NORTHERN CHILE is one of the driest places on Earth. It is also populous and, during the Fifties, the flourishing cities of Antofagasta and Mejillones slaked their thirst by dipping into an untreated water supply fed by rivers laced with arsenic.

Now epidemiologists have found that the untreated water not only made ill those who drank it, but also damaged unborn babies. The study has been hailed as powerful confirmation of the theory that what happens in the womb can have a devastating impact in adulthood. The researchers have been taken aback by their findings, which they call “extraordinary”.

Water supplies polluted by arsenic are implicated in skin, bladder and lung cancers (arsenic occurs naturally in buried sediments in certain regions, such as Bangladesh and Chile). It is also thought to cause bronchiectasis, a rare lung disease.

Allan Smith, of the University of California’s School of Public Health in Berkeley, decided to study the death certificates of young adults in Antofagasta and Mejillones who died between 1989 and 2000. The deceased were split into two groups. The first were born between 1951 and 1958. Rivers containing arsenic started being tapped in 1958; these individuals would have spent all or some of their childhood drinking contaminated water.

The second group were born between 1958 and 1971 (an arsenic treatment plant started operation in 1971) and would have drunk contaminated water during childhood and also been exposed to arsenic in the womb. Those in the first group were seven times more likely to have died of lung cancer than the average Chilean, and twelve times more likely to have died of bronchiectasis. Among the second group, exposed both as children and as foetuses, the risk of bronchiectasis soared. While the risk of dying from lung cancer was six times the Chilean average, the chances of dying from bronchiectasis multiplied 46-fold.

“These are the most amazing findings I’ve confronted,” says Professor Smith, who, with colleagues in Chile, will publish the research in Environmental Health Perspectives in July. “Not only are they the highest death rates for lung cancer and bronchiectasis discovered among young adults, but they are also the strongest evidence . . . that implicates not just arsenic but any environmental exposure in utero or in early childhood to any adverse health effect in adults.”

• IN 2004 three mischievous students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology devised a computer program that could churn out plausible-sounding, but ultimately meaningless, sentences on the topic of computer science. They submitted four pages of gibberish to an international conference on computer science — and had their spoof accepted.

  Now comes the Inauthentic Paper Detector, designed to tell if papers are real or fake by working out whether they have been written by man or machine. Authentic text, by real people, tends to have meaning, whereas so-called inauthentic text is stuffed full of syntactically correct sentences that, taken collectively, don’t mean anything. Dr Mehmet Dalkilic, of the University of Indiana, said that his detector could weed out most fakes, including the MIT one, but was not a foolproof way of distinguishing between meaning and nonsense.

• ON THE other hand, the European starling, a virtuoso songbird and expert mimic, has been found by scientists in California to be clever enough to understand sentences that are punctuated, rather like this annoying example, with lots of clauses. This ability to learn and recognise “recursive centre-embedded grammar” — to follow a sentence’s meaning when phrases and sentences are inserted — was thought to be singularly human.

  Timothy Gentner, of the University of California, San Diego, recorded eight different “warbles” and eight “rattles” from a single male starling. Using these sounds as building blocks he then constructed 16 artificial songs. Some of the strings of rattles and warbles contained clauses and others not. Professor Gentner played the artifical songs to a group of eleven birds, of which nine learnt to discriminate between simple sentences and those with several clauses. The starlings, he reported in Nature last week, even learnt how to spot “ungrammatical” songs.

  So who’s a bird brain?

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