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THE QUEST FOR SPACE
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A FIFTH FORCE
Fresh hints of a new fundamental force of nature
ALLL THE PRETTY HORSES
Stone Age artists and their obsession with the equine form
FABIO OLA GIA ANOTTI
The woman who runs the world’s biggest physics lab WEEKLY November 23 –29, 2019
A SPECI A L I S SU E
THE WAY WE DIE NOW Redrrawin ng the line betweeen liffe and death
It’s neve er too la ate to o go green
Ev ven atheistss belie eve in an affterlife
Gen nes that onlly swittch on when you diee
Cu uratiing yourr diigitall legacyy
Mourn ning g the de eath of a robot
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This week’s issue
On the cover
34 Features
11 A fifth force Fresh hints of a new fundamental force of nature
“You can be pronounced dead in one country, yet you would still be alive in another”
14 All the pretty horses Stone Age artists and their obsession with the equine form
34 The way we die now A special issue 42 Fabiola Gianotti The woman who runs the world’s biggest physics lab
Vol 244 No 3257 Cover image: Can Tuğrul
19 First map of Titan 24 ‘Hyperpalatable’ foods 20 The rise of stalkerware 11 Transparent batteries
News
Features
8 Virtual universe A huge computer simulation looks at how stars live and die
34 The way we die now Astounding discoveries are redrawing the line between life and death
News
10 Gene-edited babies Geneticists debate the rules of creating CRISPR children
42 Fabiola Gianotti Scientific collaboration has never been more vital, says the director general of CERN
12 Maths of solitaire We finally know the odds of winning this fiendish one-player card game
The back pages
Views
51 Stargazing at home See Venus and Jupiter together
23 Comment Michael Le Page on genetically modified golden rice
52 Puzzles Cryptic crossword and a hat-based logic puzzle
JAVIER TRUEBA/MSF/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
24 The columnist James Wong takes a bite out of the myth of addictive foods 26 Letters Stress about the end of the world as we know it 28 Aperture Art in a Petri dish probes human potential 30 Culture Time is up for outdated ideas about testosterone
14 Equine obsession Stone Age artists in Europe loved painting horses
53 Feedback AI tipping point and the best new words: the week in weird 54 Almost the last word Dogs and nettles, wasps and waists: readers respond 56 The Q&A Geologist Paul Smith on his love of fossils and Greenland
23 November 2019 | New Scientist | 3
SECOND EDITION OF BEING HUMAN
BEING HUMAN Take a step back from the everyday chores of being human to tackle the big – and small – questions about our nature, behaviour and existence.
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The leader
For all humankind CERN’s example shows the unifying power of open scientific collaboration “THE organization shall have no concern with work for military requirements and the results of its experimental and theoretical work shall be published or otherwise made generally available.” The second sentence of the second article of the “Convention for the Establishment of a European Organization for Nuclear Research”, signed by 12 countries on 29 September 1954, was a statement of visionary idealism in a world less than a decade on from the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Such admirable principles led to the vast particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, that is now better known as CERN. The model championed by its founders, of peaceable scientific collaboration across borders with results freely available to all, has more than proved its worth. It can be measured
not just in the contribution of CERN researchers to our understanding of the building blocks of reality, which culminated in the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, but also the technological spin-offs. Most notable of these was the World Wide Web, developed in the lab
“Just imagine a similar international research institution dedicated to climate change” by Tim Berners-Lee and released to the world in 1993. Others include medical, computing and imaging technologies that have benefited humanity as a whole. CERN’s boss Fabiola Gianotti is right to be proud of the spirit of common human purpose her organisation embodies (see page 42). Its work relies on combining
expertise from across theoretical and experimental science, technology and engineering to solve cutting-edge challenges. As Gianotti points out, that often involves cooperation between scientists from countries whose leaders refuse to sit down and talk to each other. Is it dewy-eyed idealism to suggest that this is a model we might apply elsewhere? Just imagine an international research institution dedicated to climate change bringing together, physically and in virtual spaces, the best minds from climate science, energy technology, economics, social science and beyond. More than ever, we need global scientific leadership in finding solutions to this existential challenge. CERN’s motto is “accelerating science”: there is no area of science we need to put a rocket under more right now than climate change. ❚
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23 November 2019 | New Scientist | 5
Where did we come from? How did it all begin?
And where does belly-button fluff come from? Find the answers in our latest book. On sale now. Introduction by Professor Stephen Hawking
News Superstrong lead Lead blasted with lasers is tougher than steel p8
Blood in space Low gravity made astronauts’ blood flow backwards p9
Toxic goo gun Australia attempts to tackle its feral cat problem p12
Extinction repetition US parrot went extinct not once but twice p14
Insulin nasal spray Treatment could help with polycystic ovary syndrome p16
Astronomy
NELSON ALMEIDA/GETTY IMAGES
Starlink obscures images of the sky
Vanishing Amazon Satellite monitoring confirms that loss of the rainforest has taken a dramatic turn for the worse, reports Adam Vaughan DESTRUCTION of the Amazon over the past year hit its highest level in more than a decade. Satellite data from the Brazilian space agency gave the first official confirmation that deforestation has soared since Jair Bolsonaro became president in January on a promise to develop the Amazon. Between August 2018 and July 2019, there was a loss of nearly 10,000 square kilometres of forest, the worst since 2008. Logging and burning of the world’s greatest rainforest jumped by 29.5 per cent in that period compared with the year before, to 9762 square kilometres. Observers noted that this is the biggest annual increase in more than two decades. It also ends a
period of relatively stable losses. The average between 2012 and 2018 was 6727 square kilometres. Gilberto Camara, ex-director of the space agency, tweeted that the trend was “terrible” and showed a very strong upward swing. He predicted losses could reach 12,000 square kilometres next year, if no action is taken. The figures don’t cover some of the worst deforestation detected between August and October. Although laws protecting the Amazon are still in place in Brazil, Bolsonaro’s rhetoric and a drop in enforcement has led him to be
accused of encouraging logging operations (pictured above, in Para state) that clear and burn trees. More than 180,000 fires have been recorded this year, resulting in global attention and pressure due to the sheer number of blazes across the Amazon. Brazilian environment minister Ricardo Salles suggested that deforestation has been rising since 2012, well before Bolsonaro took over. “Yes, it was, but it was pretty stable,” says Erika Berenguer at the University of Oxford. “It wasn’t an increase like this. That’s a misrepresentation of reality.” ❚
More on our changing planet online For everything you need to know visit newscientist.com/environment
ELON MUSK’s SpaceX is interfering with astronomy again, after its second batch of Starlink satellites got in the way of observations. SpaceX launched 60 new Starlink communications satellites into orbit on 11 November, bringing the total number of satellites it has in low Earth orbit up to 120. After the first launch, in May, astronomers noted that the satellites were extremely bright, prompting concerns that the thousands of satellites that SpaceX plans to launch could interfere with scientific research and views of the night sky. The newly launched satellites interfered with astronomical observations at the Cerro Tololo InterAmerican Observatory (CTIO) in northern Chile on 18 November. Astronomers were using the Dark Energy Camera (DECam), which can take images of large areas of the night sky in visible and near-infrared wavelengths of light. “I am in shock,” wrote astronomer Clara MartinezVazquez at CTIO on Twitter, in reference to the Starlink satellites. “Our DECam exposure was heavily affected by 19 of them,” she tweeted. “The train of Starlink satellites lasted for over 5 minutes!” SpaceX says it plans to make the base of future Starlink satellites black to help mitigate the impacts on astronomical observations, and will adjust satellite orbits if required. ❚ Donna Lu 23 November 2019 | New Scientist | 7
News Cosmology
Giant virtual universe A VAST simulation of the universe is digitally recreating the lives of stars, black holes and galaxies. Approximately 1 billion light years across, it is modelling tens of thousands of galaxies. Richard Bower at Durham University in the UK and his colleagues started the simulation last week. It will run non-stop for 50 days across 30,000 computer processors in both Durham and Paris developed by tech firm Intel. The simulation is 30 times larger than one the team ran in 2015, which led to predictions about the mergers of supermassive black holes. The new simulation includes the physics of all the “normal” matter such as the atoms and molecules that make up humans and Earth, as well as the mysterious dark matter that forms around 85 per cent of the universe but which we haven’t yet been able to directly observe. It also incorporates the physics of star and black hole formation, and the conditions at the start of the universe. “We set the initial conditions, represented by
NASA/SWIFT/AURORE SIMONNET
A simulation of the universe, 1 billion light years across, is looking at how galaxies form and die, reports Donna Lu
hundreds of billions of particles in play, and then we let the universe go,” says Bower. The team will look at galaxies by breaking them up into blocks about 3000 light years across. One objective is to try to understand rare objects in the universe, such as galaxies that are so distant from Earth that they are invisible to many telescopes. By simulating what the universe looked like at different points in time – at half or a quarter of its present age, say – the team can test theories about how galaxies are related
Tens of thousands of galaxies are included in a digital model of the cosmos
soft and pliable. When they cannot move around so easily, like in iron, the material is hard and strong. Andy Krygier at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and his colleagues tested the properties of lead that is quickly pushed to incredibly high pressures using lasers at the lab’s National Ignition Facility. Applying significant pressure also applies heat, so the researchers had to devise a setup that would allow the lead to reach pressures higher than those in Earth’s core without melting. They did this using a special gold tube, which had a
higher melting point, into which they fired 160 laser beams. Those beams heated up the tube to about 1,000,000°C, sending a highpressure shock wave through a sample of lead. At the same time, they measured the lead’s strength using X-rays. They found that after a few tens of nanoseconds, once the apparatus had reached its highest pressures, the lead had become 250 times
to the growth of black holes, and what happens when they die. Simulating individual galaxies in sufficient detail is a challenge. “If you try to do a calculation where you have less detail in the galaxy, then you really can’t understand the rate at which stars are going to form,” says Bower. Another difficulty in simulating the internal structure of galaxies, which contain gas, dust and
billions of stars, is that there are huge uncertainties about their underlying physics. “The physics is so complicated that any small mistake could lead to a very wrong prediction,” says Romain Teyssier at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. He was part of a team behind a massive universe simulation in 2017 that contained 25 billion galaxies, focusing on dark matter. The paradox is that although we don’t know what dark matter is, its physics is simple to model. That is because it doesn’t seem to interact with anything or itself except through gravity, which is why we don’t see it emitting light or other radiation. In contrast, we don’t know very accurately how stars form or how much energy is released when a star goes supernova, says Bower. To check the accuracy of the virtual universe, the team will compare simulated features to the observed universe to check for discrepancies. Teyssier says this is like weather forecasting, in which actual observations are used to refine predictions. ❚
Materials
Blasting lead with lasers makes it really strong LEAD just got an upgrade. When it is quickly compressed with powerful lasers, the typically weak element gets 250 times stronger, making it tougher than hardened steel. The difference between strong and weak materials has to do with how the atoms move against one another. When the atoms are arranged so that they can slide across each another easily, like they typically are in lead, the material is 8 | New Scientist | 23 November 2019
“We can hold it at this pressure just long enough to make a measurement before it explodes”
stronger (Physical Review Letters, doi.org/dfdk). “We can hold it at this pressure just long enough to make a measurement before it explodes,” says Krygier. As well as teaching us how materials behave at high pressures, like those inside planets, these sorts of experiments could help create shielding that becomes strong when it is hit. “Designing new armour for war-fighters or for tanks or even for satellites that run into small meteors depends on our ability to understand dynamic strength,” says Krygier. ❚ Leah Crane
Artificial intelligence
Some astronauts’ blood flows the wrong way
Ads and products get pasted into TV shows
Clare Wilson
Donna Lu
BEING in microgravity can have strange effects on the body – now it has emerged that it can make people’s blood flow backwards. The changes to circulation caused two astronauts to develop small blood clots, which could have been fatal, though they came to no harm. Blood flow was affected in a vessel called the left internal jugular vein, one of two that normally move blood out of the head when we are lying down. When we are upright, they mostly collapse to stop too much blood from draining out of the head, with our circulation taking a different route through veins with more resistance instead. On Earth, people have been observed with backwards blood flow in the left internal jugular vein if there is a blockage lower down, such as from a chest tumour. Microgravity is known to change people’s blood flow, so Karina Marshall-Goebel of KBR, an engineering company based in Texas, and her colleagues wondered if it would also affect this vein. They carried out measurements and scans of the blood vessel in nine men and two women on the ground before and after their missions on the International Space Station. The astronauts took measurements 50 and 150 days into their flights (JAMA Network Open, doi.org/dfb6). In two of the astronauts, the blood flow was backwards while in space, perhaps because the lack of gravity caused organs in the chest to shift around, pressing on the vein lower down, says Marshall-Goebel. Blood in this vein was stagnant in another five crew members. In one of these, the scan revealed a clot. “That was definitely alarming,” says Marshall-Goebel. Clots can be fatal if they reach the lungs, so the person began taking blood-thinning drugs. A small clot was also spotted in one astronaut who had already returned to Earth. ❚
AD BLOCKERS aren’t going to be useful for much longer. Major entertainment firms including 20th Century Fox are now using artificial intelligence to digitally insert advertisements and products into movies and TV shows after they have been filmed. The companies are using technology developed by UK firm Mirriad to insert flat posters on buildings, walls and buses in already-filmed scenes and even to add 3D objects. It has the potential to make advertising more targeted and ubiquitous than ever before, and also virtually impossible to avoid. The technology blurs the line between advertising and entertainment, and could take the feel of a production outside a director’s creative vision for it. The technique has been used to insert ads into shows such as Modern Family, which is produced by 20th Century Fox. In the US, Mirriad has also worked with Univision, NBC Universal and Sony Pictures Television so far. In Europe, Mirriad has partnerships with French broadcasters France
ERIC MCCANDLESS/ABC-TV/KOBAL/SHUTTERSTOCK
Space exploration
Television and TF1, and with RTL in Germany. In China, Mirriad-inserted ads have been seen by more than 100 million viewers on video-streaming website Tencent Video. Mirriad analyses films or TV episodes for spaces where ads or objects could be inserted, using an AI to identify information about each scene – whether it is on a street, for example, or of a family. Scenes shot in living rooms, say, may contain table
“It has the potential to make advertising more targeted and ubiquitous than ever before” space where bottles of particular drinks brands can be inserted. “We can recognise all the scenes when people are in an elevator,” says Ann Wang at Tencent Video. This lets them insert posters on the elevator walls. The goal is to train the AI to understand emotion, context and continuity across scenes, so ad insertion can be fully automated, says Mirriad CEO Stephan Beringer. Mirriad and Tencent Video both have plans to tailor these
in-video ads to individual viewers. Tencent has the technology to show different advertisements to different people, but hasn’t yet launched the feature, says Wang. Take a scenario in which two people are separately watching a television series. “You would be watching the exact same scene, but we would be seeing different things,” says Beringer – say, a silver or red car, or different brands of soft drink. Mirriad can produce several versions of each ad, and what a viewer sees would depend on how the company targets them. “Consumers are not always aware that the commercial content is being blended in with the cultural content,” says Caroline Moraes at the University of Birmingham, UK. “There’s a blurring of lines.” Firms have long paid for product placement in entertainment, but there are specific concerns with ad-insertion technology. For example, actors may be seen to be endorsing items that appear in scenes with them, which they may have little say in because the ads are added after filming. Creative integrity and continuity within a show or film are also factors. And new ads inserted into older content may not be in line with what a film or TV director wanted to do. There are strict rules around product placement, but these may need updating for this more sophisticated and potentially more targeted kind of advertising. 20th Century Fox didn’t respond to New Scientist’s requests for comment. ❚ Modern Family has episodes with digitally inserted adverts 23 November 2019 | New Scientist | 9
News Conference report Human Germline Genome Editing
Writing the rule book on gene-edited humans A year after the birth of the first CRISPR babies, Michael Le Page discovers how geneticists are setting rules for creating more
considering the potential uses of the technology and drawing up guidelines for how to proceed. For now, the consensus remains that it would be irresponsible to try it. This is because, at the group’s second meeting last week, two broad messages became clear. First, we still don’t know if any of the many variants of CRISPR gene editing are safe enough to use for editing embryos. Kathy Niakan at the Francis Crick Institute in London, who is using Modifying human embryos will require strict controls
CRISPR to study early development, said her team is finding that the technique deletes large chunks of DNA in about 20 per cent of embryos. This was discovered only recently. Effectively, biologists were looking for spelling mistakes and not noticing that whole pages were missing. Meanwhile, Hui Yang at the Chinese Academy of Sciences has been trying a more precise form of CRISPR, called base editing, in animal and human embryos. His team has found unintended changes too. Yang hopes a new method called prime editing might work better. The second message is that many
attendees see no pressing need to resort to editing the genomes of human embryos. Almost all serious genetic diseases can be prevented by screening the genomes of IVF embryos before implanting them in a uterus, said Frances Flinter at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust in London. This is known as pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). Cases where genome editing would be the only way for people to have healthy children are “incredibly rare”, she said. Several attendees questioned the focus on genome editing when many families have yet to get access to existing, safer technologies for preventing genetic disorders. Nick Meade at Genetic Alliance, which supports people with genetic conditions, said not all people in the UK who want PGD can get it. Germline genome editing can’t solve any pressing medical need yet, but that may change. It is likely that we will one day be able to generate eggs or sperm cells from adult cells, said Azim Surani at the University of Cambridge. That would allow a wider range of uses, such as treating male infertility caused by mutations that stop sperm being produced. ❚
Only small amounts of Australian pollution have been recorded hitting South America this time, with Parrington reporting carbon monoxide levels of 80 to 100 parts per billion. Anything above 110 ppb is considered polluted air. However, it is unlikely the pollution will affect local air quality in South America since the material is around 5 kilometres up in the
atmosphere and likely to stay there. Still, says Parrington: “If the air comes down and reaches the surface, it could add an extra bit on top of local air quality issues.” Instead, the significance of the pollution reaching so far is what it tells us about the power of the fires in Australia. “It’s reflecting the sheer intensity of the fires, particularly in New South Wales,” says Parrington. Australian fire chiefs have warned that with little rainfall expected imminently, the fires could continue for weeks. ❚ Adam Vaughan
PASCAL GOETGHELUCK/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
A HANDFUL of protesters were leafleting people arriving for a conference on creating gene-edited children in London last week. The Stop Designer Babies campaign group claimed in a press release that those at the meeting “are planning how to conduct GM baby experiments without asking the public”. It is true that this meeting was about coming up with guidelines for how to conduct the first clinical trials of human germline genome editing, making changes that could pass down the generations. But those involved want to consult the public, and many think the guidelines will deter rather than encourage further attempts, at least in the short term. If people have to tick off a checklist before trials begin, they aren’t going to get far down the list, says Andy Greenfield at the MRC Harwell Institute in the UK. This meeting was a direct result of the announcement last November that a woman in China had given birth to two genetically edited baby girls. This led to the establishment of the International Commission on the Clinical Use of Human Germline Genome Editing, a group of doctors, biologists and ethicists tasked with
Wildfires
Pollution from Australia’s bushfires hits South America SMOKE particles from Australian bushfires have reached South America, more than 10,000 kilometres away. Satellites show that atmospheric pollution created by fires in New South Wales and Queensland has reached Chile and Argentina. Researchers at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) in Reading, UK, 10 | New Scientist | 23 November 2019
found a plume of carbon monoxide and aerosols trailing across the Pacific Ocean to South America. More pollution will follow, says Mark Parrington at ECMWF. “There’s still thick smoke coming out of New South Wales,” he says, “so more will be being pumped out, meaning a train of pollution going across the south Pacific, following the jet stream.” While it is unusual for pollution to travel so far, studies have shown that Australia’s deadly 2009 “Black Saturday” fires released materials that travelled a similar distance.
“There’s still thick smoke coming out of New South Wales, so more will be being pumped out”
Technology
Another surprise hint of a fifth force of nature
Transparent battery looks like glass
Stuart Clark
Edd Gent
A NEW clue to the existence of a fifth fundamental force of nature may have emerged. It comes from Attila Krasznahorkay at the Atomki Institute of Nuclear Research, Hungary, and his team. They spent years studying the decay of beryllium-8, a radioisotope, and, in 2016, published details of an odd finding, suggesting it was caused by an unknown particle. This was later proposed to be a hint of a fifth force. Now, the same researchers have found another anomaly, this time in an energy transition involving an excited state of the helium nucleus, and say that it points to the same particle. They calculate that the new particle has a mass of around 17 megaelectronvolts, or about 33 times that of an electron, and have called it X17 as a result. The particle appears to carry energy away from an atomic nucleus, and then decay into an electron-positron pair, which the team’s experiment can detect. Normal physics predicts that the electron and positron should be emitted in roughly the same direction. But in the beryllium-8 experiment, the two particles diverged at an angle of 135 degrees, while the new helium result gives a similar detection bump at an angle of 115 degrees (arxiv.org/abs/1910.10459). This difference is crucial because the helium transitions take place at a higher energy to the beryllium one. The higher the energy, the smaller the expected angle. “If the bump is produced by a new particle, it has to move in exactly this way,” says Jonathan Feng, a theoretical particle physicist at the University of California, Irvine. He investigated the original
claim in 2016. At the time, he proposed that the X17 particle must only be capable of interacting with neutrons, otherwise it would have been detected already. But for this to be true, the particle can’t be using any known force of nature. Instead, it must be interacting through a force unrelated to gravity, electromagnetism or the two nuclear forces we know of. Feng says that the latest result corroborates the first and has got people excited. “I sent a one-line email to my collaborators with the link and one word: ‘Wow’,” he says. For his part, Krasznahorkay is looking to other, independent groups to confirm whether the particle really exists. “If the existence is settled, that would open up a new avenue in particle
X17 The name of a hypothetical new particle that is exciting physicists physics,” he says. X17 could be the link between ordinary matter and dark matter. The Positron Annihilation into Dark Matter Experiment (PADME) in Frascati, Italy, is also looking for X17. Its researchers collected data this year and will run their experiment again next year with improved performance. PADME spokesperson Mauro Raggi says to expect the analysis around spring 2021. “The beryllium-8 anomaly is a result published by a very qualified journal and the helium [result] will soon have the same destiny,” says Raggi. “We need to seriously consider these two results. The question is whether it is connected to a new particle or not and this is what PADME may help to clarify.” ❚
NTT DATA
Particle physics
A TRANSPARENT battery could replace glass in windows. The battery still has a low output, but may eventually add extra energy storage to cars or smart glasses. Most battery research focuses on increasing power output or energy density, a measure of how much energy can be stored in a certain volume. But Hironobu Minowa and his colleagues at Japanese communications giant NTT sought instead to make a battery that was as inconspicuous as possible. To do this, the team had to create new versions of battery components to lower overall light absorption and reflection. The result is a battery the size of an A4 or a US letter sheet of paper that is as see-through as window glass. The battery lacks the capacity of a conventional one: it holds only 1 milliamp hour compared with more than 1000 in an AA battery. But it lets 69 per cent of light pass through it, which is at the lower end of what window glass achieves. Its output is still enough to power an LED or a digital clock, says Minowa, who demonstrated the battery at NTT’s R&D Forum in Tokyo this month.
Hironobu Minowa sought to create a battery that was inconspicuous
As homes fill up with sensors and small smart devices, used for everything from monitoring temperature to optimising lighting, transparent batteries like this could help clear up the associated mess of wires and battery packs. Since building the prototype battery last year, the team has already doubled its output and tripled its transparency, says Minowa. Although the team can’t yet make batteries any larger than an A4 sheet, it is possible to link multiple panes together to boost capacity. The ability to turn a window into a battery could be revolutionary, says Kevin Curran at Ulster University, UK. Transparent batteries could also have applications in smart glasses, in vehicles and even in sensor-packed contact lenses, he says. “No one desires ugly cables,” says Curran. Having transparent batteries would open up the possibility of having much more beautiful devices, he says. ❚ 23 November 2019 | New Scientist | 11
News Wildlife
Toxic goo gun culls feral cats Australia is testing a device to tackle its devastating feline problem
A TRAP that kills feral cats by spraying them with a lethal gel they lick off while cleaning themselves is being trialled as a way to save endangered Australian wildlife. Since their introduction in the 18th century, cats have severely harmed Australia’s ecology by preying on native birds and small
2 million Australia plans to cull this many feral cats by 2020
mammals. They have contributed to the extinction of more than 20 Australian animals, including the paradise parrot, broad-faced potoroo and rusty numbat, and continue to threaten many more. In 2015, the Australian government set a goal of culling 2 million of the estimated 6 million cats living in the wild by 2020. But this has been hard because they prefer live prey to eating poison baits and are too numerous to be controlled by shooting. To address these problems, John Read at the University of Adelaide
and his colleagues have invented an automated device for culling cats that takes advantage of their compulsive self-grooming rituals. The solar-powered device, called a Felixer grooming trap, has laser sensors that detect a cat as it walks past based on its size, shape and gait. When activated, the sensors trigger the release of a toxic gel that squirts onto the cat’s fur. The cat later licks the gel off while routinely cleaning its coat. The gel contains a commonly used poison called sodium fluoroacetate, or “1080”, that halts the production of energy in cells. The poison is thought to euthanise cats painlessly because it causes unconsciousness before shutting down brain activity, says Read. An initial trial with two cats in a pen found they passed out within 6 hours of being squirted and died within 10 hours. As a test, the researchers recently installed 20 Felixer devices in a 2600-hectare fenced paddock in South Australia that is inhabited by feral cats and native wildlife. Cameras showed that the traps correctly identified, sprayed
SCOTT RAPSON
Alice Klein
and killed feral cats, causing their population to decline by about two-thirds over six weeks. No native animals activated the traps or were poisoned. In a separate experiment on Kangaroo Island, the researchers showed they could prevent pet cats from activating the traps by fitting them with special wireless tags. Read will present the results at the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of Australia later this month. Some cat protection groups say the most humane way of
The Felixer grooming trap can spray a lethal gel at feral cats
each. It had to examine 20 billion partially played positions, and calculate sequences as long as 2274 moves to find that you have a roughly 82 per cent chance of winning the game (arxiv.org/ abs/1906.12314). For other variants, the odds ranged from nearly 100 per cent for Freecell, which has also often appeared on Windows, to around 16 per cent for Trigon, which is
similar to Klondike, but has stricter rules on when cards can be moved. The pair’s program can’t prove mathematically what the odds are, but with a sample of a million hands, they have reduced the remaining uncertainty by a factor of 30, so the estimates should be within 0.1 per cent of the true number. “We can certainly be less embarrassed now that we not only know the winning probability but have a winning program that generalises to other games,” says Prasad Tadepalli at Oregon State University. ❚ Dana Mackenzie
controlling Australia’s feral cats would be to trap them, surgically sterilise them and then return them to the wild. But Di Evans at animal charity RSPCA Australia says this is impractical because feral cats often live in remote, hard-to-access areas. Felixer traps are preferable to poison baits because they specifically target cats and are therefore less likely to harm other animals, says Evans. ❚
Mathematics
We finally know the odds of winning a game of solitaire THERE is now an answer to a surprisingly tricky problem: what are the chances of winning a game of solitaire? It was once called an “embarrassment” of mathematics that this couldn’t be solved, but now a computer program is homing in on the solution. Solitaire, also known as patience, is a single-player card game that involves sorting cards using certain rules. Probably the most famous 12 | New Scientist | 23 November 2019
variant is Klondike, which is often installed on Windows computers. Klondike is hard. Renowned mathematician Irving Kaplansky once played 2000 games and won only 36.6 per cent. Later, computers won more than 80 per cent, but there was still a huge amount of uncertainty about the true odds. To address this, Charlie Blake and Ian Gent at the University of St Andrews, UK, wrote a program to compute the approximate odds of winning any version of solitaire. For Klondike, the program dealt 1 million random hands and computed the best strategy for
“It was once called an ‘embarrassment’ of mathematics that this couldn’t be solved”
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News Archaeology
Wildlife
Horses reigned supreme among Stone Age artists
American parrot went extinct not once but twice
Colin Barras
Michael Le Page
UNIVERSAL HISTORY ARCHIVE/UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP/GETTY
Horses are numerous in this scene in Lascaux cave, France
14 | New Scientist | 23 November 2019
their pictures. Some 29.5 per cent of all the animals in Sauvet’s database are horses, with three-quarters of all sites across his study area containing at least one image of a horse. Impressive though these raw numbers are, they don’t tell the whole story. Sauvet has also
29.5 Percentage of cave drawings of animals that were horses
looked at the way Stone Age artists portrayed horses and found additional evidence of their special status. For instance, the ancient artists tended to depict all animals – including lions, mammoths and bears – in profile with the head to the left. The horse is different: it is the only species that is mainly oriented to the right. Even the location and size of horses in the ancient murals stand out as special. Artists often chose to depict horses on high surfaces, writes Sauvet. For instance, in Lascaux cave, France, there is a pair of large horses on the ceiling, one of which is 2.5 metres long. Sauvet writes that they are above and
dominate the hundreds of smaller animals drawn on the walls below. A horse in Rouffignac cave, also in France, is even larger, at 2.7 metres long. There are 65 animals drawn around it, including mammoths and rhinoceros, but all are far smaller (Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, doi.org/dd8b). What makes this focus on horses particularly striking is that the animals weren’t all that abundant in Stone Age Europe, says Randall White at New York University. And in some regions, horse flesh seems to have made up only a small part of diets. This tells us that artists didn’t choose to draw and paint horses because they were an important food resource, says White. There was clearly more going on. Sauvet suspects horses had cultural significance to Stone Age European communities. He argues they had a belief system in which animals were arranged in some sort of hierarchy, a bit like the pantheon of Ancient Greek gods. In the same way that Zeus ruled over the other Greek gods, Sauvet suggests the horse reigned at the top of this Stone Age hierarchy. That is pushing the evidence too far, says April Nowell at the University of Victoria in Canada. “We don’t know that [horses] were thought of as gods or that one animal ‘reigned’ over another,” she says. Although we can’t be sure exactly why horses were culturally significant, Sauvet’s data is important for demonstrating that this significance was shared across a geographically wide area and for a long time, says Genevieve von Petzinger, also at the University of Victoria. ❚
THE only parrot once common in the US may have gone extinct more recently than thought. The bright green Carolina parakeet was once found in much of the US, with its range stretching from the east coast to Nebraska in the Midwest, and as far south as Florida. “The stacks of grain put up in the field are resorted to by flocks of these birds, which frequently cover them so entirely, that they present to the eye the same effect as if a brilliantly coloured carpet had been thrown over them,” wrote John
Carolina parakeets are extinct but can been seen in museum collections
MICHAEL DOOLITTLE/ALAMY
ANCIENT occupants of Europe had a strange fixation on equines. Almost one in every three animals they depicted on cave walls was a horse, and the images are often larger and in more prominent positions in the caves than those of other animals. However, why the horse loomed so large in ancient minds remains a mystery. Since the 1990s, Georges Sauvet at the University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès, France, has been compiling a database of European Stone Age (or Palaeolithic) art. That database now contains information on more than 4700 drawings, paintings and engravings of animals found in caves across France and Spain. The oldest image may be more than 30,000 years old and the youngest 12,000 years old. Sauvet has begun analysing the information and has realised something odd: no matter where or when artists were at work in Stone Age France and Spain, they were very likely to put horses in
James Audubon in his 1827 book The Birds of America. He also noted that its numbers were declining rapidly. The species (Conuropsis carolinensis) was thought to have gone extinct in the wild in 1915. By analysing records and modelling the bird’s extinction, Kevin Burgio at the University of Connecticut has found that an eastern subspecies of the parakeet, which was mainly found in Florida, may have clung on until the 1940s (bioRxiv, doi.org/dd8c). The study may reveal when the parakeets went extinct, but it doesn’t reveal why, says Paul Reillo of the Rare Species Conservatory Foundation. “The parakeets’ extinctions are a fascinating mystery,” he says. There is no doubt many were killed for food, fun or to stop them eating crops, but some biologists think habitat destruction or a disease dealt the final blow. ❚
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A rare opportunity to explore the evolution of space travel over two weeks A comprehensive and unforgettable experience of visiting sites that have been, and will continue to be, key to the development of space travel. Leading space journalists and academics Sarah Cruddas, Rebecca Boyle and Chris Impey will accompany the tours to provide fascinating insights. From the beginnings of liquid fuelled rockets, through to the Apollo and Space Shuttle missions and in to the future of commercial orbital human space flight.
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News Health
An insulin nasal spray could help with polycystic ovary syndrome Jessica Hamzelou
to burn calories. After most people eat a meal, their fat tissue starts to burn through calories, releasing heat, but this is reduced by around 25 per cent in women with PCOS. This means that a woman with PCOS would have to eat around 4 per cent less, or exercise around 20 per cent more, than another woman of a similar height and weight who doesn’t have the disorder, just to maintain Insulin (pictured) could alleviate a symptom of polycystic ovary syndrome
a steady weight, says Duncan. To find out if they could discover a potential treatment, Duncan and his colleagues turned to sheep. When Scottish greyface ewes are injected with male levels of testosterone, says Duncan, they show the symptoms of PCOS: they stop ovulating, develop polycystic ovaries and gain weight. When Duncan’s team sprayed insulin up the noses of 12 of the sheep with PCOS-like symptoms, the sheep’s fat tissue appeared to burn more calories. The group
hasn’t yet studied the animals for long enough to see whether they lose weight. “This was a short-term proofof-concept study,” says Duncan, who presented the findings at the Society for Endocrinology BES annual meeting in Brighton, UK, on 12 November. Duncan is currently applying for funding to trial the same approach in women with PCOS. Because insulin has been associated with satiety, Duncan hopes the women that try it will benefit from both effects. “Maybe squirting insulin up your nose gets you two benefits: it burns off calories and makes you not want to eat any more,” he says. Hormone production in sheep isn’t the same as that of humans, says Lina Schiffer at the University of Birmingham, UK, who chaired the session at which Duncan presented his results. “[Duncan’s] work has established the rationale and applicability of this in sheep with great success,” she says. “We now need to translate this into the human setting.” ❚
plasticrusts on rocks that are submerged at high tide, and grey-blue stone-like blobs of pyroplastic on a beach. Analysis using spectroscopy showed the plasticrust was polyethylene, the most common plastic we produce. The pyroplastic was polyethylene terephthalate, used to make drink bottles (bioRxiv, doi.org/dd8k). The culprit for the pyroplastic may have been a beach campfire,
says Ehlers, judging from burnt charcoal discovered nearby and the number of blue plastic bottles she found on Giglio. We should be concerned, says Ehlers. “It shows how plastic debris is changing the landscape.” We don’t know for sure whether animals are eating these plastics, but it seems likely. Snails were found on the plasticrust in Madeira and marbled rock crabs (Pachygrapsus marmoratus) on the plasticrust in Giglio. “This might be a way the plastic enters the food chain,” says Ehlers. ❚ Adam Vaughan
JEAN-FRANCOIS MONIER/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
WOMEN with polycystic ovary syndrome often struggle to maintain a steady weight. A nasal spray of insulin might help such women burn calories, according to preliminary research in sheep, which can show many of the same symptoms of PCOS. A trial in women with the condition is now being planned. Around 7 to 8 per cent of women have polycystic ovary syndrome, which affects the way ovaries work. Women with PCOS often have irregular periods and can find it difficult to become pregnant. But PCOS also appears to put women at risk of obesity and diabetes. In the US, around three-quarters of women with PCOS are also obese. Colin Duncan at the University of Edinburgh, UK, says that most of his patients can have restored ovulation with the right treatment, but treating obesity is much harder. That is because women with PCOS find it more difficult to lose weight. A study published in the 1990s suggested that this is because women with PCOS are less able
Environment
Odd forms of plastic pollution turn up in the Mediterranean TWO unusual types of marine plastic debris have been documented in the Mediterranean for the first time, on the Italian island of Giglio off the coast of Tuscany. Plasticrust, as the name suggests, is a layer of plastic crust. It forms on rocks when plastic in the ocean is mechanically worn down by waves rubbing it over outcrops, leading to small particles getting trapped on the solid surface. Prior to being 16 | New Scientist | 23 November 2019
spotted in Italy, plasticrusts have also been found recently on the Portuguese island of Madeira. The other type of debris is pyroplastic, burned pieces of plastic that are hard to distinguish from stones. These have also been found before in Cornwall and Devon in the UK. Sonja Ehlers at Germany’s Federal Institute of Hydrology and independent researcher Julius Ellrich say their findings on Giglio suggest these types of plastic pollution are more widespread than thought. Ehlers and Ellrich surveyed several sites on Giglio last month. They discovered blue layers of
“A layer of plastic crust forms when waste debris is worn down by waves rubbing it over rocks”
Animals
Analysis Climate change
Pigeons’ toes are being amputated by waste human hair
Growing up in a warming world Children face serious health risks from climate change - but not an apocalyptic future as some campaigners claim, reports Adam Vaughan
Ruby Prosser Scully Children are increasingly protesting about climate change
STEFAN BONESS/PANOS PICTURES
PIGEONS with mutilated feet are a common sight in cities – and human hair appears to be a grisly culprit. It turns out that the greater the number of hairdressers on a city block, the more pigeons have missing toes. This isn’t the only explanation for the birds’ missing toes. One widespread belief is that pigeons get foot infections from standing in their own excrement. But birds often have string or human hair wrapped around their toes and feet. This can tighten, cutting off circulation and leading to tissue death and the toe falling off. This observation prompted Frédéric Jiguet at the National Museum of Natural History in France and his colleagues to study the relationship between the foot health of pigeons and possible sources of these hairs or strings. To do this, they looked at the number of foot mutilations in pigeons found at 46 sites across Paris, and how these related to different features in the environment. Pigeons were more likely to have mutilated toes in city blocks where air and noise pollution was high, and where a greater number of people lived, they found. In addition, the greater the number of hairdressers on a city block, the higher the chance pigeons were to have lost toes – seemingly because waste hair is escaping into the environment (Biological Conservation, doi.org/dd76). Hair cut at the hairdressers is removed by garbage collection services along with household wastes, and residual cut hair would end up on the pavements where pigeons could get caught up in it, say the authors. If the birds can’t untangle themselves, the hairs begin garrotting the toes – causing what is known as “stringfoot”. ❚
A CHILD born today faces far-reaching health effects from living through a world 4°C warmer than humans have ever experienced, according to a major new assessment. But the research doesn’t support claims by some activists that children may not grow up at all. The 2019 report by the Lancet Countdown on health and climate change – put together by doctors and researchers – warns that children are particularly vulnerable to climate change. This is because a warming world exposes them to more infectious diseases, malnutrition and stunted growth, and dirty air that hinders the development of their lungs (The Lancet, doi.org/dd75). A major concern is Vibrio cholerae, the bacterium that leads to diarrhoeal disease, the world’s number two killer of children under the age of 5. People are most susceptible in certain coastal areas, and the percentage of these at-risk regions has already grown almost a third in the Baltic and north-east US since the 1980s as warming changes sea surface temperatures.
Elizabeth Robinson at the University of Reading, UK, one of the report’s authors, says children’s diets are also at risk, with under nutrition and malnutrition set to rise as climate change causes food production to fall. Higher temperatures will trap more air pollution in some cities, says another author, Nicholas Watts at University College London. This will have a particular impact on children. “It has lifelong effects on your lungs as they are trying to develop,” he says.
4°C Global warming a person born today is likely to see
Watts says the current trajectory of global carbon emissions means that we are on track for more warming than the worst case scenario – of a 2.8-4.6°C rise by between 2080 and 2100 – so 4°C is a conservative estimate of what a person born today might experience. That assumes a global average life expectancy of 71. The report follows recent claims that rising temperatures mean
children may not grow up at all. “People probably sometimes ask you: what are you going to be when you grow up? But we’ve reached a point in human history where the question also has to be asked: what are you going to do if you grow up?” Rupert Read, a spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion, told children in July. His remarks were condemned last month by climate scientists for straying beyond what science says. Read tells New Scientist his comments stem not just from the risk to children from issues such as infectious diseases and malnutrition but from “potential societal collapse”, and the need to err on the side of precaution. The health effects of climate change don’t need exaggerating: the Lancet Countdown report lays out dire impacts if emissions go unchecked. On the positive side, the report makes clear that acting on climate change could improve health compared with conditions today. Watts says a child born in the UK today will, by the age of 6, live in a country without coal power stations. By 21, they will be unable to buy a petrol car – a date that politicians have hinted may come earlier. When 31, they will live in a society that should have hit net-zero emissions, with cycling and walking more prevalent. “By the time you reach net zero, you have cleaner air, healthier diets, more liveable cities, you have stronger, more resilient health systems,” says Watts. Which one of the two pathways we pick is a political question, he adds. “It’s now entirely a question of implementation, of getting on with it.” ❚ 23 November 2019 | New Scientist | 17
News In brief Disease
Improved rabies vaccine could save more lives
ANDREA RICORDI/GETTY IMAGES
TWEAKING the rabies vaccine could lead to more effective and cheaper treatment that may save some of the 60,000 people killed by the disease each year. More than two in three people live in areas where rabies is endemic. Something as simple as a dog bite – dogs account for around 99 per cent of infections – can transmit the virus, but symptoms may not emerge for weeks. If an infected person hasn’t received treatment by then, death is virtually inevitable. Unfortunately, the vaccines used both to prevent infection and to treat someone with rabies are costly and need multiple rounds to work, which is an issue in poorer nations. This prompted James McGettigan at Thomas Jefferson University in Pennsylvania and his colleagues Malnutrition
TINY particles packed with vital nutrients could provide a better way of delivering supplements to people at risk of malnutrition. The particles protect their contents from moisture and resist heat during cooking before breaking down in the stomach. Some 2 billion people globally have nutrient-deficient diets. This is the leading cause of cognitive and physical disorders in the developing world, according to an international team of researchers led by Ana Jaklenec and Robert Langer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A major challenge in adding nutrients to food is that many are destroyed by the heat of cooking or add a bad taste to dishes, the pair say. Their team has overcome these issues by trapping nutrients inside small, protective particles that can be added to food. 18 | New Scientist | 23 November 2019
Technology
The microscopic particles measure less than a quarter of a millimetre across and can package 11 different nutrients individually, or combinations of up to four nutrients together. They are made of a material that is resistant to heat, light and moisture, but disintegrates when exposed to stomach acid, ensuring that the nutrients inside are released and absorbed by the gut. The researchers baked particles containing iron into bread, which was then eaten by 24 volunteers. Almost three weeks after eating the bread, iron levels in their blood were equivalent to levels detected after they had a conventional iron supplement (Science Translational Medicine, doi.org/dd73). Giuseppe Battaglia at University College London says the approach could have applications beyond delivering nutrients: it may also be possible to encapsulate some therapeutic drugs using the particles. Layal Liverpool
Moving holograms that you can touch IT IS possible to create a 3D moving image using nothing but a tiny polystyrene ball and speakers. Ryuji Hirayama at the University of Sussex, UK, and his colleagues built the device using 512 speakers, positioned above and below a small 3D stage that acts as an image display. The speakers emit silent ultrasound to create small pockets of low air pressure in which the polystyrene ball
EIMONTAS JANKAUSKIS
Minute nutrient pods could tackle poor diet
to search for a better treatment. Current vaccines use the inactive virus to trigger B cells in the body. B cells remember the virus and make antibodies against it to fight any subsequent infection. The team modified this vaccine by attaching an extra protein to the surface of the inactive virus, one that binds directly to B cells and alerts them to the existence of the pathogen more quickly than the old vaccine does. When the researchers tested this vaccine on mice, they found that the levels of antibodies in their blood jumped quicker and higher than in mice given the old vaccine. Within five days, mice who had the new vaccine had twice the level of antibodies in their blood of the other mice (PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, doi.org/dd7x). Ruby Prosser Scully
floats. By manipulating the sound waves, they can rapidly shift the precise 3D position of the lowpressure pockets, and so control the position of the ball. If the bead moves fast enough, it traces out what appears to the viewer to be a 3D shape, and it is even possible to change the form of that shape over time to give the impression of a moving 3D object. All this has to happen extremely quickly. The 3D shape has to be traced out in full in less than 0.1 seconds – any slower and the visual effect is lost. It is possible to add colour to the 3D objects by directing beams of red, green and blue light onto the bead. In one demonstration, the system shows a butterfly flapping its wings (pictured). People are also able to touch the image. This works because the speakers create an area of higher pressure air surrounding the bead. When your fingers contact it, it feels like you are touching the 3D object (Nature, doi.org/dd72). Gege Li
New Scientist Daily Get the latest scientific discoveries in your inbox newscientist.com/sign-up Genetics
Really brief
Bygone era’s family secrets revealed
©ISAS/JAXA
POORER 19th century families in Europe’s cities were more likely to include children who weren’t biologically related to their legal fathers, according to a genetic study. It is widely assumed many men aren’t the biological fathers of their children. So-called extra-pair paternity has been claimed to be as high as 30 per cent today. But over the past two decades, DNA studies have shown the average
Hayabusa 2 says sayonara to Ryugu Japan’s Hayabusa 2 spacecraft has begun its return journey to Earth from the asteroid Ryugu, carrying two samples of the space rock back for analysis. “This is an emotional moment,” the team (above) posted on the mission’s Twitter account.
rate is actually around 1 per cent. Maarten Larmuseau at KU Leuven in Belgium wondered if social class might have made a difference to this in past centuries. His team identified 500 pairs of men in Belgium and the Netherlands where, according to genealogical records, each pair descended from the same male ancestor through a male lineage. Half of these ancestors were born before 1840 and the oldest was from 1315. DNA testing allowed the team to work out that the rate of extra-pair paternity among farmers and
Diet
Solar system
Titan’s surface features mapped
Fish can judge how far they have gone Triggerfish have an impressive ability to estimate the distance they have swum, and scientists think that understanding this may shed light on how all animals with a backbone evolved the ability to navigate spaces. Researchers trained the fish to swim a set distance in order to acquire food (bioRxiv, doi.org/dd7n).
GEORGE DOLGIKH/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
Big emissions from US video gaming A study of the energy use of gaming in the US has found that it produces annual emissions on a par with Sri Lanka’s: 24 megatonnes of carbon dioxide. Better graphics, a move to 4K monitors and TVs and the growth in streaming games are all energy hungry developments (The Computer Games Journal, doi.org/dd7m)
more well-to-do craftsmen and merchants was about 1 per cent, rising to 4 per cent among labourers and weavers and nearing 6 per cent among working class people in densely populated cities in the 19th century. The overall rate was still low, at 1.6 per cent per generation (Current Biology, doi.org/dd78). What the study can’t reveal is why some were more likely to be in this situation. One possibility is that poorer women in such cities were more vulnerable to male sexual violence and exploitation. Michael Le Page
High-fat, low-carb regime helps mice avoid the flu DITCHING carbohydrates and eating lots of fat may give some protection against flu. Feeding mice the so-called keto diet seems to boost certain immune cells, which may be responsible for the effect. The keto diet forces the body to burn fat for energy, which can help with weight loss, and people may get flu-like symptoms known as the “keto flu” as they adapt to eating fewer carbs. Akiko Iwasaki at Yale School of Medicine and her colleagues previously found that the keto diet reduced inflammation in mice with gout. Because inflammation is common to both gout and flu, they
thought the diet may also help with flu-related inflammation, which can severely damage the lungs. To test this, the team fed mice infected with influenza A – the most serious type of flu – either a keto or standard diet for a week before infection. After four days, all seven mice fed a standard diet succumbed to the flu, compared with only five out of the 10 mice on the keto diet. The keto diet mice also didn’t lose as much weight, which is usually a clear sign of flu infection in animals. These mice had more of a type of T cell found in the lungs that is key to an immune response (Science Immunology, doi.org/dfbd). GL
SLOWLY but surely, the face of Saturn’s strange moon Titan is being revealed. Researchers have made the first map of the geology of its entire surface. Titan’s atmosphere is full of a thick, orange haze that blocks light, making it difficult for spacecraft to take pictures. NASA’s Cassini probe, which orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017, took radar and infrared data of Titan’s surface, giving a hint of the terrain. Now, Rosaly Lopes at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in California and her colleagues have analysed that data to map lakes, craters, dunes, plains, hilly terrain and heavily eroded, labyrinthine plateaus. They found the landscape type depended strongly on the latitude. The equator is mostly covered in dunes, with flatter plains in the mid-latitudes and lakes and labyrinths closer to the poles. They were able to determine that the oldest areas on the surface are probably mountains, which are bits of the moon’s icy crust. The youngest areas are the lakes and dunes. Sand from the dunes seems to be blowing over the plains, creating a fuzzy border between the two zones (Nature Astronomy, DOI: 10.1038/s41550019-0917-6). Leah Crane 23 November 2019 | New Scientist | 19
News Insight Cybersecurity
The rise of stalkerware Apps that secretly give people access to their partner’s smartphones are growing in prominence. Chris Baraniuk reports
“Accessing the contents of someone’s phone now is accessing their life. We are very concerned about this” Neither HelloSpy nor FlexiSpy responded to a request for comment on these marketing practices. The sale of such apps is permitted in both the US and UK, but these disturbing examples demonstrate how the software easily slips into a legal grey area. The software itself is perfectly legal. For example, an employer might tell an employee that their work phone will be loaded with software that records everything they do. The employee’s consent may be explicitly granted in that case. However, software can also be installed surreptitiously on someone’s device to snoop on their messages and phone calls. The use of such “stalkerware” seems to be on the rise. “Accessing the contents of someone’s phone now is accessing their life,” says Lucy Purdon at campaign group Privacy International. “We are very concerned about this.” Once installed, stalkerware 20 | New Scientist | 23 November 2019
can be set up so as to be practically invisible to the phone’s owner. It might be used, for example, to monitor their location and movements using GPS. It can provide access to any text messages or pictures they send, or record everything they type. In some cases, stalkerware can even switch on the device’s microphone to eavesdrop on private conversations. Purdon and her colleagues have examined apps that market themselves as helpful tools that allow parents to keep an eye on their kids. In reality, they offer unbridled access to children’s phones. “These tools go way beyond checking your child’s location,” she says. Employers, parents and snooping partners have emerged as the three main target audiences for spy apps. An analysis by cybersecurity company Kaspersky found that, in the first eight months of 2019, more than 37,500 of its customers encountered spyware or stalkerware at least once – a 35 per cent rise on the same period in 2018. “We’re seeing a marked increase,” says David Emm, a researcher at the firm. Another security firm, Avast,
detected eight stalkerware apps on the Google Play app store in July. All have since been removed as Google prohibits such apps.
Spy in your pocket Many notorious stalkerware apps are built for Android, but there are variants that can be installed on iPhones running iOS as well. In a July blog post, Google software engineer Ivan Rodriguez described how stalkers can get around some of the security protections built into iOS and spy on the phone’s owner anyway. But a crackdown is afoot. The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has just taken legal action against a Florida-based firm called Retina-X, which developed spyware apps called MobileSpy, PhoneSheriff and TeenShield. Among other things, the FTC said the company was failing to ensure that users of the software were installing it for “legitimate” purposes, a practice it said was “unfair” since it put people at risk of being monitored illegally. Despite this, stalkerware can still slip through legal loopholes. Neither the UK nor the US explicitly outlaw this software. Rather it is how it is used – for
SINAN SAGLAM/EYEEM/GETTY
“Catch cheating spouses” the website for California-based HelloSpy, a smartphone app, says. There is a photo of a woman with a bruised face and a man grabbing her arm. Infidelity is easier these days because of online social networks and mobile phones, the page claims. But the “good news” is that technology can reveal infidelity too, it says. On the site for another app, FlexiSpy, I seek help from a customer support agent. During a web chat, I say, “I think my wife is cheating.” The agent, whether human or bot, immediately asks whether I have physical access to her phone so I can install the app.
example to harass people or access their data without consent – that may fall foul of legislation. There is a lack of international coordination over how to deal with the misuse of spy apps, says Christopher Parsons at the University of Toronto. He and his colleagues published an in-depth report on the rise of stalkerware earlier this year.
How to protect yourself You might think that scanning your phone to detect stalkerware is a good idea. But be careful. Besides the fact that antivirus programs don’t always catch spy apps, a stalker could be alerted to your attempts to take protective actions and confront you. “Some of these applications have the ability to see every web page that you go to,” says Christopher Parsons, co-author
of a report looking at stalkerware. He recommends instead that people seek out advice directly from a domestic abuse charity or similar organisation if they think they are being targeted. If you are confident that your device hasn’t already been compromised, David Emm of security firm Kaspersky suggests the best thing to do is lock down your phone. Not allowing your
partner to know the passcode for your phone, which is ideally at least six digits long, is a good start. Then make sure that you have antivirus software installed and that your online accounts are protected with strong passwords. Yet taking precautions against loved ones doesn’t come naturally, says Emm: “By definition, none of us is as unguarded as we are with a partner.”
Working hypothesis
More Insight online Your guide to a rapidly changing world newscientist.com/insight
Sorting the week’s supernovae from the absolute zeros
Stalkerware programs can follow your every move online
partner that is most insidious. Christina Dardis at Towson University in Maryland has studied the mental health effects of stalking, including cases where stalkers turn to technology to spy on or harass their target, broadly known as cyberstalking.
▲ Pope Francis The pope is mulling introducing “ecological sin” to the Roman Catholic church’s teachings to help combat climate change. ▲ Source code Software platform GitHub plans to store the source code for thousands of applications in an Arctic vault – just what you need when the apocalypse hits.
Stressful situation
on their partners’ devices aren’t just invading their privacy. Emm says that because such apps often ask the installer to deactivate security protections, the target is left open to other cyberthreats such as malware. Stalkerware providers themselves can also be targeted. In 2017, Retina-X was hit by a hacker who was allegedly able
“Some victims fear that their partners will use the information to blackmail or shame them” to retrieve photos and data from the company’s servers of people being stalked. That such data was left vulnerable in this way was another reason the FTC decided to take action against the firm. But it is perhaps the psychological impact of having your phone completely compromised by a romantic
Affected by domestic violence? Call the US National Domestic Violence Hotline on 1-800-7997233 or search online for local alternatives
▲ Appendages A three-antlered deer has been seen in Michigan, while a puppy called Narwhal has an extra tail on its forehead. Maybe GitHub is on to something with this apocalypse idea… ▼ Idris Elba The British actor now shares his name with a parasitic wasp, a member of the Idris genus. ▼ Drug dealers TOP: LISA MAREE WILLIAMS/GETTY IMAGES; NICK UPTON/NATURE PICTURE LIBRARY
Parsons says law enforcement agencies in different countries could collaborate to shut down firms that market their products for purposes that are abusive. One issue is that this marketing can be covert. Parsons and his colleagues found that one London-based firm, mSpy, didn’t explicitly refer to spousal snooping on its website. Instead, web code concealed references to such spying as a means of attracting search traffic on the subject. mSpy didn’t respond to a request for comment. Tactics like this can mean that some stalkerware apps only come to the attention of law enforcement when their targets report them – something Parsons says shouldn’t be necessary. “Women are suffering incredibly serious harms because of this and they don’t have to,” he says. “Governments could solve this if they chose to.” People who install stalkerware
Such behaviour can cause post-traumatic stress disorder or depression, she says, as well as prompting worries of further abuses. “Some victims fear that their partners will use the information they obtain from their surveillance to blackmail or shame them,” says Dardis. Cyberstalking is also correlated with other forms of harassment, including physical stalking and sexual violence, she says. Stalkerware is really a symptom of a deeper problem. “There’s kind of an assumption with technology misuse that if you remove the technology you stop the abuse,” says Erica Olsen at the US National Network to End Domestic Violence. In reality, these apps clearly fulfil a disturbing demand. One review on FlexiSpy’s website, apparently left by a customer, says they purchased the software to keep tabs on their wife. Seeing her calls, photos and locations was “very helpful” the reviewer says, before adding: “I’ll be recommending this to anyone that needs to know.” ❚
The pigs are cracking down on drugs: wild boar have destroyed £17,000 worth of cocaine buried in a forest in Tuscany. The hogs partly devoured the hidden stash.
23 November 2019 | New Scientist | 21
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Views The columnist James Wong takes a bite out of the myth of addictive foods p24
Letters We can learn lessons from the rats that drive cars p26
Aperture Art in a Petri dish probes human potential p28
Culture Time is up for outdated ideas about testosterone p30
Culture interview The writers of sci-fi show The Expanse reveal all p32
Comment
Golden prospects Genetically modified golden rice is finally set for approval where it is needed, but GM scaremongering continues, argues Michael Le Page
JOSIE FORD
A
FTER a regulatory approval process lasting two years, Bangladesh is expected to soon green-light the cultivation of “golden rice” genetically modified to prevent vitamin A deficiencies. It would be the first approval in a country where the rice is sorely needed, and perhaps a turning point in a long-running and bitter battle. Our bodies make vitamin A from beta-carotene, the pigment that gives carrots and sweet potatoes their colour. But many people can’t afford to eat much apart from rice, which is low in beta-carotene. Lack of vitamin A causes blindness and weakens the immune system, and kills more than half a million children a year. There is a global push to give vitamin A supplements to children, but a third of those at risk still aren’t receiving them, and coverage has fallen in recent years. When biologists unveiled the prototype of golden rice in 1999, they expected a warm welcome. The researcher behind the project, Ingo Potrykus, told New Scientist that it would be three years before farmers could plant it. Yet 20 years on, the rice has been approved only in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the US, countries not noted for vitamin A deficiency. Early strains didn’t produce enough beta-carotene, but this was fixed. The problem now is that golden rice has been demonised by anti-GM campaigners, who see it as a Trojan horse for the acceptance of other genetically
Michael Le Page is an environment reporter for New Scientist @mjflepage
modified crops, even though this has already happened in many countries. What shocks me is that some activists continue to misrepresent the truth about the rice. The cynic in me expects profit-driven multinationals to behave unethically, but I want to think that those voluntarily campaigning on issues they care about have higher standards. For instance, there is the claim that the US Food and Drug Administration has said that golden rice has no nutritional
benefits. The FDA said only that because people in the US eat so little rice on average, golden rice wouldn’t make much difference. In the Philippines, meanwhile, it is being claimed that beta-carotene breaks down into cancer-causing chemicals. That simply isn’t true. The deeper problem here is the idea that genetically modified crops are inherently good or bad. All crop breeding involves genetic changes. What we call genetic modification is just a newer set of manipulation methods – now including CRISPR, which makes it
far easier to make desired changes. Think of it as like computergenerated graphics in films. CGI can create amazing effects, but what makes a movie great – or terrible – is the end result, not how the special effects are achieved. Opponents of genetic modification claim it is inherently dangerous. If this were true, many “natural” foods would be bad for us. One in 20 plants, including tea and bananas, naturally contain genes added by the bacterium used by genetic engineers. That doesn’t mean all GM crops are good. Some, especially those designed to help turn a profit, could turn out to have undesirable consequences. The irony is that activists have helped to create a situation in which only rich multinationals can afford to get GM crops approved, while many potentially beneficial ones never get beyond the laboratory. Worse, because anti-GM campaigners have made so many false or exaggerated claims about existing GM crops, people might be less likely to believe them if there is a genuine problem. My fear now though is that if Bangladesh approves golden rice, activists will try to dissuade farmers from growing it and parents from feeding it to their kids. This battle is far from over, and its victims will continue to be needlessly suffering children. ❚ 23 November 2019 | New Scientist | 23
Views Columnist #FactsMatter
Food that gets you hooked “Hyperpalatable” foods are said to have been engineered to be addictive. But do they even exist? James Wong investigates
I
James Wong is a botanist and science writer, with a particular interest in food crops, conservation and the environment. Trained at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, he shares his tiny London flat with more than 500 houseplants. You can follow him on Twitter and Instagram @botanygeek
James’s week What I’m reading Oryx. The journal is a fascinating window onto the complexities of conservation science. What I’m watching David Attenborough smashing it, yet again, on Seven Worlds: One Planet on the BBC. What I’m working on After attending an inspiring conference on ending hunger, it is back to writing, lecturing and a couple of radio jobs.
This column appears monthly. Up next week: Chanda Prescod-Weinstein 24 | New Scientist | 23 November 2019
N THE secret labs of corporate giants, scientists are engineering foods with “hyperpalatable” formulas to hijack our brains’ reward mechanisms, turning us into addicts for their products. This claim has been the subject of books, documentaries and the columns of “investigative journalists”, and is continually amplified by social media. According to the narrative, the driving force behind the rise in obesity rates in recent decades is the hyperpalatability of certain modern formulations of food, specifically designed to trigger a psychological “bliss point” where those who consume them lose all self-control. As stories go, it has it all: deception, intrigue and a link to your everyday life. But how much of it is backed by science? Are there universal formulations of ingredients that can be deployed to trigger this response, causing food to act more like a drug? Perhaps surprisingly, given the frequency with which the term is used, even in academic literature, there has been little attempt to define what exactly constitutes hyperpalatability. Nebulous descriptions like “loaded with sugar”, “fat-filled” or cultural labels like “fast food” or “junk food” have filled the void. Given that people are referring to incredibly precise ubiquitous formulations of foods, it does seem surprising that there doesn’t seem to be any clear record for these in the scientific literature. To tackle this issue, a team at the University of Kansas Medical Center set out to define clear criteria for hyperpalatability for the first time. Trawling through thousands of studies, this month they identified examples of such foods – from biscuits to macaroni cheese – and analysed
the make-up of their ingredients using nutrition software. Perhaps unsurprisingly, their results didn’t report a single “magic bullet” recipe, but three clusters of loose formulations that matched the nebulous descriptions. First up were foods in which more than 20 per cent of the calories came from both fat and sugar, such as cakes, cookies and pancakes. No surprise there. Then there were foods in which more than 25 per cent of their calories came from fat and which contained more than 0.3 per cent sodium (from salt) by weight. This tended to include mainly meat,
“Brownies fit the idea of a ‘hyperpalatable’ food, but so does a large baked sweet potato and a quarter of an avocado” dairy or egg products such as bacon, omelettes and cheesy dips. Finally came foods with more than 40 per cent of calories coming from carbs and containing 0.2 per cent or more sodium by weight, like pasta and breads. Looking at these results, it may be surprising how many diverse foods match the criteria for what is often described as an incredibly precise, modern formulation. Indeed, given that salt is used universally in savoury foods and carbohydrates and fats are the two key energy sources for our species, the two clusters based on fat and salt or carbs and salt cover a lot of everyday meals. A plain grilled steak, for example, would meet the criteria, as would a bowl of brown rice, as long as both were seasoned enough. This doesn’t exactly fit the narrative of hyperpalatability as a modern spectre concocted
in the labs of big processed food manufacturers. Indeed, when the researchers compared these clusters to a database of everyday foods eaten in the US, they found that 62 per cent of all entries matched these criteria. This even included vegetable dishes such as carrots served with butter. After all, vegetables are so low in calories that you don’t have to add much fat to make this more than 25 per cent of the dish’s energy, turning them instantly into allegedly drug-like hyperpalatable foods. Even the category of foods that derive at least 20 per cent of their calories from sugar and fat is a pretty open one. Brownies fit it perfectly, but so could a large baked sweet potato and a quarter of an avocado. In fact, this “clean eating” meal could match all three clusters depending on seasoning, making it an archetypical example of a hyperpalatable food too. What this reveals is that, despite being pitched as a modern corporate evil, food combinations such as salt and fat, or sugar and fat, are also home-cooking techniques that predate the modern rise in obesity, and aren’t necessarily unhealthy either. So is there really much more to the term hyperpalatable than just being tasty? It is important to point out that this field of research is new, with a 550 per cent increase in published papers in the past 20 years. Indeed, even the claim that food can be addictive in the same way as drugs like cocaine are is still raging in academia. As we have only just figured out a definition of hyperpalatability (or should that be definitions?), it is strange how bold the media claims have often been. I, for one, can’t wait to find out what further research uncovers. ❚
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Views Your letters
Editor’s pick Stress about the end of the world as we know it 26 October, p 12 From Fred White, Keyworth, Nottinghamshire, UK Penny Sarchet describes eight coping methods for climate stress. I’m surprised she omitted the one adopted by our political leaders, namely to insert your fingers firmly into your ears and loudly recite “la, la, la”. The concept of icebergs hasn’t escaped our leadership, but the main UK political parties are preoccupied with either the economic viability of the Titanic or social justice for those forced to travel steerage. Given the speed and course of the ship, stress and anxiety are rational responses. From Simon Goodman, Griesheim, Germany It is definitely no bad thing that we are becoming stressed about climate change. Perhaps it is better for children to be terrified now, and active, than for them to live to experience a dystopia when it is too late to alter it. My generation faced a present in which 30,000 thermonuclear warheads awaited their wake-up call – our future always potentially ended in 30 minutes’ time. No wonder some of us are a bit odd, having watched the Cuban missile crisis live in 1962, when it seemed very likely we would all fry together. Now there are only about 15,000 thermonuclear warheads ready to go. I am not entirely sure this means we can all rest easy in our beds…
I am even more worried than you are about climate 14 September, p 39 From Ray Sheldon, Bridgetown, Nova Scotia, Canada Amid all the discussion of planetary risks, such as the safety limits that Johan Rockström describes to Fred Pearce, I fear a major point is being missed: that we are committed to an increase in average global temperature of 26 | New Scientist | 23 November 2019
about 3°C. If we ignore computer models and look at historical data we find that atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration and average global temperature have marched in lockstep for the past 500 million years. The present level of CO2 in the atmosphere is over 400 parts per million and increasing. The last time that concentration of CO2 was seen on Earth was during the Pliocene epoch, 5 million years ago (6 July, p 38). Temperatures then were about 3°C warmer than today and sea level was 10 to 20 metres higher. The ecosystem worked fine, except that we weren’t there. Is anyone prepared to gamble that we could survive a return to such conditions? If not, we need a crash programme not only to eliminate emissions, but to get the CO2 out of the atmosphere now.
it. Another important approach to dealing with domestic and similar violence is empowerment self-defence training for women. In addition to giving women the skills to handle abusers, this has been shown to help people heal from trauma caused by abuse. Showing women how to set boundaries, use their voice and fight if they have to is a powerful tool for ending violence. Research is being done on the effects of empowerment training in places including Kenya, Malawi, Canada and the US. The victim of an attack is never at fault, and we must make societal changes. But it will take a long time to root out violence – and those who are targeted need solutions now. Empowerment self-defence is one of many important tools for changing the violent environment.
Empowerment to resist domestic violence now
We would all be the poorer without New Scientist
19 October, p 20 From Nancy Jane Moore, Oakland, California, US Alice Klein reported on domestic violence and some ways to tackle
Letters, 2 November From Jill Dempsey, Small Dole, West Sussex, UK Like your letter writers Andrea Needham and Marcus Swann,
my first reaction to the series of adverts by BP in New Scientist was “they shouldn’t be publishing these”. On reflection, if New Scientist doesn’t get funded from advertising, we will all be the poorer as it will cease to exist. I cannot recall a single editorial item that gave even a hint that the team isn’t fully behind a greener future. Carry on, New Scientist, you’re doing a great job.
Pluto was promoted when it was reclassified 26 October, p 23 From Jay Pasachoff, Williamstown, Massachusetts, US In her interesting piece on the definition of a moon, Leah Crane says that in 2006 the International Astronomical Union voted to “downgrade” Pluto. I was at that IAU meeting. Pluto was promoted from being the runt of the litter of planets. It turned out to have a mass less than 0.2 per cent of Earth’s. Pluto’s status was enhanced when it became the premier object – the largest and nearly the most massive – in the main category of solar-system objects,
the so-called dwarf planets. The sun is, after all, a dwarf star – a term coined in 1906 by the Danish astronomer Ejnar Hertzsprung to distinguish it from giant stars that are brighter than normal stars of the same colour and surface temperature. Dwarf stars are the ordinary objects in our galaxy, just as dwarf planets are the ordinary objects in our solar system.
Several ways that power lines may make big berries Letters, 26 October From Bryn Glover, Kirkby Malzeard, North Yorkshire, UK Claire and Greg Sullivan recount finding bigger and juicier blueberries under power lines. I recall a report that cereals grown under electricity pylons were bigger and better than in the rest of the fields (23 August 1997, p 28). Several explanations were offered. I recall a suggestion that rain on the wires would be warmed, and plants beneath would benefit from warmer water.
The other side of that whale of a tale, Moby-Dick 19 October, p 28 From Derek Till, Bedford, Massachusetts, US Chris Simms reviews Ahab’s Rolling Sea: A natural history of Moby-Dick. The sinking of the Nantucket whaler Essex by a large whale in the Pacific in 1820 is generally regarded as inspiration for Moby-Dick. Its author, Herman Melville, was friendly with the first mate, Owen Chace, and knew the skipper, George Pollard. Those interested in the survivors’ stories can read In the Heart of the Sea: The tragedy of the whaleship Essex by Nathanial Philbrick, which won the US National Book Award for Non-fiction in 2000.
Surely giraffes’ necks must confer some advantage
From Richard Miller, London, UK Whether or not electric fields directly influence plant growth isn’t clear to me. But I am interested by a study that suggests that birds and mammals that are able to see ultraviolet light are scared off by it emanating from power lines (Conservation Biology, doi.org/ddw7). Perhaps more berries were able to grow larger by the time Claire and Greg found them because there were fewer animals around to eat them.
Letters, 14 September, p 27 From Anthony Wheeler, Mackay, Queensland, Australia Derek Bolton mentions Daniel Milo’s assertion that giraffes’ long necks have no significant advantages. On the contrary, the length of their necks allows them to drink water on the ground, but only just. Giraffes have to splay their front legs to get their mouth low enough to drink, which could hinder their escape should a predator be nearby. In this context, giraffes’ necks are very short. Their defining adaptation as a prey animal is their long legs, allowing them to run away from predators.
Do we know that the brain generates consciousness?
Use and prefiguration of a steered aerial bathyscaphe
Leader, 21 September From Peter Calviou, Amersham, Buckinghamshire, UK You say that we have been unable to explain how our brains create conscious experience. Do we know that our brains create conscious experience? What if the brain is merely the organ through which conscious experience manifests?
12 October, p 15 From Bernie Hanning, Calonge, Girona, Spain I have been following for some
An apology In the 16 December 2017 issue we ran a diagram accompanying a story on stereotyping that, without appropriate context about the research it was drawn from, actually perpetuated the harmful stereotypes it was meant to debunk. Unacceptably, it listed “Jews” among groups that could be considered “high status competitors”. When this appeared in print, our readers swiftly let us know this was wrong and offensive, and we amended the diagram online, apologised to readers and reviewed our editorial procedures. Unfortunately, due to an error in our archiving process, we
time the progress of Alan Handley’s Varialift project, reported by Donna Lu. The Varialift is an aerial bathyscaphe, able to perform highly accurate and maintainable altitudes. I believe the most important use for it will be in disaster relief. Delivering basic supplies in meaningful quantities across areas whose infrastructure has been destroyed is currently very difficult. Imagine a Varialift fleet paying its way when parked on the ground by generating as much solar power as a field full of solar panels. When a disaster strikes, it could pick up containers from strategic locations and deliver the relief required. Its first drops might be mini field hospitals, powered from the Varialift itself. All this could be delivered in a single flight. From Sandy Henderson, Dunblane, Stirling, UK Lu mentions exploiting the buoyancy of an airship to propel it by storing compressed air and
Want to get in touch? Send letters to New Scientist, 25 Bedford Street, London WC2E 9ES or letters@newscientist.com; see terms at newscientist.com/letters
recently republished the original version of the diagram in an issue of The Collection, a digest publication of New Scientist content. We want to take this opportunity to make clear that we reject antisemitism in all its forms and apologise for republishing this material. The notion that Jewish people, as an ethnic group, are generally high status or affluent belies the long history of poverty, exclusion and persecution that many members of this community have faced, and continue to face. We are keenly aware of the harm that insidious stereotypes can cause. We offer our sincere apologies.
using it for thrust. Your columnist Daedalus (David E. H. Jones, 19382017) had a more elegant solution with his thermal “glidoon” (17 February 1972, p 400). He proposed effecting buoyancy change through the condensation of ammonia. Some drones at sea now use this technology. Some of your other recent reports also touch on things he discussed. For example, Jones prefigured your story on a generator that runs on heat escaping to the sky (21 September, p 17), describing it as an “antigreenhouse” (3 March 1966, p 562); and also discussed the effect of electric fields on crops (24 August, p 42, prefigured on 15 January 1981, p 192). It would be nice if you gave him a bit more recognition. ❚
For the record ❚ Among heat pumps, only the air-source variety uses a fan in collecting energy (9 November, p 18). ❚ Gluten may be present in many parts of wheat grains, as well as in some other grains (Feedback, 12 October). ❚ Alexei Poludnenko and his team ignited a mixture of hydrogen and air to track the evolution of its explosion (9 November, p 17). 23 November 2019 | New Scientist | 27
Views Aperture
28 | New Scientist | 23 November 2019
Worlds in a dish Photographer Suzanne Anker
PETRI dishes have rarely looked so beautiful, transformed into art. In Vanitas (in a Petri dish), Suzanne Anker selected objects ranging from butterfly wings, mushrooms and mosses to metal and glass beads to demonstrate how the real can be combined with the artificial – much as it is in synthetic biology. Anker was inspired by a type of still-life painting called vanitas that was popular in the Netherlands in the 16th and 17th centuries. The artists started from the premise that earthly goods, pleasures and pursuits were transitory and worthless, as the Vulgate, the main Latin version of the Bible, says: vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas, or vanity of vanities, all is vanity. This symbolic form of art captured the shortness of life, the futility of earthly pleasures and the inevitability of death through such objects as skulls, rotten fruit and hourglasses. Vanitas’s micro-worlds also reflect how life is short-lived, literally “in vain”: the motifs of decay coupled with nature’s abundance warn against excessive materialism, says Anker. But the new work also highlights the growing scope of the biological sciences and the way life can now be morphed into strange and unnatural forms. The humble Petri dish is a key addition, a symbol of the science we use to redesign and engineer organisms with new traits to carry out specific functions – or sometimes, just because we can. “Science is nature through a lens, allowing us to uncover unseen worlds,” says Anker. “Art, too, reveals what is unseen, by turning the ordinary into the extraordinary.” ❚ Gege Li 23 November 2019 | New Scientist | 29
Views Culture
Time’s up on testosterone myths As the real story about the hormone emerges from the labs, outdated ideas about its effects on masculinity sell everyone short, finds Jessica Hamzelou
Books
Are Men Animals? How modern masculinity sells men short Matthew Gutmann Basic Books
Testosterone: An unauthorized biography
OVER the past few years, gender gaps have become part of our cultural conversation. Women still earn less than men, shoulder more of the burden of domestic chores and are much more likely to experience sexual assault. All of this should be unacceptable, yet plenty of people still justify it with a single word: testosterone. The hormone is routinely used to account for bad behaviour by men. Some even blamed the 2008 global financial crisis on raging testosterone in male bankers. Others reason that US President Donald Trump’s bragging about grabbing women is just lockerroom talk fuelled by the high levels of testosterone that might have endowed him with the power and aggression needed to secure beneficial business deals. This is possible partly because testosterone is seen as a male hormone, linked to stereotypically masculine characteristics: strength, power, aggression, high libido, success. Except that it isn’t and they aren’t. Researchers are starting to rewrite the story of testosterone, but changing its public image will take some work. This can’t happen fast enough for anthropologist Matthew Gutmann, whose book Are Men Animals? takes a broad look at how we understand masculinity. 30 | New Scientist | 23 November 2019
LORADO/GETTY IMAGES
Rebecca M. Jordan-Young and Katrina Karkazis Harvard University Press
Gutmann argues that our ideas about masculinity “sell men short”. Our assumptions about maleness are not only based on flawed evidence and reasoning, but are also harmful to men. Part of the problem, he argues, is that we anthropomorphise animal behaviour. Claims that
“Researchers are starting to rewrite the story of testosterone, but changing its public image will take work” male mallard ducks “gang rape” females or that swans exhibit “infidelity” obscure why the birds behave as they do and normalise those behaviours in humans. By so doing, he says, we inadvertently create a biological excuse for human rape. “Human rape is a choice, not an accident or a hardwired compulsion,” he writes. The entrenched idea that there is something about maleness that
generates violence and sexual aggression, and that “boys will be boys”, can also lead policy-makers astray. Keeping women out of the army isn’t a solution to rape in the military, just as sex-segregated train carriages on public transport won’t prevent assault. Such policies, says Gutmann, treat men as children who can’t control themselves, and ultimately fail to stop sexual harassment or assault. Gutmann makes interesting points, drawing on commentary from some academics and offering valid criticisms of the views of others. But he can take a long time to get there. His book is filled with personal anecdotes, sometimes offering colour, but often feeling like an unnecessary diversion. Sociomedical scientist Rebecca Jordan-Young and cultural anthropologist Katrina Karkazis take a more direct approach in their “unauthorised” biography of testosterone. The authors dissect the evidence – or lack of – behind testosterone’s role in violence,
Many link testosterone with masculinity but it isn’t just a male hormone
power, risk-taking, parenting, athleticism and even ovulation. Jordan-Young and Karkazis tear through influential studies, ripping apart notions such as that high levels of testosterone help businessmen make the risky deals that win fortunes. The truth is that hormones are complicated – they can have different effects in different settings. A chapter describing testosterone’s role in female fertility makes clear that it isn’t just a male hormone. Simplistic assumptions about testosterone don’t just entrench stereotypes about what it means to be a man. They can also set the scene for research with racist and classist undertones, as JordanYoung and Karkazis argue. For example, when researchers study testosterone’s role in beneficial risk-taking, they tend to recruit financial traders and
Don’t miss
On the plus side Catherine Chung’s new novel celebrates female mathematicians, says Donna Lu
Book
The Tenth Muse Catherine Chung Little, Brown
“A MATHEMATICAL proof is absolute once it has been written and verified,” says Katherine, the narrator of Catherine Chung’s The Tenth Muse. “If the internal logic of a proof holds, it is considered unassailable and true.” The novel contrasts the axioms of mathematics with the mutability and complexities of life, spanning the second world war to the present. Its title comes from the idea of a “tenth muse”, an addition to the nine muses of Greek mythology, one unwilling to use her talents as a means to amplify men. As a child in the US in the 1950s, Katherine is intrigued by nature and space. She annoys a primary school teacher by doing sums in her head with a method used by German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss. What is the sum of the numbers 1 to 9? 45, Katherine answers quickly, after combining pairs of numbers to give four sums that make 10: 1+9, 2+8, 3+7 and 4+6, then adding the unpaired 5.
As an adult mathematician, Katherine works on the Riemann hypothesis – proposed by Bernhard Riemann in 1859 and still one of the biggest unsolved problems in pure mathematics. The hypothesis, as Katherine puts it, “predicts a meaningful pattern hidden deep in the seemingly chaotic distribution of prime numbers”. It also becomes inextricable from the mystery of Katherine’s family history, which takes her to the University of Göttingen, Germany, once a powerhouse of mathematics but known later, infamously, for its “great purge” of Jewish researchers by the Nazis in the 1930s. The only woman in many of her university maths classes (“a skirt in a sea of pants”), Katherine is determined to be taken seriously. Here, the novel is most trenchant, in railing against the sexism for so long ingrained in academia. “If you were a man, you’d have a brilliant future ahead of you,” says one professor. There is no dearth of short-changed women in history. The Tenth Muse is keenly aware of how easily the past can be rewritten, how achievements and lives can be subtracted. ❚
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Polarities: Psychology and Politics of Being Ecological opens at 8pm on 29 November at MU artspace, Eindhoven, the Netherlands. With a focus on the Anthropocene, exhibitors include Bio Art & Design Award winners.
Read
Antimony, Gold, and Jupiter’s Wolf (OUP) is chemist Peter Wothers’s erudite, complex, but always enjoyably unbuttoned account of how the elements acquired their names. A charming way to convey the history of this science.
Detroit: Become Human launches for PC this week on the Epic Games Store. Producer Quantic Dream has created an ambitious branching narrative, where players’ decisions determine the fate of the entire city of Detroit.
23 November 2019 | New Scientist | 31
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business people – often white men. But research looking at risk-taking in the context of dangerous or antisocial behaviours is more likely to feature poor, low-status and more ethnically diverse people. It is also foolish to generalise as different people will take different risks in a lab task. Some researchers have used differences in testosterone levels to argue that black men in the US are less invested fathers. Nonsense, of course. In fact, a report by the US Centers for Disease Control found that black fathers tend to be more involved in their children’s play, bathing and feeding than white and Hispanic fathers. All three authors agree that social factors such as structural racism and sexism say much more about why some men are more likely to take home bigger pay cheques or take financial risks. Jordan-Young and Karkazis’s Testosterone is a fascinating, if slightly academic, read. There are plenty of curious case studies, and the authors make well researched arguments directly and elegantly. It’s not all bad news. While both books refer to flimsy studies, worn stereotypes and how research can perpetuate harmful assumptions about maleness, they do indicate a shift. As scientists overturn old assumptions about testosterone driving “male behaviours”, we can hope to see an improvement in the way we do research. Future studies may reveal the hormone’s intricate effects, with implications for women’s health as well. Even so, changing the public image of testosterone is difficult. Worldwide, there are cultural variants of the refrain “boys will be boys”, notes Gutmann. As we make progress outing sexual harassment and wage disparities, let’s ditch this thinking, too. ❚
Views Culture
The humane condition As The Expanse returns for a fourth season on Amazon Prime, Simon Ings asks its writers how it all started THE writers Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck (better known as the sci-fi writer James S. A. Corey), began collaborating on their epic, violent, yet uncommonly humane space opera The Expanse in 2011 with the book Leviathan Wakes. The series of novels pits the alltoo-human crew of an ice-hauler from Ceres against the studied realpolitik of a far-from-peaceful solar system. The ninth and final book is due out next year. Meanwhile, the TV series enters its fourth season, available on Amazon Prime from 13 December. New Scientist grabbed a word with the writer-producers in the middle of a whistle-stop tour of Europe. The Expanse began as a game, became a series of novels and ended up on television. Was it intended as a multimedia project? Ty Franck Initially it was just a video game that didn’t work, then it evolved into a tabletop role-playing game. Daniel Abraham And then books, and then a TV show. I think intention is a very bold word to use for any of this. It implies a certain level of cunning that I don’t think we actually have. What inspired its complex plot? TF I’m a big fan of pre-classical history. I pull a lot of weird Babylonian and Persian and Assyrian history into the mix. It’s funny how often people accuse you of critiquing current events. They’re like, ‘You are commenting on this elected politician!’ And I’m like, ‘No, that character is Nebuchadnezzar’. How have the humans changed in your future? Or is their lack of change the point? DA If you really want a posthuman future, change humans so that they don’t use wealth to 32 | New Scientist | 23 November 2019
Dominique Tipper (playing Naomi Nagata) and Wes Chatham (Amos Burton) in a tense moment from the new series
we made it and it wants to kill us, or we made it and we want it to love us. But AI is neither of those things. TF What people mean is: where are the computers that talk and act like people? Robots are everywhere in The Expanse. But when you build a machine to do a job, you build it in a form that most efficiently does that job, and make it smart enough to do that job.
measure status. But then they wouldn’t be human any more. We are mean-spirited little monkeys, capable of moments of great grace and kindness, and that story is much more plausible to me and much more beautiful than any post-human tale. TF I find that the books that I remember the longest, and the books that I’ve been most entertained by, are the ones where the characters are the most human, not the least human. You’ve mentioned Alfred Bester's 1959 novel The Stars My Destination as an influence… TF Exactly, and there you have an anti-hero called Gully Foyle. Gully is everything that we fear to be true about ourselves. He’s venal, and weak, and cowardly, and stupid, and mean. Watching him survive and become something more is the reason we’re still talking about that book today. You began The Expanse nine years ago. What would you have done differently knowing what we know now about the solar system?
DA We would have made Ceres less rocky. We imagined a mostly mineral dwarf planet, and then it turned out there’s a bunch of ice on it. But this sort of thing is inevitable. You start off as accurate as possible, and a few years later you sound like Jules Verne. That the effort to get things right is doomed doesn’t take away from its essential dignity.
“We bumble through the future the way we bumbled through the past. What changes is technique” Other things have happened, too. Deepfake technology was still very speculative when we started writing this, and now it’s ubiquitous. One of our plot points in Book Three looks pretty straightforward now. I don't see many robots DA We’re in real danger of miseducating people about the nature of artificial intelligence. Sci-fi tells two stories about AI:
Is your future dystopian? DA When Season One of the TV version came out in the US, we were considered very dystopian. Then the 2016 election brought Donald Trump to power, and suddenly we were this uplifting and hopeful show. Of course we’re neither. The argument the show makes is that humans are humans. We bumble through the future the way we bumbled through the past. What changes is technique: what we learn to do, and what we learn to make. TF We don’t murder each other in a jealous rage with pointy sticks any more. Now we use guns. But the jealous rage and the urge to murder hasn’t gone away. DA What we’ve managed to do is expand what it means to be a tribe. From a small group of people who are actually physically together… TF …and mostly genetically related … DA …we’ve expanded to nation states and belief systems and… TF …fans of a particular TV show. DA The great success of humanity so far isn’t in abolishing tribalism, because we didn’t. It’s in broadening the size of the tribe over and over. Of course, there’s still work to be done there. ❚
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Features Cover story
The end? Death isn’t what it used to be. Astounding discoveries challenge our ideas about where it begins. New technology is transforming our end-of-life choices. Even our afterlife beliefs are more curious than we thought. Read on to find out more
The living dead Medical breakthroughs are blurring the line between life and death. How do we know when the end has come, asks Helen Thomson
34 | New Scientist | 23 November 2019
F
OR the Egyptians, death was simple. You stopped breathing and your friends and family bid you farewell. Then they poked a hook up your nose and scraped out your brain, safe in the knowledge that they would see you again in the afterlife. These days, figuring out the difference between life and death has got more problematic. For starters, there is no globally agreed definition of death, which means you can be pronounced dead in one country yet wouldn’t be in another. Then there is the recent discovery that death doesn’t happen in an instant, but over weeks. Add to that the inevitable storm generated by experiments revealing that brains can be resuscitated hours after death. No wonder scientists, philosophers and even the Vatican are asking how we should decide when dead really is dead. Until the mid-20th century, our definition
of death was unambiguous: you were dead when you stopped breathing and had no pulse. Things got complicated with the invention of the ventilator, a machine that could maintain breathing for a person who would otherwise be declared dead. At about this time, doctors began transplanting organs from the dead into the living and found that they could increase the success rate by using a ventilator to provide the donor heart with oxygen. These “beating-heart cadavers” were legally alive even though their brains had ceased to function. The resulting quandary of how to remove an organ without committing murder eventually led to the 1980s Uniform Determination of Death Act in the US, which introduced the concept of brain death. Now you could be pronounced dead either when your heart had stopped or when all areas of your brain had irreversibly ceased to function.
CAN TUĞRUL
Despite this, the criteria doctors use to declare death still vary from person to person, hospital to hospital, state to state and country to country, says Ariane Lewis, director of neuro-critical care at NYU Langone Health in New York. There are differences in the assessments that are carried out, for instance. Fortunately, we have progressed from the 19th-century practices of sticking leeches up a person’s anus or pinching their nipples. These days, doctors are more likely to observe whether the eyes are responsive to light – a sign of activity in the brainstem – whether pricking the nail beds elicits any sign of pain, and whether breathing occurs once a ventilator is switched off. A doctor might also do an EEG, which identifies electrical activity in the brain, to rule out the possibility that something else might be masquerading as death. Drugs, alcohol and hypothermia can
“Hundreds of genes actually ‘wake up’ in the first 24 hours of death”
all slow breathing to undetectable levels. According to the American Academy of Neurology, there have been no reports of anyone recovering full brain function after a determination of brain death using recognised tests. But here is where things have become sticky. Not everyone’s brain completely stops working when they experience brain damage or when their heart stops beating. And we don’t know the minimal level of brain activity necessary to be considered alive, which means mistakes are possible. Recently, Brian Edlow at Massachusetts General Hospital discovered that half of the people in his emergency room who had been diagnosed as being in a coma or minimally conscious state with severe brain damage and no apparent awareness could respond to questions when placed in an MRI scanner. Four out of eight of them could follow instructions such as “imagine squeezing your right hand”, as revealed by brain activity in response to his questions. It was an uncomfortable finding, given that tests like these aren’t routine, and these patients can become candidates for having their life support switched off. Another complication is that death isn’t an event but a process. Sit beside someone who has just been declared dead and you may see spontaneous finger movements or even witness their entire upper body jerking as their arms fly up to their chin – a phenomenon resulting from reflexes that occur via the spine, bypassing the brain. In fact, muscle and skin cells can go on living without any instructions from the brain for weeks after death. What’s more, hundreds of genes, including those involved in inflammation and heart contraction, actually “wake up” within the first 24 hours after death, which is probably a reaction to the cellular processes that occur from lack of oxygen. The body doesn’t know it is dead, and fights to stay alive, long after our arbitrary sentence has been passed. But if the brain has stopped working, that’s irreversible, right? Perhaps not. Historically, it was thought that minutes after the oxygen supply is cut off, cells begin to break down and die, becoming irretrievably damaged unless oxygen is quickly replenished. Earlier this year, however, a team led by Zvonimir Vrselja at Yale School of Medicine managed to revive pig brains hours after death. Four hours after the animals were decapitated, their brains were removed from their skulls and connected to an artificial perfusion system, which pumped a blood substitute around them. Incredibly, after 6 hours, the brains began to function again. Blood vessels responded to drugs > 23 November 2019 | New Scientist | 35
“Earlier this year, a team managed to revive pig brains hours after death”
designed to make them dilate and contract. Cells began to regain their metabolism. Changes to the structure of the brain thought to lead to irretrievable damage reverted to normal. And, astonishingly, when stimulated by an electrode, neurons responded by creating action potentials, the electrical activity by which brain cells communicate. Although the team didn’t see any signs of consciousness or pain, these kinds of technologies have serious implications for our definition of death. If the procedures could be done in humans, people who are declared brain dead by our current standards might be resuscitated. At the very least, this would exacerbate the tension between doctors trying to save the life of an individual, and those wanting to use their organs to save others. The notion of brain resuscitation is being explored elsewhere too. Accidents involving people falling into freezing lakes reveal that the brain can withstand a lack of oxygen much more readily at low temperatures. At UPMC Presbyterian hospital in Pennsylvania, doctors aim to replicate this phenomenon, putting people with severe wounds into a state of
Can you kill a robot?
TOSHIFUMI KITAMURA/GETTY IMAGES
If we can create a robot that’s “alive”, will we kill it when we turn it off, wonders Rowan Hooper “HELLO, I’m Scout. Want to play?” My daughter has a toy dog that yaps and comes out with a few stock phrases. When it gets too annoying, I don’t hesitate to turn it off. I sometimes think about “losing” Scout, or even “accidentally” breaking it, acts that would be cruel to my daughter but not to the dog. But for how much longer will this be true? Technology is getting better all the time. What will it mean if we can create a robot that is considered alive? If I find myself annoyed by such a robot, would it be wrong to turn it off? Would that
36 | New Scientist | 23 November 2019
be the same as killing it? The answer isn’t obvious. Many people already regard robots more sensitively than I do. At Kofukuji temple (pictured) near Tokyo, Japan, Buddhist priests conduct
suspended animation, providing more time to save their lives. The trial will replace patients’ blood with cold saline, flushing it through the heart and into the brain. With no blood circulating and no brain activity, they will be clinically dead for 2 hours during which surgeons will try to fix their injuries before slowly warming them again with fresh blood. “The brain isn’t like the heart,” says Greg Fahy at 21st Century Medicine, a biotech company in California. “It doesn’t need a jump-start. If you restore normal conditions, that gives it the opportunity to start again.” As if that wasn’t eerie enough, consider this. Hundreds of people across the world are stored in giant metal tubes full of liquid nitrogen, being cryogenically frozen. “Frozen” is actually a misnomer – most have had all the liquid in their bodies replaced with a kind of de-icer, which is then cooled rapidly to a crystal-like state. In theory, this process, called vitrification, maintains cells in the state they were in at the moment before cooling, while also stopping ice crystals forming, which can puncture tissues and destroy delicate brain cells. Whether these people are alive or dead
services for “dead” Aibo robot dogs. In Japan, inanimate objects are considered to have a spirit or soul, so it makes sense for Aibos to be commemorated in this way. Such sentiments aren’t confined to Japan, however. Julie Carpenter, a roboticist in San Francisco has written about bomb disposal soldiers who form strong attachments to their robots, naming them and even sleeping curled up next to them in their Humvees. Not barking: there are good reasons to celebrate a “dead” robotic dog
“I know soldiers have written to military robot manufacturers requesting they fix and return the same robot because it’s part of their team,” she says. This is attachment. You might feel the same about an old coat, yet no one will argue that a coat is sentient. Even machines that seem very human-like, such as Alexa, Siri and those capable of face or voice recognition, have internal states that are completely different from those of humans or animals. “They have no consciousness, no awareness, no emotions, no attachments,” says Bernd Stahl of De Montfort University, UK. “Speaking of the ‘death’ of a robot is thus a metaphor similar to the ‘death’ of your car or phone when they stop functioning.” Yes, at the moment it is a metaphor. But it is feasible that we will one day make
Cryogenics could make death reversible
comes down to our interpretation of one important word in the definition of death: irreversible. If you believe that one day we will be able to resuscitate a brain, and if it has been preserved intact, and if the injuries that caused the original death could be repaired – then these people aren’t truly dead.
MURRAY BALLARD
Where does this end?
a sentient machine that has empathy and moral agency. Then what? Even if artificial intelligence gets good enough to pass as sentient, it is likely to “live” in a dispersed state, not situated in a single device. “It will probably live in the cloud or some other place where its memory could be retrieved and used in a different format or body,” says Carpenter. In that case, a sentient robot could never die. It could just download itself somewhere else – like Alexa and Siri, it could be in many places at once. Would we feel differently if that sentient robot contained an actual human brain? This year, neuroscientists mapped all the connections between all the neurons in an animal’s brain for the first time. It was a simple nematode worm. But transhumanists believe
will be “alive” any time soon. Nevertheless, a growing feeling that robots are becoming more sentient Rowan Hooper is head of features will change how we behave at New Scientist and author of towards them, says David Superhuman: Life at the extremes Gunkel at Northern Illinois of mental and physical ability University. “We keep moving the line in the sand to protect that if we could create such ourselves from the incursion a “connectome” for a human, of the robot. We are now we could replicate it on a making machines that computer and transfer our challenge those boundaries,” consciousness to silicon, he says. That is a good thing, creating an entity that was because exposure to them “alive”. However, Daniel will teach us new ways to Dennett at Tufts University think about other entities. in Massachusetts is sceptical. Because our world is “Having the complete changing so rapidly, Gunkel connectome would be a bit believes we should now like having a complete map start to think from the robot’s of a city’s telephone system point of view, considering and thinking that was all you their rights and the question needed to know to make of robot death and even sense of all the events going suffering. “We have to answer on in London or New York,” these questions before we he says. In short, there is little get these things in our world, chance that an uploaded brain so we are prepared.”
That is a stretch of the imagination, although progress is being made. Fahy has been working on vitrification for decades – ultimately to allow transplant organs to be stored indefinitely. Using rabbits and pigs, his team has already cracked the challenge of preserving the delicate structures of the brain almost perfectly using vitrification. He has also shown that a vitrified rabbit kidney can be warmed up and function perfectly well back in the body. “It’s very possible that trials like the one in Pennsylvania, and our own, are going to change our definition of death,” says Fahy. “No doubt we will ultimately conclude that death depends on circumstance.” Before we developed the defibrillator, you were dead minutes after your heart stopped beating, he notes. Then we realised that by reducing the temperature we might bring someone back to life hours after their brain has stopped working. “Where does this end?” he asks. “Is there a limit somewhere that you cannot overcome? Are there opportunities to help people who we’d otherwise assume are dead? It certainly gives you pause for thought.” Such questions have even reached the top echelons of the Catholic church. Recently, the Vatican asked to talk to Stephen Valentine, the architect behind Timeship, a project aiming to build a facility in Texas that could cryogenically store hundreds of human organs, brains and bodies indefinitely. “I didn’t hold back,” he says. “They were fascinated by the concept of storing people and organs, and of suspended animation. There was a genuine interest about life extension and what it meant for the soul and for definitions of life and death.” In performing this kind of research, we are confronting issues that challenge all our beliefs about what it is to die, says Valentine. Admittedly, no cryopreserved person has yet been brought back to life. “But the chance of it happening is increasing every year,” he says. ❚
Helen Thomson is a consultant for New Scientist. She is the author of Unthinkable: An extraordinary journey through the world’s strangest brains 23 November 2019 | New Scientist | 37
Prepare to die It’s never too soon to start contemplating your own demise, finds Daniel Cossins
A teenager muses on mortality at a Bangkok death cafe
I
F YOU planted an apple tree in the ground where your mum had been composted, would you eat the apples?” It isn’t a question you hear every day. But that’s the whole point of a death cafe: to get people talking about something we typically choose to ignore. I had come to the end of the line, the London Underground’s District Line, to get my first taste of the experience. Fuelled by tea and cake, the conversation meandered from powers of attorney and whether a sudden death is better than a terminal illness to living wills and biodegradable burials – hence the apples. But I wasn’t here to think about what to do with my mother. The assignment was to embrace the end of my own life. Honestly, it felt a bit daft to begin with: I’m 37 and, as far as I know, in good health. As it turns out, though, that first visit to a death cafe was the start of a brief journey that would open my eyes – not only to what I can do to prepare, and the adventures my cadaver might enjoy, but also to how the very act of contemplating death can improve my life. We are all going to die, and we know it. Yet people don’t generally think about death, never mind discuss it. That might be because it is far removed from most of us. In the West, death is outsourced: the dying itself is medicalised, while the aftermath is sanitised and stage-managed. Or it might be the result of deep-rooted fear. According to the influential “terror management theory”, a desire to transcend death is the driving force behind all manner of human behaviours, from art to belief in the afterlife. Either way, brushing it under the carpet isn’t doing us any good, says psychologist Mireille Hayden, co-founder of Gentle Dusk, which seeks to lift the taboo around discussing death. “It tends to isolate people facing death or bereavement because nobody knows how to talk to you,” she says. “It also makes it difficult for your relatives when the time comes because in most cases the family have never discussed what the dying person wants.”
Take back control LILLIAN SUWANRUMPHA/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Above all, our inability to confront death means we lose control over one of the most significant events we will face. For instance, although some 70 per cent of people in the UK say they would prefer to die at home, only 24 per cent get that wish fulfilled. That might help explain the increasing demand for end-of-life doulas, people who are trained to support those who are dying and their families. Hayden is one. The services she provides range 38 | New Scientist | 23 November 2019
MARIA IONOVA-GRIBINA
“
from companionship and advice on pain relief to helping people with terminal illnesses make video messages for their children. When I ask what I can do, she says the first step is to complete an “advance care plan”. The template she gives me asks how I would like to be cared for in old age, where I would prefer to die and what is important to me in those final days. I find it hard to engage. I suspect I am failing to manage my terror. But then I reach the question about what I want to do with my lifeless body, and I’m keen to find out more. Until recently, there were just two main options: burial in a cemetery or cremation. Now, people are waking up to a world of possibilities. You can be made into a firework, a diamond or an artificial reef, for instance, or float gently towards space beneath a helium balloon. Such alternatives are certainly flamboyant, says Fran Hall, CEO of the Good Funeral Guide, an independent, non-profit
Most of us fail to acknowledge death, let alone see beauty in it
Another option is to donate your corpse to medical science, where it can at least be of use before it is cremated. Just be careful not to perish during holidays such as Christmas when medical schools tend not to accept bodies. In any case, I have decided: a nice quiet death at home, surrounded by family, followed by a quick change into a mushroom shroud and a woodland burial. Lovely. But then a colleague reminds me that it isn’t just your corpse you leave behind – there is your online legacy, too.
Cyber funerals
source of funeral advice. “But they’re mainly just about making stuff with your ashes,” she says. “For me, the most important change in recent years is the rise of green burials.” Cremation comes with a big carbon footprint, while the toxic chemicals used in embalming eventually leach into the ground. People concerned about these impacts are increasingly choosing biodegradable coffins and woodland burials. The UK now has some 270 natural burial sites. This year, Washington state made it legal to compost human bodies, with a process called recomposition. You might even don a “mushroom shroud”, a body suit in which the threads are infused with spores of fungi that can barely wait to start digesting you to leave nothing but a pollutant-free compost. Hall also alerts me to an eco-friendly version of cremation. Technically known as alkaline hydrolysis, it essentially dissolves the body, reducing it to liquid and ash over several hours.
“Ultimately, the value in thinking about death is that it makes you value your finite life more”
I’m minded to ignore this. I don’t do much in the way of social media and none of my photos are stored in the cloud. But James Norris, founder of the Digital Legacy Association, leaves me in no doubt that it is important. “It’s an altruistic thing,” he says. “If you make no plans for your digital legacy, your next of kin might have no idea about the tranche of precious photographs on Facebook, for instance.” Curating your own digital legacy takes a bit of work, I discover. Each platform has different terms of service, which makes it doubly tricky if you want to erase your online presence entirely. A few companies promising “cyber funerals” will do this for you but it isn’t cheap. Either way, it is unlikely to be totally effective. “We usually recommend people accept that there is going to be a legacy online and do their best to curate it,” says Norris. Alternatively, you might decide that you want to live forever (online). A company called Eterni.me and an app called Augmented Eternity both promise a version of “digital immortality” by scraping your online data to create a digital avatar capable of interacting with people on your behalf after your death. This is most definitely not for me. In fact, I tend to agree with Hayden that “ultimately, the value in thinking about death is that it makes you value your finite life more”. Now, I’m not saying I’m suddenly going to live every day like it is my last. But this whole exercise has had an impact, not least by persuading me not to agonise over everyday frustrations that are actually unimportant. As a bonus, I also know that my mum would very much like to become compost for an apple tree. And I would gladly eat the apples. ❚
Daniel Cossins is a features writer at New Scientist
23 November 2019 | New Scientist | 39
GL ARCHIVE/ALAMY
Hieronymus Bosch had clear visions of heaven and hell, unlike most of us
Lure of the afterlife Belief in life after death is pervasive, even among atheists. Why, asks Graham Lawton
40 | New Scientist | 23 November 2019
R
ICHARD WAVERLY was a 37-year-old history teacher. One day he was driving to work, tired after a late night and hungry from skipping breakfast. He was also in a bad mood following a row with his wife, who he suspected of having an affair. At a busy junction, he lost control, drove into a telegraph pole and was thrown through the windscreen. The paramedics said he was dead before he hit the pavement. This story is fictitious, but when psychologist Jesse Bering narrated it to volunteers, he discovered something you probably couldn’t make up. Asked questions such as “do you think Richard knows he is dead?” and “do you think he wishes he had told his wife he loved her before he died?”, large numbers of volunteers answered yes. For many, who had already professed a belief in the afterlife, this was no big surprise. However even people who totally rejected the idea of life after death – so-called extinctivists – also answered yes. That experiment was done in 2002. Since then, Bering – who is now at the University of
Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand – and others have confirmed and extended its findings. Confronted with the finality of death, the majority of us, dogged rationalists included, cling on to the belief that it isn’t the end. “Most people believe in life after death,” says psychologist Jamin Halberstadt, also at the University of Otago. “That’s amazing. Science has changed the way we think about almost every aspect of our lives, including death, but through all of that, belief in life after death has remained steadfast.” Why? Humans aren’t the only animals with an awareness of death. Elephants and dolphins are fascinated by corpses of their kin and chimps have been observed performing what some primatologists say are elaborate funerary rituals. We have no way of knowing whether they have a concept of an afterlife, but we know for sure that humans do. Archaeological evidence for afterlife beliefs goes back at least 12,000 years, when bodies started to be buried with useful stuff to take to the other side. But such beliefs are far from a thing of the past. Surveys done regularly since the 1940s
Theologically incorrect An obvious explanation is that people internalise religious teachings. “One function of religion is to alleviate death anxiety because it usually comes with afterlife beliefs,” says Halberstadt. But that doesn’t explain why belief in the afterlife has held up even as religiosity has declined, nor why these beliefs are rarely religious. Rather than articulating concepts such as heaven and hell, they talk in vague terms about there being “something”. This lack of theological correctness has led psychologists to see afterlife beliefs as largely intuitive rather than learned. It is partly a failure of imagination, according to Bering. Despite having been non-existent for billions of years before we were conceived, we can’t imagine being in that state after death. This might help explain a feature common to many afterlife beliefs. In the Richard experiment, for example, as well as asking
Religion cannot explain the form and universality of afterlife beliefs
GRANGER HISTORICAL PICTURE ARCHIVE/ALAMY
consistently show that about 70 per cent of US citizens believe in some form of life after death – a number that is mirrored across the developed world. What’s more, as Bering found, even the 30 per cent who say they don’t, often do. When he asked extinctivists whether they agreed with the statement “conscious personality survives the death of the body but I am completely unsure of what happens after that”, 80 per cent said yes.
“We can conceive of our bodies dying, but not our minds”
Touching the void The vast majority of us hold some kind of belief in an afterlife, but the people who believe in it most strongly are those who claim to have been there and lived to tell the tale. Up to 25 per cent of people who almost die report a near-death experience. These usually involve sensations of zooming through a tunnel towards a light. Many also feature replays of the person’s life and reunions with dead loved ones. Near-death experiences may result from lack of oxygen to the brain. Whatever causes them, they tell us
nothing about whether the afterlife exists. Yet their psychological effects are profound, says Natasha Tassell-Matamua of Massey University, New Zealand. Survivors often believe they have been to another realm. They lose all fear of death and become convinced that some aspect of their consciousness will survive it – although they struggle to say what, falling back on vague notions such as spirit and soul. Even people who were convinced that death is final often come back from a brush with it as believers in an afterlife.
about post-mortem mental states – desires, knowledge and feelings – Bering also asked about physical attributes such as hunger, pain and tiredness, and whether Richard could still see, hear and taste. People accepted that biological and perceptual abilities were lost, but maintained that psychological states persist. In other words, we can conceive of our bodies dying, but not our minds. “I can imagine not being hungry, or not being able to see, but to imagine not being anything is impossible because imagination itself is a mental state,” says Jonathan Jong at the University of Coventry, UK. But, again, that isn’t the whole story. Afterlife beliefs don’t just emerge when we try, and fail, to imagine death. They seem to be a default setting of cognition. In a recent cunning experiment, Halberstadt invited students to take part in what they were told was a meditation trial. They were shown into a room and wired up to record their arousal levels. Then half of them were told that a few weeks beforehand a janitor had died in the room and that a student later saw a ghost in the corner. Halfway through, the experimenters made the light in the room flicker. People who hadn’t been told the ghost story showed mild surprise; the others – including selfproclaimed extinctivists – jumped out of their skins. This, says Halberstadt, is evidence that belief in the afterlife is instinctive and universal. Extinctivists are simply people who have learned to suppress it. Psychologists think that these “implicit beliefs” are a by-product of our evolved cognition. One essential tool in our mental toolkit is theory of mind: the ability to think about other people’s thoughts, beliefs, feelings and intentions even in their absence. This underpins belief in gods and other supernatural beings, and also makes afterlife beliefs come easily. Even when somebody dies, we don’t switch off our theory of mind about them. “There’s something intuitive about projecting psychological traits onto people who are dead,” says Jong. Of course, none of this tells us anything about the existence or otherwise of the afterlife. “I’m a social psychologist, so I know what people believe is totally independent of reality,” says Halberstadt. But don’t worry, you’ll find out sooner or later. ❚
Graham Lawton is a feature writer at New Scientist
23 November 2019 | New Scientist | 41
Features
“The world desperately needs places like this” Fabiola Gianotti is leading CERN, the biggest particle physics lab on the planet, through difficult times. Scientific collaboration has never been more vital, she tells Richard Webb
42 | New Scientist | 23 November 2019
LUCIA HUNZIKER/13 PHOTO
E
VEN if the entrance has been spruced up, and a spanking new tram runs from its front door into the centre of Geneva, from the outside, CERN could be mistaken for any other institute of higher learning in need of a lick of paint. Yet the flags of 23 nations fluttering by the main entrance, and the buzz of activity inside, tell a different story. Straddling the border between Switzerland and France, CERN is the world’s largest particle physics laboratory, an international scientific collaboration without parallel in its scale and ambition. Established by international convention in the aftermath of the second world war, the European Council for Nuclear Research – known now by its French acronym – was intended to foster collaborative research into fundamental physics for peaceable purposes. Today, some 12,000 researchers from across the globe use its facilities each year, and it has been the scene of seminal scientific and technological breakthroughs – notably the World Wide Web, invented within its portals in 1989 to allow particle physicists to exchange data across borders. CERN’s greatest scientific triumph came in 2012, with the discovery of the Higgs boson at its 27-kilometre-circumference Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle smasher. The Higgs is the particle that gives all other fundamental particles mass. That same year, CERN was granted independent observer status at the United Nations, bestowing the right to participate in the work of the UN’s General Assembly and to attend its sessions. It is just one of the myriad responsibilities with which its boss must grapple.
PROFILE Fabiola Gianotti has been a researcher at CERN since 1994. As head of its ATLAS experiment, a collaboration involving 3000 people, she was one of two scientists charged with revealing the details of the Higgs boson discovery in 2012. She has been CERN’s directorgeneral since 2016 and was recently appointed for a second term
Richard Webb: How difficult is it to manage the thousands of physicists at CERN? Fabiola Gianotti: Well, I’m a physicist myself, so I feel really at home. What is very nice in this place is that it is always about teamwork. We always try to get different points of view around the table. The LHC is shut for an upgrade until 2021, and you have a decade or so’s worth of data since it started up in 2008. Are you happy with what it has achieved so far? Of course, we are extremely happy. The discovery of the Higgs boson was a monumental one because this particle is very special, very different from the other 16 elementary particles that we had discovered and measured before. The Higgs is related to the most obscure and problematic sector of the standard model, the theory that describes the elementary particles and their interactions. And it is a unique tool to look for physics beyond the standard model that could help us elucidate other mysteries. But the LHC hasn’t discovered anything new and unexpected. The precise measurement of the Higgs boson and many other well-known particles has allowed us to make a step forward in our
“It is the duty and the right of humanity to understand how nature works”
understanding of fundamental physics. We didn’t discover new physics, true. This may appear disappointing, because of course discovering new particles is always very glamorous and exciting. But being able to disprove some scenarios and hypotheses is important to help us guide our explorations towards the most promising directions. Hasn’t the no-show of new particles broken the successful model of particle physics over the past few decades: theorists propose new particles and experimentalists find them? It hasn’t always been like that in the history of particle physics. There have been times when theory has guided experiments, and there have been times when the experiments were discovering plenty of new particles and theory was trying to make sense of them. Now, perhaps more than ever, we need to make progress on the experimental side to give some hints to theorists about the most promising direction for developing new ideas. The likes of supersymmetry, a theory that would fill in gaps in our understanding of the universe that the standard model of physics can’t, predict a bevy of new particles, but the LHC has detected no sign of them. Does that mean these theories have ceased to be viable? We have to be very careful about that. I consider supersymmetry a very nice theory. The fact that we haven’t found any sign of it as yet may indicate two things. One, supersymmetry is wrong. Fine. Or, supersymmetry sits at an energy scale above where we are exploring now, or alternatively manifests itself through particles that are extremely light and extremely weakly interacting. Our goal is not to run behind a given theory. Theories are good benchmarks, but nature may have chosen a completely different way. We have to address the open questions – and there are many, many of them – related to the Higgs boson and its mass, the problem of dark matter, the problem of matter-antimatter asymmetry, and so on. You mention dark matter, this vast quantity of unseen matter that cosmological observations tell us must be there. The LHC hasn’t been able to make anything that looks like a dark matter particle. So where are they hiding? Dark matter could be either extremely light or extremely heavy. The window that we have explored so far might not be large enough, or dark matter might not have the type of > 23 November 2019 | New Scientist | 43
“The laws of nature are the same here as in the US or China, so nobody can argue about them”
interaction that would be accessible to the LHC or to a future collider. Colliders are one tool that we have to explore dark matter, but not the only one. Is fundamental physics in a bit of a funk, trying to think too much about established theories concerning things like dark matter and not about new ideas? I think you are correct. We have to approach our explorations with a very open mind. That’s why the LHC experiments, in particular the two general-purpose experiments, ATLAS and CMS, have been built in a way that, in principle, allows them to detect any type of new particles, whether from an established theoretical scenario like supersymmetry or extra dimensions, or something new. It’s very important to be very broad and very open. Earlier this year, CERN published plans for the Future Circular Collider, a larger version of the LHC. What convinces you that this is the way forward for particle physics? First of all, CERN is doing design studies and R&D for two projects. One is a linear collider up to 50 kilometres long called CLIC, which will smash electrons against positrons coming from the opposite direction. It will allow detailed studies of the Higgs boson and provide sensitivity to new physics up to very high energy scales. The other is the Future Circular Collider, which is a ring like the Large Hadron Collider but three times bigger. However, they are not just bigger, they also come with much more sophisticated and powerful technologies that will allow us to make a big step up in the energy and intensity of the particle beams compared with previous colliders.
Fabiola Gianotti opens Esplanade des Particules, a new plaza outside CERN
Some theoretical models suggest that there aren’t any more particles at the energy scales we can realistically reach with a collider. Wouldn’t it be a big gamble to build these things? What is the goal of particle physics, and in particular of colliders? Is it to discover new particles, or to make a step forward in our understanding of fundamental physics? 44 | New Scientist | 23 November 2019
CERN
What is the benefit of that? A Future Circular Collider can collide electronpositron beams and proton-proton beams in more than one experiment. An electronpositron collider would allow detailed studies of not just the Higgs boson, but other known particles. A proton-proton collider would allow the production and observation of heavy, new particles.
The LEP [Large Electron-Positron] Collider, which was the predecessor of the Large Hadron Collider, didn’t discover a single particle, and yet there are few projects in the history of particle physics that have progressed our understanding of fundamental interactions so much. The goal of any scientific exploration is to make progress in our understanding of nature. Discovering a new particle is one way, but very precise measurement of known particles is as important, as is ruling out ideas that are unfounded. What would you say to people who say it isn’t worth spending that amount of money on particle physics, that it should go on something like mitigating climate change? Obviously, we should also be spending money on mitigating climate change. But one doesn’t exclude the other. I think it is the duty and the right of humanity to understand how nature works, how the universe evolved, and how it will evolve in the future. Pushing back the limits of knowledge is one of our aspirations and obligations. Apart from that, science in general, and particle physics in particular, is a driver of innovation, because our goals are often so ambitious that they require the development of new technologies. From CERN alone, the spin-offs are huge: the World Wide Web, medical applications and many others. And there is also another important role of science nowadays: to foster collaboration across borders and all over the world. In a fractured world with many forces pulling it apart rather than together, science is still an example of what humanity can do when we use our cultural diversity to work together and do something good. Can that sort of ideal prosper in this fractious period in international relations? I think science carries a good message of peace and of collaboration at a very delicate time. Perhaps even more than the arts, it brings together people from all over the world, because it is based on facts, and not on opinions. The laws of nature are the same here as in the UK, in the US, in China, so nobody can argue about them. Science is a very strong glue that unites people of all cultures, traditions, passports, religions and political beliefs. We have scientists sitting around tables here at CERN whose countries will not sit around the table for political discussions. That is a very important message.
CERN
You mention the power of science to bring people together, but last year CERN was in the headlines for the wrong reasons when theorist Alessandro Strumia made disparaging comments about women in physics at a CERN seminar. Did that set your mission back? That was an opportunity for us to re-emphasise the importance of diversity in all its facets. That isn’t just gender diversity, but diversity in terms of ethnicity, culture and so on. Diversity means giving everyone the same opportunities, and unfortunately in our work this is not true. We still have a gender gap, but also gaps between developed countries and developing countries, the rich and the poor. We live in a world where technology is expanding at a very fast pace and that brings the risk of exacerbating differences and inequalities. What can a place like CERN do about that? We can continue to promote, support and expand open science. What we do, what we
publish, what we develop is open to everybody. In 1993 we made the web available for everyone to use and develop royalty-free, and that is still true today. We develop open-source software and hardware. We publish our results in openaccess journals available to everyone, for free. Our data, once they are understood and wellcalibrated, are available to everyone. The other important component is education, training available to everybody and reaching out to countries that aren’t at the forefront of science and technology. We have many initiatives, for instance, a summer programme including students from less privileged countries. So we try in our little corner to do something good for the world. What achievement are you most proud of, both personally and for CERN? From the point of view of my scientific career, I had the fortune to be involved in the Large Hadron Collider project right from the
A prototype neutrino detector under construction at CERN
beginning, developing the detector and analysis techniques for the ATLAS experiment and then being on the forefront at the time the Higgs boson was discovered. That was clearly a great satisfaction. I’ve been lucky enough to grow in this lab, and I am very grateful for what I got, not only as a physicist but also as a human being. It has helped me develop as an open and tolerant person. I think the atmosphere of this place is very special. There are a few places like it, but not so many. We should cherish them, because the world definitely and desperately needs them. ❚
Richard Webb is executive editor at New Scientist
23 November 2019 | New Scientist | 45
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Great minds come together at Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany What’s in it for me? If you are a post graduate student with an interest in the pharmaceutical and chemical industry, the Innovation Cup is your chance to gain in-depth knowledge about research and development, to network with top students from around the world and to build a business case together with experienced professionals. Who can apply: Advanced students and post docs in the fields of life science, material science, data science and business administration from all over the world can apply: • Sciences: Post graduate students on their way towards a PhD in biology, medicine, biotech, bioinformatics, data sciences, biochemistry, chemistry, pharmacy, physics or engineering. • Business: Advanced MBA students and recent MBA graduates with an interest in the pharmaceutical and chemical business and a science background. The Innovation Cup will comprise the following team topics: oncology, immuno-oncology, autoimmunity, drug discovery technologies, digitalization, electroceuticals, lithography.
How it works: During a one-week Summer Camp, 50 selected students will attend in-depth presentations about the pharmaceutical and chemical industry given by researchers and managers at Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany. The participants will be divided into teams, work together to develop a business plan and present it to a grand jury, who will award the Innovation Cup for the best plan along with a cash prize of EUR 20,000 plus EUR 5,000 for the runner-up. A conference with alumni of previous Innovation Cup editions will be held on the first day of the Summer Camp. Further information about the program and how to apply online from November 1, 2019, until January 31, 2020: http://innovationcup.emdgroup.com Location: Near Frankfurt, Germany, June 20–26, 2020. Travel, accommodation and food expenses will be paid by Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany.
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23 November 2019 | New Scientist | 47
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Associate or Full Professor in Experimental Quantum Information Science The Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) and the Faculty of Science at the University of Waterloo (UW) is seeking an exceptional scholar and researcher for a senior hire at the Associate or Full Professor level, with an anticipated start date of September 1, 2020. A PhD, demonstrated evidence of running a world-class research program in experimental quantum information science and technology, a clear YLVLRQ RI WKH IXWXUH LPSDFW RI TXDQWXP WHFKQRORJ\ DQG HÓ˝HFWLYH WHDFKLQJ are required. Responsibilities include the supervision of graduate students and teaching at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Full consideration for this position is assured only for applications received by December 1, 2019. Interested individuals should upload their application via the faculty application form at https://uwaterloo. ca/institute-for-quantum-computing/positions and arrange for three referees to upload letters of reference. The University of Waterloo regards diversity as an integral part of academic excellence and is committed to accessibility for persons with disabilities. As such, we encourage applications from women, First Nations, Metis and Inuit peoples, persons with disabilities, members of diverse gender identities, and others who may contribute to the further GLYHUVLÓžFDWLRQ RI LGHDV $OO TXDOLÓžHG FDQGLGDWHV DUH HQFRXUDJHG WR DSSO\ KRZHYHU &DQDGLDQV DQG permanent residents will be given priority. Full description at https://jobs.newscientist.com/en-gb/ job/1401680537/associate-or-full-professor-in-experimental-quantum-information-science/
HMRI Postdoctoral Fellowship Program Pasadena, CA Huntington Medical Research Institutes’ (HMRI) Postdoctoral Fellowship Program provides MDs, PhDs, and MD/PhDs rigorous scientific training, mentoring, and a rich research environment supplemented by close interactions with colleagues at nearby universities, including Caltech, USC, and others. Fellows will obtain hands-on experience carrying out studies in HMRI’s four major areas of research: • Brain research with focus on Alzheimer’s disease and Migraine • Imaging and spectroscopy of the brain, blood vessels, and heart • The study of heart attack and ways to reduce cell death during heart attack, models of heart failure, models of cardiogenic shock, studies of cardio-toxic substances, e-cigarettes. • Studies specifically focused on the connection between the brain and heart disease ELIGIBILITY:
Applicants for the HMRI Postdoctoral Fellowship Program must have completed a PhD, an MD, or an MD, PhD program and have proof of completion and degree by June 30, 2019. At the time of acceptance into the fellowship program, the applicant may have no more than five (5) years of research training or experience since obtaining a post-baccalaureate doctoral-level degree. Applications are accepted on a rolling basis. Find out more at https://jobs. newscientist.com/job/1401678395/hmri-postdoctoral-fellowship-program-/
Assistant Professor - Mathematics or Science Postdoctoral Associate in Chemogenomics Trudeau Institute – Saranac Lake, NY As a part of Trudeau Chemogenomic research, we are recruiting an innovative, highly motivated computational chemist/biochemist/biologist to help develop and apply breakthrough methods for efficient identification of new opportunities for therapeutic intervention in the control of viral and bacterial infections, including drug-resistant tuberculosis. The successful candidate will deploy outstanding computational skills and a thorough understanding of protein-ligand interactions, small molecule structureactivity relationships, physical chemistry of bacterial cell walls, and protein sequence and structure determinants of binding selectivity. Qualifications: PhD or MD/PhD with evidence of innovation, diligence, and productivity; - Expertise in one or several and working knowledge of most of the following techniques: comparative protein sequence and structure analyses, protein modeling, protein-ligand interactions, 2D/3D chemoinformatics, structure-activity relationships, comparative analysis of enzyme active sites, pathway analysis; - Strong programing skills: Python, Perl, UNIX shell scripting, SQL, API queries; experience with working with large chemical and biological databases; Kelly Stanyon, Human Resource Office Trudeau Institute, Inc. 154 Algonquin Avenue Saranac Lake, NY 12983 Fax (518) 891-5126 hr@trudeauinstitute.org
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Applications are invited for a tenure-track faculty position at the rank of Assistant Professor, and in special cases Associate or Full Professor, at the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) and any department in the Faculties of Mathematics or Science. IQC is a collaborative research institute focused on quantum information science and technology, ranging from the theory of quantum information to practical applications. Membership in IQC is renewable, with an initial appointment of 5 years, and comes with research space, a teaching reduction of one course, and a stipend. Information about research at IQC can be found at http://uwaterloo.ca/iqc/research and https://tqt.uwaterloo.ca/. As an employer committed to employment equity and accessibility for persons with disabilities, we encourage applications from members of equity-seeking communities including women, racialized and Indigenous persons, persons with disabilities, and persons of all sexual orientations and gender identities/expressions. The University of Waterloo is host to the Institute for Quantum Computing. At present, IQC has a complement of 32 faculty members from the Faculties of Engineering, Mathematics and Science. Interested individuals should upload their application via the faculty application form at: https://uwaterloo.ca/institute-for-quantum-computing/positions. Full consideration for these positions is assured only for applications received by December 1, 2019. $OO TXDOLÓžHG FDQGLGDWHV DUH HQFRXUDJHG WR DSSO\ KRZHYHU &DQDGLDQV DQG permanent residents will be given priority. Full description at https://jobs.newscientist.com/en-gb/ job/1401680540/assistant-professor-mathematics-or-science-institute-for-quantum-computing/
23 November 2019 | New Scientist | 49
The back pages Puzzles Cryptic crossword and a hat-based logic puzzle p52
Feedback AI tipping point and the best new words: the week in weird p53
Twisteddoodles for New Scientist A cartoonist’s take on the world p53
Almost the last word Dogs and nettles, wasps and waists: readers respond p54
The Q&A Geologist Paul Smith on his love of fossils and Greenland p56
Stargazing at home 2 Week 3
See Venus and Jupiter together
Abigail Beall is a science writer in Leeds, UK. This series is based on her book The Art of Urban Astronomy @abbybeall
What you need A place where you can see the western horizon
For next week Binoculars
Next in the series: 1 Mercury transits the sun 2 How to watch the Leonid meteor shower 3 Venus and Jupiter in conjunction 4 Mercury at its greatest elongation The best time to see the planet directly 5 How to see the Northern Lights 6 Find the Andromeda galaxy 7 How to see Santa (the ISS) on Christmas Eve
IT ISN’T common to see two planets in the same part of the sky, but on 24 November, Jupiter and Venus will be in what is known as conjunction. This happens when their position in space relative to that of Earth means they appear to line up. Most of the time, Venus and Jupiter are far away from each other in the sky, but roughly once a year they line up. The last conjunction of Venus and Jupiter happened on 22 January 2019, and the next will be 11 February 2021. The two planets will still be on the opposite side of the sun to Earth, so they won’t be at their brightest. But despite Venus being much smaller – Jupiter’s diameter is a whopping 140,000 kilometres, more than 10 times that of Venus, at about 12,000 kilometres across – it will appear bigger and brighter than Jupiter. That’s partly because it is much closer to us, and partly down to reflectivity. The light we see from planets is all reflected from stars, in this case the sun. Venus reflects 75 per cent of the light that hits it thanks to a thick, permanent cloud layer containing sulphuric acid. It makes Venus the second most reflective object in our solar system after Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Jupiter’s atmosphere of water, ammonia and other gases reflects only 34 per cent of the sun’s light. At conjunction, Venus passes just 1.4 degrees from Jupiter in the sky. As a general idea for the separation you should expect to see, this is about three times the width of the moon. The planets
PETR HORÁLEK
This week brings a rare opportunity to see two planets in conjunction. Abigail Beall explains how to spot them
Stargazing at home online Projects will be posted online each week at newscientist.com/maker Email: maker@newscientist.com
will stay in conjunction for a few days, so if it is cloudy on 24 November, you can still see them together on another day, albeit slightly further apart. To see the planets, go somewhere with a clear view of the horizon in the direction the sun is setting. As we learned a few weeks ago, planets follow the same line as the sun, known as the ecliptic. They will start to appear low in the sky about 45 minutes after sunset. If you’re having trouble finding them, an app can help. It’s easy to tell the two planets apart as Venus will always be brighter. In the days after the conjunction, Jupiter will start
to move closer to the sun while Venus will appear higher up, away from the sun. The planets will set at a time that depends on your latitude. For example, at 35 degrees north, Venus and Jupiter set about 1 hour and 40 minutes after sunset on 24 November, so you will only have about an hour to look at them. At the equator, you will get an extra 10 minutes, while at 35 degrees south they set 2 hours after sunset. Use this as an opportunity to consider how small we are. Venus and Jupiter are close together in astronomical terms, but they are still nearly 700 million kilometres apart. ❚ 23 November 2019 | New Scientist | 51
The back pages Puzzles Cryptic crossword #19 Set by Wingding Editor’s note: Unfortunately, due to radiation exposure, mutations have occurred in 14 of the solutions in this crossword. In these cases, the word that should be written into the grid is a real word, but it is one letter different to the word described by the clue. There are three types of mutation: (a) the addition of A, T, G or C; (b) the deletion of A, T, G or C; (c) the substitution of A, T, G or C for one of the other three letters. The numbers in brackets indicate the length of the word that is clued, which may be different to the length of the word written in the grid.
Puzzle set by David Bodycombe
#31 Three hats
A
ACROSS 1 Youth Climate Leaders fall out of vehicle in an instant (5) 3 Powerful DNA: I’m not sick  (8) 9 Liberal Tory hid growth stimulator (7) 10 About a way to sleep (4) 11 Some walrus tastes like iron oxide (4)
12 The French chase male insect under the ground (6) 14 Break up carbon and drink digestive fluid, one’s forgotten (7) 16 Stick poster in this place (6) 19 Form of energy with little mass (5) 21 Move swiftly around new quartz (5)
24 Trade union stands by automaton, having lost zero fish (6) 25 Occupation for one absorbed by scientific instrument (6) 26 Speeding around central Amman, causing damage (7) 27 Make garment, taking in bottom of hem, for duck (4)
DOWN 1 Conservative supports timetable for turning (8) 2 South American mammal said to resemble fish faeces (5) 4 Poet essentially made mess of swelling (6) 5 Incorporated into brown food container (3,3) 6 Pigmented areas
periodically carried on leader (7) 7 Water birds gutted to get places to sleep (4) 8 Ethical eel with tail cut off by line (5) 13 Primarily horticultural boundary line (8) 15 Note in Blondie song – it’s infectious (7)
17 Iron got into German court – the result of a mutation? (6) 18 Shocked at men’s reproductive organ (6) 20 Upland lifted to make space (4) 22 Bone in leg injured under muscle initially (5) 23 Notice part of the ear (4)
The quiz will be back next week, as well as the next quick crossword and the solution to this cryptic crossword.
B
C
Ariana, Beverley and Cassie are standing in a line. They know that two of them are wearing black hats and one is wearing a white hat – or vice versa – in an arrangement like the one shown above. Beverley and Cassie can see the hats in front of them but not behind, while Ariana can’t see any hats. They can only say “white� or “black� to announce their own hat colour. Who will be able to confidently state their hat’s colour first? And who will be second? Answer next week
#30 Sticking in a PIN Solution We are looking for a four-digit PIN containing a zero that, when squared, ends in itself. This is known as an “automorphic� number. A quick mental calculation confirms that, of the numbers 0 to 9, only 0, 1, 5 and 6 end in themselves when squared, so our number must end with one of these. Moving on to two-digit numbers, you will find that only 00, 01, 25 and 76 end in themselves when squared. There are algebraic ways of deducing the digits of longer numbers, but trial and error can be just as quick. Automorphic numbers ending with 0 or 1 always end with 0000 or 0001 when squared, which rules them out. The only “proper� four digit number that, when squared, ends in itself is 9376, which makes 87909376. However, 9376 doesn’t contain a zero. Fortunately, PINs can have leading zeroes. The only number that has the required property is 0625 (its square is 390625), so this must be the answer.
Quick Crossword #45 Answers ACROSS 8 Hemi, 9 Leopard cat, 10 Tensor, 11 Flamingo, 12 RGBA, 13 Semidesert, 16 Anne, 17 Unbox, 18Â SASH, 19 Esaki diode, 21 Erie, 22 Elon Musk, 26 Lactic, 27 Homosphere, 28 Aloe DOWN 1 Jet engines, 2 Oil shale, 3 Ultrasound, 4 Roof, 5 NASA, 6 Eddies, 7 Yang, 14 Dixie flyer, 15Â Russia Iron, 18 Seed coat, 20 King of, 23 Lyot, 24 USPO, 25 Knee
52 | New Scientist | 23 November 2019
Get in touch Email us at crossword@newscientist.com puzzles@newscientist.com
The back pages Feedback
Scream my name As has been widely reported, the company formerly known as Facebook is undergoing a highprofile rebrand. It is getting a new logo and changing its name. The new moniker is slick, professional and just a teensy bit shouty. Yes, Facebook is now FACEBOOK. Feedback is EXCITED, but also wonders whether the diminishing appeal of Facebook – sorry, FACEBOOK – to younger social media users will be revived by a name that looks like it was written by a troll who forgot to disable caps lock on their keyboard. Perhaps reflecting this, not all of FACEBOOK’s services will be known as FACEBOOK. The networking site formerly known as Facebook will continue to be known as Facebook, although it will now be run by FACEBOOK. Meanwhile, formerly Facebook-owned entities such as WhatsApp and Instagram will carry the upgraded FACEBOOK logo. Although now confused, Feedback believes in experts, and isn’t one to gainsay the wisdom of no doubt highly recompensed marketing gurus. So henceforth, please: this column is brought to you by FEEDBACK.
AI tipping point ANYONE WHO HAS WATCHED – OK, NOW HOW DO WE TURN THIS OFF? Anyone who has watched the viral videos of Boston Dynamics’ robots will have been impressed by the grace of these machines under pressure. In very nearly the words of tubthumping Brit band Chumbawamba, they get knocked down, but they get up again. How have their creators imbued them with such a human-like ability to recover from being unbalanced? The company’s CEO, Marc Raibert, let the secret slip in an interview with BBC News: child experimentation. “I have video of pushing on my daughter when she was one year old, knocking her over, getting some grief,” he said. “She was teetering and tottering
and learning to balance and I just wanted to see what would happen.” Raibert says he and his daughter remain “good pals”. But clearly this isn’t an approach best repeated, let alone taken any further. We don’t want Jeff Bezos, say, sticking a toddler in a cardboard box to test Amazon’s delivery methods, nor Elon Musk tossing children in the air to see which way up they land.
Twisteddoodles for New Scientist
Best new words Collins Dictionary has named “climate strike” as 2019’s word of the year in a sign that the world is getting more worried about global warming and less worried about what constitutes a word. Doubling down on its insistence that two-word phrases count, the dictionary included “double down” on its shortlist. This isn’t a reference to a trend towards better-stuffed pillows, FEEDBACK is disappointed to learn, but rather to the tendency of figures in power caught saying something wrong to cover it up by saying something even wronger. FEEDBACK – it’s already getting a bit exhausting, isn’t it? – feels that the usual approach of highlighting new words coined to match existing meanings is old hat. Why not instead recognise existing words whose meanings have miraculously changed to reflect new realities? First nominees include: Glacier (noun) – formerly a mighty, slow-moving river of ice, now a small, sad trickle of microplastic-infused water. FACEBOOK (proper noun; also “Facebook”) – formerly a social-media platform populated by updates from friends and family, and cute cat videos, now a social-media platform populated by unfocused rage, Russian trolls and cute cat videos. Self-partner (verb) – formerly an activity unmentionable in print, now a synonym for being single. As in: “I’m self-partnering. Why are you looking at me like that?” If you have encountered other neologisms that deserve our attention, do please let us know.
Mordaunt humour As already hinted, the web can be a nasty place, full of harassment, abuse and thousands of people making the same joke about selfpartnering. Former UK defence secretary Penny Mordaunt has put her head above the parapet with a plan to combat it. The current prospective parliamentary candidate for Portsmouth North is campaigning for six new emojis to be added to the existing lexicon, which she hopes will contribute to a kinder, gentler cyberspace. Feedback’s favourite is a teal sphere, mouth turned down in tearful disappointment, raising a single finger as if to admonish a wayward child. Mordaunt has christened this sad ball of frustration “That won’t do…”, and suggests it could help netizens put racists, misogynists and
general trolls back in their place. Feedback has no intention of contributing to the culture of abuse that Mordaunt so rightly condemns. But knowing netizens as we do, our response must be a sad, finger-wagging teal emoji.
Spinning clocks We have received many excellent proposals for how to describe clockwise and counterclockwise for Generation Z students unfamiliar with analogue clocks (2 November). There was one outstanding contender: clockwise is the direction of the spinning animation often displayed while waiting for a computer program to perform an action such as loading a video. We learn that this is called a “throbber” in the trade, and look forward to “counterthrobberwise” featuring in 2020’s words of the year. ❚
Got a story for Feedback? Send it to New Scientist, 25 Bedford Street, London WC2E 9ES or you can email us at feedback@newscientist.com 23 November 2019 | New Scientist | 53
The back pages Almost the last word Are tortoises smart, or do they just live a long time?
Nettle effect How is it that stinging nettles don’t seem to affect my dog’s sensitive nose and ears or his relatively fur-free belly while I respond rapidly with a very painful skin rash?
Pamela Manfield Monmouth, UK A friend recently told me that he hasn’t felt nettle stings since a boyhood experience. At the age of 6, riding his new bicycle while wearing shorts and a T-shirt, he overbalanced into a patch of nettles and was badly stung all over his body. Since then, he hasn’t had a problem with them. Perhaps it is the same for dogs. Dogs probably are shielded from stings for the most part, but can feel them. A recent article in Veterinary Record Case Reports (DOI: 10.1136/ vetreccr-2018-000672) describes two gun dogs that were treated for suspected toxic effects from sustained exposure to nettles – Ed
Hourglass figure Why do wasps have such a narrow waist? What could be the advantage of having such a narrow join between thorax and abdomen, which seems like a very weak point?
David Muir Edinburgh, UK Key to the evolution of certain insects was a change from feeding 54 | New Scientist | 23 November 2019
AMMIT/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
Fiona Hussey Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, UK Nettles are covered in tiny, hair-like structures called trichomes with fragile ends that break off when touched. The ends act like needles, injecting chemicals that cause irritation and pain. The outer layer of skin on a dog’s nose is very thick, so I suspect that the trichomes are too delicate to penetrate it. The rest of the dog’s body has hair, and even though the ears and belly have much less hair than elsewhere, it probably still provides protection.
shorts when it was just 21°C. Obviously, I had acclimatised to the local weather. Is this a psychological or physiological process? Do any changes occur in the body?
This week’s new questions Time to think Are longer-lived animals such as turtles or tortoises typically more intelligent than those with shorter lifespans? Deborah Hartstein, Sydney, Australia Mind fuel How many calories go on running the brain? Could I burn more calories by trying to do lots of difficult mental arithmetic or solving the New Scientist cryptic crossword? Could I actually think myself thinner? Thomas Reid, Dundee, UK
on plants to laying eggs on or in the bodies of other arthropods. The eggs hatch and the larvae eat their host from the inside, eventually killing them. Around 250 million years ago, at the start of the Triassic period, a species of insect evolved to have a narrow waist, called a petiole. This adaptation allowed greater flexibility and manoeuvrability of the ovipositor, the tubular structure on the female’s rear used to deposit eggs. This insect was the last common ancestor of bees, wasps and ants. In some families of Apocrita, the wasp-waisted insects, the ovipositor has morphed over time into a stinger – as lots of us have discovered to our cost. Hazel Russman London, UK Wasps and bees have a narrow section joining their thorax to their abdomen, so they can curl their abdomens under to sting you while resting on your skin.
Dan O’Donovan, Solihull, West Midlands, UK The waist is narrow for flexibility. This area needs to act like a hinge, but unlike with a finger joint in humans, it isn’t surrounded by flexible skin and flesh. Instead, it has a hard outer casing and a thin membrane that can flex only a little. If this hinge were thicker, the membrane would have to flex further and more quickly. The joint is only as wide as it needs to be for itself, nerves and other plumbing.
Getting used to it I grew up in Perth, Western Australia, where summer days are often in the high 30°Cs. I found this warm, but not too hot. But after a year living in the UK, I was wearing
Neil Holmes Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, UK Acclimatisation will be a factor, but differences in relative humidity of the air are probably more important. In warm weather, the cooling effect of the evaporation of sweat from the skin is vitally important. When the air temperature in Perth is in the high 30°Cs, the relative humidity is usually very low, often about 40 per cent or lower. This allows sweat to readily evaporate from the skin, keeping the body comfortable. The air in the UK in summer is usually more humid. At 21°C and a relative humidity of 70 per cent, there will be less evaporation of sweat from the skin and so less heat loss. So the body will feel comfortable at this lower temperature. Eddy Richards Allanton, Scottish Borders, UK When I moved to Kenya, I experienced the same adaptation, but in reverse. After a few months, I started to put on a jumper when the temperature dropped below about 24°C. Returning to the UK was a bit of a shock, because it was snowing at the time, but I rapidly reacclimatised. However, even 30 years later, I still find high temperatures perfectly pleasant. This makes me think that the effect is psychological and is a reaction to changes in the typical temperature locally. ❚
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UFAW APPEAL
IS FLIGHT IMPORTANT TO THE WELFARE OF CAPTIVE BIRDS? Can you help us to find the answer? This proposed study will cost ÂŁ50,000 but has the potential to improve the welfare of millions of birds. Can you help us to fund this study or others with a donation? Universities Federation For Animal Welfare (UFAW) is an animal welfare charity but one with a difference, using science in the service of animal welfare. Established in 1926, the charity works globally in a variety of ways, including funding quality projects which have the capacity to help large numbers of animals and to really make a difference, and by disseminating the information learned. As a charity, UFAW relies on member subscriptions, donations and legacies to continue its vital work. To find out more about the study and donate please see our website
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Study will test theory that restricting flight leads to welfare problems in caged birds Flight is one of the most constrained natural behaviours for captive birds and restricting or preventing flight is therefore a welfare concern Findings have the potential to improve wellbeing in millions of birds from a variety of species
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Birnstiel Award 2019 We congratulate the 2019 recipients of the International Birnstiel Award for Doctoral Research in Molecular Life Sciences: Justin Silpe (Princeton University), Emily Bayer (Columbia University), and Mohamed El-Brolosy (Max Planck Institute for Heart and Lung Research), selected from over 100 nominations by universities and research institutions in North America, Europe, Asia and Australia
The Birnstiel Award is presented annually by the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) at the Vienna BioCenter and the Max Birnstiel Foundation. It celebrates outstanding talent in molecular life sciences and research successes of young, up-and-coming scientists.
For the next call in spring 2020, see: www.imp.ac.at/birnstiel-award
23 November 2019 | New Scientist | 55
The back pages Q&A
Paul Smith’s love of geology and palaeontology has taken him from museums to mapping Greenland to being shipwrecked in the wildest reaches of the Arctic As a child, what did you want to do when you grew up? I read Gerald Durrell’s books over and over and was attracted to his life of travel and collecting animals. This is more or less what I ended up doing – except all the animals are dead.
Explain your work in one easy paragraph. I am director of Oxford University Museum of Natural History. I also do research and teaching in geology and palaeontology.
How did you end up working in this field? In my mid-20s, I had a few months spare before taking up a lectureship and passed the time working in the Sedgwick Museum in Cambridge. I enjoyed it and shifted direction in consequence.
Did you have to overcome any particular challenges to get where you are today? As a white male, not as much as some people, but I grew up in a declining, post-industrial mill town in east Lancashire and it concerns me that this is sometimes still seen as an unconventional route.
What’s the most exciting thing you’ve worked on in your career? I did my PhD on conodonts, animals that lived between 500 and 200 million years ago. No one knew what kind of animals they were. I was lucky to be part of the team that determined that conodonts were primitive eel-like vertebrates and among the earliest active predators.
What achievement or discovery are you most proud of? Aside from the conodonts, I was involved in the primary geological mapping of Crown Prince Christian Land in the remote north-east corner of Greenland. Two of us mapped a 4500-squarekilometre area of mainly untrodden ground.
Were you good at science at school? I was always keen and good at biology, and developed a love of geography and history.
If you could send a message back to yourself as a kid, what would you say? Work harder at the things you aren’t naturally interested in. 56 | New Scientist | 23 November 2019
If you could have a conversation with any scientist living or dead, who would it be? William Scoresby – Greenland explorer and map maker in the early 19th century, and one of the first Arctic scientists.
Is there a discovery or achievement you wish you’d made yourself? The Burgess Shale fossil deposit in British Columbia, Canada – a remarkable window on the evolutionary origin of animals in the Cambrian era around 510 million years ago.
What’s the best thing you’ve read or seen in the past 12 months? I’m passionate about theatre, and the thing that stands out is Kunene and the King, written by John Kani. It’s a reflection on apartheid and South Africa over the past 25 years, but also very funny.
What scientific development do you hope to see in your lifetime? On the altruistic side, a way to rapidly sequester atmospheric carbon dioxide. More selfishly, a locality with exceptional fossil preservation close to the start of the Cambrian, to understand better the initial, rapid diversification of animals.
How useful will your skills be after the apocalypse? Field geologists are like cockroaches – they will survive in a post-apocalypse world. Fieldwork in the high Arctic means being resourceful and adaptable – as well as tolerant of discomfort, and I would relish the chance to document the planet recovering from a major mass extinction event.
OK one last thing: tell us something that will blow our minds… I was shipwrecked at 76° north whilst doing field work in Spitsbergen in the Norwegian Arctic. Our 25-metre research ship hit a submerged rock and sank. No one was seriously injured, but we were left with only the clothes we stood up in. ❚
Paul Smith directs the Oxford University Museum of Natural History in the UK ELLIE KURTTZ ©RSC
“Field geologists are like cockroaches they will survive in a post-apocalypse world”
Humanity will need the equivalent of 2 Earths to support itself by 2030.
People lying down solve anagrams in 10% less time than people standing up.
About 6 in 100 babies (mostly boys) are born with an extra nipple.
60% of us experience â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;inner speechâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; where everyday thoughts take a back-and-forth conversational style. We spend 50% of our lives daydreaming.
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