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A BRIDGE TOO FAR

Lessons from Genoa

FIRST LIFE

It happened much, much earlier than we thought

THE END OF MONEY

Hidden costs of a cash-free world

WEEKLY August 25 – 31, 2018

HALF NEANDERTHAL, HALF DENISOVAN Astounding ancient hybrid discovered

Slimmer. Fitter. Less stressed. How a positive mind really can create a healthier body

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News Life on Earth began much earlier than we thought 5

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A bridge too far Lessons from Genoa

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First life It happened much, much earlier than we thought

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Half Neanderthal, half Denisovan Astounding ancient hybrid discovered

28 Slimmer. Fitter. Less stressed How a positive mind really can create a healthier body Plus Russia’s mystery satellite (6). Organs in space (14). Glyphosate and cancer (23). Scientific African (22). Lucid dreaming (10). Reversing ageing (26). Oldest galaxies (13)

The poorest will suffer if the cashless dream fails. All bridges should have structural redundancy

News 4

THIS WEEK Genoan bridge collapse. Life began earlier than we thought. Measles outbreak

6

NEWS & TECHNOLOGY Is Russian satellite a weapon? Huge ancient monument in Kenya. Making universal blood. HalfNeanderthal, half-Denisovan teenager. AI finds hazardous lead pipes in Flint. The galaxy’s many water worlds. Drug boosts lucid dreaming. Batteries made with bacteria. Autism linked to lingering insecticide. Old galaxies discovered next door. Organs in space. Psychedelic brew mimics near-death experiences

36 The end of money Hidden costs of a cash-free world 7

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16 IN BRIEF How to break spaghetti in two. Fish eat their eggs to have better babies. Mean robot overlord

Analysis 20 INSIGHT Gains in life expectancy in the UK are faltering – here are six possible reasons why 22 COMMENT Keep population control out of the climate change fight. All hail Africa’s mega-journal 23 ANALYSIS Does a commonly used weedkiller cause cancer?

Features 26 The maverick putting ageing in reverse Geneticist George Church on how to turn back the clock 28 Mind over matter How a positive mind really can create a healthier body 34 Ice sage The unschooled Scotsman who first explained Earth’s recurrent cold spells 36 The end of money Hidden costs of a cash-free world

Culture 42 Ocean plastic Eye-popping show of marine anatomy 43 Emotional ignorance Why we need a road map of the emotions. PLUS: This week’s cultural picks 44 Seeking Sandra What happens when AI isn’t really artificial?

Regulars 24 APERTURE A helping hand for lemurs 52 LETTERS Ice giant mission 55 MAKE Slam dunk the junk 56 FEEDBACK Jobs lost to avian intelligence 57 THE LAST WORD Load of rubbish

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Out of pocket If the cashless dream goes sour, it will hurt poor people most ON THE same day that Donald Trump was elected US president, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi took to national TV to make a stunning announcement. From midnight, the country’s two highest denomination banknotes would no longer be legal tender. The 500 and 1000 rupee notes accounted for 86 per cent of currency supply in a country where roughly 90 per cent of transactions are done in cash. Modi’s stated intention was to curb what he called “black money”. People had 50 days to swap their old cash for new at banks. It was hoped that by capping how much each person

could exchange, criminals would struggle to launder suitcases of banknotes. Plenty of people around the world think having less cash would benefit society. After all, counterfeiting aside, cash can be unsafe – in terms of being easily stolen – and it also results in transactions that are hard to keep track of, which can lead to the oiling of corruption. The Better Than Cash Alliance, a UN-based partnership of some 60 governments, companies and international organisations, is pushing this line. Yet in the aftermath of Modi’s overnight demonetisation,

A bridge too far © 2018 New Scientist Ltd, England. New Scientist ISSN 0262 4079 is published weekly except for the last week in December by New Scientist Ltd, England. New Scientist (Online) ISSN 2059 5387 New Scientist Limited, 387 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016 Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY and other mailing offices Postmaster: Send address changes to New Scientist, PO Box 3806, Chesterfield, MO 63006-9953, USA. Registered at the Post Office as a newspaper and printed in USA by Fry Communications Inc, Mechanicsburg, PA 17055

AUTHORITIES in Italy are investigating what went wrong to make Genoa’s Morandi motorway bridge collapse last week, killing 43 people (see page 4). Bridges rarely just give way. They normally show signs of wear and tear, such as cracks or corrosion, long before they fall apart. Even then a collapse doesn’t normally follow and there is

plenty of time to organise a fix. Most suspension bridges, such as San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, use cables to support them, but the few on the Morandi bridge were encased in concrete. This contributes to a lack of structural redundancy, and if one component fails, it can have a disproportionate effect on the bridge if other parts can’t take the strain.

sociologists documented how it was poor people who were disproportionately affected. Replacement notes turned out to be in short supply and poor people found it hardest to get to banks and trade in old for new. The trend towards less-cash societies keeps spreading and strengthening, especially in richer countries. A few central banks are considering whether they should issue digital analogues of cash (see page 36). But as India’s experiment hints, this tech trend presents risks as well as opportunities. Unless the phasing out of cash is done carefully, it is the poorest who will suffer. ■

Undoubtedly, signs the bridge was in need of repair were either ignored or missed, but a better bridge would probably have lasted longer. The design turned out to be an architectural dead end, and luckily few other bridges were ever built like it. Modern bridges have greater structural redundancy, which is a good thing. Even components in more recent structures fail, but this redundancy keeps a failure from becoming a disaster. ■ 25 August 2018 | NewScientist | 3

THIS WEEK

Genoan bridge collapse

Record measles outbreak in Europe

ITALY is still reeling from the collapse

has a pH of about 12. At this highly

THE failure of parents to vaccinate

of a large portion of a bridge in Genoa

alkali level, steel embedded in the

Hammersmith Flyover, a similar bridge

their children has contributed to the

last week, killing at least 43 people.

concrete won’t corrode. However,

in London, Jackson and his colleagues

biggest surge in measles cases Europe

Italian prime minister Giuseppe Conte

if the concrete mix contains too much

attached acoustic sensors to the

has seen in a decade, according to

declared a state of emergency in the

water, or drainage doesn’t function

bridge that detected when strands

region and has made €5 million

properly, it can become porous, which

from the steel cable later broke.

available to help with the aftermath.

results in the pH dropping over time.

“Normally this happens so rarely you

the World Health Organization. Across the 53 countries in the region, there have been at least

“These are unacceptable tragedies that should not happen in a modern

Below a pH level of 9, the steel can

can’t be sure if your sensor is working,

37 deaths and more than 41,000

corrode, weakening the structure

but with Hammersmith they kept

cases in the first half of this year,

society. This government will do

of the bridge. This can also happen

pinging a lot,” says Jackson. This

already nearly twice the 23,927

everything to prevent such tragedies

if cracks allow water to seep in. “The bridge doesn’t have a lot of redundancies, so if one cable goes,

meant that extra steel cables had to

cases recorded in the whole of 2016. More than half this year’s cases have been in Ukraine, where measles

from happening again,” said Conte in a press conference. Harrowing footage and tales from survivors are at odds with the precision and reliability we have come to expect from modern engineering. It has left many asking what went

“Concrete is fantastic and can last many years, but if it’s poor quality, the tensioning steel corrodes”

During a recent project on the

be added to the exterior, resulting in a lengthy and costly repair job. Around Europe, many bridges are in a poor state. A report in France

vaccination coverage has been

from earlier this year said that a third

In 2016, vaccination rates dropped

of the country’s road bridges are in

to 50 per cent. The WHO warns that

need of repair, with about 7 per cent

as soon as fewer than 95 per cent of

plummeting over the past decade.

being at risk of eventual collapse.

eligible children receive vaccination,

happen to other bridges.

it could be enough to take the whole

And a report from Germany’s Federal

measles can spread rapidly.

Completed in 1967, the Genoese bridge was made primarily of

bridge down,” says Paul Jackson at

Highway Research Institute last

engineering firm Ramboll, who helped

year found that more than 12 per

England has seen 807 cases this year, 281 of them in London.

pre-stressed concrete, which is

to refurbish the bridge in the 1990s.

cent of Germany’s road bridges

Before vaccination began in 1968,

strengthened by high-tension steel a motorway that connects the city to

always an element of judgement,

were in bad condition. In the US, a recent report determined that 54,000 of the

the UK reported roughly half a

cables running through it. It is part of

It is hard to tell if the steel inside concrete is corroding and there is

local ports and hooks up the Italian

says Jackson. “The Genoa bridge is

613,000 bridges surveyed were

and French rivieras. On 14 August,

unusual because bridges tend to give

structurally deficient. These

a massive tower and a 200-metre

more warning before collapsing, such

bridges are crossed 174 million

section of road collapsed onto

as revealing cracks,” he says.

times each day. Timothy Revell

wrong – and if the same thing could

million cases a year.

Floods kill 350 people in Kerala

railway lines, a river and a warehouse 45 metres below, taking dozens of

HUNDREDS of people have died as

vehicles with them. More than 400 people were evacuated, including those who live

a result of flooding in the southern

in housing blocks under one of the

June, more than 200,000 people have

pillars. Firefighters have been

had to abandon their homes and move

searching for survivors and bodies.

to emergency relief camps. “We’re

It is not yet known why the bridge collapsed. At the time, work was

witnessing something that has never

under way to firm up the bridge’s

Kerala,” Pinarayi Vijayan, the chief

foundations, and there was

minister for the region, told local news.

torrential rain. Some engineers have suggested that the maintenance

More than 930 people have died across India this monsoon season.

work may have been a factor in the

Kerala has been hit particularly hard,

collapse, whereas others are

with more than 350 killed. Officials

design or construction flaws. “Concrete is a fantastic material that can last for many years, but if it’s poor quality it becomes porous, and the tensioning steel corrodes,” says Michael Byfield at the University of Southampton, UK. High-strength concrete normally 4 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018

happened before in the history of

CARLO ALBERTO ALESSI/SPUTNIK/CAMERA PRESS

suggesting there were fundamental

Indian state of Kerala. Since monsoon season began in

say many of the deaths were in landslides triggered by the floods. Kerala has 44 rivers running through it, and the state authorities have been criticised for not gradually releasing water from 80 local dams. Instead, water was only discharged once the reservoirs were full, exacerbating the situation.

For new stories every day, visit newscientist.com/news

Born on a battered Earth Life’s crucial early steps are being rewritten, finds Michael Marshall Early Earth may not have been as inhospitable as we thought

ARCTIC-IMAGES/GETTY

THE shared ancestor of every organism now on the planet lived at least 3.9 billion years ago – adding weight to theories that life started 100 million years earlier than we thought, at a time when Earth was still being pummelled by meteorites. That’s according to a study that has combined genetic and fossil evidence to build a timeline of crucial shifts in the early evolution of life. The study also sheds new light on the birth of complex cells, which today make up all animals and plants. For the first few billion years of Earth’s history, the only life present was single-celled microorganisms. Unlike the large plants and animals that arose in the past 600 million years, such as trilobites and dinosaurs, The result is a timeline of the these microbes left few fossils – first 3 billion years of life, from so understanding life’s early the ancestor of all modern life history has been tricky. to the first complex animals To find out more, Holly Betts (Nature Ecology & Evolution, at the University of Bristol, UK, doi.org/cs5q). “We can go very and her colleagues combined “This is the best attempt two sources of evidence. They yet to actually get a compared the sequences of coherent picture of the 29 genes across 102 species to history of life on Earth” build a family tree that showed how they were all related, and the order in which new groups split deep in time, which we never away from their relatives. thought was possible,” says Pisani. The researchers then added “I think they’ve really made some dates to this tree, taken the most sincere and honest effort from the geological record. This yet to actually get a coherent enabled them to estimate when picture of the history of life,” the various groups evolved and says Bill Martin at the University parted company. For instance, of Düsseldorf in Germany. they knew that life could be no One major finding is that the older than 4.52 billion years most recent organism that all because that is when a rock the existing life is related to – known size of Mars slammed into Earth, as the last universal common forming the moon. The impact ancestor, or LUCA – lived at least was so severe that the planet’s 3.9 billion years ago. There is entire surface melted. “Nothing tentative support for life to have could have survived it,” says team existed this early in our planet’s member Davide Pisani, also at the history. Some have suggested that University of Bristol. traces of carbon in 4.1-billion-

year-old rocks are signs of early life. Similar traces were found in 3.95-billion-year-old rocks in 2017. And another 2017 study claimed to have found fossilised singlecelled organisms from 3.77 billion years ago. But all these findings are disputed. Nevertheless, Greg Fournier at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology says the new date for LUCA is reasonable. This means life probably formed relatively quickly, within 600 million years of the moon-creating impact, when big meteorites were still battering the planet.

Supercharged life LUCA gave rise to two groups of single-celled microorganisms called bacteria and archaea. This split happened at least 3.4 billion years ago, the study finds. Later on, more-complex cells evolved – one of the most crucial evolutionary events ever. Compared with bacteria and archaea, these “eukaryote” cells

are larger, with membrane-bound compartments and tiny, energysupplying mitochondria. All animals, plants and fungi are eukaryotes, and if these cells had not evolved, we could never have existed. The timeline suggests these cells first appeared at least 1.84 billion years ago. It was thought that eukaryotes evolved in response to rising oxygen levels, but this finding suggests this might not have been the case, as the first atmospheric oxygen turned up much earlier – 2.4 billion years ago. However, it does not rule out a link, as there was little oxygen at first and levels later rose in fits and starts. The timing of the eukaryotes’ origin is curious because it took place almost exactly when the study found that microbes called alphaproteobacteria evolved. The mitochondria inside eukaryotic cells were once freeliving alphaproteobacteria, which were somehow swallowed by an archaean that then gave rise to the first eukaryotes. The implication is that acquiring mitochondria was the key step in eukaryote evolution, says Pisani. This then spurred a massive evolution of diversity among eukaryotic cells, he says. Martin and his colleagues have made a similar argument on physical grounds, suggesting that the first eukaryotes could only have evolved large, complex cells once they had mitochondria to supercharge them. However, Fournier suspects the timings might be off. He says mitochondria are quite different from their alphaproteobacteria ancestors, “so they should be substantially younger”. ■ 25 August 2018 | NewScientist | 5

NEWS & TECHNOLOGY

US fears over Russian satellite UNUSUAL manoeuvres by a Russian satellite have sparked fears in the US. On 14 August, Yleem Poblete at the US Department of State expressed concerns at a UN conference on disarmament held in Switzerland. “We are concerned with what appears to be very abnormal behaviour by a declared ‘space apparatus inspector’. We don’t know for certain what it is, and there is no way to verify it,” she told the conference. Poblete referenced previous statements by Russian officials about programmes to develop anti-satellite systems, and said the US has no way to tell if the satellite in question is a weapon. A Russian delegate at the conference said Poblete’s remarks were unfounded, according to Reuters. Based on the satellite’s orbital changes – which are tracked by the US and made publicly available – it is hard to tell whether the manoeuvres have an innocuous explanation, says Jonathan McDowell at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts.

Vast ancient site built by equal society

of the satellites was observing the other and that test is now complete, so they have been put into lower orbits to speed up their eventual re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere. “We just have to wait and see. We’ve got the popcorn out and we’re checking the orbital data every day,” says McDowell. The lowering of orbits is a much less provocative manoeuvre than attempting to move one satellite close to another, says Laura Grego, a space security expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A satellite able to close in on another could potentially carry a weapon, but it could also perform more benign tasks like inspection, refuelling or repair, she says. Without knowing how the Russian satellite is equipped, it is fair to say the US can’t rule out the possibility it carries a test weapon. Poblete said that these manoeuvres are “inconsistent with anything seen before from on-orbit inspection or space situational awareness capabilities”, but McDowell says they are merely unusual, not unprecedented. Russian officials haven’t announced why this satellite moved, but US officials may be jumping to the worst-case scenario. “At some level, that’s their job. But they’ve jumped from ‘we don’t know’ to rampant paranoia,” says McDowell. ■

The satellite in question, Kosmos-2519, launched in October 2017 and then deployed two smaller satellites. Since then, Kosmos-2519 has made a series of orbital adjustments, including a rendezvous with those smaller satellites in December. A further flurry of activity began in late June, when it entered an orbit closer to Earth. The Russian satellite operators could simply be testing their ability to identify space debris,

Kosmos-2519 launched on the Russian rocket Soyuz 2-1v–

vast 700-square-metre raised

with ornaments such as ostrich shell

came together to undertake the huge

platform, together with the remains

beads and rings made from hippo

task of digging out the cemetery site.

of at least 580 people. Researchers tend to think such

ivory (PNAS, doi.org/cs58). “There is no evidence that anyone

“This is clearly beyond the scale of

large structures were the work of

was more important than anyone else,

MINISTRY OF DEFENCE OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION

Chelsea Whyte

but they might also be trialling techniques for monitoring other satellites in low orbit. “It could be for that kind of spying,” says McDowell. “It could also be testing out Earth-observing cameras from different heights. That seems like a weird thing to do, but who knows?” The day after the satellite lowered its orbit, one of the smaller satellites did so too. That isn’t a coincidence, says McDowell, but the connection between the two is puzzling. It may be that Russia simply decided to move the satellites one after the other. Or it could be that one

something constructed by an

stable, complex, hierarchical societies

that there was a chief,” says Katherine

EXCAVATIONS at eastern Africa’s oldest and biggest cemetery offer a new perspective on why ancient humans built large monuments. The Lothagam North Pillar site is

with surplus resources, arguing that

Grillo at the University of Florida in

extended family,” says Grillo. So why did the herders go to such lengths to build the cemetery?

they were often a way for a chief to

Gainesville, who co-directed the

They had moved into the region at a

advertise their power. But excavations at the Lothagam North Pillar site suggest this wasn’t

excavation. It seems that the builders were small groups of mobile herders who

time of great environmental change –

a communal cemetery built about 5000 years ago near Lake Turkana, Kenya, by the region’s first herders. At the site, there are 1.5-metre-tall stone pillars, nine stone circles and a

the case here. The burials include

6 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018

people of both sexes and all ages, and there is little evidence that anyone at the site was treated differently after death. Most skeletons were adorned

“There is no evidence that anyone buried at the site was more important than anyone else”

water levels in Lake Turkana had dropped by 55 metres, for example. Grillo and her colleagues think the herders built the cemetery as a place to interact and strengthen social networks in the face of challenging conditions. Alison George ■

For daily news stories, visit newscientist.com/news

The tiny sliver of bone (seen from many angles) from “Denny”

COULD blood shortages become a thing of the past? Bacterial enzymes from the human gut turn type A blood into the type universally accepted for transfusions, and do it more efficiently than current methods. Our blood comes in four main varieties: A, B, AB and O. The red blood cells in each type are similar in shape, but they have different sugars on their surfaces. Red blood cells in type A host a particular set of these sugars, with type B having a different set. AB blood cells carry both A and B sugars, and type O cells have none. These sugars can act as antigens, triggering an immune response. For instance, transfusing type B blood into someone with type A can be fatal. That is what makes anyone with type O blood a universal donor: there are none of these antigens. So being able to strip these sugars from A, B and AB type blood would be helpful, effectively making it usable in transfusions for all. “We knew that those same sugars that are on our red blood cells are also produced on the lining of the gut wall,” says Steve Withers at the University of British Columbia, Canada. So he and his colleagues started searching for bacteria in human faeces that might make enzymes that let them feed on  and break down gut wall sugars. Analysing bacterial genes, they found a family of enzymes that help gut bacteria harvest the sugars. When the team combined the enzymes with type A blood, the sugars were removed from the blood cells, resulting in type O blood. The process is 30 times more efficient than an existing one involving other enzymes. The bacterial enzymes will have to go through more safety testing before they can be used in blood destined for human transfusions, but it is a promising step, says Withers. He presented the work at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in Boston this week. Chelsea Whyte ■

BROWN, S. ET AL/CC BY 4.0

Bacteria hold key to universal donor blood

Prehistoric teenager was offspring of two species A SLIVER of bone from a cave in were thought to be rare. “The Russia is at the centre of what likelihood of actually finding may be the biggest archaeological a [first-generation] hybrid story of the year. The bone has always been considered belonged to an ancient human infinitesimally low,” says Katerina who had a Neanderthal mother Harvati-Papatheodorou at the and a Denisovan father. “Denny” University of Tübingen, Germany. is the only first-generation hybrid A few years ago, archaeologists hominin ever found. found a 90,000-year-old bone “My first reaction was fragment in Denisova cave. disbelief,” says Viviane Slon “The likelihood of finding a of the Max Planck Institute for first-generation hybrid has Evolutionary Anthropology in always been considered Leipzig, Germany. infinitesimally low” The find is either a stunning stroke of luck or a hint that hominins interbred more often Samantha Brown, then at the than we thought. It may even University of Oxford, discovered suggest that extinct groups like that it came from a hominin by Neanderthals did not die out, examining the proteins preserved but were absorbed by our species. inside it. Her team nicknamed the In prehistory, members of our hominin “Denny”. Based on the species interbred with at least structure of the bone, Denny died two other ancient humans: the at about 13 years of age. Neanderthals and the mysterious Slon and her colleagues have Denisovans, who are known only now examined Denny’s DNA, from fragments of bone and discovering that Denny was teeth discovered in Denisova female – and she had astonishing cave, Russia. Neanderthals and parentage. Her DNA was almost Denisovans interbred too. 50:50 Neanderthal and Denisovan, These interbreeding events arranged in a tell-tale way. Our

DNA comes in paired strands called chromosomes, one from each parent. In Denny’s case, each pair had one Neanderthal and one Denisovan chromosome, with very little mixing. She was the daughter of parents from different species (Nature, doi.org/cs64). Denny’s mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited only from mothers, is Neanderthal. Therefore, her mother was Neanderthal and her father Denisovan. Only 23 ancient hominins have had their genomes sequenced. Yet Denny is not the first with recent shared ancestry. There is also “Oase 1”, a member of our species who lived 37,000 years ago in what is now Romania. They had a Neanderthal ancestor just four to six generations earlier. If interbreeding were rare, we should not have found these individuals so easily, says Svante Pääbo, also of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. “It suggests that these groups, when they met, mixed quite freely with each other.” This doesn’t mean Neanderthals and Denisovans were constantly interbreeding. Their genomes show they were “quite distinct populations”, says Pääbo. They controlled separate territories – the Neanderthals in Europe, the Denisovans in east Asia – and occasionally met at the boundaries. He says the Denisova cave was “a unique area where they met, and then they had no prejudices against each other”. Pääbo argues that when modern humans expanded from Africa into Europe and Asia, they often interbred with Neanderthals and Denisovans. This could be why these groups vanished. “Neanderthals and Denisovans may not have become violently extinct, but may have become absorbed into modern human populations.” Michael Marshall ■ 25 August 2018 | NewScientist | 7

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Pipework below the city of Flint, Michigan, is being upgraded

AI hunts down lead pipes in Flint Frank Swain

EFFORTS are under way to replace the lead pipes that have been contaminating the water supply in the city of Flint, Michigan. Nobody knows which of the 55,000 properties are directly affected, but an artificially intelligent algorithm can make accurate guesses. The Flint water crisis began in 2014 when city officials began sourcing water from the local

Water worlds are everywhere in the galaxy PLANETS rich in water, with atmospheres of steam, oceans of liquid water and cores of rock surrounded by solid ice, may be abundant around distant stars. An analysis of the almost 4000 known exoplanets estimates that about 1400 are water-rich worlds, potentially increasing the chances that some harbour life. 8 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018

river instead of the Detroit water system. The water wasn’t treated properly and corroded lead pipes, causing the heavy metal to leach into drinking water. Residents complained of foul smelling, discoloured water that caused rashes, and were advised to boil tap water before drinking. Paediatrician Mona HannaAttisha raised the alarm in 2015 when she found herself treating children with abnormally high levels of lead in their blood. A state

“Life could develop in certain near-surface layers on these water worlds, if the pressures, temperatures and chemical conditions are appropriate,” says Li Zeng of Harvard University, who presented his results at the Goldschmidt geochemistry conference in Boston last week. Only a few exoplanets have been identified as water worlds. Zeng and his colleagues worked out the likely compositions of others by analysing measurements of the radius and mass of each, and modelling how they might have evolved. They relied on a well-established

of emergency was declared and millions of litres of bottled water shipped in. The water supply has now been reconnected to the Detroit water system, but the lead pipes remain. At the height of the crisis, Google funded a project to help map the affected homes. A team of scientists from various fields and institutions volunteered to help, but quickly realised there was little information available, as many records were missing, incomplete or outdated. Jacob Abernethy at Georgia Tech and his colleagues built an AI to predict which homes are likely to be connected to a lead pipe. They drew on work by a separate team that digitised old city plans and more than 140,000 handwritten records of building work in the city. The system catalogues 71 different pieces of information for every property in Flint, such as the age, value and location of the home. By training itself on properties where lead levels had been measured, the algorithm could predict other homes that were likely to have lead pipes. Before the AI was developed, homes were selected for pipe replacement based on educated guesses and around 20 per cent of the pipes dug up turned out not

to be made of lead, wasting time and money. “We had no good way of doing it, frankly,” says Michael McDaniel, who was in charge of the initial pipe replacement programme. Now, the AI system can produce a list of properties suspected to have lead pipes with a 97 per cent success rate. This amounts to a saving of $10 million, enough to make safe an additional 2000 homes. The team’s AI also revealed that the number of homes affected had been grossly underestimated. A couple of years into the crisis there was a big argument in Congress about how much more money would be needed, says Abernethy. The city had estimated that no more than 10 per cent of homes would be connected to lead pipes, but Abernethy and colleagues found it to be about 40 per cent. This was first predicted by the AI and since then has been supported by ongoing replacements. The revelation helped to secure a further $100 million of federal funding to clean up Flint. The team has made its data available to the firm now managing Flint’s clean up. It has also created an app that allows engineers to log the results of their surveys to improve the predictions. The model can be applied to other cities as well, says the team. ■

theory of how planets evolve from the disc of gas and material that forms around new stars. Small rocky planets like Mercury,

shrouded by huge quantities of gas, mostly hydrogen, and end up as giant planets like Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

Venus, Earth and Mars form in the hot, “terrestrial” zone closest to the star. Further out from the star, beyond a “frost-line”, temperatures are low enough for water vapour to condense into ice grains and clump together into icy planets. Some then become

Around 35 per cent of the known exoplanets don’t evolve fast enough and rebound closer to their host star to form water worlds, the researchers found. Oceans form from the melting core, with atmospheres of steam billowing from the oceans. On many of the worlds, water may account for more than half the mass of the planet, compared with just 0.02 per cent on Earth, says Zeng.

“Life could develop in certain near-surface layers on these water worlds, if conditions are appropriate” Andy Coghlan ■

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TAKE PART IN RESEARCH Round off your trip with three days on the subtropical island of Okinawa. Get stuck in at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology where you’ll take part in environmental research, learn about sustainable living and how coral is being restored.

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Alice Klein

EVER wanted to fly? A drug that helps people take charge of their dreams could let you try it from the comfort of your own bed. A few people have lucid dreams, in which they recognise they are dreaming and steer the path they take. Some others can learn to induce them using cognitive techniques. The practice is most commonly used to pursue fantasies, but it may also help with nightmares, says Benjamin Baird at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. However, its therapeutic potential has been limited by it often being so hard to achieve. Now, Baird and his colleagues have developed the most effective method yet for promoting lucid dreams, by combining cognitive training with a drug. The researchers taught 121 adults aged 19 to 75 a cognitive technique for stimulating lucid dreams. It involves picking a feature of a previous dream called a “dreamsign” that can serve as a reminder to become lucid when encountered again. The volunteers were then

Paper batteries use bacteria to make electricity

handed capsules of galantamine, which is used to treat mild to moderate Alzheimer’s disease. This drug boosts the brain chemical acetylcholine, which boosts memory, but also promotes rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, the phase in which dreams are most common. Each person got a high-dose capsule, a low-dose capsule and a placebo capsule, but they couldn’t tell which was which. On three occasions, they woke in the middle of the night, took a capsule, visualised their dreamsign and went back to sleep. The high dose was most effective, inducing lucid dreams in 42 per cent of participants. About 27 per cent reported lucid dreams with the low dose and 14 per cent after taking the placebo capsule (PLoS One, doi.org/cs38). The galantamine-induced dreams varied widely. One participant became lucid while dreaming about falling donkeys and actively flew out of their way. Another fulfilled her fantasy of rollerblading through a shopping centre after realising she was in a dream. The lucid dreams were rated as being more vivid,

MILLENNIUM IMAGES

Drug lets you control dreams

Lucid dreams were rated as being more vivid than the regular sort

complex and emotionally positive than regular dreams. Common side effects of galantamine in people with Alzheimer’s disease include stomach upsets and tiredness. In the study, 4 per cent of participants reported nausea, 6 per cent experienced insomnia and 2 per cent felt fatigued. Baird has experimented with galantamine himself. One time he took it, he dreamed about being in an unfamiliar house. As he inspected different objects, he was astonished at how real they felt. “As I ran my hand along a brick wall, for example, I could feel the

coarse texture and the outline of individual bricks,” he says. The potential therapeutic applications are exciting, says Denholm Aspy at the University of Adelaide in Australia. “This new method finally has the success rate we need to be able to properly do research on lucid dreaming,” he says. Small studies have already shown that lucid dreaming can be used to treat nightmares, says Aspy. “If you know you’re having a nightmare, it automatically becomes less distressing because you know it’s not real,” he says. “But more than that, you might be able to escape the situation, fly away, confront the threat or even just make yourself wake up.” ■

University in New York created a

bacteria and they start eating the

work on 19 August at a meeting of the

paper battery powered by bacteria to do the job instead. The battery is made of waxed

organic material from the pouch. Through a series of reactions, electrons from the food are moved

American Chemical Society in Boston. For now, says Gao, the battery can only be used to fuel fairly low-power

paper, with thin layers of metals

through the bacteria, eventually

devices, like a small calculator or an

and polymers printed on top to

being absorbed into the battery,

LED light. But he and Choi hope that

A PAPER battery powered by electron-harvesting bacteria could one day power environmentally friendly disposable devices. Researchers have been working

hold bacteria and harvest electrons.

where they can be used to power

it will someday be used in medical

The type of bacteria used, called

small devices. The batteries have a

technologies, like pregnancy tests,

exoelectrogens, pull electrons from

shelf life of about four months and

that currently require traditional

the molecules they eat and transfer

can provide power for up to two days. The researchers presented their

batteries and can be hard to dispose

on paper sensors and circuit boards for years, but they have mostly been powered by traditional batteries or simple chemical reactions. Yang Gao and Seokheun Choi at Binghamton

The battery is freeze-dried to place the bacteria in a dormant state. It is

10 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018

them outside their cells.

packaged with a small pouch of liquid bacterial food. When the device is squeezed, the liquid revives the

“The batteries have a shelf life of about four months and can provide power for up to two days”

of in a green way. “If we can provide power without using conventional batteries, those devices could be cheaper and more disposable and environmentally friendly,” says Gao. Leah Crane ■

Humanity will need the equivalent of 2 Earths to support itself by 2030.

People lying down solve anagrams in 10% less time than people standing up.

About 6 in 100 babies (mostly boys) are born with an extra nipple.

60% of us experience ‘inner speech’ where everyday thoughts take a back-and-forth conversational style. We spend 50% of our lives daydreaming.

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Autism linked to lingering insecticide million women during the early stages of pregnancy. Like in the UK and US, DDT was used widely in Finland before it was banned. The team screened the samples for DDE – a breakdown product of DDT that persists in the body for a long time – and found that, on average, DDE levels were higher in women who went on to have autistic children. Women whose children didn’t develop autism had, on average, 811 picograms of DDE present in

ALTHOUGH it has been banned for decades in many countries, the insecticide DDT may still be influencing whether babies develop autism. A study in Finland has found that pregnant women who show signs of high DDT exposure in their blood seem more likely to have children with autism. DDT was sprayed in large amounts from the 1940s onwards, to kill disease-carrying mosquitoes. But it was widely banned in Western nations in the 1970s and 1980s, after evidence mounted that it caused cancers in laboratory animals and impaired reproduction in wildlife. However, the insecticide takes decades to break down, so people are still absorbing it from contaminated water and food. It lodges in the body’s fat, circulates in the blood and is known to pass across the placenta to fetuses during pregnancy. To see if DDT might be linked to autism, Alan Brown of Columbia University in New York and his colleagues analysed blood samples taken in Finland between 1983 and 2005 from more than a

Oldest galaxies in the universe are next door MEET the Milky Way’s elderly neighbours. It turns out that the faint galaxies orbiting our own are among the oldest in our universe. These satellite galaxies, including Ursa Major and Boötes I, are thought to be more than 13 billion years old. The closest is probably Segue-1, some 75,000 light-years away, says Sownak Bose of the Harvard-

DDT was sprayed widely from the 1940s to kill insects

BETTMANN/GETTY

Andy Coghlan

each millilitre of their blood, but the average was 1032 picograms in those with autistic children (American Journal of Psychiatry, DOI: 10.1176/appi. ajp.2018.17101129). Comparing women with and without autistic children who had the highest levels of DDE, the team calculated that high exposure to DDT raises the likelihood of having a child with autism by around a third. The team also screened the samples for other long-lived pollutants called polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, which were formerly used as insulation in

electrical transformers. But they found no association between these and autism. Brown says this tallies with previous research showing that DDE, but not PCBs, have been linked with low birth weight and prematurity – two wellestablished factors in autism. However, Brown says the team’s findings shouldn’t concern people. “I would argue against worrying, because even among those with high levels, most won’t have children with autism,” he says. Further work is needed to determine if DDT really is linked to autism, and whether DDT itself is a cause, or if the two are linked by some other, causative factor. “Ideally, we’d like to see the same finding replicated in at least three studies to feel confident about the association,” says Kristen Lyall of the A. J. Drexel Autism Institute in Philadelphia. “I wouldn’t dismiss it as unlikely,” says Rosa Hoekstra of King’s College London. But she says any effect of DDT is very small compared with the genetic factors that contribute to autism. DDT levels in the countries that have banned it are slowly declining, so pregnant women today are likely to have slightly lower levels of DDE in their blood. But it will be a long time before the DDT used in the 1970s will have fully broken down. ■

Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Most attempts to find old galaxies have looked deep into the universe.

The discovery was made as part of research into how galaxies grew from

Way. They found two different

very small ones to the large ones we

they think are among the first that

Because light takes a long time to

see today. These old galaxies formed

formed, and brighter ones, which

travel to us from the far reaches of

in the “cosmic dark ages”, a period

formed later. The Milky Way itself

the cosmos, this is equivalent to

about 380,000 years after the big

formed later, because the smaller,

looking back in time. Now it turns

bang in which the early, hot universe

earlier galaxies inhibited the growth

out that some of the oldest galaxies

had cooled down and become

are right on our doorstep (The

transparent for the first time.

of our larger galaxy. The observation of these very faint

Astrophysical Journal, doi.org/cs3w). “The nice thing about that is that, because they are relatively near,

As part of this, the team studied satellite galaxies orbiting the Milky

we can actually see them,” says Bose. “Theoretical models predict that very, very old galaxies should be sprinkled throughout the cosmos.”

populations: very faint ones, which

galaxies has been possible only in the past decade, thanks to increasingly sophisticated sky maps from the

“Theoretical models predict that very, very old galaxies should be sprinkled throughout the cosmos”

Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the Dark Energy Survey, which have so far detected 54 satellite galaxies around the Milky Way. Alison George ■ 25 August 2018 | NewScientist | 13

NEWS & TECHNOLOGY

Human tissue to be grown in space Adam Mann

NASA

MUSCLE fibres and liver tissue are set to be grown on board the International Space Station (ISS). If successful, we could one day see full human organs grown in space. Researchers have studied the effects of microgravity on different types of cells for decades, but two projects in the pipeline would be the first to attempt to cultivate large volumes of human tissue in space. The first will grow muscle in a nutrient-rich chamber called a bioreactor in order to assess new drugs for muscle loss. Such loss is part of the natural ageing process, and starts to occur in physically inactive people in their 30s and can worsen over time. “The degree of muscle loss can be so significant that it creates a risk of frailty and can lead to poor health outcomes,” says Ngan Huang of Stanford University in California. While diet and exercise

14 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018

grow organs in the lab tends to be made of hard plastic and cells settle to the bottom of a container under the influence of gravity. Liver tissue grown in a rotating bioreactor, mimicking the effects of microgravity, has shown some promise. These liver cells are able to metabolise more drugs than those grown in static containers. But as cell clusters grow, the bioreactors need to spin faster in order to keep them suspended and eventually the cylinder begins turning so quickly that the tissue is pinned against the walls. Microgravity might more easily mimic the natural environment where organs develop. In the next

can alleviate some of these effects, doctors have long sought drugs to complement such practices. People who spend extended periods in microgravity also experience muscle loss, which is why astronauts must exercise rigorously while in space. Huang’s team intends to launch the experiment to the ISS next year and assess whether microgravity mimics an accelerated version of muscle loss. If so, the team hopes “Microgravity might more to test treatments in space. easily mimic the natural The second experiment will environment where attempt to grow a 3D structure made from functional liver tissue. organs develop” Biomedical engineers have produced thin bits of tissue such few years, Tammy Chang at the as cartilage or skin on Earth in the University of California, San past, but a complex organ like Francisco, and her colleagues the liver is more challenging. hope to send different stem cells Part of the problem is that that can give rise to the various organs inside the body develop in tissues and blood vessels of the a soft and buoyant environment, liver to the ISS. The cells will be whereas artificial scaffolding to filmed as they grow inside a bioreactor and the resulting tissue Sunita Williams exercising on will be brought back to Earth. the ISS to prevent muscle loss Chang says the eventual goal is to transplant some of the tissue into a rat and see if it functions properly. This could potentially open up a way to produce livers for people on organ donor lists. “Imagine if we show that we can generate life-saving tissues in orbit, and there’s no other way to do that,” says Chang. It might spur rocket technology to access low Earth orbit more cheaply, she says. Testing tissue growth in reduced gravity could reveal some unknowns, says bioengineer Jordan Miller of Rice University in Houston, Texas. “If we can validate that microgravity has a positive effect, maybe some of the biochemical pathways activated in a microgravity setting could be identified and those could be directly stimulated here on the ground,” he says. ■

Brew induces near-death experiences A PSYCHEDELIC drug taken as part of the South American plant brew ayahuasca produces effects that are strikingly similar to near-death experiences. Some people who narrowly escape dying report having had feelings of leaving the body or of sudden inner peace. Such phenomena are described as near-death experiences. The ayahuasca study suggests these may be explained by changes in how the brain works, and aren’t evidence of paranormal phenomena, say the researchers behind the finding. DMT is the main psychoactive ingredient in ayahuasca, used by some indigenous peoples in the Amazon. People who take it often describe feeling that they transcend their body and enter another realm. Chris Timmermann and his colleagues at Imperial College London gave DMT intravenously to 13 volunteers and afterwards asked them to fill in a questionnaire that assesses near-death experiences. The same volunteers had previously been given an intravenous placebo, and weren’t told which session involved the real drug. During the DMT session, all 13 participants met the criteria for a near-death experience (Frontiers in Psychology, doi.org/gdz665). They reported feeling as though they entered an “unearthly environment”, feeling “incredible peace” and having heightened senses and a feeling of unity with the universe. There were no statistically significant differences between the questionnaire responses of those who took DMT and 13 people who had reported actual near-death experiences. Little is known about what happens in the brain when someone has a near-death experience. The subjective similarity with taking DMT suggests that psychedelics could shed some light on the phenomenon, says Timmermann. Sam Wong ■

WHAT IF TIME STARTED FLOWING BACKWARDS?

WHAT IF THE RUSSIANS GOT TO THE MOON

FIRST?

WHAT IF DINOSAURS STILL RULED THE EARTH? AVAILABLE NOW newscientist.com/books

ALEX WILD

IN BRIEF Doubts over organ donation shake-up

Slacker ants take a back seat to get the job done faster

exiting them hundreds of times to extend the network.

TOO many cooks spoil the broth, and the same goes for

trying to avoid clogging up the tunnel,” says Goldman.

ants. A study into how these insects cooperate during a task has found that the optimum strategy is for most of

To further understand the process, Goldman and his team tested out different strategies with four excavation

them not to do any work. The findings may prove useful

robots. “One dug OK. Two dug OK. Three was kind of

for programming how large swarms of robots cooperate. Ants create networks of narrow underground tunnels by excavating soil bit by bit as a team. To understand the

good. But with four, the robots just couldn’t get

strategies they use, Daniel Goldman at Georgia Tech

causing clogs unless some took a back seat. The results

and his colleagues placed 30 ants into a transparent

suggest that when groups of individuals work together,

container filled with soil-like particles made of glass.

the best strategy may be for some to hang back, says

For 48 hours, ants created tunnels, entering and

But surprisingly only 30 per cent of the ants did around 70 per cent of the work. “Only a few… would do the majority of the work, with the rest just hanging out

anywhere,” he says. However smart the team made the robots, they kept

Goldman (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.aan3891).

Mean robot can help you solve tricky task CRUEL robot overlords get more out of their human subjects than nice ones. The mere presence of an unkind robot seems to improve some cognitive abilities, more so than being watched by a friendly robot or none at all. The effect of a robot observer on human performance was tested using the Stroop task, in which words printed in different colours appear on a screen and volunteers 16 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018

must identify the colour, ignoring the word itself. People are usually worse at this when the colour and word clash, like when the word “blue” is printed in green letters. Nicolas Spatola at the University of Clermont Auvergne in France and his colleagues paired volunteers with a small humanoid robot they could chat to. The robots were programmed to either answer all questions

negatively or all positively, which led to them being seen as mean or friendly. Those who had mean robots were faster at the task and made fewer mistakes than those with friendly ones or no robot (Science Robotics, doi.org/cs3r). It seems participants give more attention to the “bad” robot. That makes them focus only on the colour of a word, not on reading it. While cruel robots make us better at the Stroop task, they probably won’t work in every situation.

AN IMPENDING “opt-out” system for organ donation in England may fail to boost transplant rates and could even lead to a fall. From 2020, people in England will be presumed to consent to donation unless they have signed a register to object. The country currently has an opt-in approach, where people sign up to give consent. Under both systems, families can veto donation. To gauge the effect of the opt-out system, Magda Osman at Queen Mary University of London and colleagues asked nearly 1300 people to imagine they were a family member being asked to make this decision under different rules. They found people felt more certain that a relative wanted to donate if they had signed up under the opt-in system, than if they had been presumed to consent under opt-out (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, doi.org/cs3s).

Infected plankton make it cloudier WHEN clouds cast a shadow over a day out, tiny, sick sea creatures may be partly to blame. The phytoplankton Emiliania huxleyi (Ehux) is a single cell encased in calcite discs. When infected with a virus known as EhV, it sheds this exoskeleton. Sea spray can fling the discs into the air as an aerosol and water vapour can condense around them to form cloud droplets. Miri Trainic at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and her team tested the effect of the virus on calcite aerosol release. They found it was 10 times higher for infected Ehux. These discs may contribute more to cloud formation than sea salt because their shape keeps them aloft longer (iScience, doi.org/cs3t).

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RAISING kids is hard, even for fish. Male blennies sometimes eat their eggs if they think they aren’t worth the effort and want a better batch. After female barred-chin blennies (Rhabdoblennius nitidus) lay eggs, they leave their male partners in sole charge of caring for them until they hatch. This arrangement usually works well. But if the female leaves less than a thousand or so eggs, the male typically eats them instead of looking after them. It was thought this was because the nutritional value of eating the eggs outweighed the benefits of protecting only a few offspring. But Yukio Matsumoto at Nagasaki

Low-carb, high-meat diets could cut years of life DIETS low in carbohydrates have been linked to reduced longevity unless they are dominated by plant-based foods. An analysis of data from 15,400 people in the US found that those who lived longest tended to get about 50 to 55 per cent of their energy from carbohydrates. At the age of 50, such people could expect to live a further 33 years. This is one year longer than people who obtain 70 per cent or more of their energy from carbs, and four years longer than people who get less than 30 per cent of

calories from this food group. Sara Seidelmann at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and her colleagues wondered if the types of fat and protein people eat on low-carb diets might contribute to reduced longevity. Diving into the data, they found that when people replaced carbs with meat such as lamb, pork, beef and chicken – typical for low-carb dieters in Europe and the US – their mortality rose. But the opposite was true for those who ate plant-based sources of fat and protein such as nuts,

legumes and vegetables. The team thinks that the higher mortality of a low-carb, high-meat diet is due to lower intake of vegetables and fruit, as well as the harmful effects of animal proteins and fats on the body’s systems that counter inflammation and oxidative stress, when cells are threatened by a surge in reactive molecules. For those who eat a lot of carbohydrates, death rates may be higher due to metabolic problems associated with large quantities of refined carbs (The Lancet Public Health, doi.org/cs5h). CASARSAGURU/GETTY

Honey, I ate the kids again

4D printer creates complex ceramics

University in Japan and his colleagues found that the motivation was actually to enable them to breed again as soon as possible to get a larger, healthier batch of young. They showed that the breeding cycle of male R. nitidus, found in Asia, is tightly controlled by the presence or absence of eggs. When eggs are laid in their nests, testosterone levels in the male fish drop and they cannot mate – perhaps to make them stick to parenting. When the eggs hatch about a week later, their testosterone levels rise and they can court females again

AFLO/NATUREPL.COM

(Current Biology, doi.org/cs3p).

POTTERY has had a futuristic makeover. It is now possible to 4D print ceramics, which could be used for strong, complex parts in rockets and electronic devices. 4D printing involves making structures that change shape in response to stimuli such as heat, light or elastic forces. This is useful for creating complex objects, but has mostly been limited to flexible materials like metals and plastics. Now, Jian Lu at City University of Hong Kong and his colleagues have used ceramics, which have the advantage of being extremely strong and able to cope with extreme temperatures. The researchers developed a ceramic “ink” by mixing ceramic nanoparticles and silicone rubber, which they then used to print stretchy sheets. To create 4D structures, the researchers stretched the sheets and attached joints in various patterns. Once released, the elastic forces and pattern of joints made the sheets contract and change into bent or helical shapes. Finally, heating at 1000°C caused them to react with air and form hard, rigid ceramics (Science Advances, doi.org/cs5j).

To snap spaghetti in two, add a twist IT IS a puzzle that has perplexed

Technology have concluded you

physicists for decades: hold a strand

can, provided you add a twist into

of dry spaghetti at both ends, bend

the mix. Using a pair of clamps, they

it until it snaps, and you will always

twisted strands of spaghetti almost

end up with three or more pieces. In 2005, researchers in France finally discovered why: after the

360 degrees before bringing the

initial break, the brittle spaghetti snapping itself again. Yet a lingering

reliably snap spaghetti in two. Using a high-speed camera, they found the twist prevented the

question still hovered over the

two remnants flexing back quite as

culinary conundrum: was it possible,

forcefully as an untwisted strand.

with the right technique, to snap a

The untwisting motion also released

strand of spaghetti into just two? Mathematicians led by Jörn Dunkel at the Massachusetts Institute of

some of the stored energy, further

flexes back in the opposite direction,

two clamps together until the strand broke. With this method, they could

reducing the likelihood of a second fracture (PNAS, doi.org/cs3v).

25 August 2018 | NewScientist | 17

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INSIGHT LIFE EXPECTANCY

The big slowdown Growth in UK life expectancy is starting to ease off – and no one knows why. Clare Wilson and Andy Coghlan explore the possibilities

mortality figures are now being classed as a real change. They mean that although life expectancy was previously climbing by about three months a year in women and four months a year in men, it is now two weeks and one month a year respectively (see graphs, below). Similar trends have been seen in other countries, such as the US, Australia and Germany, the ONS reported. However, that doesn’t mean this lower growth in life expectancy will become the norm. Some other countries, such as Japan, Denmark and Italy, have previously seen a slowdown in life expectancy increases, but then reverted to the old, higher rate. “The trend could reassert itself,” says Stripe. “We do not have enough data yet to say.” What happens next will have tremendous importance for the future of the UK. So what are the possible explanations for the slowdown?

Most recent six years

Males

Females

15

10

5

**2005-2015

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0

*2006-2016

For a long time we have been successfully reducing death rates from heart disease and stroke, but now the knock-on effects are a major factor behind the unexpected backsliding in life expectancy, says the ONS. Death rates for these conditions plunged by 70 per cent in the past three decades, thanks in part to improvements in heart surgery. Anti-smoking campaigns and the introduction of drugs to lower blood pressure also both prevented heart attacks and stroke. Now many of those who benefited may be starting to die. One factor could be that the hearts of those saved by surgery eventually give out through heart failure, for which there is no effective treatment. Shifts to unhealthier habits could be another. Although smokers in the UK continue to quit – the biggest help to avoiding heart trouble – gains are now potentially being lost through poor diet and lack of exercise, says Rory Collins at the University of Oxford.

Preceding six years

DEADLY DEMENTIA SOURCE: OFFICE FOR NATIONAL STATISTICS

20

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Increase in life expectancy (weeks)

In the UK and US, the average annual increase in life expectancy at birth has fallen, although this isn’t the case with all rich nations

SICK AT HEART

***2004-2014

20 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018

More than two-thirds of deaths in the UK are in people over the age of 75, so most of the recent slowdown in life expectancy improvements is likely to stem from changes to death rates in this age group. The most obvious factor is an increasing number of deaths due to dementia. Some of this is down to doctors being more willing to put dementia as the

B&M NOSKOWSKI/GETTY

THE past century saw rapid growth in life expectancy, a key measure of progress. But no longer. UK figures released this month show that the life expectancy of people in the country, currently 79 for men and 83 for women, has started to rise more slowly. The change isn’t something to panic about – life expectancy isn’t falling, it’s just not rising as fast as it was. But it will have an impact. “Potentially, it’s a really big societal, cultural and economic change that we are seeing,” says Nick Stripe at the UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS), which produced the figures. Life expectancy is calculated from the proportion of deaths of people at each age. This death rate has been falling in all Western countries for decades, thanks to a raft of improvements in medicine and nutrition. The fall started to slow down in 2011 in the UK. At first it could have been a statistical fluke, but the latest

cause of death because of increased awareness and reduced stigma. But there is also a real rise in this condition. As more people survive heart attacks and cancer, they live long enough to get Alzheimer’s disease and other kinds of dementia. This in turn can cause pneumonia: people with dementia often have difficulty swallowing, which leads to food entering the airways, triggering infections. The rise in dementia cases is likely to persist because, unlike heart disease and cancer, we have no effective therapies for it. “These numbers will continue to rise in the absence of a new treatment,” says Matthew Norton of Alzheimer’s Research UK.

AUSTERITY BITES Stalling life expectancy isn’t just an issue for older people. Since 2012, the death rates

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How much time do you have left? It all depends...

the decade that followed 1925. For unclear reasons, they have long been experiencing higher rates of improvements in life expectancy than those born before and after. There were several beneficial changes in the 1920s that could have helped kick this off, such as improved nutrition, better sanitation and the advent of

“Potentially, it’s a really big societal, cultural and economic change that we are seeing”

among those aged 15 to 55 have also been increasing, mostly through accidents, assault or suicide. Although the number of deaths in this age group is too small to have much impact on headline life expectancy figures, the trend could be a sign of something larger. One worry is that cuts in social support and healthcare resulting from the UK’s austerity drive, allied to poor job prospects, could lead to “deaths of despair”, like those seen in white, middle-aged Americans. There are parallels with the US, says Stripe, but he thinks the jury’s out on whether austerity is to blame for the slowdown in the UK’s life expectancy. “All we can say is that the data corresponds to an interesting period politically and economically. But correlation is not causation,” he says. What’s not in doubt is that the UK’s economy is stagnating.

In 2017, its economic growth was the fifth lowest in Europe at just 1.7 per cent. We know that economic collapses elsewhere have shortened lives. The most well known occurred following the fall of the Soviet Union, which saw life expectancy for men plunge from 63.8 to 57.7 between 1990 and 1994. “Deteriorating health among working-age men is a type of canary in the coal mine for something going deeply wrong with our labour markets,” says David Stuckler at the University of Bocconi in Milan, Italy.

GOLDEN OLDIES While the slowdown in life expectancy rises is recent, some of the factors responsible may have happened decades ago. One could be the dwindling of the so-called golden cohort: a group of people who were born in

vaccines for diphtheria and tetanus. But this doesn’t explain why rises in life expectancy slowed for those born later. One theory is that the golden cohort benefited from eating more fruit and vegetables in their childhood and adolescence because food rationing, which began in the second world war and was phased out in the 1950s, restricted access to unhealthier foods. Whatever the reasons, this group are now in their 80s and 90s and their numbers are falling – so they make less of a contribution to overall death rates. The health advantages of that group are beginning to fade from the overall figures, says Stripe.

HEROIN HIKE Another possible reason for a slowdown in life expectancy improvements in under-55s could be escalating drug deaths. A National Health Service report published in February revealed that 2593 people died from drug misuse in England and Wales in 2016, 58 per cent more than in 2006 and the highest toll since records began in 1993. Deaths from drug misuse are now the third most common killer in 15 to 49-year-olds, it said. Increased availability and

purity of heroin has been blamed for a doubling in heroin-related deaths between 2012 and 2016, with many of those dying aged 40 or above, according to a report released by Public Health England in September. “People who became addicted to heroin in their teenage years and 20s back in the 1980s and 1990s are now older, less resilient and therefore more susceptible to overdosing,” says Johnathan Watkins of the PILAR Research Network, a think-tank in Cambridge, UK, that analyses public health issues. Austerityrelated cutbacks in support systems for drug users may also have contributed, he says.

OBESITY TIME BOMB Doctors have long been predicting that today’s children will be some of the first in history to have shorter lives than their parents thanks to the obesity epidemic. But it may be premature to assume that it is behind the recent slowdown in the rate of increase of our life expectancy. Most of the levelling off stems from changes to death rates in people who are in their 70s or older – where there hasn’t been so much of a rise in obesity in the UK. Changes to death rates in younger age groups are mainly due to other causes. In fact, it takes fairly severe obesity to have much of an effect on lifespan, and the impact declines as people get older. For instance, people in their 60s and 70s who are classed as obese lose just one extra year of life on average. “Being mildly overweight doesn’t cause a huge difference in mortality figures,” says Steven Grover of McGill University in Montreal, Canada. But David Ludwig of Harvard Medical School predicts that obesity will have more of an effect on life expectancy over the next couple of decades. “The impacts are still flowing through the pipeline,” he says. ■ 25 August 2018 | NewScientist | 21

COMMENT

Lives in the balance Making population control part of the fight against climate change would be very wrong, says Ian Angus SHOULD we confront population growth as part of efforts to tackle climate change? That question is raised by US environmentalists this week. They argue that population control ought to be seen as a potential “policy lever”. To their credit, they advocate only voluntary fertility-reducing measures such as education and access to family planning (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.aat8680). Unfortunately, history shows that good intentions aren’t enough to prevent abuses, and that voluntary programmes frequently turn into the opposite. In Bangladesh, hailed by population lobbyists as a success story for voluntary birth control programmes, poorer women were paid to “accept” sterilisation, and the number who accepted soared when unemployment was high. In Peru, 350,000 chiefly Quechuan and Aymaran indigenous

minority women were sterilised against their will in the 1990s. Such abominations result from treating fertility control not as a human right, but as a means to an end. When birth control policies are motivated by demographic, economic or environmental goals, the focus easily shifts away from supporting women’s right to choose, to pressuring them to make the “right” choice. That’s especially true in nations divided along ethnic, class and racial lines, and in which those in power see “others” as disposable. These kinds of societies are more likely to use population control in the name of climate change. In the past, we were told that reducing birth rates in developing countries would end hunger and poverty. It didn’t. Now we are told it will slow climate change, not because poorer people are high carbon dioxide emitters – they

Maximum impact A “mega” science journal for Africa will be a big boost to research there, says Curtis Abraham THE wait is nearly over for Africa’s scientists. Very soon, they won’t have to rely on collaboration with Western academics and institutions to get work published in a high-profile journal. The first edition of Scientific African, the continent’s new “mega” journal backed by a major publisher, is due in September. 22 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018

It could be a game changer. Lack of access to prominent Western journals represents a catch-22 for many African scientists. Without it, their work can suffer and become less publishable. A generation ago, sub-Saharan Africa’s share of the world’s scientific papers was 1 per cent, but by 1996 it had dropped to

about 0.7 per cent, where it stayed for almost a decade with no sign of recovery, according to Robert Tijssen at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Scientific African will give a welcome added incentive for research into regional challenges that might not be prominent on a Western agenda: malnutrition, conflict, adaptation to climate change, unproductive agriculture and haemorrhagic disease. The new journal will, of course,

“This will give an added incentive for work on challenges not prominent on a Western agenda”

publish on broader topics. South Africa is co-host of the Square Kilometer Array, an effort to build the world’s largest radio telescope. Robotics engineer Ashitey TrebiOllennu, a Ghanaian-born NASA scientist who worked on the robotic craft that found water on Mars, has established the Ghana Robotics Academy Foundation. But the hope is that work that has remained in the shadows will get exposure, aiding African research careers. This could rebalance partnerships. As it stands, collaboration is pretty much skewed towards Western nations, who have largely conceptualised and designed

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Ian Angus edits online journal Climate & Capitalism and co-authored Too Many People? Population, Immigration, and the Environmental Crisis (Haymarket)

projects without much, if any, input from African colleagues. That could bring us closer to the ideal of local solutions to local challenges, as championed by William Easterly, an economist at New York University. He sees this as a more effective way for poorer nations to achieve prosperity than the grand schemes of the West that, by and large, have failed to deliver socio-economic benefits. Change won’t come overnight, but Scientific African’s debut will be an important moment, one with an outsize impact. ■ Curtis Abraham is a writer based in Kampala, Uganda

ANALYSIS Cancer risk

JOSH EDELSON/POOL VIA REUTERS

aren’t – but because emissions from poorer countries might rise. Never mind that nations with high birth rates have low per capita emissions or that economic development in those places is controlled by corporate entities, not population. Never mind that most industries in poorer nations produce goods for wealthier ones, that poorer people have no influence over which technologies firms use, get little benefit from polluting industries and are the main victims of global warming. As the Science authors say, safe, affordable contraception should be available to all, so women can choose whether and when to bear children. But linking birth control to climate change risks eroding women’s right to choose. If rich countries treat women’s rights instrumentally, as a means to achieve environmental ends, they will strengthen repressive elites and deter the poorest people from backing environmental causes. Climate policies must incorporate the deepest respect for human rights and social justice. Population control campaigns do not qualify. ■

Glyphosate ruling at odds with evidence Tom Chivers

simply don’t know if glyphosate was a relevant cause of cancer in this case or any other, he says. In 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a branch of the World Health Organization (WHO), said that glyphosate is “probably carcinogenic”, having reviewed the evidence. But Pharoah says this decision is controversial. The IARC found no evidence at all from human studies, and its evidence from animal studies is unconvincing: some studies in rats

DOES weedkiller cause cancer? According to a ruling by a Californian court last week, yes. Monsanto, the agricultural chemicals company, has been ordered to pay $289 million to Dewayne Johnson (pictured), a groundskeeper who says his terminal cancer was caused by their products Roundup and RangerPro, which contain the chemical glyphosate. The ruling has led to Greenpeace calling for sales of the weedkiller to be restricted and shares in Monsanto’s “We simply don’t know if parent company Bayer to drop. glyphosate was a relevant Meanwhile, Thérèse Coffey, an cause of cancer in this environment minister in the UK case or any other” government, is under fire for her tacit support of the products, having tweeted that she was about to and mice found evidence of a raised “deploy the amazing Roundup!”. risk of certain tumours at very high But while the jury ruled that doses, while other studies found Johnson’s cancer, a non-Hodgkin no association. lymphoma, was probably caused by In particular, there was no evidence glyphosate, the evidence for a link of a raised risk of the non-Hodgkin is extremely thin. lymphoma that Johnson developed. “I don’t think there’s any good “It’s bizarre,” says Pharoah. “You can’t scientific evidence,” says Paul Pharoah, tell a coherent story.” who studies cancer epidemiology at The IARC’s finding stands out the University of Cambridge. We further because separate reviews of

glyphosate’s safety by the European Food Safety Authority, the European Chemicals Agency and the US Environmental Protection Agency found no increased risk of cancer. Another review by a different branch of the WHO also found that glyphosate isn’t carcinogenic in rats, although it couldn’t rule out that it might be in mice, in very high doses. Cancer Research UK says there is a “small amount of evidence” that people exposed to very high doses might have increased risk, but no evidence of risk at normal levels. There is also a problem in that there is no plausible mechanism. Cancer is usually the result of DNA damage, which glyphosate doesn’t cause. Pharoah adds that the jury’s wariness is understandable. Major corporations have a long and inglorious history of obfuscating evidence that would make their product seem harmful – the manufactured doubt over the links between tobacco and cancer, or fossil fuels and global warming, are obvious examples. But there is no evidence that has happened here. There have been several independent studies finding no link. It is OK to be cautious about big companies selling chemicals and claiming that they are harmless, but in the specific case of glyphosate, the likelihood of it causing cancer is somewhere between zero and negligible. ■ 25 August 2018 | NewScientist | 23

APERTURE

24 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018

Helping hand THIS is an indri, the largest of Madagascar’s endemic lemurs – and it really does need all the help it can get. Almost all members of this iconic group of primates, which range from mouse-sized animals up to the indri, which is as big as a small child, are on the brink of extinction. This month, an assessment for the International Union for Conservation of Nature said that 95 per cent of lemur species are at risk, making this the most threatened mammal group anywhere on the planet. The indri is known for its stunningly loud call. Like other lemurs, it is a victim of hunting and habitat loss to slash-and-burn agriculture. Its larger size – it weighs 9 kilograms – makes it a prime target for hunters and means it requires a bigger territory to survive. Conserving it will be a challenge. Because it has never bred in captivity, preserving it in its wild habitat is its best hope. Well-managed protected areas offer the greatest chance of success, and ecotourism provides vital incomes in an impoverished nation. Christoph Schwitzer, a lemur expert at Bristol Zoological Society in the UK, says there is still time to save these animals. “I am an unfaltering optimist and remain hopeful that all 107 lemur species will survive the current extinction crisis in Madagascar,” he says. “We haven’t yet lost a single lemur species in modern times and even though the rarest one – the northern sportive lemur – is now down to just 60 individuals in the wild, these populations can bounce back to larger numbers if the conditions are right for them.” Jon White

Photographer Nick Garbutt naturepl.com

25 August 2018 | NewScientist | 25

KEN RICHARDSON

The maverick putting ageing in reverse

26 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018

INTERVIEW Geneticist George Church tells Catherine de Lange why we should all get our genome sequenced, why sperm editing mustn’t be sidelined and how dogs will lead us to age reversal

H

E MADE his name as a pioneer of gene sequencing in the 90s. Since then, however, George Church has also gained a reputation as something of a maverick, with his often-controversial ideas on how to apply gene editing, most notably his project to bring back the woolly mammoth. Church is a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and a prolific entrepreneur. He has also worked for decades to get more people to have their genome sequenced, and with his latest company, he hopes he has hit on a way to do just that. Why have you set up Nebula Genomics?

It’s not the first time I’ve tried to figure out a way to get affordable genomes to the people of Earth. I’ve tried many models. I think this one is the best as it addresses several issues. One of those is trust, because we’re using secure encryption. The other is price. I used to think there would be some magic price that would trigger everybody to get their genome sequenced. Now I have concluded that even zero is not low enough. We are going to pay people to have it done. Why do you think people are so resistant to getting their genome sequenced?

One reason is there’s poor communication of its value by the press, and even by my colleagues. As a result, most people imagine that they are not at risk of having a child with a genetic disease if no one in their family has ever had one. That’s far from the facts. Most infants that are born severely affected are the first in their family history, as far as the parents know. It’s like seat belts. For years, people wouldn’t install seat belts, and once they were installed, they wouldn’t buckle them, even though it was clearly good for them and does no harm.

The same is true of getting your genome sequenced. It could help prevent a proportion of tragic birth defects, which also cost upwards of $1 million each. You can save the healthcare system trillions of dollars. So you think everyone should get their genome sequenced?

I don’t think everyone should do any particular thing other than breathe and eat, but probably yes, it’s good public health. Ninety-five per cent of people will find there was no point in sequencing their genome, but they don’t know that in advance. Imagine you are coming to the end of your life and sitting in the hospital and you say to yourself, why did I bother getting seat belts and airbags? That would be a very weird way to think about seat belts, but it’s not a weird way to think about genetics, apparently. You are also working on gene editing in sperm. Why is this important?

If you have a couple that are both unaffected carriers of a genetic condition, they have a high chance of their children being affected very seriously. As an alternative to standard practice right now – which is abortion and IVF – you could edit the sperm to remove the faulty gene. Procreation would then be indistinguishable from the usual, except up front you engineered some of the cells in the testes. I have been one of the people making sure that this is in the conversation, because the gene-editing conversation has a tendency to go to embryos rather than to sperm. And I think there’s a huge difference, certainly in how acceptable they are to certain groups. For example, in 2004 a Vatican commission imagined a scenario in which editing sperm would be acceptable: it could avoid the unnaturalness of in vitro fertilisation and abortion. But any gene editing with results that would be passed on to the next generation faces regulatory obstacles, right?

The US Congress voted for legislation that prevents the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) from evaluating the safety and efficacy of germline gene editing. They didn’t explicitly ban sperm editing, but it’s implicitly banned. I don’t think they thought that through. The people who promoted that aspect of the bill were probably anti-abortion, but ironically that bill is delaying the arrival of technology that would reduce the number of abortions on medical grounds.

Do you have another commercial venture brewing?

That’s a complicated one: we have 13 start-ups coming out of my lab alone. One of them, Rejuvenate Bio, is working on ageing reversal – in dogs, initially. Why work on ageing reversal in dogs first?

One of the reasons is we can make the cost much lower. The FDA approval for veterinary products is a lot faster and cheaper, and I want the world to get used to the idea that gene therapies can be inexpensive. Dogs are a really good product target, but they are also a good segue to humans because they are similar in size, they live in our environment, they eat our food, we are responsive to their emotional state. In many ways, they are like children. We want to do this in dogs that are at least 11 years old. We have tested ageing reversal in mice that are at least 2 years old, mice almost dead with ageing. What do you really mean by ageing reversal?

Well, there are acute diseases where the recovery is faster in young animals: for example, heart problems in which there is essentially no recovery when you’re old,

“Sperm editing would result in fewer abortions on medical grounds” but it is very fast when you’re young. So, we are looking at things like how gene therapy can aid recovery from cardiac damage, kidney problems, obesity, diabetes – a lot of things that really only kill old people, only kill dogs that are over 10 years old. Ageing reversal is a much better target than longevity. It’s very difficult to get the FDA to approve a drug that will make you live 20, 30 years longer. The FDA requires you to prove exactly what you want to put on the label, so if you want to put 30 years of added longevity, you have to do a 30-year study. We’re saying we can achieve ageing reversal in maybe a couple of months, so then our study can be that short. Do the animals you are treating look the same afterwards?

The mice look the same. Perhaps a little friskier. ■ Catherine de Lange is New Scientist ’s deputy features editor 25 August 2018 | NewScientist | 27

MATT CHASE

28 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018

COVER STORY

MIND OVER MATTER Simply changing your attitude could make you itter, slimmer, less stressed and even younger, inds David Robson

O

“

UR minds aren’t passive observers simply observing reality as it is; our minds actually change reality. The reality we experience tomorrow is partly the product of the mindsets we hold today.” That’s what Alia Crum told global movers and shakers at this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. It may sound like New Age nonsense, but Crum, who heads the Mind & Body lab at Stanford University in California, can back up her claims with hard evidence showing the mysterious influence the mind has over our health and well-being. Crum’s pioneering research was inspired by her own experiences as a child gymnast and college ice hockey player. “You can be the same physical being from one day to the next,” she says, “but your mindset can have a dramatic effect on performance and physiological capabilities.” She often wondered why. Then, as a psychology student, she read about the placebo effect and had a eureka moment: if our expectations can influence the effectiveness of a drug, perhaps something similar can happen in other situations, too. Pursuing that idea, Crum and others have discovered that your mindset affects everything from your weight and fitness to the physical toll of insomnia and stress – even how well you age. The upshot is that two people could have identical genes and lifestyles but one can end up healthier than the other, thanks solely to their different thoughts. Placebos are inert pills used in most clinical drug trials. The participants are divided randomly into two groups: half take the drug

being tested, the rest, for comparison, take an identical-looking sugar pill. With no active ingredient, the placebo shouldn’t have any effects. Yet it often brings about measurable changes, triggering the release of natural painkillers and lowering blood pressure, for example – all because of people’s expectations. Patients sometimes reap these benefits even when they know they are taking the placebo (see “Everyday placebos”, page 30). On the downside, our expectations of a pill can also produce side effects, including nausea and skin rashes. This is the placebo effect’s “evil” twin, the nocebo effect (see “The science of voodoo”, page 32). Crum was “blown away” when she learned how powerful these effects can be. “But what surprised me most was the fact that we’ve done relatively little to understand and harness them to improve health and wellbeing,” she says. Governments spend huge amounts of money encouraging us to adopt healthier lifestyles. What if our efforts could be boosted, or undermined, by the very psychological processes that influence a drug’s efficacy through the placebo and nocebo effects, Crum wondered. She has spent the past decade investigating that possibility. One of Crum’s first experiments examined the fitness of 84 hotel cleaners. She suspected that few of them would be aware of the sheer amount of exercise their job entails, and that this might prevent them from gaining the full benefits of that workout. To manipulate their mindsets, she gave half of them detailed information about the physical demands of > 25 August 2018 | NewScientist | 29

EVERYDAY PLACEBOS CAFFEINE: If a strong espresso sets your nerves jangling, that may be largely due to your expectations. Even pure water increased alertness and raised blood pressure in volunteers who were told it contained caffeine. As for those withdrawal symptoms when you can’t get your morning cup of joe, they might be all in your head, too. SPORTS SUPPLEMENTS: There is little scientific backing for many of these products, but studies show that people only have to believe they are taking performance enhancers or energy drinks to show greater stamina and strength. Even the effects of steroids may be boosted by a placebo response. DESIGNER BRANDS: Are they really better than generics? Not necessarily. People tricked into thinking they were wearing designer sunglasses could more easily decipher small writing through the glare of bright light than those who thought they were wearing less prestigious brands. BOOZE: Drinking culture is full of urban myths, including the idea that adding Red Bull to vodka “gives you wings”. Studies reveal that the power of expectation is what really increases feelings of drunkenness. LUCKY CHARMS: They work because we believe they will. Golfers who thought they were using a professional’s putter perceived the hole to be larger and easier to putt – and were more accurate as a result.

30 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018

their work – such as the fact that hoovering burns 200 calories an hour – and told them that their activity met the US surgeon general’s exercise recommendations. One month later, despite reporting no change to their diet or activity outside work, the cleaners who received the information had lost about a kilogram each, and their average blood pressure had dropped from elevated to normal. The others showed no difference. It was, admittedly, a small study and Crum didn’t record actual behaviour. “It could be that they were putting slightly more oomph into making the beds,” she says. However, a follow-up study with her colleague, Octavia Zahrt, bolstered the idea that people’s expectations directly influence their body’s response to exercise. That study used data from health surveys monitoring more than 60,000 people for up to 21 years. Zahrt found that the “perceived fitness” of the participants – how they felt compared with the average person – was a better predictor of their risk of mortality than the amount of time they said they spent exercising. Crucially, influence everyday fitness, but argues that some of them wore accelerometers for part “we can learn a lot about the mechanisms, of the survey period – yet, after taking their implications and applications” of the actual physicial activity into account, the mind-body connection from such studies. influence of their perceived fitness remained. Crum has now documented many other Overall, people who took a more pessimistic ways in which our mindset could be harming view of their fitness were up to 71 per cent more likely to die during the survey, compared our health. A nocebo effect may undermine with those who thought they were more active efforts to lose weight by dieting, for instance. than average – whatever their exercise routine. In 2011, Crum offered volunteers a milkshake at her lab, then measured their levels of the How this works is still a bit of a mystery. We do know that the brain can directly control “hunger hormone” ghrelin, which normally drops after a meal. Although everyone blood pressure through the autonomic received the same shake, some were told it nervous system. In addition, Crum suspects was healthy while others were led to believe that a poor perception of your fitness could be triggering inflammation and the release of hormones such as cortisol, which might “Understanding that stress help determine how the body responds to needn’t be damaging can exercise. Her team is investigating possible mechanisms but, she says, it’s not too early to help your body cope with it” take advantage of these effects. Crum’s advice, they were having an indulgent treat. The which she follows herself, is not to deceive impact was striking. Those who thought yourself about your fitness, but to make sure they had drunk a low-calorie shake showed that you don’t undervalue the exercise you markedly higher levels of ghrelin afterwards, do either. You should also avoid comparing yourself critically with your peers, particularly which left them feeling less full. Ghrelin doesn’t affect appetite alone. if they are exceptionally sporty. Fabrizio Benedetti at the University of Turin By signalling food deprivation, the hormone Medical School, Italy, who has pioneered work also slows down metabolism, tipping the body on the placebo and nocebo effects, praises the towards storing fat rather than burning it. findings. “Crum’s work is very interesting and It makes evolutionary sense to reduce energy her approach to health is important from both consumption when resources are scarce, but it is bad news when we are trying to lose weight. a medical and psychological point of view,” “When people think they are eating healthily, says Benedetti. He stresses the need for that’s associated with the sense of caution, given the many variables that

You don’t need to go to the gym to get the benefits of a workout

MICHAEL LOEWA/LAIF/CAMERAPRESS

actually improve health, triggering the production of hormones necessary for cell growth, among other things. “There’s a lot of public health messaging that warns us about the effects of stress, but it’s one-sided, and builds the mindset that stress is debilitating, when in fact there are many enhancing qualities,” says Crum. What’s more, simply understanding that stress needn’t be damaging can help our bodies cope with it. After watching a video on the ways that stress can boost focus and creativity, Crum’s participants showed more optimal hormonal responses under stress, marked by moderate levels of cortisol and raised levels of growthpromoting hormones.

Fizzy drinks trick your brain, which is why they don’t fill you up as much as solid foods

assessed students’ attitudes by getting them to rate statements such as “experiencing stress depletes my health and vitality” and “experiencing stress enhances my performance and productivity”. Then she told them that they had to give a short presentation. Faced with this prospect, those who considered stress to be debilitating rather than enhancing showed the largest physiological reactions, including greater fluctuations in levels of the stress hormone cortisol. Such reactions are thought to underpin the most damaging health effects of stress. However, moderate stress responses can

PLAINPICTURE/BLEND IMAGES/MOXIE PRODUCTIONS

deprivation,” says Crum. “And that mindset matters in shaping our physiological response.” Instead, she suggests, dieters should cultivate a “mindset of indulgence”, savouring the textures and flavours of whatever they are eating. Non-dieters could be falling prey to this effect, too. When we drink a sugary beverage, our brain doesn’t seem to recognise the liquid as a source of energy, and fails to adjust digestion accordingly so that we tend to eat more afterwards than if we had eaten solid food containing the same number of calories. However, it is possible to subvert this effect by changing our expectations. Richard Mattes at Purdue University in Indiana primed people to believe that an energy drink would solidify once it reached their stomach. As well as lowering ghrelin levels, this increased their insulin response after consumption, and the drink stayed in their stomach longer – all of which left them feeling fuller. “That was followed by a decrease in the daily energy they consumed,” says Mattes. Crum has also been investigating the influence of our expectations on stress. It is well known that chronic stress can lead to reduced cognitive performance, high blood pressure and a compromised immune system. But can the fear of stress itself worsen its harmful effects? To find out, Crum first

Tired all the time? The dangers of stressing about stress might help explain some insomnia too. About a quarter of people’s perceptions of how well they sleep don’t correlate with the sleep they actually get, with potentially significant repercussions. “Complaining good sleepers” – people who believe they are insomniacs, even though monitoring of their night-time brain activity suggests otherwise – are most likely to experience symptoms such as daytime fatigue, high blood pressure, depression and anxiety. “Non-complaining bad sleepers”, by contrast, are remarkably free of ill effects. “Worry about poor sleep is a stronger pathogen than poor sleep,” says Kenneth Lichstein at the University of Alabama, who made this discovery. It is possible that constant daytime fatigue leads people to identify as insomniac, rather than insomnia causing the fatigue. But, at least one study supports the idea that a placebo effect is partly responsible. It found that simply priming participants to think they had slept poorly or unusually deeply influenced their cognitive functioning the next day. All these findings give us plenty of reasons to reassess our mindsets. But perhaps the most provocative research concerns ageing – with some strong evidence that negative beliefs could knock decades off your life. The first clues emerged in the early 1980s. Ellen Langer at Harvard University – who later collaborated with Crum on the hotel cleaner study – took a group of pensioners to a monastery in New Hampshire and told them to act as if they were 22 years younger for the duration of their stay. The retreat was decorated as if the year were 1959, and filled with music, films, magazines and books from that era. Their rooms contained no mirrors, > 25 August 2018 | NewScientist | 31

When anthropologists first heard reports of witch doctors killing people with a curse, they looked for rational explanations. These were undermined, however, by the discovery that Western doctors have similar powers. In the 1970s, for example, a man died just months after doctors told him he had end-stage liver cancer – despite the autopsy revealing that the diagnosis had been mistaken. He hadn’t died from cancer but from believing he had cancer. We now know what lies behind these strange goings-on: the nocebo effect. The “evil” twin of the placebo effect, it is when putting someone in a negative frame of mind has adverse consequences for their health or well-being. Tell people that a medical procedure will be extremely painful, for example, and they will experience more pain than they would otherwise. Similarly, warning about the possible side effects of a drug makes it more likely that patients will report experiencing those effects. The nocebo effect is widespread: about a quarter of participants in clinical trials experience side effects even though they have been given a placebo, a sugar pill. Recent research indicates that it can be even stronger than the placebo effect, particularly when people are anxious or feel that their doctor doesn’t understand or believe them. And the nocebo effect is not just a problem in healthcare. It could also be undermining your efforts to lose weight, shape up, cope with stress, and more (see main story).

32 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018

DAVID ALAN HARVEY/MAGNUM

THE SCIENCE OF VOODOO

A positive attitude to ageing will keep you healthier and more active for longer

assimilated the age stereotypes of their culture,” says Levy. But her latest studies suggest that attitudes can be changed. In one, participants aged between 61 and 99 played a computer game while positive age-related words such as “wise”, “mature” and “experienced” flashed briefly on the screen. Although they did not consciously register the words, their perceptions of ageing had significantly improved after four sessions, as had their physical well-being. Amazingly, the benefits, including increased mobility, surpassed those from a six-month physical exercise regime. No wonder some researchers are calling for campaigns that educate people about the dangers of ageism. “Being aware of these

only pictures of their younger selves. After just five days, the pensioners’ arthritis had improved, their posture was more upright, and their thinking – as measured by an IQ test – was sharper. Inspired by this study, other teams have since shown that our attitudes really can influence how our bodies fare over time. Overall, people who view ageing positively live 7.5 years longer than those who associate it with frailty and senility. Negative perceptions of ageing are not merely the result of poor health; they can foreshadow symptoms by as much as 38 years. Admittedly, people with a pessimistic view of ageing are less active and less likely to “It’s about being empowered seek healthcare when they need it. However, by the possibility that we many studies find this cannot fully explain the effect on health. So, what’s going on? can choose better mindsets” It seems that people with rosier beliefs stereotypes, and questioning them, and about ageing react less to stress and are less developing a resistance to them – that’s a good likely to develop inflammation – both of skill people can learn at any age,” says Levy. which would mean that they age more Of course, a positive mindset is not a slowly. Becca Levy at the Yale School of panacea. But these findings could help us all Public Health has found that they tend to benefit more from our efforts to achieve a have longer telomeres – the protective caps healthy lifestyle through exercise, a balanced at the ends of chromosomes. This matters diet, relaxation and getting a good night’s sleep. because telomeres wear away with time, “It’s about being mindful of the fact that we so are a yardstick of age. Such people are have mindsets and that they matter, and being also less likely to develop brain changes empowered by the possibility that we can associated with Alzheimer’s disease than choose more useful mindsets,” says Crum. ■ those who view ageing negatively. Ageism is deeply engrained. “We know David Robson is a freelance journalist in London that children as young as 3 or 4 have already

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UNTOLD STORY

Ice sage It took a singular Scot, the unschooled James Croll, to explain Earth’s recurrent cold spells, inds Fred Pearce

H

34 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018

His head was full of ideas, but Croll had no qualifications and no money. At 16, he was a travelling millwright, sleeping in rat-infested barns. Later he became a joiner, before a damaged elbow left him unable to do manual work. He was also, as his step-nephew James Campbell Irons wrote in a biographical appreciation, “heavy and ungainly” as well as “modest, shy, dry and with an almost speechless manner”. Not surprisingly, then, Croll also failed as a tea merchant and an insurance salesman, and went bankrupt as the landlord of a temperance hotel in a town of 3500 people and 16 taverns. By luck, he eventually found himself a A genius who worked out the choreography of glaciers, James Croll was not a people person

J. CAMPBELL IRONS

E WAS the janitor who unlocked the secret of how ice ages happen. The sickly son of a poor Scottish farmer, James Croll left school at 13 and became an itinerant labourer and failed salesman. But decades of private reading and an astonishing capacity for original thought saw him soar to scientific stardom. Croll became the father of climatechange research, and corresponded as an equal with the science heavyweights of the day, including Charles Darwin, Lord Kelvin, Arctic explorer Fridtjof Nansen and geologist Charles Lyell. Yet you have probably never heard of him. His star waned, and his insights about the cosmological causes of the great glaciations sank from view, until revived half a century later by Serbian mathematician Milutin Milankovitch, who took the plaudits. Croll died in penury, a footnote even on his own gravestone. Was he a victim of Victorian snobbishness? Or might he have fared even worse had he lived in the modern age? Croll was born in 1821 and raised on a smallholding on moorland in rural east Scotland, land he worked from a young age. His sporadic schooling ended at 13, but by then he had stumbled across a copy of The Penny Magazine, the New Scientist of its day. He became hooked on science. By 14, he was reading the great science texts of the time. “At first I became bewildered, but soon the beauty and simplicity of the conceptions filled me with delight and astonishment,” he later wrote in an autobiographical sketch. “I studied pneumatics, hydrostatics, light, heat, electricity and magnetism. I obtained assistance from no one.”

neighbour of the head of Anderson’s University, the forerunner of Strathclyde University. Croll became its caretaker. There, duties done, he would hole up in the library, pursuing the great scientific issues of the day. One of those was the cause of the ice ages. Geologists had deduced that large parts of Europe had been repeatedly covered in ice, but nobody knew what caused this waxing and waning. There were some theories rooted in astronomical phenomena, but it was Croll’s untutored, free-ranging mind that would crack the conundrum. By painstaking calculation, he showed that over more than a million years, the glaciations appeared to coincide with the periodic extremes of what astronomers call eccentricity. This variation in the elliptical shape of Earth’s orbit around the sun has only a tiny effect on the total amount of solar radiation reaching the planet. In his greatest insight, Croll proposed that it was enough to trigger substantial indirect cooling of the Arctic – in particular by the diversion of the Gulf Stream, reducing heat reaching the pole. As more ice formed, more sunlight was reflected, causing more cooling. Such amplifying feedbacks underpin estimates of the impact of human-made climate change today. His ideas were published in 1864 in the Philosophical Magazine, a top UK science journal of the day. The paper was attributed to “James Croll, Anderson’s University”. Whether the editors knew Croll was a janitor is not recorded, but soon it didn’t matter. As Croll put it, “the paper excited a considerable amount of attention”.

THOMAS GÜNTHER/PLAINPICTURE

He was soon corresponding with the great and the good of science. Darwin wrote: “I have never, I think, in my life, been so deeply interested by any geological discussion.” Croll’s paper had, he said, “cleared so much mist from before my eyes”. In 1867, Croll became secretary of the Scottish Geological Survey in Edinburgh. It allowed him time, despite growing bouts of poor health, to produce a book on his thinking. Published in 1875, Climate and Time appeared to seal his reputation as one of the era’s great scientists. Within months, he had an honorary degree from the University of St Andrews, and fellowships at the Royal Society in London and the New York Academy of Sciences. Croll published more groundbreaking research: on how glaciers moved, the causes of ocean circulation, and the thickness of Antarctic ice – at a time when scarcely anyone had even set foot on the continent. He also persuaded Darwin that rivers were important agents of erosion. The high waters of Croll’s fame retreated as he became ever more reclusive. Turning down an invitation to lecture at the British Association (today the British Science Association), he wrote: “I dislike all such public displays… there is a cold materialistic

atmosphere around scientific men in general that I don’t like. I mix but little with them.” His health worsening, he retired in 1880, aged 59. Prime ministers William Gladstone and Lord Salisbury both rebuffed pleas from Darwin, Lord Kelvin and others to give Croll a full civil-service pension. He ended up penurious in rented lodgings in Perth, just streets away from where he bought his first Penny Magazine. He died a decade later. He was buried in what is now an abandoned churchyard in Cargill. A worn gravestone

“An astonishing capacity for original thought saw him soar to scientific stardom” lists 14 of his forebears, with Croll and his wife Isabella mentioned last, in the smallest letters, as space on the stone ran out. One obituary called him “among the foremost, if not the first [investigator] of the physical cause of climatic change”. But by then, the salons of science had tired of this testy recluse. Soon, his name and his theories were largely forgotten. Only in the 1930s were they revived by Milankovitch, who corrected some

inaccuracies in what he called Croll’s “most remarkable” work. Even so, when oceansediment cores taken in the 1970s confirmed the causal links deduced by Croll, the Scot was so forgotten that Earth’s periodic coolings became known as Milankovitch cycles. In the past decade, a handful of Scottish academics have tried to rescue Croll’s name. There is now a memorial to him outside the Royal Scottish Geographical Society in Perth. Croll’s fall is usually painted as the result of Victorian sniffiness at the untutored working class. Maybe so. But what is remarkable, says Andrew Dlugolecki at the University of East Anglia, UK, is how much respect he did receive in his heyday, despite his lack of formal qualifications. “Leading scientists corresponded with Croll as an equal. That would probably be impossible nowadays, given the huge emphasis placed on papers in the scientific literature,” says Dlugolecki. And what journal today would publish a paper, whatever its merits, from a janitor with no formal education? New Scientist asked Nature whether its editors could think of such an upstart in their recent archives. They could not. ■ Fred Pearce is a consultant for New Scientist 25 August 2018 | NewScientist | 35

Goodbye, cash? Banks and governments are toying with killing off physical money. That might not be such a good idea, says Joshua Howgego

W

HEN Marco Polo visited Kublai Khan at the end of the 13th century, little seems to have impressed him more than that the Khan used paper money. “In this city of Kanbalu is the mint of the Great Khan, who may truly be said to possess the secret of alchemists, as he has the art of producing money,” he wrote. It isn’t hard to see why it seemed that way. To a European of the time, money consisted of things such as silver and gold coins that had intrinsic, tradable worth. The Khan simply took common old bark from mulberry trees, pulped it into paper and, with an array of signatures and seals, declared that it had value. No one in the Mongol empire dared refuse it as a means of payment. Today this idea is so central to our lives that we hardly spare it a thought. But cash – physical money in the form of notes or coins – is losing its lustre. The rise of internet shopping and the increasing convenience of card payments, plus the extra costs for governments and central banks associated with cash, means all the talk is of taking money fully digital. The necessary technology already exists. But as the dash away from cash gathers 36 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018

momentum, there are increasing rumblings about the downsides. Digital money might not solve all the problems of cash, and will bring a whole slew of new ones too. So do we want it? Victoria Cleland knows a thing or two about cash. Currently the Bank of England’s executive director for banking, payments and financial resilience, she was until recently its chief cashier, meaning her signature appeared on all banknotes issued in England. Cash fulfils three crucial functions in modern

87% OF PAYMENTS IN SWEDEN ARE ALREADY CASHLESS SOURCE: SWEDISH RIKSBANK

economies, she says. It is easily exchangeable from person to person; everyone knows precisely what it is worth; and in normal economic circumstances, its value barely changes from day to day. There are plenty of other tradable assets around, from gold bullion to diamonds to houses, but none fulfils all these functions as neatly as cash does. A whole complex financial

system including central banks has built up around it (see “The rise of the bank”, page 38). But the use of cash is in free fall. According to trade association UK Finance, fewer payments will be made with cash than by debit card in the UK for the first time in 2018. The proportion of cash payments in the UK dropped from 62 per cent of transactions in 2006 to 40 per cent in 2016, and is projected to fall to just 21 per cent in 2026 (see “Money down the drain”, page 38). It is a similar story of “demonetisation” around the world, as cards and mobile payment apps take over the functions of cash. That change has largely been driven by consumer convenience, but governments and central banks have their own reasons to think beyond cash. Coins and notes must be minted or printed – and in far greater quantities than are in use at any one time, to keep shops, retail banks and cash machines in stock. That leads to a paradox of cash. “We are seeing a slowdown in cash used for transactions, but we are still seeing an increase in demand for cash,” says Cleland. Part of the problem is rock-bottom interest rates, and the fear of bank runs generated by the financial crisis a decade ago, which have >

ANDREA UCINI

28 August 2018 | NewScientist | 37

Money down the drain In the UK, as in many parts of the world, the use of cash is falling precipitously 25 PROJECTED

Number of payments (billions)

20 Debit card Cash

15

Direct debit

10

Credit/charge/ purchasing card Faster payments and other remote banking

5

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0 2006

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2011

2016

2021

2026

SOURCE: UK FINANCE

THE RISE OF THE BANK Modern finance began with institutions such as the London goldsmith bankers of the 17th century, who accepted chunks of gold, recorded its value in ledgers and issued a receipt or IOU. Gradually people began to pay each other for goods by exchanging these notes. But holders could only redeem the gold at the bank that issued it, and had to physically move the gold to their own bank to realise its value. So banks came

led many people to opt for stashing cash under the mattress. A survey commissioned by the Bank of England in 2014 found that 18 per cent of people in the UK hoarded cash, an average of £345 each. Beyond that, though, there is a steady flow of cash across borders and into criminal enterprise and the untaxed shadow economy. Economists Friedrich Schneider and Colin Williams have estimated that the shadow economy accounts for between 8 and 24 per cent of GDP in the rich-world OECD countries, representing a serious drain on government coffers.

to accept each other’s notes, and to take care of moving the gold around. As the number of banks and the complexity of transactions increased, it became hard to keep track of where the gold should be. The solution was for a “clearing bank” to sit at the centre of the system and keep a single, trustworthy register of transactions. That clearing role is carried out by central banks like the Bank of England or the US Federal Reserve, which now issue the standard IOUs everyone uses, and generally ensure that no one attempts to spend the same money twice. By controlling the supply of money, and twiddling associated knobs such as the base interest rate, central banks have become central to a well-greased economy. 38 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018

49%

OF GDP IN KENYA IS TRANSACTED THROUGH MOBILE DIGITAL PAYMENTS SOURCE: CENTRAL BANK OF KENYA

Ending cash would help combat crime, while also giving central banks more power to keep the economy moving, for example by introducing negative interest rates. This de facto tax on money in banks is already in effect in Japan, Sweden, Denmark and Switzerland, and Bank of England chief economist Andy Haldane has called it an “interesting solution”. The idea is to encourage people to spend money when the economy is stagnating. Hoarding cash

allows people to sidestep this stick. Oddly enough, it is a movement originally designed to topple conventional finance that has spurred talk of government-issued digital money. Digital cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin were motivated by a desire to escape the whole banking system and its centralised accounting and control. Instead, they use a distributed, supposedly unfalsifiable online ledger known as the blockchain, which relies on rigid mathematical rules to securely record transactions in the currency. This generates the same kind of trust in a transaction that cash issued and backed by a central bank does. Now central banks are considering how they might co-opt such a system for their own purposes. One of the furthest along the road is the Swedish Riksbank, which floated the idea of a state-issued digital currency, e-krona, in 2016. Despite negative interest rates, cash use is falling unusually rapidly in Sweden: the proportion of cash payments declined from 39 per cent in 2010 to 13 per cent in 2018. About 60 per cent of Swedes already use a mobile app called Swish that allows people to instantly transfer money between different bank accounts just by tapping in a phone number. This is really just a user-friendly interface with the Swedish banking system’s existing payment infrastructure. E-krona would be a whole new currency. In a report issued in late 2017, the Riksbank identified two possible ways of doing things. The first would be to provide bank accounts at the central bank in which people could keep digital currency, then have a centralised register of transactions between them, not unlike the databases already used to process debit card transactions. The second would be a system by which encrypted digital files are exchanged between users, where the files themselves are declared to have value. “Other Swedish authorities are very interested,” says Björn Segendorf, a policy analyst at the Riksbank, seeing a way also to reach people without bank accounts. “It seems one of their main headaches is making payments to unbanked people, and this might offer a solution.” The bank asked for proposals from tech companies for how to build the e-krona and, having received 33 ideas, is continuing to discuss the options this year. Sweden isn’t alone. In November 2017, Uruguay published details of a small test of digital pesos issued by the country’s central bank. Venezuela has launched the petro,

banks work on the assumption that not everyone will withdraw their money at once. If this happens, it can run out, as for example happened with the collapsed UK bank Northern Rock in 2008. The fear is that digital currencies could make this sort of thing more likely. In times of crisis, people would pull their money from commercial banks and buy safe digital currency backed by a central bank – a potentially quicker way to undermine the banking system than withdrawing your money in the form of physical cash. As the Bank of England’s Marilyne Tolle suggested in a paper in 2016, that could precipitate chaos: if commercial banks went out of business, there would be no one to provide loans.

34%

OF PEOPLE IN THE US SAY THEY CARRY CASH RARELY OR NEVER SOURCE: ING INTERNATIONAL SURVEY MOBILE BANKING 2017

a cryptocurrency run by the state, although the scheme is widely derided. South Korea, too, plans to be cashless by 2020 and has been mulling launching a digital currency. But the latest signs are that it will not, at least for now. One concern cited by the country’s central bank is how it would radically transform the banking system, potentially destabilising it. The reason is the subtle difference between cash backed by a central bank and the non-physical money

that sits in your bank account, or that you use when you pay with plastic. “When you’re using a credit or debit card, you are using money that’s created by a commercial bank,” says Garrick Hileman at the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance in the UK. This money is either created by interest on loans made by that institution, or by you when you make a deposit. Unlike with central-bank cash, there is no hard-and-fast guarantee that you will get this money back. Commercial

There may be ways around that, such as allowing commercial banks to offer better interest rates than central banks. But this is uncharted territory, and the Bank of England’s researchers are still trying to work out what the effects might be. “This is the big reason why the Bank has backed away from issuing a central bank digital currency to everyday people,” says Hileman. Cleland confirms that, although the Bank is monitoring the situation, it has no immediate plans to introduce a digital currency. It is, however, testing whether the technology that underlies it could be used to speed up international financial transactions (see “Really swift”, page 40). There are other reasons for scepticism about digital money, too. While a cashless economy might stop people stuffing cash under mattresses, hoarding hard currency isn’t in itself morally wrong, and stopping it undermines honest people’s right to choose what they do with their money. Critics suggest that criminals would simply switch to another cash currency, or a tradable asset such as gold. Brett Scott, author of The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance, has written about the time he was due to speak at a conference on reinventing money, and went to get a drink from a card-only vending machine only to have his plastic denied. His point is that cash transactions take place between two parties, whereas digital transactions inevitably involve third-party payment facilitators. Currently > 25 August 2018 | NewScientist | 39

Phasing out large-value banknotes could make criminal activity harder

these are private credit and debit card firms such as Visa and Mastercard. Not only do those firms make a profit on the back of your payments, they can also choose not to offer their services to certain clients. If we were to totally replace physical cash with digital cash, we would be giving a similar power to a state authority or any other third party they might franchise the operation out to. And whoever controls your digital currency potentially has access to a huge amount of information about you, your finances and your habits.

That doesn’t have to be a bad thing, says Tom Blomfield, founder of Monzo, a recently founded mobile-only bank in the UK. Monzo already crunches data to offer its customers insights into their spending habits, for example automatically labelling payments made on one of the bank’s debit cards “groceries” or “eating out” and flashing them up on the customer’s phone. He says there are about 30 financial issues, from switching energy providers to renewing insurance policies, where such a data-driven approach could help – with the proviso that people are clear what they are getting into when they sign up. “I don’t want to use the

GP KIDD/GETTY

Questionable transactions

“Whoever controls your digital currency has access to a huge amount of information about you” F-word – Facebook,” says Blomfield. “But they didn’t do enough proactive stuff.” Others are less sanguine. If one driver of the end of cash is a desire to control the flow of money more and reduce questionable transactions, that implies a degree of insight into the nature of transactions. Even with the best of intentions and safeguards in place,

REALLY SWIFT International money transfers

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40 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018

countries using the Interledger Protocol, an open

the question is whether having a lot more sensitive data sloshing around in the digital realm can ever be a good thing. “There has been a lot said about the decline of cash, but there’s not been nearly as much discussion of the data privacy and what it would mean, potentially, to go to a world of completely known transactions where there’s no anonymity, no privacy,” says Hileman. Then there are questions of infrastructure reliability. “Imagine a completely electronic payment system, no cash. Imagine there’s a cyberattack and people can’t transact. That would be catastrophic, there would be chaos in the streets.” Such problems exist to be solved – but mean that we probably shouldn’t anticipate the end of cash soon. Even critics baulk at that suggestion. Kenneth Rogoff is a Harvard economist who wrote the 2016 book The Curse of Cash, which among other things strongly argues that cash oils the wheels of the criminal underworld. “I don’t make the case for going cashless,” says Rogoff. There is inestimable value in being able to use cash in certain situations, including emergencies. Instead, he suggests phasing out only the most valuable banknotes, the £50 note in the UK, say, or the US $100 bill. Perhaps that’s what the immediate future looks like – not cashless, just less cash. ■ Joshua Howgego is a feature editor at New Scientist

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In Florence, admire Brunelleschi’s daring dome atop the cathedral and his Old Sacristy at San Lorenzo with its Ptolemaic planetarium. Enjoy elaborate collections at the Pitti Palace and Speculo Museum, and catch an early example of artistic perspective in the Brancacci Chapel. Visit much under-rated Bologna. Discover its Anatomical Theatre and the science museum at Palazzo Poggi. And don’t forget to sample its world-renowned cuisine. Our celebration of culture includes four-star hotels throughout.

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WHAT’S INCLUDED g Return flights with British Airways from London g All hotels and transfers g Entry to museums and tours g Expert guide throughout g Evening lectures from:

Andrew Spira

START PL ANNING YOUR TRIP Call now on +44 (0)20 7251 0045 or visit newscientist.com/travel/renaissance

Jeremy Webb

CULTURE

The deep blue, greyed out It’s an eye-popping show of marine anatomy, but Sumit Paul-Choudhury longs to dive deeper Sea Creatures, at the RHS Lawrence Hall, London, to 30 August; then to Edinburgh, Harrogate and Belfast

SEA CREATURES

THE 3-tonne corpse of Hai Hai the baby minke whale, beached on a Chinese island in 2009, was rotting by the time scientists reached it. Undeterred, a team of around 30 anatomists swung into action, labouring for nearly two years to preserve, dehydrate and plastinate it, before reassembling it to reveal muscles on one side, and bones, nerves and organs on the other. Now Hai Hai, the world’s largest plastinated marine animal, is the star of Sea Creatures, an exhibition of more than 50 similarly preserved aquatic animals that will be touring the UK over the next few months. His companions include sharks, a manta ray, a porpoise and a giant squid. Ocean dwellers ranging from crabs to cuttlefish are also represented, as well as some 150 individual body parts. have been “ethically sourced” – Any fish market serves up a although Hai Hai is the only visual banquet of aquatic viscera – specimen whose provenance fresh from the sea, to boot. is described. But when the sea’s charismatic The curation is generally megafauna are presented for our sound, with sections devoted delectation, we seek assurances to the flamboyant (a staring that they are being served up with sailfish) and the humble respect, and not merely to sate (a cabinet of shellfish). There our more ghoulish appetites – are idiosyncrasies: a salami-sliced a concern that has lingered over “Ocean dwellers from plastination spectaculars for crabs to cuttlefish are decades, largely thanks to the here, as well as some 150 exhibitions of human cadavers individual body parts” staged by the technique’s inventor, Gunther von Hagens. Educational value is the usual penguin is a non sequitur in fig leaf held up against charges an area otherwise devoted to of indecency. invertebrates. And the show’s few Sea Creatures, presented wince-worthy grotesques seem by a former associate of von inadvertent, rather than designed: Hagens, stresses that its exhibits another penguin grinning 42 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018

Ocean plastics: a sunfish preserved using a plastination technique

manically as it opens its skin; a porpoise split like a banana. Credibility comes from a partnership with the Scottish Association for Marine Science, which has provided crisply informative labels describing the anatomies and behaviours of the animals on display. The presentation of body parts works well. The material fact of the crucian carp’s pea-sized brain makes its ability to learn from experience all the more striking. Everyone knows what gills look like from the outside, but their corsetry, winnowed free from flesh, is a different matter. And a shark’s stomach turns out to be

surprisingly small but densely corrugated, as it is surface area, not volume, that counts when it comes to digestion. With the complete specimens, however, there is little to help viewers understand what they are looking at. There aren’t any explanatory diagrams, or even illustrations of the animals as they might have appeared in life. (The show’s companion smartphone app does offer some media, but it is more entertaining than informative.) Plastination can use colours to add visual appeal and highlight certain tissues. It also allows for poses both naturalistic and contrived – attributes used to spectacular effect at the Animal Inside Out exhibition at London’s Natural History Museum in 2012, for example. Here, though, the subjects’ stiff poses and bleached appearance give no hint of the elegant motion or vibrant colours we associate with marine life. Once the initial shock and awe of seeing a whale shark’s innards had passed, my reaction to the parade of bloodless guts was mounting ennui. Without contextual information – age, sex, locale, distinguishing features, circumstances of death and collection – I found it hard to remember that this monochrome tableau is made up of remarkable animals, remarkably preserved, rather than waxworks in a slightly past-it museum. Sea Creatures may offer sufficient gawping opportunities to satisfy those who just want to graze the surface of marine biology. But it is likely to frustrate those who would like to dive more deeply. ■

DON’T MISS

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

Emotional beings

Read

We know little about how emotions are made, says Helen Thomson The Neuroscience of Emotion: A new synthesis by Ralph Adolphs and David J. Anderson, Princeton University Press

multivariate analyses or representational geometry are your thing. The early chapters are about what we don’t know and what we consistently get wrong, an in-depth view of our ignorance in which the authors imply we know almost nothing about how the brain produces emotion. This criticism continues throughout the book. I can imagine scientists despairing, overcome by the

DELIA BAUM/PLAINPICTURE

IF YOU struggle to define your innermost feelings of love, lust, anger and jealousy, you are not alone – scientists are especially sloppy, sometimes referring to emotions as feelings, at other times referring “A science of emotion must to internal states or behaviours. Which is just one of the reasons be cumulative since we don’t know the best level why Ralph Adolphs and David at which to understand it” Anderson have created a new framework for the study of emotion across species. In The futility of their past work and the Neuroscience of Emotion, the two enormity of future endeavours. Caltech professors sift through Light relief comes through current studies of emotion, and famous historical cases, including provide a road map for the future. Phineas Gage, the railroad worker Their analysis is authoritative whose behaviour changed after an and unsurpassed in its intricate iron pole was blasted through his examination of the field. It is also brain, and SM, a woman whose fluent, but don’t expect a frolic: rare brain lesion left her with little this is a commanding textbook or no capacity to experience fear. for scientists and students. The As the book progresses, it gets book may interest lay readers, easier to read, with Adolphs and but most will struggle – unless Anderson moving from how to understand the basic properties Understanding human emotion is of emotion to the tools used to incredibly complex work study animals and humans.

It ends by evaluating current theories and running through the questions still to be answered. It is clear that understanding emotions will take a group effort. Emotion is an emergent property of a complex system of molecules, cells, circuits, networks and entire brains, say the authors. Since we don’t yet know the best level at which to understand it, a science of emotion must be cumulative, with all levels studied in parallel. Part of the problem is that emotions are not material phenomena. The amygdala, for example, is often associated with fear: we can cut it out and impair some forms of fear. But put one in a dish, stimulate it as much as you like – and it would still be absurd to claim you are causing a state of fear. As the authors say: “Insofar as the amygdala generates fear, it can do so only within a complex network of other brain structures.” The book is at its best with thought experiments. Try decoupling the word “emotion” from the “conscious experience of emotion”. Our everyday usage assumes conscious experience, but the science of emotion need not: is non-conscious emotion possible, in animals, humans, even robots? Antonio Damasio, one of the foremost scientists in the field, calls this an “indispensable book”. For students and scientists willing to invest serious effort, I agree. But readers who want to learn how we use feelings to construct ourselves might feel more at home with Damasio’s book, The Strange Order of Things. ■

Neurology and psychiatry come together in The Disordered Mind: What unusual brains tell us about ourselves (Little, Brown), a masterful summary of the field by Nobel prizewinner Eric Kandel.

Visit Roll up to London’s Science Museum at 6.45 pm BST on 29 August to celebrate 250 years of the circus and uncover the technical skills and science behind the thrills of the big top.

Subscribe In her podcast People Behind the Science, Marie McNeely gets scientists to share their stories. The most recent episode features Michael Levin of Tufts University, Massachusetts, who studies the decisions and computations that occur in living systems.

Play E-Line Media’s The Endless Mission (pictured) puts the tools of game creation on your screen. Use templates and assets from other built-in games, share creations with other players or dip into theirs via a central hub.

Listen In BBC Radio 4’s Hotspot (1.45 pm BST, 27 August), Jenny Kleeman explores the stories behind some startling place-based statistics. Who knew the UK capital of personal debt was Plymouth?

Helen Thomson is a consultant for New Scientist 25 August 2018 | NewScientist | 43

CULTURE

Searching for Sandra What if AI assistants aren’t as artificial as they seem? Sarah Leach enjoys a new podcast

HOW do we really know who is on the other end of conversations with digital assistants like Siri and Alexa? Just who is listening to our requests and questions, or accessing the vast troves of personal information we have given over to these companies? And does that kind of access affect both those handing over their details and the employees on the other end? The podcast Sandra weaves these debates about ethics in technology into an engaging audio drama. The premise of the show is that a woman, Helen (played by Alia Shawkat), takes a job in which she pretends to be a virtual assistant named Sandra (voiced mechanically by Kristen Wiig), which has been created by a tech company called Orbital Teledynamics. All the “Sandras”, as the company names the humans it pays to pretend to be artificial intelligences, are assigned a specialised topic to cover. To Helen’s confusion, she is assigned birds, but other Sandras she meets specialise in everything from the Enlightenment philosophers to movies starring Morgan Freeman. She quickly finds that, while her personal life is a mess, as Sandra she can solve any problem, from buying doves for a pagan wedding to picking canary wallpaper for a nursery. Early on, she and her supervisor Dustin (played by Ethan Hawke) bond over their love of being Sandra, describing it as a Just shut up! Many of us are abusive to our digital assistants 44 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018

“superpower”. Yet as is fairly usual frustrated, to the point of saying when superpowers are involved, they are looking forward to being wielding them is nothing like as replaced by machines. And the simple as it first appears. Dustin humans interacting with this tells Helen to “trust the system”, pseudo-AI have had to resort to reassuring her that Orbital developing their own tests to wouldn’t put her in a situation it figure out whether they really are didn’t think she could handle, but talking to a human or a machine. she hits both highs and lows as All this is part of a bigger she answers the questions put to picture among tech companies. her by users. For many years it has been While the idea of a human “The customers ask the pretending to be an AI may Sandras questions they sound like a bit of a stretch, it probably wouldn’t dream is actually a real phenomenon. of asking another person” From start-ups to established outfits, companies have rolled out “AI” tools that later turn out to be acceptable to roll out unfinished powered by human intelligence, products and reel in investors where people did everything by overstating a product’s from chatting with customers capabilities. This is a strategy that to transcribing personal has been seen in companies like information, such as receipts. Theranos, which made false The humans performing claims about its blood-testing these tasks are often bored and technology in order to raise

JENS MORTENSEN/NYT/REDUX/EYEVINE

Sandra, Gimlet Media, gimletmedia.com/sandra

millions of dollars from investors. Sandra also picks up on another interesting trend in AI, something that is one of the attractions of the technology: people interact with it very differently than they do with other people. For example, when the US military used an AI therapist to screen homecoming service personnel for posttraumatic stress disorder, they found that it was more effective at getting people to discuss their symptoms honestly than either a human interview or a written questionnaire. The customers in the show ask Helen and her fellow Sandras questions they probably wouldn’t dream of asking another person, like whether it is possible to get an allergy just by thinking about a food. But they also contact her just to have someone to talk to (or, in one case, to have someone for their parrot to talk to). Unsurprisingly, some of the humans that Helen talks to as Sandra aren’t being straightforward about who they are and what they want either. Some do it to abuse her, a pattern we see when humans interact with AI in the real world. Others turn out to be doing it for more duplicitous reasons with more serious consequences. What does Sandra have to say about a world that is full of AIs pretending to be human and humans pretending to be AIs? Well, you will have to listen to the whole show to find out, but it comes down to this: sooner or later, your lies will catch up with you, whether you are a human, an AI or something in between. ■ Sarah Leach is a freelance writer based in London

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. [email protected] 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 ^PSSJVU[PU\L\U[PSHSSWVZP[PVUZHYLÄSSLK ;OL