Musical training can accelerate brain development and help with literacy skills

What's happening in world-famous cellist Yo-Yo Ma's brain? Cello by Shutterstock

The notion that musical training can have positive effects on cognitive functions other than music has long been a source of interest. Research first emerged at the beginning of the 20th century. Standardised assessments of IQ and musical ability suggested the two were correlated – and it was thought that participation in musical training could improve IQ.

Recently, research has shifted focus from effects on musical training on global intelligence and instead focuses on benefits to specific skills and tasks in individuals.

Musical training has shown to lead to improvements in a wide variety of different skills, including memory and spatial learning for example. In addition, language skills such as verbal memory, literacy and verbal intelligence have been shown to strongly benefit from musical training.

Musicians are also more adept at processing speech in environments where there are large amounts of background noise, possess a greater propensity for processing auditory signals that are in some way degraded and show an advantage over their musically naive counterparts when it comes to pitch detection in both music and language. Recent advances in technologies have also allowed researchers to probe into the neural (functional, structural and electrophysiological) underpinnings of these adaptations.

The brain responds

A new study, just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, aimed to assess neurodevelopment in adolescence and the impact that certain forms of experience, such as musical training, could have on this process.

Neuro-physiological methods were adopted to measure subcortical and cortical responses to speech in the brains of two groups of adolescents in a high school in the Chicago area. One group took part in group musical training and one group took part in a Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps programme. Enrolment on to one of these two programmes was part of the curriculum of the schools with which the lead researcher, Adam Tierney of Northwestern University, worked.

March of progress. Richard Thornton/Shutterstock.com

The method allowed Tierney and his colleagues to assess how their participants' brains encoded speech before and after three years of taking part in the two different types of training. Language skills were also assessed using a phonological awareness task – which included asking the adolescents to create a new word by dropping a syllable or unit of sound from a spoken word. They were also assessed using a phonological memory task, in which they had to repeat back lists of digits or non-English words, and a rapid naming task, where they had to read aloud a list of letters or digits as quickly and accurately as they could.

At adolescence the brain is not fully developed and specific areas are yet to mature, which makes this an interesting age to do these tests. The results showed that both groups made improvements in all of the language tasks, as would be expected over this period in their development – but, in addition, the degree of improvement was larger in the phonological awareness task for the group who had undergone musical training.

The methods used allowed the researchers to track the level of neural development present in the brains of the participants. Through this they were then able to measure the usual time course of changes that occurred at this stage in development and assess any alterations due to participation in either the music training, or officer training.

The researchers observed the normal brain development that occurs at this age in both groups. However, for those who participated in musical training the period of time during which regions of the brain responsible for auditory processing were developing was extended in comparison to those that did the officer training. The musically trained groups also showed an accelerated time course for reaching adult cortical development. The results therefore suggest that participation in musical training can accelerate brain development and that this can benefit literacy skills.

Music and language

Music could potentially function as a training ground for language skills and may potentially offer an effective, economical and enjoyable activity that could help improve language skills in children around the world if employed in schools. Giving adolescents musical training could help kick-start and accelerate maturation of their brains.

These advantages may also have potential to provide enhancements to a wider range of skills, such as the learning of a second language. The study suggests that musical training could help prolong the window of time in which the brain is developing and is able to deal with complex auditory input, which in turn could make second language learning more achievable to people who otherwise may struggle.

It is important to note however, that although musical training was shown to produce benefits for the phonological awareness language tasks, for the other two tests of phonological memory and rapid naming, no difference between the two groups of adolescents was found. This suggests that although musical training does have the potential to enhance some forms of language skills, there are areas that it does not improve.

Why is life left-handed? The answer is in the stars

A needle in a haystack? Search for the first ever biological molecule. Hubble Heritage/Flickr, CC BY-SA

While most humans are right-handed, our proteins are made up of lefty molecules. In the same way your left and right hands mirror one another, molecules can assemble in two reflected structures. Life prefers the left-handed version, which is puzzling since both mirrored types form equally in the laboratory. But a new study suggests that this may be because the star-forming cloud that created the first-ever biological molecule, before our sun was even born, made it left-handed.

In 2004, NASA’s Stardust spacecraft swept through the nebulous halo surrounding a comet. What it found was the simplest of life’s building blocks: the amino acid glycine. Comets are frozen remnants from the earliest days in our solar system. Their material is therefore not made in planets, but likely originates in the natal gas cloud that formed our sun.

A research team recently recreated the freezing conditions inside such a star-forming cloud. In apparatus sealed completely from the already crisp air in the laboratory, the temperature can be brought down to -263 degrees Celsius, just ten degrees above absolute zero where even molecules stop vibrating. They believed that on the surface of dust grains suspended in this chilly gas, glycine may have undergone a change that made it left-handed.

Protein molecules: just a bunch of lefties. Perhelion/wikimedia

At the core of the glycine molecule is a carbon atom with four bonds. If two of these bonds attach to hydrogen atoms, then the molecule is symmetric and neither right nor left handed. However, swap a hydrogen for a heavier atom and this symmetry is broken. The molecule can then form two mirrored versions, giving it handedness or “chirality” as it is called in chemistry.

The experiments suggest that a glycine hydrogen atom could be displaced by an atom of deuterium, which is a heavier version of hydrogen that contains an extra neutron in its nucleus, doubling its weight. It is abundant inside star-forming clouds, which is why they create many deuterium-enriched compounds, including heavy water. Once a deuterium atom has replaced a hydrogen, it is very hard to dislodge. This means that the fraction of chiral glycine steadily increases, until the main species of glycine inside the cloud shows left or right handedness.

Chiral glycine is very similar to original glycine, but with an important extra property. Laboratory experiments have shown that chiral glycine is a catalyst for other chiral molecules. That is, it promotes the production of other species with the same handedness as itself.

The result is that if glycine became a left-handed molecule, then future biological molecules would also be predominantly left-handed. When life developed on Earth, it would therefore build from a pool of left-handed molecules, giving it the bias we observe today.

Pinning down glycine in space

This discovery potentially resolves another issue. While glycine is expected to be abundant inside star-forming clouds, it has never actually been observed. Individual molecules absorb different wavelengths of the starlight passing through them. Which wavelengths are absorbed depends on the atoms and their arrangement, providing a fingerprint for the presence of a particular molecule. Glycine’s fingerprint has never been seen. However, these searches have been looking for the symmetric version of glycine, not its left-handed twin. If most of the glycine was left-handed, it would absorb different wavelengths and be missed.

It is an exciting idea, but many questions still remain. In the new experiment, the scientists could tell that deuterium had replaced hydrogen to form chiral glycine, but the quantities were too small to see which mirrored version had formed.

It could be that the dust grain structure favours left or right handedness. Alternatively, both types could form but one might be more easily destroyed. The answer to this would tell us if life beyond our own solar system is expected to share our left-handed bias.

Giving fish their medicine at the right time can make all the difference

A fish out of time is as bad as a fish out of water Shutterstock/The Conversation

Over the course of evolution, humans and other animals have developed biological clocks. These act as internal timekeepers and are synchronised by environmental cues, mainly the daily alternation between day and night. These internal clocks control biological rhythms for things like temperature, alertness and tiredness, helping animals to adapt their daily and seasonal activities to the environmental changes.

In recent years, these insights have become increasingly interesting to the world of medicine. Reseachers have been looking into the extent to which drugs have different effects on people at different times of the day as a means of optimising treatment – a field known as chronotherapy. In particular, Professor Francis Levi of Warwick Medical School has pioneered applying these principles to optimise chemotherapy treatments for cancer patients. His work revolves around improving patients' quality of life by administering drugs at times when they can be best metabolised and are therefore least toxic.

One hour past the fish

While such work is still in its early stages in humans, the potential benefits have scarcely been considered in veterinary medicine at all. In my specialist area of aquaculture, otherwise known as fish farming, myself and some colleagues have been looking at some of the possibilities.

One of the major challenges in the field is disease outbreaks. At present, fish farms aim to keep their fish healthy by administering a variety of licensed drugs into the enclosures when there are outbreaks of disease. This happens more or less at random, depending on the operational constraints of the farm in question. Yet our recent research has found that the levels of both the toxicity and effectiveness of these drugs towards the fish varies at different times of day.

My colleagues and I have studied how the effects of several compounds on the physiology of fish change during the day. For example we looked at the effects of the anaesthetics which are used to minimise the stress responses of the fish. We found that if the fish were given the anaesthetics during the day, the drugs took effect much more quickly than at night, when the recovery period also took longer.

More recently our studies have looked at Atlantic salmon, the main aquaculture species in the UK. The focus has been the effects of chemicals used to control sea lice, the most significant parasite in salmon farming in Europe, estimated a few years ago to cost the world industry around €300m (£215m) a year.

Sea lice: number one parasite in salmon farms Norsk Havbrukssenter, CC BY-SA

Farms treat infected salmon in several ways, either in chemical baths or by adding drugs to the fishes' food. This has led to a surge in parasite resistance and can cause stress in the fish, which can reduce feeding. This in turn affects growth rates, as well as raising concerns about the fishes' welfare.

We have recently looked at the effects of hydrogen peroxide, one of the chemicals used to control sea lice, on the stress and toxicological responses of the salmon at different times of the day. Our initial results have found substantial time-dependent differences in the drug’s effects on the physiology of the fish. This is another sign that you can minimise negative effects by considering the timing of the treatment. Not only could it directly benefit the aquaculture industry by improving fish growth, it could improve its image as consumers increasingly demand higher standards of animal welfare.

When it comes to controlling sea lice there is much optimism in aquaculture around using “cleaner” fish called wrasse that feed on fish parasites. But their use in salmon aquaculture is still in its infancy – and further research is being conducted to optimise how they are produced and managed. While that takes place, the industry is still relying on chemicals, so there appears much scope for new strategies that could improve their effects.

Where we next cast our nets

All a matter of timescale? Leo U, CC BY-SA

In future we are going to look at the effectiveness of drugs at controlling parasites when they are administered at different times, taking into account the effects on both the pathogens and the fish. Another area of enquiry that potentially looks interesting concerns using vaccines or immunostimulants to prevent diseases and reduce stress in farmed fish. Since fishes' immune systems also seem to rely on daily rhythms, it would not be surprising if the effects of such treatments varied throughout the day too.

Professor Giuseppe Piccione and his collaborators at the University of Messina in Italy pointed out as long ago as 2002 that chronotherapy should lead to a better use of medicines on farm animals. Our progress with fish certainly supports this. If medics in other fields both in human and animal medicine can learn to fine-tune treatments by adjusting administration times and doses accordingly, we could be looking at a great leap forward in the decades to come.

In first case of its kind, UK court rules surveillance law unconstituional

European legislation has emerged triumphant once more. court by Peter Fuchs/shutterstock.com

Controversial surveillance legislation hustled through parliament last summer has been ruled unlawful by a UK court, which argued that the vague terms and descriptions of powers in the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act 2014 (DRIPA) renders the act incompatible with human rights under European law.

In a 44-page ruling, the divisional court criticised the lack of clarity and detail in spelling out the terms and conditions under which communications data can be intercepted by police and intelligence agencies, declaring the act “incompatible with the British public’s right to respect for private life and communications and to protection of personal data under Articles 7 and 8 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights”.

It is a decision that must have caused howling with both joy and indignation from both sides of the House of Commons, as the legal action that led to this ruling was a cross-party effort by Conservative MP David Davis and Labour MP Tom Watson. The judgment makes for interesting and instructive reading, providing as it does an overview of the fissures emerging between how national legislatures, led by the UK, regard their relationship to the European Union’s institutions.

Precedence of international law

DRIPA, one in a series of laws supporting controversial surveillance powers passed by successive UK governments, establishes the principle by which anti-terrorism measures and national security priorities take precedence over human rights considerations. However, the judgment rules that the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights must take precedence, and in doing so requires the UK government to undo its own act of parliament – a significant precedent by a British court.

David Anderson QC, the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, comments that this ruling confirms the already well-established supremacy of EU over national law. But it also underscores the UK’s truculence in complying with this principle compared to other European nations.

Human rights online

The judgment also adds to international recognition, such as from the UN, that the way people use the internet is a human rights issue.

It does not refer to the wider geopolitical context of issues around the internet’s design, governance and use – from Wikileaks to the Snowden revelations, to the recent appointment of Joe Cannataci as the first UN Special Rapporteur on Privacy. But reading between the lines, it reflects the quiet sea-change underway in national and international courts as they start to comprehend the legal and political challenges of a world increasingly dependent upon computer networks and communication.

This judgment vindicates the efforts and the slow drip, drip effect of long-term lobbying from across the political spectrum for formal recognition that human rights matter online.

What this ruling makes more apparent is the lack of appropriate and affordable legal means for people to rectify violations of those rights. A recent report from the Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights on the rule of law on the internet, and a move to incorporate human rights into the heart of the internet’s governing bodies such as ICANN demonstrate that the debate is moving in that direction. The Right to Be Forgotten rulings are another example of courts deciding that human rights trump the technocratic approach.

Access regime poorly governed

It’s good news that those with power to enforce these principles are doing so, with courts correcting the government’s misuse of terrorist threats and abuse of the spirit of the law that governs the democratic process.

However, while the ruling is a positive step towards more robust checks and balances to abuses of executive power, it draws a distinction between its opinion on controversial EU laws governing blanket data retention, and its judgment that DRIPA lacks adequate standards governing access to that data.

Data retention and access to it may be legally distinct, but through mandatory data retention regulations EU member state governments have access to considerable details of our private lives online. With retention periods varying from six months to two years across the EU, this scale of data retention has been a source of friction between EU nations, and a bone of contention for civil liberties groups.

In 2014 the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruled that the 2006 EU Data Retention Directive violated the same elements (Articles 7 and 8) of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights as DRIPA. This ruling may have made the DRIPA legally redundant at the time it was hurried into law, but this did not diminish its political significance in the Conservative government’s use of cybersecurity rhetoric.

Why is the fine line between retention and access important? As privacy expert and online human rights advocate, the late Caspar Bowden noted in one of his interventions, this is much more than an academic distinction:

Ubiquitous personal communication technologies are here to stay. Because of exponentially falling data storage costs, two contrasting states of society can be envisaged … either that individuals determine whether and when their history is recorded, subject to exceptions, or that data will exist about everyone all the time. This is the policy choice between data retention and preservation, and it is a sharp dichotomy.

Bowden puts his finger on the political dimensions to legalities about the rights implications of the intimate entanglement of internet media and communications with everyday life, politics, and business. So the question remains: why do we permit governments and companies to retain so much data, about so many people, for so much of the time? I hope this judgment on access will be a first step along the path of the “broader-reaching change to data retention” David Anderson suggests may be in the air.

A handshake in space changed US-Russia relations: how long will it last?

Frenemies? NASA

Exactly 40 years ago, a historic handshake took place between Russian cosmonaut Aleksey Leonov and US astronaut Tom Stafford during a joint USSR-American docking mission, kicking off a successful collaboration between the two countries in space. That cooperation has lasted, even when relationships on the ground deteriorated. But now that there are more international entrants in the field of space exploration, how firm will the US-Russia bond hold, especially as political tensions rise?

For now, however, US and Russia are working together on the in space. Some 400 km above us, the International Space Station (ISS) is orbiting with three crew members on board: two Russians and one American. Next week, a rocket launched from the Russian launch facility in Baikonur, Kazakhstan, will carry a Japanese astronaut, plus a third Russian and a second American.

The crew of six will work together until just before Christmas, when they will return to Earth. The ISS is a great example of how international relations should work, and is an active manifestation of the Global Space Exploration Strategy, established in 2007. This is a roadmap for robotic and human exploration of space, endorsed by 14 separate space agencies, including NASA, the European Space Agency and the Russian, Japanese and Chinese counterparts.

From competition to co-dependency

This is a very different picture of space exploration from 50 years ago, when the USA and the USSR were firmly gripped in a Cold War and a space race. In 1965, the USA was lagging behind the Soviet competition. Still smarting from losing out to Sputnik (the first artificial satellite, launched in 1957), Yuri Gagarin (first man in space, 1961) and Valentina Tereshkova (first woman in space, 1963), America focused its efforts on sending a man to the moon.

Part of the drive behind the space race was its mirroring of poor international relations between the US and USSR superpowers. While not actively engaged in direct conflict, the Cold War, the Cuban Missile crisis and war in Vietnam all provided opportunities for tension between the two nations. How, then, did we move from international competition to collaboration?

It only took a decade for matters to change dramatically. By 1975, the US had gained international accolades for the achievements of the Apollo astronauts, and was leading the world in exploration of other planets. In contrast, the USSR had had more limited success with its series of probes to Venus and Mars, and was concentrating much of its efforts on its Salyut programme of Earth orbiters and long duration flights.

Home of the brave NASA

Although international relations between the superpowers were still frosty, there was an easing in dialogue brought about by mutual visits by the presidents of each country. Threat of nuclear war was diminished following signing of the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT), and trading embargoes were lifted.

The handshake between Stafford and Leonov, televised across the globe, was one of the major symbols of the new détente between America and USSR. It started with a bit of to-ing and fro-ing, a quick eye contact, then a handshake. But the overwhelming significance was where this took place: 230 km above the Earth’s surface.

Leonov, the Russian Commander, was an experienced cosmonaut, the first man to undertake a space walk. Stafford, the US Commander, had been Commander of Apollo 10, which all but landed on the Moon. The two men spoke in Russian and English, and exchanged flags. It meant that, not quite 20 years after it had begun, the space race had officially come to an end and an era of four decades of close collaboration in space would follow.

Trouble on the horizon?

In the last few years, however, the political situation has been getting more fraught as Russia continues its conflict with Ukraine. While scientists are hoping this won’t affect the space exploration relationship, this is not something that can be taken for granted. In response to sanctions from the US, Russia’s deputy prime minister Dmitry Rogozin said in 2014 that the country would reject a US request to extend the use of the ISS beyond 2020.

In February this year, however, Russia agreed to remain part of the ISS until 2024, before setting up its own space station.But just a month later, Russian sources reported that Russia and the US had made plans to build a new joint space station after the ISS – something that the US never confirmed.

Exactly what is going to happen is hard to say but the stakes are high. Although the ISS is an international facility, it is reliant on the Russian Soyuz system to deliver and collect astronauts. Russia, however, has suffered a series of launch failures in recent years, prompting concerns that its space industry may be struggling At the same time, the end of NASA’s Space Shuttle Programme, and delay of its successor, the Orion Crewed Vehicle, has meant that the US no longer has the capacity to launch people into space.

However one development that could put an end to these uncertainties is the rise of private companies involved in space exploration. Commercial companies have already been awarded contracts to supply the ISS – but not (yet) to carry astronauts.

Another significant change in recent years are the new entries into the human spaceflight business: ESA has had an astronaut training programme for many years, and is a major partner in the ISS. But it, too, is dependent on Russia for astronaut transport.

Chinese astronaut Liu Yang spent 13 days in space. wikimedia, CC BY-SA

While it is hoped that the US and Russia continue their successful partnership in space, they are eventually going to have to make room for several other players. The biggest new independent player at the table is China, rapidly making great strides in progress, following the successful launch of the first ‘taikonaut’ in 2003.

In the same way that, in the past USSR kept many of its space technology developments (and failures) secret, China tends not to announce its plans ahead of the game, so it is possible that China might be building the capacity to establish a more permanent base in orbit around the Earth. As of now, because of security concerns, NASA researchers are not allowed to work with Chinese citizens affiliated with a Chinese state organisation. This has prevented Chinese astronauts visiting the ISS, and is regretted.

In recent years, despite political upheavals, changes in administrations and re-alignment of national space priorities, there has been a great deal of international good will towards the ISS. This is as much because of what it stands for, as what it does. The ISS is a clear representation that human spaceflight has to be co-operative and that no single nation can go it alone.

As larger numbers of countries become involved in space exploration, the ISS, representing as it does the “final frontier”, could act as a buffer zone from international politics, where confrontation once again gives way before handshakes between colleagues.

When Chrome, YouTube and Firefox drop it like it's hot, Flash is a dead plugin walking

Despite its longevity, now there's more than just aesthetic reasons to drop Flash. logo by 360b/Shutterstock.com

After more than 20 years making the web a slightly more interesting and interactive place, albeit one that pandered to designers’ worst excesses and (in pre-broadband days) led to interminable download waiting times, the word on the net is that Adobe Flash Must Die.

The ironic hack of Hacking Team, the controversial security and surveillance software firm, exposed yet another brace of security flaws and vulnerabilities in Flash, the hugely popular multimedia animation plugin for web browsers. This may be the final straw: Mozilla has disabled Flash by default in its Firefox browser, and Facebook’s chief of security has called for Adobe to set a date when the program will be taken behind the shed and shot:

Why hate Flash?

The software and services that Hacking Team sells provide the means for its government and law enforcement clients to break into and even control computers remotely through the internet. The huge leak of the firm’s company data also revealed details of previously unknown vulnerabilities in software that could be exploited to provide ways of hacking computers – known as zero-day vulnerabilities because the software’s manufacturer has no time to fix the problem.

Zero-day vulnerabilities are great news for criminals. Three of these vulnerabilities were in Flash, and some of those revealed in the leaked documents appeared in attack kits available online within hours – faster than the developers of the affected programs could fix the holes, let alone distribute the updates to millions of users worldwide.

The Flash plugin is notorious for being riddled with security flaws and other shortcomings. Yet it’s also one of the most popular pieces of software on the planet. So what will it take to kill it?

It seemed like a good idea at the time

Back in the web’s dim and distant past (the 1990s), web pages were static, unyielding things with just text and images and occasionally a dumb animated GIF that everyone but the designer hated.

But we wanted more: interactivity, responsiveness, perhaps even a little bit of bling. Flash made this happen, and animators and designers could create all the interactivity they wanted and wrap it up in a file that was inserted into the web page and downloaded on request.

The web is a hostile place for browsers, however, and the more functionality exposed to the web, the larger the surface exposed to attack. Flash offers a large attack surface, and because animation is often computationally demanding, Flash needed deep access to many aspects of the computer to work well, making any flaw potentially serious.

Security isn’t the only problem with Flash. For example it wasn’t security but Flash’s demanding processor and battery consumption that caused Steve Jobs to banish Flash from the iPhone and iPad. On a device with such limited resources as a smartphone or tablet, Flash just doesn’t fit.

While these drawbacks could be tackled, Flash’s proprietor Adobe seems uninterested in doing so, having not released an update to Flash Player on mobile since 2012.

Flash forward to the future

Yet Flash endures, mainly on account of the last 20 years in which websites have been created using it and the plugin has been installed in billions of browsers. There have been attempts at alternatives: Microsoft’s Silverlight was Windows-specific and never caught on, and even the company itself urges people not to use it; Java applets have even worse problems than Flash, and have already been deprecated or removed from modern browsers.

The best hope for the elimination of Flash is HTML 5. The latest version of HTML, the markup language in which web pages are written, finally includes support for directly embedding video and audio in a web page. In combination with JavaScript, web pages can now offer all the interactivity and animated bling that anyone could want. Having previously been without a doubt the largest user of Flash, YouTube now uses an HTML 5-based player as default for its video content. Google’s Chrome browser dropped support for Adobe Flash some time ago, and uses only its own version.

Inside, HTML 5 supports a lot of technologies such as audio/video now, with more to come. Sergey Mavrody, CC BY-SA

HTML 5 has two major advantages over Flash. As a much more modern technology (2014 versus 1995) it delivers better results with fewer resources, making it better suited to mobile devices. But more importantly it requires no plugin, which means the surface open to attack by hackers doesn’t expand just because you want to watch a video, or because some site wants to display an animated advert.

Of course there are still sites that use Flash extensively, and these will have to be redesigned in HTML 5. While these sites still exist and people wish to use them, the Flash problem will not go away.

It’s more than just Flash

Flash’s problems make it an easy target, but it’s just one place where security failures occur. Of the zero-day exploits discovered so far in the Hacking Team leak, three relate to Flash, one to Java, one to a font processor for Windows (also made by Adobe), and one to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 11 browser. But security is hard, no software is invulnerable, and breaches like this will continue to happen. Even if Flash is somehow secured – or disappears entirely – security flaws will still be found and exploited in other software. Security is an ongoing journey, not a destination.

The bigger problem is how the exploits originate. Hacking Team didn’t discover most of these exploits – they bought them from hackers who found them, keeping them secret for use in their products. Perhaps this is why a security firm such as Hacking Team becomes a tempting target for criminals, as a concentrated source of zero-day exploits.

As governments and intelligence agencies collect more information, they will also become more valuable targets. If Britain’s GCHQ is able to bypass all encryption, as prime minister David Cameron has suggested, then all our data could be vulnerable to anyone who can find the slightest crack in GCHQ’s armour.

Five bizarre fossil discoveries that got scientists excited

I've made a huge discovery! Gabor Lonyai/flickr, CC BY-SA

From trilobites to tyrannosaurs, most fossils are of creatures with hard shells or bones. These materials don’t easily biodegrade and sediment has time to build up around them and turn them into a record of the creature that is still with us millions of years after it has died. Soft-bodied organisms like worms, on the other hand, decay rapidly and their fossil record is decidedly patchy.

In exceptional circumstances, however, their remains are preserved and sometimes in the most unusual places. With the right detective skills, palaeontologists can use such discoveries to open up whole new windows on the history of life on Earth. A recent discovery found in 50-million-year-old rocks from Antarctica has yielded a particularly incredible example: fossilised worm sperm.

It’s a great reminder that there are far stranger fossils out there than dinosaur bones. Here are some of the most bizarre specimens ever found.

1. Ancient sperm

A seminal discovery Department of Palaeobiology, Swedish Museum of Natural History

This remarkable find of fossilised spermatozoa from a clitellate or “collared” worm represents the oldest animal sperm ever discovered, beating the previous record holder – springtail sperm found in Baltic amber – by at least ten million years.

The sperm preservation was made possible because such worms reproduce by releasing their eggs and sperm into protective cocoons. In this case, a tough shell kept the cocoons intact until scientists discovered them in shallow marine gravels on the Antarctic Peninsula. Even then, it required high-powered microscopic analysis for the sperm to be spotted.

The sperm most resemble those of a leech-like group of worms that attach themselves to crayfish, even though today these live only in the northern hemisphere. But the researchers think the technique could be applied to other cocoon fossils, and help us learn more about previously cryptic creatures.

2. A well-endowed Silurian shrimp

Old todger?

If 50-million-year-old spermatozoa are surprising, what about a 425-million-year-old penis? Discovered in a ditch near the Anglo-Welsh border in the early 2000s, a tiny ostracod, or seed shrimp, proved to be quite clearly male. Preserved in three-dimensions with all its soft tissues fossilised, it was proportionally well-endowed. “Old Todger” was the headline in the The Sun newspaper.

During the Silurian period (443-419 million years ago), the Welsh borderlands lay on the shelf of a tropical sea. Marine animals were occasionally smothered, entombed and petrified by the ash of distant volcanoes. The ostracod – and countless other small fossils – cannot be seen adequately using microscopes, however, so their mineral tomb has to be gradually ground away and the fossil recreated with 3D digital imaging.

3. Ancient reptile poo and puke

It’s amazing what passes for a fossil. Poozeum/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

The notion that where there’s muck there’s brass is perhaps best shown by coprolites: petrified dung that can be found in many palaeontological shops. Beyond the novelty, such specimens are “trace fossils” of tremendous palaeoecological value. This means they can tell scientists precisely what an extinct creature was eating.

Coprolites are actually just one element of a richer broth, that of bromalites or “stink rocks”. The term was coined in the early 1990s to encompass all matter of excreta preserved in the rock record, and in the last few years, bromalites have been popping up everywhere.

In Australia, they show that Cretaceous plesiosaurs were bottom feeders. In Poland the regurgitated dinners of shell-crushing fish help us work out how life recovered from the biggest mass extinction in Earth history. And in Jurassic shales from Peterborough and Whitby, pavements of squid-like belemnites have been interpreted as ichthyosaur vomit.

4. Yorkshire rhinos

Buckland in the hyaena’s cave

One very odd fossil discovery was made in Kirkdale Cave, near Kirkbymoorside, North Yorkshire in 1821. Workman quarrying for roadstone found a cliffside hollow full of large animal bones. They were at first thought to be cattle, but a local naturalist saw that they were more exotic-looking, and the remains eventually made their way to Oxford University’s Professor William Buckland.

A man who claimed to have eaten his way through the entire animal kingdom, Buckland was the most marvellous experimental scientist. He recognised that the bones were mainly of large herbivores, such as elephants and rhinos. They showed signs of having been gnawed, and fossilised faeces found on the cave floor resembled those of hyaenas. Conveniently being in possession of one as a pet, Buckland proved Kirkdale Cave had been a hyaena den, and founded the science of palaeoecology. Almost two hundred years on, we know that “African” megafauna roamed the Vale of Pickering about 125,000 years ago, in a warm phase between ice ages.

5. A mystery monster

Slice of history. Ghedoghedo/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

The fossils of Mazon Creek in Illinois, USA, were first encountered during coal mining in the 19th Century. But it wasn’t until the 1950s that the site became fossiliferously famous, thanks to Francis Tully’s discovery of an exceptionally weird beast: a beautifully preserved soft-bodied animal revealed in a naturally split mineral nodule.

Specimens turned out to be quite abundant but unique to Mazon Creek, and the beast was given the name of Tullimonstrum gregarium. It is now the state fossil of Illinois. Trouble is, no-one knows what Mr Tully’s Common Monster really is. A few inches long, it has a long snout with toothy pincers at the end, two eyes on stalks, a segmented body, and a finned tail. It was probably a predator, and the rocks it was found in suggest that it lived in tropical, shallow seas.

Beyond that, after more than half a century, we’re not much the wiser. It cannot be satisfactorily united with any other invertebrate group, living or extinct. Even with exceptional preservation, the fossil record always has the capacity to surprise.