(Image: Kacper Pempel/Reuters)
Read more: “2014 preview: 10 ideas that will matter next year“
What’s the price of loss of trust? We will find out in 2014 as the after-effects of the revelations about the spying campaigns on the world’s internet and cellphone networks become apparent.
The financial costs are already mounting. The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a Washington DC think tank, reckons US firms could lose $35 billion in sales in the next two years because of fears over snooping by the US National Security Agency (NSA).
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The revelations might also change how we use the internet in more fundamental ways. World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee has warned that a lack of faith in privacy could make people interact less freely with one another online.
But there may be some benefits, too. People are now more aware of what they do online. For example, use of DuckDuckGo, a search engine that promises not to collect a user’s personal information, in the weeks after the NSA’s activities were revealed. This personal data protection is likely to accelerate next year.
We might also see the first signs of internet fragmentation. Some nations, including Brazil and Germany, are considering reining in internet routing to within their own borders, although such moves would play into the hands of authoritarian states and cause delays for international traffic.
“We might see the first signs of internet fragmentation”
Other methods to beat the spooks could also hit the mainstream, including ways of masking traffic and even local internet networks that keep sensitive data off the public internet.
This article appeared in print under the headline “Hiding from spying eyes”
![Astronomers have long known that understanding how star clusters come to be is key to unlocking other secrets of galactic evolution. Stars form in clusters, created when clouds of gas collapse under gravity. As more and more stars are born in a collapsing cloud, strong stellar winds, harsh ultraviolet radiation and the supernova explosions of massive stars eventually disperse the cloud, and their light can bear down on other star-forming regions in the galaxy. This process is called stellar feedback, and it means that most of the gas in a galaxy never gets used for star formation. Researching how star clusters develop can answer questions about star formation at a galactic scale. Now, the state of the art has been further developed with both Hubble and Webb working together to provide a broad-spectrum view of thousands of young star clusters. An international team of astronomers has pored over images of four nearby galaxies from the FEAST observing programme (#1783), trying to solve this mystery. Their results show that it is the most massive star clusters that clear away their gaseous shroud the fastest, and begin lighting their galaxy the earliest. The team identified nearly 9000 star clusters in the four galaxies in different evolutionary stages: young clusters just starting to emerge from their natal clouds of gas, clusters that had partially dispersed the gas (both from Webb images), and fully unobstructed clusters visible in optical light (found in Hubble images). With Webb???s ability to peer inside the gas clouds, they were able to then estimate the mass and age of each cluster from its light spectrum. This image shows a section of one of the spiral arms of Messier 51 (M51), one of the four galaxies studied in this work, as seen by Webb???s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). The thick clumps of star-forming gas are shown here in red and orange, representing infrared light emitted by ionised gas, dust grains, and complex molecules such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Within these gas complexes, each tens or hundreds of light years across, Webb reveals the dense, extremely bright clusters of massive stars that have just recently formed. The countless stars strewn across the arm of the galaxy, many of which would be invisible to our eyes behind layers of dust, are also laid bare in infrared light. [Image description: A large, long portion of one of the spiral arms in galaxy M51. Red-orange, clumpy filaments of gas and dust that stretch in a chain from left to right comprise the arm. Shining cyan bubbles light up parts of the gas clouds from within, and gaps expose bright star clusters in these bubbles as glowing white dots. The whole image is dotted with small stars. A faint blue glow around the arm colours the otherwise dark background.]](https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/13114322/SEI_296271016.jpg)
