Lucy's Cousin

Nature news reports the finding of a new australopithecine in Ethiopia only 35km from the site where Lucy, Australopithecus afarensis, was discovered in 1974. Lucy marked one of the oldest examples of early hominins at that time, living as she did approximately 3.2 million years ago. She has a relatively small cranium, which means a small brain, but was clearly bipedal; thereby resolving the chicken and egg question in relation to large brain capacity and bipedalism. Her skeleton is 40% complete, which is remarkably intact for a specimen that old, and we have learnt an awful lot from her.

This new specimen is contemporaneous with A. afarensis, being 3.3-3.5 million years old, which throws up the scenario that there were possibly several early hominins all wondering around east Africa at the same period. But this shouldn't come as a surprise, it is only in very recent history that we became the only biped on the block when we finished off the last of the neanderthals; before then there had been as many as half a dozen species cohabiting in Africa and through into Asia. Part of the reason that this could happen is demonstrated in the new skeleton. It has a much sturdier and stronger jaw than Lucy does, this would imply that they had a different diet and therefore weren't competing for the same resources.

This new species has been dubbed Australopithecus deyiremeda which roughly translates as 'close relative' in the local Afar language. We shouldn't assume that she (I'm calling her a she) is our ancestor, however, many early hominins died out and weren't a part of the lineage that went on to become the Homo genus. That said, she does make for a wonderful transition fossil, which turns out to have been something of a theme on the blog this week. I shall try to transition into a new area next week.

Model of what Lucy, and possibly A. deyiremeda, may have looked like

Uprooting the Tree of Life

Yesterday I wrote a post about a cool new transition fossil. When writing it I was more than once tempted to make some kind of reference to the Tree of Life, but I resisted. Why? Put simply: because it would be wrong. There was a time when everyone, even people who were totally on board with evolution by natural selection, was under the impression that the species we see wriggling around today could be traced neatly back, branch by branch, to the ancestor that is common to all life and that those species that looked physically similar did so because they shared a branch on the tree. In the metaphor today's animals are represented by the fresh new shoots and buds on the mighty oak of life; each bud forms a neat ladder ever back to the base of the trunk that started everything, but this picture can lead to many misconceptions about evolution. A more modern understanding of the theory and the evidence we now have paints a different picture. The Tree of Life is dead, say hello to the Shrubbery of Life!

The traditional, misleading view of the Tree of Life

Actually, people generally say the Bush of Life but I saw a chance to use the word shrubbery and I ran with it. Instead of thinking of a perfect, archetypal tree that a 6 year old might draw, think of a tangled mess of thorns full of jagged twigs, thick and choking, jutting this way and that such that you can barely tell where one branch begins and another ends. This is the far better analogy. It allows for the possibility of animals arriving at the same physical niche via a variety of evolutionary paths. It also rules out the idea that as life evolves it moves ever upwards in an increasingly complicated and intricate manner, this isn't the case. Some species 'devolve', or lose features that they had previously evolved; some, like coelacanths or nautili, remain unchanged for millions of years.

Worry not, if you have a poster on your child's bedroom wall like the one on the right I'm not about to tear it down and set fire to it. But the next time you have a chat about it, as you undoubtedly do, use it as an opportunity to highlight that the reality is actually a lot more nuanced and complicated than we often like to think, just like every other single topic worth having a chat about.

I Love Transition Fossils

One of the many stupid arguments put forward by people trying to dispute the theory of evolution by natural selection is: if evolution is true then there should be fossils of missing links, if birds evolved from dinosaurs then show me a fossil that is half bird and half dinosaur. Now, asides from the fact that this shows a gross misunderstanding of the theory there are actually a great deal of 'missing links' out there; they're called transition fossils and there is now a quite beautiful catalogue of them. We have transition fossils for pretty much every major order of animals out there, the only exception I can think of is bats, we don't yet have a decent fossil record of their evolution - it's only a matter of time, though.

We have ambulocetus, a wonderful cetacean (whale and dolphin) precursor that could swim well and walk around on land too; we have tiktaalik, a transition fossil of a fish that had 4 primitive legs and was well on its way to being an amphibian; and we have the legendary archaeopteryx, which is quite literally half bird half dinosaur. The fossil record, by its very nature, will never be 100% complete, but it is now well stocked with a plethora of transition fossils all of which add support to the now invincible edifice that is evolution by natural selection, and, I'm pleased to say we can now welcome another strut to the structure.

Image used with permission

An article in Nature has given details of an awesome new transition fossil; it is quite clearly a snake but equally clearly it has four little legs. The legs would not have allowed it to walk, they're too small and it's body is too long, but they may have allowed it to grab prey a little easier or get a better grip when mating hence its name: Tetrapodophis amplectus which translates as four-legged hugging snake.

For a long time it was uncertain if snakes had evolved from land animals or aquatic animals. If the latter then we would expect to see a transition fossil with a tail adapted for swimming and vestigial fins; if the former then we would expect, well, we would expect exactly what this fossil shows. Another little gap in our knowledge has been filled in, leaving one less place for evolution deniers to hide.

A-Hazing New Pluto Picture

Exciting news Plutophiles! Last Friday NASA had another Pluto press conference and in it they released the latest images from New Horizons, the most amazing of which was this beauty below.

This is an image taken by the probe after it has sped past Pluto. It is looking back at the night side of the world 7hrs after closest approach. The halo around the edge is the hazy atmosphere backlit by the sun. It was only recently that we even became sure that Pluto had an atmosphere; the data here shows that it does indeed have one, that it extends about 80 miles above the surface and that it is comprised mainly of nitrogen. But the haze is actually the interesting bit. The haze is made up of complex hydrocarbons, like ethylene and acetylene, which are created when ultraviolet light from the sun interacts with methane gas in the atmosphere. The UV light in turn changes the hydrocarbons into tholins, these fall back to the surface and are what gives the dwarf planet its now distinctive dark patches.

Pluto has once again, however, thrown up a mystery. These hazes are created by the hydrocarbons condensing into little ice crystals, but it was thought that Pluto would be too warm for this to happen at a height of above 20 miles or so; yet we're seeing haze as high as 80 miles and we have absolutely no idea how. Some new ideas are needed to come up with a satisfactory explanation for this, but that's a good thing; if the answer to your question doesn't throw up at least a couple of new questions then you're not doing it right and that, Science Fans, is one of the exciting things about the frontiers of science.

New Earth-like Planet Discovered

Last Thursday NASA called a press conference. It was a bit out of the blue but we were given a heads up that it had to do with Kepler so everyone knew they would be announcing a newly discovered earth-like planet; and so it came to be. Kepler, of course, was the planet hunting satellite named after Johannes Kepler the German mathematician and astronomer. Kepler worked using the transit method; it would stare at thousands of suns and look for tiny dips in the levels of brightness, this could indicate that a planet had passed in front of, or transited, the star and temporarily blocked some of its light. If a dip was found to have a regular pattern then there was a good chance it was a planet. Using this method Kepler has found many thousands of candidate planets, 1879 of which have been confirmed at time of writing.

Thursday's announcement of planet Kepler 452b was a little different as they claimed to have found the exoplanet most like our own. The planet is a rocky one about 60% larger in size than the earth but about 5 times more massive, so it's likely to be very volcanic with quite a dense atmosphere. Its sun is 50% or so larger than our own and a billion years older so it's likely to throw out a lot more heat than we're used to experiencing. This combination could actually mean that conditions on the planet are too harsh for life to exist, certainly complex life anyhoo.

Before this announcement the most earth-like planet discovered to date was Kepler 186f. This is a rocky world no more than 10% larger than us orbiting a red dwarf star. Even at midday this world would only be about as light as sunset here on earth, despite this I think 186f actually remains the most earth-like planet we have yet discovered. Sorry Kepler 452b.

Below you can see the four most earth-like planets and their stars discovered by Kepler so far with the earth for comparison.

Image courtesy of NASA

Our Saviour: Bacteriophages

Parkinson's Disease (PD). Alzheimer's Disease. Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD). Transthyretin amyloidosis (TTR). These are diseases that are increasingly blighting our society. Almost everyone will have now heard of the first two as the misery of dementia slowly ebbs further into the public consciousness. CJD is the infamous mad cow disease that had the world panicking in the 1990s. As chance would have it I happened to be doing some work just today during my day job on TTR, a disease that can ravage the heart and liver.

Although these diseases can present in a variety of different ways they all have something in common, something that may play to our advantage. They are all caused by the misfolding of proteins. Yep, as simple as that. The abject horror of losing your mind to Alzheimer's is the result of a protein folding up slightly wrongly and producing a little kink that renders it insoluble in your cells. These misshapen chains of amino acids aggregate together into plaques that become toxic and kill your brain cells; we currently have no way of removing them. In PD we call them Lewy bodies, in CJD they're prions but the subtle differences between them all may be rendered irrelevant by a new drug that specifically targets the kink in the protein that unites them all.

Researchers at NeuroPhage Pharmaceuticals have released data from animal trials that shows their drug is capable of breaking up the plaques and subsequently improving their cognitive function. They have applied for a licence to do human trials and hope to start small scale trials in PD patients next year. The drug is derived from M13 bacteriophages, a very common organism in biomedical research. Bacteriophages are vanishingly small viruses that infect bacteria (a fact that makes them one of our best bets for the next generation of antibiotics), many thousands of them can fit inside a single bacterium. The drug comprises of two parts. The first is a compound from the M13 phage that can recognise and bind to the kink in the deformed proteins. The second is a human antibody that the first part is bound to. The antibody signals to the body's immune system that the plaque needs to be sequestered away and destroyed.

This compound is still a very, very long way away from being a useable drug, probably five years minimum, and there's probably an even chance that it won't come to anything; but it does show promise.

The Architecture of an Earworm-Infected Brain

Earworms. Love them or hate them we all get them; but some of us get them more than others and can get rid of them more easily than others. A new open access paper in Consciousness and Cognition is the first to ever look at brain structure in relation to the phenomenon. They asked 44 people to fill in a questionnaire to find details like frequency, duration, how it makes them feel, how it affected their concentration and, of course, what the tune is. They ascertained their musical abilities, too, to see if those of us that can play instruments or sing well are affected differently. They also conducted MRI scans of their brains to try to find differences in their brain structure that might account for whatever they found.

People who could play instruments or performed music were, indeed, more likely to suffer an earworm, and the scans revealed that areas of the brain responsible for pitch discrimination and auditory perception had thicker cortices in people who had more frequent earworms. People who found earworms very annoying tended to have more grey matter in the emotional-related temporal pole. There's no suggestion that these differences are directly causing the earworms, that would need a lot more further study. One thing has become clear over multiple studies, though, and that is that an idle brain that isn't doing anything is far more likely to be infected. If you don't want that annoying tune stuck in your head then keep yourselves busy.

Mosquitoes: Know Your Enemy

Mosquitos, or the parasites they carry, have been responsible for more human deaths than any other cause in history, and they continue to be responsible for at least one death every minute even as you read this. New research from Caltech might give us some insight into why we're so susceptible.  It has been known for some time that Anopheles gambiae have multiple strategies for detecting a tasty meal but it was never fully understood how these various systems worked and interacted. Many thought that one might be gated by another, for example, some believed that an initial detection of carbon dioxide from a person's breath would trigger activation of the thermal detection system that would home in on body heat. This new paper suggests that each of the mosquito's sensory systems; carbon dioxide detection, thermal detection, visual acuity and detection of volatile chemicals given off by skin (sweat); can work independently.

So why do we need to know this? Well this is the sort of information we need to know to come up with strategies to defeat humankind's greatest ever enemy and in this case: it's bad news. If the systems worked consecutively then we would only need to break one link in the chain, preferably high up the chain, to defend ourselves; if they all work together in concert then we would likely need to counteract all of them at once to render ourselves undetectable. A tall order, indeed. As someone who attracts mozzies like an N52 neodymium magnate attracts steel this makes me sad.

Extinction by Fussiness

If there's one thing that really bugs me it's fussy eaters but a new paper from researchers at Oxford University may have found an example where the ramifications of a restrictive diet were more than just annoying me. Australopithecus bahrelghazali was a form of early hominid that forged west out of the rift valley some 4 million years ago; they settled in what is modern day Chad a long way from any other australopithecine yet found. The land was fertile and there were few predators and this allowed them to evolve into a niche that, when push came to shove a million years later, left them facing extinction in the face.

Although there were plenty of different things available to eat research has shown that the thin enamel of their teeth would have restricted their diet to soft, easily chewable plants like sedges. These are not a very nutritious food, which was fine when times were good, but as the climate changed and as predators moved into the territory they simply couldn't eat enough high quality food to survive the new difficult conditions and that, Science Fans, was the end of Australopithecus bahrelghazali.

Very Bright Light, Very Big Number

Researchers at the Kavli Institute in Beijing have reported potentially finding the brightest supernova ever seen. If correct this exploding star was about 600 billion times brighter than the sun; that's about 100 times brighter than your common to garden supernova and 2.5 to 5 times brighter than the previous brightest one depending upon who you ask. I have to caveat all this as it is not certain yet that it even was a supernova, it could also have been caused by the destruction of a star that passed a bit too close to a black hole; further observations over the coming months should help us find out. In any case, the explosion happened 2.8 billion years ago, about 700 million years before multi-cellular life evolved on earth.

Oh, and I calculated the brightness to be the equivalent of 2.3034e+36, or 2,303,400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 or 2.3 undecillion 100 watt lightbulbs.

Image courtesy of ESO

Mind Control Robots

One of the most exciting areas of research in the world today is that of Brain-Machine Interfaces (BMIs). BMIs are the technology that will one day allow amputees to control mechanical limbs with just their thoughts, gamers to shoot each other with the power of their minds and, one day, for us all to upload our consciousness into The Matrix. Although that last example is still a very long way away the first is very much a reality that should be in clinical use by the end of the decade (amazing video here).

Another potential use, as demonstrated in two new, open access papers in Nature's Scientific Reports, is to combine multiple brains into one super powerful shared consciousness. The first paper details four rhesus macaques that had electrodes implanted into their brains in the region responsible for controlling arm movement. Three at a time they trained to move a realistic looking robotic macaque arm. Each monkey was only given control of one of the three axes of movement X, Y or Z forcing them to coordinate together to achieve the task and earn their reward. Each monkey was sat in a separate room and was linked solely to a central computer.

Figure taken from original paper

In the second paper the same team, at Duke University, created what they are calling a brainet by connecting the brains of 3-4 adult rats not only to a central computer but also to each other. They then conducted a series of 4 experiments. One of these involved delivering a physical stimulus to one rat and then using the brainet to transfer this stimulus to a second and third rat. A more ambitious experiment, designed to investigate the potential for organic computers, involved codifying temperature and barometric data from North Carolina and then using the brainet on 3 rats to predict rainfall. They achieved an accuracy of 41% which is much greater than chance alone. We're a long way from organic supercomputers but this is certainly a tentative first step in that direction.

Pluto: Why So Smooth?

Fantastic news, Science Fans! It took it's sweet time (about 4.5 hours at the speed of light) but we finally got the first data from the New Horizons spacecraft. And even better than that: there is already a genuine mystery to puzzle out. So far we have two great pictures and some data on methane density.

The first picture, below, is of Pluto itself; it is a close up of the now famous 'heart' region. For scale, some of these peaks are about 11,000 feet high, which is comparable with mountains here on earth. What is interesting is that there are hardly any craters at all in this picture. It's very unlikely that this is because Pluto hasn't been hit by any meteors so we have to conclude that it means this surface is a very new one, and when we say very new here we mean about 100 million years old. Therefore, in the recent geological past, a process must have occurred to create this new surface. Generally this could be achieved by the planet being geologically active, like the earth is, with earthquakes and volcanoes and such churning up the place and destroying any evidence of crater impacts; or, a very large mass nearby can literally cause tides in the rock that cause them to grind and move and create heat again destroying any impact craters that might be around. The problem is that Pluto is both too small and cold to be geologically active and there is nothing large enough nearby to create tidal forces. We have a mystery.

The next picture, below, is of Pluto's largest moon, Charon, and here we see the same puzzling phenomenon. It's surprisingly smooth, there aren't all that many obvious craters; conjure (or Google) an image of our pock marked moon for comparison and the lack of craters will be much more obvious. The same argument applies here as to Pluto and we simply don't yet have an explanation. I guess it's not completely impossible that just by chance the two bodies have avoided impacts for several billions of years, but given that we know the Kuiper belt, of which Pluto is a part, is chock full of rocks and potential meteors this really does seem extremely unlikely. Do not, however, be disheartened. If there's one thing that scientists like it's a mystery. If you ask a question and the answer doesn't throw up at least a dozen new questions then you're doing it wrong.

These images are just the first tranche of what will ultimately be a deluge of data, frustratingly most of that is still on the New Horizon's craft and it will take weeks or even months for it all to be beamed back home. These initial images will have to keep us busy for a little while but one thing is for certain; we have lots of new and exciting discoveries to make about our former planetary cousin.

New Horned Dinosaur Discovered

Triceratops has always been my favourite dinosaur, it's just so freaking awesome looking. So I was very excited to come across a new paper in PLOS ONE by the curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History giving the details of a new member of the ceratopsids. The venerable old lady pictured below has been named Wendiceratops after Wendy Sloboda, the veteran fossil hunter who discovered this particular fossil bed in Alberta in 2010.

Just like triceratops wendiceratops would have been a herbivore cropping away at medium length grass, much like rhinos today. The horns would have been used for defence from predators and for competition when mating, the frill could have been used for display and perhaps also to keep the animal cool like an elephant's ears. The interesting thing about this find is that it actually pre-dates triceratops by several million years and represents a second independent evolution of a conical nose horn in this family.

Pluto Revealed

I, for one, am excited. 3,462 days ago a rocket was launched carrying the New Horizons spacecraft. Its mission was to conduct the first ever flyby of the planet Pluto. Yes, that's right, the planet pluto. Back then it was still a planet but as every 8 year old but few 38 year olds know Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006 and we now have a solar system with 8 planets in it. The problem was that we started to find a lot of other objects out there that were about the same size as Pluto so, if we were going to keep pluto, then we would have to make room for these other objects too and very soon we might have a solar system with a couple of dozen planets in it. Good luck getting the 8 years olds to memorise all those.

Anyhoo, Pluto being so very small (only a couple of thousand kilometres across) and receiving only about one thousandth of the sunlight we enjoy it is quite difficult to see. Even when we point the mighty Hubble space telescope at it we fail to get images with any great detail in them. The image on the right was the best we had until new Horizons started edging closer in the last few weeks.

Then last weekend, at a distance of about 1 million miles from Pluto, the image below was beamed back from 3 billion miles away. The increase in resolution is marked and will have the Geology, Geophysics and Imaging nerds at John Hopkins university very excited; as it will all of us interested in going boldly where no one has ever gone before. And the best part? It's only going to get better. The craft will pass within 8,000 miles of the planet's surface today and, asides, from all the cool science that will be done, should take some pretty awesome pictures before speeding off into the outer solar system at 50,000 miles per hour.

Images courtesy of NASA

Non-Human Tool Use

Humans are not the only animals to use tools. Chimps have been seen to use various different tools including anvils and hammers, spears and probes and even ravens can use objects around them to solve problems (awesome, short videos here and here).

Slightly less closely related to us than chimps are the sexually legendary bonobos. In a recent study bonobos in zoos and in sanctuaries were shown food hidden underground, underneath heavy objects or in the cavities of long bones. A set of potential tools were then left in their enclosure for them to find a use for. The tools were antlers, short sticks, long ticks and stones. One bonobo modified the sticks to turn them into spears and defensive barriers, another used an angular stone to completely bisect a long bone. About half of the animals observed were able to use the tools in some way with the ones in sanctuaries generally performing better than those in the zoos.

These animals were all captive or semi-captive and now the challenge is to observe similar behaviours in wild individuals; a difficult task as bonobos are only found in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and any country with the word democratic in it name is, well, not always conducive to vigorous academic research. If wild bonobos are found using tools then it pushes the trait further back into evolutionary history than previously thought to about 5 million years ago, the time at which bonobos and us humans last shared a common ancestor.

Accuracy Redefined

A new paper in Nature Communications gives details on the most accurate atomic clock to ever be built. Researchers from Intel took a clock they produced last year and improved upon the design by adding a pair of highly accurate thermometers, one each to measure the temperature inside and outside of the device. With the data provided they could control for tiny variations between the two and add an extra layer of accuracy to the strontium based clock. The new and improved time keeper is now accurate to one second in 15 billion years. Yes, 15 billion years. That's longer than the universe itself has existed. For context, your wristwatch will lose 1 second every 2 days or so.

Einstein's relativity says that time itself runs slower the further it is measured from a gravity well. This clock is so exquisitely finely tuned that it would run at a noticeably different pace if its height was changed by a mere 2 centimetres.

Continental Connection

It has been known for a long time that offspring of closely related individuals tend to be less healthy than those of unrelated individuals. Authors of a new paper note that even Charles Darwin speculated as to whether or not marrying his own first cousin (the couple had the same grandfather in pottery magnate Josiah Wedgewood) had a bearing on the mortality of some of his own children. The opposite idea has also been established, that offspring of distantly related individuals tend to fair better on many measures via a phenomenon known as hybrid vigour.

A new study in the journal Nature has tried to put some hard numbers on the concept. They looked at a total of 16 traits, ten covering various cardio-metabolic health factors along with height, lung function, cognitive ability and educational attainment. Curiously, none of the health measures saw an effect but each of the 4 others saw a positive correlation. Children from distantly related parents were taller, had larger lungs, stayed in school longer and scored better on cognitive tests. It's certainly possible that genetics is directly influencing these measures but let's keep in mind, though, that correlation is not the same as causation.

The strongest effect was seen between people of different continental groups so if you want tall, bright children you might want to find yourself a partner from a long, long way away.

Gene Therapy for Cystic Fibrosis

An article in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine reports the first ever successful testing of a gene therapy for Cystic Fibrosis (CF). CF is caused by having two faulty copies of the CFTR gene, this results in a thick heavy mucous that builds up in the lungs providing a ripe breeding ground for bacterial infections. Treatments include a brutal regimen of physiotherapy to dislodge and bring up the mucous and plenty of antibiotics to keep infections at bay. Even with the best treatment available, though, 50% of sufferers are dead by the age of 41.

Researchers used a plasmid to deliver normal copies of the CFTR gene into the lungs of patients using an inhaler. They had treatment once per month for a year. Once the study was complete they compared lung function with a year earlier and also against a control group that was given only saline. The treatment group saw an increase in lung function of about 3% whist the control group saw a decrease in function. Whilst the improvement was modest if treatment could be started early in life then the chronic degradation of the lungs that is so characteristic of the disease could be stopped in its tracks. The team are now working on a virus based delivery system.

First Ever Head Transplant

Controversial neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero has announced that he plans to carry out the first ever full head transplant within the next two years. Before the end of 2017 he believes he will have successfully removed the head from one human and successfully grafted it, spinal cord and all, to the body of another human. The difficult part, some say the impossible part, will be successfully creating a functioning junction between the two spinal cords. He intends to use polyethylene glycol, a drug used to form bridges between the fat membranes in nerve cells, to achieve this. The drug has been used with mixed measures of success in animals and there is certainly a cadre of scientists out there who say getting this to properly work is a non-trivial problem to overcome. Time will tell.

Sergio Canavero

Hermaphroditic Shenanigans

A paper in the Royal Society's Proceedings B gives a remarkable example of a hermaphroditic flatworm, Macrostomum hystrix. In the absence of a female to mate with it will curve its behind towards its front end and stab itself in the head with its 'male copulating organ'. The sperm will then migrate through the body to the site of self-fertilisation. Who says science can't be romantic?

Dungeness: Black and White

Back in April I met up with a couple of fellow camera nerds, comrades from the 365 Project, for a trip down to the south coast. We were going to Dungeness, somewhere I had long wanted to photograph. I had looked into going there before but without a car it is prohibitively difficult; public transport doesn't best serve such areas. And they can't really be blamed, its own promotional website describes Dungeness as 'bleak and desolate'. This wasn't what was on our mind, however, as we headed progressively south. The weather was wonderful, one of the first truly beautiful days of the year. Sadly, it didn't last. By the time we had arrived the cloud had solidly set in and the exposed nature of the area left us open to a biting wind that soon left my ears stinging. Undeterred we set off to explore.

Anyone vaguely into landscape photography in the UK will be aware of Dungeness as a location unlike any other in the country. Basically it is an enormous bank of shingle, the largest on the continent. At a glance it is as bleak and desolate as advertised but upon closer inspection there is actually a lot going on. It is a part of a vast nature reserve that is particularly important with regard to bird and plant life, in fact it is home to one third of all the plant species to be found in the UK. There are also two nuclear reactors, Dungeness A and Dungeness B, the first of which has been shut down and the second of which is due to be so in 2018.

Although from a comfort perspective this was not going to be the most wonderful afternoon, from a photographic perspective it was pretty much exactly what I'd hoped for. It was Dungeness at its gloomy best. What little colour there already was had been further muted by the grey clouds and so tones and textures became ever more important. There was always going to be a lot of black and white conversions in post processing after this trip. A little tip, even if you fully intend to end up with black and white pictures it is generally a good idea to originally shoot in colour and then convert to black and white. This gives you a lot more options after the event in what type of black and white you want to apply and, of course, in staying in colour if you so choose.

The main photographic focus are the numerous abandoned fishing boats that sit just above the high tide mark in every imaginable stage of decay. There are a few where it's actually difficult to tell whether the boat has been left for dead or whether it's still a living, breathing boat; and then there are others where all that is left are the ribs of the hull and a few warped planks like the skin on the corpse of a rotting whale corpse. There are also tiny little railway tracks and wheelhouses that, once upon a time, were used to haul the fleet up and down the beach. The tracks can provide leading lines to help guide the eye around a carefully composed image.

I'm going to post a second Dungeness article full of colour images, there were a couple of occasions where having a splash of vibrancy was the right path to take. Our final path led Rachel, Christin and I to a local pub where we could warm up and refresh before the long drive home. I'm very happy that I finally made it down to Dungeness, it was a photographic and social success; I highly recommend it to those with a bleak streak running through them.