August 18 – 24, 2018 New Scientist 1401650756

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MEMORY GLUE

Reinforced brain cells boost recall

HAWKING POINTS

Black hole remnants from a former universe

FERTILITY APPS

Does next-gen contraception work? WEEKLY August 18 – 24, 2018

Forget the Higgs. This particle changes everything

THE PEOPLE V THE POLLUTERS

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Legal action over climate change gets serious Science and technology news www.newscientist.com US jobs in science

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Volume 239 No 3191

Insight Will fertility apps replace traditional contraception? 20

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Memory glue Reinforced brain cells boost recall

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Hawking points Black hole remnants from a former universe

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THIS WEEK Signs of a previous universe. AI detects eye problems. Solar probe launches. Security fears as Fortnite hits Android

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NEWS & TECHNOLOGY Gluing memories together. Solar cycle hidden in ancient rock layer. Urination neurons. Sterile farmed fish protect wild salmon. Climate forecasts. Oldest rocks forged by meteorite strikes. AI spots crimes on CCTV. Quantum computers harder to build. Bots pretend to be crowdworkers. Slime to stop getaway boats. Supervolcano’s hidden secrets. Online dating strategies

20 Fertility apps Does next-gen contraception work? 28 Five mysteries. One solution Forget the Higgs. This particle changes everything 38 The people v the polluters Legal action over climate change gets serious

Legal action may be the best way to fight climate change. Tech has a place in contraception

17 IN BRIEF Einstein right again. Alien grasses make wildfires worse. Tight underwear lowers sperm count. The speed of death

Analysis 20 INSIGHT What fertility apps tell us about contraception 22 COMMENT Video gamers ready for Asian Games debut. Pets don’t need diet fads and homeopathy 23 ANALYSIS We can survive a Hothouse Earth

Features 28 Five mysteries. One solution The particle that is key to it all 32 Our true best friend How we are teaching yeast some tasty new tricks 36 Mission to a metal world Lindy Elkins-Tanton is plotting a course for the asteroid Psyche 38 People vs polluters Climate lawsuits get serious

Culture 42 Saving the planet Women’s fightback over the environment 43 Meg lives! The real megalodon would eat Jason Statham alive. PLUS: This week’s cultural picks 44 Local hero How a tiny festival is transforming Scotland’s coastline

Regulars 26 APERTURE Fighting fire with a giant plane 52 LETTERS Focus on methane for climate 55 MAKE Do not disturb 56 FEEDBACK Telepathic mountain lion 57 THE LAST WORD Cubicle count

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THE coalition for climate action is nothing if not broad. Civil society pushes grass-roots action and civil rights groups make the humanitarian arguments. Economists, financial institutions and big companies increasingly press the economic case for action, rightly seeing in global warming a threat to the world’s prosperity. Even the Pope and the Pentagon have waded in. So far, however, the responses of governments to curb emissions have been half-hearted at best. Now that inaction faces its sternest test – in the courts. Legal action on climate change is not new. In 2007, in the case

Massachusetts vs EPA, the US Supreme Court ruled on behalf of 12 states and several cities that the Environmental Protection Agency was obliged by law to regulate emissions of CO2 from cars. For a long time, this was an isolated success. But recent years have seen a rise in strategic lawsuits – ones that could have wide-ranging impacts, by setting a precedent or triggering policy changes. The cases largely involve people taking on governments for their failure to legislate to protect them against climate change, or people directly targeting fossil fuel companies, demanding either compensation

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IT IS tempting to think that people who entrust their family planning to an app that uses body temperature to work out when they are fertile deserve all they have coming. Certainly the app Natural Cycles, recently approved as a form of contraception in the European Union and the US, has been controversial, especially after it was linked to several

abortions in Sweden last year (see page 20). Women may fail to heed the app’s warnings on fertile days, or the app itself may sometimes get it wrong. But all contraceptive methods fail: pills get forgotten, injections missed and condoms skipped. The average effectiveness of most contraceptive methods is usually considerably lower than

for harm done or money to shield them from future damage (see page 38). Most suits are in the US: more than a dozen directly challenge the Trump administration’s actions to deregulate emissions. Some people, including judges presiding over climate cases, have questioned whether the courts are the right place for climate policy to be determined. To be sure, no one wants government by judicial fiat. But in democratic societies the law exists because someone has made it, and it is the right of every citizen to seek its protection. When all else fails, send in the lawyers. ■

“perfect use” effectiveness. What’s clear is that Natural Cycles works pretty well for at least some women. Hormonal contraception is still likely to be the best option for many, but those who have had side effects or who baulk at chemically altering their bodies have a right to seek alternatives. Abortion is a separate issue – it should not be used to generate a moral panic over a genuine advance for free choice. ■ 18 August 2018 | NewScientist | 3

THIS WEEK

A glimpse of a previous universe Can we see black holes from before the big bang, asks Chelsea Whyte

STEFFEN RICHTER, HARVARD UNIVERSITY

SWIRLING patterns in the sky Hawking predicted that black may be signs of black holes that holes should emit small amounts survived the destruction of a of electromagnetic radiation. universe before the big bang. We have never seen this Hawking “What we claim we’re seeing is radiation, but it should shrink the final remnant after a black black holes until they evaporate. hole has evaporated away in Penrose is saying that we may the previous aeon,” says Roger Penrose, a mathematical physicist “We claim we’re seeing the final remnant after a black at the University of Oxford. hole has evaporated away He is co-creator of a theory called conformal cyclic cosmology in the previous aeon” (CCC). It states that, rather than having started in the big bang, the be able to see signs of Hawking universe infinitely cycles through radiation left over from a previous periods of ballooning up and universe. “I think he would have compressing back to a tiny point. been delighted to see the actual This could let electromagnetic effect he predicted in an radiation pass unscathed from observation,” says Penrose. one aeon to the next. And These Hawking points pop up Penrose and his colleagues see in a map created by BICEP2, a these remnants in the cosmic radio telescope at the South Pole, microwave background (CMB), say Penrose and his colleagues. the faint radiation that fills the In 2014, BICEP2 found distinctive universe. They have named these swirls of polarised light in the spots in the sky Hawking points, CMB. The BICEP2 team said these after the late Stephen Hawking. swirls, known as B-modes, were caused by gravitational waves BICEP2 at the South Pole measures from inflation – the universe’s radiation from the big bang growth spurt after the big bang.

4 | NewScientist | 18 August 2018

Data from the Planck spacecraft later showed that the B-modes were probably created by interstellar dust, but Penrose and his colleagues have another explanation. They noticed a point in the BICEP2 map surrounded by a ring of polarised light, indicating a vast temperature difference between the inner and outer part. They suggest these are magnetic fields from black holes in the previous aeon that have spewed Hawking radiation. According to CCC, all the energy of an evaporating black hole would be compressed into one tiny point as the universe shrank before expanding again in a new aeon. We don’t see the Hawking points themselves in the data, Penrose says, because the CMB measurements only go back to 380,000 years after the big bang, but we do see the rings. Penrose and his colleagues saw 20 of these areas of temperature increase in the BICEP2 maps. So far, they think one of those is from a Hawking point, but Penrose says

simulations show four or five more that warrant investigation (arxiv.org/abs/1808.01740). Other effects could mimic this signal, says Olivier Dore at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. “I love the fact that their cosmological model predicts specific signatures in the data,” he says. “But I would need to see more details to be convinced by their claim, as it would certainly be very interesting.”

Black hole down Brian Keating at the University of California, San Diego, a member of the BICEP2 team, says the B-mode spot in question is likely to be due to the bending of light by massive objects in space. “They’re not interpreting our results the way that we do,” he says. “But the photons don’t come with a sign that says, ‘I came from a black hole’ or ‘I came from a dust grain’.” A bigger problem is that the BICEP2 team hasn’t released its raw data, so Penrose’s team is working from images. Each pixel averages data over very wide swathes of the cosmos, so it is difficult to make claims about a single point, says Keating. Penrose and his team used maps of the CMB from the Planck space telescope to check that these points weren’t a fluke of the BICEP2 map. They also ran 4000 simulations of a developing universe and found that these anomalous points still arise. “That means they were probably caused not by chance, but by some physical phenomenon,” says Daniel An at SUNY Maritime College in New York, one of Penrose’s colleagues. As CCC predicts the signals they see, perhaps the theory is correct, he says. ■

For new stories every day, visit newscientist.com/news

Mission to the sun begins NASA’S Parker Solar Probe is on its way to meet the sun. The spacecraft, which is designed to enter and study the sun’s scorching atmosphere, launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida on Sunday at 3.31 am local time, after a failed attempt on the previous day. The probe is equipped with a carbon heat shield to protect it from the sun’s atmosphere, the corona, where temperatures can reach a few million degrees Celsius. The mission team is hoping that

NASA/BILL INGALLS

a close look at the corona will solve some ongoing mysteries, such as why it is 300 times hotter than the surface of our star. They also want to study coronal mass ejections, outbursts of solar particles that can disrupt Earth’s magnetic field and interfere with

VIDEO GAME mega-hit Fortnite is finally coming to Android – a move that has prompted warnings from security researchers. Almost all apps for Android phones

the game directly from its website. But to do this, users have to first disable a security setting that normally prevents installation of third-party apps, protecting them from malware. While it is possible to enable this setting again afterwards – some devices do this already – some users may forget.

and tablets are distributed via the Google Play store, giving Google a 30 per cent cut on any money made by an app. To get around this, Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, is not putting it on Google Play, instead it is asking Android players to download

And there’s a risk that keen gamers will be tricked into downloading something completely different. Before Fortnite for Android had even been officially launched, dozens of sites had begun offering bogus download links.

New Zealand latest Malware risk for to ban plastic bags Fortnite fans SINGLE-USE plastic shopping bags will be banned in New Zealand next year, the country’s government announced last week. Retailers will be given six months to phase out the bags or face fines of up to NZ$100,000 (£52,000). Prime minister Jacinda Ardern told a press conference that plastic pollution was the subject school children wrote to her about most. New Zealand currently uses more

Bangladesh was the first country to ban thin plastic bags, in 2002, with China, the Netherlands and some other countries implementing similar bans since then. The UK has a 5 pence charge for plastic bags to deter use and some Australian supermarkets have voluntarily stopped handing out free single-use plastic bags this month.

ANDREW HARRER/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES

than 750 million single-use bags per year, which is equivalent to about 150 per person. “A mountain of bags, many of which end up polluting our precious coastal and marine environments and cause serious harm to all kinds of marine life,” said Ardern.

satellites and power grids. Shooting the probe directly towards the sun would require tremendous energy, about 55 times more than it takes to get to Mars. Instead, the probe is taking a detour to Venus, where it will arrive on 2 October. The planet’s gravity will help whip the spacecraft into an orbit that gets it closer to the sun. The probe will dip into the corona for the first time in November. In total, it will make 24 loops around the sun during its seven-year mission, and it will come within 6.2 million kilometres of the star’s surface, the closest an artificial object has been. The Parker Solar Probe will also break the record for the fastest artificial object, reaching speeds as high as 700,000 kilometres per hour as it approaches the sun.

AI now as good as best eye doctors DEEPMIND’S artificial intelligence can spot key signs of eye disease as well as the world’s top consultants. Anonymous diagnostic data from almost 15,000 patients in the UK’s National Health Service was used to help an AI system learn how to spot 10 key features of eye disease. The AI analysed complex optical coherence tomography (OCT) retinal scans, which generate 3D images of the back of the eye, revealing abnormalities. The system was developed with scientists at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London and University College London. It assessed patients with more than 50 eye conditions correctly in more than 94 per cent of cases, matching the performance of leading doctors from around the world (Nature Medicine, doi.org/cszp). The AI doesn’t make a diagnosis, but recommends which patients should be seen urgently by a specialist or simply placed under observation. The team hopes it could be rolled out across many hospitals in the UK within three years. 18 August 2018 | NewScientist | 5

NEWS & TECHNOLOGY

Brain glue holds memories longer to compounds on the surface of brain cells on either side of a synapse, creating an artificial bridge between the two cells. In Alzheimer’s disease, people gradually lose synapses for decades before the damage is enough to start causing memory loss and confusion. “The idea is you don’t allow the synapses to go away,” says Kaushik. “We don’t let two neurons detach from each other completely.” When the team injected the

CAN we bolt brain cells together to protect our memories from ageing or Alzheimer’s? It’s an eccentric idea, but there are signs it could work. Rahul Kaushik of the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases in Magdeburg and his colleagues have created a molecule to reinforce the connections between brain cells called neurons, acting like the steel bars in reinforced concrete. Although the approach hasn’t yet been tested in people, injecting this molecule into the brains of mice seems to improve their memories. “It is very clever and has a natural logic to it,” says John Aggleton of Cardiff University, UK. The connections between brain cells, known as synapses, allow signals to jump from one cell to another. Our memories are made of networks of strengthened synapses between millions of brain cells distributed through our heads. To reinforce this, Kaushik’s team has designed a molecule called CPTX. This chemical binds

Rock layers reveal sun’s repeating cycle

hundreds of years of observations. Now evidence from the geological record suggests that this cycle has held fairly steady for several hundred million years. A team led by Dongjie Tang and

THE solar cycle during the dinosaur era was similar to that of today – and its 700-million-year-old history is hidden in layers of rocks. During a solar maximum, there are many dark sunspots seen on the star’s surface, and hardly any during a minimum. Maxima and minima alternate over an 11-year cycle, which has been consistent over

Xiaoying Shi at the China University of Geosciences in Beijing has now reconstructed solar cycles from between 810 and 715 million years ago. At this time, life on Earth was still relatively primitive and there probably weren’t any complex animals. The planet was about to almost entirely freeze over, for the second time in its history.

6 | NewScientist | 18 August 2018

Memories are made by bolstering connections between brain cells

THOMAS DEERINCK, NCMIR/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

Clare Wilson

molecule into mice genetically altered to have Alzheimer’s-like symptoms, they did better in memory tests than the same kind of mice that didn’t receive the chemical. These tests included having to recognise a new object, and learning that they would receive electric shocks in a certain location. When the animals’ brains were examined, those that had received the treatment had 30 per cent more synapses than those that hadn’t, Kaushik told the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies meeting in Berlin last month.

To find out what the solar cycle was like, the team studied sedimentary rocks called laminites from south China (Precambrian Research, doi.org/csw8). These formed on the bottom of a lake. In winter, a river carried silt into the lake and it was laid down in a thin layer. Then in summer, calcite precipitated, forming another layer on top, followed by a layer of algae in autumn. This pattern repeated

“When solar activity is low, more galactic cosmic rays enter Earth’s atmosphere and trigger extra clouds”

The effect tailed off after seven days. But the team is developing a gene therapy in the hope that it will make brain cells produce their own supply of the synapseboosting molecule. “You could have long-lasting effects up to years,” says Kaushik. Carol Routledge of charity Alzheimer’s Research UK says that if the technique works, we would also need better tests to detect the onset of dementia several years before symptoms begin. “Lots of people are focusing on early diagnosis. Everyone realises we need to treat earlier than we are doing.” Routledge says the approach might also help people who develop the memory problems common with ageing. “Whether we should be able to slow down cognitive ageing – that’s a whole other question,” she says. A big unknown, though, is whether an artificial synapse strengthener might make it harder to forget things that we normally want to lose, such as day-to-day trivia. Aggleton says people shouldn’t get too optimistic about the approach before it has been tested in people. “There have been a lot of studies that seem to show ways of ameliorating changes in Alzheimer’s mouse models,” he says, but the same positive effects are rarely seen when trials are done with humans. ■

annually, resulting in many thin layers, with each set of three representing a year. The thickness of the layers, and their chemical make-up, varied over a period of 11 years, just as the sun’s cycle does today. This probably occurs because the solar cycle can subtly influence the weather. When solar activity is low, more galactic cosmic rays enter Earth’s atmosphere and trigger extra cloud formation. This means more rainfall, and thus rivers carried more sediment into the lake at these times.

Michael Marshall ■

For daily news stories, visit newscientist.com/news

Salmon farms in Norway are monitored to prevent escapes–

The brain cells that let you pee when you want

when they urinate. To attract mates, males intentionally leave urine wherever they smell females. Lisa Stowers at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, and her colleagues have used this ability to identify the brain cells involved in urination. The team had previously identified neurons in the brainstem region – the part of the brain that extends downward into the spinal cord – that control bladder muscles. But these alone aren’t enough for a mouse to urinate. Muscles that constrict the urethra, the tube that empties the bladder, need to relax, too. Analysing the chemicals made by slices of cells from this region of the brain, the team identified around 200 neurons that didn’t behave the same way as the bladder-controlling cells. When the team stimulated these neurons in mice, they urinated on demand. Measurements made using implanted pressure recorders showed that activation of these neurons relaxes the muscles that normally hold the urethra closed. Chemically blocking these neurons stopped mice from urinating when they were exposed to female scents (Nature Neuroscience, doi.org/cszk). “Identifying these neurons now opens the door for new ways of understanding and treating incontinence,” says Stowers. She thinks these brain cells might have a role in other bodily functions, such as defecation, giving birth, orgasm and ejaculation. Like urination, these depend on the relaxation of muscles at the base of our pelvis. “These muscles stay contracted your whole life, and only relax briefly during a handful of behaviours: urination, defecation, sex and childbirth,” she says. Andy Coghlan ■

BLUEGREEN PICTURES / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

IF YOU have ever had to hold on for hours before being able to use a toilet, thank special brain cells for your ability to control when you urinate. Like humans, mice learn to control

Sterile farmed fish may help protect wild salmon FROM Norway to Canada, farmed pressurise fertilised eggs, which Atlantic salmon are escaping in makes them retain an extra set of such large numbers that they chromosomes. The resulting fish are a threat to the local salmon. are triploid: they have three sets This could be prevented by of chromosomes. making the farmed fish sterile. This method is already used But there is a catch: the sterile worldwide to sterilise trout for fish are less nutritious. release in rivers. Now David Salmon farming has satisfied Murray at the University of soaring demand without the need East Anglia, UK, has confirmed to catch ever more wild salmon. that triploid salmon are also But it has also created an entirely “A quarter of the wild new threat. salmon in Norway have Farmed salmon have been 10 per cent or more DNA transformed into a domesticated animal by selective breeding. They from farmed salmon” eat more, grow faster and have less fear of predators. This means effectively sterile. The females they are less likely to survive in the didn’t develop gonads and wild and so weaken wild salmon while the males did produce when they interbreed with them. sperm, less than 1 per cent of Norway is tackling the problem the eggs they fertilised survived in several ways, from trying to to the 5-week stage, when the reduce the number of escapees to experiment stopped (Royal having snorkellers spear farmed Society Open Science, DOI: salmon that turn up in rivers 10.1098/rsos.180493). before they can interbreed. But The method doesn’t need to some experimental farms there be 100 per cent reliable because are already testing the ultimate a little interbreeding doesn’t solution: making farmed matter: any disadvantageous salmon sterile. gene variants will soon be One way to do this is to briefly eliminated by evolution.

The problem comes when so many escapees interbreed that they introduce “bad” genes faster than they can be weeded out. “If this is happening year after year after year, and there are enough of them, you are swamping the local population,” says Kevin Glover at the University of Bergen in Norway. A quarter of the wild salmon in Norway have 10 per cent or more DNA from farmed salmon. The problem could be even worse in other countries such as Scotland, but no one is checking. Nor do we know just how much of a threat this “gene pollution” is, because wild salmon populations are declining for many other reasons, such as dams blocking their way to spawning grounds. “We don’t have evidence of wild populations collapsing because of [interbreeding],” says Glover. “That does not mean it has not occurred.” While triploid farmed salmon could eliminate this threat to wild salmon, Murray’s work reveals another problem. The triploid salmon have a lower fat content and thus less beneficial omega-3s. The omega-3 content of farmed salmon is already falling because of efforts to make it more sustainable by relying less on wild-caught fish as feed. And while triploid fish are doing fine on some experimental fish farms in Norway, says Glover, in others they are not. Unlike triploid trout, triploid salmon appear to be less resilient. It might be necessary to breed a strain of salmon that copes better with triploidy and has a higher fat content, says Murray. Others are working on ways of making salmon sterile by genetic modification but it won’t be easy to get regulatory approval. “Triploidy is the method that is ready right now, that can be implemented much more easily,” says Murray. Michael LePage ■ 18 August 2018 | NewScientist | 7

NEWS & TECHNOLOGY

Michael Le Page

EXPECT a lot more heat in coming years. The world will warm at an even faster rate from 2018 to 2022 than the underlying global warming trend, according to a forecasting method so simple it can run on a laptop. We are fairly good at predicting the weather for the next few days. Long-term forecasts of the climate are also already proving reliable. Yet what would be really useful would be detailed forecasts for the months and years ahead. The chaotic nature of weather means it will never be possible to predict events like heatwaves years in advance, but some aspects of the climate, such as average yearly temperatures, are predictable. There are now 10 groups worldwide, including the UK Met Office, collaborating on multi-year forecasts based on supercomputer models of the planet that incorporate the laws of physics. Their 2018 to 2022 forecast maps suggest that the northern hemisphere will keep warming especially fast, and that Australia and South Africa could

Origin of oldest rocks on Earth revealed THE oldest rocks ever found on our planet may have been born in an asteroid bombardment more than 4 billion years ago. Discovered at the Acasta river in Canada about three decades ago, these ancient granite, or felsic, rocks formed about 600 million years after Earth’s creation, before any life arose. They contain a distinctive mix of 8 | NewScientist | 18 August 2018

get much less rain than normal. A few groups are also making forecasts based on much simpler “semi-empirical” methods. These look at what happened in the past, what is happening now and then use brute-force statistics to predict what might happen next. No physics is involved. This week, a semi-empirical method was unveiled by Florian Sévellec at the University of Western Brittany, France, and Sybren Drijfhout at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute. Its predictions of rapid warming from 2018 to 2022 are broadly in line with those made by the supercomputer models (Nature Communications, doi.org/cszn). The new method may be a useful addition to our toolkit, but it doesn’t add much. The paper suggests the possibility of making predictions on mobile devices. There is no particular need for this, given we have the internet. This study also predicts only the average global surface temperature, which is by far the easiest thing to do and the least useful. The paper claims that “accurate and reliable interannual

elements compared with rocks that came later, suggesting they may have been created by a different geological process. Tim Johnson at Curtin University in Australia and his colleagues simulated the conditions in which these rocks could have formed. The team concluded that partial melting of Earth’s surface at a temperature of 800 to 900°C under very low pressure may have contributed to their creation. It would have been impossible for the young Earth to reach such high temperatures unaided, says Johnson.

JOHN THYS/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

The 2022 climate report: it’ll be hot

predictions of global temperatures are key for determining the regional climate change impacts”. That is not the case, says Adam Scaife, head of long-range prediction at the UK’s Met Office. The long-term warming trend certainly matters, but the small changes in average global surface temperature from year to year have no discernible impact on regional weather. For instance, 2018 is not as hot as 2016 was in terms of the global average, yet this year has seen some ferocious heatwaves. Long-term regional forecasts would be more useful. But

Instead, he thinks that the late heavy bombardment, a period of intense asteroid impacts on our planet that also left the moon heavily cratered, may be responsible (Nature Geoscience, doi.org/csw7). “We know that the Earth was bombarded for 600 to 700 million years after its birth,” says Johnson. “The fact that they are the only felsic rocks older than 4 billion years that

“A period of intense asteroid impacts may have created the most ancient known rocks on the planet”

semi-empirical methods cannot provide them, says Scaife. And although the supercomputer models are already making regional forecasts, the Met Office web page hosting its forecasts carries a disclaimer: “Decadal prediction is still experimental and the forecasts should not be relied on for making decisions, particularly on regional scales.” In other words, it is certainly going to be hot – but we will have to wait and see exactly when, where and how hot. ■ For more on our warming world, see page 23

we know of instantly got me thinking about impacts as a possible cause.” With such large-scale meteorite showers, rocks like the ones found at Acasta river could have been prevalent at the time, he says. But later plate tectonics would have swallowed most of them, meaning these rocks could be the only survivors of the extraterrestrial impacts that happened early in our planet’s history. Johnson now hopes to explore places like Siberia to discover more geological evidence to support his idea. Yvaine Ye ■

SECOND EDITION OF THE BIG QUESTIONS

21 OF Explore the big bang, dark energy, the multiverse, black holes and more %X\\RXUFRS\IURPDOOJRRGPDJD]LQH UHWDLOHUVRUGLJLWDOO\)LQGRXWPRUHDW newscientist.com/thecollection

NEWS & TECHNOLOGY True quantum computers now harder to build

MEDIAPRODUCTION/GETTY

GOOGLE is racing to create the first quantum computer capable of solving a problem ordinary computers cannot – and it has just made that challenge much harder.

AI hunts for crimes caught on camera Richard Kemeny

run-of-the-mill videos from YouTube, LiveLeak and the Orlando police department, and 810 of “anomalous activity”, including vandalism, fighting, arson, robbery and an explosion. Then it got to work, analysing patterns in motion and colour to find out why some videos showed crimes and others didn’t. The system was then tested on 150 normal videos and 140 showing a crime. It created a probability ranking system for criminal activity in segments of the videos. When this number

SURVEILLANCE cameras are already ubiquitous, but you still need trained guards to spot crime. Keeping that level of attention up can be hard, even for the most focused individual. Now police in Orlando, Florida, have been testing a system that automatically scans CCTV looking for potentially illicit activity. Previous AIs have been trained to spot specific activities, such as violence. Yet as crime comes in many forms, these systems are inherently limited. Waqas Sultani “With the advent of this at the Information Technology kind of AI monitoring, the University in Pakistan and his whole camera network is colleagues tried to incorporate a in some sense waking up” more holistic approach to crime. The team uses a form of deep learning, where AI analyses exceeded a threshold, it would separately labelled data sets and flag it up as a possible crime. then tries to spot distinguishing The results were promising: patterns. The idea is that by the AI correctly identified 75 per finding a way to identify criminal cent of crimes and could pick activity in general, the system out segments of the video where should be better at interpreting the criminal activity took place. previously unseen crimes. The researchers then tested it To train the AI, it was fed 800 on videos showing crimes it 10 | NewScientist | 18 August 2018

Just like humans, machines can be trained to spot illicit activity

wasn’t trained on, such as mobile-phone snatching. Here, the accuracy was about 73 per cent. The paper was presented at a computer vision conference in Salt Lake City, Utah. The work has some real benefit, says Tamás Szirányi at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. But the database is still limited, he adds, and very rare crimes are hard to learn how to spot. There were limitations to the system too. False alarms were triggered less often than a handful of competitor AIs tested on the same videos, but they still happened: people gathering to watch a relay race were judged to be lawbreakers, for example. Orlando police say they do not plan to roll the system out for real. There are broader concerns with the implementation of an automated surveillance system. “With the advent of this kind of AI monitoring, the whole network of cameras is in some important sense waking up,” says Jay Stanley at the American Civil Liberties Union. “Everybody is going to be monitoring themselves and feeling watched in a way that they don’t currently with today’s cameras.” ■

Achieving “quantum supremacy”, as it is known, involves building a device that can solve a problem faster than any non-quantum computer. In 2016, a team led by Sergio Boixo at Google published a paper showing that even with state-of-the-art supercomputers, it would be infeasible to simulate the behaviour of a quantum circuit with 48 qubits (quantum bits) at a circuit depth of 40, a measure of the problem’s complexity. But now, Boixo and his colleagues have devised a classical, or nonquantum, algorithm that can simulate a quantum circuit with 49 qubits at a depth of 48. In other words, ordinary computers are back on top. Their new algorithm only gives approximate answers, resulting in errors. That is OK, because current quantum computers also generate small errors, meaning you have to run calculations multiple times to get the correct answer. By matching the size of these errors, Boixo’s team can help ordinary computers catch up to their quantum competitors. Boixo and his colleagues found they can simulate the output of a circuit with 49 qubits at depth 48 with a fidelity of 0.5 per cent – a measure of the error in the calculation. They estimate this would cost $1 million on Google’s cloud computing service. So while it is scientifically possible, it is expensive (arxiv.org/abs/1807.10749). It is a reasonable approach, says Ciarán Lee at University College London. “It seems only fair to allow classical computers to simulate the outcome approximately.” Including cost as a factor in determining whether a system can achieve quantum supremacy brings this race more into the real world, he says. Chelsea Whyte ■

Humanity will need the equivalent of 2 Earths to support itself by 2030.

People lying down solve anagrams in 10% less time than people standing up.

About 6 in 100 babies (mostly boys) are born with an extra nipple.

60% of us experience ‘inner speech’ where everyday thoughts take a back-and-forth conversational style. We spend 50% of our lives daydreaming.

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NEWS & TECHNOLOGY

Crowd bots that mess up science location as someone else. Around 50 were supposedly logging on from a statue in Buffalo, New York. A handful of others appeared to have taken the survey in the middle of a lake in Kansas. These strange locations are a tell-tale sign of bots taking the survey, says Bai. “I was wondering, what is going on?” He’s not the only one to have noticed such problems with data.

AN ARMY of bots has infiltrated crowdsourcing. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is a crowdworking platform that pays people small sums to take part in menial tasks, such as tagging photos or filling out forms. Essentially it is a way to get humans to perform robotic jobs that machines can’t yet manage. But now bots are starting to take on the tasks themselves. That is a problem, because the platform is widely used by scientists as a cheap way to carry out research. Hui Bai, a social psychologist at the University of Minnesota, was using it to collect data on the perception of far-right movements when he noticed a massive spike in support for groups including the Ku Klux Klan and the Nazi party. Digging deeper into the data, he discovered a number of responses to open-ended questions within his survey didn’t have any connection to the question. Instead, they simply said “Very good” or “Very nice”. Bai also found that around half of his sample of 578 responders had the same GPS

US Navy wants to fire slime at boats KIDS aren’t the only ones who love slime. The US Navy wants to take the gloopy hobby to the next level – by making super-expanding slime that can stop boat propellers turning. Currently, the US Navy stops suspicious boats, such as those of suspected smugglers, by firing a plastic rope at the boat’s propeller. This tangles up the mechanism,

Crowdworkers can earn as little as $2 an hour filling in surveys

MATS SILVAN/GETTY

Chris Stokel-Walker

Erin Buchanan and John Scofield at Missouri State University and the University of Missouri identified bots completing Mechanical Turk tasks around 2 per cent of the time in a separate analysis conducted last year. We already know that gathering scientific data with Mechanical Turk can be problematic. Previous research indicates that between 14 and 18 per cent of responses to surveys posted on Mechanical Turk are fraudulent in some way. “It makes it harder to see what actually happens in your data,”

but it isn’t very environmentally friendly and is hard to disentangle. Synthetic slime could halt small boats by clogging their propellers, before later dissolving away. Justin Jones and his colleagues at Utah State University have a 15-month Navy contract to experiment making slime proteins with this in mind. The team’s slime is inspired by the hagfish, an eel-like creature that deters predators by projecting a jet of slime that clogs the mouth and gills. When it comes into contact with sea water, the slime swells by a factor of several thousand. One hagfish can

produce several litres in one go. Hagfish slime has two components, a sticky mucin and long thread-like proteins. The protein threads provide toughness and elasticity, thanks to a pattern of repeating proteins similar to spider silk. Jones says his team is using modified E.coli bacteria to produce the proteins, a technique honed by the lab’s 20 years of research on artificial spider silk.

“The slime is inspired by the hagfish, which deters predators by projecting slime that clogs the gills”

says Buchanan. Adding bots to the mix will only make things worse. Bai has set up an online survey for fellow researchers to report any anomalies in their data that may be the work of bots. He has received around 20 replies so far. “Three months ago, no more than 5 or 10 per cent of the total subject base were suspected bots,” Bai says. “Now half my participants aren’t human.” Kurt Gray at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, is editor of a psychology journal, where he estimates at least half of the papers he reviews include data from Mechanical Turk. “It’s worrying you’re not observing real people making real decisions,” he says. “We’re in the business of determining how and why people act, and if we’re not looking at people, we’re not doing our jobs.” For those that rely on Mechanical Turk to make a living, using crowdworking bots is a natural progression as it becomes harder to earn enough money on these platforms, says Kristy Milland, who runs Turker Nation, a forum for workers on the site. “Bots are not just there to take money from academics. They’re a way to level the playing field,” she says. “They give us control over our hourly rate. They give us control over the income we make.” Amazon did not respond to a request for comment. ■

The aim is to move from a labour-intensive process that makes just a few grams at a time to an automated system turning out industrial quantities. The team will then work on spinning the proteins into fibres, again using experience from spinning spider silk proteins. This won’t be easy. “The devil is in the details, as it is with spider silk,” says Jones. As well as smugglers, a slime barrier could stop small boats aimed at larger vessels, as in the terrorist attack on the USS Cole in 2000.

David Hambling ■ 18 August 2018 | NewScientist | 13

NEWS & TECHNOLOGY It pays to play it cool when online dating

ROGER RESSMEYER/CORBIS/VCG VIA GETTY IMAGES

“HEY.” Short, neutral openers on internet dating sites may be a good idea – especially if you’re hoping for a response from someone out of your league. Elizabeth Bruch and Mark Newman at the University of Michigan studied the messaging patterns of 94,478 men and 92,457 women on a free online dating website. The users were located in New York, Boston, Chicago and Seattle. All were seeking heterosexual relationships, and their genders were self-identified.

Supervolcano’s hidden secrets Michael Marshall

Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California, and his colleagues pulled together data from all seismic stations within 150 kilometres of the caldera within the last 26 years, and converted it into a threedimensional image of the rocks. This let them estimate how much magma was still molten and how much had solidified.

A LONG-DORMANT supervolcano in California still holds more than 1000 cubic kilometres of semi-molten magma. The find suggests that the volcano is not entirely extinct, but a major eruption remains unlikely. Long Valley caldera in eastern California is 32 kilometres across and almost a kilometre deep. It “Since the late 1970s, the marks the spot where, 760,000 years ago, a supervolcano spewed dome in the centre of the supervolcano’s caldera out in excess of 1400 cubic has been slowly rising” kilometres of material in just six days. Clouds of scorching ash and rocks blanketed the surrounding They identified a zone in the 50 kilometres, and ash landed middle of the crust that seems as far afield as Nebraska, almost to contain more than 1000 cubic 2000 kilometres away. kilometres of magma. That is The volcano hasn’t erupted a lot of magma, but Flinders on a similar scale since, although emphasises that just because it is smaller eruptions continued until there doesn’t mean it will erupt. about 100,000 years ago. Since That’s because the magma then, it has been dormant. But will only erupt if a large fraction since the late 1970s, the dome in of it is molten. “Magmas with less the centre of the caldera has been than 50 per cent melt typically slowly rising. So geologists have don’t erupt,” he says. His team studied the area to find out estimates that 27 per cent of the whether it might erupt again. Long Valley magma is molten – Ashton Flinders of the US making a large-scale eruption 14 | NewScientist | 18 August 2018

The dormant Long Valley caldera in California holds a lot of magma–

unlikely (Geology, doi.org/cswv). However, it is possible that there are smaller pockets where the melt fraction is higher than 27 per cent. The study couldn’t pick out such fine details. If one region achieves a melt fraction of 50 per cent or more, it could lead to a localised, normal-sized eruption – but not a supervolcano blast. “I imagine there could be smaller eruptions and indeed they are the most likely,” says Robert White of the University of Cambridge. “But there hasn’t been anything for a very long time.” It seems what we are seeing at Long Valley caldera is a supervolcano dying slowly, its vast magma reservoir gradually crystallising into solid rock. If Flinders is right about how much of it is molten, it will take a long time before it is dead, and might have a few ordinary-sized eruptions left in it – but the time when it might have unleashed a supereruption is long past. This is a stark contrast to the Yellowstone supervolcano in Wyoming, which remains a threat – albeit one that may not erupt in a big way for thousands of years. A 2015 study found 10,000 cubic kilometres of magma under Yellowstone. ■

The pair found that women receive more messages than men, and most of the messages sent on the service go to only a small fraction of users. The most popular person in the study was a 30-year-old woman in New York who received 1504 messages during the month-long study period. Bruch and Newman ranked each user’s desirability by the number of initiating messages they received, which were themselves weighted by the desirability of the person sending them, using the same kind of maths used to rank web pages in a Google search. People of both genders generally contacted others who had roughly the same ranking as them, so they were fairly self-aware. But a majority of the users – both male and female – still messaged some people who were out of their league. On average, these attempts to aim high were targeted at people who were ranked as 25 per cent more desirable than the user (Science Advances, doi.org/cswt). When trying their luck with more attractive people, men were more successful in getting a response if they sent less-enthusiastic messages. “I remember thinking that this strategy can’t possibly work,” says Bruch. But it does – in all four cities, men got slightly lower reply rates when they wrote more positively worded messages, and only men in Seattle saw a pay-off to writing longer messages. Chelsea Whyte ■

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IN BRIEF Nature’s answer to nuclear waste issue

Easter Island society may not have collapsed into infighting

Dale Simpson at the University of Queensland in Australia says the evidence suggests otherwise. He and his colleagues traced the origin of the volcanic basalt

EARTH’S crust used to be full of radioactive uranium. In some spots, it underwent chain fission reactions, the process that gives us nuclear power today. The remnants of these natural nuclear reactors could give us clues about how to store radioactive waste. Evan Groopman at the US Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC and his colleagues used samples from one such site in Gabon to find out whether the byproducts of fission escape the site. One of the most dangerous is radioactive caesium-137, which can cause major health problems if it gets into the soil or water. The team found that some caesium-137 was trapped in the lattice structure of another element, ruthenium. Ruthenium might help keep our own nuclear waste contained, says Groopman (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.18072671145).

chisels, picks and axe-like tools used for making canoes THE Rapa Nui people of Easter Island were thought to

as well as the moai, massive monoliths carved into

have experienced societal collapse after the 17th century

human figures (shown above). The team compared the chemical elements in the basalt of 17 picks and tool fragments excavated near the

due to infighting over depleted resources. But a study of tools they used to carve their famous moai statues adds to evidence that they may have collaborated at this time. Remote Easter Island is in the south-eastern Pacific Ocean. Once lush with palms, it was devoid of trees by

statues with those found in the 31 largest quarries on

about 1500. Some scientists have suggested that erosion limited boat building. They argue this could have led to

Pacific Archaeology, vol 9, p 12). “This... suggests more communal use of stone, which arguably facilitated socio-political and economic

violence and the eventual collapse of Rapa Nui society.

interaction between clans,” says Simpson.

resulted and led to food shortages, while the lack of wood

the island and found the majority of the tools matched the high quality basalt in one quarry complex (Journal of

Death moves at 2 millimetres an hour WE HAVE seen death travelling for the first time – and it moves in a wave at 30 micrometres per minute. At least in an egg cell. In multicellular animals, cells often sacrifice themselves for the greater good, for example to prevent cancer. Much of the cell’s internal machinery self-destructs, then the whole cell disintegrates. It has been clear for a while that once this programmed cell death

begins, the signal travels rapidly within a cell, but no one had studied how it spreads. Now James Ferrell and Xianrui Cheng of Stanford University in California have shown that rather than being spread by a slowly diffusing chemical signal, death travels as a “trigger wave”, like a wildfire, with the self-destruction of one part of the cell triggering the same in the next.

They discovered this by filling a tube with the cytoplasm – the fluid in a cell – from frog eggs. This held sub-cellular compartments, seen as green dots thanks to a glowing protein. They put one end of the tube in a dyed extract of a cell that had undergone programmed death. As the compartments self-destructed, the green dots vanished, revealing the rate at which death spread – much faster than the dye diffused (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.aah4065).

Inducing birth at 39 weeks cuts surgery CHOOSING to induce labour at 39 weeks has been found to reduce the rates of emergency caesarean deliveries. Inducing labour had been thought to raise the C-section rate. Now a study of over 6100 women in the US, half of whom were induced at 39 weeks of pregnancy, suggests this cuts the emergency C-section rate by 3 percentage points, to 19 per cent of deliveries. It also found that women who had inductions reported less labour pain and a greater sense of control over the birth. William Grobman at Northwestern University in Chicago, who led the research, says women who deliver vaginally have fewer complications (New England Journal of Medicine, doi.org/csv2). 18 August 2018 | NewScientist | 17

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IN BRIEF Loosen up for better sperm A MAN’S choice of underwear really can have an impact on his sperm. That is the finding of Jorge Chavarro and his colleagues at Harvard University. They asked 656 men to provide semen samples and answer a questionnaire about what type of underwear they wore most often in the previous three months. Men who wore boxer shorts had a 25 per cent higher sperm concentration, 17 per cent higher total sperm count and 33 per cent more swimming sperm in a

Einstein was right about the speed of light – again IF YOU are driving a car and speed up to match the vehicle in front, it will appear to slow down, relative to you. Albert Einstein said the same isn’t true when photons are involved – they will always travel at light speed even if you change your speed. This central tenet of Einstein’s theory of special relativity – that the speed of light does not change because of the speed of the observer – has now been proved more precisely than ever before. Vahe Gurzadyan and Amur Margaryan at Alikhanian National

Laboratory in Armenia used data from two experiments at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in France to look for signs of a changing speed of light. The first test measured the speed of a photon in a moving reference frame. A high-powered laser was fired at a beam of fastmoving electrons, bouncing off into a detector that measured the speed of light from the electrons’ frame of reference. The second experiment was able to measure light speed in a stationary frame of reference. For this, a particle

called an eta meson decayed into two photons. The velocities of those photons gave the speed of light as measured from the meson’s frame of reference, which was not moving. “Both experiments are done very accurately, monitoring a lot of systematic effects and potential sources of uncertainty,” says Gurzadyan. The pair found that if the two measured light speeds are different, it is by a factor of less than seventrillionths (The European Physical Journal C, doi.org/csvx).

single ejaculate than men who wore Reproduction, doi.org/csvz). The team adjusted for other factors that might affect the results,

JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES

other types of underwear (Human

Neutron star’s rear visible from front

such as differences in age, BMI and smoking. But it is impossible to rule out all confounding factors. Sperm production is sensitive to temperature, and needs conditions a few degrees lower than inside the abdomen. Previous studies have shown that tight underwear can push the testes closer to the abdomen and raise the temperature inside the scrotum, says Chavarro. Although the differences he found are quite significant, Chavarro says that men who wear tight underwear typically had sperm concentrations within the normal range and wouldn’t necessarily be expected to have difficulty

MICHAEL COGLIANTRY/GETTY

conceiving children.

18 | NewScientist | 18 August 2018

THE gravity of a dense neutron star can be so powerful that it bends light emitted on one side towards the opposite side of the star. In other words, an observer could see all of it at once. When a star is destroyed in a supernova, it can leave behind a neutron star, a ball the size of a city and very dense. Hajime Sotani at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and his colleagues modelled three neutron stars each 10 kilometres in radius, one with the mass of two suns, one slightly more massive and one slightly less. They found that the light from the least-massive star acted normally. But for the denser stars, photons from the back are whipped to the front by gravity (arxiv.org/abs/1807.09071). Photons emitted at a right angle will still travel away from the star, but those leaving in any other direction will be bent around to the front. This “gravitational lensing” would distort the light from our perspective, implying we would see a different light signature from denser neutron stars. A circular hot spot on the star could look like an arc, for example.

Alien grasses fuel bigger US wildfires INVASIVE species of grass are making wildfires in the US up to twice as

Emily Fusco at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst presented

large and three times as frequent. One species, cheatgrass, is now

preliminary results of her study last

widespread in California and was

meeting of the Ecological Society of

involved in last year’s Thomas Fire,

America. She analysed the impact

the largest recorded in the state until

of nine widespread alien grasses in

the Mendocino Complex Fire now burning (see page 26). Like cheatgrass, many of the

areas of the US they have invaded. Fusco combined this information with ground and satellite fire records,

invaders are finer than native species,

comparing fire frequency and size in

and so ignite more easily, and occupy

infested habitats versus comparable

space within and between patches of

but uninvaded habitats. She found

native grass. Other invaders, such as

all the invasive species except one

silk reed, grow more than 3 metres

made fires more frequent, and all

high and can spread fire into trees.

but two made fires larger.

week in New Orleans at the annual

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Digital family planning

20 | NewScientist | 18 August 2018

following Natural Cycles into the contraception business. In May, Ava – a firm that makes a fertility-tracking bracelet and app – announced it had raised $30 million to expand into various aspects of female health.

True, condoms, caps, diaphragms and the copper coil (IUD) are the only non-permanent methods besides natural family planning that don’t involve hormones. But many common perceptions about hormonal contraception are myths. For example, some methods, like the combined pill, are unsuitable for women who are over 35 and smoke, because oestrogen raises their risk of dangerous blood clots, while contraceptive implants, coils and progestogen-only pills are all safe for women with these risk factors. But there are other reasons why many prefer not to use hormones: reported side effects across various methods include breast pain, headaches and changes in libido (see “Why the Natural Cycles app works for me”, right). “There’s no question that [hormones] increase some side effects, and some women are much more susceptible than others,” says Maureen Cronin, chief medical officer at Ava.

“There is so much confusion about the risks and effectiveness of contraceptive methods” One of these is preventing pregnancy and the firm is in discussions with EU and US health agencies. It is easy to see the appeal of high-tech solutions. Many people only consider two kinds of contraceptive: the combined pill, which isn’t a good fit for everyone due to hormone problems, and condoms, which are unpopular and relatively unreliable. In reality, more than 10 types of contraception are available along with the combined pill and more permanent measures, like sterilisation (see graph, below).

Number of women in 100 who rely on each contraceptive method who are likely to get pregnant in a year ( non-hormonal method) Typical use

Perfect use

Female sterilisation Contraceptive implant

18 August 2018 | NewScientist | 33

vegetation or winery equipment for the rest of the year. They have retained more of their wild characteristics, including sexual reproduction. “Beer yeast is more like dogs, while wine yeast is more like cats,” says Steensels. “Cats can survive in the wild, but if you put a chihuahua in the jungle, it wouldn’t survive.” Steensels was part of a team that in 2016 sequenced the genomes of 157 strains of S. cerevisiae, and built a family tree. They

“Beer yeast is like a chihuahua – it wouldn’t survive in the jungle” found there were separate branches for wild strains, wine yeasts and Asian sake yeasts. Beer yeasts occupy not one but two branches, each of which traces back to a common ancestor just 500 or so years ago, about when industrial brewing supplanted home brewing. Bread yeasts are part of a mixed group most closely related to the main beer group. The family tree paints a picture of a domesticated organism pumping out alcohol and carbon dioxide as its main job. Yet as Bauer’s as yet unpublished wine-spoofing experiment shows, this is far from all that yeast does. Most of the fruity flavours in wine come not from grapes, but from chemicals called

esters produced by the yeast’s metabolism. Beer generally contains no fruit at all. Most of its flavour notes – floral, banana, pear, whatever – come from yeast-derived esters. Yeast also accounts for a wide range of other small, volatile molecules that contribute to the aroma of the final product. Wine-makers and, increasingly, brewers can select specific strains from yeast suppliers to achieve the desired sensory profile in their finished product. We know surprisingly little about why yeast bothers to make these volatiles. One theory is that they are accidental leftovers discarded as the yeast produces cell membranes and other key materials. This unimportance would explain why different yeast strains, or the same strain under different environmental conditions, can produce very different mixes of volatiles. There is an alternative explanation, and it comes from ripe fruit. Just as with beer and wine, many of the smells we commonly associate with fruit are not, in origin, fruity. “If I leave a banana in my office, which I often do, it’s pretty obvious when I come in on Monday morning that there’s a banana there,” says Brian Gibson, a yeast biologist at the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. “That’s the yeast contribution, not the banana itself.” Those yeasty smells notoriously attract flies. Yeasts are relatively large, heavy microbes, and cannot easily drift from host to host on the

breeze. But producing sweet-smelling chemicals might attract insects to hitch a ride on – and help disperse yeasts to new habitats. Sure enough, in 2014, a team led by Kevin Verstrepen at VIB showed that volatile acetate esters produced by yeast do attract insects. That same year, Matthew Goddard, then at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and his colleagues showed that yeast strains more

MORE YEAST, MORE FUN Few questions animate beer lovers so much as why lager tastes so samey and non-alcoholic beer so rubbish. The answer is simple: yeast. Low or no-alcohol beer is made

but non-disclosure agreements – presumably with brewers – prevent him from telling more.

in one of two ways. You can stop fermentation early, yielding less alcohol but also fewer of the pleasing yeast-derived flavours (see main story). Or you brew normal beer and then remove the alcohol – and many of those same flavours along with it. Kevin Verstrepen of the Flemish Institute for Biotechnology (VIB) in Belgium and his team say they have solved the problem, by breeding a yeast strain that produces a pleasing flavour spectrum even after the alcohol and some volatiles are removed. “To be honest, we are now beyond this,” says Verstrepen,

“Saccharomyces have been designed by evolution to produce alcohol. It’s kind of their party trick,” says Brian Gibson at the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. Other yeasts are less boozy and yet produce pleasing flavour profiles. Already, some German brewers are using Saccharomycodes ludwigii – a wild

34 | NewScientist | 18 August 2018

A second option is to work with yeast species beyond the usual Saccharomyces cerevisiae.

yeast more usually associated with food spoilage – in their low-alcohol brews, and other yeasts are being studied. At the other end of the spectrum, yeast that naturally makes a higher-alcohol, more intensely flavoured beer could

yield environmental benefits, says Verstrepen. Brewing such a beer and diluting it back to normal strength would let brewers make the same amount of beer in a smaller brewery using less energy. And what of lagers? The problem there is that they are fermented cold, something S. cerevisiae does poorly. Lager yeasts are hybrids of it and the related wild yeast Saccharomyces eubayanus, which has been found in Tibet and Patagonia and contributes cold-tolerance. All lager yeasts are descended from just two such hybrids created about 500 years ago, presumably in Bavaria. Lager yeast underwent another genetic bottleneck in the 19th century, when the Carlsberg brewery in Copenhagen began culturing specific strains. This lack of

genetic diversity is a big reason that most lagers taste so similar to one another. To broaden the flavour palette, in 2015, Verstrepen’s student Stijn Mertens created 31 cerevisiae-eubayanus hybrids. Many of them made terrible beer with unappealing onion or clove flavours, but a few gave more pleasing fruity tastes not usually found in lagers. The new yeasts are now being developed for commercial use, says Mertens. Verstrepen’s team is also working on a way to speed up yeast breeding. By encapsulating individual yeast cells in water droplets in an oily matrix, they can now screen hundreds of thousands of crosses at once. “We often call them single-cell breweries,” says Verstrepen.

Unleash the inner yeast

MONKEY BUSINESS IMAGES/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK

JUSTIN JIN/PANOS

attractive to fruit flies are more likely to be dispersed. But Goddard remains unconvinced that most volatiles are there as dispersal aids – if they were, every yeast strain would have evolved to produce the optimal mix, he says. Whatever the reason for making volatiles, their diversity is a boon for yeast breeders. In 2014, a brewery asked Verstrepen’s team to develop a yeast that produced more of the banana and pear-like esters prized in Belgian-style beers. The researchers found that existing yeast strains varied 34-fold in how much of these esters they made. After picking three of the top producers and cross-breeding them, using some genetic tricks to ensure sexual reproduction, they quickly boosted the ester production of the best-performing strains by 50 per cent. Similar breeding programmes could soon enhance the taste of two types of beer that often leave a little to be desired: lagers and non-alcoholic beers (see “More yeast, more fun”, left). Not every novel yeast needs special breeding, however; many are out there waiting to be found. Home brewers along western Norway’s fjords, for example, have been handing down their own yeast for generations. Genetic studies suggest that these kveik yeasts are distinct from the main beer-yeast lineage. They produce a distinctive flavour profile that includes desirable tropical fruit notes and even an intriguing, as yet not fully characterised, mushroom-like savour. “I find them to be quite different from other domestic yeasts,” says Richard Preiss, a microbiologist and co-founder of Escarpment

and unusual, subtly nutty or fruity notes that tasters found pleasing. These yeasts could someday give commercial bakers new options, the researchers say. Over the centuries, we have done well in expanding yeast’s repertoire of tricks, by exploiting its natural diversity and breeding and selecting strains with desirable traits, first accidentally and then on purpose. Genetic methods are now upping the game. Verstrepen, for example, has produced genetically modified yeasts that make so much of the banana-flavoured isoamyl acetate that the resulting ale tastes more like banana milkshake. That may sound yucky, but it shows what’s possible. As yet, no conventional breweries are keen to use GM yeast, for reasons of consumer acceptability.

Laboratories, a company based in Guelph, Canada, that markets kveik and other regional yeast strains to breweries. “I can usually pick kveik out of a herd,” says Preiss. Many wine-makers have travelled this path already, fermenting their wines with wild yeasts that settle on the grapes naturally. Since the yeast flora varies from vineyard to vineyard, this can contribute to a wine’s terroir, the flavour of place so prized by connoisseurs. Brewers of Belgian lambic beers claim the same of the seasonal wild yeasts of the Zenne valley. Bakers have fewer options. Speciality bakers do often develop richer flavours in their loaves by using sourdoughs, fermented by whole communities of yeast and bacteria. But flavour diversity traditionally has not been as important in bread-making: even high-end bakers have had no options for ordinary leavened loaves other than bog-standard bread yeast. Verstrepen’s research suggests that may be a missed opportunity. His team baked test loaves with 10 non-standard yeasts: two Saccharomyces species and eight species from other genera. Most either failed to leaven the bread enough or produced unpleasant and potentially toxic by-products. Two species, however – champagne yeast Saccharomyces bayanus (thought to be a three-way hybrid between S. cerevisiae and two related species) and Torulaspora delbrueckii, used to produce Chinese liquor – showed both good leavening

Yeasts cultured in the lab to make new flavours (top left) have come a long way from their wild cousins on the surface of grapes (above)

We can do similar things without cutting and pasting DNA, though. When Christopher Curtin and his colleagues at the Australian Wine Research Institute near Adelaide wanted a wine yeast that would contribute rose-like floral aromas, they noted that the volatiles responsible are derived from the amino acid phenylalanine. What they needed, therefore, were cells that produced phenylalanine more readily. So they added a toxic analogue of phenylalanine to a yeast culture, figuring that cells that would keep making the amino acid instead of taking up the toxin would be more likely to survive. It worked: their strategy created several lineages of yeasts with high-activity mutations in two genes that are part of the metabolic pathway for making phenylalanine. The yeasts produced up to 20 times more of the rose aromas, and this led to pleasingly floral white wines. “It has a big impact on aroma,” says Curtin, who is now at Oregon State University. Yeast companies are already working to commercialise the new strains. And it is just the start. Yeast may be one of our littlest pets, but its metabolism is complex. Breeding to favour one pathway often has unexpected knock-on effects on others, and we don’t yet understand enough to shape entire flavour profiles in a predetermined, pleasing way. For the yeast whisperers, then, there is still much to achieve. “That’s good,” says Verstrepen. “It stays a bit of an art.” ■ Bob Holmes is a New Scientist consultant based in Edmonton, Canada 18 August 2018 | NewScientist | 35

INTERVIEW

Lindy Elkins-Tanton is leading a mission to the only known metal world in the solar system. Rowan Hooper hears how it could teach us about the heart of our own planet

Why go to Psyche?

We want to learn about how Earth formed, but we can’t get to the core to test our ideas, so we are going to a metal world. It is the only place in the solar system where we can directly observe a planetary core. 36 | NewScientist | 18 August 2018

Were you surprised last year, when NASA selected your project for funding as one of its Discovery-class missions?

How do you know Psyche is metal?

We’re pretty darn sure from its radar albedo: a very high percentage of radar is reflected back by Psyche compared with other asteroids. We also know from how quickly it heats and cools: its thermal inertia is four times higher than any other asteroid. So it really seems to be largely metal, if not completely metal. We think it’s the result of a planetesimal being hit over and over again as the solar system formed, leaving only its core. When the Psyche spacecraft arrives there in 2026, how will you tell whether the asteroid is a core or something else?

We’ve got a lot of predictions for what it will look like if it’s a core. To investigate, the Psyche spacecraft now being built will have an imager and a magnetometer, and we’ll do an experiment to measure exactly how its gravity varies around the asteroid’s surface, which will reveal composition and structure. But the

Lindy Elkins-Tanton (right) leads a project to visit Psyche, seen in an artist’s impression, above ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY

We’re all still pinching ourselves. We started out competing against 27 other missions. We knew we had a really strong science case – it’s so exciting to go to the first metal world. But usually you don’t get through step one of NASA’s selection process the first time you try, so it’s crazy that we went all the way. We bucked all the trends, and now we’re trying to prove that we’re worthy.

PETER RUBIN/ASU

HE solid metal centre of Earth is shrouded in mystery. Or, more accurately, in thousands of kilometres of molten metal and swirling magma. It is impossible to examine up close, so everything we know about it must be inferred. What would we give to study a naked core directly? NASA’s answer is $850 million – the cost of a mission led by planetary scientist Lindy Elkins-Tanton, the director of Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Exploration. She is only the second woman to lead a NASA deep-space mission. Due to launch in 2022, the mission will venture to an extraordinary asteroid between Mars and Jupiter. Some 210 kilometres across, asteroid 16 Psyche is unique in that it seems to be composed of solid metal. It may represent the exposed core of a tiny planet that has had its outer layers smashed away, so Elkins-Tanton believes it could tell us a lot about the core and formation of our own planet. And its likely composition represents the ultimate fantasy for wannabe asteroid miners.

key instrument is the gamma ray and neutron spectrometer, which will tell us the elemental composition of the surface. Based on the metal meteorites that fall to Earth, we think it’s mainly iron and nickel, and that’s what we think Earth’s core is too. But it has lots of goodies mixed in, which is what makes the asteroid miners excited. The asteroid miners?!

At this point I have to say: “NASA reminds me this mission is about fundamental science and nothing to do with asteroid resources.” That said, Psyche is mainly iron and nickel,

In terms of technology development, water on the moon is going to be the first target. Asteroids are going to be much more difficult. You mean extracting water from the moon?

Yes, from ice or water absorbed in lunar minerals. That will be critical to future lunar settlements. The number of private consortia that are getting together to go to the moon, which seems attainable compared with Mars, means people will attempt this. There are going to be problems, but people are going to succeed. How did you get into all this?

I actually wanted to be a veterinarian until I realised that animals hate veterinarians. Even at college I wasn’t sure if I wanted to study biology or Earth science. And I didn’t have the confidence

“On Earth, the metals in this asteroid would be worth 10 quintillion dollars” to go for a PhD, so I went into business. Then I got married, had my son, then separated from my husband and became a math teacher. At 31 I decided to go back to get my PhD. I was a single mother and my son started kindergarten at the same time. You’re basically the J. K. Rowling of planetary science.

I guess! So in grad school I studied half Earth and half the moon. I studied return samples from the Apollo missions, which I just adored. I made a model of how a magma ocean could freeze and that launched me into planetary science. And, ultimately, planetary politics. Tell me about the Interplanetary Initiative that you started with ASU president Michael Crow.

but we also expect silver, gold, palladium, iridium and copper. So the asteroid would be worth a lot?

I calculated it for fun, and in the metals market of January 2017 it would have been worth 10 quintillion dollars. That’s a 1 followed by 19 zeros – a large multiple of Earth’s gross domestic product, which is in the region of $100 trillion. But of course it’s an irrelevant number because (a) if you brought it to Earth it wouldn’t be worth that any more and (b) there’s no way to bring it to Earth. It’s complete fantasy.

Nevertheless, people want to exploit the resources in asteroids, right?

We don’t have an Elon Musk for asteroid mining, and there is no significant technology for it yet, but there’s a huge amount of interest and a number of companies working on it, so I’m sure it will happen. I’m on the Hague working group for space resources at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. And right now, Luxembourg is positioning itself in a bid to own the European processes of governance, industry and law concerning asteroid mining.

It’s an effort to shape our future in space. I believe we’re going to do a lot more space exploration, because it’s human nature to explore and space is the place to go. The sheer fact that we can do it is miraculous. And the thing about space exploration is that it’s almost uniquely inspiring to people – an illustration of an integrated society trying to do better. That was the great pull of Star Trek. What happens when on Mars there’s an Elon Musk settlement right next to a settlement from China? Do they become the best allies to help each other survive, or does their allegiance remain to entities back on Earth, at least 7 radio-minutes away? Can we figure out a better set of legal and social norms to go into the future with? I think we can. ■ Rowan Hooper is New Scientist ’s managing editor 18 August 2018 | NewScientist | 37

KEVIN FRAYER/GETTY IMAGES

A raft of lawsuits around the world are seeking to force action on climate change. Fred Pearce meets the plaintiffs

38 | NewScientist | 18 August 2018

IGH-SCHOOL student Aji Piper goes snowboarding in the mountains behind Seattle – but for how much longer, he wonders. Miko Vergun fears her native Majuro atoll in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific could soon be under water. In Alaska, Nathan Baring’s friends can no longer hunt for seals because the ice is too thin. Nine-year-old Levi Draheim, who lives in low-lying, coastal Florida, says of his president: “It’s scary having someone in the White House who doesn’t believe in climate change.” All four are among 21 young people – selfdescribed “climate kids” – who will head for a district court in Eugene, Oregon, in October. Over several weeks, they will face off against federal government lawyers. The plaintiffs will accuse the Trump administration and its

activists are echoing the beliefs of former NASA climate scientist James Hansen, who is also advising the climate kids’ case. Hansen has called the judicial system “the only way to get the funds needed to deal with climate change”, because it bypasses the influence of lobbyists. US judges are paying attention. They have rejected attempts by the Obama and Trump administrations to have the climate kids’ case thrown out. One impact of these cases is the momentum they provide for more of the same. The Dutch success was the inspiration for the climate kids’ action, says Julia Olson, chief attorney at an NGO called Our Children’s Trust that is masterminding the case. “We want to be the catalysts, not just as plaintiffs in an American courtroom, but in shifting ideals and priorities round the world,” says Kelsey Juliana, one of the young people suing the US government.

>1100 lawsuits invoking climate change worldwide, 888 in the US Source: Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

predecessors of decades of deceit and wrongheadedness in handling climate change, and will seek an order compelling Washington to devise a plan that will halt and reverse it. Suddenly, legal action over climate change is getting serious. The climate kids’ case is one of a rash of challenges this year, against governments and fossil fuel companies, in which citizens of various countries will try to get the legal system to reboot our response to the most pressing global problem of our time. Climate-change litigation has been tried before, with mixed results. Eleven years ago, judges ruled that the federal Environmental Protection Agency had a duty to regulate emissions from motor vehicles, following a lawsuit brought by the state of Massachusetts and 11 others. This opened the door for the

Obama administration’s aggressive climate policies. But in 2013, a court threw out a claim by an Alaskan coastal village that big oil companies should pay damages because rising tides and melting ice were flooding residents out of their homes. Over in the Netherlands, in 2015 a district court sided with 886 Dutch citizens who argued that their government had not exercised its “duty of care” to protect the environment from climate change. The ruling called on the government to make its emissions reduction target more ambitious. The government has appealed the decision and a final ruling is due on 9 October. With the 2015 Paris Agreement on a knifeedge after the US announced it was pulling out, an increasing number of scientists and

She wants to shake up the debate on climate change just as students caught up in the Parkland, Florida, shooting in February did with the discussion of gun laws. “We have a moral authority, and we want to call out government for neglecting its duty,” she says. The climate kids’ case hangs on the public trust doctrine, which says that the government holds and must protect certain natural resources like lakes and coastal waters in trust for its citizens. Olson says this should apply to the atmosphere and a stable climate too. She wants the courts to uphold the doctrine by ordering the government to draw up a climate recovery plan. It would encompass a long list of environmental actions: withdrawing rights to mine and drill for fossil fuel on federal lands and coastal waters, including those in the Arctic Ocean; ending federal permits for oil and gas pipelines and power plants; tightening the rules on car emissions; and restoring the US’s forests and soils so that they can draw down some of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The case goes to court at the end of October and is expected to last six weeks, with a range of scientists and experts called to testify on both sides. There are more than 1000 climate-centred court cases worldwide, according to databases held by the Sabin Center for Climate Change > 18 August 2018 | NewScientist | 39

JONATHAN CHU/GETTY. TOP: ANTHONY KWAN/GETTY IMAGES

Law at Columbia University in New York and the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment in London. The lawsuits can broadly be divided into two groups, depending on whether they seek government action or corporate reparations. Among those pursuing governments, several have children and young adults as the plaintiffs. They claim that the political system has failed them, leaving them with little choice but to go to court. “I have been active politically for five years, lobbying, writing letters locally and nationally, organising in the streets. But I am only 18, so I have never had a chance to vote,” says Baring. “We are going to court to show that young people, who are going to suffer from climate change much more than their elders, must be listened to.” Besides the US climate kids, there is Ridhima Pandey, the 11-year-old daughter of Indian climate activists, who is challenging her government’s support for burning coal. In Colombia earlier this year, a court ruled in favour of an action brought by 25 young

240 Lawsuits against governments outside the US Source: Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

people, and ordered the government to halt deforestation in the Amazon in order to stem global warming. Lawyers from the Global Legal Action Network, an environmental nonprofit based in London, are supporting six Portuguese children affected by the country’s worst-ever forest fires last year, in an action against the European Union at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. Other cases against governments lean on the 2015 Paris Agreement. In the UK, a charity called Plan B has brought an action calling for a review of climate policy, which it says is illegal. Tim Crosland, a barrister and director of Plan B, argues that although the UK’s 2008 Climate Change Act requires national emissions to be cut by 80 per cent by 2050,

Saúl Luciano Lliuya, from Peru, says a German power firm is responsible for 0.5 per cent of the emissions that are melting the glacier above his home town 40 | NewScientist | 18 August 2018

that is not good enough by the standards of the Paris Agreement, which envisages zero net global emissions in the second half of the century to help limit warming to 1.5°C. The case was backed by David King, who was government chief scientist while the act was being drafted. “The scientific information has changed quite dramatically from 2008,” says King. “Our commitment should now be zero emissions by 2050.” In July, Justice Supperstone turned down the challenge, saying the secretary of state’s refusal to amend the target was not unlawful.

Suing companies The climate kids want more than Plan B. They say the Paris targets are a political compromise. Their lawsuit demands that the US lead the world in heading towards just 1°C of warming. Hansen says that will require cutting atmospheric CO2 from the current 410 parts per million to 350 ppm – its level in the late 1980s. Litigants in other cases see governments as the pawns of corporations that mine, drill and ultimately burn most of the carbon that is warming the planet. Saúl Luciano Lliuya, a Peruvian farmer and mountain guide, has travelled to Europe to challenge Germany’s second-largest power company, RWE. He is taking the company to court over a potential catastrophe high in the Andes. Luciano lives in Huarez, a town of 120,000 people directly beneath the glacial Lake Palcacocha, in a region of the Andes where glaciers are melting faster than any on Earth. As a result, the lake’s volume has grown 30-fold, to more than 17 million cubic metres. Efforts to siphon off water have failed. Daene McKinney at the University of Texas at Austin, who has studied the situation in detail, says a landslide or icefall into the lake could cause its contents to spill onto the town below. Luciano’s case against RWE is based on recent research tracing rising CO2 levels to certain corporations. It began with a 2014 study by Richard Heede at the Climate Accountability Institute in Colorado, which found that almost two-thirds of total industrial emissions of CO2 and methane can be attributed to the products of just 90 companies. On that basis, Luciano alleges that RWE is responsible for 0.47 per cent of the total global emissions that are melting the glacier above Huarez, and should contribute the same percentage to the cost of engineering works to make the town safe. RWE denies liability. In November last year, a regional court in

77 cases seek additional emissions cuts from governments Source: Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

when it looks like the courts are being asked to make public policy,” says Allen. Fossil fuel companies, he says, can argue that society needed the oil, gas and coal they got rich on last century, and that there was no way of producing and burning them without emitting CO2. That, however, could open up another legal avenue. The idea that CO2 could be captured from power station exhaust and stored underground has been around for decades, but has not received any significant funding. If courts can establish that fossil fuel

ROBIN LOZNAK/ZUMA WIRE/ALAMY LIVE NEWS

Germany said the case should enter the evidence phase, meaning both sides have to collect evidence and assemble experts for court hearings. No trial date has yet been set. A subsequent study by Heede with Myles Allen at the University of Oxford found that six companies, including Chevron and ExxonMobil, each bore responsibility for between 2 and 3 per cent of the gases behind global warming. This study became the basis for the Californian cities of San Francisco and Oakland taking five giant oil companies – Chevron, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhilips, Shell and BP – to court. The cities say that a 2 per cent responsibility for climate change should warrant a company paying 2 per cent of the bill for protecting their communities from rising sea levels in San Francisco Bay. Estimates by the Pacific Institute, a think tank in California, suggest that a possible 1.4 metres of sea level rise along the state’s coast by 2100 would threaten property worth $100 billion, two-thirds of it in San Francisco Bay. Its report argued that oil companies should be liable for the impact of their products, just as tobacco companies were forced in the 1990s to pay out $206 billion in a settlement with smokers. The cities’ case drew a lot of attention but in June, judge William Alsup ruled that district courts were not the right place to decide such matters. However, another California judge, Vince Chhabria, has sent comparable cases brought by San Mateo and Marin counties and the City of Imperial Beach to court at the state level. New York City is also engaged in a similar action that has yet to reach court. “My impression is all these cases fall down

Some of the 21 young people taking the US government to court over climate change

companies knew about carbon capture and storage technologies, a case could be made that they should have been investing in them. “If they’d done that,” says Allen, “we would now be at maybe 10 per cent carbon capture. Since [fossil fuel company] profits for the last 30 years have been pretty substantial, they wouldn’t have had to invest a high percentage to kick-start the global carbon capture industry.” One thing a court could still do is require companies to get rid of CO2 , says Allen. A critical question is how long governments and corporations have known about the threats of climate change. Several plaintiffs say they have found evidence that bosses were aware of the climate consequences of their activities long ago, but denied it to their investors, customers and the wider public. In the case of Exxon, a 2017 study by Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes of Harvey University suggested that the company’s internal research tied its products to climate change as early as 1977. When it comes to political awareness in Washington DC, the expert witnesses in the US climate kids’ case will probably highlight the loss of innocence as dating back to 1965. That was when a report from President Lyndon Johnson’s Science Advisory Committee reported rising CO2 in the atmosphere, for which “at least during the recent past, fossil fuel combustion has been the only significant source”. The committee’s environmental pollution panel warned that by 2000 this increase “may be sufficient to produce measurable and perhaps marked changes in climate” that “could be deleterious from the point of view of human beings”. One expert helping the climate kids,

Gus Speth, a senior environmental adviser to President Jimmy Carter in the 1970s, has reviewed US government climate policy over the past half-century. “The federal government knowingly set and stayed a course for major climate change, with terrible consequences to be endured especially by present-day young people and future generations,” he says, calling this “the greatest dereliction of civic responsibility in the history of the republic”.

“A legal case could be made that oil companies should invest in carbon capture” Allen suggests the US may provide a unique opportunity for litigants because it has abandoned the international climate process. An obvious defence for governments and corporations alike is that the courts have no jurisdiction because the global community has taken charge of fighting climate change with treaties such as the Paris Agreement. Those in the dock can argue that they are doing everything that the international community has demanded of them, based on solid science. In many countries, that might be a plausible defence. But in the US, where the president contests the science and has said he intends to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, the courts may rule that international law has no jurisdiction. If the government continues to set itself against climate science, and places itself outside the ambit of international policy-making, then who is left to judge it but the country’s own courts? ■ Fred Pearce is a consultant for New Scientist based in London. Read more about some of the women behind climate litigation on the next page 18 August 2018 | NewScientist | 41

CULTURE

Climate justice, now! Women‘s fightback over the environment inspires Alice Klein Former Irish president and lawyer Mary Robinson (left) and comedian Maeve Higgins take on the world

CALIFORNIA and Portugal are burning, Greece is in ashes and heat-stressed fish are dying in droves in Germany. It is easy to despair as the full force of climate change is felt across the northern hemisphere. Amid this gloom, Mothers of Invention, a six-part podcast hosted by former Irish president – and lawyer – Mary Robinson and comedian Maeve Higgins, is a beacon of hope. It showcases how women around the world are banding together to fight for solutions and are generating remarkable momentum. In the first episode, we meet women among the lawyers, activists, university students and children who are bravely suing governments and multinationals over their climate negligence (see previous feature).

“Rabab Ali from Pakistan was only 7 years old when she sued her government in 2016” Tessa Khan, a BangladeshiAustralian lawyer, explains that most legal systems contain duties of care that make it incumbent on governments to protect their citizens from harm. These can be interpreted as including climate change. There have been some spectacular successes. In 2015, for example, Dutch environmental group Urgenda won the first citizen-led climate litigation case against a government. Its legal team successfully argued that the Netherlands was not doing 42 | NewScientist | 18 August 2018

RUTH MEDJBER

Mothers of Invention podcast, available online, produced by the non-profit Doc Society

enough to avert dangerous climate change. In response, the court ordered the government to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 25 per cent by 2020. Marjan Minnesma, the Dutch lawyer who co-founded Urgenda, tells Robinson and Higgins she “did not imagine what it would spark off”. The victory has inspired hundreds of copycat cases and boosted what Dutch-Bolivian film-maker Chihiro Geuzebroek calls our “collective boldness”. Geuzebroek, who was one of the 886 co-plaintiffs in the Urgenda case, is now one of 10,000 Dutch citizens suing fossil fuel giant Shell. “We’re moving the bar again,” she says. Climate litigation has particularly been embraced by women, says Robinson, who has become a committed climate

campaigner since her presidency. “It really reflects my own experiences travelling the world,” she explains, adding that it is “women in general who are just rolling up their sleeves and getting on with it”. Khan says this may be because women are disproportionately affected by climate change. She says that research has found that women are more likely than men to die in natural disasters and to experience the effects of food and water shortages due to their traditional caregiving roles. Girls and young women, who will be impacted by climate change for the longest, have been especially active. Rabab Ali from Pakistan, for example, was only 7 years old when she sued her government in 2016. “In Karachi, the pollution level is very high. It directly affects IQ level of kids,”

she tells Robinson and Higgins. Ridhima Pandey, an 11-year-old from India, and Sarah Thomson, a New Zealand law student, have also launched similar cases against their governments. Robinson and Higgins also speak to Kelsey Juliana and Victoria Barrett, two of the 21 young people who will be entering court in October to argue that the US government is violating their right to life, liberty and property by allowing excessive fossil fuel use. “I genuinely am optimistic that our government will listen to us and hear our demands,” says Juliana. Of course, it remains to be seen whether this collective action will have any meaningful impact. The outcome of the Urgenda case, for example, remains uncertain after the Dutch government launched an appeal. And many of the subsequent climate litigation cases have also failed, including those seeking to block Australia’s plan to build the country’s biggest-ever coal mine. Nevertheless, listening to Robinson and Higgins’s podcast is enough to make anyone want to roll up their sleeves. As Thomson tells them: “Courage is contagious, and when you see other people dedicated to fighting for a cause, it’s hard not to be inspired by that.” In future episodes, the duo will showcase women who are fighting fossil fuels outside the courtroom, for example, by campaigning against plastic and helping to spread solar power in developing countries. ■

For more books and arts coverage, visit newscientist.com/culture

DON’T MISS

Meg the shark lives again Megalodon would eat Jason Statham for lunch, says Michael Marshall

GOING for a fun night at the movies this month could find you in front of Jason Statham facing off against a giant megalodon, a long-extinct shark far larger than today’s great whites. As a film, The Meg is not high art, but it is expected to do well at the box office, partly because it embraces the inherent daftness of its premise. Unlike Jaws, which featured a living species, The Meg is the Jurassic World of shark movies. This may well be a good thing, because it is unlikely to scare us out of the water or encourage a “kill ’em all” attitude towards sharks – many of which are endangered species. The real megalodon gets a lot of press, giving the impression we know a lot about it. We don’t, says palaeontologist Darren Naish at the University of Southampton, UK. Pretty much all we have is teeth, which are startlingly big. Jason Statham faces his biggest enemy – a giant, but extinct, shark

“The record is 16.8 centimetres from base to tip,” says Naish. Being sharks, their skeletons were made of cartilage rather than bone, and didn’t fossilise. There are a few vertebrae, but that’s all. As a result, even basics like length are an estimate, derived by measuring the teeth. The shark in The Meg is apparently “75 to 90 feet”(22 to 27 metres). This is an exaggeration, says Naish: current thinking puts it at around 15 or 20 metres. Reconstructions of their jaws as large enough for a person to sit inside for a photo are also exaggerated. But megalodon was still a whopper, capable of eating Statham for lunch. That lack of bones also means we don’t know what they looked like, or where they fit in the shark family – somewhere in the group called the Lamniformes, says Naish. Also known as mackerel sharks, the group includes species from great whites to basking, megamouth and goblin sharks. People imagine megalodon as a huge great white, but Naish is not so sure.

2018 WARNER BROS.ENT.INC, GRAVITY PICS.PRODUCTION CO, APELLES ENT.INC

The Meg, in UK and US cinemas

However, we do know what megalodon ate. “There are bite marks on whale and dolphin bones that come from the right time,” says Naish. “It does seem to have been a marine mammal predator.” That’s to be expected – it is what great white sharks eat. More remarkably, this species used shallow-water ecosystems like the Panama Bay as a nursery, says Catalina Pimiento of Swansea University, UK. Unusually small megalodon teeth from this region may be from juveniles, which stayed there until they were big enough to hunt in the open sea. Despite claims (including in a Discovery Channel programme), megalodons are unlikely to lurk in the sea today. They went extinct at least 2.6 million years ago, according to a study co-authored by Pimiento. One possible reason might have been the evolution of competitors like great white sharks and orcas, which left the megalodons struggling for food. The big reveal came in 2017, when Pimiento’s team discovered megalodon was just one victim of a hitherto-unknown extinction event. Among large marine animals, “36 per cent of all genera became extinct around the same time”, says Pimiento. The key seems to have been changing sea levels, which reduced the volume of the shallow, coastal waters – the megalodon’s nurseries. As for their survival today, there are two main lines of purported evidence, says Naish. Megalodon teeth were found and claimed to be just 10,000 years old, and there were a few sightings. Naish and his co-authors examined these for their book Cryptozoologicon and found them to be “tall tales or hoaxes, or they’re mistakes”. ■

Read We’ve got termites all wrong, says journalist Lisa Margonelli. Her book Underbug: An obsessive tale of termites and technology (Oneworld) has us learning from them as well as about them.

Visit On 25 August, London’s Whitechapel Gallery presents Surreal Science, in which objects from the Loudon Collection, relating to the study and teaching of life sciences, are transformed into surreal artworks (pictured).

Subscribe Your earliest memories may be fake, according to the latest Curiosity Daily podcast. Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer blend cultural trends, life hacks, science and tech to make you smarter “in just a few minutes” every day.

Watch Based on Ian McEwan’s novel, a new film called The Children Act is a canny exploration of truth, faith and medicine. Emma Thompson plays a judge who must decide whether to force a lifesaving blood transfusion on a teenage Jehovah’s Witness.

Listen Tune into CrowdScience: Is there life on Mars? on the BBC World Service at 8.30pm BST on 24 August and discover what the new Mars-bound missions hope to find.

18 August 2018 | NewScientist | 43

CULTURE

Scotland’s secret weapon Something is stirring on the tiny island of Arran, finds Simon Ings

NOBODY catches much fish around the island of Arran now: overfishing and pollution have hit wild populations hard. There are still plenty of fish, mind: not free-swimming, but cooped up in huge salmon farms that leach detritus, pesticides, antibiotics and plastic waste into the Firth of Clyde. And yet it is to Arran that Scotland’s coastal communities have turned to see a working vision of a cleaner, healthier, more productive ocean. Arran’s Lamlash Bay became a Community Marine Reserve in January 2008. Its No Take Zone is helping local maerl, a fragile pink coral-like algae, which provides a habitat for sponges, sea squirts, crabs, squat lobsters and scallops. The hope is that commercial species such as cod will use this area to recover their numbers, and then spill out into the surrounding sea. Meanwhile, the 280 square kilometres of the South Arran Marine Protected Area restricts trawling and dredging. A community development, it is the first of its kind, and has been taken up by the Scottish government with the creation of 30 more MPAs, covering some 20 per cent of the country’s seas. Restoring Scottish sea life after decades of pollution, dredging and overfishing is not going to be easy. “We’ve got a long way to go, just to get the environment back to the condition it was 50 years ago,” says Howard Wood, founder Film-maker Ed Webb-Ingall investigates the Arran shoreline 44 | NewScientist | 18 August 2018

of local advocacy organisation key environmental issues. COAST, the Community of Arran Its founder, Alice Sharp, Seabed Trust. Most ministers, he has commissioned two filmadds, are only interested in what makers, despite the lack of the environment provides or used cinemas in the north of Scotland. to provide – and how much can But the Shore festival does not be wrung from it in five years. lack technical backup: it has The exciting thing about Screenmachine, a large blue lorry COAST is the armoury it brings “Restoring Scottish sea life to the battle against the myopia after decades of pollution, of politicians. Glasgow and York dredging and overfishing universities are monitoring is not going to be easy“ Arran’s coastal waters, while COAST is working with local tourist organisations to that unpacks Transformer-like develop dive sites. Even more into a comfortable 80-seater impressively, it has won over surround-sound cinema. the local fishing community. Margaret Salmon’s Cladach Multimedia festival Shore: explores the shoreline of the How we see the sea is the latest Wester Ross Marine Protected addition to COAST’s arsenal. This Area and the community festival of coastal life was created bordering it in Ullapool. “Imagine in Arran and is now circling the somebody spending time in a Scottish coast, before it ends up town, then drifting down a beach in Edinburgh’s Dynamic Earth and into the sea. Margaret’s film is science theme park in April 2019. like a journey from one medium It is curated by Invisible Dust, a to another,” says Sharp. UK-wide organisation that pairs The second film, I Walk There scientists and artists to explore Every Day But Never Saw It That

Way by Ed Webb-Ingall, is a very different proposition as the first instalment in a community video project that aims to get Scotland’s disparate coastal communities talking to each other. It is an old idea, Webb-Ingall says. In the 1970s, the National Film Board of Canada invited film-maker Colin Low to visit Fogo Island, off Newfoundland, whose fishing community was collapsing. “Low made short films of a group on one part of the island, then showed it to another group.” Soon the different communities and interests had a conversation going, and a more sustainable fishing industry began to emerge. “The myth among film-makers is the ‘Fogo Process’ rejuvenated the island,” says Webb-Ingall. “Others reckon they were doing the work already!” Salmon is inclined to agree: “These precarious communities have experienced centuries of ebbs and flows. They’re a strong people.” ■

EOIN CAREY, COURTESY OF INVISIBLE DUST.

Shore: How we see the sea, a touring festival to April 2019

TENURE-TRACK ASSISTANT PROFESSOR PHYSICAL CHEMISTRY Faculty of Arts and Sciences Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology Position Description: Candidates are invited to apply for a tenure-track assistant professorship in physical chemistry, broadly defined, including experimental and theoretical research in areas such as but not limited to atomic and molecular physics, biophysical chemistry, condensed matter, quantum science and ultrafast spectroscopy. The appointment is expected to begin on July 1, 2019. The tenure-track professor will be responsible for teaching at the undergraduate and graduate levels. We are seeking candidates who have an outstanding research record and a strong commitment to undergraduate and graduate teaching. Basic Qualifications: Doctorate or terminal degree in chemistry or related discipline required by the time the appointment begins. Additional Qualifications: Demonstrated experience in teaching is desired. Special Instructions: Please submit the following materials through the ARIeS portal (https://academicpositions.harvard.edu/8371). Applications must be submitted no later than October 15, 2018. 1. Cover letter 2. Curriculum Vitae with publications list 3. Teaching statement (describing teaching approach and philosophy) 4. Outline of future research plans 5. Names and contact information of 3-5 references. Three letters of recommendation are required, and the application is complete only when all three letters have been received. 6. Selected publications Contact Information: Susan M. Kinsella, Search Administrator, Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University, 12 Oxford St., Cambridge, MA 02138. Phone: 617-496-4088. [email protected] Harvard is an equal opportunity employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status, gender identity, sexual orientation, pregnancy and pregnancy-related conditions, or any other characteristic protected by law.have been submitted.

Position Title: Assistant

Professor of Chemistry

Req # 03779

The Department of Chemistry at The University of Chicago invites applications for the position of Assistant Professor of Chemistry in all areas of chemistry. Applicants must apply online to the University of Chicago Academic Career website at http://tinyurl.com/y9yhvxg9 and upload a cover letter, a curriculum vitae with a list of publications, a succinct outline of research plans, and a one page teaching statement. In your cover letter, please specify one sub-discipline that best represents your research interests (inorganic, materials, organic, physical, and theoretical chemistry or chemical biology). In addition, three reference letters are required. At the time of hire the successful candidate must have completed HSS YLX\PYLTLU[Z MVY H 7O+ PU *OLTPZ[Y` VY H YLSH[LK ÄLSK Joint appointments with other departments are possible. Review of applications will begin on October 08, 2018 and ^PSSJVU[PU\L\U[PSHSSWVZP[PVUZHYLÄSSLK ;OL