Volcanoes are usually stately and sometimes violent. Great mountains with smooth slopes and circular calderas, they lie dormant for centuries, or give off occasional wisps of steam and, more rarely, surges of lava and clouds of ash. And every now and then, one of them explodes spectacularly.

But the volcano that erupted at 5am on 29 May 2006 in Porong, Indonesia, was different; no mountain, just a spreading lake of simmering mud and a 30m plume of sulphurous steam. Up to 50,000 people lost their homes, more than a dozen villages were submerged and two dozen factories abandoned. Rice paddies and shrimp ponds were inundated, roads and railways diverted. The death toll so far is 13, killed when a gas pipeline ruptured.

At its peak, the mud volcano, called Lusi, pumps out 150,000 cubic metres a day, enough to fill Wembley Stadium in about three weeks. And it’s been gushing for nearly two and a half years, with no end in sight.

One recent study by a Durham University-led team considered what Lusi would be like if it keeps erupting for another decade. Attempts to cork the volcano by dropping thousands of concrete balls linked by chains into the vent failed completely. Environmentalists fear that diversion of the mudflow into the Porong river will destroy the local fisheries. Meanwhile the levees keep rising.

Mud volcanoes are not well understood, partly because they usually occur on the seabed. What is clear is that a hot, high pressure reservoir of liquid, in this case mostly water, broke through a rocky cap and began percolating through a layer of clay, turning it into mud and carrying it up to geyser forth at the surface.

The cause of this disaster has generated scientific, legal and political debates as heated as the 60C eruption. Two hypotheses are in play, one is that the magnitude 6.3 Yogyakarta earthquake, which killed 6,000 people two days earlier and 260km away, triggered Lusi. The other is that the Banjar Panji-1 drilling rig operated by PT Lapindo Brantas, which was exploring for natural gas just 150 metres from Lusi’s main vent, set it off.

The legal and political arguments swirl around this central scientific issue. Legally the question is who should pay for dealing with the disaster and compensating the victims. If the drilling was at fault, the companies involved should cough up. If it was a consequence of the earthquake, the government is responsible. The stakes are high; the IMF estimates the cost of Lusi at some £2bn.

And that’s where the politics comes in. Lapindo is 50 per cent owned by Energi Mega Persada, part of the business conglomerate controlled by the family of Aburizal Bakrie, Indonesia’s Co-ordinating Minister for the People’s Welfare. Mr Bakrie has been criticised for distancing himself from the disaster, both as a businessman and as a minister. His refusal to visit Lusi prompted angry activists to spray 700kg of mud on his ministry’s gates in Jakarta. Although his family’s company provides food and other aid to the refugees, and has agreed to pay them £240m in compensation, they denounce it at every turn.

The scientific question came to the fore again at the Geological Society of London on 22 October. Proponents of the earthquake hypothesis, employed by the oil companies, claimed that evidence from their well proved its innocence.

Bambang Istadi, a geologist and exploration manager at Energi Mega Persada, argued that if the 2,800m borehole was guilty, a powerful pressure spike, called a kick, would have been observed. Although there was a spike, he said the roughnecks brought it under control in less than an hour, before it could damage the rock formation. Pressure tests since then have shown that the well is intact; with no leaks in or out. Nor is there any evidence of an underground blowout in the formation surrounding the well; if there had been, the borehole’s temperature would have risen to match the volcano’s and the remaining piece of the drill left in the hole would have slipped down into an opening abyss. So if it wasn’t the well, it must have been the earthquake.

Professor Richard Davies of Durham University’s Centre for Research into Earth Energy Systems, who also made a presentation to the Geological Society, remained unconvinced. The kick was powerful enough to damage the rock formation, he argued, and the lower portion of the well had not been sheathed to prevent such problems. The evidence cited by Mr Istadi can be explained if the massive upheaval when the volcano was triggered resulted in the well becoming pressure sealed from what was going on around it. And crucially, the earthquake was too far away and too weak to have caused the mud volcano. So if it wasn’t the earthquake, it must have been the drilling.

The scientific question, then, is far from settled. But progress is being made. So confident are they of their data, that Mr Istadi and the companies have agreed to share it with Professor Davies. If one side or the other can carry the scientific argument, the legal and political issues will be clarified too. For the people whose homes have been swallowed by Lusi, that can only be good.

www.newstatesman.com - The mystery of Lusi

Charles Darwin has set the cat among the pigeons yet again. A century and a half after the publication of On the Origin of Species, the Church and the Royal Society spent most of September in a dither over the theory of evolution, the surprise this time being that it’s not entirely clear which side each is on. While the Church appeared to apologise to Darwin, the Royal Society seemed to condone the teaching of creationism in science classes. Has the world really turned topsy-turvey?

Consider the ecclesiastical position first. The Church of England is preparing to mark 2009, the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s seminal book and the bicentenary of his birth, with a new section on its website, offering contributions from the likes of the Bishop of Swindon, the Right Rev Dr Lee Rayfield, who writes that he hopes it will be a “resource for growing wisdom and understanding”. Judging by the media reaction to another article in the section, posted on 15 September, it’s a faint hope.

“Good Religion Needs Good Science”, by the Rev Dr Malcolm Brown, the Anglican director of mission and public affairs, argues that the Church was wrong to vilify Darwin, though it also takes some passing swipes at social Darwinists and atheists. It concludes by saying: “Charles Darwin: 200 years from your birth, the Church of England owes you an apology for misunderstanding you and, by getting our first reaction wrong, encouraging others to misunderstand you still.”

Rev Brown’s claim that the Church owed Darwin an apology was widely reported as being the apology itself. But clergymen are generally far more rigorous in their use of language than mere journalists. The Church has, in fact, long since reconciled itself with Darwinism (It allowed him to be buried in Westminster Abbey when he died in 1882), and this story was only news because of the ignorance of the reporters and editors involved. Predictably, only a few journalists picked up on a later Associated Press report that: “The Church of England said Brown’s statement reflected its position on Darwin but did not constitute an official apology.” The Reverend Doctor got to keep his job.

Less fortunate was Dr Michael Reiss, a biologist and, like Rev Brown, a Church of England vicar. His day job is as professor of science education at the Institute of Education, but he also served until mid-September as the director of education for the Royal Society. Then he made the mistake of presenting a paper at the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Liverpool in which he argued that creationism and “intelligent design” should be treated with respect, not scorn, in science classes.

This was in keeping with the society’s policy, and with that of the Government. He did not suggest for a moment that creationism and “intelligent design” should be taught on a par with evolution, but that when students raised doubts, teachers should be prepared to discuss them. Yet again, as in the case of Rev Brown, the media jumped on an old story as if it were new.

The backlash was quick and furious. Nobel laureates Sir Harry Kroto and Sir Richard Roberts demanded his head. Another Royal Society fellow, arch atheist Richard Dawkins, described his appointment as a “Monty Python sketch”, though he later relented a bit. The Royal Society stood by him at first, but by 16 September, it had decided that Dr Reiss’s comments damaged its reputation. He resigned. Arguably, it was the society’s failure to stand up to criticism, rather than anything Dr Reiss said, that caused the most damage.

The attitude expressed by Dr Reiss is fundamental to science. We trust science to discover the truth because it is based on reason. It does not merely dismiss contrary ideas, as dogmas do, but argues with them. And if it is proven wrong, it changes. The same can not be said of creationist views, which when proven wrong fall back on “faith”.

That the Church of England is prepared to honour Darwin on its website, if not quite by apologising to him officially, is due to evolutionists presenting reasoned arguments, not to a blind insistence that Genesis is merely a creation myth. Children deserve to be given the same intellectual choice.

And if they can be offered that choice in science classes, why not in Sunday school too? Since the Church accepts Darwinism, perhaps it should undertake to ensure that evolution is raised during discussions of Adam, Eve and Eden. It might not convert many eight year olds – the Bible has a better narrative – but it would at least sow the seeds of critical thinking that might sprout, years later, in some biology classroom.

Reason need never fear a fair fight.

www.newstatesman.com - Darwin in Sunday School

“Are we seeing evolution at work?” asked a colleague as the Beijing Olympics came to a close last month. I was stunned, but he had evidence: Usain Bolt’s 9.69 second 100m dash, no less. So superior was Bolt that he didn’t even tax his abilities to the limit while setting this new world record; he began to showboat as he neared the finish line, contemptuous of his rivals’ attempts to catch him. Was this not clear evidence of the emergence of Homo supernus, a species superior to mere H sapiens?

Bolt wasn’t alone. The tiny nation of Jamaica – with a population of 2.8 million, less than that of Wales – won 11 medals in Beijing, six gold, three silver and two bronze, all of them in athletics. It ended up 13th in the medal rankings, well ahead of bigger, richer countries. Nor was the success of Jamaica’s 2008 team unprecedented. In the 100m alone, it claimed silvers in 1952, 1968, 1976 and 1996, plus bronzes in 1972, 1984, 2000 and 2004.

And the statistics are misleading; several recent winners for other countries were in fact reflagged Jamaicans. Linford Christie, who won gold in Barcelona, was running for Britain, while Donovan Bailey represented Canada when he won in Atlanta, as did Ben Johnson, who was stripped of his victory in Seoul after failing a drugs test.

It’s an impressive record, but not nearly enough to show evolution at work. Complex behaviours such as running are governed by a host of genes influencing everything from the size and shape of bones to the microscopic structure of muscles and the efficiency of oxygen-carrying molecules in the blood.

To argue that the success of Jamaica’s athletics team was down to better genes, you would have to show that a new mutation emerging on the island in the past 500 years (assuming that the pre-Columbian Arawak and Taino were exterminated) conferred such a speed advantage that it drowned out other factors, both genetic and environmental.

And as if on cue, just such a mutation appeared in the press shortly before the Games opened in Beijing. Professor Errol Morrison, the president of Jamaica’s University of Technology, and a team from Glasgow University have found that Jamaica’s elite athletes had a particularly high incidence of a protein called α-actinin-3 (misnamed “actinin a” in most reports), which is produced by a gene called ACTN3 and has been linked to explosive releases of power in fast-twitch muscles. Of the Jamaican athletes studied by Morrison and his colleagues, 70 per cent had the gene for α-actinen-3, compared with just 30 per cent of Australians. This, it was claimed, was the genetic root of Jamaican’s superiority on the track. As The Daily Mail said on 6 August, it determines “whether humans are sprinters or plodders”.

Except that it doesn’t. Daniel MacArthur, a researcher at the Institute for Neuromuscular Research in Australia and member of the team that first linked the gene with elite athletes, notes that everyone has the ACTN3 gene, in one of two forms. As often happens, one of these forms is dominant, resulting in the production of α-actinin-3, the other recessive. People with a double dose of the recessive gene produce no α-actinen-3, produce less explosive power in their fast twitch muscles and are, not surprisingly, under represented among athletes the world over, since the difference in performance has been estimated at 2 to 3 per cent.

But a double dose of the dominant gene confers no special advantage. And when you count the people with one dominant and one recessive version of the gene as well as those with the double dominant version, the disparity between Jamaica and the rest of the world starts to disappear. Of Jamaicans, 98 per cent have at least one dominant version of the gene, compared to 82 per cent among Europeans. Around the world, an estimated 5 billion people have at least one copy of the dominant gene. It’s a fair bet that every runner at the Olympics had the dominant version of ACTN3.

Lots of other explanations have been put forward for the Jamaican team’s success, ranging from yams in the diet (as suggested by Bolt’s father) to the long distances that many Jamaican children run to get to school. Perhaps most significant though is the cultural importance of the track. Just as young British athletes are attracted by football and young Americans by basketball and baseball, Jamaicans have their own favourite sport, athletics. The Champs, the annual high-school athletics meet, is the country’s top sporting event. And for the past 30 years, the elite from those trials have gone on to Professor Morrison’s Utech, where their skills have been further honed.

Chances are, this is no more evidence of evolution than the lottery-backed success of Britain’s 2008 Olympic team.

www.newstatesman.com - Jamaican evolution

Nestle’s new television adverts for Smarties are a cross between grown-up Teletubbies in head-to-toe lycra jumpsuits and the parable of the prodigal son. You’ve probably caught a glimpse of their idyllic, pastoral scene being abruptly disrupted by the appearance of Blue Smartie on the ridgeline. His former friends flee to the safety of their tubular home, dispatching Yellow to get rid of the unwelcome intruder. All is well though, because Blue is now free of artificial colours; no longer a pariah, he can rejoin the community. The Smarties rainbow is complete again.

How sweet. But, one wonders, why were the old colours dropped? Why has it taken so long to replace blue? And perhaps most importantly, what has it been replaced with?

Nestle got rid of the artificial colourants in Smarties three years ago.

Until then, the blue shade was provided by an extract from coal tar which revels in the food additives label E133. Though banned at one time or another by Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Norway, Spain and Sweden, Brilliant Blue, as it is more commonly known, is currently deemed safe for use as a food dye within the EU.

The reason for dropping Brilliant Blue, and several other colours, was for appearances, admits Richard Wood, regulatory affairs manager and food law adviser at Nestle confectionary. A growing number of consumers are demanding additive-free products. The trend got another boost late last year when a study conducted for the Food Standards Agency by Professor Jim Stevenson at Southampton University linked artificial additives with hyperactivity in children, even though the connection was not strong.

Nestle, like other food processing companies, is keen to be on the right side of that trend. Rather than arguing until it’s blue in the face that E133 is safe, it prefers to trumpet its newly natural ingredients, though perhaps without going in to too much detail.

Take cochineal, for instance, an ingredient that contributes to the red, orange and chocolate brown tones in Smarties. Cochineal comes originally from Mexico, where it is found in the bodies of a cactus parasite, an insect called Dactylopius coccus. For centuries, these bugs have been swept off cacti, boiled or baked and used as a reddish dye.

Records from Montezuma’s reign show it was part of the tribute paid by at least 11 of the Aztec cities he conquered, before himself being overthrown by the Spanish. During the 20th century, the cochineal industry was all but wiped out by cheaper artificial colours, but has been making a comeback in recent years as demand grows for natural ingredients, no matter how unpalatable they may be.

Blue was harder to replace, though. Which is not surprising. Historically, blue has always been the most difficult colour. The first colour-fast blue dye came from shellfish and was so valuable that only the aristocracy could afford it. Purple has traditionally been the colour of royalty for a reason.

Nestle eventually found a substitute in alkalai ponds. A cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae, called Spirulina (actually two species, Arthrospira platensis, and Arthrospira maxima) provides the appropriate colour, though food scientists worried that its strong seaweed smell might put off customers, Mr Wood said. Fortunately, the concentration of Spirulina is so low that the odour is masked by the rich aroma of the chocolate.

Like cochineal, the use of spirulina as a food comes to us from Mexico, where, according to one of Cortes’s soldiers, it was harvested from lake Texcoco (now Mexico City) by dragging a rope across the surface, drying the sludge into cakes and selling them as food under the brand name Teocuitlatl, meaning “stone’s excrement”. Clearly the Aztec’s had an interesting sense of truth in advertising. Both Nasa and the European Space Agency have proposed it as a possible food source for long interplanetary missions, such as to Mars.

At a molecular level, the distinction between artificial and natural disappears. Artificiality does not necessarily mean dangerous, any more than naturalness means safe. Nature has many deadly products, from toadstools and digitalis to snake venoms. As scientists investigate what we eat in greater detail, it is becoming clear that foods can have both beneficial and detrimental effects at the same time.

For an example of this, one need look no further than beta carotene, another natural Smarties additive derived from the fungus Blakeslea trispora found in the orange and red sweets. Beta carotene is most famous for giving carrots their orange hue, but it has also been found to have anti-oxidant properties, and 50mg every two days has been shown to prevent cognitive decline among 4,000 physicians. On the down side, it has been linked to increased risk of lung cancer among smokers and those who have been exposed to asbestos. Fortunately for Nestle, the doses contained in Smarties are so low they are unlikely to make much difference.

www.newstatesman.com - Smarties

Where do we come from? It’s an abiding question, and one that has been only partially answered by science. While little doubt remains that our species evolved in East Africa, details of its spread around the world are still obscure. And the further back we peer, the harder it is to get a clear picture.

What evidence we have falls into three categories: physical remains, such as stone tools and cave paintings, can reveal the movement of technology and culture, but sometimes these spread not just as groups move, but between peoples. Linguistic studies, comparing modern languages to find their common roots, have the same problem. But genetics, looking at how minor mutations have spread through the world’s population, does not.

One of the more intriguing suggestions in the past decade is that the initial spread of humans from Africa extended along the southern coastline of Eurasia, to what is now Southeast Asia, then a subcontinent called Sundaland that was twice the size of modern India, stretching from Burma to Borneo. The flooding of this fertile paradise as the last Ice Age ended forced these people to adapt to new lifestyles, flee to new lands, or become extinct.

DNA research led by Leeds University’s Martin Richards, one of only two professors of archaeogenetics in the world, supports this idea, showing that the stone-age people on the southeastern shore of Sundaland expanded across the newly formed island chains 12,000 years ago.

The new theory, published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution, is likely to draw bitter criticism from supporters of the old consensus, based on linguistics, that the area is populated today by descendants of a rice-growing people called the Austronesians who expanded from Taiwan just 4,000 years ago. “Some quite forceful archaeologists have been extremely reluctant to accept this,” says Professor Richards. “And I haven’t met a single linguist willing to give up the out-of-Taiwan argument.”

The Austronesians supposedly supplanted the indigenous hunter-gatherers, who first arrived 50,000 years ago yet were considered so insignificant that they have not even been named.

“That was a great mistake,” Professor Richards says. His team is the first to use the full mitochondrial genome rather than fragments, giving it a much more detailed picture of population movements in the distant past. Their results show that the biggest migration went not from Taiwan, but to it, and occurred much earlier.

“The radical explanation is that the linguists are wrong and that these people spread out during the last episode of post-glacial expansion,” he said. The Austronesians may have been like the Normans, a small elite group that arrived later and took control of a larger, indigenous population, he
suggests.

Sundaland was the biggest area to be drowned as the glaciers started to retreat 19,000 years ago, raising sea levels by more than 100 metres. The second largest, Doggerland, now the southern North Sea, was submerged towards the end of the Ice Age, separating the British Isles from continental Europe.

The people living in the southeast Asian subcontinent would have been particularly hard hit by three great sea level surges, 14,000, 11,500 and 7,600 years ago, believed to have been caused by catastrophic events as the ice sheets in North America and Antarctica retreated.

Professor Richards argues that many populations will have been wiped out as their land disappeared beneath the waves.

But one group could have been pre-adapted to the new environment, which had fewer inland plains and meandering riverbanks and twice as much coastline – the people of southeast Sundaland, who may have had a maritime culture linking them to the nearby Wallacean island group, named after the Victorian naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, which includes New Guinea.

What is certain is that, as sea levels rose, these people began to spread throughout the region, according to mitochondrial mutations, which are passed down from mother to child. A parallel study of stone-age tools by other members of the team supports the theory, showing the spread of a stone tool technology called “flake and blade” throughout the region.

Professor Richards hopes to do further work on the Sundaland population, and is already working on a study of y chromosomes, which are only passed down through the male line. Marine archaeology could also shed more light on the drowned culture, though there are no immediate plans to begin looking beneath the shallow waters of the Sundaland Shelf.

In the original version of this article it was suggested the idea that Europeans are descended from a group of people who settled in what is now Southeast Asia, then a subcontinent called Sundaland, was mooted by Dr Stephen Oppenheimer in his 1998 book Eden in the East. We fully accept that this was not the case and apologise to Dr Oppenheimer for the error.

www.newstatesman.com - Sundaland

Could the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas, asked mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz in a 1972 paper? It was a small question, with an appropriately huge answer.

The weather, Professor Lorenz demonstrated, is extremely sensitive to minute changes in initial conditions. Forecasting a month in advance is all but impossible. Though Lorenz shied away from blaming storms around Houston on the Fluminense swallowtail Parides ascanius, the Butterfly Effect, as his insight came to be known, set off a rethink of classical physics to rival relativity and quantum – a rethink now known as Chaos theory.

The experiment that started this scientific revolution was conducted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1961. Lorenz - who died aged 90 last month - had written one of the first computer models of the way the atmosphere moves. His Eureka moment came after he fed interim results from the previous day’s work back into his model. He expected the model to repeat itself. Instead the new output quickly diverged from the previous day’s. The reason, he eventually determined, was that the model used figures precise to six decimal places, but those in the printout contained only three. That difference, less than a tenth of a percentage point, should have been trivial, instead it was enough to generate dramatically different results. Professor Lorenz had discovered Chaos.

The other two great revolutions in physics during the 20th century, relativity and quantum, applied to the very large and the very small. The deterministic universe built by Sir Isaac Newton and René Descartes was undermined in extreme cases, but remained true over a wide range of scales. We might know, in an abstract way, that the world is not deterministic, but our technology continued to work like, well, clockwork.

Determinism was perhaps best described by Pierre-Simon Laplace, the brilliant French astronomer and mathematician, who argued in 1820 that if some intellect (popularly known as Laplace’s Demon) could know all positions and forces in nature it would be able to read the future as easily as the past. Chaos tore the guts out of his demon. Even everyday functions, for example the size and timing of drips falling from a leaky tap, are so complex that that the only way to predict what they will be doing at some point in the future is to work them out, step by step, at an infinite level of precision.

This insight alone would have been enough to raise Professor Lorenz to the scientific pantheon. It won him numerous honours, including the Crafoord Prize, awarded by the Swedish Academy of Sciences for research in fields not eligible for Nobel Prizes. Yet Lorenz had more to offer. In 1963 he discovered the Lorenz Attractor, the first of a class of mathematical phenomena called Strange Attractors. In essence, having discovered chaos, Lorenz explored deeper and found that a form of unpredictable order could spontaneously arise from it. It is not clear whether the shape of his Strange Attractor, which when graphed looks like the wings of a butterfly, influenced his choice of metaphor for the 1972 paper. Had he stuck with his original image, climatologists would today be talking about the Seagull Effect. A small change, but small changes can have huge consequences.

www.newstatesman.com - Edward Lorenz, 1917-2008

"If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then Man would have only four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more life.” This quote, often attributed to Albert Einstein though there is no record of him saying anything like it, has been doing the rounds in apian circles since the nineties. If the calculation is true, notwithstanding the dodgy attribution, then the world might end in 2022, since Lord Rooker, the minister for sustainable food and farming and animal health, is on record with his warning: "Bee health is at risk and, frankly, if nothing is done about it, the honey bee population could be wiped out in 10 years."

To environmentalists struggling to save Canadian harp seals and Sumatran orang-utans, this additional worry may seem a bit too much. After all, billions of bees live in British hives alone, compared with populations of endangered large animals measured in mere hundreds or thousands. And while everyone loves honey, bees, when seen close-up, well, they aren’t the most photogenic creatures. Besides, bees are domesticated. One might want to ensure they get better treatment, as with battery chickens, but if any group of animals is safe from early extinction it’s those with a high economic value, and bees are worth some £165m a year.

Yet Lord Rooker has a point. Bee populations are crashing around the world, in some places due to a mysterious syndrome called Colony Collapse Disorder, in others because of the spread of a virulent parasite against which there is little defence. So it was with enthusiasm that beekeepers awaited the government’s release earlier this month of a consultation document, the first step towards a ten-year bee protection plan. And it was with disappointment that they discovered it proposed no additional funds for apian research, beyond the annual £200,000 Britain spends now. They had been hoping, given the threat to their buzzing charges, for £8m.

Consider, first, the parasite. If bees are less than pretty, Varroa destructor is positively ugly. The mite has a brown oval body a millimetre across and keeps its legs and mouthparts tucked underneath. Adult varroa (which are invariably female) sneak into brood cells in the hive and wait for workers to cap them off with wax. Then they cut holes in the bee larvae and suck out the hemolymph – essentially their blood, though since it carries nutrients but not oxygen, it is not red. The mite then lays five or six eggs at 30 hour intervals, starting with a single male. The next generation mates before the bee emerges, at which time the male mite, and any immature females, die. The bee carries the surviving adult females out into the hive where they can spread to the uninfected.

While hives can survive with a low-level infestation, the mite population quickly soars if not suppressed. It can cause deformities in the bees and, more importantly, spreads viruses. But treatment is difficult. Since varroa was identified in Britain in 1992, it has spread to all parts of England and Wales, and since 2001, a strain resistant to the only effective class of pesticides, pyrethroids, has emerged, particularly in Cornwall. Hopes now rest on methods designed to encourage bees to groom each other, such as by sprinkling them with harmless powders, or by trapping the adult mites in combs which are then removed from the hive and frozen.

But these techniques are complicated and labour intensive. Of Britain’s 44,000 beekeepers, only 200 run commercial businesses. The rest are mostly amateurs, or they are keeping hives as an adjunct to bigger farming enterprises. As Martin Smith, the chairman of the British Beekeepers’ Association, put it: “In Britain we are hobby beekeepers and should they stop caring and looking after them, the honey bee will disappear.” The number of hives in the UK fell from 400,000 in 1960 to 275,000 now, and the British Beekeepers’ Association fears varroa could slash the total by 30 per cent a year.

And if that’s not enough, there’s the looming threat of CCD, said to be sweeping across America and reaching from Poland to Portugal in Europe. Its symptoms include the desertion of hives, usually over the winter.

Particularly high rates of desertion in 2006 led to the new label and theories ranging from electromagnet interference to GM crops. But it’s still not clear what the new threat is, or indeed, whether there is a new threat at all. Bee populations die off naturally for many reasons, sometimes in high numbers. And among the usual suspects being scruitinised is our ugly little mite, V. destructor.

www.newstatesman.com - Plan bee

In the Iliad, Homer described Chimera as “lion-fronted and snake behind, a goat in the middle, and snorting out the breath of the terrible flame of bright fire”. She was a monster, good only as a target for Bellerophon’s lead-tipped spear. To listen to the spiritual descendants of the Greek hero, you might think modern-day chimera were equally foul. The Catholic bishops leading the pro-life brigade don’t just want to destroy the monster, they want to ensure it never draws breath in the first place.

Yet the scientific meaning of chimera is far less fearsome. The word is used to describe creatures that have two or more different sets of genetic material caused when the zygotes of fraternal twins merge early in a pregnancy to form a single embryo. Test the DNA of, for example, the hair roots and saliva of a chimera and you would think they came from siblings.

But a person with this rare condition is no more a monster than you, I or even Cardinal Cormack Murphy O’Connor.

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, to which the Cardinal’s priests objected so vociferously over Easter, would allow the creation of three new types of human-animal embryos - chimerics, true hybrids and cytoplasmic hybrids (or cybrids), known collectively by the awkward term “human admixed embryos”.

Chimeras are made by merging the cells of animal and human embryos, hybrids by fertilising the egg of one species with sperm from another and cybrids by inserting human DNA into an animal egg from which the nucleus has been removed. Under the proposed new law, all three types would have to be destroyed after 14 days, and none could be implanted in a human womb.

The modern history of admixed embryos goes back at least as far as 1984, when sheep and goats were combined to create a geep. By 1990, hamster eggs were being used to check the fertility of human sperm. These true hybrids were allowed to grow for a day before being destroyed.

The first human-animal cybrids were made at the Shanghai Second Medical University in 2003 by fusing human cells with rabbit eggs. A year later, the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota announced it had created pigs whose veins carried human blood cells. And in 2005, British researchers added an extra, human, chromosome to mouse stem cells, leading to a strain of mice with Down’s syndrome, opening whole new dimensions of research.

The potential benefits of this sort of admixed embryonic research are so far reaching that many of them have not yet been imagined. Those that have been proposed include providing embryonic human stem cells (which are in short supply), animal models for research into human diseases and, perhaps one day, tissues and whole organs for transplant into humans.

Opponents of the Bill would have us believe that the DNA from humans is somehow different from the DNA of other animals, so they should not be mixed. In fact, at most levels, it is indistinguishable.

Deoxyribonucleic acid’s four bases - adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine - are found in the chromosomes of all life. The 20 amino acids used by life - each specified by a three-base codon in the genetic code - are similarly universal.

The proteins made up of amino acids are a bit more discriminating, but those found in humans are also present in a wide range of other animals. The difference is not in the fine structure, but in the way common components are assembled. Clearly, the division between human and animal is artificial.

With the potential medical benefits so great and the cell groups in question so microscopic, why is the pro-life movement so incensed? Perhaps it is because the real problem this presents to the religious right is not some unspecified “ethical question”; it is the risk of undermining the anti-abortion case. The idea that sacred human life begins with a single fertilised egg cell was clear and simple. It maintained the myth that we are superior to other forms of life, that we were created in His image. But should an embryo with 99 per cent human DNA get the same protection. Where now to draw the line?

www.newstatesman.com - Embryology and Catholicism

For a science-mad kid growing up in the West Midlands during the 1960s, the centre of the universe lay in a muddy field 20 miles south of Manchester. While the Americans had Cape Kennedy, we had Jodrell Bank. And if Britain couldn't quite land a man on the Moon, we stood a much better chance of being the first to hear from the aliens every nine-year-old just knows are already on their way from Alpha Centauri. So when Sir Bernard Lovell, the radio telescope's founder, rose on his soap box to denounce budget cuts that would tear the heart out of the observatory, a little boy's voice inside me demanded that I come to his defence.

If only it were so simple. Sir Bernard, now in his 90s, is right that the current cuts make no sense. Typically, the quangos that hand out the taxpayers' cash have decided to slash the £2.5m a year operating budget, after completing a £7.6m upgrade designed to put Jodrell Bank back at the forefront of astrophysics. Letting that project, e-Merlin, run its course would lead to the collection of enormous amounts of valuable data. But that should be the end. After more than 50 years as a working observatory, Jodrell Bank should be retired.

This is not the first time Jodrell Bank has been on the front line between scientists and bureaucrats. The instantly recognisable Lovell Telescope, as it's now known, was redesigned in the middle of construction during the 1950s, adding immensely to the cost. By 1957 the bill was £250,000, four times the original estimate, and the Treasury was threatening legal action. Salvation came with Sputnik in 1957. Neither the Americans nor the Soviets who launched it were able to track the Earth's first artificial satellite, but Jodrell Bank managed to bounce a radar signal off it and pick up the echo. Overnight, the observatory became world famous.

During the heyday of the Space Race, Jodrell Bank tracked, controlled and received data from numerous spacecraft, even publishing the first (Russian) pictures from the Moon. And during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when space looked to be the next battlefield, the telescope was discretely pointed east, becoming the world's first ICBM early warning system. Over the years it has used radar to precisely measure the distance to Venus and helped in Seti, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence.

Dr Lovell, as he was then, moved his borrowed war-surplus radar equipment to Manchester University's botanical gardens in 1945 because the electric trams in the city-centre were interfering with his search for cosmic rays. His first big discovery, though, were traces of ionisation, charged atoms, caused by cometary dust streaking through the upper atmosphere. Then came the faint sound of radio noise from Andromeda, the nearest galaxy to our own Milky Way at a distance of just two million light years.

The radio telescope's biggest success, though, were quasars, quasi-stellar radio sources, the lighthouse beacons of intergallactic space, trillions of times as bright as our sun. They are now believed to be caused by a halo of matter falling into supermassive black holes in the centres of galaxies. But this was only realised after Jodrell Bank, linked to several other radio telescopes, discovered that they were shining in the deepest reaches of the universe. This line of research triumphed again in 1979 when what appeared to be a twin quasar turned out to be a single radio source passing through a gravitational lens, a phenomenon predicted by Einstein's Theory of Relativity but never before seen.

Jodrell Bank's record is impressive. But like the Greenwich Royal Observatory, it should now stride into history. The radio telescopes of the future will be huge arrays of small dishes, linked together with computers and fiber optics. E-Merlin is an attempt to emulate such a system, but on too small a scale. Future projects will be so big and expensive that, like particle accelerators such as Cern, only international consortia will be able to afford them. Here is where Britain's budget for astrophysics should mostly be spent, ensuring our scientists get the observation time they need. This is not the cheap solution the government might want. Not only should it pump money into overseas hardware, but it will have to find new funding to maintain Jodrell Bank as a museum and an inspiration for pre-teen scientists of the future.

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