2018 PREVIEW

Eight new moon missions

A menagerie of human ancestors
Return to Mercury
Gene therapy in the womb
Microbe discovery bonanza
Qubits beat supercomputers
Bioelectric body regeneration
One last hurrah for the LHC?
23/30 December 2017

Inside L
ORIGINAAD
2000 IC

CHRISTMAS
COM
STRIP

SPECIAL
Life in the sloth lane
Artificial unintelligence
Fake snowflakes
The people who see time
Earwax factor
Britain’s secret chocolate garden
Blue-dye thinking
Your placename is mud
Holly hunters
From Russia with laughs
Mad Victorian science
Owl bling
and more...

No3157/8 £4.50 US/CAN$6.99

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PLUS THE 12 BIGGEST STORIES OF 2017/ORIGINAL SCI-FI/ JAPANESE PUZZLES

MIRACLE BABY/WORLD’S LONGEST SCIENCE EXPEDITION/QUIZ OF THE YEAR
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Volume 236 No 3157/8
Holiday special
44 Life in the sloth lane
Evolution’s slowest masterpiece
47 Blue-dye thinking
Pigments from deep inside Earth
49 Artificial unintelligence
Why robots will never be in charge
51 Your place name is mud
England’s soggy history
53 From Russia with laughs
Poking fun at British scientists
56 Holly hunters
How to save a prickly customer
58 Mad Victorian science
Sugar lights and magic teaspoons
60 The grape depression
France’s 19th-century wine crisis
63 Bright skies at night
Mystery of the nocturnal sun
65 The secret chocolate garden
Inside the UK’s cocoa quarantine
67 Earwax factor
The secrets held in your lugholes
69 Owl bling
When birds really feather the nest
72 Fake snowflakes
Is artificial snow any good?
74 People who see time
When mental calendars turn real
76 Missives impossible
How Newton fell foul of fake news
newscientist.com/issue/3157
JEAN BAPTISTE VENDAMME
EDDIE LAWRENCE/GETTY
News Most premature baby ever to survive 6
Leader Culture
5 Science is a force for prosperity 78 Elf Lands: The new fantasy
If producers come looking for a
rival to Game of Thrones, it’s time
News to call M. John Harrison
6 NEWS & TECHNOLOGY Most 80 World’s longest science
premature baby ever. Blockbusters expedition Peter the Great
filmed by drones. Mission to our planned an extravagant expedition
next-nearest star. Fungus controls to Russia’s far east and Alaska.
flies’ minds. Quantum origin of What happened next?
space-time. Female monkeys get 81 Puzzles: The problems Test
frisky with deer. Venice gains your brain with Japanese puzzles
100 years of history. Weird lines 82 Into the whirlpool Enjoy a
on Saturn’s moons. Infection spectacular tour of the universe –
scanner. The family that feels and how we found our place in it
no pain 83 Experience is all Curators can
get in the way of the natural
17 IN BRIEF Children want revenge. enjoyment of art
Our solar system’s twin. Oldest 83 Puzzles: The answers Find out
plesiosaur fossil. Urine test for TB how you got on
85 2000 AD The Dark Judges: No
Future An exclusive comic strip
Analysis
22 Off-grid energy How solar
power is giving electricity to
Regulars
millions for the first time 26 APERTURE
24 COMMENT A tipping point for A messy midnight feast
climate action is coming fast. 100 LETTERS
France is right to try to tame Love is the key to happy families
vaccine holdouts 103 MAKE
25 INSIGHT Gambling laws need Snow predictor
digital update to protect kids 104 FEEDBACK
Elf sightings are on the rise
105 QUIZ
2018 preview Test your scientific knowledge
29 The year ahead Your sneak
peek at the biggest news before
it happens
40 PLUS: The best stories of 2017
23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 3
LEADER

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FOREST WOODWARD/GETTY
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(Aus) Alice Klein

Features
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A world divided
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Sean O’Neill

Culture and Community

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by Williams Gibbons (Wolverhampton)
Science is a force for prosperity, but not enough of us share it
IS LIFE today better than it was
50 years ago? It depends on who
you ask. Nearly nine out of 10
Vietnamese people think so –
but only one in 10 Venezuelans.
About two-thirds of Germans and
Swedes say yes, but fewer than
half of Brits and only a third of
Americans agree. Worldwide,
an unhealthy majority – 57 per
cent – think quality of life has
deteriorated or stagnated.
These results come from a
survey of 43,000 people in
38 countries, published this
month by the Pew Research
Center in Washington DC.
The gloom is perhaps
surprising, given how much life
has been transformed by science,
technology and medicine since
1967. As the report notes, 50 years
ago, many countries had yet to
experience the gains in health
and life expectancy brought
about by vaccinations, green
revolutions and so on. Technology On top of that, our ability to
has dramatically boosted living
standards too.
Why don’t people seem to
notice, or care? In the words of Bill scientific facts to crushing our
Clinton, it’s the economy, stupid.
The single biggest influence that
Pew identified was respondents’
sense of their own nation’s
economic performance. In South
Korea, India, Vietnam, Indonesia
and Turkey, which have enjoyed
big economic gains, solid
majorities say that life is better.
But when life is a struggle,
long and gradual improvements
in living standards are easy to
forget. The result is that one of
the greatest uplifts in well-being
in human history seems to be
widely taken for granted.
This is also a warning about
the future. Recently, we have seen
signs that the gains from science
and technology are slowing or
“After the initial vigour of
the March for Science last
April, attempts to defend
reason have fizzled out”
even reversing. Challenges like
climate change and antibiotic
resistance will make it harder
to make further improvements.
address these issues is threatened
by a tsunami of anti-scientism,
which has moved from denying
ability to determine them at all.
The epicentre is, of course,
Donald Trump’s White House. Its
latest insult is apparently to ban
officials at the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention from
using the terms “evidence-based”
and “science-based”. But it doesn’t
end there. Turkey’s authoritarian
regime continues to suppress
free exchange of ideas. India’s
government is promoting
research inspired by Hindu
mythology – the health-giving
properties of cow dung and urine,
for example.
Science and scientists need to
get better at reminding the world
that they are a force for good –
including that all-important
prosperity.
After the initial vigour of the
March for Science last April,
attempts to defend science have
fizzled out or returned to angry
tweeting or academic letter-
writing. Such politesse is not
enough in the face of determined
and unscrupulous opposition.
Science has its weaknesses.
Not everyone will be or should
be a cheerleader for it. But as we
go into the new year, we could
all begin by emphasising what
science has done and can do for
us. If we forget, and allow it to
seem irrelevant or threatening,
the next half-century really may
be no better than the last. ■

23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 5

NEWS & TECHNOLOGY

The youngest survivor

A girl born after less than 22 weeks of gestation has reached the age of
5 in good health, making her the earliest ever premature baby to survive

Alice Klein
A BABY born more than four
months before her due date has
become the youngest premature
baby to survive. The girl was born
after only 21 weeks and 5 days’
gestation, at Samsung Medical
Centre in Seoul, South Korea,
and is now a healthy 5-year-old.
In 2012, the girl’s 38-year-old
mother was rushed to hospital
because the membrane sac
encasing her unborn twins had
months after she had been born.
Since then, she has mostly
developed normally. She is smaller
than other children her age, but
has normal language, cognitive
and social skills. She needs to wear
glasses, but she has no breathing
problems or signs of physical
disability (Journal of Korean
Medical Science, doi.org/chdz).
Her good health may be due to
the steroids she was given before
she was born and her gender,
says her doctor Yun Sil Chang of
The previous record for the
youngest surviving premature
infant was a girl born in the US
at 21 weeks and 6 days’ gestation.
She was also conceived via IVF.
Last month, Kaashif Ahmad
at Baylor College of Medicine
in Texas reported the case of a
2-year-old girl who was surviving
well after being born at about
21 weeks and 4 days’ gestation.
However, her exact gestational
age at birth couldn’t be
determined because she was

burst – a sign of impending
labour. She was told that her
twins, which had been conceived
by IVF, were extremely unlikely
to live, and that active life support
is usually only given to preterm
infants born at 25 weeks or later.
However, the woman and her
husband had a long history of
infertility issues and IVF failures
and urged their doctors to try to
support the twins. The doctors
agreed, and gave the mother
steroids to try to speed up the
development of the twins’ lungs.
Intensive care
When she gave birth the next
day, the babies weighed just
under half a kilogram each, and
were 30 centimetres long. Most
full-term infants born at 40 weeks
weigh about seven times as much,
and are 50 centimetres long.
The newborns were placed on
ventilators and fed via tubes into
their stomachs, because at only
12 days past the halfway mark of
pregnancy they couldn’t breathe
or swallow food on their own (see
“Stages of development”, right).
The male twin died two months
later from an infection, but the
female twin survived and was
discharged from hospital six
Samsung Medical Centre. Many
previous studies have found that
premature babies are more likely
to survive when female, although
the reasons for this are unclear.
STAGES OF
DEVELOPMENT
If a baby is born prematurely, it
might not yet have reached key
milestones of development.
WEEKS 1 TO 12
Basic structures of organs, limbs,
eyes, nose, lips, ears, fingernails
and genitals start to form.
WEEKS 14 TO 18
Toenails, taste buds, hair follicles
and sweat glands form. Lung
airways develop fine branches, and
ear canal becomes fully formed.
WEEKS 20 TO 24
Mammary glands form. Grooves
appear on brain surface and start
to fold. Lung alveoli begin to form,
allowing gas exchanges with
bloodstream.
WEEKS 28 TO 40
Organs continue to grow. The brain
undergoes complex folding, testes
descend, and eye lenses develop.
EDDIE LAWRENCE/GETTY
conceived naturally, not by IVF.
The estimate was based on
her mother’s last period and
ultrasound dating, which has an
error margin of about five days.
Nicholas Evans at Royal Prince
Alfred Hospital in Sydney,
Australia, says these cases
highlight how far neonatal care
has advanced in recent decades.
When he started training as a
neonatologist in the 1970s, babies
born between 30 and 34 weeks
often didn’t survive, he says.
“Now they mostly sail through
without any problems.”
Big improvements were
initially made with the
introduction of mechanical
ventilators and giving the mother
steroids during labour. The use
of lung surfactant has helped
premature babies breathe using
their slightly stiffer lungs.
More recently, additional
improvements have been made
by disconnecting babies from
ventilators and IV nutrition lines
as soon as possible, to prevent
lung damage and reduce the risk
of infection. Doctors have also
found that waiting a minute to
clamp the umbilical cord seems
to improve health. This may be
because it allows more blood
and immune cells to flow into
the baby from the placenta.
However, babies that survive
extremely premature birth
can create false hope for other
parents, says Evans. Only 23 per
cent of babies born at 22 weeks
who receive intensive care
survive, and there is not enough
data to know what the overall
chances of survival for a baby
born at 21 weeks, like the Korean
girl, are (see graph, right).
“There’s no doubt that
survival rates are
improving for extremely
premature babies”
Of the very premature babies
that survive, about one-third end
up having severe neurological
issues. “There’s no doubt that
survival rates are improving
for these extremely premature
babies, but the disability rates
are still quite high,” says Evans.
“Their brain is still a rudimentary
structure, their lungs haven’t
properly developed yet, and they
have no defence mechanisms

6 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017

In this section
■ Mission to our next-nearest star, page 8
■ Venice gains 100 years of history, page 12
■ How solar power is giving electricity to millions, page 22
against infection, so it’s
challenging to nurse them
through that.”
Most premature babies in
Australia, the UK and US now
receive active support if they are
born at 25 weeks or later, while
decisions about those born at
23 to 24 weeks are made on a
case-by-case basis. Few neonatal
units offer interventions for
babies born at 22 weeks or less.
The closer a fetus gets to full term,
the more likely it is to live
100
80
Survival rate (%)
60
40
20
0 20 weeks would probably be a
22 24
Gestation age (weeks)
SOURCE: NEW ENGLAND JOURNAL OF MEDICINE, PEDIATRICS
The increasing survival of
very premature babies may
have implications for abortion
laws, which have time limits to
prevent the termination of fetuses
that would be capable of living
outside the womb. In the UK and
parts of Australia and the US,
abortions are legal up to 24 weeks,
which has been considered the
threshold of viability.
In June, the British Medical
Association reaffirmed its
support for this cut-off. “It is
the BMA’s view, based on the
peer-reviewed published UK
data, that there is no evidence of
significant improvements in the
survival of extremely preterm
infants to support reducing
the 24 week time limit for legal
abortion on this basis,” it
wrote in a position paper.
However, Evans thinks this
may change. “I think many
neonatologists would now say
that 24 weeks is a bit high and
BACKGRID UK
26 28 30
better cut-off,” he says. “But it
is a difficult ethical thing.” ■
Smart drone camera
crew films every angle
LIGHTS, drone swarm, action! In the
future, movies may not be shot by
lumbering cameras on rails, but by
drones that automatically fly around
a scene, grabbing the best possible
angles without the need for human
intervention.
One project that aims to make this
happen is by cinematography firm
Technicolor and the French Institute
for Research in Computer Science
and Automation (Inria). In recent
experiments, the team began by
scanning a mock film set in 3D using
infrared sensors. This data was then
fed to algorithms that told the drones
the position of any obstacles. Physical
markers on the actors, which can be
edited out later, allowed the drones
to visually recognise when they had
performers in their sights.
The director could then simply
draw a route for the drones to follow
on a digital map of the set. They
are smart enough so that if the
path sketched out by the director
accidentally conflicts with an
obstacle or actor they automatically
adjust their route, keeping a safe
distance to avoid crashing.
Another option the team is working
on involves programming two “slave”
drones to automatically position
themselves near to a “master” drone
to get multiple angles of the same
scene. That way a director-pilot gets
three shots for the price of one.
“Right now, flying drones by
pilots is quite tricky,” says Quentin
Galvane at Inria. Rarely do drone
pilots film actors at close range
as they are worried about losing
control, but automating the process
changes that.
Although drones are noisy,
which is potentially problematic
when filming scenes with dialogue,
Galvane says that for action
“Rarely do drone pilots
film actors at close range
as they are worried
about losing control”
sequences, film-makers often
rerecord audio in the studio later
anyway. Technicolor hopes to
demonstrate the system to movie-
making clients in the near future.
“I think it’s great, it makes
absolute sense,” says Jim Scanlan
at the University of Southampton.
He uses drones and optical sensors
for organisations that map scenery,
who could also benefit from this
kind of automation. “For instance,
automatically following landscapes
and terrain without the tedium of
putting in a detailed flight plan.”
Chris Baraniuk ■
23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 7
NEWS & TECHNOLOGY
NASA dreams of
Alpha Centauri trip
John Wenz
IF A small, scrappy group at
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory
(JPL) in Pasadena, California, get
their way, the 100th anniversary of
Apollo 11 – the first crewed moon
landing – will see a spacecraft
launched to a nearby exoplanet
to look for life.
The project is so new it doesn’t
have a name – and most of the
technology it needs doesn’t exist
yet. But there’s plenty of time to
work out the kinks before 2069.
“It’s very nebulous,” says
Anthony Freeman at JPL, who
presented the mission concept at
the 2017 American Geophysical
Union conference in New Orleans,
Louisiana, on 12 December.
The impetus came from a 2016
US funding bill telling NASA to
study interstellar travel that could
reach at least 10 per cent of the
speed of light by 2069. It also
directed the agency to launch
a mission to Alpha Centauri,
the nearest star system to ours.
The JPL group has drafted
science goals for the mission,
including studying the make-up
of the matter and radiation it
encounters, and testing general
Zombie fungus
hijacks fruit
flies’ brains
A “ZOMBIE” fungus that infects fruit
flies may take control of them by
releasing chemicals into their brains.
Parasitic fungi usually infect a host,
then control its behaviour in a way
that gives the fungus a better chance
of spreading to more victims. Now
Carolyn Elya at the University of
California, Berkeley, has observed this
kind of fungus infecting fruit flies in
8 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017
relativity on the way. Upon
arrival, the probe should make
observations of the planetary
system, plus the atmosphere and
landscape of the target exoplanet.
A few years after the launch,
NASA would send a large telescope
to deep space. There, it would
position itself so that light from
Alpha Centauri grazes our sun,
meaning gravitational lensing can
give us a full view of the exoplanet.
The probe’s primary goal will
be to determine whether life is
present. After all, the telescope
could confirm virtually
everything else.
“We’ll be able to characterise
the atmosphere. We’ll be able to
see the planet, assuming it’s not
covered in clouds,”says JPL’s Stacy
Weinstein-Weiss, lead author of
the paper outlining the concept.
Techniques to detect life once in
orbit include looking for artificial
structures, lights going on and off,
and large-scale land modification.
The target might not be Alpha
Centauri, depending on who you
ask – the group has identified
other sun-like stars close enough
to visit. Wherever is chosen, one
big hurdle is that no technology
we have can get a craft to a decent
her back garden. Getting it to attack
fruit flies in the lab allowed her team
to learn more about how parasitic
fungi operate, because fruit flies are
so well studied – they are used in labs
around the world.
The fungus, called Entomophthora
muscae, kills fruit flies in four to seven
days, Elya’s team has found. The
animals appear to behave normally
until the final day, when their gait
becomes shaky and they won’t fly
even if prodded.
Instead, they start heading up any
vertical object and soon stop walking
altogether. The flies then extend
ESO/DIGITIZED SKY SURVEY 2
fraction of the speed of light.
What’s more, entering orbit
upon arrival would add decades
to the mission, says Avi Loeb at
Harvard University, who is part
of the interstellar Breakthrough
Starshot initiative. “This requires
braking and a low travel speed for
the spacecraft, much less than a
tenth of the speed of light, which
implies a trip time of centuries or
more,” says Loeb.
The JPL team is exploring ways
to power a spaceship travelling
at 10 per cent the speed of light –
their proboscis and use it to “glue”
themselves to whatever surface they
are on. Over the next 10 minutes,
they slowly spread their wings in
little bursts. Then, a few hours before
sunset, they die in a characteristic
pose. It was this pose that drew
Elya’s attention to the infected wild
flies in her backyard. After the flies
die, the fungus starts sprouting
from their bodies.
“A few hours before sunset,
the flies die in a particular
pose, then fungus sprouts
from their bodies”
The launch is decades away, and
the journey will take even longer
including antimatter-matter
collisions, nuclear propulsion,
and even laser-powered light sails
like those Breakthrough Starshot
will use, which the team says are
most promising.
Of course, there’s no guarantee
this spaceship will ever leave the
drawing board. But if it does gain
steam, it could even give us better
ways of getting around our own
solar system. ■
Five hours after sunset, the fungus
starts to launch tiny, sticky spores at
high speeds – 9 metres a second – over
several centimetres (bioRxiv, DOI:
10.1101/232140).
Elya has found that the fungus
invades the nervous system very
early on, appearing first in the brain
after around 48 hours. She thinks the
fungus alters behaviour by releasing
chemicals directly into the brain.
“It’s really cool just to work out
what’s going on, but we may also
learn general principles about how
it changes behaviour,” says Elya.
Michael Le Page ■
NEWS & TECHNOLOGY
Quantum origins
of space-time
Anil Ananthaswamy
WE FIRST discovered the laws of
gravity, and then those of
quantum mechanics. But new
work suggests nature might go
about it the other way around:
space-time, and hence gravity,
could emerge from a fundamental
quantum mechanical description
of the universe.
According to Einstein’s general
relativity, gravity is the curvature
of space-time. That this geometry
might be related to the minuscule
quantum world was first
understood in the 1970s when
Stephen Hawking and Jacob
Bekenstein showed that the
entropy of a black hole – which
depends on the black hole’s
microscopic quantum structure –
is proportional to its surface area.
While at Harvard University in
the late 1990s, Juan Maldacena
discovered a connection between
a theory of gravity that describes
a volume of space and a quantum
field theory that describes the
volume’s surface, and doesn’t
include gravity. Since then,
GETTY IMAGES
others have used Maldacena’s
conjecture to show that the area
of certain surfaces within such a
Young female
monkeys get
frisky with deer
IT’S a kind of monkeying around.
Adolescent female monkeys mount
deer and rub themselves on their
backs, apparently to practise sex
when they are still too young to be
chosen by adult males.
Earlier this year, biologists reported
observations of a male Japanese
macaque mounting sika deer and
trying to mate. Now female macaques
10 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017
volume is related to the amount
of quantum entanglement
between different regions in
the quantum field theory. Two
regions are entangled if the
state of one cannot be described
independently of the other.
In this model, changing the
amount of entanglement between
different surface regions can
create or destroy space-time in
have been seen mounting these
deer in Minoo, Japan. Noëlle Gunst
and colleagues at the University
of Lethbridge, Canada, recorded
five adolescent female macaques
mounting deer a total of 258 times
in a two-month period (Archives of
Sexual Behaviour, doi.org/chht).
Adolescent females in this species
of monkey are sometimes seen
mounting other females or males and
soliciting for sex. These encounters,
known as consortships, are thought to
be a way to practise and develop adult
sexual behaviours. Gunst even claims
they allow the female monkeys to
the volume, suggesting that it
emerges from entanglement.
There is one catch: this space-time
is not quite the same as the space-
time of our universe.
Now, ChunJun Cao and Sean
Carroll at the California Institute
of Technology in Pasadena have
tried to extract the kind of space-
time we would find in the vicinity
of our solar system from standard
quantum mechanics. This type
of space-time is one whose
curvature is mostly flat, but with
small undulations due to weak
gravitational fields.
To see if space-time can emerge
from this quantum description,
experience sexual reward through
genital stimulation.
The deer-mounting behaviour is
related, Gunst believes. It has only
been seen during the mating season
and is similar to consortships between
monkeys. Female monkeys often
rubbed their genitals on the back of
the deer and would also gaze at them
and emit high-pitched vocalisations,
like their typical calls when on heat.
“Female monkeys often
rubbed themselves on the
backs of deer and made
calls like when on heat”
Cao and Carroll used an abstract
mathematical concept called
Hilbert space that can be split
into different tiny parts, such
that each one corresponds to a
single point in 3D space. “There
is entanglement between these
little parts,” says Carroll. “A lot
of entanglement between some,
and very little between others.”
The researchers relate
entanglement to geometry by
further assuming that the greater
the entanglement between two
parts, the closer they are.
The entire system is also
assumed to be in some state of
equilibrium, such that increasing
the entanglement in one region
decreases it elsewhere, and vice
versa. Given a handful of such
assumptions, Cao and Carroll
have shown that the equations
governing the dynamics of
entanglement are similar
to Einstein’s equations of
general relativity (arxiv.org/
abs/1712.02803). In other words,
space-time and gravity emerge
from entanglement.
Bartlomiej Czech at Princeton
University, who researches
emergent space-time in the
context of Maldacena’s
conjecture, says the work is
“excellent”. But the assumptions
must be validated. “To construct
an actual system that satisfies
these assumptions is going to
be difficult, but it’s also very
exciting,” he says. ■
When deer walked away, the
female monkeys sometimes displayed
what Gunst calls “sexually motivated
tantrums”, consisting of body spasms
and screaming.
“It is well known that a period of
maturation and practice is necessary
for the development of adult-like
sexual behaviours and sexual partner
preferences in non-human primates,”
Gunst says. Adolescent females are
not the preferred partners of adult
male monkeys, so tend to be rejected.
Deer-mounting may act “as an outlet
for sexual frustration”, says Gunst.
Sam Wong ■
 NEWS & TECHNOLOGY

Mysterious
streaks on
Saturn’s moons
RESEMBLING claw marks made by
some giant space bird, peculiar
parallel tracks on Saturn’s moons
Dione and Rhea are proving baffling.
“I feel like I’m going crazy trying to
come up with an explanation,” says
Emily Martin at the National Air and
THIERRY GRUN/ONLYWORLD/4CORNERS

Space Museum in Washington DC.

A few streaks had been spotted
before but not systematically charted.
Martin’s team did so using data from
NASA’s Cassini probe, and named them
linear virgae. Their brightness and the
way they lie on the landscape suggest
they are relatively young, perhaps no
more than a billion years old.

Venice gains
deposited a metre or more below The team considered various
sea level in the 8th century. This explanations for the lines. They might
implies that they were tossed into be an unknown type of fault or crack,

years of history
the natural canals that ran through but they neither disrupt the terrain
the Venice lagoon before the city nor cast a shadow, almost as if they
was built, says Ammerman. were painted on. Rolling boulders
The peach stones may have been produce long, linear grooves on Mars’s
Colin Barras like hitting the jackpot,” says dropped in the lagoon by people, moon Phobos. However, these are
Ammerman. Peach stones are agrees Laura Sadori at the typically shorter than the virgae and
DEEP beneath the mosaic floor ideal for carbon dating, because Sapienza University of Rome. are known to cast shadows.
of Venice’s St Mark’s Basilica, they grow in a single year and What’s more, bits of ceramics Could they be from comet and
archaeologists have found two contain lots of carbon. and metal were found in the asteroid hits? The virgae look a lot
1300-year-old peach stones. Both stones dated to between same layer of sediment. This like crater rays, which radiate from an
They add at least 100 years to AD 650 and 770 – up to 180 years layer is clearly human-made, impact in straight lines. But they fail
the city’s history. older than the earliest basilica. says Ammerman, and it is 80 to converge on any craters. On Dione,
Most of Italy’s great cities A bit of elm charcoal found in centimetres thick in some places. most appear to be in the same
date back to the Romans, but not the same core was a similar age Ammerman thinks the core is orientation, running east and west
Venice, says Albert Ammerman (Antiquity, doi.org/chf2). evidence that people were filling above and below the equator.
at Colgate University in Hamilton, That fits a study Ammerman the natural waterways in the Maybe the little moons had ring
New York. There were Romans on published in 1995, in which his lagoon, to create the dry land on systems that crashed down. But
Torcello island in the north of the team found glass and mortar which Venice was built from the collapsing ring particles should all
Venetian lagoon, but there are no that they were able to date to the 9th century onwards. land near the equator where rings
Roman remains in Venice. It makes sense people were in generally orbit, whereas the streaks
Instead, the city’s history seems “It indicates when people the area early, says Nick Marriner on Dione stretch far to the north and
to begin in the 9th century. Local were filling the waterways at the University of Franche- south of it. On Rhea, whose surface
tradition says the bones of Saint to create the dry land on Comté in Besançon, France. We is poorly mapped, the known linear
Mark the Evangelist were carried which Venice was built” “have been living in and around virgae seem to cluster in a single
to Venice in AD 828 from Egypt. lagoonal areas for thousands of eastern region near the equator.
The earliest basilica named in his 7th and 8th centuries in sediment years, because they are hotspots “I’m not sure what to make of it,”
honour was built a few years later. cores taken near the basilica. of biodiversity, rich in resources says Amanda Hendrix at the Planetary
Ammerman and his colleagues The new finds give a sense of and afford natural protection Science Institute in Arizona. Perhaps
think they have evidence for an what people were doing in the from the sea”, he says. a strange mixture of processes could
earlier chapter of the Venetian area at this time. The peach stones “There seems to be sufficient account for the streaks, she says.
story. In a sediment core taken were almost 4.2 metres below the evidence for a human presence Martin presented her team’s work
from under the modern basilica – modern ground surface. Using in the area in the 7th and the at the 2017 American Geophysical
built in the 11th century – they data on historic sea levels, the 8th century,” says art historian Union meeting last week in New
found two peach stones. “This was team calculates that they were Wolfgang Wolters. ■ Orleans, Louisiana. Adam Mann ■

12 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017

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NEWS & TECHNOLOGY
Wound scanner
picks out infection
Clare Wilson
THE surgeon was poised to carry
out a skin graft when he decided
to try out an experimental device
to check for infection. Called the
MolecuLight i:X, it shows the
presence of bacteria in real time
as an eerie fluorescent glow.
The patient was a 47-year-old
man whose leg had been
amputated above the knee.
He had endured one infection
already and the surgeon didn’t
want to risk another.
“I was ready to perform surgery
on this patient. The wound looked
clean,” says Steven Jeffery of
the Royal Centre for Defence
Medicine in Birmingham, UK.
One look through the machine,
however, and the operation was
called off. The wound glowed red
at the edge, showing it was riddled
with bacteria that would probably
have caused the skin graft to fail.
When the wound was swabbed
and tested in the lab it confirmed
that harmful bacteria were
present. The skin graft was
delayed until the wound had
The peculiar
family who
don’t feel pain
AN ITALIAN family that barely
senses pain has had the genetic root
of their shared disorder uncovered.
Understanding this gene may lead
to new painkillers.
The affected family members
include a 78-year-old woman,
her two daughters and their three
children. All of them fail to sense
pain the way most of us do, and don’t
notice when they injure themselves.
When they were assessed, the
individuals were found to have
14 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017
healed, which Jeffery says led
to a better outcome. Using the
device “completely changed
my decision-making”, he says.
Wound infections are a big
problem in medicine. Swabs
can be taken and sent to a lab for
testing but this takes days, which
can delay treatment. On the spot,
doctors can only inspect the
wound, touch it to see if it is too
warm, or even sniff it. But they
don’t want to use antibiotics
unnecessarily as this can cause
MOLECULIGHT
side effects and lead to drug
resistance. And sometimes there
are no early signs of infection.
Launched in October, the
MolecuLight i:X is a little larger
than a smartphone. It emits
light at a wavelength of 405
nanometres – perfect to spot
bacteria, which have molecules
called porphyrins that fluoresce at
this wavelength. When held over a
patient’s wound, the screen shows
it augmented with glowing red
where there are certain bacteria, or
in the case of one type, blue-green.
Apart from the blue-green
species, it doesn’t distinguish
fractures in their arms and legs that
they hadn’t realised were there.
“Sometimes they feel pain in the
initial break, but it goes away very
quickly,” says James Cox of University
College London. “For example, Letizia
broke her shoulder while skiing, but
then kept skiing for the rest of the
day and drove home. She didn’t get
it checked out until the next day.”
To find the cause of this lack of pain
sensitivity, Cox and his colleagues
performed a series of tests. The team
found that all six family members had
a typical number of nerves in their
skin, but that they all had a mutation
in a gene called ZFHX2.
When the team deleted this gene
in mice, they discovered that the
between different types of
bacteria, nor does it indicate
their quantity.
Swabs may still need to be
tested but the device shows
where they should be taken,
says Rosemary Hill of Lions Gate
Hospital in Vancouver, who has
been field-testing it. Wounds are
usually swabbed from the centre
but the MolecuLight i:X has
been showing that bacteria may
be present only around the edges.
animals were not as good at sensing
when painful pressure was applied
to their tails, but they were
hypersensitive to heat sensations.
This suggests the gene may play a
role in controlling whether stimuli
are painful or not.
The team then gave mice the same
mutated version of the gene that the
Italian family have. These mice were
much less sensitive to painful levels
of heat. The mutation seems to have
this effect because the gene normally
controls the activity of 16 other
“The pain goes away very
quickly. Letizia broke her
shoulder skiing, but carried
on and then drove home”
A glowing red shows bacteria
ringing the wound
“The presence of bacteria does
not mean the existence of active
infection,” says Ewen Harrison at
the University of Edinburgh,
who isn’t involved in the research.
Two small trials have linked the
device with faster wound healing
partly by showing where wounds
should be swabbed, although
neither were randomised. ■
genes, some of which are involved in
sensing pain (Brain, DOI: 10.1093/
brain/awx236).
Cox and his colleagues hope to
work out exactly how these genes
contribute to the reduced sensation of
pain. This might allow them to develop
drugs that achieve the same effect.
Such drugs could benefit people in
chronic pain, who often struggle to
find relief with existing treatments.
It may also be possible to develop
a treatment to reverse the family’s
insensitivity to pain. But team
member John Wood, also at University
College London, says the family don’t
want that. “I asked them if they would
like to normally sense pain and they
said no.” Jessica Hamzelou ■
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 IN BRIEF
KUMAR SRISKANDAN/ALAMY

A plesiosaur that
swam in the Triassic
THE long-necked marine reptiles
known as plesiosaurs are icons of
the dinosaur age. Now the oldest
plesiosaur ever found is shedding
light on their origins.
The fossil dates from the first
dinosaur period, the Triassic. It
shows that plesiosaurs evolved in
the late Triassic and survived the
mass extinction that ushered in
the Jurassic 200 million years ago.
The 2-metre-long fossil may be
a juvenile. It was found in 2013 in a
clay pit in Germany and acquired
by a private collector, who told
authorities. Now Martin Sander
at the University of Bonn and his
colleagues have confirmed it as
the first known Triassic plesiosaur
(Science Advances, doi.org/chdp).
“Very early in the Jurassic there
are lots and lots of plesiosaurs, as
if they appeared from nowhere,”
says Roger Benson of the
That’s the way to do it! Kids “pay” with prized stickers to continue watching.
On average, 6-year-olds were willing to spend twice
University of Oxford. “So
everyone was expecting to find
pay to see justice done as much to see the bad puppet beaten than the generous a plesiosaur from the Triassic.”
one punished. This age seems to be a critical – at 4 or 5,
CHILDREN as young as 6 want to see wrongdoers children showed no appetite for revenge.
punished, it turns out. “This study tells us that children have a motivation
TB, or not TB? The
Nikolaus Steinbeis of the Max Planck Institute for to see deserved punishment enacted,” says Steinbeis.
Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, In a similar experiment with 17 chimps, the animals answer is in pee
and his team carried out a series of tests involving were either handed or denied food by a person, who
72 children. Each of them watched Punch and Judy was then “beaten” from behind by another human. A URINE test for tuberculosis
shows in which one puppet shared a toy with the child, To continue watching, the chimps had to push back a could make it much easier to
while a second, nastier puppet taunted them instead. heavy door. Half the chimps made the effort to see the identify the disease before it kills.
Then a third puppet would appear and randomly hit food-denier beaten, but only 19 per cent of them wanted TB is currently diagnosed using
either of the two other puppets. After a few seconds, to see the person who’d fed them take a beating (Nature a skin test, or by culturing bacteria
a curtain covered the action, but children could choose to Human Behaviour, DOI: 10.1038/s41562-01700264-5). from a person’s sputum. Both
methods take days to give results.
Now Alessandra Luchini of
Sperm hacked for use as drug couriers The team then fitted sperm George Mason University in
with tiny four-armed magnetic Virginia and her team have
THERE’S a new use for sperm – Germany and his team are harnesses that allowed them to developed a urine test for TB that
delivering cancer drugs. experimenting with using sperm be guided by magnets. When gives results in 12 hours. It detects
Standard chemotherapy is toxic cells to take drugs to cancers in the sperm hit a solid tumour, a certain sugar that coats the
to both cancer cells and normal the female reproductive tract. the arms sprung open, releasing surface of TB bacteria.
cells, leading to symptoms like When they loaded sperm cells the sperm and allowing them to The test uses tiny molecular
nausea, and limiting the dose a with doxorubicin, a common swim into the tumour. cages embedded with a dye that
person can receive. chemo agent, and released them As well as cancer, spermbots can catch and trap these sugar
But if chemotherapy drugs in a dish containing mini cervical might be useful for treating other molecules, even at low levels.
specifically targeted tumours, cancer tumours, the sperm swam conditions affecting the female In tests, the technique correctly
we could avoid this. Haifeng Xu towards the tumours, killing 87 reproductive tract such as identified 48 people with TB
at the Leibniz Institute for Solid per cent of their cells within three endometriosis or ectopic (Science Translational Medicine,
State and Materials Research in days (ACS Nano, doi.org/gcm4wq). pregnancies, says Xu. doi.org/chdm).

23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 17

 IN BRIEF
Mini-robots
master Pac-Man
YOU would need a magnifying glass
to play this real-world version of
Pac-Man. Tiny robots can plot their
own route around a maze modelled
on the iconic video game. Similar
devices could one day be used to
travel around the body, delivering
drugs or performing surgery.
Sarthak Misra from the University
of Twente, the Netherlands, and
colleagues created four different
types of micro-gripper robots, all
less than 1 millimetre in size, and
each with a miniature set of pincers.
The robots were moved around a
water tank using electromagnets.
Next, the team created a virtual
Pac-Man maze haunted by “ghosts”
programmed to chase down robots.
The set-up simulated how the
robots could be guided by an
algorithm, as they would need to
be to work inside the human body
(PloS One, doi.org/chhw).
The team also tested the robots’
grip – they had to grab a chunk of
mozzarella cheese with pincers
that closed on the application of a
magnet. Some of the designs that
had six pincers were good at cutting
mini pieces of cheese, suggesting
they might be handy when cutting
out tissue, for example.
“In the long term we feel such
miniaturised grippers could be used
as micro-robots for applications
within minimally invasive surgery,
such as taking biopsies,” says Misra.
MANLEY099/GETTY
18 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017
Exoplanet find makes star system our perfect match
OUR solar system’s twin has been
discovered more than 2500 light
years away. In data from the
Kepler space telescope, an eighth
planet has been spotted in the
Kepler-90 system, tying our own
system for the highest number
of known planets.
Christopher Shallue of Google
and Andrew Vanderburg at the
University of Texas at Austin
used a neural network – a type of
machine learning that mimics the
connections in a brain – to look
for new planets in old Kepler data.
They trained their algorithm on
A tiny space rock
with a tinier moon
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft
is on its way to a tiny rock in the
outer solar system. We don’t know
much about that rock, but now
we think it might have a moon.
The New Horizons probe flew
past Pluto in 2015 and started
heading toward a Kuiper belt
object called 2014 MU69, 1.6 billion
kilometres further away. From the
few observations made, we have
narrowed down the shape of
MU69 to three main options: a
bulbous peanut shape, a “contact
binary” with two rocks that touch
one another, or even two separate
objects orbiting one another.
Most of what we know about
MU69 comes from pictures taken
during occultations – when the
little rock passes between a bright
star and our telescopes. During
those brief moments, we can look
at the shadow it casts to try to
figure out its size and shape.
One such event happened on
10 July, when researchers spotted
an extra dip in the light of a star
MU69 was passing. This extra dip
could have come from an even
more minuscule moon passing
in front of the star, giving New
Horizons another place to point
its cameras when it passes by in
early 2019.
For new stories every day, visit newscientist.com/news
15,000 signals that scientists
had already examined and either
labelled as real exoplanets or not.
When it was applied to a set of
Kepler signals from 670 stars, the
algorithm found two new planets
(arxiv.org/abs/1712.05044). One,
called Kepler-80g, orbits a star
about 1100 light years away that
was already known to have five
planets. The other discovery,
Kepler-90i, is the eighth planet
in its system. It appears to be
small and rocky, and probably
is without a thick atmosphere.
Because it orbits near its star, this
Grossed-out great tits steer evolution
GREAT tits that show disgust when
they eat a horrible meal may be
driving their prey to evolve.
Many prey animals have deterrents
against predators, like poison. Some
signal this with conspicuous colours.
It’s unclear how such signals came
about. “Predators need to first learn
the signal before they avoid it, but
until they do, these prey are easy to
detect and kill,” says Rose Thorogood
at the University of Cambridge.
If predators learn by watching other’s
errors, however, this might protect
the prey population long enough for
it to reproduce and evolve.
world’s surface may reach
temperatures as high as 425°C.
All the planets around the star
Kepler-90 orbit closer than Earth
does to the sun. Closest in are two
planets slightly larger than our
own, then Kepler-90i, which is the
system’s smallest planet, followed
by three worlds a bit smaller
than Neptune and two gas giants.
Kepler has only searched the area
near to the star, so there may be
more planets further out.
Our solar system might not
hold the record for the most
number of planets for long.
BIOSPHOTO / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
Her team gave great tits a new
“prey”: almonds, some dosed with
a chemical they dislike. The almonds
were in envelopes, marked if they
held a bad one. Some tits watched
a bird eat a bad almond. It spat it out,
then wiped its beak: a sign of disgust.
All birds learned to avoid the bad
almonds through trial and error, but
“trained” birds ate fewer (Nature
Ecology & Evolution, DOI: 10.1038/
s41559-017-0418-x).
“The conspicuous ‘prey’ were
40 per cent more likely to survive
when predators were socially
informed,” says Thorogood.
Advertising feature
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The world needs a safe and sustainable supply of food. That’s why Syngenta
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HE world faces a challenge. As the
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As one of the world’s largest
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Syngenta has invested heavily to achieve
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high external regulatory standards set by
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“We have a world-class Product Safety
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Global Product Safety at Syngenta.
This team is now expanding. At Syngenta,
we are looking for talented scientists with an
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the ability to communicate with both expert
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New recruits will join a supremely capable
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MARC SCHLOSSMAN
Syngenta. “I decided to join Syngenta
because I had always been impressed by
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The team has members with different
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whose previous work focused on
understanding the uptake, movement and
metabolism of Syngenta’s novel plant
protection products to optimise their
biological activity. Her new role in Product
Safety offered a different challenge. “I had
become increasingly aware of the challenge
to optimise biological activity while also
ensuring that our new products are safe and
can be registered for use,” she says. “While
I am developing technically, I can still utilise
my skills from my previous roles.”
It is this kind of diverse team that Syngenta
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feed the world sustainably. “As we rise to the
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Find out more about roles in Product Safety
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Advertising feature

A new complexion
for skin science
Human skin grown in a petri dish is helping to replace animal
testing and giving researchers unprecedented insight into the
tissue that covers and protects us all

F
ROM a distance, it seems like a tray
of pink jellies. But look more closely
and you will see 12 pieces of skin,
stretched across small wells, ready to be
covered in mascara, lipstick and other
cosmetics or chemicals.
For four decades, scientists at the French
cosmetics company L’Oréal have pioneered
the development of this lab-grown human
skin. EpiSkin, as it is known, is such a good
model of the real thing that it has helped lead
the way in ending animal testing.
“L’Oréal stopped testing finished products
on animals in 1989,” says Estelle Tinois-
Tessonneaud, who did some of the early
EpiSkin research and now oversees safety
and communications at the company. “It was
the first company in the world to do this.”
EpiSkin hasn’t just revolutionised the
way ingredients are tested in the cosmetics
industry; EPISKIN, a subsidiary of L’Oréal,
sells batches to other cosmetics companies,
to chemical and pharmaceutical industries,
and to university-based scientists.
The research it supports has brought
insights into how our own skin functions and
ages. That’s because EpiSkin is actually
made from human cells. “It’s not artificial
skin,” says Tinois-Tessonneaud, who has a
PhD in skin biology.“These are real, living
cells.” They come from discarded skin tissue,
donated by people undergoing
reconstructive breast surgery, for example.
Skin technology
The team at EPISKIN carefully isolates cells
from the epidermis – the top layer of skin –
before arranging them onto a matrix layer.
The researchers then place these cell patches
in lab dishes and bathe them in a fluid
containing water, sugar and amino acids, as
well as a host of other ingredients that give it
a pinkish hue. This fluid mimics the function
of blood and keeps the cells alive. Within a
few weeks, a structure resembling human
skin forms in the dish.
Like the real thing, the epidermis-in-a-dish
is made up of four layers, each of which has
cells of a different shape. At the surface is the
horny layer, comprised of flattened dead
cells. This top layer of the EpiSkin is dry, which
makes it easy for researchers to apply
chemicals and measure how the cells react.
Underneath this is the granular layer, where
lipids are produced. Lower again is the
spinous layer that contains a variety of lipids,
as well as immune cells and enzymes. The
basal layer sits at the bottom of the stack.
EpiSkin reproduces the distinctive shape of
the cells in each layer.
Having these tissues gives laboratories a
fuller picture of how skin reacts to different
substances and allows them to better select
the product to be tested in clinical studies. For
example, if a cosmetics team is working out

How to grow skin

NUTRIENTS
SKIN CELLS

MATRIX LAYER

Skin cells are extracted from The skin cells are placed Initially, the cells grow The cells are then exposed to air.
donated skin tissue on a matrix and bathed horizontally, forming a monolayer This causes them to stratify into
in nutrients that covers the matrix layers similar to those in skin tissue

how much of an ingredient to add to a
product, “we can test the formula with
different concentrations, to see the tolerance,
the effect on toxicity,” says Tinois-
Tessonneaud. “That can help them to choose
the percentage to add to the formula.”
L’Oréal has developed a range of other skin
models too, mimicking different features of
human skin. To investigate the way sunlight
affects ageing, the team incorporated the
layer of skin under the epidermis, known as
the dermis.
The dermis in humans contains sweat
glands, hair follicles and blood vessels, but
EpiSkin’s version is simpler. “We mimic the
dermis by mixing the most important
component of the dermis in our body,
collagen, with the most important cells,
which are fibroblasts,” says Tinois-
EpiSkin has
allowed L’Oréal
to stop animal
testing
Tessonneaud. Together, the fibroblasts –
which help maintain structure and elasticity –
and the collagen make a dermis-like gel,
which the epidermis can sit on top of.
We know that when sunlight penetrates
the dermis, it kills fibroblasts, and this is
thought to contribute to ageing. Indeed,
when the EPISKIN team expose their full-
thickness skin to ultraviolet light, fibroblasts
disappear. Because of this, the model allows
the team to test anti-ageing treatments. If a
cosmetic prevents the fibroblasts dying, it is
then tested in clinical studies.
The full thickness skin model helped
“EpiSkin is made from human
skin cells. It’s not artificial skin.
These are real, living cells.”
L’Oréal develop an anti-ageing ingredient
called Pro-Xylane, which is now used in many
of the company’s products, such as
moisturisers and face masks. Tests on
EpiSkin show that Pro-Xylane boosts
collagen production, and follow up studies in
women have found that it smooths the
appearance of wrinkles.
Another of the EpiSkin models was created
to help develop better sunscreens and
whitenings. The cells in this model can burn
when exposed to ultraviolet light. This allows
the team to test potential sunscreen formulas
and whether they prevent this happening.
These cells also contain melanin, which is
responsible for brown spots associated with
ageing. Age spots are thought to result from
an over-production of melanin, and EpiSkin is
helping to reveal compounds that can
diminish their appearance.
The range of models doesn’t stop at skin.
The EPISKIN team and L’Oréal researchers
have developed and grown a model of the
human cornea to test if products cause eye
irritation, for example. Using other donated
skin types, the team has created a model of
human gums, the inside of the mouth and
even the lining of the vagina, which makes it
possible to test female hygiene products.
Beyond the cosmetics industry, EpiSkin is
improving our understanding of skin
disorders, says Tinois-Tessonneaud.
Nowadays, researchers are using skin
models to study diseases that cause people
to be extremely sensitive to sunlight, which
can put them at risk of developing cancers.
This research is already aiding the
development of promising gene therapies.
Researchers at L’Oréal and EPISKIN now
plan to expand the EpiSkin range even
further. Models that mimic dry skin, inflamed
skin or sensitive skin could give researchers a
better understanding of these complaints
and highlight ways to develop new and
improved treatments.
“We are also developing new tissue
models that integrate the latest advances
such as tissue reconstruction using
functionalised cells,” says Jean-Marc
Ovigne, head of R&D at EPISKIN.
The hope is to offer an alternative to animal
testing across industry and academia all over
the world. “This is really what L’Oréal has
been doing for the last 30 years,” says Tinois-
Tessonneaud. “L’Oréal has been a pioneer of
this research for a long time.” ■
Discover other scientific careers at L’Oréal:
www.loreal.com/careers
 ANALYSIS OFF-GRID ENERGY
BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES

Catch the sun

Solar power is giving millions of people access to electricity.
Could they bypass the grid altogether, asks Michael Le Page
MORE than 100 million people has sold 550,000 home solar the world. There is, in short, no people leapfrog conventional
around the world now have access power systems in East Africa. doubt that the off-grid renewable electricity grids powered by fossil
to electricity for the first time Some families spend a tenth of energy revolution has begun. fuels entirely and go directly to
thanks to simple solar power their income on fuel for lighting. But where is it going to end up? 100 per cent renewable systems.
systems that typically provide “It’s a crazy price for a poor fuel,” In South-East Asia and sub- Critics argue that low-power
LED lights and a phone charger. says Hughes. Saharan Africa, about 1.3 billion solar is no substitute for getting
More powerful versions include His firm has just raised the people still lack electricity. Some poor people onto more plentiful
radios and even televisions. money it needs to finance a think off-grid energy systems will and cheaper grid electricity.
The LEDs provide a clean and million more systems, and expand to fill this gap. If so, that However, for the hundreds
cheap alternative to the kerosene Hughes thinks they could could let the world’s poorest of millions of those with no
lamps normally used by those eventually sell up to 11 million in immediate prospect of getting
with no electricity. “People spend East Africa alone. And M-KOPA is “In South-East Asia and such electricity, off-grid is
50 cents a day on kerosene,” just one of many companies now sub-Saharan Africa, about better than nothing. And as the
says Nick Hughes, co-founder of selling solar power systems to 1.3 billion people still technology improves and prices
M-KOPA Solar of Kenya, which people who lack electricity around don’t have electricity” fall, the systems will become

22 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017

For daily news stories, visit newscientist.com/news
Electrification brings educational
benefits and raises income
ever more powerful.
Most of those who lack
electricity live in rural regions
far from the grid. Providing
them with access to electricity
isn’t just a matter of basic
human rights and fairness.
It has also been shown to have
wide socio-economic benefits,
from improving educational
attainment to boosting incomes.
So there is wide agreement
about its importance.
But how do you do it? Until
recently, the main option besides
grid connection was to set up
microgrids covering multiple
homes powered by diesel
generators, which are expensive
and highly polluting.
Light work
Now the falling prices of solar
panels and batteries, along with
more energy-efficient appliances
such as LED bulbs and televisions,
have created another option.
The International Energy Agency
(IEA) estimated earlier this year
that solar home systems will
provide basic electricity to
another 70 million people
over the next five years.
“Off-grid energy has incredibly
high social consequences,” said
Paolo Frankl, head of the IEA’s
renewable division, at the
report’s launch.
Indeed, some proponents of
off-grid solar argue that it can
provide all the wider benefits
of electricity while reducing
greenhouse gas emissions. That
seems like a massive win-win
situation: tackling poverty and
climate change at the same time.
But it’s not that simple. “Anyone
who tells you that this is about
tackling climate change is
misleading you,” says Varun
Sivaram of the Council on Foreign
Relations, a US think tank, and
author of a forthcoming book on
solar power called Taming the Sun.
For starters, the poorest people
use hardly any energy compared
with the richest, whether they
have electricity or not. “Rising
levels of access to modern energy
have a negligible impact on
emissions,” says a 2014 IEA report.
What’s more, cheap solar power
systems have their limitations.
When Greenpeace set up a
low-power solar microgrid in
an Indian village in 2014, the
villagers were so disappointed
they protested and demanded
“real” electricity.
They may have been right to do
so, as several studies have found
that basic home solar doesn’t
appear to provide the broader
socio-economic benefits of grid
access. A two-year randomised
trial in India by Michaël Aklin at
the University of Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, and his colleagues
found no evidence that after its
introduction people saved more,
started more businesses or spent
more time working or studying.
“It’s not a silver bullet,” he says.
The reason is probably that
these systems provide so little
electricity. Beefier systems are
available but cost much more.
Home solar systems do at least
reduce kerosene use, which is a
big source of indoor air pollution.
“That’s great news,” says Aklin.
“Kerosene is nasty for health.”
CLIMATE-FRIENDLY COOKING
Around 3 billion people – including
many with electricity – still cook
using solid fuels such as wood,
dung and charcoal. This produces
plenty of indoor pollution and a third powered by solar-charged batteries.
of the outdoor pollution plaguing
South Asia.
You might think that wood and
dung are forms of renewable energy
and thus climate friendly, but cooking much more than most home solar can
with them produces black carbon and
methane, both of which make the
planet hotter. Phasing out traditional panels and batteries fall.
stoves would prevent tens of millions
of premature deaths and reduce
global warming by 0.1°C by 2100,
a study estimated earlier this year.
India is encouraging people to
switch to gas cookers, which are far
When it comes to providing
access to electricity, most gains
will come from extending
conventional grids, says Sivaram.
And indeed many countries are
trying to do exactly that. Both
India, which has 260 million
people without electricity, and
Nigeria, which has 80 million,
have ambitious plans to extend
grid access.
But electrification will take
time. A 2015 report forecast
that less than 80 per cent of
people in sub-Saharan Africa
will have access to electricity
by 2040, for instance.
So off-grid solar does have a
valuable role to play, says Sivaram. will have access to
In the areas where grid access
will be a long time coming or
will never be practical, countries
should be encouraging private
companies such as M-KOPA.
That means getting rid of import
tariffs that make solar expensive
in some African countries, as well such as refrigerators, along with
as the kerosene subsidy in India,
which makes it difficult for solar
to compete.
Providing electricity alone,
of course, isn’t enough. It’s no
use having a socket if you have
nothing to plug into it. This is
where the innovative business
models M-KOPA is pioneering
could make a big difference.
less polluting. Moving to solar would
be even better, says Mahesh Bhave,
whose firm Bhave Power Systems
plans to sell induction cookers
“Nobody is thinking about [solar]
cooking,” he says.
Running induction cookers requires
1500 to 2000-watt systems, which is
currently provide, but is fast becoming to feed power into it. In other
achievable as the prices of solar
Bhave is also targeting homes
connected to the grid. He thinks he
can sell solar microgrids that run
induction cookers to relatively
wealthy apartment blocks to act as
a backup to unreliable mains power.
23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 23
Few people in poor regions
can afford to buy a solar power
system outright. Instead, using a
payment system based on mobile
phone credit, they pay M-KOPA
a deposit followed by small daily
payments. After a year, they own
the system outright. If they miss
a payment, the system stops
working until they resume.
“We can turn them on and off
remotely,” says Hughes.
So M-KOPA is effectively
lending money to people who
would never normally be able to
“Less than 80 per cent
of sub-Saharan Africans
electricity by 2040”
get a loan. “We have a really good
repayment rate, in excess of
90 per cent,” says Hughes.
This approach could allow
people to buy bigger appliances
farming equipment and maybe
even electric cars (see “Climate-
friendly cooking”, below left).
“Our technology works with
anything that turns on and off,”
says Hughes.
Given this, full grid access won’t
necessarily put companies like
M-KOPA out of business, then. But
more surprisingly, they may be
able to keep selling solar systems
even to people with grid access.
The grids in many countries are
extremely unreliable, so solar-
powered microgrids are likely to
be used in conjunction with the
conventional grid. “The quality of
the grid is very poor. There are lots
of blackouts,” says Aklin. “I see
potential for a combined system.”
These backup microgrids could
remain separate from the grid,
says Sivaram, or could be designed
words, off-grid renewables could
end up merging with the grid,
making it more resilient.
“It’s important to neither
see off-grid as a magical perfect
solution or useless,” says
Aklin. “The truth is somewhere
in-between.” ■
COMMENT
What’s blowin’ in the wind?
How will global temperatures, carbon dioxide levels, electric cars
and Trump’s coal dream fare in 2018, wonders Owen Gaffney
HERE’S a sure-fire 2018 headline:
carbon dioxide in the air hits
levels unprecedented in at least
800,000 years. That’s an easy call,
given emissions are non-zero and
this gas stays aloft for centuries.
What is more concerning is the
rate of increase in carbon dioxide,
which appears to be accelerating
despite a recent dramatic slowing
in emissions from human activity.
The strong El Niño climate event
of 2015 and 2016 explains some
of this, as it leads to drought and
natural carbon release. But in
2018, with El Niño gone, scientists
will be watching for signs that
land and ocean stores of carbon
are making things worse.
On the flipside, recent record
temperatures are unlikely to be
repeated, thanks to a cooling La
Niña, El Niño’s opposite number.
More good news is that 2018 is
likely to be the year electric cars
become cheaper than diesel and
Le problème
Can France’s bold vaccine law overcome
anti-vax sentiment, asks Laura Spinney
A NEW law takes force on 1 January
to increase the number of
mandatory childhood vaccines
in France to 11 from 3. It has
provoked a polemic, but the law
is sound. If there is a problem, it
is officials neglecting the main
drivers of vaccine hesitancy.
France isn’t the first nation
to introduce such a law, as anti-
24 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017
vaccination views rose widely
after the Wakefield scandal in the
UK. However, it has the world’s
worst anti-vax attitudes: a 2016
survey showed that 41 per cent of
people say vaccines are unsafe.
The hope is the law will reverse
a 20-year fall in vaccine coverage
that has eroded herd immunity
and raised the risk of epidemics.
For example, France, stubbornly
below the 95 per cent target for
measles vaccination, saw 24,000
cases of the illness between 2008
and 2016, including 10 deaths.
There are no epidemiological
or clinical reasons why the extra
vaccines – whooping cough,
measles, mumps, hepatitis B,
pneumococcus, Haemophilus
influenzae, meningococcus C
and rubella – should be treated
differently to the existing three.
The edict is also less onerous than
“The hope is the law will
reverse a 20-year fall in
vaccine coverage that has
eroded herd immunity”
petrol cars, helped by China’s
expected announcement of an
end to diesel and petrol engines.
March may bring gloom as we
will get a snapshot of the health
of the natural world in five reports
on biodiversity. How to get on a
better track? There may be ideas
in the first report from the World
in 2050 research initiative next
year, which uses economic and
Earth system models to explore
ways to meet the UN’s sustainable
development goals without
harming crucial natural systems.
The search for solutions will
also get a boost in May thanks to
a philanthropist in Sweden, who
will launch a $5 million prize for
the best governance ideas to
tackle global challenges, protect
common resources vital to Earth’s
health and ensure a safe future.
An Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change report on the
impacts of 1.5°C of warming and
the one it replaces in a key way:
there are no criminal sanctions.
Admittedly, unvaccinated
children will be barred from
public crèches and schools, so
most parents will be compelled to
comply. But it feels less draconian.
Job done then? Not necessarily.
The hitch is that the government’s
promotion of the law is lacking. It
makes its case in established news
outlets, but rarely on social media
and the broader internet. Though
social media use is low in France,
it still stands at 48 per cent, and
anti-vax views rule there.
The government knows it needs
to do more to get its message out.
The committee advising it on
For more opinion articles, visit newscientist.com/opinion

ways of avoiding it is due in

October. Spoiler alert: Earth
INSIGHT Child gambling
has already reached 1.1°C above
pre-industrial temperatures.
Lags in both Earth and economic-
industrial systems mean 1.5°C is
almost unavoidable without a
huge ramping up of “negative
emissions technologies”. But
these seem unlikely to be feasible
at the scale required.
So, 2018 will be the year the
PIERO CRUCIATTI/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

world wakes up to this reality and

emissions scenarios will come
under increased scrutiny. New
scenarios must demand much
deeper near-term cuts – closer to
halving emissions every decade.
As the year ends, nations will
meet under the UN banner in

Gamblinglawsneedan
Poland to work out how to up UK law says that if an item is won
climate ambitions. by a game of chance and can be
Finally, what of US president considered to have monetary worth

updatetoprotectkids
Donald Trump? The price of wind then the activity is a form of gambling
and solar power is crashing and and should be regulated as such.
19 countries have vowed to phase Normally, this means that winning an
out coal fast. Over half of Europe’s item that is only used within a game
coal-fired power plants are losing and can’t be “cashed out” doesn’t
money – closing them and Timothy Revell one of their weapons with a spin of constitute gambling. But now that
replacing them with renewable a virtual fruit machine. third-party websites allow people
power is cheaper. Trump’s coal HUGE numbers of children are Skins can normally be earned by to trade skins for real money, the line
revival dream will likely be dead gambling online, the UK Gambling just playing the game, but there is is easily blurred.
before 2019 begins. ■ Commission reports. About 25,000 often also the option to pay with real “It no longer makes sense to
children aged between 11 and 16 meet money for more cracks at winning use formal definitions of what is and
Owen Gaffney is an Anthropocene the definition of a problem gambler, them. Nearly half of all children in is not gambling, when what children
analyst and science communicator at according to the commission’s latest the UK are aware of skin betting and experience is a blur of infotainment,
the Stockholm Resilience Centre and annual survey. And some 370,000 11 per cent of 11 to 16-year-olds have celebrity endorsement, free games,
the Future Earth research programme children in England, Scotland and placed a skin bet. risky games, games for money,
Wales – 12 per cent of the total – said This shouldn’t be possible: people games for virtual goods, etc,” says
they had gambled in the past week. must be over 18 to gamble in the Rebecca Cassidy at Goldsmiths,
vaccination was due to discuss The most common forms of UK, and licensed gambling websites University of London.
the problem of countering social gambling that children participate must verify the ages of all of their A quick fix, such as putting skin bets
media anti-vaxxers in December. in take place in the physical realm, customers. Annual reviews can lead on the same level as other forms of
Let’s hope it doesn’t prove too involving fruit machines, scratch to such sites losing their licence if the gambling by slapping an age “gate” on
late. A recent survey suggested the cards or just making wagers with certain online games, is likely to have
French were evenly split on the friends. Now, however, a type of “The older generation has some benefit, but it won’t stop every
law, and some experts warn that a online gambling called “skin betting” absolutely no conception instance of underage gambling.
browbeating approach may make is also taking off, and a regulatory of the many forms that UK gambling laws were last
hesitators more resistant. Tips blind spot means children are able gambling now takes” updated in 2005, when rules around
on how to get a fake inoculation to easily take part. the advertising of gambling were
certificate are already online. Skins are cosmetic items found in industry regulator feels that they relaxed. Since then, children have
There is an early lesson in this some video games, which can be are not doing a good enough job, so been increasingly exposed to gambling
for other governments battling traded on third-party websites for they have an incentive to be rigorous. in various forms. Now we need new
hesitancy: embrace all the ways cash. Some sites also let players But skin-betting platforms don’t laws that are properly adapted to the
in which people get information gamble their skins to receive a more have the same requirements. They digital age. “The older generation of
today if you want your message valuable one. In some cases, this aren’t legally obliged to take this regulator, researcher and policy-maker
to rise above the anti-vax froth. ■ gambling is built into the game. For matter seriously, says Rachel O’Connell has absolutely no conception of the
example, during a shoot-’em-up, at Trust Elevate, a company focusing many forms that gambling now takes,”
Laura Spinney is based in France players might have a chance to gamble on age-verification technology. says Cassidy. ■

23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 25

APERTURE

26 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017

A messy midnight feast
DARKNESS in the Chocó rainforest of Ecuador
holds many surprises, such as this young Andean
mouse-opossum (Marmosops impavidus)
plucking a crunchy late-night snack from the air.
It was a lucky moment for herpetologist-
photographer Lucas Bustamante, if not for the
moth being devoured. The rodent, also known as
Tschudi’s slender opossum, fell under the glare
of his head torch, which also lured flying insects,
creating perfect conditions for a startling image.
So frenzied was the feast that Bustamante was
showered in debris. “Moth scales were flying all
around me,” he recalls.
He wasn’t actually looking for mammals when
he stumbled across this scene; he was searching
for frogs, lizards and snakes. Bustamante uses
his photography to raise global awareness
of amphibians and reptiles, many of them
endangered, partnering with conservation
groups in Ecuador and around the world to
display the rich natural wonders of this place.
The hope is that extinctions can be avoided
in habitats like the Chocó, which spans Ecuador,
Colombia and Panama, and is threatened by
logging, gold mining and drug cultivation. It is
a treasure trove of life, containing one of the
highest concentrations of endemic species
anywhere and probably many undiscovered ones.
Bustamante hopes to capture more of them on
camera soon. Jon White

Photographer
Lucas Bustamante
naturepl.com

23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 27

See the world
differently
Subscribe or give as a gift and save up to 54%
Visit newscientist.com/11102 or
call 0330 333 9470 and quote 11102
2018PREVIEW
1 Return to the moon The race to revisit
our closest neighbour 2 Missing limbs
regrown Bioelectricity remakes the body
3 Meet your long-lost cousin Next great
hominin fossil is imminent 4 Opioid crisis
continues Deadly epidemic shows no sign
5 Microbiology’s mother lode
of abating
New forms of life revealed 6 Bitcoin’s
bubble Cryptocurrency set for boom or bust?
7 Pre-birth therapy First stem cell treatment
in the womb 8 Last chance for the LHC
Time’s running out for the discovery of new
physics 9 Mission to Mercury An epic
voyage to a scorched world 10 Quantum
dawn Google’s computing breakthrough
 BILGIN S. SASMAZ/ANADOLU AGENCY/GETTY IMAGES FAR RIGHT: JIM WEHTJE

2018 PREVIEW

30 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017

1
 to the moon Everyone is going to the moon, so they say.
Between national space programmes and
private initiatives, 2018 is the goal launch year
for at least eight different missions to the
moon, making it the most popular destination
outside low Earth orbit.
Elon Musk said last year that SpaceX plans to
send two tourists on a jaunt around the moon
in 2018 using his Falcon Heavy rocket and Crew
Return
to launch and land a lunar rover. The first of
these firms to cruise across the moon’s surface
and send back video will receive $30 million.
Barring further extensions – there have been
several since the challenge was announced in
2007 – the competition will end on 31 March.
All the contenders have contracts with launch
providers, but the rovers are still being built and
there is no guarantee they will be ready in time

Dragon capsule. Neither of these have flown or survive the voyage.

yet, so they face significant testing before their
intended launch date at the end of the year, and
even a minor issue with one of them could
delay the journey. Musk has not revealed the
identities of the astro-tourists, who will pay an
undisclosed – but surely astronomical – amount
of money for the ride. President Trump declared
in December that the US will send astronauts
back to the moon, but in this modern moon race,
plenty of others are set to beat them there.
The Google Lunar X Prize is the motivation
for five privately funded groups making efforts
They are not the only ones getting in on
moon mania. India aims to launch its first rover
in March, along with a lunar orbiter and lander.
China’s Chang’e 4 mission is set to launch in
December 2018 with the country’s second lunar
lander and rover. Designed as a backup for their
predecessors, these have been repurposed for
a more difficult landing on the far side of the
moon. Chang’e 3 roamed the lunar surface for
a year and a half before it stopped transmitting
in 2015. Now, it will have a pal. In fact, things
might even get a little crowded. Leah Crane

“The lunar surface is the most

popular destination outside
low Earth orbit. It might even
get a bit crowded”

MISSING LIMBS REGROWN

A bold plan to regenerate missing
limbs by tweaking the body’s
bioelectricity could be realised in
the coming year. Michael Levin
and his team at Tufts University,
Massachusetts, have started
experiments to get mice to regrow
parts of their paws.
Levin’s team has already found
that patterns of electrical activity
allow cells to communicate with
each other, and control how
embryos develop. Earlier this year,
the group altered this pattern –
which they call the “bioelectric
code” – in worms, enabling them
to grow heads instead of tails and
vice versa.
Since then, the team has
developed a cocktail of chemicals
that alter the electrical activity of
cells by changing the way charged
substances, such as calcium ions,
move through them. Preliminary
results suggest this brew can
boost frogs’ natural ability to
regrow severed limbs.
The next step is to do this
in mammals – a much more
challenging feat since these
animals aren’t normally very good
at regenerating limbs. Mice and
humans might be able to regrow a
little piece of a chopped-off finger
or toe, but that is pretty much it.
Levin’s goal is to regenerate an
entire mouse paw – and eventually,
human limbs.
The team is now applying its
2
chemical cocktail to mice missing
parts of their paws. To do this,
Levin has created a silk-based gel
that can be impregnated with the
cocktail and attached to the end
of the damaged limb.
There have been some early
signs of regrowth, although the
researchers think they will need
to tweak either the cocktail or
the way they deliver it to get the
results they are hoping for. “We’ve
started with a mouse digit, but
ultimately it will be an entire paw,”
says Levin. Jessica Hamzelou

23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 31

 2018 PREVIEW
3 The 21st century has so far been a golden age of
hominin discovery. New species like the 7-million-year-
old Sahelanthropus tchadensis and the 300,000-year-
old Homo naledi have added to our understanding
of humanity’s past. And the finds will keep coming.
long-lost relative
“It doesn’t look like [we’re] sampling something that
is running out,” says John Hawks at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison. “I think in part there’s a greater
intensity of exploration right now.”
There’s a good chance that a new species will be
revealed in 2018, with rumours swirling of two major
finds that could answer many questions.
“Undoubtedly, the biggest gap is between 4 and
7 million years,” says Fred Spoor at University College
London. “It’s a huge amount of time that’s so far
represented by just a few bits and bobs.” Any hominins
Meet our
from that period are almost certainly new species, and
could reveal the earliest stages of hominin evolution.
32 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017
David Begun at the University ofToronto, Canada, wants
northerly fossils. In 2017 he studied Graecopithecus, an
extinct European ape from 7.25 million years ago. He
claimed it might have been a hominin, meaning Europe
was home to early hominins. “I would obviously like to
see more complete material attributable to
Graecopithecus or one of its relatives,” says Begun.
But for many, the focus is Africa 3 to 3.5 million years
ago. In the 1990s we thought only one hominin lived
back then – Lucy’s species Australopithecus afarensis,
which seemed likely to be our ancestor. But in 2001
Spoor revealed a second: Kenyanthropus platyops.
It may be crucial, as it might have been more closely
related to us than A. afarensis was. K. platyops and
humans (Homo) seem to belong in the same group,
with burly hominins called Paranthropus. If so, Homo
and Paranthropus emerged in Kenyanthropus‘s time.
There’s no trace of them so early – so far. Colin Barras
 OPIOID CRISIS
CLAIMS MORE
LIVES
Tens of thousands of people will
die from opioid drug use next year,
as the US epidemic worsens.
It is thought there were more
than 53,000 opioid-related deaths
there in 2016. Official tallies won’t
be released until next year, but a
number of states – among them
Missouri, Mississippi, Connecticut
and Maryland – have already
reported higher opioid-related
death rates for 2017 than for 2016.
While prescription painkillers
have played a role in the epidemic,
crackdowns mean many now get

4 opioids on the street – including

“Deaths from fentanyl –
which can be 100 times
URIEL SINAI/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX/EYEVINE TOP: SCOTT OLSON/GETTY IMAGES
fentanyl, which can be 100 times
more powerful than heroin.
Given its trajectory, this trend
is expected to worsen next year.
In 2016, there were over 21,000
fentanyl-related deaths – more
than double the number in 2015
– meaning the drug overtook heroin
as a cause of death.
It isn’t just a US problem.
Drug-related deaths have been
rising in Europe, and there were
more than 60 fentanyl-related
deaths in the UK in 2017.
Governments are finally taking
notice. Next February, medication
containing codeine will no longer
be sold over the counter in
Australia, where codeine-related
deaths have more than doubled

since 2000. This October, President

more powerful than Donald Trump declared a national
public health emergency in the US.
heroin – have doubled But any improvements there
and will continue rising” next year are likely to be achieved
by local areas and individual states
rather than by a government that
seems reluctant to commit any
emergency funding to the crisis.
Massachusetts and Rhode Island
are both already on track to have
fewer opioid-related deaths next
year. “I expect a few states may
begin to emerge as success stories
to be emulated,” says Michael
Barnett of Harvard University.
Mallory Locklear

23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 33

 COLIN MONTEATH/HEDGEHOG HOUSE/MINDEN PICTURES

Life’s hidden
2018 PREVIEW

realm revealed

34 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017

5
Get ready for an explosion of
life. Next year, thousands of
previously unknown microbes
will be revealed.
Bacteria and other microbes
are all around us, but we know
only about 1 per cent of them. The
rest are “microbial dark matter”.
It is hard to study these mystery
microbes because most can’t
be grown in labs. They need the
conditions of their natural habitat –
be it a hydrothermal vent or our
intestines – to survive.
Metagenomics gets around
this by taking a sample from a
habitat, reading all the DNA in it –
its metagenome – then using
computers to painstakingly
reassemble the genomes of all
the organisms.
Metagenomics has already
made big finds. In September,
Philip Hugenholtz and his team
at the University of Queensland,
Australia, used it to identify 1749
novel microbial species. But that
was just the tip of the iceberg.
Hugenholtz’s team is set to
unveil another 382 microbial
species in 2018. Other groups say
they have found thousands of new
species in permafrost, geothermal
“In 2018, they will publish the
springs, our guts and other places.
Nikos Kyrpides and his team at
the US Department of Energy
Joint Genome Institute are leading
the biggest metagenome project.
Next year, they will publish the
genomes of more than 100,000
microbial species from a range of
environments. They don’t yet know
how many are new to science,
but they expect thousands to be.
Once the genomes have been
published, we will be able to study
them to find out what each species
does. For example, we could scan
for patterns that resemble genes in
microorganisms known to produce
methane or oxygen.
There are many reasons why
these findings will be important.
A new species may prove useful
in medicine or industry, perhaps
helping to develop different
antibiotics or turn sewage into
clean water.
Filling in the microbial family tree
will also provide clues to our oldest
evolutionary history. For example,
we may be able to trace the origins
of basic life processes such as
respiration and photosynthesis.
“This is just the beginning,” says
Kyrpides. Alice Klein
genomes of over 100,000
microbes. Thousands will
be new to science”
BITCOIN’S
BUBBLE SET
TO BURST
6 Sick of hearing about bitcoin?
Well it’s unlikely to be any
different next year, and ICOs,
the latest cryptocurrency fad,
will be impossible to escape too.
This year, Jamie Foxx, Paris
Hilton and Floyd Mayweather all
promoted “initial coin offerings”.
Named to mimic initial public
offerings, where firms raise
money in exchange for shares,
ICOs allow companies to swap
tokens for cash. These tokens are
forms of cryptocurrency secured
using a blockchain, the technology
behind bitcoin.
What does a token get you? It
varies. For Filecoin, a company that
raised more than $250 million from
an ICO earlier this year, the tokens
let you trade hard drive space.
If you have a few spare gigabytes
on your home PC, you could
lend them out to other people
as cloud storage in exchange for
Filecoin tokens.
People who buy tokens during
an ICO are banking on their value
increasing. Once the platform is
up and running, demand for tokens
will rise, so early investors can sell
them at a profit – or so the theory
goes. But if the company goes bust
or never becomes popular, the
tokens could rapidly lose their
value. In this way, ICOs are the
cryptocurrency world’s answer to
crowdfunding. You could end up
backing a killer product or a dud.
Regulators have no idea what to
do about ICOs. China has banned
them, but those elsewhere have
largely been ignored. In the UK, for
example, the Financial Conduct
Authority has said ICOs are “very
high-risk, speculative investments”
and that people should be
prepared to lose their money.
And there is a lot to lose: 2017
saw more than $3 billion raised
by ICOs. It is clear there is an ICO
bubble, but nobody knows when
it will burst. Timothy Revell
23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 35
 2018 PREVIEW
7 “You can see during pregnancy that they already
have bone fractures in the womb,” says Cecilia
Götherström of the Karolinska Institute in
Stockholm, Sweden. She is head of what will be
the world’s first ever trial of giving fetuses stem
cell therapy in the womb.
fixed before birth
The aim is to relieve symptoms of, or even cure,
osteogenesis imperfecta, known as brittle bone
disease. Babies born with this rare condition have
bones that fracture easily, caused by having faulty
genes for collagen, the protein that normally
reinforces and strengthens bones.
Götherström hopes to prevent this before babies
are even born, by injecting them with healthy stem
cells that have been extracted from donated tissue
from aborted fetuses.
The team will specifically inject mesenchymal
stem cells, which should go on to make bone with
Disease
36 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017
fully functioning collagen. “We hope they will home to
bones, reside there and build them up, so they become
stronger and grow better,” says Götherström.
“We hope that by intervening so soon, we can treat
them before fractures and other damage develops in
the womb,” she says.
The team has got approval to carry out 30 treatments.
Most of these will be on fetuses, and the stem cells will
be injected into their mothers’ umbilical veins around
20 weeks into pregnancy. During their first year of life,
they will receive four booster injections. A number of
babies and infants will also be treated.
The team has already given the treatment to a
small number of fetuses, and had promising results.
The trial next year will be the first test of the approach to
include an untreated control group, to see whether the
treatment really does improve the health of babies with
this condition. Andy Coghlan

8 monumental since. We know that
“We know there is exotic
physics beyond the
standard model, but the
DR G. MOSCOSO/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY TOP: PETER MACDIARMID/GETTY IMAGES
LHC hasn’t seen signs of it.
Yet”
23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 37
LAST CHANCE
SALOON FOR
THE LHC
Stay on the edge of your seat. The
Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will
keep smashing particles until the
end of 2018, although this will be
our last chance for a while to see
a new particle emerge from the
cloud of collisions. A year from
now, the atom smasher will shut
down for two years of upgrades.
With the discovery of the Higgs
boson in 2012, the LHC completed
the menagerie predicted by the
standard model of particle physics.
It was a victorious moment, but
we haven’t seen anything as
there is exotic physics lurking
beyond the standard model; dark
matter and dark energy have not
yet been explained. But the LHC
has not seen signs of either – yet.
“It’s like we’ve done a corner of
a puzzle, but we don’t know what
the picture on the box looks like
and we don’t know what the rest
of the pieces are,” says Claire Lee, a
physicist at CERN. If new particles
are too heavy or last too long
before they decay, the LHC won’t
be able to detect them and we
will either have to build a bigger
collider or devise new ways to look
for them.
For now, it’s a numbers game.
Every second the LHC is running,
600 million particle collisions
happen in its detectors, spraying
out debris. The stuff we’re looking
for is extremely rare, so it may
only crop up once every thousand
billion collisions. That leaves an
avalanche of data to sift through
for minuscule anomalies.
That process takes a long
time – results are still coming out
from data taken in 2012. So just
because the cameras will stop
rolling doesn’t mean the main
feature is cancelled: weird new
particles could be hiding in LHC
data from this year or years past,
but we might not know for a while.
Leah Crane
 2018 PREVIEW

to Mercury
Mission
AIRBUS

38 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017

9
It should be signposted “Welcome
to hell”. Mercury, the sun’s closest
neighbour, sees blasts of radiation
and extreme temperatures – and
it’s where we’re headed next.
In October 2018, a probe called
BepiColombo will set off on an
epic seven-year voyage to orbit
the scorched world. Provided it can
withstand the unforgiving 350°C
after it arrives in 2025, the craft will
try to unravel some of the enigmas
left after observations by two
previous missions to the planet.
Mariner 10 swept past Mercury
in 1974 and found, to everyone’s
surprise, that it had a magnetic
field, whereas Venus, Mars and the
moon don’t. More mysteries arose
when Messenger visited a few
years ago. In 2009, it confirmed
that Mercury has a tenuous upper
atmosphere of charged particles
too sparse to constitute a true
atmosphere. In 2012, it spotted
what appeared to be ice buried in
deep craters at the poles.
BepiColombo may confirm that
the material is indeed solid ice, and
work out how it survives. “It could
be that the ice is always in shadow,
so sunlight never shines on it,
explaining why it’s been there for
“It will be an epic seven-year
billions of years,” says Johannes
Benkhoff of the European Space
Agency, which is running the
mission alongside the Japan
Aerospace Exploration Agency.
Messenger also saw bright
hollows in the planet’s plains.
Volatile material may make these
pits by lifting off from the surface
and floating into space, maybe
sublimed by intense heat from
beneath. If BepiColombo finds that
material does indeed leave the
planet, it would be a “sensation”,
says Benkhoff, because it would
indicate geological activity on a
planet thought to be inactive.
BepiColombo may also confirm
Einstein’s theory of general
relativity. Mercury’s warped
orbit might be explained through
relativistic effects, and because
we can precisely pin down the
craft’s position, we can see if the
planet’s path obeys the theory.
But getting there will be no
cakewalk. “It’s easier to get to
Pluto,” says Benkhoff. The craft
will have to brake against the sun’s
huge gravitational pull, so must
take a circuitous route involving one
Earth flyby, two of Venus and six
past Mercury itself. Andy Coghlan
journey to reach the
scorched planet and unravel
some of its enigmas”
GOOGLE’S
QUANTUM
DAWN
10 If all goes to plan in 2018, Google
will unveil a device capable of
performing calculations that no
other computer on the planet can
tackle. The quantum computing
era is upon us.
Well, sort of. Google is set to
achieve quantum supremacy, the
long-awaited first demonstration
of quantum computers’ ability to
outperform ordinary machines at
certain tasks. Regular computing
bits can be in one of two states:
0 or 1. Their quantum cousins,
qubits, get a performance boost
by storing a mixture of both states
at the same time.
Google’s planned device has
just 49 qubits – hardly enough to
threaten the world’s high-speed
supercomputers. But the tech
giant has stacked the deck heavily
in its favour, choosing to attack a
problem involving simulating the
behaviour of random quantum
objects – a significant home
advantage for a quantum machine.
This task is useless. Solving
it won’t build better AI, improve
image recognition or even help
filter your emails. But as proof of
scientific principle, Google’s first
ever record-beating quantum
calculation will be a landmark
event on a par with the launch
of Sputnik or splitting the atom.
The breakthrough will spark
a rush to invest in developing
quantum technology – a field that
is already surprisingly far along in
commercialisation. In the next
decade, quantum computers will
move from laboratory curiosities
to actual, useful technology.
Google seems to be on track
to hit 49 qubits next year. There is
just one wrinkle – in October, IBM
threw Google a curveball with
a 56-qubit-size simulation on an
ordinary computer, thus raising the
bar for quantum supremacy. Next
year, Google will have to show it is
up to the challenge. Jacob Aron
23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 39
 REVIEW 2017

Technology
THE ULTIMATE PLAYER
AlphaGo has been going from strength
to strength. In January, it emerged that
DeepMind’s Go-playing AI had been lurking
incognito in online Go tournaments and
secretly beating some of the world’s top
human players. And in May it beat Ke Jie,
the world’s number one player, in Wuzhen,
China. Finally, in October, DeepMind unveiled
a new version that hones its considerable
skills by playing against itself. Three days
and 4.9 million games later, AlphaGo Zero
is unbeatable.

GPS SPOOFING ATTACK

Russia may be testing a new system for spoofing
GPS, we revealed in August. The GPS on board
a ship off the coast of Russia put it more than
32 kilometres away from where it really was.
At least 20 ships were affected. It seems to be
the first documented use of GPS misdirection.
VCG VIA GETTY IMAGES

WEAPONISED PROPAGANDA
Could Facebook really tip the balance in an
election? In July, we got the first suggestion
that it could. A study that created Facebook ad
campaigns tailored to certain groups showed
how AI can direct political campaigns at people
based on their personality and political interests,
Health

TURN BACK TIME potentially influencing their vote.

In January, we reported on Hanadie Yousef’s work
on mice at Stanford University. She has developed
an antibody that blocks the harmful effects of a
protein that builds up in the blood with age. Then
in March we revealed that Hartmut Geiger at the
University of Ulm, Germany, and his team had
rejuvenated stem cells in the blood of old mice
using a bone marrow protein. The race is on to “The race is on to develop a
develop a blood rejuvenation drug.
drug that can rejuvenate older
EDITING OUR GENOME people’s blood, restoring its
We uncovered results from the first study to
use CRISPR genome editing in normal human stem cell properties and
embryos in March. The team in China had removing harmful proteins”
corrected genetic mutations in at least some
of the cells of three embryos. Then we revealed
in May that as many as 20 human trials of the
technique for diseases in adults were imminent,
mostly in China. These included the first to edit
cells with CRISPR while still inside the body.

REMEMBER THIS
In July, Christine Denny at Columbia University
and her team revived forgotten memories in
mice with Alzheimer’s-like symptoms by
activating the neurons in which memories
were stored. Perhaps Alzheimer’s just makes
memories harder to access, rather than
destroying them.

40 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017

“It is now completely clear
that our best models
predict more warming
than the average model”
Earth

CLIMATE OF FEAR
The effort to stop climate change hit the buffers
in 2017. DonaldTrump announced that the US

NASA/JPL-CALTECH/SPACE SCIENCE INSTITUTE

would leave the Paris climate accord, though in
practice it is committed until 2020. Emissions of
greenhouse gases began rising again after holding
steady for three years, and the fraction of our
energy that comes from non-fossil fuels has barely
changed in 25 years. Finally, the climate models
that best fit the observations predict 15 per cent
more warming than is generally expected.

HUMANS ARE HOW OLD?

It seems our species is almost twice as ancient
as we thought. For decades anthropologists
have believed that Homo sapiens evolved
200,000 years ago. But H. sapiens-like skulls from
Space & Physics CASSINI’S SWAN SONG
In September, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft ended
its 20-year mission in spectacular fashion
Jebel Irhoud in Morocco have now been dated by diving directly into Saturn’s atmosphere,
to between 250,000 and 350,000 years ago. burning up on the way down. The craft was
The find rewrites our history. running out of fuel and its fiery demise avoided
contamination of nearby moons. We already
NOW WE ARE THREE miss Cassini’s stunning images of the ringed
For years, we thought only two species planet, though they will continue to fuel
CANDREW WALMSLEY/NATUREPL

of orangutan existed: the Bornean and the discoveries for years to come.
Sumatran ones. But it turns out there are
three.TheTapanuli orangutan was unveiled HIDDEN NO MORE
in November. It is the seventh non-human Half of the normal matter in the universe was
great ape. But the population is only 800 and missing – until this year. Made of particles called
they live in an area smaller than London. baryons, this bright stuff was spotted hiding out in
tenuous filaments of gas between galaxies, only
made visible by combining millions of images.

A FAR-OFF MOON
In July, we reported tantalising hints of an
exomoon, the first to be detected outside our solar
system. David Kipping at Columbia University
in New York and his colleagues used the Kepler
Space Telescope to find a dip in light as this
wannabe moon passed in front of its star. If real,
it is probably as big as Neptune and orbits a
Jupiter-sized planet 4000 light years away.

23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 41

 Flake news!
There’s snow substitute for our 36-page festive features special:
featuring fake flakes, the people who can see time, a secret
chocolate garden, the mystery of the nocturnal sun, the world’s
blingiest birds and dumbest robots and much, much more...

44
LIFE IN THE
SLOTH LANE
47
BLUE DYE
THINKING
49
ARTIFICIAL
INCOMPETENCE
51
WET’S IN
A NAME

63
BRIGHT SKY
AT NIGHT
65
CHOCOLATE
GARDEN
67
SECRETS OF
EARWAX

42 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017

53
FROM RUSSIA
WITH LULZ
56
HOLLY
HUNTERS
58
THE GHOSTS OF
SCIENCE PAST
60
THE GRAPE
DEPRESSION

69NEST IN
SHOW
72
ACCEPT SNOW
SUBSTITUTES
74
CLOCKING
TIME
76
MISSIVES
IMPOSSIBLE

23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 43

Life in the
sloth lane
Evolution has worked tirelessly to perfect
the world’s laziest animal, finds Jason Bittel
EORGE-LOUIS LECLERC, the
G Comte De Buffon, was the most
famous naturalist on the planet in
the middle of the 18th century, and he
didn’t think much of the New World. He
proclaimed the Americas “degenerate”,
a sodden, miserable land filled with
weak and inferior species. But Buffon
reserved his most biting contempt for
one creature in particular.
He wrote of their “too short”
and “badly terminated” legs, of their
“slowness, stupidity… and even
habitual sadness”. “These sloths,”
he continued, “are the lowest term of
existence in the order of animals with
flesh and blood. One more defect would
have made their existence impossible.”
Buffon couldn’t have been more
wrong. What he saw as shortcomings
we now realise are exquisite adaptations
that have allowed sloths to thrive in an
exceedingly austere niche for at least
30 million years. In fact, the closer we
look at sloth biology, the more we see
just how hard evolution has had to
work so that these notorious dawdlers
can take it easy.
One reason we know so little about
sloths is that they are surprisingly
difficult to study. They live high in the
canopies of South and Central America
and are extremely hard to spot: they
are small, they rarely move and their
fur often gets matted with green algae,
making them blend in with the leaves.
To figure out exactly how slow
they are, in 2014 Jonathan Pauli at
the University of Wisconsin-Madison
and colleagues went to Costa Rica to
44 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017
measure the metabolic rates of three-
toed brown-throated sloths and
Hoffmann’s two-toed sloths. He found
that while both species have extremely
slow metabolisms, the three-toed sloth
is a record-breaker. The rate at which it
expends energy in the wild, known
as the field metabolic rate, came in at
162 kilojoules per day per kilogram,
meaning it has lower energy needs
than any other mammal that isn’t
hibernating, including renowned
slouches like koalas (410 kJ/day/kg)
and giant pandas (185 kJ/day/kg).
The long way down
Part of the reason sloths are such
extreme energy savers is their diet.
They are arboreal folivores, meaning
they live in trees and eat leaves. It is
a deeply unpopular lifestyle choice,
occurring in just 0.2 per cent of
mammal species, and for good reason:
leaves tend to be rather difficult to
digest and contain few nutrients. Some
tree-living leaf-eaters, such as howler
monkeys, get around this by gorging
on massive quantities of the stuff.
Sloths have adopted a different
strategy: they nibble a bit here and
there, making sure to keep their
stomachs full. And they don’t rush
digestion. It can take anywhere from
two days to nearly two months before
swallowed food emerges again as dung,
which makes this the longest digestive
process on record for a plant-eating
mammal. That’s particularly weird
when you consider that among
MY ANCESTOR
ST
THE ANTEATER
Look at a three-toed sloth and
a two-toed sloth side by side and
you might think they descended
from a common, tree-living ancestor.
The truth is much stranger.
Genetic studies suggest that the
two branches of living sloths hark back
to entirely different genera of giant
ground sloths. Two-toed sloths, it
seems, come from a family of beasts
called Megalonyx, roughly the size of
grizzly bears, while three-toed sloths
are most closely related to the
elephant-sized Megatherium.
It is a great example of convergent
evolution. But how did they both move
from the ground to the trees? John
Nyakatura at Humboldt University in
Berlin has an idea.
Sloths are xenarthrans: they belong
to the same group as anteaters and
armadillos, both of which boast large,
curved claws and powerful forelimbs.
Nyakatura suggests that the last
common ancestor of today’s sloths
probably inherited these features
from their giant ancestors, which were
powerful diggers, before co-opting
them for an arboreal lifestyle. If so, the
common ancestor might have looked
like the silky anteater, which can move
upside down beneath branches.
 mammals, the digestion rate typically
depends on body size, with big animals
taking longer to digest their food.
A long and winding alimentary
canal isn’t the only way sloths conserve
energy. They also allow their body
temperature to vary wildly compared
with other mammals. Whereas
humans hover within a degree of 38°C,
the three-toed sloths Pauli studied
allowed swings of nearly 5°C as the
forest cooled or warmed around them.
“That’s a huge cost saving,” says Pauli,
because maintaining a core body
temperature is energetically expensive.
But sloths still need a way to warm
up. Shivering, favoured by most warm-
blooded animals, is for creatures with
energy to burn. Instead, Pauli says,
three-toed sloths climb higher into the
canopy each morning to make the most
of the sun’s generosity. “They’re on the
reptile end of being a mammal,” says
Rebecca Cliffe, a sloth researcher at
Swansea University in the UK.
Life as an extreme energy saver does
have its drawbacks. “Sloths can’t jump,”
says Cliffe. “They never do anything
unless they’re holding on with at least
two hands.” But even beyond saving
energy, the sloth’s characteristic slow-
motion upside-down walking might
have another benefit: camouflage. One
of the sloth’s main predators, the harpy
eagle, relies on seeing its prey move.
“Everything in the forest can eat them,”
says Sam Trull, co-founder of the Sloth
Institute in Costa Rica. “So they have to
be careful to go undetected, and one of
the best ways to do that is to be very
slow and very quiet.”
Hanging upside down, completely
still, for hours on end seems to do the
trick. Sloths can do this in part thanks
to their long, curved claws, which
their giant ancestors used to excavate
tunnels (see “My ancestor the anteater,”
left), but now operate more like coat
hangers. The constant grip is made
possible by a lattice of tendons in the
hands and feet that draw the digits
closed while at rest.
But there seems to be more to their
muscular abilities than that. We usually
JEAN BAPTISTE VAN DAMME

think about muscles as doing one thing

well, says Michael Butcher, a zoologist
at Youngstown State University in
Ohio. An Olympic weightlifter, for
instance, has muscles capable of >

23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 45

LIVING, FAST AND SLOW
Sloths aren’t the only creatures
with extreme energy lifestyles
FAST: Hummingbirds
Flapping your wings 70 times a
second is hard work, so it is little
wonder these tiny birds have
super-fast metabolisms. If humans
had the same metabolic rate, we
would have to eat 155,000 calories
per day – that’s 77 times as much as
we actually consume.
SLOW: Giant tortoises
Living on islands prone to long
droughts and food shortages, these
behemoths can go months without
sustenance. Alas, such superpowers
backfired when European seafarers
realised they could keep them below
deck as a living larder, and their
numbers plummeted.
FAST: Camel spiders
Most arachnids are sit-and-wait
predators, relying on webs or
ambush tactics to take down their
unsuspecting prey. Not camel spiders,
properly known as solifugids: they
run and run and run until they find
something, anything, to satisfy their
extremely high energy needs.
SLOW: Geckos
Bradfield’s Namib day geckos use
about one-quarter as much energy as
other desert geckos. Not only do they
move and eat very little, they also
boast special scales that grab heat
from the sun. They even have the
ability to absorb 70 per cent of their
daily water intake from fog.
FAST: Swordfish
To help them zip around at lightning
speed, swordfish have huge hearts
relative to their body size and blood
containing an unusually high
concentration of oxygen-carrying
haemoglobin. They even boast a gland
in their heads to produce a lubricating
oil that seems to reduce drag.
SLOW: Greenland sharks
MATTHIAS BREITER/PLAINPICTURE
With lifespans exceeding 400 years,
Greenland sharks are in it for the long
haul. They swim slowly, grow just
1 centimetre a year and the females
may not become sexually mature
until they are 156 years old.
46 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017
“Why sloths climb all the
way down to the forest
floor to defecate, then bury
the mess, is still a mystery”
small, powerful movements, whereas a
marathon runner’s muscles are geared
towards sustaining long periods of
exertion. “But sloths break that rule,”
he says. They have an uncanny ability
to resist fatigue, as well as a surprising
amount of strength.
To better understand how they do
it, Butcher dissected a dozen sloth
cadavers. He was surprised to see they
had very little muscle tissue – roughly
10 per cent less than you find in other
arboreal mammals. But what muscle
there is appears to be extraordinary.
Most strikingly, sloth muscles
seem to contain a unique set of
enzymes that confers tolerance to
heavy accumulations of lactic acid,
which may help them resist fatigue as
they hang out or move in super-slow
motion. Butcher’s latest work, which
hasn’t yet been published, suggests
that sloths have enzyme profiles
similar to fast-running cats such
as cheetahs. “Sprinting is all about
anaerobic power for short durations,”
says Butcher. “So it is odd and
fascinating that a sloth that hangs for
extended periods of time matches that
metabolic profile.”
The plot thickens when you consider
that anaerobic power is less efficient
because, while it can create energy
quickly, it can only create a fraction of
the energy that aerobic mechanisms
produce. And yet for an animal that has
spent millions of years trending toward
energetic thrift, a little bit of immediate
energy from time to time seems to be
the least wasteful way to power their
occasional perambulations.
For all these fresh insights, there is
still a lot to learn about sloths. We don’t
know why they climb all the way down
to the forest floor to defecate, for
instance, never mind why they bury
the mess. It doesn’t seem very frugal.
Perhaps it is a form of communication,
says Cliffe. It could even be linked to a
putative nutrient cycle involving the
algae that colonise the sloths’ fur and
certain moths that share this just-
about mobile home, Pauli suggests.
One thing is clear, though: the more
we learn about these extraordinary
creatures and their unhurried lifestyle,
the easier it is to appreciate how diet
and metabolism can drive evolutionary
Hummingbirds adaptation. And that applies to us
burn energy faster humans too.
than every other In 2016, Herman Pontzer at the
vertebrate City University of New York and his
colleagues compared human energy
expenditure to that of chimpanzees,
bonobos, gorillas and orangutans, and
found that we burn calories 27 per cent
faster than other primates. The
researchers reason that this dramatic
uptick afforded us not only enhanced
brainpower, but also the opportunity
for faster reproduction and longer
lives. These changes probably occurred
as we diversified our diets and ate more
high-calorie foods, like meat. We also
started to get fatter, probably as
insurance against food shortages.
If that last fact hits a little too close to
home at this time of year, don’t look to
the sloths for lifestyle tips. It has taken
them millions of years to acquire the
behaviours and anatomy to live the
way they do. You are unlikely to
reproduce it in the six weeks you might
invest in a New Year’s resolution. Q
Jason Bittel is saving his energy
 Blue dye thinking
Blue pigments are so rare that people will go to the depths
of the planet to create new ones, says Joshua Howgego
THE STARRY NIGHT, JUNE 1889, GOGH, VINCENT VAN/MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK, USA/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES
OU have probably seen The
Y Great Wave off Kanagawa – the
Japanese woodblock print of a
huge, foaming wave about to engulf
a group of small boats. It’s no surprise
that the picture is mostly blue; it is a
wave after all.
However, it is part of a series of
images called Thirty-six Views of Mount
Fuji by the artist Hokusai, and if you
flick through them, you will notice
that nearly every one is predominantly
blue. That might seem strange, until
you realise that in 1830, when Hokusai
began printing these works, blue was
rather a new thing. The Prussian blue
he used had been introduced into Japan
just a few years earlier, giving artists
their first blue pigment that was bright,
attractive and lasting.
“Historically, blue has been a big
Fade to grey: Van
Gogh’s The Starry
Night would once
have been bluer
issue for artists; there are very few
natural blue colours,” says materials
scientist David Dobson at University
College London. These days, we have
plenty of blue dyes, which, being
soluble, are ideal for colouring
materials uniformly. But the insoluble
blue pigments needed for paints,
printing inks, ceramics and plastics
are still rare. That is why, when Dobson
realised that he might be able to
create a new one based on a mineral
that can exist only at the immense
“The ancient Greeks
didn’t even have a word
for blue – hence Homer’s
famous ‘wine-dark’ sea”
pressures found 500 kilometres
beneath Earth’s surface, he was very
much up for the challenge.
The colour blue has proved such a
problem to recreate that most ancient
cultures don’t seem to have had a word
for it – Homer famously describes the
“wine-dark” sea. Only the ancient
Egyptians are known to have had one,
and it’s probably no coincidence that
they alone were able to produce a blue
pigment. Egyptian blue was used
widely until the Middle Ages when the
recipe was lost and artists had to resort
to either azurite or ultramarine (see
“True blue”, page 48). Both were made
from naturally occurring minerals,
the latter from lapis lazuli. This was
exorbitantly expensive, explaining
why blue tended to be reserved for
high-ticket items such as the Virgin
Mary’s robes.
Dobson, who is an artist as well
as a scientist, has a long-running
collaboration with Jo Volley at UCL’s
Slade School of Fine Art. However,
he was unaware of just how rare blue
pigments are until a few years ago.
His epiphany came when he attended a
meeting of artists to describe his work
with one of Volley’s students hunting
for new pigments in coal-mine sludge.
The conference was abuzz with the
discovery of a pigment called YInMn
blue. Volley explained that everyone
was excited about it because blues are
so rare. That got Dobson thinking about
another blue he had seen – a mineral
that had been discovered deep in the
bowels of our planet.
It’s not easy to know exactly
what rocks deep inside Earth are like
because they exist under extreme
pressures and change when brought
to the surface as the minerals become
distorted. However, sometimes
diamonds are dug up that bear >
23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 47
TRUE BLUE
AZURITE
The first blue pigment. Originally made by
grinding up the mineral azurite, a copper
carbonate. Synthesised artificially from the
17th century. Can dehydrate into malachite,
another copper carbonate, which is green.
THE MILKMAID, VERMEER, JAN (JOHANNES) (1632-75)/RIJKSMUSEUM, AMSTERDAM/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES
ULTRAMARINE
Made as early as 7000 BC in Afghanistan
from lapis lazuli. Famously used on
Tutankhamun’s death mask, illuminated
manuscripts and Italian panel paintings.
In the Renaissance it was more expensive
than gold. First synthesised in 1826.
PRUSSIAN BLUE
The first modern synthetic pigment.
Discovered by accident in 1706, and
produced by the oxidation of ferrous
ferrocyanide salts. Exemplified by
Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa
and Van Gogh’s The Starry Night. It fades
to grey over time.
COBALT BLUE
A mixture of cobalt, aluminium and
oxygen. Discovered by French chemist
Louis Jacques Thénard in 1802. Famously
used in Bristol blue glass. The pigment is
very stable but costly, and cobalt is toxic
when inhaled or ingested.
AZURITE/UHA/UIG/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES
YINMN BLUE
Discovered by Mas Subramanian at Oregon
State University in 2009. An inorganic
pigment, prepared by heating oxides of
yttrium, indium and manganese to around
1200°C. It is chemically stable, non-toxic
and does not fade.
“inclusions” – minerals within them
that are trapped at the pressures they
experience during formation. In 2014,
Graham Pearson at the University of
Alberta, Canada, found such a diamond
containing the mineral ringwoodite.
Geologists were fascinated because
it addressed a long-running debate
about where Earth’s water came from;
it is thought that ringwoodite in the
mantle contains enough water to fill
the surface oceans three times over.
But Pearson’s discovery intrigued
Dobson for an entirely different
reason: the mineral was blue.
Now, ringwoodite’s structure would
collapse and lose its intense colour
at normal surface pressures, but
Dobson wondered if it might be
48 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017
were in a tetrahedral configuration, in
which each is surrounded by four other
atoms. “If you could put an iron ion
into a tetrahedral coordination, it
should end up going blue,” he says.
In January 2017, Dobson got a chance
to test this idea when he became the
first scientist in residence at the Slade
School. What he needed was a mineral
that would interact with iron ions to
give a crystal with the characteristic
tetrahedral configuration found in
ringwoodite. First he looked at a series
of minerals called spinels, which have
a cubic crystalline structure. One
of these, magnesium aluminate
(MgAl2O4), seemed perfect because its
aluminium ions have the same charge
as the iron ions in ringwoodite. But
when he tried baking it in an oven with
a source of iron, he found the iron kept
slipping into the wrong size gaps –
surrounding itself with eight oxygen
atoms rather than four. “It ended up
just brown,” says Dobson.
Then he hit on two other
Vivianite, the blue compounds, zinc silicate (ZnSiO4)
used by Vermeer in and zinc germanate (ZnGeO4),
The Milkmaid, and which contain zinc in just the
azurite (left) both right configuration. When he tried
turn green in time substituting the zinc for iron, lo and
behold he got two new blues. The
silicate is a soft, greenish blue that
Dobson describes as “duck egg”.
The germanate gives a richer
“deep water blue”.
A manufacturer of fine-art
products has already shown interest
in commercialising his blues. But
there is still a hurdle to overcome. At
possible to capture its blueness by the moment, when the compound
engineering a crystal that mimicked Dobson has created is ground into a
it at surface pressure. fine powder to suspend into a liquid
You can think of a crystal a bit like a paint, its colour dims. That’s because it
3D version of the colourful, tessellated contains too little iron. But if he adds
tiling often seen in Islamic buildings. too much, the blue will disappear.
Each atom in the crystal structure is The balance of iron and zinc in the
like a tile that must fit snugly next to its compound needs to be just right.
neighbours. Dobson made an educated “That’s what I’m working on now:
guess that the key to ringwoodite’s trying to see how much iron I can
blueness was the iron atoms. These dissolve into these structures and so
how intense I can get the blue,” says
“Unfortunately, a student Dobson. “Unfortunately, a student
recently blew up my furnace, so that’s
recently blew up my hampering progress.”
furnace, so that’s But then, no one said making a new
blue would be easy. Q
hampering progress”
Joshua Howgego has got the blues
Artificial
Judging by the awkward ascents of
most robots, to avoid the rise of the
machines we only need to retreat to
the mezzanine.

incompetence
Robots that aren’t quite as good
as they seem have a glorious lineage.
At the 1939 World’s Fair in New York,
the Westinghouse Electric Corporation
paraded Elektro the Moto-Man, a
“talking”, cigarette-smoking robot.
It could move a little, count its fingers
Will robots take over the world? and utter lines such as “I am Elektro”
and “My brain is bigger than yours”.
Nah, says Douglas Heaven Standing more than 2 metres tall, the
golden humanoid wowed crowds.
Westinghouse even built it with a
hole in its chest lest people think
there were human operators inside.
E ALL know how it ends: the machines. There is BigDog, a four- Actually, Wizard-of-Oz-like, they

W machines rise up to enslave

their puny masters. Robots
and artificial intelligences may so far
legged metal pack mule that can
cope with stairs and rough terrain;
WildCat, which can run at more than
were behind a curtain. A light bulb
would flash to signal that a voice
command had been received,
have confined themselves to blameless 30 kilometres an hour; and SpotMini, so they could press a button to play
pursuits such as vacuum cleaning, a dog-like robot designed for homes a recording. Elektro went on tour
beating us at board games and and offices that has an arm for a head. again in 1950 and appeared as campus
recommending products we might Impressive, or terrifying, depending computer Thinko in the 1960 comedy
also like. But as they continue their on your point of view. But Raibert romp Sex Kittens Go to College, proving
inexorable rise, entering a “singularity” also played a video that showed the that, in common with their human
of runaway self-improvement, they humanoid Atlas robot missing some creators, robots have no shame.
will inevitably turn their attention to shelves where it was supposed to In fairness, Elektro was more
robopocalypse. Stephen Hawking says deposit a carton, then tripping over the publicity stunt than the stuff of serious
AI could spell the end for humanity. shelves and finally falling flat on its face. research. Not so NASA’s hydraulic,
Elon Musk thinks it could lead to world The fact is, moving is hard. So is not spacesuit-testing robot of the early
war three. Vladimir Putin says whoever moving: when we stand still, our brains 1960s. Built by Joe Slowik, an engineer
controls AI will control the world. have to tell our muscles to make tiny at the Illinois Institute of Technology
Maybe so. But as comic strip author adjustments all the time just to keep in Chicago, the idea was to kit the robot
Randall Munroe – himself formerly a us upright. Robots are terrible at it. out in the latest experimental suit and
roboticist – puts it in his book What If? They aren’t very good at opening suspend it from the ceiling to mimic
Serious scientific answers to absurd doors either. And for all BigDog’s First casualty in the effects of zero gravity. An operator
hypothetical questions: “What people abilities, don’t even talk about stairs. the robot wars would guide it through a repertoire of
don’t appreciate, when they picture lifelike movements using a network of
Terminator-style automatons striding small tubes carrying high-pressure oil
triumphantly across a mountain of under the robot’s aluminium skin.
human skulls, is how hard it is to keep But the tubes weren’t strong enough
your footing on something as unstable to contain the pressurised oil and
as a mountain of human skulls.” leaked. Crippled by incontinence, the
Far from being a steady march to robot ended its days wearing a nappy,
greatness, the past and present of a wetsuit used to contain the fluid.
robotics and AI are littered with It never graduated to a spacesuit.
examples of banal practicalities tying Most robotics researchers have their
machines down. If you want to look at favourite bad robot story. For Alan
what the future of AI really holds, it’s Winfield at the Bristol Robotics Lab in
not the highlight reels that matter – the UK, it involves an assembly-line
DOD PHOTO/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

it’s the out-takes. robot rigged to open a fridge and pass

Boston Dynamics in Waltham, out cans of Coke to passers-by at a trade
Massachusetts, makes some of the show. The fridge door stopped working,
most advanced robots in the world. In a so the robot arm punched its way
TED talk earlier this year, founder Marc through, grabbed a can and then lifted
Raibert showed off his firm’s range of the entire fridge as it tried to remove >

23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 49

the drink. If that’s back in the realm of
the unnerving, Winfield does note that
although he has heard the story many
times, it might be apocryphal.
Roomba, the robotic vacuum
cleaner, is very real. When Jesse
Newton’s example encountered puppy
mess in the middle of its nightly clean,
it simply continued its cycle, smearing
it over the entire floor. Never mind
robopocalypse, this was “poocalypse”,
in Newton’s words. According to a
spokesperson for iRobot, the company
that makes Roomba, it wasn’t an
isolated incident.
The popularity of YouTube videos
celebrating robotic epic fails is proof
of our schadenfreude when robots go
wrong. “Watching things fail is always
funny and with robots you avoid the
need to feel bad,” says the founder of
the “Shitty Robots” forum on the web
discussion site Reddit, who goes by the
name mr_bag. “I also quite enjoy how
the robots in question often manage to
come across as being quite proud of
their achievement.”
But Winfield thinks out-take videos
serve a more serious purpose. Greater
familiarity with dead ends and failed
experiments would help counter
the Hawking-Musk narrative that
a superintelligence will take over
the world, he says. It shows AI and
robotics for what they are: very human
endeavours whose products are limited

RENAUD VIGOURT
by human flaws and foibles. “They are a
great reality check that real-world robots
fall well short of the hype,” he says.

DUMB AND DUMBER

If machines aren’t all they are
cracked up to be (see main
story), some were never meant
to be any good in the first place.
There is something cathartic
about a useless machine.
Perhaps it comes from our
unease about our perceived
diminishing place in the scheme
of things, but a machine that
clearly does nothing – or even
defeats itself – makes us feel
better for a moment.
Take AI pioneer Marvin
Minsky’s mechanised box. Its
sole action when switched on
was to extend a hand to turn
itself off again. Minsky also
invented a machine that would
ring a bell if it sensed that the
gravitational constant had
changed.
The Unplugger robot, created
by “sculptor of the useless and
absurd” Nik Ramage, is a more
recent variant on this theme.
Plugged into a power socket by
a short cable, this steampunk
contraption trundles forwards
until it pulls out its own plug.
Occasionally, tech nihilism
takes on a darker flavour. Artist
Matt Kenyon has built a small,
wheeled robot that searches
for and sucks up puddles of
Coca-Cola from the floor
through a straw, before spraying
the drink over itself. The acidic
liquid slowly eats through the
robot’s skin until it reaches the
circuitry, causing a breakdown.
Simone Giertz, YouTube’s
“queen of shitty robots”, has
become synonymous with the
form. Starting with an idea for a
machine that she would actually
like to have, Giertz builds
something so over the top that it
is ridiculous. “It’s funny in the
same way as a well-trained
show dog suddenly stopping
to poop on the arena floor,”
she says. Highlights include a
breakfast-making robot that
hurls Cheerios and milk over a
table, a lipstick applicator that
smears make-up across her
cheeks and a wake-up device
that slaps her repeatedly before
getting tangled in her hair. In
her videos, Giertz sits blithely
by – a picture of the human
serenity we should adopt in the
midst of mechanical meltdown.

50 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017


It is probably wise counsel to look in
the mirror if we want to see what the
future truly holds for AI. Besides a lot
of machines that will undoubtedly be
useful in our daily lives, the picture
includes a good few robots unwittingly
replicating human klutziness – and
AIs adopting the worst of human
intelligence.
Take Microsoft’s Tay, the chatbot it
debuted in 2016. Designed to interact
with people on social media by picking
up their natural phrasing and slang,
it was almost immediately tricked
into making racist and inflammatory
comments. Microsoft pulled the plug
within 24 hours.
Robopocalypse never
So perhaps what we should fear is
not so much the robots as ourselves.
“Focusing on implausible futures like
Skynet or the singularity distracts
from real issues that are happening
today,” says Mark Riedl, an artificial
intelligence researcher at the Georgia
Institute of Technology in Atlanta.
The signs are that most of us
would rather be distracted. Earlier
this year, Facebook announced it was
discontinuing an experiment to get
bots to learn to negotiate because the
AI wasn’t haggling in human-readable
language, making it hard to understand
what they were up to. That got mangled
by many news outlets into Facebook
shutting the experiment down because
the AI was getting too smart.
The Facebook incident spawned
a meme among AI researchers of
congratulating each other on a sudden
or unexpected result by sending
messages saying “shut it down!”.
But the truth is that rumours of the
singularity are vastly exaggerated, even
if they are often propounded by those
who should know better.
Riedl thinks his peers need to
acknowledge that the perils of physical
existence and the very human flaws
that AIs adopt mean they will always,
ultimately, be dragged down to our
level. Nemesis comes before hubris,
says Riedl. “One thing that would be
healthy for the entire field of AI is if we
had more recognition of failures.” Q
Douglas Heaven can’t do stairs
Wet’s in
a name
We could learn a lot from England’s soggy
Anglo-Saxon place names, says Richard Webb
T’S blowy on the B4380 to Buildwas.
I A keen wind whipping across the
floodplain from Shrewsbury flaps a
misarranged saddle bag strap against
my back wheel. As I cross the river
Severn at Atcham, and bend right down
the back road past Wroxeter, a black
cloud delivers the first dribbles of rain.
England’s place names are a treasure
trove of hidden history – if only
we could find the key. Shrewsbury:
recorded in the 10th century as
Scrobbesbyrig, the name’s origin is as
uncertain as its pronunciation today,
but possibly means “the fortified place
in the scrub”. Atcham: a contraction of
Attingham, “the homestead of Eata’s
children”, a puzzling reference to an
obscure 7th-century saint from
England’s far north. Wroxeter: origin
disputed, but a rare Roman place name
survival, as befits the site of what was
Roman Britain’s fourth largest town.
Buildwas: we’ll get to that.
In the title of one of her books,
Margaret Gelling, the doyenne of
English toponymists, called place
names “signposts to the past”.
I’m cycling the road to Buildwas
because they could be signposts
to the future, too.
I take refuge from the now intense,
globular rain in the shadow of a large
hedge on a bluff overlooking the
floodplain just beyond Eyton – a
homestead on a raised promontory –
on Severn. Britain is a wet island,
and it’s getting wetter. This is just a
passing autumn shower, but as global
temperatures rise, the paths of the
most severe Atlantic storms are hitting
the western shores of Britain and
Ireland more frequently, often
dumping large quantities of rain in
short periods.
Just before Christmas 2015, Storm
Desmond broke the UK’s two-day
rainfall record, and caused flooding and
disruption over much of the country.
Similar extreme rainfall had already
hit parts of the country in the summer
of 2007 and in the 2009 to 2010 and
2013 to 2014 winter seasons. The UK
Environment Agency estimates that
one in six households and businesses
in England are now at risk of flooding.
Warm and stormy
This sequence of events is without
parallel in the 300 or so years the UK
has had consistent weather records,
but a historical precedent can be found
if you go back far enough. Various
strands of evidence point to a sustained
period of warming across England
between the 7th and the 10th centuries
that brought more storminess with it.
“The Anglo-Saxons also experienced
a lot of extreme weather events like
Storm Desmond,” says landscape
historian Richard Jones of the
University of Leicester, UK.
This happens to be when most
English place names were coined.
When the Severn flooded in 2007,
it struck Jones that these names hold
clues to the flood risks that prevailed
at a time of rapid climate change – and
perhaps highlight the increasing risk
we face as we move into a similar
regime today. “I realised there was a >
23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 51
relationship between those places
suffering the most and water-related
names,” he says. “It intrigued me – and
I did nothing about it.”
That changed in 2014, when winter
floods hit the Somerset Levels in south-
west England. “I was struck by the
plight of the village of Muchelney,”
says Jones. “People were saying, I can’t
believe it’s turned into a big island.
But it’s in the name.” Ey, as also in
Eyton, is a common Anglo-Saxon
place name element meaning just
that: an island or raised promontory
(see “Five flood-prone names”, below).
That was the genesis of a research
project called “Flood and flow”:
a confluence of historians, place name
specialists and archaeologists that
SWNS/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

aimed to investigate the connections

between place names and flood risk,
and what that might tell us about the
effects of climate change and other
human activities.
It’s a division of labour: the
toponymists identify place names
of interest, and the archaeologists go
digging there to see what they can
find. A technique known as optically
stimulated luminescence allows them
to date when a layer of soil in a core
dug out from a riverbank or floodplain
at a place of interest last saw sunlight –
and so when, approximately, it was
laid down in a flood. That can be used
in tandem with information on the
chemical composition of the soil,
its magnetic properties and the
granularity of the deposits – clay
and silt from quieter floods, coarser
material from highly energetic flash
Island story: flooding – to build up a picture of flood
Muchelney in intensity over time. “We can look at the
January 2014 physical sequence of flooding against
the coining of names, and find place
names that warn explicitly against
flood or types of flood,” says Ben Pears
of the University of Southampton,
UK, an archaeologist on the project.
The wases are a case in point. English
place names do not often include the
element was, so it was an ideal sample
for the team to start its investigations.
It has a very specific meaning – one
pinned down by Gelling as “alluvial
land by a meandering river that floods
and drains quickly”. One example is
Wasperton, a tiny village just south of
Warwick in the English Midlands. Cores
extracted there show sequences of very
quick flooding laying down lots of
coarse sediment before disappearing
quickly again. Here, there’s a double
clue in the name: “perton” indicates a
place with a pear orchard. “Pears don’t
like waterlogged soil,” says Pears.
Buildwas has perhaps the most
spectacular site of all the wases,
situated where the widely meandering
Severn enters the confines of
Ironbridge Gorge. It’s looking soggy
when I arrive, although the river
doesn’t seem inclined to burst its banks

FIVE FLOOD-
PRONE NAMES

ey – island, area of raised ground in
wet country
This is one of the most common
reliably wet Anglo-Saxon place-
name elements, with examples
including Bermondsey, Chertsey,
Hackney and Witney.
slaep – slippery place
Perhaps understandably, few of
these places have achieved
greatness, although a sprinkling of
Slaptons, Islip near Oxford and
possibly Ruislip in Greater London
indicate places where you should
watch your step.
hamm – land surrounded by water
or marsh
Frustratingly close to a simple
“ham”, meaning a homestead or
settlement, this element has long
been misidentified, leading one
eminent toponymist to describe it as
a “long-suffering” place-name element.
Reasonably certain instances include
Chippenham, Evesham, Fulham,
Twickenham and Southampton.
holmr – inland promontory, raised
ground in marsh
Confusingly, over the years often
also corrupted to “ham”, this is
actually an Old Norse element similar
in meaning to “ey”. Prominent
examples are Durham and Oldham.
sloh – muddy place, mire
As in Slough.

52 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017

 From Russia
after just one October shower. But the
secrets lie in the soil. Information the
team has extracted from soil cores
there show a dramatic flood event in

with lulz
the late Roman period; frequent, more
moderate flooding from the 8th to the
10th centuries; and another distinct
flooding maximum at the start of the
10th century, just when the name was
being coined. “If Buildwas had been
established in the 12th century it would
have been highly unlikely to have got British scientists have discovered that they are
the name it did,” says Jones.
a figure of fun in Russia. Why, asks James Harkin
Meanders of history
Is it a surprise that places with watery
names are more prone to flooding? It’s
a fair enough question, says Jones. But F YOU happen to have travelled on called the UK-Russia Year of Science
the intriguing thing revealed by the digs
is just how nuanced the information
contained in place names can be.
I the London Underground’s District,
Circle or Hammersmith & City lines in
the past three months, you may have
and Education, one of its goals was to
improve the reputation of British
scientists in Russia.
“How do places flood? Fast? Slow? Does spotted the legendary Russian chemist God knows they need it. But the train
the inundated water sit there, or drain Dmitri Mendeleev, creator of the never materialised, perhaps because it
away quite rapidly?” he says. “We can periodic table. Not in person of course, would have instantly become the object
start to map this kind of historical but splashed across the side of a special of ridicule.
evidence with what we see today.” train celebrating Russian achievements When they hear the phrase “British
What’s more, later medieval mapping in science, space and the arts. scientists”, Russians don’t tend to think
and manorial records naming small When The Heart of Russia took to the of Newton, Darwin or Faraday; nor do
areas and even specific fields could allow rails in October, the British Council they think of Stephen Hawking or Peter
us to build up fine-grained maps of announced that it would be running a Higgs. Instead, they are much more
historical, and contemporary, flood risk. similar stunt on the Moscow Metro: a likely to think of psychologist Richard
“Place names became redundant Science Train adorned with images of Stephens of Keele University, who
because we stopped paying attention Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Michael earlier this year showed that swearing
to them,” says Jones. In the cooler late Faraday and the like. Part of something can help reduce pain. Or Olli Loukola, >
medieval and early modern periods,
they were no longer describing rivers
as they were – so we started building
on floodplains. “But in the past two
decades they are describing how the
rivers behave again,” says Jones.
“It’s very exciting.” It’s not just river
behaviour, either. Forest and tree-
related names might help inform
strategies for rewooding, for example,
or river-related names tell us about
former sinuosity for remeandering,
again to reduce flood risk.
In the end it’s just about
reconnecting us with a source of
knowledge we’ve been living with for
hundreds of years, but whose value we
had forgotten, says Pears. “We spoke to
a farmer in Buildwas, and he knew that
the water didn’t stay long when it
floods, but he didn’t know it was
MODERN TOSS

already in the name.” Q

Richard Webb’s name is mud

23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 53

a behavioural ecologist at Queen Mary
University of London, who has taught
bumblebees how to play football.
The phrase “British scientists” is a
meme that you’ll regularly encounter
if you search the Russian-language
parts of the internet. It is defined on
the online encyclopaedia Lurkmore as
“a synonym for researchers working
on pseudoscientific projects that are
bonkers, idiotic and have absolutely
no practical value”. In the past year,
Russian news outlets have reported
that “British scientists have found that
fish have personalities”, that “British
scientists have discovered the best time
to make love”, that “British scientists
have calculated the IQ of cats”, and
many more in the same vein.
54 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017
These are at least genuine studies
by real scientists. Russians also tell
a genre of satirical jokes that start
“British scientists have discovered…”.
For example, “British scientists have
proven that birthdays are good for you:
people who have the most live the
longest”. And “British scientists have
invented a way to walk through walls.
They called it a door”. There’s also the
(rather lame) “British scientists have
discovered that British scientists live
in Britain”, but in fact, this is not always
true. The term is now so ubiquitous
that anyone who conducts frivolous
studies, including Russians, can be
described as British Scientists.
So why do British scientists have
this reputation in Russia? Last year,
BONKERS… OR NOT
Can you work out which of these are
Russian headlines about real studies,
and which are jokes?
1. British scientists have established
the height of Cinderella’s heels.
2. British scientists have found that
women more often reach orgasm if
they have sex in their socks.
3. British scientists have invented a
teacup for left-handed people.
4. British scientists have found that
ostriches become sexually active in
the presence of humans.
5. British scientists have discovered
that primates can find the connection
between a cassette tape and a pencil
more quickly than people born after 1995.
(The real studies are 1, 2 and 4)
 RIA Novosti, one of Russia’s state news
agencies, announced that British
scientists themselves had discovered
the answer. In a story entitled “British
scientists have explained why ‘British
Scientists’ exist”, it reported a paper by
Andrew Higginson and Marcus Munafo
at Exeter and Bristol universities.
Wanting to explore strategies for career
success in science, they turned to a
model usually used to predict optimal
behaviour in animals. They found that
it is in scientists’ best interest to search
out novel results and conduct small
studies with less rigorous statistical
analysis. Their paper was not specific
to British scientists, but Higginson
argues that the findings are especially
pertinent to the UK due to something
called the Research Excellence
Framework. This, he says, preferentially
gives research money to institutions
with a track record of publishing in top
journals, which are massively biased
towards strikingly novel findings.
Harmless eccentrics
I asked Higginson what he thought
about his paper becoming such a big
story in Russia. “Bemused,” he said.
He was at pains to point out that the
headlines in Russia were not strictly
true: his research was concerned with
novel findings rather than frivolous
ones, which may sometimes overlap
but are not the same thing.
Nonetheless, he also said he was
proud to have done some research that
qualified him to be a British Scientist.
“Intrigued too,” he said, “as it’s got
me interested in the role of satire in
Russian life.”
I also asked Marc Abrahams, founder
of the Annals of Improbable Research
and the man behind the Ig Nobel prizes
(known in Russia as the Schnobels).
He is not surprised by the reputation
of British scientists in Russia. The Ig
Nobels, which celebrate amusing-
sounding scientific work, are very
“British scientists stand
for projects that are
bonkers, idiotic and
of no practical value"
REUTERS/GRETCHEN ERTL
popular in the Russian-speaking world,
and a number of Russian journalists
travel to Harvard University to cover
the event each year. The awards get a lot
of nominations from Russia, but not
nearly as many as from the two most
successful nations, Japan and the UK.
So why are scientists from these two
countries more likely to write winning
papers? Abrahams thinks it’s down to
national culture. “There are eccentric
people everywhere, but they are treated
differently in different countries,”
he says. “In some places they are
punished, but in the UK and Japan
people are proud that ‘they are our
eccentrics’. In fact, the term ‘British
eccentrics’ is also common, not just
in Russia, but around the world.”
There may, however, be a more
sinister explanation. Lurkmore
suggests that the meme gained
prominence around the time of the
fatal poisoning of former Russian
agent Alexander Litvinenko in London.
The implication is that the Russian
government pushed the meme to
undermine British scientists at a
time when they were expected to find
evidence linking Litvinenko’s death
to the Kremlin.
The claim seems plausible given
recent accusations of Russia’s election
hacking and fake-news creating, but
the timings don’t quite add up: the
meme first hit the internet in 2003,
three years before Litvinenko’s death.
It’s possible that the Kremlin saw an
opportunity and encouraged its spread,
but there’s no real evidence for this.
Perhaps we should set some British
Scientists to get to the bottom of it.
If the meme did begin as a negative
publicity campaign, it hasn’t worked.
British scientists are now a much-loved
part of Russian folklore. In the past
year, RIA Novosti has run twice as many
articles mentioning British scientists as
US ones, and almost 10 times as many
as Japanese scientists. Russian rock
band Mediavirus wrote a hit song called
British Scientists; British Scientists is
the name of a chain of coffee shops in
the city of Krasnoyarsk.
The meme is now so popular that
a discovery made in an obscure lab of
a lesser British university, and which
barely makes a ripple in the UK
press, can make national headlines
in Russia. And while the angle is
usually humorous, these are often real,
interesting and sometimes important
studies. Just like the winners of the Ig
Nobel prizes, it is science that makes
you laugh… then makes you think.
The UK may not be at the forefront
of very much these days, but when it
comes to serious humour, we still take
some beating. Q
James Harkin likes bonkers and idiotic
projects. He is one of the QI Elves, the
research team for the BBC panel show QI,
appears on the podcast No Such Thing as a
Fish and is co-author of The Book of the Year,
published by Random House
23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 55
 EN days before Christmas,

T Romany Garnett wrapped up

warm and set off for Quinag, a
spectacular three-peaked mountain in
the far north of Scotland. Several hours
later, chilled through and battered by
bitter winds, she headed home, her
fingers frozen, pricked and bleeding.
It had been a highly successful day.
Like many others at this time of year,
Garnett was hunting for holly. Until the
Victorians introduced the Christmas
tree to the UK in the 19th century, the
yuletide decoration of choice was a
great ball of evergreens – mistletoe, ivy
and dark, glossy holly with its scarlet
berries. Holly was part of the country’s
culture and folklore. Since ancient
times, it has been a symbol of life in
the dead of winter and a charm to ward
off witches and other evildoers.
It remains an indispensable part of
Christmas – the wreath on the front
door, the sprig atop the pudding. But
as the John Muir Trust’s conservation
officer for Quinag, Garnett’s interest
lay elsewhere. On foot, with a search
area of 3700 hectares, she set out to
pick berries from as many hollies as
possible, then send them south to the
cold-storage vaults of the Millennium
Seed Bank (MSB) at Wakehurst. There,
scientists working for the Royal Botanic
Gardens, Kew, which runs the MSB,
would extract the seeds and add them
to millions of others as part of an
ambitious project to safeguard Britain’s
native trees.
SUPERSTOCK

The UK is one of the least wooded

countries in Europe, with trees
covering only 13 per cent of the land.

Prickly
Since the start of the millennium,
there has been increasing recognition
of their value and the need to grow
more, but, at the same time, native
trees have come under attack from an

customer
Saving holly is no walk in the park,
unprecedented number of pests and
pathogens. The arrival, in 2012, of a
fungus that kills a key species, the ash,
put the health of the nation’s trees
centre stage. “We know other pests are
on their way,” says Clare Trivedi of the
MSB. “And we also know that climate
change will have an impact on our

says Stephanie Pain native trees and woodlands.” With

that in mind, she and her colleagues
decided they must take action.
The MSB already has seed from most
of the UK’s flora safely in its vaults, but

56 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017

the UK National Tree Seed Project goes
a step further: it aims to capture as
much genetic diversity as possible.
“Then, no matter what happens to
individual populations, we know we
have the genes safely in the collection,”
says Trivedi. This approach will also
allow researchers to investigate the
genetics of native trees, to see which
features differ from place to place,
and to identify specimens that might
be resistant to new diseases or more
resilient in the face of climate change.
“We don’t know what scientists might
be looking for in future, but we can
store seed for many decades so it will be
there when it’s needed,” says Trivedi.
Holly hunters
Little is known about the diversity of
most UK trees, so to build a genetically
comprehensive collection, Trivedi
and her colleagues want seed samples
from the entire geographical range
of each species. That would entail
gathering millions of seeds from
thousands of trees. There was only one
way to tackle such a mammoth task:
harness the energy and enthusiasm
of hundreds of volunteers. Ordinary
people also helped foot the bill. The
project has been funded largely by
players of People’s Postcode Lottery,
a British charity lottery.
Since 2013, teams have criss-crossed
the country collecting seeds from
70 priority species: those at great risk,
such as the ash, rare species, such as the
Plymouth pear, and those like holly
which are so widespread that their loss
would be catastrophic. “If something
came out of the blue that threatened
holly, there would be a massive impact
on the landscape and on the wildlife
that relies on holly,” says Trivedi.
Gathering tree seeds is rarely easy,
but hollies pose some particular
challenges. Where other collectors
RICHARD CHILDS PHOTOGRAPHY/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
work with telescopic loppers, giant
catapults and throw lines, holly
hunters must pick berries with their
bare hands. “If you wear gloves, you
just end up squashing and dropping
the berries,” says Garnett. “You soon
realise just how sharp the prickly leaves
are.” What’s more, late-ripening berries
mean collection must often be done in
the depths of winter, sometimes in
“Since ancient times,
it has been a symbol of
life and a charm to ward
off witches”
atrocious conditions. And there’s an
exhausting amount of legwork. Hollies
once grew in dense holly woods, but
demand for the hard, white wood for
firewood and to make bobbins for
weaving and teapot lids left few of
these intact. Today, most hollies are
dotted around mixed woodlands or
strung out along hedgerows, while
some older trees cling to the sides of
steep gorges or cliff ledges, safe from
woodcutters and browsing animals.
On the isle of Skye, in north-west
Scotland, Sarah Lewis’s “patch” is a
magnificent mountain called Blaven,
where holly trees are far apart, often in
dangerous places, and the pickings
slim. “I climbed up to a crag where I’d
seen holly trees with my binoculars and
thought I’d get a good handful. When I
got there – nothing,” says Lewis, who
also works for the John Muir Trust.
Either they were males, which don’t
bear fruit, or birds had eaten the
berries. The wild island weather didn’t
help either. “I’d see some holly trees at
the start of the week and make a note to
collect on Wednesday. By Wednesday,
there had been a gale and the berries
had all come off,” she says. “Sometimes
I’d be out all day and come home
without finding any berries.”
Hollies are surprisingly diverse. In
Shropshire, on the Welsh borders, they
produce berries in September, months
earlier than elsewhere. These trees are
part of Europe’s oldest holly grove:
some germinated at least 400 years
ago, when the climate was much
colder. Scotland’s mountain hollies are
unusually rugged, persisting despite
frequent battering by the harshest
winds. “The best spot for hollies on
Quinag is a place called Allt na Doire
Cuilinn – ‘the burn of the grove of the
hollies’,” says Garnett. The name is
very old, suggesting that this is also an
ancient population of trees. Whether
genetic differences explain their
particular characteristics remains
to be seen, however.
During the last ice age, hollies
survived in geographically isolated ice-
free refuges in the Iberian peninsula
Low-lying holly and Italy. When the ice retreated,
leaves are spikier trees from these two regions – by then
than those high up genetically distinct – migrated along
to deter browsers different routes to Britain. But without
molecular analysis, it is hard to say
which are which, or whether there
are populations with other origins.
Outward appearances are an unreliable
guide. Leaf shape, for instance, varies
from tree to tree and place to place,
but also on individual trees: lower
leaves are prickly as a defence against
browsing by deer or cattle, while those
higher up are smooth-edged. Recent
research reveals that hollies grow
pricklier leaves as a result of heavier
browsing – and that they do it by
modifying existing genes.
Right now, teams of volunteers are
out picking berries at sites from the
south-west of England to the Scottish
Highlands in a final push to bank the
nation’s holly genes before the project
comes to an end in March. Their efforts
will ensure that holly remains a part
of the UK landscape, and that there
will always be a sprig to crown the
Christmas pudding. ■
Stephanie Pain is evergreen
23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 57
 The ghosts of
science past
Jaw-dropping Victorian experiments could
blow your mind – and possibly your living
room, discovers George Bass
IRST off, drown a fly. That may
F not be a conventional way to
start a scientific experiment,
but then again, the instruction is taken
from a rather unconventional book.
The Young Man’s Book of Amusement,
first published by William Milner in
1839, is among the stranger relics of an
era when scientific experimentation
was starting to take off as a form of
popular entertainment. Elsewhere in
its pages, there are instructions to rub
liquid mercury on your skin, stick
explosives under a toy spider and apply
voltage to a corpse. It’s a wonder that
any of its readers survived long enough
to be amused.
GRANGER HISTORICAL PICTURE ARCHIVE / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO, GARRYKILLIAN - FREEPIK.COM
Today, The Young Man’s Book of
Amusement – or, to give its full title,
The Young Man’s Book of Amusement
Containing the Most Interesting and
Instructive Experiments in Various
Branches of Science to Which Is Added
All the Popular Tricks and Changes in
Cards and the Art of Making Fire Works –
reads like a drinking game for health
and safety officials. It was a jaw-
dropping, illustrated compendium
of experiments that promised to
“unite instruction with amusement” –
and very possibly, thin out the male
gene pool.
This is a manual that recommends
everything from brewing your own
nitrous oxide to electrifying fake
58 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017
heads (with real hair) until the strands
jump to attention “like quills upon the
fretful porcupine”. Pages are devoted
to exciting new hobbies, such as
restoring withered fruit, making
inflamed soap bubbles, transforming
iron into copper and freeing stuck rings
using liquid mercury. There are early
forays into meteorology involving
hand-built barometers, and a dip into
optics, with guides on how to produce
light from sugar.
At the time the book came out,
scientific experimentation was no
longer the preserve of an intellectual
elite. The wealth generated by the
industrial revolution was producing
a middle class with time on its hands
and money to splash on spending it
well. Astronomy demonstrators
toured the country with their model
solar systems, Michael Faraday’s
lectures at the Royal Institution in
London were a Christmas staple
and the first inexpensive chemistry
sets were rolled out in the 1850s by
John J. Griffin & Sons.
“Elsewhere, there are
instructions to rub mercury
on your skin and stick
explosives under a toy spider”
With literacy rates rising steeply,
publishers were also quick to take
advantage of this new market.
Cheap, mass-produced educational
texts took off. The Penny Magazine,
published by the Society for the
Diffusion of Useful Knowledge,
had a weekly circulation of 200,000
in the early 1830s, its readers agog
with curiosity about everything from
copper mining to swordfish.
But these were tame compared
with The Young Man’s Book of
Amusement, which saves its most
peculiar moment for the alarmingly
titled “Galvanic experiments on the
dead body of a criminal”. What follows
goes well beyond the boundaries of
home science, requiring the budding
electrochemist to source a morgue,
a hanged murderer (“middle-sized,
athletic, extremely muscular”),
something resembling a Leyden jar,
and a public gallery with a fondness
for the spectacle of a dancing corpse.
Not all the experiments in the
book end badly. The drowned fly, for
example, once laid to rest in some chalk
dust or fine ash, gets the water removed
from the openings it uses to breathe,
and stages a magical recovery. Just
don't try any of this at home – or
anywhere else for that matter. Q
George Bass is having a blast
 EXCERPTS FROM
THE YOUNG MAN’S BOOK OF AMUSEMENT
TO MAKE AN ARTIFICIAL SPIDER,
CONTAINING FULMINATING SILVER
Take about one third of a grain of fulminating silver, and
inclose it in a piece of paper or cloth made up in the form
of a spider, then place it in a situation where it is likely to
be trod upon. The noise will both surprise and amuse.
{Ed: Fulminating silver, AgCNO, though worryingly
considered too sensitive for use in explosives, is still used
to give some toy crackers their bang.}

THE MAGICAL TEA-SPOON

Put into a crucible four ounces of bismuth, and when in
a state of fusion, throw in two ounces and a half of lead,
and one ounce and a half of tin: these metals will
combine, forming an alloy, fusible in boiling water.
Mould the alloy into bars, and take them to a silver-
smith’s to be made into tea-spoons. Give one to a
stranger to stir his tea, as soon as it is poured from the
tea-pot; he will not be a little surprised to find it melt in
his tea-cup.
{Ed: A similar trick can also be performed with
gallium.}

VEGETABLE CHIMNEY ORNAMENTS TO CAUSE A BRILLIANT EXPLOSION

In winter an elegant chimney ornament may be formed
by cutting the head or thick end of a carrot, containing
the bulb, and placing it in a shallow vessel with water.
Young and delicate leaves unfold themselves, forming a
radiated tuft of a very handsome appearance, and
heightened by contrast with the season of the year.
UNDER WATER
Drop a piece of phosphorus, the size of a pea, into a
tumbler of hot water; and, from a bladder, furnished
with a stop cock, force a stream of oxygen directly upon
it. This will afford a most brilliant combustion under
water.

INFALLIBLE ANTISEPTIC TO GIVE A GHASTLY APPEARANCE TO

For ensuring the sweetness of fish conveyed by land-
carriage, the belly of the fish should be opened, and the
internal parts sprinkled with powdered charcoal. The
same material will restore impure, or even putrescent
water, to a state of perfect freshness.
PERSONS IN A ROOM
Dissolve salt in an infusion of saffron and spirits of
wine. Dip some tow {Ed: Any fibres will do} in this
solution, and having set fire to it, extinguish all the
other lights in the room.

ELECTRICAL ILLUMINATION LIGHT PRODUCED BY SUGAR

To illuminate eggs by electricity, it is merely necessary
to get a mahogany stand so constructed as to hold
three eggs at a greater or smaller distance, according
to the position of two sliding pieces of wire. A chain is
then placed at the bottom in such a manner as to
touch the lowest egg with one end, and with its other
the outside coating of a charged jar. The sliding wire at
the top is made to touch the upper egg, and the
distance of the eggs asunder should not exceed the
quarter or eighth part of an inch. The electricity being,
by means of the discharging rod, sent down the ball
and wire, will, in a darkened room, render the eggs
luminous and transparent.
If two pieces of loaf-sugar (about a pound each) are
struck against each other in the dark, a light-blue flame,
like lightning, will be elicited. The same effect takes place
when a loaf of sugar is struck with an iron instrument.
TO KEEP A SNOW-BALL ALL SUMMER IN A
PERFECT STATE
Get a snow-ball, and squeeze it very hard together, then
put it in a pot and surround it well with flour, which
must be pressed very hard about it, and you shall have as
perfect a snow-ball in the height of summer, as you had
when you first put it in the pot
The grape depression
A period of enforced sobriety had unexpected consequences
in 19th-century France, says Chris Simms

HERE was no rot… but suddenly from its native home in the Americas. vines vulnerable to fungal and bacterial

T under the magnifying lens of the

instrument appeared an insect,
a plant louse of yellowish colour, tight
Before the advent of steamships, the
voyage was too long, and the insect
would have died en route.
infections. Beyond the reach of
pesticides and with no native predators
below ground, the females reproduced
on the wood, sucking the sap… it is The bugs must have made landfall asexually with abandon, each one
not one, it is not ten, but hundreds, somewhere on France’s southern coast; laying up to 100 clone eggs in a month.
thousands… They are everywhere…” the first documented case of blight With four or more generations annually,
In 1868, botanist Jules-Émile occurred in the commune of Pujaut, one bug could produce more than a
Planchon unmasked the culprit behind near Avignon in the Rhone valley, in billion descendants in one year.
a national crisis. For five years, a blight 1863. Once they arrived in a vineyard, The nature of the blight explains
had been stealing across France’s the bugs would head underground, its peculiarly destructive course, but
vineyards. Its cause was invisible, its where they would literally suck the life also its gradual geographical spread.
spread inexorable. Always it followed out of the vines. They depleted the The fruit of the Rather than ripping across France
the same pattern. First a single vine roots’ sap while secreting a fluid that vine fuels many within weeks as a virus might,
would wither, then a circle of plants. stopped the plant healing, leaving the a social fracas D. vitifoliae moved slowly, perhaps
Entire vineyards were wiped out transferred from vineyard to vineyard
within years. on the mud of itinerant workers’
Panic grew and blame flew. shoes, speculates Vincent Bignon,
Vineyards were watered with white an economic historian at the Bank
wine and pruning cuts sealed with hot of France.
wax to halt the blight’s advance. One In the late 19th century, agriculture
supposed cure involved burying live accounted for about 30 per cent of
toads under the vines to draw out the France’s economic output. Wine was
mysterious poison. the nation’s second most important
Even Planchon’s revelation couldn’t product after wheat. Estimates have
halt the blight. Before it was finally put the total income shock from the
A DRUNKEN FIGHT IN A PARIS PARK, 1899/UNIVERSAL HISTORY ARCHIVE/UIG/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES

stalled in the 1890s, it had laid waste blight as high as 15 billion francs, which
to an estimated 40 per cent of French equates to 75 per cent of one year’s
vineyards, and changed the face of economic output at the time.
European viticulture for ever. Those it hit had few other sources
With the vines, scores of rural of income, either. “This event affected
communes also saw their livelihoods people who were already at the margin
wither. And that’s where the story of of the economy,” says Roberto Galbiati,
the Great French Wine Blight has now who researches economics and the law
earned a second telling. Its gradual at Sciences Po in Paris. “Peasants and
spread and devastating effects workers on the vines. People who didn’t
illuminate the complex relationships have any other support.”
between wine, poverty and crime. That led Bignon and Galbiati,
The cause of the blight was the together with labour market expert Eve
tiny aphid-like bug Daktulosphaira Caroli of Paris Dauphine University, to
vitifoliae, often known as phylloxera. wonder what insight the blight might
Its arrival in France was the bitter fruit give into the social effects of economic
of technological progress. It travelled dislocation. Standard economic models
across the Atlantic on vines imported suggest that people choose between

60 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017

CHARLES O’REAR/CORBIS DOCUMENTARY/GETTY
legal and criminal economic activities
on their relative costs and benefits.
When the income of low-skilled
workers with poor job mobility falls,
crime rates often rise, because it can be
difficult to get a job that pays enough.
“When you are poor, you have an
incentive to steal because you have
to eat,” says Bignon.
But when poverty and crime rise
in lockstep, is poverty causing crime
or crime poverty? “When there is a
lot of crime, businesses can suffer,
influencing income,” says Bignon.
Disentangling what is cause and what
is effect can often be difficult.
The slow spread of the blight
provided a natural experiment to test
these interplays, thanks to information
contained in archived yearbooks from
the French Ministry of Justice that set
out annual crime records from all
French departments throughout the
period. “Some areas were hit, some
weren’t,” says Bignon. “This allows you
to compare lots and lots of groups. The
control groups are the areas with no
disease.”
As expected, as the blight spread
to new areas, instances of property
crimes such as theft, counterfeiting
and pillaging rose. On average, these
crimes were 22 per cent higher in
districts affected by the bugs. The rise
couldn’t be explained by other factors
such as demographic changes caused
by patterns of migration.
But there was a twist. While property
“While property crime
ballooned during the
Great French Wine Blight,
violent crime slumped”
crime ballooned, violent crime in the
worst affected areas slumped, by about
13 per cent on average.
This doesn’t surprise Christian
Traxler, an economist at the Hertie
School of Governance in Berlin. In 2010,
he showed a similar relationship
between a decreased supply of rye and
crime in Prussia between 1882 and 1912.
“Bad weather increased rye prices,
which induced more property crime
and fewer violent crimes,” he says.
Rye was used to make bread, but bad
weather for rye also meant bad weather
for barley, which is used to make beer.
In both the French and the Prussian
instances, Traxler thinks lack of booze
explains the drop in violent crime.
“Shock to wine production isn’t just a
shock to income, but also to wine
consumption,” he says. With less
alcohol to drink, people are less
inclined to fight. In England and >
23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 61
THE EBOLA OF
OLIVE TREES
Some 150 years after the Great
French Wine Blight (see main story),
European vines are under threat
from another disease that originated
in the Americas. A bacterium known
as Xylella fastidiosa causes Pierce’s
disease, in which the plants’
transport vessels become blocked,
cutting the supply of water and
nutrients to the leaves.
California’s Department of Food and
Agriculture spends about $40 million
a year to control the leaf-hopping
insects known as sharpshooters that
carry the bacteria from plant to plant
in that region. Without that outlay, the
annual cost to the wine industry could
be northwards of $250 million, says
Alberto Acedo of biotech firm Biome
Makers in San Francisco.
NOT SO FASTIDIOUS
The bacterium doesn’t just hit
ERIC CABANIS/AFP/GETTYIMAGES
vines – in the Americas it also strikes
citrus and coffee plants. Now X.
fastidiosa has reached Europe,
where it has earned another name
– the “Ebola of olive trees”. In 2013,
it was spotted in a few olive trees
in southern Italy, and by 2015 had
infected up to a million trees there
with what has become known as olive
quick decline syndrome, causing
withering, desiccation and death. That
same year, the blight reached Corsica
and mainland France, and since then
Germany as well as Spain, the world’s
largest producer of olives according to
the International Olive Council.
So far, 359 plant species in Europe
have been identified as being
vulnerable to X. fastidiosa, including
peaches, sycamore, lavender and
rosemary. Some show no symptoms,
acting as reservoirs for the bacteria.
Others wither quickly. Short of
controlling insect species that could
spread the various strains, no cure is
yet known.
Generally cold winters slow the
spread of Pierce’s disease in the US.
That might mean northern Europe will
escape unscathed. But as the planet
warms, there is every chance the
“The idea of replacing the
disease’s ranges could change or
increase. “Some say there is a
relationship between climate change
and the increasing virulence of Xylella
fastidiosa strains,” says Acedo.
62 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017
Wales today, for instance, alcohol A few vines that
consumption is thought to contribute survived the blight
to 1.2 million violent incidents a year. still grow today
“Alcohol consumption makes people
more impulsive, less restrained,”
says Bignon.
It took a long time for the underlying
cause of this economic dislocation to be
overcome, even after Planchon had
unmasked the malefactor, and it
came at a significant price to French
exceptionalism. American varieties
of vine had always existed alongside
phylloxera, and were able to survive the
blight. The idea of replacing European
vines, which include varieties like Pinot
Noir, Chardonnay and Merlot, with
supposedly inferior American imports
was summarily dismissed. Instead,
vine growers tried cross-breeding two
varieties or grafting the stems of
vines with supposedly
inferior American imports
was summarily dismissed”
European vines onto the resistant roots
of American plants to get the best of
New and Old Worlds. That seemed to do
the trick, producing excellent grapes on
bug-resistant plants, finally halting the
blight in the 1890s.
Some vineyards with pure European
vines still exist in France, Spain and
elsewhere. That’s mostly luck, says
Alberto Acedo of Biome Makers, a
biotech firm in San Francisco that
develops sustainable methods to treat
grapevine microbial diseases. These
ancient vines, often producing feted
and expensive wines, tend to grow
in sandy soils, through which the
phylloxera bug can’t disperse so
easily, he says.
Phylloxera eventually overcomes
cross-bred resistance. Most recently in
California in the 1980s and 1990s, the
bugs caused more than $1 billion of
damage to cross-bred vines. Now most
vines are grafted, transatlantic mergers
that reduce the risk of an epidemic.
At least the world is better prepared
now. Harvests are more integrated,
so a shortage in one place can be
compensated by imports from another.
Welfare systems and increased access
to credit also help to cushion the blows
of economic dislocation. But the story
of the Great Blight has eerie pre-echoes
of the recent credit crunch, says
Bignon. Through the blight’s ravages,
thousands of local companies,
including banks, went bust and the
credit system partly collapsed,
preventing farmers from borrowing.
In a paper Bignon co-wrote for the
European Central Bank earlier this
year, he shows a parallel with the recent
bank bailouts: when French companies
had access to a nearby branch of the
central bank, which would take on their
debt, it helped smooth troubles locally.
Rural France may now have
recovered from the effects of the
blight, but it took a long time. Property
crime levels remained high in wine-
dependent regions for decades,
and the blight lives on in the collective
memory, in tales of families uprooted
and livelihoods ruined. “There are
many family stories of upheaval a few
generations ago,” says Bignon. For good
and ill, though, the wine returned. Q
Chris Simms is blighted by the bottle
Bright sky
at night
The mystery of the “nocturnal sun” is no
astronomer’s delight, says Rebecca Boyle

N THE millennia before street lights Astronomical Complex high in the year, but aside from that reveals no

I and smartphones, humans could,

on rare occasions, walk around on a
moonless night and see clearly. Looking
Argentinian Andes. During that event,
Steven Smith of Boston University in
Massachusetts and his colleagues
obvious temporal or geographical
pattern. “I think you would have to
have been in the right place at the
up, they could see broad luminous reported a night sky that was 10 times right time, and in the right situation,
patches of light stretching across the brighter than normal. to see one,” says John Barentine, an
sky, which brightened the heavens in There is an obvious reason why the astronomer at the International Dark-
all directions as though it were daylight. frequency of reported bright nights Sky Association, which works to
People could read without candlelight, might have fallen: it has to be dark for combat light pollution.
view small details in their surroundings, us to notice them, and these days,
and make out landscapes in the distance. 99 per cent of people in Europe and
It was as if the world were illuminated North America sleep under an Luminous smog
by a hidden night-time sun. artificially lit sky. However, Barentine points to an
The existence of bright nights is well Hersé’s book suggests that about one interesting clue buried in 19th-century
accepted, but their cause remains a bright night used to be observed every accounts. These frequently include a
mystery. Frustratingly, sightings description of a “luminous smog” in
have almost entirely faded away in the air. Astronomers and maritime
the past few decades, making it seem observers said the effect was distinct
that any hope of solving the riddle was from auroras or the faint nocturnal
dimming. Now, though, one man says glow known as the zodiacal light, a
he has seen the solution. pyramid shaped brightness produced
The earliest account of a bright night when space dust reflects sunshine
comes from Pliny the Elder, a Roman coming from below the horizon. This
army commander who studied nature suggests there might be some sort of
in his spare time. In his encyclopaedic reflective haze hanging in the upper
Natural History of around AD 77, atmosphere.
he wrote that the “phenomenon Perhaps that could have been dust
commonly called a nocturnal sun… a from volcanoes or meteors, says
light emanating from the sky at night” Barentine. Take the account of a diarist
has been seen many times. In 1988, a we know only as M. Toucher, writing
French atmospheric scientist named near Paris on 30 June 1908. It is possibly
Michel Hersé produced the definitive no coincidence that this was the day of
GABRIELA ANTOSOVA/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

collection of accounts of bright nights, the Tunguska event, when a huge space
which documented similar stories rock exploded in the upper atmosphere
from the past millennium and all over over Siberia. People around the world
the world. In French, they were nuit reported a haze in the atmosphere for
claires, and in German helle Nächte. months afterwards, and light reflecting
But sightings have become rarer. from the haze might explain why
The most recent may be from 22 Toucher could write: “At 22.30… Very
and 23 August 2001 at the Leoncito clear sky, full of stars which shine to >

23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 63

the horizon. No moonlight. All the
details of the landscape are visible.”
Despite Toucher’s observation
during a night when there was no
moonlight, some have wondered
whether bright nights could simply
be cloudless nights with a full moon
and bright stars. However, in 1909 L.
Yntema, a doctoral student at the
University of Groningen in the
Netherlands settled that question.
After measuring the total amount of
light from all the stars reaching Earth’s
surface, he found a discrepancy in the
light on bright nights. That seemed to
point to some sort of atmospheric
phenomenon as their cause. Yntema
called it “Earthlight”.

Rolling on the waves

So, are we sure that this isn’t just a rare,
mid-latitude aurora? That possibility
was ruled out by Robert Strutt, son and
heir to Lord Rayleigh, a physicist who,
among other things, had discovered
that the way gas molecules scatter light
explains why the sky looks blue. The
younger Rayleigh witnessed a bright
night on 8 November 1929, and
demonstrated that the light came
from all directions. In an aurora, it
typically comes in streaks.
Today bright nights may have all
BETH HOECKEL

but vanished, but we do have certain

advantages over Rayleigh – satellites,
for example. In the late 1980s, Gordon
Shepherd of York University in Toronto,
Canada, built a satellite instrument
called WINDII, which could monitor
waves of air as they rolled through
the atmosphere. He soon found that
these waves could pile up on top of
one another to produce towers of
pressurised air.
Along with the waves, Shepherd also
studies how the chemical make-up of
the atmosphere changes through the
day. During daylight hours, ultraviolet
radiation from the sun splits molecular
oxygen into individual atoms. When
the sun goes down, the atoms rejoin.
This produces a small amount of light,
called airglow.
“Unlike an aurora coming
Airglow is usually barely visible with
the naked eye from Earth’s surface,
but looking at WINDII readings, which
spanned from 1991 to 2004, Shepherd
noticed the airglow emissions varied
wildly from night to night, and from
place to place.
Earlier this year, it occurred to him
that air waves and airglow could be
connected. The waves might force the
oxygen into a higher concentration, he
thought, creating a more intense glow
that could explain bright nights. “I don’t
know why it came to me, but I said, ‘
Ah, that’s the explanation’,” he says.
To verify his suspicion, Shepherd
first had to account for the sun’s
activity, which can affect the brightness
in streaks, the light on
a bright night comes
from all directions”
of airglow too. He and his colleague
Young-Min Cho went back through
WINDII data for 1992 and 1996, when
the sun’s activity was at different levels.
Cho wrote an algorithm that could
search the data, discard any nights
when there was an aurora and find
times when waves might have piled up
enough to produce a bright night. For
both years, that analysis showed that
the waves could have produced a bright
night about 7 per cent of the time at any
given spot on Earth.
That convinced them that the action
of the waves was a greater influence
on the airglow than increased solar
activity. But it also indicated that you
would get about 25 bright nights a
year, which doesn’t tally with Hersé’s
collected accounts. However, further
analysis showed that stacked waves and

64 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017

 Chocs away
In a field near London, botanists work to avert
a chocolate meltdown, finds Alison George

EADING keeps its secrets well. and there are fears that climate change

R Some might call the town

60 kilometres west of London
undistinguished. Exotic is certainly not
the word. But hidden in a walled garden
in a field to the south of the town is a
destination both special and unique.
Without what goes on inside a huge
white tent here, chocolate would hit
a rocky road – and not the sort with
marshmallows. This is the
International Cocoa Quarantine Centre.
Chocolate is the world’s favourite
treat: globally, we eat 7 million tonnes
of the stuff a year, and demand is rising
as Asian consumers develop a taste for
it, too. Yet supply is far from assured.
Most of the world’s commercial cocoa
plants originate from just a few clones
made in the 1940s, which have so far
proven productive enough to keep up
with demand. But this has led to a
dangerous lack of genetic diversity,
leaving cocoa vulnerable to a host of
a cloud-free night are not very likely pests and diseases that love cocoa as
to coincide at any given spot, reducing much as we do. Some 30 to 40 per cent
the expected frequency. “I think that’s of the crop is lost to disease each year,
pretty consistent with the historical
record,” says Shepherd.
Shepherd, now 86 and retired,
hasn’t been able to link any of the
suitably stacked waves with eyewitness
reports of bright nights, partly because
modern reports are so rare. To do so
would be a neat confirmation, though,
so he is looking into crowdsourcing a
bright night. “You could get together
500 to 1000 people via the web
MACIEJ GORZELINSKI/EYEEM/GETTY
might exacerbate the problem.
The drive to breed new cocoa
varieties that are more productive, as
well as hardy and pest-resistant, means
sending specimens around the world,
which risks spreading disease and
making matters worse. That’s why since
1985 the vast majority of cocoa samples
being transported to distant regions
have made a two-year pit stop.
“Reading is the hub these days for
the international movement of cocoa,”
says Andrew Daymond, not a little
proudly. A plant physiologist at the
University of Reading, he is in charge
of cocoa quarantining.
Entering the tent, I am transported to
the tropics. A wall of heat and humidity
hits me, plus the striking sight of
hundreds of 2-metre-tall plants, lush
and green, some with large orange or
red pods hanging from their trunks.
Daymond walks me through the aisles
of trees, pausing to cut off a wrinkly,
yellow pod. He slices it open to reveal a
white, slimy pulp with fat, brown >

and cover different longitudes and

potentially all nights of the year,” he
says. Enough to brighten someone’s
night, anyway. ■

Rebecca Boyle is blinking in the bright lights

of the big city

23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 65


STEVE PARSONS/PA IMAGES
seeds nestled inside. The seeds are
bitter, with only a hint of a chocolately
taste. It is only when they and the pulp
are fermented, and the seeds dried and
roasted, that the characteristic
toothsome flavour begins to emerge.
“Why Reading?” I ask. It is a world
away from the tropical forests of South
America where cocoa naturally grows.
That’s exactly the point, says Daymond.
If a pathogen should escape, it wouldn’t
survive long in the temperate UK
climate and there are no crops from
its native land for it to infect.
In quarantine, Daymond and his
team are on the look out for pod-
rotting fungal diseases such as witches’
broom and the festive-sounding frosty
pod, both of which spread easily. In
the 1990s, witches’ broom devastated
cocoa production in the state of Bahia
in Brazil, after spores were brought in
from the Amazon region, perhaps
deliberately. The output from the Bahia
region plummeted by 75 per cent. So
far, neither disease has reached West
Africa, where most of the world’s
cocoa is now grown. There, they have
different problems: the bug-borne
disease swollen shoot virus, which kills
cocoa trees within a few years, and
mirid bugs, which feed on the pods,
slashing yields by up to 40 per cent.
Cocoa samples arrive in Reading as
budwood: a short stick with a number
of active buds sprouting on it. Around
30 new varieties turn up each year,
some of them wild plants from
rainforest expeditions. On arrival, the
samples are inspected for obvious signs
of insect stowaways. Buds are then
66 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017
YURI CORTEZ/AFP/GETTY IMAGES)
grafted on to seedlings to establish
a mother plant. To check for less
conspicuous problems, buds from
the mother plant are also grafted on
to seedlings of an “indicator” plant,
a variety of cocoa that shows disease
symptoms more clearly than most.
If viruses or other diseases are present
in a sample that comes in, the
symptoms will eventually develop.
After two years, the team can be
confident that any dormant viruses
will have shown up, and the plant is
deemed safe. Genetic tests under
development at the University of
Reading could offer a way to speed up
the quarantine process, but Daymond
says he is not yet certain these tests can
pick up all of the viruses.
When the cocoa plants are certified
disease-free, cuttings are sent to
researchers around the world. One
of these is Wilbert Phillips-Mora,
Sweet teeth
The world’s top 10 chocolate-consuming peoples
are overwhelmingly in Europe
Switzerland
Germany
Ireland
UK
Norway
Sweden
Australia
Netherlands
US
France
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Annual chocolate consumption
per person (kilograms)
a specialist in cocoa diseases and head
of the breeding programme at the
Tropical Agricultural and Higher
Education Center (CATIE) in Costa Rica.
For decades, he has been painstakingly
mixing promising strains to create
hybrids that are screened for disease
resistance. “We are refreshing the blood
of cocoa,” says Phillips-Mora. One new
variety he has developed, CATIE R6, not
only shows remarkable resistance to
frosty pod, but also delivers a huge
boost in productivity. The chocolate
icing on the cake was when it was
commended in the International Cocoa
Awards in 2009 for its taste and aroma.
The world’s secret
Quite a hill of beans
cocoa garden New varieties such as CATIE R6 are sent
to researchers in other nations to be
hybridised with the native crop and
rolled out to farmers. In West Africa in
particular, where many plantations are
reaching the end of their productive
life, this new blood is sorely needed.
The quarantine greenhouse is large
enough to cover four tennis courts, and
much of it is filled with plants that have
already received the all-clear – 400
different varieties. Plants still under
quarantine are housed separately.
Has anyone made chocolate from
the Reading crop, I ask Daymond,
hopefully. “It’s not something we’ve
tried,” he says. “You need a large heap
of beans to do a proper fermentation
of cocoa beans, and we don’t get huge
numbers of pods here.”
Undeterred, when I get home,
I decide to give it a go. I put the contents
of the single cocoa pod that Daymond
gave me into the most tropical
conditions I can find, next to the hot
water tank. First I need to let the pulp
ferment into an alcoholic liquid to
break down the astringent compounds
in the seeds. Then I can dry and roast
the seeds in the oven. Easy. Or not, as it
turned out. After a few days, I found
myself with a handful of black, mouldy
beans and an aroma that was anything
but delicious.
Perhaps leave the chocolate-making
to the experts, and savour the flavour –
with the exotic taste of Reading in
9 every bite. Q
Alison George is organic and fair trade
 Ear
and diagnose both types of diabetes.
One advantage of earwax over
other samples like blood or urine is
that collection is more straightforward

witness
and less invasive. “Just asking a patient
for a cotton swab in their ear is much
easier than asking to draw blood,” says
Shokry. To ensure they get enough,
they ask that volunteers don’t clean
inside their ears (a practice discouraged

The wax in your lugholes hides your
filthy secrets, finds Christie Wilcox
OU can tell yourself you haven’t
by doctors anyway – earwax should
just fall out naturally) for a week
beforehand. “We can get 20 milligrams,
which is more than enough for our
tests,” she says. And earwax needs little,
if any, processing to be analysed. “It
takes around a tenth of the preparation
time of other kinds of samples.”
potent antimicrobials and other

Y been too naughty over the

festive season. You may even be
able to convince others. But whether
chemicals.
It is these other chemicals – the
leftovers of cellular processes and
Earwax factor
It has other advantages, too. “Because
it’s an extra portion of Christmas traces of substances you have been earwax builds up over time, you can
pudding, too many glasses of wine or exposed to – that, we are now starting look back and get more information,”
even the odd cigarette, the proof of to realise, contain a surprising says Prigge; blood and urine only
your indulgences may be lurking amount of intel about you. give a “snapshot of what’s going on in
somewhere altogether more For the past few years, Engy Shokry your body at this moment.” In the lab,
surprising – inside your ears. at the Federal University of Goiás in Shokry has shown that tests on earwax
Earwax can easily be dismissed as Goiânia, Brazil, and her colleagues can detect drugs up to three months
a little gross and something to get rid have been doing some pioneering after they were taken, provided the
of, but we are fast discovering that experiments to test whether earwax patient hasn’t been meticulously
it is more than just another bodily can be used as a forensic or diagnostic Q-tipping. This means we can use it for
secretion. All sorts of secrets about you tool. As well as being able to extract both short and long-term monitoring
are collected in it. With enough detailed plain old DNA from it, they have used of some substances, she says.
probing of the stuff, says Katherine earwax to detect drug and tobacco use You don’t even need to extract >
Prigge of fragrance company Symrise,
based in Marlow, UK, it is possible that
earwax could be used to reveal not only
someone’s identity, “but information
about where they’ve been, what they’ve
eaten and what they were exposed to”.
From drug tests to disease diagnosis,
the potential of its unique chemical
signature is starting to be put to good
use. It may even give us answers about
the lives of other animals who can’t tell
us for themselves.
More formally, the glop in your
ears is called cerumen, and it is made
up of the secretions of the ceruminous
glands – specialised sweat glands –
and sebaceous glands in the outer
ear canal. Most of these are waxy
compounds, which clean the ear canal
and protect it from drying out, as well
as killing bacteria and trapping foreign
WIEBKE RAUERS

bodies like dust and fungal spores.

Mixed into that wax are bodily cast-offs
like shed skin cells and hair, alongside

23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 67

DIVIDED BY EARWAX
Next time a lump of earwax falls
out of your ear, what do you see:
flaky, whitish-yellow stuff or sticky,
orange-brown goop? The difference
is down to a single gene: ABCC11.
Dry, flaky earwax is most common
in people of East Asian descent.
A change in just a single DNA base
pair in the ABCC11 gene encodes for
the “wet” kind, most often found
in people of African or European
descent. The difference isn’t just
cosmetic. The same gene is also
responsible for variation in
underarm odour: people with
dry earwax stink less.
And we are just beginning to
understand what the ABCC11 protein
does in the body. Some forms of it
are associated with more aggressive
tumours, whereas the dry earwax
variant could make some tumours
more sensitive to chemotherapy.
So eventually, earwax could help
determine a person’s prognosis if
they are diagnosed with cancer.
68 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017
“One earplug was
50 centimetres long –
and you can imagine
the smell”
compounds from the wax directly:
valuable information can be gathered
by smell alone. “It’s definitely not the
most pleasant smell,” says Prigge,
who spent years getting acquainted
with it. “It’s kind of acidic and pungent.
There are also some faecal notes to it…
and a goat-like odour.”
We already knew that there are two
types of earwax – and that which kind
you have is linked to ethnicity (see
“Divided by earwax”, left). But Prigge
has also identified about a dozen
different volatile compounds present
in earwax at levels that vary with
ethnicity – and since these substances
make up smells, a person’s ancestry
could be partly deciphered using the
scent of their earwax.
These findings are just the tip of the
iceberg in terms of what information
the stuff may hold. Some of the most
incredible discoveries have come not
from humans, but from the giant
plugs removed from whales. These
help to transmit acoustic vibrations
underwater, and are another ball of
wax altogether. “We had one particular
earplug that was 50 centimetres long
and weighed about 2 pounds,” says
Stephen Trumble, a marine mammal
physiologist at Baylor University in
Texas. “And you can imagine the smell.”
The wax plugs are often collected
and kept in museums alongside bones
and such because they are used to
determine age. With whale ears largely
sealed off from the outside, the earwax
compacts over time into layers. “You
can cut it in half and count the rings,
like a tree,” Trumble says.
The other details Trumble and his
colleagues can glean by carefully
sampling and analysing the layers is
astounding, ranging from DNA to
hormones. In their most recent, as
yet unpublished, work they looked at
20 earplugs with about 1100 layers
between them and were able to connect
high levels of stress hormones such as
cortisol with historical whaling activity.
“The data are kind of unprecedented,”
he says. “To be able to show a tight
correlation between 20th-century
 Nest in show
whaling and stress in whales – you
could never ever in a million years do
that without earplugs.”
Whales aren’t the only mammals
whose ears offer clues to their past.
In one experiment on cattle earwax,
Shokry detected fluoroacetate, a poison
US farmers use against coyotes, and
We aren’t the only ones with an eye for tacky
one that is hard to identify in other plastic decorations, says Claire Ainsworth
biological fluids, meaning diagnoses
of accidental cattle poisoning are
currently only made using symptoms
and the animal’s history. She hopes this
will improve diagnoses.

We hear ewe
Shokry has shown that changes in
ewe earwax relate to pregnancy and
lactation too. Since earwax requires no
veterinary experience to collect, this
could offer a simple, cheap way to
check up on farm animals, and one
that would be less stressful for them.
Shokry is also soon to publish a study
on spotting cancer using dog earwax.
But for all the promise earwax shows
WESTEND61/GETTY

as a diagnostic tool, it could be some

time before it reaches the clinic. We
have centuries of data about what
blood and urine samples should look
like, but little on earwax, says Craig
Wheelock at the Karolinska Institute
in Sweden, who looks at molecular
signatures of disease. “Earwax is an
open book, so to speak – for good and
bad.” And although careful analysis
F over a home to spy on its owners’
can tell us a lot about what someone
has been up to, the sheer diversity in
earwax makes it hard to know what
anomalies look like. “Normalising it
so that earwax is earwax is earwax will
be a challenge,” Wheelock says.
That said, we have overcome similar
challenges before. “We’ve been working
this field for 15 years and we’ve done
over 300 different types of sample,”
says Mike Milburn at Metabolon, a firm
based in North Carolina that profiles
biological markers. In principle, there
is no reason why you wouldn’t get a
good representation of important
biomarkers in earwax, he says.
But for now, any confidential
information will stay archived in your
ear where nobody can get at it. The
perfect excuse for another brandy. Q
Christie Wilcox waxes lyrical
LYING a state-of-the-art drone
taste in decor is usually frowned
on. Fabrizio Sergio and his team,
however, had a good excuse. The homes
in question were nests belonging to
birds of prey called black kites. Their
decoration style? Tatty white plastic
bags. In some cases, lots of them,
making the nests as conspicuous as a
reindeer on your front lawn or a plastic
Santa climbing onto the roof.
Sergio, at the Doñana Biological
Station in Seville, Spain, wanted to
answer a question that had puzzled
him and other biologists for
decades – why would a bird decorate its
nest with conspicuous tat? This kind of
flamboyant adornment would be likely
to attract predators to vulnerable eggs
and chicks, harming a bird’s chances of
passing on its genes – hardly a trait that
would be favoured by natural selection.
It might seem odd to talk about nests
in terms of natural selection: after all,
they aren’t part of a bird’s body, which
is the obvious product of its genes. But
35 years ago, biologist Richard Dawkins
suggested that a gene’s influence could
reach beyond the body that houses
it and manipulate its environment –
a phenomenon he called the extended
phenotype. Structures built by
animals, such as beaver dams and
birds’ nests, are a good example.
Extended phenotypes should
help, not hinder, reproduction. Take
the eye-catching work of the male
bowerbird, which builds grass tunnels
and litters them with stones, glass and
plastic to court mates. Males with the
most pleasing bowers mate with more
females. But bowers never contain eggs
and can be abandoned if their gaudiness
catches the attention of predatory eyes.
More discreet nest adornments
are also known to have reproductive
benefits. Some bird species incorporate
aromatic plants and even cigarette
butts to repel parasites, while others
tuck feathers or fresh greenery inside
to attract mates. >

23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 69

 But what about the kites? These birds
have a long history of adding human-
made objects to their nests, including
smalls pilfered from washing lines,
a habit noted by Shakespeare in The
Winter’s Tale. “Everywhere you study
them, it catches your attention that in
those nests you find all this rubbish
and strange materials,” Sergio says.
The showy displays favoured by black
kites are hard to explain, particularly
because both sexes are involved in nest
building. To find out more, Sergio and
his team turned to a dense population
containing 500 breeding pairs in the
Doñana National Park.
This group is exceptionally well-
studied: the team knew the age, body
size, condition and migratory history
of many individuals. This meant they
could link the birds’ decorating
behaviour to aspects of their biology
such as their survival and reproduction,
and their place in the social hierarchy,
which reflects a bird’s ability to defend
its territory from competitors. These
hierarchies establish which are the
strongest birds, to prevent them
wasting energy engaging in conflicts
they are unlikely to win.
Doñana’s breeding pairs each have
a nest in a tree that they will fiercely
defend, along with a small surrounding
territory. Territories closest to the
communal hunting ground are highly
coveted and occupied by the strongest,
most dominant birds. Weaker, lower-
status kites occupy poorer territories,
and some find themselves nestless.
“Their only chance to get a territory
is to usurp it,” says Sergio.
Curiously, the team found that
the most decorated nests suffered the
fewest attacks from nestless birds. These
belonged to individuals in their physical
prime, ones that had the best territories
and were the most dominant. This
suggested that the decorations were
a signal of the physical strength and
social status of the resident, and an
“honest” one at that – it wasn’t that
weaker birds were gaming the system
by adding plastic too. And these signals
were heeded by other kites.
Those with highly decorated nests
also raised more young, possibly
because their homes deterred attacks
and food theft – a clear reproductive
benefit of decoration.
70 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017
What stops birds cheating the
system? To find out, the team added
extra white plastic to the nests of
low-status birds to see how the others
would react. These nests experienced
an upsurge in intrusions from other
kites that the residents found hard
to repel, revealing a social control to
enforce honesty. “There are individuals
that are constantly checking a subset
of nests,” says Sergio. “And when they
see a change in the decoration, they
come to check that you are not lying.”
Intriguingly, the birds had strong
decor taste preferences, opting for
white plastic over the green or
transparent stuff the team left out for
them. What’s more, weaker, low-status
birds quickly removed any extra white
plastic the team placed in their nests.
“They had very clear ideas of what they
wanted in the nest in terms of plastic,”
says Sergio. “I wouldn’t say ‘conscious’,
but surely it’s a decision that they take.”
PLAINPICTURE/MINDEN PICTURES/HISHAM ATALLAH/ NIS
Cool decorations
Why the preference for white? Sergio
wondered whether it helped the kites
resolve a trade-off between keeping
the nest sufficiently shaded from the
sun to keep it cool, and making it
visible to flying birds. White would
certainly stand out against green
canopy. “It was very compatible with a
message towards the sky,” says Sergio.
Last summer, he and his team Burrowing owls Mainwaring, who studies nests at
published the results of the study in adorn their nests Lancaster University, UK. Sergio’s
which they flew a camera drone over with manure and kite study in particular has sparked
experimental nests in Doñana, to see other decorations renewed interest in the field, and
how the plastic affected visibility. to deter intruders ecologists now think nests have a
Human volunteers shown the number of functions beyond safely
images were quicker to spot decorated cradling a brood, says Mainwaring.
nests, even from great heights. And it seems these birds aren’t alone.
So the plastic clearly made the nests In a slightly revolting twist on the
conspicuous – probably more so to technique, burrowing owls decorate
the razor-sharp eyes of a roaming kite. their nests with clods of cow or horse
Biologists had previously seen dung that are neither too fresh nor too
a handful of examples of species’ old. Finding out why makes for icky
extended phenotypes being used as a research. “It’s not a popular task for
signal to other individuals, but these students when you tell them they’ve
were almost always related to getting got to go out and collect garbage cans
a mate. The kind of status-signalling full of manure and then go and scatter
nest decorations displayed by the kites it around nests,” says behavioural
was new and suggested that nests were ecologist Courtney Conway at the
more complex than generally believed. University of Arizona.
“Up until about 10 years ago, people But it is not just the choice of
thought nests were boring, and not decorations that is odd. If ever a bird
worthy of much attention,” says Mark ought to keep its home under wraps,
 acted as bait for the owls’ main prey:
dung beetles. This made it one of the
few examples of wild birds using tools.
Yet it may not be the whole story.
Conway and his team had also shown
that the owls’ manure decorating

JOSE LUIS GOMEZ DE FRANCISCO/NATUREPL

behaviour trapped insects. But this
didn’t explain why some individuals
were garlanding their burrows with
other materials. Burrows can be in
short supply and attract the attention
of single males looking for somewhere
to nest. Resident males attack and
usually see off any intruders. Could the
owls, like black kites, be using a signal
to avoid conflict? Not all black kites Another bird, the diminutive
To find out, Conway’s team scattered have such dour rock sparrow, seems to have a similar
manure around unoccupied test decoration signalling motivation behind its
burrows at the start of the breeding decorating behaviour. Many birds
season, and discovered that owls line their nests with feathers, possibly
visited these less often than test to keep eggs at the right temperature.
burrows without manure. They then But Matteo Griggio at the University
placed a stuffed owl near real occupied of Padova in Italy and his team
nests to see how their owners would noticed that rock sparrows stacked
react. Not only did the males vigorously feathers on the rim of their nest like
attack the stuffed intruder, they hunting trophies.
immediately fortified their burrows When the team added extra
with more manure, as if they felt the feathers, these altered nests
need to boost their signals. experienced fewer intrusions, and
Seeing how owls behaved when were defended more vigorously by
manure was removed proved difficult: their occupants. This suggests that
the owls replaced it as fast as the the decorations, like those of the black
researchers could take it away. kites, are a signal to deter competitors.
“They work overtime to thwart our What’s more, resident females laid
experiments,” says Conway. “That told more eggs than those in unaltered nests,
us there was a function to having that and their male partners defended the
it’s this one. Burrowing owls nest manure around the entrance to the nest more, and were less likely to
underground, some in holes they digburrow – it wasn’t just that they were abandon it. Female rock sparrows are
for themselves, others in abandonedpoor housekeepers.” the nest decorators, so Griggio’s team
animal burrows. These usually have Intriguingly, about half the burrows speculates that it is a way for a female to
only one entrance and no emergency the team studied were also decorated signal her quality to a male, persuading
exit to flee hungry coyotes and badgers,
with other materials, which the owls him to stick around after mating and
looking for tasty eggs or nestlings.
were just as quick to replace if removed. invest more effort in raising their
Instead of being discreet, the owls
And given a choice, owls didn’t brood. This would make it a rare
decorate their nests with abandon –specifically seek out manure, instead example of sexual selection favouring
strewing the entrance with manure and
favouring materials that were closest an ornament on females – the ornament
other items such as moss, grass, plastic,
to hand. Conway can’t rule out the being outsourced to the nest.
paper and aluminium foil. Males stand
possibility that other materials The closer ecologists look, the more
guard, motionless, puffing themselves
somehow attract insects, although they are realising that nests aren’t just
up to full height if they spot a potential
he thinks the signalling hypothesis is a safe home for offspring, but can also
threat. “They appear to be trying to
the most plausible one. work as an extension of the body – like
stand out,” says Conway. a puffed-up chest to see off rivals,
For many years, ecologists assumed or a head crest that attracts a mate.
the manure masked the scent of the
“The owls replaced If only they could be aware of it, birds
burrow and so made it harder for the manure as fast as might preen themselves to know that
predators to find. But in 2004, a team
the researchers could science proves their taste in decor to be
led by Douglas Levey at the University a sign of great sophistication. Q
of Florida showed that the manure take it away”
offered little camouflage. Instead, it Claire Ainsworth decorates with abandon

23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 71


Accept snow
substitutes
Can fake flakes ever cut it on the piste,
asks Catherine Brahic
ORGET Christmas; I’m dreaming
F of a white February. Seven days
of natural snowfall, that’s all I’m
asking for while I’m on holiday. Call me
a snob if you like, but artificial snow just
doesn’t cut it on the slopes. It feels like
tiny glass beads under my skis, it’s
heavy, and it doesn’t move or pack or
stick like the real stuff does.
But we have to be realistic. Reliably
snowy Alpine winters are a thing of the
past. Our greenhouse gas emissions,
including those piling up from flights
to Geneva or Boulder, have made sure
of that. With global temperatures 1.1°C
72 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017
above where they were on average at
the end of the 19th century and still
on the rise, the smart money is on
learning to love fake snow or else
trading in those ski boots for a pair
of walking shoes.
Unless, of course, we can engineer
our way out of the problem. A new
generation of snow-making machines
is promising to create artificial stuff
that is as good as the real thing, and
uses less energy and water to boot.
Goodbye grainy fake snow,
hello year-round fluffy powder.
Could this be the answer to all our
PHILIP & KAREN SMITH/TFA/AURORA PHOTOS
middle-class winter woes?
As anyone who has ever had their
skiing holiday ruined by a dry spell
will know, real snow can be capricious.
The temperature and humidity have
to be just right for any droplets of mist
that bump up against airborne dust
particles to crystallise upon contact.
And the two must meet high in the
sky to give the budding crystals time –
as they fall – to form the delicate,
interconnected branches we
associate with snowflakes. It is the air
trapped in this branched structure
that gives powder snow its signature
fluffy finish.
When natural conditions aren’t
quite right, ski resorts have a few tricks
to spur things along. The most effective
is using snow machines that pump
water and air out of a nozzle at high
pressure. As the air expands, it loses
energy, causing a localised drop in
temperature. That freezes the pumped
water droplets to create tiny airborne
ice particles.
These frozen snow seeds are blown
high, giving them a little more air time
to knock up against a mist of larger
droplets also pumped out by the snow
guns. When the two meet, the outside
of the larger droplets freezes into a hard
shell, and an artificial snow “flake”
is born. Rather than forming delicate
branches, however, these are more like
tiny grains of sand, often with a liquid
centre as the inside generally doesn’t
have enough time to freeze.
While this ersatz snow may
sound unappealing, engineer
Fabian Wolfsperger at TechnoAlpin,
one of Europe’s large snow-making
companies, believes there are some
upsides. For one thing, it is harder and
denser than the real stuff. It is also
more homogeneous and packs well
into a smooth, even piste. “Those kinds
of conditions are what professional
skiers are after: they need snow that
will resist their hard turns, not just
fluff away,” he says.
This fake snow is also good for very
steep slopes, where powder is more
likely to lead to avalanches, and for
giving resorts a solid snow base at
the beginning of the season. This is
becoming more and more important
as temperatures rise. The last few
years have seen very dry weather in
November and December in Europe,
and climate models tell us to expect
increasingly erratic conditions. Most
resorts make their money between
Christmas and New Year, so being
able to make a lot of snow on cold
days early in the winter is key.
Perhaps it is because I am not
a professional skier, but I find
Wolfsperger’s argument tough to
swallow. An alternative, so-called
nature-identical snow, sounds far
more appealing. The idea is to produce
snowflakes with a classic branched
structure and powdery feel.
One method involves running a flow
of cold air over a basin of hot water
inside a closed chamber. The cold air
becomes supersaturated with water
vapour, and is blown into a second,
cold chamber that is criss-crossed with
nylon threads. Ice crystals form on the
threads and grow in a typical branching
fashion until they are shaken off into a
drawer below.
The snowflakes are lovely, but the
technique can’t replace traditional
snow-making, says Martin Schneebeli
of WSL Institute for Snow and
Avalanche Research SLF in Switzerland.
Schneebeli uses the snow to learn
about the physics of avalanches in the
Rising
temperatures
are forcing resorts
to up their use
of fake snow
lab, but the quantities produced in
this way are too small to coat a piste.
Michael Bacher of Neuschnee, a
company based in Austria, thinks he
has found a happy medium. Bacher’s
idea combines parts of traditional
artificial snow-making with the closed
chamber approach. “We are producing
high-quality snow, targeting a niche
market in the winter tourism industry,”
he says.
Slippery slope
Instead of spraying ice nuclei into the
open air, he puts them into a tent-like
space with air tuned to hold more water
than would be possible under normal
conditions, with over 100 per cent
humidity. This triggers crystallisation
on the free-floating ice nuclei.
Flakes grow bigger and bigger in this
engineered environment, just as in
the sky, until they are either blown out
the top of the chamber or pulled out
through a pipe at the bottom to be
distributed on the mountain.
Neuschnee’s method can’t yet
handle large resorts. But if it can make
the upgrade, it promises to have one
further advantage over traditional
snow-making: it uses less water per
“Unfortunately resorts are
expanding snow-making,
which is like throwing
gasoline on a fire”
WESTEND61/GETTY
cubic metre of snow formed. With
traditional fake snow, some of the
water droplets that are sprayed into
the air evaporate. Two recent studies –
one French and one Austrian – have
found that between 15 and 40 per cent
of pumped water is lost to evaporation
during snow-making, reducing the
efficiency of the technique.
That can be a problem in high
mountain regions where water is
already at a premium, particularly with
the seasonal pressures of the tourism
industry. Large resorts address this by
building water storage, says Auden
Schendler, vice president of
sustainability at Aspen mountain
resort in Colorado. “This has several
benefits,” he says. “It allows you to fill
reservoirs during peak flow, which is
least damaging to ecosystems. And it
means you’ve decoupled from streams
or rivers at low periods, so you are not
stressing them.”
By switching to more efficient snow-
making methods, resorts could see
their water and energy bills melt
away, shrinking their environmental
footprint in the process. But fake snow
is unlikely ever to be without impact.
“Unfortunately, in response to climate
change, resorts are expanding snow-
making, which is like throwing gasoline
on a fire,” says Schendler. The more
artificial snow we use, the more we
heat the planet, and the more of the
stuff we wind up needing. It’s all
downhill from here. Q
Catherine Brahic is a precious snowflake
23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 73
Clocking time
People who see vivid mental calendars
could help us understand memory,
says Caroline Williams

OR Emma, this time of the year has That’s because calendar synaesthetes

F special significance, and not just

because of all the gifts and food.
It’s also the only time of year when the
date in her mental calendar lines up
perfectly with her body.
Emma is a calendar synaesthete,
one of a handful of people who see
time: not as a vague conceptual
timeline, but as a vivid calendar that
feels so real they could almost touch
it. This is a little-known variation of
synaesthesia, in which the brain links
one kind of sensation to another. Some
people associate shapes with certain
sounds, or colours with numbers (see
“Crossed wires”, opposite). Emma sees
experience a supercharged version of
the way everyone else experiences
time. Studies of different cultures
around the world have shown that our
perceptions vary slightly – most people
in the West perceive time as a straight
line running through their bodies, with
the future ahead of them, while in parts
of Papua New Guinea time flows uphill
and for some Chinese people it flows
downwards. But we all compute the
abstract concept of time in the same
way: in our brains, “time is always
mapped onto space,” says V. S.
Ramachandran, a neuroscientist at
the University of California, San Diego.
BRETT RYDER

time as a hula hoop, which anchors 31
December to her chest and projects the
rest of the year in a circle that extends
about a metre in front of her.
Heidi, another calendar synaesthete,
sees the year as a backwards C hovering
before her, with January at one end of
the horseshoe and December at the
other. When she thinks of a date she
feels herself travel along the calendar to
the right spot. She has a separate, hoop-
shaped calendar for days of the week.
Both have been part of her life for as
long as she can remember.
The fact that certain people can
vividly conjure number lines and
calendars was first noted by Victorian
polymath Francis Galton in 1880, but
we have only recently begun to figure
out how – and why. It’s not just a matter
of idle curiosity. Understanding how
calendar synaesthesia works may help
unravel the way we all keep track of our
memories as we move through space
and time.
The mapping job falls largely to
the hippocampus, a pair of curved
structures towards the centre of the
brain that contain specialised neurons.
Some, called grid cells, plot locations,
while others, known as place cells,
become active when we arrive on the
scene. The basic circuitry seems to have
evolved about 300 million years ago
in a fish-like common ancestor, and
similar systems are found in most
other animals, from lizards to birds.
At some point in human evolution,
though, the hippocampus gained a
second role: storing autobiographical
memories, each with a time stamp
recorded by specialised time cells.
“Heidi’s year is a backwards
C hovering in front of her,
with the days of the week
shaped like a hoop”
“As you live your life, place cells keep
track of your location in the world, and
time cells keep track of stimuli receding
into the past,” says neuroscientist Marc
Howard at Boston University. “When
you vividly remember a specific event
from your life – say lunch last Tuesday –
the hippocampus recovers the activity
of time cells and place cells that were
active during that event.”
Whether any other animals have this
kind of autobiographical memory is
hotly debated, but we know for sure
that no other species makes calendars.
Around 10,000 years ago, we began to
notice the natural cycles of the sun
and moon and record them for future
reference, first in stone circles, and
today on paper and computer screens.
But calendar synaesthetes don’t
need to. They can call up their mental

74 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017


versions at will, something most are
surprised to learn is unusual. Heidi first
realised in a psychology class in high
school. “My teacher was talking about
synaesthesia and how some people see
calendars. I said, ‘doesn’t everybody see
a calendar? How can you not?’ ”.
Ramachandran wanted to know how
they do it, and if they were really seeing
calendars or summoning something
from memory. So he asked a 20-year-
old synaesthete called ML to recite
alternate months between January
and December, first forwards and then
backwards. For most people, it takes
three times as long to go backwards,
because we have to construct the
calendar from memory as we go. But
ML was equally fast in both directions.
She also unconsciously moved her eyes
and finger as she went, suggesting her
calendar was always in front of her.
To find out more, Ramachandran
also used visual illusions, including the
“motion after-effect”. If you stare for
30 seconds at a contracting spiral and
then look at another picture, it will
appear to expand, because the brain’s
prediction outpaces our perception.
But the illusion doesn’t happen if you
CROSSED WIRES
Around 1 in every 40 people has
some form of synaesthesia, in
which sensations of one kind
evoke another – so they might
taste colours or hear flavours,
for instance. Up to 15 per cent of
synaesthetes experience vivid
perceptions that seem to be
“out there” in the world, rather
than in their mind’s eye.
Synaesthesia runs in families
and is thought to be caused by
extra wiring between adjacent
sensory areas of the brain.
People with one type are likely
to have another unrelated kind
as well. It is still unknown which
gene or genes are involved.
look at a blank wall or just imagine a
scene. “The brain needs something to
attribute it to,” says Ramachandran.
When ML looked at her calendar after
the spiral, it expanded in the same way
as a real image. When asked to imagine
an object in her mind’s eye, it stayed still.
That means that, as far as her brain is
concerned, the calendar isn’t a figment
of her imagination, it is actually there.
What is going on? Ramachandran
points to an area of the brain that we
rely on to make sense of symbols
and numbers and order events into
sequences. The angular gyrus is found
above and behind the ears on each side
of the brain at the junction of several
sensory areas, including the visual
cortex. It also connects directly to the
hippocampus. We all probably use this
bit of circuitry to imagine the layout of
time, but Ramachandran believes this
is where calendar synaesthetes have
the extra connections that make their
visions so very real.
There are many open questions, not
least whether this vivid calendar helps
memory. There’s reason to think so. “If
you ask them about a specific memory,
then they’ll conjure up the calendar
and put the memory in the appropriate
slot,” says Ramachandran.
That might be a trick worth learning.
Daniel Bor at the University of Sussex,
UK, has found that people can teach
themselves to experience synaesthesia
by repeatedly associating colours with
certain letters. It might be possible to
do something similar with calendars.
But they may not be a universal
boon. One synaesthete Ramachandran
met finds her calendar confusing, and
another says hers is missing August,
which can be frustrating – not least for
making plans for a summer break.
For Heidi, it’s a mixed bag. “It helps
me sometimes because I can picture
things better, but I do get mixed up.”
Her horseshoe-shaped calendar has a
big gap after December, which means
January always comes sooner than she
expects it to. “It feels really abrupt, like
a whole month was in between them
and it just went all of a sudden,” she
says. With the return to the office after
Christmas looming, that’s probably
something we can all relate to. ■
Caroline Williams has time on her hands
23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 75
Missives
impossible
Fake news is nothing new – even Isaac Newton
was a victim, says Stephen Ornes

ONDAY morning seemed a but also Galileo Galilei and René other scientists to claim undue credit –

M good time to upend the history

of science. And Michel Chasles
was poised to do it, armed with just two
Descartes, Caligula, Judas Iscariot, Joan
of Arc and even Jesus Christ himself.
Chasles’s supporters, typically lesser
a claim that riled British historians.
An article in The Times said the charge
against Newton “touches our national
letters and four notes. It was July 1867, members of the academy, praised the pride” and that the allegations should
and Chasles, a mathematician at the sheer detail in the letters. Historians be “repelled by his countrymen”.
Sorbonne, stood before the French noted that the paper was aged and the The scandal grew. Chasles refused to
Academy of Sciences in Paris. The ink chemistry consistent with the reveal his source, but produced letters
documents threatened to dethrone epoch. The academy published the text from other scientists “proving” that
Isaac Newton as the originator of the of the letters in its weekly proceedings. Pascal, inspired by the work of Galileo
law of universal gravitation and install Most established scientists were and Johannes Kepler, devised the law
French mathematician Blaise Pascal sceptical. Objections poured in. Pascal’s of gravitation. Some letters came from
in his stead. estimates of planet masses were too Galileo himself, who apparently had
Chasles was a pre-eminent scholar. precise; the handwriting wasn’t a close a robust – and previously unknown –
He had hammered out new geometry, match to other existing documents correspondence with the young Pascal.
won international awards and was a penned by him; there were logical
beloved “geometer of genius”. inconsistencies. But Chasles not only
His reputation stretched far beyond held firm, he doubled down. When a
Get Galileo!
France. When he talked, people listened. critic pointed out that Pascal couldn’t Italian historians jumped into the
But that morning, he stood on the have worked without calculus, which fray, noting a complete lack of other
edge of a maelstrom. The letters, one of Newton had developed, Chasles evidence that Galileo even knew
them dated 1652 and apparently sent by presented a new newly found letter in French. In fact, all the letters Chasles
Pascal to Anglo-Irish chemistry pioneer which Pascal reported receiving a presented were in French – a fact that
Robert Boyle, included an early manuscript from Newton describing didn’t dissuade him or his supporters.
description of the law of gravitation. the “calculus of the infinite”. That was “One of the remarkable points of this
The notes also contained calculations problematic: judging by the date of affair is the unanimous sentiment that
of the masses of the major planets, that letter, Newton would have been united the scholars of all these diverse
based on gravity and relative to the sun. just 11 years old. countries in one spirit of indignation,”
The controversial part? The date on the By October, Chasles had obtained reported attorney Henri Bordier and
letters was decades before Newton first and presented many letters between librarian Emile Mabille, who
described the same law in his Principia. Newton and Pascal that hinted at a investigated the affair in 1869.
It seemed Pascal deserved credit for one darker story: that a young Newton had The cycle continued for two years,
of the biggest advances in the history appropriated the work of Pascal and with Chasles answering questions by
of physics. Newton was derivative. presenting more letters, which raised
“Newton dépossédé!” (Newton more questions. Many prominent
dispossessed!) read the headline “The affair united historians believed the letters to be
of a Belgian newspaper soon after. scholars of diverse authentic, or at least that they were
The affair agitated Europe’s scientific copies of authentic documents. It was
community and beyond. Over the
countries in one spirit in 1869, under pressure from his critics,
next two years, it would swell to of indignation” that Chasles revealed to the academy
envelop not only Newton and Pascal, that he had obtained the manuscripts

76 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017


from a mysterious archivist called
Denis Vrain-Lucas, and enlisted
the police to visit the man’s home.
Inside, they found Vrain-Lucas, but
no manuscripts. Instead, there was an
array of ink bottles and blank pages
SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTE LIBRARY/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
ripped from old books. It was clear that
Vrain-Lucas was writing the documents
himself. He was duly arrested.
Vrain-Lucas, an insatiable reader
from Châteaudun, started out as a law
clerk in nearby Chartres and moved to
Paris in 1852. At first, he pursued work
in bookstores and libraries, but was
stymied by his lack of formal education.
Finally, he was hired by a firm that
forged family pedigrees for people who
wanted to “uncover” their genealogical
links to famous French people. It was
perfect training: by 1854, he was
working on forgeries of his own.
He “drew boldness from his very
ignorance”, wrote Bordier and Mabille,
and he “hoped, against all expectations,
that a catastrophe did not necessarily
lie at the end of his undertaking”.
For the better part of two decades,
with the industry of a monk, the
counterfeiter reportedly created and
sold more than 27,000 forgeries,
including letters and autographs.
He would pilfer blank pages from old
books in Parisian libraries, sometimes
wetting them to age them.
It was in 1861 that Vrain-Lucas first
visited the home of Chasles and sold
him three letters: one each from the
playwrights Molière and Jean Racine,
and one from the scholar François
Rabelais. Vrain-Lucas said he had been
entrusted to sell documents belonging
to a collector who had died in a
shipwreck, but whose collection
had survived. Chasles bought every
manuscript Vrain-Lucas brought him.
Chasles’s collection stretched far
beyond science, and Vrain-Lucas’s
fabrications grew increasingly reckless.
He rewrote history through a huge cast
of characters. Judas Iscariot wrote to
Mary Magdalene, who wrote to
Lazarus – risen from the dead – about
her hopes of seeing Jesus, and how
she enjoyed her travels in France. In
another note, she mentions a letter
from Jesus. “Lucas’ fecundity shames
other forgers,” notes historian Joseph
Rosenblum in Prince of Forgers.
But this fecundity caught up with
him, with his arrest. Chasles testified
that over the course of eight years, he
had spent more than 140,000 francs –
a fortune – on Vrain-Lucas’s products.
No one knows why Chasles was so well
deceived, but the judge was clear where
the blame lay: “You have abused in the
most brazen manner the passion of an
old man, of a scholar, his passion as a
collector and his love for his country,
in order to deceive him shamefully.”
Vrain-Lucas was fined 500 francs and
sentenced to two years in jail. While
inside, he wrote to Chasles, who visited
him regularly and prayed for him.
It seems Chasles had fallen under
Vrain-Lucas’s spell. Perhaps that’s why
Did patriotism blind the controversy left his reputation only
Michel Chasles to bruised and his character untarnished.
the true origin of When Chasles died in 1880, an obituary
some astonishing in Nature affirmed his integrity and
letters? noted “how honourably he extricated
himself from the matter, and did all in
his power to repair the mischief done”.
The shock waves that Vrain-Lucas
sent through science subsided, but his
con-artistry did not. He would bounce
back into jail twice more, before being
banished to his home town, where he
ended his days as a second-hand book
seller. Quite a comedown for the man
who hijacked history. Q
Stephen Ornes is a man of letters
23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 77
CULTURE
Elf Lands: The new fantasy
When producers come calling in search of a rival to Game of
Thrones, who better to call than M. John Harrison? He’s famous
for this sort of thing. What could possibly go wrong?
Volume 1:
Before the Battle
The Elf Queen, who’s eaten
nothing for a week but the
wadding from benzedrine
inhalers, has sex with her dwarf,
Cootchie Cootie, in the back seat
of his bombed-up 1951 Fleetline
Cadillac, while Tolkien and
C. S. Lewis look on in passive-
aggressive disavowal. It’s a favour
for a friend. After that, for the
founding volume anyway, we
envisage Zap Comic dynamics
on a lean-burn version of The
Revenger’s Tragedy – the usual
tale of poor choices, low ground
clearance and self-medication.
Emotional palette from
A Glastonbury Romance, prose
from Destination: Moon and
worldbuilding from one of those
ads where if you buy the right
mobile phone it causes
inconvenient buildings to fold
themselves away in front of
the user so she can get to some
other stuff she wants to consume
without ever walking round
a corner or even, apparently,
consulting the phone itself.
The world – or perhaps the King –
will be called Eldrano, and not
as we first proposed Eldranol,
which turns out to be already
trademarked for a bovine
mastitis application.
78 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017
Volume 2:
The Lost Palaces
Eldrano the Elf Lord is wheeled to
bed every night on a reinforced
composite and titanium gurney.
Two or three attendants lift the
thick laps of flesh and lovingly
clean out the sores down in the
creamy, lardy folds where his
genitals still nestle. He has lost
some of his right foot to diabetes.
The Queen left him a hundred
years ago, with her dwarf, for the
North. But none of this will ever
spoil his dream of finishing an
ultra-marathon. At night in a
secondary world of his secondary
world the Elf Lord runs, barefoot
and effortless, across the Great Erg
Desert (see map), wearing only the
traditional leather kirtle, while his
favourite daughter keeps watch
over his sleeping body with its
faint, calming smells of ketones
and antifungal cream. She’s a
feisty urban vampire princess but
her heart is so in the right place!
She can’t help but wonder how
things will go with them when
the Horde arrives at the Gate next
Wednesday. Tomorrow, in a final
attempt to reach out to his
people, the Elf Lord will feature
kingdomwide in the Don’t Do This
To Yourself segment of Supersize
vs Superskinny; while for the
Princess it’s a Kickass Battle Looks
Last Chance on QVC.
Volume 3:
Out of Elf Land
Over time the Elf Queen’s
underjaw has thickened, while
her chin has remained small and
pointed, her nose turned up, so
that you can see, embedded in fat,
the adolescent she was fifteen
hundred years ago. In her garden
she keeps papery silver poppies
and an iris which smells of
chocolate; but since the Fall of
Llyngitgothgethreal, the rest of
her life has been half-warm meals
in cold rooms. Though he still
carries the single strand of her
hair she gave him in the grim
days before the battle of Clotsore
Moor, the dwarf knows that their
relationship is over. So when she
says, in a final rather desperate
move to regain the initiative, that
she has decided to go away for a
week, he only shrugs.
“I need to get some space,” she
tells him. “Great,” he says vaguely.
“Get right away,” she insists.
“Everyone needs space,” he says.
She leaves the room but calls
back, “I can’t think what’s wrong
with you.”
The dwarf can’t bring himself to
say. As they fail to get older, elves
cling on to peak moments and try
to repeat them, squeezing a little
less out each time until they are
DAVE MCKEAN
only going through the motions.
To an outsider this makes their
whole society seem grotesque,
caricatured, desperate. He doesn’t
want to be a party to it any more.
He wants to be back underground,
where the real things are
happening.
For more books and arts coverage, visit newscientist.com/culture
Volume 4:
Last Transmission
from the Deep Halls
... saying, once those outsiders get
in your tortured halls... I’m saying
we didn’t have command of the
vast fictions of the day... The city
wasn’t, in the end, where those of
us who lived there thought it was.
We had already lost it in all senses
of that word... All we knew of this
place was the news... the halls are
aware that – in the end – they can
never know what, exactly, the plot
was. It’s only silence after that.
Back at the beginning there’s
the tapping sound, like metal on
stone... then the call signs, several
of them, very amplified and
confused... cries in the halls...
a cruel few words and then,
“We no longer know which way
to face.” The halls are still aware...
What if the city didn’t “fall”?
What if nothing “fell”? Nothing
was lost but existed just alongside
everything else, fifty years later
in the rubble by a farm at the flat
end of nowhere... who could write
this... everyone has a different
story to sell... call signatures in
rooks, fresh plough, old silence:
“We don’t know what to do.
Everything is the alongside of
something else...” Minor players
gesture helplessly... signals hard
to make out in the chaos as the big
institutions go down... everyone
desperate now.
23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 79
Volume 5:
The Royal Estate
The palace turned out to be a
stuffy, disappointing warren that
just reeked of dogs. The Queen
showed us around lots of small
low-ceilinged rooms with fitted
carpets, not what we were looking
for at all. No real Elf Land values or
internal architecture left, except
for that rather gorgeous river
frontage. She kept saying that she
and her husband had been going
to make this or that improvement,
but everything was interrupted
when “They came back”. At one
point she said, “we were going to
sell up, go to the Deep West, but
they came back. They came back,
you see, and what can you do?”
She never said who or what they
were. There was an old labrador
sleeping outside the back door.
They also had a really quite smelly
chihuahua, always gazing up at
you, and when you petted it,
“Oh she’ll go to anyone, that one.
When you’re shopping she’ll go
straight in your bag.” Meanwhile,
honestly, Eldrano just vegetated
there in the front room, watching
cable TV on satellite and in the
end we decided no matter how
close it was to the Evening
Harbours it just wasn’t for us. ■
M. John Harrison’s new collection of
stories, You Should Come With Me Now,
is published by Comma Press
CULTURE

INTERFOTO/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Triumph and tragedy
Okhotsk in Russia’s far east:
the jumping-off point for Alaska

Siberia, laying claim to Alaska and

Peter the Great planned a fabulously extravagant expedition to Russia’s
far east and Alaska. Stephanie Pain finds out what really happened
Island of the Blue Foxes: Disaster and
triumph on the world’s greatest
scientific expedition by Stephen R.
Bown, Da Capo Press
SOME might call it
ambitious, others
madness. The
Great Northern
Expedition,
dreamed up by
Peter the Great
in 1724 and
completed five Russian rulers
later in 1743, was the biggest,
longest scientific expedition in
history – undeniably ambitious,
then. Thousands of people
trekked 8000 kilometres from
St Petersburg on Russia’s western
coast to Okhotsk on the Pacific,
a terrible journey through the
roadless and lawless wilds of
Siberia. Those who then went on
to sail in search of the Great Land
(Alaska), endured scurvy and
shipwreck. Only the overly
optimistic could have believed
it anything but madness.
In Island of the Blue Foxes,
Stephen Bown has drawn on
“The foxes bit the sick and
dying and ate the hands
and feet of corpses before
they could be buried”
journals, logs, letters and official
reports to piece together a story
never fully told before. And what
a story: adventure and discovery,
misery and death, and a cast of
characters by turns admirable and
appalling, brilliant and hopeless,
annoying and plain nasty. Two of
them – Vitus Bering, the Danish
leader of the expedition, and
German naturalist Georg Steller –
have long been heroes of mine.
Thanks to Bown’s revelations and
brilliant storytelling, I now know
just how astonishing their
exploits were.
In 1725, Bering led a preliminary
expedition to Russia’s far east,
then built a ship and sailed north
along the coast of Kamchatka in
search of a passage to the Arctic
Ocean. He found what is now the
Bering Strait, but thanks to thick
fog failed to spot Alaska. In 1733,
he set out again, charged with
stamping Russia’s authority on
opening up new trade routes, as
well as exploration and discovery.
Bering retraced his route, this
time with an army of scientists,
soldiers, servants, wives, children
and labourers – and everything
they needed, from tools, ropes
and sails to candelabra, silk
gowns, powdered wigs and his
wife Anna’s clavichord.
After four years of hard travel,
they reached Okhotsk. There, they
built a dockyard and two ships,
the St Peter and St Paul, to explore
the far north Pacific. What
happened next is the stuff of
nightmares. The two ships lost
contact. Fog, storms and blizzards
meant they were sailing almost
blind in uncharted waters dotted
with islands and reefs. In July 1741,
both ships reached Alaska but
neither stayed long, fearful of
being trapped over the winter.
By October, the St Paul was back
in Siberia, with 21 men lost or
dead from scurvy.

80 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017

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

Thinking inside the box

The St Peter was even less
fortunate. In November, with
the crew sick, dying or dead from
scurvy, the ship was wrecked on
a desolate island. The survivors
lived in holes dug in the beach,
with little protection from the
weather and hardly any food.
They were attacked by packs of a
dark-furred subspecies of Arctic
fox. The foxes “crowded into our
dwellings and stole everything
they could carry”, Steller reported.
They bit the sick and dying and
“Stuck on the island, Steller
was also able to do what
he came to do: observe
and describe nature”
“ate the hands and feet of the
corpses before we had time to
bury them”, wrote Lieutenant
Sven Waxell.
Then Bering died. The
survivors’ fate now lay in the
hands of Waxell, the new leader,
and Steller, who became revered
for his botanical knowledge and
skill in treating scurvy. Stuck on
the island, he was also able to do
what he came to do: observe and
describe nature.
In the event, Steller was the
only naturalist to see some of the
How much brain power have you got left after floating on a sea of
indulgence this holiday? Find out with puzzles from Alex Bellos
ALL the most entertaining pencil-
and-paper puzzles come from
Japan. Sudoku is the best known,
but there are hundreds more.
I’ve selected two types of puzzle
from my recent book that I think
New Scientist readers will
particularly enjoy. In each, the
grids can be filled in through
logical deduction alone.
KenKen
In 2004, maths teacher Tetsuya
Miyamoto wanted to create a
puzzle for his classes of 8-year-
olds using the basic arithmetical
operations: addition, subtraction,
multiplication and division.
So he devised KenKen, which
became a hit in Japan and now
features in some UK newspapers.
However, in the newspaper
version, the mathematical
symbols for the arithmetical
the numbers in those cells must
either add, subtract, multiply or
divide to make the target number.
Straight Cross
What would you get if you
combined a crossword with a
sudoku? Puzzle creator Naoki
Inaba set himself this challenge
and came up with Straight Cross.
I find it more rewarding than
sudoku, since you must take into
account the numerical value of
the number, which adds an
unusual twist. Try these two
examples (bottom left and right).
The rules: fill the cells with
numbers from 1 to 9 (but not
1/ (1-4,+, ‒,×, ÷)
2 36
necessarily all of them) so each
horizontal and vertical strip
contains consecutive numbers.
A strip is made up of adjacent
white cells between the edges
of the grid and/or black squares.
Although the numbers must
be consecutive, the sequence
needn’t start with 1 and the
numbers can be in any order.
So, if the digits are 2, 3 and 4,
for example, they could be in
the order 2-3-4, 2-4-3, 3-2-4, 3-4-2,
4-2-3 or 4-3-2. ■
The puzzles are from Puzzle Ninja: Pit
your wits against the Japanese puzzle
masters by Alex Bellos (Guardian
Faber). For solutions, see page 83
2/ (1-6,+, —,×, ÷)
108 6 50
30 7 2

species he described. His sea cow operations required are always 11 5

was a gigantic, 4-tonne manatee written in the grid. Too easy! 11 72

with blubber “as agreeably yellow In the two examples here (top
as the best Holland butter” and left and right), which Miyamoto 9 7

beef-like meat that stayed good designed by hand, the symbols

for weeks. The goose-sized
spectacled cormorant was easy to
catch, and one bird was “sufficient
for three starving men”.
The island’s birds and marine
mammals were a vital source of
food for shipwrecked men, but
Steller worried the expedition
would open up new routes for
hunters who would destroy what
he had discovered. He was right.
Ten months after the wreck,
Bering’s men sailed back to
Kamchatka in a small ship built
from the remains of the St Peter.
Ambitious or mad? You decide. ■
Stephanie Pain is a consultant for
New Scientist
1 6 12 5
are omitted, making for a much
more interesting challenge. The 7
30
number of ninja heads indicates
the level of difficulty.
The rules: fill the grid with
the numbers between 1 and the
total number of rows (1, 2, 3, 4 in 3/ 4/
a 4×4 grid, for example), so each
number appears only once in 7 3 2
every row or column. The grid 6
is divided into “cages”, each 3 3 4 7 5
containing a target number in
its top left corner. 2 7
Using only one arithmetical
4 2
operation in each cage, either
7 8 7
+, –, ×, or ÷, you must produce
the target number using all
1 5 3
the numbers in that cage. So,
if there are two cells in a cage,
4 5 5
23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 81
CULTURE

Peering into the Whirlpool

Enjoy a spectacular tour of the cosmos, says Jonathon Keats

Universe: Exploring the astronomical

world, Intro by Paul Murdin, Phaidon
LATE one summer
night in 1845, the
3rd Earl of Rosse
climbed up to an
18-metre-high
platform to focus

LEBRECHT MUSIC AND ARTS PHOTO LIBRARY/ALAMY STOCK

a telescope on a nebula known as
M51. At the time, the telescope
was the world’s biggest, and
operating it took considerable
stamina. But what Rosse saw was
worth his effort. The light resolved
into a whirlpool – the first spiral
galaxy ever observed.
Rosse’s resulting drawing is
humble and astonishing. The ink
smudges lack the grandeur of the
Hubble Space Telescope’s images
of M51 (the Whirlpool galaxy),
but they were stunningly accurate. enticements to find other
It exemplifies astronomy’s
close link to technology: more
powerful instruments allow
more penetrating insights.
The opportunity for such side-
by-side comparison is just one
of the pleasures of Universe,
a spectacular book with 300
images relating to astronomy.
These range from a Lascaux cave
painting made in 15,000 BC, where book deducing that Saturn must
dots may depict the Pleiades,
to a photo of Jupiter’s south pole “The most powerful way of
released by NASA this year. Visual becoming Copernican has
art is also included, from Vincent
van Gogh’s Starry Night to Sarah
Sze’s 21st-century Planetarium.
These deliberately disparate
images are paired to provoke the
viewer. While some pairings are
fairly straightforward, others are
more playful. For example, the
Horsehead nebula is juxtaposed
with the Egyptian Temple of
Hathor, where animal-headed
deities are portrayed against a
background of stars.
But these pairings are mere
connections: it’s choose your own
adventure, with the whole cosmos
to explore. One such tour offers
myriad views of how we make
sense of the universe, revealing
the brilliance and the blind spots
of conjecture. The brilliance is
strikingly illustrated in a 1659
diagram by the Dutch polymath
Christiaan Huygens, drawn for a
been to discover ever more
stars and planets like ours”
be encircled with rings. At the
time, Galileo contended that the
rings were attached to the planet.
Conjectural blind spots,
however, show up in a drawing
illustrating scholar Martianus
Capella’s geo-heliocentric model
of the universe. In the 5th century,
Capella cleverly marshalled
contemporary observations in
support of the prevailing world
view. His drawing is a powerful
evocation of confirmation bias.
Both graphics hold more than
historical interest. Together they
provide important context for
understanding another
remarkable image in Universe:
a still from the Millennium
Simulation of 2005, in which the
Virgo Consortium extrapolated
the distribution of dark matter
across the cosmos. It’s cutting-
edge science, deserving both
admiration and scepticism.
Another thematic course begins
with a simple, yet iconic diagram
of the heliocentric universe from
Nicolaus Copernicus’s 1543 book,
De Revolutionibus, and reveals our
ongoing struggle to absorb the
implications of the Copernican
revolution. One big hurdle has
been to grasp our unexceptional
place in the vastness of space.
Science and art have provided an
impressive range of visual aids.
For instance, Universe includes an
1851 educational chart in which
In 1845, this vast telescope
observed the first spiral galaxy
the relative distance of the planets
from the sun was shown in terms
of the time a cannonball would
take to hit them. And in 2011,
artist Mishka Henner brilliantly
presented the solar system in a
6000-page book, where each leaf
represents a million kilometres.
Most pages are blank.
And yet the most powerful way
to become Copernican has been to
look ever further into the cosmos
and discover ever more stars and
planets like ours. Images of spiral
galaxies hold a special place in
this gaze, because they have the
same structure as the Milky Way.
From Rosse’s sketch to the Hubble
images, peering at the Whirlpool
we see ourselves from afar – and
recognise that beings from M51
may be taking the same picture. Q
Jonathon Keats wrote You Belong to
the Universe: Buckminster Fuller and
the future, Oxford University Press

82 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017

 For more books and arts coverage, visit newscientist.com/culture
Just experience it
Curators can get in the way of a good show, finds Simon Ings
Natural Histories: Traces of the
Political, Mumok, Vienna, Austria,
until 14 January 2018
VISITORS to Vienna’s spectacular
Natural History Museum may
discover some taxidermied
exhibits smothered in black
gloop. This is artist Mark Dion’s
The Tar Museum, and it is part of
Natural Histories: Traces of the
Political, an art exhibition about
nature and politics, most of
which is in the nearby museum
of contemporary art, Mumok.
Those venturing across the
Maria-Theresien-Platz will not
be sorry. Or not at first. Early on, in some cases”
there is charming, sometimes
beautiful documentation of work became a focus of dissent against
in the 1970s by the Romanian
Sigma group. Inspired by research
in bionics and cybernetics,
mathematician Lucian Codreanu
and his fellows applied scientific
method to their observations of
the rivers and woods of the
Timisoara hunting forest.
The Tar Museum: damaged nature
is transformed into art spectacle
KLAUS PICHLER
AND MORE…
Thinking inside the box:
the solutions
Well done – I hope you didn’t find
the puzzles too hard! The key to
solving the KenKen is to start by
looking at cages with the biggest
numbers, since the operation
required must be multiplication.
Doru Tulcan’s abstract sculpture altered for military purposes. And remember, a number can be
Structuring the Cube makes More often, though, the art repeated in a cage if it appears in
something surprisingly organic, focuses on how nature encroaches different rows and columns.
suggestive of the workings of on human settlement. In Arena,
a crayfish’s eye, from a tiny Anri Sala records the decayed 1.
vocabulary of rods and triangles.
Meanwhile, Stefan Bertalan’s
state of Tirana zoo, with feral
dogs occupying a space meant
2 4 3 1
Structure of the Elderflower earns for people, while the zoo’s “wild”
its place by virtue of its exquisite animals languish in cages. 1 3 2 4
draughtsmanship. This being Nature’s eradication of human
the 1970s, the Sigma group also
enjoyed a lot of more-or-less
traces can’t come quickly enough
in some cases. In 2003, Polish
4 2 1 3
undressed mucking about, and sculptor Miroslaw Balka visited
Auschwitz and filmed deer grazing 3 1 4 2
“Nature’s eradication by the barbed wire fence of the
of human traces can’t concentration camp. A wall board
2.
come quickly enough observes that, in 1942 (when Bambi 3 6 1 4 5 2
was released), “while cinemagoers
were shedding tears about the 6 3 4 1 2 5
emotional story of a little deer,
Nicolae Ceausescu’s dictatorship. the ‘final solution’ and the murder 5 2 3 6 1 4
The other artists, groups and of millions of people was already 4 1 2 5 6 3
movements in this show rarely being planned”. This is silly: would
achieved as direct an engagement the world be any better if Bambi’s 1 4 5 2 3 6
with the natural world. bereavement left us unmoved?
Many pieces here index human It gets worse. Exquisite
2 5 6 3 4 1
activity through changes in the allegorical frescoes by 18th-
environment. The models and century artist Johann Wenzel 3.
photographs of Anca Benera and Bergl are “recognizable as 4 5 7 6
Arnold Estefan’s Debrisphere strategies of absolutist picture
record how landscapes have been propaganda”. And back with Dion:
4 3 2 4 3
one installation capturing “the 3 3 2 5 4
lifestyle and self-image of the
prototypical ethnographer of 2 1 4 3 5
colonial times”, isn’t even that,
according to the curators, but
1 2 4 5 6
alludes “to our own imagination 3 4 5 6
of that ethnographer”.
I left feeling rather as Lewis
4.
Carroll’s Alice might have felt if, 5 4 3 7 6 2 3
instead of freely stepping through
the mirror, she had been shoved
6 5 6 4 5 3 2
through it from behind by a gang 4 6 5 7 6 5
of goonish anthropologists. 7 4 6 5 5 4
Natural Histories is a portal 4 3 5 3 4 2
into a world where history,
politics, horror, guilt and the
7 7 8 5 6 7
5 4 6 7 3 4 5
natural world are sewn together.
It is well worth seeing, but I wish 6 5 4 2 5 3 6
the curators had shut up. ■
23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 83
DISCOVER MORE DARK FUTURES EVERY WEEK IN 2000 AD!!
LETTERS
EDITOR’S PICK
Love is the key ingredient for happy families
households containing dependent
children, 78 per cent contain two
parents of opposite genders, either
married or cohabiting.
So the traditional nuclear family
is still the dominant one. However,
many children experience more
than one kind of family during their
childhood. Even I, now 70 years old,
lived in an extended family with my
single mother, and then in a traditional
household when she remarried.
Cross-sectional studies are
From David Byrne, valueless in exploring the effect of
Swinton, Dunstable, UK family type on children’s happiness.
You assert that more than half the Longitudinal studies would allow us
children in the UK and the US are being to explore the trajectories of children
brought up outside a nuclear family through multiple household types.
(2 December, p 5). This is wrong, at My experience is that what matters
least for the UK. The latest figures is that parents, alone or together, gay
from the Office for National Statistics or straight, love their children and let
show that of the nearly 8 million their children know it.
100 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017
letters@newscientist.com
Animal rights need not
be subject to caveat
From Rod Munday,
Llanishen, Cardiff, UK
The reason MPs voted not to
enshrine the Lisbon treaty
into UK law was that the treaty
is flawed and ineffective in
preventing cruelty to animals
(2 December, p 25).
After the fine words about
animals being sentient beings,
the treaty promises to respect
“the legislative or administrative
provisions of the member states,
relating in particular to religious
rites, cultural traditions and
regional heritage”.
This caveat means that if
member states have a traditional
activity involving cruelty to
animals they can continue doing
it. This includes torturing bulls to
death in the bullring for public
entertainment, confining veal
@newscientist newscientist
calves in narrow crates so that
they can hardly move, force-
feeding geese through metal
tubes pushed down their throats
to produce foie gras, treating
donkeys as if they were unfeeling
machines, negligent cruelty to
live animals being shipped for
slaughter and so forth.
These activities would already
be illegal in this country under
current UK law.
An unusual benefit of
immunosuppressants
From Valerie Argent,
Stocksfield, Northumberland, UK
The possible use of stem cell
therapy for treatment of
Parkinson’s disease is long
awaited and much needed
(2 December, p 8). However,
I note that in the clinical trials,
an immunosuppressing drug
is to be used as well, as the cells
 “We do just fine with monogamy. It’s so successful
we repeat it 3 to 5 times per lifetime”
kay646464 delivers her verdict on our feature
exploring modern families (2 December, p 30)

are not matched to the recipient.
Previously, New Scientist
reported evidence that
Parkinson’s progression is driven
by an autoimmune response
attacking dopamine-producing
cells (24 June, p 11).
In my experience,
immunosuppression therapy has
been of great benefit in reducing
symptoms of Parkinson’s disease,
though I take this medication for
sarcoidosis.
A chiller for wine keeps
fruit just fine
From Gwydion Williams,
Coventry, West Midlands, UK
Sam Wong raises the problem of
a fridge being too cold for storing
tomatoes, yet the kitchen being
too warm (9 December, p 25).
I solved this by buying a wine
cooler. I seldom drink wine, but it
stores my tomatoes and bananas
very nicely. They used to rot or get
overripe, and at 12°C they seem
fine. Is there a market for a fruit
and vegetable cool box?
When Earth sneezes, the
cosmos catches a cold
From Richard Swifte,
Darmstadt, Germany
I am alarmed by Claudius Gros’s
suggestion that we should
deliberately seed life throughout
the cosmos (18 November, p 10).
Space agencies quite rightly
try to sterilise spacecraft sent
to planets or moons that might
harbour life, however remote
the possibility, in order to avoid
contamination. Gros’s plan is
in direct contradiction to this.
We still need much more
investigation to verify whether
any of the bodies in our solar
system contain life or not, so it is
unrealistic for us to think we can
show that any planet in another
star system is truly sterile.
Without such proof, it should
be considered unethical to risk
wiping out alien life forms with
Earth-despatched panspermia. I
hope this idea will fail to become
reality.
Bitcoin is too valuable to
spend on stuff
From Trevor Campbell,
Berrima, NSW, Australia
Bitcoin may be a success at many
things, but surely it must be a
failure as a currency (2 December,
p 36). If there can only ever be
21 million bitcoins, then the supply
is obviously highly restricted,
and the currency will be in a
permanent state of deflation.
Your bitcoins will almost
certainly have more buying
power tomorrow than they do
today. If that is so they are a great
investment, but why would you
ever use them to buy stuff?
Today, the economy relies on
more currency continuously
entering the system to support
an increasing amount of trade
and wealth and relies on inflation,
hopefully at a controllable low
level, to discourage hoarding
and promote investment and
spending.
Don’t paint a smiley face
on the grim reaper
From Jessica Roberts,
Brighouse, West Yorkshire, UK
Your interview with mortician
Caitlin Doughty was unnerving,
but also gave much food for
thought (11 November, p 40).
If we Westerners were to change
our attitudes towards death and
become a lot more positive in
dealing with it, I feel it would take
away our healthy discomfort. >

Medals and awards 20

Nominations now open
Royal Society medals and awards recognise
excellence in science and technology and
celebrate outstanding scientific achievement.

royalsociety.org/awards/nominations

23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 101

LETTERS
We need to fear death, and more
so in this century where there is
a very big movement in science
towards a future that is free of
disease and the effects of old age,
and therefore of most death.
What does Doughty think of
cryonics, which promises to
preserve your dead body until
you can be revived by future
technology? She may well prefer
having her dead body consumed
by ravenous vultures, but to
me nothing deserves more
celebration than the prolonging
of life and teaching our children
that one day everyone may live a
very long, very happy life. Because
isn’t that what matters in the end?
Finding the universe’s
missing matter
From Chris Wilkins,
Tewin, Hertfordshire, UK
Gilead Amit writes that if dark
matter is continuously decaying
into dark energy, it would explain
the otherwise unexplained rate
of the universe’s expansion
(9 December, p 28).
We now know that gravity and
light travel at the same speed. Also
TOM GAULD
102 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017
that at a critical mass, light is
unable to escape and a black hole is
formed. Could there be another,
greater critical mass where
gravity also could not escape?
If so, the effective mass of the
universe would reduce over time,
presumably giving a similar
effect. This would also account
for the structure of halo galaxies.
Perhaps indoor solar is
not such a bright idea
From Ben Haller,
Ithaca, New York, US
You say a 5-centimetre-square
solar panel being developed “
can’t quite extract enough energy
from indoor light to charge a
phone in a reasonable time
frame” (18 November, p 16).
Let’s suppose the room in
question is lit by a 100 watt
incandescent bulb with an
efficiency of about 2.2 per cent,
generating about 2.2 watts in
the form of light. That bulb
illuminates every surface of a
small room 3 metres cubed, for a
surface area of 54 square metres
or 540,000 square centimetres.
A solar panel occupying 25
letters@newscientist.com
square centimetres of this room
will claim about 0.0001 watts.
Even if the solar panel is 100 per
cent efficient, it seems to me
that “can’t quite extract
enough energy from indoor
light to charge a phone in a
reasonable time frame” must
qualify as the understatement
of the year.
With engine emissions,
size doesn’t matter
From Ernest Ager,
Exmouth, Devon, UK
Governments of all persuasions
have always taxed road vehicles
unfairly, with varying amounts of
tax on both fuel and the annual
vehicle tax (2 December, p 24).
In more recent years, concern
about climate change has led to
still more muddled thinking.
For example, larger engine
vehicles naturally pay more in
fuel tax as they use more fuel.
However, if you run a vehicle
with a larger engine, but with a
low mileage per year, the car tax
remains the same. Clearly, if you
burn the same amount of fuel in a
year as a car with a smaller engine,
@newscientist newscientist
then the total emissions are the
same. So why is the vehicle tax
double or more?
The government should
practise what it preaches
From Chas Bazeley,
Colchester, Essex, UK
You write about the steep price we
face for failing to tackle climate
change (4 November, p 24). One
reason for our apathy is that, in
the UK at least, the government
uses climate change as an excuse
to tax the public and restrict their
freedoms while using “carbon
neutral” wood-burning at Drax
power station to fudge its own
figures on renewables. People are
unlikely to become enthusiastic
about climate-change mitigation
unless those in power are seen to
be taking it seriously.
Flat-Earthers driven
around the bend
From Simon Pryce,
Radlett, Hertfordshire, UK
Elsa Beckett asks whether a group
of flat-Earthers has ever mounted
an expedition to find the edge
of the planet (9 December, p 52).
Perhaps they have sent one and
are still looking for it.
For the record
Q Our article on lizard reproduction
left egg on our faces: Kathryn Elmer
is at the University of Glasgow
(9 December, p 11).
Q We meant to say it was the
European Economic Community
that gave Botswana privileged
access to beef markets in 1966
(9 December, p 32).
Letters should be sent to:
Letters to the Editor, New Scientist,
25 Bedford Street, London, WC2E 9ES
Email: letters@newscientist.com
Include your full postal address and telephone
number, and a reference (issue, page number, title) to
articles. We reserve the right to edit letters.
New Scientist Ltd reserves the right to
use any submissions sent to the letters column of
New Scientist magazine, in any other format.
MAKE
Do try this at home
Let it glow, let it glow,
let it snow…
Christmas comes but once a year – and for some of us, so does
a good snowfall. Here’s how to make sure you don’t miss it
“I love building snowmen,
but the neighbourhood kids
snatch up every flake for their
snowball arsenal,” writes Jack F.
“My wife gives me an icy stare
if I keep flicking to the weather
channel, and I can’t stay glued
to the window when we’re
entertaining relatives. How can
I make sure I don’t miss out?”
I may be dreaming of a white
Christmas, but I’m not changing
out of my PJs unless the odds
of a snowman are favourable.
But what if I could deck my
hall with a personalised snow
predictor? It’s time to hack the
Christmas tree…
I grabbed a pack of clear
baubles and sprinkled in some
glitter and polystyrene beads.
This does a good impression of
snow, and I slapped on some
adhesive snowflakes for good
measure. LEDs slipped into the
top of each bring real sparkle,
and trailing wires can be
cunningly disguised with tinsel.
Now for the clever part –
connecting the baubles to my
Adafruit Feather, a circuit board
that can talk to my home Wi-Fi.
I programmed it to contact the
Dark Sky weather service, which
collates data from different
For more Makes visit newscientist.com/make
EndNote
TM
access your research anywhere, anytime!
RUSSEL COBB
sources to give a forecast for
your GPS location – or the local
tobogganing hill’s. To build
excitement, the lights function
like a progress bar – each extra
tier illuminates as the chance of
snow increases.
When the snow starts
falling, my baubles send flurries
of light cascading down the
tree, simulating a mini blizzard.
The tree updates every minute,
so you can tell whether it’s just
a sprinkle or something more.
In my flat, we’ve agreed we
won’t brave the elements for
anything less than 10 minutes
of continuous snow.
The snow tracker should be
an easy project even after a
couple of sherries, although my
prototype had me dashing out
in my snow boots to blue skies –
it thought I was in Iceland. Leave behind the tedious work of bibliographies and
You can also connect the reference management and take your research to the
lights to Google’s open source next level. Buy your EndNote at www.endnote.co.uk
Santa Tracker, which plots St
Nick’s course on Christmas Eve.
Get to sleep before the top
bauble illuminates or he’ll skip
For more product details and training please contact:
your house. Now there’s no
need to keep checking weather
apps, Jack. But you might want Ecaterina Rotariu
a second set of lights for the ecaterina@alfasoft.co.uk
tree – just in case it’s a mild year.
Hannah Joshua ■ +44 (0)2036957815
23/30 December 2017 | NewScientist | 103
 FEEDBACK
DO YOU hear the pitter-patter of tiny
feet? Elf sightings are on the rise,
and it’s a trend for life, not just
for Christmas. A team of folklore
researchers led by Simon Young
at the University of Virginia has
published a compendium of British
encounters with fairy folk, charting
a steady rise in sightings.
An online survey of 1062 people
found that 44 per cent reported
seeing fairies, and the majority of
these eagle-eyed respondents had
seen them more than once.
Sadly, not all of these pointy-eared
folk appear to be the jovial stripy-
socked toy-makers you might find in
Santa’s workshop. Some of these
creatures were mischievous, even
malevolent by turns. One Devon
resident reports being threatened by
“small men with lots of hair, in brown
suits, almost dirty-looking”, while a
respondent in Cornwall said they
PAUL MCDEVITT
had an encounter with “a brown
leathery-skinned, very angry looking
old man”. Plus ça change!
“Bubbles are mathematically impossible in this
new paradigm.” John McAfee, cybersecurity
pioneer, rubbishes warnings that Bitcoin’s
1600% growth will falter
104 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2017
PURVEYOR of proprietary colour
swatches Pantone has announced
its choice for colour of the year.
“We are living in a time that
requires inventiveness and
imagination,” the announcement
intones. “It is this kind of creative
inspiration that is indigenous
to PANTONE 18-3838 Ultra
Violet.” Yes, it’s a “dramatically
provocative and thoughtful”
purple, “complex and
contemplative”. This colour “takes
our awareness and potential to a
higher level”, and is “associated
with mindfulness practices,
which offer a higher ground to
those seeking refuge from today’s
over-stimulated world”.
It falls on Feedback to
remark that purple is also the
colour associated with turgid,
flowery prose.
AND now to Alabama, where last
week the Republican Roy Moore
narrowly lost out to Democrat Doug
For more feedback, visit newscientist.com/feedback
Jones in a US Senate race. Voters in
Alabama were treated to a “special”
election, following the promotion of
button-eyed senator Jeff Sessions to
the role of US Attorney General.
That move left one less climate
change sceptic in the Senate. Who
might then be a suitable replacement?
Enter Roy Moore, the firebrand
evangelical Christian who is sceptical
about a lot more than just greenhouse
gases: abortion, gay rights, Islamic
worship, women’s suffrage, and the
abolition of slavery, among others.
He also seems to be nursing some
wounds that have not healed since
the Scopes trial of 1925.
Addressing the National Clergy
Council in 1997, Moore blamed the
teaching of evolution in public schools
for drive-by shootings. These young
people, said Moore, were “acting like
animals because we taught them they
come from animals”.
However, Moore has been accused
of having an interest in children that
is sometimes less than godly. He still
faces a string of allegations of sexual
misconduct, including claims he
molested a 14-year-old girl. Which of
these factors led voters to decide
Moore wasn’t fit to represent Alabama
we can’t say; but at least the result
means some sense has prevailed –
a special election indeed.
GIVEN the season, Feedback
has taken a leaf out of Father
Christmas’s book and drawn
up our list of who has been nice
enough to warrant a gift this year.
For those of you who, like us,
have left their present shopping
to the last minute, Feedback
offers its own unique gift guide,
collected from issues past.
At the budget end of the scale,
why not procure that classic
Christmas gift: a pair of socks.
No ordinary socks though,
but the silver-laced anti-static
footwear from Sock’M, claimed to
be designed for the “challenging
conditions of space” (1 July). Just
remember to complement them
with a fully functional space suit.
AND speaking of protective wear,
why not consider gemstone-studded
wonderpants (9 August)? The ZK
Magnetotherapy Breathable U-Shape
Underwear Antibacterial Healthcare
Modal Boxer For Men features no less
than 500 tourmaline stones, which
promise to increase your nerve
conduction velocity, which we think
is a way of saying you’ll blush even
faster when you unwrap them in
front of your mum.
FOR those with a keen interest
in healing gems and even more
money to spend, there’s the
Healthy Urn, a product we find
ineffable, if only because its full
name is 25 words long (18 March).
The giant vase/sauna/isolation
chamber is the perfect place to
hide from relatives during the
holiday season, and thus well
worth the £18,300 price tag.
AND a final word on stocking stuffers:
Bill Quinton suspects that not all
Christmas presents are made by
elves. The warning plastered to the
20-centimetre-diameter football he
purchased for his grandson tells him:
“Not suitable for children under three
years. Choking hazard”.
Bill notes that the warning label
also recommends he “retain this
information”, which might help
emergency room doctors diagnose
a case of football-stuck-in-throat.
He muses that “somewhere in the
football-manufacturing district of
China there must be a race of giants.”
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 QUIZ
PAUL NICKLEN/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CREATIVE/GETTY IMAGES
Fingers on buzzers
Time to test your scientific knowledge with our annual Christmas quiz.
Compiled by Eric Monkman and Bobby Seagull
After their epic clash in the semi-finals
of BBC quiz University Challenge back
in March, Monkman and Seagull joined
forces to host a Radio 4 programme
and have just published a general
knowledge quiz book. To round off
the year, they teamed up with
New Scientist to put your science
knowledge through its paces.
1. The oldest-known Homo sapiens
fossils (estimated to be around
300,000 years old) were found in
which country?
a. Morocco
b. Kenya
c. Ethiopia
2. The Fibonacci sequence, which
runs 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, was devised by
the Italian mathematician Leonardo
of Pisa for which reason?
a. To measure the population
growth of rabbits
b. To calculate interest rates
c. To identify the angle of the
leaning tower
3. Larvae of the wax moth (Galleria
mellonella) may be able to perform
what useful activity?
a. Produce a very strong silk
b. Consume and break down plastics
c. Serve as a good snack on space
journeys
4. Which country has the highest
percentage of the world’s 500
fastest supercomputers?
a. China
b. The US
c. Japan
5. Tuatara, reptiles endemic to
New Zealand, are known for which
distinctive physical trait?
a. A double row of teeth
b. A third eye
c. Both of the above
6. Aa, pahoehoe and Pele’s hair are
all types of what?
a. Butterfly
b. Lava
c. Mathematical theorem
7. This year, cameras revealed
narwhals using their long
tusks to:
a. Stun Arctic cod by hitting them
b. Spray poison onto predators
c. Clean algae from each other
first day.
with 60,000 people accessing it on the
was made openly accessible in October,
“Properties of expanding universes”
10. b. Hawking’s 1966 thesis
Vazrick Nazari.
given its name by Canadian lepidopterist
California, Mexico. The species was
found in southern California and Baja
9. c. Neopalpa donaldtrumpi are
spectrum as well.
the collision in the electromagnetic
so astronomers were able to observe
detectable electromagnetic radiation,
black holes, neutron stars produce
from two neutron stars. Unlike
8. b. The gravitational waves were
making them easier to eat.
cod by striking and stunning them,
narwhals using their tusks to hunt Arctic
Canada showed, for the first time,
7. a. Drone footage shot in north-east
fire and volcanoes.
its name from a Hawaiian goddess of
the famous footballer, but rather takes
8. What two objects collided to
6. b. Pele’s hair has nothing to do with
produce the gravitational waves
whose detection was announced in
but unable to form images.
October – the first time such a collision
the top of its head, is sensitive to light
had been observed?
5. c. The tuatara’s “third eye”, located on
a. A black hole and a neutron star
b. Two neutron stars
Sunway TaihuLight.
c. Two black holes
supercomputer is currently China’s
planet, while the US had 143. The fastest
9. Neopalpa donaldtrumpi has a
the 500 fastest supercomputers on the
yellow-white fringe on its head.
4. a. As of last month, China had 202 of
What type of animal is it?
a. A pheasant
used plastics.
b. A goby
polypropylene, two of the most commonly
c. A moth
munch its way through polythene and
She found that this parasite could
10. What event caused the
and stored them in a plastic bag.
University of Cambridge website
moth larvae from her honeycombs
to crash this year?
Federica Bertocchini removed wax
a. The epic Monkman vs Seagull
3. b. Scientist and amateur beekeeper
University Challenge clash
b. Demand to download Stephen
or “son of a Bonaccio”.
Hawking’s PhD thesis
been a contraction of Filius Bonacci,
c. The announcement of
Fibonacci, which is likely to have
Richard Henderson’s
2. a. Leonardo was better known as
Nobel prize in
chemistry
Irhoud, Morocco.
1. a. The fossils were found in Jebel
The Monkman and
Seagull Quiz Book is
ANSWERS
published by Eyewear