The future of rail travel, and why it doesn’t look like Hyperloop

Maryland GovPics/flickr, CC BY-SA

As the world’s population becomes increasingly urbanised, it is estimated that the number of journeys measured in passenger-kilometres will triple by 2050. Roads simply can’t absorb this increase.

Railways, with their greater capacity for carrying more people, quickly and with greater energy efficiency, are the best bet to become our mobility backbone. It’s no surprise that some of the most advanced urban rail systems are in places that are already as much as 80% urbanised, such as in Europe.

Of course, engineers’ imaginations have created many alternatives to the original steel-on-steel approach to the railway. Maglev and the much-publicised but so far theoretical Hyperloop are often regarded as the alternatives to watch – but do they really represent the future of rail travel?

Maglev

Magnetic levitation (maglev) uses powerful magnets to propel the train along dedicated lines that are as straight as possible. The attractive forces between electronically controlled electromagnets in the vehicle and the ferromagnetic guide rails pull the vehicle up, while additional guidance magnets keep it laterally on track. This version of the technology was developed in Germany and is currently used to link Shanghai airport with the city centre at speeds of 430kph (267mph).

However it’s perhaps Japan that is most associated with maglev. The nation that established the modern era of high-speed trains is also attempting to define the next chapter. Superconducting magnetic levitation (SCMaglev) has been in development for decades but was recently approved to run from Tokyo to Osaka from 2027, when it will complete the 500km (311 mile) journey in just over an hour. Unlike the Transrapid system in Shanghai, the Japanese maglev principle uses more powerful superconducting magnets and a guideway design based on repulsive rather than attractive forces.

But while maglev is technically possible, its commercial viability is questionable. There is an extremely high initial infrastructure cost – Japan’s SCMaglev line is expected to cost ¥9 trillion (US$72 billion. It also cannot be integrated with existing rail networks and has a phenomenal energy demand, during both construction and operation. This casts serious doubts about maglev’s true potential as an alternative to conventional high-speed technology, which still has enormous potential.

Hyperloop

Fifth mode of transport? Hyperloop Transportation Technologies

Hyperloop is an elegant idea: travelling seamlessly at 1,220kph (that’s right, 760mph just under the speed of sound) in gracefully designed pods that arrive as often as every 30 seconds is very appealing. The concept is based around very straight tubes with a partial vacuum applied under the pods. These pods have an electric compressor fan on their nose which actively transfers high-pressure air from the front to the rear, creating an air cushion once a linear electric motor has launched the pod. All this would be battery and solar powered.

Technically it’s a challenging design, although if someone can make it happen it’s the man who proposed the idea, Elon Musk, the mind behind SpaceX and Tesla. However, Hyperloop is not rail travel. It is, as Mr. Musk puts it, a fifth mode of transport (after trains, cars, boats and planes). It’s designed to link Los Angeles to San Francisco, cities hundreds of miles apart that can be connected in an almost straight line over a relative flat landscape. This simply isn’t an option in much of the world.

Ultimately, given its unique principles, Hyperloop if it happens at all will be a stand-alone system. It’s no substitute for rail.

What else?

In practice, the vast majority of us will continue to travel on trains that are not dissimilar to those today. The UK is about to take delivery of 122 trains that will be the workhorses of most intercity travel for decades to come. If the trains they are replacing are anything to go by, we will still be using the new ones in 2050, albeit following several refurbishments.

Greater automation are expected to dominate not just rail but all types of travel. Automatic train operation is already used in some urban railways which allows for shorter distances between trains on the same line. It is anticipated that all mainline trains will be able to talk to each other, meaning significantly more trains on the track, increasing capacity and service levels. This in turn will make physical line-side signalling equipment redundant, leading to more simple layouts for new lines. Better use of energy on electrically powered intercity rail travel will likely play a significant role. For instance, energy storage systems and advanced substations will allow a shift to smarter rail systems in a transition similar to that witnessing the power grid becoming a smart grid.

Future predictions are to be treated with caution. But regardless of the bleeding edge, modern state-of-the-art railway investment around the globe is still based on the steel-on-steel principle of trains on tracks. And there’s no reason to doubt that, by and large, this will be the future of rail travel just as it was at its birth nearly 200 years ago.

The autonomous killing systems of the future are already here, they're just not necessarily weapons – yet

(Potentially) killer AI tech is already here, built into many less ominous sounding everyday objects. zen_warden, CC BY-NC-ND

When the discussion of “autonomous weapons systems” inevitably prompts comparisons to Terminator-esque killer robots it’s perhaps little surprise that a number of significant academics, technologists, and entrepreneurs including Stephen Hawking, Noam Chomsky, Elon Musk, Demis Hassabis of Google and Apple’s Steve Wozniak signed a letter calling for a ban on such systems.

The signatories wrote of the dangers of autonomous weapons becoming a widespread tool in larger conflicts, or even in “assassinations, destabilising nations, subduing populations and selectively killing a particular ethnic group”. The letter concludes:

The endpoint of this technological trajectory is obvious: autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow. The key question for humanity today is whether to start a global AI arms race or to prevent it from starting.

It’s hard to quibble with such concerns. But it’s important not to reduce this to science-fiction Terminator imagery, narcissistically assuming that AI is out there to get us. The debate has more important human, political aspects that should be subjected to criticism.

The problem is that this is not the endpoint, as they write; it is the starting point. The global artificial intelligence arms race has already begun. The most worrying dimension of which is that it doesn’t always look like one. The difference between offensive and defensive systems is blurred just as it was during the Cold War – where the doctrine of the pre-emptive strike, for example, that attack is the best defence, essentially merged the two. Autonomous systems can be reprogrammed to be one or the other with relative ease.

Autonomous systems in the real world

The Planetary Skin Institute and Hewlett-Packard’s Central Nervous System for the Earth (CeNSE) project are two approaches to creating a network of intelligent remote sensing systems that would provide early warning for such events as earthquakes or tidal waves – and automatically act on that information.

Launched by NASA and Cisco Systems, the Planetary Skin Institute strives to build a platform for planetary eco-surveillance, capable of providing data for scientists but also for monitoring extreme weather, carbon stocks, actions that might break treaties, and for identifying all sorts of potential environmental risks. It’s a good idea – yet the hardware and software, design and principles for these autonomous sensor systems and for autonomous weapons is essentially the same. Technology is ambivalent to its use: the internet, GPS satellites and many other systems used widely today were military in origin.

As an independent non-profit, the Planetary Skin Institute’s goal is to improve lives through its technology, claiming to provide a “platform to serve as a global public good” and to work with others to develop other innovations that could help in the process. What it doesn’t mention is the potential for the information it gathers to be immediately monetised, with real-time information from sensors automatically updating worldwide financial markets and triggering automatic buying and selling of shares.

The Planetary Skin Institute’s system offers remote, automated sensing systems providing real-time, tele-tracking data worldwide – its slogan is “sense, predict, act” – the same sort of principle, in fact, on which an AI autonomous weapon systems would work. The letter describes AI as a “third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms”, but the capacity to build such AI weapons has been around since at least 2002, when drones transitioned from remote-control aircraft to smart weapons, able to select and fire upon their own targets.

The future is now

Instead of speculating about the future, we should deal with the legacy of autonomous systems from the Cold War, inherited from World War II and Cold War-era complexes between university, corporate and military research and development. DARPA, the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency is a legacy of the Cold War, founded in 1958 but still pursuing a very active high-risk, high-gain model for speculative research.

Research and development innovation spreads to the private sector through funding schemes and competitions, essentially the continuation of Cold War schemes through private sector development. The “security industry” is already tightly structurally tied to government policies, military planning and economic development. To consider banning AI weaponry is to point out the wider questions around political and economic systems that focus on military technologies because they are economically lucrative.

Relating the nuclear bomb to its historical context, the author EL Doctorow said: “First, the bomb was our weapon. Then it became our foreign policy. Then it became our economy.” We must critically evaluate the same trio as they affect autonomous weapons development, so that we discuss this inevitability not by obsessing on the technology but on the politics that allows and encourages it.

What happened to MH370? Prediction markets might give us the answer

Maylasia Airlines Flight MH370 disappeared on 8 March 2014 Laurent Errera, CC BY-SA

Could the wisdom of crowds locate missing Flight MH370? Perhaps with a sufficient number of experts, each bringing a little knowledge of the ocean, currents, wreck salvage, and so forth, the lost aircraft could be found by pooling all this expertise.

While an individual expert’s prediction is limited to their special knowledge, taken together the combined wisdom of experts could locate the vessel more accurately than a range of other predictive tools.

A method known as prediction markets – the combination of a large number of educated estimates – has demonstrated astonishing accuracy in the past. Perhaps it’s time to apply prediction market theory to Flight MH370.

Prediction markets are essentially speculative markets used to aggregate information with a view to making accurate predictions. As an advocate of their power and someone who has researched them extensively, this way of locating lost planes or ships is certainly plausible.

In a 2001 paper in Financial Analysts Journal, Professor Mark Rubinstein retells the fascinating story of the missing US Navy submarine, the USS Scorpion, as featured in Blind Man’s Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage by Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew. On the afternoon of May 27, 1968, Scorpion was declared missing with all 99 men on board. It was known that the submarine must be somewhere within a 20-mile radius of a particular region of the Atlantic Ocean. But this search area was too large – and, after five months of searching, the navy had almost given up hope of finding the submarine.

It was at this point that John Craven, the navy’s top deep-water scientist, turned to a group of submarine and salvage experts and asked them to bet on what could have happened to the lost submarine. He proposed the location suggested by taking an average of their combined responses – and this turned out to be within 200 metres of where the wreck was eventually found. Craven’s prediction method was remarkably successful, predating the explosion of interest in prediction markets by decades.

This story got me thinking, as to the best of my knowledge in the case of Flight MH370 the prediction market method has not yet been formally employed.

Some interested parties believe that there has been, up to now, insufficient information to make proper use of this methodology. But with reports of a piece of debris washed up on Reunion, this may have changed.

The debris is suspected to be a leading edge flaperon of a Boeing 777 wing, used to control the roll or bank of the aircraft. If it is part of an aircraft it will have a unique serial number on it, which can be used to identify the plane it came from. Expert analysis of the debris at the BEA, the French air accident investigators based in Toulouse, will also be able to provide an indication of the speed and angle of impact at which it hit the ocean.

Analysis from marine biologists of the barnacles attached to the debris could help establish where it has travelled before washing ashore. Combined with drift analysis of Indian Ocean currents by oceanographers, this could provide a boost to search efforts.

The next question is how to locate the rest of the missing plane. By aggregating all the information from a broad range of experts, a prediction market of collective expertise could provide us with new leads to continue the search.

We're only just starting to understand the side-effects of driverless cars

Eric Risberg/AP/Press Association Images

The dawn of driverless cars is almost upon us. Governments around the world are rapidly legalising the use of driverless vehicles on their roads and are working towards overcoming regulatory difficulties associated with their large-scale introduction. Meanwhile, some of the largest technology and automotive corporations in the world are investing heavily in driverless technologies. Many people in industry seem certain that the largest revolution in personal transport since the invention of the car itself is less than a decade away.

Whether this technology will ever mean we can give up all responsibility for driving is unclear. But the shift towards driverless cars won’t just mean a change in the way we drive. It will undoubtedly have other implications for car owners, authorities and ultimately all of us.

While the large-scale introduction of fully driverless consumer vehicles appears to be around a decade away, the current generation of new cars is already highlighting some of the potential challenges. For example, in recent demonstrations funded by large car manufacturers, security experts were able to “hack” the onboard computers of ordinary vehicles and take control of braking, steering and engine functions, among other things. In one particularly alarming demonstration, a hacker was able to force the car to perform an emergency stop at high speed.

Safe and secure?

This increasing reliance on computers in modern cars is itself a major and well-documented safety and security challenge, that will be significantly heightened by the nature of truly autonomous vehicles. In such cases, the fundamental fact is that all systems within the vehicle are under the control of a piece of sophisticated software which will always be vulnerable to malicious attack and malfunction.

What’s more, unlike many current vehicles, this software is likely to be directly networked to other vehicles and systems. This in turn introduces a whole host of safety and security complications beyond those experienced in current cars. For example, the complexity of processing data about the road and location and behaviours of surrounding vehicles means that small errors in the design or operation of the software could lead to collisions or other dangerous behaviours that could have fatal results. And the potential to deliberately trigger such events is at the root of the security challenge.

Data gathering smoothgroover22/flickr, CC BY-SA

A further associated challenge is privacy, which believe may trump the security challenges from a regulatory perspective. This issue emerges from the fact that the software in control of driverless vehicles – much like the brains of human drivers – have a model of the vehicle they are controlling and a model of their environment.

The environment model means each vehicle collects huge quantities of data about its surroundings, something that is particularly troubling from a privacy perspective. This data includes locations of other road users and pedestrians relative to the vehicle. Although the anonymous to a driverless vehicle, the potential to infer identities and other information (particularly of other vehicles through networked capabilities) is a privacy minefield.

Black box for the road

Yet if used responsibly, the power of this data could be used for a number of beneficial purposes. For instance, a commonly proposed use is for data to support police inquiries. In the event of an accident involving or within the vicinity of the vehicle, a driverless car could act as a black box with information of the incident recorded in unprecedented detail, which in turn could be used to support an investigation.

More creative uses of the technologies in driverless cars could include the ability to supercharge “smart roads” with their networked capabilities by eliminating traffic jams and potentially even doing away with traffic lights and road signs altogether. They could also be used to gather information about road conditions, traffic or even weather or pollution.

These same networked capabilities could also enable cars to foresee potential collisions and take steps to avoid an accident by actively keeping track of their surroundings including cars and hazards beyond the visual range of a human driver. One industry report has estimated wide-scale introduction of driverless cars could reduce accidents by up to 90%.

Despite the potential benefits, there is always the potential for misuse. This is an ongoing challenge with powerful technologies more generally as they become increasingly ubiquitous in our everyday lives. Without adequate legislation and industry focus to preserve privacy and maintain the security and safety of the individual and the public generally, large-scale introduction of these vehicles could have severe implications. If these challenges can be resolved, however, the mainstream introduction of these vehicles could save hundreds of thousands of lives each year, while having countless other environmental and economic benefits.

People should have the 'right to wipe' youthful online indiscretions

ervins_strauhmanis, CC BY

There was a time before Facebook and social media and text messaging. But for the current and subsequent generations they’re already here, whether or not they’re aware of them. Inevitably this can lead to ill thought-out or regrettable public posts. It’s said that “the internet is forever”, but a campaign that has garnered ministerial backing aims to give those reaching adulthood a second chance.

Not unlike the right to be forgotten applied to Google’s search results, the campaign from iRights calls for a means for those turning 18 to be able to scrub their foolish, childish ways from the internet now they have become adults, in order to spare them from later embarrassment or even career-damaging discoveries.

After all, such discoveries have already occurred. The youngest member of the House of Commons, 20-year-old SNP politician Mhairi Black, has been criticised for her NSFW teenage tweets, posted only a few years ago. And in a high-profile case in April 2013, Paris Brown, a 17-year old girl selected by Kent Police to become their new youth police and crime commissioner, was obliged to resign over the violent, racist and homophobic content of tweets she’d posted between the ages of 14 and 16 – some years before she was hired by the Kent force.

Her resignation sparked debate on whether or not it was right that someone of her age should be publicly admonished, humiliated and forced out of a job for something thoughtlessly blurted out in 140 characters or less at the age of 14.

The web moves fast, but has a long memory

There has been a change in the way UK employers recruit – social media vetting of employees is becoming more common as the way employees or would-be employees conduct themselves on social media is increasingly of interest to employers. Social media polices have become a standard part of terms and conditions of employment.

The term digital media scholars use to describe self-censorship on social media is “impression management”, something that has been well studied. In fact interesting research from the University of Antwerp suggests an increasing awareness among adolescents and young adults of the visibility and permanence of years of their less-thoughtful status updates and over-shared information. Many of those surveyed also expressed a need to avoid the watchful eyes of their parents, in a world where the privacy of teenagers’ emotions, and the sense in which that privacy exists, is under assault from all sides.

Striving for privacy where none exists

Young people often set up multiple profiles (in contravention of most social networking sites’ rules) for different audiences. Facebook is something their parents (“old people”) also use – while younger people use a range of others including Instagram, Snapchat and Vine.

This is equally the case in real-life contexts too. Studies in social psychology suggest that just as we present different versions of ourselves in various face-to-face contexts, so we modify behaviour and public image for social media. It’s not just about hiding certain information. Sometimes the fact the web allows anonymous or asynchronous communication feeds people uncharacteristic urges, either to over-share or to be aggressive or rude – what psychologists such as John Suler call the online disinhibition effect.

If we genuinely thought people should “accept us we are, take it or leave it", then strict privacy settings wouldn’t be so popular (or desirable) as they are. There is a collision between reasonable social pressures aimed at keeping children safe online, and the need for children and young adults to be able to express themselves freely among their peers.

Growing pains

To complicate matters, this is all happening at a crucial time as their adult identity develops. While university-age adults tend to give employment prospects priority and often regret their published thought-crimes years later, it’s far from their teenage minds when they’re posting.

So the iRights campaign seems to push all of the correct ethical buttons, and UK ministerial support for this additional right to be forgotten (and indeed the right of the poster to forget) is remarkably progressive. But the question of how legislation can be brought to bear on multinational and almost entirely foreign-based companies such as Facebook to tackle how that information is stored and with whom it’s shared is another matter.

Information that makes up social media profiles and status updates, even all that which is visible to the user themselves, is not the whole story. There are many other datasets derived from social media activity that operate behind the scenes. Ultimately it may come down to improving teenagers and young adults’ digital literacy and impressing upon them the importance of a private life, in order to temper the urge to leave detailed online records of their lives, their nights out, or their next bucket challenge.

Even educated fleas do it ... but is animal sex spicier than we thought?

Fly me to the moon Nednapa

There’s an idea circulating that humans are the only animal to experience sexual pleasure; that we approach sex in a way that is distinct from others. As with many questions about sex, this exposes some interesting facts about the way we discuss the subject.

On one level, the question of whether humans and nonhumans experience sex in the same way is fairly simply dismissed: how would we know? We cannot know how a nonhuman experiences anything – they can’t be asked. Sex as an experiential phenomenon for nonhumans is, quite simply, inaccessible. Science is obliged to propose questions that are answerable, and “how does a leopard slug experience sex?” is, at time of writing, about as unanswerable as they get.

Having said that, we can make educated guesses about whether sex is pleasurable for other species. Sex would be a very strange thing to seek if it didn’t bring some form of pleasure. It increases risk of disease, it wastes energy, it can seriously increase the likelihood of something bigger coming along and eating you (seriously, check out leopard-slug reproduction).

There’s no reason why an animal should seek sex unless they enjoy it. It is often proposed that an inherent “drive to reproduce” explains nonhuman sexual activity, but that is not an alternative here: if animals possess an instinct to reproduce, it needs to function somehow – and pleasure is a fairly basic motivator. The hypothesis that all sexually reproducing species experience sexual pleasure is, in itself, quite reasonable – as would be the hypothesis that animals find eating pleasurable.

Peak performance

This hypothesis about sex has been tested. Since the word “pleasure” is quite vague, scientists have tended to focus on orgasms. As a particularly intense form of sexual pleasure for many people, the logic has been that if non-humans experience orgasm, they are almost certainly experiencing pleasure.

Given that we are most familiar with human orgasms, scientists have unsurprisingly looked for behavioural and physical correlates of what we sometimes experience – shuddering, muscular rigidity, a cessation of movement, vocalisation, changes of facial expression, ejaculation. None of these are guaranteed, and consequently we should not expect them necessarily to be associated with sex in other species. But using this method, most commonly to study non-human primates, the animals perhaps most likely to display responses similar to humans, scientists have detected orgasm in many different species including macaques, orangutans, gorillas and chimpanzees.

In fact, very few primatologists doubt that non-human primates experience orgasm – at least, male non-human primates. There is debate as to whether female primates (including humans) experience sexual pleasure in the same way male primates do, which raises some fairly important questions about how Western culture views female sexual agency. But some detailed studies of the stump-tailed macaque have suggested that females of this species, at least, demonstrate a capacity for orgasm.

‘The post-coital twig’ Funny Solution Studio

One size fits all

Drilling down the totality of the “experience of sexual pleasure” to the moment of orgasm is problematic, though. It is the result of the pioneering work of Masters and Johnson dating from 1966. They focused sexual pleasure on orgasm by proposing a four-stage biomedical framework of excitement, plateau, orgasm and resolution. Despite much criticism, it entered intellectual and public consciousnesses as a description of “normal” sex, involving genitals and aimed at producing orgasms.

But while this may describe sex for many, it excludes an awful lot of people. A brief survey of the various things that humans get up to quickly indicates that sex isn’t necessarily focused on orgasm or genitals. Focusing sex on genitals and orgasm only makes sense if we assume that the central function of sex is reproduction – exactly the same assumption that seems to lie behind scientific enquiries into sexual pleasure in other species.

Various cultures maintain that sex is not connected to conception, though – most famously the Trobrian Islanders of the South Pacific. New reproductive technologies have meanwhile separated sex and reproduction: it is not necessary for a people to have sex in order to conceive. This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, given that people have more sex than they have children. The yoking of sex to reproduction to the exclusion of pleasure can be traced to the Victorian era, and is the consequence of all sorts of exciting historico-political processes that would take a whole separate article to explain, but it seeped into all aspects of Western culture, including science.

‘Mind where you’re putting that trumpet’ RCKM594

Not to suggest that sex isn’t involved in reproduction. The gamete exchange that is necessary for conception to occur is, in general, the result of some form of contact between bodies. But when people say that “humans are the only species to have sex for pleasure” they are really saying that “humans are the only species that has non-reproductive sex”.

In fact, sex may well serve a number of other functions. Sex may bond animals together or may cement a dominance hierarchy in the case of bonobos, for example, one of humans' closest relatives. These functions may be extremely important, especially for social animals, and would likely only be feasible if sex were in itself a source of pleasure.

There is also no shortage of examples where non-human sex has nothing to do with reproduction at all. Females of many species mate with males when they are non-fertile (marmosets for example). And same-sex sexual behaviour, which is definitionally non-reproductive, occurs in every vertebrate species in which it has been looked for, along with some non-vertebrates (bedbugs, for example, or fruit flies).

This evidence alone should lead us to expect that many animals experience sexual pleasure in much the same way that humans do – that the pleasure involved in sex leads many animals to seek it in non-reproductive contexts, and that this aspect of sexuality is not as unique as humans may like to think. This insight is surely vital to understanding sex in other species, not to mention all other aspects of their behaviour too.

Building blocks of life found among organic compounds on Comet 67P – what Philae discoveries mean

The building blocks of life are lurking on the dark and barren surface of Comet 67P. ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM, CC BY-SA

Scientists analysing the latest data from Comet 67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko have discovered molecules that can form sugars and amino acids, which are the building blocks of life as we know it. While this is a long, long way from finding life itself, the data shows that the organic compounds that eventually translated into organisms here on Earth existed in the early solar system.

The results are published as two independent papers in the journal Science, based on data from two different instruments on comet lander Philae. One comes from the German-led Cometary Sampling and Composition (COSAC) team and one from the UK-led Ptolemy team.

The data finally sheds light on questions that the European Space Agency posed 22 years ago. One of the declared goals of the Rosetta mission when it was approved in 1993 was to determine the composition of volatile compounds in the cometary nucleus. And now we have the answer, or at least, an answer: the compounds are a mixture of many different molecules. Water, carbon monoxide (CO) and carbon dioxide (CO₂) – this is not too surprising, given that these molecules have been detected many times before around comets. But both COSAC and Ptolemy have found a very wide range of additional compounds, which is going to take a little effort to interpret.

New images show Philae’s landing spots on comet when bouncing around and taking measurements. ESA/ROSETTA/NAVCAM/SONC/DLR

At this stage, I should declare an interest: I am a co-investigator on the Ptolemy team – but not an author on the paper. But the principal investigator of Ptolemy, and first author on the paper, is my husband Ian Wright.

Having made this clear, I hope that readers will trust that I am not going to launch into a major diatribe against one set of data, or a paean of praise about the other. What I am going to do is look at the conclusions that the two teams have reached – because, although they made similar measurements at similar times, they have interpreted their data somewhat differently. This is not a criticism of the scientists, it is a reflection of the complexity of the data and the difficulties of disentangling mass spectra.

Deciphering the data

What are the two instruments? And, perhaps more to the point, what exactly did they analyse? Both COSAC and Ptolemy can operate either as gas chromatographs or mass spectrometers. In mass spectrometry mode, they can identify chemicals in vaporised compounds by stripping the molecules of their electrons and measuring the mass and charge of the resulting ions (the mass-to-charge ratio, m/z). In gas-chromatography mode they separate the mixture on the basis of how long it takes each component in the mixture to travel through a very long and thin column to an ionisation chamber and detector.

Either way, the result is a mass spectrum, showing how the mixture of compounds separated out into its individual components on the basis of the molecular mass relative to charge (m/z).

Unfortunately, the job doesn’t end there. If it were that simple, then organic chemists would be out of a job very quickly. Large molecules break down into smaller molecules, with characteristic fragmentation patterns depending on the bonds present in the original molecule. Ethane, C₂ H₆ for example, has an m/z of 30, which was seen in the spectra. So the peak might be from ethane, or it might be from a bigger molecule which has broken down in the ionisation chamber to give ethane, plus other stuff.

Then again, it might be from CH₂O, which is formaldehyde. Or it might be from the breakdown of polyoxymethylene. Or it might be from almost any one of the other 46 species which have an m/z of 30. Figuring out what it is exactly is a tough job and the main reason why I gave up organic chemistry after only a year – far too many compounds to study.

Of course, the teams didn’t identify every single peak in isolation, they considered the series of peaks which come from fragmentation. This helps a bit, in that there are now many more combinations of compounds and fractions of compounds which can be matched.

So where does this leave us? Actually, with an embarrassment of riches. Have the teams come to the same conclusions? Sort of. They both detected compounds which are important in the pathway to producing sugars – which go on to form the “backbone” of DNA. They also both note the very low number of sulphur-bearing species, which is interesting given the abundance of sulphur in the solar system, and the ease with which it can become integrated into organic compounds.

The COSAC team suggests that nitrogen-bearing species could be relatively abundant, whilst Ptolemy found fewer of them. This is important because nitrogen is an essential element for life, and is a fundamental part of the amino acids which eventually make up the central core of DNA. Conversely, the Ptolemy team has found lots of CO₂, whilst COSAC hasn’t detected much.

These differences are probably related to sampling location: COSAC ingested material from the bottom of Philae, while Ptolemy sniffed at the top. Did Ptolemy breathe in cometary gases, whilst COSAC choked on the dust kicked up during the brief touchdown? If so, then the experiments have delivered wonderfully complementary sets of data.

Most importantly, both of those sets of data show that the ingredients for life were present in a body which formed in the earliest stages of solar system history. Comets act as messengers, delivering water and dust throughout the solar system – now we have learnt for certain that the ingredients for life have been sown far and wide through the 4.567 billion years of solar system history. The challenge now is to discover where else it might have taken root.

What else is certain is that both teams are keeping fingers crossed that the Philae-Rosetta communications link stabilises, so that they can get on with their analyses. This is just the start.

Disclosure

Monica Grady is a co-investigator on the Ptolemy team, and wife of Professor Ian Wright, the Principal Investigator, but is not an author on the Science paper discussed in the article, and neither was she involved in its preparation. She receives funding from the STFC and is a Trustee of Lunar Mission One.