New Scientist Nov 9 2019

Discovery Tours

C OMP E T I T ION What’s your science holiday dream? We can make it come true!

Is there a scientific holiday, tour or experience in your bucket list that you dream of making a reality? We might just be able to help with that!

We are crowd sourcing ideas for new tours, and the winner will recieve 2 free places on their tour when it's launched.

k Write a brief description of your ideal science holiday, tour or experience. k We will launch the best idea late 2020 or 2021. The winner will receive two places on the tour. k No matter how big or small, we are looking for brilliant unique ideas. It can be complex multi-location overseas holiday tour or a simple walking tour or a weekender (and everything in between). k We are also looking for ideas for family, active and school tours.

More details and entry form at form at newscientist.com/tours

MEET THE FIRST ANIMALS

Enigmatic creatures from before life’s big bang

SEEING AROUND CORNERS How shadows can help us piece together the invisible

THREE-BODY PROBLEM

AI takes on Isaac Newton’s most fiendish puzzle

WEEKLY 9 November 2019 No3255 Australia $9.50 (Inc. GST) New Zealand NZ$9.50 (Inc. GST) Print Post Approved 100007877

THE HEALING POWER OF YOUR MIND Why hypnosis is finally being taken seriously by modern medicine

HOME OF THE FUTURE

What a truly eco house could look like

4 5

PLUS THE SHAPE OF THE UNIVERSE / ELEPHANT MENOPAUSE / ALIEN WATER / HOW OUR BRAINS REMEMBER WHERE THINGS ARE News, ideas and innovation www.newscientist.com

9 771032 123104

World Leader of Luxury Expeditions

INSPIRE YOUR SPIRIT WILD KIMBERLEY ENRICHMENT. PURE PONANT LUXURY. Take an incredible ancient wilderness. Add the intimate luxury of a small ship on board the youngest +! *,01 0201 &+ )" Ć?""1 2//"+1)6 0 &)&+$ 1%" 4,/)!#, limited to only 184 guests, and you have an expert-led expedition par excellence.

In your ZodiacÂŽ you will meander through massive mangrove systems, pristine and rich with wildlife.

Marvel at the mighty tidal movements of Montgomery Reef. Admire King Georges River’s vertical falls and enjoy the thrill as you get up close to Talbot Bay’s raging Horizontal Falls, considered by some to be "one of the greatest wonders of the natural world". Then behold over 30,000 years old ancient rock art galleries of dreamtime Gwion Gwion masterpieces. +!Çž 0 1%" 02+ 0)&!"0 ( &+1, 1%" 0" Çž 1%"/"ȉ0 1%" "3"+&+$ %" !Ç˝ ,,) ,Ć› 4&1% 04&* &+ 1%" ,21!,,/ &+Ćœ+&16 -,,)Çž "+',6 /"Ćœ+"! /"+ %Č’&+0-&/"! 2&0&+" ),+$0&!" + -"+ / +! " - *-"/"! with attentive service, just one of the perks of being aboard a luxury small expedition ship. Your Kimberley calls! From so tantalisingly close to home.

Book your 2021 Kimberley Luxury Expedition early and SAVE up to 30%!* PLUS, receive $800^ ,Ć› 6,2/ Ćœ/01 /2&0"Č‚ DARWIN TO BROOME or BROOME TO DARWIN: Australia’s Iconic Kimberley Luxury Expedition aboard Le Bellot.

9 departures from May to September 2021. 10 nights from $ǔǓ,ǜǖ0 pp(1) Can’t wait? Staterooms still available on 2020 departures!

Learn more about PONANT at our FREE Information Events in your capital city or request a brochure.

Contact your Travel Agent or our PONANT Cruise Consultants on: Australia: 1300 737 178 | New Zealand: 0800 767 018 | reservations.aus@ponant.com | au.ponant.com ČŻ *0- Ç˝ )&$)" ǕǓǔǜ ČŁ *) )/ *)0. $. *0)/ .0 % / /* # )" . *) 1 $' $'$/4Çť 1 -/$. +-$ $. . *) /# *) )/ *)0. ! - + - + -.*)Çź $) 0./- '$ ) *'' -.Çź . *) *0 ' * 0+ ) 4Çź $) '0 $)" +*-/ / 3 . ) /- ).! - Č™+*-/ /* -**( /*2)Č&#x; $-+*-/Țǟ 4$ ' ( ) " Çź *-- / / /$( *!

2-$/$)" Č? Ç•Ç›Č&#x;ǔǓČ&#x;Ç•Ç“Ç”ÇœÇť Ęś ' *( !! - $. $) 0./- '$ ) *'' -. Č™ Țǟ + - ./ / -**( . *) *0 ' * 0+ ) 4Çź Ę?Ç—Ç“Ç“ . 1$)". + - ./ / -**( !*- .$)"' * 0+ ) 4Çť !! - 1 '$ !*- "0 ./. /- 1 ''$)" 2$/# !*- /# !$-./ /$( Çť !! - $. )*/ - ( ' !*- .#Çź )*/ - /-* /$1 Çź ) )*/ *( $) ' 2$/# )4 */# - *!! -.Çź 3 +/ /# *) )/ *)0. ) $)"' - 1 '' - !! -.Çť '$ !*- ) 2 **&$)". *)'4 ) 1 $' ' 0)/$' !0-/# - )*/$ 0/ ) # )" *- 2$/# - 2) / )4 /$( Çť *) $/$*). ++'4Çť ! - /* 0Çť+*) )/Çť *( !*- Ç’ .Çť șǔȚ *- /# Çš/# +/ ( - Ç•Ç“Ç•Ç” -0$. $) '03 / / -**(Çť #*/*"- +#. Ȩ $ & $).Çť Ç˝ ǖǘ ǔǙǙ ǙǚǙ Ç˜Ç”ÇšÇť

AUSTRALIA CRUISERS’ CHOICE

This week’s issue

On the cover

38 Meet the first animals Enigmatic creatures from before life’s big bang

34 The healing power of your mind Why hypnosis is finally being taken seriously by modern medicine

42 Seeing around corners How shadows can help us piece together the invisible

42 Features

“A 3-D image of a room can be constructed from the shadow cast by a houseplant”

14 Three-body problem AI takes on Isaac Newton’s most fiendish puzzle

18 Home of the future What a truly eco house could look like

Vol 244 No 3255

7 The shape of the universe 16 Elephant menopause 10 Alien water 10 How our brains remember where things are

Cover image: Dan Page

News

Features

6 On the origin of two legs Did apes first become bipedal in a surprising place?

34 The healing power of your mind Hypnosis appears to alleviate anxiety and chronic pain.

Is it time to take it seriously?

News

9 Fighting fake news The problem with Facebook’s plans to tackle misinformation

38 Meet the first animals The enigmatic creatures of early Earth are rewriting life’s history

10 There it is The newly discovered type of neuron that keeps track of objects in space

42 Seeing around corners The intriguing science of perceiving the invisible

Views

The back pages

21 Comment Who owns the code of life?

51 Stargazing from home How to spot Mercury 52 Puzzles A cryptic crossword, a puzzle and a quick quiz

24 Letters We must deal with the roots of domestic violence

53 Feedback Speed-reading without opening a book: the week in weird

28 Aperture A futuristic solar farm in a desert high above sea level

54 Almost the last word Why are some people interested in science? Readers respond

30 Culture The chasm between scientists and those who reject science

SEBASTIAN BRILL/MPI-C

22 The columnist Graham Lawton examines our progress so far on saving the planet

12 The Amazon’s secrets Experimenting high above the canopy

56 The Q&A Henning Beck says mistakes are crucial for our success

9 November 2019 | New Scientist | 1

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

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

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

60% of us experience ‘inner speech’ where everyday thoughts take a back-and-forth conversational style.

We spend 50% of our lives daydreaming.

AVAILABLE NOW newscientist.com/howtobehuman

The leader

Return of hypnosis Time to see if it really has a place in mainstream medicine DO YOU know what they call alternative medicine that’s been proved to work?

Medicine. So says Tim Minchin in his poem “Storm”, in which he makes the case for evidence-led treatment.

We have a long history of therapies that first seemed bananas, only to be proved marvellous medicine. In the 1980s, two Australian scientists showed that stomach ulcers were caused by bacteria, not stress. As a result, simple antibiotics could treat a problem once considered incurable. But the medical establishment took some persuading.

The pair won a Nobel prize, for having the “tenacity to challenge the prevailing dogma”. Tenacity is just what is needed now, in identifying the place of hypnosis in mainstream medicine (see page 34).

People are right to be sceptical, given its fantastical origins, but evidence is

accumulating that hypnosis has real promise as a medical therapy – helping doctors perform surgery with fewer side effects and at lower cost, minimising chronic pain, improving weight loss techniques and potentially aiding an international addiction crisis.

“The jury may be in on therapies like homeopathy, but that shouldn't stop us exploring other unusual treatments” But no establishment should accept any alternative medicine until we have solid evidence of what works, and what doesn’t. Tenacity only gets you so far.

We also need investment and rigorous studies. When it comes to hypnosis, these are still in short supply.

For instance, despite its popularity as

a means to quit smoking, a recent review found no good evidence that hypnosis helps. But this doesn’t mean it doesn’t, says Jamie Hartmann-Boyce at the University of Oxford, because relevant research has been so poorly designed it makes it impossible to say for sure either way. “It’s such an important issue that we need… bigger, better trials,” she says.

Hypnosis may be hard to define and difficult to study, but the pay-offs could be huge. With suggestions that it can potentially reduce reliance on opioids, drugs which kill 130 people in the US every day due to overdose, surely it is worth taking seriously.

The jury is in on alternative remedies like homeopathy, but that shouldn’t stop us from exploring other unusual treatments – you never know, it might just lead to a Nobel prize. ❚

PUBLISHING & COMMERCIAL

MANAGEMENT

EDITORIAL

Display advertising Tel +44 (0)20 7611 1291 Email displayads@newscientist.com Commercial director Chris Martin Display sales manager Justin Viljoen Lynne Garcia, Bethany Stuart, Henry Vowden, (ANZ) Richard Holliman Recruitment advertising Tel +44 (0)20 7611 1204 Email nssales@newscientist.com Nicola Cubeddu, Viren Vadgama, (US) Jeanne Shapiro New Scientist Live Tel +44 (0)20 7611 1245 Email live@newscientist.com Events director Adrian Newton Creative director Valerie Jamieson Event manager Henry Gomm Sales director Jacqui McCarron Exhibition sales manager Rosie Bolam Marketing manager Katie Cappella Events team support manager Rose Garton Marketing executive Jessica Lazenby-Murphy Marketing Head of campaign marketing James Nicholson Poppy Lepora Head of customer experience Emma Robinson Head of data analytics Tom Tiner Web development Maria Moreno Garrido, Tom McQuillan, Amardeep Sian

Chief executive Nina Wright Finance director Jenni Prince Chief technology officer Chris Corderoy Marketing director Jo Adams Human resources Shirley Spencer HR coordinator Serena Robinson Facilities manager Ricci Welch Executive assistant Lorraine Lodge Receptionist Alice Catling

Editor Emily Wilson Executive editor Richard Webb Creative director Craig Mackie News News editor Penny Sarchet Editors Jacob Aron, Timothy Revell Reporters (UK) Jessica Hamzelou, Michael Le Page, Donna Lu, Adam Vaughan, Clare Wilson (US) Leah Crane, Chelsea Whyte (Aus) Alice Klein, Ruby Prosser Scully Interns Gege Li, Layal Liverpool, Jason Arunn Murugesu Digital Digital editor Conrad Quilty-Harper Web team Lilian Anekwe, Anne Marie Conlon, David Stock, Sam Wong Features Head of features Catherine de Lange (parental leave) and Rowan Hooper Acting head of features Tiffany O’Callaghan Editors Gilead Amit, Julia Brown, Kate Douglas, Alison George, Joshua Howgego Feature writers Daniel Cossins, Graham Lawton Culture and Community Editors Liz Else, Mike Holderness, Simon Ings Subeditors Chief subeditor Eleanor Parsons Bethan Ackerley, Tom Campbell, Chris Simms, Jon White Design Art editor Kathryn Brazier Joe Hetzel, Dave Johnston, Ryan Wills Picture desk Picture editor Susan Banton Production Production manager Alan Blagrove Robin Burton, Melanie Green

© 2019 New Scientist Ltd, England.

Environment ISO 14001 Certification applies to Offset Alpine Printing

ISSN 1032-1233. New Scientist (Online) ISSN 2059 5387. New Scientist is published weekly by New Scientist Ltd, 25 Bedford Street, London, WC2E 9ES, UK. Registered as a newspaper. Printed in Australia by OVATO Print Pty Ltd, 31 Heathcote Road, Moorebank NSW 2170

Non-exec chair Bernard Gray Senior non-exec director Louise Rogers

CONTACT US newscientist.com/contact General & media enquiries Email media@newscientist.com.au Australia New Scientist Ltd, ABN 22 621 413 170 PO Box 2315, Strawberry Hills, NSW 2012 UK Tel +44 (0)20 7611 1200 25 Bedford Street, London WC2E 9ES US Tel +1 617 283 3213 210 Broadway #201, Cambridge, MA 02139 Australian Newsstand Gordon and Gotch Australia Tel 1300 650 666 Gordon and Gotch New Zealand Tel +64 9 979 3018 Syndication Tribune Content Agency Email tca-articlesales@tribpub.com Subscriptions newscientist.com/subscribe Tel AUS: 1300 130 226 or NZ: +61 2 8355 8923 Email NSAus.subs@quadrantsubs.com Post AUS: New Scientist, Reply Paid 89430, Wetherill Park DC, NSW 1851. NZ: New Scientist, PO Box 210051, Laurence Stevens Drive, Manukau 2154

9 November 2019 | New Scientist | 3

17MORE THINGS YOU NEED T O UNDERSTAND A treasure trove of knowledge to help you understand, appreciate and navigate the world better. Including: Quantum theory & general relativity The theory of evolution ArtiďŹ cial intelligence The human brain Climate change & Much more

Buy your copy from all good magazine retailers or digitally.

News African swine fever The search for a vaccine to protect the world’s pigs p6

Cosmological crisis We still don’t know if the universe is round or flat p7

Biased sampling African gene variants missing from gene studies p12

Take the bus Delivery drones could use public transport to go further p14

Infant diseases The long-lasting impact of measles revealed p15

Environment

2019 HINDUSTAN TIMES/GETTY IMAGES

Chemical lawsuit set to hit Australia

India chokes on dirty air Levels of air pollution are spiking in northern India and environmental controls are lacking, reports Adam Vaughan A SEVERE episode of smog in large parts of northern India has forced authorities to impose traffic restrictions, cancel dozens of flights and close primary schools.

Levels of tiny particulate pollution, known as PM2.5, spiked over the weekend in the capital, Delhi, to more than 10 times safe limits.

Such extreme pollution occurs every year in the region, usually between October and November, as a result of weakening winds, falling temperatures and farmers burning the stubble of crops.

“You can almost count on something of this magnitude happening,” says Joshua Apte at the University of Texas at Austin.

The current crisis isn’t even the worst India has suffered: in 2016,

Delhi was hit by a week of smog.

Agricultural fires were the single biggest cause of pollution in Delhi on Monday, contributing 38 per cent of it, according to modelling by independent air quality researcher Sarath Guttikunda.

But Apte says it would be wrong to focus on farming because things such as vehicles, power plants and household woodburning are also big sources. “Even on a good day, the air in north India is among the most severely polluted on the planet,” he says.

The smog isn’t only in Delhi, says Pallavi Pant at the Health

Effects Institute in Massachusetts.

“There are smaller towns and villages across the northern part of the country that are facing equally dire pollution.”

For now, little can be done short of waiting for winds to shift the smog. In the longer term, both Apte and Pant say India must implement stronger pollution controls across a range of sectors.

Delhi is the 11th worst city in the world for annual PM2.5 levels, according to the World Health Organization. It says that almost half of the planet’s 50 most polluted cities are in India. ❚

More on air pollution online For everything you need to know, visit newscientist.com/round-up/air-pollution

UP TO 40,000 residents of towns contaminated with chemicals from firefighting foams are set to sue the Australian government, making it the biggest class action lawsuit in the country’s history.

The chemicals, called PFAS (perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances), were used in firefighting foams on military bases in the 1970s. They were phased out in Australia in 2004 after studies showed they tended to accumulate in people’s blood, but they are still found in some waterways used for drinking and agriculture.

The lawsuit will argue that properties near the bases have lost value as a result.

PFAS don’t easily break down. Studies in lab animals suggest that extended exposure to high levels of some may cause cancers, but it is still unclear how this translates to humans.

The Australian government has warned people in some communities not to drink from waterways or bore water, eat fish or consume produce grown on nearby farms. But the website of the government’s defence department says the health effects of PFAS are “generally small and within normal ranges for the whole population”.

“It’s an extraordinarily confusing message,” says Erin Brockovich, an ambassador for Shine Lawyers, the firm bringing the case. ❚ Ruby Prosser Scully 9 November 2019 | New Scientist | 5

News Palaeoanthropology

Ancient European ape may have been first to walk on two legs Michael Marshall The 21 bones discovered from an adult male Danuvius guggenmosi

CHRISTOPH JÄCKLE

THE discovery of 11.6-million-yearold fossils in Europe suggests that the first apes to walk upright may have evolved there, not Africa.

“These findings may revolutionise our view on human evolution,” says Madelaine Böhme at the University of Tübingen, Germany.

Böhme and her colleagues discovered the fossils in a clay pit in Bavaria in southern Germany.

They found 37 bones belonging to four individuals: an adult male, two adult females and a juvenile.

They named the new species Danuvius guggenmosi. It was a small ape, weighing between 17 and 31 kilograms, and probably ate hard foods like nuts (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1731-0).

Surprisingly, its legs resemble those of humans. We can fully extend our knees, so our legs act like pillars directly under our bodies. Chimps can’t do this: when they stand on two legs, their knees stay bent. D. guggenmosi’s leg bones suggest it could stand like a human, prompting Böhme’s team to argue that the ape stood and

walked upright in trees, unlike all known apes.

This is startling because D. guggenmosi is much older than the oldest known hominins that may have been bipedal: Sahelanthropus tchadensis and Orrorin tugenensis. Both lived around 6 million years ago, meaning the newly discovered species may push back the origin of bipedality about 5 million years.

Furthermore, the known

bipedal hominins are all African, leading scientists to believe that bipedality evolved there. Böhme’s team argues that this trait arose among European apes.

Her colleague David Begun at the University of Toronto, Canada, has long argued that hominins first evolved in Europe before moving into Africa, but this isn’t widely accepted, largely because the evidence is fragmentary.

Böhme says the discovery of

and infected wild boar have turned up as far west as Belgium. It is also spreading in east Asia, killing many pigs in Vietnam and elsewhere.

ASF was spotted in China in August 2018. It is now in every province. The virus may have spread there from North Korea.

The only way to get rid of ASF is to kill infected herds. But while pigs on farms can be destroyed and replaced, the disease persists in wild boar and feral hogs, as well as in meat, which is increasingly sold abroad. “I predict ASF virus will remain endemic for some time in east Asia and eastern Europe, with constant introductions around the world,” says Dirk Pfeiffer of City

University in Hong Kong. “Currently nobody on this planet has the solution to the problem.”

Despite years of warnings from virologists, there is no vaccine. Most vaccines against viruses stimulate the body to make antibodies

D. guggenmosi is “a game changer”, but many remain sceptical.

“The fossils presented here do not preserve convincing evidence for bipedal locomotion,” says Kelsey Pugh at City University of New York. She says the hips and feet are both crucial for this, but aren’t among the fossils.

Others are more positive.

“This is really cool,” says John Hawks at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He notes that D. guggenmosi’s shin bone looks a lot like that of a hominin.

But he is unconvinced that bipedality, or hominins, began in Europe. He says that, around 11 million years ago, apes were expanding and diversifying, so finding a fossil in one place isn’t proof that it originated there.

Even if bipedality or hominins evolved in Europe, there is no doubt both our genus and our species originated in Africa. ❚

Infectious diseases

Many millions of pigs wiped out as African swine fever spreads A QUARTER of the world’s domestic pigs have died this year as a virus rampages across Eurasia, and that may be just the start. Half the pigs in China – which last year numbered 440 million, some 50 per cent of the world’s pigs – have either died of African swine fever (ASF) or been killed to stamp out the virus.

ASF comes from East Africa. In 2007, it reached Georgia in the Caucasus in contaminated meat, and in infected wild boar. Now, it is all over Russia and eastern Europe 6 | New Scientist | 9 November 2019

“I predict the virus will keep spreading. Nobody on this planet has the solution to the problem” against viral structural proteins, such as those in the virus coating.

These then stop the virus from entering cells, for example. But ASF, says Linda Dixon of The Pirbright Institute in Surrey, UK, is a large,

complex virus, with two coatings and several ways of entering cells.

Antibodies to various bits of it have never been enough to stop it.

We will now be able to look for better antibody targets, says Dixon, as scientists in China and Spain published the first detailed images of the virus last month (Journal of Biological Chemistry, doi.org/ddqz).

Experimental vaccines made of live, weakened ASF have worked better, says Dixon. These prompt specialised blood cells to recognise a range of viral proteins, but there are several hurdles to developing such vaccines for use. Meanwhile, she fears, ASF “could go global”. ❚ Debora MacKenzie

Cosmology

Gene editing

We don’t know if the universe is spherical or flat

Spray-on CRISPR Genetically modifying plants could soon be almost as easy as squirting them with water, reports Michael Le Page

Leah Crane

STICKING DNA to nanoparticles and spraying these on plant leaves can alter their genomes as they grow. The simple technique could have a wide variety of uses, including changing the properties of crops in fields.

“It was so straightforward,” says Heather Whitney at the University of Bristol in the UK. “It was really surprising how easy it was.”

Whitney and her team have so far tested their technique on wheat, maize, barley and others.

They used a plant mister to spray leaves with water containing nanoparticles called carbon dots that were bound to DNA. The DNA, which coded for a fluorescent protein, got into cells in the plants’ leaves, prompting them to glow green under UV light. This is a huge advance on conventional methods for inserting DNA into plants.

But the DNA wasn’t incorporated into the cells’ genomes, so should break down over time. The researchers then took the technique a step further, using carbon dots bound to DNA coding for the CRISPR machinery used for genome editing. In this way, they were

TRAVEL far enough in the universe and you could end up back where you began. That is because the universe might be a sphere rather than a flat sheet, which would change nearly everything we think we know about the cosmos.

The Planck observatory, which operated from 2009 to 2013, mapped the cosmic microwave background, a sea of light left over from the big bang. It found there was more gravitational lensing – stretching of the light due to the

shape of space-time, which can be distorted by heavy matter – than expected. Alessandro Melchiorri at the Sapienza University of Rome and his colleagues believe this could be because the universe is “closed”, or spherical, rather than flat (Nature Astronomy, doi.org/ddpc).

If the universe is indeed closed, that could be a major problem for our understanding of the cosmos.

Another cosmological puzzle is that the part of the universe near to us seems to be expanding faster than it ought to be. This is tough to explain with a flat universe, and the team calculated that this gets even tougher with a spherical universe.

It is so bad that the team calls it a “cosmological crisis”.

However, there are no other observations hinting that the cosmos may be closed, and there is a chance that this Planck measurement is a statistical fluke.

“If this [claim] is true, it would have profound implications for our understanding of the universe,” says David Spergel at Princeton University. “It’s a really important claim, but I’m not sure it’s one that’s backed by the data. In fact, I’d say the evidence is actually against it.” ❚

DEEPOL BY PLAINPICTURE

“If the universe is spherical, it could be a major problem for our understanding of the cosmos”

able to permanently edit the genomes of sprayed leaf cells (bioRxiv, doi.org/ddmw).

The results have yet to be confirmed by other groups, but if spray-on gene editing works, it could lead to new ways of improving and protecting crops, and of turning plants into biofactories capable of making chemicals such as flavourings and pharmaceutical products.

“It’s amazing,” says Ignacio Rubio Somoza at the Centre for Research in Agricultural Genomics in Spain, who now plans to try the method.

At present, the main tool for genetically engineering plants is a microbe called Agrobacterium.

Researchers use it to insert DNA into plant genomes, although it only works in some plants and using it outside the laboratory would be impractical and risky.

Another approach is to use a “gene gun” to force DNA into plant cells, but this can damage plants and is difficult to do on a large scale.

Whitney uses carbon dots created by her colleague Carmen It may soon be possible to edit the DNA of plants simply by spraying them

Galan. First discovered in 2004, carbon dots are ball-like particles of carbon less than 10 nanometres across that can be attached to other molecules.

Carbon dots can form when carbon compounds burn, and occur naturally. “We’ve found them in coffee, we’ve found them in soil,” says Galan.

Galan makes carbon dots for Whitney by heating sugars in a normal microwave oven. Next, she attaches a polymer called polyethylene glycol that attracts DNA molecules electrostatically.

When sprayed on leaves, carbon dots get into nearly every cell on the leaf surface. Up to a third of these cells use the added DNA to make new proteins. Experiments by the team show that the carbon dots don’t seem to be toxic, and may even boost plant growth.

So far, the team’s attempts to modify egg cells in plant ovaries and stem cells in growing shoots have failed. That is a disadvantage when it comes to creating new varieties of GM plants. However, it could make it safer to apply carbon dots to fields of plants because modifications wouldn’t get passed to future generations or spread among wild plants.

Many questions remain unanswered, though, such as how the carbon dots get into cells. “There’s so much we don’t know,” says Whitney.

Spray-on gene editing could be misused, for instance to make crops toxic. But Whitney notes that there are already far easier ways to poison food.

As for whether spraying carbon dots into the environment could harm animals, more research is needed. Carbon dots can get into mammalian cells growing in a dish, says Galan, but the immune system mops them up if they get into the body. ❚ 9 November 2019 | New Scientist | 7

News UK general election Polling

Row over tactical voting site Campaigners under fire for their statistical model for tactical voting James Ball

calculator. It used a relatively new form of election modelling known as MRP, short for multilevel regression and post-stratification.

“MRP isn’t polling, that’s the key thing that people probably don’t quite understand,” says Smith.

Instead, it is a model that takes a large initial polling sample (more than 46,000 voters in this case) and combines it with numerous other factors (90,000 for this A new way of modelling is being used to offer pro-Remain voting advice

model) to make much more granular predictions about the behaviour of constituencies – and even individuals.

The method saw a boost in 2017 when polling firm YouGov released an experimental MRP on the eve of the election, correctly identifying the winning party in 93 per cent of seats. Chris Curtis from YouGov says the principle behind MRP is to model types of voters, rather than relying on traditional constituency polling.

For example, an MRP will model the behaviour of a 24-year-old

woman in the north-east of England with a degree, then work out how many such people there are in different constituencies.

It then assesses other factors, such as how marginal a seat is, as voters in marginal seats are more likely to switch parties than those in safe seats. It also calculates incumbency effects, which particularly boost an MP’s first election as the incumbent.

The techniques behind MRP are decades old, but are largely a new factor in politics. This is partly because existing polling techniques are becoming less effective as it gets harder to reach balanced samples, and also because online polling decreases the cost of the large-scale polls needed to power the models.

There are limitations, of course, not least that during an election campaign, voters change their minds. Smith says Best for Britain is planning to update its model closer to election day.

“MRP is still just like all polling, telling us where the public is right now,” says Curtis. “It is not predicting the future.” ❚

The decision follows the UK spending watchdog saying last month that fracking had cost police forces and public bodies £33 million, and that the

would ban fracking permanently.

Prime minister Boris Johnson has said the environment will be one of his top three domestic priorities. Opposition to fracking has long outstripped support in official polling.

Although environmentalists welcomed the fracking moratorium, on the same day officials also gave the green light for the country’s first deep coal mine in decades, near Whitehaven in Cumbria. ❚ Adam Vaughan

ALEX SEGRE/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

THE UK general election campaign has begun, with voters having to decide whether to support the current Conservative government, which wants to proceed with leaving the European Union, or try to replace it.

A pro-EU campaign group, Best for Britain, has launched a tactical voting guide designed to help elect politicians who want to change course on Brexit. The tool has been criticised for giving what some see as odd advice, but the group says its choices are backed by complex statistical modelling.

The Liberal Democrats are the most anti-Brexit UK party, with a policy of notifying the EU that the country no longer wishes to leave.

However, it is also a minor party, meaning its chances of winning many of the 650 seats are seen as slim. Despite this, Best for Britain suggests a Lib Dem vote in 99 seats where the party trailed the incumbent by at least 25,000 votes in the 2017 general election.

Best for Britain CEO Naomi Smith says this advice isn’t due to partisan bias, but rather the result of how the group powered its

Energy

Fracking banned as UK parties compete on green credentials THE UK government has brought in a moratorium on fracking in England and dropped measures to speed the development of shale gas wells, ringing the death knell for the nascent industry. The sharp reversal of support ends nearly a decade of protests, court cases and minor earthquakes without any energy being produced.

The move comes after fracking caused a magnitude-2.9 quake 8 | New Scientist | 9 November 2019

in August near Blackpool. It is the largest so far after operations by shale firm Cuadrilla in the past year.

A scientific analysis published last week by the UK oil and gas regulator concluded that bigger future tremors couldn’t be ruled out, which could cause unacceptable “damage and disturbance”.

Although the moratorium applies only to England, fracking is already effectively banned in Scotland and Wales. Opposition political parties have pledged to ban the method of extracting gas. The UK government also ditched controversial planning reforms to aid the industry.

2.9

The magnitude of a fracking-related earthquake in August industry’s progress had been slower than expected.

The opposition Labour party accused the government of trying to win over voters in next month’s general election. It said that it

For more on climate change in the UK election, see page 18

Analysis Social media

Fighting fake news Facebook has a plan to tackle misinformation in elections, but changes the firm made to its advertising policies in October effectively halt the efforts before they have begun, reports Donna Lu

wrote Allan, who is also a member of the UK’s House of Lords.

The rationale, according to a Facebook fact sheet, is grounded in the firm’s “fundamental belief in free expression” and a “respect for the democratic process”. But more than 250 of Facebook’s own staff have openly challenged the position.

“Politicians or political parties aren’t even eligible for fact-checking in the first place” “[The policy] doesn’t protect voices, but instead allows politicians to weaponize our platform by targeting people who believe that content posted by political figures is trustworthy,” they wrote in an open letter.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was grilled recently by US member of congress Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and implied that demonstrably false ads wouldn’t be removed from the platform.

Beyond misinformation, there is also the issue of what personal data

NOAH BERGER/GETTY IMAGES

FACEBOOK has announced plans to reduce misinformation and foreign interference ahead of the UK general election. But its efforts are unlikely to make much of a difference.

On 12 December, voters across the UK will go to the polls in the country’s first December election in nearly a century. As the fallout from the 2016 Brexit referendum continues, misinformation and electoral interference will be at the front of many people’s minds.

“We will set up a dedicated operations centre to bring together the teams who monitor activity across our platforms,” Richard Allan, Facebook’s vice-president of policy solutions, wrote in The Telegraph just before the election was announced.

Facebook’s measures include removing fake accounts and reducing the reach of articles that have been debunked by independent third-party fact-checkers. The firm announced a similar approach for the 2020 US presidential election.

But the effectiveness of these measures is dwarfed by changes that the firm made to its advertising policies in early October. Facebook previously prohibited any advertising that contained “deceptive, false, or misleading content”. Now the ban is only for “ads that include claims debunked by third-party fact checkers”.

This is a problem for two reasons: Facebook’s two UK fact-checking partners have limited resources to monitor the more than 1 billion pieces of content posted to the platform daily. Full Fact, the larger of the two partners, has a team that comprises fewer than 10 people.

The second issue is that under Facebook’s rules, ads from politicians or political parties aren’t even eligible for fact-checking in the first place.

“We do not believe it should be our role to fact check or judge the veracity of what politicians say,”

is being used to target political advertising at potential voters.

Facebook and other social media companies need to improve their transparency around the use of data for advertising, says Ailidh Callander at non-profit Privacy International. In October, a Privacy International report found that Facebook has increased transparency for political ads in only 35 countries.

Twitter bans political advertising Twitter is banning all political ads from its service, saying social media companies help advertisers proliferate highly targeted, misleading messages.

In tweets announcing the policy, Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey said: “While internet advertising is incredibly powerful and very effective for commercial advertisers, that power brings significant risks to politics, where it can be used to influence votes to affect the lives of millions.”

Facebook has faced criticism since it disclosed that it won’t fact-check ads by politicians or their campaigns (see main story).

Shortly after Twitter’s announcement, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said “political speech is important” and stood

by Facebook’s decision.

Twitter currently only allows certified campaigns and organisations to run political ads for candidates and issues. The latter tend to advocate on broader issues such as climate change, abortion rights and immigration.

The company said it will make some exceptions, such as allowing ads that encourage voter turnout. It will describe those in a detailed policy it plans to release on 15 November.

Facebook HQ looked for misinformation during the Brazil 2018 election

“You have 80 per cent of the world essentially where they’re not making any effort whatsoever,” says Callander. This includes no requirement for political advertisers to become authorised, for political ads to carry disclosures or for ads to be saved in a public archive.

Even in countries with heightened transparency, like the UK, it is still difficult for an individual to access information about why they are seeing particular advertisements.

Last week, Facebook agreed to pay a penalty of £500,000 to the Information Commissioner’s Office, the UK data watchdog, relating to the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

The firm dropped its appeal of the fine, but didn’t admit fault.

The data privacy issue extends beyond Facebook. In the UK, under a provision of the Data Protection Act, registered political parties can use personal data revealing political opinions as part of their campaigning activities, says Callander.

“They don’t need to go and get explicit consent,” she says. “It’s open to abuse and it’s a condition that political parties rely on fairly heavily.” ❚ 9 November 2019 | New Scientist | 9

News Space

Neuroscience

We may have spotted alien water on comet Borisov

Brain cells could help recall missing objects

Jonathan O’Callaghan

Jason Arunn Murugesu

ASTRONOMERS say they have detected a telltale trace of water on comet 2I/Borisov, the first known interstellar comet. If confirmed, it will be the first time water from another planetary system has been spotted inside our solar system.

Since comet Borisov was discovered in late August, astronomers have been racing to observe it in detail before it hurtles away following its closest approach to the sun in early December.

Adam McKay at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and his colleagues used an instrument at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico to study the light reflected by comet Borisov. They found large amounts of oxygen around it, possibly

A NEW kind of navigational neuron has been discovered in the mammalian brain, and it fundamentally changes our understanding of how we relate to objects in our vicinity.

We already knew how we locate ourselves within an environment, thanks to the Nobel prize-winning discovery of the so-called place cells and grid cells that form the brain’s inner GPS system.

Now a third type of cell, recently discovered in rats, adds another layer of complexity to this system. Known as vector trace cells, these relate more to the objects in an environment than to the environment itself.

They become active when a rat sees an object, helping the animal judge how far away that object is and its relative distance to other objects within sight.

These cells are active even when the object they have been tracking is no longer visible or has been removed, and they can remain in this active state for hours. In other words, vector trace cells – assuming they are present in the human brain – may help us remember where

19

a result of water ice turning, or sublimating, from solid to gas as it is heated by the sun (arxiv.org/ abs/1910.12785).

“If a water molecule sublimates off the surface, it gets released as water vapour,” says McKay. From there, ultraviolet light from the sun will break the molecule apart into hydrogen and oxygen, which is what the team detected.

The findings suggest that the comet is currently producing up to 19 kilograms of water per second.

Alan Fitzsimmons at Queen’s University Belfast, UK, says the observation is a clear detection of oxygen atoms that points to the comet containing water.

Although we have detected water outside the solar system before – such as in the atmospheres of exoplanets or in star-forming nebulae – we have never seen water from another planetary system this close. ❚ 10 | New Scientist | 9 November 2019

GETTY IMAGES

Kilograms of water per second seemingly coming off comet Borisov

we last saw an object.

Steven Poulter at Durham University, UK, and his colleagues found the new neurons accidentally. The team was working on an experiment that involved putting obstacles – wine bottles, in this case – in the path of rats, while monitoring activity in the rodents’ brains, particularly in a region of the hippocampus, a brain area involved in memory and interpreting space.

“One particular evening, I took away a couple of the bottles and I looked at the neuronal response – but it stayed the same,” says Poulter.

He initially assumed there was an error in the software, but soon realised that some cells were consistently firing as if the wine bottles were still there.

The team then confirmed, through four years of further experiments, that the cells that continued to fire were a neverbefore-seen type of neuron.

Team member Colin Lever, Sometimes it can be hard to keep track of where things are

also at Durham University, says the cells can’t identify objects.

Instead, they act as distancecheckers. The information that they generate and store is the same regardless of whether the object in question is a sofa or a table.

The cells also don’t seem to differentiate between objects and obstacles. A brick that a rat can simply crawl over activates the neurons in the same way as

“The cells become active when we see an object, and stay active when it is moved” a wine bottle that the animals must travel around. Even a line painted on the floor makes the neurons fire in a similar way (bioRxiv, doi.org/ddhx).

Lever suspects that vector trace cells will be found in the human brain, noting that there is already indirect evidence for their presence in people. He suggests they are vital to how we visualise a room or space.

In rats, vector trace cells are located in the subiculum, a region of the hipppocampus that is one of the first areas of the brain to degenerate in people with Alzheimer’s. Lever suggests that this could explain why forgetting where you left an object is often one of the first symptoms of the disease.

Alastair Smith at the University of Plymouth, UK, says the findings seem to “move us away from a system that tells you where you are in space and actually tells you where other things are in that space”.

Neil Burgess at University College London says the discovery of the cells verifies long-held theories about spatial memory. ❚

SECOND EDITION OF BEING HUMAN

BEING HUMAN Take a step back from the everyday chores of being human to tackle the big – and small – questions about our nature, behaviour and existence.

Buy your copy from all good magazine retailers or digitally.

Find out more at newscientist.com/TheCollection

News Field notes Amazon Tall Tower Observatory

of the Amazon. With forest fires in recent weeks burning faster than they have in the past decade, the air below us was thick with haze.

Since the Amazon Tall Tower Observatory was inaugurated in late 2015, its instruments have sampled the air above the forest hour by hour, looking at levels of carbon dioxide, sulphur compounds, pollen and other substances. In makeshift labs at the tower’s base, researchers derive other vital data, such as rates of photosynthesis in the trees.

Some of the chemistry is unexpected. “We know there are reactions going on in the air that

we haven’t accounted for yet,” said Andreae. “That means there are probably tree emissions we are ignorant about.” Uncovering them may unlock the mystery of how the trees maintain rainfall so far from the ocean. We know rainforests recycle rainfall on a heroic scale: each tree releases

JOST LAVRIC/MPI-BGC

IT WAS a long climb – 325 metres above the floor of the pristine Amazon rainforest, a metre higher than the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

Rising out of the steamy jungle, temperatures peaked just under the canopy and then started to drop. Above 150 metres, a stiff, cool breeze blew. From the top, the trees looked like a mass of tiny broccoli heads stretching unbroken to the horizon.

I was met at the top by Meinrat Andreae, director of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany. In 2007, he first proposed erecting the structure to sniff the Amazon forest’s breath and examine its interactions with the atmosphere. In this remote spot, 150 kilometres north of Brazil’s jungle city of Manaus, he hoped it could provide “a window on our planet’s atmospheric chemistry before industrialisation”.

Andreae got his wish – during the November to May wet season at least, when clean air from the Atlantic blows across 800 kilometres of largely intact forest. But our climb was in late September, the end of the dry season, when the winds from the south cross the deforested areas

PAULO BRANDO/IPAM/WHRC

Discovering rainforest secrets high above the trees I took almost an hour to ascend the 1500 steps of the tallest tower in Latin America, says Fred Pearce

The Amazon Tall Tower Observatory is 325 metres high

about 500 litres a day into the atmosphere. More intriguing are the physics and chemistry that turn that water into rain clouds.

The key seems to be volatile organic compounds, such as the isoprenes and terpenes emitted by most trees. In the air around the tower’s summit, these compounds oxidise into the tiny molecular seeds around which raindrops form – but not enough to provide the volume of rain we see. Andreae’s hunch is that other compounds – fast-reacting sesquiterpenes – could be the missing link, but they are hard to spot as they disappear quickly.

While straining to understand pristine climatic processes, Andreae’s team is increasingly worried about the polluted air coming from the south. Back at the research camp, his colleague Matthias Sorgel told me about ozone generated by the fires. He is measuring up to 70 parts per billion (ppb), a level normally found in urban smogs. “We don’t know the sensitivity of rainforest trees to ozone,” he said.

“But as a rule of thumb, levels above 40 ppb are toxic to plants.

As the burning gets closer, it is poisoning pristine forest.” ❚

Human genetics

Important gene variants in African people being missed MORE than a quarter of the genetic variation found among people in 25 Ugandan villages has never previously been recorded, because most human genetics studies focus on people of European descent. This oversight could have a significant impact on global human health, because the variants included genes 12 | New Scientist | 9 November 2019

associated with cardiovascular and metabolic diseases.

Human genetics studies have suffered from a lack of diversity and more research on people from different parts of the world is needed, says Deepti Gurdasani at Queen Mary University of London, who led the work in Uganda.

“European ancestry populations make up 16 per cent of the global population, but approximately 80 per cent of participants in genetic studies,” says Alicia Martin

at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, meaning other groups are under-represented.

Gurdasani and her colleagues analysed DNA from 6000 people in south-west Uganda. About 29 per cent of the gene variants they found weren’t present in one of the world’s largest human genome sequence databases (Cell, doi.org/ddmk).

Although some data sets do include people of African descent, such as African-Americans, Gurdasani says this isn’t enough.

The ancestors of modern AfricanAmericans came from specific parts of Africa and so this doesn’t capture the genetic diversity that exists within the African continent.

Because all humans originated in Africa, those who migrated away took only a fraction of the genetic diversity with them. “Two individuals within an African population will be much more different than two individuals within a European population,” says Gurdasani. ❚ Layal Liverpool

News Maths

AI tackles thorny orbits Artificial intelligence can solve hideously hard three-body puzzle Leah Crane

solve it using a neural network, which can be up to 100 million times faster than the best computerised solvers.

They trained their AI on a set of 9900 three-body scenarios generated by a state-of-the-art solver called Brutus. The researchers used 100 more scenarios from Brutus to make sure their system worked, and then 5000 unsolved scenarios to Predicting how three objects orbit each other is a complex challenge

test it. It matched examples from Brutus nearly exactly, showing the neural network could provide accurate and speedy solutions to the three-body problem (arxiv.org/abs/1910.07291).

The AI could improve our understanding of how black holes collide and form gravitational waves, says Breen. Many of those kind of complex systems can be boiled down to a series of threebody interactions that the neural network can easily solve, he says.

“It’s astonishing to me to find a totally new approach to this old

problem,” says Douglas Heggie at the University of Edinburgh, who wasn’t involved in the research.

One limitation is that the AI only works for a finite length of time, and if a particular three-body problem hasn’t been studied before, you don’t know in advance how long it will take to figure out what actually happens, he says.

The researchers have proposed a solution to this: rather than using the AI for the entire task, just give it the hard bits – when the three bodies make close passes.

Then give the problem back to Brutus with that computational bottleneck already solved.

This could provide any number of solutions rapidly, even without a long sought-after, neat three-body equation, says Christopher Foley at the University of Cambridge, who also worked on the AI. “It’s less about the elegance and more about making progress and advancing our understanding of the building blocks of our physical environment,” he says. “If I can get the solutions, some would argue that it doesn’t matter how I get there, as long as they are right.” ❚

should take and when they should hop on and off buses.

In simulations of San Francisco and the Washington DC area, the program typically took a few seconds to do both tasks. Riding buses boosted drone ranges by up to 450 per cent. The largest

simulation involved 200 drones delivering 5000 packages using a bus network with 8000 stops on it (arxiv.org/abs/1909.11840).

The research doesn’t deal with practical considerations, such as noise pollution, reliably landing drones on buses and public transport delays, says Choudhury.

“Exploiting predictable, existing traffic flows is smart,” says Niels Agatz at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands.

However, transit networks in many areas wouldn’t be extensive enough for this system to work, he says. ❚ Edd Gent

JUPE/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

A NOTORIOUS maths problem first posed by Isaac Newton has become a lot easier thanks to artificial intelligence. The three-body problem – the question of how three objects orbit one another under their own gravity – has baffled physicists and mathematicians for more than 300 years, but it turns out a neural network can find solutions remarkably quickly.

The problem is difficult because three objects orbiting each other form a chaotic system, meaning a very precise understanding of where the objects start is needed.

In a chaotic system, the “butterfly effect” comes into play – even a tiny starting error could result in very different orbits. There is no single equation to predict how the objects will move and whether the orbits will be stable over time.

Instead, mathematicians have to meticulously test each scenario iteratively, either by hand or using computerised solvers, which can be slow and energy intensive.

Philip Breen at the University of Edinburgh, UK, and his colleagues have come up with a new way to

Drones could ride on public transport to extend their reach DELIVERY drones could get a range boost by taking the bus. Landing on public transport means the flying vehicles could travel four-and-ahalf times further, making them more useful for carrying packages over longer distances.

Drones are agile and fast, but their measly battery life means they can’t fly for long – considerably less than an hour for most consumer models. That is a problem if you 14 | New Scientist | 9 November 2019

want to use them to deliver packages across a large city.

To address this, Shushman Choudhury and his colleagues at Stanford University in California devised a computer program that plans deliveries by getting drones to piggyback on buses for a range boost. “We already have this existing, generally decent infrastructure for most good cities and we’re just benefiting from that,” says Choudhury.

The software has two tasks.

The first is to decide which drones should deliver which packages and the second is to set the route each

OKTAY ORTAKCIOGLU/GETTY

Technology

If flying delivery vehicles want to extend their reach, they might have to take the bus

Immunology

You can change the size of your pupils just by thinking

The long and deadly shadow of measles

Gege Li

Debora MacKenzie

IMAGINE looking across a sparkling lake on a sunny day. Did your pupils contract? It turns out that simply thinking about a bright light is enough to change the size of our pupils, even if there isn’t anything real for our eyes to react to.

Our pupils dilate in dark conditions to let more light into our eyes. The reverse happens in bright conditions, which cause our pupils to contract.

A team led by Nahid Zokaei at the University of Oxford looked at whether thinking about brightness can be enough to alter the size of people’s pupils. In a series of experiments, the team repeatedly showed 22 healthy men and women dark or light patches, each of which was associated with a specific sound.

“This could mean our pupils constrict before we turn on a light in a dark room to prepare us for the glare” After 2 seconds, the patches disappeared. The participants then had to picture the correct patch in their mind when they heard its corresponding sound.

The team found that people’s pupils dilated when thinking of a dark patch and contracted when picturing a light one, the same results that would be expected when actually looking at the objects (PNAS, doi.org/ddhq).

This seemingly small action could allow us to anticipate a change in real brightness before it happens, says Sebastiaan Mathôt at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, who carried out a similar study that also confirmed this finding.

For example, this reaction could mean our pupils constrict just before we turn on a light in a dark room to prepare us for the resulting glare, he says. ❚

JIM WEST/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

Human vision

MEASLES is known to make children vulnerable to other infections. Now two studies of Dutch Orthodox Protestants, who reject vaccination, have discovered why: it massively damages the immune system, making measles even more lethal than we realised.

After measles vaccination began in the 1960s, cases of the disease plunged. Mysteriously, wherever these vaccinations were given, deaths from unrelated infections also fell.

In 2015, Michael Mina, now at Harvard University, found that children who have had measles are so much more likely to catch other diseases that such postmeasles infections may account for half of all infectious disease deaths in children living in areas where measles circulates.

Around 100,000 children died of measles in 2017. Mina suspects that two or three times that number who survived the disease will later die of other infections they wouldn’t have caught if they hadn’t had measles.

To understand why, Mina and his team determined what

A child in Michigan receives the MMR vaccine

antibodies were made by 77 unvaccinated Dutch children who later caught measles.

As we are exposed to pathogens as children, we accumulate specialised immune cells, each of which has learned to make antibodies to attack one particular bit of a pathogen. The measles virus kills these cells, but the impact of this wasn’t known.

The team found that before any of the children had measles, they could make antibodies to many viruses and bacteria. But afterwards, they lost between 11 and 73 per cent of their antibody library, for all kinds of pathogens. The live, weakened measles virus in the MMR vaccine had no such effect in the 32 other children studied (Science, doi.org/ddhv).

To get their lost antibodies back, Mina suspects those who had measles must be re-exposed to all the pathogens they had already encountered, with the attendant risks of

disease. They may need to be given any previous vaccinations again too, as vaccines work by teaching the immune system to make specific antibodies.

It might be even worse than that. In another study, Colin Russell at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands and his colleagues sequenced the DNA of immune cells from 20 of the same group of children. “We could look not just at cells producing antibodies, but at their naive, precursor cells,” says Russell.

In our first few years of life, these naive cells mature, diversifying so they can rapidly recognise certain molecules on different pathogens. Russell’s team found that measles kills the mature cells (Science Immunology, doi.org/ddhw).

“It’s as if our immune system is reset back to infancy.”

This means that those who have had measles may need to be re-exposed to diseases multiple times to rebuild their antibody repertoire, he says.

It could take five years for their immune systems to recover, as this is how long it takes in people given the powerful immunosuppressive drug rituximab, which depletes the same cells and is used to treat some kinds of cancer. This agrees with studies showing that the immunity of people who have had measles is lowered for up to five years.

The effect has real clinical impact. Russell’s team gave a virus similar to measles to ferrets vaccinated against flu.

When exposed to flu, these animals went on to have bad bouts of illness. Vaccinated ferrets who didn’t get the measles-like virus were still protected against flu. ❚ 9 November 2019 | New Scientist | 15

News In brief Zoology

Elephants found to have menopause-like stage of life

TONY HEALD/NATURE PL

FEMALE Asian elephants stop reproducing towards the end of their lives, putting them among the few species that experience something akin to the menopause.

Only humans, orcas, narwhals, beluga whales and short-finned pilot whales are known to exhibit what biologists call extended post-reproductive lifespan.

The existence of such a stage is an evolutionary riddle: why should individuals give up trying to leave more descendants?

Now Asian elephants have been added to the list, thanks to Simon Chapman at the University of Turku, Finland, and his team. They studied records of 3802 female elephants used in timber camps in Myanmar between 1940 and 2018. Their mortality and fertility patterns are like those of wild Asian elephants.

Ancient humans

MOSS buried alongside Ötzi the Iceman bolsters the theory that his last journey was through a gorge, possibly fleeing someone.

The well-preserved 5300-yearold mummified body was found in the Alps on the border of Italy and Austria in 1991. His demise was gruesome: he probably bled to death after being hit by an arrow.

Now James Dickson at the University of Glasgow, UK, and his colleagues have used thousands of fragments of moss and liverwort buried alongside or inside Ötzi to understand his final days.

The plants were from at least 75 different species, only 23 of which live in that precise area today. One of the most intriguing discoveries was of the bog moss Sphagnum affine in Ötzi’s colon. This moss is typically found in wetlands and probably came from the bottom of the Vinschgau valley in South 16 | New Scientist | 9 November 2019

Neuroscience

Tyrol, Italy. Some people believe this was Ötzi’s home as an adult.

The moss had long been used for staunching wounds because of its mild antiseptic properties.

It may have been used to treat a deep wound he received to his right palm possibly 48 hours or less before his death, says Dickson.

Dickson was also surprised to find fragments of the moss Neckera complanata in his intestines, a low-altitude moss of the woodlands. Ötzi was found at 3200 metres above sea level, which is way above the treeline.

This suggests Ötzi travelled from the forests below, possibly at 1200 metres but maybe as low as 600 metres above sea level, and went north up a gorge (PLoS ONE, doi.org/ddhp).

“It seems puzzling that he took the most stressful track through a gorge, but considering scenarios that he was on the run, a gorge provided most opportunities to hide,” Dickson and his colleagues write. Ruby Prosser Scully

Brainwaves help take out the trash AS YOU sleep, slow waves of electrical activity in your brain seem to help rinse away waste products that could harm cells.

This may play a role in preventing conditions such as Alzheimer’s.

Brainwaves are made by large networks of brain cells firing together in rhythm, but much about their function is unclear.

To see if they play a role in cleaning the brain, Laura Lewis at Boston

FULTZ ET AL. 2019

Ötzi’s attempt to flee his pursuers charted

The oldest in this group lived into their 70s, but most had their last calf by 55. The team calculates that the proportion of years lived by females in a post-reproductive phase is 16 per cent: some way short of humans’ 43 per cent but considerably more than African elephants’ 4 per cent (BMC Evolutionary Biology, doi.org/ddhj).

In elephants, halting reproduction may be behavioural rather than physiological, says Chapman. Such behaviour could be a step towards evolving a true menopause.

One idea to explain menopause is the grandmother hypothesis. It says that if older females help care for grandchildren, they end up with more descendants than by having more children of their own. There is some evidence for this in the Asian elephants studied. Sam Wong

University, Massachusetts, and her team used EEG caps to measure electrical activity in the brains of 13 people while they napped inside MRI scanners.

They also monitored blood oxygen levels (in red, pictured) in their brains and the flow of cerebrospinal fluid, a watery liquid that surrounds the brain and spinal cord. The team found that, during sleep, large waves of cerebrospinal fluid flow into and out of the brain every 20 seconds, a process thought to remove waste. The inward flow was preceded by patterns of slow waves of electrical activity.

These brainwaves coincided with blood flowing out of the brain, which the team says helps balance the total volume of fluid around the brain (Science, doi.org/ddmr).

People with Alzheimer’s have fewer slow brainwaves, says Lewis.

However, it isn’t clear whether this is a cause or a symptom of the condition. Layal Liverpool

New Scientist Daily Get the latest scientific discoveries in your inbox newscientist.com/sign-up Electric cars

Really brief

CAIAIMAGE/PAUL BRADBURY/GETTY

Warm batteries key to a very fast charge OWNERS of electric vehicles may soon be able to fully charge their cars in just 10 minutes, thanks to a new design that heats up batteries.

One offputting aspect of electric cars is the length of time it takes to recharge them. Ideally, we need batteries that can reach 80 per cent charge – which gives a range of roughly 300 kilometres – within 10 minutes, says Chao-Yang Wang at Penn State University.

At the moment, when lithium

Sorry, sex won’t start labour Sex got you into this – can it get you out? A review of trials looking at whether sex can induce labour has found no evidence for this commonly held view. In all, the evidence from about 1500 women shows that it makes no difference to when labour starts (The Journal of Sexual Medicine doi.org/ddhs).

ion batteries are charged rapidly, there is a tendency for lithium to form plate-like deposits on the negative electrode’s surface.

This can shorten battery life.

Wang and his team suspected they could minimise this problem by first heating the battery to a temperature too high to allow lithium plating to form.

To test this, they took an industrial battery and inserted micron-thick nickel foils in a stack of electrode layers. This structure allows the electrode to heat in less than 30 seconds, setting up conditions for ions to move

Technology

Astrophysics

Vast stellar blasts mimicked on Earth

Cancer drug takes aim at mutation An experimental cancer drug targets a genetic mutation involved in a range of common and rare cancers, including some colorectal and lung cancers.

In tests, the drug removed tumours in eight out of 10 mice and shrank them in two out of four people (Nature, doi.org/ddhm).

ALPHASTAR

Smallest ever black hole spotted A search for black holes has uncovered the smallest yet seen at only 3.3 times the mass of the sun. It is about 10,000 light years away from Earth, where it orbits a giant star about once every 83 days. Despite its mass, the black hole is only about 20 kilometres across – roughly the length of Manhattan in New York (Science, doi.org/ddht).

quickly into the negative electrode without lithium plating.

Then, they tested how well the cells worked when they were charged at either 40°C, 49°C or 60°C, and compared the performance with a control battery charging at 20°C. They found heating the electrode to 60°C was best, allowing the battery to recharge through 2500 cycles without forming lithium plates. That is equivalent to 14 years of use or around 750,000 kilometres of driving, says Wang. (Joule, doi.org/ddmh) RPS

AI conquers most players of hit video game in a fair fight ARTIFICIAL intelligence can play the real-time strategy video game StarCraft II so well that it is better than nearly all human players.

The AI, called AlphaStar, was developed by tech firm DeepMind.

It competed anonymously against people in a series of online games on the official StarCraft II game server, Battle.net, and ended up ranked in the top 200 players for each of the leagues it was in.

In January, an earlier version of AlphaStar beat two of the world’s top professional players of the same title, but at the time it was given advantages, such as the ability to see the entire game map.

To level the playing field, this time AlphaStar was restricted to what human players can see, stopping it from completing actions in multiple locations simultaneously, said Oriol Vinyals at DeepMind in a press conference. The number of actions was also restricted, so it wasn’t able to click at superhuman speed.

This version of AlphaStar was then pitted against human players in various locations. In the European league, it was in the top 0.2 per cent of approximately 90,000 players (Nature, doi.org/ggb9jx).

“It’s an extremely impressive achievement,” says Julian Togelius at New York University. Donna Lu

WHAT happens when a star explodes? Surprisingly, the same thing that happens when gas explodes here on Earth.

For gas explosions to occur, there needs to be a build-up of pressure. Alexei Poludnenko at the University of Connecticut and his team wanted to find out how this can happen in unconfined spaces, such as in a type Ia supernova, when a small star called a white dwarf detonates.

Poludnenko and his colleagues wondered whether there were similarities between these events and unconfined explosions on Earth. To investigate, they ignited a mix of methane and air in a lab facility and measured the pressure of the resulting explosion with sensors, while also tracking the speed of the flames. They then compared this with a computer simulation of a type Ia supernova.

They found that igniting the gas mix created fast turbulence, stirring up the flames and making the burning more vigorous,. Once the burning is fast enough, this creates pressure so quickly that it doesn’t have time to dissipate, eventually causing a detonation.

The team says the same process seems to be behind supernovae (Science, doi.org/ddhr). LL 9 November 2019 | New Scientist | 17

News Insight Net-zero carbon

Home of tomorrow Radical plans are set to slash the carbon emissions of UK homes.

Will people accept them, asks Adam Vaughan GAS boilers make for an unlikely UK election battleground, but politicians have been competing on who will phase them out the fastest. Last week, the opposition Labour party said it would make all new homes net-zero carbon from 2022, beating the Conservative government’s plans to rule out gas boilers from new homes by 2025. The Liberal Democrats in turn said they will make new homes net zero by 2021.

Whoever wins next month’s election, the flicker of gas boilers is long due for extinction. The UK’s 26 million homes are responsible for about a fifth of the country’s carbon emissions, making the greening of them a key plank of slashing net emissions to zero by 2050 – now a legal requirement.

Retrofitting those buildings will be a huge undertaking (see “How to green your home”, opposite).

running costs roughly equivalent to those of gas boilers.

However, doing away with a gas connection means a financial saving both to society – because the cost of connecting the home to the pipe network is paid through everyone’s energy bills – and to the owner of the home, because they will no longer need to pay the gas standing charge that energy suppliers impose.

1

2

3 8 4

6 7

5

Homes that are net zero when it comes to carbon emissions will require many features that most current homes lack

New build Meanwhile, some 230,000 new homes are built in the UK every year, most of them reliant on fossil fuels for heating and hot water.

That will radically change with the government’s recent future homes standard, which will apply to England from 2025, and could be followed by similar rules in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. What will new homes then look like?

Ministers hope the building regulations mean an average home’s carbon emissions will be 80 per cent lower in 2025 than one built to today’s standards. To reach that goal, the government isn’t explicitly banning gas boilers, but is implicitly ending them by proposing a reduction in home CO2 emissions that would be impossible to meet with one.

Crucially, a home’s source of heat will have to be low carbon.

18 | New Scientist | 9 November 2019

1 Green roof

5 Ground source heat pump

2 Timber frame construction

6 Induction hob

3 Insulated walls and floors

7 Air source heat pump

4 Car charging point

8 Double glazing

For some, such as blocks of flats, it may come via a heat network, where a central boiler pipes hot water to every property. That is still likely to involve fossil fuels in the near term, but a central system is much more efficient than a block full of individual gas boilers.

For many homes, the answer will be a heat pump – effectively a refrigerator in reverse – which uses a fan to extract heat from the

80%

How much lower the carbon emissions of new homes in England will have to be

ground, water or the air, even on a cold day. Most will be air source pumps, which involve a box like an air conditioning unit on the home’s exterior. Like a traditional boiler, these pumps can be used for hot water or space heating, so the inside of future homes won’t look much different.

“It’ll have bigger radiators, running on lower temperatures, but otherwise it will look pretty much the same as a house today,” says Jenny Holland of the UK Green Building Council.

There is a cost: heat pumps are about £3000 compared with about £1500 for a gas boiler, and they consume electricity, with

Changing behaviour Jenny Hill of the Committee on Climate Change, which advises the UK government, says the switch to heat pumps is likely to require some adaptation. “It does absolutely require behaviour change. We don’t currently know how people are going to react to not being able to install gas boilers in their homes.”

For one thing, gas cooking hobs will be replaced by induction hobs, which are not only more efficient, but can now match gas for responsiveness when it comes to turning the heat up and down.

“But they do require you to have a new set of pans, so there is some inconvenience there,” says Hill.

It isn’t just boilers: the fabric of future buildings will be transformed (see diagram). Their walls, floors and roofs will have to be much better at retaining heat than today’s, and they will need high-performance windows.

Homes will have to be airtight, but still well-ventilated.

Richard Lowes at the University of Exeter, UK, says walls are likely to look the same, but have more efficient insulating materials inside them. With windows, double glazing is so good now in performance that triple glazing is unnecessary. Other potential changes include a growing use of timber frames for buildings, which

Working hypothesis

More Insight online Your guide to a rapidly changing world newscientist.com/insight

lock-in carbon, and “green roofs” covered in vegetation, providing a natural form of insulation to reduce energy consumption.

Although 2025 is the key date, the government is proposing an interim strengthening of regulations next year. That won’t force the switch to greener heating, but promises a cut of 31 per cent on carbon emissions and more than £200 off average annual energy bills for new builds, versus rules today. Solar panels, already on the roofs of nearly a million homes, would be one way to do that, officials suggest.

Hill says there is definitely a role for solar panels, but they are no substitute for a low-carbon heat source. “You have to look at how you decarbonise your heating and that is what delivers the bulk of your savings.”

Home battery storage devices, which can store electricity from solar panels and exploit off-peak energy tariffs, are expected to be niche initially and are unlikely to be standard in new homes.

“It comes down to the economics:

batteries are expensive. You don’t need solar power or a battery but it’s nice to have,” says Lowes.

The Home Builders Federation trade body says it welcomes standards on carbon emissions, but argues that the government’s

“We don’t currently know how people are going to react to not being able to install gas boilers” proposals would be very challenging and require a lot of work on supply chains. Such concerns can have an impact.

In 2015, the government shelved zero-carbon home standards a year before they took effect, in a sop to developers.

Hill questions why the UK construction industry should find the rules a challenge, when a gas-reliant country such as the Netherlands has already introduced rules banning gas boilers without it causing problems.

“From our perspective, we believe the technology exists now

Sorting the week’s supernovae from the absolute zeros

to build homes that are net-zero compliant, water efficient and don’t overheat. The problem we have is with the skills and industry.” Compliance regimes for new homes, enforced by thinly stretched local authorities, aren’t fit for purpose, she adds. Hill also believes that the new standards should be introduced before 2025.

Still, the future homes rules have been broadly welcomed, even if they could be tightened up in places. “There’s a general thing here about moving away from fossil fuels, which is to be applauded,” says Lowes.

There may be grumbles in some quarters about induction hobs and people missing gas boilers, but Lowes thinks there will be an inevitable movement away from combustion in homes, not just for climate change reasons but because of concerns over indoor air pollution. “Longer term, the idea of burning stuff in the house will be seen as completely daft.” ❚

▲ Space cookies Astronauts will be baking cookies in a new space oven as a PR stunt. Looks as if it worked, given that we are writing about it. ▲ Pet face-swap Ever wish your dog was a lion? Obviously not: think of the furniture. But if you insist, NVIDIA has made a photo app that morphs the face of one animal into another. ▲ Vampire bats Creatures of the night are generally unfriendly, but it turns out vampire bats form close relationships in captivity and retain them in the wild. ▼ Climate meeting

For more on what we need to do to tackle climate change, see page 22

Greta Thunberg has had to beg a ride back across the Atlantic, as a major climate summit is moving from Chile to Spain.

“There is a tendency for people to think ‘I need solar panels or a whizzy app to control my heating’,” says Russell Smith at energyefficiency consultants Parity Projects. Try to resist the urge, he says. Instead, if you are looking at upgrading your existing home to cut carbon emissions, Smith recommends finding a local company to do an impartial energy assessment of your property to see all the possible opportunities.

The priority should be to reduce the need for energy. A typical home uses 65 per cent of its energy for heating, so insulation is

Solar panels may not be the best way to cut your carbon emissions

key. “Insulating all external walls, floor and roofs, then upgrading windows and plugging all of the gaps to reduce draughts has a massive impact on bills and more so on comfort,” says Smith. Once it is airtight, you then need to keep an eye on ventilation to maintain air quality, though, he adds.

Energy efficient appliances and lighting are next. Only once you have done everything you can to reduce demand should you look at a low carbon heat source – like a heat pump – or generating your own energy, such as through solar panels, says Smith.

▼ NHS pagers

REELDEAL IMAGES/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; GETTY IMAGES

CHRIS HOWES/ALAMY

How to green your home

Pagers used by the UK’s National Health Service are leaking medical data over radio waves, possibly to the 1980s, where pagers belong.

9 November 2019 | New Scientist | 19

Discovery Tours

FRANCE

Science of pro cycling: Mont Ventoux Departing: 5 days for £2,199 (approximately $2,859) 21 May 2020 A highly immersive expert-led training camp with sports scientists from Sheffield Hallam University and former Olympian and ex-Team Sky rider Phil Deignan, based near France’s iconic Mont Ventoux. The scientists have supported multiple Olympic and UCI professional wins, whilst Phil has ridden in support of Chris Froome and achieved a Grand Tour stage win in his own right at the Vuelta a España.

A unique ride experience, in the company of experts giving stimulating seminars and 1:1 consultation. Plus, a full ride itinerary, road support, recovery sessions and plenty of those special touches that pro-cyclists enjoy. Staying in a delightful 4-star chateau in the heart of Provence. This is the next level up from a standard training camp, where you will leave as a more effective, efficient and enlightened rider. k 4 days of seminars and interactive experiences from leading sports science experts k Ride with ex -Team Sky professional and Olympian Phil Deignan k 3 long-distance training rides and 2 warm-up/recovery rides k Including the famous les cinglés du Ventoux k Bespoke, risk-assessed routes, GPS data and route profiles

k 4 nights full-board at Chateau de Mazan k Speed groups to suit differing rider abilities k Professional ride support and guidance from expert ride leaders k Return bike and luggage transfer from Guildford and London k Transfers from Marseille airport/ Avignon rail station to the camp k Cervelo C3 disc bikes (with full Ultegra) for hire

Full details and booking form at newscientist.com/tours or email tours@newscientist.com

newscientist.com/tours

In partnership with Just Pedal and Sheffield Hallam University's Centre of Sport and Exercise Science

Views The columnist Graham Lawton assesses our climate change progress p22

Letters We must deal with the roots of domestic violence p24

Aperture Futuristic looking solar panels in the Chilean sand p28

Culture The chasm between scientists and those rejecting science p30

Culture columnist Chelsea Whyte finds clone fun in Living With Yourself p32

Comment

Who owns life?

JOSIE FORD

A debate over who can access and exploit the planet’s genetic resources will have ramifications for all of us, says Laura Spinney NEXT week, delegates will gather in Rome to discuss a question that could have profound implications for global biodiversity, food security and public health.

Stripped of technical language, it boils down to this: who owns life?

The Rome meeting convenes the governing body of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. It is also known as the “seed treaty” because it mostly deals with seed collections. It will address arrangements for accessing these genetic resources, and how to share any benefits resulting from their exploitation.

Central to that discussion will be “digital sequence information”.

The seed treaty covers only samples of the physical material that constitutes plants. But as more species are sequenced and their molecular blueprints digitised, they can be exploited – for creating a drought-resistant crop plant, say – without accessing a physical sample.

It is not just plants at stake.

The outcome of the Rome meeting is likely to influence a meeting for the Convention on Biological Diversity next October.

This treaty covers all life, and also neglects digital sequences.

Given that an organism’s DNA, RNA or protein sequence is merely information stored in a molecule, you might think that extending these treaties to cover digital sequence information would be uncontentious. Far from it. So far, all attempts to reach a consensus

have failed, and some have called the issue “the monster in the closet”. Part of the problem is that digital sequence information isn’t clearly defined: should it include only DNA and RNA sequence data, for example, or also amino acid sequences and epigenetic data?

The larger issue is whether including it will further the goals of the treaties, which aim to fairly share the fruits of Earth’s genetic resources. On this, the world is split. On one side are the generally biodiverse and developing countries, which want digital data

included to close what they see as a loophole. On the other are the developed countries, which have carried out most of the cataloguing of that biodiversity, and drawn most benefit from it. They don’t want the digital data covered.

Much of the information sits in public databases that researchers can access without obligations towards donor countries. Some in developed nations fear that adding red tape, similar to the agreements that control the sharing of physical samples, will slow crucial research. Because

biodiversity loss is a problem, and species can’t be conserved until they have been catalogued, they argue that it will be the developing countries that mainly lose out.

Another area of concern is public health. Containing epidemics and developing new drugs depend on the rapid sharing of pathogen information.

A drug recently shown to be effective against Ebola was made

by Regeneron Pharmaceuticals in the US using digital data derived from a clinical sample taken from a Guinean woman during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, and deposited in GenBank. Regeneron isn’t obliged to share the benefits with Guinea because there was no physical sample involved. If the firm had to share, it may have had less incentive to develop the drug and more people might have died in the current Congolese outbreak.

There are potential solutions.

Users of digital databases could be required to sign data access and use agreements, which would protect donors’ interests, while leaving research unrestricted until it was commercialised. It is time to discuss these because, while the stand-off endures, more and more biodiverse countries are bringing in restrictive national legislation on access and benefit-sharing, and that is unlikely to help anyone, including them. ❚ Laura Spinney is a journalist based in Paris.

Follow her @lfspinney

9 November 2019 | New Scientist | 21

Views Columnist No planet B

A case of cautious climate optimism A year ago, we were told we had 12 years to save the planet. We now have 11. What have we achieved in that time? You may be surprised, says Graham Lawton “

Graham Lawton is a staff writer at New Scientist and author of The Origin of (Almost) Everything. You can follow him @grahamlawton

Graham’s week What I’m reading The Wall by John Lanchester. I find dystopian, postapocalyptic fiction weirdly comforting.

What I’m watching Chernobyl. I find dystopian, postapocalyptic docudramas weirdly comforting.

What I’m working on I’m in Cambridge for a very juicy-looking human evolution conference.

This column appears monthly. Up next week: Annalee Newitz 22 | New Scientist | 9 November 2019

W

E HAVE to do everything, and we have to do it immediately.” That quote, from climate scientist Piers Forster at the University of Leeds, UK, has haunted me ever since I wrote it down almost a year ago. I was interviewing Forster for a piece on limiting global warming to 1.5°C. Like many senior scientists from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), he remains institutionally optimistic that we can pull off a rescue. But he didn’t mince his words.

That was just after an IPCC report spelled out the scale and speed of the changes needed to avoid catastrophic warming of more than 1.5°C. It was widely reported as giving us “12 years to save the planet” – not entirely accurate, but not entirely wrong either, and a useful rallying cry for action. We now have 11 years. So it’s a good time to ask, with another year over, what have we done?

I put this question to another titan in the climate ecosystem, Petteri Taalas, secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization. I asked him what had actually happened since the 1.5°C report came out. His answer can be summarised in two words: not much. Carbon emissions and consumption of fossil fuels are still rising, he admitted. But, he said, “the mental attitude has changed… sentiment has moved in the right direction”.

Really? Is that all we have?

Sure, sentiment matters, but Greta Thunberg alone can’t achieve the hard yards of getting emissions down. I felt like Talaas was putting a brave face on an increasingly hopeless situation. A few weeks on from our conversation, however, my gloom has lifted a little. I’m not about to do a U-turn: we are

still in deep trouble. But if you look behind the headline figures on greenhouse gas emissions and fossil fuel consumption, there are glimmers of light.

One of them is emanating from an industry that is rarely recognised as being on the front line of the climate fight, yet actually wields a disproportionate influence: architecture. In the past year, UK architects have declared a climate emergency, inspired in part by a new grass-roots organisation called the Architects Climate Action Network! (ACAN) whose stated aim is to rapidly decarbonise the building sector.

That may sound like small beer, but it isn’t. According to the IPCC, buildings are responsible for

“If you look behind the headline figures on greenhouse gas emissions and fossil fuels, there are glimmers of light” about a third of the world’s total energy consumption, and so the built environment is absolutely critical to solving the climate crisis. The 1.5°C report called for all new buildings to be carbon neutral by 2020, the most ambitious target in the entire document.

According to Duncan BakerBrown from the School of Architecture and Design at the University of Brighton, UK, ACAN increasingly reflects mainstream opinion in the sector. Even those working on colossal infrastructure projects, such as the Heathrow Airport expansion and the HS2 railway – guzzlers of concrete and steel – are seriously thinking about how to go zero carbon.

Similar movements are emerging across Europe and North America.

Architecture can make a real

impact, says Baker-Brown.

“Architects specify what buildings are made of, and can therefore decide to make them out of environmentally benign stuff.”

That principally means recycling materials instead of demolishing buildings. To put it in perspective, the construction industry creates 60 per cent of the UK’s waste – 120 million tonnes a year – and the built environment contributes around 40 per cent of the UK’s carbon footprint. “Architects are thinking, ‘Actually, we can do something about this’,” he says.

This isn’t the sole solution. But if a small group of activists inside a profession like architecture can turn sentiment into action in less than a year, then maybe Taalas’s optimism is justified.

The renewable energy industry – the one bright spot in the gloomy picture painted by the IPCC – is also powering on. Last month, the International Energy Agency reported that offshore wind could generate more than enough electricity to meet global demand.

That would go a long way to decarbonising not just our energy supply, but also buildings, transport and industry, four of the sectors earmarked by the IPCC for immediate and transformational change. And if the Green New Deal – a gigantic environmental infrastructure plan proposed by the US Democratic party – can be set in motion next year, then we are really starting to talk about a revolution.

Forster is feeling optimistic too.

“With the public, businesses and cities, the conversations have shifted from if we cut emissions to how,” he says. “Government needs to do much more, but even here, there are some encouraging signs.”

We still have to do everything, immediately. But at least we aren’t doing nothing. ❚

Discovery Tours E C U A DOR

Darwin’s Galapagos with Jo Ruxton Explore the Galapagos Islands from the comfort of a luxury small-berth yacht accompanied by marine conservationist and documentary producer Jo Ruxton A paradise for natural history, animal and geology lovers, we have curated a distinctive trip which includes the UNESCO World Cultural Heritage Site of Quito followed by 8 days exploring at sea and exclusive behind the scenes access at the Galapagos Science Centre.

The spacious and stylish yacht Natural Paradise is small enough to get into bays that larger expedition ships cannot go near, so you get to experience Galapagos as Darwin did.

Highlights of the tour include: k Explore eight varied islands including Isabela, Espanola and Fernandina k Exclusive behind the scenes access at the Galapagos Science Centre k Jo Ruxton will give talks on board

k Lots of opportunities to visit the many islands by panga boat and snorkel in these k Observe a wide variety of wildlife including reef sharks, nazca, blue-footed boobies, sea lions, Galapagos penguins, seahorses, sea

as accompanying the daily excursions

turtles, and the strange yet fascinating mola.

or phone UK +44 208 1089 520 (Mon to Thu 9-5:30 Fri 9-5 GMT)

k Explore Latin America’s largest and best-

accompany the voyage and give seminars

preserved historic centre and colonial quarters

at sea and on land

in Ecuador’s capital, Quito

The Natural Paradise yacht only accommodates 15 people, so enquire early to avoid missing out.

newscientist.com/tours

To book or query email newscientist@ steppestravel.com

amazing waters

covering her marine conservation as well k Plus local naturalist guides will

Departing: 11 days from AU$12,519 7 June 2020

In partnership with Steppes Travel

Views Your letters

Editor’s pick We must deal with the roots of domestic violence 19 October, p 20 From Ann Bliss, London, UK I was interested by Alice Klein’s article on domestic violence and ways to tackle it. During the 1980s, I worked in a women’s refuge, then one of two in my London borough.

This essential service for vulnerable women and their children has since been cut as a result of the government’s reduction of financial support to local authorities.

The male-dominated police and judiciary still don’t understand or take seriously the physical, psychological and emotional damage that the fear and actuality of domestic violence and abuse cause, not just to victims – who are, as Klein says, overwhelmingly women – but also to their children.

Women need to feel empowered and supported to resist abuse by promoting a culture of respect, both in the home and in schools. Children who witness domestic violence may come to believe that this is the norm within families and repeat the patterns as adults. By all means support men to prevent further abuse, but it is more important to provide support for women by empowering them and providing refuges so that they and their children have a safe place to run to.

Until we accept that we live in a patriarchal, misogynist culture and overthrow this system, very little systemic change will happen.

The editor writes: For more on the origins of patriarchy, see 21 April 2018, page 33.

Eco-anxiety is just anxiety and may merit treatment 12 October, p 22 From Philip Belben, Nettlebridge, Somerset, UK Graham Lawton makes some good points about the alleged condition of eco-anxiety. But in getting from these to his conclusions, he takes a strange route. At first, he seems to 24 | New Scientist | 9 November 2019

be generalising from his own experience: because his anxiety is rational, so is that of everyone else. This may give the impression, though, that eco-anxiety is something specific and different from other forms of anxiety.

Surely the reason not to classify eco-anxiety as a mental illness is that it isn’t a special case. People react emotionally to situations, sometimes by becoming anxious.

This anxiety may be rational or it may not. Anxiety about climate change covers this whole range.

If someone needs treatment for an inappropriate response, this must not be obscured by a notion that eco-anxiety is always rational, any more than by the idea that it is a specific mental condition that is somehow different from other forms of anxiety.

Children often have incomplete models to assess what response is appropriate, and can thus suffer from irrational fears.

The current climate emergency, impinging so hugely on all our lives, may well be the trigger for some of these. This is neither a new phenomenon that needs a new name nor a non-existent one to be dismissed.

We have proposals for regulating animal work 12 October, p 18 From Hope Ferdowsian, Albuquerque, New Mexico, US We need a clear ethical framework for animal research, says Chelsea Whyte. Protections for human research provide a template.

In 1979, the Belmont Report, issued following the US National Research Act (1974), revolutionised research on human subjects by articulating key ethical principles: specifically, respect for autonomy and obligations to beneficence and justice. Such research now requires informed consent, a full assessment of the risks and benefits, and the just selection of participants. Vulnerable groups, including children and prisoners, have special protection.

In an article in the Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, my colleagues and I envision an equivalent for animals that considers concepts like autonomy, justice and vulnerability to harm (doi.org/dc9m). We describe how animals could be treated as vulnerable subjects, with greater attention to the potential harms

they experience before, during and after proposed experiments.

This includes separation from loved ones, confinement and the infliction of painful, deadly procedures and diseases.

We argue for a stricter risk threshold that recognises animals’ status as a vulnerable population.

We also describe new ways forward including more ethical, humancentred research methods and re-envisioning animal research as more akin to human clinical research – for example, enrolment of “animal patients” who live with “surrogate” human caregivers.

Animals overwhelmingly bear the burdens of research, despite their inability to provide informed consent or to benefit from it. This is a decidedly unjust proposition.

Public concern, backed by our current understanding of animals, demands better.

Consciousness may be just a model of attention 21 September, p 34 From Markus Eymann, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada Michael Graziano suggests our brains have evolved something

he calls an “attention schema”. In an earlier issue, Donald Hoffman explained how we may see the world as a series of “icons” that represent real objects in the world but aren’t those objects, because if we saw an object for what it was, we would be overwhelmed by its complexity (3 August, p 34).

An attention schema is a model of attention that our brains can manipulate to shift focus from one object to another, without having to worry about all the details of synapses and neurons that are actually the basis of our attention.

It seems to me that these two ideas are related. Graziano’s attention schema is one of Hoffman’s icons.

We experience the attention schema as consciousness. We could say consciousness is an icon that represents us to ourselves. It gives us the ability to manipulate objects and find pathways through an environment.

If neurobiologists one day understand how our brains generate Hoffman’s icons, they will be close to knowing how our brains generate consciousness.

Apps won’t reliably spot mental health symptoms 28 September, p 7 From Miles Clapham, London, UK Jessica Hamzelou reports on a smartphone app that could spot signs of schizophrenia in facial expressions and speech. This may be confounded by the fact that medication, notably neuroleptics, can alter voice and facial expressiveness. Alcohol and other drugs can have similar effects.

A bigger issue is the notion that schizophrenia is a single illness distinguished from other conditions by such signs. Reduced facial expression and altered voice and content of speech can be part of many emotional and psychological problems. Shyness might also produce these effects.

The notion of smartphone surveillance as a way of monitoring people’s mental health, even with

formal consent, is worrying.

We should instead rely on key relationships with mental health staff, which we know help in many ways other than just monitoring.

Phone surveillance seems like one more blow to the idea that we should develop humane services based on understanding people in their social context.

Carry on with life on your solar-powered airship 12 October, p 15 From David Wyper, Glasgow, UK I enjoyed reading Donna Lu’s article on a solar-powered airship scheme while my wife Margaret and I returned to Glasgow from New Scientist Live. It concludes with the view that low speeds would be a deterrent to using airships for passenger transport.

Instead of our 5-hour rail trip, we could have travelled by air in 1 hour. Eco-anxiety prompted us to take the train. While perusing the article, it occurred to me that our decision hadn’t cost us any time. We were doing what we would have done at home: reading, listening to music, emailing, chatting and eating snacks.

Sunscreen formulators still have work to do 27 July, p 20 From Brian J. Wilkins, Wellington, New Zealand As midsummer approaches here, I return to Jessica Hamzelou’s report that, of the 16 active ingredients for sunscreen listed as “safe” in the US, only zinc oxide and titanium dioxide are certainly safe and effective.

After nearly 40 years of research into sunscreens, I note that the medium for the active ingredient is also important. Most sunscreens are oil-water emulsions using

surfactants, which help the passage of substances through the skin. A small number are surfactant and water-free. These tend to be greasy, but avoid the problem of emulsion-based sunscreens washing off, which makes a mockery of their sun protection factor ratings.

Zinc oxide and titanium dioxide have their own problems.

The finest particulate sizes have the least whiteness on the skin, but have run up against studies confirming that they can enter tissue and do damage. Larger particles are safer and good blockers of ultraviolet light, but require users to look like whitepainted circus clowns. Sunscreen formulators still have work to do.

Lack of funding leaves satellite data inaccessible 21 September, p 10 From Alan Trusler, South Ockendon, Essex, UK You report findings on the melting Greenland ice cap. Many amateur scientists and school pupils have witnessed this. In the mid-1970s, I worked on remote sensing in science education.

But the closure of Dundee Satellite Receiving Station due to the withdrawal of funding has left us without data from polar-orbiting weather satellites.

The other UK-funded satellite receiving station at Plymouth doesn’t offer such data.

Yet another problem with electrolysing seawater Letters, 12 October From Tim Stevenson, Prestwood, Buckinghamshire, UK Clive Semmens discusses ways to get around obstacles to electrolysing seawater to make hydrogen. But electrolysing a salt

Want to get in touch?

Send letters to New Scientist, 25 Bedford Street, London WC2E 9ES or letters@newscientist.com; see terms at newscientist.com/letters

solution is the standard way of making bleach.

Sodium hydroxide and hydrogen are produced at the cathode and chlorine at the anode.

Reacting sodium hydroxide and chlorine produces sodium hypochlorite. Using seawater to produce hydrogen would be complicated by these reactions.

Cyclists don’t need or use gyroscopic effects Almost the Last Word, 5 October From Tim Lewis, Narberth, Pembrokeshire, UK Several answers in Almost the Last Word refer to the gyroscopic effect of bicycle wheel rotation helping to maintain balance.

This has been discussed before (Last Word, 9 December 2006 and 3 February 2007). Michael Brooks reported experiments showing it to be false (28 May 2011, p 44).

Balance on a bicycle is maintained solely by continual correction of rider and handlebar positions. The faster you go, the smaller the corrections you have to make.

From Stephen Kinsella, Kingston Bridge, Somerset, UK The gyroscopic action of the wheels is negligible in balancing a bicycle. Think of a child’s scooter with its tiny wheels, or an ice skate with no wheels at all.

Balance is achieved by the rider constantly moving their centre of gravity slightly to one side or the other. To stay stationary, a rider moves slightly back and forward, as well as shifting side to side. This is observed with unicyclists. ❚

For the record ❚ There is at least one other rearrangement of a dartboard in which each neighbouring pair adds up to a square number: 20, 18, 15, 10, 6, 19, 17, 8, 1, 3, 13, 12, 4, 5, 11, 14, 2, 7, 9, 16 (Puzzle, 28 September; solution, 5 October). ❚ Tardigrades, or “water bears”, have eight legs (12 October, p 34).

9 November 2019 | New Scientist | 25

The treats are on us this Christmas It’s the time of year for giving and receiving.

That’s why we’re giving away an extra 10% off with every subscription that you can put towards your Christmas food shop (or whatever treats you wish to spend it on)

The perfect present full of ideas and discoveries for friends, family… or yourself!

newscientist.com/13817 Or call 1300 130 226 or +61 (0)2 8355 8923, quoting reference 13817

Offer ends 31st December 2019. Use code XMAS10 at checkout to claim your extra 10% discount

Views Aperture

28 | New Scientist | 9 November 2019

Powering on Photographer Jamey Stillings jameystillings.com

ALTHOUGH protests in Chile have led the nation to withdraw from hosting the 2019 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP25), its ambitious plans for a renewable energy future continue. This dramatic image of a solar facility, contrasting starkly with the ancient sand of the Atacama desert, shows how those intentions are becoming reality.

These panels are in the Solar Jama plant, along the coast from Chile’s capital, Santiago.

It is located thousands of metres above sea level, and the arid desert air contains very little water vapour, allowing more sunlight to reach the solar cells.

The country’s green energy credentials were dealt a blow last week when it pulled out as host of COP25. The move followed anti-government protests about inequality and rising prices.

Chile had seemed like a perfect home for the conference in the year climate change protests went mainstream: in the past 10 years, the country has suffered mega-droughts and its worst ever wildfires.

Chile aims to get 20 per cent of its power from renewables by 2025, rising to 70 per cent by 2050, the year by which it has pledged to become carbon neutral. Its late withdrawal from hosting COP25 points to the difficulties and complexities of such ambitions: how can you effect change in the middle of civil unrest? ❚ Jason Arunn Murugesu

9 November 2019 | New Scientist | 29

Views Culture

The great divide Can we bridge the chasm between scientists and those who reject much of what science shows? The first step is to understand it, says Michael Brooks

Book

Why Trust Science?

“I DON’T want you to listen to me. I want you to listen to the scientists.” That is what climate activist Greta Thunberg told the US Congress in September when she offered a report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) rather than her own words as testimony.

But why would anyone choose to listen to carefully dehumanised, committee-speak science over the impassioned, but not impartial, rhetoric of real human beings?

Because facts outweigh opinions, say science insiders. The trouble is, as Naomi Oreskes points out in her fascinating new book, Why Trust Science?, that is because we have faith in science. In the end, none of us can actually come up with a convincing answer to the question at the heart of this discussion: why trust science?

Maybe because it works.

Surely the results of social experiments like vaccination speak for themselves? Death and damage from diseases such as measles and smallpox have been radically reduced by inoculation.

Or we could cite the laws of physics: if you blanket Earth in a gas that absorbs infrared radiation, trapping heat, it has to experience significant warming.

Ah, but how do outsiders know this is true? Frustrating as it seems, Oreskes argues that this is a valid question. Scientists, she says, “need to explain not just what they know, but how they know it”.

But attempts to do this can confound the problem. Take IPCC reports. They are the voice of scientific consensus on climate 30 | New Scientist | 9 November 2019

ALESSANDRO DI CIOMMO/ZUMA WIRE/SHUTTERSTOCK

Naomi Oreskes Princeton University Press

change: thousands of scientists contribute, and their findings, researched over decades, are distilled into a digest of objective facts by teams of scientist-writers.

These reports aren’t designed to be page-turners, nor to convey scientists’ anguish at the dire situation. They are cool

“In suppressing their values and insisting on science’s neutrality, scientists have gone down a wrong road” presentations of the scientific conclusions and how they were reached.

Perhaps, Oreskes suggests, that is why they have made so little impact on global policy-makers.

“The dominant style in scientific writing is not only to hide the values of the authors, but to hide their humanity altogether,” she says. “The ideal paper is written… as if there were no human author.”

Humanity matters, as we see with former doctor Andrew Wakefield’s claim that the MMR vaccine causes autism. Scientific refutations of his flawed research continue to be outgunned by media accounts of parents who declare their children have been left with autism by the vaccine.

Now measles, mumps and rubella are back. People are powerful.

The issues are complicated.

But as co-author with Erik Conway of Merchants of Doubt, which looked at the efforts by vested interests to obscure real science behind everything from smoking to climate change, Oreskes knows that part of the problem is that a little mistrust goes a long way.

In the pursuit of a reputation for unbiased objectivity, scientists have declined to discuss their values, she says. In fact, they have pretended to have none – a disastrous strategy. “Would you trust a person who has no values?” asks Oreskes. “In suppressing their values and insisting on the value-

Defending the scientific method turns out to be a very complicated matter

neutrality of science, scientists have gone down a wrong road.”

But it is hard to discern an alternative. A 2017 study suggests climate change researchers offering policy suggestions aren’t viewed as any less credible by the public, unless they are advocating new nuclear power stations. Even the broader research community is now accepting of scientists who hold opinions on what should be done about their research results.

Such actions do make it easier for politicians to ignore inconvenient truths, though. If scientists had declared themselves angry at decades of inactivity or sounded an alarm to mobilise public opinion, they would have risked being grouped with lobbyists – and there are better lobbyists around, as Oreskes and Conway’s book made clear.

Oreskes offers peer review and

Succeeding to fail From Silly Putty to an abandoned universal language, Simon Ings stares failure in the face tenure as mechanisms to establish trust. The trouble is, insiders are keeping a dirty secret: peer review is far from perfect, and tenure isn’t “the academic version of licensing” that Oreskes suggests.

The vast majority of working scientists don’t have tenure. Surely most of these are as knowledgeable and trustworthy as the tenured?

Whatever paths we take, to make progress, we have to start by acknowledging that things look different outside science. If you haven’t studied science beyond what was compulsory in school, have no ongoing connections with scientists and have trusting relationships with those who doubt science’s claims, then you may be sceptical about scientists who claim to have a handle on what is true or real. Especially if those scientists suggest we take a path that looks dauntingly painful.

In fact, trust may not be the central issue anyway. Maybe, for climate change at least, it amounts to this: why do today what you can put off until tomorrow, especially if it then becomes somebody else’s problem? That “somebody else” is, of course, the next generation.

Thunberg’s, to be precise.

If it is a bold move to focus a book on a question with no clear answer, it is even bolder to publish the critiques of your answer in the same book. The second half of Why Trust Science? is a back-andforth between Oreskes and some academics. But in a field with few reasons to be cheerful, it is both enlightening and encouraging.

Once we begin to understand the size of the chasm that separates science’s outsiders and insiders, as Oreskes clearly does, we can at least start to design a bridge. ❚

Flop: 13 stories of failure The Octagon University College London Until 10 April 2020

QUITTING your job? Then do remember to clear out your locker. One former employee of University College London left a bottle of home-made plum brandy in a drawer. The macerated plum was eventually discovered, mulled over (sorry), misidentified as a testicle (species unknown) and added to the university’s collection.

It is this selection of paintings, prints, objects and medical exhibits that provides the items for Flop, taking place in UCL’s tiny Octagon gallery. This isn’t so much an exhibition as a series of provocations. A notice by the last case asks us to share our failures on a postcard “so we can all start learning from each other’s mistakes”.

What is a failure? Do they exist outside human judgement?

A favourite undergraduate philosophy question is “can animals have accidents?”.

People certainly can: one of the more gruesome exhibits is a human heart, fatally punctured by a sword swallower’s blade.

How we define failure

MATT CLAYTON

Michael Brooks is a consultant for New Scientist. He wrote The Quantum Astrologer’s Handbook

Exhibition

depends on changing needs and circumstances.

There was a time, not very long ago, when the plethora of human languages seemed indicative of some deep, historical failure to establish amity across our species. There is a fascinating page on display from an essay by the 17thcentury clergyman John Wilkins, whose Royal Society project attempted to establish an analytical language that would let people communicate despite not sharing the same spoken language. It foundered because the Royal Society couldn’t agree how many essential concepts existed in the world.

Now that we have developed artificially intelligent agents capable of translating spoken speech in real time, we find failure in the reduction of linguistic diversity. We bemoan lost languages (3000 have perished since 1900) and mourn the cultural deficit left.

Can objects fail? Only in the sense that they fail to perform an expected action. Silly Putty, a perennially popular toy, was the result of a failed attempt to produce synthetic rubber during the second world war.

If these examples of failure feel a bit tenuous, well, that is the point Flop wants to make: what is interesting is how we deal with failures, not how we define them. As the introductory material explains: “Perhaps contrasting failure with success is the real problem. If every activity has to end in either one or the other, it denies the nuanced and messy complexities of life.” ❚ The failure to make synthetic rubber created one of the world’s most enduring toys, Silly Putty

Visit

Manual Override opens on 13 November at The Shed in New York.

It is a group exhibition of collaborations between artists, geneticists, engineers and AI specialists, built around the visionary art of Lynn Hershman Leeson.

Watch

The Atom: A love affair takes no sides, and pulls no punches, in its witty and admirably objective archival account of the West’s relationship with nuclear power, directed

by Vicki Lesley. At Leeds International Film Festival from 16 November.

Read

Change Is the Only Constant: The wisdom of calculus in a madcap world (Black Dog & Leventhal) is the latest cartoon triumph from Ben Orlin, creator of the underground bestseller Math With Bad Drawings.

Learn to think in curves!

9 November 2019 | New Scientist | 31

LYNN HERSHMAN NEESON, FIRST PERSON PLURAL, THE ELECTRONIC DIARIES OF LYNN HERSHMAN, 1984-96, EXHIBITION VIEW, KW INSTITUTE FOR CONTEMPORARY ARTS BERLIN, 2018. FOUR-CHANNEL VIDEO INSTALLATION. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND BRIDGET DONAHUE, NYC. PHOTO: FRANK SPERLING.

Don’t miss

Views Culture The TV column

The best you can be Living With Yourself plays with the idea of creating a clone that’s better than the original, exploring ideas about human perfectibility and what might happen if we could edit out our flaws, says Chelsea Whyte

Paul Rudd is Miles Elliot, who accidentally acquires a more perfect cloned self

NETFLIX

Chelsea Whyte is a reporter for New Scientist, based in Boston, Massachusetts.

Follow her on Twitter @chelswhyte

TV

Living With Yourself Creator Timothy Greenberg Netflix

Chelsea also recommends...

Film

Multiplicity (1996) Director Harold Ramis

In this cloning comedy, things go awry – several iterations of Michael Keaton’s character get dumber and dumber as they make copies of themselves

32 | New Scientist | 9 November 2019

ARE two Paul Rudds better than one? We find out in Living With Yourself, a Netflix comedy in which Rudd plays Miles Elliot, a burntout, middle-class suburbanite. His marriage is strained after years of unsuccessful attempts to have a child and the normal decay that can set in with routine. He has hit a roadblock at the advertising agency where he works, coming up empty when he needs ideas.

Then, he gets a chance to hit the refresh button. A colleague has recommended a nondescript spa where he is offered a deal that sounds too good to be true. For $50,000, he can undergo a procedure – mysteriously described as to do with DNA restructuring and microsynaptic memory transfer – and voila, he will be a better version of himself.

It is no spoiler to explain that instead of waking up feeling fantastic, Miles comes to in a shallow grave in a forest. He finds his way home to see an identical Miles living in his home, talking to his wife and living his life. It turns out the procedure he underwent was cloning and his original self

wasn’t supposed to wake up at all.

You can imagine the hijinks that ensue. They may not tread any new ground, but it is a joy to see Rudd inhabit very different versions of the same person. He can manage to look a decade older or younger through a single posture or expression.

When the two Miles confront each other, it reminds me of a conversation my friends and I

“A lot is lost if we try to edit ourselves: what we like in people isn’t always about perfection, flaws can be endearing” have had about teleportation. The person who comes out the other end of a hypothetical teleportation machine may look like you and have your memories, but even if every single atom is in the same position in your body, is it you?

A lot of the show deals with the idea of the “best self”: what if you were kinder, more thoughtful, more creative, funnier and more respected? It becomes clear that

while such change seems appealing, a lot gets lost if we can edit ourselves this way. What we like in people isn’t always about perfection. Flaws are endearing, an angry flare-up can lead to humour, and smoothing down those edges makes for a flat imitation of life.

The first few episodes employ the well-worn trope of identical men swapping places and trying not to get caught. So it is a relief when the series changes tack (warning: spoilers ahead) and they out themselves to Miles’s wife, Kate (Aisling Bea). Understandably, she is horrified, but also finds herself falling for her husband’s clone, only to realise that this perfect, Ken doll version of Miles isn’t what she really wants.

In the end, the show poses an interesting scientific conundrum.

Kate has sex with both versions of her husband and gets pregnant.

The series ends with ambiguity about the father. But if the DNA reconstruction created a new Miles with younger-looking skin and more energy, it seems plausible that his biological age is somehow different. The spa staff mentioned telomere length in the hand-waving explanation of the procedure, which made me check how that might affect a child.

Telomeres are DNA sequences at the ends of our chromosomes that shorten with age, and a child’s telomere length has been shown to correspond to the age at which their father conceived them. So Kate and the two Miles might be able to work out who was the father. But could they live with it?

Maybe living with yourself is only possible when you accept some ambiguity, or gloss over the bad to focus on the good. ❚

WHAT IF TIME STARTED FLOWING BACKWARDS?

WHAT IF THE RUSSIANS GOT TO THE MOON

FIRST?

WHAT IF DINOSAURS STILL RULED THE EARTH? AVAILABLE NOW newscientist.com/books

ASHLEY MACKENZIE

Features Cover Story

34 | New Scientist | 9 November 2019

Look into my eyes Hypnosis is entering mainstream medicine and appears to be helping with everything from anxiety to chronic pain. Is it time to take it seriously, asks Helen Thomson

“

H

ONESTLY, I wondered whether I was actually in labour, because surely it was meant to be more painful than this.” That’s Shona, describing the recent birth of her daughter. Her secret? Hypnosis. During pregnancy, she learned how to hypnotise herself into a state of mind that allowed her to minimise the pain of labour and, in her own words, “quite enjoy the whole thing”.

The word hypnosis may call to mind a swinging watch or an entertainer getting people to believe they are naked on stage for an audience’s amusement. Its history is one of sorcery and magic, tales of the occult and exploitative charlatans. Practitioners are rarely doctors or counsellors, clinical trials struggle to get funded and there is still no regulatory authority that monitors the practice.

Yet despite these issues, people are turning to the technique to help with everything from labour to hot flushes, anxiety and chronic pain, and a growing body of research is starting to confirm its benefits. We are also beginning to get a handle on how it actually works and what happens in the brain during hypnosis.

The result is that how we define hypnosis is changing, and its use in mainstream medicine is increasing. The UK’s Royal College of Midwives now accredits hypnobirthing courses and funds training in the technique.

Some anaesthetists now include hypnosis in their toolkit, and it is even being touted as a solution for the opioid addiction crisis.

Hypnosis is certainly no cure-all, but learning what works, why it works and how to do it ourselves may help us harness the power of the mind for some of life’s toughest battles.

Hypnosis has a long history in medicine.

The earliest recorded use dates to 1550 BC, but it took off in the 18th century when German physician Franz Mesmer decided that the planets’ physical influence on people could be manipulated using magnets to cause a trance and treat disease. Mesmer was later denounced as a fraud and hustler, but the idea of changing people’s behaviour through trance persisted, and gained more credibility in the 19th century when the Scottish surgeon James Braid began to investigate what physiology might underlie this strange phenomenon.

Today, hypnosis is used for a vast range of conditions. But even as its use has become more common, its reach within medicine has been limited. In part that is because few can agree on what exactly hypnosis is. Cobbling together opinions from several researchers, a hypnotic “trance” could be described as a state of focused attention, concentration and inner absorption, accompanied by a loss of awareness of the other things around you.

“You’ve probably been in a trance, when you were so absorbed you didn’t notice the passage of time”

It is a state you are likely to have experienced before – when you have been so absorbed in an activity that you don’t notice anything around you or the passage of time.

We also now know that the success of famous illusionists getting people to do weird and wonderful things on stage has more to do with peer pressure than it does with being hypnotised (see “Smoke and mirrors”, page 36).

When it comes to how to actually hypnotise someone, there is no standard method.

A common approach starts with thinking of a calming image, before imagining yourself in a peaceful setting that stimulates all your senses, followed by a deepening procedure and affirmations that help you achieve your goal. It can be induced by another party or by yourself (see “How to hypnotise yourself”, page 37).

As we’ll see, there are good reasons to keep calling the process “hypnosis”, but its fuzzy definition and controversial history have made it difficult to figure out what works and what doesn’t. Its classification as “complementary” rather than mainstream therapy by the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) hasn’t helped either, says Jane Boissière from the British Society of Clinical and Academic Hypnosis, because it makes obtaining funding for trials, training or setting up relevant services in the NHS “virtually impossible”.

In spite of this, the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence does recommend hypnosis for one condition: irritable bowel syndrome. IBS causes painful cramps, bloating, diarrhoea and constipation. The cause isn’t known and there is no cure, but some drugs and diet changes can ease symptoms. > 9 November 2019 | New Scientist | 35

BURGER/PHANIE/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

NHS trusts now offer hypnobirthing courses

And for treatment-resistant IBS, there is overwhelming evidence that hypnosis can improve symptoms and quality of life.

“During hypnosis, patients might picture the gentle waves of the sea, and imagine their bowels are moving in a similar regular, quiet rhythm,” says Carla Flik at University Medical Centre Utrecht in the Netherlands.

In the US, both the American Psychological Association and the National Institutes of Health now promote hypnosis as part of standard care for pain. Numerous studies have shown that it can improve a variety of chronic problems, such as lower back pain and side effects of cancer treatments – often offering more relief than physical therapy and cognitive behavioural therapies alone.

Hypnosis can be so effective for pain relief that, since 1992, it has been used in many surgical procedures – including biopsies, laparoscopies and plastic surgery – as an alternative to general anaesthesia.

The technique is simple, says Aurore Marcou at the Curie Institute in Paris, France. “The patient receives a local anaesthetic and mild sedation. We sit beside them and guide them to concentrate on their inner world, their breathing, and help them bring their attention to a safe space. We help them relive experiences in the past. All of your brain is focused on those memories.”

The major benefit is fewer side effects.

“You don’t feel drowsy, or sick from the general anaesthetic,” says Marcou.

Guy Montgomery at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, has found that women who had hypnosis before breast cancer surgery reported less pain, anxiety, 36 | New Scientist | 9 November 2019

nausea and fatigue afterwards. And the benefits weren’t just physical. His team predicted that if 90 per cent of people needing a breast cancer biopsy in the US were to undergo hypnosedation, it would save the country more than $135 million a year.

Going deeper This reported reduction in mental and physical symptoms makes it no surprise that pregnant women like Shona flock to hypnobirthing classes. Officially, though, the jury is still out on this one – a 2011 review of 13 studies concluded that hypnobirthing “holds promise” as an intervention for labour pain, but so many of the trials were poorly designed that a more definitive answer wasn’t possible. A 2015 trial found the technique made little difference to whether women requested pain relief during

childbirth, but it did significantly reduce their reported levels of fear and anxiety.

Indeed, many see promise for its use in mental health. Anxiety disorders are some of the most impairing and common conditions in the US. This year, in the first analysis of its kind, Keara Valentine at the University of Hartford, Connecticut, and her colleagues quantified the effect of hypnosis for reducing anxiety by analysing all of the controlled studies of this intervention. The results were impressive: the average participant receiving hypnosis showed more improvement than 84 per cent of people who didn’t receive it.

What’s more, there was no difference in benefit between those who used self-hypnosis and those given guided hypnotherapy.

Hypnosis isn’t just used for pain and anxiety, of course. It is increasingly popular as a way to help people learn new behaviours or kick bad habits. But, again, the research is mixed because of poor trial design. In June, Jamie Hartmann-Boyce at the University of Oxford and her colleagues published a review of 14 studies analysing the use of hypnosis to help people give up smoking and couldn’t find sufficient evidence to recommend it. The problem wasn’t that hypnosis definitely didn’t help, she says, but that the trials were a mess.

“They had lots of bias, were imprecise or had too few participants,” Hartmann-Boyce says.

“It’s such an important issue that we need to produce bigger, better trials.”

In other areas, results are more consistent.

For instance, in the early 1990s, a meta-analysis of weight-loss studies showed that adding hypnosis to cognitive behavioural therapy more than doubled how much weight people lost. Another meta-analysis done in 2018 had equally encouraging results.

Despite this increasing evidence of

Smoke and mirrors No hypnotist can make you do something against your will, despite what TV mentalist Derren Brown’s stunts may suggest. Back in 1939, scientists did show that hypnotised volunteers would perform risky acts, like picking up poisonous snakes, suggesting they weren’t acting of their own volition.

But later experiments

revealed that most people would do these things whether hypnotised or not, merely because they had been put under pressure by a person in authority. When asked to perform the same acts outside such settings, participants all said no.

“It’s true that the people who are brought on stage and hypnotised feel

compelled to behave in the way they do,” says Michael Heap, a clinical psychologist at the University of Sheffield, UK. “Mainly it’s because these people are placed in front of an audience. They know what’s expected of them. They’re actually just obeying the hypnotist, they’re cooperating, complying with authority.”

hypnotism’s potential, there remain many questions regarding how it actually works.

But that too is starting to change.

“I don’t think anyone should say ‘yes we know exactly what hypnosis is’,” says Laurence Sugarman at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, “but we have some ideas.” First, he says, we shouldn’t think about hypnotism as something that induces a single state, but as a discipline that influences the brain’s ability to adapt and learn. “It’s a skill we can use to help us change our mind.”

This adaptability – which is also known as plasticity – lets the brain modify its neural connections and rewire itself so that we can perform novel behaviours, remember new information and adapt to the variety of experiences life throws at us. There are times when the brain is more plastic – the first few years of life, for instance, or when we experience strong emotions. It is likely that hypnosis puts our brain in a state that is conducive to remoulding, not in one specific way, but in many different ways depending on the individual and the therapy involved.

For instance, imaging studies show that the relaxation part of hypnotic induction significantly suppresses activity in our frontal cortex, the brain area responsible for planning, decision-making and attention. This releases the brake that it normally puts on other areas involved in filtering and integrating salient information from inside and outside our body, which we use to generate new memories, ideas and behaviours. Something similar happens when we drink alcohol, a time when you might also feel more suggestible.

It seems that while in the hypnotic state, we can generate more intense sensations in our mind. Marie-Elisabeth Faymonville, head of the pain clinic at Liège University Hospital in Belgium, has found that people who are hypnotised and asked to imagine a pleasant memory show more activity in brain areas responsible for movement and sensations than people who are merely imagining the same scene without hypnosis.

“There was no real stimulation coming from the outside world, but those who were hypnotised were seeing as if their eyes were open and information was coming in. It was similar to real perception,” she says. The stronger such sensations are – imagined

How to hypnotise yourself Start with 5 minutes of calming imagery, such as imagining your favourite colour washing over you, or thinking about floating in a pool of water, while concentrating on your breath.

Next, imagine yourself in a happy place – somewhere peaceful that stirs your senses; you can smell, touch, hear and see the different aspects of the images around you. If you are imagining a day at the beach, for instance, you can visualise the bright sky above you, feel the warmth of the sun on your skin, taste and smell the salt in the air and hear the sounds of the waves rolling in and out.

Next, it is time to go deeper. To make yourself feel even more relaxed, think about descending a spiral staircase, for instance.

Now repeat affirmations that help you achieve your desired outcome.

or otherwise – the more easily they can be incorporated into a learned behaviour.

When it comes to controlling pain, hypnotism seems to help in a different way.

Pain perception is generated by the brain, and we know that it can be influenced: consider the gymnast who breaks their leg halfway through a routine and carries on, or a mother who saves her child from a burning building before noticing her own injuries. Hypnotism seems to allow us to do something similar.

On your wavelength When Faymonville hypnotised volunteers before pressing a warm or painfully hot stimulus on their palm, it lowered the perceived unpleasantness and intensity of the pain by about 50 per cent compared with subjects who were just resting, and by about 40 per cent compared with those told to distract themselves with a pleasant memory.

A closer look at the brain in this context shows that hypnosis lowers activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, a region that receives

“For treating anxiety, self-hypnosis or guided hypnosis were equally good”

information about sensory stimuli and is linked to areas that organise an appropriate emotional, behavioural response. Lower activity in this area may mean that pain signals are given less attention than normal.

Other research suggests that hypnosis gets people into a state of mind where the associated brainwaves – patterns of neural activity – are similar to those seen during deep meditation. In a small study of people with multiple sclerosis who underwent hypnosis to treat chronic pain, Mark Jensen at the University of Washington, Seattle, and his colleagues found that enhancing the theta brainwaves generated during a hypnotic trance increased the potency of the pain relief. That may be because the brainwaves generated during a hypnotic trance aid the brain’s ability to learn and adapt to the new information it is receiving during the therapy.

Despite this progress, there remain challenges: not least convincing doctors to keep an open mind. According to Montgomery, many trainees ask: “Do we have to call it hypnosis? That word may scare patients off.”

The short answer is yes. When people undergo the same procedure labelled either hypnosis or relaxation or suggestion, it works better when called hypnosis. Motivation to be hypnotised, as well as believing it is a credible therapy, can also increase the likelihood that it is effective.

As with the placebo effect, it may be that your belief hypnosis will make a difference is in fact a critical part of the success of the treatment.

Giving hypnosis a fair shot in mainstream medicine could have big pay-offs. Studies show that people with chronic pain can lower their use of painkillers through hypnosis. In the US, more than 130 people die every day from overdoses involving addictive prescription painkillers, most notably opioids. Speaking at last year’s World Economic Forum, psychologist David Spiegel at Stanford University in California pointed out that hypnotism isn’t addictive and doesn’t kill people, yet it can have a considerable effect on pain, and is therefore worth taking seriously.

Does hypnosis work for everyone? No. But you can try it on yourself for free and it comes with minimal risks, says Marcou.

“That’s what’s so nice about hypnosis – the results can be really good, you just need to be willing to give it a go.” ❚

Helen Thomson is a consultant for New Scientist. She is the author of Unthinkable: An extraordinary journey through the world’s strangest brains 9 November 2019 | New Scientist | 37

Features

The first animals

38 | New Scientist | 9 November 2019

The Cambrian explosion is feted as evolution’s big bang, but now some enigmatic earlier creatures are rewriting the history of life, says Colin Barras

LEFT: RICHARD BIZLEY/SCIENCE PHOTO; RIGHT: SINCLAIR STAMMERS/SCIENCE PHOTO

L

IFE appeared on our planet more than 3.5 billion years ago and consisted exclusively of microbes for the next 3 billion years. Then, about 539 million years ago, everything changed.

In the geological blink of an eye, the seas were filled with large and complex animals, including worms with legs and fearsome spikes, creatures with a trunk-like nose and five eyes, and giant shrimp-like predators with mouths like pineapple rings.

This evolutionary starburst is known as the Cambrian explosion. It is one of the most significant moments in life’s history on Earth because it is the point at which species that are clearly related to today’s animals first appeared. It is seen as evolution’s big bang.

But over the past few years, geologists have begun to have second thoughts. Newly discovered fossils and careful analysis of ones found decades ago suggest that animals were thriving in the period before the Cambrian.

As a result, some people are now arguing that the explosion of animal life started about 12 million years earlier. Others are questioning whether it is possible to define a distinct explosion at all.

You could be forgiven for thinking that shifting the dawn of the animal revolution from 539 to 551 million years ago isn’t that big a deal. But evolution can do a lot in that length of time: the entire span of human evolution probably fits within 12 million years, the length of time since our lineage separated from that of chimpanzees. What’s more, shifting life’s big bang back could have important implications for the quest to figure out what sparked evolution’s most spectacular spell of invention.

Scholars first worked out how to read the

“Ediacarans were as strange to our eyes as life on another planet would be”

The leaf-like rangeomorphs (left), the largest of which grew to 2 metres in height, are now thought to have been some of the earliest animals.

The same goes for Tribrachidium (above)

geological record in the 19th century, and they quickly noticed something puzzling. The oldest rocks they could find seemed devoid of fossils. Biologically complex marine animals, including woodlouse-like trilobites, suddenly appeared in abundance in the rocks assigned to the Cambrian period.

The pattern troubled Charles Darwin because it clashed with his idea of evolution by natural selection as a slow and gradual process. To make sense of it all, he suggested that simpler life forms must have evolved before the Cambrian but left little or no fossil evidence of their existence.

We now know Darwin’s hunch was correct.

Geologists have spotted signs of microbial life in rocks more than 3 billion years old. They have also identified an important transition roughly 2 billion years ago, when those microbes became slightly larger and more biologically complex. This was a necessary step on the way to animals, broadly defined as organisms that are multicellular, capable of locomotion and responsive to their environment.

But the Cambrian explosion still seemed to mark the sudden blossoming of animal life. This remained the case even though, in the mid-20th century, geologists began finding fossils of large organisms, some a metre or more across, in rocks that predate the Cambrian explosion by 30 million years. These organisms were dubbed the Ediacaran biota because they date to the Ediacaran geological period, which precedes the Cambrian. But we couldn’t quite figure out what to make of them.

This wasn’t only because none of these organisms seemed to possess obvious animal features like a gut or a mouth. Some, including those in a group called the rangeomorphs, also had a very unanimal-like fractal anatomy, in which tiny parts of the organism looked like miniature versions of larger parts (see “Pushing back the clock”, page 40).

The influential palaeontologist Adolf Seilacher argued that the Ediacaran organisms were so clearly unrelated to the animals of the Cambrian that they were effectively as strange to our modern eyes as life on another planet would be. Seilacher was one of many researchers who felt that Ediacaran species and ecology looked so alien that it was impossible to escape the conclusion that the Cambrian was indeed a dramatic explosion of familiar animal life.

In the past 10 years, however, geologists have shifted their thinking. Sophisticated analytical techniques have started to suggest that some of the weird species of the Ediacaran were animals after all, and that they behaved > 9 November 2019 | New Scientist | 39

“There probably wasn’t a Cambrian explosion worthy of the name after all”

uncannily like modern creatures. “We used to be obsessed with the Ediacaran-Cambrian boundary,” says Simon Darroch at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. “Now it’s looking smoother than previously thought.”

Perhaps the most compelling clues come from rocks in Newfoundland, Canada, that contain traces of the earliest Ediacaran communities. Here, you don’t just stumble on the occasional nicely preserved specimen – you walk over bedrock exposures 120 square metres in area that each contain thousands of fossils.

Each giant slab is a Pompeii-like snapshot of the deep-sea floor community as it was 570 million years ago. “It’s absolutely astonishing in terms of preservation,” says Emily Mitchell at the University of Cambridge.

It is what the rocks reveal about Ediacaran organisms that really surprised her, though.

Mitchell and her colleagues mapped the size and distribution of fossils of an oval-shaped rangeomorph called Fractofusus. This Ediacaran grew up to 40 centimetres in length and was covered in peculiar, fractally repeating pleats. The data, published in 2015, showed that the largest individuals were scattered randomly

Pushing back the clock We used to think that animals burst onto the scene in an abrupt “explosion” of complex life during the Cambrian period. However, new discoveries are revealing animal-like creatures in the earlier Ediacaran period

Ediacaran 635

Million years ago

Fractofusus

Cambrian 539

485

Marella

Reproduced much like modern deep-sea animals like sponges

Anomalocaris

Kimberella Trundled around the sea floor grazing on microbial mats

Yilingia Segmented creature with primitive legs, possibly an early arthropod

40 | New Scientist | 9 November 2019

Hallucigenia

across the ancient sea floor, surrounded by halos of smaller and smaller individuals.

This suggests that Fractofusus reproduced in a sophisticated way. It generated waterborne offspring that would drift and land on an empty bit of sea floor. Then, as the offspring developed into adults, each would form a series of tentacle-like fingers, the ends of which would then grow into a clone of the adult.

Surprisingly modern That is a little like how certain modern deep-sea animals such as sponges and corals reproduce, says Mitchell. Fractofusus may have had a fractal-like anatomy unlike that of any modern animal, but it apparently reproduced like some of today’s animals do. That might hint that it was related to those animals, although Mitchell says we can’t rule out the possibility that Fractofusus was instead related to fungi, which sometimes also reproduce this way.

In any case, it isn’t just Fractofusus that behaved surprisingly like a modern animal.

Another Ediacaran organism called Kimberella left behind tracks that suggest it trundled around, grazing on microbial mats on the sea floor, which is a strikingly animal-like way to behave. Darroch and his colleagues have used computer models to show that another Ediacaran, Tribrachidium, probably fed on suspended particles, just as many modern shellfish do. In a sense, it doesn’t even matter whether these Ediacaran organisms were animals or not: they were behaving and reproducing like modern marine animals do, which suggests that Ediacaran ecology was more like today’s than we previously thought.

There might also be good reason to believe that at least some strange Ediacaran organisms really were animals. The strongest evidence for this came last year. Ilya Bobrovskiy at the Australian National University in Canberra and his colleagues analysed the chemistry of rocks containing an Ediacaran organism called Dickinsonia. The rock around the fossils had a chemical signature associated with algae, which would make sense because the shallow sea floor on which Dickinsonia lived was probably coated in mats of algae. But the molecules within the fossils themselves included a particular type of steroid that is produced only by animals, implying that Dickinsonia was an animal.

These conclusions don’t necessarily lead to a defusing of the Cambrian explosion.

Some people suspect that the Ediacaran animals didn’t give rise to modern ones.

UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP NORTH AMERICA LLC/DEAGOSTINI/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

If so, it is possible that there was still an evolutionary explosion of sorts 539 million years ago, just one that involved a sudden blossoming of different sorts of animals, namely recognisably modern ones.

Palaeontologists have, however, begun to find evidence that the Ediacaran seas did contain animals that probably were related to modern ones. “We’re sucking down the [species] that were previously known in the Cambrian into the Ediacaran,” says Rachel Wood at the University of Edinburgh, UK. For instance, in 2017, Wood and her colleagues announced they had found tiny fossils of what were previously assumed to be exclusively Cambrian animals in Siberian rocks dating to the final 10 million years of the Ediacaran. Tiny burrows that could have been produced by nematode-like worms have also been seen in Ediacaran rocks from Brazil dating back at least 550 million years.

That is an important discovery because nematodes, primitive though they may seem, are relatively advanced animals. One study even suggests that they are closely related to arthropods: animals, like spiders and lobsters, with legs and an exoskeleton.

If nematodes were around in the Ediacaran, it is plausible arthropods were too.

Indeed, just last year, minuscule footprints left by an unidentified, multi-legged animal were reported stretching several centimetres in rocks from south China thought to be up to 551 million years old. And earlier this year, a team caught a rare glimpse of another possible early arthropod in the same rocks: a 25-centimetre-long segmented creature called Yilingia that seems to have had primitive legs.

In light of all this, there probably wasn’t a Cambrian explosion 539 million years ago after all. Animals, both familiar and weird, really were thriving millions of years earlier.

This revelation is so fresh that opinion is still divided on how to recast the rise of the animals.

Earlier this year, a team including Wood and Mitchell argued that animals actually became dominant by diversifying through a series of relatively small evolutionary changes over tens of millions of years. As such, they concluded that it is debatable whether there really was any explosion worthy of the name.

“I can absolutely see their argument,” says Darroch. Even so, he still thinks there was a distinct evolutionary explosion, albeit one that began much earlier than we had thought.

In a paper published last year, he and his colleagues argued that this explosion didn’t take place 539 million years ago but 12 million years earlier, when the Ediacaran period was

Fresh analysis of Dickinsonia fossils suggests they were among the first animals

still in full swing. It is then that we see the first clear signs that tiny yet unmistakably modern animals were scuttling around in the shadow of the larger Ediacaran organisms.

If there was a distinct explosion, our chances of working out why it happened would be immeasurably improved if we could figure out when and where to look for clues. For comparison, by 54 million years ago, mammals were thriving across the world and the first primates had just appeared. But our explanations for this explosion of mammal life are lacking if they don’t acknowledge the dinosaur-ending asteroid impact that had occurred 12 million years earlier.

As far as we know, there was no asteroid impact to trigger the evolutionary explosion 551 million years ago. But we do know that huge changes were afoot at the time.

The problem is that they are frustratingly mysterious. Geochemists studying the chemical isotopes locked away in 551-millionyear-old rocks have found signs of what they describe as the single biggest shift in the ratio of carbon-13 to carbon-12 in Earth’s history.

It is known as the Shuram event.

Carbon shifts often indicate ecosystems in flux. At other times in our planet’s past,

they have been linked to sudden drops in the quantity of nutrients generated through photosynthesis – and with mass extinction events. But the size of the carbon shift during the Shuram event is so large that it has so far defied explanation, even after 25 years of study.

And deciphering the event has now taken on new significance, given the realisation that it might have been the trigger for the blossoming of animal life as we know it.

Some geologists argue that the Shuram event reflects what they describe as “turmoil” from dramatic changes to the paths that water took as it slowly circulated around the ancient oceans. Others suspect that it represents a huge global warming event that released carbon-containing methane into the oceans and atmosphere. Either of these environmental disturbances might somehow have triggered the dawn of modern ecosystems, but we still don’t know quite how.

Alternatively, the Shuram event might reflect a sudden rise in atmospheric oxygen.

Conventionally, a surge in oxygen levels has been viewed as a potential trigger for the sudden flourishing of animal life – although these days, many biologists suspect that the story is more complicated.

It is also exasperatingly unclear how animal life responded to the Shuram event.

Darroch says geologists have struggled to find rocky outcrops that both record the Shuram geochemical signal and contain enough Ediacaran fossils to show how ecosystems reacted. “The rock record is not being as helpful as we’d like it to be,” he says.

Darroch thinks we will eventually find those elusive rocks. One reason for optimism is that a number of new outcrops of Late Ediacaran rocks have come to light in the past couple of years: details of a previously unknown site in Iran were published just last year, and Darroch and his colleagues are in the process of studying a fresh locality in South Africa.

Evidence from these sites might finally help explain when and why the most dramatic event in the history of life on Earth occurred – or it could indicate that the story of early animal life is so complex that there wasn’t a neatly definable Cambrian explosion after all. “It might just be that we’ve been trying to impose artificial patterns and boundaries on the rock record,” says Darroch. ❚

Colin Barras is a consultant for New Scientist. He is based in Ann Arbor, Michigan

9 November 2019 | New Scientist | 41

Features

Seeing around corners

N

OTHING to see here: just an image of an empty street. But the investigator thinks there is more to this than meets the eye. With a few clicks of his mouse, he enhances a featureless shadow cast on the floor, apparently defying the laws of optics to extract a blurry image of two people lurking around the corner.

Technical wizardry like this seems farfetched. But this isn’t CSI. The investigator is a computer scientist not a detective, and those characters are graduate students not suspects.

More importantly, this technology is real, and it is being developed in labs right now.

The science of seeing around corners is new, fast-moving and breathtaking. We are discovering that the shadows are full of visual information that our eyes can’t see. Now, as people develop clever ways to make the invisible visible, they are exposing all manner of potential applications besides forensics.

Autonomous cars that spot hidden hazards.

Cameras that direct fire crews to people trapped in burning buildings. Endoscopes that guide surgery in unreachable parts of the body.

“It could be extremely powerful,” says Vickie Ye, a computer vision researcher at the University of California, Berkeley.

“Any information outside the frame could be interpretable.”

You don’t need novel science to see around a corner. You could just use a periscope, or any mirror for that matter. A mirror works because light rays bounce off the surface in a clean and

42 | New Scientist | 9 November 2019

predictable way – namely, at the same angle at which they hit it. As a result, all the visual information collectively contained within the light rays is preserved, so that you always see a clear image of whatever is out of view.

The problem is that most surfaces we encounter aren’t reflective, at least not in the sense that a mirror is. When you look at a painted wall, for example, you are observing light rays that have bounced, or scattered, from all sorts of random angles, preventing you from seeing an image of yourself. In fact, your image is there, but it is made up of only the tiny minority of light rays that happen to take the direct path from your face, into the wall and back into your eyes. The majority of light rays, which scatter through alternative paths, wash these out and thus render any image invisible.

To the human eye, at least. In 2012, computer scientist Ramesh Raskar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and his team hid an artists’ manikin behind a screen and then fired laser pulses onto an adjacent wall. They knew that some of the photons fired by the laser would scatter off the wall, rebound off the manikin and then scatter off the wall again, before finally being picked up by their photon detector. They also knew that this portion of photons would be tiny compared with the zillions taking different routes. The trick was in the precision of their detection system.

By timing the return of a photon to within a few trillionths of a second, they could calculate how far that photon had travelled after it had

ELENI DEBO

Hidden scenes are lurking in the shadows.

Jon Cartwright exposes the intriguing science of seeing the invisible

bounced off the wall. The haphazard nature of scattering made things difficult, because it was only possible to get a sphere of possibilities as to what point on what object’s surface each photon had come from. But by timing lots of photons returning from many different positions on the wall, the researchers ended up with numerous spheres of possibilities.

Ultimately, the points where these spheres overlapped in their calculations formed a crude yet recognisable three-dimensional image of the hidden manikin.

Accidental cameras Specialist laser systems like Raskar’s don’t come cheap, which could limit their application. Last year, some of his former group members, now at Stanford University in California, developed a version of their algorithm that could be run in conjunction with more widely available detection equipment. As the technology shrinks, they hope it could be integrated into surgical endoscopes. This might allow surgeons to see parts of an unhealthy intestine that are otherwise too tight to probe. It could also find use in autonomous vehicles, letting them spot other road users about to hurtle out of side streets. Exploiting it in CSI-style forensics will be trickier, because the technology would have to be incorporated into every CCTV camera at the manufacturing stage.

And yet, even everyday technology can be trained to see things outside the frame.

The underlying concept here is different, relying on the existence of what are now being called “accidental cameras”, but the results are equally jaw-dropping.

We normally think of cameras as devices with glass or plastic lenses, but a camera can be anything that controls the light falling on a surface. Take the humble camera obscura, for example: by allowing light to enter a darkened room solely through a tiny hole, only light rays travelling directly from different points outside can get in. Unadulterated by any scattered light, these direct rays form a perfect, if inverted, image of the exterior scene on the wall opposite the hole.

Such a camera is almost always deliberately constructed. But as soon as Antonio Torralba and William Freeman at MIT started looking, they found unintended cameras almost everywhere – not just holes, but edges of any sort. A corner in a corridor, for instance. > 9 November 2019 | New Scientist | 43

HEARING THE SIGHTS To understand how this vertical edge acts as a camera, and how, ironically, it can allow you to see the very scene it is obscuring, you first have to notice that the floor by the corner of the wall is in shadow. Known technically as a penumbra, this dark patch is easy to miss.

Most of the floor is at the same brightness due to light scattering from everywhere in the corridor. At the penumbra, however, it is slightly dimmer because light from around the corner can’t quite reach it.

Given a photo of the floor near to the corner, a computer could subtract the contribution made by light that stays the same brightness everywhere to leave only the diminished light in the shadow region – that is, the contribution from around the corner. This would tell you the average brightness and colour of the hidden scene, which is pretty useless on its own. But the existence of the corner tells you something else about the light striking the shadow region.

To understand why, imagine standing with your shoulder to the wall, next to a corner, but so you can’t see round it. This is where the shadow is deepest. As you sidestep away from the wall, your view around the corner steadily improves. In the same way, the portion of the hidden scene exposed at any one point within the shadow depends on how far away that point is from the wall.

It is this constraint that makes the maths for converting the shadow to an image solvable, as Torralba and Freeman, together with Ye and others at MIT, discovered in 2017. Armed with

nothing more than the basic geometry of a corner and video footage of the ground beside it, taken by an ordinary digital camera, their algorithm could reconstruct a video of two people moving about, completely outside the frame.

There was a big snag with this work. The “images” making up the reconstructed video were only one-dimensional, like thin strips of normal photographs. That was enough to disclose movement, but not to recognise anyone. The reason was that the accidental camera itself, a vertical edge, was onedimensional. As a result, moving away from the wall improved the view around the corner, but shifting up or down did not.

What the yucca sees In January this year, however, a group led by Vivek Goyal at Boston University managed to reproduce, from around a corner, two-dimensional, colour images of what was being shown on an LCD monitor. The feat required a slightly different accidental camera: a credit card-sized occluder set back from the corner, casting a shadow not onto the floor, but onto a wall even further back (see diagram, right). “We’re getting two-dimensional reconstruction because the occluder itself is two-dimensional,” says Goyal.

Goyal hasn’t stopped there. Determined to make round-the-corner imaging more applicable to everyday situations, his group recently demonstrated improved algorithms

Walls have eyes: clever tricks can tease images from shadows

GAMPE/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Listening to the inaudible might sound like a paradox, but not according to a group including one of the pioneers of round-the-corner imaging. In 2014, William Freeman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his colleagues captured high-speed video footage – without audio – of various objects from glasses of water to empty crisp bags while an instrumental version of Mary Had a Little Lamb played in the background. The almostimperceptible vibrations of the objects caused by the sound waves were enough to enable them to reconstruct the nursery rhyme.

Sound can see through walls, too.

In June this year, David Lindell of Stanford University in California and his colleagues hid an H-shaped object behind a wall. They then used speakers to bounce sound off another wall so it would go behind the first wall. Deploying microphones to pick up the returning sound waves, they could build up an image of the hidden object. They believe the set-up is a faster and cheaper way to see round corners than light-based systems.

If all this hidden imaging sounds a little cloak-and-dagger, be warned that people can be tracked through the walls of a home or office using ambient Wi-Fi and a smartphone. You need an app developed by Yanzi Zhu at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his colleagues, which can detect the faint swelling of a Wi-Fi signal caused by human movement, so long as you walk up and down a few times first to map the Wi-Fi environment. The researchers, who created the app to expose the privacy risk, are now developing defensive systems for Wi-Fi transmitters.

44 | New Scientist | 9 November 2019

that work with textured, rather than just featureless, surfaces. He even has preliminary results for two-dimensional images from one-dimensional corners without extra occluders. Position in the second dimension can be gauged from the relative brightness of the scattered light, he says. “It’s less robust, but we’ve had success.”

Meanwhile, Torralba, Freeman and their colleagues have shown that a three-dimensional image of a room can be reconstructed merely from the shadow cast by a houseplant. This works in the same way as the corner-imaging technique, in that different points of the plant’s shadow reveal information about different portions of the room. The distinction is that the computation required is far more complicated here, because the shadow is cast by leaves and stems sprouting in all directions. In fact, the image they created was only made possible thanks to a painstaking calibration procedure, which involved shining light onto the plant from every point within the room beforehand, to work out the geometrical relationship between shadow and hidden scene.

With the science moving so fast, it is tempting to speculate what these algorithms could do in the future. Ye points out that artificial intelligence is increasingly able to work out geometry from still photographs, without any calibration. Combined with the ability to interpret shadows, this potentially means that any photo could betray something of the scene outside the original frame. “Any camera has a limited field of view,” says Ye. “Even just for security or forensics, it would be incredible if you could increase that.”

Because the recording equipment need be nothing special, the images don’t have to be new, either. Imagine being able to shed light, retrospectively, on the context of rare historical photos or video footage, or contemporary photos presented as fake news. “It’s definitely plausible,” says Goyal. “It’s all just postprocessing. You just need high resolution.”

Equally plausible, of course, are more nefarious uses, such as spying on people who believe they are out of sight. “I’ve thought a lot about this and I don’t think people should be too concerned,” says Ye. “These techniques are currently super-sensitive to things like camera motion, which is why we’ve mostly used fixed cameras. Even just for very slowly moving cameras, things become very hard, very quickly.” Although the technology is progressing fast by scientific standards, she adds, societies will still have plenty of time

In the shadows How an ordinary digital camera can see a hidden image 1. A screen shows an image that is hidden from a camera’s view

2. Light and shade from the image, obstructed by a chair, fall on the opposite wall. The camera takes a picture of the shadow

3. An algorithm analyses the shadow, teasing out the visual information encoded in the pattern of light rays blocked out by the chair, to reconstruct the out-of-sight image

SOURCE: doi.org/gftrn2

to get used to it, and push back against any uses they consider inappropriate.

In any case, it is hard to stem the flow of ideas, especially given a $28 million well of funding from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency shared by many of the research groups. Another concept Goyal is working on is a combination of the penumbra and laser approaches, which he expects will make round-the-corner imaging more flexible and reduce acquisition time.

Others, meanwhile, are using sound or Wi-Fi signals rather than light to see into hidden spaces (see “Hearing the sights”, left).

Then there are ways to employ the technology to see objects hidden not outside, but inside the frame. In 2016, Raskar and his colleagues exposed a printed manuscript to

“A 3-D image of a room can be constructed from the shadow cast by a houseplant”

a laser operating in the terahertz range, which is midway between infrared light and microwaves. Terahertz light can penetrate materials and, unlike X-rays, it can also distinguish between white and black tones.

From the precise arrival time of photons that are reflected, the MIT researchers could select, by depth, any page up to nine sheets down, and scan its text. The capability could be a boon for historians looking to investigate delicate cultural artefacts.

Or, returning to vehicle safety, how about being able to see through fog?

Last year, Guy Satat, then a PhD student in Raskar’s group, noticed that the wavelength of photons that have scattered off fog particles is skewed in a distinct way. The skewed photons can be discarded, leaving only those scattered from the object. Add some sort of photon-return timing system to judge depth and the fog is lifted.

This sort of technology is still in its infancy, but it is already clear it will save lives – and who knows what other applications are hiding around the corner? ❚

Jon Cartwright is a consultant for New Scientist based in Bristol, UK

9 November 2019 | New Scientist | 45

Recruitment

Associate or Full Professor in Experimental Quantum Information Science newscientistjobs.com Recruitment advertising Email nssales@newscientist.com

The Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) and the Faculty of Science at the University of Waterloo (UW) is seeking an exceptional scholar and researcher for a senior hire at the Associate or Full Professor level, with an anticipated start date of September 1, 2020.

A PhD, demonstrated evidence of running a world-class research program in experimental quantum information science and technology, a clear YLVLRQ RI WKH IXWXUH LPSDFW RI TXDQWXP WHFKQRORJ\ DQG HÓ˝HFWLYH WHDFKLQJ are required. Responsibilities include the supervision of graduate students and teaching at the undergraduate and graduate levels.

Full consideration for this position is assured only for applications received by December 1, 2019. Interested individuals should upload their application via the faculty application form at https://uwaterloo. ca/institute-for-quantum-computing/positions and arrange for three referees to upload letters of reference.

The University of Waterloo regards diversity as an integral part of academic excellence and is committed to accessibility for persons with disabilities. As such, we encourage applications from women, First Nations, Metis and Inuit peoples, persons with disabilities, members of diverse gender identities, and others who may contribute to the further GLYHUVLÓžFDWLRQ RI LGHDV $OO TXDOLÓžHG FDQGLGDWHV DUH HQFRXUDJHG WR DSSO\ KRZHYHU &DQDGLDQV DQG permanent residents will be given priority.

Full description at https://jobs.newscientist.com/en-gb/ job/1401680537/associate-or-full-professor-in-experimental-quantum-information-science/

Bring your career to life Sign up, create your own job alerts and discover the latest opportunities in life sciences at

newscientistjobs.com

HMRI Postdoctoral Fellowship Program Pasadena, CA Huntington Medical Research Institutes’ (HMRI) Postdoctoral Fellowship Program provides MDs, PhDs, and MD/PhDs rigorous scientific training, mentoring, and a rich research environment supplemented by close interactions with colleagues at nearby universities, including Caltech, USC, and others.

Fellows will obtain hands-on experience carrying out studies in HMRI’s four major areas of research: • Brain research with focus on Alzheimer’s disease and Migraine • Imaging and spectroscopy of the brain, blood vessels, and heart • The study of heart attack and ways to reduce cell death during heart attack, models of heart failure, models of cardiogenic shock, studies of cardio-toxic substances, e-cigarettes. • Studies specifically focused on the connection between the brain and heart disease ELIGIBILITY:

Applicants for the HMRI Postdoctoral Fellowship Program must have completed a PhD, an MD, or an MD, PhD program and have proof of completion and degree by June 30, 2019.

@science_jobs

#sciencejobs

46 | New Scientist | 9 November 2019

At the time of acceptance into the fellowship program, the applicant may have no more than five (5) years of research training or experience since obtaining a post-baccalaureate doctoral-level degree.

Applications are accepted on a rolling basis. Find out more at https://jobs. newscientist.com/job/1401678395/hmri-postdoctoral-fellowship-program-/

newscientistjobs.com

Department of Biological Science Assistant Professor, 9 Month Salaried (Cell Biology) The Department of Biological Science at Florida State University invites outstanding applications for a tenure-track ASSISTANT PROFESSOR in the EURDGO\ GHÂżQHG DUHD RI Cellular Biology. The Department is interested in individuals using any experimental system, from cultured cells to organismal, to understand fundamental cellular processes using approaches including but not limited to correlative light and electron microscopy, highresolution light microscopy, live cell imaging, or genomics. Successful candidates are expected to establish an innovative, extramurally-funded research program and contribute to undergraduate and graduate education.

Successful candidates for an Assistant Professor rank will possess at a minimum a doctoral GHJUHH IURP DQ DFFUHGLWHG LQVWLWXWLRQ RU WKH KLJKHVW GHJUHH DSSURSULDWH LQ WKH ÂżHOG RI specialization with a demonstrated record of achievement in teaching, academic research, and service, and must meet university criteria for appointment to the rank of Assistant Professor.

3RVWGRFWRUDO WUDLQLQJ LQ WKH ¿HOG RI VSHFLDOL]DWLRQ LV SUHIHUUHG The Department of Biological Science is a diverse and interactive group with 46 tenure-track faculty members in Cell and Molecular Biology, Neuroscience, and Ecology and Evolution JUDGXDWH SURJUDPV 2XU GHSDUWPHQW LQFOXGHV VFLHQWL¿F OHDGHUV LQ F\WRVNHOHWDO PRWLOLW\ structural biology, epigenetics, chromosome biology, plant biology, virology, and chemical senses. Researchers have access to excellent core resources, including a state-of-the-art LPDJLQJ IDFLOLW\ HTXLSSHG ZLWK D 7LWDQ .ULRV HOHFWURQ PLFURVFRSH FRQIRFDOV IRU ¿[HG RU OLYH FHOO LPDJLQJ DQG VXSHU UHVROXWLRQ ' 6,0 ÀRZ F\WRPHWU\ DQG PDVV VSHFWURPHWU\ IDFLOLWLHV a modern BSL3 facility; and the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory. For information about Florida State University’s Department of Biological Science, visit our website at http://www.bio.fsu.edu.

Questions about the position should be directed to Prof. Hank W. Bass: cell.search@bio.fsu.edu See details at:

https://jobs.newscientist.com/en-au/job/1401680298/assistant-professor9-month-salaried-biological-science-/ $Q (TXDO 2SSRUWXQLW\ $FFHVV $IÂżUPDWLYH $FWLRQ 3UR 'LVDEOHG 9HWHUDQ (PSOR\HU

Professor of Chemistry The Department of Chemistry in the College of Letters and Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison seeks outstanding applicants with research interests in all areas of chemistry for faculty positions at the tenured and tenure-track levels. Faculty positions require a commitment to excellence in scholarly research, teaching, and service.

The department is strongly committed to diversity among faculty.

Women and candidates from groups traditionally underrepresented in the field of chemistry are strongly encouraged to apply.

Senior-level theoretical chemists, including those specializing in materials science and biophysics, are especially encouraged to apply and will be considered for the Joseph O. Hirschfelder professorship in theoretical chemistry. This position will begin August 2020 or later. Candidates for the Joseph O. Hirschfelder professorship in theoretical chemistry must have extensive experience, a track record of innovation, world-class research accomplishments, and teaching credentials which meet the requirements for full or associate professor with tenure as determined by the Physical Sciences Divisional Committee.

Assistant Professor - Mathematics or Science

A successful candidate will be expected to develop an internationally recognized scholarly research program in their area of specialization, to teach chemistry courses at the undergraduate and graduate level, to mentor graduate and undergraduate students, and to perform professional and university service as appropriate.

Applications are invited for a tenure-track faculty position at the rank of Assistant Professor, and in special cases Associate or Full Professor, at the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) and any department in the Faculties of Mathematics or Science. IQC is a collaborative research institute focused on quantum information science and technology, ranging from the theory of quantum information to practical applications.

Membership in IQC is renewable, with an initial appointment of 5 years, and comes with research space, a teaching reduction of one course, and a stipend. Information about research at IQC can be found at http://uwaterloo.ca/iqc/research and https://tqt.uwaterloo.ca/.

A Ph.D. in Chemistry or related field is required. Candidates for the Assistant Professor title must have demonstrated potential for internationally recognized research in their field of specialization.

Tenured candidates must have demonstrated excellence in scholarly research, teaching, and service which meet the requirements for full or associate professor with tenure as determined by the Physical Sciences Divisional Committee.

As an employer committed to employment equity and accessibility for persons with disabilities, we encourage applications from members of equity-seeking communities including women, racialized and Indigenous persons, persons with disabilities, and persons of all sexual orientations and gender identities/expressions.

The University of Waterloo is host to the Institute for Quantum Computing.

At present, IQC has a complement of 32 faculty members from the Faculties of Engineering, Mathematics and Science. Interested individuals should upload their application via the faculty application form at: https://uwaterloo.ca/institute-for-quantum-computing/positions.

Full consideration for these positions is assured only for applications received by December 1, 2019. $OO TXDOLÓžHG FDQGLGDWHV DUH HQFRXUDJHG WR DSSO\ KRZHYHU &DQDGLDQV DQG permanent residents will be given priority.

Full description at https://jobs.newscientist.com/en-gb/ job/1401680540/assistant-professor-mathematics-or-science-institute-for-quantum-computing/

newscientistjobs.com

Apply online at https://academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/15083 Application materials including cover letter, current CV, teaching statement, research experience summary, and a concise description of research plans will be required for all applicants.

Applicants will also be asked to provide the names and contact information for three professional references. To guarantee full consideration, applications must be received by November 17, 2019. However, applications will be accepted until all positions are filled.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison is an equal opportunity affirmative action employer. Women and minority candidates are especially encouraged to apply. Unless confidentiality is requested in writing, information regarding the identity of the applicant must be released on request. Finalists cannot be guaranteed confidentiality. A criminal background check will be required prior to employment.

9 November 2019 | New Scientist | 47

The Department of Land Resources and Environmental Sciences at Montana State University, Bozeman (http://landresources.montana.edu) are seeking applicants for tenure track faculty positions: Tenure Track Faculty, Environmental Systems Science Screening will begin 9 December 2019 Job ID: 1401680241 Assistant Professor of Remote Sensing Screening will begin 15 December 2019 Job ID: 1401677925 Assistant/Associate Professor of Watershed Analysis Screening will begin 20 December 2019 Job ID: 1401678440 Applications will be accepted until an adequate applicant pool has been established.

Find complete descriptions and applications instructions: https://jobs.newscientist.com/ minisites/montana-stateuniversity/ Montana State University values diverse perspectives and is committed to continually supporting, promoting, and building an inclusive and culturally diverse campus environment.

48 | New Scientist | 9 November 2019

POSTDOCTORAL POSITION Vascular smooth muscle and endothelial cell ion channels Postdoctoral position immediately available to study physiological functions and pathological alterations in arterial smooth muscle and endothelial cell ion channels.

Projects include studying blood pressure regulation by ion channels and regulation RI WUDI¿FNLQJ VLJQDOLQJ DQG IXQFWLRQV RI 753 %.&D .Y DQG YROWDJH GHSHQGHQW &D FKDQQHOV VLPLODU WR VWXGLHV ZH KDYH UHFHQWO\ SXEOLVKHG /HR HW DO 31$6 .LGG HW DO 6FLHQFH 6LJQDOLQJ /HR HW DO 6FLHQFH 6LJQDOLQJ %XOOH\ HW DO H/LIH

7HFKQLTXHV LQ WKH ODERUDWRU\ LQFOXGH 57 3&5 :HVWHUQ EORWWLQJ ELRWLQ\ODWLRQ LPPXQRÀXRUHVFHQFH )5(7 SDWFK FODPS HOHFWURSK\VLRORJ\ FDOFLXP LPDJLQJ SUHVVXUL]HG DUWHU\ P\RJUDSK\ EORRG SUHVVXUH WHOHPHWU\ DQG FRQGLWLRQDO NQRFNRXW PRXVH PRGHOV ([SHULHQFH ZLWK PROHFXODU ELRORJ\ LRQ FKDQQHO ELRFKHPLVWU\ SDWFK FODPS HOHFWURSK\VLRORJ\ DQG FDUGLRYDVFXODU physiology preferred.

5HTXLUHG TXDOL¿FDWLRQV LQFOXGH D 3K' RU 0' LQ 3K\VLRORJ\ RU D UHODWHG ¿HOG 6HQG curriculum vitae and names and addresses RI WKUHH UHIHUHQFHV WR 'U -RQDWKDQ + -DJJDU 0DXU\ %URQVWHLQ (QGRZHG 3URIHVVRU RI 3K\VLRORJ\ 'HSDUWPHQW RI 3K\VLRORJ\ 8QLYHUVLW\ RI 7HQQHVVHH +HDOWK 6FLHQFH &HQWHU 8QLRQ $YHQXH 0HPSKLV 71 86$ jjaggar@uthsc.edu.

https://www.uthsc.edu/ physiology/faculty/jjaggar.php 87+6& LV DQ (TXDO (PSOR\PHQW $I¿UPDWLYH $FWLRQ 7LWOH 9, ,; 6HFWLRQ $'$ $'($ (PSOR\HU

newscientistjobs.com

Join us in Anaheim this November!

2019 ANAHEIM, CALIFORNIA NOVEMBER 13-16, 2019

Recipient of the 2019 AIMBE Excellence in STEM Education Award The Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minority Students (ABRCMS) is a must-attend event bringing together one of the largest communities of underrepresented minorities in STEM fields.

This award-winning conference gathers dynamic undergraduate students, and the research faculty and program directors who mentor them, for four-days of learning, sharing, and networking. From poster presentations to scientific and professional development sessions and exhibitor showcases, ABRCMS is a robust event guaranteed to leave you feeling inspired.

Mark your calendar and plan to join us November 13-16, 2019, in Anaheim, CA! www.abrcms.org/register Managed by:

Funded by:

The back pages Puzzles Cryptic crossword, a wood cutting riddle, and the quiz p52

Feedback How to read 20,000 words a minute: the week in weird p53

Twisteddoodles for New Scientist A cartoonist’s take on the world p53

Almost the last word Why science holds some of us spellbound p54

The Q&A Neuroscientist Henning Beck on breaking rules p56

Stargazing at home 2 Week 1

Watch the transit of Mercury

Abigail Beall is a science writer in Leeds, UK. This series is based on her book The Art of Urban Astronomy @abbybeall

What you need Binoculars Tripod Cardboard Paper

For next week Warm clothes

Next in the series: 1 Mercury transits the sun 2 How to watch the Leonid meteor shower See Earth plough through cometary debris 3 Venus and Jupiter in conjunction 4 Mercury at its greatest elongation 5 How to see the Northern Lights 6 Find the Andromeda galaxy 7 How to see Santa (the ISS) on Christmas Eve

JUST last week we learned how to identify the constellation of Taurus, which starts to pop up in November and can be viewed in the night sky from pretty much anywhere until around March.

This week, we are learning about something much more fleeting: the transit of Mercury across the face of the sun.

On 11 November, Mercury, the rocky, crater-covered world that is the closest planet to the sun, will pass in front of our star as viewed from Earth. This will be visible from much of Europe, Africa, New Zealand, west Asia and America.

You might think all the planets orbit the sun in the same plane, but that isn’t the case. Mercury’s orbit, which takes 88 Earth days, is about 7 degrees off from ours, which is why transits like this are relatively rare: they only occur about 13 times a century.

In total, the transit will take about 6.5 hours. It will start at 12:34 GMT. Of course, the time of day and weather in your area will determine whether the sun is even visible. If it isn’t, there will be plenty of opportunities to watch the event live on webcams or see professional images of it. For the most recent transit, in 2016, NASA created an iconic composite photo showing Mercury’s movement as a dotted line across the sun’s surface (pictured). It also recorded a high-definition video.

It should go without saying, but never look directly at the sun. This is particularly true if you are using a telescope or binoculars because even a glimpse of the sun through

NASA'S GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER/SDO/GENNA

The closest planet to the sun is about to make a spectacular pass in front of our star. Abigail Beall explains how to view it safely

Stargazing at home online Projects will be posted online each week at newscientist.com/maker Email: maker@newscientist.com

these can blind you. Using a telescope equipped with a special filter is a great way to see a transit like this, but most people don’t have access to their own telescope.

In any case, there is a safe way to watch the transit using binoculars, if you have bright sunshine on the day. Mercury is 4900 kilometres across – tiny compared with the sun – so you will need to mount your binoculars on a tripod to keep them still enough to make out the diminutive planet.

A simple set-up will enable you to view the motion of Mercury without damaging your eyes. Take a piece of cardboard and cut two holes in it just big enough to fit

over the binocular eyepieces. Hold the cardboard over the binoculars and point them towards the sun.

Then, stick white paper onto another piece of card and hold this up behind your binoculars so the light from the eyepieces is shining onto the paper. It is that simple.

The cardboard with holes for the eyepieces stops light that isn’t from the binoculars from hitting the paper and drowning out the image of the transit. You can cover one of the lenses if you only want to see one image, otherwise you will have two that are identical.

Next week, you may need to grab your coat – we will be outside watching a meteor shower. ❚ 9 November 2019 | New Scientist | 51

The back pages Puzzles Quick quiz #28

Cryptic crossword #18 Set by Wingding

2 The individual antennas of the Square Kilometre Array, planned to be the world’s largest radio telescope, will be built in Australia and South Africa. Where is the project’s headquarters?

ACROSS 1 Satellite destroyed – it’s punk! (7) 5 Insignificant quantities of iodine, oxygen, tantalum and sulphur (5) 8 Almost moon-shaped function with rising amplitude (9) 9 Some whale intestine worn around the neck (3) 10 Small, competent marten (5) 12 Crush odd Tory politician covered in beer (7) 13 Organic compounds derived from virus or sick barons DOWN 1 Dismisses neuroscience writer (5) 2 Consume American energy (3) 3 Reported novel and obvious type of power (7) 4 Inner city geek, when moving, has this? (7,6) 5 Italian swamp with a psychedelic plant (5) 6 Type of lens provided by Dorothy’s companion hugging large animal – not ant (9)

around freezing temperature (13) 15 Smear picture, a point of no return? (7) 17 Speaker’s to bring legal action against Native Americans (5) 19 Fish in French station, we hear (3) 20 Planet high in alien lifeforms, originally, like a kangaroo (9) 22 Grass-like plant found on southern border (5) 23 A dry ram somehow makes a reference for solar observations? (7) 7 Wife puts on jeans back to front, then slowly at first, turns around (7) 11 Cried like a seal? (9) 13 Seeks food, taking a long time (7) 14 Regret swallowing key with Russian saviour (7) 16 Crow met her regularly for cheese (5) 18 Plant tissue can be extracted from sexy lemmings (5) 21 Pascal holding up one drink (3)

Answers and the next quick crossword next week.

52 | New Scientist | 9 November 2019

1 Which chemical element is “missing� from the universe, with far less of it apparently about than the big bang theory says there should be?

#29 How many strips?

How many 3x1 strips, like the example pictured, can be cut out of this piece of wood?

EXAMPLE

3 In terms of cross-section, Hang SŃŤn Ä?oòng near Vietnam’s border with Laos is the world’s largest what?

4 What are the longest and shortest bones in the human body?

Answer next week

5 Agreeableness, openness to experience, extroversion, conscientiousness and what other factor make up psychologists’ Big Five personality traits?

#28 A well-timed nap Solution

Answers below

Quick Crossword #44 Answers ACROSS 1Â Littoral, 5Â Uremia, 10Â Holes, 11Â Subscript, 12Â Esperanto, 13Â EPROM, 14Â Mosaic, 15Â Gas main, 18Â Eyelids, 20Â Acinus, 22Â Eosin, 24Â Brown Kiwi, 25Â Imaginary, 26Â Imide, 27Â Medusa, 28Â Beat-em-up DOWN 1Â Lehrer, 2Â Telephone, 3Â Observation bias, 4Â Arsenic, 6Â Rocket scientist, 7 Meier, 8Â Antimony, 9 Oblong, 16Â Aluminium, 17 Selenium, 19Â Subway, 20 Anodyne, 21Â Bilerp, 23Â Shard

Quick quiz #28 Answers 1 Lithium 2 Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire, UK 3 Cave. It is some 200 metres high and 150 metres wide 4 The femur (thigh bone) and the stapes (stirrup) in the middle ear 5 Neuroticism

Puzzle set by David Bodycombe

One hour is 60 minutes for the minute hand, and 1 hour is one-twelfth of a circle (i.e. 30°) for the hour hand. In other words, if the time is “mâ€? minutes past the hour, then the hour hand has travelled through ½m degrees past the hour.

Suppose that when I go to sleep, the angle between the minute and hour hand = m. If the minute hand is ahead of the hour hand, this means (30 – ½m) = m. This is only true for m = 20, meaning the time is 3.20 pm. It is also possible that the minute hand is more than one hour segment ahead of the hour, i.e. 30 + (30 – ½m) = m, meaning m = 40, and the time is 6.40 pm.

If the minute hand were even further ahead, m = 60 + (30 – ½m) means m = 60, but we call “60 minutes past 9â€? 10 o’clock. And if the minute hand isn’t ahead of the hour hand, then m = ½m (midnight or midday, but neither can apply here) or m = (30 + ½m) and all solutions are m = >60 again.

So I fell asleep at 3.20 pm and woke at 6.40Â pm, having slept for 3 hours and 20Â minutes.

Get in touch Email us at crossword@newscientist.com puzzles@newscientist.com

The back pages Feedback Quick lit

Nom det corner

Exciting news for those struggling to catch up on back issues of New Scientist: colleges in China are offering courses in speed-reading, promising students the ability to zip through texts at 20,000 words a minute.

We got wind of this story (a t a m u c h s l o w e r p a c e) via China Daily, which published a viral video showing students flipping through whole books in seconds. The bookworms, filmed at a reading competition in Yancheng, Jiangsu, are said to be practising “quantum speed-reading”, a technique pioneered by Japanese educator Yumiko Tobitani.

According to a website run by Ruwan Education – a New Zealand outfit that offers courses in quantum speed-reading – the technique “does not require the book to be opened at all”, noting that it can be “simply held up in front of the reader’s face and the pages are flipped rapidly using the thumb”.

Even better than that, quantum speed-readers can read books while blindfolded, and practitioners can understand books written in any language. Well, if you can’t see the words, why would it matter that you don’t know what they say?

Quantum speed-reading also promises to improve your memory and intuition, shorten sleep duration, heal skin blemishes, improve your golf score, make you win the lottery more often, find lost cats, summon people by thinking of them, grant you precognitive powers such as telepathy and clairvoyance, and unlock psychokinetic abilities.

Yes, those are all genuine benefits listed by Ruwan Education.

Speed isn’t everything, of course: comprehension also has its upsides. Feedback has now spent what feels like hours reading about quantum speed-reading, and we are none the wiser on how this technique is supposed to work. On the plus side, we have found an awful lot of lost cats.

We promised we’d give it up, but just can’t help ourselves. Anne Barnfield writes to say that as a specialist in equine facilitated therapy, her name is rather apt.

And Jim Ainsworth spots Mark Bridge writing in The Times about a bridge design by Leonardo da Vinci. Regular reader Ben Haller is right to point out that Feedback is stuck in a positive feedback loop, and every example of nominative determinism further fuels the fire of addiction. This is unsurprising, given that it is itself an example of nominative determinism.

Twisteddoodles for New Scientist

No-air mail Robin Adams notes that those writing letters to the Newbury Weekly News must supply “a terrestrial address”. “Does this discriminate unfairly against aliens?” he asks. Feedback is more concerned for the publication’s financial health. In these trying times for print media, overseas readership is not to be sniffed at.

Fantasy food More on the food labels that under-promise and over-deliver: the “cheese and onion flavour potato snacks” consumed with relish by Maggie Delaney are “made with real ingredients”.

“Personally, I’d be much more inclined to buy the product if it contained unreal ingredients: fairy dust perhaps or one of Santa’s helpers or a leprechaun,” which would be much more interesting than boring old crisps, says Maggie.

Which makes us ask: how do you know there aren’t unreal ingredients in your food? You can’t prove a negative. Checkmate, science.

Lamb & Mint Sausages”, which are manufactured by “The English Sausages Ltd” of Auckland, using New Zealand lamb. A blow to anyone hoping the UK will be an export powerhouse following Brexit: it seems the world already makes its own British goods.

Dirty business In New Delhi, the Khadi and Village Industries Commission has launched a campaign to promote traditional handicrafts, such as bottles made from bamboo and soap made from cow dung. Since the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in 2014, the cow – a sacred animal in Hinduism – has enjoyed a resurgence in popularity, and the market for beneficial bovine byproducts is stacking up.

Readers may recall that the Indian ministry for traditional

medicines, AYUSH, previously announced plans to raise a generation of super-children by feeding women pastilles made from cow dung (28 September).

Good nationalists, meanwhile, are brushing their teeth with cow urine toothpaste and washing their bodies with cow-dung soap.

A handwash that contains the very thing you wash your hands of does sound like a cunning plan for a self-perpetuating business.

But in reality, cow-dung soap contains only ash made from dried and heated cowpats.

This ingredient is said to be an excellent exfoliant with healing powers that are as extensive as they are unproven.

Feedback has issued an office-wide email: if any of our holidaying colleagues want to bring back a traditional souvenir from India, we would love a bottle made from bamboo. ❚

Brits abroad Robert Bevan Smith finds himself unable to resist an offering in a supermarket in Wellington, New Zealand: “Traditional Welsh

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 9 November 2019 | New Scientist | 53

The back pages Almost the last word

Are some flames hotter than others, and if so, what gives them a higher temperature?

Different minds Why do some people become interested in science and some don’t?

54 | New Scientist | 9 November 2019

GETTY IMAGES

Steve Gisselbrecht Boston, Massachusetts, US People are incredibly complicated and a lot of factors affect what we like. In this case, one person might have had more inspiring science teachers early on in life. Or perhaps they saw more scienceoriented TV shows growing up, or had a book read to them with a scientific fact that answered a question they had just been wondering about. Since our brains grow and change in response to our thoughts, this kind of accident can contribute a lot to how we think in the future.

But people are also just different. Scientists who study personality have mostly settled on five major traits, or axes, that people differ along. They have been given different names, but we can call them curiosity, friendliness, conscientiousness, outgoingness and nervousness.

There is evidence that these traits are fairly heritable, meaning that outgoing parents tend to have outgoing children more often than introverted parents do, and so on.

These traits could affect a person’s reaction to science – a more conscientious person might work harder to get answers, say, while a more nervous person could be unhappy about ideas that aren’t really settled – but curiosity seems like the strongest driver of a scientific mindset.

Curious people tend to seek out new things and more cautious people prefer the tried and true. I suspect that both exist as a result of natural selection. A group in which no one is willing to try new things will fail when conditions change or familiar foodstuffs become unavailable. But on the other hand, a group in which no one values familiarity and tradition will lose the knowledge of what is edible and what is

energy state. However, the amount of energy needed to compress the spring is quite small, so the difference in temperature would be hard to detect.

This week’s new questions Burning hot Are all flames the same temperature? If not, what causes them to have different temperatures?

Stefan Badham, Portsmouth, Hampshire, UK Number games My bank has given me a new PIN, advising me that I can change the number for one that is “more memorable”. Anything I chose, say based on my birthday, would surely be easier for a fraudster to discover.

So should I keep the randomly generated PIN I was issued?

Martin Frearson, St Albans, Hertfordshire, UK

useful, and waste a lot of time and energy reinventing the wheel.

Marilyn Lott Front Royal, Virginia, US Sixty-five years ago, girls were told, “don’t take these subjects: mechanical drawing, motor mechanics, advanced mathematics”. That rubric became far less common by the 1970s.

Terry McDonald (graduate of Mirboo North high school, Australia, 50 years ago) Maidstone, Kent, UK A high level of curiosity about the world around them.

It is also worth pointing out that science encompasses a vast array of subjects. A person who is interested in analysing fossils might be as different from someone who models fluid dynamics in pipes as they are from someone who studies languages – Ed

Coil conversion If I compress a metal spring, tie it with an acid-proof binding then submerge it in acid and dissolve the spring, what happens to the energy that was used to compress it? I think the acid must warm up, but how is the stored energy converted to heat?

Eric Kvaalen Les Essarts-le-Roi, France The acid solution will warm up even if the spring isn’t compressed, due to the heat of reaction as the acid dissolves the metal. If the spring is compressed, it will warm up slightly more. As each atom or ion is released from the crystals of metal, it will leave with a slightly higher energy because it is being released from a slightly higher

Ron Dippold San Diego, California, US When you compress a spring, the potential energy is stored in the mechanical bonds between atoms, which you can think of as little springs. The spring as a whole can’t decompress – until it breaks – but little chunks can decompress as they come off.

Most of the stored energy goes into decompressing each small part. It isn’t 100 per cent efficient, so the fragments heat up a tiny bit from friction. The bits also stir the acid slightly as they come off.

This is where the spring energy goes. But stirring is a terrible way to heat a liquid – try stirring a cup of water with a spoon.

The heat from the chemical reaction between the metal and the acid will be much greater than that released by the spring’s decompression, but it will still be a very small amount.

David Muir Edinburgh, UK The reaction between a metal and an acid is exothermic, releasing energy to the solution and raising its temperature. A steel spring weighing 5.6 grams gives out around 8800 joules of energy when dissolved in acid.

If the spring is compressed 10 centimetres with a force of 10 newtons, then the spring is stressed by 1 joule of energy.

This increases the solution’s temperature by 1/8800 more than an unstressed spring, a piffling 0.01 per cent. ❚

Want to send us a question or answer?

Email us at lastword@newscientist.com Questions should be about everyday science phenomena Full terms and conditions at newscientist.com/lw-terms

The back pages Q&A

We should embrace our mistakes, says neuroscientist and author Henning Beck.

Without them, we would never achieve anything worthwhile As a child, what did you want to do when you grew up?

I wrote a science “book” about the human body when I was 8 years old. I think I always wanted to explain things.

In your latest book, you say that making mistakes is good. Why? Consider the alternative: if we never made any mistakes and followed the rules perfectly, we would never visit anywhere new. Breaking rules and making mistakes push the boundary of human knowledge.

How did you end up in neuroscience?

If you could send a message back to yourself as a kid, what would you say?

Dude, the most valuable thing you have is your brain. Wear a helmet!

What scientific development do you hope to see in your lifetime?

The first aircraft tried to mimic a bird’s wings.

Of course, that didn’t work out. Artificial intelligence is in the same position. Copying the brain is a dead end: we need to find the principles that make it work and replicate them.

What’s the best thing you’ve read or seen in the past 12 months?

The brain is the last and greatest mystery in science. No other thing has been studied so deeply and is so poorly understood. When you look at a brain from the outside, you just see a wet mass full of densely packed nerve cells. How can this be the origin of game-changing ideas, great symphonies, language, love and art? We have no idea. Is there a greater enigma on Earth?

I recently played with my 2-year-old neighbour, who learned the name of a particular spider at first sight. That’s when I realised that human thinking is fundamentally different to any kind of computer.

How has your field of study changed in the time you have been working in it?

I throw boomerangs because I love the idea that the things you throw away will eventually come back to help you – if you do it cleverly.

When I started, neuroscience was dominated by biochemistry and molecular biology. But it turns out that biology alone cannot explain how the brain works. We need support from mathematics and information science to understand how the brain actually creates thoughts and organises information. We know that there are mathematical principles and rules that guide its processing, but we have no clue what they are.

What’s the best piece of advice anyone ever gave you?

When I was 17, my teacher said: “It’s the mistakes we make that distinguish us from unimaginative computers.” Since then, I’ve remembered that learning from failures is more important than avoiding them. Done is better than perfect.

If you could have a conversation with any scientist, living or dead, who would it be?

Probably Richard Feynman, about encouraging people to think scientifically. In our times, it is more necessary than ever to think critically and challenge our opinions.

56 | New Scientist | 9 November 2019

Do you have an unexpected hobby, and if so, please will you tell us about it?

How useful will your skills be after the apocalypse?

When something bad happens, people always look for somebody to explain how or why, so that they can understand it and ensure it doesn’t happen again. Of course, explaining that before it happens would be the better approach.

OK, one last thing: tell us something that will blow our minds…

In a thousand years, no one will remember anything about life today because our electronic storage devices are non-durable. We’re a lost generation. People will look back to the present-day dark ages and wonder what we fools were up to. ❚

Henning Beck’s book Scatterbrain: How the mind’s mistakes make humans creative, innovative, and successful is out now (Greystone Books) TATIANA KOROLEVA/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

“The most important message I’d send to my past self? ‘Dude, your brain is valuable.

Wear a helmet!’ ”

SOUVENIR ISSUE

MOON LANDING 5OTH ANNIVERSARY 1969-2O19

THE QUEST FOR SPACE

Don’t miss a special souvenir issue from New Scientist celebrating the 50th anniversary of the moon landings. Explore the past, present and future of space exploration with over 100 pages of in-depth articles on the wonders of the solar system, plus 20 pages of newly resurfaced historical content from New Scientist’s archive detailing the original space race as it happened

Available from all good magazine retailers, digitally in the New Scientist app or direct from

newscientist.com/thecollection