What if everything that happened in the environment was immediately recorded and made available to everyone in real time?

This is the idea behind a bold 10-year research programme run by Australia’s government research agency CSIRO to build a complete digital representation of the country.

– named to echo the Human Genome Project – aims to become a “historical, current and future digital representation of everything” in the country by 2025, starting with environmental data.

“Like the Human Genome Project, Oznome is a big crazy idea that many people will say isn’t possible,” says , a research team leader at CSIRO.

Making this happen will involve finding a way to bring together data from government agencies, researchers, private companies and citizen scientists to offer an unprecedented understanding of how all sorts of different systems connect with each other – whether that’s water, energy or agriculture, health or economics.

If CSIRO pulls it off, Oznome would, for example, allow researchers to easily track the impact of climate change or iron mining – or both – on the water supply or the economic well-being of Australia’s rural populations over time.

The plan echoes other big science initiatives in ecology such as the in the US, a continental-scale system for examining ecological change.

Model-making

In the long run, historical data from Oznome could be combined to make sophisticated models to predict what is likely to happen in the future.

“This is kind of the dream for any of us that work with data,” says , technical director of the UK’s Open Data Institute in London. “But it’s really, really hard to do.”

To get there, the team will need to focus on making various sources of data available and compatible. “We need to solve the problem of finding data, accessing it and making sure it’s usable and interoperable,” says Lemon.

Doing so could also lower research costs. In a typical CSIRO project, the cost of data discovery, access and preparation accounts for about 30 per cent of the time and budget, Lemon says. “Even if we could automate just half of it, our organisation could save around A$75 million [US$54 million] per year,” he adds.

In part, it’s a technical challenge: how to build a platform that allows researchers to easily search for and find data streams in a consistent and clear format, particularly when data-handling technologies are evolving so quickly.

Tennison mentions a similarly ambitious initiative by the European Union called , which aims to make environmental data comparable across state borders. This project used XML as the data-file format when it launched in 2001. “Now, 15 years later, it looks old-fashioned. The way we deal with information has evolved,” says Tennison.

Culture change

However, a bigger challenge is the cultural shift required to get scientists and other data holders to share their information.

“Many organisations with data have the view that sharing it is a cost with little benefit to the sharer,” says Lemon. Convincing them to invest upfront in a sharing system for savings in the long term is easier said than done. Some organisations also make money from selling their data, which adds a layer of licensing red tape to the bureaucracy.

CSIRO has started with “Oznome Water”, a subsection of the overall project, which is in its infancy.

“We know from past projects looking at land management, water availability, hydrological modelling, ground water and water quality that an interdisciplinary approach is key,” says project leader Jonathan Yu. “But the data infrastructure doesn’t typically exist.”

Yu and Lemon draw parallels with the that began in Tasmania five years ago, under which a sensor network and data resource are being built to create a digital view of the island state. Sensors have been placed across the island to measure real-time weather conditions, carbon dioxide levels, the health of animals and farmed fish, water reserves and energy use.

The information is being used to help industry and researchers make better decisions. In one example, moisture-detecting sensors connect to an app and keep farmers informed about irrigation strategies in the drought-stricken land.

“It’s fascinating to see what a community does with access to information in a form they can consume,” says Lemon. “To me this is a taster of what’s to come with Oznome.”

Read more: Don’t let internet companies hoard the wealth of big data

“GLOBAL warming is the greatest scam in history.” Denialist headlines like this one litter the internet, confusing the public and frustrating climate scientists.

That frustration prompted Emmanuel Vincent at the University of California, Merced, to create Climate Feedback, a tool that lets climate scientists review journalists’ reports on the subject and give each story a credibility score.

The system uses a web annotation browser extension called Hypothesis to enable an invited group of climate scientists to comment on words, sentences or data points within media stories. Anyone who installs the plug-in can see the additional layer of commentary.

“Highlight misinformation, and it sends a visual cue to the reader to be cognitively on guard”

For example, one Forbes article headlined “Updated NASA Data: Global Warming Not Causing Any Polar Ice Retreat” has 33 comments from nine scientists who have given it the lowest possible credibility score. The piece, one of the site’s most popular climate stories of 2015, “contains many invalid and unjustified claims”, says Jan Lenaerts, who studies polar climate and ice sheets at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. It’s not the first attempt to fact-check the internet. Other tools include email fact-checker LazyTruth and web page annotation tool Truth Goggles, but all of them reach just a self-selecting few, says Matt Stempeck, who created LazyTruth. Getting Google to take these annotations into account when ranking search results would let initiatives like Climate Feedback make more impact, he says. Google is testing a model that assesses the trustworthiness of web content.

John Cook of the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland, Australia, says that Climate Feedback could be powerful from a psychological point of view. “One of the reasons why misinformation is so problematic is because once a myth takes hold, it is fiendishly difficult to dislodge,” he says. “By highlighting misinformation, you’re sending a visual cue to the reader to be cognitively on guard.”

Vincent plans to launch a Kickstarter campaign next month to recruit more climate scientists and to develop a system for scoring the overall credibility of a publication’s climate coverage to help guide readers. The same approach could be applied to other fields such as GMOs, he says.

(Image: Jeffrey Blackler / Alamy)

This article appeared in print under the headline “Climate change checker marks sceptics down”

What lives in the seas of Enceladus? Despite 10 years orbiting Saturn’s icy moon and sampling the material gushing from its plumes, NASA’s is far from having an answer. Now two proposed missions hope to change that by searching for life more directly.

Cassini has made a series of fly-bys through water-rich plumes erupting from deep inside the icy moon out of cracks in the surface. These have yielded tantalising clues that the ingredients for life might be buried there.

The subsurface ocean is probably an alkaline solution with a pH of 11 or 12, which could have been produced by water reacting with certain iron-rich types of rock – a process called serpentinisation. This creates hydrogen, a source of energy that is favourable for life and probably powered ancient life on Earth.

But despite focusing on these details during its most recent fly-by on 28 October, Cassini researchers haven’t been able to determine precise hydrogen levels because of complications in how the probe’s instruments take measurements.

The final fly-by on 19 December will offer more data, but it won’t be able to confirm whether microbes live in the salty sea: the instruments on board, designed more than 20 years ago, simply don’t have the capability.

That’s where the Enceladus Life Finder (ELF), proposed by at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, aims to step in. Equipped with better instruments, the solar-powered probe would follow in Cassini’s footsteps by flying through the plumes and building on what we already know.

“The plume of Enceladus is waiting for us. It could be the place where we find out if life had a second genesis in our own solar system,” Lunine said in a talk at the in San Francisco, California, on 14 December. “We must go back.”

The ELF would use mass spectrometers with much higher sensitivity, range and resolution than those of Cassini. One, called MASPEX, would analyse the gas streaming from the vents. Another, the Enceladus Icy Jet Analyzer, would focus on solid particles.

This combination would allow space scientists to detect and identify amino acids, the building blocks of life. It would also shed light on whether the ocean has the basic requirements of habitability – the right pH, temperature, available chemical energy and types of chemical reactions taking place in the thermal vents.

The ELF was initially proposed to NASA’s Discovery Program, which offers up to $500 million for small space missions. It was, however, rejected earlier this year in favour of less risky mission concepts focused on asteroids and Venus.

Lunine’s team plans to resubmit the ELF proposal at “the first opportunity available”.

Collecting samples

A separate mission dubbed LIFE (Life Investigation For Enceladus) offers an alternative approach: to collect samples from the plumes and then take them back to Earth in a capsule for investigation. LIFE would run on a plutonium battery, which means it can’t be funded through NASA’s Discovery Program because it prohibits the use of nuclear power sources.

of Sample Exploration Systems in La Cañada, California, heads up LIFE. He was previously deputy principal investigator on NASA’s 2006 Stardust Mission to capture and return comet particles, and argues that his plan will be more likely than the ELF to deliver definitive results.

“We don’t even have a set of instruments on Earth to detect life. We aren’t even sure what life is. So if we go out there with any in situ instruments, they will always be extremely limited and the information you get won’t be very definitive,” he says. “A more productive means to learn of the possibility of life would be to bring samples to terrestrial laboratories for the scientists of the world to reach a consensus.”

Tsou argues that his proposals are being hampered not only by NASA’s desire to conserve its dwindling plutonium supply, but also by concern for planetary protection. “They want to make sure we do not bring any live germs to kill everybody on Earth,” he said.

Lunine points out that such a sample-return mission is scientifically risky as well, because it won’t make as many fly-bys. The team would also have to wait three or four years to get the sample back to Earth, leaving plenty of room for something else going wrong.

“We have a much lower-risk approach to understanding whether there’s life on Enceladus,” he says.

Image credit: JPL-Caltech/NASA

Magnetic models

Real-time auroras

Blind people have long relied on sound as a substitution for sight, and some even use echolocation to navigate around objects. But it turns out that sound can be specifically designed to convey visual information. Now, that phenomenon is being used in an attempt to build better navigation aids for blind people.

Researchers from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena have built smart glasses that translate images into sounds that can be intuitively understood without training.

The device, called vOICe (OIC stands for “Oh! I See”), is a pair of dark glasses with an attached camera, connected to a computer. It’s based on an algorithm of the same name developed in 1992 by Dutch engineer Peter Meijer. The system converts pixels in the camera’s video feed into sound, mapping brightness and vertical location to an associated pitch and volume.

A cluster of dark pixels at the bottom of the frame sounds quiet and has a low pitch, while a bright patch at the top would sound loud and high-pitched. The way a sound changes over time is governed by how the image looks when scanned left to right across the frame. Headphones sends the processed sound into the wearer’s ear.

“You’re taking something from vision and you’re putting it into audition,” says Caltech’s , who works on vOICe. “Your brain is doing the opposite – it’s taking in all of the sounds and it’s making sense of them visually.”

Integrating the senses

In a paper published this week, Stiles and her colleague explain that mapping visuals to sound in this way reflects how we integrate data from different senses. Perceiving a rose, for instance, means experiencing more than just its colour – its scent, the texture of its petals and the rustle of its leaves also count.

Shimojo and Stiles worked to understand how people intuitively map objects to sounds. They asked sighted volunteers to match images (stripes, spots and natural textures) to sounds, while blind volunteers were asked to feel textures and select sounds that seemed to correspond to them. The pattern of choices directly shaped vOICe’s algorithms and seemed to produce an intuitive result.

Tested on the device, blind people with no experience of using it were able to match the shapes to the sounds as often as those who had been trained – both groups performed 33 per cent better than by chance. But when the encoding was reversed, so that a high part of the image became a low pitch and a bright part of the image became a quiet sound, volunteers found it harder to match image to sound.

Intuitive mapping

“The result that select natural stimuli could be intuitive with sensory substitution, with or without training, was unexpected,” the researchers write.

“This research shows it’s not just important how much information you provide, but whether you provide it in a way that the person can intuitively make sense of,” says of the University of Washington in Seattle.

“They are basically saying that the magic bullet is going to be finding an intuitive mapping system and not relying on training,” she says.

Fine points out that there’s a gulf between distinguishing patterns in a lab and using vOICe to observe and understand the real world. But she says the work could ultimately help design better vision aids. Traditionally, these have relied on training users to understand the patterns they produced when converting vision to other stimuli. “It’s much better to find something intuitive and easy to use,” she says.

Stiles and Shinsuke are now using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data to analyse activity within the brain, looking for that intuitive mapping system.

Journal reference:

(Image credit: Giorgia Aloisio/Getty)

The idea involves placing a tray of organic pesticide powder inside a commercially bred hive. The powder contains a substance to help it stick to bees’ legs and a strain of Clonostachys rosea fungus that is harmless to these insects but attacks crop diseases and pests. “It’s a perfectly natural fungus found very commonly throughout the world. We’ve just developed a way to grow and harvest it efficiently,” says Michael Collinson, CEO of BVT.

The bumblebees walk through the powder as they leave the hive. When they land on flowers to gather nectar and pollen, they leave a dusting of pesticide to protect the plant and future fruit.

Many crops can be protected this way, including blueberries and bell peppers. BVT plans to provide its dispensing system to a number of companies that have developed biological controls for other pests such as fireblight, which affects apples and pears. “Farmers usually spray the whole orchard and 99 per cent of it ends up in the wrong place,” says Collinson. “We can deliver it locally and use 20 grams as opposed to 2 kilograms. It’s much better for the environment.”

“These bees fly for us, delivering pesticides to targeted crops. It’s better for the environment”

David Passafiume, an organic farmer near Toronto, has been using the system for five years on 8.5 acres of strawberries and raspberries. “We were losing a significant portion of our crop each year to Botrytis and tarnished plant bugs,” he says. Now those losses are negligible and profits have gone up by a quarter, he says. “I wouldn’t even try to grow without it now.”

The idea of using bees to carry pesticides isn’t new, but BVT is one of the first to attempt to commercialise the approach.

“It’s a good idea. It’s better than spraying highly toxic chemicals over acres of land,” says , an entomologist at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. “As long as it doesn’t have a bad effect on the bees.”

, a biologist at the University of Ottawa in Canada, thinks it should only be used inside greenhouses, away from wild bees. If used outside, he says, it could have unintended effects on non-target plants or other pollinators.

Another concern relates to BVT’s use of commercially bred insects. “Domesticated bumblebees carry pathogens that can be transmitted into the wild,” says Sydney Cameron of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “That issue has not been resolved.”

The company plans to work with other companies to deliver inorganic pesticides that have been deemed safe to bees by the US Environment Protection Agency. But the agency typically tests only on honeybees, using them as surrogates for all pollinators, despite differences between bee species.

“Honeybees and bumblebees to pesticides in ways that can be hard to predict,” says Dave Goulson at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK. What’s more, the EPA generally tests only to see if chemicals are acutely toxic, rather than looking at the effects of long-term exposure.

Collinson says the company is “very cautious” about the insects’ well-being. “Our business is bees. We need these guys to fly for us.”

His company now plans to add more biocontrols to its pesticide mix to create broad-spectrum crop protection.

(Image: Bee Vectoring Technology)

This article appeared in print under the headline “Bees put to work lugging pesticides to flowers”