GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN
Are early childhood memories still stored in our brains?
repeat after me
The mysterious 14-year cycle in the words we use
parkinson’s shock
Disease starts in the gut and spreads to the brain
WEEKLY 3 December 2016
half full or half empty? The truth about alcohol and your health
changing minds How to defeat delusion when facts lose their power
No3102I SÂŁ3.95 S N 0US/CAN$5.95 262-4079
4 8
9 770262 407268
eat green If you love the planet, ditch organic food
Contents
Volume 232 No 3102
This issue online newscientist.com/issue/3102
Leader
News
5
8
News
Looking in the wrong place
6 UPFRONT Polar fish in Mediterranean. Spacesuits deal with human waste. Spanish embryo surplus. New Zealand wipes out butterfly pest 8 THIS WEEK Language runs in 14-year cycles. Moon was born wet. Early memories may linger. Genetic rewrite to treat cystic fibrosis. India’s new river to be twice the size of Nile 15 IN BRIEF Africa’s tallest tree. Never go to sleep angry. World’s strongest crab. Spider single dads fix up nursery. Molasses Flood physics
MICROSCAPE/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
Parkinson’s disease may start in the gut and travel to the brain
On the cover
28
10 Gone, not forgotten Early memories stored 9 Repeat after me 14-year word cycle 8 Parkinson’s shock Disease starts in the gut 33 Half full or half empty? Alcohol and your health 21 Eat green If you love the planet, ditch organic food
Changing minds How to defeat delusion when facts lose their power
Analysis 18 High seas fishing The plan to ban catching fish in more than half the world’s oceans 20 comment An internet for all will liberate and disrupt. Bring solar engineering out of the shadows 21 insight Ditch organic food to help save the planet
Technology 22 AI envisions the future. Computer plays wingman. Augmented reality crime scenes. Navigating a maze with brain stimulation
Cover image Alex Williamson
Aperture
Features
26 Fangtooth fish ready for its close-up
33
Features 28 Changing minds (see above left) 33 Half full or half empty? (see left) 40 This toy will self-destruct Hard plastics that disappear on demand 42 PEOPLE Zhang Heng and the first seismoscope
Half full or half empty?
Culture
Nick Purser/Getty
Special report: The truth about alcohol and your health
The campaign against alcohol abuse deserves two cheers
44 The reality question How much of physics is real, and how much of reality is physics? 46 Earwigs, rotten panther Frank Buckland’s diet tells us all about this Victorian naturalist
Coming next week… Ten traits that make you
The best and the worst of being human
Toxic legacy
Regulars 52 letters Origins of ancient hallucinations 55 Signal boost Help for good causes 56 Feedback Supermoon’s effect on wine 57 The Last Word Power ballads
Inside Russia’s forgotten nuclear zone
3 December 2016 | NewScientist | 3
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Sobering thoughts The campaign against alcohol abuse deserves two cheers “WHEN I read about the dangers when they target something as of drinking, I gave up reading.” widely enjoyed and culturally That old joke – usually attributed entrenched as alcohol, they to British-born comedian Henry expect strong push-back. Youngman – neatly sums up Lobbying from corporate interests many of his compatriot’s only adds to the pressure. attitudes to the risks of alcohol. Alcohol-awareness campaigners Or at least it did. have suffered their fair share of After years of public health brickbats. But their patient and messaging and a tightening of largely consistent messaging the advice on safe limits, the UK seems to be getting through. public finally seems to be reading This is even more remarkable the warning signs. Over the past given that the alcohol industry decade, alcohol consumption has has stubbornly resisted legislation been falling, especially among “ We need to understand younger people (see page 38). A similar downward trend has been what parts of the public health campaign are seen in other Western countries. working, and why” Knowing what we know about alcohol’s health and social aimed at reducing consumption. impacts, this is a welcome It has, for example, fought a development. It is also a series of legal battles against remarkable one, given how Scotland’s minimum unit pricing entrenched drinking culture legislation – a measure proven appeared to be. Social and to cut alcohol abuse – which have economic changes have played a delayed implementation and part, but some of the credit must may yet stop it altogether. be handed to the public health Efforts to reduce harmful bodies who have fought this most drinking have been modelled unfashionable of causes. on the campaign against tobacco. Six years ago, the World The success of both suggests Health Organization launched a public health campaigners have worldwide campaign against hit on a formula for tackling alcohol abuse. At the time, the diseases that result from lifestyle WHO appeared to be picking a fight it was unlikely to win. Public choices and increasingly guzzle healthcare resources in developed health campaigns are easy to countries. We now need to dismiss as killjoy nanny-statism;
understand which parts of the campaign work best, and why. The early evidence suggests that people pay less attention to safety limits than they do to pricing. Whatever is behind the success may also be of interest to those who study the growing problem of post-truth politics, where facts and evidence have lost their value (see page 28). It seems that public health campaigners can marshal science and evidence to change beliefs and behaviour, often in the face of personal denial and corporate obstruction. What are they doing right that other public bodies are doing wrong? It is also important to understand the limitations of such campaigns and avoid the temptation to overreach. Around one in five adults in the UK still smokes – often huddled in doorways, cast out as social pariahs. That, surely, isn’t a desirable end point for the alcohol campaign, especially given that light drinking may sometimes be beneficial (see page 33). Like tobacco, drinking won’t go away entirely. Unlike tobacco, we shouldn’t necessarily wish it to. Moderation must be the name of the game, or else well-meaning but overzealous messages risk making people give up reading all over again. n 3 December 2016 | NewScientist | 5
EUROFUSION
UPFRONT
Brexit’s nuclear fallout BREXIT puts the future of the world’s
of current nuclear power stations
largest nuclear fusion reactor, based in Oxfordshire, in doubt. By leaving the European Union the UK might also exit Euratom, the EU’s framework for safe nuclear energy. The UK government has yet to say what its plans are for cooperating with Euratom, but part of the Brexit negotiations will have to include the nuclear fusion experiment JET. Decommissioning JET is expected to leave around 3000 cubic metres of radioactive waste, which would cost
and it should produce a smaller amount of waste. But making it work effectively has proved difficult as reactors need huge amounts of energy to get going and only remain stable for short periods. Recently, JET has been running experiments to help with building ITER, a larger, more powerful reactor in France. The plan was for JET to keep running after its scheduled finish date in 2018. Whether that happens will depend on Brexit negotiations.
around £289 million to deal with, according to the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA). JET’s aim is to commercialise nuclear fusion, which releases energy by forcing atoms together. The energy output should be far greater than that
“It would be bizarre and extreme for the UK, which has been at the forefront of fusion research for 50 years, to just leave these projects,” says Ian Chapman, CEO of the UKAEA. “It would make no sense strategically.”
What is Uber?
much stricter regulation. The case was referred to the ECJ by a Barcelona judge after a 2014 ruling pushed Uber to suspend services in Spain after complaints that its operations amounted to unfair competition. Taxi firms across Europe have argued that Uber has an advantage if it is not subject to the same laws as they are, with additional protests and legal battles taking place in countries including France, Germany and the UK. Uber maintains that it is simply a digital service connecting drivers and riders.
–JETxit: no future for fusion reactor?–
Embryo mountain
35. Most couples who have fertility treatment are above this age. Experts contacted by New Scientist say the embryos could be invaluable for research in other countries. “As far as research is concerned, they would be priceless,” says Yacoub Khalaf, a fertility specialist at Guy’s Hospital, London. A major hurdle is gaining permission from their owners to export the embryos – many of whom cannot be located. “It’s an interesting dilemma that requires public consultation and ethical debate,” says Khalaf.
SPAIN’s fertility clinics have an unusual problem: they have a mountain of “priceless” human embryos that they don’t know what to do with. It emerged this week that
230,000 frozen embryos left over from fertility treatments have been left in storage in Spanish clinics for more than two years – seemingly abandoned by their owners. By law, the embryos can be donated to other couples, used in research or destroyed after 10 years in storage. Clinics tend not to do the latter in case they are needed for research at a later date. However, not a single request has been made to use them for research in the last 16 years. Donation has not had much of an impact on the problem either. Embryos used this way must come from donors no older than 6 | NewScientist | 3 December 2016
OCEANA
“As far as research is concerned, they could be invaluable to other countries”
IS UBER a transport company or just an app? That’s the question facing the EU’s highest court this week in a landmark case that will inform how Uber and other digital-focused “sharing economy” firms are able to operate across Europe. The European Court of Justice (ECJ) will hear arguments over whether the ride-booking company should be treated like a normal taxi firm or a purely digital service. The distinction is important, as transport firms face
Exotic deep seas INVASIVE species and those normally found in polar regions have been spotted in the deep seas of the eastern Mediterranean. The unexpected visitors were seen by a remotely operated vehicle descending to depths of 1 kilometre in waters off Lebanon. The team, led by marine conservation agency Oceana, was left speechless by the discovery of an Atlantic Lantern Shark. –Hitched a ride though Suez canal?– Measuring 20 centimetres and
For new stories every day, visit newscientist.com/news
Space body-waste
glowing bright blue along its spine and belly, the Lantern is a shark generally associated with the chilly waters of the north Atlantic. Why it’s here, no one knows. The team also saw invasive Lion Fish and Rabbit Fish, which can be explained more easily. They may have been carried in the ballast water of ships coming through the Suez Canal, says Oceana’s Ricardo Aguilar. These species are pushing out native species and destroying the habitat by overgrazing. “Some rocks have now been stripped bare of algae,” says Aguilar.
NASA is offering $30,000 to the person with the best solution for spending a penny during a space emergency. Currently, astronauts never occupy their spacesuits for more than 10 hours at a time, during which they normally use a nappy if they are caught short. But NASA worries that if a disaster struck, such as a depressurisation, astronauts may need to spend up to six days in their suits. Instead of getting their own hands dirty, the space agency has decided to launch the Space Poop Challenge
60 SECONDS
to ask for the public’s help. Anyone can propose a solution on the crowdsourcing website HeroX. Ideas must be able to deal with 75 millilitres of faecal volume and 1 litre of urine per day per crew member, as well as up to 80 ml of menstrual blood. It must also be hands-free and collect the waste away from the body. During an emergency, astronauts can’t just tinkle out of a side-flap – space suits need to be pressurised to keep the wearers alive. Solving the Space Poop Challenge really could be a matter of life and death. The deadline for submissions is 20 December.
Mission to the moon
Bye bye butterfly
NASA
NEW ZEALAND has become the A PLANNED private mission to the moon could revisit the spot where first country ever to eliminate an astronauts last roamed its surface. invasive butterfly species. German-based PTScientists says The great white butterfly (Pieris it will land a pair of rovers, designed brassicae) is normally found in with the help of car firm Audi, near Europe, Africa and Asia. It was the Apollo 17 landing site and check discovered in New Zealand in out the lunar buggy left behind by 2010, probably after arriving on a NASA during its final mission to the boat. An elimination plan was soon launched by the government moon in 1972. “Has it been ripped to shreds by to protect agricultural crops from micrometeorids, or is it still standing being destroyed by the invaders. there like on the day they left?” P. brassicae starts out as a says Karsen Becker, the team’s caterpillar that feeds voraciously rover driver. on brassica crops such as cabbage, PTScientists is taking part in the broccoli and Brussels sprouts. It Google Lunar XPrize, a race to get the also targets New Zealand’s 79 native cress species, 57 of which first privately funded rover on the moon. There are currently 16 teams are at risk of extinction. in the running, though only some, “The caterpillars feed in groups on a wide range of host plants and will completely defoliate a plant, and can travel more than 100 metres to find another,” says Jaine Cronin at New Zealand’s Department of Conservation. Between 2010 and 2014, the department carried out 263,000 searches of 29,000 properties to wipe out the butterfly. Since the NZ$3 million campaign finished in December 2014, no great white butterflies have been seen. “We’re confident we can declare them eradicated,” says Nathan Guy, New Zealand’s –How’s it holding up?– minister for primary industries.
including PTScientists, have a contract in place to launch their rovers before the competition deadline at the end of 2017 – a date that has been pushed back numerous times from the original end of 2012. Becker says the team has booked a flight through launch broker Spaceflight Industries and hopes to share a ride on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket by late 2017, or early 2018. NASA guidelines suggest that moon missions should land at least 2 kilometres away from any Apollo heritage sites, and not approach within 200 metres. Becker says they will land at a distance of 3 to 4 km and drive to within 200 metres to study the buggy remotely.
Great Barrier grief Two-thirds of the coral in the most pristine northern parts of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef have died over the past nine months as a result of bleaching, driven by warmer waters triggered by a major El Niño. This is the worst ever die-off recorded at this World Heritage Site. Reef sections further south suffered only 1 to 6 per cent bleaching, says a survey that mapped the damage.
Cassini’s end game It’s the beginning of the end. The orbit of NASA’s spacecraft Cassini is about to be nudged even closer to Saturn ahead of its death dive into the planet next April. This week, Cassini was moved into an orbit over the planet’s poles and will graze Saturn’s outermost F ring, where it will sample ring particles and gases.
Zika outbreak Texas health officials have reported the state’s first case of Zika probably spread by native mosquitoes. The virus has been linked to severe birth defects. Florida is the only other state in the US to report cases of Zika caught locally.
Snoopers assent Controversial new surveillance powers have taken effect in the UK. The Investigatory Powers Act received royal assent on 29 November, meaning it is now officially law. For example, internet service providers will be obliged to collect records of people’s internet browsing history and store them for 12 months.
Beaverland Highlands The Scottish government has said that Eurasian beavers introduced to the country will be allowed to expand naturally, while being managed to protect farmers and land owners. The beavers will have protected status and be considered as native species. Scottish beavers were hunted to extinction in the 16th century.
3 December 2016 | NewScientist | 7
MICROSCAPE/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
This week fibres into the stomach and intestine of mice. Three weeks later the fibres could be seen at the base of the brain, and by two months they had travelled to parts of the brain that control movement. The mice also became less agile – similar to people with Parkinson’s disease. The work was reported at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego last month. This study builds on a growing body of work that the gut plays a role in Parkinson’s, says Burn. For example, people who have had the main nerve to their stomach cut – an old treatment for stomach ulcers – have a lower risk of the condition. No single bacterium or virus has been pinpointed as the cause. But early evidence suggests that people with Parkinson’s have different gut bacteria to healthy –Gut reaction– people. Some doctors are already experimenting with treating patients with antibiotics or faecal transplants. “It could be that having the wrong bacteria in your gut triggers inflammation,” says Sébastien Paillusson at King’s College London. “We know that inflammation makes synuclein The disease could start in the gut not the brain, finds Clare Wilson more likely to aggregate.” Other studies have shown that WE HAVE been thinking about fibres of a substance called in their brain. They suggested the farmers exposed to certain Parkinson’s disease all wrong. synuclein. Normally found as trigger was some unknown pesticides, and people who get The condition may arise from small soluble molecules in microbe or toxin. their drinking water from wells – damage to the gut, not the brain. healthy nerve cells, in people with The finding made sense which might be contaminated If the idea is correct, it opens Parkinson’s, something causes the because people with Parkinson’s with pesticides – are more likely the door to new ways of treating synuclein molecules to warp into often report digestive problems – to get Parkinson’s. Perhaps these the disease before symptoms a different shape, making them mainly constipation – starting up chemicals can also damage occur. “That would be gameclump together as fibres. to 10 years before they notice nerves in the gut. changing,” says David Burn at The first clue that this tremors. Interestingly, another Whatever the culprit, knowing Newcastle University, UK. transition may start outside the early symptom of Parkinson’s is the location of the first strike “There are lots of different brain came about a decade ago, loss of smell. It may be no allows for early detection – and mechanisms that could when pathologists reported coincidence, says Burn, that the treatment. For instance, drugs potentially stop the spread.” seeing the distinctive synuclein nose and gut are two organs where that mop up synuclein fibres or Parkinson’s disease involves the fibres in nerves of the gut during nerve cells are exposed to the block their formation are in the death of neurons deep within the autopsies – both in people with outside world – and to potentially works. If these are given to people brain, causing tremors, stiffness Parkinson’s and in those without problematic toxins and microbes. before the fibres reach the brain and difficulty moving. While symptoms but who had the fibres Now, the synuclein fibres have they should have a better chance there are drugs that ease these been shown travelling from the of success. It might also be “Knowing the location symptoms, they become less gut to deep within the brain. possible one day to screen for effective as the disease progresses. of the first strike allows Collin Challis at the California fibres in the nerves of the gut for early detection – One of the hallmarks of the Institute of Technology and his during colonoscopies for earlyand treatment” condition is deposits of insoluble colleagues injected synuclein stage cancers, says Burn. n
Parkinson’s: we’re looking in the wrong place
8 | NewScientist | 3 December 2016
In this section n India’s new river to be twice the size of Nile, page 12 n The plan to ban fishing in the world’s high seas, page 18 n AI envisions the future, page 22
Language trends in 14-year cycles
Moon-dust cake mix shows early moon had water WATER may have been a crucial ingredient of the primordial body that split apart 4.5 billion years ago to become Earth and the moon. The latest evidence for this, from lab simulations of how minerals formed in the early moon, may settle a long-running debate about whether the early moon and Earth contained water from the outset, or whether it
digitised books. They then ranked the nouns in order of popularity and tracked how their rankings changed from 1700 to 2008. Some cycles appear to coincide with historical events. For example, large swathes of words declined in popularity in the years around the world wars. Although the reason for this is unclear, Montemurro thinks it could be
arrived later through collisions with water-bearing comets or asteroids. Water has been detected in
the early moon. They did this both with and without water. Only when water was included in
the moon would be around 34 to 43 kilometres thick, matching the average thickness measured with
samples from the moon before, but only in young rock from the surface, which doesn’t tell us whether it was there from the beginning or not. To investigate, Wim van Westrenen at Vrije University in Amsterdam and his colleagues made 10 milligram mixtures containing all the basic lunar ingredients: silicon, oxygen and a sprinkling of magnesium, calcium, iron, titanium and aluminium. The team subjected each to temperatures and pressures that matched those on
the mix, at levels of just 0.5 to 1 per cent by weight, did the types and amounts of rock formed match those that have been observed on the moon. Most importantly, the water-based mixture generated a layer of plagioclase – the main component of the crust – that when extrapolated to
satellites. Dry mixtures led to a plagioclase layer twice as deep. This suggests that the moon’s current geology could only have evolved if water was there at the outset (Nature Geoscience, doi.org/btz8). “This has important implications both for our models of lunar origin, and for the possibility there are still water-rich reservoirs on the moon today,” says Robin Canup at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. Andy Coghlan n
KUMAR SRISKANDAN/ALAMY
THE media tends to interpret culture in annual cycles. Critics publish end-of-year best-of lists and Oxford Dictionaries just selected “post-truth” as its word of the year. But the actual words we use seem to operate on a 14-year cycle. Marcelo Montemurro at the University of Manchester, UK, and Damián Zanette at Argentina’s National Council for Scientific and Technical Research identified 5630 commonly used nouns and analysed how their popularity changed over the last three centuries. A curious pattern emerged. They found that English words rose in popularity and then fell out of favour in cycles of about 14 years, although cycles over the past century have tended to be a year or two longer. They also found evidence of 14-year cycles in French, German, Italian, Russian and Spanish. The popularity of related nouns – such as king, queen and duchess – tended to rise and fall together over time (Palgrave Communications, doi.org/btwd). To find the pattern, they wrote computer scripts to dig through Google Ngram, a database of the words used in nearly five million
related to political trends. These results support previous work suggesting that language evolves in a patterned way, similar to how genes are transmitted from parent to offspring, says Mark Pagel at the University of Reading, UK. “Language is not all over the place,” he says. “It’s remarkably consistent.” However, Pagel says the researchers still need to completely rule out these cycles being a statistical fluke. “It’s fascinating to look for
cultural factors that might affect this, but we also expect certain periodicities from random fluctuations,” he says. “Now and then, a word like ‘apple’ is going to be written more, and its popularity will go up. But then it’ll fall back to a long-term average.” However, if something does lie behind the cycle, its 14-year duration is puzzling. Some baby names have been found to move in and out of popularity over roughly the length of a human generation. But with nouns in general, Pagel doesn’t see an obvious cultural connection. “It doesn’t fit the human life history,” he says. “There’s no particular reason why it should be 14 years.” Montemurro admits that the significance of the cycle’s length remains unclear, but he believes it is due to more than chance. “It’s very difficult to imagine a random phenomenon that will give you this pattern,” he says. And he thinks that further study of the cycle could reveal insights about human behaviour and the nature of fashion and trends. “Assuming these patterns reflect some cultural dynamics, I hope this develops into better understanding of why we change the topics we discuss,” Montemurro says. “We might learn why writers get tired of the same thing and choose –Nouns will pass– something new.” Sophia Chen n
“The evidence may settle a long-running debate about whether early Earth had water from the outset”
3 December 2016 | NewScientist | 9
This week Can we tap into our earliest memories?
areas involved in memory formation interferes with storage of memories. As a result, they are lost forever. To investigate, Alessio Travaglia at New York University and his team turned to rats, in the belief that they also experience infantile amnesia. Young 17-day-old rats – equivalent to a 2-to 3-year-old child – could learn to associate one side of a box with a shock, but the memory would be gone within a day. Older rats could hold onto these memories for several days. However, the team discovered that the right reminder would prompt young rats’ lost memories to resurface. Once the pups had forgotten to associate one side of the box with a shock, Travaglia and his team gave them another shock. “Suddenly they had the memory back,” he says. This suggests that the memory is still there, just not normally accessible (Nature Neuroscience, doi.org/btwt). Travaglia thinks his findings might apply to us as well. The “off days” we experience might result from the subconscious reactivation of unpleasant memories, he suggests. Andrii Rudenko and Li-Huei Tsai at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are impressed, and say that Travaglia’s team has tackled a centuries-old question. “The study breaks new ground… it shows that very early memories in mammals are not lost but stored as latent traces that can be recalled later,” the pair write in a comment piece published alongside the study. Jessica Hamzelou n 10 | NewScientist | 3 December 2016
Guy Viner/SPL
YOU probably can’t remember life as a 2-year-old. But memory traces from our earliest years might stay in our brains, ready to be reactivated with the right trigger, according to research in rats. Most people have infantile amnesia, meaning they can’t remember the first two or three years of their life. One idea is that growth of new neurons at this time in brain
this with cells in a dish, but with further developments, it might offer an alternative to drugs and gene therapy for treating about 10 per cent of cases of cystic fibrosis. It should one day become possible to cure cystic fibrosis by fixing or replacing the mutant gene, Ahern says, but getting the long gene sequences needed for gene therapy or gene editing into lung cells is a huge challenge. Artificial tRNAs are smaller, so it might be possible to develop treatments more quickly. Once inside a cell, the artificial tRNAs compete with the proteins that normally bind to stop codons and halt protein production. This means that artificial tRNAs won’t fix every protein made by the –Mutations can cause cystic fibrosis– faulty gene, but they may be able to fix enough – for many genetic disorders, even low levels of protein can make a big difference. “I think it’s really exciting,” says Malcolm Brodlie who treats people with cystic fibrosis at the IF THE instructions for what it to work in human cells. It Great North Children’s Hospital in you’re building are wrong, what focuses on tRNAs, the molecules Newcastle, UK. But he points out can you do? That’s the problem that recognise codons, and match that while Ahern’s team got cells posed when DNA mutations the right amino acid to them. to produce proteins with the right in people with genetic disease It is possible to make artificial amino acid sequence, they have lead to the production of faulty tRNAs that recognise a premature not yet shown whether these proteins. A new technique could stop codon and, instead of proteins are fully functional. help cells get around that problem terminating the protein-making Is it safe to muck about with the and potentially treat conditions process, add the amino acid genetic code like this? One danger like cystic fibrosis. required to make a useful protein. is that the artificial tRNAs may Most of our genes are recipes In 2014, Carla Oliveira at the interfere with correct stop codons, for making proteins. Each threeUniversity of Porto in Portugal messing up other proteins. This letter DNA sequence – known as and her team restored the might happen occasionally, but a codon – specifies which amino cells do have other ways of telling “ Artificial tRNAs won’t fix acid should be added next to a when they have reached the end every protein made by the growing chain of amino acids to of the instructions. create a protein. This goes on until faulty gene, but they may Evidence from other kinds of be able to fix enough” the protein-making machinery research suggests that artificial reaches a codon that says stop. tRNAs should be safe. “The But sometimes, DNA mutations production of a healthy protein introduction of tRNAs that are create a stop codon in the wrong in cells carrying a mutation that targeted to stop codons is tolerated place, so the resulting protein is leads to hereditary stomach and in animals,” says Jason Chin of the useless. These are known as breast cancer. Now Christopher University of Cambridge. nonsense mutations, and they Ahern at the University of Iowa in Any treatment based on this cause about 10 per cent of all Iowa City and his team have used approach is still a long way off, genetic diseases. artificial tRNAs to restore some says Brodlie, not least because There might be ways to get production of the protein that is artificial tRNAs are harder to around these premature stop usually missing or broken in deliver to cells than conventional codons. One approach was first people who have cystic fibrosis drugs. The field is advancing proposed in the 1980s, but only (BioRxiv, doi.org/btv9). rapidly, though, Ahern says. Michael Le Page n now have people managed to get Like Oliveira’s team, they did
Forcing cells to ignore mutation to fight disease
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THIS WEEK
India plans to make longest ever river
team modelled the rainfall changes under climate change (PLOS One, doi.org/btwn). “So, how do you justify interlinking?” Geologists are concerned, too. Over the millennia India’s “The canal network will cut landscape has gradually evolved through a tiger reserve and with the natural flow of water. will displace hundreds of “Most rivers are fed by monsoon thousands of people” rains and have built large floodplains and deltas over the years,” says Vedharaman Bangaluru. “It carries deposits and Rajamani at the Jawaharlal sediments. Dams trap sediments Nehru University in New Delhi. that are critical to habitats “Pushing rivers around disrupts downstream.” the supply of sediments and Rajendran says that the dams nutrients downstream.” required by the scheme would He says the project could push down on Earth’s crust, adding negatively affect agriculture, extra strain and possibly increasing as farmlands have been built the risk of earthquakes in the over centuries in floodplains already quake-prone Himalayas. and near river deltas. “Rivers In addition, building dams and recharge aquifers near farmland,” vast reservoirs to control and says Rajamani. store water will displace hundreds
12 | NewScientist | 3 December 2016
STUART FREEDMAN/PANOS
T.V. Padma, in New Delhi
ENGINEERING projects don’t come any bigger than this. Work could soon begin on a massive programme to link up India’s rivers so that water can be diverted from flood-prone areas in the east and north to those vulnerable to drought in the west and centre of the country. But the scheme could be calamitous for the environment, say geologists and ecologists. The Interlinking of Rivers scheme, which government officials say is to get the green light from India’s environment ministry “imminently”, will create a water network 12,500 kilometres long – almost twice the length of the world’s longest rivers, the Nile and the Amazon. Some 14 rivers in northern India and 16 in the western, central and southern parts of the country will be linked via 30 mega-canals and 3000 dams, costing $168 billion. In the process, 35 million hectares of new arable land will be created, as well as the means to generate an extra 34,000 megawatts of hydropower. The project has the backing of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and the country’s water agency has made detailed plans for the first three links. But many researchers question the science behind the scheme. They say there isn’t a simple division between river basins that carry too little and too much water – and that climate change has triggered changes in rainfall patterns with unpredictable effects on future water flow. “What may appear as waterdeficient today may become water-surplus in the future due to climate change,” says Sachin Gunthe at the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras, whose
What’s more, a central target of the scheme – to make flooding in some parts of India a thing of the past – ignores the value of natural flooding. For example, it carries huge volumes of silt that can reduce coastal erosion. “A river is not just a natural pipe through which water flows,” says Chittenipattu Rajendran at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research,
of thousands of people in a country that has a poor record of resettling, says Sunita Narain, director of Delhi-based NGO, the Centre for Science and Environment. She has described river linking as a “grand distraction” from pressing problems such as environment degradation. Ecologists are also worried. One of the pilot projects that received government approval in September will link the rivers Ken and Betwa in central and northern India. The project looks set to destroy an estimated 4100 hectares of forest, which may include 58 square kilometres of the Panna Tiger Reserve – 10 per cent of the reserve’s area. The government remains committed to the idea. The Interlinking Rivers scheme is an attempt to boost water supply to the needy states, says Vijay Goel, junior minister for water resources. The project looks grand on paper but whether it will work and its cost to the environment remain to be seen. n
–The internet of rivers–
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in Brief Single spider dads care for young
Physics behind Boston’s deadly 1919 Molasses Flood ON 15 January 1919, a storage tank in Boston’s North End ruptured and a wave of molasses more than 7 metres
Harvard University gathered data from historical records and ran experiments on how molasses flows under various conditions, then fed it all into computer models. The culprit seems to have been gravity currents, which come into play when a dense fluid spreads horizontally into a less dense fluid (in this case, molasses into air).
high swept through the streets, flattening buildings and killing 21 people. For nearly a century, historians have wondered why a famously slow-moving fluid caused such devastation. Now, the first physics analysis of Boston’s Great Molasses Flood shows that cold temperatures and unusual currents conspired to turn the sticky goop into a speeding wave.
The density of the molasses alone would account for the speed of its initial spread. It was like being bowled over by a sticky-sweet tsunami, says Sharp. The initial onslaught left people covered in suffocating molasses as rescuers struggled to save them, waist-deep in the goo. Here the cold temperatures played a deadly role: as the molasses cooled it became even more viscous.
Nicole Sharp, an aerospace engineer who runs a Tumblr blog on fluid dynamics, and Jordan Kennedy at
Much like quicksand, the more people thrashed about, the more deeply they found themselves trapped.
Sleep makes bad memories stick DON’T go to bed angry. Now there’s evidence for this proverb: it’s harder to suppress bad memories if you sleep on them. In a study, 73 male students memorised 26 mugshots, each paired with a disturbing image, such as a mutilated body. The next day they were asked to think about the images associated with half the mugshots, and to actively suppress memories of the images
associated with the others. They were then directed to memorise another 26 pairs of mugshots and nasty images. Half an hour later they again thought about half the associated images and actively suppressed memories of the rest. Finally, they were asked to describe the image associated with each of the 52 mugshots. The idea was to see if trying to suppress a memory works
better before or after sleep. The participants struggled most to remember suppressed images for the mugshots they saw on the second day, suggesting that sleep makes it harder to erase bad memories (Nature Communications, DOI: 10.1038/ ncomms13375). This seems to support a previously explored idea of using sleep deprivation to suppress bad memories and prevent conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder.
MOST male spiders bail out after mating – but not one South American species. Male Manogea porracea not only help with childcare, they also often end up as single dads. The male builds a web above the female’s and helps to maintain a “nursery” web between the two that holds the egg sacs. He also defends the eggs from predators and removes rain from the surface of egg sacs. By the end of the mating season, 68 per cent of egg sacs are being cared for by males alone, says Rafael Rios Moura at the Federal University of Uberlândia in Brazil (Animal Behaviour, doi.org/btrg). Moura found that significantly more hatchlings emerge from egg sacs tended by males than those left alone. Males often outlive females, which may have led to them evolving to take on paternal duties – the first such known case in a solitary spider species.
Being popular is good for the health LIFE at the bottom of the social ladder can be tough. Rhesus monkeys reveal how the stress of low social status can damage the immune system. Luis Barreiro at the University of Montreal, Canada, and colleagues sorted female rhesus monkeys who had never met into groups and observed as they formed a social pecking order. Monkeys introduced to their groups earlier tended to be ranked higher than those introduced later. To find out how rank affected health, the activity of 9000 genes in the animals’ immune cells was measured (Science, doi.org/btr5). White blood cells that fight infection were more active in higher-ranking monkeys, giving them better protection. 3 December 2016 | NewScientist | 15
in Brief
A GIANT crab from the Asia-Pacific region has the most powerful claw strength of any crustacean. The coconut crab, Birgus latro, lives on islands in the Indian and Pacific oceans. It can weight up to 4 kilograms and have a leg span of almost a metre. Its claws are strong enough to lift up to 28 kilograms and crack open coconuts – hence its name. But the squeezing force of its claws has never been precisely measured until now. Shin-ichiro Oka at the Okinawa Churashima Foundation, Japan, and his colleagues recorded the claw strength of 29 wild coconut crabs weighing between 30 grams and 2 kilograms from Okinawa Island in southern Japan. The crabs were given a force sensor to squeeze. The team found claw strength increased proportionally with body weight. The highest reading was almost 1800 newtons (PLoS One, doi.org/btrh). That means a coconut crab weighing 4 kilograms could be expected to exert a crushing force of more than 3000 newtons, says
David Kleyn/Alamy Stock Photo
Oka. This significantly outmuscles all other crustaceans, including lobsters, which have claw strengths of only about 250 newtons. Human hands have an average grip strength of about 300 newtons, while crocodile jaws bite down with a whopping 16,000 newtons – the strongest in the animal kingdom.
16 | NewScientist | 3 December 2016
Living cells bond carbon and silicon for the first time A PROTEIN has been coaxed into bonding carbon to silicon organically for the first time. The innovation could transform how we make an array of products, from drugs to semiconductors. Silicon is the second most abundant element in Earth’s crust, but it doesn’t naturally bond to carbon. That’s why manufacturers use artificial methods to make compounds combining the two. It would be more sustainable and perhaps cheaper to create the same bonds with biology, says
Frances Arnold at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Arnold and colleagues have now unveiled a protein that does the job – and outperforms other methods of bonding the two elements (Science, doi.org/btrz). The team created the protein using a process of artificial selection called directed evolution. They started with a protein called cytochrome c enzyme, which is found in the bacterium Rhodothermus marinus. This was synthesised in E. coli and modified by randomly
mutating its DNA coding. Each time, the team selected the most promising candidates and mutated them again. After three rounds of mutations, the protein could bond silicon to carbon 15 times more efficiently than any synthetic catalyst. The research may also help us answer questions about what silicon-based life forms could look like, says Arnold – here or on another planet. “One can start to dream about what happens when you put silicon into life,” she says. Andreas Hemp
Crab’s claws are crushing champs
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Sweetener causes mice heath issues DIET drinks may make you fatter. Experiments in mice suggest the artificial sweetener aspartame can cause increased weight gain and chronic health issues. Aspartame is widely used and many reviews have found it safe to consume. But Richard Hodin at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and his team found that it may disrupt processes in the body that prevent inflammation. When the team fed mice a highfat diet for 18 weeks, those also given aspartame put on more weight than those that weren’t. Mice on healthy diets given it had higher blood sugar levels between meals – a warning sign of diabetes. This may be because of the chemical’s influence on intestinal alkaline phosphatase (IAP), an enzyme that neutralises gutirritating toxins. When aspartame was injected into segments of mouse intestine, IAP levels fell by 50 per cent (Applied Physiology, Nutrition and Metabolism, doi. org/btr8). This effect may lead to low-level inflammation, which can cause chronic diseases. “Our results provide a mechanism for why aspartame may not always work to keep people thin,” says Hodin.
Africa’s tallest tree is on highest peak AFRICA’S tallest indigenous tree – at a whopping 81.5 metres – has been discovered in a remote valley on the continent’s highest mountain,
ranged from 59.2 to 81.5 metres in height. Hemp estimates that they are between 500 and 600 years old (Biodiversity and Conservation,
Kilimanjaro, in Tanzania. Andreas Hemp at the University of Bayreuth in Germany first spotted a bunch of tall Entandrophragma excelsum trees while exploring Mount Kilimanjaro’s vegetation 20 years ago. But it was only recently that the tools were available for him to measure their heights accurately. His team sized 32 specimens using laser instruments between 2012 and 2016, and found that the 10 tallest
doi.org/btrk). The massive trees play an important role in the mountain’s ecosystem, harbouring ferns and other plants. “They are like a city in the forest,” says Hemp. The colossus in Tanzania has matched the previous record for the tallest tree in Africa, which was established by an introduced Sydney blue gum in Limpopo, South Africa. It died in 2006.
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ANALYSIS FISHING BAN
–Deadliest catch?-
Leave the sea be Conservationists have a plan to ban fishing in the world’s high seas, but is it the right approach, asks James Randerson IT IS one of the planet’s last true wildernesses, yet a handful of the world’s wealthiest nations are plundering its riches to satisfy the appetites of luxury consumers – all with the help of billions in public money. The great blue wilderness in question is the “high seas” – the 58 per cent of the ocean outside the 200-nautical-mile limit that defines the area each coastal country can exploit as an exclusive economic zone (EEZ). The vast majority of the high seas is a fishing free-for-all with almost no legal protection, but now a bold idea is taking root: why not ban fishing there altogether? The plan might seem an 18 | NewScientist | 3 December 2016
impossible conservation dream, persistence of a handful of marine especially with a new US president scientists who have steadily built who has rejected internationalist the ecological, economic and foreign policy and environmental social case underpinning it. protections, but it has been The idea was put on the map gaining momentum. At the Our in 2014 by Christopher Costello at Ocean conference, hosted by the the University of California, Santa US Department of State in Barbara, who tackled one of the Washington DC in September, chief objections. Seafood is a vital Secretary of State John Kerry spoke source of protein for the world’s warmly about the notion of placing population, so if a high seas the high seas off limits. Turning fishing ban were to slash the this vast area of ocean into a global catch significantly, the marine protected area would be idea would be a non-starter. “an extraordinary step”, he argued. The raw numbers suggest that The notion has obvious appeal for conservationists, but that isn’t “They are exploiting enough by itself. The fact that talk the global commons. We are talking about of a ban has reached diplomatic big fishing mafia” circles is testament to the
is the case. In the first decade of the 21st century, the high seas accounted for around 12 per cent of the global average annual catch of 80 million tonnes, worth around $109 billion. Critics of a ban cite the loss of jobs and economic value from high seas fishing vessels, though working conditions on such ships are far from ideal (see “It’s a hard life at sea”, right). But Costello showed that the economics make sense. He modelled global fish stocks, taking into account migration between high seas and coastal zones, and found that a high seas ban is likely to have clear benefits for coastal fisheries, where most fishing takes place
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(PLoS Biology, doi.org/bs3d). The model suggests seafood populations would recover in the high seas and then spill out into the EEZs, increasing fish caught by more than 30 per cent and more than doubling profits. This is partly because the most highly prized species tend to be migratory ones such as bluefin tuna, sharks and swordfish. “It was basically a thought experiment,” said Jennifer Jacquet at New York University, who spoke about the feasibility of a ban at the Pew Marine Fellows annual meeting in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, in October. “But it planted a seed.”
Winners and losers Of course, some seafood would be off the menu entirely – but not much. Of the average annual 10 million tonne high-seas catch, just 0.03 per cent consists of species found only there. This is backed up by a list of the species that would be affected by a ban, which mentions 585 species that migrate between the coastal zones and high seas, and just 19 found only in the high seas (Scientific Reports, doi.org/bs3f). These include such unappetisingsounding fare as the sandpaper fish, spiny icefish, Antarctic tooth fish and blunt scalyhead. The study also predicted that populations of migratory fish would only have to increase by 18 per cent as a result of a ban for the net impact on global fisheries to be positive. Costello found there would be a 42 per cent increase, which would boost world fishery value by $13 billion as the benefits spill into EEZs. And a ban would share that wealth around. At the moment, just four countries – Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Spain – account for nearly half of all high seas fishing, as measured by landed value (see map, above right). “They are exploiting the global commons without paying properly for the right to access those resources,”
says Eric Sala of the National Geographic Society, who spoke at the Our Oceans meeting. “We are talking about big fishing mafia.” So like a nautical Robin Hood, a ban would take from the rich and give to the poorest nations, whose own coastal waters are being deprived of migratory fish by the high seas trawlers. “Globally we will benefit but you are going to have losers,” says Rashid Sumaila at the University of British Columbia in Canada. If a ban were to boost migratory species by 42 per cent, Costello found that 135 countries and territories (mainly developing nations) would enjoy a net gain, seven would experience no change and 50 would lose out. In particular, South Korea and Taiwan would suffer losses of over $500 million each. No prizes for guessing who will oppose a ban then, but conservationists have another argument up their sleeve. High seas fishing only makes economic sense because of piles of public money subsidising ship-building and fuel costs. Sumaila estimates that the total annual subsidy for high seas fishing amounts to around $3 billion globally. “Fishing on the high seas would not be possible without the huge
IT’S A HARD LIFE AT SEA Working conditions on high seas fishing vessels vary considerably, but they include some of the worst in the industry. “There would be rats and cockroaches on the boats,” says John Robidoux, a former fishing observer in Canada who often spent months at sea watching the working practices on foreign vessels. Many ships are vast factories in which workers haul in the catch, then process and pack it on board for sale. Other boats often meet the factory ship to transport the catch to shore, allowing the factory to remain on the high seas for long periods. As profit margins have tightened, unscrupulous operators have
A big haul Ten countries are responsible for 70 per cent of global high seas fishing, as measured by the average annual landed value High-seas Rest of world $3552m
Exclusive economic zones Spain $742m
France $349m
China $629m
South Korea $1262m Japan $2542m
Taiwan $932m
US $709m
Chile $635m
Philippines $385m
Indonesia $309m
SOURCE: SCIENTIFIC REPORTS, doi.org/bs3f; PLOS BIOLOGY, doi.org/bs3d
subsidies that countries are worry that campaigning for a giving to that industrial fishing high seas ban would distract from fleet,” Sala told Our Oceans. In an existing UN process to create fact, it would be losing around smaller marine protected areas. $2.4 billion a year. “I’m torn – really torn,” says So could a high seas ban be Kristina Gjerde at the workable? Most nations already “High seas fishing would agree on the goal of protecting 10 per cent of the oceans by 2020, not be possible without huge subsidies given to though we aren’t there yet. Even the industrial fishing fleet” with recent gains such as the creation in October of the world’s largest marine protected area in International Union for the the Antarctic Ross Sea, just 4 per Conservation of Nature. cent of the ocean is protected. Countries like Japan will react very But some conservationists negatively to any mention of a ban, she says, but it can’t be done without getting them on board. Others counter-argue that the squeezed their employees to threat of a total ban would give make the sums add up. “As we have impetus to the existing UN plans. eaten most of the world’s fish it has Either way, conservationists become increasingly difficult to shouldn’t give up on this remain profitable,” says John ambitious goal, says Jacquet. Hocevar, Oceans Campaigns Director Accommodating the losers may at Greenpeace. look difficult or even impossible, In many cases, this means that but the Paris climate agreement, poor and vulnerable workers from which came into force in record countries like Myanmar, Cambodia, time last month, shows what can Indonesia and the Philippines are be achieved when there is political duped into accepting minimal wages will in the face of disagreement. with no worker protections – slave High seas fishing ought to be a labour in effect. “Their passports are diplomatic walk in the park by often confiscated and they can be comparison. trapped on the boats at sea for “I actually think this is a way months or even more than a year,” easier political deal than climate says Hocevar. change,” she says, “You’re talking about luxury fish.” n
Analysis_1031216
3 December 2016 | NewScientist | 19
CO
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COMMENT
Disruption from above Efforts to beam the internet to all corners of the globe are gathering pace. It will liberate but also bring chaos, says Jamais Cascio COULD toppling dictatorships be as easy as flying a balloon or lofting a satellite? Some proponents of plans to provide global wireless internet from the skies seem to think so. After all, we have seen the effect that a brief wave of uncontrolled internet access had in the Arab Spring. Imagine how much more lasting and eventful the effects of an internet largely outside the control of governments that want to censor it would be. These schemes are coming, as indicated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX seeking consent last week to put 4425 base stations into orbit. As societies in the West have discovered, however, unfettered internet access doesn’t just mean giving voice to the voiceless and a more diverse array of philosophies. It also means a cacophony of voices clamouring for attention by being louder or more
outrageous than the next, a platform for demagoguery and division, and the ability to rapidly spread false news stories, images and videos that inflame voter fury. It turns out that, rather than being a unifying force, the internet has also been a tool for deepening biases and ideological conflicts. It makes it easier to find like-minded allies, so it quickly becomes possible to only encounter opinions that agree with one’s own world view. Various digital maladies afflicting netizens, from spam to fraud to malware, would also find fertile ground in new users of a global internet. Many of these threats have been shaped over the years by a Darwinian environment of attack and counter-attack as they seek to evade and overcome the just-as-rapidly evolving spam blockers, antivirus packages and ad barriers. It’s easy to imagine
The heat is on Atmospheric geoengineering trials must begin in earnest, says Matthew Watson THE Paris climate deal’s goal of keeping global warming below 1.5 °C produced a strong but mixed response from scientists. Most welcomed its intention, while some, including me, were also alarmed, wondering how it might be achieved. Here’s the truth, made plainer by the US election result: if we 20 | NewScientist | 3 December 2016
methods. These would aim to alter Earth’s radiation budget by, for example, pumping reflective particles into the air. Field trials of such radiation management need support. The urgency is akin to being in a raft without paddles heading for a waterfall. We could paddle for the bank with our hands – which is like curbing carbon emissions – but it’s too late to make it to safety this way. We could build makeshift paddles to row quicker
wish to stay below 1.5 °C we have to deliberately intervene in the global climate system on a massive and unprecedented scale. The worst impacts of a warmer world would make it immoral not to act. We are nearing the point at “ If we wish to stay below 1.5 °C we must intervene in which we must make choices – the global climate system hence the growing call for a frank on a massive scale” discussion of all geoengineering
– develop technologies to suck carbon out of the air – but it is doubtful we can make them in time. We could brace for the inevitable and strap in – adapt to climate change by building coastal defences and so on. Or, we could swim for it. But that’s risky: the water looks cold and not everyone can swim. This is like radiation management. It’s quick and relatively cheap but it’s a plunge into the unknown. This is why information is vital: if we knew how long we had, the size of the fall, the time to make a paddle, and the temperature and depth of the water, we could make a more informed decision.
For more opinion articles, visit newscientist.com/opinion
Jamais Cascio is a distinguished fellow at the Institute for the Future
In reality, climate change might be a series of increasingly severe drops, and it makes sense to fully explore all the options: wean ourselves off carbon, create negative emissions technologies and brace for impacts. But we must also test the water in case we decide to swim for it. That means considering properly, through research and a more open discussion, the unpalatable choice of radiation management. n Matthew Watson is a reader in natural hazards at the University of Bristol, UK, and was the principal investigator of the UK SPICE project, which aimed to field test atmospheric geoengineering
INSIGHT Food labelling
DANIEL ACKER/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES
the chaos that would reign in regions with sudden access to the internet but little or no online security, in particular the addition of millions of relatively unprotected computers that could be recruited for distributed denial of service attacks. None of this means we should halt plans to make access global. It will offer powerful tools for cooperation and organisation. Access to uncensored sources of information – even if flawed – will allow millions the chance to see the world anew. But advocates for unleashing the internet everywhere need to temper hopes with a recognition that this could also result in political disruption, technical chaos and culture shock. Not all outcomes will be happy, and more than a few of the groups and ideologies empowered by this will oppose key principles such as free information access. A truly global internet will, in time, be a good thing. But we must be clear-eyed as to the near-term consequences and opportunities for chaos that it will mean. As the last few years have shown, the internet can be a powerful medium for disharmony. n
–A carbon nightmare–
Care about Earth? Ditch organic food Michael Le Page
For starters, you are not helping wildlife. Yes, organic farms host a greater diversity of wildlife than conventional ones. But because the yields are lower, organic farms require more land, which in the tropics often means cutting down more rainforests. And organic food also results in higher greenhouse gas emissions than conventional farming. The trouble is, there is no way to tell whether that basic loaf of bread is better in terms of greenhouse emissions than the organic one sitting next to it on the supermarket shelf. This divide will become ever greater
WANDER around the local supermarket and you will struggle to find any clues to the environmental impact of the food you eat. If you are lucky, some of the seafood might bear the mark of the Marine Stewardship Council, which certifies fish caught in a sustainable way, but that’s about it. Yet farming is the second largest source of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, only slightly behind heating and electricity. And while it’s relatively easy to cut emissions from electricity by switching to solar, reducing emissions from farming is a “ Food flown thousands of tougher nut to crack. miles can have a much You might think buying local food is lower carbon footprint always preferable to imported food than local produce” when it comes to carbon emissions, but even this is not a reliable guide. Food flown thousands of miles can still in the future, because the have a much lower carbon footprint organisations that set the rather than, say, local produce grown in arbitrary standards for what counts as “organic” have firmly rejected the heated greenhouses. The one label you’re likely to find on technology showing the greatest promise for reducing farming many food items is the “organic” one. But if you care about the environment, emissions: genetic modification. Existing GM crops may already don’t buy it (it’s not healthier either, be reducing carbon emissions even but that’s another story).
though they were not designed to do so. Next up: crops that can capture more of the sun’s energy, require less fertiliser and tolerate drought or salt. But the organic movement will have none of it. There was a faint hope that some might at least accept gene editing, given that gene-edited crops can be genetically indistinguishable from conventional crops. But no, on 18 November the US organic standards board voted unanimously against this. What we really need are climate labels on foods, so consumers can see that whether, say, gene-edited bread is far better in climate terms than organic bread. This isn’t going to be easy. Measuring all the emissions associated with producing food and getting it onto a supermarket shelf is extremely complex, not to say expensive. Most schemes so far have foundered. Tesco tried introducing its own carbon labelling in 2007, for instance, but eventually abandoned the idea. And it’s pointless unless the labels are easy to follow. One promising proposal is to describe the greenhouse emissions associated with particular food items in terms of what percentage of a person’s typical daily carbon footprint they represent. Climate labelling is definitely worth pursuing despite the challenges. The only alternative is to allow consumers to continue being hoodwinked by feelgood mumbo jumbo – and the stakes are far too high to let this happen. n 3 December 2016 | NewScientist | 21
Technology
AI predicts the future A deep learning system can guess what happens next from a photo, helping it understand the present, says Victoria Turk
Kenneth Whitten/Plainpicture
AN ARTIFICIAL intelligence or help a self-driving car foresee system can predict how a scene an accident. will unfold and dream up a vision “Any robot that operates in of the immediate future. our world needs to have some Given a still image, the deep basic ability to predict the learning algorithm generates a future,” says Carl Vondrick at mini video showing what could the Massachusetts Institute of happen next. If it starts with a Technology, part of the team picture of a train station, it might that created the new system. imagine the train pulling away “One network generates from the platform, for example. the videos, and the other Or an image of a beach could judges whether they look inspire it to animate the motion real or fake” of lapping waves. Teaching AI to anticipate the future can help it comprehend “For example, if you’re about the present. To understand what to sit down, you don’t want a someone is doing when they’re robot to pull the chair out from preparing a meal, we might underneath you.” imagine that they will next eat it, Vondrick and his colleagues something which is tricky for an will present their work at a AI to grasp. Such a system could neural computing conference in also let an AI assistant recognise Barcelona, Spain, on 5 December. when someone is about to fall, To develop their AI, the team
22 | NewScientist | 3 December 2016
trained it on 2 million videos from image sharing site Flickr, featuring scenes such as beaches, golf courses, train stations and babies in hospital. These videos were unlabelled, meaning they were not tagged with information to help an AI understand them. After this, the researchers gave the model still images and it produced its own micro-movies of what might happen next. To teach the AI to make better videos, the team used an approach called adversarial networks. One network generates the videos, and the other judges whether they look real or fake. The two get locked in competition: the video generator tries to make videos that best fool the other network, while the other network hones its ability to distinguish the generated videos from real ones.
At the moment, the videos are low-resolution and contain 32 frames, lasting just over 1 second. But they are generally sharp and show the right kind of movement for the scene: trains move forward in a straight trajectory while babies crumple their faces. Other attempts to predict video scenes, such as one by researchers at New York University and Facebook, have required multiple input frames and produced just a few future frames that are often blurry.
Rules of the world
The videos still seem a bit wonky to a human and the AI has lots left to learn. For instance, it doesn’t realise that a train leaving a station should also eventually leave the frame. This is because it has no prior knowledge about the rules of the world; it lacks what we would call common sense. The 2 million videos – about two years of footage – are all the data it has to go on to understand how the world works. “That’s not that much in comparison to, say, a 10-yearold child, or how much evolution has seen,” says Vondrick. That said, the work illustrates what can be achieved when computer vision is combined with machine learning, says John Daugman at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory. He says that a key aspect is an ability to recognise that there is a causal structure to the things that happen over time. “The laws of physics and the nature of objects mean that not just anything can happen,” he says. “The authors have demonstrated that those constraints can be learned.” Vondrick is now scaling up the system to make larger, longer videos. He says that while it may never be able to predict exactly what will happen, it could show us alternative futures. “I think we can develop systems that eventually hallucinate these reasonable, plausible futures –AI can tell what happens next– of images and videos.” n
Computer plays wingman in US air force simulations WOULD you trust an artificial intelligence to fly a combat jet? Software called ALPHA is being used to fly jets in simulations and could one day control planes that join pilots in real-world missions. ALPHA was developed by Psibernetix in Liberty Township, Ohio, as a training aid for the US air force. It was designed to fly enemy aircraft in a virtual air combat simulator, but has now been turned into a system that controls allied planes that accompany human pilots in the simulator. Many AIs are based on neural networks that mimic human brains. These use layers of computation that are hard for us to decipher, which makes it tricky to work out how they reached a decision, and perhaps harder to verify that they will behave as expected in combat. ALPHA is different. Its developers claim that its behaviour can be verified at each step, so it won’t behave unpredictably. It uses a fuzzy logic approach and classifies data in terms of concepts, such as a plane “moving fast” or being “very threatening”, and develops rules on how to behave in response. “Rather than emulating the biological structure of the brain, fuzzy logic emulates the thought process of a human,” says Nick Ernest, CEO of Psibernetix. He says this makes it easier to work out each step the system took to produce an outcome. But Noel Sharkey at the University of Sheffield, UK, doubts that it will be so easy to validate ALPHA’s code. “It is notoriously difficult for even relatively simple programs,” he says. While the current version of ALPHA is geared towards a simulated environment, Ernest says there is no technological obstacle to a later version piloting an uncrewed aircraft or co-piloting a crewed one. “Let us see proper scientific testing and evaluation of the idea before we embark on such a dangerous idea,” says Sharkey. David Hambling n
ilbusca/Getty
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Using the prototype, a police officer can view an AR version of the scene in front of them on a smartphone. As they explore the area, footage from a camera on their vest is sent to people at different locations, such as forensic scientists or chemical specialists. These remote colleagues can add information and notes to the officer’s AR view, ranging from a request to explore a particular area to a big arrow saying “body here”. “We’ve tried the system and it really adds a lot of value to many different areas of policing,” says innovation adviser Nick Koeman from the National Police of the Netherlands. The set-up isn’t suitable for use when making an arrest, Koeman says, because officers trialling –View without entering– the system sometimes found the additional information distracting. But it is helpful for more routine aspects of policing like crime scene investigations. “The technology makes it possible to get the right information to the right people at the right time, in a YOU’RE the first police officer to Datcu and his colleagues at the way that’s easy to see,” he says. arrive at the scene: a suspected Delft University of Technology While it would be preferable to ecstasy lab. There’s drug have been developing the AR have a team of the most suitable paraphernalia everywhere, system for five years and have investigators search every site in but which piece of evidence now tested it in collaboration with person, this isn’t always possible. could be most helpful for your the Dutch police, the Netherlands The system could also keep investigation? Then, a massive Forensic Institute and the Dutch numbers at a crime scene to a virtual arrow appears, pointing fire brigade. “In six months, the minimum without sacrificing out a bottle of chemicals, police will be able to buy the thoroughness. The more people accompanied by a note complete package,” he says. you have there, the more likely saying “Bag this please”. you are to find important “ The advantage of Dutch police are trialling an evidence – but you also raise the augmented reality is the augmented reality (AR) system risk of accidental contamination. potential to recreate a that streams video from body With AR, many people can help crime scene for a jury” cameras worn by officers to uncover clues without physically experts elsewhere. These experts touching anything. can then guide the officers by When an officer arrives at a It may also be possible to use annotating the scene virtually crime scene, it is often important the recordings from the system with notes that the officers can that they explore it immediately – in court. “The advantage of see on a smartphone or headthere could be a suspect hiding, or augmented reality is the potential mounted device like Google Glass. a chemical giving off toxic fumes. ability to recreate a crime scene “We now have good enough But the first person there isn’t for a jury,” says Michael Buerger, software and hardware to use necessarily the most qualified to professor of criminal justice at augmented reality at crime investigate. The new system aims Bowling Green State University in scenes,” says Dragos Datcu, to allow the most relevant experts Ohio. However, Buerger says there principal researcher at AR to get actively involved in the are likely to be legal challenges the company Twnkls in Rotterdam, search, even if they’re hundreds first time AR is used as evidence. Timothy Revell n the Netherlands. of kilometres away.
Police search for clues with augmented reality
3 December 2016 | NewScientist | 23
Technology
ONE PER CENT
Maze in your mind Brain stimulation can help you navigate, finds Timothy Revell
Dave and Les Jacobs/Getty
you put pressure on your eyeballs when rubbing your eyes. To escape from the maze, the participants simply had to choose to carry on walking until they experienced a flash of light, and then turn. On average, participants successfully completed 70 per cent of the mazes, each of which required making 10 correct moves. In contrast, people provided with a fake TMS machine that gave them no stimulation were not able to complete any of the mazes, suggesting that TMS was helpful in guiding people and they weren’t just guessing (Frontiers in Robotics and AI, doi.org/btqb). Phosphenes are not only experienced by sighted people, but also those who are blind. This means that similar systems could one day help to give people with visual impairment more information about their surroundings by providing “visual” clues. “This is a very promising initial study,” says Eric Thomson at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. The set-up is currently basic, given that volunteers only had a binary choice to go forward or turn. “But it has the potential to be expanded to convey more information,” he says. Losey’s ambition is to augment virtual reality in a way that can’t be achieved with a pair of goggles alone. “Traditionally, virtual reality is done through goggles and headsets, but really it’s your brain that creates your reality. We want to go directly to the brain,” he says. He wants to find ways to use brain stimulation to communicate more complex experiences than just a flash of light. “That could be something abstract, like the colour blue, or –I’m sure the exit was here before– even an emotion,” he says. n
24 | NewScientist | 3 December 2016
Self-driving scooter Forget driverless cars, how about a driverless mobility scooter? A team at the National University of Singapore and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a personal scooter that can drive itself along a prearranged route without bashing into obstacles. The vehicle uses similar sensor technology to driverless cars and golf buggies but is much lighter, weighing just 56 kilograms. And pedestrians need not fear: its maximum speed is only 8 kilometres per hour.
130
quadrillion operations a second: Japan’s planned supercomputer would outperform the world’s fastest-known machines
Solar island The Pacific island of Ta’u in American Samoa now gets almost all of its power from a solar microgrid developed by SolarCity, the energy firm Tesla acquired last week. The microgrid includes 60 Tesla Powerpack batteries so the island’s 600 residents can use solar power at night too. The islanders previously used diesel generators and often experienced power cuts.
the Autonomous Vehicle Team of the SMART Future of Urban Mobility Project
YOU’RE stuck in a maze. You can’t them – instead, they faced a blank see the walls, or the floor. All you screen. At regular intervals, a have to navigate with is a device question box would pop up asking on your head stimulating your if they wanted to move forward or brain to tell you which way to go. make a turn. This is exactly what happened to All they had to go on was a volunteers who were asked to solve dose of TMS to the primary visual a maze puzzle guided only by cortex at the back of their brain transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). Their success suggests that “Brain stimulation could augment virtual reality or this type of non-invasive brain prompt could be used to augment help give people who are blind ‘visual’ information” virtual reality experiences or help give people who are blind “visual” information about each time their avatar got too their surroundings. close to a wall. Darby Losey at the University TMS produces small electric of Washington in Seattle and his currents that can, at certain colleagues created virtual mazes intensities, induce the perception in the style of a simple 2D video of a flash of light called a phosphene. game. Participants had to guide No light actually enters the eye, an avatar through these mazes, but the brain still “sees” it. but without being able to see Phosphenes can also occur if
Aperture
| NewScientist| 00 | 3 December 26| NewScientist 2 Month 2016 2016
Ready for its close-up THESE fearsome-looking teeth aren’t just for show. This common fangtooth (Anoplogaster cornuta) is an aggressive hunter, and members of its species have been observed eating fish onethird their size. It has the largest teeth of any marine species relative to the size of its body. German photographer Solvin Zankl snapped the 20-centimetre-long fish when he joined a deep sea expedition off the African island nation of Cape Verde in November 2015. Marine biologists on board the German research vessel Maria S. Merian took net samples between 150 and 1000 metres down and Zankl photographed the species they collected in a temperature-controlled tank. The fangtooth is found 500 to 5000 metres below the surface in tropical and temperate oceans. The two middle fangs on its lower jaw grow so long, they have to slot into sockets on either side of its brain when it closes its mouth. However, these hunters are also vulnerable to predation by bigger fish such as tuna and marlin, and so they use their dark colour as camouflage in the murky depths. The expedition found many other bizarre deep sea creatures. Zankl also snapped a see-through octopus, a strange flattened fish and a squid with a single, bulging eye. Alice Klein
Photographer Solvin Zankl naturepl.com
3 December 00 Month2016 2016| NewScientist | NewScientist| 27 |3
28 | NewScientist | 3 December 2016
COVER STORY
seeing reason Human brains skew facts. How can we change our minds, asks Dan Jones
francesco bongiorni
I
N NOVEMBER, Donald Trump defied the pollsters to be elected the 45th US president. A few months earlier, UK voters decided to end their country’s 43-year membership of the European Union. Throughout Europe populist movements are prospering. In every case, opponents have cried foul: these campaigns, they argue, win support by distorting or flagrantly disregarding the truth. Politicians spin and politicians lie. That has always been the case, and to an extent it is a natural product of a free democratic culture. Even so, we do appear to have entered a new era of “post-truth politics”, where the strongest currency is what satirist Stephen Colbert has dubbed “truthiness”: claims that feel right, even if they have no basis in fact, and which people want to believe because they fit their pre-existing attitudes. In recent years, psychologists and political scientists have been revealing the shocking extent to which we’re all susceptible to truthiness, and how that leads to polarised views on factual questions from the safety of vaccines to human-caused climate change. The fact is that facts play less of a role in shaping our views than we might hope for in a species whose Latin name means “wise man” – and the problem seems to be getting worse. By figuring out when and why we have a partial view of factual information, however, researchers are starting to see how we can throw off the blinkers. Let’s just establish one fact first: facts are good. They may be uncomfortable, or inconvenient, but only by embracing rational,
fact-based solutions can we hope to prosper as a society. “We need to have discussions that are based on a common set of accepted facts, and when we don’t, it’s hard to have a useful democratic debate,” says Brendan Nyhan at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. In a world of rational empiricists, facts and a careful weighing of the evidence would determine which claims we accept and which we reject. But we are biased. In the real world of flesh-and-blood humans, reasoning often starts with established conclusions and works back to find “facts” that support what we already believe. And if we’re presented with facts that contradict our beliefs, we find clever ways to dismiss them. We’re more wily defence lawyer than objective scientist.
What’s my motivation? Psychologists call this lawyerly tendency motivated reasoning. Take climate change. The science here is unambiguous: climate change is happening and human activity is driving it. Yet despite this, and the risks it poses to our descendants, many people still deny it is happening. The major driver, especially in the US, is political ideology. A Pew Research Center survey released a month before the US election showed that, compared with Democrats, Republicans are less likely to believe that scientists know that climate change is occurring, that they understand its causes, or that they fully and accurately report their findings. They are also more likely to
believe that scientists’ research is driven by careerism and political views. Many liberals like to think this is a product of scientific illiteracy, which if addressed would bring everyone round to the same position. If only. Studies by Dan Kahan at Yale University have shown that, in contrast to liberals, among conservatives it is the most scientifically literate who are least likely to accept climate change. “Polarisation over climate change isn’t due to a lack of capacity to understand the issues,” says Kahan. “Those who are most proficient at making sense of scientific information are the most polarised.” For Kahan, this apparent paradox comes down to motivated reasoning: the better you are at handling scientific information, the better you’ll be at confirming your own bias and writing off inconvenient truths. In the case of climate-change deniers, studies suggest that motivation is often endorsement of freemarket ideology, which fuels objections to the government regulation of business that is required to tackle climate change. “If I ask people four questions about the free market, I can predict their attitudes towards climate science with 60 per cent certainty,” says Stephan Lewandowsky, a psychologist at the University of Bristol, UK. But liberal smugness has no place here. Consider gun control. Liberals tend to want tighter gun laws, because, they argue, fewer guns would translate into fewer gun crimes. Conservatives typically respond that with fewer guns in hand, criminals can attack the innocent with impunity. > 3 December 2016 | NewScientist | 29
We can’t see past our biases on immigration and vaccination risks
Despite criminologists’ best efforts, the evidence on this issue is mixed. Yet Kahan has found that both liberals and conservatives react to statistical information about the effects of gun control in the same way: they accept what fits in with the broad beliefs of their political group, and discount that which doesn’t. And again, it’s not about IQ: “The more numerate you are, the more distorted your perception of the data,” says Kahan. We are blinkered on other contentious issues, too, from the death penalty and drug legalisation to fracking and immigration. In fact, the UK’s Brexit vote provides another compelling case study in the distorting power of motivated reasoning. Drawing on responses from more than 11,000 Facebook users, researchers at the Online Privacy Foundation found that while both Remainers and Brexiteers could accurately interpret statistical information when it came to assessing whether a new skin cream caused a rash, their numeracy skills
abandoned them when looking at stats that undermined rationales for their views – for example, figures on whether immigration is linked to an increase or decrease in crime. As a result, the facts they encountered didn’t lead them to update their beliefs in line with the evidence – a weakness the Leave campaign exploited. As Arron Banks, co- founder of the Leave.eu group said in a recent interview: “The Remain campaign featured fact, fact, fact, fact, fact. It just doesn’t work. You’ve got to connect with people emotionally. It’s the Trump success.” Lewandowsky points to another problem: the lure of conspiracy theories. When it comes to climate change, “you can say ‘All the scientists have made a mistake’, which is a hard sell, but it’s much easier to say ‘They’re all corrupt’,” says Lewandowsky. His work shows that many people do in fact reject climate change as a conspiracy, and they tend to endorse a wide range of other conspiracy theories (see “It’s a cover-up!”, right). Political ideology doesn’t explain everything. The bogus link between autism and the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella, while often portrayed as a liberal obsession, cuts across politics. “Opposition to vaccines is a diverse phenomenon, and resists 30 | NewScientist | 3 December 2016
Top: Elliott Franks/Eyevine; Bottom: Susannah/The Times
“ The most numerate people are better at distorting the data to fit their beliefs”
easy generalisations,” says Nyhan. “There’s no demographic factor that predicts who is most vulnerable to anti-vaccine claims.” It’s clear, then, that many of us, if not all, are stuck with blinkers. But how did we get to a point where facts have almost no value? It could be down to how we get our news. In the immediate aftermath of Trump’s election, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg came in for criticism for effectively running a media machine – perhaps the world’s biggest – without the due care that should come with such a responsibility. In the US, nearly twothirds of people get news through Facebook, which is programmed to bring you news similar to what you’ve already seen – often what the most ideological and politically
active people in your feed have shared. It’s not hard to see how that could have an amplifying effect on motivated reasoning, and the rise of social media might well explain why our problems with facts seem to have grown more acute. These days, it’s easy to drift into echo chambers reverberating not only with news and views that confirm your biases, but also falsehoods, rumours and conspiracy theories jostling with stories from reputable sources. So if we want to restore the power of facts, perhaps it is time to rethink how news is delivered on the largest scales. But even if the social media “filter bubble” is burst and everyone is exposed to inconvenient truths, it may not be enough. A study of 1700 parents done by Nyhan and Jason Reifler at the
NASA
It’s a cover-up!
Estimates suggest that half of the US population believe in a conspiracy theory
Why we’re drawn to conspiracy theories Were the moon landings faked? Was the US government behind the 9/11 attacks? Is human-caused climate change a liberal hoax? The power of conspiracy theories has never waned – in fact, according to a recent estimation, at least half of the US believes in one or more of the common ones. And to some extent, we’re all susceptible because conspiratorial thinking stems from universal aspects of human psychology. There is our propensity to see threats lurking everywhere and to make links between coincidental events. But according to Joanne Miller, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, belief in conspiracy theories is also fuelled by politically motivated reasoning – a tendency to skew factual information according to our pre-existing beliefs and political allegiances (see main story). “Both conservatives and liberals are prone to accept conspiracy theories that make the other side look bad,” says Miller. But she has also found that conservatives, especially those who are knowledgeable about politics but distrust mainstream authorities, are most likely to endorse conspiracy theories. This reason, suggests Miller, is that conspiracy theories are most attractive to those who feel they’re on the losing end of politics. Indeed, Miller has found that inducing this feeling of losing out increases endorsement of conspiracy theories across the political spectrum, though again the effect is more pronounced among conservative Republicans – which means Trump’s claims that the election was rigged made perfect sense as a campaign tactic. Now Trump has been elected as US president, we might see a reversal, says Miller. “Liberals and Democrats might become more likely to believe conspiracy theories that make the other side look bad now that they find themselves the political losers.”
University of Exeter, UK, reveals that factbased messages of the sort often used in public health campaigns don’t work – and sometimes have the opposite effect to what was intended. So while messages debunking the claim that the MMR vaccine causes autism, for example, did reduce belief in this misconception, they actually decreased intent to vaccinate among parents with unfavourable attitudes towards vaccines. Similarly, images of children suffering from the diseases that MMR prevents led sceptical parents to be less likely to vaccinate than they were previously. Nyhan and Reifler call this the “backfire effect”. That is not to say that debunking myths, which became an Olympic sport during the recent US election campaign, is a waste of time. Nyhan and Reifler found that during the 2014 midterm elections in the US, factchecking improved the accuracy of people’s beliefs, even if it went against ingrained biases. Democrats would update their beliefs after having a claim made by a Democrat debunked, and Republicans did likewise. Work by Emily Thorson at George Washington University in Washington DC paints a similar picture. She found that misconceptions on issues like how much of the US debt China owns, whether there’s a federal time limit for receiving welfare benefits and who pays for Social Security could be fixed by a single corrective statement. The bad news is that myth-busting loses its power on more controversial or salient issues. “It’s most effective for topics that we’re least concerned about as a democracy,” says Nyhan. “Even the release of President Obama’s birth certificate had only a limited effect on people’s belief that he wasn’t born in this country.” And Thorson has found that even when corrections work – say, getting people to accept that a fictional congressman accused of taking campaign money from criminals did no such thing – the taint of the earlier
claim often sticks to the innocent target, in what she calls “belief echoes”. Yet Thorson remains upbeat. “It’s easy to become pessimistic when we focus on really frustrating cases like 9/11 conspiracy theories or Obama’s birthplace,” she says, “but there’s still a lot of room to use facts to change attitudes.”
Changing minds In some cases, the power of facts to persuade might turn on the way they’re presented. In unpublished work, Nyhan and Reifler have found that information presented graphically leads people to form more accurate beliefs about the topic in question – the effectiveness of Bush’s troop surge in Iraq in 2006/2007, say, or the state of the economy under Obama – than simply reading text about the same topic. And this is true even when the people looking over the graphs have political reasons to reject the conclusions they encourage. For Nyhan, it is a simple way of re-packaging information that journalists and the broader media could take into account when reporting stories. Another avenue draws on the idea that people reject facts because they threaten the identity built around their world view. If so, buffering self-esteem might reduce that threat. When Nyhan and Reifler got people to reflect on and write about values that are important to them, an esteem-enhancing intervention called self-affirmation, they found that it can do the trick – but its effects are not uniform. For instance, for Republicans whose identity is not strongly tied up with their party, self-affirmation makes them less likely to reject claims about climate change, but among Republicans who strongly identify with the party, the intervention either has no effects, or reinforces their beliefs. Likewise, Miller has found that self> 3 December 2016 | NewScientist | 31
Left: Joe Raedle/Getty; Right: DAMON WINTER/NYT/Eyevine
From gun control to climate change, our existing beliefs skew how we see the facts
affirmation increases endorsement of conspiracy theories among conservatives, but not among liberals. Combining graphical information with self-affirmation also produces mixed results, depending on who you’re dealing with. Until recently, researchers had found no personality trait that mitigates motivated reasoning. But earlier this year, Kahan discovered something intriguing about people who seek out and consume scientific information for personal pleasure, a trait he calls scientific curiosity. Having devised a scale for measuring this trait, he and his colleagues found that, unlike scientific literacy, scientific curiosity is linked to greater acceptance of human-caused climate change, regardless of political orientation. On a host of issues, from attitudes to porn and the legalisation of marijuana, to immigration and fracking, scientific curiosity makes both liberals and conservatives converge on views closer to what the facts say. Perhaps even more encouragingly, Kahan’s team found that scientifically curious people were also more eager to read views that clashed with those of their political tribe. So finding ways to increase scientific curiosity, 32 | NewScientist | 3 December 2016
perhaps by increasing the influence of people with this trait, could take the heat out of partisan disputes more effectively than promoting scientific literacy. Kahan sees other glimmers of hope. One might be to exploit what he calls “cognitive dualism”, the ability to hold two seemingly contradictory beliefs at the same time. It’s a phenomenon at play in the recent Pew survey
“ Asking about climate change is akin to asking ‘whose side are you on?’” on climate change: just 15 per cent of conservative Republicans agreed that human activity was causing climate change, but 27 per cent agreed that if we changed our ways to limit carbon emissions it would make a big difference in tackling climate change. The same cognitive dualism is evident among US farmers. A 2013 survey of farmers in Mississippi, North Carolina, Texas and Wisconsin found that only a minority accepted climate change as a fact. Yet a majority in each state believed that some
farmers will be driven out of business by climate change, and the rest will have to change current practices and buy more insurance against climate-induced crop failures. By buying crops genetically engineered to cope with climate change and purchasing specialist insurance policies, many of them already have. The psychological underpinnings of this “quantum mental state”, in Kahan’s words, are mysterious, he says, but it’s important because it suggests that people can think about factual issues at very different levels, depending on the extent to which the issue is bound up with their identity. Kahan thinks that asking people about human-caused climate change is akin to asking “Who are you, and whose side are you on?”, which is why political identity makes such a difference to their answers. But when you start talking about climate change as a local, personal issue, it loses its political edge and becomes a more pragmatic concern. “When issues are wrapped up in national electoral politics, they have a resonance that divides people,” says Kahan. “So you want to depoliticise things along one dimension to facilitate action at another level.” Taking poisonous partisan politics out of factual issues like climate change is part of what Kahan calls “detoxifying the sciencecommunication environment”. A major pollutant of this ecosystem, argues Lewandowsky, is the influence of dark money in politics. A 2013 study by Robert Brulle at Drexel University, Philadelphia, found that between 2003 and 2010, $558 million was funnelled through third-party “pass through” organisations, which hide the source of money, to climate-denial groups. “We have to talk about these anti-democratic influences and how they affect public discourse,” says Lewandowsky. So is there any hope for facts? Restoring their power is not going to be easy. But despite the challenges, Nyhan cautions against despondency. “It’s important not to overstate what’s different about today from the past, when there were other ways of circulating misinformation,” he says. Although slower than today’s instant-access 24-hour news and all-consuming social media, they still allowed politicians to introduce false claims into the national debate. “There was no Golden Age of democracy when facts dominated public opinion or political discourse,” says Nyhan. “But we’ve survived nonetheless”. n Dan Jones is a writer based in Brighton, UK
SPECIAL REPORT ALCOHOL Binging is bad, but the odd drink never did any harm – right? Helen Thomson distils the facts about alcohol
Here’s to your health
NICK PURSER/GETTY
W
E RAISE a glass to celebrate, sip wine to unwind, knock back a few beers while catching up with friends. Alcohol plays a central role in socialising in many cultures, especially at this time of year. In December, consumption is 41 per cent higher in the UK than during the other months. Yet the warm glow of a holiday tipple may be tempered by a growing awareness of alcohol’s harms. Drinking can increase your risk of cancer, stroke and liver disease. It exacerbates the harms of smoking, can undermine your immune system, impair your judgement and make you more likely to have risky sex, injure yourself or hurt someone else. Each year, alcohol-related crime costs the UK a whopping £11 billion, and the country’s National Health Service spends £3.5 billion treating alcohol-related medical issues. That’s not to mention the £7.3 billion hangover in lost workdays. So far, so clear. Booze is bad. But what about the steady trickle of findings that suggest, in moderate amounts, it may have some benefits? There is the seductive story of red wine staving off dementia, and the finding that regular drinking decreases your risk of heart disease and premature death. Do these stories stand up? In other words, can we really raise a glass to our health? First, let’s face the facts. According to > 3 December 2016 | NewScientist | 33
Weekly guidelines The definition of a “standard drink”, or unit, of alcohol and the recommended limit per week varies around the world
UK
8 14
Weekly guidelines for men
6
13.6
7.6 9.1
7.4
10
11.1
7.6 12
Germany
10.6 7.6
20
Canada
6
5.3
10
Austria
France
Weekly guidelines for women 6
US Australia
Equivalent in pints of 4% beer
4.6
Ireland
10
6
New Zealand
10
5.4
Poland
10
the World Health Organization, 3.3 million deaths worldwide are attributable to alcohol each year. The WHO classifies alcohol as a group 1 carcinogen, alongside asbestos and plutonium. That’s because regularly drinking three units a day – a premium pint of lager or large glass of wine – can cause seven types of cancer, including those of the mouth, breast and bowel, as well as increasing your risk of liver disease. Across the different types of cancer, that risk tends to rise with each additional daily drink. A major part of the problem comes from a chemical called acetaldehyde, which is produced as our body breaks down alcohol. Acetaldehyde damages DNA and prevents our cells from repairing this damage, leading to cancer. And while our liver is a fairly hardy organ, its superb ability to replace damaged cells while healthy is limited by chronic alcohol consumption. Too much booze can also produce a build up of fatty acids in the liver, which eventually results in liver disease. So how much is too much? Public health officials hedge by saying that there is no “safe” level of drinking, and some studies indicate even one drink a day can increase the risk of cancer. The UK government recently updated its guidance, recommending no more than 14 units a week – the equivalent of six pints of beer – spread evenly over three days or more. This was based on findings that showed 34 | NewScientist | 3 December 2016
11.4 9.1 9.2 8.2
7.6
15.2
the risk for injury and disease significantly increases above that level. Pregnant women are advised to avoid alcohol completely. It didn’t go down well. Even though alcohol consumption and binge drinking have been declining in recent years (see “Down in one”, page 39), people were up in arms that their suggested weekly limits were being cut again. Over the past 40 years, the upper limit in UK guidelines has fallen sharply: in 1979, it was 56 units a week – about 24 pints or 23 glasses of wine. “These limits are about a vague national self-image of puritanism, not health,” declared Simon Jenkins in The Guardian.
Glass half-full It didn’t help that in other countries the guidelines for low-risk drinking are, for the most part, more lenient than those of the UK. They are also very different, even down to what constitutes a unit of alcohol or “standard drink” (see “Weekly guidelines”, above). In Austria, one drink can have up to 20 grams of alcohol in it. In the UK, it’s just 8 grams. Guidelines also vary in whether they are daily or weekly limits. And some countries, like Canada, make allowances for an extra drink on special occasions. This lack of agreement merely shows how difficult it is to pinpoint a safe level. What’s more, many countries have
SOURCE: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/add.13341/epdf
Standard drink (grams of pure alcohol)
different guidelines for men and women. In the UK, the new limits apply to everyone. That’s because even if the route to harm is different, when you look at the health hazards for each sex the statistics start balancing out, says Petra Meier at the University of Sheffield, UK, one of the researchers whose work informed the new guidelines. Alcohol does affect men and women differently – women metabolise it more quickly, so have a higher blood alcohol concentration after drinking the same amount. Women are also at higher risk for some alcohol-related cancers. But men are more frequent binge drinkers and tend to engage in more risky behaviour when drinking. “Accounting for all the outcomes, it’s so similar that there isn’t a good base for saying men can drink more,” says Meier. One thing national guidelines can’t do is take into account how risk varies between individuals. Lots of things determine how bad alcohol is for each of us, from social circumstances to mental health issues. Even our genes may play a part: studies in mice show associations between particular genes and propensity to drink alcohol. “Knock out that gene in animals and they become heavy drinkers,” says Klaus Miczek at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. In humans, several studies have shown that certain variations of genes – specifically those that drive cycles of sleep and wake – can cause a
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person to have a higher risk of alcoholism. “There are other things that the guidelines can’t address – how drinking a certain amount of units affects someone’s family, or their risk of criminal activity, or their risk to other people,” says Meier. It would be difficult to come up with recommendations around those things that were applicable to everyone.” Guidelines are designed to get people drinking less. And that can have tremendous benefits. In the Soviet Union in 1985, life expectancy at birth increased by two years in a single calendar year – largely because of a reduction in deaths from cardiovascular disease. This leap was attributed to a campaign by communist party leader Mikhail Gorbachev to lower alcohol consumption.
But when researchers compared intake and health with that of other countries, they were befuddled. At the time, the Soviet Union had high levels of heart disease and the highest consumption of alcohol in any OECD country. But France, the country with the second highest consumption, had surprisingly low levels of cardiovascular disease. The finding didn’t square with studies showing diminishing heart health with increasing alcohol consumption either. Researchers were bemused – they called it the “French paradox”. Part of the reason for the disparity was how they looked at drinking, considering only the total consumed in a week, without looking at when people drank. The French were more likely to consume alcohol as wine with meals, whereas the Soviets drank more spirits and binged at the weekends. Then these differences were taken into account, it revealed that bingeing was significantly detrimental to cardiovascular health. The French paradox also led people to look into whether drinking alcohol has any beneficial effects. There are now more than 100 studies that show a link between having just one or two drinks a day and a decreased risk of heart attack, stroke and sudden cardiac death. Some also suggest that small amounts of alcohol can decrease your risk of gallstones and type 2 diabetes. The key here is moderation. A meta-analysis of 15 studies that followed more than 300,000 people for 12 years found none of these benefits for those who consumed more than four drinks a day. These potential benefits make sense
PHILIP JONES GRIFFITHS/MAGNUM PHOTOS
Pass the bottle
The recommended UK alcohol consumption limit is now the same for men and women
1 drink per day If you average out global alcohol consumption it works out to a daily drink for everyone aged 15 and older (WHO)
biologically. Moderate drinking seems to boost the amount of high-density lipoproteins (HDL) in our blood. These cruise around getting rid of low-density lipoproteins, which tend to promote the formation of fatty deposits in our arteries, so high levels of HDL may reduce the risk of heart disease. One study in monkeys supports this idea: six months of regular moderate intake of alcohol was associated with improved levels of HDL, and this wasn’t seen in animals given alcohol in binges or no alcohol at all. In humans, providing solid evidence of a link between regular drinking and heart health has been more difficult. To run a controlled trial you would have to ask people to drink a certain amount every day for many years, something that is impractical if not unethical. So instead, researchers look for trends in people’s drinking habits and health markers over time. Shue Huang at Pennsylvania State University and her colleagues recently analysed alcohol intake and cholesterol > 3 December 2016 | NewScientist | 35
CHRIS SEMBROT
levels of more than 80,000 Chinese adults over six years. Those who drank moderately – one drink per day for women and two for men – maintained higher levels of HDL over time than those who abstained or drank more heavily. Unfortunately, Huang’s study is subject to the same pitfalls as other observational studies. People who drink in moderation also tend to exercise regularly, have a healthy weight and get a decent amount of sleep, all reasons they may have better heart health. Additionally, many studies don’t differentiate between never-drinkers and those who have given up drinking. The health issues of people who have quit may undermine data on non-drinkers, and serve to exaggerate the benefits seen in others. Another pitfall is that when people are reporting how much they drink, they underestimate both how much alcohol is in their beverages, and how many they have across a week. Self-reported consumption is well below the level calculated from alcohol sales data and may be off by as much as 40 per cent, according to the UK Department of Health. That amounts to one additional large glass of wine each day. This all make it very difficult to tease out which benefits are actually down to alcohol consumption.
Everything in moderation When studies have tried to control variables including level of physical activity, number of friends and socio-economic status, they have reached different conclusions. After factoring in demographics, lifestyle, family background and health history, Michael French at the University of Miami, Florida, found that there were protective effects of moderate alcohol consumption, particularly among women. Yet he says there are many factors that are harder to take into account. “It could be that those who drink moderately live a moderate lifestyle,” he says. “Maybe they’re moderate in their work-family balance, for instance. Perhaps it’s that which helps their heart. If that’s the case, it is merely an indicator of living a balanced life.” One consistent finding is that the benefit is more pronounced in older people, says Annie Britton, an epidemiologist at University College London. “They have a higher risk of heart disease so it may be that the alcohol has more to work with, which is why you see more of an effect.” But there is no consensus that a certain 36 | NewScientist | 3 December 2016
amount of alcohol is good for your heart. “There are people who are passionate that there are health benefits, and there are others who are equally passionate that it is all down to errors in the data,” says Britton. What about tales that red wine might prevent cognitive decline? It is packed with resveratrol, a chemical thought to protect against the effects of stress and a poor diet by activating a group of enzymes that affect gene expression. It has also been linked to a reduction in agerelated conditions such as arthritis, macular degeneration and dementia, but many of these studies have been in animals. Last year, though, Scott Turner at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington DC put it to the test in humans. His team gave 119 people with mild to moderate symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease either a resveratrol pill or a placebo twice a day for a year. Over time, the placebo group’s Alzheimer’s symptoms worsened, and there were changes in their blood biomarkers. Those taking resveratrol had fewer symptoms and showed little or no change in the blood
biomarkers. One small catch: to consume the same amount of resveratrol, you would have to glug about 1000 bottles of red wine a day. The story is similarly underwhelming when it comes to claims that champagne may help stave off dementia. Spatial memory is one of the first things to be affected by Alzheimer’s disease, so it is no surprise that a study suggesting that this type of memory can be improved by phenolic acids in champagne made viral headlines. Unfortunately, that was only found that to be true in rats. Far more research has to be done before the same can be said for humans. If it seems like none of the reported benefits stand up, there is at least evidence for one straightforward perk we have all heard: a small tipple makes it easier to solve problems that require creative solutions. Andrew Jarosz, now at Mississippi State University, Starkville, and his colleagues had 40 men do a battery of memory tests, then grouped them into pairs with roughly the same working memory capacity. They asked one of each pair to drink a vodka and
Running it off People in England and Scotland who drink moderately and do at least 7.5 hours of exercise per week have a smaller relative risk of dying from cancer and heart disease than drinkers who do little or no exercise Exercise (hours a week) Less than 7.5 More than 7.5 More than 15
Cardiovascular disease mortality 2
Relative risk
1.5
1
0.5
0
Cancer mortality 2
1 SOURCE: doi.org/bqd7
Exercise seems to help you negate the effects of your beers
Relative risk
1.5
0.5
2.5 million The people in the UK who recently drank more than the recommended weekly limit in a single session. It is equivalent to about six pints (ONS, 2014)
H ar m fu l
H az ar do us
No
al co ho l
Oc ca si on Fo al llo ly w sg ui de lin es
0
1 = no difference between groups 2 = twice the risk 0.5 = half the risk
9-21 6-15 Equivalent in pints or glasses of wine per week Women Men
<9 <6
>21 >15
cranberry, then had both try to solve a series of word problems. Those who drank were better at solving problems that required thinking outside of the box. The theory is that alcohol reduces your working memory capacity, in other words, your ability to focus on one thing while blocking out peripheral information. By lowering these walls, your mind can wander, making novel connections that would otherwise be overlooked. The evidence may be thin that the odd drink can be a boon, but you might at least be able to counteract its damage. One way is exercise. A recent look at data from 36,370 men and women aged 40 years and over showed that in people who did little to no exercise, there was a direct relationship between alcohol intake and cancer risk. But in those who drank moderately and did at least 7.5 hours of activity a week – from walking or gardening to more rigorous exercise – the risk of death from cancer or heart disease was decreased (see “Running it off”, left). A break from booze might also help. In work in press, Gautam Mehta and his colleagues at University College London studied 100 people who took part in “Dry January” – a campaign by UK charity Alcohol Concern that encourages people to give up alcohol for a month. Mehta’s team analysed the participants before and after their abstinence and found that it reduced their blood pressure, weight and markers of insulin resistance, a key factor in diabetes. When a small group of New Scientist employees teamed up with Rajiv Jalan at University College London Medical School to test a similar period of abstinence, they found hints that liver fat – which can prelude liver damage – might also fall when you stop drinking. “Any time off alcohol can only be a good thing,” says Mehta. “But in terms of how much you need to completely reset the body, it’s impossible to say.” While it’s clear that there’s no “safe” amount to drink, a small tipple could nevertheless get your creativity going and might – just might – benefit your heart in old age. If you don’t exceed recommended limits, avoid bingeing and try to exercise for at least an hour a day, you should keep your long-term hangover to a minimum. Cheers! n Helen Thomson is a consultant for New Scientist. If you are worried about your drinking habits or those of a loved one, visit drinkaware.co.uk
>
3 December 2016 | NewScientist | 37
SPECIAL REPORT ALCOHOL
Generation clean Young adults are increasingly choosing to stay sober. What is driving the trend, asks Jon White?
38 | NewScientist | 3 December 2016
not the result of a few teetotallers skewing the stats. Not only are more of these age groups saying they are teetotal but people who do drink are binge drinking less often. “It is clear it is not just a flash in the pan,” says Robin Room, who studies alcohol policy at the University of Melbourne, Australia.
Just saying no
None for me Underage alcohol consumption in England has dropped significantly over the past decade
Girls
Boys
70 60 50 40 30 20 SOURCE: HSCIC (2015)
Why are younger people drinking less? It’s impossible to ignore the role of new financial pressures. Millennials in many places are loaded with student debt, have faced recessions, are living in an era of greater job insecurity, widening income inequality and also rising housing costs. Additionally, for them, socialising no longer requires meeting in a pub or bar. They can group chat from bedrooms via laptops, tablets and smartphones. “When you are communicating with your friends online, you’re not usually standing around at somebody’s house party drinking alcohol,” says psychologist Jean Twenge at San Diego State University in California, who wrote a book on millennial culture, Generation Me. These trends are picking up steam with the generation born in 1995 and after. Under-age drinking in the UK is declining in a way that mirrors the young adult trend (see “None for me”, right). In Australia, the most dramatic recent declines are in 13 and 14-year-olds. The fact that smartphones have cameras may also inhibit alcohol use because people fear appearing drunk in photos posted online for all to see. Beer-maker Heineken acknowledged as much in a report in January. It concluded that “self-awareness and staying in control” are the main motivations for reduced drinking on a night out for millennials. Another factor is the increasingly cosmopolitan nature of Western populations,
Percentage of 11 to 15-year-olds who have had an alcoholic drink
W
HILE baby boomers may be parsing the evidence to see if an evening glass of wine could be good for them, young adults are quietly turning away from alcohol. Sure, a hardcore still binge heavily, but more and more are choosing to be teetotal, and those who do drink are, on average, doing less of it. That has public health experts toasting their good luck. If this lifestyle takes hold, there could be many health benefits, from fewer accidents and less alcohol-fuelled violence, to reduced incidences of cancer and liver and heart disease in decades to come. So what is spurring young people to shun alcohol, and will it continue? The move away from booze was first seen in those born between the early 1980s and mid1990s, the generation known as millennials. The post-millennials (or generation Z) are continuing and even deepening the trend. This is in spite of the fact that alcohol is broadly less costly than it has been in decades. Indulging in drunkenness from early adulthood – once a rite of passage – is in decline across many developed countries. In the UK in 2002, roughly two-thirds of people aged 16 to 24 drank the week before. By 2014, that was down to less than half. But two-thirds of people aged 45 to 64 still drink regularly, according to the UK Office for National Statistics. In fact, as of 2014, men aged 65 to 74 were more likely than any other age group to drink more than 21 units of alcohol a week – about 10 pints of beer – the advised upper limit at the time. That limit has since been dropped to 14 units – about six pints. In the US, alcohol intake has been declining among teens since hitting a peak in 1997. It’s much the same in Australia, especially among those born between 1995 and 1999. “A significant generational shift is under way,” says James Nicholls of Alcohol Research UK. Surveys indicate that this is widespread,
10 0
2005
2008
2011
2014
1 in 6 The proportion of people around the world who regularly binge drink (WHO)
Down in one Overall, binge drinking is in decline, in large part thanks to the youngest generations choosing to abstain
Per cent binge drinking the previous week*
30 16 to 24
25 25 to 44 20
15
45 to 64
10
5 65 and over 0
*In this survey, binge drinking was defined as having more than 8 units in a day for men, and 6 units for women
SOURCE: ONS
20 05 20 06 20 07 20 08 20 09 20 10 20 11 20 12 20 13
AMMENTORP PHOTOGRAPHY/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
Alcohol isn’t central to social life for a growing number of young people
as they incorporate newcomers from cultures where drinking is less common. London not only has the most diverse population in the UK, but at more than 30 per cent, the highest concentration of people who are teetotal. Then there is the idea of a backlash to the excesses of your elders. This has been dubbed the Ab Fab or Saffy theory in reference to the straight-laced daughter of a hard-drinking character in UK comedy Absolutely Fabulous. Drinking by the baby boomer generation, born between 1946 and 1964, and their successors in generation X, the last of whom were born in 1980, has either risen or remained high in recent decades. Younger generations bucking such trends would be the reverse of 1960s counter culture, when those coming of age rebelled against the straightlaced ways of their parents. Other possible factors are that public health messages have become more effective, a clampdown on under-age sales stopped bad habits setting in, and attitudes about alcohol among parents have shifted. In 2004, 27 per cent of 11 to 15-year-olds said their parents provided them with alcohol. By 2014, that was down to 17 per cent.
No rolling over It’s likely that all of these elements contribute to some extent, but it’s hard to pin down which are most important. That’s a problem for public health officials, because a better understanding could help guide strategies to ensure the trend endures. When you look at the illness, death and crime attributed to alcohol consumption, the payoff for maintaining it at a low level is potentially huge in terms of lives and money saved and pressures eased on healthcare systems. But the industry won’t just roll over. It markets hard on social media and runs viral campaigns that reach millions. Alcohol advertising may not be winning over millennials at the moment, but its influence shouldn’t be underestimated. In the UK, spending on alcohol advertising rose from £150 million to £250 million annually between 1989 and 2000. Over the same period, weekly alcohol consumption by people aged 11 to 15 years rose in a correlated manner, even if they weren’t the target audience. Can public health experts stop the industry upending the decline? “If you raise the price of alcohol, with a minimum unit price for example, you can gently discourage
more drinking,” says Room. In Scotland, politicians are attempting to do just that. In 2012 they agreed a minimum price of 50p per unit of alcohol – what amounts to a minimum price of £1 for a 500ml can of beer, or £14 for a bottle of spirits. Wine and whisky industry groups promptly challenged this, but in October, the minimum price was upheld by Scotland’s highest court. The drinks groups are expected to appeal to the UK’s Supreme Court. Alison Douglas from the charity Alcohol Focus Scotland sees shades of tobacco industry tactics. “The health of the people must come before the profits of big business,” she says. Much is at stake. Substantial health gains of the younger, drier generations are unlikely to show themselves for a few years because of the long-term nature of chronic illness linked to alcohol, but no one doubts they will emerge. “If consumption starts to rise again this could be undone,” says Nicholls. But Twenge is optimistic that moderate drinking is here to stay. “If you think about the causes here I don’t think any of them are going away,” she says. n
G_Alcohol_ cons
Jon White is comment editor at New Scientist
3 December 2016 | NewScientist | 39
Toy Wish you could get that plastic tat to vanish once the festive season’s done? Granted, says Sandrine Ceurstemont
Y
OUNG, energetic and clean-shaven, Scott Phillips looks the very antithesis of Santa Claus. Just as well: he makes toys disappear. The Western world’s festive consumer frenzy contributes to a global crisis that has left the planet up to its neck in long-lasting plastic tat, and its oceans, according to a recent estimate, awash with some 250 million tonnes of the stuff. What we wouldn’t give for plastics that could transform into something else, fall apart or even vanish altogether. In his lab at Penn State University, Phillips is on the case. “We make plastic objects disappear all the time,” he says. Perhaps it won’t be too long before the season’s must-have toy comes equipped with a self-destruct button. But today’s plastics are not just for Christmas. Indeed, their durability and low cost mean that many everyday objects are destined to hang around for decades. We can only guess at how long some plastics survive in landfill, but in many cases it extends beyond the 50 years or so we’ve been producing and discarding them on a grand scale. If we recycle plastic instead, melting it down takes a lot of energy and can release toxic components. And even then, the resulting mix of hard plastics that usually enters a recycling stream creates a polymer soup peppered with various dyes and solvents, so we end up with a hunk of junk plastic fit only for a single, final use, like a park bench. It was that end-of-life problem, rather than 40 | NewScientist | 3 December 2016
any Scrooge-like tendencies, that prompted Phillips to try to design self-destructing toys. “It’s a nice place to start minimising the accumulation of plastic waste,” he says. The first step is some basic chemistry. Research in the past few years has produced new sorts of polymers, the long, chain-like molecules that make up plastics. These polymers are just as durable as conventional ones in normal use, but contain chemical units at points within them, or at their ends, that prompt the material to break up at room temperature when it meets a particular stimulus. Phillips’s lab has been developing plastics that break down in ultraviolet light – not ideal for toys, but good for components not exposed to sunlight, for example on the inside of electronic devices. He has also been looking at plastics that disintegrate on contact with chemicals they don’t encounter in daily use, such as fluoride or hydrogen peroxide.
Destruction trigger One challenge is ensuring that the selfdestruct signal spreads from a plastic’s surface right through the material. Here, Phillips and his colleagues were inspired by plants such as the Venus flytrap, where a fleeting touch to a leaf causes a change in the whole plant. “We are building self-propagating reactions into our materials,” says Phillips. In a proof-ofconcept design, one molecular component of a water-repelling polymer film reacts to a
specific wavelength of light, starting a chemical reaction that spreads through the whole polymer and turns it hydrophilic. Phillips has also been building plastic objects from layers that react to different triggers, so that applying a sequence of them makes the objects change shape. These morphing materials might not quite make a real-life Transformer toy, but Phillips thinks they could be useful for creating adaptive tools: think bolts and washers that shrink to fit a range of screws or that change from rigid to rubbery. Other plastics can be engineered to
gentler chemical process to break down both PET plastics, commonly used in drink bottles, and the hard plastics used in smartphones and CDs that usually end up in landfill. Catalysts used in existing recycling processes leave heavy metals in the plastic that have to be removed since they are toxic and affect its structure. The new process creates a pure product, allowing the resulting molecules to be turned into even higher value polymers, for use in composites and in medical applications like drug delivery. “Now when I look at a bottle
steven wilson
“ The toilet might eventually be the ideal garbage disposal unit for plastic”
give out a chemical or light signal as they break down, with potential applications in medicine. Another innovative byproduct is a propulsion system: one of Phillips’s plastics springs forward because it releases carbon dioxide as it decomposes. Phillips is not alone in trying to make plastics vanish. At the University of the West of England in Bristol, UK, Ioannis Ieropoulos and his colleagues want to avoid rigid plastics and toxic power supplies for the robots they are developing. Instead, they plan to build them from soft, biodegradable polymers such
as latex or collagen, with microbial fuel cells that extract energy from waste liquids such as urine. “The materials we choose and their properties indicate the lifetime of the whole thing,” says Ieropoulos. The team hopes to develop tricks to change the expiry date of such plastics, perhaps by embedding substances that will ooze out or self-destruct in response to a signal if the robot gets lost. Meanwhile, James Hedrick from IBM Research in San Jose, California, and his team were looking for new materials to use in computer hardware when they developed a
I don’t see garbage, I see a feedstock for all types of new materials,” says Hedrick. The team is speaking to potential partners about commercialising the process. With Phillips’s plastics, mass production is still a long way off: they are slightly toxic and too expensive. But he thinks his materials could be put to immediate use as selfdestructing adhesives. Small amounts of the polymers can double as glue on a range of materials like glass, metal and plastic, and they are just as strong as conventional adhesive. “What’s neat is that ours can also be reversed,” says Phillips. “By applying a signal, the object you’ve glued together will fall apart.” Joost Duflou at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium has also developed a low-cost polymer glue that can bond the components of a television, and falls apart only when a particular amount of force is applied. Such materials might soon have a ready market: European Union laws being drafted could mean gadgets must be designed to disintegrate at the end of their lives. Phillips imagines a further, perhaps unexpected boon from his particular plastics. While his ultimate goal is to create a vanishing plastic that emits nothing but inert gases when it decays, many of those developed so far decompose in liquids – meaning the toilet might be an ideal general garbage disposal unit. Imagine plastics that respond to a signal from sewer-dwelling bacteria, or even components in urine, so parents can take unusual vengeance on an annoying toy by peeing on it. Not that Phillips wants to make a splash with that particular idea. “It often creeps people out when I mention it,” he says. n Sandrine Ceurstemont is a writer based in Morocco 3 December 2016 | NewScientist | 41
PEOPLE
Use a toad to catch a quake The world’s first seismoscope was created in AD 132 by polymath Zhang Heng, but did his legendary device really work? The evidence is shaky, finds Andrew Robinson
42 | NewScientist | 3 December 2016
mountains. The chief reason for detecting earthquakes, thought Zhang, was because they were heavenly omens indicating misconduct of government officials. “The heavens crack, and the earth shakes,” is one of many Chinese sayings about high politics and everyday life. After a particular earthquake shook the capital, Zhang submitted a statement to Emperor Shun describing the disaster as a divine comment on the failure of a new policy for recruiting the talented and virtuous for office. If movements within the earth were portents of corruption within the court, an instrument to detect earthquakes might greatly assist the emperor. The imperial eunuchs – advisers with the ear of the emperor – probably felt differently. On one occasion, the young emperor was said to have summoned Zhang to his chambers and asked him to name the most despised men in the kingdom. The eunuchs present during the
audience were prime candidates, but glared at Zhang so menacingly that he thought better of nominating them. Nevertheless, they later slandered him to the emperor, so it was not surprising that his career encountered periodic setbacks. He reflected upon his travails in some of his many poems, which won him literary fame, such as these closing lines from his final composition, written during his retirement: “If I set my mind free beyond the common world / Why care for worldly glory or disgrace?”
Heavenly inspiration
One of many variations on the seismoscope, in London’s Natural History Museum collection
Natural History Museum, London, UK/Bridgeman Images
C
LANG! An ornate dragon’s head suddenly spat a metal ball into the mouth of a bronze toad crouching patiently beneath it, and officials at the court of the Han emperor were astonished. And sceptical too: this supposedly revealed that an earthquake was happening elsewhere in China, yet they felt no tremors in the capital Luoyang. Sure enough, just a few days later, galloping horsemen brought news of a destructive earthquake in Longxi, 700 kilometres away. “Upon this everyone admitted the mysterious power of the instrument,” or so the story goes. From then on, officials in the Bureau of Astronomy and Calendar were required to note the occurrence and direction of earthquakes in the imperial realm indicated by this, the world’s first seismoscope. China has kept records of earthquakes since at least 780 BC – longer than any other country – and has suffered the two deadliest quakes in history. So perhaps it’s unsurprising that a Chinese official, Zhang Heng, should have been the first to create a seismoscope, around AD 132. His striking story is told in the chronicles of the Hou Han Shu (the history of the Later Han dynasty). And what a device it was. Shaped like an urn some 2 metres across, its curved bronze case was adorned with eight dragons’ heads and toads oriented in the directions of the compass. The position of the dragon that released its ball indicated the direction of an earthquake’s epicentre. Zhang called it houfeng didongyi: literally, a “wind-observing earth-movement instrument”; less literally, an “earthquake weathercock”. He believed earthquakes were linked to air movement, especially storm winds encountering obstacles, such as
Zhang spent the first few decades of his life far from the centre of imperial power. He was born in AD 78 to a distinguished but not wealthy family and it wasn’t until 112 that he was summoned to the capital by Emperor An to become a junior official, as a result of his broad learning. Zhang then worked his way up the ranks, including taking a stint as imperial astronomer/astrologer. Inspired by the heavens, he wrote the first clear Chinese description of the celestial sphere including the equator and sun’s apparent path during the year. He is also said to have designed the world’s first water-powered armillary sphere – the earliest in a long line of water-driven astronomical clocks in China. Zhang finally became a palace attendant in 134, allowing him to offer personal advice to the emperor. Despite his many talents, Zhang’s attitude to authority prevented his becoming the official court historian. He opposed the idea – favoured by the emperor and certain officials – of revising the Chinese calendar and compiling the history of the Han dynasty according to
Zhang Heng pictured with a scale model of his “earthquake weathercock”
movements of the ground more sensitively than a human could. To add to the uncertainty, we can never know if the seismoscope’s famous quake detection happened as chronicled in the Hou Han Shu, which was completed around 440, centuries after Zhang’s death. Suspiciously, the detection goes unmentioned in an earlier history, the Hou Han Ji, source of the Hou Han Shu’s description of the device. Moreover, the later document lists seven earthquakes between 132, when the seismoscope was made, and 139. And although one of these quakes, in 138, caused destruction in Longxi, the record clearly states that the tremors were also felt in the capital. Cullen suspects the detection story is “fan fiction”, inspired by admiration for
Roger-Viollet/REX/Shutterstock
“ Was the quake-detection story ‘fan fiction’ inspired by his mechanical creativity?”
some apocryphal teachings akin to the prophecies of Nostradamus. In 136, perhaps as a result of increasing political pressure, Zhang left the capital and became the chief administrator of a princely kingdom, and in 138 retired to a peaceful life of scholarship in his home town. But not for long. He was recalled to the capital, now with the rank of imperial secretary, but died shortly thereafter, in 139. Whether the dramatic success of his houfeng didongyi was a factor in his recall is, alas, unrecorded. Whatever the truth, the enigmatic seismoscope is his enduring legacy. It remains a mystery partly because it vanished without trace and partly because seismologists still cannot agree on its inner mechanism. While
the Hou Han Shu speaks volumes on the device’s outer appearance, it contains only a minimal description of the innards: “A central column capable of lateral displacement along tracks in the eight directions [so arranged as to operate] a closing and opening mechanism” in the dragons’ mouths. According to historian Christopher Cullen, an authority on ancient Chinese science, “The description of the device that has come down to us is sufficiently detailed to have led to numerous attempts at reconstruction, but not clear enough to enable any of the attempts to be taken as definitive.” Surely, the central column was a sensitive pendulum. Yet, seismologists have no clue how the complete mechanism could have kept mechanical friction low enough to detect tiny
Zhang’s undoubted mechanical creativity. These doubts haven’t stopped many experts in China, Japan and elsewhere attempting to reconstruct the seismoscope. In China, museum curator Wang Zhenduo modelled it twice: in 1936 with a conventional pendulum and in the 1950s with an inverted pendulum. Neither responded to real earthquakes, including the devastating Tangshan quake of 1976, which killed hundreds of thousands of people. This quake caused tremors in Beijing, where the second of Wang’s models was kept. During the past decade or so, a Chinese Academy of Sciences team led by retired geophysicist Feng Rui has built and tested a handsome new model with a conventional pendulum that is now prominently displayed in Beijing’s Science and Technology Museum. But it has yet to detect an earthquake, including the great Sichuan quake of 2008. Another model, in London’s Natural History Museum collection (pictured, left), made for a BBC TV programme in the 1970s from Wang’s 1936 design, has failed to detect an earthquake, too – less surprisingly, given the UK’s seismic stability. Nevertheless, the model’s popularity suggests that the puzzle of Zhang’s unique invention continues to fascinate not only China, but also the rest of the world. n Andrew Robinson is the author of Earth-Shattering Events: Earthquakes, nations and civilization (Thames & Hudson) 3 December 2016 | NewScientist | 43
culture
Good times, bad times How much of physics is real, and how much of reality is physics, asks Richard Webb Now: The physics of time by Richard A. Muller, W. W. Norton, $27.95; Reality is Not What it Seems: The journey to quantum gravity by Carlo Rovelli, Allen Lane, £16; QBism: The future of quantum physics by Hans Christian von Baeyer, Harvard University Press, $24.95; Fashion, Faith and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe by Roger Penrose, Princeton University Press, $29.95
standard cosmological model of a big bang universe rooted in Einstein’s theory of gravity, the general theory of relativity. Yet the deficiencies of those two theories are obvious. Not only do they contradict each other, they contradict how we feel reality should behave. Can we do better? Muller’s starting point is time, the most obvious place where our perception of reality and the description given by our physical theories diverge. Relativity robbed reality of a flowing time that neatly separates past from future. It denies the existence of any privileged spot from which we can measure time’s passage. How can a physical theory predict things so at odds with our experience? In Muller’s words, physics should explain what we see in reality, not contradict it. His is a thoughtful, thoughtprovoking and accessible book
“WHAT fraction of what you know that is important is physics?” Richard A. Muller strikes an unexpected note with this question towards the end of his book Now. A veteran of particle physics and cosmology behind at least two Nobel-prizewinning strands of research, Muller isn’t pouring cold water on an entire discipline. But he is addressing a theme that, one way or another, exercises him and the authors of three other major new books: how much of physics is real, and how “ In one sense fundamental physics is flowering like much of reality is physics? never before; in another, it There’s reason enough for is in one of its deep funks” the navel-gazing. In one sense fundamental physics is flowering like never before. In another, it is that blends concepts from in one of its deepest funks. The relativity, thermodynamics past five years have seen three and quantum theory to elucidate great experimental advances: the how physics got where it is, and discoveries of the Higgs boson the missteps that might have and gravitational waves, as well as led it there. It is less about the the Planck satellite’s meticulous destination, more about the measurements of the cosmic journey. Muller’s big reveal – that microwave background. But all new time might be continuously have served to confirm existing created in the aftermath of a 4D pictures of reality: the standard big bang – may or may not stand model of particle physics based up to scrutiny, as he freely admits. on quantum field theory, and the Something similar could be 44 | NewScientist | 3 December 2016
said of Carlo Rovelli’s pet idea. Author of last year’s bestseller Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, Rovelli is a leading light in loop quantum gravity, a theoretical endeavour which, after string theory, is the second most popular route to reconciling quantum theory and general relativity. As such he is part of an honourable tradition among physicists of seeking a better understanding of reality through the unification of physical theories. Bouts of unification have spurred on progress in physics ever since the 17th century when Newton married heavenly and Earthly movements in his laws of gravitation and motion. At each stage, new conceptual tools were introduced – particles, waves, fields – that, mathematically at
least, help us to order and predict the world’s workings. Each has required sometimes cherished preconceptions to be reconsidered. Loop quantum gravity is no exception. Again, you have to unpick space-time, the unified fabric of reality that Einstein’s relativity stitched together. At the infinitesimal level of the Planck scale, space becomes a pixelated, rough, quantum foam. That, incidentally, also supplies time with a new guise: the direction in which it flows emerges from the order in which processes happen on unobservably small scales within this foam. As radical as this sounds, Rovelli makes a convincing argument that this is the conservative option compared with the extra dimensions, fields and particles
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Christian von Baeyer bangs the drum for a new “Quantum Bayesian” interpretation: the uncertainties that apparently haunt the quantum world before it is measured have little to do with reality being uncertain, and everything to do with us being uncertain about reality. In QBism, quantum theory becomes a theory not of the observed, but of the observer. Von Baeyer does a passable job of setting out the stall, although his more narrowly focused book
David Maurice Smith/Oculi/Agence VU/Camera Press
“ Ultimately physics only describes that part of reality that is susceptible to mathematics”
demanded by string theory and its widely trailed precursor, supersymmetry. Newton, Einstein and co did not try to “guess” new theories, argues Rovelli, but built on what was known. Quantum theory and general relativity are “right” theories on their respective scales of the small and the large – the trick is to do as little damage to both while melding them into a unified whole. In the best tradition of scientists writing popular science, Rovelli marries physical understanding with a light touch and a literary eye for incidental detail. Take the case of the Belgian priest-astronomer Georges Lemaître, who in 1951 successfully dissuaded Pope Pius XII from equating the big bang (Lemaître’s baby more than anyone’s) with the biblical act of creation in
Catholic dogma. His argument was that it would be embarrassing should it turn out that the big bang wasn’t actually the beginning – an act of extraordinary foresight, given that contemporary ideas about the existence of a multiverse were decades away.
Quantum gravity Yet in some senses Rovelli’s easy, readable style pulls the wool over our eyes. You could be forgiven for concluding that a working theory of loop quantum gravity as good as exists, and that experimental verification is around the corner. Would it were that simple. And a blunter question emerges. Quantum gravity is unlikely to produce a more intuitive picture of reality than we
Are there many important things about reality physics can’t explain?
have now, and its predictions will probably only kick in at energies so huge and distances so small it is hard to see how we might probe the theory experimentally or find a practical use for it. Never say never, of course, and knowledge for knowledge’s sake has its value – but in what sense is such a theory a useful guide to reality? Let’s roll back a bit: if we’re making intuition the measure of a theory, where does that leave quantum theory? It’s given us lasers and computers, so on some level it is unquestionably useful – even if the old line that if you think you understand it, you haven’t understood it, is both true and has a fittingly fuzzy origin. In his new book QBism, Hans
tends to get lost in the details at the expense of the big picture. But QBism remains a minority sport. Is that, to return to Muller’s critique, because of the inability of physicists to recognise or to accept the limits of their pretensions to describe reality? This theme is taken up by Roger Penrose in Fashion, Faith and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe – by far the least easy read of the four books, but one that gives us a valuable insight into what one of the most prominent theoretical physicists of recent times makes of reality’s relationship to ideas in quantum theory, standard cosmology, and theories that pretend to replace them. So where does all this leave us? Ultimately, physics only describes the part of reality that is susceptible to mathematics – as Muller points out, not least because Kurt Gödel’s theorems of the 1930s made it clear that any mathematically based theory will always be incomplete. Efforts such as the push to a quantum theory of gravity may bring us to a more complete understanding, but it is likely our vista will remain blurred. No doubt physics is important, but it could be there is much that is important about reality that is not physics. n 3 December 2016 | NewScientist | 45
culture
A curious life Eccentricity was the birthright of 19th-century naturalist Frank Buckland, finds Stephanie Pain
BIG bushy beard: check. Bizarre childhood: check. House stuffed with exotic and sometimes scary animals (not all stuffed): check. In the roll call of Victorian eccentrics, a man who dissects his dad, dines on fried viper and roast giraffe and tries to become a salmon must rank somewhere near the top. Thanks to Richard Girling’s biography, my current favourite nutty naturalist is Frank Buckland: surgeon, zoologist, pioneering fish farmer. What gives him the edge is that for all his wacky ways, he was tireless in his search for knowledge about the natural world and for the best of reasons. Buckland wanted to find better sources of food to feed the poor and became a tireless champion of fish. He never made the grade academically yet became a respected expert, sell-out speaker and hugely popular writer. Buckland was never going to be ordinary. He grew up among piles of fossils, bones and a menagerie of strange animals because his father was the equally eccentric William Buckland, the University of Oxford ’s first geology professor and an eminent churchman. It was Buckland senior who instigated the family interest in improving the nation’s diet. Dinner might include hedgehog, horse, puppy – even crocodile, Buckland fought for a dependable supply of fish for the UK’s poorest 46 | NewScientist | 3 December 2016
turtle or half-rotten bear. to send me down some chops. Surrounded by animals alive, It had, however, been buried a deconstructed or on his plate, couple of days, but I got them to Buckland junior began his own dig it up… It was not very good.” investigation of the natural world. Buckland’s eating habits make Throughout his life, Buckland for entertaining reading, but there observed, dissected and tasted. are other reasons to remember Secondhand facts weren’t good him. He had hoped to do good as enough: he had to find out for a surgeon, but spent much of his himself. There was nothing he time as unofficial vet at London wouldn’t taste. Roasted field mice Zoo (a good source of previously made “a splendid bonne bouche for a hungry boy”. Boa constrictor “Earwigs were ‘horribly bitter’ to eat and tasted like veal. Kangaroos were an ideal source of good meat, with decomposing panther was not a huge success either” their long tails better than oxtail. But earwigs were “horribly bitter”. Decomposing panther wasn’t a untasted species) until he threw huge success either. Hearing that himself into the cause that the panther at a friend’s zoo had occupied the rest of his life: fish. died, “I wrote… at once to tell him Buckland founded the UK’s
Chronicle/Alamy Stock Photo
The Man Who Ate the Zoo: Frank Buckland, forgotten hero of natural history by Richard Girling, Chatto & Windus, £17.99
Acclimatisation Society to identify and introduce new food crops and animals. But he quickly concluded that the best way to feed proteinstarved families was to ensure a dependable supply of fish. He developed techniques for hatching fish eggs, hoping to restock depleted rivers. He spelled out why so few rivers supported salmon: most were filthy. “Manufacturers of all kinds of materials… seem to think rivers are convenient channels kindly given to them by nature to carry away… the refuse of their works.” Weirs were another problem, preventing salmon returning upriver to spawn. Those that did make it were poached before they could breed. Buckland tackled every problem, river by river – even wading in to see for himself the obstacles salmon face. He identified threats to coastal fisheries and argued for government-sponsored research. “We shall keep stumbling and blundering along until there are no fish left to catch, unless we at once grasp the lamp of science and guided by its light, boldly strive to find out for ourselves what actually is going on.” When Buckland wasn’t leaping into rivers, he was writing a stream of articles that changed how people looked at the natural world. Nature, he convinced a previously uninterested public, was to be admired and protected. In his lifetime he was revered. After he died, he was forgotten. But unlike the panther, Buckland was well worth digging up again. And if you want to know why he dissected his dad, read the book. n Stephanie Pain is a consultant for New Scientist
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LETTERS
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editor’s pick
Our ancestors may not have been tripping
From Geoff Harmer Reading, Berkshire, UK I was very interested by Alison George’s description of cave art symbols used throughout the ancient world (12 November, p 36). But the description of archaeologist David Lewis-Williams’s work gives the impression that hallucinations,
perhaps part of shamanic rituals, are caused by drugs and migraines. That is true, but many archaeologists, including LewisWilliams, state that throughout the world there are many other ways to create shamanistic hallucinations, such as drumming, singing, rhythmic dancing, fasting, meditating, fatigue and hypnagogia (a transitional state to and from sleep). The signs seen in the first stage of the hallucinatory state are very similar, no matter what method is used to achieve that state. In 1992 I visited members of the Mentawi tribe, still living traditionally on Siberut Island off Indonesia. One evening I saw three shamans conduct their ritual by drumming, singing and rhythmic dancing, which induced a hallucinatory trance that caused them to collapse on the floor.
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Culture is not sacred when it oppresses
“These are my people”. Is he “honour” bound to this culture?
From Nicola Hutchison Harlow, Essex, UK I am disappointed that researcher Ryan Brown seeks “only to understand” the “honour” aspect of southern US culture, “not change it” (12 November, p 32). He acknowledges that it leads to oppression of women and violence against them. While I agree that heavyhanded attempts at cultural change based on unreplicated results would be bad, I maintain that where breaches of human rights are endemic to a culture, then those aspects of the culture deserve no more preservation than a disease would – though members of the culture must be sensitively engaged and empowered by those working towards change. Brown notes that
From Gwydion Williams Coventry, West Midlands, UK Your article on “honour cultures” was interesting, but could have given more history. The Icelandic sagas, to take just one example, give details of just such a system, operating with its own laws and without a regular state.
Unexpected origins of sign languages From Les Hearn London, UK Your correspondent bemoans the impending loss of Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL) (Letters, 5 November) and accuses Hebrew speakers of lacking respect for “languages and cultures under threat”. Israeli Sign Language (ISL) has no more to do
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“ Geo-engineering terrifies me. Technology with planet-wide consequences tied to international politics?” cott Wahlstrom responds to Matthew Watson’s call for tests of S controversial geoengineering methods (p 20)
with Hebrew than British Sign Language has to do with… British. It was developed from German Sign Language, which was taken to Jerusalem in the 1930s. It is the main means of communication for deaf Jews, Arabs, Druze and Bedouins in Israel. If you only sign ABSL, you are confined to one small village for the rest of your life. If you sign ISL, a whole new set of opportunities opens up in education, employment and social relationships. No one is trying to stop people signing in the village language but it is difficult to see what else the authorities should do other than offer them the same services available to deaf people elsewhere in Israel. From Rod Murphy Pinegowrie, South Africa Shira Rubin observes that AlSayyid Bedouin Sign Language
achieving the capability to communicate broadly “without complex grammar is largely a mystery” (8 October, p 36). In the 1960s I worked for a parachuting training school: we flew with no door on the aircraft. Wind noise prevented speech. We quickly developed a sign language that was quite complex, conveying details of altitude, air speed, direction and what action to take to compensate for a non-optimal exit from the plane. Needs must…
Some roots and branches of 3D printing From Guy Cox, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia Two readers pointed out that back in 1974, New Scientist columnist Daedalus proposed 3D printing by laser beam polymerisation within a liquid resin – rather than accreting
THE CHILDREN
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layers as in modern 3D printing (Letters, 12 November). Something similar has actually been done by Satoshi Kawata and colleagues at Osaka University, Japan. Their masterpiece, created in 2001, was a complex sculpture of a prancing bull – the size of a red blood cell (18 August 2001, p 7). Rather than using two laser beams as Daedalus proposed, they used one pulsed beam. They depended on the fact that in twophoton reactions both must hit the molecule simultaneously, which will only happen at the centre of the focused spot. From Stewart Dickson Champaign, Illinois, US As long ago as 1989 I was involved in the first wave of 3D printing; but the trumpeting of the recent second wave, which started after some patents expired, perplexes me. I hear that sales of home 3D
printers are in decline, as people discover how non-automatic it really is. But economic forecasters keep predicting exponential growth and markets into the billions. Only for the wealthiest 1 per cent, I think. The value of 3D-printed sculpture is even harder to see than the mass market for customised prosthetics.
Population size is only part of the story From Iain Climie Whitchurch, Hampshire, UK It is certainly true that a drastic cut in the human population could benefit the rest of nature, but Perry Bebbington overlooks some elephants in the room (Letters, 22 October). We are not only part of a damaging species but probably all have relatively well-off Western lifestyles – >
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LETTERS while the median global income is a few pounds per person per day. Compare the impact of our lifestyles in terms of diet, cash crops, transport, waste, housing plus water and mineral uses with (say) a Malawian subsistence farmer, and we don’t look too good. If human numbers are to fall naturally, the death rate must exceed the birth rate. It is easy to think this ought to apply to other people; accepting our own entry in the obituary column is a little less popular.
Language, nature, nurture and change From Christine McNulty Oxhey, Hertfordshire, UK Marek Kohn quotes linguist Noam Chomsky concluding: language “is not properly regarded as a system of communication… It is a system for expressing thought” (5 November, p 42). This is the key to resolving the two opposing ideas concerning the evolutionary source of human language: does it spring from nature or nurture? The 17th-century philosopher John Locke was also clear that the Tom Gauld
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primary role of language is to keep order in the human mind and to be the engine of free will. Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man, however, proposed that language evolved as an instinctual means of communication “through natural and sexual selection”. He was arguably the originator of the idea of heritable, mutable “memes”, declaring that “the survival of certain favoured words in the struggle for existence is natural selection”. As Alun Anderson observes, reviewing Tom Wolfe’s book about linguists The Kingdom of Speech, none of this explains “how language comes to mean something” (12 November, p 44). Humans are the only animal that can create a virtual reality in the theatre of the mind, and that can deny the evidence of the senses. Language is the antithesis of instinct. The idea that our thoughts are instinctive is parent to the dangerous idea that culture is innate. From Bryn Glover, Kirkby Malzeard, North Yorkshire, UK Kohn implicitly poses the
question of whether science is or can be politically neutral. There can be no doubt that neutrality is untenable. Science concerns the pursuit of knowledge, which naturally means new knowledge and new information. Such new information could theoretically be kept isolated from the rest of humanity as some sort of sterile museum exhibit that we could all admire while refusing to change any aspect of our existence. But the history of humanity makes clear that this never has been the case, and probably never will be. Consider the early use of fire for cooking (5 November, p 36). The work of every scientist can lead to new and possibly (though not necessarily) improved ways of leading our lives: change. Like it or not, change and opposition to change are what politics is all about. It is a cop-out for scientists to claim that they are the seekers of new ideas, but it is the job of politicians to decide what to do with their results. To provide new information in any expectation other than that it could potentially be applied to the
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nature of society flies against the universal experience of the last few millennia of human history.
The standard of proof to put value on a life From Neil Holmes Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, UK Discussing the price of a life, Shannon Fischer mentions the case of Victor Nealon (22 October, p 28). His conviction was quashed in 2013 because DNA on a victim’s underwear was shown not to be his, but he has not been compensated for the 17 years he spent in prison. Fischer wrote: “The evidence bar is so high that many receive no compensation at all.” It is worse than that. A claimant for compensation now has to prove beyond reasonable doubt that they did not commit the crime. Nealon could not do this. It is virtually impossible to do so. The barrister Helena Kennedy said when the law was changed by the then secretary of state Chris Grayling that “to ask people to prove their innocence beyond reasonable doubt is an affront to our system of law.” We are, of course, thankful that the government has achieved its objective of saving money. From Carl Zetie Waterford, Virginia, US The article left out one method of valuing a life: the purely capitalist principle that a thing is worth only what somebody is willing to pay for it. On that basis, my life is worthless, having reached that point where I’m too old to sell my body for sex, yet too young to sell it for science. Letters should be sent to: Letters to the Editor, New Scientist, 110 High Holborn, London WC1V 6EU Email: letters@newscientist.com Include your full postal address and telephone number, and a reference (issue, page number, title) to articles. We reserve the right to edit letters. Reed Business Information reserves the right to use any submissions sent to the letters column of New Scientist magazine, in any other format.
54 | NewScientist | 3 December 2016
SIGNAL BOOST
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Heart of the matter
IF YOU or one of your children needed a heart transplant, your gratitude to the family that donated one would be boundless. In their hour of greatest despair that family would have consented to an organ donation, a selfless, life-saving choice. But if the positions were reversed, could you make the same decision? Sadly, the number of donor hearts does not match demand. That means many adults and children die waiting. Every death is the loss of a father or a son, a mother or a daughter. Part of the problem is that not enough families give their consent. In the UK only 60 per cent agree compared with 80 per cent in many other European countries. That means 4 out of 10 families who are approached in the UK refuse to donate. Perhaps that’s not surprising. Many people are uncomfortable about confronting their mortality and that of their immediate family. Surveys for the National Health Service show that more than 30 per cent of people have never discussed organ donation, and few are aware how those closest to them feel about it. The NHS wants to change this. Its organ donation team is encouraging families to talk about organ donation, to think about how they would feel about donation if they needed a transplant and to encourage them to sign the organ donation register at organdonation.nhs.uk. And of course, the problem is not confined to hearts. People waiting for lungs, livers, kidneys, corneas and so on, vastly outnumber the supply of organs for transplant. At the end of March 2016, there were almost 6500 patients waiting for some kind of transplant. Even a small increase in the percentage of people agreeing to donate would make a huge difference to the waiting time. Increasing the UK consent rate from 60 per cent to 80 per cent would lead to about 1000 more transplants each year. That’s a great many lives. One of them could be yours. Justin Mullins
For more information on organ donations and transplants visit www.organdonation.nhs.uk Signal Boost is your chance to tell our readers about a project that needs their help. We’re looking for campaigns, programmes or ideas from non-profit or voluntary enterprises based in the UK. Send a proposal, together with images and information about yourself, to signalboost@newscientist.com. Publication is entirely at New Scientist’s discretion. We reserve the right to edit contributions for clarity and style.
My name is Martha. My mum says I’d still be alive if drugs were legally regulated.
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FEEDBACK
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Or does the Second Law of Robotics already forbid following orders that would cause harm to humans? Feedback expects we’ll soon field cold calls from law firms asking if we’ve been in an accident with a robot.
AS WE recover from our close encounter with the moon after it skimmed a dizzying 356,511 kilometres from Earth – the closest pass since 1948 – we turn our attention to the after-effects of this celestial event. At wine-buff bible Decanter, brows were furrowed over the important question: what could the supermoon do to wine? The answer is, for most of the
Paul McDevitt
world, absolutely nothing, of course. But there are some vineyards bracing themselves for an effect: those run as “biodynamic” farms, where organic practices merge with the occult. As a biodynamic wine consultant – a role we presume is as a sort of astrologer for grapes – Monty Waldin thinks that the closer-than-average moon could bring a “winter mood” to the vines, making the wines taste less fruity. But the brighter-than-average moon could also bring a “summer mood” to the vines, he says, making the wines taste more fruity. So your wine will be less fruity, more fruity – or possibly the change will be indistinguishable. A dramatic effect
for a moon that was only 0.38 per cent closer than the previous month.
MEANWHILE, Brian King is concerned that current dining trends might leave him hungry for more, and not in a good way. At a recent trip to a restaurant, he was offered “bunless meat free burgers”. Just the dressing, perhaps? “The restaurant also offered doughnut holes,” says Brian, “which obviously have no fat, sugar, other carbohydrates or anything else.” At least they’re safe from the supermoon though. REPORTS of a robot on the rampage in China. A domestic droid named Fatty crashed out of its booth and through a glass panel at the China Hi-Tech Fair in Shenzhen, injuring a bystander. An official statement from organisers pinned the blame on a robot operator, who “mistakenly hit the forward button, instead of the reverse one”. Can robots invoke the Nuremberg defence of “only following orders”?
Pat Collins asks: “Have you encountered the Director of Science and Technology for Employer Solutions at Quest Diagnostics, a drug testing firm, named Dr Barry Sample?” 56 | NewScientist | 3 December 2016
BAN this sick filth! Having bided its time for almost a century, the Scottish Medical Journal launches a broadside against violence in early-20th-century cinema with “Eye trauma in Laurel and Hardy movies – another nice mess”, which “examines the occurrence of eye trauma in Laurel and Hardy movies and discusses the impact they could have… had if the films were set in reality”. Popcorn in hand, the researchers binge-watched 92 Laurel and Hardy movies, tallying 88 incidences of ocular trauma (and therefore, we suspect, at least four disappointingly eyeballfriendly movies). Hardy was the recipient of 48 per cent of eye traumas, most frequently an eye poke in which “traumatic corneal abrasion was very likely the most frequently occurring injury”. Jabbing fingers were assisted in their work by “a stick, a champagne cork, a tree branch and tacks”. The authors warn gravely that “if their films had been reality, especially Hardy but also Laurel and several other people, would have suffered from serious eye injuries”. While we wait to hear back from the British Board of Film Classification on whether the movies will be slapped with an 18 certificate in light of this research, we think these medics make for good optometrists but lousy cinema buddies. OUR abortive efforts to find the body of water responsible for Himalayan pink sea salt has left some readers feeling left high and dry (5 November). Tom Brock asks “isn’t all salt sea salt?”, to which we reply, no, the kind on dry land is rock salt. But, as Barry Cash points out: “It’s likely the salt was formed from an ancient sea; if so at
what point does it cease to be sea salt?” Perhaps a geologist can help.
MORE than a pinch of salt might be called for when visiting California’s Santa Barbara Salt Cave, “a natural way to enhance overall physical and mental health”. Michael Littlewood tells us this is not a cave but a spa clad with the celebrated Himalayan seasoning. On offer are saltinfused yoga, salty meditation, services to rub negative ions – that is, salt – into your skin, and the chance to relax in the “zerogravity” deckchairs that find themselves erected regularly in Feedback’s inbox – or better still, “lie directly in the salt”. If you can’t make it to Santa Barbara, Feedback recommends clambering into a roadside hopper where the local authority
keeps its road grit, for a lowbudget salt-infused isolation chamber experience. PREVIOUSLY, Feedback noted attempts by Brian Reffin Smith to download an assembly guide from the IKEA website, only to be told “this page is under construction” (19 November). Chris Williams thinks that “perhaps Brian needs a computer keyboard with an Allen key”.
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THE LAST WORD Power ballads Does listening to heavy metal music require more battery or electrical power than other types of music, for example solo acoustic artists?
only reason why it could use more electrical power than listening to other types of music. Amplifiers are rated by the average power output, which is derived from the root mean square (RMS) of the alternating current voltage waveform. Because music normally has a wide dynamic range – the difference between loud and quiet sounds – the actual power consumption is likely to be much less than the quoted RMS, even when listening at full volume. However, in recent years there has been a drive to make CDs
n The quick answer is yes. When an amplifier exceeds its operating capacity, a type of waveform distortion called clipping occurs. Let’s assume that the volume is turned up to the point just before clipping kicks in – where the amplifier is pushing out its maximum voltage without distortion. This clipping point fixes the maximum output “ Allegedly the ‘loudest’ CD peak voltage. created was Metallica’s An instrument with a pure Death Magnetic, which tone will have a nearly sinusoidal would use more power” single-frequency waveform. So the peak-to-average voltage will be 1 divided by the square root sound louder by compressing of 2, which makes 0.707. For the dynamic range, which is an complex music that has lots idea taken from AM radio; this of different frequencies – is the so-called “loudness war”. particularly heavy metal – the Allegedly the “loudest” CD created output spends much more time is Metallica’s Death Magnetic, at the peak voltage level, so the which would therefore use more peak-to-average approaches 1. power than a CD with a greater Battery life is determined by dynamic range. the average power level, which is One side effect of making CDs voltage squared. So heavy metal louder in this way is that it can (and similar complex waveforms) fatigue the auditory system. I am could drain the battery nearly a long-time Metallica fan and love twice as fast as a pure tone for the that album, but I can rarely listen same volume level. to it all the way through. It took Paul Riley a while for me to work out why Ilkeston, Derbyshire, UK that is. Richard Hind n As any heavy metal devotee York, UK will tell you, heavy metal should be listened to with the amplifier n Heavy metal music typically turned up to 11… But that isn’t the involves higher and more
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sustained sound levels than other types. Whether this requires greater electrical power depends largely on the design of the amplifiers driving the speakers. Class A amplifiers draw constant power from their supplies irrespective of the signal level, with any power not delivered to the speakers dissipated as heat within the equipment. This makes them very inefficient, but they are capable of outstandingly low levels of non-linearity and distortion, and so are much loved by audiophiles. Class B amplifiers are much more efficient because their power consumption correlates strongly with that delivered to the speakers. However, they suffer from crossover distortion, which results in a zero-voltage “flat spot” in the waveform and is most apparent at low signal levels. Good design can limit this to an acceptable level, but cannot eliminate it completely. Nevertheless, most high-powered audio amplifiers are of this type. Class D amplifiers operate in a digital or switching mode, delivering power to the speakers in the form of pulses at a frequency well above the audible range. The power delivered is adjusted by varying the pulse width to produce the desired audio output and this correlates strongly with that drawn from the supply. Efficiency is very high, and they are highly compatible with digital circuitry, so they are now the
preferred type for batterypowered equipment such as cellphones and MP3 players. So, for a class A amplifier the answer to the original question is no, but for class B or D amplifiers the answer is a qualified yes. Tony Ellis Porirua, New Zealand
Breaking the law If the laws of physics very slowly began to break down, who would be most likely to notice first?
n The words “break down” in the context of this question suggest change – and change implies some reforming. If we are talking about fundamental laws then most physicists would be very reluctant to say that these can ever break down. General laws are different. In some cases these can be said to “evolve” as our understanding of all that surrounds us improves. So if evolving can be described as a form of breakdown, change or reform then it will be physicists who notice first. C. Smith Whitstable, Kent, UK
This week’s question Plant departure
If all the oxygen-producing plants disappeared suddenly, how long would it take for us to die? Jimmy Littlefield (age 8) Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire, UK
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