Features

Ant colonies, schools of fish and flocks of birds all have a different kind of intelligence from individuals: Oxford scientists are amongst those finding ways of creating artificial 'swarm intelligence' to help perform all kinds of tasks - including designing new drugs.

Currently drug designers use NMR spectroscopy to model the structure of proteins and work out what shape drug molecules need to be to bind to specific protein receptors - but this is very time-consuming and can only be done efficiently by an expert. Andrew Pickford of Oxford's Department of Biochemistry and colleagues aim to cut the time it takes to calculate protein structure from months to hours, and make it much easier to use, by applying swarm intelligence techniques.

The approach has been tested successfully using proteins where the 3D structure is already well known and the NMR spectroscopy invention is being commercialised by Oxford University Innovation, the University of Oxford's technology transfer company. More details from Adam Stoten at Isis.

Lion bones found in the Tower of London came from an area of north Africa where no wild lion populations survive today. The finding comes from a study of mitochondrial DNA from two lion skulls, the first lion remains to be found in England since the end of the last Ice Age.

‘According to historic records, lions could be found from north Africa and through the Middle East to India, until the growth of civilisations along the Egyptian Nile and Sinai Peninsula almost 4,000 years ago stopped gene flow, isolating the lion populations,' said Nobuyuki Yamaguchi of the WildCRU at Oxford, one of the authors of the report published in this month's Contributions to Zoology. 'Western north Africa was the nearest region to Europe to sustain lion populations... making it an obvious and practical source for mediaeval merchants. Apart from a tiny population in northwest India, lions had been practically exterminated outside sub-Saharan Africa by the turn of the twentieth century.’ Beth Shapiro and Ross Barnett, of the Ancient Biomolecules Centre at the Department of Zoology, were the other members of the Oxford research team.

Richard Sabin, a co-author from the Natural History Museum, London said: ‘Our results are the first genetic evidence to clearly confirm that lions found during excavations at the Tower of London originated in north Africa. Although we have one of the best mammal collections in the world here at the Natural History Museum, few physical remains survive of the Royal Menagerie. Direct animal trade between Europe and sub-Saharan Africa was not developed until the eighteenth century, so our results provide new insights into the patterns of historic animal trafficking.'

The two skulls were recovered from the moat during excavations in 1936 and 1937, and were recently radiocarbon dated to AD 1280–1385 and AD 1420–1480, making them the earliest confirmed lion remains in the British Isles since the extinction of the Pleistocene cave lion. The lions were members of the Royal Menagerie, established at the Tower of London in mediaeval times and served as a home of exotic animals until it was closed in 1835. Physical examination of the skulls also suggested both the lions were males, as they have longer skulls and larger canine teeth. The skulls are now part of the Natural History Museum’s vast zoological collections.

Naturalists are looking to raise £25m to build the world's biggest walk-in butterfly house. It's all part of an effort to draw attention to the plight of butterflies around the world, with many species thought to be driven to extinction before scientists even set eyes on them.

Jeremy Thomas of Oxford's Department of Zoology, told the Times: 'Butterflies desperately need our help. They are one of the most sensitive indicators known to science of what is about to happen to nearly all the animals and plants that share their ecosystem,' while his predictions in the Telegraph were rather more apocalyptic:  
'A comprehensive survey of our butterflies in 2001 made clear that 71 per cent of our species were in decline, several had become extinct and others were in worrying decline, with 70 to 80 per cent of our stock lost. It supports the belief that the natural world is approaching the sixth great extinction.' Loss of habitat is the main reason why butterflies are under threat; the growth of cities and climate change may also have a hand in their decline.

It's easy to see why this butterfly campaign is getting lots of attention but maybe it is, as Professor Thomas implies, the butterfly's role as an ecological indicator that's more important here. The butterfly is the poster-boy of the insect world and as insects make up an estimated 2/3 of all the creatures on Earth similar declines in other less-lovable insect species could be extremely bad news for humans. As an avid fan of BBC's Life in the Undergrowth keeps reminding me, saving large cuddly mammals such as pandas, polar bears and whales is all well and good but we should be more worried about the insects that hold together our animal ecosystems: insects can live without us but we can't live without them.

Does the universe harbour other intelligent lifeforms? According to this NYT article it could do but they may be a whole lot quieter than we first supposed. It makes the point that as older broadcast technology is phased out and replaced by more efficient cable and satellite options we beam less powerful transmissions into space: and if we are getting quieter then it's likely our galactic neighbours are too.

It's perhaps a useful reminder that detecting anything in the wider universe (as well as here on Earth) depends on signals getting through. Scientists are developing some clever tricks to squeeze more information out of these signals - for example gravitational microsensing, recently used to detect two extrasolar planets - but we still rely on 'listening' to the universe. Just as archaeology is not about what was there but what survives, so the search for life is not about what's out there but what reaches us. And of course it may be quiet because there's nobody else out there.

We all woke up this morning to be reminded that the earth doesn't always sit placidly under our feet. Yet the earthquake the UK experienced in the early hours of this morning doesn't bear comparison with the catastrophic quakes of the past or ones predicted for the future. According to Shamita Das from Oxford's Department of Earth Sciences the severity of particular quakes may be down to speedy 'super-shear' waves travelling down the straight portions of faults at twice the speed of the original shockwave. In her comparison of data from the the 1906 California earthquake with data from a similar earthquake that occurred in 2001 in Kunlunshan, Tibet, she found that these 'super-shear' waves could explain why similar magnitudes of earthquake can cause much greater devastation in some areas than others. 'Long straight faults are more likely to reach high rupture speeds,' Shamita commented. 'The fault starts from rest, then accelerates to the maximum permissible speed and continues at this speed until it reaches an obstacle such as a large 'bend'. If the next earthquake in southern California follows the same pattern as the ones in California in 1857 and 1906, and in Tibet in 2001, a super-shear rupture travelling southward would strongly focus shock waves on Santa Barbara and Los Angeles.' Shamita is currently in San Francisco continuing her research, so she missed the UK's latest teacup rattling moment. Let's all be grateful that Britain lacks California's long, straight 'freeway' faults.