August 27 - September 2, 2016 New Scientist

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SHADOW WORLD

The untouchable layer of reality all around us

GENETIC RECODE

Blueprint of life gets a total rewrite

TIME TWISTER

Quantum trick reverses cause and effect WEEKLY August 27 -September 2, 2016

BAD MEDICINE Why so much health advice turns out to be wrong S PE C I A L R E P OR T: PROX I M A B

WE’VE FOUND AN EARTH-LIKE PLANET AROUND OUR NEAREST STAR Should we go there?

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WHEN DARWIN MET MENDEL How genetics transformed evolution

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CONTENTS

Volume 231 No 3088

This issue online newscientist.com/issue/3088

Leaders

Analysis

5

16

Proxima b could be our far-future home. Medicine’s evidence problem is bad for society

News

Superexcryption

6

JASPER JAMES/PLAINPICTURE

Has the era of unhackable communication begun?

UPFRONT Drug-free IVF. NSA leaks. US goes for offshore wind. Luxury Arctic tourism 8 THIS WEEK Genome recode. Birdsong warns eggs of hot weather. Quantum weirdness confuses causality. Oldest jewellery in East Asia 14 IN BRIEF See-through mouse. Why you need sleep. Galaxy running out of gas. Jellyfish laser. Iceman’s fashion

On the cover

Analysis

8

28 Shadow world Untouchable reality 10 Genetic recode Blueprint of life rewritten 12 Time twister Quantum trick reverses cause and effect 34 Bad medicine Wrong health advice 39 Darwin meet Mendel How genetics transformed evolution

Earth-like planet spotted round nearest star Should we go there?

Cover image ESO/M. Kornmesser

16 Super-encryption Has the era of unhackable communication begun? 18 COMMENT The US must brace for bots and immortality. Imagining life on the exoplanet next door 19 INSIGHT Vitamins are an unworthy insurance policy

Technology 20 AI needs new computers. App to turn up whispers. Clickbait tweets are new phishing tool. Blockchain enables solar energy swap

Aperture 24 Blow-up rainbow at China’s Dead Sea

Features

Features

34

28 Shadow world The untouchable layer of reality all around us 32 PEOPLE Tim Nelson, dark force hunter 34 Misguided medicine (see left) 39 INSTANT EXPERT When Darwin met Mendel: How genetics transformed evolution

Bad medicine

MARTIN LEON BARRETO

Why so much health advice turns out to be wrong

Culture 44 Human gods Will our strange future be all about algorithms or voyages to inner space? 45 Clarke award A very British SF hopeful 46 Money, not The making of unselfish citizens

Coming next week… The metaphysics issue

How do I know I exist? What is reality made of? Why does anything exist? How science answers the deepest questions

Regulars 54 LETTERS Climate change is undeniable 56 FEEDBACK Black hawk up 57 THE LAST WORD Our lust for meat

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27 August 2016 | NewScientist | 3

Professor Dame Carol Robinson 2015 Laureate for United Kingdom

By Brigitte Lacombe

Science needs women

L’ORÉAL UNESCO AWARDS

Dame Carol Robinson, Professor of Chemistry at Oxford University, invented a ground-breaking method for studying how membrane proteins function, which play a critical role in the human body. Throughout the world, exceptional women are at the heart of major scientific advances. For 17 years, L’Oréal has been running the L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women In Science programme, honouring exceptional women from around the world. Over 2000 women from over 100 countries have received our support to continue to move science forward and inspire future generations. JOIN US ON FACEBOOK.COM/FORWOMENINSCIENCE

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Hello neighbour The planet next door is full of tantalising possibilities SPACE just got a new frontier. The discovery of a rocky planet orbiting our nearest star makes it hard to resist imagining boldly going there (see page 8). But while Captain Kirk and co could cover the 4.25 light years to Proxima b in hours, all we can do is strain our biggest telescopes to glean a few facts about our new neighbour. That is the down-to-earth reality. But discussions have inevitably turned to sending a probe. And why not? The planet is just about reachable; an existing private venture claims it can get tiny probes to Proxima b’s star system in just 20 years. Exciting and romantic as this idea is, it is too soon. Almost everything about the venture is

theoretical. Bringing it to fruition would cost billions; at present it has just $100 million. What’s more, there remains a possibility that the planet is a blip in the data. Even if it exists, there is no guarantee it is worth a visit. Studies with existing Earth-bound technology are needed to probe Proxima b’s true nature. That may still require huge investment. The next generation of observatories such as the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) may be able to image the planet, but only as a tiny blob. We may need something along the lines of the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope, which the 16-nation European Southern Observatory considered

Medicine for society’s ills THESE are hard times for believers in evidence-based policy-making. Almost every day brings fresh news of initiatives that fly in the face of facts, from the mooted return of grammar schools and badger culling in the UK to the deluded and dangerous fantasies of Donald Trump. New Scientist has long argued that political decisions should be based on demonstrable evidence,

and that randomised controlled trials (RCT) are the best way to gather that evidence. Put simply, you test one policy against another and see which one delivers the goods. So it is disappointing to report that medicine – the field that invented the RCT – often fails to live up to its own gold standard. Half of common practices are not supported by robust science.

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before opting to build the cheaper and less technically demanding E-ELT. With the prospect of seeing a nearby habitable solar system, now would be a good time to take a fresh look at the blueprints. Curiosity aside, spending big money on Proxima b may eventually become an existential requirement. In 5 billion years, the sun will begin to expand, eventually engulfing Earth. But Proxima b’s host star Proxima Centauri will shine on for a trillion years, basking the planet in its warm, inviting glow. If humans or our descendants are still around, we will need somewhere to move to. The discovery of Proxima b may be our first glimpse of an out-of-this-world future. ■

This has to change, and it is. Thanks to the efforts of an increasingly vociferous group of researchers, the medical establishment is becoming more disciplined about following where the facts lead (see page 34). Advocating evidence-based policy will probably always be a Sisyphean task. But if medicine gets its house in order – and, crucially, helps to spread the idea that evidence is the surest route to sound practice – the task may get a little easier. ■ 27 August 2016 | NewScientist | 5

ANDREW KELLY / REUTERS

UPFRONT

A second Snowden? WE ARE getting closer to unmasking the Shadow Brokers. Last week, the group put hacking tools from the National Security Agency up for auction, including security flaws in companies’ systems and remote access tools. There have been no serious bidders, but the documents have been confirmed as the real deal, raising the spectre of another whistleblower at the agency. Initially, the prime suspect was Russia, but this theory has now been downgraded. Certain naming conventions in the files point to scripts only accessible on a machine physically isolated from the network and therefore inaccessible to anyone not physically present in the NSA building. The idea that it was an accidental upload has also

been debunked, shifting the focus internally. However, it couldn’t have been Edward Snowden, pictured, as it looks like the tools were stolen around October 2013, five months after he fled to Hong Kong. On Monday, Shlomo Argamon at the Illinois Institute of Technology, analysed the broken English Shadow Brokers used to sell the tools, examining, for example, patterns of grammatical errors. He concluded that the author was a native English speaker trying to appear non-native. A bogus accent, in other words, but a pretty good attempt to cover it up. All of that would point to an NSA insider motivated to leak documents, but also to cover their own tracks to avoid a fate similar to Snowden’s.

US wind power

the capacity for 11,000 megawatts of electricity. The US already gets about 5 per cent of the electrical power it produces from inland wind energy – more than 70,000 megawatts in 2015. Wind tends to be stronger and more stable over the ocean, says Deepwater Wind CEO Jeffrey Grybowski. The ocean breeze is also generally strongest during the late afternoon and early evening, when electricity demand peaks. This make offshore areas an attractive location for future development, he says.

–Looking inward-

Cheaper IVF

growth factors that stimulate egg maturation into a single compound for use in IVM. This technique should also be quicker than standard IVF, which typically takes around a month per cycle of treatment. “With IVM, five days after a minor surgery you have an embryo ready to put back,” says Ledger. Gilchrist’s team presented the results this week at the Society for Reproductive Biology conference in Queensland. They plan to begin implanting embryos produced this way as part of a clinical trial next year.

FINALLY, a breakthrough for cheaper, faster, drug-free IVF. Conventional IVF usually involves taking hormone injections for around 10 days, to stimulate egg maturation. This

procedure is unpleasant, can cause serious side effects, and is also expensive. “About half of the cost of IVF is the drug cost,” says William Ledger at the University of New South Wales, Australia. An alternative is to remove a woman’s eggs while they are still immature and mature them in the lab before fertilising them. But this technique – called IVM – is less successful. As of last year, only around 400 babies worldwide had been born using this method. Now Ledger’s colleague, Robert Gilchrist, has found a way to increase the number of embryos produced by IVM by 50 per cent. He did this by combining two 6 | NewScientist | 27 August 2016

NASA/GFSC

“Five days after a minor surgery, you have an embryo ready to implant back in a woman”

THE turbines at the first offshore wind farm in the US were installed last week, and their blades are set to start generating power by the end of the year. The Block Island Wind Farm, developed by Deepwater Wind in Providence, Rhode Island, will be able to produce enough power for 17,000 homes – up to 30 megawatts. That’s much less than many of the offshore wind farms in the UK and Europe generate, some of which contain more than 100 turbines and together have

We’ve got STEREO NASA is back in touch with one of a pair of sun-watching spacecraft after nearly two years of silence. The twin STEREO spacecraft were launched in 2006 to study coronal mass ejections and were supposed to communicate with Earth every day. A mission extension then took the spacecraft to the opposite side of the sun from Earth, where they would be unable to radio back for –Contact restored– at least two months.

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US maternal deaths

Prior to this, mission operators had been testing a system for dealing with this long silence when, on 1 October 2014, the STEREO-B craft failed to respond. The team thinks it accidentally set itself spinning. This meant its antenna was not pointing at Earth and its solar panels stopped charging its batteries, as they were no longer facing the sun. Ever since, NASA has used its Deep Space Network to listen for signals from STEREO-B – and on 21 August, it succeeded. The next step is to diagnose what is wrong with the spacecraft and try to regain control.

PREGNANCY-related deaths increased by 26.6 per cent across most of the US in 15 years. The problem is particularly acute in Texas, where the maternal mortality rate nearly doubled in one year between 2011 and 2012. The figures come from a study of health data led by Marian MacDorman at the University of Maryland. The average maternal mortality rate in the US was 23.8 per 100,000 live births in 2014, although the researchers excluded Texas and California from this calculation (Obstetrics &

HRT cancer risk

60 SECONDS

Gynaecology, doi.org/bpn9). This compares with just 9 per 100,000 live births in the UK in 2015. Cuts to family planning and women’s health may be partly to blame for the sharp rise in Texas. A law that prompted some abortion clinics across the state to close may have made it harder for women whose health was at risk from pregnancy to get a termination. “When you see a decrease in services related to reproductive health, you’re certainly going to see adverse outcomes,” says Regina Davis Moss, at the American Public Health Association in Washington DC.

Luxury liner’s Arctic voyage advantage of the shorter, cheaper route between the two oceans. But it is the passage of the behemoth Crystal Serenity – 13 decks high, 250 metres long and weighing 68,870 tons – that has angered environmentalists as well as local Inuit communities, whose villages passengers will visit along the way. They are worried about damage to pristine environments, and the influx of people and rubbish. Crystal Cruises claims that its use of “ultra low-sulphur content marine gas oil” and slow speed minimises the ship’s carbon footprint. The waterways are not free of ice – and risk, so Serenity will be accompanied by an icebreaker and two ice-scouting helicopters.

CRYSTAL CRUISES PR

HORMONE replacement therapy MELTING ice has smoothed the path for luxury travel in the Arctic. As New may be even more likely to cause Scientist went to press, the high-end breast cancer than we thought. cruise liner Crystal Serenity was Breast cancer was first seven days into its eight-day journey associated with combined HRT through the once impassable treatment in 2003, when a large North-West Passage, en route US trial found that the risk of from Seward, Alaska, to New York. developing breast cancer was 1.26 With the capacity to carry 1070 times higher for women taking passengers and 655 crew, the HRT than those who weren’t. mega-liner is the largest vessel to The UK National Health Service embark on the perilous journey since advises that the therapy is likely receding sea ice first opened up the to cause five more cases of breast route in 2007. cancer than the 22 normally This summer’s sea ice is at the expected per 1000 postthird lowest level on record, finds menopausal women. the US National Snow and Ice Data But Michael Jones at the Center. The all-time low was recorded Institute of Cancer Research in in 2012, when 421 people made the London and his team think this same voyage. Last year, 17 ships took is an underestimate. Using data on 114,000 British women, they calculated that women who take HRT for five years have a 2.74 times higher risk of developing breast cancer than women who never take it (British Journal of Cancer, doi.org/bppd). This may mean the number of extra cases per 1000 women caused by HRT could be as high as 38. But this doesn’t necessarily mean the therapy, which prevents osteoporosis and seems to protect against heart disease, should be abandoned. “For each woman there will be a balance between –Navigating pristine waters– risks and benefits,” says Jones.

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Betting on LHC fail The latest run of the Large Hadron Collider has failed to find any new particles, and that means some physicists are settling old bets. Garrett Lisi, known as the “surfer physicist”, claimed $1000 from Nobel prizewinner Frank Wilczek. Meanwhile, 20 physicists each won a $100 bottle of cognac from 24 others at a meeting in Copenhagen.

Killer bagpipes A man has died from breathing in mould and fungi that accumulated in his bagpipes. He experienced breathlessness for 7 years before being diagnosed with chronic lung inflammation. Any wind instrument can carry spores, although regular cleaning should reduce the build-up.

Hunting the fishing cat The search is on to find the world’s rarest feline, the Javan fishing cat. Thought to be critically endangered, it lures fish by slapping the water with its partially webbed paws to mimic insects. Conservation group SPECIES hopes to track down the elusive creature in the first survey since the early 1990s.

Heartening news The number of Brits dying from heart disease and stroke has fallen from 341,000 in 1979 to 155,000 in 2014, probably because the conditions are more likely to be identified and treated. Between 2013 and 2014, heart disease and strokes accounted for 1.69 million hospital visits – 50,000 more than in 2010 to 2011.

Europe’s oldest tree? A 1075-year-old tree in northern Greece is said to be Europe’s oldest living thing. The Bosnian pine (Pinus heldreichii) was discovered by researchers from US and Europe, who dated it by counting the rings that are formed each year as the tree grows. It is one of more than a dozen trees of a similar age growing in the area.

27 August 2016 | NewScientist | 7

THIS WEEK

The Earth next door A newly discovered nearby planet shares some key traits with our own. Jacob Aron asks how much this brave new world is really like home signal and confirmation of the planet for almost four years.” The team says the planet is likely to be 30 per cent more massive than Earth, although it could be bigger than that. It orbits the star at a distance of 7.3 million kilometres – less than 5 per cent of the distance between Earth and the sun – making its year last just 11.2 Earth days. You might think such a tight orbit would scorch the surface of the planet. But Proxima Centauri is a small, red dwarf star and shines much less fiercely than the sun. Standing on the surface of the planet, you’d see the star as a dull red orb, about three times as large as the sun appears from Earth. As a result, the planet sits in its star’s habitable zone, and its surface temperature may be right for it to host liquid water. The planet is rocky, of a similar mass to Earth, and temperate – all conditions that are promising for life. But Proxima b isn’t a second Earth.

Close to home Proxima b orbits closer to its star than Mercury, our solar system’s innermost planet, does to the sun. But because Proxima Centauri is smaller and cooler than the sun, the planet could still host life

OUR SOLAR SYSTEM

PROXIMA SYSTEM PROXIMA CENTAURI

MERCURY’S ORBIT

PROXIMA B ORBIT

SUN

HABITABLE ZONE

ALPHA CENTAURI B

ALPHA CENTAURI A

PROXIMA CENTAURI

OORT CLOUD SUN Light years

2

8 | NewScientist | 27 August 2016

4

6

“The similarities end there,” says Anglada-Escudé. Even our knowledge of the surface temperature is fairly uncertain, ranging from a possible -33 °C to the high hundreds, depending on its atmosphere. That’s just the average temperature. However, Proxima b and its star are probably tidally

“The planet is rocky, about the same mass as Earth, and temperate – conditions that are promising for life” locked, so the same face of the planet always points towards the star. So one half of the globe is in perpetual day, the other in neverending night. “That’s not very Earth-like,” Anglada-Escudé says. Whether life could exist on such a planet also depends on the nature of its atmosphere, which we know nothing about. “The planet’s atmosphere, if it indeed exists, might be something completely different from what we are used to seeing in the solar system,” says Mikko Tuomi of the University of Hertfordshire in Hatfield, UK, who was the first to spot signs of the planet when studying archival data. “Before we know much more about the atmosphere of the planet and its physical properties, I would be very wary,” says Brice-Olivier Demory at the University of Cambridge. The atmosphere could be purely carbon dioxide, as Earth’s was before the emergence of life, and with a density that is anything from a Mars-like wisp to the choking clouds of Venus. A dense-enough atmosphere would trap heat from the star, and potentially distribute it to

ESO/M. KORNMESSER

IT’S the planet we’ve all been waiting for. Earlier this month, rumours swirled that astronomers had discovered an Earth-like planet orbiting the closest star to our own, the aptly named Proxima Centauri. Well, the planet’s real, but don’t pack your interstellar bags yet, because this alien world is probably far from homely. The planet – Proxima b – was discovered by astronomers who spent years looking for signs of the tiny gravitational tug exerted by a planet on its star, after spotting hints of such disruption in 2013. Proxima Centauri is 4.25 light years from Earth, making it slightly closer than the binary star system of Alpha Centauri, which the Proxima star is thought to loosely orbit. “We’ve been excited for a long time,” says Guillem AngladaEscudé of Queen Mary University of London, who led the discovery as part of a project called Pale Red Dot. “We’ve been hunting for this

Proxima b’s permanent dark side. “That would make it possible for the planet to retain oceans in their liquid form throughout the planet’s surface,” says Tuomi. “It would thus be a very different place from the Earth, but still ‘Earth-like’ in the sense that life could exist on its surface.” Although Proxima Centauri’s dimness provides the planet with a balmy climate, the star is prone to outbursts of harsh X-ray and ultraviolet radiation, which could damage any chance of life on the planet – X-rays hit the surface 400 times more often than those from the sun pummel Earth. A magnetic field and dense atmosphere could shield against the effect of these harmful rays. “The question is how well an atmosphere could deal with that,” says Ignas Snellen of the

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In this section ■ Genetic recode: Blueprint of life rewritten, page 10 ■ Quantum weirdness confuses causality, page 12 ■ Clickbait tweets are new phishing scam, page 21

SPYING ON THE NEIGHBOURS The top priority for learning more about Proxima b is determining whether it passes between us and its host star during its orbit. If it performs such a transit, we will be able to tell its size, and perhaps a whole lot more. “If a transit is found, we can use Hubble to look for features in the atmosphere of the planet,” says Brice-Olivier Demory at the University of Cambridge. “It could be done before the end of the year.” Analysing light filtered through the planet’s atmosphere during a transit is the only current way to learn about its composition, but for that, the stars must literally align. Unfortunately, the odds don’t look good – just a few per cent chance, given the small size of the star and its close-in, speedy orbit. Searches for transits have always come up short, says Ignas Snellen of the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. “We are already extremely lucky to find a planet bang in the middle of the habitable zone of our nearest neighbour,” he says. “If it was also transiting, that would be a little bit too much to ask for.”

If there’s no transit, we will have to wait for the construction of telescopes capable of separately resolving the planet and its star. One possibility is the James Webb Space Telescope, NASA’s replacement for Hubble, due to launch in 2018, but Snellen says even that might not be powerful enough. “This will be extremely difficult, and I’m not sure it will be possible.” Instead, we might need to sit tight for the European Extremely Large Telescope, due in 2024. This mighty 40-metre eye could perhaps gather a single pixel of light from Proxima b, says René Heller of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen, Germany, but watching how this changes over time could reveal a great deal. “We might be able to recover cloud patterns, even separate continents from oceans.” The desire to know more about Proxima b could also drive development of other projects. “This planet candidate is our best bet for the next few decades, maybe even forever, to directly image an Earth-mass planet in the habitable zone,” says Heller.

–Red sun in the morning – every day–

University of Leiden in the Netherlands. “I think the probability that this planet has life is larger than that of there being life on Mars.” Pinning down these details might take decades (see“Spying on the neighbours”, above right), because we don’t yet have telescopes powerful enough to see the planet directly.

No more mistakes Astronomers will still want to turn their scopes towards Proxima Centauri – to confirm that the planet is real, and avoid a repeat of an earlier embarrassment. Despite initial excitement, the claimed discovery in 2012 of a planet orbiting neighbouring Alpha Centauri B now looks to have been a mistake.

Tuomi and his colleagues have done everything they can to avoid that happening again. He first saw signs of Proxima b in 2013, when looking at data taken by the Very Large Telescope at Paranal Observatory in Chile between 2003 and 2009. “I spent weeks trying to make the signal go away, trying to show that it was caused by the star’s activity or pure measurement noise rather than a planet,” he says. But the team became increasingly convinced. To confirm the find, the group examined data from other telescopes and in January this year began the Pale Red Dot campaign, using another instrument in Chile – the HARPS planet-searcher at the La Silla Observatory. The observations lasted 60 nights, but the team was confident of a discovery after just

10 nights of data, says Tuomi. “It was as predicted by the previous observations. We knew this was going to become a year to remember for exoplanet science.” “I think this is a very solid thing,” says Snellen. “For me personally, this is the scientific discovery of the year, maybe of the decade.” The team also saw signs of a second potential planet around Proxima Centauri, a super-Earth with an orbit of between 60 and 500 days. If such an outer planet exists, it might be possible to observe it, says Tuomi. The discovery of Proxima b will be a boost for Breakthrough Starshot, an ambitious project announced earlier this year to send a small spacecraft capable of reaching the Alpha Centauri star system in just 20 years. Funded

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to the tune of $100 million by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, the mission will need billions more to actually happen. “I’m not sure it will work, but I think it’s worth trying,” says Anglada-Escudé. “It shows that there is a target we can go and visit,” says Avi Loeb of Harvard University, who heads the project’s scientific advisory board. “We are living in very exciting times now, and we are very fortunate that the nearest star happens to have a habitable planet.” For now, we can only dream of what awaits us on Proxima b. “When I think about it, I think something like Mars, as it is under a red sun. A planet with polar caps, reddish on the surface, maybe with a thin atmosphere,” says Anglada-Escudé. “But this is pure speculation.” ■ 27 August 2016 | NewScientist | 9

JUAN GARTNER/GETTY

THIS WEEK Baby it’s warm outside, birds sing to the eggs

Recoded life a step closer to reality Michael Le Page

IT’S not finished yet. But if and when it is, it will be the greatest feat of genetic engineering by far. A team in the US is part of the way towards recoding the E. coli bacterium to work with a genetic code that’s different from all other organisms on Earth. That means making more than 62,000 changes to its genome. “We take on projects other groups say are impossibly expensive – or just plain impossible,” says the team leader George Church at Harvard Medical School in Boston, for whom this is one step towards even more ambitious creations. The recoded E. coli could have all kinds of industrial uses. It should be resistant to all existing viruses, and capable of producing proteins unlike any found in nature. Normal proteins have the 20 natural amino acids as their building blocks. The recoded E. coli will make proteins with up to four additional artificial amino acids. It will be unable to grow unless fed one of those artificial amino acids, so it shouldn’t 10 | NewScientist | 27 August 2016

spread in the wild. Church says: “Biocontainment is our number one priority.” He ultimately wants to make farm animal and human stem cells that are resistant to all viruses. Such cells could be used for producing vaccines and tissues for transplants. It is very difficult to make people resistant to viruses, cancer and ageing, Church says, but we could create tissues and organs for transplant with these properties. But making animals resistant to viruses in the same way will be a far greater challenge. So what have they done so far? In a gene coding for a protein, each sequence of three DNA letters – a codon – either specifies an amino acid to be added to the chain next, or tells the proteinmaking machinery to stop when a protein is complete. There are four different DNA letters (A, T, G and C) so there are 64 different codons (AAA, AAT and so on). But because there are only 20 amino acids, there’s a lot of redundancy. For instance, the codons TAG, TAA and TGA all mean stop. If every TAG in a genome was

WHEN the weather is hot, zebra finches sing a special song to their eggs that preps them for the warmer climate. The song appears to affect the unborn chicks’ development, helping them to cope with heat and produce more chicks themselves – a strategy that may help the birds deal with global warming. Some species of birds call to their –A bug’s life: reloaded– unborn offspring, says Mylene Mariette at Deakin University in Victoria, Australia. Birds that hatch at altered to TAA or TGA, it wouldn’t an early stage, such as zebra finches, alter any of the protein recipes. were not thought to do this. But it would free up the TAG But they do – and they seem to codon, so it could be used for take this to a whole new level. When specifying an artificial amino Mariette and her colleague Katherine acid. Buchanan put microphones in 125 Now Church’s team has made zebra finch nests in an outdoor aviary, progress towards changing they noticed the parents sometimes seven codons in E. coli. The sang a specific song when they were team designed the genome on a alone with the eggs. They only did computer and then synthesised this in warm weather when their the DNA in short pieces around chicks were close to hatching. “It really 2000 DNA letters long. looked like they do it to communicate These short segments have with the egg,” Mariette says. been stitched together to make To see if they were listening, 87 longer segments 50,000 DNA the team incubated eggs in the lab, letters long. The final step will be playing the song to half of them to put them all together to create

a complete genome 4 million “The chicks that heard the letters long. But before they do that, Church song and grew up in hot nests, went on to produce and his team are checking all more chicks themselves” the recoded genes still work, by inserting these segments into a living bacterium and deleting the before returning the hatchlings to nests scattered around the aviary. equivalent sequence. Of the chicks that had been played Changing codons sometimes the song, those raised in nests in has lethal effects. This is to be hotter parts of the aviary weighed expected. But only 13 deadly flaws less than those in cooler nests and have been found in the 2200 those also in warmer nests but that genes checked so far – just over hadn’t heard the song. Smaller birds half the total – and these have all been fixed (Science, doi.org/bpkz). may shed body heat more easily or perhaps growing is more stressful When will it be finished? The during hot weather, Mariette says. betting pool among the team Female finches that had heard the ranges from 4 months to 4 years, song also produced more fledglings in says Church. Other research their first breeding season (Science, teams will be able to work on doi.org/bpkx). This could potentially the recoded E. coli. But firms will help them deal with global warming, have to pay to license it on a nonsays Mariette. Emily Benson ■ exclusive basis, Church says. ■

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KEN WELSH / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

THIS WEEK

Before, after and at the same time that event A happens before event B, or vice versa. But Rubino’s team have created a situation in which these seemingly contradictory scenarios are in superposition. “If you put together quantum mechanics and causal relations, you get a situation with no predefined causal order,”she says.

ALICE sent the present to Bob. No wait, Bob sent the present to Alice. Actually… they kind of sent it to each other at the same time. A new experiment shows how giftgiving gets confusing when you’re using quantum mechanics to muck about with causality. “We don’t have the words to You may have heard of the describe the nature of the double-slit experiment, in which a single particle fired at two small quantum realm bubbling beneath our reality” gaps appears to interfere with itself, as if it had passed through both slits at once. That happens Their set-up involves sending because, until it is measured by a photon through two optical a detector on the other side, the devices, labelled Alice and Bob, particle is in a quantum that transform the quantum state superposition of two states. In of the photon in different ways. some sense it takes both paths. So going through Alice, then Bob It’s difficult to get your head produces a different outcome around, but now Giulia Rubino from Bob, then Alice. and her team at the University of To picture how it works, Vienna in Austria have performed imagine the photon is a present a different kind of experiment intended for a third party. Alice that is even more mind-bending: likes to wrap presents, while Bob putting the order of events into a prefers a ribbon tied into a bow. superposition. If Alice gets the present first, she Normally, it’s easy for us to say wraps it and then passes it to Bob,

Ancient bling lifts lid on early east Asian craft WHAT tales jewellery can tell. Shell ornaments up to 42,000 years old, discovered in East Timor, are the oldest evidence yet that the first inhabitants of South-East Asia made such decorative items. The find also overturns old assumptions that these people were unsophisticated. The most ancient example of shell jewellery, found in Morocco, is 82,000 years old. As humans migrated out of Africa, similar jewellery began to appear in the European archaeological record from about 50,000 years ago. 12 | NewScientist | 27 August 2016

Humans moved into east Asia around the same time, but the area has yielded few examples of personal ornamentation of such antiquity. Some researchers had speculated that the early settlers abandoned crafts and so were less technologically advanced. Now Michelle Langley of the Australian National University in Canberra and her colleagues have made finds in the Jerimalai cave of East Timor that refute that idea. One was the shell of an Oliva sea snail, dating back 37,000 years (pictured right) – making it the oldest piece of jewellery ever found in the region. A hole in the top of the shell suggests that it was used in a necklace or bracelet. Marks on the side were

–Messing with causality

who puts a bow on. If Bob gets it first, Alice’s wrapping covers the bow, resulting in a differentlooking present. Things are more complicated for the photon, as Alice and Bob can perform different actions with a certain probability, so there are more than two possible outcomes. In the team’s experiment, a quantum switch controls which path the photon takes, and thus the order in which Alice and Bob act. To mess with causality, they place this switch itself in a

superposition, meaning that in a sense, both act first (arxiv.org/ abs/1608.01683). Of course, that’s not quite what’s happening, just as the particle in the double-slit experiment doesn’t truly go through both slits at once – it’s just we don’t have the language to describe the truly weird nature of the quantum realm that bubbles beneath our layer of reality. “Time itself might be undefined in these situations,” says team member Mateus Araújo. ■ MICHELLE LANGLEY, AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY

Jacob Aron

Nautilus pompilius shells, some of which could be up to 42,000 year ago. Found in the same cave, the artefacts show marks that point to drilling, flaking, grinding and staining with red ochre (Journal of Human Evolution, doi.org/bpk5). The team previously found 42,000-year-old tuna bones in the cave, suggesting that the inhabitants had also developed some of the oldest known deep-sea fishing methods. –Truly antique– “All of this together shows that the people who lived in Jerimalai were characteristic of rubbing against very well adapted to the coast – they adjacent shell beads, while traces of understood the environment, they red ochre may have come from body knew what was there and the best paint (PLoS One, doi.org/bpn7). way to get it,” says Langley. “It was not Separately, the team has published a cultural backwater as once thought.” details of ornaments made from Alice Klein ■

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ALI ERTÜRK

IN BRIEF Sleep makes way for new memories

Nerves glow green though transparent mini mouse BEHOLD a mouse’s nervous system, fluorescing through its completely see-through body. Ali Ertürk at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany, and his team have worked out how to make rodents transparent and shrink them by two-thirds, so that the whole animal can be viewed under a microscope and subjected to detailed laser scanning. The team used the technique on mice genetically engineered to make their nerve cells glow green, revealing the mouse’s entire nervous system in unprecedented detail (Nature Methods, DOI: 10.1038/

nmeth.3964). “You can track individual cells several centimetres long that reach from the brain right through to the tip of the spinal cord,” says Ertürk. The technique uses solvents to clear the body of its water, and much of its fat too, over three or four days. This leaves the remaining tissue and bones transparent, enabling much clearer, crisper microscope images. The researchers have already scaled the technique up for rats, which are 10 times larger than mice. “It might be possible with larger animals, such as small monkeys, and possibly with a whole human brain for the first time in the near future,” says Ertürk. The team hopes to uncover the neural connections in healthy people, and to show how conditions like Alzheimer’s disease or multiple sclerosis affect the brain.

Iceman clad in clothes of many animals ANTI-FUR groups, look away now. Ötzi, the 5300-year-old iceman found in the Alps, wore clothes made from several animal species, both domestic and wild. The clothes come from at least five different mammals – cattle, sheep, goats, brown bears and roe deer – according to an analysis by Niall O’Sullivan at University College Dublin, Ireland, and his colleagues. 14 | NewScientist | 27 August 2016

The team sequenced the mitochondrial genomes of leather fragments from the iceman’s clothes and quiver, enabling them to identify the source of each. The quiver was made from roe deer and the hat from brown bear. The coat was stitched together from a combination of at least four hides from two species: goats and sheep. The leggings were made of goat leather, and

the loincloth was sheep leather. All this supports the idea that Copper Age people looked for specific attributes in materials when making their clothing (Scientific Reports, doi.org/bphr). Since the iceman had some tools, it is quite likely that he hunted the animals and mended the clothes by himself, says team member Frank Maixner at the EURAC Institute for Mummies and the Iceman in Bozen-Bolzano, Italy.

THIS is why you feel so awful after a bad night’s sleep – your brain is jammed with yesterday’s news. Christoph Nissen at the University Medical Center in Freiburg, Germany, and his team examined the brains of 20 people after they’d slept well, and after a night of disruption. They found that, after a bad night’s sleep, people had higher levels of theta brainwaves, and it was easier to stimulate their brains using magnetic pulses (Nature Communications, DOI: 10.1038/ncomms12455). These are both signs of stronger connectivity between neurons. The findings support the theory that sleep serves to weaken memory connections, making way for new ones. “Without this synaptic downscaling, the brain loses the capacity to form novel connections, impairing the encoding of novel memories,” says Nissen.

The killer lion with primate elbows IT WASN’T something you’d want to bump into in the dark. The extinct marsupial lion (Thylacoleo carnifex) had sharp teeth, crushing jaws, and primate-like forearms for slashing at prey with large, retractable thumb claws. It could kill animals much larger than itself, including prehistoric kangaroos. Borja Figueirido at the University of Malaga in Spain and his team say the lion’s elbows were unlike those of big cats. Instead, they were more like those of treeliving animals with manoeuvrable forearms, like primates and sloths (Paleobiology, doi.org/bpj8). The lion might have used those forelimbs to clamp down on a victim’s throat, says Chris Johnson at the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Australia.

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NASA,ESA,HUBBLE HERITAGE TEAM STSCI/AURA

AN EXUBERANT galaxy is running on empty, consuming gas so fast that it may stop forming stars in just 8 million years – the blink of an eye, cosmically speaking. M82 is one of the nearest “starburst” galaxies, lying just 12 million light years away. It’s much smaller than the Milky Way, but spawns far more stars each year. Now John Chisholm at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and Satoki Matsushita at Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan, have taken a hard look at the galaxy to see whether it can keep it up. Their conclusion: it can’t. The team used radio observations to quantify how much gas M82 acquires from its surroundings, and how much gas its stars blow out when they explode. The numbers are bleak. Each year, M82 takes in 3.5 solar masses of new gas. We already knew that it converts 13 solar masses of molecular gas into stars each year, and the team now finds that it’s losing another 17 solar masses via outflows. At this rate, M82 will probably run out of molecular gas in just 8 million years (arxiv.org/abs/1608.00974). However, the galaxy may be able to buy itself time if it can convert some of its abundant atomic gas, which is not dense enough to make stars, into a molecular form.

Proteins from jellyfish light up unconventional laser JELLYFISH could take the sting out of lasers. Molecules from the gelatinous marine animal may help make lasers that can map cells without damaging tissue. A type of laser called a polariton laser works by passing photons back and forth between excited molecules. Unlike in conventional lasers, the photons are released and reabsorbed within the device before zooming out as laser light. These devices can use less energy, so in theory are less destructive to living tissue. But most only work at extremely low

temperatures, and the ones that work at room temperature have light-emitting molecules that sit too close together and so interfere with each other. So Malte Gather at the University of St Andrews, UK, and his colleagues turned to barrel-shaped fluorescent proteins engineered from jellyfish DNA. Each protein’s cylindrical shell encloses a component that emits light and keeps these molecules from getting too cosy. Gather’s team sandwiched a thin film of the protein between

two mirrors, and activated it with a pulse of blue light from an external laser (Science Advances, doi.org/bpk4). The laser could some day be embedded within cells and used like a beacon to track them. This would be safer than embedding lasers based on conventional semiconductors, which can be poisonous. “You can look at the light and say, ‘Aha, this is this cell, because the laser light it emits has this particular wavelength’,” says Gather. CYRIL RUOSO/MINDEN PICTURES

Hyper galaxy is running on fumes

Volcanic debris crossed Australia IT’S a blast from the past. Some 100 million years ago, the east coast of Australia was lined by volcanoes that were so explosive they could shoot sand-sized particles a distance of 2300 kilometres – all the way across to the west coast. Milo Barham at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia, and his colleagues were drilling beneath the Nullarbor plain in a remote part of the state when they discovered sand-sized zircon crystals that did not match any of the region’s typical rock compositions. But the crystals did match volcanic rock in the Whitsundays area on the north-east coast, in age and geochemical make-up. “We didn’t find anything else from the east coast – just these very distinctive grains,” says Barham. “Initially, we thought there might be some volcanism in Western Australia, but we couldn’t find any evidence.” The finding points to the sheer force of the east coast volcanoes, says Barham. The eruptions would have been tens to hundreds of times more powerful than any documented in human history (Geology, doi.org/bphq).

Bunnies fuelled ancient Mexican city THE trade in rabbits may have helped power an advanced ancient economy. The ancient city of Teotihuacan in central Mexico flourished between the 1st century AD and AD 550. With about 100,000 inhabitants, it was the largest urban centre in the Americas at the time, of a similar sophistication to Alexandria and Rome. But unlike other civilisations, its population didn’t appear to have close relationships with animals. Now it seems that cottontails and jack rabbits may have sustained the city as a reliable source of meat and fur. Linda Manzanilla at the National

Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City and colleagues have uncovered a compound featuring a stone rabbit sculpture. Rooms were littered with rabbit bones and obsidian blades for butchering and scraping skins. The remains of baby rabbits and a low-walled pen-like room indicate that the inhabitants were breeding them, Manzanilla says. Bone analysis showed that up to 74 per cent of the rabbits’ diet came from humangrown foods rather than wild plants, which also suggests they were farmed (PLoS One, doi.org/bpht).

27 August 2016 | NewScientist | 15

ANALYSIS SUPER-ENCRYPTION

A quantum of privacy HAS the era of unhackable global communication begun? Last week, the world’s first quantum communications satellite blasted into orbit from China’s Gobi desert. Known as the Quantum Science Satellite (QUESS), it is Sputnik for the ultra-paranoid. The mission will test a way of transmitting impenetrable messages across vast distances. If successful, the next decade could see a boom in quantum satellites, resulting in a secure network that will protect its users from even the most savvy eavesdroppers. In an age of cyberwarfare, WikiLeaks and state-sponsored hacks, it’s easy to see the lure of a truly private way to talk to each other – something existing infrastructure just can’t ensure. The new satellite will make its home among the thousands of communications spacecraft that already float in low Earth orbit, pumping out multiple TV

channels and enabling agree a stream of 0s and 1s that international phone calls. But form a secure code or key, which signals beamed from regular can be used to encrypt data sent satellites to the ground via radio via conventional means – over the or microwaves can be intercepted internet or through an ordinary by anyone with the necessary communications satellite. receiving equipment. To get Measuring a quantum object around this, signals are often disturbs its state, so any attempts encrypted. Trouble is, encryption by an eavesdropper to intercept a can be cracked – that’s how photon will be detected and the satellite TV pirates are able to “If the first is a success, watch channels for free. a quantum constellation QUESS is different. It uses a of satellites could provide technique called quantum key global coverage” distribution to encrypt signals. The laws of quantum mechanics are such that they guarantee the key discarded, so there is no risk of message is secure. So if done being hacked (see diagram, below). properly, signals can’t be hacked. Quantum key distribution It’s a bold claim, but one has already been rolled out on backed up by hard science. fibre-optic networks in the US, Quantum key distribution Europe and China, but these are works by transmitting particles limited to just a few hundred of light called photons prepared kilometres – any greater and the in a particular quantum state. light signals become too faint. By measuring these states, the Photons sent through space receiver on the other end can last longer, and QUESS will extend the reach of quantum key distribution even farther by Eavesdroppers thwarted exploiting the quantum property of entanglement, which links the Quantum key distribution allows users to agree on a way of transmitting their data without the worry that someone is listening in quantum states of two particles even when they are separated. 1 Sender instructs satellite to generate The satellite will first test 1 2 entangled photons in particular communications between quantum states ground stations 1200 kilometres apart in China, says Jian-Wei Pan 2 of the University of Science and 2 Photons are beamed to both Technology of China in Hefei. ground stations If successful, his team will look to establish a secure connection 3 Sender and receiver compare the with collaborators in Austria, quantum states of the photons to then in Italy and Germany, before check if they have been intercepted. creating “a quantum constellation If not they use the photons to create for global coverage”, says Pan. a code to encrypt the data 3 Pan’s efforts are likely to spur other launches. “You could 4 Encrypted data can then be sent dream of a network of satellites 4 securely via conventional means providing secure keys,” says 10100010011101011100 Harald Weinfurter of the Ludwig

16 | NewScientist | 27 August 2016

JASPER JAMES/PLAINPICTURE

The launch of a Chinese quantum communication satellite could usher in age of total digital privacy for all, says Jacob Aron

Maximilian University of Munich, Germany. “Within some 10 years we could have a working network.” Given the need for specialised receivers to pick up the faint photon signals, it’s unlikely you or I will be tapping directly into this network right away. Ordinary encryption methods based on difficult mathematical problems work fine most of the time, and underpin everyday activities like buying things online, checking your bank balance or sending WhatsApp messages. The first users of quantum key distribution will therefore be the military, governments and banks wanting security for their most precious data. “With the budget that banks have, it’s a minor investment,” says Weinfurter. Another attraction of quantum key distribution is that it offers

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QUESS weighs 600 kilograms and is equipped to run experiments that will push quantum science to its limits (see “Testing times for quantum theory”, right). “If you only want to do secure communication, we can make much smaller and cheaper

“Quantum communication would prevent things like the NSA tapping into Google’s fibre-optic cables”

protection against the march of progress. As computers get faster, there’s no guarantee that a secure message sent today won’t eventually become crackable. And if we ever develop large-scale quantum computers, many of today’s encryption techniques will be busted wide open.

Future proof If the signal has been encrypted using a quantum satellite, these issues go away. “While quantum key distribution is considered difficult to implement, it does provide very high, long-term security for communications,” says Thomas Jennewein at the University of Waterloo, Canada. Such a network could change the rules of financial fraud and cyberwarfare. Thanks to the

satellites,” says Weinfurter. A team at the Centre for Quantum Technologies in Singapore is working to put quantum key distribution equipment on CubeSats – small spacecraft that cost a fraction of their larger cousins to build and launch. The team launched its first test photon generators earlier this year, and will be watching how the Chinese mission aims photons at a ground station from a fast-moving satellite, says team member Alexander Ling. And Jennewein and his colleagues are working on a quantum CubeSat for the Canadian Space Agency, but –I’d like anonymity, please- haven’t yet got full funding. QUESS could change that, he says. Snowden revelations, we know Future satellites may go higher that the US National Security as well as smaller. QUESS is about Agency and its spying partners 500 kilometres up, and whizzes have tapped into the fibre-optic around the globe every networks of firms like Yahoo and 90 minutes, so can be in contact Google, allowing them to slurp up with ground stations for only a data at will. With quantum key short period of time. Christoph distribution, that data would be Marquardt of the Max Planck encrypted in an unbreakable form. Institute for the Science of Light And much like the internet in Erlangen, Germany, thinks began as a military tool, there’s quantum satellites should be no reason why this shouldn’t placed 36,000 kilometres up, in become the default encryption geostationary orbit, so they are of communications for everyone above the same point on the in a few decades. Firms may start ground at all times and thus offering customers ultimate always in contact. His team has security as a premium product, shown that this is technically a move Apple has already made and economically feasible. with ordinary encryption after Whatever its form, the quantum its battle against the FBI. network is coming soon. “Five For this to happen, a quantum years ago, I wouldn’t have thought network will have to be made up it would be working so fast,” says of satellites designed differently Marquardt. “Now, it’s likely in the to China’s pioneering effort. next 10 or 15 years.” ■

TESTING TIMES FOR QUANTUM THEORY The laws of quantum mechanics govern how atoms and sub-atomic particles behave. Although it is one of our most successful theories, we still don’t know whether its predictions hold in some situations – such as over very long distances or beyond Earth’s gravitational pull. As well as showcasing the feasibility of a secure global communications network (see main story), China’s satellite QUESS will put quantum mechanics to the test. ENTANGLEMENT The satellite is equipped with a crystal that produces entangled photons. If the theory holds, their quantum states should remain intertwined even when they are physically separated. QUESS will fire one of these photons at a ground station in Delingha, China, and another to a station in Lijiang, more than 1200 kilometres away. If all goes to plan, measuring the state of one photon will instantly put the other in the opposite state, despite the vast separation. The record for demonstrating entanglement currently stands at 143 kilometres, the distance between the Canary Islands of La Palma and Tenerife, where such experiments are often done thanks to the still atmosphere. TELEPORTATION The QUESS team will perform quantum teleportation over 1000 kilometres between the satellite and a ground station, which involves transferring or “teleporting” the quantum state of one photon to another. Although this happens instantly, the result is only apparent once the satellite and ground stations have communicated their readings via normal channels, so this can’t send messages faster than light. HIDDEN VARIABLES The team will also carry out what’s known as a Bell test – essentially, a statistical check that reality must be based on quantum mechanics, and not some other hidden theory. 27 August 2016 | NewScientist | 17

COMMENT

Political machines It is time to embrace technology’s power to transform us, says Zoltan Istvan, the transhumanist who would be US president SOME scientists question the value of mixing politics with science. Not so at the US Transhumanist Party. We’re sick and tired of seeing career politicians – nearly half of them lawyers – control national science agendas and budgets. We want passionate pro-science politicians to determine scientific policy, spending and research ethics in our nation. So we decided to get involved ourselves. I formed the US party, the first of its kind, in October 2014. There are now others around the globe. Our motto is: “Putting science, medicine, and technology at the forefront of US politics.” I am the party’s 2016 presidential candidate. My campaign’s main job is to set out science and technology policy from a pro-innovation point of view – not one shaped by religion, ethnicity, culture or

history. I think the world’s problems can be best solved by scientific or technological solutions. Our top pledge is to reduce the size of the US military and spend the money on science and medical research. We are also trying to spread awareness of the increasing pace at which science and technology are changing our world – from gene editing to robots taking jobs. And the near future will be even more dramatic: driverless cars, artificial hearts, artificial wombs, virtual-reality sex, and telepathy via mind-reading headsets. Also coming soon or already here are bionic arms, exoskeleton suits, artificial intelligence, brain implants and designer babies. These technologies will change the world and how we see ourselves. Is society ready for this? Transhumanism and my political party say yes. But the wider US –

New world, to order An earthlike planet found 4 light years away fires the imagination, says Stephen Baxter IN MY sci-fi novel Proxima I imagined a habitable planet orbiting the red dwarf Proxima Centauri – the nearest star to our solar system. I called it Per Ardua. Fiction has now turned into partial fact with the discovery of a planet, Proxima b, in this very spot by a team led by Guillem Anglada-Escudé at Queen Mary 18 | NewScientist | 27 August 2016

atmosphere could transport heat around such a planet and, together with a magnetic field, might shield it from radiation. Proxima b is 7.3 million kilometres from its star, slightly further out than Per Ardua; both are in the habitable zone. I gave Per Ardua a mass 8 per cent less than Earth’s; Proxima b’s is 30 per cent higher. This is pretty much all that we know about Proxima b so far, but it is fun to speculate further. Could it have life like Per Ardua’s?

University of London (see page 8). Until recently we thought that no such planet could be habitable because it must be tidally locked – keeping the same face pointing at its star – leading to extremes of temperature. A flood of exoplanet “The real thrill of finding Proxima b is that suddenly discoveries is revising that view. our galaxy looks much Proxima was partially inspired by the suggestion that even a thin more hospitable”

With one face permanently turned to Proxima Centauri, Per Ardua’s “substellar point”, directly beneath the star, is a focus of climate patterns. Around it lie concentric bands of types of life, adapted to set levels of starlight, with analogues of tropical forest at the centre, and temperate forest and taiga further out. From space the planet looks like an archery target broken up across oceans. Life on Per Ardua exploits its peculiar conditions. One plant spreads tough photosynthesising sheets to stifle competitors. The terminator zone between permanent light and dark has sunlit mountains and valleys of

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Zoltan Istvan is a writer and philosopher and Transhumanist Party candidate in the US presidential election

perpetual darkness; the “light islands” are evolutionary labs, like isolated islands on Earth. Solar flares inflict long-term climate change, like our ice ages, to which life has to adapt. I was thrilled when AngladaEscudé told me that my climate description was plausible. But the real thrill of finding Proxima b is that since red dwarfs are the most numerous stars and much more long-lived than the sun, our galaxy suddenly looks much more hospitable. ■ Stephen Baxter is author of novels including Proxima (Gollancz). He is a British Interplanetary Society fellow

INSIGHT Dietary supplements

FOTOGRAFIABASICA/GETTY

with its roughly 75 per cent Christian population – may not be. They need to know that the transhumanist age is arriving. Not only has transhumanism become a leading buzzword for a new generation pondering the significance of merging with machines, but transhumanistthemed columns and discussion are now appearing in major media. And Google has hired futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil as lead engineer to work on artificial intelligence, while Craig Venter’s genome sequencing start-up in San Diego, California, has longevity in its sights. With science and technology as our tools, the human species can seek out and challenge the nature of its being and place in the universe. That will almost certainly mean the end of human death by mid-century if governments allow the science and medicine to develop. It is likely to mean the transformation of the species into something with tech built directly into it. My campaign and party are trying to lead the way, so that humanity becomes a scienceinspired species. ■

–A daily top-up could even do harm–

Dementialinkcasts doubtoncalciumpills Clare Wilson

TAKING a daily vitamin or mineral supplement is widely seen as a common-sense way of looking after yourself – a kind of insurance, like wearing a seat belt. But evidence is growing that it might not be such a healthy habit after all. The latest finding is that calcium supplements, taken by many women after the menopause to strengthen bones, are linked to dementia. Among women who have had a stroke, taking calcium was associated with a seven-fold rise in the number who went on to have dementia (Neurology, doi.org/bpk3). Although the finding came from a trial that was not randomised, and so is not the most robust type of medical evidence, the results are striking. What’s more, they come on the heels of a previous randomised trial that found a link between calcium supplements and a modestly higher risk of heart attacks. It seems caution over calcium is indeed warranted. Team member Silke Kern at the Sahlgrenska Academy Institute of Neuroscience and Physiology in

Gothenburg, Sweden, says that taking a calcium pill triggers a rapid surge in the mineral’s levels in the blood, which you don’t get from calcium in food. Such a spike could make harmful blood clots more likely to form. That could, in turn, trigger heart attacks or harm brain cells, resulting in a higher incidence of dementia, she says. If the association is confirmed, women could face a horrible dilemma: increased dementia risk versus increased risk of fatal fractures. But there are wider lessons here. The importance of vitamins and minerals largely emerged in the last

“Trials show that people taking antioxidants have a slightly higher death rate than those who don’t” century through deficiency diseases seen in the poor. It was tempting to conclude that even well-fed individuals might benefit from taking supplements, “to be on the safe side”. Today, about two-thirds of people in the US take a daily supplement. The adverts for such pills can be slick, often featuring celebrities testifying their

benefits, but evidence of these is remarkably lacking. In the US and UK, there is, shamefully, no need for supplement-makers to carry out trials showing their products work. And as with calcium, rather than just failing to do good, some supplements may even be harmful. For instance, many people like taking antioxidants – including the vitamins A, C and E, and the mineral selenium – in the belief that they ward off cancer by blocking damaging oxidising compounds produced by metabolism. But trials show that those taking antioxidants have a slightly higher death rate than those who don’t. The explanation for this finding is unclear. It could be because we have misunderstood how antioxidants work, or because plants contain thousands of protective chemicals, and taking a few in isolation just doesn’t have the same benefits. In the case of calcium, it isn’t too hard to get all we need from natural sources. The UK recommended intake of 700 milligrams a day could be met by consuming, for instance, 300 millilitres of milk, a 100-gram pot of yogurt and a small 30-gram wedge of cheese. With the exception of folic acid, which trials have shown prevents birth defects if taken before and during pregnancy, many dieticians now say that supplements are no substitute for a healthy and varied diet. There’s no better health insurance than that. ■ 27 August 2016 | NewScientist | 19

TECHNOLOGY

Making light work of AI The artificial intelligence boom means silicon chips are nearing the end of the line, says Hal Hodson. It’s time to rethink how computers learn SILICON has been making our computers work for almost half a century. Whether designed for graphics or number crunching, all information processing is done using a million-strong horde of tiny logic gates made from element number 14. But silicon’s time may soon be up. Moore’s law – the prophecy which dictates that the number of silicon transistors on microprocessors doubles every two years – is grinding to a halt because there is a limit to how many can be squeezed on a chip. The machine-learning boom is another problem. The amount of energy silicon-based computers use is set to soar as they crunch more of the massive data sets that algorithms in this field require. The Semiconductor Industry Association estimates that, on current trends, computing’s energy demands will outstrip the world’s total energy supply by 2040. So research groups all over the world are building alternative systems that can handle large amounts of data without using silicon. All of them strive to be smaller and more power efficient than existing chips.

team has harnessed these oscillations to do basic computations. Scaled up, Grollier believes the technology could recognise patterns far faster than existing techniques. It would also be less powerhungry. The magnetic autooscillators Grollier works with could use 100 times less power than their silicon counterparts. They can be 10,000 times smaller too, she says. Igor Carron, who launched Paris-based start-up LightOn in December, has another alternative to silicon chips: light.

Julie Grollier leads a group at the UMPhy lab near Paris that looks at how nanodevices can be engineered to work more like the human brain. Her team uses tiny magnetic particles for computation, specifically pattern recognition. When magnetic particles are really small they become unstable and their magnetic fields start to oscillate wildly. By applying a current, the 20 | NewScientist | 27 August 2016

VETTA/GETTY

Unstable computing

Carron won’t say too much about how his planned LightOn computers will work, but they will have an optical system that processes bulky and unwieldy data sets so machine learning algorithms can deal with them more easily. It does this using a mathematical technique called random projection. This method has been known about since 1984, but has always involved too many

computations for silicon chips to handle. Now, Carron and his colleagues are working on a way to do the whole operation with light. What will these new ways of processing and learning from data make possible? Carron thinks machines that can learn without needing bulky processors will allow wearable computing to take off. They could also make the emerging “internet of things” – where computers are built into “On current trends, ordinary objects – far more computing’s energy powerful. These objects would demands could outstrip no longer need to funnel data total supply by 2040” back and forth to data centres for processing. Instead, they will be able to do it on the spot. Devices such as Grollier’s and Carron’s aren’t the only ones taking an alternative approach to computation. A group at Stanford University in California has built a chip containing 178 transistors out of carbon nanotubes, whose electrical properties make them more efficient switches than silicon transistors. And earlier this year, researchers at Ben-Gurion University in Israel and the Georgia Institute of Technology used DNA to build the world’s smallest diode, an electronic component used in computers. For the time being, high-power silicon computers that handle massive amounts of data are still making huge gains in machine learning. But that exponential growth cannot continue forever. To really tap into and learn from all the world’s data, we will need learning machines in every pocket. Companies such as Facebook and Google are barely scratching the surface. “There’s a huge haul of data banging on their door without them being able to –Silicon chips are too energy-hungry– make sense of it,” says Carron. ■

For more technology stories, visit newscientist.com/technology

PSST! Did you hear the news? A new program can convert whispers into normal-sounding speech. Whispering is useful if you don’t want to be overheard, but it’s also unavoidable if your vocal cords are damaged. So an app that turns whispered words into full speech could be invaluable. One hurdle is that whispering cannot produce all the tones achieved by our vocal cords. That missing ingredient means it doesn’t have an actual pitch. Any app that miscalculates the pitch can muddle the message. In English, pitch makes the difference between sounding earnest and sarcastic. In Japanese, it changes the meaning of words, for example turning “good” into “drunkenness”. For this reason, whisperers instinctively try to indicate the pitch in other ways, for example by changing the shape of their mouth, helping listeners guess the intended pitch. Hideaki Konno and his colleagues at Hokkaido University of Education in Japan played sounds with just one frequency to five people and asked them to whisper at those pitches. This established a link between their

“A miscalculated pitch can muddle the message. It can change the Japanese word ‘good’ to ‘drunkenness’” whispers and intended pitch (Speech Communication, doi.org/bn8z). From that, the team built a pitch predictor. The algorithm analysed whispered Japanese words for which pitch changes meaning, then added the missing frequency. Eight people who listened to the synthesised words grasped the intended meaning 72 per cent of the time. Such a system could eventually run on a smartphone, says Konno. But for that to happen, the algorithm must become good enough to reconstruct complete sentences. Bas den Hond ■

CHRIS BATSON / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Whisper tech turns secrets into normal speech

–Don’t trust everything you see–

Beware tweets that lure clicks to steal info CAREFUL of that clickbait. Phishing, where crooks try to trick people into clicking links to malware or sites that steal your personal information, is common on social networks like Twitter. Now a machine learning system that reads our past tweets to craft personalised traps could make clicking links that show up in your feed even riskier. Some criminals take the trouble to tailor their phishing tweets to specific individuals by hand – known as spearphishing. For example, @NatWest_HelpTC is a scam account that responds to anyone tweeting a customer service question at NatWest Bank’s real Twitter account. The impostors direct users to a fake NatWest site in an attempt to harvest bank login details. A NatWest spokesperson told New Scientist that attacks like this have plagued them – and other companies – for a while now. Success rates for spearphishing are estimated to be around 45 per cent, but it’s also time consuming.

“It is a very labour intensive way for fraudsters to phish,” says the spokesperson. Banks shouldn’t count on the difficulty of phishing protecting their customers though – researchers at Baltimore security company Zerofox have shown that spearphishing can be done automatically. By mining people’s past Twitter activity, their machine learning system first hunts down a target. It looks for high-profile or wellconnected users – such as those who list a job title like recruiter or CEO in their profile – and people who are particularly active. Zerofox’s Philip Tully says they also targeted people by looking at the hashtags they used in their tweets, as well as what the person likes to retweet and the times they are most likely to be using Twitter. Using this information, the algorithm generates tweets that the individual is likely to click on – personalised clickbait. The team tested the system on 90 people and managed to trick

more than two-thirds of them into clicking the link. The team thinks that the approach could reach far more people with a greater success rate than handcrafted approaches. They also say the system would work on other social media sites, including Facebook. The work was presented at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas earlier this month. But it’s not just about clicks. A recent study from Columbia University found that 60 per cent of people don’t click on or read the links they retweet. Tully says that’s a boon for the technique his team is warning about – nolook retweeters are effectively laundering the dodgy tweets, lending them the sheen of legitimacy and making it more likely that others will click. What can we do to avoid falling into this trap? For a start, we should think twice before clicking. “If that tweet is coming from someone I don’t follow, maybe I shouldn’t trust them,” says Matt Devost at cybersecurity firm FusionX in Washington DC. We should also keep our devices updated. “If I have an up-to-date browser on an up-to-date operating system, the probability of infection from a malicious link is minimal,” he says. Sally Adee ■ 27 August 2016 | NewScientist | 21

TECHNOLOGY

ONE PER CENT

Blockchain aids solar sales Energy companies are about to be shaken up, reports Aviva Rutkin computers to track their usage. Homeowners can decide how much excess solar energy to sell and to whom, with each sale logged on the blockchain. This first two-month trial is a practice run to ensure the technology works; no energy will actually be traded. Real deployments are scheduled for next year in Perth and Victoria. Green says she was inspired by a similar project in Brooklyn called TransActive Grid. More than 100 buildings have been enrolled in that project, says LO3, the company behind the project. LO3 is looking into starting trials in Europe and Africa. “I think that there are going to be hundreds of blockchain energy companies springing up in the next couple of years,” says Lawrence Orsini, founder of LO3 Energy. “It’s going to be a really interesting time in the energy space.” ■

Uber’s driverless fleet Driverless cars are coming up fast. Last week, Uber announced that it would make a fleet of driverless cars available to riders in Pittsburgh later this year. For now, the cars will come with two human supervisors in the front seats, and they will be available through Uber’s standard app. Rides in the autonomous cars – customised Volvo XC90s – will be free.

$25,000 The total cost to build a “small starter house kitted out with state-of-theart eco features”, according to an open-source house-building toolkit released by the Open Building Institute.

Twitter harassment Finally! Twitter – ground zero for online harassment – has released a tool that should help curb the problem. Previously available only to verified users, everyone can now turn on a “quality filter”, which hides tweets that are abusive or spam from their timeline. Tweeters can also choose to hide all replies that don’t come from accounts that they follow. The new options are designed to help people avoid abuse from anonymous accounts.

–Who should they sell it to?– 22 | NewScientist | 27 August 2016

AP PHOTO/JARED WICKERMAN

WILLIAM ROBERTSON/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

THE blockchain is coming to an array of real-world industries. Australia’s electricity grid. On Residents on the west coast of 25 August, a group of neighbours Australia see 300 days of sunshine will test a system to trade excess a year and rooftop solar panels energy from solar panels between are growing in popularity, says themselves using a blockchain PowerLedger co-founder Jemma to record the transactions. Green. Rather than sell excess Run by start-up PowerLedger, energy back to the power company, the trial at a retirement village the blockchain will allow residents in the city of Busselton, Western to trade directly with the people Australia, is another sign of the “People can sell excess solar energy industry’s growing energy to their neighbours, curiosity about the technology. with each sale logged on A blockchain is a the blockchain” cryptographically secure ledger of every transaction made in a system, stored across every around them, with the ledger computer in its network. As keeping track of transactions. every computer has a continually “Consumers want to take updating copy of the ledger, no control of their energy generation central authority is in control. and consumption,” she says. Instead, the computers essentially “We want to show that this tech monitor each other to prevent is so simple to use that anyone fraud. The technology began as could use it.” the driving force behind the Energy meters at 20 households cryptocurrency bitcoin, but is and a clubhouse in Busselton will now being explored as a tool for be fitted with Raspberry Pi mini-

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24 | NewScientist | 27 August 2016

An inflatable rainbow ROOM for one more? Six thousand people somehow crammed into this indoor pool in Suining, south-west China, last week, seeking refuge from temperatures in excess of 40°C. The chaotic, gaudy scene unfolded at a resort called the Dead Sea. Here the water’s natural concentration of salts – at around 22 per cent – gives swimmers a buoyancy similar to what people experience at the real Dead Sea in the Middle East. The resort also has a 10,000-squaremetre artificial surfing pool. The searing conditions were the result of high-pressure systems trapping hot air over the country. Last week, China issued an orange alert, its second-highest temperature warning, for central and southern areas. It isn’t just China that is sweltering. Last month, Earth’s average surface temperature was at its highest since records began. Conor Gearin

Photographer Zuma Press/eyevine

27 August 2016 | NewScientist | 25

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From meteorites to parasites, volcanoes to asteroids and insects that invade our bodies when we die, the Natural History Museum has an intriguing range of activities throughout New Scientist Live. On Thursday 22 September, the museum’s Sara Russell joins Monica Grady to discuss comets and asteroids and what they can tell us about the early solar system. Sara will also join her team on the museum stand. Visit them to see meteorites from Mars, the moon and the asteroid belt and find out how they use cutting-edge technology to peer inside them. On Friday, the stand will be overrun by parasites. Take a look at specimens of worms that cause diseases in more than a billion people. Ask Anouk Gouvras and her colleagues how they are unravelling the biological secrets of these freeloaders and running trials to fight the diseases they cause. Chiara Maria Petrone will speak on Saturday. She will take you to the heart of Popocatépetl, one of the most active volcanoes in Mexico. Chiara and her team study the minerals and magma that spew from volcanoes, trying to reconstruct what happens before they erupt. Their aim is to contribute to better eruption forecasting. On the stand, Chiara and her team will display samples they’ve collected from volcanoes, and talk about how a simple simulation of lava streams and pyroclastic flows on a 3D model can help to communicate volcanic hazard. You’ve seen CSI. Sunday is your chance to meet real forensic entomologists Martin Hall and Molly Mactaggart. On the museum stand they’ll be showing off live blowfly larvae and explaining how their life cycle can help solve crime scene mysteries.

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Ghosts among us We might already have seen hints of a shadow world of matter we just can’t touch, says Stuart Clark

PARE a thought for the dark-matter hunters. Every time they’re on the verge of trapping the elusive stuff thought to make up the bulk of the universe’s matter, it slips away. They don’t see the expected signals, or they spot something exciting only to watch it fade into background noise. Each time it’s the same: put on a brave face, go back to the drawing board and begin the hunt again. Perhaps it’s time for a change of tack. Instead of going after a single species of dark matter particle, maybe we should be looking for a menagerie of dark particles and forces – a whole new “dark sector”. After all, there is no reason to think dark matter will be any less intricate than the visible stuff we consider ordinary, with its panoply of particles from electrons to quarks.

LEVENTE SZABO

S

28 | NewScientist | 27 August 2016

“If you look at normal matter, our universe is enormously complicated,” says Alex DrlicaWagner, a dark matter hunter at Fermilab near Chicago, Illinois. “So it may be naive to think that the dark sector is exceptionally simple.” The talk is of an entire shadow world in which invisible particles influence one another through forces unfelt by the familiar stuff of stars and planets and us. A quixotic idea? Perhaps not. If the faint hints of a dark force emerging from one lab stand up to scrutiny, this shadow realm may already have revealed itself. From as early as the 1930s, astronomers could see that galaxies orbit each other much faster than expected given the gravitational tug produced by their visible stars. Forty years on, we spotted that stars within galaxies also

seemed to rotate too fast. Either the laws of gravity drawn up by Newton and Einstein required a substantial rewrite, or some invisible form of matter was producing more gravitational heft. Most astronomers favoured the second option – dark matter. Whatever this stuff is made of, it must have mass so that it feels and generates gravity, but no electric charge, so it does not interact with light. Gravity’s effects are so weak that physicists have to hope that dark matter does interact with some component of ordinary matter in some other way, just barely, or else we may never identify it. For decades, the leading candidate has been the weakly interacting massive particle, or WIMP. The trouble is, a long line of exceedingly sensitive detectors has failed to record a single

sign of them. Only last month, the LUX experiment in South Dakota came to the end of a two-year search without a sniff. WIMPs aren’t quite dead yet. Some astronomers think we have seen their signature in ultra-faint dwarf galaxies surrounding the Milky Way (see “Dwarfs to the rescue?”, page 31). But for others it’s time to move on. “We’ve been looking for these for decades and we haven’t found anything,” says Jonathan Feng at the University of California, Irvine. “This naturally leads people to consider other, more baroque ideas.” Dark matter has taken various guises besides WIMPs over the years (see “Seven ways to make dark matter”, page 30). But now there are compelling reasons to consider more extravagant alternatives. For a start, we can

measure the rotation of galaxies in such detail that we can figure out how dark matter is distributed within them. Simple models suggest it should be very dense in the middle of galaxies. The latest observations, however, show that it is spread more evenly. One way to explain that is by appealing to a force that acts only between dark matter particles, pushing them apart. That could be a game changer. “Once you start thinking about forces acting just between dark matter particles, then you are led into a whole new arena,” says Feng. “You

“With the dark matter search failure, we must consider other, more baroque ideas”

can think about a zoo of dark particles and forces all of its own. It’s a brand new world.” The idea of a dark sector is not entirely novel. Back in 2006, astronomers studying the Bullet Cluster, an ongoing smash-up between two groups of galaxies, proposed that the collision speed was too high for the gravity of the matter involved – dark and ordinary – to be solely responsible. They figured that the additional pull must be coming from a force of attraction between dark matter particles. More detailed simulations proved that the speed of the Bullet Cluster collision was not beyond what we might expect. But the suspicion of dark forces never went away, with researchers suggesting that anomalies thrown up by particle experiments on Earth might also hint at their existence. For example, > 27 August 2016 | NewScientist | 29

SEVEN WAYS TO MAKE DARK MATTER

MACROS It could be that the dark stuff is made of dense clumps of quarks, the particles that, in pairs or triplets, form ordinary matter. These “macros” could be as dense as neutron stars and extremely heavy. Unfortunately, the experiments needed to spot them, such as deploying seismometers on the moon, are too outlandish to carry out. AXIONS A punier version of the WIMP, axions would interact even less with ordinary matter. That suggests WIMP detectors might have spotted them – but they haven’t. The jury is still out, at least until dedicated experiments such as the Axion Dark Matter Experiment return a verdict. STERILE NEUTRINOS Neutrinos pass through other matter almost as if it doesn’t exist, but they are too light and zippy to be dark matter. Sterile neutrinos are a heavier, more aloof version. Signs of them have emerged in underground detectors, only to quickly disappear. We’ve also seen a suggestive excess of X-rays coming from galaxy clusters – but failed to pin down the sources. GRAVITINOS The graviton is a particle proposed by the theory of supersymmetry to mediate the force of gravity, and the gravitino is its hypothetical “superpartner”. It nicely fits the bill for a dark matter particle. The trouble is there is still no sign of the many heavy partner particles predicted by supersymmetry. MOND Modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND) doesn’t make dark matter so much as remove the need for it, by tweaking the laws of gravity. That makes many physicists uncomfortable. Now a hybrid model exists in which a phase-changing form of dark matter acts like WIMPs inside galaxies but modifies gravity on larger cosmological scales. 30 | NewScientist | 27 August 2016

X-RAY: NASA/CXC/CFA/M.MARKEVITCH ET AL.; OPTICAL: NASA/STSCI; MAGELLAN/U.ARIZONA/D.CLOWE ET AL.; LENSING MAP: NASA/STSCI; ESO WFI; MAGELLAN/U.ARIZONA/D.CLOWE ET AL.

MACHOS This is the idea is that dark matter is just normal stuff hiding at the edges of galaxies – “massive astrophysical compact halo objects” that are so dim as to be invisible. Candidates include black holes or failed stars. Alas, MACHOs could only account for a tiny fraction of the universe’s missing mass.

a long-standing discrepancy between theory and experiment over the magnetic properties of ordinary matter particles called muons, a heavier version of the electron, might be explained by invoking a dark-force carrying particle. Now Feng thinks we might have found the most compelling evidence for such a particle so far – in a nuclear physics lab in Hungary. Attila Krasznahorkay of the Institute for Nuclear Research at the Hungarian Academy of Science in Debrecen leads a team looking at the radioactive decay of beryllium-8 nuclei. Beryllium is a naturally occurring light element that is stable when its nucleus contains four protons and five neutrons. But with just four of each, the isotope Be-8 splits into two helium nuclei in the blink of an eye. Previous experiments had hinted at something odd about this particular decay, and Krasznahorkay and his colleagues wanted to pin it down. To make Be-8, they fired protons at a wafer-thin sheet of lithium-7. The beryllium decayed, releasing pairs of electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons. In standard particle theory, most of those pairs should be emitted in roughly the same direction as the incoming proton beam. But the Hungarians found that there were two unexpectedly prominent side streams, coming out almost at right angles to their expected direction. This was the sort of behaviour you would expect if the decay created a slow-moving particle that lived for short time before itself decaying into an electron and positron, which it would spit out in almost opposite directions. When the team calculated the mass of this hypothetical particle, they found that it fitted nothing in the standard model of particle physics. Instead, their numbers suggest it has a mass of around 17 megaelectronvolts – just 33 times that of an electron and far lighter than any WIMP. No known force of nature could create such a particle. Having investigated the anomaly for three years, the team published their results in 2015. They refer to their particle as a “dark photon”. By analogy with the way the photon carries electromagnetism, this particle would carry an unknown force between dark matter particles. The paper passed pretty much unnoticed – until Feng came across it. From the description, he could see nothing wrong with the experimental set-up. “They did a lot of crosschecks and they could not make the effect go away,” says Feng. “They have seen hundreds of

events now. The likelihood of this result happening by chance is one in 200 billion.” Taking the results at face value, Feng and his colleagues sought their own explanation. They also wanted to address a nagging doubt: given that the Hungarian team spotted this putative new particle with an experiment well within the capabilities of most physics labs around the world, why had no one else noticed anything before?

XENON

WIMPS The textbook solution to dark matter is that it is a thick, slow-moving soup of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs). That could explain the odd way galaxies rotate – yet no detector have yet found a WIMP. If they do exist, it seems they must be lighter than we thought.

Even the cleanest, most sensitive detectors have failed to lay a glove on dark matter particles

Galactic smash-ups hint that dark matter is more complex than we thought

whether it exists or not. “The nice thing is that we have a concrete target now and these experiments can actually check this,” says Essig. “I don’t think this anomaly is going to stick around forever.” Indeed, the race is on to confirm or refute the Hungarian group’s original findings and look for more examples of the X boson at work. The DarkLight experiment at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Newport News, Virginia, is already searching for particles in the mass regions where Feng’s team calculated it should be (see “I’m shooting for a beam of dark light”,

hundreds and thousands of other effects in other experiments and particle accelerators.” If not a dark photon, then what? Feng’s team searched for other ways a dark particle could be interacting, albeit slightly, with familiar matter to cause the anomalous beryllium decay. They found that, to be consistent with everything we have seen in experiments designed to characterise the known forces of nature, it must interact not with protons and electrons, as a conventional photon does, but with the neutrons inside the beryllium nuclei. This is a property beyond the scope of physics “Sooner or later the standard as we know it, which might explain how the particle slipped by unseen in previous dark model must break, so every matter searches. Feng’s team call the anomaly must be looked at” interloper a “protophobic X boson”. Not everyone is convinced of claims of a The hypothetical dark photon, as well as page 32). The LHCb experiment at CERN’s Large whole shadow world beyond the visible carrying the dark force between dark matter Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland, material universe. Rouven Essig at Stony particles, should also carry a little bit of Brook University, New York, is sceptical of both will also look for it in the decays of quarks ordinary electromagnetism. So it should and their antimatter counterparts. the experimental result and the attempts to occasionally interact with the protons and Some researchers have expressed deduce a particle that might explain it. “I don’t electrons in normal matter. But when Feng reservations because the Hungarian team has think anyone has written down a compelling and his colleagues calculated the strength of reported anomalies before, only for them to or natural candidate yet,” he says. this interaction, the plot thickened. “There disappear on further investigation. Feng is At least the theory can be tested. Feng’s was no way this could be a dark photon,” undeterred. “No one has identified a weakness X boson is of a size that should allow several says Feng. “If it were, we should have seen of this experiment,” he says. “Do they have a current experiments to show definitively specific problem with the experimental results, or is it just general scepticism?” DWARFS TO To his mind, the current situation of general THE RESCUE? cluelessness surrounding dark matter means the X boson is well worth pursuing, regardless Dark matter might not be as gloomy as its dark matter, making them the ideal of any qualms. “We know there is dark matter name suggests. If this mysterious substance place to look for its gamma-ray glow. “If we and it is not explained in the standard model,” is made of weakly interacting massive don’t see it here, we never will,” says Josh he says. “There must be an explanation, so particles (WIMPs), as most physicists Simon at the Carnegie Observatories in sooner or later the standard model will have to believe, then they would come in matter and Pasadena, California. break. Every anomaly must be looked at.” antimatter versions. When the two come Maybe we already have. In 2015, we Others are yet to be persuaded. “All of these into contact, they would produce a shower of found a new dwarf galaxy called Reticulum II ideas are very interesting, but I wouldn’t say high-energy photons known as gamma rays. just 100,000 light years away, prompting that we have a compelling reason to abandon In 2009, researchers at Fermilab in Alex Geringer-Sameth at Carnegie Mellon the simpler dark matter picture yet,” says Josh Batavia, Illinois, thought they had caught University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Simon, an astrophysicist at the Carnegie a glimpse of such a signal coming from the his colleagues to take a closer look. They Observatories in Pasadena, California. The centre of the Milky Way. Most astronomers downloaded observations from the archive problem with a complex dark sector, he says, now think that was a false alarm. Galaxies of NASA’s Fermi gamma-ray space telescope is that it is going to be even harder to put to tend to be crowded with billions of stars, and, sure enough, they found what the test than the elusive WIMPs and their ilk. making it almost impossible to rule out other appeared to be an excess of gamma rays. “It becomes very difficult to make any sources for the gamma rays. Critics say there could be hidden predictions about what we should observe.” It’s not quite game over, however. gamma-ray sources beyond Reticulum II. But then again, Simon goes on to say, just In the past few years, astronomers have The possibility is hard to rule out and there because a theory is complicated doesn’t make discovered a nearby population of ultra-faint are no plans for new instruments to provide it wrong. “Nature doesn’t have to give us dwarf galaxies, so named because each more accurate observations. Unless we something that is easy to test.” ■ contains no more than a few hundred million stars. These mini-galaxies are also thought to hold unusually high concentrations of

discover more nearby dwarf galaxies to test, a certain identification of WIMPs remains a long shot (see main story).

Stuart Clark is a consultant for New Scientist and the author of The Unknown Universe (Head of Zeus) 27 August 2016 | NewScientist | 31

PEOPLE

I’m shooting for a beam of dark light Does dark matter have its own set of forces? The only way to find out is to hunt them down, says Tim Nelson

Why do you think there is a fifth force?

so why wouldn’t it be as diverse? If you open that conceptual door, you’re suddenly looking at a lot of new possibilities. But to help us get started, we’re just considering the simplest option at the moment, which is a dark force analogous to electromagnetism, so we came up with the term “dark photons”.

The four fundamental forces of physics – gravitational, electromagnetic, strong nuclear and weak nuclear – are pretty well understood. But there’s always the chance that there’s another one we just haven’t noticed, perhaps because it’s incredibly weak. People have been looking for a new one for a long time. But the forces we’re looking for now are different in that they act primarily on dark matter. Just as regular matter consists of a range of particles and forces, I’m motivated by the idea that dark matter is just the lightest, most stable component of an undiscovered “dark sector” of particles and forces.

It all sounds a little out there.

Any reason to think such a dark sector exists?

How do you go about hunting for dark photons?

It makes increasing sense to consider it. We know dark matter exists, that it interacts gravitationally – in other words, it has mass – and that the vast majority of it is probably embodied in a particular type of particle. Scientists latched on to the idea that dark matter is mostly composed of particles called weakly interacting massive particles (see page 26). But searches for those WIMPs – with underground detectors and the Large Hadron Collider, for example – haven’t turned up anything, and we’re running out of room where we might find them. So if dark matter isn’t just WIMPs, one solution is that there are different sorts of dark particles that interact with each other via their own set of forces.

The theory is that dark photons mix with regular photons by a process called kinetic mixing. That means a dark photon can turn into a regular photon, and vice versa – though most likely at some very, very low rate. So, in principle, if you have an experiment where you produce lots of high-energy photons, you’ll also produce dark photons at some much lower rate.

So dark matter could be pretty diverse stuff?

Sure. The standard model of particle physics has lots of particles, with a set, including the photon, that carry the forces. This ordinary matter only accounts for about one-sixth of the universe’s matter. The rest is dark matter, 32 | NewScientist | 27 August 2016

It was a challenge early on because not everyone took these ideas seriously as they were outside the mainstream. That’s changing but nevertheless the students and scientists attracted to this search tend to be clever and crazy in equal parts.

And how do you detect dark photons?

Dark photons can’t be massless like regular photons. If they were, it would contradict our understanding of how dark matter behaves. In fact, they could have an incredibly wide range of masses. That means that although we can’t see the dark photons directly, we can hunt for them the same way we hunt for any other particle that has mass. Are you trying this already?

Yes, our Heavy Photon Search experiment at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator

PROFILE Tim Nelson is a physicist at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California. He is working on the Heavy Photon Search experiment

Facility (JLab) uses a beam of high-energy electrons that we fire into a tungsten foil target. When you do that – and the electrons suddenly hit that obstacle – you get deceleration radiation. That radiation is essentially a beam of photons, and, if dark photons exist, the collisions will radiate those too, at a lower rate. What happens next depends on whether or not dark photons are the lightest particle of the dark sector. Our experiment assumes that they are, which means they must decay via kinetic mixing to regular matter such as electronpositron pairs, which we can detect. Have you found anything so far?

We had a practice run in early 2015 where the principal purpose was to get the experiment working, but we did take a few days’ worth of high quality data. And we ran the experiment for a while earlier this year. In the coming months, when we’ve analysed these data sets, we have a chance of seeing something new. What if dark photons are heavier than you think?

We presume that the lightest dark matter particle makes up the bulk of dark matter. If the dark photon is not the lightest particle in the dark sector, then instead of decaying back to regular matter, it will pretty much always decay to dark matter. That means we can’t see it with our current experiment, but it actually leads to some interesting possibilities. If I have an experiment with a really thick tungsten

target and create a bunch of dark photons that are all moving really fast, they are all going to decay to dark matter – so I have now essentially created a dark matter beam. We will have lost the ability to detect dark photons, but gained the ability to detect dark matter itself. It’s a win-win situation. A dark matter beam sounds awesome…

The cool thing about this is that it would produce dark matter at high energy. The direct-detection experiments we have for dark matter, such as LUX and CDMS, are trying to detect dark matter orbiting our galaxy at relatively low velocities. When it bumps into the detector it only deposits a very small amount of energy that is really hard for us to spot. That’s why we have to bury these detectors in mines – the surrounding earth screens out many interfering signals. But if I had a high-energy dark-matter beam I could just point it at a standard particle detector.

“People attracted to this search tend to be clever and crazy in equal parts” Is anyone attempting to do this?

There is a plan to create one of these “beam dump experiments” at JLab in Virginia, but here at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory we’re proposing something we call a missing momentum experiment. The idea is to try to create the dark photons in the same way, but rather than worry about detecting them, we measure the incoming and outgoing momentum for each individual electron in the beam, looking to see if any momentum went missing. That would mean something had been produced in the target that was invisible to our detector – dark matter. This would be a very sensitive way of finding hints that dark photons exist, though it wouldn’t help us study them in detail. In March, CERN approved a first-generation experiment of this sort, called NA64.

TIMOTHY ARCHIBALD FOR NEW SCIENTIST

What would definitive detections of dark matter mean for humanity?

It would be like the Copernican revolution – another confirmation that we are not at the centre of the universe, and that what we thought was the entire universe is just a tiny slice. It’s one thing to be intellectually convinced of that, as we are, but another to confront it face to face. ■ Interview by Joshua Howgego 27 August 2016 | NewScientist | 33

Misguided medicine Too many treatments are being overturned because they never worked in the first place. What should we do, asks Kayt Sukel

T

34 | NewScientist | 27 August 2016

10 major reversals 01

HORMONE REPLACEMENT THERAPY Advice: HRT for menopausal women Rationale: Observational studies and animal trials suggested protective effect on heart and bones Adoption: Given to millions in 1990s Reversal: In 2002, found to increase risk of breast cancer, heart disease and stroke. Largely discontinued, though some believe future studies may show benefit for certain women

02

PEANUT ALLERGY Advice: No nuts for young children Rationale: For an immature immune system, exposure increases allergy risk Adoption: Widespread in Western countries Reversal: Major trial found early exposure actually decreases allergy risk. New guidelines issued in 2015

MARTIN LEON BARRETO

IFFANY MCLEOD followed the advice to the letter. She has food allergies, and was worried that her children might too. Her doctor recommended that she avoid eating nuts while pregnant or breastfeeding, and to keep the kids away from them until the age of 3. “You want to do what’s best for your child,” she says. “And you figure that your doctor knows what that is.” Her doctor was following American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines issued in 2000. But by 2008, the AAP had backed off from this recommendation. Then last year, it reversed course. A large study had found that regular exposure to peanuts from 4 months of age reduces the risk of allergy by about 80 per cent. McLeod, who lives in Texas, had both of her babies in the years between the changing advice. She learned the hard way that her youngest has a life-threatening allergy. “We had to rush her to the emergency room. It was extremely scary,” she says. It would be comforting to think the drastic change in advice with peanut allergy is unique. But this type of medical about-face isn’t rare. A recent analysis of research published in one medical journal over 10 years identified a whopping 146 such reversals. To be clear, this is not just the process of upgrading advice as better evidence comes in. These are practices that became routine before we learned they didn’t actually work. And worse, before we knew if they could cause harm. >

27 August 2016 | NewScientist | 35

In the era of evidence-based medicine you might assume most of your doctor’s advice is based on evidence obtained through rigorous testing. But it is becoming clear that is often far from the case. Fortunately, people are now shining a light on the problem, and devising ways to fix it. They have their work cut out. In recent years official advice has reversed course on everything from broad issues such as diet and nutrition, to specific techniques like using stents to keep open the narrowed arteries of people with heart disease. There have also been dramatic U-turns on cancer screening and other major public health concerns.

For many of us, this isn’t an abstract worry. My mother was given hormone replacement therapy (HRT) in the 1990s to help ease her way through menopause. That was before it was found to increase the risk of heart attack, stroke and breast cancer. Nine years later, when she was diagnosed with bilateral breast cancer, and endured a gruelling year of surgery and treatment, we were left wondering if or how much HRT had contributed to her disease. “The medical journals are filled with interesting ideas that get tested and fail. That’s science,” says Adam Cifu at the University of Chicago, who wrote a book called Ending Medical Reversal with Vinay Prasad. “The problem is when that new technology or treatment or surgery has actually gotten out and is being given to millions of people before it’s found to not work.” How does this happen? In the late 1990s, peanut allergies were on the rise in the US and the UK. At the time, the best theory about the cause was that feeding allergenic proteins to infants before the intestinal lining was mature allowed them to seep into the bloodstream. The baby then built up antibodies to these substances and later became allergic to foods containing them. This hunch was consistent with assumptions about how allergens affect the immune system, and studies showing few peanut allergies in countries where people don’t eat many peanuts. So steering clear of the potential allergens until children were older made sense – in theory. “Much of what we do in medicine is theorybased. It’s only relatively recently that good quality evidence has been available for many things,” says Virginia Moyer, who develops guidelines for the American Board of Pediatrics (ABP) and is a long-time campaigner for evidence-based practice. “Peanut allergy is 36 | NewScientist | 27 August 2016

IMAGE SOURCE/GETTY

What is at stake

life-threatening – we were doing the best we could with the knowledge we had at the time.” But no data backed up that theory. And now it seems just the opposite is true: exposure to peanut protein while the immune system is immature actually decreases the likelihood of developing an allergy. “We spend so much time training people first and foremost in how the body works and how it breaks. So we get why things should work, and then we tend to adopt things because they should work before we know if they actually do,” says Cifu. It’s no small concern. An analysis by BMJ Clinical Evidence of 3000 common medical practices categorised half as having “unknown effectiveness”, and 3 per cent as likely to be ineffective or harmful. Just a third were found to be “beneficial” or “likely to be beneficial”. A major problem is that we often do the studies only after practices are widely adopted. There is a well-trodden path to developing new treatments, says David Jones, a medical historian at Harvard University. Someone gets some promising early results, a lot of people get enthusiastic about the innovation and get on board. “Then it is successfully marketed to a willing audience of patients who are generally dissatisfied with existing treatments,” says Jones.

03

KEYHOLE SURGERY FOR OSTEOARTHRITIS OF THE KNEE Advice: Surgical removal and smoothing of cartilage fragments Rationale: Thought to reduce inflammation, improve motion and decrease pain Adoption: By 2002, 650,000 surgeries per year in US Reversal: Several trials found no benefit over physical therapy alone. Surgery still common, however

04

CANCER SCREENING Advice: Routine early screening Rationale: Early detection is a chance to intercept disease Adoption: Mammograms and the PSA test for prostate cancer became routine in 1980s Reversal: Early stage cancers do not always develop further, many treated unnecessarily. PSA test no longer recommended in US, age for routine mammograms raised from 40 to 50

Eventually, concerns surface and clinical trials are done. By then, though, the horse is out of the barn. People want innovation and ready access to new and better treatments. But, as Jones says, “it leaves open the door that you’ll get a lot of enthusiasm coming from small, poorly designed studies that drive unwarranted use of a new procedure before it has been fully validated.” It’s tough to get the horse back in the barn. For instance, a treatment known as vertebroplasty, which involves injecting medical cement into broken vertebrae, is widely used for people with spinal fractures related to osteoporosis. In spite of randomised trials showing that it is no better than a placebo intervention, the practice is still used, even at Massachusetts General Hospital, one of the top ranked hospitals in the US. “Once a treatment has been dubbed ‘standard of care’ it tends to persist,” says Ted Kaptchuk at Harvard Medical School, who studies the placebo effect. It isn’t that doctors are wilfully ignoring the evidence, it is likely they believe in what they’re doing. “The practitioners who perform vertebroplasty want to help people and probably continue to believe they are doing so,” he says. Preventing untested practices from becoming standard care seems simple – just test them first. But even when studies are conducted early on, what they actually measure can be part of the problem. Because it’s simpler and faster, researchers often look at “surrogate outcomes”, not actual end points. So for instance, blood cholesterol levels are taken as a stand-in for the risk of heart attack or death.

Measuring what matters For years, dieting and taking medication to keep a certain measure of blood sugar – glycated hemoglobin – below 7 per cent, was recommended for people with type 2 diabetes. This was after a large study showed that diabetics with levels closest to those of nondiabetics had the best outcomes. But in 2008 a team led by Hertzel Gerstein at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, discovered that those fighting to get their glycated haemoglobin below this threshold actually faced a higher risk of death. “There comes along some piece of evidence that is definitive, so much better than the existing evidence, that you have to do a total 180 on something you once thought was the best way to go,” says Prasad, an oncologist at Oregon Health and Sciences University. The calibre of evidence can depend on who

05

HEART STENTS Advice: Stents for people with coronary heart disease and angina Rationale: Clear benefit in cases of heart attack, so those with stable heart disease should benefit too Adoption: Commonplace by 2004 Reversal: Shown not to reduce risk for future heart attack or death and may cause harm. Practice remains common

06

VERTEBROPLASTY Advice: Inject medical cement to fix fractured vertebrae Rationale: Thought to improve spine stability and reduce pain Adoption: By 2009, 750,000 operations per year in US Reversal: Although we now know the procedure is no more effective than a placebo, it is still widely carried out

07

INTENSIVE BLOOD SUGAR LOWERING FOR TYPE 2 DIABETICS Advice: Diet and drugs to get longterm blood sugar metric (glycated haemoglobin) below 7 per cent Rationale: 1997 study found lower risk for heart attack at 7 per cent. Aim became lower the better Adoption: By early 2000s, advice was often to aim for under 7 per cent Reversal: A 2008 study found that trying to keep levels too low increased risk of death. Aiming under 7 per cent now seldom advised

08

PRE-IMPLANTATION GENETIC TESTING Advice: Screen embryos for older women doing IVF Rationale: Genetic screening should reduce pregnancy failure due to chromosome abnormalities in embryos Adoption: Common for older women undergoing IVF Reversal: 2007 trial found screening decreased pregnancy rates and live births for older women

is paying for it. There are the perennial issues that plague medical research: the pressure on researchers to publish new and impressive findings, and medical journals’ tendency to publish positive results more than negative. But increasingly, the pharmaceutical and medical device industries – rather than public bodies – are funding clinical trials. Not only do they have vested interests in the initial outcomes needed to get drugs or devices approved, but once they are approved, little incentive to do the expensive, large-scale studies that could potentially upend their initial findings and hurt their bottom line. The popularity of the anti-inflammatory

“We adopt things because they should work before we know if they actually do” drug Vioxx is one example. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved it in 1999, but later the manufacturer, Merck, was accused of concealing risks discovered in early studies. By the time independent research showed that Vioxx increased the risk of heart attacks, 20 million people had prescriptions. It was withdrawn in 2004, but not before causing up to 140,000 preventable heart attacks. Merck pleaded guilty to criminal charges in 2011 and paid $950 million in fines. There is no simple fix. There are so many factors at play, and for some, there is no perfect way – this is what progress looks like. “There are cases where we just haven’t done the research we need to do before a practice gets adopted,” says Moyer. “But there are also a whole host of reasons why the evidence for certain medical practices might change – and continue to change – over time.” Among them is the fact that you’re often working on a moving target. “Diseases aren’t static – they can and do change over time,” says Gerstein. “Diabetes today is not the same as it was 50 years ago.” The number of people diagnosed with type 2 diabetes has more than doubled in the past two decades, and the age of onset has dropped. He says today’s type 2 diabetes is more likely to come with additional health issues like cancer, kidney problems and heart disease, compared with 50 years ago. “We call it by the same name but it behaves differently,” says Gerstein. So where do we go from here? It is understandable that patients and their advocates want new options as soon as possible, especially those who are seriously > 27 August 2016 | NewScientist | 37

standards. The aim is to highlight potential funding biases and stop flawed results from sneaking their way into everyday medicine. There are also attempts to address the problem further upstream. It used to be that medical education was predominately an exercise in memorisation. But now teaching critical thinking has become central to the curriculum for doctors and other health professionals and there is a much greater focus on the need for evidence-based practice. “I give a lecture to the medical students every year where I tell them the most important thing they need to know is that, one day, they’ll learn everything they learned in

PLAINPICTURE

“If we’re treating people the same way we did 30 years ago, then we’re probably not treating them right”

ill. At the same time, it makes sense to have the highest quality of evidence for any treatment. Balancing these demands should be straightforward. It means providing early access to treatments, but ensuring that we gather the data at the same time. “The most important message is that we, as a society, need to keep pushing for large, well-designed research studies and keep on reassessing,” says Gerstein. “If we’re treating people the same way we did 30 years ago, then we’re probably not treating them right.” Efforts are underway to ensure that this happens. Medical specialty organisations, like the American College of Physicians, have an expiration date on clinical guidelines – and reassess them as new studies are published. Jones says that many medical conferences now insist on some form of peer review before new practices can be presented. And as part of its safety surveillance programme, the FDA has a comprehensive adverse event reporting system for drugs and devices. In addition, researchers are trying to change the culture surrounding clinical trials to promote more transparency and utility. John Ioannidis at Stanford University is leading the push for medical journals to set more rigorous standards for the publication of results – and to have external groups monitor those 38 | NewScientist | 27 August 2016

09

LOWERING BODY TEMPERATURE FOR ANEURYSM SURGERY Advice: Cool down body during surgery Rationale: Animal studies suggested improved outcomes Adoption: Common by 1980s Reversal: Large 2005 study found no improvement and increased risk of infection

10

EAR TUBE SURGERY Advice: Implant tubes in ears of children with persistent infection Rationale: Fluid drainage would improve hearing and cognitive development, best to do surgery sooner than later Adoption: Most often performed surgery in children Reversal: Review in 2014 found no adverse effect on long-term child development if surgery is postponed. But surgery, which carries the risk of bleeding and ear drum damage, is still common in the early stages of infections

medical school is wrong. Some of it may even be considered malpractice,” says Gerstein. “What we currently believe today based on the evidence will change – so every doctor, as much as possible, has to keep up to date with new research because things can and do change all the time.” It may be too much to ask for our doctors to follow every incremental change. But they should be willing to examine the benefits and drawbacks of the therapies they are offering, says Cifu. “It should be okay for doctors to discuss options with each patient and say, ‘Look, I’m not completely convinced about this therapy because the data isn’t so good but it’s low risk and I think there’s a chance it could work for you and here’s why.’ That way patients understand they are taking a little bit of a chance but there are potential benefits.” Patients can spur their doctors on as well. When a therapy or surgery is suggested, instead of immediately asking about side effects or cost, Cifu wants them to start at a more fundamental level. “The real questions are, how is this actually going to help me? Will this actually decrease my risk of having a heart attack?” He wants ordinary people to be empowered to ask about the evidence and possible alternatives. It won’t be easy, and doctors can feel intimidated when their patients push back. But, as Cifu says, “That’s the job of a good physician – to answer those questions.” ■ Kayt Sukel is a writer based in Houston, Texas

Instant Expert | Evolution Part Two

EVOLUTION PART TWO

Darwin’s beautiful theory famously lacked a mechanism. Then came genetics… Illustrations by Raymond Beisinger

27 August 2016 | NewScientist | 39

Instant Expert | Evolution Part Two

DARWIN AND DNA

Though genetics revolutionised ideas about inheritance, it was not at all obvious that it had anything to do with evolution. Peter Bowler explains

O

ur understanding of evolution today stems from the combination of two very different ideas. One came from a monk who studied pea plants in a Moravian monastery in the 1850s. The other came from a Victorian gentleman who spent five years as a naturalist on a voyage around the world, 20 years previously. Although Gregor Mendel and Charles Darwin were alive at the same time, they never met and Darwin wasn’t aware of Mendel’s work. With hindsight, the union of the two men’s work seems like a marriage made in heaven (or hell, if you’re a creationist). In fact, for many years, it wasn’t obvious that Mendel’s studies of heredity had any relevance to Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. It would take nearly 60 years for this jigsaw to be pieced together and give rise to the “modern synthesis” of evolution, which framed Darwin’s idea in terms of genetics. How exactly did this new understanding arise? And why did it take so long? The explanation starts with natural selection itself. According to this, only the fittest – the best adapted to the local environment – survive and breed, and in this way the population as a whole gradually transforms. The idea of evolution was already accepted by many biologists in the mid19th century, but there was considerable opposition to the notion that it happened by means of natural selection. The plausibility of this mechanism rests on the assumption that beneficial characteristics are passed more or less intact from one generation to the next. But it was 40 | NewScientist | 27 August 2016

studied in peas, such as flower colour, were of any general significance, and the work was largely ignored for decades. Then in 1900, Mendel’s laws were rediscovered by the botanists Hugo De Vries and Carl Correns. Through studying inheritance, each independently came to the view that an organism’s characteristics are fixed units that are transmitted unchanged. Only later did they discover that Mendel had carried out similar work.

DAWN OF THE GENE

not clear how this might happen. To explain heredity, Darwin proposed a hypothesis he called pangenesis. It posited that each organism produces particles called “gemmules”, which transmit its characteristics to the next generation. Darwin suggested that the offspring develops from a mix of the parents’ gemmules and thus exhibits a blend of their characters. But the idea had a major flaw, seized upon by his opponents: blending would result in the useful characteristics of one parent becoming diluted as it mated with individuals that do not have those traits. Over successive generations these characteristics would gradually disappear. It was a problem no

one was able to solve during Darwin’s lifetime. Unbeknown to Darwin and his compatriots, the key to solving this puzzle had already been found. Sometime in the 1840s, Gregor Mendel joined the friary at Brno, in what is now the Czech Republic. In the years that followed, he made detailed studies of how the characteristics of pea plants were passed from one generation to the next. He found that parents’ traits were not blended in their offspring; rather, they were transmitted unchanged in predictable ratios. This led him to devise laws of inheritance, published in 1866 (see “Mendel and the birth of genetics”, page 43). No one imagined, though, that the characteristics Mendel

A new science of heredity emerged. First dubbed “Mendelism”, it was soon christened “genetics” by the biologist William Bateson, who translated Mendel’s paper into English and was a key promoter of his work. Bateson derived the name from the Ancient Greek word “genesis”, meaning “origin”. Mendel had expressed his laws in terms of characteristics transmitted from parent to offspring. The early geneticists were convinced that some material entity in the organism must encode that information. Before long, the biologist Thomas Hunt Morgan had identified genes as units arranged along the chromosomes inside the cell’s nucleus. Working on the fruit fly Drosophila in 1910, Morgan showed that the trait for eye colour could be traced to a specific place on the X chromosome. This led to a burst of discoveries about the links between different genes, and to the creation of genetic maps showing the positions of genes on chromosomes.

Peter Bowler is a historian of science specialising in evolution, and emeritus professor at Queens University Belfast, UK. His latest book is Darwin Deleted: Imagining a world without Darwin

COLLECTION CHRISTOPHEL/ARENAPAL

ROUTE TO A NEW VIEW EVOLUTION Morgan’s research eventually won him a Nobel prize and confirmed that genes were the physical substance of inheritance. It would take another three decades, however, to discover that they were made of DNA and that each gene codes for a specific protein. The concept of the gene seemed to be the missing piece in Darwin’s jigsaw. It completed his picture of natural selection by showing that traits can’t be blended away to insignificance, although this wasn’t recognised immediately. Genetics also solved another problem of Darwin’s theory: the source of the variation within a population. Darwin’s starting point was that any population naturally contains a variety of individuals, providing the raw material for natural selection. A key source of this variation was now shown to be mutation – spontaneous changes in the structure of a gene, leading it to code for something new. Such changes had been observed by Morgan and others as they traced the position of the genes on chromosomes. Morgan himself came to believe that harmful mutations would quickly be eliminated from a population, thus recognising the negative side of natural selection. However, more work was needed to demonstrate how selection acted on genes to create positive evolutionary change. According to Darwin, evolution is a slow process of gradual adaptation to the environment, in which most characteristics have, or once had, an adaptive function. So giraffes with slightly longer necks were able to reach leaves higher up, and thus >

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outlining his hypothesis of pangenesis: that particles called gemmules transmit an organism’s characteristics to its offspring

Humans begin to understand inheritance when they start to selectively breed more useful varieties of livestock and crops such as maize, wheat and rice Ancient Greek philosophers contemplate mechanisms of human inheritance. Hippocrates believed that the material of heredity was tiny particles in the body which accumulate in a seminal fluid in the parents. These particles blend to create the traits of the offspring

Charles Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species – his explanation of evolution by natural selection. It contains a wealth of evidence for how variable traits become more common in a population, but suggests no mechanism for their transmission

Augustinian monk Gregor Mendel publishes meticulous studies of inheritance in pea plants, marking the birth of modern genetics. The findings go unnoticed for over three decades Darwin publishes The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication,

1900 1905-6 1920s

Mendel’s laws of inheritance are rediscovered by Dutch and German botanists The term “genetics” is coined by the biologist William Bateson, a key proponent of Mendel’s work. Soon the concept of a gene is developed The new field of population biology begins to unite the ideas of Darwin and Mendel, establishing how evolution can work at the level of genes

1937

Theodosius Dobzhansky develops the modern synthesis, defining evolution in genetic terms as the “change in the frequency of an allele [gene type] within a gene pool”

1942

Ernst Mayr outlines how new species can evolve, for example when a geographical barrier results in a population becoming genetically incompatible with its original species

1944

DNA is proven to be the material of heredity, not protein as had been suspected

1951

Images of DNA are captured for the first time by Rosalind Franklin. Two years later, James Watson and Francis Crick determine the double-helix structure of DNA

1990

The Human Genome Project begins, completing its work 13 years later when the full sequence is revealed. Genomes of many other organisms follow 27 August 2016 | NewScientist | 41

Instant Expert | Evolution Part Two

“With hindsight, the union of Darwinism and Mendelism seems a marriage made in heaven”

Ronald Fisher: evolutionary pioneer and eugenicist 42 | NewScientist | 27 August 2016

FROM GENETICS TO EUGENICS Some of the early pioneers of evolutionary theory were enthusiastic proponents of eugenics: the idea of enhancing the human population by eliminating “unfit” genes. Ronald Fisher, for example, devoted part of his 1930 book The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection to his hopes for improving the human race by this means. He even fathered eight children to further the cause. The dark reality of eugenics became clear in the early 20th century when several US states legislated to sterilise the “ feebleminded”, and the Nazis took the idea to its ultimate, horrific extreme.

gene coding for a beneficial character, and eliminate those that are maladaptive. This concept was developed in Fisher’s 1930 book The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection and in Haldane’s more popular The Causes of Evolution in 1932. That same year, Wright introduced the idea of an adaptive landscape, a map depicting all possible gene combinations and the resultant fitness of the organism. Collectively, their work demonstrated that genes accounted for both the abrupt changes in characteristics sometimes seen in an organism’s offspring, and the continuous variation that Darwin had documented for large populations. These biologists showed that genetic selection is a

genuinely creative force driving the adaptation of a species to its local environment, with continual mutation ensuring that the fund of variability is maintained. However, their theoretical models involved complex statistics and were hard to understand. The gene-centred perspective of evolution only reached the wider scientific community in 1937, when Theodosius Dobzhansky published his Genetics and the Origin of Species, translating the mathematical formulations into terms that were more accessible. Dobzhansky’s work also expanded our understanding of how genetics enabled evolution, showing, for example, how new species could emerge when isolated populations changed to adapt to their local environment. In 1942, the biologist Julian Huxley’s broad survey Evolution: The Modern Synthesis gave the new perspective a name. By the 1950s, this formulation had become dominant, although one key aspect would continue to be debated for decades to come.

A HIGHER PURPOSE?

A. BARRINGTON BROWN/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

gradually evolved longer necks through the process of natural selection. In contrast, many of the original geneticists saw evolution as something that happened in large jumps, or saltations, whereby new characteristics appear abruptly as the result of some internal rearrangement of an organism’s hereditary constitution. For example, a plant could suddenly start producing flowers of a colour not seen in its parents. The change would not necessarily have any adaptive benefit. The early geneticists were attracted to Mendel’s laws precisely because they seemed to support these ideas. Morgan thought that “Nature makes new species outright” through a “sudden change of the germ”. Bateson saw no value in the Darwinians’ studies of continuous variation and resisted the claim that natural characteristics appear as a result of adaptive pressures on the species. By the same token, the saltation mechanism of change seemed to have no relevance to the process of natural selection. These entrenched positions made it hard for anyone to suggest a way to reconcile the two approaches. But that changed in the 1920s, thanks to the new field of population genetics – the study of how certain genes within populations change over time. The biologists Ronald Fisher, J. B. S. Haldane and Sewall Wright used sophisticated mathematical models to show that natural selection is able to enhance the frequency of any

More or less since its conception, Darwinian evolution was seen as an idea hostile to the Christian vision of nature as the product of some higher purpose. In the US especially, creationist opposition to Darwinism took hold in the 1920s and has continued ever since. The founders of the modern synthesis wanted to present Darwinism as able to accommodate the belief that evolution has a built-in tendency to produce higher levels of organisation. Dobzhansky, for

In our third and final Instant Expert on evolution, we look at the future of the theory and whether the gene-centric view of evolution needs to evolve

GETTY IMAGES

FRANCIS MILLER/TIME LIFE/GETTY

MENDEL AND THE BIRTH OF GENETICS

God trumps Darwin in a 1948 “science” lesson on life’s creation

example, came from a Russian Orthodox background and wrote Mankind Evolving in 1962 to promote the idea that evolution had an ultimate purpose. Huxley also wrote prolifically to promote the idea of evolutionary progress. These authors presented ideas about the modern synthesis in a way that did not challenge traditional hopes and values too openly. This, however, did not stop some of them being proponents of eugenics (see “From genetics to eugenics”, left). The quasi-religious portrayal would change in later decades, most notably with the publication of Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene in 1976 and his emergence as a leading proponent of the argument that nature has no ultimate moral purpose. Subsequent debates over the evolution of social behaviour and the emergence of altruism have taken place against the backdrop of an increasing tension between Darwinian evolution and religion – exactly what the founders of the

Mendel’s studies of flower colour in peas form the basis of modern genetics

synthesis hoped to avoid. Despite these difficulties, the modern synthesis remains at the heart of our understanding of evolution today. It is itself evolving as advances in genetics, developmental biology and ecology broaden our understanding of the relationship between genes, organisms and the environment. The gene-centred view of evolution that emerged from the ideas of Darwin and Mendel is being transformed by the growing recognition that the environment in which the organism develops does play a role in shaping its characteristics, and may even affect the way traits are passed on to future generations. Discoveries in the field of epigenetics are showing that chemical tags that attach to genes to switch them on and off might be as important for development as the hard-wired genetic code itself. The modern synthesis was an idea for the 20th century. In the 21st, the story of evolution is set to acquire a sophistication that Darwin could only have dreamed of. ■

Gregor Mendel had an unlikely background for someone known as the founder of modern genetics, not least because he carried out his work 50 years before genes were actually discovered. Born in 1822 on a farm in what is now the Czech Republic, he joined the Augustinian friary at Brno and here carried out his work on heredity. In the friary garden he bred thousands of pea plants, noting the presence of characteristics such as flower colour and wrinkliness of seeds. He found, for example, that when he crossed white-flowered plants with purple ones, the resulting plants weren’t a light mauve, as might be expected if parental traits blended together, but appeared as either white or purple in fixed ratios. These observations led him to devise the now famous laws of inheritance, published in 1866, which introduced the idea of dominant and recessive traits. This work went largely unnoticed until the turn of the century, when his ideas were incorporated into the new science of genetics. The significance of Mendel’s contribution is debated, however. His laws certainly helped to clarify how characteristics are transmitted from parent to offspring. But even Ronald Fisher, who used Mendel’s ideas to create a genetic theory of evolution in the 1930s, suggested that Mendel’s results were a bit too good to be true, perhaps “tidied up” by an overzealous assistant. And it is by no means clear that Mendel would have been a proponent of the theory that was based on his work. He expressed his ideas solely in terms of the transmission of characters from one generation to the next – there was no discussion of any mechanism. Mendel eventually abandoned his studies when he became abbot at the age of 46. Little else is known about him as his correspondence and other personal papers were burned after his death. 27 August 2016 | NewScientist | 43

CULTURE

We are gods of the future As we hurtle towards the strange tomorrow we created, will it be algorithmic determinism or voyages to inner space? Pat Kane explores

BRIGHITTA MOSER-CLARK/MILLENNIUM IMAGES, UK

Homo Deus: A brief history of tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari, Harvill Secker, £25

technologies. “Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?” was Harari’s closing line. Homo Deus tries to answer that question, with all the pedagogic and encyclopaedic brilliance of its predecessor. But in this volume, I am struck by the cosmic levity of Harari’s project. With great charm, he has decided to ride two of his favourite hobby horses through the middle of this terrain: think Don Quixote and Sancho Panza trotting towards the Singularity. Harari’s first hobby horse is Buddhism: he is an ardent

IN 2014, a Hong Kong venture capital firm appointed an investment algorithm called VITAL to its board. Like the five human board members, it gets a vote. More recently, the US law firm BakerHostetler hired an artificially intelligent attorney, IBM Watson’s “Ross”, to handle its bankruptcy cases. If we are ever to be godlike men “Increasingly the algorithm and women, as the title of Yuval will rule humans – and Noah Harari’s big friendly giant our humanism, ironically, of a book suggests, we had better is to blame” hurry and raise our game. Maybe we should start negotiations with the machines and algorithms student of its Vipassana version, running them. Or we might take and his late teacher takes prime another path, and explore the position in acknowledgements. inner worlds of consciousness – Much Buddhist practice aims at human, animal or other forms the dissolution of the ego into a we have yet to develop. world of flowing and connecting Harari’s last book, Sapiens, was processes. In his zeal for a paean to humanity’s powers of algorithms as the “master collective imagination. Our science” of the future, Harari capacity to create giant fictions – draws on this world view. markets, laws, companies, He gathers together extensive religions, ideologies – helped us research to show that there is now dominate Earth. But Sapiens “scientific orthodoxy” about the concluded with darker notes on continuity between the rules of how these mega-stories might natural selection in evolution and direct our new, transformative, the rules computing information information and biological in our devices. (“Organisms are 44 | NewScientist | 27 August 2016

One kind of future: exploring inner as easily as outer space?

algorithms” is Harari’s pithy and challenging slogan.) Whether it’s made from DNA or digital bytes, an algorithm is a program, a set of instructions, that incessantly makes effective choices. But these algorithms are indifferent to the “substrate” that enables their operations – be it organic or

inorganic, carbon or silicon. Increasingly, says Harari, the algorithm will rule humans – and our humanism, ironically, is to blame. By displacing God, and placing human will (and our elemental dissatisfaction) at the centre of existence, we have until now successfully bent science and technology to our ends. Yet in order for smart machines to help us pursue our happiness, we have

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

world where our technologically enabled fictions may become “the most potent force on earth”, Harari has a straightforward test for what is real: “Does it suffer?” One of our lines of defence against the machines, says Harari, might come from a kind of crossspecies solidarity, particularly around the question of the nature of an organism’s experience. For all his apparent algorithmic fundamentalism, Harari is scathing about the sciences of consciousness, and their inability to explain “how a congeries of biochemical reactions and Liberalism’s collapse electrical currents in the brain For Harari, a seasoned meditator, creates the subjective experience liberalism collapses the day the of pain, anger or love”. algorithm-driven system “knows Neuroscience and psychology me better than I know myself. mostly (and embarrassingly) draw Which is less difficult than it may their test results from students, sound, given that most people a category of what Harari calls the don’t really know themselves well.” “WEIRD” – Western, educated, Sentence by sentence, there is industrialised, rich, democratic. much street-corner humour in “The experiencing faculties this book. But you eventually realise that playfulness constitutes of organisms may indicate different and fascinating its entire structure. Rather than internal worlds” being a beach-read celebration of our imminent divinity, Homo Deus actually pulls the towel out Much mental variety exists from under its own flip-flops. beyond this, not least within Towards the end, there is much cultures that value visionary and rumination about the possibility exalted states. We also have a of a new “religion” called Dataism. growing sense of how the To be honest, it sounds like a experiencing faculties of other Buddhism of the Cloud. Every organisms – bat echolocation, entity is a unit that processes data or whale song – might indicate at different levels of complexity qualitatively different and (“from giraffe to tomato to fascinating internal worlds. human”). Our political and social Harari suggests that the “new choices are shaped by all-seeing, Magellans”might as easily explore compassionate algo-savants. inner space as outer space – using The “Internet-Of-All-Things” brain-computer interfaces and becomes, effectively, nirvana. targeted biochemistry to chart Harari’s other hobby horse and develop new forms of runs counter to his own headline- consciousness. It turns out that, grabbing anti-humanism. A like Hamlet, Homo (et Femina) passionate supporter of animal Deus may be “bounded in a rights, he dwells on how human nutshell”, and count themselves treatment of animals as “a lower kings and queens of infinite space. life-form” has now become an Were it not, of course, that they issue – “perhaps because we are had bad dreams. ■ about to become one”. If we would fight against an all- Pat Kane is a curator at FutureFest (futurefest.org), and author of The Play powerful AI trying to kill us, how Ethic (www.theplayethic.com) can we justify killing pigs? In a

A very English tale SF blogger Paul McAuley on his favourite Arthur C. Clarke award hopeful

WHERE better to catch up with the best recent science fiction than the Arthur C. Clarke award shortlist? Selected from 100plus novels, the six contenders burst with fresh perspectives on themes central to SF, from decaying starships to post-human superpowers. The winner is announced this week. Win or lose, I hugely admire Europe at Midnight by Dave Hutchinson. After the UK’s Brexit referendum, the story, set in a Balkanised near-future Europe, seems more prescient than ever. Sharing the same background (but none of the characters) as his previous novel, Europe in Autumn, it begins in a seemingly hermetic pocket world, the Campus, where, in the aftermath of a bloody revolution, the new professor of intelligence uncovers

a dangerous conspiracy. Meanwhile, an investigation into a random stabbing entangles a British intelligence officer in the search for a county imagined into being by an eccentric family of landowners. The two threads gradually merge, climaxing in a mission to infiltrate the Community, a quaint yet sinister English Ruritania underlying Europe’s shattered map. The novel’s vivid settings and complex intrigue are enlivened by a wry cynicism, clever misdirection and a sprinkling of homages to espionage literature. Like John le Carré, Hutchinson foregrounds the human stories at the heart of conspiracies; like Eric Ambler, he uncovers the heroic impulse in ordinary men caught up in events they only partially witness or understand. Hutchinson expertly weaves their fractured stories into a satisfying whole, interrogating and satirising English mythology and the nature of Englishness with a mordant wit. ■

Spy tension: the novel references classic espionage literature

Paul McAuley’s latest SF novel is Into Everywhere (Gollancz)

Europe at Midnight by Dave Hutchinson, Solaris, £7.99

PLAINPICTURE/BOBSAIRPORT/CHRISTIAN REISTER

allowed them to quantify and measure our lives via algorithms. Every day we interact through the likes of Google and Facebook. And based on their panoptical view of us, Harari anticipates a future where individuals will be replaced by “dividuals”. Our precious selves will be regarded by these systems as a collection of manageable, mostly predictable functions. Reality will be “a mesh of biochemical and electronic algorithms, without clear borders, and without individual hubs”.

27 August 2016 | NewScientist | 45

CULTURE

Not by money alone “Buying” our good behaviour can backfire, finds Bob Holmes

HOW should a society encourage its members to act in socially beneficial ways, when these can run counter to their own selfinterest? For several centuries, Western societies have tried to do this through incentives. We penalise things we want to discourage, by, say, taxing fossil fuel. Conversely, we reward what we want to encourage, for example, by giving tax breaks to job-creating businesses. If we get the incentives right, say economists, the invisible hand of the market guides people to do the right thing out of sheer selfinterested greed, with no need to appeal to mushy notions of ethical responsibility. “Virtue was something economists thought they could safely ignore,” writes Samuel Bowles, himself an economist at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. In his new book, The Moral Economy, Bowles makes the case that economists have got it wrong: as his subtitle suggests, incentives alone can’t push people toward responsibility. In fact, they can backfire. Consider the experience of an Israeli day-care centre, which had a problem with parents who picked up their kids late, forcing staff to work overtime. When the centre instituted a fine for tardy Trust is fundamental for people to act with honour and commitment 46 | NewScientist | 27 August 2016

pickups, they found it turned People tend to value what they inconsiderate behaviour into an are familiar with, so a world that economic transaction. Parents frames decisions within an were happy to pay to be late. economic calculus teaches that This sort of reframing often selfish motives matter more than happens with incentives for good ethical ones. That’s a problem, behaviour, Bowles argues. And it because even the smoothest isn’t the only problem: they can market economy still needs virtue convey unintended messages, too. to oil its gears – which is why When a Boston fire commissioner business people prefer to deal decided to dock the pay of with those they trust. firefighters who took too many sick days, it sent the message that “The case that virtue has a place in economics is he didn’t trust his employees – and absenteeism went up because appealing, but real-world evidence is hard to find” he lost their goodwill. More subtly, even when incentives work, they may not be For Bowles, the upshot is that necessary. Economic inducements sound public policy should take can crowd out moral and ethical account of people’s virtuous motives for doing good. The effect motives as well as selfish ones. is hard to prove in the real world, Sometimes, ethical persuasion although Bowles provides plenty alone can suffice. A former mayor of examples from experiments to of Bogota, Colombia, for example, show that it can happen under tamed the city’s chaotic traffic by controlled conditions. issuing hundreds of thousands of But the rot goes deeper still. An thumbs-down cards for citizens to over-reliance on incentives can flash at inconsiderate drivers. stifle our ethical development. But properly done, economic

incentives can help, especially when the problem is framed ethically to start with. The daycare fines might have worked, says Bowles, if it had been pointed out to parents first that late pickups upset the kids and kept staff from going home to their own families. Bowles makes an appealing case that virtue has a place in the world of economics. Unfortunately, much of his argument – which can be heavy going, at times – rests on economic theory or, more often, on the results of games played out in labs, such as the prisoner’s dilemma. Real-world tests would be more accessible and more persuasive, but are hard to come by. Still, Bowles’s book adds to a tide of research (such as the work of economist Elinor Ostrom and evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson) showing that selfishness is not the only human virtue in the real world. ■ Bob Holmes is a consultant for New Scientist

MAT JACOB / TENDANCE FLOUE

The Moral Economy: Why good incentives are no substitute for good citizens by Samuel Bowles, Yale University Press, $27.50

INTRODUCING THE SECOND IN A NEW SERIES OF WHITE PAPERS FROM NEW SCIENTIST What’s the future of business? We at New Scientist decided to take a look at how three of the key drivers of business – energy, money and automation – might change over the next decade. To do that, we’ve asked three writers with deep understanding of these areas to tell us how they think the future could unfold, and how it might confound our initial expectations. The author of our second GameChangers report in the series is Steven Cherry, who for 15 years covered the work sector for IEEE Spectrum, and now directs TTI/Vanguard, a members-only forum that explores the impact and implications of future technologies for senior business leaders. In his report, Cherry examines the arguments for and against the idea that automation will ultimately outsource every human job, and explores the paradoxes inherent in both. If cognitively complex jobs are the only ones that are safe, why is there still such high demand for cashiers? If automation generates new jobs, why is GDP slowing? And when can you expect the robots to take your job? To find out, register to download your free copy of GameChangers: Automation and Artificial Intelligence today.

Sally Adee Editor, GameChangers

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Steven Cherry is the Director of TTI/Vanguard, a membership forum based in New York that explores future technologies. Previously he was a journalist and editor at IEEE Spectrum, the magazine of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Prior to that he was an editor at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). He founded and co-hosts the award-winning podcast series, Techwise Conversations, which covers technology news, careers and education, and the engineering lifestyle.

GAME CHANGERS AUTOMATION AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN THIS EXCLUSIVE NEW REPORT FIND OUT:

] Why every technological breakthrough takes twice as long as we expected, but we’re still not prepared for its arrival ]Why GDP is an increasingly limited tool for measuring productivity, and what that means for jobs and automation ] Which jobs might be safe – and which won’t

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The NIH Intramural Research Program is Recruiting Tenure-Track “Earl Stadtman Investigators” The National Institutes of Health, the U.S. government’s premier biomedical and behavioral research enterprise and a component of the Department of Health and Human Services, is pleased to announce its eighth annual call for “NIH Earl Stadtman Investigators,” a broad recruitment of tenure-track investigators (assistant professor equivalent) for the NIH intramural research program. Come join the team whose hallmarks are stable funding, intellectual freedom, shared YLZV\YJLZ HUK HJJLZZ [V H ^PKL YHUNL VM ZJPLU[PÄJ L_WLY[PZL ( MHU[HZ[PJ HYYH` VM ZJPLU[PZ[Z HSYLHK` OHZ ILLU OPYLK [OYV\NO [OL ¸:[HK[THU¹ YLJY\P[TLU[ PU [OL SHZ[ ZL]LU`LHYZ ( ]HYPL[` VM IHZPJ HUK [YHUZSH[PVUHSJSPUPJHS WVZP[PVUZ HYL H]HPSHISL ^P[O HYLHZ VM HJ[P]LYLJY\P[TLU[PUJS\KPUNI\[UV[SPTP[LK[V!)LOH]PVYHS:JPLUJLZ)PVJOLTPZ[Y` )PVTLKPJHS ,UNPULLYPUN )PVWO`ZPJZ )PVZ[H[PZ[PJZ *HUJLY )PVSVN` *LSS )PVSVN` *LSS 4L[HIVSPZT *OLTPJHS )PVSVN` *OYVTVZVTL )PVSVN` *VTW\[H[PVUHS )PVSVN`)PVPUMVYTH[PJZ PUJS\KPUN UH[\YHS SHUN\HNL WYVJLZZPUN HUK [L_[ TPUPUN +L]LSVWTLU[HS )PVSVN` ,WPKLTPVSVN` .LUL[PJZ .LUVTPJZ /LHS[O +PZWHYP[PLZ /LHYPUN  )HSHUJL 0TT\UVSVN` 0UMLJ[PV\Z +PZLHZLZ 4PJYVIPVSVN` 4VSLJ\SHY 7OHYTHJVSVN` 5L\YVKL]LSVWTLU[ 5L\YVZJPLUJLZ 7O`ZPVSVN` :LUZVY` )PVSVN` :VJPHS:JPLUJLZ:[Y\J[\YHS)PVSVN`:`Z[LTZ)PVSVN`;V_PJVSVN`;YHUZSH[PVUHSHUK *SPUPJHS9LZLHYJOHUK=PYVSVN` ---------------

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Who we are: (TVUN V\Y HWWYV_PTH[LS`  WYPUJPWHS PU]LZ[PNH[VYZ HUK  [YHPULLZ PU [OL 50/ PU[YHT\YHS YLZLHYJO WYVNYHT HYL ^VYSKYLUV^ULK L_WLY[Z PU basic, translational, population-based, and clinical research. Similar to academia, ^L V LY V\Y ZJPLU[PZ[Z [OL VWWVY[\UP[` [V TLU[VY V\[Z[HUKPUN [YHPULLZ H[ HSS SL]LSZ (e.g., graduate students and postdoctoral fellows) in a research setting. Whom we seek: We seek a diverse cadre of creative thinkers eager to take on innovative, high-impact research. 8\HSPÄJH[PVUZLSPNPIPSP[`: (WWSPJHU[Z T\Z[ OH]L HU 4+ 7O+ ++:+4+ +=4 +6 957O+ VY LX\P]HSLU[ KVJ[VYHS KLNYLL HUK OH]L HU V\[Z[HUKPUN YLJVYK VM YLZLHYJO HJJVTWSPZOTLU[Z HZ L]PKLUJLK I` OPNO X\HSP[` W\ISPJH[PVUZ PU WLLYYL]PL^LK QV\YUHSZ (WWSPJHU[Z ZOV\SK IL UVU[LU\YLK ZJPLU[PZ[Z (WWVPU[LLZ TH`ILÌÛiƂVÌ «ÞiÀ° iÛi«}>`ÃÕÃÌ>}>`ÛiÀÃiv>VÕÌÞ]ÃÌ>vv]>`ÃÌÕ`iÌL`Þ vÕÀÌ iÀ Ì i 1ÛiÀÃÌ޽à i`ÕV>Ì> Ãð }>Ìi à > } Þ ÃiiVÌÛi Õ`iÀ}À>`Õ>Ìi LiÀ> >ÀÌà Vi}i  Ì i Li>ÕÌvÕ i>} 6>iÞ v ViÌÀ> iÜ9À ° 6QCRRN[ECPFKFCVGUUJQWNFUWDOKVCEWTTKEWNWOXKVCGCFGUETKRVKQPQH VGCEJKPICPFTGUGCTEJKPVGTGUVUCPFVJTGGNGVVGTUQHTGEQOOGPFCVKQP VJTQWIJhttps://academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/7608.

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The Senor Chemist’s responsibilities are to set up and validate new tests on Food, Supplement, Environmental and other matrices as needed to grow the business. Part of this will be writing the SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) for the method, creating the quality control documents and procedures associated with the test, creating and executing the validation protocol, writing the official validation report, and training chemists/technicians on new testing. Other duties will include creating costing models for pricing, performing research on current techniques and new testing capabilities, creating training documents to help develop staff, and being a technical resource for chemistry staff and clients. The Senior Chemist will have frequent contact with the client base as well as review, reporting and interpretation of laboratory results in collaboration with the management team. The Chief Science Officer is responsible for all aspects of analytical laboratory processes including technology, methodology, laboratory proficiency measurements, research, and scientific processes. This position is responsible for application and evaluation of approved microbiological techniques and methodologies used in all FSNS laboratories in the analysis of food products as they relate to accreditation, certification, and customer requirements. This position will have contact with customers, laboratory staff and will review new business and special projects proposals. This role may have supervisory responsibilities. Please apply online at

http://chp.tbe.taleo.net/chp02/ats/careers/jobSearch.jsp?org=FOODSAFETYNET&cws=1 Food Safety Net Services (FSNS) is a network of ISO/IEC 17025:2005 accredited laboratories that provide a wide range of microbiological testing and chemical analysis. Testing includes but is not limited to non-routine and routine quantitative and qualitative analysis following standardized and validated methods such as AOAC, USDA, AOCS, FDA, ASTA, USP as well as others. In addition to our comprehensive scope of laboratory testing, FSNS also provides a full menu of auditing services that synergistically improve the effectiveness of food safety and quality programs. Our experts help you ensure that your food safety and quality programs deliver the critical information you need to continually improve your process controls and measurement systems. We assist you to meet and help you develop effective contingency planning for governmental regulatory requirements. Services Include: • • • • • •

Laboratory Services Including Microbiological Analysis & Chemistry Testing Nutritional Labeling (NLEA) Education Special Projects Including Validation and Challenge Studies. Auditing Research

Get Connected: FSNS is actively involved in industry trade meetings and technical sessions, and have long-standing relationships with industry leaders that can provide information and support faster and with more depth. Having access to a third-party laboratory that upholds and maintains such relationships can strategically guide you through technological advances and regulatory changes. Through your third-party lab, you can have open access to a network of resources and contacts that can support you and your organization as needs arise.

27 August 2016 | NewScientist | 49

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Postdoctoral Scholars for MERIT Program Funded by a NIH IRACDA Program

The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) MERIT (Mentored Experiences in Research, Instruction, and Teaching) Program is seeking individuals who are interested in outstanding teaching and research experiences during their postdoctoral training. The MERIT Program will provide opportunities for research experience at UAB and teaching experiences at minority serving institutions, including Oakwood University and Stillman College, located near UAB. MERIT Scholars are supported for four years at NRSA rates; are provided with health insurance at no charge; Allowance for travel and supplies as outlined on our website.

in association with

Spotlight on… the MERIT program With all of the changes going on in STEM, it’s hard for post-docs to know which path they should choose. We explore one possible option in the world of biomedical sciences. Discover more in our careers advice section on newscientistjobs.com

Applicants to the MERIT Program must be Ph.D. candidates or recent Ph.D. recipients (with the past year) and a US citizen or non-citizen national; individuals with comparable degrees, include MD and DVM, are also eligible. Women and persons from diverse backgrounds, including underrepresented racial and ethnic groups, individuals with disabilities, and individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds are encouraged to apply. Application materials as well as other information are available at http://www.uab.edu/meritprogram/.

50 | NewScientist | 27 August 2016

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Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minority Students (ABRCMS) Tampa Convention Center | Tampa, FL | November 9-12, 2016 ABRCMS advances

2015 ABRCMS Attendees by Location

undergraduates and postbaccalaureates from underrepresented populations, including those November 9–12 with disabilities, in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) along the path toward graduate-level training. The conference features about 1,800 poster and oral presentations, along with scientific, professional development, and networking sessions. Approximately 700 exhibitors showcase their summer research and graduate school opportunities.

WA MT ME

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OR WI VT NH

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MI CA

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IL OH

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Attendees 251 – 500 101 – 250 51 – 100 11 – 50 1 – 10 0

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2015 Distribution of Scientific Disciplines Immunology 4% Cancer Biology 8.5%

Biochemical Sciences 10% Cell Biological Sciences 7%

ABRCMS Registration

Molecular Sciences 5%

5000 Non-Students 4000

Grads/Postdocs Undergrads/Postbacs

Chemical Sciences 9.5%

Developmental Biological Sciences 8.5%

3000

Microbiological Sciences 11%

2000 Social & Behavioral Sciences & Public Health 9.5%

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“It was a great opportunity to see the extraordinary research being conducted in the country and also to encourage and offer thoughtful advice to the future scientists.”

(Quantitative) Physical Sciences & Mathematics 9%

Neuroscience 13% Physiological Sciences 5%

“I love ABRCMS because of the vast amount of opportunities it has to offer. I meet so many new people who broaden my perspective of different areas of research. It’s great to see people from all walks of life who possess the desire to be involved in science.” STUDENT ATTENDEE

FACULTY/JUDGE

Important Deadlines: Judges’ Travel Subsidy Application:........... July 12, 2016 Travel Award Application: ........................... August 26, 2016 Abstract Submission: .................................... September 9, 2016 Discount Registration:................................... October 12, 2016 For more information, please visit: www.abrcms.org.

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Since 2009, the National Postdoctoral Association (NPA) has sponsored National Postdoc Appreciation Week to recognize the significant contributions that postdoctoral scholars make to U.S. research and discovery. Institutions from across the country and other parts of the world participate by holding special events. During this week-long celebration, institutions are encouraged to plan activities that increase awareness of postdocs and recognize the contributions they make. Email us with information on how you will be showing appreciation for the postdocs at your institution this year. We look forward to hearing from you!

Submit your events to [email protected] http://www.nationalpostdoc.org/?page=NPAW 27 August 2016 | NewScientist | 53

LETTERS EDITOR’S PICK

Getting sceptics to warm to the truth From Quentin Macilray As I am sure many others do, I occasionally hear people making remarks along the lines of: “I don’t believe all this global warming nonsense. What do you think?” I appreciate the point about “expertise” making sceptics dig in their heels (2 July, p 5). The trouble is, there don’t seem to be any snappy answers. I can rattle on about graphs of hurricane frequency and intensity, but that just raises a storm of indifference. I can point out that the North-East Passage is now open on a regular basis for the first time in at least 500 years, but that doesn’t cut any ice (sorry) with those who haven’t heard of Willoughby and Barents. If I mention that the south of England now has a wine industry, some bright spark then points out that the vine was cultivated and wine made in southern England in the Medieval Warm Period. I note that the BBC has officially forbidden its journalists from “presenting both sides of the debate,” on the grounds that there is no other side. But that just leads to a digression into BBC salaries. Surely there must be some obvious natural indicator that I can point to? Perhaps concerning butterflies. Or hedgehogs. Hedgehogs would be nice, everybody loves hedgehogs. Limassol, Cyprus

To read more letters, visit newscientist.com/letters 54 | NewScientist | 27 August 2016

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Feeling for meaning of empathy From Julie Fitzpatrick I was interested in Penny Dunbabin’s response to the idea of training caring professionals in compassion (Letters, 18 June). She sees empathy as a “feeling of individual connection or attachment.” I do not. There is increasing confusion about the meanings of words relating to our responses to others’ experiences and feelings. I think some standard definitions are needed and suggest as follows. Sympathy: shared understanding of a situation and emotions, an emotional connection often aided by parallel life events, without internal experience of the other’s actual current feeling. Empathy: the ability to physically and emotionally share the feelings of another. Empathetic: using standardised techniques to appear empathic. Compassion: deep sympathy with pity, kindness, caring, and a willingness to help. May involve a degree of empathy. Comments made by the few truly empathic people I have met make me prefer training people to use more compassion and less empathy. From my experiences with empathetic professionals, it would deliver better client experiences, too. Perth, Western Australia

GM rice isn’t so wonderful From Nagib Nassar A manifesto signed by more than 100 Nobel prizewinners, claiming that the environmental group Greenpeace threatens food security (9 July, p 7), was much reported. It seems that the signatories were prompted to act by Greenpeace’s criticism of the genetically modified vitamin A enhanced “golden rice”.

I would question why Support Precision Agriculture, the organisation funding the meeting that produced the manifesto, is focusing on golden rice, which accounts for just 0.1 per cent of the area cultivated with genetically modified organisms. Herbicide-resistant soya, and maize containing the Bt toxin to combat caterpillars and other insects make up more than 99 per cent of the GMOs consumed in the world. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization recommends that children aged from 1 to 3 get 0.2 milligrams of vitamin A per day. A kilogram of golden rice contains 1.6 milligrams of the vitamin A precursor betacarotene, and we need 6 mg of beta-carotene to get 1 mg of vitamin A, so a child would need to eat about 750 grams of golden rice daily to get the level advised. By contrast, a kilogram of sweet potato, a cheap and abundant food for poor populations worldwide, has 11.4 milligrams of beta-carotene. Natural selection has provided plants with a balanced genetic make-up for their habitat. This warns us not to neglect natural biodiversity and existing natural genetic resources. Biodiversity provides us, inexpensively, with the genes that we need. Corporations that gain from the manufacture of GM crops want us to forget that. Brasilia, Brazil

Is Schrödinger’s human alive yet? From Toby Pereira Jon Cartwright discusses the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics, in which observation causes a quantum wave function to collapse (16 July, p 30). As is often the case in such articles, this is often stretched to speculation that human consciousness is an important

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factor in this. But there’s no experimental evidence that any different results would be achieved by non-conscious observation. There does in fact seem to be no reason in principle why a conscious observer couldn’t be part of a quantum set-up. Schrödinger’s cat may indeed be such a thought experiment. But, given the slightly ambiguous status of cats, a better and more explicit version would surely be “Schrödinger’s human”. Braintree, Essex, UK From Nalin de Silva A problem with the Copenhagen interpretation is that there are many interpretations of it. The physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg each had their own. This does not mean that the observer has no role to play. The observations are interpreted as such by the observer. Issaquah, Washington, US From Will Andrews You report that Daniel Sudarsky and Elias Okon showed a decade ago that it was inevitable in the early universe for the wave functions of matter to collapse and for things to be able to form. But was it inevitable before they discovered that? Claremont, California, US

Farm policy is not about environment From Sandy Henderson Michael Le Page discusses how UK environmental laws might improve post-Brexit (9 July, p 19). But agricultural policies were and are about food rather than land management. This stems from the long-established fact that agricultural commodity markets are inherently unstable. Commercial agriculture can only be profitable when demand exceeds supply. The cheap food that so many of us have enjoyed for more than 50 years is directly

“It’s when a visual signal goes to the memory part of your brain. It’s just your brain doing goofed” Olivia James patiently explains to Facebookers who want their déjà vu to be mystical, despite our report (20 August, p 9)

down to agricultural policies that have allowed farmers to keep producing at a loss. If we want areas managed for reasons other than the production of food, fuel , timber, fibre and recreation, then we should be prepared to pay for this without expecting , as in the past, to get it by default from farmers. Dunblane, Perthshire, UK

Your computer may be commandeered From Chris deSilva Some companies want to use your computer itself, not just your data (23 July, p 26). Microsoft, for example, uses peer-to-peer file transfer to update the Windows 10 operating system. This means that update files stored on your hard disc can be sent to other computers on Microsoft’s command, which may entail a cost to you. You can opt out by going to the “Choose how updates are delivered” section buried in the computer’s Update settings. Dianella, Western Australia TOM GAULD

How omega–3s got their true name From Chris Evans Your article on “superfoods” refers to some fatty acids as “omega 3s” (6 August, p 27). The correct name is “omega-3”, the “-” being a minus sign. In these fatty acids there is a double bond between the third and fourth carbon atoms from the “omega” carbon at the end of the chain. Correct terminology might even prevent any misconception that omega-6 fatty acids are twice as good for you. Earby, Lancashire, UK

The saga of the last common ancestor From Spencer Weart It is interesting that the Last Universal Common Ancestor of all living organisms was adapted to life in undersea vents (30 July, p 12). But we cannot assume that this proves that life originated in such an environment over

3 billion years ago. Life might have originated anywhere, and some of it then adapted to undersea vents. Perhaps only this form survived the frozen snowball Earth period some 700 million years ago, and thus became our ancestor. Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, US

It is a search for impossible galaxies From Nick Hamilton The idea that we could detect aliens by observing galaxies that they cause to disappear seems to be flawed (9 July, p 15). A galaxy could only disappear over a period greater than the time it takes a signal to cross that galaxy. Even the smallest of galaxies, 3000 light years across, would take 1500 years or so to disappear if aliens were so inclined. Red Hill, Queensland, Australia The editor writes: ■ Yes – but the researchers are indeed looking for effects that are impossible (or nearly impossible) in conventional astrophysics.

Catpocalypse for NZ feral creatures From Merlin Reader You report a plan to exterminate vermin to protect New Zealand’s birds (30 July, p 7). Feral cats are also a major problem: are they included? And to prevent them becoming re-established, controlling the domestic cat population will be necessary. London, UK The editor writes: ■ Feral cats are indeed included: mentioning them in the policy announcement was described as “electorally impossible”.

A prescient poet hinted at evolution From Chris Aspin Derek Hough draws our attention to Patrick Matthew setting out the principles of evolution in 1831, before Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Darwin (Letters, 6 August). Jalaluddin Rumi, the Persian Sufi teacher and poet who died in 1273, seems to have come close when he wrote: “I died from minerality and became vegetable / And from vegetativeness I died and became animal / I died from animality and became man.” Helmshore, Lancashire, UK

For the record ■ By 2019, the world will have spent $18 billion to eradicate polio (6 August, p 16).

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27 August 2016 | NewScientist | 55

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study, published in Environmental Health Perspectives, which identifies a lack of “semantic standards” when it comes to presenting data on microbiome samples. The origin of the microbes was variously described as feces, faeces, odure, manure, excreta and stool, meaning that searching any one term was unlikely to flush out all of the material available. Feedback hopes that the finding prompts researchers to get their, er, act together, and settle on a definitive term for dung once and for all.

DRAMATIC scenes are emerging from Louisiana, where residents are once again battling torrential rains and flooding. How are legislators responding to this latest crisis, given Louisiana’s reputation as a state besieged both by rising sea levels and climate change denialism? Louisiana senator John Fleming has previously gone on record to say that “global warming, to the extent that it ever existed, halted 16 years ago”. While we wait for his response to the latest bout of flooding, Feedback turns the clock back to March, when he railed against the Obama administration for diverting military funding to tackle climate change. Just two days later, Fleming proved the necessity of that military spending, when he hitched a ride on the Coast Guard’s black hawk helicopter – to survey the damage caused by the March floods.

PROVING once again that the Internet of Things is also the Internet of Things That Strangers Can Hack Their Way Into, security researchers have uncovered vulnerabilities in web-connected sex toys intended to let distant lovers share a buzz. The results were unveiled at the Def Con conference in Las Vegas, where hackers demonstrated their ability to siphon off information enabling them to see when the device, at least, was turned on. Feedback thinks that the need for encrypted channels takes safe sex to an entirely new level. IN SCIENCE, it’s important to know your… stuff, but that might be difficult if everyone’s referring to it by a different name. Our friends at Improbable Research are alerted by Tony Tweedale to a

The Associated Press reports that “Giant tarpaulins are being installed in the Italian Alps to help prevent glaciers from melting. Researchers say they can reduce the sun’s temperature by as much as 90 per cent.” Should we be worried? 56 | NewScientist | 27 August 2016

IN HIS latest contract with cellphone operator Orange, Steefaan van Ryssen is restricted to sending no more than 16,666,666 text messages a month. To stay within his contract, he calculates he must limit himself to just one text every 0.16 seconds, morning, noon and night. “I am only human and I need to sleep some hours,” says Steefaan, so in practice he would have to tap out messages a little faster than that during his waking hours. “It is appropriate that the contract is called Dolphin, since these intelligent animals can turn off half of their brain to take a nap,” says Steefaan. If only they had thumbs. RICHARD LAMBLEY spotted a bag of “guinea pig crunch” which boasts that it will make your pet “healthy from nose to tail”. “Cavia porcellus is well known to science and, beyond that, to a wider animal-loving public,” says Richard. “So I was surprised to see the maker appears ignorant of a very distinctive feature, or non-feature, of the little rodent’s anatomy.”

ALAN WELLS reports that while logging in to pay his taxes online, he is required to provide details such as his birth date. That’s when he noticed that “the days field allows the entry of negative days”. Feedback suspects it’s not the only time people will try to offer imaginary numbers when asked their age.

CHINA has launched what it claims is the world’s first hack-proof satellite, powered by quantum computers. The Guardian, quoting state broadcaster Xinhau, reports that the quantum satellite would allow messages to be sent “faster than light”. If true, this would let someone receive a reply before they’d sent the question – which is certainly one way of hiding your communications from prying eyes.

AS THE Rio Olympics come to a close, Team GB’s carry-on luggage in groaning under the weight of metalware. With 27 gold medals collected, it strikes Feedback that in these economically perilous times, the athletes may be under instructions to replenish the nation’s gold reserves. Just how many medals would it take to recover the 395 tonnes of

gold sold off in the late 1990s? Unfortunately, even the top award at Rio only contains 6 grams of gold, plated over a silver sovereign. This places Team GB’s haul just 6,583,312 medals shy of the requisite number. We recommend focusing on team sports at the forthcoming 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo, which offer the best return on bullion per win. You can send stories to Feedback by email at [email protected]. Please include your home address. This week’s and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website.

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THE LAST WORD Bloodthirst Do humans have an innate desire to eat meat, or is it cultural? If our culture had all references to eating meat removed, would people still desire it?

■ It is less an innate desire for meat in particular than for concentrated nutrition such as fats and proteins. Even in nonmeat foods, we favour nutrientrich items such as nuts, fruits, grains and tubers. Think of how appetising chocolate or halva is, compared with lettuce or grass. Herbivores generally must eat large quantities of low-grade plant foods, discarding most of

So it is with us: most of us relish and thrive on some of the concentrated fat, protein, vitamins and essential fatty acids in meat. Jon Richfield Somerset West, South Africa

Lunar attraction If a sea-level canal were dug from east to west across Asia, would the moon have a tidal effect on the water level, with a daily tidal bore in phase with it?

the fibre and excess materials they contain. They also discard the toxins: plants are generally full of harmful chemicals that herbivores must tolerate, excrete or destroy, while concentrating the vitamins, proteins, fats and digestible carbohydrates. The resultant, purified herbivore flesh suits carnivores, which would die if they tried eating too much of the wrong plant matter – the list of wholesome plant foods that could kill your dog or cat is shocking. Many herbivores are partial to a bit of meat if they can get it, and omnivores will generally work harder to obtain animal-based food than plant-based food.

■ Tides are raised on Earth by the gravitational pull of the moon and, to a lesser extent, the sun. Even the water in your bathtub is moved as the moon passes overhead, albeit by an immeasurably small amount. The same is true for water in a canal. But the tidal range – the difference in the water level at high and low tides – is only significant in huge bodies of water such as oceans, and only noticeable when the bulge of water then encounters a land mass. Tidal bores occur in some rivers and, more rarely still, on narrow sea inlets, known as fjords in Norway or sea lochs in Scotland. A significant tidal range is required, typically in excess of 6 metres. Entering a wide bay, the incoming tide is funnelled towards the narrow opening of the river or inlet, and the water piles up on top of itself, creating a wave that travels upriver. Bores can be subdivided into hydraulic jumps, where there is a sudden

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submitted by readers in any medium or in any format and at any time in the future. Send questions and answers to The Last Word, New Scientist, 110 High Holborn, London WC1V 6EU, UK, by email to [email protected] or visit www.newscientist.com/topic/lastword (please include a postal address in order to receive payment for answers). Unanswered questions can also be found at this URL.

“Herbivore flesh suits carnivores, which die if they eat too much of the wrong plant matter”

change in water level, and undular bores. The UK’s Severn bore is undular, characterised by a wavefront followed by a series of solitons, or solitary waves. John Scott Russell first described solitons in 1834, when he saw one moving along the Union Canal in Scotland. It was created when a horse-drawn narrowboat suddenly stopped and the water that was being pushed along by the vessel continued for several kilometres, travelling at around 13 kilometres per hour. However, even if there were no locks, the energy of a tidal bore running through a trans-Asia canal would peter out as it worked against friction on the bottom and sides of the canal. Mike Follows Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands, UK

Coloured dots I’ve noticed that when an object is seen from a distance in daylight, the colours appear changed. For example, when I observed my wife walk round a lake in Switzerland, her pink top looked white and her blue trousers looked pink from 600 metres or more away. Do surfaces need to be sufficiently large in our field of view for us to perceive their colours correctly?

■ In the centre of your visual field there is a small area that is effectively blue-blind. This “foveal tritanopia” means that objects with colours that differ only in

how much blue they contain become indistinguishable when they are very small – about the size of a tennis ball viewed from the other end of the court. So white and yellow will look identical, as will red and magenta, or blue and black. This phenomenon has been known empirically for a long time. Naval signalling flags are designed so they cannot be confused even when viewed at a distance where this effect could manifest itself. Similarly, heraldic rules forbid a yellow emblem on a white background or vice versa, or blue on black, and so forth. Roger Carpenter Professor of Oculomotor Physiology University of Cambridge, UK ■ This effect is called aerial perspective and is an important technique in a landscape painter’s toolbox. Diluting colour intensity by blending it with white mimics the effect of the atmosphere on distant objects. This effect is the reason faraway hills have a bluish or purple tinge, and why the colours on your wife’s clothes appeared pale. In a landscape painting, bright colours such as reds and yellows are best used in the foreground, whereas pale blues and other diluted colours will give the illusion of depth. Of course, the Fauvists broke all these rules, favouring strong colours over realism with wonderful results. Ingrid Banwell Sydney, Australia

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