World War II is long over, but the fight against oppressive, invasive state laws continues

Back in charge. Facundo Arrizabalaga/EPA

The 70th anniversary of Victory in Europe also brought victory in Britain for the Conservative Party, which garnered a slim Commons majority with 36.9% of the vote. The change of government has implications for technological fields, from investment in infrastructure to the use of surveillance, encryption, and big data.

Surveillance

Sadly much of what passes for technology policy is likely to be driven by the Home Office, such as home secretary Theresa May’s obsession with the thoroughly discredited Communications Data Bill – aka the Snoopers' charter.

No matter how many times the dangers of mass surveillance and the many ways it fails in its aims are explained, the largely technologically illiterate residents of Parliament never seem to understand. Ministers tend to avoid understanding something when their jobs or even the opportunity to become Tory leader depend on their not understanding it.

Effective law enforcement and intelligence work is complex, messy and difficult. Unfortunately ministers, under the gaze of the 24-hour news media, want only clear and immediate actions and apparent solutions, even when those solutions amount to security theatre.

May wants to be seen as tough on crime and terrorism and is determined to give the security services everything they need. Such unqualified support for the secret services may find approval in the UK but sends shivers down the spines of continental Europeans, a fair proportion of which are nations with all-to-recent experience of totalitarianism.

Law enforcement and security services need to use modern digital technologies intelligently in their work, focusing their information systems and energies against individuals about whom they have reasonable cause to harbour suspicion. Mass surveillance of the entire population is neither proportionate nor effective as a security strategy. Legal safeguards should dictate the security services' operations, not the other way around.

The UK parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee recently declared “bulk collection” of communications data acceptable because most data is only ever “seen” by computers. By that measure, perhaps Home Office ministers should install multiple CCTV cameras in every room in every building in the country – which would only be monitored by computers, of course.

Not once in the 14 years since the dreadful attacks on September 11, 2001 has any mass surveillance regime on either side of the Atlantic demonstrated itself to be a magic terrorist-catching machine capable on its own of pre-emptively identifying a terrorist suspect.

Big data and privacy

UK governments have a poor record at managing data. The promise of medical breakthroughs has led to a push on the use of big data in healthcare, despite the potential privacy pitfalls. Making medical data available to researchers and industry is considered a clear win for many Conservatives due its potential commercial applications.

Labour’s now largely dismantled NHS National Programme for IT was arguably the largest-ever government IT disaster, costing more than £10 billion to deliver almost no usable improvements.

However Conservatives are keen to press forward with further privacy-invading centralisation of medical records and the ill-conceived medical care.data programme.

It’s moments like this that make you realise that it’s win-win for governments to claim they’re “spending more on the NHS”, even if it’s money squandered on IT systems that won’t work and in practice wreak organisational havoc.

There is room for a debate about constructive, socially useful and ethical research using healthcare data. But it should not allow government to circumvent guarantees to privacy. Such research needs to be governed by a set of principles such as those such as those set out in the Nuffield Bioethics Council report on the ethical use of data. For example, treating people as individuals worthy of respect and not as industrial raw material, tell people what you’re doing with their data, consult them properly – and account for what you’ve done with the data and tell people if things go wrong.

Encryption and security

David Cameron found himself the target of much mockery after declaring his desire, like the FBI, to “ban encryption” and require mandatory back doors for security services.

This is little different to every householder being required to deliver copies of their door keys to police. What self-respecting crime syndicate would break into multiple houses when they can break into the police station – or encourage an insider to help them – and get all the keys in one fell swoop.

Encryption is the bedrock of trust and security on the internet and the billions of transactions of direct and indirect commerce each day. There is no such thing as a security hole tailored for the exclusive use of the “good guys”. When you build back doors into communications infrastructure, however well-intentioned you may be, you undermine security for everyone.

Human rights

All these policies involve the sorts of rights and freedoms protected under the Human Rights Act – which the Tories intend to repeal, replacing it with a British Bill of Rights not dictated by unelected European judges. The Tories' proposals for the Bill of Rights would replicate those protections of the Human Rights Act, but remove judicial protection for those rights judged “trivial”. It’s not clear which protections (right privacy? prohibition of slavery or torture? freedom of assembly and association?) would be deemed “trivial” – or indeed by whom.

They are not abstract ideals with no meaning in real life. They have real effects on real people’s lives. The rightsinfo.org site illustrates what these protected rights and freedoms mean in practice. “”), and debunks various oft-trotted out myths, from terrorists allowed to stay to “unelected European judges”.

Surveillance society

There are many other concerns about the direction we’re headed. But let me ask: given the increasingly authoritarian, fearful, surveillance society we have created in the 70 years since the war in Europe ended in 1945 – and, given the intention to extend and reinforce mass surveillance in years to come, is this really the way to honour the sacrifice of those who died to win freedom and a lasting peace founded on justice and goodwill?

Or, as John Naughton so eloquently puts it, does our indolence constitute “a shocking case study of what complacent ignorance can do to a democracy”?

A new government poses challenges for digital business and innovation in Britain

How will the technology landscape look? men at work by Kirill__M/shutterstock.com

In as much as technology and the digital economy had their moment in the spotlight at all during the recent election campaign, the parties' policies contained few surprises. Our attention was deflected instead to speculation regarding the parties' use of social media to attract votes.

But even now that the results are in, the impact on the technology sector of a Conservative majority and a virtual single-party state in Scotland under the SNP is not entirely straightforward.

Storm over Europe

The Conservative’s key policy statement was to make the UK the “technology centre of Europe”. With barely a 20-seat majority in the House of Commons, however, the biggest challenge will undoubtedly come from David Cameron’s own Eurosceptic backbenchers. For the UK to develop any sort of dominance over the technology sector will require intelligent engagement with Europe and EU policy, such as the proposed Single Digital Market.

While the Number 10 website is certainly very enthusiastic about the prospects of this agenda, will for example the MP for Stone (and known Eurosceptic), Bill Cash, feel the same way?

Education

The Tories have also made commitments to improve education in science, technology, engineering and maths. But the progress achieved during the previous coalition government suggests there’s little to this policy that has been properly thought through. The idea of teaching children to code and initiatives such as the “year of code” is (presumably) based on the reasoning that equipping a generation with these skills will eventually give rise to genuine technological innovation and more business start-ups.

But the criticisms of the Year of Code and the project CEO’s disastrous Paxman interview suggests that a code-first approach to innovation is neither a simple nor easy fix. An analogy to this policy would be to put every high school student through a motor mechanics course, in the (clearly mistaken) hope that these skills will re-ignite the UK car industry’s former glories.

Under new management

The demise of the coalition brings uncertainty to the sector and requires the immediate replacement of Vince Cable as business secretary. Cable’s style and approach to business split opinion, but in any case his successor will not be able emulate it. Will technology transfer programmes between universities and businesses continue to be supported? The long-term support for Knowledge Transfer Partnerships is one example of a university-business partnerships that have benefited the UK economy, but potentially are at risk from a more strident majority Conservative government.

Beyond the policy statements made in the heat of an election campaign, Conservative political ideology itself hints at what the future holds for technology, digital business and innovation. Despite the chancellor’s support for developing a Northern Powerhouse, the focus of George Osborne’s speech at Manchester’s Museum of Science and Industry in June 2014 leaned heavily on 19th and 20th-century technology. Osborne’s hopes rest on politicians’ fascination with creating new “big” infrastructure such as trains and roads in order to regenerate economic growth.

However even the chancellor’s references to the world’s largest supercomputer at Daresbury (infrastructure again) seems to reflect a 1960s “big iron” view of computing power, when supercomputers can be fashioned out of Raspberry Pi devices and commercial cloud computing solutions that provide essentially infinite computing power are commonplace.

Old-world vs new-world technology

The list of recent donors to the various parties tends to reveal the types of businesses and organisations that the parties best understand and represent. Seen like this, the prospect is that Conservative innovation and technology policies will encourage new systems that attempt to prop-up pre-digital and problematic business models. For example, those found in the print and broadcast media sectors. For the Conservatives, copyright is in no way a problematic concept.

Genuine business innovations that threaten these existing business models will almost certainly find less favour under the new government – unless developed by incumbent organisations themselves. Innovations that make use of disruptive technologies, such as peer-to-peer networking, or digital business processes, such as Uber or AirBnB, will also be more tightly regulated. Similarly, the tendency for Conservative governments to favour “big finance” businesses such as hedge funds may see an encouragement of speculative copy-cat technology developments, rather than taking the risk of supporting evolutionary or even revolutionary new approaches.

Rumbling from ocean trenches could be sign that Japan faces mega earthquake

Ocean bottom seismometer floating after releasing its anchor on the seafloor. Yusuke Yamashita, ERI, Univ. of Tokyo, Japan

Researchers in Japan have for the first time detected and traced shallow tremors under the ocean that could be a sign that the country is heading towards a huge earthquake. But the technique itself may one day help us predict exactly when such an event would take place, which could save thousands of lives.

Japan still has the devastating 9.0 magnitude, megathrust earthquake in Tohoku in fresh memory, which produced a powerful tsunami and killed nearly 16,000 people when it hit in 2011. It is therefore no wonder that Japanese researchers are the first to detect weak signals of seismic activity.

Devastation following the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan. EPA

Japan already has the most powerful seismic network in the world – and research institutions in the country are constantly growing it. Ocean Bottom Seismometers, which measure motion under the sea, have greatly facilitated these efforts by listening to the “rumbling” that is created when two tectonic plates meet. Such instruments have helped detect low-energy, “slow earthquakes” along oceanic trenches that we otherwise wouldn’t notice.

These earthquakes, which we know are produced deep under the famous San Andreas fault, preceded the Tohoku Earthquake. They occur much more slowly than standard earthquakes. If they are associated with the underground movement of magma and hot water but they are not related to volcanoes, they are knows as “non-volcanic tremors”. By comparison, big earthquakes are caused by the rupture of faults and give rise to short-lived, high-energy seismic waves.

Slow-slip earthquakes and tremors don’t cause any damage on their own. However, if they coincide with very-low-frequency earthquakes they can. These are another type of slow earthquake that is caused by processes deeper down under ground than tremors and usually indicate fault motions near the dangerous area where the tectonic plates meet. If all these types of slow earthquakes take place, along the faulted zone at different depths, they could be a sign we are near to a mega-thrust earthquake.

The researchers – who investigated the Kyushu Palau Ridge, southeast of Kyushu – have, for the first time, been able to detect and map shallow tremors in correlation with the other kinds of slow earthquakes. Even more importantly, they have showed what direction all these events are moving in. This kind of detailed knowledge of seismic activity is considered one of the most reliable ways of predicting big earthquakes.

Warning signs

What the study found out is that the waves produced by all these quiet earthquakes consistently migrated north along the ridge. The movement abruptly ended at the limit of the trench, where it was blocked by a so-called locked zone – where friction keeps the two plates together so they can’t slip – where previous mega-thrust events have occurred. After this, the waves travelled east.

This does not look promising, as to avoid a mega-thrust earthquake you’d prefer the slow quakes to stay in a locked zone, where the stress caused by them can be released and the movement can fizzle out. In this case, however, they are probably causing the coupling between the two plates to weaken, which is expected before a mega-thrust event.

The study, which was published in Science on May 7, shows that shallow slow earthquakes may therefore become a reliable way of detecting when and where the next mega earthquake will strike. This can be done by deploying ocean bottom seismometers along different trenches. In that way, we could detect the pattern of earthquakes in various places so that they would become an exact marker of when any mega-thrust earthquake strikes under the ocean, often causing a tsunami as well.

Deploying an ocean bottom seismometer. Yusuke Yamashita, ERI, Univ. of Tokyo, Japan

The next such earthquake could strike the coast of Kyushu, a region well known for its dangerous volcanoes. Let’s hope that, by then, we have come far enough to prevent the same devastation as we saw in 2011. No place is better than Japan to drive such technological progress.

Turns out the answer to virtual reality sickness is right in front of your face

It's all in the nose. David Whittinghill/Purdue University, Author provided

Virtual reality (VR) equipment has tended to be cumbersome and expensive, all heavy headsets and awkward gloves. Until recently it’s been beyond the reach of the home consumer, but with the appearance of Oculus Rift (since bought by Facebook), Microsoft’s HoloLens, and even DIY options such as Google Cardboard, it seems VR is coming to a living room near you soon.

But there’s a bigger problem with VR than just cost: virtual reality tends to make users feel sick. Simulator sickness, symptoms of which include dizziness, nausea, sweating and disorientation, is a well-known problem for virtual reality users. However, researchers from Purdue University have struck upon a novel way of combating virtual reality sickness that draws upon natural methods.

Sensory scramble

The computer-generated sensory signals that generate simulated virtual reality experiences manipulate our senses independently. As our usual perceptual experience of the world is multisensory, the difference between what we’re seeing and hearing in the VR headset and information from our other senses causes confusion.

When we walk around in the real world, the stereoscopic images formed by our eyes changes as we move, providing us with clear visual information about where we are going. We also sense the movement of our body directly, largely through the vestibular sense organs that form part of our inner ears. Having multiple senses telling us about where we are going is helpful as it allows us to more accurately keep track of our movement around the world.

In virtual reality, however, these signals become uncoupled. For example, while in the real world you might be slumped on the sofa, in the virtual world you are riding a roller coaster. In which case, while the images projected to your eyes tell you you’re looping the loop, your body knows that it has gone nowhere. These kinds of mixed messages are thought to be the cause of simulator sickness.

Point of reference

In many ways, it is the flip-side of sea-sickness – if you’re below decks on a boat rocked by the waves, your body feels the movement while your eyes tell you that you’re motionless. A well-known remedy to sea-sickness is to get out on deck and look at the horizon. This provides a stable reference, bringing your vestibular and visual senses back into agreement.

The answer from the team at Purdue University’s Department of Computer Graphics Technology draws from this idea of a point of reference. Their elegant solution involves simply adding a virtual nose to the scene. This virtual nose is clearly visible in the bottom right of the left eye’s field of view, and the bottom left of the right eye’s field of view – imitating the experience we’re all familiar with. They found that test subjects were able to use their applications, which included walking around inside a virtual Tuscan villa, and another in which you rode a virtual roller coaster, for considerably longer when the nose was visible.

Exactly how this works biologically speaking is not clear, but it seems likely that the nose, by providing a clear visual reference that moves with the point of view of the observer in the scene, gives a better impression of your motion in the virtual world.

The researchers’ long-term goal is a complete model of simulator sickness, that will allow them to predict the degree of sickness that might be expected from a given application. For now, though, they have provided us with a potentially very easy way to reduce simulator sickness and increase the usability of virtual reality systems. And the take-home message is clear – for a painless virtual experience, just follow your nose.

Polluted dwarf star could hold the key to the origin of water on Earth

Artist's view of a watery asteroid heading to a white dwarf star. ESA/Hubble, CC BY

Astronomers have discovered a white dwarf star with a polluted atmosphere that may shed light on where the water on Earth comes from and how much water there is outside our own solar system.

A major question in planetary science is whether the water on Earth was already present in the primordial material that formed our planet or whether it was planted here by collisions with bodies such as asteroids, comets and proto-planets.

Oxygen in the atmospere

New research by a team of British and German astronomers suggests that water delivery by collision may be common in other star systems outside our solar system. They came to this conclusion by measuring the chemical composition of the atmosphere of a white dwarf star, dubbed SDSS J1242.

White dwarfs are essentially corpses of former stars. Most low or medium-sized suns will become white dwarfs at the end of their lifetime. The strong surface gravity within these stars causes heavier elements, such as carbon and oxygen, to sink to their centres, leaving simple atmospheres of hydrogen and helium.

The atmosphere of SDSS J1242 is dominated by helium but the researchers also found large amounts of oxygen and hydrogen, along with rock-forming elements magnesium, silicon and iron.

We still don’t know where the oceans on Earth come from ESA

The new measurements suggest SDSS J1242 has accreted at least an exatonne (which is about 10¹⁸ tonnes) of material in its life time – similar to the mass of the dwarf planet Ceres in our solar system. This has happened at a mind-boggling rate of of 20,000 tonnes per second, which is higher than for any other known metal-polluted white dwarf. The large amount of oxygen suggests that nearly 40% of the mass of the planetary debris is water – possibly in the form of ice delivered by a water-rich asteroid.

A similar mechanism has been suggested for the origin of oceans on Earth. Four billion years ago, the Earth and other rocky planets are thought to have been bombarded by comets and asteroids, which were scattered from the asteroid belts into the path of the inner planets as the gas giants migrated outwards, delivering water and possibly the complex organic molecules that provided the building blocks of life.

Prime candidates

Comets are known to contain water and, for some time, seemed the most promising candidates for transferring water to Earth. However, a growing body of measurements has suggested the water in comets are of a different kind to that found on Earth. This is because water on comets contain more deuterium – a heavy isotope of hydrogen – than water on Earth.

Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko has the wrong kind of water. ESA/Rosetta/NavCam, CC BY-SA

The record holder was the water in comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, measured by the Rosetta spacecraft in 2014, which has a deuterium level 3.4 times higher than that of water on Earth. Researchers therefore now pin their hopes on asteroids. While they are today dry, barren objects, they have a similar chemistry to the Earth and may have contained much more water when the solar system formed.

The discovery of asteroid-donated water in white dwarf SDSS J1242 appears to add weight to the hypothesis. But, as the authors of this study emphasise, if the amount of carbon in J1242 turns out to be the same as that in our sun, all of the oxygen detected could have been delivered in the form of carbon dioxide rather than water. While the authors argue this is unlikely, higher quality observations at optical and ultraviolet wavelengths could provide a definitive answer.

Future observations of other planetary systems and more detailed study of polluted white dwarfs will be important in establishing the role of asteroids as a source of water – and perhaps life – on Earth and other worlds.

France, 'cradle of liberty', struggles to balance anti-terrorism law and rights

The French National Assembly, where the surveillance bill was passed. Ian Langsdon/EPA

The French National Assembly has voted through measures that would grant sweeping surveillance powers including wiretaps and secret cameras. The measures are part of counter-terrorism legislation hurried through parliament in the wake of the attacks on Charlie Hebdo magazine in January that left 17 dead.

If approved by the Senate, the legislation will allow the use of wiretaps, secret cameras or other surveillance measures without a warrant from a judge. The legislation also allows security agencies to install scanning devices at telecoms firms' premises, to allow for untargeted, sweeping surveillance.

‘We are at war against terrorism’

The French president, François Hollande, and his executive have prioritised the fight against terrorism. They surprised many in January 2013 when they sent French troops to Mali to provide support against “terrorist elements” and, earlier this year, when they deployed the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle to the Gulf to fight the Islamic State.

The executive is concerned by the radicalisation and involvement in terrorist groups of French citizens and residents. The Ministry of Interior has flagged 1,422 persons as being involved in the Syrian conflict alone, including 413 fighting in combat zones.

Two counter-terrorism laws have already been passed by the French parliament in 2014 and anti-terror measures worth 940m euros have been introduced since January. These include a “stop jihadism” website, training for judicial services to identify those who might be under the influence of terrorist networks, reinforced security controls such as plan vigipirate (similar to the UK threat level) and increased recruitment to the secret services, police and army.

But the passing of this law by the National Assembly has taken the war against terrorism in a new direction. In February 2015, a decree allowed authorities to block pro-terrorism websites without judicial oversight. The new legislation extends this self-authorisation to surveillance measures such as phone-tapping. It will also allow for constant collection of internet metadata and information to identify threats and persons of interest automatically – as Edward Snowden’s leaked documents revealed to be common in the US and UK. The only oversight will be provided by a panel of magistrates, politicians and communications experts – where deemed necessary.

France fears that it may end up with a surveillance culture, as in Britain. oogiboig, CC BY-NC-SA

Human rights in the face of terror

The threat of terrorism presents a challenge for Hollande as he must find a balance between effective counter-terrorist measures and France’s values – particularly its commitment to human rights. France is not the first to face this difficulty, but the French people have learnt from the Patriot Act and others enacted in the US, and are wary of how far steps taken against terrorism in their own country could go.

The idea that France is the birthplace of human rights is deeply embedded. For example, in 1981 Socialist president Mitterrand explained that France was the “champion of the rights of the citizen”, referring to the French as “the sons of the French Revolution”. Likewise, Liberal president Chirac argued in his Memoires that “France is custodian of a vision, of values, of a humanist ideal”.

After the attacks in January, the incumbent French prime minister, Manuel Valls, referred to France as “the spirit of the Enlightenment”. He also said that although “an exceptional situation needs to be responded to with exceptional measures” he would never “infringe on the principles of law and values”.

Checks and balances

Nevertheless, there are concerns the legislation goes too far. NGOs such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, the Mozilla Foundation that creates the Firefox web browser, and ISPs opposed the project. Quadrature du Net, an online rights campaign, declared that it “goes even further than the NSA”. French data protection agency CNIL and the Paris Bar also oppose the legislation – Judge Marc Trévidic condemned the “exorbitant powers” it would give the surveillance agencies. Even the New York Times editorial board has warned of the consequences for the freedom of press.

Legislation brought forward last year that allowed authorities to access internet user data met a similar reaction. And while the Charlie Hebdo shootings might have given more leeway to the government, the French people do not seem willing to compromise their rights in the fight against terrorism. In an informal poll by the newspaper Le Figaro, only 64% agreed that freedoms should be limited to fight terrorism – less than expected, given the paper’s conservative readership and the fact that the poll took place the week after the January attacks.

A group of 75 MPs have declared that if the legislation is passed, they will call upon the Constitutional Council to review the constitutionality of the law. So Hollande and his government face a difficult puzzle: how to fight terrorism without compromising elements of France’s identity. This will inevitably mean addressing concerns over the legislation’s extent and the lack of judicial overview – as the bill now heads to the Senate, it remains to be seen if it stays unchanged by the upper house.

Strange microorganism under the sea may be missing link in evolution

Hydrothermal vents on the seafloor hold the key to understanding the evolution of cellular life. Centre for Geobiology (University of Bergen, Norway) by R.B. Pedersen

Researchers have discovered a group of microscopic organisms in deep sea sediment from the Atlantic Ocean that could be the crucial missing link in the early evolution of life on Earth. Their study sheds light on one of the most important questions in biology: how did ancient ancestors of simple cells like bacteria evolve to give rise to more complex organisms such as us humans?

The authors of the study, published in Nature, analysed DNA extracted from sediment cores driven two metres into the seafloor – more than 3,000 metres below sea level. Their analysis revealed a completely new group of microorganisms called Lokiarchaeota, which the researchers named after “Loki’s Castle”, a field of hydro-thermal vents on the mid-Atlantic ridge near the sampling location.

The Lokiarchaeota are considered to be important because they provide the best evidence to date for the evolutionary link between simple single-celled organisms, called prokaryotes, and organisms with complex cells called eukaryotes like multi-cellular animals and plants.

Multi-million piece jigsaw puzzle

Bacteria are the best known and most studied prokaryotes. However, the Lokiarchaeota are members of a very different, major group of prokaryotes often found in extreme environments, called Archaea, which enjoy much less public recognition even though they are now known to be at least as important as bacteria, if not more so. Some in this group are well known: Methanogens, for example, have been exploited as a source of renewable energy.

Halobacteria are a type of Archaea. NASA

Modern-day single-celled prokaryotes and the more complex eukaryotes constitute the so-called major “domains” in the tree of life. It is clear that prokaryotes evolved first, just under four billion years ago. Eukaryotes appeared much later, possibly around two billion years ago. Since there is no micro-fossil record to help trace the evolutionary transition from prokaryotes to eukaryotes, scientists rely on DNA-based evidence from existing organisms to investigate the issue.

Although the researchers were not able to isolate or grow any of the Lokiarchaeota, they were able to identify bits of their DNA in the sediment samples. Thanks to next-generation DNA sequencing and high-performance computing, they could then sort these from the rest of the sediment’s diverse microbial community DNA mixture.

Eukaryote cells have a nucleus, unlike prokaryotes Biology flashcards/Flickr, CC BY

Remarkably, they were able to obtain three representative genome sequences, one almost complete. This is like solving a multi-million piece jigsaw puzzle from a box including billions of pieces from other similar but subtly different jigsaws. To complete a computing tour de force they picked out several key genes from the Lokiarchaeota genomes and compared them with related genes from many other prokaryotes and eukaryotes.

Starting pistol

In this way they showed that the Lokiarchaeota are the closest single-celled relatives of eukaryotes yet to be discovered. Their genomes contain eukaryote-like signature genes, such as those involved in cell division and the movement of structures inside the cell. However, a major difference between prokaryotes and eukaryotes is that the latter contain membrane-bound structures such as vesicles and organelles, for example mitochondria and chloroplasts.

It has been known for some time that the major eukaryotic organelles originated from ancient bacteria. The new evidence suggests how this happened. Billions of years ago “advanced” prokaryotes with unique capabilities, ancient ancestors of the Lokiarchaeota, engulfed and retained bacteria for energy metabolism and photosynthesis, which became the mitochondria and chloroplasts in modern eurkaryotes. These were the first eukaryotes.

The paper has effectively fired a starting pistol – the search is now on for more Lokiarchaeota and, possibly, other relatives that might provide further insights into the evolution of cellular life. Genome sequencing may also provide clues as to how to cultivate the Lokiarchaeota.

Analysis of combined microbial community genomes (or metagenomes) from marine sediments and many other environments is being carried out on a massive scale by research groups across the world, so it is likely that our rapidly expanding DNA sequence databases will soon provide more information on these important Archaea.