An alcohol substitute that mimics its pleasant buzz without leading to drunkenness is being developed by scientists.

The new substance could have the added bonus of being “switched off” instantaneously with a pill, to allow drinkers to drive home or return to work.

The synthetic alcohol, being developed from chemicals related to Valium, works like alcohol on nerves in the brain that provide a feeling of wellbeing and relaxation.

But unlike alcohol its does not affect other parts of the brain that control mood swings and lead to addiction. It is also much easier to flush out of the body.

Finally because it is much more focused in its effects, it can also be switched off with an antidote, leaving the drinker immediately sober.

The new alcohol is being developed by a team at Imperial College London, led by Professor David Nutt, Britain’s top drugs expert who was recently sacked as a government adviser for his comments about cannabis and ecstasy.

He envisions a world in which people could drink without getting drunk, he said.

No matter how many glasses they had, they would remain in that pleasant state of mild inebriation and at the end of an evening out, revellers could pop a sober-up pill that would let them drive home.

Prof Nutt and his team are concentrating their efforts on benzodiazepines, of which diazepam, the chief ingredient of Valium is one.

Thousands of candidate benzos are already known to science. He said it is just a matter of identifying the closest match and then, if necessary, tailoring it to fit society’s needs.

Ideally, like alcohol, it should be tasteless and colourless, leaving those characteristics to the drink it’s in.

Eventually it would be used to replace the alcohol content in beer, wine and spirits and the recovered ethanol (the chemical name for alcohol) could be sold as fuel.

Professor Nutt believes that the new drug, which would need licensing, could have a dramatic effect on society and improve the nation’s health.

The NHS report Statistics on Alcohol: England, 2009 found more than 800,000 alcohol-related admissions to hospitals in 2007-08 – and more than 6,500 deaths – at a cost to the service of £2.7bn a year.

Some charities estimate that the toll could be up to five times higher. Drink is, for example, a factor in 40 per cent of fatal fires, 15 per cent of drownings, 65 per cent of suicides and 40 per cent of domestic abuse. It also has other costs, including 17 million lost working days a year, worth about £20bn to the economy.

“I’ve been in experiments where I’ve taken benzos,” said Professor Nutt. “One minute I was sedated and nearly asleep, five minutes later I was giving a lecture.

“No one’s ever tried targeting this before, possibly because it will be so hard to get it past the regulators.

“Most of the benzos are controlled under the Medicines Act. The law gives a privileged position to alcohol, which has been around for 3,000 years. But why not use advances in pharmacology to find something safer and better?”

Getting the drug approved could be hard for the team as clinical trials are expensive, and it is not clear who would pay for them, according to Professor Nutt.

He said that the traditional drinks industry has not shown any interest, however some countries might be persuaded to sponsor the team.

Some countries have more liberal regimes than others, though, and Professor Nutt thinks Greece or Spain, within the EU, could lead the way.

The latest Home Office performance figures showed that more than one in four people believe that alcohol is blighting their community.

A survey of every police force area in England and Wales found that 26 per cent of those polled “perceived people being drunk or rowdy in public placed to be a problem in their area” – a slight increase from last year.

The fears over the affects of alcohol range from urban to rural communities, with the worst hit being Manchester, South Wales, London, Northumbria and Gwent.

One of the super-cooled tubes that make up the Large Hadron Collider

Sunday, 18 July 2010

After decades of bending atoms around giant rings and smashing them apart in search of the secrets of the universe, scientists at Cern, the European particle physics laboratory outside Geneva, are reviving a 1960s technology and going straight.

Their latest ring, the 27km Large Hadron Collider (LHC), only got up to speed in March, yet physicists meet in Paris this week to discuss plans for a new $6.7bn (£4.4bn) experiment – the International Linear Collider (ILC), which they hope to start building in 2012.

The new machine will be a straight-line tunnel, 31km long, and will use super-conducting magnets to accelerate electrons and positrons, their antimatter equivalents, towards each other at close to the speed of light.

“To explore what the LHC discovers in more detail, you need an electron collider,” says Professor Brian Foster, the European director of the ILC project. Part of the report to the Paris conference will be “a blueprint for how you would set up an ILC lab”. More than 700 people at 300 laboratories and universities around the world are already working on the accelerator. The only other high-energy linear electron smasher is the Stanford Linear Accelerator in California, a 3.2km track built in 1962.

Both the existing LHC and the planned ILC are trying to solve fundamental physics questions, including – what happened in the Big Bang? Where did all the antimatter go? How many dimensions does space have? Why are there so many different sub-atomic particles? And, most famously, what does a Higgs particle look like?

While the 12 subatomic components of matter have all been found, including quarks and neutrinos, the Higgs has proved more elusive. The leading theory of how the universe works says that the Higgs gives matter mass, and therefore gravity. Its discovery could point the way to unifying the two great 20th-century theories of physics – quantum and general relativity.

It may also help solve the mystery of the missing 96 per cent of the universe. When astronomers estimate the mass of galaxies, including stars, planets, nebulas and black holes, they find that they are so light they should fly apart as they spin. The extra mass needed to keep them together is thought to be hidden in as yet undiscovered “dark matter”.

Although a location for the new device has not been decided, Cern is a likely contender, if only because most of the physicists who might want to use it are already there, along with the infrastructure they need.

Cern’s LHC uses protons made from atoms of the lightest element, hydrogen, by stripping off their electrons in a strong magnetic field, and accelerating them to 99.9999991 per cent of the speed of light.

By the time they enter the LHC, Einstein’s equation, E=mc2, is in play. Since the protons can’t be made to go any faster, pumping additional energy in makes them more massive. In the LHC, they can be pushed to 7 trillion electron volts. When two beams, rotating in opposite directions, cross, the energy released from a single pair could be as high as 14 TeV.

But proton crashes are “dirty”. “It’s like colliding two oranges together at 45mph,” says Professor Foster. “Sometimes the pips hit each other, but usually it’s just a spray of juice.” The pips, in his analogy, are the trio of quarks that make up a proton and which cause the most interesting smashes. Typically, only one quark from each proton in a collision will hit head on, while the other four will miss each other.

Worse, although scientists know how much energy they’ve put into each proton, they don’t know how it is distributed between the pips. One quark could have most of it, or all three could have roughly equal amounts. At best, researchers can tell the maximum amount of energy a collision might involve. Still, the LHC produces billions of bangs a second so they know roughly what energy levels give them interesting results.

But for a more precise exploration of the high-energy frontier, they will need the ILC. Electrons are 2,000 times smaller than protons, and do not have an internal structure. When two of them run into each other, the energy released is known exactly.

But electrons are not perfect. When particles are bent by magnetic fields, they emit X-rays. For relatively massive protons, this is not a problem, but for the lighter electrons it’s a huge obstacle. Most of the energy pumped into an electron in the LHC would merely replace that lost to radiation.

And so, scientists are returning to the linear design of half a century ago. The exact specifications will have to wait until the LHC has identified which energy ranges are of interest, but the ILC as envisioned will have energy levels of around 0.5TeV.

Construction of the new accelerator is expected to take seven years. No one would be surprised if, during that time, plans emerge for an even more powerful, next-generation accelerator.

Sunday, 11 October 2009

The only road to St Theresa Point in north-eastern Manitoba is made of ice and lasts just two months. The remote community’s 3,200 people, most of them Cree Indians, are squeezed into 530 homes, more than half of them without running water. Until June, a doctor flew in once a week for three days. But since an outbreak of swine flu left more than 200 people ill and sent 12 by air ambulance to Winnipeg, 600km (375 miles) away, Health Canada has been ferrying in more doctors. This autumn, in preparation for the flu season, it is also delivering something else: a supply of body bags.

In Australia, a similar scenario played out in July. An estimated 400 people out of a population of 3,400, more than 90 per cent of them Aboriginal, caught H1N1 influenza on Palm Island off the Queensland coast. In Brazil, a conference on indigenous education was cancelled in September after seven members of the Matsigenka, a tribe living along the Urubamba river in the Peruvian Amazon, tested positive for swine flu.

As health authorities gear up for the northern hemisphere’s flu season, the new strain of influenza is expected to hit indigenous peoples far harder than it will healthy, wealthy, urban Westerners. If the outbreaks in Canada and Australia are any guide, native communities could find a tenth of their populations sick, and untold numbers dead.

The World Health Organisation warned in its August briefing note on the pandemic that minorities and indigenous peoples face a far higher risk of hospitalisation and death. “In some studies, the risk in these groups is four to five times higher than in the general population,” it said.

Survival International, a London-based charity that tries to protect indigenous peoples, has called on the government of the Andaman Islands to close the Andaman Trunk Road because it runs through land populated by a nomadic tribe. The Jarawa came into contact with outsiders only in 1998; within a year, half of them had suffered respiratory problems after an outbreak of measles.

Glenn Shepard, an anthropologist who works closely with Peru’s Matsigenka, said they are not the only tribe he is concerned about. “The arrival of swine flu among the Matsigenka is especially worrying as they are known to have intermittent contact with quite isolated Indian groups living near by,” he said.

Scientists and medical researchers have two hypotheses to explain the vulnerability of tribal peoples. The first is that those, like the Jarawa, who have had little contact with the global community simply have immune systems that have never been primed. Kevin Paterson, a Canadian doctor, notes that during the 1918 Spanish flu, 8.5 per cent of American Indians died, but among the more isolated Inuit in Nome, Alaska, the toll was 55 per cent. In Hebron, Labrador, 5,000km to the east, 150 out of 220 Innu were killed. Yet the global fatality rate for Spanish flu was just 2.5 per cent.

The other hypothesis applies to those indigenous populations that live on the fringes of Western society, such as the Cree of St Theresa Point and the Aborigines on Palm Island. For them, the problem is poverty, poor general health and crowded living conditions. “We have in excess of 15 people living in a three-bedroom home, which you wouldn’t find in mainstream communities,” said Alf Lacey, the mayor of Palm Island. Although Tamiflu was available, many islanders were unaware of it because they are unable to read.

“Influenza has a cure,” said Dr Paterson. “It’s called affluence.”

By Paul Rodgers and Smitha Mundasad

Sunday, 16 May 2010

The spectre of plague stalked the world last year with its constant companion, fear. Schools and stadiums were closed in Mexico, tourists from Egypt to Singapore were quarantined, and the surgical mask became a universal fashion accessory across Asia. Yet predictions that the global death toll from swine flu could reach 7.5 million were well off the mark. At most, the virus killed 14,000 people, and some of those had pre-existing conditions or had been infected by other dangerous bugs as well. Against a background death toll from seasonal flu of up to 500,000, the new H1N1 strain was invisible.

Professor Ulrich Keil, a World Health Organisation (WHO) adviser on heart disease, said the decision to declare a pandemic had led to a “gigantic misallocation” of health budgets. “We know the great killers are hypertension, smoking, high cholesterol, high body mass index, physical inactivity and low fruit and vegetable intake,” he told the Council of Europe. Yet governments “instead wasted huge amounts of money by investing in pandemic scenarios whose evidence base is weak”.

The suspicion that the response to the outbreak was an unnecessary panic has been spreading since the virus slipped from the front pages. Even the WHO, the UN body that first punched the big red button, may be having doubts. An external committee has been set up to review its reaction and will deliver an interim report this week, though at the moment no bombshells are expected.

The WHO faces two main charges. The first is that between the first cases of H1N1 being reported in March and the declaration of a full, phase 6 pandemic by its director-general, Dr Margaret Chan, in June, the organisation changed its definition of a pandemic. Critics say the old definition required that a virus result in “enormous numbers of deaths and illness”. The new definition applies only if the virus is new, if it spreads easily between people, and if the population has little or no immunity to it. A bug that causes a mild case of the sniffles could qualify.

A spokesman for the organisation insists there has been no change at all – that the old definition was an error on a single web page about bird flu, the last great influenza scare. But Peter Doshi, a doctoral candidate at MIT whose thesis is on science, politics and influenza policy, argued in a paper in the British Medical Journal in September that the old definition had been widely applied by the WHO since at least 2003.

The second charge, prominently made by Dr Wolfgang Wodarg, the former head of health at the Council of Europe, is that the WHO is unduly influenced by the drugs industry, which stood to make a fortune from selling anti-virals and vaccines. The Swiss giant Novartis, for example, saw its profits jump by nearly a third in the first quarter of this year to $2.95bn, much of it from delivering swine flu vaccines ordered last year. Debate rages over allegations that some experts who recommended the pandemic be declared, have links to drugs companies, although this has been denied. But critics note that it’s hard to become an expert in the field without having some funding from big pharmaceutical companies.

Others say that the problem is due to the spread of false assumptions. Most people think, for example, that when they have flu symptoms they must have influenza. But Dr Tom Jefferson of the Cochrane Collaboration, which reviews the evidence for various medical treatments, notes that more than 200 agents can cause flu-like illnesses. Only 7.5 to 15 per cent of cases are actually influenza. Anti-viral drugs and vaccines are aimed just at this group. “To stop one new case of H1N1, you’d have to inoculate 100 people,” says Dr Jefferson “or you could get four people to wash their hands.” Masks work too, he says, and so does sending people home from work if they have symptoms.

The usual justification for the massive response to H1N1 is that no one wants a repeat of the 1918 pandemic, which killed an estimated 50 million people. But scientists are not even sure if that plague was caused by influenza at all. The virus was not discovered until 1933. And outbreaks since then have been much milder.

The last time H1N1 showed up was in 1976, at a US army base. Washington ordered the immunisation of 40 million Americans before it discovered that it had only one death from the flu but hundreds of cases of severe side-effects to the vaccine. A review headed by Dr Harvey Fineberg put much of the blame on the “influenza fraternity”, arguing that expert panels tend towards “group think” and should be backed up by independent scientific advice. Dr Fineberg is now chairman of the WHO’s external committee evaluating its response to the 2009 outbreak whose final report next May could well lead to a radical rethink of the world’s reaction to new viruses.

Sunday, 26 September 2010

Australia’s Darling river is running with water again after a drought in the middle of the decade reduced it to a trickle. But the rains feeding the continent’s fourth-longest river are not the undiluted good news you might expect. For the cloudbursts also create ideal conditions for an unwelcome pest – the Australian plague locust.

The warm, wet weather that prevailed last summer meant that three generations of locusts were born, each one up to 150 times larger than the previous generation. After over-wintering beneath the ground, the first generation of 2010 is already hatching. And following the wettest August in seven years, the climate is again perfect. The juveniles will spend 20 to 25 days eating and growing, shedding their exoskeletons five times before emerging as adults, when population pressure will force them to swarm.

It is impossible to say how many billions of bugs will take wing, but many experts fear this year’s infestation could be the worst since records began – 75 years ago. All that one locust expert, Greg Sword, an associate professor at the University of Sydney, would say was: “South Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria are all going to get hammered.”

A one-kilometre wide swarm of locusts can chomp through 10 tons of crops – a third of their combined body weight – in a day. The New South Wales Farmers Association said an area the size of Spain was affected and the Government of Victoria alone forecasts A$2bn (£1.2bn) of damage.

Though locusts move slowly when the sun’s up, at night they can fly high and fast, sometimes travelling hundreds of kilometres. “A farmer can go to bed at night not having seen a grasshopper all year and wake up in the morning to find his fields full of them,” said Professor Sword.

All locusts are grasshoppers, but not all grasshoppers are locusts. The difference is a suite of genetic changes that kick in when population densities cross a critical threshold. In some species, they produce physical transformations – the desert locust of North Africa goes from green to black and yellow, for example – but the Australian plague locust merely reprogrammes its behaviour, from solitary to gregarious.

Swarms probably make use of the available food more efficiently as the leading edge is constantly pushing forwards into new vegetation. It may be fear more than hunger, however, that drives the locusts.

Locusts are highly cannibalistic, says Professor Sword, and any that stay still too long are likely to get nibbled. “Swarms are like lifeboats,” he says, forging a gruesome metaphor. “If you’re the only one in the boat, you could easily starve. But if you’ve got lots of company, you could be the last to survive. We call it travelling with your lunch.”

Controlling the bugs involves spotter planes identifying juvenile bands that can be targets for attack by crop sprayers armed with pesticides. But eastern Australia is struggling to find enough pilots to take on all the work.

And the spraying itself comes at a cost. Apiarists have complained that their bees are in danger from pesticides and ecologists fear for the many animals that treat the locusts as a moving smorgasbord. Concerns have also been raised by bloggers and activists that some of the chemicals used could harm humans.

The best hope for phasing out the chemicals comes from research. But the goal, says Professor Sword, is control not eradication. “They were here long before humans arrived,” he said.

A Maori legend about a giant, man-eating bird has been confirmed by scientists. Te Hokioi was a huge black-and-white predator with a red crest and yellow-green tinged wingtips, in an account given to Sir George Gray, an early governor of New Zealand. It was said to be named after its cry and to have “raced the hawk to the heavens”. Scientists now think the stories handed down by word of mouth and depicted in rock drawings refer to Haast’s eagle, a raptor that became extinct just 500 years ago, say the authors of a study in The Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Haast’s eagle (Harpagornis moorei) was discovered in swamp deposits by Sir Julius von Haast in the 1870s. But it was at first thought to be a scavenger because its bill was similar to a vulture’s with hoods over its nostrils to stop flesh blocking its air passages as it rooted around inside carcasses.

But a re-examination of skeletons using modern technology, including CAT scans, by researchers at Canterbury Museum in Christchurch and the University of New South Wales in Australia showed it had a strong enough pelvis to support a killing blow as it dived at speeds of up to 80kph.

With a wingspan of up to three metres and weighing 18kg, the female was twice as big as the largest living eagle, the Steller’s sea eagle. And the bird’s talons were as big as a tiger’s claws. “It was certainly capable of swooping down and taking a child,” said Paul Scofield, the curator of vertebrate zoology at the Canterbury Museum. “They had the ability to not only strike with their talons but to close the talons and put them through quite solid objects such as a pelvis. It was designed as a killing machine.”

Its main prey would have been moa, flightless birds which grew to as much as 250kg and 2.5 metres tall. “In some fossil sites, moa bones have been found with signs of eagle predation,” Dr Scofield said.

New Zealand has no native land mammals because it became isolated from other land masses in the Cretaceous, more than 65 million years ago. As a result, birds filled niches usually populated by large mammals such as deer and cattle. “Haast’s eagle wasn’t just the equivalent of a giant predatory bird,” said Dr Scofield. “It was the equivalent of a lion.” The eagle is thought to have died out after the arrival, 1,000 years ago, of humans, who exterminated the giant moa. The latest study shows it was a recent immigrant to the islands, related to the little eagle (Aquila morphnoides) an Australian bird weighing less than 1kg.

Remains of Haast’s eagles are rare because there never were many. They lived only on New Zealand’s South Island, with probably not more than 1,000 breeding pairs at any one time.

The first sign of trouble came when the Eagle was five minutes into its descent, 33,500ft above the Moon’s surface. A shrill alarm rang through the cramped, seatless cabin in which two astronauts stood facing the stars. An error message flashed up on their primitive computer’s tiny read-out: “1202″. Neither Neil Armstrong nor Buzz Aldrin knew what it meant. It was left to Steve Bales, a 26-year-old technician at Mission Control in Houston to decide they should keep going. The error, he was fairly sure, would fix itself, and he repeatedly called “Go!” as the alarm sounded four more times.

Armstrong later said it was the computer glitch that kept him from dealing with a much more serious problem: when the descent had begun, before they rolled so they were face up, the Apollo 11 astronauts had noticed they were passing landmarks four seconds early. After the lunar module rocked forward, to point the engine nozzle straight down to feather their descent, they should have been able to see their smooth, flat landing site in the Sea of Tranquillity below. But Armstrong recognised nothing when he looked out of his window; the autopilot had taken them four miles beyond their target. “We were landing just short of a large crater with very large rocks covering a high percentage of the surface,” he recalled.

Ten minutes after beginning their descent from orbit, at an altitude of 500ft, Armstrong switched to manual control. His heart rate leapt from 77bpm to 156bpm as he set the engine to hover and sought a safe place to touch down. To his right, Aldrin called out their altitude, rate of descent and forward speed, his hand never far from the button that would explosively abort the landing. Then he added a number: “90 seconds” – the time until their landing fuel ran out. Finally, among the rubble ejected from the crater by a meteor impact millions of years ago, the mission commander saw a gap. Tilting the lunar module, they drifted to port.

At Mission Control, Gene Kranz, the flight director, turned to Charlie Duke, the astronaut charged with communicating with the crew. “Better remind them there ain’t no damn gas stations on the Moon,” he said. Duke’s warning was more concise: “30 seconds.” Aldrin’s tense voice crackled back: “Light’s on,” referring to the low fuel signal. “Thirty feet… Kicking up some dust… Faint shadow… Contact light.” They were down, with just enough fuel left for 16 seconds of flight – less than the time it took you to read this paragraph.

For a 10-year-old boy, nervously fidgeting around his living-room, confirmation came from Armstrong: “Houston, Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed.” It was 8.17pm GMT on 20 July 1969. I remember whooping and jumping on and off the sofa in a scene much like the one at Mission Control. The 12-minute descent had been an agony of suspense. There had been no pictures of the descent to watch, and between the distortion of the communications and the technical jargon, the astronaut’s funny accents had conveyed no meaning.

I knew nothing then about how close my heroes had come to disaster. The computer alarm was later blamed on a radar dish which had been left switched on, overloading the tiny computer. (Your mobile phone is about a million times more powerful.) The navigational error was caused by “masscons” – the Moon, like the Earth, is less than perfectly spherical, so its gravity fluctuates as you fly over it. Mass concentrations had pulled the Eagle into a slightly lower orbit, speeding it up, and it was already going at more than one mile a second.

What I did know about Apollo 11 was still pretty impressive for a 10-year-old. I knew, for example, that the 363ft Saturn V rocket was one foot shorter than the dome on St Paul’s Cathedral. I knew the velocity required to escape the Earth’s gravity (seven miles per second), the distance to the Moon (239,000 miles) and the time lag as radio signals travelled there and back (three seconds). Years before the word was invented, I was a geek – a space geek. I knew that the age I was growing up in was neither Modern nor Atomic, nor Post-War. It was the Space Age, and the arrival of men on the Moon, even if they were, disappointingly, not British, was its defining moment. By the time I was an adult, I knew lunar trips would be as routine as taking a jumbo jet from London to New York.

So the past 40 years have been a bit of a letdown, a point I tactfully made to David Scott, commander of Apollo 15, when he visited London last month to open a new ride at the Science Museum. Where was Moon Base One, I demanded. Why couldn’t I just buy a ticket on the internet for a discount break on a space station? “We made it look too easy,” said Scott, the seventh of 12 men to walk on the Moon. “Put it in perspective,” he said, comparing the Apollo missions to the gradual discovery of the Americas. “Columbus has just returned but Cabot and Magellan have not yet made their voyages. And Cook hasn’t even been born.” He’s right about Captain James Cook, but John Cabot and Ferdinand Magellan both sailed within 40 years of Columbus.

I’m not about to argue. Aged 77, Scott is still a commanding figure, tall with a distinguished head of grey hair. He flew with Armstrong in Gemini 8 and was the command module pilot in Apollo 9. On his lapel he wears a gold astronaut’s pin, a shooting star rising to orbit on three streaks. He must have heard the same questions 1,000 times, yet he answers patiently. Moon rocks feel as though they’re made from Styrofoam, he tells one young lad. To me, he describes flying the lunar module as “like trying to run on an ice-covered pond and turn without skates. It’s more difficult than any plane I ever flew,” he says. “You ‘zone’ like an Olympic athlete. You’re totally focused.” Then the former test pilot thinks of a better metaphor: “It’s like riding a pogo stick on a trampoline.”

Our nearest neighbour was hurtling around Earth once every 27 days, seven hours and 43 minutes long before man evolved. It governs the tides, illuminates the night and provides a convenient measure of time between the day and the year. The Greeks believed in Hecate, a three-faced goddess who transformed into Artemis as the satellite waxed and then into Selene when it was full. Plutarch told of cave-dwelling Moon demons. Johannes Kepler wrote that its craters were built by Moon creatures. And as recently as the 1920s, the American astronomer William Pickering thought it might have insects. The superstitious believed sleeping in moonbeams would drive one crazy and werewolves transformed from men into monsters by its light. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare called the crescent moon “a silver bow new-bent in heaven”; Shelley described it in “The Cloud” as “that orbed maiden with white fire laden”. So enamoured were poets and lyricists, particularly bad ones, that by the early 20th century, rhymes with “spoon” and “June” were the worst of clichés.

The first recorded story of a trip to the Moon was a satirical piece by the Syrian writer Lucian of Samosata during the 2nd century AD, who had his hero sucked up in a water spout. In the 1600s, Cyrano de Bergerac imagined being lifted to the Moon by bottles of dew. Two centuries later, Jules Verne fired his crew off from a huge cannon, while in 1901 HG Wells invented anti-gravity. And in 1950, Hergé, Tintin’s author, launched the young reporter and Captain Haddock in a ship that looked suspiciously like a German V2 rocket. They were all wrong – but Hergé came closest.

Wernher von Braun conducted his first rocket experiment in 1924 by attaching fireworks to his sister’s red wagon and setting it off in a busy Berlin street. The police arrested him. By the time he reached university, his love of astronomy and things that go bang was firmly established. He joined the Verein für Raumschiffahrt, an amateur spaceflight society, and was writing his doctorate when the Nazis came to power in 1933.

Von Braun’s connection with the Nazis is controversial. He built weapons for Hitler, notably the V2, joined the SS and employed slave labourers at his factories. (More people died building the V2s than were killed when they landed on London.) But he was also suspected of being a Communist and was arrested for defeatism. He was one of those obsessed people who believe their work is more important than anything around them. His comment when the first V2 exploded in London is revealing: “The rocket worked perfectly except for landing on the wrong planet.”

At the end of the Second World War, Von Braun and his team arranged to be captured by the Americans and were sent to the US under Operation Paperclip. Eventually, he would build every major US rocket up to the Saturn V. But at first, Washington was uninterested. Then the Soviet space programme scored a series of triumphs: the first artificial satellite (1957), the first animal in space (1957), the first unmanned Moon mission (1959), the first man in space (1961) and the first woman (1963). The space race had begun, and America was losing.

It doesn’t take a cynic to appreciate the significance of Cold War politics on the Apollo programme. The ascendancy of the free market is clear now, but in the 1960s, central planning still seemed viable. The space race looked like a reasonable way to determine which system, capitalist or Communist, was superior, though so many factors were involved, including blind luck, that it could have gone either way.

President Dwight Eisenhower had been caught napping by Sputnik, a fact John Kennedy used in his 1960 campaign. But once in power, Kennedy seemed distracted by the Communist threat. Influential advisers argued that the US should cede space to the Soviets and get on with earthly business. Many space scientists wanted to concentrate on unmanned exploration, which offered richer rewards at lower cost. Yet Kennedy’s hand was forced by the April 1961 flight of Yuri Gagarin in Vostok 1 and the Bay of Pigs fiasco five days later. The president had promised an army of Cuban exiles air support for their invasion, but failed to deliver. Survivors bitterly denounced his treachery, and his standing with the American public hit a record low. Desperate for a distraction, he called on vice president Lyndon Johnson. “Do we have a chance of beating the Soviets by putting up a laboratory in space?” he asked. “Or by a trip around the Moon, or by a rocket to go to the Moon and back with a man?” The mission didn’t matter; all that counted was beating the Russians. In a speech to Congress a month later, Kennedy announced: “This nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him back safely to the Earth.” America was back in the running.

‘Apollo 1′ sat atop a Saturn 1B rocket at Cape Kennedy on 27 January 1967 while its three member-crew went through a tedious five-hour systems check. The atmosphere inside the command module was pressurised pure oxygen. Political pressure was also high; president Johnson wanted an Apollo success to boost his re-election chances. But the command module had been plagued by 20,000 failures, and condemned as “sloppy and unsafe” by a quality-control inspector. Early in the test, the astronauts complained of a sour odour, and static was breaking into their communications. At 6.31pm, something sparked. “I’ve got a fire in the cockpit,” reported mission commander Gus Grissom. “Fire!” shouted Roger Chafee. Then came a garbled, “Get us out!” possibly from Ed White.

In the pure-oxygen atmosphere, almost everything was inflammable. Metal pipes bubbled and dripped, joints melted, cooling lines burst, spraying burning fluid like a blowtorch. The foam cushions on the floor burst into a wall of flame between the crew and the exit. The hatch took 90 seconds to open in ideal circumstances. The crew of Apollo 1 died in 8.5 seconds.

The fatal fire could have brought the programme to a halt, or slowed it so much that the Soviets won. For the first time, public debate turned to whether the huge sums ($25bn in 1965 dollars, about £100bn today) being spent on a Moon shot were worthwhile. An internal investigation was never able to find the point of ignition, listing 10 possible sources. Poor management, carelessness, negligence and failure to consider safety were highlighted. Management at Nasa and the command-module contractor, North American, now part of Boeing, were overhauled. Half-a-billion dollars was spent on redesigning Apollo. Chris Kraft, one of the flight directors, said later: “It was unforgiveable that we allowed that accident to happen. [But] had it not happened, we probably would not have got to the Moon when we did.”

The Russians had not been idle meanwhile, but they had been unlucky. Their first plan was to launch a “direct ascent” mission, with a single vehicle going all the way to the Moon and back. But their massive N-1 rocket was delayed. Under a second plan, “Earth orbit rendezvous”, several smaller rockets would dock in orbit, then head to the Moon. But the first ship in the flotilla, Soyuz 1, crashed, killing cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov. A compromise mission, Zond, was devised to send a reduced crew to orbit the Moon and return without landing. Moscow dithered, however, and Nasa swapped its mission plans for Apollos 8 and 9, getting a crew into lunar orbit first. In 1968, Americans were treated to a Christmas Eve broadcast from the Moon. Mission commander Frank Borman looked back at the Earth, calling it “a grand oasis in the vastness of space”.

Nasa’s plan was to employ a technique known as “lunar orbit rendezvous”, in which a two-part lunar module goes to the surface, and the top section blasts off to rejoin the orbiting command module, transferring the astronauts and samples. The command module then heads for Earth. After Apollo 9 practised docking manoeuvres between lander and command module above the Earth, Apollo 10 returned to the Moon, dropping its lander to within nine miles of the surface. (That command module is in the Science Museum in London.)

In February 1969, the Soviet N-1 rocket was at last ready, but it exploded on its first unmanned flight. The Russians were all but beaten. They made one last attempt – a smaller, unmanned mission that would return rock samples to Earth – but it, too, crashed. Only the Americans were left in the race.

Half-a-million people crowded the roads and waterways around Cape Kennedy to watch the launch on 16 July of Apollo 11 and an estimated half-a-billion saw it on television. “It was awe-inspiring,” recalls Dr Allan Needell, curator of the space-history division at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington. “There was a lot of tension in the US over civil rights and the war in Vietnam back then. Apollo 11 overcame some of that strife and conflict. There was a great sense of human accomplishment.” Even a small band of protesters who felt Nasa’s money could be better spent reducing poverty ended up appreciating Nasa’s point of view after being given ringside seats to the launch of Armstrong, Aldrin and the command-module pilot, Michael Collins.

Neil Armstrong never quite matched the image of the first man to walk on the Moon. “How long must it take,” he demanded in 1976, “before I cease to be known as a spaceman?” Unlike many other astronauts, he never jumped on Nasa’s publicity bandwagon. “He was a bit of a recluse even before the mission,” says Dr Needell. “He’s a respected member of the astronaut corps, very knowledgeable. But he has never readily accepted the role of public icon.”

If Armstrong were to be remembered for anything else, it would be as an aeronautical engineer. The son of a state civil servant posted to Wapakoneta, Ohio, he enrolled in the Navy to fund his education at Purdue University. His experience as a pilot in the Korean War helped further his understanding of aircraft, but only after he graduated did he think of becoming a test pilot, and from there of joining the astronaut programme.

Nasa is said to have been divided about whether Armstrong or Aldrin should be the first to set foot on the Moon. In the end, the mission commander got the honour… then flubbed his lines. He intended to say, “One small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind,” but left out the definite article, turning it into a tautology. Aldrin’s most memorable quote came shortly after he joined Armstrong on the surface: “Magnificent desolation.”

For the two spacemen, the point of the mission was to get to the Moon and return safely. Science was not their top priority, nor was putting up flags or taking pictures. But they did collect samples, and more were added on the five subsequent missions. In all, some 382kg of Moon rocks were returned to Earth. Two fragments are housed in the Natural History Museum in London: a blackened chunk of anorthosite breccia, a calcium-rich feldspar, brought back by Apollo 16, and a volcanic basalt gathered by the Apollo 17 astronauts.

What started out as a political, Cold War race ended up adding substantially to human knowledge, says Tom Watters, senior scientist at the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies at the National Air and Space Museum. Before Apollo, the Moon was thought to have originated either as a passing planetoid captured by Earth’s gravity or by condensing out of the same primordial dust cloud as the Earth. Thanks to evidence including the Apollo rocks, the consensus today is that a Mars-size planet slammed into the early Earth, throwing up a cloud of debris that coalesced into the Moon.

A new space race is shaping up, though the competition will be far less intense than it was 40 years ago. The US plans a return to the Moon, while China, India and Japan are each preparing for manned missions. If they succeed, they will add substantially to our knowledge. Dr Watters is hopeful, for example, that additional seismometers will help locate the sources of the small quakes detected by instruments left by the Apollo missions. It is not yet clear whether these are from unseen impacts or tectonic processes. And little is known about the far side of the Moon.  

For the 10-year-old space geek in me, this flurry of activity also holds out hope. One day, probably too late for me admittedly, someone will build a permanent Moon Base One. And then the Space Age will really start to reach for the stars.

Researchers at Sheffield University have tested the new technique on 150 volunteers and used it to examine their lungs. In this way they have detected early signs of emphysema and revealed obstructions caused by cystic fibrosis and asthma.

Until now the best way to see inside lungs was with a CT (computed tomography) scan built up from x-rays. “But that’s just a black-and-white picture without any functional information,” added project leader Dr Jim Wild. “You don’t see any of the micro-structure.” And because x-rays can themselves damage tissues, doctors are reluctant to use them too often.

MRI scanners were invented in 1973 by Nottingham University’s Sir Peter Mansfield, who later won a Nobel Prize for his work, and rely on the way atoms spin like tops.

Using powerful magnets, atoms in a patient are aligned. Then a radio wave is passed through their body, bending the atoms away from the magnetic axis. When the signal is turned off, the atoms release a burst of energy that is picked up by detectors.

Usually the scanners are tuned to work with the hydrogen atoms in the water that makes up most of our bodies. But only one in 100,000 hydrogen atoms stay lined up long enough for a scan, resulting in a weak signal. So Wild has concentrated on using lasers to hyperpolarise xenon or an isotope called helium-3. Both agents remain magnetised so well that one in 10 atoms can be kept in alignment for days.

Their observations revealed a gigantic magnetic pump funnelling cosmic dust into the centre of the galaxy, where it piles up until it forms a ball dense enough to spark a nuclear chain reaction. Jane Greaves, the leader of the four-member team, said it was like having an ultrasound scan that shows how stars are formed in a galactic womb.

The galaxy Dr Greaves studied, M82, is 11 million light years from Earth in the constellation Ursa Major, the Plough. It can be seen from Britain with powerful binoculars or a good amateur telescope.

M82 is going through a phase known as a “starburst”, producing 50 times as many new suns as our own Milky Way does. Dr Karen Wills, a researcher at the University of Sheffield, said: “It seems likely that all galaxies, including our own, have gone through a starburst phase at some point. So learning about M82 allows us to find out about the way in which galaxies have evolved from the early Universe to the present day.”

Until now, astronomers have been unable to see what goes on in other galaxies because their view is blocked by cosmic dust. But Dr Greaves and her team used the faint heat radiation from the dust itself to chart M82’s inner workings.

Their computer-enhanced photographs show a huge magnetic bubble, 3,000 light years (18,000 billion miles) across in the centre of the galaxy. Its structure is revealed by the glowing dust motes that have been pulled on to its force lines, like iron filings around a bar magnet.

The bubble is strikingly different from those seen in normal galaxies; spirals like the Milky Way have well-ordered, flat magnetic fields, or plumes of magnetic force lines spouting from their poles. “We were really surprised to see the huge bubble,” said Dr Greaves. “This is a new feature of galaxies that we didn’t know about before and could show how magnetic fields help shape the evolution of starburst regions.”

Exactly how the magnetic field was formed is still not known, but a near-collision with another galaxy, M81, is thought to have been responsible. Although galaxies can pass through each other without any individual stars hitting each other, even a close call involves massive tidal forces that can stir up the dust to set off a starburst.

Dr Greaves’ team at the James Clerk Maxwell telescope in Hawaii used a sub-millimetre camera called Scuba – which takes pictures in wavelengths between infrared and microwave – and a polarimeter, which works on the same principle as polarised sunglasses.

At present, the camera is not sensitive enough to pick out individual stars being formed, but a new camera being developed by the Royal Observatory Edinburgh will be 10 times as accurate, allowing Dr Greaves to see concentrations of dust just a few light years across.