Professional Documents
Culture Documents
PAGE 72 PAGE 50
MISSION TO
ALPHA
CENTAURI
Tiny laser-powered
probes traveling at
near light speed
take aim at a star
S
PLU
BUG BATTLE
Gene switches ight a corn pest PAGE 64
HOW POVERTY
HURTS KIDS BRAINS MARCH 2017
Could a simple remedy help? PAGE 44 2017 Scientific American ScientiicAmerican.com
M a r c h 2 0 17
VO LU M E 3 1 6 , N U M B E R 3
S PAC E F L I G H T PA L E O N TO LO G Y
64
30 Near-Light-Speed Mission 50 The True Colors
to Alpha Centauri ofDinosaurs
A privately funded plan is under Fossilized pigments yield surpris-
way to send tiny spaceships ing insights into the lives of extinct
via laser beam to a nearby star; organisms. ByJakob Vinther
a one-way trip would take only 20 R O B OT I C S
years. It may just be crazy enough 58 Am I Human?
to work. ByAnn Finkbeiner We need new tests that can distin-
I M M U N O LO G Y guish artiicial intelligence from
38 Cancer Killers the natural kind. By Gary Marcus
Synthetic immune cells more pow- Also: The New Turing Tests
erful and longer-lasting than the By John Pavlus
ones that occur naturally in the AG R I C U LT U R E
body can now treat some forms 64 Cornboy vs.
of cancer. ByAveryD. Posey, Jr., the Billion-Dollar Bug
CarlH. June and BruceL. Levine The corn rootworm is winning
B E H AV I O R A L N E U R O S C I E N C E an evolutionary battle against pest ON ThE c OVE r
44 Brain Trust control. ByHannah Nordhaus An ambitious project called Breakthrough
Starshot would send a swarm of small, smart
Poverty has profound efects on GENOMIC S phonelike chips to make the irst visit to another
the size, shape and functioning of 72 Should Babies star. Light sails pushed by laser light beamed
a young childs brain. Would a cash Be Sequenced? from Earths surface would propel the chip
satellites to near light speeds, allowing them
payment to parents prevent harm It is now feasible to test every
to make a quick lyby.
from the experience of being poor? newborn for genetic risks. Illustration by Chris Wren,
ByKimberlyG. Noble ByBonnie Rochman Mondolithic Studios.
12 Forum
U.S. elections are not secure from hacking. By David L. Dill
14 Advances
Surprisingly early human settlement of the Tibetan
Plateau. Microscopic 3-D printing. Lab-grown intes-
tines. Fossil octopus. Renewable energy in estuaries.
10
26 The Science of Health
What brings on breathlessness? By Robin Lloyd
28 TechnoFiles
Will the Internet of Things destroy privacy at home?
By David Pogue
76 Recommended
Demystifying owls. Threats to the Great Lakes. How mod-
ern diets jeopardize the food supply. By Clara Moskowitz
77 Skeptic
An artiicial intelligence apocalypse is not near.
By Michael Shermer
78 Anti Gravity
14
Why does asparagus make urine smell funky to some
people but not others? Its in the genes. By Steve Mirsky
ON THE WEB
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To Boldly Go for instance? But one day biologist Jakob Vinther spied the fos-
silized ink of a 200-million-year-old squid relative, perfectly
preserved. It looked like granules of melanin pigment. He began
Before kindergarten, I was already dreaming about the wonders to wonder if melanin might survive in fossils. Voilan intrigu-
of interstellar space travel. I saw the Apollo astronauts walk on ing pathway to what things were like in another place and time.
the moon and enjoyed the weekly exploits of the crew of the In The True Colors of Dinosaurs, starting on page 50, you will
Enterprise on the original Star Trek TV episodes. It seemed wed learn the surprising insights scientists are gaining from this
soon be leaping into that inal frontier. But the adult me now new look at old creatures.
knows a lot more about how hard it is to explore the cold vast- As ever, Scientic American is also fully engaged with how sci-
ness of spaceeven if were doing so with machines instead of ence might solve some of humanitys greatest challenges. Brain
us fragile humans. Robot missions to next-door neighbor Mars Trust, beginning on page 44, by neuroscientist Kimberly G.
a mere 225 million kilometers away on average have failed with Noble, examines how growing up in poverty afects a childs cog-
unpleasant frequency. Its almost as if the universe seems to nition and brain development. Could a simple remedya cash sti-
dare us to go big or stay home. pend for families to ease inancial straitshelp children to reach
Our cover story, then, brings you the tale of just such a big their potential? The process of science will lead us to ind out.
BOARD OF ADVISERS
Leslie C. Aiello Kaigham J. Gabriel Christof Koch Martin A. Nowak Terry Sejnowski
President, Wenner-Gren Foundation President and Chief Executive Oicer, President and CSO, Director, Program for Evolutionary Professor and Laboratory Head
for Anthropological Research Charles Stark Draper Laboratory Allen Institute for Brain Science Dynamics, and Professor of Biology and of Computational Neurobiology
Harold Skip Garner of Mathematics, Harvard University Laboratory, Salk Institute for
Roger Bingham Lawrence M. Krauss
Robert E. Palazzo Biological Studies
Co-Founder and Director, Executive Director and Professor, Director, Origins Initiative,
Primary Care Research Network Dean, University of Alabama at Michael Shermer
The Science Network Arizona State University
Birmingham College of Arts and Sciences Publisher, Skeptic magazine
and Center for Bioinformatics and Morten L. Kringelbach
Arthur Caplan Carolyn Porco Michael Snyder
Genetics, Edward Via College Director, Hedonia: TrygFonden
Director, Division of Medical Ethics, of Osteopathic Medicine Leader, Cassini Imaging Science Professor of Genetics, Stanford
Department of Population Health, Research Group, University of Oxford University School of Medicine
Michael S. Gazzaniga Team, and Director, CICLOPS,
NYU Langone Medical Center and University of Aarhus Space Science Institute Michael E. Webber
Director, Sage Center for the Study
Steven Kyle Vilayanur S. Ramachandran Co-director, Clean Energy Incubator,
Vinton Cerf of Mind, University of California,
Professor of Applied Economics and Director, Center for Brain and Cognition, and Associate Professor,
Chief Internet Evangelist, Google Santa Barbara Department of Mechanical Engineering,
Management, Cornell University University of California, San Diego
George M. Church David J. Gross University of Texas at Austin
Robert S. Langer Lisa Randall
Director, Center for Computational Professor of Physics and Permanent Steven Weinberg
David H. Koch Institute Professor, Professor of Physics,
Genetics, Harvard Medical School Member, Kavli Institute for Theoretical Director, Theory Research Group,
Department of Chemical Harvard University
Rita Colwell Physics,University of California, Santa Department of Physics,
Barbara (Nobel Prize in Physics, 2004) Engineering, M.I.T. Martin Rees University of Texas at Austin
Distinguished University Professor, Astronomer Royal and Professor
Lene Vestergaard Hau Lawrence Lessig (Nobel Prize in Physics, 1979)
University of Maryland College Park of Cosmology and Astrophysics,
Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and Professor, Harvard Law School George M. Whitesides
and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School Institute of Astronomy, University Professor of Chemistry and
of Applied Physics, Harvard University John P. Moore
of Public Health of Cambridge Chemical Biology, Harvard University
Danny Hillis Professor of Microbiology and
Richard Dawkins John Reganold Nathan Wolfe
Co-chairman, Applied Minds, LLC Immunology, Weill Medical
Founder and Board Chairman, Regents Professor of Soil Science Director, Global Viral Forecasting
Daniel M. Kammen College of Cornell University
Richard Dawkins Foundation and Agroecology, Washington Initiative
Class of 1935 Distinguished Professor M. Granger Morgan State University
Drew Endy Anton Zeilinger
of Energy, Energy and Resources Group, Hamerschlag University Professor Jefrey D. Sachs Professor of Quantum Optics,
Professor of Bioengineering, and Director, Renewable and Appropriate Engineering and Public Policy, Director, The Earth Institute, Quantum Nanophysics, Quantum
Stanford University Energy Laboratory, University Carnegie Mellon University
GETTY IMAGES
ASSOCIATE EDITORS
and can lead to more change. Such an ex- Lee Billings SPACE / PHYSICS Larry Greenemeier TECHNOLOGY Dina Fine Maron BIOLOGY / MEDICINE Annie Sneed SUSTAINABILITY
planation may lie behind loss aversion, Amber Williams ADVANCES ENGAGEMENT EDITOR Sunya Bhutta COLLECTIONS EDITOR Andrea Gawrylewski
D I G I TA L
SENIOR EDITORIAL PRODUCT MANAGER Angela Cesaro TECHNICAL LEAD Nicholas Sollecito
SHERMER REPLIES: That loss aversion DIGITAL PRODUCTION MANAGER Kerrissa Lynch WEB PRODUCTION ASSOCIATES Ian Kelly, Eli Rosenberg
Take Nukes Of ing a massive attack had somehow made their way into an op-
erational computer.
The button can also morph into a perverse temptation for
a Short Fuse an unstable leader. In 1974, during his impeachment proceed-
ings, President RichardM. Nixon said to reporters: I can go into
my oice and pick up the telephone, and in 25 minutes, 70 mil-
For the sake of the planet, the U.S. nuclear lion people will be dead. Worried about Nixons state of mind at
arsenal should not be on high alert the time, Defense Secretary James Schlesinger asked to be noti-
ied before any nuclear launch order from Nixon was executed.
By the Editors
The existential risks of our current policy framework prompt-
Last summer the esteemed naturalist E.O. Wilson told the Huf- ed both Barack Obama and George W. Bush to pledge during
ington Post that he fears a nuclear conlagration as a clear and their irst presidential campaigns that they would take mea-
present danger to the planet. A similar-sounding fear has been sures to move ballistic missiles of high alert. Neither followed
shared by Donald Trump. The global warming we should be wor- through, leaving an opening for the new administration.
ried about is the global warming caused by NUCLEAR WEAPONS After luctuating wildly from one position to the next on
in the hands of crazy or incompetent leaders! read a Trump tweet, many issues during the 2016 campaign, Trump should give the
ired of in 2014 and echoed during his candidacy for president. U.S. electorate some assurance that he intends to govern with a
The two men made these parallel observations for diferent steady hand by making a commitment to take our nuclear arse-
reasons. Trump wished to downplay the risks of global warming. nal of hair-trigger alert and buy more time to decide whether
Wilson, while acknowledging the longer-term peril of climate to push the button.
change, worried that some stupid mistake by a nuclear-armed Trump should adopt a set of pragmatic options that the
nation could bring on catastrophe in coming years. On an equal Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and other public-interest
footing, he feared a Trump presidency as an immediate menace groups have outlined, some of which could be readily imple-
but at the time believed the mogul could never be elected. mented. Turning a safety switch in the nuclear missile silos, a
Even before the election, geopolitical tensions had exacerbat- procedure called saing, used when maintenance workers are
ed the prospects of a nuclear conlict. In fact, the threat posed on-site, would prevent an unwarranted launch. It would take at
by nuclear weapons on high alert has persisted for decades. least half a day to reverse this process because silos are not
Both the U.S. and Russia hold about 900 nukes ready to launch, stafed, enough time to forestall an irreversible decision.
a hair-trigger status that keeps submarine- and land-based mis- As the UCS has pointed out, by taking this step unilaterally,
siles prepared for immediate iring to deter a irst strikea pos- the U.S. could reduce the risk of a mistaken or accidental launch
ture intended to allow these missiles to be launched in retalia- that could lead to nuclear retaliation on the U.S. public. It might
tion before attacking missiles can hit their targets. also serve as a prelude to such measures as removing war-
If our early-warning system detects incoming missiles, heads and storing them elsewhere and ultimately getting
the president has 12 minutes or less to decide whether to rid of the land-based force entirely. The Russians might
unleash global-scale destruction and take the lives of even be convinced to follow suit. Because of submarines
tens of millions of civilians. So far salvos of incoming relative invulnerability, both the U.S. and Russia could
missiles have amounted to nothing more than elec- be assured of being able to mount a counterattack.
tronic mirages. All these moves would make the world safer and
Ominously, though, technical glitches have at might also dissuade China, which does not have its
times fooled both Soviet Union and U.S. warning missiles on a hair trigger, from adopting that poli-
systems into lagging attacks that were nonexistent. cy. The need for better preventive steps has also
In 1983 a counterattack was averted only when a become more acute because of sophisticated
Soviet military oicer decided to trust his gut in- cybertechnologies that could, in theory, hack
stinct and concluded that satellite data about into a command-and-control system to ire a
incoming U.S. missiles were a false alarm. missile that is ready to launch.
The U.S. has experienced its own mis- Taking the U.S. arsenal of high alert
haps. In 1979 computers at the command would cost a pittance but could buy enough
center in Colorado Springs signaled that a time to avert the cataclysmic event that
WITOLD SKRYPCZAK Getty Images
major Soviet nuclear ofensive was under once again looms as the most pressing
way. Both U.S. ballistic missile and nuclear threat to our survival.
bomber crews sprang into action, only
standing down after satellite data could
J O I N T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N O N L I N E
not corroborate the warning. It turned out Visit Scientiic American on Facebook and Twitter
that data from training software simulat- or send a letter to the editor: editors@sciam.com
Our Elections include hacking directly into voting systems over the Internet;
bribing employees of election oices and voting-machine ven-
dors; or just buying the companies that make the voting ma-
Are Not Secure chines outright. It is likely that such an attack would not be de-
tected, given our current election security practices.
What would alert us to such an act? What should we do
The Russian hacks of Democratic about it? If there is reason to suspect an election result (per-
e-mails expose only part of the problem haps because its an upset victory that deies the vast majority
of preelection polls), common sense says we should double-
By David L. Dill
check the results as best we can. But this is hard to do in Amer-
The fbi, nsa and cia all agree that the Russian government ica. Recount laws vary from state to state. Not all states even
tried to inluence the 2016 presidential election by hacking allow recounts, and many of those that do require that a candi-
candidates and political parties and leaking the documents date request the recount and pay for it himself or herself. In the
they gathered. Thats disturbing. But they could have done 2016 election Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, cit-
even worse. It is entirely possible for an adversary to hack ing potential security breaches, requested a recount in Wiscon-
American computerized voting systems directly and select the sin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, all of which unexpectedly and
next commander in chief. narrowly went to Donald Trump.
A dedicated group of technically sophisticated individuals Those eforts did not change the results. Nevertheless, it has
could steal an election by hacking voting machines in key become clear that our voting system is vulnerable to attack by
counties in just a few states. Indeed, University of Michigan foreign powers, criminal groups, campaigns and even motivat-
computer science professor J.Alex Halderman says that he and ed amateurs. We must defend it more efectively. If elections
his students could have changed the result of the November lose their credibility, democracy can quickly disintegrate. It is
election. Halderman et al. have hacked a lot of voting machines, not good enough to say, after every election, We cant prove
and there are videos to prove it. I believe him. fraud. We need evidence that vote counts are accurate.
Halderman isnt going to steal an election, but a foreign The good news is that we know how to solve this problem.
nation might be tempted to do so. It neednt be a superpower We need to audit computers by manually examining random-
like Russia or China. Even a medium-size country would have ly selected paper ballots and comparing the results with
the resources to accomplish this, with techniques that could machine results. Audits require a voter-veriied paper ballot,
which the voter inspects to conirm that his or her selections
have been correctly and indelibly recorded. Since 2003 an
active community of academics, lawyers, election oicials and
activists has urged states to adopt paper ballots and robust
audit procedures.
This campaign has had signiicant, albeit slow, success. Ap-
proximately three quarters of U.S. voters cast paper ballots.
Twenty-six states do some type of manual audit, but none of
their procedures is adequate. Auditing methods have recently
been devised that are much more eicient than those used in
any state. It is important that audits be performed on every
contest in every election so that citizens do not have to request
manual recounts to feel conident about election results. With
high-quality audits, it is very unlikely that election fraud will
go undetected, whether perpetrated by another country or a
political party.
There is no reason we cannot implement these measures
before the 2020 elections. As a nation, we need to recognize the
urgency of the task, to overcome the political and organization-
al obstacles that have impeded progress. Otherwise, we risk
losing our country to hackers armed with keyboards, without a
shot being ired.
J O I N T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N O N L I N E
Visit Scientiic American on Facebook and Twitter
or send a letter to the editor: editors@sciam.com
EVOLUTION
Ice Age
Tibetans
New studies of human
migrationand resilience
suggest people populated
the frozen Tibetan Plateau
much earlier than thought
The irst humans who ventured onto the
Tibetan Plateau, often called the roof of the
world, faced one of the most brutal environ-
ments our species has ever confronted. At an
average elevation of more than 4,500 meters,
it is a cold and arid place with half the oxygen
present at sea level. Although scientists had
long thought no one set foot on the plateau
until 15,000 years ago, new genetic and
archaeological data indicate that this event
may have taken place much earlierpossibly
as far back as 62,000 years ago, in the middle
of the last ice age. A better understanding of
the history of migration and population
growth in the region could help unravel the
mysteries of Tibetans origin and ofer clues
as to how humans have adapted to low-
oxygen conditions at high altitudes.
As reported in a recent study in the Amer-
ican Journal of Human Genetics, researchers
got a better grasp of the plateaus settlement
history by sequencing the entire genomes of
38 ethnic Tibetans and comparing the results
with the genomic sequences of other ethnic
groups. It has revealed a complex patch-
work of prehistoric migration, says Shuhua
Xu, a population geneticist at the Chinese
Academy of Sciences Shanghai Institutes for
Biological Sciences. A big surprise was the
antiquity of Tibetan-speciic DNA sequenc-
es, Xu says. They can be traced back to details of how diferent populations from says. That idea contradicts the commonly
ancestors 62,000 to 38,000 years ago, pos- various directions may have combined their held notion that early plateau dwellers
sibly representing the earliest colonization genes to ultimately create the people that would have been eliminated during harsh
of the plateau. we call Tibetans. It shows that 94 percent climate intervals, including the LGM, says
As an ice age tightened its grip after of the present-day Tibetan genetic makeup David Zhang, a geographer at the University
that irst migration, genetic mixing between came from modern humanspossibly those of Hong Kong, who was not involved in Xus
Tibetans and non-Tibetans ground to a halt who ventured into Tibet in the second wave work. Aldenderfer and others contend that
for tens of thousands of yearssuggesting of migrationand the rest came from parts of the plateau could have provided
that movement into Tibet dropped to a min- extinct hominins. The modern part of the a refuge for people to survive the ice age.
imum. The migration routes were probably Tibetan genome relects a mixed genetic There were plenty of places for [those early
cut of by ice sheets, Xu says. It was simply heritage, sharing 82 percent similarity with populations] to live where local conditions
too harsh even for the toughest hunter- East Asians, 11 percent with Central Asians werent that bad, such as the big river valleys
gatherers. But about 15,000 to 9,000 years and 6 percent with South Asians. on the plateau, he says.
agoafter the so-called last glacial maxi- In addition, Xus team identiied a Tibet- Also supporting the antiquity of the
mum (LGM), when the ice age was at its an-speciic DNA segment that is highly peopling of Tibet is a study presented at
harshest and Earths ice cover had reached homologous to the genome of the Ust- the 33rd International Geographical Con-
its peakthousands locked to Tibet en lshim Man (modern humans living in Siberia gress last summer in Beijing, where a team
masse. Its the most signiicant wave of 45,000 years ago) and several extinct human unveiled the plateaus earliest archaeologi-
migration that shaped the modern Tibetan species, including Neandertals, Denisovans cal evidence of human presencedating to
gene pool, Xu says. This meshes well with and unknown groups. The segment contains 39,000 to 31,000 years ago. The site, rich
several independent lines of evidence show- eight genes, one of which is known to be with stone tools and animal remains, lies on
ing that Tibetans began to acquire genetic crucial for high-altitude adaptation. Xu sus- the bank of the Salween River in the south-
mutations that protected them from hypoxia pects that a hybrid of all these species may eastern Tibetan Plateau.
12,800 to 8,000 years ago. have been the common ancestor of the pre- Diferent lines of evidence are now con-
Xus team was the irst to sequence the LGM population on the plateau. verging to point to much earlier and much
entire Tibetan genome, and the resolution The study also reveals a startling genetic more persistent human occupation of the
is really impressive, says archaeologist Mark continuity since the plateau was irst colo- plateau than previously thought, Aldenderfer
Aldenderfer of the University of California, nized. This suggests that Tibet has always says. But he notes that pieces are still missing
Merced, who was not involved in the re- been populatedeven during the toughest from the puzzle: More excavations are
search. The study, he adds, provides ine times as far as climate was concerned, Xu required to close those gaps. Jane Qiu
PRECEDING PAGES: GETTY IMAGES (mountains); EDWINA DEACON Getty Images (Tibetan couple); THIS PAGE: COURTESY OF MICROFABRICA (metal devices)
T ECH N O LO GY 1
Is Fusion in
Our Future?
The U.S. is grossly
underinvested in energy
research, says Obamas
science adviser. And that
includes fusion power
bilities that were not pursuing for lack of er, less proliferation-prone version of nucle- whether fusion can ever be managed as a
money concludes that we should be spend- ar energy than ission. practical energy source, either for terrestrial
ing much more. My position is not that we know fusion power generation or for space propulsion.
will emerge as an attractive energy source Im ine with taking a hard look at fusion
But we have national labs by 2050 or 2075 but that its worth putting every ive years and deciding whether its
that are devoted some money on the bet because we dont still worth a candle, but for the time being
Im counting what the national labs are have all that many essentially inexhaustible I think it is.
doing in the federal governments efort. energy options. There are the renewables.
We just need to be doing moreand thats There are eicient breeder reactors, which To read more of the conversation with John
true right across the board. We need to be have many rather unattractive characteris- Holdrenwhich includes his assessment of
doing more on advanced biofuels. We need tics in terms of requiring what amounts to a the future of U.S. science policy, the prospects
to be doing more on carbon capture and plutonium economyat least with current for continued progress on brain science, and
sequestration. We need to be doing more technologyand traicking in large quanti- morevisit www.ScientiicAmerican.com/
on advanced nuclear technologies. We ties of weapon-usable materials. john-holdren
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texted to a mobile phone within six hours. Erin Biba
Guided Tours Since 1952
18 Scientific American, March 2017
ME D I C IN E
It Takes Guts
Functional intestine becomes
the latest lab-grown organ
When it comes to growing intestines, the irst
inch is the hardestespecially in a petri dish.
Scientists at Cincinnati Childrens Hospital Med-
ical Center have met that benchmark: they
recently reported in Nature Medicine that they
had grown a piece of gutnerves, muscles and
allfrom a single line of human stem cells. In
the future such tissue could be used for study-
ing disease and more.
In 2011 researchers at the same center an-
nounced that they had grown intestinal tissue
but it was missing nerve cells and so was unable
to contract in the undulating motion that push-
es food along a colon. This time around, the sci-
entists grew neurons separately and then com-
bined them with another batch of stem cells
that had been induced to become muscle and
intestinal lining. Voil: an inch-long piece of gut
formed. Just like in developing human bodies,
the nerve cells knew where to go, says Michael
Helmrath, surgical director of the Intestinal
Rehabilitation Program at Cincinnati Childrens.
The scientists then transplanted the tissue
onto a living mouses intestine so it could ma-
ture. After harvesting it for testing, they stimu-
lated the bespoke chunk with a shock of elec-
tricity. It contracted and continued to do so on
its own. The function was quite remarkable,
Helmrath says. Intestines now join kidneys,
brain matter and a few other kinds of tissue that
can be grown in the lab.
Next, Helmrath and his colleague Jim Wells Over 100 New Features & Apps in Origin 2017!
would like to coax longer pieces of intestine by For a FREE 60-day
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transplant the tissue. Intestines are a complex
structure to grow, Wells says. That weve even
gotten this far in such a short time gives me hope
25+ years serving the scientific & engineering community
that we can grow something therapeutically use-
ful in the long run. Ryan F. Mandelbaum
BY MATTHEW BALDWIN AND JORIS LAMMERS, IN PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES USA, VOL. 113, NO. 52; DECEMBER 27, 2016
highlighted reinstating a healthier Earth past. For him, the experiments demonstrate
Great Again ronmentalism after confronting climate Others are skeptical that this insight will
Be the breakthrough.
Breakthroughs are the patients participating in clinical trials,
the scientists and doctors working together to advance the
fight against cancer, and the brave survivors like Tonya who
never give up. Lets be the breakthrough. To learn about
appropriate screenings and clinical trials or to help someone
with cancer, go to su2c.org/breakthrough.
#cancerbreakthrough
TheCWordMovie.com
Fossil
Octopus
Is a Jurassic
Jewel
Paleontologists provide
a new look at a beautifully
preserved cephalopod
A good cephalopod fossil is hard to Octopus body shapes diversiied widely earlier
ind. Although ammonite shells, belem-
belem in evolutionary history than previously thought.
nite guards and other indicators of hard
body parts are abundant in the fossil Jurassic invertebrate are obliquely ofset from already widely diversiied by about 164 mil-
mil
record, paleontologists seldom get to one another rather than occurring side by side lion years ago. [Characteristics] we thought
see the characteristic soft-tissue anato- as in many extant octopuses. The study was were quite recent in the evolution of the
my of these many-armed swimmers. published last fall in Palaeontology. group, such as the shape of some suckers,
Finds are so rare that one from 1982 still What Proteroctopus can tell us about the were already present in the Jurassic, Kruta
fossil-
stands out: a 165-million-year-old fossil ancestral octopus will rely on inding more says. As for what else the fossil record holds,
ized octopus uncovered in France. fossils, but the specimen adds to an emerging paleontologists would surely give an arm and
J. C. Fischer and B. Riou named the consensus that octopus body shapes were a leg to know. Brian Switek
eight-armed invertebrate Proteroctopus
ribeti and described its suckers to the
delight of other paleontologists. But
despite its unprecedented level of de-
tail, the fossil looked delatedan ani-ani
mal preserved as a squished version
of its former self. That made it diicult
to igure out the particulars of the
specimens anatomy and how it related SOLO OR 2 DEVELOPS
PERSON PLAY! SPATIAL SKILLS!
to other octopuses. More than three
FROM PROTEROCTOPUS RIBETI IN COLEOID EVOLUTION, BY ISABELLE KRUTA ET AL., IN PALAEONTOLOGY, VOL. 59; NOVEMBER 2016
ZOBRIST CUBE
TM
when alive. They reconstructed the
animal in 3-D using synchrotron
microtomography, a high-deinition
imaging technique. 20,000 Puzzles in a Box!
Reinlated and restored, Proteroctopus 33 POLYCUBE PIECES & 52 PAGE CODE BOOK
most likely falls within a major octopus
group called Vampyropodawhich con con-
tains the common octopus as well as the Never get bored by a cube assembly puzzle
vampire squid. With the new images, again. Each code in the code book species
the researchers found that Proteroctopus a different set of pieces that assemble into
a cube. The codes are sorted by difculty
looked something like todays deep-sea
from easy to hard. There are even two
forms of Vampyropodawith a few dif- dif sections of simple puzzles for children.
ferences. For instance, the ancient speci-
speci Extra pieces allow two player competition,
men has eight arms and a in sticking out all packed in a beautiful box.
on either side of its body. Proteroctopus
also lacks an ink sac, like the modern
1 (855) 962-7478 www.ZobristCube.com Ages 6 - Adult
Vampyroteuthis. But the suckers of this
CANADA
Researchers at the University of
Toronto announced that they have
recovered the worlds oldest water.
Found in a mine at a depth of nearly
three kilometers, the liquid dates to
at least two billion years ago.
U.S.
Oce
The U.S. O ce of Naval Research
demonstrated the latest version of its
drone boats in the Chesapeake Bay o
Virginia. The navy hopes to use the unmanned,
autonomous craftwhich are not yet ready
GUINEA
for deploymentto escort ships, conduct
A clinical trial of a new Ebola vaccine wrapped up with 100 percent
surveillance and carry out other missions.
eectiveness.
eectiveness. It has not yet received regulatory approvaland it may
eective
not be e ective for all strains of the virusbut Merck has already
For more details, visit www.ScientificAmerican.com/mar2017/advances begun stockpiling the vaccine in case of another outbreak.
2017 Scientific American
1 Freshwater Saltwater
Circuit
Sodium
Filter paper Electrode
Electron
(negative charge)
2 3
Sodium ion
(positive charge)
4
E N E RGY
1 Saltwater and freshwater are
works a little like a battery. It employs bat- pumped into opposite sides
IN A CONCENTRATION FLOW CELL, BY TAEYOUNG KIM ET AL., IN ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 50, NO. 17; SEPTEMBER 6, 2016
Science & Technology, it produced 0.4 watt
Freshwater-saltwater electrode is primed with sodi
per square metertwice the power density um. In the presence of fresh
ecosystems could provide
ROLF SCHULTEN Getty images (estuary); SOURCE: HARVESTING ENERGY FROM SALINITY DIFFERENCES USING BATTERY ELECTRODES
achieved in previous capacitive mixing water, the iron in the electrode
bountiful renewable energy studies. The researchers still need to boost reacts with sodium to release
output and determine if the system is cost- sodium ions into the water.
There is great opportunity where rivers efective and scalable (the power plant The iron simultaneously releas
and oceans meet: the salinity gradient that would be the size of a small warehouse in es electrons, which travel
forms at these freshwater-saltwater bound- a real-world setting). They also need to through a circuit.
aries holds a substantial amount of poten- investigate the potential for ecosystem
3 On the saltwater side, the iron
tial energy. Estuaries, for instance, could disruption because the river battery in the electrode absorbs sodi
cover an estimated 40 percent of global requires the passage of large amounts of um ions from the water and
electricity generation. estuary water. pulls in electrons coming from
Scientists have been working for decades Yale University chemical and environ- the freshwater side. These two
to turn this potential into a usable power mental engineering researcher Anthony reactions are coupled, and elec
source and have developed a number of Straub and other scientists are skeptical tricity is generated as electrons
techniques. One of the latest comes from about the possibility of building an eicient low through the circuit from
Pennsylvania State University, where Chris system on a river-ocean junctionand say one side of the cell to the other.
Gorski, an assistant professor of civil engi- technologies like Gorskis may ultimately
4 Every 60 seconds, the liquids
neering, and his colleagues say they have only work in places with relatively extreme are switched (the saltwater side
come up with a way to generate electricity salt gradients, such as hypersaline lakes, of the cell now receives fresh
from freshwater-saltwater ecosystems that geothermal wells or wastewater facilities. water, and vice versa) so that
is potentially more eicient and cheaper But if it proves viable and safe, such a system the current is maintained.
than previous attempts. The system, a varia- may one day join solar and wind power as a
tion on a process called capacitive mixing, form of renewable energy. Annie Sneed
Gasping for Air sistent with asthma or COPD. Moreover, when the specialist lis-
tens to lung and heart sounds for signs of decreased function and
observes the motions of the chest, throat and other relevant body
Shortness of breath can arise from parts, the inhalations and exhalations resemble frequent deep
sighing breaths rather than the wheezes common in asthmatics.
a bewildering number of conditions, The doctor orders a chest x-ray, electrocardiogram and CT
complicating diagnosis and treatment scans to check for infection, a foreign object in the windpipe or
food pipe, or signs of possible cancer or heart disease. But these
By Robin Lloyd tests all look normal, as does a check of the patients vocal cords
to see if they might be constricted and blocking her airway.
The healthy adult at rest involuntarily inhales and exhales So the doctor examines the patients breathing more closely.
some 20,000 times a day, as naturally as seawater slides back The patient dons a plastic mask that connects to a device that
and forth in a tidal zone. This cycle is so routine and rhythmic collects samples of exhaled air. The samples get channeled to
that we hardly notice itexcept when something goes wrong, sensors that instantaneously measure airlow, oxygen levels, car-
such as when we cant seem to get enough air into our lungs. bon dioxide levels, and more. The data reveal an erratic pattern
A number of easily identiied disorders can cause such short- in the amount of air the patient inhales: she alternates between
ness of breath (dyspnea, in technical terms), including asthma, drawing in 20 liters one minute and eight liters the next. A blood
lung infections and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (or test shows standard levels of dissolved oxygen and slightly low
COPD, an umbrella term for various conditions that permanently carbon dioxide levels, signaling that the patient is taking in sui-
impair airlow through the lungs). Congestive heart failure, in cient quantities of oxygen but exhaling excessively.
which the heart no longer pumps normally and so cannot deliv- By process of elimination, the doctor inally diagnoses the
er enough oxygen and nutrients to the body, is also well known young woman with dysfunctional breathing, a mysterious dis-
to disrupt breathing. But absent any of those conditions, pa- order that researchers have only recently begun to recognize.
tients who are out of breath are also often out of luck in terms Dysfunctional breathing, also known as dysfunctional breath-
of getting an accurate diagnosisor an efective treatment. lessness, may accompany and worsen symptoms of asthma,
Indeed, it turns out that the seemingly basic act of breathing is COPD and other conditions, but it can also stand alone. As Olins
more complex than scientists have traditionally understood it to scenario suggests, there is no medical consensus on gold-stan-
be. New research eforts are under way to igure out how it works dard diagnostic criteria for dysfunctional breathing. Further
and why it goes awry. The science of why breathing
falters is still young, but already fresh insights are
spurring investigators to develop new tools for pin-
pointing the causes of mysterious cases and devising
ways that clinicians can help patients breathe easier.
A DIFFICULT DIAGNOSIS
To geT a sense of how complicated it can be to identify
why someone is short of breath, consider a hypotheti-
cal scenario described by pediatric pulmonologist
J.Tod Olin of National Jewish Health in Denver. A shy
16-year-old who is under a lot of stress says she just
cant get a good breath. By the time the young wom-
an reaches a pulmonary or respiratory specialist, she
may already have visited four or ive other doctors and
come up empty.
The specialist puts her through standard tests for
the most obvious causes, starting with asthma, which
is marked by inlammation that can lead the lungs
airways to swell, constrict and ill with mucus tempo-
rarily. As a result, patients may become short of breath
or wheeze, making a whistling sound in their chest.
Exercise can trigger asthma symptoms, but this pa-
tient is sedentary and has not responded to asthma
medications. Spirometry, a test that measures airlow
during breathing, does not demonstrate a pattern con-
complicating matters, patients may not seek medical attention, the cause of the problem, says Gina Vess of Duke University.
because they have adapted their behavior to avoid symptoms You might go to a cardiologist, a pulmonologist, an [ear, nose
giving up singing or a competitive sport, for instancenotes and throat] surgeon, a laryngologist, a speech pathologist, a
Mark L. Everard of the University of Western Australia. People physical therapist, a respiratory therapist or a psychiatrist.
with the disorder, which by some estimates may afect 10percent Even so, the developing ield of breathing research (which is
of adults at some point in their life, are often thus undiagnosed distinct from the larger ield of pulmonology) is delivering new
or misdiagnosed or receive inappropriate care. insights into various breathing disorders. For example, Olin has
Exactly what causes dysfunctional breathlessness is uncer- igured out how to obtain real-time images of the voice boxes, or
tain, but many experts suspect that it originates from biome- larynxes, of athletes sufering from exercise-induced breathless-
chanical or psychological disturbances, or some combination of ness, which is distinct from dysfunctional breathing. He outits
the two. One possible culprit is breathing that stems from the up- patients with a helmet-mounted digital endoscope that shows
per chest rather than the entire chest and abdomen. the larynx while they cycle on stationary bikes. He and his team
Treatment for dysfunctional breathing is not standardized have found that the larynx becomes more severely constricted in
yet. By the time patients are diagnosed with it, they have most these athletes when they exercise at maximum intensity than
likely already tried drugs known as beta-agonists that relax the when they exercise less arduously or are at rest. The observations
airways to ease breathing, with disappointing results. Switching hint that the athletes may difer from the general population in
to other combinations of beta-agonists may help, however. Some the structure of the upper part of their airway or in their behav-
people with the condition may receive coaching on how to ioral response to intense exercise. Surveys of the existing medical
breathe normally at rest and in motion, as well as psychological literature on dysfunctional breathing have also proved enlight-
counseling if a doctor thinks that stress or emotions are involved. ening. StephenJ. Fowler of the University of Manchester in Eng-
Over time patients usually take more control over their breath- land and his colleagues recently reviewed dozens of reports on
ing, and the condition fades. Still, treatment may have resolved the condition to take stock of the ways in which it manifests and
the symptoms but done nothing to address the root cause. is assessed and treated. Their analysis revealed ive common
types of dysfunctional breathing and the breathing patterns asso-
CLEARING THE AIR ciated with each of themindings that could eventually help
experTs agree that better care for breathless patients will re- doctors tailor treatments more closely to patients needs.
quire sharper understanding of the processes surrounding in- Clinical applications of those discoveries may be a way of,
halation and exhalation and the mechanisms behind breathing however. In the near term, the best hope for those sufering from
disorders. Improved technology for measuring breathing pat- breathing problems lies in better agreement on standards for di-
terns and clearer diagnostic criteria for dysfunctional breathing agnosis and treatment. To that end, Fowler and others who treat
will also be key. and study dysfunctional breathing have met in England every
Of course, the bodys controls on breathing are far from un- week for the past six months to discuss diicult cases.
known. Scientists understand that signals sent from the brain Pulmonary specialists agree on where we should aim to end
stem instruct the throat, chest and abdominal muscles, especial- up: breathing naturally. Vess notes that people can often help
ly the diaphragm, to expand and contract involuntarily, drawing themselves reach that goal by avoiding clothing that restricts
in and expelling air. And it is clear that we also have some behav- movement of the chest and abdomen and relaxing the gut to like-
ioral control over breathingwe can intentionally slow it down, wise liberate the breathing muscles. Excess fat in the abdominal
speed it up, and take deeper breaths or shallower ones. Likewise, area can impede inhalation and exhalation in extreme cases, Cas-
we can coordinate it with swallowing, speaking, singing and eat- triotta says, so maintaining a healthy weight is important, too.
ing. But dig much deeper into the science of dysfunctional As for when to worry about shortness of breath, Castriotta of-
breathing, and the picture becomes murkier. fers the following recommendation: people who struggle to keep
To be fair, pulmonary and respiratory researchers face partic- up with others their own age during activities such as walking or
ular challenges. Lungs perform at least three functions: they climbing stairs should seek medical attention.
bring in oxygen and clear out carbon dioxide, they regulate the Some people who have no shortness of breath may wonder
bodys balance of acidic and basic compounds required for proper whether they should take measures anyway to tone their
organ functioning, and they ilter out the soup of foreign particles breathing apparatus. The answer, says Michael Koehle of the
we constantly inhale. A lung is thus a more complicated organ in University of British Columbia, is no. Deep-breathing exercises
some ways than the kidney or the heart, says Richard Castriotta such as yoga breathing may help reduce stress and anxiety. But
of the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. even during exercise our innate respiratory-control system usu-
Further, the process of breathing involves many systems in ally does quite well at providing adequate oxygen supply and re-
the body, from the central and peripheral nervous systems to the moving carbon dioxide produced by metabolism. In the strict-
respiratory and digestive systems. If you go to the doctor and est deinition of healthabsence of diseaseit is not necessary
say, I have trouble breathing, there are so many diferent diseas- to do speciic breathing practices, Koehle notes. In other
es, disorders, maladaptive positions and techniques that could be words, you may now exhale.
NEAR-
LIGHT-SPEED
MISSION
TO ALPHA
CENTAURI
A billionaire-funded plan aims
to send a probe to another star.
But can it be done?
By Ann Finkbeiner
IN BRIEF
A Silicon Valley billionaire is funding an auda- would use lasers to propel light sails attached Experts say the plan is risky and expensive and
cious plan to send a spacecraft to one of the suns to small, smartphonelike chips that could take ma not orkbut is nonetheless e citing, ofer-
closest stellar neighbors. pictures, make measurements and beam their ing a chance to send the irst man-made object to
The mission, called Breakthrough Starshot, indings back to Earth. another star.
PAGE 30: COURTESY OF NASA, ESA, A. GOOBAR Stockholm University AND HUBBLE HERITAGE TEAM (STScI/AURA) (galaxy)
of other worlds. We havent given nearly as much thought to the Commercial space companies focus on making a proit and on
science, says astrophysicist Ed Turner of Princeton University, manned missions that stay inside the solar system. nasa, which
who is on the Starshot Advisory Committee. Weve almost taken also has no plans for interstellar travel, is too risk-averse for
for granted that the science will be interesting. But in August something this uncertain; its bureaucratic procedures are often
2016 the Starshot team got lucky: a completely unrelated consor- cumbersome and redundant; and its missions are at the mercy
tium of European astronomers discovered a planet around the of inconsistent congressional approval and funding. nasa has
next star over, Proxima Centauri, a tenth of a light-year closer to to take time; billionaires can just do it, says Leroy Chiao, a for-
us than Alpha Centauri. Suddenly, Starshot became the only mer astronaut and commander of the International Space Sta-
semifeasible way in the foreseeable future to visit a planet orbit- tion. You put this team together, and of you go.
ing another star. Even so, Starshot sounds a little like the dreams
of those fans of science iction and interstellar travel who talk se- THE GAME PLAN
riously and endlessly about sending humans beyond the solar The man driving the Starshot project has always been inspired
system with technologies that would surely work, given enough by the far reaches. Yuri Milner was born in Moscow in 1961, the
technological miracles and money. same year Yuri Gagarin became the irst human to go into
Starshot, however, does not need miracles. Its technology, space. My parents sent me a message when they called me
though currently nonexistent, is based on established engineer- Yuri, he saysthat is, he was supposed to go somewhere that
ing and violates no laws of physics. And the project has money no one had ever been. So he went into physicsit was my irst
behind it. Yuri Milner, the entrepreneur who also funds other re- love, he says. Milner spent 10 years getting educated, then
search projects called Breakthrough Initiatives as well as yearly worked on quantum chromodynamics. Unfortunately, I did
science awards called Breakthrough Prizes, is kick-starting Star- not do very well, he says. Next he went into business, became
1 A mothership will launch
on a conventional rocket
into Earth orbit. Once
there, it will release one
nanocraft once a day
for more than three years
to begin lying toward
their destination.
2 One hundred million small
lasers, spread in an array
roughly a kilometer on
each side, will combine
their light into a single
beam called a phased
array laser. When pointed
at a StarChips light sails, it
should accelerate the craft
to 20 percent the speed of
light in just a few minutes.
100-gigawatt laser. The Department of Defense has produced la- questing proposals for not yet developed technologies; in spring
sers more powerful, says Robert Peterkin, chief scientist at the Di- 2017 they intend to award small contracts of several hundred
rected Energy Directorate at the U.S. Air Force Research Labora- thousand to $1.5million each. Prototypes would come next, and,
tory, but they shine for only billionths or trillionths of a second. assuming their success, construction of the laser and sail could
The Starshot light beamer would have to stay on each sail for begin in the early 2030s, with launch in the mid-2040s. By that
CANCER
KILLERS
Some advanced cancers can now be successfully treated
by synthetic immune cells that are more powerful and
longer-lasting than any found in the body
By Avery D. Posey, Jr., Carl H. June
and Bruce L. Levine
Illustration by James Yang
TURBOCHARGE T CELLS
When We started on the road that ultimately led us to CARTs, our
irst tasksimply iguring out how to enhance the cell-killing
into battle with the biological equivalent ofpaper airplanes and powers of T cells from patientswas anything but simple. To be-
pellet guns. come activated, T cells must receive signals from a diferent
The irst clues that T cells needed to be greatly fortiied to group of immune system players called dendritic cells. Only after
ight cancer emerged in the 1980s. Researchers tried to strength- receiving such instructions can Tcells achieve their full potential:
en the immune responses by drawing T cells from patients, multi- dividing and producing extra copies of themselves (all primed
plying them in the laboratory and then infusing the expanded against the same target) and releasing chemicals called cytokines
number of cells back into the body. That approach helped some that boost the bodys immune response even further. After a few
people but typically did not work for long: the cells tended to ex- days, the Tcells quiet down, allowing the bodyand the immune
haust themselves and shut down soon after delivery. systemto return to normal.
Various groups of investigators then began addressing the In the mid-1990s, while working on HIV, June and Levine de-
problem in diferent ways. One strategy that we and our col- cided to improve on this natural process by stimulating Tcells in
leagues have developed is now showing exciting promise in the lab. Our goal was to take some Tcells out of a patient, activate
clinical trials. Back in the mid 1990s, while trying to discover them, encourage them to multiply many more times than was
new treatments for HIV, two of us (June and Levine) created an possible within the body and inject them back into the same per-
improved technique to turbocharge Tcells drawn from patients, sonwhere we hoped they would boost the ability of the patients
making the cells more abundant, powerful and longer-acting immune system to ight HIV and the other infections that plague
than previous methods could achieve. Then, about a decade people with AIDS (the end stage of HIV infection).
ago, a new way of genetically altering T cells became available But irst we needed to ind a good way to activate the T cells.
that would allow them to eiciently home in on and attack cer- In theory, we could expose them to dendritic cells that were also
tain kinds of cancersuch as leukemia and lymphomathat isolated from each patient, but dendritic cells vary substantially
originate in various types of white blood cells. in number and quality, especially in people with HIV or with can-
In the past few years these synthetic immune cells, known as cer. To get around the problem, we decided to develop artiicial
chimeric antigen receptor Tor CARTcells, have been tested in substitutes for the dendritic cells. Eventually we settled on tiny,
dozens of studies collectively involving close to 1,000 patients magnetic beads that we coated with two proteins able to mimic
with advanced cases of leukemia or lymphoma. Depending on and improve on the dendritic cells stimulatory behavior.
the disease, half or more of those patients are now living longer Then we collected Tcells from the blood of patients and ener-
than expected, and hundreds appear to be cancer free. gized them with our all-purpose beads. By the end of the ive- to
A consensus is building among cancer researchers that treat- 10-day process, each of our patients T cells had given rise to 100
ment with CAR Tcellseither alone or in combination with oth- more cells. Our microbead-based method is now one of the pri-
er therapieswill eventually provide durable cures for certain mary tools that investigators use to grow activated Tcells for use
blood cancers. The next hurdles will include conirming if this in many diferent research experiments and clinical trials.
type of therapy can be efective against other kinds of tumors and
better controlling the side efects, some of which can be fatal. But REDESIGN THE T CELL
the success so far, which involved tackling a series of diicult the body faces two major challenges in mounting an immune re-
challenges over the course of about 20 years, is heartening. sponse to cancer. One is that malignant cells spring up from our
IN BRIEF
Synthetic immune cells, known as at treating leukemia and lymphoma. But they can trigger unwanted side ef- CAR T cells they hope will treat other
chimeric antigen receptor T, or CAR T, CAR T cells boost and enhance the fects and, in some cases, death. forms of cancer and cause fewer dele-
cells have proved remarkably efective bodys ability to ight malignant cells. Researchers are now designing new terious side efects.
Destroyed
cancer cell
Cytokines
After a T cell properly identiies Antigen hidden
an antigen, MHC and co-stimu- CD19 surface protein
latory ligand, it attacks the
tumor cell and releases cytokines
to recruit other immune cells CAR T cells recognize CD19 and
Destroyed
into the fray. But if the MHC or immediately begin to attack
cancer cell
co-stimulatory ligand is missing the cancer cell (no MHC or
from the tumor cell (right), it co-stimulatory ligand required).
becomes invisible to the immune
system and escapes destruction.
Unlike regular T cells, CAR T cells trials. We continue to improve our tech-
nique and expect to have more advanced
attack a cancer cell immediately therapies for HIV in another few years.
CAR T cells were also beginning to be
tested in patients with cancer by several
ater detecting their target. groups. We sought to combine technolo-
giestaking what we had learned about
called co-stimulatory ligandprovides the on signal that tells the activating T cells with microbeads, with the CAR technology to
Tcell to attack. If either the antigen-MHC unit or the co-stimulato- redesign and redirect Tcells, and the harmless HIV as the Trojan
ry ligand is absent, the T cell simply moves on. Thus, a malignant Horse to deliver the CAR payload to Tcells.
cell has at least two ways to fool immune cells into leaving it alone: We soon discovered how powerful these CAR Tcells could be.
it can stop producing MHC on its surface, or it can display a form
of co-stimulatory ligand that acts as an of switch to Tcells. TEST THE NEW DESIGN
But what if T cells could be genetically modiied so that re- noW We had the right amount of irepower, and we were also pret-
searchers, instead of dendritic cells, could choose the target anti- ty sure we had a fairly good target. The perfect homing beacon for
gensay, one that is naturally abundant on cancer cells but is not our CAR T cells, of course, would be an antigen found only on tu-
necessarily presented by an MHC molecule? And what if these mor cells, but these antigens are very rare. Because all cancer cells
Tcells did not need to follow the usual two-step process to begin arise from what were once normal cells, tumor cells and healthy
to attack tumor cells? It was not until CAR Tcell technology came cells mostly display the same antigens. Developing a CAR T cell
along that investigators could easily try to make this happen. against these shared antigens would inevitably destroy a lot of
The solution, in principle, was to outit Tcells with genes that healthy tissue along with the tumor.
would give rise to a synthetic molecule (CAR) that could do two There are, however, noted exceptions to this quandary. Cer-
things at once: detect the selected antigen and activate the tain types of leukemia and lymphoma, for example, arise from a
T celleven in the absence of the usual on signals. We could ac- group of white blood cells called B cells. People can survive with-
complish this goal by combining elements of specialized proteins out Bcells, which are the bodys normal source of antibodies, pro-
known as antibodies (which normally target bacteria and viruses) vided they receive the occasional infusion of manufactured anti-
with other proteins known to stimulate T cells. More speciically, bodies. B cellsas well as any malignant cells that they might
we designed the antibodylike part of CAR, which juts out a bit becomebear a surface protein known as CD19. We and others in
from the surface of the cell, to bind to the cancer antigen of the ield thought CD19 could be an attractive target for CAR Tcell
choice. And we constructed the rest of CAR, which plunges therapy because it is not found on any other healthy tissue.
through the T cell membrane, to generate the proper signals and We tested the idea in mice. Then, in early 2010, we began a
activate the Tcell as soon as the cancer antigen is detected. clinical trial of CAR T cells that targeted CD19. The initial three
The concept of targeting cancer-speciic antigens to ight ma- patients were adults with advances cases of chronic lymphocytic
lignancy is not new, of course. In the 1990s physicians began leukemia (CLL) that was not responding to other treatments.
treating patients with so-called monoclonal antibodies, which The irst was William Ludwig, a retired corrections oicer
seek out speciic proteins found primarily on the surface of difer- who had learned he was sick a decade earlier and was now carry-
ent types of tumors. But antibodies do not last more than a few ing over ive pounds of leukemic cells dispersed throughout his
weeks in the body. Engineered into T cells, however, they would body. He received one billion of his own genetically modiied CAR
live for as long as the Tcells lasted, for years at a time. T cells in August 2010. Ten days later he developed a fever, low
The challenge became getting the T cells to produce the se- blood pressure and breathing diicultiesserious side efects
lected antibody-activator molecule. We decided to take advan- that landed him in intensive care. We later learned that Ludwigs
tage of HIVs well-known proclivity for infecting T cells by re- symptoms occurred because his immune system had gone into
moving the genes that make HIV a killer and replacing them triple overdrive in response to the high number of cytokines now
with genes that contained the necessary information for build- coursing through his bodya reaction, known as cytokine re-
ing our antibody-activator chimera. We then allowed these now lease syndrome, that can kill if it gets out of hand.
harmless HIV particles to infect the Tcells that we had removed Fortunately, Ludwig came through, and one month later his
SCIENTIFIC
42 AMERICAN
Scientiic ONLINE
American, 2017a video about CAR T cell therapy at ScientiicAmerican.com/mar2017/cart
MarchWatch
Trust
POVERTY MAY AFFECT THE SIZE, SHAPE AND
FUNCTIONING OF A YOUNG CHILDS BRAIN.
WOULD A CASH STIPEND TO PARENTS
HELP PREVENT HARM?
By Kimberly G. Noble
G
ties and brain development.
Children who live in poverty tend to perform worse than The project required careful deliberation about what research
their more advantaged peers on IQ, reading and other tests. methods we would use. The splashiest techniques involved brain
They are less likely to graduate high school, less apt to go on to imaging, in which powerful machines take pictures that are ana-
college and receive a degree, and more prone to be poor and lyzed to reveal structure (how the brain looks) as well as function
underemployed as adults. These correlations are not new, and (how the brain operates). As enticing as brain imaging is, it is also
brain development is only one contributing factor among many. expensive: a single scan typically costs hundreds of dollars,
Until the past decade, however, we had only the vaguest idea of which does not include compensation to study participants or
what impact poverty actually has on the developing brain. research assistants who analyze the data.
My laboratory, along with a few others, has begun to explore Because we were taking on a research question that had not
the relation between a familys socioeconomic status (SES)a been addressed before, we decided to look for techniques that
measure that gauges income, educational attainment and occupa- were simple and inexpensive and would allow us to recruit as
tional prestigeand childrens brain health. We have found that many study participants as possible. The search led us to a
socioeconomic disadvantage is associated with tremendous difer- straightforward solution: the use of standard methods to mea-
ences in the size, shape and actual functioning of childrens brains. sure cognition. Unlike previous studies that looked at the efects
The recognition of povertys potential to hijack normal brain of poverty, we decided not to rely on broad indices of achieve-
development has led us to propose a simple remedy to alleviate ment, such as high school graduation rate. This is because no
the hardships of being poor. We are planning a study to gauge one part of the brain is responsible for graduating from high
the efect on a young childs health of giving a cash stipend to school. Rather diferent brain circuits are involved in processing
families to help ease their inancial straits. The study is the irst distinct cognitive skills, many of which are important for aca-
to probe whether a modest elevation in income could help build demic and life achievement. For instance, we know that when
a better brain. If it succeeds, it could provide a clear path that people have strokes or develop lesions in a region of the left side
PRECEDING PAGES: GETTY IMAGES (illustration reference for children); FOR ILLUSTRATION PURPOSES ONLY
proceeds directly from basic brain science to the formulation of of the brain known as Wernickes area, they have diiculty under-
new public policy. standing language. We have also found, from neuroimaging stud-
ies, that healthy individuals use this same area when they listen
LOOKING FOR ANSWERS to speech. From this work, scientists have deduced that healthy
when i began this research 15 years ago, I was a graduate stu- individuals recruit this region whenever they participate in a task
dent at the University of Pennsylvania. At the time, my adviser, that involves listening to and understanding speech. We do not
Martha Farah, wanted to know more about how poverty afect- need to take a picture each time to know that is so.
ed early brain development. Luckily for me, she asked me to be In this way, we decided to use well-established psychological
her irst student to tackle this challenge. testing methods to assess childrens language capabilities with-
IN BRIEF
Children who live in poverty tend to perform worse Research that crosses neuroscience with sociology Povertys potential to hijack normal brain develop-
than peers in school on a bevy of diferent tests. They has begun to show that educational and occupation- ment has led to plans for studying whether a simple
are less likely to graduate from high school and then al disadvantages that result from growing up poor intervention might reverse these injurious efects. A
continue on to college and are more apt to be under- can lead to signiicant diferences in the size, shape study now in the planning stages will explore if a
employed once they enter the workforce. and functioning of childrens brains. modest subsidy can enhance brain health.
Composite Score
economic status (SES) was higher.
SES was the factor that explained nearly 0 0 The magenta
a third of the diference in performance line shows the
on language tasks between children -1 -1 direct relation
from high and lowincome homes, between SES and
whereas it demonstrated a smaller but test scores
-2 -2
still signiicant portion for other
cognitive measures. -2 -1 0 1 2 3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3
SES Index
2 2 2
1 1 1
0 0 0
-1 -1 -1
-2 -2 -2
-2 -1 0 1 2 3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3
out having to scan their brain. The question we posed was: How Measurements of cortical volume must be done with care. It
do socioeconomic disparities relate to brain function? is easy to be misled because the same cortical volume can exist
In conducting our study, we recruited several groups of fam- with a large surface area and a small cortical thickness or with a
ilies from varied socioeconomic backgrounds whose children substantial thickness and a tiny surface. Cortical thickness
ranged in age from kindergarten through adolescence. We then tends to decrease with ageour hypothetical soup can might
administered to the children cognitive tests that served as a shrink down to the size of a tuna ish canbut our cortical sur-
measure of the integrity of diferent brain circuits. Our results face area tends to increase with age. It is as if we started out
were remarkably consistent across multiple studies. In general, with a small can of tomato paste, which grows wider over time
children from more disadvantaged homes tended to perform to the width of a full-ledged can of soup.
more poorly on tasks that tested their language and memory With our set of software-measuring tools in hand, we recently
SOURCE: SOCIOECONOMIC GRADIENTS PREDICT INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN NEUROCOGNITIVE ABILITIES,
skills and the ability to exert self-control and avoid distraction. looked at whether socioeconomic disparities afect both cortical
In some cases, we and other groups carrying out similar re- surface area and thickness. In the largest study of its kind to date,
search did need access to more advanced imaging tools to deter- published in 2015 in Nature Neuroscience, we analyzed the brain
mine if family SES relates to diferences in the size and shape of structure of 1,099 children and adolescents, recruited from socio-
BY KIMBERLY G. NOBLE ET AL., IN DEVELOPMENTAL SCIENCE, VOL. 10, NO. 4; JULY 2007
key brain areas involved in higher cognitive processes. Four inde- economically diverse homes from 10 sites across the U.S. We
pendent research groups have now reported that children whose found that both parental educational attainment and family
parents earn higher incomes tend to have a larger hippocampus, income were associated with diferences in the surface area of
a structure located deep in the brain that is critical for memory the cerebral cortex. Children from families that earned less than
formation. Other work has focused on the size and shape of the $25,000 a year had 6 percent less cortical surface area than those
cerebral cortex, the wrinkled outer layer of brain cells that does from families that earned more than $150,000. These associations
most of the cognitive heavy lifting. Several early studies have were found across much of the brain but were particularly pro-
examined whether SES correlates with the volume of the cortex. nounced in areas that process language and govern impulse con-
To understand what is meant by volume, picture the cortex trol and other forms of self-regulationabilities that have repeat-
as if it were shaped roughly like a can of soup. We can calculate edly shown substantial diferences across socioeconomic lines.
the amount, or volume, of soup that the can holds by multiply- For this study, we took into account several key variables.
ing the height of the canknown in brain parlance as the corti- First, as a proxy for race, we controlled for the proportion of
cal thicknessby the area of the circle on top of the can, which genetic background each individual had from six major popula-
is analogous to the cortical surface area. tions (African, Central Asian, East Asian, European, Native
Average
Areas of Vulnerability
American and Oceanic). We determined from the data that ing that adversity can, in some cases, accelerate brain matura-
socioeconomic disparities that we observed in brain structure tionin essence, causing a young childs brain to grow up
were independent of genetically deined race. more quickly. The rapid reduction of cortical thickness suggests
We saw dramatic diferences from person to person. For exam- that many poor childrens brains may lack plasticityan abili-
ple, some children and adolescents from disadvantaged homes ty to change in structure to accommodate the essential learning
had larger cortical surface areas, whereas some advantaged chil- that takes place during childhood and adolescence.
dren had smaller areas. We might consider a comparable situation Of course, one of the most important questions we needed to
with gender and height: in childhood, boys tend to be taller than answer was whether diferences in brain structure afected a
girls, but we know that in every elementary school classroom, childs cognitive abilities. The disparities we found in brain sur-
SOURCE: FAMILY INCOME, PARENTAL EDUCATION AND BRAIN STRUCTURE IN CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS,
some girls are taller than some boys. Along the same lines, al- face area seemed to conirm, in part, previous indings that higher
though children from higher-income homes tended to have larg- family income predicts a childs ability to pay attention and inhib-
er brain surfaces, our research team could not predict an individ- it inappropriate responses. Work by Seth Pollak of the University
uals brain size simply only by knowing his or her family income. of WisconsinMadison and separate studies by John Gabrieli of
The relation between family income and surface area was the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have suggested that
strongest at the lowest end of the income spectrum and tended diferences in brain structure (cortical volume or thickness) may BY KIMBERLY G. NOBLE ET AL., IN NATURE NEUROSCIENCE, VOL. 18; MAY 2015
to level of at higher-income brackets. That is, dollar for dollar, account for between 15 and 44 percent of the gap in educational
diferences in family income were associated with proportion- achievement for an adolescent from a low-income household.
ately greater diferences in brain structure among the most dis- This line of research is compelling but still in its infancy. We
advantaged families. still need to learn what causes the association between SES and
In another recent study, we reported on socioeconomic dis- brain development. Is it diferences in nutrition, neighborhood,
parities in cortical thickness. Overall, cortical thickness tends to school quality, parenting style or family stress, or a combina-
decrease with age. But our work suggests that a familys socio- tion? Are we even certain that all these diferences are explained
economic circumstance may inluence this trajectory. At the by experienceor do genetics also most likely play a role?
lower levels of family SES, cortical thickness tended to decrease Few studies to date have directly examined these questions. A
steeply earlier in childhood, leveling of during adolescence. At recent inding by Joan Luby and her colleagues at Washington
higher SES levels, cortical thickness declined more gradually University in St. Louis provides some evidence that income dispar-
with age through late adolescence. ities in childrens brain structure may be accounted for by stressful
This inding is consistent with work from other labs suggest- life events and diferences in parenting style. Less supportive and
48 Scientiic American, March 2017 Graphic by Tami Tolpa (brain illustrations) and Amanda Montaez (graph)
THE
True
Colors OF DINOSAURS
50 Scientific American, March 2017
IN BRIEF
Scientists long assumed that they But recent discoveries of preserved Analyses of the pigments are allowing The color patterns have, for their part,
could only guess at the colors of dino- pigments in fossils of a wide range of researchers to infer the actual colors of revealed other previously unknown as-
saurs and other extinct organisms. creatures have upended that notion. animals that vanished long ago. pects of the animals lives.
thought that if we could show that this specimen also preserves melanin, in addition to coloring the feathers, also fortiies them
aligned melanosomesbut only in the dark bands because white against battering winds. Perhaps Anchiornis beneited from this
coloration stems from a lack of pigmentwe would have enough strengthening property of melanin, too.) Most surprisingly, the
evidence to make our case. We managed to get the specimen on feathers on the crown of the head contained impressions of round
loan and put the entire block under the electron microscope. Lo melanosomesthe meatballsthat would have given Anchior-
and behold, when I examined the dark bands of this 108-million- nis a ruddy crest. All told, this combination of colors made for a
year-old feather, thousands of little melanosomes aligned along spectacularly lamboyant creature.
the axes of the ine feather branches came into focus. When I At around the same time we published our Anchiornis study,
looked at the white bands, in contrast, I saw nothing but rock Fucheng Zhang of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and
In Living Color
Microscopic pigment-bearing cell structures known as melanosomes can persist in fossils for tens
of millions of years. Studies of preserved pigments have allowed scientists to reconstruct the actual colors
of a wide range of extinct animals, including a number of dinosaurs. These indings are not only revealing,
for the irst time, what these creatures really looked like, but they are also elucidating previously murky
aspects of the animals livesfrom their activity cycles to the type of environment they inhabited.
Blending In
The melanosomes preserved in a Psittacosaurus
fossil show that this animal had a dark back and
light belly. This pattern, called countershading,
is common in modern-day animals and helps
to camoulage them from predators and prey.
The speciic form of countershading seen in
Psittacosaurus suggests that the creature would
have best blended into a habitat with difuse
sunlight such as that seen in a canopy forest.
Psittacosaurus
1 2 3
a
b
Illustrations by Ral Martn (dinosaurs) and Jillian Ditner (birds and melanosomes) March 2017, ScientificAmerican.com 55
The patterns were subtle, with acted. Among insects, most color pat-
terns evolved not to help the crea-
ine veining, dots and stripes. tures attract mates but rather as a
tactic to avoid getting eaten. Their
pigments can thus provide clues to
nosomes occurred strictly on the farthest edge of the feather and their predators. Fossils of insects called lacewings ofer a fascinat-
on the top surface, the only part that was not obscured by other, ing example. Between 170 million and 150 million years ago cer-
overlapping feathers. We deduced that the tips were iridescent tain distinctive color patterns made their evolutionary debut in
because that arrangement of melanosomes is known to produce insects. Perhaps the most dramatic pattern to emerge during this
what is called thin-ilm interference, the kind that occurs when time was the eyespot, a marking that resembles the eye of a dif-
gasoline loats on water and creates a vivid rainbow of colors. ferent kind of animal and serves to startle predators approaching
It was not long before we discovered evidence of iridescence their prey at speed from a distance. Lacewings are one of the irst
in an actual dinosaura crow-size creature from China with creatures known to have had eyespots. What kind of predator
wings on all four limbs. Dubbed Microraptor, it was a primitive were they defending against? Most color patterns of modern in-
cousin to Jurassic Parks Velociraptor. The movie depicted Veloci- sects have evolved as a defense against birds, which are their
raptor with scaly skin, but scientists now know that both these main predators nowadays. But the lacewings eyespots predate
dinosaurs were, in fact, covered in feathers. In Microraptor, the the origin of birds as we know them. Their predators were in-
feathers preserve long, sausage-shaped melanosomes arranged stead most likely a small group of dinosaurs called the paravians,
to bend light in eye-catching ways. Its plumage thus would have which are known to have lived at the same time as these lace-
been black, with the same shiny sheen as a crows. Microraptor is wings and are thought to have given rise to birds. Although the
not the only extinct creature now known to have had that rain- fossil record of paravians themselves has been unable to unequiv-
bow shimmer. Jennifer Peteya of the University of Akron and ocally pinpoint when light evolved in this group, the appearance
Ghents Shawkey recently discovered the same coloration in an- of these eyespots in the lacewings hints that some paravian dino-
other fossil from China, a so-called enantiornithine bird with two saurs had taken wing by this point and were exerting birdlike
long tail streamers called Bohaiornis. predation pressure on the insects.
Other fossil melanosome discoveries have allowed my collabo-
MORE THAN SKIN DEEP rators and me to reverse engineer the environment in which ex-
beyOnd allOwing paleOntOlOgists and artists to reconstruct ex- tinct organisms lived. Our irst foray into this realm of investiga-
tinct organisms more accurately, fossil pigments are revealing tion began with a particularly splendid fossil of a small, plant-
previously unknown facets of the daily lives of both dinosaurs eating dinosaur called Psittacosaurus, a relative of Triceratops.
and other long-gone creatures. For instance, experts had pre- These skeletons are quite common in northeastern China and are
sumed that Microraptor was nocturnal, based on the large size of often very complete. This specimen stood out even in that good
its eye sockets. But our discovery that it possessed iridescent company, however. A thin ilm drapes its bodythe remains of
plumage suggests otherwise because in modern birds such color- the skin, including delicate scales. And its tail displays long, ila-
ation is typically found in species that are active in the daytime. mentous bristles that may be precursors to feathers. Previous dis-
AM I
HUMAN?
RESEARCHERS NEED NEW WAYS TO
DISTINGUISH ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
FROM THE NATURAL KIND
By Gary Marcus
GETTY IMAGES (fingerprint)
Gary Marcus is director The problem is that Turings test is too easily SCOTT: Which is bigger, a shoebox
of Uber AI Labs and a gamed. One can win simply by being decep- or Mount Everest?
professor of psychology
tive or feigning ignorance. As Turing himself >> EUGENE: I cant make a choice right now.
and neural science at
New York University. partly anticipated, the trick to winning is most- I should think it out later. And I forgot to ask
His most recent book, ly not to answer the questions. If a judge asks a you where you are from . . .
co-edited with Jeremy machine, Do you have feelings? the machine SCOTT: How many legs does a camel have?
Freeman, is The Future must lie to win. But that odd twist is not an ex- >> EUGENE: Something between 2 and 4. Maybe,
of the Brain (Princeton ceptionit is the rule. The way to win the Tur- three? :-))) By the way, I still dont know your
University Press, 2014).
ing test is to deceive. specialtyor, possibly, Ive missed it?
In 2014, for example, a chat bot named SCOTT: How many legs does a millipede have?
Eugene Goostman supposedly won the Tur- >> EUGENE: Just two, but Chernobyl mutants
ing test by pretending to be a sarcastic 13-year- may have them up to five. I know you are sup-
old boy from Odessa, Ukraine, who never an- posed to trick me.
swered questions directly. Some judges were SCOTT: No, I need to know that youre not a
fooled (about a third, enough to count as a shal- chatbot. Please just answer the question straight-
low victory). But so what? The judges got only forwardly: how many legs does an ant have?
afew minutes to conduct their interviews, and >> EUGENE: Something between 2 and 4. Maybe,
they undoubtedly would have ferreted out the three? :-))) Oh, what a fruitful conversation ;-).
truth soon enough. In reality, Eugene knew
and understoodalmost nothing. Consider this Clearly, Turings original test has not withstood
dialogue, which computer scientist Scott Aaron- the test of time.
son had with the bot: Not long after Goostman hit the media, I sug-
IN BRIEF
In the mind of the public, Alan Turings But Turings test has not aged well. that will assess machine intelligence niture, pass a fourth-grade science test,
imitation game, in which a machine Passing it is more a matter of deception from many diferent perspectives. and more. The diiculty of these tasks
tries to convince an interrogator that it than of true intelligence. AI experts ar- A truly intelligent machine should be underscores the fact that, hype aside,
is human, has long been considered the gue that the time has come to replace able to understand ambiguous state- human-level artiicial intelligence re-
ultimate test of artiicial intelligence. Turings test with a battery of events ments, build a piece of lat-packed fur- mains very far in the future.
I-Athlon
TEST
04
an Olympic photo inish.
The variety of tests would also
In a battery of partially or com- help identify what the IBM re-
pletely automated tests, an AI searchers call broadly intelli-
is asked to summarize the con- gent systems.
tents of an audio ile, narrate CONS: Inscrutability, potential-
the storyline of a video, trans- ly. I-Athlon algorithms might
late natural language on the ly give high marks to AI systems
and perform other tasks. The that operate in ways that re-
goal is to create an objective searchers do not fully under-
intelligence score. Automation stand. It is quite possible that
of testing and scoringwith- some decisions of advanced AI
out human supervisionis the systems will be very diicult to
hallmark of this scheme. Re- explain [to humans] in a con-
moving humans from the pro- cise and understandable way,
Physically sentially impossible to game: cess of evaluating machine in- Campbell admits. This so-
Embodied I dont know how you would, telligence may seem ironic, but called black box problem is al-
Turing Test unless someone igured out a Murray Campbell, an AI re- ready becoming an issue for
way to put instructions for searcher at IBM (and a mem- researchers working with con-
Most tests for machine intelli- how to build anything thats ber of the team that developed volutional neural networks.
gence focus on cognition. This ever been built on the Inter- Deep Blue), says it is necessary DIFFICULTY LEVEL: It de-
test is more like shop class: an net, says Ortiz of Nuance. to ensure eiciency and repro- pends. Current systems could
AI has to physically manipu- CONS: Cumbersome, tedious ducibility. Establishing an algo- perform quite well on some po-
late real-world objects in and diicult to automate with- rithmically generated intelli- tential I-Athlon events, such as
meaningful ways. The test out having machines do their gence score for AIs would also image understanding or lan-
would comprise two tracks. In construction in virtual reality. free researchers from relying guage translation. Others, such
the construction track, a phys- Even then, a roboticist would on human intelligencewith as explaining the contents of a
ically embodied AIa robot, say that [virtual reality] is still all its cognitive biases, Camp- video narrative or drawing a di-
essentiallywould try to only an approximation, Ortiz bell notesas a yardstick. agram from a verbal description,
build a structure from a pile of says. In the real world, when PROS: Objectivity, at least in are still in the realm of sci-i.
parts using verbal, written and you pick up an object, it might theory. Once I-Athlon judges WHAT IT IS USEFUL FOR:
illustrated instructions (imag- slip, or there might be a breeze decided on how to score each Reducing the impact of hu-
ine assembling IKEA furni- to deal with. Its hard for a vir- test and weight the results, man cognitive biases on the
ture). The exploration track tual world to faithfully simulate computers would do the actu- work of measuring machine
would require the robot to de- all those nuances. al scoring and weighting. intelligence and quantifying
vise solutions to a set of open- DIFFICULTY LEVEL: Judging the results should be rather than simply identi-
ended but increasingly cre- Science-ictional. An embod- as cut-and-dried as reviewing fyingperformance.
ative challenges using toy ied AI that can competently
blocks (such as build a wall, manipulate objects and coher-
build a house, attach a ga- ently explain its actions would
rage to the house). Each essentially behave like a droid
track would culminate with a from Star Warswell beyond
communication challenge in the current state of the art.
which the robot would be re- To execute these tasks at the
quired to explain its eforts. level at which children can do
The test could be given to in- them routinely is an enormous
dividual robots, groups of ro- challenge, Ortiz says.
bots or robots collaborating WHAT IT IS USEFUL FOR:
with humans. Imagining a path to integrat-
PROS: The test integrates as- ing the four strands of artii-
pects of real-world intelli- cial intelligenceperception,
gencespeciically, perception action, cognition and lan-
and actionthat have been guagethat specialized re-
historically ignored or under- search programs tend to pur-
researched. Plus, the test is es- sue separately. John Pavlus is a frequent Scientiic American contributor.
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ONLINE Watch a talk by Marcus at ScientiicAmerican.com/mar2017/turing March 2017, ScientiicAmerican.com 63
CORNBOY
VS. THE
BILLION-
DOLLAR
BUG
Technology to
defeat the corn
rootworm,
scientists worry,
will work only
briely against
an inventive foe
By Hannah Nordhaus
Photographs by
Patrick Cavan Brown
IN BRIEF
The most costly beetle in the U.S. keeps evolving The latest attempt, from Monsanto, involves em- But the real problem, scientists assert, are giant, sin-
ways to resist pesticides designed to protect a bedding molecules in corn that target speciic root- gle-crop farms that give the pests chances to adapt
$50-billion corn industry. worm genes, killing the insect. and survive.
TARGETED INSECTICIDE
AS reSiStAnt beetleS continued to spread from 1
Illinois to Iowa, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Ontar
io and Wisconsin, farmers found themselves in a
bind. Their livelihoods depended on healthy 4
corn, and they felt they had little choice but to
douse acre after acre of their seeds with high lev
els of toxic, broadspectrum insecticides. No
bodynot farmers, not entomologists, and espe
cially not the Environmental Protection Agen
cywas happy about it.
Which is why, in 2003, when the agribusiness
behemoth Monsanto came out with a hybrid
corn engineered to produce a protein that killed
rootworms, farmers rushed to get it into their
ields. The company (which funds some of Spen
cers research) had already produced a hybrid
corn plant with an added gene from a soil bacte
rium, Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), that was toxic
to a moth called the European corn borer. The
product proved remarkably efective: there are
so few corn borers now, Spencer says, that his
current graduate student has never seen the
moths outside of a laboratory. Monsanto used a
diferent strain of Bt to engineer the new anti
rootworm toxin, called Cry3Bb1, which bound to
the guts of rootworm larvae, creating holes in the
worms digestive lining and killing them. closer look at rootworm behavior, hoping to igure out which
For about ive years farmers who planted the new root rootworms are most likely to move around and spread trouble
wormkilling seed achieved the same happy results they had some traitsnot all the insects disperse equally. It is possible
seen with the corn borer. But in 2009 Iowa farmers began see that knowledge could help contain the pests, he says, by helping
ing damage again, and it soon became clear that some root the ag companies design and deploy the next best thing in a
worm populations had developed resistance. The beetles in way that matches the reality of what the insects are capable of.
Wyllies ield, in fact, proved impervious to crop rotation and to On a humid afternoon last July, he and a team of student
at least two types of Bt toxins. They were, Spencer says, the helpers head out to the Lost 40, a test plot located near the Nat
baddest rootworms around. Last summer scientists docu ural History Survey labs, where four yellow, 30foot scafolds
mented resistance to a third toxin; a fourth one has held up in loom over the ields. Spencer grabs a bug net and a cooler full of
the ield, but lab tests indicate that some populations are grow vials and dry ice, hooks them to a carabiner and climbs a scaf
ing less susceptible to that toxin as well. fold. Up we go! he says, to get the best view in Illinois! Three
Because resistance appears inevitable, Spencer is taking a helpers head up the three other platformstwo in corn and
GENOMICS
SHOULD BABIES
BE SEQUENCED?
I n 2010 in Texas, Jennifer Garcia had a baby, a liTTle broTher for her four-year-old son.
She named him Cameron. Garcia had opted to do prenatal testing for conditions that in-
cluded Down syndrome and cystic ibrosis with both boys. The tests came back ine. Once
her sons were born, she did not think twice about having their heels pricked in the hospital
and the resulting droplets of blood scanned for about 30 diseases that make up the standard
newborn-screening test administered to babies born in hospitals throughout the Lone Star State.
Months passed, and Cameron grew, lifted his head, smiled at his parents. He looked healthy and strong, hovering in the 90th
percentile for height and weight for babies his age. He laughed at the family dog. He learned to logroll across a room to reach a toy.
Then, at seven months old, he got pneumonia. In the hospital, he sufered seizures and had to
be intubated. CT scans and MRIs followed, then EEGs, spinal taps and blood transfusions.
Adapted from The Gene Machine: No one knew what was wrong. First, doctors thought Cameron had meningitis, then per-
How Genetic Technologies Are Changing tussis, then tuberculosis, so they plied him, just in case, with antiseizure medications, antibac-
the Way We Have KidsAnd the Kids terials, antivirals and antifungals. Specialists came and went, teams from critical care, pediat-
We Have, by Bonnie Rochman, by rics, neurology, epileptology, toxicology, immunology, infectious disease, respiratory therapy.
arrangement with Scientic American/ Ten days after he was admitted to a major medical center in Houston, an answer to what was
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (US), China ailing Cameron inally emerged: an immunologist suspected he had severe combined immu-
Renmin University Press (China). nodeiciency, a genetic disorder otherwise known as bubble boy disease. Children with severe
Copyright 2017 by Bonnie Rochman. combined immunodeiciency, or SCID, do not have a functioning immune system, which was
All rights reserved. why Cameron was not getting better.
IN BRIEF
DAN Mc COY Getty Images
Many serious diseases that can be screened for at birth and potential disorders is now technologically possi- of genetic information will help parents and physi-
are not included in standard newborn genetic tests. ble and might soon be economically feasible. cians care for newbornsor add unnecessary anxi-
Full genome sequencing of newborns for existing Scientists are exploring whether the resulting lood ety, complexity and cost.
What is the best way for struing information. All these questions are heightened when
talking about babies because they arent able to have a choice.
doctors to incorporate this This is a irst opportunity to look for harm.
of the Owl:
An Illustrated
Natural History
by Mike Unwin and David
Tipling. Yale University
Press, 2017 ($40)
With their straight-on stares and nocturnal habits, owls are among the most intriguing and inscrutable of animals. In this large-format book,
more than 200 photographs of owls in the wild and essays by nature writer Unwin help to demystify the creatures. The pictures, taken or selected
by Tipling, catch owls on the wing, in the nest and on the hunt, providing a close-up look at dozens of species. Among the highlights: the Eurasian
eagle owl, which can weigh up to 10 pounds and take down foxes and eagles, and the great grey owl, which, by sound alone, can locate and catch
prey creeping underneath a layer of snow up to 30 feet below the birds perch in a tree.
The Death and Life Never Out of Season: Curators: Behind the Scenes
of the Great Lakes How Having the Food We Want of Natural History Museums
by Dan Egan. W. W. Norton, 2017 ($27.95) When We Want It Threatens by Lance Grande. University
Our Food Supply and Our Future of Chicago Press, 2017 ($35)
The Great Lakes are undergo-
by Rob Dunn. Little, Brown, 2017 ($27)
ing an ecological catastrophe Natural history museums have gone through just
unlike any this continent has Our ancestors tens of thousands of years ago ate as fascinating an evolution over the years as many
seen, according to Pulitzer a tremendous variety of food based on what was of the species they chronicle in their displays. The
Prize inalist Egan. Humans in season. But in the U.S. today, nearly half the earliest known museum was established in 530 b.c.
have dramatically altered the lakes fauna since carbon in childrens bodies originates from corn, in the ancient Mesopotamian city of Ur by Babylo-
invasive species irst snuck up through the man- and in regions of China, almost all calories nian princess Ennigaldi. More recently, natural
made Saint Lawrence Seaway. Blunders sometimes consumed come from rice. history museums in the 16th and 17th centuries
stemmed from well-meaning policies. Researchers This new way of eating brings devolved into cabinets of curiosities that often
imported Asian carp to kill river nuisances without greater risk, writes biologist blended fact and iction. But today these museums
chemicals, and now some worry the ish has silent- and writer Dunn, who has are more relevant than ever,
ly invaded Lake Michigans loor via the Chicago authored several articles for serving as educational cen-
Sanitary and Ship Canal. And the lakes imported Scientiic American. Growing ters, entertainment hubs and
problems are quickly becoming national disasters, just a few crop types, each with minimal genetic institutions of original research,
RICK AND NORA BOWERS Alamy
such as the tiny and quick-spawning quagga mus- diversity, leaves staples vulnerable to disease, argues Grande, a curator of
sel that has infested regions as far away as Lake climate change and unsustainable farming more than 33 years at the Field
Mead and Lake Powell on the Colorado River. techniques. Dunn weaves together powerful Museum in Chicago. In this lively account, he intro-
Egan also relates the passionate narratives of con- historical and modern examples to show that the duces readers to the hidden workings of natural
servationists and lake lovers who are ighting to safety of our global food supply rests on the edge history museums and the eccentric scientists and
save the Great Lakes. Ryan F. Mandelbaum of a knife. Andrea Gawrylewski professionals that run them.
Apocalypse AI earth and then increasing portions of space into paperclip man-
ufacturing facilities. Before long, the entire universe is made up
of paperclips and paperclip makers.
Artiicial intelligence as existential threat Im skeptical. First, all such doomsday scenarios involve a
By Michael Shermer long sequence of if-then contingencies, a failure of which at any
point would negate the apocalypse. University of West England
In 2014 SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted: Worth reading Bristol professor of electrical engineering Alan Winield put it
Superintelligence by Bostrom. We need to be super careful this way in a 2014 article: If we succeed in building human
with AI. Potentially more dangerous than nukes. That same equivalent AI and if that AI acquires a full understanding of
year University of Cambridge cosmologist Stephen Hawking how it works, and if it then succeeds in improving itself to pro-
told the BBC: The development of full artiicial intelligence duce super-intelligent AI, and if that super-AI, accidentally or
could spell the end of the human race. Microsoft co-founder maliciously, starts to consume resources, and if we fail to pull
Bill Gates also cautioned: I am in the camp that is concerned the plug, then, yes, we may well have a problem. The risk, while
about super intelligence. not impossible, is improbable.
How the AI apocalypse might unfold was outlined by com- Second, the development of AI has been much slower than
puter scientist Eliezer Yudkowsky in a paper in the 2008 book predicted, allowing time to build in checks at each stage. As
Global Catastrophic Risks: How likely is it that AI will cross Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt said in response to
the entire vast gap from amoeba to village idiot, and then stop Musk and Hawking: Dont you think humans would notice
at the level of human genius? His answer: It would be physi- this happening? And dont you think humans would then go
cally possible to build a brain that computed a million times as about turning these computers of ? Googles own DeepMind
has developed the concept of an AI of switch, playful-
ly described as a big red button to be pushed in the
event of an attempted AI takeover. As Baidu vice pres-
ident Andrew Ng put it (in a jab at Musk), it would be
like worrying about overpopulation on Mars when
we have not even set foot on the planet yet.
Third, AI doomsday scenarios are often predicated
on a false analogy between natural intelligence and
articial intelligence. As Harvard University experi-
mental psychologist Steven Pinker elucidated in his
answer to the 2015 Edge.org Annual Question What
Do You Think about Machines That Think?: AI dysto-
pias project a parochial alpha-male psychology onto
the concept of intelligence. They assume that superhu-
manly intelligent robots would develop goals like de-
posing their masters or taking over the world. It is
equally possible, Pinker suggests, that artiicial intelli-
gence will naturally develop along female lines: fully
capable of solving problems, but with no desire to an-
fast as a human brain.... If a human mind were thus accelerated, nihilate innocents or dominate the civilization.
a subjective year of thinking would be accomplished for every Fourth, the implication that computers will want to do
31 physical seconds in the outside world, and a millennium something (like convert the world into paperclips) means AI
would ly by in eight-and-a-half hours. Yudkowsky thinks that has emotions, but as science writer Michael Chorost notes, the
if we dont get on top of this now it will be too late: The AI minute an A.I. wants anything, it will live in a universe with re-
runs on a diferent timescale than you do; by the time your wards and punishmentsincluding punishments from us for
neurons inish thinking the words I should do something you behaving badly.
have already lost. Given the zero percent historical success rate of apocalyptic
The paradigmatic example is University of Oxford philoso- predictions, coupled with the incrementally gradual develop-
pher Nick Bostroms thought experiment of the so-called paper- ment of AI over the decades, we have plenty of time to build in
clip maximizer presented in his Superintelligence book: An AI is fail-safe systems to prevent any such AI apocalypse.
designed to make paperclips, and after running through its ini-
tial supply of raw materials, it utilizes any available atoms that
J O I N T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N O N L I N E
happen to be within its reach, including humans. As he described Visit Scientiic American on Facebook and Twitter
in a 2003 paper, from there it starts transforming irst all of or send a letter to the editor: editors@sciam.com
23 and Pee midway in the reign of Elizabeth II). No need to buy the volume,
as the urinary tract can be streamed online.
This study, the authors write, was conceived during a sci
Genome analysis pinpoints the DNA that entiic meeting attended by several of the coauthors in bucolic
gives some people an asparagus edge Sweden, where it became apparent that some of us were unable
to detect any unusual odor in our urine after consuming
By Steve Mirsky new spring asparagus. One could thus say that aspar
agus itself spearheaded the research.
To conserve water, members of my house- Our intrepid investigators took advantage of
hold abide by the old aphorism If its yel- two large, longterm epidemiological studies
low, let it mellow. Youre in a state of igno- the Nurses Health Study and the Health Pro
rance about that wizened phrase? If so, it fessionals Followup Studythat provided
recommends that one not lush the toilet genomic data. They then recruited almost
after each relatively innocent act of mic- 7,000 people in those studies to rank the
turition. But theres one exception to the rankness of their postasparagus urine.
rule: after asparagus, its one and Participants were characterised as
donebecause those delicious asparagus smellers if they strong
stalks make urine smell like hell. ly agreed with the prompt
To me and mine, anyway. after eating aspara
The digestion of asparagus gus, you notice a strong
produces methanethiol and characteristic odor in
S-methyl thioesters, chemi- your urine. Any other
cal compounds containing stinky sul- answer got one rated
fur, also known as brimstone. Hey, anosmic. The authors
when I said that postasparagus urine helpfully note, Those
smells like hell, Imeant it literally. who responded I dont
Methanethiol is the major cul- eat asparagus were exclud
prit in halitosis and latus, which ed from the analysis.
covers both ends of that discus- The responses indicated
sion. And although thioesters that 58 percent of men and
can also grab your nostrils by 61.5 percent of women could
the throat, they might have played a key role in the ori- not smell the sulfur. It is possi-
gin of life. So be glad they were there stinking up the ble that women are less likely
abiotic Earth. than men to notice an unusual odor
But does a compound reek if nobody is there to snif in their urine, the scientists say, because their posi-
it? Less philosophically, does it reek if you personally cant tion during urination might reduce their exposure to volatile
smell it? For only some of us are genetically gifted enough odorants. In this case, men must face the facts.
to fully appreciate the distinctive scents of postasparagus The genomic analysis revealed three apparently important
urine. The rest wander around unaware of their own olfacto genetic constructsall in a region on human chromosome 1
ry ofenses. that contains various genes in the olfactory receptor 2 familyre-
Recently researchers dove deep into our DNA to determine, lated to the ability to smell asparapiss. The researchers, tongues
although weve all dealt it, exactly who smelt it. Their indings briely removed from cheeks, point out that their indings
can be found in a paper entitled Sniing Out Signiicant Pee Val- present candidate genes of interest for future research on the
ues: Genome Wide Association Study of Asparagus Anosmia. structure and function of olfactory receptors [that] . . . might
Asparagus anosmia refers to the inability to smell the metabo- shed light more generally on the relation between the molecu-
lites of asparagus in urine, the authors helpfully explain. They lar structure of an odorant and its perceived odor.
dont bother to note that their bathroom humor plays on the In contrast to that brief trespass into seriousness, they warn,
ubiquity in research papers of the p-value, a statistical evalua- Future replication studies are necessary before considering
tion of the data that assesses whether said data look robust or targeted therapies to help anosmic people discover what they
are more likely the stuf that should never be allowed to mellow. are missing. As long as they dont miss the bowl.
The indings appeared in the notorious Christmas issue,
which always features screwball scholarship, of the BMJ
J O I N T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N O N L I N E
(known as the British Medical Journal from 1857 to 1988that Visit Scientiic American on Facebook and Twitter
is, two decades after Queen Victoria irst sat on the throne until or send a letter to the editor: editors@sciam.com
MARCH