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IT’S the planetary equivalent of a family portrait. An image snapped from Earth reveals the chemical contents of four worlds at once – the first result in a push to characterise whole solar systems, not just individual planets.

The portrait, of the star HR 8799 and its four massive planets, is spectral, meaning it splits the light from planets into its constituent wavelengths to reveal molecules in their atmospheres. This in turn gives clues about how life-friendly they may be.

Previously, only a handful of planets had had their spectra measured, and most were worlds that crossed in front of their stars, or transits, as viewed from Earth,

meaning only individual planets have been clocked in one go.

By contrast, Project 1640, an international collaboration named after the wavelength of

Planetary portrait infrared light at which it works best – 1640 nanometres – uses advanced imaging techniques that block the light from stars. This leaves only the light from planets, including ones that don’t transit, and means light from all the planets in a system can be detected simultaneously.

The 1640 team used the Hale telescope at California’s Palomar Observatory to capture the HR 8799 system. But more spectra are coming. The project has begun a three-year campaign to survey 200 stars within 150 light years of our solar system.

Needles cook up piNEEDLES falling on paper will calculate pi, everyone’s favourite mathematical constant, on the day that bears its name.

Pi day is 14 March, or 3.14 as Americans might write it. The constant – the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter – is a string of numbers beginning 3.14159, although it goes on forever.

Computers have crunched pi to trillions of digits. But this pi day, beginning at 1.59 pm GMT, Marcus du Sautoy of the University of Oxford will run Pi Day Live, an

online experiment to get people to calculate pi using a 200-year-old method called Buffon’s needle. It involves dropping a needle onto paper marked with evenly spaced parallel lines that are further apart than the needle’s length. The probability of the needle crossing a line is linked to the value of pi.

A single needle drop won’t give an accurate estimate, so the idea is to pool results from as many online participants as possible. “The more data we get coming in, the more we’ll home in on pi,” says du Sautoy.

Going for goodSEE Canada’s glaciers while you can – their melting is irreversible.

By the end of the century, a fifth of the Canadian ice sheet – the world’s third largest – could be gone for good, raising average global sea level by 3.5 centimetres. If the whole sheet melts, it would raise sea level by 20 centimetres. This is a fraction of the 70- and 7-metre rises expected if Antarctica and Greenland respectively each shed all their ice.

–Save our sharks-

–Thaw spot–

Hammerheads protectedIT LOOKS like it will be good news for sharks but bad news for polar bears at the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).

As New Scientist went to press, delegates at the meeting in Bangkok, Thailand, had voted to increase protection for five shark species. Three were types of hammerhead. All final decisions will be made on Thursday.

“This is a landmark moment showing that the world’s governments support sustainable fisheries and are concerned about the reckless over-exploitation of sharks for commercial use,” says Heather Sohl, chief species advisor for the WWF.

Sohl says overfishing driven by the luxury goods market is the main contributor to the near collapse of these shark populations, which will

now be protected by legislature regulating, but not banning, their international trade.

At the other end of the spectrum, a US proposal to ban the export of polar bears and their parts was contested by 42 nations in an effort led by Canada’s Inuit population, who cited their economic reliance on the sale of the bears’ pelts.

The meeting was also the final goodbye for the laughing owl, Tasmanian tiger and crescent nailtail wallaby, among others, as they were removed from the CITES database following their extinction over the last century. “This is a matter of book-keeping rather than a result of a sudden wave of extinctions,” says Richard Thomas of TRAFFIC, the wildlife trade monitoring network.

“Project 1640 allows light from all the planets in a solar system to be detected simultaneously”

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16 March 2013 | NewScientist | 5

But it becomes significant when combined with the melting of other smaller ice fields, says David Vaughan of ice2sea, the EU programme supporting the work.

Jan Lenaerts of Utrecht University in the Netherlands and colleagues based these projections on measurements of receding ice. They say melting is accelerating, from 31 gigatonnes in 2005 to 92 gigatonnes in 2008 (Geophysical Research Letters, doi.org/kqr).

The ice is unlikely to return, because the process is raising local temperatures. Less ice cover means more sunlight is absorbed rather than reflected.

Life under iceTHERE is something alive in Lake Vostok, deep beneath the East Antarctic ice sheet – but we don’t know what it is.

Lake Vostok lies beneath ice 3.5 kilometres deep and has been cut off from the rest of the world for 14 million years. Sergey Bulat of the Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute in Russia and colleagues have been studying lake water that froze onto the drill bit when they broke into it in February 2012.

They identified short fragments of DNA belonging to 19 known bacterial species. “All proved to be contaminants, or from human skin,” says Bulat. A twentieth species is more unusual. The genetic samples show less than 86 per cent similarity to known major groups of bacteria. That could mean it belongs to an entirely new division, says Bulat, or it could just be a new species. The finding was confirmed by Russia’s Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute.

“This is encouraging, but we don’t really know much about it,” says David Pearce of the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, UK. Life manages to carry on in all sorts of extreme environments. What Pearce wants to know is how different life in Vostok really is to everything else on Earth.

Difficult diagnosis“COULD do better,” says the report card of US army physicians diagnosing post-traumatic stress disorder.

The evaluation comes from a US army report, published last week, that was prompted by allegations from 14 soldiers whose doctors had diagnosed them with PTSD. They claim that army officials pressured an evaluation board to change their diagnoses to avoid compensating them.

Independent reviewers found that since 2001, 6400 of 146,000 behavioural health diagnoses –

which includes brain injury – had been altered, although these were just as frequently changed to PTSD as changed from it.

The report found no evidence of wrongdoing but says that PTSD evaluation practices could be

improved. Data from the Veteran’s Health Association suggests 16 per cent of veterans returning from Iraq or Afghanistan have been treated for PTSD since 2001.

“There was no wrongdoing, but evaluating post-traumatic stress disorder could be improved”

FOR the first time we are close to creating artificial life from scratch for the first time. So says Craig Venter, founder of the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland, and famed for creating the first cell with a synthetic genome.

“We think we’re close, but we’ve not submitted a paper yet,” he said at the Global Grand Challenges summit in London this week.

Venter announced in 2010 that he had brought to life an almost completely synthetic version of the bacterium Mycoplasma mycoides, by transplanting it into the vacant shell of another bacterium. Venter’s latest creation, which he has dubbed the Hail Mary Genome, will be made from scratch with genes he and his

institute colleagues, Clyde Hutchison and Hamilton Smith, consider indispensable for life.

The team is using computer simulations to better understand what is needed to create a simple, self-replicating cell. “Once we have a minimal chassis, we can add anything else to it,” he says.

Venter’s quest to engineer algae to produce more oil than usual is also going well. “We’ve been able to increase photosynthesis threefold, meaning that we get three times as much energy per photon [of sunlight] as from natural algae,” he says. He also announced that his programme to scour the oceans for novel microscopic life has so far turned up 80 million genes new to biology.

Synthetic life from scratch

–Only the best genes for Venter–

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Hello, neighbourThe nearest habitable exoplanet may be quite close indeed. Based on an earlier estimate, we hoped to find an Earth-like planet orbiting a red dwarf star about 13 light years away. But that was before an updated definition of the habitable zone, the region around a star where liquid water can exist. It now seems other Earths are up to three times more common, with the closest probably a mere 6.5 light years away.

L’Aquila seven appealThe six seismologists, and one government official, who were convicted of manslaughter for failing to warn of an impending earthquake are to appeal. The seven were sentenced to six years in prison last year, in the wake of a 2009 earthquake that struck the Italian town of L’Aquila.

Drinks ban upsetA Supreme Court judge has blocked New York’s sugary drinks ban, one day before it was due to take effect. The planned anti-obesity measure would have prevented food vendors from selling sugary drinks in portions bigger than 475 millilitres. Mayor Michael Bloomberg said he will appeal, stating: “People are dying every day. This is not a joke”.

Fuel from the deepIn the first commercial-scale venture of its kind, Japan has begun extracting natural gas from icy clathrates beneath the seabed. If all goes well, clathrates could become a major energy source.

Brain boostMice given transplants of human brain cells called glial cells outperform their counterparts in memory and learning tests. The study suggests that glial cells are more than “housekeeping” cells and that their evolution may have played a vital role in the development of human cognition (Cell Stem Cell, doi.org/kr4).

For daily news stories, visit newscientist.com/news

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