4 | NewScientist | 14 July 2012

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TECHNOLOGY has helped Stephen Hawking in many ways, and now it might allow him to communicate using thought alone. The cosmologist is trialling a device that monitors brain activity with the ultimate aim of transforming it into speech.

Hawking has motor neurone disease – nerve decay that has left him almost completely paralysed. He currently communicates using a series of cheek twitches to select words from a screen. “It is a very, very slow process,” says Philip Low at Stanford University in California, who is founder of healthcare company NeuroVigil.

As Hawking loses control of his cheek, Low hopes he might

instead communicate using his company’s portable device. The iBrain records brain activity from a single point on the scalp. An algorithm then extracts useful

Silent voice information from this activity.In a preliminary trial, Low’s

team asked Hawking to imagine moving his hands and feet while wearing the device. They were able to identify what movement he was imagining through changes in his brain activity.

They now hope to develop the technology to enable Hawking and others to use the imagined movements to instruct a computer to write or speak words. Low presented the work at the Francis Crick Memorial Conference in Cambridge, UK, on 8 July.

Libel victoryNATURE abhors a lack of scientific rigour – and so does the Crown Court of England and Wales. The scientific journal has won a libel case brought against it by Mohamed El Naschie, a theoretical physicist.

In 2008, Nature published an article by journalist Quirin Schiermeier questioning the lack of peer review at the journal Chaos, Solitons and Fractals, which at the time was edited by El Naschie and published many of his papers. El Naschie sued for

damage to his reputation.His claim has now been

dismissed by the Crown Court in Bristol, UK. Judge Victoria Sharp agreed that although El Naschie’s papers had been informally discussed with his colleagues before publication, they were not subject to “any proper peer review at all” and “would not have been published by any reputable peer reviewed journal”.

“It is apparent that [El Naschie] had little if any interest in the norms of scientific publishing or the ethical considerations which underpinned them,” she said.

Downsized homeIT’S a case of habitat well and truly lost for South Florida’s Cape Sable seaside sparrow. It can enjoy only a fraction of the homeland it was promised.

The Center for Biological Diversity in Tucson, Arizona, has found that the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) systematically ignored recommendations to increase habitats for endangered species between 2002 and 2007.

–Contaminating drinking water?–

–Be it ever so humble…–

Salt problem for frackersTHE salt of the Earth may hint at trouble for the fracking industry’s safety claims.

Hydraulic fracturing uses pressurised fluid to crack open deep shale rocks and release the methane trapped within them. Geologists say this potentially harmful fluid is unlikely to percolate up through a few kilometres of rock to reach the shallow aquifers that supply drinking water – but Avner Vengosh of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, thinks the methane itself could do so. The gas would be an explosion risk.

Last year his team claimed drinking wells close to fracking sites in Pennsylvania were contaminated with methane – perhaps from fracking – a finding that was met with a storm of criticism. Now Vengosh claims more

evidence of possible contamination. Some 40 of the 158 Pennsylvania

aquifers his team studied were unusually salty, contaminated with brine from salt aquifers situated at the same depth as fracking operations. Cracks in the rock must have allowed the brine to migrate hundreds of metres upwards. Gas from deep fracking operations could travel in the same way (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1121181109).

The process is likely to be far too slow to pose a serious problem, says Mike Stephenson of the British Geological Survey. Last December an industry-funded study claimed that the methane in the aquifers was chemically different to that liberated from the shale during fracking.

“It was possible to identify what movement Hawking was imagining through changes in brain activity”

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