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‘Helical engine’ claimed to break laws of physics
COLD-BLOODED MAMMALS
The curious lifestyles of our ancient ancestors
ETERNAL WORMHOLES
Space portals that last as long as the universe
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This week’s issue News
Features
8 Moon walker UK rover will have legs, not wheels
34 Living with elephants Deforestation is forcing elephants into conflict with us. How can we live together?
9 Cannabis addiction Can CBD pills help?
38 The information wars How you became the new battlefield in the era of fake news
16 Changing the brain Experiencing depression may reduce white matter
42 Coping with uncertainty A guide to building resilience when your future hangs in the balance 38 Information wars How you became the fake-news front line 15 Action, no reaction ‘Helical engine’ claimed to break laws of physics 17 Cold-blooded mammals The curious lifestyles of our ancient ancestors 14 Eternal wormholes Space portals that last as long as the universe 34 Living in peace with elephants 17 Was life made of urea? 8 UK moon rover has legs 10 The art of surreal headlines
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On the cover
42 Coping with uncertainty Building resilience to the agony of waiting for events to unfold
The back pages 28 The reality behind Moby-Dick
51 Stargazing from home Hop from star to star 52 Puzzles A crossword, a matchstick puzzle and a quick quiz
Views 23 Comment The world needs climate protests, says Adam Vaughan
31 Aperture From jet suits to giant moons, this was New Scientist Live 2019
53 Feedback Strange maths and tangerine dreams: the week in weird
24 The columnist Annalee Newitz on the dirty, biological future of technology
28 Culture A deep dive into the facts behind epic novel Moby-Dick
54 Almost the last word Shopping green and fluorescent blue ink: readers respond
26 Letters We are still aware of some doubts on consciousness
30 Culture columnist Jacob Aron on the blurry boundary between gaming and gambling
56 The Q&A Anu Ojha reveals the solar system’s coolest moons
Editor’s note
Vol 244 No 3252 Cover image: Francesco Ciccolella
MANY thanks to everyone who joined us for another four-day spectacular at New Scientist Live last weekend. As ever, the exhibits on the show floor were immense, but for me, the best bit is meeting our readers – and seeing the talks. Some of the highlights are showcased on pages 8-10 and 31-33. To hear scientists describe their latest work – whether building liquid xenon detectors for dark matter, or using hot water to drill through the Antarctic ice sheet – is a thrill and a huge privilege. Rock-star palaeoanthropologist Lee Berger was the standout for
me. His story of discovering Homo naledi at the bottom of a suffocatingly narrow shaft in a cave in South Africa is one he tells brilliantly and with sparkling humour (see page 9). But every talk I went to inspired me. After hearing Joe Pecorelli at the Zoological Society of London talk about the citizen science behind the return of eels and seahorses to the Thames, I feel so differently about the murky river that I walk past most days – for all that its crabs are now stuffed full of microplastics (see page 8). We know that not all of you –
our Australian and US readers for example – are able to make it to a show in London . We are working on this, but in the meantime, we did film all the stages this year, and we will put the talks online for subscribers as soon as we can. For those of you within striking distance of London, please put 15-18 October next year into your diaries. We’ll be doing it all again – just with barrel-loads more new science. Emily Wilson
19 October 2019 | New Scientist | 3
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The leader
Uncertain times
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We can all combat the feeling of being unable to control our destiny “THE only certainty is that nothing is certain”, wrote Pliny the Elder with classical authority in his Natural History. Later, more waggish sources added death and taxes to the list, but the passage of time has done little to diminish the original sentiment. Indeed, modern life seems to have elevated gnawing insecurity to an art form. Whether it is awaiting a diagnosis or the result of an interview, trying to get pregnant or completing on a house sale, few of us haven’t felt that sense of limbo: of a fate in the balance, determined by forces outside our control. The UK has even been experimenting with making it a form of national psychosis with its failure to decide on its future relationship with the European Union. Good, then, that psychologists are beginning to gain insights into the
Not knowing what’s going on affects us all differently
effects of a state of limbo on our mental well-being, and how to combat them (page 42). It seems that our ability to contend with uncertainty in our lives has got worse in recent decades. Our “intolerance of uncertainty” falls somewhere on a sliding scale, with those who are least able to cope at highest risk of developing anxiety disorders. Those insights give us new ways to protect ourselves: old but good ones, such as mindfulness and distraction
techniques, and also new ones, such as identifying the subconscious safety behaviours we use against uncertainty, which probably make things worse. The good news is that the research shows that going through periods of huge uncertainty, like Brexit, might actually make people more resilient to the smaller things. That is supported by the recent UN-backed World Happiness Report, which claims that the people of the UK are actually getting happier. None of which should encourage us to seek out limbo when our fate lies in our hands. Paralysing concern about our planet’s uncertain future has recently gained a name: eco-anxiety. Protest movements such as Extinction Rebellion are at least countering this resigned apathy (page 23). Certain uncertainties are best met with action. ❚
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News Plastic pollution Crabs in the Thames river have stomachs full of plastic p8
Lyme disease Are prolonged cases really chronic fatigue syndrome? p12
Eternal wormhole Quantum weirdness means stargates could persist p14
Deep-sea bacteria Angler fish may shed luminous microbes p15
Green economy The US has 10 times more green jobs than fossil fuel jobs p16
Pregnancy
XINHUA/ALAMY
Pollution linked to miscarriage risk
Marathon milestone Eliud Kipchoge’s historic sub-2-hour marathon comes years ahead of sport scientists’ predictions, reports Adam Vaughan TWO years after missing out on a 2-hour marathon by only 25 seconds, Eliud Kipchoge has become the first person ever to run 42.2 kilometres in less than 2 hours. He ended the run in Vienna, Austria, on 12 October, smiling and pointing to the crowd as he accelerated through the final kilometre to finish in 1:59:40. The feat won’t be recognised as an official world marathon record because it wasn’t a race and the elite athlete was assisted by a pace car and a rotating team of 41 pacemakers. Nevertheless, Kipchoge’s achievement is undoubtedly historic. And the following day, Brigid Kosgei set a women’s
world marathon record of 2:14:04 in the Chicago Marathon. These feats show how far sports science has come. “Many of the leading scientists didn’t really see [a sub-2-hour marathon] happening in the next couple of years,” says Stephen Mears at Loughborough University, UK. The marathon record was just under 3 hours at the start of the 20th century, but it quickly fell in the following decades due to improvements in technology, training and nutrition, says Mears. Roger Bannister broke the 4-minute mile in part because of interval training, for example. There have been other developments too, such as a growing grasp of the role our
minds play in capping athletic performance. Mears describes Kipchoge as a “once-in-a-lifetime athlete”. He probably has superb VO2 max – the maximum amount of oxygen the body can utilise – and exceptional running economy, meaning he uses energy extremely efficiently. Kipchoge’s second effort at sub-2-hours involved small improvements to many different aspects of the race, says Mears. The formation of pacers around him was precisely tweaked and the car was slightly further ahead than before. The drinking strategy was different, the weather better, the course flatter, his shoes slightly modified – and this time there was a supporting crowd. ❚
HIGH levels of air pollution may increase the chance of a missed miscarriage, according to data from pregnant women living and working in Beijing, China. A missed or silent miscarriage is when a fetus dies or stops developing during pregnancy, usually without any symptoms. Such miscarriages tend to happen in the first trimester, and can be picked up on 12-week scans. Little is known about what causes them. Liqiang Zhang at Beijing Normal University and his colleagues assessed the health records of 17,500 women in Beijing who had a missed miscarriage in their first trimester. They also collected data on the levels of air pollutants close to where the women lived and worked. Those exposed to higher levels of air pollution had an increased risk of a missed miscarriage. The team didn’t directly test if the link was causal, but there is growing evidence that air pollutants
“There is growing evidence that air pollutants can reach a developing fetus” can reach and potentially harm a developing fetus (Nature Sustainability, doi.org/dcnh). Zhang’s team also found that, since China’s government issued rules to reduce pollution in 2013, air pollutant levels have declined, as has the risk of missed miscarriage. ❚ 19 October 2019 | New Scientist | 7
News
2019
Space exploration
First ever UK moon rover It will have legs, not wheels, to help it explore even the most difficult lunar terrain, reports Leah Crane
SpaceBit CEO Pavlo Tanasyuk (left) unveiled a model of the tiny lunar rover (above) at New Scientist Live last week
JAMES WINSPEAR
THE first moon rover to originate from the UK is going to be tiny. SpaceBit, a UK-based start-up, announced last week that it is set to have its lander touch down on the lunar surface in 2021. In May, NASA said that US space robotics firm Astrobotic and two other companies had been awarded funding to build lunar landers. Astrobotic was given $79.5 million to carry up to 14 NASA instruments to the moon, as well as 14 payloads from other partners, including private companies and other nations. SpaceBit will be one of those partners, sending its small lunar rover to the surface inside Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander. Weighing just 1 kilogram, the rover is the smallest lunar rover ever, according to SpaceBit. Once the lander reaches the moon, the rover will drop from beneath it along with other payloads. “It’s going to be quite a spectacle when we land, because we’re going to have multiple small rovers dropping and rolling or crawling
“It’s going to be quite a spectacle. We’ll have multiple small rovers dropping and walking off” or walking off and taking all kinds of pictures and data,” says Astrobotic CEO John Thornton. The rovers will send their data to the lander, which will then transmit the findings back to Earth.
The SpaceBit rover will be unlike the others aboard the lander: instead of using wheels, it will walk around the moon’s surface on legs. It is expected to move only about 10 metres. But SpaceBit hopes that the legs will help future generations of rovers explore tubular caves on the moon created by ancient lava flows, which hasn’t been done before. Some have suggested that
these caves could be sites for future moon settlements. “The legs could be better for steep, rocky terrain and basically any place where wheels start to struggle,” says Thornton. SpaceBit founder and CEO Pavlo Tanasyuk announced details of the mission at New Scientist Live on 10 October and the firm also displayed a life-sized model of the rover at the show. ❚
through their system quickly, the material seems to remain inside crabs. “We find crabs are a very unusual sink for plastics. They seem to retain a lot of them for potentially a long time. We don’t know if they are predated on, and if that high dose is delivered to other animals,” said McGoran.
However, she did find some fish had eaten juvenile crabs, so if those crabs were as contaminated as the adults, that would mean fish were consuming a lot of plastic too. It is impossible to say how many Thames crabs might have died from ingesting plastic, said McGoran. However, studies suggest the contamination does have negative impacts on the animals, including impaired growth due to reduced food intake. Compared with the crabs, shrimp in the Thames seem to be largely unaffected. Only six out of 100 brown shrimp examined had plastic in their digestive system. ❚ Adam Vaughan
Crabs found with stomachs full of discarded plastic SHOCKING amounts of plastic are being ingested by crabs in the Thames river in the UK, and it may be passed up through the food chain to other species. A UK team surveying the river looked at 55 shore crabs (Carcinus maenas) and 57 Chinese mitten crabs (Eriocheir sinensis, pictured), and discovered that almost every one had plastic in their stomach, intestines or gills. Much of it was so tightly wound and tangled together inside the gastric mill –the relatively 8 | New Scientist | 19 October 2019
small stomach inside these crabs – that the plastic fibres completely filled it. “What is particularly shocking is, not only are they filling the stomach, but they can be made up of over 100 fibres [in each crab], so they are very highly contaminated,” said Alexandra McGoran of London’s Natural History Museum, speaking at New Scientist Live on 11 October. In one crab, McGoran found the telltale chequered pattern of plastic from a sanitary pad, meaning that in this case she was able to identify exactly where it had come from. Unlike Thames fish, many of which have been found to have eaten plastic that then passes
MIKE LANE/NATURIMAGES
Pollution
2019 Human evolution
Drugs
Another shake-up for humanity’s ancient family tree?
CBD capsules may treat cannabis addiction
Alison George
Clare Wilson and Jason Arunn Murugesu
FOSSIL skeletons found embedded in rock at a site in South Africa may be about to once more rewrite our understanding of ancient humans. “We have another major hominin discovery,” revealed renowned palaeoanthropologist Lee Berger at New Scientist Live. In the past decade, Berger, who is at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, and his team have discovered two new species of human ancestor. In 2010, Berger and his then 9-year-old son found the remains of a new species of human in the hills north of Johannesburg. This was Australopithecus sediba, which lived around 2 million years ago and could be our closest ape-like ancestor. Then, in 2013, Berger hit the jackpot again, with thousands of fossil bones found deep inside the Rising Star cave system, also near Johannesburg. These turned out to belong to a new species of small-brained hominin called Homo naledi, which lived very recently, around 250,000 years ago, and has a strange mix of modern and archaic features. Speaking on 12 October, Berger said his third major discovery involves hominin fossils found near the Rising Star caves. These bones haven’t yet been excavated due to the challenging nature of their location. So could this be another new species? “I don’t know. We haven’t got them out of the rock yet,” Berger told New Scientist. “All I have is a glimpse of several individuals.” The large jaw and teeth mean that the skeletons don’t belong to H. naledi or A. sebida, he said. Early next year we can also expect a study that reveals a relationship between H. naledi and another species, says Berger. “That will be big news,” he says. “These are exciting times.” ❚
FOR people who are addicted to cannabis, one treatment option may be, paradoxically, to take pills that contain an extract of the drug. The first test of the idea has found that people taking capsules of this extract, known as cannabidiol (CBD), nearly halved the amount of cannabis they smoked, according to results presented at New Scientist Live on 12 October. Cannabis is often seen as a soft drug, but according to one estimate about one in 10 people can become addicted, getting withdrawal symptoms such as anxiety when they try to stop using it. The number of those seeking treatment because they can’t quit smoking cannabis has been rising in the past decade, linked with use of the more potent form known as skunk, said Val Curran of University
SEASTOCK/GETTY IMAGES
Cannabis plants contain the chemical cannabidiol
College London at the event. There are two main psychoactive substances in cannabis, one of which is CBD. The other compound is tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), which is responsible for the drug’s high. While THC tends to increase anxiety, CBD calms. “CBD gets rid of the toxic effects of THC,” said Curran. Her team ran a trial, in which people took CBD for four weeks to alleviate withdrawal symptoms to help them quit smoking cannabis. It involved 82 people classed as severely addicted to the drug, who were given one of three different doses of CBD in capsule form or a placebo. All of them also had psychological support. The middle dose of 400 milligrams worked best, said Curran. After six months, it halved the amount of cannabis people used compared with placebo, as shown by tests for THC in their urine. The highest dose of 800 milligrams
was slightly less effective than the middle one. The lowest dose didn’t work. The 400 milligram dose also more than doubled the number of days when people had no THC in their urine. “That’s really remarkable,” said Curran. A previous study has shown that people can also be helped to quit smoking cannabis by treatment with Sativex,
“Some cannabis users become addicted, getting withdrawal symptoms when they try to stop” a cannabis extract with both CBD and THC, deployed in a similar way to nicotine replacement therapy for tobacco users. There could be advantages to using CBD alone, says Iain McGregor at the University of Sydney, Australia, who helped run the Sativex study. “CBD has a variety of anti-addictive properties.” McGregor’s team is also investigating CBD as a treatment for alcohol addiction. “Two of the main features during alcohol detoxification are severe anxiety and risk of seizures. We think CBD has very strong anxiety-reducing properties,” he says. Curran’s team has also found preliminary evidence that CBD may help people to give up smoking tobacco. CBD supplements are increasingly sold in pharmacies and health food shops as remedies for a range of illnesses, but at much lower doses than those used in Curran’s trial. And most of the health claims made for them aren’t based on evidence. “If anyone can’t stop smoking cannabis, I would advise people to seek medical assistance,” says McGregor. ❚ 19 October 2019 | New Scientist | 9
News
2019
Technology
The surrealist art of Twitter bots Three bots that generate New Scientist-inspired headlines unveiled Leah Crane
AUTOMATED accounts on social media platforms have been accused of many abuses, including large-scale political manipulation, but they aren’t all bad. Speaking at New Scientist Live on 12 October, Tony Veale from University College Dublin, Ireland, and Mike Cook from Queen Mary University of London argued that bots can also be forces for good. For example, many Twitter bots created for fun or art don’t pretend to be human, unlike those with more serious or sinister aims. These bots often follow in the footsteps of surrealist artists, working to make the everyday seem new and fascinating, said Veale. “When a bot strives to be creative, people respond creatively,” he said. People choose to follow bots to see how they subvert our expectations by building language algorithmically rather than intuitively, he said. Cook shared a number of examples, including a bot that tweeted every word from the dictionary in order, provoking startling engagement with certain
words. Notably, “butt” received far more retweets than the average. “Lots of people in our field see this as the future of creativity,” said Cook. Anyone with a basic knowledge of coding can build a bot, and its success relies on how others interact with it. “Some of the best bots are incredibly simple. It’s really about how it works in the space that it’s in,” he said.
Cook also demonstrated three Twitter bots that he had created for the event. All three use a set of 45,000 New Scientist headlines that have appeared online since 2003 to build new headlines, but each bot uses a different method. The first bot (@NewerScientist1) uses a neural network that learns from the original headlines to generate strange new ones, including gems such as “Self-destruction of the brain power” and “Inside the most powerful thing”.
A bot-created headline that splices together bits of previous New Scientist ones
The second (@NewerScientist2) uses a Markov chain, which works by learning what words generally go together in New Scientist headlines and combining them
“One dictionary-tweeting bot provoked startling engagement when it posted the word ‘butt’” in common orders. Its output includes “Global warming: Will the anaconda or the ‘Garbage of Eden’?” and “A total solar eclipse with non-addictive cigarettes by alien worlds without words”. The final bot (@NewerScientist3) uses a simpler protocol similar to cut-and-paste methods used in songwriting by artists like David Bowie. Cook divided the headlines into lists of topics; the bot replaces words from a headline under one topic with words from another. Its output included headlines such as “There may already be crows on Mars”, “Tiny pebbles may be the reason most politicians spin in the same direction” and “Leopards that live in memes are protecting people from rabies”. ❚
Knowledge
NEW SCIENTIST readers are more knowledgeable than the general public and experts on certain issues, but don’t score much better than monkeys would on some questions. “To score worse than monkeys requires misconceptions,” Ola Rosling, author of Factfulness, told attendees of New Scientist Live on 10 October. Most people are not only ignorant of some basic facts about the world, they don’t even 10 | New Scientist | 19 October 2019
realise they are ignorant, he said. For example, about 88 per cent of children around the world are now vaccinated against at least one disease, but most people think the figure is much lower. When asked if this proportion is around 20, 50 or 80 per cent, only about 15 per cent of people in countries such as the US and the UK get the answer right in Rosling’s surveys. At a recent world health summit, only 27 per cent of attendees got it right. Nobel laureates and medical scientists would be outsmarted by monkeys randomly picking answers, he said. New Scientist readers do a bit
better, though. In an online survey, 46 per cent of New Scientist readers correctly answered the vaccination question. On climate, they excelled. When asked what climate experts believe will happen to global temperatures over the next 100 years – grow warmer,
SEREGRAFF/GETTY IMAGES
Congratulations: you are (a bit) smarter than average
Nobel laureates would be outsmarted by monkeys on some questions about the world
cooler or stay the same – 99 per cent opted for the right answer. In other surveys, the proportion answering correctly has ranged from 94 per cent in Hungary to just 76 per cent in Japan. In the US, 81 per cent get it right and 87 per cent do so in the UK. But on questions about endangered species and world population trends, New Scientist readers fared worse. Overall, they got 3.9 out of 12 questions right. “That’s on par with monkeys,” said Rosling. The average score is just 2.2. ❚ Michael Le Page
Discovery Tours USA
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DAY 4: HONOKOHAU NATIONAL PARK Kaloko-Honokohau is the site of an ancient Hawaiian settlement, comprising of historic temples, fishponds and petroglyphs. The park is also renowned for its walking trails, geological features. and opportunity to observe turtles. DAY 5: MAUI Explore one of the most unique ocean reef systems in Hawaii. Snorkel in this known sea turtle habitat among hundred-year-old coral gardens and sail through the Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary, spotting humpback whales, spinner dolphins, Hawaiian monk seals and reef fish. DAY 6: LANAI Wake up to views of the tranquil island of Lanai and prepare for a full day of water and land-based excursions. Hike to Puu Pehe, an
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News Machine learning
Chronic Lyme disease may really be chronic fatigue
UK knew its photo checker could fail with dark skin
Clare Wilson
Adam Vaughan
MOST people who think they have a long-lasting form of Lyme disease may have chronic fatigue syndrome, said a panel of UK infectious disease experts on 9 October. Lyme disease is a potentially serious infection caused by bacteria passed on by tick bites. If untreated, it can lead to fatigue, joint pain and memory problems. But if diagnosed in time, it can be quashed with a short course of antibiotics. Some people who have persistent symptoms believe that they have a long-term infection, or chronic Lyme disease, and take long courses of antibiotics. This can lead to other infections such as sepsis.
The UK government went ahead with a face-detection system for checking passport application photos, despite knowing the technology failed to work well for people in some ethnic minorities. Face-recognition technology has a record of failing to recognise people with certain skin tones. Documents released by the Home Office last week show it was aware that these problems were likely to occur with its system too. “User research was carried out with a wide range of ethnic groups and did identify that people with very light or very dark skin found it difficult to provide an acceptable passport photograph,” the department wrote in a document released in response to a freedom of information (FOI) request, submitted by campaign group MedConfidential. “However; the overall performance was judged sufficient to deploy.” Since it went live in June 2016, some users have had problems with the service, which checks photos are suitable before they are submitted in a passport application. Joshua Bada, a black sports coach, was told by the system recently that his photo didn’t meet requirements after it mistook his lips for an open mouth. And the service wrongly suggested that Cat Hallam, a black technology officer at Keele University, UK, had her eyes closed and her mouth open. “What is very disheartening about all of this is they were aware of it,” says Hallam. “A person’s race should not be a barrier to using technology for essential public services,” says a spokesperson for the UK’s Equality and Human Rights Commission.
“Long courses of antibiotics to treat chronic Lyme disease can lead to infections such as sepsis” Matt Dryden at Hampshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust said there is a large overlap in symptoms ascribed to chronic Lyme and those of chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). “Most have CFS. What clinches it for me is that there’s a great group of these patients in Australia where [Lyme disease bacteria] have never been detected,” he said. CFS is itself controversial: some think it involves immune system problems, perhaps triggered by an infection, while others believe psychological factors contribute. “There’s so much stigma associated with chronic fatigue. Our treatments and support network [for CFS] are not great,” said Sarah Logan at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in London. Julia Knight of the patient support group Lyme Disease UK says some doctors still don’t believe there is any Lyme disease in the UK. “They are quick to label people with CFS. It could be that people with chronic Lyme are being misdiagnosed with CFS,” she says. ❚ 12 | New Scientist | 19 October 2019
PAUL ELLIS/GETTY IMAGES
Health
The Home Office says users can override the photo checker and proceed with their passport application, but observers say that misses the point. “Even with the user being able to override the selection, it is still creating a – largely racialised – disparity in experience between users,” says Os Keyes at the University of Washington, Seattle. Users may be reluctant to use the override function given that the website warns that people
“It clearly shows it wasn’t a priority for them that it would work for people with black skin” may have a problem with their application if the photo doesn’t meet the rules, says Hallam. Face-detection software is normally trained on thousands of images. If data sets used for training a system aren’t large or diverse enough, bias can result. The government said that to mitigate the issue it would “continue to conduct user
Face-recognition systems can fail if not trained on a diverse selection of faces
research and usability testing with appropriate participants to ensure that users from different ethnicities can follow the photo guidance and provide a photo that passes the photo checks”. A Home Office spokesperson told New Scientist that the department “will continue working to improve this process for all of our customers”. The government promise of “we’ll fix it later” is “a depressingly common response to people pointing out biases in technology”, says Keyes. Samir Jeraj at the Race Equality Foundation says: “It clearly shows it wasn’t a priority for them that it would work for people with black skin.” The government should be clearer about what improvements it will make, he says. And it wouldn’t cost the Passport Office anything to put a note on its website acknowledging the issue, he says. ❚
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News Botany
Trees from a fantasy scene California’s weird trees are captured in an award-winning image
AT FIRST glance, the velvety grey that trims the gnarled branches of this Monterey cypress tree might look like snow. But this otherworldly scene is the result of algae and lichen growth and occurs at only one place in the world: a protected coastal zone in the Point Lobos State Natural Reserve in California. The image, taken by Zorica Kovacevic, is a 2019 Wildlife Photographer of the Year winner, announced this week. Run by the Natural History Museum in London, the competition showcases the world’s best nature photography. The spongy orange growths on the branches are a green alga that has been coloured by carotenoid pigments. Although abundant in nature, it is found on Monterey cypresses only at Point Lobos, where clean air and moisture create ideal conditions for growth. The snow-like deposits are a lace lichen. ❚
ZORICA KOVACEVIC/WILDLIFE PHOTOGRAPHER OF THE YEAR
Donna Lu
Cosmology
Wormholes could last as long as the universe FANCY a trip down a wormhole? Calculations suggest that this might be possible, because these portals through space-time could stick around forever. Wormholes are essentially a pair of connected black holes. Two types could theoretically exist. A non-traversable wormhole is like a room with two doors that can be used only from the outside – the doors are black holes through which things can enter, but never escape. “These are not very interesting, as any astronaut who is brave enough to venture in won’t be able to make it back to tell the story,” says Diandian Wang at the University of California, Santa Barbara. 14 | New Scientist | 19 October 2019
Traversable wormholes are also possible, but until now we didn’t know whether they could exist for long enough for anything to pass through them. For such a wormhole to form, space-time needs to spontaneously change shape. In classical physics, this can’t happen. But the rules of quantum mechanics allow space-time to do so for brief periods. Wang worked on a scenario involving string theory, in which the fundamental ingredient of reality is tiny strings. If one of these strings breaks, it can create a traversable wormhole with black hole-like portals either end that allow both entry and exit.
Although researchers had shown that this was a possibility before, it seemed that the energy involved would always snap the wormhole. Now, Wang and his team have calculated that the curvature of space-time could counteract this
“Any astronaut brave enough to venture in won’t be able to make it back to tell the story” acceleration, keeping the pseudo black holes static and allowing the throat of the wormhole to remain open (Classical and Quantum Gravity, doi.org/dchc). This scenario is extremely
unlikely, and becomes even more unlikely the longer the wormhole is and the larger the black holes are. Thanks to quantum mechanics, though, the probability of it happening isn’t zero. Wang’s team also calculated that, once a traversable wormhole exists, it could remain stable for at least as long as the universe has been around. The work shows how wormholes could be created from scratch, says Aron Wall at the University of Cambridge. But he points out that they couldn’t be used to time travel or move faster than light. ❚ Chelsea Whyte
Physics
Oceans
Helical engine could break the laws of nature
Anglerfish may collect their glowing bacteria
Jon Cartwright
Michael Marshall
SOMETHING strange is going on in the deep sea. Luminous bacteria have teamed up with predatory anglerfish, which seem to use the glowing microbes to help catch prey. The bacteria have evolved to depend on the anglerfish, yet they may spend much of their time floating freely in the water. Anglerfish have large teeth, and protruding from the heads of females is a long, thin growth called an esca, which resembles a fishing line. Its tip is often luminous, and might help some anglerfish living in the pitch-black deep sea to lure in prey. But we don’t know for sure, says Tory Hendry at Cornell University in New York. Anglerfish biology is so mysterious that the only evidence we have that the esca is a lure is that it looks like it should be one, she says. Hendry and her team are now beginning to throw some light on anglerfish ecology, with a particular focus on the luminous bacteria living in their escas. They previously found that these bacteria have lost about 50 per cent of their DNA, and with it many abilities. “They rely on
to relativistic speeds during one stroke and decelerated during the other. Burns thinks it would make sense for the engine to essentially be a helical particle accelerator. It would need to be big: 200 metres long and 12 metres in diameter. It would also require 165 megawatts of power to generate just 1 newton of thrust, about the same force you use to type on a keyboard.
200m
Length of particle accelerator needed in a helical engine For that reason, the engine would reach meaningful speeds only in the frictionless environment of space. “The engine itself would be able to get to 99 per cent the speed of light if you had enough time and power,” says Burns. Propellant-less proposals aren’t new. For example, in the early 2000s, British inventor Roger Shawyer proposed the EM drive, which he claimed could convert microwaves into thrust. The concept hasn’t been demonstrated and is widely assumed to violate the laws of physics. “All inertial propulsion systems, to my knowledge, never worked in a friction-free environment,” says Martin Tajmar at the Dresden University of Technology in Germany. Burns’s machine makes use of special relativity, unlike the EM drive, which complicates the picture, says Tajmar. Burns, who worked on his design without NASA sponsorship, admits his concept is inefficient, but says it might be improved by harvesting wasted heat energy. ❚
Anglerfish employ glowing bacteria in their “fishing rods”
DOUG PERRINE/GETTY IMAGES
ALL space rockets operate on the principle of action-reaction: by blasting material one way, they travel in the opposite one. But one NASA engineer believes he could take us to the stars without any propellant at all. The “helical engine” designed by David Burns at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama exploits mass-altering effects that occur at close to light speed. Burns has posted a paper describing the concept on NASA’s technical reports server. It has been met with scepticism, but Burns believes his concept is worth pursuing. “If someone says it doesn’t work, I’ll be the first to say ‘it was worth a shot’,” he says. To get a sense of Burns’s engine, picture a box on a frictionless surface. Inside is a rod, along which a ring can slide. If a spring inside the box gives the ring a push, the ring will slide along the rod one way while the box recoils in the other direction. When the ring reaches the end of the box, it will bounce back, and the box’s recoil direction will switch too. This is actionreaction, or Isaac Newton’s third law of motion. In normal circumstances, it restricts the box to wiggling on the spot. But, Burns asks, what if the ring’s mass is much greater when it slides in one direction than the other? Then it would give the box a greater kick at one end than the other and the box would accelerate forwards. Einstein’s theory of special relativity says objects gain mass as they are driven towards the speed of light. In fact, a simplistic implementation of Burns’s concept would be to replace the ring with a circular particle accelerator, in which ions are swiftly accelerated
glucose from the host,” she says. This discovery implied that the bacteria spend all their lives inside anglerfish, but Hendry and her colleagues have now overturned this. They sequenced the DNA of the bacteria found in the escas of seven anglerfish species. One species of anglerfish had its own unique bacteria, but all the others shared the same species of symbiotic bacteria. The only explanation is that the bacteria live in the water and the anglerfish collect them, says Hendry. This implies the bacteria are widespread, because anglerfish from both the North Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico had the same species (eLife, doi.org/dchh). “There has to be an environmental pool that all these fish are getting their symbionts from,” says Hendry. The team found that the bacteria have lost many genes, making it harder for them to survive alone. Why might this be? It may not be an adaptation, says Hendry. The team also found signs of rogue pieces of DNA called transposable elements, which can disrupt genes and may have triggered the losses. The secret to the bacteria’s survival could lie in a chemical called polyhydroxybutyrate (PHB). Many bacteria use it to store carbon for lean periods. Hendry says the bacteria may accumulate glucose from anglerfish, then store it as PHB and live off that when they return to the water. She speculates that some anglerfish may even seed the water with bacteria. They have mysterious knobs on their back that also hold bacteria, but which are opaque so they can’t glow. “We know they have a pore on them, so presumably the bacteria can leave the host and go out into the environment,” says Hendry. ❚ 19 October 2019 | New Scientist | 15
News Genetics
Depression alters brain structure Many differences seem to be the result of the condition rather than its cause Jessica Hamzelou
exception: differences in a brain structure called the anterior thalamic radiation appear to come before depression (bioRxiv, doi.org/dcmk). This suggests the
“It might be that people with depression don’t use some brain connections other people would use”
ZEPHYR/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
YOUR brain looks different if you have depression. But many of the differences seem to be caused by depression, rather than precede it. When neuroscientists compare the brains of people with and without depression, there are common dissimilarities. For example, people with depression tend to have a smaller hippocampus, a brain region important in forming memories. But it has been difficult to work out whether such differences cause the symptoms of depression or result from the disorder, says Heather Whalley at the University of Edinburgh, UK. To answer the question, she and her colleagues turned to two huge genetic databases. Consumer genetic testing company 23andMe holds information on the DNA and depressive symptoms of tens of thousands of individuals, and the UK Biobank collects DNA, lifestyle and behaviour questionnaires and brain scans from thousands more. They used this, as well as earlier research, to create a polygenic risk score (PRS) for depression. A PRS assigns weight to various genetic
well. White matter is the tissue that makes up most of our brains. Whalley and her colleagues then analysed how closely both brain structure and symptoms of depression were related to genetic factors. Genes are present from birth, so if genetic factors are more closely linked to symptoms, for example, that suggests the symptoms were present before the brain structure differences. They found that many brain differences appear to be caused by depression. There was one
White matter tissue is found throughout our brains
factors thought to contribute to the risk of a condition. They made sure the PRS worked by testing it in a separate group of 11,214 people. The team then assessed the brain scans and behaviour records of people with a PRS that put them at risk of depression. People with higher genetic risk tended to have less white matter in their brains, and it didn’t seem to function as
genes that puts a person at risk of depression do so via this structure. Whalley’s team also found that a combination of childhood trauma and poverty leaves individuals at greatest risk of depression. Behaviours linked to depression could end up impacting the brain’s white matter connections more generally, says Maxime Taquet at the University of Oxford. “It might be that patients with depression… do not use some of the brain connections that other people would use,” he says. Being socially withdrawn, or focusing more on the negative than the positive, could have an effect, he says. “We know that if we don’t use a pathway in the brain, that pathway starts to shrink.” ❚
US green economy jobs eclipse those in fossil fuel industry THE green economy has grown so much in the US that it employs around 10 times as many people as the fossil fuel industry – despite the past decade’s oil and gas boom. The fossil fuel sector, from coal mines to gas power plants, employed around 900,000 people in the US in 2015-16, government figures show. But Lucien Georgeson and Mark Maslin at University College London found that over 16 | New Scientist | 19 October 2019
the same period this was vastly outweighed by the green economy, which provided nearly 9.5 million jobs, or 4 per cent of the working age population. The pair defined the green economy broadly, covering everything from renewable energy to environmental consultancy. Their analysis showed the green economy is worth $1.3 trillion, or about 7 per cent of US GDP (Palgrave Communications, DOI: 10.1057/s41599-019-0329-3). The figures don’t cover the presidency of Donald Trump, who promised to protect coal mining jobs and exploit oil and gas
DEREK MEIJER/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
Environment Green economy jobs include everything from installing solar panels to environmental consultancy
resources. But Maslin says the figures show that Trump’s policy is economically misguided. “The Trump administration with the ‘America first’ approach of ‘fossil fuels are good’, is stupid when it comes to economics. If you want to be a hard-nosed
neoliberal economist you would say, ‘Let’s support the green economy as much as possible.’” The US stopped recording green job statistics several years ago, but these suggested 3.4 million people worked in the sector in 2011. Maslin and Georgeson used a much broader set of 26 sub-sectors including wind and solar power, marine pollution controls, carbon capture, biodiversity and air pollution. Maslin says the figures have been underestimated in the past, partly because the green economy is so diffuse. ❚ Adam Vaughan
Evolution
Early life may have had genes made from urine chemical
Ancestors of mammals retained cold blood
Michael Marshall
Michael Marshall
WHEN the first life emerged on Earth, it may have had a helping hand from an unexpected source: urea, a chemical found in urine. The urea may have been used to make the first simple genes. Life on Earth began at least 3.5 billion years ago. Nobody knows exactly how, but it is likely that one of the most crucial steps was the formation of the first genes. Today, most organisms store their genes on DNA, but this is such a complex molecule that many scientists believe life must have begun with something simpler. “We argue, let’s start with just two molecules, formaldehyde and urea,” says Thomas Carell at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany. Both are simple and are likely to have existed on early Earth. Carell and his team had already shown that formaldehyde can be converted into sugars, including ribose – a key component of a DNA-like molecule called RNA – so they then focused on urea. The researchers knew that simply heating urea causes individual urea molecules to link up into pairs and triplets. They mixed these ureabased molecules with ribose and water, heated them to 95°C until the mixture dried out, then added more water. This simulated a volcanic pond evaporating in the sun, then filling up again. The result was molecules similar to nucleosides, another component of RNA. Follow-up experiments showed that they could be inserted into RNA molecules in place of the normal nucleosides. Crucially, the nucleosides in RNA can pair up with each other and the urea nucleosides could also do this, suggesting they could be used as genes for storing genetic information (Angewandte Chemie, doi.org/dchm). “It’s certainly a molecule that we could consider as an ancestor of RNA,” says Carell. ❚
OUR mammal ancestors were cold-blooded for tens of millions of years after their first appearance. In this respect, they remained similar to the cold-blooded reptiles from which they evolved. The finding comes from an analysis of fossils of two early mammal-like species, which suggests the animals lived relatively long lives and had slow metabolisms – both reptile-like traits. The first mammals evolved during the dinosaur era. By the middle of the Jurassic, around 170 million years ago, they were common. However, we don’t know if they were warm-blooded, or endothermic, because this trait leaves no obvious traces behind in the fossil record. To find out when warmbloodedness evolved, Elis Newham at the University of Bristol in the UK and his colleagues studied two animals from 200 million years ago in the Early Jurassic, Morganucodon and Kuehneotherium. Both were mammaliaforms, meaning they may have been related to
MAGDALENA REHOVA/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
Origin of life
mammals without technically belonging to the group. Newham’s team studied the roots of the animals’ teeth. The roots had a hard coating called cementum, as ours do. New layers were added as the animal aged, so counting the layers gave an estimate of its age – a bit like counting tree rings. Based on 61 specimens, the researchers estimated that Morganucodon could live for 14 years and Kuehneotherium
inside them through which blood vessels once flowed, they could conclude that the animal had a low rate of blood flow through its thigh bones. This, too, suggests a slow metabolism and cold-bloodedness (bioRxiv, doi.org/dchk). The findings fit with other studies of protomammals, says Rachel Wallace at the University of Texas at Austin. “There really isn’t good indirect evidence for endothermy until more recent mammalian taxa, where actual fur is preserved.” The oldest mammal known to have fur is Morganucodon’s lifespan in years, the beaver-like Castorocauda suggesting it was cold-blooded from the Middle Jurassic, about 164 million years ago. for nine. That is a long time for a The new finding is small mammal: mice rarely live striking because, in other more than three years. However, respects, Morganucodon and Kuehneotherium were it isn’t unusual for a small mammal-like, says Eva reptile like a lizard. It indicates Hoffman at Harvard University. that the animals had slow For instance, Morganucodon metabolisms, suggesting they were cold-blooded, as mammals had both a big brain and a modern-looking skeleton. need fast metabolisms to “That these advanced maintain their body heat. mammaliaforms still lived more The researchers also like reptiles than like mammals examined fossil thigh bones reflects a mosaic pattern of belonging to Morganucodon. evolution, in which some By comparing the length of the ancestral features are retained bones to the area of openings even as novel features evolve,” she says. Hoffman says the protomammals may have been similar to the most primitive living mammals: monotremes, such as the duck-billed platypus. Unlike other mammals, these animals still lay eggs. “Monotremes have pretty long lifespans and relatively low metabolic rates,” she says. There is also evidence that they aren’t fully warm-blooded. ❚
14
Morganucodon might have been a coldblooded creature 19 October 2019 | New Scientist | 17
News In brief Health
Eating out can bring a side serving of suspect chemicals
THE PICTURE PANTRY / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
PEOPLE who eat home-cooked meals have lower levels of potentially harmful chemicals in their blood. Tools used to prepare restaurant and takeaway meals and some packaging may be to blame. PFAS, short for perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a group of synthetic chemicals that are resistant to heat and don’t easily degrade. Because of this, they are used in some cookware and stain-resistant materials. Studies in the US have found the chemicals in the blood of 97 to 100 per cent of adults and children. Diet is thought to be a key factor. To investigate further, Laurel Schaider at the Silent Spring Institute in Massachusetts looked at how eating habits affect PFAS levels. Schaider and her colleagues analysed data from more than Wildlife
THE controversial killing of thousands of badgers to prevent them spreading disease to cattle risks making it worse. The animals roam further when culling begins, raising the chance of transmission. The UK government has been working with farmers since 2013 to shoot badgers across England in a bid to reduce the spread of bovine tuberculosis (TB) to cattle farms. Infected cows must be destroyed, which costs the government around £100 million a year in compensation. Last month, the cull was expanded. Scientists have warned of unintended negative side effects from culling for years. Now, a team led by Cally Ham at the Zoological Society of London has found that badgers increased the area they range in by 61 per cent after culling started, increasing the risk of bovine TB reaching cattle. “We 18 | New Scientist | 19 October 2019
Space
know that direct badger to cattle contact is rare,” says Ham. “But if the badger goes in more fields, it could spread its infection further, through defecation or urination.” She also discovered that badgers spent around an hour and a half less outside their setts each night after culling began, making the cull harder. The reason may be that, with fewer badgers around, food is more plentiful and successful hunts take less time. Previous studies had suggested that badgers move around more in response to a cull, but had only looked at badgers before and after the cull. In contrast, Ham and her team fitted trackers to 67 badgers in north Cornwall between 2013 and 2017. Their study is the first to observe real-time movements of individual badgers (Journal of Applied Ecology, doi.org/dcgn). Ham says vaccinating badgers avoids the problems a cull brings. Efforts are under way to start a large vaccination programme in Cornwall. Adam Vaughan
Move over Jupiter, Saturn is moon king THE solar system has a new champion. The discovery of 20 additional satellites around Saturn means the ringed giant has passed Jupiter as the planet with the most known moons: 82 to Jupiter’s 79. The new additions are all about 5 kilometres across. They were spotted by a team led by Scott Sheppard at Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington DC. Only three of the 20 moons are
NASA
Badger cull to avert TB could backfire
10,000 participants in the US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey from 2003 to 2014. Participants provided blood and information on food sources. PFAS were detected in three out of every four samples. Levels were lower in those who ate more meals at home, and higher among those who ate out or ate more fast food. For every 1000 kilocalories of food eaten from non-restaurant sources each day, the concentration of PFAS dropped by up to five per cent. Microwave popcorn raised levels, possibly due to chemicals in packaging (Environmental Health Perspectives, doi.org/dcg2). There is some evidence to suggest PFAS may cause cancer and weight gain, and affect fertility, child development and the immune system. Ruby Prosser Scully
prograde, meaning they orbit Saturn (pictured) in the same direction as the planet spins. Of the rest, one has the widest orbit of any of Saturn’s known moons. Most of the objects seem to be clustered in two groups, each of which probably came from a parent moon that was smashed apart. Two of the prograde moons have the tightest orbits of the new haul, taking about two years to circle Saturn. All the others take more than three years. As we find more of these small moons, we also learn about the larger parent moons that orbited earlier in our solar system’s history. That can help us figure out how the planets formed and what their environments were like then. There is now a competition to name the moons, with specific rules. Two must be named after giants from Inuit mythology. Another 17 must be named after giants from Norse lore. And one must be named after a giant from Gallic mythology. Leah Crane
New Scientist Daily Get the latest scientific discoveries in your inbox newscientist.com/sign-up Ancient humans
Really brief GEORGETTE DOUWMA/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
Cave people used bones as a food store OUR distant ancestors had the foresight to put aside bones from animals so they could eat the fatty marrow later. This is the first evidence that ancient humans delayed eating food and indicates they could plan ahead. Ran Barkai at Tel Aviv University in Israel and his team analysed more than 80,000 animal bone specimens from Qesem cave in Israel to determine precisely how ancient humans accessed
Corals on the brink of death can recover Marine heatwaves degrade reef-building corals, but a 16-year study of Cladocora caespitosa has shown that this endangered coral’s polyps may only look dead (Science Advances, doi.org/ dchd). They shrink and retreat into a hard skeleton, but can regrow over time, a survival strategy that is seen in ancient corals.
the bone marrow. Humans lived in this area about 200,000 to 400,000 years ago. The team noted characteristic cut marks on 78 per cent of the bone surfaces, consistent with bone preservation and delayed consumption. These result from the effort required to remove dried skin from preserved bones. The researchers also tested how bone marrow degrades over time. They exposed 79 bones from red deer to outdoor conditions, as well as a simulated indoor cave setting. Then they experimented with removing the skin and flesh from
Animal cognition
Cancer
Tumour in a dish can test chemo benefits
Twisted fridges could save energy Nickel titanium wires cool when they are twisted and then released. A model fridge based on this idea cooled water as it passed over the untwisting wire (Science, doi.org/dcmj). If scaled up, this approach could provide refrigeration that is more energy efficient than traditional compressed gas systems.
PROXYMINDER/GETTY IMAGES
Ancient DNA reveals Bronze Age slaves Slavery may have started in the Bronze Age, about 1300 years earlier than we thought. Analysis of ancient DNA from 104 individuals found generations of rich families adorned with jewellery or weapons buried with poor, unrelated people who may have been live-in slaves (Science, doi.org/gf9rmr)
the bones at various times during nine weeks of storage. The number of short incisions and marks left increased when this removal was done after four or more weeks, leaving a similar pattern to those seen on the bones from the cave. The team found that the skincovered bones could withstand nine weeks of exposure during autumn without losing a significant amount of nutritional value, but the fat within them degraded after the third week in spring and in indoor conditions (Science Advances, doi.org/dchf). Layal Liverpool
To bee the best with numbers try a stick and carrot method HONEYBEES may be better at counting when penalised for errors compared with when simply rewarded for correct answers. We already had some evidence suggesting bees can count to four. But it turns out they may be capable of understanding larger numbers. To investigate, Scarlett Howard at the University of Toulouse in France and her team trained bees to enter a chamber from where they could see two channels with images, one with an image of four shapes and the other showing one to 10 shapes. The bees were then split into two groups. The first were trained to pick the image with four shapes,
getting sweet sucrose for choosing that and bitter tasting quinine for the other image. The second group got sucrose for the four-shape image, but weren’t penalised for choosing the other image. The team then tested whether the bees could identify images of four shapes compared with five, six, seven or eight shapes. Only bees conditioned with both reward and penalty could pick the four-shape image at a level higher than would be expected by chance. This also suggests they can grasp numbers beyond four (Journal of Experimental Biology, doi.org/dcj2). Jason Arunn Murugesu
TINY organoids grown from a person’s cancer cells could help predict if chemotherapy will work. At the moment, it is difficult to know whether a chemotherapy will help an individual. Although the drugs are often lifesaving, for some they can trigger bad side effects without having any benefit. To better predict if a treatment will work, teams are turning to personalised organoids grown from clumps of cells biopsied from a person’s tumour. The idea is that the organoid serves as a lab model for that person, and the drugs that kill cells in the lab are more likely to work on their tumour. Emile Voest at the Netherlands Cancer Institute and his colleagues tested this idea using 35 organoids grown from tumour cells from people with colorectal cancer. They gave some organoids a drug called irinotecan and found it seemed to work similarly in the organoids and the individuals. Organoid use correctly predicted how eight out of 10 people responded to the drug. But the organoids failed to show if a combination of irinotecan and a drug called oxaliplatin would work. This may be because they are too simplistic a model (Science Translational Medicine, doi.org/ gf9p32). Jessica Hamzelou 19 October 2019 | New Scientist | 19
News Insight Social science
Behind closed doors Domestic violence is particularly difficult to study, but at last evidence is beginning to reveal the best way to tackle it, reports Alice Klein
20 | New Scientist | 19 October 2019
MARTIN BUREAU/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
A 2008 survey found that almost nine out of 10 New Zealanders said the ads made them feel like change was possible. Despite these apparent shifts, police call-outs for domestic violence have risen in Australia and New Zealand in recent years. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean the campaigns are failing, says Joanne Spangaro at the University of Wollongong in Australia. “It might be that people now feel safer to come forward or more confident that they’re going to be believed by the police,” she says.
Back to school
Safe refuges (above) are a commonly used intervention to protect people from domestic violence. An Australian advertising campaign (below) tried to change attitudes to abuse
© COMMONWEALTH OF AUSTRALIA 2019
DEATHS from domestic violence have hit a five-year high in the UK, with 173 people killed by a partner or relative in 2018. The newly published figures have been labelled a “national travesty” by women’s support groups, who are calling for urgent government action. “We know that these are not isolated incidents or one-offs,” says Lucy Hadley at Women’s Aid. The UK government has promised to tackle this violence through its Domestic Abuse Bill, which was introduced by former prime minister Theresa May. During its second reading this month, May said it would be important to “identify the programmes that work” before it is subjected to a final vote. But how do we know what is effective? Most domestic violence is committed by men against women – but not all. There are also examples of women hurting male partners and violence between same-sex couples. In the UK, about three-quarters of victims are women. Domestic violence is a problem beyond the UK. In Australia, on average one woman a week is killed by a current or former partner (see graphs, right). In the US, more than 1500 women were killed by their partner in 2017. Between 17 and 25 per cent of women in all three nations say they have experienced abuse at the hands of a male partner. Obtaining evidence on the best ways to stop domestic violence is difficult. People who participate in studies may be too scared to report abuse, making data unreliable. Nevertheless, we are starting to get a sense of what helps, says Michele Robinson at Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety. Domestic violence interventions conventionally involve criminal penalties for perpetrators and
counselling and shelter for those affected. Now there is an emerging focus on trying to stop the abuse before it happens, by reshaping “violence-supportive beliefs”, says Robinson. In 2016, Australia launched ads on TV, in newspapers and on buses to challenge beliefs that male violence against women is a product of “boys being boys” or women “asking for it”. A 2017 survey found that Australians were less likely to excuse violence against women than they had been in 2009, hinting that the campaign was working. For example, the proportion who agreed with the statement, “domestic violence can be excused if, afterwards, the violent person genuinely regrets what they have done” dropped from 25 per cent to 14 per cent. New Zealand introduced similar TV ads earlier, in 2007, featuring people including celebrities voicing short messages like: “It’s not OK to punch a hole in the wall to show your wife who’s boss.”
Many experts believe we also need to intervene at a young age to change sexist attitudes before they become entrenched. There is some evidence they are right. The International Center for Research on Women, a non-profit organisation based in Washington DC, found that classes on gender equality in 80 high schools in India changed the way that boys thought about gender. They were less likely to agree with statements like “a wife should always obey her husband”. Community programmes have also been found to be effective, including one called SASA! This scheme – partly named for its four phases: start, awareness, support and action – was trialled in Uganda, where more than half of all married women under the age of 50 have experienced abuse from partners. Researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine randomly assigned eight similar communities to try the programme or continue as normal. In the SASA! communities, more than 11,000 activities, including theatre performances,
Working hypothesis
More Insight online Your guide to a rapidly changing world newscientist.com/insight
12 voluntary programmes for men in the UK who had been violent and found evidence that they did help to protect the men’s partners. Each scheme lasted for a year or more and challenged participants to think about the effects of their violence, while also teaching them techniques to manage their aggression. Afterwards, their female partners reported large falls in violence. The number who reported being recently kicked, punched, beaten or burned dropped from 54 per cent to 2 per cent. The number who said
“Support for violent men is controversial. Many people believe that ‘leopards can’t change their spots’ ” they felt very safe increased from 8 per cent to 51 per cent. The programmes didn’t fix everything. Many of the women said their male partners still tried to control them psychologically after they stopped physically hurting them, for example, by reading their messages or trying to restrict where they went. Michael Roguski at New Zealand firm Kaitiaki Research and Evaluation believes we may achieve better results by looking
Australia
150 100 50
20 14 20 15 20 16 20 17 20 18
20 18
20 17
20 16
20 15
0
20 14
Number of deaths
200 UK
SOURCE: BBC RESEARCH. AUSTRALIAN BUREAU OF STATISTICS
The number of deaths due to domestic violence rose slightly in both the UK and Australia in 2018 compared with the previous year
at what worked for men who have stopped abusing their partners altogether. “For many years, their voices have been ignored, but instead of seeing them as the enemy, we can learn from their journeys of recovery,” he says. Many previously violent men have told him that the key to changing their behaviour wasn’t formal counselling, but talking to men who had stopped abusing their partners. One said that this is because counsellors “wouldn’t have understood” and that he needed to “speak to people who had walked that path and who had come out the other side all the better for it”. As a result, improving access to these positive role models may help to reduce domestic violence, says Roguski. No single strategy will halt domestic violence, but a growing body of research is pointing us in the right direction. The UK’s Domestic Abuse Bill appears to be taking this evidence into consideration – its current recommendations include a public awareness campaign designed to challenge violencesupportive beliefs, compulsory classes on respectful relationships in schools, and greater funding for perpetrator support programmes. Women’s Aid is waiting for a firm commitment that the bill will improve access to women’s refuges and other support services before fully supporting it, but welcomes the other proposed actions. We don’t know if it will reduce the number of women dying at the hands of partners, but it is a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” to try, says Hadley. ❚ Affected by domestic violence? Call the US National Domestic Violence Hotline on 1-800-7997233 or search online for local alternatives
▲ Space meat You’ll have no beef with this burger. Bovine cells have been grown on the International Space Station for the first time. ▲ Digital privacy Celebrity Coleen Rooney, the wife of footballer Wayne, found out who leaked her Instagram posts to the press using a cunning process of elimination. She’s now dubbed Wagatha Christie. ▲ Batteries The 2019 Nobel prize in chemistry went to three people who helped create the lithium-ion battery. ▼ Megalodon A study found that the largest shark of all time was probably no more than 15 metres long, 5 metres shorter than had been thought. Megalodon? More like kilolodon. ▼ Libra
WIT OLSZEWSKI/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; GETTY IMAGES
conversation groups and door-todoor discussions, were organised over five years to get people thinking and talking about domestic violence. By the end, men in these communities viewed violence against women as less acceptable and were more likely to support their female partners’ autonomy than men in those where no action was taken. Women in the SASA! communities were 52 per cent less likely to be abused by their partners. Together, these studies show it is possible to improve attitudes towards women. We don’t yet know if such shifts will translate into less violence against them. Spangaro is optimistic, because large, multi-country studies show that sexist attitudes strongly predict rates of domestic violence. Nicole Westmarland at Durham University, UK, agrees we need to prevent men becoming violent. But she says we also need strategies to help violent men change their behaviour. Support programmes for such men are controversial – many of those affected by domestic violence reckon that “leopards can’t change their spots”, says Westmarland. However, she recently studied
Sorting the week’s supernovae from the absolute zeros
Facebook’s cryptocurrency project Libra is struggling to get off the ground after partners such as Visa and Mastercard pulled out.
19 October 2019 | New Scientist | 21
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
Views The columnist Annalee Newitz imagines nature and tech merging p24
Letters To solve AI’s biggest problem, try asking an AI p26
Aperture Incredible images from four days of New Scientist Live p31
Culture A deep dive into the facts behind epic novel Moby-Dick p28
Culture columnist Jacob Aron on the line between games and gambling p30
Comment
Right to rebel Climate protests are sparking a hefty backlash but, for all their faults, they are what the world needs, says Adam Vaughan
JOSIE FORD
M
Y LUNCHTIME runs in London have been joyfully car-free of late, thanks to climate activists blocking key streets. But that’s not why I’m writing this defence of the protests, which were banned this week. The reason is that, along with student climate strikes, the Extinction Rebellion movement has helped propel environmental issues to be one of the top public concerns. Meanwhile, the backlash has drawn out its critics’ scientific illiteracy and failure to grasp the scale of the challenge posed by climate change, laying bare why the protests, not just in the UK, but across Europe, Australia and elsewhere, are necessary. Extinction Rebellion triggered a fair bit of criticism with its first wave of protests earlier in the year. But the latest response has been far more hostile. “It is certainly more voluminous and bile-filled now,” says Leo Hickman of Carbon Brief, which monitors UK media coverage of climate change. Prime minister Boris Johnson set the tone when he spoke of “importunate nose-ringed climate change protesters” and “uncooperative crusties”. The Daily Telegraph branded the group a “millenarian death cult”. The Sun fumed: “Do they know our share of global greenhouse gases is now just 1.2 per cent?” The Daily Mail even trotted out the old “global warming is good for you” trope. Perhaps the attacks are a sign people have realised the protests aren’t just a fun sideshow, but are
Adam Vaughan is New Scientist’s chief reporter @adamvaughan_uk
setting the agenda. Maybe that is why Andrea Leadsom, the minister responsible for energy policy, has joined the criticisms by saying people blocking roads in London are protesting in “the wrong country” because the UK has cut emissions hugely since 1990. That is utterly missing the point. The point is the future. The fact is global carbon emissions are still rising, when they need to fall. The UK is a small emitter, but it has hefty per-capita emissions. And it has a historical debt, with responsibility for up to
3 per cent of all global warming. Moreover, the UK government admits it is set to miss carbon targets from the mid-2020s. That is because we have largely done the easy stuff, swapping coal power for wind power. The next carbon cuts will require behaviour and lifestyle changes, as a report for the UK government’s climate advisers made clear last week. If the political and media class claim to be serious about climate change but have a tantrum over traffic disruption, imagine their
response when pressure comes to bear on diet, flights and more. Last week, New Scientist held its annual festival of science in east London not far from City Airport, a hotspot of the climate protests. One of our speakers was Astronomer Royal Martin Rees. He is a co-founder of the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, and one of the most clear-headed thinkers on the future of humanity there is. He welcomed the presence of climate change protesters on the streets, and pointed out that if the UK were to invest in export-ready green-tech research, as it does in the defence and biomedical sectors, it could help cut global emissions by far more than it emits – and reap the rewards. That is the scientifically and economically literate response to the climate change challenge. For the record, I strongly disagree with the view expressed by some prominent Extinction Rebellion members on the role the private sector has to play in cutting emissions. Some of the group’s more extreme claims and demands, such as net-zero emissions in the UK by 2025, are rightly facing scrutiny. But the new wave of protest movements are creating a political space for action commensurate with the science. That should be embraced, rather than condemned. ❚ 19 October 2019 | New Scientist | 23
Views Columnist This changes everything
The dirty, biological future of technology Imagine a world where tech has become so advanced that it is indistinguishable from nature, writes Annalee Newitz
T
HERE is a long-standing myth that nature is the opposite of technology. Yet now we know that our industrial machines didn’t conquer the wilderness; instead, they caused a climate change catastrophe that might one day wipe us out. Knowing this will dramatically change the way our future technologies look, as well as how we interact with them. Consider the plant tattoo. Last year, a group at Iowa State University revealed flexible water sensors made of graphene that could be taped onto plants. When attached to the undersides of leaves, the devices look like tattoos. They are used to measure how healthy and hydrated crops are, but they could also be adapted for environmental monitoring. Corn fields could become drought prediction systems. At Northumbria University, UK, researchers at the Hub for Biotechnology in the Built Environment are taking this idea further. Earlier this year, they received a grant of £8 million to incorporate sustainable, biological materials into buildings. They will be exploring the idea of walls made from living, self-repairing cells and plumbing systems seeded with microbes that convert waste into fuel. The ventilation systems in these buildings might even include plants with graphene tattoos that monitor air quality. Meanwhile, in medicine, people are using light to manipulate the behaviour of cells in the burgeoning field of optogenetics.
Annalee Newitz is a science journalist and author. Their novel Autonomous won the Lambda Literary Award and they are the co-host of the Hugo-nominated podcast Our Opinions Are Correct. You can follow them @annaleen and their website is techsploitation.com
Annalee’s week What I’m reading Questioning Collapse, an essay collection about why certain concepts of civilisational collapse are both scientifically and historically incorrect. What I’m watching The trailer for Picard, the new Star Trek series. I need this in my brain.
This column appears monthly. Up next week: James Wong 24 | New Scientist | 19 October 2019
MARCIA STRAUB/GETTY IMAGES
What I’m working on Promoting my novel, The Future of Another Timeline, which comes out in the UK this month.
Carefully aimed beams of light can activate medicines circulating in the body, or change the behaviour of synapses in the brain. As we cope with environmental and health needs, the realm of nature is becoming nearly indistinguishable from the realm of technology: plants are sensors; light is a form of medicine. Our future won’t be anything like the Apple Store version of tomorrow, with its clean white lines and antiseptic designs. Instead, it will be dirty and full of bacteria. And that will be cutting edge. How do we prepare ourselves for a future where advanced
“How do we prepare ourselves for a future where advanced machines look like a sunny day on the farm?” machines look like a sunny day on the farm? I think we need better stories about what is really coming next. That is why I sometimes write science fiction instead of reporting the facts. In my new novel, The Future of Another Timeline, a cast of heroic geologists struggles to understand a piece of technology that is so advanced that it looks exactly like slabs of rock. You see, they have discovered that time machines are embedded in ancient shield rock formations that were part of Earth’s crust more than half a billion years ago. Of course, my characters know they weren’t the first to stumble
across these wormholes that open when you pound rock against rock in five locations across the planet. People have been smacking rocks together for a long time, so it is pretty likely that Palaeolithic people were jumping into the time machines long before science was invented. And then there are the written records from classical antiquity about magical portals that can be opened by drumming on the ground. It is only in the age of science that my geologists finally figure out that humans have been mucking around with the timeline forever, by banging on an ancient machine interface that opens wormholes to the past. For these geologists, time travel is like metallurgy. There is a long history of people making iron, but a relatively short history of people understanding why iron comes from heating and blending different kinds of shiny nuggets they mined from rocks. At last, science has progressed far enough for the geologists to comprehend how advanced the time machines are. They are a part of nature, built into Earth by someone or something that left them behind for reasons we can only hope to understand one day. Cosmologist Sean Carroll has assured me that time travel will never exist, which is kind of a bummer. Science fiction is fiction, after all. But it is also a way for us to imagine a radically different future. Nature won’t be erased by machines. Instead, it will absorb them. ❚
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Views Your letters
Editor’s pick We are still aware of some doubts on consciousness 21 September, p 34 From Dave Hulme, Stockport, Greater Manchester, UK Michael Graziano says we might be able to begin to develop artificial visual consciousness with existing technology, but that it will take a lot longer to build a machine with a stream of consciousness. I have a sneaking suspicion that we will develop an artificial human-like brain before we crack consciousness. We could then task it with cracking the problem for us, and hope we understand the answer. From Guy Inchbald, Upton upon Severn, Worcestershire, UK The idea of an “attention schema” as a “self-reflecting mirror” that is the brain’s representation of how the brain represents things, so that consciousness isn’t so much an illusion as a self-caricature, is beguiling and probably correct. But Graziano is mistaken in suggesting that he knows how to solve “the hard problem” of consciousness. The objective existence of a dynamic self-caricature is one thing; the subjective experience of that caricature is quite another. The integrated information theory that Graziano mentions is honest about the divide. What his team has actually done is bring the hard problem into sharper focus. From Ben Haller, Ithaca, New York, US I welcome Graziano’s statement at the beginning of his article that “instead of trying to grapple with the hard problem” of consciousness, he takes “a more down-to-earth approach”. But he then discusses an attention schema and sensory and verbal capabilities. All he is really entitled to claim is that a machine having these would be attentive, not that it would be conscious. From John Theophilus, Milkwall, Gloucestershire, UK Graziano’s article on consciousness was enlightening, especially the 26 | New Scientist | 19 October 2019
proposal to build a machine that reflects the author’s consciousness model and see whether it displays conscious behaviour. My question is: how would you know whether it was or wasn’t conscious? We have difficulty determining whether a human in a coma or with locked-in syndrome is conscious. We do have personal experience of what it is like to be a conscious human, but we have no idea what it is like to be a bat. How could we tell what a machine was experiencing? And if we did think it was conscious, would it be moral to switch it off?
Look on our works, ye mighty, and despair Almost the Last Word, 14 September From Ben Walsh, London, UK I was interested in the various responses to the question of how long any traces of human civilisation would last beyond our species’ sudden and catastrophic demise. If extraterrestrials were heading to Earth, wouldn’t they encounter our array of orbital satellites before getting anywhere near the surface? If so, then surely this raises a new question: how
long would the evidence of our technological achievements, currently found in near-Earth orbit, last? From Judith Hanna, London, UK Hillary Shaw suggests that aliens might find “fossil tunnels” in Earth’s crust and that some of this persists from 4.4 billion years ago. The geology that is that ancient isn’t intact crust, but three submillimetre zircon crystals found embedded in 3.3 billion-year-old sediments in the Jack Hills in Western Australia. So I doubt that tunnels would be preserved that far into the future. Geochemical traces of our air and water pollution might, however, survive within similarly tiny crystals.
Don’t expect more than we are prepared to give 28 September, p 12 From Judith Graham, Millbrook, Ontario, Canada Brazil is burning its forests to make room for farms. Canada and the UK have already cleared vast tracts of forest for the same purpose, which is why the situation in Brazil is so critical
globally. Instead of vilifying developing nations, we should either pay them to maintain their existing ecosystems or rewild our own lands. Expecting more than we are prepared to give doesn’t improve the global situation.
Pint-sized data firms may be perfect ransom victims 13 July, p 9 From Robert Willis, Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada Chris Stokel-Walker’s overview of the increasing threat of ransomware missed a major cause of the ramp-up in attacks. Small and medium firms, at least in the US, are outsourcing data operations to small outfits. The likes of small medical or dental offices may forgo the major cloud storage companies due to the cost of their services. This has opened up a sub-market for smaller firms to offer cheaper off-site backup and storage. Some of these service providers lack the skills, software or technical knowledge to ensure the security of their clients’ data. They are perfect ransomware victims. Such companies may pay a ransom to
Views From the archives hide their vulnerability. One, PM Consultants in Portland, Oregon, closed suddenly in July after an attack. Educating management is necessary, but we need a concomitant emphasis on “you get what you pay for”.
It isn’t necessarily good just because it is green 24 August, p 6 From Hugh McAdams, Glasgow, UK You report on CityTrees – moss walls from Berlin-based firm Green City Solutions. Glasgow installed two on busy streets in 2017. I calculate that they removed less than 0.02 per cent of the city’s pollutants each year. They have now disappeared. As Scully notes, researchers at the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research found that eight moss walls installed in Amsterdam failed to reduce the concentration of pollutants. The makers of the trees don’t make any outlandish claims – so why have 50 been installed in European cities, costing about $60,000 each?
How well do wind tunnels simulate mountain air? 14 September, p 14 From Sandy Henderson, Dunblane, Stirling, UK Chelsea Whyte reports that wind-tunnel experiments on bar-headed geese show their blood cools in low-oxygen conditions, simulating those they face crossing the Himalayas. Cooler blood can carry more oxygen. Did the researchers recreate the low pressure and temperature that the birds would encounter 7000 metres up? At low pressure, it is harder for the wings to transfer heat to the passing air and cool the blood. That might be
balanced in real life by the greater temperature gradient at altitude. The editor writes: The experiment didn’t mimic pressure or temperature at high altitudes, just oxygen levels. But if the birds’ blood running cold makes them more efficient at sealevel pressures, the effect is likely to be even stronger at altitude.
I am not so happy with Ola Rosling’s cheery statistics 7 September, p 46 From Arne Maus, Nesoddtangen, Norway I agree with Ola Rosling that we should base our views on facts, but I see problems with the statistics he presents. One graph shows the risk of dying in a plane crash as one per 10 billion passenger miles. No flights are 1 mile long and most of the risk is at take-off and landing. It would be better to give the risk per flight. Another states that the fraction of Earth’s surface in protected reserves increased from 0.03 per cent in 1900 to 14.7 per cent in 2016. This says only that certain nations are trying to save some of their land. Pristine forests and nature are clearly suffering as the Amazon, parts of Indonesia and elsewhere are burned to make way for farmland. ❚
For the record ❚ The photograph we used to illustrate our report on climate change increasing the risk of heavy rainfall and storm surges in coastal areas was of Mytholmroyd, West Yorkshire, UK, which has flooded but is around 90 metres above sea level and a 70-kilometre walk from the coast (28 September, p 18).
25 years ago, New Scientist was celebrating a milestone in eradicating the scourge of polio IT WAS a rare example of a straight-up good news story. “Polio has been eradicated in the western hemisphere, officials at the Pan American Health Organization declared last week,” we wrote in our 8 October 1994 issue. Polio is a viral disease that is typically transmitted by the ingestion of faecal matter, often through infected water supplies. If the virus enters the central nervous system, it can cause muscle weakness and paralysis, and sometimes death or long-term disabilities. Effective polio vaccines were first developed in the 1950s, but a coordinated global fight to eradicate the disease began in earnest in 1988. The disease was officially eliminated in China, Australia and 34 other western Pacific countries in 2000. Europe was declared polio-free in 2002. “The last known polio case in the Americas was a Peruvian boy called Luis Fermin who contracted the virus in August 1991,” we wrote. Models suggested that if the virus were still circulating there, at least one case of polio-induced paralysis would have occurred in the following three years. There had been none. Other animals can’t carry polio, so once the world’s human population is finally purged of it, there will be no reservoir from which the natural virus can emerge to reinfect us. Afghanistan and Pakistan are the last remaining regions with wild polio cases; there are fewer than 100 a year. Will the scourge of polio now vanish from human memory? Probably not. For a start, there is an attenuated strain present in the popular and effective trivalent oral polio vaccine itself. This strain can persist in the environment and regain the ability to cause polio. Such a strain was probably responsible last month for the first cases of polio recorded in the Philippines since the virus was declared eradicated there in 2000. We discussed one ingenious solution to this problem in March 2017, when we reported on some nifty gene editing that resulted in a live vaccine with a lower risk of mutating into a virulent form. More worrying, perhaps, is that a team of researchers in 2002 built the polio virus from scratch in the lab, using nothing more than genetic sequence information from public databases and readily available technology. The price of liberty from polio will be eternal vigilance. Simon Ings
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19 October 2019 | New Scientist | 27
Views Culture
A whale of a tale Teasing apart the fact and fiction in the classic novel Moby-Dick produces some fascinating insights and rare gems, finds Chris Simms
Book
Ahab’s Rolling Sea: A natural history of Moby-Dick
ASIDE from being one of the greatest works of American literature, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick spawned the term “Moby-Dickering”, describing the activity of spending too much time hunting for meaning in the book’s pursuit of a giant white sperm whale. Fortunately, marine biologist Richard J. King has approached the classic very differently in his own book, Ahab’s Rolling Sea. The process of unravelling fact from fiction can make it a slow read, and like Moby-Dick, you may want to put it down at times. Don’t: you will be rewarded for persevering. Moby-Dick teems with natural life. Aside from the sperm whale, there are other whales, seals, coral, giant squid, sharks, sea ravens (which King thinks are in fact cormorants), sky-hawks (frigate birds), albatrosses and more. King has been rigorous. He studied Melville’s original sources to work out what he probably knew rather than what he wrote, delved into specimen tanks below the Natural History Museum in London, interviewed scientists and took to the seas himself. This results in some rare gems, from the biological to the linguistic. Take right whales. How these mammals got their name is clear. “Since it was slow, coastal, and plump with oil, hunters called it the ‘right whale’, as it was the best one to chase,” writes King. Today, we know these whales use the baleen plates in their mouths to filter plankton and krill out of the 28 | New Scientist | 19 October 2019
OVERSNAP/GETTY IMAGES
Richard J. King University of Chicago Press
water. But Moby-Dick was published in 1851 and the word “krill” didn’t come into regular usage until the 20th century. In the novel, narrator Ishmael says right whales feed on “brit”. There are clues to suggest he meant krill, but we can’t be sure. Other details are clearer. Ishmael refers to whales as fish, not mammals, even though he
“There is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men” knows they have lungs and warm blood. This is deliberate, says King, because Ishmael “positions the practical hunter’s knowledge of the whalemen above that of the ‘learned naturalists ashore’ ”. Yet the novel’s claim that sperm whales migrate in predictable slim highways was a genuine mistake, says King. So were assertions that
males act as lords of harems, and that those whales are the largest inhabitants of the globe. Overall, though, the natural history in Moby-Dick seems spot on. For example, the white whale himself is described as streaked, spotted and marbled. It turns out that such patterning is created by years of scratches and scars from the suckers and talons of the large squid that sperm whales eat, as well as from other whales’ teeth. King updates other aspects too, revealing the surprising intellect of sperm whales, with some learning to dive down to “floss the fish off the longlines” when they hear the sound of commercial boats hauling back the catch. While King judges Moby-Dick’s scientific accuracy, he also reveals how the book helped raise the profile of sperm whales, opening the door to better protection for them. Yet King also writes that “Melville fed the period fear and contempt for sharks, writing of these fish as a ghastly, fierce and
A sperm whale diving off the coast of New Zealand
cannibalistic metaphor”. So the novel may also be partly responsible for the widespread, irrational fear of sharks and the deaths of so many of these beautiful predators. Ahab’s Rolling Sea will give you a new appreciation of the sperm whale. If you are studying Melville’s book, it will provide details far more original than any exam guide. It also underscores the more undesirable aspects of another animal that stars in MobyDick: humans, with our penchant for environmental destruction. Melville was as aware as we are of how we wipe out animals – he feared the effect of hunting on North American bison. As Ishmael says: “There is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.” Nearly 170 years later, it is time we got the message. ❚
Don’t miss
The golden afterlife of King Tut Tutankhamun was a minor pharaoh, but the funerary objects soon arriving in the UK were fit for any king, says Alison George
Saatchi Gallery, London From 2 November to 3 May 2020
LIFE after death was a complicated business in Ancient Egypt. The volume of treasures found in Tutankhamun’s tomb show that Egyptian royals didn’t travel lightly to the afterlife. When King Tut’s crypt was discovered nearly 100 years ago – the only tomb of a pharaoh to be found unplundered – it contained thousands of objects to help his bid for immortality. Now, 150 of these objects are on a world tour. Sixty of them have never travelled out of Egypt before, and some are probably personal objects from his life. This stunning exhibition, which focuses on the significance of these funerary items for Tut’s journey to an everlasting afterlife, arrives in London after a sell-out stint in Paris. Tutankhamun is a household name today, but he was only a minor pharaoh, ascending to the throne aged 9 or 10 in around 1334 BC and reigning for less than a decade until his untimely death. Interred in a tomb meant for someone of lower status, he was later erased from the records due to his heretic father, with no funerary cult to keep his memory alive. The forgotten pharaoh burst back onto the scene more than 3000 years later in November 1922, when archaeologist Howard Carter uncovered a rock-cut staircase leading to Tut’s tomb in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings after five years of searching. “At last have made wonderful discovery in This shrine shows Tutankhamun and his half-sister Ankhesenamun
Valley; a magnificent tomb with seals intact,” wrote Carter in a telegram to his benefactor. Untouched since ancient times, it was a treasure trove of 5398 funerary artefacts. As well as the boy king’s mummy, interred in a sarcophagus and three inner coffins, the tomb contained a “strange and wonderful medley of extraordinary and beautiful objects”, said Carter. These included a silver trumpet (that still makes a beautiful sound), statues of the gods and six chariots. Traditionalists might baulk at the exhibition’s format. Rather than a dry parade of artefacts, it is an immersive experience that attempts to conjure the mystique of dark chambers and the intricate details of the Egyptian afterlife through lighting and sound. King Tut himself isn’t here – his
Leonardo Da Vinci at the Louvre in Paris from 24 October marks 500 years since the death of an artist whose study of nature and the heavens seamlessly married science and art.
Watch
Daybreak (Netflix) is a US high school drama set in a post-apocalyptic California, where evil jocks have banded together into Mad Maxstyle gangs. The fun begins on 24 October.
Read
The Crowd and the Cosmos: Adventures in the Zooniverse (Oxford University Press) by astronomer and TV presenter Chris Lintott is the story of his popular online citizen-science project, the Zooniverse. Find out the intriguing questions in astronomy that its users are helping to solve.
19 October 2019 | New Scientist | 29
URSULA COYOTE/NETFLIX; © THE ROYAL COLLECTION 2019
Tutankhamun: Treasures of the golden pharaoh
Visit
frail mummy remains in its original resting place, chamber KV62 in the Valley of the Kings – but his likeness is everywhere, most strikingly in an extraordinarily lifelike black and gold statue that originally guarded the burial chamber. Gold symbolised the sun to the Egyptians, and there is plenty on display, from slippers that adorned the mummy’s feet to a gilded wooden bed carved with figures to keep evil forces at bay. But the burial hoard wasn’t all bling. The priests who interred Tutankhamun seemingly thought of every item he would need to overcome obstacles on his voyage to the next life and to thrive when he got there. On display at the exhibition are linen gloves he might have worn when riding a chariot and a collection of boomerangs for hunting birds and warding off evil spirits adopting their form, as well as some of the vessels that contained sustenance for the afterlife, including meats, breads, spices and wine. Visitors can also see some of the 413 different workforce figurines called shabti that Tut was interred with to carry out his labour in the next world. After London, Tut’s objects head for Sydney, Australia, and six other cities before reaching their final destination at the Grand Egyptian Museum, under construction near the pyramids at Giza. ❚
LABORATORIOROSSO
Exhibition
A gilded wooden figure of Tutankhamun on a skiff
Views Culture The games column
All bets are off Borderlands 3’s lavish animated treasure chests blur the boundaries between gaming and gambling. As demands for regulation of loot boxes increase, Jacob Aron asks where we should draw the line. Plus, Frostpunk’s super-seasonal chills
Winter is coming to Frostpunk, and painful decisions must be made
Jacob Aron is New Scientist’s deputy news editor. He has been playing video games for 25 years, but still isn’t very good at them. Follow him on Twitter @jjaron
Games
Borderlands 3 Gearbox Software PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One
Frostpunk 11 Bit Studios PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One
30 | New Scientist | 19 October 2019
THERE is an argument raging at the moment over whether some video games are a form of gambling and need to be regulated. Are loot boxes within games, which are bought for real money and contain random virtual items, akin to a spin on a slot machine? Last month, members of the UK parliament called for these boxes to be banned for children. Game developers are pushing back because these boxes make significant revenue for some of the world’s most popular games. I think loot boxes should be regulated, but mostly for selfish reasons. Games that include them can be less fun if you don’t want to part with cash, so I tend to skip them. I am slightly baffled by stories of people spending thousands on such items. Yet playing Borderlands 3, a game that doesn’t have loot boxes but is essentially built around acquiring loot, has made me understand how people get hooked. The series is a first-person shooter in which the guns are randomly generated. The developer, Gearbox Software,
claims there are more than a billion weapons in the latest instalment, although many of these will be small variations of each other in terms of damage, accuracy and so on. Borderlands 3 may not use loot boxes, but the tricks it uses to get you hooked on finding the next gun are much the same as in the games that do.
“Should Borderlands 3 be regulated? No, but it doesn’t hurt to think about how it is made to keep me hooked” You get new guns by killing enemies or opening treasure chests within the game. Greater rewards are accompanied by more lavish animations: taking down a particularly difficult foe sees loot spilling out as if from a smashed piñata. It feels great, and that may be a problem. Studies suggest that the lights and sounds of both real and virtual slot machines play a part in getting people hooked; this kind of reward presentation may have a similar effect.
The uncertainty of reward is also a factor. In Borderlands 3, guns are graded according to rarity: standard white, uncommon green, rare blue, epic purple and legendary orange, the last ones often possessing prized properties like infinite ammo. When I see a flash of purple or orange, I can almost feel the dopamine coursing through my brain. I am sceptical that video game addiction is a real psychological condition (many researchers agree with me), but I have certainly found my Borderlands 3 sessions stretching out longer than I intended. Given that no money is involved, should the game be regulated? No, but it doesn’t hurt to think about how it is designed to keep me hooked. IT IS getting cold in London, and not just because it is October. I have been playing Frostpunk, a city-builder set in an alternative 19th century. Here, the world is plunged into chaos by a worldwide winter caused by volcanic eruptions, and an expedition sets out from London to cross frozen seas and establish a new home. At the centre of your city is a coal-guzzling generator: a towering furnace designed to keep the survivors warm. You have to make difficult decisions, such as whether to put children to work, or mandate 24-hour shifts to secure more coal, food and other resources to keep the city going, while balancing people’s discontent and hope. It is similar to Surviving Mars, which I wrote about earlier this year, but much grimmer, and certainly one of the best climate fiction games I have come across. ❚
Views Aperture
Having a blast at New Scientist Live 2019 Photographers Jonny Donovan, David Stock, James Winspear
THERE were jellyfish, there were robots, there was a banana piano – plus astronaut Tim Peake. This was New Scientist Live 2019, which welcomed more than 40,000 science enthusiasts of all ages to ExCeL London for a four-day celebration of ideas and discovery. The festival opened on 10 October with engineer Sam Rogers flying his jet suit around the dusty ExCeL car park (pictured above). It was a truly multisensory
experience, according to one spectator, who ended up with grit in his socks and smelling of kerosene. The next day, another visitor had a more immersive outing than most after joining neuroscientist Hannah Critchlow on the Humans Stage, one of six stages offering a programme of more than 120 talks over the four days. An electric current was applied to her ulnar nerve, making her hand and fingers twitch. With 2019 marking half a century since the Apollo 11
mission, the moon was bound to be a big theme at this year’s show. Artist Luke Jerram’s huge model of the moon hung above a lunar surface exhibit on the show’s main floor. Visitors even had the chance to smell the moon, which has an earthy, smoky scent, it turns out, not a cheesy one. “I would love to be the first woman to walk on the moon,” said space scientist Maggie Aderin-Pocock on 12 October as she wowed the Main Stage. “I’m definitely working on it!” Later on, palaeoanthropologist Lee Berger enthralled his audience
with the story of how his team discovered many skeletons of Homo naledi, an ancient hominin species, in a cave chamber he was too big to access himself. Other popular talks included Gina Rippon on the myth of male and female brains, Michele Bannister on interstellar objects and Val Curran on medical cannabis. When it comes to gut health, “a little bit of flatulence is a good thing,” Megan Rossi told a rapt crowd . “It’s a sign of a healthy microbiome.” For the first time, the show > 19 October 2019 | New Scientist | 31
Views Aperture stayed open late on Friday. Psychologist and magician Gustav Kuhn explained how illusions reveal the vulnerabilities of perception, illustrating this with a bewildering rope trick. Bobby Seagull elucidated the mathematics of dating, Julia Shaw delved into the science of evil and Steve Cross hosted a comedy science quiz to round off the night. Throughout the festival, the Space Shed hosted question sessions, workshops and storytelling, featuring astronaut Al Worden and author Konnie Huq. Nearby, a virtual-reality roller coaster offered some scarier fun and visitors glimpsed the future, thanks to a cutting-edge operating theatre and a giant combine harvester for farms yet to come. For New Scientist staff, it was a thrill to see so many people inspired and entertained by the festival, including readers from as far afield as Canada and Australia. Thanks to everyone who was part of it. We look forward to seeing you again on 15-18 October 2020. ❚
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Maggie Aderin-Pocock celebrating the history and future of the moon 2 Maddie Moate on making chocolate and paper at the Space Shed 3 Playing with sound and selfies during the new Friday Night Lates event 4 Gina Rippon takes on the myth of male and female brains 5 Chris van Tulleken talks defying his genetics with his twin brother and fellow doctor, Xand (off-picture), and a couple of young helpers 6 Middlesex University London’s robot Pepper engages in dialogue with human visitors 7 Megan Rossi on gut health – and why flatulence can be a good thing 8 Astronauts Tim Peake and Al Worden beneath Luke Jerram’s Museum of the Moon installation 9 Researchers from Imperial College London demonstrate a fire tornado 10 Lee Berger tells the story of finding a new hominin species, Homo naledi 11 A view of the main show floor 32 | New Scientist | 19 October 2019
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Features
The elephant in the garden Rampant deforestation is forcing Asian elephants into conflict with humans. Rachel Nuwer went to Sri Lanka to see if we can live in peace with them
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IKE many young bull elephants, Brigadier had a strategy. Spending his days in a small patch of forest in northwest Sri Lanka, he would emerge under cover of darkness to feast on crops. One evening, he bundled into an army brigadier’s property, earning him his name and sealing his fate. Government officials captured Brigadier and trucked him to Maduru Oya National Park. But he immediately took off, probably intending to find his way home, got lost and wound up 120 kilometres north at Sampur beach. Incredibly, a navy boat discovered him swimming 5 kilometres offshore and towed him to safety. After his big adventure, Brigadier settled down again, returning to his nocturnal cropraiding routine. Six months later, he was 34 | New Scientist | 19 October 2019
found dead at the bottom of a well. Apart from the swimming bit, stories like this are common in Sri Lanka, where habitat loss is forcing elephants into an increasingly bloody conflict with humans. When I visited the country to report on efforts to stem the bloodshed, I found that the government’s favoured solution of moving problem elephants into fenced-off national parks isn’t working. Some experts believe it will even backfire, pushing the species to the brink in the country. The only way to secure the future of Sri Lanka’s elephants, they argue, is to find ways to peacefully coexist with them. That is no mean feat. And yet, as I saw for myself in several villages, there is a simple solution. The question is, will it be implemented across
the island? And will people accept that the elephants must live among us or not at all? Asian elephants are under pressure. Their numbers have declined by an estimated 50 per cent in the last 75 years, leaving just 40,000 to 50,000 in the wild. Although they aren’t poached anywhere near as much as their African cousins, their forest homes are being rapidly fragmented. Nowhere is the problem more acute than in Sri Lanka. It accounts for just 2 per cent of their total habitat, yet is home to over 5000 Asian elephants – more than 10 per cent of the remaining global population. That so many elephants remain here is a testament to the species’ cultural importance in the country. The majority of Sri Lankans are Buddhist and elephants feature prominently in a number of stories about the Buddha’s
MICHELE BURGESS / ALAMY
Problem elephants in Sri Lanka are often relocated to parks
previous reincarnations. Hinduism, Sri Lanka’s second largest religion, also enjoys a close association with the animals in the form of the god Ganesh. “Elephants hold a very special place in our hearts,” says Prithiviraj Fernando, chairman of the Centre for Conservation and Research in Tissamaharama. Yet as the island grows increasingly crowded and their habitat disappears, the lives of elephants and humans are overlapping more and more. This puts Sri Lanka’s many farmers at constant odds with the animals, often with deadly consequences. Hungry elephants raid crops, trampling fields and sometimes people. In response, farmers attack the animals with flaming torches, firecrackers, home-made guns and even explosives embedded in fruit, known as
hakka patas or “jaw exploders”. Last year, more than 300 elephants were killed in altercations with humans and around 70 people lost their lives to elephants. “Sri Lanka has the highest level of human-elephant conflict in the world,” says Fernando. “Wherever there are people and elephants, there’s conflict.” For more than 70 years, Sri Lanka has attempted to solve the problem by moving elephants to national parks. According to the government’s approach, the world’s secondlargest land animal belongs in protected areas surrounded by electric fencing, while people belong everywhere else. In many cases, as with Brigadier, problem animals are specifically targeted for translocation. Officials also attempt to clear whole herds using a colonialera tactic called an elephant drive. Day after
day, sometimes for a year or more, hundreds of people venture into elephant territory, setting off guns and thousands of “elephant thunders” (a type of huge firecracker) to corral the animals into fenced areas. Whichever method officials use to try to confine elephants to parks, it doesn’t work. In 2012, Fernando and his colleagues published a study showing that of 16 translocated bull elephants that the researchers had monitored over several years, two were killed within the park they were released in and none of the others stayed put. Some broke out and returned home while others established a new territory where they began raiding crops again. Elephant drives produce similar results. Many males evade the round-up or break > 19 October 2019 | New Scientist | 35
“Last year in Sri Lanka, more than 300 elephants were killed in altercations with humans”
out soon after arriving at a park. The only ones that stick around are the females and calves, which tend to be more risk averse. They soon experience first-hand that Sri Lanka’s parks often lack the resources necessary to support hundreds of additional residents, each of which eats up to 140 kilograms of vegetation per day. The newcomers quickly become “emaciated, walking skeletons, and many starve to death”, says Fernando. “We’ve seen this over and over again wherever elephants have been driven to parks and fenced in.” I saw it for myself at Udawalawe National Park. Tourists raised their cameras as a mother and calf stepped out of the thick brush, but the elephants were a disturbing sight, with jutting ribs, protruding shoulder blades and rope-like backbones. They plucked placidly at the short grass beneath their feet, but it clearly isn’t enough to sustain them. Like many elephants confined to overcrowded national parks, they were on the verge of starvation. That females and calves tend to suffer this fate is especially concerning, says Shermin de Silva, director of the Udawalawe Elephant Research Project and founder of Trunks & Leaves, a non-profit organisation focusing on elephant research and outreach. Elephants have extremely slow reproduction rates, usually
Plan bee In Kenya, folklore suggests elephants are terrified of bees. Lucy King, a zoologist at the University of Oxford, spent the best part of a decade exploring the scientific validity of that belief. “It turns out that, like most decent folklore, there’s a lot of truth in it,” she says. Merely the sound of bees sends elephants running – a finding that could help reduce human-elephant conflict. King has since designed elephant-deterring beehive fences. With 15 beehives and 15 dummy hives strung along a 300-metre wire, the fences are elevated so that people and cattle can pass safely beneath. But if an elephant tries to push through, the wire swings, triggering a flurry of buzzing wings
36 | New Scientist | 19 October 2019
and stings. King’s studies suggest the bees are an effective deterrent. The fences reduce crop raids by 80 per cent, on average, which explains why they have now been installed at 62 sites in 20 countries. King is currently experimenting with introducing the concept in Sri Lanka, where human-elephant conflict is particularly intense. She found that Indian bees are more placid than African ones, reducing the effectiveness of the fences. But beehive fencing could still be a worthy investment for Sri Lankan farmers, who would enjoy a reduction in elephant raids, ensure their crops are well pollinated and get honey to sell. As King says: “This is the only fence that, once you build it, makes money for you.”
producing just one calf every six years. Earlier this year, based on mathematical modelling of elephant population demographics from Udawalawe, de Silva reported that for Asian elephants to maintain their numbers, females must reproduce at near-optimal rates and most calves must survive. Nutritional stress, in other words, can quickly push elephant populations in Sri Lanka and beyond into tailspins. “For elephants, the biggest threat is the calf that’s never born,” says de Silva. The stark implications of this finding were reinforced earlier this year, when Fernando and his colleagues published the first nationwide elephant survey. It showed that elephants occur across 60 per cent of the country – virtually everywhere that isn’t highly urbanised – and that 70 per cent of them live side-by-side with humans. This not only means that Sri Lanka’s attempt to confine elephants to parks has “completely failed”, says Fernando, but also that non-protected areas will have to play a critical role in the species’ survival. If Sri Lanka wants to save its elephants, it has to find a way for people to live peacefully alongside them. I saw just how difficult this is when I came across a bloated bull elephant lying in a ditch by the side of a dirt road in north-west Sri Lanka, flies buzzing around two bullet wounds. A local man guessed it had been shot by a farmer in a nearby field and ran away before collapsing here. The animal was still alive when it was discovered and a small crowd had gathered and erected a makeshift tent to give it some shade. Someone brought coconuts and bananas to try to feed it. Someone else brought water. Another person called the vet. When the elephant died, a monk performed a ceremony to help ease it into the next life. I left the scene feeling nauseous. But just a few minutes drive away, past neon green rice paddies and homes shaded by coconut and banana trees, I visited a place that is showing by example that there is an alternative. In 2013, the village of Galewewa pioneered a programme designed by Fernando and his colleagues to use electric fences to encircle crops and homes rather than elephants. The locals took some convincing. “People just assumed it wouldn’t be successful because they’d seen the government fences,” says Sampath Ekanayaka, manager of the Centre for Conservation and Research’s community programmes in the region. “To them, this was just another fence.” In many ways, it is. But there are reasons to think the scheme would work. Elephants that encounter fences in national parks have “all
JAMES MORGAN/PANOS, WWW.CCRSL.ORG
Electric fences that surround villages, rather than elephants, seem to reduce conflict
the time in the world” to figure out how to get past the obstacles, says Fernando. Those that encounter a fence surrounding a village or crop field are unlikely to invest the time and energy required to break in because there will usually be people around, and elephants are afraid of them.
Do fence me in Eventually, after several years of deliberation, the village elders agreed to try the method. Fernando’s organisation paid for 90 per cent of the installation costs but villagers paid the rest, as well as shouldering the burden of maintaining the fences throughout the growing season. After harvesting, they take down the fences, allowing elephants to forage on the crop remains. The results have been encouraging. After six years with the fences, no people or elephants have been killed, nocturnal raids are practically non-existent and crop yields and earnings have significantly increased. Galewewa’s success has prompted around 25 more villages to join the programme, and Sri Lanka’s wildlife department has now established another 30 village fences. “I would 100 per cent recommend this
system to others in Sri Lanka,” says J. M. Muthubanda, president of the Fence Maintenance Society in Manakkuliya Gama, a village near Galewewa. “If we didn’t have this fence, many people would have been killed and we would have had to abandon the land. This was the best decision we ever made.” Fencing can only ever be one part of the solution. Just as important is persuading people to change the way they think about living alongside elephants – and to adapt their behaviour. People need to take responsibility for protecting themselves and the elephants they share the land with, says Fernando. Take drinking, for example. Around 70 per cent of men who are killed by elephants are intoxicated when the incident happens. Simply staying inside after a night of drinking would greatly reduce those deaths, says Sumith Pilapitiya, an independent elephant researcher and former director general of wildlife conservation in Sri Lanka. “If you’re out drunk on a bike at night and you ride into an elephant, what do you expect the elephant to do at that point?” says Pilapitiya. “As human beings, we should be taking much more responsibility for our lives.” Trains are another problem. Around 15 elephants are killed each year on the tracks.
Sri Lanka has few underpasses or overpasses but there is a straightforward fix. Train drivers could simply slow down in the areas where elephants tend to get hit. What I saw in Galewewa shows that people can peacefully coexist with elephants, so long as they have the right attitude and some semblance of support. Notionally at least, the Sri Lankan government is on board. As early as 2007, it created a national elephant conservation plan that largely reflected the findings of Fernando, Pilapitiya and other elephant researchers, including provisions for implementing seasonal agricultural fencing and educational programmes. But the plan was implemented ad hoc and has failed to live up to its potential as a result, says Pilapitiya, who resigned from his job heading Sri Lanka’s wildlife department in 2015 because of “systemic political interference”. G. C. Sooriyabandara, the current director-general of the Department of Wildlife Conservation, didn’t respond to repeated interview requests. Still, there are signs of progress. In a first for Sri Lanka, the country’s Southern Development Board, following advice from Pilapitiya and Fernando, agreed to use radio tracking collars to study the movements of several herds of elephants so it could select a site for a major industrial project that would minimise impact on the animals. “It’s the right thing to do, as far as I’m concerned,” says a high-level official at the board, who asked not to be named because he didn’t have permission to speak to the media. As more and more villages sign up for his fencing programme, Fernando and his colleagues believe the country as a whole will eventually follow. “This is not something that can be done in a day or a year or even 10 years,” says Fernando. “It might take 25 years. But we’re hopeful that common sense will prevail.” It is already too late for Brigadier. But if Fernando is right, Asian elephants can look forward to a brighter future, and not only in Sri Lanka. The country’s human population density isn’t far behind that of India and Bangladesh, but it has almost 10 times the number of elephants. This makes it a test case for human-elephant coexistence, says de Silva. “If we can get it to work in Sri Lanka, we can get it to work anywhere.” ❚
Rachel Nuwer is author of Poached: Inside the dark world of wildlife trafficking. Reporting for this story was supported by the Pulitzer Center 19 October 2019 | New Scientist | 37
Features
A
T FIRST glance, you might think you were in the office of a technology start-up. People peer at computers and talk about influencers, reach and hashtags. Like their peers in Silicon Valley, these men and women know how the internet can be used to change hearts and minds. But this is a world away from the primary-colour campuses of the tech giants. These offices lie behind barbed wire, and everyone is wearing the green patterned camouflage of the British Army. The 77th Brigade is the British Army’s unit for what it calls “information manoeuvre” and what everyone else calls information warfare: using print and online media to change the behaviour of hostile parties and prevent them causing problems at home. When I visited, just over two years ago, everything was in motion. Flooring was being laid, units installed. Desks formed neat lines in offices still covered in plastic, tape and sawdust. Even then, there was a sense that they were already too late. Today, they face new kinds of conflict that are breaking out online, leading to mass deception, protests and even deaths. Our information flow is being invaded. Attention is being hacked. The hostile manipulation of information has even been blamed for rigging
elections, the Brexit vote and paving the road for Donald Trump. Whether real or imagined, the fear of such activity is changing our world. Amid all the intrigue and shadows, you have become the front line. Your opinions, your values, what you hold to be true, even the way you feel, are all under siege. And it isn’t clear what anyone can do to stop it. A powerful illustration of that fragility came on 7 March 2019, when Facebook made an announcement. Among the billions of accounts, groups and pages that inhabit its site and its subsidiary, Instagram, it had identified a network of 137 engaged in what it termed “inauthentic” activity targeting the UK. Yet to the 180,000 people who followed all or part of this network, it would have seemed utterly unremarkable. Tedious even. On the one hand, nationalists were sharing slogans. “Being a leftist is easy!” one meme said. “If anyone disagrees with you, call them a racist!” But others in the network pushed a different angle. One account called for the leader of the pro-Brexit party UKIP to be charged with hate crimes. Others drew attention to stories that LGBT Christians were being bullied because of their faith. The vitriol and polarisation would be familiar
Inside the information wars COREY BRICKLEY
In the age of fake news and digital manipulation, you are the new battlefield. Carl Miller reports from the front lines of information warfare
38 | New Scientist | 19 October 2019
to anyone who has spent time on social media. The one key difference was that none of it was real. Neither the nationalists nor the anti-racism campaigners existed. Both were online masks worn by a single coordinated and hidden group. This ecosystem of fake identities, false voices and deceptive groups was attempting to provoke broad social change. Its members pumped polarised messages to both ends of the political spectrum not to change anyone’s mind, but to confirm the beliefs their viewers already held. The aim was outrage: to make people angrier and angrier about the injustices they were already convinced were happening. To alter the way that people behaved and thought, they had lured them into a fake society that only existed online. This was the first time that Facebook had found a network specifically targeting the UK. And while it didn’t say who was behind it, the culprit could have been almost anyone. Military groups, intelligence operatives, party political campaigns, extremist political factions or even just technically savvy individuals have all joined the rush for influence and attention that has broken out in cyberspace, forming a background hum to many of our experiences online.
Same old stories To David Omand, none of this is new. Omand has spent most of his career inside the UK’s Ministry of Defence, before serving as the director of GCHQ , the country’s technical spy agency based near Cheltenham. “You always had two different levels of battlefield,” he told me. “You have the intelligence battlefield where the adversary’s intelligence agencies would be slugging it out with us. And you have the campaign for influence through propaganda.” The manipulation of information during warfare is as old as warfare itself. But it really took off during the cold war, when both sides systematically developed tools to influence the public watching at home and abroad. Fake companies, front organisations, leaked letters, bogus journalism, planted conspiracy theories and manufactured protests were all part of the ideological struggle. For the practitioners of these tactics, the arrival of the internet and social media was a spectacular opportunity. Here was an environment far more open than newspapers and television. Here were global forums for debate and discussion that were very easy to join and post in, and which were curated > 19 October 2019 | New Scientist | 39
and shaped by algorithms that could be reverse-engineered, gamed and manipulated. The platforms also became increasingly personalised, serving up the information they thought users wanted and, in doing so, sometimes creating bubbles of hyperpartisanship – small online knots of identity that could each be contacted and exploited. In the space of a decade, it became far easier, faster and cheaper for people to mould the public with social media using networks like the one Facebook had found. And it didn’t take the resources of a state, either. Anyone could do it, so long as they had a smartphone.
“This fake news merchant had more online readers than some UK broadsheets” and websites to monetise them. It wasn’t just Facebook that was innovating, people like Besar were too. Around the world, thousands of people are using the same tools to game and manipulate social media platforms on an industrial scale. For $3 you can buy a “HUGE MEGA BOT PACK” on the darknet, allowing you to build your own army of automated accounts across hundreds of social media platforms. Other services can manipulate search engine results, buy Wikipedia edits or rent fake IP addresses to make it look like your accounts come from all over the world. There are even “legend farms” that you can recruit, giving you control of tens of thousands of unique identities, each with its own personality, interests and writing style. Despite the power these rogue agents claim to possess, the harm they cause is purely incidental to them; their biggest driver is profit. They work in small groups, with limited budgets – they are the agile start-ups of the influence industry. The giants when it comes to propaganda and influence are the nation states. Their aim
When I met one such fake news merchant in a dimly lit bar in Kosovo in November 2018, his phone never stopped chirping. Each noise was a click – the sound of someone stepping into a vast digital web that could also be called coordinated and inauthentic. One where bay leaves can cure cancer and George Washington was really Albanian. The man, who I’ll call Besar, told me his operation was all about pumping out content that, true or false, was so shocking that people couldn’t help but be drawn in. Some stories were patently false, others simply clickbait. But for Besar that distinction is a waste of time. “It’s all total nonsense,” he told me. “I don’t even read this stuff.” Click on any of Besar’s stories, and you’re taken to the money-making part of the operation. On a series of crude-looking websites, he turns eyeballs to money in the same way as any journalist: advertising. A former waiter, Besar was now building and buying Facebook groups with huge audiences dedicated to everything from evangelical Christianity to holiday destinations. He created thousands of fake accounts to rope in even more people. He would use already large groups to grow new ones, and invest thousands of euros in carefully targeted advertising to drive numbers up even further. When we met, I judged he probably had more online readers than some UK broadsheets. Besar isn’t alone. He showed me a whole network of invitation-only groups on Facebook, with memberships ranging from a few hundred to several thousand. They formed a kind of marketplace where pages with hundreds of thousands of likes were traded for thousands of dollars. Others sold fake likes or fake accounts, or offered advice on how to get around Facebook’s evolving enforcement. I found a “fake news starter pack”, complete with a collection of pages to get an audience 40 | New Scientist | 19 October 2019
MIKE KEMP/GETTY
The fake news economy
isn’t profits, but geopolitics, and they work at a far larger scale. Yevhen Fedchenko, the director of Mohyla school of journalism in Ukraine, was among the first to realise that states were joining the race for influence. That realisation came after what he called Maidan: the public demonstrations in Ukraine in 2013 and 2014 against Russian influence in the country. In the months that followed, new messages and narratives appeared in Russian media. They were on TV bulletins and in newspaper stories, as they had been during the cold war, but were now joined by mobs on social media. In July 2014, a gruesome story appeared on Russia’s most popular TV station, Channel One. It claimed that Ukrainian officials had nailed a 3-year-old boy to a wooden board in the city of Slovyansk. It wasn’t true, but in story after story, interview after interview, tweet after tweet, a case was being put together using false stories: that the Ukrainian authorities were a Western-backed junta; that Ukraine was a failed state, a fascist state. Ukrainian journalists were hounded and threatened. “All Russian media started to describe Maidan using the same words, and the same kind of perspective,” says Fedchenko. “It was massive.” It was almost like a preordained narrative had been switched on. The Institute of Strategic Dialogue (ISD) in the UK is one of a number of think tanks that Anger is a powerful tool for change, but can easily be hijacked
Seven rules to keep yourself safe online 1. Actively look for the information you want, don’t let it find you. The information that wants to find you isn’t necessarily the information you want to find.
2. Beware the passive scroll. This is when you are prey to processes that can be gamed and virals that can be shaped.
3. Guard against outrage. Outrage is easy to hijack, and makes you particularly vulnerable to being manipulated online. What’s more, your outrage can induce outrage in others, making it a particularly potent tool.
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Slow down online. Pause before sharing. Give time for your rational thought processes to engage with what you are reading.
5. Lean away from the metrics that can be spoofed. Don’t trust something because it is popular, trending or visible.
have tried to stay on top of how social media activities are being used to manipulate politics. Chloe Colliver, a researcher at the institute, told me that in the run-up to May’s elections for the European Parliament, the ISD and colleagues at the community organisation Avaaz were finding active networks of influence across a range of platforms in Germany, France, Poland, Spain and the UK that dwarfed what Facebook had found in March. “This is a long-term investment geared towards changing what entire populations are seeing and thinking,” she told me. “The culture of a continent is threatened by something it has no idea it’s supposed to be defending itself from.” The team estimates that far-right disinformation networks across France, the UK, Germany, Spain, Italy and Poland produced content that was viewed an astonishing 750 million times in three months. In Poland, pro-government accounts posed as pensioners in order to attack striking teachers, all drawing on the same archive of infographics and linking to anti-Semitic youth-oriented sites. A network of 60 pages on Facebook also amplified anti-Semitic and pro-Kremlin content in the country. In Germany, 200,000 fake social media accounts were spreading electoral content supportive of the far-right political party Alternative für Deutschland. In Italy, a network with more than 2.6 million followers spread antimigration, anti-Semitic and anti-vaccine information. An estimated 9.6 million Spanish voters had seen disinformation on WhatsApp. Five of the top 10 accounts mentioning the UK’s Brexit party on Twitter were showing “bot-like” activity.
6. Never rely only on
Real-world consequences
information sourced from social media. This is particularly the case for key pieces of information, such as where polling booths are or whether you can vote.
The creation of fake realities online can lead to violence. In 2018, false information shared on social media in Nigeria caused rioting and people to be hacked to death by machetes. In 2019, rumours of child abductions in France caused violence against the Roma community. In Myanmar, hundreds of soldiers posed as celebrities and national heroes on social media to flood it with incendiary comments about the Rohingya minority, again leading to violence and conflict. This type of information warfare is on the rise. In 2017, researchers at the University of Oxford found it happening in 28 countries. In 2018, it was 48. The nature of battle has changed. Information is no longer being used in war. War is being waged within information. Since the end of the cold war, the militaries
7.
Spend your attention wisely: it is both your most precious and coveted asset.
of liberal democracies have been bigger, better funded and more powerful than the military of any country that wishes to do them harm. The dangers, however, are no longer physical. Now, coordinated groups can step right into the middle of the politics of any country with an online presence. And this poses a problem that no state can answer alone. While new treaties, laws and sanctions are long overdue to turn the cheap, easy and risk-free practice of information warfare into something more hazardous and difficult for
“Information is no longer being used in war. War is being waged within information” its perpetrators, the platforms will also need to change. In their search for frictionless online spaces accessible to anyone, the tech giants have created places where it is far easier to create information than to tell if it is true, and easier to create a fake identity than it is to expose one. To fix this, platform engineering will need to change, whether through forcing more identity checks, slowing down how information circulates, introducing cooling off periods or challenging far more of the accounts that are behaving suspiciously. For the societies that use these platforms, growth can no longer be the priority. Authenticity should be. In the meantime, states will continue to slug it out in the theatre of information. The 77th Brigade will continue to grow, and every military around the world will build its own equivalent to try to meet the threat. Yet the real challenge isn’t to join the arms race but to avoid it altogether. If information is a theatre of war, what does de-escalation in it look like? Ultimately, that comes down to you. You may be the target of all this activity, but you are also its off switch. By guarding against outrage, pushing against the desire to believe what is convenient and simply becoming less angry about what you see online, you may lose some battles, but you can help end the war. ❚
Carl Miller is research director for Demos. He is the author of The Death of the Gods: The new global power grab 19 October 2019 | New Scientist | 41
Features Cover story
42 | New Scientist | 19 October 2019
The agony of waiting We spend days, weeks and years waiting in limbo for life-changing events to happen. How do we build resilience in a world full of uncertainty, asks Helen Thomson
OLIVIER CULMANN/TENDANCE FLOUE
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WO minutes, 58 seconds. Two minutes, 59 seconds. Three minutes. One blue line or two? Our lives are full of moments where we hold our breath, waiting, our future in the balance. Whether it is three minutes for a pregnancy test, three months for an exam result or three years to find out what will happen with Brexit, time spent waiting for the news that could change everything can be filled with excitement and hope, or fear and anxiety. Now though, we are starting to understand how our capacity for coping with such uncertainty varies, and the toll that not coping well can take on our physical and mental health. With that comes the revelation that our ability to tolerate periods living in limbo has actually decreased over the past few decades. That has profound implications for many aspects of our lives – from the medical advice we are given and choices we make about it to how we cope with times of personal struggle, political upheaval and even longerterm existential threats like climate change. Thankfully there are ways to identify how tolerant we each are to spells of uncertainty that invade our lives, and methods we can use to manage and build resilience to them. It may be true that nothing in life is certain, but we
“It’s more stressful not knowing if a shock is coming than knowing you’ll definitely get zapped” can all learn how to traverse life’s limbos better and emerge from them relatively unscathed. Limbo is, of course, the first circle of hell in Dante’s Divine Comedy. It is a place where people have no hope yet live in longing. It is described as a gloomy, dimly lit wood – dark, deep and foggy. What are first mistaken for cries of anguish are in fact sighs of sadness. Not knowing isn’t nice. We are curious. We like to know what is going on, what might happen and what the long-term effects of our actions might be. Our brains are geared towards predicting the future; our very perception of the world is generated by combining memories of our past with information from our senses, to make an
educated guess about what is about to happen. Experiencing uncertainty makes us feel very uncomfortable. In fact, we find uncertainty so unsettling that people would rather know they are going to receive an electric shock than wait for the possibility of one. This was shown when researchers at University College London got people to play a computer game where snakes were hidden behind certain rocks. Each time participants found a snake, they got a small electric shock. The computer measured uncertainty using the players’ guesses and their stress response based on how much they sweated and their pupil size. People were more stressed if they were uncertain whether a shock was coming than if they knew they were definitely going to get zapped. “It’s the state that uncertainty generates,” says Benjamin Rosser at Liverpool John Moores University in the UK. “If you’re in a situation where something bad is definitely going to happen, you know what you’re dealing with and you can start thinking about ways of coping. If you are in a situation where the outcome could be positive or negative, you’re in a preparatory frame of mind and you’re less prepared for either outcome.” Think about a time of recession – in some ways it can be more stressful waiting for the possibility of lay-offs at work than just being told “you’re sacked”. We all differ in our ability to cope with not knowing how things will turn out. Scientists call this trait our “intolerance of uncertainty”. Where we sit on a spectrum of intolerance affects how we experience everyday situations, from waiting for a bus to waiting for news of a loved one in hospital. “It means that in life’s ambiguous scenarios, two people with the same information can react in two completely different ways,” says Rosser. Say your partner should have been back from work 20 minutes ago. Those with a low intolerance of uncertainty will assume they are stuck in traffic. A person with a high intolerance of uncertainty might immediately think they have been involved in an accident and worry until they arrive home. Of course, sometimes having a high intolerance of uncertainty is a good thing, says Michel Dugas at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. “There are certain jobs where it’s a benefit. Obviously, you don’t > 19 October 2019 | New Scientist | 43
want your air traffic controller to say, ‘well I don’t know what’s going to happen, but that’s OK.’” Equally, if you are a detective or a brain surgeon, a high intolerance for uncertainty is critical for some aspects of the job. But for the most part, an extreme dislike of the unknown is undesirable. It can provoke fear, anxiety and a perception of vulnerability. People who are less tolerant of uncertainty will engage in “safety behaviours”, says Dugas. “These are strategies that prevent undesirable outcomes in our future – phoning your partner all the time to check in with them, is a prime example.” While some safety behaviours allow us to minimise uncertainty and the associated anxiety, too many, paradoxically, just make things worse. “Safety behaviours in the absence of a realistic threat are actually maladaptive,” says Dugas. This has been demonstrated in a lab experiment. Healthy people were told to engage in daily safety behaviours to prevent the spread of germs – washing their hands every time they touch a door handle, for instance. At the end of a week, they showed increased avoidance in contamination-related tests, and overestimated contamination threats. Too many safety behaviours mean that we never learn that uncertainty isn’t always dangerous, and if you never have to experience negative outcomes, you never realise how good you might actually be at coping with them, says Dugas. It is hard to put a figure on exactly how
many people have extreme intolerance to uncertainty – it isn’t in psychiatry’s diagnostic manual as a condition in its own right. Instead, it is what doctors call a “vulnerability factor” for other conditions, such as generalised anxiety disorder. It is the most important factor contributing to whether people develop anxiety disorders in the first place, and whether they persist. These disorders affect 1 in 20 people.
Worst-case scenario So how can you work out how well you deal with uncertainty? You could use a scale developed by Dugas and his colleagues, in which you decide to what extent you agree with 27 statements such as “It’s unfair that life is uncertain” (see “How much do you fear uncertainty?”, page 46, for a short version). Another technique that therapists use is called a “catastrophising interview”, in which you are asked to consider a current worry, such as the outcome of a job application. They then ask you what it is that worries you about this situation. You might say you need the extra money. They would then ask you what worries you about that. “What if I can’t pay my rent?” you say. They ask you what worries you about that. “Where would I borrow the money from? What if I default on my credit card? Would my children have to move schools?” “We continue to drill down into the details of your worry until we get to the bottom of it,”
Paralysed by the unknown The impact of an extreme intolerance of uncertainty (see main feature) can range from everyday worry to severe anxiety to, at its worst, a coma-like state. In 2016, researchers in Sweden reported on a rise of resignation syndrome, or “uppgivenhetssyndrom”, among child and adolescent asylum seekers facing deportation. More than 400 cases have been reported in which children fall into depression, then gradually withdraw into a stupor until eventually they require a feeding 44 | New Scientist | 19 October 2019
tube and no longer respond to even painful stimuli. This particular state appears to be specific to Swedish refugees, although it exists in similar forms throughout the world, appearing as a reaction to sudden periods of uncertainty. The encouraging news is that, in the Swedish cases, the resolution of uncertainty – “restoration of hope to the family”, in the words of researchers who studied the phenomenon – was enough to start a process of full recovery.
says Frances Meeten, a psychologist at the University of Sussex, UK. “We note how many ‘what if’ scenarios you generate from your initial worry, how many future negative outcomes you imagine. The more you have, the higher your intolerance of uncertainty.” Normally, this test is used before and after an intervention to see whether it is working, says Meeten, rather than using it to figure out how uncertainty might affect your life. Many factors can influence how uncertainty affects us. “It’s like any other personality trait,” says Dugas. “There’s an interplay between our traits and our life experience. If I’m quite intolerant of uncertainty but my life is extremely predictable, I won’t have any problem. If my life is chaotic, I might experience severe anxiety from the same level of intolerance.” (See “Paralysed by the unknown”, below left.) There are, however, wider medical implications of intolerance of uncertainty. “It’s influential for all kinds of health outcomes,” says Paul Han at the Maine Medical Center Research Institute. For a start, your doctor’s personal uncertainty threshold has huge implications for your health. For instance, women are more likely to end up with a vaginal birth after a previous caesarian section if their doctor has a low intolerance of uncertainty. This trait also makes doctors more likely to offer a new genetic test, prescribe generic drugs, adopt a cutting-edge therapy and feel comfortable talking to patients about grief and loss. However, doctors who are more intolerant of uncertainty are more likely to recommend a pregnancy termination following abnormal results from prenatal genetic tests, and are less willing to use newer therapies, such as cognitive behavioural therapy, for eating disorders. Doctors may also give different advice depending on how well they think their patients can cope with uncertainty – in some cases even withholding information or not offering interventions with uncertain outcomes. Your own intolerance of uncertainty can also affect health outcomes. For instance, people who have a high tolerance of uncertainty have better emotional well-being after a cancer diagnosis and experience less distress after receiving genetic test results. It is also associated with a better quality of life and less irritability in people with epilepsy, as well as lower language impairment and fewer motor symptoms in Parkinson’s. On the other hand, a high intolerance may make people more likely to adhere to their medication.
Watch and wait: how you cope with uncertainty influences treatment choices
How to build resilience when life is in limbo • Make a note of “safety behaviours” you rely on to cope when you don’t know how things will turn out (see main article). Then attempt to reduce these little by little. • Challenge yourself to let your uncertainty play out without using any safety behaviours. • Assume the best for as long as possible; only brace for the worst at the end of the wait.
RAYMOND DEPARDON / MAGNUM PHOTOS
• Distract yourself to pass the time more quickly. • Practise mindfulness meditation to keep yourself grounded in the present. • Find a silver lining in case the awaited outcome is negative. • Talk to others about how they cope with uncertainty; try to take their perspective.
It also affects people’s ability to cope with particular treatment regimes, says Han. Sometimes, men with localised prostate cancer can choose a “watch and wait” approach, whereby they have regular scans rather than immediate treatment that can have side effects including incontinence and impotence. This approach means enduring long periods of limbo between scans. Several men in this position, who spoke to New Scientist confidentially, described this choice as one of the most difficult decisions they’d ever had to make – and one that sometimes caused a rift with loved ones, whose ability to cope with uncertainty differed from their own. Contending with the unknown can place great strain on relationships, says Dugas. When couples with a high intolerance of uncertainty have difficulties, they might leave each other immediately rather than wait and see what might happen, he says. Or people have difficulty developing relationships in the first place, because they aren’t prepared to go through that initial period of uncertainty – will they call, do they like me, should I ask
them out to lunch? “This makes them very hesitant to form relationships, and when they do make the effort, they want too much certainty about the future from the start, which scares the other person off.” The good news is that our discomfort with the unknown can be manipulated, so we can learn how to boost our resilience. In one experiment, students were told to read a story in which the main character had either a high or low intolerance of uncertainty and try to put themselves in that person’s mindset. Their own intolerance of uncertainty was then tested. After the manipulation, the group reading about a character who is more rattled by uncertainty generated far more steps in subsequent catastrophising interviews about their own real worries. In the real world, you need to treat your intolerance of uncertainty as you would a phobia, says Dugas. “If you’re scared of dogs, we’d expose you to them slowly and carefully to help you develop the understanding that most dogs are not dangerous. The same holds true for intolerance of uncertainty.” >
• Sit with your uncertainty for a short time and see what happens.
19 October 2019 | New Scientist | 45
How much do you fear uncertainty?
Silver linings We are using safety behaviours more and more, though. Over the past two decades, our intolerance of uncertainty has increased significantly, according to Nicholas Carleton at the University of Regina in Canada and his colleagues. Their recent analysis of 52 studies of students showed that intolerance went up by about a fifth between 1994 and 2014. The team believes cellphones and internet access, which both grew rapidly over the same period, might be to blame – increasing safety behaviours by offering us immediate access to emergency services, loved ones and information that isn’t always helpful. “Cellphones nourish our safety behaviours,” says Dugas. To practise what he preaches and minimise his own safety behaviours, he doesn’t own a cellphone. “You know what, nothing awful has happened yet,” he says. There are strategies to help you cope with uncertainty that don’t involve ditching your phone or resorting to professional help (see “How to build resilience when life is in limbo”, page 45). Throwing yourself into an engrossing task can provide a welcome distraction and make time pass more quickly, for instance. And practising mindfulness meditation can help keep you in the moment, stopping you from agonising about future outcomes. Don’t forget that a degree of intolerance can be useful, however. It helps to lower your expectations. Bracing for the worst can minimise the impact if bad news arises, but timing is everything. To avoid unnecessary 46 | New Scientist | 19 October 2019
Circle the number that best corresponds with how much each of the statements below is characteristic of you. A higher score indicates a higher intolerance of uncertainty Not at all
A little
Somewhat
Very
Entirely
Unforeseen events upset me greatly
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It frustrates me not having all the information I need
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Uncertainty keeps me from living a full life
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One should always look ahead so as to avoid surprises
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A small unforeseen event can spoil everything
1
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5
When it’s time to act, uncertainty paralyses me
1
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5
When I am uncertain I can’t function very well
1
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5
I always want to know what the future has in store for me
1
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I can’t stand being taken by surprise
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The smallest doubt can stop me from acting
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I should be able to organise everything in advance
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I must get away from all uncertain situations
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worry, you need to assume the best for as long as possible before bracing for the worst towards the end of the wait, says Kate Sweeny at the University of California, Riverside. Finally, it may be helpful to concentrate on finding the silver lining in any potential bad news. In the 2016 US presidential election, Hillary Clinton supporters who preemptively looked for the good in Donald Trump being elected were less shattered when he won, Sweeny found. But be cautious, this strategy can backfire: Trump supporters who tried to find an upside to Clinton winning were less thrilled when their candidate did. Alongside the everyday uncertainties that we face, many of us are living in a particularly uncertain time. In the UK, Brexit has loomed large for more than three years, putting the future of the country in the balance. Could the perpetual uncertainty about the nation’s ties with the European Union be causing the population harm? “With Brexit there’s an enormous amount of uncertainty, so you might find there are more people having to deal with more uncertainty and more anxiety as a result,” says Dugas. “But it might go the other way and make people less
SOURCE: CARLETON, NORTON, & ASMUNDSON, 2007
To cure people’s fear of uncertainty, we get them to experiment with their safety behaviours, says Dugas. He describes one person who was overanxious about her son going out by himself. She made him call her as soon as he left the house and stay on the phone while he was on the bus, until he reached his friend’s house. Dugas encouraged her to let her son hang up when he got on the bus and call back when he arrived. The next time the son just called when he arrived, then finally didn’t call at all. “There’s no magic bullet, it’s about putting ourselves in a situation where we can learn that uncertainty isn’t dangerous, and we know this leads to a decrease in anxiety over time.” Minimising safety behaviours without outside intervention isn’t easy. “It’s not impossible, but it’s difficult,” says Dugas. “Safety behaviours are really sneaky, they’re hard to identify and we mostly don’t realise we’re doing them.”
anxious, because they go on with their life even though they are experiencing more uncertainty. They realise they can cope with this big, long-term limbo, so the small things are also easier to cope with.” Deal or no deal, pass or fail, two blue lines or one – one thing is for certain: uncertainty isn’t going away. If you need to build some extra resilience to it, Meeten has some final advice: Instead of weighing yourself down with worry or trying to problem-solve every eventuality, try sitting with that uncertainty for a while. You’ll see that, most of the time, nothing particularly bad happens. And talk to others about how they cope. “Taking a step back and realising that your way of dealing with uncertainty isn’t set in stone, that others might not feel the same way about that same situation, that it’s a personal perspective that is changeable, is one of the strongest messages we can give people.” ❚
Helen Thomson is a consultant for
New Scientist. She is the author of Unthinkable: An extraordinary journey through the world’s strangest brains
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For next week Binoculars
Next in the series 1 Model the equinox 2 Find the North Star and Southern Cross 3 Test your area’s light pollution 4 Identify the craters of the moon 5 Orion and Sirius: how to star-hop 6 Planet spotting: Mars, Mercury and Uranus When is a star not a star? 7 Taurus and the zodiacal constellations
BETELGEUSE SIRIUS ORION'S BELT RIGEL
ARMAN GOLESTANEH
Abigail Beall is a science writer in Leeds, UK. This series is based on her book The Art of Urban Astronomy @abbybeall
THIS week, we are going to be star-hopping. We will identify the most recognisable constellation visible around now – Orion – and use it to find Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky. You don’t need any equipment, and as Orion is one of the brightest constellations, light pollution shouldn’t be a problem either. Sirius can be seen in summer in the southern hemisphere, rising early in the morning before the sun, and in the evening when it sets after the sun. At the moment in the northern hemisphere, Sirius will rise above the horizon at about midnight, and it will appear earlier through winter. Orion the Hunter is a great constellation to start with because it contains many bright stars. It is also found on the celestial equator, which means it can be seen from anywhere in the world. It appears in September, and is visible for most of the night between January and March. The best way to find Orion is to look for the iconic line of three stars that make the asterism of Orion’s Belt. Their names are Alnitak, Alnilam and Mintaka. The brightest star in Orion and the sixth-brightest in the night sky is Rigel, at the bottom right. Rigel is actually a system of three stars, the blue supergiant Rigel A with two fainter companions. Betelgeuse, at the top left, is Orion’s shoulder. Although it is between 11 and 15 times as massive as the sun, its radius is 950 times wider. This makes it one of the biggest stars we know of. It is a red
Stargazing at home online Projects will be posted online each week at newscientist.com/maker Email: maker@newscientist.com
supergiant, so has used up its core of hydrogen and is now burning the helium around its outside. It is some 8 or 10 million years old, which is quite old for a supergiant. Such stars burn their fuel quickly and brightly. This means Betelgeuse might explode in a supernova any day now. However, before you get excited, “any day now” in astronomical terms means any time in the next million years. Now for the star-hop. Going from the right side of Orion’s Belt to the left, carry that line a little further than the distance between Betelgeuse and Rigel. At the end is Sirius, the dog star, in the constellation Canis Major.
Most stars we can see with the naked eye are binary systems, and Sirius is no exception. Sirius A and B orbit each other at a distance of between 8.2 and 31.5 astronomical units (1 AU is the distance between Earth and the sun). Sirius A is about twice as big and 25 times as bright as our sun, but Sirius B used up its hydrogen a long time ago, became a red giant and is now a white dwarf. In absolute terms, that makes Sirius quite a dim star. The only reason it appears bright is that it is just 8.6 light years away. Next week, we will be finding out how to tell the difference between a star and a planet, and spotting all those it is possible to see. ❚ 19 October 2019 | New Scientist | 51
The back pages Puzzles Quick crossword #43 Set by Richard Smyth
Quick quiz #25 1 Which 19th century Scottish physicist’s name is associated with the unifying equations of classical electromagnetism? 2 Pluto, Makemake and Haumea are the largest objects in what disc of icy rocks engirdling the solar system? 3 What are the individual tiny tentacled animals that make up a coral called? 4 What is ITER being built to demonstrate at Cadarache in the south of France? 5 What letter must you add to C2H5OH to make CH3OH?
ACROSS 1 Biologist and president of Humanists UK (5,7) 10 South Korean social network (7) 11 Turn to vinegar (7) 12 Dolphin genus; bacterium (informally) (5) 13 Heavy-lift helicopter (8) 15 Irregular heartbeat (10) 16 Mineral, Mg3Si4O10(OH)2 (4)
DOWN 2 1st or 2nd, say? (3,4) 3 ___ group, COOH (8) 4 ctrl+Y or cmd-shift-Z (4) 5 UV-A lamp (5,5) 6 ___ Ocean, prehistoric sea between Gondwana and Laurussia (5) 7 Shrub genus (7) 8 Icicle or brinicle (3,10) 9 Unfounded health concerns exacerbated by online research (13)
Answers below
18 Palm tree, Euterpe oleracea (4) 20 Tropical cyclone that struck Japan in 1990 (7,3) 22 Aromatic herb (8) 24 Consonantal alphabet (5) 26 Tidal wave (7) 27 Ettore ___, automobile designer (7) 28 Pr (12)
Cryptic Crossword #16 Answers
14 Peridot (10) 17 Red-flowering eucalyptus (5,3) 19 Inflating tool; the constellation Antlia (3,4) 21 IT firm founded in Kawasaki in 1935 (7) 23 Old World lizard (5) 25 Latin abbreviation, found in endnotes (4)
ACROSS 7 Angler, 8 Weevil, 9 Beta, 10 Cambrian, 11 Erratic, 13 Essay, 15 Fence, 17 Mineral, 20 Cleavage, 21 Tray, 23 Encode, 24 Garnet DOWN 1 Ante, 2 Alpaca, 3 Breccia, 4 Swamp, 5 Beards, 6 Himalaya, 12 Riesling, 14 Diverge, 16 Craton, 18 Entire, 19 Facet, 22 Apex
Quick quiz #25 Answers
52 | New Scientist | 19 October 2019
1 James Clerk Maxwell 2 The Kuiper belt 3 Polyps 4 Nuclear fusion: it is the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor 5 M – they are the chemical formulae for ethanol and methanol
Answers and the next cryptic crossword next week.
Puzzle set by Paulo Ferro #26 Evening out
The figure above is composed of 15 matchsticks. Move 2 matchsticks to get a 3-digit number with all the digits even numbers. Find them all! Answer next week
#25 Car crash maths Solution A blue car travelling at 70mph and a yellow one at 100mph brake simultaneously when they see a fallen tree ahead. The blue one stops just in time. But the yellow one hits the tree at about 70mph, so option (d) is the best answer. The yellow car hasn’t even got down to the speed that the blue car was travelling at. Here is one way to calculate this: • The energy expended on braking is the force × the distance. • In this model, therefore, both cars expend the same amount of energy. • The blue car braked to a halt and has zero energy left. • Energy in motion (kinetic energy) is proportional to ½×mass×velocity², so think of both cars losing ½×m×70² of energy. •The yellow car started with ½×m×100². • 70² is not quite half of 100², so the yellow car still has half of its energy, which means it is still travelling at a touch over 70mph when it hits the fallen tree. The same result can be reached if you use the equations of constant acceleration. Our intuition is confused by the squaring of the velocities – this isn’t a linear relationship. This helps to explain why our guesses are often poor in such situations. What’s more, this model assumes no driver reaction time and some simplification of braking forces. In fact, if reaction time is included, the yellow car will be travelling even faster when it hits the tree.
Get in touch Email us at crossword@newscientist.com puzzles@newscientist.com
The back pages Feedback Advanced maths Internet giant Amazon has attracted criticism in recent years for the minimal tax it pays on a business worth billions a year. All above board, it goes without saying. Now, while browsing for awnings on amazon.co.uk’s Outsunny Door Awning Canopy page, Alan Wells has stumbled on the company employing non-conventional mathematics in a different context. “Looking at the reviews, I saw that it had been given a mean score of 3.1 out of 5 from two reviews, which on further examination resulted from one review of 5 stars and one review of 1 star,” he writes. To help explain matters, a bar chart was also provided, which recorded that 53 per cent of the two reviews had awarded five stars, and 47 per cent had given a one star. “Can anybody explain the maths to me?” he asks. We can’t, Alan – but then our tax bill this year was eye-watering.
Tangerine dream From inexplicable mathematics to unexplained science. It is well known that US president Donald Trump’s environmental concerns don’t extend much further than potential locations for his next golf course, but a speech at a policy retreat in Baltimore shed new light not just on his anti-green stance, but also his strange skin hue. During a 70-minute speech to captive Republicans, the president railed against energy-saving light bulbs, telling his audience: “The light bulb. People said what’s with the light bulb? I said here’s the story. And I looked at it, the bulb that we’re being forced to use, number one to me, most importantly, the light’s no good. I always look orange. And so do you. The light is the worst.” He didn’t explain in detail how this curious photochemistry works, but Feedback notes that Trump isn’t alone. There is something about energy-saving light bulbs that induces a mysterious redshift in the
complexion of a certain type of person. As far as the US commander-in-chief is concerned, he has often been accused of gaslighting the nation; perhaps it was only a matter of time before he really did blame the lights.
Twisteddoodles for New Scientist
Bright spark More light on a dark place. “I have been trying to find a use for the many thousands of damaged laser crystals that exist in physical science laboratories, and this seems to be one way forward,” chemist Tony Stace writes. He supplies photos of an elegant pendant and set of earrings in white gold, mounted in which are crystals taken from the heart of a solid-state laser. In natural light, the traces of neodymium they contain create a faint pink-purple hue perfect for communicating ideas of love. Alternatively, if you pump light into them with a flash tube emitting at 900 nanometres, you will stimulate emissions in the infrared. It seems obvious when you think about it to link these two uses of rare metals and exotic crystals. Rather than gathering dust, your scientific kit can be upcycled into fetching jewellery. A talking point at any scientific dinner party! But why stop there, we wonder. Laboratories come stocked with all kinds of esoteric kit destined to fall into disuse: we’d love to hear your stories of the curious afterlives of scientific equipment.
Emergency buzzing In its eternal battle to subjugate humankind, robotkind has developed a new and troubling strategy. On Twitter, Jess Kidding discovers the following warning on a new appliance: “GOOVI Robot Vacuum Cleaner will emit a series of bees when it is in trouble,” before adding unhelpfully, “please refer more solution with User Manual in Troubleshooting”. Who approved this apian alert system? How many bees are involved, and how does releasing them help? We suggest you don’t
try to find out, but accompany your GOOVI wherever it goes, and do everything you can so it leads a trouble-free life. No, wait – is that just what they want you to do?
Climate change bites A Swedish economist has suggested eating human flesh to combat climate change. Magnus Söderlund floated the idea, tongue in cheek (two of the tastiest cuts), at the Gastro Summit in Stockholm, noting that survival in a climate-ravaged world rests on marketing types convincing us to develop an appetite for new sources of protein. Readers with longer memories will recall that the satirist Jonathan Swift made a similar “modest proposal” in the 18th century, that the Irish poor should feed their children to the English rich. That one didn’t fly – but then they didn’t have marketing departments back then.
Water, water... Our nominative determinism pot runneth over. Paul Kitcatt (four fingers on each hand, we imagine), spots How to Read the Weather by Storm Dunlop. We furrow our brow, consult our leather-bound tomes and consider that this may be the same Storm Dunlop who has written on such subjects in our own pages, and insists his name did not predispose him to it. Meanwhile, Chris Evans notes a recent article on European flood risk features one Emanuele Bevacqua (28 September, p 18), whose surname is Italian for “drink water”. “A possible solution to the problem?” asks Chris. And browsing The Daily Telegraph, Martin Malec discovers that Scotland’s Rural College is working to breed sheep that produce less greenhouse gas. The geneticist in charge? Nicola Lambe. ❚
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 19 October 2019 | New Scientist | 53
The back pages Almost the last word Since its force gives energy to falling rocks, why doesn’t gravity diminish over time?
In the ink
Guy Cox Sydney, New South Wales, Australia There are two reasons for this. One is that our eyes are much less sensitive to blue light – peak sensitivity is in the yellow-green region of the spectrum, so if all markers were of equal intensity, the yellow and green ones would always seem brighter to us. Sensitivity falls in the red region, too, so red markers can never match the brightness of yellows and greens either. The second reason is inherent in the way these markers work. They seem so bright because they contain fluorescent dyes that absorb short-wavelength light and re-emit it at their specific colour. Blue is at the short end of the visible spectrum, so a blue fluorescent pigment can only be excited by ultraviolet light, which is usually in short supply indoors. Yellow-green dyes can be excited by blue light and UV, so they are excited more efficiently. Red-emitting dyes can be excited by green light as well and this helps to compensate for the eye’s lower sensitivity to their colour. Eric Kvaalen Les Essarts-le-Roi, France Our eyes are more sensitive to light in the middle of the spectrum, which means orange, yellow and green. For longer wavelengths (red) or shorter wavelengths (blue), the sensitivity drops off, falling to zero for infrared and ultraviolet. Pink is a mixture of red and white, which makes it more luminous than just red. One can also make a mixture of blue and white, which will also be fairly luminous. Some languages, such as Russian and Hebrew, have a different word for this blue/white mixture, just as we have different words for pink and red. 54 | New Scientist | 19 October 2019
IMAGEBROKER/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
Why do blue highlighter markers never seem to have the high luminosity of pink, yellow, orange and light green highlighters?
This week’s new questions Shrinking gravity The first law of thermodynamics is the conservation of energy. The first law of geology is that rocks fall downhill. Falling rocks gain energy. The energy must come from gravity. So why doesn’t gravity get less every day? Anthony Woodward, Portland, Oregon, US Super seers I have heard that it is possible for some people to see ultraviolet light. Is this true, and if so, how is it possible? Kevin Burton, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Good consumers Which is better for the environment, online shopping or traditional high street shopping?
Brian Horton West Launceston, Tasmania, Australia In terms of packaging and shipping, it is more efficient for a shop to bring large quantities of goods from a factory or depot to your local area than for everyone to buy those goods online and have them delivered individually to their homes from the factory or the depot. Therefore, if the items you want are readily available from local shops, then in environmental terms, it is better to buy them locally. For anything else, buying online would be more efficient. We can probably ignore the environmental cost of driving to the shops to buy goods, since this is roughly equivalent to the cost of the final stage of delivery to your house when you buy online.
Simon Dales Oxford, UK I would say the best options are to drive to an out-of-town store to do your weekly grocery shop, ideally when driving back from somewhere else. Then go to a local store for perishables. And for most of the rest, walk, cycle or use public transport. Hillary Shaw Newport, Shropshire, UK There are factors other than emissions used in transporting goods to consider. Online searches themselves use energy. Car owners who shop online may drive elsewhere in the time freed up from shopping. But trip-linking may mean going to the shops is done in conjunction with, say, work journeys, and then there is no gain by going online.
With set delivery slots, a vehicle bringing goods ordered online may not take the shortest route, and with frequent stop-starting its fuel use may be higher than that of consumers driving to a shop. The distance from factory to online delivery depot may also be long. Socially, traditional high street shopping wins hands down: you retain more employment, meet more people, keep town centres viable and enjoy experiences outside the home. If only the roads weren’t so clogged and the parking so expensive. Ali El Idrissi San Francisco, California, US Rather than just choose between online or high street shopping, society needs to transition to sustainable consumption and organise new ways to provide everyday products and services. The consumerist culture associated with shopping – both on- and offline – has huge negative impacts on our health and our environment. Humanity currently uses resources each year equal to those of 1.7 planets. If nothing changes, this will be two planets by 2030. A study in the Journal of Industrial Ecology calculated that, in 2007, household consumption, including shopping, contributed to more than 60 per cent of carbon emissions. This is unsustainable. There is nothing wrong with consumption per se. It is part of our lives, reflects our journey and carries our memories. The problem is the excess that happens when consumption itself becomes the goal. ❚ For more on this subject, see “The last-mile revolution”, New Scientist, 7 September, p 42 – Ed
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The back pages Q&A
Anu Ojha, UK’s National Space Academy director, reveals which are the coolest moons in the solar system, what finding alien life will mean and why the best discussions happen with the young As a child, what did you want to do when you grew up? I grew up fascinated by space science and the world around me. As I grew older, this extended to a desire to understand societal and human issues, but I never really knew what I wanted to be apart from something that let me keep learning.
Explain your work in one easy paragraph. I direct the UK’s National Space Academy, which helps young people navigate towards careers in the space and wider science and engineering sectors. I have other roles nationally and internationally, including a lot of space science policy and government advisory work. I do some research: I’m a co-investigator on a new planetary drilling technology being developed by the University of Leicester. And most importantly, I still have opportunities to teach.
What is the most exciting thing you have worked on in your career? Being invited to be principal investigator for an International Space Station experiment conducted by Tim Peake was a tremendous honour and took my understanding of human space flight operations to much higher levels. My current work for the Science and Technology Facilities Council and the European Space Agency focuses on long-term planning for UK physics research and human and robotic exploration of the moon and Mars.
How has your field of study changed in the time you have been working in it? In my lifetime, we have seen distant moons transformed into worlds of fire (Io is the most volcanic object in the solar system), of ice (Europa, Ganymede, Callisto) and possibly of life (Enceladus). We also now have a far better understanding of the impact of human activity on our planet, the most astonishing, diverse planet in the solar system.
If you could have a conversation with any scientist living or dead, who would it be? To be honest, I am more stimulated by the real discussions I have with young researchers and students. They are the true crucibles of creativity and innovation of thought. 56 | New Scientist | 19 October 2019
What achievement or discovery are you most proud of? Teaching young people really brings home to me the fact that the 21st century is theirs, not my generation’s. Sometimes, I think politicians need to be reminded about this.
What scientific development do you hope to see in your lifetime? The discovery of microbial life elsewhere in the solar system would be one of the greatest achievements of science. But evidence of intelligence elsewhere in the universe would have a transformational impact on human civilisation, for better or possibly worse.
Do you have an unexpected hobby, and if so, please will you tell us about it? I have been a freediver, scuba diver and skydiver for more than 20 years. When jumping out of a plane with friends, the sky transforms into an aerial playground with a horizon over 100 kilometres away. For that magical minute of free fall, the third dimension becomes accessible and you gain a new and very personal perspective on our home planet and our relationship with it. Even after nearly 1500 jumps, I never tire of it.
What is the best thing you have read or seen in the past 12 months? The writings, activities and impact of advocates like Greta Thunberg and Malala Yousafzai challenge my generation in ways that may make us feel uncomfortable but which are essential for us to take on board.
OK, one last thing: tell us something that will blow our minds… I think I first heard it in a speech by the Astronomer Royal, Martin Rees: “The greatest complexity we see in astrophysics and astronomy pales into insignificance when compared to the biological complexity of a simple ant.” ❚
Anu Ojha is director of the UK National Space Academy and a member of the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council JASPER CHAMBER/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
“Advocates like Greta Thunberg challenge my generation in ways that are essential for us to take on board”