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 QUANTUM SHOCK
Theory contradicts
itself in the lab
FAT SHAMING
Is obesity really
that bad for you?
MIND READERS
Machines that know your
thoughts and dreams
WEEKLY September 29 – October 5, 2018

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 newscientist.com/issue/3197
CONTENTS

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12 Quantum shock 5 Maths needs more arguments.
Theory contradicts itself in the lab A promising step in medical tech
20 Fat shaming
Is obesity really that bad for you?
News
6 THIS WEEK People with
28 Mind readers paralysis walk again. Pictures from
Machines that know your an asteroid. The world’s hardest
thoughts and dreams maths proof. Loneliness among
over 50s
33 The Inca code
We thought they left no writing. 8 NEWS & TECHNOLOGY
We were wrong Mammals with females that take
control. Planet hunter spots new
Plus Maths proof controversy (9). worlds. Mind-controlled drones.
Oldest animal (12). Perfect Mathematician takes on Riemann
metals (40) hypothesis. Mosquito gene tweak
could save millions. Making AI less
stupid. A quantum contradiction.
Earliest animal is an underwater
blob. Civil servant chat rooms.
Unconscious cues make us forget.
Polluted polar bears
18 IN BRIEF Hair loss treatment.
Purging brain cells for dementia.
Octopuses on ecstasy. Mucus-
sucking robot. Genetic therapy
for drug addiction
Analysis
20 INSIGHT Is being overweight
actually bad for your health?
22 COMMENT There is more to
success than turning up on time.
Smart pills vs privacy
23 ANALYSIS Why a trip to the
moon is the ultimate luxury
28 Mind-reading tech Machines
that know what you are thinking
are no longer the stuff of sci-fi
33 The Inca code We thought they
left no writing. We were wrong
38 Big game hunter Priya Singh’s
search for the critically
endangered clouded leopard
40 Perfect metals Nature’s tricks
could help us build stronger and
tougher materials
Culture
44 For the people Addiction is an
intriguing topic for a new gallery
PLUS: This week’s cultural picks
46 Cultural differences What
really separates us from other
animals
Regulars
24 APERTURE
A round-up of New Scientist Live
52 LETTERS
Bears could be lottery winners too
55 MAKE
Inspiration generator
56 FEEDBACK
Menacing goat in Minneapolis
57 THE LAST WORD
Sign of maturity

29 September 2018 | NewScientist | 3

LEADERS

Editorial
Editor Emily Wilson
Managing editor Rowan Hooper
Art editor Craig Mackie
Editor at large Jeremy Webb

News
News editor Penny Sarchet
Editors Jacob Aron, Timothy Revell

ROBERT BROOK/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

Reporters (UK) Andy Coghlan,
Jessica Hamzelou, Michael Le Page,
Clare Wilson, Sam Wong
(US) Leah Crane, Chelsea Whyte
(Aus) Alice Klein

Features
Chief features editor Richard Webb
Editors Catherine de Lange, Gilead Amit,
Julia Brown, Daniel Cossins, Kate Douglas,
Alison George, Joshua Howgego,
Tiffany O’Callaghan, Sean O’Neill
Feature writer Graham Lawton

Culture and Community

Editors Liz Else, Mike Holderness, Simon Ings,
Frank Swain
Universal truth, contested
Subeditors
Chief subeditor Eleanor Parsons Mathematicians don’t like to argue, but maybe they should
Tom Campbell, Hannah Joshua,
Chris Simms, Jon White

Design
IT IS a truism that science is not demonstrate that truth is Shinichi Mochizuki claimed a
Kathryn Brazier, Joe Hetzel, true. A scientific theory is merely sometimes out of reach in the solution to the ABC conjecture,
Dave Johnston, Ryan Wills our best guess at truth, backed mathematical world too. another long-standing puzzle,
Picture desk up by evidence, but waiting to be On Monday, eminent UK in a 500-page paper so dense that
Chief picture editor Adam Goff overturned by something better. mathematician Michael Atiyah his peers have argued ever since
Kirstin Kidd, David Stock
Copernicus rewrote Ptolemy; presented a claimed proof of over whether it is correct. Until
Production
Einstein picked holes in Newton; the Riemann hypothesis, one of now, few would commit to a
Mick O’Hare, Melanie Green ,
Alan Blagrove, Anne Marie Conlon Darwin overturned pre-existing the most difficult open problems public confrontation (see page 6).
Contact us stories of our origins. in mathematics (see page 9). Mathematicians are a generally
newscientist.com/contact Mathematics is different. Atiyah is certain he has cracked it. genteel lot, so such a dual
General & media enquiries Theorems proved by the ancient Most mathematicians disagree, controversy is a rare occurrence
enquiries@newscientist.com
Greeks remain as true as ever. but decline to say so in public that surely merits statistical
US
210 Broadway #201 Pythagoras’s theorem about for fear of embarrassing him. investigation. Barring a divine
Cambridge, MA 02139 the three sides of a right-angled This proof was only a brief oracle to hand down judgement,
Tel +1 617 283 3213
triangle works, will always work sketch, so at the very least will a proof can only be found true if a
UK
25 Bedford Street, London, WC2E 9ES and won’t be improved. require a lot of fleshing out. majority of mathematicians deem
Tel +44 (0)20 7611 1200 It is a Platonic ideal of truth Brevity was not the problem it sufficiently rigorous. Perhaps
AUSTRALIA (another Greek, of course). with the second contested proof we need a few more to stick their
PO Box 2315, Strawberry Hills, NSW 2012
But two incidents this week in the spotlight this week. In 2012, heads above the parapet. ■

the leg muscles began to respond

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First steps
SOME might call it a miracle,
but it relies on technology. At
two separate clinics, three people
paralysed from the waist down
have walked again, thanks to an
electrical stimulation implant,
combined with intensive exercise
and rehabilitation (see page 7).
Yet it is true that prevailing
medical wisdom says this should
be impossible. Because these
people’s injuries had ruptured the
spinal cord, contact between the
brain and the nerves operating
the leg muscles was thought to be
entirely severed. Controversially,
the researchers who restored
mobility believe that some weak
connections survived. By tuning
the electrical device, they say it
was possible to reinforce those
weak signals to the point where
again to signals from the brain.
The resulting steps are halting
and awkward. But they are
steps, and with them comes hope
that other people can benefit.
Paralysis perhaps need not mean
paralysis for life. If we can pin
down the science, and work
out how to identify similarly
surviving spinal connections –
a challenge in itself – we might
help many more people with
similar life-changing injuries. ■

29 September 2018 | NewScientist | 5

 THIS WEEK

First asteroid rovers land

THE world’s first rovers to land on an
asteroid have arrived, and they are
sending back postcards from Ryugu.
The Japan Aerospace Exploration
Agency’s Hayabusa 2 spacecraft
arrived at the asteroid in June,
and on 21 September it dropped
a pair of landers onto the surface.
The landers, collectively known
as MINERVA-II, don’t drive around
the surface like standard rovers –
instead, they hop a few metres at
a time, which is made easier by
Ryugu’s weak gravity.
Hayabusa 2 and its landers have
taken some impressive pictures. As it
neared Ryugu to drop the rovers from
60 metres up, it snapped one image
of its own shadow on the surface.
Just after the rovers separated from
their parent spacecraft, one of them
JAXA
Ryugu’s surface and a bright smudge
from sunlight reflecting off the
camera’s lens can be seen.
However, the most important
image was taken after the rovers
landed (see left). It is blurry because
the rover was rotating through the
air as it snapped the shot — proof that
they had begun hopping. “The image
taken by MINERVA-II1 during a hop
allowed me to relax as a dream of
many years came true,” said Hayabusa
2 spokesperson Takashi Kubota in
a statement.
Both the mother ship and the
rovers will continue to send images
as the mission goes on, and Hayabusa
2 has two more landers to deploy.
Eventually, researchers hope that the
images and samples from this mission
will help us learn about how the

snapped a picture as it fell, where planets in our solar system were born.

be clear for many weeks, but initial

The world’s hardest Florence flooding estimates put the costs at up to
Sharp rise in over
maths proof causes devastation $50 billion. More than 40 people have 50s loneliness
died, and evacuations and rescues
THE biggest spat in maths is heating MORE than a week after Hurricane continue. Many of those who stayed THE charity Age UK has warned that
up again. In 2012, Shinichi Mochizuki Florence hit the US, the record- in their homes despite evacuation the number of older people who are
at Kyoto University in Japan produced breaking amount of rain it dumped orders have said they did so because lonely will increase by around 50 per
a 560-page proof of a long-standing is still causing destruction. they couldn’t afford to evacuate. cent in the next seven years.
problem called the ABC conjecture, While most flooding is now The disaster was made worse Data from the English Longitudinal
which concerns a fundamental receding, the lower reaches of some by global warming. According to the Study of Ageing, a long-term project
property of numbers. But almost rivers in the Carolinas continue to First Street Foundation, a non-profit investigating economic, physical
nobody can understand it, so the jury flood as the rainwater that fell inland environmental organisation, the and mental well-being in over-50s,
is still out on whether it is correct. makes its way downriver. In places, the 30-centimetre rise in local sea level shows that 2 million people in this
Peter Scholze at the University of floodwater carries pollution from pig over the past century led to at least age group will live in social isolation
Bonn – who in August was awarded slurry “lagoons” and coal-ash dumps. 11,000 more houses being flooded by by 2025-2026, up from 1.36 million
the Fields Medal, the highest honour The full scale of the disaster won’t seawater from Florence’s storm surge. in 2015-2016.
in maths – and Jakob Stix at Goethe The projected increase is due to
University Frankfurt spent a week several factors, including people living
studying the proof with Mochizuki in longer, family members living further
Tokyo in March. They claim to have apart and cuts to local social services.
found an error in his work. “We came Loneliness can become a
to the conclusion that there is no downward spiral. People who are
proof,” they said in a report released lonely are more likely to experience
on 20 September. poor mental and physical health,
GERALD HERBERT/AP/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK

The pair’s reputation means their which can lead to greater social
claim is a blow for Mochizuki. But isolation.
there is still room for dispute. Scholze The UK government has set up
and Stix haven’t spent enough time a £11 million fund to help connect
studying the proof, says Ivan Fesenko people across the country. The
at the University of Nottingham, UK. National Health Service recommends
older people keep in touch with family
For more contentious maths, see page 9 and friends via email or video chat.

6 | NewScientist | 29 September 2018

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

People with paralysis walk again

Spinal and brain implants help treat paralysis in three patients, says Andy Coghlan

ONE woman and two men Jeff Marquis (left) and Kelly Thomas
paralysed from the waist down (below) have paralysed legs
have become the first people to
walk again through a new type treatment. During one session,
of therapy. Doctors treated them Marquis managed to cover
with a mixture of electrical 362 metres aided by the
stimulation from spinal implants, stimulator, reaching a top
plus gruelling exercise regimes. speed of 19 centimetres a
Two were treated at the second (NEJM, doi.org/ct7z).
University of Louisville’s The procedure didn’t get
Kentucky Spinal Cord Injury everyone walking. Two more
Research Center. Kelly Thomas people treated by Angeli and
from Florida was injured in a her team in Kentucky learned to
2014 car accident, while Jeff stand and sit independently, but
Marquis from Wisconsin broke didn’t progress to walking. It may
his back in 2011 when mountain be that certain individuals lack the
biking. The third person, Jered weak, residual spinal connections
Chinnock, was injured in a on which the treatment might
snowmobile accident in 2013. depend. A second person is
He was treated at the Mayo midway through being treated
Clinic in Minnesota. at the Mayo Clinic.
All three received similar The latest breakthrough
treatment. Surgeons implanted coincides with an advance by
a panel of electrodes in their back another team that has enabled Ian
UNIVERSITY OF LOUISVILLE

below the injury site, tuning it to Burkhart, a man from Ohio with
feed brain signals into the tissue quadriplegia, to intentionally
of the spinal cord below the injury control his hand and fingers,
that has connections to the main and manipulate objects.
leg muscles. “Using our system, Ian was able
In theory, the break in each to quickly and accurately interact
of their spines ruptured direct holding their upper bodies, the help of front-wheeled with objects he encounters in his
links between their brains and they began exercises to step walkers (see photo below), daily life,” says David Friedenberg
the nerves that control the leg forward. They could only move and sometimes also an assistant at Battelle Memorial Institute in
muscles. But the researchers at when the electrical stimulator to guide their balance. Ohio and co-leader of the team
both clinics believe the implants was switched on. At the Mayo Clinic, Chinnock that provided the treatment
somehow bridge the gap. Next, they progressed to walked 331 steps in a single (Nature Medicine, doi.org/ct6x).
They think that some nerve walking across the floor with session on the floor, covering A microchip implanted in
connections that cross the gap 102 metres. Between weeks 25 Burkhart’s motor cortex, the
might remain intact, but they and 42, his speed rose from 5 to brain area that controls voluntary
are too weak on their own to carry 20 centimetres a second (Nature movement, feeds electrical
the brain’s signals to the legs. Medicine, doi.org/ct6w). signals from 96 locations into a
By tuning the electrical signals “Even though it’s only one device called a decoder. Machine-
from the implant through trial patient, being able to regain learning algorithms then interpret
and error, coupled with intensive intentional control and move the electrical activity as he thinks
physical exercise, the teams were [100 metres] is incredibly about moving his hand and
able to boost the signal from significant,” says Kendall Lee predict Burkhart’s intentions.
the brain enough to stimulate at the clinic. Finally, an implant on his right
UNIVERSITY OF LOUISVILLE

movement in the leg muscles. In Kentucky, the work of the forearm receives signals from
First, all three learned to stand team co-led by Claudia Angeli the decoder as he is thinking.
on a treadmill. Then, with the aid allowed Thomas to walk across It is programmed to stimulate
of physiotherapists who moved the floor solely aided by the muscles in his forearm to carry
their legs plus a support system stimulator by the end of the out his intended actions. ■

29 September 2018 | NewScientist | 7

NEWS & TECHNOLOGY
Females rule in just
7 mammal species
Chelsea Whyte
FEMALES are rarely leader of
the pack in the animal kingdom.
Of the 76 non-human mammal
species that exhibit leadership,
only seven have females that take
charge during conflict, foraging
or travel. That is the conclusion
of a study into female leadership
among mammals carried out by
Jennifer Smith at Mills College in
California and her colleagues.
Females of these seven species
fit a certain definition of
leadership. Smith’s team found
that they have one or more of
the following traits: they are
physically stronger than males,
they are long-lived or spend most
of their life in one area, and they
form strong social bonds with
other females. The work will
appear in Leadership Quarterly.
“In these species, females are
bonded to each other, and they
influence their society’s structure
through directing food collection,
fighting wars, deciding where
their group moves and holding
ANUP SHAH/GETTY
local knowledge useful for finding
food,” says Smith. Here is the list
her team came up with:
AFRICAN LION: Although known as
Latest planet-
hunter spies its
first new worlds
NASA’s new planet-hunting spacecraft
has made its first find — an exoplanet
about twice the size of Earth orbiting
a star called Pi Mensae about 60 light
years away.
The discovery comes two months
after the Transiting Exoplanet Survey
Satellite (TESS) began examining our
galaxy with the aim of finding
thousands of new worlds.
8 | NewScientist | 29 September 2018
the “king of the jungle”, the African
lion actually forms female-led
prides. Lionesses stay in the area
in which they were born their
whole lives, which gives them the
advantage of knowing where to
find the best watering holes and
hunting grounds. Females also
cooperate on hunts, defend their
territory from other prides and
defend cubs against adult males.
SPOTTED HYENA: Elsewhere on
the African savannah, female
spotted hyenas dominate clans.
“This is one of the first objects we
looked at,” says Chelsea Huang, a
TESS scientist at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. “We were
immediately saying, ‘Hey this is too
good to be true!’ ”
The alien world, Pi Mensae c, takes
6.27 Earth days to orbit its parent star,
which was previously found to have
a planet with the mass of 10 Jupiters
circling it.
TESS works by watching thousands
of nearby stars in the Milky Way,
looking for tiny dips in their brightness
that can indicate that an orbiting
planet is passing in front of them.
They are physically larger than
males and in command during
conflicts with predators or other
clans. “It’s the adult females who
are on the front lines in battles,”
says Smith.
AFRICAN ELEPHANT: Leadership
is not always about aggression.
African elephants live long lives,
and matriarchs survive across
many generations. This gives
them more experience to draw
on, which may influence their
ability to lead their herd to
sources of food.
ORCA: Only one of the species
lives in the oceans. Female orcas
live into their 90s and remain in
Female bonobos call the shots
when resolving conflicts
Having found this for Pi Mensae c,
the team confirmed its presence by
examining separate studies of the
light of its star made by ground-based
observatories. These revealed a tiny
tell-tale wobble in the motion of the
star that the researchers attribute to
the gravitational pull of Pi Mensae c
(arxiv.org/abs/1809.05967).
Based on the planet’s radius,
Pi Mensae c is likely to be a mini-
“Pretty much all the planets
we find at that radius have
a gassy layer. So it wouldn’t
look anything like Earth” Will Gater and Leah Crane ■
their birth area throughout their
lives, so the pod matriarch has
valuable knowledge of the
location of salmon-filled waters.
LEMURS: Two species of lemur
are female-led. In both ring-tailed
and black-and-white ruffed
lemurs, females often keep the
peace within the colony and
lead in interventions with other
colonies. Adult females, which
are similar in size to males, will
consistently win in a one-on-one
confrontation with males.
BONOBO: In one of our closest
relatives, the females help resolve
group conflicts: they diffuse
tension by using their hands or
feet to touch an agitated
individual’s genitals, Smith’s
team says. This may give the
impression that female bonobos
lead through affection rather than
aggression. The truth is a bit more
nuanced, says Amy Parish at the
University of Southern California.
She says bonobo females can hurt
males severely to keep control.
A few other animals may join
these seven as we study behaviour
more closely.
For instance, Smith and her
team say that naked mole rat
colonies are known to be
controlled by a queen. She and
her female relatives may hold
sway over the colony, but at the
moment we lack enough data on
the role females play in conflict
resolution to formally define this
mammal species as female led. ■
Neptune with a gaseous hydrogen
and helium atmosphere, says Hugh
Osborn at the Marseille Astrophysics
Laboratory in France. “Pretty much
all the planets we find at that radius
have this gassy layer,” he says. “So it
wouldn’t look anything like Earth.”
Shortly after the first detection,
NASA announced that TESS had found
a second planet, LHS 3844 b, which
orbits a small star 49 light years away.
It is smaller than Pi Mensae c, only
1.3 times the size of Earth, but hotter,
at an average temperature of about
532°C (arxiv.org/abs/1809.07242).
For daily news stories, visit newscientist.com/news

Michael Atiyah claims to have found

Flying drones a proof for a long-unsolved problem
using mind correct. “It looks miraculous,” says
control Atiyah, “but I claim that all the
hard work was done 70 years ago.”
I THINK, therefore I fly. Headsets that In his talk, Atiyah gave a history
read brainwaves are being used to of this work, along with that of
control drones, letting us fly machines other noted mathematicians. His
with just our thoughts. proof of the Riemann hypothesis
A team from the Indian Institute was dealt with in just a few slides.
of Science in Bangalore trained It claimed a connection with the
14 people to operate a multirotor fine structure constant, a physical
drone using EEG headsets, devices parameter that describes the
that use small electrodes to measure interaction between light and
JAMES GLOSSOP/NEWS SYNDICATION

the electrical activity in your brain. matter, and whose status as a

There have been other attempts constant has come into question.
to control multirotor drones using Born in 1929, Atiyah is one
thought, but Subbaram Omkar, who of the UK’s most eminent
led the research, believes the new mathematicians, having received
system is accurate enough to operate both awards often referred to as
fixed-wing drones – something that the Nobel prizes of maths, the
has never been done before. Fields medal and the Abel prize.
Such aircraft require more control
because they move through the air Has the Riemann He has also been president of the
London Mathematical Society,
continuously, whereas multicoptor
drones can hover, for instance while hypothesis been solved? the Royal Society and the Royal
Society of Edinburgh.
awaiting a command. Other systems Atiyah has produced a number
that translate brain activity into MATHEMATICIANS held their with a map to the location of all of papers in recent years making
drone motion cannot perform quickly breath this week to find out prime numbers, a breakthrough remarkable claims. So far, these
enough to control a high-speed if one of the most famous with far-reaching repercussions have failed to convince others.
vehicle, says Omkar. unsolved problems in the field in the field. His latest proof has yet to undergo
To pilot the drones, people were had finally been cracked. In a In more practical terms, a the rigorous peer review process
asked to imagine, but not carry out, hotly anticipated talk at the correct solution would earn its necessary to test its validity, and
four physical actions: moving their Heidelberg Laureate Forum in composer a $1 million prize from initial reactions were cautiously
left or right hand, and moving their Germany, retired mathematician the Clay Mathematics Institute, sceptical. Most mathematicians
left or right fingers and elbow. Michael Atiyah delivered what which includes the hypothesis contacted by New Scientist
These thought processes activate he claimed was a proof of the among its six unsolved Clay declined to comment on the work.
the sensory and motor cortex, even Riemann hypothesis, a challenge “The Riemann hypothesis is
without moving any body parts. Each that has eluded his peers for “Nobody has proved the a notoriously difficult problem,”
was tied to a particular drone action. nearly 160 years. hypothesis, so why should says Nicholas Jackson at the
An algorithm read the brain waves “Solve the Riemann hypothesis anybody do so now? Unless University of Warwick, UK. “Lots
at 90 hertz. This corresponds to the and you become famous. If you with a totally new idea” of other top-rate mathematicians
frequency of gamma waves, which are famous already, you become have nearly but not quite
are thought to be associated with infamous,” Atiyah said at the talk. Millennium Problems. The managed to prove it over the
perception. When a thought pattern “Nobody believes any proof of the prestige has tempted many years, only for a subtle flaw in
was clear enough, it was used to steer Riemann hypothesis because it is mathematicians over the years, the proof to become apparent.”
the drone in mid-air. so difficult. Nobody has proved it, none of whom has yet been If it is borne out, however, Atiyah
Depending on the pilot, the so why should anybody prove it awarded a prize. hopes his proof will inspire a
algorithm interpreted instructions now? Unless, of course, you have Atiyah’s self-described “simple younger generation to extend his
from brainwaves with an accuracy a totally new idea.” proof” builds on the work of two work to more general cases of the
of between 77 and 98 per cent The Riemann hypothesis leading 20th-century figures, Riemann hypothesis, as well as
(arxiv.org/abs/1809.00346). is intimately connected to John von Neumann and Friedrich seemingly unrelated areas of
This accuracy is partly thanks to the distribution of prime Hirzebruch. By combining their mathematics. “Hopefully, some
developments in AI that are having a numbers, those indivisible insights, and assuming the useful insights will come out of
big impact on the ability to interpret by any whole number other Riemann hypothesis does not Atiyah’s work even if the Riemann
brain signals. Chelsea Whyte ■ than themselves and 1. If the hold, Atiyah claims to have hypothesis proof doesn’t quite
hypothesis is proven to be correct, reached a logical contradiction, hold together,” says Jackson.
For more on mind reading, see page 28 mathematicians would be armed implying the hypothesis must be Gilead Amit ■

29 September 2018 | NewScientist | 9

NEWS & TECHNOLOGY

Until now, all the gene drives
Gene tool could tested in labs have stopped
spreading after a few generations.
But males carrying two copies,
and females with just one, look
and behave normally, so the gene

halt malaria spread

This is because they copy drive spreads rapidly. Eventually
themselves to a specific target all females inherit two copies
site and if this site mutates they and the population crashes.
stop working. To avoid this kind Crisanti’s team found no sign
Michael Le Page in pairs, only one of which is of resistance, Crisanti’s team of resistance evolving in their tests,
passed from a parent to its targeted a sequence crucial for which involved two cages each
MILLIONS of lives might be saved offspring, so such a piece of DNA the development of female starting with 600 mosquitoes
or transformed for the better would usually pass to half an mosquitoes that cannot mutate. (Nature Biotechnology, DOI:
by the first working gene drive. animal’s progeny. But gene drives Females that have two copies 10.1038/nbt.4245).
This piece of “parasitic DNA” “copy and paste” themselves onto of the gene drive develop male To find out if the drive will
could spread through mosquito both chromosomes when eggs genitalia and are infertile. work in the wild, the team will
populations, wiping them out by and sperm form, meaning they now carry out tests in bigger cages
making them infertile and halting get passed on to all offspring and Gene drives aim to cause designed to mimic conditions in
the spread of deadly malaria. spread through a population. mosquito populations to crash the tropics. The work will follow
In the lab, the gene drive guidelines set out by the US
killed off all mosquitoes within National Academies of Sciences
12 generations. “There were no in 2016. Even if the mosquitoes
progeny,” says Andrea Crisanti of escape, they cannot survive in the
Imperial College London, whose region or interbreed with local
team’s gene drive is based on the mosquito species, Crisanti says.
CRISPR gene-editing method. Because a gene drive could
There are 200 million cases spread to many countries, all
of malaria each year and half a would have to give the go-ahead
million deaths. Those who survive for field tests to begin.
may have lasting health issues, “For a scourge such as malaria,
and can become trapped in a cycle a diplomatic agreement among
of illness and poverty. all affected countries is feasible,”
“Gene editing holds the Kevin Esvelt at the Massachusetts
potential to save millions of lives Institute of Technology, a leading
and empower millions of people gene drive researcher, told
VOLKER STEGER/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

to lift themselves out of poverty,” New Scientist recently.

billionaire Bill Gates, whose However, Esvelt is opposed
charity is helping fund the work, to releasing this kind of gene
wrote earlier this year. drive for purposes other than
Gene drives are pieces of eliminating diseases. The risk of
parasitic DNA inserted into one a gene drive spreading or being
of an organism’s chromosomes. smuggled into other areas is too
Chromosomes generally come great, he warned last year. ■

Stopping AI the way we think about both human

and computer vision and suggest
from falling for new ways to prevent AIs from getting
quite so flummoxed.
visual tricks Zhenglong Zhou and Chaz
Firestone at Johns Hopkins University
ON THE whole, humans don’t have showed people a range of different
a problem telling a milk jug from a images that trip up AIs.
train, or a power drill from an orange. The participants had to guess what
But the same doesn’t apply to artificial an AI would (incorrectly) see, from a
intelligence, which can be fooled just list of 48 objects. The images ranged
by altering a few pixels in an image. from those that trick an AI into
Yet a new experiment hints that misidentifying a clearly depicted
the difference between human and object – such as labelling an orange as
machine perception might not be as a power drill – to those where it would
big as we thought. This could change identify objects that were not there,
such as labelling a square of random
pixels as an armadillo.
Across six different kinds of image,
most participants – between 81 and
98 per cent, depending on the image
type – made more correct predictions
about what an AI would see than
would be expected by chance.
“It suggests that humans are able
to decipher these images in the same
way as the poor victim machines do,”
“Humans have no problem
telling a milk jug from a
train. But AI can be fooled
by altering a few pixels”
says Anh Nguyen at Auburn University
in Alabama, who provided some of
the examples for the experiments.
Nguyen thinks that this shows
humans could help AIs handle
images better. One option would be
to train AIs to also mimic human visual
perception and use this model as a
defence, filtering out any guesses an
AI makes that don’t agree with what
the human model sees, he says.
It is a huge research problem to
defend against this type of visual trick
for AI, says Firestone. “It tickles me a
bit to think humans could be part of
the answer.” Douglas Heaven ■

10 | NewScientist | 29 September 2018

 Humanity will need the
equivalent of 2 Earths to People lying down
support itself by 2030. solve anagrams in
10% less time
than people
standing up.

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

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

We spend 50% of our

lives daydreaming.

AVAILABLE NOW
newscientist.com/howtobehuman
NEWS & TECHNOLOGY

applies quantum theory to Brian But the maths of quantum

Quantum physics and his lab in just the same way.
Quantum theory says that
theory shows that in a small
minority of cases, this thought

contradicts itself the particle’s spin as measured

Anil Ananthaswamy
QUANTUM mechanics seems
to falter when applied to large
objects like people, suggesting
it may not be a valid description
of how nature works at levels
beyond the microscopic.
Standard quantum theory
explains the behaviour of tiny
things like electrons and atoms.
In practice, it is very difficult to
observe quantum behaviour in
large objects, but in principle
the theory should still apply and
it should be possible to do this.
However, this universal
applicability of quantum theory
at all scales is an assumption that
may not be correct. To test this,
Daniela Frauchiger and Renato
Renner at the Swiss Federal
Institute of Technology in Zurich
came up with an elaborate
thought experiment.
It begins with a person, say
Amy, tossing a coin and using the
result to set a property called spin
for a particle: heads, the spin is set
to down; tails, the spin is set to up.
Amy sends the particle to Brian,
who measures the spin. If he finds
it to be up, he knows Amy got tails,
otherwise she got heads. The pair
by Brian is linked, or correlated,
with the outcome of Amy’s coin
toss. That means if Andy gets a
repeat this process many times. “yes” for his measurement of
Meanwhile, Amy has a friend, a coin toss experiment, he can
Andy, who uses quantum theory make a definitive statement about
to model Amy and her entire the spin of the particle Brian saw.
lab. Andy checks whether Amy And if Bella gets a “yes” for her
and her lab are in a quantum measurement of Brian and his
superposition of two states. The lab for that experiment, she can
result is a “yes” or “no” answer. say something definitive about
Brian has a friend, Bella, who whether Amy saw heads or tails.
Quantum conundrum
1. Amy tosses a coin to determine 2. Andy models Amy and her lab to
the spin of a particle, which she check if they are in a quantum
then sends to Brian to measure superposition – a yes or no question.
Bella does the same for Brian
Heads
Brian saw
YES spin down
Spin down
Amy Andy
CONTRADICTION
Amy got
tails
YES
= Heads
Brian Bella
3. Because the outcome of the coin toss 4. This process is repeated. In a
and the spin of the particle are linked, if small minority of cases, Andy and
Andy gets a “yes”, he can deinitively Bella get a “yes” at the same time,
know what Brian saw. In turn, if Bella leading to contradictory
gets a yes, she can do the same for Amy conclusions
experiment produces
contradictions. Andy can get a
“yes” and know that Brian saw a
particle with spin down and at the
same time, Bella can get a “yes”
and know that Amy saw a coin
toss that came up tails. The facts
don’t match, which they should
if quantum theory holds at larger
scales (Nature Communications,
doi.org/gd7gkt).
The analysis assumes that
it is equally valid for Amy to
describe her experiment using
quantum theory as it is for Andy
to describe Amy and her entire
lab that way – ditto for Brian
and Bella. Renner thinks that
this assumption – that quantum
theory is universal – is suspect.
“Why should the same theory
still work on the scale of humans?”
he says. “It could well be that
there is some modification.”
The thought experiment is
very provocative, says Robert
Spekkens of the Perimeter
Institute of Theoretical Physics
in Ontario, Canada. “There’s
been this long tradition in the
field of foundations of quantum
mechanics to talk about what
quantum theory predicts about
how one observer ought to
describe another observer,”
he says. “Their contribution
has really reinvigorated those
discussions.” ■

Their alien body shapes have created life forms have much less of these
Earliest animal confusion over whether they were substances. Their presence in the
identified by its primitive animals, other complex life fossils implies Dickinsonia was rich
ILYA BOBROVSKIY, AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY

fatty signature
A STRANGE soft-bodied sea creature
that lived over half a billion years
ago may have been the first animal
species on Earth.
The earliest large complex
organisms – known as the Ediacarans –
appear in the fossil record about
570 million years ago, just before
the dramatic rise in animal diversity
known as the Cambrian explosion.
forms like lichen or giant amoebas, in these fats. “It tells us this creature
or failed experiments of evolution. in fact was our earliest ancestor,”
Now, Jochen Brocks at Australian says Brocks (Science, doi.org/ct5j).
National University and his colleagues Like today’s animals, Dickinsonia
have found fats in 558-million-year- probably used cholesterol to build cell
old fossils of Dickinsonia – a type of walls, says Brocks. Other organisms
Ediacaran – that seem to confirm it tend to use other types of fat, he says.
was an early animal. The researchers The cholesterol discovery is the
found the fossils in sandstone cliffs best evidence yet that Dickinsonia
in the White Sea region of Russia. was an animal, says Emily Mitchell
The cholesterol-like molecules at the University of Cambridge – but
preserved in them are found in almost A fossilised Dickinsonia unearthed other species may have preceded it in
all animals today, while non-animal in the White Sea area of Russia the animal line, she says. Alice Klein ■

12 | NewScientist | 29 September 2018

 NEW
SCIENTIST
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 WHAT IF TIME STARTED
FLOWING BACKWARDS?

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IF THE
RUSSIANS
GOT TO
THE MOON
FIRST?

WHAT IF DINOSAURS
STILL RULED THE EARTH?
AVAILABLE NOW
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NEWS & TECHNOLOGY

The UK government has sent more

Subconscious than 300,000 messages on Slack
cues can make in the list of topics available,
us forget things with chatrooms set up for coffee,
whisky and pub o’clock – the
WE CAN forget things when instructed traditional British call for a post-
to – even if the instruction is work beverage. Elsewhere, users
subliminal, it turns out. can talk in channels set up for
We already knew that people can books, stickers, photography
consciously suppress memories when and other hobbies, or discuss
asked to. One experiment used visual lifestyle interests such as
TRUE IMAGES/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

cues to tell volunteers to remember Christianity and polyamory.

or forget words while they tried to The government’s use of Slack
learn a variety of word pairs. If told to has previously been scrutinised
forget a word, a volunteer was less by the UK data watchdog the
likely to remember it later on. Information Commissioner’s
Now Raphael Gaillard, at the Office (ICO) as potentially
Hospital Sainte-Anne in Paris, France, conflicting with legal duties
and his colleagues have shown that surrounding record keeping.
this can work subliminally too. The
team trained a group of 44 volunteers
to remember or forget in response to
Government chat: In 2016, an individual made
a freedom of information request
for all of the information held
clear, conscious visual cues. They
found that volunteers recalled the
second word in a pair 83 per cent of
games, booze, love on the GDS Slack platform.
The Cabinet Office refused the
request, stating that “Slack is not
the time if they were given the used in any official capacity”,
“remember” cue when learning it, Jacob Aron a list of tech buzzwords, such but the individual pushed back
but only 77 per cent of the time when as cloud computing, GDPR and and ultimately raised a complaint
they had been shown the “forget” cue. BOARD games, whisky and artificial intelligence. with the ICO, which published a
Next, the team ran the same polyamory are just some of the There are just 100 members ruling on the matter in July 2017.
experiment with a twist. As the things being discussed by UK in the channel about blockchain, The Cabinet Office said that in
volunteers tried to learn new pairs civil servants on a government- the technology behind the April 2017, the GDS Slack
of words, the “forget”and “remember” wide chat system – along with cryptocurrency bitcoin that contained more than 308,000
cues were flashed on a screen for their actual work. Like many has been touted as the digital messages, and that because it
periods of time that were too short organisations (including solution to almost any problem was using the free version of
for anyone to consciously notice them. New Scientist), the UK civil you can think of. Slack, it was not possible to export
The researchers found that service has embraced Slack as Along with these work-based all of these messages or separate
subconscious cues to forget lowered an alternative to email, but the channels, the details released by out relevant information from
the average recall rate to 75 per cent, ephemeral nature of the service the Cabinet Office provide a peek meaningless chat.
compared with 81 per cent when could make it harder to hold at what it is like inside the civil Freedom of information
participants were given subconscious the government to account. legislation places a limit on the
cues to remember. This is the first Slack allows organisations “There are channels for amount of time that can be
study to provide experimental to set up multiple chat channels coffee, whisky and pub dedicated to a particular request,
evidence that some memories are devoted to particular topics. A o’clock – the British call meaning the ICO ruled that the
susceptible to unconscious distortions freedom of information request to for a post-work beverage” Cabinet Office did not have to
(Cognition, doi.org/ct5m). the Cabinet Office, which oversees release a full chat history.
Experiments like these may the Government Digital Service service. A video games channel The ICO did, however, note that
ultimately lead to new therapies for (GDS), reveals that, as of June 2018, encourages people “to chat about government use of Slack raises “a
people with post-traumatic stress the UK government had 282 Slack all things game-related and maybe number of complicated and novel
disorder, helping them to suppress channels with 6723 users. organise a game or two!” A board issues in respect of compliance
upsetting memories without As you might expect, Slack games channel, meanwhile offers with the requirements of FOIA
conscious effort. This would avoid the seems to have been embraced by chat about “Games played on [the Freedom of Information Act],
need for them to continuously revisit civil servants on the techier end a board. Or possibly with cards including wider issues related to
their traumatic memories, says of the scale. The channels with the or miniatures or whatever. As records management”.
Brendan Depue, at the University most members are dedicated to long as it’s not Monopoly”. Even The ICO told New Scientist that
of Louisville, in Kentucky. “But we topics like design, user research a group of 16 die-hard Pokémon its work on this area is ongoing,
are not quite there yet,” he says. and security, but there are also Go fans have a place to talk. and the Cabinet Office declined
Lea Surugue ■ more specific ones that read like Drinking also features heavily to comment. ■

29 September 2018 | NewScientist | 15

 NEWS & TECHNOLOGY
FIELD NOTES Franz Josef Land, Russia
CORY RICHARDS/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CREATIVE
Polar bears at risk
from polluted ice
Adam Popescu
AS OUR boat bobs in a windy,
iceberg-filled cove, I try to gauge
the skinniness of the polar bear
in front of me. It isn’t plump, but
I have seen bears in worse health.
We are in Franz Josef Land,
a remote part of Russia between
the Barents Sea and the Arctic
Ocean. Many biologists consider
this 192-island archipelago one
of the least damaged polar
ecosystems on Earth.
It is late summer and there are
lots of polar bears, walruses and
seabirds, and plenty of ice. Unlike
the permanent sea ice a few
hundred kilometres to the north,
this ice calves off from glaciers as
they shrink and grow in annual
cycles, creating floating sculptures
that our boat manoeuvres around
to get a better look at the bear.
While offshore bears follow the
sea ice, hunting seals on ice floes
all year round, bears that live
along the coastline spend their
summers on land and are forced
to forage whatever they can find.
16 | NewScientist | 29 September 2018
Relying on sporadic, low-calorie
meals such as the eggs of nesting
guillemots or skuas, it is harder
for these bears to pack on the
pounds. The bears I see seem
to be doing OK, if a little skinny.
These slimmer bears may
appear less healthy than their
bigger offshore cousins, but in
fact it might be the other way
round. Researchers recently
found that offshore bears around
As more ice melts, inancial interest
in polar bear habitats is rising
ARCTIC OCEAN
CANADA Franz Josef Land
NORTH
POLE
GREENLAND SVALBARD
(Danish territory) (Norway)
BARENTS
SEA
SOURCE: NATIONAL SNOW AND ICE DATA CENTER: SEPT 2018
the Barents Sea are some of the
most polluted animals on Earth.
This is a direct consequence of
the seals they eat to bulk up.
Over a period of 14 years,
Heli Routti of the Norwegian
Polar Institute and her colleagues
studied 152 bears living around
Franz Josef Land and the nearby
Norwegian archipelago of
Svalbard. They found that
offshore female bears were in a
better condition, having greater
body mass, than coastal females,
but on average their levels of
pollutants called perfluoroalkyl
substances (PFASs) are 33 per cent
higher (Environmental Science
and Technology, doi.org/gc9w33). rise. Canadian firms mine inside
PFASs are used to make
products including carpeting
and metal plating. They are toxic
and degrade extremely slowly at
the frozen poles. These and other
organic chemical pollutants
probably originate from factories Greenland’s seabed, and multiple
in China, Russia, Poland and India. nations are stepping up their
They find their way to the Arctic
(Russia)
via air currents, where they fall in situation the US Coast Guard has
snow and accumulate in the ice.
As the ice melts every summer, in the South China Sea.
the PFASs are released into the
water, where they enter the food
chain. They eventually make their is one certainty for the bears and
way into the fatty deposits that
keep seals warm and from there
into the bears that eat them.
Staying close to land protects
polar bears from pollution
The biggest challenge is to
figure out what these chemicals
do to the health of the offshore
bears, says Routti. Polar bear
bodies are extremely complex –
a contaminated bear isn’t
necessarily unhealthy, she says.
Yet previous research in eastern
Greenland has linked chemical
exposure to brain damage in
bears, and even breakages of
the baculum – the penis bone.
During my 15 days in Franz
Josef Land, I saw five bears,
all living along the coast.
Each looked relatively healthy.
There are signs that some
bears along the coast are coping
with global warming-induced
ice loss relatively well. “The bears
in Svalbard, so far, seem to be
handling the sea ice loss,”
says Andrew Derocher at the
University of Alberta, Canada,
who worked with Routti on the
study. “But I’d bet that’s going
to change given the extreme
rate of ice loss in the area.”
“The biggest challenge is
to figure out what these
chemicals do to the health
of the offshore bears”
There is more trouble for polar
bears ahead, as exploitation
across the Arctic also looks set to
the Arctic circle, and China’s
Arctic Policy includes bankrolling
mining in Greenland, in an effort
to encourage the autonomous
Danish territory’s independence
movement. Russia claims parts of
military activity in the region in a
likened to the land grabs going on
No one knows how these
tensions will play out, but there
their home: yet more change.
That is the biggest threat of all
for ecosystems this fragile. ■
 Where did we come from?
How did it all begin?

And where does belly-button fluff come from?

Find the answers in our latest book. On sale now.

Introduction by Professor Stephen Hawking

 IN BRIEF
MARK CONLIN/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Pill-sized robot can

check out your gut
A ROBOTIC capsule designed to
suck up gut mucus will hopefully
end the need for uncomfortable
procedures to sample it.
Gut mucus can be a more
accurate indicator of health than
a stool sample. But getting at it
usually involves inserting a long
tube, called an endoscope, into
the digestive tract. Capsules make
a good alternative as they are easy
to swallow and can get to spots
that endoscopes struggle to reach.
Li Zhang at the Chinese
University of Hong Kong and his
colleagues have built a prototype
robotic capsule that has a vacuum
bag for sucking up mucus. When
the capsule is in place, a magnet
outside of the body can trigger an
electric current that melts a wax
plug to open the vacuum bag.
Mucus is sucked into the bag
and the capsule is excreted with its
To test the impact of ecstasy, or MDMA, on this cargo (arxiv.org/abs/1809.03096).
An octopus on ecstasy gets behaviour, Dolen and her colleague Eric Edsinger at the Zhang has yet to test the device in
all sociable and huggy Marine Biological Laboratory in Massachusetts set up animals but plans to do so.
an aquarium with a central chamber and two side ones.
OCTOPUSES given the drug ecstasy become more An octopus in a perforated container was put in one side
gregarious and try to “hug” other octopuses. chamber. In the other was an object in an identical
Big and hairy woos
The fact that they respond in a similar manner to container. In the centre was an octopus that could roam.
people who use the drug suggests the molecular basis Normally, the roaming octopus spent little time in the males at bugs’ ball
for social behaviour evolved in our shared ancestor chamber with the other octopus and touched its container
more than 500 million years ago. cautiously. But if it was put in water containing dissolved FOR female dance flies, large
Gul Dolen at the Johns Hopkins University School MDMA before being placed in the test aquarium, it spent inflatable sacs and hairy legs are
of Medicine in Maryland says octopuses are usually much longer with the other octopus and tried to “hug” it the look when they go to the ball.
solitary animals. “During reproduction, they are social in a way that seemed exploratory rather than aggressive. The insects get their name
for 3 minutes while they mate and then they go back None of the animals appeared stressed during the because they seem to dance
to wanting to kill each other,” she says. experiment (Current Biology, doi.org/ct4t). in the air in mating swarms.
Rosalind Murray and colleagues
at the University of Toronto
Mozzies may spread plastic pollution a mix of food and microplastics. Mississauga, Canada, and the
They examined 15 individuals University of Stirling, UK, have
MOSQUITO larvae living in aquatic systems can ingest small selected at random while larvae, now revealed how females
water contaminated with plastic pieces by accident. But plastic’s and another 15 when the animals help attract a mate.
accumulate the litter in their impact may be spread further had turned into flying adults. They inflate sacs along their
bodies – and retain some of it even by animals with a life cycle that The team found microplastics abdomen to make their bodies
after they become flying adults. involves living in water and in all 30. On average, there were look bigger. Hair-like scales on the
The worry is that the plastic may then on land. more than 3000 bits of plastic legs also make females look larger.
then get into animals outside the Amanda Callaghan at the in each larvae. As the animals The team found that males find
aquatic food chain. University of Reading, UK, and matured, they gradually stopped females with big sacs three times
Plastic pollution is ubiquitous, her colleagues suspected that eating microplastics and excreted as attractive as those with small
but is especially common in mosquitoes could do just this. most of them. Even so, adults still sacs. But if the sacs are small,
water. Birds, fish and other To test their idea, they fed typically contained about 40 bits hairier legs help (Proceedings of
animals living in and around 150 aquatic mosquito larvae with (Biology Letters, doi.org/ct3d). the Royal Society B, doi.org/ct3b).

18 | NewScientist | 29 September 2018

 For new stories every day, visit newscientist.com/news
How a swarm of
bees acts as one
A SWARM of honeybees hanging
from a branch can change its shape
in bad weather. Now we know more
about how the bees work as a single
superorganism to do this.
Colonies of European honeybees
reproduce by releasing a queen with
thousands of workers. This swarm
often attaches itself under a branch,
in an inverted cone with the queen
at its centre. Researchers know the
cone can change shape to cope with
winds, typically becoming flatter.
To understand how individual
bees work together to do this, Orit
Peleg at Harvard University and her
colleagues put a bee cluster under a
board in their laboratory and shook
it to mimic the stress of high winds.
The cone cluster began to sway
and started to flatten, losing half its
height in 30 minutes. This made it
less prone to swaying.
By filming the swarm and
tracking individual bees, the team
discovered that those near the tip
of the cone slowly climb up and
spread out, flattening the structure.
By simulating the physical
processes that individual bees
experience when the swarm
shakes, the researchers showed
that bees are physically strained
as they cling together. It is possible,
they say, that shaking-related
physical strain acts as a cue to
climb upwards and flatten the cone
(Nature Physics, doi.org/ct3g).
TIM GRAHAM / GETTY
Drug that prunes useless brain cells in mice halts dementia
PURGING brain cells that are worn
out but won’t die could provide
a new way to treat or prevent
Alzheimer’s disease and other
types of dementia.
That is the hope after research
in engineered mice showing that
if these kinds of “senescent” cells
are eradicated as they develop,
the animals’ brains are protected
against the ongoing degeneration
to which they are prone.
Darren Baker of the Mayo Clinic
in Minnesota, who led the study,
says this shows that senescent
cells promote neurodegeneration
Genetic therapy for
cocaine addiction
PEOPLE hooked on cocaine may
soon be invited to test a therapy
designed to destroy the drug in
their bodies if they take it again.
There are no approved
treatments for cocaine addiction.
It is hoped the new therapy,
using genetically engineered cells,
may help tackle the 5000 annual
cocaine overdose deaths in the US.
Skin cells would be taken from
people undergoing treatment
and altered to constantly make an
enzyme that destroys cocaine in
the blood. The cells would then be
multiplied and implanted under
the recipient’s skin.
Ming Xu at the University
of Chicago and his colleagues
trialled this technique in mice.
Within 20 minutes, six mice with
an implant had nearly eliminated
a dose of cocaine, while six control
mice took almost 2 hours. Unlike
the control animals, the treated
mice didn’t get a cocaine-related
pleasure hit (Nature Biomedical
Engineering, doi.org/ct3f).
Xu expects the treatment to
work in people. Prototype versions
of engineered human cells made
the enzyme continuously, for at
least two months. “We’d like to
move to clinical trials as soon
as possible,” says Xu.
and cognitive loss. “Preventing
these cells from accumulating
attenuates disease,” he says.
The mice were genetically
engineered so their brains
degenerate from a young age
by becoming clogged with fibres
called tau tangles, which are also
present in people with dementia.
Baker’s team discovered that by
the time the mice were a year old,
they had also accumulated lots
of senescent cells in their brains.
Compared with healthy mice,
they had a dozen times as many
of the cells in the memory centre –
A hair loss remedy to be sniffed at
TREATING hair loss may no longer
mean pills, injections or transplants,
just a whiff of synthetic sandalwood.
Olfactory receptors that detect
odours are found in the nose, but
similar receptors crop up in other
parts of the body, including the skin
around hair follicles. Here they play
a role in functions including healing.
Ralf Paus at the University of
Manchester, UK, and his colleagues
say there is evidence that forming a
hair uses a similar set of molecular
tools as making new skin after being
wounded. This made them wonder
whether activating one of these
the hippocampus – and twice as
many in the cortex, the “thinking”
hub of the brain.
To find out if senescent cells
also drive tau-related brain
degeneration, the researchers bred
the tau tangle-prone mice with
mice whose senescent cells could
be destroyed as they emerged
using a drug called AP. Wiping out
the senescent cells halted brain
degeneration in the crossbred
mice and prevented the loss of
memory and cognitive ability
usually seen in mice with tau
tangles (Nature, doi.org/gd7gh6).
PLAINPICTURE/BILDHUSET/SIMON BERG
receptors could promote hair growth.
To test the idea, the researchers
exposed human scalp samples to
synthetic sandalwood for six days.
They chose this scent because it has
a molecule highly likely to bind to the
receptor. They found a 25 to 30 per
cent hike in a hormone needed for hair
growth in the samples. The death of
cells involved in forming hair declined.
The synthetic sandalwood, already
widely used in cosmetics, could be
applied to the scalp to help promote
hair growth. The team says natural
sandalwood doesn’t work (Nature
Communications, doi.org/ct3h).
29 September 2018 | NewScientist | 19
INSIGHT FAT ACCEPTANCE

Big, bold and body-positive

Growing calls for “fat acceptance” fly in the face of medical advice, but is
being overweight actually that bad for your health, asks Clare Wilson

WOMEN’S glossy magazines often amputations and blindness. But can we be so certain about heart disease and diabetes,
get flak for promoting unhealthy As a result, people who are the health toll? Take the current are not always as dramatic as
beauty ideals, but usually it is overweight often face a lecture campaign from the charity Cancer the health warnings suggest.
because their models are so thin. from their doctor about slimming Research UK (CRUK), with ads One study found that people
Not so for this month’s UK issue down, even if they are visiting depicting chips like cigarettes in in their 60s and 70s who have a
of Cosmopolitan, which features for unrelated reasons. Some UK a packet. The charity says that body mass index (BMI) of over
the plus-sized model Tess family doctors now advise their obesity is a cancer risk comparable 30 – classed as medically obese –
Holliday resplendent in green patients to use commercial to smoking, and that in future the lose just one extra year of life on
satin underwear. weight loss programmes, like risk from obesity may be greater. average (see graphic, below). The
Holliday’s success in modelling, Weight Watchers. Sofie Hagen, a comedian who size of the effect is larger for those
despite her UK size-26 figure, Wider society is also adopting founded a Danish fat-acceptance who are younger because they
epitomises the burgeoning an increasingly moralistic organisation, says such have more life left to lose, so if
“body-positive” movement, which tone about health and fitness. campaigns aren’t justified by you are obese in your 20s and 30s
says that people’s weight is their Earlier this year, UK magazine medical evidence. The studies you lose about six years of life.
own business and that no one cited by CRUK show correlations It isn’t just about lifespan, of
should dislike the way they look. “People who are between being overweight and a course, but also the extra toll on
“If I saw a body like mine on this overweight often face a higher risk of certain cancers, but health while people are still alive.
magazine when I was a young girl, lecture from their doctor not that being overweight causes Obese people in their 20s lose
it would have changed my life,” about slimming down” those cancers. Something else about 13 years of healthy life, while
Holliday said when she posted the might underlie both, such as lack very obese people of the same age
cover on Instagram. The Big Issue urged readers to take of exercise or being poor. lose about 19 years, compared with
Yet there may be downsides to a “health pledge” to exercise and Even if being overweight really those of recommended weight.
this idea of “fat acceptance”, as it take better care of themselves does cause cancer, it doesn’t play
is sometimes called. Doctors want to avoid “being a drain” on the a particularly big role. According
to warn people about the physical National Health Service. to CRUK’s own figures, obesity Costly calories
risks of being overweight – not “There’s an atmosphere is linked to just 6 per cent of Those extra years spent in poor
only for the sake of their personal where it’s OK to publicly criticise tumours. The ad campaign could health cost health services money.
health, but also because of the overweight people,” says Margaret leave cancer patients thinking As such, many argue that public
wider impact on medical budgets. McCartney, a doctor in Glasgow, they are to blame for their illness health bodies should warn people
So does fat acceptance mean we UK. Cosmopolitan was admonished when they aren’t. about the medical consequences
face a clash between people’s by both internet trolls and TV Cancer isn’t the only health of being overweight.
health and their happiness? And journalist Piers Morgan for risk from being overweight. But That said, there are other
if so, which should take priority? promoting unhealthy eating the wider health consequences of behaviours that are likely to cost
This is an issue that goes when it put Holliday on the cover. obesity, such as increased risk of health services money – such as
beyond one magazine cover, as parachuting – that don’t attract
almost all countries are seeing Being very overweight takes a toll on your health, but not as much as some other the public vitriol reserved for
rising numbers of their citizens lifestyle factors. These igures all come from diferent studies and so are not strictly being overweight. Being lonely
comparable. They are also based on correlations – the characteristics have been
classed as overweight. Obesity is linked to earlier death, rather than proven as the direct cause
correlates with higher rates of
the top public health problem heart disease too. Sure, no one
facing most Western nations. Obesity (age >60) chooses to be lonely, but then no
We have long known that being one chooses to be fat either.
significantly overweight comes Obesity (age 20-39) There is another flaw in telling
with certain health risks, such Poverty people to lose weight. It ignores
as a higher rate of heart attacks. the fact that there is no simple
Smoking
More recently, we have found that way to achieve this long-term. The
just being moderately overweight Severe alcoholism exact figure is unclear, but most
makes people more prone to 0 5 10 15 20 25 people who go on a diet put the
developing diabetes, which can Years of life lost weight back on and often end up
lead to complications such as foot SOURCE: doi.org/f2zc2d; doi.org/4mj; doi.org/f3pdk9; LONGEVITYPANEL.CO.UK even heavier than when they

20 | NewScientist | 29 September 2018

For daily news stories, visit newscientist.com/news
started. According to one study
of people following the Weight
Watchers programme, just one
in five were still at their goal
weight two years later.
Why is it so hard to keep it
off? When someone loses any
significant amount of weight,
their body goes through several
changes. Hormone shifts mean
people feel hungrier than they
used to after a set amount of
food. Their metabolism slows,
so the same calorie intake that
previously kept weight steady
now piles on the pounds, says
Traci Mann at the University of
Minnesota. “It doesn’t make it
impossible to keep the weight off,
but it makes it harder.”
The only weight loss method
shown to work long-term is gastric
surgery, where the stomach or
gut is made smaller. But surgery
is a drastic measure, with the
operation itself carrying risks. In
many countries, it is restricted to
people who are morbidly obese.
What can everyone else do?
There is another way, says Mann:
work towards improvements in
health, not weight. If people can
adopt a healthier lifestyle, they
should see improvements in their
blood pressure and blood sugar
levels, making heart disease and
good scores on these measures.
Doctors should switch from
recommending weight loss to
advising people about exercise
and healthy eating, says Mann.
Fat acceptance campaigners
such as Hagen say it is not even
ethical to tell people to diet.
“I don’t know a single fat person
who hasn’t been on a diet. I have
tried that the majority of my
life. Why not work with the body
I have now?”
But Yoni Freedhoff, who
heads the Bariatric Medical
Institute in Ottowa, Canada, says
“I have tried dieting
the majority of my life.
Why not work with the
body I have now?”
fat acceptance groups become
dangerous when they dismiss
dieting. “They say it’s impossible
and unnecessary to lose weight.
That [ignores] the challenges to
the quality of life of individuals
who are dramatically obese.”
While Freedhoff accepts that
significant weight loss is rare, he
says the effort is worthwhile for
SWAN GALLET/WWD/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK
those who do manage it. And a
sizeable minority succeed in
losing and keeping off more
modest amounts, such as 5 to 10
per cent of their starting weight,
which can be helpful. “I have seen
people who have lost 5 per cent
who have come off various
medications,” says Freedhoff.
Model Tess Holliday is a body- Clearly, any decision to try to
positive activist lose weight has to be an individual
one, taking into account people’s
diabetes less likely, even if they past attempts, current health
don’t lose weight. “Exercise has status and their personal feelings.
benefits even if you don’t lose What frustrates Hagen is that
1 pound,” says Mann. while commenters may couch
Such an approach clashes their criticisms as health
with the belief that anyone who concerns, she suspects they really
is overweight must be unhealthy, just enjoy judging and finger-
but there is growing evidence to wagging. “People hate fat people
suggest that isn’t true. Certainly, and they fear becoming fat – it’s
people who are overweight are the worst thing you can be.”
more likely to have high blood But personally, she has had it
pressure, cholesterol or blood with strangers offering her
sugar – but not all do. By some medical advice over the internet.
estimates, as many as a third of “I don’t owe anyone my health.
people who are overweight have It’s my body.” ■
29 September 2018 | NewScientist | 21
COMMENT
Flaw and order
A disciplined schedule may benefit some students, but there is
more to life success than turning up on time, says Michael Brooks
GET ready for the next trend in
education theory. A new paper
examining the habits of students
at the University of Electronic
Science and Technology of China
suggests that “orderliness
predicts academic performance”.
The study uses activity logged
on student access cards to show
that keeping a regular schedule
(indicated by showering and
eating at the same time every day)
correlated with higher grades.
Diligence, as measured by the
amount of time spent in teaching
buildings and the library, showed
a similar positive correlation.
For all the headlines – and even
policies – that this finding is likely
to generate, it pays to be orderly
and diligent in our own analysis.
The first and most obvious flaw
is to believe that good grades are
harbingers of success. The UK
government has been particularly
gullible in this, seduced time and
Every pill you take
Drugs that send data to doctors risk patient
privacy, say I.Glen Cohen and Alex Pearlman
YOUR next prescription might
include pills with embedded
sensors that can collect and
transmit data on whether you
are taking them as instructed.
“Smart pills”like these are part
of digital medicine, which also
includes things like insulin pumps
that allow continuous glucose
monitoring. The hope is such
22 | NewScientist | 29 September 2018
agreements for the battery
changes, sensor replacements
and software updates involved.
And because these devices will
capture data, there are thorny
issues about data ownership.
Although much of the attention
has focused on gathering data on
people who use digital medicines,
products will provide doctors these devices also generate data
with information about patients on physicians and other providers
between visits and assist agencies
of medical services. Insurers and
and researchers to monitor healthhospital systems can learn to
outcomes. Many, though, have what extent a provider is ensuring
reacted to these products with
fear and concern. And many “Ethicists, companies
bioethical issues have been raised. and healthcare providers
It will be a challenge to ensure must work hard to
that people understand user maintain patients’ trust”
again by the lure of high rankings
in international tests such as
PISA and TIMSS that measure
academic achievement among
school students.
Certain Asian countries –
China, Singapore and South
Korea, for example – do very
well here, outperforming most
Western nations. Yet research
shows that achieving stellar
grades is no guarantee of success
in life, of creativity or of future
economic achievement. The UK,
for instance, may not produce
students that rank highly in
the PISA hierarchy, but it does
consistently turn out people who
are world class in technological
hardware, software, the film
industry, music and the arts.
If we want success here, we
might do better to encourage
disorder in our schools. Kathleen
Vohs at the University of
Minnesota showed in 2013 that
patients adhere to treatment
regimes. Moreover, provider
behaviour in response to alerts
and other information may
become important for
malpractice claims if people
experience adverse effects, and
lawyers seek to access the records.
Some people undergo
directly observed treatment for
tuberculosis, for example, which
involves a doctor watching them
take their medication. Is a digital
medicine an encroachment on
freedom or a welcome, less
intrusive option?
Digital medicine products
have the potential to improve
healthcare for all involved.
For more opinion articles, visit newscientist.com/opinion

people’s ideas are more creative

and interesting when they are
ANALYSIS SpaceX moon mission
working in a messy room. Two
years later, Bob Fennis and Jacob
Wiebenga at the University of
Groningen in the Netherlands
showed a messy environment
helps people focus on reaching
clear, well-defined goals.
Albert Einstein’s desk on the
day he died was a mess of clutter.
CHRIS CARLSON/AP/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK

Steve Jobs’s workspace, too,

was far from pristine. The Marks
Twain and Zuckerberg offer
similar insights: there are clearly
strong associations between a
messy working environment and
getting things done. Not always
good things, I’ll admit: Donald
Trump often appears behind a

Why a trip to the moon

cluttered desk. But we do have to build these spacecraft and test
admit that Trump is creative and them to build towards his vision
productive, albeit in ways many of going to Mars.”

is the ultimate luxury

find troubling. Musk declined to reveal how much
The last thing anyone needs Maezawa paid for all the seats on the
is a truckload of government BFR trip, but he did say it was enough
education theorists announcing to “have a material effect on paying for
that students who deviate from cost and development of BFR”. He also
the norm will be excluded on the Leah Crane The flight is scheduled for 2023, said that the total development costs
basis that they are compromising but Musk is known for coming up with of the rocket will be about $5 billion.
their institution’s ranking. THE first private voyage of SpaceX’s overly optimistic timescales. “Take But just like the launch of a red
By all means, encourage daily planned Big Falcon Rocket (BFR) the timeline with a grain of salt,” Tesla car aboard the first flight of
hygiene, but also remember that will be the ultimate artists’ retreat. says Todd Harrison at the Center for the Falcon Heavy rocket in February,
conformity and uniformity are SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced on Strategic and International Studies in these pleasure cruises may be more
the enemies of true success. ■ 17 September that Yusaku Maezawa Washington DC. “It may not happen, style than substance. It is a marketing
(pictured above, at right, with Musk), or it may not happen for a long time.” strategy similar to those of more
Michael Brooks is a consultant at the Japanese billionaire and art curator In February 2017, SpaceX Earth-bound luxury brands, says Laura
New Scientist who founded Japan’s largest online announced it would send two Grego at the Union of Concerned
clothing retailer, will be the first passengers around the moon in the Scientists in Massachusetts.
passenger on the enormous rocket, Falcon Heavy rocket in late 2018, “The real profit centre for fashion
But ethicists, companies and and he plans to make the voyage but those plans never materialised. designers is not the clothes that they
healthcare providers must work around the moon a work of art. Musk revealed during the walk the runway with,” she says.
hard to maintain patients’ trust. “I would like to invite six to eight announcement of this new flight that “They create a brand persona that
We must be transparent about artists from around the world to join way, and what they really make their
how data on both patients and me on this mission to the moon,” said “I would like to invite six to money in is handbags and perfumes.”
providers is collected, how it is Maezawa. “These artists will be asked eight artists from around This flight has higher stakes than
used, and what rights people have to create something after they return the world to join me on this a fashion show, though. Pulling it off
once the data has been collected. to Earth, and these masterpieces will mission to the moon” would give SpaceX a major reputation
We must also ensure that people inspire the dreamer within all of us.” boost, but if anything went awry it
are making informed, voluntary He also invited Musk along on the Maezawa was one of those original could be disastrous for the firm as
choices to use this technology. ■ journey around the moon and back, passengers, but it’s not clear what well as the passengers.
to which Musk responded, “Maybe happened to the other. At the time, “It would be astonishingly bad if
I. Glenn Cohen is faculty director I would join on this trip, I don’t know.” Musk said that one or two private trips something went wrong, not just for
of Harvard’s Petrie-Flom Center for The spaceship that will sit atop a year could provide 10 to 12 per cent SpaceX, but for the space tourism
Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and the rocket is planned to hold about of SpaceX’s annual revenue. industry, which is just in its infancy,”
Bioethics. He has acted as consultant 100 people. However, this flight will “It’s a way of funding his longer- says Harrison. “It would scare people
for Otsuka Pharmaceuticals advising have a much smaller crew to leave term ambition,” says Harrison. off, and if there’s an accident, it will
on the use of digital medicine. Alex room for extra fuel and supplies just in “If he can get billionaires that want attract much more government
Pearlman is a journalist and bioethicist case anything goes wrong, said Musk. to do it for the thrill, it allows him to oversight and regulation.” ■

29 September 2018 | NewScientist | 23

APERTURE
Life, the universe
and everything
More than 35,000 visitors, 120 speakers and
100 immersive experiences added up to one
unforgettable weekend at New Scientist Live.
Valerie Jamieson picks her highlights
STEPHEN HAWKING once visited a
karaoke club in Los Angeles where
he sang a duet with a Nobel
prizewinning physicist. The song?
Yellow Submarine by The Beatles.
Marika Taylor, who had Hawking as
her PhD supervisor at the University
of Cambridge, recounted the tale in
a discussion exploring Hawking’s life,
work and legacy. She fondly explained
how Hawking always put his students
first and had no qualms about keeping
politicians and the media waiting
while he discussed physics with them.
These were some of the fascinating
personal insights visitors to New
Scientist Live at ExCeL in London
were treated to at the weekend.
My own spine-tingling moment
came when European Space Agency
astronaut Tim Peake shared his
experiences with jungle explorer
Will Millard and Nics Wetherill, who led
the first all-female expedition to trek
across Antarctica using muscle power
alone. The packed audience was
gripped by their incredible stories
and their humility. Although the three
had never met before, they bonded
immediately. Don’t be surprised to
hear them arrange an expedition to
Antarctica in future.
Similarly, in a discussion on
the role of technology in sport,
you could see a future collaboration
forming between sports engineer
Steve Haake and wheelchair racing
champion Hannah Cockroft. His
brain whirred into overdrive as she
explained how little research and
development goes into improving
24 | NewScientist | 29 September 2018
the equipment para-athletes use. Astronomer
Carlo Rovelli blew everyone’s minds Martin Rees, left
describing the mysteries of time.
Marine biologist Jon Copley introduced
us to the Hoff crab, a species that lives
in deep Antarctic waters and feeds by
combing bacteria trapped on its hairy
chest. And Harvard University
geneticist David Reich, a pioneer in
the analysis of ancient human DNA,
gave one of his rare public talks,
“We would have
competitions to see who
could build the best toilet”
Nics Wetherill, leader of
the Ice Maidens expedition Visitors to New Scientist
to Antarctica (right) Live could do everything
from holding plastinated
explaining how the latest findings frogs (top) to seeing
are overturning our existing ideas life-sized rocket cars
of who we are and where we came (below right)
from. His work paints an extraordinary
picture of us as a mosaic of other Physicist
human species and of human Carlo Rovelli
migration across the globe.
On the show floor, more than
1000 people made slime and learned
about the materials science behind
this year’s biggest trend. Robots
mingled with a prehistoric shaman,
visitors ground flour the Stone Age
way and the virtual reality
rollercoaster led our brains and bodies
to believe we were on the real thing.
Thank you to the 35,000 people
who came to the show and made it
such a success. New Scientist
subscribers will be able to watch
videos of any of the talks they
missed – look out for details soon.
 Photographed for New Scientist by Jonny Donovan Events, Kirstin Kidd and Dave Stock

Astronaut Tim Peake and a young guest

Computer scientist Presenter

Anne-Marie Imafidon Clare Balding

29 September 2018 | NewScientist | 25

APERTURE

“Do you know how

bees make honey?
They vomit it up!”
TV presenter
Maddie Moate (above)

Mathematician
Hannah Fry, left

People could handle giant

insects (left), experience
virtual reality (above), build
their own kite (right) and
hug a robot (middle right)

Doctor and TV presenter

Rangan Chatterjee, far left;
New Scientist ’s executive
chairman Bernard Gray
and UK government
chief scientific adviser
Patrick Vallance, left

26 | NewScientist | 29 September 2018

 “One of the most
underrated triggers
of gut symptoms is the
nocebo effect”
Dietician Megan Rossi (left)

Physicist Melissa Windridge, left

Join us at the ExCeL again

next year. In 2019 we will
be there 10-13 October

Follow @newscientist
on Twitter and Facebook
for the latest on science
L-R: Emily Wilson, Lucy Siegle, Richard Thompson, Jo Ruxton
news and events

29 September 2018 | NewScientist | 27

 Thoughts laid bare
Mind-reading technology is no longer the stuf of
science iction, as Timothy Revell discovers
I
FEEL like a cross between an Olympic
swimmer and a cyborg. On my head is a
bathing-cap-like hat dotted with electrodes,
and a cable dangles behind me.
David Ibanez and Marta Castellano, from
the neuroscience company Starlab, look at
me from across a table at their headquarters
in Barcelona. As the sun beams in through two
giant windows illuminating the plain white
room where we sit, I am trying to hide my
nerves, but wonder whether that is even
possible while wearing a device like this. These
may be humble surroundings, but Ibanez and
Castellano are about to try to read my mind.
For decades, neuroscientists have been
trying to decipher what people are thinking
from their brain activity. Now, thanks to an
explosion in artificial intelligence, we can
decipher patterns in brain scans that once
just looked like meaningless squiggles.
“Nobody dreamed that you could get to
the content of thought like we’ve been able to
in the past 10 years. It was considered science
fiction,” says Marcel Just at Carnegie Mellon
University in Pennsylvania. Researchers have
already peered into the brain to recreate films
people have watched and decoded dreams.
Now the world’s biggest players in AI are
28 | NewScientist | 29 September 2018
racing to develop their own mind-reading
capabilities. Last year, Facebook announced
plans for a device to allow people to type using
their thoughts. Microsoft, the US Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency and
Tesla’s Elon Musk all have their own projects
under way. This is no longer just a case of
seeing parts of the brain light up on a screen,
it is the first step towards the ultimate
superpower. I had to give it a try.
Out of your head
The brain is the most complex organ in the
body, comprising 100 billion nerve cells called
neurons, each of which can make contact with
thousands of others. Every second a million
new connections are made. So it is no wonder
that we don’t fully understand its inner
workings. Luckily, to make a decent mind
reader, we may not have to.
Until now, the only way to find out what
is happening in someone’s mind has been to
use brain scans that reveal the general areas
involved with different types of thinking.
When you have a thought, the neurons
involved repeatedly fire, which burns a lot of
energy. As a result, blood rushes to these areas
to make sure they have enough oxygen and
nutrients. This increase in blood shows up in
fMRI scans and can hint at what type of
thought someone is having. If they are looking
at a picture, you would see activity in the
visual cortex, for instance. So you could put
someone in a scanner and work out what
kinds of general thought processes are going
on, but the content of the thoughts themselves
remained locked away.
This is where artificial intelligence comes
into the picture. Its algorithms excel at picking
up patterns in complicated data sets, such as
brain scans. Rather than being hard-coded
with specific things to look out for, many AIs
learn by example. This means that instead of
needing to fully understand the brain, it may
be possible to show AIs thousands of examples
of brain scans along with details of whatever
the brain was doing at the time, and for them
to work out the links for themselves.
This is exactly what Zhongming Liu and
his team at Purdue University in Indiana have
been trying. And rather than just identifying
which general areas, such as the visual cortex,
are involved in a process, Liu’s work shows that
AIs can unpick some of the content too. From
an fMRI brain scan, Liu’s AI can say which of >
IKER AYESTARAN

29 September 2018 | NewScientist | 29

 a selection of 15 different things a person
was viewing when the scan was taken. For
example, if someone was looking at a picture
of a face, the AI can detect patterns in their
scan that convince it to say “face”. Other
options include birds, aeroplanes and people
exercising, and the AI can call the correct
category 50 per cent of the time.
Although this is far from perfect, it is also
a long way from the 6.7 per cent success rate
you would expect from luck alone. “It’s a form
of mind reading, and without AI none of it
would be possible,” says Liu.
Taking this a step further, Jack Gallant’s
group at the University of California, Berkeley,
has managed to convert such brain patterns
into movies, essentially producing videos of
people’s mental images. To do this, the team
trained an AI on millions of frames of YouTube
clips and the brain scans of people watching
them. When shown brain scans of someone
watching a different YouTube video, the AI was
able to generate a new movie of what it thought
the person was viewing. The results are eerie
outlines of the original, but still recognisable.
“It is sort of the world’s greatest party
trick,” says Just, who has trained an AI to
be able to guess the content of a sentence
someone is reading from their brain scan
using similar techniques.
It may even be possible to read someone’s
mind while they are asleep using only brain
scans. Yukiyasu Kamitani at Japan’s Advanced
Telecommunications Research Institute first
showed in 2013 that it is possible to train an
AI to detect the content of someone’s dreams,
“It is possible to train an AI
to detect the contents of
someone’s dreams”
describing each in basic terms such as whether
there was a male or female character, the
objects included and details about the overall
scene. Kamitani’s system has an accuracy of
about 60 per cent.
Since then, he and his colleagues have
developed a method like Gallant’s for
replaying brain content as movies, and he
says they are now going to apply it to dreams.
Even if you don’t remember your dreams after
waking, with Kamitani’s system you might be
able to watch a highlights reel.
All this hints at the possibility that AI
coupled with fMRI could show what is going
on inside people’s minds. Rather than relying
on our ability to describe what we are thinking,
in the future we might just show our thoughts
30 | NewScientist | 29 September 2018
FINN O’HARA
IS ANYBODY THERE?
We used to think that all people in
a vegetative state were completely
unconscious and unaware. But work
by neuroscientist Adrian Owen
(pictured above) over the past 20
years has forced us to reconsider.
Owen was initially spurred on by
a woman called Kate. She was left in a
vegetative state after a viral infection,
but when she was shown photos of her
family members, her brain would light
up on an fMRI scan in the same way as
someone who was completely healthy.
It was an indication that Kate was still
conscious at some level.
Working with another patient, Owen
and his team decided to ask them if they
could imagine playing tennis, which
would activate the brain’s premotor
cortex. If someone in a vegetative state
could do that on cue, it would show up
on a brain scan and reveal a level of
consciousness previously thought lacking.
Since then, Owen and his team have
found that up to 20 per cent of people in
a vegetative state are actually conscious.
His team has had basic conversations
with these people, asking things like
whether they are in pain, with answers
given by imagining different activities
to answer yes or no.
Owen’s work has shown that
some people in a vegetative state
are more conscious than we thought,
and with improvements in mind-reading
technology we may soon discover even
more (see main story).
on a screen instead. For people with trouble
speaking or with the near-total paralysis of
locked-in syndrome, this could be a lifeline to
the outside world. It may even provide a way
to communicate with people who are in a
vegetative state (see “Is anybody there?”, left).
Wearable devices
But MRI machines cost hundreds of thousands
of dollars, and are incredibly cumbersome.
Each typically weighs several tonnes and along
with all of the associated equipment requires
a dedicated room. It is impractical to have
someone lie down inside a massive machine
every time they need to communicate, and
so there is no way such devices would be used
by consumers.
To top it off, fMRI scans can show patterns
that aren’t really there – as was seen in a
famous 2009 study that exposed the
“thoughts” of a dead salmon by scanning
its brain. So, to realise the dream of wearable
mind readers, we need a different approach.
One alternative is electroencephalogram
(EEG) caps, like I wore at Starlab. These are
filled with electrodes that measure electricity,
and because brain activity produces electrical
signals, they can detect when different parts of
the brain are most active. EEG caps are simply
worn like a swimming cap with a chin strap.
Once fitted with mine at the Starlab offices,
I was asked to carry out a simple task called the
Stroop test. As words flash up on the screen,
I have to say what colour the word is written in.
The trick is that the words themselves are
colours too. So for blue I should say “blue”,
but for red I should say “black”.
When the colour and word match, I have an
easy time saying the right answer, because the
visual processing and language processing
parts of the brain both agree. But when there
is a mismatch, it requires more effort, because
one part is forced to override the other.
This internal struggle shows up clearly on
the screen after being processed by artificial
intelligence. By looking at the waves on the
screen, Ibanez and Castellano can see where
I am in the test, and how hard I am having to
work. It might sound like a pointless exercise,
but it is remarkable to see the inner workings
of my mind laid out in front of me in real time.
It is also pretty unnerving, and makes me
wonder what practical uses the technology
could have.
So far, EEG caps have been used to
control wheelchairs, drones (see news story on
page 9) and humanoid robots. They have even
been used by two people to communicate
 using only their brains (see “Brain-to-brain
communication”, page 32).
However, one big drawback of EEG is that
there is so much unwanted noise to contend
with. Every time you blink or move your
cheeks, the electrical activity associated with
the muscle movement is far larger than that
associated with brain activity. “These muscles
produce millivolts of electricity, but from a
skullcap we can only pick up microvolts of
electricity from the brain,” says Mahnaz
Arvaneh at the University of Sheffield, UK. In
other words, the unwanted noise is 100 times
louder than the interesting signal. Trying to
decode the brain using an EEG cap is like
trying to hear a whisper from across a room,
while having a foghorn blown in your ear.
One way to improve EEG is to get the
electrodes closer to the brain by implanting
them inside the head. But though this may
work for medical uses of the technology, like
controlling a robotic prosthetic hand, it is
unlikely to take off as a consumer product
for mind reading any time soon.
However, noise may not be the fatal blow to
an EEG mind reader that it was once thought
to be. “We now have AI algorithms that can
extract useful patterns even in incredibly
noisy environments,” says Arvaneh. The
progress using AI with fMRI is causing people
to rethink what EEG might be capable of.
Mind melding is on the cards,
no physical contact required
PARAMOUNT/KOBAL/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK
Spearheading this approach is Adrian Nestor
at the University of Toronto, Canada. He had
previously used fMRI scans to reconstruct
images of faces that someone was looking at
from their brain scan, and wondered if it was
possible to do the same with EEG.
“We were initially very sceptical,” says
Nestor. Nonetheless, he and his group trained
an AI with EEG data from 13 people looking at
about 100 images of human faces. The AI was
then shown EEG scans of the participants
looking at 16 new faces. The AI didn’t see the
new faces, but created a picture of what it
thought the person would look like based
on the brain data.
“We are opening up the
possibility for a cheap,
portable mind reader”
Astonishingly, around 70 per cent of the
time the results were judged by an algorithm
to be more similar to the actual face than to
any other in the data set. From EEG data alone,
Nestor’s AI could recreate human faces –
a trick previously reserved for clunky MRI
machines. “It is just bewildering how much
information is processed millisecond by
millisecond in the brain, and using EEG we
can get to some of that,” says Nestor. At the
moment, the system takes a couple of hours
to tailor itself to the thought patterns of an
individual, but he believes that it could be
done in real time, opening up the possibility
for a cheap, portable mind reader.
It isn’t surprising, then, that some
big players are starting to pay attention.
Microsoft, for instance, has been granted a
patent for a device that uses brain signals to
open and control apps using EEG.
Facebook is rumoured to be using a
different technology for its project: functional
near-infrared spectroscopy, or fNIRS, that
shines near-infrared light through the scalp.
Skin, tissue and bone are mostly transparent
to this light, but haemoglobin in the blood
isn’t. So, by analysing how near-infrared light
is absorbed, it can reveal blood flow in the
brain, and hence brain activity. The goal is a
wearable interface that lets “you type words
as fast as you could imagine saying them”,
a Facebook spokesperson told me.
It is even possible to decode certain types
of thoughts by doing away with brain scans
altogether. In April, New Scientist reported on
a wearable device called AlterEgo that uses
sensors on the face, teamed with AI, to pick up
imperceptible muscle movements that occur
when thinking of a word. Its creators at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology have
linked it up to Google search, meaning users
can simply think about asking a question –
whether that’s a tricky sum or an update on
the weather forecast – and the headset will tell
them the answer. A device like this will never
be able to interpret the intricate inner
workings of someone’s mind, though, and
for now requires many hours of training on
a single user to work properly. But it could
become a handy way to interact with the
digital world.
Other techniques are altogether more
ambitious. The US Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency has launched a four-year
project to create a device that can monitor
brain activity using 1 million electrodes that
simultaneously and selectively stimulate up
to 100,000 neurons.
Elon Musk, founder of technology
companies Tesla and SpaceX, has a venture
called Neuralink that is reportedly working
on a neural lace – an ultra-thin mesh that can
be implanted under the scalp for interacting
with machines. Few details have been released,
but the idea is that by having electrodes so
close to the brain it would be easier to
understand the signals they pick up.
As the technology races forward, the
implications are coming into focus. Last >
29 September 2018 | NewScientist | 31
year, a group of 27 experts, representing EEG cap in place,
companies such as Google and universities Timothy keeps
from around the world, warned that current his thoughts on
research guidelines don’t provide sufficient task as his mind’s
protection for the dangers and pitfalls of inner workings
brain-computer interfaces in the presence are exposed
of AI.
They call themselves the Morningside
Group and say that the devices could
“exacerbate social inequalities and offer
corporations, hackers, governments or anyone
else new ways to exploit and manipulate
people”. They worry that, without sufficient
COURTESY OF TIMOTHY REVELL

protections, plugging us in to technologies

that intercept our thoughts could alter our
identities by blurring the boundaries between
our inner minds and the outside world.
So they propose adding extra “neurorights”
to the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human
Rights as a safeguard.
There are also hints that brain-computer
interfaces may be able to access information “Eyewitness testimony conditions such as Parkinson’s in brain
in the brain that people themselves can’t. activity as early as 10 years before the person
Nestor and his team have been performing could be replaced by themselves starts to notice symptoms,
preliminary experiments with people with brain-witness testimony” for instance. This could lead to technology
prosopagnosia, who can’t recognise faces, companies knowing that you have a condition
sometimes even their own. They found that suspect or a scene to a jury, we could just before you do – without your consent.
their AI could reconstruct the faces the reconstruct it using brain scans instead. The technology to make this happen is still
volunteers had seen from their brain scans Eyewitness testimony could become some way off, as are the days when the issues
in the same way it could for people without a thing of the past, with brain-witness raised by the Morningside Group will have a
the condition. It seems that the information is testimony replacing it. big impact. However, the implications are so
inside the brain, even if the person themselves Then there is the issue that mind reading large that many say they should be considered
can’t consciously get a hold of it. “We can is perhaps the ultimate privacy breach. now. “Even academics are still surprised at
access information in someone’s brain that In our highly connected lives, the thoughts the incredible capability the technology has,”
the individual cannot,” he says. in our heads are one of the only things we says Just.
This has implications for testimonies in can keep to ourselves. Up until this point I had been awestruck
court. Maybe rather than relying on people’s It could invade our privacy in unexpected at just how impressive the combination of
ability to describe their mental image of a ways too. It is possible to see signs of brain tech and AI could be. But it strikes me
that while academics march forward on this
front, it is easy to forget that tech companies
BRAIN-TO-BRAIN COMMUNICATION are likely to be leading the next wave of
progress.“They have the biggest numbers
“Hola” or “Ciao” are not The receiver was in France, than directly thinking of when it comes to artificial intelligence
normally remarkable and wore a computer-brain the words in a message, researchers,” says Ibanez.
messages to send or interface that converted the participants had to Do we need to be able to tweet directly
receive, but on one day in the message received via use a special code. from our brain or communicate with Siri
2014 things were a little the internet into an For the sender, this meant using thought alone? I am not sure. Even
different. The messages electrical signal directly thinking about either though I managed to withhold most of my
weren’t typed or spoken, applied to the brain. moving their hands or feet, darkest secrets when wearing the EEG headset
instead they were directly This was the first direct where the brain pattern for at Starlab, the prospect of giving technology
exchanged between two human brain-to-brain each then corresponded companies access to my brain waves is equal
brains. Two people, communication, and was to a sort of Morse code. parts terrifying and panic-inducing.
5000 kilometres apart, conducted by Spanish Similar methods can be Then again, if offered the chance to do so
managed to communicate company Starlab and used to select a yes or a no I would almost certainly try it. The human
using thought alone. Axilum Robotics, based on a screen, or give basic brain is a complex thing. AI has as good a
The sender was in India, in Strasbourg, France. instructions to a machine. chance as understanding it as the rest of us. ■
and wore an EEG cap that The method of But it is a far cry from the
turned their thoughts into communication was a little feats achieved with fMRI Timothy Revell is technology news editor at
a transmittable message. crude, however. Rather (see main story). New Scientist

32 | NewScientist | 29 September 2018


How to read Inca
We thought they left no written records. Now we’re untangling the truth,
says Daniel Cossins
T
HE Incas left no doubt that theirs was a
sophisticated, technologically savvy
civilisation. At its height in the 15th
century, it was the largest empire in the
Americas, extending almost 5000 kilometres
from modern-day Ecuador to Chile. These were
the people who built Machu Picchu, a royal
estate perched in the clouds, and an extensive
network of paved roads complete with
suspension bridges crafted from woven grass.
But the paradox of the Incas is that despite all
this sophistication they never learned to write.
Or did they? The Incas may not have
JONNY WAN
bequeathed any written records, but they
did have colourful knotted cords. Each of
COVER STORY
these devices was called a khipu (pronounced
key-poo). We know these intricate cords to be
an abacus-like system for recording numbers.
However, there have also been teasing hints
that they might encode long-lost stories,
myths and songs too.
In a century of study, no one has managed
to make these knots talk. But recent
breakthroughs have begun to unpick this
tangled mystery of the Andes, revealing the
first signs of phonetic symbolism within
the strands. Now two anthropologists are
closing in on the Inca equivalent of the
Rosetta stone. That could finally crack the
code and transform our understanding of >
29 September 2018 | NewScientist | 33
 a civilisation whose history has so far been The Inca royal palace
told only through the eyes of the Europeans of Machu Picchu
who sought to eviscerate it. (right) remained
The Spanish conquistadors, led by hidden to the Spanish
Francisco Pizarro, first encountered the conquistadors – as did
Incas at the start of the 1530s. They were their system of writing
awestruck by the magnificent stone cities, in khipus, or knotted
the gold and treasure. But as the Spanish cords (below)
began to take over the Inca empire and
impose their own customs, they became
equally enthralled by the way the society
was organised.
The Incas governed the 10 million people
in their realm with what amounted to a
federal system. Power was centred in Cusco,
in the south of what is now Peru, but spread
through several levels of hierarchy across a
series of partially self-governing provinces.

“Break the khipu code and

we might finally read an
indigenous Inca history”
RALPH LEE HOPKINS/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CREATIVE

There was no money and no market

economy. The production and distribution
of food and other commodities was centrally
controlled. People had their own land to
farm, but every subject was also issued
with necessities from state storehouses in
exchange for labour, administered through
an impressive tribute system.
Historians have argued variously that
the Inca empire was a socialist utopia or an
authoritarian monarchy. But no one disputes
its efficiency. “It was an extraordinary
system,” says Gary Urton, an anthropologist
at Harvard University. “Administratively
speaking, it was very sophisticated and it
seems to have worked well.”
Key to that success was the flow of reliable
data, in the form of censuses, tribute accounts
and storehouse inventories. For that, the Incas
relied on the khipumayuq, or the keepers of
the khipus, a specially trained caste who could
tie and read the cords.
The majority of surviving khipus consist
of a pencil-thick primary cord, from which
hang multiple “pendant” cords and, in turn,
“subsidiaries”. The Spanish described how
they were used to record all manner of
©THE TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM

information. The poet Garcilaso de la Vega,

son of an Inca princess and a Spanish
conquistador, noted in a 1609 account that
they had “an admirable method of counting
everything in the Inca’s kingdom, including
all taxes and tributes, both paid and due,
which they did with knots in strings of
different colours.”

34 | NewScientist | 29 September 2018


There are reasons to think khipus may
record other things, including stories and
myths – the sort of narrative information
that many cultures write down. De la Vega was
among many chroniclers who hinted as much,
writing in one passage that the Incas “recorded
on knots everything that could be counted,
even mentioning battles and fights, all the
embassies that had come to visit the Inca,
and all the speeches and arguments they had
uttered”. True, he was prone to ambiguity and
contradictions. But about a third of the khipus
in collections seem to have a more elaborate
construction than the others, as if they
contain a different sort of information.
For decades the point was moot, however,
because no one could read any of them.
The first hints of revelations from khipus
came in the 1920s, when anthropologist
Leland Locke analysed a bunch of them
housed at the American Museum of Natural
History in New York. He noticed that the
knots are organised in rows almost like
beads on an abacus (see diagram, page 37).
He demonstrated that each row of knots at a
certain height denoted units, tens, hundreds
and so on. That made sense, fitting with the
decimal system the Inca used to divide up
groups for tribute purposes.
Hard knot to crack
The discovery sparked a wave of interest in
khipus. By the 1990s, though, we still had
no idea what the numbers meant. “Say you
read off the number 76 – what does it refer
to?,” asks Urton.
To answer that, you would ideally have a
translation of a khipu into a familiar language.
It would be an equivalent of the Rosetta
stone, which contained a translation of
Egyptian hieroglyphics into ancient Greek
and unlocked that picture language. In the
absence of that, Urton has spent the last 25
years tracking down and carefully digitising
the details of every khipu he could find in
museums and private collections across the
world. Today, his Khipu Database Project
contains details of more than 900 of them.
There are all sorts of varying factors in
khipus: the colour of the strings, the structure
of the knots and the direction in which they
were hitched. Having spent countless hours
poring over them, Urton began to think that
binary differences in these features might be
encoding information. For example, a basic
knot tied in one direction could mean “paid”,
while in the other it would mean “unpaid”.
By 2012, he had developed a more specific
hypothesis, proposing that the direction in
which knots were tied, the colours of the
strings, or some combination of the two,
corresponded to the social status of the
people whose tributes they recorded, and
even individuals’ names. Without a khipu
translation, however, the idea looked destined
to remain untested.
Then in 2016, Urton was browsing his
personal library when he picked out a book
that contained a Spanish census document
from the 1670s. It was what the colonists
referred to as a revisita, a reassessment of
six clans living around the village of Recuay
in the Santa valley region of western Peru.
The document was made in the same region
and at the same time as a set of six khipus in
his database, so in theory it and the khipus
were recording the same things.
Checking it out, Urton found that there
were 132 tribute payers listed in the text and
132 cords on the khipus. The fine details fitted
too, with the numbers on the cords matching
the charges the Spanish document said had
been levelled. It seemed to be the match he
had been looking for.
Even so, Urton was struggling to pick
apart the detail of the connections between
the Santa valley khipus and the Spanish
documents. He ended up letting a Harvard
undergraduate student named Manny
Medrano take a look. He turned out to have
the perfect complement of skills for the
job. He was a native Spanish speaker and,
majoring in economics, he was a whizz
with spreadsheets. Medrano painstakingly
generated tables of the khipu data and
combed through them in search of matching
patterns. This year, he and Urton showed for
the first time that the way pendant cords are
tied onto the primary cord indicates which
clan an individual belonged to.
“It is a really important achievement,”
says Jeffrey Splitstoser at George
Washington University in Washington DC,
who specialises in khipus from the Wari
empire that preceded the Inca. “It gives us
a new way to interpret these sources. Gary >
29 September 2018 | NewScientist | 35

JORDI BUSQUE/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CREATIVE
KIKE CALVO/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CREATIVE
Inca inventions
You need only look at the
archaeological site of
Tambomachay to see how
creative the Incas were. The
site shown (above, bottom
left) is near Cusco, once the
Incas’ capital, and consists of
terraced rocks riddled with
aqueducts and canals. We
don't know its function, but
it may have been a military
outpost or a spa for the Inca
political elite. Either way,
it shows how the people
could organise and build.
With little flat ground in
36 | NewScientist | 29 September 2018
has made things a lot more tractable.” Yet the
question of whether the khipus also contain
stories still hung there.
Urton was not the only one trying to find
meaning beyond numbers and names
in khipus. Sabine Hyland, an ethnographer at
St Andrews University in the UK, has spent the
past decade searching in the central Andes for
communities with enduring khipu traditions.
She starts by looking for mentions of khipus
in archives, before travelling to remote
villages in the hope they might have survived.
The strategy tends to be more miss than hit,
but in 2015, Hyland’s persistence paid off.
Having seen a documentary about her work,
a woman in Lima, Peru, got in touch about
the khipus in the remote village of San Juan
de Collata, where she grew up. After months
of negotiations with the community, Hyland
was invited to see two khipus. Villagers believe
them to be narrative epistles created by local
chiefs during a rebellion against the Spanish
in the late 18th century. By that time, the
people spoke Spanish too, so there are
corresponding written records.
The khipus were kept locked away in an
underground chamber in the village church.
Hyland and her husband were the first
outsiders to lay eyes on them, and she was
“This writing system is three-
LYNN JOHNSON/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CREATIVE
dimensional, dependent
on touch as well as sight”
not disappointed. “It was an incredible
moment,” she says. “But I didn’t have time to
be awestruck because this was my big chance
to study them, and I didn’t have long.” She
had 48 hours before the man in charge of the
khipus, the village treasurer, had to travel to
a nearby community festival.
Under strict supervision, Hyland set about
the mountainous areas stories, not just numbers photographing the cords, reviewing the
where the Incas lived, they (see main story). manuscripts and taking notes. Each khipu
also constructed terraces to They certainly went to had hundreds of pendant cords, and they were
grow crops. It is thought that great lengths to transport the more colourful and complex than anything
they created experimental khipus. Couriers would loop she had ever seen. It was clear the various
agricultural stations too, the cords over their shoulders animal fibres used could only be identified by
such as the one seen above and run with them across the touch. The villagers told her the khipus were
(bottom right), where they empire. To navigate the terrain, the “language of animals” and insisted that
tested which crops would a vast network of roads and the different fibres have significance.
grow best on terraces at woven grass bridges were built. Her analysis eventually revealed that the
different altitudes. The last remaining bridge, pendants came in 95 different combinations
It seems odd that all this known as Queshuachaca (top), of colour, fibre type and direction of ply. That
sophistication arose but straddles a river high in the is within the range of symbols typically found
writing did not. That is one Andes. Local people band in syllabic writing systems, where a set of signs
reason to think their knotted together to renew the woven (say, the letters C-A-T) aligns with the sound
cords might record ideas and grass ropes every year. of speech (the word “cat”). “I thought ‘Woah,
could this be a syllabic writing system?’,”
says Hyland. She has since hypothesised that
the khipus contain a combination of phonetic
symbols and ideographic ones, where a
symbol represents a whole word.
Earlier this year, Hyland even managed to
read a little of the khipus. When deciphering
anything, one of the most important steps
is to work out what information might be
repeated in different places, she says. Because
the Collata khipus were thought to be letters,
they probably encoded senders and recipients.
That is where Hyland started. She knew from
the villagers that the primary cord of one of
the khipus contained ribbons representing
the insignia of one of two clan leaders.
She took a gamble and assumed that the
ribbons referred to a person known as Alluka,
pronounced “Ay-ew-ka”. She also guessed that
the writer of this letter might have signed
their name at the end, meaning that the last
three pendant cords could well represent the
syllables “ay”, “ew” and “ka”.
Tangled mystery
Assuming that was true, she looked for cords
on the second khipu that had the same colour
and were tied with the same knot as the ones
she had tentatively identified on the first
khipu. It turned out that the first two of the
last three cords matched, which gave “A-ka”.
The last was unknown. It was a golden-brown
fibre made from the hair of a vicuna, an
alpaca-like animal. Hyland realised that
the term for this hue in the local Quechua
language is “paru”. And trying this alongside
the other syllables gave, with a little wiggle
room, “Yakapar”. That, it turned out, was the
name of another of the lineages involved in
the revolt that these khipus recorded.
“We know from the written testimony that
one of the khipus was made by a member of
the Yakapar clan and sent to Collata, and we
think this is it,” she says. Hyland claims that
the Collata khipus show that the cords really
do hold narratives.
Yet even if she is right, it is possible these
later khipus were influenced by contact
with Spanish writing. “My feeling is that the
phoneticisation, if it’s there, is a reinvention
of khipus,” says Urton. Equally, the Collata
DR WILLIAM HYLAND
khipus might be a regional variation. Possibly
even a one-off.
Hyland is the first to admit that we don’t
understand the link between these khipus and
those dating from before the Spanish arrived.
That doesn’t make them any less interesting
though. “Even if these later khipus were
Written in knots
The Incas recorded census data in knotted cords called khipus. The primary cord had ofshoots, which
may have signiied individual people or villages. The number of twists in a knot determined units, and
its position on the pendant cord signiied tens, hundreds and so on
Primary cord with numerical
Primary cord example on pendant cord
Pendant cord
2 10,000s
Subsidiary cords
4 1000s
Knots tied on pendant cords (with their numerical value)
9 100s
1 2 3 4
1 10s
8 Units
5 6 7 8 9 The total of this cord would read
24,918
influenced by the alphabet, I still think it’s narrative khipus, even if he has a different
mind-blowing that these people developed idea on how they encoded information. He
this tactile system of writing,” she says. suspects they are semasiographic, a system
She will spend the next two years doing of symbols that convey information without
more fieldwork in Peru, attempting to being tied to a single language. In other
decipher the Collata khipus and looking for words, they would be akin to road signs, where
similar examples elsewhere. we all know what the symbols mean without
Urton too is turning his attention to having to sound anything out. That makes
sense, given that the Inca ran a multi-ethnic,
multilingual empire, says Urton.
There is no solid evidence that any Spaniard
living at the time learned to read or make a
khipu. That suggests that they were more
complicated than conventional writing –
or perhaps just conceptually very different.
“This is a writing system that is inherently
three-dimensional, dependent on touch as
well as sight,” says Hyland – and that presents
us with a uniquely tangled mystery.
It also gives us an important insight. If the
Inca used khipus in this way, it might tell us
something about their world view. With a
writing system dependent on touch, says
Hyland, “you must have a different way of
being in the world”. ■
Sabine Hyland holds one of Daniel Cossins is a staff feature writer for
the incredible Collata khipus New Scientist
29 September 2018 | NewScientist | 37
SANDESH KADUR/WWW.FELIS.IN
Leopard finder with W
her life on the line
Priya Singh spent months in the jungles
of north-east India looking for rare felines,
but caught more than she bargained for in
her camera traps. By Adam Popescu
38 | NewScientist | 29 September 2018
ORKING in the bamboo forests of
Mizoram, north-east India, isn’t
easy. Alongside torrential monsoons
and poachers, there are armed separatist
groups to contend with. Yet independent
wildlife biologist Priya Singh, currently
funded by UK conservation charity the
Rufford Foundation, spent months at a
time here to deploy and maintain 160 camera
traps in an effort to spot the country’s most
elusive cats. Her persistence paid off: she
produced the first ever estimate of the
marbled cat population in continental Asia
and discovered one of its highest recorded
densities of clouded leopards.
Her three-year study, published last
October with zoologist David McDonald at
the University of Oxford, involved combing
the thick jungle of the Dampa Tiger Reserve,
which borders Bangladesh and Myanmar.
It is a protected park – on paper, at least – but
Dampa is a tiger refuge where she found scant
evidence of tigers. Singh’s results suggest that
the lack of bigger cats has allowed both marbled
cats and clouded leopards to spend more time

on the ground and grow in numbers – her
estimates put both populations at about five
individuals per 100 square kilometres.
Gunmen regularly traverse the forest.
While Singh was there in 2015, one armed
group kidnapped 22 local people who were
building a road in the park, and held them
hostage until a ransom was reportedly paid.
Along with images of cats, Singh’s cameras
spotted many gunmen, and the cameras
themselves were routinely stolen.
India’s Border Security Force, police and
forest guards patrol here, but are often unpaid
for months, not to mention outgunned.
Despite the dangers, for many nights Singh
slept on the forest floor or in caves, unarmed
and escorted by several young forest guards.
Dampa’s instability has in a sense guarded
the cats, keeping outsiders out, though Singh
says the pressure on them now comes from
the people living in the area.
Globally, the clouded leopard is classified
as vulnerable, according to the IUCN Red List.
Despite her high estimate of the numbers
of these animals in north-east India, Singh
believes her work to raise awareness of the
clouded leopard has prompted the Indian
government to declare it a critically
endangered species, one of 21 animals in
India thought to be on the brink of extinction.
What is it like working in the field, and in
such a dangerous environment?
For those who enjoy being outdoors,
being in the field is the best part of our jobs.
Waking up to a dawn chorus of birds, the
excitement of sighting animals all day and
being constantly challenged by a diversity
of life is an incredible experience. Working
in areas where armed groups operate means
you must be vigilant at all times. When one
spends months living like this, the reality of
dangers becomes clear: snakes and elephants
were the least of our worries.
Sometimes it is a challenge to explain your
motives for being in such regions. I have had
bureaucrats digging for my “ulterior motive”
for working in a challenging landscape.
Saying “for the love of it” doesn’t qualify as
a satisfactory answer at such times.
What is the scariest thing that happened
while you were in the field?
SANDESH KADUR/WWW.FELIS.IN
The last kidnapping happened while I was
working there. Multiple tribes merge in this
landscape, which is also along the border with
Bangladesh. Many of the elements responsible
for the kidnapping are still around, but I want
to continue working in this landscape, to make
a difference on the ground in terms of
increasing patrolling activities, ensuring that
the local communities have employment or
opportunities so they don’t have to operate
the way they are right now.
How are the local communities living?
People in this region tend to be nomadic in
nature, and they don’t have political security.
I’m trying to focus on the wildlife part,
but I’m hoping we will be able to find other
people to help improve the lives of the local
communities. It’s very hard for me to tell
someone not to go into the forest and kill
an animal. People say: “If we cannot kill
animals, how are we going to feed our
children? We can’t afford to buy vegetables
and meat from the market. We don’t have
any jobs, we don’t have any money.”
It’s a difficult situation to be in.
As a scientist, what keeps you in this area?
To come across a patch of forest like this,
so rich in biodiversity, is unusual. Someone
has to see what such unstable areas hold.
Deforestation may not be that high here,
but the flip side is there is little monitoring or
patrolling, and species could be suffering. For
example, I didn’t find any tigers or leopards –
other than clouded leopards – in my camera
traps, and just one elephant. It looks like
something is selectively happening to these
larger animals, and some people are hunting
to support their family. We have to work to
Clouded leopards are doing well in Mizoram,
perhaps due to the worrying lack of tigers
INTERVIEW
help people in these landscapes co-exist
peacefully with wildlife, to see biodiversity
as a benefit to them. It’s important to me that
species are protected and that this landscape
will eventually be known for its clouded
leopards, not for its instability.
What attracted you to this line of work?
I grew up on a farm in a semi-arid part of
north-west India, spending much of my time
interacting with animals – some wild, most
“The danger became clear:
snakes and elephants were
the least of our worries”
domesticated. When I was 5, a relative visited
who was collecting data for his doctoral study
on the wolf. He’s now a well-known scientist
at the Wildlife Institute of India and he allowed
me to accompany him in the field. I wanted to
do what he did.
How do you pick animals to study, and is it
easier to do research on charismatic species?
It is true that it is easier to find funding and
collaborators interested in cats and tropical
forests. But my first study, on the striped
hyena, was dictated entirely by a true interest,
not practical considerations. In conversations
with my father, I realised hyenas used to
occur in areas around our home but had
disappeared. They were never persecuted
but no one seemed to care about their
disappearance either. I chose to study them.
After six months of back-breaking
fieldwork, I realised that research requires
being practical. Working on nocturnal,
territorial species in human-dominated
landscapes using camera traps that are easily
stolen means limited data. This was a problem.
Working on forest-dependent cats in north-
east India is no easier. The landscape throws
up challenges on all fronts: climatic,
geographical, political and social.
What is the biggest misconception about
your work?
We are almost always mistaken for being
wildlife photographers or TV show hosts
for Nat Geo, Discovery or Animal Planet.
I’ve never been able to successfully explain
to a layperson what work I do and how that
will benefit society. Humans always look for
factors that will help their own lives improve,
not those of other species. ■
Adam Popescu is a writer based in Los Angeles
29 September 2018 | NewScientist | 39
 Natural
born
metals
We’ve discovered life’s secret
recipe for making materials that
are both strong and tough,
says Liz Kalaugher

W
HO’S afraid of the peacock mantis
shrimp? Brightly coloured, googly-
eyed and with a profusion of weedy
legs, it doesn’t seem much of a threat. Beneath
its ordinary carapace, however, lurks a
remarkable weapon. When the mantis
shrimp is roused, its clublike appendages
punch forward with acceleration greater
than a Formula 1 car engine, moving fast
enough to make bubbles in the
surrounding water and create a force
that shatters aquarium glass.
It is an extraordinary feat, especially
when you consider the shrimp’s
deadly appendage is made of nothing
more remarkable than the material in
our bones or teeth. But it is no isolated
example. All across the natural world,
ARTO HAKOLA, MONTY RAKUSEN, MARK BRIDGER, STEVE ALLEN, MARTIN PICKARD, ISTOCK/GETTY IMAGES

plants and animals have developed ways

of using nature’s simple building blocks
to astonishing ends. Using only the
meagre items on
the menu of raw materials – minerals,
proteins, sugars – and without any of
the industrial machinery we have at our
disposal, they have produced structures
that can rival anything we have engineered.
It is a feat we would dearly like to imitate.
The trick lies in the way these constituent
parts are arranged on the nanoscale,
formations that have until recently
been impossible to replicate. But as our
manufacturing techniques and palette of
raw materials improve, some materials
scientists have started looking to outdo
the natural world. They’re using nature’s
tricks to re-engineer the materials that
form the backbone of our world – metals.

40 | NewScientist | 29 September 2018


A mantis shrimp’s clubs, a stag’s
antlers and an alligator’s armour
could hold the key to better metals
A metal’s defining qualities – strength and
toughness – may seem like different ways of
expressing the same thing, but to a materials
scientist they are like chalk and cheese. It is
an apt comparison. Chalk is stronger than
cheese, able to resist loads without bending,
but it is not tough – it is brittle, snapping
easily. Cheese may be weaker, but its ability
to deform before breaking makes it tough.
Metals are generally stronger and tougher
than either chalk or cheese. But they are
cursed with a weakness: any attempt to
increase a metal’s natural strength destroys
its toughness. We’d love to change that, but
it hasn’t stopped us using them for
thousands of years. “The world is still
made of steel,” says Robert Ritchie
at the University of California,
Berkeley, but stronger is always
better. “If you have high strength,
you don’t have to use so much
material,” says Ritchie. That
means your plane, drone or car
can weigh less, saving money as
well as fuel and cutting the
carbon dioxide emissions that
are warming the planet. New
improved metals could also
help make lighter hip
replacements, bionic hands,
robots, pipelines, reinforcing
bars for concrete and coatings to
protect spacecraft from impacts.
Over the past 20 years or so, as
our control over the nanoscale has
improved, we have sought to boost the
strength of metals by making their
constituent granular crystals smaller.
These nanograined metals are super-strong,
but so brittle we can’t use them in structures.
“If you made the Golden Gate Bridge out of a
high-strength material, you wouldn’t need to
use such thick girders, but one day it could just
snap and break,” says Ritchie. Nature has
managed to sidestep this problem.
Biological materials are generally made up
of a mixture of a hard biomineral like calcium
carbonate or silica and a soft biopolymer,
such as a protein chain or a sugar. The hard
part provides the strength and the soft part
the toughness; together they are often
more than the sum of their parts.
Take a mantis shrimp club. Beneath a thin,
hard coating of calcium phosphate like that
in our bones, it consists of layers of softer,
fibre-like sugar molecules embedded in yet
more calcium phosphate. This composite
structure already makes for a better
combination of strength and toughness than
either material could achieve alone. But what
really gives the clubs the ability to withstand
repeated pummelling is the way those layers
change as you go deeper beneath the surface.
The further inside the club you go, the less
crystalline the calcium phosphate becomes.
The layers of aligned sugar molecules also
become thinner, and each is rotated relative
to the layers above and below, forcing any
“A mantis shrimp’s punch
accelerates faster than
a Formula 1 car”
would-be crack to follow a complicated path.
This gradient is nature’s secret sauce,
and it is in almost every dish. “It’s probably
more difficult to think of structures in the
natural world that do not have gradients,”
says Ulrike Wegst of Dartmouth College in
New Hampshire.
Gradients come in a variety of flavours. The
remarkable flexibility of bamboo stalks, for
example, arises from a distribution gradient,
with more cellulose found on the outside of
the stems to ensure they don’t break. The bony
plates that protect alligators have a gradient in
their structural arrangement, with four
different types of bone, varying in the way
their collagen fibres align, creating a hard
upper surface, a porous core and a softer base.
Fish scales, which are also made of collagen,
have a gradient in composition.
They are more mineralised at the surface,
where hardness is needed to defend against
the teeth of bigger fish, and less so beneath,
providing toughness. Even our own teeth
have a gradient between two different
materials, dentin and enamel, creating a >
29 September 2018 | NewScientist | 41
smooth interface rather than a sudden change Taking inspiration
that concentrates stress and may initiate from a mussel’s byssus
breakage. threads could lead to

ES-CUISINE/PHOTOALTO/ALAMY
“Nature has to play these games because metals stronger and
it’s not dealing with particularly good tougher than copper
materials – collagen and chitin and minerals,”
says Ritchie. “We would never use them as
structural materials, but nature has the ability
to craft them into these ingenious structures.”

Testing our metal

It has taken a while, but we’re just starting
to master the same ability. Back in 2011,
Ke Lu at the Shenyang National Laboratory
for Materials Science in China and his
colleagues made a gradient structure in
copper, one with nanoscale-sized grains at
the surface that gradually increased in size
into the bulk of the material. They did this by
repeatedly grinding the surface, keeping the
ERIK ISAKSON/GETTY

inner structure untouched but causing the

outer layer to subdivide into smaller grains.
This outer skin, which Lu compares to the
layer of enamel coating our teeth, provided a
gradient that made the copper twice as strong
without reducing its toughness. This was a
breakthrough, says Ramathasan Thevamaran
at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“It showed a pathway to improve both
strength and toughness in metals that are
often found to be mutually exclusive.”
Ritchie has taken the concept of gradient
nanograins a step further. He was inspired by
byssus, the material in the threads produced
by mussels to help them cling to rocky
surfaces. Byssus is strong and tough. It also
has a huge gradient – while the rock-facing end
is strong and stiff, the mussel end is stretchier
and 10 times less stiff. To create this dramatic
difference, the form of collagen making up
the threads changes along their length.
But there is a snag. To replicate the
remarkable properties of byssus, Ritchie
“Nature can craft
needed something more complicated than poor materials into
copper. That is because the outer coating
of the fibres consists of a hard layer that ingenious structures”
contains even harder granules – a structure
impossible to reproduce in a pure metal.
Instead, Ritchie focused on steel, an
alloy of iron, carbon and other elements.
As Lu had done before, he battered the
surface of the metal, this time with hundreds
of small steel balls. As well as creating a
gradient in grain size, this also made some
pockets of steel shift their structure into a
hard phase known as martensite. The result
was alternating stripes of hard martensite
and a softer phase, austenite, inside each
grain: a gradient in grain size paired with
a two-phase structure.
This combination gives the steel a
higher strength than other steels while
stopping it from becoming brittle.
“The hard and soft phases help you with
the strength and ductility and the gradient
gives you a harder, stronger outer surface
and a tougher underbelly,” says Ritchie.
That being said, he adds, “it’s still very
primitive compared to nature”.
It’s a start, but it only scratches the
surface – quite literally. For Thevamaran,
the key to making the perfect metal lies in
reaching deep into the material. In 2016,
he fired microcubes of silver at a rigid silicon
surface faster than the speed of sound.
The microcubes hit the silicon so hard that
they deformed, causing the changes in
grain size he was looking to create.
“With a shock process, you’ll propagate
through the material,” says Thevamaran.
“You’re likely to get a continuous gradient.
That could be one advantage.”
For all of these laboratory successes,
scaling up such processes is a challenge.
“One of the problems with emulating nature
is nature does it from the bottom up; it takes
the atoms or the molecules and it builds up
from there,” says Ritchie. “We go the other
way – we take a big chunk of metal and try to
generate it down.”
The solution might be the emerging
technology of 3D printing, which allows
you to build up a material layer by layer.
This makes small-scale construction possible,
says Ritchie, although making larger products
is more challenging. “The problem with 3D
printing, despite all the hype you hear, is at
present it’s good for making the right shape
but it’s very difficult to make the right
properties,” he says. Ritchie thinks it needs
another decade or so to improve.
That said, gradient nanograined steels could
start to be seen in structures in just five years,
says Ritchie. And other super-metals could
perhaps be available even sooner for Formula 1
cars or biomedical uses.
Even then, nature will still be able to do
things we can’t. The peacock mantis shrimp
moults and grows a new shell every three or
four months, removing all the damage done
to its club from tens of thousands of impacts.
That ability packs quite a punch. ■
Liz Kalaugher is a science writer based in Bristol, UK,
and co-author of Furry Logic: The physics of animal life

42 | NewScientist | 29 September 2018

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CULTURE
Science for
the people
Addiction is a captivating subject to launch a
new gallery that takes down the boundaries
around science, finds Simon Ings
Hooked: When want becomes need
at London Science Gallery, until
6 January 2019
IN THE spacious atrium of the
new London Science Gallery,
Lawrence Epps is tweaking the
workings of a repurposed coin-
pushing arcade game. It is part of
the gallery’s first show, Hooked.
He hands me one of 10,000
handmade terracotta tokens.
Will I be lucky enough to win a
gold-leafed token, or maybe one
of the ceramic ones stamped with We’re interested in all
images of an exotic sunset? No.
Reluctantly (I’m hooked
already), I leave Again and follow
Hannah Redler-Hawes up the
stairs. Hooked is Redler-Hawes’s
responsibility. Fresh from co-
curating [JOYCAT]LMAO at the
Open Data Institute with data
artist Leila Johnston, she took
on the task of building London
Science Gallery’s launch
exhibition. She soon found
herself in a room with six “young
leaders” – selected from local
schools in the London boroughs
of Southwark and Lambeth –
who, for the past year, have been
shaping the direction of London’s
newest public institution.
“We are not a neutral space,”
she explains. “We’re interested
in all the things that make simple
facts hard to find. In a show about
addiction, that means thinking
seriously about all the personal
and social factors that might drive
Happy Chat Beast tries to be good
in Rachel Maclean’s Feed Me
44 | NewScientist | 29 September 2018
people to harm.” And by people,
Redler-Hawes means all of us.
Addiction, she argues, is a
normal part of life. Every tribe
has its social lubricants, and, as
she points out, “we are creatures
who like to explore, who like
pleasure, who like extending
our boundaries intellectually,
emotionally and physically,
and we are also creatures
who aren’t that fond of pain,
“We are not a neutral space.
the things that make
simple facts hard to find”
so when we encounter it we
look for an escape route”.
A visit to Hooked becomes
increasingly unnerving,
as one by one you identify all the
apparently innocuous corners
of your own life that contain at
least an element of addictiveness,
from caffeine to Facebook. That
journey begins with the show’s
iconic image, a lolly-turned-
pincushion from the series
Another Day on Earth by Olivia
Locher, whose work explores the
moment when getting what you
want becomes taking what you
can’t help but take.
The Science Gallery ethos is
to leave its visitors with more
questions than answers. It is there
to pique curiosity, rather than
address ignorance. The success
of this approach, pioneered by
Science Gallery Dublin in 2008,
can be measured by the project’s
rapid expansion. There are
Science Galleries planned for
Bangalore this year, Venice in 2019
and Melbourne in 2020, not to
mention pop-ups everywhere
from Detroit to Davos.
Science Galleries do not
amass private collections. Each include explorations of dark
show is curated by someone new, matter and prosthetics. That
displaying work from art, science, latter show, explains the gallery’s
engineering and territories that, departing director Daniel Glaser,
frankly, defy classification. Shows is going to be very hands-on. A
already announced for London different proposition to Hooked,
then, which is about international
art and curatorial rigour.
Glaser joins our exploration
of the wet paint and bubble wrap
of the half-assembled exhibition.
Among the more venerable pieces
here are Richard Billingham’s
films from the late 1990s,
capturing the gestures and habits
FEED ME (2013)-5 © RACHEL MACLEAN
of life on benefits in the deprived
corner of West Bromwich, UK,
where he grew up. Smoking,
snorting, hammering away at a
PlayStation might be addictive
behaviours, or might become
addictive, but the films remind
For more books and arts coverage, visit newscientist.com/culture
Olivia Locher’s Pincushion: danger
lurks in the simplest pleasures
in was very obviously vying for
their attention, and quite literally
trying to get them hooked.”
Naturally enough, then,
online experiences feature
heavily in the exhibition. Artist
Rachel Maclean’s celebrated and
extremely uncanny film Feed Me
(2015) is a twisted fairy tale where
ghastly characters communicate
in emojis and textspeak, as each
pursues a lonely path in search of
the unattainable.
More immediate, and more
poignant from my point of view,
is a new video installation by
Yole Quintero, Me. You. Limbo,
which very quickly convinces
you that your phone is much
more a part of you than you ever
realised. Anyone who has had a
ANOTHER DAY ON EARTH (PINCUSHION) 2012 © OLIVIA LOCHER
relationship decay into a series
of increasingly bland WhatsApp
messages will get it. “A lot of these used to visit the McDonald’s that
pieces are about love,” Redler-
Hawes comments, quietly.
Although the emphasis here is
on established artists, there are
pieces that point to just how
mischievous and hands-on this
institution is likely to become in
the years ahead. Katriona Beales’s gallery’s 150-seat theatre, so
Entering the Machine Zone II is
a new commission, developed
us they are also ways of dealing with the assistance of Henrietta
with boredom. They kill time. Bowden-Jones, founder of the
They are ordinary activities, first NHS gambling clinic. It is
and of obvious utility. the world’s most pointless video
“We’re all users, which means game – though I defy you to stop
we’re all at risk of tipping into playing once you have started.
harm,” says Redler-Hawes. It propels you with frightening
“Addiction is a natural part of rapidity towards the dissociative
being human. It’s a problem when state that, for gamblers in
it’s harming you, but when that particular, is the real attraction
happens, it’s not just you that’s of their vice – far more addictive
the problem.” than the promise of money.
This point was brought It is also the state one achieves
sharply into focus for her when when climbing a demanding
she discussed addiction with the learning curve. Addiction in the
gallery’s young leaders group. guise of flow isn’t bad. Though
“My idea of addiction was a forty- then, of course, we call it passion.
something in a room unable to Not everyone will be comfortable
work, but these young people with this show’s broad definition
were absolutely engaged and of addiction. But there’s nothing
a bit afraid that so much of the lazy about it. If the show doesn’t
environment they had grown up change your mind, it will certainly We’re a part of the city at last.” ■
DON’T MISS
have sharpened your opinions.
The tour done, Glaser takes me
around the building itself – a
£30 million development that
has transformed a car park and
an underused wing of the original
18th-century Guy’s Hospital into
a major piece of what the papers
like to call “the public realm”.
What this boils down to is that
people come and eat their lunches
here and find themselves talking
to lively, well-briefed young
people about curious objects that
turn out to be about topics that
don’t often come up in ordinary
conversation.
Accessibility here is about
more than wheelchairs, it is about
ensuring that the people who
“It is the world’s most
pointless video game – but
I defy you to stop playing
once you have started”
formerly occupied the cafe area
can still find affordable food
here. This is important: there is
a hospital next door, and streets
full of people desperate for a
steadying cup of tea. It is about
building a terrace around the
you can come in and see what’s
going on without finding yourself
intruding or getting trapped in
something you’re not interested
in. It is about getting into
conversations with the staff,
rather than being approached
only when you are doing
something wrong.
Glaser, who has spent the past
five years directing this project, is a
neurologist by trade, and is keenly
aware what a difference this space
will make to researchers at King’s
College London, the university
associated with Guy’s. These days,
knowing how to communicate
with the public is a key component
to securing funding. With this
Science Gallery, Glaser tells me,
“a major world university is
turning to face the public. It’s
becoming an asset to London.
29 September 2018 | NewScientist | 45
Watch
On 2 October a new theatre at
London’s Natural History Museum
opens with the European premiere
of The Wider Earth, a play by David
Morton about Charles Darwin’s
daring voyage on HMS Beagle.
Listen
Six world-class artists whose
work features in climate-themed
exhibition When Records Melt
discuss their work on Unseen
Radio, a six-part podcast series
from the photography platform.
Visit
The Sun: Living with our star opens
at London’s Science Museum on
6 October. Starting with neolithic
artefacts and ending with future
space missions, it is being billed as
the biggest exhibition about this
subject ever staged.
Play
In the occult serial game The
Midnight Sanctuary (pictured), the
people of an isolated village, keen
to make it a modern tourist stop,
build a cathedral in honour of a
malign local deity. A clever mix of
2D and 3D effects ups the mystery.
Read
Steven Novella’s podcast The
Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe
has spawned a book through
Grand Central Publishing subtitled
“How to know what’s really real in
a world increasingly full of fake”,
which might prove handy.
CULTURE
Cultural complexities
What’s the latest on how we differ from other animals? Michael Bond catches up
The Book of Humans: The story
of how we became us by Adam
Rutherford, Weidenfeld & Nicolson
AS ANY cat lover
will tell you,
humans do
not have all the
tricks. We think
of ourselves as
special, but many
species are just as
proficient at adapting to their
environment and manipulating
circumstances to their own ends.
We behave like gods, yet we are
irrefutably animals. What then,
if anything, sets us apart?
In The Book of Humans, science
writer Adam Rutherford tries to
answer by embarking on a kind
of intellectual enema, exposing
the popular myths about human
exceptionalism and settling on
a few core truths. He accepts
that there is something unique
about Homo sapiens and our
evolutionary journey, but delights
in reminding us, as Charles
Darwin did, of the indelible
stamp of our lowly origin.
Like the soul, the attributes
that define our humanness are
surprisingly elusive. It is often
said that we are shaped by our
technology, yet we are not the
only tool users. Some sea urchins,
insects, spiders, crabs, snails,
octopuses, fish, birds and other
mammals manipulate objects to
help them access food or exploit
their habitats.
We are the only animal that
cooks, but not alone in our use
of fire: Aboriginal Australians
have recorded hawks deliberately
setting bush fires to chase out
Defining core differences between
us and other animals is tough going
46 | NewScientist | 29 September 2018
small mammals. We also excel
at violence, although so do
chimpanzees, whose societies
appear as warlike as our own.
Nor does our appetite for
non-reproductive sex stand
out. Other animals masturbate
(elephants, dolphins), have
oral sex (bears) and engage
in genital-to-genital contact
(bonobos do it every few hours).
These behaviours may cement
social bonds. They also seem
to be for pleasure, though
most biologists, unable to
read animal minds, are
reluctant to acknowledge this.
What is left? One thing now
unique to us, although perhaps
the Neanderthals also had it, is
language. Rather than leave it at
that, Rutherford focuses on what
it enables us to do: communicate,
share information about resources
and exchange ideas, skills and
technologies with people beyond
our group. Culture is the key, in
other words. Without it, we would
be just another animal.
“Are there other species
of contemporary humans
yet to be found? Did we
breed with them?”
The Book of Humans is in
the vein of Yuval Noah Harari’s
Sapiens. But Rutherford’s tone is
less exalted, his approach more
questioning. As a geneticist, he
is appreciative of the messy and
convoluted way in which modern
TIM FLACH/GETTY
humanness has emerged. “There
is no single genetic change that
made us Homo sapiens… There
isn’t a gene for speech… creativity,
imagination, spear throwing,
dexterity, consciousness, or even
cultural transmission. There
wasn’t a moment when we were
not human before.”
He makes a charming guide,
giving the impression that, like us,
he finds it all rather mysterious,
though he clearly knows what he
is talking about. “I’ve dissected a
lot of pig’s brains in my time,” he
writes, before launching into an
examination of animal cognition.
The small details interest him
as much as the big picture. His
explanation of how our genetic
make-up differs from that of
other primates is as carefully
considered as his discussion of
why small populations with less
cultural sophistication are less
likely to survive than large ones.
Knowledge brings
understanding, but it also makes
things messier. The recent
discovery that the earliest
figurative art was created not
by us but by Neanderthals has
confounded our assumptions
about our cousins. They had
culture, but they didn’t survive.
Are there other species of
contemporary humans yet to be
found? Did we breed with them?
Rutherford thinks the answer
to both is almost certainly yes.
“The picture of how we came to
be is only going to get more
complicated as we continue to
discover,” he says. “We should
revel in this complexity and
celebrate the fact that we alone are
capable of understanding it.” ■
Michael Bond is a science writer based
in London
Department of Chemistry
Faculty Position in Chemistry
The Department of Chemistry, at the University of California,
Berkeley, invites applications for two faculty positions at the
assistant professor level with an expected start date of July 1,
2019. We will consider creative and energetic candidates who
show extraordinary promise or accomplishment in research
and teaching in any area of chemistry. Preference will be given
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experimental physical chemistry, and analytical chemistry.
7KHEDVLFTXDOL¿FDWLRQIRUWKLVSRVLWLRQLVD3K'RUHTXLYDOHQW
international degree in the physical sciences or life sciences at
the time of application.
The Department of Chemistry and the Berkeley campus value
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principles of community:
• We recognize the intrinsic relationship between diversity
and excellence in all our endeavors.
• We embrace open and equitable access to opportunities
for learning and development as our obligation and goal.
Our excellence can only be fully realized by faculty, students and
staff who share a commitment to these principles. Successful
candidates for our faculty positions will demonstrate evidence
of a commitment to equity and inclusion in higher education
through their teaching, research and service activities. Financial
and in-kind resources are available to pursue activities that help
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All applicants should submit a recently updated curriculum vitae,
a statement of research plans, a statement of teaching, and a
2-3-page statement on your contributions to diversity, equity,
and inclusion, including information about your understanding of
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plans and goals for advancing equity and inclusion if hired as a
Berkeley faculty member (for additional information, go to https://
ofew.berkeley.edu/recruitment/contributions-diversity). In
addition, applicants should provide at least three but no more
WKDQ¿YHOHWWHUVRIUHFRPPHQGDWLRQ$FRYHUOHWWHULVRSWLRQDO
Applications should be submitted electronically through our
web-based system at: https://aprecruit.berkeley.edu/apply/
JPF01881.
$OOUHFRPPHQGDWLRQOHWWHUVZLOOEHWUHDWHGDVFRQ¿GHQWLDOSHU
University of California policy and California state law. Please
refer potential referees, including when letters are provided via
a third party (i.e., dossier service or career center), to the UC
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html) prior to submitting their letters.
The deadline for receipt of the application materials is October 1,
2018. Please direct questions to
Lauren Nakashima (ltnakashima@berkeley.edu).
UC Berkeley is committed to diversity in all aspects of our mission and to
addressing the family needs of faculty, including dual career couples and
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7KH8QLYHUVLW\RI&DOLIRUQLDLVDQ(TXDO2SSRUWXQLW\$I¿UPDWLYH$FWLRQ
(PSOR\HU$OOTXDOL¿HGDSSOLFDQWVZLOOUHFHLYHFRQVLGHUDWLRQIRUHPSOR\PHQW
without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender
identity, national origin, disability, age or protected veteran status. For the
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SROLF\VHHKWWSSROLF\XFRSHGXGRF1RQGLVFULP$I¿UP$FW
Professor of Chemistry
he Department of Chemistry of the University of Wisconsin-Madison is accepting
applications for multiple positions at the tenured and tenure-track level, beginning
August 2019. We seek outstanding candidates with research interests in all areas of
chemistry.
Ph.D. in Chemistry or related ield is required prior to the start of the appointment.
Area of specialization within chemistry is open. Candidates for the Assistant
Professor title must have demonstrated potential for internationally recognized
research in his/her ield of specialization. Tenured candidates must have
demonstrated excellence in scholarly research, teaching, and service. he successful
candidates will be expected to teach chemistry courses at the undergraduate and
graduate level. Mentoring of graduate and undergraduate students is required, as is
the development of an internationally recognized scholarly research program.
Professional and university service are also required.
Please go to https://academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/11873 to view the posting
and begin the application process. Application materials including cover letter,
current CV, teaching statement, research experience summary, and a concise
description of research plans will be required for all applicants. Applicants will also
be asked to provide the names and contact information for three professional
references. To guarantee full consideration, applications must be received by October
18, 2018. However, applications will be accepted until all positions are illed.
he University of Wisconsin-Madison is an equal opportunity airmative action employer. Women and
minority candidates are especially encouraged to apply. Unless conidentiality is requested in writing,
information regarding the identity of the applicant must be released on request. Finalists cannot be
guaranteed conidentiality. A criminal background check will be required prior to employment.
TENURE-TRACK ASSISTANT PROFESSOR
PHYSICAL CHEMISTRY
Faculty of Arts and Sciences Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology
Position Description: Candidates are invited to apply for a tenure-track assistant
professorship in physical chemistry, broadly defined, including experimental and
theoretical research in areas such as but not limited to atomic and molecular physics,
biophysical chemistry, condensed matter, quantum science and ultrafast spectroscopy.
The appointment is expected to begin on July 1, 2019. The tenure-track professor will
be responsible for teaching at the undergraduate and graduate levels. We are seeking
candidates who have an outstanding research record and a strong commitment to
undergraduate and graduate teaching.
Basic Qualifications: Doctorate or terminal degree in chemistry or related discipline
required by the time the appointment begins.
Additional Qualifications: Demonstrated experience in teaching is desired.
Special Instructions: Please submit the following materials through the ARIeS portal
(https://academicpositions.harvard.edu/8371). Applications must be submitted no later
than October 15, 2018.
1. Cover letter
2. Curriculum Vitae with publications list
3. Teaching statement (describing teaching approach and philosophy)
4. Outline of future research plans
5. Names and contact information of 3-5 references. Three letters of
recommendation are required, and the application is complete only when all
three letters have been received.
6. Selected publications
Contact Information:
Susan M. Kinsella, Search Administrator, Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology,
Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University, 12 Oxford St., Cambridge, MA 02138.
Phone: 617-496-4088. kinsella@chemistry.harvard.edu
Harvard is an equal opportunity employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration
for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability status,
protected veteran status, gender identity, sexual orientation, pregnancy and pregnancy-related
conditions, or any other characteristic protected by law.have been submitted.
 Join the AWIS community

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 newscientistjobs.com

Position Title: Assistant Professor of Chemistry

Req # 03779
The Department of Chemistry at The University of Chicago
invites applications for the position of Assistant Professor of
Chemistry in all areas of chemistry. Applicants must apply
online to the University of Chicago Academic Career website
at http://tinyurl.com/y9yhvxg9 and upload a cover letter, a
curriculum vitae with a list of publications, a succinct outline
of research plans, and a one page teaching statement. In
your cover letter, please specify one sub-discipline that best
represents your research interests (inorganic, materials,
organic, physical, and theoretical chemistry or chemical
biology). In addition, three reference letters are required. At the
time of hire the successful candidate must have completed
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Joint appointments with other departments are possible.
Review of applications will begin on October 08, 2018 and
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WYVJLZZZOV\SKJHSSVYLTHPSACOppAdministrator@uchicago.edu
^P[O[OLPYYLX\LZ[
The Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School ofers
graduate programs leading to a Master of Biomedical Informatics and a PhD in
Bioinformatics and Integrative Genomics.
The Master of Biomedical Informatics program is designed for students who aim
for a biomedical career that requires strong data science skills. The program ofers
two routes to the degree:
Traditional Master’s Program (48-credit)
• For students who hold a Bachelor’s degree in Bioinformatics, Bioengineering,
Biomedical Engineering, Computer Science, Mathematics, or another related
quantitative ield.
Accelerated Master’s Program (36-credit)
• For students who hold a Doctoral degree in a biomedical or related ield who
recognize the relevance of informatics and data science to their research.
• MDs who are interested in qualifying for the subspecialty in clinical informatics.
• Medical students who would like to explore the importance of informatics in the
practice of medicine.
The Bioinformatics and Integrative Genomics (BIG) PhD program is designed
for students with a strong quantitative background who are interested in applying
their skills to solve fundamental problems in biological and medical sciences. The
mission of the BIG program is to train future leaders in bioinformatics and genomics
by providing students with the tools they need to conduct original research and
develop novel approaches and new technologies to address fundamental biological
questions. Prospective students should hold at least a Bachelor’s degree in a quan-
titative science or a Bachelor’s degree with a substantial minor in engineering or
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Both programs beneit from being housed at the Department of Biomedical Infor-
matics in the Longwood Medical Area, which is one of the premiere medical research
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and other programs ofered by Harvard-affiliated institutions.
For more information please visit: informaticstraining.hms.harvard.edu

NRC Research Associateship Programs

The National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine offers postdoctoral and senior research awards on
behalf of 23 U.S. federal research agencies and affiliated institutions with facilities at over 100 locations throughout the
U.S. and abroad.
We are actively seeking highly qualified candidates including recent doctoral recipients and senior researchers.
Applications are accepted during 4 annual review cycles (with deadlines of February 1, May 1, August 1, November 1).

Interested candidates should apply online http://sites.nationalacademies.org/PGA/RAP/PGA_046398

Awardees have the opportunity to:

• conduct independent research in an area compatible with the interests of the sponsoring laboratory
• devote full-time effort to research and publication
• access the excellent and often unique facilities of the federal research enterprise
• collaborate with leading scientists and engineers at the sponsoring laboratories

Benefits of an NRC Research Associateship award include:

• 1 year award, renewable for up to 3 years
• Stipend ranging from $45,000 to $80,000, higher for senior researchers
• Health insurance, relocation benefits, and professional travel allowance

DESIRED SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE

Applicants should hold, or anticipate receiving, an earned doctorate in science or engineering. Degrees from universities
abroad should be equivalent in training and research experience to a degree from a U.S. institution. Some awards are
open to foreign nationals as well as to U.S. citizens and permanent residents.

ABOUT THE EMPLOYER

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Fellowships Office has conducted the NRC Research
Associateship Programs in cooperation with sponsoring federal laboratories and other research organizations approved
for participation since 1954. Through national competitions, the Fellowships Office recommends and makes NRC
Research Associateship awards to outstanding postdoctoral and senior scientists and engineers for tenure as guest
researchers at participating laboratories. A limited number of opportunities are available for support of graduate
students in select fields.

29 September 2018 | NewScientist | 51


LETTERS
EDITOR’S PICK
Bears could be lottery winners too
From Peter Inkpen,
Amersham, Buckinghamshire, UK
Marc Bekoff decries the planned
grizzly bear hunt near Grand Teton and
Yellowstone national parks in the US
(1 September, p 22). He mentions that
21 hunters were licensed by lottery,
and that wildlife photographer
Thomas Mangelsen won one of the
52 | NewScientist | 29 September 2018
permits to hunt grizzly bears and does
not plan to use that prize. Mangelsen
thus reduced the number of shooters
that will participate by one — should
the courts finally approve the hunt.
It occurs to me that if tens of
thousands of people who care
passionately about these bears were
also to enter into any future lotteries
for a permit, the odds are that some
would win and deprive that number of
hunters the means to legally kill these
magnificent animals.
Some 7000 people applied for the
most recent permits. Assuming the
number of permits available each year
is fixed, if 14,000 additional people
entered the lottery, the chances are
that only about seven permits would
end up in the hands of hunters. Of
course, a far better solution would be
to not issue any permits at all.
letters@newscientist.com
Populism won’t wilt
without redistribution
From Hillary Shaw,
Newport, Shropshire, UK
Simon Oxenham describes a data
analysis suggesting that waves of
support for populist politics peak
10 years after financial crises, and
asks if it will be same this time as
economies recover after the 2008
crash (15 September, p 22). But the
recent populist surge may not
follow this pattern if a decade
after the start of the financial
crisis too many people feel their
situation still hasn’t improved.
Many people see reports
of rising GDP or falling
unemployment but feel the
system isn’t working for them
personally. A few at the top have
captured most of the growth in
GDP; for many, personal wealth
has not grown.
A large part of many people’s
@newscientist newscientist
income goes on accommodation,
made more costly by a property
price boom that was fostered by
low interest rates after the crash.
This leaves people feeling poorer.
Telling such people that the
economy is “recovering” may lead
to resentment and a feeling they
are missing out. This is likely to
stoke more populism, when they
ask: “Who is getting the rewards
of growth? I’m not.” Economic
redistribution as well as economic
recovery is essential.
We are not cleverer than
directionless evolution
From Mark Dowson,
Leesburg, Virginia, US
You ask what kind of force is
evolution (Leader, 1 September).
Evolution isn’t a force. It is a
description of the process by
which species change over time in
response to their environments.
 “People, asked about eternal life, looked at
Keith Richards and said ‘nope’?”
Tracy Jones invokes the gnarled Rolling Stones guitarist to wonder
why only one in five of us favour immortality (22 September, p 8)

And it makes no sense to see it as
either malevolent or beneficial,
although you may like or dislike
the results of the process it
describes. Using the term force
can reinforce the fallacy, called
teleology, that evolutionary
change is directed to some
objective beyond a species simply
changing to fit its environment.
From Andrew Scott,
Perth, UK
You announce your report on
ways to outwit evolution
(1 September, p 28) by saying on
your cover: “Nature used to decide
how life turned out. Now we do”.
But we are products of nature’s
evolution and everything we do is
part of the evolutionary process.
If our attempts to be smart
eventually cause our extinction,
that will just be one more of many
previous dead ends in evolution.
We are part of nature. We are not
smarter than it. Everything we
do, including modifying genes,
is just as much a part of evolution
as fish flopping about on some
ancient shore.
From John Innes,
Knowle, West Midlands, UK
Michael Le Page quotes Stephen
Palumbi describing triple drug
therapy for HIV as “one of the
first truly evolutionary treatment
strategies”. Much the same
strategy was used 60 years ago
in the early days of antibiotic
treatment for tuberculosis.
Streptomycin, the first anti-TB
antibiotic, became available in the
UK in 1948. When the country’s
Medical Research Council tried
using it to treat pulmonary TB
it failed because, after 140 days,
85 per cent of cases had developed
drug resistance. In 1954, John
Crofton, when a professor of
respiratory medicine in
Edinburgh, used a combination
of three drugs for three months
followed by 15 months on two of
them. It worked and this has been
the basic principle of tuberculosis
treatment since.
But Palumbi’s conclusion that
we will never completely solve the
problem is correct: TB continues
to develop antibiotic resistance,
pushed by poor prescribing,
poor compliance by some
patients and supply and quality
problems with antibiotics.
Green vehicles can still
be a cause of air pollution
From Tom Watts,
Bristol, UK
You list the emissions of electric
cars as “none” (8 September, p 20).
I am in full, enthusiastic support
of the research and development
of non-fossil-fuel-burning
vehicles, but must point out that
although battery electric vehicles
have no emissions at point of use,
unless they are all charged from
renewable power sources, their
source of electricity is likely to be
the result of fossil fuel burning.
The editor writes:
Q We used “emissions” in the
sense of “what comes out of the
car”. As you say, the carbon impact
of charging it is important too –
as is that of building it.
Electric meters that are
unsmart are a headache
From Steve Swift,
Medstead, Hampshire, UK
Colin Cook observes that smart
meters may make for noisier
neighbours, with people running
washing machines at night
when electricity prices drop, for
example (Letters, 1 September).
In a similar vein, I use off-peak >

SUMMER READING
One of the foremost physicists of
mid-Victorian Britain, John Tyndall’s
contribution to science underpin our
“If you want to understand AI, you need to
understanding of climate change, the
atmosphere, and glaciology. He was read The Deep Learning Revolution.”
also a pioneering mountaineer, —Erik Brynjolfsson, Professor at MIT Sloan
friend to the political and
literary elite of his day, and one
School of Management
of the great popular science
communicators of his time. mitpress.mit.edu/revolution

Roland Jackson’s
biography makes
perfect summer
reading.

9780198788959 | 576 pages | £25

29 September 2018 | NewScientist | 53


LETTERS
electricity to recharge my electric
car on an “Economy7” tariff,
which offers cheaper power for
seven hours each night. The old
meter that goes with this is even
more stupid than most. Its clock is
synchronised to the mains supply.
In our rural area, this is erratic,
and the clock loses time. So our
cheap rate electricity comes on a
little later after every power cut.
Neanderthal, Denisovan
and Sapiens, all people
From Elizabeth Bell,
Great Shefford, Berkshire, UK
I am always amused to read
articles on our human ancestry,
and findings relating to how
Homo sapiens “interbred”
with other “species” such as
Neanderthals and Denisovans.
You report, for example, that a
prehistoric teenager was the
offspring of these two species
interbreeding (25 August, p 7). I
long ago came to the conclusion
from reading reports such as this
that H. sapiens, Neanderthals and
Denisovans are variants on the
same hominin species and that
our current relatively narrow
TOM GAULD
54 | NewScientist | 29 September 2018
H. sapiens gene pool represents
lost genetic diversity.
It seems likely that when the
groups met, they probably just
saw each other as people, with
different appearances and
cultures, not as separate species.
The tale of James Croll
and ice ages is tangled
From David Sugden,
Loanhead, Midlothian, UK
It was good to see James Croll
recognised as the first scientist
to link ice ages with orbital
fluctuations of Earth (25 August,
p 34). The loss of support for his
ideas in the late 19th century may,
however, have had less to do with
Victorian sniffiness about his
working-class background than
with his work apparently being
contradicted by subsequent
dating of ice ages.
He assumed that the key driver
of ice ages was the amount of
sunlight reaching the northern
hemisphere in winter, and wrote
that “we may safely conclude that
it is considerably more than
100,000 years since the glacial
epoch”. It later emerged that
letters@newscientist.com
much of the past 100,000 years
was taken up with the last ice age.
We now know that summer, not
winter, temperatures are the key
to glacier survival. Had Croll
calculated on this basis, he would
have been spot on.
From John Reid,
Aberdeen, UK
Fred Pearce says that Croll’s ideas
were only revived by Milutin
Milankovic in the 1930s. However,
Robert Ball, Royal Astronomer of
Ireland and a notable populariser
of astronomy, gave talks on ice
ages in 1886 acknowledging Croll’s
work. In 1890, he published The
Cause of an Ice Age. My copy was
originally presented as an English
prize in a girls’ school, so the book
must have had a wide circulation.
On the knotty issue of
bow ties and neckwear
From Roderick Ramage,
Coppenhall, Staffordshire, UK
What is the world coming to? Eric
Clow notes gastroenterologists,
obstetricians and gynaecologists
tending to wear bow ties rather
than “knotted ties” (Letters,
@newscientist newscientist
25 August). A bow tie is knotted.
A clerk in my former law firm
took to bow ties after he leaned
over our first shredding machine
to see how it worked, and those
standing nearby were laughing
too much to find the off switch.
The editor writes:
Q Our apologies to Clow for an
inexact clarification. We did
assume clip-on bow ties, thinking
that knotted ones would be
graspable by distressed patients.
By its bouncing shall you
know this battery’s state
From Roger Calvert,
Blawith, Cumbria, UK
Gabriel Carlyle says a charged
alkaline battery may weigh a tiny
bit more than a discharged one
(Letters, 1 September). But hearing
aid batteries work by reaction
with air or moisture, and gain
mass as they discharge.
I have measured a discharged
battery as weighing 95 milligrams
more than a new one. When
dropped on a hard surface, a new
battery lands with a clunk and a
discharged one will bounce. I have
no idea why, but it is useful when
you get confused as to which is
which when changing them.
Opinions vary on
whether we know it all
From Carl Zetie,
Raleigh, North Carolina, US
Dave Neale suggests that we read
New Scientist because we don’t
think we know everything
(Letters, 1 September). Some of us
only read the magazine looking
for opportunities to send in
corrections for publication.
Letters should be sent to:
Letters to the Editor, New Scientist,
25 Bedford Street, London, WC2E 9ES
Email: letters@newscientist.com
Include your full postal address and telephone
number, and a reference (issue, page number, title)
to articles. We reserve the right to edit letters.
New Scientist Ltd reserves the right to
use any submissions sent to the letters column of
New Scientist magazine, in any other format.
MAKE
Do try this at home
Creation station
Why wait for a bolt from the blue when you can code
your own muse?
“I’m an aspiring inventor,” says
May Kitt, “but my best work so
far was a Fitbit attachment for
my dog, so I can game the step
counter. Someone beat me to
the grape peeler. Where can
I get some more inspiration?”
Creative geniuses all have their
own tricks. Yoshiro Nakamatsu,
who has 3000 inventions to his
name, takes a deep breath and
dives underwater. “Zero-point-
five seconds before death, I
visualise an invention,” he says.
But you needn’t go to such
extremes. My inspiration
generator will bring ideas for all.
To create it, I first grabbed
lists of random words, then I
used Stanford University’s tool
for tagging “parts of speech”
like nouns and adjectives and
some Excel wizardry to arrange
the data. With a few lines of
JavaScript – a popular web
coding language – I could mix
the tagged words into suitable
grammatical patterns. My
random idea generator was
ready for action.
“Disinheriting underpass,”
it suggested cryptically,
“Autosexing pie. Lasagne
categorising ink.” Some of the
prompts were more plausible: I
would certainly buy a “gratitude
For more Makes, visit newscientist.com/make
RUSSELL COBB
showing armchair”.
Some say inspiration comes
from remixing, so I replaced
the word list with text from old
Make columns. I also added a
function to suggest a company
name – combining letters from
the words. The results: protect
your home with WaRoo, the
warning Roomba. And a rival to
Uber Eats, called Urfoo – USB
roving food. My style indeed.
Others say inspiration lurks
where you least expect, so I
built a version from articles on
Gwyneth Paltrow’s offbeat
lifestyle site Goop. It was no An accessible guide to our digital infra-
less rich. Who wouldn’t eat üfu
(übermoms fuelling spread)? structure, explaining the basics of
Especially in a Bind (beet- operating systems, networks, security,
cheese-basil indulging brand). and other topics for the general reader.
How do you know if your
idea is unique? My program also
assesses the number of hits mitpress.mit.edu/bits
the word combination gets on
Google and the availability of
the “.com” domain for each
suggestion. The text turns
green if you’re good to go.
I also added an option to
email my ideas to select friends.
Maybe not a great idea, after
almost sending “swinging
services” to my boyfriend with
no context. Which gave me a
great idea for an email
retriever… Hannah Joshua ■
29 September 2018 | NewScientist | 55

FEEDBACK
PAUL MCDEVITT
PEOPLE in Minnesota are sleeping
soundly following the capture of
a large, white goat that had been
menacing a Minneapolis suburb.
Local news site City Pages reports
that the animal, of mysterious origin,
had been seen staring into homes
“with its creepy sideways goat pupils”.
“We know about the goat that’s
on the lam,” the Inver Grove Heights
police wrote on their Facebook page.
“Do not hesitate to give us a call
(9-1-1), if you spot him. We need to
get this billy goat gruff off of Inver
Grove Heights bluffs.”
Following a kid-hunt over several
days (and numerous pun-filled
updates from the police), the
errant goat was captured and thrown
in the pen. Iggy – named for the
neighbourhood he haunted – has
since been released to the local
farm animal shelter.
RAT kings, according to legend,
are packs of rodents whose tails
have become fused, skittering
about as a seething mass of terror.
A far more cuddly variation was
chanced upon by a resident of
A cosmologically-named town in Missouri,
US, is once again the butt of jokes, after local
newspaper The Waynesville Daily Guide
was replaced by The Uranus Examiner
56 | NewScientist | 29 September 2018
Wisconsin, who found a close-knit
family of five young squirrels
with their tails hopelessly knotted
together. The five-headed,
20-legged squirrel king was
delivered to the Wildlife
Rehabilitation Center at
Wisconsin Humane Society.
“You can imagine how wiggly
and unruly (and nippy!) this
frightened, distressed ball of
squirrelly energy was,” staff wrote
on Facebook, “so our first step
was to anesthetize all five of
them at the same time. With that
accomplished, we began working
on unraveling the ‘Gordian Knot’
(Google it) of tightly tangled tails
and nest material”.
Following a successful
operation, all five are doing
well and are free to live rather
more independent lives.
FIELDWORK and lab work are
increasingly linked at the Louisiana
Universities Marine Consortium,
where scientists studying coastal
flooding keep finding their laboratory
flooded. The building, which sits on a
For more feedback, visit newscientist.com/feedback
low-lying strip of land at the southern
reach of Louisiana, is under threat
from sinking ground and rising seas.
Director Craig McClain told
reporters at Yale Climate Connections
that, although the lab may relocate
eventually, “our location here is very,
very important to us. It’s not, ‘oh,
there’s coastal loss somewhere.’
It’s like, ‘oh, there’s coastal loss here
and I can see it and experience it and
witness it myself’.”
A commendable attitude from an
oceanographer, though Feedback
suspects volcanologists may be
hesitant to follow suit.
YOU might think that firefighters
in the tropics could take a well-
earned rest during the wet season.
But for Bangkok’s crews, monsoon
season means a whole different
type of call-out.
Built on swampy ground,
Thailand’s capital is teeming
with snakes, which emerge from
flooded burrows in heavy rains.
Not only have firefighters become
expert snake charmers, but they
are also running workshops so
residents can relocate any non-
venomous varieties that stray
into their homes. That way, the
snakes can keep a lid on those
other perennial city pests: rats.
Suraphong Suepchai told
Agence France-Presse that, in
contrast to the tragedies faced in
firefighting, “when it comes [to]
catching snakes, people are very
grateful to us, and it’s fun.”
A LONESOME narwhal has found
company in a pod of white beluga
whales. The animal was spotted
by conservationists swimming in
Canada’s Saint Lawrence river,
far south of its usual Arctic habitat.
Adolescent narwhals are known
for wandering far from home.
Highly social, in the absence of
other narwhals to accompany they
will attempt to make friends with
ships or even navigation buoys.
This is the third year the narwhal
has been seen with the belugas,
suggesting they have taken to the
tusked stranger, and accepted him
as one of their own.
SPOTTED by Tim Hamill
in London’s Science Museum:
“The complex mathematics
[of microwaves] were worked
out by the late Dr K. Posthumus
in Holland in the 1930s.”
AUCKLAND residents are upset
over an 11.4 cents-per-litre fuel tax
imposed by the local government.
“With nary a sign of a raised eyebrow,”
writes Lindsay Wright, “several local
media publications quoted a man
grumbling that his commute fuel bill
had skyrocketed an extra $40 a week.”
Assuming a mileage of 10
kilometres per litre, says Lindsay,
“it seems to me that the man should
avoid commuting the entire length of
the country every day, or perhaps we
should be introducing the public to
the basics of mathematics”.
FOLLOWING the news that
cheeses “protect against death
from any cause” (15 September),
Graham Legg writes “I am
concerned that you may not get
the level of protection you expect
from Dairylea.”
This, he explains, is because
its triangles are only a cheese-
flavoured paste. “Can I suggest
secreting slices of Limburger
or Stinking Bishop about your
person? This will not only repel
death in all its forms but most
people as well.” Win-win!
You can send stories to Feedback by
email at feedback@newscientist.com.
Please include your home address.
This week’s and past Feedbacks can
be seen on our website.
 Last words past and present at newscientist.com/lastword
THE LAST WORD

Sign of maturity a chemical reaction between The water is likely to be the who even with their eyes shut.
polyphenols in the potato key to stopping the browning Rowan Hooper
Last year, we had a Christmas and oxygen from the air. This through preventing oxidation. London, UK
pudding that was two years old and it produces brown compounds in It is possible that phenolic
was superb, whereas a one-year-old the potato called melanins, but compounds, responsible for the ■ It is possible that the reason
pudding wasn’t nearly as tasty. I read can be prevented in several ways. browning, may bind to the fibre we – as adults, at least – can’t tell
that a supermarket won an award The oxidation of the in the brown bread, but we know crows apart is due to “perceptual
for its two-year-matured puddings. polyphenols can be slowed little about the chemistry of the narrowing”. As humans, we don’t
So, what happens over two years to by keeping oxygen away from interaction of phenolics and fibre. need to tell crows apart, so lose
bring out the flavour? potatoes by storing them under Separating the potatoes into two the ability to do it, instead
water. The water’s pH can also be bowls of water, one also containing developing the ability to
■ Christmas pudding matures made acidic by adding lemon brown bread, is the obvious test. recognise human faces. Studies
as it ages because of the Maillard juice or vinegar. As enzymes are I take no responsibility for you of babies have shown that at
reaction, which takes place pH-sensitive, the polyphenol getting the sack if the water-only 6 months old they have the ability
between sugars and amino acids. oxidase loses its catalytic ability, condition fails. to tell monkeys apart, but lose
This generates rich, complex, David Cox this by 9 months old, as their
caramelised flavours and colours. “When you slice a potato, Adelaide, South Australia brain learns that skill isn’t needed.
The reaction occurs slowly at polyphenol oxidase is Presumably, a child who grew up
room temperature, but heat released, which produces around monkeys would retain it.
speeds it up – classic instances are brown compounds” Wisdom of the crows Something similar happens
browning onions or roasting meat. even with our own ethnicity,
Often the reaction produces further preventing browning. New Scientist recently ran an article which is why people can find it
desirable flavours, but in long- The addition of antioxidants about crows making up after a fight, harder to tell different ethnicities
stored milk powder or fruit juices, to the water scavenges dissolved or keeping their distance from apart than they do their own.
for example, these “cooked” oxygen, stopping discolouration. another crow they had beaten Other crows are perfectly
flavours imply a loss of quality. Bread has an antioxidant capacity. (6 January). So how do crows tell each identifiable to the crow brain,
Andrew Lea That of wholemeal bread is greater other apart? They look alike to me. allowing them to engage in the
Abingdon, Oxfordshire, UK than white bread, and fresher kind of social activity described.
bread is better than stale. ■ Crows look alike to you because Cath Ferguson
Old wives’ tales are not to be you can’t see in the ultraviolet. Glasgow, UK
Potato tip lightly dismissed – they are often Most birds can, and the plumage
based on years of trial and error. of crows, which to us looks mostly
I work in a restaurant where the chef Enzymatic browning is not all black, is elaborately detailed when This week’s question
saves time by parboiling potatoes and bad: it develops colour and seen under ultraviolet light.
leaving them in the water overnight, flavour in teas and, without it, There are also many matt A KEY QUESTION
then roasting them the following day. chocolate would be bland. and iridescent colours in corvid We keep the key to our holiday
To stop the potatoes discolouring David Muir feathers. Seen close up, even with cottage in a four-digit key safe by
overnight, he puts a slice of brown Edinburgh, UK human eyes, the plumage is the door. Because of my poor
bread in the water. Is this an old marvellously patterned. eyesight, I move only one of the
wives’ tale or does this really work? ■ My mother used a similar Differences in plumage digit rotors when I leave, so it is
And does it have to be brown bread? strategy, but without the bread. colouration are used by birds in easier to open next time. Most
She would parboil potatoes, place mate choice, and probably also visitors rotate all rotors on
■ When you slice a potato, them in a bowl of water, go to in social interactions in flocks. leaving. Is my behaviour riskier?
an enzyme called polyphenol church, then roast them for Corvids also vary individually in Joie Richards
oxidase is released and catalyses Sunday lunch on her return. caw sound, so they can tell who is By email, no address supplied

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