Making a song and dance of particle physics (Image: Michael Hoch)

Up, down, spin …that’s dancers at work at the premiere of , a contemporary dance piece inspired by particle physics. For extra drama, it was performed immediately above the, one of the two experiments running on CERN’s Large Hadron Collider to spot the Higgs boson.

Quantum will be performed at the Thèâtre de la Cité Internationale, Paris, on 4, 5, 7, 8 November, 2013; there will be more performances in , France, and New York, in 2014.

As befits the subject matter, six dancers sometimes whirl alone, with little apparent rhyme or reason, while at other times, they glide across the floor in graceful unison. Most of the time, though, paired dancers either vibrate on the spot or twist and contort themselves, with their limbs interlocked, gliding them over each other, yet never quite making physical contact.

“The piece is very abstract and can be counterintuitive, but so is quantum physics,” says its Swiss creator, choreographer Gilles Jobin. “The piece doesn’t tell you what to think, rather it seeks to guide you.”

Jobin took inspiration from Feynman diagrams – pictorial representations of the mathematics governing the behaviour of subatomic particles – to sketch out sequences of the choreography. “I wanted to explore physical phenomena as a way of generating movement,” he explains.

Colliding sounds

The music for Quantum was created by composer and software developer using data from the LHC. Through a process known as , she mapped particle collision data from CERN’s ATLAS detector to specific sounds. The result was a sporadic soundtrack that builds, layer on layer, to a series of crescendos throughout the dance.

“I first became interested in data sonification as a teenager,” says Scaletti. “I had a teenager’s romantic notion that there were some basic patterns in the universe, and that music could express the beauty of those patterns. I guess I still have some of that romantic notion today.”

Jobin says he finds Scaletti’s work fascinating: “There is an organic nature to the music she’s produced – it’s very moving, although complex, and it has a fragmented structure. When art and science get together like this, it’s a five-sigma result every time.”

He was inspired to create Quantum after a three month residency at CERN brought him face to face with physicists. This residency, part of the , was launched by the programme’s director , in 2011.

Unusual approach

Jobin was the second artist to take up a residency at CERN, following German artist Julius von Bismarck‘s stay last year.

To light Quantum, Jobin used four large, suspended lamps created by von Bismarck for his installation . The lamps, swaying in a pendulum-like motion to the beat of Scaletti’s music, cast a dramatic and ever-changing light on the performers throughout the dance.

Collide@CERN is not about communicating science in the traditional outreach way, Koek says. “The arts are not being used to explain or illustrate the science. Instead, we are putting arts and science on an equal footing, so that great scientists interact with great artists and become mutually inspired and transformed in their understanding of each other’s disciplines and processes.”

Whether or not Jobin’s piece will be judged as achieving these lofty goals remains to be seen, but it is compelling and highly thought-provoking. Whatever the outcome, this quirky (quarky?) piece certainly has a strange charm.

There’s nothing like the fear of eternal damnation to encourage low crime rates. But does belief in heaven and a forgiving god encourage lawbreaking? A new study suggests it might – although establishing a clear link between the two remains a challenge.

at the University of Oregon in Eugene and his colleagues compared global data on people’s beliefs in the afterlife with worldwide crime data collated by the . In total, Shariff’s team looked at data covering the beliefs of 143,000 individuals across 67 countries and from a variety of religious backgrounds.

In most of the countries assessed, people were more likely to report a belief in heaven than in hell. Using that information, the team could calculate the degree to which a country’s rate of belief in heaven outstrips its rate of belief in hell.

Even after the researchers had controlled for a host of crime-related cultural factors – including GDP, income inequality, population density and life expectancy – national crime rates were typically higher in countries with particularly strong beliefs in heaven but weak beliefs in hell.

Licence to steal

“Belief in a benevolent, forgiving god could license people to think they can get away with things,” says Shariff – although he stresses that this conclusion is speculative, and that the results do not necessarily imply causality between religious beliefs and crime rates.

“There are a number of possible causal pathways,” says , an anthropologist at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, who was not involved in the study. The most likely interpretation is that there are intervening variables at the societal level – societies may have values that are similarly reflected in their legal and religious systems.

In a follow-up study, yet to be published, Shariff and Amber DeBono of Winston–Salem State University in North Carolina primed volunteers who had Christian beliefs by asking them to write variously about God’s forgiving nature, God’s punitive nature, a forgiving human, a punitive human, or a neutral subject. The volunteers were then asked to complete anagram puzzles for a monetary reward of a few cents per anagram.

God helps those who…

Participants were given the opportunity to commit petty theft, with no chance of being caught, by lying about the number of anagrams they had successfully completed. Shariff’s team found that those participants who had written about a forgiving god claimed nearly $2 more than they were entitled to under the rules of the game, whereas those in the other groups awarded themselves less than 50 cents more than they were entitled to.

“When you take all of this research together, it does start to build a stronger case,” says Shariff.

It is unclear the degree to which these lab-based psychological experiments translate to large-scale societal effects. But according to Sosis, such a link is at least plausible.

Journal reference:

Wind turbines have an unusual way of generating hot air. By drawing down warm air from the atmosphere above, they cause temperatures in their immediate surroundings to warm slightly.

of the and colleagues used land-surface temperature data gathered by to examine the effect.

The satellites give temperature measurements with a spatial resolution of roughly 1 square kilometre, which the team matched up with data from the on the exact location of 2358 wind turbines in west-central Texas.

They found that the immediate surroundings of wind turbines were on average 0.5 °C warmer than the rest of the region. The study spanned 2003 to 2011, during which time the region saw a boost in the number of wind turbines, from 111 to 2358.

Good mixer

The warming was particularly pronounced at night. Zhou says the warming was caused primarily by vertical mixing of the air, rather than as a direct result of friction as air passes over the turbines’ blades: the movement of the turbines is mixing the cooler ground-level air with warmer air higher up.

Despite the warming effect identified by his team, Zhou points out that the region overall has not got significantly warmer since 2003. This suggests that the wind farms are not having a big effect on regional climate.

He is also keen to emphasise that wind power remains an important part of the solution for tackling climate change. “Maybe we could modify wind turbines or simply think about where we put them, so as to minimise their impact. This research is just the first step.”

in Jena, Germany, says: “Wind turbines have to be part of the solution, but it would be naive to think that they don’t have an impact. Balancing the impacts of various technologies is key to tackling climate change.”

Journal reference: Nature Climate Change, DOI:

Read more: “Power paradox: Clean might not be green forever“

Much of the high-energy physics research community currently uses a system of open-access online publishing, and Janet Finch, former vice-chair of Keele University, UK, has been charged with investigating how the UK might set up something similar for all its taxpayer-funded science. The website, an online repository set up in 1991, offers almost all high-energy physics research for free. Despite this, established physics journals .

The announcement is part of a growing trend towards open access, following the success of the free journals and, more recently, .

No way to get a job

Critics of the government’s announcement have argued that these prominent open-access journals already allow researchers to publish their research online for free, and yet some still choose not to. of the , Germany, a prominent advocate of open access to research, says this criticism is unfair: “One of the major obstacles to open-access publishing is that the highest-ranking journals have chosen not to go open-access. We may in principle be free to publish wherever we want already, but not if we want to get a job.”

British science minister David Willetts suggests that peer-reviewed journals could become open-access by charging their contributors, rather than their readers. “One of the clear options is to shift from a system in which university libraries pay for journals to one in which the academics pay to publish,” he says. “But then you need to shift the funding so that the academics could afford to pay to publish.”

However, Brembs argues that paying to publish won’t tackle one of the major issues that sparked the open-access movement – the high price of journals. “It’s the spiralling charges by the publishers which really need be brought under control.”

The advice goes beyond “five a day” in our pick of the bold and beautiful public health posters of the past

See gallery: Health posters show the fine art of persuasion

THE world’s premier particle smasher, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva, may generate the most column inches on science in Switzerland, but it is the country’s medical technology industry – medtech to those in the know – that is the nation’s real success story. From syringes to specialist imaging equipment and pacemakers to orthopaedic implants, Switzerland has companies specialising in all areas of medtech and can boast 10 per cent of Europe’s workforce in this field, says a published last year by the export advisory platform, .

The origins of Swiss medtech can be traced back to the country’s watchmaking industry. In the latter part of the 20th century, a number of businesses which manufactured parts for timepieces realised they could use their existing expertise and increase profits by diversifying into high-precision medical instruments.

, a family-run company, found itself in such a position. As well as making parts for watches, Straumann created other highly specialised metal-based products, including the timing equipment used in skiing competitions. When Fritz Straumann, son of the firm’s founder, was injured in a skiing accident, he became fascinated with the possibility of using metals within the body to treat injuries. As a result, the company started manufacturing implants to help bones heal.

Today Straumann, now based in Basel, specialises in dental implants but that inventive spirit is still very much alive. “The company has a real history of ingenious inventions – I think there must have been a bit of in their genes, tempered of course with Swiss reliability,” says Mark Hill, vice-president of corporate communications, referring to the eccentric inventor and his dog created by animator Nick Park. On Switzerland’s medtech prowess he adds: “It all comes down to generations of metals experience and high-precision engineering skills. People in Switzerland have precision in their genes; they’ve grown up with precision mechanics all around them.”

“The company has a real history of ingenious inventions – there must be a bit of Wallace and Gromit in there”

Jean-Marc Wismer, CEO of – a company which specialises in the production of electronic ocular implants used to diagnose early stage glaucoma – also cites the watchmaking industry as a driving force behind the Swiss medtech success story. “Because of the heritage of the watch industry, there are a lot of specialist technologies available in Switzerland: micro-electronics, plastic injection, silicon technology, moulding… there is deep experience in all of these areas.”

Yet, unlike Straumann, Wismer’s own company has no direct link to the watchmaking industry. Sensimed originated from the (EPFL) in 2003, an organisation well known for its ability to create thriving companies. “There’s a real start-up culture here,” says Susan Thomas, a postdoctoral researcher at EPFL. Thomas came over from the US in 2008 to research ways of integrating biological and synthetic polymers into the body. She points out that it is easier to secure funding in Switzerland than in the US and that salaries are higher.

Big business also plays an important role in Swiss medtech. “There are several international companies, active in the field of medical devices, which have either major offices or regional headquarters in Switzerland,” says Wismer. “There is Medtronic, Edwards Lifesciences, Eli Lilly, Biosensors International, Johnson & Johnson and Baxter International, to name but a few. These companies not only bring highly skilled workers to the area from abroad, but they also create jobs for local people who are trained in the skills required for medtech.”

Richard Kenyon, a communications consultant for , a company whose international headquarters is in Morges, says that large multinational companies are attracted to Switzerland for several reasons, as well as the obvious tax benefits: “The native Swiss population is very well-educated and provides a good pool for employment, particularly around the Lausanne area, where the EPFL is located. Also, it’s relatively easy to attract senior multinational executives to Switzerland, as it’s seen as a good place to bring up your children and has excellent international schools.”

Another reason why US companies often set up in Europe is the appeal of the CE mark, used to show that products conform to EU standards. “The CE mark is recognised in most countries of the world, but it is much easier to gain than FDA approval in the US, so lots of US companies start in Europe to be on the market earlier,” says Wismer. “When they come to Europe, Switzerland is often their first choice.”

Today, there are around 1400 medtech companies operating out of Switzerland. In 2008, the last year figures were available, these companies contributed 2 per cent of the country’s GDP, roughly three times as much as the medtech sector did in Germany or the UK, says the Medtech Switzerland . The goods the companies produced accounted for 5 per cent of all good exported by Switzerland, again about three times that of Germany or the UK.

The industry currently relies primarily on the US and European markets but future growth is likely to come from increasing demand from the emerging markets, says Hill. As healthcare standards in Brazil, India and China rise, the demand for medtech products is expected to increase dramatically and medtech in Switzerland is uniquely positioned to take advantage of this growing market.

As children, we overproduce the connections – synapses – between brain cells. During puberty the body carries out a kind of topiary, snipping away some synapses while allowing others to strengthen. Over a few years, the number of synapses roughly halves, and the adult brain emerges.

Or so we thought. at Yale University and colleagues at the University of Zagreb, Croatia, and the VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, have now found that the brains of adults in their 20s are still subject to synaptic pruning.

Rakic’s team analysed post-mortem tissue from a brain region called the prefrontal cortex (PFC) in 32 people aged between 1 week old and 91 years. Specifically, they calculated the density of dendritic spines – the tiny projections that protrude from the neuron’s long dendrites, each of which facilitates communication with other neurons through a synapse.

As expected, Rakic’s team found that spine density increased rapidly during infancy, reaching a peak before the 9th birthday. It then began to fall away as pruning began. Intriguingly, though, spine density did not plateau after adolescence, as might have been expected, but continued to fall gradually until the late 20s.

Rakic says the result could be good news for those hoping to gain new skills in their third decade. The period of pruning is associated with a heightened ability to learn – whether that is in picking up language skills or understanding new concepts, he says. “You should not give up learning just because you’re in your 20s – it isn’t too late,” he says.

The finding also has implications for our understanding of some psychiatric disorders. The PFC is thought to be particularly relevant to late-onset disorders such as schizophrenia, says Rakic, but it is unclear whether such disorders are triggered by processes. The new finding is likely to give weight to the idea that schizophrenia emerges as a result of late brain development.

“I’m sure that for many people schizophrenia has a strong developmental component,” says , who researches schizophrenia at the University of Cambridge – although she adds that some cases will likely have a degenerative component.

at the University of Sydney, Australia, agrees with the conclusion. It is possible that the prefrontal cortex “is susceptible for longer to disorders and disease that result from abnormal pruning”, she says. Such pruning may also contribute to memory loss and dementia, she adds.

Journal reference:

John Koschwanez at Harvard University and colleagues say that budding yeast () may show the answer. Yeast is a single-celled organism, but strains of some species, including the budding yeast, can also clump into groups of cells – the first step on the way to multicellularity.

The researchers compared how both strains of yeast – free-living individuals and clumpers – fared in a weak sucrose solution. Yeast eats sucrose, but needs to break it down into glucose and fructose before it can get the food through its cell wall. To break the sucrose down, yeast produces an enzyme known as invertase.

The researchers found that clumping yeast could consume significantly more sucrose than the free-living variety, giving them a clear competitive advantage. Koschwanez thinks this might have acted as a selection pressure to nudge single cells down the path towards multicellularity. “We’re speculating that this could be a general principle,” he says. “There are lots of unicellular organisms which secrete enzymes to break down sucrose.”

Opportunist mutants

The team didn’t stop there, though. “We’re still exploring how multicellularity can develop in yeast,” says Koschwanez. The second half of the team’s analysis suggests another possible factor.

Not all yeast can produce invertase. The mutant yeast that can’t are known as opportunists, because they avoid the energetic costs of breaking down the sucrose themselves, and instead consume the glucose and fructose produced by other yeast.

Koschwanez and colleagues found that opportunists are a thorn in the side of free-living yeast – but not as much of a problem for the clumpers. That’s because the clumped structure keeps the glucose and fructose from escaping to be slurped up by opportunists.

Koschwanez says that, as such, the clumping yeast population will rapidly become fitter overall than the free-living population, providing another potential reason for the rise of multicellularity.

Journal reference:

Fingerprints form roughly halfway through a normal pregnancy. Every individual has a unique set – even identical twins – which makes them an ideal way to quickly and easily establish identity.

The biological function of fingerprints remains a matter of controversy. It has long been thought that the ridges improve grip, but a recent study suggests they actually reduce friction between skin and a surface and perhaps increase the sensitivity of touch.

But not in the members of the five families so far diagnosed with adermatoglyphia – an absence of fingerprints. at Tel Aviv University, Israel, and colleagues studied three generations in one of these families and found that everyone with the condition shared a mutation in the gene SMARCAD1.

Genetic fingerprint

Gabriele Richard, who researches dermatology and genetics at genetic testing company in Gaithersburg, Maryland, points out that the finding is unlikely to help those with adermatoglyphia to grow fingerprints – but Sprecher says there might be wider implications.

“Without this family, we simply would not know what SMARCAD1 is,” he says. Studying the proteins generated by such new genes “may lead to the development of treatments for more common conditions”, he says.

Journal reference: , DOI: 10.1016/j.ajhg.2011.07.004