In the spirit of renegade research, we decided to conduct our own investigation into the relationship between smell and attraction, asking our audience to judge the smells of our contestants with a Feast of Stenches at the Secret Garden Party, sponsored by the Wellcome Trust as part of their Dirt season of events.

We gave things a twist, as we are wont to do. We threw a non-human – the orangutan Hannah – into the mix, without telling our unwitting judges.

The very attractrive Hannah - who wore a beige shirt, because she refuses to wear white.

To thicken the plot (or at least, their odours), we had our two male subjects go without washing for forty days and forty nights in the run-up to the festival, in a Smelly Tweeter competition.

For the chance to win a ticket to the Secret Garden Party, we asked contestants to attempt to last 40 days without soap and water, and tweet daily about their experience of being physically filthy, the reactions of those around them to their odiferous state, how being dirty makes them feel, and their reasons to quit the contest should they choose to drop out.

You can see all the tweets from contestants on Twitter under the hashtag #smellytweet. Daniel, the champion, kept a detailed blog on his experiences – you can see a choice selection of his posts here: “I am sitting less than three metres from a bathtub. This is torture. I will persevere. I WILL persevere.”

Daniel, enjoying a well deserved bath at the Feast of Stenches.

Beyond having a good chuckle at their expense, we hoped to enrich our understanding of the cultural implications of dirt: “This will be something that no-one has ever done before – this is a totally unique experiment,” says Dr Knapp. “Humans usually try to cover up their natural odours, so we will be interested in the results.”

The audience’s first task was to guess the gender of each of the four stations using coloured beads to indicate male (blue) or female (pink). The overwhelming majority vote in every case was correct – most people could tell that Daniel and Jim are male, and Hannah and myself are female. (Somewhat humiliatingly, more people thought Hannah was female than thought I was female.)

Next we asked the audience to rate the four smells on a sliding scale of attractiveness. Daniel was deemed least attractive, Jim somewhat less so, followed by myself – and then Hannah, the orangutan, was declared the most pleasing. My friends said this would keep them in jokes for weeks to come (and that afternoon called their team in the pub quiz “ORANG-

UTAN > ZOE”), but I query this conclusion: Hannah’s shirt smelled more like laundry detergent than any of ours, presumably because she did not have the patience to wear it for long. Had she kept it on her hairy form for as long as I did, I believe I would have won. But I digress.

Our last table featured strips from four shirts, all worn by Daniel, at various points during his 40 day soap fast. Unsurprisingly, the shirts worn at the later stages were deemed unbearably putrid.

But here’s where things get more interesting: Dr Knapp examined our DNA, extracted from mouth cheekswabs, and produced visual illustrations (in the form of gel electrophoresis assays, which display genetic variations in the form of lines) of our HLA genes. She also examined the DNA of Shamima, Daniel’s long-term girlfriend.

The HLA clusters, pictured using gel electrophoresis, of Hannah, Daniel, his girlfriend Sham, and the Guerilla Science team.

Unsurprisingly, Sham (who descends from both European and Asian parents) boasted diverse HLA genetics – Daniel, who’s lineage is largely Irish, possessed more homogenous genes, which would make him less immunologically robust and more vulnerable than Sham.

But, amusingly, Sham deemed the smell of the other boy, Jim, to be more attractive than Daniel – and his genetics looked to be a better match for her as well, said Dr Knapp.

Of course, being social creatures who rely so much on language, and whose beliefs, desires and behaviours are largely governed by the cultures in which we live, we use far more than just smell to pick our partners. It certainly makes life more interesting.

But the results are certainly fascinating, nonetheless. And even if Hannah was deemed more attractive than me, I do take pride in having defeated the boys – even if they hadn’t bathed in 40 days.

Imagine you haven’t slept more than two hours a night for three days because towering soundsystems in every direction send thundering bass lines through the ground towards your sleeping bag. You can see your breath, because in this part of the world, the temperature drops to the dew point at night in the height of summer. You are in a tent. The insides of the polyurethane single sheet are dripping onto your dirty face.

Your face is muddy and your hair grimy. The nearest toilet consists of a metal cube, ten metres long, with a row of seats floating above a swirling Sargasso Sea. Showers boast hour-long line-ups. Sleep is a laughable ambition.

On every side of your tent, sprawling several hundred metres towards the horizon, are tents. And tents. And tents. All filled with similarly exhausted people, who have opted to spurn snooze for whisky and loud, confused conversation.

Your phone is dead. Your friends are nowhere to be seen. The noise is getting louder. Suddenly you realize one of your rubber boots is missing—presumably lost amid the rivers of mud meandering through the area.

And you never, ever, want to go home.

Read the full story in the Toronto Standard about the strange experience of the English music festival, a five-day endurance test of rain, music, chemicals and costumes, and check out my photo gallery of snaps of drunk brits having fun.

The virus is described inPLoS Pathogens today. The team that discovered it might also have found the first human to be infected: the primary carer for a colony of titi monkeys (Callicebus cupreus) that suffered an outbreak.

The culprit is an adenovirus, one of a class of viruses that cause a range of illnesses in humans, including pneumonia. But this particular strain has never been seen before. It has been dubbed TMAdV, or titi-monkey adenovirus.

“It’s always been thought that adenoviruses are not likely to be causes of outbreaks or pandemics because they have never been known to cross between animals and humans,” says Charles Chiu, director of the UCSF–Abbott Viral Diagnostics and Discovery Center at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), who led the study. Now that assumption needs to be re-examined.

In May 2009, a deadly outbreak of respiratory illness spread through a colony of titi monkeys at the California National Primate Research Center in Davis. Of the 65 monkeys housed in one building, 23 developed symptoms, including pneumonia. As a result, 19 died or were put down.

Chiu and his colleagues analysed tissue taken from the affected monkeys, and identified a previously unknown virus. Genetic sequencing revealed it to be an adenovirus, although its genome was substantially different to those of all known related viruses.

But what tipped the researchers off that there was something unusual about this virus, says Chiu, was what happened when they tried to culture it. “It was unusual to see it grow well in human cell lines, but not monkey” cells, he says. This suggested that the virus could infect humans as well as titi monkeys. “After we interviewed all of the staff, the only person who said they had been sick was one researcher — the one who had had the closest daily contact with the colony,” says Chiu.

That researcher experienced flu-like upper-respiratory-tract symptoms for four weeks. More crucially, a family member who had never visited the primate centre also became ill — demonstrating that TMAdV can spread between humans.

Unknown origins

The titi monkeys might not have been the original hosts of the virus. Of those that developed symptoms, 83% died — a fatality rate that would prevent the virus from circling in the population without wiping out the monkeys. In human-specific strains of adenovirus, death rates usually only reach 18%.

The original host species could be humans, who passed the virus to the monkeys, only for it to jump back to humans — or it could be another animal, such as a rodent. The researchers are collecting blood samples from monkeys and humans from all over the United States, Brazil and Africa to help them to discover the virus’ origins.

Chiu says that there is no reason to suspect that there will be a pandemic of TMAdV, as there has been with other viruses that spread to humans from animals. A survey of blood samples from 81 random, healthy blood donors from the western United States found that two people already had significant levels of antibody to TMAdV. “This virus then potentially crossed into the human population a long time ago and is now circulating at low levels,” says Chiu.

But the more we know about this and other new viruses, the better, says Eric Delwart, a virologist at the Blood Systems Research Institute at UCSF. “Characterizing animal viromes facilitates the detection of related viruses, and may shave a few precious days from identifying a new virus in the event of a future severe outbreak,” he says.

The discovery also raises the possibility of using adenoviruses as vectors in gene therapy, in which a virus is used to correct defects in a patient’s genes, says Chiu. “The fact that TMAdV appears to infect two or more different species but is not common in the human population also suggests this might be a therapy that could have broader applicability,” says Chiu, because it means the virus on a wider range of targets. Other labs are already investigating gene therapies using adenoviruses. “This could open up new and better treatment possibilities,” says Chiu.