July 30 - August 5, 2016 New Scientist

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SIGHT SAVERS

Editing genes to beat blindness

LIVING ON THE EDGE Earliest life was half biology, half geology

WIMP OUT

Still no sign of the dark matter particle WEEKLY July 30 -August 5, 2016

SPECIAL REPORT THE DEEP OCEAN Exploring Earth’s final frontier

YOU ARE JUNK It’s not your genes that make you human

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BEAM ’EM UP Boom time for space lasers

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CONTENTS

Volume 231 No 3084

This issue online newscientist.com/issue/3084

Leaders

News

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8

News

Saving sight by tweaking DNA

6

UPFRONT Fires rage in California. Teen HIV surge. Underwater astronauts. Zika could rebound 8 THIS WEEK Dark matter no-show spells trouble for WIMPs. The hunt for Mars-like life on Earth. Neanderthal brains developed like ours. Ancestor of all life was only half-alive. Old planets grow too hot or cold for life 15 IN BRIEF Self-destructing bacteria kill cancer. Earwigs survive on own faeces. Planetary mud mask

MARK GAMBA/GALLERYSTOCK

CRISPR is showing promise for treating hereditary eye disease

Gene editing is moving fast, but is it too fast? Time for some rules on sea-floor mining

On the cover

28

8

Sight savers Editing out blindness 12 Living on the edge Half biology, half geology 9 WIMP out Still no dark matter 32 Special report: The deep ocean Earth’s final frontier 40 Beam ’em up Boom time for space lasers

You are junk It’s not your genes that make you human

Analysis 18 Digital discrimination The fightback against racist technology begins 20 COMMENT It’s a myth that only home-cooking is good for kids. Academic freedom on the line in Turkey 21 INSIGHT Let’s ditch the flag-waving space missions

Technology

Cover image Eiko Ojala

22 Drones find their way in the world. Chinese internet giant predicts shopping trends. Microbes that recycle what you flush

Features

26 Magnetic liquids bloom into stunning shapes

Aperture

32

Features 28 You are junk (see above left) 32 Special report: The deep ocean Undersea volcanoes. Mapping the seabed. Robotic search swarms. Mining for treasure 40 PEOPLE Robert Byer and the space laser resurgence

Special report: The deep ocean Exploring Earth’s final frontier THE RED DRESS

Culture 44 The great IQ debate James Flynn’s quest to change our view of intelligence

Coming next week… Superfoods

Regulars 52 LETTERS Birth risks and biome benefits 56 FEEDBACK Cucumber time is here 57 THE LAST WORD Lake shawls

Are any of them actually worth eating?

Black hole blasters

The cosmic monsters that blow, not suck

30 July 2016 | NewScientist | 3

Professor Dame Carol Robinson 2015 Laureate for United Kingdom

By Brigitte Lacombe

Science needs women

L’ORÉAL UNESCO AWARDS

Dame Carol Robinson, Professor of Chemistry at Oxford University, invented a ground-breaking method for studying how membrane proteins function, which play a critical role in the human body. Throughout the world, exceptional women are at the heart of major scientific advances. For 17 years, L’Oréal has been running the L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women In Science programme, honouring exceptional women from around the world. Over 2000 women from over 100 countries have received our support to continue to move science forward and inspire future generations. JOIN US ON FACEBOOK.COM/FORWOMENINSCIENCE

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The new genetic lottery Gene editing is moving fast – possibly too fast THERE’S a certain breed of technooptimist who likes to talk about “the singularity” – a time when technology progresses so rapidly that life is transformed beyond recognition. The driving force of this hypothetical event is artificial intelligence, but biotech plays a key role too. Singularity watchers are no doubt eyeing the ongoing gene editing revolution with glee. Progress is dizzying, especially on a technique called CRISPR. Just over two years ago, CRISPR was an arcane research tool stirring up excitement in genetics labs because it allowed genes to be precision-edited with ease. Its medical potential was clear but rather distant: as we reported at

the time, “in years to come, it is likely to be used in gene therapy”. We probably meant the obligatory, non-committal five to 10 years, but CRISPR is already limbering up for human trials and further rapid progress seems inevitable (see page 8). Even biotech scientists talk of being unable to keep up. This is, of course, exciting news. CRISPR has great potential; the sooner we put that potential to the test, the better. But there are dangers ahead – not least the science outpacing public consent. Two teams in China have already tried to engineer human embryos. That seems unnecessarily hasty given the ethical issues it raises.

Gold mine or minefield? DEEP-SEA mining is one of those ideas that keeps on slipping over the horizon. Since 2012, a company called Nautilus Minerals has held a licence to mine the sea floor near Papua New Guinea. All along the firm has claimed that it would start within a year or two; its present target is 2018. Sadly, this procrastination has not been used to resolve some urgent issues that were evident

four years ago. One is the possible environmental impact. Another is that the captain’s share of mineral resources lie in international waters, which are a legal black hole (see page 38). The International Seabed Authority is responsible for governing these areas but up to now has only adopted regulations about prospecting, not mining. This seems tardy, considering

Those who work on CRISPR have a duty to consider not just the science but also how it will be received. As yet, CRISPR has hardly registered in public debate. An international panel of experts is working on a “comprehensive” review of gene editing and its wider implications. Their report – due in late 2016 – will be thorough and scholarly. But it also needs to consider the possibility of a backlash from a public taken by surprise by the pace of progress and in no mood to listen to expertise and facts. As any singularitarian will tell you, when technologies move extremely fast, they can acquire momentum that no one can predict or control. ■

that last year, the US introduced a law covering mining in space, an industry that is much less developed. The seabed authority needs to get on with it. Estimates suggest that there is as much copper and zinc in sea-floor deposits as is left in mines on land. If it replaced terrestrial extraction, underwater mining could make the world a greener place. But not if it is allowed to happen with no legal or environmental oversight, like a Victorian gold rush. ■ 30 July 2016 | NewScientist | 5

AP PHOTO/NICK UT

UPFRONT

California under wildfire CALIFORNIA is burning, again. Eyewitnesses described “raining fire from the sky” and flames racing down a steep hillside “like a freight train” as a raging wildfire left homes in smouldering ruins and forced thousands of people to flee. The fire has destroyed at least 18 houses and a movie set in northern Los Angeles County. Its ferocious power sent so much smoke into the air that firefighting planes had to be grounded at times. “For this time of year, it’s the most extreme fire behaviour I’ve seen in my 32-year career,” county fire chief Daryl Osby said. More than 10,000 homes had been evacuated as New Scientist went to press. A sanctuary for rescued exotic creatures also had to evacuate most of its animals, including Bengal

tigers and a mountain lion. California is going through its worst drought on record, and melting snowpack in the Sierra Nevada may mean even less water will be available in coming years. At least one study has linked the drought to climate change, and we know that global warming is expected to fuel more wildfires in the future. The heat from the wildfires could also be releasing carbon stored in permafrost, fuelling further warming. The wildfire seasons in North America over the last couple of years have been particularly bad. More than 80,000 Canadians were forced to leave their homes when wildfires engulfed Fort McMurray in May, for example.

Special delivery

and improve drone technology. The coming tests will be the first of their kind in the UK. The trials will look at systems that allow drones to be controlled out of their operator’s line of sight, something not currently permitted under CAA rules. The tests will also look at how drones can be flown safely over densely populated areas, and investigate sensors to help avoid obstacles. Last week Amazon also announced a service called Flex, which allows anyone to earn money by delivering packages for the company.

–Raining fire–

The future of Zika

worst-case scenario, but it is impossible to say how much better reality might be. In another study, Neil Ferguson at Imperial College London and his team have calculated that the epidemic will be largely over in three years (Science, doi.org/ bm4b). However, if Zika continues spreading among people who aren’t immune, they say it could explode again after 10 years. As New Scientist went to press, two people in Florida were expected to be confirmed as the first to catch Zika from mosquitoes in the US.

THE Zika epidemic could be over in three years. By then, 93.4 million people may have caught the virus, including some 1.65 million women of childbearing age – and infection during pregnancy can cause birth defects.

Novel infections spread unhindered until so many people have been exposed that the virus is unlikely to encounter susceptible people. This point is the threshold of “herd immunity”. Alex Perkins at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana and his colleagues have modelled how many people would get Zika before it burned out in local areas of Central and South America (Nature Microbiology, doi.org/ bm39). “We wanted to know how much of a given population will have been infected when herd immunity kicks in,” says Perkins. Their figure of 93.4 million is a 6 | NewScientist | 30 July 2016

NASA, ESA, AND J. LOTZ (STSCI)

“If Zika virus hangs on after this epidemic, it could explode again after 10 years”

THERE’S a buzz in the air. Amazon is about to start UK trials to make its home delivery drones safer. As part of its Prime Air initiative, the technology giant has been developing drones that can deliver its parcels to private addresses over short distances. It wants to get parcels to a customer’s door within 30 minutes. This week Amazon announced that it will work with the government and the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) to develop better safety regulations

Latest Hubble snap IT’S galaxies galore in this latest deep-field picture from the Hubble Space Telescope, a series of observations that concentrate on a tiny patch of sky to reveal the majesty of the distant universe. Hubble took this image by gazing far out into the cosmos at the galaxy cluster Abell S1063 – the bright smudge visible at the centre – which contains hundreds of galaxies. –Looking back in time– The cluster is 4 billion light

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

Robot shooter

years away from Earth. And if that wasn’t far enough, its massive gravity helps Hubble to see even further into the universe by warping and magnifying the light from galaxies behind it. This warping is evident in the strange lines that seem to arc around the cluster. These are the distorted images of ordinary galaxies, bent by gravitational lensing. The images form partial Einstein rings, an effect named after the famous physicist who predicted them. The most distant galaxy in this image appears as it did just 1 billion years after the big bang.

WATCH out Mars, Curiosity is firing at will. NASA’s rover, which has been exploring the Red Planet since 2012, can now decide for itself which rocks to zap with its ChemCam laser. ChemCam is an instrument designed to study the chemical make-up of rocks and soil on Mars by shooting them with a laser and studying the gas released on impact. Researchers on Earth had been telling Curiosity where to fire, but the rover has now been upgraded to select its own targets. Its new autonomous software

HIV surge in teens

60 SECONDS

analyses images from its navigation camera to spot potential targets. If the software picks out a particularly interesting rock, Curiosity can drive over and zap it without having to wait for the images to be transmitted back to Earth. Curiosity’s new freedom will come in handy when Mars is out of communication with Earth, or when Mars orbiters are otherwise occupied and unable to relay messages to the rover. Fortunately, there aren’t any humans on the planet, so we don’t have to worry about unleashing a trigger-happy robot.

Mars mission on the ocean floor

NASA/KARL SHRIVES

HIV is on the rise in the young. AQUANAUTS away. On 21 July, six astronauts splashed down into the Last week, attendees at the AIDS Aquarius Reef Base, a research 2016 annual meeting in Durban, station 19 metres below the waves South Africa, heard how many off the coast of Florida. The team’s young carriers caught the virus 16-day mission, called NASA Extreme from their mothers while still in Environment Mission Operations the womb. These teens are now (NEEMO), will test gadgets and skills coming of age. for a future trip to Mars. The most reliable data on this It’s the 21st mission of its kind trend comes from South Africa. since NEEMO began in 2001. This Findings presented at the time, communications between conference reveal that the the crew and ground control imitate number of people in the the 15-minute delay between Mars country aged between 10 and and Earth. The close quarters of 19 who have HIV has increased the Aquarius station mimic the 16-fold – to 237,987 – since the conditions of a spacecraft. mid-2000s. The pattern is likely The aquanauts reached the base to be similar in many other using scuba gear and negotiated countries, particularly those airlocks to get inside. Now inside, in sub-Saharan Africa that also have high rates of HIV. Mhairi Maskew of the University of Witwatersrand in Cape Town says that the number of South Africans between the ages of 15 and 19 with HIV will peak by around 2019. Worryingly, anti-HIV regimes don’t seem to be as effective in this age group. “The reason for this is presumably multifaceted,” says Maskew. It could be that the virus becomes resistant to the drugs after the children have taken them for a decade, but adolescents may also be less likely –The new aquanauts-– to take all their pills regularly.

they are trialling an experimental hands-free headset called mobiPV that streams video back to shore – similar kit might be useful on Mars. On the crew’s first full day, they tried out a miniature DNA sequencing device, which NASA hopes to use on the International Space Station. Other medical experiments involve technology that could regenerate chromosome telomeres – which shorten with age – and remote medicine techniques to use when astronauts are far from home. The aquanauts will also swim out of the base to simulate spacewalks and pilot underwater vehicles. Their first challenge will be to build a coral nursery to practice low-gravity construction.

Get moving Being at your desk shouldn’t mean working yourself to death. Doing at least 1 hour of cycling, brisk walking or other physical activity a day may counteract the increased risk of mortality associated with sitting for 8 hours a day, a study of over a million people finds (The Lancet, 10.1016/S0140-6736(16)30370-1).

Rat-killing race The Pied Piper is coming to New Zealand. Prime Minister John Key this week vowed to rid the country of rats, stoats and possums by 2050, pledging NZ$28 million over the next four years to get the effort started. The aim is to save the 25 million native birds, including kiwis, killed each year by introduced vermin.

No deal on ozone fix Emissions of hydrofluorocarbons – substitutes for ozone-eating CFCs, but greenhouse gases in their own right – will keep rising for at least the next five years. UN talks in Vienna, Austria, last week discussed a ceiling on their use, but failed to agree a date for it to be imposed.

Solar odyssey complete It finally did it. By landing in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday, Solar Impulse became the first plane to fly around the world on solar power alone. The 42,000-kilometre trip was divided into 17 legs and took more than a year, using 17,000 solar cells to power motors for day flying and charge batteries for use at night.

Teen brain upgrade MRI scans have revealed the final “edit” of the brain before adulthood for the first time. Scans of 300 young people show how the brain’s cortex layer thins down – probably as a result of pruning out unwanted connections between neurons. At the same time, important neurons gain a sheath that helps them transmit signals more quickly (PNAS, doi.org/bm38).

30 July 2016 | NewScientist | 7

THIS WEEK

Editing away blindness THE CRISPR revolution continues. The genome editing technique has now been tested in animals as a possible therapy for saving the sight of people with inherited eye diseases, and the results are looking good. “We are certainly very excited by the potential,” says Alex Hewitt at the University of Tasmania, Australia, whose team has shown that it is possible to use CRISPR to disable genes in the eyes of mice. The first trials of CRISPR treatments in people could start soon. In August, a group in China plans to treat lung cancer with the technique (see “First human trial”, below). But the team will simply remove immune cells from the body, edit their DNA to make them better at killing cancer cells, and put them back. For many other diseases, though, we need to find ways to use CRISPR to alter cells while they are still inside the body – a much greater challenge. The appeal of using genome

“This is the first time genome editing has been tested using a method known to be safe for us” editing to treat eye diseases is that it is easier to get new DNA into the cells of the eye than other tissues. Several teams are exploring the possibility – the firm Editas Medicine in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has said it hopes to start testing a CRISPR treatment for a form of blindness in people next year. All groups face a big obstacle: getting the tools needed to do CRISPR in the eye. The genes that 8 | NewScientist | 30 July 2016

encode the CRISPR machinery are large, and do not fit into a single virus of the kind commonly used to insert new DNA into cells. Now Hewitt’s team has shown that, by splitting the load between two viruses, these genes can be inserted into the eyes of mice and disable a target gene. The problem with using two viruses is it reduces the number of cells that are likely to receive all the new DNA. But despite this, Hewitt’s team were able to successfully disable a specific gene in 84 per cent of the retinal cells of the mice they tried this on (Investigative Opthalmology and Visual Science, doi.org/bm2r). This is a really encouraging result. Altering just 10 per cent of retinal cells might be enough to preserve vision in some cases of hereditary eye disease, and Hewitt

MARK GAMBA/GALLERYSTOCK

Tweaking DNA to save sight has made a promising start, finds Michael Le Page

says the method should work just as well in people. What’s more, this is the first time that genome editing has been tested in the eye using a gene-delivery method we already know is safe for human use – adeno-associated viruses. A handful of other animal studies have been published, but these experiments used electric pulses

FIRST HUMAN TRIAL What will be the first human trial of the revolutionary genome editing technique, CRISPR? It looks like a team in China will take that honour. There have been several trials of genome editing in people, but so far these have used techniques that are older and harder to use than CRISPR. But that could soon change. A trial of a CRISPR-based lung cancer treatment led by Lu You of Sichuan University’s West China Hospital in Chengdu was given ethical approval this month, and could begin in August.

KILLING CELLS You’s team will remove immune cells from people with lung cancer and use CRISPR to disable a gene called PD-1.

They will then reintroduce these cells back into each patient’s body. PD-1 usually prevents the immune system from attacking a person’s body, and the hope is that disabling this gene will make immune cells better at recognising and killing tumour cells. There’s a danger that disabling PD-1 could cause immune cells to attack healthy tissues too. But as the trial involves people with advanced cancer, who have no other treatment options, the risk may be worth taking. PD-1 will also be disabled by CRISPR in a cancer trial in the US that may start later this year. But in this trial, the immune cells will also be engineered to only attack cancer cells, so it should not be as risky.

to get CRISPR genes into the retinal cells. “If applied to a human, this would essentially fry their retina,” says Hewitt.

The correction question Adeno-associated viruses are already being used in conventional gene therapy trials for eye diseases. These therapies are designed to deliver genes to the eye to counteract the effects of harmful inherited mutations. In principle, genome editing could be a more powerful method, because it can directly correct the harmful mutation itself, or disable the affected gene. For instance, one gene therapy trial in London has targeted a form of Leber congenital amaurosis (LCA), a degenerative eye disease. While it produced promising results at first, the benefits wore off after a few years. The team thinks this is because the healthy gene they inserted did not produce enough of the protein it encodes. Directly correcting the unhealthy gene with CRISPR instead would ensure exactly the right amount of protein is produced, says Robin

In this section ■ Ancestor of all life was only half alive, page 12 ■ The fightback against racist technology begins, page 18 ■ Microbes that recycle what you flush, page 24

Dark matter no-show spells trouble for WIMPs

to make a difference. This means that, for now, Ali’s team is focusing on improving their gene therapy treatment. By contrast, Editas has chosen to target a very rare form of LCA that can be treated merely by disabling a gene – a much easier task. Most eye diseases, however, would only be treatable by gene editing if it could be improved to correct mutations efficiently. As things stand, CRISPR will be of limited use for treating eye diseases even if it proves safe and effective in human trials. But the technology is advancing rapidly, so this could soon change. A modified CRISPR method was recently announced that could provide an alternative approach for correcting genes. Watch this space. ■

C.H. FAHAM

THE HUNT lasted nearly two years, but there was not even a sniff of the quarry. One of the world’s leading dark matter detectors has failed to find any candidate particles, suggesting that the dominant model of the stuff may be on its last legs. Dark matter does not emit light and scarcely interacts with normal matter except through gravity, yet appears to account for around 85 per cent of the universe’s mass. Without its gravitational pull, galaxies would spin themselves apart. Theorists have settled on some of its basic characteristics: its particles have some mass and interact a bit with other matter via the weak –A prime target for CRISPR– nuclear force. So they called these mysterious entities “weakly Ali at University College London, interacting massive particles”, or WIMPs. who led the team. WIMPs’ occasional glancing But there’s a catch. This would blows with normal matter are what mean correcting mutations in a allow experiments like the Large gene, instead of just disabling it, Underground Xenon detector in as in Hewitt’s experiment. Lead, South Dakota, to detect their Correcting genes is much harder presence and measure their in non-dividing cells like those properties. But on 21 July, the LUX in the retina. It is not yet possible team told the Identification of Dark to correct a gene inside a high enough proportion of retinal cells Matter conference in Sheffield, UK,

that its final 20-month run had failed to make a single detection. That means LUX, dormant since May, has ruled out a large number of possible characteristics for WIMPs – to the point where some argue it might be time to abandon WIMPs altogether. “I think we are getting to the point where the limits are excluding so much of the parameter space that we should rethink,” says Avi Loeb at Harvard University. “Perhaps the dark matter is not WIMPs.” Richard Gaitskell at Brown University in Rhode Island, who worked on LUX, is still optimistic. Plans are already under way for an upgraded detector called LZ that will be 70 times more sensitive. Gaitskell says that the technology to detect flashes in pools of liquid xenon, caused by WIMPs striking atoms, is improving exponentially. That’s a good sign for those hoping we can still catch WIMPs. “To avoid everybody dying of boredom and running out of money, you have to do it as fast as you can,” he says. But even he acknowledges that sooner or later, WIMPs will be out of hiding places. “On a 15-year view

you have to be ready to admit that, if we fail to see anything.” If dark matter isn’t WIMPs, what is it? There’s no shortage of alternatives, from lightweight particles called axions to tiny black holes left over from the big bang. Some renegades want to do away with dark matter altogether. Mordehai Milgrom at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel, has fought a 30-year battle to explain away the need for extra matter in the universe. He accomplishes this by changing the

“We are getting to the point where we should rethink. Perhaps the dark matter is not WIMPs”

way gravity works on galactic scales – a theory called modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND). “I am certainly not surprised when I see negative reports coming from dark matter search enterprises,” says Milgrom. “Not finding dark matter at higher and higher sensitivity will only strengthen the case for MOND.” However, he wants the WIMP hunt to continue – not searching at all would leave both WIMP and MOND fans at a standstill. WIMPs have endured in part because theorists are unwilling to give up on decades of work around the idea. It’s always possible for them to tweak their models to save them from the latest data, says Loeb. “The good news about physics is that experiments set the agenda,” he says. “Theorists that have no connections with experiments miss being wrong, and that’s not physics in its actual sense.” Gaitskell isn’t bothered by playing whack-a-mole with different models. He’s no stick-in-the-mud either – he quit a previous experiment when it seemed as if it wouldn’t be able to deliver evidence for its preferred flavour of WIMPs. He maintains that there is still plenty of room for exploration. “I don’t think at this stage there has been any build-up in the science that says it’s not WIMPs,” he says. “I think it’s more that people would rather talk –It shed no light on dark matter– about something new.” Jacob Aron ■ 30 July 2016 | NewScientist | 9

THIS WEEK FIELD NOTES Boulby Mine, Cleveland, UK

Looking for life 1100 metres down so we’d like to use Boulby to work out where the best places are to look for signs of ancient life on Mars,” says Charles Cockell, an astrobiologist from the University of Edinburgh, UK. The cage clunks to a halt and we emerge into a cavernous tunnel, lit with a harsh fluorescent glow. I’m hit by a warm salty breeze and nearby we can hear the roar of generators, sucking air down from the surface to ventilate the mine. Headlamps on, we continue down the network

ORANGE boiler suit? Check. Hard hat and headlamp? Check. Emergency breathing apparatus? Check. Ear defenders on, into the airlock; clang, clang go the giant metal doors before we squeeze into the cage. The door slides down and our 8-minute descent begins, taking us 1100 metres below ground. I’ve come to Boulby Mine, a working potash, polyhalite and salt mine on the north-east coast of England, one of the deepest in Europe and home to the Boulby Underground Laboratory. “It is a unique environment to do science in,” says Sean Paling, head of the lab. “The kilometre of rock above the lab filters out cosmic rays, making it one of the few radioactively quiet places accessible to scientists in the world.” For a number of years, this lab has hosted the UK’s search for dark matter, along with super-sensitive radioisotope testing equipment for environmental and climate studies. But today I’m accompanying 20 scientists who are on a quest to find exotic signs of life. “Some parts of Boulby Mine are similar to environments we see on Mars, and

Neanderthal brains mirrored ours – perhaps GREAT minds grow alike. Neanderthal brains grew in the same way as ours do, a study of their skulls finds. That in turn suggests that Neanderthals were not so cognitively different from us – although not everyone agrees with the findings. Neanderthal brains were roughly the same size as ours, making them the largest among all known human 10 | NewScientist | 30 July 2016

KATE RAVILIOUS

Kate Ravilious

species. To glimpse how they grew over an individual’s life, Christoph Zollikofer at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and his colleagues looked at 15 Neanderthal skulls: six from adults and nine from children. Using software, they generated 3D casts of the brain case, allowing them to study changes in the rough shape of the brain through childhood. They then compared the findings with patterns of brain development in modern children (Current Biology, doi.org/bm34). The team found that the Neanderthal brain was subtly but

salt when the sea periodically dried out,” says Cockell. “We suspect that the rims contain clay, iron and organics, and could perhaps once have supported life.” Similar polygonal deposits have been observed on Mars, and the aim of today’s work is to help calculate where NASA’s Mars 2020 rover mission should concentrate its efforts in the search for signs of Martian life. The work also involves a dummy run of an immunoassay machine that will be used on the rover, which identifies organic compounds in samples. Ear defenders back on, Cockell drills into the edge and then the interior of one of the polygons, collecting the fine powder in sterilised jars. Next, Peter Edwards, from the University of Leicester, fires a beam from a Raman spectrometer into the holes. “The reflected spectrum gives you a fingerprint for the molecules making up the rock,” Edwards says. The spectrum produced by the edge of the polygon is clearly very different to the centre, although only further analysis will reveal if that difference represents a sign of life. This is the first time Cockell’s team has collected samples from the polygon rocks, something he has had an ambition to do ever since NASA’s Opportunity rover recorded similar formations on Mars. Five-o-clock arrives and we all troop back to the lift shaft, ready the –Like Mars, but closer to home– cramped ride to the surface. ■

of tunnels, the air becoming warmer and stiller as we leave the ventilation shaft behind. Ten minutes later, with sweat pouring down the backs of our necks, we arrive at our first sampling site. We enter an alcove, about the size of a squash court, and Cockell points out a honeycomb-like pattern on the rock salt walls, a possible haven for ancient forms of life. Dark grey crystals define the irregular polygonal shapes, which are about one metre across. Inside are the precious creamy-white salt crystals, mined to make fertilisers and road salt, among other things. “These rocks formed around 250 million years ago, in a giant inland sea. We think the polygonal shapes are connected to the expansion of

significantly longer, wider and flatter than modern human brains at birth. Subsequently, though, it developed rather like ours: certain regions, including the cerebellum, expanded quickly during childhood and then became some of the slowest-growing in early adulthood. It’s difficult – perhaps impossible – to work out exactly how such changes in the brain relate to particular

“If their brains grew like ours, perhaps they weren’t all that cognitively different to us either”

cognitive traits. But if this pattern of development was shared, it becomes that little bit harder to argue that Neanderthals were cognitively different from us, says Zollikofer. But a similar analysis by Philipp Gunz at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, previously found that Neanderthal brains developed differently. The divergent conclusions could be down to some guesswork in reconstructing Neanderthal brain shape, Gunz says. “We have to be honest about limitations of these methods.” Colin Barras ■

BOSTON, MA

INSTANT EXPERT:

RELATIVITY AND BEYOND SATURDAY 29 OCTOBER 2016 Six leading cosmologists, one amazing day of discovery. Hear how Einstein’s relativity continues to revolutionise our view of the cosmos and ask our expert speakers the questions you’ve always wanted answering. By the end of the day, you’ll feel like an expert too.

THE BIGTHEMES: Get to grips with gravitational waves, the big bang, dark matter and dark energy. Discover what makes black holes so special, how we’ll find a theory of everything and more. OUR EXPERTS: David Kaiser, Robert Caldwell, Lisa Barsotti, plus 3 more leading experts to be announced.

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THIS WEEK Old planets grow too hot or cold for life

Genes trace weird ancestor of all life Michael Le Page

LUCA emerged around 3.8 billion years ago and gave rise to two kinds of simple cells: bacteria and archaea. Martin’s group analysed the genomes of 1800 bacteria and 130 archaea to identify the most ancient genes. The 355 they found include some universal genes, such as a few involved in reading the genetic code. But others point to a very

WANT to find some ancient fossils? Scratch yourself. Many of the genes in our cells evolved billions of years ago and a few of them can be traced back to the last common ancestor of all life. Now we have the best picture yet of what that ancestor was like and where it lived, thanks to a study that identified 355 genes “The first life was only that it probably possessed. “It was flabbergasting to us that half-alive because it got its we found as many as we did,” says energy from reactions in the hydrothermal vents” William Martin at the University of Düsseldorf in Germany. This supports the idea that the last distinctive lifestyle (Nature universal common ancestor (LUCA) Microbiology, doi.org/bm2s). lurked in hydrothermal vents One characteristic of almost all where hot water rich in hydrogen, living cells is that they pump ions carbon dioxide and minerals across a membrane to generate emerge from the sea floor. an electrochemical gradient, “It’s spot-on with regard to then use that gradient to make the hydrothermal vent theory,” the energy-rich molecule ATP. The Martin says. He describes LUCA team’s results suggest LUCA could as half-living, because it may not generate such a gradient, but have depended on non-living could harness an existing one. reactions in the vents to produce That fits in with the idea that many of the chemicals it needed. the first life got its energy from 12 | NewScientist | 30 July 2016

AGE matters. Searching for alien life on planets orbiting older stars may be fruitless because they always become prohibitively hot or cold. The search for life on other worlds has focused on planets in what’s known as the habitable zone – the ring around stars where it’s the right temperature for liquid water. That has led some to target planets orbiting red dwarf stars, as their smaller size and cooler temperatures mean planets in the habitable zone are closer in, and so easier to spot. –Cooking up life– But we should also look for planets whose stars are the right age, regardless of their size, say the natural gradient between Shintaro Kadoya and Eiichi Tajika vent water and seawater, and so at the University of Tokyo, Japan. was bound to these vents. Only Because stars grow brighter with later did the ability to generate age, planets at the inner edge of the gradients evolve, allowing life habitable zone enter a “runaway to break away from the vents. greenhouse mode”, in which their LUCA also appears to have oceans boil away. Meanwhile, planets had a gene for a “revolving door” at the outer edge lose heat-trapping protein that could swap sodium gases from their atmospheres as and hydrogen ions across this volcanic activity decreases, so they gradient. Such a protein would enter an ice-covered “snowball state”. have been crucial for exploiting Kadoya and Tajika built a model of the natural gradient at vents. how planets heat or cool over time, One thing Martin didn’t find and found that both fates set in after is genes involved in making about 3 billion years (Astrophysical amino acids, the building blocks Journal Letters, doi.org/bm27). of proteins. LUCA may have The findings have implications for depended on those produced planned exoplanet missions that will spontaneously at vents, he says. target red dwarf stars. Smaller stars “Most of the identified genes don’t actually provide life-friendly are good candidates for having environments for any longer than been present in LUCA,” says sun-sized stars, says Kadoya. Peter Gogarten at the University “For the purpose of detecting of Connecticut in Storrs. But planets with life, it is important to Martin’s approach, while sound, concentrate on the young planetary may have omitted some genes systems,” he says. that LUCA did posses, perhaps But there might be another thing including those for amino-acid keeping planets habitable, says synthesis. Craig O’Neill at Macquarie University The hydrothermal vent theory in Sydney, Australia: life itself. is the leading contender for the “The ability of life to modulate origins of life, because it provides the surface conditions means that a detailed scenario that explains any planet on which life evolves is many of life’s key features. But probably more robust to climatic however plausible it appears, it change than these models predict,” may never be possible to prove he says. Alice Klein ■ that it is right, Martin says. ■

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INTRODUCING THE THIRD IN A NEW SERIES OF WHITE PAPERS FROM NEW SCIENTIST What’s the future of business? We at New Scientist decided to take a look at how three of its key drivers – energy, automation and money – might change over the next decade. To do that, we’ve asked three writers with a deep understanding of these areas to tell us how they think the future could unfold, and how it might confound our initial expectations. In this report, author David Wolman looks at the future of money in a world increasingly divorcing itself from centralised institutions. With technology already disrupting the role of the middleman, he examines how long banks can expect to eke out an existence. By a subtractive process, Wolman identifies how much of banking is “socially useless activity” ripe for technological disruption. Even ostensibly specialist products like initial public offerings and insurance are being brought to the masses. He also sees a threat over the horizon to the US dollar’s globally privileged status. To download your free copy, register online at newscientist.com/gamechangers. Sally Adee Editor, GameChangers

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IN BRIEF Urban monkeys get high cholesterol

Boozy primates seek out palm nectar rich in alcohol IT LOOKS wasted, right? Aye-ayes (pictured above) seem to prefer fake nectar with higher concentrations of alcohol – as does the slow loris, a small primate from South-East Asia. Both animals probably encounter fermented palm nectar in the wild. Chimps have been caught gulping fermented sap in the wild before, but it wasn’t clear if primates tolerated the alcohol or actively sought it out, says Robert Dudley at the University of California in Berkeley. “This is the first study – albeit using captive primates – to show that there is a preference for higher levels of alcohol,”

says Dudley, who wasn’t involved in the study, Nathaniel Dominy at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, offered two aye-ayes and one slow loris five cups of sugary water with alcohol content ranging from 0 to 4 or 5 per cent, similar levels to those found in wild flowers. The primates could tell the difference and preferred to drink the boozier liquids (Royal Society Open Science, doi.org/bmwx). “Aye-ayes used their fingers to compulsively probe the cups long after the contents were emptied, suggesting that they were extremely eager to collect all residual traces,” says Dominy. It’s not yet clear why they seek fermented drinks. One idea is that the smell of alcohol might help these animals locate edible fruits and flowers in the wild.

Self-destructing microbes take on cancer BACTERIA could be our new allies in the war against cancer, tearing themselves apart in order to hit tumour cells with poisons. Chemotherapy reaches tumours via the bloodstream, but the innermost parts of a tumour have no blood vessels. Now Jeff Hasty and his team at the University of California, San Diego, have engineered Salmonella strains that can

get to these areas and slow tumour growth in mice. First, the team gave the Salmonella the ability to produce three types of toxins. Then they programmed the bacteria to release these poisons by self-destructing after a certain number of them had reached the same spot. “It’s basically a kamikaze mission,” says Hasty. When fed to mice with liver

tumours, the bacteria travelled directly to the interior of the tumours and stopped them from growing. Used in combination with chemotherapy, the bacteria caused tumours to shrink and increased the mice’s life expectancy by 50 per cent (Nature, doi.org/bmw6). Hasty hopes that bacterial therapies of this kind could eventually be used alongside existing drugs to attack tumours from both the inside and outside.

CITY slicker monkeys have it easy – but with their sophisticated lifestyle come health concerns. Urban white-footed tamarins seem to enjoy a life of few worries, bar traffic and the possibility of lethal shocks from power lines. “There are no predators, and fruit trees like mangoes and guavas are quite common, so tamarins probably don’t have to move as much as rural tamarins,” says Iván Dario Soto, from the University of Antioquia in Medellín, Colombia. “People have fun feeding them things like cane sugar, cookies, marshmallows and bananas.” These urban excesses may have a downside. Soto’s team compared the health of 16 adult tamarins living in the city with 20 from rainforests. “The tamarins in the city were overweight, [and] showed a 38 per cent increase in the levels of cholesterol,” says Soto (American Journal of Primatology, doi.org/bmxd).

Water-bottle bees air-condition hives BEES have a cool trick for hot weather. When honeybee hives get too warm, thirsty bees beg their specialised, water-foraging sisters for more liquid, which ends up cooling the colony. These “water collector” bees fly out and fill their bellies with water, then regurgitate it once they’re back at home. Other bees slurp it up and spit it out around the hive, cooling the hive as the water evaporates. Some bees even stock up for later, like living water tanks (Journal of Experimental Biology, doi.org/bmw3). “It’s critical for their cooling,” says Thomas Seeley at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. “Without that, they cannot really control the temperature in the nest on hot days.” 30 July 2016 | NewScientist | 15

IN BRIEF

NASA/JPL-CALTECH/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

HIDING scars 800 kilometres wide isn’t as tricky as you might think. If you’re a dwarf planet, all you need is the right kind of mud. The absence of such large impact craters on Ceres, a dwarf planet in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, has been a puzzle since NASA’s Dawn probe arrived there in March 2015. Ceres has witnessed most of the solar system’s evolution and should be pockmarked with at least 10 giant craters. The latest images from Dawn, still in orbit around Ceres, may just explain why we cannot see them. Simone Marchi and his colleagues at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, used hi-res images from Dawn to create a model of Ceres’s topography. They found depressions hinting at large craters, all surface traces of which had been wiped out (Nature Communications, DOI: 10.1038/ncomms12257). The team suggests that Ceres’s unusual internal composition and evolution are to blame. Beneath the surface, Ceres could be a slushy cocktail of low-viscosity materials such as ice and clay that form a kind of mud. That would allow the outer layer to shift and relax, potentially smoothing out any large craters. The results confirm that Ceres is a long-term resident of the asteroid belt, says Thomas Davison of Imperial College London.

16 | NewScientist | 30 July 2016

Superatoms joined to make molecules with super properties IT’S Lego for advanced chemists. Superatoms have been linked up to make molecules for the first time. These could be the building blocks for advanced magnetic materials and electronics. Chemists began building superatoms when they found that certain arrangements of atoms can behave like scaled-up versions of an atom of a different element. These superatoms pool their electrons into shells around a central core, and since such shells determine the atom’s chemical properties, the superatom takes

on those characteristics. That lets you get features that wouldn’t appear in nature. Now a team led by Xavier Roy at Columbia University in New York has taken the concept a step further by constructing pairs or trios of superatoms – the simplest possible superatom molecules. The team built the core of the superatoms out of six cobalt and eight selenium atoms, then added arms made from a variety of other atoms. These arms are designed to fit together, mimicking a chemical bond at the super-scale

(Nano Letters, doi.org/bmw5). The materials could have uniquely tunable magnetic properties, Roy says. “We’re aiming to make things where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts,” he says. “We’re interested in new types of magnetic material or conductive material. By controlling the coupling between superatoms, we can tailor that.” The team plans to build large assemblages of superatoms with these tailored properties, which could form the basis for new kinds of electronics and sensors. JOËL MEUNIER

Mud facial worked wonders for Ceres

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A gene that piles on the pounds IT COULD be in your DNA. A gene variant that raises the risk of obesity by between 30 and 40 per cent is the strongest genetic predictor of body weight found in humans so far. Having just one copy of this variant of the CREBRF gene is linked to an increase in body mass index of 1.5 points. For an 83-kilogram person who is 1.75 metres tall, this is the equivalent of gaining 4.6 kilograms (Nature Genetics, doi.org/bm2t). The variant was uncovered during a genomic analysis of more than 5000 people in Samoa, where obesity rates are among the highest in the world. Ryan Minster at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and his team found that a quarter of Samoans carry this variant, which may have evolved during their history colonising the South Pacific. “They had to endure voyages between islands and subsequently survive on those islands,” says Minster. The CREBRF variant appears to be rare in other populations, but studying how the gene works may help researchers better understand obesity.

Baby earwigs eat faeces in hard times DESPERATE times call for desperate measures. As food shortages hit, young European earwigs resort to eating each other’s excrement in their underground homes, helping to keep hunger and death at bay. When food is plentiful, the earwig offspring, or nymphs, feast on scraps of plant and insect material that their mother brings back from above ground, and on food she regurgitates. But when faced with starvation, the nymphs have to make do with what’s around them. Unlike some other group-living insects, European earwigs don’t clear

their nests of faeces. When food is short, the availability of excrement keeps the nymphs alive for about two more days on average than if there is none present, a team has now found (Behavioral Ecology, doi.org/bmwz). Munching on faeces might also be a way for the young to acquire essential gut microbes, says Maximilian Körner of the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz in Germany. The nutritional and microbial gains from faeces may even have kept earwig offspring from straying and given rise to family life in the species, he adds.

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ANALYSIS TECHNOLOGY AND RACE

Digital discrimination The fight back against biased software starts now, says Aviva Rutkin

ELIOT DUDIK/NEW YORK TIMES / REDUX / EYEVINE

GREGORY SELDEN was planning a weekend trip with friends to Philadelphia, so he decided to book through holiday rental site Airbnb. Selden, a 25-year-old black man, enquired about a room, but was told by the host that it was not available. As he browsed the site later, however, it was showing up as available for his preferred dates. Wondering if his profile had something to do with it, Selden made fake accounts with pictures of white men as avatars, and tried to book the

18 | NewScientist | 30 July 2016

same room. This time, he was told it was available. In May, Selden shared his experience on Twitter, joining a public outcry on the hashtag #airbnbwhileblack. The stories there echo Selden’s. One black woman said she was finally approved by a black host after being rejected by a string of white ones. Another woman reported more success on the site after she changed her name and switched out a picture of herself with a photo of a landscape. These stories are not just

anecdotal: a study from Harvard University in January found that people with names usually perceived as being AfricanAmerican such as “Tanisha” and “Tyrone” are 16 per cent less likely to be accepted as guests on Airbnb than people with names like “Kristen” and “Brad”. Another experiment found that black hosts charge 12 per cent less than

non-black ones. “Despite the potential of the internet to reduce discrimination, our results suggest that social platforms such as Airbnb may have the opposite effect,” wrote researchers Benjamin Edelman and Michael Luca. Airbnb has acknowledged it has a race problem, and said it plans to pursue potential solutions, including unconscious bias “Popular apps have forms of training for hosts and machinediscrimination, and certain learning models to enforce antiautomatic soap dispensers discrimination policy. Edelman don’t recognise black skin” and Luca suggest the site removes profile pictures or even names from the booking system. But it’s not just Airbnb. Some of our most popular apps and algorithms have their own forms of discrimination (see “Skewed software”, right). In cases like Airbnb’s, this stems from unwittingly leaving the door open for users’ prejudices, but in others it seems designers simply forgot to consider entire groups of potential customers. For example, certain automatic soap dispensers appear not to recognise black skin. Some of the most egregious examples involve biases baked directly into code, hidden under a veneer of mathematical precision. For instance, courts around the US have started trialling computer programs to predict how likely a criminal is to reoffend. The idea is that the software will one day help judges decide who should receive harsher sentences or who can get out on parole earlier. Although the specific input considered by the program is often opaque, the output is troubling. In May, ProPublica analysed one program in Broward County, Florida, and found that it falsely labelled black people as future reoffenders almost twice as often as white –Gregory Selden took on Airbnb– people over a period of two years.

RUSSELL HART / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

At the Color of Surveillance conference in Washington DC in April, speakers depicted racist technology as merely the latest incarnation of discrimination. Simone Browne, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin, described how “lantern laws” in Manhattan in the 1700s required black slaves over 14 to carry a lantern when travelling at night in certain cities. Today, says Brown, the city still relies on light to supervise its minority residents, only now by shining floodlights on social housing projects. “Surveillance is nothing new to black folks. It is the fact of anti-blackness,” she said. It seems that despite technology’s promises of calculations unencumbered by human mistakes or partisanship, it keeps mirroring back the same prejudices of the analogue world.

The fight back begins Many believe the technology community has a responsibility to do better and are calling for these patterns to be recognised and rectified. In the meantime, some are using technology to push back. One way is to create tools that turn the spotlight back on to the authorities. The Swat App is an upcoming database that will collect crowd data on police

Michigan Law School in Ann Arbor. Algorithms frequently consider other factors that are correlated with race. For example, sentencing algorithms take into account where someone lives, and their employment history. It can be difficult to disentangle those factors, she says. A 2011 study on facial recognition software from different countries found that algorithms from France, Germany and the US were markedly more accurate at recognising Caucasian faces than East-Asian faces. The opposite held true for algorithms developed in China, Japan and Korea. The flaws were likely born from incomplete training data, populated by more of one type of face than the other. Being more aware of these potential issues might have caught the oversight. Anupam Chander, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, also believes discrimination is often embedded in the data. The resulting technology then becomes a mechanism for discrimination

violence and automatically file complaints on the user’s behalf. Another option is to take the fight to court. In May, Selden filed a civil rights lawsuit against Airbnb on behalf of himself and others. Meanwhile, a Wisconsin man named Eric Loomis has tried to appeal his six-year prison sentence, arguing that the judge’s use of a sentencing algorithm violated his right to due process. Although the state supreme court upheld Loomis’s sentence earlier “Technology can become a mechanism for this month, it admitted there discrimination to amplify were potential problems with and spread, like a virus” the algorithm, and suggested that courts should be warned about its questionable accuracy. to amplify and spread, like a virus. In the wake of He argues that designers should #airbnbwhileblack, black employ “algorithmic affirmative entrepreneurs have been action”, explicitly paying inspired to come up with their attention to race in the data fed own alternatives. Two start-ups to the algorithm and in the results founded this year, Noirbnb and it spits out, and then correcting Innclusive, aim to offer a more course as needed. That might equal alternative to Airbnb. mean tweaking the inputs or (Innclusive’s tagline is: “Be You explicitly gathering more Wherever You Go.”) diverse data and test subjects. These alternatives offer a way to “By pretending we’re colourcircumvent users’ biases, but the blind, we may in fact be still fundamental source of the bias acting on a world that is clearly in software can often run deeper. so skewed by racism or sexism In some cases, prejudice arises and other prejudices, that we from the information that would be propagating that racist/ software is given to work with, sexist world,” he says. “We need as with the sentencing algorithm. to teach computers about race Race does not even have to be so that they can recognise explicitly included, says Sonja when they are unintentionally Starr of the University of promoting racism.” ■

SKEWED SOFTWARE ● In March, Microsoft unveiled a new Twitter chatbot named Tay and invited people to talk to it. Trolls quickly taught Tay to parrot racist, sexist and anti-Semitic lines. The bot was taken down within 24 hours. “Although we had prepared for many types of abuses of the system, we had made a critical oversight for this specific attack,” said corporate vice president Peter Lee in a public statement. ● The GhettoTracker app, released in 2013, let people rate “which parts of town are safe and which ones are ghetto, or unsafe”, complete with a homepage picture of a smiling white family. The following year, another app, Sketchfactor, let users anonymously report and geotag “sketchy” behaviour, which was seen as enabling people to racially profile different city areas. After a public backlash, both apps disappeared. ● Last June, web developer Jacky Alcine realised that the Google Photos app had automatically tagged a picture of two black people as “gorillas”. Flickr’s smart tagging system ran into similar problems, tagging a photo of a black man with “animal”. ● The behaviour of some cameras suggests creators never tested their tech on non-white people. In one viral video from 2009, a black man named Desi and a white woman named Wanda play around with an HP motion-tracking camera. It follows Wanda as she ducks from side to side, forward and back. When Desi is in shot, it does nothing. ● In 2013, Harvard University’s Latanya Sweeney discovered that Googling her name led to ads suggesting she might want to look up arrest records for the name. A follow-up study found that names such as Darnell and DeShawn were 25 per cent more likely to prompt arrest record ads than names like Jill and Emma.

30 July 2016 | NewScientist | 19

COMMENT

Half-baked nonsense The idea that only meals prepared from scratch are good for children is a misogynistic myth, says Anthony Warner ONLY 16 per cent of UK mothers cook from scratch every day, according to a survey. Many healthy-eating campaigners will be keen to tell you that the other 84 per cent are risking the health and prospects of their children. Blame is routinely heaped on working mothers – and let’s be honest, it is largely mothers who get shamed – for apparently neglecting their family’s nutritional needs, filling them up with processed junk. “Return to real ingredients that our grandmothers would have recognised”, “ditch additive-laden frankenfoods”. The guilt trip over not feeding children a “proper” meal is pervasive and reinforced by misguided attitudes towards manufactured food products. It has become commonplace to pour scorn upon women who do not fulfil their “duty” of delivering a continual stream of beautiful

home-cooked dishes. Critics long for what they see as a lost world of nuclear families gathering daily at the table to be nourished by serene and domesticated mothers. Driven by the animated corpse of Victorian misogyny, this view comes with a handy narrative: the pre-prepared food products that make lazy women’s lives even easier must be rejected. Those products are vile, unhealthy and unclean. They make children fat. Such people might do well to read recent research (Archives of Disease in Childhood, doi.org/ bmtx). It found home-made meals for children based on recipes from bestselling cookbooks are not always healthier than convenience products and ready meals. In fact, on many measures they seemed less healthy: they tended to have a lower vegetable variety and were more likely to bust recommended

Degrees of freedom The autonomy of Turkish academic institutions faces an existential threat, says Caghan Kizil SOCIETY’S prized institutions are always worth defending. On 16 July, Turkey woke up to scenes unprecedented to most. Shocking images from the attempted coup d’etat included the bombing of parliament, war jets swooping over cities and tanks on the Bosphorus Bridge in Istanbul. This was an undemocratic and 20 | NewScientist | 30 July 2016

educational staff, have been suspended and 1577 deans of universities have been forced to resign. More than 600 academics have been sacked. All academics are banned from going overseas and those on assignments abroad have been told to return. Life is more difficult for those dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. The reason for this purge is a falling-out between Turkey’s ruling AKP government and the Gülen movement. Political allies

unacceptable act. Many citizens died. Fortunately, the coup failed, but it has had dire consequences for many parts of Turkish society, including its academics. Due to suspected involvement in the coup, blamed on a political “Intimidating top-down control has long been network called the Gülen eradicating free speech movement, tens of thousands and academic creativity” of public employees, including

for over a decade, relations between the two soured a few years ago. Before then, warnings had been raised that key positions in education were being filled by members of the AKP and Gülen movement. Today’s actions are more than a selective hunt for those behind the coup attempt. Those in power are taking advantage to try to restructure this vital part of society by cracking down on anyone who might have opposed their actions in the past. It is a continuation of previous hostility, demonstrated by the AKP’s earlier subordination of the Turkish Academy of Sciences to

For more opinion articles, visit newscientist.com/opinion

Anthony Warner is a food industry development chef by day and blogs as The Angry Chef by night

political power and prosecution of the group Academics for Peace. An indiscriminate dragnet is undermining academic freedom by seizing control of this sector’s already impaired autonomous decision-making. Intimidating top-down control and the blurring of the distinction between criminal investigations and political punishment has long been eradicating free speech and academic creativity in Turkey. It seems there is more to come. ■ Caghan Kizil is a biologist at Dresden University of Technology, Germany, and a former associate professor of Turkey’s higher education and science council

INSIGHT The politics of space

NASA

limits for energy and fat content. It’s a small study and you can’t draw too many conclusions, but it does question the narrative that processed food is inherently bad. As with most simple stories, when you look closely, the reality is far more nuanced. If there is a core message, it is that choosing convenient options as part of a balanced and varied diet is OK and should not be a source of shame. We must stop thinking of the consumption of processed fare as a symbol of society’s moral decline. In many ways it has given us more freedom, time and energy to engage in family life. My formative years were full of beautiful home-cooked meals, but I have equally fond memories of ice cream, Crispy Pancakes, fish fingers and tinned tomato soup. Foods like these form a rich part of many lives. They can be an expression of love and family values as wholesome and joyful as any meal cooked from scratch. Every time we shame food choices and advocate excluding perfectly healthy items for moral reasons, we move away from the sensible, balanced relationship with food that we really need. ■

–Next time, let’s do it together–

Ditchtheflag-waving: spaceisforusall NATIONALISM has always been a part international efforts; going it alone will of space exploration. The US went to not teach us more about the universe. the moon “because it was hard”, as Before Kennedy even made his President Kennedy said – but also famous moon-shot speech, US military because the Russians were orbiting officials were talking of the moon as a Earth. Every time a NASA craft visits vital base for warfare – the “ultimate another world, the little American high ground”. A similar tone was flags come out. NASA administrator evident when President Johnson Charles Bolden has justified the defended the Apollo programme, agency’s current efforts to develop saying, “I do not believe that this crewed craft as a way to “bring space generation of Americans is willing to launches back to America“. resign itself to going to bed each night We may now be seeing the logical by the light of a communist moon.” conclusion of that focus. On 20 July, Collins echoed these sentiments in the anniversary of the Apollo 11 her speech: “Nations that lead on the moon landing, former space shuttle frontier lead in the world,” she said. commander Eileen Collins spoke at “Human space flight is the Republican national convention mostly about flexing and called for “leadership that will national muscle – expect make America’s space programme more of that from Trump” first again” – a clear reframing of Donald Trump’s nationalistic “Make America Great Again” theme. Do we really want to return to this? This is a step too far. The space Since the cold war, space missions community and scientists, more have broadened to encompass broadly, should not be co-opted in understanding what space is and our place in it. Human space flight service of a presidential candidate who was and is mostly about flexing has called climate change a Chinese national muscle, not about science. hoax. It’s time to reassess what we That’s the sort of exploration we value in space. The best, most exciting, can expect from a Trump presidency: work has been done through

one that lets science take a back seat. Trump has said that he would prioritise fixing potholes over space. Let’s not kid ourselves that his apparent reversal means that a Trump administration would send spacecraft to Pluto. The “me-first” framing limits what we can do in space. In a speech to Congress in 2014, astronaut Sandra Magnus speculated that the goaloriented nature of the moon landings led to the eventual decline of the US space programme – once they were accomplished, funding dried up. By contrast, the International Space Station has been saved from the budget axe many times over, in large part because of the political treaties that ensured its survival. Particle physics has a similar cautionary tale: by many accounts, the Texas-based Superconducting Super Collider would have found the Higgs boson 20 years ahead of the international Large Hadron Collider, if its funding hadn’t been cut. Our stated goals for the future of space exploration are huge: to send people to Mars; to observe the first stars in the universe; to explore other worlds and see whether they have life. Maybe nations can take the first steps towards these goals alone, but only an international effort will attain them. Collaboration makes projects more sustainable, long-lived and efficient, not to mention affordable. We don’t need another space race. Lisa Grossman ■ 30 July 2016 | NewScientist | 21

Drones find their way

REUTERS/WOLFGANG RATTAY

TECHNOLOGY

Delivering parcels, monitoring crowds, counting whales – a week doesn’t go by without us hearing of a new use for drones. Yet for all the buzz, drone technology is only just getting off the ground. Cheap and lightweight, most simply aren’t that smart. But things are changing. Here are three advances that will help drones find their way in the world

SMART NAVIGATION

LOCKHEED MARTIN

When you’re zipping through the air at 60 kilometres per hour, it can be hard to work out where you’re going. But now drones can create detailed 3D maps as they fly – an advance that could let them navigate the world free from human input. Called Hydra Fusion, the system could one day allow drones to use a form of navigation known as simultaneous localisation and mapping to find their way in unfamiliar spaces – just as some robots do on the ground. It will also make them better at aerial surveillance.

SUPER BRAINPOWER

It feels like there’s a drone for every Hydra Fusion works by stitching together multiple images – in this case, occasion: one to monitor farms, one to spy on wildlife, yet another to deliver consecutive frames of footage from your pizza. Now a drone called Teal a drone’s video camera – to form a aims to do it all – thanks to a boost in detailed 3D map while it is in the air. brainpower. “We can fly a drone along at 30 knots Most drones are designed with and create a map as we go,” says John a specific use in mind, says George Molberg at Lockheed Martin, part of the team behind the system. It previously took hours of postflight “Image recognition is used in one app that lets you processing to build maps from instruct the drone to follow drone footage. The bottleneck was a specific person” processing power. The team overcame this by harnessing the power of Matus, CEO of iDrone in Salt Lake GPUs – fast image-processing chips City. “We’re making this almost like originally developed for games. a smartphone for drones, where we At 60 kilometres per hour, Hydra can build an app store around it.” Fusion creates maps with a resolution Matus has been flying drones since of 30 centimetres per pixel, clearly he was 11 years old. “I built this wish showing trees and buildings (see list of everything I wanted in a drone,” picture, left). Higher resolutions – up he says. to 2.5 cm per pixel – can be generated at slower speeds and low altitudes. Now 18, he has developed Teal, Even greater detail may be possible: a drone that can make decisions in for one client, Lockheed Martin is the air. That’s thanks to brain-inspired looking into mapping changes as software from Neurala, a robotics small as 6 millimetres in the position firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts, –Drone’s-eye view– of railway tracks. David Hambling that has previously developed tech

22 | NewScientist | 30 July 2016

to guide space rovers. Layers of artificial neural networks handle different tasks, such as interpreting what the camera sees or choosing where the drone will go next. “The Teal drone is the first drone with a processor powerful enough for us to run our machine learning software right on the drone itself, so it can make immediate decisions,” says Roger Matus, vice president at Neurala. “It’s the first stage of autonomous flight.” Neurala’s image recognition is used in one of Teal’s three built-in apps, which lets you instruct the drone to track a specific person. Over time, the team intends to develop skills like better obstacle avoidance and autonomous navigation. Teal’s two other starter apps offer flight control and a racing game. George Matus hopes developers will build on the drone’s smarts to create more, such as a search-and-rescue function, or one that learns when the drone is about to crash and instructs it to take avoidance action. Aviva Rutkin

For more technology stories, visit newscientist.com/technology

Internet giant crunches 600 million users’ data

Why have one when you can have a swarm? Getting multiple drones to carry out a coordinated task means that more ground can be covered in less time. It took a drone swarm just 6 hours to map the Matterhorn mountain in the Alps, for example. Moving about as a swarm is tricky, however. Single drones can avoid obstacles with relative ease, but it is hard to do so while flying in formation.

Into the woods So Matthias Brust at the Singapore University of Technology and Design and Bogdan Strimbu at Oregon State University devised a way for drones to stick together as they fly through one of the toughest environments they could think of – a forest. Getting a drone swarm to pick its way through trees means that such swarms could soon map and take pictures of areas that were previously off limits. Their method is based on a followthe-leader approach. A lead drone is given a GPS destination, and the rest

to send images back home. The researchers tested their system by running a computer simulation in which eight drones approached a tree and took up positions to scan it. The swarm reached its destination and spread out almost as quickly as it took a single drone to arrive there. If the drones can surround a tree without crashing, flying past many trees shouldn’t be a problem, says Brust. Chris Lippitt at the University of New Mexico looks forward to drone swarms soon mapping hard-to-reach places. “It really changes the equation for how we can measure the environment,” he says. Conor Gearin

south-east China closing down in early 2016 – the area of the factory, once buzzing with location traces, suddenly emptying like an abandoned beehive. The data also shows success and growth. The number of people going to a Beijing technology park doubled from 2014 to now, while attendance at a start-up’s offices skyrocketed after it won investment in mid-2015 (arxiv.org/abs/1607.04451). Baidu has collated the data to build an employment index for China, a number that reflects the state of the

“Baidu used the number of visits to Apple Stores to predict the company’s Chinese revenue” labour market by tracking how many people visit industrial, manufacturing and technology zones. This shows that since 2014, China’s manufacturing employment has dipped by around 10 per cent, while high-tech employment has grown slightly. A similar index for consumption measures changes in shopper footfall. Baidu used the number of visits to Apple Stores to predict that Apple’s Chinese revenue for the second quarter of 2016 would be down 20 per cent over the previous year – roughly in line with Apple’s published results. Hal Hodson ■ JASON LANGLEY/AURORA PHOTOS/PLAINPICTURE

SPEEDY SWARMS

BAIDU, China’s internet giant, has shown what you can learn when you have access to enough location data. The firm’s Big Data Lab in Beijing has used billions of location records from its 600 million users as a lens to view the Chinese economy. It has tracked the flux of people around offices and shops as a proxy measurement for employment and consumption activity. The lab even used the data to predict Apple’s second quarter revenue in China. Location data has already proved useful for purposes such as keeping tabs on population movements and the spread of disease. This is the first time that a company the size of Baidu – similar to Facebook or Google – has shown what it is capable of doing with the data from their –Special delivery– huge user bases, giving these firms enormous power and insight that they don’t typically talk about. The researchers hand-labelled thousands of areas of interest – of the pack maintains its position offices, shopping centres and relative to the leader, while avoiding industrial zones – across China. Then obstacles. If the leader runs low on they studied location data from the battery or crashes, the swarm picks end of 2014 to the middle of 2016 to a new captain on the fly. see how many people were at those Because trees and leaves – or places at each time, and how that buildings in a city – can block the changed through the year. swarm’s communication with the The data presents a bird’s-eye view ground base, the lead drone collects of Chinese society. For example, it data from its teammates and captures a large shoe factory in periodically rises above the canopy

–Every shop you visit…– 30 July 2016 | NewScientist | 23

TECHNOLOGY

ONE PER CENT

They’ve got the power Microbes can generate energy as they clean water, says Sally Adee

24 | NewScientist | 30 July 2016

bacteria to metabolise the organic set-up into a battery. This has the material in waste water. “There’s added benefit of slowing bacterial lots of food for them, so they growth, so that at the end of the reproduce fast,” says Cambrian process you have electricity and chief technology officer Justin no microbe cake. Buck. At the end of the process, A number of teams are working the microbes can make up a third on their own versions of these by weight of the leftovers to be cells. Orianna Bretschger at the disposed of. Before being put in J. Craig Venter Institute in San landfill, this “microbe cake” itself Diego, California, is testing hers needs to be heat-sterilised and at a farm run by the San Pasqual chemically treated, which uses High School in nearby Escondido, a lot of energy. using it to process about 630 litres Microbial fuel cells have long of pig waste per day. been touted as the way forward. The idea is that the biochemistry “The bacteria that purify the water also liberate involved in metabolising the contaminants can yield electricity electrons, turning the set-up into a battery” to help power the process. But fuel cells of this kind have been very difficult to scale up outside Bretschger is in the early stages the lab. of building a larger pilot system, BioVolt uses strains of to be commissioned in Tijuana, Geobacter and another microbe Mexico, later this year. “I think called Shewanella oneidensis to that we will still be on track for process the sludge. Its proprietary commercialisation in the next mix of organisms has one key three to five years,” she says. advantage – the bacteria liberate Her system goes a step some electrons as they respire, beyond BioVolt and traditional effectively turning the whole plants in that it can rid water of pharmaceuticals – synthetic oestrogens, for example. Bretschger is now looking at ways to add pain relief drugs to the list. Cambrian CEO Matt Silver sees a future in which different kinds of microbial fuel cells treat different kinds of waste, perhaps recovering useful by-products. Another of the firm’s designs, EcoVolt, generates methane as it cleans up waste water produced by a Californian brewery. It has also cut the brewery’s energy use by 15 per cent and its water use by 40 per cent. Cambrian hopes BioVolt will scale up to processing more than 20,000 litres per day. Microbial fuel cells, Silver thinks, will do for renewable water what solar and –The usual way is a bit of a grind– wind did for renewable energy. ■

Dead man’s fingers As requests go, it’s an odd one. Last month, police asked biometric researcher Anil Jain at Michigan State University to 3D-print copies of a dead man’s fingertips so they could access his fingerprint-locked phone. The police have scans of the man’s digits from a previous arrest. The replicas have been coated with metallic particles to make them work on a capacitive scanner, which relies on our skin’s conductivity.

3%

The boost to GDP that could result from a central bank issuing a digital currency like bitcoin, according to the Bank of England

Cybercrime on the rise Bank fraud, virus attacks, hacked email accounts. There were 5.8 million cybercrime incidents in England and Wales last year, affecting about one in 10 people, says the UK’s Office for National Statistics. Chris Greany of the City of London Police endorsed a call for a national campaign to make people more internet savvy, on a par with the UK’s seat-belt and drink-drive campaigns of the 1980s and 90s.

PICTURE CREDIT

PICTURE CREDIT

THEY’RE miraculous in their own way, even if they don’t quite turn water into wine. Personal water treatment plants could soon be recycling our waste water and producing energy on the side. Last month, Boston-based Cambrian Innovation began field tests of what’s known as a microbial fuel cell at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Maryland. Called BioVolt, in one day it can convert 2250 litres of sewage into enough clean water for at least 15 people. Not only that, it generates the electricity to power itself – plus a bit left over. This is a big deal, as conventional treatment plants guzzle energy – typically consuming 1.5 kilowatt-hours for every kilogram of pollutants removed. In the US, this amounts to a whopping 3 per cent of the total energy demand. If the plants could be self-powered, recycling our own waste water could become as commonplace as putting a solar panel on a roof. Existing treatment plants use

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APERTURE

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Metallic beauty THESE images are truly magnetic. To create them, photographer Andrew Hall passes a powerful magnet underneath a tray of ferrofluid — an oil speckled with magnetic particles — and captures the results. “The liquid always tries to find a way to align itself with the polarity of the magnetic field,” Hall says. “It often forms itself into spikes. It’s amazing stuff.” Hall adds pigments, inks and dyes to the mixture in specific proportions to get the stunning colour patterns; differences in density drive the designs. The patterns only last for a fraction of a second, so Hall uses a flash with a duration of just 1/6000th of a second. Though he has honed his technique over several years, the outcomes are sometimes surprising. “There’s always that little element of chance. That’s nature taking its course, which is what makes them all so beautiful,” he says. Some of Hall’s work will be on view at the Lancaster Museum of Art and History in California from 19 November to 22 January. Emily Benson

Photographer Andrew Hall andrewhalleditions.com

30 July 2016 | NewScientist | 27

EIKO OJALA

28 | NewScientist | 30 July 2016

COVER STORY

SCRAPHEAP CHALLENGE How do you make a human? Start with a load of old junk, says Colin Barras

T WAS a discovery that threatened to overturn everything we thought about what makes us human. At the dawn of the new millennium, two rival teams were vying to be the first to sequence the human genome. Their findings, published in February 2001, made headlines around the world. Back-ofthe-envelope calculations had suggested that to account for the sheer complexity of human biology, our genome should contain roughly 100,000 genes. The estimate was wildly off. Both groups put the actual figure at around 30,000. We now think it is even fewer – just 20,000 or so. “It was a massive shock,” says geneticist John Mattick. “That number is tiny. It’s effectively the same as a microscopic worm that has just 1000 cells.” We’ve only gradually come to grasp the full implications of this discovery. The blueprint for building a human, or indeed any complex creature, lies not only in our genes but in other, neglected parts of our genome. This long-overlooked DNA could have shaped iconic traits such as our upright stance, opposable thumbs, big brains, capacity for language, even our tendency to form monogamous relationships. We might like to think of ourselves as pinnacles of evolution, but actually we are mostly made of junk. In fact, one group was less surprised by the genome shock. Evolutionary biologists had long thought 100,000 genes would make for a fatally complicated genome. And we now know that genes – the sequences of DNA that code for proteins – account for just 1 or 2 per cent of our genome. For a long time the rest was considered to have no function at all,

I

earning it the dismissive title “junk DNA”. While researchers still argue over how much of it truly is junk (see “What do you mean, junk?”, right), what’s clear is that this trash hides treasure – bits of DNA that control genes like a conductor directing an orchestra, switching them on and off at different times and in different cells. These discoveries have come from studies comparing the human genome, junk and all, with those of chimps, mice and other animals. Some have even compared the genomes of Neanderthals and other extinct human species. The aim is to identify bits that look suspiciously different in modern humans, regions that are uniquely ours. James Noonan at Yale University and Shyam Prabhakar at the Genome Institute of Singapore did this comparison across all mammals. They homed in on one piece of supposedly junk DNA called HACNS1, which has accumulated an unusually large number of mutations since we split from chimps. In other words, it was distinctly human. Seeking clues to what HACNS1 does, they inserted it into the genomes of mouse embryos, along with a tiny, molecular label that would change colour whenever it was modifying the activity of surrounding genes. The label popped up in the embryos’ paws, in the area where digit 1 forms. In humans, that is either the thumb or big toe, suggesting that HACNS1 might influence their development. For an idea of how, we can look at the fossil record. “Human thumbs and feet are among the most distinctive features of our species,” says Prabhakar. There is evidence that our ancestors evolved opposable thumbs about >

WHAT DO YOU MEAN, JUNK? It was the evolutionary biologist Susumu Ohno who popularised the term “junk DNA” in the early 1970s. At the time, researchers had begun to realise just how much non-coding DNA there is kicking about in our genome. It didn’t code for proteins, but what other purpose it might serve was a mystery. “The classic argument was: if it’s that abundant and not functional, natural selection would have got rid of it,” says T. Ryan Gregory at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. Ohno dared to question that idea. Non-coding DNA, he said, really was mostly just junk. The debate continues to this day. Most evolutionary biologists say the evidence in large part backs Ohno’s view. We now know, for instance, that some non-coding DNA acts almost like a parasite, randomly copying and pasting itself into new locations in the genome without apparently altering the way the genome functions. That shows a large fraction of our genome really is useless, they say, with no role to play in human evolution or development. But some human geneticists take the opposite view. They say the assumption from the early 1970s is correct, and most supposed junk DNA does influence our biology. That’s true for at least some of the junk (see main story), but we still don’t know exactly how much.

30 July 2016 | NewScientist | 29

NICOLAS NOTHUM/MILLENNIUM IMAGES, UK

You need the whole genome for a complete picture of human traits

3 million years ago, roughly when they began to use stone tools and only a few million years after we split from chimpanzees. It’s likely that early humans were also standing upright and were starting to walk on two legs around the same time or a little earlier. Doing so was tied to physical changes: toes shrank and foot arches became more rigid. According to Prabhakar and Noonan, all this could have been happening around the time that HACNS1 began altering gene activity in our hands and feet. By subtly changing when and where genes were switched on, this little piece of DNA could have been modifying our hands and feet. The study is not the only one to suggest that genetic controllers, rather than genes themselves, played a crucial part in shaping us. Gene activity is often regulated via methylation, a process in which a chemical unit called a methyl group is attached to a gene segment, influencing how much protein it produces. There are hints that junk DNA is involved. In 2013, a study suggested that DNA methylation had helped our transition to walking on two legs, and perhaps our language skills too. Andrew Sharp of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, and his colleagues compared DNA methylation patterns in humans, chimps, gorillas and orangutans, and found 171 genes with uniquely human patterns. A closer look suggested that these genes were involved in a handful of traits: regulating blood pressure, 30 | NewScientist | 30 July 2016

controlling the development of the inner ear and shaping facial muscles. “What are the big differences between humans and chimps? We walk upright and we speak,” says Sharp. Walking upright lifted the brain, which meant our ancestors had to change how they regulated blood pressure to keep the brain supplied with enough oxygen. It also demanded exceptional balance, typically improved by modifying the inner ear. Speech, meanwhile, required an unprecedented level of control over the muscles in our face and around our mouth. “Seeing these methylation changes in genes associated with these human traits,

“WHEN OUR ANCESTORS LOST THIS PIECE OF JUNK DNA, SUDDENLY BRAIN CELLS COULD PROLIFERATE” I just felt… wow, that’s incredible,” says Sharp. A year later, David Gokhman and Liran Carmel at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel published a pioneering study of methylation in ancient DNA extracted from the fossils of extinct hominins. Using the fact that bits of DNA carrying methyl groups degrade differently from bits that don’t, the pair were able to reconstruct Neanderthal methylation patterns and compare them with human ones. They found key differences in

genes that control limb development. “Our hypothesis was that these genes were less active in the archaic humans,” says Gokhman. That’s an exciting finding, because we know that Neanderthals typically had shorter, stouter legs than we do. So by switching some genes on or off, and making them pump out different amounts of proteins, methylation could have contributed to giving us longer legs than our extinct cousins. The fact you can see these different methylation signals is tantalising, says Sharp. “It does suggest that they might have been involved in some major events in human evolution.” Mattick, who is at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney, Australia, thinks that junk DNA controls methylation. He suggests cells might transcribe junk into RNA, molecules typically associated with the process of making proteins (see diagram, below right). But this “non-coding” RNA does something else: it influences when and where DNA methylation occurs. That’s plausible, says geneticist and evolutionary biologist T. Ryan Gregory at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, and he agrees that non-coding RNA might well be involved in managing methylation. Carmel and Gokhman also found some unsettling patterns in their study. Some genes that are methylated differently in humans compared with Neanderthals appear to be linked to disease – including neurological and psychiatric disorders. “This suggests

Not the whole story Humans are not remarkable either in the number of genes we have or in the proportion of genes in our genome. So is junk DNA what makes us human?

Proportion of genes to junk Black truffle

Number of genes

12%

7496 16,571

Golden eagle Nematode worm

29%

20,541

Human

20,805

Mouse

23,148

Red clover

10%

47,398

0

20

40

60

80

100

SOURCE: RYAN GREGORY

Per cent

some kind of a link between our rapid brain evolution and the fact that many neurological disorders are more prevalent in humans, or even specific to humans,” says Gokhman. A link between junk DNA and illness makes sense to Mattick. He likes to think of the genome as a set of organic building blocks. The proteins that genes code for are generic components that can be used to construct almost any animal. Encoded in our junk DNA is a set of instructions for how to assemble them to make one species or another. The problem with instruction manuals is that they can get damaged. And indeed, genetic diseases can often be traced to non-coding “junk” regions of the genome.

Emotional bonds Just occasionally, damaging or even losing sections of this DNA creates a potent opportunity for useful innovation. For example, a team led by David Kingsley at Stanford University in California identified about 500 regions of our genome that are

missing a chunk of genetic information which our primate relatives carry. They focused on two, both found in non-coding regions. One lies near a tumour suppressor gene, the other near a gene that makes a receptor for male hormones. They inserted chimp versions into mouse embryos and watched to see where they were most active. The answer turned out to be the brain and the groin. The first chimp sequence controlled gene activity in a part of the brain where lots of new brains cells are born. Kingsley suspects that the chimp version exercises careful restraint over that process. When our ancestors lost this piece of DNA, he says, suddenly brain cells could proliferate at unprecedented rates and our brains got much bigger. More speculatively, the second sequence might have changed our ancestors’ relationships. It was active in spines that are found on mouse penises. The spines appear to play a role in species where several males compete for individual females: male chimps have penile spines, while human males do not. No one really knows what they are for, but if

The junk that controls your genes Most of the genome is “junk” DNA, strewn around and even within genes. Just as genes use RNA to make proteins, so junk DNA might be using it as a way to regulate gene activity CODING RNA

PROTEIN JUNK DNA

GENE

Regulates gene NON-CODING RNA

losing them made sex less painful, that might have contributed to the creation of stronger emotional bonds between men and women, boosting monogamous relationships. All of these examples of how non-coding DNA could have shaped human evolution are suggestive rather than definitive. It’s hard to prove cause and effect in human evolution, says Prabhakar, because you can’t experiment on humans. But a new genetic megaproject could make the case a lot stronger. Human Genome Project-Write (HGP-Write) aims to build a human genome from scratch. According to Jef Boeke at the New York University Langone Medical Center, one of the researchers behind the project, exploring the role of non-coding DNA will be among its most interesting applications. As the team pieces together a complete human genome, they will be able to delete non-coding segments one by one and see how that affects cells, he says. That could lead to tangible benefits. Renewed efforts to grow human organs in pigs, and so make up for the shortfall in organ donors, rely on injecting human stem cells into pig embryos. But exactly how those human cells manage to mature into a human organ inside a newborn piglet is still mysterious. HGP-Write could help us understand what’s going on and finesse our organ-growing efforts. There’s an enormous amount of work still to be done before we really understand how our genome gave rise to unique human characteristics, but the idea that the process starts and ends with genes has never looked more misguided. “Clearly when it comes to turning trillions of cells into a walking, talking human, it’s not the 20,000-strong protein set alone that’s going to get you there,” says Mattick. The answers, it seems, are buried in the trash. ■ Colin Barras is a freelance writer based in Ann Arbor, Michigan 30 July 2016 | NewScientist | 31

OCEANS SPECIAL

Conquering Most of Earth is covered in ocean, and most of the ocean remains unexplored. But a new age of discovery is finally revealing what lies beneath the waves. Over the next eight pages we explore how sensors, robots and other high-tech devices are probing the depths for us – and kicking off a gold rush on the sea floor

THAR SHE BLOWS! Revealing what makes an undersea volcano tick is part of an ambitious plan to wire up the ocean floor, says Christina Reed

ILLIAM WILCOCK had been monitoring the volcano for months as the tremors around its base grew more frequent. Such swarms of small quakes might, under normal circumstances, have stirred thoughts of alerting the authorities and perhaps warning residents nearby. But these weren’t normal circumstances. This volcano was 1.5 kilometres under the sea, and its nearest neighbours were a lot of tube worms and crabs. Wilcock is a marine geophysicist at the University of Washington, Seattle, and part of an ambitious project to explore the 70 per cent of our planet’s surface that is invisible beneath the waves. Known as the Ocean Observatories Initiative, its aim is to wire up sections of the sea floor to an array of sensors that will continuously monitor in real time everything down there – from chemistry and currents to the ebb and flow of life. Wilcock’s volcano, Axial seamount some 500 kilometres off the US Pacific north-west coast, was laced with more cables than the average suburban neighbourhood. Volcanoes exemplify our ignorance of the deep ocean. We didn’t know underwater volcanoes encircled the planet until the 1950s, when cartographer Marie Tharp mapped the mid-Atlantic ridge. Using echo-sounding data from research cruises, she showed that this long rise in the Atlantic sea floor – extending, she would later find, almost from pole to pole – wasn’t one ridge, but two bisected by a valley (see “Land under”, page 36). The true significance only became clear when Tharp and her colleague Bruce Heezen completed a map of the southern Atlantic. The ridges were fault lines where new ocean crust was emerging from the mantle and spreading, forcing the continents apart and powering volcanism. The discovery helped cement the still disputed theory of plate tectonics. We now know there are a lot of volcanoes down there. “About 70 per cent of the volcanism on the planet occurs underwater,” says oceanographer Deborah Kelly, also at the University of Washington. We recently discovered one of the largest known volcanoes in the solar system hidden beneath the waves. At 300,000 square kilometres, Tamu Massif in the north Pacific has a footprint matching the gigantic Martian volcano Olympus Mons. Active areas peppered with volcanoes and hydrothermal vents continuously spew hot, nutrient-rich water into the >

THE RED DRESS

W

30 July 2016 | NewScientist | 33

ocean, altering its chemistry and currents and providing warmth and nourishment for microbes, large eyeless shrimp and bizarre tube worms on the otherwise cold and barren deep ocean floor. Yet we know little about what makes undersea volcanoes tick. Only twice have autonomous submersibles caught fleeting glimpses of eruptions. Last year, Maya Tolstoy of Columbia University in New York studied 25 years’ worth of recordings from deep sea hydrophones that were in effect listening in on the volcanoes. She found that volcanic activity peaked cyclically at times of the month and year when the combined pull of

“Hydrophones heard the lava exploding on contact with the seawater” the sun and the moon was at its weakest. A longer cycling pattern was also evident in scars in the sea floor caused by ancient eruptions (Geophysical Research Letters, vol 42, p 1346). Tolstoy’s theory is that changes in pressure on the sea floor could be triggering eruptions. The frequency and magnitude of undersea eruptions matter because they produce greenhouse gases including carbon dioxide – and the more gas is pumped into the ocean from below, the less it can absorb from above, limiting the ocean’s dampening effect on

95%

OF EARTH’S OCEANS HAVE NEVER BEEN SEEN BY HUMAN EYES

global warming. “People have ignored sea floor volcanoes based on the idea that their influence is small,” says Tolstoy. “But that’s because they are assumed to be in a steady state, which they’re not.” The aim with Axial seamount was finally to get solid data – provided the sensors were ready in time. The volcano’s increasingly frequent tremors, plus deformation measurements indicating a bulging magma chamber beneath, prompted the team to convene a meeting to discuss what they would do if it were to blow soon. At the time, most of the quakes were less than magnitude 1.5, barely noticeable on land. “I thought it might be a while before it erupted,” says Wilcock. “That proved to be wrong.” Just two days after the meeting, on 24 April last year, the volcano experienced a “seismic crisis” associated with an eruption. Wilcock couldn’t properly measure how many earthquakes were happening, as they were probably overlapping each other. “You’re just counting the big ones,” he says. By his estimate there were 600 an hour. “In geologic time that’s a lot of activity happening very, very rapidly,” says Kelly. Hydrophones also caught a popping interpreted as steam or gas explosions triggered by hot lava interacting with the cold water. There were also, curiously, sounds possibly associated with ash-producing explosions familiar from volcanoes on land. “There were thousands of explosions recorded during the eruption of the lava flows and we

34 | NewScientist | 30 July 2016

The Axial seamount volcano (see main story) is not the only place we’ve wired up to investigate the deep ocean. Numbers refer to the map below. 1 Axial seamount, north-west Pacific 2 Juan de Fuca plate boundary, north-west Atlantic.

The US Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) and Ocean Networks Canada have wired up sensor arrays as far down as 3000 metres to monitor the sea floor and water column. 3 Off Martha’s Vineyard, Cape Cod, north Atlantic.

The OOI Pioneer array studies the interplay of nutrients, pollutants and currents at the boundary of the deep ocean and the shallower continental shelf. In February this year, it measured the transfer of momentum, heat and moisture between the sea and atmosphere during a hurricane. 4 + 5 Off the Chilean and Argentinian coasts.

Further OOI deep ocean arrays, 6 Marianas trench, north Pacific. From April to

July this year the US NOAA research ship Okeanos Explorer sent rovers to explore the deepest part of the ocean, 11,000 metres down. 7 Off the south coast of Japan, north Pacific. Some 320 kilometres of cables connect seismometers of the DONET array (Dense Oceanfloor Network System for Earthquakes and Tsunamis). 8 South China Sea. China has recently confirmed plans

for a crewed “space station” 3000 metres down.

A WORLD TO EXPLORE

1

2 3 7

6

8

65,000km

LENGTH OF EARTH’S LONGEST MOUNTAIN SYSTEM, THE GLOBECIRCLING MID-OCEAN RIDGE

I LIKE TO BE UNDER THE SEA

5 4

Known massive sulphide deposits on the sea floor (see “Sunken treasure”, page 38)

are debating the source of those sounds,” says William Chadwick of Oregon State University, who is part of the team. Pressure gauges showed that the sea floor dropped by 2.4 metres over 10 hours as lava streamed out. The lack of warning meant that although the seismometers and hydrophones were feeding in readings in real time, the rest of the sensors weren’t, so the observatory team faced an agonising wait to see if the instruments – and the precious data – had survived. When they arrived above the volcano that summer armed with a remotely operated submersible, they found the lava stream had flowed north and missed most of the instruments. The lava layer was over 100 metres thick, and hydrothermal fissures were producing a blizzard of stringy white bacterial “snowblower” material. In other areas, thick orange microbial mats covered the otherwise glassy volcanic basalts. Many questions remain to be resolved about how these habitats are created and life comes to thrive there. Since last month, all the instruments on Axial seamount have been streaming data in real time, including a video feed of tube worms and crabs around a hydrothermal vent to the south of the site. For now the researchers are chewing over what they’ve learned from last year’s eruption and refining their models, but next time this volcano blows, they’ll be ready. ■ Christina Reed is a science writer based in Paris

DROPPED IN THE OCEAN To find objects lost at sea unleash the robots, says Sandrine Ceurstemont

ETHODICALLY, a team of robots patrols the turbid waters of Venice’s lagoon. Some glide through the gloom, seeking their quarry. Others sit silent on the silty floor, waiting to relay intel back to base. If Thomas Schmickl has his way, this vision will soon be reality. The robotic fleets he and his colleagues are developing are part of a struggle to crack one of the biggest challenges in the ocean: finding things. We all followed the story of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, which vanished shortly after take-off from Kuala Lumpur airport in 2014, and seemingly crashed somewhere in the Indian Ocean. Debris from the plane washed up more than a year later, but the sea search was a failure. The search zone initially covered an area about half the size of the UK, but “we can safely say that nobody has ever seen a part of MH370 underwater,” says Jules Jaffe at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California. Lost planes might grab headlines, but there are many other reasons to improve our ability to search at sea: locating and plugging holes in

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poison-leaking shipwrecks, for example, or recapturing the thousands of shipping containers estimated to be lost overboard each year. Robotic search could be the answer – if some tricky problems can be overcome first. When we explore the deep ocean now, we generally do so in submarines with human pilots or with robots that, if not physically tethered to a boat, must regularly surface to broadcast their findings. The search for MH370 involved ships criss-crossing the ocean towing an underwater microphone on a 6-kilometre cable to listen for the ping of the plane’s black box. To make progress, we need autonomously powered searchers that can communicate wirelessly from the depths of the ocean and orient themselves underwater. The difficulties start with high-frequency radio signals, our go-to communication medium in air, being quickly absorbed in water. Lower frequencies go further, but can’t carry much information. Sound, on the other hand, travels much more easily through water than it does through air. Sonar systems were first >

SCOTTISH GEOGRAPHICAL MAP

FROM SOUNDING LINE TO SONAR… A knotted sounding wire was the instrument of choice for the first systematic attempts to map the seabed. This map of the Cocos Islands in the Indian Ocean was made by the crew of HMS Beagle in 1835. The soundings helped the ship’s on-board naturalist, one Charles Darwin, develop his theory for how coral atolls form in the wake of subsiding volcanoes

2012

1979 GENERAL BATHYMETRIC CHART OF THE OCEANS CENTER FOR COASTAL AND OCEAN MAPPING, UNIVERSITY OF NEW HAMPSHIRE, USA

Today surveys wield multibeam sonar to chart the sea floor in 3D with metre resolution. The difference between this and single beam echo-sounding is apparent in these images of Northwind ridge and Chukchi margin off northern Alaska. Less than 15 per cent of the seabed is mapped in high resolution now, but the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans initiative hopes to cover it all by 2030

30 July 2016 | NewScientist | 35

NOAA OFFICE OF OCEAN EXPLORATION AND RESEARCH

developed after the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 to detect submerged objects like icebergs. But encoding information in sound pulses is difficult and the acoustic modems that do it are slow. And with whales and dolphins as well as ships already using echolocation systems, there’s plenty of noise that will interfere with an underwater searcher trying to send information back to the surface. Schmickl is a member of the Subcultron project, whose robot swarms are testing out alternative approaches. Their scheme involves “mussel” robots that sit on the sea floor and act as a coordinating grid, floating to the surface when they need to talk to a base station. They chat to “fish” explorer robots that can also talk among themselves, reducing the distance any signal need travel. The result is a “dynamic seabed-exploring carpet, which can then slowly crawl through a larger habitat”, says Schmickl, who is based at the University of Graz in Austria. In Venice’s lagoon the water is rarely more than 2 metres deep. Here, the robots will look for hazards like burst sewage pipes or chemical spills, and test communication methods. Options include spherical electromagnetic fields that would be detectable to other robots, or lasers or blue LEDs; blue because that’s the colour of light that travels furthest in water. Communicating with light pulses is likely to be even more effective in the clearer and darker water of the deep ocean. James Kinsey at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

in Massachusetts and his colleagues recently established a high-speed data connection between an autonomous underwater vehicle and a sensor node on the sea floor when they were up to 100 metres apart. “We were reaching the same transfer speed you would expect from home internet,” says Kinsey. The Subcultron robots can chat to each other, but Chiara Petrioli at the Sapienza University of Rome wants to create something more extensive – a submarine version of the internet of things. The idea is that any device or person could log on to the network and access information from divers, autonomous sensors and robots anywhere in the ocean, all

“The result is a dynamic, slowly crawling, seabedexploring carpet” speaking the same language. “It would let us monitor the underwater world, for example to understand climate change and underwater volcanoes, or to research an accident or oil spill,” says Petrioli. That would all work without the kilometres of difficult-to-install wiring that characterises existing underwater observatories (see “Thar she blows!”, page 33). Petrioli is part of the Europe-wide Sunrise

LAND UNDER The topography of the deep ocean is just as varied as that of the continents, as this section across the north Atlantic shows

The waters of the continental shelf are no more than 150 metres deep. Adjacent nations have enhanced rights to exploit them

NEW ENGLAND Continental shelf

36 | NewScientist | 30 July 2016

The New England seamounts rise 4000 metres from the seabed, but all lie over 1000 metres below the ocean surface

Abyssal plain The flat abyssal plain covers 50 per cent of the Earth’s surface. It is also a free-for-all legally speaking with any nation eligible to exploit it

Direction of continental drift

SONARDYNE/NASA

Cabled arrays allow real-time ocean floor monitoring (left), while underwater LED communication systems could aid search

project, which has already created a smallscale version of such a wireless network. In 2014, the team unleashed three autonomous vehicles into Porto harbour in Portugal. Equipped with sonar for probing the seabed, they could talk among themselves and respond to instructions. The swarm found a “lost” shipping container in 20 minutes flat. During a similar test at an archaeological site in Sicily, they found an ancient wreck. Later this year, a bigger test will see if 12 different robots and other devices can be persuaded to communicate and collaborate on a task. There are plenty of other problems to be ironed out if we want to find objects like fallen

Mid-Atlantic ridge plate boundary Cartographer Marie Tharp identified the distinctive V-shaped rift valley between the two parallel ranges of the Mid-Atlantic ridge in 1952. Here at a tectonic plate boundary upwelling rock forces two tectonic plates apart

planes in enormous expanses of open ocean. Rough seas can easily destroy robots, so making them cheap enough to be considered disposable is an important goal. Another is making them intelligent enough to switch to the most appropriate communication mode as they travel through regions of the seas that are choppy, murky, shallow or remote. But we are making progress. At the moment underwater robots only know where they are by resurfacing and receiving signals from positioning satellites or by listening out for the pings of positioning buoys, painstakingly placed at the surface during a mission. “Putting out pingers is a pain and we would

prefer a scheme that doesn’t add extra noise to the oceans,” says Jaffe. His team are investigating whether robots can triangulate their relative positions by listening for ambient noise from shipping routes – or possibly even the surprisingly loud claw snaps from shrimp colonies. Likewise for power. The Subcultron robots top up their juice by docking with floating “lilypads” of solar panels, but at great depths another solution is needed. Schmickl suggests a fuel cell powered by bacteria. The basic technology already exists, and it has the added benefit that the bacteria munch on polluting chemicals to keep going. “Dirtiness could be a benefit,” says Schmickl. “The robots would be helping to clean up the oceans.” None of this is easy, but Schmickl’s team are used to ambitious feats. In 2014, they got 41 underwater robots collaborating in a tank. This summer the Venice lagoon experiments will kick off, and within two years their swarm should be large enough to explore a sizeable area. “We will have 150 robots in total,” says Schmickl. “We’re aiming for the largest underwater swarm in the world.” ■ Sandrine Ceurstemont is web content editor at New Scientist

Azores Upwelling at this volcanic hotspot forms a series of islands with their highest point 2350 metres above sea level

1000 km

Oceanic trenches can drop significantly below the level of the abyssal plain

GIBRALTAR

30 July 2016 | NewScientist | 37

SUNKEN TREASURE The sea floor is packed with precious minerals. Can we safely cash in, asks Brian Owens HE submersible Alvin encountered its first “black smoker” 2000 metres deep off the coast of the Galapagos Islands. It was 1977, and the realisation that life could survive in pitch darkness next to deep sea hydrothermal vents was about to stun the world. Now we are returning to those vents, this time on the other side of the Pacific – and armed with diggers. The hot water shooting out of these vents contains all sorts of dissolved precious metals. On contact with the cold ocean water, these immediately precipitate out, showering the vicinity with gold, silver, copper and more (see diagram, below). Some want to tap into this booty, arguing that deep sea mining is not only lucrative, but also a more sustainable alternative to mineral extraction on land. But not everyone is convinced we can exploit the deep without damaging it. Soon such debates could become very real. Since 2009, Canadian company Nautilus Minerals has held a licence from Papua New Guinea to mine in its waters, targeting a massive sulphide deposit. Such deposits are distributed around the globe,

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principally along the active margins of tectonic plates (see map, page 34). This one, named Solwara 1, lies 1600 metres down and is around 7 per cent copper, 10 times what is typical for mines on land. There’s gold too: about 6 grams per tonne of rock, six times what landlubbers get. “These are grades that haven’t been seen on land for 300 to 400 years, since the start of the industrial revolution,” says Nautilus CEO Mike Johnston. The plan is for two enormous underwater

“To get to gold on land sometimes you take the top off a whole mountain” tractors to grind up the mineral-rich rock near the vents. A third will collect the rubble and deliver it to a sea floor pumping station that will send it up to a ship, ultimately to be processed in China. Because the deposits sit directly on the seabed no tunnelling is needed, and the site’s footprint is relatively small, making for cleaner extraction, says Johnston.

BLACK BOUNTY “Black smoker” hydrothermal vents eject valuable metals that can be harvested from the surrounding waters

3. Superheated fluid meets cold seawater at pressure, precipitating metals out

1. Seawater becomes acidified and laced with metals as it passes through permeable rock

METAL SULPHIDE DEPOSITS

2. Heat from volcanic magma drives upward convection

38 | NewScientist | 30 July 2016

Marine economist Linwood Pendleton at the European Institute for Marine Studies in Brest, France, says there could be something to that argument. “To get to gold on land sometimes you have to take off the top of an entire mountain,” he says. But he points out that undersea mining will always add emissions and environmental damage unless it replaces mining on land. How much damage is moot. Nautilus’s plans stalled in 2014 when it got into a row over funding with the government of Papua New Guinea, which holds a stake in the firm. By then, questions had been raised about the company’s environmental impact assessment. A 2012 report commissioned by an antimining group and prepared by John Luick at the South Australian Research and Development Institute in Adelaide argued that it didn’t take account of surface currents heading towards land, so it wasn’t clear whether any stirred-up sediments would pollute coastal areas of Papua New Guinea. The funding worries have not completely evaporated, but Nautilus has tried to dispel some of the environmental concerns by commissioning a comparative study of the proposed Solwara 1 mine and three terrestrial copper mines. In 2015, this concluded that Solwara 1 would be less damaging to the environment. Another study, commissioned by the development organisation Pacific Community, found that deep sea mining was likely to improve the lives of people in Papua New Guinea and the Cook Islands – Nautilus is exploring mining sites near there, too. The firm is now hoping to begin operations in 2018, and it is conducting shallow water tests of its tractors in Oman. But Stace Beaulieu, an oceanographer who studies hydrothermal vents at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, has some reservations about the reports. “The work is quite good. It accounts for the sea floor and the water column, but without peer review we can’t really say whether this is less damaging than land mining,” she says. One risk is that pumping rocks to the surface might transfer cold, nutrient-rich water too. If this were to mix with surface water, it could cause algal blooms. Johnston

says the pumping system has been carefully designed to ensure there will be no such mixing. Another possibility is that disturbed sediments could travel long distances and affect ecosystems far from the mining site itself. Beaulieu thinks that could be tough for filter-feeders including fish and sea anenomes. “They’re just not adapted to high sedimentation.” The rich ecosystems in the immediate vicinity of the vents will probably be destroyed. Most of the organisms here grow rapidly – giant tube worms, for example, are the fastest-growing marine invertebrate, able to colonise a new location as juveniles and reach sexual maturity within two years. A study of a big undersea volcanic eruption with vents nearby showed that life can start to recolonise affected areas within a few years. Even so, that was a natural process, and we don’t know what will happen if mining removes the seabed. “It might take time for the habitat to return to the point where the animals are able to come back,” says Beaulieu. Nautilus is surveying the area around Solwara 1 to make sure there are communities nearby to provide new colonists. Given our lack of knowledge about sea floor mining, some would like to see a moratorium on it. Namibia has already banned coastal Going down: could large-scale mining equipment soon be deployed on the sea floor?

phosphate mining in its waters. But many hydrothermal vents are located in international waters, along ocean plate boundaries. Who is responsible then? The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea designates the seabed beyond national maritime boundaries as the common heritage of humanity. In these regions – known somewhat strangely as “the Area” – the job of deciding who can mine what and where, and how the environment should be protected, falls to a UN agency called the International Seabed Authority (ISA). It is developing rules to allow all nations to share the potential

NAUTILUS MINERALS

Hydrothermal vents produce dustings of valuable metals on the sea floor, but rich pickings can be found elsewhere too. Metals can also crystallise out of seawater to form so-called polymetallic nodules. These grow incredibly slowly – at a rate of about 1 centimetre over several million years – and can reach the size of a potato. Mining them might be pretty easy, says Phil Weaver, who coordinates the European Union’s MIDAS project on the impacts of deep-sea mining. “You just have to rake through the sediment and sift out the nodules, then crush them.” But the nodules are small and thinly dispersed, so collecting a profitable amount would involve destructive dredging. Then there is the question of pumping the nodules to the surface. The nodules lie at 6000 metres, that is twice as far down as today’s deep sea mining projects, placing a huge burden on equipment. “It’s a completely new challenge,” says Weaver.

NOAA OCEAN EXPLORER

PRETTY DESTRUCTIVE

Comfort zone: black smokers nourish rich ecosystems like this tube worm colony

benefits of seabed exploitation, and put in place strong environmental safeguards. Kristina Gjerde, a high seas adviser to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, says that the ISA is behind the times. Although several companies are gearing up to work in the Area, “the ISA hasn’t adopted its exploitation rules yet, so it has no way to enforce them at present”. Gjerde also reckons that the agency’s decision-making structures are dominated by industry players, which creates conflicts of interest. “The ISA is on a precipice: either reforming itself and becoming an effective organisation, or allowing commercial interests to dominate,” she says. One decision the ISA needs to make is how to spend any royalties it can collect from mining in the high seas. Divvying up the money among all nations will mean paltry sums for each, so Johnston and Pendleton both advocate investing the proceeds in ocean research and environmental clean-up. “We have already done so much damage to the sea floor, for example through trawling, with no way to pay for it,” says Pendleton. Perhaps at the very least the wealth of the seabed could help heal those scars. ■ Brian Owens is a freelance journalist in Canada 30 July 2016 | NewScientist | 39

PEOPLE

We’re like Galileo with his new telescope From detecting gravitational waves to launching spacecraft with light – it’s a boom time for lasers, says Robert Byer

What was your first encounter with lasers?

As an undergrad in 1964, I had an interview at a little company in Mountain View, California, called Spectra-Physics. Nobody was in the entry room, so I sat and waited for half an hour until I heard people yelling and then I walked through to the back. Earl Bell greeted me and said “Let me show you a laser.” He had just built the first ionised-gas laser. I was fascinated. I became employee 13 and worked there for a year. How did your laser work lead you to the hunt for gravitational waves?

In 1988, I was visiting the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics in Boulder, Colorado, when Pete Bender showed me his plans to detect gravitational waves in space using extremely stable and precise lasers. The plan required three satellites orbiting the sun in a triangular formation. The idea was that light from a laser in one satellite would be split into two beams, then each of these beams would travel a million kilometres to one of the other satellites and bounce back. If gravitational waves – tiny ripples in space-time – passed through the region, we would see signs of them when the returning light beams recombined. I had co-invented a laser of the kind that Pete needed, so I said we could probably make one for him. But that satellite system, now called the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), still hasn’t been built. So how did you get involved with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory?

Within weeks of that visit, Rainer Weiss at MIT called to ask me about a laser for LIGO, a ground-based experiment that worked on the same principle and was in development at the time. I persuaded them to use our laser and I’ve worked with LIGO (pictured) ever since. 40 | NewScientist | 30 July 2016

An upgraded LIGO has reported on two gravitational wave detections so far. What did that first detection reveal?

The first signal it detected was caused by the merger of two black holes 1.3 billion light years away. We’ve calculated that one of these black holes had the mass of 29 suns, and the other 36 suns. The collision basically converted three suns’ worth of matter into gravitational wave energy in one-fifth of a second. That’s just mind-boggling. When someone asks how many hydrogen bombs that’s equivalent to, I tell them trillions and trillions. It’s more power for 0.2 seconds than all the stars in the universe are radiating. What about the long-awaited LISA?

The European Space Agency’s LISA Pathfinder mission, launched late last year, is testing technology that will pave the wave for eLISA – an updated version of Bender’s plan. Because we can put much larger gravitational antennas in space than on the ground, eLISA would be large enough to observe the very long gravitational waves from supermassive black holes colliding in the centres of distant galaxies. We’re at the Galileo stage of gravitational wave science. Like Galileo seeing the moons of Jupiter with his telescope, we have detected gravitational waves with our first instrument, albeit an upgraded one. Decades from now, more sensitive instruments will discover much more. What else can lasers be used for in space?

I dream about building orbiting telescope arrays. You need extremely precise clocks to successfully combine the data from all the instruments in a telescope array. The latest in precision timing is laser-based clocks that are so precise that if they had started running at

PROFILE Robert Byer is a professor of applied physics at Stanford University, co-director of the Stanford Photonics Research Center, and a member of the LIGO collaboration

the birth of the universe, they would only be out by milliseconds today. A dozen optical telescope satellites could orbit in formation, with optical clocks and laser measurements giving the required precision. The array could be as wide as Earth, and because laser light wavelengths are a million times shorter than radio waves, the resolution would be much finer than the best radio telescope array. It would be sensitive enough to hunt for signs of life on exoplanets. Could ground-based lasers be used to launch spacecraft too?

Absolutely. A 20-megawatt laser could be used as part of a launching system for satellites of, say, 1 cubic metre. Such a laser may cost $3 billion, though, so it would be uneconomical. But in the 1980s we paid $200,000 for a laser that I could buy today for less than $5, so it won’t be too long before people can get serious about laser launches to put things into orbit. I recently heard a proposal for a gigawatt laser to launch a fleet of spacecraft the size of cellphones, equipped with light sails, to visit the nearest star four light years away. The laser would accelerate them to a quarter of the speed of light so they could survey for planets and life. That would be an exciting venture. What other frontiers can lasers open?

Lasers are coming closer to generating fusion power. The National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California is by far the world’s largest laser, and one of the most complex optical devices ever built. Since 2009, it has been heating and compressing fuel capsules containing isotopes of hydrogen to temperatures and densities higher than at the centre of the sun. That’s enough to fuse the nuclei to create helium and release energy. NIF can generate a 500-trillionwatt pulse lasting a few billionths of a second. The next step would be to build a superpowerful laser that fires 15 shots per second. That could drive a fusion power plant. After that, we can begin thinking about how fusion energy can complement other energy sources.

TIMOTHY ARCHIBALD FOR NEW SCIENTIST

How much more powerful can these things get?

Well, a project called the Extreme Light Infrastructure is now being built in Romania. It will focus laser pulses lasting less than a trillionth of a second to intensities so high that they can ionise the vacuum, creating positrons and electrons. It takes black holes to do that in nature. ■ Interview by Jeff Hecht 30 July 2016 | NewScientist | 41

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CULTURE

Uncommon sense We’ve moved a long way from a genes-vs-environment view of intelligence. Alun Anderson explores how will remain a popular measure of “intelligence”. We are entering an era where diversity of thinking is prized and networking skills are essential. Before long, machines that think will be a natural part of our social environment. In the future, will IQ tests still measure what is needed from our minds? That question leads to a bigger, more optimistic view of ourselves: that our minds have come a long way, constantly changing, and that as we build new worlds to challenge them, new ways of

Does Your Family Make You Smarter? Nature, nurture, and human autonomy by James R. Flynn, Cambridge University Press, $24.99

CAITLIN OCHS/THE NEW YORK TIMES/EYEVINE

JAMES FLYNN has changed the way the world thinks about one of the things we care most about. Back in the 1980s, it was accepted that there was powerful evidence for a factor called intelligence, IQ or “g”, which seemed to be largely determined “We are entering an era where diversity of thinking by our genes. That left us with is prized and networking the pessimistic view that human skills are essential” intelligence would only ever grow at the glacial pace at which evolution changes our thinking will emerge, beyond genetic make-up. Worse, it led to those measured by IQ tests. bitter public debates over race, I don’t know whether class and intelligence. Flynn would agree with such Flynn drew our attention to a speculation, but he certainly trend hidden in past data: IQ helped liberate the world from had been rising rapidly over the a view of intelligence that left previous century or so in Western little room for human autonomy. nations – about three points a “I have tried to break a steel chain decade. This rise should simply not have been possible. It is now known as “the Flynn effect”. Since then, Flynn, now 82 years old and an emeritus professor at the University of Otago in New Zealand, has continued to provide controversial insights into IQ – including in his latest book, Does Your Family Make You Smarter? Thanks to his fresh thinking, we no longer believe that IQ measures some unchanging and unchangeable pure characteristic, free from the social demands of societies. So much so, in fact, that I wonder just how long IQ tests 44 | NewScientist | 30 July 2016

of ideas that circumscribed our ability to see what was happening all around us and to appreciate what was possible,” he wrote in an earlier book entitled What is Intelligence? In his new book, he looks deeper into our ability to influence our own IQ. Once again, behind his arguments is an imaginative new method of seeing patterns in IQ data that others have missed. To appreciate the book, it is important to see how far our understanding has progressed. Long ago, studies showed that identical twins had very similar IQs in adulthood, even when they had been separated and brought up in very different families. The conclusion that genes ruled and environment had a weak impact on IQ seemed unshakeable. Now we know that although twin data is valid, its interpretation was not, and that the arguments that stemmed from it do not hold. Looking back, we can see that there were misconceptions about

what genes are, how they interact with the environment and about the nature of IQ. If IQ provided a unitary measure of intelligence, and given the fact that average IQ has risen by 30 points over the 20th century, we might think that past generations were rather dumb. But reading the works of our great-grandparents suggested that was not the case. Our ancestors were no less smart than us, Flynn argues, but lived in a world that placed less value on the abstract and hypothetical thinking that IQ scores stress, and that society began to demand from us as modernisation gained pace. We can thus think of IQ less as a witness to a unitary “intelligence” fixed in the genes and more as a “barometer of cognitive progress over time”, Flynn writes. Still, the Flynn effect would seem to leave a huge conundrum.

DAVID HURN/MAGNUM

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Over the course of generations, environment has a powerful effect on IQ, but twin studies showed conclusively that the differences in the IQ of people of the same generation were largely due to differences in their genes. How could the impact of environment on IQ be simultaneously strong and weak? A powerful solution (albeit one that awaits definitive test) came in 2001 from economist William Dickens, then at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC, working with Flynn. The heart of the argument is that once people grow up and choose their own lives, they are drawn to environments that suit their genes: in other words, genes select environments. To repeat Dickens and Flynn’s sports analogy, if you happen to be tall then you are more likely to make it onto the basketball team and to receive coaching, play in

Families can boost our cognitive powers – at least up to late teens

you can train every day and expect to beat Usain Bolt. But you can go faster and beat your couch potato friends. Flynn’s book continues this theme, showing that the right family can make you smarter – to answer the question posed in the title. Family environment really can make a difference, certainly up to the late teens when many young people are applying for college and a little cognitive edge is especially important. Unfortunately, the wrong family (try Homer Simpson for a dad) can make you dumber, too. Contrary to popular belief, family environment does not leave an “indelible mark on your intelligence throughout life”. Later on, the environments we choose for ourselves continually influence our IQs, Flynn writes. A demanding job can boost IQ, but early retirement may send it plunging. Of course, some of us have been lucky to be born with genes that give us the potential to be smarter than others. But, in Flynn’s view, whatever you have been born with, you can find environments that will help boost your brainpower – or dumb it down – throughout your life. He provides some insightful advice (spelled out in full in his 2012 book How to Improve Your Mind) and makes one big point. The best way to keep in good mental shape long-term is to fall in love with activities that stretch

competitive games and find your basketball skills racing ahead of a friend who was a little shorter. The new environment you have moved into amplifies a small genetic difference. We can think of intelligence in the same way: a child who “Once people can choose has natural cognitive skills will their own lives, they are delight in more cognitively drawn to environments difficult tasks and make friends that suit their genes” with those who feel the same. The brain is more like a muscle that can get stronger in a workout you: reading intellectual books than suggested by the older view. or solving puzzles, perhaps. Genetic differences between There may be something more individuals appear dominant to learn from Flynn, which he “only because they have hitched doesn’t mention. In all his books, powerful environmental factors he highlights his mistakes and to their star”, Flynn writes. wrong turns. “At one time, I was That does not mean anyone can blind…”, “I went astray…”, “Until be an Einstein if they hang out recently I was deceived…” are with the right people (the mind is phrases that leap from the page. not a blank slate) any more than Seeing your blunders may be as

important in growing your mind as celebrating your successes. This book is not for everyone – although lucid and wise, it is geared more towards those with a particular interest in IQ. A third of it is devoted to appendices explaining Flynn’s new method. Another third provides a deep discussion of what is needed for a good theory of intelligence. Author and psychologist Howard Gardner’s plea for a much wider view of “seven intelligences” doesn’t win much approval. But Flynn does welcome sociologist Georg Oesterdiekhoff’s lesserknown work on the “cognitive transformations” that underlie big changes in society. The remaining third contains insights into nature, nurture and autonomy. Flynn, a self-confessed liberal, is also honest enough to warn his readers that he has critics who would “caution me against encouraging naive beliefs about the potency of family environment and choice”. There is still much to do to straighten out our thinking about the role of genes in our lives (see page 28). Every one of us is the result of a genetic lottery over which we had no control. We might wish that we had been born smarter or more attractive or, on a bad day, wish that we had been born someone else altogether. But our genes are always with us. We have to accept that selfmotivation, and the capacity for self-control, which is a much better predictor of school grades than IQ, are also influenced by our genes. As Flynn writes “what could make you more uniquely yourself than your particular set of genes”. Finding the place where you can flourish remains the really tricky part of life. Flynn reminds us that we do have choices, and after many decades of the great IQ debate, he returns us to well-grounded common sense. ■ Alun Anderson is a consultant for New Scientist 30 July 2016 | NewScientist | 45

Executive Director, North Pacific Research Board Congress created the North Pacific Research Board in 1997 to recommend marine research initiatives to the U.S. Secretary of Commerce, who makes final funding decisions.

Primary Responsibilities: Under the direction of the North Pacific Research Board (NPRB), provide leadership for a nationally recognized scientific organization to maintain and enhance the organization’s reputation for excellence in marine research. To meet this goal, manage the staff and established processes to administer sub-awards with funds made available to the Secretary of Commerce from the Environmental Improvement and Restoration Fund (EIRF). EIRF funds provide for Federal, State, private and foreign organizations or individuals to conduct; research activities for cooperative marine research projects and activities on, or relating to, the fisheries or marine ecosystems in the North Pacific Ocean, Bering Sea, Gulf of Alaska and Arctic Ocean (including lesser related bodies of water) as set forth at 43 U.S.C. §1474d(e)(1) and in accordance with criteria and priorities for grants established by the North Pacific Research Board, as set forth at 43 U.S.C. §§1474d(e)(2) and (e)(4)(B).

Specific Duties: Work jointly with the parties of the Memorandum of Understanding pertaining to the North Pacific Research Board (NPRB) and the North Pacific Marine Research Institute; the U.S. Department of Commerce, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the Alaska SeaLife Center to meet the overall objectives of the EIRF. Employ and manage NPRB staff and contractors in accordance with relevant laws and regulations to assist in achieving the duties and responsibilities outlined in this scope of services. Develop the annual work plan formulation process to generate budgets for the operation and administration of all research, education, and administration activities, and submit these timely for NPRB approval, together with all proposals for grant funding; track and report on the work plan in synchrony with Board meetings. Manage the overall NPRB budget, and track and report on the budget in synchrony with Board meetings. Provide NPRB with all information necessary to approve research, education and demonstration projects in accordance with 33 U.S.C. §2738 and oversee implementation and monitoring of all approved grants to ensure compliance and timely conduct; report to Board timely on issues associated with grant implementation. Work with and for the Board, including working at the direction of the Board to develop standard operating procedures, science and strategic plans, and other policies for ultimate NPRB approval and oversee their implementation by staff, consultants, and contractors. Provide oversight of scientific guidance provided to the Board and scientific peer review of grant requests via the Science Panel; implement and administer grants, programs and projects, and perform such other science review functions as may be required by the Board. Coordinate Advisory Panel meetings and reports to the Board and foster community and public input to the Board as appropriate. Oversee a public process of communications and outreach and develop a biennial report of NPRB activities for Board approval. Oversee, in

conjunction with the ASLC HR manager, performance appraisals of NPRB staff; submit to the Executive Committee an annual performance report for this position and meet annually to agree on personal business goals and priorities for the year ahead. Represent the Board at appropriate public, professional, and scientific meetings and symposia. Ensure compliance with applicable laws and regulations and work with the Fiscal Agent for the NPRB (the Alaska SeaLife Center) to ensure compliance with all Federal, State and local regulations pertaining to NPRB operations; comply with all NPRB policies, procedures, and programs and all ASLC financial agent requirements relating to human resources, fiscal management, risk management, etc. Perform other related duties as assigned from time to time by the Executive Committee. Physical Requirements: The physical demands described are representative of those that must be met by the employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this position. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.

Minimum Skills and Qualifications: Proven/strong managerial and leadership skills; team building; and strong interpersonal skills; At least 10 years experience at a senior level in research and/or organizational management with 5 years of program-level supervisory experience; Proven communication and interpersonal skills - must be able to communicate effectively, internally and externally, to multiple audiences; Leader and facilitator – ability to motivate, influence, and develop capacity in others to create conditions that elicit passion, commitment, and best in class work that builds the reputation of an organization; Proven emotional intelligence (i.e., ability to appropriately perceive, use, understand, and manage the emotions of oneself and others); and a Bachelor’s degree in a field related to science, business, law, administration, fisheries, or environmental research.

Preferred Skills and Qualifications: A postgraduate degree in a field related to science, business, law, administration, fisheries or environmental research; A record of accomplishment with a particular emphasis on oversight of multidisciplinary research that has management applications; Solid understanding of issues relating to marine ecosystems, including current, key, and developing issues; Experience working with and for a board of directors; Ability to work effectively with key government, private and academic institutions; Current knowledge of key government and academic institutions and partners in marine science and management, including fisheries, oil and gas, tourism and other marine industry organizations; Demonstrated experience with business and financial management; Demonstrated partnership-building experience with diverse political environments at State, National and International levels; Able to work with confidential information and diverse stakeholders; Be alert to opportunities, be innovative, entrepreneurial, and take on new challenges in a manner that supports and reinforces the priorities of the Board; and Be of the highest levels of character and ethical behavior.

This is a regular, full-time position equivalent to the GS-15 level in federal service. Candidates should submit a letter of application, curriculum vitae, a two-page summary of their philosophy on guiding collaborative research and contact information for four references at

http://alaskasealifecenter.gatherdocs.com/apply?listing_id=2382 Applications will be accepted through June 24, 2016 and review of applications will take place in July with an anticipated start date of no later than October 21, 2016. NPRB is committed to affirmative action, equal opportunity and the diversity of its workforce.

LETTERS EDITOR’S PICK

Birth risks and biome benefits From Daphne Watkins I was initially shocked by your article about warning women of the risks of all births (9 July, p 8). Then I remembered my experience of two “normal” vaginal deliveries: the excruciating pain with poor analgesia, the exhaustion, the sensation of sitting on straw for a week from stitches and 40 years of mild but inconvenient incontinence. The human infant’s head has outgrown a woman’s pelvis. When I was in Uganda in the 1960s, rural midwives were being taught to perform C-sections because in some areas 1 in 10 births was complicated by the baby’s head being too big to fit through the mother’s pelvis. But the article did not mention the infant’s microbiome, largely acquired from the mother’s vaginal passage. Research is needed to establish where babies delivered by caesarean section get their microbiomes. It has been suggested that they should be given their mothers’ vaginal secretions. Conversely, C-sections may present therapeutic opportunities. There is evidence of an association between obesity and the microbiome. If an obese mother had an abnormal microbiome, the infant could be prevented from acquiring it. Velindre, Pembrokeshire, UK

To read more letters, visit newscientist.com/letters 52 | NewScientist | 30 July 2016

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We can see brains randomising choice From Roger Carpenter Nial Wareing speculates that the brain might make its decisions probabilistically, and that in some circumstances it might deliberately randomise its actions (Letters, 2 July). It has long been known that this is what it does. Recordings show that neurons in the brain encode probability and run races with each other to make decisions. A good deal of randomness is gratuitously injected into this process. To an outside observer, the resultant unpredictable responses look like “free will”, and would indeed be highly desirable in predator/prey interactions. To the owner of the brain, the crucial difference between those responses that we recognise as unconscious – like reflexes – and those that we think we have “willed”, is that we experience the latter being prepared in advance, but not the former. But both are equally mechanistic. Free will is a pretty meaningless expression. Cambridge, UK

100 per cent confidence might be exemplified by sports stars. What of the other two corners? Do you know of self-effacing, retiring, bushel-hiding geniuses? And many of our current national politicians might find themselves in the 100,0 corner. Your article has prompted a modification to this simple model; clearly a third axis needs to be added to represent empathy. I propose that most of us would now fall within the central sphere of radius 30 to 40. There are now eight unusual “corner” groups. Who, for example, would score near 100 per cent for competence, confidence and empathy? And as for the other combinations… Kirkby Malzeard, North Yorkshire, UK From Barry McGuinness Emma Young tries to convince us that a degree of narcissism is a good thing. This is rather like arguing that because war is good for business, every business venture could do with a bit of war. Narcissists have a fixed delusion of superiority that blinds them to negative feedback. Bath, UK

Life at the corners of personality

Free will, pleasure, pain and drives

From Bryn Glover Your story on narcissism (9 July, p 27) brought to mind an image I use to illustrate the balance of human qualities. On a pair of X-Y axes I plot individuals’ confidence against competence, scaling each from 0 to 100 per cent lacking more precise quantification. The vast majority of us would fall within a central circle with a radius of 30 or 40 per cent. The interesting groups appear in the corners. The unfortunate people near 0,0 would be those incapable of coping with our modern society and those in need of intensive support, while high-flyers at 100 per cent competence and

From Bill Summers I agree with Denise Taylor that “the freedom of will is a misleading term and what we actually have is the freedom to choose” (Letters, 11 June). This has an elegant grip on logic, reality and the meaning of words – but does not go far enough. Assuming that we are free to choose, what drives us to choose one option over another? It is our perception of which gives us most pleasure and least pain. I struggle to find an example of a free choice explainable in any other way. The pleasure/pain dichotomy drives all of life and its evolution. Sturminster Newton, Dorset, UK

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No Nobel prize for that GM letter From Judy Carman You report over 100 Nobel laureates signing a letter about GM crops saying that “there has never been a single confirmed case of a negative health outcome for humans or animals from their consumption” (9 July, p 7). Most of these laureates have no training or experience in medical research, so they are speaking outside of their area of expertise. And no studies have been done on people, so we don’t yet know what effects there may be. Absence of evidence of harm is not the same as evidence of absence of harm. Adelaide, South Australia From Michael Abraham It would have been more useful to the general population had these Nobel prizewinners suggested a testing protocol that would establish the health outcomes of GM foods. For example, a GM food for human consumption could be regarded and tested in the same way as a new drug. For example, let 10,000 families be chosen to consume a given GM food as part of their daily diet. A matched set of 10,000 families would consume the equivalent non-GM food, with neither set knowing which food they were eating. Of course, all this will take time and cost. But if such testing is appropriate for a drug that may be taken by millions, then surely it should be appropriate for a food that will be eaten by millions. London, UK

If staying buried is hard to do... From Gila Shoshany Why ascribe benign motives to those who will defrost the “deanimated” (2 July, p 26)? I can

“As an undergraduate 40 years ago I found the same with pigeons: nobody would believe my data” Susan Finsen finds belated vindication in the report of ducklings recognising abstractions (23 July, p 15)

easily imagine zoos where reanimated 21st-century “neuros” provide entertainment. My own claim to the future is to be staked by my genes. My time-travelling will be in honoured fashion as my children lay me securely – and permanently – in my grave. Madison, Wisconsin, US From Gregory Sams Helen Thomson mentions the challenge of designing a building to survive a century with minimal human input, protected from natural or human disasters and without a consistent power supply. Since “no building in the world currently satisfies” this, must we not question the sanity of building nuclear power plants, where similar demands extend to thousands of years? London, UK

Watch for the signs of curved space From Chris deSilva Anil Ananthaswamy reports the hypothesis of a “backreaction” TOM GAULD

between matter and space-time that could obviate the need for dark energy through the effects of negatively curved space in voids (18 June, p 28). I suggest there is an observational test for this. Light from supernovae and galaxies that passes through voids should be different from light that passes through regions of high density and positive curvature. For example, supernovae seen through a void could appear fainter and further away than expected, and those observed through a region of high density brighter and closer. It is possible that existing surveys of distant objects may already have the data needed to carry out the test. Dianella, Western Australia

Work, work, work, always the same From Paul Wood Your consideration of the future of work reminds me that there remains a fundamental condition (25 June, p 30). What has changed with apparent “progress”?

Slaves were (0r are) owned by their masters or mistresses and forced to work for their livelihood. Serfs are seen as less oppressed than slaves, but their homes and property were owned by their lord and in return for their work they were allowed to live on the land. When serfs were freed their homes were still owned by their previous masters: they became indentured labourers. With “freedom for the workers”, obtaining a house and the goods that people believe they need has raised household debt to levels where work is essential to meet these obligations. Mortgages and hire purchase agreements seem very similar to the contract of the indentured labourer, the serf’s obligations to their lord and the slave’s servitude to their owner. Hamilton, New Zealand

Turing you, Turing me, in my head From Carol Anne Ogdin Jonathon Keats makes what seems to me an extraordinary assertion

in his excellent review of Turing’s Vision (2 July, p 42). He writes: “Turing noted that people are really Turing machines.” While my mathematical skills are not even modest, and some may assert that “thinking is computing”, I have difficulty accepting this. I would appreciate a breakdown of the caveats that allow this assertion to be true. As I understand it, a Turing machine is based on a finite set of symbols. Turing’s insight was to show how manipulating them could prove that some problems are just not solvable. Turing accepted the behaviours of human “computers” of his era as a model for his insight; I accept that people can emulate Turing machines. Yet people are capable of visualising what does not exist, of inventing that which has never before been imagined. Was Turing’s insight and publication itself necessarily the product of a Turing machine? And, if so, how did that Turing machine evolve? Placerville, California, US

For the record ■ The Pew Research Center found that 62 per cent of US adults sometimes get news from social media, and 18 per cent often (16 July, p 20). ■ Peter Piot was a member of a collaboration that investigated the Ebola outbreak in what was then Zaire: it was Karl Johnson’s team at the US Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, that confirmed Ebola was a new virus (23 July, cover). ■ The Patagonian Toothfish is not an invasive species (9 July, p 43).

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FURTHER to previous examples of scientific prescience in literature, Jocelyn Penington asks what the Bard knew about astronomy. In Hamlet’s love letter to Ophelia, the prince exclaims: “Doubt thou the stars are fire; Doubt that the sun doth move; Doubt truth to be a liar; But never doubt I love.” Could either of those opening astronomical statements be in doubt in Shakespeare’s time, wonders Jocelyn. For the answer, look no further than our own feature that examines the influence of radical astronomy on Shakespeare (19 April 2014, p 40).

PAUL MCDEVITT

HAVING been forced to digest a year’s worth of political turmoil in just five weeks, British citizens will welcome Parliament’s summer recess – traditionally a period when newspapers struggle to fill their pages and lightweight stories dominate the headlines. In the UK, this is known as the “silly season”, but Feedback notes that many countries – among them Denmark, Iceland, Germany, Poland and Norway – refer to it as “cucumber time”. Although the UK has certainly been left in a pickle this summer, we can’t help but wonder about the provenance of this phrase. Can any of our readers enlighten us?

HOLLYWOOD hippy hang-out Moon Juice is appealing for help to recover a piece of rock stolen from the premises. The smoothie and “sex dust” store beloved of New Agers such as Gwyneth Paltrow issued a plea on Instagram for the return of a paperweight-sized lump of rose quartz, insisting that “this loving

rock has given so much to an entire community and has much more to share”. Consulting Crystal Energy, our go-to guide for such matters (29 August 2015), we learn that any guilt the thief harbours is likely to be alleviated by the rose quartz itself, given that this gem “cleanses the emotions [and] promotes inner healing”. Feedback recommends that Moon Juice contacts experienced stone-hunters, such as those who re-located Scotland’s Stone of Scone (at least once). BBC News notes acidly that “though it’s difficult to put a monetary value on such an object, a similar looking crystal on the CWS Healing site costs £2.50.” PROMPTED by Ian Napier’s question on the correct name for recursive déjà vu (9 July), Dave Rogerson thinks that “Déjà View would be a good name for a guest house – but it might leave residents wondering if they’d been there before.”

“Multiverse theory is a lot like the national anthem,” writes Carl Zetie. “In theory there are many 'verses, but in practice we only  ever experience one.” 56 | NewScientist | 30 July 2016

ALSO mining the vein of literary foreshadowing, John Courcier reveals that quantum theory was well described by E.M. Forster in 1924, when he wrote in A Passage to India that “nothing in India is identifiable, the mere asking of a question causes it to disappear or to merge into something else”.

THE parents of 16-month-old Harwin Cheng say he was knocked down and injured by a patrolling security robot at Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto, California, reports ABC7 News. The Dalek-sized drone boasts a suite of sensors, but apparently not enough to avoid running over young Cheng. His parents want other families to know about the threat posed to young people in malls by belligerent 300-pound security guards… and presumably by robots as well. OUR readers continue to sniff out examples of incongruous scents in nature. To complement the creamsoda-smelling Jeffrey pine (28 May), Meg Wilkinson suggests another pine, the ponderosa, which sounds mouth-watering: “Some friends and I decided its scent was of coconutvanilla cookies fresh from the oven whilst drinking hot buttered rum.” The thick bark has deep furrows filled with this intoxicating scent, writes Meg, inviting people to press their faces against the tree to catch a whiff. “Those of us who live here and

love the natural environment are often called ‘tree huggers’,” says Meg. “Perhaps this comes from the uninitiated visitor observing us not hugging, but sniffing the trees.”

FURTHER to the strange smells of dogs (popcorn) and tigers (chocolate, peanuts), Heikki Henttonen reveals that the male Laxmann’s shrew has a strong musk that resembles “cheap perfume or soap”, distinctive enough that “one can identify the species even with eyes closed”. He recalls once sitting on a train in Helsinki, Finland, when he caught a whiff of the rodent. “I started to look around to see if someone had forgotten any Laxmann’s shrews in his pocket,” Heikki says. “To my disappointment, I realised the

fellow next to me had used a popular new deodorant that smelled very similar.” AS ANY brass player knows, “a crook is a metal tube used to alter the pitch of brass instruments”, writes Andrew Talbot. This suggests that Major Crook, the band conductor and policeman recalled by Crispian Strachan (9 July), “is a case of nominative quantum superposition, being both determinative and anti-determinative at the same time”.

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THE LAST WORD Lake shawls

instance when moulting, and then venture out as a group to feed. Their nest is not their only protection, however. The larvae are usually well armed with prickly urticating hairs, which irritate predators and help keep them at bay. Despite these defence strategies, common species of tent caterpillars in North America are taken by many kinds of bird and small mammals, and even bears when the caterpillars are numerous. Terence Hollingworth Blagnac, France

While walking around Lake Matheson in New Zealand, I came across many of these cocoon-like structures in a field of shrubs (see photo, right). What exactly are these?

■ The photo is of an old spider nursery made by the nursery web spider (Dolomedes minor). Endemic to New Zealand, it occurs from sea level up to subalpine environments and across a range of habitats including swamps, shrubland and grassland. The female carries her egg sac in her fangs for at least five weeks before constructing a nursery web at the tips of foliage. It can be around 15 centimetres across and will house the eggs and young. The spiderlings usually emerge within a week of the web’s construction, and after two weeks most of the young will have left the nest. Caroline Jones Karamea, New Zealand

spiders. These look eerie when hanging from telephone wires or blanketing acres of fields. Often called angel hair, in the 1950s and 1960s they were popularly believed to be a waste product of UFO propulsion systems. Some modern-day photos online incorrectly identify spider cocoons as angel hair. Peter Hassall Wellington, New Zealand

■ These are cocoons spun by female spiders to protect their eggs and are relatively common in New Zealand, especially in bush areas. A spider web is designed to trap flying insects for food, so it only needs to be two-dimensional, whereas these cocoons are three-dimensional in order to provide a protective space for the spider’s eggs. Even more startling in appearance than the cocoons are the long, trailing gossamer threads from aerial migrating

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We suspect the spider answer is correct but we also include the following because it’s one of a few that suggested caterpillars instead – Ed ■ This looks like an abandoned silk nest of what are broadly termed “tent caterpillars” of the family Lasiocampidae. I say this because, in the upper left part of the nest, it’s just possible to make out what looks like either a dead larva or a larval exuviae (moulted skin). Whereas some moths might spread their eggs around, laying them singly, tent moths lay in a large batch. When the caterpillars hatch out they remain as a group, surrounding themselves with a tent of silk to keep out predators such as birds, parasitic flies and wasps. Grouping together also assists thermoregulation: they develop faster if they are warmer. The larvae shelter together in the nest some of the time, for

This week’s questions VICIOUS SPIN

According to your “This is the end” feature (4 June, p 26): “When sunlight strikes asteroids they spin faster and faster, and many will centrifuge themselves into smithereens.” What causes this ever-increasing speed? David Harper Church Stretton, Shropshire, UK LUNAR LANDSCAPE

I’m an astronaut and I’ve landed on the moon. I’d like to do a painting of the magnificent desolation I see before me, but in the interests of getting close to my subject, I’d like to paint while standing on the lunar surface, not looking through a window. How should I go about it? Sumit Paul-Choudhury London, UK

Question Everything The latest book of science questions: unpredictable and entertaining. Expect the unexpected Available from booksellers and at newscientist.com/questioneverything

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From parallel universes to photosynthesis, entanglement WRbHQFU\SWLRQFRPSXWLQJWRFDWVDQGbPXFKPRUH %X\\RXUFRS\IURPDOOJRRGPDJD]LQHUHWDLOHUVRUGLJLWDOO\ )LQGRXWPRUHDWnewscientist.com/TheCollection