12 | NewScientist | 25 December 2010/1 January 2011

THE astonishing ability of many children with autism to rapidly locate concealed on-screen symbols falls apart in an experiment that mimics hunting for objects in the real world.

The experiment took place on an array of 49 lights resembling a disco dance floor. For each game, researchers switched on an apparently random pattern of 16 green lights. Children then had

to dash around pressing them, searching for one that turned red. Twenty children with autism and 20 without took turns to complete the game as fast as possible.

The game was biased so that 80 per cent of the time, the light that turned red was located in a specific half of the room. Children with autism were expected to spot this pattern faster but the reverse happened. Non-autistic children

On the origin of Earth’s oxygen

GENE families involved in respiration and photosynthesis arose in a short evolutionary burst that began nearly a billion years before Earth’s atmosphere became rich in oxygen.

Lawrence David and Eric Alm from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology mapped the evolutionary history of 3983 gene families that occur in a wide range of modern species. They were able to show that 27 per cent of these gene families appeared in a short evolutionary burst which began about 3.3 billion years ago (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature09649).

Many of the genes from this time were involved in electron transport – a key step in respiration and photosynthesis, which ultimately led, say David and Alm, to oxygen-producing photosynthesis and the “great oxygenation event” 2.4 billion years ago, when the atmosphere became oxygen rich.

Five billion words at their fingertips, courtesy of Google

GOOGLE’S “fossil record” of digitised books now covers 5 million books, spans 500 years and more than 500 billion words. Already it is possible to trace the accelerating evolution of the English language, map the rise and fall of various people, and uncover patterns of censorship in Soviet Russia, modern China and 1950s America – and that’s only a beginning.

“This dataset is going to underwrite a field which is far, far more interesting than anything we could talk about in a single paper,” says Erez Lieberman Aiden, who led the research at Harvard University with Jean-Baptiste Michel.

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Autistic ability falters in real world spent 60 per cent of their time searching the target-rich half, compared with 45 per cent for those with autism.

The team, led by Liz Pellicano of London’s Institute of Education, suggests that while autistic kids may be good at spotting preset visual patterns, they find it harder to work out rules from apparently random events (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1014076108).

From the more than 15 million books digitised to date, Aiden, Michel and colleagues from Google and Harvard selected the 5.2 million with the most reliable data, for example, they know the author and date. If written as a single line of text, this would stretch to the moon and back 10 times (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1199644).

The researchers counted up the number of times each word appeared in the dataset during each year from 1800 to 2000, allowing them to follow changes in word use. Similarly, they tracked the mention of people’s names, a crude measure of fame, and found that people today become famous earlier in life than they used to – around the age of 29 in the mid-20th century, down from 43 in the early 19th century. However, fame today is more fleeting, they found.

BLACK holes may dodge the speeding “bullets” that would otherwise strip them naked.

The event horizon surrounding a black hole means nothing, not even light, escapes. But in 2009, theorists showed that incoming particles might cause a black hole to rotate so fast that this horizon is destroyed, allowing light to escape. The trouble is, this “naked singularity” violates Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

Now Enrico Barausse of the University of Maryland in College Park and colleagues reckon such particles needn’t strip black holes. Instead, approaching matter distorts a black hole’s gravity so that it shrinks away from the particles, which speed on past (Physical Review Letters, in press).

Black holes saved by superhero move