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30 March 2013 | NewScientist | 15 Superstorms aiming for Europe BATTEN down the hatches, western Europe. Come the end of the century, superstorm Sandys could be battering your beaches. Hurricanes usually form in the western tropical Atlantic and head north-west to the US. Occasionally they make it to Europe by piggybacking on the jet stream. To simulate future hurricanes, Reindert Haarsma of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute in De Bilt and colleagues ran a detailed climate model for 2094 to 2098, assuming modest future greenhouse gas emissions. They found that future hurricanes formed further east in the tropical Atlantic, as that area had warmed sufficiently to provide enough heat and moisture to power them. As a result, many didn’t hit the US and instead struck western Europe. The storms weakened once they left the tropics, but powered up again when they entered cold and windy areas, becoming hybrid storms like Sandy, halfway between winter storms and hurricanes. In the Bay of Biscay, the model predicts the average number of yearly hurricanes will increase from one to six (Geophysical Research Letters, doi.org/kv2). If you want to get on in life, make like a sphere BIGGER isn’t always better, even for simple forms of life like yeast. In 2011, William Ratcliff and Michael Travisano at the University of Minnesota in St Paul reported that they had nudged single-celled brewer’s yeast across one of life’s great divides. In only a matter of weeks the yeast had made the leap to multicellularity. They grew the yeast in a nutrient broth and created the next day’s culture from the cells that reached the bottom of the flask fastest, effectively selecting for yeast that clumped together and settled quickly. The yeast evolved so that daughter cells formed multicellular “snowflakes”. But new work has shown that with time, the yeast change strategy. By repeating the process over 227 days, the team found that at first, yeast settled faster just by forming bigger snowflakes. But there’s a limit to how big they can grow. After day 65, the yeast sank faster by becoming more spherical with fewer branches to create drag (Evolution, doi.org/kwm). Something similar may have GULF war syndrome has been hugely controversial. Only recently has it been accepted as a physical illness rather than a psychological one, perhaps brought on by exposure to substances used in chemical weapons. Now scans suggest that nerve damage of a kind not seen in any other illness may play a key role. James Baraniuk of Georgetown University in Washington DC scanned the brains of 51 veterans, 31 of whom had symptoms of Gulf war syndrome. He found that bundles of nerves that connect brain regions break down in people with GWS. The damage tends to be in fibres that connect pain-registering nerves to areas that interpret pain. There is also damage to areas that manage how people break from concentrating on a task to respond to an unrelated stimulus. This may help explain why people with GWS tend to be easily distracted and experience memory problems (PLoS One, doi.org/kwf). Scans might help distinguish people with GWS from others with similar symptoms, ensuring they receive appropriate drugs rather than psychotherapy, Baraniuk says. Nerve damage seen in Gulf war illness GAMMA/CAMERA PRESS happened when multicellularity evolved in early life on Earth. At first, being bigger would have been good enough, but eventually size has costs as well as benefits. At that tipping point, says Ratcliff, multicellular innovations such as tissues and specialised cells may have sprung up. No one knows what actually happened billions of years ago, of course, but Charles Goodnight at the University of Vermont in Burlington says it is a plausible scenario for the evolution of multicellularity. First snapshot of a twin-sun world THE faint blob in the image below might be the first planet with two suns to have its picture taken. Either that, or it is a failed star with the tightest known orbit around two others. Deciding its true identity could teach us more about how stars and planets form. Philippe Delorme of the Joseph Fourier University, Grenoble, France, and colleagues took the picture last November using a telescope in Chile. Searches in the telescope’s archives turned up data on the object’s position in 2002 (slightly to the left, marked by green arrow), allowing them to trace its orbital motion (arxiv.org/abs/1303.4525). Planets that orbit binary stars have only been found before through indirect methods. The new object orbits at a distance of about 12.5 billion kilometres, close enough to its stars to have been born from a disc of dust surrounding them, like a planet. But it is 12 to 14 times the mass of Jupiter, placing it near the dividing line between planets and failed stars called brown dwarfs. If it is a planet, it must have formed via gravitational instability, in which clumps in the dust discs quickly collapse into planets. It is too large in relation to the stars to have been made by core accretion, a more widely accepted model in which planets grow via slow accumulation. ESO 2013 For new stories every day, visit newscientist.com/news
