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 EARTH’S ALIEN PAST
Our planet’s hidden clues
to life elsewhere
TWO DECADES MORE
Embryo gene tweaks to
vastly extend lifespan
APOCALYPSE NEVER
Sci-fi genius Cixin Liu
predicts the future
WEEKLY September 8 – 14, 2018

THE YOU
DELUSION
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just a trick of the mind

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On the cover
38 Earth’s alien past
Our planet’s hidden clues
to life elsewhere
7 Two decades more
Embryo gene tweaks to vastly
extend lifespan
42 Apocalypse never
Sci-fi genius Cixin Liu predicts
the future
28 The you delusion
Why your sense of self is just
a trick of the mind
20 Hydrogen resurgence
The battle for the future of
clean cars
Plus Anti-pollution prams (13).
Mummified penguins (6).
Europa’s mystery cold spot (8).
Desalination’s dirty secret (32)
Leader
3 We should be open to the idea that
human intelligence isn’t as special
as we like to think
News
4 THIS WEEK Crunch time for
Ebola. Brazil National Museum fire.
Race to save Opportunity. Find
your heart age. The reality of the
American dream
6 NEWS & TECHNOLOGY
Mummified penguins. Dark matter
blasted. Laser-powered drones.
DNA editing before birth. Europa’s
mystery cold spot. How you type
could reveal Parkinson’s. Do AIs
know what we are thinking?
Corals fight the heat. Pram
design can cut air pollution risk.
Overworked brains. CRISPR helps
dogs’ muscle disease. Fish pass
the mirror test
17 IN BRIEF Elk antler gamble.
Non-addictive opioid. Warm water
threatens Arctic. AI tracks cancer.
Print with sound and honey
Analysis
20 INSIGHT Why your next car could
run on hydrogen
22 COMMENT The lunar gateway
is a terrible idea. Why Americans
should vote for a scientist
23 ANALYSIS Is self-harm in UK
teens rising?
Features
28 The you delusion Why your
sense of self is just a trick of
the mind
32 The briny deep Ocean
desalination could provide drinking
water for all – if only we knew
what to do with the waste salt
36 The surgeon fixing a scandal
We could have avoided the worst
consequences of vaginal mesh,
says Sohier Elneil
38 Earth’s alien past Our deepest
history may hold the key to the
search for life on other planets
Culture
42 Apocalypse never China’s
sci-fi genius Cixin Liu on why our
future is bright. PLUS: This week’s
cultural picks
44 A fantastical experiment
Ceramic art acts as a foil for a
collection of scientific curios
Regulars
24 APERTURE
Eye to eye with a hawkmoth
52 LETTERS
Polluter pays - but to whom?
55 CROSSWORD
56 FEEDBACK
The politics of alien abduction
57 THE LAST WORD
Eggstraordinary claim

8 September 2018 | NewScientist | 1

LEADER

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

News
News editor Penny Sarchet
Editors Jacob Aron, Timothy Revell, Jon White
Reporters (UK) Andy Coghlan, Alison George,

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

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

Culture and Community

Editors Liz Else, Mike Holderness, Simon Ings,
Frank Swain
Like looking in a mirror
Subeditors
Chief subeditor Eleanor Parsons We’re not unique – lots of species can recognise themselves
Tom Campbell, Hannah Joshua, Chris Simms

Design
WE LIKE to think that the human oneself is more related to an has long been seen as another
Kathryn Brazier, Joe Hetzel,
Dave Johnston, Ryan Wills mind is special. One sign of our animal’s lifestyle than to its brain cornerstone of human mental
Picture desk
superiority is self-awareness, size. Self-awareness is likely to superiority. The possibility that
Chief picture editor Adam Goff which is generally seen as the occur in creatures whose survival fish possess it is not, however,
Kirstin Kidd, David Stock pinnacle of consciousness. is dependent on reading the the only threat to our human
Production Only a select group of species has minds of others. In fact, by this exceptionalism. It may not be
Mick O’Hare, Melanie Green , passed the test of being able to way of thinking, it is nothing more long before computers give us
Alan Blagrove, Anne Marie Conlon
recognise themselves in a mirror. than an accidental by-product of a run for our money, too.
Contact us
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PO Box 2315, Strawberry Hills, NSW 2012 finding does fit with an emerging insight into the minds of its intelligence isn’t quite as special
idea that the ability to recognise clients. Such “theory of mind” as we like to think. Q

A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR

There are only two weeks to go because we really think it is. forward to introducing
© 2018 New Scientist Ltd, England.
now until New Scientist Live. The Last year, more than 30,000 astronaut Tim Peake’s
New Scientist ISSN 0262 4079 is published
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by New Scientist Ltd, England.
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8 September 2018 | NewScientist | 3

 THIS WEEK
BUDA MENDES/GETTY
American dream
is slipping away
IT IS the American dream that
anyone can become prosperous
through hard work, irrespective of
their status at birth – but the reality
is different. The socio-economic
status of someone in the US is more
strongly influenced by that of their
parents than previously thought.
Michael Hout of New York
University looked at data from 21,000
people, each given a “socio-economic
index” (SEI) score – a measure of pay
and credentials ranking 0 to 100, with
0 representing the lowest in society.
The data included questionnaire
answers that helped establish the
SEI scores of the people’s parents.
The American dream suggests that
anyone can achieve a high SEI score,
but Hout found otherwise. It turned
out that there was a strong linear
relationship between someone’s SEI
score and that of their parents (PNAS,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1802508115).
Earlier studies have hinted at such
“intergenerational persistence”, says
NASA/JPL
Hout, but not to such a strong degree
as his findings suggest.
4 | NewScientist | 8 September 2018
Race to save Mars
rover Opportunity
TIME is running out for NASA’s
Opportunity rover. A dust storm that
has been raging on Mars since early
June is starting to subside, potentially
giving the rover enough sunlight to
charge its batteries. But on 30 August,
NASA set a 45-day deadline before it
gives up trying to wake it.
The Opportunity rover runs solely
on solar power, so a dust storm like
this one, which has blocked out more
than 99 per cent of sunlight on Mars’s
Treasured artefacts lost
BRAZIL’S oldest and most important
scientific museum was gutted by
fire on 2 September. Within hours,
the blaze destroyed many priceless
scientific artefacts and collections
gathered since the National Museum
was founded in 1818.
Items potentially lost include
the massive Bendegó meteorite,
weighing 5260 kilograms, and Luzia,
a 12,000-year-old human skeleton,
the oldest in the Americas.
Based in Rio de Janeiro, the
museum housed irreplaceable
collections of scientific artefacts,
specimens and records in geology,
botany, biology, palaeontology and
zoology, as well as priceless cultural
and anthropological artefacts. Almost
90 per cent of the 20 million items
there are thought to have been lost.
“It is incalculable for Brazil to lose
surface, can be catastrophic. The last
signal received from Opportunity was
on 10 June. Since then, it has been in
sleep mode, using any power it has
left to keep its batteries warm enough
to survive on the frigid surface.
Now that the planet-encircling
storm has begun to clear, rover
operators are sending Opportunity
wake-up calls three times a week with
orders to send back a beep if it is alive.
The hope is that sleep mode kept the
battery safe, and that a Martian dust
devil will soon come along and blow
the sand off the rover’s solar panels,
allowing it to charge up again.
the collection of the National
Museum,” said Michel Temer, Brazil’s
president, in a statement reported by
The Rio Times. “200 years of work,
research and knowledge were lost.”
Media sources report that the
fire began between the museum
closing at 5 pm as usual on Sunday
2 September and 7.30 pm.
Some reports claim that two
key fire hydrants on site were dry,
preventing firefighters from tackling
the fire in the early stages. Other
reports say that successive
governments had allowed the
museum to fall into disrepair.
The Brazilian government says it
is now seeking corporate funding to
help rebuild the museum. Officials are
also seeking international help and
are speaking to UNESCO, the cultural
agency of the United Nations.
Doubts raised over
online heart test
HEALTH chiefs in England this week
launched an online “heart-age” test,
which is claimed to reveal people’s
risk of a heart attack or stroke. Public
Health England (PHE) says that if a
person’s heart is “older” than their age,
they are at increased risk and should
consider diet and lifestyle changes.
PHE says that of 1.9 million who
have already tried the test, 78 per
cent had hearts older than their age.
In 14 per cent, their hearts were
10 years older. But critics say the
test – which asks simple physical and
lifestyle questions – could create
unfounded alarm by basing estimates
on incomplete data.
It asks for accurate measurements
of blood pressure and cholesterol, but
if these are not available, it seems to
assume abnormal values, potentially
overestimating heart age. “I just
entered this as a 30-year-old with
no risk factors, and it told me to get
cholesterol and blood pressure-
tested,” tweeted Margaret McCartney,
a family doctor in Glasgow, UK. “Where
is [the] evidence of benefit?”
For new stories every day, visit newscientist.com/news

Crunch time for Ebola in the DRC

War zones may thwart efforts to halt virus, reports Debora MacKenzie

THE Ebola outbreak in the

Democratic Republic of the
Congo (DRC) has reached a critical
juncture. It seems to be subsiding,
after striking 121 people and killing
81 as of 2 September. But the
coming days may be crucial, says
Tedros Ghebreyesus, head of the
World Health Organization (WHO).
That is partly because the
outbreak is in North Kivu
province in the war-torn east
of the DRC, where fighting by
more than 50 armed groups puts
JOHN WESSELS/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

many areas off limits.

To stop the virus spreading,
medical teams must isolate and
vaccinate anyone who has had
contact with an infected person,
and all the people they in turn
came into contact with. But the
teams can’t work much more than
30 kilometres from the epidemic’s
centre in the city of Beni.
Worse, the UN’s International
Organisation for Migration (IOM)
has found that people in the
region are highly mobile, with
traders and miners transiting
to Uganda and Rwanda, and
a million people have been
displaced by violence.
Such high population mobility,
plus a slow medical response,
caused an Ebola outbreak in
West Africa to mushroom into
an unprecedented epidemic that
killed more than 11,000 in 2014.
This time, the response has
not been slow. The outbreak was
recognised on 1 August, only a
week after an Ebola epidemic
on the other side of the DRC had
been halted. A week later, teams
in North Kivu were vaccinating.
This selective “ring vaccination”
of the contacts of known cases,
then their contacts, makes best
use of limited vaccine stocks by
containing virus spreading from
known cases. It seems to be
working: on 1 September, with
5462 contacts vaccinated, the
WHO reported 13 new cases the
previous week, down from 25 and
35 in the weeks before that.
If that continues, the 300,000
doses of vaccine available
worldwide should be more than
enough to contain this epidemic.
But epidemics can hit tipping
points and soar exponentially.
“Ebola comes in waves: the
next surge could still be
incubating, or invisible in
violent no-go areas”
Stopping that requires stopping
all the chains of transmission,
says Mike Ryan, head of
emergency response at the WHO.
Moreover, Ebola epidemics
come in waves: the next surge
could be incubating, or invisible
in violent no-go areas. Worryingly,
four of the new cases reported last
week were not from known chains
of transmission, so there are
unknown chains out there.
They may be hard to find. The
IOM has used its data to choose
the 34 most important transport
hubs where people leave the
region, and Congolese authorities
have so far checked 840,000
travellers there for symptoms.
It has also mapped highly
vulnerable spots, such as popular
markets and churches with strong
connections to the outbreak zone,
for closer monitoring.
But the IOM is only able to
monitor relatively safe zones.
“The news of two confirmed cases
in Oicha is extremely distressing,
because the area is almost
entirely surrounded by armed
militants,” says Michelle Gayer
of the US-based International
Rescue Committee.
Last week, a medical team
with a heavy UN military escort
vaccinated 97 contacts of the
two infected people in Oicha,
discovered only because one
travelled to Beni. Anyone in the area
around Oicha cannot be reached.
The WHO also last week decided
to test three antiviral drugs in
randomly chosen patients. No one
will get a placebo, so the trials
A church service near Beni, DRC,
the epicentre of an Ebola outbreak
can’t establish formally how
much better the drugs are than
getting no drug. But they can
compare the three.
Two people have received
ZMapp, a cocktail of antibodies,
the immune proteins that attack
the Ebola virus. It showed promise
in 2014, but is hard to administer
and must be stored at −80°C,
which is difficult in the DRC. Five
have had remdesivir, a molecule
that blocks the infection process.
The big surprise is that 13 have
been given mAb114, an antibody
from a survivor of the 1995 Ebola
epidemic in Kikwit, DRC, which
can be kept in a refrigerator and
needs only one simple injection.
Last year, a WHO panel judged it
too untested to use in epidemics,
but the US National Institutes of
Health has since rushed through
safety trials in humans. Two
people on it have recovered,
says the WHO, but it is not yet
known if the drug helped. ■

8 September 2018 | NewScientist | 5

NEWS & TECHNOLOGY

sediment and corpses downhill,
Graveyard is a bad and signs of erosion (Journal of
Geophysical Research:
that can send extra damp air to
east Antarctica. Climate change is
likely to make this more frequent.

omen for penguins Biogeosciences, doi.org/ctj9).

Rain is a lethal threat, says Yan
Ropert-Coudert of the French
Adélies are widespread, so can
handle occasional disasters, says
Steven Emslie at the University of
National Centre for Scientific North Carolina Wilmington. But
Michael Marshall sediments, which contain Research. “The chicks especially they face increasing pressures. In
excrement and nest material. are not made for wet weather,” April, Emslie published a study of
MUMMIFIED penguins have been They found that penguins have he says. Hypothermia is a risk. the largest modern Adélie colony,
found littering the ground in lived there for at least 3900 years, Meanwhile, snow makes it hard at Cape Adare. “Sea level rise is
Antarctica. The birds seem to have but most of the deaths occurred for parents to find pebbles to going to displace hundreds of
died during two bouts of extreme in two periods, about 750 and make nests, and if it melts the thousands of penguins there and
weather over the past 1000 years. 200 years ago. The colonies were meltwater can drown chicks. at Cape Hallett within the next
Such conditions are expected to abandoned afterwards each time, The cause of the wet weather 30 to 50 years, as those beaches
become more common as a result as little new sediment was laid was probably a shift in the are gradually inundated,” he says.
of climate change, making mass down in later centuries. Southern Annular Mode, a pattern Ropert-Coudert has detailed
die-offs more likely. The cause seems to have been of winds in the Southern Ocean the disastrous 2013-14 breeding
The birds were found on Long unusually heavy snow or rain over season, when no chicks survived
Peninsula, in east Antarctica, by several decades. The team found Climate change threatens the in a major colony on Petrel Island
researchers led by Liguang Sun evidence of floods that carried Adélie penguins of Antarctica in east Antarctica. Unusually
at the University of Science and heavy snowfall killed them,
Technology of China in Hefei. combined with weak winds that
It isn’t unusual to find dead failed to break up the sea ice,
penguins, but those on Long preventing adults from catching
Peninsula – mainly chicks – are enough food. And it wasn’t a one-
especially numerous, with up to off. “In 2016-17 we had a second
15 per square metre and hundreds massive breeding failure in the
overall. “They consist of well- same place,” he says.
preserved dehydrated mummies,” According to the International
the researchers write in a paper. Union for Conservation of Nature,
All are Adélie penguins Adélie penguins are at low risk of
(Pygoscelis adeliae), which only extinction. But Ropert-Coudert
HIROYA MINAKUCHI/MINDEN PICTURES/FLPA

live in Antarctica. They currently says repeated breeding failures

breed in the Antarctic summer on Petrel Island are a bad sign.
at about 250 sites, forming huge The solution is to limit climate
colonies near the coast. change as much as possible,
To find out what happened on he says. We could also set up
Long Peninsula, Sun’s team used protected areas to “prevent other
carbon dating to estimate the ages threats from superimposing on
of the corpses. They also studied the climate ones”. ■

of this dark matter should increase
Star explosions as you move towards the centre of a
could explain galaxy, but some dwarf galaxies didn’t
get the memo: they have a constant
misfit galaxies density of dark matter.
That might seem a minor wrinkle,
THE dark matter in small galaxies has but if it can’t be explained within
been giving cosmologists a headache. lambda-CDM, it could deal a blow to
Blowing up a few stars may provide our understanding of dark matter.
the solution. “The implications of these very
Dark matter is thought to make subtle measurements are large
up most of the matter in the universe so people have argued a lot over
and should be found mixed in with them,” says Marla Geha at Yale
the regular matter of galaxies. The University, who wasn’t involved
standard model of cosmology, called in the latest work.
lambda-CDM, predicts that the density Star formation is one potential
explanation. Some stars are born
after old ones die in explosive
supernovas, which send matter flying.
Bursts of such star formation in small
galaxies might blow some dark matter
towards the edges, smoothing out
the distribution.
Justin Read at the University of
Surrey in the UK and his colleagues
used measurements of the mass at
the centres of dwarf galaxies to test
“Dark matter density should
increase as you move to
the centre of a galaxy, but
some didn’t get the memo”
this idea. They picked out samples of
two different types of galaxy, eight
that stopped forming stars long ago,
and eight that are still forming stars
or only stopped relatively recently.
They found that the galaxies with
higher rates of star formation had less
dark matter in their centres, pointing
to a more uniform distribution. That
matches up with the idea that star
formation moves mass towards
the edges of the galaxy, which then
shifts the dark matter outward.
It’s a good sign for lambda-CDM,
if the result stands up (arxiv.org/
abs/1808.06634). Leah Crane ■

6 | NewScientist | 8 September 2018

For daily news stories, visit newscientist.com/news

Genome engineering could reduce

Drone can fly disease risk in generations to come
indefinitely by with the highest risk. The findings
laser power suggest the results would be
dramatic, with people on average
THE US Army is taking wireless living many years longer before
recharging to new heights, by developing these diseases.
using lasers to power small drones The benefits would be greatest
in mid-air. for cancers. Those treated would
Small multicopters – flying vehicles live two decades longer, on
with several rotating blades – have average, before developing breast,
proven valuable to the military for prostate or colorectal cancers, and
intelligence gathering. But they their lifetime risk would be more
are power-hungry, meaning that than halved, even if they live 10
their flying time is limited to half years longer (bioRxiv, doi.org/ctjp).
an hour or less. However, as Oliynyk
Now the US Army’s acknowledges, his conclusions
JADE ALBERT STUDIO/GETTY

Communications-Electronics Research, depend on several assumptions.

Development and Engineering Center One is that we have correctly
based in Maryland is developing identified SNPs that affect disease
a power beaming system with a risk. In reality there is still huge
combination of lasers and efficient uncertainty. “I don’t think we are
photovoltaic cells. there yet. I’m not sure we ever will
The aim is to provide enough
power from 500 metres away to DNA editing before birth be,” says geneticist Helen O’Neill
of University College London.
keep a drone patrolling indefinitely
above a base, or flying over a convoy may bring healthier lives She points out that the effect
of gene variants can depend on
for its entire route. The system works the environment and other gene
by firing laser light at photovoltaic MAKING dozens of changes to decades, says Roman Teo Oliynyk, variants and may prove impossible
cells on the drone, which then DNA in human egg and sperm a computational biologist at the to accurately predict.
converts the light into electricity. cells or very early embryos could University of Auckland, New Another assumption is that
“The major challenge we see is dramatically extend the lifespan Zealand. For instance, CRISPR altering SNPs has no side effects,
thermal management,” says project of offspring – according to genome editing has been used to says Ali Torkamani of the Scripps
engineer William Rowley. Any energy the first attempt to quantify make multiple changes to animal Research Institute in La Jolla,
that is not converted to electricity potential benefits of germline egg cell genomes. California. “There is often a trade-
becomes heat, so there is a risk genome editing. Oliynyk looked at gene variants off to be had – you’ve reduced your
of melting or burning the drone. “This… shows that we could known as SNPs that affect the risk risk for coronary artery disease but
This problem is being overcome by potentially use germline gene you may have increased your risk
developing accurate beam control editing to make us all resistant “Those treated would live for some other disorder,” he says.
and ensuring the excess heat can to diseases of old age,” says two decades longer on There is also a major practical
dissipate. biomedical ethicist Christopher average before developing problem, says O’Neill. You can’t
The plan looks technically feasible, Gyngell at the University of a range of cancers” know what SNPs an embryo will
according to David Anderson at the Melbourne, Australia, who was inherit until it forms, so you can’t
University of Glasgow, UK. However, not involved in the study. of developing diseases of old age, work out risk in advance. But if
proving its safety is another matter, It is already possible to prevent including heart disease, type 2 you wait until this stage, it may
given the potential risks from the genetic diseases caused by single diabetes, stroke, Alzheimer’s, be too late to edit the genome.
high-energy beam, such as eye or mutations, such as cystic fibrosis – osteoarthritis and some cancers. Oliynyk thinks the answer could
skin damage. by screening IVF embryos before From these it is possible to be the use of synthetic genomes –
“The challenge is how you can implantation, for instance. estimate whether a person has a rebuilding genomes from scratch
convince the regulatory authorities But we all carry thousands of greater or lower risk of developing and correcting disease-causing
that it is safe,” says Anderson. gene variants that don’t inevitably these diseases. variants. This is not yet possible
“Specifically, you have to persuade lead to diseases, yet affect our risk Oliynyk modelled what would with large genomes like ours, but
them that the laser will not miss of developing them. Changing happen if those with a higher- Oliynyk is confident it will be.
the drone energy collector panel one wouldn’t have a big impact, than-average risk had undergone “It is a purely technological
when charging.” but changing many could genome editing before birth to issue, and these are always
The team aims to demonstrate potentially add years to lives that reduce their risk to the average. solved,” he says. Michael Le Page ■
a first working system in 2019. would otherwise be cut short. This This would mean altering dozens
David Hambling ■ may be possible in the next few of SNPs – even hundreds in those For more on gene editing, see page 14

8 September 2018 | NewScientist | 7

 NEWS & TECHNOLOGY
NASA/JPL-CALTECH/SETI INSTITUTE
Mystery cold spot
found on Europa
Leah Crane
THERE is a weird cold spot on
Europa, and nobody knows what
it is. The first full thermal map
of Jupiter’s icy moon has thrown
up a spot about 300 kilometres
across that seems colder than
its surroundings, and we don’t
have enough data on the area to
figure out why.
Samantha Trumbo at the
California Institute of Technology
and her colleagues used the
Atacama Large Millimeter Array,
a set of more than 60 radio
telescopes in Chile, to measure
the heat radiating from Europa’s “The cold spot might emit
surface in a set of four overlapping less heat than the rest of
thermal images. It represents the
first full temperature map of the
icy moon.
“We weren’t so interested
in cold spots, we were more
interested in hot spots, because
those could indicate geological
activity,” says Trumbo. “But we
saw this one cold spot repeated
in two of the images.” The spot
is only about 9°C colder than
the surrounding areas, but it
8 | NewScientist | 8 September 2018
is different enough to be
surprising, she says (arxiv.org/
abs/1808.07111).
There are two main potential
explanations for the cold spot:
either it is emitting less heat than
the rest of the surface, or it takes
longer to warm up in Europa’s
morning.
The first could happen if the ice
there has a different composition
to that in the surrounding area,
making it harder for heat to travel
through it. The second could be
a result of a blockier, less grainy
texture. A large block of ice would
the surface or take longer
to warm up in the morning”
take longer to warm up, much as
an ice sculpture can last an entire
afternoon but a bowl of ice cubes
will melt within a few minutes.
“If this spot is real, I would
expect it to be a large ice sheet,
maybe younger than the rest
of the surface because it hasn’t
been broken up yet,” says
Part of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa is
even chillier than the rest
Jessica Noviello at Arizona State
University. “On Europa, I would
be interested in studying
something young to see what
this moon really looked like in its
earlier state and how it changed
over time.”
The model that Trumbo’s team
used to spot this anomaly was
partially based on limited data
from the Galileo spacecraft on the
area’s albedo, or reflectiveness.
Because of that, Noviello and Julie
Rathbun of the Planetary Science
Institute in Arizona doubt that
the cold spot is actually there.
“I looked back over the Galileo
data, and there is no good data
on that area, so we have no idea
what it looks like,” says Rathbun.
Despite the lack of data,
Trumbo insists that there’s
something odd going on. “It is
possible that our albedoes are
not 100 per cent correct – actually
it’s likely,” she says. “But it
would be strange if they were
wrong significantly in only one
location without that spot being
somehow different.”
Figuring out exactly how it is
different will have to wait for
more data. “For now, you can
imagine almost anything,”
Trumbo says. ■
Your typing
could reveal
Parkinson’s
SUBTLE clues in how you type on a
keyboard may be able to reveal early
signs of Parkinson’s. The hope is that
this could help spot the disease before
pronounced hand tremors or serious
changes in the brain have occurred.
To test the approach, hundreds
of volunteers installed a program
on their computers that monitored
their typing over nine months.
Warwick Adams at Charles Sturt
University in Australia then whittled
the sample down to 76 individuals
who were of the appropriate age, not
taking medication, and who either
didn’t have Parkinson’s or whose
condition was of mild severity.
Adams wanted to see if the times
between key presses could be
accurately plotted against a sine
wave of 4-6 hertz – the frequency of
Parkinson’s hand tremors. If these
data points didn’t map well to such
a curve, that would be an indication
that no tremor was present.
Using this technique, the system
was able to correctly identify patients
who had mild Parkinson’s disease
tremor with 78 per cent accuracy
(bioArXiv, doi.org/ctjk).
“The endgame is to develop a
widely available screening test
for both GPs and individuals,” says
Adams, who has Parkinson’s himself,
but not tremors.
Early detection would in
theory allow doctors to prescribe
treatments that can inhibit the
progression of the disease. About
three-quarters of people with
Parkinson’s develop hand tremors.
Adams has previously developed a
method of detecting early Parkinson’s
disease by spotting changes in the
flow of someone’s typing. He thinks
combining the two methods will help
build a diagnostic tool.
However, one difficulty the system
will face is that mild tremors are most
pronounced when resting, not typing,
says Álvaro Sánchez Ferro at the HM
CINAC Comprehensive Neurosciences
Center in Spain. Chris Baraniuk ■
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NEWS & TECHNOLOGY
AI takes ‘marble’
theory-of-mind test
Timothy Revell
DO COMPUTERS know what we
are thinking? To find out, a team
at the University of California,
Berkeley, has created a set of
gruelling tests that probe AI’s
progress in understanding the
world. None has passed the tests
yet, but one got very close.
The tests examine theory of
mind – the ability to reason about
another’s beliefs – and are inspired
by experiments in psychology.
Each consists of a short paragraph
describing a scenario involving
people – for example, Sally hides
a marble and then Anne moves it
to a new location.
Passing the test revolves around
identifying first and second-order
beliefs. A first-order belief is
working out what someone else
thinks, answering a question like
“where does Sally think the marble
is?”, for example. A second-order
belief is what someone thinks
someone else is thinking, for
example, “where does Anne think
Sally thinks the marble is?”.
Children are normally able
to correctly identify first-order
beliefs by around age 3, but it isn’t
until age 6 or 7 that they can do
Some corals are
beginning to
beat the heat
REPEATING an experiment 47 years
after it was originally carried out has
revealed some rare good news about
corals: some species appear to have
become significantly better at
surviving temperature increases.
In 1970, marine zoologist Steve
Coles collected three species of coral
from a reef in Kane‘ohe Bay, Hawaii.
When he put them in a chamber and
10 | NewScientist | 8 September 2018
the same for second-order beliefs.
Aida Nematzadeh, who led the
work and is now at Google’s AI lab
at DeepMind, and her colleagues
generated 10,000 scenarios and
associated questions that tested
theory of mind via first and
second-order beliefs. They then
put them to four state-of-the-art
AIs. None managed to achieve a
passing score, which was set at
95 per cent. Most humans should
be able to score 100 per cent.
The highest achiever was an AI
called RelNet, produced by Adam
Santoro and his colleagues at
DeepMind, which scored 94.3 per
cent. The other three AIs managed
scores of between 82 and 94 per
cent (arxiv.org/abs/1808.09352).
However, the results were fairly
fickle. Inserting an unrelated
sentence with no bearing on the
tested situations was enough to
bamboozle the AIs. All of them
dropped their scores by between
5 and 20 per cent, suggesting
they weren’t properly grasping
the meaning of the text.
Though no AI has yet displayed
theory of mind, they are
improving at an impressive rate.
Only two years ago, Facebook
produced a series of tests that
gradually heated the water, he found
that they couldn’t tolerate increases
of 1 to 2°C. They started to bleach,
ejecting the colourful algae that live
within them. Without these, coral die.
Overall, no corals from one species
survived, and survival rates were 40
per cent and 5 per cent for the others.
But Coles, at the Hawaii Institute of
Marine Biology, got a different result
when he repeated the experiment
using the same species of coral from
the same area decades later. When
he raised temperatures by the same
amount, it took a few days longer for
the corals to begin bleaching, and more
Tracking marbles can test the
ability to reason what others think–
would examine AI’s ability to
answer questions about the world.
None tested could handle the task
at the time, but some can now
pass with few mistakes.
A machine with theory of mind
could prove useful, says Alan
Wagner at Georgia Tech Research
Institute in Atlanta. “An AI agent
teaching assistant might be able
to reason about a student’s false
beliefs related to a course, for
than half survived (PeerJ, doi.org/cthn).
“That was a big surprise,” says Coles.
The finding is in line with anecdotal
observations from reefs that some
corals seem to be surviving bleaching.
Coles doesn’t know how they do it,
but other research suggests some
corals adapt to higher temperatures
by associating with species of algae
that are more tolerant of heat stress.
It isn't clear whether corals in
“If we take action now,
some coral reefs may still
exist a hundred years in
the future”
EYEEM/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
example, that the final exam
is next week when in fact it is
tomorrow, and in doing so be
better suited to help.”
Another example is self-driving
cars, says Johannes Bjerva at
the University of Copenhagen,
Denmark. An AI-driven car with
theory of mind might realise that
the driver of another car hasn’t
seen a person in the road, and honk
its horn to warn them, he says.
However, even if an AI can pass
these tests, it may still not have
theory of mind, says Wagner. ■
Hawaii are individually acclimatising
to rising temperatures, or whether
they have genetically evolved a heat
tolerance that they will pass onto
future generations, says Mikhail Matz
at the University of Texas at Austin.
Either way, it is good news, he says,
although genetic adaptation may
have more lasting benefits.
Coles doesn’t think the change will
be enough to counteract the effects
of global warming on coral. But it
suggests that, if we take action on
climate change now, some coral reefs
may still exist in a hundred years’
time, he says. Katarina Zimmer ■
 Humanity will need the
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than people
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are born with an
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thoughts take a
back-and-forth
conversational style.

We spend 50% of our

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 NEWS & TECHNOLOGY
WEHNER/PLAINPICTURE
Pram design can cut
air pollution risk
Inga Vesper
HIGH prams with canopies that
shield a baby’s head could go some
way towards reducing exposure
to dangerous particle pollution.
By kitting out prams with
air quality sensors and taking
them for a stroll, a team at the
University of Surrey, UK, is
studying how much pollution
babies are exposed to and the
pram designs that are best at
combating it.
The team has found that higher
prams are better, because most
particle pollution is concentrated
in the first metre above road level. “Babies are more vulnerable
On average, children in prams
breathe at a height of about
0.85 metres, meaning they are
exposed to about 60 per cent
more pollution than adults.
On top of this, particle pollution from pollution falling down on
is more dangerous to infants than
adults, says Jonathan Griggs at
Queen Mary University of
London, who was not involved in
the study. Babies breathe faster
than adults and they are more
vulnerable to the effects of
pollution because the protective
mechanisms in their lungs are
not yet fully developed, he says.
When choosing the best pram
for defending against pollution,
the weather is also a factor.
Hot summer air concentrates
pollution close to the ground,
making seat height particularly
important. But when the air is
cold, the heat from car exhausts
whirls dangerous particles higher
in the air, after which they
descend. In these cases, prams
with some kind of covering, such
as a canopy or plastic bad-weather
to pollution than adults –
they breathe faster and
have less developed lungs”
cover, can help protect children
them from above (Environment
International, doi.org/cthc).
“There are very few existing
studies to draw conclusive
evidence on which pram design is
best,” says Prashant Kumar, who
led the research. So far he is only
Canopies can shield babies from
swirling car exhaust particles
able to identify broad things to
look for in a pram, but his team
are running further tests until
the end of September, after which
they plan to make more detailed
recommendations.
In the future, it may be possible
to purchase add-on air filter
systems for prams. One currently
in development is called Brizi. The
device consists of a flat headrest
with wings on either side of the
baby’s head.
Air is sucked in on one side,
cleaned, and blown out the other,
creating a bubble of slightly
higher air pressure, which keeps
out particles.
Exposure to particle pollution
damages lungs and can cause
inflammation and long-term
respiratory problems. According
to the UK government’s Clean Air
Strategy, around 340,000 life
years are lost in the country every
year due to pollution.
Designing better prams is only
an interim solution to tackling
pollution itself, says Griggs.
“It’s certainly prudent not to stick
your child next to an exhaust
pipe, but in the end it is not about
protecting babies by technology,
but reducing emissions on roads,”
he says. Q
Brains at full
capacity stop
noticing things
EVER felt like you are struggling to
think about too many things at once?
That might be because your brain’s
attention systems are full.
A brain scanning method that
shows how much energy nerve cells
are using has provided support for
the idea that we have a finite amount
of attention available. This offers an
explanation for the bizarre “invisible
gorilla” optical illusion, in which
people focus so much on one aspect
of a staged video that they fail to
see a person in a gorilla suit.
Nilli Lavie at University College
London (UCL) took advantage of a
new brain scanning method, called
broadband functional near infrared
spectroscopy, which was developed
as a way of measuring the brain’s
oxygen levels with a simple headset.
Another research group at UCL
has tweaked the technology so
that instead of oxygen, it measures
the activity of an enzyme inside
mitochondria, the tiny structures
that provide cells with energy. “We
are measuring the metabolism inside
the neuron,” says Lavie.
In her latest experiment,
participants did either an easy or hard
version of a visual task that involved
spotting certain shapes and colours on
a screen, while wearing the headset.
Half the time they were also shown a
flickering chequerboard pattern in the
periphery of their vision.
When the main task was easy, the
brain cells dealing with peripheral
vision raised their firing rates as the
pattern started flashing. When the
main task was difficult, the flashing
chequerboard pattern led to little
increase in neural activity. “You
suppress things you’re not attending
to,” says Lavie, who presented the
findings at a recent UCL Neuroscience
Symposium.
Jan de Fockert of Goldsmiths,
University of London, says other work
has also shown that demands on our
attention from one sense can affect
other senses too. Clare Wilson Q
8 September 2018 | NewScientist | 13
NEWS & TECHNOLOGY

CRISPR helps dogs’

muscle disease
Chelsea Whyte
CRISPR gene-editing has been
used to improve muscle function
in dogs with a condition similar to
Duchenne muscular dystrophy
(DMD) – and the technique might
one day lead to a treatment for
humans. The study represents the
first use of CRISPR gene-editing in
a living large animal.
People with DMD have a genetic
a potential treatment for DMD.
Today there is only one
approved DMD treatment to
elevate dystrophin levels. In
clinical trials, this drug treatment
had modest effects: people taking
it could produce dystrophin but
only at about 0.4 per cent the
levels seen in healthy individuals.
The gene-editing treatment has
been able to restore up to 92 per
cent of the dystrophin expression

mutation that makes them unable
to produce dystrophin, a protein
that maintains muscle structure
and function. The condition can
“Virtually all of the muscle
fibres showed high levels
of dystrophin. We were
exuberant”
result in heart or lung failure.
In 2010, Richard Piercy at the
Royal Veterinary College in
London and his colleagues
identified the same mutation in a
Cavalier King Charles spaniel that
was brought into the veterinary
hospital showing muscle
weakness. They found relatives
of that dog and bred them with
beagles. Three of the resulting
pups have now been used to test
RVC
in the beagles’ heart tissue, 58 per
cent in the diaphragm and 64 per
cent in the biceps. Some of these dogs have a genetic they require more safety testing.
This method relies on CRISPR muscle condition – but which? “The Cas9 protein expresses
Cas9, a genome editing enzyme for a long time, so the immune
that cuts a cell’s DNA in a specific “We looked through the system could attack it. We need a
spot, guided there by RNA . microscope and it was jaw- better assessment of the immune
The team injected a virus dropping,” says Olson. “Virtually response, and we also need to be
carrying CRISPR and its RNA all of the muscle fibres showed sure CRISPR isn’t cutting off-
molecular guide into the skeletal high levels of dystrophin target,” Spencer says.
muscle and heart tissue of two one- underlying every membrane. Recently, concerns have been
month old beagles with the DMD We were exuberant.” raised that CRISPR does indeed
mutation. It is the first time CRISPR However, he says it is not cut off-target – snipping up DNA
has been used in live animals of known whether the treatment where it isn’t supposed to. Olson
such a large size, says Eric Olson would have such dramatic effects says they didn’t see evidence that
at the University of Texas in the human version of the this was happening in the dogs,
Southwestern Medical Center. condition (Science, doi.org/ctgz). and blood tests were normal after
Six weeks later, they analysed the Melissa Spencer at the the treatment.
dogs’ muscles and sequenced University of California, Los Piercy adds that he hopes the
their genomes before comparing Angeles, says the results are a treatment could lead to a routine
them with a dog with the same great first step towards a therapy for dogs with muscle
mutation, and a healthy dog. treatment, but she cautions that disease, as well. ■
HELMUT CORNELI/ALAMY

Fish passes
mirror test for
first time
THE cleaner wrasse has become the
first fish to pass the mirror test – a
classic experiment used to gauge
self-awareness in animals.
Until now, only relatively intelligent
animals – such as apes and elephants –
have passed the test, which shows
whether an individual can recognise
itself. To see if fish may also be
self-aware, Masanori Kohda at Osaka
City University, Japan, and his
colleagues put 10 wild cleaner wrasses
in individual tanks with a mirror.
During the first few days, seven
of the fish attacked their mirror
images. But these fish then began
to dash towards the mirror and
dance – unusual behaviours that
have never been observed before.
The team put a coloured gel onto
the heads of eight of these fish, in
positions that could be seen only
using the mirror. Seven of the fish
spent significantly more time in front
Cleaner wrasse are only about the of the mirror in poses that let them
size of a human finger observe the mark on their head. Some
even tried to scrape it off (bioRxiv,
doi.org/cthm). According to the team,
this means cleaner wrasses are as
successful at recognising themselves
in a mirror as elephants.
However, Gordon Gallup of the
University at Albany, New York, who
invented the mirror test, is not
convinced. Cleaner wrasses eat
parasites living on other fish. These
wrasses probably mistook the marks
for parasites on the skin of other fish,
Gallup says. Yvaine Ye ■
See page 10 and page 28 for more on
self-awareness and intelligence

14 | NewScientist | 8 September 2018

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Opioid blocks pain

and addiction
A NEW opioid drug has been
shown to stop monkeys feeling
pain, without any apparent
addictive or harmful side effects.
Opioids such as morphine
stop pain, but can also be
addictive. In the US alone, more
than 46 people die daily from
overdoses of prescription opioids.
Mei-Chuan Ko at Wake Forest
University in North Carolina and
his colleagues have found that a
drug called AT-121 blocks pain by
activating two types of opioid
receptor in the brain. One is
the mu opioid receptor, the
pain-relieving receptor targeted
by many opioids. The other is
the nociceptin opioid receptor,
which blocks the brain’s
addiction-forming response,
while also providing pain relief.
The drug was 100 times as good
as morphine at reducing pain in
In 18 cases wolves attacked a lone male, and the monkeys. No addictive properties
Wolves may have influenced presence or lack of antlers made no difference. But the were seen (Science Translational
when elk shed their antlers remaining 37 encounters involved attacks on groups of Medicine, doi.org/ctf3).
two or more male elk, and wolves targeted stags without
EACH spring male elk lose their antlers so they can grow antlers. Groups containing at least one antler-less animal
back bigger and stronger to fight rivals for mates in were 10 times more likely to be attacked (Nature Ecology
Serengeti shaped
autumn. It turns out wolves may have helped shape the & Evolution, DOI: 10.1038/s41559-018-0657-5).
evolution of this timing: if elk lose their antlers too soon, The findings may also apply to related species. by ancient herders
their risk of ending up as wolf food rises. Too late and Elk don’t have a choice about when they shed their
they may fail to win a mate. antlers – it is probably linked to testosterone levels – AFRICA’S Serengeti grasslands are
Matthew Metz at the University of Montana and but shedding early seems to carry long-term benefits for far from pristine works of nature.
colleagues analysed 55 encounters between male elk a potential short-term but fatal cost. In fact, their rich biodiversity
and wolves in Yellowstone National Park from 2004 to “We suggest that wolves – formerly everywhere across may owe more to cowpats from
2016. They found that elk that shed their antlers early the northern hemisphere – have shaped the timing of livestock corralled overnight by
were also the most vulnerable to wolf attacks. when elk… shed their antlers,” says Metz. nomadic herders millennia ago.
Such dung has long been known
to provide hotspots of nutrients
Warm-water time bomb threatens Arctic time. The root cause is global in otherwise barren grasslands,
warming, which has seen Arctic eventually enabling much richer
THE Arctic is in hot water, literally. discovered the heat time bomb surface temperatures rise by 2°C ecosystems to develop. It was
Heat has been accumulating after analysing data on ice cover from pre-industrial levels, leading assumed that, on the Serengeti,
rapidly in a salty layer 50 metres and sea temperature, heat content to record-low sea ice coverage. these spots – called grassy glades –
down in a large part of the Arctic and saltiness at different depths With sea ice retreating, heat date back roughly 1000 years.
Ocean. Currently, it is capped by over the past three decades in the absorption by surface waters has Fiona Marshall of Washington
a less-dense layer of fresh water, Canadian basin, which is fed by increased fivefold in 30 years, the University in St Louis, Missouri,
but the fear is that winds could waters from the North Chukchi team found. Strong winds push and her colleagues have shown
make this lid fall apart. If the two Sea, north of the Bering Strait these newly warmed surface they may be much older. The
layers mix, this could melt all the between Alaska and Siberia. waters at the Arctic fringes down team sampled five sites in Kenya
seasonal sea ice above. The team found that the heat to the depths where they are now and found evidence of dung and
Mary-Louise Timmermans at content of the 100-metre-thick accumulating under the ice richer soils dating back 3700 years
Yale University and her colleagues salty layer had doubled over this (Science Advances, doi.org/ctf4). (Nature, doi.org/gd3zfb).

8 September 2018 | NewScientist | 17


IN BRIEF
A machine to split
the electron
SURF’S up! Electrons riding a plasma
wave can be accelerated to high
energies, which may let us build
small particle accelerators to smash
them up and learn more about the
tiniest objects in the universe.
The world’s largest accelerator,
the Large Hadron Collider at the
CERN particle physics laboratory
near Geneva, Switzerland, smashes
protons by whizzing them around
a 27 kilometre ring, but that won’t
work for electrons – they have to
be accelerated in a straight line.
The Advanced Proton Driven
Plasma Wakefield Acceleration
Experiment, also at CERN, gets
round this by shooting hundreds of
billions of protons into a tube filled
with rubidium atoms that have been
stripped of their electrons, forming
a plasma. This results in waves in
the plasma, and when electrons
are injected into the tube,
the waves accelerate them.
The container used is just
10 metres long, and the electrons
at the end reached energies of
2 gigaelectronvolts (GeV) (Nature,
doi.org/gd3zfz).
Electrons are fundamental
particles, meaning we think they
don’t break down into anything
smaller. But we don’t know for
sure. To test that would require
smashing electrons at hundreds
of GeV, which could be done
using higher-energy protons.
CERN
18 | NewScientist | 17 September 2018
AI could help doctors stay one step ahead of cancer
AN ARTIFICIAL intelligence
system called Revolver is
unveiling the evolutionary tricks
cancers use to spread and defy
treatment. It should allow
doctors to more accurately
identify what stage cancers have
reached, what they will do next
and how to stop them.
We can treat cancer if we
intervene early enough, says
Andrea Sottoriva of the Institute
of Cancer Research in London,
whose team is developing Revolver.
“The key is, can you stay one step
ahead of the disease?” he says.
MS drug halves loss
of brain tissue
AN EXPERIMENTAL drug for the
most severe forms of multiple
sclerosis has slowed brain
shrinkage by nearly 50 per cent.
Loss of brain tissue is a marker
of disease progression in primary
and secondary progressive MS.
In these forms of the disease,
the ongoing breakdown of the
protective myelin that surrounds
nerve fibres in the brain leads to
slower nerve signals, which can
ultimately result in muscle
weakness and problems with
balance and vision.
Robert Fox at the Cleveland
Clinic in Ohio led a phase II
clinical trial of a drug called
ibudilast, which inhibits proteins
that can result in central nervous
system inflammation.
The trial involved 255 people
from the US, with 126 receiving a
placebo instead of the drug. Each
took up to 10 capsules per day for
22 months and had brain scans
every six months to gauge the
volume of brain tissue.
The team found that, on average,
ibudilast slowed brain shrinkage
by 48 per cent compared with
placebo, with those given the drug
losing 2.5 millilitres less brain
matter (New England Journal
of Medicine, doi.org/ctf2).
For new stories every day, visit newscientist.com/news
Revolver helped Sottoriva’s
team unmask key evolutionary
steps in cancers. It uses data from
patients to create a genetic
“family tree” tracking how cancer
evolves, and identifies the series
of mutations that most often lead
to cancer. Existing analyses, often
relying on samples from one
patient, can struggle to
distinguish important mutations
from harmless ones.
Revolver instead analysed
mutation data from 178 patients,
covering 768 tumour samples and
four types of cancer – bowel, lung,
Print with sound using honey as ink
PRINTERS that use sound waves may
one day let us build structures out of
honey droplets, or even print human
tissue without harming cells.
Regular inkjet printers are great
at controlling the placement and
size of ink droplets, but only work
for watery fluids. Daniele Foresti at
Harvard University and his colleagues
have come up with a way to print
droplets of viscous liquids.
Inkjet printers rely on streams of
liquid naturally separating into drops.
To make droplets from a viscous fluid,
that fluid has to be forcefully broken.
The team turned to sound waves,
breast and kidney. This made
key evolutionary steps stand out
better. Three key gene mutations
are known to be crucial for benign
colon polyps to turn cancerous,
for example, but have not been
seen together in a single patient.
Despite this, Revolver identified
the three mutations as the key
ones when tested on gene profiles
from 95 colorectal cancer patients.
It also correctly identified key
mutations already known to drive
evolution of lung, breast and
kidney cancers (Nature Methods,
doi.org/cthk).
DANIELE FORESTI, JENNIFER A. LEWIS, HARVARD UNIVERSITY
which can exert a force on objects.
Their printer extrudes a droplet
from a nozzle and then fires sound
waves at it to make it fall to the
printing surface.
The sound is extremely loud,
but it is at a high frequency that
the human ear cannot detect.
The researchers tested the printer
using water, honey and a liquid mix
of gallium and indium metal. They
also tried an ink full of human cells to
confirm they wouldn’t be killed by the
sound (Science Advances, doi.org/
ctjq). “With the cells, you could do
tissue engineering,” says Foresti.
 ADVERTORIAL

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It’s 2040 and you’re piloting Britain’s newest fighter
aircraft. At Mach 1.2, you ask the AI assistant to plot
a course and hand it control of the plane. You switch
to night mode and look down to see an image of the
terrain below created from multiple sensors on the
plane’s skin...
Rewind to 2018 and engineers are working on a
sleek, stealthy combat aircraft that isn't due to fly
for many years. Yet its systems are not so far from
reality – they will be based on technologies being
developed by scientists at BAE Systems and the
University of Birmingham.
For pilots the changes will be profound. AI will
take on an increasing range of tasks, for example.
But the biggest change is likely to be in the look
and feel of the cockpit. “What we’re trying to do
is to augment the human,” says Nick Colosimo,
a technology strategist at BAE Systems.
Pilots today are largely stuck with a massive
array of instruments and controls. By making them
virtual, the cockpit can be de-cluttered so pilots see
only things that are relevant to their mission. They
can also personalise what they see, like customising
the home screen on their mobiles.
Head-up displays will be transformed to
have a very wide field of view in full-colour and
high-resolution. These will offer a wide range of
functions, such as adding markers to significant
locations that appear to be outside the cockpit.
Pilots’ brain waves and blood oxygen will be
monitored to detect when they are overloaded or
losing alertness. In such cases, the cockpit could
automatically de-clutter to focus attention. The
flight suit could also squeeze the pilots’ legs to
prevent blood flowing from the brain.
The world’s most At New Scientist Live on Saturday 22 September,
Colosimo will discuss these developments with Bob

exciting festival of ideas Stone, director of the human interface technologies

team at the University of Birmingham. Some he

and discovery hopes will transfer to everyday life. For example,

high g forces can make pilots’ arms feel
heavy while vibrations give them the
20 – 23 Sept 2018 | ExCeL London shakes. So researchers at BAE Systems
are testing hands-free ways to
communicate with the plane. One option
is eye-tracking, which Colosimo hopes
could eventually be transferred to the health
BOOK YOUR TICKETS NOW sector. “We hope we can spin back some

newscientistlive.com of this work,” he says.

TECHNOLOGY
ZONE SPONSOR
 INSIGHT HYDROGEN CARS
GETTY
Gassed up and ready to go
Vehicles that run on hydrogen have been dismissed by the likes
of Elon Musk, but they’re making a comeback, says Alice Klein
HYDROGEN-POWERED cars have
had a bumpy ride. Back in 2003,
they were touted as “one of the
most encouraging, innovative
technologies of our era” by
US president at the time George
W. Bush. Then the Tesla revolution
came along and they were left in
the dust by their battery-driven
electric rivals.
Now, there are signs of a
comeback. A recent survey of
more than 900 global automotive
executives by consulting firm
KPMG found that 52 per cent rated
hydrogen fuel cell vehicles as a
leading industry trend. Japan has
announced plans to put 40,000
hydrogen vehicles on the road in
the next five years, and South
20 | NewScientist | 8 September 2018
Korea 16,000. Germany wants to
have 400 refuelling stations for
hydrogen vehicles by 2025 and
California has already opened 35.
This renewed push has its
sceptics. Tesla chief Elon Musk, for (see diagram, above right).
example, has dismissed hydrogen
cars as being “extremely silly”.
But Joan Ogden at the University
of California, Davis, sees a future “Hydrogen vehicles
in which hydrogen and electric
vehicles play complementary
roles. “There are arguments for
having both,” she says.
Like electric cars, hydrogen
vehicles produce zero pollutants
and carbon emissions, so they
don’t damage our health or the
climate. The main difference is
that hydrogen cars use a fuel cell
instead of a battery to power an
electric motor. Hydrogen is stored
in a tank and fed into the fuel
cell, where its chemical energy is
converted into electrical energy
Hydrogen cars are finally
becoming commercially viable
produce zero emissions,
so don’t damage our
health or the climate”
because fuel cells have become
smaller and lighter, says Matthew
Macleod at Toyota, which began
selling the Mirai, one of the first
mass-market hydrogen cars, in
2014 for $60,000. Honda and
The Toyota Mirai is one of the
first mass-market hydrogen cars
Hyundai have competing models,
and Mercedes-Benz plans to
launch one next year.
We are also figuring out better
ways to transport and store
hydrogen, says Michael Dolan
at Australia’s national science
organisation, the CSIRO. Last
month, his team showed that
hydrogen gas can be converted to
liquid ammonia for transportation,
then converted back using a
membrane made from the metal
vanadium. Liquid ammonia takes
up less space and is less flammable
than hydrogen gas, making it
easier to ship to refuelling stations.
The ability to rapidly refuel
is one of the main advantages
hydrogen vehicles have over
their electric counterparts, says
Macleod. Filling up a hydrogen
car takes about the same time as
filling a petrol one, rather than the
hours it typically takes to recharge
For daily news stories, visit newscientist.com/news
an electric car’s battery. You can
also go further on a full tank of
hydrogen – about 500 kilometres,
compared with 300 kilometres
for a standard fully charged
battery (see table, below).
But although hydrogen reacts
cleanly – the only thing coming
out of the exhaust pipe is water –
hydrogen vehicles are more
energy-intensive than electric
ones if you factor in fuel
production and transport, says
Jake Whitehead at the University
of Queensland, Australia.
At the moment, most hydrogen
is extracted from natural gas –
a fossil fuel. “Green” hydrogen
can be made by splitting water
using solar or wind power,
but this involves multiple steps,
each using energy along the way.
In contrast, a single energy step
is required to directly recharge
a car battery at home.
Clean fuel?
If you account for this complete
energy cycle, Whitehead’s
modelling shows that hydrogen
vehicles require between 80 and
100 kilowatt-hours of electricity
to travel 100 kilometres, compared
with about 20 kilowatt-hours to
travel the same distance in a
battery vehicle. This is the main
charge levelled by Musk at
hydrogen cars. “[The efficiency is]
terrible, so why would you do
that? It make no sense,” he told
reporters at the Automotive News
World Congress in Detroit in 2015.
Hydrogen fuel is also more
expensive than petrol. Hydrogen
cars currently cost about 13 cents
per kilometre to run, compared
with 8 cents per kilometre for
petrol cars. However, some
projections suggest that the costs
will become equivalent by 2025
as the technology to produce
hydrogen becomes cheaper.
At the moment, there are only
about 6000 hydrogen vehicles
on the road globally, compared
with 2 million electric vehicles.
But Ogden says that hydrogen
vehicles may end up becoming
A chemical reaction between oxygen and hydrogen generates electricity, which is fed to the car’s
battery and motor. Water is the only by-product, leading to clean emission
Motor
Air in (oxygen)
Fuel cell stack
more popular among certain
drivers. “If you’re only using your
car for short commutes or to get
around the city, battery cars can
handle all your needs,” she says.
“But if you want a big car that
you can take on long drives in the
mountains on a whim, a hydrogen
fuel cell car might be better.”
The shorter refuelling time
and longer range of hydrogen
fuel cells also make them
appealing for taxis, buses and
long-haul trucks, says Dolan.
“These vehicles can’t afford to
be stopping for hours at a time
to recharge,” he says.
Hydrogen fuel cells are already
finding applications in these
heavy-use vehicles. Japan will
showcase 100 hydrogen buses
at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, and
South Korea plans to introduce
1000 hydrogen buses by 2022.
A fleet of 180 hydrogen taxis,
private-hire and police cars
is being trialled in London,
Paris and Brussels, and retailer
Amazon has recently invested in
hydrogen-powered forklifts for
its warehouses. US manufacturer
Nikola Motors, meanwhile, says
it has received 11,000 pre-orders
Car type Petrol
Emissions Carbon dioxide,
carbon monoxide,
NOx gases etc.
Typical refuel/ 3-5 minutes
recharge time
Typical range 400 kilometres
Typical 8 cents/
running cost kilometre
Power
generation Battery Hydrogen in
H2
O2
Water out
High-pressure SOURCE: TOYOTA
hydrogen tank
for its hydrogen fuel cell truck. can even survive being shot
Japan and South Korea are at or set on fire. New ways of
leading this push because they transporting hydrogen – like
want to embrace zero-emissions in the form of ammonia – will
technology, but their combination also make its deployment safer,
of small land masses and large says Macleod.
populations means they don’t The most probable future
have enough solar, wind or other scenario is that we will have a
renewable energy to support large mix of vehicles run by batteries,
numbers of battery electric hydrogen and petrol, each
vehicles, says Dolan. performing different roles, says
They can’t import renewable Ogden. “There are proponents of
energy itself, but they can import the different technologies saying
hydrogen made from renewable it’s all going to be all hydrogen
energy in other countries. or all batteries, but auto-makers
Australia, for example, could use are putting their money on both,”
its abundant solar energy to split
water and export hydrogen to “There are only about 6000
these countries, says Dolan. hydrogen vehicles on the
“You can see hydrogen basically road globally, versus
as a carrier for renewable energy.” 2 million electric vehicles”
Many people feel jittery
about hydrogen because of its she says. According to the KPMG
connection with hydrogen bombs survey, car-makers are predicting
and the 1937 Hindenburg disaster, an even four-way split between
in which a hydrogen-filled airship electric, hydrogen, petrol and
spectacularly caught fire, killing hybrid vehicles by 2040.
36 people. But the hydrogen tanks The final mix will depend on
used in modern fuel cell vehicles the willingness of governments
are made from multiple layers of and industry to invest in
resin, carbon fibre and fibreglass hydrogen infrastructure – for
that keep the flammable gas example, by building refuelling
safely contained. Tests show they stations and introducing
hydrogen buses – as well as
Battery Hydrogen consumer enthusiasm for
electric fuel cell hydrogen cars. But whether it
None Water ends up being hydrogen or battery
power that wins the bigger share,
any dent in the dominance of
8 hours 3-5 minutes petrol vehicles is likely to be a
good thing. With less emitted
300 kilometres 500 kilometres carbon warming our globe, less
toxic exhaust fumes choking our
3 cents/ 13 cents/
lungs and less smog staining our
kilometre kilometre
skylines, we will all be better off. ■
8 September 2018 | NewScientist | 21
COMMENT
Sheer lunacy
The US plan to build a habitable station orbiting the moon is
the worst idea of the new space age, says Robert Zubrin
BEFORE the recent Mars Society
convention, I was asked what I
thought of the US plan to send
astronauts to the moon. No doubt
I was expected to explain why the
Red Planet is a more suitable goal,
but I said this was about much
more than the moon versus Mars.
I am prepared to make the case
for prioritising Mars, though.
Once warm and wet, it may have
evolved life, and if we can find
evidence of it, we could learn a lot
about the possible prevalence and
diversity of life in the cosmos.
Taking on Mars would inspire
millions of young people into
science. It is also the closest planet
with the resources for human
settlement. In short, Mars is
where the science is, where the
challenge is and where the future
is. It should be the goal.
Unfortunately, that argument
assumes that those making US
space policy think it is important
A vote for reason
If they value facts, Americans can elect a
scientist, says Shaughnessy Naughton
THE battle for political power in
the US is heating up. The two
main parties are stepping up pleas
for support in this autumn’s
midterm election, which will
decide who controls Congress.
That’s nothing unusual.
But November’s vote does offer
something the electorate hasn’t
seen before: a dedicated push to
22 | NewScientist | 8 September 2018
the halls of power ever since.
I founded this organisation in
part because I know how hard it
is to be a candidate with a STEM
background – I was one myself.
I’m a chemist by training, and
when I ran for Congress in 2014,
I realised that if you aren’t a
lawyer or a career politician, it
get candidates with science can be hard to break into politics.
backgrounds on the ballot. Take, for example, the simple
Anti-science attitudes in US barrier of entry for scientists
politics are well-documented. in the middle of their careers.
For those enraged by them, helpUnlike lawyers (who are often
is at hand. I started 314 Action in
2016 to recruit, train and support “There are more talk
scientists running for office, and radio hosts in Congress
we’ve been laying the groundwork than there are physicists
to bring evidence-based policy to and chemists”
for NASA’s human space flight
programme to have any goal at all.
This is far from evident. While the
Trump administration says that it
is setting its sights on a return to
the moon, its actions do not lend
credence to such claims.
If it intended to put people on
the moon again, it would fund the
development of a lunar lander.
Instead it is funding the Lunar
Orbit Platform-Gateway, a costly
boondoggle that serves no useful
purpose. US Vice President Mike
Pence talks of it as a done deal.
What he fails to add is that we
don’t need a lunar-orbiting base
to go to the moon, or to Mars, or
to go anywhere. Not only that,
crewed trips to anywhere beyond
Earth orbit would be designed to
use the gateway as a staging post,
adding to fuel requirements and
decreasing the load they can carry,
which is why I call it the Lunar
Orbit Tollbooth instead.
encouraged by their firms to run),
taking a year off to campaign
can spell the end of a scientist’s
career. Our organisation acts as a
support system and siren call for
a community that has long shied
away from politics.
The response has been
promising. An unprecedented
number of scientists ditched lab
coats for suits and launched
campaigns. While I neither expect
nor desire every seat of Congress
to be held by persons with STEM
backgrounds, 2018 is a great
chance to bolster the scientific
community’s representation
there. Currently, there is one
physicist (Representative Bill
For more opinion articles, visit newscientist.com/opinion
Yet the problem with the
project is bigger than the waste of
time and money and the harmful
distortions imposed on other
missions. The deeper problem is
the form of thinking it represents.
NASA’s astronomy and robotic
exploration programmes have
achieved epic accomplishments
because they are purpose-driven.
In contrast, since Apollo ended,
NASA’s human space flight work
has been purpose-free. As a result,
accomplishments have been few.
The science programmes spend
money to do things. The human
SHESTOCK/GETTY
space flight programme is doing
things to spend money.
The situation is ironic. With the
success of the Falcon Heavy rocket
that could send crew to the moon
and Mars, the US could be poised
for a deep space breakthrough.
The Lunar Orbit Tollbooth cash,
if spent on developing landers and
ascent vehicles, could enable a
return to the lunar surface within
four years and human missions to
Mars in eight. What is lacking is
intelligent direction. We will never
get to Mars if we allow our human
space flight programme to be run
as a random walk. Q
Robert Zubrin, an astronautical
engineer, is president of the Mars
Society, which advocates for a human
mission to the Red Planet
Foster) in Congress. There are
more than 200 lawyers. There are
more talk radio hosts in Congress
than physicists and chemists.
The time for signing polite
letters and waiting to be tapped
for an advisory role is over.
Scientists need to get involved
in electoral politics.
Voters want governance based
in facts and evidence, and who
better to lead that charge than
those who have spent their
careers in a role where there is
no room for “alternative facts”. ■
Shaughnessy Naughton is founder
of 314 Action, which seeks to get
scientists into elected office in the US
ANALYSIS Self-harm
medical criteria. Teenagers have
Are modern teens always been sad or anxious from time
to time. Thankfully, clinical depression
is still rare in this age group.
hurting or happy? In fact, a different and regularly
repeated survey has found no change
in 11-to-15-year-olds’ happiness with
life as a whole between 1995 and
Clare Wilson like that just once in the past year 2016. Nor did their satisfaction with
for it to count. their appearance change, which makes
ALARMING headlines suggest one Such self-destructive behaviour it odd to blame the selfie culture for
in four teenage girls in the UK are would naturally be of concern to the apparent self-harm epidemic.
self-harming, motivated by sexist parents, but wouldn’t be that unusual This survey, called Understanding
stereotypes and pressures to look for teenagers. Max Davie, a health Society, even found a boost in
good in a selfie society. The truth may promotion officer for the UK’s Royal happiness with family and schoolwork
not be as bleak as it first appears. College of Paediatrics and Child Health, over that period. These more
These stories come from a report does believe that self-harm among optimistic findings were also in
by UK charity The Children’s Society, teens is somewhat on the rise – the latest Children’s Society report,
based on an ongoing survey of 11,000 but thinks the question in this survey but were buried at the bottom of
children aged 14, called the Millennium was not specific enough to reveal its their press release.
Cohort Study. Among the girls, 22 per real prevalence. Davie thinks the rise in self-harm
cent said they had self-harmed. The latest headlines join an ongoing may not be due to a rise in
For boys it was 9 per cent. narrative about a mental health crisis unhappiness, but simply that this age
But while the term self-harm in today’s youth. Some blame cutbacks group now sees self-harm as a more
conjures images of teenagers cutting culturally acceptable way to express
themselves, that may, thankfully, “The latest headlines join anguish. “It may be that previously
be only the most extreme end of an ongoing narrative people didn’t know that this was
a broader spectrum. In this survey, about a mental health something you could do. If people
participants were merely asked if crisis in today’s youth” are talking about something and
they had “hurt themselves on normalising it, it’s probably more
purpose in any way”. in social services, while others point likely that their peers will do it.”
Some could have answered yes to a loosening of sexual norms putting If that is the case, it is all the more
for things like punching a wall in teens at risk. For those wary of new reason not to make self-harm seem
frustration or deliberately getting technologies, it is social media or the more common than it really is. ■
falling-down drunk. Others could have latest popular computer games.
thought the question included mental But such reports also deserve Need a listening ear? UK Samaritans:
hurt – such as spending a miserable some scepticism. Claims of soaring 116123 (samaritans.org). Visit bit.ly/
evening stalking an ex on social media. rates of depression are usually based SuicideHelplines for hotlines and
They needed to have done something on surveys with very loose, non- websites for other countries.
8 September 2018 | NewScientist | 23
APERTURE

24 | NewScientist | 8 September 2018

Eye to eye
NO NEED to fear this hairy monster. This
poplar hawkmoth couldn’t even try to bite you:
it has no functioning mouthparts, and will
never be able to eat.
These moths (Laothoe populi) are found all
over Europe, and can reach the size of a small
bat. Unlike other moths, they have no proboscis
protruding from their head, so are unable to sip
nectar from flowers.
Instead, these adults rely solely on body
fat they stored for energy when they were
caterpillars. This keeps them going for just three
or four weeks, meaning the race is on to find a
partner and mate.
The large insects use pheromones to find each
other. This moth is a male, and will use his yellow
antennae to search for scent-emitting females in
the night. The females send their signals and wait.
They are so weighed down by eggs that flying is
too strenuous.
If they mate successfully, the eggs are laid and
more than 100 pale green caterpillars will emerge
a week later. Before winter arrives, these bulk up
on the food that gives their species its common
name – the leaves of poplar trees.
“I wouldn’t have stood a chance had this
individual been flying,” says photographer Alex
Hyde of this close-up. He snapped this hawkmoth
as it rested in Derbyshire, UK, early one summer
morning. “It is humbling to remember that we
are surrounded by a multitude of fascinating
creatures every day, most of which are too small
for us to give a second look to as we charge
through our busy lives,” Hyde says. Yvaine Ye

Photographer
Alex Hyde
Naturepl.com

8 September 2018 | NewScientist | 25

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TECHNOLOGY HUMANS
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 The why
of me
Is having a sense of self really the hallmark
of a sophisticated brain or simply an accident
of evolution? Soia Deleniv investigates
L
OOK into a mirror and you may see
pimples, wrinkles or unruly facial hair,
but beneath the superficial lies something
far more interesting. Every time you lock eyes
with your reflection, you know exactly who is
looking back at you. The sense of self is
unmistakable. It is so much a part of being
human that we often fail to notice it. Yet self-
awareness is one of the biggest mysteries of
the mind. How did it arise and what is it for?
Looking at other animals suggests we are
not alone in being able to recognise ourselves
in a mirror. Admittedly, it’s a short list of
species that seem capable of this feat, but it
hints at a possible explanation. Self-awareness
may have evolved in only the brightest
animals with the biggest brains. If so, it
represents the peak of mental complexity –
the highest form of consciousness.
However, some people have started to
question this idea. Now, an extraordinary
finding lends weight to their scepticism: one
monkey species that was previously deemed
unable to recognise itself in a mirror can easily
learn to do so. This isn’t simply another name
to add to the echelons of the self-aware. The
discovery suggests we need to fundamentally
rethink our ideas about mirrors and minds.
The hunt for self-awareness among non-
28 | NewScientist | 8 September 2018
humans has been going on for decades. In
the most widely used test – the so-called face-
mark test – researchers stealthily apply a spot
of odourless dye to an animal’s forehead or
cheek and then observe its reaction when it is
in front of a mirror. The underlying premise
is that those with a firm sense of self can
acknowledge their reflection and attempt to
scrub off the dye.
Most of the animals that have passed this
test are considered to be intelligent. They
include chimps, bonobos, orangutans, Asian
elephants and Eurasian magpies (a member
of the notoriously clever corvid family). Killer
whales and bottlenose dolphins also seem to
recognise themselves in a mirror, although
their anatomy means they can’t remove a face
mark. This apparent correlation with smarts
means that self-awareness has become a sort
of proxy for mental complexity. But there are
some puzzling evolutionary gaps. Gorillas,
for instance, usually fail the test – with the
notable exception of the recently deceased
Koko – yet our more distant primate relatives,
the orangutans, pass it. Also, the self-aware
elite contains some bizarre anomalies such
as pigeons, manta rays, ants and even a robot.
Some of these findings – particularly with
ants and pigeons – are contested. >
 COVER STORY
REILIKA LANDEN/PLAINPICTURE

8 September 2018 | NewScientist | 29

Researchers have tried to explain away others,
arguing, for example, that gorillas have
mentally regressed since their split from the
other ape lineages because they face fewer
pressures in their environment. But the recent
discovery in monkeys is harder to dismiss.
Last year, Liangtang Chang and colleagues at
the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences,
China, released video footage of a small group
of rhesus macaques interacting with a mirror.
It shows the monkeys contorting their bodies,
tugging at their facial hair, inspecting their
fingertips and making flashy displays of their
genitals, all the while keeping their eyes on
their reflections. They are captivated, leaving
little doubt they recognise themselves. Yet,
rhesus macaques have consistently failed the
mirror test. And just a few weeks earlier, the
ones studied by Chang’s team had shown no
signs that they understood their reflections.
What changed?
In fact, there is anecdotal evidence of
macaques in the lab showing a sudden interest
in mirrors after being fitted with bulky neural
recording devices that protrude from their
heads. Chang’s team wondered whether the
monkeys genuinely lacked self-awareness, or
whether they were being held back by a lack of
coordination – an inability to link what they
saw with internal signals generated by their
muscle movements. To test this, they taught
the monkeys to link vision and movement
by giving them a food reward for touching a
projected laser dot. At first, the researchers
shone the laser where the monkeys could
easily see it, then gradually worked up to
shining it in places only visible in the mirror.
Fast-forward a few weeks of practice, and they
passed the face-mark test with flying colours.
At the least, this indicates that the way we
test for self-awareness is flawed (see “Mirror,
mirror”, right). That, in turn, raises the
possibility that self-awareness is much more
widespread than we think. So, what do we
know about the evolution of this prized trait?
Levels of consciousness
Many psychologists and anthropologists
hold that there is a hierarchy of consciousness
that corresponds with increasing brain
complexity. At its base is the minimal
consciousness attributed to animals with
simple nervous systems. These minds are
thought to be permanently adrift in a sea
of raw sensory experiences, tossed around
between perceptions such as colour, hunger,
warmth and fear, with little awareness of their
meaning. Few minds are sophisticated enough
30 | NewScientist | 8 September 2018
MIRROR, MIRROR
The ability to recognise oneself in
a mirror is generally taken to be an
indicator of self-awareness, but that
idea is being challenged. For a start,
developmental psychologists argue
that it doesn’t necessarily reveal an
awareness of self that extends
beyond the here and now.
Experiments show that children can
acknowledge themselves in a mirror
at the age of 3, yet cannot recognise
themselves in videos taken a few
months earlier. They will struggle
with the idea of existing in the past
for another year or two.
It is even less clear what it means
for a non-human animal to recognise
itself in a mirror. Only a handful of
species seem capable of the task.
The majority are either our primate
relatives or animals with complex
social lives, like us. So, rather than
reflecting mental complexity, it could
simply indicate that their minds have
evolved to face similar challenges
to our own. Besides, the discovery
that animals can learn to pass the
mirror self-recognition test hints
that there could be many species
with undetected self-awareness
(see main story).
JOE RAEDLE/NEWSMAKERS
to experience the world differently – through
an introspective lens. Even then, they may
have a limited sense of self. Only at the peak of
mental complexity do we find minds able to
construct a lifelong narrative of experiences
centred around an abstract concept of “self” –
these are the elite.
What is the evidence for this hierarchy? After
all, mental complexity is a slippery concept
and, besides, none of us has insight into even
the mind of another human, let alone a bat or
a beetle. Well, there’s no question that some
brains are much bigger and more structurally
complicated than others. This disparity is
mainly the result of the differing evolutionary
demands that animals must meet to survive.
For example, the nervous system of a
sedentary, filter-feeding oyster consists of
just two cell clusters. These allow it to do
exactly what an oyster needs to do – control
its digestion, and transmit signals from light-
sensing tentacles to the muscle that snaps it
shut when a predator looms. Meanwhile, at
the other end of the spectrum, there is one
particular demand that seems to have led to
the evolution of complex brains and could
also have created the conditions for a sense of
self to arise. That challenge is dealing with the
minds of others – be they prey, competitors
or other members of your social group.
According to the social brain hypothesis,
developed by Robin Dunbar at the University
of Oxford, life in tight-knit communities
is especially challenging because close
relationships hinge on being able to
understand what is going on in another
individual’s mind. To achieve this, brains
needed to evolve from being simply things
that experience sensations and thoughts to
becoming their observer. To do this, they
needed to build a model of a mind, according
to neuroscientist Michael Graziano at
Princeton University. And once the biological
machinery for such model-building evolved,
it could be used to represent not only the
minds of others, but also one’s own mind.
A model – be it for mind reading, weather
forecasting or whatever – usually starts with
some assumptions about the factors that
contribute to the system in question and their
relative importance. It then runs a simulation
and, depending on how much the result
diverges from physical observations, modifies
the assumptions. The model thus acquires an
accurate representation of the forces at work,
allowing it to make reasonable predictions
about the future. “The brain is a model-
builder,” says Graziano. “You can’t move your
arm properly if your motor system doesn’t

know where it is, can’t predict where it
will be in the next few seconds, and can’t run
simulations about what will happen if it sends
out this or that command to the muscles.”
And, he argues, the brain uses exactly the
same strategy to model minds so that it can
interact socially. If he is correct, then what
you consciously experience is the simulation.
By extension, self-awareness is the
conscious state of running that simulation on
your own mind. Graziano believes we have no
reason to put it on a pedestal. “Self-awareness
is not higher-order, or intrinsically more
complicated, than consciousness,” he says. “It
is another example of consciousness.” A mind
is just an object that some brains can model,
and so become aware of. Moreover, it is hard
to establish whether this ability is associated
with uniquely complex biological machinery.
After all, we are still struggling to pin down
what consciousness looks like in the brain.
Most researchers agree that the brain
operates at least partly by generating
simulations. However, many disagree that
consciousness is a functional piece of the
modelling machinery. Instead, a widely held
view sees it as the unintended by-product of
information rushing through the closed loop
of connections that is the brain. Consciousness
can’t help existing despite serving no
particular purpose, just like the noise emitted
by a running engine, which has no bearing on
the workings of the engine itself. By this way
of thinking, self-awareness isn’t even a
simulation; it is just a hall of mirrors.
Smart animals
like chimps
and dolphins
can recognise
themselves in
a mirror, but
have they led
us up the
garden path?
JAMES BALOG / AURORA PHOTOS
Such emergent phenomena are common in
nature. They give the mesmerising impression
of complexity and intentionality, despite
stemming from a system whose components
operate with no regard for the phenomenon
itself. One notable example is the collective
behaviour of flocks of birds, which can be
modelled using individuals driven by just two
opposing forces – an instinct to follow their
nearest few neighbours, and to back off if they
get too close. Apparent complexity emerges
even in Petri-dish-bound bacterial colonies,
where individual bacteria automatically
respond to chemical signals secreted by
their neighbours to regulate their proximity.
“Perhaps self-awareness
isn’t even a simulation
but just a hall of mirrors”
The structure that emerges has no agency or
purpose – it is purely an indicator of the forces
at work in each individual.
Similarly, self awareness may be an
apparently complex phenomenon that
emerges from the brain. However, unlike with
birds or bacteria, a mind cannot observe its
individual components. It can only glean the
echo of billions of neurons responding to
each other with electrical signals. The flow of
signals is dynamic, rushing along a different
set of connections every moment. But some
paths are more well trodden than others. In
humans, the predominant connections seem
to be those used to contemplate the minds
of others – the same connections used to
contemplate ourselves. What emerges from
this is a pattern that seems constant. To you,
that is your sense of self, confined inside the
Petri dish of your brain.
In other animals, the well-trodden paths
in the brain will be different. In bats, for
example, it might be those transmitting
information from the echolocation clicks used
to construct a 3D model of the world. There
will be a huge diversity of emergent mental
patterns that serve the various survival needs
of different species. Looked at this way, there
is no clear hierarchy of consciousness
corresponding to mental complexity.
Consider the octopus
In fact, some of nature’s most sophisticated
minds probably lack a sense of self as we know
it. In mammals, those with bigger social
groups generally have bigger brains, implying
that a sense of self goes hand in hand with
intelligence. But some other animals seem to
have evolved to be highly intelligent without
having had to understand the minds of others.
Take cephalopods – a group of marine
animals that includes cuttlefish and octopuses.
Having spent years collaborating with marine
biologists, philosopher of science Peter
Godfrey-Smith at the University of Sydney
believes that the particularly large brain of
the common octopus is shaped mainly by
the unique demands on a soft-bodied animal
inhabiting an environment dominated by
vertebrates. This challenge might have
triggered the evolution of a bodily self-
awareness akin to that of primates, but
Godfrey-Smith sees a clear distinction between
the two. “When one watches an octopus
squeeze through a tiny space, it certainly looks
[different],” he says. Either way, we can rest
assured that if an octopus has a sense of self, it
will have very little in common with the “self”
that inhabits our brains. It is even less likely to
be something we can measure with a mirror.
Indeed, all this makes clear that the best
we can hope for with mirrors is an imperfect
glimpse into minds like our own. What’s more,
if we proceed under the assumption that such
minds are the true pinnacles of complexity,
then we will miss out on the most beautiful
thing about minds – that they are biological
machines for adaptation, with contents that
can be sophisticated in so many ways. Q
Sofia Deleniv is a doctoral student at the University
of Oxford
8 September 2018 | NewScientist | 31
 The briny
deep
Ocean desalination would provide
drinking water for all – if only we knew
what to do with the waste salt.
Katherine Bourzac reports
F
OR the time being, Cape Town has dodged
a bullet. After months of unrelenting
drought, the recent winter rains have
begun to refill its parched dams. That doesn’t
mean things are easy. City residents are still
limited to using 50 litres of water a day,
scarcely enough to half-fill a bath. But at least
so-called day zero, when the taps run dry and
residents have to wait in line to collect survival
rations of water, has been averted.
The South African city is an extreme
example, but it is far from the only place
facing a severe water shortage. To slake that
thirst, many cities are turning to the ocean,
a seemingly inexhaustible supply of water.
They are doing this through desalination,
a water purification technology that has been
around for decades. Cape Town is bringing a
32 | NewScientist | 8 September 2018
couple of desalination plants online in a hurry
and many others are being built elsewhere. As
they spring up, however, attention is focusing
on what they leave behind: concentrated
brine, millions of litres of it a day.
Now scientists are sounding a note of
caution about the impacts of dumping all that
salt in the environment. “Increasing salinity
is one of the most important environmental
issues of the 21st century,” says engineer
Amy Childress. But smarter methods of
desalination are emerging and they have
benefits far beyond providing clean water.
Sao Paulo, Cairo, Beijing, Bangalore – the
list of cities with water shortages runs long
and touches every continent. Even London,
often thought of as a wet city, only gets about
600 millimetres of rain a year and will
probably have supply problems by 2025.
As populations grow, things are set to worsen.
In 2007, the UN found that about 1.6 billion
people lacked adequate infrastructure to
supply them with drinking water. By 2025,
the organisation expects 1.8 billion people,
almost a quarter of the world’s population,
to be living in areas where there is not
enough water to sustain them.
Ideally, we would meet demand by tapping
into stores of fresh water such as rain-filled
reservoirs and rivers, or perhaps groundwater
wells. But plenty of places don’t have
sufficient, easily accessible sources of
fresh water to support growing populations.
One option is to recycle waste water on a
mammoth scale. Another is to turn to salty
water, like the ocean or brackish lagoons.

That is where desalination comes in, and
there are plenty of ways to do it. For example,
you can evaporate water from one spot and
condense it in another, leaving salt and
impurities behind. But the most energy-
efficient method is reverse osmosis.
Imagine a strong salt solution and a weak
one, separated by a membrane that allows
only water through. In this situation, the
water will flow naturally from the weak
solution to the strong, evening out their
concentrations in a process called osmosis.
Do the reverse, forcing ocean water at high
pressure through a salt-excluding membrane
in the opposite direction, and you are well
on the way to making drinking water.
This approach is becoming more
common. In 2005, desalination produced
about 40 billion litres of water daily, according
to the International Desalination Association.
By 2015 that had increased to 87 billion litres,
produced by nearly 1900 plants around the
world. The vast majority of those are in the
dry countries around the Persian Gulf, but
the technology is on the up elsewhere too.
The Australian city of Adelaide gets roughly
half of its water from a huge desalination
plant. California already has a few plants
and is spending more than $30 million on
eight new ones.
Great news. Except what about all that brine
left behind? It is about twice as salty as the
starting water, depending on the desalination
technique used, and most plants dispose of it
by pumping it back out to sea. That is a source
of concern for researchers, including
SPACES IMAGES/PLAINPICTURE
For coastal communities, the ocean is
a tempting source of water
Childress, who is based at the University
of Southern California.
The concentration of salts in the sea
varies. On average it is 35 parts per thousand,
meaning that for every 1000 grams of
seawater, about 35 grams is salt. Once salt
levels exceed what marine plants and animals
are used to, there is a danger that their cells
might cease to work properly.
The evidence so far for what happens to
life around brine outflows from desalination
plants is mixed. In 2012, a study for the
California State Water Resources Control
Board looked at how animals responded to
increased salt concentrations in lab >
8 September 2018 | NewScientist | 33
conditions. It found that many marine species
would probably be fine in increased salinity.
But some important ones, like giant kelp,
would be at risk. Dense strands of these tall
algae form underwater forests along the
California coastline, and their canopies are
home to a diverse range of species including
sea otters and urchins.
Giant kelp reproduces most successfully
at salinity levels between 25 and 35 parts per
thousand, says Michael Foster at California’s
Moss Landing Marine Laboratories. With the
Pacific Ocean’s salinity already at 35 parts per
thousand, any increase might be problematic
for the kelp and the ecosystem it supports.
The water control board study also found that
red abalone, a prized edible mollusc, seems
to be highly sensitive to salinity increases.
Heather Cooley, director of research at
the Pacific Institute, a water think tank in
California, is alert to the unintended
consequences of brine disposal. “We don’t
really know what the impacts will be on the
marine environment,” she says.
Cooley has conducted an extensive review
of the evidence, for example looking at levels
of biodiversity and dissolved oxygen before
and after the installation of brine outflows
from desalination plants in Perth, Australia,
and elsewhere. The results are not easy to
interpret and do not necessary apply
Dilution solution
Desalination produces concentrated brine. Pumping this back out to sea is a potential problem for
the environment, but diluting it wastes water that could be otherwise recycled. Extracting energy
from the dilution could make it worthwhile
MEMBRANE
PRESSURE
Salt water from the sea
Concentrated brine
returned to the sea or...
REVERSE
OSMOSIS
PRESSURE
...mixed with treated
water before being
returned to the sea
PRESSURE RETARDED
FORWARD OSMOSIS
34 | NewScientist | 8 September 2018
“The ideal desalination
process will reap valuable
minerals, not just water”
elsewhere. Wave patterns, for instance,
significantly influence brine dispersion,
she says.
Still, the potential risks mean that most
desalination plants must already dilute their
brine before discharging it into the ocean.
That in itself is problematic. The stuff used for
the dilution is often cleaned-up waste water
or water used to cool industrial facilities. It is
clean enough to dump in the ocean but not
quite drinkable.
That whole procedure is drenched in irony.
Desalination plants are needed only where
there is a lack of fresh water, yet they are
taking fresh water that could be easily cleaned
to make it drinkable, and instead flushing it
into the sea. “Why aren’t we reusing that
water?” says Cooley. “You’re treating it, then
dumping it back in with desalination brine.
It just defies logic.”
Childress thinks innovative engineering
could stop this. In order to desalinate water,
you have to fight against its natural tendency
to flow from areas of low to high salt
concentration. But if you let nature take its
course – allowing forward, not reverse,
FRESH WATER
WASTE
WATER
Pressure used to
drive a turbine
producing electricity
Water treatment plant
osmosis – it is possible to get more and
more water to flow across a salt-excluding
membrane into a container of brine,
increasing the pressure. That pressurised
water can be used to drive a turbine and
generate electricity in a process called
pressure-retarded forward osmosis (PRFO).
Add this stage to a reverse-osmosis
desalination plant and you not only dilute
the waste brine, you also get power that can
be fed back into the process or used however
you like (see diagram, below).
Hybrid systems like this do not work
perfectly yet. The first such facility, opened in
2009 and operated by Norwegian company
Statkraft, closed after five years because it
didn’t generate enough electricity to justify
the building and operating costs. Childress is
currently modelling similar systems in her lab
to see if they can be made successful, though
the details are under wraps.
There are hopeful signs elsewhere. Neal
Tai-Shung Chung, a chemical engineer at the
National University of Singapore, says his
lab has developed the technology to a point
where it makes economic sense. It comes not
a moment too soon in his home country.
“We don’t have energy and we don’t have
water,” he says. Singapore buys a significant
amount of water from neighbouring Malaysia,
but the arrangement is set to expire in 35 years
and has long been a political football.
Chung’s group set up a test system based
on essentially the same idea as the Statkraft
plant, but using the team’s own improved
membranes. When the researchers ran the
set-up for 500 hours, feeding it municipal
waste water and seawater, its power
consumption was just 1 watt per cubic metre
of desalinated water made, a quarter of what
is typically needed for reverse osmosis alone.
A Singapore research incubator has taken up
the designs and is planning a larger pilot plant.
Ultimate utopia
Some want to take desalination even further.
Carry on removing water from brine, and you
eventually get pure water and salt. Childress
calls it the “ultimate utopian” desalination
process. The technical name for it is zero liquid
discharge (ZLD) desalination. Anyone who
pulls off the feat would get three-fold rewards:
zero brine, maximum fresh water and a haul
of valuable compounds. In some cases that
includes lithium salts, which would provide
the crucial component of our best batteries.
“It’s amazing how much work has been
done on this,” says Christopher Bellona,

BLOOMBERG/GETTY
RICHARD HERRMANN/FLPA
an environmental engineer at the Colorado
School of Mines. Chemists have explored
mining just about any mineral from brines:
uranium, lithium, rubidium, plain old table
salt. But turning briny trash into treasure
has never quite hit the big time, principally
because the various salts are present at low
concentrations and in mixtures that are hard
to separate. There are, however, a few places
where the economics finally add up.
Most desalination happens at the shoreline,
but the US is an exception. Much of the
country has groundwater reserves that tend
to be salty, which is why 95 per cent of its
desalination plants are inland. With no ocean
to discharge into, the waste brine is even more
of a problem than usual. Most of the time,
California is building 8 desalination plants. The
effect of waste salt on kelp forests is unknown
it gets dumped in rivers. Where land is cheap,
it might be routed to evaporation ponds.
In Texas and other places with favourable
geology, it is injected into deep wells.
But all these options have a limited capacity.
That’s why Arizona is trying to get Mexican
permission to build a brine-carrying canal
to the sea, so far without success.
The largest inland desalination facility in
the US is the Kay Bailey Hutchison plant in El
Paso, Texas. It slakes the thirst of 2.7 million
people and injects its brine into deep wells.
That is expensive and the wells will be full
before long, a combination that has breathed
new life into the ZLD dream. The plant has
teamed up with Enviro Water Minerals of El
Paso and, in April, they finished building a
brine-mining facility inspired by, and using
some technology from, the petroleum
industry. The firm’s CEO Hubble Hausman
calls it a “water refinery”. Just as crude oil can
be separated into many valuable products,
the facility separates brine into about five
different streams, eventually extracting
nearly all the water and a handful of useful
compounds. These include hydrochloric acid,
sodium hydroxide, gypsum and magnesium
hydroxide, all of which are either used in
industry or in building materials.
The facility will soon be running at full
scale, recovering an additional 7.5 million
litres of drinking water a day from the
plant. There is no new technology involved,
just existing tech in a new combination.
“It’s a brilliant idea,” says Michael Mickley,
a hydrologist and consultant in Colorado.
“Whether it makes sense economically is
the question.” Only time will tell.
Oily treasure trove
Other engineers are looking to turn waste
water into treasure under even more
challenging conditions. Benny Freeman at the
University of Texas at Austin has his eye on
oil wells, which extract five times as much
water as oil. “There’s been talk about using
the water, but the least expensive thing to do
is pump it back into the ground,” he says.
Yet oil well water in Texas contains 1000
parts per million of lithium. Freeman has
collaborated with chemists at Monash
University in Australia to develop membranes
that can selectively separate the element from
water. Even if mining the lithium in this way
makes economic sense, Freeman is the first to
admit that turning this system into a full-on
desalination process would be a challenge,
but he says it is an obvious thing to try next.
The ZLD dream won’t work everywhere.
But desalination is a tool that city and state
planners need to have ready, says Childress.
She says the only way to solve the problems
that come with it is to embrace a diverse set of
technologies and pick the options that work
locally. The reason many of these more cutting-
edge ideas are not widely used is not that they
don’t work. Rather, it is that “we aren’t
desperate enough yet”. Perhaps the lesson
from Cape Town is that we soon will be. ■
Katherine Bourzac is a freelance science journalist
based in San Francisco
8 September 2018 | NewScientist | 35
INTERVIEW

The surgeon
fixing a scandal
The worst consequences of vaginal mesh could have been
avoided if doctors had taken women’s reports of pain seriously,
surgeon and campaigner Sohier Elneil tells Julia Brown

I
N THE late 1980s, the medical industry
was looking for new ways to treat women
experiencing urinary incontinence and
vaginal prolapse, both relatively common
conditions following childbirth. At the time,
doctors suggested physiotherapy, weight loss
and other non-surgical interventions, with
complex surgery as a last resort.
ALICIA CANTER/EYEVINE

When mesh implants came along,

they seemed like a simple and convenient
alternative: a flexible plastic scaffold that
took less than an hour to implant and allowed
women to leave hospital quickly and get on
with their lives. Permanent mesh implants
became standard treatment for millions of
women with these conditions.
They have proved effective in many
cases. But some women have experienced
complications, including mesh eroding
through the vaginal wall or piercing the
bladder, nerve damage and infection. The
implant can cause chronic pain, sometimes
so severe women are barely able to walk.
Tens of thousands of women around the
world have brought lawsuits. The US Food
and Drug Administration reclassified mesh
as a “high-risk” device in 2016. More recently,
Australia and New Zealand have banned its
use in some circumstances. And in July the
UK’s National Health Service suspended the use
of mesh in England for stress incontinence.
The mesh was designed to allow bodily
tissue to grow through it, so it is very hard to
remove. Sohier Elneil at University College
Hospital in London is one of fewer than
10 surgeons in the UK able to carry out the
procedure. She performed her first mesh
removal in 2005 and, since then, has been
Protesters outside the UK Houses of Parliament
call for a halt to vaginal mesh implants
at the forefront of the campaign to raise
awareness of mesh complications.
How bad is the situation?
It’s a crisis that’s probably unprecedented –
we still don’t know the depth of it. Worldwide,
3.7 million meshes were sold between 2005
and 2013, and we will have to monitor patients
for the next 15 to 20 years.
The complication rate is around 1 in every
10 women who receive mesh, according to
research I was involved with. And that’s just
for the first five years after implantation –
we have really limited information on longer-
term outcomes. But there are indications that
complications could be as high as 40 per cent
for mesh inserted to treat prolapse.
The complications can be serious, so why have
doctors been using the material for so long?
Originally, the complication rates were
deemed to be between 1 and 3 per cent. But
this was based on hospital data, where there
was no standardised way to record mesh
complications and removals. And these
figures didn’t consider patients who had
gone to a family doctor or pain clinic.
Why did you start removing mesh?
Women with mesh implants would often
come into the chronic pain clinic I ran with
colleagues at University College Hospital
in London. We initially focused on using
medication and other pain management
strategies but a significant group of patients
did not respond. We concluded the only
thing would be to try to remove this mesh.
Do women’s symptoms improve after the mesh
is removed?
In certain patients, things do improve and
generally women are back on track. But the
pain doesn’t always go away. There are long-
term consequences even after you have taken
the mesh out, including an autoimmune

36 | NewScientist | 8 September 2018


response seen in some people, as well as
complex nerve problems affecting the pelvis
and lower limbs.
How many people in the UK are qualified to
insert mesh?
Hundreds are qualified to insert it, but
relatively few are qualified to remove it.
My training involved a lot of complex vaginal
surgery, in particular in women who’d had
really bad, traumatic childbirth. So my skill set “This crisis is unprecedented.
came from that background. Mesh removal is We still don’t know the
difficult and occasionally scary surgery. The
mesh adheres to the bladder, urethra, vagina,
blood vessels, nerves and bones. Once removed,
the symptoms of incontinence and prolapse
often return and so one needs to consider
non-mesh options to restore functionality.
That can be difficult in tissue that has been
chronically inflamed or infected by the mesh.
Even though others can do removals,
I understand women seek you out.
Many patients were dismissed for a long time, stopped from using mesh, and they haven’t
so they lost trust in their doctors. They want
somebody who will listen to them. There’s also
a group of women who feel that nobody else
can do their surgery, and there’s an element
of truth to that: many surgeons are starting
to learn how to deal with potential surgical
complications, but many are still not far
enough down the road of experience.
depth of it”
You and others face resistance for speaking out
against mesh. What do you think is behind that?
There has been a great deal of resistance, even
anger, from some clinicians, even though
evidence is coming out all the time. I think
there are some who believe this is media hype
and upset, and that women have jumped on
the bandwagon. And of course if a surgeon is
Photographed for New Scientist by Dave Stock
been trained in all the other complex surgical
techniques, they cannot offer a surgical option
to their patients, so they have no alternative.
Some doctors are taking it personally: they fail
to recognise that the injury isn’t to them – the
injury is to the women.
So, what’s the alternative?
Research shows that over 70 per cent of
women with stress urinary incontinence who
committed to physiotherapy did not need any
further intervention. So, many clinicians are
reverting to conservative measures first before
considering surgery, and some are retraining
in the traditional surgical techniques, which
existed in the pre-mesh era.
How do you feel about the issue from a
cultural perspective?
It’s no longer just a mesh issue or a pain issue.
This is about right of access to good healthcare,
and belief in women: it’s a women’s rights
issue. What makes me angry is the fact that
many women affected by complications were
not listened to. They were ignored, patronised,
and many were sent to psychiatrists or
psychologists when their problem was
physical. Sometimes these women couldn’t
walk unaided, couldn’t function, gave up their
jobs, couldn’t look after their families – the
impact on their quality of life was huge.
What has happened in the past few years
has made me sad because it has affected the
way I think about my profession. But
occasionally in life, and especially in medicine,
you must stand up because you have to make
people think differently.
Is the situation getting better in the UK?
Until the recent suspension led by Julia
Cumberlege and her team in tandem with
NHS England and the Department of Health,
people were still using continence and
prolapse mesh. The suspension has meant
many have stopped, albeit temporarily. But
we are just at the tip of the iceberg in dealing
with the complications of the mesh already
implanted. This is going to get bigger in years
to come, globally. I have several trainees and
colleagues working with me, learning how to
do removals. And women are becoming much
more aware. Many women are telling doctors:
I’m not having this, thank you very much.
The suspension is a good result for the
women: it is a vindication. I suspect using mesh
will become more difficult from now on. ■
Julia Brown is an interview editor at New Scientist
8 September 2018 | NewScientist | 37
STANLEY CHOW

38 | NewScientist | 8 September 2018

Lessons from
early Earth
Our deepest history could hold the key to the
search for life on other planets. Kelly Oakes reports
F
EW discoveries could be bigger than
detecting life on another planet. Whether
it is a rocky ball or a giant cloud of gas,
hot, cold, or somewhere in between, we aren’t
picky: so long as a world has life, we want
to find it.
For as long as we have searched, we have had
one image in mind: Earth. It might seem like
vanity, but our focus makes a certain amount
of sense. After all, Earth is the only planet in
the universe that we know for a fact supports
life. Even if faraway exo-Earths don’t have
oceans, continents, rainforests, deserts and
polar caps, the long-standing assumption is
that they will still be familiar in certain ways.
There will be water on the surface, oxygen in
the air, possibly even vegetation on the land.
But Earth hasn’t always looked the way it
does now. In the 4.5 billion years our planet
has existed, it has experienced dramatic
transformations: ice ages and warming
periods, times when the atmosphere was
impossible to breathe, when large areas were
desert, or when lush tropical forests hugged
the poles. Throughout the vast majority of this
turbulent history, life has somehow clung on.
If, armed with a spotters’ guide to the world
we inhabit today, we found exoplanets
resembling those early Earths, would we even
recognise them for what they were? Maybe
not. We know how to seek comparatively
advanced signs of intelligent life, such as
cacophonous radio transmissions and the
bright lights of megacities. If a planet has less
sophisticated inhabitants, however, we must
rely on identifying other signatures of life.
That is why scientists interested in filling in
the blind spots of our search for intelligent
life have started a lot closer to home. They
want to imagine how early Earth would look
if seen from far outside the solar system.
The first time we tried to study our planet
from afar was when the Galileo mission
launched in 1989. It was programmed to orbit
twice around Earth, using the planet’s
gravitational pull as a slingshot to power it
on its way to its ultimate goal, Jupiter. The
astronomer Carl Sagan suggested taking the
opportunity to point our best alien-finding
equipment at Earth itself. If it found nothing,
he reasoned, that meant life elsewhere might
also escape our attention.
Galileo was to be the first of several probes
to use their instruments in this way, and they
confirmed that our technological civilisation
should be detectable by a distant, similarly
advanced alien civilisation.
Where there are no hints of technology
to home in on, by far the best life sign to
latch on to is oxygen. Its abundance in our
atmosphere – 21 per cent – would be difficult
to sustain without plants pumping it out
constantly. Methane, released by bacteria
as well as flatulent livestock, is a more
ambiguous biosignature, given that a number
of non-biological mechanisms can produce
the gas.
A bigger giveaway than either oxygen
or methane on their own, however, is the
presence of both. That is because the
combination is combustible and releases
energy when it reacts, forming carbon dioxide
and water. “If these two gases are left to
their own devices, they’ll usually annihilate,”
says Chris Reinhard at the Georgia Institute
of Technology. “The fact that they’re both
present at relatively high abundance
suggests that they’re being pumped into
the atmosphere at very high rates, potentially
by biology.”
Another reliable sign of life is the light
reflected by plants. Although our planet’s
vegetation absorbs most visible wavelengths,
with the exception of green, it absorbs far less
infrared light. The upshot is an abrupt jump –
known as the red edge – in Earth’s reflectance
spectrum, a phenomenon that would be hard
to replicate without living organisms.
Searching for high levels of oxygen,
methane coexisting with oxygen, or a red
edge would be a good way of picking up
planets that look like Earth now. But Earth has
been inhabited – not to mention inhabitable –
for far longer than it has displayed any of
these features (see diagram, page 41).
The earliest known life forms emerged
about 4 billion years ago, when the planet’s
crust was cooling to form rocks and the
beginnings of continents. At this time, known
as the Archaean, Earth’s atmosphere would
have been dominated by carbon dioxide
produced by active volcanoes. In this hostile
environment, primitive microbes emerged >
8 September 2018 | NewScientist | 39
 that made methane, and oxygen levels were
“For about four-fifths at an all-time low. This was fortunate – if they
of Earth’s history, we had been any higher, life as we know it might
not have emerged at all. “Oxygen poisons
would not have been some of the prebiotic chemistry that we think
culminated in the origin of life on Earth,”
able to see evidence says Stephanie Olson at the University of
of life as we know it on California, Riverside.
A billion or so years later, the planet
the surface” was entering a time called the Proterozoic.
Photosynthesis was already well under way,
but it was at this time that the ability to convert
carbon dioxide into oxygen had lasting
consequences for the planet. For the first
time, oxygen, carbon dioxide and methane
coexisted in the atmosphere, leading to the
accelerated evolution of multicellular life.
During this time there were two “snowball
Earth” events, when the entire planet was
covered in ice. The trigger may have been
something as trivial as a brief drop in global
temperatures, allowing the polar ice caps
to expand. This reflected more sunlight,
reducing temperatures even more in a
feedback loop that eventually froze the whole
planet. The trouble is, we don’t know how
freezing over would have affected the chance
of spotting life from afar. “The composition
of the atmosphere during the snowball Earth
events is actually not terribly well known,”
says Reinhard.
The Proterozoic’s defining feature, however,
The emergence of vegetation dramatically
changed Earth’s appearance from space
VITALIJ CEREPOK/EYEEM/GETTY
40 | NewScientist | 8 September 2018
was a billion-year period of apparent stability
from 1.8 billion years to 800 million years ago.
After the frenzied emergence of multicellular
life, and the chaos of the first snowball Earth
event, the planet relished the opportunity to
take a breather. The climate was constant, life
appeared to be evolving very slowly, if at all,
and oxygen remained at low levels. Little
wonder that geologists have taken to calling
this the “boring billion”.
Oxygen masked
Some think that name is a tad unfair. After
all, this was when sexual reproduction first
evolved, and when the first eukaryotes –
organisms with complex cells that ultimately
gave rise to ourselves – appeared, “which
is a big deal”, says Nick Butterfield at the
University of Cambridge. From the
perspective of an alien Galileo space probe,
however, little would appear to change.
By the time the boring billion ended, life
was really stepping on the accelerator pedal.
At this time, called the Phanerozoic, the
diversity of life forms skyrocketed in what is
known as the Cambrian explosion, oxygen
finally reached levels that would be remotely
detectable and plants began to flourish on
the planet’s surface. This is when the red
edge would have first been visible.
This complicated history offers a stark
lesson for those hunting exoplanets based on
Earth’s current appearance. “For about four-
fifths of Earth’s history we would not be able
to see evidence of life on the surface,” says
Reinhard. Whether searching for high oxygen
levels, oxygen-methane coexistence or a red
edge, you would mostly come up empty-
handed. “The obvious candidates for
biosignatures aren’t going to work as well
as we thought,” says Olson.
Part of the problem is how little we know
about early Earth. It is no exaggeration to
say that, in some ways, we will soon know
more about planets billions of kilometres
away than we do about our own world
billions of years in the past. With so little
surviving evidence – and each piece so open
to interpretation – reconstructing Earth’s
history is a major challenge. Until the gaps
are filled in, what life-hunting astronomers
need is a broader-brush way of figuring out
which planets to investigate further.
For Enric Pallé at the Institute of
Astrophysics of the Canary Islands, one
promising avenue is the ancient equivalent of
red edge. Ever since the days of the Archaean,
long before the continents became hotbeds
Earth through the ages from afar at any point in Earth’s history, that
of carbon dioxide and methane might be.
The characteristic signals of present-day life on Earth include the coexistence of methane
and oxygen in the atmosphere. But life existed on the planet for billions of years before the
“A detectable carbon dioxide and methane
atmospheric composition we see today formed disequilibrium is more likely on a broader
range of planets,” says Olson, “including
ARCHAEAN PROTEROZOIC PHANEROZOIC
those with undetectable levels of oxygen.”
Butterfield thinks looking for these
4.0 bya 3.5 3.0 2.5 2.0 1.5 1.0 0.5 0
atmospheric imbalances is an interesting idea,
Relative atmospheric concentration

but cautions against falling for alien life as

TODAY
103
Methane Glaciation the explanation. “Just seeing disequilibrium
102 ”Snowball Earth”
101 is interesting,” he says. “But it doesn’t
100
necessarily have to be biological activity.”

10-1
10-2
10-3
10-4
Oxygen
10-5
10-6
Earliest signs
of life
Plate tectonics resemble modern Earth
Photosynthesis develops
for vegetation, they were probably swamped
by purple mats of single-celled bacteria. If
these tiny organisms were present in great
enough numbers, says Pallé, their effect on
the light reflected from Earth would be similar
to that of vegetation, but shifted toward the
far red end of the spectrum. “You can envision
a whole bunch of colours you can get,” says
Abel Méndez, director of the Planetary
Habitability Lab at the Arecibo Observatory
in Puerto Rico, depending on which bacteria
are most common.
Attractive though this sounds, its signal
could be weak and tough to spot from afar.
Olson and her colleagues think they have
identified two more promising avenues. The
first could be to observe planets over a long
period, instead of just getting a snapshot of
their atmosphere’s composition. Observing
Earth in this way, for example, would reveal
a seasonal change in atmospheric carbon
dioxide levels. That is because plants use more
carbon dioxide during their growing season,
with the northern hemisphere dominating
the effect because of its greater land mass.
“You’d see that it’s kind of wobbly up and
down once a year,” says Reinhard.
On plant-free planets like Proterozoic
Earth, it is not likely that photosynthesis by
microbes would be enough to cause clear
oscillations in carbon dioxide levels. Instead,
respiring organisms might produce similar
seasonal variations in oxygen. And although
oxygen levels themselves might be too
low to spot from afar, the effect of their
fluctuations on levels of other chemicals
SOURCE: ARXIV.ORG/1803.05967
Oxygen appears in the atmosphere First land
plants appear
such as ozone could conceivably be picked up.
One downside of using seasonality as a
biosignature is that some worlds don’t have
seasons. Méndez points out that planets
around the smaller, dimmer stars that are
Earth’s closest neighbours must orbit close
to their star to be potentially habitable, but
doing so means they tend to end up keeping
the same face pointing toward their star all
the time. “They are tidally locked,” he says,
“so you won’t have any seasons.”
Delicate imbalance
The other idea Olson and her colleagues are
working on could prove more fruitful. It
involves rethinking how life might influence
the make-up of an atmosphere. Much as
methane and oxygen would not persist together
on Earth if all present-day life disappeared,
there are other combinations of gases that
scientists regard as being in disequilibrium –
that is, they would be hard to sustain without
life. During the Archaean, for example, such
was the imbalance of atmospheric methane
with carbon dioxide, nitrogen and water that
it would have been rapidly wiped out as soon
as it stopped being produced.
But it isn’t necessary to look for all of
those gases at once. Olson’s team argues
that you need only see carbon dioxide and a
sufficiently large amount of methane together
in an atmosphere to realise something
biological is probably afoot. And although the
relative abundance of oxygen and methane
would probably not have been measurable
Although false positives are inevitable,
Olson is hopeful that clues like disequilibrium
and seasonality will help fill in some of those
blind spots in our search for life. For one
thing, says Olson, “they’re not tied to specific
metabolisms”. Alien life wouldn’t necessarily
need to be like us, or even be carbon-based,
for these potential biosignatures to reveal its
existence on a distant planet.
Getting a good enough look to find out,
however, isn’t going to be easy. Figuring out
what is going on in the atmosphere of an
exoplanet means gathering as much light as
possible from it. But of course, planets don’t
produce light; they only reflect it, and that
signal is dwarfed by the light of their star.
To separate them, we will need enormous
telescopes like NASA’s James Webb telescope,
due to launch in 2021, or the next generation
of extremely large, ground-based telescopes.
Even with these devices, the task will be tricky.
Seasonality on an exoplanet will require so
much telescope time, says Pallé, that “we will
not be able to measure that, not as long as you
or I are alive”.
No single measurement is ever going to
be conclusive. By looking at the make-up of a
planet’s atmosphere, how it changes over time
and anything unusual that appears to be going
on at the surface, researchers will instead
build a slowly evolving picture of that world’s
chances of hosting life. “It’s not going to be
like a discovery where you dig something
and you say, ‘That’s it! I found it’,” says Pallé.
“It’s a process where we are slowly choosing
our best candidate.”
Our continuing ignorance of aspects of
Earth’s primordial past could also hamper
the hunt for distant life. What set off the
snowball Earths of the Proterozoic, for
example, is still a mystery. Even if we spot
an exoplanet in an ice age, says Reinhard,
we won’t know how to interpret what we see.
One of the biggest discoveries in history could
elude us once again. ■
Kelly Oakes is a freelance writer based in London

8 September 2018 | NewScientist | 41

CULTURE
Among the cruel stars
China’s leading sci-fi author Cixin Liu tells Yvaine Ye that the future is
bright for our species – partly because we kill everything in our path
Your Three-Body Problem trilogy,
first published between 2006 and
2010, describes the 20-million-
year-long fallout from humanity’s
attempt to make contact with
extraterrestrials. How well
prepared are we for the arrival of
an alien race like your Trisolarans?
We are totally not ready yet. The
technology we have is still
primitive. If other civilisations
visit – aliens who are able to travel
distances of hundreds or even
millions of light years to get here – we can overcome any
the gap between our respective
technologies would be about the
same as that between humans
and ants. How will a group of
such highly civilised aliens even
know that we are intelligent?
Actually, that problem works
both ways. How does that ant
wandering across your desk know
you are the planet’s dominant
species? You don’t know how
to dig a hole, you don’t fondle
delicious dead bugs and you don’t because they ran up against
protect your queen. All you do is
hit those square-shaped things
in front of you – an activity that
generates absolutely no food
whatsoever. Ants don’t think
humans are intelligent at all.
In Dark Forest, the middle volume
of your trilogy, you wrote “Each
civilization’s goal is survival”. This
sounds like a Darwinian process,
applied at a civilisation level.
Is it possible to have a galactic
ecosystem that is ethical?
First, we haven’t discovered any
extraterrestrial life form, not to
mention any other civilisation!
And if we are to picture what the
universe would be like if there
42 | NewScientist | 8 September 2018
were an enormous number of
civilisations out there, we can
only derive assumptions from
our own experience. A glance
over human history tells us that
the rise and fall of a great many
civilisations is the result of war.
It is even more depressing when
we think about inter-species
interactions. What happens
when a species meets a stronger,
“Because of our selfishness,
amount of environmental
destruction”
more intellectually developed
competitor? That thought gives
me shudders. The Cretaceous-
Paleogene extinction was a
horrible event. Dinosaurs and
many other animals and plants
were killed. But consider what we
are witnessing now. Every year,
thousands of species disappear,
humans. So, the survival theory
in Dark Forest is reasonable.
There could be a highly civilised
cosmic ecosystem with high
moral standards, but I think the
possibility is low, given what
we know about Earth’s history.
If we receive a message from the
stars, should we respond?
How to respond will be a decision
for the entire world. We would
need a consensus, as this would
affect every one of us. I think we
should be cautious, rather than
recklessly respond to the message
and expose our location. We
simply don’t know whether we
are talking to friends or enemies.
Some people think if a
species enjoys a high level of
civilisation, it is bound to
maintain high moral standards.
That’s very naive; we have no way
of knowing whether that’s true.
Most of your stories have sad
endings. Are you pessimistic
about the development of
civilisation?
I’m absolutely positive about
human survival. We will continue
to develop our civilisation and
expand not just on Earth, but
also across the solar system, the
galaxy, even the entire universe.
But I’m absolutely pessimistic
about the survival of the other
species who currently share Earth
with us. The development of
human civilisation will eventually
force other living things to go
extinct or become our food.
Are you not concerned that the
destruction of Earth’s ecosystems
will threaten human survival?
We are almost wholly reliant on
science and technology for our
survival already. We can create an
environment to sustain ourselves
with technology, even if the
ecosystem collapses. The new
system could be on Earth or in
space; we might develop one
system or hundreds of them.
Frankly, these environments
could probably only support
humans, although we probably
wouldn’t care about other species
anyway. Humans are selfish, and
because of our innate selfishness,
I’m very confident that we can
overcome any amount of
environmental destruction.
PROFILE
Dubbed “China’s Answer
to Arthur C. Clarke”
by The New Yorker,
Cixin Liu worked as a
computer engineer for
a power plant before
winning accolades in the
late 1990s as a writer of
galaxy-spanning science
fiction. In Liu’s thrillingly
pessimistic space
operas, intelligence does
not breed virtue, and the
most advanced cultures
live in fear of each other.
His 2004 novel Ball
Lightning has just been
published in English by
Atlantic Books.
ZACHARY BAKO/REDUX/EYEVINE
Can we work together as
civilisation develops further
in the future?
I believe we can work together.
Even though we still have
defined nations, and each nation
pursues its own self-interest,
the borderlines between nations,
ethnicities and religions are
disappearing. Technology is
improving communication and
accelerating cultural exchange.
So, I think the concept of
For more books and arts coverage, visit newscientist.com/culture
nationhood will eventually
vanish. The world will share the
same set of values and become
a more united group.
The science in your stories is
very detailed. Do you consult
experts over its plausibility
when you write?
I have never checked with any
experts for my novels. Not long
ago, science fiction was a very
marginal activity and science-
fiction writers didn’t have access
to expert opinions. Those ideas
and concepts of mine are all
distilled from my own self-taught
understanding of the science.
When you write stories, do you let
your imagination fly free or is there
a limit to how far you can travel?
The imagination in science fiction
has boundaries. Unlike fantasy,
science fiction must follow
natural laws and scientific rules.
For example, if you want to fly,
you need a massive amount of
energy to work against gravity.
Riding a magical broom doesn’t
work in science fiction.
But there’s something
paradoxical about the science in
science fiction. Although it sets
boundaries, science doesn’t
restrain our imagination; it only
spurs it. What modern physics has
revealed goes far beyond common
sense. We zoom out, and the
universe in science fiction is
40 billion light years across,
consisting of millions of solar
systems with countless planets.
We zoom in, and quantum
mechanics inspires us to create a
world that we can hardly visualise.
Science immensely expands the
canvas for science fiction. Fantasy,
on the other hand, operates almost
entirely at one, human scale.
Does it bother you that your wife
and daughter don’t like science
fiction?
Not at all. It is understandable that
they don’t like it. Science fiction,
wherever it comes from, has
always been a niche genre, only
enjoyed by a unique group of
people. I write science fiction, not
because I’m fond of literature, but
because I’m fascinated by science.
Which area of science excites
you the most?
I’m interested in studies that
probe the mysteries of nature and
the universe, such as physics and
cosmology. I spend a lot of time
every day reading about them and
following the latest news.
Do you think science fiction can
predict the future?
I don’t think science fiction
predicts the future at all. It simply
lays out some possibilities. The
2018 we are living in now is so very
different from the 2018 I wrote
about in my short story of that
name. Back when I wrote 2018,
that year seemed really, really far
away – but here we are! ■
Yvaine Ye is a science reporter
DON’T MISS
Listen
Science guru Bill Nye’s views on
the politics of space feature in the
latest instalment of astrophysicist
Neil deGrasse Tyson’s excellent
(if slightly hokey-sounding)
StarTalk All-Stars podcast.
Play
Actions have consequences in
Growing the Galaxy: Boundless,
a game where every element –
from the politics to the buildings –
is left entirely in the hands of
the players. It launches on
11 September for PC and PS4.
Visit
The premiere of Marshmallow
Laser Feast’s immersive black hole
experience Distortions in
Spacetime kicks off this year’s
British Science Festival, in Hull
from 11 to 14 September.
Learn
Discover how conflict can shape
international science at “Science
and the First World War: the
aftermath”, a one-day conference
at London’s Royal Society on
13 September.
Watch
Charlton Heston has crashed onto
a distant planet ruled by apes! Go
cheer him (or them) along at a
50th-anniversary screening of
Planet of the Apes (pictured) on
15 September at the National
Space Centre in Leicester. Doors
open at 6.30pm BST.
8 September 2018 | NewScientist | 43
CULTURE
A fantastical experiment
Ceramic art acts as a cunning foil for a collection of scientific curios, finds Simon Ings
Surreal Science: Loudon Collection
with Salvatore Arancio, Whitechapel
Gallery, London, to 6 January 2019
WHENEVER the artist Salvatore
Arancio visits a new city, he heads
for the nearest natural history
museum. He goes partly for
research: his eclectic output,
spanning photography and
ceramics, explores how we
categorise and try to understand
natural and geological processes.
In the main, though, Arancio
wants to be overwhelmed. “A lot
of these collections are so vast,
after a while you find yourself
wandering around in a spaced-out
state, inventing mental landscapes
and narratives. It’s that feeling I’m
trying to evoke here,” he tells me
as we watch the assembly of his
new show, Surreal Science, a
collaboration with art patron
George Loudon.
Loudon famously collected
work by Damien Hirst and his
generation years before they
became global celebrities – until
the day a canvas he bought
wouldn’t fit through his door.
At that point, Loudon turned
to the books, images and models
(in clay, felt, glass and plaster) that
educated 19th-century science
students. “Looking back, I can
see the move was a natural one,”
Loudon says. “Artists like Hirst
and Mark Dion were exploring the
way we catalogue and represent
the world. Around the time that
collection felt complete I was
travelling to South America a lot,
and I became interested in the
scientific discoveries made there –
by Charles Darwin, Alexander von
Humboldt, Alfred Russel Wallace
and Henry Walter Bates.”
This isn’t a collection in the
sense that there is any demarcation
44 | NewScientist | 8 September 2018
Loudon’s collection includes wax
lemons and an anatomical torso
to it. “It’s somebody’s personal
eye that chooses this over that,”
says Loudon. Nevertheless, a
clear theme has emerged: how
the explosion of science in the
19th century meant that scientists
had to turn artist to produce
educational materials for students.
And, when the burden became too
much, how companies of artisans
emerged to satisfy the demand.
Loudon’s collection has been
shown before, at the Manchester
Museum last year, but Surreal
Science is a different enterprise.
The objects, designed to be
handled, are exhibited here on
open shelves, bringing the visitor
tantalisingly close to the work in
a very un-museumlike manner.
Needless to say this makes for a
nerve-racking build.
This is the moment of truth
for Arancio, who had to plan
this installation-cum-exhibition
armed only with photographs of
Loudon’s collection and sheets of
careful measurements. It is the
first chance he has had to see his
arrangements realised in situ.
The ceramic pieces he has
created provide a foil for the
items in Loudon’s collection. An
arrangement of ceramic flowers
above an anatomical cut-away
torso suggests a mandrake-like
marriage of vegetable and human.
Next to it is a discomforting
juxtaposition of plaster models
of teeth and wax copies of lemons.
Models of cell division are easily
“The explosion of science
meant scientists turned
artist to produce materials
for their students”
mistaken for geodes. Again and
again, Arancio’s ceramic pieces –
pools, leaves, corals and tubular
spider forms – mislead the eye,
so we miscatalogue what we see.
“I tried to create pieces that
carried George’s objects off into
some kind of fantastic realm,” says
Arancio. Even before key elements
of the show are installed –proper
lighting, a looping educational
film from 1935 and an
experimental soundtrack by The
Focus Group – it is clear that the
experiment has succeeded.
For Loudon, it is a vindication of
his decision to collect objects that
until recently weren’t recognised
by the fine-art market. He moves
from shelf to shelf, past exquisite
Blaschka glass slugs, felt fungi,
a meticulously repaired elephant
bird egg. “Now these objects have
lost their original purpose, we can
look at them as objects of beauty,”
he says. “I’m not claiming that
this is art forever. I am saying it
is art for today.” ■
George Loudon’s collection is explored in
his book Object Lessons (Ridinghouse)
TOP: FRANCESCO GARNIER VALLETTI TWO BOXES OF WAX FRUITS
(LEMONS AND PEACHES) 19TH CENTURYTURINIMAGE COURTESY
GEORGE LOUDON COLLECTION, PHOTOGRAPH BY ROSAMOND PURCELL
PLASTER ANATOMICAL DEMONSTRATION MODEL TORSO 19TH CENTURY
72X37X26CM FRANCE OR GERMANY IMAGE COURTESY GEORGE LOUDON
COLLECTION, PHOTOGRAPH BY ROSAMOND PURCELL

Department of Chemistry
Faculty Position in Chemistry
The Department of Chemistry, at the University of California,
Berkeley, invites applications for two faculty positions at the
assistant professor level with an expected start date of July 1,
2019. We will consider creative and energetic candidates who
show extraordinary promise or accomplishment in research
and teaching in any area of chemistry. Preference will be given
WRFDQGLGDWHVLQWKHEURDGO\GH¿QHG¿HOGVRIFKHPLFDOELRORJ\
experimental physical chemistry, and analytical chemistry.
7KHEDVLFTXDOL¿FDWLRQIRUWKLVSRVLWLRQLVD3K'RUHTXLYDOHQW
international degree in the physical sciences or life sciences at
the time of application.
The Department of Chemistry and the Berkeley campus value
GLYHUVLW\HTXLW\DQGLQFOXVLRQDVH[HPSOL¿HGE\WKHIROORZLQJ
principles of community:
• We recognize the intrinsic relationship between diversity
and excellence in all our endeavors.
• We embrace open and equitable access to opportunities
for learning and development as our obligation and goal.
Our excellence can only be fully realized by faculty, students and
staff who share a commitment to these principles. Successful
candidates for our faculty positions will demonstrate evidence
of a commitment to equity and inclusion in higher education
through their teaching, research and service activities. Financial
and in-kind resources are available to pursue activities that help
accelerate our efforts to achieve our equity and inclusion goals.
All applicants should submit a recently updated curriculum vitae,
a statement of research plans, a statement of teaching, and a
2-3-page statement on your contributions to diversity, equity,
and inclusion, including information about your understanding of
WKHVHLVVXHV\RXUUHFRUGRIDFWLYLWLHVWRGDWHDQG\RXUVSHFL¿F
plans and goals for advancing equity and inclusion if hired as a
Berkeley faculty member (for additional information, go to https://
ofew.berkeley.edu/recruitment/contributions-diversity). In
addition, applicants should provide at least three but no more
WKDQ¿YHOHWWHUVRIUHFRPPHQGDWLRQ$FRYHUOHWWHULVRSWLRQDO
Applications should be submitted electronically through our
web-based system at: https://aprecruit.berkeley.edu/apply/
JPF01881.
$OOUHFRPPHQGDWLRQOHWWHUVZLOOEHWUHDWHGDVFRQ¿GHQWLDOSHU
University of California policy and California state law. Please
refer potential referees, including when letters are provided via
a third party (i.e., dossier service or career center), to the UC
VWDWHPHQWRQFRQ¿GHQWLDOLW\ http://apo.berkeley.edu/evalltr.
html) prior to submitting their letters.
The deadline for receipt of the application materials is October 1,
2018. Please direct questions to
Lauren Nakashima (ltnakashima@berkeley.edu).
UC Berkeley is committed to diversity in all aspects of our mission and to
addressing the family needs of faculty, including dual career couples and
single parents.
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(PSOR\HU$OOTXDOL¿HGDSSOLFDQWVZLOOUHFHLYHFRQVLGHUDWLRQIRUHPSOR\PHQW
without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender
identity, national origin, disability, age or protected veteran status. For the
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SROLF\VHHKWWSSROLF\XFRSHGXGRF1RQGLVFULP$I¿UP$FW
TENURE-TRACK ASSISTANT PROFESSOR
PHYSICAL CHEMISTRY
Faculty of Arts and Sciences Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology
Position Description: Candidates are invited to apply for a tenure-track assistant
professorship in physical chemistry, broadly defined, including experimental and
theoretical research in areas such as but not limited to atomic and molecular physics,
biophysical chemistry, condensed matter, quantum science and ultrafast spectroscopy.
The appointment is expected to begin on July 1, 2019. The tenure-track professor will
be responsible for teaching at the undergraduate and graduate levels. We are seeking
candidates who have an outstanding research record and a strong commitment to
undergraduate and graduate teaching.
Basic Qualifications: Doctorate or terminal degree in chemistry or related discipline
required by the time the appointment begins.
Additional Qualifications: Demonstrated experience in teaching is desired.
Special Instructions: Please submit the following materials through the ARIeS portal
(https://academicpositions.harvard.edu/8371). Applications must be submitted no later
than October 15, 2018.
1. Cover letter
2. Curriculum Vitae with publications list
3. Teaching statement (describing teaching approach and philosophy)
4. Outline of future research plans
5. Names and contact information of 3-5 references. Three letters of
recommendation are required, and the application is complete only when all
three letters have been received.
6. Selected publications
Contact Information:
Susan M. Kinsella, Search Administrator, Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology,
Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University, 12 Oxford St., Cambridge, MA 02138.
Phone: 617-496-4088. kinsella@chemistry.harvard.edu
Harvard is an equal opportunity employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration
for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability status,
protected veteran status, gender identity, sexual orientation, pregnancy and pregnancy-related
conditions, or any other characteristic protected by law.have been submitted.
Position Title: Assistant Professor of Chemistry
Req # 03779
The Department of Chemistry at The University of Chicago
invites applications for the position of Assistant Professor of
Chemistry in all areas of chemistry. Applicants must apply
online to the University of Chicago Academic Career website
at http://tinyurl.com/y9yhvxg9 and upload a cover letter, a
curriculum vitae with a list of publications, a succinct outline
of research plans, and a one page teaching statement. In
your cover letter, please specify one sub-discipline that best
represents your research interests (inorganic, materials,
organic, physical, and theoretical chemistry or chemical
biology). In addition, three reference letters are required. At the
time of hire the successful candidate must have completed
HSS YLX\PYLTLU[Z MVY H 7O+ PU *OLTPZ[Y` VY H YLSH[LK ÄLSK
Joint appointments with other departments are possible.
Review of applications will begin on October 08, 2018 and
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VYPNPU HNL Z[H[\Z HZ HU PUKP]PK\HS ^P[O H KPZHIPSP[` WYV[LJ[LK ]L[LYHU Z[H[\Z
NLUL[PJ PUMVYTH[PVU VY V[OLY WYV[LJ[LK JSHZZLZ \UKLY [OL SH^ -VY HKKP[PVUHS
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http://www.uchicago.edu/about/non_discrimination_statement/
1VIZLLRLYZPUULLKVMHYLHZVUHISLHJJVTTVKH[PVU[VJVTWSL[L[OLHWWSPJH[PVU
WYVJLZZZOV\SKJHSSVYLTHPSACOppAdministrator@uchicago.edu
^P[O[OLPYYLX\LZ[
 Picture yourself among one of the largest communities of
underrepresented minorities in STEM during the Annual
Biomedical Research Conference for Minority Students (ABRCMS)

2018
NOVEMBER 14-17, 2018

Computational & Biochemistry &

Systems Biology Molecular Biology
4% 15%
Be a Part of ABRCMS to: Unspecified
6%
Cell Biology
• Present your scientific research in one of 11%
the 12 STEM disciplines Cancer Biology
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• Explore 380+ graduate schools, summer
research experiences, and professional
society opportunities Chemistry
Immunology 6%
• Network with 2,300 students from more 8%
than 350 colleges and universities, and
700 researchers, Program Directors, and
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faculty members 8%
Developmental
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Important Dates Sciences & Public
Health
Physiology
Engineering, 4%
7%
Judge Travel Award Deadline: July 20 Physics &
Mathematics
Student Travel Award Deadline: August 22 4%

Abstract Submission Deadline: September 7

Judges needed. If you know a postdoctoral scientist or faculty member who

is active in research, encourage them to participate as an ABRCMS poster and oral
presentation judge. Travel awards available. Learn more at www.abrcms.org/judges.

www.abrcms.org
Funded by

8 September 2018 | NewScientist | 47

newscientistjobs.com

This could be you:

A NASA Postdoctoral Fellow investigates short gamma-ray
bursts that could be from the same cosmic collision that
created the gravitational waves that were detected by LIGO,
the first-ever observation of gravitational waves.

Become a Fellow.
Contribute to history-making research.

npp.usra.edu

Fields of study include:

t
Aeronautics, Aeronautical or Other Engineering,
t
Astrobiology,
t
Astrophysics,
t
Biological Sciences,
t
Cosmochemistry,
administered by t
Earth Science,
t
Heliophysics Science, Interdisciplinary/Other,
t
Planetary Science, and
t
Technology Development.

Fermi GBM Observations of LIGO Gravitational Wave event

published by V. Connaughton, USRA, E. Burns and A. Goldstein, NASA Postdoc, et al.

Image Credit: NASA/C. Henze

48 | NewScientist | 8 September 2018

 newscientistjobs.com

The Department of Psychology anticipates making a tenure-track appointment The Department of Psychology anticipates making a tenure-track appointment at the
at the assistant professor level to begin July 1, 2019. assistant professor level to begin July 1, 2019.

We seek candidates with core expertise in clinical psychology/clinical science
whose research programs also bridge to other domains in psychology,
neuroscience, or related disciplines. Our interest is less in specific areas than it
is in innovation and excellence. The appointment is expected to begin on July 1,
2019. Candidates at all levels are encouraged to apply.
Candidates must have a strong doctoral record and have completed their Ph.D.
Candidates should have demonstrated a promise of excellence in both research
and teaching. Teaching duties will include offerings at both undergraduate and
graduate levels.
Please submit a cover letter, curriculum vitae, research and teaching statements,
up to three representative reprints, and names and contact information
of three to five references. In addition, please arrange for three letters of
recommendation to be submitted to http://academicpositions.harvard.edu/
postings/8335. The application will be complete only when all three letters
have been submitted.
Questions regarding this position can be addressed to Jill Hooley at
jmh@wjh.harvard.edu. The committee will consider completed applications
starting immediately on a rolling basis through October 1. We expect to begin
conducting Interviews in October and November.
We seek candidates with expertise in developmental cognitive science, broadly
conceived. Our interest is less in specific topic areas or methods than in innovation and
excellence in the applicant’s research program. For instance, in addition to experimental
behavioral research on human children, successful candidates might employ cognitive
neuroscience, animal cognition, cross-cultural ethnographic work or computational
modeling, among approaches. Topics of study might include perception, action
planning, conceptual representation, social cognition, reasoning, decision-making
or language, among other topics. We seek candidates whose research complements
research already going on in the Department, taking it in clearly new directions.
The appointment is expected to begin on July 1, 2019. Candidates at all levels are
encouraged to apply.
Candidates must have a strong doctoral record and have completed their Ph.D.
Candidates should have demonstrated a promise of excellence in both research and
teaching. Teaching duties will include offerings at both undergraduate and graduate
levels.
Please submit a cover letter, curriculum vitae, research and teaching statements, up
to three representative reprints, and names and contact information of three to five
references (three letters of recommendation are required, and the application is
complete only when all three letters have been submitted) to
http://academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/8336.
Questions regarding this position can be addressed to spelke@wjh.harvard.edu.
The committee will consider completed applications starting immediately and on a
rolling basis until September 15. Interviews will be conducted in October and November.

We are an equal opportunity employer and all qualified applicants will receive
consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex,
national origin, disability status, protected veteran status, gender identity, sexual
orientation, pregnancy and pregnancy-related conditions or any other character-
istic protected by law.
We are an equal opportunity employer and all qualified applicants will
receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion,
sex, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status, gender identity,
sexual orientation, pregnancy and pregnancy-related conditions or any other
characteristic protected by law.

NRC Research Associateship Programs

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

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

Awardees have the opportunity to:

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

Benefits of an NRC Research Associateship award include:

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

DESIRED SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE

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

ABOUT THE EMPLOYER

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

8 September 2018 | NewScientist | 49

newscientistjobs.com

50 | NewScientist | 8 September 2018

Fellowships for Postdoctoral Scholars
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accepted from doctoral recipients with research interests associated with the following:

Departments - Applicants who wish to conduct !;1brb;m|vo=-‰-u7v-u;v;Ѵ;1|;71olr;ঞঞˆ;Ѵ‹ķ‰b|_

research on topics of general interest to one or more of the
departments are encouraged to apply. Interdepartmental
research is also encouraged. The Departments are:
ƒApplied Ocean Physics & Engineering
ƒBiology
ƒGeology & Geophysics
ƒMarine Chemistry & Geochemistry
ƒPhysical Oceanography
A joint USGS/WHOI award will be given to a postdoc
whose research is in an area of common interest between
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with both USGS and WHOI based advisors on their research.
The Center for Marine and Environmental
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environment including the study of their sources and fate or
use as tracers of ocean processes.
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$60,000 per year, a wellness allowance and a modest research
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20, 2018 for the 2019/2020 appointments. Awards will be
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research themes may be obtained through the Academic
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www.whoi.edu/postdoctoral
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techniques in marine science radiocarbon studies.

$_;1;-m$‰bѴb]_|,om;Ő$,ő project
will award a fellowship for research on midwater
ecosystems and processes, including biomass,
biodiversity, life histories and behavior, trophic
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well as the Marine Policy Center.

LETTERS
EDITOR’S PICK
Polluter pays – but pays to whom?
From Daniel Hackett, London, UK
Fred Pearce reports how lawsuits over
climate change might bring justice
along the lines of “polluter pays”
(18 August, p 38). But from where
might the payee raise the fines?
From taxes or from energy charges,
no doubt. There is thus a risk of
sending money in circles, unless the
52 | NewScientist | 8 September 2018
fines are all spent on preventative or at
least remedial works. This could make
the exercise of suing nearly pointless,
and could even bring into question the
whole idea of the value of money.
There will be little progress until
some system can be devised in which
economies aren’t pitted against each
other. Until then, the environment will
always be the loser because it has not
been costed or is a common resource,
as in the case of the atmosphere and
the oceans, with their capacity as a
heat-sink. When a truer cost-benefit
analysis of our lifestyle is calculated,
we will all have to admit we are out of
our depth. Fatalism based on religion
will have to be tackled, since humans
are the only agency that could solve
this. So bring on the court cases –
but realise this is but the opening
shot in a massive upheaval.
letters@newscientist.com
I bring good news and
bad news on methane
From Iain Climie,
Whitchurch, Hampshire, UK
Ilkka Savolainen points to the
importance of reducing methane
emissions to combat climate
change (Letters, 18 August).
I have good and bad news.
Much methane is emitted by
ruminant livestock. The good
news is the success of tests on
the methane-reducing effect of
adding the seaweed Asparagopsis
taxiformis to livestock food
(Letters, 18 November 2017).
The bad news is that there are
signs of massive methane releases
from previously frozen deposits
(27 July 2013, p 16). These could
easily outweigh any reductions in
emissions from human activities.
I suspect the current mess is
due to three major blunders. The
first was the emphasis on setting
@newscientist newscientist
targets to cut emissions instead of
controlling levels of greenhouse
gases. Second, many measures
that are essential if conventional
wisdom is correct – from reducing
waste and developing alternatives
to fossil fuels to cutting livestock’s
impact – are sensible regardless of
the effect of human activities on
climate change, and would be even
if the world were cooling. Instead
of pursuing such win-win options,
effort was wasted bickering about
whether human activities
mattered. Third, and predictably,
nobody wanted to pay to address
these concerns or to have their
consumer convenience affected.
Neoliberal capitalism
is a Ponzi scheme
From John O’Hara, Mount
Waverley, Victoria, Australia
Whatever value Earth Overshoot
Day may have as a measure of the
 “Being wrong should be on the curriculum:
what holds people back is fear of it”
Kate Shaw MA, MS, PsyD responds to a report that we can train
ourselves to better know when we are wrong (1 September, p 14).

rate at which we are thrashing the
planet, Mathis Wackernagel is on
the money in describing typical
economic activity as the largest
“Ponzi scheme” (4 August, p 20).
The dominant global economic
paradigm in the developed world
is neoliberal capitalism. It ticks
four boxes recognised as defining
a Ponzi scheme: it is predicated
on infinite growth, which is an
impossibility in a finite world;
when growth stops it falls over;
there is no way to a soft landing;
and the precise point of collapse
can’t be predicted. The reason this
description hasn’t registered in
mass consciousness is the longish
time span to collapse.
From Fred White,
Nottingham, UK
Our society determines actions
based on cost-effectiveness and
profit potential at all scales, from
the household up to government
level. This should work, but these
actions are based on an economic
system that draws down capital
assets and counts them as profits.
It assumes that continual growth
is possible in a finite system and
takes no account for cleaning up
the consequences of actions.
Our descendants will be at a
loss to know how a society capable
of exploring other planets and
editing the genome could possibly
have done so with an accounting
system that encourages two plus
two to equal seven.
When glaciers have gone
it’s too late to use valleys
From Perry Bebbington,
Kimberley, Nottinghamshire, UK
Erik Foxcroft suggests using
vacant glacial valleys as water
reservoirs for pumped storage
hydropower (Letters, 18 August).
By the time the glaciers have
retreated enough to make this
viable I think it will be a bit too
late to think about such storage.
Renewable energy
thwarted by appliances
From Enid Smith,
Linton, Cambridgeshire, UK
Paul Whiteley suggests that
instead of funding large-scale
energy projects we should spend
the money putting solar hot water
panels on people’s roofs (Letters,
4 August). We have solar hot water
panels on our roof, and they have
saved us money for some years.
But our predominant use of
warm water is to wash clothes.
Needing a new washing machine,
we couldn’t find one that took
warm water from the system,
only ones that took cold water that
was then heated. The rise in our
electric bills has been significant.
Meanwhile we have excess hot
water (and it can get very hot).
Energy generation must be
accompanied by appliances that
enable the resulting heat to be
used in the most practical way.
What is the role of stress
in producing allergies?
From Piers Roberts, Hampton
in Arden, West Midlands, UK
Thank you for the interesting
article on allergies (11 August,
p 28). I was amazed, though, to
find no discussion of whether
stress levels can have a role,
either as a precursor of allergic
reactions or in exacerbating them.
From Tony Kelly,
Crook, County Durham, UK
Penny Sarchet doesn’t mention a
factor that, I am sure, contributes
to allergies: stress. I refer to
unrelenting mental stress to
which there is no conceivable >

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

Roland Jackson’s
biography makes
perfect summer
reading.

9780198788959 | 576 pages | £25

8 September 2018 | NewScientist | 53


LETTERS
ending or solution. I am sure,
for example, that at least some
children who develop an allergy
after starting school are the
targets of bullying.
In Australia, they keep
cats under curfew
From Robert Craig,
Washingborough, Lincolnshire, UK
Hugh Boyd complains that
farming is blamed for wildlife
woes and mentions that domestic
cats kill vast numbers of birds
(Letters, 4 August). In some areas
of Australia there are curfews for
cats, in contrast to the strange UK
policy of allowing them to roam
anywhere at any time. Aboriginal
communities have found that
feral cats, blamed for driving up
to 30 species into extinction,
are a great source of food.
Terraforming Mars in the
style of science fiction
From Bryn Glover, Kirkby
Malzeard, North Yorkshire, UK
I was surprised to read that “we”
(whoever that might be) have ever
dreamed of converting Mars into
TOM GAULD
54 | NewScientist | 8 September 2018
an Earth-like world (4 August, p 6).
No one – surely – has ever really
proposed this as a practical
possibility, outside the realms
of science fiction. Have they?
Future geologists will
define the Anthropocene
From Jeffrey Harte, Caringbah,
New South Wales, Australia
While the International Union
of Geological Sciences (IUGS) has
declared that we are still in the
Holocene epoch (28 July, p 24),
I believe the “Anthropocene” is
functionally and stratigraphically
different to the Holocene.
But when did it start and what
evidence is appropriate to
distinguish the two?
The idea of a layer of plastic
rubbish as a marker is unlikely
to be appropriate, because over
many millennia rock strata are
reworked vertically and laterally.
Perhaps, though, the result will be
a band of “plastiglomerate” lithic
material that could serve as a new
worldwide marker. Maybe the
growth of radionuclides in
sediments accumulated since
the 20th century will provide a
letters@newscientist.com
uniform marker. The priority of
the IUGS may be nomenclature –
defining eras, periods, epochs and
ages. But it needs to acknowledge
the impact of a species on the
geological record and not, as Mark
Maslin and Simon Lewis intimate,
go out of its way to confuse
members of the public.
My job has already fallen
to digital technology
From Alastair Brotchie,
London, UK
Your article on rules that robots
should follow contains the
platitude “We must be careful it
isn’t only employers that benefit
from robots” (4 August, p 38). As
one of many whose profession has
already been digitally destroyed,
I am tired of this feeble plea.
For 30 years I painted backdrops
for theatre. Now all middle-skilled
work in this field is done by large-
scale digital printing. There isn’t
enough high-skilled work to
support the infrastructure of
training and career progression,
so we see the end of a profession
that dates back to the Renaissance.
The owners of this technology
@newscientist newscientist
now have all our jobs, but
“progress” is both incremental
and accidental. There is no way
I or my colleagues can get the
originators or the owners of this
technology to share its benefits –
nor those who should perhaps
be described as “unemployers”.
Nor will this change. (How can
it?) All benefits accrue to those
who control the technology.
Digital technology tends to
promote the most rapacious
form of capitalism yet seen.
Relying on votes from
unsustainable farmers
From Geoff Browne,
Sydney, Australia.
Chris Milligan warns that much
of the world is in for a rough ride
from climate change (Letters,
4 August). This is timely, given
the drought gripping New South
Wales as I write. What isn’t timely
is the response of the Australian
government. As usual it is
dispensing vast amounts of
“drought relief” cash without
consideration of whether the
changing climate is making this
largesse misplaced.
How many farms are really
viable in this new climate world?
Has any research been done to
establish the viability of raising
hoofed animals on soils that are
drying and deteriorating? Of
course, the current government
depends on the farmers’ party
to stay in office.
For the record
Q Paul Jackson was not involved with
the refurbishment of the bridge that
collapsed in Genoa (25 August, p 4).
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.
CROSSWORD
Compiled by Richard Smyth

Crossword No22
ACROSS
8 0 (4) Mesozoic eras (7)
9 1988 sci-fi animation directed by 19 In photography, the ratio of the
Katsuhiro Otomo (5) focal length of a lens to the
10 European nuclear research diameter of the aperture (1,6)
organisation (4) 22 1986 sci-fi film directed by
11 Judith ___ (1949–1986), James Cameron (6)
astronaut killed in the Challenger 24 Phylum to which vertebrates
disaster (6) belong (8)
12 BBC wildlife programme 26 To install new technologies
presented by David Attenborough within older systems (8)
from 1954 to 1963 (3,5) 28 Early steam locomotive designed
13 Component of an electrical by George Stephenson (6)
circuit (8) 30 Integrated circuit (4)
15 Seed-eating finch, Spinus spinus 31 Rotary wing of, for example,
(6) a helicopter (5)
17 Supercontinent of the late 32 Element, atomic number 10 (4)
Palaeozoic and early

DOWN
1 Unit of hereditary information (4)
2 ___ bomb, ordnance designed by
Barnes Wallis (8)
3 Mechanical seal (6)
4 Organ found in the digestive tract
of many animals (7)
5 Nathan ___ (1910–1999),
Warsaw-born US mathematician
(8)
6 Sanitary clothing worn by
surgeons (6)
7 Genus of flowering plants; part of
the eye (4)
14 Form of electronic communication
(5)
16 Unreactive – like 32 Across (5)
18 Of a leaf, sword-shaped (8)
20 Field in which Robert G.
Edwards won the 2010
Nobel prize (8)
21 CH3CO2–, for instance (7) The Perfect Gift
23 Moon of Jupiter (6)
25 Mechanical model of the solar
for Anyone Interested in Space!
system (6)
Launch them into the worldwide space community with the
27 Computing command; damselfly
British Interplanetary Society. Membership includes our
PRQWKO\PDJD]LQH¶6SDFHÁLJKW·DQGDFFHVVWRWDONVE\
genus; letter in the NATO
phonetic alphabet (4)
29 Reactive structure in organic
astronauts, space scientists and thought leaders. Join in
chemistry (4)
with one of our technical projects and help design the future
of space exploration!

Answers to Crossword No21

From £20/year (Under 22) and £70/year (Standard)
ACROSS: 1 STIGMA, 4 STOMACHS, 10 ESPARTO, 11 CONTACT, 12 TWO, 13 JOLIOT-CURIE,
14 TRIUNE, 15 DISEASE, 19 ANDROID, 20 TRIODE, 23 ADAPTATIONS, 25 MOA, 26 SAND BAR, www.bis-space.com
27 FLICKER, 28 CHAINSAW, 29 ENGRAM. DOWN: 1 STEATITE, 2 IMPLOSION, 3 MARY JANE
RATHBUN, 5 TECTONIC, 6 MANIC DEPRESSION, 7 CHAIR, 8 SUTTER, 9 BOYLE, Telephone +44 (0)20 7735 3160
16 SHOEMAKER, 17 LISTERIA, 18 HEXAGRAM, 21 PARSEC, 22 WOLFF, 24 APNEA.

8 September 2018 | NewScientist | 55


FEEDBACK
PAUL MCDEVITT
A CONGRESSIONAL candidate in
Florida who claims to have been
abducted by aliens says she doesn’t
want to be defined by the experience.
City councillor Bettina Rodriguez
Aguilera claims that blond, Christ-like
aliens took her aboard a UFO as a child,
where she learned that Africa was the
energy centre of the world, and a cave
in Malta hid thousands of non-human
skulls. Since then, she has remained
telepathically in touch with aliens.
Florida is well-known for its
weirdness, which may explain why
the Miami Herald endorsed Rodriguez
Aguilera ahead of eight other
candidates. Although her head may be
in the clouds, an editorial praised her
“boots on the ground experience”.
After all, stranger ideas endure in
Congress, such as American
exceptionalism and trickle-down
economics.
CAR-MAKER Volkswagen is
under a cloud after installing hail
cannons at its plant in Puebla,
Mexico. After factory-fresh cars
were damaged by hail storms, VW
In the Czech Republic, falling water levels have
exposed “hunger stones” in the river Elbe, where
people recorded earlier droughts. Inscribed on
one stone is the message: “If you see me, weep”
56 | NewScientist | 8 September 2018
installed large cannons in the car
lots. These emit loud bangs every
6 seconds during threatening
weather, with the sonic wave said
to break up hailstones.
But local farmers claimed
the cannons were to blame for
a recent drop in rainfall, and
demanded $3.7 million in
damages. There is no evidence
that sound cannons can disrupt
rainfall, and even less evidence
that they can shatter hailstones.
VW has replaced the cannons
with nets, but Feedback thinks
the farmers may still have a case.
Having famously cheated on
their emissions tests, might
VW bear some responsibility
for a changing climate?
NAPOLEON’S defeat at Waterloo
might be down to the eruption of
Mount Tambora in Indonesia two
months earlier. According to Matthew
Genge at Imperial College London,
volcanic eruptions can shoot
electrified volcanic ash into the upper
atmosphere, leading to increased
For more feedback, visit newscientist.com/feedback
cloud formation and changing the
climate on a global scale.
That could be why an unseasonable
June downpour the night before the
battle left the ground so muddy that
it had to start late, allowing time for
the Prussian army to arrive and fight
alongside the British. A reminder to
always check with your volcanologist
when drawing up battle plans.
A REGIONAL council on New
Zealand’s South Island has
proposed a ban on domestic
cats, in an effort to preserve local
wildlife. Claws are out for the
housepets, which are blamed for
killing huge numbers of birds.
Aside from two species of bat,
New Zealand has no native land
mammals, and the cat ban is
part of an ambitious project
to make the island free of all
non-native predators by 2050.
The ban would not apply to
existing pets, but no new cats
would be permitted, gradually
reducing the population to zero.
Some citizens were alarmed
by the impending cat-astrophe.
“It’s not even regulating people’s
ability to have a cat. It’s saying you
can’t have a cat,” Omaui cat owner
Nico Jarvis told the Otago Daily
Times. “It’s like a police state.”
A JAPANESE rail company has been
criticised for making employees sit
next to bullet trains passing at
300 kilometres per hour. The training
exercises were introduced at JR West
following an accident in 2015, when a
plate fell off the outside of a train and
damaged the car behind. Employees
must now huddle in a safety trench
next to the tracks as the levitating
train flies past.
“It is to give employees who
work with train cars an opportunity
to experience and understand
the importance of their work,”
a spokesperson told The Mainichi
newspaper. Graduates of the
demonstration have compared
the experience to public flogging.
Despite pleas from the
workers’ union, the company said
it had no plans to suspend the
petrifying programme.
THE mayor of a French seaside
town closed the beach following
a spate of advances by an
amorous dolphin. Zafar, as
the animal is known, has
been pestering bathers in the
Brittany town of Landévennec.
Zafar is a familiar presence
in the area, and was previously
well-behaved. But since
coming into season, he has
been rubbing himself against
boats and bumping into
swimmers. After one woman
was lifted out of the water by
the dolphin, the town’s mayor
Roger Lars issued a decree
that forbade approaching the
animal or entering the water
when it was present.
The ban was lifted, reports
the Associated Press, after the
frustrated Zafar left Landévennec
to find relief elsewhere.
WHEN life gives you lemons, make
lemonade. But what if life doesn’t
give you any lemons? That question
was answered by a 69-year-old man
in Thermal, California, who was
discovered with about 360 kilograms
of lemons in his truck, allegedly stolen
from a nearby farm. NBC San Diego
reports that the arrest was part of a
wider police investigation into fruit
rustling. Feedback notes the alleged
lemon thief was apprehended on
Grapefruit Boulevard.
You can send stories to Feedback by
email at feedback@newscientist.com.
Please include your home address.
This week’s and past Feedbacks can
be seen on our website.

THE LAST WORD
Eggstraordinary
claim
I’ve just read that eggs should not be
stored in a rack on the back of a fridge
door, the exact place where most
fridge manufacturers put the egg
rack. Before I revamp my fridge,
is there any truth to this? And if so,
what could it be?
Q Once an unfertilised egg drops
out of the back of a chicken, it
crosses the road towards decay.
This is because chick embryos
need to breathe, so eggs must be
gas-permeable. Even in the
absence of an embryo, carbon
dioxide diffuses out through the
shell, and this makes the interior
less acidic. Water from the white,
or albumen, also diffuses outwards
and, by osmosis, into the yolk.
The egg white thus becomes
inhospitable to healthy proteins,
“Did fridge-makers put egg
racks inside fridge doors
because they did not know
how else to use the space?”
which have a naturally folded
structure that depends on the
local acidity. This in turn swells
the yolk and makes membrane
more fragile. If you ever try to
make a soufflé using old eggs, you
will find that the whites and yolks
have become inseparable.
All these processes speed up
with temperature, so storing eggs
in the fridge is a good start. But an
open rack behind the door is not
the best spot. When you open the
fridge, you waft fresh, warm air
We pay £25 for every answer
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over any layer of carbon dioxide
that has built up at the egg’s
surface. This encourages yet more
diffusion out of the egg, and thus
yet more ageing. You also tend to
shake the eggs, resulting in a more
watery albumen by mixing the
thick and thin components of
the white.
The best place in the fridge to
store eggs is probably in a sealed
box, to prevent diffusion, and as
low down as possible – in other
words, in the coolest part. This
slows the loss of carbon dioxide
and water to the air, and also
prevents the egg taking up odours
from inside the fridge.
It is worth remembering that
eggs emerge from a contaminated
part of a bird’s anatomy, so
routinely harbour bacteria,
notably Salmonella enteritidis.
A sealed box would stop egg-
winds wafting over the other
contents of your fridge. We should
also clean the egg rack regularly,
wherever in the fridge it may be.
I wonder if fridge-makers
originally put egg racks inside the
doors because they could not
think what else to use these tiny
spaces for.
Simon Goodman
Griesheim, Germany
Q Eggs can be stored in the fridge,
preferably in a box to slow water
loss, but they should be taken
out and allowed to reach room
temperature before cooking. This
is important if you like a soft yolk:
oeufs en cocotte and eggs sunny
side up don’t work otherwise,
because when the white is cooked,
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25 Bedford Street, London, WC2E 9ES.
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published content and reserves all
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the yolk is still only lukewarm.
I learned this back in the 60s
when working as a short-order
chef at a motorway services,
where I also learned to crack
eggs single-handed.
Luce Gilmore
Cambridge, UK
Clean cut
Every so often, my adopted cat brings
home geckos in two pieces, namely
the still-moving tail and the rest of the
body (also still moving). But there is
never any obvious blood. Why?
Q Wild animals often must
recover from severe injuries,
or die. Where we live, I am
repeatedly amazed to see game
birds survive incidental injuries
and regain normal use of loosely
flapping broken legs or wings
that had been very crooked.
The realities of natural
selection are so extreme that
many snakes, insects, fish or birds
have developed highly effective
self-healing abilities. As a result,
they can afford to try to redirect
attacks towards non-critical areas
at their rear, in particular frills of
hair, loosely set feathers, fake
heads – or, indeed, sacrificial tails.
Some animals even use their tail
non-sacrificially to attract prey.
Many lizards have more or less
fragile tails that distract predators
by thrashing when broken off. If
alarmed, some geckoes drop their
tail whether or not something is
tugging at it, an example of what
is known as autotomy.
A tail is a major investment,
served by its own artery. Letting
it bleed would be fatal, so muscles
at intervals along the blood
vessels clamp the flow, and the
blood clots rapidly. It is something
surgeons can only envy.
Jon Richfield
Somerset West, South Africa
Q Many lizards and geckos
display this behaviour, which is
known as autotomy. Where I live,
there are no geckos but lots of
wall lizards, which shelter in and
around the garden. Occasionally,
just moving one of my outside
bins will reveal a wriggling tail,
the startled lizard having
made off.
My cat loves hunting lizards
and has brought in tails –
although less often now – but
never both the tail and its owner
together. The lizards do grow a
new tail, but it lacks vertebrae
and clearly doesn’t match the
rest of the body.
Terence Hollingworth
Blagnac, France
Q In Hawaii, I see geckos hunted
by cattle egrets (both are invasive
species there). The egrets walk
on the tops of hedges and reach
down to grab geckos with their
beak. If one gets hold of the tail, I
frequently see the gecko fall away,
leaving the egret with only a tail
in its mouth. If it grabs the body,
the egret must still twist the gecko
90 degrees to swallow it, and so
may still end up with just the tail.
Stephen Johnson
Eugene, Oregon, US