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Contents

Volume 229 No 3063

This issue online newscientist.com/issue/3063

News

Leaders

Animal invaders on the kill list

News

5

8

6 UPFRONT

Texas abortion law goes before Supreme Court. Google car crash. Zika linked to paralysis. Astronaut twin returns home 8 THIS WEEK Our galaxy is showing its age. Did life begin in icy seas? Tame cancer rather than kill it.

Chimps use friendship to beat stress. The hunt for Planet Nine. Fish splits into two species. Saturn’s moon has waves 17 IN BRIEF

Gorillas hum as they eat. Necrophiliac birds.

The universe’s end. Squid hunts with ink

Johner Images / Alamy Stock Photo

Europe is set to decide which foreign species to wipe out

On the cover

30

We didn’t predict this...

Is this discovery bigger than the Higgs?

New forensic techniques raise fears of misuses. Encryption battles rage on

34 The “C” word Time to start talking about a cure for cancer 38 Your vapour trail Telltale microbe clouds 22 Living light Bacterial illumination 8 Aliens out Europe’s invasive species clampdown 28 Say it with brainwaves The power of telepathy

Features

34

Technology 20 Building aeroplanes in augmented reality.

Our blind faith in robots. Bioluminescent lights made from microbes

Aperture 24 Spawning mass of fish make a milky way

Opinion 26 ANALYSIS How long until an AI beats a Go champion, asks Garry Kasparov. David Berger says doctors shouldn’t bow to state coercion over refugee health. Facebook’s AI hints at the future of work 28 Brain to brain Andrea Stocco hopes his telepathy tech will enable minds to meet

Features

The “C” word

30 We didn’t predict this... (see above left) 34 The “C” word (see left) 38 Your vapour trail The cloud of microbes that reveals your every move

Time to start talking about a cure for cancer

CultureLab 42 What price reason? Have we let the PR industry run amok and take control?

43 Fabulous fringes Exploring the wild frontiers of consciousness

Martin Oeggerli 2012, kindly supported by FHNW

Coming next week…

The power of the mind

How your thoughts control you

Plastic fantastic

Regulars 52 letters No one need own a driverless car 56 Feedback Quantum queues 57 The Last Word Galaxy twirl

Trusty polymer gets a radical makeover

5 March 2016 | NewScientist | 3

Ashley Cooper/Visuals Unlimited/getty

LEADERS

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by Williams Gibbons (Wolverhampton)

Will it stand up in court?

New forensic techniques raise fears of misuse of evidence IT BECAME known as “the CSI effect”. TV shows such as NCIS, Law and Order, Silent Witness and of course CSI itself sparked a surge of popular interest in forensic science, swelling the applications for university courses.

But with this popularity came concern that idealised TV depictions of crime labs would cause the public to invest too much faith in forensics. On TV, tests are definitive, databases always find a match and scientists rarely make mistakes.

The public, however, turns out to be capable of telling fact from fiction. Studies of potential jurors carried out around the world have shown that they maintain realistic expectations of forensics.

Sadly, we can’t always say the same for practitioners. In the US, the Department of Justice has commissioned a major review of the FBI’s application of forensic science in the courtroom. This was prompted by a number of high-profile abuses such as the discovery that FBI agents routinely misrepresented the results of hair analysis.

The UK also has problems. In 2012, the government disbanded its Forensic Science Service and split the work among private firms, prompting fears that quality would suffer. Those fears have not been entirely dispelled.

Next month, the government’s Forensic Science Regulator will publish an extensive review of the

Those prying eyes THE encryption wars continue.

Apple is still refusing the FBI’s request to help unlock an iPhone owned by San Bernardino bomber Syed Rizwan Farook, which the agency believes holds valuable evidence. Apple argues that doing so would weaken security for all iPhone users. The power struggle looks set to go all the way to the Supreme Court, and – surreally – may depend on a contemporary

interpretation of a 1789 law called the All Writs Act. You might think that new laws are the answer, but be careful what you wish for. Apple probably wouldn’t even get a hearing if the case were taking place in the UK. The revised Investigatory Powers Bill, released this week (see page 6), suggests that companies would be compelled to remove “electronic protections” they have applied to

procedures it expects scientists to follow when investigating sexual assault cases, after allegations that using a contractor’s procedures would compromise the evidence.

Now we have a new tool to worry about. Inferring that someone was at a crime scene by assessing the presence of microbes may soon have its day in court (see page 38). This technique has been hailed by one lawyer as potentially the biggest advance since DNA forensics. But it raises fresh concerns about overzealous law enforcement and naive jurors.

Those may turn out to be unfounded, but that’s no reason to be complacent. A lot still hangs on our ability to tell forensic fact from fiction. n

their users’ messages and devices.

Should the bill pass into law, it is difficult to see how Apple could refuse to cooperate. And under gagging clauses in the bill, the company would also not be able to engage in the very public debate it has started in the US. Encryption is hard to get worked up about. But the outcome of these fights will go a long way to decide the balance of power between governments’ desire to pry and citizens’ right to secrecy. That means you. n 5 March 2016 | NewScientist | 5

eric gay/ap/pa

Upfront

Texas abortion fight IT’S been called the most momentous

modifications to increase room size

abortion case confronting the US Supreme Court in a generation. As New Scientist went to press, the justices were gearing up to hear a Texas case that could affect abortion provision across the country.

The law being challenged, known as HB2, was passed in Texas in 2013.

Since then, the number of clinics in the state has dropped from around 40 to around 10. If the law stands, these would also be at risk of closure.

HB2 stipulates that doctors

and corridor width. The law also rules out any abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy and limits the way the procedure can be carried out.

Supporters of the law argue that the criteria will ensure women receive better care, but US medical organisations dispute this. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American Medical Association have stated that instead of protecting women, the law jeopardises their health by restricting

working at abortion clinics must have permission to admit people at a hospital within 50 kilometres of the clinic, and that all clinics meet the same building standards as outpatient surgery centres. In many cases, this would require expensive

access to abortion providers.

If a majority is reached in the Supreme Court, the decision will affect all lower courts in the country. But if it is a tie, which is possible since Justice Scalia’s death last month, then it will stand in Texas but not nationwide.

–Fighting to keep the clinics open-

Wildlife crime plan FOUR years in the slammer.

That’s what those found guilty of wildlife crime could face if a European plan to combat illegal trade in animal parts is approved.

Conservation groups welcomed the proposals, unveiled on 26 February by the European Commission. “A key element in the plan is the recognition of wildlife trafficking as a serious crime,” says Philip Mansbridge, UK director of the International Fund for Animal Welfare. “As one of the world’s most lucrative criminal

“The wildlife trade is one of the most lucrative criminal activities, after people and drug trafficking” activities, valued at €15 billion annually, illegal wildlife trade ranks fourth globally in terms of value, behind people and drug trafficking, and counterfeiting.”

In its action plan, expected to be endorsed by member states’ environment ministers in June, the commission urges all 28 members of the European Union 6 | NewScientist | 5 March 2016

to recategorise wildlife trafficking as a “serious crime”, making it punishable by up to four years in prison. By beefing up the involvement of law enforcement authorities in investigation of cases, the aim is to increase awareness of how serious the crime is, and that it often provides funds for terrorist groups.

The plan points out that although most poaching takes place in Africa and Asia, and most consumption is in East Asia, much of the illegal material is transported through hubs in Europe. “The challenge now is to ensure the plan is fully implemented,” says Katalin Kecse-Nagy, European director of Traffic, the wildlife trade monitoring network.

Meanwhile, the UK government announced it would continue funding the National Wildlife Crime Unit for another four years, assuaging recent fears over the unit’s future. Heather Sohl of the conservation group WWF-UK told the media that the move shows the government is serious about combating illegal trade within UK borders.

Zika fingered again AS WE await firm evidence that the Zika virus is responsible for the spate of babies born in Latin America with small, damaged brains, it seems Zika may also play a role in a condition called Guillain-Barré syndrome.

GBS can occur after a viral or bacterial infection. Symptoms include weakness and numbness; in some cases, people can’t walk.

During an outbreak of Zika in French Polynesia in 2013 and 2014, cases of GBS jumped to around

eight times their previous level.

Latin American countries are now beginning to report a similar rise.

Blood samples from 42 people in French Polynesia who were diagnosed with GBS during the Zika outbreak provide the clearest evidence yet of a link. All but one carried a type of antibody that suggested a recent Zika infection.

And 36 reported Zika symptoms a week before the onset of GBS. The data would suggest that 24 out of every 100,000 cases of Zika will result in GBS (The Lancet, DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(16)00562-6).

Snooper’s bill to go ahead THE UK government is pushing ahead

forced to remove “electronic

with plans to update surveillance laws, despite criticism from privacy activists, communications firms and three parliamentary committees.

On Tuesday, the Home Office published the latest version of its Investigatory Powers Bill. “The revised bill is both clearer and stronger in protecting privacy,” said home secretary Theresa May (pictured).

The final version attempts to clarify that a company will only be

protections”, such as encryption, it has applied to users’ messages when it is “technically feasible” to do so. The earlier version suggested firms could be required to decrypt messages for which they do not have a key, which is impossible.

This may still be the case, and will hinge on whether firms like Apple are deemed to apply certain kinds of very strong encryption to messages, or if a user does it themselves.

For new stories every day, visit newscientist.com/news

THAT was quick. Last week researchers reported they had traced a cosmic blast of radio waves back to its source for the first time – but now another team of fast-acting astronomers has

Xu Yu/Xinhua Press/Corbis

Radio wave ruckus

60 Seconds

Winston destruction Tropical storm Winston is both the most powerful storm ever recorded in the South Pacific and the most destructive. Fiji estimates the damage at half a billion dollars, 10 per cent of the country’s GDP. Around 50,000 people are still living in evacuation shelters.

“The authors at least have to explain why their interpretation is more probable”

Grey hair gene

ANDY RAIN/EPA

called the result into question.

On 25 February, a team lead by Evan Keane at the Jodrell Bank Observatory in the UK published a paper in the journal Nature claiming they had finally found Winds of change the source of one of these CHINA is surging ahead in its mysterious signals. They did this switch to renewables and away by following up an observation of from coal – a move it claims will a fast radio burst (FRB) and seeing allow the nation to surpass its a galaxy with a radio “afterglow” carbon emissions targets. in the same direction.

The country’s solar and wind But Peter Williams of the energy capacity soared last year Harvard-Smithsonian Center for by 74 and 34 per cent respectively Astrophysics and his colleagues compared with 2014, according to say that conclusion is wrong. figures issued by China’s National Over the following weekend they Bureau of Statistics this week. found the galaxy was glowing Meanwhile, its consumption again, which shouldn’t happen (arxiv.org/abs/1602.08434).

“The latest figures confirm The galaxy probably contains what is known as an active galactic China’s record-breaking shift toward renewable nucleus. These are common, and energy, away from coal” should be an obvious explanation to rule out. “The authors at least of coal dropped by 3.7 per cent, have to explain why their with imports down by a interpretation is more probable,” substantial 30 per cent. says Williams.

The figures back up claims made last month by Xie Zhenhua, China’s lead negotiator at the UN climate talks in Paris last December, that the country will “far surpass” its 2020 target to reduce carbon emissions per unit of national wealth (GDP) by 40 to 45 per cent from 2005 levels.

“The latest figures confirm China’s record-breaking shift toward renewable power and away from coal,” says Tim Buckley of the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, an energy consultancy –Privacy protector?– in Cleveland, Ohio.

–China’s future: who needs coal?–

“It’s a really positive signal, a perfect example of an emerging economy trying to shift the way it develops,” says Ranping Song of the World Resources Institute think tank in Washington DC. China is due to issue its next fiveyear economic plan this month.

“So it’s a perfect time to see how serious they are about tackling emissions,” Song says.

Space twins TIME to come home. As we went to press, two astronauts were due to return from the International Space Station, having spent almost a year living in space.

Scott Kelly and Mikhail Kornienko are returning after 340 days on the ISS. Also returning is Sergey Volkov, who spent six months in orbit. The trio should touch down in Kazakhstan early Wednesday morning. Some Russians have spent more than a year in space, but Kelly now holds the US record and has taken part in a unique experiment.

His identical-twin brother Mark, also an astronaut, has been monitored by NASA on Earth for the past year. Comparing the twins should help disentangle the effects of space from those of genetics, potentially leading to treatments for the bone mass loss and vision problems experienced by astronauts.

The discovery of a gene that causes hair to go grey may inspire ways to delay the process. The IRF4 gene dictates the amount of the dark pigment, melanin, in hair. By tweaking the gene it may be possible to boost melanin levels (Nature Communications, DOI: 10.1038/ncomms10815).

Google car collision On 14 February, a Google car drove into the side of a bus. It is the first clear-cut case of an accident caused by self-driving technology. The car detected the approaching bus but wrongly predicted that the bus would allow it to pass. Google says it needs to improve its AI’s anticipation of other road users even when both (or neither) are following the law.

C = fail for Europe…

The European Union is not on track to meet carbon targets set at the Paris climate talks. It is relying on its trading scheme to reduce emissions after 2020, but has not raised carbon prices fast enough to cut industrial emissions by a sufficient amount, says a leaked note from the European Commission seen by the UK’s Guardian newspaper.

...and UK fails on NO2 The UK government is off track, too.

Last year, law firm ClientEarth won a case that resulted in the government being ordered to draw up a plan to cut nitrogen dioxide pollution. But the plan falls “woefully short” of what was required, ClientEarth says, and it has given the government 10 days to redraft it or face renewed legal action.

5 March 2016 | NewScientist | 7

This week

Furry aliens on Europe’s hit list A blacklist of 37 invasive species to be wiped out or controlled could protect native wildlife

OBLIVIOUS to his sterilisation, Judas the raccoon dog treks through Sweden’s countryside in search of a mate. At last he finds one, only for their liaison to end when she is shot. He trudges on and finds another, but she is killed too. This is his destiny: he is a

TOP 10 invasive threats to europe A team of 43 researchers across Europe has compiled a list of the top 95 invasive species threats to Europe over the next decade. The work was funded by the European Commission to inform future versions of its forthcoming blacklist (see main story).

The researchers assessed every species using factors such as the likelihood of its arrival and the scale of its impact. Here are their top 10: Alligator weed Alternantherea philoxeroides Devil firefish Pterois miles Small Asian mongoose Herpestes auropunctatus Finlayson’s squirrel Callosciurus finlaysonii Common kingsnake Lampropeltis getula Golden mussel Limnoperna fortune Rusty crayfish Orconectes rusticus Northern brown shrimp Penaeus aztecus Western mosquitofish Gambusia affinis Striped eel catfish Plotosus lineatus

8 | NewScientist | 5 March 2016

radio-tagged lure leading hunters to the last live raccoon dogs in the country.

The Swedish war on the raccoon dog (Nyctereutes procyonoides), a furry, short-legged mammal spreading west across Europe, is a rare success against alien species.

And the European Commission hopes to support similar efforts when, later this month, it officially publishes a blacklist of 37 invasive plants and animals.

All these species will require action across the European Union under its regulation on invasive alien species, which became law last year. Member states will be obliged to prevent these species to houses and transmit diseases entering their countries; to that humans can catch, such as quickly detect and eradicate them raccoon roundworm. if they do invade; and to manage “There’s not much we can do invasions that are already now,” says Marten Winter at the established. Also, purchases of German Centre for Integrative these species and their commercial Biodiversity Research in Leipzig. breeding and import will be illegal, Even hunters can’t be bothered as, of course, will wild releases. with them nowadays, he says.

The list will include several “Once you have one hat you don’t species of crayfish, plus the ruddy need more. And you can’t eat duck and the grey squirrel, them because of parasites.” nemesis of the red. Key future The blacklist is motivated by threats are also listed, such as European Environment Agency the squirrel-like small Asian “ There’s not much we can mongoose (see “Top 10 invasive do about wild raccoons threats to Europe”, left). now. Once you have one The vast majority of alien hat you don’t need more” species are benign, but some threaten native biodiversity. Leave it too long and it can be too late to figures showing that invasive deal with them, as the case of the species cost Europe at least raccoon (Procyon lotor), also on €12 billion per year in human and the list, shows. Raccoons were animal health costs, decreased introduced into Germany from crop and fish yields, damage North America in the last century, to infrastructure and river and their population there has navigability, and in harm to now reached 1 million. They feast protected species. The idea behind on crops and eggs, cause damage the list is to get member states to Johner Images/Alamy Stock Photo

Aisling Irwin

work together for more effective results, something Francisco José García, an independent biologist from Spain, says is essential.

Spain, too, has an epidemic of free-roaming raccoons, which began when a generation of kids fell in love with one in the film Pocahontas and demanded their own. Many pets ended up in the wild, and since then several regions have been assiduous in launching eradication campaigns, García says.

But in central Spain, where raccoons pose a great threat to migrating birds, crops and plants, the populations are older and larger as control programmes began too late and lack resources.

Various public organisations are working “with an obvious lack of coordination and technical criteria”, García says.

Escaped mammal predators, such as raccoons, can flourish in Europe for several reasons. Prey in intensively farmed fields is easier for them to spot, and as generalist

In this section n Did life begin in icy seas?, page 10 n The hunt for Planet Nine, page 12 n Building aeroplanes in augmented reality, page 20

Milky Way retired early from star-making

but it divides nations because those with lucrative mink fur farms fear its inclusion in the blacklist. In fact, mink will not be on the list because the damage it causes has yet to be scientifically assessed.

Divisions over how to treat newcomers are also illustrated by the golden jackal (Canis aureus), which is spreading rapidly from south-eastern Europe and the Caucasus – thanks in part to climate change.

But is it an alien?

This epoch was also when our galaxy formed its bulging disc and barlike concentration of stars at its centre.

“There seems to be a connection between quenching in the Milky Way and its thick disc,” Haywood says.

That means a galaxy can stop growing even while it has reservoirs of gas, as the Milky Way does.

Haywood argues that the disc and bar structures could disrupt growth by stirring up the gas, making it too

But it was unclear whether most galaxies lose their raw material abruptly when it is ejected by supernovae or a central black hole, burn through their reserves slowly, or stop growing for some other reason.

Misha Haywood at the Paris Observatory and his colleagues decided that studying our own galaxy is the best way to address this

hot to form new stars (arxiv.org/ abs/1601.03042). Other spiral galaxies too distant to be probed by these methods could be ageing in a similar fashion.

“Star formation boils down to a battle between gravity and other things, like turbulence,” says Katherine Alatalo at the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, California.

question. They probed the chemical signatures of tens of thousands of stars – a clue to their ages – recorded by a high-resolution spectrograph at the Sloan Digital Sky Survey telescope in New Mexico. With the data, they were able to reconstruct a record of the Milky Way’s past.

They found that our galaxy’s star formation rate dropped by an order of magnitude between 10 billion and 8 billion years ago. It resumed forming stars after this sudden die-off, but at a much slower rate.

ESO/NASA/JPL-CALTECH/M. KORNMESSER/R. HURT

The Baltic states, where it was first spotted in 2011, have declared it an alien. Yet in Italy it is protected.

The European Habitats Directive lists it as an animal whose hunting should be compatible with its survival as a species.

This contrast arises largely because in some countries the golden jackal is thought to have returned after a long absence, –Destined to loneliness– whereas others have never seen it before. So, is this wolf-like eaters, they can often survive on creature to be welcomed or urban leftovers too. And rabies, fought? Legally, the answer lies which used to hold mammalian in whether it arrived through populations in check, has largely human intervention – in which gone from Western Europe. case it is deemed an alien.

In such an environment, Last year, a team led by Wieslaw acting early and decisively is vital, Bogdanovicz of the Polish says P-A Åhlén of the Swedish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw Association for Hunting and revealed that Baltic golden jackals Wildlife Management. When are descended from a population the Swedish government tasked that moved there naturally. his association with eradicating “We have proved it is not an alien raccoon dogs and gave him species,” says Bogdanovicz. As a budget – now at €800,000 a result, he says, Estonia has a year – he swiftly recruited a reversed its classification as an team of professional hunters. alien, and Lithuania may do the They erected cameras over same. Being indigenous to parts an area three times the size of of Europe, the golden jackal may Denmark, trained dogs to sniff never be added to the blacklist. out the pests and encouraged Over 90 per cent of newly the public to report sightings. arrived species are no trouble, The raccoon dog population is says Helen Roy of the Centre now so low that they have to for Ecology and Hydrology in recruit their “Judas” animals Wallingford, UK, whose team from outside the country. has published its own report on But it can be hard to act future species threats to Europe. decisively. For example, the The value of studies like this, and American mink (Neovison vison) the blacklist, is that prevention has devastated some ecosystems, is always better than cure. n

OUR galaxy is past middle age and could be gradually dying. A team of stellar archaeologists have found the first evidence that the Milky Way suddenly stopped giving birth to stars after it formed a thick saucer-like disc around 8 billion years ago, suggesting such “quenching” can happen even before a galaxy runs out of gas.

Galactic life cycles were thought to be driven largely by how much gas a galaxy has to build new stars with.

“ It was unclear whether most galaxies lose their fuel abruptly or burn through reserves slowly” Our galaxy’s disc and bar cause the gas to become turbulent, injecting energy that prevents it from collapsing and initiating star formation, she says.

“Their results with the Milky Way give us subtle clues about what we should be looking for in other evolving spiral galaxies, too.” Ramin Skibba n

–Over the hill– 5 March 2016 | NewScientist | 9

This week

Colin Barras

Michael Schwab/Getty

Life may have begun in icy seas this could sometimes have dropped to today’s polar temperatures. For ice to be present at these relatively low latitudes, the planet must have been locked in a severe ice age at least once during the Archaean.

Oxygen isotopes in ancient rocks had previously been used to calculate sea temperature at this

DID life begin in the freezer? Early Earth may not have been as hot and hellish as we thought, and our planet may have been in a deep ice age when life first emerged.

This is according to an analysis of rocks from South Africa that formed about 3.5 billion years ago, during the Archaean period. “ Key organic molecules Previous research suggested for the origin of life that the ocean in which these could have become more rocks formed was hot – perhaps concentrated in ice” around 85 °C. But Maarten de Wit at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in Port time, but de Wit believes that Elizabeth, South Africa, now says these indicated a misleadingly ocean temperatures at that time warm temperature, due to local were similar to today’s. hydrothermal activity.

South Africa’s Barberton Working with Harald Furnes at Greenstone Belt, where these the University of Bergen, Norway, rocks are now found, formed at a de Wit looked instead at rocks latitude of 20° to 40° – equivalent that formed in the deep sea, away to the border between the tropics from ancient hydrothermal vents. and mid-latitudes today. De Wit These rocks contained gypsum, says ocean temperatures here a mineral that only grows if water would have been around 26 °C, temperatures are below 40 °C. while evidence of glacial activity What’s more, in a sequence of in some of these rocks suggests nearby Archaean rocks that

–A chilly start to life on Earth?–

formed in shallow water about 30 million years later, de Wit and Furnes found evidence of dropstones, which are associated with icebergs, suggesting that ocean temperatures must have plummeted and the planet was in the grip of an ice age (Science Advances, doi.org/bcw2).

Don Lowe at Stanford University in California says his team’s extensive studies in the area have found no evidence of glaciation, but he doesn’t

Oldest Fossilised nervous system

Jie Yang (Yunnan University; China)

was not involved in the discovery.

The animal had a nerve cord that ran the length of its body, with bulbous nodes of neurons located between appendages. “It’s almost like a mini-brain for each pair of legs,”

Preserved inside 520 million-year-old fossils, this is the most ancient nervous system we have ever seen.

The fossils are of Chengjiangocaris kunmingensis, a creature around 10 centimetres long, with multiple pairs of legs and a heart-shaped head.

Found in southern China, the five

10 | NewScientist | 5 March 2016

Cambrian fossils belonged to a group of organisms that gave rise to insects, crustaceans and other arthropods.

Most interesting of all is its nerve cord and associated neurons. “The detail of this fossil is exquisite,” says Rob DeSalle of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, who

says Javier Ortega-Hernández of the University of Cambridge, whose team analysed and described the fossil.

Surprisingly, they found dozens of fine, subsidiary nerves fanning out across the entire length of the nerve cord, making this nervous system more complex than those seen in today’s descendants, and proving that evolution isn’t a one way street to complexity (PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/ pnas.1522434113). Andy Coghlan

entirely dismiss the idea that ice may have been present.

De Wit and Furnes’s ideas are supported by the research of Ruth Blake at Yale University. She says her isotope work also suggests relatively cool water temperatures in the Archaean, similar to those of today’s tropical oceans.

Life first appears in the fossil record around 3.4 billion years ago, although some think it may have evolved millions of years earlier. If there was ice present when life emerged, this would bolster theories that suggest important stages in the origin of life occurred inside frozen water.

“Key organic compounds thought to be important in the origin of life are more stable at lower temperatures,” says Jeffrey Bada at the University of California at San Diego. He adds that important organic molecules, which might have been present in tiny quantities in the early ocean water, could have become more concentrated in ice.

But if life did emerge on a cool Earth, it wouldn’t necessarily have done so at freezing temperatures.

Instead, it could have formed around hydrothermal vents, and there is no clear way to determine which theory is correct. n

For daily news stories, visit newscientist.com/news

Gentle attack on cancer may help us live with it

Chimp warrior pairs stay cool under pressure IT’S just like the Greek warriors Achilles and Patroclus. Chimpanzees like to head into battle alongside a close friend – a tactic that lowers stress levels.

Individuals of many primate species, including macaques and baboons, form strong, long-lasting social bonds that resemble human friendship. These relationships appear to benefit both males and

it beat us,” says Gatenby.

His team has developed an algorithm that adjusts the chemotherapy dose in line with the tumour’s growth. The idea is to blast the tumour with a high dose when it is growing rapidly, then reduce the dose as growth slows and it starts shrinking.

In mice with the equivalent

females: they are associated with higher reproductive success and even longer life.

In male chimps these bonds

and grooming intimate areas.

To understand the purpose of these close male pairings, Crockford and her colleagues tracked wild chimpanzees

month’s annual meeting of the Ethological Society in Göttingen.

That suggests friendships may act as a “social buffer”, protecting against

can seem surprising, given that adult males are very aggressive and sometimes kill each other.

“Chimpanzees are highly territorial, and encounters with neighbouring groups tend to be very hostile and can be deadly,” said Catherine Crockford of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

Yet pairs of strongly bonded males also engage in relaxed, cooperative behaviours, including sharing food

on defensive patrols in Uganda and the Ivory Coast, and analysed levels of glucocorticoid stress hormones in their urine after a hostile encounter.

Aggressive confrontations are less stressful if a chimp is fighting alongside a regular grooming partner, Crockford and her team told last

the negative health impact of stress.

“Primates suffer from social stress because they live in large bonded groups,” says Robin Dunbar at the University of Oxford. “Friendships are the solution to this problem, because they create protective alliances.”

So be thankful for your friends.

“There is considerable evidence that the quality of your relationships has a massive effect on your well-being – more than almost anything else you do,” says Dunbar. Penny Sarchet n

STEVE GSCHMEISSNER/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

FROM an evolutionary perspective, our “kill all” approach to cancer doesn’t make much sense. Instead, letting some tumour cells survive might help us to live with the disease.

Standard cancer treatment involves giving people high doses of chemotherapy in an attempt to eradicate the cancer cells.

Often this leaves behind a population of cells that are resistant to treatment. These cells go on to multiply aggressively and spread to other organs. The person can be put on a different type of chemotherapy only for the same thing to happen.

Robert Gatenby at Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida, thinks he has a better strategy: keep some treatment-responsive cells alive so they stop the resistant cells taking over. The premise is based on the idea that acquiring resistance genes must come at a cost to the cells and make them weaker in other ways.

As a result, any non-resistant cells that aren’t killed off should be able to outcompete the resistant but weakened cells, by dominating the resources.

“The goal is to use evolution in our favour rather than letting

of breast cancer, standard therapy was successful at suppressing tumour growth for 10 to 20 days, but after that the tumour grew rapidly. The evolutionary approach, known as “adaptive therapy”, kept tumours small for much longer, and after the initial 20 days only low doses were needed to prevent the tumours growing larger.

The mice on the adaptive therapy were observed for 155 days and during that period, therapy was stopped completely

for 60 per cent of the animals, without the cancer progressing (Science Translational Medicine, doi.org/bcwb).

Gatenby’s team has already begun a clinical trial testing the strategy in men with metastatic prostate cancer who have stopped responding to the first-line treatment. The group is using levels in the blood of a chemical – prostate specific antigen – released by the prostate gland to infer the size of the tumour and determine when and how to give treatment.

This is cheaper than using scans to determine the tumour’s size.

We have to get past the intuitively appealing idea of killing as many cancer cells as possible, says Gatenby. “Our goal is to keep playing this game with the tumour to keep it sensitive, and as long as we do that the patient is fine.”

Mel Greaves at the Institute of Cancer Research in London says scientists are increasingly thinking of cancer treatment as a Darwinian process. “It’s like antibiotic resistance,” he says. “If you apply very aggressive therapy, there’s a very strong selective pressure for the emergence of these mutants. You just clear the space and hey presto, they have the opportunity to take off.

So, unfortunately, aggressive treatment does the opposite of –No need to be so mean?– what you want.” Sam Wong n

“The quality of your friendships has more of an effect on your well-being than almost anything else”

5 March 2016 | NewScientist | 11

This week

Planet hunting with the big bang Jacob Aron

THE fate of an entire world is at stake. Astronomers are enlisting every telescope and space probe they can think of in the hunt for the solar system’s potential ninth planet, and some unlikely sources may be key to tracking it down.

In January, Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena announced they had found indirect evidence for “Planet Nine”. Following up on previous hints, they analysed the wonky orbits of small bodies beyond Neptune and determined they may have been caused by a

that it should emit another signal we can pick up – radio waves.

The proposed planet is large enough to have retained a small amount of heat from its formation. Using Uranus and Neptune as a model, the team calculated this would be just tens of degrees above absolute zero – which means it would faintly radiate millimetre-length waves.

It just so happens we have a bunch of telescopes searching the

planet 10 times the mass of Earth, with an orbital axis 700 times longer than the distance from Earth to the sun.

Now the race is on to spot the planet directly. Using the Hubble Space Telescope would take too “ Planet Nine would barely much time away from other reflect enough light for us observations, and Planet Nine’s to see. So astronomers are suggested location is so far from the sun that it would barely reflect getting crafty” enough light for us to see.

So astronomers are getting skies at these wavelengths, though crafty. Instead of visible light, they planet-hunting astronomers are looking for stranger signals don’t normally use them. Instead, that could help narrow the search. the telescopes look for the cosmic Nicolas Cowan of McGill microwave background (CMB), University in Montreal, Canada, the remnant of the first light left and his colleagues have calculated over from the big bang, which

The revolution begins Sunday 13 March 9pm

12 | NewScientist | 5 March 2016

is at the same wavelength.

Cosmologists use telescopes like BICEP2 and Planck to map this radiation. They tend not to concern themselves with mere planets.

“Cosmologists never look for moving targets,” says Cowan.

But his cosmologist colleague Gil Holder, who works in a neighbouring office, heard the news of Planet Nine, and asked Cowan if it would show up in CMB telescopes. “Apparently Neptune is so bright that they use it as a calibration source,” says Cowan.

Seeing a single bright spot at these wavelengths isn’t enough to detect a planet, as it could just be part of the background radiation.

But a planet’s motion should help it stand out from the background.

Working with Nathan Kaib of the University of Oklahoma, the team calculated that Planet Nine’s speed across the sky should be

distinct from the thousands of asteroids that are similarly bright, making it easy to spot with just a few months’ observations (arxiv. org/abs/1602.05963).

Many CMB telescopes are sited at the South Pole with a narrow field of view – ideal for cosmology but not for planet hunting. Future telescopes will look over wider patches of the sky, upping the chances of catching the planet.

But it is possible current observations could hit the jackpot. “There is an outside chance that Planet Nine is already in someone’s CMB experiment,” says Cowan.

But these big bang telescopes aren’t our only option for finding Planet Nine. Agnès Fienga of the Nice Observatory in France and her colleagues have been using data from NASA’s Cassini probe, which has been exploring Saturn and its moons for the

Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC)

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past 10 years, to pinpoint the planet’s potential location.

Astronomers have used radioranging data from the probe to make a model of the motion of all the large bodies in the solar system. Fienga’s team tried

Astrophysics, doi.org/bcwg).

“These are very clever ideas,” says Batygin. “It is wonderful to see that members of the community are presenting their own proposals on how to best optimise the observational search for Planet Nine. This is exactly what Mike and I hoped for.”

So if Planet Nine does exist, what should we call it? Some, including Cowan, have already suggested “Bowie”, after rock star David Bowie who died shortly before Batygin and Brown’s paper was published. But the International Astronomical –Are you out there?– Union, which governs the naming of the cosmos, has strict rules on adding Planet Nine into the naming and prefers to reference mix and found they could rule ancient myths rather than out the planet’s presence in modern celebrities, so it remains around half of its potential orbit, to be seen whether Bowie will be as its tug from these locations allowed. “I guess you could argue would have shown up in the that maybe he is a mythological Cassini data (Astronomy & creature,” says Cowan. n

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5 March 2016 | NewScientist | 13

This week groups with distinct genetic traits can arise and remain distinct.

But Marques’ team found that the genetic differences between the fish types are concentrated on the parts of chromosomes that are less likely to undergo recombination (PLOS Genetics, doi.org/bcw3). As a result, the sets of gene variants that give the two their distinct characteristics are less likely to get split up.

We cannot know for sure that the Lake Constance sticklebacks –Same lake, different fish– will continue evolving to become two non-interbreeding species, says Marques. But evidence for physically different types. sympatric speciation is growing: This kind of speciation, known from mole rats in Israel to palms as sympatry, was once thought to on Lord Howe Island, Australia. be extremely unlikely, says Chris This is leading some evolutionary Bird of Texas A&M University biologists, including Bird, to think Corpus Christi. The conventional it could be surprisingly common. view is that speciation almost bigger, with longer spines and As for the speed of the always requires two populations tougher armour. In theory, these sticklebacks’ separation, there is to be physically separated to differences could be due to another case where sympatric prevent interbreeding, for lifestyle rather than evolution – speciation seems to be occurring example, by living on different perhaps lake fish survive longer nearly as fast, Bird points out. islands in an archipelago. and grow larger.

Apple maggots evolved from “ They have been But David Marques of the hawthorn maggots within two interbreeding all along, University of Bern and his team centuries of apples being have found there are already clear yet they are splitting introduced to North America. into two different types” genetic differences. “We could be Also, there are now many glimpsing the beginnings of two examples of recent evolution species,” he says. that show how fast it can happen: This is because when What makes this finding cancers becoming resistant to animals mate, a process called extraordinary is that both types drugs, bedbugs becoming recombination mixes up gene breed in the same streams at resistant to pesticides, fish getting variants, meaning that genes the same time of year. They have from both parents will be shuffled smaller to avoid becoming our been interbreeding all along, dinner. It’s possible that such together in future generations. and still do, yet they are splitting rapid evolution may be the norm, As long as interbreeding into two genetically and rather than the exception. n continues, it’s unlikely that two

Fish species split before our eyes

eawag/david Marques

Michael Le Page

SOME thought it was impossible.

But a population of stickleback fish that breed in the same place is splitting into two species before our eyes, and at rapid speeds.

Three-spine sticklebacks were introduced to Lake Constance in Switzerland around 150 years ago – an evolutionary blink of an eye. But since then, the fish have begun splitting into two types: one that lives in the main lake (pictured above left, female top, male below), and another that lives in the streams that flow into it (above right).

The main lake dwellers are

Waves ripple surface of Saturn’s moon CATCH a wave. Fleeting features on the face of Titan are probably waves rippling across the moon’s seas.

As far as we know, Saturn’s largest moon is the only world apart from Earth to host liquids on its surface, in the form of methane and ethane lakes and seas. The lakes are usually flat and calm, but NASA’s Cassini orbiter 14 | NewScientist | 5 March 2016

has spotted mysterious intermittent glints. Their reappearance seems to

and it was gone again by January 2015. The glints could be icebergs,

of the change of seasons,” Hofgartner says. “Titan’s year is 30 years long,

confirm something is afoot.

“Now we have confirmation that these seas are not stagnant ponds just sitting there, but there is activity in them,” says Jason Hofgartner of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Cassini first spotted a glint in 2013 in Ligeia Mare, a 26,000-squarekilometre sea in Titan’s north polar region about 50 per cent bigger than Lake Superior. In later observations, the glint disappeared. Another view in 2014 found the bright spot again,

but not much floats in methane, Hofgartner says. Or they could be bubbles.

On Earth, waves ruffled by a breeze are the most common cause of a shimmering sea. That’s probably true on Titan, too. That is surprising, because Titan’s lakes appear glassy smooth. But a faint breeze would be enough to ripple the surface according to Hofgartner’s calculations (Icarus, doi.org/bcwn).

“If it is waves, it could be because

and it is going toward summer in the northern hemisphere. We would expect that winds would be picking up and it could get more common.”

Cassini is making one last visit in April 2017, in the middle of Titan’s summer, and may pick up more evidence of the ephemeral shimmers.

“There are many reasons why we would want to go back to Titan,” Hofgartner says. “Hopefully, one day we would get to observe these from a lander in the sea.” Rebecca Boyle n

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Thomas Marent / Minden Pictures

in Brief Inflamed brain only part of depression

Wild gorillas hum and sing to sound the dinner gong HUM again? Gorillas sing and hum individual tunes at mealtime, possibly to signal that it’s time to eat.

random melody (PLoS One, doi.org/bctw).

“They don’t sing the same song over and over,” says Luef. “It seems like they are composing their little food songs.” Food-related calls have been documented in many animals, including chimps and bonobos, but apart from anecdotal reports from zoos, there had been no

Eva Luef, a primatologist at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Seewiesen, Germany, made the discovery by watching groups of wild western lowland gorillas in the Republic of the Congo. She found that the gorillas made two types of sound when eating.

One of them was humming – a steady low-frequency tone that sounds a bit like a sigh of contentment. The

evidence of it in wild gorillas.

In zoos, all gorillas sing, but Luef found that in the wild, it is mainly the dominant silverback male from each group that makes these sounds while eating. This is perhaps his way of telling the group that it is still mealtime and not yet time to move on. “He’s the one making the collective decisions for the group,” Luef says.

other was singing – a series of short, variously pitched notes that sounds a little like someone humming a

“We think he uses this vocalisation to inform the others ‘OK, now we’re eating’.”

Tailless artificial sperm go for gold THEY can’t swim but they are the best test-tube sperm yet, matching mature sperm cells in vital ways.

Mouse embryonic stem cells were turned into something resembling spermatids, the round cells that mature into sperm, by Jiahao Sha of Nanjing Medical University in China and his team.

They have shown that injecting these cells into mouse eggs

can produce pups that grow up to be fertile (Cell Stem Cell, doi.org/bctx).

The artificial spermatids are the first in vitro sex cells to meet a gold standard defined by three fertility and reproduction researchers in 2014. They devised a set of rigorous conditions for judging progress in the race to generate sperm-like cells from stem cells or other adult tissues.

Unlike many other efforts, Sha’s cells are able to undergo the meiotic divisions that are crucial for making genetically correct sex cells. Until now, researchers have struggled to prove that they have pushed cells through this complicated dividing process, which leaves sperm with only half of the father’s chromosomes.

“We think our work is the first to monitor and examine all requirements for successful meiosis,” says Sha.

THERE’S more to it. Inflammation in the brain has been linked to mental health disorders, and scientists are exploring whether anti-inflammatory drugs could help treat depression.But now it seems blocking inflammation only treats some symptoms.

Jonathan Godbout at Ohio State University in Columbus put mice under stress for six days. The mice began behaving anxiously and having memory problems, similar to people with depression. They had more inflammation-causing immune cells in their brains, as expected, but they also stopped making new brain cells.

Giving the mice an antiinflammatory drug reduced the anxiety and memory problems but had no effect on brain cell production (Journal of Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1523/ jneurosci.2394-15.2016). We don’t yet know the impact of the lack of new neurons, says Godbout.

Inky smokescreen helps squid to hunt GOTCHA! Japanese pygmy squid don’t just use their ink to make a getaway – they also use it to catch a meal.

“This is the first report that cephalopods use ink for predation,” says Noriyosi Sato of Aberystwyth University, UK, whose team studied wild Japanese pygmy squid in the lab.

They filmed 17 instances of the squid releasing ink as they began to attack shrimp. The ink clouds hid the squid from their prey, or served as a distraction. “This means they use ink as a tool, and it is a concrete example that squid have intelligence,” Sato says.

In most cases, the squid succeeded in ensnaring their targets (Marine Biology, doi.org/ bct2).

5 March 2016 | NewScientist | 17

in Brief

CALL it a whalegorithm. A computer has learned to suss out the different dialects of long-finned pilot whales, a step towards unlocking the secrets of whale communication.

Some marine mammals develop distinct songs that are peculiar to their social groups, much as we learn accents or idioms from our families. Normally, researchers assess recordings of such songs directly, only using computers to check for specific features, like whistles. But this means you might miss important clues to how whales communicate, says Sarah Hallerberg at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Göttingen, Germany.

Instead, Hallerberg and her colleagues built a “bag of calls” algorithm that analyses recordings of groups of animals, examining all the frequencies in the signal.

Rather than classifying individual calls one by one, it calculated a coefficient to represent all the features of interest.

Tobias Bernhard Raff/Biosphoto/FLPA

The algorithm was able to pick out distinct dialects in recordings of six groups of long-finned pilot whales along the Norwegian coast (Physical Review E, doi.org/bcv6).

The team thinks their software could help analyse the vocalisations of other species, too, and plan to try the algorithm on orca recordings.

18 | NewScientist | 5 March 2016

Male-on-male necrophilia filmed in birds for the first time LEAVE a good-looking corpse, and your mates may mate with it. At least, that’s what happened with sand martins in Japan, which were filmed engaging in necrophilia.

In 2014, Naoki Tomita and Yasuko Iwami at the Yamashina Institute for Ornithology in Abiko saw a dead sand martin by the roadside. As they filmed, three males repeatedly mounted it.

After 15 minutes, the researchers collected the body and identified it was a male. They have now published an article describing the incident – only the second

paper describing such behaviour in birds (Ornithological Science, doi.org/bctv).

At least 30 cases of necrophilia have been reported in birds.

Homosexual behaviour is common in birds, but in this case it was probably due to mistaken identity, as male and female sand martins look the same.

Tomita and Iwami think the event they witnessed occurred because the dead bird happened to end up in a pose resembling the female mating position.

“We suggest that posture is an

important trigger arousing male sex drive,” they write.

Kees Moeliker of the Natural History Museum Rotterdam, the Netherlands, agrees that the males were responding to the posture, rather than having a predilection for dead bodies.

“It’s a mistake,” he says.

Mating with corpses has been observed in many kinds of animals, from spider mites to whales. While it may provide pleasure to some, it seems to have no benefit in terms of survival in most cases.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / Arizona State University

My PC speaks whale, can yours?

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Universe could end before the sun dies WE’RE safe for now. The universe won’t tear itself apart for at least a few billion years.

Observations indicate that the universe is expanding, and at an increasing rate. If that acceleration stays constant, everything will drift apart and the universe will cool into an eternal “heat death”.

But there is another possible end. The acceleration is thought to be due to mysterious stuff called dark energy. If the total amount of dark energy is increasing, the acceleration will also increase, until the very fabric of space-time tears itself apart in a “big rip”.

So how long do we have? Diego Sáez-Gómez at the University of Lisbon in Portugal and his colleagues modelled a variety of scenarios and used the latest expansion data to calculate a probable timeline. They found that the earliest a big rip can occur is around 2.8 billion years from now (arxiv.org/abs/1602.06211v1).

“We’re safe,” says Sáez-Gómez.

Given that the sun isn’t expected to burn out for another 5 billion years, it would be surprising if the universe ended so early. But pondering our doom could be a worthwhile exercise anyway, Sáez-Gómez says.

Lava flood gave Mars an epic jolt YOUNG Mars had its world turned upside down by some hot stuff. The emergence of a titanic mound of molten rock jostled the Red Planet’s

rivers and their network of valleys suggests that they formed before or at the same time as Tharsis. Rainfall or snowfall while the volcanic

early tropics out of position and altered the tilt of its axis.

Between 4.1 and 3.7 billion years ago, huge outpourings of lava deformed the entire planet, creating a massive bulge of rock called the Tharsis region. We had thought that its presence also dictated the direction of later rivers.

Now Sylvain Bouley of the University of Paris-South and his colleagues say the orientation of the

structure was active could have spawned the rivers, for example (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature17171).

The rivers were concentrated along what had been Mars’s equator, but the formation of Tharsis tilted the planet around – with wild, catastrophic effects on the climate and surface water.

If Earth’s axis had experienced the same change in tilt, Paris would now be sitting at today’s magnetic north.

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Herve GOUSSE/MasterFilms/Airbus Group

Technology easy to spot missing parts.

Airbus is also using AR to check that control panels are correctly configured. Every switch and button that needs to be set for a given test is highlighted in the AR view.

The tablet-based system works well when one or two people need to see what is on screen. But to give a view that several engineers can see at once, Airbus is using video projection tools that

“ It used to take three weeks to check everything was in the right place. Now it takes less than three days” superimpose virtual information on to the aircraft’s structure itself.

The virtual representations of the parts to check are taken from the 3D models of the plane created at the design stage. “You can completely automate the –Now with instructions in AR– production of instructions,” says Chevassus.

To give workers an AR view without having to hold a tablet, Airbus hopes to introduce headsets in the next two to three years. These would be roughly similar to Google’s Glass headset, Assembling an aircraft is a painstaking task. It’s safer and quicker although to be practical they will using augmented reality, says Chris Baraniuk need better processors and longer battery life, Chevassus says.

PUTTING together an Airbus A350 MiRA to build both its A350 and towards part of the aircraft Airbus researchers are also is an eye-wateringly complex task. A380 passenger craft. Around gives the engineers a view on developing virtual training The wiring for a single aircraft 1000 workers across its the screen on which a virtual environments in which assemblyruns to more than 500 kilometres, production sites in Europe and structure can be overlaid. It line workers can learn how to put not to mention dozens of pipes the US have been given tablet will show, for instance, where parts together. In a recent test, and hydraulic lines, all held in computers running augmented each bracket should be. people were taught how to place by 60,000 brackets. Missing reality software.

Comparing what’s on the screen assemble part of an aircraft door a few is not an option.

Pointing the tablet’s camera with the actual aircraft makes it via an Oculus Rift.

To make sure that doesn’t The headset let them see happen – and to speed up the and interact with a virtual Meet me in Virtual Reality inspection process – door superimposed on the Augmented reality can help you examine the latest 3D prototypes. manufacturers have started environment around them. The understand a complex structure Founder Sébastien Kuntz says assembling planes with the help researchers found that the mixed that’s right in front of you. But that it allows technicians to upload of augmented reality (AR). reality training was as effective as sometimes you need to work on several different models and “It used to take about three a normal training approach in something that doesn’t exist yet. manipulate them at realistic scales. weeks for the inspecting team to which workers would interact This is the idea behind French naval defence contractor check all those brackets were in with real parts.

French firm MiddleVR’s Improov3 DCNS is already using the system, the right position,” says Nicolas This would make it easier for system – a virtual meeting place and the company plans to widen Chevassus at Airbus Group instructors to teach new workers. where engineers in different its scope from engineering to Innovations. “Now it’s less than “You could actually be trained in locations can come together to industries such as architecture. three days.” something like this while not Airbus is testing a system called located in the same place,” says

Let’s build a plane

20 | NewScientist | 5 March 2016

For more technology stories, visit newscientist.com/technology

Cyber sickness But Funk thinks there are a few technical hurdles to overcome before it is widely used. For a start, quite a bit of processing power is needed to stop the AR viewpoint feeling sluggish and disorientating. Chevassus says the problem is worse if the user is wearing a headset. “It’s an issue with head-mounted displays because any latency makes you feel cyber sick,” he says. It is only a matter of time before such wrinkles get ironed out, though.

In the meantime, other industries are also experimenting with augmented reality.

Canadian firm Scope AR’s system provides a view of a structure that can be annotated from a remote location. Drawing on the screen allows them to highlight specific features, such as indicating which of a number of cables in a bundle needs to be plugged in. A person on site can see this highlighted cable on their tablet.

The device remembers the position of the cable so that every time the tablet’s camera hovers over the bundle again, the right cable will still be marked. “If you bring your tablet back to the object everything will snap back,” says Scope AR CEO Scott Montgomerie.

Scope AR’s system is being used by utility companies, car-makers – including Toyota – and aerospace firms such as Lockheed Martin.

Boeing is experimenting with similar technology, too.

Augmented reality is seeping into many different industries, says Funk. People are learning to work in two places at once – the real and the virtual. n

Robot or exit sign? In an emergency, we vote bot A UNIVERSITY student is holed up in a small office with a robot, completing a survey. Suddenly, an alarm rings and smoke fills the hall outside the door.

The student is forced to make a quick choice: escape the same way they entered the room, or head in the direction the robot is pointing, along an unknown path and through an obscure door.

That was the choice given to

“We were surprised,” says Paul Robinette, who led the study.

“We thought that there wouldn’t be enough trust, and that we’d have to do something to prove the robot was trustworthy.”

Robinette’s team used a modified Pioneer P3-AT, a robot that looks like a small bin with wheels and has foam arms that light up and point (pictured below). The participants

30 participants in a recent experiment at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

The research is another piece of a puzzle that roboticists are struggling to solve. If people don’t trust robots enough, then the bots won’t be able to guide them in an emergency or help them in other hazardous situations. But it could also be

first followed the robot along a hallway until it indicated the room they were to enter. They then filled in a survey to rate the robot’s navigation

“Almost everyone followed the robot – even though it led them away from the clearly marked exit”

for unrelated reasons, and the other two chose not to leave the room.

In another survey the participants completed after the fake emergency, many explained that they followed the robot because it was wearing a sign that read “EMERGENCY GUIDE ROBOT”. This suggests that if people are told the robot is designed to do a particular task, they tend to trust in its ability, say the researchers. Robinette likens the relationship to the way drivers often follow the routes suggested by their satnav devices without checking them first.

The work will be presented later this month at the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Some people’s faith in the robot guide went even further.

In a follow-up test, the robot pointed to a darkened room with the doorway partially blocked by a piece of furniture. Two of six participants tried to squeeze past

dangerous if people are too willing to follow the instructions of a buggy or malicious machine.

The results were not what researchers expected: almost everyone elected to follow the robot –

skills and read a magazine article.

The emergency was simulated with artificial smoke and a First Alert smoke detector.

A total of 26 of the 30 participants chose to follow the robot during the

the obstruction rather than taking the clear path out.

Too much trust in a robot can be a serious problem, says Kerstin Dautenhahn at the University of Hertfordshire. “Any piece of software

even though it was taking them away from the clearly marked exit.

emergency. Of the remaining four, two were discounted from the study

will always have some bugs in it,” she says. Aviva Rutkin n Georgia Tech Research Institute

Pablo Bermell-Garcia, who was involved in the research.

Jeffrey Lee Funk at the National University of Singapore thinks that augmented reality training environments are a good idea.

“It’s going to help people learn much more quickly,” he says.

–Trust me, it’s this way– 5 March 2016 | NewScientist | 21

Technology

ONE PER CENT

Bacteria light the way Microbial illumination has hit the shops. Frances Marcellin reports

Glowee

them as decorative lighting and on building exteriors – as well as providing lighting in places with no power cables, such as parks.

ERDF, a largely state-owned utility company that manages 95 per cent of France’s electricity network, is among the backers of Glowee’s recent crowdfunding campaign.

“Gloweeis not meant to replace electric light,” says Rey. “It offers different possibilities.”

How feasible is the idea in the long run? Edith Widder, a biologist at the Ocean Research & Conservation Association in Florida, thinks the costs of producing and maintaining large numbers of bioluminescent bacteria in suitable environmental conditions are too high for most commercial lighting needs.

To get the bacteria to emit light for more than a few days requires adding extra nutrients and removing waste products, she says. “If you do the math, it doesn’t make sense, especially when you factor in how incredibly efficient LED lighting has become.”

But Glowee is undeterred.

Having adjusted the gel, the company is now genetically engineering the bacteria. Rey says her team is developing a molecular switch that will activate the bioluminescence only at night. This will let the bacteria save energy during the day and make the nutrients last longer.

The team also plans to make the bacteria glow brighter and survive temperature fluctuations of up to 20 °C. The aim is to launch a product in 2017 that lasts for a month.

Solutions exist in nature, says Rey. “Now that we have the tools to copy them, we can build far more sustainable processes –The bacteria are bright tonight– and products.” n

22 | NewScientist | 5 March 2016

Atlas shrugged Some took it as a sign that the robot uprising is a step closer.

Google-owned robotics company Boston Dynamics has released footage of Atlas, its new humanoid robot. In the video Atlas walks over uneven and slippery terrain – and calmly takes a beating from a human with a hockey stick.

“We need a new industrial strategy fit for the epoch of drones, bots and artificial intelligence” Tom Watson, deputy leader of the UK’s Labour party, calls for a new government approach in response to technological change

AI hits the books Like every good student, Facebook’s artificial intelligence is a diligent reader. Last week, the company released the list of books it is using to train its neural networks. It includes more than 100 children’s classics , including The Jungle Book, Little Women and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

After being trained on a sample of books, the AI was able to fill in missing words in sentences taken from books it hadn’t read using just the preceding few lines as context.

Boston Dynamics

THE future may be bright – but The gel provides nutrients could it be powered by living that keep the bacteria alive. organisms? Glowee, a start-up At first, the lights worked for in Paris, has started selling only a few seconds. By tweaking bioluminescent lights to illuminate the consistency of the gel, the team shop fronts and street signs. has now extended the lifespan After a demonstration in of the bacteria to three days.

December, the French company Bioluminescent lights are has launched its first product – a not new. But Glowee is one of bacteria-powered light that glows the first companies to develop for three days. The company is a commercial product. Initially, now working on lights that will the lights are being marketed glow for a month or more. to shops. In France, retailers are “Our goal is to change the way “ They could work as we produce and use light,” says decorative lighting in Glowee founder Sandra Rey. “We want to offer a global solution places like parks with no power cables” that will reduce the 19 per cent of electricity used to produce light.”

The lights are made by filling not allowed to light their shop small transparent cases with a windows between 1 am and 7 am gel containing bioluminescent to limit light pollution and energy bacteria. Glowee uses a bacterium consumption. The softly glowing called Aliivibrio fischeri, which bacterial lights – about as bright gives marine animals such as the as night lights – provide a way to Hawaiian bobtail squid the ability get around the ban. to glow with a blue-green light.

Glowee also suggests using

Aperture

24 | NewScientist | 5 00 March Month 2016 2016

Milky way on a coral reef IT’S a game of life. A mass of fish dart in and out of a cloud of sperm and eggs off the island of Palau in the western Pacific, creating the next generation.

“The existence of red snapper spawning aggregations in Palau has been known for some time, so I wondered why there weren’t many photographs of it,” says photographer Tony Wu. Once he got in the water with them he discovered one possible reason – the fish were really fast and he struggled to keep up.

Spawning aggregations are common but not well understood. Two-spot red snapper (Lutjanus bohar) gather in huge numbers where the edge of the reef meets the open ocean. They produce vast clouds of sperm and eggs – enough that plenty get fertilised, despite predators devouring much of the nutritious mixture. A strong current pulls any surviving fertilised eggs out to sea where they grow into adults. Some will make it back to the reef and spawn themselves, starting the whole process all over again.

Those same strong currents also made it difficult to get the shot, says Wu. “Getting into the right place at the right time was a challenge.

The flow of water over the reef was steady and unrelenting, but I was able to position myself so that the action came to me.”

The spawning took place at Shark City diving site, and Wu spotted a few blacktip sharks lurking on the lookout for an easy meal. Niall Firth

Photographer Tony Wu naturepl.com

005Month March 2016 | NewScientist | 25

analysis

Game changers Can the world’s top player of super-complex game Go stay one step ahead of the machines, wonders Garry Kasparov

MY TWO matches against the chess supercomputer Deep Blue in 1996 and 1997 were called “the brain’s last stand” and compared with everything from the first moon landing to the Terminator movies. I won the first time and, more famously of course, lost the rematch a year later, at which point IBM shut its project down.

Every time a similar challenge hits the headlines my news and social media mentions erupt.

The latest flurry is due to the Google-backed artificial intelligence AlphaGo taking on Go champion Lee Se-dol of South Korea after it beat Europe’s best player 5 to 0. I don’t play this ancient Chinese game so am not qualified to predict the outcome next week, but I do know what the result will probably hinge on and what the future holds for Go. Computers excel at flawless calculation, our brains at

generalities, long-range planning and applying general themes to new circumstances. This contrast makes for interesting battles in the brief windows when humans and machines are evenly matched, as in chess 20 years ago and, apparently, as in Go today.

Early chess machines had blind spots and exploitable weaknesses and the temptation is to target these instead of playing a normal game. I could not resist doing so against Deep Blue. Mind sports like chess and Go require intense concentration and when focus is disrupted by trying to trick a computer you can end up tricking yourself into making objectively dubious moves. As machines get stronger, these are punished.

But the key disparity between flesh and silicon is the mundane machine advantage of relentless consistency. Computers don’t make big blunders, at least not

Beyond borders Australia’s doctors risk jail fighting for refugee health. Europe may be next, says David Berger AUSTRALIA’S hard-line stance on asylum seekers is coveted by some right-wing politicians in Europe.

Designed to “stop the boats”, it includes mandatory, indefinite detention in appalling conditions in offshore camps and snail-like processing of asylum claims. The UN has found arbitrary detention in the camps amounts to torture.

26 | NewScientist | 5 March 2016

Government staff and contractors risk jail under the Border Force Act of 2015 for revealing details about what happens in the camps.

Crucially, this includes doctors who treat detainees.

Medics conducted widespread protests against these gagging provisions and, in the first acts of civil disobedience, doctors have disclosed information about detainees’ conditions. Last month, doctors at Lady Cilento Children’s Hospital in Brisbane went further

Ministers justify this by saying it deters others and prevents more drowning. In reality, it panders to racist fears of crucial swing voters.

Also worrying is the attempt to suppress information about the policy’s impact. Camps on Nauru “ That doctors in a Western and on Manus Island in Papua New democracy are resorting to Guinea lack independent oversight acts of civil disobedience is a chilling sign of the times” and journalists are banned.

by refusing to discharge a baby of asylum seekers back into the care of the authorities. They feared she would be going back to Nauru, which was “not a safe home environment”.

That such rare acts of civil disobedience by medics are taking place in a contemporary Western democracy is a chilling sign of the times and underlines the degree to which the independence of doctors has been imperilled.

The profession, however, is subject not only to the law of the land, but to its own ethical code, breaches of which can lead to severe sanctions. In two landmark cases, in the UK in 2012 and in

For more articles, visit newscientist.com

Garry Kasparov is a former world chess champion, the chairman of the Human Rights Foundation and author of Winter is Coming (PublicAffairs)

South Africa in 1985, doctors were struck off for failure to act in the deaths of detainees even though they broke no law. Sticking to the law, or “following orders”, is not a defence for unethical conduct for doctors – and nor should it ever be.

As opinions harden against asylum seekers and refugees in Europe, doctors there must be wary of being coerced into becoming servants of the state at the expense of their primary duty to patients. They should boycott any service that seeks to compromise them in this way. n David Berger is a UK doctor now working in Australia

INSIGHT Artificial intelligence

Albert Gea / Reuters

in chess, while a human is only a slip away from catastrophe.

No machine suffers complacency, anxiety and exhaustion. When I lost the decisive sixth game to Deep Blue in 1997 I was under huge pressure and played like it. It was the worst game of my career.

Despite that, it was an exciting time, the culmination of interest in mastering the game mechanically dating back to the 18th-century hoax chess machine the Turk. Today AlphaGo represents a machine learning project with real AI implications and deserves wide attention.

Se-dol may be so much stronger than AlphaGo that human fallibilities won’t be decisive yet.

Go also has many more possible moves each turn than chess and is less dynamic, factors that work against machine success. But I’m afraid the writing is on the wall.

Today, a decent laptop running a free chess program would crush Deep Blue and any human grandmaster. The jump from chess machines being predictable and weak to terrifyingly strong took just a dozen years.

Go, your clock is ticking. n

humans make maps in the 21st century.

One approach is a project called Open Street Map, which uses volunteer labour to trace satellite photographs by hand, picking out roads and houses. It can create maps of entirely unmapped regions in a few days, and these have been used all over the world, often for disaster response.

But it would take decades for a human team of any size to carry out mapping on the scale that Facebook’s AI system has demonstrated.

Facebook’s map-making AI is just one of probably thousands of narrow AIs – those trained to focus on a single task – churning through human projects around the planet, faster and on larger scales than we ever could.

The CERN particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, is using deep learning to find patterns in the mass of its collision data; pharmaceutical –Who are you calling ambitious?– companies are using it to find new drug ideas in data sets that no human could plumb.

What’s exciting is that all neural networks can scale up like Facebook’s mapping AI. Have a narrow AI that can spot the signs of cancer in a scan?

Good: if you have the data, you can now search for cancer in every human on Earth in a few hours. An AI that internet to areas that don’t have it. knows how to spot a crash in the It’s a dubious starting point, but markets? Great: it can watch all 20 of whatever you think about Facebook’s the world’s major stock exchanges at internet colonialism, the company’s the same time, as well as the share drones won’t be able to beam Wi-Fi prices of individual companies. to the disconnected until they know The real power of narrow AI isn’t in where they are. what it can do, because its performance The model was able to map is almost never as good as a human’s 20 countries after being trained on would be. The maps that Facebook’s just 8000 human-labelled satellite AI produces are nowhere near as “The model was able to map good as those that come out of 20 countries after being companies that rely on humans such trained on just 8000 as custom map developer Mapbox. photos from one nation” But smart systems being built in labs at Google, Facebook and Microsoft are powerful because of the speed and photos from a single nation – and scale at which they operate. The future Facebook’s data-science team wasn’t of human work may be determined by even trying to go quickly. whether it is better to do an averageThe company says it has now quality job many thousands of times improved the process to the point at a second or a human-quality job once which it could do the same mapping in a few hours. Assuming it had the every few minutes. photos, this means it could map Earth AI is here – and it’s real and powerful. in about six days. That’s something But humans are still in control. We’re we still haven’t managed to do fully. just all about to get some extremely Using its AI, Facebook aped how clever help. n

Facebook maps out the future of work Hal Hodson

WE HAVE just learned that Facebook’s artificial-intelligence software can probably map more in a week than humanity has over our entire history.

In a blog post, the social network announced that its AI system took two weeks to build a map that covers 4 per cent of our planet. That’s satellite photos of 14 per cent of Earth’s land surface – an area covering 21.6 million square kilometres – digested and traced into a digital representation of the roads, buildings and settlements they show.

This is the starkest example we have seen so far of the most important phenomenon in technology – computers doing human work really fast. It will have massive implications for how we acquire knowledge, cooperate on large projects and even understand the world.

The stated goal of Facebook’s datascience team is to build maps to help the social network plan how to deliver

5 March 2016 | NewScientist | 27

OPINION INTERVIEW

Let’s talk, brain to brain Telepathy technology that enables the meeting of minds could help us explore the basis of human knowledge, says Andrea Stocco

You are working on brain-to-brain communication. Can one person’s thoughts ever truly be experienced by another person?

Each brain is different. And while differences in anatomy are relatively easy to account for, differences in function are difficult to characterise. And then we have differences in experience – my idea of flying could be completely unlike your idea of flying, for example. When you think about flying, a bunch of associated experiences come into your mind, competing for your attention. We somehow need to strip away the individual differences to grasp the basic, shared factors.

But it seems possible. Other researchers have been able to use information collected from a group of people to make surprisingly successful, if basic, predictions about what another individual is thinking.

What do you need to transmit information between brains?

The idea is to record one person’s brain activity using a non-invasive device such as an EEG, which involves wearing a cap of electrodes. A computer program filters out what is thought to be the relevant brain activity, and this is recreated in another person using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) – a non-invasive technique that induces an electrical current in their brain.

Do you think it will ever be possible to convey something as rich and personal as emotion or memory in this way?

If you ask 20 scientists that question, you’ll probably get 20 different answers. We don’t really know. Scientists have been able to detect patterns of brain activity that correspond to particular objects, and have created databases of these correspondences. But we still don’t 28 | NewScientist | 5 March 2016

know what the mind is actually experiencing.

We hope that brain-to-brain interfaces will help us explore these issues, and understand the basis of human knowledge. What does it mean to feel happiness? What does it mean to think of breakfast? We should get a better idea when we try to recreate these states in other people’s minds.

Wouldn’t it just be easier to communicate by talking to each other?

Yes and no. Language is a very complex tool for sharing our thoughts. Many different parts of the brain are involved in making sense of any given word, which has a definition but can also vary in meaning based on how it is pronounced and the context in which it is used.

In truth, I don’t think we can develop brain-to-brain interfaces that will recreate the mental dialogue that is generated by

“ What if you could record your brain activity, then roll it back and relive it?” conversations. But a conversation assumes that two people can speak the same language, and that they can speak at all. A brain code is the most robust way to communicate, because unless the person is injured or in some kind of deep coma, they will have a functioning brain.

What else could we use brain-to-brain communication for?

There are some potential medical applications. For example, a healthy person’s brain could be used in the treatment of some conditions. Depression, schizophrenia and many other conditions are associated with

quite specific and localised changes in brain activity. Doctors have been trying to correct this problematic activity using brain stimulation. But instead you could use activity patterns from a healthy brain to drive activity in the brain of someone with a disorder.

I can imagine taking a similar approach to help people with brain damage as a result of a stroke. When the damage occurs in parts of the brain that control movement, people can become seriously impaired, and can lose the ability to grasp or swallow, for example.

The activity recorded from a healthy brain performing these tasks could provide the damaged brain with some kind of template, which may speed up recovery.

Do you have any non-medical applications in mind?

My favourite application is the idea of transferring concepts that are difficult to verbalise, such as how we control movement or how we feel. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night thinking I have a great idea, and try to write it down. But in the morning I don’t understand what I’ve written.

That thought in the night was the partial representation of an idea that is lost forever because it was hard to put into words. I always wonder – what if I could record my brain activity, roll it back and replay it? I’d love this ability to use and not waste my half-intuitions.

You mean log and relive your own brain states?

Why not? A brain interface is a way to record information and put it back into a biological system. They don’t need to be different brains.

In fact, this would get rid of all the problems we have in overcoming the individual differences between people.

For more opinion articles, visit newscientist.com/opinion

Photographed for New Scientist by Brian Smale

Get your thinking cap on: patterns of brain activity are picked up by this EEG headgear

20 questions with each other using a brain-tobrain communication device. The volunteers did surprisingly well, guessing the right object 72 per cent of the time.

How do the volunteers play 20 questions?

One person wearing an EEG cap, who we call the “transmitter”, chooses an object from a list of items. The second person, the “receiver”, has to work out what the object is by selecting yes-or-no questions that are then presented on a screen to the transmitter.

When the transmitter sees a question, they answer by looking at a “yes” or “no” button.

Each of these buttons is accompanied by a light flashing at a different frequency, which drives activity in a visual part of the transmitter’s brain. We record this activity, and use it to wirelessly send a signal that we convert into direct stimulation of the vision centres of the receiver’s brain using TMS: the receiver perceives a specific visual disturbance for “yes” and a different one for “no”. In this way, the yes or no answers are delivered directly to the enquirer’s brain. The pair continue like this until only one object from the list remains.

Some people have called this “mind-reading”.

Would you agree with this description?

Not quite. In earlier work, my team developed a device that could tell when a person was thinking of moving their hand before they made any movement at all. This ability to detect an intention is more akin to mindreading. But in our 20-questions set-up, we are only transmitting simple visual information.

Profile Andrea Stocco is an assistant professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he co-directs the Cognition and Cortical Dynamics Laboratory

These applications sound a lot like science fiction – are they plausible?

I often brainstorm possible applications with colleagues and we get very excited about them, but mostly we know very well that the first steps we have to take are so far away from these big scenarios. I am in contact with doctors who work in brain rehabilitation and I always pitch them these ideas to see what

So what’s the next step?

We are working to develop our brain-to-brain communication interface and take it much further than the 20 questions experiment.

We want to be able to transmit information that is more complex than simple commands and visual information. We believe we can transmit information that is more conceptual. they think. Some are sceptical, but others are enthusiastic and want to try treatments now.

The biggest challenge is in recording and stimulating this kind of brain activity at a high enough resolution. We’re not there yet.

What do you have in mind?

What have you achieved so far?

I would rather not say. I don’t want to sound suspicious but there are other groups working on this and there is a race between us to develop the next interface, so we must be careful. Watch this space. n

Most recently we have had two people in two different buildings play a version of

Interview by Jessica Hamzelou 5 March 2016 | NewScientist | 29

COVER STORY

Is it me you’re looking for?

Never mind the Higgs and gravitational waves – the LHC might finally have caught a glimpse of a new and better theory of reality, says Matthew Chalmers

Stuart Patience

I

F IT is anything, it is what Gian Giudice has been waiting for his entire scientific life.

“We are not talking about a confirmation of an established theory, but about opening a door into an unknown and unexplored world,” says Giudice, a theoretical particle physicist based at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland.

That’s if it turns out to be anything. At the moment, all we have are hints emerging from the debris of collisions within CERN’s showpiece particle smasher, the Large Hadron Collider. But if those hints firm up in the course of the coming weeks and months, it could be the big one. Forget the Higgs, forget even gravitational waves: 2016 could go down as the year when a new picture of nature’s fundamental workings was unveiled.

The hopes spring from two “bumps” that have appeared independently, in the same place, in the latest data from the LHC’s two big detectors, ATLAS and CMS. They point to the existence of a particle that dwarfs even the Higgs boson, the giver-of-mass particle discovered at CERN in July 2012.

The Higgs was a milestone, but ultimately

one that marked the end of a road. It was the last particle to be found of those predicted by the standard model of particle physics. This clutch of sophisticated equations matches every experimental result to date with exquisite precision, and explains the workings of three of the fundamental forces of nature: electromagnetism and the weak and strong nuclear forces. But it is a manifestly incomplete model, silent on the fourth force, gravity, and unable to explain why the Higgs and the 16 or so other particles it is built on have the properties they do – not to mention what makes the invisible dark matter that is thought to dominate the universe.

To break free from the standard model, we need to find something completely new.

Hence the excitement surrounding hints contained in the LHC’s data from 2015, the first full year when it was running at close to its maximum design energy. Theorist John Ellis of King’s College London says he hasn’t seen anything like it since the ill-fated 2011 announcement by physicists in Italy that neutrinos travel faster than light.

That turned out to be a trick of the light: an incorrectly attached fibre optic cable was skewing the experiment’s timings. Such an error is unlikely to be the cause here, but cruel teases from inconclusive data are an occupational hazard for researchers at a machine like the LHC. Sifting through the debris of its proton collisions, which happen billions of times a second, to determine whether it contains anything unexpected is a complex and messy business. Look long and hard enough and, once in a while, you’re likely to see any pattern you want. Certainty, however, comes only by observing the same thing many times over.

If you get three tails in the first three tosses of a coin, you would be inclined to put the result down to chance. Get more than five tails in a row, and you might start to suspect the coin is loaded. Particle physicists’ “gold standard” for declaring a discovery corresponds to there being a chance of only 1 in 3.5 million that the observed pattern is a fluke – a threshold you reach between the 21st and 22nd consecutive tails.

We’re not there yet with the latest LHC bumps. They were spotted in collisions that produce two high-energy photons of light.

Such collisions should generally produce fewer very energetic photons, purely because these take more energy to make. And indeed ATLAS and CMS see a declining number of “background” events, stemming from other well-known processes that produce two photons, as energy increases.

But at an energy of 750 gigaelectronvolts (GeV) shared between the two photons, the detectors see a slight upwards blip (see graph, page 32). This hints at something. Particles have set masses, and when they decay, that mass is converted into mass and energy of the decay products. Seeing an excess of photons with energy totalling 750 GeV suggests they came from the decay of an as yet unknown particle with just this amount of energy in the form of mass.

Decays into two photons are very “clean” processes – photons are easier to detect than other particles, and the expected rate of background events is well known. A similar bump in the graph at 125 GeV was how the Higgs first hinted at its existence. This newest bump would represent the most massive particle yet discovered, and by some margin, with a mass six times that of the Higgs > 5 March 2016 | NewScientist | 31

and almost four times that of a lead atom.

The signal is eerily similar to the size of the Higgs bumps six months before they were confirmed as a discovery. It is almost impossible to calculate an exact figure, but combine ATLAS and CMS’s latest results, announced in December, and the likelihood that the bumps are a statistical fluctuation is one in several hundred. That is equivalent to flipping maybe nine or 10 tails in a row – enough to become suspicious that the coin is loaded, but not to convince.

Even so, the spark has ignited a fuse. Barely a week after the ATLAS and CMS bumps were made public, theorists had posted more than 100 possible explanations to the arXiv server, a repository where physicists post data before formal publication, and the number has been skyrocketing ever since.

Fifth force?

Yasunori Nomura of the University of California, Berkeley, was one of the first.

“I don’t normally jump in on anomalies such as these because most of them are just too crappy, but this one is relatively clean,” he says. “We’re desperate to some degree because we have lots of problems to solve and no data.”

There are some things we can already say about the putative particle. It has no electrical charge, for a start, and its spin – a quantum mechanical property – is constrained. The mathematics of spin mean that any particle that decays into two photons, which have a

spin of 1, cannot itself have a spin of 1. It must also have whole-number spin. So the particle might have a spin of 2, exciting the idea among some theorists that it is a type of graviton – a hypothetical spin-2 particle that transmits gravity. That would be the first herald of a long-awaited theory beyond the standard model that unifies gravity with the other known forces of nature.

Or the particle might have spin 0, as does the Higgs – in fact, another theory is that the apparition is a heavier cousin of the Higgs.

But if it does have spin 0, Nomura’s analysis suggests it is not an elementary particle: if it were, the vagaries of quantum theory would mean a sea of other, short-lived elementary particles would bubble up from the vacuum around it, sending its mass ballooning far higher than it is even now.

Instead, Nomura thinks, it must be a composite particle similar to the protons and neutrons within the atomic nucleus. These are made up of quarks bound together by the strong nuclear force. The mystery particle, on the other hand, would be the first in a family bound by an entirely new fifth force that only kicks in at high energies.

That might sound far-fetched, but it would just be history repeating itself. In the 1950s and 1960s, the discovery of a barrage of particles that turned out to be made up of quarks led physicists to the idea of the strong force. Nomura says that, together with his postdoctoral researcher, he threw several tests at the idea – and it passed every one.

Other theorists say the same about their pet

Suspicious blip Counting LHC particle decays that produce two photons reveals a slight excess at an energy of around 750 gigaelectronvolts (GeV), perhaps indicating the existence of a new particle 10,000

Standard model prediction

Data point with margin of error

100

10 SOURCE: THE ATLAS COLLECTION

Number of events

1000

1

200

400 600 800 1000 1200 1400 Combined energy of the photons produced (GeV)

32 | NewScientist | 5 March 2016

1600

Patrice Loïez; Max Brice/CERN

“ We are not talking about confirming a established theory, but opening a door into an unexplored world”

theories, and Ellis urges caution – given our level of ignorance, he says, the particle could still be either elementary or composite. “We can’t rule out much. The spin of the particle is wide open too.”

Strangely, the only thing we probably can rule out is that the particle is what many theorists, including Ellis, would like it to be: a supersymmetric particle. Supersymmetry is a theory that plugs many holes in the standard model by conjuring up a raft of heavier particles that partner each known particle.

The LHC has in general failed to turn up any evidence of supersymmetry, and even from the little we know about this latest particle, it doesn’t correspond to anything found in the simplest supersymmetry models.

A further oddity is that a particle so massive should decay into two photons only indirectly, via particles of at least half its mass – but there is no sign of these. “If this thing is real then it can’t just come alone. It demands the existence of further new particles,” says Ellis.

The fact that there is no off-the-shelf model such as supersymmetry that supplies a particle with the right properties makes things all the more intriguing for Giudice. “This is the most exciting part of the story,” he says. His own hunch chimes with Nomura’s – that the

Shadows of something

big

Situated between the ATLAS and CMS detectors around the Large Hadron Collider’s 27-kilometre underground ring is a third experiment, LHCb. Unlike its larger cousins, which search for new particles by measuring debris from their decay, LHCb makes precise measurements of the decays of composite particles called B mesons, comparing them with predictions from the standard model of particle physics.

Hints of a couple of deviations have been hanging around for a while. One is in the rate at which B mesons disintegrate into lighter K mesons and a pair of muons, heavier cousins of electrons.

Others concern the rates at

A giant magnet for novel phenomena: the LHC’s CMS experiment

particle heralds a bevy of particles interacting through an as yet unknown fifth fundamental force. If so, we should expect to see a lot more such things at even greater masses as ATLAS and CMS accumulate data.

They might not be the only source of surprises. In a separate development, the LHCb experiment is also seeing anomalies that could point to the existence of unidentified particles – although where those fit into the bigger picture remains unclear (see “Shadows of something big”, above).

Getting more data is the foremost task of experimentalists like Jim Olsen of CMS. While trying to remain cool-headed, he is as excited as his theorist colleagues. If the ATLAS and CMS bumps grow after the LHC resumes highenergy particle collisions next month, then it’s “absolutely major”, he says. “It is a completely new object to study and the first thing outside the standard model.”

Or perhaps such hopes will be crushed, as they have been often enough before. Most recently in 2014, CMS and ATLAS saw tentative blips in data from lower-energy collisions that produce jets of particles. It hinted at a possible

which B mesons decay into electrons, muons and a third, heavier type of particle, tau leptons. The standard model says all three decay rates should all be the same – but LHCb measurements seems to indicate deviations from the standard model, although the degree of statistical significance varies.

LHCb’s Ulrik Egede of Imperial College London. “People are getting excited that there are multiple effects that might be related.”

If these are real effects, the likelihood is that they are down to the influence of undiscovered massive particles participating in the ethereal quantum dance of the subatomic world. That might appear to tie in well with

Ethereal dance None is significant enough to say something is definitely amiss – and yet the feeling is that the whole might be more than the sum of its parts. “We’ve seen things come and go in the past, but what is interesting now is that we have all these anomalies together,” says

the anomalies that have recently popped up at ATLAS and CMS, which provide more direct evidence for a new particle. But according to LHCb, the unseen ghost would have a spin of 1 – about the only thing that the ATLAS and CMS results definitively rule out (see main story).

particle with a mass of about 2000 GeV, and had a significance about the same as that of the latest bump.

Theorists duly trotted out explanations – the most popular being a particle carrying a new force – only for this bump to fade into nothing when the 2015 data was analysed, even as this latest bump reared up.

“Statistics may play games with us, as always, so I would just wait for the data to come,” says Patrick Janot of CMS. “With physicists searching for so many things in the LHC data, it would be abnormal not to find a

“ If the bumps grow when the LHC resumes collisions, then it’s absolutely major” few excesses of this magnitude.” The same point is emphasised by Marumi Kado of ATLAS. “We already have a host of different analyses searching for many signatures, which makes the probability of a mere fluctuation of the background more likely,” he says.

Make or break time could be very soon.

The LHC did not deliver as much data as anticipated in 2015, and problems with the giant magnet that bends particles through the

CMS detector meant that not all of that was as useful as it might have been. If the researchers have since managed to compensate for the missing magnet in their data analysis, more clarity could be forthcoming as CERN physicists gather for a winter conference in the Italian Alps starting next week. Otherwise, we will have to sit tight until the summer, when the first data from the round of particle smashing starting in April should be available.

Particle physicists are hoping that 2016 will take them back to the unparalleled excitement of the 1960s, when our picture of matter’s make-up was shaken by the discovery of quarks and the strong force. First, though, they have the tough task of balancing the facts with the lure of finding something new. Bump into someone you know in a big city once and you are likely to be amazed by the coincidence, forgetting the 99 times you didn’t bump into them, says LHCb physicist Ulrik Egede of Imperial College London. Our human minds are primed to see causes for effects even where there might be none. “But at the same time you have to be excited because otherwise you can’t get anywhere in science.” n Matthew Chalmers is a consultant for New Scientist based in Bristol, UK 5 March 2016 | NewScientist | 33

Closing in on Cancer

A new type of drug is shattering cancer’s grip on the immune system, with astonishing results. Andy Coghlan reports

34 | NewScientist | 5 March 2016

of Kyoto, he was studying how and why T-cells – immune cells that recognise and attack invaders and abnormal cells – sometimes selfdestruct. He discovered a protein produced on the surface of some T-cells and suspected it was involved in this process. So he called it “Programmed cell death-1”, or PD-1.

To find out what PD-1 does, Honjo disabled the gene that makes the protein in mice. He found that they developed autoimmune disease, including mild arthritis, heart degeneration and joint disease.

This suggests that PD-1 helps to prevent the immune system running out of control.

“The immune system needs brakes and accelerators, and PD-1 was clearly a brake,” Honjo says. So he started to wonder whether the immune system could be unleashed against cancer by blocking PD-1 with a drug.

The idea that drugs might boost the immune system’s ability to fight cancer – socalled immunotherapy – has been the subject of intense research for decades. Ideally, our immune system would do this on its own.

But one of the reasons that cancer is so good at thriving and spreading in the body is its ability to quieten the immune system. For this reason, most conventional treatments

Ralph Barrera-Pool/Getty Images

Martin Oeggerli 2012, kindly supported by FHNW

W

HEN Vicky Brown was diagnosed with advanced malignant melanoma in 2013, she was in shock. Even with the best treatments available at the time, most people with her diagnosis lived for about six months.

Then her fate took a turn for the better.

Through the Melanoma UK charity, Brown was referred to take part in a trial of an experimental treatment at the Royal Marsden Hospital in London. Over several weeks, she received three intravenous infusions. After the second, the lumps she had felt in her throat and breast had vanished.

“I was thrilled,” says Brown, who is still alive almost three years after her initial diagnosis.

“The consultant says he’d never seen a result like that so quickly.”

Brown’s results may be extraordinary, but they aren’t unique. Other people who have taken part in similar trials are still alive a decade later, despite starting out with similarly bleak prognoses. Optimistic headlines and column inches have been dedicated to these new drugs, not least since former US president Jimmy Carter announced that they were responsible for clearing potentially lethal melanoma from his brain.

This new generation of anticancer drugs – called checkpoint inhibitors – is having such a profound impact that some scientists are pitching it as a turning point in cancer treatment. “Melanoma and lung cancer used to be death sentences, but they’re not any more,” says Gordon Freeman at the DanaFarber Cancer Institute in Boston. “It’s a revolution, and it’s only the start.”

The story of these treatments began in the 1960s when Tasuku Honjo, a Japanese trainee doctor, learned of the death of a close classmate from gastric cancer.

“My dream became to cure cancer,” he says.

The dream began to materialise in 1992 when, as an immunologist at the University

Jimmy Carter’s brain cancer was successfully treated with the new drugs

use brute force, zapping tumour cells with drugs or radiation.

Such treatments work to a varying degree, but they are unspecific, damaging healthy cells alongside the tumours. They are also unable to keep up with cancer as it evolves in response to their onslaught.

Better would be to find a way to loosen the grip that cancer cells have over the immune system, reawakening it to do the job it is intended for. Attempts have included a range of vaccines and immune-stimulators, but none has worked consistently well.

Then, about six years ago, came sensational results from a trial of a drug called ipilimumab, or “ipi” for short, which had unprecedented effects against melanoma, the most lethal type of skin cancer. Some 45 per cent of people were still alive a year after the trial ended, and 24 per cent were alive after a further year – around four times better than standard chemotherapies.

More strikingly, there was a subset of people who seemed to be almost completely rid of their cancer. “Around 20 per cent of the patients survived longer than three years,” says Jedd Wolchok of the Memorial SloanKettering Cancer Center in New York City, one of the main clinicians involved in testing the drug. “Some are still alive 10 or 11 years later.” Once people have reached three years survival, they seem to go on without the cancer coming back, says Wolchok.

But although ipi was approved for treating melanoma in the US in 2011, it brought with it a toxicity that many people taking it found intolerable. Side effects included lung inflammation and hepatitis. Some died.

The problem is that ipi lifts a master immune brake, sending the whole immune system into overdrive, exposing healthy as well as cancerous cells to the blitzkrieg – a similar problem to that seen with standard chemotherapy. What was needed was a > 5 March 2016 | NewScientist | 35

TIMELINE March 2011 Ipilimumab (brand name Yervoy, made by Bristol-Meyers Squibb) approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for advanced melanoma, but it has severe side effects July 2014 Japan approves nivolumab (brand name Opdivo, made by BristolMeyers Squibb) for treating melanoma that has spread to other organs, making it the first PD-1 inhibitor to receive regulatory approval September 2014 Pembrolizumab (brand name Keytruda made by Merck) approved in the US for treating melanoma October 2014 Pembrolizumab approved by the FDA to treat non-small cell lung cancer in people who had not responded to other treatments, after it was shown to shrink lung tumours in 41 per cent of patients December 2014 Nivolumab approved in the US for melanoma after it was shown to shrink tumours in a third of patients March 2015 Nivolumab gets approval from the FDA to treat advanced non-small cell lung cancer, after trials showing that 42 per cent of people survived for at least a year, twice the survival rate of those taking the standard treatment drug, docetaxel June 2015 European Commission approves nivolumab for lung cancer October 2015 Nivolumab approved by the FDA for kidney cancer after a trial showed that, on average, people on the drug survived for more than two years – five months longer than those on rival treatment everolimus January 2016 The UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence recommends that nivolumab should be available to people with melanoma being treated by the UK National Health Service February 2016 Atezolizumab (made by Genentech and Roche) is undergoing clinical trials for melanoma, breast cancer, non-small cell lung cancer, renal cell carcinoma and bladder cancer. It could be the first important drug for bladder cancer, because it has been shown to shrink tumours in 27 per cent of recipients 36 | NewScientist | 5 March 2016

much more targeted approach.

That’s where Honjo comes in. As PD-1 is a “receptor” molecule produced only on immune cells, his team reasoned there must be something that binds to it and switches it – and the brake – on.

Honjo sent samples of PD-1 over to Freeman, who, along with his colleagues, tested it against different proteins produced by human cells, to see if it would bind to anything. They found it attracted a molecule now known as PD-L1 (programmed death ligand-1).

Crucially, they also discovered that cancerous cells often produce PD-L1. “The first ones we found were on ovarian and breast cancer cells,” says Freeman. “Then, we

“ The immune system machine-guns the tumour rather than taking one shot” found it on lots of other cancer cells, and realised it seemed to be produced to engage PD-1 and turn on the immune brake. That was the ‘aha’ moment.”

What Freeman, Honjo and their teams had discovered is that PD-L1 on the surface of cancer cells forms a truce-like handshake with PD-1. This calls off the immune attack, allowing the cancer to proliferate unchallenged (see diagram, opposite).

So could blocking PD-1 stymie cancer?

To test the idea, Honjo tried growing human tumours in mice engineered to lack PD-1.

Sure enough, he found that the tumours wouldn’t grow.

The next step was to make antibodies against PD-1, to see if they would protect against cancer by “releasing the brake”.

They did, although not as well as knocking the gene out completely. But it was enough to show that it was possible to give the immune system the desired boost.

And yet the findings scarcely excited any interest, drowned out by the success of ipi. “I tried to convince the pharmaceutical industry, but with enormous difficulty,” Honjo says.

That changed with the realisation that the side effects of ipi often outweigh the benefits.

Finally, the pharmaceutical industry turned its attention to the PD-1 system, which is much more targeted to the interaction between the immune system and tumour cells.

The drugs now setting the cancer world alight are called PD-1 inhibitors.

The two blazing the trail are nivolumab, or “nivo”, and pembrolizumab, or “pembro”, the drug used to treat Jimmy Carter.

These focus the immune attack on cancer cells rather than on healthy tissue, which means they are more effective and milder than ipi. “They have remarkably few side effects,” says James Larkin, a consultant medical oncologist at the Royal Marsden, who has been treating people with melanoma or kidney cancer – including Brown – with nivo, pembro and ipi. “But overall, the biggest boost from the new drugs is that there’s a 30 to 40 per cent chance the effects will be durable, for years, not months,” he says.

In trials so far, nivo and pembro have routinely outperformed both ipi and the best existing chemo- and radiotherapy treatments, often triggering double the rate of tumour shrinkage and patient survival with far milder side effects. In July 2014, nivo received regulatory approval, in Japan, for treating melanoma that had spread. Pembro and nivo shortly followed suit in the US (see Timeline, left). They are also showing promise against the most common form of lung cancer, which kills more than 4000 people a day worldwide.

One reason the drugs are proving so successful is that remobilising the immune system allows it to continuously evolve to keep the tumour in check, limiting the ability of the cancer to escape detection and destruction even if it develops hundreds of mutations. “The immune system doesn’t see one target on the tumour, it sees 10, or 50 maybe, so it machine-guns the tumour, rather than taking a single pot-shot,” says Freeman.

“It’s a lot harder to evade a machine gun.”

And while nivo and pembro both disrupt the “handshake” by blocking PD-1, a second wave of drugs is under development that blocks the other partner, the PD-L1 molecule

Keeping tumours in check A new class of drugs can boost the immune response to cancer cells Some cancer cells produce a molecule called PD-L1, which forms a truce-like "handshake" with the PD-1 receptor on the surface of T-cells…

…and the T-cell remains passive, allowing tumour to grow

PD-L1 PD-1

The antigen on a cancer cell’s surface tells a T-cell it is foreign

If drugs are used to prevent this handshake…

T-cell

Cancer cell Antigen

Anti PD-L1 drugs

Anti PD-1 drugs

…the T-cell recognises the cancer cell as foreign and kills it

Receptor

on the cancer cells. The most successful so far is Atezolizumab, developed by Genentech and Roche. It has recently shown potential for treating lung cancer, extending the lifespan of patients by almost 8 months more, on average, than docetaxel, the best currently available drug.

There is a significant downside: these drugs only work for some of the people who receive them. “In lung cancer, two or three out of 10 have very significant responses, or their disease is stable for a long time,” says Julie Brahmer of Johns Hopkins University of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, and coleader of some of the PD-1 inhibitor trials. “But the majority of lung cancer patients are not responding, and that’s where the work is now.”

Another big question is why the drugs don’t seem to be as effective for some of the major cancer types including prostate, colon and breast cancers. One possibility is that the more mutations a cancer has, the better, because it gives the immune system more “abnormal” molecular targets to aim at. This could explain why melanoma, lung and kidney cancers are seeing the most compelling results. Through exposure to mutation-causing ultraviolet rays, cigarette smoke and toxins, they are likely to have more mutations than tumours in tissues that are better insulated from the environment.

One way to broaden the drugs’ reach could be to use them together. The most dramatic results so far have been seen with the combination of nivo and ipi in treating melanoma. Almost 60 per cent of people showed a response, with their tumours shrinking by more than 30 per cent, compared with 44 per cent in those taking nivo alone and 19 per cent for ipi alone. In 12 per cent of people taking the combination – 36 people in all – tumours vanished completely. The preliminary results also showed that 80 per cent of those given the combination were still alive two years after treatment.

It was a trial of this combination that Brown had taken part in, and which cleared her tumours. She didn’t know it at the time, but she happened to receive the combination.

Even so, her story is a reminder that even if these combinations work better, they aren’t guaranteed to work perfectly every time.

Two years after her first combined treatment, Brown was told that new lumps had appeared in her lungs. Shortly after, she became one of

G_Cancer_penicillin

Patrick ALLARD/REA

Some people with lung cancer are responding particularly well to the new drugs

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OK for press

the first people in the world to have a repeat treatment. That was last September, and just two weeks ago, she received the welcome news that her cancer is stable. “I feel very lucky.

I’ve been given a second chance,” she says.

An even better approach could be to combine the new drugs with other kinds of cancer therapies, such as radiotherapy or anticancer vaccines, something many pharmaceutical companies are now trying.

That’s because many conventional treatments act like sledgehammers, smashing apart their target cells, says Dan Chen, head of cancer at Genentech. By creating more cellular debris, they could open up the way for PD-1 inhibitors to work better, exposing the remobilised immune system to targets that would otherwise be locked away in tumours.

Nobody has all the answers yet, but there is a feeling that cancer treatment has turned a significant corner. “We’re at the point where we’ve discovered the cancer equivalent of penicillin,” says Chen. Although penicillin itself couldn’t cure all infections, it gave rise to a whole generation of antibiotics that changed medicine forever, consigning most previously fatal infections to history.

If this really is cancer’s penicillin moment, we might see some types of cancer consigned to a similar fate. Other people are similarly optimistic. “I hesitate to say the ‘C word’,” says Brahmer, “but potentially it will offer the chance of cures. It’s a very exciting time.” n Andy Coghlan is a reporter for New Scientist.

Links to studies appear in the online version of this article at bit.ly/NSCancerMoment 5 March 2016 | NewScientist | 37

38 | NewScientist | 5 March 2016

A cloud of distinction L

Renaud Vigourt

Could the trails of microbes we leave behind be used to solve crimes? Julian Smith picks up the scent

OS ANGELES, 2025. Two police detectives gaze at a body sprawled on the floor of a seedy hotel room. One scans test results on a tablet screen. “No prints or DNA. If this was our guy, he was careful to clean up.” Her partner sweeps a microbe sensor through the musty air. The readout pings: a match. “It was him. Six hours ago. Looks like he moved back in with his girlfriend.” A grunt. “And they got a new dachshund.”

Like our hapless suspect, we all leave traces of our microbes behind. We are haloed by an invisible nebula of bacteria, fungi and viruses. It’s inevitable that this gets transferred onto the things we touch, the people we meet, even the air we pass through. It’s our vaporous calling card.

Recently we have started learning to unravel its message, and the results look set to change forensic science and policing for good.

Your internal microbial community weighs about the same as your head and is unique. That much we have known for years.

Then we discovered that the balance of microbes can affect your health. A technique known as a faecal transplant for instance has moved into the mainstream in recent years.

Here, patients get a dose of a volunteer’s excrement suffused with a healthy balance of gut microbes to counteract intestinal complaints. But what happens when the critters that make up your microbiome waft away from your body was unknown.

Now a picture is emerging. We all have our own individual, identifiable ecosystem on our skin and it seems that it is this that sloughs off to form most of our microbe cloud, otherwise known as the external microbiome.

The species line-up morphs over time, but

these changes are small compared with the differences between two people’s microbiomes.

The distinction is a bit like the difference between gin and whisky, says Edwin Steussy, a lawyer interested in the forensic implications of microbial clouds.

Whiskies can vary in subtle ways, but you would never mistake any of them for gin.

Even identical twins have skin microbe populations that are as different as a highland malt and a London dry.

Caught red-handed These differences can be used to identify you, long after you touched something.

Take the 2010 study in which a team at the University of Colorado, Boulder, identified individuals out of a group of 270 from just the microbial signature they left on computer keyboards and mice, even after the devices had been sitting around for up to two weeks.

The same is true for mobile phones.

In 2014, James Meadow, then at the University of Oregon in Portland, and his team looked at a predefined selection of DNA chunks that act as a measure of microbial diversity on both the phones and the index fingers of the owners. They found that 82 per cent of the results matched.

Another study a year later showed that people could be accurately matched to their phones and shoes by microbial communities.

But to a homicide detective, a set of recent experiments may be even more tantalising.

Meadow and his team turned one of the university’s labs into a sanitised chamber, complete with CSI-style plastic-covered > 5 March 2016 | NewScientist | 39

Microbial CSI Analysing microbe populations could help pin down key facts of a criminal case

time of death Rigor mortis and body temperature could be on the way out. We still use these methods to measure time of death, but they date to the 19th century and can be confounded by many variables. Looking at the “necrobiome” of decomposing bodies can do better.

In a study published in December, researchers looked at mice and human cadavers at the Southeast Texas Applied Forensic Science Facility, the largest outdoor human decomposition lab in the world.

Analysing the skin microbiome of bodies left to rot for 25 days provided time of death estimates accurate to within four days – already on a par with modern methods, with room for improvement.

The results also showed that a corpse changed the microbial communities of surrounding soils. In future that could help investigators locate buried bodies or figure out if a cadaver has been moved.

the “muddy boot” Ah the giveaway muddy boot, that trope of so many police dramas. But has this suspect been burying a body in the woods or merely doing a spot of gardening?

Forensics scientists already know enough about soil to determine if two samples of the stuff – from a boot and the woods, say – match. Colour, consistency and so on reveal that. But microbial analysis could help police locate an unknown crime scene from traces of soil. We already know that the microbial composition of soil varies distinctively from place to place. We even have a rudimentary map of the UK’s soil microbiome – improve that and we could soon have a searchable index of soil.

Which body fluid is it?

Working out whether that stain on the wall is semen or something else can make or break a case. But these stains can be weeks old and often several fluids are mixed together. Traditional tests look for biological molecules, but these aren’t that sensitive.

The tests also can’t reliably distinguish vaginal fluid and saliva.

But there’s an answer: each type of body fluid has its own distinctive population of microbes. It has now been shown that you can identify saliva and vaginal fluids by sequencing the DNA of their core microbes, which stick around for longer than the biomolecules.

40 | NewScientist | 5 March 2016

walls (see pictures, right). People sat alone in a chair for up to 4 hours as air filters and traps collected samples of the microbes given off by their bodies. To make comparisons fairer, each was given an identical outfit of clothes – tank top, shorts, flip flops – that had all been laundered together. The team sequenced the DNA and catalogued the genetic material collected (PeerJ, DOI: 10.7717/peerj.1258).

“It worked so well we didn’t believe it,” Meadow says. The presence of most people could be clearly detected simply from bacterial emissions into the air, and some could even be individually identified – the first time this has been shown. Some people gave off more microbial detritus than others, and the individual clouds became more different from each other the longer someone sat there.

Another experiment showed comparable results after just 90 minutes. “In science, you usually fail 10 times before it works once,” Meadow says. “That hasn’t been the case in this field so far.”

Microbial barcode It’s not all plain sailing though. “There are far fewer microbes floating around in the air than there are on the surface of skin or in the gut,” says Roxana Hickey, one of Meadow’s former students at the University of Oregon. That makes sequencing a person’s cloud challenging, but as the technology improves it should be possible to do it faster, says Meadow.

All this means your skin microbiome – and by extension your personal microbe cloud – can act as an identifying barcode for you. But that’s not all. Other strands of research are showing that our microbiome retains an imprint of what we have been up to, where – and even with whom.

For instance, when we hang out with people, our clouds begin to rub off on each other, says Rob Knight of the University of California, San Diego, who studies the microbiomes of people who live together.

Knight was surprised at how many microbes crossed species lines. “We thought small children would be huge vectors for microbiome sharing among adults – that children bring you close together, microbially speaking,” he says. “We didn’t really find that with kids, but we did with dogs.”

Family members who live together, particularly couples, shared more microbiota with each other, Knight found. The effect was most pronounced with skin microbes, especially if there was a dog in the house:

dog owners shared more skin microbes with their pets than with other people’s animals.

Knight has also investigated how our microbes rub off on our homes. Quite easily, it seems. “When you move into a new house, you unpack your stuff – and your microbes too,” he says. All this means that microbiome data could one day be used by detectives to tell where someone lives and with whom, and even whether or not they have pets.

First, however, it will probably be used as supplementary evidence, a way to narrow down a field of suspects so investigators can collect more familiar evidence, such as DNA. It’s a leap from the lab to the courtroom, Steussy says, but for microbial forensic science the jump is coming – and it will be a big one.

“It’s one of three or four times since I started studying law that I felt I’m on the edge of an infinite cliff,” he says.

Because of that, Steussy recently teamed up with scientists and another lawyer to consider what the future might hold. That produced a report titled: “Microbial forensics: the biggest thing since DNA?” Steussy certainly thinks the answer is yes.

Meadow, who now works at a microbiome sequencing firm called Phylagen, would agree.

DNA is the gold standard of forensic science but it can’t tell you where someone has been, who they have been with, or whether they have a dog or cat, he says. “But in the foreseeable future we will be able to find that information just by swabbing dust.”

Two samples of one person’s microbiome will never match exactly, because the genomes of bacterial cells and viruses are constantly mutating as they reproduce. As a result, drawing links between microbiome samples has to be done by comparing the populations of millions of different microbes all at once and seeing how closely related they are in terms of abundance and DNA. Part of the reason Steussy thinks the cloud forensic science revolution is imminent is that this sequence-and-compare approach, known as phylogenetic analysis, is already making appearances in courtrooms. Take for instance a case in which an alleged rapist had HIV and

“ DNA can’t tell you if someone has a cat or dog or who they hang out with. But we will be able to get that info just by swabbing dust”

University of Oregon

Cloud catchers: The first experiments to pick up the external microbiome were done in a sterile chamber

the person who was raped is now also infected.

Prosecutors can take samples of the virus from both, plus other sexual partners, and compare the types of mutations present in the different strains to build a “family tree” showing which samples are descended from which.

This sort of evidence has already helped convict rapists, says Steussy, and in the early 2000s, it helped jail a Spanish anaesthesiologist. Juan Maeso, who had hepatitis C, injected himself with morphine and then used the same needle to infect 275 patients. He was sentenced to 1933 years in prison. Around the same time, phylogenetic analysis helped convict a gastroenterologist in Louisiana of attempting to murder his mistress by injecting her with blood infected with HIV and hepatitis C. Analysing microbe communities on surfaces is already a handy tool (see “Microbial CSI”, left). And cloud forensics would operate in a similar way. The idea would be to create family trees for thousands of different microbes and use these to reveal many more connections. We might expect to spot fluctuations in someone’s microbe cloud that bear witness to their associates, family, clothes and perhaps even their route through a building to a crime scene. “It’s an incredibly powerful tool that is going to turn everything upside down,” Steussy says.

But using clouds to identify people and pin down their movements is still some way from being admissible as evidence in a courtroom.

More studies on larger populations and in real-life environments will have to come first.

And to identify which person was at a scene you would have to create and manage large databases to compare samples against, which raises privacy issues.

Borrowed microbes There are also several fundamental questions that remain unanswered. “We’re asking things like how far in space your microbiome extends,” says Hickey. “Is it spread across the room, or does it stay close to you? Do some people take over the room?”

Then there’s the issue of whether a database of people’s microbiomes would be useful, given that these communities are constantly in flux. It’s a legitimate worry, but there should be a core cadre of microbes that mark us out consistently. It will be a question of using statistics to get at this “quiet signal”, says Meadow. He thinks machine learning algorithms will help, as will sequencing entire microbe genomes rather than just characteristic sections.

Even when it does arrive in court, microbial cloud evidence won’t be immune to false

positives or manipulation. The more familiar people become with the concept of microbe clouds, the greater the odds that someone will dream up a way to game the system. Someone might bathe in a caustic solution to kill off their microbes, wear another person’s clothing or spread a sample of their rival’s microbes across a crime scene.

Another risk is that juries might be dazzled by science when microbiome evidence is first used in court. Microbiome data could be misinterpreted, like DNA was, says Edward Imwinkelried of the University of California Davis School of Law. In the early days of DNA evidence, he says, a combination of faulty analyses and unfamiliar juries led to questionable testimony and problematic convictions.

Regardless of these hurdles, Steussy would bet “lots of money” the technique has already been used in cases of national security. “In a legal framework you have to clear a burden of proof,” he says. “But in a foreign country, trying to find someone on a list of targets – those kind of niceties don’t come in.”

The rest of us, though, might have to wait a little longer before our microbial clouds get us into trouble. n Julian Smith is a science writer in Portland, Oregon 5 March 2016 | NewScientist | 41

culturelab

What price reason?

Have we let the PR industry control our minds, asks Sally Adee

A FUNNY thing happens when you start noticing people who are unmoved by facts and reason: you also start noticing those bashing their heads against the wall trying to get The Facts out there. That could be you, climate scientists, atheists, angry people with Facts.

Oh, the chasm between the people brandishing facts and the people without them (or with “facts” that are demonstrably wrong). Is it getting worse? I don’t know – let’s ask those rekindling interest in a flat Earth.

Introducing The Persuaders, philosopher James Garvey describes the event that motivated him to write the book: a panic that seized him after he had bested a public speaker with a killer objection – and it had made no difference. The speaker had stuck to his views. What price argument and reason? Garvey writes that the idea life turns largely on stuff other than reason “menaces me more than a little”.

So what does run the show?

After centuries of the ancient Greeks worshipping reason and evidence, after the debating clubs at the peak of the Enlightenment, we are now a world filled with conspiracy theories and optional realities. The rules have changed.

Reason and argument are dead.

And Garvey, who works at the The PR industry started with simple advertising 42 | NewScientist | 5 March 2016

Royal Institute of Philosophy, realities to suit their agendas. thinks he knows what killed them: Garvey doesn’t pull any public relations. punches. Tracing the rise of PR, Over the past century, the PR the book is a riotous collection industry has increasingly studied of near-libellous assertions and our psychology and identified the scandalous anecdotes. It’s hard chinks in our mental armour. For to stop reading, especially when example, Garvey cites the social Garvey finds the industry’s origin psychology of pioneering tangled up with the Nazi regime. neurosurgeon Wilfred Trotter, And he doesn’t back down, who found that our opinions are plumbing the depths of the shaped not by reason and logic “ Cake is the most feminine but by our in-group allegiances. of foods, meat the most Seizing on such insights, and masculine, roast chicken everything else that came their and oranges are bisexual” way, the PR industry designed tools to override critical reasoning: emotional appeals, industry’s uncritical reliance on status anxiety and so on. pop psychology, in which it is It started with simple decreed, for example, that cake is advertising but soon, realising the the most feminine of foods, meat extraordinary potential, the PR the most masculine, and “roast industry colonised every arena chicken and oranges are bisexual”. of modern life, from politics to To hear Garvey tell it, science communication, until civilisation was bound to slide there was no more room for into unreason. Once the PR reasoned debate. These days industry discovered our everyone has a PR company doing fundamental weaknesses, it their wicked work, warping our wouldn’t be long before these

were exploited. To make this case, the book depends on thinking that has been in the ascendant since psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky introduced us to the dim view behavioural economists take of the human mind.

From them, we learned about a host of cognitive biases that show our minds are infested with irrationality. These include confirmation bias, in which we favour evidence that backs up our existing beliefs, while more or less ignoring alternative possibilities; and availability bias that makes us back options we recall easily over a wider sample that we can’t.

But are we really at the mercy of such biases? If so, how did we make it this far? Is behavioural economics the best measure of our ability to reason, or just another attempt to understand human rationality that will in time be replaced?

Maybe it’s time to break out of our cognitive bias bubble. n

Jorg Dickman/plainpicture

The Persuaders: The hidden industry that wants to change your mind

by James Garvey, Icon Books, £12.99/$22.95

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

The fabulous fringes There is a world of wonders at the wild frontiers of consciousness, finds Julian Richards

imogen Stidworthy, The Whisper Heard (2003), Matt’s Gallery, London. Courtesy the artist, Galerie Akinci, Amsterdam

States of Mind: Tracing the edges of consciousness, Wellcome Collection, London, to 16 October

JOHN’s heart stopped when he was kicked in the chest. His brain was starved of oxygen and he stopped communicating. For years, he seemed at best minimally conscious, at worst vegetative.

That is until he was put into a brain scanner and asked to imagine he was playing tennis. Up lit his premotor cortex. How about walking through a house? On went the parahippocampal gyrus.

The neuroscientists watching his brain asked him to think “tennis” for “yes” and “house” for “no” – so John began a conversation for the first time in 15 years.

Adrian Owen’s team at the University of Western Ontario in Canada had been having such conversations with other patients for six years before John got his chance to prove his consciousness. method ensures that the patterns But “talking” with John was not correspond to thoughts. The like conversing with any of the thoughts themselves elude us, others. He told them something just as they did René Descartes they could not have known centuries ago. His book Man, otherwise: that he was not in pain. published in 1662, years after his Owen’s case studies are death, confronts visitors as they among the most memorable enter the exhibition. It lies open at pieces in Tracing the edges of an illustration of a dissected brain consciousness, the latest part of that reveals the pineal gland, the States of Mind show at the “ Next to Francis Crick’s Wellcome Collection in London. notes on consciousness His exhibit isn’t aesthetically were plasticine objects. No arresting: it’s just a small screen one knew what they were” displaying simple explanatory text and the crucial fMRI images, with a journal reference on the where he thought the mind, or wall alongside. But it achieves soul, was to be found. something that people have been As insightful as Descartes was trying to do for centuries – it wrong, Santiago Ramón y Cajal makes a thought visible. transformed neurology in the Of course, it’s not quite that early 20th century with beautiful simple. The scans make blood in ink drawings of brain cells, a the brain visible, and Owen’s line of which fill a nearby wall.

Frightening poetry: the sound of a man learning to speak again

Knowing the work of Descartes and Cajal is one thing; seeing the originals of these remarkable maps of the immaterial is another. Even the exhibition’s science adviser Anil Seth, codirector of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK, said he had never seen the original Cajal drawings before.

As Seth explained, the day-to-day work of science is pretty mundane, so a scientist can marvel over these artefacts as much as a member of the public can.

All exhibitions aim to modify the visitor’s consciousness, but Seth’s own piece messes with your mind more directly than most.

Spend enough time with his

touchscreen brain-trainer and you might end up with graphemecolour synaesthesia, in which letters evoke specific colours – as they did for the novelist Vladimir Nabokov (the exhibition also has some fun with watercolours of Nabokov’s alphabet).

Synaesthesia is a perfect topic for the Wellcome Collection to address, given its remit of mediating between art and science. It’s a pity that another notable synaesthete, the painter Wassily Kandinsky, is represented by a book of his art theory, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, rather than his art. That said, his book explores the connections he made between music and painting, and his augmented colour perception, to make a case for abstract art.

As Seth said, it’s on the fringes of consciousness that the interesting stuff happens.

Not all the fringes are enjoyable, however. The Whisper Heard, a 2003 sound and video installation

by Imogen Stidworthy, mingles the voice of the artist’s young son learning to speak with that of a man trying to do the same after a stroke. It’s nice to hear the child’s voice, heartbreaking to hear the man’s – although his struggle to recall and form words creates a sort of frightening poetry.

There was one exhibit that left me baffled. Next to Francis Crick’s notes on consciousness were some other items from the late biologist’s archive: a collection of plasticine objects. I searched the display case for a label – in vain. So I asked Seth, who knew Crick, what they were. He didn’t know. No one did. That’s why there was no label.

With Crick’s consciousness gone, there were no words. n 5 March 2016 | NewScientist | 43

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School of Engineering & Physical Sciences James Watt Scholarships & Doctoral Training Partnerships for PhD Research

From Autumn 2016 Heriot-Watt University has now created additional Doctoral Training Partnerships and James Watt Scholarships in the School of Engineering & Physical Sciences for 2016. The James Watt scholarships will provide full fees and stipend for 3 years from Autumn 2016, whilst the DTPs provide full fees and stipend for 3.5 years. These scholarships will be available in the following areas: Reference Title Leading to a PhD in Chemistry JWS2016/1 EĞǁ WƌŽďĞƐ ŽĨ /ŶĞůĂƐƟĐ Θ ZĞĂĐƟǀĞ ^ĐĂƩĞƌŝŶŐ Ăƚ ƚŚĞ 'ĂƐ >ŝƋƵŝĚ /ŶƚĞƌĨĂĐĞ JWS2016/2 ĂƟŽŶŝĐ ƉƌŽĐĞƐƐĞƐ ŝŵĂŐŝŶŐ ƚŚĞ ĚLJŶĂŵŝĐƐ ŽĨ ŝŽŶŝĐ ƌĞĂĐƟŽŶƐ JWS2016/3 ŽŵƉƵƚĂƟŽŶĂů DŽĚĞůůŝŶŐ ŽĨ , ĐƟǀĂƟŽŶ ĂŶĚ &ƵŶĐƟŽŶĂůŝƐĂƟŽŶ ĂƚĂůLJƐŝƐ ŝŶ ^ŽůƵƟŽŶ DTP2016/1 /ŵĂŐŝŶŐ ƚŚĞ LJŶĂŵŝĐƐ ŽĨ /ŶĞůĂƐƟĐ ĂŶĚ ZĞĂĐƟǀĞ ^ĐĂƩĞƌŝŶŐ ŽĨ 'ĂƐ WŚĂƐĞ ZĂĚŝĐĂůƐ DTP2016/2 WƌŽďŝŶŐ ůŝƋƵŝĚ ƐƵƌĨĂĐĞƐ ƵƐŝŶŐ ƌĞĂĐƟǀĞ ĂƚŽŵ ƐĐĂƩĞƌŝŶŐ DTP2016/3 LJŶĂŵŝĐ DƵůƟ ŽŵƉŽŶĞŶƚ ƐƐĞŵďůLJ ŽĨ EĂŶŽ ĂŐĞƐ ŝŶ ^ŽůƵƟŽŶ DTP2016/4 ƉƉůLJŝŶŐ dĞƚŚĞƌĞĚ E ,ĞƚĞƌŽĐLJĐůŝĐ ^ƚĂŶŶLJůĞŶĞ >ŝŐĂŶĚƐ ŝŶ ĂƚĂůLJƐŝƐ DTP2016/5 hŶĚĞƌƐƚĂŶĚŝŶŐ ^ƉŽŶƚĂŶĞŽƵƐ ŝƉŽůĞ ůŝŐŶŵĞŶƚ ŝŶ DŽůĞĐƵůĂƌ ^ŽůŝĚƐ Leading to a PhD in Physics JWS2016/4 YƵĂŶƚƵŵ ŝŶĨŽƌŵĂƟŽŶ ƐĐŝĞŶĐĞ JWS2016/5 hůƚƌĂƐŚŽƌƚ ƉƵůƐĞĚ ůĂƐĞƌ ǁĞůĚŝŶŐ ŽĨ ŽƉƟĐĂů ŵĂƚĞƌŝĂůƐ ƚŽ ŵĞƚĂůƐ ĂŶĚ ĐĞƌĂŵŝĐƐ JWS2016/6 > Ŭ,ƐD/ >ĂƌŐĞ ^ĐĂůĞ ,LJĚƌŽĚLJŶĂŵŝĐ /ŵĂŐŝŶŝŶŐ ŝŶ ƚŚĞ KĐĞĂŶ &ƌŽŵ Ŷ ƌƟĮĐŝĂů >ĂƚĞƌĂů >ŝŶĞ JWS2016/7 YƵĂŶƚƵŵ ŽŵŵƵŶŝĐĂƟŽŶƐ YƵĂŶƚƵŵ ĚŝŐŝƚĂů ƐŝŐŶĂƚƵƌĞƐ ĂŶĚ ƋƵĂŶƚƵŵ ĂŵƉůŝĮĞƌƐ JWS2016/8 ƌĞĂƟŽŶ ĂŶĚ ĂƉƉůŝĐĂƟŽŶ ŽĨ ƵůƚƌĂ ŚŝŐŚ ƌĂƚĞ ƉŚŽƚŽŶŝĐ ƋƵĂŶƚƵŵ ďLJƚĞƐ JWS2016/9 YƵĂŶƚƵŵ ƚĞĐŚŶŽůŽŐŝĞƐ ǁŝƚŚ ĂŶ ŝĚĞĂů ƐŽƵƌĐĞ ŽĨ ŝŶĚŝƐƟŶŐƵŝƐŚĂďůĞ ƐŝŶŐůĞ ƉŚŽƚŽŶƐ JWS2016/10 tŝĚĞ ŵŽĚĞ ƐƉĂĐŝŶŐ ďƌŽĂĚďĂŶĚ ŽƉƟĐĂů ƉĂƌĂŵĞƚƌŝĐ ŽƐĐŝůůĂƚŽƌ ĨƌĞƋƵĞŶĐLJ ĐŽŵďƐ JWS2016/11 ^ƚƌŽŶŐůLJ ĐŽƌƌĞůĂƚĞĚ ƋƵĂŶƚƵŵ ŐĂƐĞƐ DTP2016/6 YƵĂŶƚƵŵ ŝŶĨŽƌŵĂƟŽŶ ƐĐŝĞŶĐĞ DTP2016/7 >ĂƐĞƌ ƉŽƐƚ ƉƌŽĐĞƐƐŝŶŐ ŽĨ ŵĞƚĂů ĂĚĚŝƟǀĞůLJ ŵĂŶƵĨĂĐƚƵƌĞĚ ƉĂƌƚƐ DTP2016/8 hůƚƌĂ ĐŽŵƉĂĐƚ ƐŽůŝĚ ƐƚĂƚĞ ůĂƐĞƌ ƐLJƐƚĞŵƐ DTP2016/9 ĞƉƚŚ ŝŵĂŐŝŶŐ ƵƐŝŶŐ ƐŝŶŐůĞ ƉŚŽƚŽŶƐ DTP2016/10 ƌĞĂƟŽŶ ĂŶĚ ĂƉƉůŝĐĂƟŽŶ ŽĨ ƵůƚƌĂ ŚŝŐŚ ƌĂƚĞ ƉŚŽƚŽŶŝĐ ƋƵĂŶƚƵŵ ďLJƚĞƐ DTP2016/11 ĚĚŝƟǀĞ ŵĂŶƵĨĂĐƚƵƌŝŶŐ ;ϯ ƉƌŝŶƟŶŐ­ ŽĨ ŵĞƚĂůƐ ;ZĞŶŝƐŚĂǁ ŝŶĚƵƐƚƌŝĂů ^ ƐƚƵĚĞŶƚƐŚŝƉ­ DTP2016/12 DĞĂƐƵƌŝŶŐ ƐƚƌĞƐƐ ŝŶĚƵĐĞĚ ďŝƌĞĨƌŝŶŐĞŶĐĞ Ăƚ d,nj ĨƌĞƋƵĞŶĐŝĞƐ DTP2016/13 Ŷ ĂƌƟĮĐŝĂů ĂƚŽŵ ŝŶ Ă ƚǁŽ ĚŝŵĞŶƐŝŽŶĂů ƐĞŵŝĐŽŶĚƵĐƚŽƌ DTP2016/14 &ŝůŵŝŶŐ ůŝŐŚƚ Ăƚ Ă ƚƌŝůůŝŽŶ ĨƌĂŵĞƐ ƉĞƌ ƐĞĐŽŶĚ DTP2016/15 &ůƵŝĚƐ ƐƵƉĞƌŇƵŝĚƐ ĂŶĚ ĂƌƟĮĐŝĂů ďůĂĐŬ ŚŽůĞƐ ŵĂĚĞ ŽĨ ůŝŐŚƚ DTP2016/16 Ϯ ŵĂƚĞƌŝĂůƐ ĂŶĚ ŵĞƚĂ ŵĂƚĞƌŝĂůƐ ŝŶ ƚŚĞ ƋƵĂŶƚƵŵ ƌĞŐŝŵĞ Leading to a PhD in Chemical Engineering JWS2016/12 ĂƌďŽŶ ŝŽdžŝĚĞ ĂƉƚƵƌĞ hƟůŝnjĂƟŽŶ ĂŶĚ ^ƚŽƌĂŐĞ ; h^­ dĞĐŚŶŽůŽŐŝĞƐ Leading to a PhD in Electrical Engineering JWS2016/13 ŚůŽƌŽƉŚLJůů ƚŽ ŐƌŽǁ ŵĞƚĂůƐ ŽŶƚŽ ŶŽŶ ĐŽŶĚƵĐƟǀĞ ƐƵƌĨĂĐĞƐ JWS2016/14 ZĂĚŝŽ ĨƌĞƋƵĞŶĐLJ ĂŶĚ ĂŶƚĞŶŶĂ ĞŶŐŝŶĞĞƌŝŶŐ ĨŽƌ ƐƉĂĐĞ ĂƉƉůŝĐĂƟŽŶƐ JWS2016/15 dƌĂŶƐĐĞŝǀĞƌ ĞƐŝŐŶƐ ĨŽƌ >ĂƌŐĞ ^ĐĂůĞ ŶƚĞŶŶĂ ^LJƐƚĞŵƐ Ăƚ DŝůůŝŵĞƚĞƌ tĂǀĞ &ƌĞƋƵĞŶĐŝĞƐ JWS2016/16 ^ŵĂƌƚ /ŶƚĞƌĨĂĐĞƐ ĨŽƌ ŽŶǀĞƌŐĞĚ tŝƌĞůĞƐƐ ĂŶĚ KƉƟĐĂů EĞƚǁŽƌŬƐ JWS2016/17 ŶĂůLJƐŝƐ ŽĨ ZĂŵĂŶ ^ƉĞĐƚƌĂ ƵƐŝŶŐ ŚLJƉĞƌƐƉĞĐƚƌĂů ŝŵĂŐŝŶŐ ŵĞƚŚŽĚƐ JWS2016/18 Z& ƐŝŐŶĂů ƉƌŽĐĞƐƐŝŶŐ ĨŽƌ ƚŚĞ ŶĞƚǁŽƌŬĞĚ ďĂƩůĞƐƉĂĐĞ JWS2016/19 ŽŵƉƌĞƐƐŝǀĞ ^ĞŶƐŝŶŐ ĨŽƌ /ŶƚĞƌĨĞƌŽŵĞƚƌLJ ŶĞǁ ŝŵĂŐŝŶŐ ƚĞĐŚŶŝƋƵĞƐ ĨŽƌ ƚƌĂŶƐĨŽƌŵĂƟŽŶĂů ƐĐŝĞŶĐĞ JWS2016/20 ĚǀĂŶĐĞĚ ŵŝůůŝŵĞƚƌĞ ǁĂǀĞ ĚĞǀŝĐĞ ƚĞĐŚŶŽůŽŐŝĞƐ

Supervisor ƌ D > ŽƐƚĞŶ ƌ ^ : 'ƌĞĂǀĞƐ WƌŽĨ ^ DĂĐŐƌĞŐŽƌ ƌ D > ŽƐƚĞŶ WƌŽĨ < ' DĐ<ĞŶĚƌŝĐŬ ƌ ' K >ůŽLJĚ ƌ ^ DĂŶƐĞůů WƌŽĨ D DĐ ŽƵƐƚƌĂ WƌŽĨ ŶĚĞƌƐƐŽŶ WƌŽĨ W ,ĂŶĚ ƌ t DĂĐWŚĞƌƐŽŶ WƌŽĨ ' ^ ƵůůĞƌ ƌ &ĞĚƌŝnjnjŝ WƌŽĨ 'ĞƌĂƌĚŽƚ ƌ Z dŚŽŵƐŽŶ Θ WƌŽĨ ZĞŝĚ WƌŽĨ W PŚďĞƌŐ WƌŽĨ ŶĚĞƌƐƐŽŶ WƌŽĨ W ,ĂŶĚ WƌŽĨ D : ƐƐĞƌ WƌŽĨ ' ^ ƵůůĞƌ ƌ &ĞĚƌŝnjnjŝ WƌŽĨ DŽŽƌĞ WƌŽĨ DŽŽƌĞ WƌŽĨ 'ĞƌĂƌĚŽƚ WƌŽĨ &ĂĐĐŝŽ WƌŽĨ &ĂĐĐŝŽ WƌŽĨ &ĂĐĐŝŽ WƌŽĨ D DĂƌŽƚŽ sĂůĞƌ WƌŽĨ D ĞƐŵƵůůŝĞnj WƌŽĨ ' 'ŽƵƐƐĞƟƐ ƌ D ^ĞůůĂƚŚƵƌĂŝ ƌ y tĂŶŐ WƌŽĨ ^ DĐ>ĂƵŐŚůŝŶ ƌ D ^ĞůůĂƚŚƵƌĂŝ WƌŽĨ ' 'ŽƵƐƐĞƟƐ ƌ z tŝĂƵdž WƌŽĨ :ĂƐŽŶ ,ŽŶŐ

Requirements

Further Information and How to Apply

All applicants must have or expect to have a 1st class MChem, MPhys, MSci, MEng or equivalent degree by Autumn 2016.

Selection will be based on academic excellence and research potential, and all short-listed applicants will be interviewed (in person, by phone or by Skype).

Synopses of these projects, email addresses of supervisors from whom further details are available, and information on how to apply are all available at http://www.hw.ac.uk/schools/ engineering-physical-sciences/research/james-watt.htm

Level of Award

Closing Date

For James Watt Scholarship students, the annual stipend will be £15k, whilst for DTP Scholarship students the annual stipend will be £14,057

Thursday, 31st March, 2016. All successful candidates must commence studies by Thursday 1st December 2016 at the very latest.

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5 March 2016 | NewScientist | 49 12:31

Get Connected: UTC Cambridge Delivering Future Scientists One of the challenges facing today’s science employer is the recruitment of the next generation of staff with both an academic underpinning of their subject and the practical skills to support their work. UTC Cambridge (UTCC) is a new concept in science education. A state funded academy that educates students from the ages of 14-19, UTCC teaches specialist skills in STEM, Biomedical and environmental science and delivers future scientists. The location of the college, next to the Addenbrookes Biomedical Campus, Cambridge, provides students with the opportunity to work alongside world leading scientists on a weekly basis, building professional networks and experience with the local scientific community.

Unlike traditional schools students spend time each week working with scientific industry partners from across Cambridge’s Science community developing their academic understanding of science in practical projects at the forefront of their field. Some of the projects being run this year include airship design with Hybrid Air Vehicles, DNA bar coding with the Sanger Centre and genetic engineering with the Babraham Institute. These are only a few examples of what are known as ‘Challenge Projects’ and sit alongside the students’ GCSE, A Level and BTEC work.

UTCC is forming into a science hub, allowing professionals from different fields to meet and form new collaborations.

Through developing an innovative curriculum in partnership with leaders from the worlds of science and education, UTCC plans to revolutionise the teaching of science across the UK and beyond.

If you would like to work or study at UTC Cambridge, please visit the website www.utccambridge.co.uk or contact reception on 01223 724300 to make an appointent to joint the weekly tour.

Our next open day is Sunday 20th March 2016 10am-2pm.

UTC Cambridge Delivering Future Scientists A New Science and Technology College for 14-19 year olds

Robinson Way, Cambridge, CB2 0SZ

www.utccambridge.co.uk

Please call

01223 724300

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LETTERS editor’s pick

No one need own a driverless car From Emily Wolfe I can see some advantages to driverless cars (16 January, p 20 and Letters, 13 February), most promisingly that they might spark a shift to ownerless cars.

An under-acknowledged blight is the land annexed by parked cars. If personal parking became a thing of the past, we might see a return to front gardens, with attendant wildlife, carbon footprint reduction and protection from pollution and flash floods. Demolishing garages could free up house-building space. And how much more free-flowing could traffic be in the absence of illegal parking?

It won’t be a good time to be a taxi-driver, though.

Bristol, UK From Keith Macpherson Driverless cars could lead to unintended consequences.

At present, pedestrians are reluctant to step out into traffic: they don’t want to be hit by a car. But in the future, they will learn they can freely cross busy roads. Driverless cars will stop because of Isaac Asimov’s First Law: “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.” Gridlock will ensue.

Houston, Renfrewshire, UK

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Gravitationally waving goodbye From Alan Wilson So gravitational waves have finally been detected, but I feel slightly let down by the tiny “chirp” that signalled their presence (20 February, p 8). I am curious about the period of the wave: was the signal compressed, and if so, by how much?

Why would a wave have been expected at all? Surely the universe contains numerous other sources of gravitational waves, so would these waves not have interfered with each other constructively and destructively?

If so, how much information can actually be gathered from the “chirp” when it might just be the end result of interference from multiple other, as yet unknown, gravitational wave sources?

Colmworth, Bedfordshire, UK

You can’t flee an Unruh-ly black hole From Phil Stracchino Anil Ananthaswamy reports on a resolution of the black hole firewall paradox (30 January, p 14).

He suggests that for someone to stay put at a black hole’s horizon, they would have to keep accelerating away from it – and that the Unruh effect, in which an accelerating observer sees an apparent rise in temperature, would create the appearance of a firewall to this observer.

He reports that in the vicinity of a black hole the Unruh effect “can be as high as 1010 kelvin”.

It could, mathematically speaking. But by my calculation, our observer would have to be accelerating away from the black hole at roughly 1029 g. I believe it is safe to say that, if a black hole is massive enough for an observer accelerating away from it at 1029 g to remain in its vicinity for more than some tiny fraction of a

second, the observer is probably already within the event horizon.

And they would experience such tidal forces that they wouldn’t be observing much of anything for very long.

Gilford, New Hampshire, US

Psychoactive legal logic, unravelled From Tim Jackson Eleanor Bath thinks that proteins in seminal fluid are manipulators of female behaviour (13 February, p 27). This clearly brings them into the ambit of the UK Psychoactive Substances Act (30 January, p 26).

Sexual intercourse (and other methods of introducing these substances to the body) will presumably be banned by default when that law comes into force.

Haslingden, Lancashire, UK From Ian Moseley Whatever criticisms can be made of the Psychoactive Substances Act, the mechanism of banning everything and then allowing exceptions is relatively fail-safe.

One example is the UK Education Reform Act 1988, which bans anyone from offering anything that is, or might be perceived to be, a degree. It goes on to make exceptions for bodies on a list maintained by the Department for Education.

London, UK

Votes, not vetoes, eject politicians From Brian Tagg Jeremy Marchant raises the idea of deselecting parliamentary candidates on the basis of ability, calling for “an independent system that culled the 50 most useless politicians each year” (Letters, 20 February). We have a system called democracy that culls them in hundreds every five years, run by the people directly

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affected by their legislation. I would trust the electorate to get this right, rather than a small “independent” body whose members, by the same principle, would be recruited by a yet more powerful “independent body”, whose members would be recruited…

Cheddon Fitzpaine, Somerset, UK

Save lives with cord blood donations From Alejandro Madrigal, director of research, Anthony Nolan Trust Your article about the efficacy against cancer of stem cells taken from umbilical cord blood makes encouraging reading (13 February, p 17). The Anthony Nolan Trust has long recognised that cord stem cells have the potential to save the lives of people with blood cancer, and our research has been helping improve treatment outcomes for many years.

As the stem cells in cord blood are immature, they can develop to suit their recipient. That makes them important for patients from ethnic minority communities that are under-represented on the adult donor register.

Cord blood is not the solution for everyone, but our four cord collection centres, together with those run by the National Health Service, are expected to meet UK demand. Donating cord blood is painless and risk-free. Parents can visit anthonynolan.org/cord to find out more.

London, UK

Hungry plants flower more, but…

From Guy Cox Hazel Beneke points out that plants reproduce more under environmental stress, and asks: “are humans an exception to the rule?” (Letters, 6 February). The answer is that all mammals are an

“ Scientists can’t stop at gravity and black holes and the spacetime continuum, you know” J ames Gleick reacts to the news that mice watching movies on iPods prefer action to mouse erotica (newscientist.com/article/2077351)

exception. Plants are rooted to the ground but their seeds are dispersed, so fruiting offers seeds a chance to find more fertile ground. In contrast, mammals can seek out more hospitable environments. Reproducing in bad times is counterproductive for them, since their offspring are tied to their mothers while suckling, making the food shortage worse.

Many female mammals cease to ovulate when starving – we see this in humans in cases of anorexia or in athletic training.

Many species, from marsupials to rodents, can keep an embryo in suspended animation (diapause) until conditions are more favourable for its development.

Sydney, Australia

Language thinking about thought From Rob Gerrand Alan Larman asks who said, “Teach me a man’s language, and I shall know how he thinks” (Letters, 30 January). A version of

the idea might have been first expressed by Wilhelm von Humboldt in the 19th century, but it reminds me of Jack Vance’s 1958 novel The Languages of Pao. This tells of an experiment to devise customised languages to create warrior, technical and mercantile classes. Mastermind Lord Palafox says: “We must alter the mental framework of the Paonese people, which is most easily achieved by altering the language.” Later, his son says to a class of linguists, “every language impresses a certain world-view upon the mind.”

St Kilda, Victoria, Australia From Alan Wells May I suggest that the quote is a subconscious rearrangement of one or more of the following: “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart” – politician Nelson Mandela; “Learning another language is not only learning different words for the same things, but learning another way to think about things” – journalist

Flora Lewis; “Language shapes the way we think and determines what we can think about” – linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf; “If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world” – philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Larman’s version is certainly snappy.

Chichester, Dorset, UK From Michael Zehse So if I master Aramaic, will I know how Jesus thought?

London, UK

human faces from photographs is amazing, as other animals do not.

I remember being taken to the local drive-in cinema as a child, to see National Velvet. A string of racehorses from a nearby stables arrived in the row behind. They naturally ignored most of the film, but became very excited when the race began, neighing and dancing around. More of the audience were watching the live horses than the ones in the film.

Malmsbury, Victoria, Australia

Through normal Horses no slouches channels, please with emotions From Nina Dougall It would be no surprise to a horse owner that horses can recognise emotion (13 February, p 7). I would say they can recognise joy, pain, sadness, frustration and anger, not just from a photo but also from body language. Injury caused by the horse to its owner, such as a squashed foot, produces a reaction I can only describe as apology. That they recognise

From Liz Berry Martin Greenwood’s nice juxtaposition of the Latin for “year” with the fundament (Letters, 16 January) reminded me of the father who received a letter from his son’s private school, informing him that fees had risen by £500 per annum.

Unfortunately, someone had typed “per anum”. The father wrote back saying he would rather pay through the nose, as usual.

Lydbrook, Gloucestershire, UK

Tom Gauld

For the record n The authors of a study on the “backflow” of DNA into Africa from Eurasia have issued a correction (doi.org/bcr6), saying that it affected East Africa and a few sub-Saharan populations, not the entire continent (17 October 2015, p 19). n We can’t blame artificial intelligence for the misnaming of researcher Jeff Clune (20 February, p 22). Sorry.

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FEEDBACK

For more feedback, visit newscientist.com/feedback

FEEDBACK previously reported on Arden Grange’s claims that its cat food was “not tested on animals” (20 February). J. D. Baines writes to

Paul McDevitt

report that the company described its dog food the same way 15 years ago.

“I wrote to them then asking if it was tested on the chairman, but received no response,” J. D. says.

Feedback imagines that a bowl of cat food would make an easy meal for one well-acquainted with dog chum, but Arden Grange staff may need stronger stomachs (and teeth) if the company widens its customer base to include those with more exotic pets such as parrots – or snakes.

OUR readers continue to be plagued by quantum effects making themselves felt at larger scales (13 February). “Surely the most widespread macroscopic

BUT is there more to this

manifestation is queuing,” says Larry Stoter. By joining a queue, he explains, you increase the precision with which you know its length.

But consequently, the uncertainty principle manifests itself, making

quantum quirk than meets the eye? Richard suggests that these so-called quantum effects are in fact a manifestation of Murphy’s Law – which states that anything that can go wrong will go wrong –

your momentum uncertain.

“As your mass remains fixed,” Larry concludes, “your velocity towards the front of the queue remains uncertain, and it is quite likely your queuing time will go up instead of down.”

and its corollaries.

Mulling on this, Feedback is prompted to raise the question, do we in fact have everything on its head?

Can the fundamental laws of physics be described in what we thought were satirical rules of thumb?

FEEDBACK previously noted that USB cables, despite having two possible orientations, will usually only connect on the third attempt.

“I have another example with a larger number of ‘superposed’ states,” writes Richard Price.

“Back in the day, we electronic engineers stored our resistors and capacitors in four-sided carousels of little drawers. In

Answers on a postcard, please.

my experience, the component I wanted was often to be found on the fifth side that I tried.”

LIKE a determined weed, no matter how much we try to thin out examples of nominative determinism, green shoots sprout up between our toes. And so hearty congratulations to Lucy de la Pasture, who has been appointed technical editor at Crop Production Magazine.

“ While shopping at our local grocery, we heard the announcement ‘All perishable managers please report to the office’,” writes John Cleveland. “In the long run, aren’t we all?”

56 | NewScientist | 5 March 2016

REFERRING to reports that US rapper BoB thinks the world is flat (20 February), Chris Evans writes to put things in perspective.

“BoB’s comment that ‘No matter how high in elevation you are… the horizon is always eye level’ is a bit difficult to understand,” says Chris, “but I would like to suggest that he visits Roque de los Muchachos, at the summit of the island of La Palma. From this altitude of 2423 metres, on a clear day the ocean horizon appears distinctly curved.”

in. He refers us to the label of his jacket, which is listed as XXL for Italian and French customers, XL for ones in the UK and Germany, and simply L for those in the US. THE latest advice on Zika, as reported by our colleagues on the news desk, is for men to “wear a condom for six months after symptoms stop” (20 February, p 7). “No doubt this is well-intended advice,” writes John Parry, “but personally I would find it extremely difficult to comply.”

MESSAGE in a bottle? Comments made by pop maestro (and latterly, award-winning vintner) Sting in The Times newspaper left Jim Ainsworth feeling addled.

“I’m from the north of England,” said the tantric singer, “so I drank beer from age 16 on and younger.”

“So when did he start drinking beer?” wonders Jim. “I’m from the north of England too, but it still doesn’t make sense to me.”

ROUNDING errors when converting inches to centimetres are bad enough, writes Steve Morton (20 February), “but confusing the German Pflanzenschildchen with Danish is quite another. I assume Feedback confused the label D for Deutschland with Denmark (DK), but surely you should have known that Denmark does not have a border with the Netherlands!”

Steve encourages Feedback to get out of the office, take the Eurostar to Brussels, and explore the near continent while brushing up on modern European languages. We couldn’t agree more, but the editor is shaking his head.

FEEDBACK notes that the singer also outs himself as a proponent of Masaru Emoto’s endlessly fruitful theories on the susceptibility of liquids to emotive imprinting (5 December 2015).

“I go down and play to the wine,” said Sting. “I practise down there. If I play it true, the wine is better.” Well, jazz-infused wine is certainly more appealing than tepid bottles of sun-charmed water (30 January).

SLIMMERS take note: a weekend abroad could drop you a dress size – temporarily, at least. Lance Hartland writes to tell us that it’s not just plant labels for which size depends on the country you are

You can send stories to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com.

Please include your home address.

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Last words past and present at newscientist.com/lastword

THE LAST WORD Galaxy twirl

in my whiskers. I understand the loss of pigmentation occurring, but why are the grey hairs growing more slowly than the darker ones? This discrepancy is clearly noticeable if I stop shaving for a few days.

Peter Milne, Brunswick, Victoria, Australia

Are the spiral arms of galaxies evidence for gravitational waves?

If not, what creates these arms?

n Spiral arms are not evidence for gravitational waves. According to density wave theory, they are regions in which the density of gas and stars is much higher and this matter moves more slowly than in the regions between the arms. This theory explains how the spiral arms form in the first place – and once formed, they are self-sustaining.

Material that approaches a spiral arm speeds up because of the extra mass in the arm and then slows down while passing through it.

This triggers intensive star formation, leading to the birth of massive and luminous stars that have relatively short lifespans (millions of years) compared with our sun (billions of years).

These types of star die in supernova explosions before they

Bloodthirst

Do humans have an innate desire to eat meat, or is it cultural?

If our culture had all references to eating meat removed, would people still desire it?

Richard Brown Geneva, Switzerland

have time to leave the spiral arm. Only stars with a low mass, such as the sun, can leave the spiral arm and orbit the galactic centre to eventually return to their birthplace.

Chris Brindle, Bodmin, Cornwall, UK

n There is a possible method for spiral galaxies to form without invoking mysterious forces. I have in my possession a harmonograph, which is a drawing toy that comprises two pendulums. One pendulum is attached to a table for paper, and the other a pen. It is not difficult to arrange for a decreasing spiral to be drawn.

We can consider those spirals as a set of concentric nested circles, representing a uniform disc of matter. All of these orbit the central point in the expected manner, with things remaining uniform and the orbital rate of each “band” not affecting the distribution in the disc too much. But if a remote galaxy or disturbance nudges the orbits into a slightly elliptical shape, then the fun begins.

The images shown above are from my collection. The lines

The writers of answers that are published in the magazine will receive a cheque for £25 (or US$ equivalent). Answers should be concise. We reserve the right to edit items for clarity and style. Please include a daytime telephone number and an email address if you have one. New Scientist retains total editorial control over the published content.

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Send questions and answers to The Last Word, New Scientist, 110 High Holborn, London WC1V 6EU, UK, by email to lastword@newscientist.com or visit www.newscientist.com/topic/lastword (please include a postal address in order to receive payment for answers).

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“ Only stars with a low mass, such as the sun, can leave the spiral arm and orbit the galactic centre”

represent material of uniform density, and the precession, or uneven motion, causes the overlapping areas. Because the orbital rate has a gradient across it (for example, the outer orbits take slightly longer than the inner orbits), the matter will slowly group together in the density pattern shown in the harmonograph. The resemblance to a spiral galaxy is astonishing, and nothing non-Newtonian is involved. It is very hypnotic watching these being drawn.

Dennis Cowdery Brimpton, West Berkshire, UK

This week’s questions Old growth

I’m a 55-year-old man with an increasing number of grey hairs

PEOPLE-TASTING

What do humans taste of?

I have heard that it’s a little bit like pork (not that I want to find out). But if it is, why? And if it isn’t, what do they taste of?

Also, why do different meats – say lamb, beef, chicken or pork – taste different anyway?

Brian Bott Paris, France Lunar lift

Tides are affected by the moon’s gravity. So does your weight change depending on its position?

Priyã-Louan Macknay By email, no address supplied Clean break

I’ve discovered that glasses with a thick base crack around the bottom when cleaned in the dishwasher. Why is this?

Tony Sandy Kilmarnock, East Ayrshire, UK

Question Everything The latest book of science questions: unpredictable and entertaining. Expect the unexpected Available from booksellers and at newscientist.com/questioneverything