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EXTENSIVE READING SERIES – 51 -
Consciousness isn't just the brain: The body shapes

your sense of self
Electrical signals coming from your heart and other organs influence
how you perceive the world, the decisions you take, your sense of who
you are and consciousness itself.
PARTS of Ann Arbor bring The Truman Show to mind, with their wood-frame houses
and white picket fences. Home to the University of Michigan, the city oozes middle-
class prosperity and security. So, while doing research there a decade ago, Sarah
Garfinkel was shocked to discover that young veterans of wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan felt terrified even in Ann Arbor. “It broke my heart,” she says. And it
changed the course of her career.
Garfinkel was in Michigan to study the brain circuitry involved in persistent fear. But
working with traumatised veterans, she realised two things. First, a safe
environment didn’t help them feel less fearful. And second, their fear was physical
as well as mental: their hearts were constantly racing, their pupils dilated, their
palms sweaty. “It seemed to me that what their bodies were doing was meaningful,
but I was just scanning their brains,” she says. So she set out to understand the
body-mind connection.
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Garfinkel, now at the University of Sussex, UK, discovered that our bodies have
more influence over our minds than you might imagine. “Our thoughts, feelings and
behaviours are shaped in part by the internal signals that arise from our body,” she
says. But it goes beyond that. It is leading her and others to a surprising conclusion:
that the body helps to generate our sense of self and is a key part of consciousness.
This idea has practical implications in assessing people who show little sign of
consciousness. It may also force us to reconsider where we draw the line between
life and death, and provide a new insight into how consciousness evolved.
It has long been known that our internal organs have lives of their own. They
generate electrical activity, which is conveyed by neurons to the brain. As a result,
signals from your heartbeat, your breathing, the slow, regular pulses of your
stomach and the state of your muscles are all represented in the brain’s electrical
activity. The brain, in turn, regulates these functions. In other words, there is a
neuronal loop in which nerve cells carry information from the organs up to the
brain, and commands down to the organs.
However, in the 20th century, neuroscientists tended to ignore the body. They
associated mental life exclusively with the brain – an approach epitomised by the
“brain in a vat” thought experiment, in which a disembodied brain continues to
have normal conscious experiences.
Things began to change at the turn of this century, when neuroscientist Antonio
Damasio at the University of Southern California pioneered the field of embodied
consciousness. “I have been defending the idea that the body is a critical player in
anything that has to do with mind,” he says. For years, he was in a minority, but
now a handful of researchers, including Garfinkel, have joined him in his quest for
the bodily origins of our sense of self.
Their starting point is interoception, a sort of sixth sense that we have about what is
going on in our own body. A simple way to measure interoception is to get someone
to count their heartbeats over a fixed time and compare their count with the actual
one measured by an electrocardiogram (ECG). People’s ability to do this varies a lot.
Those who can sense their heartbeat most accurately tend to make better intuitive
decisions and are better at perceiving the emotions of others.
What is going on? To tease it out, the researchers needed a read-out of
interoception in the brain. They found one in the brain’s response to the heartbeat,
known as the heartbeat-evoked potential (HEP). Many studies focus on this because
the HEP is relatively easy to measure: the heartbeat isn’t completely regular, so it is
possible to filter the HEP out from all the brain’s other activity. The HEP can be
found by simultaneously recording a person’s heartbeat, via an ECG, and scanning
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their brain. It shows up as activity in various “resting-state networks” in the brain,

which are active even when a person isn’t consciously doing anything.
One clue as to what the HEP might be doing came in 2016 when neuroscientist
Hyeongdong Park at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL)
and his colleagues measured it in people who were experiencing a full-body illusion.
Volunteers donned a virtual reality headset and watched a simulation of themselves
having their back stroked as it was being stroked in reality. After a while, they
described feeling as if they were now physically located closer to where their virtual
self was, rather than where they were actually sitting. The more pronounced their
HEP, the stronger the illusion. Here was the first neurophysiological evidence of a
link between interoception and the brain’s notion of self, claimed the researchers.
“The HEP reflects changes in bodily self-consciousness such as changes in self-
identification with – and displacement towards – the virtual body,” says Olaf Blanke,
who heads EPFL’s Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience.
“It starts with interoception, a sort of sixth sense that we have about our own body”
The EPFL group has gone on to show that our bodily self is anything but passive – it
intervenes in every decision we make. Blanke’s team has built on work by US
physiologist Benjamin Libet, who in 1983 detected a signal that arose in the brain
just before a person became aware of their intention to act. Libet interpreted it as
meaning that there is no such thing as free will. The EPFL group has found that the
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same signal is linked with a particular bodily act, breathing: we are more likely to
initiate a voluntary act when exhaling. Blanke describes the finding as a clear
indication that “acts of free will are hostage to a host of inner body states”.
Such experiments have led Park and Blanke to propose that signals from the organs,
together with signals from the outside world, feed a representation of the bodily
self to the brain. This includes self-identification and self-location, as in the full-body
illusion. They also believe that the rhythmic nature of signals from the organs helps
generate a feeling of your self being continuous in time. “The cyclic pattern of the
heartbeat is predictable,” says Blanke, “and this temporal element could play a big
role in that continuity of self.”
Catherine Tallon-Baudry, a neuroscientist at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris,
France, has a different conception of how the body contributes to self-
consciousness. The brain is constantly bombarded by signals from inside and
outside the body and as a result of its own cognitive processes. The signals are
processed by different brain circuits. She thinks that rhythmic signals from the
organs impose a unified frame of reference on the brain. This allows us to perceive
all that incoming information from the perspective of a single, subjective “I”. “I
think of consciousness as a property that is generated by the brain once it has
integrated information from the whole organism,” she says. And a series of
experiments supports her contention, she believes.
In 2014, Tallon-Baudry and Park, who worked in her lab before he moved to
Blanke’s, began by exploring how the HEP might influence our conscious experience
of things. They asked people to fix their gaze on a central point and to say whether
they could see a faint ring around that point. The bigger a person’s HEP just before
showing them the ring, the more likely they were to perceive it. “The heartbeat
behaves like an extra piece of visual information,” says Tallon-Baudry. It also
provides the intrinsic “mineness” of the conscious experience. “In the person’s
response – ‘I saw something’ – there is that element of ‘I’,” she says. “We shouldn’t
ignore that element of ‘I’ in perception.”
Blanke sees this study as a beautiful demonstration of the threshold of
consciousness, but says there is no need to conclude that the self is involved. To
address this issue, Tallon-Baudry and her group devised another study. This time,
they homed in on the distinction between “I” and “me”. Tallon-Baudry says “I”
captures the most basic aspect of self – the aspect that comes before thought, the
unified entity that does the thinking. It is fundamentally different from the kind of
reflection about “me” that implies monitoring different bodily functions without
that sense of unity.
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To see if they could show that the brain treats those two concepts differently too,
Tallon-Baudry’s team asked people who were having their brain scanned to fixate
on a point and then let their mind wander. Every now and then, they were
interrupted and asked whether – at that precise moment – they were thinking
about “me” or “I”, which they had been trained to recognise. Depending on which
they reported, the HEP occurred in different parts of the brain: a region near the
front for “me” thoughts and one further back for “I” thoughts. This showed for the
first time that the brain does indeed discern between the two concepts.
In as-yet unpublished work, Tallon-Baudry’s group has also shown how the body
might contribute to our decisions on our personal preferences, which in many ways
define us in the eyes of others. Volunteers saw 200 posters of well-known films and
were asked to rate the ones they had seen. Next day, they were shown pairs of
posters from the films they had rated, and had to indicate which they preferred as
they had their HEP tracked. As is usual with these sorts of experiments, people’s
responses weren’t wholly consistent. However, people with the biggest HEP at the
moment of choice gave answers that were most in line with their original ratings.
Their choices were truest to themselves when their brains were listening most
closely to their hearts.
Blanke’s notion of a bodily self and Tallon-Baudry’s notion of bodily consciousness
may not be too far apart. Indeed, they can imagine hitting on an overarching model
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of the embodied self that reconciles their findings. But how does Garfinkel’s
research fit in?
Emotional me
She has been exploring two connected ideas: that bodily signals influence emotions
and that emotions shape our sense of self through memory and learning. Working
with people with autism, she has concluded that the problems they often encounter
relating to others stem from their brains being overwhelmed with the visceral
inputs associated with their own and others’ emotion. Building on the idea of an
overactive body-brain axis, Garfinkel’s research has now come right back to what
haunted those traumatised war veterans: fear. In her most recent study, she has
adapted a classic psychology paradigm called fear conditioning, in which volunteers
learn to associate neutral stimuli with negative consequences. She measured
people’s heartbeats and their skin’s electrical conductivity, which increases when
we feel fearful. Her volunteers showed more fear when stimuli were presented as
their heart was contracting than when it was relaxing. The phase of the heartbeat
also affected how easily those fear responses were evoked later on. “These signals
from the heart can really drive and override conditioned fear responses,” she says.
Garfinkel doesn’t like to talk about consciousness because she thinks the concept is
woolly. “Consciousness operates on so many levels,” she says. But she does believe
she is trying to solve the same puzzles as Blanke and Tallon-Baudry. For Damasio, all
three approaches are reconcilable if we take an evolutionary perspective.
“It may force us to reconsider where we draw the line between life and death”
Four billion years ago, the first primitive organisms monitored changes in their
bodily state – equivalent to hunger, thirst, pain and so on – and had feedback
mechanisms to maintain equilibrium. The relic of those primitive mechanisms is our
autonomic nervous system, which controls bodily functions such as heartbeat and
digestion, and of which we are largely unconscious. Then, about half a billion years
ago, the central nervous system, featuring a brain, evolved. “It was an afterthought
of nature,” says Damasio. But it became the “anchor” of what had once been a
more distributed mind. Changes in bodily state were projected onto the brain and
experienced as emotions or drives – the emotion of fear, say, or the drive to eat.
Subjectivity evolved later again, he argues. It was imposed by the musculoskeletal
system, which evolved as a physical framework for the central nervous system and,
in so doing, also provided a stable frame of reference: the unified “I” of conscious
experience.
While Damasio contemplates a synthesis, the other researchers are thinking about
applications of their findings. Garfinkel intends to test her idea about an overactive
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heart-brain axis directly in people affected by trauma. Already, her results lend
support to the rationale that drugs designed to act on the cardiovascular system
might help treat post-traumatic stress disorder – and indeed such drugs are now in
clinical trials.
Blanke and Park have filed a patent related to the use of breathing patterns to
predict behaviour. Among other applications, it could help in tuning brain-computer
interfaces to be more sensitive to the choices of people with disabilities.
Tallon-Baudry is working with neurologist Steven Laureys at the University of Liège
in Belgium to study the HEP in people with disorders of consciousness, such as
coma. They have trained an artificial intelligence to learn how the HEP relates to
measurable clinical signs in such patients, to test whether the HEP alone could serve
as a diagnostic tool in people whose clinical signs are ambiguous – particularly those
in the grey area known as minimally conscious state.
There are philosophical implications to these discoveries too. If consciousness is
embodied, that could affect how we think about death, which is currently defined
by the World Health Organization as the irreversible loss of brain (but not body)
function. The research also has implications for the consciousness of other animals
and how we treat them. And if consciousness is embodied, it would mean that a
machine or robot with no way of integrating signals from its body will never be truly
conscious. “When you start to think through the implications of the embodied self,”
says Tallon-Baudry, “they are really quite profound.”
Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24632881-300-

consciousness-isnt-just-the-brain-the-body-shapes-your-sense-of-
self/#ixzz6Qjylx5yu
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EXTENSIVE READING SERIES – 52 – (BENCE EFSANE BİR RÖPORTAJ :)
The surprising benefits of contemplating the death of

the universe
Cosmologist Katie Mack spends her days pondering the end of
everything. Whether the cosmos dies a slow heat death or winks out of
existence tomorrow, she finds it helps put everyday troubles in
perspective
Some day in the distant future, the whole universe will end. Katie Mack has made it
her business to understand how. A cosmologist at North Carolina State University
and one of the most popular scientists and science communicators on social media
(her @astrokatie twitter account has over 350,000 followers), she has studied
everything from dark matter and black holes to how the universe began, evolved
and will eventually end – even inspiring a line by Irish chart-topper Hozier in which
he sings “as Mack explained, there will be darkness again”.
How and when that darkness will come is the topic of her book, The End of
Everything (Astrophysically Speaking), set for publication on 4 August by Scribner in
the US and Allen Lane in the UK. It is a daunting topic, but Mack has found that
focusing on such enormous cosmic questions can bring a degree of comfort in these
troubled times. She spoke to New Scientist about her own story and that of the
universe.
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Leah Crane: How did you get into cosmology?

Katie Mack: As a kid I was always taking things apart and trying to understand how
they worked. At some point, I was exposed to Stephen Hawking’s writing, and that
personality trait extended to the universe. I was always drawn to the weird stuff like
black holes and time travel, things that didn’t have an easy, intuitive explanation. I
did lots of reading about Hawking and I understood that he was called a
cosmologist, so obviously I wanted to be a cosmologist too.
What big cosmological questions are you and your colleagues working on right
now?
The biggest questions in cosmology right now are really around dark matter and
dark energy. We have this weird situation where we’ve been able to quantify what
the universe is made of to a very high degree. We can say what fraction of the
universe’s energy density is matter and what is radiation, and we found out that a
large proportion of the universe is made up of these invisible substances called dark
matter and dark energy.
Dark matter makes up about 27 per cent of the universe, but we only know it’s
there because of the gravitational force it exerts on regular matter – we can’t see it.
We think that dark energy makes up even more of the universe, about 68 per cent
of everything. We know even less about dark energy, only that it makes space
expand so that galaxies move apart at an ever-accelerating rate.
It’s a confusing situation where we can describe the universe perfectly, except for
the fact we don’t understand its two biggest components.
Surely there are some other big things that we don’t understand?
There are also questions around the beginning of the universe. We think that the
big bang, which was the beginning of the universe as we know it, happened about
13.8 billion years ago, and the first tiny fractions of a second after that saw the
universe expand exponentially in a process called inflation. Most cosmologists agree
that it happened, but there’s no solid theory on what would have caused it.
Jumping to the far future, your upcoming book, The End of Everything
(Astrophysically Speaking), is about the end of the universe. Do we know how that
will happen?
There are several possibilities that I discuss in my book. The one that I think is most
likely based on current data is called the heat death.
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If the universe is expanding, and if its expansion continues to speed up, then space
will get more and more dilute over time, which is to say there will be more and
more space between each galaxy. Eventually, space gets so dilute that matter in the
universe becomes less and less important. Galaxies stop colliding with each other,
so they aren’t bringing in enough gas to make new stars and the old stars are
burning out. Even black holes will disappear.
As time goes on and things decay, that increases entropy, which is the disorder of
the universe. If you leave the universe alone for long enough and it’s decaying over
time, you end up in this maximum entropy state where all that’s left is this tiny
amount of background radiation known as waste heat. Once you get to maximum
entropy, nothing else of importance can really occur.
Of all the possible scenarios, which is your favourite?

My favourite scenario is vacuum decay. It’s this idea that’s been around since the
1970s that our universe might not be entirely stable. It’s all based on the Higgs field,
which is a field related to the Higgs boson, the particle that was discovered at the
Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN [the particle physics laboratory near Geneva,
Switzerland] in 2012. The energy of the Higgs field determines whether the universe
is in its lowest possible energy state, known as a true vacuum, or a false vacuum,
which is a slightly higher energy state.
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The conditions in the early universe determined which state the Higgs field would
be in, and if it’s in a false vacuum state, then it could spontaneously transition to a
true vacuum. That would rewrite all the laws of physics and constants of nature as
we know them.
Physicists call this process vacuum decay. In the universe after vacuum decay, the
new laws of physics would make it impossible for, say, molecules to exist, because
the way that atoms interact with one another would be different. Space itself would
be unstable, and eventually everything would collapse into a black hole.
What could make this happen?
Imagine balancing a glass right on the edge of the table. It’s fine right now, but it
would prefer to be on the floor because that’s the lowest energy state, and
something could happen at any time that could push it over. Similarly, it’s possible
that our universe prefers a different value of the Higgs field and the slightest touch
could knock it over. Like the glass, it would be more stable, but it would be broken.
There are two ways for this to happen. One would be that something disturbs the
Higgs field. That would have to be an extremely high-energy event, much higher
energy than we can even imagine. When the LHC first started up, there was some
worry that its collisions could create a high enough energy to disturb the Higgs field,
but they are nowhere near powerful enough to do that.
The other idea is that the transition could happen spontaneously through a
phenomenon known as quantum tunnelling. If you have a particle on one side of a
wall, quantum mechanics says it’s possible for the particle to spontaneously appear
on the other side. In theory, if you put a glass on the edge of the table, all its
constituent particles could align and allow it to just spontaneously quantum tunnel
to the floor. It’s extremely unlikely to happen, but we can’t rule it out.
If something like this happened to our universe, a bubble of the new vacuum would
spontaneously form within it: a region where we can’t exist, because our molecules
would fall apart, and space itself collapses. And it would expand at roughly the
speed of light. It would plough through the universe and destroy everything within
it. If it got you, you wouldn’t see anything or feel anything: you’re just done. It’s this
very dramatic way to destroy the universe.
Should we be worried about it?
There are several reasons not to worry about vacuum decay – for one, the false
vacuum is predicted to stay stable for way longer than the current age of the
universe – but physicists are paying a lot of attention to it now because our
experiments do suggest that it’s possible.
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What comes after the end of the universe? Is it just nothingness?

In my book, I define the end of the universe as the end of our observable universe –
the volume of space that we can interact with, that has any impact on us or that we
have any impact on. If everything in that region is destroyed, I rate that as the end
of the universe. It doesn’t mean that there couldn’t be more space beyond that
where more things continue, or another universe after ours, but for us, the end of
the observable universe is the end.
I have friends who don’t want me to talk to them about space because it’s big and
scary, but I personally find it somewhat comforting. How do you feel about the end
of the universe?
When I was putting together this book, I interviewed a bunch of other cosmologists
and astronomers about how they feel about the end of the universe: are they sad
about it, or have they come to terms with the fact that we won’t go on forever?
A few people said that it was really sad. One person said that when she gives
lectures about the heat death, people sometimes cry.
I haven’t really decided how I feel about it yet. I’m still kind of trying to wrap my
head around it in some meaningful way. I am somebody who is not at all
comfortable with the idea that I will die some day, for example. Intellectually, I
know that that’s true, but it’s also terrifying. So the idea that the whole universe will
die some day, that everything I love and care about will be over, is hard to wrap my
head around.
“The idea that the whole universe will die some day is hard to wrap my head
around”
Does thinking about things on this massive scale help you put daily troubles in
perspective?
There’s something about studying the forces of nature that changes how you view
everyday life. It doesn’t so much make everything insignificant, but it makes clear
how little control we really have.
We live in a society with the illusion of control, and there’s a sense of security in
how much we’ve altered our surroundings and built a world that suits us. But when
you get to the bigger picture, we’re this tiny little speck of dust adrift in the cosmos
with no say over what happens to our cosmic environment or the universe as a
whole, however much we eventually come to understand it.
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Studying these kinds of things, it’s not like it’s reassuring at all, but it chips away at
the illusion of control in a way that lets you step back a little bit. Sometimes things
are just going to happen and the universe doesn’t care about any of it.
All we can do is make the best out of what we have. There’s some amount of
comfort in the fact that we’re all in this together, at the mercy of some of these
bigger forces, and that’s OK.
Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24632831-500-the-

surprising-benefits-of-contemplating-the-death-of-the-universe/#ixzz6Qk07KzFj
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EXTENSIVE READING SERIES – 53 –
Emphasizing social play in kindergarten improves

academics, reduces teacher burnout
Emphasizing more play, hands-on learning, and students helping one
another in kindergarten improves academic outcomes, self-control and
attention regulation, finds new UBC research.
The study, published today in the journal PLoS One, found this approach
to kindergarten curriculum also enhanced children's joy in learning and
teachers' enjoyment of teaching, and reduced bullying, peer ostracism,
and teacher burnout.
"Before children have the ability to sit for long periods absorbing
information the way it is traditionally presented in school through
lectures, they need to be allowed to be active and encouraged to learn
by doing," said Dr. Adele Diamond, the study's lead author, a professor
in the UBC Department of Psychiatry and Canada Research Chair in
Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience. "Indeed, people of all ages
learn better by doing than by being told."
Through a randomized controlled trial, Diamond and her colleagues

analyzed the effectiveness of a curriculum called Tools of the Mind
(Tools). The curriculum was introduced to willing kindergarten teachers
and 351 children with diverse socio-economic backgrounds in 18 public
schools across the school districts of Vancouver and Surrey.
Tools was developed in 1993 by American researchers Drs. Elena

Bodrova and Deborah Leong. Its foundational principle is that social-
emotional development and improving self-control is as important as
teaching academic skills and content. The program emphasizes the role
of social dramatic play in building executive functions -- which includes
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skills such as self-control and selective attention, working memory,

cognitive flexibility, reasoning, and planning.
"Executive functioning skills are necessary for learning, and are often
more strongly associated with school readiness than intelligence
quotient (IQ)," said Diamond. "This trial is the first to show benefits of a
curriculum emphasizing social play to executive functioning in a real-
world setting."
Previous studies had demonstrated that Tools produces better results

for reading and math and on laboratory tests of executive functions.
Diamond's new study demonstrates for the first time that Tools also
dramatically improves writing (exceeding the top level on the provincial
assessment scale), improves executive functions in the real world, and
has a host of social and emotional benefits not previously documented.
Teachers reported more helping behavior and greater sense of

community in Tools classes. Cliques developed in most control classes,
but in few Tools classes. Late in the school year, Tools teachers reported
still feeling energized and excited about teaching, while control
teachers were exhausted.
"I have enjoyed seeing the enormous progress my students have made
in writing and reading. I have never had so many students writing two
or three sentences by the end of kindergarten," said Susan Kochan, a
Tools teacher in Vancouver. "I have also enjoyed seeing the students
get so excited about coming to school and learning. They loved all the
activities we did so much that many students didn't want to miss
school, even if they were sick."
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Light diet: Animals that eat sunshine
From sea slugs to salamanders, many animals can naturally tap into solar power –
and we’re learning how to make more
It was a long shot,” says Christina Agapakis. “We just wondered what would
happen.” She has done an extraordinary experiment: injecting photosynthetic
bacteria into the eggs of zebrafish.
Agapakis, a research student at Harvard Medical School in Boston, only wanted to
see if the bacteria could survive. Bacteria that get into larger cells usually kill or are
killed, but occasionally things work out differently, with consequences that can
transform the planet. The ability to turn light into food evolved in cyanobacteria,
and plants evolved when more sophisticated cells stole the technology by enslaving
cyanobacteria within themselves.
While most biologists would have bet that cyanobacteria and fish do not mix, the
Synechococcus that Agapakis injected into the eggs were still alive two weeks after
the fish hatched, which is the point when the pigment of zebrafish develops. The
bacteria might survive longer in a transparent strain.
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However, the cyanobacteria did not grow and divide as normal. They also didn’t
provide much sugar to the fish, says Agapakis, so the fish embryos got little if any
energy from light. This was true even for cyanobacteria genetically modified to
export sugar. Yet the mere fact that both fish and cyanobacteria survived raises
tantalising questions. Could we one day create fish that get part of their energy
from sunlight? Could photosynthetic animals help feed the world?
This might sound laughable, but lots of animals already get part of their food from
photosynthesis. The best known are the tropical corals, but many sponges,
anemones, sea squirts, hydras and bivalves also rely partly on solar energy. In fact,
solar-powered animals already help feed us, in a small way; giant clams have been
part of the human diet for at least 100,000 years.
If you are thinking all these animals look and behave rather like plants, that’s not
always the case. There are plenty of free-living photosynthetic animals.
Photosynthetic flatworms up to 15 millimetres long can be found in huge numbers
in places. Then there are the jellyfish-like Vellela, which float on the sea surface, and
the upside-down jellyfish. Most striking of all are the many different kinds of solar-
powered sea slugs.
As yet, the list doesn’t include any vertebrates – but that might be about to change.
It has long been known that algae grow in the jelly surrounding the eggs of some
amphibians. Both sides benefit: the algae supply oxygen and eat the embryos’
waste.
Now it turns out that the spotted salamander Ambystoma maculatum goes even
further. Ryan Kerney of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, has discovered that
females store algal cells in their oviducts and somehow pass them on to their eggs.
Even more amazingly, the algae do not just grow on the outside of the eggs but also
within the cells of the developing salamander embryos. Inside the salamander cells,
energy-burning mitochondria cluster around the algal cells as if to gobble sugar and
oxygen, Kerney announced earlier this year.
We don’t yet know for sure that the salamander embryos get food from the algae,
and it seems unlikely this happens in adult salamanders, which spend the day hiding
under moss or stones, and whose mostly black skin would not let much light
through anyway. Nevertheless, it appears at least one vertebrate is partly
photosynthetic during a brief period of its life cycle.
“The algae grow within the cells of salamanders, and appear to supply them with
food and oxygen”
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The question, then, is not whether animals can photosynthesise, but why relatively
few do. Some researchers think for most animals, the downsides of photosynthesis
usually outweigh the benefits. Others disagree. “I think the answer is not that they
can’t, just that they haven’t,” says Patrick Keeling of the University of British
Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, who studies chloroplast evolution. To get a better
idea of who is right, we need to look at what it takes to photosynthesise.
Where there be Light
The first requirement is light. It is surely no coincidence that animals in which
photosynthesis has evolved already had lifestyles that involved staying in the light,
and that many, like hydras and jellyfish, also have translucent bodies that let light
through.
Body shape also matters. Plenty of photosynthetic animals, such as anemones and
corals, have a branching structure similar to that of plants. Others, including
flatworms and some sacoglossan sea slugs (pictured overleaf), have a flat, leaf-like
shape. This gives these creatures a large surface area relative to volume, maximising
the amount of light – and thus energy – that can be captured.
The need for light might explain why many animals do not photosynthesise. Even if
adult spotted salamanders could get a little energy from photosynthesis, for
instance, the risks of exposing themselves during daytime probably outweigh any
benefit, meaning this ability will never evolve further. And while many mammals,
birds and reptiles get plenty of light, their fur, feathers or scales prevent the light
reaching living cells.
Then again, it seems even a little light will do. The nudibranch sea slug
Plakobranchus ocellatus must benefit from photosynthesis even though it spends its
day half-buried in sand and its photosynthetic cells are shaded by flaps of skin. Nor
is a flat or branched body the only way to get it. The silica skeletons of some
sponges act like fibre-optic cables, channelling light to cells deep within them.
Perhaps the most unlikely photosynthesisers are the giant clams, with their thick
shells and relatively small surface area. Despite this, a young clam can keep growing
for 10 months powered by light alone. To achieve this, giant clams have undergone
major internal rearrangements, says Angela Douglas of the Bermuda Institute of
Ocean Sciences. However, these extensive adaptations would not have evolved if
photosynthesis had not benefited clams right from the start.
In fact, photosynthetic algae have even been found inside the bodies of some small
bivalves, conchs and snails, apparently thriving on the low levels of light that
3
penetrate the shell. It is thought the hosts are gaining some food from the algae,
though it hasn’t been proven.
If clams and conchs can get enough light for photosynthesis, surely some fish could
too? Indeed, some fish, like lionfish and leafy sea dragons, or rays and flatfish, seem
to have ideal shapes for capturing light.
Transmuting sunbeams
The second requirement for photosynthesis is the machinery for turning light into
food. In plants, this comes in the form of chloroplasts, stripped-down descendants
of the cyanobacteria that were engulfed by the ancestors of plants around 2.5
billion years ago. The ancestors of animals never had chloroplasts, but one kind of
animal can acquire them.
Solar-powered sacoglossan sea slugs extract chloroplasts from the algae they feed
on and tuck them away inside gut cells. Branches of the sea slugs’ gut extend
throughout their bodies, providing a large surface area for capturing light.
But there is a catch. As cyanobacteria turned into chloroplasts, most of their genes
moved to the genome of the host, including some essential for keeping chloroplasts
working. Since sea slug cells do not have these genes, they must replace their
chloroplasts every few days or weeks. The exception is the emerald green Elysia
chlorotica (pictured). After it steals the chloroplasts from one particular alga upon
reaching its adult form, it doesn’t need to eat again for the remaining 10 months of
its life.
Has E. chlorotica somehow acquired the genes needed to keep chloroplasts
working? Yes, two teams announced last year, but they might have been too hasty.
Mary Rumpho of the University of Maine in Orono, who heads one of the teams,
has been unable to confirm the finding. “The final verdict awaits sequencing of the
genome,” she says.
To sustain chloroplasts requires 200 or so extra genes, she says, and adding them to
an animal’s genome would be an enormous challenge for today’s genetic engineers.
“It is unrealistic to think you could insert all the nuclear genes needed to sustain
chloroplast activity in a foreign genome, and get them expressed, and the protein
products targeted to the chloroplast, not to mention regulating the genes’ activity,”
says Rumpho.
This would explain why the many organisms that have stolen the ability to
photosynthesise from plants have usually done so by enslaving entire cells –
nucleus, chloroplasts and all (see diagram). Adding an entire plant cell to an animal
cell would require less genetic tinkering than adding only chloroplasts. The obvious
4
candidate is the alga Symbiodinium, which provides the solar power in corals,
anemones, jellyfish, nudibranch sea slugs, giant clams and other animals. The other
option is to add cyanobacteria to animal cells, as Agapakis did – some sponges and
corals already play host to cyanobacteria.
5
Even if vertebrates tolerate algae or cyanobacteria within their cells, though, it

wouldn’t be enough. “Coral polyps somehow induce Symbiodinium to release the
sugar it makes,” says Douglas. “Outside the polyp, it keeps that sugar for itself,
thanks very much.”
Such inducement is not the only challenge. While the single-celled amoeba
Paulinella chromatophora has acquired a cyanobacterial endosymbiont that is losing
genes and turning into a chloroplast, in a repeat of the ancient event that gave rise
to plants, no multicellular organism has acquired the ability to pass a
photosynthetic endosymbiont down the generations like this. “Incorporating a
chloroplast into a multicellular organism is very different from a unicellular one,”
says Chris Lane of the University of Rhode Island in Kingston, who studies
endosymbiosis. “Getting it passed on, controlling the cell division cycle, is not
trivial.”
Animals that do not pass down photosynthetic endosymbionts within eggs have to
acquire them from the environment and distribute them around their body.
Photosynthesis might have evolved multiple times in sea slugs in part because they
can already extract toxins and stinging cells from their prey and distribute them
around their body, but this is a very rare talent.
No free lunch
A photosynthetic lifestyle really is like a day at the beach: you can get too much sun.
“It would be kind of nice to be a photosynthetic animal and use sunlight when food
was scarce,” says Rumpho. “But you also have to develop ways to withstand the
damage caused by absorbing high energy from sunlight.”
Damaging ultraviolet light is also a big problem, as is heat for those that live on land.
Animals that stayed in the blazing sun all day would have problems staying cool,
which might be partly why all known photosynthetic animals are aquatic.
Then there is the cost of producing and maintaining photosynthetic machinery, not
to mention the anatomical compromises needed to carry the tools for both
photosynthesis and eating. Photosynthetic anemones, for instance, often have both
long, stinging tentacles to capture prey, and short, algae-loaded ones to capture
sunlight. They use their hunting tentacles only at night.
What does all this tell us? While there does not appear to be any fundamental
obstacle to animals photosynthesising, it is very hard for most animals to acquire
the necessary machinery. What’s more, many animals would need major changes in
lifestyle and anatomy to benefit even if they did somehow acquire the machinery,
6
and the intermediate stages would decrease their chances of survival, so it is hard
to see how it could ever evolve.
Genetic engineering might be able achieve what evolution hasn’t, but would the
benefits outweigh the costs for any vertebrates, especially energy-hungry animals
with active lifestyles? Let’s say we have induced Symbiodinium to live in the skin
cells of a fish the way it lives in coral polyps. Coral fixes 3 to 80 grams of carbon per
square metre of photosynthetic surface per day, according to Stuart Sundin of the
Scripps Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. In energy terms, that is 126
to 3360 kilojoules.
The surface area of a typically shaped 20-gram fish, including fins, is 0.0044 m2 or
so; for a 500 g fish it is 0.045 m2. According to fish nutritionist Ingrid Lupatsch of
Swansea University in the UK, a 20-gram carp, ready for stocking in an aquaculture
pond, needs about 3 kJ a day to maintain its weight; a harvestable 500 g fish needs
40 kJ.
Do the sums and you find that – in theory – photosynthesis could supply carp with
several times the energy they need for maintenance. This makes photosynthetic fish
look like huge winners, and similar back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that
even energy-guzzling mammals could get a useful amount of energy from light – but
there are huge “buts”.
For starters, genetically engineered fish are unlikely to be anywhere near as
efficient as corals honed by millions of years of evolution. There are a whole host of
changes required. To maximise their exposure to light, for instance, fish would have
behaved differently. They need clear skin and scales to let light through to cells, but
protection from UV light. And, like corals, solar-powered fish might thrive only in
the tropics, where there is lots of sunlight, clear water and steady temperatures.
In addition, what most photosynthetic animals get from their symbionts is a fast fix
of carbohydrates that Douglas calls “junk food”. Proteins, vitamins and minerals all
come from eating. Too much sugar can be bad for fish, and, in the case of fish
farming, carbs are cheap to provide. The costly part is providing protein and oils;
most carnivorous fish, such as salmon, have to be fed fishmeal. In theory, equipping
fish with modern nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria, as found in some sponges and
corals, would enable them to make as much protein as they need, but nobody’s
managed to do this in plants yet despite decades of effort.
In any case, some farmed fish like carp and tilapia already get part or all of their
food from plants growing in their ponds, and animals that feed on these plants.
Sticking the algae inside the fish might not be any better.
7
The surprising answer then, is that it might well be possible to create solar-powered
fish, but that such fish might not provide any clear advantage when it comes to food
production. And without that, no one will invest in creating them, especially given
the need to convince regulators and consumers that they are safe. But if genetic
technology continues to advance in leaps and bounds, someone’s sure to carry on
where Agapakis left off. Maybe one day feeding your pet fish will be as easy as
turning on the light.
Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20827901-100-light-diet-

animals-that-eat-sunshine/#ixzz6Qk2zXXhC
8
Living dinosaurs: Was archaeopteryx really a bird?
It had wings and feathers, but also the teeth, legs, claws and tail of a
dinosaur – what kind of beast was archaeopteryx?
Archaeopteryx has always been considered to be the most primitive as

well as the most ancient bird. Yet its strange mix of traits – the teeth,
legs, claws and tail of a dinosaur but the wings and feathers of a bird –
continues to raise doubts about its true affinities.
Recent discoveries have only added to the enigma. It grew very slowly
compared with modern birds. A 2009 study of growth patterns in its
bones reveal that an adult would have taken over two-and-a-half years
to mature, at least three times as long as a modern bird. This slow
growth indicates a slow metabolism and suggests that archaeopteryx
may have been sluggish compared with today’s active and warm-
blooded birds.
1
“Archaeopteryx was much more like a dinosaur,” says lead author Greg
Erickson of Florida State University in Tallahassee (PLoS One, vol 4, p
e7390). His conclusion is that archaeopteryx should be regarded as a
feathered dinosaur capable of flight.
That is not to say its flying skills were up to much. Archaeopteryx may
not have been capable of flapping flight at all, according to a recent
study of its feather strength. “They were not strong enough to
withstand the forces generated during flight: they would have broken,”
says Robert Nudds of the University of Manchester, UK, who suggests
that it might have been a glider instead (Science, vol 328, p 887). These
findings have been disputed by other palaeontologists but all sides
agree that its flying ability was weak compared with modern birds.
However, archaeopteryx did have the large brain and excellent sight of
a flying bird, according to a team who used computed tomography to
scan the interior of its skull. A bird’s brain fits very tightly into the skull
so a scan will provide a clear impression of its shape and structure. The
shape and volume of the brain and inner ear were almost identical to
those of modern birds. “It was a flight-ready brain,” says co-author
Angela Milner of the Natural History Museum in London, home of the
first archaeopteryx skeleton ever found (Nature, vol 430, p 666).
Most palaeontologists still regard archaeopteryx as the earliest known
bird, but there is far less certainty about its taxonomic position than
there used to be. Some now argue that it should be expelled from the
Avialan group (modern and extinct birds) and placed closer to the
dromaeosaurs and troodontids.
The real question is, where do you draw the line between dinosaurs and
birds? Ask different palaeontologists and you will get subtly different
answers. That is because the distinction is basically arbitrary, says Xing
Xu of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in
Beijing, China, who discovered many of the Chinese fossils.
2
We now know that from the mid-Jurassic onwards, the world was full of
feathered theropods, some more bird-like than others. One group gave
rise to modern birds, but the magic moment when dinosaurs became
birds is impossible to pin down.
Even so, there is hope of discovering bird fossils older than
archaeopteryx. Xu thinks that birds split from the other dinosaurs
between 175 and 161 million years ago, and is now hunting for fossils in
rocks of this age.
It is even possible that we already have such fossils. Xu argues that two
species of miniature feathered dinosaur discovered recently in 161-
million-year-old rocks in Mongolia – Epidexipteryx and
Epidendrosaurus, together known as the Scansoriopterygids – belong in
the Avialans. If so, they usurp archaeopteryx as the earliest-known bird.
Whatever happens, archaeopteryx will remain a pivotal fossil.
“Archaeopteryx will always be the benchmark for discussing bird
evolution,” says Erickson.
Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19850-living-

dinosaurs-was-archaeopteryx-really-a-bird/#ixzz6Qk4AHT6R
3
Narcissism
Excessive preoccupation with self and lack of empathy for others.
Narcissism is the personality trait that features an exaggerated sense of
the person’s own importance and abilities. People with this trait believe
themselves to be uniquely gifted and commonly engage in fantasies of
fabulous success, power, or fame. Arrogant and egotistical, narcissistic
are often snobs, defining themselves by their ability to associate with
(or purchase the services of) the “best” people. They expect special
treatment and concessions from others. Paradoxically, these individuals
are generally insecure and have low self-esteem. They require
considerable admiration from others and find it difficult to cope with
criticism. Adversity or criticism may cause the narcissistic person to
either counterattack in anger or withdraw socially. Because narcissistic
individuals cannot cope with setbacks or failure, they often avoid risks
and situations in which defeat is a possibility.
Another common characteristic of narcissistic individuals is envy and
the expectation that others are envious as well. The self-
aggrandizement and self-absorption of narcissistic individuals is
accompanied by a pronounced lack of interest in and empathy for
others. They expect people to be devoted to them but have no impulse
to reciprocate, being unable to identify with the feelings of others or
anticipate their needs. Narcissistic people often enter into relationships
based on what other people can do for them.
During adolescence, when the individual is making the transition from
childhood to adulthood, many demonstrate aspects of narcissism.
These traits, related to the adolescent’s need to develop his or her own
sense of self, do not necessarily develop into the disorder that
psychologists have studied for decades, known as narcissistic
personality disorder. In 1898, Havelock Ellis (1859-1939) was the first
psychologist to address narcissism in a published work. Sigmund Freud
claimed that sexual perversion is linked to the narcissistic substitution
of the self for one’s mother as the primary love object in infancy. In
1933, psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich (1897- 1957) described the “phallic-
1
narcissistic” personality type in terms that foreshadow the present-day

definition: self-assured, arrogant, and disdainful. In 1969, Theodore
Milton specified five criteria for narcissistic personality disorder in the
third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
disorders (DSM-III): (1) inflated self-image; (2) exploitative; (3) cognitive
expansiveness; (4) insouciant temperament; and (5) deficient social
conscience.
The person with narcissistic personality disorder experiences a powerful
need to be admired and seems consumed with his or her own interests
and feelings. Individuals with this disorder have little or no empathy for
others and an inflated sense of their own importance and of the
significance of their achievements. It is common for persons with this
disorder to compare themselves to famous people of achievement and
to express surprise when others do not share or voice the same
perception. They feel entitled to great praise, attention, and deferential
treatment by others, and have difficulty understanding or
acknowledging the needs of others. They envy others and imagine that
others are envious of them. The person with narcissistic personality
disorder has no patience with others, and quickly strays from situations
where he or she is not the centre of attention and conversation.
According to DSM-IV, narcissistic personality disorder affects less than
1% of the general population. Of those, between half and three-fourths
are male.
Secondary features of narcissistic personality disorder include feelings
of shame or humiliation, depression, and mania. Narcissistic personality
disorder has also been linked to anorexia nervosa, substance-related
disorders (especially cocaine abuse), and other personality disorders.
2
06.07.2020 Sn ff ng out smell: How the bra n organ zes nformat on about odors -- Sc enceDa ly
Your source for the latest research news
Sn ff ng out smell: How the bra n organ zes nformat on about

odors
Date: July 2, 2020
Source: Harvard Med cal School
Summary: Neurosc ent sts descr be for the f rst t me how relat onsh ps between d fferent odors are encoded
n the bra n. The f nd ngs suggest a mechan sm that may expla n why nd v duals have common
but h ghly personal zed exper ences w th smell, and nform efforts better understand how the
bra n transforms nformat on about odor chem stry nto the percept on of smell.
FULL STORY
Bra n w th nscr pt on smell (stock mage).
Cred t: © ushakovsky / stock.adobe.com
The prem ere of the mov e Scent of Mystery n 1960 marked a s ngular event n the
annals of c nema: the f rst, and last, mot on p cture debut " n glor ous Smell-O-V s on."
Hop ng to wow mov egoers w th a dynam c olfactory exper ence alongs de the fam l ar
spectacles of s ght and sound, select theaters were outf tted w th a Rube Goldberg-
esque dev ce that p ped d fferent scents d rectly to seats.
Aud ences and cr t cs qu ckly concluded that the exper ence stunk. Fraught w th techn cal ssues, Smell-O-
V s on was panned and became a runn ng gag that holds a un que place n enterta nment h story. The flop of
Smell-O-V s on, however, fa led to deter entrepreneurs from cont nu ng to chase the dream of del ver ng smells
to consumers, part cularly n recent years, through d g tal scent technolog es.
Such efforts have generated news headl nes but scant success, due n part to a l m ted understand ng of how
the bra n translates odor chem stry nto percept ons of smell -- a phenomenon that n many ways rema ns
opaque to sc ent sts.
A study by neurob olog sts at Harvard Med cal School now prov des new ns ghts nto the mystery of scent.
Report ng n Nature on July 1, the researchers descr be for the f rst t me how relat onsh ps between d fferent
odors are encoded n the olfactory cortex, the reg on of bra n respons ble for process ng smell.
By del ver ng odors w th carefully selected molecular structures and analyz ng neural act v ty n awake m ce,
the team showed that neuronal representat ons of smell n the cortex reflect chem cal s m lar t es between
odors, thus enabl ng scents to be placed nto categor es by the bra n. Moreover, these representat ons can be
https://www.sc enceda ly.com/releases/2020/07/200702144119.htm 1/4

rew red by sensory exper ences.
The f nd ngs suggest a neurob olog cal mechan sm that may expla n why nd v duals have common but h ghly
personal zed exper ences w th smell.
"All of us share a common frame of reference w th smells. You and I both th nk lemon and l me smell s m lar
and agree that they smell d fferent from p zza, but unt l now, we d dn't know how the bra n organ zes that k nd
of nformat on," sa d sen or study author Sandeep Robert Datta, assoc ate professor of neurob ology n the
Blavatn k Inst tute at HMS.
The results open new avenues of study to better understand how the bra n transforms nformat on about odor
chem stry nto the percept on of smell.
"Th s s the f rst demonstrat on of how the olfactory cortex encodes nformat on about the very th ng that t's
respons ble for, wh ch s odor chem stry, the fundamental sensory cues of olfact on," Datta sa d.
Comput ng odor
The sense of smell allows an mals to dent fy the chem cal nature of the world around them. Sensory neurons
n the nose detect odor molecules and relay s gnals to the olfactory bulb, a structure n the forebra n where
n t al odor process ng occurs. The olfactory bulb pr mar ly transm ts nformat on to the p r form cortex, the ma n
structure of the olfactory cortex, for more comprehens ve process ng.
Unl ke l ght or sound, st mul eas ly controlled by tweak ng character st cs such as frequency and wavelength, t
s d ff cult to probe how the bra n bu lds neural representat ons of the small molecules that transm t odor. Often,
subtle chem cal changes -- a few carbon atoms here or oxygen atoms there -- can lead to s gn f cant
d fferences n smell percept on.
Datta, along w th study f rst author Stan Pashkovsk , research fellow n neurob ology at HMS, and colleagues
approached th s challenge by focus ng on the quest on of how the bra n dent f es related but d st nct odors.
"The fact that we all th nk a lemon and l me smell s m lar means that the r chem cal makeup must somehow
evoke s m lar or related neural representat ons n our bra ns," Datta sa d.
To nvest gate, the researchers developed an approach to quant tat vely compare odor chem cals analogous to
how d fferences n wavelength, for example, can be used to quant tat vely compare colors of l ght.
They used mach ne learn ng to look at thousands of chem cal structures known to have odors and analyzed
thousands of d fferent features for each structure, such as the number of atoms, molecular we ght,
electrochem cal propert es and more. Together, these data allowed the researchers to systemat cally compute
how s m lar or d fferent any odor was relat ve to another.
From th s l brary, the team des gned three sets of odors: a set w th h gh d vers ty; one w th ntermed ate
d vers ty, w th odors d v ded nto related clusters; and one of low d vers ty, where structures var ed only by
ncremental ncreases n carbon-cha n length.
They then exposed m ce to var ous comb nat ons of odors from the d fferent sets and used mult photon
m croscopy to mage patterns of neural act v ty n the p r form cortex and olfactory bulb.
Smell pred ct on
The exper ments revealed that s m lar t es n odor chem stry were m rrored by s m lar t es n neural act v ty.
Related odors produced correlated neuronal patterns n both the p r form cortex and olfactory bulb, as
measured by overlaps n neuron act v ty. Weakly related odors, by contrast, produced weakly related act v ty
patterns.
In the cortex, related odors led to more strongly clustered patterns of neural act v ty compared w th patterns n
the olfactory bulb. Th s observat on held true across nd v dual m ce. Cort cal representat ons of odor
relat onsh ps were so well-correlated that they could be used to pred ct the dent ty of a held-out odor n one
mouse based on measurements made n a d fferent mouse.
Add t onal analyses dent f ed a d verse array of chem cal features, such as molecular we ght and certa n
electrochem cal propert es, that were l nked to patterns of neural act v ty. Informat on gleaned from these
features was robust enough to pred ct cort cal responses to an odor n one an mal based on exper ments w th
a separate set of odors n a d fferent an mal.
The researchers also found that these neural representat ons were flex ble. M ce were repeatedly g ven a
m xture of two odors, and over t me, the correspond ng neural patterns of these odors n the cortex became
more strongly correlated. Th s occurred even when the two odors had d ss m lar chem cal structures.
The ab l ty of the cortex to adapt was generated n part by networks of neurons that select vely reshape odor
relat onsh ps. When the normal act v ty of these networks was blocked, the cortex encoded smells more l ke
the olfactory bulb.
"We presented two odors as f they're from the same source and observed that the bra n can rearrange tself to
reflect pass ve olfactory exper ences," Datta sa d.
Part of the reason why th ngs l ke lemon and l me smell al ke, he added, s l kely because an mals of the same
spec es have s m lar genomes and therefore s m lar t es n smell percept on. But each nd v dual has
personal zed percept ons as well.
"The plast c ty of the cortex may help expla n why smell s on one hand nvar ant between nd v duals, and yet
custom zable depend ng on our un que exper ences," Datta sa d.
Together, the results of the study demonstrate for the f rst t me how the bra n encodes relat onsh ps between
odors. In compar son to the relat vely well-understood v sual and aud tory cort ces, t s st ll unclear how the
olfactory cortex converts nformat on about odor chem stry nto the percept on of smell.
Ident fy ng how the olfactory cortex maps s m lar odors now prov des new ns ghts that nform efforts to
understand and potent ally control the sense of smell, accord ng to the authors.
"We don't fully understand how chem str es translate to percept on yet," Datta sa d. "There's no computer
algor thm or mach ne that w ll take a chem cal structure and tell us what that chem cal w ll smell l ke."
"To actually bu ld that mach ne and to be able to someday create a controllable, v rtual olfactory world for a
person, we need to understand how the bra n encodes nformat on about smells," Datta sa d. "We hope our
f nd ngs are a step down that path."
Add t onal authors on the study nclude G ul ano Iur ll , Dav d Brann, Dan el Ch charro, Kr sten Drummey, Kev n
Franks and Stefano Panzer .
The study was supported by the Vallee Foundat on, the Nat onal Inst tutes of Health (RO11DC016222,
U19NS112953) and the S mons Collaborat on on the Global Bra n.
Story Source:
Mater als prov ded by Harvard Med cal School. Or g nal wr tten by Kev n J ang. Note: Content may be ed ted
for style and length.
Journal Reference:
1. Stan L. Pashkovsk , G ul ano Iur ll , Dav d Brann, Dan el Ch charro, Kr sten Drummey, Kev n Franks,
Stefano Panzer , Sandeep Robert Datta. Structure and flex b l ty n cort cal representat ons of odour
space. Nature, 2020; DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2451-1
C te Th s Page:
Extreme warming of the South Pole

The South Pole has been warming at more than three times the global
average over the past 30 years, according to research led by Ohio
University professor Ryan Fogt and OHIO alumnus Kyle Clem.
Fogt, professor of meteorology and director of the Scalia Laboratory for
Atmospheric Analysis, and Clem co-authored a paper with an
international team of scientists published in the journal Nature Climate
Change on the findings. According to the study, this warming period
was mainly driven by natural tropical climate variability and was likely
intensified by increases in greenhouse gas.
Clem, a current postdoctoral research fellow in climate science at
Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, is the lead author of
the study and studied under Fogt for both his bachelor's and master's
degrees at Ohio University.
"I've had a passion for understanding the weather and fascination of its
power and unpredictability as far back as I can remember," Clem said.
"Working with Ryan I learned all about Antarctic and Southern
Hemisphere climate, specifically how West Antarctica was warming and
its ice sheet was thinning and contributing to global sea level rise. I also
learned that Antarctica experiences some of the most extreme weather
and variability on the planet, and due to its remote location, we actually
know very little about the continent, so there are constant surprises
and new things to learn about Antarctica every year."
The Antarctic climate exhibits some of the largest ranges in
temperature during the course of the year, and some of the largest
temperature trends on the planet, with strong regional contrasts. Most
of West Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula experienced warming
and ice-sheet thinning during the late 20th century. By contrast, the
South Pole -- located in the remote and high-altitude continental
interior -- cooled until the 1980s and has since warmed substantially.
These trends are affected by natural and anthropogenic climate change,
but the individual contribution of each factor is not well understood.
1
Clem and his team analysed weather station data at the South Pole, as
well as climate models to examine the warming in the Antarctic interior.
They found that between 1989 and 2018, the South Pole had warmed
by about 1.8 degrees Celsius over the past 30 years at a rate of +0.6
degrees Celcius per decade -- three times the global average.
The study also found that the strong warming over the Antarctic interior
in the last 30 years was mainly driven by the tropics, especially warm
ocean temperatures in the western tropical Pacific Ocean that changed
the winds in the South Atlantic near Antarctica and increased the
delivery of warm air to the South Pole. They suggest these atmospheric
changes along Antarctica's coast are an important mechanism driving
climate anomalies in its interior.
Clem and Fogt argue that these warming trends were unlikely the result
of natural climate change alone, emphasizing the effects of added
anthropogenic warming on top of the large tropical climate signal on
Antarctic climate have worked in tandem to make this one of the
strongest warming trends worldwide.
"From the very beginning, Kyle and I worked very well together and
were able to accomplish more as a team than we were individually,"
Fogt said. "We have published every year together since 2013, with one
of our continuing collaborations being the annual State of the Climate
reports. Our work on this project together each year ultimately led to
this publication documenting the warming at the South Pole, however,
most importantly for me, apart from being a fantastic scientist and
collaborator, my family and I are both honoured to consider Kyle one of
our closest friends."
2
How the post-COVID workplace will change business

for the better
• Businesses that prioritize their return to work strategies and
change how they operate will outpace their peers;
• As we emerge from coronavirus lockdowns, we need to evolve
the dated mindset that being in an office full-time is an actual
business imperative;
• Organizations should focus on four key pillars to ensure a smooth
transition of team members back onsite.
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced organizations across the globe into
a balancing act – protecting the health and safety of their employees
while simultaneously continuing their operations. Like all essential
businesses, Dell Technologies is working through this challenge to
implement the most effective approach for protecting as many
stakeholders as possible. And, it’s critical that we partner with
customers to put their business continuity, remote working and digital
services into practice.
As we began creating our company's return to site strategy, it became
clear that the workplace impact would not be a temporary one, and
organizations that seize this opportunity to change how they work will
outpace their peers. This concept compelled us to create a formal
Customer Playbook that serves as reassurance that our plan – and
business – are strong, as well as providing guidance on how to leverage
these strategies to strengthen their own businesses.
Emerging opportunities
As governments at local and federal levels start to lift restrictions and
ask employees to “return to work,” we must remember: we are already
at work. Our team members who are required to be in a facility or in
the field are steadfast in their support of our customers. Meanwhile,
the remaining 90% of our workforce continues to be productive working
remotely.
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We know coming out of this crisis that many of our team members
won’t need to return to corporate sites, at least not on a full-time basis.
While every industry and every business is different, it’s critical that
organizations reinvent and redefine “work” in the new world. We must
change how we think about spaces, cybersecurity, meetings, travel,
events and policies, and we mustn’t forget the ways employees find
balance through their family, volunteer work, hobbies and more. We
need to evolve the dated mindset that being in an office full-time is an
actual business imperative.
As we rethink where business is done, it creates the opportunity for
organizations of all sizes to advance and achieve their goals and
experience a more flexible culture, reduce their carbon footprint,
enhance diverse talent recruitment and make new investments in
innovation.
How does this paradigm shift enable us to do all of this?
Businesses should start with an honest accounting of how a reduced on-
site workforce with more flexible workplace conditions can help the
business execute on its strategy. We’ve aligned our business objectives
with our evolving workforce in the following ways:
• Use our values to develop new ways of working, with high levels
of engagement and productivity.
• Create a stronger customer and team member experience by
investing time and money on the things that matter most.
• Start from the top, with a leadership team and ethos culturally
committed to increasing our work-from-home
footprint and team member flexibility and choice.
• Be a leader in workplace flexibility with a goal of 50% (or greater
in countries with the right infrastructure) of our team members in
flexible work arrangements.
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• Advance progress against our 2030 Moonshot goals by reducing

our carbon footprint and opening new opportunities to bring in
diverse talent.
Although this is specific to our own approach and goals established
before the pandemic arrived, we’re confident it’s a strong framework
for customers to consider as they adapt their own goals, along with the
right technology to accelerate innovation and growth.
Of course, to achieve these goals, we must prioritize the safety and
wellbeing of our team members at every step. This includes planning
our return to site in a way that prioritizes flexibility and will require fine-
tuning as we learn through the process. The way we’re approaching our
strategy is focused on health first, through graduated return to site for
different functions based on need and flexible schedules.
This strategy takes a conservative approach and relies strongly on data
and science to determine safety and readiness, align to local
government regulations and follow health and hygiene guidance. It also
ensures we support our customers and partners, focus on teams who
need to be on-site for enhanced productivity, and enables employees to
return to the office while taking into consideration the future state of
work.
Once the conditions are right, organizations should focus on four key
pillars to ensure a smooth transition of team members back onsite
while cementing the conditions for greater innovation and flexibility:
• Return to site risk assessment – Evaluate the infection rates,
active cases, recovery and scaled increase trends of the
country/specific location to determine how safe it is for team
members to return to site.
• Pre-opening readiness – Assess and prepare for team members
to return to site while ensuring hygiene, social distancing, and
infrastructure all support team member health and productivity.
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• Phased return to site – Start with those team members who are
physically required to be onsite, and gradually move to those
functions and people who prefer to come to their place of work;
as well as accommodating those who don’t feel comfortable to
return.
• Communication – Develop transparent and frequent
communications, with a feedback loop, to team members and
communities.
We’re rarely afforded the opportunity to make such dramatic changes
to our businesses in such a short period of time – even rarer still is the
ability to do so in a way that will better prepare our teams for the
changing digital landscape while helping us achieve organizational goals
around sustainability, diversity and innovation. Although it’s not a
change that anyone asked for, it’s the change that will help us create
more flexible, sustainable businesses that put people first.
4
GENES AND BEHAVIOUR

Is a child’s athletic ability inherited, or simply a product of training? If one parent
has schizophrenia, will his child acquire the disease? The genetic foundations of
behaviour are studied by behaviour genetics, an interdisciplinary science which
draws on the resources of several scientific disciplines, including genetics,
physiology, and psychology. Because of the nature of heredity, behaviour
geneticists are unable to assess the role played by genetic factors in an individual’s
behaviour: their estimates by definition apply to groups. There are 23 pairs of
chromosomes in each human cell (a total of 46 chromosomes-each with
approximately 20,000 genes). Genes from both members of a pair act in concert to
produce a particular trait. What makes heredity complex and extremely difficult to
measure is the fact that human sperm and eggs, which are produced by cell
division, have 23 unpaired chromosomes. This means that one half of a person’s
genes comes from the mother, and the other half from the father, and that each
individual, with the exception of his identical twin, has a unique genetic profile.
Scientists are working on the Human Genome Project recently finished mapping an
estimated 100,000 genes in the human DNA. They have been able to identify genes
responsible for a variety of diseases, including Huntington’s disease, Down
Syndrome, cystic fibrosis, Tay Sachs disease, and a number of cancers. Genetic
information about a particular disease constitutes a crucial milestone in the search
for a cure. For example, phenylketonuria (PKIU) is a disease caused by a recessive
gene from each parent; PKU’s genetic basis is clearly understood. A child with PKU is
unable to metabolize phenylalanine, an amino acid found in proteins.
Thephenylalanine build-up afflicts the central nervous system, causing severe brain
damage. Because the genetic processes underlying PKU are known, scientists have
been able to develop a screening test, and thus can quickly diagnose the afflicted
children shortly after birth. When diagnosed early, PKU can be successfully
controlled by diet.
While genetic research can determine the heritability of some diseases, the genetic
foundations of behaviour are much more difficult to identify. From a genetic point
of view, physical traits, such as the colour of a person’s hair, have a much higher
heritability than behaviour. In fact, behaviour genetics assumes that the genetic
bases of an individual’s behaviour simply cannot be determined. Consequently,
researchers have focused their efforts on the behaviour of groups, particularly
families. However, even controlled studies of families have failed to establish
conclusive links between genetics and behaviour, or between genetics and
particular psychological traits and aptitudes. In theory, these links probably exist; in
practice, however, researchers have been unable to isolate traits that are
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unmodified by environmental factors. For example, musical aptitude seems to recur

in certain families. While it is tempting to assume that this aptitude is an inherited
genetic trait, it would be a mistake to ignore the environment. What is colloquially
known as “talent” is probably a combination of genetic and other, highly variable,
factors.
More reliable information about genetics and behaviour can be gleaned from twin
studies. When compared to fraternal (dizygotic) twins, identical (monozygotic)
twins display remarkable behavioural similarities. (Unlike fraternal twins, who
develop from two separate eggs, identical twins originate from a single divided
fertilized egg.) However, even studies of identical twins reared in different families
are inconclusive, because, as scientists have discovered, in many cases, the different
environments often turn out to be quite comparable, thus invalidating the
hypothesis that the twins’ behavioural similarities are entirely genetically
determined. Conversely, studies of identical twins raised in the same environment
have shown that identical twins can develop markedly different personalities. Thus,
while certain types of behaviour can be traced to certain genetic characteristics,
there is no genetic blueprint for an individual’s personality.
Twin studies have also attempted to elucidate the genetic basis of intelligence,
which, according to many psychologists, is not one trait, but a cluster of distinct
traits. Generally, these studies indicate that identical twins reared in different
families show a high correlation in IQ scores. No one questions the genetic basis of
intelligence, but scientists still do not know how intelligence is inherited and what
specific aspects of intelligence can be linked to genetic factors.
2
'We ignore the power of symbols at our peril' -

architect David Adjaye on why racist monuments must
be replaced
• Racist statues are falling, exposing the relationship between symbols and the
built environment with systems of injustice.
• Sir David Adjaye – lead designer of the Smithsonian Museum’s National
Museum for African American History and Culture in Washington DC –
explains why memorials need to be ruthless with the truth to enable
fractured communities to heal.
Racist statues are falling. In the past weeks since the killing of an unarmed African
American man by a Minnesota police officer, the global rage at racial injustice and
inequality has been visceral.
A number of statues and monuments to past “heroes” have been defaced,
beheaded, drowned and dismembered. These are important acts. They highlight the
relationship between symbols and ideas and epitomize the human need for ritual
and meaning through memory, recollection and fantasy.
They also expose the uncomfortable fact that history is constructed – and
traditionally, there were winners and losers. These acts of revulsion signify a
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rejection of this binary understanding of the past. People are tired of myths and
singular heroes and seek complex truths in new symbols that don’t ignore the losers
or the forgotten underbelly of history.
This is why cities, towns, museums and those responsible for designing
infrastructure and public space need to rethink how we memorialize the past and
develop new approaches to past mistakes that give current and future generations
the means to move forward.
Here, David Adjaye – lead designer of the Smithsonian Museum’s National Museum
for African American History and Culture in Washington DC and architect of
London’s forthcoming Holocaust Memorial – explains why monuments need not be
permanent and why we need to be ruthless with the truth to enable fractured
communities to heal.
There is something very hopeful about the fact that this
generation is saying, wait a minute. That's not what we thought
history was about. It’s time to move on.
—David Adjaye, Architect
What’s the significance of symbols, statues or memorials?
Adjaye: There's a direct relationship between symbols and systems. We ignore the
power of symbols and disregard the power of past symbols at our peril. Symbols
construct our sense of ourselves and our beliefs. And what we're now seeing is a
disgust with the construction of monuments and narratives that glorified people
and things that we thought were about a great history, only to find out that the
underbelly of that history is steeped in horror, violence and blood.
It's also healthy for the system and for the city to continue to reconstruct and
rethink these things. Monuments are not forever. They take us through transitions.
The statues that are falling reference a mythical sense of time, which exists only in
fantasy. The danger is that when these myths are made physical, they can project
permanently into future generations, but the truth inevitably emerges into plain
sight. And that’s what we're seeing now: you can't hide these things.
Does the rejection of racist statues in cities across the world mean that there is
progress?
Adjaye: The rituals of cities and the rituals of spaces give meaning to our lives – this
is why monuments are so important. They capture memory and recollection, and
they tell stories. But there is now a disregard for the power of singular monuments
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and an embrace of multiple stories – including those that may have been lost. We're
entering an age where there is a distinct departure from the “god complex”.
The spatial experience of being in the world is so rich that as designers, artists and
architects, we have to make the city relevant and offer people a collective
understanding of complex issues and challenges. These singular statues have
become irrelevant because they tell only one story: stories that are often part of a
fiction. This is deeply problematic for contemporary life in terms of trying to steer a
course towards the world that we all want to live in. The projects that I've been
doing work against this kind of memory of the image as opposed to memory of the
act.
Image: Alan Karchmer, National Museum of African American History and Culture
Memory can also change. The idea of signs and monuments that are fragments
within an unfolding story is interesting. These are important touchstones to teach
people about values and morals. There's nothing better than a society admitting
mistakes. Nobody's perfect.
We need to establish new ways of being in cities and communities within a very
complex and interdependent global world – this is one of the struggles that as
architects we're trying to work through.
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How do you design a contemporary memorial?

Adjaye: It’s critical that the responsibility of the monument is not done with a sense
of a fantasy. For me, it's a cold analysis of past events and I use that information to
show what went wrong. There's no emotion.
In building the National Museum of African American History and Culture, it
inadvertently also became a monument. The story had simply been held back for so
long that just making a building didn't seem enough. It was about delivering a
narrative and a formal message of the building as a device to talk about our moral
compass.
It is now used as the backdrop for many of the anti-racist protests. So immediate
histories are unfolding as the building evolves to convey new stories as well as old.
For me, this is the ultimate success of a monument. It should enable a community
to move forward by creating a historical marker, a social reference point and a
generational moral compass.
Protesters kneel in front of the National Museum of African American History and Culture during a march as
racial inequality protests continue, in Washington DC, June 23, 2020
Image: REUTERS/Leah Millis
4
What about systemic racism inherent in the design of cities?

Adjaye: The construction of racism in the construction of cities is seen all the time –
Johannesburg is probably the epitome. We know about Johannesburg because of
the Apartheid story, but the architecture of segregation can be found in any society
where there's been a dislocation between those who have and those who have not
(either through marginalization, through skin colour or any other difference).
Infrastructure – which seems apparently benign and of benefit to everyone – has
been used as a tool of separation to create communities of dependency and
communities that are just on the edge of collapse.
So racism is not just a human hate issue. It's been deployed through
every mechanism of how we construct and make our physical
environments. Statues are just one of these mechanisms.
There were inherent mistakes made by generations, which fundamentally blocked
the access and the opportunity of many people. It's incumbent on architects now to
find fresh ways to bridge or create new relationships.
The past few months have seen an extraordinary shift in context and mood. The
consequences of our actions are more questioned and the interconnectedness of
everything is more apparent. With the internet we’re able to see the cataclysmic
effects of all these things upon each other. So we suddenly share a collective
consciousness through the medium.
It's forcing a global awareness in a way that's never happened before in the history
of civilization. It will impact the way in which we make cities, how we legislate, how
we make things, how we use materials, how we use resources. Something that was
meant to be about separation, can suddenly become a tool of continuity – within
this changed context. Cities are always changing and symbols and signs are being re-
appropriated.
There is something very hopeful about the fact that this generation is saying, wait a
minute. That's not what we thought history was about. It’s time to move on.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/07/tthis-architect-explains-why-racist-statues-
are-no-longer-relevant-and-describes-how-to-replace-them/
5
Why 'cancel culture' doesn't always work

Name a celebrity who has ever said or done anything remotely
controversial -- they've probably been cancelled.
It's a growing phenomenon that's left almost no one unscathed, from

comedians and actors to musicians and TV hosts.
Some people rail against this "cancel culture" while others say it's
necessary. And a lot of people just have questions.
Here are some answers.
What does it mean to cancel someone?
The dictionary definition of "cancel," per Merriam Webster, is to
"destroy the force, effectiveness or validity of."
When people say they're cancelling a famous person, that's essentially
what they're trying to do. They want to take away their power or their
cultural capital. They want to diminish their significance, whether it's a
personal boycott or a public shaming.
Does cancelling actually work?
Eh. It depends.
When was the last time you saw Kevin Spacey in a new movie or on TV?
When was the last time you heard anything about him that didn't
involve allegations of misconduct?
After being accused of sexual assault on Nantucket in 2017, Spacey
hasn't done any new projects. His latest movie was 2018's "Billionaire
Boy's Club," which was filmed before the allegations were revealed. The
Oscar-winning actor was kicked off the hit show "House of Cards" and
cut from 2017's "All the Money in the World," a movie he'd already
filmed.
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Since then, the only news about the actor has been on his sexual assault
case.
R. Kelly has also been scrubbed from recent cultural relevance. The
singer faces numerous sexual assault and abuse charges, and Spotify
has removed him from its playlists. To sing an R. Kelly song now is
almost taboo.
Filmmaker Woody Allen, who has been accused by daughter Dylan
Farrow of sexually assaulting her, lost his movie deal with Amazon
earlier this year. Roseanne Barr's TV show was cancelled last year after
she went on a racist Twitter rant. And Shane Gillis was fired from
"Saturday Night Live" this month after some past racist jokes
resurfaced.
But the truth is, most attempts at cancelling someone don't really work
like that. Many people, for example, have tried to cancel Taylor Swift
over a series of perceived missteps. But she's still out there, making
music. She's not really cancelled, not in the way Spacey or Kelly are.
Then there's Kanye West. His very public support of President Donald
Trump -- at a time when some people of colour have felt victimized by
the President's comments -- shocked fans. And then West went off and
called slavery "a choice."
What came next for West? Cancellation, right?
The truth is a bit more complicated. Some people certainly tried to
cancel the rapper by swearing off his music and criticizing his
viewpoints.
But let's be honest. Many other people still bump Ye's songs, and his
recent Sunday Services have garnered huge crowds -- including actor
Brad Pitt. Ultimately, Kanye proved just too big to cancel.
What about Michael Jackson? How do you cancel a legend?
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Though the allegations of sexual assault surrounding Jackson are

serious, can you really cancel someone whose influence runs so deep
and who is so omnipresent?
Jenna Wortham, a culture writer for the New York Times, contemplated
this question on the podcast "Still Processing." She says she's managed
to cut out such entertainers as Allen, Louis CK and Chris Brown -- but
Jackson is still everywhere. His songs influenced generations of
musicians. It simply isn't possible to totally cancel him.
"[Cancel culture] doesn't really work," Wortham says. "You can't just
cut problematic people and problematic cultural properties or entities
out because it's whack-a-mole, right? You're dealing with the symptoms
of a sick society rather than actually treating the disease."
Cancelling also doesn't undo the harm these people have done and
doesn't prevent them from doing it again, Wortham says. She cites the
example of Chris Brown, who assaulted then-girlfriend Rihanna in 2009
and continues to see musical success despite continued allegations of
assault and rape.
This, in a lot of ways, is what cancel culture has become. It's less about
eradicating the offender and more about giving the offended a personal
catharsis.
Is cancel culture going too far?
Some people argue that cancel culture is justified because celebrities
are facing repercussions for their actions. Others complain that it's is an
unfair form of "gotcha."
After old tweets surfaced last year that revealed homophobic language
by Kevin Hart, fellow comedian Billy Eichner came to Hart's defence,
saying people sometimes rush to judgment. Eichner said he doesn't like
the culture of bringing up past tweets and using them against someone.
"I'm not into people being permanently 'cancelled' over something like
this," he said on Twitter. "To me, 'cancellation' is childish. I'm into
conversation, not cancellation. I'm into owning up to past mistakes,
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acknowledging blind spots and hurtful remarks, talking through it,

discussing it, learning, moving past it and making progress together."
To cancel someone immediately, Eichner is essentially saying, is denying
them that opportunity to learn and grow.
That's easier to do when the problem is homophobic tweets from a long
time ago.
It's tougher when the issue is bit more muddled. After Gillis was fired
from "SNL" for racist jokes he made as recently as 2018, comedian Jim
Jeffries said, "This is just cancel culture. The guy shouldn't have been
fired."
Many people agreed with Jeffries. But others took an opposing stance,
like author Mark Harris, who said, "SNL reversing its decision to hire
Shane Gillis isn't a triumph of cancel culture or political correctness or
whatever else idiots will label it. It is the swift and appropriate
rectification of a mistake."
So, in the end, maybe public cancellations don't really matter. Brown is
still making music. Comedian Aziz Ansari, who was briefly "cancelled"
after a controversial 2018 article about his behaviour on a date, just
released a comedy special on Netflix. West is doing ... fine. So is Swift.
Barr is planning a comeback.
Cancel culture, in most cases, isn't permanent. But it does let public
figures know that fans will hold them accountable.
4
Living close to green space benefits gut bacteria of

urban, formula-fed infants
Date: July 9, 2020
Source: University of Alberta Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry
Summary: Living close to natural green space can mitigate some of the changes in infant
gut bacteria associated with formula feeding, according to new research.
Living close to natural green space can mitigate some of the changes in
infant gut bacteria associated with formula feeding, according to new
research published in the journal Environment International.
"Not every infant can be breastfed," said Anita Kozyrskyj, paediatrics

professor at the University of Alberta. "This is one of the first pieces of
evidence for a nature-related intervention that could possibly help
promote healthy gut microbial composition in infants who are not
breastfed."
"We consider breastfeeding to be the desirable state, and we know that
a breastfed infant is at reduced likelihood of many conditions later in
life -- for example, developing respiratory infections and becoming
overweight," said Kozyrskyj, who is principal investigator for SyMBIOTA,
a research team that studies how changes in infant gut microbiota can
lead to the development of obesity, allergies and asthma in children.
The researchers examined faecal samples taken during routine home
visits from 355 four-month-old infants who are part of the CHILD Cohort
Study -- a national study that is following nearly 3,500 Canadian
children from before birth to adolescence with the goal of discovering
root causes of allergies, asthma and chronic disease.
The babies' postal codes were then cross-referenced with the City of
Edmonton's urban Primary Land and Vegetation Inventory (uPLVI),
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which maps natural green spaces in the city, including natural forest,
grasslands, wetlands, lakes, rivers and ravines.
"We found that the infants who lived within 500 metres of a natural
environment were less likely to have higher diversity in their gut
bacteria," she said. "It may seem counterintuitive, but a young
breastfed infant has lower gut microbial diversity than a formula-fed
infant because formula feeding increases the number of different gut
bacteria."
The results applied only to infants living close to natural spaces,
regardless of whether there was a human-made park in the
neighbourhood.
The researchers found the greatest association was for formula-fed
infants living in a home with a pet. Though the exact mechanism is not
understood, they hypothesize that families who walk their dog may use
natural areas more often, or that pets may bring healthy bacteria into
the home on their fur.
"We know that when you introduce a pet into the home, it does change
the types of microbes that are found in household dust," Kozyrskyj
pointed out.
The researchers found that 54 per cent of the infants lived close to a
natural environment and 18 per cent of the babies were exclusively
formula-fed. Nine per cent were both formula-fed and had pets in the
home. The results were adjusted for the type of delivery (caesarean
section or natural), the season, and the age and education level of the
mothers.
They did not distinguish between the type of pets the families owned,
but Kozyrskyj said, "We think it's a dog effect."
"Even if you live in a high-rise, if you have a dog you go out and use the
natural spaces near your home. It's likely that the pet is the conduit."
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The researchers reported an increased presence of Proteobacteria --

the type of bacteria more often found in nature -- in the guts of all of
the babies.
While numerous studies have examined the impact of living close to
natural green spaces on the skin and gut microbiota of adults, this is the
first study to cross-reference proximity to natural green spaces with the
gut bacteria of infants.
"We had this wonderful opportunity for data linkage between the
unique natural assets map, the home locations of infants in the CHILD
birth cohort and information on the composition of their gut bacteria,"
Kozyrskyj said.
Kozyrskyj said the research team included a geographer, a city planner,
paediatrics and obstetrics specialists, and international environmental
and microbiome scientists.
"It takes an interdisciplinary team to do this kind of research," she said.
"That's what made the project so rich in terms of the interpretation of
the results and the kinds of questions that could be asked."
Kozyrskyj said the next step for this research will be to follow the
formula-fed infants who are exposed to natural areas throughout
childhood and track the impact on their health.
She said she often receives emails from new mothers who are unable to
breastfeed and are concerned about their children's futures. Based on
these results, she will now advise them to take their babies out to
natural areas and consider getting a pet.
The research was funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research,
the Allergy, Genes and Environment (AllerGen) Networks of Centres of
Excellence, the Stollery Children's Hospital Foundation through the
Women and Children's Health Research Institute and the Spanish
Ministry of Science and Innovation.
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14.07.2020 Damaged human lungs rev ved for transplant by connect ng them to a p g | New Sc ent st
EXTENSIVE
-16% READING SERIES – 64 – -27%
-12% -33% -18%
F yat nd r m
Damaged human lungs revived for transplant by connecting them to a

pig
HEALTH 13 July 2020
By Jessica Hamzelou
A person’s lungs quickly deteriorate after they die

SEBASTIAN KAULITZKI / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
Donated lungs that are too damaged to be used in transplants have been revived after being connected to the blood supply
of a live pig. The technique could potentially triple the number of lungs available for transplant, say the researchers behind
the work.
As soon as someone dies, their lungs begin to deteriorate. If the person has chosen to donate their lungs, the race is on to
get the organs to a recipient as soon as possible. “The lung is very delicate,” says James Fildes at the University of
Manchester, UK, who wasn’t involved in the work. “It is one of the most difficult organs to preserve.”
https://www.newsc ent st.com/art cle/2248535-damaged-human-lungs-rev ved-for-transplant-by-connect ng-them-to-a-p g/ 1/5

Most donated lungs are only outside the body for a matter of hours. But even then, the majority will have deteriorated so
much that they cannot safely be used for transplantation. Only around 28 per cent of donated lungs meet the criteria for
transplantation in the US, according to the American Lung Association.
Advertisement
Doctors can attempt to “recondition” damaged lungs using ex vivo lung perfusion (EVLP) devices that pump oxygenated air
and fluid through the lungs, but even then, many fail, says Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic at Columbia University in New York.
Read more: The coronavirus is leaving some people with permanent lung damage
Vunjak-Novakovic and her colleagues wondered whether the lungs might do better if they were connected to a living body,
with other working organs able to deliver nutrients and remove harmful substances.
To find out, the team obtained lungs that had been rejected for transplantation from six human donors, both single lungs
and pairs. One lung had failed even after 5 hours on an EVLP device, and had been outside the body for around 24 hours
before the team received it.
The team connected each lung to the circulatory system of an anaesthetised pig for 24 hours, with tubes feeding the blood
vessels of the human lung from those in the neck of the pig. At the same time, the lung was pumped with air using a
ventilator. Immunosuppressant drugs, which prevent “foreign” tissues from being rejected by the immune system, were
added to the circulatory system, infiltrating both the pig and the human lung.
Human lungs revived by pigs
Vunjak-Novakovic’s previous research has shown that the procedure doesn’t seem to cause any lasting effects to the pigs. In
one previous experiment, the pigs were able to move around, play with toys and feed while connected to a device used to
support lungs taken from other pigs, she says.
Before the treatment, all the lungs had a lot of white areas, suggesting tissue was dying, and weren’t considered capable of
getting enough oxygen into the blood.
But after 24 hours of being connected to the pigs, the lungs look transformed. Vunjak-Novakovic and her colleagues
performed a range of tests on the lungs, and found that the cells, tissue structure and capacity to deliver oxygen had
significantly improved.
Even the lung that had been outside the body for almost two days appeared to have recovered. “That’s remarkable,” says
Fildes. “My expectation would be that that lung would be destroyed, but actually it doesn’t look like it is at all.”

Read more: Artificial lungs in a backpack may free people with lung failure
“They aren’t 100 per cent normal, but they’re close enough,” says Vunjak-Novakovic. In theory, the lungs looked healthy
enough to be considered acceptable for transplant, but she wants to repeat the experiment with many more lungs before
implanting treated lungs in people.
Vunjak-Novakovic also plans to use medical-grade pigs, which researchers can be sure won’t harbour potentially harmful
pathogens that could be transmitted to people. That doesn’t necessarily mean the lungs will be entirely free of pig cells,
however. The lungs in the current study were found to contain white blood cells from the pigs – cells that could trigger an
immune reaction in a lung recipient, cautions Fildes.
Eventually, Vunjak-Novakovic hopes that a potential lung recipient could use their own blood supply to revive donated lungs
that they will receive. It is unlikely that the approach will rescue the most severely damaged lungs, but “if you can salvage
two out of every four that are rejected, you can increase the number of lungs available to patients by three times”, she says.
Journal reference: Nature Medicine, DOI: 10.1038/s41591-020-0971-8
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Wolves howl because they care: Social relationship

can explain variation in vocal production
Date: August 22, 2013
Source: Cell Press
Summary: When a member of the wolf pack leaves the group, the howling by those left
behind isn't a reflection of stress but of the quality of their relationships. So say
researchers based on a study of nine wolves from two packs living at Austria's Wolf
Science Center.
When a member of the wolf pack leaves the group, the howling by those
left behind isn't a reflection of stress but of the quality of their
relationships. So say researchers based on a study of nine wolves from
two packs living at Austria's Wolf Science Center that appears in Current
Biology, a Cell Press publication, on August 22.
The findings shed important light on the degree to which animal vocal
production can be considered as voluntary, the researchers say.
"Our results suggest the social relationship can explain more of the
variation we see in howling behavior than the emotional state of the
wolf," says Friederike Range of the Messerli Research Institute at the
University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna. "This suggests that wolves, to
a certain extent, may be able to use their vocalizations in a flexible
way."
Scientists have known very little about why animals make the sounds
that they do. Are they uncontrollable emotional responses? Or do
animals have the ability to change those vocalizations based on their
own understanding of the social context?
1
At the Wolf Science Centre, human handlers typically take individual

wolves out for walks on a leash, one at a time. On those occasions, they
knew, the remaining pack mates always howl.
To better understand why, Range and her colleagues measured the
wolves' stress hormone levels. They also collected information on the
wolves' dominance status in the pack and their preferred partners. As
they took individual wolves out for long walks, they recorded the
reactions of each of their pack mates.
Those observations show that wolves howl more when a wolf they have
a better relationship with leaves the group and when that individual is
of high social rank. The amount of howling did not correspond to higher
levels of the stress hormone cortisol.
"Our data suggest that howling is not a simple stress response to being
separated from close associates but instead may be used more flexibly
to maintain contact and perhaps to aid in reuniting with allies," Range
says.
2
Coronavirus outbreak raises question: Why are bat

viruses so deadly?
Bats' fierce immune systems drive viruses to higher virulence, making
them deadlier in humans
Date: February 10, 2020
Source: University of California - Berkeley
Summary: A study of cultured bat cells shows that their strong immune responses,
constantly primed to respond to viruses, can drive viruses to greater virulence. Modelling
bat immune systems on a computer, the researchers showed that when bat cells quickly
release interferon upon infection, other cells quickly wall themselves off. This drives
viruses to faster reproduction. The increased virulence and infectivity wreak havoc when
these viruses infect animals with tamer immune systems, like humans.
It's no coincidence that some of the worst viral disease outbreaks in

recent years -- SARS, MERS, Ebola, Marburg and likely the newly arrived
2019-nCoV virus -- originated in bats.
A new University of California, Berkeley, study finds that bats' fierce

immune response to viruses could drive viruses to replicate faster, so
that when they jump to mammals with average immune systems, such
as humans, the viruses wreak deadly havoc.
Some bats -- including those known to be the original source of human
infections -- have been shown to host immune systems that are
perpetually primed to mount defences against viruses. Viral infection in
these bats leads to a swift response that walls the virus out of cells.
While this may protect the bats from getting infected with high viral
loads, it encourages these viruses to reproduce more quickly within a
host before a defence can be mounted.
This makes bats a unique reservoir of rapidly reproducing and highly
transmissible viruses. While the bats can tolerate viruses like these,
when these bat viruses then move into animals that lack a fast-response
1
immune system, the viruses quickly overwhelm their new hosts, leading
to high fatality rates.
"Some bats are able to mount this robust antiviral response, but also
balance it with an anti-inflammation response," said Cara Brook, a
postdoctoral Miller Fellow at UC Berkeley and the first author of the
study. "Our immune system would generate widespread inflammation
if attempting this same antiviral strategy. But bats appear uniquely
suited to avoiding the threat of immunopathology."
The researchers note that disrupting bat habitat appears to stress the
animals and makes them shed even more virus in their saliva, urine and
feces that can infect other animals.
"Heightened environmental threats to bats may add to the threat of
zoonosis," said Brook, who works with a bat monitoring program
funded by DARPA (the U.S. Defence Advanced Research Projects
Agency) that is currently underway in Madagascar, Bangladesh, Ghana
and Australia. The project, Bat One Health, explores the link between
loss of bat habitat and the spill-over of bat viruses into other animals
and humans.
"The bottom line is that bats are potentially special when it comes to
hosting viruses," said Mike Boots, a disease ecologist and UC Berkeley
professor of integrative biology. "It is not random that a lot of these
viruses are coming from bats. Bats are not even that closely related to
us, so we would not expect them to host many human viruses. But this
work demonstrates how bat immune systems could drive the virulence
that overcomes this."
The new study by Brook, Boots and their colleagues was published this
month in the journal eLife.
Boots and UC Berkeley colleague Wayne Getz are among 23 Chinese
and American co-authors of a paper published last week in the journal
EcoHealth that argues for better collaboration between U.S. and
Chinese scientists who are focused on disease ecology and emerging
infections.
2
Vigorous flight leads to longer lifespan -- and perhaps viral tolerance

As the only flying mammal, bats elevate their metabolic rates in flight to
a level that doubles that achieved by similarly sized rodents when
running.
Generally, vigorous physical activity and high metabolic rates lead to
higher tissue damage due to an accumulation of reactive molecules,
primarily free radicals. But to enable flight, bats seem to have
developed physiological mechanisms to efficiently mop up these
destructive molecules.
This has the side benefit of efficiently mopping up damaging molecules
produced by inflammation of any cause, which may explain bats'
uniquely long lifespans. Smaller animals with faster heart rates and
metabolism typically have shorter lifespans than larger animals with
slower heartbeats and slower metabolism, presumably because high
metabolism leads to more destructive free radicals. But bats are unique
in having far longer lifespans than other mammals of the same size:
Some bats can live 40 years, whereas a rodent of the same size may live
two years.
This rapid tamping down of inflammation may also have another perk:
tamping down inflammation related to antiviral immune response. One
key trick of many bats' immune systems is the hair-trigger release of a
signalling molecule called interferon-alpha, which tells other cells to
"man the battle stations" before a virus invades.
Brook was curious how bats' rapid immune response affects the
evolution of the viruses they host, so she conducted experiments on
cultured cells from two bats and, as a control, one monkey. One bat,
the Egyptian fruit bat (Rousettus aegyptiacus), a natural host of
Marburg virus, requires a direct viral attack before transcribing its
interferon-alpha gene to flood the body with interferon. This technique
is slightly slower than that of the Australian black flying fox (Pteropus
alecto), a reservoir of Hendra virus, which is primed to fight virus
infections with interferon-alpha RNA that is transcribed and ready to
3
turn into protein. The African green monkey (Vero) cell line does not
produce interferon at all.
When challenged by viruses mimicking Ebola and Marburg, the different
responses of these cell lines were striking. While the green monkey cell
line was rapidly overwhelmed and killed by the viruses, a subset of the
rousette bat cells successfully walled themselves off from viral
infection, thanks to interferon early warning.
In the Australian black flying fox cells, the immune response was even
more successful, with the viral infection slowed substantially over that
in the rousette cell line. In addition, these bat interferon responses
seemed to allow the infections to last longer.
"Think of viruses on a cell monolayer like a fire burning through a forest.
Some of the communities -- cells -- have emergency blankets, and the
fire washes through without harming them, but at the end of the day
you still have smouldering coals in the system -- there are still some
viral cells," Brook said. The surviving communities of cells can
reproduce, providing new targets for the virus and setting up a
smouldering infection that persists across the bat's lifespan.
Brook and Boots created a simple model of the bats' immune systems
to recreate their experiments in a computer.
"This suggests that having a really robust interferon system would help
these viruses persist within the host," Brook said. "When you have a
higher immune response, you get these cells that are protected from
infection, so the virus can actually ramp up its replication rate without
causing damage to its host. But when it spills over into something like a
human, we don't have those same sorts of antiviral mechanism, and we
could experience a lot of pathology."
The researchers noted that many of the bat viruses jump to humans
through an animal intermediary. SARS got to humans through the Asian
palm civet; MERS via camels; Ebola via gorillas and chimpanzees; Nipah
via pigs; Hendra via horses and Marburg through African green
4
monkeys. Nonetheless, these viruses still remain extremely virulent and

deadly upon making the final jump into humans.
Brook and Boots are designing a more formal model of disease
evolution within bats in order to better understand virus spill-over into
other animals and humans.
"It is really important to understand the trajectory of an infection in
order to be able to predict emergence and spread and transmission,"
Brook said.
5
Men think they are maths experts, therefore they are

More men pursue science and engineering jobs because they readily
overestimate how good they are in sums
Date: June 23, 2015
Source: Springer
Summary: Just because more men pursue careers in science and engineering does not
mean they are actually better at math than women are. The difference is that men think
they are much better at math than they really are. Women, on the other hand, tend to
accurately estimate their arithmetic prowess.
Just because more men pursue careers in science and engineering does
not mean they are actually better at math than women are. The
difference is that men think they are much better at math than they
really are. Women, on the other hand, tend to accurately estimate their
arithmetic prowess, says Shane Bench of Washington State University in
the U.S., leader of a study in Springer's journal Sex Roles.
There is a sizeable gap between the number of men and women who
choose to study and follow careers in the so-called STEM fields of
science, technology, engineering and mathematics in the U.S. This is
true even though women outperform their male counterparts on
mathematical tests in elementary school. Bench's study examined how
people's biases and previous experiences about their mathematical
abilities make them more or less likely to consider pursuing math-
related courses and careers.
Two studies were conducted, one using 122 undergraduate students

and the other 184 participants. Each group first completed a math test
before guessing how well they had fared at providing the right answers.
In the first study, participants received feedback about their real test
scores before they were again asked to take a test and predict their
1
scores. In the second study, participants only wrote one test without
receiving any feedback. They were, however, asked to report on their
intent to pursue math-related courses and careers.
Across the two studies it was found that men overestimated the
number of problems they solved, while women quite accurately
reported how well they fared. After the participants in Study 1 received
feedback about their real test scores, the men were more accurate at
estimating how well they had done on the second test. The results of
Study 2 show that because the male participants believed they had a
greater knack for maths than was the case, they were more likely to
pursue maths courses and careers than women.
'Gender gaps in the science, technology, engineering and maths fields

are not necessarily the result of women's underestimating their
abilities, but rather may be due to men's overestimating their abilities,'
explains Bench. His team also found that women who had more positive
past experiences with mathematics tended to rate their numerical
abilities higher than they really were. This highlights the value of
positively reinforcing a woman's knack for mathematics especially at a
young age.
'Despite assumptions that realism and objectivity are always best in

evaluating the self and making decisions, positive illusions about math
abilities may be beneficial to women pursuing math courses and
careers,' says Bench. 'Such positive illusions could function to protect
women's self-esteem despite lower-than-desired performance, leading
women to continue to pursue courses in science, technology,
engineering and maths fields and ultimately improve their skills.'
2
Why are giant pandas born so tiny?

New clues from bones put an old theory to the test
Date: December 13, 2019
Source: Duke University
Summary:
Born pink, blind, and helpless, giant pandas typically weigh about 100 grams at birth --
the equivalent of a stick of butter. Their mothers are 900 times more massive than that.
That raises a question that has vexed biologists: why the disparity? No one knows the
answer, but by comparing bone growth across new-born bears, dogs and other animals,
scientists find that one idea doesn't hold up.
Born pink, blind, and helpless, giant pandas typically weigh about 100
grams at birth -- the equivalent of a stick of butter. Their mothers are
900 times more massive than that.
This unusual size difference has left researchers puzzled for years. With
a few exceptions among animals such as echidnas and kangaroos, no
other mammal new-borns are so tiny relative to their mothers. No one
knows why, but a Duke University study of bones across 10 species of
bears and other animals finds that some of the current theories don't
hold up.
Duke biology professor Kathleen Smith and her former student Peishu Li
published their findings this month in the Journal of Anatomy.
Baby panda skeletons are hard to come by, but the researchers were
able to study the preserved remains of baby pandas born at the
Smithsonian's National Zoo in Washington, D.C.
The National Zoo's first panda couple, Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing, had
five full-term cubs in the 1980s, but none of them survived long after
birth.
The researchers took micro-CT scans of two of those cubs, along with
new-born grizzlies, sloth bears, polar bears, dogs, a fox, and other
1
closely related animals from the Smithsonian National Museum of

Natural History and the North Carolina State College of Veterinary
Medicine.
They used the scans to create 3-D digital models of each baby's bony
interior at birth.
As a baby animal grows and develops inside the womb, its bones and
teeth do, too. The researchers examined the degree of ossification, or
how much the skeleton has formed by the time of birth. They looked at
whether the teeth had started to calcify or erupt, and the degree of
fusion between the bony plates that make up the skull.
The panda may be an extreme example, but all bears have
disproportionately small babies, Li said. A new-born polar bear's
birthweight as a fraction of mom's is less than 1:400, or less than one-
half of one percent of her body mass. For the vast majority of baby
mammals, including humans, the average is closer to 1:26.
One decades-old idea links low birthweights in bears to the fact that, for
some species, pregnancy overlaps with winter hibernation. Pregnant
females don't eat or drink during this time, relying mostly on their fat
reserves to survive, but also breaking down muscle to supply protein to
the foetus.
The thinking is that, energetically, females can only afford to nourish
their babies this way for so long before this tissue breakdown threatens
their health. By cutting pregnancy short and giving birth to small,
immature babies, bears would shift more of their growth to outside the
womb, where babies can live off their mother's fat-rich milk instead of
depleting her muscles.
Proponents of the theory concede that not all bears -- including pandas
-- hibernate during the winter. But the idea is that small birthweight is
'locked in' to the bear family tree, preventing non-hibernating relatives
from evolving bigger babies too.
"It's certainly an appealing hypothesis," Smith said.
2
But the Duke team's research shows this scenario is unlikely. The
researchers didn't find any significant differences in bone growth
between hibernating bears and their counterparts that stay active year-
round and don't fast during pregnancy.
In fact, despite being small, the researchers found that most bear
skeletons are just as mature at birth as their close animal cousins.
The panda bear is the one exception to this rule, results show. Even in a
full-term baby panda, the bones look a lot like those of a beagle puppy
delivered several weeks premature.
"That would be like a 28-week human foetus" at the beginning of the
third trimester, Smith said.
Other factors might have pushed panda babies toward smaller sizes
over time -- some researchers blame their bamboo-only diet -- but data
are scarce, Li said. The researchers say the panda bear's embryonic
appearance likely has to do with a quirk of panda pregnancy.
All bears experience what's called "delayed implantation." After the egg
is fertilized, the future foetus enters a state of suspended animation,
floating in the womb for several months before implanting in the
uterine wall to resume its development and get ready for birth.
But while other bears gestate for two months after implantation, giant
pandas are done in a month.
"They're basically undercooked," said Li, now a Ph.D. student at the
University of Chicago.
The researchers say they only looked at skeletons in this study, and it
could be that other organs like the brain tell a different story. But the
new study suggests that baby pandas follow the same trajectory as
other mammal relatives -- their bones mature in the same sequence
and at similar rates -- but on a truncated timetable.
"Development is just cut short," Smith said.
3
Scientists are still searching for a complete explanation of why the

panda's peculiar size differential evolved over geological time, and how.
"We really need more information about their ecology and
reproduction in the wild," Smith said, and we may not have much time
given their risk of extinction. But this study brings them one step closer
to an answer.
This research was supported by a Shared Material Instrumentation
Facility Undergraduate User Program grant, the Duke Department of
Biology, and the Undergraduate Research Office at Duke.
4
20.07.2020 Max Tegmark nterv ew: "AI can be the best th ng ever for human ty" | New Sc ent st
Max Tegmark interview: "AI can be the best thing

ever for humanity"
Physicist Max Tegmark wants to make artificial intelligence work for everyone. Here he
waxes lyrical about cosmology, consciousness and why AI is like fire
TECHNOLOGY 15 July 2020
By Max Tegmark
Stephanie Singleton
“All possible universes exist, even triangular ones”. These were the words on the cover of
New Scientist on 6 June 1998, when Max Tegmark made one of his first appearances in the
magazine. Inside, the then 31-year-old expanded on his idea of a multiverse on steroids, in
which all logically possible universes not only can but must exist.
Tegmark, now a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is known for
his provocative ideas. As he explains in the “Crazy” section of his website: “Every time I’ve
written ten mainstream papers, I allow myself to indulge in writing one wacky one.” But
the outlandish elements shouldn’t overshadow his serious track record in cosmology,
https://www.newsc ent st.com/art cle/mg24732911-300-max-tegmark- nterv ew-a -can-be-the-best-th ng-ever-for-human ty/ 1/10
quantum information science and the study of some of the very deepest questions about
the nature of reality.
Recently, Tegmark has shifted his focus to intelligence, both human and artificial. He
conducts front-line research in artificial intelligence (AI), most recently working with
fellow MIT researcher Silviu-Marian Udrescu to create an AI that was able to rediscover
some of the most fundamental equations of physics by studying patterns in data. In 2014,
he co-founded the Future of Life Institute, which aims to understand and mitigate
existential risks to humanity, particularly those associated with the rise of AI.
Advertisement
Richard Webb: What made you switch from cosmology to working on artificial
intelligence?
Max Tegmark: I’ve always been fascinated by big questions, the bigger the better. That’s
why I loved studying the universe, because there were philosophically very big questions
like where does everything come from, what’s going to happen, what is our place in the
grand scheme of things? We have made enormous progress in cosmology, but at the same
time, really new data has started to become rarer and harder to obtain.
So it was very natural for me to gravitate to the biggest unsolved mystery that’s sort of
coming within range. We are able to see things with telescopes that our ancestors could
never see, and the same thing is happening now with the mind. We have so much data now
from neuroscience, and the ability to build artificial versions of the things that we are
trying to study.
What are you working on right now?
My research is focused on what I would call machine learning for good. We have been
doing a lot of work recently on a project that applies machine learning to identifying news
bias. I had gotten increasingly fed up with the quality of the news here in the US, and I
made a New Year’s resolution a while back that I was no longer allowed to whine and
complain about something unless I actually spent some time working on making things
better.
How can AI make the news less biased?
There are these projects aiming to improve the quality of the news by having humans go in
and fact-check and flag problems. But if you look more closely, you will see that some fact-
checking sites find 95 per cent of errors in media outlets on the left side of the political
spectrum, and other ones will only find errors in the media outlets on the right. It’s unclear
exactly what criteria they use.
We decided to build something entirely automated. It’s a work in progress, but we use
machine learning to classify news articles on all sorts of different metrics: by the topic that
they are about, whether they are left or right, pro- or anti-establishment, in-depth or quite
breezy, more inflammatory or quite nuanced. The tool is a bit like Google News, but with a
bunch of sliders underneath, so you can adjust for what you want to read.
A visitor to an AI-powered self-service shop in Nanjing

Zheng Peng/Imaginechina/SIPA USA/PA Images
Doesn’t that risk reinforcing echo chambers, with people choosing to see only the
news that conforms to their biases?
The status quo is already like this – if you go on Facebook, it’s entirely reinforcing your
echo chambers. The question is, if you get the opportunity to make slightly more
deliberative choices, rather than it being just sort of impulse eating, does that make things
better or worse?
There are some really nice experiments done by psychologist David Rand at MIT that find
it’s a bit of a myth that people only want to read things that they agree with. People are
interested in hearing other points of view, as long as they are presented in a nuanced way.
We can use machine learning to discover which articles are the nuanced ones and which
are the ones that are just likely to piss people off. My hope is that a user won’t just set
their preferences once and for all, but exhibit some curiosity.
What is the broader agenda of “machine learning for good”?
I think the fundamental challenge we have with AI, and technology more broadly, is to win
the wisdom race. We need to make sure that the power of technology doesn’t grow faster
than the wisdom with which we manage it.
Historically, we have stayed ahead by learning from mistakes. We invented fire, screwed up
a bunch of times and then invented the fire extinguisher, the fire brigade and fire alarms;
we invented the automobile and then invented the seatbelt, the airbag, the traffic light and
laws against driving too fast.
The challenge is that when the power of the tech crosses a certain threshold, learning from
mistakes stops being a good idea. We don’t want to have an accidental nuclear war
between the US and Russia starting in 20 minutes and then, thousands of mushroom
clouds later, be like: “Oopsie, let’s learn from this mistake.” We see the same thing
happening with synthetic biology and ultimately with artificial intelligence as it gets closer
to human abilities. So this is the focus of my research. How do we make AI that we can
actually trust?
Why is trusting AI so important?
The greatest breakthroughs in machine learning recently have come from artificial neural
networks, which can do all sorts of wonderfully smart-looking things, like beat everybody
on Earth at chess and Go. But we have very little clue how this AI works. We tend to treat it
as a black box and then, every once in a while, it doesn’t work as we thought it would. We
have problems like Boeing really wishing that it understood better how its automated
system on the 737 worked, or the trading company Knight Capital wishing it knew how its
automatic trading system worked before it managed to lose the company $10 million a
minute for 44 minutes straight.
“The space of possible artificial minds is much bigger than that of

biological minds”
Then we had courtrooms around the US using a piece of software to recommend who was
going to get probation and who wasn’t. People didn’t really understand how it worked and
didn’t realise that it was racially biased. If you can use the sort of techniques that we are
hoping to develop in my group to let people peek inside the black box and understand
what AI is actually doing, things might look much better.
It certainly sounds like you are a tech optimist.
Are you the kind of person who thinks fire can kill people or the sort of person who thinks
that fire can keep people warm in the winter? Both things are true, obviously.
Facial recognition software on display at a security expo in Shenzen, China

REUTERS/Bobby Yip
The interesting question isn’t to argue for or against fire, it is to figure out how you can
manage fire wisely. Technology isn’t good or evil: it’s a morally neutral tool that can let
you do good or bad. Right now, AI is still pretty stupid, but it’s already given enough
influence in the world that it’s caused a lot of problems, from biased court decisions to
crashing aeroplanes.
I think it’s possible to make very powerful AI and I think if we do that wisely, it can be the
best thing ever for humanity, because everything that I love about civilisation is the
product of human intelligence. If we can amplify that with AI, we can use it to solve the
climate crisis, to lift everybody from poverty, to figure out how to cure the coronavirus and
so on. What’s so bad about that?
Is building this sort of advanced “general” AI realistic, given that we don’t even
understand how human intelligence works?
You could just as well ask, how could we possibly figure out how to build a flying machine
before understanding how birds fly? Darwinian evolution gave us both flying birds and
thinking animals, but it was very constrained: to only build solutions that could self-
assemble, that could self-repair, that only used a handful of chemical elements, that were
super-energy-efficient. When you remove all these biological constraints, you can often
find much simpler solutions to the same problems.
I know some people think there’s something magical about intelligence, making it possible
for it to exist only in human bodies. I don’t think so. I am a blob of electrons and quarks
processing information in certain complex ways, and the key to intelligence is just the
nature of that information processing. I would go so far as to predict that the way we are
finally going to understand exactly how the human brain works is by building something
simpler that is comparably smart.
Presumably we can’t build an AI that thinks or feels exactly as a human does, that
has things like agency and consciousness?
I wouldn’t be so sure. I think the most interesting question isn’t to ask what will happen,
but what we want to happen. It might be that we have a lot of designer’s choices. The space
of possible artificial minds is much bigger than the space of biological minds, because all
biological minds evolved – they tend to have a survival instinct first, then other things.
When you are free of those constraints, there’s so much more opportunity to choose.
It may be possible to build different AIs that perform equally well on tasks, but have a
whole range of conscious experience, from nothing to a subjective experience that feels
quite a lot like yours, where it experiences colours and sounds and vibrations and maybe
even emotions.
Really? Surely you can’t program something to have feelings?
I think we tend to be very arrogant about this. We have to be very careful with self-serving
claims that we know when there is a subjective experience and when there isn’t. We made
that mistake with animals, and I think we are making it all over again with machines. Most
of my colleagues just take it as an axiom that none of the machines they ever build will
ever have any subjective experience, so they never have to worry about suffering and can
just turn them off and on at will. I don’t think that’s so obvious at all.
My own guess is that consciousness is simply the way information feels when it’s being
processed in certain complex ways. I think scientists owe it to the world to figure out what
those complex ways are.
We can’t assume that humanoid robots such as Sophia will never have subjective experiences
Visual China Group via Getty Images
What do you mean by “the way information feels”?
Many people make the mistake of assuming that, when you look around you and you see
different colours, that those experiences somehow have something to do with the outside
world. For example, if you see an apple and it’s red, and you think somehow that you only
have redness because there’s an apple. That’s obviously wrong: you can dream about an
apple and you will still experience it as being red, even though now there is no outside
world at all. So there is something happening that’s just purely inside your brain as the
neurons fire. What is this thing? I want to figure that out.
Do you think we will ever arrive at a full description of how consciousness emerges
from atoms and molecules?
This is the Wild West where we are very clueless and have to have very open minds,
obviously. But in the big picture, I think about consciousness as the last bastion that has
still refused to be captured by physics.
Now even intelligence is beginning, little by little, to yield to mathematical description,

right? That’s what artificial intelligence is all about, and there are already some theories
out there trying to predict which information processing is conscious and which isn’t. It’s
ripe for the scientific assault.
But the laws of physics are themselves the product of conscious deliberation. Isn’t
consciousness always going to fall down at describing itself?
Yeah, that’s a very fun idea. Is it possible for a small part of something to be able to
describe the whole thing that it is part of, including itself? Or do you get into some bizarre
recursive loop? Of course, I can’t know for sure that we will be able to describe
consciousness with physics or machines. There are plenty of people who think that we will
never be able to describe consciousness because it involves some sort of soul or something
that’s by definition impossible to study.
“I think about consciousness as the last bastion that has refused to be

captured by physics”
I’m more optimistic. My personal guess is that consciousness can be fully understood in
terms of information processing done by particles moving around. But regardless of
whether you think it’s going to work out or not, one way to guarantee failure is if you start
by convincing yourself that it’s impossible. So let’s try our best. If this all fails, it’s also
going to be very cool.
Where do you see all this going?
I think we shouldn’t conflate intelligence with consciousness here. On the intelligence

side, I have no doubt that we are going to keep making more progress, unless we self-
destruct as a species by screwing up somehow. I just hope we won’t end up saying that
curiosity killed the cat, that our curiosity to figure out intelligence made us build things
that we used to drive ourselves extinct. That’s why I’m so big on also thinking through the
wisdom part.
Are we wising up to AI’s dangers?
I think there’s been a big shift for sure. Now you can’t go to an AI conference without
coming across a bunch of talks about AI safety, transparency, interpretability and
robustness. There is a lot of idealism in the community. This is where I get a lot of hope
that we can use machine learning to empower the grassroots, push back against the powers
that be and even sometimes use those tools to uncover sneaky stuff.
That sounds like tech optimism again.
The key to having a good future is to be able to formulate a vision that people around the
world can really get on board with. This isn’t a zero-sum game: you can easily envisage
scenarios in which artificial intelligence multiplies the world’s GDP by a factor of 100 or
more. It’s very easy to envisage a future in which everybody wins at the same time and
becomes much better off. But we have failed epically so far to get humanity to collaborate
to make it real.
More on these topics: artificial intelligence AI
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TRENDING LATEST VIDEO FREE

Alice Ball pioneered leprosy treatment and then had

her work stolen
Short film The Ball Method tells the story of Alice Ball. She helped develop an effective
treatment for leprosy, then a senior colleague claimed her work as his own giving her no
credit
IN it declared global elimination on that basis in 2000 I think: 2000, the

World Health Organization declared that leprosy had been eliminated
as a global public health problem, due to effective multi-drug
treatments. It is a disease that has long been stigmatised due to
disfiguration it can cause. The story of one unsung hero in the
development of a treatment for leprosy is told in the short film The Ball
Method.
The story starts with archive footage of the Hawaiian island of Moloka’i,
where thousands of people with leprosy were quarantined from 1866
by the Hawaiian government. Back then, little was known about the
disease and people feared it was highly contagious, though we now
know it doesn’t spread very easily.
1
Countries such as the UK, the US and India exiled people with leprosy to
remote locations, where they were left to die. One of the film’s clips
shows a child covered in sores on his face and hands.
By 1915, when the film is set, one remedy was beginning to show
promise. We are introduced to Alice Ball (played by Kiersey Clemons), a
chemistry professor at the University of Hawaii, as she visits Kalihi
Hospital in Honolulu. Ball has been enlisted to help develop a treatment
for leprosy by Dr Harry Hollmann (Kyle Secor) using the oil from the
seeds of the chaulmoogra tree. Chaulmoogra oil seemed to work in
treating some cases of leprosy and had already been used for centuries
in China and India for skin ailments.
Taking the oil orally caused nausea, so it was administered by injection.
But this method was flawed. In its impurified form, chaulmoogra oil
isn’t water soluble and doesn’t react well with the body; oil oozes
painfully out of the forearm of one patient with leprosy as he is given a
shot.
“Ball was the first woman and first black American at the University of
Hawaii to teach chemistry”
In between teaching students at her university, Ball tries to purify the
oil into chemical compounds called ethyl esters so it can be successfully
injected. To do this, the oil first needs to be converted into fatty acids.
Ball has a eureka moment. She realises the acid needs to be frozen
overnight to give enough time for the esters to separate, as well as to
stop them degrading at room temperature.
Her discovery, the Ball method, led to the most effective treatment for
leprosy at the time, one that was used until the 1940s, when a full cure
was found. Why, then, is Alice Ball not more famous?
One reason is that credit wasn’t given to her at the time. Ball’s
colleague Arthur Dean (played by Wallace Langham), who was
president of the University of Hawaii, took her findings as his own,
2
naming the technique the Dean method. There was no mention of Ball
in his papers. She didn’t get credit until 1922 when Hollmann published
a paper detailing her work.
Director Dagmawi Abebe says this is why he felt it was so important to
make the film. “When I came across Alice’s story and saw all the
amazing accomplishments she’s done, and how not a lot of people even
knew about her, I really wanted to make that known.”
There are few historical records about Ball. She didn’t keep a diary that
we know of and died in 1916 aged 24, possibly after inhaling chlorine
gas in a lab accident.
So Abebe had to make a lot of choices in how to portray her. He says he
wanted to depict her as strong and ambitious given the barriers she is
likely to have faced.
Looking at the facts, that doesn’t seem like much of a stretch. At only
23, Ball was the first woman and first black American to teach chemistry
and obtain a master’s degree at the University of Hawaii. But being a
black woman in this environment wasn’t easy. In one scene, as Ball
takes a class, students (all male and white) snigger as they pass around
a picture of a crudely-drawn monkey.
For Abebe, who is originally from Ethiopia, it was important to highlight
this aspect of Ball’s experience. “I’m interested in telling a story where I
feel like a lot of minority stories went untold or hidden,” he says. This
narrative is at last finding a wider audience.
3
The moon may have stopped the early Earth from

being a frozen snowball
The sun is thought to have once been far fainter than it is today, which
should have left Earth frozen as a global snowball. That it wasn’t, a
discrepancy known as the faint young sun paradox, has long plagued
astronomers, but now we might have an answer: the moon helped keep
Earth warm.
Models of the sun’s past suggest it was up to 70 per cent dimmer in its
first 100 million years. “The surface of the Earth should have been
frozen for at least a billion or even 2 billion years,” says René Heller at
the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen,
Germany.
Geological evidence, not to mention the evolution of life, shows this
didn’t happen. We know Earth must have had water back then thanks
to a mineral called zircon, some crystals of which have survived for 4.3
1
billion years and retain evidence of water at the time. Life may have
even emerged around a similar time.
But the early Earth did have an important difference to today. When
both the moon and Earth formed about 4.4 billion years ago, our
satellite began life as little as 20,000 kilometres away from our planet,
compared with an average of 380,000 kilometres now. Earth was also
rotating much faster back then, as quickly as once every 3 hours.
Heller and his colleagues have calculated that these two factors mean
the gravitational interaction between the two bodies would have been
much stronger – enough to produce tidal heating from the gravitational
squeeze. This would have slightly warmed Earth and could have
triggered the eruption of volcanoes, giving our planet a thicker
atmosphere that could trap more heat.
“The classic example in our solar system is [Jupiter’s moon] Io, which is
spectacularly volcanic because of the tidal heating from Jupiter,” says
Rory Barnes at the University of Washington. “The moon could have
turned early Earth into something like Io for tens of millions of years.”
Finding out how Earth was able to hold liquid water back then could
thus be crucial in our search for life on other worlds, says Ludmila
Carone at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg,
Germany. “We are not entirely sure why Earth was habitable,” she says.
“We have the possibility to go back in time and think about the early
Earth as a kind of exoplanet.”
Other solutions for the faint young sun paradox include Earth having a
thicker carbon dioxide atmosphere at the time as a result of the planet
being molten following the giant impact that formed the moon,
trapping more heat. Another is that the planet’s orbit brought it closer
to the sun at times, warming it up, or that the sun had more mass at the
time and was brighter than we think.
All these ideas have numerous unknowns, says Barnes, but while the
tidal heating hypothesis is a good fit, it isn’t perfect. The amount of
energy produced directly by the moon’s gravity would have been small,
2
requiring it to cause other processes like volcanic eruptions to also take

place, which we don’t have any direct evidence for.
“The amount of tidal heating required to have a climatological effect is
very great,” says Kevin Zahnle at the NASA Ames Research Centre in
Mountain View, California. The moon moved away from Earth quickly,
limiting the duration of the tidal heating to just 10 to 20 million years,
he says – not enough to warm Earth sufficiently. Further modelling of
the early Earth could help better understand the different factors at
play, says Heller.
Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2248638-the-moon-

may-have-stopped-the-early-earth-from-being-a-frozen-
snowball/#ixzz6Sjoj8Omt
3
ADHOCRACY
An adhocracy is an organization that lacks structure—the complete

opposite of a bureaucracy. This form of organization is common among
advertising agencies and other creativity-based companies. Start-ups
often opt for such a structure as well because of its tendency to foster a
team atmosphere. Characteristics of an adhocracy-type firm include
taking risks and being flexible as new projects arise.
Not surprisingly, one e-company even chose to use the term as its
name. Adhocracy LLC is an Internet-based marketing communications
company consisting of advertising, communications, and Web
professionals who work in a tele-computing atmosphere. The firm’s
creative teams provide advertising, Web design, direct mail, ideation
(sometimes described simply as the development of ideas),
cybercommerce, and market strategy services to mid-level businesses.
It supports clients via offices in Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia,
Detroit, and Washington, D.C.
Adhocracy got its start in the 1990s when an ad hoc group of
advertising professionals began to work on freelance projects together.
The group noticed a strong demand within mid-sized companies for
marketing communication services. This demand led President Brooks
Richey to develop an organization that utilized the skills of top-level
advertising and communications professionals to offer marketing
services.
One of the services offered by Adhocracy is the creation of cyber-
commerce sites. Roper Starch Worldwide polled 30 nations and found
the United States to have the largest proportion of e-commerce
consumers and the fastest-growing number of Internet users. To take
advantage of these statistics, businesses continue to look for ways to
promote their product or service online. Adhocracy provides its services
to businesses seeking online growth and works with them to develop
1
secure online cyber-stores which enable Web surfers to browse and

shop on the site and make online purchases.
The firm also provides Web design using both HTML and flash-based
Web content, including streaming audio and video programming. It
develops and creates Internet advertising programs and other
marketing strategies that allow for maximum exposure on the Internet.
Additionally, the company’s team of professionals offers ideation
(brainstorming) and other marketing services.
2
Prologue
– What is Bitcoin?
– It’s a digital currency.
– Yeah, I get that, but who is behind Bitcoin?
– Nobody.
– What do you mean by nobody? Somebody must be controlling it!
– Nobody is controlling it, it is an algorithm.
– What? You mean like Terminator? So you say the world is going to be
taken over by
machines?
– Well, not the world, but maybe some businesses.
– Right... (rolling her eyes) But who controls the algorithm? Some mad
scientist?
– It’s an open source project.
– An open what?
– Yes, free code. You can download it from the internet and do with it
whatever you
want.
– So you don’t have to pay for the “program”?
– Well, it’s free as in freedom, not free as in beer.
– What does beer have to do with it?
– The code is not only free in the sense that you can use the program
free of charge. It is
also free in the sense that you can take the code, modify it, and release
a program of
your own with it.
– Wait a second! If I can do that then I can make my own bitcoins. What
value does a
bitcoin have then?
– No, you cannot mint your own bitcoins. What you can do is invent
your own currency.
And then you have to somehow make it gain acceptance...
– Oh, but this surely is the end of Bitcoin. If you can make as many
1
currencies as you
want, none of them would have any value.
– Currencies have value because of social convention. Bitcoin has value
because people
are willing to give value to it.
– I don’t think you are right. Euros or dollars have value, everybody
knows that.
– Well if bitcoins do not have value I will gladly accept your bitcoins
(smiling).
– Bitcoins are not backed by anything so they cannot have value.
– Neither euros, dollars nor Bitcoin are backed by anything. You can say
that all of
them are the result of consensual hallucination. They have value
because people give
value to them. There is not much difference between them in this
regard.
– I don’t think so. You can buy things with euros or dollars, but what can
you buy with
bitcoins?
– You can buy almost anything with bitcoins. There are companies that
will gladly accept your bitcoins in return for regular currency that you
can use to buy anything.
Converting bitcoins to sovereign currencies is just a technical interface
and many
companies provide this service. Besides, you can do things with bitcoins
that you cannot do with sovereign currencies.
– Like what?
– For example, you could launch a crowd-funding campaign, just
creating a special type
of Bitcoin transaction.
– That sounds cool.
– There are many more applications that were impossible until now,
such as a car which
reads its ownership from the cloud. If you want to buy the car, you just
2
pay the owner

with bitcoins and the car knows automatically you are its new owner
because it can
look it up in Bitcoin’s database. And there might be more applications
to come that
nobody has thought of yet, as was the case (and still is) with the
internet.
– I guess I did not think of it that way.
– As they say, a currency is just the fist application. The technology
allows transferring value securely and in a decentralized way and this
can lead to many new cool
applications.
– I’m intrigued, I’d like to learn more.
– Great! I believe I have the right book for you...
This excerpt is from:
Understanding
Bitcoin
Cryptography, engineering, and economics
by PEDRO FRANCO
3
28.07.2020 How quantum theory says we can never see a complete p cture of real ty | New Sc ent st
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complete picture of reality

How quantum theory says we can never see a complete picture of
reality
Schrödinger's cat is only the start of quantum weirdness, says physicist Vlatko Vedral – it leads us to strange worlds where
personalities split and time does not exist
PHYSICS 1 July 2020
By Vlatko Vedral
Francescoch/istock photo
TO TRY to explain quantum physics, it’s always best to start with Einstein. He had two famous complaints about it: how it
seems to say that “God plays dice with the universe”, and how it appears to allow “spooky action at a distance“.
A very simple experiment illustrates both problems. First, imagine sending a single photon of light through a beam splitter,
a piece of glass that either reflects it or transmits it with a 50 per cent chance. One of two detectors clicks in each of the two
cases. If we run this experiment many times, we find that half of the time detector 1 clicks, and the other half detector 2. But
quantum mechanics shows that nothing in the universe can tell us which detector will click any one time. Einstein came
https://www.newsc ent st.com/art cle/mg24632891-300-how-quantum-theory-says-we-can-never-see-a-complete-p cture-of-real ty/ 1/9

from a classical frame of mind where everything is deterministic and predictable: but it seems randomness really is at the
heart of quantum mechanics.
But suppose now, instead of detecting the photon with two detectors behind the first beam splitter, you first recombine the
light at a second beam splitter, with two detectors now behind here. What’s remarkable now is that the photon behaves
perfectly deterministically. Basically, only detector 1 clicks, never detector 2 (see diagram “Weirdness, squared”).
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How can two random things be put together to give you something 100 per cent predictable? In quantum mechanics, the
only way to explain it is to say that the photon actually splits into two at the first beam splitter and takes both routes: it’s
reflected and transmitted simultaneously. When these two possibilities converge on to the second beam splitter, they
interfere like water waves: when they go to detector 1, they amplify each other, and when they go to detector 2, they cancel
out and make no signal.


We call this state of the photon a quantum superposition. Einstein called it “spooky action” because it looks as though the
photon can exist in two places. But we’ve tested the effect not just on photons, but also on atoms, subatomic particles and
larger particles and molecules, and every time we’ve actually got them to behave this way. Randomness and spooky action at
a distance are here to stay.
That’s where Erwin Schrödinger, entanglement and that exciting and stimulating thought experiment we all know and love
comes in: Schrödinger’s cat. Imagine I put a cat into the laboratory together with this photon that’s undergoing
interference. If the photon goes one way at the beam splitter, nothing happens. But if it goes the other, it hits a very fragile
bottle, releasing poison so the cat dies. If quantum mechanics really describes the whole experiment, and the photon does
go both ways simultaneously, then the cat is not either dead or alive; it too must be both things simultaneously.
Genie outside the box

The story doesn’t stop there. What if there is a physicist observing this experiment – how would quantum mechanics
describe this situation? Well, you would now have a superposition of a physicist who in one branch sees a living cat and in
another branch a dead cat. Anyone who interacts with these kinds of superposed states and finds out what state it’s in has to
join in and actually split according to the same two possibilities. This is what quantum mechanics says would happen, if the
whole universe really can be described quantum mechanically. If you think small objects like photons and atoms are weird,
and can exist in many different states at the same time, then anything that they couple to has also got to become weird.
There’s a version of the Schrödinger cat experiment where you can test this idea – in principle, because we’re nowhere near
close to doing this in reality yet. Imagine that Alice is the chief experimental physicist outside the lab, and Bob is inside the
lab, observing the interferometer and the cat and the two distinct possible outcomes. Alice wants to test whether Bob really
sees two alternatives simultaneously, and whether he sees a definitive outcome at some point in the experiment.
So she waits for the photon to go through the first beam splitter and Bob to look at the outcome. Quantum mechanics says
that following this point, there is one happy copy of Bob with a live cat and another sad Bob with a dead cat. At this point
Alice sneaks a piece of paper under the door so Bob picks it up – both copies of Bob, if you like. On it, she asks: “do you see a
definitive state of the cat?”. Note she doesn’t ask “do you see a dead or alive cat?”, because if Alice got the answer to that
question, she would join one of these two quantum worlds. What’s interesting here is that quantum mechanics would
suggest that in both branches, Bob must answer the question Alice actually asks with “yes”.
So Bob writes his answer, and then gives Alice the piece of paper back under the door. Only now does Alice complete the
interferometer with the second beam splitter. This is tantamount to undoing the whole experiment and returning it to the
original state, before the photon split. You recombine the two possibilities, and bring them back into just one universe.
That’s difficult to do in practice, but the conclusion of the thought experiment is that halfway through, if the laws of
quantum mechanics hold, Alice can confirm that Bob really is entangled to the cat: there is one branch with dead cat and
sad Bob, and another with live cat and happy Bob.
There is another interesting twist on that, one proposed by my friend and colleague David Deutsch at Oxford. He also
invented the idea of quantum computers, and I think you can see why these experiments might make someone think about
massive parallel computations, all happening simultaneously but on one and the same device.

Now, as far as each of the Bobs is concerned, there is nothing unusual about their situation: each of them exists in their own
alternative world and sees one definitive outcome, a dead or alive cat, and behaves as though the other Bob does not even
exist. So armed with her knowledge, Alice can sneak another piece of paper in halfway through this experiment to tell Bob
that he’s actually in two different branches. She can say, I know that each of you doesn’t know about the existence of the
other one, and that you definitely see one state of this cat or another, but I know from my position observing from outside
the experiment that you are now split into two different states. But she can’t know which state Bob’s in, or she loses her
perspective and becomes part of his world.
“Quantum theory suggests that nothing evolves and everything that will happen, already has”
Curiouser and curiouser
You can go further down this rabbit hole. What if there is another observer, call him the Mad Hatter, who is outside Alice’s
laboratory so the he can control Alice, who in turn can control what happens to Bob, who in turn is observing the cat…? You
can follow the same logic, and you come to the same conclusion as we did before. If Alice figures out what’s happening with
Bob, she can communicate this to Mad Hatter. She can open her own door towards the Mad Hatter and say look, Bob has
made an observation and the cat is alive, but as soon as she does so they’re all part of that world, even if from the point of
view of an ultimate observer, there must be this other world in superposition, where the bad news is that the cat is dead.
This picture of observers observing observers is called Wigner’s friend, after Eugene Wigner, a quantum physicist who
thought very deeply about these issues and asked, what kind of reality does this lead to? The analogy is of a painter who
wants to paint, say, a forest 100 per cent faithfully down to the smallest minute detail. When he finishes, he realises that one
important bit is missing: himself. So he decides to add himself, but then of course realises that the painter painting the first
painter is missing – and so on ad infinitum.
This is very similar to how, in this picture, a definite reality emerges through a sequence of entanglements that you get from
interactions that, we are now assuming, are completely quantum mechanical: between the photon and the poison, the
poison and the cat, the cat and Bob, Bob and Alice, Alice and the Mad Hatter and so on. As with the somewhat paranoid
painter, it’s not a completely faithful image of reality – because there is always another observer missing.
This leads to another fascinating conclusion, one that many of us are actively researching. It is linked to a question that that
you frequently get when you talk about this: what does it feel to be in another universe? The interesting thing is that,
quantum mechanically, this is the same as asking what would it feel like to exist at another time.
Two physicists called Don Page and William Wootters showed this in the 1980s in a paper whose title is “Evolution without
evolution”. What they suggest is that the universe at different times is really just different quantum universes. Nothing
really evolves and everything that will happen has already happened: it’s all sitting simultaneously in this “block” universe
that contains all possible things that can happen.In this case, the components of the entangled state are just different times
at which the universe exists. This, believe it or not, is a fully consistent way of thinking about quantum mechanics.
Just finally, I’d like to bring things back to experiments. The reason why doing this Schrödinger type of experiment is so
difficult in practice is that it relies on the sort of communication between the different observers in the experiment that
really only humans can do. You might perhaps substitute Bob, say, with any computer. In fact my impression is that it’s
more likely that a very simple artificial intelligence system will actually be the first to undergo this kind of experiment, in
which we will be communicating with it and asking questions, like how do they feel about being in one state or another and
things like that.
But the next milestone would be to put something like viruses or bacteria in a superposition state. You might think it’s
something we might like to do with covid-19, if only as a revenge, but it’s probably too large for the present technology –
you would need something two orders of magnitude smaller in mass. But in principle you can do these experiments with two
microbes confined between two mirrors, where a split photon would excite one and not the other. Of course, you cannot
communicate with bacteria and ask them whether they feel they’re in a definitive state of being excited or not, but you can
confirm from the light they emit whether they are entangled or not.
It’s still very hard to do. We’re trying in Oxford, and there is another group in Vienna run by Markus Arndt that I think is also
close to being able to superpose a virus in a number of different spatial locations. It’s hard to speculate how long it will take,
but the race is certainly on. We’re really at the level where we can test some of these ideas that maybe 100 years ago would
would be thought to be completely crazy, maybe impossible, maybe even contradictory. It’s a very exciting time.
From cosmology to climate change…

Upcoming events include Mark Maslin on coronavirus and climate and Dan Hooper on what happened at the big bang.
Details on all events at newscientist.com/events

Your quantum reality questions answered

Vlatko Vedral also took questions from audience members after his talk. Here’s a selection of the best
Is quantum entanglement prevalent in everyday life? If so, where might we see it?
As soon as you get any kind of interaction between quantum systems where they can exchange energy and information, quantum
physics says that they become entangled. What is difficult, and a serious problem for quantum technologies, is to maintain and isolate
entanglement in a useful way, because it tends to interact with the environment. In that sense, there is good entanglement and bad
entanglement, and we are trying to somehow enhance the good entanglement and suppress the bad one.
Do physicists really take this idea of parallel worlds seriously?
That’s still a point of controversy. When Schrödinger wrote his cat paper, he really was aiming to expose a contradiction, maybe a little bit
like Einstein himself. He thought that it was contradictory to think that quantum mechanics could describe cats or any macroscopic
object, for that matter, as being in two very distinct states.
But I think it as time went on, physicists got used to the fact that quantum mechanics could actually be a universal theory. It seems to me
from reading various historical accounts that even Schrödinger changed his mind. I think the support for for many worlds is certainly
growing in my community, and may well be the dominant view now. But there are certainly many other competing interpretations, and
that’s what makes the whole discussion very interesting.
Does an observer in quantum mechanics have to be conscious?
That’s an excellent question, and it impinges on the fact that we don’t really understand consciousness very well. It’s mindblowingly
complex. As a physicist, I would like to think that quantum physics applies to everything indiscriminately, and that the way that we
understand atoms and molecules should somehow be applicable to consciousness. And if you accept the idea that quantum mechanics
applies to the whole universe, you can always interchange the roles of the observer and the observed. So you end up concluding either
that consciousness is not relevant, or that everything is conscious, even atoms, and when they’re observing us you could attribute some
consciousness to them – not that I’d agree with that personally.
Isn’t this all just an argument for reality being a simulation?
This idea has many origins, and resonates with the idea that you could think of the whole universe as a quantum computer. But all you’re
really saying there is that every physical process can be thought of as a bunch of gates that act on different quantum bits. None of us
really understand where the laws of physics come from; they are taken as as the initial axioms. I think when Napoleon read Laplace’s
treatise on Newtonian mechanics, he said, I loved your piece, but I was disturbed that you never mentioned God. And Laplace replied, I
simply had no need for such a hypothesis. It seems to me that would be our answer as well: you have the laws of physics, but you don’t
really need a programmer there as well.
Want to see Vlatko Vedral’s full talk?
Sign up for the event on-demand, including exclusive access to additional New Scientist content at newscientist.com/events
More on these topics: quantum physics
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Social learning theory

An approach to personality that emphasizes the interaction between
personal traits and environment and their mediation by cognitive
processes.
Social learning theory has its roots in the behaviourist notion of human
behaviour as being determined by learning, particularly as shaped by
reinforcement in the form of rewards or punishment. Early research in
behaviourism conducted by Ivan Pavlov, John Watson, and B. F. Skinner
used animals in a laboratory. Subsequently, researchers became
dissatisfied with the capacity of their findings to fully account for the
complexities of human personality. Criticism centred particularly on the
fact that behaviourism’s focus on observable behaviours left out the
role played by cognition.
The first major theory of social learning, that of Julian B. Rotter, argued
that cognition, in the form of expectations, is a crucial factor in social
learning. In his influential 1954 book, Social Learning and Clinical
Psychology, Rotter claimed that behaviour is determined by two major
types of “expectancy”: the expected outcome of a behaviour and the
value a person places on that outcome. In Applications of a Social
Learning Theory of Personality (1972), Rotter, in collaboration with June
Chance and Jerry Phares, described a general theory of personality with
variables based on the ways that different individuals habitually think
about their experiences. One of the major variables was I-E, which
distinguished “internals,” who think of themselves as controlling events,
from “externals,” who view events as largely outside their control.
Correlations have since been found between I-E orientations and a
variety of behaviours, ranging from job performance to attitudes
toward one’s health.
The social learning theories of Albert Bandura emphasize the reciprocal
relationship among cognition, behaviour, and environment, for which
Bandura coined the term reciprocal determinism. Hostile thoughts can
result in hostile behaviour, for example, which can affect our
1
environment by making others hostile and evoking additional hostile

thoughts. Thus, not only does our environment influence our thoughts
and behaviour—our thoughts and behaviour also play a role in
determining our environment. Bandura is especially well known for his
research on the importance of imitation and reinforcement in learning.
His work on modelling has been influential in the development of new
therapeutic approaches, especially the methods used in cognitive-
behaviour therapy. Bandura also expanded on Rotter’s notion of
expectancy by arguing that our expectations about the outcome of
situations are heavily influenced by whether or not we think we will
succeed at the things we attempt. Bandura introduced the term self-
efficacy for this concept, arguing that it has a high degree of influence
not only on our expectations but also on our performance itself.
Most recently, Walter Mischel, building on the work of both Rotter and
Bandura, has framed the determinants of human behaviour in
particular situations in terms of “person variables.” These include
competencies (those things we know we can do); perceptions (how we
perceive our environment); expectations (what we expect will be the
outcome of our behaviour); subject values (our goals and ideals); and
self-regulation and plans (our standards for ourselves and plans for
reaching our goals).

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