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Eight new moon missions A menagerie of human ancestors Return to Mercury Gene therapy in the womb Microbe discovery bonanza Qubits beat supercomputers Bioelectric body regeneration One last hurrah for the LHC? 23/30 December 2017
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CONTENTS
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Volume 236 No 3157/8
News Most premature baby ever to survive 6
Holiday special
Leader
44 Life in the sloth lane Evolution’s slowest masterpiece 47 Blue-dye thinking Pigments from deep inside Earth 49 Artificial unintelligence Why robots will never be in charge 51 Your place name is mud England’s soggy history 53 From Russia with laughs Poking fun at British scientists 56 Holly hunters How to save a prickly customer 58 Mad Victorian science Sugar lights and magic teaspoons 60 The grape depression France’s 19th-century wine crisis 63 Bright skies at night Mystery of the nocturnal sun 65 The secret chocolate garden Inside the UK’s cocoa quarantine 67 Earwax factor The secrets held in your lugholes 69 Owl bling When birds really feather the nest 72 Fake snowflakes Is artificial snow any good? 74 People who see time When mental calendars turn real 76 Missives impossible How Newton fell foul of fake news
5
Science is a force for prosperity
News 6
NEWS & TECHNOLOGY Most premature baby ever. Blockbusters filmed by drones. Mission to our next-nearest star. Fungus controls flies’ minds. Quantum origin of space-time. Female monkeys get frisky with deer. Venice gains 100 years of history. Weird lines on Saturn’s moons. Infection scanner. The family that feels no pain
17 IN BRIEF Children want revenge. Our solar system’s twin. Oldest plesiosaur fossil. Urine test for TB
Analysis 22 Off-grid energy How solar power is giving electricity to millions for the first time 24 COMMENT A tipping point for climate action is coming fast. France is right to try to tame vaccine holdouts 25 INSIGHT Gambling laws need digital update to protect kids
2018 preview
Culture 78 Elf Lands: The new fantasy If producers come looking for a rival to Game of Thrones, it’s time to call M. John Harrison 80 World’s longest science expedition Peter the Great planned an extravagant expedition to Russia’s far east and Alaska. What happened next? 81 Puzzles: The problems Test your brain with Japanese puzzles 82 Into the whirlpool Enjoy a spectacular tour of the universe – and how we found our place in it 83 Experience is all Curators can get in the way of the natural enjoyment of art 83 Puzzles: The answers Find out how you got on 85 2000 AD The Dark Judges: No Future An exclusive comic strip
Regulars 26 APERTURE A messy midnight feast 100 LETTERS Love is the key to happy families 103 MAKE Snow predictor 104 FEEDBACK Elf sightings are on the rise 105 QUIZ Test your scientific knowledge
29 The year ahead Your sneak peek at the biggest news before it happens 40 PLUS: The best stories of 2017
23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 3
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A world divided Science is a force for prosperity, but not enough of us share it IS LIFE today better than it was economic performance. In South 50 years ago? It depends on who Korea, India, Vietnam, Indonesia you ask. Nearly nine out of 10 and Turkey, which have enjoyed Vietnamese people think so – big economic gains, solid but only one in 10 Venezuelans. majorities say that life is better. About two-thirds of Germans and But when life is a struggle, Swedes say yes, but fewer than long and gradual improvements half of Brits and only a third of in living standards are easy to Americans agree. Worldwide, forget. The result is that one of an unhealthy majority – 57 per the greatest uplifts in well-being cent – think quality of life has in human history seems to be deteriorated or stagnated. widely taken for granted. These results come from a This is also a warning about survey of 43,000 people in the future. Recently, we have seen 38 countries, published this signs that the gains from science month by the Pew Research and technology are slowing or Center in Washington DC. “After the initial vigour of The gloom is perhaps the March for Science last surprising, given how much life April, attempts to defend has been transformed by science, reason have fizzled out” technology and medicine since 1967. As the report notes, 50 years ago, many countries had yet to even reversing. Challenges like experience the gains in health climate change and antibiotic and life expectancy brought resistance will make it harder about by vaccinations, green to make further improvements. revolutions and so on. Technology On top of that, our ability to has dramatically boosted living address these issues is threatened standards too. by a tsunami of anti-scientism, Why don’t people seem to which has moved from denying notice, or care? In the words of Bill scientific facts to crushing our Clinton, it’s the economy, stupid. ability to determine them at all. The single biggest influence that The epicentre is, of course, Pew identified was respondents’ Donald Trump’s White House. Its sense of their own nation’s latest insult is apparently to ban
officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from using the terms “evidence-based” and “science-based”. But it doesn’t end there. Turkey’s authoritarian regime continues to suppress free exchange of ideas. India’s government is promoting research inspired by Hindu mythology – the health-giving properties of cow dung and urine, for example. Science and scientists need to get better at reminding the world that they are a force for good – including that all-important prosperity. After the initial vigour of the March for Science last April, attempts to defend science have fizzled out or returned to angry tweeting or academic letterwriting. Such politesse is not enough in the face of determined and unscrupulous opposition. Science has its weaknesses. Not everyone will be or should be a cheerleader for it. But as we go into the new year, we could all begin by emphasising what science has done and can do for us. If we forget, and allow it to seem irrelevant or threatening, the next half-century really may be no better than the last. ■ 23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 5
NEWS & TECHNOLOGY
The youngest survivor Alice Klein
A BABY born more than four months before her due date has become the youngest premature baby to survive. The girl was born after only 21 weeks and 5 days’ gestation, at Samsung Medical Centre in Seoul, South Korea, and is now a healthy 5-year-old. In 2012, the girl’s 38-year-old mother was rushed to hospital because the membrane sac encasing her unborn twins had burst – a sign of impending labour. She was told that her twins, which had been conceived by IVF, were extremely unlikely to live, and that active life support is usually only given to preterm infants born at 25 weeks or later. However, the woman and her husband had a long history of infertility issues and IVF failures and urged their doctors to try to support the twins. The doctors agreed, and gave the mother steroids to try to speed up the development of the twins’ lungs.
Intensive care When she gave birth the next day, the babies weighed just under half a kilogram each, and were 30 centimetres long. Most full-term infants born at 40 weeks weigh about seven times as much, and are 50 centimetres long. The newborns were placed on ventilators and fed via tubes into their stomachs, because at only 12 days past the halfway mark of pregnancy they couldn’t breathe or swallow food on their own (see “Stages of development”, right). The male twin died two months later from an infection, but the female twin survived and was discharged from hospital six 6 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017
months after she had been born. Since then, she has mostly developed normally. She is smaller than other children her age, but has normal language, cognitive and social skills. She needs to wear glasses, but she has no breathing problems or signs of physical disability (Journal of Korean Medical Science, doi.org/chdz). Her good health may be due to the steroids she was given before she was born and her gender, says her doctor Yun Sil Chang of Samsung Medical Centre. Many previous studies have found that premature babies are more likely to survive when female, although the reasons for this are unclear.
STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT If a baby is born prematurely, it might not yet have reached key milestones of development.
WEEKS 1 TO 12 Basic structures of organs, limbs, eyes, nose, lips, ears, fingernails and genitals start to form. WEEKS 14 TO 18 Toenails, taste buds, hair follicles and sweat glands form. Lung airways develop fine branches, and ear canal becomes fully formed. WEEKS 20 TO 24 Mammary glands form. Grooves appear on brain surface and start to fold. Lung alveoli begin to form, allowing gas exchanges with bloodstream. WEEKS 28 TO 40 Organs continue to grow. The brain undergoes complex folding, testes descend, and eye lenses develop.
The previous record for the youngest surviving premature infant was a girl born in the US at 21 weeks and 6 days’ gestation. She was also conceived via IVF. Last month, Kaashif Ahmad at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas reported the case of a 2-year-old girl who was surviving well after being born at about 21 weeks and 4 days’ gestation. However, her exact gestational age at birth couldn’t be determined because she was conceived naturally, not by IVF. The estimate was based on her mother’s last period and ultrasound dating, which has an error margin of about five days. Nicholas Evans at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney, Australia, says these cases highlight how far neonatal care has advanced in recent decades. When he started training as a neonatologist in the 1970s, babies born between 30 and 34 weeks often didn’t survive, he says. “Now they mostly sail through without any problems.” Big improvements were initially made with the introduction of mechanical ventilators and giving the mother steroids during labour. The use of lung surfactant has helped premature babies breathe using their slightly stiffer lungs. More recently, additional improvements have been made by disconnecting babies from ventilators and IV nutrition lines as soon as possible, to prevent lung damage and reduce the risk of infection. Doctors have also found that waiting a minute to clamp the umbilical cord seems to improve health. This may be because it allows more blood and immune cells to flow into
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A girl born after less than 22 weeks of gestation has reached the age of 5 in good health, making her the earliest ever premature baby to survive
the baby from the placenta. However, babies that survive extremely premature birth can create false hope for other parents, says Evans. Only 23 per cent of babies born at 22 weeks who receive intensive care survive, and there is not enough data to know what the overall chances of survival for a baby born at 21 weeks, like the Korean girl, are (see graph, right).
“There’s no doubt that survival rates are improving for extremely premature babies” Of the very premature babies that survive, about one-third end up having severe neurological issues. “There’s no doubt that survival rates are improving for these extremely premature babies, but the disability rates are still quite high,” says Evans. “Their brain is still a rudimentary structure, their lungs haven’t properly developed yet, and they have no defence mechanisms
In this section ■ Mission to our next-nearest star, page 8 ■ Venice gains 100 years of history, page 12 ■ How solar power is giving electricity to millions, page 22
Smart drone camera crew films every angle
The closer a fetus gets to full term, the more likely it is to live 100
Survival rate (%)
80 60 40 20 0 22 26 28 24 Gestation age (weeks) SOURCE: NEW ENGLAND JOURNAL OF MEDICINE, PEDIATRICS
30
The increasing survival of very premature babies may have implications for abortion laws, which have time limits to prevent the termination of fetuses that would be capable of living outside the womb. In the UK and parts of Australia and the US, abortions are legal up to 24 weeks, which has been considered the threshold of viability. In June, the British Medical Association reaffirmed its support for this cut-off. “It is the BMA’s view, based on the peer-reviewed published UK data, that there is no evidence of significant improvements in the survival of extremely preterm infants to support reducing the 24 week time limit for legal abortion on this basis,” it wrote in a position paper. However, Evans thinks this may change. “I think many neonatologists would now say that 24 weeks is a bit high and 20 weeks would probably be a better cut-off,” he says. “But it is a difficult ethical thing.” ■
scene. That way a director-pilot gets three shots for the price of one. “Right now, flying drones by pilots is quite tricky,” says Quentin Galvane at Inria. Rarely do drone pilots film actors at close range as they are worried about losing control, but automating the process changes that. Although drones are noisy, which is potentially problematic when filming scenes with dialogue, Galvane says that for action
“Rarely do drone pilots film actors at close range as they are worried about losing control” sequences, film-makers often rerecord audio in the studio later anyway. Technicolor hopes to demonstrate the system to moviemaking clients in the near future. “I think it’s great, it makes absolute sense,” says Jim Scanlan at the University of Southampton. He uses drones and optical sensors for organisations that map scenery, who could also benefit from this kind of automation. “For instance, automatically following landscapes and terrain without the tedium of putting in a detailed flight plan.” Chris Baraniuk ■
BACKGRID UK
against infection, so it’s challenging to nurse them through that.” Most premature babies in Australia, the UK and US now receive active support if they are born at 25 weeks or later, while decisions about those born at 23 to 24 weeks are made on a case-by-case basis. Few neonatal units offer interventions for babies born at 22 weeks or less.
LIGHTS, drone swarm, action! In the future, movies may not be shot by lumbering cameras on rails, but by drones that automatically fly around a scene, grabbing the best possible angles without the need for human intervention. One project that aims to make this happen is by cinematography firm Technicolor and the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation (Inria). In recent experiments, the team began by scanning a mock film set in 3D using infrared sensors. This data was then fed to algorithms that told the drones the position of any obstacles. Physical markers on the actors, which can be edited out later, allowed the drones to visually recognise when they had performers in their sights. The director could then simply draw a route for the drones to follow on a digital map of the set. They are smart enough so that if the path sketched out by the director accidentally conflicts with an obstacle or actor they automatically adjust their route, keeping a safe distance to avoid crashing. Another option the team is working on involves programming two “slave” drones to automatically position themselves near to a “master” drone to get multiple angles of the same
23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 7
NEWS & TECHNOLOGY
John Wenz
IF A small, scrappy group at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, get their way, the 100th anniversary of Apollo 11 – the first crewed moon landing – will see a spacecraft launched to a nearby exoplanet to look for life. The project is so new it doesn’t have a name – and most of the technology it needs doesn’t exist yet. But there’s plenty of time to work out the kinks before 2069. “It’s very nebulous,” says Anthony Freeman at JPL, who presented the mission concept at the 2017 American Geophysical Union conference in New Orleans, Louisiana, on 12 December. The impetus came from a 2016 US funding bill telling NASA to study interstellar travel that could reach at least 10 per cent of the speed of light by 2069. It also directed the agency to launch a mission to Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system to ours. The JPL group has drafted science goals for the mission, including studying the make-up of the matter and radiation it encounters, and testing general
Zombie fungus hijacks fruit flies’ brains A “ZOMBIE” fungus that infects fruit flies may take control of them by releasing chemicals into their brains. Parasitic fungi usually infect a host, then control its behaviour in a way that gives the fungus a better chance of spreading to more victims. Now Carolyn Elya at the University of California, Berkeley, has observed this kind of fungus infecting fruit flies in 8 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017
relativity on the way. Upon arrival, the probe should make observations of the planetary system, plus the atmosphere and landscape of the target exoplanet. A few years after the launch, NASA would send a large telescope to deep space. There, it would position itself so that light from Alpha Centauri grazes our sun, meaning gravitational lensing can give us a full view of the exoplanet. The probe’s primary goal will be to determine whether life is present. After all, the telescope could confirm virtually everything else. “We’ll be able to characterise the atmosphere. We’ll be able to see the planet, assuming it’s not covered in clouds,”says JPL’s Stacy Weinstein-Weiss, lead author of the paper outlining the concept. Techniques to detect life once in orbit include looking for artificial structures, lights going on and off, and large-scale land modification. The target might not be Alpha Centauri, depending on who you ask – the group has identified other sun-like stars close enough to visit. Wherever is chosen, one big hurdle is that no technology we have can get a craft to a decent
her back garden. Getting it to attack fruit flies in the lab allowed her team to learn more about how parasitic fungi operate, because fruit flies are so well studied – they are used in labs around the world. The fungus, called Entomophthora muscae, kills fruit flies in four to seven days, Elya’s team has found. The animals appear to behave normally until the final day, when their gait becomes shaky and they won’t fly even if prodded. Instead, they start heading up any vertical object and soon stop walking altogether. The flies then extend
ESO/DIGITIZED SKY SURVEY 2
NASA dreams of Alpha Centauri trip
fraction of the speed of light. What’s more, entering orbit upon arrival would add decades to the mission, says Avi Loeb at Harvard University, who is part of the interstellar Breakthrough Starshot initiative. “This requires braking and a low travel speed for the spacecraft, much less than a tenth of the speed of light, which implies a trip time of centuries or more,” says Loeb. The JPL team is exploring ways to power a spaceship travelling at 10 per cent the speed of light –
The launch is decades away, and the journey will take even longer
their proboscis and use it to “glue” themselves to whatever surface they are on. Over the next 10 minutes, they slowly spread their wings in little bursts. Then, a few hours before sunset, they die in a characteristic pose. It was this pose that drew Elya’s attention to the infected wild flies in her backyard. After the flies die, the fungus starts sprouting from their bodies.
Five hours after sunset, the fungus starts to launch tiny, sticky spores at high speeds – 9 metres a second – over several centimetres (bioRxiv, DOI: 10.1101/232140). Elya has found that the fungus invades the nervous system very early on, appearing first in the brain after around 48 hours. She thinks the fungus alters behaviour by releasing chemicals directly into the brain. “It’s really cool just to work out what’s going on, but we may also learn general principles about how it changes behaviour,” says Elya. Michael Le Page ■
“A few hours before sunset, the flies die in a particular pose, then fungus sprouts from their bodies”
including antimatter-matter collisions, nuclear propulsion, and even laser-powered light sails like those Breakthrough Starshot will use, which the team says are most promising. Of course, there’s no guarantee this spaceship will ever leave the drawing board. But if it does gain steam, it could even give us better ways of getting around our own solar system. ■
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Quantum origins of space-time volume is related to the amount of quantum entanglement between different regions in the quantum field theory. Two regions are entangled if the state of one cannot be described independently of the other. In this model, changing the amount of entanglement between different surface regions can create or destroy space-time in
WE FIRST discovered the laws of gravity, and then those of quantum mechanics. But new work suggests nature might go about it the other way around: space-time, and hence gravity, could emerge from a fundamental quantum mechanical description of the universe. According to Einstein’s general relativity, gravity is the curvature of space-time. That this geometry might be related to the minuscule quantum world was first understood in the 1970s when Stephen Hawking and Jacob Bekenstein showed that the entropy of a black hole – which depends on the black hole’s microscopic quantum structure – is proportional to its surface area. While at Harvard University in the late 1990s, Juan Maldacena discovered a connection between a theory of gravity that describes a volume of space and a quantum field theory that describes the volume’s surface, and doesn’t include gravity. Since then, others have used Maldacena’s conjecture to show that the area of certain surfaces within such a
Cao and Carroll used an abstract mathematical concept called Hilbert space that can be split into different tiny parts, such that each one corresponds to a single point in 3D space. “There is entanglement between these little parts,” says Carroll. “A lot of entanglement between some, and very little between others.” The researchers relate entanglement to geometry by further assuming that the greater the entanglement between two parts, the closer they are. The entire system is also assumed to be in some state of equilibrium, such that increasing the entanglement in one region decreases it elsewhere, and vice versa. Given a handful of such assumptions, Cao and Carroll have shown that the equations governing the dynamics of entanglement are similar to Einstein’s equations of general relativity (arxiv.org/ abs/1712.02803). In other words, space-time and gravity emerge from entanglement. Bartlomiej Czech at Princeton University, who researches emergent space-time in the context of Maldacena’s conjecture, says the work is “excellent”. But the assumptions must be validated. “To construct an actual system that satisfies these assumptions is going to be difficult, but it’s also very exciting,” he says. ■
experience sexual reward through genital stimulation. The deer-mounting behaviour is related, Gunst believes. It has only been seen during the mating season and is similar to consortships between monkeys. Female monkeys often rubbed their genitals on the back of the deer and would also gaze at them and emit high-pitched vocalisations, like their typical calls when on heat.
When deer walked away, the female monkeys sometimes displayed what Gunst calls “sexually motivated tantrums”, consisting of body spasms and screaming. “It is well known that a period of maturation and practice is necessary for the development of adult-like sexual behaviours and sexual partner preferences in non-human primates,” Gunst says. Adolescent females are not the preferred partners of adult male monkeys, so tend to be rejected. Deer-mounting may act “as an outlet for sexual frustration”, says Gunst. Sam Wong ■
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Anil Ananthaswamy
the volume, suggesting that it emerges from entanglement. There is one catch: this space-time is not quite the same as the spacetime of our universe. Now, ChunJun Cao and Sean Carroll at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena have tried to extract the kind of spacetime we would find in the vicinity of our solar system from standard quantum mechanics. This type of space-time is one whose curvature is mostly flat, but with small undulations due to weak gravitational fields. To see if space-time can emerge from this quantum description,
Young female monkeys get frisky with deer IT’S a kind of monkeying around. Adolescent female monkeys mount deer and rub themselves on their backs, apparently to practise sex when they are still too young to be chosen by adult males. Earlier this year, biologists reported observations of a male Japanese macaque mounting sika deer and trying to mate. Now female macaques 10 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017
have been seen mounting these deer in Minoo, Japan. Noëlle Gunst and colleagues at the University of Lethbridge, Canada, recorded five adolescent female macaques mounting deer a total of 258 times in a two-month period (Archives of Sexual Behaviour, doi.org/chht). Adolescent females in this species of monkey are sometimes seen mounting other females or males and soliciting for sex. These encounters, known as consortships, are thought to be a way to practise and develop adult sexual behaviours. Gunst even claims they allow the female monkeys to
“Female monkeys often rubbed themselves on the backs of deer and made calls like when on heat”
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THIERRY GRUN/ONLYWORLD/4CORNERS
Mysterious streaks on Saturn’s moons
Venice gains years of history Colin Barras
like hitting the jackpot,” says Ammerman. Peach stones are ideal for carbon dating, because they grow in a single year and contain lots of carbon. Both stones dated to between AD 650 and 770 – up to 180 years older than the earliest basilica. A bit of elm charcoal found in the same core was a similar age (Antiquity, doi.org/chf2). That fits a study Ammerman published in 1995, in which his team found glass and mortar that they were able to date to the
DEEP beneath the mosaic floor of Venice’s St Mark’s Basilica, archaeologists have found two 1300-year-old peach stones. They add at least 100 years to the city’s history. Most of Italy’s great cities date back to the Romans, but not Venice, says Albert Ammerman at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York. There were Romans on Torcello island in the north of the Venetian lagoon, but there are no Roman remains in Venice. Instead, the city’s history seems “It indicates when people were filling the waterways to begin in the 9th century. Local to create the dry land on tradition says the bones of Saint which Venice was built” Mark the Evangelist were carried to Venice in AD 828 from Egypt. The earliest basilica named in his 7th and 8th centuries in sediment honour was built a few years later. cores taken near the basilica. Ammerman and his colleagues The new finds give a sense of think they have evidence for an what people were doing in the earlier chapter of the Venetian area at this time. The peach stones story. In a sediment core taken were almost 4.2 metres below the from under the modern basilica – modern ground surface. Using built in the 11th century – they data on historic sea levels, the found two peach stones. “This was team calculates that they were 12 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017
deposited a metre or more below sea level in the 8th century. This implies that they were tossed into the natural canals that ran through the Venice lagoon before the city was built, says Ammerman. The peach stones may have been dropped in the lagoon by people, agrees Laura Sadori at the Sapienza University of Rome. What’s more, bits of ceramics and metal were found in the same layer of sediment. This layer is clearly human-made, says Ammerman, and it is 80 centimetres thick in some places. Ammerman thinks the core is evidence that people were filling the natural waterways in the lagoon, to create the dry land on which Venice was built from the 9th century onwards. It makes sense people were in the area early, says Nick Marriner at the University of FrancheComté in Besançon, France. We “have been living in and around lagoonal areas for thousands of years, because they are hotspots of biodiversity, rich in resources and afford natural protection from the sea”, he says. “There seems to be sufficient evidence for a human presence in the area in the 7th and the 8th century,” says art historian Wolfgang Wolters. ■
RESEMBLING claw marks made by some giant space bird, peculiar parallel tracks on Saturn’s moons Dione and Rhea are proving baffling. “I feel like I’m going crazy trying to come up with an explanation,” says Emily Martin at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC. A few streaks had been spotted before but not systematically charted. Martin’s team did so using data from NASA’s Cassini probe, and named them linear virgae. Their brightness and the way they lie on the landscape suggest they are relatively young, perhaps no more than a billion years old. The team considered various explanations for the lines. They might be an unknown type of fault or crack, but they neither disrupt the terrain nor cast a shadow, almost as if they were painted on. Rolling boulders produce long, linear grooves on Mars’s moon Phobos. However, these are typically shorter than the virgae and are known to cast shadows. Could they be from comet and asteroid hits? The virgae look a lot like crater rays, which radiate from an impact in straight lines. But they fail to converge on any craters. On Dione, most appear to be in the same orientation, running east and west above and below the equator. Maybe the little moons had ring systems that crashed down. But collapsing ring particles should all land near the equator where rings generally orbit, whereas the streaks on Dione stretch far to the north and south of it. On Rhea, whose surface is poorly mapped, the known linear virgae seem to cluster in a single eastern region near the equator. “I’m not sure what to make of it,” says Amanda Hendrix at the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona. Perhaps a strange mixture of processes could account for the streaks, she says. Martin presented her team’s work at the 2017 American Geophysical Union meeting last week in New Orleans, Louisiana. Adam Mann ■
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Clare Wilson
THE surgeon was poised to carry out a skin graft when he decided to try out an experimental device to check for infection. Called the MolecuLight i:X, it shows the presence of bacteria in real time as an eerie fluorescent glow. The patient was a 47-year-old man whose leg had been amputated above the knee. He had endured one infection already and the surgeon didn’t want to risk another. “I was ready to perform surgery on this patient. The wound looked clean,” says Steven Jeffery of the Royal Centre for Defence Medicine in Birmingham, UK. One look through the machine, however, and the operation was called off. The wound glowed red at the edge, showing it was riddled with bacteria that would probably have caused the skin graft to fail. When the wound was swabbed and tested in the lab it confirmed that harmful bacteria were present. The skin graft was delayed until the wound had
The peculiar family who don’t feel pain AN ITALIAN family that barely senses pain has had the genetic root of their shared disorder uncovered. Understanding this gene may lead to new painkillers. The affected family members include a 78-year-old woman, her two daughters and their three children. All of them fail to sense pain the way most of us do, and don’t notice when they injure themselves. When they were assessed, the individuals were found to have 14 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017
healed, which Jeffery says led to a better outcome. Using the device “completely changed my decision-making”, he says. Wound infections are a big problem in medicine. Swabs can be taken and sent to a lab for testing but this takes days, which can delay treatment. On the spot, doctors can only inspect the wound, touch it to see if it is too warm, or even sniff it. But they don’t want to use antibiotics unnecessarily as this can cause side effects and lead to drug resistance. And sometimes there are no early signs of infection. Launched in October, the MolecuLight i:X is a little larger than a smartphone. It emits light at a wavelength of 405 nanometres – perfect to spot bacteria, which have molecules called porphyrins that fluoresce at this wavelength. When held over a patient’s wound, the screen shows it augmented with glowing red where there are certain bacteria, or in the case of one type, blue-green. Apart from the blue-green species, it doesn’t distinguish
fractures in their arms and legs that they hadn’t realised were there. “Sometimes they feel pain in the initial break, but it goes away very quickly,” says James Cox of University College London. “For example, Letizia broke her shoulder while skiing, but then kept skiing for the rest of the day and drove home. She didn’t get it checked out until the next day.” To find the cause of this lack of pain sensitivity, Cox and his colleagues performed a series of tests. The team found that all six family members had a typical number of nerves in their skin, but that they all had a mutation in a gene called ZFHX2. When the team deleted this gene in mice, they discovered that the
MOLECULIGHT
Wound scanner picks out infection
between different types of bacteria, nor does it indicate their quantity. Swabs may still need to be tested but the device shows where they should be taken, says Rosemary Hill of Lions Gate Hospital in Vancouver, who has been field-testing it. Wounds are usually swabbed from the centre but the MolecuLight i:X has been showing that bacteria may be present only around the edges.
animals were not as good at sensing when painful pressure was applied to their tails, but they were hypersensitive to heat sensations. This suggests the gene may play a role in controlling whether stimuli are painful or not. The team then gave mice the same mutated version of the gene that the Italian family have. These mice were much less sensitive to painful levels of heat. The mutation seems to have this effect because the gene normally controls the activity of 16 other
“The pain goes away very quickly. Letizia broke her shoulder skiing, but carried on and then drove home”
A glowing red shows bacteria ringing the wound
“The presence of bacteria does not mean the existence of active infection,” says Ewen Harrison at the University of Edinburgh, who isn’t involved in the research. Two small trials have linked the device with faster wound healing partly by showing where wounds should be swabbed, although neither were randomised. ■
genes, some of which are involved in sensing pain (Brain, DOI: 10.1093/ brain/awx236). Cox and his colleagues hope to work out exactly how these genes contribute to the reduced sensation of pain. This might allow them to develop drugs that achieve the same effect. Such drugs could benefit people in chronic pain, who often struggle to find relief with existing treatments. It may also be possible to develop a treatment to reverse the family’s insensitivity to pain. But team member John Wood, also at University College London, says the family don’t want that. “I asked them if they would like to normally sense pain and they said no.” Jessica Hamzelou ■
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IN BRIEF A plesiosaur that swam in the Triassic
That’s the way to do it! Kids pay to see justice done CHILDREN as young as 6 want to see wrongdoers punished, it turns out. Nikolaus Steinbeis of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, and his team carried out a series of tests involving 72 children. Each of them watched Punch and Judy shows in which one puppet shared a toy with the child, while a second, nastier puppet taunted them instead. Then a third puppet would appear and randomly hit either of the two other puppets. After a few seconds, a curtain covered the action, but children could choose to
“pay” with prized stickers to continue watching. On average, 6-year-olds were willing to spend twice as much to see the bad puppet beaten than the generous one punished. This age seems to be a critical – at 4 or 5, children showed no appetite for revenge. “This study tells us that children have a motivation to see deserved punishment enacted,” says Steinbeis. In a similar experiment with 17 chimps, the animals were either handed or denied food by a person, who was then “beaten” from behind by another human. To continue watching, the chimps had to push back a heavy door. Half the chimps made the effort to see the food-denier beaten, but only 19 per cent of them wanted to see the person who’d fed them take a beating (Nature Human Behaviour, DOI: 10.1038/s41562-01700264-5).
Sperm hacked for use as drug couriers THERE’S a new use for sperm – delivering cancer drugs. Standard chemotherapy is toxic to both cancer cells and normal cells, leading to symptoms like nausea, and limiting the dose a person can receive. But if chemotherapy drugs specifically targeted tumours, we could avoid this. Haifeng Xu at the Leibniz Institute for Solid State and Materials Research in
Germany and his team are experimenting with using sperm cells to take drugs to cancers in the female reproductive tract. When they loaded sperm cells with doxorubicin, a common chemo agent, and released them in a dish containing mini cervical cancer tumours, the sperm swam towards the tumours, killing 87 per cent of their cells within three days (ACS Nano, doi.org/gcm4wq).
The team then fitted sperm with tiny four-armed magnetic harnesses that allowed them to be guided by magnets. When the sperm hit a solid tumour, the arms sprung open, releasing the sperm and allowing them to swim into the tumour. As well as cancer, spermbots might be useful for treating other conditions affecting the female reproductive tract such as endometriosis or ectopic pregnancies, says Xu.
THE long-necked marine reptiles known as plesiosaurs are icons of the dinosaur age. Now the oldest plesiosaur ever found is shedding light on their origins. The fossil dates from the first dinosaur period, the Triassic. It shows that plesiosaurs evolved in the late Triassic and survived the mass extinction that ushered in the Jurassic 200 million years ago. The 2-metre-long fossil may be a juvenile. It was found in 2013 in a clay pit in Germany and acquired by a private collector, who told authorities. Now Martin Sander at the University of Bonn and his colleagues have confirmed it as the first known Triassic plesiosaur (Science Advances, doi.org/chdp). “Very early in the Jurassic there are lots and lots of plesiosaurs, as if they appeared from nowhere,” says Roger Benson of the University of Oxford. “So everyone was expecting to find a plesiosaur from the Triassic.”
TB, or not TB? The answer is in pee A URINE test for tuberculosis could make it much easier to identify the disease before it kills. TB is currently diagnosed using a skin test, or by culturing bacteria from a person’s sputum. Both methods take days to give results. Now Alessandra Luchini of George Mason University in Virginia and her team have developed a urine test for TB that gives results in 12 hours. It detects a certain sugar that coats the surface of TB bacteria. The test uses tiny molecular cages embedded with a dye that can catch and trap these sugar molecules, even at low levels. In tests, the technique correctly identified 48 people with TB (Science Translational Medicine, doi.org/chdm). 23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 17
IN BRIEF
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YOU would need a magnifying glass to play this real-world version of Pac-Man. Tiny robots can plot their own route around a maze modelled on the iconic video game. Similar devices could one day be used to travel around the body, delivering drugs or performing surgery. Sarthak Misra from the University of Twente, the Netherlands, and colleagues created four different types of micro-gripper robots, all less than 1 millimetre in size, and each with a miniature set of pincers. The robots were moved around a water tank using electromagnets. Next, the team created a virtual Pac-Man maze haunted by “ghosts” programmed to chase down robots. The set-up simulated how the robots could be guided by an algorithm, as they would need to be to work inside the human body (PloS One, doi.org/chhw). The team also tested the robots’ grip – they had to grab a chunk of mozzarella cheese with pincers that closed on the application of a magnet. Some of the designs that had six pincers were good at cutting mini pieces of cheese, suggesting they might be handy when cutting out tissue, for example. “In the long term we feel such miniaturised grippers could be used as micro-robots for applications within minimally invasive surgery, such as taking biopsies,” says Misra.
18 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017
Exoplanet find makes star system our perfect match OUR solar system’s twin has been discovered more than 2500 light years away. In data from the Kepler space telescope, an eighth planet has been spotted in the Kepler-90 system, tying our own system for the highest number of known planets. Christopher Shallue of Google and Andrew Vanderburg at the University of Texas at Austin used a neural network – a type of machine learning that mimics the connections in a brain – to look for new planets in old Kepler data. They trained their algorithm on
15,000 signals that scientists had already examined and either labelled as real exoplanets or not. When it was applied to a set of Kepler signals from 670 stars, the algorithm found two new planets (arxiv.org/abs/1712.05044). One, called Kepler-80g, orbits a star about 1100 light years away that was already known to have five planets. The other discovery, Kepler-90i, is the eighth planet in its system. It appears to be small and rocky, and probably is without a thick atmosphere. Because it orbits near its star, this
world’s surface may reach temperatures as high as 425°C. All the planets around the star Kepler-90 orbit closer than Earth does to the sun. Closest in are two planets slightly larger than our own, then Kepler-90i, which is the system’s smallest planet, followed by three worlds a bit smaller than Neptune and two gas giants. Kepler has only searched the area near to the star, so there may be more planets further out. Our solar system might not hold the record for the most number of planets for long. BIOSPHOTO / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
Mini-robots master Pac-Man
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A tiny space rock with a tinier moon NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is on its way to a tiny rock in the outer solar system. We don’t know much about that rock, but now we think it might have a moon. The New Horizons probe flew past Pluto in 2015 and started heading toward a Kuiper belt object called 2014 MU69, 1.6 billion kilometres further away. From the few observations made, we have narrowed down the shape of MU69 to three main options: a bulbous peanut shape, a “contact binary” with two rocks that touch one another, or even two separate objects orbiting one another. Most of what we know about MU69 comes from pictures taken during occultations – when the little rock passes between a bright star and our telescopes. During those brief moments, we can look at the shadow it casts to try to figure out its size and shape. One such event happened on 10 July, when researchers spotted an extra dip in the light of a star MU69 was passing. This extra dip could have come from an even more minuscule moon passing in front of the star, giving New Horizons another place to point its cameras when it passes by in early 2019.
Grossed-out great tits steer evolution GREAT tits that show disgust when they eat a horrible meal may be driving their prey to evolve. Many prey animals have deterrents against predators, like poison. Some signal this with conspicuous colours. It’s unclear how such signals came about. “Predators need to first learn the signal before they avoid it, but until they do, these prey are easy to detect and kill,” says Rose Thorogood at the University of Cambridge. If predators learn by watching other’s errors, however, this might protect the prey population long enough for it to reproduce and evolve.
Her team gave great tits a new “prey”: almonds, some dosed with a chemical they dislike. The almonds were in envelopes, marked if they held a bad one. Some tits watched a bird eat a bad almond. It spat it out, then wiped its beak: a sign of disgust. All birds learned to avoid the bad almonds through trial and error, but “trained” birds ate fewer (Nature Ecology & Evolution, DOI: 10.1038/ s41559-017-0418-x). “The conspicuous ‘prey’ were 40 per cent more likely to survive when predators were socially informed,” says Thorogood.
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Our work matters The world needs a safe and sustainable supply of food. That’s why Syngenta is looking for world-class scientists to join its Product Safety group
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HE world faces a challenge. As the population grows, our choices about what to eat along with climate change, desertification and loss of biodiversity are all affecting access to safe and nutritious food in sufficient quantities. As one of the world’s largest agribusinesses, Syngenta is committed to addressing these challenges. We believe that innovation is critical for sustainable food production and for supporting the millions of people who produce food. Our goal is to find ways to feed more mouths using the same land more efficiently. Syngenta has invested heavily to achieve this goal. Each year, we invest over USD 1.4 billion in Research and Development and we have more than 5000 scientists at research labs across the globe. The R&D team has created one of the strongest product pipelines in the industry, and every product needs to be both effective and safe. That’s where our Product Safety centre of excellence comes in. Based at Jealott’s Hill in the UK, the Global Product Safety team ensures that products are safe for people and the environment. The team ensures that
these products comply with rigorous internal standards as well as meeting the high external regulatory standards set by organisations such as the European Union. “We have a world-class Product Safety department,” says Steve Maund, Head of Global Product Safety at Syngenta. This team is now expanding. At Syngenta, we are looking for talented scientists with an innovative approach to problem solving and the ability to communicate with both expert and non-expert audiences. “We want to tap into a global talent pool,” says Maund. “You may not currently work in a Product Safety role but if you have a mix of passion, creativity, imagination and good scientific practice, we want to speak to you.” New recruits will join a supremely capable and experienced team. Peter Campbell, a senior environmental specialist at Syngenta, says the work will appeal to those who share the company’s goals of promoting biodiversity and sustainability. “We have chemists, biologists and toxicologists all working together,” says Campbell, who headed the ecotoxicology branch of the UK pesticide regulatory agency before joining
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A new complexion for skin science Human skin grown in a petri dish is helping to replace animal testing and giving researchers unprecedented insight into the tissue that covers and protects us all
F
ROM a distance, it seems like a tray of pink jellies. But look more closely and you will see 12 pieces of skin, stretched across small wells, ready to be covered in mascara, lipstick and other cosmetics or chemicals. For four decades, scientists at the French cosmetics company L’Oréal have pioneered the development of this lab-grown human skin. EpiSkin, as it is known, is such a good model of the real thing that it has helped lead the way in ending animal testing. “L’Oréal stopped testing finished products on animals in 1989,” says Estelle TinoisTessonneaud, who did some of the early EpiSkin research and now oversees safety and communications at the company. “It was the first company in the world to do this.” EpiSkin hasn’t just revolutionised the way ingredients are tested in the cosmetics industry; EPISKIN, a subsidiary of L’Oréal, sells batches to other cosmetics companies,
to chemical and pharmaceutical industries, and to university-based scientists. The research it supports has brought insights into how our own skin functions and ages. That’s because EpiSkin is actually made from human cells. “It’s not artificial skin,” says Tinois-Tessonneaud, who has a PhD in skin biology.“These are real, living cells.” They come from discarded skin tissue, donated by people undergoing reconstructive breast surgery, for example.
Skin technology The team at EPISKIN carefully isolates cells from the epidermis – the top layer of skin – before arranging them onto a matrix layer. The researchers then place these cell patches in lab dishes and bathe them in a fluid containing water, sugar and amino acids, as well as a host of other ingredients that give it a pinkish hue. This fluid mimics the function
of blood and keeps the cells alive. Within a few weeks, a structure resembling human skin forms in the dish. Like the real thing, the epidermis-in-a-dish is made up of four layers, each of which has cells of a different shape. At the surface is the horny layer, comprised of flattened dead cells. This top layer of the EpiSkin is dry, which makes it easy for researchers to apply chemicals and measure how the cells react. Underneath this is the granular layer, where lipids are produced. Lower again is the spinous layer that contains a variety of lipids, as well as immune cells and enzymes. The basal layer sits at the bottom of the stack. EpiSkin reproduces the distinctive shape of the cells in each layer. Having these tissues gives laboratories a fuller picture of how skin reacts to different substances and allows them to better select the product to be tested in clinical studies. For example, if a cosmetics team is working out
How to grow skin
NUTRIENTS SKIN CELLS MATRIX LAYER
Skin cells are extracted from donated skin tissue
The skin cells are placed on a matrix and bathed in nutrients
Initially, the cells grow horizontally, forming a monolayer that covers the matrix
The cells are then exposed to air. This causes them to stratify into layers similar to those in skin tissue
EpiSkin has allowed L’Oréal to stop animal testing
how much of an ingredient to add to a product, “we can test the formula with different concentrations, to see the tolerance, the effect on toxicity,” says TinoisTessonneaud. “That can help them to choose the percentage to add to the formula.” L’Oréal has developed a range of other skin models too, mimicking different features of human skin. To investigate the way sunlight affects ageing, the team incorporated the layer of skin under the epidermis, known as the dermis. The dermis in humans contains sweat glands, hair follicles and blood vessels, but EpiSkin’s version is simpler. “We mimic the dermis by mixing the most important component of the dermis in our body, collagen, with the most important cells, which are fibroblasts,” says Tinois-
Tessonneaud. Together, the fibroblasts – which help maintain structure and elasticity – and the collagen make a dermis-like gel, which the epidermis can sit on top of. We know that when sunlight penetrates the dermis, it kills fibroblasts, and this is thought to contribute to ageing. Indeed, when the EPISKIN team expose their fullthickness skin to ultraviolet light, fibroblasts disappear. Because of this, the model allows the team to test anti-ageing treatments. If a cosmetic prevents the fibroblasts dying, it is then tested in clinical studies. The full thickness skin model helped
“EpiSkin is made from human skin cells. It’s not artificial skin. These are real, living cells.”
L’Oréal develop an anti-ageing ingredient called Pro-Xylane, which is now used in many of the company’s products, such as moisturisers and face masks. Tests on EpiSkin show that Pro-Xylane boosts collagen production, and follow up studies in women have found that it smooths the appearance of wrinkles. Another of the EpiSkin models was created to help develop better sunscreens and whitenings. The cells in this model can burn when exposed to ultraviolet light. This allows the team to test potential sunscreen formulas and whether they prevent this happening. These cells also contain melanin, which is responsible for brown spots associated with ageing. Age spots are thought to result from an over-production of melanin, and EpiSkin is helping to reveal compounds that can diminish their appearance. The range of models doesn’t stop at skin. The EPISKIN team and L’Oréal researchers have developed and grown a model of the human cornea to test if products cause eye irritation, for example. Using other donated skin types, the team has created a model of human gums, the inside of the mouth and even the lining of the vagina, which makes it possible to test female hygiene products. Beyond the cosmetics industry, EpiSkin is improving our understanding of skin disorders, says Tinois-Tessonneaud. Nowadays, researchers are using skin models to study diseases that cause people to be extremely sensitive to sunlight, which can put them at risk of developing cancers. This research is already aiding the development of promising gene therapies. Researchers at L’Oréal and EPISKIN now plan to expand the EpiSkin range even further. Models that mimic dry skin, inflamed skin or sensitive skin could give researchers a better understanding of these complaints and highlight ways to develop new and improved treatments. “We are also developing new tissue models that integrate the latest advances such as tissue reconstruction using functionalised cells,” says Jean-Marc Ovigne, head of R&D at EPISKIN. The hope is to offer an alternative to animal testing across industry and academia all over the world. “This is really what L’Oréal has been doing for the last 30 years,” says TinoisTessonneaud. “L’Oréal has been a pioneer of this research for a long time.” ■ Discover other scientific careers at L’Oréal: www.loreal.com/careers
BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES
ANALYSIS OFF-GRID ENERGY
Catch the sun Solar power is giving millions of people access to electricity. Could they bypass the grid altogether, asks Michael Le Page MORE than 100 million people around the world now have access to electricity for the first time thanks to simple solar power systems that typically provide LED lights and a phone charger. More powerful versions include radios and even televisions. The LEDs provide a clean and cheap alternative to the kerosene lamps normally used by those with no electricity. “People spend 50 cents a day on kerosene,” says Nick Hughes, co-founder of M-KOPA Solar of Kenya, which 22 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017
has sold 550,000 home solar the world. There is, in short, no power systems in East Africa. doubt that the off-grid renewable Some families spend a tenth of energy revolution has begun. their income on fuel for lighting. But where is it going to end up? “It’s a crazy price for a poor fuel,” In South-East Asia and subsays Hughes. Saharan Africa, about 1.3 billion His firm has just raised the people still lack electricity. Some money it needs to finance a think off-grid energy systems will million more systems, and expand to fill this gap. If so, that Hughes thinks they could could let the world’s poorest eventually sell up to 11 million in East Africa alone. And M-KOPA is “In South-East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, about just one of many companies now 1.3 billion people still selling solar power systems to people who lack electricity around don’t have electricity”
people leapfrog conventional electricity grids powered by fossil fuels entirely and go directly to 100 per cent renewable systems. Critics argue that low-power solar is no substitute for getting poor people onto more plentiful and cheaper grid electricity. However, for the hundreds of millions of those with no immediate prospect of getting such electricity, off-grid is better than nothing. And as the technology improves and prices fall, the systems will become
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Electrification brings educational benefits and raises income
ever more powerful. Most of those who lack electricity live in rural regions far from the grid. Providing them with access to electricity isn’t just a matter of basic human rights and fairness. It has also been shown to have wide socio-economic benefits, from improving educational attainment to boosting incomes. So there is wide agreement about its importance. But how do you do it? Until recently, the main option besides grid connection was to set up microgrids covering multiple homes powered by diesel generators, which are expensive and highly polluting.
Light work Now the falling prices of solar panels and batteries, along with more energy-efficient appliances such as LED bulbs and televisions, have created another option. The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimated earlier this year that solar home systems will provide basic electricity to another 70 million people over the next five years. “Off-grid energy has incredibly high social consequences,” said Paolo Frankl, head of the IEA’s renewable division, at the report’s launch. Indeed, some proponents of off-grid solar argue that it can provide all the wider benefits of electricity while reducing greenhouse gas emissions. That seems like a massive win-win situation: tackling poverty and climate change at the same time. But it’s not that simple. “Anyone who tells you that this is about tackling climate change is misleading you,” says Varun Sivaram of the Council on Foreign Relations, a US think tank, and author of a forthcoming book on solar power called Taming the Sun. For starters, the poorest people
use hardly any energy compared with the richest, whether they have electricity or not. “Rising levels of access to modern energy have a negligible impact on emissions,” says a 2014 IEA report. What’s more, cheap solar power systems have their limitations. When Greenpeace set up a low-power solar microgrid in an Indian village in 2014, the villagers were so disappointed they protested and demanded “real” electricity. They may have been right to do so, as several studies have found that basic home solar doesn’t appear to provide the broader socio-economic benefits of grid access. A two-year randomised trial in India by Michaël Aklin at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and his colleagues found no evidence that after its introduction people saved more, started more businesses or spent more time working or studying. “It’s not a silver bullet,” he says. The reason is probably that these systems provide so little electricity. Beefier systems are available but cost much more. Home solar systems do at least reduce kerosene use, which is a big source of indoor air pollution. “That’s great news,” says Aklin. “Kerosene is nasty for health.”
When it comes to providing Few people in poor regions access to electricity, most gains can afford to buy a solar power will come from extending system outright. Instead, using a conventional grids, says Sivaram. payment system based on mobile And indeed many countries are phone credit, they pay M-KOPA trying to do exactly that. Both a deposit followed by small daily India, which has 260 million payments. After a year, they own people without electricity, and the system outright. If they miss Nigeria, which has 80 million, a payment, the system stops have ambitious plans to extend working until they resume. grid access. “We can turn them on and off But electrification will take remotely,” says Hughes. time. A 2015 report forecast So M-KOPA is effectively that less than 80 per cent of lending money to people who people in sub-Saharan Africa would never normally be able to will have access to electricity “Less than 80 per cent by 2040, for instance. of sub-Saharan Africans So off-grid solar does have a valuable role to play, says Sivaram. will have access to electricity by 2040” In the areas where grid access will be a long time coming or will never be practical, countries get a loan. “We have a really good should be encouraging private repayment rate, in excess of companies such as M-KOPA. 90 per cent,” says Hughes. That means getting rid of import This approach could allow tariffs that make solar expensive people to buy bigger appliances in some African countries, as well such as refrigerators, along with as the kerosene subsidy in India, farming equipment and maybe which makes it difficult for solar even electric cars (see “Climateto compete. friendly cooking”, below left). Providing electricity alone, “Our technology works with of course, isn’t enough. It’s no anything that turns on and off,” use having a socket if you have says Hughes. nothing to plug into it. This is Given this, full grid access won’t where the innovative business necessarily put companies like models M-KOPA is pioneering M-KOPA out of business, then. But could make a big difference. more surprisingly, they may be able to keep selling solar systems even to people with grid access. CLIMATE-FRIENDLY COOKING The grids in many countries are Around 3 billion people – including less polluting. Moving to solar would extremely unreliable, so solarmany with electricity – still cook be even better, says Mahesh Bhave, powered microgrids are likely to using solid fuels such as wood, whose firm Bhave Power Systems be used in conjunction with the dung and charcoal. This produces plans to sell induction cookers conventional grid. “The quality of plenty of indoor pollution and a third powered by solar-charged batteries. the grid is very poor. There are lots of the outdoor pollution plaguing “Nobody is thinking about [solar] of blackouts,” says Aklin. “I see South Asia. cooking,” he says. potential for a combined system.” You might think that wood and Running induction cookers requires These backup microgrids could dung are forms of renewable energy 1500 to 2000-watt systems, which is remain separate from the grid, and thus climate friendly, but cooking much more than most home solar can says Sivaram, or could be designed with them produces black carbon and currently provide, but is fast becoming to feed power into it. In other methane, both of which make the achievable as the prices of solar words, off-grid renewables could planet hotter. Phasing out traditional panels and batteries fall. end up merging with the grid, stoves would prevent tens of millions Bhave is also targeting homes making it more resilient. of premature deaths and reduce connected to the grid. He thinks he “It’s important to neither global warming by 0.1°C by 2100, can sell solar microgrids that run see off-grid as a magical perfect a study estimated earlier this year. induction cookers to relatively solution or useless,” says India is encouraging people to wealthy apartment blocks to act as Aklin. “The truth is somewhere switch to gas cookers, which are far a backup to unreliable mains power. in-between.” ■ 23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 23
COMMENT
What’s blowin’ in the wind? How will global temperatures, carbon dioxide levels, electric cars and Trump’s coal dream fare in 2018, wonders Owen Gaffney HERE’S a sure-fire 2018 headline: carbon dioxide in the air hits levels unprecedented in at least 800,000 years. That’s an easy call, given emissions are non-zero and this gas stays aloft for centuries. What is more concerning is the rate of increase in carbon dioxide, which appears to be accelerating despite a recent dramatic slowing in emissions from human activity. The strong El Niño climate event of 2015 and 2016 explains some of this, as it leads to drought and natural carbon release. But in 2018, with El Niño gone, scientists will be watching for signs that land and ocean stores of carbon are making things worse. On the flipside, recent record temperatures are unlikely to be repeated, thanks to a cooling La Niña, El Niño’s opposite number. More good news is that 2018 is likely to be the year electric cars become cheaper than diesel and
petrol cars, helped by China’s expected announcement of an end to diesel and petrol engines. March may bring gloom as we will get a snapshot of the health of the natural world in five reports on biodiversity. How to get on a better track? There may be ideas in the first report from the World in 2050 research initiative next year, which uses economic and Earth system models to explore ways to meet the UN’s sustainable development goals without harming crucial natural systems. The search for solutions will also get a boost in May thanks to a philanthropist in Sweden, who will launch a $5 million prize for the best governance ideas to tackle global challenges, protect common resources vital to Earth’s health and ensure a safe future. An Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on the impacts of 1.5°C of warming and
Le problème Can France’s bold vaccine law overcome anti-vax sentiment, asks Laura Spinney A NEW law takes force on 1 January to increase the number of mandatory childhood vaccines in France to 11 from 3. It has provoked a polemic, but the law is sound. If there is a problem, it is officials neglecting the main drivers of vaccine hesitancy. France isn’t the first nation to introduce such a law, as anti24 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017
vaccination views rose widely after the Wakefield scandal in the UK. However, it has the world’s worst anti-vax attitudes: a 2016 survey showed that 41 per cent of people say vaccines are unsafe. The hope is the law will reverse a 20-year fall in vaccine coverage that has eroded herd immunity and raised the risk of epidemics.
For example, France, stubbornly below the 95 per cent target for measles vaccination, saw 24,000 cases of the illness between 2008 and 2016, including 10 deaths. There are no epidemiological or clinical reasons why the extra vaccines – whooping cough, measles, mumps, hepatitis B, pneumococcus, Haemophilus influenzae, meningococcus C and rubella – should be treated differently to the existing three. The edict is also less onerous than
“The hope is the law will reverse a 20-year fall in vaccine coverage that has eroded herd immunity”
the one it replaces in a key way: there are no criminal sanctions. Admittedly, unvaccinated children will be barred from public crèches and schools, so most parents will be compelled to comply. But it feels less draconian. Job done then? Not necessarily. The hitch is that the government’s promotion of the law is lacking. It makes its case in established news outlets, but rarely on social media and the broader internet. Though social media use is low in France, it still stands at 48 per cent, and anti-vax views rule there. The government knows it needs to do more to get its message out. The committee advising it on
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Owen Gaffney is an Anthropocene analyst and science communicator at the Stockholm Resilience Centre and the Future Earth research programme
vaccination was due to discuss the problem of countering social media anti-vaxxers in December. Let’s hope it doesn’t prove too late. A recent survey suggested the French were evenly split on the law, and some experts warn that a browbeating approach may make hesitators more resistant. Tips on how to get a fake inoculation certificate are already online. There is an early lesson in this for other governments battling hesitancy: embrace all the ways in which people get information today if you want your message to rise above the anti-vax froth. ■ Laura Spinney is based in France
INSIGHT Child gambling
PIERO CRUCIATTI/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
ways of avoiding it is due in October. Spoiler alert: Earth has already reached 1.1°C above pre-industrial temperatures. Lags in both Earth and economicindustrial systems mean 1.5°C is almost unavoidable without a huge ramping up of “negative emissions technologies”. But these seem unlikely to be feasible at the scale required. So, 2018 will be the year the world wakes up to this reality and emissions scenarios will come under increased scrutiny. New scenarios must demand much deeper near-term cuts – closer to halving emissions every decade. As the year ends, nations will meet under the UN banner in Poland to work out how to up climate ambitions. Finally, what of US president Donald Trump? The price of wind and solar power is crashing and 19 countries have vowed to phase out coal fast. Over half of Europe’s coal-fired power plants are losing money – closing them and replacing them with renewable power is cheaper. Trump’s coal revival dream will likely be dead before 2019 begins. ■
Gamblinglawsneedan updatetoprotectkids Timothy Revell
one of their weapons with a spin of a virtual fruit machine. Skins can normally be earned by just playing the game, but there is often also the option to pay with real money for more cracks at winning them. Nearly half of all children in the UK are aware of skin betting and 11 per cent of 11 to 16-year-olds have placed a skin bet. This shouldn’t be possible: people must be over 18 to gamble in the UK, and licensed gambling websites must verify the ages of all of their customers. Annual reviews can lead to such sites losing their licence if the
HUGE numbers of children are gambling online, the UK Gambling Commission reports. About 25,000 children aged between 11 and 16 meet the definition of a problem gambler, according to the commission’s latest annual survey. And some 370,000 children in England, Scotland and Wales – 12 per cent of the total – said they had gambled in the past week. The most common forms of gambling that children participate in take place in the physical realm, involving fruit machines, scratch cards or just making wagers with “The older generation has friends. Now, however, a type of absolutely no conception online gambling called “skin betting” of the many forms that is also taking off, and a regulatory gambling now takes” blind spot means children are able to easily take part. Skins are cosmetic items found in industry regulator feels that they some video games, which can be are not doing a good enough job, so traded on third-party websites for they have an incentive to be rigorous. cash. Some sites also let players But skin-betting platforms don’t gamble their skins to receive a more have the same requirements. They valuable one. In some cases, this aren’t legally obliged to take this gambling is built into the game. For matter seriously, says Rachel O’Connell example, during a shoot-’em-up, at Trust Elevate, a company focusing on age-verification technology. players might have a chance to gamble
UK law says that if an item is won by a game of chance and can be considered to have monetary worth then the activity is a form of gambling and should be regulated as such. Normally, this means that winning an item that is only used within a game and can’t be “cashed out” doesn’t constitute gambling. But now that third-party websites allow people to trade skins for real money, the line is easily blurred. “It no longer makes sense to use formal definitions of what is and is not gambling, when what children experience is a blur of infotainment, celebrity endorsement, free games, risky games, games for money, games for virtual goods, etc,” says Rebecca Cassidy at Goldsmiths, University of London. A quick fix, such as putting skin bets on the same level as other forms of gambling by slapping an age “gate” on certain online games, is likely to have some benefit, but it won’t stop every instance of underage gambling. UK gambling laws were last updated in 2005, when rules around the advertising of gambling were relaxed. Since then, children have been increasingly exposed to gambling in various forms. Now we need new laws that are properly adapted to the digital age. “The older generation of regulator, researcher and policy-maker has absolutely no conception of the many forms that gambling now takes,” says Cassidy. ■ 23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 25
APERTURE
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A messy midnight feast DARKNESS in the Chocó rainforest of Ecuador holds many surprises, such as this young Andean mouse-opossum (Marmosops impavidus) plucking a crunchy late-night snack from the air. It was a lucky moment for herpetologistphotographer Lucas Bustamante, if not for the moth being devoured. The rodent, also known as Tschudi’s slender opossum, fell under the glare of his head torch, which also lured flying insects, creating perfect conditions for a startling image. So frenzied was the feast that Bustamante was showered in debris. “Moth scales were flying all around me,” he recalls. He wasn’t actually looking for mammals when he stumbled across this scene; he was searching for frogs, lizards and snakes. Bustamante uses his photography to raise global awareness of amphibians and reptiles, many of them endangered, partnering with conservation groups in Ecuador and around the world to display the rich natural wonders of this place. The hope is that extinctions can be avoided in habitats like the Chocó, which spans Ecuador, Colombia and Panama, and is threatened by logging, gold mining and drug cultivation. It is a treasure trove of life, containing one of the highest concentrations of endemic species anywhere and probably many undiscovered ones. Bustamante hopes to capture more of them on camera soon. Jon White
Photographer Lucas Bustamante naturepl.com
23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 27
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2018PREVIEW
1 Return to the moon The race to revisit our closest neighbour 2 Missing limbs regrown Bioelectricity remakes the body
3 Meet your long-lost cousin Next great hominin fossil is imminent 4 Opioid crisis continues Deadly epidemic shows no sign
5 Microbiology’s mother lode New forms of life revealed 6 Bitcoin’s of abating
bubble Cryptocurrency set for boom or bust?
7 Pre-birth therapy First stem cell treatment in the womb 8 Last chance for the LHC Time’s running out for the discovery of new
9 Mission to Mercury An epic voyage to a scorched world 10 Quantum
physics
dawn Google’s computing breakthrough
BILGIN S. SASMAZ/ANADOLU AGENCY/GETTY IMAGES FAR RIGHT: JIM WEHTJE
2018 PREVIEW
1
30 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017
to the moon
Return
Everyone is going to the moon, so they say. Between national space programmes and private initiatives, 2018 is the goal launch year for at least eight different missions to the moon, making it the most popular destination outside low Earth orbit. Elon Musk said last year that SpaceX plans to send two tourists on a jaunt around the moon in 2018 using his Falcon Heavy rocket and Crew Dragon capsule. Neither of these have flown yet, so they face significant testing before their intended launch date at the end of the year, and even a minor issue with one of them could delay the journey. Musk has not revealed the identities of the astro-tourists, who will pay an undisclosed – but surely astronomical – amount of money for the ride. President Trump declared in December that the US will send astronauts back to the moon, but in this modern moon race, plenty of others are set to beat them there. The Google Lunar X Prize is the motivation for five privately funded groups making efforts
to launch and land a lunar rover. The first of these firms to cruise across the moon’s surface and send back video will receive $30 million. Barring further extensions – there have been several since the challenge was announced in 2007 – the competition will end on 31 March. All the contenders have contracts with launch providers, but the rovers are still being built and there is no guarantee they will be ready in time or survive the voyage. They are not the only ones getting in on moon mania. India aims to launch its first rover in March, along with a lunar orbiter and lander. China’s Chang’e 4 mission is set to launch in December 2018 with the country’s second lunar lander and rover. Designed as a backup for their predecessors, these have been repurposed for a more difficult landing on the far side of the moon. Chang’e 3 roamed the lunar surface for a year and a half before it stopped transmitting in 2015. Now, it will have a pal. In fact, things might even get a little crowded. Leah Crane
“The lunar surface is the most popular destination outside low Earth orbit. It might even get a bit crowded”
MISSING LIMBS REGROWN A bold plan to regenerate missing limbs by tweaking the body’s bioelectricity could be realised in the coming year. Michael Levin and his team at Tufts University, Massachusetts, have started experiments to get mice to regrow parts of their paws. Levin’s team has already found that patterns of electrical activity allow cells to communicate with each other, and control how embryos develop. Earlier this year, the group altered this pattern – which they call the “bioelectric code” – in worms, enabling them to grow heads instead of tails and vice versa.
Since then, the team has developed a cocktail of chemicals that alter the electrical activity of cells by changing the way charged substances, such as calcium ions, move through them. Preliminary results suggest this brew can boost frogs’ natural ability to regrow severed limbs. The next step is to do this in mammals – a much more challenging feat since these animals aren’t normally very good at regenerating limbs. Mice and humans might be able to regrow a little piece of a chopped-off finger or toe, but that is pretty much it. Levin’s goal is to regenerate an
entire mouse paw – and eventually, human limbs. The team is now applying its chemical cocktail to mice missing parts of their paws. To do this, Levin has created a silk-based gel that can be impregnated with the cocktail and attached to the end of the damaged limb. There have been some early signs of regrowth, although the researchers think they will need to tweak either the cocktail or the way they deliver it to get the results they are hoping for. “We’ve started with a mouse digit, but ultimately it will be an entire paw,” says Levin. Jessica Hamzelou
2
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2018 PREVIEW
Meet our
long-lost relative
3
The 21st century has so far been a golden age of hominin discovery. New species like the 7-million-yearold Sahelanthropus tchadensis and the 300,000-yearold Homo naledi have added to our understanding of humanity’s past. And the finds will keep coming. “It doesn’t look like [we’re] sampling something that is running out,” says John Hawks at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “I think in part there’s a greater intensity of exploration right now.” There’s a good chance that a new species will be revealed in 2018, with rumours swirling of two major finds that could answer many questions. “Undoubtedly, the biggest gap is between 4 and 7 million years,” says Fred Spoor at University College London. “It’s a huge amount of time that’s so far represented by just a few bits and bobs.” Any hominins from that period are almost certainly new species, and could reveal the earliest stages of hominin evolution.
32 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017
David Begun at the University ofToronto, Canada, wants northerly fossils. In 2017 he studied Graecopithecus, an extinct European ape from 7.25 million years ago. He claimed it might have been a hominin, meaning Europe was home to early hominins. “I would obviously like to see more complete material attributable to Graecopithecus or one of its relatives,” says Begun. But for many, the focus is Africa 3 to 3.5 million years ago. In the 1990s we thought only one hominin lived back then – Lucy’s species Australopithecus afarensis, which seemed likely to be our ancestor. But in 2001 Spoor revealed a second: Kenyanthropus platyops. It may be crucial, as it might have been more closely related to us than A. afarensis was. K. platyops and humans (Homo) seem to belong in the same group, with burly hominins called Paranthropus. If so, Homo and Paranthropus emerged in Kenyanthropus‘s time. There’s no trace of them so early – so far. Colin Barras
OPIOID CRISIS CLAIMS MORE LIVES
URIEL SINAI/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX/EYEVINE TOP: SCOTT OLSON/GETTY IMAGES
4
“Deaths from fentanyl – which can be 100 times more powerful than heroin – have doubled and will continue rising”
Tens of thousands of people will die from opioid drug use next year, as the US epidemic worsens. It is thought there were more than 53,000 opioid-related deaths there in 2016. Official tallies won’t be released until next year, but a number of states – among them Missouri, Mississippi, Connecticut and Maryland – have already reported higher opioid-related death rates for 2017 than for 2016. While prescription painkillers have played a role in the epidemic, crackdowns mean many now get opioids on the street – including fentanyl, which can be 100 times more powerful than heroin. Given its trajectory, this trend is expected to worsen next year. In 2016, there were over 21,000 fentanyl-related deaths – more than double the number in 2015 – meaning the drug overtook heroin as a cause of death. It isn’t just a US problem. Drug-related deaths have been rising in Europe, and there were more than 60 fentanyl-related deaths in the UK in 2017. Governments are finally taking notice. Next February, medication containing codeine will no longer be sold over the counter in Australia, where codeine-related deaths have more than doubled since 2000. This October, President Donald Trump declared a national public health emergency in the US. But any improvements there next year are likely to be achieved by local areas and individual states rather than by a government that seems reluctant to commit any emergency funding to the crisis. Massachusetts and Rhode Island are both already on track to have fewer opioid-related deaths next year. “I expect a few states may begin to emerge as success stories to be emulated,” says Michael Barnett of Harvard University. Mallory Locklear 23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 33
COLIN MONTEATH/HEDGEHOG HOUSE/MINDEN PICTURES
realm revealed
Life’s hidden
2018 PREVIEW
34 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017
5 Get ready for an explosion of life. Next year, thousands of previously unknown microbes will be revealed. Bacteria and other microbes are all around us, but we know only about 1 per cent of them. The rest are “microbial dark matter”. It is hard to study these mystery microbes because most can’t be grown in labs. They need the conditions of their natural habitat – be it a hydrothermal vent or our intestines – to survive. Metagenomics gets around this by taking a sample from a habitat, reading all the DNA in it – its metagenome – then using computers to painstakingly reassemble the genomes of all the organisms. Metagenomics has already made big finds. In September, Philip Hugenholtz and his team at the University of Queensland, Australia, used it to identify 1749 novel microbial species. But that was just the tip of the iceberg. Hugenholtz’s team is set to unveil another 382 microbial species in 2018. Other groups say they have found thousands of new species in permafrost, geothermal
springs, our guts and other places. Nikos Kyrpides and his team at the US Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute are leading the biggest metagenome project. Next year, they will publish the genomes of more than 100,000 microbial species from a range of environments. They don’t yet know how many are new to science, but they expect thousands to be. Once the genomes have been published, we will be able to study them to find out what each species does. For example, we could scan for patterns that resemble genes in microorganisms known to produce methane or oxygen. There are many reasons why these findings will be important. A new species may prove useful in medicine or industry, perhaps helping to develop different antibiotics or turn sewage into clean water. Filling in the microbial family tree will also provide clues to our oldest evolutionary history. For example, we may be able to trace the origins of basic life processes such as respiration and photosynthesis. “This is just the beginning,” says Kyrpides. Alice Klein
“In 2018, they will publish the genomes of over 100,000 microbes. Thousands will be new to science”
BITCOIN’S BUBBLE SET TO BURST
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Sick of hearing about bitcoin? Well it’s unlikely to be any different next year, and ICOs, the latest cryptocurrency fad, will be impossible to escape too. This year, Jamie Foxx, Paris Hilton and Floyd Mayweather all promoted “initial coin offerings”. Named to mimic initial public offerings, where firms raise money in exchange for shares, ICOs allow companies to swap tokens for cash. These tokens are forms of cryptocurrency secured using a blockchain, the technology behind bitcoin. What does a token get you? It varies. For Filecoin, a company that raised more than $250 million from an ICO earlier this year, the tokens let you trade hard drive space. If you have a few spare gigabytes on your home PC, you could lend them out to other people as cloud storage in exchange for Filecoin tokens. People who buy tokens during an ICO are banking on their value increasing. Once the platform is up and running, demand for tokens will rise, so early investors can sell them at a profit – or so the theory goes. But if the company goes bust or never becomes popular, the tokens could rapidly lose their value. In this way, ICOs are the cryptocurrency world’s answer to crowdfunding. You could end up backing a killer product or a dud. Regulators have no idea what to do about ICOs. China has banned them, but those elsewhere have largely been ignored. In the UK, for example, the Financial Conduct Authority has said ICOs are “very high-risk, speculative investments” and that people should be prepared to lose their money. And there is a lot to lose: 2017 saw more than $3 billion raised by ICOs. It is clear there is an ICO bubble, but nobody knows when it will burst. Timothy Revell 23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 35
2018 PREVIEW “You can see during pregnancy that they already have bone fractures in the womb,” says Cecilia Götherström of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. She is head of what will be the world’s first ever trial of giving fetuses stem cell therapy in the womb. The aim is to relieve symptoms of, or even cure, osteogenesis imperfecta, known as brittle bone disease. Babies born with this rare condition have bones that fracture easily, caused by having faulty genes for collagen, the protein that normally reinforces and strengthens bones. Götherström hopes to prevent this before babies are even born, by injecting them with healthy stem cells that have been extracted from donated tissue from aborted fetuses. The team will specifically inject mesenchymal stem cells, which should go on to make bone with
Disease
fixed before birth
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fully functioning collagen. “We hope they will home to bones, reside there and build them up, so they become stronger and grow better,” says Götherström. “We hope that by intervening so soon, we can treat them before fractures and other damage develops in the womb,” she says. The team has got approval to carry out 30 treatments. Most of these will be on fetuses, and the stem cells will be injected into their mothers’ umbilical veins around 20 weeks into pregnancy. During their first year of life, they will receive four booster injections. A number of babies and infants will also be treated. The team has already given the treatment to a small number of fetuses, and had promising results. The trial next year will be the first test of the approach to include an untreated control group, to see whether the treatment really does improve the health of babies with this condition. Andy Coghlan
LAST CHANCE SALOON FOR THE LHC
DR G. MOSCOSO/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY TOP: PETER MACDIARMID/GETTY IMAGES
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“We know there is exotic physics beyond the standard model, but the LHC hasn’t seen signs of it. Yet”
Stay on the edge of your seat. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will keep smashing particles until the end of 2018, although this will be our last chance for a while to see a new particle emerge from the cloud of collisions. A year from now, the atom smasher will shut down for two years of upgrades. With the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, the LHC completed the menagerie predicted by the standard model of particle physics. It was a victorious moment, but we haven’t seen anything as monumental since. We know that there is exotic physics lurking beyond the standard model; dark matter and dark energy have not yet been explained. But the LHC has not seen signs of either – yet. “It’s like we’ve done a corner of a puzzle, but we don’t know what the picture on the box looks like and we don’t know what the rest of the pieces are,” says Claire Lee, a physicist at CERN. If new particles are too heavy or last too long before they decay, the LHC won’t be able to detect them and we will either have to build a bigger collider or devise new ways to look for them. For now, it’s a numbers game. Every second the LHC is running, 600 million particle collisions happen in its detectors, spraying out debris. The stuff we’re looking for is extremely rare, so it may only crop up once every thousand billion collisions. That leaves an avalanche of data to sift through for minuscule anomalies. That process takes a long time – results are still coming out from data taken in 2012. So just because the cameras will stop rolling doesn’t mean the main feature is cancelled: weird new particles could be hiding in LHC data from this year or years past, but we might not know for a while. Leah Crane 23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 37
AIRBUS
Mission
to Mercury
2018 PREVIEW
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9 It should be signposted “Welcome to hell”. Mercury, the sun’s closest neighbour, sees blasts of radiation and extreme temperatures – and it’s where we’re headed next. In October 2018, a probe called BepiColombo will set off on an epic seven-year voyage to orbit the scorched world. Provided it can withstand the unforgiving 350°C after it arrives in 2025, the craft will try to unravel some of the enigmas left after observations by two previous missions to the planet. Mariner 10 swept past Mercury in 1974 and found, to everyone’s surprise, that it had a magnetic field, whereas Venus, Mars and the moon don’t. More mysteries arose when Messenger visited a few years ago. In 2009, it confirmed that Mercury has a tenuous upper atmosphere of charged particles too sparse to constitute a true atmosphere. In 2012, it spotted what appeared to be ice buried in deep craters at the poles. BepiColombo may confirm that the material is indeed solid ice, and work out how it survives. “It could be that the ice is always in shadow, so sunlight never shines on it, explaining why it’s been there for
billions of years,” says Johannes Benkhoff of the European Space Agency, which is running the mission alongside the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. Messenger also saw bright hollows in the planet’s plains. Volatile material may make these pits by lifting off from the surface and floating into space, maybe sublimed by intense heat from beneath. If BepiColombo finds that material does indeed leave the planet, it would be a “sensation”, says Benkhoff, because it would indicate geological activity on a planet thought to be inactive. BepiColombo may also confirm Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Mercury’s warped orbit might be explained through relativistic effects, and because we can precisely pin down the craft’s position, we can see if the planet’s path obeys the theory. But getting there will be no cakewalk. “It’s easier to get to Pluto,” says Benkhoff. The craft will have to brake against the sun’s huge gravitational pull, so must take a circuitous route involving one Earth flyby, two of Venus and six past Mercury itself. Andy Coghlan
“It will be an epic seven-year journey to reach the scorched planet and unravel some of its enigmas”
GOOGLE’S QUANTUM DAWN
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If all goes to plan in 2018, Google will unveil a device capable of performing calculations that no other computer on the planet can tackle. The quantum computing era is upon us. Well, sort of. Google is set to achieve quantum supremacy, the long-awaited first demonstration of quantum computers’ ability to outperform ordinary machines at certain tasks. Regular computing bits can be in one of two states: 0 or 1. Their quantum cousins, qubits, get a performance boost by storing a mixture of both states at the same time. Google’s planned device has just 49 qubits – hardly enough to threaten the world’s high-speed supercomputers. But the tech giant has stacked the deck heavily in its favour, choosing to attack a problem involving simulating the behaviour of random quantum objects – a significant home advantage for a quantum machine. This task is useless. Solving it won’t build better AI, improve image recognition or even help filter your emails. But as proof of scientific principle, Google’s first ever record-beating quantum calculation will be a landmark event on a par with the launch of Sputnik or splitting the atom. The breakthrough will spark a rush to invest in developing quantum technology – a field that is already surprisingly far along in commercialisation. In the next decade, quantum computers will move from laboratory curiosities to actual, useful technology. Google seems to be on track to hit 49 qubits next year. There is just one wrinkle – in October, IBM threw Google a curveball with a 56-qubit-size simulation on an ordinary computer, thus raising the bar for quantum supremacy. Next year, Google will have to show it is up to the challenge. Jacob Aron 23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 39
VCG VIA GETTY IMAGES
Technology
REVIEW 2017 THE ULTIMATE PLAYER AlphaGo has been going from strength to strength. In January, it emerged that DeepMind’s Go-playing AI had been lurking incognito in online Go tournaments and secretly beating some of the world’s top human players. And in May it beat Ke Jie, the world’s number one player, in Wuzhen, China. Finally, in October, DeepMind unveiled a new version that hones its considerable skills by playing against itself. Three days and 4.9 million games later, AlphaGo Zero is unbeatable.
GPS SPOOFING ATTACK Russia may be testing a new system for spoofing GPS, we revealed in August. The GPS on board a ship off the coast of Russia put it more than 32 kilometres away from where it really was. At least 20 ships were affected. It seems to be the first documented use of GPS misdirection.
Health
WEAPONISED PROPAGANDA
TURN BACK TIME In January, we reported on Hanadie Yousef’s work on mice at Stanford University. She has developed an antibody that blocks the harmful effects of a protein that builds up in the blood with age. Then in March we revealed that Hartmut Geiger at the University of Ulm, Germany, and his team had rejuvenated stem cells in the blood of old mice using a bone marrow protein. The race is on to develop a blood rejuvenation drug.
EDITING OUR GENOME We uncovered results from the first study to use CRISPR genome editing in normal human embryos in March. The team in China had corrected genetic mutations in at least some of the cells of three embryos. Then we revealed in May that as many as 20 human trials of the technique for diseases in adults were imminent, mostly in China. These included the first to edit cells with CRISPR while still inside the body.
REMEMBER THIS In July, Christine Denny at Columbia University and her team revived forgotten memories in mice with Alzheimer’s-like symptoms by activating the neurons in which memories were stored. Perhaps Alzheimer’s just makes memories harder to access, rather than destroying them. 40 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017
Could Facebook really tip the balance in an election? In July, we got the first suggestion that it could. A study that created Facebook ad campaigns tailored to certain groups showed how AI can direct political campaigns at people based on their personality and political interests, potentially influencing their vote.
“The race is on to develop a drug that can rejuvenate older people’s blood, restoring its stem cell properties and removing harmful proteins”
CLIMATE OF FEAR The effort to stop climate change hit the buffers in 2017. DonaldTrump announced that the US would leave the Paris climate accord, though in practice it is committed until 2020. Emissions of greenhouse gases began rising again after holding steady for three years, and the fraction of our energy that comes from non-fossil fuels has barely changed in 25 years. Finally, the climate models that best fit the observations predict 15 per cent more warming than is generally expected.
NASA/JPL-CALTECH/SPACE SCIENCE INSTITUTE
Earth
“It is now completely clear that our best models predict more warming than the average model”
It seems our species is almost twice as ancient as we thought. For decades anthropologists have believed that Homo sapiens evolved 200,000 years ago. But H. sapiens-like skulls from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco have now been dated to between 250,000 and 350,000 years ago. The find rewrites our history.
CANDREW WALMSLEY/NATUREPL
NOW WE ARE THREE For years, we thought only two species of orangutan existed: the Bornean and the Sumatran ones. But it turns out there are three.TheTapanuli orangutan was unveiled in November. It is the seventh non-human great ape. But the population is only 800 and they live in an area smaller than London.
Space & Physics
HUMANS ARE HOW OLD? CASSINI’S SWAN SONG In September, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft ended its 20-year mission in spectacular fashion by diving directly into Saturn’s atmosphere, burning up on the way down. The craft was running out of fuel and its fiery demise avoided contamination of nearby moons. We already miss Cassini’s stunning images of the ringed planet, though they will continue to fuel discoveries for years to come.
HIDDEN NO MORE Half of the normal matter in the universe was missing – until this year. Made of particles called baryons, this bright stuff was spotted hiding out in tenuous filaments of gas between galaxies, only made visible by combining millions of images.
A FAR-OFF MOON In July, we reported tantalising hints of an exomoon, the first to be detected outside our solar system. David Kipping at Columbia University in New York and his colleagues used the Kepler Space Telescope to find a dip in light as this wannabe moon passed in front of its star. If real, it is probably as big as Neptune and orbits a Jupiter-sized planet 4000 light years away.
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Flake news! There’s snow substitute for our 36-page festive features special: featuring fake flakes, the people who can see time, a secret chocolate garden, the mystery of the nocturnal sun, the world’s blingiest birds and dumbest robots and much, much more...
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LIFE IN THE SLOTH LANE
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BRIGHT SKY AT NIGHT
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ARTIFICIAL INCOMPETENCE
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CHOCOLATE GARDEN
51 WET’S IN A NAME
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SECRETS OF EARWAX
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FROM RUSSIA WITH LULZ
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THE GHOSTS OF SCIENCE PAST
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Life in the sloth lane Evolution has worked tirelessly to perfect the world’s laziest animal, finds Jason Bittel
EORGE-LOUIS LECLERC, the Comte De Buffon, was the most famous naturalist on the planet in the middle of the 18th century, and he didn’t think much of the New World. He proclaimed the Americas “degenerate”, a sodden, miserable land filled with weak and inferior species. But Buffon reserved his most biting contempt for one creature in particular. He wrote of their “too short” and “badly terminated” legs, of their “slowness, stupidity… and even habitual sadness”. “These sloths,” he continued, “are the lowest term of existence in the order of animals with flesh and blood. One more defect would have made their existence impossible.” Buffon couldn’t have been more wrong. What he saw as shortcomings we now realise are exquisite adaptations that have allowed sloths to thrive in an exceedingly austere niche for at least 30 million years. In fact, the closer we look at sloth biology, the more we see just how hard evolution has had to work so that these notorious dawdlers can take it easy. One reason we know so little about sloths is that they are surprisingly difficult to study. They live high in the canopies of South and Central America and are extremely hard to spot: they are small, they rarely move and their fur often gets matted with green algae, making them blend in with the leaves. To figure out exactly how slow they are, in 2014 Jonathan Pauli at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and colleagues went to Costa Rica to
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measure the metabolic rates of threetoed brown-throated sloths and Hoffmann’s two-toed sloths. He found that while both species have extremely slow metabolisms, the three-toed sloth is a record-breaker. The rate at which it expends energy in the wild, known as the field metabolic rate, came in at 162 kilojoules per day per kilogram, meaning it has lower energy needs than any other mammal that isn’t hibernating, including renowned slouches like koalas (410 kJ/day/kg) and giant pandas (185 kJ/day/kg).
The long way down Part of the reason sloths are such extreme energy savers is their diet. They are arboreal folivores, meaning they live in trees and eat leaves. It is a deeply unpopular lifestyle choice, occurring in just 0.2 per cent of mammal species, and for good reason: leaves tend to be rather difficult to digest and contain few nutrients. Some tree-living leaf-eaters, such as howler monkeys, get around this by gorging on massive quantities of the stuff. Sloths have adopted a different strategy: they nibble a bit here and there, making sure to keep their stomachs full. And they don’t rush digestion. It can take anywhere from two days to nearly two months before swallowed food emerges again as dung, which makes this the longest digestive process on record for a plant-eating mammal. That’s particularly weird when you consider that among
MY ANCESTOR ST THE ANTEATER Look at a three-toed sloth and a two-toed sloth side by side and you might think they descended from a common, tree-living ancestor. The truth is much stranger. Genetic studies suggest that the two branches of living sloths hark back to entirely different genera of giant ground sloths. Two-toed sloths, it seems, come from a family of beasts called Megalonyx, roughly the size of grizzly bears, while three-toed sloths are most closely related to the elephant-sized Megatherium. It is a great example of convergent evolution. But how did they both move from the ground to the trees? John Nyakatura at Humboldt University in Berlin has an idea. Sloths are xenarthrans: they belong to the same group as anteaters and armadillos, both of which boast large, curved claws and powerful forelimbs. Nyakatura suggests that the last common ancestor of today’s sloths probably inherited these features from their giant ancestors, which were powerful diggers, before co-opting them for an arboreal lifestyle. If so, the common ancestor might have looked like the silky anteater, which can move upside down beneath branches.
JEAN BAPTISTE VAN DAMME
mammals, the digestion rate typically depends on body size, with big animals taking longer to digest their food. A long and winding alimentary canal isn’t the only way sloths conserve energy. They also allow their body temperature to vary wildly compared with other mammals. Whereas humans hover within a degree of 38°C, the three-toed sloths Pauli studied allowed swings of nearly 5°C as the forest cooled or warmed around them. “That’s a huge cost saving,” says Pauli, because maintaining a core body temperature is energetically expensive. But sloths still need a way to warm up. Shivering, favoured by most warmblooded animals, is for creatures with energy to burn. Instead, Pauli says, three-toed sloths climb higher into the canopy each morning to make the most of the sun’s generosity. “They’re on the reptile end of being a mammal,” says Rebecca Cliffe, a sloth researcher at Swansea University in the UK. Life as an extreme energy saver does have its drawbacks. “Sloths can’t jump,” says Cliffe. “They never do anything unless they’re holding on with at least two hands.” But even beyond saving energy, the sloth’s characteristic slowmotion upside-down walking might have another benefit: camouflage. One of the sloth’s main predators, the harpy eagle, relies on seeing its prey move. “Everything in the forest can eat them,” says Sam Trull, co-founder of the Sloth Institute in Costa Rica. “So they have to be careful to go undetected, and one of the best ways to do that is to be very slow and very quiet.” Hanging upside down, completely still, for hours on end seems to do the trick. Sloths can do this in part thanks to their long, curved claws, which their giant ancestors used to excavate tunnels (see “My ancestor the anteater,” left), but now operate more like coat hangers. The constant grip is made possible by a lattice of tendons in the hands and feet that draw the digits closed while at rest. But there seems to be more to their muscular abilities than that. We usually think about muscles as doing one thing well, says Michael Butcher, a zoologist at Youngstown State University in Ohio. An Olympic weightlifter, for instance, has muscles capable of > 23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 45
LIVING, FAST AND SLOW Sloths aren’t the only creatures with extreme energy lifestyles FAST: Hummingbirds Flapping your wings 70 times a second is hard work, so it is little wonder these tiny birds have super-fast metabolisms. If humans had the same metabolic rate, we would have to eat 155,000 calories per day – that’s 77 times as much as we actually consume.
“Why sloths climb all the way down to the forest floor to defecate, then bury the mess, is still a mystery” small, powerful movements, whereas a marathon runner’s muscles are geared towards sustaining long periods of exertion. “But sloths break that rule,” he says. They have an uncanny ability to resist fatigue, as well as a surprising amount of strength. To better understand how they do it, Butcher dissected a dozen sloth cadavers. He was surprised to see they had very little muscle tissue – roughly 10 per cent less than you find in other arboreal mammals. But what muscle there is appears to be extraordinary. Most strikingly, sloth muscles seem to contain a unique set of enzymes that confers tolerance to heavy accumulations of lactic acid, which may help them resist fatigue as they hang out or move in super-slow motion. Butcher’s latest work, which hasn’t yet been published, suggests that sloths have enzyme profiles similar to fast-running cats such as cheetahs. “Sprinting is all about anaerobic power for short durations,” says Butcher. “So it is odd and
SLOW: Giant tortoises Living on islands prone to long droughts and food shortages, these behemoths can go months without sustenance. Alas, such superpowers backfired when European seafarers realised they could keep them below deck as a living larder, and their numbers plummeted.
FAST: Camel spiders Most arachnids are sit-and-wait predators, relying on webs or ambush tactics to take down their unsuspecting prey. Not camel spiders, properly known as solifugids: they run and run and run until they find something, anything, to satisfy their extremely high energy needs. SLOW: Geckos Bradfield’s Namib day geckos use about one-quarter as much energy as other desert geckos. Not only do they move and eat very little, they also boast special scales that grab heat from the sun. They even have the ability to absorb 70 per cent of their daily water intake from fog.
FAST: Swordfish
SLOW: Greenland sharks With lifespans exceeding 400 years, Greenland sharks are in it for the long haul. They swim slowly, grow just 1 centimetre a year and the females may not become sexually mature until they are 156 years old. 46 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017
MATTHIAS BREITER/PLAINPICTURE
To help them zip around at lightning speed, swordfish have huge hearts relative to their body size and blood containing an unusually high concentration of oxygen-carrying haemoglobin. They even boast a gland in their heads to produce a lubricating oil that seems to reduce drag.
Hummingbirds burn energy faster than every other vertebrate
fascinating that a sloth that hangs for extended periods of time matches that metabolic profile.” The plot thickens when you consider that anaerobic power is less efficient because, while it can create energy quickly, it can only create a fraction of the energy that aerobic mechanisms produce. And yet for an animal that has spent millions of years trending toward energetic thrift, a little bit of immediate energy from time to time seems to be the least wasteful way to power their occasional perambulations. For all these fresh insights, there is still a lot to learn about sloths. We don’t know why they climb all the way down to the forest floor to defecate, for instance, never mind why they bury the mess. It doesn’t seem very frugal. Perhaps it is a form of communication, says Cliffe. It could even be linked to a putative nutrient cycle involving the algae that colonise the sloths’ fur and certain moths that share this justabout mobile home, Pauli suggests. One thing is clear, though: the more we learn about these extraordinary creatures and their unhurried lifestyle, the easier it is to appreciate how diet and metabolism can drive evolutionary adaptation. And that applies to us humans too. In 2016, Herman Pontzer at the City University of New York and his colleagues compared human energy expenditure to that of chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans, and found that we burn calories 27 per cent faster than other primates. The researchers reason that this dramatic uptick afforded us not only enhanced brainpower, but also the opportunity for faster reproduction and longer lives. These changes probably occurred as we diversified our diets and ate more high-calorie foods, like meat. We also started to get fatter, probably as insurance against food shortages. If that last fact hits a little too close to home at this time of year, don’t look to the sloths for lifestyle tips. It has taken them millions of years to acquire the behaviours and anatomy to live the way they do. You are unlikely to reproduce it in the six weeks you might invest in a New Year’s resolution. Q Jason Bittel is saving his energy
Blue dye thinking Blue pigments are so rare that people will go to the depths of the planet to create new ones, says Joshua Howgego
THE STARRY NIGHT, JUNE 1889, GOGH, VINCENT VAN/MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK, USA/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES
Fade to grey: Van Gogh’s The Starry Night would once have been bluer
OU have probably seen The Great Wave off Kanagawa – the Japanese woodblock print of a huge, foaming wave about to engulf a group of small boats. It’s no surprise that the picture is mostly blue; it is a wave after all. However, it is part of a series of images called Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji by the artist Hokusai, and if you flick through them, you will notice that nearly every one is predominantly blue. That might seem strange, until you realise that in 1830, when Hokusai began printing these works, blue was rather a new thing. The Prussian blue he used had been introduced into Japan just a few years earlier, giving artists their first blue pigment that was bright, attractive and lasting. “Historically, blue has been a big
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issue for artists; there are very few natural blue colours,” says materials scientist David Dobson at University College London. These days, we have plenty of blue dyes, which, being soluble, are ideal for colouring materials uniformly. But the insoluble blue pigments needed for paints, printing inks, ceramics and plastics are still rare. That is why, when Dobson realised that he might be able to create a new one based on a mineral that can exist only at the immense
“The ancient Greeks didn’t even have a word for blue – hence Homer’s famous ‘wine-dark’ sea”
pressures found 500 kilometres beneath Earth’s surface, he was very much up for the challenge. The colour blue has proved such a problem to recreate that most ancient cultures don’t seem to have had a word for it – Homer famously describes the “wine-dark” sea. Only the ancient Egyptians are known to have had one, and it’s probably no coincidence that they alone were able to produce a blue pigment. Egyptian blue was used widely until the Middle Ages when the recipe was lost and artists had to resort to either azurite or ultramarine (see “True blue”, page 48). Both were made from naturally occurring minerals, the latter from lapis lazuli. This was exorbitantly expensive, explaining why blue tended to be reserved for high-ticket items such as the Virgin Mary’s robes. Dobson, who is an artist as well as a scientist, has a long-running collaboration with Jo Volley at UCL’s Slade School of Fine Art. However, he was unaware of just how rare blue pigments are until a few years ago. His epiphany came when he attended a meeting of artists to describe his work with one of Volley’s students hunting for new pigments in coal-mine sludge. The conference was abuzz with the discovery of a pigment called YInMn blue. Volley explained that everyone was excited about it because blues are so rare. That got Dobson thinking about another blue he had seen – a mineral that had been discovered deep in the bowels of our planet. It’s not easy to know exactly what rocks deep inside Earth are like because they exist under extreme pressures and change when brought to the surface as the minerals become distorted. However, sometimes diamonds are dug up that bear > 23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 47
TRUE BLUE
PRUSSIAN BLUE The first modern synthetic pigment. Discovered by accident in 1706, and produced by the oxidation of ferrous ferrocyanide salts. Exemplified by Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa and Van Gogh’s The Starry Night. It fades to grey over time. COBALT BLUE A mixture of cobalt, aluminium and oxygen. Discovered by French chemist Louis Jacques Thénard in 1802. Famously used in Bristol blue glass. The pigment is very stable but costly, and cobalt is toxic when inhaled or ingested. YINMN BLUE Discovered by Mas Subramanian at Oregon State University in 2009. An inorganic pigment, prepared by heating oxides of yttrium, indium and manganese to around 1200°C. It is chemically stable, non-toxic and does not fade.
“inclusions” – minerals within them that are trapped at the pressures they experience during formation. In 2014, Graham Pearson at the University of Alberta, Canada, found such a diamond containing the mineral ringwoodite. Geologists were fascinated because it addressed a long-running debate about where Earth’s water came from; it is thought that ringwoodite in the mantle contains enough water to fill the surface oceans three times over. But Pearson’s discovery intrigued Dobson for an entirely different reason: the mineral was blue. Now, ringwoodite’s structure would collapse and lose its intense colour at normal surface pressures, but Dobson wondered if it might be 48 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017
Vivianite, the blue used by Vermeer in The Milkmaid, and azurite (left) both turn green in time
AZURITE/UHA/UIG/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES
ULTRAMARINE Made as early as 7000 BC in Afghanistan from lapis lazuli. Famously used on Tutankhamun’s death mask, illuminated manuscripts and Italian panel paintings. In the Renaissance it was more expensive than gold. First synthesised in 1826.
THE MILKMAID, VERMEER, JAN (JOHANNES) (1632-75)/RIJKSMUSEUM, AMSTERDAM/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES
AZURITE The first blue pigment. Originally made by grinding up the mineral azurite, a copper carbonate. Synthesised artificially from the 17th century. Can dehydrate into malachite, another copper carbonate, which is green.
possible to capture its blueness by engineering a crystal that mimicked it at surface pressure. You can think of a crystal a bit like a 3D version of the colourful, tessellated tiling often seen in Islamic buildings. Each atom in the crystal structure is like a tile that must fit snugly next to its neighbours. Dobson made an educated guess that the key to ringwoodite’s blueness was the iron atoms. These
“Unfortunately, a student recently blew up my furnace, so that’s hampering progress”
were in a tetrahedral configuration, in which each is surrounded by four other atoms. “If you could put an iron ion into a tetrahedral coordination, it should end up going blue,” he says. In January 2017, Dobson got a chance to test this idea when he became the first scientist in residence at the Slade School. What he needed was a mineral that would interact with iron ions to give a crystal with the characteristic tetrahedral configuration found in ringwoodite. First he looked at a series of minerals called spinels, which have a cubic crystalline structure. One of these, magnesium aluminate (MgAl2O4), seemed perfect because its aluminium ions have the same charge as the iron ions in ringwoodite. But when he tried baking it in an oven with a source of iron, he found the iron kept slipping into the wrong size gaps – surrounding itself with eight oxygen atoms rather than four. “It ended up just brown,” says Dobson. Then he hit on two other compounds, zinc silicate (ZnSiO4) and zinc germanate (ZnGeO4), which contain zinc in just the right configuration. When he tried substituting the zinc for iron, lo and behold he got two new blues. The silicate is a soft, greenish blue that Dobson describes as “duck egg”. The germanate gives a richer “deep water blue”. A manufacturer of fine-art products has already shown interest in commercialising his blues. But there is still a hurdle to overcome. At the moment, when the compound Dobson has created is ground into a fine powder to suspend into a liquid paint, its colour dims. That’s because it contains too little iron. But if he adds too much, the blue will disappear. The balance of iron and zinc in the compound needs to be just right. “That’s what I’m working on now: trying to see how much iron I can dissolve into these structures and so how intense I can get the blue,” says Dobson. “Unfortunately, a student recently blew up my furnace, so that’s hampering progress.” But then, no one said making a new blue would be easy. Q Joshua Howgego has got the blues
Artificial incompetence Will robots take over the world? Nah, says Douglas Heaven
E ALL know how it ends: the machines rise up to enslave their puny masters. Robots and artificial intelligences may so far have confined themselves to blameless pursuits such as vacuum cleaning, beating us at board games and recommending products we might also like. But as they continue their inexorable rise, entering a “singularity” of runaway self-improvement, they will inevitably turn their attention to robopocalypse. Stephen Hawking says AI could spell the end for humanity. Elon Musk thinks it could lead to world war three. Vladimir Putin says whoever controls AI will control the world. Maybe so. But as comic strip author Randall Munroe – himself formerly a roboticist – puts it in his book What If? Serious scientific answers to absurd hypothetical questions: “What people don’t appreciate, when they picture Terminator-style automatons striding triumphantly across a mountain of human skulls, is how hard it is to keep your footing on something as unstable as a mountain of human skulls.” Far from being a steady march to greatness, the past and present of robotics and AI are littered with examples of banal practicalities tying machines down. If you want to look at what the future of AI really holds, it’s not the highlight reels that matter – it’s the out-takes. Boston Dynamics in Waltham, Massachusetts, makes some of the most advanced robots in the world. In a TED talk earlier this year, founder Marc Raibert showed off his firm’s range of
machines. There is BigDog, a fourlegged metal pack mule that can cope with stairs and rough terrain; WildCat, which can run at more than 30 kilometres an hour; and SpotMini, a dog-like robot designed for homes and offices that has an arm for a head. Impressive, or terrifying, depending on your point of view. But Raibert also played a video that showed the humanoid Atlas robot missing some shelves where it was supposed to deposit a carton, then tripping over the shelves and finally falling flat on its face. The fact is, moving is hard. So is not moving: when we stand still, our brains have to tell our muscles to make tiny adjustments all the time just to keep us upright. Robots are terrible at it. They aren’t very good at opening doors either. And for all BigDog’s abilities, don’t even talk about stairs.
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First casualty in the robot wars
Judging by the awkward ascents of most robots, to avoid the rise of the machines we only need to retreat to the mezzanine. Robots that aren’t quite as good as they seem have a glorious lineage. At the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, the Westinghouse Electric Corporation paraded Elektro the Moto-Man, a “talking”, cigarette-smoking robot. It could move a little, count its fingers and utter lines such as “I am Elektro” and “My brain is bigger than yours”. Standing more than 2 metres tall, the golden humanoid wowed crowds. Westinghouse even built it with a hole in its chest lest people think there were human operators inside. Actually, Wizard-of-Oz-like, they were behind a curtain. A light bulb would flash to signal that a voice command had been received, so they could press a button to play a recording. Elektro went on tour again in 1950 and appeared as campus computer Thinko in the 1960 comedy romp Sex Kittens Go to College, proving that, in common with their human creators, robots have no shame. In fairness, Elektro was more publicity stunt than the stuff of serious research. Not so NASA’s hydraulic, spacesuit-testing robot of the early 1960s. Built by Joe Slowik, an engineer at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, the idea was to kit the robot out in the latest experimental suit and suspend it from the ceiling to mimic the effects of zero gravity. An operator would guide it through a repertoire of lifelike movements using a network of small tubes carrying high-pressure oil under the robot’s aluminium skin. But the tubes weren’t strong enough to contain the pressurised oil and leaked. Crippled by incontinence, the robot ended its days wearing a nappy, a wetsuit used to contain the fluid. It never graduated to a spacesuit. Most robotics researchers have their favourite bad robot story. For Alan Winfield at the Bristol Robotics Lab in the UK, it involves an assembly-line robot rigged to open a fridge and pass out cans of Coke to passers-by at a trade show. The fridge door stopped working, so the robot arm punched its way through, grabbed a can and then lifted the entire fridge as it tried to remove > 23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 49
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the drink. If that’s back in the realm of the unnerving, Winfield does note that although he has heard the story many times, it might be apocryphal. Roomba, the robotic vacuum cleaner, is very real. When Jesse Newton’s example encountered puppy mess in the middle of its nightly clean, it simply continued its cycle, smearing it over the entire floor. Never mind robopocalypse, this was “poocalypse”, in Newton’s words. According to a spokesperson for iRobot, the company that makes Roomba, it wasn’t an isolated incident. The popularity of YouTube videos celebrating robotic epic fails is proof of our schadenfreude when robots go wrong. “Watching things fail is always funny and with robots you avoid the need to feel bad,” says the founder of the “Shitty Robots” forum on the web discussion site Reddit, who goes by the name mr_bag. “I also quite enjoy how the robots in question often manage to come across as being quite proud of their achievement.” But Winfield thinks out-take videos serve a more serious purpose. Greater familiarity with dead ends and failed experiments would help counter the Hawking-Musk narrative that a superintelligence will take over the world, he says. It shows AI and robotics for what they are: very human endeavours whose products are limited by human flaws and foibles. “They are a great reality check that real-world robots fall well short of the hype,” he says.
DUMB AND DUMBER If machines aren’t all they are cracked up to be (see main story), some were never meant to be any good in the first place. There is something cathartic about a useless machine. Perhaps it comes from our unease about our perceived diminishing place in the scheme of things, but a machine that clearly does nothing – or even defeats itself – makes us feel better for a moment. Take AI pioneer Marvin Minsky’s mechanised box. Its sole action when switched on
was to extend a hand to turn itself off again. Minsky also invented a machine that would ring a bell if it sensed that the gravitational constant had changed. The Unplugger robot, created by “sculptor of the useless and absurd” Nik Ramage, is a more recent variant on this theme. Plugged into a power socket by a short cable, this steampunk contraption trundles forwards until it pulls out its own plug. Occasionally, tech nihilism takes on a darker flavour. Artist
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Matt Kenyon has built a small, wheeled robot that searches for and sucks up puddles of Coca-Cola from the floor through a straw, before spraying the drink over itself. The acidic liquid slowly eats through the robot’s skin until it reaches the circuitry, causing a breakdown. Simone Giertz, YouTube’s “queen of shitty robots”, has become synonymous with the form. Starting with an idea for a machine that she would actually like to have, Giertz builds something so over the top that it
is ridiculous. “It’s funny in the same way as a well-trained show dog suddenly stopping to poop on the arena floor,” she says. Highlights include a breakfast-making robot that hurls Cheerios and milk over a table, a lipstick applicator that smears make-up across her cheeks and a wake-up device that slaps her repeatedly before getting tangled in her hair. In her videos, Giertz sits blithely by – a picture of the human serenity we should adopt in the midst of mechanical meltdown.
It is probably wise counsel to look in the mirror if we want to see what the future truly holds for AI. Besides a lot of machines that will undoubtedly be useful in our daily lives, the picture includes a good few robots unwittingly replicating human klutziness – and AIs adopting the worst of human intelligence. Take Microsoft’s Tay, the chatbot it debuted in 2016. Designed to interact with people on social media by picking up their natural phrasing and slang, it was almost immediately tricked into making racist and inflammatory comments. Microsoft pulled the plug within 24 hours.
Robopocalypse never So perhaps what we should fear is not so much the robots as ourselves. “Focusing on implausible futures like Skynet or the singularity distracts from real issues that are happening today,” says Mark Riedl, an artificial intelligence researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. The signs are that most of us would rather be distracted. Earlier this year, Facebook announced it was discontinuing an experiment to get bots to learn to negotiate because the AI wasn’t haggling in human-readable language, making it hard to understand what they were up to. That got mangled by many news outlets into Facebook shutting the experiment down because the AI was getting too smart. The Facebook incident spawned a meme among AI researchers of congratulating each other on a sudden or unexpected result by sending messages saying “shut it down!”. But the truth is that rumours of the singularity are vastly exaggerated, even if they are often propounded by those who should know better. Riedl thinks his peers need to acknowledge that the perils of physical existence and the very human flaws that AIs adopt mean they will always, ultimately, be dragged down to our level. Nemesis comes before hubris, says Riedl. “One thing that would be healthy for the entire field of AI is if we had more recognition of failures.” Q Douglas Heaven can’t do stairs
Wet’s in a name We could learn a lot from England’s soggy Anglo-Saxon place names, says Richard Webb
T’S blowy on the B4380 to Buildwas. A keen wind whipping across the floodplain from Shrewsbury flaps a misarranged saddle bag strap against my back wheel. As I cross the river Severn at Atcham, and bend right down the back road past Wroxeter, a black cloud delivers the first dribbles of rain. England’s place names are a treasure trove of hidden history – if only we could find the key. Shrewsbury: recorded in the 10th century as Scrobbesbyrig, the name’s origin is as uncertain as its pronunciation today, but possibly means “the fortified place in the scrub”. Atcham: a contraction of Attingham, “the homestead of Eata’s children”, a puzzling reference to an obscure 7th-century saint from England’s far north. Wroxeter: origin disputed, but a rare Roman place name survival, as befits the site of what was Roman Britain’s fourth largest town. Buildwas: we’ll get to that. In the title of one of her books, Margaret Gelling, the doyenne of English toponymists, called place names “signposts to the past”. I’m cycling the road to Buildwas because they could be signposts to the future, too. I take refuge from the now intense, globular rain in the shadow of a large hedge on a bluff overlooking the floodplain just beyond Eyton – a homestead on a raised promontory – on Severn. Britain is a wet island, and it’s getting wetter. This is just a passing autumn shower, but as global temperatures rise, the paths of the most severe Atlantic storms are hitting
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the western shores of Britain and Ireland more frequently, often dumping large quantities of rain in short periods. Just before Christmas 2015, Storm Desmond broke the UK’s two-day rainfall record, and caused flooding and disruption over much of the country. Similar extreme rainfall had already hit parts of the country in the summer of 2007 and in the 2009 to 2010 and 2013 to 2014 winter seasons. The UK Environment Agency estimates that one in six households and businesses in England are now at risk of flooding.
Warm and stormy This sequence of events is without parallel in the 300 or so years the UK has had consistent weather records, but a historical precedent can be found if you go back far enough. Various strands of evidence point to a sustained period of warming across England between the 7th and the 10th centuries that brought more storminess with it. “The Anglo-Saxons also experienced a lot of extreme weather events like Storm Desmond,” says landscape historian Richard Jones of the University of Leicester, UK. This happens to be when most English place names were coined. When the Severn flooded in 2007, it struck Jones that these names hold clues to the flood risks that prevailed at a time of rapid climate change – and perhaps highlight the increasing risk we face as we move into a similar regime today. “I realised there was a > 23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 51
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relationship between those places suffering the most and water-related names,” he says. “It intrigued me – and I did nothing about it.” That changed in 2014, when winter floods hit the Somerset Levels in southwest England. “I was struck by the plight of the village of Muchelney,” says Jones. “People were saying, I can’t believe it’s turned into a big island. But it’s in the name.” Ey, as also in Eyton, is a common Anglo-Saxon place name element meaning just that: an island or raised promontory (see “Five flood-prone names”, below). That was the genesis of a research project called “Flood and flow”: a confluence of historians, place name specialists and archaeologists that aimed to investigate the connections between place names and flood risk, and what that might tell us about the effects of climate change and other human activities. It’s a division of labour: the toponymists identify place names of interest, and the archaeologists go digging there to see what they can find. A technique known as optically stimulated luminescence allows them to date when a layer of soil in a core dug out from a riverbank or floodplain at a place of interest last saw sunlight – and so when, approximately, it was laid down in a flood. That can be used in tandem with information on the chemical composition of the soil, its magnetic properties and the granularity of the deposits – clay and silt from quieter floods, coarser material from highly energetic flash
Island story: Muchelney in January 2014
flooding – to build up a picture of flood intensity over time. “We can look at the physical sequence of flooding against the coining of names, and find place names that warn explicitly against flood or types of flood,” says Ben Pears of the University of Southampton, UK, an archaeologist on the project. The wases are a case in point. English place names do not often include the element was, so it was an ideal sample for the team to start its investigations. It has a very specific meaning – one pinned down by Gelling as “alluvial land by a meandering river that floods and drains quickly”. One example is
Wasperton, a tiny village just south of Warwick in the English Midlands. Cores extracted there show sequences of very quick flooding laying down lots of coarse sediment before disappearing quickly again. Here, there’s a double clue in the name: “perton” indicates a place with a pear orchard. “Pears don’t like waterlogged soil,” says Pears. Buildwas has perhaps the most spectacular site of all the wases, situated where the widely meandering Severn enters the confines of Ironbridge Gorge. It’s looking soggy when I arrive, although the river doesn’t seem inclined to burst its banks
FIVE FLOODPRONE NAMES ey – island, area of raised ground in wet country
This is one of the most common reliably wet Anglo-Saxon placename elements, with examples including Bermondsey, Chertsey, Hackney and Witney. slaep – slippery place
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possibly Ruislip in Greater London indicate places where you should watch your step. hamm – land surrounded by water or marsh
Frustratingly close to a simple “ham”, meaning a homestead or settlement, this element has long been misidentified, leading one eminent toponymist to describe it as a “long-suffering” place-name element. Reasonably certain instances include
Chippenham, Evesham, Fulham, Twickenham and Southampton. holmr – inland promontory, raised ground in marsh
Confusingly, over the years often also corrupted to “ham”, this is actually an Old Norse element similar in meaning to “ey”. Prominent examples are Durham and Oldham. sloh – muddy place, mire
As in Slough.
From Russia with lulz
after just one October shower. But the secrets lie in the soil. Information the team has extracted from soil cores there show a dramatic flood event in the late Roman period; frequent, more moderate flooding from the 8th to the 10th centuries; and another distinct flooding maximum at the start of the 10th century, just when the name was being coined. “If Buildwas had been established in the 12th century it would have been highly unlikely to have got the name it did,” says Jones.
British scientists have discovered that they are a figure of fun in Russia. Why, asks James Harkin
Meanders of history
Richard Webb’s name is mud
F YOU happen to have travelled on the London Underground’s District, Circle or Hammersmith & City lines in the past three months, you may have spotted the legendary Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev, creator of the periodic table. Not in person of course, but splashed across the side of a special train celebrating Russian achievements in science, space and the arts. When The Heart of Russia took to the rails in October, the British Council announced that it would be running a similar stunt on the Moscow Metro: a Science Train adorned with images of Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Michael Faraday and the like. Part of something
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called the UK-Russia Year of Science and Education, one of its goals was to improve the reputation of British scientists in Russia. God knows they need it. But the train never materialised, perhaps because it would have instantly become the object of ridicule. When they hear the phrase “British scientists”, Russians don’t tend to think of Newton, Darwin or Faraday; nor do they think of Stephen Hawking or Peter Higgs. Instead, they are much more likely to think of psychologist Richard Stephens of Keele University, who earlier this year showed that swearing can help reduce pain. Or Olli Loukola, >
MODERN TOSS
Is it a surprise that places with watery names are more prone to flooding? It’s a fair enough question, says Jones. But the intriguing thing revealed by the digs is just how nuanced the information contained in place names can be. “How do places flood? Fast? Slow? Does the inundated water sit there, or drain away quite rapidly?” he says. “We can start to map this kind of historical evidence with what we see today.” What’s more, later medieval mapping and manorial records naming small areas and even specific fields could allow us to build up fine-grained maps of historical, and contemporary, flood risk. “Place names became redundant because we stopped paying attention to them,” says Jones. In the cooler late medieval and early modern periods, they were no longer describing rivers as they were – so we started building on floodplains. “But in the past two decades they are describing how the rivers behave again,” says Jones. “It’s very exciting.” It’s not just river behaviour, either. Forest and treerelated names might help inform strategies for rewooding, for example, or river-related names tell us about former sinuosity for remeandering, again to reduce flood risk. In the end it’s just about reconnecting us with a source of knowledge we’ve been living with for hundreds of years, but whose value we had forgotten, says Pears. “We spoke to a farmer in Buildwas, and he knew that the water didn’t stay long when it floods, but he didn’t know it was already in the name.” Q
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a behavioural ecologist at Queen Mary University of London, who has taught bumblebees how to play football. The phrase “British scientists” is a meme that you’ll regularly encounter if you search the Russian-language parts of the internet. It is defined on the online encyclopaedia Lurkmore as “a synonym for researchers working on pseudoscientific projects that are bonkers, idiotic and have absolutely no practical value”. In the past year, Russian news outlets have reported that “British scientists have found that fish have personalities”, that “British scientists have discovered the best time to make love”, that “British scientists have calculated the IQ of cats”, and many more in the same vein.
These are at least genuine studies by real scientists. Russians also tell a genre of satirical jokes that start “British scientists have discovered…”. For example, “British scientists have proven that birthdays are good for you: people who have the most live the longest”. And “British scientists have invented a way to walk through walls. They called it a door”. There’s also the (rather lame) “British scientists have discovered that British scientists live in Britain”, but in fact, this is not always true. The term is now so ubiquitous that anyone who conducts frivolous studies, including Russians, can be described as British Scientists. So why do British scientists have this reputation in Russia? Last year,
BONKERS… OR NOT Can you work out which of these are Russian headlines about real studies, and which are jokes?
1. British scientists have established the height of Cinderella’s heels. 2. British scientists have found that women more often reach orgasm if they have sex in their socks. 3. British scientists have invented a teacup for left-handed people. 4. British scientists have found that ostriches become sexually active in the presence of humans. 5. British scientists have discovered that primates can find the connection between a cassette tape and a pencil more quickly than people born after 1995. (The real studies are 1, 2 and 4)
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Harmless eccentrics I asked Higginson what he thought about his paper becoming such a big story in Russia. “Bemused,” he said. He was at pains to point out that the headlines in Russia were not strictly true: his research was concerned with novel findings rather than frivolous ones, which may sometimes overlap but are not the same thing. Nonetheless, he also said he was proud to have done some research that qualified him to be a British Scientist. “Intrigued too,” he said, “as it’s got me interested in the role of satire in Russian life.” I also asked Marc Abrahams, founder of the Annals of Improbable Research and the man behind the Ig Nobel prizes (known in Russia as the Schnobels). He is not surprised by the reputation of British scientists in Russia. The Ig Nobels, which celebrate amusingsounding scientific work, are very
“British scientists stand for projects that are bonkers, idiotic and of no practical value"
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RIA Novosti, one of Russia’s state news agencies, announced that British scientists themselves had discovered the answer. In a story entitled “British scientists have explained why ‘British Scientists’ exist”, it reported a paper by Andrew Higginson and Marcus Munafo at Exeter and Bristol universities. Wanting to explore strategies for career success in science, they turned to a model usually used to predict optimal behaviour in animals. They found that it is in scientists’ best interest to search out novel results and conduct small studies with less rigorous statistical analysis. Their paper was not specific to British scientists, but Higginson argues that the findings are especially pertinent to the UK due to something called the Research Excellence Framework. This, he says, preferentially gives research money to institutions with a track record of publishing in top journals, which are massively biased towards strikingly novel findings.
popular in the Russian-speaking world, and a number of Russian journalists travel to Harvard University to cover the event each year. The awards get a lot of nominations from Russia, but not nearly as many as from the two most successful nations, Japan and the UK. So why are scientists from these two countries more likely to write winning papers? Abrahams thinks it’s down to national culture. “There are eccentric people everywhere, but they are treated differently in different countries,” he says. “In some places they are punished, but in the UK and Japan people are proud that ‘they are our eccentrics’. In fact, the term ‘British eccentrics’ is also common, not just in Russia, but around the world.” There may, however, be a more sinister explanation. Lurkmore suggests that the meme gained prominence around the time of the fatal poisoning of former Russian agent Alexander Litvinenko in London. The implication is that the Russian government pushed the meme to undermine British scientists at a time when they were expected to find evidence linking Litvinenko’s death to the Kremlin. The claim seems plausible given recent accusations of Russia’s election hacking and fake-news creating, but the timings don’t quite add up: the meme first hit the internet in 2003, three years before Litvinenko’s death. It’s possible that the Kremlin saw an
opportunity and encouraged its spread, but there’s no real evidence for this. Perhaps we should set some British Scientists to get to the bottom of it. If the meme did begin as a negative publicity campaign, it hasn’t worked. British scientists are now a much-loved part of Russian folklore. In the past year, RIA Novosti has run twice as many articles mentioning British scientists as US ones, and almost 10 times as many as Japanese scientists. Russian rock band Mediavirus wrote a hit song called British Scientists; British Scientists is the name of a chain of coffee shops in the city of Krasnoyarsk. The meme is now so popular that a discovery made in an obscure lab of a lesser British university, and which barely makes a ripple in the UK press, can make national headlines in Russia. And while the angle is usually humorous, these are often real, interesting and sometimes important studies. Just like the winners of the Ig Nobel prizes, it is science that makes you laugh… then makes you think. The UK may not be at the forefront of very much these days, but when it comes to serious humour, we still take some beating. Q James Harkin likes bonkers and idiotic projects. He is one of the QI Elves, the research team for the BBC panel show QI, appears on the podcast No Such Thing as a Fish and is co-author of The Book of the Year, published by Random House 23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 55
EN days before Christmas, Romany Garnett wrapped up warm and set off for Quinag, a spectacular three-peaked mountain in the far north of Scotland. Several hours later, chilled through and battered by bitter winds, she headed home, her fingers frozen, pricked and bleeding. It had been a highly successful day. Like many others at this time of year, Garnett was hunting for holly. Until the Victorians introduced the Christmas tree to the UK in the 19th century, the yuletide decoration of choice was a great ball of evergreens – mistletoe, ivy and dark, glossy holly with its scarlet berries. Holly was part of the country’s culture and folklore. Since ancient times, it has been a symbol of life in the dead of winter and a charm to ward off witches and other evildoers. It remains an indispensable part of Christmas – the wreath on the front door, the sprig atop the pudding. But as the John Muir Trust’s conservation officer for Quinag, Garnett’s interest lay elsewhere. On foot, with a search area of 3700 hectares, she set out to pick berries from as many hollies as possible, then send them south to the cold-storage vaults of the Millennium Seed Bank (MSB) at Wakehurst. There, scientists working for the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, which runs the MSB, would extract the seeds and add them to millions of others as part of an ambitious project to safeguard Britain’s native trees. The UK is one of the least wooded countries in Europe, with trees covering only 13 per cent of the land. Since the start of the millennium, there has been increasing recognition of their value and the need to grow more, but, at the same time, native trees have come under attack from an unprecedented number of pests and pathogens. The arrival, in 2012, of a fungus that kills a key species, the ash, put the health of the nation’s trees centre stage. “We know other pests are on their way,” says Clare Trivedi of the MSB. “And we also know that climate change will have an impact on our native trees and woodlands.” With that in mind, she and her colleagues decided they must take action. The MSB already has seed from most of the UK’s flora safely in its vaults, but
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Prickly customer Saving holly is no walk in the park, says Stephanie Pain
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the UK National Tree Seed Project goes a step further: it aims to capture as much genetic diversity as possible. “Then, no matter what happens to individual populations, we know we have the genes safely in the collection,” says Trivedi. This approach will also allow researchers to investigate the genetics of native trees, to see which features differ from place to place, and to identify specimens that might be resistant to new diseases or more resilient in the face of climate change. “We don’t know what scientists might be looking for in future, but we can store seed for many decades so it will be there when it’s needed,” says Trivedi.
“Since ancient times, it has been a symbol of life and a charm to ward off witches” atrocious conditions. And there’s an exhausting amount of legwork. Hollies once grew in dense holly woods, but demand for the hard, white wood for firewood and to make bobbins for weaving and teapot lids left few of these intact. Today, most hollies are dotted around mixed woodlands or strung out along hedgerows, while some older trees cling to the sides of steep gorges or cliff ledges, safe from woodcutters and browsing animals. On the isle of Skye, in north-west Scotland, Sarah Lewis’s “patch” is a magnificent mountain called Blaven, where holly trees are far apart, often in dangerous places, and the pickings slim. “I climbed up to a crag where I’d seen holly trees with my binoculars and thought I’d get a good handful. When I got there – nothing,” says Lewis, who also works for the John Muir Trust. Either they were males, which don’t bear fruit, or birds had eaten the berries. The wild island weather didn’t
Little is known about the diversity of most UK trees, so to build a genetically comprehensive collection, Trivedi and her colleagues want seed samples from the entire geographical range of each species. That would entail gathering millions of seeds from thousands of trees. There was only one way to tackle such a mammoth task: harness the energy and enthusiasm of hundreds of volunteers. Ordinary people also helped foot the bill. The project has been funded largely by players of People’s Postcode Lottery, a British charity lottery. Since 2013, teams have criss-crossed the country collecting seeds from 70 priority species: those at great risk, such as the ash, rare species, such as the Plymouth pear, and those like holly which are so widespread that their loss would be catastrophic. “If something came out of the blue that threatened holly, there would be a massive impact on the landscape and on the wildlife that relies on holly,” says Trivedi. Gathering tree seeds is rarely easy, but hollies pose some particular challenges. Where other collectors work with telescopic loppers, giant catapults and throw lines, holly hunters must pick berries with their bare hands. “If you wear gloves, you just end up squashing and dropping the berries,” says Garnett. “You soon realise just how sharp the prickly leaves are.” What’s more, late-ripening berries mean collection must often be done in the depths of winter, sometimes in
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Holly hunters
Low-lying holly leaves are spikier than those high up to deter browsers
help either. “I’d see some holly trees at the start of the week and make a note to collect on Wednesday. By Wednesday, there had been a gale and the berries had all come off,” she says. “Sometimes I’d be out all day and come home without finding any berries.” Hollies are surprisingly diverse. In Shropshire, on the Welsh borders, they produce berries in September, months earlier than elsewhere. These trees are part of Europe’s oldest holly grove: some germinated at least 400 years ago, when the climate was much colder. Scotland’s mountain hollies are unusually rugged, persisting despite frequent battering by the harshest winds. “The best spot for hollies on Quinag is a place called Allt na Doire Cuilinn – ‘the burn of the grove of the hollies’,” says Garnett. The name is very old, suggesting that this is also an ancient population of trees. Whether genetic differences explain their particular characteristics remains to be seen, however. During the last ice age, hollies survived in geographically isolated icefree refuges in the Iberian peninsula and Italy. When the ice retreated, trees from these two regions – by then genetically distinct – migrated along different routes to Britain. But without molecular analysis, it is hard to say which are which, or whether there are populations with other origins. Outward appearances are an unreliable guide. Leaf shape, for instance, varies from tree to tree and place to place, but also on individual trees: lower leaves are prickly as a defence against browsing by deer or cattle, while those higher up are smooth-edged. Recent research reveals that hollies grow pricklier leaves as a result of heavier browsing – and that they do it by modifying existing genes. Right now, teams of volunteers are out picking berries at sites from the south-west of England to the Scottish Highlands in a final push to bank the nation’s holly genes before the project comes to an end in March. Their efforts will ensure that holly remains a part of the UK landscape, and that there will always be a sprig to crown the Christmas pudding. ■ Stephanie Pain is evergreen 23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 57
The ghosts of science past Jaw-dropping Victorian experiments could blow your mind – and possibly your living room, discovers George Bass
IRST off, drown a fly. That may not be a conventional way to start a scientific experiment, but then again, the instruction is taken from a rather unconventional book. The Young Man’s Book of Amusement, first published by William Milner in 1839, is among the stranger relics of an era when scientific experimentation was starting to take off as a form of popular entertainment. Elsewhere in its pages, there are instructions to rub liquid mercury on your skin, stick explosives under a toy spider and apply voltage to a corpse. It’s a wonder that any of its readers survived long enough to be amused. Today, The Young Man’s Book of Amusement – or, to give its full title, The Young Man’s Book of Amusement Containing the Most Interesting and Instructive Experiments in Various Branches of Science to Which Is Added All the Popular Tricks and Changes in Cards and the Art of Making Fire Works – reads like a drinking game for health and safety officials. It was a jawdropping, illustrated compendium of experiments that promised to “unite instruction with amusement” – and very possibly, thin out the male gene pool. This is a manual that recommends everything from brewing your own nitrous oxide to electrifying fake
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heads (with real hair) until the strands jump to attention “like quills upon the fretful porcupine”. Pages are devoted to exciting new hobbies, such as restoring withered fruit, making inflamed soap bubbles, transforming iron into copper and freeing stuck rings using liquid mercury. There are early forays into meteorology involving hand-built barometers, and a dip into optics, with guides on how to produce light from sugar. At the time the book came out, scientific experimentation was no longer the preserve of an intellectual elite. The wealth generated by the industrial revolution was producing a middle class with time on its hands and money to splash on spending it well. Astronomy demonstrators toured the country with their model solar systems, Michael Faraday’s lectures at the Royal Institution in London were a Christmas staple and the first inexpensive chemistry sets were rolled out in the 1850s by John J. Griffin & Sons.
“Elsewhere, there are instructions to rub mercury on your skin and stick explosives under a toy spider”
With literacy rates rising steeply, publishers were also quick to take advantage of this new market. Cheap, mass-produced educational texts took off. The Penny Magazine, published by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, had a weekly circulation of 200,000 in the early 1830s, its readers agog with curiosity about everything from copper mining to swordfish. But these were tame compared with The Young Man’s Book of Amusement, which saves its most peculiar moment for the alarmingly titled “Galvanic experiments on the dead body of a criminal”. What follows goes well beyond the boundaries of home science, requiring the budding electrochemist to source a morgue, a hanged murderer (“middle-sized, athletic, extremely muscular”), something resembling a Leyden jar, and a public gallery with a fondness for the spectacle of a dancing corpse. Not all the experiments in the book end badly. The drowned fly, for example, once laid to rest in some chalk dust or fine ash, gets the water removed from the openings it uses to breathe, and stages a magical recovery. Just don't try any of this at home – or anywhere else for that matter. Q George Bass is having a blast
EXCERPTS FROM
THE YOUNG MAN’S BOOK OF AMUSEMENT TO MAKE AN ARTIFICIAL SPIDER, CONTAINING FULMINATING SILVER Take about one third of a grain of fulminating silver, and inclose it in a piece of paper or cloth made up in the form of a spider, then place it in a situation where it is likely to be trod upon. The noise will both surprise and amuse. {Ed: Fulminating silver, AgCNO, though worryingly considered too sensitive for use in explosives, is still used to give some toy crackers their bang.}
THE MAGICAL TEA-SPOON Put into a crucible four ounces of bismuth, and when in a state of fusion, throw in two ounces and a half of lead, and one ounce and a half of tin: these metals will combine, forming an alloy, fusible in boiling water. Mould the alloy into bars, and take them to a silversmith’s to be made into tea-spoons. Give one to a stranger to stir his tea, as soon as it is poured from the tea-pot; he will not be a little surprised to find it melt in his tea-cup. {Ed: A similar trick can also be performed with gallium.}
VEGETABLE CHIMNEY ORNAMENTS In winter an elegant chimney ornament may be formed by cutting the head or thick end of a carrot, containing the bulb, and placing it in a shallow vessel with water. Young and delicate leaves unfold themselves, forming a radiated tuft of a very handsome appearance, and heightened by contrast with the season of the year.
INFALLIBLE ANTISEPTIC For ensuring the sweetness of fish conveyed by landcarriage, the belly of the fish should be opened, and the internal parts sprinkled with powdered charcoal. The same material will restore impure, or even putrescent water, to a state of perfect freshness.
ELECTRICAL ILLUMINATION To illuminate eggs by electricity, it is merely necessary to get a mahogany stand so constructed as to hold three eggs at a greater or smaller distance, according to the position of two sliding pieces of wire. A chain is then placed at the bottom in such a manner as to touch the lowest egg with one end, and with its other the outside coating of a charged jar. The sliding wire at the top is made to touch the upper egg, and the distance of the eggs asunder should not exceed the quarter or eighth part of an inch. The electricity being, by means of the discharging rod, sent down the ball and wire, will, in a darkened room, render the eggs luminous and transparent.
TO CAUSE A BRILLIANT EXPLOSION UNDER WATER Drop a piece of phosphorus, the size of a pea, into a tumbler of hot water; and, from a bladder, furnished with a stop cock, force a stream of oxygen directly upon it. This will afford a most brilliant combustion under water.
TO GIVE A GHASTLY APPEARANCE TO PERSONS IN A ROOM Dissolve salt in an infusion of saffron and spirits of wine. Dip some tow {Ed: Any fibres will do} in this solution, and having set fire to it, extinguish all the other lights in the room.
LIGHT PRODUCED BY SUGAR If two pieces of loaf-sugar (about a pound each) are struck against each other in the dark, a light-blue flame, like lightning, will be elicited. The same effect takes place when a loaf of sugar is struck with an iron instrument.
TO KEEP A SNOW-BALL ALL SUMMER IN A PERFECT STATE Get a snow-ball, and squeeze it very hard together, then put it in a pot and surround it well with flour, which must be pressed very hard about it, and you shall have as perfect a snow-ball in the height of summer, as you had when you first put it in the pot
The grape depression A period of enforced sobriety had unexpected consequences in 19th-century France, says Chris Simms
HERE was no rot… but suddenly under the magnifying lens of the instrument appeared an insect, a plant louse of yellowish colour, tight on the wood, sucking the sap… it is not one, it is not ten, but hundreds, thousands… They are everywhere…” In 1868, botanist Jules-Émile Planchon unmasked the culprit behind a national crisis. For five years, a blight had been stealing across France’s vineyards. Its cause was invisible, its spread inexorable. Always it followed the same pattern. First a single vine would wither, then a circle of plants. Entire vineyards were wiped out within years. Panic grew and blame flew. Vineyards were watered with white wine and pruning cuts sealed with hot wax to halt the blight’s advance. One supposed cure involved burying live toads under the vines to draw out the mysterious poison. Even Planchon’s revelation couldn’t halt the blight. Before it was finally stalled in the 1890s, it had laid waste to an estimated 40 per cent of French vineyards, and changed the face of European viticulture for ever. With the vines, scores of rural communes also saw their livelihoods wither. And that’s where the story of the Great French Wine Blight has now earned a second telling. Its gradual spread and devastating effects illuminate the complex relationships between wine, poverty and crime. The cause of the blight was the tiny aphid-like bug Daktulosphaira vitifoliae, often known as phylloxera. Its arrival in France was the bitter fruit of technological progress. It travelled across the Atlantic on vines imported
from its native home in the Americas. Before the advent of steamships, the voyage was too long, and the insect would have died en route. The bugs must have made landfall somewhere on France’s southern coast; the first documented case of blight occurred in the commune of Pujaut, near Avignon in the Rhone valley, in 1863. Once they arrived in a vineyard, the bugs would head underground, where they would literally suck the life out of the vines. They depleted the roots’ sap while secreting a fluid that stopped the plant healing, leaving the
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The fruit of the vine fuels many a social fracas
vines vulnerable to fungal and bacterial infections. Beyond the reach of pesticides and with no native predators below ground, the females reproduced asexually with abandon, each one laying up to 100 clone eggs in a month. With four or more generations annually, one bug could produce more than a billion descendants in one year. The nature of the blight explains its peculiarly destructive course, but also its gradual geographical spread. Rather than ripping across France within weeks as a virus might, D. vitifoliae moved slowly, perhaps transferred from vineyard to vineyard on the mud of itinerant workers’ shoes, speculates Vincent Bignon, an economic historian at the Bank of France. In the late 19th century, agriculture accounted for about 30 per cent of France’s economic output. Wine was the nation’s second most important product after wheat. Estimates have put the total income shock from the blight as high as 15 billion francs, which equates to 75 per cent of one year’s economic output at the time. Those it hit had few other sources of income, either. “This event affected people who were already at the margin of the economy,” says Roberto Galbiati, who researches economics and the law at Sciences Po in Paris. “Peasants and workers on the vines. People who didn’t have any other support.” That led Bignon and Galbiati, together with labour market expert Eve Caroli of Paris Dauphine University, to wonder what insight the blight might give into the social effects of economic dislocation. Standard economic models suggest that people choose between
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legal and criminal economic activities on their relative costs and benefits. When the income of low-skilled workers with poor job mobility falls, crime rates often rise, because it can be difficult to get a job that pays enough. “When you are poor, you have an incentive to steal because you have to eat,” says Bignon. But when poverty and crime rise in lockstep, is poverty causing crime or crime poverty? “When there is a lot of crime, businesses can suffer, influencing income,” says Bignon. Disentangling what is cause and what is effect can often be difficult. The slow spread of the blight provided a natural experiment to test these interplays, thanks to information contained in archived yearbooks from the French Ministry of Justice that set out annual crime records from all French departments throughout the
period. “Some areas were hit, some weren’t,” says Bignon. “This allows you to compare lots and lots of groups. The control groups are the areas with no disease.” As expected, as the blight spread to new areas, instances of property crimes such as theft, counterfeiting and pillaging rose. On average, these crimes were 22 per cent higher in districts affected by the bugs. The rise couldn’t be explained by other factors such as demographic changes caused by patterns of migration. But there was a twist. While property
“While property crime ballooned during the Great French Wine Blight, violent crime slumped”
crime ballooned, violent crime in the worst affected areas slumped, by about 13 per cent on average. This doesn’t surprise Christian Traxler, an economist at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. In 2010, he showed a similar relationship between a decreased supply of rye and crime in Prussia between 1882 and 1912. “Bad weather increased rye prices, which induced more property crime and fewer violent crimes,” he says. Rye was used to make bread, but bad weather for rye also meant bad weather for barley, which is used to make beer. In both the French and the Prussian instances, Traxler thinks lack of booze explains the drop in violent crime. “Shock to wine production isn’t just a shock to income, but also to wine consumption,” he says. With less alcohol to drink, people are less inclined to fight. In England and > 23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 61
THE EBOLA OF OLIVE TREES
NOT SO FASTIDIOUS The bacterium doesn’t just hit vines – in the Americas it also strikes citrus and coffee plants. Now X. fastidiosa has reached Europe, where it has earned another name – the “Ebola of olive trees”. In 2013, it was spotted in a few olive trees in southern Italy, and by 2015 had infected up to a million trees there with what has become known as olive quick decline syndrome, causing withering, desiccation and death. That same year, the blight reached Corsica and mainland France, and since then Germany as well as Spain, the world’s largest producer of olives according to the International Olive Council. So far, 359 plant species in Europe have been identified as being vulnerable to X. fastidiosa, including peaches, sycamore, lavender and rosemary. Some show no symptoms, acting as reservoirs for the bacteria. Others wither quickly. Short of controlling insect species that could spread the various strains, no cure is yet known. Generally cold winters slow the spread of Pierce’s disease in the US. That might mean northern Europe will escape unscathed. But as the planet warms, there is every chance the disease’s ranges could change or increase. “Some say there is a relationship between climate change and the increasing virulence of Xylella fastidiosa strains,” says Acedo. 62 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017
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Some 150 years after the Great French Wine Blight (see main story), European vines are under threat from another disease that originated in the Americas. A bacterium known as Xylella fastidiosa causes Pierce’s disease, in which the plants’ transport vessels become blocked, cutting the supply of water and nutrients to the leaves. California’s Department of Food and Agriculture spends about $40 million a year to control the leaf-hopping insects known as sharpshooters that carry the bacteria from plant to plant in that region. Without that outlay, the annual cost to the wine industry could be northwards of $250 million, says Alberto Acedo of biotech firm Biome Makers in San Francisco.
Wales today, for instance, alcohol A few vines that consumption is thought to contribute survived the blight still grow today to 1.2 million violent incidents a year. “Alcohol consumption makes people more impulsive, less restrained,” says Bignon. It took a long time for the underlying cause of this economic dislocation to be overcome, even after Planchon had unmasked the malefactor, and it came at a significant price to French exceptionalism. American varieties of vine had always existed alongside phylloxera, and were able to survive the blight. The idea of replacing European vines, which include varieties like Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and Merlot, with supposedly inferior American imports was summarily dismissed. Instead, vine growers tried cross-breeding two varieties or grafting the stems of
“The idea of replacing the vines with supposedly inferior American imports was summarily dismissed”
European vines onto the resistant roots of American plants to get the best of New and Old Worlds. That seemed to do the trick, producing excellent grapes on bug-resistant plants, finally halting the blight in the 1890s. Some vineyards with pure European vines still exist in France, Spain and elsewhere. That’s mostly luck, says Alberto Acedo of Biome Makers, a biotech firm in San Francisco that develops sustainable methods to treat grapevine microbial diseases. These ancient vines, often producing feted and expensive wines, tend to grow in sandy soils, through which the phylloxera bug can’t disperse so easily, he says. Phylloxera eventually overcomes cross-bred resistance. Most recently in California in the 1980s and 1990s, the bugs caused more than $1 billion of damage to cross-bred vines. Now most vines are grafted, transatlantic mergers that reduce the risk of an epidemic. At least the world is better prepared now. Harvests are more integrated, so a shortage in one place can be compensated by imports from another. Welfare systems and increased access to credit also help to cushion the blows of economic dislocation. But the story of the Great Blight has eerie pre-echoes of the recent credit crunch, says Bignon. Through the blight’s ravages, thousands of local companies, including banks, went bust and the credit system partly collapsed, preventing farmers from borrowing. In a paper Bignon co-wrote for the European Central Bank earlier this year, he shows a parallel with the recent bank bailouts: when French companies had access to a nearby branch of the central bank, which would take on their debt, it helped smooth troubles locally. Rural France may now have recovered from the effects of the blight, but it took a long time. Property crime levels remained high in winedependent regions for decades, and the blight lives on in the collective memory, in tales of families uprooted and livelihoods ruined. “There are many family stories of upheaval a few generations ago,” says Bignon. For good and ill, though, the wine returned. Q Chris Simms is blighted by the bottle
Bright sky at night The mystery of the “nocturnal sun” is no astronomer’s delight, says Rebecca Boyle
N THE millennia before street lights and smartphones, humans could, on rare occasions, walk around on a moonless night and see clearly. Looking up, they could see broad luminous patches of light stretching across the sky, which brightened the heavens in all directions as though it were daylight. People could read without candlelight, view small details in their surroundings, and make out landscapes in the distance. It was as if the world were illuminated by a hidden night-time sun. The existence of bright nights is well accepted, but their cause remains a mystery. Frustratingly, sightings have almost entirely faded away in the past few decades, making it seem that any hope of solving the riddle was dimming. Now, though, one man says he has seen the solution. The earliest account of a bright night comes from Pliny the Elder, a Roman army commander who studied nature in his spare time. In his encyclopaedic Natural History of around AD 77, he wrote that the “phenomenon commonly called a nocturnal sun… a light emanating from the sky at night” has been seen many times. In 1988, a French atmospheric scientist named Michel Hersé produced the definitive collection of accounts of bright nights, which documented similar stories from the past millennium and all over the world. In French, they were nuit claires, and in German helle Nächte. But sightings have become rarer. The most recent may be from 22 and 23 August 2001 at the Leoncito
Astronomical Complex high in the Argentinian Andes. During that event, Steven Smith of Boston University in Massachusetts and his colleagues reported a night sky that was 10 times brighter than normal. There is an obvious reason why the frequency of reported bright nights might have fallen: it has to be dark for us to notice them, and these days, 99 per cent of people in Europe and North America sleep under an artificially lit sky. Hersé’s book suggests that about one bright night used to be observed every
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year, but aside from that reveals no obvious temporal or geographical pattern. “I think you would have to have been in the right place at the right time, and in the right situation, to see one,” says John Barentine, an astronomer at the International DarkSky Association, which works to combat light pollution.
Luminous smog However, Barentine points to an interesting clue buried in 19th-century accounts. These frequently include a description of a “luminous smog” in the air. Astronomers and maritime observers said the effect was distinct from auroras or the faint nocturnal glow known as the zodiacal light, a pyramid shaped brightness produced when space dust reflects sunshine coming from below the horizon. This suggests there might be some sort of reflective haze hanging in the upper atmosphere. Perhaps that could have been dust from volcanoes or meteors, says Barentine. Take the account of a diarist we know only as M. Toucher, writing near Paris on 30 June 1908. It is possibly no coincidence that this was the day of the Tunguska event, when a huge space rock exploded in the upper atmosphere over Siberia. People around the world reported a haze in the atmosphere for months afterwards, and light reflecting from the haze might explain why Toucher could write: “At 22.30… Very clear sky, full of stars which shine to > 23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 63
the horizon. No moonlight. All the details of the landscape are visible.” Despite Toucher’s observation during a night when there was no moonlight, some have wondered whether bright nights could simply be cloudless nights with a full moon and bright stars. However, in 1909 L. Yntema, a doctoral student at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands settled that question. After measuring the total amount of light from all the stars reaching Earth’s surface, he found a discrepancy in the light on bright nights. That seemed to point to some sort of atmospheric phenomenon as their cause. Yntema called it “Earthlight”.
So, are we sure that this isn’t just a rare, mid-latitude aurora? That possibility was ruled out by Robert Strutt, son and heir to Lord Rayleigh, a physicist who, among other things, had discovered that the way gas molecules scatter light explains why the sky looks blue. The younger Rayleigh witnessed a bright night on 8 November 1929, and demonstrated that the light came from all directions. In an aurora, it typically comes in streaks. Today bright nights may have all but vanished, but we do have certain advantages over Rayleigh – satellites, for example. In the late 1980s, Gordon Shepherd of York University in Toronto, Canada, built a satellite instrument called WINDII, which could monitor waves of air as they rolled through the atmosphere. He soon found that these waves could pile up on top of one another to produce towers of pressurised air. Along with the waves, Shepherd also studies how the chemical make-up of the atmosphere changes through the day. During daylight hours, ultraviolet radiation from the sun splits molecular oxygen into individual atoms. When the sun goes down, the atoms rejoin. This produces a small amount of light, called airglow. Airglow is usually barely visible with the naked eye from Earth’s surface, but looking at WINDII readings, which spanned from 1991 to 2004, Shepherd noticed the airglow emissions varied 64 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017
BETH HOECKEL
Rolling on the waves
wildly from night to night, and from place to place. Earlier this year, it occurred to him that air waves and airglow could be connected. The waves might force the oxygen into a higher concentration, he thought, creating a more intense glow that could explain bright nights. “I don’t know why it came to me, but I said, ‘ Ah, that’s the explanation’,” he says. To verify his suspicion, Shepherd first had to account for the sun’s activity, which can affect the brightness
“Unlike an aurora coming in streaks, the light on a bright night comes from all directions”
of airglow too. He and his colleague Young-Min Cho went back through WINDII data for 1992 and 1996, when the sun’s activity was at different levels. Cho wrote an algorithm that could search the data, discard any nights when there was an aurora and find times when waves might have piled up enough to produce a bright night. For both years, that analysis showed that the waves could have produced a bright night about 7 per cent of the time at any given spot on Earth. That convinced them that the action of the waves was a greater influence on the airglow than increased solar activity. But it also indicated that you would get about 25 bright nights a year, which doesn’t tally with Hersé’s collected accounts. However, further analysis showed that stacked waves and
Chocs away In a field near London, botanists work to avert a chocolate meltdown, finds Alison George
EADING keeps its secrets well. Some might call the town 60 kilometres west of London undistinguished. Exotic is certainly not the word. But hidden in a walled garden in a field to the south of the town is a destination both special and unique. Without what goes on inside a huge white tent here, chocolate would hit a rocky road – and not the sort with marshmallows. This is the International Cocoa Quarantine Centre. Chocolate is the world’s favourite treat: globally, we eat 7 million tonnes of the stuff a year, and demand is rising as Asian consumers develop a taste for it, too. Yet supply is far from assured. Most of the world’s commercial cocoa plants originate from just a few clones made in the 1940s, which have so far proven productive enough to keep up with demand. But this has led to a dangerous lack of genetic diversity, leaving cocoa vulnerable to a host of pests and diseases that love cocoa as much as we do. Some 30 to 40 per cent of the crop is lost to disease each year,
a cloud-free night are not very likely to coincide at any given spot, reducing the expected frequency. “I think that’s pretty consistent with the historical record,” says Shepherd. Shepherd, now 86 and retired, hasn’t been able to link any of the suitably stacked waves with eyewitness reports of bright nights, partly because modern reports are so rare. To do so would be a neat confirmation, though, so he is looking into crowdsourcing a bright night. “You could get together 500 to 1000 people via the web and cover different longitudes and potentially all nights of the year,” he says. Enough to brighten someone’s night, anyway. ■ Rebecca Boyle is blinking in the bright lights of the big city
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and there are fears that climate change might exacerbate the problem. The drive to breed new cocoa varieties that are more productive, as well as hardy and pest-resistant, means sending specimens around the world, which risks spreading disease and making matters worse. That’s why since 1985 the vast majority of cocoa samples being transported to distant regions have made a two-year pit stop. “Reading is the hub these days for the international movement of cocoa,” says Andrew Daymond, not a little proudly. A plant physiologist at the University of Reading, he is in charge of cocoa quarantining. Entering the tent, I am transported to the tropics. A wall of heat and humidity hits me, plus the striking sight of hundreds of 2-metre-tall plants, lush and green, some with large orange or red pods hanging from their trunks. Daymond walks me through the aisles of trees, pausing to cut off a wrinkly, yellow pod. He slices it open to reveal a white, slimy pulp with fat, brown >
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a specialist in cocoa diseases and head of the breeding programme at the Tropical Agricultural and Higher Education Center (CATIE) in Costa Rica. For decades, he has been painstakingly mixing promising strains to create hybrids that are screened for disease resistance. “We are refreshing the blood of cocoa,” says Phillips-Mora. One new variety he has developed, CATIE R6, not only shows remarkable resistance to frosty pod, but also delivers a huge boost in productivity. The chocolate icing on the cake was when it was commended in the International Cocoa Awards in 2009 for its taste and aroma.
seeds nestled inside. The seeds are bitter, with only a hint of a chocolately taste. It is only when they and the pulp are fermented, and the seeds dried and roasted, that the characteristic toothsome flavour begins to emerge. “Why Reading?” I ask. It is a world away from the tropical forests of South America where cocoa naturally grows. That’s exactly the point, says Daymond. If a pathogen should escape, it wouldn’t survive long in the temperate UK climate and there are no crops from its native land for it to infect. In quarantine, Daymond and his team are on the look out for podrotting fungal diseases such as witches’ broom and the festive-sounding frosty pod, both of which spread easily. In the 1990s, witches’ broom devastated cocoa production in the state of Bahia in Brazil, after spores were brought in from the Amazon region, perhaps deliberately. The output from the Bahia region plummeted by 75 per cent. So far, neither disease has reached West Africa, where most of the world’s cocoa is now grown. There, they have different problems: the bug-borne disease swollen shoot virus, which kills cocoa trees within a few years, and mirid bugs, which feed on the pods, slashing yields by up to 40 per cent. Cocoa samples arrive in Reading as budwood: a short stick with a number of active buds sprouting on it. Around 30 new varieties turn up each year, some of them wild plants from rainforest expeditions. On arrival, the samples are inspected for obvious signs of insect stowaways. Buds are then 66 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017
grafted on to seedlings to establish a mother plant. To check for less conspicuous problems, buds from the mother plant are also grafted on to seedlings of an “indicator” plant, a variety of cocoa that shows disease symptoms more clearly than most. If viruses or other diseases are present in a sample that comes in, the symptoms will eventually develop. After two years, the team can be confident that any dormant viruses will have shown up, and the plant is deemed safe. Genetic tests under development at the University of Reading could offer a way to speed up the quarantine process, but Daymond says he is not yet certain these tests can pick up all of the viruses. When the cocoa plants are certified disease-free, cuttings are sent to researchers around the world. One of these is Wilbert Phillips-Mora,
The world’s secret cocoa garden
Sweet teeth The world’s top 10 chocolate-consuming peoples are overwhelmingly in Europe Switzerland Germany Ireland UK Norway Sweden Australia Netherlands US France
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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Annual chocolate consumption per person (kilograms)
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Quite a hill of beans New varieties such as CATIE R6 are sent to researchers in other nations to be hybridised with the native crop and rolled out to farmers. In West Africa in particular, where many plantations are reaching the end of their productive life, this new blood is sorely needed. The quarantine greenhouse is large enough to cover four tennis courts, and much of it is filled with plants that have already received the all-clear – 400 different varieties. Plants still under quarantine are housed separately. Has anyone made chocolate from the Reading crop, I ask Daymond, hopefully. “It’s not something we’ve tried,” he says. “You need a large heap of beans to do a proper fermentation of cocoa beans, and we don’t get huge numbers of pods here.” Undeterred, when I get home, I decide to give it a go. I put the contents of the single cocoa pod that Daymond gave me into the most tropical conditions I can find, next to the hot water tank. First I need to let the pulp ferment into an alcoholic liquid to break down the astringent compounds in the seeds. Then I can dry and roast the seeds in the oven. Easy. Or not, as it turned out. After a few days, I found myself with a handful of black, mouldy beans and an aroma that was anything but delicious. Perhaps leave the chocolate-making to the experts, and savour the flavour – with the exotic taste of Reading in every bite. Q Alison George is organic and fair trade
Ear witness The wax in your lugholes hides your filthy secrets, finds Christie Wilcox
OU can tell yourself you haven’t been too naughty over the festive season. You may even be able to convince others. But whether it’s an extra portion of Christmas pudding, too many glasses of wine or even the odd cigarette, the proof of your indulgences may be lurking somewhere altogether more surprising – inside your ears. Earwax can easily be dismissed as a little gross and something to get rid of, but we are fast discovering that it is more than just another bodily secretion. All sorts of secrets about you are collected in it. With enough detailed probing of the stuff, says Katherine Prigge of fragrance company Symrise, based in Marlow, UK, it is possible that earwax could be used to reveal not only someone’s identity, “but information about where they’ve been, what they’ve eaten and what they were exposed to”. From drug tests to disease diagnosis, the potential of its unique chemical signature is starting to be put to good use. It may even give us answers about the lives of other animals who can’t tell us for themselves. More formally, the glop in your ears is called cerumen, and it is made up of the secretions of the ceruminous glands – specialised sweat glands – and sebaceous glands in the outer ear canal. Most of these are waxy compounds, which clean the ear canal and protect it from drying out, as well as killing bacteria and trapping foreign bodies like dust and fungal spores. Mixed into that wax are bodily cast-offs like shed skin cells and hair, alongside
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potent antimicrobials and other chemicals. It is these other chemicals – the leftovers of cellular processes and traces of substances you have been exposed to – that, we are now starting to realise, contain a surprising amount of intel about you. For the past few years, Engy Shokry at the Federal University of Goiás in Goiânia, Brazil, and her colleagues have been doing some pioneering experiments to test whether earwax can be used as a forensic or diagnostic tool. As well as being able to extract plain old DNA from it, they have used earwax to detect drug and tobacco use
and diagnose both types of diabetes. One advantage of earwax over other samples like blood or urine is that collection is more straightforward and less invasive. “Just asking a patient for a cotton swab in their ear is much easier than asking to draw blood,” says Shokry. To ensure they get enough, they ask that volunteers don’t clean inside their ears (a practice discouraged by doctors anyway – earwax should just fall out naturally) for a week beforehand. “We can get 20 milligrams, which is more than enough for our tests,” she says. And earwax needs little, if any, processing to be analysed. “It takes around a tenth of the preparation time of other kinds of samples.”
Earwax factor It has other advantages, too. “Because earwax builds up over time, you can look back and get more information,” says Prigge; blood and urine only give a “snapshot of what’s going on in your body at this moment.” In the lab, Shokry has shown that tests on earwax can detect drugs up to three months after they were taken, provided the patient hasn’t been meticulously Q-tipping. This means we can use it for both short and long-term monitoring of some substances, she says. You don’t even need to extract >
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DIVIDED BY EARWAX Next time a lump of earwax falls out of your ear, what do you see: flaky, whitish-yellow stuff or sticky, orange-brown goop? The difference is down to a single gene: ABCC11. Dry, flaky earwax is most common in people of East Asian descent. A change in just a single DNA base pair in the ABCC11 gene encodes for the “wet” kind, most often found in people of African or European descent. The difference isn’t just cosmetic. The same gene is also responsible for variation in underarm odour: people with dry earwax stink less. And we are just beginning to understand what the ABCC11 protein does in the body. Some forms of it are associated with more aggressive tumours, whereas the dry earwax variant could make some tumours more sensitive to chemotherapy. So eventually, earwax could help determine a person’s prognosis if they are diagnosed with cancer.
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“One earplug was 50 centimetres long – and you can imagine the smell” compounds from the wax directly: valuable information can be gathered by smell alone. “It’s definitely not the most pleasant smell,” says Prigge, who spent years getting acquainted with it. “It’s kind of acidic and pungent. There are also some faecal notes to it… and a goat-like odour.” We already knew that there are two types of earwax – and that which kind you have is linked to ethnicity (see “Divided by earwax”, left). But Prigge has also identified about a dozen different volatile compounds present in earwax at levels that vary with ethnicity – and since these substances make up smells, a person’s ancestry could be partly deciphered using the scent of their earwax.
These findings are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what information the stuff may hold. Some of the most incredible discoveries have come not from humans, but from the giant plugs removed from whales. These help to transmit acoustic vibrations underwater, and are another ball of wax altogether. “We had one particular earplug that was 50 centimetres long and weighed about 2 pounds,” says Stephen Trumble, a marine mammal physiologist at Baylor University in Texas. “And you can imagine the smell.” The wax plugs are often collected and kept in museums alongside bones and such because they are used to determine age. With whale ears largely sealed off from the outside, the earwax compacts over time into layers. “You can cut it in half and count the rings, like a tree,” Trumble says. The other details Trumble and his colleagues can glean by carefully sampling and analysing the layers is astounding, ranging from DNA to hormones. In their most recent, as yet unpublished, work they looked at 20 earplugs with about 1100 layers between them and were able to connect high levels of stress hormones such as cortisol with historical whaling activity. “The data are kind of unprecedented,” he says. “To be able to show a tight correlation between 20th-century
Nest in show
whaling and stress in whales – you could never ever in a million years do that without earplugs.” Whales aren’t the only mammals whose ears offer clues to their past. In one experiment on cattle earwax, Shokry detected fluoroacetate, a poison US farmers use against coyotes, and one that is hard to identify in other biological fluids, meaning diagnoses of accidental cattle poisoning are currently only made using symptoms and the animal’s history. She hopes this will improve diagnoses.
We aren’t the only ones with an eye for tacky plastic decorations, says Claire Ainsworth
Shokry has shown that changes in ewe earwax relate to pregnancy and lactation too. Since earwax requires no veterinary experience to collect, this could offer a simple, cheap way to check up on farm animals, and one that would be less stressful for them. Shokry is also soon to publish a study on spotting cancer using dog earwax. But for all the promise earwax shows as a diagnostic tool, it could be some time before it reaches the clinic. We have centuries of data about what blood and urine samples should look like, but little on earwax, says Craig Wheelock at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, who looks at molecular signatures of disease. “Earwax is an open book, so to speak – for good and bad.” And although careful analysis can tell us a lot about what someone has been up to, the sheer diversity in earwax makes it hard to know what anomalies look like. “Normalising it so that earwax is earwax is earwax will be a challenge,” Wheelock says. That said, we have overcome similar challenges before. “We’ve been working this field for 15 years and we’ve done over 300 different types of sample,” says Mike Milburn at Metabolon, a firm based in North Carolina that profiles biological markers. In principle, there is no reason why you wouldn’t get a good representation of important biomarkers in earwax, he says. But for now, any confidential information will stay archived in your ear where nobody can get at it. The perfect excuse for another brandy. Q Christie Wilcox waxes lyrical
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We hear ewe
LYING a state-of-the-art drone over a home to spy on its owners’ taste in decor is usually frowned on. Fabrizio Sergio and his team, however, had a good excuse. The homes in question were nests belonging to birds of prey called black kites. Their decoration style? Tatty white plastic bags. In some cases, lots of them, making the nests as conspicuous as a reindeer on your front lawn or a plastic Santa climbing onto the roof. Sergio, at the Doñana Biological Station in Seville, Spain, wanted to answer a question that had puzzled him and other biologists for decades – why would a bird decorate its nest with conspicuous tat? This kind of flamboyant adornment would be likely to attract predators to vulnerable eggs and chicks, harming a bird’s chances of passing on its genes – hardly a trait that would be favoured by natural selection. It might seem odd to talk about nests in terms of natural selection: after all, they aren’t part of a bird’s body, which
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is the obvious product of its genes. But 35 years ago, biologist Richard Dawkins suggested that a gene’s influence could reach beyond the body that houses it and manipulate its environment – a phenomenon he called the extended phenotype. Structures built by animals, such as beaver dams and birds’ nests, are a good example. Extended phenotypes should help, not hinder, reproduction. Take the eye-catching work of the male bowerbird, which builds grass tunnels and litters them with stones, glass and plastic to court mates. Males with the most pleasing bowers mate with more females. But bowers never contain eggs and can be abandoned if their gaudiness catches the attention of predatory eyes. More discreet nest adornments are also known to have reproductive benefits. Some bird species incorporate aromatic plants and even cigarette butts to repel parasites, while others tuck feathers or fresh greenery inside to attract mates. > 23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 69
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What stops birds cheating the system? To find out, the team added extra white plastic to the nests of low-status birds to see how the others would react. These nests experienced an upsurge in intrusions from other kites that the residents found hard to repel, revealing a social control to enforce honesty. “There are individuals that are constantly checking a subset of nests,” says Sergio. “And when they see a change in the decoration, they come to check that you are not lying.” Intriguingly, the birds had strong decor taste preferences, opting for white plastic over the green or transparent stuff the team left out for them. What’s more, weaker, low-status birds quickly removed any extra white plastic the team placed in their nests. “They had very clear ideas of what they wanted in the nest in terms of plastic,” says Sergio. “I wouldn’t say ‘conscious’, but surely it’s a decision that they take.”
Cool decorations Why the preference for white? Sergio wondered whether it helped the kites resolve a trade-off between keeping the nest sufficiently shaded from the sun to keep it cool, and making it visible to flying birds. White would certainly stand out against green canopy. “It was very compatible with a message towards the sky,” says Sergio. Last summer, he and his team published the results of the study in which they flew a camera drone over experimental nests in Doñana, to see how the plastic affected visibility. Human volunteers shown the images were quicker to spot decorated nests, even from great heights. So the plastic clearly made the nests conspicuous – probably more so to the razor-sharp eyes of a roaming kite. Biologists had previously seen a handful of examples of species’ extended phenotypes being used as a signal to other individuals, but these were almost always related to getting a mate. The kind of status-signalling nest decorations displayed by the kites was new and suggested that nests were more complex than generally believed. “Up until about 10 years ago, people thought nests were boring, and not worthy of much attention,” says Mark
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But what about the kites? These birds have a long history of adding humanmade objects to their nests, including smalls pilfered from washing lines, a habit noted by Shakespeare in The Winter’s Tale. “Everywhere you study them, it catches your attention that in those nests you find all this rubbish and strange materials,” Sergio says. The showy displays favoured by black kites are hard to explain, particularly because both sexes are involved in nest building. To find out more, Sergio and his team turned to a dense population containing 500 breeding pairs in the Doñana National Park. This group is exceptionally wellstudied: the team knew the age, body size, condition and migratory history of many individuals. This meant they could link the birds’ decorating behaviour to aspects of their biology such as their survival and reproduction, and their place in the social hierarchy, which reflects a bird’s ability to defend its territory from competitors. These hierarchies establish which are the strongest birds, to prevent them wasting energy engaging in conflicts they are unlikely to win. Doñana’s breeding pairs each have a nest in a tree that they will fiercely defend, along with a small surrounding territory. Territories closest to the communal hunting ground are highly coveted and occupied by the strongest, most dominant birds. Weaker, lowerstatus kites occupy poorer territories, and some find themselves nestless. “Their only chance to get a territory is to usurp it,” says Sergio. Curiously, the team found that the most decorated nests suffered the fewest attacks from nestless birds. These belonged to individuals in their physical prime, ones that had the best territories and were the most dominant. This suggested that the decorations were a signal of the physical strength and social status of the resident, and an “honest” one at that – it wasn’t that weaker birds were gaming the system by adding plastic too. And these signals were heeded by other kites. Those with highly decorated nests also raised more young, possibly because their homes deterred attacks and food theft – a clear reproductive benefit of decoration.
Burrowing owls adorn their nests with manure and other decorations to deter intruders
Mainwaring, who studies nests at Lancaster University, UK. Sergio’s kite study in particular has sparked renewed interest in the field, and ecologists now think nests have a number of functions beyond safely cradling a brood, says Mainwaring. And it seems these birds aren’t alone. In a slightly revolting twist on the technique, burrowing owls decorate their nests with clods of cow or horse dung that are neither too fresh nor too old. Finding out why makes for icky research. “It’s not a popular task for students when you tell them they’ve got to go out and collect garbage cans full of manure and then go and scatter it around nests,” says behavioural ecologist Courtney Conway at the University of Arizona. But it is not just the choice of decorations that is odd. If ever a bird ought to keep its home under wraps,
it’s this one. Burrowing owls nest underground, some in holes they dig for themselves, others in abandoned animal burrows. These usually have only one entrance and no emergency exit to flee hungry coyotes and badgers, looking for tasty eggs or nestlings. Instead of being discreet, the owls decorate their nests with abandon – strewing the entrance with manure and other items such as moss, grass, plastic, paper and aluminium foil. Males stand guard, motionless, puffing themselves up to full height if they spot a potential threat. “They appear to be trying to stand out,” says Conway. For many years, ecologists assumed “The owls replaced the manure masked the scent of the the manure as fast as burrow and so made it harder for predators to find. But in 2004, a team the researchers could led by Douglas Levey at the University take it away” of Florida showed that the manure offered little camouflage. Instead, it
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acted as bait for the owls’ main prey: dung beetles. This made it one of the few examples of wild birds using tools. Yet it may not be the whole story. Conway and his team had also shown that the owls’ manure decorating behaviour trapped insects. But this didn’t explain why some individuals were garlanding their burrows with other materials. Burrows can be in short supply and attract the attention of single males looking for somewhere to nest. Resident males attack and usually see off any intruders. Could the owls, like black kites, be using a signal to avoid conflict? To find out, Conway’s team scattered manure around unoccupied test burrows at the start of the breeding season, and discovered that owls visited these less often than test burrows without manure. They then placed a stuffed owl near real occupied nests to see how their owners would react. Not only did the males vigorously attack the stuffed intruder, they immediately fortified their burrows with more manure, as if they felt the need to boost their signals. Seeing how owls behaved when manure was removed proved difficult: the owls replaced it as fast as the researchers could take it away. “They work overtime to thwart our experiments,” says Conway. “That told us there was a function to having that manure around the entrance to the burrow – it wasn’t just that they were poor housekeepers.” Intriguingly, about half the burrows the team studied were also decorated with other materials, which the owls were just as quick to replace if removed. And given a choice, owls didn’t specifically seek out manure, instead favouring materials that were closest to hand. Conway can’t rule out the possibility that other materials somehow attract insects, although he thinks the signalling hypothesis is the most plausible one.
Not all black kites have such dour decoration
Another bird, the diminutive rock sparrow, seems to have a similar signalling motivation behind its decorating behaviour. Many birds line their nests with feathers, possibly to keep eggs at the right temperature. But Matteo Griggio at the University of Padova in Italy and his team noticed that rock sparrows stacked feathers on the rim of their nest like hunting trophies. When the team added extra feathers, these altered nests experienced fewer intrusions, and were defended more vigorously by their occupants. This suggests that the decorations, like those of the black kites, are a signal to deter competitors. What’s more, resident females laid more eggs than those in unaltered nests, and their male partners defended the nest more, and were less likely to abandon it. Female rock sparrows are the nest decorators, so Griggio’s team speculates that it is a way for a female to signal her quality to a male, persuading him to stick around after mating and invest more effort in raising their brood. This would make it a rare example of sexual selection favouring an ornament on females – the ornament being outsourced to the nest. The closer ecologists look, the more they are realising that nests aren’t just a safe home for offspring, but can also work as an extension of the body – like a puffed-up chest to see off rivals, or a head crest that attracts a mate. If only they could be aware of it, birds might preen themselves to know that science proves their taste in decor to be a sign of great sophistication. Q Claire Ainsworth decorates with abandon 23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 71
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Accept snow substitutes Can fake flakes ever cut it on the piste, asks Catherine Brahic
ORGET Christmas; I’m dreaming of a white February. Seven days of natural snowfall, that’s all I’m asking for while I’m on holiday. Call me a snob if you like, but artificial snow just doesn’t cut it on the slopes. It feels like tiny glass beads under my skis, it’s heavy, and it doesn’t move or pack or stick like the real stuff does. But we have to be realistic. Reliably snowy Alpine winters are a thing of the past. Our greenhouse gas emissions, including those piling up from flights to Geneva or Boulder, have made sure of that. With global temperatures 1.1°C
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above where they were on average at the end of the 19th century and still on the rise, the smart money is on learning to love fake snow or else trading in those ski boots for a pair of walking shoes. Unless, of course, we can engineer our way out of the problem. A new generation of snow-making machines is promising to create artificial stuff that is as good as the real thing, and uses less energy and water to boot. Goodbye grainy fake snow, hello year-round fluffy powder. Could this be the answer to all our
middle-class winter woes? As anyone who has ever had their skiing holiday ruined by a dry spell will know, real snow can be capricious. The temperature and humidity have to be just right for any droplets of mist that bump up against airborne dust particles to crystallise upon contact. And the two must meet high in the sky to give the budding crystals time – as they fall – to form the delicate, interconnected branches we associate with snowflakes. It is the air trapped in this branched structure that gives powder snow its signature fluffy finish. When natural conditions aren’t quite right, ski resorts have a few tricks to spur things along. The most effective is using snow machines that pump water and air out of a nozzle at high pressure. As the air expands, it loses energy, causing a localised drop in temperature. That freezes the pumped water droplets to create tiny airborne ice particles. These frozen snow seeds are blown high, giving them a little more air time to knock up against a mist of larger droplets also pumped out by the snow guns. When the two meet, the outside of the larger droplets freezes into a hard
Rising temperatures are forcing resorts to up their use of fake snow
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shell, and an artificial snow “flake” is born. Rather than forming delicate branches, however, these are more like tiny grains of sand, often with a liquid centre as the inside generally doesn’t have enough time to freeze. While this ersatz snow may sound unappealing, engineer Fabian Wolfsperger at TechnoAlpin, one of Europe’s large snow-making companies, believes there are some upsides. For one thing, it is harder and denser than the real stuff. It is also more homogeneous and packs well into a smooth, even piste. “Those kinds of conditions are what professional skiers are after: they need snow that will resist their hard turns, not just fluff away,” he says. This fake snow is also good for very steep slopes, where powder is more likely to lead to avalanches, and for giving resorts a solid snow base at the beginning of the season. This is becoming more and more important as temperatures rise. The last few years have seen very dry weather in November and December in Europe, and climate models tell us to expect increasingly erratic conditions. Most resorts make their money between Christmas and New Year, so being able to make a lot of snow on cold days early in the winter is key. Perhaps it is because I am not a professional skier, but I find Wolfsperger’s argument tough to swallow. An alternative, so-called nature-identical snow, sounds far more appealing. The idea is to produce snowflakes with a classic branched structure and powdery feel. One method involves running a flow of cold air over a basin of hot water inside a closed chamber. The cold air becomes supersaturated with water vapour, and is blown into a second, cold chamber that is criss-crossed with nylon threads. Ice crystals form on the threads and grow in a typical branching fashion until they are shaken off into a drawer below. The snowflakes are lovely, but the technique can’t replace traditional snow-making, says Martin Schneebeli of WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research SLF in Switzerland. Schneebeli uses the snow to learn about the physics of avalanches in the
lab, but the quantities produced in this way are too small to coat a piste. Michael Bacher of Neuschnee, a company based in Austria, thinks he has found a happy medium. Bacher’s idea combines parts of traditional artificial snow-making with the closed chamber approach. “We are producing high-quality snow, targeting a niche market in the winter tourism industry,” he says.
Slippery slope Instead of spraying ice nuclei into the open air, he puts them into a tent-like space with air tuned to hold more water than would be possible under normal conditions, with over 100 per cent humidity. This triggers crystallisation on the free-floating ice nuclei. Flakes grow bigger and bigger in this engineered environment, just as in the sky, until they are either blown out the top of the chamber or pulled out through a pipe at the bottom to be distributed on the mountain. Neuschnee’s method can’t yet handle large resorts. But if it can make the upgrade, it promises to have one further advantage over traditional snow-making: it uses less water per
“Unfortunately resorts are expanding snow-making, which is like throwing gasoline on a fire”
cubic metre of snow formed. With traditional fake snow, some of the water droplets that are sprayed into the air evaporate. Two recent studies – one French and one Austrian – have found that between 15 and 40 per cent of pumped water is lost to evaporation during snow-making, reducing the efficiency of the technique. That can be a problem in high mountain regions where water is already at a premium, particularly with the seasonal pressures of the tourism industry. Large resorts address this by building water storage, says Auden Schendler, vice president of sustainability at Aspen mountain resort in Colorado. “This has several benefits,” he says. “It allows you to fill reservoirs during peak flow, which is least damaging to ecosystems. And it means you’ve decoupled from streams or rivers at low periods, so you are not stressing them.” By switching to more efficient snowmaking methods, resorts could see their water and energy bills melt away, shrinking their environmental footprint in the process. But fake snow is unlikely ever to be without impact. “Unfortunately, in response to climate change, resorts are expanding snowmaking, which is like throwing gasoline on a fire,” says Schendler. The more artificial snow we use, the more we heat the planet, and the more of the stuff we wind up needing. It’s all downhill from here. Q Catherine Brahic is a precious snowflake 23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 73
Clocking time
OR Emma, this time of the year has special significance, and not just because of all the gifts and food. It’s also the only time of year when the date in her mental calendar lines up perfectly with her body. Emma is a calendar synaesthete, one of a handful of people who see time: not as a vague conceptual timeline, but as a vivid calendar that feels so real they could almost touch it. This is a little-known variation of synaesthesia, in which the brain links one kind of sensation to another. Some people associate shapes with certain sounds, or colours with numbers (see “Crossed wires”, opposite). Emma sees time as a hula hoop, which anchors 31 December to her chest and projects the rest of the year in a circle that extends about a metre in front of her. Heidi, another calendar synaesthete, sees the year as a backwards C hovering before her, with January at one end of the horseshoe and December at the other. When she thinks of a date she feels herself travel along the calendar to the right spot. She has a separate, hoopshaped calendar for days of the week. Both have been part of her life for as long as she can remember. The fact that certain people can vividly conjure number lines and calendars was first noted by Victorian polymath Francis Galton in 1880, but we have only recently begun to figure out how – and why. It’s not just a matter of idle curiosity. Understanding how calendar synaesthesia works may help unravel the way we all keep track of our memories as we move through space and time.
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That’s because calendar synaesthetes experience a supercharged version of the way everyone else experiences time. Studies of different cultures around the world have shown that our perceptions vary slightly – most people in the West perceive time as a straight line running through their bodies, with the future ahead of them, while in parts of Papua New Guinea time flows uphill and for some Chinese people it flows downwards. But we all compute the abstract concept of time in the same way: in our brains, “time is always mapped onto space,” says V. S. Ramachandran, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego. The mapping job falls largely to the hippocampus, a pair of curved structures towards the centre of the brain that contain specialised neurons. Some, called grid cells, plot locations, while others, known as place cells, become active when we arrive on the scene. The basic circuitry seems to have evolved about 300 million years ago in a fish-like common ancestor, and similar systems are found in most other animals, from lizards to birds. At some point in human evolution, though, the hippocampus gained a second role: storing autobiographical memories, each with a time stamp recorded by specialised time cells.
“Heidi’s year is a backwards C hovering in front of her, with the days of the week shaped like a hoop”
BRETT RYDER
People who see vivid mental calendars could help us understand memory, says Caroline Williams
“As you live your life, place cells keep track of your location in the world, and time cells keep track of stimuli receding into the past,” says neuroscientist Marc Howard at Boston University. “When you vividly remember a specific event from your life – say lunch last Tuesday – the hippocampus recovers the activity of time cells and place cells that were active during that event.” Whether any other animals have this kind of autobiographical memory is hotly debated, but we know for sure that no other species makes calendars. Around 10,000 years ago, we began to notice the natural cycles of the sun and moon and record them for future reference, first in stone circles, and today on paper and computer screens. But calendar synaesthetes don’t need to. They can call up their mental
versions at will, something most are surprised to learn is unusual. Heidi first realised in a psychology class in high school. “My teacher was talking about synaesthesia and how some people see calendars. I said, ‘doesn’t everybody see a calendar? How can you not?’ ”. Ramachandran wanted to know how they do it, and if they were really seeing calendars or summoning something from memory. So he asked a 20-yearold synaesthete called ML to recite alternate months between January and December, first forwards and then backwards. For most people, it takes three times as long to go backwards, because we have to construct the calendar from memory as we go. But ML was equally fast in both directions. She also unconsciously moved her eyes and finger as she went, suggesting her
calendar was always in front of her. To find out more, Ramachandran also used visual illusions, including the “motion after-effect”. If you stare for 30 seconds at a contracting spiral and then look at another picture, it will appear to expand, because the brain’s prediction outpaces our perception. But the illusion doesn’t happen if you
CROSSED WIRES Around 1 in every 40 people has some form of synaesthesia, in which sensations of one kind evoke another – so they might taste colours or hear flavours, for instance. Up to 15 per cent of synaesthetes experience vivid perceptions that seem to be “out there” in the world, rather
than in their mind’s eye. Synaesthesia runs in families and is thought to be caused by extra wiring between adjacent sensory areas of the brain. People with one type are likely to have another unrelated kind as well. It is still unknown which gene or genes are involved.
look at a blank wall or just imagine a scene. “The brain needs something to attribute it to,” says Ramachandran. When ML looked at her calendar after the spiral, it expanded in the same way as a real image. When asked to imagine an object in her mind’s eye, it stayed still. That means that, as far as her brain is concerned, the calendar isn’t a figment of her imagination, it is actually there. What is going on? Ramachandran points to an area of the brain that we rely on to make sense of symbols and numbers and order events into sequences. The angular gyrus is found above and behind the ears on each side of the brain at the junction of several sensory areas, including the visual cortex. It also connects directly to the hippocampus. We all probably use this bit of circuitry to imagine the layout of time, but Ramachandran believes this is where calendar synaesthetes have the extra connections that make their visions so very real. There are many open questions, not least whether this vivid calendar helps memory. There’s reason to think so. “If you ask them about a specific memory, then they’ll conjure up the calendar and put the memory in the appropriate slot,” says Ramachandran. That might be a trick worth learning. Daniel Bor at the University of Sussex, UK, has found that people can teach themselves to experience synaesthesia by repeatedly associating colours with certain letters. It might be possible to do something similar with calendars. But they may not be a universal boon. One synaesthete Ramachandran met finds her calendar confusing, and another says hers is missing August, which can be frustrating – not least for making plans for a summer break. For Heidi, it’s a mixed bag. “It helps me sometimes because I can picture things better, but I do get mixed up.” Her horseshoe-shaped calendar has a big gap after December, which means January always comes sooner than she expects it to. “It feels really abrupt, like a whole month was in between them and it just went all of a sudden,” she says. With the return to the office after Christmas looming, that’s probably something we can all relate to. ■ Caroline Williams has time on her hands 23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 75
Missives impossible Fake news is nothing new – even Isaac Newton was a victim, says Stephen Ornes
ONDAY morning seemed a but also Galileo Galilei and René good time to upend the history Descartes, Caligula, Judas Iscariot, Joan of science. And Michel Chasles of Arc and even Jesus Christ himself. was poised to do it, armed with just two Chasles’s supporters, typically lesser letters and four notes. It was July 1867, members of the academy, praised the and Chasles, a mathematician at the sheer detail in the letters. Historians Sorbonne, stood before the French noted that the paper was aged and the Academy of Sciences in Paris. The ink chemistry consistent with the documents threatened to dethrone epoch. The academy published the text Isaac Newton as the originator of the of the letters in its weekly proceedings. law of universal gravitation and install Most established scientists were French mathematician Blaise Pascal sceptical. Objections poured in. Pascal’s in his stead. estimates of planet masses were too Chasles was a pre-eminent scholar. precise; the handwriting wasn’t a close He had hammered out new geometry, match to other existing documents won international awards and was a penned by him; there were logical beloved “geometer of genius”. inconsistencies. But Chasles not only His reputation stretched far beyond held firm, he doubled down. When a France. When he talked, people listened. critic pointed out that Pascal couldn’t But that morning, he stood on the have worked without calculus, which edge of a maelstrom. The letters, one of Newton had developed, Chasles them dated 1652 and apparently sent by presented a new newly found letter in Pascal to Anglo-Irish chemistry pioneer which Pascal reported receiving a Robert Boyle, included an early manuscript from Newton describing description of the law of gravitation. the “calculus of the infinite”. That was The notes also contained calculations problematic: judging by the date of of the masses of the major planets, that letter, Newton would have been based on gravity and relative to the sun. just 11 years old. The controversial part? The date on the By October, Chasles had obtained letters was decades before Newton first and presented many letters between described the same law in his Principia. Newton and Pascal that hinted at a It seemed Pascal deserved credit for one darker story: that a young Newton had of the biggest advances in the history appropriated the work of Pascal and of physics. Newton was derivative. “Newton dépossédé!” (Newton “The affair united dispossessed!) read the headline of a Belgian newspaper soon after. scholars of diverse The affair agitated Europe’s scientific countries in one spirit community and beyond. Over the next two years, it would swell to of indignation” envelop not only Newton and Pascal,
M
76 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017
other scientists to claim undue credit – a claim that riled British historians. An article in The Times said the charge against Newton “touches our national pride” and that the allegations should be “repelled by his countrymen”. The scandal grew. Chasles refused to reveal his source, but produced letters from other scientists “proving” that Pascal, inspired by the work of Galileo and Johannes Kepler, devised the law of gravitation. Some letters came from Galileo himself, who apparently had a robust – and previously unknown – correspondence with the young Pascal.
Get Galileo! Italian historians jumped into the fray, noting a complete lack of other evidence that Galileo even knew French. In fact, all the letters Chasles presented were in French – a fact that didn’t dissuade him or his supporters. “One of the remarkable points of this affair is the unanimous sentiment that united the scholars of all these diverse countries in one spirit of indignation,” reported attorney Henri Bordier and librarian Emile Mabille, who investigated the affair in 1869. The cycle continued for two years, with Chasles answering questions by presenting more letters, which raised more questions. Many prominent historians believed the letters to be authentic, or at least that they were copies of authentic documents. It was in 1869, under pressure from his critics, that Chasles revealed to the academy that he had obtained the manuscripts
SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTE LIBRARY/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
from a mysterious archivist called Denis Vrain-Lucas, and enlisted the police to visit the man’s home. Inside, they found Vrain-Lucas, but no manuscripts. Instead, there was an array of ink bottles and blank pages ripped from old books. It was clear that Vrain-Lucas was writing the documents himself. He was duly arrested. Vrain-Lucas, an insatiable reader from Châteaudun, started out as a law clerk in nearby Chartres and moved to Paris in 1852. At first, he pursued work in bookstores and libraries, but was stymied by his lack of formal education. Finally, he was hired by a firm that forged family pedigrees for people who
wanted to “uncover” their genealogical links to famous French people. It was perfect training: by 1854, he was working on forgeries of his own. He “drew boldness from his very ignorance”, wrote Bordier and Mabille, and he “hoped, against all expectations, that a catastrophe did not necessarily lie at the end of his undertaking”. For the better part of two decades, with the industry of a monk, the counterfeiter reportedly created and sold more than 27,000 forgeries, including letters and autographs. He would pilfer blank pages from old books in Parisian libraries, sometimes wetting them to age them.
Did patriotism blind Michel Chasles to the true origin of some astonishing letters?
It was in 1861 that Vrain-Lucas first visited the home of Chasles and sold him three letters: one each from the playwrights Molière and Jean Racine, and one from the scholar François Rabelais. Vrain-Lucas said he had been entrusted to sell documents belonging to a collector who had died in a shipwreck, but whose collection had survived. Chasles bought every manuscript Vrain-Lucas brought him. Chasles’s collection stretched far beyond science, and Vrain-Lucas’s fabrications grew increasingly reckless. He rewrote history through a huge cast of characters. Judas Iscariot wrote to Mary Magdalene, who wrote to Lazarus – risen from the dead – about her hopes of seeing Jesus, and how she enjoyed her travels in France. In another note, she mentions a letter from Jesus. “Lucas’ fecundity shames other forgers,” notes historian Joseph Rosenblum in Prince of Forgers. But this fecundity caught up with him, with his arrest. Chasles testified that over the course of eight years, he had spent more than 140,000 francs – a fortune – on Vrain-Lucas’s products. No one knows why Chasles was so well deceived, but the judge was clear where the blame lay: “You have abused in the most brazen manner the passion of an old man, of a scholar, his passion as a collector and his love for his country, in order to deceive him shamefully.” Vrain-Lucas was fined 500 francs and sentenced to two years in jail. While inside, he wrote to Chasles, who visited him regularly and prayed for him. It seems Chasles had fallen under Vrain-Lucas’s spell. Perhaps that’s why the controversy left his reputation only bruised and his character untarnished. When Chasles died in 1880, an obituary in Nature affirmed his integrity and noted “how honourably he extricated himself from the matter, and did all in his power to repair the mischief done”. The shock waves that Vrain-Lucas sent through science subsided, but his con-artistry did not. He would bounce back into jail twice more, before being banished to his home town, where he ended his days as a second-hand book seller. Quite a comedown for the man who hijacked history. Q Stephen Ornes is a man of letters 23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 77
CULTURE
Elf Lands: The new fantasy When producers come calling in search of a rival to Game of Thrones, who better to call than M. John Harrison? He’s famous for this sort of thing. What could possibly go wrong?
Volume 1:
Volume 2:
Volume 3:
The Elf Queen, who’s eaten nothing for a week but the wadding from benzedrine inhalers, has sex with her dwarf, Cootchie Cootie, in the back seat of his bombed-up 1951 Fleetline Cadillac, while Tolkien and C. S. Lewis look on in passiveaggressive disavowal. It’s a favour for a friend. After that, for the founding volume anyway, we envisage Zap Comic dynamics on a lean-burn version of The Revenger’s Tragedy – the usual tale of poor choices, low ground clearance and self-medication. Emotional palette from A Glastonbury Romance, prose from Destination: Moon and worldbuilding from one of those ads where if you buy the right mobile phone it causes inconvenient buildings to fold themselves away in front of the user so she can get to some other stuff she wants to consume without ever walking round a corner or even, apparently, consulting the phone itself. The world – or perhaps the King – will be called Eldrano, and not as we first proposed Eldranol, which turns out to be already trademarked for a bovine mastitis application.
Eldrano the Elf Lord is wheeled to bed every night on a reinforced composite and titanium gurney. Two or three attendants lift the thick laps of flesh and lovingly clean out the sores down in the creamy, lardy folds where his genitals still nestle. He has lost some of his right foot to diabetes. The Queen left him a hundred years ago, with her dwarf, for the North. But none of this will ever spoil his dream of finishing an ultra-marathon. At night in a secondary world of his secondary world the Elf Lord runs, barefoot and effortless, across the Great Erg Desert (see map), wearing only the traditional leather kirtle, while his favourite daughter keeps watch over his sleeping body with its faint, calming smells of ketones and antifungal cream. She’s a feisty urban vampire princess but her heart is so in the right place! She can’t help but wonder how things will go with them when the Horde arrives at the Gate next Wednesday. Tomorrow, in a final attempt to reach out to his people, the Elf Lord will feature kingdomwide in the Don’t Do This To Yourself segment of Supersize vs Superskinny; while for the Princess it’s a Kickass Battle Looks Last Chance on QVC.
Over time the Elf Queen’s underjaw has thickened, while her chin has remained small and pointed, her nose turned up, so that you can see, embedded in fat, the adolescent she was fifteen hundred years ago. In her garden she keeps papery silver poppies and an iris which smells of chocolate; but since the Fall of Llyngitgothgethreal, the rest of her life has been half-warm meals in cold rooms. Though he still carries the single strand of her hair she gave him in the grim days before the battle of Clotsore Moor, the dwarf knows that their relationship is over. So when she says, in a final rather desperate move to regain the initiative, that she has decided to go away for a week, he only shrugs. “I need to get some space,” she tells him. “Great,” he says vaguely. “Get right away,” she insists. “Everyone needs space,” he says. She leaves the room but calls back, “I can’t think what’s wrong with you.” The dwarf can’t bring himself to say. As they fail to get older, elves cling on to peak moments and try to repeat them, squeezing a little less out each time until they are only going through the motions. To an outsider this makes their whole society seem grotesque, caricatured, desperate. He doesn’t want to be a party to it any more. He wants to be back underground, where the real things are happening.
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The Lost Palaces
Out of Elf Land
DAVE MCKEAN
Before the Battle
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Volume 4:
Volume 5:
... saying, once those outsiders get in your tortured halls... I’m saying we didn’t have command of the vast fictions of the day... The city wasn’t, in the end, where those of us who lived there thought it was. We had already lost it in all senses of that word... All we knew of this place was the news... the halls are aware that – in the end – they can never know what, exactly, the plot was. It’s only silence after that. Back at the beginning there’s the tapping sound, like metal on stone... then the call signs, several of them, very amplified and confused... cries in the halls... a cruel few words and then, “We no longer know which way to face.” The halls are still aware... What if the city didn’t “fall”? What if nothing “fell”? Nothing was lost but existed just alongside everything else, fifty years later in the rubble by a farm at the flat end of nowhere... who could write this... everyone has a different story to sell... call signatures in rooks, fresh plough, old silence: “We don’t know what to do. Everything is the alongside of something else...” Minor players gesture helplessly... signals hard to make out in the chaos as the big institutions go down... everyone desperate now.
The palace turned out to be a stuffy, disappointing warren that just reeked of dogs. The Queen showed us around lots of small low-ceilinged rooms with fitted carpets, not what we were looking for at all. No real Elf Land values or internal architecture left, except for that rather gorgeous river frontage. She kept saying that she and her husband had been going to make this or that improvement, but everything was interrupted when “They came back”. At one point she said, “we were going to sell up, go to the Deep West, but they came back. They came back, you see, and what can you do?” She never said who or what they were. There was an old labrador sleeping outside the back door. They also had a really quite smelly chihuahua, always gazing up at you, and when you petted it, “Oh she’ll go to anyone, that one. When you’re shopping she’ll go straight in your bag.” Meanwhile, honestly, Eldrano just vegetated there in the front room, watching cable TV on satellite and in the end we decided no matter how close it was to the Evening Harbours it just wasn’t for us. ■
Last Transmission from the Deep Halls
The Royal Estate
M. John Harrison’s new collection of stories, You Should Come With Me Now, is published by Comma Press
23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 79
INTERFOTO/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
CULTURE
Triumph and tragedy Peter the Great planned a fabulously extravagant expedition to Russia’s far east and Alaska. Stephanie Pain finds out what really happened Island of the Blue Foxes: Disaster and triumph on the world’s greatest scientific expedition by Stephen R. Bown, Da Capo Press
a terrible journey through the roadless and lawless wilds of Siberia. Those who then went on to sail in search of the Great Land (Alaska), endured scurvy and shipwreck. Only the overly optimistic could have believed it anything but madness. In Island of the Blue Foxes, Stephen Bown has drawn on
SOME might call it ambitious, others madness. The Great Northern Expedition, dreamed up by “The foxes bit the sick and Peter the Great dying and ate the hands in 1724 and and feet of corpses before completed five Russian rulers they could be buried” later in 1743, was the biggest, longest scientific expedition in history – undeniably ambitious, journals, logs, letters and official then. Thousands of people reports to piece together a story trekked 8000 kilometres from never fully told before. And what St Petersburg on Russia’s western a story: adventure and discovery, coast to Okhotsk on the Pacific, misery and death, and a cast of 80 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017
characters by turns admirable and appalling, brilliant and hopeless, annoying and plain nasty. Two of them – Vitus Bering, the Danish leader of the expedition, and German naturalist Georg Steller – have long been heroes of mine. Thanks to Bown’s revelations and brilliant storytelling, I now know just how astonishing their exploits were. In 1725, Bering led a preliminary expedition to Russia’s far east, then built a ship and sailed north along the coast of Kamchatka in search of a passage to the Arctic Ocean. He found what is now the Bering Strait, but thanks to thick fog failed to spot Alaska. In 1733, he set out again, charged with stamping Russia’s authority on
Okhotsk in Russia’s far east: the jumping-off point for Alaska
Siberia, laying claim to Alaska and opening up new trade routes, as well as exploration and discovery. Bering retraced his route, this time with an army of scientists, soldiers, servants, wives, children and labourers – and everything they needed, from tools, ropes and sails to candelabra, silk gowns, powdered wigs and his wife Anna’s clavichord. After four years of hard travel, they reached Okhotsk. There, they built a dockyard and two ships, the St Peter and St Paul, to explore the far north Pacific. What happened next is the stuff of nightmares. The two ships lost contact. Fog, storms and blizzards meant they were sailing almost blind in uncharted waters dotted with islands and reefs. In July 1741, both ships reached Alaska but neither stayed long, fearful of being trapped over the winter. By October, the St Paul was back in Siberia, with 21 men lost or dead from scurvy.
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The St Peter was even less fortunate. In November, with the crew sick, dying or dead from scurvy, the ship was wrecked on a desolate island. The survivors lived in holes dug in the beach, with little protection from the weather and hardly any food. They were attacked by packs of a dark-furred subspecies of Arctic fox. The foxes “crowded into our dwellings and stole everything they could carry”, Steller reported. They bit the sick and dying and
“Stuck on the island, Steller was also able to do what he came to do: observe and describe nature” “ate the hands and feet of the corpses before we had time to bury them”, wrote Lieutenant Sven Waxell. Then Bering died. The survivors’ fate now lay in the hands of Waxell, the new leader, and Steller, who became revered for his botanical knowledge and skill in treating scurvy. Stuck on the island, he was also able to do what he came to do: observe and describe nature. In the event, Steller was the only naturalist to see some of the species he described. His sea cow was a gigantic, 4-tonne manatee with blubber “as agreeably yellow as the best Holland butter” and beef-like meat that stayed good for weeks. The goose-sized spectacled cormorant was easy to catch, and one bird was “sufficient for three starving men”. The island’s birds and marine mammals were a vital source of food for shipwrecked men, but Steller worried the expedition would open up new routes for hunters who would destroy what he had discovered. He was right. Ten months after the wreck, Bering’s men sailed back to Kamchatka in a small ship built from the remains of the St Peter. Ambitious or mad? You decide. ■ Stephanie Pain is a consultant for New Scientist
Thinking inside the box How much brain power have you got left after floating on a sea of indulgence this holiday? Find out with puzzles from Alex Bellos ALL the most entertaining penciland-paper puzzles come from Japan. Sudoku is the best known, but there are hundreds more. I’ve selected two types of puzzle from my recent book that I think New Scientist readers will particularly enjoy. In each, the grids can be filled in through logical deduction alone.
KenKen In 2004, maths teacher Tetsuya Miyamoto wanted to create a puzzle for his classes of 8-yearolds using the basic arithmetical operations: addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. So he devised KenKen, which became a hit in Japan and now features in some UK newspapers. However, in the newspaper version, the mathematical symbols for the arithmetical operations required are always written in the grid. Too easy! In the two examples here (top left and right), which Miyamoto designed by hand, the symbols are omitted, making for a much more interesting challenge. The number of ninja heads indicates the level of difficulty. The rules: fill the grid with the numbers between 1 and the total number of rows (1, 2, 3, 4 in a 4×4 grid, for example), so each number appears only once in every row or column. The grid is divided into “cages”, each containing a target number in its top left corner. Using only one arithmetical operation in each cage, either +, –, ×, or ÷, you must produce the target number using all the numbers in that cage. So, if there are two cells in a cage,
the numbers in those cells must either add, subtract, multiply or divide to make the target number.
Straight Cross What would you get if you combined a crossword with a sudoku? Puzzle creator Naoki Inaba set himself this challenge and came up with Straight Cross. I find it more rewarding than sudoku, since you must take into account the numerical value of the number, which adds an unusual twist. Try these two examples (bottom left and right). The rules: fill the cells with numbers from 1 to 9 (but not
1/
(1-4,+, ‒,×, ÷)
2
necessarily all of them) so each horizontal and vertical strip contains consecutive numbers. A strip is made up of adjacent white cells between the edges of the grid and/or black squares. Although the numbers must be consecutive, the sequence needn’t start with 1 and the numbers can be in any order. So, if the digits are 2, 3 and 4, for example, they could be in the order 2-3-4, 2-4-3, 3-2-4, 3-4-2, 4-2-3 or 4-3-2. ■ The puzzles are from Puzzle Ninja: Pit your wits against the Japanese puzzle masters by Alex Bellos (Guardian Faber). For solutions, see page 83
(1-6,+, —,×, ÷)
2/ 108
36
30
11
6
50
7
2
5 11
9
72
7
6
1
12
5
7 30
3/
4/
3
7 3
3 2
4
7
5 2
5 4
6 7
4 1
2
7
8
7 3
5
5
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CULTURE
Peering into the Whirlpool Enjoy a spectacular tour of the cosmos, says Jonathon Keats
LATE one summer night in 1845, the 3rd Earl of Rosse climbed up to an 18-metre-high platform to focus a telescope on a nebula known as M51. At the time, the telescope was the world’s biggest, and operating it took considerable stamina. But what Rosse saw was worth his effort. The light resolved into a whirlpool – the first spiral galaxy ever observed. Rosse’s resulting drawing is humble and astonishing. The ink smudges lack the grandeur of the Hubble Space Telescope’s images of M51 (the Whirlpool galaxy), But these pairings are mere but they were stunningly accurate. enticements to find other It exemplifies astronomy’s connections: it’s choose your own close link to technology: more adventure, with the whole cosmos powerful instruments allow to explore. One such tour offers more penetrating insights. myriad views of how we make The opportunity for such sidesense of the universe, revealing by-side comparison is just one the brilliance and the blind spots of the pleasures of Universe, of conjecture. The brilliance is a spectacular book with 300 strikingly illustrated in a 1659 images relating to astronomy. diagram by the Dutch polymath These range from a Lascaux cave Christiaan Huygens, drawn for a painting made in 15,000 BC, where book deducing that Saturn must dots may depict the Pleiades, to a photo of Jupiter’s south pole “The most powerful way of released by NASA this year. Visual becoming Copernican has been to discover ever more art is also included, from Vincent stars and planets like ours” van Gogh’s Starry Night to Sarah Sze’s 21st-century Planetarium. These deliberately disparate be encircled with rings. At the images are paired to provoke the time, Galileo contended that the viewer. While some pairings are rings were attached to the planet. fairly straightforward, others are Conjectural blind spots, more playful. For example, the however, show up in a drawing Horsehead nebula is juxtaposed illustrating scholar Martianus with the Egyptian Temple of Capella’s geo-heliocentric model Hathor, where animal-headed of the universe. In the 5th century, deities are portrayed against a Capella cleverly marshalled background of stars. contemporary observations in 82 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017
LEBRECHT MUSIC AND ARTS PHOTO LIBRARY/ALAMY STOCK
Universe: Exploring the astronomical world, Intro by Paul Murdin, Phaidon
support of the prevailing world view. His drawing is a powerful evocation of confirmation bias. Both graphics hold more than historical interest. Together they provide important context for understanding another remarkable image in Universe: a still from the Millennium Simulation of 2005, in which the Virgo Consortium extrapolated the distribution of dark matter across the cosmos. It’s cuttingedge science, deserving both admiration and scepticism. Another thematic course begins with a simple, yet iconic diagram of the heliocentric universe from Nicolaus Copernicus’s 1543 book, De Revolutionibus, and reveals our ongoing struggle to absorb the implications of the Copernican revolution. One big hurdle has been to grasp our unexceptional place in the vastness of space. Science and art have provided an impressive range of visual aids. For instance, Universe includes an 1851 educational chart in which
In 1845, this vast telescope observed the first spiral galaxy
the relative distance of the planets from the sun was shown in terms of the time a cannonball would take to hit them. And in 2011, artist Mishka Henner brilliantly presented the solar system in a 6000-page book, where each leaf represents a million kilometres. Most pages are blank. And yet the most powerful way to become Copernican has been to look ever further into the cosmos and discover ever more stars and planets like ours. Images of spiral galaxies hold a special place in this gaze, because they have the same structure as the Milky Way. From Rosse’s sketch to the Hubble images, peering at the Whirlpool we see ourselves from afar – and recognise that beings from M51 may be taking the same picture. Q Jonathon Keats wrote You Belong to the Universe: Buckminster Fuller and the future, Oxford University Press
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AND MORE…
Just experience it
Thinking inside the box: the solutions
Curators can get in the way of a good show, finds Simon Ings Natural Histories: Traces of the Political, Mumok, Vienna, Austria, until 14 January 2018
Doru Tulcan’s abstract sculpture Structuring the Cube makes something surprisingly organic, suggestive of the workings of a crayfish’s eye, from a tiny vocabulary of rods and triangles. Meanwhile, Stefan Bertalan’s Structure of the Elderflower earns its place by virtue of its exquisite draughtsmanship. This being the 1970s, the Sigma group also enjoyed a lot of more-or-less undressed mucking about, and
KLAUS PICHLER
VISITORS to Vienna’s spectacular Natural History Museum may discover some taxidermied exhibits smothered in black gloop. This is artist Mark Dion’s The Tar Museum, and it is part of Natural Histories: Traces of the Political, an art exhibition about nature and politics, most of which is in the nearby museum “Nature’s eradication of contemporary art, Mumok. of human traces can’t Those venturing across the come quickly enough Maria-Theresien-Platz will not in some cases” be sorry. Or not at first. Early on, there is charming, sometimes beautiful documentation of work became a focus of dissent against in the 1970s by the Romanian Nicolae Ceausescu’s dictatorship. Sigma group. Inspired by research The other artists, groups and in bionics and cybernetics, movements in this show rarely mathematician Lucian Codreanu achieved as direct an engagement and his fellows applied scientific with the natural world. method to their observations of Many pieces here index human the rivers and woods of the activity through changes in the Timisoara hunting forest. environment. The models and photographs of Anca Benera and The Tar Museum: damaged nature Arnold Estefan’s Debrisphere is transformed into art spectacle record how landscapes have been
altered for military purposes. More often, though, the art focuses on how nature encroaches on human settlement. In Arena, Anri Sala records the decayed state of Tirana zoo, with feral dogs occupying a space meant for people, while the zoo’s “wild” animals languish in cages. Nature’s eradication of human traces can’t come quickly enough in some cases. In 2003, Polish sculptor Miroslaw Balka visited Auschwitz and filmed deer grazing by the barbed wire fence of the concentration camp. A wall board observes that, in 1942 (when Bambi was released), “while cinemagoers were shedding tears about the emotional story of a little deer, the ‘final solution’ and the murder of millions of people was already being planned”. This is silly: would the world be any better if Bambi’s bereavement left us unmoved? It gets worse. Exquisite allegorical frescoes by 18thcentury artist Johann Wenzel Bergl are “recognizable as strategies of absolutist picture propaganda”. And back with Dion: one installation capturing “the lifestyle and self-image of the prototypical ethnographer of colonial times”, isn’t even that, according to the curators, but alludes “to our own imagination of that ethnographer”. I left feeling rather as Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have felt if, instead of freely stepping through the mirror, she had been shoved through it from behind by a gang of goonish anthropologists. Natural Histories is a portal into a world where history, politics, horror, guilt and the natural world are sewn together. It is well worth seeing, but I wish the curators had shut up. ■
Well done – I hope you didn’t find the puzzles too hard! The key to solving the KenKen is to start by looking at cages with the biggest numbers, since the operation required must be multiplication. And remember, a number can be repeated in a cage if it appears in different rows and columns. 1.
2 4 3 1 1 3 2 4 4 2 1 3 3 1 4 2 2.
3.
4.
3 6 5 4 1 2
6 3 2 1 4 5
1 4 3 2 5 6
4 5 4 3 2 3 3 2 1 4 1 2 3 4 5 4 3 6 5 4 6 5 7 4 4 3 7 7 5 4 6 6 5
4 1 6 5 2 3
5 2 1 6 3 4
2 5 4 3 6 1
7 6 4 2 5 3 4 5 5 6
3 4 5 6
7 6 6 4 5 7 6 6 5 5 3 4 8 5 7 3 4 2 5
2 3 3 2 5 5 4 2 6 7 4 5 3 6
23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 83
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EDITOR’S PICK
Love is the key ingredient for happy families
From David Byrne, Swinton, Dunstable, UK
You assert that more than half the children in the UK and the US are being brought up outside a nuclear family (2 December, p 5). This is wrong, at least for the UK. The latest figures from the Office for National Statistics show that of the nearly 8 million
households containing dependent children, 78 per cent contain two parents of opposite genders, either married or cohabiting. So the traditional nuclear family is still the dominant one. However, many children experience more than one kind of family during their childhood. Even I, now 70 years old, lived in an extended family with my single mother, and then in a traditional household when she remarried. Cross-sectional studies are valueless in exploring the effect of family type on children’s happiness. Longitudinal studies would allow us to explore the trajectories of children through multiple household types. My experience is that what matters is that parents, alone or together, gay or straight, love their children and let their children know it.
100 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017
Animal rights need not be subject to caveat From Rod Munday, Llanishen, Cardiff, UK The reason MPs voted not to enshrine the Lisbon treaty into UK law was that the treaty is flawed and ineffective in preventing cruelty to animals (2 December, p 25). After the fine words about animals being sentient beings, the treaty promises to respect “the legislative or administrative provisions of the member states, relating in particular to religious rites, cultural traditions and regional heritage”. This caveat means that if member states have a traditional activity involving cruelty to animals they can continue doing it. This includes torturing bulls to death in the bullring for public entertainment, confining veal
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calves in narrow crates so that they can hardly move, forcefeeding geese through metal tubes pushed down their throats to produce foie gras, treating donkeys as if they were unfeeling machines, negligent cruelty to live animals being shipped for slaughter and so forth. These activities would already be illegal in this country under current UK law.
An unusual benefit of immunosuppressants From Valerie Argent, Stocksfield, Northumberland, UK The possible use of stem cell therapy for treatment of Parkinson’s disease is long awaited and much needed (2 December, p 8). However, I note that in the clinical trials, an immunosuppressing drug is to be used as well, as the cells
“We do just fine with monogamy. It’s so successful we repeat it 3 to 5 times per lifetime” kay646464 delivers her verdict on our feature exploring modern families (2 December, p 30)
are not matched to the recipient. Previously, New Scientist reported evidence that Parkinson’s progression is driven by an autoimmune response attacking dopamine-producing cells (24 June, p 11). In my experience, immunosuppression therapy has been of great benefit in reducing symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, though I take this medication for sarcoidosis.
A chiller for wine keeps fruit just fine From Gwydion Williams, Coventry, West Midlands, UK Sam Wong raises the problem of a fridge being too cold for storing tomatoes, yet the kitchen being too warm (9 December, p 25). I solved this by buying a wine cooler. I seldom drink wine, but it stores my tomatoes and bananas
very nicely. They used to rot or get overripe, and at 12°C they seem fine. Is there a market for a fruit and vegetable cool box?
When Earth sneezes, the cosmos catches a cold From Richard Swifte, Darmstadt, Germany I am alarmed by Claudius Gros’s suggestion that we should deliberately seed life throughout the cosmos (18 November, p 10). Space agencies quite rightly try to sterilise spacecraft sent to planets or moons that might harbour life, however remote the possibility, in order to avoid contamination. Gros’s plan is in direct contradiction to this. We still need much more investigation to verify whether any of the bodies in our solar system contain life or not, so it is unrealistic for us to think we can
show that any planet in another star system is truly sterile. Without such proof, it should be considered unethical to risk wiping out alien life forms with Earth-despatched panspermia. I hope this idea will fail to become reality.
Bitcoin is too valuable to spend on stuff From Trevor Campbell, Berrima, NSW, Australia Bitcoin may be a success at many things, but surely it must be a failure as a currency (2 December, p 36). If there can only ever be 21 million bitcoins, then the supply is obviously highly restricted, and the currency will be in a permanent state of deflation. Your bitcoins will almost certainly have more buying power tomorrow than they do today. If that is so they are a great
investment, but why would you ever use them to buy stuff? Today, the economy relies on more currency continuously entering the system to support an increasing amount of trade and wealth and relies on inflation, hopefully at a controllable low level, to discourage hoarding and promote investment and spending.
Don’t paint a smiley face on the grim reaper From Jessica Roberts, Brighouse, West Yorkshire, UK Your interview with mortician Caitlin Doughty was unnerving, but also gave much food for thought (11 November, p 40). If we Westerners were to change our attitudes towards death and become a lot more positive in dealing with it, I feel it would take away our healthy discomfort. >
Medals and awards 20 Nominations now open Royal Society medals and awards recognise excellence in science and technology and celebrate outstanding scientific achievement. royalsociety.org/awards/nominations
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LETTERS We need to fear death, and more so in this century where there is a very big movement in science towards a future that is free of disease and the effects of old age, and therefore of most death. What does Doughty think of cryonics, which promises to preserve your dead body until you can be revived by future technology? She may well prefer having her dead body consumed by ravenous vultures, but to me nothing deserves more celebration than the prolonging of life and teaching our children that one day everyone may live a very long, very happy life. Because isn’t that what matters in the end?
Finding the universe’s missing matter From Chris Wilkins, Tewin, Hertfordshire, UK Gilead Amit writes that if dark matter is continuously decaying into dark energy, it would explain the otherwise unexplained rate of the universe’s expansion (9 December, p 28). We now know that gravity and light travel at the same speed. Also TOM GAULD
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that at a critical mass, light is unable to escape and a black hole is formed. Could there be another, greater critical mass where gravity also could not escape? If so, the effective mass of the universe would reduce over time, presumably giving a similar effect. This would also account for the structure of halo galaxies.
square centimetres of this room will claim about 0.0001 watts. Even if the solar panel is 100 per cent efficient, it seems to me that “can’t quite extract enough energy from indoor light to charge a phone in a reasonable time frame” must qualify as the understatement of the year.
Perhaps indoor solar is not such a bright idea
With engine emissions, size doesn’t matter
From Ben Haller, Ithaca, New York, US You say a 5-centimetre-square solar panel being developed “ can’t quite extract enough energy from indoor light to charge a phone in a reasonable time frame” (18 November, p 16). Let’s suppose the room in question is lit by a 100 watt incandescent bulb with an efficiency of about 2.2 per cent, generating about 2.2 watts in the form of light. That bulb illuminates every surface of a small room 3 metres cubed, for a surface area of 54 square metres or 540,000 square centimetres. A solar panel occupying 25
From Ernest Ager, Exmouth, Devon, UK Governments of all persuasions have always taxed road vehicles unfairly, with varying amounts of tax on both fuel and the annual vehicle tax (2 December, p 24). In more recent years, concern about climate change has led to still more muddled thinking. For example, larger engine vehicles naturally pay more in fuel tax as they use more fuel. However, if you run a vehicle with a larger engine, but with a low mileage per year, the car tax remains the same. Clearly, if you burn the same amount of fuel in a year as a car with a smaller engine,
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then the total emissions are the same. So why is the vehicle tax double or more?
The government should practise what it preaches From Chas Bazeley, Colchester, Essex, UK You write about the steep price we face for failing to tackle climate change (4 November, p 24). One reason for our apathy is that, in the UK at least, the government uses climate change as an excuse to tax the public and restrict their freedoms while using “carbon neutral” wood-burning at Drax power station to fudge its own figures on renewables. People are unlikely to become enthusiastic about climate-change mitigation unless those in power are seen to be taking it seriously.
Flat-Earthers driven around the bend From Simon Pryce, Radlett, Hertfordshire, UK Elsa Beckett asks whether a group of flat-Earthers has ever mounted an expedition to find the edge of the planet (9 December, p 52). Perhaps they have sent one and are still looking for it.
For the record Q Our article on lizard reproduction left egg on our faces: Kathryn Elmer is at the University of Glasgow (9 December, p 11). Q We meant to say it was the European Economic Community that gave Botswana privileged access to beef markets in 1966 (9 December, p 32).
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Let it glow, let it glow, let it snow… Christmas comes but once a year – and for some of us, so does a good snowfall. Here’s how to make sure you don’t miss it “I love building snowmen, but the neighbourhood kids snatch up every flake for their snowball arsenal,” writes Jack F. “My wife gives me an icy stare if I keep flicking to the weather channel, and I can’t stay glued to the window when we’re entertaining relatives. How can I make sure I don’t miss out?”
I may be dreaming of a white Christmas, but I’m not changing out of my PJs unless the odds of a snowman are favourable. But what if I could deck my hall with a personalised snow predictor? It’s time to hack the Christmas tree… I grabbed a pack of clear baubles and sprinkled in some glitter and polystyrene beads. This does a good impression of snow, and I slapped on some adhesive snowflakes for good measure. LEDs slipped into the top of each bring real sparkle, and trailing wires can be cunningly disguised with tinsel. Now for the clever part – connecting the baubles to my Adafruit Feather, a circuit board that can talk to my home Wi-Fi. I programmed it to contact the Dark Sky weather service, which collates data from different
sources to give a forecast for your GPS location – or the local tobogganing hill’s. To build excitement, the lights function like a progress bar – each extra tier illuminates as the chance of snow increases. When the snow starts falling, my baubles send flurries of light cascading down the tree, simulating a mini blizzard. The tree updates every minute, so you can tell whether it’s just a sprinkle or something more. In my flat, we’ve agreed we won’t brave the elements for anything less than 10 minutes of continuous snow. The snow tracker should be an easy project even after a couple of sherries, although my prototype had me dashing out in my snow boots to blue skies – it thought I was in Iceland. You can also connect the lights to Google’s open source Santa Tracker, which plots St Nick’s course on Christmas Eve. Get to sleep before the top bauble illuminates or he’ll skip your house. Now there’s no need to keep checking weather apps, Jack. But you might want a second set of lights for the tree – just in case it’s a mild year. Hannah Joshua ■
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PAUL MCDEVITT
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DO YOU hear the pitter-patter of tiny feet? Elf sightings are on the rise, and it’s a trend for life, not just for Christmas. A team of folklore researchers led by Simon Young at the University of Virginia has published a compendium of British encounters with fairy folk, charting a steady rise in sightings. An online survey of 1062 people found that 44 per cent reported seeing fairies, and the majority of these eagle-eyed respondents had seen them more than once. Sadly, not all of these pointy-eared folk appear to be the jovial stripysocked toy-makers you might find in Santa’s workshop. Some of these creatures were mischievous, even malevolent by turns. One Devon resident reports being threatened by “small men with lots of hair, in brown suits, almost dirty-looking”, while a respondent in Cornwall said they had an encounter with “a brown leathery-skinned, very angry looking old man”. Plus ça change!
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PURVEYOR of proprietary colour swatches Pantone has announced its choice for colour of the year. “We are living in a time that requires inventiveness and imagination,” the announcement intones. “It is this kind of creative inspiration that is indigenous to PANTONE 18-3838 Ultra Violet.” Yes, it’s a “dramatically provocative and thoughtful” purple, “complex and contemplative”. This colour “takes our awareness and potential to a higher level”, and is “associated with mindfulness practices, which offer a higher ground to those seeking refuge from today’s over-stimulated world”. It falls on Feedback to remark that purple is also the colour associated with turgid, flowery prose. AND now to Alabama, where last week the Republican Roy Moore narrowly lost out to Democrat Doug
“Bubbles are mathematically impossible in this new paradigm.” John McAfee, cybersecurity pioneer, rubbishes warnings that Bitcoin’s 1600% growth will falter 104 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017
Jones in a US Senate race. Voters in Alabama were treated to a “special” election, following the promotion of button-eyed senator Jeff Sessions to the role of US Attorney General. That move left one less climate change sceptic in the Senate. Who might then be a suitable replacement? Enter Roy Moore, the firebrand evangelical Christian who is sceptical about a lot more than just greenhouse gases: abortion, gay rights, Islamic worship, women’s suffrage, and the abolition of slavery, among others. He also seems to be nursing some wounds that have not healed since the Scopes trial of 1925. Addressing the National Clergy Council in 1997, Moore blamed the teaching of evolution in public schools for drive-by shootings. These young people, said Moore, were “acting like animals because we taught them they come from animals”. However, Moore has been accused of having an interest in children that is sometimes less than godly. He still faces a string of allegations of sexual misconduct, including claims he molested a 14-year-old girl. Which of these factors led voters to decide Moore wasn’t fit to represent Alabama we can’t say; but at least the result means some sense has prevailed – a special election indeed.
GIVEN the season, Feedback has taken a leaf out of Father Christmas’s book and drawn up our list of who has been nice enough to warrant a gift this year. For those of you who, like us, have left their present shopping to the last minute, Feedback offers its own unique gift guide, collected from issues past. At the budget end of the scale, why not procure that classic Christmas gift: a pair of socks. No ordinary socks though, but the silver-laced anti-static footwear from Sock’M, claimed to be designed for the “challenging conditions of space” (1 July). Just remember to complement them with a fully functional space suit. AND speaking of protective wear, why not consider gemstone-studded
wonderpants (9 August)? The ZK Magnetotherapy Breathable U-Shape Underwear Antibacterial Healthcare Modal Boxer For Men features no less than 500 tourmaline stones, which promise to increase your nerve conduction velocity, which we think is a way of saying you’ll blush even faster when you unwrap them in front of your mum.
FOR those with a keen interest in healing gems and even more money to spend, there’s the Healthy Urn, a product we find ineffable, if only because its full name is 25 words long (18 March). The giant vase/sauna/isolation chamber is the perfect place to hide from relatives during the holiday season, and thus well worth the £18,300 price tag. AND a final word on stocking stuffers: Bill Quinton suspects that not all Christmas presents are made by elves. The warning plastered to the
20-centimetre-diameter football he purchased for his grandson tells him: “Not suitable for children under three years. Choking hazard”. Bill notes that the warning label also recommends he “retain this information”, which might help emergency room doctors diagnose a case of football-stuck-in-throat. He muses that “somewhere in the football-manufacturing district of China there must be a race of giants.”
You can send stories to Feedback by email at [email protected]. Please include your home address. This week’s and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website.
QUIZ 10. b. Hawking’s 1966 thesis “Properties of expanding universes” was made openly accessible in October, with 60,000 people accessing it on the first day. PAUL NICKLEN/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CREATIVE/GETTY IMAGES
9. c. Neopalpa donaldtrumpi are found in southern California and Baja California, Mexico. The species was given its name by Canadian lepidopterist Vazrick Nazari. 8. b. The gravitational waves were from two neutron stars. Unlike black holes, neutron stars produce detectable electromagnetic radiation, so astronomers were able to observe the collision in the electromagnetic spectrum as well. 5. Tuatara, reptiles endemic to New Zealand, are known for which distinctive physical trait?
a. A double row of teeth b. A third eye c. Both of the above 6. Aa, pahoehoe and Pele’s hair are all types of what?
a. Butterfly b. Lava c. Mathematical theorem 7. This year, cameras revealed narwhals using their long tusks to:
a. Stun Arctic cod by hitting them b. Spray poison onto predators c. Clean algae from each other
9. Neopalpa donaldtrumpi has a yellow-white fringe on its head. What type of animal is it?
a. A pheasant b. A goby c. A moth 10. What event caused the University of Cambridge website to crash this year?
a. The epic Monkman vs Seagull University Challenge clash b. Demand to download Stephen Hawking’s PhD thesis c. The announcement of Richard Henderson’s Nobel prize in chemistry The Monkman and Seagull Quiz Book is published by Eyewear
ANSWERS
3. Larvae of the wax moth (Galleria mellonella) may be able to perform what useful activity?
a. China b. The US c. Japan
1. a. The fossils were found in Jebel Irhoud, Morocco.
a. To measure the population growth of rabbits b. To calculate interest rates c. To identify the angle of the leaning tower
a. A black hole and a neutron star b. Two neutron stars c. Two black holes
2. a. Leonardo was better known as Fibonacci, which is likely to have been a contraction of Filius Bonacci, or “son of a Bonaccio”.
2. The Fibonacci sequence, which runs 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, was devised by the Italian mathematician Leonardo of Pisa for which reason?
4. Which country has the highest percentage of the world’s 500 fastest supercomputers?
3. b. Scientist and amateur beekeeper Federica Bertocchini removed wax moth larvae from her honeycombs and stored them in a plastic bag. She found that this parasite could munch its way through polythene and polypropylene, two of the most commonly used plastics.
a. Morocco b. Kenya c. Ethiopia
8. What two objects collided to produce the gravitational waves whose detection was announced in October – the first time such a collision had been observed?
4. a. As of last month, China had 202 of the 500 fastest supercomputers on the planet, while the US had 143. The fastest supercomputer is currently China’s Sunway TaihuLight.
1. The oldest-known Homo sapiens fossils (estimated to be around 300,000 years old) were found in which country?
a. Produce a very strong silk b. Consume and break down plastics c. Serve as a good snack on space journeys
5. c. The tuatara’s “third eye”, located on the top of its head, is sensitive to light but unable to form images.
After their epic clash in the semi-finals of BBC quiz University Challenge back in March, Monkman and Seagull joined forces to host a Radio 4 programme and have just published a general knowledge quiz book. To round off the year, they teamed up with New Scientist to put your science knowledge through its paces.
6. b. Pele’s hair has nothing to do with the famous footballer, but rather takes its name from a Hawaiian goddess of fire and volcanoes.
Time to test your scientific knowledge with our annual Christmas quiz. Compiled by Eric Monkman and Bobby Seagull
7. a. Drone footage shot in north-east Canada showed, for the first time, narwhals using their tusks to hunt Arctic cod by striking and stunning them, making them easier to eat.
Fingers on buzzers