MA JORITY

REPORT
We now have the tech
to predict how entire
populations will behave
LIFE’S ORIGINS
3.5-billion-year-old fossils
found in Australia
WEEKLY October 5 –11, 2019

MYSTERY OF
THE MISSING OUARKS
'
Why do the most basic building blocks of our universe
keep disappearing?

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PLUS TEABAGS THAT LEAK MICROPLASTICS / LIOUID

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This week’s issue
On the
cover
42 Mystery of the
missing quarks
Why do the most basic
building blocks of our
universe keep disappearing?
News
9 Ocean worlds
Watery planets could host
more life than Earth
10 Google and the NHS
What you need to know about
Google Health’s deals with
hospital trusts in England
12 Accidents in Alaska
More details emerge of rocket
launches gone awry
Views
21 Comment
Michael Le Page on genetic
engineering scare stories
22 The columnist
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
on pesky cosmic dust
26 Letters
Voters want incentives
to tackle climate change
28 Aperture
A new exhibition offers a
bird’s-eye view of our world
30 Culture
Volcanoes and wine make
a perfectly balanced blend
38 Majority report
We now have the tech
to predict how entire
populations will behave
1 week to go!
14 Life’s origins Discover technologies
3.5-billion-year-old fossils that will change what
found in Australia it means to be human
at our four-day
festival of science.
Find out more at
newscientistlive.com
16 Teabags that leak microplastics 17 Liquid knots
18 Benzodiazepine crisis 22 Space dust 15 Winning at work
Vol 244 No 3250
Cover image: Howard Kingsnorth/Getty Images
Features
34 Seeing the woods
News Trees are our most powerful ally
against climate change. Now
we’re learning their full potential
38 Simulating the world
We have a way to predict –
and change – the future.
Should we use it?
42 Case of the missing quarks
Do the most fundamental
particles of matter even exist?
The back pages
LOST HORIZON IMAGES/ALAMY
51 Stargazing at home
Work out light pollution near you
52 Puzzles
The crossword, a puzzle about
7 Up in smoke Exports of Botswana’s huge untapped coal reserves begin stamps and a quick quiz
53 Feedback
Letters of note and rook-y errors:
the week in weird
38 Features
“We can already model a 54 Almost the last word
Cycling no-handed and tidal
city the size of London. effects: readers respond
Ultimately, the goal is 56 The Q&A
Gelong Thubten on Buddhism,
the whole world” science and mindfulness
5 October 2019 | New Scientist | 1
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The leader
Potential for misuse
We need robust debate about technology that allows people to manipulate others
“ARE we the baddies?” That punchline
from a Mitchell and Webb comedy
sketch about two Nazi soldiers is
something that scientists ought to
ask themselves more frequently. Even
if the knowledge that people create is
neutral, its applications often aren’t.
The potential for misuse often goes
unnoticed until it is too late. Consider a
Facebook app called This Is Your Digital
Life, which gathered information about
users’ personalities. What looked like an
innocuous, even fun, research project
was later used by Cambridge Analytica
to harvest personal data and manipulate
people’s exposure to political messaging
without their knowledge or consent.
Even though the effectiveness of
GETTY IMAGES
Cambridge Analytica’s manipulations
has been questioned, this demonstrates
how well-intentioned research
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We can now
simulate in detail
how changes will
affect complex
societies in
the future
can be hijacked by bad actors.
This is why the pre-emptive steps
being taken by the scientists developing
a technology called multi-agent artificial
intelligence (MAAI) are praiseworthy.
Simulations that use MAAI allow
computer scientists to build detailed
digital models of human societies and
see how decisions would play out in
the real world (see page 38).
Although the technology has
immense potential for good – for
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example, it is already being used to find
ways to peacefully integrate refugees
into Western societies – it has equal
potential for bad. Politicians could
use it to do the exact opposite: stoking
anti-immigrant sentiment and violence
for political advantage.
The developers of MAAI are aware
of the potential for misuse – they
actually use the word “evil” – and are
drawing up a code of conduct to prevent
misuse. But self-policing can get us only
so far; the temptation to bend the rules
will prove irresistible to somebody.
What we need is robust debate
about the technology and how it
should and shouldn’t be used. Looking
at UK and US politics at the moment,
however, it isn’t hard to suspect that it
may already be too late to prevent good
science from being misused. ❚
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5 October 2019 | New Scientist | 3
 Where did we come from?
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Introduction by Professor Stephen Hawking

 News
Deep secrets Lost your keys? Flameproof foliage Earliest fossil life Quantum supremacy
Almost all of Smart cameras A gel could protect 3.5-billion-year-old How to take quantum
Earth’s carbon is can help you find California from rocks contain signs computing to the
underground p7 them again p8 wildfires p10 of microbes p14 big time p15

Starship is the most

powerful rocket in
history, says SpaceX.
Here it stands on
the firm’s test facility
in Texas

know it multiplanetary”.
The prospect of “being a space-
going civilisation and being out
there among the stars makes
me [and] many people glad to
be alive”, said Musk at the event.
The breakthrough needed to
achieve this, he said, is to make
space travel more practical by
creating a “rapidly reusable orbital
rocket”. Starship is intended to be
just that. Musk said he plans for
Starship to fly to 65,000 feet and

“Starship will allow us to

inhabit other worlds, to
make life as we know it
multiplanetary”

then land back on Earth within the

THE ASAHI SHIMBUN/GETTY

next “one to two months”. SpaceX

says Starship “will be the most
powerful rocket in history” and an
affordable means of getting cargo
and people into space.
Ben Taylor at the University
of Surrey, UK, says Musk’s plans

Mars ship almost ready are very ambitious. “I wouldn’t be

SpaceX plans to test its Starship spacecraft by sending a group of
artists on a trip round the moon next year, reports Lilian Anekwe
ELON MUSK has said that his
Starship spacecraft – which is
designed to carry people to the
moon and Mars – will begin test
flights in less than two months.
The SpaceX CEO made the
comments during a presentation
at the firm’s test facility in Boca
Chica, Texas, with the spacecraft
looming in the background.
Musk first revealed plans for
a rocket to get to the moon and
Mars in 2016, updating them
and naming the craft the Big
Falcon Rocket (BFR) in 2017.
Last year, he revised the design
again and changed the rocket’s
name to Starship.
The prototype will stand
118 metres tall when on a separate
booster rocket required to get it
into orbit and will apparently
be capable of carrying about
100 people to the moon or Mars.
SpaceX has said that the system
will carry eight artists around the
More space online
All the latest on the solar system and beyond
newscientist.com/subject/space
moon in 2020, with the tickets
paid for by the billionaire Yusaku
Maezawa, an art collector and
businessman who founded Japan’s
largest online clothing retailer.
Maezawa says he will go along too.
But the end game for Musk still
appears to be Mars. Ahead of the
presentation, he tweeted that the
“Starship will allow us to inhabit
other worlds… to make life as we
surprised if the flights at 65,000ft
go well,” he says. “But I’m much
less sure about being able to
relaunch the engines quickly.”
He says SpaceX has good refuelling
rates with its smaller rockets, but
Starship will be a bigger challenge.
Sinéad O’Sullivan at Harvard
Business School says it is unclear
whether Starship is the start of a
sustainable business. “It will cost
upwards of $100 billion to colonise
another planet, and 100 years or
more to build a self-sustaining
economy at a further cost of
at least $1 trillion,” she says.
Sullivan says she can see
the rocket being used to carry
cargo but the costs will probably
remain too high for it to become a
route to everyday space tourism. ❚

5 October 2019 | New Scientist | 5

News
Medicine
Repurposing cancer drugs
Treating cancers with medicines for other tumours sometimes works
Michael Le Page
IF STANDARD treatments for
cancers fail, doctors sometimes
prescribe drugs that haven’t been
approved for that particular
cancer type. In the Netherlands,
this is now being done as part of
a new kind of trial, so we can get a
better idea of which drugs work for
what cancers – and which don’t.
The results from the first
215 people show that a third of
them saw some benefit from the
“off-label” use of drugs. One or two
had a complete remission, says
Emile Voest at the Netherlands
Cancer Institute in Amsterdam.
Knowing about failures is just as
important, because then we can
prevent people who may not have
long to live from being given drugs
that won’t help them and could
have nasty side effects.
A new drug goes through an
approval process for treating a
specific disease, such as a certain
kind of breast cancer. Once a
drug is approved for one purpose,
doctors can prescribe it for
another, although often insurers
CAVAN IMAGES/GETTY
won’t pay for off-label use.
This is typically done on an
ad-hoc basis. One doctor will
decide which drug, if any, might
Social media
WhatsApp limits
slow, but don’t stop,
spread of fake news
LIMITS on the number of times
a WhatsApp message can be
forwarded to other people slow
the spread of fake news, but the
restrictions don’t seem to curtail
the most shareable content.
More than 60 billion messages
are sent on WhatsApp daily, and
in recent years false rumours have
spread at an alarming speed. These
have included conspiracy theories,
6 | New Scientist | 5 October 2019
help a patient who has run out
of other options. But there is no
systematic way of reporting the
outcomes to help other doctors
in similar situations.
The approach can help some
people, but it can also go horribly
wrong. In the 1980s, some heart
drugs were widely used off-label in
the US. Later trials suggest that this
caused 50,000 premature deaths.
Trying drugs intended for
other cancers can extend
a person’s life
anti-vaccination misinformation
and rumours about child abductors.
Fabrício Benevenuto at the
Federal University of Minas Gerais,
Brazil, and his colleagues looked at
the spread of information in public
groups in Brazil, India and Indonesia
dedicated to political discussions.
The researchers tracked how
784,000 unique images were
shared by users in the 60 days
before and 15 days after the recent
general elections in each of the three
countries. They found that 80 per
cent of the images stopped being
shared after two days, but some
So Voest and his colleagues
have set up a more rational way of
using off-label drugs for cancers.
The starting point is to sequence
the whole genomes of tumours
in people for whom standard
treatments have failed, and to
use that information to identify
drugs that might help them.
For example, several drugs have
been approved to treat breast
cancers with a mutation that
makes them produce excessive
amounts of a growth factor called
HER2. Some other cancer types
continued to crop up more than two
months after their first appearance.
In January, WhatsApp introduced
a limit that meant content could
only be forwarded to five users
or groups at a time. By running
simulations, Benevenuto and his
team found that the five-forward
limit slowed the spread of content
by one order of magnitude. For
example, if a piece of content would
“In recent years, false
rumours on WhatsApp
have spread at an
alarming speed”
also produce lots of HER2, so these
drugs might work for them too.
In the trial, a person with a
particular tumour type is assigned
a drug that might help. Similar
patients are assigned the same
drug, until eight people have tried
it. If no one benefits, no more
people with that tumour type
will be given that drug. If at least
one benefits, more patients are
enrolled to see if others benefit
too (Nature, doi.org/db5z).
In the Netherlands, the trial
has been set up with the help
of hospitals, charities and
pharmaceutical companies,
which are donating the drugs
free of charge. The number of
patients now exceeds 1000.
Several other countries are
adopting the protocol, including
Canada, Denmark and Italy.
The findings of the trial
should still be checked by proper
randomised controlled trials,
says Voest. But the results have
already led to health insurers
in the Netherlands agreeing to
pay for an off-label use of one
drug even though this hasn’t
been approved by the European
Medicines Agency. ❚
ordinarily take five days to reach
an entire network, the limit would
slow the spread to 50 days.
But this delay depended on the
virality of the content – how likely
users were to share an image after
seeing it. For highly viral content,
the limits weren’t effective in
preventing it from quickly reaching
a large portion of the network
(arxiv.org/abs/1909.08740).
WhatsApp told New Scientist that
the five-forward limit has cut the
number of forwarded messages
on the platform by 25 per cent. ❚
Donna Lu
Geology Environment

Almost all of Earth’s

carbon is locked
World’s largest untapped
underground coal reserve to be mined
Michael Marshall Graham Lawton

AN EPIC project has totted THE last great undeveloped coal Coal has to mines and the state-owned
up all Earth’s carbon and the deposit on the planet is about be phased mine plans to quadruple

TAYLOR WEIDMAN/BLOOMBERG
result is in: our planet contains to go up in smoke. Botswana is out to limit production, says Mapolelo.
1.85 billion billion tonnes of it. sitting on vast amounts of coal global The development could be
The estimate comes from the and is ramping up efforts to warming bad news for the climate. Coal
Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO), mine and export it. But climate to 1.5°C has to be phased out for us
established in 2009. Its goal scientists warn that to meet to limit global warming to
has been to estimate the scale the world’s climate goals most 1.5°C, says Joeri Rogelj at the
of the carbon cycle. This involves of it has to stay in the ground. International Institute for
everything from measuring Botswana’s coal was Until this year, Botswana Applied Systems Analysis,
the release of carbon dioxide discovered in the 1960s, yet has only had one coal mine, a state- a research body in Austria.
from volcanoes to studying remained virtually untouched, owned enterprise that produces Rogelj calculated that burning
diamonds – a solid form of largely due to the country’s less than a million tonnes a year Botswana’s coal would pump
carbon – in the mantle. small population and lack of for electricity. In recent years, 63 to 84 billion tonnes of carbon
Carbon’s movements around infrastructure for exports. though, interest in Botswana’s dioxide into the atmosphere,
the planet are well understood, However, several firms are now coal has ramped up as the which is 15 to 25 per cent of the
but estimating the amounts in each developing the coalfields and government seeks to become total the world can emit to have
bit of the world is a monumental the country’s first commercial energy independent and a 50-50 chance of staying under
job. “All the work the DCO has consignment has just been diversify the economy away 1.5°C of warming.
been doing in the past 10 years exported to South Africa. from diamonds, says Mmilili
has been trying to document actual
numbers of where this carbon is
stored,” says Celina Suarez at the
Estimating coal deposits is
tricky, but Botswana’s are large.
“Everyone agrees that it has the
Mapolelo at the Botswana
Institute for Technology
Research and Innovation.
28.5 bn
The amount of coal in tonnes
University of Arkansas. biggest coal reserves in Africa, In September, the country’s estimated to be in Botswana
“The majority of carbon is very though the extent and quality first privately run coal mine,
deep in the mantle and in the core,” are far from understood,” says the opencast Masama project Digging up coal is a “strange
says Suarez. The land, air and Nicola Wagner at the University near the capital city Gaborone, decision” for a country with
ocean have only 43.5 trillion of Johannesburg in South Africa. produced its first saleable coal. vast solar resources, says Rogelj.
tonnes – less than 1 per cent One analysis in 2012 settled Owner Minergy Coal says the India and China are pulling out
of the total (Elements, DOI: on 28.5 billion tonnes, which mine is producing 70,000 to of coal, he says. In the developing
10.2138/gselements.15.5.301). would be the world’s number 80,000 tonnes of coal a month world, only Indonesia is
The DCO also looked at one undeveloped coal resource and will boost this to 100,000 planning a coal expansion.
isotopes, or variants, of carbon as well as putting Botswana in tonnes early next year. Other Rather than mainly eyeing
in rocks of different ages to the global top five. companies are developing the coal to generate its own
understand the history of power, Wagner says Botswana
the carbon cycle. In the past aims to sell it to South Africa,
500 million years, when complex which has long used coal as an
animal life has existed on Earth, oil substitute in industry, but is
the carbon cycle has been in balance running out of its own supplies.
for more than 99 per cent of the Minergy Coal declined to
time. “What comes out goes back comment, but in a presentation
in,” says Suarez. at the Botswana Resource Sector
Yet there were four periods Conference last year, then CEO
when the cycle became unbalanced Andre Boje said: “The developed
for about a million years, for nations were developed on
example because of major volcanic the back of fossil fuels… [They]
eruptions. We are also destabilising should increase cutbacks to
the carbon cycle now, by burning allow developing nations space,
especially in Africa.” ❚
FRAUKE SCHOLZ/ALAMY

fossil fuels and deforesting large

areas (see page 34 for more on
carbon stored in trees). “The Botswana’s Okavango
balance is getting a bit out of delta is a popular
whack,” says Suarez. ❚ destination for tourists

5 October 2019 | New Scientist | 7

News
Evolution Technology

A hint on the origins Camera tells

you where you
of the female orgasm put your wallet
Clare Wilson Donna Lu

WHAT’S the evolutionary origin PRONE to the occasional lapse It continuously watches an
of the female orgasm? A study that of memory? Smart cameras can area, such as a tabletop in your
involved giving antidepressants now remind you if you turned off home, tracking the placement of
to rabbits has lent support to the the stove or locked the door, and items in relation to one another.
idea that the female orgasm may where you put your wallet. It also remembers who first
have originated from a reflex that In one advance, Khai Truong brought an object into the
makes some female mammals at the University of Toronto field of view as well as if
ovulate during intercourse. in Canada and his colleagues anyone moved it afterwards.
J. TESTART/ARFIV/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

There are multiple theories have created a smartphone app

regarding the function of female that records interactions with “The app can help
orgasms. Some studies have found household objects. The system people recall whether
that contractions of the uterus involves barcode-like markers they locked a door or
experienced during orgasm help that the user sticks to items that switched a light off”
transport sperm towards the egg. they would like to track their
However, many women don’t use of, such as a cooker hob. When asked, “Where is
orgasm during intercourse, and With the smartphone worn my wallet?”, the system might
it is also common for women to around your neck, the app respond, “It is next to the vase,
conceive without climaxing. A maturing ovarian automatically records a short under the magazines.” It could
There are also simpler follicle, seen through video clip when a marked also be used in factories or
explanations, including that a microscope object comes into view. “The operating theatres to track
sexual pleasure encourages user is able to browse through vital tools, says Sisbot.
women to have more sex, making that the antidepressant fluoxetine, the application and see the last For now, the camera uses
them more likely to conceive, which is sold as Prozac, reduces time they interacted with it,” a depth sensor to spot things.
or motivates them to form people’s ability to orgasm. They says Truong. It is limited to detecting items
committed relationships, which found that, after giving rabbits The app can help people track thicker than 3 centimetres,
may be beneficial for raising fluoxetine for two weeks, the rate the state of objects – such as meaning that it has trouble with
children. But how did the female of ovulation during copulation fell whether they locked a door or thin objects such as a closed
orgasm evolve? Mihaela Pavlicev, by a third (PNAS, doi.org/db53 ). switched a light off – as well laptop placed flat on a table.
currently at the University of This supports the idea that as routine actions, like the last Multiple cameras would need
Vienna in Austria, and her the same hormones and brain time they watered a plant or to be set up to cover several flat
colleagues think that animals circuitry could be involved in took their medication. surfaces in a room where items
that ovulate during intercourse both sex-triggered ovulation At present, it successfully could be left, or to cover multiple
may hint at the answer. and orgasm, says Pavlicev. captures about 75 per cent rooms in a house. The team has
While women release an egg It could be that both events of interactions, but only plans to fit the system to a robot
roughly every month, ovulation in happened in our mammalian works for fixed objects. that can move between rooms.
some mammals, such as rabbits, is ancestors – or perhaps the brain Both the smartphone app and
triggered by copulation. Pavlicev circuitry was once used for Can you the ceiling camera could be
and her team think the hormones triggering egg release and has remember used to help people with
and brain circuitry involved in since evolved into a mechanism if you memory problems.
such reflex ovulation could also for triggering orgasm. secured the In future, both systems will
be involved in generating a “Selection can take something trial proactive interventions,
MK_MALIN/ALAMY

door to the
pleasurable climax. and shape it for a new function,” garden shed? such as prompting someone if
In 2016, they analysed 41 species says David Puts of Pennsylvania they have left the stove on or if
of mammal. Of these, 15 species, State University, who wasn’t they have accidentally picked
including cats, koalas and camels, involved in the work. “Our ear up someone else’s cup of coffee.
have reflex ovulation. The way holes were gill slits originally. A similar but separate The accuracy of such smart
these species are related across Functions evolve over time.” system can tell you where camera systems may need to
the mammal family tree suggests One clue would be whether you have left moveable items. improve before they are widely
that this system is likely to have female rabbits and other animals E. Akin Sisbot and Jonathan adopted. “You’ve got to trust
been present in the earliest with reflex ovulation also Connell at IBM Research in the technology for it to be of any
mammal ancestors. experience orgasms. “That’s a New York have devised a comfort or reassurance,” says
In their latest study, the hard question – we can’t talk to ceiling-mounted camera that Geoffrey Ward at the University
researchers exploited the finding them,” says Pavlicev. ❚ monitors objects and people. of Essex in the UK. ❚

8 | New Scientist | 5 October 2019

 Is Mars habitable? Find out from Javier Martin-Torres
at New Scientist Live on 12 October
newscientistlive.com
Space

Ocean worlds may teem with life

Planets only slightly different to ours could host more marine organisms than Earth
Leah Crane

EARTH is well-stocked with life, the surface water. Deeper water more productive than it is here,” align with its orbit so it has strong
but it might not be the best then flows upwards to fill the gaps. says Jennifer Macalady at seasons, changing the way the seas
possible cradle for it. Ocean Olson and her colleagues have Pennsylvania State University. circulate throughout the year.
dynamics are crucial to living simulated a series of worlds that “It would look greener and slimier Because the wind is so
things here, and it seems that are slightly different to Earth to and more seaweedy.” important to upwelling, the
slightly different conditions would figure out how various planetary The most sea-life-friendly atmosphere is also critical.
allow aquatic life to be even more characteristics could affect planet would be slightly larger An ideal planet for ocean life
widespread and healthy. This upwelling and other facets of than Earth, with continents and would have a thick atmosphere
insight might help us find such ocean circulation (arxiv.org/ a salty ocean like ours. It should and high surface pressure, which
worlds and search for life there. abs/1909.02928). also be rotating slower than Earth would allow a strong wind that
On Earth, life in the ocean faces The team found that upwelling and have a spin that doesn’t quite would prompt more upwelling.
a tension between the availability raised the most nutrients on a The more photosynthetic
of sunlight and of nutrients. planet not quite like our own. Astronauts in the film marine organisms there are on a
Most organisms are concentrated “Earth is not the sweet spot – life Interstellar find themselves planet, the easier that life will be to
fairly near the surface, where they on other planets could be even on an ocean world detect, says Olson. That is because
can photosynthesise. But living this sort of life pumps oxygen into
things also need minerals such the atmosphere. An oxygen-rich
as phosphorus, and these tend atmosphere is a strong hint of life.
to sink to the sea floor. Life This doesn’t account for anything
depends on these chemicals living at the bottom of a sea or
being buoyed to the surface on land, but those have signatures
by a process called upwelling. that are harder to detect from afar.
“Photosynthetic life must live Most of the properties of
at the surface where there is light, planets that Olson’s team
but gravity is always going to act simulated would be detectable
to accumulate nutrients at the with planned telescopes, says
bottom of the ocean,” says Macalady. So we could look
Stephanie Olson at the University specifically for planets with thick
of Chicago. “If you look at life atmospheres and slow spins.
in Earth’s oceans today, it is This kind of thinking might
PARAMOUNT PICTURES

overwhelmingly concentrated in help us distinguish between

areas of upwelling for that reason.” planets that are merely
Upwelling occurs primarily habitable, and those that have
because the wind pushes around detectable life, says Macalady. ❚

Nutrition

Avoiding red meat red and processed meat have
been linked with cancer.
doesn’t seem to give However, most research in this
any health benefits area is of a type that is thought to
be unreliable, as it simply observes
THERE are no health reasons what people choose to eat.
to cut down on eating red or The best research involves
processed meat, according to randomised trials in which some
a new review of the evidence. people are helped to change their
Numerous health bodies have diet in a certain way, such as eating
said for decades that we should less meat, and the rest aren’t, with
limit our intake of red meat because their health compared at the end.
it is high in saturated fat, thought Such trials are rarer because they
to raise cholesterol levels and cause are costly and hard to run.
heart attacks. More recently, both Bradley Johnston of Dalhousie
University in Canada and his
colleagues reviewed the
12 randomised trials that have been
done in this area, and found little
or no health benefit for people who
cut down on eating these meats.
The authors conclude that
people should “continue to eat their
current levels of red and processed
meat unless they felt inclined to
“What it doesn’t say is
that we can tear up the
guidelines and start eating
twice as much meat”
change them themselves”.
However, they add that some
might want to change their diet for
animal welfare or environmental
reasons (Annals of Internal
Medicine, doi.org/db52).
Duane Mellor at the British
Dietetic Association says people
shouldn’t take the advice as a green
light to eat more red meat. “What
it doesn’t say is that we can tear up
the guidelines and start eating twice
as much meat. But red meat three
times a week is not a problem.” ❚
Clare Wilson

5 October 2019 | New Scientist | 9

 News
Material science Analysis Medical data

Sticky liquid can be UK hospitals strike deals with Google Five NHS trusts have
sprayed on grass moved contracts with DeepMind to Google. But there’s a lack
verges to stop fires of transparency about what’s changed, finds Adam Vaughan
Sam Wong

A FLUID that suppresses flames The Royal Free London

could be sprayed onto vegetation is one of five trusts to
to tackle wildfires before they start. transfer its contract
Fire retardants are often used
to protect the inside of buildings, about how their data is used,”
but they are unsuitable for outdoor he says.
conditions. So Eric Appel at Stanford One change is that the data is no
University in California and his longer being stored by a third party
BRIAN ANTHONY/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

colleagues formulated a gel-like contracted by Google. It is now

fluid that sticks to vegetation on Google’s cloud infrastructure,
and withstands the elements, which NHS guidelines allow for,
potentially keeping the fire stored on servers in the UK and
retardant in place for months backed up elsewhere in the EU.
(PNAS, doi.org/db5x). Another shift is the abolition of
“Most people think fires happen the independent ethics panel that
willy-nilly anywhere in the forest,” DeepMind established, but that
he says. “It turns out that’s not really THIS month, hospitals in the instead to end its contract, saying Google Health says doesn’t fit
true.” His team worked with the National Health Service in England it didn’t find the app necessary. with its international scope. Booth
California Department of Forestry signed their first deals with We don’t know exactly what says that although the panel was a
and Fire Protection to analyse fire Google. Five NHS trusts have data sharing is occurring with “damp squib”, it provided a “level of
data from the past 10 years. It agreed contracts with Google Google Health, but the Royal Free’s reassurance”. King says the firm is
turned out that 84 per cent of fires Health, after it swallowed up its old deal with DeepMind included heavily scrutinised by its executive
had started at high-risk locations UK sister firm DeepMind Health, anonymised data such as medical board, its partners and regulators.
such as roadsides. nearly a year after signalling its history, diagnoses, treatment While patients can opt out
“What that analysis allowed intention to do so. dates, ethnic origin and religion. of their data being shared with
us to see was, if you had the tools New Scientist first revealed Google, under the NHS’s national
available, you could pretreat a the extent of DeepMind’s access “DeepMind took the data opt-out, hospitals don’t have
small amount of land and prevent to the sensitive data of more step of publishing its to be compliant with the opt-out
an enormous proportion of fires than a million NHS patients in contracts, but Google until next year.
from occurring,” says Appel. 2016, in a deal that the UK’s Health has not” Some people also have concerns
data watchdog later found over potential cultural changes
Wildfires breached the law. The partnership “Transparency is paramount,” during the switchover to Google
KARI GREER/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

have been has yielded interesting research,
an increasing including using artificial
problem in intelligence to detect eye disease
California from scans with an accuracy
that matches or exceeds
human experts.
But is there a material difference
now the deals are with the US tech
His team tested the fluid on plots giant rather than DeepMind, and
of grass and chamise, a Californian should people who use the NHS
shrub. This showed that applying be concerned at the change?
about 1 litre of fluid per square Five trusts, including the Royal
metre of land is enough to Free London and Moorfields Eye
completely prevent ignitions. Hospital, have transferred their
The fluid is made from non-toxic contracts over to Google Health.
chemicals commonly used in Taunton and Somerset NHS trust
food products, cosmetics and is among them, but will not use
pharmaceuticals. the company’s Streams app,
At the end of the fire season, rain which helps keep track of patients’
should wash away the fluid and it test results. Another NHS trust,
would then biodegrade in the soil. ❚ Yeovil District Hospital, chose
says Phil Booth at campaign
group MedConfidential.
DeepMind took the unusual
step of publishing its contracts, but
Google Health has not. It says the
public can access the documents
by asking individual NHS trusts.
“There are very minimal
changes to the contracts as they
moved over,” says Dominic King
of Google Health. The updates
that were made were in response
to new European Union data
protection laws, he says.
David Maguire at The King’s
Fund think tank questions
the decision. “It creates an
unnecessary uncertainty, which
isn’t great for assuaging people’s
fears. There’s a legitimate thing
about people feeling nervous
Health. “Previously, the DeepMind
Health leadership involved in the
actual work in London were well
known on the internet scene in
the UK as being very ethically
minded,” says Tom Loosemore
of consultancy Public Digital.
“They have now left because
of Google Health taking over.”
However, King says: “The
same team that I led in DeepMind
Health is the same team that will
be working with our partners
going forward.”
Whether patients at the five
NHS trusts should be worried is
hard to say. “The problem is: how
can I know?” says Loosemore.
“Would I personally trust Google?
No I damn well wouldn’t, I’d want
that transparency.” ❚

10 | New Scientist | 5 October 2019

News
Space flight

Rocket tests in Alaska go awry

Remote spaceport damaged by rocket malfunctions on Astra Space test flights
Mark Harris

MALFUNCTIONS during rocket
tests at one of the world’s most
isolated spaceports last year
required remediation work
that included sending more
than 200 tonnes of soil for
decontamination, New Scientist
has learned. The tests, conducted
by the firm Astra Space, took place
in Alaska, and until now it had
seemed that the rockets had
failed to launch.
Rocket tests are often the
subject of viral internet videos,
thanks to firms like SpaceX. But
not every fledgling space company
is like that. Astra has no website or
social media presence. It does have
a profile on LinkedIn – but there it
calls itself Stealth Space Company.
Founded in 2005, Astra spent
years working on aerospace
projects with funding from NASA
and the US Pentagon. Then, in
2016, it began developing a rocket.
In July, Astra applied for
permission to attempt its
first orbital launch, with an
experimental US Air Force satellite
on board. It has yet to do this, but if
it can demonstrate a successful
suborbital launch, the firm could
unlock funds from contracts with
NASA, the US Army and Air Force.
Astra chose the most private
spaceport in the US for its tests:
the Pacific Spaceport Complex –
Alaska (PSCA) on Kodiak Island.
It is a sleepy place that shares its
land with wild berries and bison.
A request under the Alaska Public
Records Act showed that Astra and
the PSCA signed a confidentiality
agreement in October 2016.
“The spaceport was
damaged twice in 2018,
with 232 tonnes of soil
removed for treatment”
On 20 July 2018, Astra carried out
its first test. The US Federal Aviation
Administration (FAA) quickly said
it was a “mishap”, a word that has
been used to describe catastrophic
accidents, including the explosion
of a SpaceX capsule. But it was
unclear exactly what happened.
Craig Campbell, then president
of Alaska Aerospace, the public
corporation that runs the
spaceport, told Space News at
the time: “there was no material
damage to our facilities as a
result of this launch”.
We now know more. In its first
public statement, Astra told New
Scientist that it had anticipated an
engine failure during the rocket’s
maiden voyage, that the flight
ended earlier than hoped for,
and that the rocket came down
within the spaceport. Minutes
from a 2018 meeting of Alaska
Aerospace’s board of directors
say that this episode damaged

This simple banana peel To turn

inspired a bold idea: trash

12 | New Scientist | 5 October 2019

one of the PSCA’s buildings and an president, confirms that the such an incident occurs, we work
insurance agency got involved. spaceport was damaged twice diligently with authorities to
On 29 November, Astra tested in 2018, with a total of 232 tonnes ensure proper remediation.”
another rocket. In December, an of soil removed for treatment Sally Brown, a soil scientist at
FAA official told a conference that in Anchorage. Among other the University of Washington in
this flight had also encountered treatments, the soil was heated Seattle says that soil contamination
a mishap, saying: “Rockets are to 315°C to vaporise residual isn’t uncommon at launch sites.
complex, powerful vehicles hydrocarbons. “But this was a very heavy-handed
HO/THE CANADIAN PRESS/PA IMAGES

that fail every now and again… “Normally, these vehicles land approach to get rid of the
Even though all five engines almost empty,” says a commercial contaminants,” she says. “Scraping
failed, all debris landed in the rocket expert, who asked not to up that much soil and shipping it
spaceport boundary.” be identified. “But if your thrust far away can cause more damage
Astra now says that only two terminated early, you’d fall down than the contamination itself.”
of the engines failed, the rest were and still have propellant left.” Brown says bioremediation
shut down automatically to ensure Lester told New Scientist that using microorganisms and plants
the rocket stayed on its planned the damage to the spaceport can be a more sensitive way to
trajectory. It confirmed that the The Pacific Spaceport was superficial. “While we handle such incidents. The PSCA
rocket landed on spaceport land. Complex – Alaska is take every precaution to avoid hasn’t responded to queries about
Mark Lester, Alaska Aerospace’s on Kodiak Island environmental impacts, when its remediation choices. ❚

,QWRMHWIXHO We see possibilities

everywhere.
BP is partnering with Fulcrum BioEnergy to
FRQYHUWODQGīOOZDVWHLQWRELRIXHOIRUSODQHV
It’s one more way BP is working to make
energy cleaner and better.

5 October 2019 | New Scientist | 13

News
International Space Station

Welcome to space
Astronaut snaps the rocket carrying her best friend into orbit
Donna Lu

NASA astronaut Christina Koch

captured this image of a Soyuz
rocket making its way to the
International Space Station –
from onboard the ISS.
“What it looks like from
@Space_Station when your
best friend achieves her lifelong
dream to go to space,” Koch
tweeted. “Caught the second
stage in progress!”
The rocket was carrying Koch’s
friend, the NASA flight engineer
Jessica Meir. Also on board were
Oleg Skripochka from the Russian
space agency Roscosmos and Hazza
Ali Almansoori from the United Arab
Emirates. Almansoori is the first
person from the UAE to go to space.
CHRISTINA KOCH/AP/SHUTTERSTOCK

The five other people on the

ISS with Koch gathered to watch
the approach. Andrew Morgan,
a NASA astronaut, tweeted: “All six
members of #Expedition60 packed
into the cupola, our window on the
Earth, to see this rare spectacle”.  ❚

Palaeontology

Earth’s earliest microbes found in rocks

WE FINALLY have hard evidence researchers have argued that these remains older than ours.” extraordinary,” says Baumgartner.
that the oldest rocks in Australia Pilbara rock structures aren’t There are claims of older fossils Because the microbes are so well-
contain fossils of living things. stromatolites and could have or chemical traces of life, some preserved, it must have formed
Dating back nearly 3.5 billion formed without life. dating to more than 4 billion years quickly – perhaps even while
years, they are the oldest known Baumgartner and his colleagues ago, but none are widely accepted. they were alive.
microorganisms. drilled into the rocks to extract The organic matter that Some modern microbes live
Raphael Baumgartner at the samples. These contained Baumgartner and his colleagues off sulphur and produce pyrite
University of New South Wales “exceptionally preserved organic found was mostly trapped inside as a waste product. The Dresser
in Australia and his colleagues matter”, he says, including strands a mineral called pyrite or fool’s Formation microbes may have
looked at rocks in the Pilbara of the sort seen when microbes gold, which is based on iron done the same, says Baumgartner.
region of Western Australia. form slimy layers called biofilms. and sulphur. “The pyrite is “They’ve done a good job,”
This area has some of the oldest Multiple chemical analyses says Lindsay Hays, who works
preserved rocks on Earth, such indicated that this matter came A stromatolite for NASA’s Astrobiology Institute
as the Dresser Formation, from living organisms (Geology, rock structure in Washington, DC. She says she
which is 3.48 billion years old. doi.org/db2s). in Western can’t say for certain that the
AUSCAPE/GETTY IMAGES

The formation appears “We have found smoking gun Australia study’s conclusions are correct,
to contain structures called evidence for some of the earliest but the fact it is based on
stromatolites. These form when life on Earth,” says Baumgartner. multiple techniques makes
microbes grow in layers and are “There are no convincing it more reliable.  ❚
covered in sediment. Yet many organic matter or microbial Michael Marshall

14 | New Scientist | 5 October 2019

Social science Analysis Computing

Half of your career What next for quantum computers? Google appears to have
success may be reached “quantum supremacy”, but there is still a long way to
down to luck go before the technology is useful, reports Chelsea Whyte
Donna Lu

HOW much of a person’s career QUANTUM computing is now competing ideas on how best to random circuit sampling problem.
success is the result of chance? ready to go – or is it? Google do this. As well as Google, firms In such a task, after a series of
About half, depending on what appears to have reached an including IBM, Microsoft and Intel calculations, each qubit outputs
field you’re in. impressive milestone known are all looking at how to advance a 1 or 0. The aim is to calculate
Roberta Sinatra at the as quantum supremacy, where the technology. the probability of each possible
IT University of Copenhagen, a quantum computer is able Also on the quantum computer outcome occurring.
Denmark, and her colleagues set to perform a calculation that to-do list is error correction. Google says Sycamore was
out to measure what role luck and is practically impossible for Classical computers have able to find the answer in just a
individual ability play in the success a classical one. But there are mechanisms to make sure that few minutes – a task it estimates
of creative works, including films, plenty of hurdles left before the when little mistakes happen they would take 10,000 years on the
songs, books and scientific research technology hits the big time. are automatically rectified. The most powerful supercomputer.
papers. They used this as a proxy For a start, the processors same will be needed for quantum Although that is impressive,
for career success. need to be more powerful. computers, especially considering there is no practical use for it.
The researchers looked at works Unlike classical computers, which the delicate nature of qubits. Google’s claim to quantum
from more than 4 million people store data as either a 0 or a 1, supremacy came via a paper
across the publishing, film and
music industries, as well as
15 scientific fields. In each career
quantum computers use qubits
that save data as a mixture of
these two states.
53
The number of (working) qubits
published online and removed
shortly afterwards. The company
has yet to make any public
there was a slightly different way Google’s quantum computer, in Google’s quantum computer statement on it.
of quantifying impact. For example, called Sycamore, consisted of only “We shouldn’t get too carried
for movies and books they looked 54 qubits – one of which didn’t In 2016, a team at Yale away with this,” says Ciarán
at the number of online reviews. work. For quantum computers to University showed that error Gilligan-Lee at University College
By looking at the random really come into their own, they correction is possible with at London. This is an important
fluctuations in the timing and will probably need thousands. least one form of qubit, although step for quantum computing,
magnitude of successful work, But scaling up the number not the type used by Google. but there’s still a long way to
the team was able to come up with won’t be easy. Qubits must be The challenge now is to build go, he says.
a crude estimate of luck different isolated from vibrations as they a quantum computer that has The hope is that quantum
careers typically involve, using a can be easily disturbed, which both quantum supremacy and computers could eventually help
measure called a randomness index, can lead to computing errors error-correcting abilities. revolutionise our understanding
R. An entirely luck-based activity down the line. There are many The final and perhaps most of fields such as chemistry and
such as roulette would have an R important next step is to actually material science by performing
score of 1, for example (arxiv.org/ IBM is one firm in the do something useful. simulations that are too complex
abs/1909.07956). race to build a practical Google’s quantum computer for classical computers.
Luck appeared to have a quantum computer tackled what is known as a “There are certain quantities
relatively consistent effect across that you’d like to know, that you
all the fields they studied, with can’t easily learn from experiment
a maximum difference of just and can’t calculate with
5 per cent. In the music industry, supercomputers today. This is
electronic music artists needed where quantum computers can
the most luck (0.546) and classical help,” says Scott Aaronson at
musicians the least (0.507), the University of Texas at Austin.
while in the film industry movie This could eventually lead to
producers needed the most luck breakthroughs in how we make
(0.545). Within science, success in fertilisers for food production
astronomy involved the most luck or in improving the efficiency
(0.55) while computer science was of energy transmission.
associated with the least (0.517). There is a risk that quantum
SETH WENIG/AP/SHUTTERSTOCK

The aim was to create a model computers could be used to crack

of the ups and downs of success some forms of encryption that
within a career, says Sinatra. keep the internet secure. However,
The differences in luck between people are already working on
industries should be taken with alternative forms of encryption
a grain of salt, she says. ❚ that would be harder to break. ❚

5 October 2019 | New Scientist | 15

 News In brief
ANTAGAIN/GETTY IMAGES
Wildlife
Desert birds really
feeling the heat
BIRD numbers are plummeting
in the Mojave desert in the US as it
gets hotter and drier due to global
warming. They can no longer get
enough water to stay cool.
“The climate change that has
already happened is too intense
for many species,” says Eric Riddell
at the University of California,
Berkeley. “And it’s not nearly as
extreme as what we expect in the
future.” The Mojave, which mainly
spans parts of California and
Nevada, is already the hottest and
driest desert in North America.
To investigate whether climate
change is to blame for dramatic
declines in bird numbers there,
Riddell and his colleagues created
computer simulations of about
50 local species. They used these
to predict how much more
moisture birds lose as it gets
hotter, which dictates how much
water they need to survive.
16 | New Scientist | 5 October 2019
Microplastics
One lump or 11 billion?
Teabags that release plastic
TEA drinkers have been urged
to avoid plastic teabags after
tests found they release billions
of particles of microplastic.
A team in Canada has found
that steeping a plastic teabag at
a brewing temperature of 95°C
releases around 11.6 billion
microplastics – tiny bits of plastic
between 100 nanometres and
5 millimetres in size. That is several
orders of magnitude higher than
the number found in other foods
and drinks, such as bottled water.
Nathalie Tufenkji at McGill
University and her team bought four
different teabags from shops and
cafes in Montreal, cut them open
and washed them, steeped them
in 95°C water and analysed the
water with electron microscopes
and spectroscopy. A control of uncut
teabags was used to check it wasn’t
Health
While birds don’t sweat, when
they get too hot they open their Hopes rise for new
beaks and flutter their throat kind of diabetes drug
muscles to evaporate water to
avoid overheating, similar to AN EXPERIMENTAL treatment
panting in dogs. The team checked for type 2 diabetes appears to
the accuracy of their computer have many beneficial effects.
simulations by exposing some Tests in animals found that the
captive live birds to the kind of drug cuts blood sugar levels and
temperatures seen in the desert. the amount that mice eat.
The models suggest the water Type 2 diabetes develops when
needs of birds rises exponentially the body fails to respond to insulin
as temperatures rise. Mojave birds by lowering levels of blood sugar.
now require 10 to 30 per cent more It is estimated that 370 million
water each than they did a century people worldwide currently have
ago. The species with the greatest type 2 diabetes, a number that is
increase in water requirements
according to the model were those
that had declined the most, says
Riddell. Predatory birds including
prairie falcons, American kestrels
and turkey vultures are among
those worst hit (PNAS,
PEOPLEIMAGES/GETTY IMAGES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1908791116).
Over the next century, these
birds could need 50 to 80 per
cent more water. However, rainfall
is expected to continue declining
in the Mojave. Michael Le Page
the cutting that was causing the
leaching of microplastics.
While tiny bits of plastic are also
increasingly found in drinking water,
the World Health Organization says
there is no evidence that this is a
health risk for people.
To test the possible effect of the
particles released by plastic teabags,
Tufenkji and her team exposed
water fleas to the water from the
washed bags (Environmental
Science & Technology, doi.org/
gf8str). “The particles did not kill
the water fleas, but did cause
significant behavioural effects and
developmental malformations,” she
says. However, she says that more
research is needed to understand
possible health impacts in humans.
In the meantime, Tufenkji
suggests avoiding plastic teabags.
Adam Vaughan
expected to double by 2030.
There are already drugs for type
2 diabetes, but better ones are
needed. For instance, metformin
is widely used to lower blood
sugar, but the side effects put off
some people and it doesn’t usually
cause weight loss. In people, losing
weight can be enough to restore
normal blood sugar levels.
So Mark Febbraio at Monash
University in Australia and his
colleagues have developed an
alternative based on proteins with
beneficial effects on metabolism.
To create the drug, they combined
parts of two human signalling
proteins and made various other
tweaks to create a designer protein
that has been called IC7Fc.
When they injected this into
obese mice, it had many benefits,
including lowering blood sugar
levels. The animals also ate less,
shed weight due to fat loss and
had increased bone density
(Nature, doi.org/dbzn). Febbraio
is now trying to get funding for
human trials. MLP

Archaeology
Really brief
Clue to fall of ancient
society in vast halls
MYSTERIOUS megastructures in
ancient Europe were hubs of social
SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
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have stopped being built around religious functions, says Hofmann.
3600 BC. Archaeologists recently But the team found a shift in the
discovered megastructures up to Maidanetske structures over time.
65 metres long and 10 metres wide Around 4100 BC, multiple smaller
in a giant Tripolye settlement in versions existed, to cater to varied
Ukraine, called Maidanetske, but segments of the community, says

and political decision-making, but their purpose was unclear. Hofmann. Towards the end of the
their role in centralising control An analysis by Robert Hofmann Tripolye culture, only the largest
may have doomed these societies. at Kiel University in Germany megastructures persisted. This
The big buildings were part of and his colleagues has found they suggests that the collapse of these
Tripolye culture, which spread occupied important positions, for town-like settlements by 3600 BC
from modern-day Moldova and example open plaza-like spaces followed strong centralisation of
Gigantic planet Romania into Ukraine. Its large (PLoS One, doi.org/dbzp). They decision-making, says Hofmann.
orbiting tiny star settlements were each home look like community centres that Maybe such centralisation was
to up to 10,000 inhabitants. serve several purposes in other dysfunctional or the population
Some 31 light years away, These “towns” emerged cultures, including economic and didn’t accept that model of society,
a planet at least half the around 4100 BC and appear to political decision-making and he says. Ruby Prosser Scully
mass of the gas giant
Jupiter is orbiting a star just Entomology Materials science
12 per as massive as our
sun. Modelling suggests
this world couldn’t have Hitch-free way to
formed around such a small make a liquid knot
star in the way we think
most planets take shape FLUIDS are a little too slippery to be
(Science, doi.org/db2p). tied in knots – but it can be done. A
special liquid has been coaxed into
Coated paper can knots that can then form crystals.
store secret letters Earlier attempts to do this have
had trouble creating stable knots
RYAN RIDENBAUGH AND MILES ZHANG

Paper can now be turned or getting the knots to take on

into a tool for spies by a crystalline structure. Finally,
adding a manganese Jung-Shen Tai and Ivan Smalyukh
coating. Secret messages at the University of Colorado,
that can be read only Boulder, have cracked it.
under UV light are printed They started with a liquid
on the paper using water. crystal. These can flow like a liquid,
Destroying any trace of the but the molecules within them
message is a cinch too – the Grisly insect can control the line up in ordered arrays, instead
recipient just has to blow it of being jumbled up as in a regular
with a hairdryer (Matter, minds of many other species fluid. Liquid crystals are already
doi.org/db2r). used in some flat-screen TVs.
A RECENTLY discovered parasitic Ward at the University of Iowa and Then Tai and Smalyukh mixed
Male infertility wasp appears to have extraordinary her colleagues looked at 23,000 in chiral molecules, which have
linked to cancer abilities – it can take over at least galls from 10 kinds of oak trees they an asymmetric “handedness” –
seven other species. found that at least seven of 100 think of them like screws, which
A study of more than It was thought that each species species of gall wasp they collected can only be tightened by turning
35,000 men in Sweden of parasite could influence the were parasitised by E. set (Biology them one way. The researchers
who had children via behaviour of only one host, or Letters, doi.org/dbzq). used electric fields to create little
fertility treatments at least only very closely related The crypt-keeper wasp seeks out whirlpools of these molecules,
suggests that men who species. For example, the oak galls and lays an egg in them. which tied themselves into knots
need IVF to conceive have crypt-keeper wasp Euderus set Its larva attacks a gall wasp larva and spontaneously assembled
a 33 per cent higher risk of (pictured), which was only identified and takes control of it. Infected gall into ordered lattices.
developing prostate cancer. in 2017, is known to parasitise the wasps start chewing their way out, These are similar to existing
The risk was 64 per cent gall wasp Bassettia pallida. but stop when the hole is small and liquid crystal materials. They could
higher in men whose sperm Gall wasps lay eggs in plants, block the exit with their head. be used for storing information,
had to be injected into triggering abnormal growths called When the crypt-keeper turns into where different knots at various
eggs, a treatment known galls inside which the larvae feed an adult after a few days, it chews locations have specific meanings,
as ICSI (BMJ, doi.org/db26). and grow, eventually chewing their through the head of the gall wasp or in very energy-efficient displays
way out of the gall. When Anna to get out. MLP (Science, doi.org/db25). Leah Crane

5 October 2019 | New Scientist | 17

News Insight
Addiction

The trouble with benzos

A hidden drugs crisis is contributing to soaring overdose rates
in Scotland. Can we fix it, asks Jessica Hamzelou
SCOTLAND is in the middle of Diazepam is prescribed
a drug crisis. The number of to help treat anxiety
drug-related deaths in the country disorders
soared by 27 per cent over the
course of 2018. Today, it has the Deaths resulting from
highest drug-related death rate overdoses of illegal benzos have
in the European Union. shot up in Scotland in the past
Though smaller in scale, the few years (see graph, below right).
problem has been compared to Etizolam was first implicated in a
the US opioid crisis. There, huge single such death in Scotland in
numbers of people became 2012. In 2017, it was involved in 299
addicted to prescription opioid deaths. By 2018, the figure was 548.
painkillers and graduated to illegal Not only is etizolam stronger
opioids. It seems a similar sort of than benzos like diazepam, its
pattern is unfolding in Scotland, effects wear off more quickly,
MAXIMILIANCLARKE/GETTY IMAGES

but with a different sort of drug. so people tend to take it more

Opioid drugs like heroin and frequently. The low cost of illegal
morphine are implicated in the benzos makes that easy to do.
largest number of Scotland’s “They can be purchased for as little
drug-related deaths. But a less as 15p per tablet,” says McAuley.
well known class of drugs called “When we talk to drug users about
benzodiazepines is the second how they consume these drugs,
biggest cause. These tranquilisers, they don’t talk about taking one
often used to treat anxiety
disorders, are implicated in
67 per cent of such deaths.
implicated in drowsiness-induced
car accidents and falls. It was also
easy to overdose. “In the 1970s,
15p
Approximate cost of an illegal
or two, they talk about taking
them in handfuls.”
At the end of 2018, a group of
And here’s the real trouble: diazepam was one of the most etizolam tablet in Scotland men were found to be producing
we are beginning to learn how to common reasons for hospital etizolam pills in a garage in
tackle the opioid epidemic, but the admissions,” says Humphreys. Paisley, Scotland. A £20,000
same solutions probably won’t Then, in the 1990s, benzos pill-pressing machine (pictured
work with benzodiazepines.
When they were first prescribed
in the 1960s, benzodiazepines
started to become a drug of choice
for people in Scotland who took
heroin. They eased the withdrawal
250,000
Number of etizolam pills produced
below) enabled them to produce
250,000 tablets per hour.
Benzos are far less of a problem
(often called benzos) were seen as effects when people were coming by one pill press per hour in the rest of the UK, but they are an
a safe alternative to barbiturates, off a high or struggling to issue in the US, where some people
a class of sedatives that had maintain their supply, says warn that they are becoming the
been responsible for several Andrew McAuley at Glasgow country’s next prescription drug
high-profile fatal overdoses, Caledonian University. The drugs This illegal pill press was crisis. An estimated 12.6 per cent
such as that of Marilyn Monroe. were available on prescription, used to create etizolam of adults are taking the drugs, both
One example is the drug but they were then being sold tablets in a garage in legally and illegally. Research has
diazepam, sometimes sold as on to heroin users illegally. Paisley, Scotland shown that the number of people
Valium. It can bring on sleepiness, As doctors in Scotland became in the US visiting outpatient
relax muscles and the mind, and aware of this onward sale they doctors for health matters related
can help treat anxiety disorders. cut back on prescriptions. But to benzos increased from 919 in
“They were introduced as wonder this made things worse as many 2003 to 1672 in 2015.
drugs with no downsides,” says of those who had been taking There are stark parallels with
Keith Humphreys at Stanford prescribed benzos then turned to the opioid crisis, says Humphreys.
University in California. “Doctors illegal alternatives that tend to be “In both cases, the drugs were
PROVIDED BY CROWN OFFICE

were giving them out like candy.” much stronger. One of the most produced perfectly legally, given
But they did have a downside. It commonly taken in Scotland is out by physicians and then a large,
became apparent during the 1970s etizolam. Possession of this drug addicted base looks for illegal
that people taking the drugs came is illegal in the UK, though it is sources,” he says. “It’s following a
to depend on them. Benzos were often made to look like diazepam. similar trajectory, but in terms of

18 | New Scientist | 5 October 2019

 More Insight online
Your guide to a rapidly changing world
newscientist.com/insight
awareness, we’re at least five to
10 years behind.”
What can we do? Humphreys
and his colleagues are calling for
doctors in the US to reduce the
number of benzo prescriptions
and look for alternative
treatments for sleep and anxiety
disorders. Physical therapies and
cognitive behavioural therapies
are both possibilities.
Safe spaces
This may help, but it won’t solve
the problem, especially for people
who are already addicted.
One widespread response to
the opioid crisis has been to make
available a drug called naloxone,
which reverses the effects of
opioid overdoses. Scotland’s
National Naloxone Programme,
launched in 2011, offers training
and drug kits to people at risk
of overdose – 36,000 kits were
handed out between 2011 and
2016. The British Columbia Centre
for Disease Control in Canada has
supplied over 100,000 naloxone
kits, and the organisation
estimates that these prevented
around 26 per cent of possible
opioid overdose deaths in 2016.
Unfortunately, there is no
equivalent drug to combat benzos.
A drug called flumazenil can
The number of deaths in Scotland caused at least partly by illegally sold
benzodiazepines (benzos) has soared recently
800
Deaths caused at least partly by prescription benzos
Deaths caused at least partly by benzos sold illegally
600
400
200
0 overdose encounter the health
2008 2009 2010 2011 2012
prevent the fatal effects of an
overdose in some cases, but it isn’t
recommended if the person has
taken other substances or has a
tolerance to benzos.
A better alternative may be
to provide safe spaces for people
addicted to benzos to take them.
That is the argument made for
supervised consumption sites,
which also offer access to
healthcare and advice. The
evidence suggests that this can
work: supervised drug use centre
Insite opened in Vancouver in
2003 and has had over 3.6 million
clients. Not one of them has died
from an overdose and many have
transferred to detox facilities.
Plans for the first safe drug use
site in the US, in San Francisco,
were thwarted in October last year,
when a bill for the site was vetoed
by California governor Jerry
Brown. Shortly before the veto,
Rod Rosenstein, the US deputy
attorney general, wrote in an
opinion piece that “one obvious
problem with injection sites is
that they are illegal”. US cities and
counties, he wrote, “should expect
the Department of Justice to meet
the opening of any injection site
with swift and aggressive action”.
Glasgow City Council has
appealed to the UK government
for permission to launch a similar
2013 2014 2015 2016 2017
Working
hypothesis
Sorting the week’s
supernovae from the
absolute zeros
“fix room” in the city. But so far
the Home Office has rejected the
request on the grounds that such
sites enable people to break the
law. “The UK government has
been clear that there is no legal ▲ Robot gymnasts
framework for the provision of A Boston Dynamics
drug consumption rooms and robot has nailed a tricky
there are no plans to introduce gymnastics routine,
them,” a spokesperson for the meaning we’re now
Home Office said in July. hoping a Robot Olympics
Another option is to legalise isn’t too far in the future.
drugs. The concern, however, is
that even if this helped people ▲ Foam
avoid overdoses, it might lead to Thank goodness for foam
a surge in drug use more widely. fire extinguishers. A man
in Germany managed to
“Drug users don’t talk save the day after his car
about taking one or two caught fire by dousing his
of these tablets – they engine in beer.
take them in handfuls”
▲ ▼ Walruses
But there is evidence that this The latest combatants
might not be the case. Portugal in submarine warfare.
decriminalised the purchase, One sank a Russian Navy
possession and use of small tugboat after being
amounts of any drug in 2001. spooked by a drone.
At the time, there were concerns
that doing so would lead to cities ▼ Single-use cups
in Portugal becoming “drug Canada’s Green Party
havens”. But this hasn’t come to even recycles its photos.
pass. Last year, Portugal had one The party edited an image
of the lowest drug-induced death of its leader holding a
rates in Europe, according to the single-use cup so that she
European Monitoring Centre for was holding a reusable
Drugs and Drug Addiction. one instead.
In Portugal, decriminalisation
was married with investment in ▼ Labradoodles
treatment for people who use A Frankenstein’s monster?
illicit drugs, including offers to That’s how the inventor
wean them off the substances. of labradoodles describes
“They destigmatised drug use, the dog, which he says is
PRODUCTIMAGEPRO/GETTY IMAGES; BLOOMBERG/GETTY
and reframed it as a health issue one of his life’s regrets.
rather than a criminal one,”
says McAuley.
He and his colleagues are
advocating for a similar approach
SOURCE: National Records of Scotland
across the UK. They hope that
financial support and a campaign
to destigmatise drug use could
ensure that people at risk of drug
2018 system before the justice system. ❚
5 October 2019 | New Scientist | 19
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 Views
The columnist Letters Aperture Culture Culture columnist
Chanda Prescod- Voters want personal A new exhibition Volcanoes and wine The tale of the vaquita
Weinstein on pesky incentives to tackle offers a bird’s-eye make a perfectly is tense and tragic,
cosmic dust p22 climate change p26 view of our world p28 balanced blend p30 says Simon Ings p32

Comment

Mutant super-mosquitoes
Scare stories about genetic engineering are impeding genuine
advances – and masking legitimate concerns, says Michael Le Page

D
“ EADLY ‘super mosquitoes
that are even tougher’
accidentally created
by scientists after bungled
experiment,” shouted The Sun
in the UK. “Plan to kill off
mosquitoes backfires, spawning
mutant hybrid insects,” screamed
the New York Post in the US.
These headlines appeared last
month, in response to a critical
study of a trial carried out in Brazil
from 2013 to 2015. It released
millions of genetically modified
male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes,
which transmit serious diseases
such as dengue, yellow fever, Zika
and chikungunya. The mosquitoes
carried an added gene meant to
kill their offspring and thus wipe
out wild mosquitoes.
The shocking headlines aren’t
true, but do contain an element
of truth. We have created mutant
mosquitoes, but not because of
any genetic engineering mishap.
That story begins in West
African forests a few thousand
years ago. There, female A. aegypti
drank the blood of many species.
Over time, these mosquitoes
evolved a separate subspecies
that fed on humans. In the
15th century, slave ships carried
them to the Americas. From there,
they reached every tropical region,
allowing diseases like yellow fever
to spread to these places too. Now,
these mosquitoes are developing
resistance to the pesticides we rely
on to control them.
Such is the backdrop for the
JOSIE FORD
“lethal” gene fails to kill up to 5 per
cent of the offspring of released
males and wild females. Oxitec
says regulators in Brazil knew this
before the trial got the go-ahead.
It is also true that the males
derive from Cuba and Mexico, so
the survival of a small percentage
of their offspring creates a mix of
three closely related strains of the
same A. aegypti subspecies. Yet
calling these hybrids is a stretch,
and there is no reason to think
they pose a greater threat, as
reduced numbers of A. aegypti
in the city of Jacobina by at least
70 per cent. When the releases
stopped, the wild mosquitoes
began to rebound, as predicted.
The story of A. aegypti is no
one-off. Alter the environment
and you alter the DNA of the
creatures that live in it. The
massive changes we are making to
the planet are causing all sorts of
mutant monsters to evolve – from
antibiotic-resistant superbugs to
poison-resistant rats and bedbugs.
Michael Le Page is an
environment reporter for
New Scientist @mjflepage
mutants we are inadvertently
creating. There are, of course, risks.
In the US, pollen from trial plots
of glyphosate-resistant GM
bentgrass for use on golf courses
spread to wild bentgrass in 2003.
Earlier this year, it emerged that
dairy cattle supposed to have only
a tiny DNA change to make them
hornless had also gained a gene
for antibiotic resistance.
But herbicide-resistant wild
grass is only a problem for those
who rely on herbicides to kill grass.
Hundreds of wild plants have
already evolved resistance without
added genes. And cows with
an antibiotic-resistance gene
wouldn’t be a major issue, even if
regulators hadn’t detected them
in time: antibiotic resistance stems
mainly from antibiotic overuse
for both people and animals.
The key question is whether the
benefits of genetic engineering
outweigh the risks. I am not
convinced that making it easier
to maintain golf courses is a good
enough reason, but hornless cattle
would make the painful methods
used to dehorn calves redundant.
As for controlling mosquitoes,
it is unclear whether Oxitec’s
approach and others like it are
practical. But surely it is worth
trying them to prevent diseases
like Zika – which can cause serious
birth defects – and judging the

Brazil trial, led by a company some have claimed. Genetic engineering is one of results objectively rather than
called Oxitec. It is true that the The trial also didn’t fail: it our best hopes of controlling these spreading scare stories.  ❚

5 October 2019 | New Scientist | 21

Views Columnist
Field notes from space-time
The universe is rather dusty Whether in our homes or the
depths of space, dust is everywhere – and it can be very annoying,
writes Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
W
E KNOW the universe
doesn’t revolve around
us. But parts of it
do, like household dust. This
continuously reproducing filth
is comprised of skin cells, hair,
clothing fibres, dirt from outside,
dust mites, bacteria and chemicals
that can stick to any of these items.
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein As a child, one of my weekly
is an assistant professor of chores was dusting the house. If
physics and astronomy, and you had told 12-year-old me that,
a core faculty member in at 37, I would find dusting one of
women’s studies at the the most comforting things I do
University of New Hampshire. at home, I would have been very
Her research in theoretical concerned about exactly how
physics focuses on cosmology, awful adulthood is. But perhaps
neutron stars and particles I might have worried less if I had
beyond the standard model also been told that with adulthood
would come knowledge of cosmic
dust, which is all over the universe
and absolutely does not revolve
around us.
Chanda’s week Space dust is part of a
What I’m reading fascinating life cycle of structure
This month, a study formation in the universe: the
group I am in is reading emergence of stars and planets,
Biocultural Creatures as well as their deaths. In the very
by Samantha Frost. early universe, gravity caused
hydrogen and helium gas to
What I’m watching collapse into objects that often
I really liked the first became densely packed enough to
episode of Stumptown! ignite nuclear hydrogen burning,
which leads to star formation. The
What I’m working on nuclear chain reactions that occur
What happens if there in stars produce elements heavier
is more than one dark than hydrogen and helium, like
matter particle? carbon, nitrogen and oxygen.
Even heavier elements, like neon
and titanium, are made in the
supernova explosions that can
occur at the end of a star’s life.
These explosions blow stardust
made of these elements – most
commonly silicon and carbon –
NASA/ESA/STSCI/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
out into the universe. Some of it
leads to solar system formation,
producing the extrasolar planets
we are increasingly capable of
observing. In the case of our
This column appears local star, the sun, that solar
monthly. Up next week: system sprouted life on the
Graham Lawton third-innermost planet, Earth.
22 | New Scientist | 5 October 2019
Some of the dust helps form
the next-generation stars that
burn a little differently than their
forebears because some of the
elements they contain are heavier.
One thing cosmic dust does have
in common with household dust is
that it can be annoying. An ongoing
issue in astronomy observations
is figuring out how to learn about
objects – from planets to stars –
that are obscured by cosmic dust
in what we call our line of sight,
the path of light travelling from
that object to our telescope. Light
passing through cosmic dust
interacts with its particles. The
dust will sometimes absorb and
“Like household dust,
cosmic dust can lead
to misinterpretations
of what we are
viewing”
scatter the light, dimming the
object’s brightness, although this
can also offer valuable insight
into the size of the dust particles.
Like household dust, cosmic
dust can lead to misinterpretations
of what we are viewing. Your
black television stand can end
up looking grey if you don’t clean
it. Similarly, cosmic dust can get
mistaken for something else.
Just five years ago, researchers on
the BICEP2 experiment revealed
they had detected gravitational
waves, ripples in space-time,
from the universe’s first second
of existence. It turned out that
instead they had seen dust.
The mistaken announcement
occurred because they hadn’t
properly subtracted dust out of
their data. In other words, dust
can really get in the way of taking
a good, clean picture.
At the same time, studying
cosmic dust is a critical part of
understanding how objects form
in the cosmos. While most of the
matter in the universe is probably
in the form of dark matter, most
of the visible matter is in the form
of interstellar dust, not in compact
objects like stars and planets.
Thus, insight into large-scale
structures like galaxies requires an
understanding of dust dynamics.
One galaxy we would really like to
understand is ours, the Milky Way.
But we face challenges in trying to
comprehend it because of the way
dust obscures our view, so looking
at other examples is important.
It is good to have neighbours.
The Milky Way is part of what
is known as the Local Group,
a collection of galaxies whose
largest members are our own
and Andromeda. By looking at the
patterns of dust in Andromeda, we
can gain exciting insight into our
own corner of the universe. Ant
Whitworth at Cardiff University
in the UK recently led a team in
doing just that, using data from
the Herschel Space Observatory.
Herschel, named after British
astronomers and siblings Caroline
and William Herschel, was a
European Space Agency telescope
that specialised in looking at
the universe in the part of the
electromagnetic spectrum that
straddles infrared and radio
waves – exactly where space dust
is most visible to our instruments.
With their data, Whitworth and
his team affirmed a previously
noted tension between theoretical
models of interstellar dust and
observations. Dust continues to
give humanity trouble, whether at
home or in the galaxy next door. ❚
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Views Your letters

Editor’s pick
A hard lesson that cod
should teach all electorates
14 September, p 23
From David McKenzie,
Launceston, Tasmania, Australia
Graham Lawton’s discussion of the
tension between action on global
warming and electoral outcomes
brings to mind a grim precedent.
Newfoundland cod was massively
overfished until the fishery
collapsed in the early 1990s.
Scientists warned that quotas
needed to be reduced. Elected
representatives didn’t dare impose
the required limitations for fear of
being labelled “anti-jobs”. I fear
we are seeing a repetition of this,
scaled up, with the global climate.
In May, Australia elected
a government that vowed to
increase coal mining. Brazil’s
president was candid about his
plans for the Amazon before his
electoral victory last October.
Unless voters see real, personal,
economic opportunity in carbon
dioxide reduction, Newfoundland’s
experience may be a prelude to
what awaits us all.
Give the rich an incentive
to offer an example
14 September, p 6
From Hillary Shaw,
Newport, Shropshire, UK
Adam Vaughan lists challenges
facing the UN Climate Action
summit. One hurdle that plans
for climate change reduction
must overcome is that they often
involve cutting things that people
find enjoyable or convenient –
cars and flights, for example.
Humans are very short-termist
as a species, as our continuing
appetite for unhealthy but tasty
food shows. We have an odd sense
of jealousy and of fairness: if
someone else has something, we
may feel entitled to it too. We are
reluctant to give something up if
someone else has it, even if doing
so benefits the entire planet.
So we may resent taxes on
fuel if we see very wealthy people
paying the same flat tax rate or
continuing to fly when we are
supposed to cut back. Maybe we
need graded carbon taxes. The
richer you are, the more you
would pay for emitting the
same amount of carbon dioxide.
Perhaps the very well-off could
publicly commit to not flying to
persuade the rest of us to follow
suit. Carbon taxes that rise
suitably steeply with income
would give them an incentive
to provide this example.
To fix a broken economy,
drop money at its base
3 August, p 30
From Fred Groenier,
Don, Tasmania, Australia
It would be a shame if none of
the three books on how the global
economy is broken that Joanna
Kavenna reviews mentioned the
way that Australia dealt with the
2008 financial crisis. The Labor
government of the time, headed
by Kevin Rudd, recognised that
employing trickle-down
economics would be futile.
Money doesn’t flow down
from the wealthy. It mostly gets
moved upward, concentrating
wealth even more. A government
that wants money to move
throughout an economy needs
to invest in its base. That is what
Labor did, through a lot of make-
work schemes. Australians didn’t
experience the horrors that
people in other countries did.
Can you be catapulted off
to start your holidays?
Letters, 24 August
From Stephen Blyth,
Roade, Northamptonshire, UK
Crispin Piney suggests ways to
book flights to minimise your
carbon footprint. Couldn’t we
adapt the technology that launches
planes from aircraft carriers
to take-offs from land-based
airports? Clean power to catapults
could be supplied off the grid and,
for some, the buzz would be great.
Backing for an ammonia-
based fuel economy
Letters, 14 September
From John Watson,
Darlington, County Durham, UK
I would like to add to the argument
for an ammonia-based fuel
economy suggested by Phil Pope.
You have reported that researchers
at the University of Tokyo have
developed a low-energy
alternative to the Haber-Bosch
process that makes ammonia from
atmospheric nitrogen (27 April,
p 8). This strengthens the case for
ammonia as a carbonless fuel.
Ammonia could be used to
fuel gas or steam turbines as well
as internal combustion engines,
thus providing for all forms of
transport. It could also be used to
meet all domestic and industrial
heating needs. It offers the
prospect of a completely
carbonless fuel economy.
Rejecting global cooling
strengthens the science
Letters, 10 August
From Michael Scott,
Lochcarron, Ross-shire, UK
Were scientists worried in
the 1970s that we were about to
plunge into another full-blown
icy spell? Jon Stern thinks not, and
you suggest that it would have
been better to say only a few were.
As part of my botany course in
the early 1970s, I was taught that
we were most probably in a warm
interglacial period, and that the

26 | New Scientist | 5 October 2019


climate could swiftly revert to the
icy conditions that had prevailed
during previous advances of an
ongoing ice age.
From time to time, there
was some discussion about the
possible impact of industrial air
pollution on climate, but this
wasn’t a formal part of the course,
and it certainly didn’t seem to
dominate the thinking of my
lecturers at the time.
Far from supporting climate
deniers, as Stern suggests it does,
I think the fact that this former
interpretation of the prevailing
climate has been so unequivocally
rejected only adds to the strength
of the scientific consensus about
anthropogenic climate change.
Not everyone benefits
when drivers become safer
7 September, p 20
From David Holdsworth,
Settle, North Yorkshire, UK
You give figures for road traffic
casualties, without distinguishing
between those who were in a
vehicle and other victims. You
also report a claim that advanced
driver assistance systems could
have the same kind of effect on
fatality rates as the introduction
of seat belts. But for whom? Some
suggest that the UK’s introduction
of seat belts increased the risk to
cyclists and pedestrians.
We suspect we’re addicted
to reading and writing
14 September, p 42
From Hilary Gee,
Grange-over-Sands, Cumbria, UK
I sometimes joke about being
a print addict, and now I see
disturbing similarities between
my reading habit and the
behavioural addictions that Moya
Sarner discusses. I look up and
find I am somehow still reading
at 4 am. I experience a “flow state”
Want to get in touch?
Send letters to New Scientist, 25 Bedford Street, London
WC2E 9ES or letters@newscientist.com; see terms at
newscientist.com/letters
and am uneasy if deprived.
Reading blanks out unhappiness,
pain, misery and illness.
I feel compelled to read any
print – yes, including cereal
packets. While reading, I am
almost totally unaware of
anything outside of the story.
I have a house full of books and
keep a spare e-reader handy.
Of course, pursuing an
academic career has allowed me
to use this tendency quite a bit.
And no, I don’t plan to go to rehab.
From Brian Horton, West
Launceston, Tasmania, Australia
Reading about addictions
to behaviours, I realise I have
become addicted to writing letters
to New Scientist. I scan each issue,
looking for some topic that I
can pretend to be an expert in.
As your article points out,
unpredictable rewards strongly
increase the addiction, and you
contribute to this by only rarely
accepting my letters. When each
issue arrives, I scan it quickly to
see if I have been published, then
get grouchy and irritable when no
letter is there or euphoric on the
occasions when my letter appears.
I could possibly fix this
addiction by cancelling my
subscription, but I can’t because
the rest of my family is addicted
to reading New Scientist. ❚
For the record
❚ The earliest of our photos of the
Mer de Glace glacier was taken in
1919 (21 September, p 8).
❚ The United Nations definition
of “extreme poverty” is an income
of US$1.90 per person per day
adjusted to 2011 purchasing
power parity (7 September, p 46).
❚ Flaming hell. Harold Gasson
was employed by the Great
Western Railway to stoke fires,
not extinguish them (Feedback,
14 September).
Views From the archives
20 years ago, New Scientist
reported on NASA’s embarrassing
loss of a Mars orbiter
“TO LOSE one Martian
orbiter may be regarded as
a misfortune,” we wrote on
2 October 1999, trotting out the
old Oscar Wilde quote. “To lose a
second looks like carelessness.”
The barb was prompted by
NASA’s second loss of a probe at
the doorstep of Mars in six years.
“The Mars Climate Orbiter was
supposed to enter an orbit that would have brought it
no closer than 155 kilometres from the surface, after
a course-altering rocket burn on 15 September,” we
reported. “The burn went according to plan. Yet the
craft descended to within 57 kilometres of the planet’s
surface, where it could not withstand the friction
caused by the Martian atmosphere.” The agency had
previously lost contact with its $1 billion Mars Observer
probe three days before orbital insertion in 1993.
We speculated that the two events might be
connected. The loss of the Mars Observer had helped
drive a switch to cheaper, more frequent missions.
“We’ve been saying all along they were going to lose
one of these things,” said an unnamed NASA scientist
after the second incident. Peter Smith at the University
of Arizona, principal investigator for the Mars Polar
Lander, agreed. “With ‘faster, better, cheaper’ you
work your people to death,” he said.
Such fears were underlined in our 9 October
1999 issue, which revealed the exact reason for
the Climate Orbiter fiasco. It was “a result of a
mistake that would shame a first-year physics
student – failing to convert Imperial units to metric”,
we wrote. Behind this was a clash between spacecraft
engineers and navigation specialists, according to
NASA spokesperson Mary Hardin. “Propulsion people
talk in pound-seconds of thrust and navigators
talk in newton-seconds,” she said.
The result was erroneous data from the orbiter’s
attitude-control system, which was crucial for guiding
the rocket burn. Stressed mission controllers had failed
to notice the discrepancy. “Everyone on NASA projects
is incredibly overworked, and mistakes are happening
not just because we’re faster, but because we’re
working nights and weekends,” said Jonathan
McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian
Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Fortunately, subsequent Mars orbiters have made it
the final few kilometres. Simon Ings
To find more from the archives, visit
newscientist.com/old-scientist
5 October 2019 | New Scientist | 27
Views Aperture

28 | New Scientist | 5 October 2019

Eyes on the skies? See jet suit pilot Sam Rogers in action
at New Scientist Live on 10 October
newscientistlive.com

Downcast eyes

Exhibition
The Elevated Eye: Aerial
photography past and
present
Forest Lawn Museum, California
From 10 October 2019 to
8 March 2020

THE intertwined histories of flight

and photography are explored in a
new exhibition at the Forest Lawn
Museum in Glendale, California,
spanning more than a century
of invention.
Nearly 150 still images and
14 minutes of video reveal how
science and technology have
been harnessed in the service
of art and beauty. Among them
is this mangrove-sheltered
outflow of the Tsiribihina river
in western Madagascar (far left),
which revealed its secrets to the
Copernicus Sentinel-2A satellite.
The image was produced from
open-source data by French
geographer Erwan Rivault.
Also on display is this
vertiginous glimpse of NASA
astronauts conducting their first
servicing mission to the Hubble
Space Telescope in December 1993,
and a shot from Los Angeles-based
drone pilot and photographer
Chen Ming of Chicago’s
Millennium Park (bottom) from
120 metres up. His strict vertical
angles and tight framing offer
as rare a perspective on public
monuments as they do on sites
that are otherwise hard to access.  ❚

Simon Ings

CLOCKWISE FROM FAR LEFT: ERWAN RIVAULT, TSIRIBIHINA

RIVER, 2018. MODIFIED COPERNICUS SENTINEL-2A SATELLITE
DATA. COURTESY OF @EARTHFROMSATELLITES; NASA;
CHEN MING, 400 FEET ABOVE MILLENNIUM PARK, 2019.
INKJET DIGITAL PRINT. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

5 October 2019 | New Scientist | 29

Views Culture

An eruption of good taste

The fruit of a globetrotting, interdisciplinary study of volcanic wines is
so good, we should really find some way to bottle it, says Adrian Barnett

Book
Volcanoes and Wine:
From Pompeii to Napa
Charles Frankel
University of Chicago Press

WINES and volcanoes might

seem an exotic pairing. But, as
volcanologist Charles Frankel
reveals here, the two are deeply
entwined. Modern vintages enjoy
playing on their volcanic roots,
and an association has in fact
existed for centuries.
After the eruption of Italy’s
Mount Vesuvius in AD 79, Pompeii
ZU SANCHEZ/GETTY IMAGES

and Herculaneum were buried so

thoroughly that their existence
was forgotten, until their entirely
accidental rediscovery during the
18th century.
But the towns had already left
a permanent legacy through the
grape vines that, having survived
the pyroclastic destruction,
continued to be cultivated on the
slopes of the volcano. Two of these
vines, Piedirosso and Sciascinoso,
have been identified, from casts
of vines and pips protected in
amphorae, as the varieties
Pompeiians grew. These are now
used to make Villa dei Misteri,
a wine that retails at around
€100 a bottle and helps fund
archaeological work at Pompeii.
The wine has, according to
Frankel, a “deep ruby colour, a
fruity and spicy bouquet, a thick
but balanced structure”. Such a
wine could “gracefully accompany
a rich seafood course”. This
combination of gastronome
and sommelier patois is nothing
new. Yet Frankel shifts to quite
another level by combining these
flourishes with rich, unusual
descriptions of terroir, that near-
mystic combination of landscape,
soils, climate and human care that
gives a wine from a particular
region its unique qualities.
The mineral-rich soils and
unusual climatic conditions that
volcanoes produce make them
uniquely suited to creating fine
wines and Frankel, a volcanologist
and a fully paid-up oenophile, is
uniquely suited to write about
them. He has paid his dues, too,
“In a disused pumice
quarry, it is possible
to unpick the eruption
that wrecked Minoan
civilisation in 1620 BC”
having written two previous
books on wine and been a visiting
university lecturer in France and
the US. This has given him a fine
eye for the influences on wine
of culture and history.
This is probably the first
book on wine to begin with an
introduction to basic volcanology,
and Frankel’s choice of chapter
topics – Santorini in Greece;
Naples (Vesusius is nearby), Sicily
(Etna) and its neighbouring
Aeolian Islands (Stromboli) in
Italy; France’s Auvergne region
and California – is an eccentric
oenophilic blend only likely to
occur to a volcanologist.
Frankel avoids the pitfalls
many books like this make.
The text never falls into colour-
supplement pretentiousness.
Neither does it tip into territory
that is tectonically tedious.
He is extremely well-informed
about his curious mix of topics
and is keen to share his knowledge.
A section on Santorini wines that
describes their “rich bouquet of
orange peel, dried apricot, figs
and nuts” is balanced by a loving
account of how, on an island that
is technically a desert, a method
has been developed to curl vines
like a coil pot so that their buds
grow towards the centre,
protected from the sun
and the pumice-laden wind.
Next, he invites you to the
island’s Carrefour car park, which
gives the best access to a disused
Volcanic regions such as
Lanzarote produce some
of the finest wines
pumice quarry. Here, by
examining its layers of ash,
pumice and lava, it is possible to
anatomise the eruption sequence
that wrecked Santorini’s Minoan
civilisation in 1620 BC.
Volcanoes and Wine is a joyous
celebration of the circumstances
that produce some of the world’s
most venerated wines. It is also
full of irresistible historical
snippets. Did you know that a
wine blended from Santorini’s
Assyrtiko, Athiri and Aidani grapes
not only became the sacramental
wine for the Russian Orthodox
Church, but that its trade was
unabated when the island was
invaded by the Muslim Ottoman
Empire in 1579? Now there is
something worth toasting.  ❚
Adrian Barnett is a rainforest
ecologist at Brazil’s National Institute
of Amazonian Research in Manaus

30 | New Scientist | 5 October 2019

 Ola Rosling reveals why the world is better than you
think at New Scientist Live on 10 October
newscientistlive.com
Writing wrongs
How do we get the world out of the mess it is in?
Sally Adee explores a new sci-fi genre that could help
Book
Gamechanger
L. X. Beckett
Tor Books
OF THE many flavours of science
fiction, the one author Kim Stanley
Robinson has least time for is
cyberpunk. During an interview
with New Scientist in 2017, he
said that it “claimed to be the great
expression of American science
fiction”, but was “basically saying
finance always wins. All you can
do is go onto the mean streets,
find your corner, pretend you’re
in a film noir and give up. I thought
it was capitulationist.”
If you believe that sci-fi stories
have the power to shape the future,
this capitulation has consequences.
Many have spoken of the prescience
of science-fiction authors Neal
Stephenson and William Gibson.
But if you take Robinson’s
perspective, maybe their stories
helped condition us to accept the
current hyper-capitalist landscape:
the “out for number one” zeitgeist
that sees billionaires prepare
doomsday bunkers and “plan B”
planets against the reality of climate
change, while populist leaders
strain to keep out climate refugees.
I know when I read Gibson’s
Neuromancer as an impressionable
young thing, I was transfixed by the
cold romance of brute-forcing your
own way around an irreparably
broken system. Young idiots
tend to be libertarian and I was
no exception. It didn’t occur to
me that maybe I shouldn’t buy
into this particular world view.
But now that we are here,
the best we can do is ask: how
do we get out of this mess?
Do our visualisations of the
future world influence how
things will turn out?
Remarkably few authors do ask
this, but there are some.
Robinson is enthusiastic about
a crop of writers working on a
genre that could be described as
“adaptation lit”. Instead of escaping
a ruined Earth for “back-up”
planets, these authors show the
work that needs to be done to pull
us out of dystopia and into a new
acceptance of our power and
responsibility as a species.
L. X. Beckett’s work has been
compared to Neuromancer, but they
share more DNA with Robinson than
with Gibson. They are something
of a scout, fashioning life rafts
out of our existing technologies,
even the ones we love to hate.
One of these, in their new book
Gamechanger, is social media.
In their vision of the near future,
life is as oppressively under
surveillance as it was in Dave
Eggers’s The Circle, but our
inherent conformity has been
harnessed to help humanity
bootstrap itself out of disaster.
With a reputation economy
measured in “strikes” and “strokes”,
the gig economy has been retuned
Don’t miss
to reward volunteer tasks that, bit Watch
by bit, are returning the world to Gemini Man, on
order from the chaos of what the general UK release from
book refers to as “The Setback”. 11 October, pits actor
Beckett’s world-building skills Will Smith against his
are formidable and their story younger self in a film that
is compelling. But it isn’t fun. has been in development
Even if you recognise the necessity for 20 years, waiting for
of retuning human nature, the the digital technology
measures that assure compliance necessary to strip years
here feel oppressive. off its lead actor.
Social media keeps individuals
fixed in a circle of hell woven
together by Twitter mentions.
Anyone can request anyone else’s
full history of media utterances and
appearances. Assistants like Siri
have metastasised into inescapable
“sidekicks” that monitor everything
from your calorie intake to your
social reputation, perpetually Read
nudging you to stay in line. Letters from an
Is there a better way to achieve Astrophysicist (Norton)
the same ends? We need ideas reveals the up-side to
on how to steer ourselves into science celebrity. Neil
a world we can actually live in. deGrasse Tyson writes
With luck, a book is now being charming replies to the
written somewhere that will many fan letters he
paint a picture of ecological receives, and reveals
redemption that is less dependent a passionate and
on hive-mind fascism. ❚ enquiring mind at work.
STEM 006 BY RUTH UGLOW (C) THE ARTIST"; ©PARAMOUNT PICTURES 2019/ SUPPLIED BY LMK
Visit
Under the skin:
Anatomy, art and
identity opens at
the Royal College of
Physicians in London
GORODENKOFF/GETTY IMAGES
on 10 October.
Historical artefacts and
contemporary art explore
how medicine represents
the human body.
5 October 2019 | New Scientist | 31
Views Culture
The film column

Doomed to destruction? With Mexican drug cartels involved, the tragic story of
the vanishing vaquita – the world’s smallest porpoise – has you on the edge of your
seat as documentary Sea of Shadows unfolds, says Simon Ings

Illegal nets for hunting

the totoaba fish catch
and kill vaquitas

vaquita: “possible death in our

care or certain death in the ocean”.
She knows what she is doing – she
is a senior vet for the US Navy
Marine Mammal Program – but
Simon Ings is a novelist and no one has ever tried to capture,
science writer and a culture let alone keep, a vaquita before.
editor at New Scientist. Sea of Shadows won the
Follow him on Instagram Audience Award at the Sundance
@simon_ings Film Festival in February this year;
National Geographic snapped it
up for $3 million. It is built around
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

THE documentary Sea of Shadows
is the story of the world’s smallest
Film porpoise, the critically endangered
Sea of Shadows vaquita, which is hiding out in the
Directed by Richard Ladkani extreme south-western corner of
National Geographic its territory in the Sea of Cortez off
Netflix, streaming from Mexico. It isn’t a story that will end
4 November well, though Richard Ladkani,
whose 2016 Netflix documentary
The Ivory Game was shortlisted
Simon also for an Oscar in the 89th Academy
recommends... Awards, has made something that
is very hard to look away from.
Film This isn’t an environmental
“Some locals believe
The Girl Who story, but a true crime. No one
Talked to Dolphins wants to hunt the vaquita. The
Directed by totoaba fish, which shares the
Christopher Riley vaquita’s waters, is another matter.
A powerful, sometimes It is known as the cocaine of the
eccentric story about sea, a nickname that only makes
maritime laboratory life sense once you learn that Mexican
drug cartels have moved into the
The Ivory Game totoaba business to satisfy the
Directed by Kief Davidson Chinese luxury market, where the
and Richard Ladkani fish’s swim bladders are said to
A previous cinematic outing have rare medical properties.
for Andrea Crosta’s Illegal gill nets that catch the
intelligence-led totoaba also catch and kill vaquitas.
environmental activism The Mexican government talks a
good environmental game but has
let the problem get out of hand.
Law-abiding fishing communities
are ruined by blanket fishing bans
while the illegal fishers operate
with near-impunity.
Late on in the film, there is CCTV
footage of a couple of soldiers with
car trouble. They ask for help from
a passing motorist, who shoots
one of the soldiers dead and drives
away. Meet Oscar Parra Aispuro,
the totoaba padron of Santa Clara.
(I said you couldn’t look away; I
didn’t say you wouldn’t want to.)
the vaquita is a myth
dreamed up by a
hostile government
to bankrupt the poor”
Things are so bad, a scheme is
dreamed up to take the vaquitas
out of the ocean to live in captivity.
It is an absurdly desperate move
because virtually nothing is
known about the vaquita or its
habits. Some locals believe the
creature is a myth dreamed up by
a hostile government to bankrupt
the poor: how’s that for fake news?
Project leader Cynthia Smith
explains the dilemma facing the
a collaborative investigation
between Andrea Crosta, executive
director and co-founder of Earth
League International (the hero-
detectives of The Ivory Game) and
Carlos Loret de Mola, a popular
correspondent and news anchor
in Mexico, with an international
audience of 35 million daily.
Crosta, de Mola and the
Sea Shepherd Conservation
Society – their maritime partners
in crime-prevention – are expert
in handling and appealing to
the media, and Sea of Shadows is,
among other things, their slick
calling card. From the film’s
“whodunnit” structure to the way
content is squeezed to release a
steady drip-drip of information,
Sea of Shadows is pure Nat Geo
fodder. If you don’t like that
channel much, you won’t like this.
The rest of us will be perched
on the edge of our sofas, in thrall
to drone-heavy cinematography
that owes not a little to Denis
Villeneuve’s 2015 thriller Sicario,
rocked by a thumping score
full of dread and menace, and
appalled by a story headed
pell-mell for the dark.
Can the vaquita be saved?
When Sea of Shadows was made
in 2018, there were fewer than
30 in the ocean. Today there are
fewer than 10. ❚

32 | New Scientist | 5 October 2019

 WHAT IF TIME STARTED
FLOWING BACKWARDS?

WHAT
IF THE
RUSSIANS
GOT TO
THE MOON
FIRST?

WHAT IF DINOSAURS
STILL RULED THE EARTH?
AVAILABLE NOW
newscientist.com/books
 Features
Seeing the
woods
Trees absorb carbon and are our most
powerful ally against climate change, but we
still don’t know their full potential. That is
set to change, finds Christine Swanson
E
XCITEMENT in the room was palpable
on the morning of 5 December last year.
The day before, the launch of SpaceX’s
Falcon 9 to supply the International Space
Station had been delayed for 24 hours. That
followed the discovery on board of mouldy
food – not bound for the ISS crew but to feed
some mice set to join them. Now, a crowd had
gathered at Kennedy Space Center in Florida
for the rescheduled lift off. Stowed along with
the mice and fresh feed were experiments,
including a remote-sensing system called
GEDI – pronounced like the Jedi in Star Wars.
GEDI – the Global Ecosystem Dynamics
Investigation – turns out to be a particularly
precious cargo. It is a NASA mission designed
to provide the first three-dimensional look
at the world’s forests. Surprisingly, given
our achievements in space, we still have
only a vague idea of how much living
MARC SCHLOSSMAN/PANOS PICTURES
matter is on Earth. We do know that trees
make up the bulk of it. We also know that
forestation and deforestation contribute to
atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations.
So, the unprecedented information that
GEDI gathers on trees will be essential for
understanding climate change.
34 | New Scientist | 5 October 2019
The SpaceX launch was just the beginning.
GEDI is in the vanguard of a new wave of
innovative sensors that will assess the
world’s plant life and how it is changing –
how much carbon, for instance, is lost to
the atmosphere when trees are destroyed
as a result of catastrophic events such as
wildfires, hurricanes and logging. These
eyes in the sky will be invaluable in efforts
to protect and regenerate forests, too. At last,
we are starting to get a holistic picture of our
green planet – and what we risk losing if we
don’t take action.
Understanding the flow of carbon between
living matter and the atmosphere is crucial
if we are to tackle global warming caused by
carbon dioxide. But tracking carbon can be
tricky. We know that CO2 emissions from
industry, vehicles and other sources put
about 10 billion tonnes of carbon into the
atmosphere each year. But not all of it stays
there. “About half of what we’re pushing up
into the atmosphere disappears back into
the land systems somewhere,” says Laura
Duncanson at the University of Maryland,
who  is a member of the GEDI team. “Where
that is and the processes that govern that, this
 is a massive scientific mystery that we’re trying
to solve.” Until we do that, we can’t nurture this
precious carbon sink.
What we do know is that the oceans absorb
some 25 per cent of the carbon we emit. When it
comes to accounting for the rest of the carbon
that vanishes from the air, forests are the prime
suspects. Yet our lack of knowledge about them
was made clear last year when researchers
attempted to quantify the total mass of life on
Earth for the first time. Using measurements
from hundreds of previous studies, they
estimated that nature contains the equivalent
of about 550 billion tonnes of carbon. Bacteria
were expected to account for much of this, so
it was a big surprise to discover that they don’t.
Instead, land plants alone make up 80 per cent.
And most of this biomass is in trees.

Trillions of trees
A 2015 estimate put the total number of trees
on Earth at 3.04 trillion, including 1.3 trillion in
tropical and subtropical forests, 0.66 trillion in
temperate regions and 0.74 billion in the boreal
conifer forests encircling the globe below the
Arctic. Despite this, our current knowledge
of how much carbon is contained in forests i
s still so poor that estimates for the Amazon
rainforest range from 60 to 93 billion tonnes,
a difference that isn’t far off the world’s entire
annual carbon emissions.
The most precise way to measure the carbon
in a tree is to chop it down and weigh it, trunk,
branches, roots and all. Of course, that would
kill it, so instead we take field measurements of
tree diameters and then use known densities
of different woods to calculate total biomass.
This method is time-consuming and expensive
– and in practice turns out to be near-
impossible, especially in the tropics where
forests are dense and difficult to navigate.
Scanning the forests from the air or from
satellites seems an obvious solution. But
most Earth-observing sensors can take
pictures only of the tops of canopies. GEDI is
different. It uses lidar, a method that sends
thousands of laser pulses towards Earth’s
surface, which bounce back to space after
hitting solid objects. By measuring the time
it takes for a pulse to travel there and back,
the distance can be calculated. So, laser beams
penetrating a forest at different depths from
“About half of the carbon the canopy down to the ground can be used to
we are pushing up into the build a three-dimensional map of the forest.
GEDI isn’t the first lidar sensor in space,
atmosphere disappears into but it is different. While others are good at
things like monitoring ice sheets, GEDI was
land systems somewhere” conceived to give the most complete picture >

5 October 2019 | New Scientist | 35

 Christiana Figueres will speak about the next steps on climate
change on the main stage at New Scientist Live on 10 October
newscientistlive.com
© STUART FRANKLIN/MAGNUM PHOTOS
of the forest possible. “We’ve designed the
instrument, its lasers, detectors, and other
technology, to get through dense tropical
forests,” says Ralph Dubayah at the
University of Maryland, who is principal
investigator on GEDI.
GEDI’s lidar uses near infrared light, which
is reflected off leaves so that the canopy looks
brighter than it does in the visible spectrum.
Nevertheless, it has some limitations. For a
start, because it is hitching a ride with the
ISS, over its two-year mission, it will sample
only a fraction of Earth’s surface and won’t
collect data north of about 52 degrees latitude,
therefore missing most of the boreal forest.
In addition, because lidar uses light in the near
infrared part of the spectrum, it can’t penetrate
clouds. So GEDI can’t do this all alone. That is
where other systems that use radar come in.
Radar systems send out microwave
radiation, which passes through cloud and
scatters when it hits a solid object. The sensor
detects this backscatter and the patterns it
produces can be analysed to form pictures of
the landscape. Microwaves range from about
1 millimetre to 1 metre in length, and the
wavelength a particular radar uses dictates
what it can see. Shorter wavelengths detect
36 | New Scientist | 5 October 2019
Orbital tech will smaller objects. Longer ones can penetrate
reveal the secrets the forest canopy to bounce off larger objects
of the forest below, such as tree trunks and branches.
Too long, however, and the wavelength gets
scattered in Earth’s ionosphere – a layer of
the atmosphere extending from about 60 to
1000 kilometres up that contains a lot of ions
and free electrons.
What is needed is a “Goldilocks” wavelength,
not too long and not too short. The one that
is just right, at 70 centimetres, is known as
the P-band. Unfortunately, that wavelength
couldn’t be used for many years. Satellites
carrying P-band radars were banned because
they would interfere with Earth-based
operations that use the same wavelength,
including military defence systems. For
example, missions including the German
Earth observation satellite TanDEM-X operate
at much shorter wavelengths, so they aren’t
very sensitive to biomass.
Radar unlocked
However, in 2004, the blanket ban on using
P-band radar in orbit was lifted. Since then,
Shaun Quegan at the University of Sheffield,
UK, and his colleagues have been developing
a system based on the Goldilocks wavelength
to measure biomass from space. In 2013,
the European Space Agency finally selected
The stuff of life this system – the Biomass satellite – for
implementation. It is set to launch in 2022.
Plants account for by far the largest proportion
of biomass on Earth, and most of that living The mission will systematically map forests
matter is in trees where information is most urgently needed,
including all the world’s tropical forest and
most subtropical and boreal forest. Remaining
defence embargoes will prevent Biomass from
surveying the 22 per cent of Earth’s boreal
forests that are in Canada and Alaska, however.
During the initial 14-month phase of its
five-year mission, the sensor will operate in a
tomography mode. Like a CAT scanner imaging
Plants
the human body in multiple slices, Biomass
450
gigatonnes of carbon will build up a three-dimensional picture of
the forest. Because it uses an imaging system
at a long wavelength, instead of the discrete
sampling system of GEDI, it will create a
different picture: a continuous map of the
woody parts of the forest structure that would
otherwise be obstructed by the canopy. “At
these wavelengths, the leafy canopy becomes
Fungi
transparent and we can see right down to the
Bacteria Archaea 7
12 ground,” says Quegan. Thereafter, the satellite
70
will switch to using interferometry – extracting
Viruses 0.2 information from interference patterns – and
SOURCE: doi.org/cp29 Protists 4 Animals 2
visit the same locations every seven months.
This will allow scientists to estimate canopy
biomass and height on a more frequent
 Turning carbon blue
Restoring ecosystems could be
a crucial weapon in our efforts
to avoid climate catastrophe.
By drawing carbon out of the
atmosphere, plants lock away the
greenhouse gases that cause global
warming. Reforestation offers the
greatest potential because trees
contain so much carbon, and
historic deforestation means there
are large areas of land that could
be restored to woodland. Coastal
habitats offer a similar opportunity
– the available area may be less, but
the carbon payback is even greater.
Lined with mangroves, salt
ground – burying it indefinitely,
provided the system stays healthy.
As a result, coastal plants can
absorb many times more carbon
than trees covering the same area.
A seagrass meadow, for example,
contains anywhere from 10 to 40
times as much, 95 per cent of which
is stored in sediment. The problem
is, these aquatic ecosystems are
disappearing. Mangroves and salt
marshes are often removed to make
way for coastal developments, and
seagrasses are dying as pollution
depletes oxygen levels in coastal
waters. It is estimated that
increased by 8 per cent last year.
Now, researchers at the University
of Southern Denmark are trying to
work out the best way to cultivate
seagrass. Unlike seaweeds,
seagrasses are vascular plants with
roots and flowers, so can be sown
from seeds or planted as seedlings.
The team tested various cultivation
methods and found that planting
seedlings was most successful
because shifting shorelines and
sediment accretion made it hard
for seeds to get established.
They want to see their techniques
adopted on a massive scale. They

©FERDINANDO SCIANNA/MAGNUM PHOTOS

marshes and seagrass meadows,
coastal ecosystems are repositories
of “blue carbon”. While forests hold
most of their carbon within woody
biomass, coastal plants pull carbon
out of the air and water and channel
it through their roots deep into the
approximately one third of blue
carbon sinks have already vanished.
Concerted efforts are being made
to restore coastal ecosystems. One
of the longest-running projects is in
Chesapeake Bay on the east coast
of the US, where seagrass meadows
point out that seagrasses have the
potential to grow in coastal waters
all over the world, except Antarctica.
So blue carbon sinks could play
a significant part in efforts to curb
global warming – not to mention
beautifying our coastlines.

basis to build a better understanding of tree
mortality and regrowth.
There are other projects on the drawing
board, too. These include the NISAR mission,
the first radar imaging satellite to use dual
wavelengths, which is due to launch in 2021.
A collaboration between NASA and the Indian
Space Research Organisation, it is designed
to observe and measure a range of natural
processes including tsunamis, earthquakes,
ice-sheet collapse and ecosystem disturbances.
Together with satellites already in orbit,
information from GEDI, Biomass, NISAR
and more will be combined to give the first
wall-to-wall picture of the world’s forests.
“Collaboration does seem to be quite a unique
component of what’s happening with the
biomass missions,” says John Armston at the
University of Maryland, who works on GEDI.
All this means that in a few years, we will
have a much better idea of where the missing
carbon is going – or at least how much of it
is being taken up by trees. The new satellites
will also help reveal the varying exchange of
carbon between trees and the atmosphere.
Last year, for example, the hurricanes that
hit the southern and eastern US felled vast
swathes of forest, while wildfires that raged
in California turned countless trees to ash,
sending their stored carbon literally up in
smoke. Such dramatic events are likely to
become more common as the world gets
hotter. In future, with an array of remote
sensors, we will be able to properly assess
the damage they have done. We will get a
more accurate measure of how much forest
is being lost through logging, too, because
the new generation of imagers will be able
to detect the thinning out of woodland as
well as the entire clearance of patches that
conventional imagers can see.
Remote sensors also have the potential
to aid forest protection and regeneration.
The 2015 Paris climate agreement included
a programme called REDD+, designed to help
poorer countries keep their forests intact
by offering financial incentives to reduce
carbon emissions caused by deforestation
and degradation. “For REDD+ to work, it is
crucial for people to be able to accurately and
reliably monitor how much carbon emissions
have happened,” says Jonah Busch, chief
economist at the Earth Innovation Institute.
To do that, they first need to know how much
carbon is contained in their forests. At present,
this is estimated using satellite images and
region-dependent estimates for biomass.
The new sensors will provide accurate
measures, putting the project on a more
empirical footing.
Worldwide, some 15 billion trees are felled
each year – and more than 3 trillion have been
cut down since people began farming around
10,000 years ago. Now, increasing urbanisation
means there is great potential for reversing
this trend. Indeed, research published in July
reveals that Earth could support enough
additional trees to cut atmospheric carbon
levels by 25 per cent – making this by far the
best climate change solution available. Some
big reforestation projects are already under
way. China, for example, has planted an area
a quarter of the size of the Amazon rainforest
in the past two decades. With the new wave
of remote sensors, we will be able to measure
the success of such projects, and their impact
on efforts to keep global warming in check.
That truly will be a giant leap for humanity. ❚
Christine Swanson is a
freelance writer based
in Gainesville, Florida

5 October 2019 | New Scientist | 37

Features
Simulating
the world
We have a way to predict – and change – the
future. Should we use it? Graham Lawton reports
O
CTOBER 2020. The US presidential
election campaign is in its final days.
Donald Trump is behind in the polls
and the pundits are predicting a win for his
Democrat challenger, former vice president
Joe Biden. But Trump is unruffled. He boasts
that he will win again. Bigly.
With two weeks to go, his campaign
unleashes an offensive in the crucial swing
states: adverts, Facebook posts, WhatsApp
groups and tweets. They warn of violent crime
and civil unrest driven by immigrants and
gangs, playing up Trump’s endorsement by
evangelicals and smearing Biden as a closet
atheist. The initiative works and Trump
snatches another unlikely victory.
You probably think you have heard it all
before. It is a replay of 2016, when consulting
firm Cambridge Analytica used targeted
messaging to apparently influence the outcome
of the US election, right? Wrong. In this
scenario, there is a new, even more persuasive
technology: multi-agent artificial intelligence
(MAAI). This tech allows predictions to be
made with extraordinary accuracy by testing
them in highly detailed simulations that
amount to entire artificial societies. If, for
example, a campaign team wants to decide
how and to whom to pitch their messages –
how to fight an election – it can do so, multiple
DOUG JON MILLER
times, inside a computer simulation.
The idea that the Trump campaign is
planning to use MAAI is pure speculation. But
38 | New Scientist | 5 October 2019
in terms of technology, there is nothing to stop
it. MAAIs are already being used to build digital
societies that simulate real ones with uncanny
accuracy. That allows people to perform radical
social experiments. Want to know what will
happen if 20,000 Syrian refugees arrive in
a city in western Europe? Build an artificial
society and watch. Want to know how to make
the integration of those immigrants peaceful?
Build an artificial society, try things out and
see what works. Want to stoke anti-immigrant
hostility or design a disinformation campaign
to win an election…?
In simple terms, an artificial society is just
a computer model similar to those that have
been used for decades to understand complex
dynamic systems, such as the weather. The first
were built by physicists and chemists in the
1960s, but as the models increased in
complexity, they were embraced by biologists
and, in the past decade, social scientists.
One of the most useful techniques is
agent-based modelling, which uses strings
of computer code to represent agents, such
as drivers navigating a route or companies
competing in an economy. The agents are
programmed to interact with one another
and their virtual environment and change
their behaviour accordingly. These models
are useful for understanding how complex
systems work, predicting how they will evolve
and testing what happens if you intervene.
In 2014, for example, an Ebola epidemic
broke out in West Africa. As cases mounted,
the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency
asked computer modellers to predict how
the epidemic would progress. Over seven
months, they built an agent-based model
that used real-world data on case numbers,
infection rates, healthcare systems, population
distribution, demographics, economic and
social interactions, travel patterns and even
cultural behaviour such as funeral rites.
It predicted that, left unchecked, the virus
would infect 1.4 million people.
It was also used to test interventions to
halt the spread. Medical teams were sent where
the model said they would be most effective
and people in affected areas were advised to
adopt quarantine measures and safe burial
practices. In the end, infections were restricted
to 28,000 people. We can’t know for sure that
the model worked, that the interventions led
to a lower number than it predicted, but this
case is frequently cited as a successful use of
agent-based modelling.

The model human

Even here, the agents are quite basic. Models
are computationally expensive and modellers
have to use their resources sparingly. Agents
are thus endowed with the bare minimum of
simple attributes – being more or less open to
health messages, for example – and a small
repertoire of behavioural responses, such as
fleeing or staying put. Such models can produce
surprisingly complex behaviour, but you
would hesitate to call them an artificial society.
In the past couple of years, however,
the game has changed, driven by a dramatic
increase in the availability of four key raw
materials: computing power, data, scientific
understanding of human behaviour and,
most crucially, artificial intelligence (AI).
“It has always been one of the ambitions
of agent-based modelling to have intelligent
agents,” says Nigel Gilbert, head of the Centre
for Research in Social Simulation at the
University of Surrey, UK. With the arrival
of MAAI, that ambition has been fulfilled.
With AI, the models suddenly become more
realistic. “One of the things that has changed
is an acceptance that you really can model
humans,” says F. LeRon Shults, director of the
Center for Modeling Social Systems at the
University of Agder in Norway. “Our agents
are cognitively complex. They are simulated
people with genders, ages and personalities. >

5 October 2019 | New Scientist | 39

 How creative can computers be?
Hear Marcus du Sautoy speak at New Scientist Live
newscientistlive.com

They can get married, have children, get

divorced. They can get a job or get fired, they
can join groups, they can die. They can have
religious beliefs. They’re social in the way
humans are. They interact with each other in
social networks. They learn from each other,
react to each other and to the environment
as a whole.”
The increase in computing power also
means that the number of agents in a model
can be vastly increased, from a few thousand
to tens of millions. “We can model a city the
size of London,” says Saikou Diallo at the
Virginia Modeling, Analysis and Simulation
Center at Old Dominion University in Virginia.
Shults says the next milestone is 320 million,
the size of the US population, and from there
1.4 billion to model China. Ultimately, the
goal is the whole world.

The way to harmony

The result is a revolution in agent-based
modelling. “We can replicate how real societies
work to explore real-world questions,” says
Diallo. If this sounds something like The Sims,
that’s because it is. But whereas The Sims is
GETTY IMAGES

a game, virtual societies powered by millions

of artificial intelligence-driven agents are
deadly serious.
In the past eight years, a million Syrian
refugees have fled to Europe, and some 20,000
of them settled in Norway. The influx of mostly
Muslim immigrants into a relatively ethnically
homogeneous, secular country with Christian
“We can
roots has stirred up tensions. Harmonious
integration is an urgent issue. The third
largest political party in Norway is the right-
wing, anti-immigration Progress Party. “You
want to have a society that is not full of
radicalisation,” says Shults.
The old-fashioned way to achieve this
is to design and implement policies that
you believe will work. “Everybody sits around
the table and argues about the right policy:
should we invest a lot of money on making
immigrants feel economically secure? Should
we invest in teaching them the language or
culture? Should we spend it on education?
Should we spend it on places for the young
men to play soccer with Norwegians?
Everyone has their idea,” says Shults.
The stakes are high: if you make the
wrong call, the outcome could be catastrophic
and irreversible. “If 10 years later you have
economic collapse and terrorism, you can’t
hit the reset button,” says Shults.
But with a computer simulation, you can
try out all sorts of interventions. If a policy
backfires in the model, you can hit reset.
That is the goal of a model being developed
replicate how by Diallo, Shults and others, which simulates
a typical Norwegian city with a sudden influx
real societies of refugees. It is a relatively small model with
work, to explore just 50,000 agents but will run for three
generations to test the long-term outcomes
real-world of various policies. Models such as this take
between hours and days to complete a run,
questions” depending on the number of parameters
involved. “It allows you to do experiments that
are impossible in the real world,” says Shults.
Because of this power, MAAI technology has
the potential to tackle the world’s most complex
problems. This month, Shults and his colleagues
are sitting down with experts on climate, energy
and conflict to start modelling a refugee crisis
triggered by climate change. “Most experts
think that climate was a big factor in the Syrian
refugee crisis,” says Shults. “A million people
flowed into Europe. As sea levels rise over the
next 20 to 30 years, we’re talking at least 100
million. Where are they going to go? There
will be massive human suffering. Our goal is
to come up with policy initiatives to change
behaviours and avoid conflict.”

40 | New Scientist | 5 October 2019


Other modellers are working on preventing
ethnic conflict and breaking up protection
rackets and sex trafficking rings. Shults also
sees applications in politics: “I’d like to
understand what is driving populism – under
what conditions do you get Brexit, or Le Pen?”
Of course, it isn’t possible to capture the full
complexity of human behaviour and social
interactions. “We still don’t really know how
people make decisions, which is a major
weakness,” says Bruce Edmonds, director of
the Centre for Policy Modelling at Manchester
Metropolitan University, UK. “In most cases,
there are some bits of the model that are
empirically validated but some bits that are
guesses.” MAAI is still so new that we don’t yet
know how accurate it will be. Shults says the
outputs of the model are still valid – if you
get your inputs right: “One of the common
phrases you hear is ‘all models are wrong,
but some are useful’.”
The first step is to decide what to model,
then bring in the best expertise available. For
the refugee model, for example, Shults and his
colleagues will call on social scientists who
have theoretical models and empirical data
City simulations
can imagine
almost anything
on religious conflict and social integration.
Stage one is to “formalise the theory”,
which means nailing down exactly how the
theoretical models apply to people in the real
world and describing it mathematically. At this
point, the modellers start to build agents.
Every conceivable social interaction can be
modelled: between family, friends, bosses,
colleagues, subordinates and religious leaders,
and from economic dealings to social media
engagement. Through these interactions, the
agents learn, altering their future behaviour.
Summed across the whole simulation, they
can alter the trajectory of the society.
Once the simulation is built, it has to
be validated. That means plugging in data
from the real world and seeing whether it
recapitulates what actually happened, and
if not, tweaking it accordingly. In the refugee
assimilation model, Shults and his team will
use data from social surveys carried out by the
Norwegian government, plus a decade of data
on assimilation in London and Berlin.
Unsurprisingly, it isn’t a trivial undertaking,
taking about a year. But once validated, you are
ready to play God. That might just mean setting
initial conditions and watching how things
pan out. It might mean testing an intervention
that you think might help – say, pumping
resources into a deradicalisation programme.
Or it might mean asking the simulation to find
a pathway to a desirable future state.
Don’t be evil
The power of the technology is that you can
do all of these things at once. “The simulation
is running hundreds, thousands, millions
of parameter sweeps to see under what
conditions agents are going to move, change
and do different things,” says Shults.
The power brings great responsibility.
“The ethical question bothers me,” says Shults.
“Could this technology be used for evil?”
We already know the answer. Shults’s team
modelled a society with a majority religious
group in conflict with a minority one. They
found that such societies easily spiral into
deadly violence. When they ran the simulation
to find the most efficient way to restore peace,
the answer that popped out was deeply
troubling: genocide.
There is also a very real fear of the
technology being exploited, as many feel
happened with Cambridge Analytica.
“They used AI to trick people into believing
something so they would vote a certain way,”
says Shults. He and his colleagues fear that
something even more manipulative could be
done with MAAIs. The US election scenario is
hypothetical, but plausible. Using simulation
technology, theoretical insights could be
weaponised for electoral gain. “Yes, it can be
used for doing bad,” says Diallo. “It could be
used to psychologically target people or groups
and work out how to influence them.”
Or worse. A group at the Center for Mind and
Culture in Boston has created an MAAI to test
ways to break up child sex trafficking rings.
Team leader Wesley Wildman points out that
the traffickers could hire someone to build a
rival simulation to disrupt the disrupters in a
technological arms race. “It could already be
happening. As far as I know, we’re ahead of
them, but they will catch up,” he says.
The Society for Modeling and Simulation
International, of which Diallo is president,
takes these threats so seriously that it is
drawing up a set of ethical guidelines for
modellers. They are forbidden from working
with criminals, but what if a politically
motivated group asks for help? “At that point,
you’re face to face with a conundrum,” says
Wildman. He says that Cambridge Analytica
didn’t do anything wrong, except for not
telling people what they were up to. “If that
is the way political campaigns are going to
be run, fine, but be clear about it.” The only
ethical requirement that could be placed on
modellers working for political campaigns is
transparency. Does that make you feel secure?
The complexity and obscurity of MAAI
mean it is unlikely that anyone is manipulating
you – yet. Outside the small community of
modellers, the existence of MAAI remains
largely unknown. “I think it is possible that
bad actors are using it,” says Wildman, “but
I don’t think they’d be very far along.”
Gilbert says some policy analysts are
becoming aware of it, but most politicians are
in the dark. According to Edmonds, Dominic
Cummings, special advisor to UK prime
minister Boris Johnson, is aware and interested.
It is only a matter of time. You know about it
now, and maybe Trump does too. For Wildman,
the genie will soon be out of the bottle: “This is
coming, whether we’re ready for it or not.” ❚
Graham Lawton is a staff writer at
New Scientist. Follow him on Twitter
@GrahamLawton
5 October 2019 | New Scientist | 41
Features Cover story
ANDREA UCINI

42 | New Scientist | 5 October 2019

 The
case of the
missing quarks
They are the most fundamental particles
of matter. But do quarks even exist?
Joshua Howgego investigates
F
INNEGANS WAKE has a reputation for
being one of the most difficult novels
in the English language. Written by
James Joyce over 17 years, it blends invented
words with real phrases in grammar-defying
constructions. The final line ends mid-
sentence – only for you to realise that the
words that should come next are the ones
at the book’s beginning. Some say it is
Joyce’s attempt at recreating a dream. Others
claim that it contains no meaning at all.
It might seem odd, then, that a nonsense
word from this most ungraspable of books
should have given its name to a particle known
as the building block of reality: the quark.
In modern physics, a quark is what you would
find if you were able to take a piece of matter
and cut it in half again and again until you
could cut no more.
Quarks are as fundamental as anything
can be. But they are also exceedingly weird.
They have strange quantum properties known
as flavour and spin. They crave each other’s
company, clustering together in pairs or
triplets. And they have a special sort of charge
that comes not in the positive or negative
variety, but in colours.
And now, in a twist to rival that of any
experimental novel, it seems quarks may not
actually exist. According to tantalising new
research, they may instead be an illusion, the
product of quantum trickery we don’t yet fully
understand. Perhaps the absurdist origin
of their name is apt after all. The search
for reality’s foundations may turn out to
be as meaningless and insubstantial as a
half-remembered dream.
The hunt for matter’s most basic
constituents is millennia old. The Greek
philosopher Democritus coined a new word
to describe fundamental units of matter:
atomos meaning indivisible. While physicists
today would agree with Democritus in
principle, history has played a nasty joke on
his terminology. Our modern understanding
of atoms suggests that they are composed of
Kwark or
kwork?
When physicist Murray Gell-Mann
was looking to name a set of new
fundamental particles that came in
threes, he coined the sound “quork”
before finding the enigmatic line “three
quarks for Muster Mark!” in James
Joyce’s 1927 novel Finnegans Wake.
Since then, scientists have been divided
over how to pronounce the word. “I’ve
heard quarks pronounced to rhyme with
‘bark’ and with ‘dork’,” says Tara Shears
at the University of Liverpool, UK. “I say
it both ways, just to be confusing!”
particles called electrons that orbit a nucleus
made of protons and neutrons. And those
latter two are actually made of quarks (see
“Nature’s lego bricks”, page 45).
It is tempting to think of these particles as
tiny spheres whizzing around like balls on a
snooker table, but we have long known that
particles are more enigmatic than that. The
problems began with light. For centuries,
scientists disagreed over its nature, with some
believing it was a steady stream of particles,
and others calling it a wave. With the advent of
quantum theory in the early 20th century, we
were forced to accept the evidence that light
can take on either form, depending on the
situation. The same reasoning that had been
applied to photons of light was soon extended
to all other particles. Electrons, protons,
neutrons, even quarks, can all be said to exist
as waves as well as particles.
Things only got more muddled from there.
We now know that under the right conditions,
particles can be coaxed into doing something
even weirder. Inside certain specially primed
materials, electrons can merge into a two-
dimensional sea where their individual
identity is lost.
Out of this collective behaviour, strange
particles emerge. They can be heavier than an
electron, or only have a fraction of an electron’s
charge, or have the opposite charge altogether.
Think of a football crowd doing a Mexican
wave: the stadium remains full of people, but >
5 October 2019 | New Scientist | 43
 Delve into the mysteries of neutrinos with Melissa Uchida
at New Scientist Live on 11 October
newscientistlive.com

an external observer sees a new phenomenon

emerge that looks nothing like individual
football fans. In particle physics, these
apparitions are known as quasiparticles.
QUARKY
For all the nuance of this picture, however,
it still makes physicists’ lives easier to think
QUIRKS
of particles as real objects that exist in the
world. But that wasn’t the case when quarks
were first conceived.
In the 1950s, more particles were turning
up than physicists knew what to do with,
barrelling towards us out of the depths of Beyond strange University of British Columbia
space or summoned into existence by particle in Canada thinks he knows
colliders. It created a messy zoo of particles The standard model of particle what could do it: a hypothetical
of different masses, charges and sizes that physics predicts the existence new field that would span the
seemed impossible to corral. The insight of six types, or flavours, of quark: universe, creating bubbles
that would resolve the chaos was developed up, down, strange, charm, pressurised enough to create
separately by three researchers: Murray bottom and top. We knew that quark nuggets that double as
Gell-Mann, Yuval Ne’eman and George Zweig. quarks can change flavour, but dark matter.
They noticed that many of these particles now it seems they might be It may sound like speculation
obeyed a symmetry, suggesting that they capable of a more radical piled on speculation, but the
were all produced by different combinations transformation too. potential is exciting. More
of the same core ingredients. Benedetta Belfatto at the controversially, Zhitnitsky
Instead of treating the particles in the zoo Gran Sasso Science Institute in believes that quark nuggets
as fundamental entities, Gell-Mann and the L’Aquila, Italy, and her colleagues could be colliding with their
others invented a new set of particles one size have analysed experimental antiparticles inside the sun,
smaller. With these quarks in place (Gell-Mann data on flavour change and spitting out prodigious amounts
coined the name and got most of the credit – found that some quarks seem of energy and explaining why
he was the only one to win a Nobel prize for his to be disappearing. “It means the sun’s outer atmosphere is
work), the mess of particle physics suddenly there is something missing as hot as it is.
snapped into order. “The introduction of the from our picture,” says Belfatto.
idea of quarks was revolutionary,” says Tara One possibility is that some
Shears at the University of Liverpool, UK. “That quarks are turning into another
idea of a similarity, or symmetry, in behaviour quark that we have never seen, Pentaquarks
hinting at deeper structure is something we says Ruth Van de Water at the and hexaquarks
hold very current in research today.” Fermi National Accelerator
Laboratory near Chicago, In familiar particles like protons
probably heavier than any of  and neutrons, quarks come
Mathematical monsters the six we know of. in collections of three colours
At first, no one was sure whether quarks (see main feature).
were real particles or just a helpful organising There is theoretically a way
idea. In a 1972 lecture, Gell-Mann warned his Quark nuggets for collections of five quarks,
audience against invoking “fictitious objects known as pentaquarks, to form,
in our models that end up turning into real Dark matter is one of the most but no one was sure they could
monsters that devour us”. perplexing mysteries in physics. exist until 2015, when a team
There were two pieces of evidence to suggest Making up about 27 per cent at the Large Hadron Collider near
that quarks were more than just monsters in the of the universe, it is an invisible Geneva, Switzerland, snared
mathematics. First, physicists firing electrons at substance that can be felt only one in the detectors.
protons noticed that some bounced off at wide through the gravitational pull it Could hexa- or septaquarks
angles. This suggested that the electrons had exerts. But what is it made of? exist? In the first instance, yes,
hit something inside the proton – something Quark nuggets, also known definitely. Nuclei of deuterium
like a quark. What’s more, Gell-Mann’s model as strangelets, are hypothetical atoms – isotopes of hydrogen –
indicated that certain combinations of quarks particles made of up, down and are hexaquarks. The rules of
remained undiscovered. Like the gaps in strange quarks that possess colour confinement would also
Dmitri Mendeleev’s original periodic table of the right properties to be dark allow you to have a septaquark
the elements, this gave the model predictive matter. They would require if you could squeeze five quarks
power. When the missing particles turned up immense pressure to form, and two antiquarks into the
as expected, the quark model’s acceptance but Ariel Zhitnitsky at the same object.
was nigh-on guaranteed.

44 | New Scientist | 5 October 2019

Nature’s lego bricks
If we dig down deep enough, almost all matter in the universe is made of quarks. They come in six “flavours”, only two of which (up and down) are found in ordinary matter
Molecules
It was a moment of celebration, but much
remained unclear. One of the major mysteries
was why certain combinations of quarks
flourished and others didn’t. You could, for
example, pair a quark with its antiparticle to
form a meson, or stick three quarks together
to form a baryon, such as a proton or neutron.
But you couldn’t easily produce a composite
particle made of four or five quarks (see
“Quarky quirks”, left), or ever get a quark on
its own. Why was this?
The answer lies in a remarkable property
of quarks known as colour charge, which bears
no relation to the colours we think of in daily
life. “Colour is something we’ve just picked
to name it because it comes in threes,” says
Freya Blekman at the Free University of
Brussels in Belgium. Quarks of these different
colours – called red, green and blue – can sit
together because their colour charges cancel
out, by analogy with the way different colours
of light blend together to make white. Through
the same logic, a quark and an antiquark
could sit together assuming they had colour
charges of red and anti-red. This also explains
why single quarks don’t fall out of atoms in
detectors: without their colour partners they
are too unstable. “Quarks are always team
players,” says Blekman.
By the end of the 1970s, we finally had
what is still the most complete description of
quarks and the force that binds them together:
quantum chromodynamics (QCD), named
for the colour charge that quarks possess.
QCD isn’t perfect. For one thing, using it
to calculate the most complex physics can
be incredibly time-consuming. “A calculation
can take us three years from start to finish,”
says Ruth Van de Water at the Fermi National
Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago.
This is why, she says, the properties of
Atoms Protons
u u Approximate mass
d u
Electrical charge
d d
u
Neutrons
many collections of quarks haven’t yet been
calculated using full-on QCD. Instead they
have been done using less sophisticated
models that don’t account for every interaction
a quark might have. “Our knowledge of QCD
is a bit like trying to grasp what an elephant
looks like by feeling some small part,” says
physicist Howard Georgi at Harvard University.
“One approach may describe the trunk without
difficulty but do a really bad job on the ears.”
This isn’t a new problem. As far back as
the 1970s, physicist Gerard ’t Hooft was
searching for a way to make QCD more
tractable. He made a bold compromise on
accuracy, essentially discarding the parts
of the QCD equations that described colour.
This made for a tremendous simplification,
says Van de Water, allowing you to do
calculations on the back of an envelope.
When ’t Hooft tried it, he found that
it reproduced the properties of mesons
with surprising accuracy. “That was pretty
exciting,” says Georgi.
But Gell-Mann’s monsters were about to
bite. Setting the colour term aside freed quarks
from needing to have three colours. Instead,
they could have any number of colours you
liked – even an infinite number. And because
“An infinite number
of colours means
an infinite number
of quarks. This has
consequences”
Quarks
Up Charm Top
3.9 x 10 -30
kg 2.3 x 10-27
kg 3.1 x 10-25 kg
c t
+⅔ +⅔ +⅔
Down Strange Bottom
8.3 x 10-30 kg 1.7 x 10-28 kg 7.5 x 10-27 kg
-⅓ d -⅓ s -⅓ b
a collection of quarks can attain stability
only if all colours are equally represented,
an infinite number of colours means baryons
with infinite numbers of quarks.
This had consequences. Every quark has
a quantum property called spin. Multiply
the number of quarks and, crudely speaking,
you multiply the amount of maximum spin.
In extreme cases, when all the quarks have
their spins aligned, the resulting baryon has
so much spin that ’t Hooft’s model struggles
to describe it. That’s true not only of particles
in ’t Hooft’s imaginary, infinite colour world,
but for some particles in the real world, such
as the unusual delta++ baryon, which consists
of three up quarks with aligned spins.
The resolution to this has come from an
unlikely place: string theory, a framework to
unify the relativistic physics of the very large
with the quantum physics of the very small.
In the early 2000s, string theorists started
noticing that their equations allowed quarks
to do something bizarre. Under certain
circumstances, they could take on a fraction of
their usual spin. This was something that had
never been seen in experiments, or predicted
by QCD. It seemed like another mathematical
monster. Then a few years ago, people began
to see that QCD could describe quarks with
fractional spin too.
Now, the quark story might be about to
change far more substantially. Last year, Zohar
Komargodski at the Weizmann Institute of
Science in Israel saw a possible way to bring
all of the disparate quark ideas together: using
the infinite colour model of ’t Hooft, but giving
the quarks freedom to take on fractional spins.
Physicists admit that his work shows ingenuity
and skill – but it is also extremely complex.
“I would like to understand it a little better
myself,” says Georgi. >
5 October 2019 | New Scientist | 45
 What everyone agrees on is that it breaks
new ground. Whereas ’t Hooft’s model
couldn’t explain exotic, high-spin particles,
Komargodski’s model does just that. “The
picture [it paints] is completely different,”
says Georgi. Instead of a three-dimensional
cluster of quarks jostling for position, it says
that the high spin pulls the baryon into a two-
dimensional pancake of quantum foam, out of
which emerges the quark with fractional spin.
Reality’s shaky foundations
It is very much like the way Mexican waves
emerge in a stadium, or quasiparticles appear
from a collection of electrons. In other words,
it implies that the quarks in these particles
aren’t fundamental at all, but a consequence
of the quantum foam’s behaviour. “It’s like a
new state of matter, or a new state of quark,”
says Komargodski. We have always known that
quarks are intensely strange beasts, almost
inexplicable in everyday terms. “But Zohar’s
quasiparticles are completely different, they’re
nutty,” says Georgi.
They may also be extremely useful. When
’t Hooft developed his simplification in the
1970s, no one was worried about its failure to
calculate the properties of high-spin baryons
like the delta++. That is because they tend to
46 | New Scientist | 5 October 2019
exist only in exotic environments like the
super-pressurised interior of neutron stars.
But today, neutron stars are at the centre of one
of the hottest areas of physics: gravitational
wave astronomy.
Over the past few years, the LIGO
collaboration has detected the gravitational
waves created when colossal objects in space
collide, including instances of a black hole
gobbling up a neutron star. These signals have
given us a new window on the cosmos, but the
glass is a little frosted. We can’t deduce much
about neutron stars from signals apart from
their mass, principally because we have no
theory with which to describe the intensely
pressurised matter they are made from.
Or at least we didn’t until now. “What Zohar
has proposed is extremely exciting because it
is relevant in these stars,” says Mannque Rho
at the Institute of Theoretical Physics in Paris,
France. He is trying to develop Komargodski’s
work into a tool that could be used with
gravitational wave signals to produce an
equation describing more about the neutron
stars, including their diameter and density.
The practical applications are only part
of the story. Komargodski’s work also raises
profound questions about the nature of
quarks. If there are circumstances under
which quarks seem to be emergent rather
than fundamental, does that mean that all
quarks are little more than abstractions?
If so, what is reality really made of?
Perhaps surprisingly, Komargodski himself
still thinks quarks are real, fundamental
objects. He likens the situation to the odd
behaviour of electrons: although there
are some situations in which they take on
weird properties, that doesn’t mean we need
to bin the concept of electrons entirely. “But
everybody has their own opinion,” he says.
Rho sees it differently. “The fundamental
nature of the quark essentially loses its
meaning in a highly correlated system like
dense matter,” he says. “Quarks are not
fundamental any more, I think.” Perhaps this
shouldn’t come as a surprise. Most physicists
think that the standard model of particle
physics doesn’t capture the full truth about
reality, not least because we don’t know why
it is like it is. Quarks may represent another
rung on the ladder of reality, but we haven’t
reached the bottom yet. We may be right back
at the beginning. ❚
Joshua Howgego is a features
editor at New Scientist specialising
in the physical sciences
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The back pages
Puzzles Feedback Twisteddoodles Almost the last word The Q&A
The crossword, a Letters of note and for New Scientist Cycling no-handed Gelong Thubten on
puzzle about stamps rook-y errors: the A cartoonist’s take and tidal effects: Buddhism, science
and a quick quiz p52 week in weird p53 on the world p53 readers respond p54 and mindfulness p56

Stargazing at home Week 3

Stars in the city

You can measure light pollution in your area by counting stars,
says Abigail Beall. You might be surprised by how many you see

LIGHT pollution makes stargazing

Abigail Beall is a science writer
in Leeds, UK. This series is
based on her book The Art of
in towns and cities more difficult,
but that doesn’t mean you can’t
see anything. By measuring the
light, you will be able to work
out what you can see in the
best-available conditions and plan
your stargazing trips accordingly.
For this I’m going to use
the constellation Pegasus,
which is visible in the southern
hemisphere between August and

SERGEI MALGAVKO/TASS VIA GETTY IMAGES

Urban Astronomy @abbybeall December and in the northern
hemisphere from July to January.
What you need First, pick a clear night with little
A phone with a stargazing app, moonlight. Then minimise all
but only if you get stuck light sources. If you live in a city,
find an open green space and go
For next week right to the middle of it. Or, if you
Binoculars have access to a rooftop, go as high
as possible. If all else fails, your
garden or a high window will do,
just turn off all the lights.
Next you need to give your eyes
time to adjust. If it is really dark,
this could take 40 minutes. If you
are surrounded by lights, you
won’t need this long because
your eyes will only adjust so
Next in the series much. Bear in mind that the
1 Model the equinox process is ruined as soon as you
2 Find the North Star look at a bright light and you will
and Southern Cross have to start again.
3 Test your area’s light A star’s brightness as seen from
pollution Earth is known as its magnitude.
4 Identify the craters This is a logarithmic scale, which
of the moon means stars with lower numbers
See millions of years are brighter. For example, Sirius is
of history the brightest star in the night sky
5 Orion and Sirius: how and has a magnitude of -1.46, while
to star-hop the North Star is 1.97. The sun is
6 Planet spotting: Mars, -27 and the International Space
Mercury and Uranus Station can reach -6.
7 Taurus and the zodiacal To find Pegasus in the north, use
constellations the Plough to find the North Star,
Stargazing at home online
Projects will be posted online each week at
newscientist.com/maker Email: maker@newscientist.com
as we did last week. Then draw an
imaginary line from any star in the
handle of the Plough, through the
North Star, to get to Cassiopeia –
a distinctive W or M-shaped
constellation. Continue this line
through the Caph star, which is at
one end of Cassiopeia – the right
if it looks like a W to you or the left
if it is an M. This line will take you
to four bright stars – all between
2 and 2.7 magnitude – that make
the Great Square of Pegasus.
In the southern hemisphere,
the easiest way to find the Great
Square at this time of year is to
look due north at around 9pm.
If you’re having difficulty, then
a stargazing app will help.
Now count how many stars you
can see inside the square. No stars
means conditions aren’t great. One
star means your visible magnitude
is 4.5, five is 5.25. If you see seven,
you are seeing stars of magnitude
5.5, and 13 stars takes you to 6.
The best you can expect with the
naked eye is 35 stars, which means
you are seeing magnitudes of up
to 6.5, but this only happens in the
darkest skies with no moonlight.
The results depend on your
eyesight, too. But it doesn’t matter
if someone else can see more than
you, just that you know what you
can expect to see. It won’t be a
problem next week, though, since
we will be looking at the moon.  ❚

5 October 2019 | New Scientist | 51

The back pages Puzzles

Quick crossword #42 Set by Richard Smyth Quick quiz #23 Puzzle set by David Bodycombe
1 The EPR thought
       experiment, proposed #24 Three stamps
by Albert Einstein, Boris
Podolsky and Nathan I’m on holiday in the lovely country of
 
Rosen in 1935, Philitaly, and planning to send plenty of
introduced the world to postcards because postage is very cheap.
which phenomenon? But the country only allows up to three
 
2 The 10,000-year-old stamps on any letter.
archaeological site Göbekli Can you tell me which three
   Tepe lies in the south-east denominations of stamps would allow me
of which country? to cover any cost of postage from 1 cent to
15 cents inclusive?
3 What name is given to
    And which four stamp denominations
solids whose underlying
would allow all values from 1 to 24 cents?
 atomic structure is ordered,
  
but doesn’t repeat regularly?
Answer next week
4 Scientists studying which
bird in 2016 found they
 
spent up to 10 months in
the air without ever landing? #23 Circling the squares
 5 Dialogue Concerning the Solution
Two Chief World Systems –
which systems, and We are told that one of 18’s neighbours is
ACROSS written by whom? 15. The other neighbour can’t be 7 (because
1 1980 sci-fi film starring 16 Arthur ___, English 18+7=25), so 7 must appear somewhere
William Hurt (7,6) astrophysicist (9) Answers below else. The neighbours of 7 can only be 2 and
8 Himalayan cryptid (4) 20 Squash cultivars (8) 9. Working outwards, this forces a chain that
9 Star in Orion (10) 21 Offshore drilling goes: 11-14-2-7-9-16-20-5-4-12-
10 Unborn baby (6) platform (3,3) Quick 13-3
11 Laptop “Hackintosh” (8) 23 Professor ___, inventor Crossword #41
12 1973 Michael invented by Norman Answers 11’s other neighbour can only be 5 if it must
Crichton film (9) Hunter (10) make a square, but 5 is already in the chain,
14 Trigonometric function (4) 24 Melting (of snow and ice) (4) ACROSS 8 Altitude, 9 Nearer, so 11 must be the other neighbour of 18.
15 Armoured combat 25 Acid perfusion 10 Centrifuge, 11 Acid,
12 Dorset, 14 Earlobes,
vehicle (4) procedure (9,4) 15 Ostrich, 17 Agnosia,
15’s other neighbour could be 1 or 10.
20 Rubidium, 22 Decode, If 1, then the chain would be 15-1-8-
DOWN 24 Skua, 25 Deoxidised, 17-19-6-10-X. But if 10, then it would
1 Plant genus in the family 7 Contraction of the heart (7) 27 Spring, 28 Uploaded be 15-10-6-19-17-8-1-3, which
Ranunculaceae (7) 13 Kitchen tool patented by completes the loop, like this:
DOWN 1 Albedo, 2 Pint,
2 Rate of rotation of a Ezra Warner in 1858 (3,6) 3 Autistic, 4 Cerumen, 5 In gear,
smooth ribbon (5) 15 Bone joined to the 6 Palaeozoic, 7 Beriberi,
3 Ribulose bisphosphate sternum (4,3) 13 Sorbic acid, 16 Skunk Ape, 5 20 16
18 Godzilla, 19 Embolus, 4 9
carboxylase/oxygenase (7) 17 In comics, the alter ego of
21 Indigo, 23 Diesel, 26 Imax
12

4 Arboreal fungal engineer Tony Stark (4,3)

7

infection (5,3,7) 18 Oxidising agent (7)

3 13

2 14

5 Nicaragua volcano (6) 19 Constriction of the pupil (6)

Quick quiz #23
6 ___ poplar, name for 22 L (5)
the tree Populus Answers
11
1

tremuloides (9) cosmological systems

18
8

the Ptolemaic and Copernican

17
5 Wrote Galileo, heretically, of
19 15
4 The common swift 6 10
example was identified in 2009
impossible, the first natural
3 Quasicrystals. Long considered
or religion
of which came first, civilisation
structures raise the question
2 Turkey. Its monumental Get in touch
Einstein’s disparaging phrase Email us at
Answers and a tectonic crossword next week. “spooky action at a distance”, in
crossword@newscientist.com
1 Quantum entanglement – or
puzzles@newscientist.com

52 | New Scientist | 5 October 2019

The back pages Feedback
Letters of note
Pleased by the, errrm, feedback
about our coverage of research
on the comparative mortality
rates of chess pieces (17 August),
we turn to what over-engineered
computer modelling can tell us
about Scrabble, the game that
has been both delighting players
and igniting lexicographical
arguments since 1938.
Feedback can’t be alone in
finding that one of the joys of
the game lies in making up words
and swearing blind they are in the
dictionary, just not that dictionary.
Also contentious, however, is
whether the values given to
individual Scrabble letters are fair.
In the English version of the
game, these values were set by
Scrabble’s creator, Alfred Butts,
based on the average frequency
with which letters appeared on the
front page of The New York Times.
But a 2013 study by computer
scientist Joshua Lewis found that
certain tiles were overpowered,
unfairly boosting the chances of
players who have them in their
selection. Z is easier to play than Q,
for example, but both score 10
points. Lewis’s calculations showed
a Z should only be worth 6 points.
However, software engineer
Kevin McElwee writes in Nautilus
that Lewis’s proposed values
actually make the game slightly less
fair. In his AI program, which oversaw
hundreds of matches between two
equally skilled computer players,
the new values increased the overall
spread in final scores, suggesting
a greater element of luck. Bizarrely,
though, McElwee found that if
Scrabble’s tile values were assigned
to letters randomly, the spread of
final scores in the game remained
unchanged – possibly because
people strive to play high-value
letters, counteracting the
“difficulty” of playing them.
Where the luck of the draw really
does seem to count is in whether
someone manages to play all seven
of their tiles at once, earning an
extra 50 points. Remove the ability
to score these “bingos” and the
average difference in final score
between two equally skilled players
Twisteddoodles for New Scientist
was significantly reduced. So there
you have it: stop debating whether
Hoover is a real word and hold out
for the tile you need to score big
with overhot. It’s in the dictionary.
Rook-y error (again)
Speaking of chess, Frank
Warnock wades into the almost
metaphysical debate raised by
our throwaway assertion that
non-drawn chess games end
with a king’s demise. “The word
‘checkmate’ came to English
through Old French and Arabic,
from the original Persian phrase
šāh māt, ‘the king is dead’, ” he
writes. To which we may only
add, long live the king.
Rave to the grave
Rest in peace? Think again. Forensic
scientists at the Australian Facility
for Taphonomic Experimental
Research – now there’s a job to
die for – have documented the
surprisingly active afterlives of California. Shortly after A case of booze
human corpses. ABC News reports construction began in 1968,
findings by Alyson Wilson and her geologists discovered a fault line Feedback is pleased to note that
colleagues, who used time-lapse running under the sea nearby. hangovers are a medical illness.
cameras to film the slow dance To insure against the increased That, at least, is the ruling of a court
of the dead over the course of earthquake risk, a design for in Frankfurt, and we are counting on
17 months. “What we found was additional supports to the cooling Teutonic exactitude in reaching it.
that the arms were significantly systems was drawn up and built The decision came after a company
moving, so that arms that started accordingly. Unfortunately, was accused of making unverified
off down beside the body ended somebody misplaced the note health claims about its powdered
up out to the side of the body,” instructing engineers to flip the supplements and liquid shots,
Wilson told reporters. transparent blueprint over when which were sold as hangover cures.
The findings will be used using it to build supports for the Under German law, food
to inform police investigations, second reactor, a mirror image and drinks can’t be marketed as
which had previously assumed of the first. Consequently, the preventing or treating illnesses.
that a body lay in the same position earthquake proofing was built This includes the after-effects of
once a person died. The rest of us in the wrong place. A well-known alcohol, the court declared, noting
can live happily in the knowledge online reference tool notes that that the condition even has a
that once we die, we might finally despite the design errors, the medical term: veisalgia.
catch up on our exercise. plant was approved to open. Good news for the thousands
“I suspect this one typo won’t of tender heads currently attending
Drafting error be the worst,” says Peter, “but it’s Munich’s beer-fuelled Oktoberfest.
legendary among engineers.” File under useful phrases: Herr
Adding to our list of We’re sure everything is going Doktor, ich brauche einen
extraordinarily expensive to be just fine. Krankenschein.  ❚
mistakes, we note with our all-
seeing eye the archived example
that appears on page 27 of this Got a story for Feedback?
issue. Meanwhile, Peter Jacobsen Send it to New Scientist, 25 Bedford Street,
draws our attention to the Diablo London WC2E 9ES or you can email us at
Canyon nuclear power plant in feedback@newscientist.com
5 October 2019 | New Scientist | 53
The back pages Almost the last word
Freewheeling
I rapidly lose my balance if I try to
ride my bike with no hands, but I
can easily ride it when the tip of
just one finger is lightly touching
the handlebars. Is that finger
providing significant support or
do I just believe that I can’t ride
a bike no-handed?
Matt Chamings
Barnstaple, Devon, UK
When a bike is in motion it doesn’t
just fall over because the spinning
wheels act as gyroscopes, which
maintain their orientation. The
front wheel only turns, and
potentially unbalances the bike,
if the rider leans to one side.
So riding a bike with no hands is
easy as long as the rider stays fairly
still. Pedalling shifts weight from
side to side, so freewheeling is
easier. Keeping one finger on the
handlebar is comforting but not
absolutely necessary. Possibly
the rider becomes anxious when
removing the finger and shifts
weight by tensing up. So yes,
unbalancing could be down to
lack of belief or confidence.
Peter Peters
Sherborne, Dorset, UK
More active than the gyroscopic
effect in keeping a bike upright is
the so-called trail effect, in which
the line of the steering axis – from
the handlebars down the front
forks to the ground – intersects
the road ahead of the point where
the tyre makes contact. But both
effects are small and usually
augmented by the rider applying
a light torque to the handlebars.
The third effect is shifting the
position of the rider’s centre of
mass. This is very effective when
riding no-handed and has to be
learned. Unless our rider has a
physical difficulty, he can teach
himself to ride no-handed in spite
of any inhibition resulting from
earlier failures.
Peter McPherson
Merriott, Somerset, UK
I have often wondered why with
some bikes I can ride no-handed
54 | New Scientist | 5 October 2019
Why do wasps have such
a narrow join between the
thorax and abdomen?
Time and tide
What is the smallest body of water
that is influenced by the moon’s
gravitational pull?
Chris Hughes
Professor of sea level science,
University of Liverpool, UK
Every body of water is influenced,
but the effect is much harder to
see in smaller ones.
The smallest body of water
This week’s new questions in which lunar tides have been
measured is Loch Ness in the UK,
Hourglass figure Why do wasps have such a narrow waist? which is 37 kilometres long. Here,
What could be the advantage of having such a narrow join the tides have an amplitude of
between thorax and abdomen, which seems like a very weak about 1.5 millimetres.
point? Rosalind Coles, Clyro, Powys, UK Tides result from the small
differences in the moon’s
Needing focus I wear spectacles to correct for myopia and gravitational attraction from place
ANTAGAIN/GETTY IM AGES
astigmatism. Is it possible to create a program to adjust to place on Earth. In water, this
the image of a TV, mobile or PC monitor using my optical results in differences in surface
prescription such that I could view it without spectacles? height up to about 0.8 mm for
Mike Daw, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, UK points 10 km apart. Ocean tides
are much larger than this suggests
because the pull oscillates about
whereas on others, I have to grip on the saddle and pedals to be twice a day, close to the time it
quickly re-grasp the handlebars. able to steer the bike, and so cause takes water to slosh naturally
I came to the conclusion that the front wheel to turn one way around ocean basins, producing
it is due to the front wheel not or the other. If not, one finger a resonance effect that amplifies
being able to function properly as on the handlebar will enable you the rising of the water. In smaller
a gyroscope if the bearings in the to microsteer and stay upright. basins such as the Mediterranean,
front fork are a bit tight. When Unicycles are balanced in or lakes, this effect is weaker.
riding with no hands and with the same way, by turning the Another factor is that land is
well-fitted bearings, any slight single wheel via the saddle. also pulled up by the moon, and
tendency to lean from a vertical Imagine trying to ride a bike these combined effects would give
posture causes the front wheel to with a non-steerable fixed front a tide of 0.45mm in Loch Ness. But
turn slightly in the direction of wheel. You would quickly crash the tide there is bigger than this
lean, thereby replicating what down on one side or the other, because the weight of water in
happens when you corner. But it being impossible to balance the surrounding seas plays a role.
stiff bearings slightly resist that such a machine. High tides push down on the UK
turn of the wheel and balance is coast and cause Loch Ness to tilt
lost. The questioner, with his Hilary Johnson from end to end. Most of what is
single finger on the bars, is simply Malvern, Worcestershire, UK measured as a tide is the result of
overcoming the reluctance of the As well as physical or this tilt – the land moves more
stiff bearings to turn. psychological support, the than the water. Disentangling
finger on the handlebars may these effects is very tricky, so it
Philip Taylor be providing feedback to help is hard to tell whether the moon
Buckland Dinham, Somerset, UK the cyclist adjust their balance. affects a small body of water. ❚
When a bicycle is travelling
slowly, it needs greater steering
correction to maintain balance, Want to send us a question or answer?
hence it tends to wobble at Email us at lastword@newscientist.com
slow speed. The trick to riding Questions should be about everyday science phenomena
no-handed is to have sufficient Full terms and conditions at newscientist.com/lw-terms
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The back pages The Q&A
As a child, what did you want to do
when you grew up?
I think I wanted to travel the world. When
I was about 5, I ran away from home but only
made it to the end of the street, where my mother
found me clutching a globe and a box of tissues.
Explain your work in one easy paragraph.
I am a Buddhist monk who teaches meditation
and mindfulness. I’m interested in the
application of Buddhist philosophy to the
problems of modern life. Meditation is training
for the mind, helping us become less controlled
by stressful thoughts and emotions. Mindfulness
brings the benefits of meditation into daily life.
I am also interested in the interface between
Buddhism and science, and I frequently
collaborate with neuroscientists and medics.
How did you become a monk?
I had an extreme burnout 26 years ago due to
high levels of stress, and I went to a Buddhist
monastery to find answers. I loved it so much,
I decided to remain a monk.
Did you have to overcome any particular
challenges to get where you are today?
I used to have bouts of depression and anxiety,
so my journey has involved quite a few rocky
patches. I do, however, feel that these struggles
have helped me to grow and discover valuable
knowledge that I can share with others.
What’s the most exciting thing
you’ve worked on?
I wrote A Monk’s Guide to Happiness: Meditation
in the 21st century. The book explores the nature
of happiness, with techniques for training our
thoughts and finding inner peace in a busy world.
At first I was a bit daunted, but in the end,
I really enjoyed the creative process.
Were you good at science at school?
No, I was terrible! I think I was yearning for
a more creative angle on science, which
I’ve now thankfully discovered.
Which achievement are you most proud of?
I spent four years in a meditation retreat, which
was very tough but also incredibly rewarding.
56 | New Scientist | 5 October 2019
In his work teaching meditation and
mindfulness, Gelong Thubten explores
the nature of reality and the intersection
between Buddhism and science
Has your field of study changed in the time
you have been working in it?
Public perception of meditation has dramatically
evolved over the past 20 years. When I began
teaching, many people had misconceptions:
they felt it could only be a religious practice, for “I believe the
example. Now, research has shown the beneficial
effects of meditation. There is also more
Buddha was
emphasis on the development of compassion, the greatest
scientist of all, as
and recent research shows that adding this
element can create a habit of intention to be
of help to others. I feel that the future of our
planet depends upon people living with greater
he understood
compassion and a sense of social responsibility. the true nature
of reality”
What scientific development do you hope
to see in your lifetime?
I would like to see cures for cancer and solutions
to the climate crisis.
If you could have a long conversation
with any scientist, living or dead, who
would it be?
The Buddha. I believe he was the greatest
scientist of all, as he explored and understood
the true nature of reality.
What’s the best thing you’ve read or seen
in the past 12 months?
I was invited by the United Nations to speak at a
conference in Peru. I heard amazing talks by local
governments and sustainability experts who are
working together to protect the Amazon.
How useful will your skills be after
the apocalypse?
Extremely. I know how to sit still and
not freak out.
OK, one last thing: tell us something that
will blow our minds…
There is no mind to be blown. The Buddhist Who are we?
understanding is that the mind is just Hear Gelong Thubten
an illusion.  ❚ in conversation with
neuroscientist Ash Ranpura
Gelong Thubten’s book A Monk’s Guide to Happiness: at New Scientist Live on
Meditation in the 21st century is out now 11 October
ZOOMZOOM/GETTY IMAGES/ STEVE ULLATHORNE newscientistlive.com
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