Apple and Starbucks could have avoided being hacked if they'd taken this simple step

Hack attack Shutterstock

Apple and Starbucks are two of the world’s most trusted companies, but their reputations were recently tarnished thanks to some recent novice cybersecurity mistakes. Both set up systems that could have allowed hackers to break into customers' accounts by repeatedly trying different passwords, a procedure commonly known as a “brute-force” attack. The mistake both firms made was in not employing the simple tactic of automatically locking accounts after several failed attempts to enter a password.

Last week it was revealed such tactics allowed thieves to steal money from users of Starbucks' mobile app. In 2014, an investigation around the publishing of nude photos of celebrities taken from their iCloud storage accounts, identified that intruders could access Apple’s Find My iPhone app by continually trying different login details.

In order to protect against this type of attack, many sites block login after a given number of incorrect attempts. The system can then go into a permanent lock-out mode (where the user must perform a lock-out procedure, such as calling the hosting company to verify their account), or lock out for a given time (known as the hold-down time).

Brute force from a stolen account Author Provided

The size of mobile keyboards can make it tricky for users to correctly enter their password on the first try, especially as it is increasingly common for companies to require passwords with non-alphabet characters. To counter this, developers now often support many more incorrect logins than was previously normal. But many just go for an infinite number of incorrect ones without the chance of a lock-out.

In the Starbucks case, and in many others, the hackers managed to gain stolen IDs and passwords and then try to brute-force the accounts on the Starbucks mobile app, trying hundreds of logins per second.

One tactic of intruders is to try many accounts rather than concentrate on a single one and try lots of passwords for it, which is more likely to trigger security measures. There is a high likelihood that there will be some user accounts that match from the stolen credentials.

Intruder trying lots of accounts Author Provided

Users will also typically use the same password for multiple accounts, so if the intruder manages to gain the password against one compromised account, they will try the same password against other login systems. Often, the same email address is used as a login for different systems, so that it can be fairly easy for an intruder to try the same ID and password that has been used on another system against a new target.

In the case of both Starbucks and Apple, the companies' authentication systems failed to provide a lock mechanism for repeated attempts to enter usernames and passwords. This should have included:

• A lock-out on a certain number of tries
• A network detection system setup to detect multiple logins
• A task or question that can’t be completed by automated bots (for example: Captcha)

Stopping attacks at source

The problem in cybersecurity is often as simple as a developer’s desire to quickly produce a solution and get it online, but forgetting to think through the processes that an adversary might take. In this case, it was a novice problem. Most system administrators would advise that a three-try system works best and will quickly knock out an automated agent. This lock can then be identified by the user and often reported by to the host company.

However, companies must also do their own penetration testing and not wait for the general public to find the weaknesses. For big firms such as Apple and Starbucks, there is no excuse for this.

Starbucks has made massive advances in getting users to trust mobile payments – and this kind of sloppiness is unlikely to stop this trend. But it is the lack of due process that is the most worrying in such large firms.

These businesses perhaps have a great deal to learn from the finance sector, where companies often employ many network monitors to detect brute-force logins and stop attacks at their source.

We would never trust a bank not to implement an auto-lock-out on incorrect passwords. A simple email reset on three bad attempts seems a balanced approach. Obviously if someone compromises your main email account they can do the reset for you, but it is another hurdle in their path. Also an intruder could trip a whole range of accounts on a network too.

Increasingly, multi-factor authentication is used, often involving location-tracking via a phone’s GPS, to prove a user is who they claim to be. This means the best piece of security you have could actually be the mobile phone that goes everywhere with you (but please make sure to refresh your passwords on a regular basis).

For companies, however, there’s nothing else for it but to employ managed security services with highly trained staff who can pick-off threats as they occur.

Why men are not biologically useless after all...

Told you so! Photo of Charles Darwin uploaded by Shehal Joseph/Flickr, CC BY-SA

Does the world really need men? It has been suggested that, in the age of cloning – and with enough sperm banks around to populate several future generations – the question is legitimate. However, new research suggests that the reason that we need two sexes is because it improves the overall genetic quality of a species and reduces the risk of population extinction.

The question of why sex is so widespread across nature has intrigued and puzzled scientists for a very long time. From a biological perspective, the purpose of life is to pass on your genes to the next generation. Asexual organisms, such as bacteria, do this simply by duplicating themselves. The offspring is an identical copy of the parent, which passes on all its genes.

Sexual organisms, however, need a partner to reproduce. Sexual species have two sexes, but only one of these can bear young. This means that sexual populations can only grow half as fast as asexual populations. Sex is also inefficient for the reason that you need to find a mate, which takes time and energy. Overall, life would be a lot simpler if we could just split in two to reproduce.

So why did sex evolve? The explanation may lie in mutations. Mutations are typos that occur as DNA is copied. The result is that we all have new variants of DNA that our parents don’t have. Most mutations have no effect, but some can be useful, and help an organism to survive. Other mutations, however, result in a loss of function in the gene they affect.

Need to get in the mood? Just think of all the possible mutations Francisco Gonzalez/Flickr, CC BY-SA

This leads to a possible explanation for why sex is useful: having two sets of genes – one from each parent – allows for the possibility of inheriting new, beneficial forms of a gene, while protecting the offspring from dysfunctional genes, because if one copy of a gene is damaged, the other copy can kick in and mask the damaging effect.

Natural selection removes badly damaged mutations from the gene pool very quickly. However, those with smaller effects, or those that can hide behind a functional version inherited from the other parent, can persist. In fact, the average human family carries hundreds of mutations that cause loss of function.

Some individuals in sexually reproducing species are better at finding mates than others, either because they compete successfully, or because they are more attractive to the opposite sex. This process, called “sexual selection”, was first identified by Charles Darwin.

Most research in this area concentrates on the implications of this selection for individuals, but if sexual selection is strong it might also affect the overall genetic quality of populations. In other words, sexual selection might provide the answer to why we have sex in the first place. If only “high-quality” individuals – those without harmful mutations – get to pass their genes on to the next generation, then the genetic benefits derived from sexual selection offset the costs of sex.

A 10-year breeding test

But that was all theory. How can we actually test this idea? The answer lies in experimental evolution. Short-term experiments have provided confusing results, but a real test takes years. Humans have experimented with evolution, selectively breeding from chosen individuals and not others, ever since we began to domesticate other species. Similar selective breeding of small species that can easily be kept in the lab, and that have rapid generation times, allow us to observe evolution in progress, and to measure its effect.

An international team of researchers, led by the University of East Anglia, bred two lines of flour beetles – a common pantry pest and a popular laboratory organism. One line was made up of 90 beetles of one sex, and 10 of the other in each generation. These are the conditions of strong sexual selection, under which many members of the abundant sex will fail to reproduce. The other line underwent weak sexual selection, with one female to five males, or no sexual selection at all, with one male for each female. Under weak or no sexual selection, most individuals will pass on their genes to the next generation.

Such effort - I wish I could just duplicate. James Niland/Flickr, CC BY-SA

After seven years of evolution, the researchers matched brothers and sisters with one another for a further three years. Such inbreeding quickly reveals harmful mutations, because siblings share 50% of their genes. If they both pass a mutation on to offspring, then it is no longer masked, and the offspring is unlikely to survive. This means we can use how long a family survives as a measure of the overall genetic quality of the two lines.

None of 108 families from populations that had evolved under weak sexual selection tested survived beyond the 10th generation of inbreeding. However, 8 of the 108 families from the strong sexual selection histories were still going strong after 20 generations of inbreeding.

Perhaps we now have an answer to the question of “why sex”? Because sexual selection – and partner choice – improves the overall genetic quality of a species and reduces the risk of population extinction.

The rise of wearable health tech could mean the end of the sickie

Is your smartwatch spying on you? wearables by Alexey Boldin/shutterstock.com

Now that the sun is shining and the temperature is rising, it’s officially sickie season: go to work, or get struck down with “flu”, a “24-hour virus”, or that faithful stand-by, the dodgy prawn takeaway.

Figures show that over a third of employees in the UK admit to pulling a sickie at some point or other. But things may be changing soon – wearable tech such as the Apple Watch, Microsoft Band, Fitbit, or Jawbone Up may become mainstream within a few years, bringing health monitoring capabilities that reveal how your body is performing. It’s not inconceivable that in time this same data could be used to prove how well, or unwell, you are – such as when phoning in sick.

Wearable health tech is still in its early days. These devices come with sensors that can record how many steps and how much exercise you’ve taken, how well and long you‘ve slept, stress levels, blood pressure, sun exposure, even what you’ve have eaten. Added together, all this could easily demonstrate that you’re not so sick after all.

Since some wearables are aimed at being fashionable accessories, employers might be minded to tap into the trend. So next time you’re pulling a sickie, you might need the data to back up your story. With GPS-equipped devices there’ll be no opportunity to escape your sickbed to a barbeque or trip to the beach, while ultraviolet sensors will detect the increase in sunshine and motion sensors detect movement not typically associated with bed rest.

Using your data against you

What if employers and health insurance companies move in the direction that the car insurance industry has taken, where every health transgression (a boozy night out, a Christmas feast, or too many lazy days on the sofa) could increase your health premium rates? Such a scenario isn’t so far away, and this should concern us. Apple is clearly making a beeline for the health and fitness industry with Watch and its integrated HealthKit software, now integrated with its iOS mobile operating system, and it is the only firm to do so.

Typically, health insurers use body mass index (a calculation of body fat that takes into account your age, weight and height) to set premiums, and some insurers set rates based on basic data from wearables, such as the number of steps we take link?. Fitbit and Jawbone Up are both already playing a bigger role in how health insurance is calculated, with more employers opting to monitor data generated by such wearable trackers. And here’s the catch: employers are holding their insured staff to account with penalties and rewards as part of an increasing number of so-called “corporate-wellness programmes”.

Is your wearable spying on you? MorePix, CC BY-SA

For example, at BP staff are given Fitbits for free as long as the company has access to their data. The more physically active an employee is (as measured by the device) the more points they’re awarded. Higher points lower the company’s insurance premium. Other companies are adopting similar wellbeing employee health insurance programmes too.

Consent, for now

Wearable tech is still far from perfect, and that means inventive workarounds will be found. A few acquaintances of mine who shall remain nameless have found creative ways of racking up a few more miles, while actually continuing their usual, less-than-active habits. These include holding and shaking the device for a few minutes at a time, or attaching it to their cat or dog, or offering pocket money to other, younger and fitter family members to wear. Obviously insurers and developers are aware of these, so it won’t be long until such loopholes are closed.

For now, we can consent to share our health data from wearables with employers or insurers in exchange or lower premiums or cheaper travel. But how long before the company wearable is a mandatory part of the uniform?

Why our ancestors were more gender equal than us

Modern hunter-gather cultures, like the Agta of the Philippines, show how equal our ancestors were. Rodolph Schlaepfer

It is often believed that hierarchical and sometimes oppressive social structures like the patriarchy are somehow natural – a reflection of the law of the jungle. But the social structure of today’s hunter gatherers suggests that our ancestors were in fact highly egalitarian, even when it came to gender. Their secret? Not living with many relatives.

These societies were not only strikingly different from most horticulturalist, farming and pastoralist societies today, but also from the hierarchical societies of apes, our closest evolutionary relatives. Chimpanzees and gorillas are known to have patterns of sex inequality similar to post-agriculture humans.

The history of hierarchy

About 10,000 years ago, humans started forming societies based on food production which also led to the development of wealth accumulation and inheritance. It was these factors that resulted in well-structured hierarchies based on social ranking – with more wealth leading to more power. This organisation was also expressed at the gender level. The sex that could monopolise resources could also take charge of territories, wedding decisions, family life and was ultimately able to control the opposite sex.

Females in the back, please! wikimedia

Specifically, sex inequality – which is seen in most food-producing societies that evolved relatively recently in human history – meant that the powerful sex (most often men) could dictate alliances between the relatives they lived with. This increased the power of clans and facilitated wealth transfer over generations. The weaker sex (most often the women) as a rule had no choice but to follow their husbands and move with their husband’s family.

Well, we do not believe that this grim scenario is necessarily “natural”. Before food production started, we were all hunter-gatherers. And if the few hunter-gatherer groups living today are representative of our adaptive past, then our findings suggest that our ancestors were much more egalitarian, and sex-egalitarian, than we are.

In our study of the BaYaka from Congo and the Agta from the Philippines, what is striking is how egalitarian these populations are in many social domains: there are no chiefs, no large households, no property of land or resources, and couples are welcome to come and go between camps as they please. Couples must constantly move around between camps in search of food or in search of people to share food with, and for this reason group composition keeps changing. As a result individuals in a camp can be highly unrelated to each other, which prevents the formation hierarchical structures.

The Ogiek people are some of the few remaining hunter-gatherers, living in East Africa EPA

This freedom of movement allows for both men and women to recruit help from their families when necessary. The main result from our computer simulations and co-residence data was that although both husbands and wives try to maximise the number of family members living close by, neither sex has the upper hand. This implies that neither one ends up living with their relatives but instead reside with a small proportion of relatives and in-laws and a large number of unrelated individuals. Rules of sharing are therefore extended to unrelated co-residents, and movement between camps is frequently used as a way to avoid the less cooperative individuals.

These populations could not have evolved in harsh environments without placing cooperation between the sexes and families at the heart of their lifestyle. In a nutshell, this means that egalitarianism, food sharing, large-scale cooperation and sex equality are all a matter of necessity in hunter-gatherers.

The evolution of fairness

Our simulations are a simple mechanistic answer for the puzzle of why modern hunter-gatherers live with so few kin, but they have huge implications for our understanding of human evolution, and also of human nature.

The fact that we are able to live, interact and cooperate with unrelated individuals and not only with kin has been recently identified as the most fundamental difference between human societies and other animal societies.

Of course, humans have the capacity to be anything, from the most cruel and unequal species, with sex slavery and warfare, to the most cooperative and caring animal, with people donating blood to complete strangers. Good and evil are just the two extremes of our malleable nature. However, the few surviving hunter-gatherers groups show us that without the equality and cooperation between sexes that they share with our distant ancestors many of the characteristics that we like to call “uniquely human”, such as caring for others and fairness, would probably not have evolved.

How we made an octopus-inspired surgical robot using coffee

Day of the tentacle Shutterstock

The unparalleled motion and manipulation abilities of soft-bodied animals such as the octopus have intrigued biologists for many years. How can an animal that has no bones transform its tentacles from a soft state to a one stiff enough to catch and even kill prey?

A group of scientists and engineers has attempted to answer this question in order to replicate the abilities of an octopus tentacle in a robotic surgical tool. Last week, members of this EU-funded project known as STIFF-FLOP (STIFFness controllable Flexible and Learnable manipulator for surgical OPerations) unveiled the group’s latest efforts.

Conventional surgical robots are based on structures made from rigid linked components. This means they can only reach sites inside a patient’s abdomen by moving along straight lines and cannot navigate around organs that may be in the way. It also means they risk damaging healthy tissue during an operation.

Robotic octopus arms have much greater freedom of movement than conventional surgical robots

Work by biologists from the Hebrew University in Israel on the underlying functions of octopus motion and control have led to a promising new approach. By mimicking the octopus’s ability to alter the stiffness of its arm, the new robotic device can squeeze through narrow openings and adapt to the environment inside a patient’s body.

This will enable it to move past and manipulate delicate organs without damaging them. Equipping the arm with a surgical tool, such as a gripper or cutter, will give surgeons a way to conduct keyhole surgery in a more intuitive and safe manner.

Up and away Tommaso Ranzani, Author provided

The STIFF-FLOP bio-robotics team at the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna (SSSA), Pisa, created a slender, soft and modular structure from silicone that moves using pneumatic actuators. This means the robot is capable of making patterns of movement that are strikingly similar to the way octopuses moves their tentacles.

To make the robot’s movement even more like those of its biological role model and enable changes in stiffness, SSSA joined forces with my team at King’s College London to employ a technique called granular jamming. This uses a flexible balloon-like chamber filled with small granules. When the air is sucked out of the chamber, the granules within are compressed or jammed against each other and the whole chamber becomes stiff.

The STIFF-FLOP robotic arm has much greater motion and manipulation abilities

This effect is the same as the one used to vacuum-pack ground coffee for sale in the supermarket. In fact, the granules used in the STIFF-FLOP robot prototypes are actually ground coffee granules because of their excellent jamming behaviour.

By integrating these granule-filled chambers with the robot arm, it can be “frozen” in specific positions. This means it can be locked in place once it has reached a location within a patient’s abdomen were an operation needs to be conducted.

This new design has proven capable of morphing from a completely relaxed state to a very stiff state, while providing ample space for surgical instruments to be integrated. As such, we plan to carry out the world’s first soft-robotic surgery on human cadavers by the end of this year, under the direction of world-leading surgeons from the University of Turin and Guy’s Hospital, London.

The STIFF-FLOP tentacle in action in simulated surgery

But octopus-inspired robots could also find uses in several other areas where changing their stiffness will be useful. For example, they could be used for industrial inspection especially where the robot needs to squeeze through a narrow opening and then extend into an otherwise inaccessible or dangerous area. This idea is of particular interest to the nuclear energy industry, which is already employing rigid, snake-like robots for such tasks.

Another potential application is assisting with search and rescue operations and bomb disposal. This is because robots that can adapt to the shape of their environment would be particular handy when they need to interact with fragile objects or humans.

Old videogames given new life – but can you ever really go back?

Everything old is new again: ZX Spectrum Vega. Retro Computers

Those over the age of 30 or so may recall fondly the 1980s British home computer boom, which saw the arrival of classic machines such as the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, BBC Micro and Amstrad CPC.

Perhaps taking advantage of the spending power of this older crowd, numerous products have been launched to capitalise on nostalgia for the games of this era. The ZX Spectrum Vega is a new device that harks back to the design of the original, and which comes loaded with 1,000 classic games. The Vega is able to use a television as a display, but thankfully modern technology has done away with the need to load games from tape. Similar ideas have been used to reintroduce the classic Atari 2600, the Commodore 64 and even another Sinclair revival, as a game controller.

The Vega’s first batch of 1,000 units has sold out at £100 each – more than I’d want to spend on what will to most seem like a novelty item. What is behind this obsession with antiquated gaming history? Is it shameless reselling of the old as new? Or does it speak to something deeper about what games were then and what they have become now?

The evolution of video games

The original ZX Spectrum shipped in 1982 with a 3.5MHz processor and 16KB RAM. By comparison, the current generation of Playstation and Xbox consoles from Sony and Microsoft contain eight processing cores running at 1.5GHz and 8GB RAM. Such an extraordinary increase in power has allowed today’s games to be almost unrecognisable in comparison to their primitive 1980s counterparts: full-colour, photo-realistic three-dimensional worlds rather than four-colour representations. Games are also more accessible, available everywhere from web browsers to smartphones and televisions.

This has led to a demographic shift in who plays games, and how and where they’re played. While for many years gamers were predominantly male with the average age steadily rising into the mid-30s, now there are gamers of all ages and a near-equal gender balance – helped by the breadth of games built for popular consoles such as the Nintendo Wii and mobile phones.

Film or videogame? With today’s graphics it’s hard to tell. JBLivin, CC BY

The evolution of the industry

In the early days, limited video game hardware forced games developers to find creative solutions. Memory was severely restricted, so in order to provide replayability games had to be demanding – they had to challenge the player to beat them. Today’s games tend not to focus on mastering the game mechanics but instead use psychological concepts of flow to keep players engaged. They match the degree of challenge to the skill of the player and offer feedback rewards to keep the player coming back for more. Games can be huge, often requiring an investment of dozens of hours to complete – to beat a game can be as much a feat of endurance as skill.

Starquake: cheap to make, fun to play, not much to look at. Bubble Bus Software

The cost to develop early games was comparatively low, with games often created by a single programmer/artist/designer working out of their bedroom. There was opportunity for experimentation, to try out new or unusual mechanics. With no rules or industry history to go on, there was considerable innovation.

Today mainstream games have budgets comparable to films with staff of dozens or even hundreds – sunk costs which often lead developers to be risk-averse with their games, leaving little room for creativity. Ubisoft executive Jade Raymond has said that the market will only support ten “triple-A” titles a year. That means if you’re working in a triple-A studio and you’re not making a top-ten game, then you’re making a loss. Publishers need to reduce risk in order to increase their chances of a return, and that stifles creativity. In 2014, of the top 20 video games sold 16 were the latest iterations of long-running franchises. One was built around the Lord of the Rings franchise, and three of the remaining four were new games to compliment the launch of next generation consoles.

Authenticity, nostalgia, disappointment

One theory is that technology isolates us from reality. Nostalgic experiences evoke feelings of authenticity because they often derive from a simpler time. In the games industry we’ve seen interactions become more direct and authentic. Gesture-tracking devices such as Microsoft’s Kinect, voice control or eye-tracking control devices – people will buy imitation musical instruments to use as controllers for games like SingStar. Through Facebook games we can interact with people we know in our real lives. All of these devices allow a greater connection to reality – perhaps it’s this same motivation that drives us to try and relive our earlier gaming experiences?

Chuckie Egg on the BBC Micro. A&F Software

It’s very hard to think about nostalgia without drawing from personal experience. I have very fond memories as an eight-year-old huddled around a BBC Micro playing games like Chuckie Egg with my Dad. I wasted many happy hours in the local arcade playing Double Dragon II. One of my first games on the NES was Bionic Commando, and I remember spending summer holidays playing through Sonic the Hedgehog on the Megadrive, and Street Fighter II on the SNES. Monkey Island on the PC was and still is a classic – and Privateer remains one of my favourite games ever.

The original Sonic the Hedgehog. Sega

I’ve revisited all these games in some new form or another– some have been ported to run on modern systems, some remastered and updated, others completely rewritten. But more often than not I’ve been disappointed; finding myself looking back through rose tinted glasses to a time of greater freedom to invest in playing games – and fewer distractions. I hope that those who have invested in their ZX Spectrum Vega don’t find the same.

But even if the ZX Spectrum Vega becomes an expensive paperweight for some, there’s no doubting the original’s place in British gaming history. Preserving it for future generations to enjoy for a moment, and reflect on how far we have come certainly has some merit. After all, games were better in the old days – right?

What rats in a maze can teach us about our sense of direction

Just ask a cab driver - they've got that map in their head. Beverley Goodwin/Flickr, CC BY-SA

London’s taxi drivers have to pass an exam in which they are asked to name the shortest route between any two places within six miles of Charing Cross – an area with more than 60,000 roads. We know from brain scans that learning “the knowledge” – as the drivers call it - increases the size of their hippocampi, the part of the brain crucial to spatial memory.

Now, new research suggests that bigger hippocampi may not be the only neurological benefit of driving a black cab. While the average person likely has many separate mental maps for different areas of London, the hours cabbies spend navigating may result in the joining of these maps into a single, global map.

The grid-cell revolution

Decades of work in both humans and animals has led to great leaps in our understanding of how the hippocampus and nearby brain regions form maps of space. A key breakthrough was made by John O’Keefe in the 1970s, who used electrodes to record the activity of individual brain cells in the hippocampus of rats as they walked around. He found cells that were active at single locations in space and named them place cells. For example, one cell was active when the rat was at the top left corner of the room, while others were active when the was rat in the middle of the room.

Four decades later, the same technique was used to identify so-called grid cells. Like place cells, grid cells are active at specific points in space, but unlike place cells become active at multiple points organised in a repeating triangular pattern. Together, these cells and others are thought to be the cellular basis of the brain’s spatial map, and their discovery led to the award of a Nobel Prize in 2014.

A grid cell’s activity as a rat moves around a room.

The repetitive pattern of grid cells means that they are activated in regular intervals as an animal explores an environment. It is thought that this repetitive activity can act like a ruler: by counting the number of times groups of grid cells become active, the rat’s brain can calculate how far it has moved. Conversely, these cells could also be used to navigate between points in space by calculating how far you have to move to reach a goal. If grid cells did act as a ruler, to get consistent measurements, the distance between the points where the cells are active would need to be the same no matter where you are.

Yet this requirement has been questioned by recent findings showing that in certain places grid cell activity is distorted from its regular pattern. For example, the pattern is misshapen near to the walls of some environments, being particularly strongly affected in the corners of triangular spaces. It is therefore difficult to use the grid cells as a ruler in these places.

In the dark

To investigate this issue, we recorded grid cells in rats exploring two compartments connected by a corridor. Crucially, the two compartments were identical: they looked, smelled and felt the same. We hypothesised that if grid cells do act as a useful measure of space their activity should span the two compartments even though they are perceptually identical, reflecting the fact that each has a different position in space.

A number of unglamorous months were spent in a dark room scattering rice around the compartments to encourage the rats to explore, followed by the only slightly more glamorous analysis of the data. Happily, we observed a number of interesting results. When the rats first started to explore, the activity patterns of the grid cells were identical in the two compartments, reflecting the identical sensory cues in each.

However, once the rats had spent a number of days exploring, the grid cells’ activity became more regular, eventually forming a single continuous pattern spanning both compartments. The grid cells had moved from having two separate and identical maps for each compartment to a single and continuous map covering both. Placing both compartments on the same map means that the grid cells can be used as a measure of space and for navigation between them.

While an interesting development, this will certainly not be the final word on the function of grid cells. Other studies have found apparently permanent distortions in their activity patterns, and it remains to be seen whether there are certain factors that prevent the regular pattern forming, and what they may be. Crucial future steps will likely include identifying how distortions in grid cell activity patterns relate to inaccuracies in navigation, and whether inactivating grid cells prevents accurate navigation.

Most studies use rodents to investigate the brain’s representation of space, as recording from single cells in humans currently requires invasive surgery. Brain scans have shown that humans also have grid cells, but new technologies are needed before we can ask whether the grid cells of cab drivers form the same global patterns seen in our rats.