Electronic News

2013-09-03

Business Blu Wireless delivers 60GHz LTE backhaul

2013/09/03

“We’re all about Gigabit WiFi,” says Henry Nurser, CEO of Blu Wireless, “we’re selling soft macros which can be easily absorbed into customers’ design flows.”

Earlier this week Sir Robin Saxby, founding CEO of ARM, and Glenn Collinson, co-founder of CSR, joined the Blu Wireless board.

“The problem was how to efficiently address multi-gigabit baseband processing,” says Nurser, “a lot of people are doing hard-wired implementations but these are totally inflexible, so we set out to do something with the same power as hard-wired but significantly more flexible.”

The application is backhaul for LTE small cells using the unlicensed 60GHz band to ensure low-cost for the carriers. “Operators are driven by dollars – they don’t want to use licensed bands,” says Nurser.

The technology permits 1 – 2 Gbps over 300 metres. “Our design is an ideal fit for that application,” says Nurser.

Blu Wireless has had £270,000 in Angel funding and three lead customers one of whom is funding prototype development. It has received £350,000 in billings so far from consultancy and from licensing some core algorithms to use in the backhaul space. It recently raised $3.1 million in venture money.

Having a customer was key to the funding round. “Unless you’ve got a customer engaged, it’s pointless trying to raise money,” says Nurser.

Blu Wireless is targeting four classes of customers: semiconductor companies which don’t have the technology and don’t want to develop it in-house; consumer electronics companies seeking to internalise their semiconductor development and don’t have the history to develop IP: infrastructure equipment companies which want to license IP for their ASICs; and network operators.

Knowing the mind of your customer’s customer’s customer is important. “You need to know more than your immediate customer about their needs,” says Nurser.

There are two main applications for multi-gig wireless:

One is high-speed data transfer for mobile platforms vis the deployment of small cells on lamp-posts which is inexpensive and reduces the loading on the network.

The second application is HDMI cable replacement. Streaming from a mobile device to a TV is seen as a mass application, though there’s little financial incentive to do it.

The alternative to using 60GHz wireless is to use fibre or ADSL. Last month the US gave a boost to the use of 60GHz wireless when the FCC made modifications to its rules to: ‘Enhance the use of unlicensed spectrum as a relatively low-cost, high-capacity short-range backhaul alternative to connect wireless broadband networks and for other wireless applications. These modifications could provide wireless broadband network connectivity over distances up to a mile at data rates of 7 Gb/s.’ There is 7GHz of unlicensed bandwidth available.

The WiGig Alliance, to standardise multi-gigabit WiFi, was formed in 2009 to try and avoid a repeat of the UWB failure. They decided on a unified standard. “It was the only IEEE standard ever agreed on the first proposal,” says Nurser.

“The key thing we are doing is we spotted an emerging market driven by leading companies,” says Nurser, “WiGig is driven by Intel and Broadcom and others. Intel and Broadcom will bring out products – others would rather die than partner with Intel and Broadcom – and if they do partner with Intel and Broadcom they won’t be in that position for very long. We are protecting these other guys who would otherwise be swamped by the big guys.”

“When you understand there’s a standard coming up which you have a way to implement better than anyone else – that’s how you add value to the industry,” says Nurser, “that’s the potential for a start-up – filling the gaps for large companies. We believe we’ve found a good niche where we have clear value-add.”

“We’re trying to engage with companies without going head-to-head with big competitors,” adds Nurser, “we’re not a threat to anyone, We’re facilitators – helping people to get to market. There’s a market opening to fill and there are road map gaps, it’s very difficult for companies to know what IP they need.”

“Our view is that we’ll be intercepting the market in 2015,” says Nurser, “the interoperability testing programme will not be completed until June 2014.”

There’s a big potential market. The 60GHz backhaul market is expected to be a five million unit market in 2017, and the small cell market is expected to be a $2.7 billion market in 2017. London will need 72,000 small cells assuming a 500 metre radius but Blu Wireless think it will be more like 300 metres.

“The general assumption is that the cost of the backhaul link is $8000,” says Nurser, “we think we can do it for less than $2000. And we see how the cost could be driven down to $500.””

The technology is scalable to 20Gbps. “We can customise the IP to a particular level – that’s one of the benefits of doing the design in C,” says Nurser, “using C means you can focus on a system-level design.”

“We thought about being a fabless company but OEMs will always be nervous about start-ups and will look for second sources,” says Nurser, “the IP play is that if you can get a customer engaged, and with a licence, then they’re not going to design you out.”

The unique advantage which Blu Wireless has in addressing this market is its Inmosy background. “The sample rate on WiGig is 2.6 Giga-samples per second but the processor is running at a few hundred MHz so you have to parallelise, you have no choice,” says Mark Barrett, Blu Wireless CMO, “the Inmos parallelised strength gives us that capability.”

Blu Wireless designers have 20 years experience of parallelising processing. The CTO and four other engineers were all ex-Inmos who inherited the Inmos legacy of how to parallelise in an elegant way.

“This all about a lot of processing tasks you need to do, and you have to deal with this in a way to make them parallelised so you don’t have to drive the processor so hard,” says Ray McConnell, Blu Wireless CTO, “it’s about how you can parallelise these tasks in a nice clean way, making sure the engine is always stuffed with data – not waiting around - being efficiently used.”

“It’s about understanding parallelised processor workloads and the efficiency of the design,” adds McConnell, “it mustn’t be over-flexible to be not efficient.”

“Now we can make these parallel systems cheaply enough for consumers. Before, only graphics could afford parallelism,” says McConnell, “and people are becoming more familiar about programming across multiple cores.”

“The more parallel it is the more parts of the chip you can switch off when not being used to save power,” continues McConnell, adding, “with multi-gigabit, parallelism comes into its own. A level of expertise is required in parallel system design which is mostly found in the GPU world.”

The result, says McConnell, is: “Lower power and smaller area and using the transistors very efficiently so each transistor is working very hard.”

“We do everything up to the point of manufacturing without doing the manufacturing,” says McConnell.

Being in the IP business in the UK has its advantages. “The reputation of UK engineers is very strong internationally,” says Nurser, “there’s a lot of creativity in the UK in how to do things better.”

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Red cedar tree study shows that clean air act is reducing pollution, improving forests

Sep. 2, 2013 — A collaborative project involving a Kansas State University ecologist has shown that the Clean Air Act has helped forest systems recover from decades of sulfur pollution and acid rain.

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The research team -- which included Jesse Nippert, associate professor of biology -- spent four years studying centuries-old eastern red cedar trees, or Juniperus virginiana, in the Central Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia. The region is downwind of the Ohio River Valley coal power plants and experienced high amounts of acidic pollution -- caused by sulfur dioxide emissions -- in the 20th century.

By studying more than 100 years of eastern red cedar tree rings, the scientists found that the trees have improved in growth and physiology in the decades since the Clean Air Act was passed in 1970.

"There is a clear shift in the growth, reflecting the impact of key environmental legislation," Nippert said. "There are two levels of significance in this research. One is in terms of how we interpret data from tree rings and how we interpret the physiology of trees. The other level of significance is that environmental legislation can have a tremendous impact on an entire ecosystem."

The findings appear in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, or PNAS, in the article "Evidence of recovery of Juniperus virginiana trees from sulfur pollution after the Clean Air Act."

The principal investigator on the project was Richard Thomas, professor of biology at West Virginia University. Other researchers include Scott Spal, master's graduate from West Virginia University, and Kenneth Smith, undergraduate student at West Virginia University.

For the study, the scientists collected and analyzed data from eastern red cedar trees ranging from 100 to 500 years old. The researchers wanted to better understand the trees' physiological response and the growth response to long-term acid deposition, or acid rain.

The team focused on red cedar trees because they are abundant, long-lived and a good recorder of environmental variability. Red cedar trees grow slowly and rely on surface soil moisture, which makes them sensitive to environmental change. Their abilities to live for centuries meant that researchers could analyze hundreds of years of tree rings, Nippert said.

The researchers analyzed the stable carbon isotopes within each tree ring as a recorder of physiological changes through time. Nippert's Stable Isotope Mass Spectrometry Laboratory at Kansas State University analyzed the samples. Researchers analyzed tree rings back to the early 1900s, when sulfur dioxide deposition throughout the Ohio River Valley began to increase.

By studying the stable isotopic signature in each tree ring, the researchers were able to compare the trees' growth patterns and changes in physiology to changes in atmospheric chemistry during the 20th century. Results showed that despite increased carbon dioxide -- which tends to increase plant growth -- tree growth and physiology declined for the majority of the 20th century when acidic pollution was high.

But scientists noticed a dramatic change around 1980, 10 years after the Clean Air Act was enacted.

"Our data clearly shows a break point in 1982, where the entire growth patterns of the trees in this forest started on a different trajectory," Nippert said. "It took 10 years for that landmark environmental legislation to reduce sulfur dioxide emissions, but it eventually did. When it did, we saw an entire ecosystem recover from years of acidic pollution."

Another interesting finding from the tree ring analysis: Results from the Great Depression era in the 1930s were very similar to the results from post-1980. Because of the suppressed economy during the Great Depression, coal power plants were less productive and the Ohio River Valley had reduced fossil fuel emissions. Similar to the post-1980 data, data from the 1930s showed improved tree growth and physiology.

"It's kind of interesting that those two very important periods in our history match up perfectly in terms of the responses seen throughout this whole forest ecosystem," Nippert said.

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Single tone alerts brain to complete sound pattern

We hear with our brain. The cochlea picks up sound vibrations but the signals produced as a result are processed by the brain, using known patterns. If, for example, you briefly hear a weak tone, your hearing focuses on that tone and suppresses any frequencies around it. This makes it easier to notice any relevant sounds in your surroundings. The present research has shown that this 'auditory attention filter' is much more complex than believed until now: frequencies that have an octave relationship with the target tone are also heard better.

John van Opstal, professor of Biophysics at Radboud University: 'This test proves that the brain prepares for a more extensive pattern of tones, even if the person just hears a single test tone or if he has a tone in mind. These extra tones in the pattern were not sounded during the experiment, but the brain complements the information received from the cochlea. This is scientifically interesting. Audiology, for example, at present places great emphasis on the cochlea.'

Octave relationship

The subjects undergoing the experiment did not have an easy time. For an hour they listened to unstructured noise containing very soft tones that they had to detect. Every few seconds they were presented with a tone of 1000 Hz, the cue. Then during one of two time intervals, a very quiet, short second tone was sounded. The subject had to indicate in which of the two intervals they had heard the second tone. It became apparent that tones having an octave relationship with the cue were all heard better, and those around the cue were heard less well. An octave is a well-known term in music, indicating the distance between two tones, the frequencies of which have a 2-to-1 relationship.

Voice

Van Opstal: 'We wanted to gather data on the auditory attention filter around the target tone. When we made the range larger than other researchers had done previously, more peaks suddenly appeared. This was a complete surprise to us. One possible explanation could be that the hearing system has evolved in order to hear sounds made by members of an animal's own species (voices in the case of humans) in noisy surroundings. Vocalisations always consist of harmonic complexes of several simultaneous tones having an octave relationship with each other.'

Hearing aid

The researchers, who work at Utrecht University, the UMC Utrecht Brain Center and Radboud University Nijmegen, can easily think up applications for this fundamental research. If, for example, someone no longer hears high tones because of damage to the cochlear hair cells, the hearing aid can be adjusted in such a way that it converts those tones so they sound one or more octaves lower. Since the brain itself 'fills in' tones with an octave relationship, that person's perception should then become more normal. It is also important for commercial sound producers to know how tones are perceived. That is why Philips Research is involved in this research in their department 'Brain, Body and Behavior.'

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The true raw material footprint of nations

Sep. 2, 2013 — The amount of raw materials needed to sustain the economies of developed countries is significantly greater than presently used indicators suggest, a new Australian study has revealed.

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Using a new modelling tool and more comprehensive indicators, researchers were able to map the flow of raw materials across the world economy with unprecedented accuracy to determine the true "material footprint" of 186 countries over a two-decade period (from 1990 to 2008).

The study, involving researchers from the University of New South Wales, CSIRO, the University of Sydney, and the University of California, Santa Barbara, was published today in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It reveals that the decoupling of natural resources from economic growth has been exaggerated.

The results confirm that pressures on raw materials do not necessarily decline as affluence grows and demonstrates the need for policy-makers to consider new accounting methods that more accurately track resource consumption.

"Humanity is using raw materials at a level never seen before with far-reaching environmental impacts on biodiversity, land use, climate and water," says lead author Tommy Wiedmann, Associate Professor of Sustainability Research at the UNSW School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. "By relying on current indicators, governments are not able to see the true extent of resource consumption."

"Now more than ever, developed countries are relying on international trade to acquire their natural resources, but our research shows this dependence far exceeds the actual physical quantity of traded goods," says Wiedmann, who worked at CSIRO Ecosystem Sciences when the research was undertaken.

In 2008, the total amount of raw materials extracted globally was 70 billion metric tons -- 10 billion tons of which were physically traded. However, the results show that three times as many resources (41% or 29 billion tons) were used just to enable the processing and export of these materials.

The researchers say that because these resources never leave their country of origin, they are not adequately captured by current reporting methods. They have used a new indicator they call the "material footprint" to more accurately account for these 'lost' resources and have developed tools that could assist policy-makers in future.

Economy-wide accounting metrics (such as Domestic Material Consumption or DMC) currently used by certain governments and intergovernmental organisations, including the OECD, the European Union and the UN Environment Programme, only account for the volume of raw materials extracted and used domestically, and the volume physically traded.

These indicators suggest resource-use in wealthy nations has increased at a slower rate than economic growth -- something known as relative decoupling -- and that other countries have actually seen their consumption decrease over the last 20 years -- something known as absolute decoupling. (See figures).

Decoupling of raw material usage from economic growth is considered one of the major goals en route to achieving sustainable development and a low-carbon economy.

But the study authors say when their "material footprint" indicators are factored in these achievements in decoupling are smaller than reported and often non-existent.

The study relates to the following resources: metal ores, biomass, fossil fuels and construction minerals.

Selected country findings:

In 2008 China had by far the largest material footprint (MF) in absolute values (16.3 billion tons), twice as large as that of the US and four times that of Japan and India. Sixty per cent of China's MF consists of construction minerals, reflecting its rapid industrialisation and urbanisation over the last 20 years.
Australia had the highest material footprint per capita (about 35 tons per person), but because it is a prolific exporter of resources, it appears to have a relative decoupling. Other developed economies (USA, Japan, UK) show similar levels at around 25 tons per person.
Lower material standard of living and lower average level of consumption in many developing countries is reflected in a footprint below 15 tons per person, with India at the lower end at 3.7 tons per person.
In absolute values, the US is by far the largest importer of primary resources embodied in trade and China the largest exporter. The largest per-capita exporters of embodied primary materials -- in particular metal ores -- are Australia and Chile.
All industrialised nations show the same typical picture over time: as GDP grew over the last two decades there appeared to be a relative decoupling of resource use as indicated by DMC (even absolute decoupling for the UK). However, when measured by the material footprint indicator, resource use has grown in parallel to GDP with no signs of decoupling. This is true for the USA, UK, Japan, EU27 and OECD.
South Africa was the only country shown to have an absolute decoupling using the MF indicator.

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Business Microsoft buys Nokia

2013/09/03

Stephen Elop - President and CEO of Nokia Corporation Microsoft has bought Nokia’s handset business for $7.2bn including a licence fee for Nokia’s patents.

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop is returning to Microsoft. A new interim CEO has been appointed for Nokia.

32,000 Nokia employees will transfer to Microsoft.

Nokia will be left with its infrastructure business called Nokia Solutions and Networks where it has had a programme to lay off a quarter of its workforce in the past 18 months.

In terms of units, Nokia had 14% world market share for mobile phones in Q2, second to Samsung’s 26%.

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Primate calls, like human speech, can help infants form categories

Previous studies have shown that even in infants too young to speak, listening to human speech supports core cognitive processes, including the formation of object categories.

Alissa Ferry, lead author and currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Language, Cognition and Development Lab at the Scuola Internationale Superiore di Studi Avanzati in Trieste, Italy, together with Northwestern University colleagues, documented that this link is initially broad enough to include the vocalizations of non-human primates.

"We found that for 3- and 4-month-old infants, non-human primate vocalizations promoted object categorization, mirroring exactly the effects of human speech, but that by six months, non-human primate vocalizations no longer had this effect -- the link to cognition had been tuned specifically to human language," Ferry said.

In humans, language is the primary conduit for conveying our thoughts. The new findings document that for young infants, listening to the vocalizations of humans and non-human primates supports the fundamental cognitive process of categorization. From this broad beginning, the infant mind identifies which signals are part of their language and begins to systematically link these signals to meaning.

Furthermore, the researchers found that infants' response to non-human primate vocalizations at three and four months was not just due to the sounds' acoustic complexity, as infants who heard backward human speech segments failed to form object categories at any age.

Susan Hespos, co-author and associate professor of psychology at Northwestern said, "For me, the most stunning aspect of these findings is that an unfamiliar sound like a lemur call confers precisely the same effect as human language for 3- and 4-month-old infants. More broadly, this finding implies that the origins of the link between language and categorization cannot be derived from learning alone."

"These results reveal that the link between language and object categories, evident as early as three months, derives from a broader template that initially encompasses vocalizations of human and non-human primates and is rapidly tuned specifically to human vocalizations," said Sandra Waxman, co-author and Louis W. Menk Professor of Psychology at Northwestern.

Waxman said these new results open the door to new research questions.

"Is this link sufficiently broad to include vocalizations beyond those of our closest genealogical cousins," asks Waxman, "or is it restricted to primates, whose vocalizations may be perceptually just close enough to our own to serve as early candidates for the platform on which human language is launched?"

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Biologists show that generosity leads to evolutionary success

Sep. 2, 2013 — With new insights into the classical game theory match-up known as the "Prisoner's Dilemma," University of Pennsylvania biologists offer a mathematically based explanation for why cooperation and generosity have evolved in nature.

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Their work builds upon the seminal findings of economist John Nash, who advanced the field of game theory in the 1950s, as well as those of computational biologist William Press and physicist-mathematician Freeman Dyson, who last year identified a new class of strategies for succeeding in the Prisoner's Dilemma.

Postdoctoral researcher Alexander J. Stewart and associate professor Joshua B. Plotkin, both of Penn's Department of Biology in the School of Arts and Sciences, examined the outcome of the Prisoner's Dilemma as played repeatedly by a large, evolving population of players. While other researchers have previously suggested that cooperative strategies can be successful in such a scenario, Stewart and Plotkin offer mathematical proof that the only strategies that succeed in the long term are generous ones. They report their findings in PNAS the week of Sept. 2.

"Ever since Darwin," Plotkin said, "biologists have been puzzled about why there is so much apparent cooperation, and even flat-out generosity and altruism, in nature. The literature on game theory has worked to explain why generosity arises. Our paper provides such an explanation for why we see so much generosity in front of us."

The Prisoner's Dilemma is a way of studying how individuals choose whether or not to cooperate. In the game, if both players cooperate, they both receive a payoff. If one cooperates and the other does not, the cooperating player receives the smallest possible payoff, and the defecting player the largest. If both players do not cooperate, they receive a payoff, but it is less than what they would gain if both had cooperated. In other words, it pays to cooperate, but it can pay even more to be selfish.

In the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, two players repeatedly face off against one another and can employ different strategies to beat their opponent. In 2012, Press and Dyson "shocked the world of game theory," Plotkin said, by identifying a group of strategies for playing this version of the game. They called this class of approaches "zero determinant" strategies because the score of one player is related linearly to the other. What's more, they focused on a subset of zero determinant approaches they deemed to be extortion strategies. If a player employed an extortion strategy against an unwitting opponent, that player could force the opponent into receiving a lower score or payoff.

Stewart and Plotkin became intrigued with this finding, and last year wrote a commentary in PNAS about the Press and Dyson work. They began to explore a different approach to the Prisoner's Dilemma. Instead of a head-to-head competition, they envisioned a population of players matching up against one another, as might occur in a human or animal society in nature. The most successful players would get to "reproduce" more, passing on their strategies to the next generation of players.

It quickly became clear to the Penn biologists that extortion strategies wouldn't do well if played within a large, evolving population because an extortion strategy doesn't succeed if played against itself.

"The fact that there are extortion strategies immediately suggests that, at the other end of the scale, there might also be generous strategies," Stewart said. "You might think being generous would be a stupid thing to do, and it is if there are only two players in the game, but, if there are many players and they all play generously, they all benefit from each other's generosity."

In generous strategies, which are essentially the opposite of extortion strategies, players tend to cooperate with their opponents, but, if they don't, they suffer more than their opponents do over the long term. "Forgiveness" is also a feature of these strategies. A player who encounters a defector may punish the defector a bit but after a time may cooperate with the defector again.

Stewart noticed the first of these generous approaches among the zero determinant strategies that Press and Dyson had defined. After simulating how some generous strategies would fare in an evolving population, he and Plotkin crafted a mathematical proof showing that, not only can generous strategies succeed in the evolutionary version of the Prisoner's Dilemma, in fact these are the only approaches that resist defectors over the long term.

"Our paper shows that no selfish strategies will succeed in evolution," Plotkin said. "The only strategies that are evolutionarily robust are generous ones."

The discovery, while abstract, helps explain the presence of generosity in nature, an inclination that can sometimes seem counter to the Darwinian notion of survival of the fittest.

"When people act generously they feel it is almost instinctual, and indeed a large literature in evolutionary psychology shows that people derive happiness from being generous," Plotkin said. "It's not just in humans. Of course social insects behave this way, but even bacteria and viruses share gene products and behave in ways that can't be described as anything but generous."

"We find that in evolution, a population that encourages cooperation does well," Stewart said. "To maintain cooperation over the long term, it is best to be generous."

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Genetic reproductive barriers: Long-held assumption about emergence of new species questioned

Sep. 2, 2013 — Darwin referred to the origin of species as "that mystery of mysteries," and even today, more than 150 years later, evolutionary biologists cannot fully explain how new animals and plants arise.

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For decades, nearly all research in the field has been based on the assumption that the main cause of the emergence of new species, a process called speciation, is the formation of barriers to reproduction between populations.

Those barriers can be geographic -- such as a new mountain, river or glacier that physically separates two populations of animals or plants -- or they can be genetic differences that prevent incompatible individuals from producing fertile offspring. A textbook example of the latter is the mule; horses and donkeys can mate, but their offspring are sterile.

But now a University of Michigan biologist and a colleague are questioning the long-held assumption that genetic reproductive barriers, also known as reproductive isolation, are a driving force behind speciation. Their study is scheduled for online publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Sept. 2.

"Most research on the formation of species has assumed that these types of reproductive barriers are a major cause of speciation. But our results provide no support for this, and our study is actually the first direct test of how these barriers affect the rate at which species form," said Daniel Rabosky, assistant professor in the U-M Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and a curator of herpetology at the Museum of Zoology.

Rabosky and Daniel Matute of the University of Chicago reasoned that if genetic barriers to reproduction are a leading cause of new species, then groups of organisms that quickly accumulate those genes should also show high rates of species formation.

They tested that idea by comparing speciation rates to genetic indicators of reproductive isolation in birds and fruit flies. They chose birds and fruit flies because extensive data sets on interspecies breeding experiments exist for both groups. The researchers used evolutionary tree-based estimates of speciation rates for nine major fruit fly groups and two-thirds of known bird species.

Rabosky and Matute created computer models to carry out the comparison, and the results surprised them.

"We found no evidence that these things are related. The rate at which genetic reproductive barriers arise does not predict the rate at which new species form in nature," Rabosky said. "If these results are true more generally -- which we would not yet claim but do suspect -- it would imply that our understanding of species formation is extremely incomplete because we've spent so long studying the wrong things, due to this erroneous assumption that the main cause of species formation is the formation of barriers to reproduction.

"To be clear, reproductive barriers are still important on some level. All sorts of plants and animals live together in the same place, which couldn't happen without reproductive barriers. But our results question whether genetic reproductive barriers played a major role in how those species formed in the first place."

While speciation is often defined as the evolution of reproductive isolation, the new findings suggest that a broader definition may be needed, Rabosky and Matute conclude.

Over the last decade or so, the pursuit of the genetic underpinnings of speciation has led to reports on the discovery of a handful of "speciation genes," defined as genes that contribute to reproductive isolation between species. The studies include a 2008 Nature paper that reported the first speciation gene in a mammal.

But if the findings of Rabosky and Matute prove to be more widely applicable to other organisms, speciation genes probably play a minimal role in the formation of species, they said.

"The whole enterprise of finding 'speciation genes' is potentially irrelevant to understanding the origin of species," Rabosky said. "But our study is certainly not going to be the final word on this. If anything, our results indicate that a lot more data will be needed before we can conclusively link the mechanisms we usually study in the lab to the patterns of species formation we see in the natural world."

The researchers speculated that part of what is missing from speciation studies is, paradoxically, extinction. Some researchers have suggested that speciation might be limited primarily by factors associated with the persistence of new species. These models propose that it is relatively easy for a species to split into new species, but the vast majority of new species do not persist over geological timescales.

The research reported in PNAS was supported by the Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science at the University of California-Berkeley, the National Science Foundation and the Chicago Fellows Program at the University of Chicago.

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Prehistoric climate shift linked to cosmic impact

The event took place about 12,900 years ago, at the beginning of the Younger Dryas period, and marks an abrupt global change to a colder, dryer climate, with far-reaching effects on both animals and humans, the scientists say. In North America the big animals, including mastodons, camels, giant ground sloths, and saber-toothed cats, all vanished. Their human hunters, known to archaeologists as the Clovis people, set aside their heavy-duty spears and turned to a hunter-gatherer subsistence diet of roots, berries, and smaller game.

"The Younger Dryas cooling is a very intriguing event that impacted human history in a profound manner," says Mukul Sharma, a professor in the Department of Earth Sciences and one of the authors of a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). "Environmental stresses may also have caused Natufians in the Near East to settle down for the first time and pursue agriculture."

That these powerful environmental changes occurred is not in dispute, but there has been controversy over why they happened. The new PNAS paper focuses on one cause: a comet or meteor striking Earth.

The classical view of the Younger Dryas cooling interlude has been that a surge of meltwater from the North American ice sheet was behind it all. According to this theory, a large quantity of fresh water accumulated behind an ice dam. The dam suddenly ruptured and dumped all this water into the Atlantic Ocean. The sudden influx is thought to have shut down the ocean currents that move tropical water northward, resulting in the cold, dry climate of the Younger Dryas.

However, Sharma and his colleagues from Dartmouth and other institutions have discovered conclusive evidence linking an extraterrestrial impact with this environmental transformation. The PNAS paper presents a scenario in which a meteor or a comet collided with Earth.

The report focuses on spherules, droplets of solidified molten rock expelled by the impact. The spherules in question were recovered from Younger Dryas boundary layers at sites in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, the layers having been deposited at the beginning of the period. The geochemistry and mineralogy profiles of the spherules are identical to rock found in southern Quebec, where Sharma and his colleagues say the impact took place.

"What is exciting in our paper is that we have for the first time narrowed down the region where a Younger Dryas impact did take place," says Sharma, "even though we have not yet found its crater." There is a known impact crater in Quebec -- the 4-kilometer-wide Corossal crater. However, based on mineralogical and geochemical studies, it is not the impact source for the material found in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

People have written about many impacts in different parts of the world based on the presence of spherules. "It may well have taken multiple concurrent impacts to bring about the extensive environmental changes of the Younger Dryas," says Sharma. "However, to date no impact craters have been found, and our research will help track one of them down."

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Average height of European males has grown by 11 centimeters in just over a century

Timothy J. Hatton, Professor of Economics at the University of Essex and the Research School of Economics at Australian National University in Canberra, examined and analysed a new dataset for the average height (at the age of around 21) of adult male birth cohorts, from the 1870s to 1980, in fifteen European countries. The data were drawn from a variety of sources. For the most recent decades the data were mainly taken from height-by-age in cross sectional surveys. Meanwhile, observations for the earlier years were based on data for the heights of military conscripts and recruits. The data is for men only as the historical evidence for women's heights is severely limited.

Professor Hatton said, "Increases in human stature are a key indicator of improvements in the average health of populations. The evidence suggests that the improving disease environment, as reflected in the fall in infant mortality, is the single most important factor driving the increase in height. The link between infant mortality and height has already been demonstrated by a number of studies." Infant mortality rates fell from an average of 178 per thousand in 1871-5 to 120 per thousand in 1911-15. They then plummeted to 41 in 1951-5 and 14 in 1976-80.

In northern and middle European countries (including Britain and Ireland, the Scandinavian countries, Netherlands, Austria, Belgium, and Germany) there was a "distinct quickening" in the pace of advance in the period spanning the two World Wars and the Great Depression. This is striking because the period largely predates the wide implementation of major breakthroughs in modern medicine and national health services. One possible reason, alongside the crucial decline in infant mortality, for the rapid growth of average male height in this period was that there was a strong downward trend in fertility at the time, and smaller family sizes have already been linked with increasing height.

Other factors in the increase in average male height include an increased income per capita; more sanitary housing and living conditions; better general education about health and nutrition (which led to better care for children and young people within the home); and better social services and health systems.

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