New Scientist Magazine - 16 December 2017

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URANUS II

Is there another ice giant lurking in our solar system?

BORN NOT MADE

Genes and antibodies shape male sexuality before birth

END OF PREHISTORY

How Bronze-Age civilisation came crashing down WEEKLY 16 December 2017

HEART TO HEART We need to talk about organ shortages

EFFORTLESS THINKING Why some ideas come naturally to us – and why they’re usually wrong

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PLUS FASTING BRAINS / SCIENTISTS IN EXILE / CALIFORNIA BURNING / GRIEVING PIGS / PLANET TORTOISE / COMEDY COMPUTERS / FARAWAY QUASAR / EXPLODING EGGS

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CONTENTS

Management Executive chairman Bernard Gray Publishing director John MacFarlane Finance director Matthew O’Sullivan Strategy director Sumit Paul-Choudhury Human resources Shirley Spencer Non-executive director Louise Rogers

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Volume 236 No 3156

News The biology of being gay 8

On the cover

Leader

36 Uranus II Is there another ice giant lurking in our solar system? 8

40 End of prehistory How Bronze-Age civilisation came crashing down

8

NEWS & TECHNOLOGY How male sexuality can be shaped before birth. Fasting boosts brainpower. Mega Mars storm is on the way. The strange history of giant tortoises. LIGO hasn’t found dark matter after all. Global warming 3.5 billion years ago. “Pigs” that grieve. Can AI make us laugh? Most distant quasar ever found. Boy can see despite lacking the vision bit of his brain. Beware exploding eggs

28 Effortless thinking Why some ideas come naturally to us - and why they’re usually wrong

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News UPFRONT A nature reserve burns. Terrorists target iconic animals. US aims for the moon

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Syndication

The world urgently needs critical thinking, not gut feelings

6

22 Heart to heart We need to talk about organ shortages

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Born not made Genes and antibodies shape male sexuality before birth

Event director Mike Sherrard Creative director Valerie Jamieson Sales director Jacqui McCarron Event manager Henry Gomm Conference producer Natalie Gorohova

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Publishing and commercial

Plus Fasting brains (9). Scientists in exile (46). California burning (26). Grieving pigs (12). Planet tortoise (10). Comedy computers (14). Faraway quasar (14). Exploding eggs (16)

19 IN BRIEF Food delivery robots. ‘Oumuamua may be a planet shard. Your breath gives you away. Glue rapidly patches up injured eyes

Analysis 22 Organ donors We need more organs for transplants. How far should doctors go? 24 COMMENT Smart cities must put privacy first. Try a radical cure for the UK’s healthcare crisis 25 INSIGHT Festive Christmas science isn’t very funny

Features 28 Thoughtlessly thoughtless Why the ideas that come so naturally to us are often misguided 36 The invisible hand Is there another ice giant lurking in our solar system? 40 PEOPLE Eberhard Zangger and the end of the Bronze Age

Culture 44 Coming at you! Think the near-real worlds of CGI and motion capture are as good as it gets? Just wait for a new kind of video 46 Refugee scientists reshape the world A film explores what happens to the researchers fleeing war and conflict

Regulars 26 APERTURE California burning 52 LETTERS Critical geologists 55 SIGNAL BOOST Put vaccination on the map 56 FEEDBACK Sparkly supplements 57 THE LAST WORD Let’s be blunt

16 December 2017 | NewScientist | 3

LEADER

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Mission critical thinking The world urgently needs deep thought, not gut feeling IN A classic episode of The But at huge cost. Our mental Simpsons, Marge and Homer’s shortcuts work fine at the level night out at a class reunion ends of individuals and small-scale in humiliation when one of societies, but in an increasingly Homer’s guilty secrets is exposed: interconnected and globalised he never graduated from high world, they are a danger to society. school. To get his diploma, he Effortless thinking is at the root of must pass a science test. As he sits many of the modern world’s most down to retake the exam, he holds serious problems: xenophobia, one of his trademark dialogues terrorism, hatred, inequality, with his brain. “All right, brain. defence of injustice, religious You don’t like me and I don’t like fanaticism and our shocking you. But let’s just do this and I can susceptibility to fake news and get back to killing you with beer.” conspiracy theories. All are Many a true word is spoken in facilitated by people disengaging jest. Homer Simpson’s Everyman their critical faculties and going character really is an Everyman. For most people, engaging in the “In an increasingly interconnected world, kind of effortful thinking that is our mental shortcuts required to pass a science test are a danger to society” feels too much like hard work. It is so much easier to kick back and let the brain’s autopilot take over. with their gut – and being And no wonder. Even when encouraged to do so by populist lubricated with beer, the autopilot politicians channelling anger is a pretty impressive piece of kit. at the liberal establishment. Evolution has endowed the This is a potent political human brain with all kinds of message because it both elevates mental shortcuts that make life common sense and exploits manageable. If we had to think our instinctive tribalism by about every action or weigh up suggesting that the world is every decision, we would be divided into two mutually paralysed. As a result, certain antagonistic tribes – the noideas and modes of thinking nonsense masses and the come naturally to us (see page 28). pointy headed elite.

This couldn’t be further from the truth. Everybody is capable of gut thinking, but also of the careful deliberation that is required to solve problems and override our basest instincts. Both thinking styles are needed to make the world go round. Unfortunately, the latter requires training that is unavailable or unappealing to many people. Put simply, effortless thinking is born, critical thinking is made. Research tells us that a scientific education is especially good at developing critical thought. But too many people take the Homerian view of science: boring, hard, irrelevant and dispensable. It would be naive to suggest that science education is the answer to all our problems: Homer passed the exam, but then reverted to type. But it isn’t naive to suggest that it can help make the world a better place. One of the bright spots of a miserable 2017 was the start of a movement called the March For Science. Those who believe in the transformative power of science and rationality need to keep on marching, or cede yet more power to people who don’t much like their own brains – or other people’s. ■ 16 December 2017 | NewScientist | 5

UPFRONT

Trump and vice-president Mike Pence both emphasised the importance of a US military presence on the moon. Pence said it will “enhance our national security and our capacity to provide for the common defence of the people of the United States of America”. Trump signed Space Policy Directive 1 following a recommendation by the National Space Council, re-established this June after 24 years of inactivity and led by Pence. Details of the directive remain murky, but Pence has shown enthusiasm for partnerships with commercial space firms. How it will be funded is also not clear. The Apollo programme cost NASA an estimated $200 billion in today’s money.

Crimes against life

The report says the key threats are the LRA, corruption in the DRC state military, armed pastoralists called the Fulani and many militias, like the Janjaweed, from the chaos in South Sudan. “In terms of quantity, the pastoralists and the militias from Sudan and South Sudan are the

JOSEPH KONY and his notorious Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) haven’t gone away. They have moved to an unstable belt of countries near their former base of Uganda. There, they and other lawless militias are decimating iconic animals like elephants for “Giraffes are reportedly food and ivory, plus terrorising villages and kidnapping children. being killed to provide the Lord’s Resistance Army That is the grim message from with tails to deter flies” a report by TRAFFIC, a wildlife trade monitoring network. Based biggest problem,” says author Liz on interviews with 700 people Williamson at the University of from Sudan, the Central African Stirling, UK. “They hop back and Republic and the Democratic forth over the border, and most Republic of the Congo (DRC), trading of wildlife products… goes the report exposes the threat to through Sudan.” elephants and species like giant The groups are professional and elands and eastern chimpanzees. well equipped. Some even poach Giraffes are reportedly being elephants using helicopters. killed simply to provide the LRA But people are fighting back. with tails for deterring flies. In October, conservation body Only 47 now survive in the DRC’s African Parks began using satellite protected “Garamba complex”, imagery to track poaching. where there had been 350. The real problem is the chronic Elephants here totalled 22,000 instability, says Williamson. in the 1970s, but are now down to “Without peace agreements to between 1100 and 1400. Rhinos, tackle ongoing insecurity, the of which there were once about problems will continue,” she says. 500, are gone entirely. 6 | NewScientist | 16 December 2017

Microwave attack? WERE US diplomats in Cuba microwaved? Those affected earlier this year reported experiencing bursts of painful, highly localised sound at home or in hotel rooms. After-effects included headaches, nausea and hearing loss. Cuba denied that any such attacks took place. Medical checks suggested that some of these people have signs of brain damage. That, in turn, suggests the attacks weren’t imagined, but isn’t consistent with a sonic device being used. Now James Lin at the University of Illinois at Chicago says the localised sounds and health effects might both be the result of a beam of pulsed microwaves. Lin has been working with this microwave auditory effect for decades, and says it could explain the Cuban reports (IEEE Microwave Magazine, doi.org/chbd). “A minuscule but rapid rise in tissue temperature, resulting from the absorption of pulsed microwave energy, creates a thermoelastic expansion of brain matter,” says Lin. The ensuing

acoustic shock wave is perceived as sound. The microwave beam could affect individuals indoors and could cause brain tissue damage from a combination of heating and shock waves. Not everyone is convinced. “That theory is a real stretch,” says Kenneth Foster at the University of Pennsylvania, who investigates the effects of microwaves on the body. The peak power levels needed would involve a rather conspicuous transmitter, he says.

JOE AMON/THE DENVER POST VIA GETTY

DONALD TRUMP wants NASA to shoot for the moon. On 11 December, the 45th anniversary of the Apollo 17 lunar landing, the US president signed a directive telling NASA to focus on human exploration, with an eye to getting back to the moon. “This time, we will not only plant our flag and leave our footprint. We will establish a foundation for an eventual mission to Mars and perhaps, some day, to many worlds beyond,” Trump said in a press conference before the signing. Under President Obama, NASA’s main target for crewed missions was the Red Planet. It isn’t clear how this shift in focus will affect NASA’s timeline for an eventual mission to Mars.

DOUG MILLS/NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX/EYEVINE

US plans moon visit

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60 SECONDS

Betting on bitcoin

Social media companies should be liable for illegal content posted on their platforms, says a new report from the UK’s Committee on Standards in Public Life. If the recommendations become law, firms could be fined for hosting content that is racist, extremist or related to child sex abuse.

NATURE PICTURE LIBRARY / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

BITCOIN has taken another step towards financial respectability. Chicago-based Cboe Global Markets launched a futures market for the cryptocurrency on Monday. Futures are a financial instrument that let traders bet on the future price of something. Commodity traders use them to limit the risks of buying or selling things like oil or metals and allow more sophisticated trading strategies. Trading had to be halted twice as demand surged after the bitcoin futures market launched. Bets on bitcoin’s price one month from now started at $15,460, rose to $18,700 and ended at $17,800 when trading closed. The price of bitcoin itself was at $16,200, suggesting investors see a rosy future for the currency, which has soared in value in recent weeks. “It is rare that you see something more volatile than bitcoin, but we found it: bitcoin futures,” Zennon Kapron of Shanghai-based consulting firm Kapronasia told Bloomberg. Nearly 4000 futures contracts swapped hands on the first day of trading, although trading volumes fell on Tuesday as the market calmed. Other exchanges are expected to launch their own bitcoin futures markets in the coming months.

Facebook under fire

Gym bunnies

Wetlands burn A PROTECTED wetland has caught fire for the ninth time since 2011. The fires threaten hundreds of species, some of them unique. The wetland of Hutovo Blato spans 7411 hectares in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It is one of Europe’s richest sites for migratory birds. However, in October, 1000 hectares were destroyed by fire. The cost of repairs is estimated at €500,000. Most of the previous fires were minor, but one in 2011 burned much of the wetland, says Nikola Zovko, a director of the site. Big fires release nutrients into the water. This boosts the growth of algae, causing blooms that remove oxygen and kill animals.

Executioners turn to opioids TWO US states are considering using the synthetic painkiller fentanyl as part of the cocktail of drugs used to execute prisoners on death row. Many pharmaceutical firms have stopped supplying prisons with the drugs used in lethal injections. Nevada and Nebraska are both proposing to add fentanyl to the mix to get around this, as it is much easier to access. The opioid drug is used clinically to treat severe pain, such as that of advanced cancer. It works in the same

way as heroin, but is 50 to 100 times more potent – making it very easy to accidentally take a fatal dose. The drug has been blamed for tens of thousands of opioid overdose deaths in the US in recent years. But it hasn’t been used in executions before, and critics warn that fentanyl-assisted executions are essentially an experiment. The first execution could happen in Nevada as soon as January, according to The Washington Post.

Hutovo Blato’s underlying problem is that it is drying due to hydropower plants that cut water flow, says Zoran Mateljak of WWF. In 2014, WWF drew up a plan to fix this, but little has been done. If the drying continues Hutovo Blato will be gone by 2050, WWF says. Mateljak says it might be sooner if a big enough fire hits.

Huntington’s hope AN INCURABLE inherited illness that kills many of those affected by their 40s may be slowed by a novel drug injected into fluid surrounding the spine and brain. Although the results of a trial in 46 people with Huntington’s disease in the UK, Germany and Canada were only preliminary, independent neurologists were still cautiously optimistic. The drug is designed to stop production of the huntingtin protein, which is mutated in those with the condition and kills brain cells, causing gradual loss of mobility and brain activity. Before it can be produced, the treatment intercepts and destroys RNA that carries the instructions to make the protein. It is the first time a drug has cut levels of the toxic version of huntingtin in the nervous system of people. A larger trial will be needed to see if this slows disease progression.

Living near a gym helps keep you trim, according to a study of around 40,000 UK adults. People with at least six physical activity facilities within 1 kilometre of their home have 0.8 per cent less body fat and a waist 1.2 centimetres smaller than average. Living near a fast-food outlet, in contrast, boosts waist size by 0.2 centimetres (The Lancet, DOI: 10.1016/S2468-2667(17)30212-8).

Little Foot steps out The near-complete skeleton of an extinct hominin found in South Africa’s Sterkfontein caves in the 1990s has finally gone on display after 20 years of study. Little Foot is an Australopithecus from 3.67 million years ago. Detailed findings will be released next year.

Penguins’ new heights An extinct species of giant penguin was as tall as an average man, reaching 1.77 metres. Kumamanu biceae lived in New Zealand more than 55 million years ago. It is one of the largest and oldest penguins ever found, and probably evolved its stature independently of other giant penguins.

Icy pinnacle resized Mount Hope is the highest peak on the Antarctic Peninsula, not Mount Jackson as we thought. According to new satellite data, Mount Hope is 3239 metres tall, 55 metres higher than Mount Jackson. As the Antarctic Peninsula is claimed by the UK, Mount Hope is now also the tallest British mountain, surpassing the 1345-metre Ben Nevis.

16 December 2017 | NewScientist | 7

NEWS & TECHNOLOGY

The biology of being gay Genes and antibodies identified that may shape male sexuality, says Andy Coghlan

TRISTAN SAVATIER/GETTY

WE’RE homing in on the pathways colleagues compared DNA from that shape sexual orientation – in 1077 gay and 1231 straight men. men, at least. The latest findings Scanning the men’s entire reveal genes and antibodies that genomes, the team spotted two seem to be part of the complex genes whose variants seem to biology behind homosexuality. be linked to sexual orientation Studies of sexuality have (Nature Scientific Reports, largely tended to focus on men, doi.org/cg94). and for decades there has been One of the genes sits on evidence that sexual orientation chromosome 13. Other research is partly heritable in men. Genetic has found that this gene, variations in regions of the called SLITRK6, is active in the X chromosome and chromosome hypothalamus brain region a 8 were linked to homosexuality few days before male mice fetuses in the mid-1990s, but no specific genes had been found. There was “It takes us a step closer to understanding one of the also no explanation for why men most fascinating features are more likely to be gay if they of human beings” have older brothers, known as the “fraternal birth order effect”. Now, for the first time, two are born. “This is thought to genes that may influence how be a crucial time for sexual sexual orientation develops have differentiation in this part of the been identified, while another brain,” says neuroscientist Simon team’s work may explain the LeVay, who in 1991 discovered fraternal birth order effect. that hypothalamus size differs Alan Sanders at NorthShore between straight and gay men. University, Illinois, and his The other gene, TSHR, is on

8 | NewScientist | 16 December 2017

chromosome 14 and helps control thyroid function. TSHR function is known to be disrupted in a genetic thyroid condition called Grave’s disease, and this disorder is more common in gay men. Not all men who have these genetic variants will be gay, says Sanders, because many other factors play a role, including the environment. “There are probably multiple genes involved, each with a fairly low effect,” he says. Anthony Bogaert at Brock University, Canada, and his team think that the maternal immune system may also influence sexual orientation. Our bodies make antibodies to recognise molecules from infectious agents. But pregnant women can sometimes also produce antibodies against fetal molecules – for example, if their fetus has a different blood group. Bogaert’s team has found evidence that maternal antibodies may be involved in the fraternal

birth order effect. The team collected blood from 142 women, and screened it for antibodies to a particular brain protein that is made only in males. They thought this would be a good candidate, because it affects how neurons communicate with each other, and it is produced on the surface of brain cells, making it relatively easy for antibodies to find and detect it.

Maternal effect The mothers of gay sons with older brothers had the highest levels of antibodies against this protein, followed by the mothers of gay sons with no older brothers. Women who had straight sons had less, while women with no sons had the least (PNAS, doi.org/cg93). The team suggests these antibodies build up in some women’s bodies with every male baby they have. At higher concentrations, it is possible that the effect of these antibodies on the protein they target leads to changes in brain development that can have an influence on sexual orientation. The study was small, so the finding is only preliminary. But it “could pave the way to a detailed understanding of this fascinating aspect of human development”, says Dean Hamer at the US National Institutes of Health, who was the first to pinpoint a genetic region linked to homosexuality in 1993. The genetic finding adds “yet more evidence that sexual orientation is not a ‘lifestyle choice’”, says Hamer. “But the real significance is that it takes us one step closer to understanding the origins of one of the most fascinating and important features of human beings.” ■

In this section ■ “Pigs” that grieve, page 12 ■ Can AI make us laugh? page 14 ■ How far should doctors go to get organs for transplant? page 22

How fasting may boost brainpower

MALIN SPACE SCIENCE SYSTEMS, MGS, JPL, NASA

COULD regular fasting make you smarter? People following regimes like the 5:2 diet usually do so for weight loss, but some who try it say it makes them mentally sharper too. If this is true, experiments in mice may offer an explanation. In these animals, enforced fasting has been found to cause changes in the brain that are likely to give neurons more energy, and enable them to grow more connections. Mark Mattson of the National Institute on Aging in Maryland and his team looked at 40 mice that consumed the same total calories, but either ate normally every day or ate nothing every other day. The team found that fasting caused a 50 per cent increase in a brain chemical called BDNF. Previous studies have shown that such a rise is likely to boost the number of mitochondria, which provide a cell’s energy, inside neurons by 20 per cent. BDNF also promotes the growth of new connections – or synapses – between brain cells, which helps in learning and memory, says Mattson. The finding makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, as animals that are hungry would benefit from more intellectual resources to find food, he says. “If human ancestors hadn’t been able to find food, they had better be able to function at a high level to chase down some prey.” The team’s results were presented at the Society for Neuroscience conference in Washington DC last month. However, results in mice don’t always translate to people. Other studies have found that living on a permanent low-calorie diet can allow mice to live as much as 50 per cent longer, although the effect seems smaller in primates. Mattson is currently testing the 5:2 diet in obese older people in a randomised trial to see if it really does make them mentally sharper. Clare Wilson ■

Temperature differences spawned this storm at Mars’s north pole

Mars storms snowball and can turn humongous LARGE dust storms on Mars might unanswered questions,” says have far-reaching effects. They Anthony Toigo at Johns Hopkins can affect the entire atmosphere, University in Maryland. Should possibly seeding new weather researchers find out, they might systems that can combine to be able to forecast these megaform planet-wide storms unlike storms. That could in turn help anything we see on Earth. ensure the safety of rovers and Dust storms are not future astronauts alike. uncommon on Mars. Local ones Toigo and his colleagues are those that cover an area less applied a weather model designed than 100,000 square kilometres – for Earth to Mars, simulating roughly half the size of the UK – and these occur several hundred “Future human colonies will need to worry about times every year, although they distant regional storms last less than a Martian day. as well as local ones” Regional ones can be as large as 1 million square kilometres – roughly the size of Alaska – and several local and regional storms. happen a dozen times every year. They wanted to study how those They are also more persistent. affect the atmosphere elsewhere Global storms blanket Mars on the planet and test a longin a thick haze and can last for standing prediction: that smaller hundreds of days. Luckily these storms cascade into larger ones. only come about every three to The team found that local four Martian years. But how storms have little to no effect on do they form? the atmosphere beyond their “That is one of the great borders, so probably do not swell

up into anything more menacing. Regional storms, on the other hand, especially ones that last for more than a few days, can boost winds or raise the temperature far from their location. The increased dust absorbs more sunlight and heats the atmosphere, driving large-scale dynamics across the planet, similar to how heating at Earth’s equator causes the jet streams. Such changes might create spin-off storms across Mars and could explain how regional storms combine to form global ones (Icarus, doi.org/cg82). “Regional dust storms occur with some frequency on Mars – so the fact that they can influence the global atmospheric condition on Mars is pretty striking,” says Brian Jackson at Boise State University in Idaho. That could mean that future human colonies will need to worry about distant regional storms as well as local ones. Although dust storms are nowhere near as damaging as the one depicted in the film The Martian, they produce enough static electricity to shortcircuit electronics. They also leave enough dust in the atmosphere to hinder solar energy generation. That’s a big concern for Jennifer Herman, the power subsystem operations team lead for the Opportunity rover at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. And it’s not her only worry. Once storms dissipate, the dust rains down on the rover’s solar panel, blocking the sun’s rays until cleared away by the wind. “It’s kind of like a double whammy,” Herman says. The last global dust storm on Mars happened in 2007, so one is overdue. Some scientists speculate that the next one will occur in 2018, although Toigo points out that this is a statistical guess. He says his study and others will help better forecast when the next mega Martian dust storm may hit. Shannon Hall Q 16 December 2017 | NewScientist | 9

NEWS & TECHNOLOGY

FRANS LANTING/FLPA

If not in black holes, where is dark matter?

When Earth was planet of the giant tortoises TORTOISES evolved into giants suggesting tortoises don’t need on at least seven occasions and islands to evolve to be larger. on four continents. The finding Evangelos Vlachos at the undermines the long-standing Museum of Paleontology Egidio idea that tortoises become Feruglio in Trelew, Argentina, enormous only if they are and Márton Rabi at the University stranded on remote islands. of Halle-Wittenberg, Germany, There are more than 40 species wanted to clarify the history of of tortoise, the most spectacular gigantism. They drew the tortoise being the giant tortoises. On the family tree using data from Galapagos islands in the Pacific extinct and living species. and Seychelles islands in the That is key, says Yuval Itescu at Indian Ocean, these animals Tel Aviv University, Israel. “There can have shells more than are two competing hypotheses 120 centimetres long. about why we find giant tortoises These islands cover just a few on remote oceanic islands,” he thousand square kilometres. says. “They either got there giant, In contrast, Earth’s continents or became giant on the island.” cover 150 million square Knowing what their ancestors kilometres. Yet they are home “We find giant tortoises to just one truly large tortoise: on remote islands. They the African spurred tortoise. either got there giant, This implies that tortoises are or became giant there” most likely to become huge when they live on islands, in line with a famous but controversial concept, were like should sort that out. the “island rule”. This states that, The tree suggests the first on islands, small animals tend to giant tortoises – with shells at evolve larger bodies while large least 80 centimetres long – animals evolve to be smaller. evolved 37 million years ago in But tortoise biologists suspect Africa and Europe. They belonged otherwise. Fossils show giant to an extinct group that gave tortoises once roamed Africa, rise to continental giants at least Eurasia and the Americas, twice more. One of those lived in 10 | NewScientist | 16 December 2017

Its ancestors roamed the continents for millions of years

North America within the past 2 million years. All other giant tortoises belong to a second group. Its members evolved into giants on at least four occasions – including an extinct Asian species, today’s islanddwellers and the African spurred tortoise (Cladistics, doi.org/cg8k). In other words, says Vlachos, tortoises tended to become giant on continents. He thinks the giant tortoises on remote islands today were big before they arrived, something that may have helped them get there. “Large tortoises have more fat, so they can survive [at sea] longer,” he says. “We don’t need an island rule to explain the giant tortoises,”says Lucienne Wilmé at the University of Antananarivo, Madagascar. Last year, her team suggested that Austronesian sailors purposely brought Seychelles giant tortoises to their present home in antiquity. That’s consistent with gigantism evolving on continents. However, with island origins seemingly ruled out by the new evolutionary tree, it is now even less clear why tortoises sometimes evolve into giants. Gigantism seems to have evolved on different continents at wildly different times. Colin Barras ■

DARK matter may not be found in primordial black holes after all. After the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) watched a pair of black holes collide for the first time in 2015, speculation swirled that the black holes might be the source of the strange gravitational effects we attribute to dark matter. But Miguel Zumalacárregui and Uros Seljak at the University of California, Berkeley, think differently. They measured a type of gravitational lensing – light from a supernova that warps as it passes a black hole on its way to Earth. This should be common if primordial black holes make up all the dark matter. But they saw little sign of it. They say this means there are not enough black holes out there to explain all the effects of dark matter (arxiv.org/abs/1712.02240). Zumalacárregui and Seljak are assuming that dark matter takes one form only – either all black holes or some other form of matter altogether. LIGO’s black holes had masses that made them a plausible candidate for primordial black holes, the kind we think formed just after the big bang. But Zumalacárregui and Seljak found that primordial black holes can account for no more than about 35 per cent of dark matter. So, they say it must be something else. LIGO team member Nelson Christensen at Carleton College in Minnesota disagrees. “Just because dark matter can’t be entirely composed of primordial black holes doesn’t mean they can’t exist,” he says. LIGO is gearing up to look for small black holes with masses lighter than stars, he says, which would be primordial because the conditions for their birth only lasted for moments after the big bang. “Even if primordial black holes weren’t all of the dark matter, even if they just existed, that would be a huge deal for explaining the beginning of the universe,” says Christensen. Leah Crane ■

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The first bout of global warming Alice Klein

TOM MURPHY/GETTY

WE’RE not the first living beings to drastically alter Earth’s climate. The earliest photosynthetic microorganisms belched out enough methane to warm the planet by 15°C. This spell of global warming may have saved Earth from freezing over, and created a comfortable climate for early organisms. When Earth formed 4.5 billion years ago, the sun was 25 per cent dimmer than it is today. This suggests the early planet should have been a frozen snowball for millions of years. But geological evidence indicates it was just as warm as it is now, if not warmer. One explanation for this “faint young sun paradox” is that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide warmed Earth by trapping the sun’s heat. But carbon dioxide levels probably weren’t high enough to fully account for the balmy climate.

Now, Chris Reinhard and Kazumi Ozaki at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and their colleagues suggest that a major contributor to this greenhouse effect was methane – generated by primitive microorganisms that had evolved to photosynthesise. Photosynthesis is the process by which green plants and many microbes sustain themselves. It involves using the sun’s energy to convert carbon into carbohydrates like sugars, which can be used as fuel. It requires sunlight and a source of electrons to “fix” the carbon. Today’s photosynthetic organisms, which date back at least 2.5 billion years, mostly use water as this source of electrons. The reaction between water and carbon dioxide produces carbohydrate fuel and releases oxygen as a waste product. But this wasn’t always the case. A simpler form of non-oxygen-

producing or “anoxygenic” For example, there is evidence photosynthesis evolved at least of 3.5-billion-year-old methane3.5 billion years ago during the producing microbes in the Pilbara Archaean aeon. region in Western Australia, At this time, the atmosphere home to some of the oldestwas rich in hydrogen and the known microbial fossils. oceans rich in dissolved iron. Nowadays, few anoxygenic These two elements provided photosynthetic organisms electrons that microbes could remain. They include green use to transform carbon dioxide sulphur bacteria and purple into methane fuel. bacteria, which can’t tolerate The researchers modelled the oxygen and live in anaerobic microbes and their primitive “Microbes may have biosphere by including factors emitted enough methane such as the amount of hydrogen to raise the temperature spewed from volcanoes, carbon from about 4 to 19°C” dioxide levels in the atmosphere, the burial rate of iron and organic matter on the sea floor, and the environments like Lake Matano breakdown of methane by the in Indonesia and Lake Fryxell sun’s ultraviolet rays. in Antarctica. They calculated that these Oxygenic and anoxygenic interlocking processes would photosynthetic bacteria probably have generated enough methane battled it out for millions of to increase the average surface years before oxygenic species temperature of the planet eventually won, says Reinhard. from about 4 to 19°C (Nature The tipping point may have been Geoscience, doi.org/cg8c). when these microbes produced The findings are consistent enough oxygen to “rust out” the with the fossil record, says dissolved iron that anoxygenic Malcolm Walter at the University microbes depended on, he says. of New South Wales in Australia. Because they are so scarce, anoxygenic photosynthetic Simple microbes may have heated microbes no longer have a our planet 3 billion years ago– significant effect on Earth’s climate, says Ozaki. He says this may help explain why the average surface temperature is now 15°C, slightly cooler than it was more than 3 billion years ago. The findings suggest we should widen the search for extraterrestrial life, says Walter. “We’ve mostly been looking for life in places that have a similar climate to ours, but this suggests life can evolve in hydrogendominated atmospheres too.” It may even be easier for hydrogen-based anoxygenic microorganisms to evolve because they don’t require complex enzymes to get electrons out of water, says Ozaki. “The Archaean anoxic biosphere is therefore expected to be an extremely useful analogue for the primitive biospheres of other Earth-like planets.” ■ 16 December 2017 | NewScientist | 11

NEWS & TECHNOLOGY

Elizabeth Preston

PIG-LIKE animals called peccaries have been seen apparently mourning their dead. The discovery adds to the growing list of species that have exhibited signs of grief. It came from a science fair project. Peccaries are hoofed mammals found in the Americas. Also known as javelinas or skunk pigs, they resemble pigs and wild boar. However, the two actually belong to different, albeit closely related,

“It is heartbreaking to see two peccaries trying to pick up the dead one, as if they wanted to help it” families. Peccaries are social animals and often live in groups. In January, 8-year-old Dante de Kort was watching a herd of five collared peccaries (Pecari tajacu) behind his house in Arizona. One of them seemed to be ill. The next day, he found a dead adult female and the rest of the herd nearby. Dante was intrigued, and he had a school science fair coming up. So on the third day after the animal’s death, he approached the body – now up a hill from the house, where it had been moved because of the smell – and set up a camera trap. Whenever an animal approached the body, the motionsensitive camera took a video. Dante captured footage over the next two weeks and put his findings onto a poster. At the regional science fair, his poster caught the attention of Mariana Altrichter at the nearby Prescott College. Altrichter is co-chair of the Peccary Specialist Group at the International Union for Conservation of Nature. She left Dante a note asking to talk. Altrichter met with Dante and 12 | NewScientist | 16 December 2017

his mother, and told them his findings might be a big deal.“They were very excited, and from then on I took on the project,” says Altrichter. “I watched all the 100 videos he had taken.” The work has now been published, with Dante listed as first author (Ethology, doi.org/cg7x). In the days after the peccary’s death, the other members of her herd visited her body repeatedly, usually alone or in pairs. Sometimes they simply walked or stood near her. “Other activities included pushing at the dead individual, nuzzling it, smelling it, staring at it, biting it, and trying to pick it up by putting their snout under the corpse and pushing it up,” the authors write. Sometimes, the other peccaries slept next to the body or snuggled up against it. “It is heartbreaking to observe two [peccaries] trying to pick up the dead one, as if they wanted to help it to get up,” says Altrichter. “The herd reacted in a way that resembles mourning and grieving.” The peccaries visited the corpse after it was moved up the hill, showing that they weren’t

DANTE DE KORT/MARIANA ALTRICHTER/SARA CORTEZ & MICAELA CAMINO

Grief is not just for the clever

just returning to the locale. On the 10th day after the peccary died, a group of coyotes approached. The other peccaries repeatedly chased them off. But later that night, the coyotes returned and ate the remains. “The behaviours observed in the surviving peccaries are quite fascinating,” says Barbara King at the College of William & Mary in Virginia, author of the 2013 book How Animals Grieve. She says the peccaries’ responses to death were similar to those of chimps, elephants and cetaceans. While the study of animal grief is new, King says researchers have seen

NATURAL GRIEF Many animals behave in ways that suggest they are grieving. African elephants get agitated if they find a dead member of their species. They even look at the skulls and ivory of long-dead elephants. Chimpanzees will sit with the body of a newly deceased troupe member. They have been seen subsequently avoiding the place where the animal died. Females sometimes carry the mummified bodies of dead offspring for days or weeks. Chimps have also been seen cleaning corpses. A study

from March, for instance, described a chimp cleaning the teeth of a fallen comrade using a firm stem of grass. Several monkey species also respond to death. In one case, a female snub-nosed monkey fell and cracked her head on a rock, and her partner spent an hour tenderly touching her until she died. Bottlenose dolphins have been seen carrying the bodies of dead infants, sometimes lifting them to the surface of the water as if helping them to breathe. Michael Marshall

Social bonds in peccaries appear to survive beyond death

responses to death among monkeys, pair-bonded birds and various pets and farm animals. Behaviours that resemble mourning might help animals recover from a loss before making new social bonds. However, just because these responses are widespread doesn’t mean they have an evolutionary benefit. King says they may just be “an emotional by-product of friendship or love”. When the peccaries pushed, nuzzled or bit the body of the dead female, they may have been trying to revive her, says King. And they may have been expressing curiosity by staring at the dead body, or possessiveness by defending it against coyotes, she says. When they slept touching the body, and refused to abandon it for over a week, they may have been displaying grief, King says. “We know that many social animals have profound social relationships with other individuals,” says King. “Individuals may feel it deeply, and visibly express those feelings, when the bonds are broken.” ■

NEWS & TECHNOLOGY

Robot stand-up shows funny side understanding and creating comedy involves high-level intelligence. Humour goes to the heart of what it is to be human, so to mimic us, AIs will have to master it. “If one were to attempt the Turing test, I find it hard to envision success without an AI that understands humour,”says Mark Riedl at the Georgia Institute

MAKING up jokes on the spot is a real test of wits. Yet, in an unlikely comedy trio known as HumanMachine, many of the ad-libbed gags are delivered by a robot. The improv group has performed 30 times to nearly 3000 people at comedy festivals in the UK and Canada. It isn’t all played for laughs, however. Kory Mathewson at the University of Alberta in Canada and Piotr Mirowski – both artificial intelligence researchers in their day jobs – are also exploring how audiences respond to a robot that is trying to be funny. Comedy typically happens when the perceptions and intuitions of the performer and the audience are challenged by surprise or novelty. It also involves the most sophisticated stage of human interaction, including non-verbal communication, allusions to shared cultural references, social satire, irony and empathy. In other words,

The most distant quasar ever seen A QUASAR has been spotted 13 billion light years away from us. It is the most distant of these supermassive black holes encircled by a bright disc of material that we have ever seen. That great distance tells us it is very old and that huge black holes must have formed fast in the universe’s youth. Eduardo Bañados at the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Pasadena, California, and his colleagues have pored over telescope data from three 14 | NewScientist | 16 December 2017

Piotr Mirowski on stage with a robot that attempts improv

HUMANMACHINE

Douglas Heaven

of Technology in Atlanta, who works on AIs that generate stories. Riedl considers making up tales to be one of the grand challenges for AI. Adding humour raises the bar even higher. “Humour is hard even for humans,” he says. During the shows, Mathewson, Mirowski and their robot called A.L.Ex – short for Artificial Language Experiment – improvise using topics suggested by the audience. A.L.Ex’s lines are provided by a neural network that has learned a vocabulary of about

surveys that covered nearly the entire sky, and confirmed possible instances of distant quasars with new images. The quasar they have uncovered is one of the most distant objects ever seen. That we can even see it means it is also one of the brightest objects ever spotted (Nature, doi.org/cg59). It is more than 800 million times the mass of the sun, which presents a problem. Theory tells us it should take billions of years for such a huge object to form, but it existed just 690 million years after the universe formed. To grow to the size we see today, “they have to start out at masses about 1000 times that of the sun”, says Michael Eracleous at Pennsylvania State University.

These seeds could have been huge early stars, or gas clouds thousands or millions of times the mass of the sun that collapsed and formed black holes. Eracleous says this distant quasar might rule out the first of these ideas because it was formed too early in the universe’s history to allow stars to grow large enough. The galaxy that hosts the quasar is full of bright dust, stars and metals that also needed time to form, which is more evidence for a fast evolution of the early universe (Astrophysical

“Such a huge object should take billions of years to form, but it existed in a cosmos younger than that”

50,000 words by reading the subtitles from some 100,000 films. A.L.Ex has to understand what its human sidekicks are saying and generate a response as quickly as possible, which it then delivers using a voice synthesiser. Things don’t always work out. At a show in January, the robot started talking gibberish, according to one reviewer. Even when A.L.Ex got its words out, the results were often more nonsensical than funny. Even so, many audiences respond warmly. When AI provides the robot’s words, people are never fooled into thinking the AI is really a human. But when the robot is secretly controlled by Mathewson, half of the people who see the show say they thought they were watching an AI perform flawlessly. That says more about the set-up than the robot’s smarts, and the pair point out that at comedy gigs the audience is primed to find anything funny. The pair presented their work at the conference on Neural Information Processing Systems in Long Beach, California, last week. They also plan to hit the road again next year, performing at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and elsewhere.“We are hard at work thinking about other ways to involve humans in the show,” says Mirowski. ■ Journal Letters, doi.org/cg6b). Bañados and his colleagues also spotted something strange about the quasar’s light: on its way to us, some of it was absorbed by non-ionised hydrogen. Most of the gas in interstellar space today is ionised. So, the quasar must have lived during the early universe’s epoch of reionisation, when stars and galaxies began to form and remove electrons from the hydrogen gas that pervades space. Only after reionisation did the universe start to resemble the one we live in today. We aren’t sure when this transformation happened, but this is a clue that it was still going on about 690 million years after the big bang. Leah Crane ■

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NEWS & TECHNOLOGY

MUNDINANO, I.-C., NEUROPSYCHOLOGIA (2017)

The eggsplosive dangers of microwaves

Boy missing visual bit of brain can see Alice Klein

objects, identify colours and discriminate between images of faces. He could also identify happy, fearful and neutral faces, and grasp different-sized blocks placed in front of him. The only major problem with BI’s vision was strong shortsightedness. He was only able to read the top letter on an eye chart from 3 metres away. Some people with damaged visual cortices have previously been found to have a degree of unconscious visual awareness, known as blindsight. For example, some can navigate an obstacle

A BOY missing the visual processing centre of his brain has baffled doctors by seeming to have near-normal sight. The 7-year-old Australian, known as BI, lost his primary visual cortex shortly after birth due to a rare metabolic disorder called medium-chain acyl-CoA dehydrogenase deficiency. The disorder means certain fats can’t be converted into energy, and this can cause brain damage. Normally, the primary visual cortex is crucial for sight because it processes electrical signals “He navigates his way relayed from the eyes. People around without any with damage to this area are said problems and plays to have “cortical blindness”. soccer and video games” However, BI has remarkably well-preserved vision, says IñakiCarril Mundiñano at Monash course even though they don’t University in Melbourne. “You consciously feel able to see. wouldn’t think he is blind,” he BI is the first person with no says. “He navigates his way around visual cortex to be identified as without any problems and plays having near-normal conscious soccer and video games.” vision, says Mundiñano, who In a series of tests run by presented the case at a meeting Mundiñano’s team, BI scored of the Australasian Neuroscience perfectly when asked to name Society in Sydney last week. 16 | NewScientist | 16 December 2017

A normal brain (left) and the boy missing a visual cortex (right)

He probably has his sight because he lost his visual cortex in the first two weeks of his life, when his brain was still highly malleable and adaptable, says Mundiñano. Using MRI brain scanning, the team found that another area of the boy’s brain appears to have taken over the role of seeing. Compared with other boys his age, he had more connections between two spots near the visual cortex, called the pulvinar and middle temporal area. The pulvinar is normally involved in relaying sensory signals, while the middle temporal area helps detect motion. Previous experiments have found that monkeys also retain many of their visual abilities if their primary visual cortex is damaged when they are in early infancy. As with BI, this retention is associated with extra connections between the pulvinar and middle temporal area. Together, these findings suggest that newborn brains can learn to reroute visual information via other centres if the primary visual cortex is missing, says Mundiñano. “Younger brains just tend to recover and adapt much better.” ■

IT’S enough to give you shell shock. A shell-less hard-boiled egg that is reheated in a microwave can explode when you bite into it or prick it with a fork, and this may happen up to a third of the time. Anthony Nash at consultancy Charles M. Salter Associates in San Francisco was an expert witness after a restaurant customer allegedly suffered hearing damage and burns when a hard-boiled egg exploded in his mouth. The case was settled out of court, but not before Nash and his colleague Lauren von Blohn reheated almost 100 eggs as the restaurant had done: microwaving them in a water bath for 3 minutes. Some ruptured or exploded. The eggs that survived heating were taken out and pricked, and 28 of these exploded. “It’s like playing Russian roulette with an egg – egg roulette,” says Nash. Foods with a skin, such as potatoes, can also explode when microwaved because steam pressure builds up inside. But the shells of these boiled eggs had been removed. Nash and von Blohn speculate that tiny pockets of water within the yolk become superheated and then start boiling, violently releasing steam, when punctured by a fork – or your teeth. These “eggsplosions” make a sound that can reach 133 decibels from 30 centimetres away – louder than a chainsaw running 1 metre from you. One exposure to this level of noise would be unlikely to damage your hearing, but the effects may be different if you bite into the egg and it explodes in your mouth, says Nash. The heat of the explosion could certainly hurt your face, too. The pair shared their results at a meeting of the Acoustical Society of America that took last week in New Orleans, Louisiana. “Don’t put any eggs in the microwave,” Nash says. “They’re to be respected, those machines.” Leah Crane ■

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IN BRIEF Want grandkids? Be a younger mum

Record-breaking fish was misidentified for 20 years GIVEN that it is 3 metres long, weighs 2300 kilograms and looks like a severed head, the heaviest bony fish should be easy to spot. But in fact we misnamed it for years. The ocean sunfish (Mola mola) is listed in Guinness World Records as the heaviest bony fish. Some sharks are larger, but their skeletons are made of cartilage not bone. The record has stood since 2002, thanks to a specimen caught off Japan in 1996. But now a study of photographs and information on the specimen has revealed that it wasn’t an ocean sunfish, but a relative: Mola alexandrini. Sunfish look almost circular from the side and narrow

when viewed head-on. They have a curved lobe at the rear, where most other fish have a tail fin. Etsuro Sawai at Hiroshima University in Japan and his colleagues reviewed the species in the Mola genus. They examined specimens and trawled accounts going back 500 years (Ichthyological Research, doi.org/cg55). When Sawai looked at photos of the monster catch, he realised it was not M. mola after all, but M. alexandrini. Unlike the other species, M. alexandrini (pictured) has a bump on its forehead, hence its name: bump-head sunfish. It also has a distinctive bump on its chin and a differently shaped “tail”. Sawai thinks the record will be beaten. In 2004, a female sunfish measuring 3.32 metres long was caught off Japan’s Aji Island, but it wasn’t weighed.

Shredded planet behind mystery visitor THE first known interstellar visitor to our solar system may be a shard from a planet shredded by its star. Astronomers spotted the fast-moving cigar-shaped rock in October. Named ‘Oumuamua, it seems to have tumbled into our neighbourhood from around another star. Now, researchers are trying to figure out where ‘Oumuamua came from and how it formed.

Matija Cuk at the SETI Institute thinks it may have been born when a planet about 10 times the size of Earth got too close to its small, dense star and was ripped apart (arxiv.org/abs/1712.01823). The debris could have been punted away by the gravitational tug of a second orbiting star. If a large planet is torn apart by a dwarf star, many objects like ‘Oumuamua could be created at

once, says Cuk. And if the asteroid is not the only one out there travelling from star to star and is typical of this population of rocks, Cuk says this mechanism could account for all of them. ‘Oumuamua is unlikely to have formed from a cosmic collision as these don’t tend to produce elongated objects. That is because the resulting debris often continues to crash together, and a long, thin rock like ‘Oumuamua is likely to crack down the middle.

THE older your mother was when you were born, the less likely you are to have children – but we don’t yet know why. Olga Basso of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and her team analysed data on more than 43,000 women in the US born between 1930 and 1964. More than 19 per cent whose mothers were aged 30 or over when they gave birth had no children of their own. That compares with about 15 per cent of women whose mothers were aged 20 to 24 at the time of their birth. Only 13 per cent of women born to teenagers had no children (Human Reproduction, doi.org/cg5x). Women with a postgraduate degree were the most likely never to have any children, followed by women who never married. But neither social factors nor wealth could fully account for the effect, suggesting there might be some biological cause.

A glue to spray onto injured eyeballs A SMART glue could fill cuts in the outer eyeball sustained during battle, protecting the eye until the wound can be stitched by someone skilled in microsurgery. “Each day that no intervention is taken, the risk of permanent vision loss increases,” says Jack Whalen of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. His team has a solution: an isopropylacrylamide glue that is a liquid at temperatures lower than 25°C, but when it is squirted into an eyeball wound, the higher body temperature solidifies it within 2 minutes. When the injured person gets to a surgeon, the glue can be removed by cooling it down with water (Science Translational Medicine, doi.org/cg5z). 16 December 2017 | NewScientist | 19

IN BRIEF

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Meals on wheels Supernova’s heartburn may have kept it burning bright get smart upgrade THE “impossible” supernova with the Multiple Mirror This ring may have been hidden

KIWI

20 | NewScientist | 16 December 2017

that kept on exploding may owe its weirdness to a doughnut of debris that circles it. Most supernovae flare up once then fade away, but a star first spotted three years ago has brightened five times and only recently started to dim. Was it a new type of explosion, perhaps? Observations seem to suggest it is a regular supernova – only supercharged with nearby debris. Jennifer Andrews and Nathan Smith at the University of Arizona in Tucson looked at the starlight

Telescope in Arizona. They saw evidence that a disc of material around the exploding star was moving much slower than the ejecta from the explosion itself (arxiv.org/abs/1712.00514). This ring of gas and dust could have been causing the explosion to repeatedly brighten and dim. As the ejected material rammed into the cloud, some energy from its motion could have been converted into light and heat, powering the dying star’s extreme and persistent brightness.

by the edge of the explosion. But as the shell of gas and plasma from the supernova expands and cools over time, it becomes transparent and we can catch hints of what is going on inside. Still, the supernova hasn’t divulged all its secrets. Chinese researchers recently detected a source of gamma radiation near the dying star that didn’t exist before the explosion. We have never seen gamma rays coming from a supernova in this way before (arxiv.org/abs/1712.01043). BABOON SPIDER ATLAS

DING dong! That’ll be the robot with my pizza. Kiwi, a company based at the University of California, Berkeley, is using machine learning to teach its delivery robots how to cross the road safely. It launched in April and lets students order food from campus restaurants via an app, to be delivered by its small fleet of robots. Human operators monitor the robots at all times, making sure they are safe, and intervening if they go off course. Until now, they have always had to step in when the robots need to cross a road. This limits how many robots can be out taking deliveries at any one time. To solve this problem, since last month, Kiwi has been using a simulation of a busy road that a computer Kiwi robot will try to cross. As the robot repeatedly tries to cross the road, it uses machine learning to gradually teach itself the best techniques to get across unscathed. After a few thousand attempts, the model was able to come up with a technique that helped it dodge between the oncoming traffic, shuffling back and forth to keep itself safe. After running successful tests in which real robots were allowed to cross the road on their own using this method, the firm now plans to roll the software out across its fleet of 25 robots.

Your breath could give you away HOW you breathe might betray you. The pattern of inhalations people make when they speak seem to be unique to each individual – which means an algorithm can be used to identify the speaker. The telltale sounds are determined by many factors, including lung capacity and the shape of the oral passageways. All of these cause turbulence known as “intervocalic breath sounds”. Rita Singh at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania and her colleagues analysed thousands of recordings of TV news anchors and interviewees. The researchers found that when analysing inhalations only, their system could identify the correct speaker out of a group of 50 with nearly 75 per cent accuracy (arxiv. org/abs/1712.00171). Singh has been working with law enforcement on ways to identify people who have made hoax or threatening phone calls. Even if a hoax caller scrambled their voice electronically to avoid giving themselves away, their breathing might provide enough information to allow them to be identified. “We’re looking more deeply into this now,” says Singh.

Spiders are hiding on social media “SCARY” photos of big spiders on Facebook may reveal new species. “When people see an animal that they think is frightening… the most common response is to take a photo and post it to social media,” says Heather Campbell at Harper Adams University, UK, who studies baboon spiders, a group of African tarantulas. Campbell and her team have built the Baboon Spider Atlas based on photos and information they found after combing social media and online forums. People also send in photos of spiders they find. The team found that many species

range more widely than thought, and some assumed to stay in burrows actually wander (Insect Conservation and Diversity, doi.org/cg57). What’s more, Campbell says they may have found 20 to 30 new species. This needs to be confirmed, but some spiders in the atlas are novel sizes or have novel patterns or colours. One in Mozambique was bright purple, unknown in African tarantulas. Another had an odd horn on its back. Baboon spiders are collected for the pet trade, threatening their survival. Learning where they live will protect them, says Campbell.

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ANALYSIS ORGAN DONORS

Dying to save a life How far should doctors push the boundaries between life and death in order to transplant organs, asks Clare Wilson ORGAN transplants may seem almost routine procedures nowadays, but they remain mired in anxieties and ethical challenges. The number of people needing a new organ vastly outweighs the supply, because less than 1 per cent of all deaths take place in a manner that makes organ donation medically possible. That’s why some doctors are now seeking ways to allow more dying patients become donors, even challenging long-held ethical principles about the boundary between life and death. Others say the methods being explored go too far, and could jeopardise organ donation all together. After all, most transplants happen only when a family, in the middle of what is often a sudden and untimely bereavement, consent to their loved one’s body being treated in ways that could

caused catastrophic and irreversible brain damage. They effectively have no brain function, which can be confirmed with some simple tests. These people cannot breathe for themselves – only the rhythmic actions of a ventilator pushing air into their lungs keeps their blood supplied with oxygen. Legally this is the equivalent of being “traditionally” dead. Usually, once the tests are done and goodbyes have been said, the

ventilator is turned off and within minutes the lack of oxygen stops the heart too. People certified as brain-dead have, with their family’s permission, been the source of most transplant organs for many decades – with the exception of organs that can be safely taken from live donors such as single kidneys and small parts of the liver. Crucially, with donors who are brain-dead, ventilation isn’t turned off until the middle of

surgery, keeping their organs well oxygenated and better prepared for transplant. But as so few lives end in brain death, transplant surgeons needed to expand the donor pool. In the 1990s, they began considering people who were also dying from irreversible brain damage, often from physical trauma or a stroke, but who were not brain-dead. Unlike the previous group, surgeons cannot start to retrieve

be seen as unnatural and brutal. Is it ethical to push such families further, if it could save lives? “What we are doing is terribly important. But people are worried that families will get upset,” says Stephen Large of Papworth Hospital in Cambridge, UK. For most of human history, life ended when the heart stopped beating. That still applies to the majority of deaths, but as intensive care progressed in the mid-20th century, a new definition evolved: brain death. It applies to just a few people who end up in a strange twilight zone, often after a head injury or lack of oxygen. Their heart still beats; but their injuries have 22 | NewScientist | 16 December 2017

PIERRE-PHILIPPE MARCOU/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

“What we are doing is terribly important. But people are worried that families will get upset”

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their organs before the ventilator is turned off because they aren’t yet dead. Instead, doctors have to withdraw ventilation and wait for the heart to stop. Then they wait for an extra period of time – in the UK it is 5 minutes, in some US hospitals it is less – and only then do the surgeons begin their work. Using this group of patients, known as non-heart-beating donors, has raised the number of organs available for transplant by as much as 25 per cent in some hospitals. But hearts from such people aren’t usable, because these organs are particularly vulnerable to the lack of oxygen in the period between the ventilator being switched off and the organ being transplanted.

Restart the heart So, for the past two years, Large’s team has been doing something not done anywhere else in the world. After a donor is declared dead, they restart the heart while it is still in the body. In effect, they use the donor’s body as an incubator, preserving the heart and other organs. The team doesn’t jolt the heart back to life with electricity. Instead, they hook the body’s circulation to a machine that pumps and oxygenates the blood, setting the heart beating again. An artery is blocked off to stop blood reaching the brain, both to prevent harmful substances from the damaged brain entering the blood, and to reassure families that their relative won’t wake up – although Large says that could never happen anyway because of the severity of the brain damage. Some have reservations. Many people instinctively see death as when the heart stops – if it is restarted, will people understand that their loved one has not come back to life? “The whole rationale of declaring a person dead is that absence of circulation is permanent – here you’re restoring it,” says James Bernat of the Geisel

As medical science has progressed, the pool of donors has expanded School of Medicine at Dartmouth in New Hampshire. 1968 1990s 1954 The heart-restarting technique First successful Organ shortage means doctors turn US recommends works. Since 2015, heart transplants kidney transplant to “non-heart-beating donors” – adopting legal people who aren’t brain dead but have increased by 15 per cent in definition of will die without a ventilator brain death the three hospitals where it was approved to take place by NHS Blood and Transplant, the UK 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020 1950 body that oversees organ 1967 2008 2015 donation. Permission is always First successful First heart New approach in which sought from the families. “As heart transplant transplant from hearts are restarted in the non-heart-beating donor long as people are happy with body of non-heart-beating donors before transplant the idea of this happening to their relatives so they can be the best possible donor, I think it Bernat thinks this idea risks suffocation in a freak accident. makes sense,” says John Dark,of losing public support for the Her family chose to donate her Newcastle University in the UK. whole concept of organ organs, but after ventilation was In the US, restarting the heart transplants. He says some stopped, she took too long to die while it is in the donor’s body is families already mistakenly for her organs to be usable, adding seen as too controversial. But a suspect hospitals of being more to her family’s distress. few doctors there have proposed interested in their relative’s “This was almost a secondary a step that is more radical still. It organs than in saving their life. loss for her family,” Truog says. stems from a potential problem As a neurologist who has cared for “Her father said: ‘I just don’t with non-heart-beating donors. many patients with brain injuries, understand why we could not Transplant surgery often has to be have given her an anaesthetic to “Organ donation may be the make sure she saves the lives of called off, because the potential last wish of the donor. If so, other children’.” donor takes too long to die after we have a moral duty to try the ventilator is withdrawn. They At the moment there are no to realise it” continue breathing unevenly for signs of a change in the rules to many hours before their heart allow donation under anaesthetic, finally stops and the long period he has heard this directly from but the fact that doctors are of low oxygen levels leaves their some families, he says. debating it in journals and at major organs unusable. Such live donor transplants conferences suggests opinions This could be avoided by taking haven’t taken place, but Robert may one day change. the patient’s organs while they Truog of Boston Children’s In the UK, the approach of are still alive, under a general Hospital, who is one of those restarting the heart in the body anaesthetic. But it would be a clear proposing the idea, says it could remains a pilot scheme while breach of the “dead donor rule”, help bereaved families. public reactions and the medical that no one’s death may ever be He recalls one such case results are assessed. “To date, caused by taking their organs (see involving an 8-year-old girl, who families have had no problem “Living donors”, below). was severely brain-damaged from with Papworth protocol,” says Paul Murphy of NHS Blood and Transplant. “Indeed, knowledge LIVING DONORS that the heart is likely to be used Taking organs from a patient who To allow organ retrieval, the person for transplantation becomes very is still alive would be a clear breach choosing euthanasia gets their lethal important for them.” of doctor’s ethics – but what if injection in a hospital and, as soon as An initial analysis suggests the that patient is about to undergo death is declared, they are whisked hearts perform as well as when euthanasia? In Belgium and the into an operating room for the they are taken from donors who Netherlands, where euthanasia is surgery. But their heart is unusable are brain-dead, although longerlegal and organ donation after such because it will have spent too long term follow-up is still needed. deaths has recently gained approval, without oxygen. For Large, there’s another it is a question some are asking. When patients learn this benefit of pushing boundaries Most people who die by euthanasia beforehand, sometimes they ask in this way – it’s to do what the are not suitable organ donors because for their organs to be taken under dying patient would have wanted. they have cancer, which could be anaesthetic, says Dirk Van Raemdonck “Organ donation may be the last passed on to the recipient. But a few of University Hospitals Leuven in wish of the donor,” he says. “When are dying from other conditions that Belgium. “We have to explain we can’t that’s the case, we have a moral can’t be transmitted. take organs while you are still alive.” duty to try to realise it.” ■ 16 December 2017 | NewScientist | 23

COMMENT

City of dreams Privacy, security and transparency must be centre stage or the urban revolution may turn into a nightmare, says Paul Marks HAVE you ever felt destined to become a supplicant whose chief purpose is to be sensed electronically, generate data and have it processed by intelligent machines for somebody else’s benefit? If not, you are probably lucky enough to have been spared hype from the smart-city lobby. Not for long though. That hype is hitting fever pitch. Examples include an investment group, backed by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, pledging $80 million to kick-start Belmont, an 80,000home smart city near Phoenix, Arizona, to feature driverless cars, superfast internet, autonomous deliveries and jobs in advanced manufacturing. In Canada, Google owner Alphabet has partnered with Toronto to develop a smart district. In Saudi Arabia, the government plans a $500 billion smart, solar-powered megacity 33 times bigger than

New York. There are many more. The premise goes like this: we are told that, if we are to fight climate change while embracing mass urbanisation, we need to live in sensor-stuffed places designed to make our lives hyper-efficient. The reason, ostensibly, is to make cities more sustainable, with services such as energy, water and transport run by AI, in turn informed by all-seeing, all-hearing 5G wireless networks. Fine. Except there is too little talk of who will govern such cities. And many of the plans seem to rely heavily on technologies, such as driverless cars, that are far from mature. But the biggest problem is that smart cities sound about as digitally secure as that boat full of holes, the internet of things. Data stores will multiply as will the chances for disruption. And what about algorithmic transparency to ensure the AI systems that run

There is a cure Solutions to crises in the NHS exist, if only we are brave enough to try them, says Luke Allen THE boring predictability of winter crises in the UK’s National Health Service has complex roots, but a paradoxically simple solution: shift the focus of our health system “upstream”. This term has its origins in the lament of an accident and emergency doctor: “I feel like I spend every day rescuing people 24 | NewScientist | 16 December 2017

is a growing, greying cohort with multiple chronic conditions, whose needs put pressure on family doctors. Exacerbating this is a failure to keep funding and recruitment in step with demand. This has led to a crisis of GP retention and recruitment. As 90 per cent of all patient contact is in general practice, major hold-ups result. Waiting times top three weeks in 40 per cent of practices, so people head straight to A&E. We need to go well upstream to

drowning in a river. I save as many as I can, but they keep coming. It’s exhausting. Eventually you just want to get out, walk upstream and stop the bastard who keeps pushing them in.” In one sense, the NHS is a victim “The sustainability of the UK’s National Health of its own success: survival rates for childhood illness, heart attacks Service depends on a and cancers have risen. The result GP-led revolution”

tackle this definitively, with a focus on keeping people well. In the UK, a quarter of deaths are preventable, many of them related to factors such as smoking, drinking alcohol, poor diet and lack of exercise. Only £1 is spent on prevention for every £20 that is spent on treating disease. The sustainability of the NHS depends on a GP-led prevention revolution. They already offer lifestyle advice and medication, but could be more effective if they spent time addressing local factors that shape behaviour and seed chronic conditions. These may include a lack of affordable fruit and veg, the availability of

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Paul Marks is a science and technology writer based in London

cheap contraband cigarettes, a dearth of safe spaces to exercise, derelict play equipment, cheap alcohol, an overabundance of takeaways and poor active travel options. None of these fall into the traditional purview of “health”, yet they are behind a lot of rising demand and cyclical crises, so why not empower GPs to act on them? This would be a radical change, requiring an overhaul of training, funding, incentives and oversight, plus major investment. But do we have a choice? It is clear that business as usual isn’t working. ■ Luke Allen researches health policy at the University of Oxford

INSIGHT Satirical science

PAUL QUAYLE / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

your city are accountable? Having been exposed to smartcity lobbying for years, I would suggest these projects are more often focused on things other than privacy, transparency and accountability. Such as creating markets for products – computers, sensors and wireless links – and the services that run on them. And perhaps on feeding egos. After achieving business success, the giants of commerce have long sought to dabble in our domestic circumstances. In mid-19thcentury England, mill owner Titus Salt created Saltaire, a beer-free village for his god-fearing staff. In 1928, Henry Ford started to build Fordlandia, a town in the Brazilian rainforest that ultimately failed. When today’s corporations get involved, it doesn’t always go well. The laying on of private coaches from costly employee housing in San Francisco to Silicon Valley labs and offices sparked protests over displacement and gentrification. Before cities and districts on the drawing boards go further, tech corporations and municipalities must engage with people a whole lot more so we can work out what they mean by smart and just who the plans are smart for. ■

TheBMJ’s festivejokes arenolongerfunny Jessica Hamzelou

databases, these papers get cited like any other. They are even used as the basis for future studies. After all, why wouldn’t you take the BMJ seriously? Maryam Ronagh and Lawrence Souder at Drexel University in Philadelphia have criticised the scientific impact one of these papers has had. A few years ago, they looked at the impact of a study from the 2001 BMJ Christmas edition. It purported to find out whether retroactively praying for a group of people who had blood infections years ago was associated with better outcomes for those people in the past. Clearly, this is impossible.

CHRISTMAS is coming, and so are the cheesy seasonal science stories. For most of the year, the BMJ publishes some of the most important medical research conducted today. But at the end of the year, it turns to what it calls “light-hearted fare and satire” – also known as silly tabloid fodder. The work, while “real” according to the BMJ, has at times been impossible to test or based on fictional characters and traits. The journal has previously published a paper looking at whether the magical skills possessed by the fictional Harry Potter were heritable “Papers published in the and why Rudolph the reindeer’s BMJ’s Christmas issue are nose is red. often impossible to test Sure, it is all a bit of fun. But not or based on fiction” everyone is in on the joke – and in an era of fake news, maybe it is time for The author concluded that “this a rethink. The BMJ tells journalists intervention is cost effective, probably reporting its papers, including these has no adverse effects, and should be daft ones, to “please remember to considered for clinical practice”. credit the BMJ - this assures your So far, so funny. But Ronagh and audience it is from a reputable source”. Souder found that since publication, And indeed, this silly science often receives straight-faced coverage from the paper has been repeatedly cited influential media outlets. What’s more, by other researchers – and not as a joke. It has been referenced, for once it is archived in scientific

example, in a Cochrane review, a thorough analysis of existing research that influences medical practice. Putting such problems aside, the joke is starting to wear thin. One paper this year complains that the children’s TV programme Peppa Pig gives UK parents unrealistic expectations of medical treatment. Another looks at whether pride really does come before a fall, by assessing how many people aged around 60 had said that they were both proud and had a fall in the recent past. Ha ha. We are also being treated to a paper on “the science of man flu”. The author of the paper complains he is “tired of being accused of overreacting”. He cites studies that suggest female mice and women have stronger immune responses to viruses than males, and that men are more likely to die from the flu. He concludes that men may experience worse flu symptoms than women, and so should lie on a couch watching TV and being assisted when they are ill. If this is meant to be a joke, it’s not a very good one. And how might it be read in the future? Months or years down the line, devoid of the context of Christmas, who is to say this paper won’t be cited seriously? Could it influence the study of flu? Or our understanding of sex differences in health, which have been confounded by bias and sexism for decades? Maybe it is time for journals to leave the bad jokes to Christmas crackers. ■ 16 December 2017 | NewScientist | 25

APERTURE

26 | NewScientist | 16 December 2017

Stoking the embers A STRING of wildfires is raging in California. Six separate blazes have together scorched more than 55,000 hectares of land. As of 8 December, nearly 200,000 people had been evacuated. The largest blaze is the Thomas fire (pictured), which has burned around 45,000 hectares. The long exposure in this photo shows how strong winds are spreading the embers between trees. California is prone to wildfires, but 2017 may end up being the worst year on record, with enormous fires also breaking out in October. A new analysis by Alexandra Syphard of the Conservation Biology Institute in Oregon and her colleagues examined the factors that have triggered US wildfires from 1972 to 2010. The team found that both climate and human activities have played significant roles in Californian wildfires over the years (PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1713885114). Climate is a key factor in California’s wildfire risk, agrees Stefan Doerr of Swansea University in the UK. “Superimpose a rather prolonged drought and the strong seasonal winds”, both of which have happened this year, he says, and “these fires are not unexpected”. Humans have also exacerbated the problem in places, Doerr says, for example “by planting highly flammable alien tree species that produce very effective embers, such as palms”. Michael Marshall

Photographer David McNew Reuters

16 December 2017 | NewScientist | 27

COVER STORY

Why are the ideas that come most effortlessly to us often misguided, asks Graham Lawton

THOUGHTLESSLY THOUGHTLESS We all have a tendency to think that the world must conform to our prejudices. The opposite view involves some effort of thought, and most people would die sooner than think – in fact they do so

HESE words are still as true today as when Bertrand Russell wrote them in 1925. You might even argue that our predilection for fake news, conspiracy theories and common sense politics suggests we are less inclined to think than ever. Our mental lassitude is particularly shocking given that we pride ourselves on being Homo sapiens, the thinking ape. How did it come to this? The truth is, we are simply doing what people have always done. The human brain has been honed by millions of years of evolution – and it is extraordinary. However, thinking is costly in terms of time and energy, so our ancestors evolved a whole range of cognitive shortcuts. These helped them survive and thrive in a hazardous world. The problem is that the modern milieu is very different. As a result, the ideas and ways of thinking that come to us most effortlessly can get us into a lot of trouble. The first step to avoiding these pitfalls is to identify them. To that end, we bring you the New Scientist guide to sloppy thinking…

T

28 | NewScientist | 16 December 2017

Zero sum We see life as a win-lose game

Children often bicker over who got the most cake or pop. But even as adults, we are acutely sensitive to the fair allocation of resources. Say there are 500 places at a local school, dished out according to who lives closest. Just before term starts, a large immigrant family is moved into a council house near the school and takes five of the places. No matter how liberal you are, it is hard not to think “Not fair!” Plenty of evidence suggests that immigrants contribute more to an economy than they take out. Yet the intuitive belief that they are extracting an unfair share of resources is hard to shake. Blame it on our zero-sum bias. In a classic zero-sum situation, resources are finite and your loss is my gain. Many situations in life follow this pattern – but not all. Unfortunately, this subtlety tends to pass us by. At best, seeing competition where none exists can blind us to opportunity. At worst, it has very unpleasant consequences. Zero-sum thinking was an evolutionary adaptation to a time when we lived in small bands of hunter-gatherers, says neuroscientist Dan Meegan at the University of Guelph in Canada. Under those circumstances, resources

such as food and mates were finite and often scarce, so more for one person meant less for another. Today, however, things are different. A good example is international trade. Treaties between nations are usually designed to be win-win: the more trade that happens, the more resources there are for everybody. The basis of this is “comparative advantage”, whereby trade benefits even less productive countries provided they concentrate their efforts on the goods they are most efficient at producing (see “Win-win”, page 30). Yet the bias persists. People find it hard to believe that a trading “win” for a foreign partner doesn’t lead to a loss for them. This, says Meegan, is one reason why free trade is politically unpopular among people it would benefit. Of course, sometimes our instincts are right. “For some people, free trade really is a zero-sum game,” says Meegan. “Even if the nation benefits – GDP is bigger – individual people may not. They had a great job, now a Mexican has their great job.” The same can happen with immigration: if school places, doctors’ appointments and decent social housing are already in short supply, then an influx of outsiders wanting all of these things will squeeze supply even further. >

GASTON MENDIETA

16 December 2017 | NewScientist | 29

Win-win

Consider a trading partnership between Portugal and Britain. Both produce wine and cloth

Portugal 170 hours’ labour

Britain 220 hours’ labour

1 unit of wine + 1 unit of cloth (80 hours) (90 hours)

1 unit of wine + 1 unit of cloth (120 hours) (100 hours)

You might assume that Portugal is better off going it alone, but this is not so

If Portugal concentrates on wine 170 hours’ labour 2.125 units of wine

If Britain concentrates on cloth th 220 hours’ labour

The trouble is, distinguishing between zero-sum and non-zero-sum situations is difficult. And even when the sum is non-zero, persuading people so is hard. “It is often easier to quantify what you’re contributing than what you’re getting back,” says Meegan. “So it’s really easy to get people upset about something when you say, ‘Look at all we’re putting in, but what exactly are we gaining?’ ” Brexit campaigners exploited this with the notorious £350 million a week the UK would save by leaving the European Union. In the US, President Trump capitalises on our zero-sum bias too, through constant carping about “bad” trade deals. It has also been blamed for the resurgence of white supremacy there. As early as 2011, during President Obama’s first term, there were signs that many white Americans perceived growing “anti-white prejudice” despite overwhelming evidence that they still enjoyed privileged access to jobs, education and justice. Research indicated that this was at least partly based on the misperception that discrimination is a zerosum game – that less of it against minorities necessarily means more against white people. With so much riding on it, just being aware of zero-sum thinking could go a long way to improving social relations.

2 2 units of cloth 2.

Folk knowledge Our childish intuitions haunt us By trading their surrplus, plus both countries can end up better off

Children, it is often said, are like little scientists. What looks like play is actually e.g. Britain offers 1.1 units of cloth in exchange experimentation. They formulate hypotheses, for 1 unit of wine and Portugal accepts test them, analyse the results and revise their Portugal world view accordingly. 1.125 units of wi wine + 170 hours’ labour That may be true, but if kids are like 1 1 units of cloth 1.1 scientists, they are rubbish ones. By the time they enter school, they have filled their heads with utter nonsense about how the world works. The job of education – especially science education – is to unlearn these “folk Britain theories” and replace them with evidence220 hours’ labour 1 unitt of wine + 1.1 units off cloth based ones. For most people, it doesn’t work, and even for those who go on to become scientists, it is only partially successful. No wonder the world is so full of nonsense. Folk theories – also known as naive theories – have been documented across all domains of science. In biology, for example, Portugal is more efficient ov verall, but itts cloth industry young children often conflate life with is less efficient than its wine ndustry, whereas h movement, seeing the sun and wind as alive, Britain’s cloth industry is more efficient than its wine industry. This is comparative advantage but trees and mushrooms as not. They also see 30 | NewScientist | 16 December 2017

KELVIN HUDSON/MILLENNIUM IMAGES, UK

Trade deals often look like a zero-sum game, but they can benefit both parties. The reason is a counter-intuitive idea called “comparative advantage”

Our innate ideas about the natural world are very unscientific and very hard to dislodge

purpose everywhere: birds are “for” flying, rocks are for animals to scratch themselves on and rain falls so flowers can drink. In physics, children conclude that heat is a substance that flows from one place to another, that the sun moves across the sky, and so on. For most everyday purposes, these ideas are serviceable. Nevertheless, they aren’t true. Children cling to their folk theories, and when they encounter difficult concepts, they cling even harder. For example, many intuitively see evolution as a purposeful force that strives to endow animals and plants with the traits they need to survive. Folk theories do get knocked back as we move through education, but they never go away. “They can be suppressed by a more scientific world view, but cannot be eradicated altogether,” says Andrew Shtulman, a psychologist at Occidental College in Los Angeles. “Intuition can be overridden but not overwritten.” Shtulman’s group has revealed this resilience by presenting people with a variety of statements about the natural world and asking them to say which were true and which false. Some were designed to be intuitively true but scientifically false, such as “fire is composed of matter”; others were intuitively false but scientifically true, such as “air is composed of matter”. People who got the right answer still took significantly longer to process an intuitively false but scientifically true statement. This was even the case for those who had been scientists for decades.

“We jump to conclusions about a person’s character after just a tenth of a second”

Stereotyping We can’t help pigeonholing people

Similar results come from brain scans. When people watch videos that are consistent with the laws of physics but intuitively wrong – such as light and heavy objects falling at the same rate – the error-detecting parts of their brains light up, suggesting that they are struggling to reconcile two competing beliefs. The persistence of folk theory is revealed in people with Alzheimer’s disease too. Tests of their science knowledge show that they often revert to folk theories as their higher executive functions decline. The upshot is that scientific thinking is hard-won and easily lost, and that persuading most people of the validity of things like evolution, climate change and vaccination will always be an uphill struggle.

We are born to judge others by how they look: our brains come hardwired with a specific face-processing area, and even shortly after birth, babies would rather look at a human face than anything else. Within their first year, they become more discerning, and are more likely to crawl towards friendly looking faces than those who look a bit shifty. By the time we reach adulthood, we are snap-judgement specialists, jumping to conclusions about a person’s character and status after seeing their face for just a tenth of a second. And we shun considered assessments of others in favour of simple shortcuts – for example, we judge a baby-faced individual as more trustworthy, and associate a chiselled jaw with dominance. Unfair, it may be, but it makes good evolutionary sense. Ours is an ultra-social species, so being able to quickly assess whether someone is friend or foe and whether they have the power to help or hurt us is important survival information. But there is a problem. As psychologist Alexander Todorov of Princeton University points out, more often than not, our first impressions are wrong. It’s not clear why, but he suggests that poor feedback and the fact that we meet many more strangers than our prehistoric ancestors would have, both play a part. Another problem is that we don’t stick to stereotyping faces one at a time. We are just as quick to categorise groups of people – and then discriminate against them as a result. Research by Susan Fiske, also of Princeton, and

her colleagues has shown that group stereotypes, too, are based on levels of trustworthiness and status – or “warmth” and “competence” as they label them. The researchers have plotted these categories on a two-by-two grid (see “Four kinds of people”, below), each quarter of which is associated with a particular emotion: pity, disgust, pride or envy. This, they have found, informs our behaviour towards people in the group. Their findings don’t paint us in a great light. We tend to dehumanise groups we judge to be lacking in warmth, and react violently to those with high status. “Historically, many genocides have been directed towards groups that fall into the envy quadrant,” says Fiske. Even our relatively positive reactions have downsides: we may pity those of low status, but react by patronising them, and the pride we feel towards our own group can spill over into nepotism. If you think you are above this kind of thing, think again. Even if you consciously reject stereotypes, the culture you live in does not, and experiments suggest that you are likely to share its biases. One study, for example, found that white Americans who showed no sign of racism on a standard test subconsciously dehumanise black people. The best way to escape this evolutionary trap is to really get to know people from outside your echo chamber. Working together on a joint project is ideal because relying on someone forces you to look beyond simplistic first impressions. And don’t trust social stereotypes – even your own national stereotype. The evidence suggests that we are not even accurate when it comes to judging ourselves.

Four kinds of people We instinctively categorise others according to whether or not we perceive them to be in competition with us for resources, and whether or not they have the status to help or harm us. These social stereotypes trigger emotional responses that influence our behaviour

High status competitors, for example Jews, rich people and professionals, trigger feelings of envy Low status competitors, for example welfare recipients, homeless people and immigrants, trigger feelings of disgust

High status non-competitors, for example our in-group and close allies, trigger feelings of pride Low status non-competitors, for example housewives, elderly people and those who are disabled, trigger feelings of pity

Sycophancy We’re suckers for a celebrity

If you ever meet the queen of England, there are certain rules you are advised to follow. Do not speak until spoken to. Bow your head, or curtsey. Address her first as “your majesty”, then “ma’am”, but “your majesty” again upon leaving. Don’t make the mistake of calling her “your royal highness” – that is for other members of the royal family, pleb! And don’t expect her to thank you for the £40 million plus she gets every year from the public purse, or for paying to have her house done up. Apply some rational thought and this is > 16 December 2017 | NewScientist | 31

“Whatever people’s political views when sober, alcohol shifts them to the right”

32 | NewScientist | 16 December 2017

STEFAN BONESS / PANOS

Other primates defer to dominant individuals but what makes the queen so “majestic”?

Conservatism Deep down, we’re all status quo fans

If you’ve ever talked politics in the pub near closing time, chances are it wasn’t an especially enlightened or right-on discussion. When researchers in the US loitered outside a bar in New England and asked customers about their political views, they found that the drunker the punter, the more right wing their leanings. That wasn’t because right-wing people drink more, or get pissed more easily. Wherever people stood on the political spectrum when sober, It requires effortful thought to overturn our natural acceptance of hierarchy

MICHAEL CHRISTOPHER BROWN/MAGNUM PHOTOS

all very puzzling. What has the queen done to deserve such treatment? What makes her “majestic”? Why is her family “higher” than yours? If humans were a wild species of primate, you would conclude that the queen must be the dominant female. But dominance has to be earned and kept, often by physical aggression and threats, and is always up for negotiation. Nobody defers to the queen out of fear that she will beat them up if they don’t, and nobody is secretly plotting a leadership challenge. Human societies do have dominant individuals, but what the queen possesses is something quite different: prestige. And we are suckers for it. According to biologists, this prestige bias is an evolved feature of human cognition that goes back to the time when our ancestors were nomads living in small bands. Humans are social learners, which means we copy the behaviour of other people rather than figuring everything out from scratch. People who copy successful individuals can acquire useful, survival-enhancing skills – how to hunt, for example. But to do so requires sustained and close contact with the skilled, without getting on their nerves. The best way to do this is to “kiss up”, as psychologist Francisco Gil-White at the University of Pennsylvania puts it. Pay them compliments, do them favours, sing their virtues and exempt them from certain social obligations. Those of our ancestors who kissed up to talented individuals advanced their own interests, making them more likely to survive and reproduce. Evolution thus favoured sycophants. This can backfire in the modern world. Now we don’t just judge the prestige of people we encounter directly, but also those we only know vicariously. To do this, we follow our natural tendency to watch others and conform. If certain people are routinely fawned over, we assume that they are skilled and prestigious individuals who we would be wise to kiss up to ourselves. Hence we show deference to the queen, and any number of celebrities who are famous for being famous. Prestige exerts such a strong pull on the human mind that the construction and perpetuation of hierarchies is hard to resist. In lab experiments, people find it easier to understand social situations where there is a clear pecking order, and they express preferences for hierarchies, even if they are at the wrong end of them. But we can at least be more discerning about whom we place at the top. If we base prestige on skill and genuine achievement, then those we kiss up to won’t be the only ones to benefit. Yes ma’am.

alcohol shifted their views to the right. Why might that be? The researchers, led by Scott Eidelmanat the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, point out that alcohol strips away complex reasoning to reveal the default state of the mind. And that is why they were chatting to drunks: they were using drunkenness to test the hypothesis that low-effort, automatic thought promotes political conservatism. The team also found that they could push people to the right by distracting them, putting them under time pressure or simply telling them not to think too hard. Participants who were asked to deliberate more deeply, in contrast, shifted their political thinking to the left. Similar effects have been seen with the three core components of conservative ideology: preference for the status quo, acceptance of hierarchy and belief in personal responsibility. All three, the researchers say, come naturally to the human mind. We think that way without trying, without even noticing. More liberal views, in contrast, require effortful deliberation. Lots of research points in the same direction. Our political views are shaped by many factors, including personality, upbringing and education. However, as early as the 1950s, psychologists probing the appeal of fascism found that right-wing ideology was associated with dislike of ambiguity and

Tr i b a l i s m Everybody wants to be in the gang

Desmond Morris was 45 when he went to his first ever football match – a club game in Malta, where he lived at the time. He had no interest in football, but had been pestered into it by his young son. For the elder Morris, it was an awesome experience. Fighting between rival fans caused the match to be abandoned before half-time. Most people would have been put off for life, but Morris – the author of the bestselling books Manwatching and The Naked Ape – was captivated. What had caused people to behave so passionately over something as meaningless as a football game? On his return to England in 1977, Morris became a director of Oxford United FC so he could closely observe the culture of football –

CARL COURT/GETTY

cognitive complexity. That’s not to say that conservatives are less intelligent. The relationship between IQ and political leanings is complex. Broadly speaking, people with lower-than-average IQs tend to be lefties, probably out of economic self-interest. People of moderately above-average intelligence lean right for the same reason. And the top 20 per cent swing left again – although highly intelligent people are also over-represented in the libertarian camp, which defies simple left-right categorisation. Nonetheless, dislike of – or lack of training in – analytical thinking is strongly associated with preference for the status quo. Conversely, people who are politically liberal tend to think more analytically than their conservative peers, and having studied science is strongly associated with progressive views. This has led to the suggestion that left-wing political ideas are more complex and counter-intuitive than right-wing ones. Of course, not everyone agrees. “In some areas they are, in some they aren’t,” says Noah Carl, a sociologist at the University of Oxford. “Market allocation of resources is less intuitive than having somebody do it from the top, for example.” Whether you think our intuitive conservatism is good or bad probably depends on your personal politics. With around 85 per cent of the world population largely untrained in critical thinking, preference for the status quo is the clear winner. Nevertheless, progressive change does usually happen eventually.

England v Russia: the clash of football fans in Marseille last year was fuelled by tribalism

the players, directors and, above all, the fans. Four years later, he published his conclusions in The Soccer Tribe, which argued that football is essentially tribal. Each club is a tribe, with territory, elders, doctors, heroes, foot soldiers, modes of dress, allies and mortal enemies. Morris saw this as a modern expression of a deep-rooted evolutionary instinct. For thousands of years, our ancestors lived in small nomadic bands of mostly related individuals in frequent conflict – and occasional alliance – with neighbours over scarce resources. Tribes made up of individuals prepared to fight for a common good had a competitive edge over those that weren’t, so tribalism was selected for by evolution. We are one species, but we instinctively and effortlessly identify with smaller groups. Tribalism and the hostility it engenders are frighteningly easy to induce. More than 60 years ago, Muzafer Sharif at the University of Oklahoma took 22 adolescent boys to Robbers Cave State Park in Oklahoma. The trip had all the trappings of a traditional summer camp, but in truth it was a psychology experiment. Sharif had divided the boys into two groups, each unaware of the other’s existence. They were given cooperative tasks

to perform, and quickly bonded, developing hierarchies and cultural norms. Then, towards the end of the week, the experimenters engineered a fleeting encounter between the groups. Hostility flared, despite the boys having been chosen for their similarities. Soon the camp descended into a sort of tribal warfare, with derogatory insults, land grabs, nocturnal raids, flag burning and, eventually, a mass brawl. Hostilities only ended when the experimenters introduced a common enemy in the form of fictitious vandals. Since then, numerous experiments have revealed how the flimsiest and most transient badges of cultural identity can trigger people to divide themselves into “us” and “them” – even the colour of randomly assigned T-shirts can do it. Tribalism can be a useful motivating force in the modern world: rivalry between scientific teams working on the same problem, for example. It also underpins some deeply unedifying behaviours including racism, xenophobia and homophobia. But there’s hope that we can reduce these negative repercussions. Our saving grace is that the boundaries between “us” and “them” are fluid. Fans of rival football clubs can forge an alliance as supporters of the national team. If we can extend our definition of the tribe in football, why not in other, more meaningful, areas of life? > 16 December 2017 | NewScientist | 33

that death is not the end of existence. This helps explain why religious ideas were widely accepted and disseminated once they got started. It has even been argued that religion was the key to civilisation because it was the social glue that held large groups of strangers together as societies expanded. No doubt it still has much of its original appeal. But these days, religion’s downsides are more apparent. Conflict, misogyny, prejudice and terrorism all happen in the name of religion. However, as the rise of atheism attests, it is possible to override our deep-seated religious tendencies with rational deliberation – it just takes some mental effort.

Religion The god-shaped hole inside us

Cognitive skills that evolved to promote our survival also underpin key religious beliefs 34 | NewScientist | 16 December 2017

Revenge

It is, according to popular wisdom, a dish best served cold. However you like yours, there’s no denying that revenge is tasty. We get a hunger for it, and feel satisfied once we’ve had our fill. You can see why if you look at what’s going on in your head. Brain scanning reveals the neural pathway of the revenge process, according to criminologist Manuel Eisner of the University of Cambridge. The initial humiliation fires up the brain’s emotional centres, the amygdalae and hypothalamus. They inform the anterior insular cortex, which evaluates whether you have been treated unfairly. If so, the prefrontal cortex steps in to plan and execute retaliation.

KYODO NEWS VIA GETTY

We all want to get our own back

JONAS BENDIKSEN/MAGNUM PHOTOS

If God designed the human brain, he (or she) did a lousy job. Dogged by glitches and biases, requiring routine shutdown for maintenance for 8 hours a day, and highly susceptible to serious malfunction, a product recall would seem to be in order. But in one respect at least, God played a blinder: our brains are almost perfectly designed to believe in him/her. Almost everybody who has ever lived has believed in some kind of deity. Even in today’s enlightened and materialistic times, atheism remains a minority pursuit requiring hard intellectual graft. Even committed atheists easily fall prey to supernatural ideas. Religious belief, in contrast, appears to be intuitive. Cognitive scientists talk about us being born with a “god-shaped hole” in our heads. As a result, when children encounter religious claims, they instinctively find them plausible and attractive, and the hole is rapidly filled by the details of whatever religious culture they happen to be born into. When told that there is an invisible entity that watches over them, intervenes in their lives and passes moral judgement on them, most unthinkingly accept it. Ditto the idea that the same entity is directing events and that everything that happens, happens for a reason. This is not brainwashing. The “cognitive byproduct theory” argues that religious belief is a side effect of cognitive skills that evolved for other reasons. It pays, for example, to assume that all events are caused by agents. The rustle in the dark could be the wind, but it could also be a predator. Running away from the wind has no existential consequences, but not running away from a predator does. Humans who ran lived to pass on their genes; those who did not became carrion. Then there’s “theory of mind”, which evolved so that we could infer the mental states and intentions of others, even when they aren’t physically present. This is very useful for group living. However, it makes the idea of invisible entities with minds capable of seeing into yours, quite plausible. Religion also piggybacks on feelings of existential insecurity, which must have been common for our ancestors. Randomness, loss of control and knowledge of death are soothed by the idea that somebody is watching over you and

Finally, the brain’s pleasure centre, the nucleus accumbens, swings into action to judge whether the revenge is satisfactory. Revenge appears to be a universal human trait. A study of 10 hunter-gatherer groups found that all of them had a culture of vengeance. The list of wrongs that need to be avenged is also common across all societies.

Could a bizarre hidden planet be manipulating the solar system, asks Richard A. Lovett

HERE’S something odd going on in the solar system. Our once settled and peaceful home is looking increasingly disturbed and deranged. Bits of it are flying about in eccentric and inexplicable ways. Other bits seemingly shouldn’t be there at all. Meanwhile, the sun is rotating at a rakish angle we are hard-pressed to explain. Mike Brown, a planetary scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, thinks he can explain these strange goings on. There is an unsettling influence in the room: something big and distinctly mobile. Not a poltergeist – but another planet. It is a controversial claim that, if true, would revolutionise our view of the solar system and go some way to explaining why it looks so peculiar when compared with other solar systems. Brown and other proponents of “Planet Nine” say they now have enough clues to pin down its existence once and for all – or show we must seek another explanation for the solar system’s eccentricities. It wouldn’t be the first time a planetary interloper had been unmasked in this way. Back in the 1840s, astronomers couldn’t explain the wobbling orbit of Uranus, then the solar system’s seventh and outermost planet. The French mathematician Urbain Le Verrier cracked the nut, suggesting the wobbles revealed a hitherto unseen eighth planet, and pinpointed where it must be. Just a few months later, astronomers found Neptune pretty much just at the right spot. It’s no sure-fire winner, mind: a decade or so later, Mercury had the collywobbles, and Le Verrier issued the same prescription. An unnoticed planet, dubbed Vulcan, was orbiting between Mercury and the sun and

T

36 | NewScientist | 16 December 2017

disturbing the cosmic balance, he suggested. But Mercury’s orbital oddity was eventually revealed to be down to something completely different, exposing flaws in the underlying theory of gravity that only Einstein’s general theory of relativity would correct. Still, the principle remained: interesting things come to those who take note of planetary irregularities. We have a few to take note of now. In 2006, Pluto was controversially declassified as a planet, largely because of the discovery of a swarm of other trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) orbiting in the Kuiper belt beyond

HOW TO MAKE A PLANET The International Astronomical Union’s definition of a planet, adopted in 2006, controversially demoted Pluto to a dwarf planet. To be a fully blown planet, a solar-system body must now fulfil three criteria: 1. It must orbit the sun; 2. Its mass and gravity must be large enough to mould it into an almost round shape; 3. It must have cleared its surrounds of bodies other than those bound to it by direct gravitational influence (such as moons). As just one of many “trans-Neptunian objects” orbiting in a similar space, Pluto fell foul of the third criterion. Planet Nine, if it exists, is almost certainly sufficiently larger than Pluto for none of the conditions to be a roadblock.

Neptune and even further out. One, Eris, was nearly as big as Pluto – although all are too puny to be full planets as now defined (see “How to make a planet”, below). And some of these objects follow truly bizarre paths. Take Sedna. This 1000-kilometre-wide body takes more than 11,000 years to revolve around the sun, and does so on a highly elliptical, or eccentric, trajectory. Where 1 astronomical unit, or AU, is Earth’s distance from the sun, Sedna varies between 76 AU, about double Pluto’s average distance, and a wild 940 AU. Sedna and a handful of other “extreme” TNOs also orbit at distinct angles to the ecliptic, the plane around the sun’s midriff on which all the major planets lie. There are other similarities in their orbits that are hard to explain with our current models of solar system dynamics. Many explanations have been put forward for these oddballs. Some suggest, for example, that they are interlopers forced into the solar system by an interaction with a passing star (New Scientist, 8 June 2016, p 36). And in 2012, Rodney Gomes of the National Observatory in Rio de Janeiro proposed that they might be influenced by an as-yet undiscovered “planetary mass solar companion” lurking hundreds of AU out. Each time one of the extreme TNOs came close to it, its orbit would be altered, eventually causing them all to skew in a similar manner (see diagram, page 39). Gomes didn’t get much attention, but in 2014, Chadwick Trujillo of the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii and Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington DC published a similar argument in Nature. In January 2016, Brown and his Caltech colleague Konstantin Batygin used >

DARREN HOPES

16 December 2017 | NewScientist | 37

SUN SKEW

SHIFT AND ADD

Planet Nine, if it exists, could help explain a long-standing mystery about the sun. Since the 1850s, we have known that our star rotates on an axis tilted six degrees from the average plane of its retinue of planets. With the exception of Mercury, however, those planets are not offset from each other by more than about a degree. “It’s this small, little-known mystery,” says Elizabeth Bailey at the California Institute of Technology. Over the years, astronomers have proposed explanations ranging from magnetic interactions with the primordial disc from which the sun and planets formed to the disruptive influence of an ancient stellar companion that somehow got lost to interstellar space. But Planet Nine might also have done it. In 2016, Bailey and her supervisor, Mike Brown, showed that gravitational torque from Planet Nine, in its inclined orbit, would have slowly tilted the orbits of the other planets by just the right amount until, from our perspective, it looks like it is the sun that’s leaning sideways. “The sun hasn’t tilted, the solar system has tilted,” says Brown. “But if you live on Earth, you think the solar system is straight.”

Could a small telescope and a large supercomputer help the hunt for Planet Nine? That’s the hope of Michael Medford, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. Specks of light corresponding to Planet Nine would ordinarily be too faint to show up in snaps taken by the 1.23-metre telescope at the Palomar Observatory on the outskirts of San Diego in California. But by using hundreds of thousands of images taken over almost a decade, and laying those that feature the same parts of the sky on top of each other, Medford hopes to bring them out. A similar “stacking” method is used to find faint, unmoving stars or galaxies. The difference is that Planet Nine would be moving in our field of vision. Instead of stacking, Medford must “shift and add”, moving each image by a few pixels along every possible trajectory along which Planet Nine could be travelling, looking for the magic formula that causes a planet to suddenly hop out of the data. This is, to put it mildly, a staggeringly difficult task, one that tests the limits of the US Department of Energy’s supercomputers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. But Medford thinks he is on the cusp of pushing the “go” button, with results possible soon.

the orbits of six extreme TNOs to pin down how big Planet Nine must be and what its orbit must look like. They came up with a Neptune-sized world in a highly elliptical orbit at an average of 400 to 500 AU from the sun. If this planet exists, in an orbit tilted from the ecliptic by about 18 to 25 degrees, it has probably not yet completed a single revolution of the sun since woolly mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers roamed Earth 10,000 years ago. Such a misaligned giant might not be so shocking, given what we have learned about planets orbiting other suns in the past couple of decades. In exoplanetary systems, inclined, eccentric orbits are the rule rather than the exception. Our sun, with its retinue of planets orbiting on neat, near-circular orbits all in the same plane, looks rather anomalous. Even another long-standing mystery, that of the sun’s misaligned spin axis (see “Sun skew”, left), is less perplexing if we expect in our own solar system something we see in others: that planets orbit not just in two dimensions, but three. “With exoplanets we have a wide variety of alignments,” says Kathryn Volk, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona. “It was when it was just our solar system that we thought everything is aligned.” That still doesn’t mean Planet Nine exists. Because we don’t know where exactly on its wide orbit it might be, the planet hunters must still search a several-degree-wide swathe amounting to about 8 per cent of the sky. That’s a lot less than the whole sky, admittedly, but it is still a challenge. Planet Nine’s highly elliptical orbit means it is also statistically much more likely to be at the far end, a long way from the sun, so you

CALTECH/R. HURT (IPAC)

“Planet Nine wouldn’t have completed an orbit since woolly mammoths roamed Earth” would need a big telescope to see it. Brown and his team have just collected what he describes as a “nice data set”, which they are currently evaluating using the 8-metre Subaru Telescope atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Others have joined the hunt, too. One team is looking at images from a smaller telescope in Chile that were collected for the international Dark Energy Survey. The goal of that study is to patrol the sky for far-off supernovae and measure the distance to them, the better to understand how the 38 | NewScientist | 16 December 2017

Ne pt un e

Ur an us

The discovery of a slew of small bodies orbiting the sun on similar highly elliptical orbits inclined to the ecliptic plane holding the sun and planets has fuelled suspicions of a ninth planet upsetting the cosmic balance

Ju pi te Sa r tu rn

Su n

Cosmic alignment

Inset

2014 FE72

2015 RX245

2013 FT28 2015 GT50

2013 ST99

Ecliptic plane

2010 GB174

2015 KG163

2014 SR349 2012 VP113

Sedna (discovered 2003) 2004 VN112

POSSIBLE ORBIT OF PLANET NINE 2013 RF98

2007 TG442

universe is expanding. But you can also spot things closer by as they trundle across the foreground of the images. So far, the Dark Energy Survey team has found a tidy 200 or so TNOs besides the 1867 currently listed by the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center. Most of these new discoveries aren’t in orbits relevant to the search for Planet Nine, and none is big enough to be the suspected planet. At the Division of Planetary Sciences meeting of the American Astronomical Society this October, however, Juliette Becker at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor announced that the team had found another data point in the hunt for Planet Nine: a 500-kilometre-diameter misfit TNO her team nicknamed “Caju”, after the Portuguese for cashew. “We’ll fold it into our predictions,” says Brown. “That will inevitably move our search region a little bit.” Becker’s team has also found some TNOs in orbits so elongated that at their closest approach to the sun they come close to Neptune’s orbit – so close that the planet’s gravity should long ago have sent them plunging into the sun, crashing into another planet or on a fast-track exit from the solar system. Becker thinks they are still there because of Planet Nine. “Instead of getting kicked out, they hop into a new orbit,” she says. “Planet Nine enhances the dynamic stability of these objects.” Meanwhile, Matthew Payne, an astrophysicist at Harvard University, thinks Planet Nine could also help to explain the elongated trajectories of another class of

outer solar system bodies, the centaurs, whose orbits cross those of one or more of the giant planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. In the hope that they too might strike lucky in the hunt, Payne’s group is combing data from the two 1.8-metre telescopes of the Pan-STARRS system in Hawaii, which were primarily designed to find near-Earth asteroids.

All I want for Christmas... Not everyone is leaping on the bandwagon, however. In July, a team involved in a decadelong sky survey called the Outer Solar System Origins Survey (OSSOS), which has discovered more than 800 TNOs, published a statistical analysis. This showed that if you point your telescope in certain directions – to avoid the clutter of known planets and asteroids in the ecliptic, for example, or away from the brightness of the Milky Way – at times of the year when important telescopes are likely to have the best viewing conditions, you are disproportionately likely to spot TNOs clustered on oddball orbits that might make you think Planet Nine exists. “Every time you observe the Kuiper belt, you are subject to selection effects,” says Volk, who is a member of the OSSOS team. “For our data, the clustering is completely explainable by observation biases.” On the other hand, a team of Spanish astronomers concluded this October that the nodes of 28 TNO orbits – the points at which they cross the plane of the ecliptic – are nonrandomly distributed in a way consistent with Planet Nine’s existence. The distribution of

orbital nodes shouldn’t be subject to the type of observation biases exposed by the OSSOS team. And at the Division of Planetary Sciences meeting, the Dark Energy Survey team presented an analysis of the distribution of eight extreme TNO orbits using a procedure similar to that used by the OSSOS team, finding only a 4 per cent chance that the apparent clustering is due to selection bias. While that’s far from a definitive statement either way, as long as there is any hope that Planet Nine is out there, astronomers are going to hunt for it any way they can (see “Shift and add”, left). It could, admittedly, be a never-ending quest. If no one sees it, is that because it doesn’t exist or because we somehow missed it again – we were looking in the wrong direction, perhaps, or it happened to be so close to a bright star in the sky that it disappeared into the glare? That’s a tad problematic, says Brett Gladman of the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, who leads the OSSOS team. Science works by disproving hypotheses, and it is unclear how the Planet Nine hypothesis could ever definitively be proved incorrect. “But don’t get me wrong,” he says. “I’d love there to be another planet out there. It would be cool and exciting.” Brown, for his part, is bullish. He has more telescope viewing time scheduled this month. “If we find it in this chunk of data, I would not be surprised,” he says. “I’m thinking it would make a nice Christmas present.” ■ Richard A. Lovett is a freelance writer based in Portland, Oregon 16 December 2017 | NewScientist | 39

PEOPLE

The champion of World War Zero The collapse of three civilisations in the Bronze Age has long been a puzzle. Now Eberhard Zangger thinks he knows what happened

N JUNE, Eberhard Zangger had an experience most archaeologists only dream of: his very own Tutankhamun moment. Just as Howard Carter had done in 1922 when he entered the boy king’s intact tomb, Zangger was exploring a chamber with the potential to revolutionise archaeology. But Zangger wasn’t in Egypt. He was in north London, in the home of the late, great archaeologist James Mellaart. The treasures he uncovered were reams of documents relating to one of the most important events in prehistory: the near-simultaneous collapse of three great Bronze Age civilisations. One text in particular, Zangger says, points to a crucial missing piece of the puzzle, the existence of a previously unknown civilisation that Zangger believes played a pivotal role in the downfall of the others. This month, Zangger will publish an analysis of that document. It is a 3200-year-old text telling the story of a warlike king and his conquests around the eastern Mediterranean. Zangger has staked his reputation on the claim that this solves one of archaeology’s biggest mysteries. His critics have a different story to tell. They say that Zangger may be the victim of an elaborate hoax. Zangger, a Swiss citizen who will turn 60 next year, freely admits he is a controversial figure. He is the head of an international

non-profit group set up to promote his idea that the Luwian civilisation in western Anatolia – in what is now Turkey – was responsible for the Bronze Age collapse. To many archaeologists, this idea is fanciful at best. But Zangger is certain he is right. Zangger began his research career in conventional fashion. He gained a PhD in geoarchaeology in the mid-1980s and became an expert in interpreting the way landscapes might have looked during the Bronze Age.

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40 | NewScientist | 16 December 2017

“I spent years working on archaeological sites all around the eastern Mediterranean – but never in Turkey,” says Zangger. He found this striking, particularly because western Turkey is home to one of the most iconic of all Bronze Age cities: Troy. The mainstream archaeological community had – and still has – a simple answer for the omission: nothing much happened in western Anatolia during the Bronze Age. Forget the ancient stories of Trojan wars, the great

LUWIAN STUDIES

PROFILE Eberhard Zangger is a geoarchaeologist based in Zurich, Switzerland, and president of the Luwian Studies foundation

Eberhard Zangger in Hattusa, the ancient Hittite capital

A.D. RIDDLE/BIBLEPLACES.COM

civilisations lay elsewhere. In particular, there were the Mycenaeans to the west and the Hittites further east (see map, page 43). Far to the south, of course, were the Egyptians. Zangger was unconvinced. He could see that western Turkey was rich in resources, from mineral deposits to natural harbours. It is simply inconceivable that the region wasn’t important during the Bronze Age, he says. This debate would perhaps have remained civil and low key, had Zangger not taken matters into his own hands. He began using the accepted evidence as a foundation for theories that his critics argue belong in the realm of fiction rather than science. For instance, in the 1990s, Zangger’s research at Tiryns, a Mycenaean site, uncovered evidence of a flash flood triggered by a Bronze Age earthquake. He realised that just such a scenario was described centuries later in one of Plato’s dialogues – a work that is famous for carrying the earliest description of Atlantis. Zangger argued that Plato’s text could be reinterpreted: his account of Atlantis was actually a distorted description of Troy, and therefore evidence of the significance of western Anatolia at that time. The idea, set out in a 1992 book, gained fans – but few in the academic community. It read “like an exercise in shoe-horning awkward evidence into a reluctant mould”, according to a historian who

reviewed the book for New Scientist. Last year, Zangger published an even more ambitious idea. He claimed to have uncovered evidence that the people living in western Turkey during the Bronze Age – known as the Luwians – had their own civilisation, separate to that of the Hittites or Mycenaeans. What’s more, he said, the presence of the Luwians explains why the surrounding civilisations crumbled within decades of one another. Zangger’s narrative runs something like this: late in the Bronze Age, the Luwians ceased squabbling among themselves and came together in a powerful coalition. They swept eastwards, destabilising the Hittite empire, and also launched ambitious overseas raids that helped sow turmoil in Egypt.

Attack on Troy The Mycenaeans viewed these developments with alarm. Forming their own coalition, they sailed across the Aegean to attack Luwian strongholds including Troy. The Mycenaeans ultimately brought down the Luwians – but later began fighting among themselves, destroying their own civilisation. Zangger dubbed the whole episode “World War Zero”. It reads like a plot from epic literature, and not without reason: some of the backing for this chain of events comes from Homer’s two

A stone from Bronze Age central Turkey showing Luwian hieroglyphs (top left)

epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, both written centuries after the Bronze Age collapse. But there are some less contentious lines of evidence too. Luwian raids are described in Hittite texts from around that time, for instance. And Zangger had commissioned a Turkish student to trawl through the archaeological literature, pulling out references to Bronze Age settlements in western Turkey. “We found about 400 sites. A few are 500 metres to 1000 metres in diameter – and they are virtually untouched by science,” Zangger says. The new database makes it clear that the region is far from being the insignificant Bronze Age backwater archaeologists believe it to be. Many archaeologists welcomed the database, but were dismissive of his story. To convince the sceptics, he needed stronger evidence. Which brings us back to that moment in June when Zangger visited Mellaart’s home. The two had corresponded in the 1990s – both shared a passion for Bronze Age western Turkey. Mellaart revealed that he had copies of Bronze Age texts found at a site called Beyköy. They might hold evidence of the Luwians’military prowess, Zangger learned. > 16 December 2017 | NewScientist | 41

The Beyköy text: copied in 1878 from a 29-metre monument?

LUWIAN STUDIES

STRANGER THINGS The Beyköy text is not the first to have a controversial past THE GROLIER CODEX

GOSPEL OF JESUS’S WIFE

THE WALAM OLUM

In the 1960s, Michael Coe at Yale University heard that an antiquities collector from Mexico called Josué Sáenz had acquired a vanishingly rare Maya codex. One expert had already said it was fake, but Coe was convinced it was genuine. By 1971, the Grolier Codex was on public display in New York. Coe said he was willing to stake his reputation on its authenticity, and published an analysis of the codex. By then carbon dating had confirmed the pages dated back about 800 years. Coe insisted the content – a never-before-seen mix of Maya and non-Maya styles – sealed the matter, as a forger would not risk experimenting in such a way. Others disagreed: the document was so confusing it would “make any Maya priest tear his long hair”, according to one researcher. Many still say it’s a forgery. Last year Coe and his colleagues responded. Among other things, a 2007 chemical analysis suggests the blue pigment used contains palygorskite. This mineral was only identified as a component of Maya blue pigment in 1964, the team say. A 1960s forger would have to be very knowledgeable about the latest scientific findings to know to use it. They concluded the Grolier Codex is genuine – but the debate is not over.

In September 2012, Karen King at the Harvard Divinity School made international headlines by announcing the discovery of a document she dubbed “The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife”. It was a papyrus fragment with 14 lines of Coptic script – and referred to Jesus and his “wife”. Many scholars sounded the alarm and one highlighted a typographical error that could be dated to a 2002 translation of another Coptic gospel. But after radiocarbon dating and ink analysis, King concluded in a peer-reviewed article that it was the real deal. An investigation by journalist Ariel Sabar finally led King to think otherwise, however. Sabar tracked down the owner of the text, a former archaeology student called Walter Fritz. He said he had bought the papyrus from an East German defector but then could only provide a copy of a purchase order as evidence. Conveniently, Sabar noted, both the defector and a scholar who had apparently studied the text were dead by then. Fritz eventually admitted that he probably had the skills to forge the document – though he still insisted he hadn’t. When King read Sabar’s report, published in The Atlantic, she accepted that the text is probably a forgery.

In 1836, Constantine Samuel Rafinesque published a translation of a series of wooden tablets covered in hieroglyphs. The “Walam Olum” was a history of the Lenape people of North America. Or so Rafinesque claimed: somehow he had lost the tablets, and his copies were the only record. Among other things, the translation tells of the Lenape reaching the Americas via the frozen Bering Strait. Scholars expressed doubts, but as the years passed, the Walam Olum gained supporters. A 1950s report concluded it was authentic, and as recently as the 1980s several historians agreed. But in the 1990s, David Oestreicher found turns of phrase that hinted the text had been conceived in English. Worse, he realised that the hieroglyphs were a mixture of ancient symbols from Egypt, China and America. Most researchers now consider the Walam Olum a hoax orchestrated by Rafinesque. But there’s an epilogue. During the 20th century, evidence grew that early Americans did arrive by crossing the Bering Strait. Recent genetic studies concluded as much too. The idea had been speculative in Rafinesque’s day – but sometimes even a fraudulent text can inadvertently contain a kernel of truth.

42 | NewScientist | 16 December 2017

Mellaart died in 2012, but last year Zangger ran into his son, Alan, in Istanbul. “I mentioned that in the estate there might be a pile of documents on Beyköy. And a year later he wrote back to tell me: I’ve found it,” says Zangger. Alan Mellaart granted Zangger access to his father’s London flat, which still contained stacks of documents. His eye was instantly drawn to one written in an ancient script: Luwian hieroglyphics. Zangger sent a copy of the text to one of the few scholars able to read Luwian hieroglyphs, Dutch researcher Fred Woudhuizen. The text turned out to be all Zangger might have hoped for. It was a history of events covering about a decade right at the end of the Bronze Age, some 3200 years ago. The text told how KupantaKurunta, king of a Luwian territory called Mira had strengthened his kingdom and gained the support of other Luwian leaders before conquering Hittite territory to the east. He then launched a fleet that conquered land as far away as Ashqelon, a coastal city near Egypt. In other words, the Beyköy text is powerful supporting evidence for Zangger’s World War Zero hypothesis. Zangger and Woudhuizen’s paper should be published imminently. Or so Zangger hopes. He claims that since he went public with his findings in October several archaeologists have been working behind the scenes to prevent publication. The Beyköy text is not, they say, dramatic proof that Zangger is correct. They claim it is a hoax probably forged by Mellaart, who was previously involved in an event that was to become notorious – the Dorak affair. One of the most important but inscrutable of 20th-century archaeologists, Mellaart made several finds in Turkey that transformed our understanding of the agricultural revolution, a step on the road to civilisation. Most significant of all was his discovery in 1958 of Çatalhöyük, a 9000-year-old proto-city. But that same year, on a train journey across Turkey, he claimed to have met a young woman wearing what was clearly a Bronze Age bracelet. She invited him to her home in Izmir where she had a large collection of such artefacts, all apparently taken from two royal tombs at Dorak, in north-west Turkey. She gave Mellaart permission to publish illustrations of them, but then disappeared – along with the treasure. A few years later, the Turkish media accused Mellaart of helping to smuggle the artefacts out of the country, and he lost his permit to excavate at Çatalhöyük. To this day no one knows the truth of the Dorak affair. Zangger stresses there is no evidence Mellaart is guilty of wrongdoing, but

The great Bronze Age collapse aeans, the e another. use?

the Egyptians – mysteriously s by a previously unknown BLACK SEA

Hattusa köy

HITTITE EMPIRE

Turkey

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EGYPTIAN MPIR SOURCE: EBERHARD ZANGGER/LUWIAN STUDIES

some still suspect Mellaart was a smuggler. Others think he was a fantasist who dreamed up the whole Dorak episode. To them, the Beyköy text is another invented treasure. Most damning as far as the sceptics are concerned is the disappearance of the original text. According to Mellaart’s notes, it was inscribed on a 29-metre-long stone monument unearthed in 1878 at Beyköy. An archaeologist carefully copied the hieroglyphs on to paper at the time. But, by the time the authorities arrived to preserve the structure, the locals had dismantled it and used the

“The 3200-year-old text turned out to be all Zangger might have hoped for” stone in the foundations of their mosque. It was lost, the only evidence of its existence being the archaeologist’s illustration, which ended up in Turkey’s government collections. By the 1950s, Luwian hieroglyphs could be read and Turkish archaeologists led an international project to decipher the Beyköy text, along with several others. Mellaart became involved – which is how, according to his notes, he obtained copies of the material. But the project stalled and publications never materialised. By the time Zangger and Mellaart corresponded in the 1990s, Mellaart was the sole survivor of the project, and as far

as we know the only living person aware that it had ever existed. The story does seem to have echoes of the Dorak affair. But Zangger is convinced the Beyköy text is genuine. He says it contains far more detail about Bronze Age Anatolia than a forger would be comfortable including, for fear of making errors that would expose the deception. Even more significantly, Zangger says, Mellaart was apparently unable to read Luwian hieroglyphs, let alone use the writing system to forge such an ambitious document. As things stand Zangger admits it is impossible to know for sure whether the Beyköy text is genuine. But publicising it is the only way to find out, he says, and he has little time for those who would stand in the way. “Is it right that certain scholars decide for the rest of us if something like this is published?” Already, he says, some researchers have begun examining the text and investigating Mellaart’s story. Of course, Zangger hopes they will conclude the text is genuine support for his ideas. But if the upshot is simply added impetus for excavating western Turkey’s Bronze Age sites, he will still view that as a victory. “I don’t think there’s any place in the world where discoveries can be made so easily as they can in western Anatolia.” One way or another, the story of the Bronze Age collapse seems to be falling into place. ■ By Colin Barras 16 December 2017 | NewScientist | 43

CULTURE

It’s coming at you!

Andy Serkis, motion captured to play Caesar in Planet of the Apes 44 | NewScientist | 16 December 2017

PHOTO 12 / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

OUTSIDE Dimension Studios in outside the US. Still, I’m sceptical. Wimbledon, south London, is one It has been clear for a while that of those tiny wood-framed snack truly immersive media won’t bars that served commercial spring from a single “light-bulb” travellers in the days before moment. The technologies motorways. The hut is guarded involved are, in conceptual terms, by old shop dummies dressed in surprisingly old. Volumetric fishnet tights and pirate hats. If capture is a good example. the UK made its own dilapidated MacMillan is considered the version of Westworld, the cyborg godfather of this tech, having rebellion would surely begin here. invented the “bullet time” effect Steve Jelley orders us breakfast. Years ago he left film production “Engineer Masahiro Mori to pursue a career developing new says his ‘uncanny valley’ idea was never meant to media. He’s of the generation for whom the next big thing is always be taken scientifically” just around the corner. Most of them perished in the dot-com central to The Matrix. But The bust of 2001, but Jelley clung to Matrix is 18 years old, and besides, the dream, and now Microsoft MacMillan reckons that pioneer has come calling. photographer Eadweard His company, Hammerhead, Muybridge got to the idea years makes 360-degree videos for before him – in fact, decades commercial clients. Its partner before cinema was invented. in this current venture, Then there’s motion capture Timeslice Films, is best known (or mocap): recording the for volumetric capture of still movement of points attached to images – the business of an actor, and from those points, cinematographically recording constructing the performance of forms in three dimensions – a a three-dimensional model. The practice that goes back to founder Tim MacMillan’s art-school experiments of the early 1980s. Steve Sullivan, director of the Holographic Video initiative at Microsoft, is fusing both companies’ technical expertise to create volumetric video: immersive entertainment that’s indistinguishable from reality There are only three studios in the world that can do this with any degree of conviction, and Wimbledon is the only one

pioneering Soviet physiologist Nikolai Bernstein invented the technique in the early 1920s, while developing training programmes for factory workers. Truly immersive media will be achieved not through magic bullets, but through thugging – the application of ever more computer power, and the everfaster processing of more and more data points. Impressive, but where’s the breakthrough? “Well,” Jelley begins, handing me what may be the largest bacon sandwich in London, “you know this business of the ‘uncanny valley’…?” My heart sinks slightly. Most New Scientist readers will be familiar with Masahiro Mori’s concept of the uncanny valley. It’s a curiously anglophone obsession. In the 30 years since the Japanese engineer published his paper in 1970, it has been referred to in Japanese academic literature only once. Mori himself says the idea was never meant to be taken scientifically. He was merely warning robot designers

DIMENSION STUDIOS/SKY

Think the near-real worlds created by CGI and motion capture are as good as it gets? Just wait for a new kind of video, says Simon Ings

at a time when humanoid robots didn’t exist that the closer their works came to resemble people, the creepier we would find them. In the West, discussions of the uncanny valley have grown to a sizeable cottage industry. There have been expensive studies done with PET scans to prove the existence of the effect. But as Mori commented in an interview in 2012: “I think that the brainwaves act that way because we feel eerie. It still doesn’t explain why we feel eerie to begin with.” Our discomfort extends beyond encounters with physical robots to include some cinematic experiences. Many are the animated movies that have employed mocap to achieve something like cinematic realism, only to plummet without trace into the valley. Elsewhere, actor Andy Serkis

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

Is this real? No, this whole scene is created by the latest movie tech

famously uses mocap to transform himself into characters like Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, or the chimpanzee Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and we are carried along well enough by these films. The one creature this technology can’t emulate, however, is Serkis himself. Though mocap now renders human body movement with impressive realism, the human face remains a machine far too complex to be seamlessly emulated even by the best system. Jelley reckons he and his partners have “solved the problem” of the uncanny valley. He leads me into the studio. There’s a small, circular, curtainedoff area – a sort of human-scale birdcage. Rings of lights and cameras are mounted on scaffolds and hang from a moveable and very heavy-looking ceiling rig.

There are 106 cameras: are no fluorescent sticky dots or half of them recording in the sliced-through ping-pong balls infrared spectrum to capture attached to actors here. As far depth information, half of them as the audience is concerned, recording visible light. Plus, volumetric video is essentially a number of ultraviolet cameras. just that, video, and as close to “We use ultraviolet paint to a true record as anything piped mask areas for effects work,” through a basement full of Jelley explains, “so we record “I know she’s not real, but the UV spectrum, too. Basically my body doesn’t. Every we use every glimmer of light bit of me has fallen for we can get short of asking you this super-real gymnast” to swallow radium.” The cameras shoot between computers is ever going to get. 30 and 60 times a second. So what kind of films are made “We have a directional map of the in such studios? Right now, the configuration of those cameras, education company Pearson is and we overlay that with a depth creating virtual consultations for map that we’ve captured from trainee nurses. Fashion brands the IR cameras. Then we can do and car companies have shot all the pixel interpolation.” adverts here. TV companies want This is a big step up from mocap. Volumetric video captures to use them for fully immersive and interactive dramas. real-time depth information On a table nearby, a demo is from surfaces themselves: there

ready to watch on a Vive VR headset. There are three sets of performances for me to observe, all looping in a grey, gridded, unadorned virtual space: the digital future as a filing cabinet. There are two experiments from Sullivan’s early days at Microsoft. Thomas Jefferson is pure animatronic; the two Maori haka dancers are engaging, if unhuman. The circus gymnast swinging on her hoop is different. I recognise her, or think I do. My body-language must be giving the game away, because Jelley laughs. “Go up to her,” he says. I can’t place where I’ve seen her before. I try and catch her eye. “Closer.” I’m invading her space, and I’m not comfortable with this. I can see the individual threads, securing the sequins to her costume. More than that: I can smell her. I can feel the heat coming from her skin. I know she’s not real, but my body doesn’t. Every bit of me that might have rejected a digitised face as uncanny has fallen hook, line and sinker for this super-real gymnast. And this, presumably, is why the bit of my mind that enables me to communicate freely and easily with my fellow humans is in overdrive, trying to plug the gaps in my experience, as if to say, “Of course her skin is hot. Of course she has a scent.” Mori’s uncanny valley effect is not quantifiable, and I don’t suppose my experience is any more measurable than the one Mori identified. But I’d bet the farm that, had you scanned me, you would have seen all manner of pretty lights. This hasn’t been an eerie experience. Quite the reverse. It’s terrifyingly ordinary. Almost, I might say, human. Jelley walks me back to the main road. Neither of us says a word. He knows what he has. He knows what he has done. Outside the snack shack, three shop dummies in pirate gear wobble in the wind. Q 16 December 2017 | NewScientist | 45

CULTURE

Bringing it all home Refugee scientists can change the world, finds Sandrine Ceurstemont

GHANYA NAJI AL-NAQEB left Yemen because she felt her life was at risk. “In my faculty, a few people disappeared. We don’t know anything about them,” she says. Her story isn’t unique. Millions fled Africa and the Middle East when conflict and war closed in. But as a scientist, Naji Al-Naqeb may have been in greater danger since authoritarian regimes often target this group because of their knowledge and influence. Although it is hard to get exact numbers, thousands of science students and professionals are thought to be among those seeking refuge. Now they are the focus of a documentary by Italian artist and film-maker Nicole Even job offers are rarely for Leghissa. Her Science in Exile permanent posts, adding to recently premiered at the World feelings of instability. After being Science Forum in Jordan, and will uprooted, refugee scientists worry be shown globally in 2018. about what will happen if their The film explores the journey host country can no longer of Naji Al-Naqeb and three other accommodate them. refugee scientists from Syria and Ahmad Sadiddin is a Syrian Iraq, now pursuing careers far agricultural economist featured from their homes. “It was hard to in the film. He relocated to Italy, find displaced scientists who want and for him the lack of stability to talk,” says Leghissa. “Many are was the hardest part. “I was scared.” They were also hard to offered a position at a university find physically because they may for two years and it was obvious live in camps or not work in their “Loneliness is a big issue own field of science. for the refugee scientists Even when refugee scientists receive a fellowship or are offered who left families behind. Then there’s racism” a job, the transition can be tough. Many struggle to get a visa or may find their knowledge isn’t up to that it was just a transitional scratch because of different phase,” he says. “I was anxious.” educational standards. Loneliness There are upsides, of course. is also a big issue for those who Naji Al-Naqeb, now in Germany leave families behind. Then there’s studying Yemeni plants used in racism. “It’s especially an issue for traditional medicine, has access women wearing veils who are on to expertise and technology not their own,” says Leghissa. available at home. And Sadiddin 46 | NewScientist | 16 December 2017

NICOLE LEGHISSA/SCIENCE IN EXILE

Science in Exile, directed by Nicole Leghissa

now works at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, where he is gaining an international perspective to complement his role as a national adviser in Syria. But previous experience helps too. Sadiddin’s knowledge of the Middle East, where there are already water and food shortages due to climate change, has been an asset when working on models of the financial impact of global warming in some countries in the Middle East and North Africa. Many refugees hope to return to their countries eventually. For Leghissa, they are bridges: having worked in very different cultures, they bring a unique knowledge. She says: “They are big resources for their countries economically, and socially.” If she is able to return to Yemen, Naji Al-Naqeb may be able to boost her country’s economy by setting up a lab to develop medicines from Yemeni plants. And Sadiddin thinks that

Ghanya Naji Al-Naqeb now has a new life in another country

developing a labour force skilled in science and technology will play a part in repairing Syria’s destruction. Before the war, he says, there were only five public universities for 23 million people. Scientists were not paid well and there was no freedom of expression, two things he thinks are necessary for science to grow. Refugee scientists have a lot to contribute, but they need more support too. Several organisations and scholarship funds offer financial help, but less emotional support is available, and many institutions aren’t clued up about refugees’ experiences. Leghissa thinks ongoing assistance should be available, including help if they opt to resettle. Meanwhile, raising awareness is a big step forward. Q Sandrine Ceurstemont is a writer based in Morocco

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EDITOR’S PICK

Fellow geologists were critical to a fault

From Rob Gibson, Irvine, California, US

Your article on Dan McKenzie’s contribution to plate tectonics dredged up a very unpleasant memory (25 November, p 41). In 1964, I presented an address to the Geological Society of America showing evidence for a 10-million-

year-old formation being offset some 80 miles by the San Andreas fault. Fellow scientists said my ideas were “absurd” and “impossible”, that ”faults cannot possibly have that much displacement”, and “I suggest that you do your fieldwork again”. The hostile reception my paper engendered resulted in me leaving the conference abruptly, very bitter over its rebuff. A few years later, McKenzie and his colleagues proved plate tectonics, the San Andreas was recognised as a major plate boundary, my paper was vindicated and suddenly I became an authority on the San Andreas fault. With some 6 to 9 metres of displacement, this fault is long overdue for a huge quake that, when it comes, will be the greatest natural disaster in the history of the US.

@newscientist

From local change comes a global tipping point From Katherine Richardson, Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate, Denmark, and Johan Rockström and Will Steffen, Stockholm Resilience Centre, Sweden We welcome critique of the planetary boundaries framework, yet Stuart Pimm seems to have misunderstood the concept (9 December, p 24). Pimm wrongly interprets the framework as if it assumes and relies on the fact that biodiversity has a tipping point at the global scale. This is not the case. Tipping points exist in individual ecosystems, but there is currently no established evidence of a global tipping point for biodiversity. The reason we include biodiversity in the planetary boundaries framework is because

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of the way living organisms interact with the climate system to regulate overall stability of the Earth system. Erosion of biodiversity can be expected to reduce Earth resilience, which in turn can increase the risk of crossing a climate tipping point, for example. Human pressures on the planet now influence interactions between the climate system and biosphere at the global scale. The planetary boundaries framework attempts to identify levels of this perturbation where the risk of the Earth system as a whole changing state is increased. The framework is certainly not meant to replace any methods of ecosystem management at the local or regional levels. On the contrary, planetary boundaries offer a complement by framing local sustainable management approaches in a global context.

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“I’m not going to Mars if all they brew is Budweiser!” Simon Morris isn’t won over by our online comment piece about the US beer maker’s plans to expand into space

Speaking in tongues can be able to attribute the result. But help you evade detection unfortunately, that was because it From Steve Swift, Alton, Hampshire, UK I was fascinated by your article on how your personal writing style betrays identity (25 November, p 36). Over a decade ago, while working for IBM, I created a website where employees could submit complaints anonymously. These were usually forwarded to the person’s manager. While I “guaranteed” that the system was anonymous, it was obvious to me that my manager could always detect something I had written. So I experimented with obfuscation mechanisms. I took a complaint and passed it through Google’s nascent English-toFrench translation. Then I passed the French back through the French-to-English translator. Perfect! No manager would

was meaningless drivel. No doubt if I repeated my experiment now, with Google’s much improved translators, the obfuscated text would be almost perfect.

Of mice and menstruation From Peter Ashby, Broughty Ferry, Dundee, UK In your article discussing the link between endometriosis and depression, you write that mice don’t menstruate like people do (25 November, p 16). It is not only that mice do not menstruate, but also that endometrial cells can’t enter the abdominal cavity as easily as in humans. As someone who has made a small mountain of genetically modified mice, I can attest that there is a fibrous capsule that

enfolds the end of the fallopian tubes and the ovaries. This is very rich in blood vessels, being the bane of transferring eggs between these transgenic mice. It is likely that this is an adaptation to prevent ectopic pregnancy, given the amount of eggs a mouse can produce per ovulation – often over a dozen. The lack of endometriosis is a side effect.

The right and wrong way to blow up a balloon From Brian Collins, Wellington, New Zealand Douglas Heaven asks if internet balloons will help hurricaneravaged Puerto Rico (14 October, p 4). In the 1960s, when I was studying law in Wellington, a fellow student and I found a partially filled weather balloon on our way back from the law library late one evening.

The following night, we decided to fully inflate this balloon. I changed the suck end of my vacuum cleaner to blow, and the balloon quickly inflated. I took my foot off the power button, but my flatmate said: “Inflate it even more” – then an almighty explosion. When I had stopped the cleaner, the hydrogen had fed back into the machine and sparked the blast. Some of my flatmates had burns on their faces and we rushed them to the public hospital. How foolhardy we were. In our defence, we were law and not science students.

Nobody will shed a tear for polio’s extinction From Bruce Denness, Whitwell, Isle of Wight, UK Michael Le Page rightly cites several reasons why care

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LETTERS should be taken to avoid unwelcome consequences of using genetic “extinction” drives to tackle invaders (25 November, p 25). This includes how its proposed application to possums in New Zealand might endanger them in neighbouring Australia, where they are a protected species. However, that surely does not apply to its potential application to the eradication of the polio virus, for example. The whole world would like to see this extinct, not least those of us who are affected by it.

The price of everything and value of nothing From Bryn Glover, Kirkby Malzeard, North Yorkshire, UK Douglas Heaven’s explanation of the workings of bitcoin and the blockchain was very helpful and illuminating (2 December, p 36). There were, however, two assertions with which I would disagree. Money, in whatever form it may take, as lumps of metal, sheets of paper, conch shells or TOM GAULD

[email protected]

clever assemblages of binary digits, has absolutely no intrinsic value, despite any apparent difficulties associated with producing it. Money is only ever a symbol or representative of true wealth, which may be tangible such as food, clothing and housing, or intangible such as healthcare, education, justice or security. Money needs to be backed not by governments, but by goods. Currency only has real practical value when it is exchanged for goods or services. The problem with our current systems is that they permit the trading of money itself as if it were a commodity with intrinsic value. It is claimed that value can be added to money by increasing the amount of it in circulation – such as through interest payments – but unless the supply of real wealth happens to keep pace, devaluation is inevitable. Money dealers would cite “growth” as the source of new money, but whereas money markets always seem to expand, real markets have a nasty habit of stagnating or actually reducing,

resulting in a crash when the money is revalued. From Bill Summers, Sturminster Newton, Dorset, UK Your article on cryptocurrencies was an opportunity to clarify what money actually is. It gets close to asking that question when it states that bitcoin “won’t become a form of currency until people are paid in it”. Both Buckminster Fuller and Karl Marx as philosophers held that currency is the mechanism by which we put our labour into storage. Coal in the ground is worth nothing until the labour of many people has put it into the hearth. If this labour can be stored as a currency in the blockchain, we must ask if it is secure, if it is stable in value and who owns it. From Adrin Neatrour, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK Douglas Heaven’s primer on bitcoin and virtual currencies was informative and welcome. One area of interest he did not consider is the effect that quantum computers – which can crunch data orders of magnitude faster

@newscientist

newscientist

than current computers – could have on the blockchain and mining system of these cryptocurrencies.

Time we voted for a fairer voting system From Ron Baker, Colchester, Essex, UK Timothy Revell says there is no perfect electoral system (18 November, p 35). But some are far better than others. Among the worst is the first-past-the-post system used in the UK and US. The best so far devised is that known as the single transferable vote (STV). It is proportional between parties. It involves voting for individuals, not party lists. It allows for third parties and for independents. It is just about impossible to gerrymander. Revell says that fairness sounds like a proportional system: so it does. Why not use the best, STV? Details on how STV works can be obtained from the UK’s Electoral Reform Society.

Might we have too much of a good thing? From Jon Hinwood, Melbourne, Australia Your leader and cover story supported medical use of psychedelic drugs (25 November, p 28). But you did not discuss the legitimate concerns that easier access to such drugs is likely to facilitate and increase nonmedical use and abuse.

For the record Q We need a pinch more salt in our sea water, which contains about 30 grams per litre (11 November, p 36).

Letters should be sent to: Letters to the Editor, New Scientist, 25 Bedford Street, London, WC2E 9ES Email: [email protected] Include your full postal address and telephone number, and a reference (issue, page number, title) to articles. We reserve the right to edit letters. New Scientist Ltd reserves the right to use any submissions sent to the letters column of New Scientist magazine, in any other format.

54 | NewScientist | 16 December 2017

SIGNAL BOOST Offering your projects a helping hand

Put vaccination on the map RABIES in Nepal is a serious issue. Canine vaccination is a key constituent of any rabies elimination strategy, and according to World Health Organization guidelines, at least 70 per cent of dogs in an area must be covered. Regular revaccination is also needed as unprotected animals migrate into areas.There are several animal welfare organisations and societies in Nepal undertaking vaccination campaigns. However, there is no way of easily knowing who has vaccinated dogs, where and when. Hence the Dog Data website was created to offer a more coordinated approach, with obvious benefits for Nepal’s human population. Launched by Jim Pearson of the Himalayan Animal Treatment Centre charity, it has been working in animal welfare in Nepal for 10 years, creating a central record of all vaccinations. Pearson had previously made smartphone apps that record dog vaccinations and upload the data to a server, allowing the Dog Data site to show individual vaccination locations on a map. Markers change colour when revaccination is due.The recording apps are freely available to organisations wishing to use them and publicly share their results. The site currently also shows dog census information, and there are plans to add other kinds of data too. Data on neutering campaigns will be added when the details of these upcoming efforts are finalised. There is no legal requirement to report rabies to government authorities in Nepal, making surveillance difficult. So a further target is collaboration with relevant sources to display information on canine and human rabies cases. Public information websites are a new concept in Nepal but internet connectivity is good and the ambition is that Dog Data will evolve to become a widely used public health tool. Dog Data would welcome suggestions, advice and finance. Barbara Webb, Dog Data UK

For more information, please visitdogdata.uk or email [email protected] Signal Boost is your chance to tell our readers about a project that needs their help. We’re looking for campaigns, programmes or ideas from non-profit or voluntary enterprises. Send a proposal, together with images and information about yourself, to [email protected]. New Scientist does not endorse any  claims made in this donated advertising space. We reserve the right to edit contributions for clarity and style. 16 December 2017 | NewScientist | 55

FEEDBACK

For more feedback, visit newscientist.com/feedback

teeth some people might have. I was told by the undertaker that the gold was sent to some government agency.” Undertakers among you, is this true? It harks of taxation without representation. Surely this silent majority will be spinning in their graves.

LASTLY, Peter says he was also asked whether his wife had a pacemaker. Paul Dorner might have a clue as to why: “This is mentioned in Iain Banks’s 1992 novel The Crow Road, which begins with the immortal line, ‘It was the day my grandmother exploded’.”

PAUL MCDEVITT

SEQUINNED dresses might be a staple of ballroom game show Strictly Come Dancing, but one contestant could be accused of taking the idea of glittery showbiz a little too far. Various outlets report that Debbie McGee’s prowess on the dance floor is down to her daily supplement of colloidal silver, a sparkly cure-all tolerated, but not encouraged, by medical professionals. And for good reason – an overdose will turn one’s skin permanently blue, which might clash with your next ballgown. Perhaps it’s only natural that people assume the long-time partner of magician Paul Daniels must be using magical potions to achieve success. Feedback timidly suggests her limber moves may be down to the fact that before she became a Mrs, McGee was a professional ballet dancer.

FEEDBACK has previously pondered the final destination of various biomedical implants

collected during one’s lifetime (18 November). Michael Zehse writes: “I’ve got a titanium aortic valve, worth around £1000, so a registrar told me.” Off the peg, perhaps, Michael, but be sure to check the Parkers guide price for that year’s model to avoid disappointment. “If it now belongs to me, maybe I could sign it up for some sort of equity release so I get £200 cash now and a firm can have the valve upon my demise,” says Michael, “although I’ve pre-donated my body to the London anatomy office, so presumably they will want to remove and recycle it if I die in hospital.” Let’s hope the anatomy office doesn’t try to collect early. AND the mystery deepens. “When arranging the cremation and funeral service for my wife about five years ago,” says Peter Ray, “out of curiosity, I asked what happened to the gold

Oliver Moody says the Beehive pub in Marylebone has some pretty totalitarian ambitions. A sign warns “only food and drink purchased on these premises might be consumed” 56 | NewScientist | 16 December 2017

FOLLOWING on from the cyberpunk terms and conditions attached to Greater Anglia trains’ Wi-Fi services (4 November), Carol Conkey writes in with more odd legalese. During a recent medical procedure in Nevada, she was handed a patient’s rights statement that included assurances that she had the right “not to be required to perform work for the facility”, and that “no beliefs or practices, or any attendance at religious services, shall be imposed”. “I certainly would have objected it they had asked me to mop the floors or wash equipment,” says Carol. And while you might expect to encounter a mass during a colonoscopy, Feedback thinks it isn’t normally the type with candles and a liturgy.

THE prospect of lab-grown burgers is so close we could taste it, if we had a million dollars to spend on lunch. Thankfully Tony Lang finds a cheaper alternative thriving in south London. Shoppers in Mitcham can pop down to Jovan Foods, which, according to the signage outside, bills itself as a “meat manufacturer”. IN LOCAL news, the Nottingham Post reports the recent appearance of the Northern Lights over the city, says Perry Bebbington. Readers are informed that “a rare scientific reaction will cause the skies above the UK to turn green”.

STIRRING the depths of our imagination, the occasional explanation of a mysterious eight- legged structure found in the sea off Rhode Island still bubbles to the surface (30 September). “Donkey feeder, drag anchor, or the remains of a paddle wheel off a paddle steamer?” asks Rodney Tapp. Meanwhile, we suspect Peter Scott has been bingeing on too much family sci-fi drama. “This metal hoop and its spokes are the remains of the flop TV show ‘Seagate SG1’,” he claims. SOME rules are made to be broken – but not all. Richard King recalls that while training with the Royal Canadian Air Force, “the station at Portage la Prairie had the usual ‘No Smoking’

signs where you would expect, except in the hangars. Here there were fully fuelled aircraft, and signs that read ‘Positively No Smoking’.”

CUTTING everything but the cost? Michael Bisson discovers that his chicken noodle soup is claiming to contain 30 per cent less salt. “When I got home from the grocery store, I compared it with my older package and noticed that it was actually 30 per cent less of everything. Even the recipe on the back said to add a third less water to each package.” 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.

Last words past and present at newscientist.com/lastword

THE LAST WORD Let’s be blunt An earlier questioner asked how metal blades in wet shavers lost their sharpness so easily on human hair. One answer said that alternating blades in a razor made each one last longer than if left in place until they became blunt. So subsequently the Last Word posed a second question. Does any reader know why alternating blades makes each one last longer?

Q Keeping razors away from water will stop the cutting edge corroding, so this might explain why alternating blades extends each one’s life. Rust consists of hydrated ferric oxides with varying quantities of water, meaning rust is a poorly defined chemical. Rust will form on a wet blade edge and the water content in the rust will increase the longer the edge stays wet, so the rust will become bulkier and the blade blunter. If the blade is placed in a dry environment, for example, under

Q It is sound economics to go on using deteriorating equipment until the cost of continued usage equals or exceeds (just) the cost of replacement. When you use two razors in turn, the cost of a “replacement decision” doubles, so will be delayed until both have got worse. This also helps us understand how a set of seven expensive cutthroat razors might easily last a lifetime, by achieving an equilibrium where the owner can neither bear to use any of them nor afford seven new ones. John McCrea Banstead, Surrey, UK

The art of timing Why are the dates when we switch between summer and winter times (for example, swapping between Greenwich Mean Time and British Summer Time in the UK) placed so asymmetrically around the solstices?

a so-called “magic pyramid” or perhaps more usefully in a cupboard drawer, then the amount of water could decrease, the rust will subsequently become less bulky and so the blade will feel sharper. David Muir Edinburgh, UK

Q British Summer Time enables us to enjoy lighter summer evenings while minimising accidents caused by travelling in the dark in winter, as result of poorer visibility and colder icy conditions. We tend to be more rushed on the morning commute and may also be more tired and less alert. Therefore, we change the clocks primarily to avoid a dark icy morning rush. So why does it end fewer than two months before the shortest day (21 December) but not restart until more than three months later? That’s because 21 December

We pay £25 for every answer published in New Scientist. To answer a question or ask a new one please email [email protected]. Questions should be scientific enquiries about everyday phenomena, and both questions and answers should be concise. We reserve the right to edit items for clarity and style. Please include a postal address, daytime telephone number and email address. You can also send questions and

answers to The Last Word, New Scientist, 25 Bedford Street, London, WC2E 9ES. New Scientist Ltd retains total editorial control over the published content and reserves all rights to reuse question and answer material that has been submitted by readers in any medium or in any format and at any time in the future. All unanswered questions and previous questions and answers are at newscientist.com/lastword/

“Keeping razors away from water stops corrosion, explaining why alternating blades extends their life”

has neither the latest sunrise nor earliest sunset. The earliest sunset occurs around 14 December and latest sunrise is around 30 December, and hence the mornings in late January are as dark as those in early December. As for icy weather, the coldest part of the year trails behind the shortest day because of thermal

“Mornings in late January in the northern hemisphere are as dark as those in early December” lag, the same reason the hottest part of the day is not at noon but late afternoon. At 3 pm the sun is getting lower, but is still adding more heat to the day. In January and February, although days are lengthening, there is still insufficient sunshine to warm the day between the long night hours, so February is often colder than November. Therefore, in late October, with sunrise at nearly 8 am, we change clocks to lighten the morning, and then we wait until late March, when sunrise has advanced to just after 6 am and most of the icy

weather is over, to start our days earlier again. Hillary Shaw Newport, Shropshire, UK

This week’s questions MIXED LEAF SALAD

This tree (see photos above) has both variegated and normal leaves, with leaves of both types on the same branch. Can anyone explain this distribution of different leaves on the same plant? John MacFarlane London, UK CRACKED IT

Why do I, or any other human, get sore and cracked heels? I understand it’s less common in men than women – presumably this is down to footwear choices? The cream product I use to cure it works very well, but its active ingredient appears to be urea. How does this react with my skin to cure the problem? Peter Lloyd London, UK