Category Archives: Science and Society

Striving for happiness could be making you unhappy – here’s how to find your own path

Happiness is big business, with sales of self-help books in the UK reaching record levels in the past year. Perhaps that’s because happiness is no longer the birthright of the elite. Just half a century ago, psychologist Warner Wilson seemed to suggest that you are be less likely to be happy if you’re uneducated and poor when he stated that a happy person generally is “young, healthy, well educated, well paid, extroverted, optimistic, worry free, religious, married, with high self-esteem, high job morale, modest aspirations, of either sex and of a wide range of intelligence”.

Today happiness is something we can all aspire to. But, as many of us try out gratitude journals, meditation and positive affirmations, we often discover that they don’t make us substantially happier. The same often goes for reaching the goals that society values – such as marriage, an interesting job or physical fitness. So is happiness just a myth? Research suggests no. The problem, however, is finding a recipe that works for everyone.

Wherever we turn, we are encouraged to strive for happiness. We’re told it will make us better at parenting, work and life in general. So it’s no wonder most of us seek happiness goals to which to aspire, whether they are based on cultural norms, self-help books or scientific research. However this pursuit of happiness can be stressful – and research suggests that it actually makes many people unhappy.

What’s more, much of the research on happiness uses quantitative methodologies that report on what works for most people, for example by working out average results. Therefore, while insightful, studies about what makes people happy are not representative of us all. After all, people value fundamentally different things in life, from material possessions to intellectual growth.

Originally, the branch of science most devoted to happiness studies – positive psychology – stated that well-being is all about maximising positive emotions and minimising negative emotions. But this approach has recently been found to be too simplistic. Recent research instead suggests that individual differences play a great role in our psychological fit for happiness.

Meaning versus positivity

The view of many researchers today actually ties in with the ancient philosopher Aristotle’s view of the “good life”. Aristotle argued that happiness is not just about feeling good but about feeling “right”. He suggested that a happy life involves experiencing the right emotions based on your values and beliefs.

Therefore, happiness is not simply about a hedonistic pursuit of pleasure, but a meaningful engagement with life. At times it may be appropriate to be sad or angry as well as being optimistic and hopeful that things can change.

Meaning is a close relative of happiness. They often go hand in hand, but are two entirely separate constructs. It is possible to lead a pleasurable life, but without much meaning. It is also possible to experience a meaningful life dedicated passionately to a cause, but experience very little positive emotion. My own forthcoming study has found that meaning is more predictive of happiness in the long run – over and above positive emotions.

Personality and maturity

But meaning and pleasure can be subjective. For one person, raising children in a stable and homely family house may be the best way to achieve meaning, while for someone else it may be travelling the world and learning as much as possible about it – with or without children.

Research has indeed found that people with different personalities differ in their experience of happiness. For example, people who are extroverted are more likely to feel fulfilled by a hedonistic approach to happiness. But for other people, this approach is not linked to a happy life. So if you are introverted, you may be more likely to find happiness by developing a meaningful purpose in life – whether that’s charity work, art or family.

Studies have found that people who are “open to experiences” – meaning they like to explore new and unconventional things and ideas – are also more likely to report having a happy life. For these people, experiencing negative emotions from time to time does not significantly reduce happiness overall. They also report less fear than others of being “too happy”, which naturally allows happiness to flow more easily. Perhaps another factor is that people who are open to new experiences are less likely than many others to conform to society’s norms – including those about happiness.

What’s more, our personalities change over time – we tend to get more emotionally stable and conscientious as we age. That means our approach to happiness may change. One qualitative study exploring the way individuals talk about happiness and personal growth found that people experience well-being differently based on what stage they are in of their conscious development, as determined by the researchers.

In the stages of early development, our happiness is mostly dependant on social norms – being loved and accepted by others. As we mature, we can differentiate between our own and other people’s emotions in order to pursue meaningful goals. Even higher stages of development are associated with a self-transformation which involves a shift of awareness from pursuing goals to the process of living. For example, when it comes to family time, it may be more important to just be together than doing certain things as a group – such as going to Legoland because everyone else is. The researchers found that mature individuals exercised more control, choice and flexibility over their well-being, and that this opened up more opportunities for happiness.

So it’s unlikely that a few simple rules could make everyone happy. Even the “rule” that money can’t make you happy is now questionable. More recent research shows that this isn’t necessarily true, but depends more on how we spend money and whether this fits with our personality and what we value.

So the next time a well-meaning relative tells you that renovating your house will boost your life satisfaction, don’t panic. We all have different ways of being happy and do not need to conform to a universal formula. As much as it is tempting at times to find happiness through learning from others – and being accepted by them – if it’s someone else’s version of happiness, it might not fit with you.

In fact, it is very possible that the social norms about what constitutes happiness make many of us miserable. Perhaps the key to happiness is truly getting to know yourself and having the guts to do what makes your life worth living at a certain point – regardless of what others say.

Lowri Dowthwaite does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Source: The Conversation: Technology http://theconversation.com/striving-for-happiness-could-be-making-you-unhappy-heres-how-to-find-your-own-path-115104

Personalities are like traditions – unique patterns of behaviour that build over a lifetime of improvisation

The question of whether personality is the result of nature or nurture has plagued researchers – and the general public – for decades. What we do know is that we are all unique, each with a distinctive pattern of speech, gesture, movement and thought. And when it comes to our personality, our past thoughts and actions influence our future thoughts and actions. In short, our personalities are traditions. If this is the case, then, can we change them? The answer is yes, but the process might be difficult.

Our personalities, like most ways in our minds vary, are a complex mix of nature and nurture. Nature certainly matters: studies of twins, separated from birth, show that our genes can shape our lives. Most tellingly, identical twins raised separately have more similar personalities than fraternal twins, who share only half their genes. But nurture matters too: identical twins raised separately – or indeed raised together – are very different people. Nature and nurture can, of course, interact in complex ways: for example, a child naturally interested in music (nature) may be more likely to be given, or persist with, music lessons (part of nurture). Similarly, an initially shy or friendly child will shape how people treat them: nature will, again, shape nurture.

It is remarkable just how different we all are. Meeting a colleague recently after 20 years, I had a strange and powerful sense of familiarity and recognition. But I had entirely forgotten the subtly distinctive patterns of intonation, the quizzical smile, the leaning of the head to one side. Conversation began to break out, just as it always had. We were, it seemed, the same people as before, picking up as if after a couple of days, not a couple of decades.

Such experiences remind us that it is the details that makes each person we encounter “feel” distinctive. Yet we tend to think of ourselves, and our personalities, in far more general terms: people are gregarious or quiet; relaxed or anxious; generous or selfish; brave or timid. We may try to pin down such traits more precisely, using any of the vast array of personality tests developed over more than a century of “psychometric” research – for example, the widely used OCEAN model, with its scales for Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism.

But these abstract descriptions don’t seem to match up with our everyday experience of the uniqueness of other people. After all, an impersonator can instantly conjure up a celebrity or politician by a distinctive phrase, tone of voice or facial expression. But an abstract list of personality traits would surely bring no one in particular to mind.

I think our intuition that it is details, not generalities, that make each of us special is on precisely the right track. To see how this might be the case, consider the analogy of tradition – whether in cooking, music, art or any other aspect of life. We know, within perhaps less than a second, the difference between traditional jazz, Bach, disco or hip-hop. It is the particularities that strike us – specific combinations of notes, harmonies and instrumentation. Describing musical traditions in terms of abstract traits (fast versus slow; rhythmical versus fluid; dynamic versus serene) is possible, but not very helpful.

Musical, and other, traditions arise from the specific, not the general. Each new piece of music is a recombination and variation of snippets of previous pieces; each new dish is an amalgam of previous dishes; each new art work draws on the canon of prior art works, and so on. And the resulting traditions are rich, complex, contradictory, and with boundaries blurring into neighbouring traditions. Musicologists, food writers and art historians can, in retrospect, come up with insightful descriptions and helpful taxonomies. But, to switch for a moment to literature, if you want to know what “metaphysical poetry” is, no amount of learned discussion will substitute for hearing a few lines of Andrew Marvell or John Donne.

I suggest that people are traditions, too: traditions of thoughts, actions and reactions, patterns of movements, and tone of voice. Each new thought and action is a recombination and variation of what we have thought and done before – and, to an extent, borrowing from what we have observed others say and do. Over a lifetime, our patterns of thoughts and behaviour become entrenched – it is our unique history, our unique habits and patterns, that make us special.

If this is right, how should we answer the question: what sort of person am I? This is an impossible question, like defining impressionism, flamenco or nouvelle cuisine. We know others, and ourselves, from experiencing examples, not contemplating abstractions.

So, from this viewpoint, our personalities are stable, not because we have unchanging “deep” traits (extrovert, anxious, risk-taker, and so on), but because we draw on, and often entrench, our own unique “history” of thoughts and action. We are like jazz musicians – our distinctive style is built up, snippet by snippet, layer by layer, through a lifetime of improvisation.

Can you change?

Changing aspects of our personalities (if we want to) will, most likely, be slow and difficult. But, like jazz musicians learning their craft, we can change, improve and gradually – and with effort – substitute new habits of thought for old. Indeed, this is the strategy of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, which asks people to record, challenge and actively modify their behaviours and thoughts.

In addressing, for example, a fear of snakes, no amount of willpower is likely to be effective, still less a general injunction to “be braver” or “pull ourselves together”. What does work is helping develop new reactions to – and thoughts about – snakes, to overwrite the old, unhelpful reactions and thoughts, for example, by gradual exposure to pictures of snakes, rubber snakes and, ultimately, snakes themselves, in safe conditions.

Read more: For some people, anxiety and phobias are taken to extremes

A recent study indicated that the same is true for more everyday personality traits. The authors found that the degree of wanting or intending to be more outgoing, for example, did not predict increased extroversion over time. But if people set goals (for example by prepare topics of conversation, saying hello to a stranger and so on), it turns out that self-reported personality change can be predicted by success in achieving these goals. If you want to change some aspect of your personality, then, you need to practice new behaviours and thoughts.

So, as with any tradition, each of us can adjust and evolve – and while we are shaped by our past, we are also authors of our future. But tradition runs deep and each of us has our own patterns of thought, speech, gesture and movement that makes us unique – immediately recognisable even when decades have passed. Rather than being troubled by our quirks and idiosyncrasies as “imperfections” from our ideal self, perhaps we should simply rejoice in our own uniqueness, and humanity’s limitless variety.

Nick Chater receives funding from the UK's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and the Economic and Social Research Council.

Source: The Conversation: Technology http://theconversation.com/personalities-are-like-traditions-unique-patterns-of-behaviour-that-build-over-a-lifetime-of-improvisation-108096

Nuclear weapons might save the world from an asteroid strike – but we need to change the law first

The schlocky 1998 Bruce Willis movie Armageddon was the highest grossing film of that year. The blockbuster saw a master oil driller (Willis) and an unlikely crew of misfits place a nuclear bomb inside a giant asteroid heading for Earth, blow it up – and save humanity. Armageddon isn’t exactly a documentary: it’s packed full of sci-fi nonsense. But, 20 years on, its basic plot – of using a nuclear explosion to avert a cataclysmic asteroid collision – doesn’t seem quite as silly as it did at the time.

Major asteroid impact is a low-probability, but high-consequence risk to life on Earth. Large “Near Earth Objects” (NEOs) don’t hit Earth often, but it only takes one (just ask the dinosaurs – oh, wait, you can’t). Of course, low probability risks are easily dismissed, however high the consequences of them manifesting might be – and until recently the countries of the world largely viewed the threat posed by NEOs as something best left to Hollywood.

But that’s all changed, following the impact (in more ways than one) of the meteoroid that hit Chelyabinsk in Russia in 2013, which injured more than 1,000 people. Suddenly, the NEO threat became “real”, and major players – the US, Russia and the EU – all started pumping money into NEO preparedness, and developing formal strategies for response (see, for example, the production of the US’s first ever National Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy in December 2016).

At the UN, we’ve recently witnessed the creation of an embryonic international institutional infrastructure to detect and respond to asteroids. As part of all this – and in line with increasing scientific opinion – there is also a notable focus at governmental and intergovernmental levels on the use of nuclear weapons as our best hope. The US and Russia have even mooted working together on a nuclear planetary defence initiative. All of a sudden, it seems Bruce Willis and his team might be put on NASA’s speed-dial, after all.

What the law says

As a lawyer I can’t help but wonder how these recent developments sit with international law. Not well, it would seem. At the intersection of nuclear non-proliferation law and space law, various Cold War-era treaties would appear to rule out nuclear planetary defence. The legal picture is not always clear – the relevant law was drafted with the superpower arms race in mind, after all, not asteroids. But if a collision-course NEO was identified, it can at least be said that a proposed nuclear response would be very likely to violate international law.

For example, Article IV of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty prohibits stationing nuclear weapons in space, which would apparently rule out nuclear NEO defence, at least if a nuclear defence system was located in space (rather than being launched from Earth).

The 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty is an even bigger barrier for most states (although, notably, not all of the nuclear powers are party to it – but the US and Russia both are). Article I(1)(a) of that treaty prohibits “any … nuclear explosion … in … outer space”. And these are just the key treaties: there are a number of other possible legal hurdles, too.

Read more: A huge asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs, but what danger do smaller ones pose?

So what? If it came to a choice between legal niceties and saving humanity from extinction, there wouldn’t be much of a choice at all: law shouldn’t be a global suicide pact. Indeed, one nuclear power, Russia, has already indicated that – if that asteroid appeared – it likely would opt for “launch first, litigate second”.

But ignoring the law is always a dangerous business, and it’s not hard to envisage nuclear powers using the vague threat of “asteroids” as a pretext for developing new warheads, or even for launching nukes into space. And if they do so in unapologetic violation of international law, they’ll also circumvent all the checks and balances that the law can provide. That threat is maybe more worrying than the threat of some hypothetical space rock.

In a major article just published in the Hastings International & Comparative Law Review, I argue that international law needs to work out a way to thread this needle.

The law has to protect us from states using asteroids as a pretext for dodging nuclear disarmament obligations, or – gulp – nuclear aggression in space, while at the same time providing for a limited, safeguarded exception that would allow for multilateral nuclear planetary defence, should it ever come to pass that we need the “nuclear option” to save ourselves.

A solution?

As such, I propose either treaty amendment (or, more likely, the adoption of additional protocols) to carve out a new, bespoke legal exception for the use of nuclear weapons in space, in instances where a large collision-course NEO was identified and verified, and where the balance of independent scientific option clearly supported a nuclear response.

At the same time, to promote certainty, protect against abuse and increase the chances of success through the pooling of expertise and resources, I also argue for the creation of a new multilateral decision-making and oversight body, composed of all states (or as many states as possible), and which additionally included direct input from independently appointed scientific experts and organisations.

The aim is that the new body would be equipped both to stop countries misusing the new legal exception to develop militarised nuclear space programmes, while at the same time avoiding the deadlock issues associated with existing institutions (such as, for example, the UN Security Council) if humanity has to act quickly to avoid going the way of the dinosaurs.

All of this would be extremely complex (legally, politically and financially) and would take a huge amount of time to set up. But when it comes to the “asteroid threat”, time is not an issue. Until it is. So I suggest we get started now.

The political and scientific context has changed since 2013 but the legal context is still stuck in the thinking of the 1960s – and we need to update it. If we don’t, we really could risk Armageddon.

James A Green does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Source: The Conversation: Technology http://theconversation.com/nuclear-weapons-might-save-the-world-from-an-asteroid-strike-but-we-need-to-change-the-law-first-115865

Female warblers live longer when they have help raising offspring

Death is, unfortunately, an inevitable consequence of life. In most animals growing old is accompanied by progressive deterioration in health and vitality, leading to an increasing likelihood of death with age.

However, within populations of a single species there is lots of variation in when individuals start to deteriorate in later life. Why some individuals of the same species age faster than others is one of the biggest unanswered questions in biology. It’s also one that has massive implications for healthcare and society. Understanding why individuals age differently may allow us to promote longer and healthier lifespans in humans and other animals.

The environment that an individual experiences as it strives to survive and reproduce appears to be a major driver of individual variation in ageing. We are all familiar with the idea that some people look like they have “had a hard life”, while others are “young for their age”. Scientists and medics sometimes refer to an individual’s biological age. An individual has a biological age of 70 if their health and condition resembles that which we would expect of a 70 year old – whatever their actual age is.

Read more: Revealed: a new way to test your ‘biological’ age

It’s thought that a lot of this variation in ageing originates because individuals experience different levels of physiological stress as they go through life. We now need to figure out which factors explain these differences, at what point they have an effect in the course of a life, and how they can be avoided or mitigated.

Research on a small bird could help us understanding this process of ageing – and the unlikely benefits of childcare.

How our cells record ageing

Investigating the causes of ageing within natural populations – where individuals are exposed to realistic variation in stresses and do not benefit from any intervention or medication – is important, but very tricky. Wild living individuals have to be tracked throughout their lives to assess the environmental and social conditions they experience, and their subsequent health and survival.

Our long-term study of the Seychelles warbler – a small, tropical songbird – on the island of Cousin in the Indian Ocean is a useful case study for understanding the ageing process. Since the 1990s, all the warblers on this tiny island – just 40 football fields in size – have been fitted with coloured leg rings so they can be tracked and identified. Birds don’t disperse on or off this isolated island so we were able to follow them from birth to death. We also monitored their health, reproduction and survival, which all decline rapidly in elderly individuals.

We also measured the warbler’s telomeres – repetitive DNA sequences which protect the ends of chromosomes but shorten in response to physiological stress. Telomere shortening has been shown to be a useful marker of biological condition and ageing in various animals, including humans. In the Seychelles warbler, telomere length predicts future survival. By measuring the telomere shortening that occurs in response to any given experience we can determine the impact that specific factors have on ageing.

Our previous studies on the Seychelles warbler have already found that certain factors influence the rate at which individuals age. For example, having a territory surrounded by unrelated and unfamiliar neighbours leads to more territorial fights, and hence more rapid telomere shortening. Growing up in a territory with limited food availability also has a detrimental impact on later ageing.

Our recent paper in Nature Communications has focused on how raising offspring is stressful and may lead to premature ageing – something that may not surprise many parents. Due to a lack of space on Cousin, many adults can’t find a territory in which to pair up and breed. Instead, these individuals may join up as subordinates to a dominant breeding pair within an already established territory – often the one in which they were born. They then sometimes help the dominant breeding pair raise their next batch of offspring – a process known as “cooperative breeding”.

Our analyses showed that the dominant birds that receive help have less telomere shortening than those that are left to do all of the parenting work themselves. This help also results in better survival of the dominant females. Therefore, we can see that the help that the dominant breeding birds received reduced the stress of breeding and delayed ageing, at least in females. The dominant males don’t appear to benefit from receiving help as much, probably because in the Seychelles warbler males invest much less energy in raising chicks than females do.

Our study confirms a long-held hypothesis that cooperative breeding – which is the norm in humans – can reduce the health costs to parents of raising young and may, therefore, slow down ageing. This could explain why more social species tend to have longer lifespans.

Our findings in the Seychelles warbler have identified the costs of more rapid ageing in overworked parents. These costs, and how individuals differ in what they experience and when, can help explain why there is so much variation in how individuals age in later life.

David Richardson receives funding from the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).

Martijn Hammers receives funding from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).

Source: The Conversation: Technology http://theconversation.com/female-warblers-live-longer-when-they-have-help-raising-offspring-115332

Curious Kids: why can’t we tickle ourselves?

Curious Kids is a series by The Conversation, which gives children of all ages the chance to have their questions about the world answered by experts. All questions are welcome: send them – along with your name, age and the town or city where you live – to curiouskids@theconversation.com. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we’ll do our best.

Why can’t we tickle ourselves? – Florence, aged 12, Cambridgeshire, UK.

Thanks for the question, Florence. The short answer is, we humans can’t tickle ourselves because we’ll already be expecting it. And a big part of what makes tickles ticklish is the element of surprise.

Tickling is an important sign that someone or something is touching you. In general, there are two types of tickles. There are good tickles, like when your family or friends tickle you and make you laugh. And there are bad tickles, like when you can feel a bug on you.

Both types of tickles help us in different ways.

Bad tickles

Over the hundreds of thousands of years that humans have been around, being ticklish has had its advantages. Tickling tells us when there is a bug or something else crawling on our skin.

The reason why we feel ticklish is because our body is covered in small hairs. These help us to feel danger that might be too small to see – like bugs.

People who are ticklish can feel bugs land on them, and flick them off before they bite. This helps to avoid getting bitten by poisonous insects.

Over the ages, ticklish people would have been less likely to be bitten by poisonous bugs, so they would have lived longer and had more babies, who were also ticklish.

In other words, humans have evolved to be ticklish, because it can help us to sense danger, such as bugs. If we could tickle ourselves, then we might have more trouble telling when there’s a bug on us or when we are just touching ourselves.

So it makes sense that we cannot tickle ourselves, so that we can be sure when dangerous things, such as bugs, are on us.

Good tickles

Good tickles feel good and can make us laugh. It can be a fun way to play – and humans aren’t the only animals that can tickle.

Did you know that when chimpanzees chase and tickle each other they make panting sounds? These pants do not mean that the chimp is tired – they actually mean that it wants to play!

Pets, such as rats, also make noises like laughter when people stroke them.

Laughter and play are good ways for animals (including us!) to make friends . And if you could tickle yourself, you might be less likely to laugh and play with others.

So, there are good reasons why we can only be tickled by others, and not ourselves. But to understand how tickling really works, we’ll have to look inside the human body.

The motor system

The motor system is a thing that most animals – including humans – have in their body. It’s made up of our muscles and brain, and it’s what lets us move

Every time that you move, your brain sends a plan to your muscles. It does this by sending the plan, in the form of electrical signals, along the nerves that run like wires through your body.

This plan tells the muscles when and how to move, and also what to expect when we have moved.

We have five senses: sight, smell, taste, touch and hearing. The plans sent to your muscles guess how each of these senses may change, after you have moved.

So, when you try to tickle yourself, your brain sends the plan through the nerves: it tells the muscles in one arm to move to do the tickling, and it also tells your other muscles that the tickle is coming.

When somebody else tickles you, your muscles haven’t got a plan from your brain, so the feeling is surprising – and ticklish!

But you can’t tickle yourself, because your brain is always one step ahead, telling your muscles and senses what to expect and stopping you from giving yourself a surprise. But then, maybe it’s better that way.

More Curious Kids articles, written by academic experts:

• Why do eggs have a yolk? – Rafael, age 7.

• Who is Siri? – Miles, aged four, London, UK.

• What would happen if the sun exploded? – Lizey, aged 12, Australia.

Aysha Bellamy does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Source: The Conversation: Technology http://theconversation.com/curious-kids-why-cant-we-tickle-ourselves-115323

Flying cars: automating the skies means playing with our lives

Recent research suggests that flying cars could eventually be a sustainable way to free up roads. The first models are set to hit our skies in 2019 as personal playthings, while industry sees them as taxis and commuter vehicles of the future.

But as Harry Potter’s encounter with the Whomping Whillow reminds us, flying cars can be dangerous. Before futuristic visions of three-dimensional sprawling city traffic can approach reality, there are some serious safety issues that need addressing.

Navigating the skies

The aviation industry is risk averse, and understandably so. Accidents in the air tend to have much more severe consequences than those on tarmac. Obtaining a pilot’s licence for small aircraft is therefore a rigorous, time consuming, and costly process. For this reason, large-scale flying car operations are likely to be automated – and that means relying on GPS.

Read more: Flying cars could cut emissions, replace planes, and free up roads – but not soon enough

Whilst GPS is usually a reliable technology, it is fallible. Susceptible to signal jamming and easily interrupted by atmospheric conditions, current aviation regulations prohibit it from being used as primary means for navigation.

Automated road cars use infrared laser technology (LIDAR) to support GPS data, scanning the environment to calculate the distance to nearby objects. However, such technology currently only reliably functions up to 100 metres away. This isn’t a problem on roads, which have many nearby features enabling quick relocalisation when the GPS signal cuts out. But the aerial environment isn’t littered with crossroads or traffic lights. Research is underway to develop LIDAR capable of detecting objects further afield, it is by no means certain that this could ever be available at a cost-effective price.

Even if static objects could be reliably detected, finding a way to safely weave through the moving ones remains a significant research problem. Automatic dependent surveillance–broadcast (ADS-B) technology allows aircraft to inform each other of their position, but aircraft such as gliders and microlights operate without power and so cannot use such systems.

Commercial traffic flies in pre-defined air corridors at high altitudes, avoiding the chaos below. Flying cars, on the other hand, would operate at the same lower altitude band as light aircraft, where route planning is much freer. Malawian government trials of autonomous drones along geofenced air corridors in relatively empty skies have passed without incident, suggesting that in sparsely populated terrains, flying car air corridors may have a future.

However, despite only improving emissions efficiency for long-distance travel, many companies are investing in the vision of flying cars as inner-city taxis and commuting vehicles. For example, Opener’s BlackFly, set to go on sale in 2019, has a range of just 25 miles. Given that the success of automated air corridors relies on GPS for geofencing, and on powerless aircraft to be aware of and avoid air corridors, flying car trials in busier skies may not have the same outcome.

Fail-safe designs

In these crowded environments, both accidents and mechanical failure could have catastrophic consequences. Risk of collision aside, operating standards must be exceptional, and safeguards must be built in to prevent loss of control in the event of mechanical problems.

The most promising and scalable flying car designs are winged, with multiple tiltable electric fans or rotors. These are reasonably safe when cruising as they can glide for substantial distances to safety if trouble hits. However, their vertical take off and landing requires sustained maximum thrust, placing significant strain on the motors at exactly the time when power failure is likely to have the most severe consequences.

Top notch health monitoring systems can predict developing issues by measuring irregular vibrations or temperatures, but this only mitigates risk. Genuine safety is only achieved by developing mechanical architecture that allows the vehicle to land safely when key components fail. Helicopters, for example, can land safely even in the event of power loss by angling the vehicle downwards and using the flow of air to keep the rotors spinning. Currently, there is no equivalent solution for flying cars except for the creation of large designated landing areas – hardly feasible in already crowded cities.

Of course, with companies putting serious money into making flying cars a reality, it is likely only a matter of time before solutions are developed and we see them in our skies in some form. But as the first deaths by driverless cars show, new technology is not always safe. We must be vigilant to ensure that increasing access to the skies does not play too much with our lives.

Jonathan Aitken does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Source: The Conversation: Technology http://theconversation.com/flying-cars-automating-the-skies-means-playing-with-our-lives-115102

Curious Kids: what would happen if the sun exploded?

Curious Kids is a series by The Conversation, which gives children of all ages the chance to have their questions about the world answered by experts. All questions are welcome: send them – along with your name, age and the town or city where you live – to curiouskids@theconversation.com. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we’ll do our best.

What would happen if the sun exploded? – Lizey, aged 12, Australia.

The sun is a star, and when a star explodes it’s called a supernova. These types of explosions are very bright, and very powerful. They release lots of dust into space, which is used to make more stars and planets. Our solar system was made using stuff from these explosions. Even humans are made of star stuff!

If the sun suddenly exploded like this, the whole solar system would be destroyed. You don’t have to worry though – only stars ten times the size of our sun, or bigger, can explode like this. Our sun will end its life in a different way.

A supernova is like bursting a balloon. But when our sun dies, it will happen slowly, like when you gradually let the air out of a balloon.

The death of the sun

The sun will start to die when it runs out of fuel in about 5,000,000,000 years (that’s five billion years). This is 77 times longer than the Tyrannosaurus-Rex has been extinct … a very, very long time.

When the sun starts to die, it will get bigger and slightly colder, turning into what astronomers call a “red giant”. It will get so big, that it will eat Mercury, Venus and even Earth.

When the sun is a red giant, it will be big and puffy, and start to blow off its outer layers out of the solar system. It will get smaller and smaller, eventually becoming what we then call a white dwarf.

The sun as a white dwarf

A white dwarf is the core of a dead star. They are super heavy, weighing almost as much as the sun, while being only the size of the Earth. A teaspoon of white dwarf would weigh somewhere around 6,000 kilograms – as much as an adult elephant!

When the sun is a white dwarf, most of the solar system will still be around. Mercury, Venus and Earth will be gone, but Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune will survive and continue to go around the sun. So will the asteroid belt, Kuiper belt and dwarf planets like Pluto.

Because a white dwarf is small, it doesn’t produce as much light. A white dwarf doesn’t have any fuel to give it energy, so it also gets colder and colder over time. Eventually it will become very dark.

Life after the sun

The light from the sun is what keeps our planet warm. Without it, the planets in the solar system will get very cold. This would make it harder for life to stay alive in the solar system.

A white dwarf doesn’t produce much light. But in the future, humans might build spaceships that will allow us to leave Earth. Humans might even build something to move the Earth. This would let the planet survive being eaten by the sun as a red giant.

The sun will become a red giant and then a white dwarf over billions of years. This is a very long time. We cannot watch a star do all of this, but we can learn how stars are born and die by looking at the stars in our galaxy – the Milky Way.

Read more: The fate of the Earth? We discovered the remains of a planet following the violent death of its parent star

The Milky Way has stars of all ages, and over time astronomers have worked out which ones are young, old or dead. By studying the old and dead stars, we can discover what will happen to our sun in the far, far future.

More Curious Kids articles, written by academic experts:

• Is water blue or is it just reflecting off the sky? – The students of Ms Brown’s class, Neerim South Public School, Victoria, Australia

• Who is Siri? – Miles, aged four, London, UK.

• How did the months get their names? – Sylvie, aged eight, Brisbane, Australia.

Christopher Manser does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Source: The Conversation: Technology http://theconversation.com/curious-kids-what-would-happen-if-the-sun-exploded-115329