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POPSCan a 13-year-old refuse treatment? "How old is old enough to decide whether to live or die? Priscilla Alderson, professor of childhood studies at the Institute of Education, says her research had found that even very young children could give or withhold informed consent to medical treatment. Decisions about treatment, or even about whether to live or die, cannot be based on age, she argues. "Our research has found that age isn't a helpful criterion - but experience is," she says. She has found that even at four years old, a child who has diabetes can understand the principle of insulin treatment - and it is vital they do understand or they risk interpreting the pain they as some kind of parental punishment."
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POPSTime to test time Yet if Hogan's ideas are right, noise associated with this fundamental fuzziness should be prominent at GEO600, a joint British and German machine operating near Hannover, Germany, that is searching for gravitational waves. These waves are thought to arise during events such as the massive cosmic collisions of black holes and neutron stars. Confirmation of the idea — which could come as experimental upgrades to GEO600 are put in place over the coming year — would be a big step towards a verifiable quantum theory of gravity, a long-sought unification of quantum mechanics (the physics of the very small) with general relativity (the physics of the very big). Hogan outlines his predictions in a paper published on 30 October in Physical Review D1.
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