Issue 3219. 2 March 2019 New Scientist (Australia)

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SOU V E N I R I S SU E

THE PERIODIC TABLE AT 150

True story of its origins X Time for a radical revamp? X The superheavy atom factory PLUS! Our favourite elements X

WEEKLY 2 March 2019 No3219 Australia $9.50 (Inc. GST) New Zealand NZ$9.50 (Inc. GST) Print Post Approved 100007877

THE TRUTH ABOUT MALE AND FEMALE BRAINS Do we really think differently? By Gina Rippon

THE POOP COLLECTOR

One man’s mission to preserve our ancient microbiome

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PLUS WOLVES RETURN TO GERMANY / ISRAEL’S MOONSHOT / WORLD’S BIGGEST BEE / WHY DNA DATA IS NEVER ANONYMOUS News, ideas and innovation www.newscientist.com

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THE WALLACE LINE: WHERE MARSUPIALS MEET MACAQUES EXPLORE DIVERGENT FORMS OF LIFE ON THE FAUNAL BOUNDARY BETWEEN ASIA AND AUSTRALIA WITH IAN MORRIS OAM The central islands of Indonesia - between Java, Bali and Kalimantan (today known as Borneo) to the West, and Papua at the eastern end of the country - are a place of wonder, a breathing laboratory for the study of evolution. The meeting of Asian and Australian ecosystems is known to biogeographers as Wallacea. In the mid-nineteenth century a titan of 19th-century British science, Alfred Russel Wallace discovered a mysterious line that separated two faunal universes. This line separated elephants and tigers from marsupials and honeyeaters from barbets and trogons. His observations of zoological differences to the northwest and southeast of this imaginary line through the Indonesian island of Sulawesi were part of a body of work that, alongside Charles Darwin, reinvented biology when he developed his theory of natural selection. Wallacea first sparked the curiosity of zoologist, author and inimitable travel guide, Ian Morris, during his early life as a teacher in East Arnhem Land where he encountered Indigenous students with genetic links to Makassan trepangers. “The precise dates of contact with outsiders have long been the subject of dispute, with both Aboriginal & Makassan oral histories indicating that trading began as far back as a thousand years before European colonisation. The Yolungu people of Arnhem land recount stories of the Makassan visitors and images of their boats are recorded in rock art” explains Morris.

Komodo Dragon on Komodo is, Ian Morris (inset)

“What’s extraordinarily unique about this place is that although the Indo-Australian Archipelago occupies only 4% of the planets land area, its home to nearly one quarter of all terrestrial land species and the most species-rich coral reefs in the world”. Sulawesi, the largest island in Wallacea, is the undiscovered paradise of Indonesia’s less visited islands. As the oldest and largest island within Wallacea, the island formerly known as Celebes hosts a rich fauna with many species that are unique to the island. Although its fauna is predominantly Asian in origin, it is the only island in south-east Asia with marsupials (the bear cuscus and dwarf cuscus), a distinctively Australian element. Exotic wildlife includes at least seven species of macaques unique to the island. There also exist several species of Tarsiers, including the smallest primate in the world which fits in the palm of your hand. Reptile diversity is high, and the best-known reptile in Wallacea is the Komodo Dragon, (Varanus komodoensis) or ‘ora’ in the local language, and you can find miniature buffaloes, or anoas, whose lovable appearance is said to hide an aggressive demeanour. And there are enigmatic wild pigs, babirusas, with wrinkled skin and impressive upper tusks that instead of growing down, grow up and backwards toward the skull penetrating through the surface of its upper lip. Today, you can visit the islands of the Archipelago and follow in Wallace’s footsteps. “Of many of these islands, thousands are difficult to travel to owing to their archipelagic spread,” says Morris. “Together with other seasoned adventure seekers, I feel fortunate to share insights with intrepid travellers who follow in the footsteps of the British field biologist Alfred Wallace on the small ship expedition vessel Coral Adventurer.” “But where Wallace undertook his voyages in small and primitive “phinisis” assisted by crew members who would often deceive or desert him, and managing illness, fever, hunger and extreme weather conditions; I am fortunate to share my knowledge with explorers in comfort that is much easier to handle.” We cross these seas in a sophisticated expedition vessel with the latest navigation equipment, and a shallow draft with manoeuvrability unmatched by larger ships. Expedition by small ship is a fitting way to explore Wallacea and all its wonders since you can travel to small, far-flung isles rarely seen by visitors”.

Enjoy

25% off As a travel guide and expert biologist, Ian accompanies Coral Expeditions’ voyages through the Indonesian Archipelago, interpreting the flora and fauna of regions from the Spice Islands and West Papua through to Sulawesi.

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Like Wallace’s famous book The Malay Archipelago, you can begin in Singapore before travelling east to the Malaysian state of Sarawak on the western coast of Borneo. Here, just near the capital of Kuching – City of Cats – you’re just upriver from Santubong National Park where Wallace wrote up the Sarawak Law. You can look out to the shallow waters and remember that you are, geologically, still connected to the Asian continent. Behind you, the immense rainforests of Kalimantan hide countless species awaiting discovery and on the far side of the mountains, the Makassar Strait marks that important transition point. Looking east, the islands of Wallacea await – Lombok, Timor, Ternate, the Moluccas and Spice Islands and many more. You’ll have woodpeckers to the west and parrots to the east. You could spend a lifetime studying the animals of these tropical islands and waters, and yet there’d be many more to find still. There’s no better laboratory for studying biogeography under the tutelage of a passionate expert than this archipelagic constellation between two continents. - A journey through the Indonesian archipelago is a feast for the senses. Explore these destinations with Coral Expeditions aboard the expedition ship Coral Adventurer.

We awoke with anticipation at Cenderawasih Bay. Our local guide whizzed off in the zodiac to talk to the local fisherfolk on their unique wooden ‘bagan’ platforms. He came back with good news – whalesharks spotted! We were soon in the clear water and snorkeling with six huge whale sharks swimming lazily beside us. It was truly awe-inspiring to be in close proximity to these gentle giants, and the encounter had us beaming for hours afterwards. I suspect it is a story we will recount for many years to come.

Spice islands & Raja Ampat > 12 Nights, All inclusive aboard Coral Adventurer > Darwin to Biak departs 21 December 2019 > Biak to Darwin departs 02 January 2020 1800 079 545 [email protected] www.coralexpeditions.com

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The periodic table at 150 True story of its origins Time for a radical revamp? The superheavy atom factory Plus: Our favourite elements

5

28 The truth about male and female brains Do we really think differently? By Gina Rippon

6

42 The poop collector One man’s mission to preserve our ancient microbiome Plus Wolves return to Germany (15). Israel’s moonshot (12). World’s biggest bee (15). Why DNA data is never anonymous (22)

The most beautiful table in science is worth celebrating. Space should be open to all

News

8

THIS WEEK Alternative facts may be real. Hayabusa 2 samples an asteroid. Millions of fish die in Australia. Ban UK gas boilers. Virgin Galactic’s first passenger NEWS & TECHNOLOGY Light leaks into habitats. Stars contain nuclear ash. Yeast brews cannabinoids. Drones to search for murder victims. Extreme warming could destroy clouds. AI photo editor. Israel’s private moon mission. Computer chip flaw is here to stay. Wolves thrive on military land. World’s biggest bee. Should your smart home snitch on you? Football injuries on the rise

18 IN BRIEF Turtles do push-ups. Squirrel-eating humans. Unknown proteins. What killed the dinosaurs? Walking lowers blood pressure

Analysis 22 INSIGHT Genetic data is a privacy scandal waiting to happen 24 COMMENT Are folding phones the future? A Green New Deal must include nuclear power 25 ANALYSIS How did the zebra get its stripes? It’s complicated

Features 28 The truth about male and female brains Do we really think differently? 33 The periodic table at 150 The icon of modern chemistry remains unfinished 42 The poop collector Eric Alm is racing to preserve humanity’s ancient microbiome

Culture 44 AI takes on Bach An AI has created music, but will an audience notice? 45 Jim Al-Khalili Why my debut sci-fi novel is true to science PLUS: This week’s cultural picks 46 Russian Doll To escape the multiverse, think like Einstein

Regulars 26 APERTURE Invasion of little nippers 52 LETTERS Electric cars are no panacea for clean air 55 CROSSWORD 56 FEEDBACK Lightsaber duelling 57 THE LAST WORD Hot topic

2 March 2019 | NewScientist | 3

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The most beautiful table As a visual symbol of reason, the periodic table is hard to beat NAGAYASU NAWA describes himself as a schoolteacher and periodic table designer. He has created versions of the table that adorn everything from clocks to a traditional Japanese coat and even a school bus. This year, the 150th anniversary of the table’s invention by Dmitri Mendeleev (page 34), has been designated by the UN as the international year of the periodic table. And Nawa’s creations featured at the opening ceremony in Paris last month: Yuri Oganessian, the only living person to have an element named after them, was photographed holding a fan with one of his

periodic table designs. Nawa takes his love for periodicity further than most, although there is something about it that appeals to many of us. People have designed periodic tables of cupcakes, Star Wars, cereal and David Bowie, to mention just a few. But what is it about the table that makes it so iconic and worth lauding? One answer lies in how it makes sense of nature. Each type of atom, the fundamental building blocks of matter, is laid out neatly in order of ascending mass. As if by magic, a periodically repeating pattern in their properties emerges. As a visual symbol of

Space for everyone SPEAKING of anniversaries, this year marks half a century since the first astronauts landed on the moon, an incredible feat that saw the US cement its space race victory over the Soviet Union. These days, there is talk of a new space race between the US and China, which recently landed a probe on the far side of the moon and has ambitious plans to send

people there. But framing the new era of exploration beyond Earth as a nationalistic competition is an error. The superpower monopoly of space is over – increasingly, it is about the little guy too. Take SpaceIL, the Israeli start-up that recently launched the first private lunar lander (see page 12). Unable to fund its own rockets, the firm hitched a ride on one

how reason helps us understand the material world, there is nothing quite like it. It stands for completeness and order. The truth, however, is that the order is disputed and the table is almost certainly incomplete. Arguments are raging over elements that don’t quite fit the pattern and whether such anomalies warrant a sweeping redesign (page 36). In Russia, a facility is about to begin hunting the biggest atoms ever observed, extending the table into virgin territory (page 39). The story of the most beautiful table in science is worth celebrating, but it is far from finished. ■

made by US-based SpaceX. They are cooperating, not competing. Elsewhere in the solar system, Japan is carving out a niche as the world-leader in asteroid mining and exploration thanks to its Hayabusa 2 mission (see page 6). JAXA, the nation’s space agency, has more experience than NASA in this area, but no one is talking about a US-Japan race. Space, as author Douglas Adams once wrote, is big. There is room for everyone. ■ 2 March 2019 | NewScientist | 5

THIS WEEK

KYODO/VIA REUTERS

Asteroid dust in the bag JAPAN’S Hayabusa 2 spacecraft has successfully landed on the asteroid Ryugu and grabbed the first sample from its surface. The manoeuvre was originally planned to take place in October last year, but had to be delayed because Ryugu’s surface proved to be more uneven than expected. The boulder-strewn terrain meant that mission controllers had to aim for a circle just 6 metres across on the asteroid, and control the landing precisely. At around 2300 GMT on 21 February, they confirmed that the ambitious touchdown had been pulled off. As it landed, the spacecraft fired a 5-gram bullet made of the hard metal tantalum onto the surface to dislodge particles for collection. The aim is to return samples to Earth for analysis.

After landing, the probe began to rise again. The image shown to the left was taken by the camera on the craft during this ascent. The spacecraft’s shadow, with its solar panels, can be seen just above a black scorch mark created by its thrusters. The mission first arrived in orbit around Ryugu in June 2018 after travelling 3.2 billion kilometres in 3.5 years. The spacecraft has been surveying the asteroid ever since. Controllers plan to take two more samples before Hayabusa 2 returns to Earth, where it is due in late 2020. The final sampling will be the most destructive, using explosives to blow a crater in Ryugu to get at material under the surface. The findings will be of interest to companies hoping to mine asteroids for valuable resources.

Gas boiler ban may hit new UK homes

VIRGIN Galactic has returned the Unity spacecraft to the edge of space, this

FISH have been dying by the millions in Australia’s largest river system.

National University in Canberra, who chaired the investigation, says the sight of millions of dead fish should be a wake-up call, equivalent to the coral bleaching events that have been hitting the Great Barrier Reef.

time with a test passenger on board. Beth Moses, the space-flight firm’s

Drought, poor water management and excess irrigation taking water

The deaths were the result of a cold snap that caused two layers of water

Committee on Climate Change (CCC), which advises the UK government.

chief astronaut instructor, joined pilots Mike Masucci and Dave Mackay

from rivers led to three mass deaths of endangered fish species during

to mix, the larger of which had little oxygen left as it had been used by

The way new homes are built and existing properties are retrofitted

on the ascent. The success comes two months after its inaugural trip

December and January in the Murray-Darling basin, according

microorganisms feeding on dead blue-green algae. Fish that had been

with energy efficiency measures often falls short of stated design

into space in December, with only pilots on board.

to an investigation by the Australian Academy of Science that was

surviving in the oxygenated top layer, which had been made shallow by

standards, inflicting costs on the future, reports the committee.

On the latest flight, Unity went three times the speed of sound and reached 89.9 kilometres above Earth at its maximum altitude. The Karman line – the point at which Earth’s atmosphere ends and space begins – is about 100 kilometres above the ground, although the US Air Force defines astronauts as people who have travelled beyond the 80-kilometre mark. Unity was launched on the underbelly of a larger aircraft. Once in the upper atmosphere, it took over with its own rocket engines to boost into space. Fifteen minutes later, it landed back at California’s Mojave Air & Space Port.

published last week. Craig Moritz at the Australian

irrigation, quickly ran out of oxygen and suffocated.

The report calls for support in retrofitting homes, such as installing loft and wall insulation, and protecting those at risk of flooding. From 2025 at the latest, no new homes should be connected to the gas grid, says the committee. Instead of gas boilers they should use lowcarbon heat sources like heat pumps. “There are almost 30 million homes in the UK, and the depressing fact is most of them are not in a condition to keep us comfortable and productive and well as the climate changes,” says Julia King at the CCC. “The UK has reduced emissions faster than any other G7 nation,” says a government spokesperson.

6 | NewScientist | 2 March 2019

MIKE BOWERS/GUARDIAN/ EYEVINE

Virgin takes first Millions of fish die passenger to space in Australian rivers

UK HOMES aren’t fit for the future, according to a report by the

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

Alternative facts may be real A quantum experiment could rewrite reality, says Anil Ananthaswamy

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THERE are no objective facts in the world. This isn’t a statement about fake news. Rather, it is the implication of an experiment that suggests the nature of reality depends on who is looking. The work is rooted in thought experiments about the nature of quantum mechanics, but this is the first time one has been done in the lab, with potentially profound implications. “I am very excited about it,” says theorist Carlo Rovelli at Aix-Marseille University in France. The experiment, carried out by Alessandro Fedrizzi at Heriot-Watt University, UK, and his team, involved four fictional observers: Alice, her friend Amy, Bob and his friend Brian. It begins with Amy and Brian inside their own labs. the same as Amy with the other A central source outside both labs original photon, and Bob, who is creates a pair of photons linked by outside Brian’s lab, makes similar quantum entanglement, sending choices to Alice to get Brian’s one each to Amy and Brian. result, B0, or his own, B1. Amy creates another pair of If this is confusing, here is entangled photons: a system the real mind-bender: quantum photon and a test photon. Amy mechanics says that the results A1 uses the test photon to measure and B1 (the facts as established by the state of the original photon Alice and Bob) can disagree with from outside the lab, and the A0 and B0 (the facts as established result is imprinted on the system by their respective friends). photon through entanglement. This can be verified by running In thought experiments, Amy’s the experiment many times, with measurement is stored in her memory. In the real experiment, “A measurement should be a fact of the world — a it is stored in the system photon, fact that all observers making it the “observer”. can agree on” Once Amy has made her measurements, she sends the original and system photons Alice and Bob making choices at out of the lab to Alice. Then Alice random, then tallying the average can either directly measure the probabilities of the outcomes. system photon, which is akin The process involves making to just asking Amy what she three assumptions. One, Alice and measured (the result A0), or Bob have the freedom to choose she can let the two photons their measurements. Two, Alice’s interfere quantum mechanically, choice doesn’t influence Bob’s establishing her own fact without outcomes and vice versa. Finally, asking Amy (the result A1). there are observer-independent Meanwhile, Brian does exactly facts in the world. “A piece of

information that’s obtained in a measurement should be a fact of the world – a fact that all observers can agree on,” says Fedrizzi. If these assumptions are correct, the tally of probabilities should be no more than 2. The real experiment gave a value of 2.47 (arxiv.org/abs/1902.05080). While this is predicted by quantum theory, it also implies the assumptions are wrong. Prior theoretical work suggests that even if you deal with the first two assumptions, the contradicting facts can persist. “One natural way to resolve this is to say there aren’t any objective facts,” says Fedrizzi. The experiment could have immense implications for our understanding of the nature of quantum reality, which depends on how we interpret quantum theory. According to Fedrizzi and his colleagues, their work favours interpretations saying that the outcomes of experiments are subjective, such as quantum Bayesianism and Rovelli’s relational quantum mechanics. In turn, it questions more

The nature of the world around us depends on who is looking

mainstream views, such as the Copenhagen interpretation, which says that the properties of quantum systems don’t exist until observed, but then become objective facts, and the manyworlds interpretation, which says that all possible measurement outcomes are real and objective, but each in a different world. Renato Renner at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, who last year published a thought experiment along similar lines, thinks photons might not count as observers. “The validity of the conclusions depends on whether one can reasonably claim that their experiment mimics ‘observers’,” he says. But Rovelli is thrilled. “I do take it as a great piece of evidence directly supporting the relational interpretation. I agree in full with the way they interpret it,” he says. “It is fantastic that ‘ideal experiments’ of the past become real experiments of today.” ■ 2 March 2019 | NewScientist | 7

NEWS & TECHNOLOGY

Light is leaking into vital habitats throughout, and fewer than a third had no light pollution at all. Rates of light pollution were significantly higher in Europe and the Middle East, where a higher proportion of the biodiversity areas experienced skyglow, than in other regions. Garrett’s team also found that more of the biodiversity areas were affected in regions that were wealthier and more densely

LIGHT pollution is now so bad that a dull orange “skyglow” obscures the stars in more than two-thirds of the world’s crucial habitats. And we have almost no idea how this affects wildlife. There are two kinds of light pollution. The first is the intense brightness close to artificial lights like street lights, which often means night-time cities are lit up like Christmas trees, and we know a lot about its effects on nature. But further from cities, although there is less bright light, there is still a diffuse orange glow in the sky. This skyglow is widespread: about a third of people cannot see the Milky Way at night because of it. Jo Garrett at the University of Exeter, UK, and her colleagues have now mapped how far skyglow has penetrated into havens for threatened wildlife known as Key Biodiversity Areas. They took existing satellite data on the global spread of skyglow and overlaid the locations of these wildlife hotspots. About half the biodiversity areas had artificially bright skies

Stars full of nuclear ash race through galaxy THEY are the stars that refuse to die. Astronomers have detected four stars hurtling through the galaxy that are full of ashes, probably because they are survivors of enormous cosmic explosions. Two of them look set to escape the Milky Way altogether. The first of these cosmic runaways, called LP 40-365, was discovered in 2017. Roberto Raddi 8 | NewScientist | 2 March 2019

We don’t know how skyglow affects animals like the lynx

LAURENT GESLIN/NATUREPL.COM

Michael Marshall

populated (Animal Conservation, doi.org/c23f). This is a warning to emerging economies, says Christopher Kyba at the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam. “There’s a problem coming for these places, because they’re going to develop, and when they do they’re going to get very bright.” However, we don’t know what the effects of spreading skyglow will be. Many studies of light pollution have focused on organisms living in cities and

at the University of Erlangen– Nuremberg in Germany and his colleagues have found three more. All four of these white dwarf stars seem to be survivors of a strange kind of supernova discovered in 2013, called type Iax. They are much dimmer than type Ia supernovae, whose consistently bright explosion allows us to use them as “standard candles” to measure astronomical distances. Both types of explosion involve stars in a pair, with a white dwarf star stealing material from its partner until it gets too big and blows up. Type Ia supernovae destroy the exploding

star completely, but it seems type Iax blasts leave their stars intact and send them hurtling away. The three stars found by Raddi’s team have strange compositions. Stars are generally made of mostly hydrogen and helium, but these stars show no sign of those, instead containing heavier elements like neon, oxygen and magnesium. These seem to be a sort of nuclear ash left

“It’s like they tried to go supernova and didn’t make it. They came through the flames and out again”

other brightly lit places. They have revealed that illuminated nights change animals’ life cycles and when plants flower, and can affect predator-prey relationships. This can be shown by bringing animals into the lab or placing lights in their habitats. But it is much harder to determine the consequences of skyglow, which is both fainter and more widespread. “I think the consensus among the scientific community is that skyglow is probably having very widespread impacts,” says Thomas Davies at Bangor University in the UK. “But we’re yet to design the type of experiments that are capable of quantifying that.” Tackling skyglow, and other light pollution, will mean both using less light and being smarter about it when we do use it, says Kyba. Street lights could be turned off in the darkest hours of the night, when most of us are asleep and the risk of accidents or violence is minimal. Limits could also be set on the brightness of illuminated signs and lights on building facades. The direction of light is also crucial, says Kyba. The main cause of skyglow is light that shines horizontally, aiming just above the horizon. “With street lights, eliminating emissions in that direction can be really effective at reducing the total sky brightness,” he says. ■

over from the explosion, says Raddi (arxiv.org/abs/1902.05061). “It’s like they tried to go supernova and didn’t quite make it,” says Ashley Pagnotta at the College of Charleston in South Carolina. “They came through the flames and out the other side.” These stars may tell us something about the type Ia supernovae. It often turns out that studying oddities gives you information about the ”normal” population, says Pagnotta. “By not following the rules, they help you define what the rules are.” Leah Crane ■

For daily news stories, visit newscientist.com/news

Modified yeast make cannabis plant chemicals

The next most abundant is cannabidiol. This helps reduce the symptoms of some forms of epilepsy, and may be useful for treating a few other conditions too. But extracting pure cannabidiol or THC from plants, or making it from scratch, is difficult and expensive. Keasling says the genetically modified yeasts will produce pure cannabinoids more cheaply. What’s more, producing chemicals in yeast is less environmentally damaging than growing large amounts of a plant just to extract a chemical that is present in tiny quantities, he says. Keasling and his team have formed a company called Demetrix to commercialise the cannayeasts. At least two other companies, Librede in California and Hyasynth in Canada, have said they are also working on making cannabinoids in yeast, but they have yet to publish any results. Michael Le Page ■

KACPER KOWALSKI/PANOS

GENES from the cannabis plant have been added to yeast strains to enable them to make cannabinoids, key chemicals from the plant that have therapeutic value. The “cannayeasts” should make it possible to turn sugar into pure forms of many different cannabinoids, and to do so more cheaply and with less environmental damage than farming. “It gives us access to all these rare cannabinoids that might even be better therapeutics,” says Jay Keasling at the University of California, Berkeley, who led the team behind the work (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-0978-9). Our bodies produce cannabinoids to help regulate everything from memory to appetite. Marijuana plants make more than 100 chemicals that can also bind to the cannabinoid receptors in our nervous system. The main cannabinoid in cannabis is tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), which is what makes people feel “stoned” when they take cannabis.

Drones with lasers can see through foliage and into the ground below

Police turn to drones to pinpoint buried bodies DRONES could soon help search donated for research purposes for murder victims in remote in a 20,000-square-metre area areas. In recent tests, drones of dense forest. equipped with laser scanners The cadavers were put in identified graves in Australian three types of grave to simulate bushland. Now, the nation’s different crime sites: one police want to use the technology containing only one body, another in an ongoing case. with three and a larger grave with In the investigation, the police six bodies. Three empty graves suspect that a missing person is were dug as controls. buried in a densely forested area. Patrick Weeden at drone However, all searches so far have company Scout Aerial then flew come up empty. By using drones “It could help generate carrying a scanning technology new leads for cold cases, called lidar, they hope to cover a but also uncover mass larger area more quickly than graves in conflict areas” they would be able to on foot. Lidar works by pointing lasers at a target and measuring how lidar-equipped drones over the much time it takes signals to be target area. He didn’t know any reflected back. The laser pulses details about the burials. bounce off the surfaces, such as Weeden used an algorithm to leaves, they encounter. In this digitally remove the vegetation instance, they travel through gaps from the resulting images and in the forest canopy to offer a view reveal the ground beneath. This of the trees as well as anything allowed him to spot changes both buried in the soil below them. on the surface and underground, To test the technique, Soren letting him successfully identify Blau at the Victorian Institute of five of the six graves (Forensic Forensic Medicine in Melbourne Sciences Research, doi.org/c22w). and her colleagues buried bodies However, the technique failed

to spot the grave containing the single body, so the process still requires refinement. Lidar only picks up soil disturbances, so one limitation of the technique is that there is no easy way to distinguish the graves of human bodies from those of animals, or even changes to the ground due to other causes. But the technique could still prove valuable. Searching an area requires a lot of resources, particularly when investigators don’t know exactly where they should look. The lidar-carrying drones can narrow down a huge search area containing difficult terrain to a few places of interest. “Drones have a capability of rapidly pinpointing areas for subsequent investigations,” says Jamie Pringle at Keele University in the UK. For the moment, the technology is expensive: Weeden says that a lidar unit costs A$60,000 to A$200,000. Elsewhere, researchers are testing cheaper methods. Peter Masters at Cranfield University in the UK recently fitted out a consumer drone with a GoPro video camera and a relatively cheap lens attachment that filters near-infrared light to produce images showing soil disturbance. He used it to locate bodies buried in a natural cemetery. But this method only works well for open areas without tree cover, as it can’t map the ground beneath vegetation. Eventually, lidar could be used to proactively search vast areas and automatically detect if anything looks suspicious. It could also be put to other uses than simply helping a police force locate a single or a small mass grave, says Weeden. As well as generating new leads for cold cases, he believes it could also help uncover mass graves in conflict areas as evidence of war crimes or genocides. Donna Lu ■ 2 March 2019 | NewScientist | 9

NEWS & TECHNOLOGY

Michael Le Page

IF WE keep burning fossil fuels with reckless abandon, we could trigger a cloud feedback effect that will add 8°C on top of all the warming up to that point. That means the world could warm by more than 14°C above the pre-industrial temperature. This would be cataclysmic. For instance, large parts of the tropics would become too hot for warm-blooded animals, including us, to survive. The good news is that, if countries step up their efforts to cut emissions, we should

“The planet became so hot about 50 million years ago that crocodiles thrived in the Arctic” avoid finding out if this idea is correct. “I don’t think we will get anywhere close to it,” says Tapio Schneider at the California Institute of Technology. Schneider’s team computermodelled stratocumulus clouds over subtropical oceans. These clouds cover about 7 per cent of the planet and keep it cooler by

reflecting the sun’s heat back into space. The group found a sudden transition when carbon dioxide levels reached around 1200 parts per million (ppm). At that point, the stratocumulus clouds broke up and disappeared. This finding applies only to subtropical stratocumulus because these clouds are unusual. The cloud layer is maintained by the cloud tops cooling as they emit infrared radiation – and very high CO2 levels block this process. The loss of these bright white clouds would have a dramatic warming effect, adding 8°C to the global temperature, Schneider calculates. Because the world would warm around 6°C or more if CO2 levels passed 1200 ppm, this means the average global temperature rise could exceed 14°C (Nature Geoscience, doi.org/c223). Carbon dioxide levels will pass 410 ppm this year, up from 280 ppm in pre-industrial times. If we burned all available fossil fuels, atmospheric CO2 levels could rise as high as 4000 ppm. However, even in the standard worst-case scenario used by climate scientists, which assumes nothing is done to curb emissions,

STOCKTREK IMAGES, INC./ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Cloud loss may lead to 14°C of warming

CO2 levels would only pass 1200 ppm decades after 2100. Other climate scientists say this cloud feedback is plausible. “Conceptually, I think it’s sound,” says Helene Muri at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. But there are some uncertainties about the numbers, so it will be important to narrow them down, she says. The result might hold up, but we already have more than enough reasons to avoid reaching such high levels of CO2, says Kate

Marvel at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Emissions are currently growing in line with the worst-case scenario, however the expectation is that countries will eventually do more. “This result isn’t cause for panic,” says Marvel. The finding could also help solve a long-standing mystery: why the planet became so hot about 50 million years ago that crocodiles thrived in the Arctic. We know that CO2 levels were generally much higher at the time, but they didn’t seem high enough to explain the extreme warmth during this period. ■

Eventually, the generator gets so good that the discriminator can no longer tell the difference (arxiv.org/ abs/1902.06838). The pair trained the program on 29,000 celebrity photos. Masks were randomly added over parts of these

images, training the program to recognise and reconstruct particular features – eyes, for example. Similar masks taught it to recognise the colours and shadows of the face. “This program would help designers by reducing tedious labour,” says Jo, enabling them to focus on more creative tasks. And, he says, it is easy to use without design expertise. “The big question,” says machine-learning researcher Alex Champandard, “is how do we make these systems so that they benefit a lot of the people whose work is being disrupted?” Donna Lu ■

Stratocumulus clouds reflect the sun’s light, keeping Earth cooler

DRAW a few lines on a photo of a face and an AI can turn your sketch into a realistic edit, no skill required. A face-editing program, created by Youngjoo Jo and Jongyoul Park at the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute in South Korea, lets you change hairstyles, add smiles and even insert earrings. The program is a generative 10 | NewScientist | 2 March 2019

EMPICS ENTERTAINMENT/PA IMAGES

AI makes Chris Hemsworth smile again

adversarial network, formed of two competing AIs: a generator and discriminator. The generator edits photos based on overlaid sketches. The discriminator is given the edited pictures and untouched photos, and must distinguish real from fake.

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NEWS & TECHNOLOGY

Leah Crane

A SPACECRAFT that began life as a sketch on a bar napkin nearly a decade ago is on its way to the moon. If it succeeds, SpaceIL’s Beresheet lander will be the first privately funded mission to touch down on the lunar surface. SpaceIL, an Israeli non-profit organisation, began as a competitor in the Google Lunar X Prize, a contest offering a $20 million reward for the first private firm to land a rover on the moon. The contest ended in 2018 without a winner, but SpaceIL continued working on its craft. Now it has successfully launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The lander will spend a number of weeks orbiting Earth before attempting to land on the moon on 11 April. To date, only three nations have successfully managed the feat: the US, the Soviet Union and China. Beresheet – which means Genesis in Hebrew – could make Israel the fourth, but with a difference. Due to the rules of the Lunar X Prize, the spacecraft has barely any government funding.

Vulnerability in computer chips can’t be fixed A CRITICAL security flaw affecting computers the world over is here to stay, and there isn’t any software that can properly guard against it. That is the conclusion of Google engineers trying to fix a vulnerability called Spectre in chips known as processors. It was first discovered a year ago, and affects chips built by Intel, AMD and ARM, which are used in 12 | NewScientist | 2 March 2019

Most of its money has come from individual donors and charities. The SpaceIL team hopes that this mission will, as befits its name, help start an era of more ambitious low-cost journeys into space. At an overall budget of $90 million, it is also much cheaper than previous lunar expeditions. It cost half as much as China’s Chang’e 4 lander, which touched down in January. “The hopes are that if missions become cheaper you can do more of them,” says Yonatan Winetraub, one of SpaceIL’s founders. “I’m over the moon, no pun intended, to start that.” Beresheet’s journey won’t be simple. Instead of flying straight to the moon, it was placed in a relatively low orbit around Earth. That lowered the launch cost, because the lander could share its ride with satellites. In the weeks ahead, the spacecraft will circle our planet in ever-widening rings before getting far enough away to be captured by the moon’s gravity at the beginning of April. If all goes well, it will land on 11 April, having travelled 6.5 million kilometres, even though the moon is less

most computers and smartphones. It leaves devices vulnerable to software that is designed to steal information, including passwords and emails. Following Spectre’s discovery, firms including Apple and Microsoft scrambled to release security patches for some variants of the flaw. However, there were problems. These fixes were reported to slow down some computer functions by between 5 and 30 per cent. And the patches mitigate the risk for only some Spectre variants found so far, and don’t solve the underlying issue. For one Spectre variant, known as

SPACEX/ALAMY

First private moon mission launches

The Beresheet lunar lander hitched a ride into space from Florida–

than 400,000 kilometres away. The lander is relatively small, at just 1.5 metres tall and 2 metres wide, but it does carry scientific instruments. The craft also has a “lunar library” in the form of a small engraved disc containing, among other things, the entirety of English-language Wikipedia. Beresheet is only expected to last about two Earth days on the moon’s surface before the heat

Speculative Store Bypass, Ben Titzer and his colleagues at Google have now concluded that there is no software fix that works – leaving all computers with affected hardware vulnerable (arxiv.org/abs/1902.05178). This all stems from a problem in how processors were designed, says Titzer. “The entire field of computing missed this.” Spectre exploits this flaw, which involves something called

“There is a problem with how processors have been designed that the entire field of computing missed”

from the rising sun sizzles its instruments. In that time, it will take pictures and measurements of the moon’s magnetic field. It also carries a mirror designed to reflect a laser light beamed from Earth back to us. This allows researchers to make precise measurements of the distance to the moon. “There are still a lot of risks involved,” says Winetraub. “A spacecraft isn’t something you can test on Earth – we can’t do a landing and see how it goes.” ■

speculative execution, a feature of chips that was intended to speed up devices. It involves guessing at future calculations, and then discarding incorrect guesses. We still don’t know exactly what can and can’t be stolen from machines with flawed chips, so while patches seem to work for some variants, we don’t know whether they are truly effective, says cybersecurity expert Paul Kocher, who helped find Spectre. “We will be living with the consequences of it for a long time,” says Ian Batten at the University of Birmingham, UK. Donna Lu ■

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Wolf packs invade military land Chelsea Whyte

animals were less likely to die from human interactions in these places than in protected areas. “Most of the dead wolves died in traffic accidents,” says Reinhardt. Although road density is similar in both types of area, there may be less traffic on the military land, she says. The relative safety of these training areas appears to have helped wolves spread across Germany. Analysing data collected between 2000 and 2015, the team

WOLVES are making a comeback in a surprising place. Germany had no wolves a few decades ago, but populations are now growing in military training areas. The predators began returning to Germany in the 1980s, mostly from Poland. “We were expecting that the large forest areas north-east of Berlin would be the first place settled by the wolves, because it is close to Poland and has dense forest,” “Many species are more says Ilka Reinhardt at Goethe afraid of humans than University Frankfurt. they are of machinery But she and her colleagues have like cars or even tanks” now analysed data from national surveys of wolf populations, and found that the first colonies discovered that wolves seem to were in Saxony, to the south of have jumped from one piece of Berlin, on military training areas. military land to another. These places have tanks and Over this period, wolves shooting ranges and are off limits in Germany went from one to the public. established mating pair to With dense forest and few 67 pairs across the whole country, roads, the areas provide a similar with the population growing habitat to that in protected exponentially. By 2015, wolves natural areas. But the team’s were found in 62 per cent of analysis suggests that military military training areas larger than land is actually better for wolves: 30 square kilometres, and in only

Germany has seen a rise in wolf numbers since the 1980s

14 per cent of similarly sized protected areas (Conservation Letters, doi.org/c2zt). Similar trends can be seen in other countries. “Something we see in our work in California is that lots of areas that have destructive processes happening, like logging, can be really important core habitats for large carnivores. Here, it’s mountain lions,” says Justine Smith at the University of California, Berkeley. Many species are more afraid of humans than they are of machinery like cars or even tanks, she adds. Recreational activities are often promoted on protected lands, while the public has little or no access to military land. “I think what might be going on is that in many parts of the world, protected areas are built in places that have a lot of people already. Or they can attract people to live near them because of the benefits they provide,” says Smith. So it may be the relative solitude of military training grounds that appeals to wolves. The routine of a military schedule could help as well. “There is some shooting, but it’s always in the same areas and it’s usually during the workday, so the animals can get used to it,” says Reinhardt. ■

A GIANT bee thought lost to the world for decades has been found again on an Indonesian island. The black bee is the size of a human thumb, with a wingspan of 6 centimetres and fierce-looking mandibles. Simon Robson at the University of Sydney and his colleagues spotted a lone specimen of Wallace’s giant bee (Megachile pluto) while searching for the insect on one of Indonesia’s North Moluccas islands. The team found the bee in a termite’s mound a few metres off the ground. “She just came and looked around and went back to her nest,” says Robson. “We ran around cheering and shouting and hugging each other.” The bee is named after British biologist Alfred Russel Wallace, who, along with Charles Darwin, is credited with developing the theory of evolution through natural selection. Wallace discovered the bee in 1859 on the Indonesian island of Bacan. He described it as “a large black wasp-like insect, with immense jaws like a stag-beetle”. In 1860, an entomologist in the UK determined that it was actually a bee, saying it was a “giant of the genus to which it belongs”. The bee has a history of vanishing. It was believed to be extinct until its accidental rediscovery by a US forester in Indonesia in 1981. But the lack of another sighting led the charity Global Wildlife Conservation to include the insect on its list of “25 most wanted” lost species in 2017. Ruby Prosser Scully ■

CLAY BOLT

PREMIUM STOCK PHOTOGRAPHY GMBH/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

World’s biggest bee found after 40 years

2 March 2019 | NewScientist | 15

NEWS & TECHNOLOGY

AI could decide to snitch on you A digital assistant faced with a drug-taking teen would weigh up the demands of the different points of view and try to find a course of action that pleases them all. It does this by mapping out the various arguments from each stakeholder, noting which ones clash (“involve the police” versus “respect individual autonomy”, for example). Conflicting

IF A smart home of the future gets a whiff of cannabis smoke in a teenager’s bedroom, should it tell their parents? Or even the police? One group of researchers thinks smart devices could draw on artificial intelligence to reach a moral decision. Situations like this may emerge as digital assistants, like Amazon Echo or Google Home, make it into more dwellings and gain even smarter features. One way to reach a resolution might be for a handful of artificially intelligent bots to debate the possibilities before reaching a decision. That is the view of Marija Slavkovik at the University of Bergen, Norway, and her team. They presented the idea at an Artificial Intelligence, Ethics and Society conference in Hawaii. The idea is that in ambiguous cases, moral AIs would each represent a point of view, such as the device owner, a guardian or the police. They would have different priorities depending on who they represent: to prioritise individual autonomy, to operate safely or to be lawful.

Footballers are working harder on the pitch PROFESSIONAL footballers have never had it so easy, right? Not according to a study, which shows modern soccer is taking an increasing toll on players. The finding lends weight to last year’s announcement by the English football authorities that the country’s Premier League will test a mid-season break, partly to try to reduce injuries. 16 | NewScientist | 2 March 2019

Your digital assistant may one day be an ethical guardian too

DPA PICTURE ALLIANCE/ALAMY

Frank Swain

demands are removed, and the system decides a course of action based on those that remain. One problem is that ethical behaviour isn’t consistent across societies or from person to person, so the AIs would have to be flexible, allowing them to be geared to better reflect local law as well as the preferences of the owner, says Slavkovik. However, the team behind the idea has yet to work out what the moral AIs should do if they can’t reach a consensus.

Ashley Jones at Leeds Beckett University in the UK and his colleagues tracked 243 footballers from 10 clubs across four of the divisions below the English Premier League in the 2015/16 season. They found players had an average of 1.9 injuries per season, compared with 1.3 in the 1997/98 and 1998/99 seasons combined – the last time a similar study was conducted (Physical Therapy in Sport, doi.org/c2z4). Jones says the game is different now, with greater physical demands. “Twenty years ago, footballers were trying to be athletes. Now we have

athletes who can play football.” Recent research has shown today’s players run roughly 30 per cent further than in 2006, but recovery time hasn’t increased. Lower league teams play a 46-game season, with additional cup competition matches. Of the injuries that Jones’s group tracked, 17 per cent were reoccurrences of an existing problem, up from 7 per cent in 1997-9. It is no

“Twenty years ago we had footballers trying to be athletes. Now they are athletes who play football”

The cannabis scenario isn’t yet possible, as digital assistants currently lack odour sensors, but they do have microphones and some have cameras. Police have already sought data collected in this way: Amazon released audio recordings from an Echo device present at a suspected murder scene to Arkansas police in 2017. Google’s Nest home security system was also found last week to contain a microphone, even though this wasn’t disclosed in any of the product material. Beth Singler at the University of Cambridge isn’t convinced by the idea of using moral AIs in this way. “Humans and human situations are far messier than this method makes out,” she says. For example, the proposed moral AIs treat parents as a single unit, but parents may disagree on what to do about a teenager’s drug use. And when facing a tough call, people can change their mind. “There is no guarantee humans won’t behave differently, and may disagree with what they expressed previously to the artificial moral agent,” says Singler. The question remains about whether we should place this responsibility on robots in the first place, says Jason Millar at the University of Ottawa, Canada. “That question is very important, much more important, I would argue, than seeking agreement or consensus.” ■

surprise that old injuries flare up more often, says Jones. Some 40 per cent of modern injuries were the result of repetitive stress and strain placed on players’ bodies over time. Some things haven’t changed: the most common injury remains a hamstring strain and problems tend to peak twice, during winter and in the first few weeks of the season. Coaches could be pushing players too hard and too early thinking they need to get them into shape, says Jones. “It isn’t needed. These players don’t lose fitness in the summer like they used to.” David Adam ■

NASA, ESA, AND L. HUSTAK (STSCI)

IN BRIEF There’s more of a buzz on the right

First alien moon may not be what it seems THE first suspected moon found beyond our solar system

System Research in Germany and his colleagues disagree. Astronomers often look for exoplanets by watching for a dip in a star’s light as a planet passes in front. Exomoons should show up as an even smaller dip on top of that. Heller says that the dip attributed

may not be what we thought. A team of astronomers say the evidence for the discovery is inconclusive, and that

to Kepler-1625b’s moon could be a statistical anomaly. Further evidence for the moon, namely that the planet

an unseen planet may be a more plausible explanation. In 2017, David Kipping and Alex Teachey at Columbia

crossed its star 78 minutes earlier than expected, hinting at a moon giving it a gravitational boost, could be caused

University in New York revealed evidence for a Neptunesized exomoon orbiting the Jupiter-sized exoplanet

by an unseen hot, Jupiter-like world orbiting more closely to the star, says Heller (arxiv.org/abs/1902.06018).

Kepler-1625b, about 8000 light years from Earth. In 2018, the pair firmed this up, using data from the Kepler

Kipping agrees that the current data shouldn’t be interpreted as a secure exomoon detection, but thinks

and Hubble space telescopes. But René Heller at the Max Planck Institute for Solar

that an unseen planet can’t explain the moon-like dip in the brightness of the host star.

A fifth of our genes are still a big mystery WE HAVE no idea what 20 per cent of our protein-coding genes are for – and progress on solving this puzzle has stalled. That is the conclusion of a study by Valerie Wood at the University of Cambridge and her colleagues. They started by defining what is known or unknown. For instance, we may be able to tell a protein is an enzyme, but if we don’t know what reaction it catalyses, its 18 | NewScientist | 2 March 2019

function remains unknown. When the researchers applied such criteria to yeast proteins, they found that the function of most was discovered in the 1990s. Progress slowed in the 2000s and plateaued in the 2010s with the function of a fifth still unclear. Next they showed that 3000 human protein-coding genes remain a mystery, which works out as the same proportion as in

yeast. The team didn’t look at the rate of progress, but Wood thinks it is similar to that for yeast (Open Biology, doi.org/c2x7). One reason for progress stalling is that a common way to find out what protein-coding genes do is to mutate them in lab animals such as mice and zebrafish to see what happens. The mystery genes may be involved in processes, such as ageing, that have subtle effects. In addition, research into such proteins struggles to get funding.

HONEYBEES are biased, at least when it comes to which way to turn when they enter a cavity. Directional preferences exist in many animals, but may be extra important in social species for group cohesion. To see if this is the case in honeybees, Thomas O’Shea-Wheller of Louisiana State University got 30 bees to explore two boxes. One was open inside; the other had a maze of tunnels. Out of 180 trials in the open cavity, the bees turned right on 86 occasions but left just 35 times. On the remaining 59 occasions, they flew straight on. They turned right more quickly than left, suggesting a more automatic response. In the maze box, they had no preference (Biology Letters, doi.org/c2zj). Bees explore spaces such as tree hollows when seeking a nest site. They choose a site only once a certain number of scout bees are together. A turn bias might help this process, says O’Shea-Wheller.

Walk lowers blood pressure like a pill JUST 30 minutes of exercise every morning may be as effective as medication at lowering blood pressure for the rest of the day. Michael Wheeler at the University of Western Australia in Perth and his team got 35 women and 32 men aged between 55 and 80 to try various regimes: sitting for 8 hours; 1 hour of sitting then 30 minutes of moderate walking, followed by 6.5 hours of sitting; 1 hour of sitting before 30 minutes of walking, followed by 6.5 hours of sitting, but with 3 minutes of light walking every 30 minutes. Blood pressure was lower in men and women in the exercise plans. Women, but not men, saw worthwhile extra gains if they also did the 3-minute walks (Hypertension, doi.org/c2zv).

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

IN BRIEF

HIBERNATING turtles have been spotted doing underwater push-ups, possibly as a way to grab enough oxygen to stay alive. Mike Plummer at Harding University in Arkansas and his colleagues noticed the behaviour by chance while keeping about 25 smooth softshell turtles in an outdoor simulated pond. During checks, the researchers saw the animals raise and lower the back of their body like a push-up over 1000 times between them. The animals typically spend the winter partially buried in sand or mud at the bottom of rivers or streams so are hard to observe in the wild. Although the reptiles can breathe in air, this species is well known for its ability to obtain oxygen through the skin. “We hypothesised that the push-ups resulted in replenishing the water next to the turtle’s skin with oxygenated water,” says Plummer. Further tests seem to agree with that idea. The turtles did more pushups in warmer water than colder water. Warmer water carries less oxygen than cold water, so the turtles would have to move more to get the oxygen they need (Journal of Herpetology, doi.org/c2zg). Plummer says they might not do this in the wild though, as water there is constantly moving over

SHUTTERSTOCK

their skin due to currents.

20 | NewScientist | 2 March 2019

Closing in on the real tale of how the dinosaurs met their end THE story of the mass extinction that killed the dinosaurs has been fleshed out by two studies. Up to 75 per cent of all species vanished in the CretaceousPalaeogene extinction 66 million years ago. There is evidence that an asteroid impact at Chicxulub, Mexico, created a global soot cloud that blocked out the sun. However, the extinction also coincided with intense volcanic activity that resulted in a huge rock formation known as the Deccan Traps in western India. To get a better idea about when

the Deccan eruptions occurred, Courtney Sprain at the University of California, Berkeley, and her colleagues worked out the age of lava flows. Another team, led by Blair Schoene at Princeton University, used a different method to do the same. Both studies agree the Deccan eruptions lasted around a million years, beginning around 400,000 years before the extinction. But Schoene and his team suggest the eruptions occurred in four bursts. The second was the most rapid and began tens of thousands of

years before the asteroid impact (Science, doi.org/c2xw). Sprain and her team concluded that three-quarters of the lava volume at Deccan erupted after the mass extinction, and that the eruption rate increased after the impact (Science, doi.org/c2xx). We still don’t know the relative contributions of the Deccan Traps and the asteroid to the extinction, says Schoene, but a more precise timeline gets us closer. Sprain thinks volcanism may have had a big role, weakening ecosystems before the Chicxulub impact. MARK CONLIN/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Turtles work out as they slumber

People conquered extremes long ago RAINFORESTS, with dangerous animals, diseases and poor resources, were generally thought too inhospitable for ancient humans to occupy. But new evidence is overturning that view. An international team analysed around 15,000 bone and tooth fragments from the Fa-Hien Lena cave in Sri Lanka’s rainforest. This is thought to be the oldest archaeological site occupied by humans in the country. The team found that the people living there were able to thrive by hunting small, quick, tree-dwelling animals, such as monkeys and giant squirrels. They did so almost continuously until around 4000 years ago. Michelle Langley of Griffith University, Brisbane, an author of the study, says their hunting methods seem sophisticated and sustainable, rather than relying on indiscriminate use of snares that can lead to overhunting. The researchers say that this finding shows the flexibility that allowed Homo sapiens to rapidly colonise extreme environments and eventually become the only hominin species left on the planet (Nature Communications, doi.org/c2zd).

Eco-friendly plastics within our grasp SQUID may hold the secret to a new generation of greener plastics. That is thanks to substances in the tough, serrated suckers at the end of their tentacles, used to grab prey. Researchers are finding that proteins in these suckers – called squid ring teeth – can be turned into fibres and films for making tough, flexible and biodegradable plastics. One barrier is that an averagesized squid only contains 100 milligrams of these proteins. But Melik Demirel at Pennsylvania State University and his team say that genetically engineered E. coli can be

used to make it in greater quantities. They say one application of the proteins could be for coating existing synthetic clothing fibres to produce a very hard-wearing fabric that won’t shed microplastics. It could even lead to self-healing materials. The usefulness of the proteins is a result of microscopic features, such as the sequence of their amino acid building blocks and the structures they form: tightly coiled helices, flat sheets and disordered tangles. These features give the proteins their macro-scale properties (Frontiers in Chemistry, doi.org/c2x4).

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And where does belly-button fluff come from? Find the answers in our latest book. On sale now. Introduction by Professor Stephen Hawking

INSIGHT GENETIC PRIVACY

Uniquely you EVERY person in the world is issued with a unique code before they are even born. Governments, insurance firms and indeed pretty much anyone can use this code to catalogue us throughout our entire lives. This isn’t a sci-fi dystopia – it is just genetics. While your genome doesn’t explicitly record your name, address or other identifying information, the rise of consumer genetics services means these details are increasingly being linked to your DNA. Once that happens, the gene genie is out of the bottle. Yet many genetics firms and researchers continue to insist that your genome isn’t personally identifiable information, despite it literally identifying you. A recent revision of US ethical guidelines, for example, has continued this fiction, ignoring multiple objections. So should we be concerned about our lack of genetic anonymity? The mistaken idea that medical information can be anonymised isn’t new. In the mid-1990s, the Massachusetts Group Insurance Commission, which provides healthcare to state employees, decided to make all medical records available for research. The state governor at the time, William Weld, assured the public that the records would be stripped of personally identifiable information. Then he fell ill, visited a hospital, and a computer science graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology took the opportunity to show him how easily identifiable his own records were. Latanya Sweeney, now the director of the data privacy lab at Harvard University, used Weld’s 22 | NewScientist | 2 March 2019

TIM FLACH/GETTY

Your genome definitively identifies you, but we keep pretending that DNA data is anonymous. That has to change, says Chelsea Whyte

zip code, birth date and gender to search hospital records on the day he visited. She got an exact match, and sent the governor his medical records in the mail, showcasing the limitations of so-called anonymised data. In the US, the privacy of medical data is protected under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which lays out 18 identifiers that must be removed before medical data can be stored in an open database for, say, research purposes. This covers obvious things like names, addresses and health insurance account numbers. It also includes some biometric markers, such as fingerprints and voice patterns. But it doesn’t include DNA.

In other words, any DNA made available to the research community or to the public in databases doesn’t have to be protected. It can therefore be used without consent for research or other purposes. Law enforcement agencies have taken advantage of this lately, trying a kind of genomic triangulation to find the perpetrators of unsolved murders. This technique has been used to find dozens of suspects by matching DNA left at a crime scene to that on genetic ancestry websites

“DNA made available to researchers doesn’t have to be protected and can be used without consent”

and tracing people through any listed relatives. The use of this kind of DNA searching has exploded along with the rise of consumer genetic kits. A recent article in MIT Technology Review used public data to estimate that 26 million people around the world have used such kits, sending in a swab of their saliva to one of several genetics companies such as AncestryDNA and 23andMe (see graph, right). Even if you haven’t taken one of these tests yourself, parts of your DNA are likely to be out there. “We’ve shown in our research that if we have a database of 2 per cent of a population, then virtually everyone is traceable,” says Yaniv Erlich, chief science

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Stripping records of information like names, addresses and social security numbers was once enough to keep it from being identifiable, but that changed about 20 years ago. “There was this notion that was useful for decades, that if you redact certain types of information, it becomes quite hard to trace back records. And it actually worked quite well,” says Erlich. “But as we got into the era of big data and large-scale internet resources, it became true that it’s hard to anonymise any big data.” The myth of genetic anonymity persists, however, because it is useful. It gives researchers access to a wealth of information without having to seek informed consent. Research of human subjects in the US is governed by the Common Rule, which applies to all federally funded research. This rule is rewritten periodically to bring it in line with current ethical standards and take into account new technology. This happened in January, but the rulebook still doesn’t count DNA as identifiable information. “Many people wrote opinions saying that DNA is identifiable and that we should treat it this way,” says Erlich. Instead, the new language explicitly says DNA isn’t identifiable. There are clear benefits to allowing this, because it is a good way of sampling the entire

Some US states are trying to limit the use of genetic data, while others want to amass large databases. In Arizona, a bill to create a statewide DNA database elicited criticism when it was announced on 19 February. It required people who work or volunteer for the state to submit DNA, along with anyone applying to serve as a foster parent or get a driving licence. The bill may have been a response to a recent criminal case where a healthcare facility worker was traced through his DNA and charged with impregnating a patient who was incapacitated. Following a backlash, the proposal has since been amended

to limit DNA collection to healthcare workers who directly care for patients. In Maryland, a bill aims to stop police from searching public genetic databases to hunt down criminals, seen by some as an invasion of the privacy guaranteed by the US constitution. Law enforcement lobbyists argue that limiting police capabilities won’t benefit the public, particularly because it isn’t illegal for a citizen to take a DNA sample found at a crime scene and upload it to a genetic genealogy database, says Yaniv Erlich at genetic ancestry company MyHeritage. “To say that police cannot do something an ordinary citizen can do is unusual.”

population. For example, if you have blood drawn at the doctor’s office and there is a bit left over after your tests are done, it could be stripped of identifiers and put into a repository where it can be used for research without you ever knowing about it. But increasingly, people want control over the use of their data. In the European Union, the recent General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) aims to give people that power, but it doesn’t apply to “anonymous data”, which includes DNA. “GDPR is of such a general nature that it couldn’t possibly address the peculiarities of

provisions,” says Natalie Ram at the University of Baltimore, Maryland. What does constrain them is their terms and conditions, but these can be unilaterally changed. For example, police were able to upload DNA to GEDmatch, a genetic genealogy database, to look for suspects, without users knowing this was possible. GEDmatch updated its terms of service after the fact. All this means the cat is firmly out of the bag when it comes to genetic anonymity. “[These databases] create the largest genetic surveillance apparatus for US individuals that has ever been established,” says Erlich. Maybe the best approach is to simply make that fact clear, says Jeantine Lunshof at MIT. “When you generate DNA data, it’s out there and you can’t get it back,” she says. As ethics consultant for the Personal Genome Project, which

genetic data,” says Kärt Pormeister at the University of Tartu in Estonia. “The fact that it’s shared in significant part with your relatives – you don’t see that with other types of data.” Protecting genetic information “Even if you haven’t taken stored by consumer genetics a genetic test yourself, companies, rather than medical parts of your DNA are researchers, is even more likely to be out there” complex. “They’re doing a lot of genetic testing, sequencing, screening and sharing of data. aims to collect and publish They aren’t covered by HIPAA, genomic data for 100,000 people, and in their capacity as consumer- Lunshof is putting this into facing, profit-driven companies, practice. Participants are made they’re not covered by research aware that their data will be fully protections. So, they kind of public and could be used for any fall outside the basic privacy kind of research, even something they might not approve of like biological weapons research. Estimated number of people DNA-tested by consumer genetics companies This kind of open consent AncestryDNA 23andMe Others model is important in a clinical 30 or research setting, because it may not be possible to explain all the possible ways genetic data could be used in the future, says Sandra 20 Lee at Stanford University in California. But the rules of the game change when we introduce commercial genetics companies. “When somebody is a patient 10 interacting with a physician, they are operating with a set of ethical expectations,” she says. “When you shift that to the 0 marketplace, those aren’t in 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 place. That’s worrisome.” ■ SOURCE: MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW

Myth of anonymity

SHOULD GOVERNMENTS GATHER DNA?

Number of people tested (millions)

officer at genetic ancestry company MyHeritage. That is because the DNA of even distant relatives can be linked back to you. Erlich and his colleagues demonstrated as much in a 2013 study. They used patterns found in DNA called short tandem repeats to search through public genetic databases, and showed that they could discover the surname of the person to whom the DNA belonged. “With enough time and effort, I can get to you,” he says.

2 March 2019 | NewScientist | 23

COMMENT

Folding phones are no fad Samsung is the first major manufacturer to launch a folding phone, and it might be useful rather than gimmicky, says Holly Brockwell

JOSIE FORD

SAMSUNG’S launch last week of the Galaxy Fold sent shock waves through the internet, with many people outside the tech industry seeing a folding smartphone for the first time. The reaction has been as divided as the phone’s hinged chassis, with one side professing starry-eyed love for the device’s innovative functionality and the other decrying its price and perceived gimmickry. The Galaxy Fold isn’t the first folding smartphone to market but it is the first from a high-profile brand, and as such it is a big deal. Samsung has spent time and money to be the first mainstream tech name on the folding bandwagon, which suggests the company believes it will be a popular category. Is it right? Well, yes and no. The Galaxy Fold itself isn’t likely to sell well: it is expensive ($1980 according

The nuclear option The proposed Green New Deal should consider the value of nuclear power, says David Titley SINCE last November, proposals in the US for a Green New Deal (GND) have incited much debate. The GND aims to address both climate change and economic inequality, but support for it is dividing along partisan lines. It is championed by many Democratic 2020 presidential candidates vying for votes from 24 | NewScientist | 2 March 2019

their progressive wing, and criticised by many Republicans. One of the contentious issues is the role in the GND of civilian nuclear power, or lack thereof. The issue is muddied by confusion between the information in the official resolution in Congress laying out the details of a Green New Deal and an accompanying

fact sheet that was briefly published on the website of the resolution’s sponsor, charismatic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. So first, the facts. The resolution doesn’t contain the word “nuclear” anywhere in its text. It does state that, within 10 years, the US will be “meeting 100 per cent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources” – but some would

“In 2017, nuclear power provided about 58 per cent of the US’s non-carbonbased electricity”

to reports) and unproven. But as the first step in a new direction, it is exactly what the market needs. Smartphone innovation has stagnated in the past few years, with various near-identical designs competing for the same money. Manufacturers have tried various tactics to stand out, experimenting with colours or add-ons, but consumers have generally stuck to their favourite brands. Foldables, as the category is known, are an innovation that combines the cool factor with functionality. Superficially, they may seem like curved TVs, which failed to revolutionise their market because consumers weren’t convinced they added anything to the viewing experience. Foldables may be different. That is because of the phones’ ability to transform into a

argue that nuclear meets those criteria. Ocasio-Cortez’s fact sheet, however, reportedly stated that the GND “will not include investing in new nuclear power plants”. Here are some more facts. According to official figures, in 2017, nuclear power provided about 20 per cent of US electricity, and 58 per cent of the country’s “non-carbon-based” electricity. Furthermore, nuclear power plants often operate at 90 per cent of their rated capacity. That of wind and solar, by comparison, ranges from 20 to 30 per cent. Ideally, wind and solar would be rapidly scalable and battery

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Holly Brockwell is a technology writer based in London

storage of the energy they generate would be nearly free, so that the electricity can be fed as needed onto power grids. But in the real world – the one where climate is changing rapidly and threatening our health, our economy and our security – we need to use what we have. Leaders are often faced with choosing between imperfect options, and one of those, for the foreseeable future, should be current and next-generation nuclear technologies. ■ David Titley is director of the Center for Solutions to Weather and Climate Risk at Penn State University

ANALYSIS Zebra stripes

TIM CARO/UC DAVIS

different device when needed. It isn’t hard to see the value in a hand-sized phone that can slip into your pocket and also fold out to offer a big screen for movies. However, one of the stumbling blocks of curved TVs also applies to foldables: concern about fragility and repair. If you break the screen on your $1980 Galaxy Fold, how much is it going to cost you to fix? Potential early adopters may be put off if they feel breakages are likely to be costly and hard to remedy. Ultimately, though, the Galaxy Fold is more important for the smartphone industry than for the consumer. It is a call to arms for manufacturers to embrace a new form and put their design talents to work finding new ways to improve people’s lives. This kind of novelty is often left to the niche brands to experiment with before the big players like Samsung will risk jumping in. The Galaxy Fold is a bold statement. It may well pay off for Samsung in the long term if it gives the firm a head start in developing and improving the technology, but that depends on how consumers – and other phone manufacturers – react. ■

Beware evolutionary just-so stories Michael Marshall

necessarily. Some ideas don’t seem to stand up, notably the suggestion that the stripes help zebras stay cool on hot days – if that were true, we would expect more stripy tropical animals. But other ideas have more to them. One that at first seems ridiculous is that the stripes are a form of camouflage. Obviously, zebras aren’t inconspicuous. But the stripes could create “dazzle camouflage”, overwhelming a predator’s visual system and making it hard to track the zebra’s movement. Imagine watching

WHEN it comes to explaining why zebras have stripes, it is best to remember that some issues aren’t black and white. A study published last week offers further evidence for one of the most promising explanations: that the stripes deter biting flies. In the parts of Africa where zebras live, there are blood-sucking horseflies that carry lethal diseases. Clearly, zebras would do well to avoid being bitten. The idea is that the stripes somehow confuse the flies so that “There is something they don’t land on the zebras. psychologically appealing A team led by Tim Caro at the about a single, clear University of California, Davis, tracked explanation” captive zebras and horses at a site in the UK. Horseflies circled round both, a herd of zebras all dashing in different but they landed on horses significantly directions, and trying to pick out one of more often. Putting striped coats them to bring down. on the horses’ bodies meant the The evidence here is mixed. A 2016 horseflies landed there less often, study suggested that the dazzle effect but still landed on their heads, which only really works if the stripes are were uncovered. The implication is parallel to the animal’s direction of that the stripes were having a real travel, implying that zebra stripes go effect (PLoS One, doi.org/gfvq46). the wrong way to work in this way. The hypothesis is backed by a lot of But this came from tracking humans evidence, but does that mean it is the playing a computer game. A 2014 only reason for a zebra’s stripes? Not

study, based on computer modelling of how moving zebras would appear to a predator, indicated that the stripes would be extremely confusing. There is also the simple possibility that the stripes are a signal. The message may not be for other zebras: in 2017, researchers suggested that the stripes signal to other grazing animals, encouraging them to graze alongside the zebras. Such mixed-species herds offer more protection against predators. For now, this is only a hypothesis. Perhaps the most important point is that these studies can tell us only why zebra stripes continue to exist today, not why they arose in the first place. Evolution is good at repurposing things, so a body part may arise, be used for one purpose, and then end up being employed for something entirely different. An obvious example is the lens of the mammalian eye. This probably arose as a protective cover for the retina and only later developed the ability to focus light, creating a sharper image – which is now its most “obvious” function. Zebra stripes may have a similarly complex history. There is something psychologically appealing about a single, clear explanation. That instinct doesn’t mean we are wrong to seek such things – sometimes just-so stories turn out to be correct – but this is one area where our biases can work against us. ■ 2 March 2019 | NewScientist | 25

APERTURE

26 | NewScientist | 2 March 2019

Invasion of little nippers IT MIGHT look as if this giant crocodilian has been sprinkled with chocolate strands, but in reality, it is hanging out with some 150 youngsters as they compete to clamber onto its back. This touching family moment in the Chambal river in northern India was captured by nature photographer Dhritiman Mukherjee. A lesser-known relative of alligators and crocodiles, gharials (Gavialis gangeticus) are the most water-loving of the crocodilians. They swim elegantly, although adults can’t walk well. Gharials have large bodies and disproportionately long, thin snouts, crammed full of interlocking teeth. Their name comes from the bulbous growth on the end of adult males’ noses (see picture below). The appendage is named a ghara, a Hindi word for the earthenware pot it resembles. It isn’t known for sure what it does, but it is thought to be an extension of the nasal chamber that amplifies the hisses and popping noises males make while guarding their territory or courting. During the breeding season, a male mates with all the females in its territory. Each female lays its eggs on a sandbank, standing guard until the clutch hatches in unison. The young then congregate in large groups, sometimes of as many as 1000 individuals. So this 4.5-metre male is probably the father of all these recent hatchlings. As such, he helps protect his progeny – and they use him as a sunbed. Chris Simms

Photographer Dhritiman Mukherjee dhritimanimages.com

2 March 2019 | NewScientist | 27

BEPPE GIACOBBE

28 | NewScientist | 2 March 2019

COVER STORY

Do women and men have different brains? EN are good at map-reading; women can’t park cars. Men are better at fixing stuff – but only one thing at a time. Women, in contrast, can multitask, and do empathy and intuition better, too. Just don’t ask them to think logically in a crisis. So say the stereotypes, anyway. It is a widespread idea that men and women are distinguished not only by their genitals and related sexual characteristics, but also by their brains. Take the notorious Google internal memo from 2017, in which now ex-employee James Damore asserted that there were more men in the company’s workforce because women’s high level of empathy and lower interest in coding made them less suited to Google-type work. According to this way of thinking, the biological blueprint that determines fixed and inevitable differences in our reproductive apparatus also determines similarly fixed and inevitable differences in the structure of our brains and how they work. If you want to know what underpins differences between women and men in ability, behaviour, temperament and even lifestyle choices, you will find the answers in genes, genitals and gonads. The slow recognition that gender identity and even biological sexual characteristics don’t fit into a neat, binary division already calls such assumptions into question. Recently, too, we have begun to understand just how plastic our brains are, capable of being moulded in all sorts of different ways throughout our lives. So where does that leave the idea of predetermined, hardwired differences in the brains of women and men – and with it the rationale for the expectations, roles and achievements of each in society?

M

The question of how sex influences behaviour and ability casts a long shadow over neuroscience, says Gina Rippon The hunt for sex differences in the brain has a long tradition, starting with the absurdities of skull measuring, or phrenology, to explain personality traits in the 19th century. Pretty much ever since, the idea that men and women have different brains has been a given. The aim of research was to pin down the nature of those differences, and to find out how they translate into the go-to list of “well-known” male-female differences: systemising vs empathic, map-reading vs multitasking, logical vs intuitive, and so on. Early explanations of brain differences often centred on the “missing 5 ounces” phenomenon. Bigger brains were thought to be better brains. As women’s brains are, on average (an important term that we will return to later), around 10 per cent lighter than men’s, amounting to about 5 ounces or 140 grams, they were deemed inferior. Later explanations tried to pin differences on specific structures in the brain. In the early 1980s, for example, came the idea that the corpus callosum, the bridge of nerve fibres connecting the two halves of the brain, was bigger in women. This fitted neatly into the pre-existing concept of “right” and “left” brains: that the left half of a human

brain is responsible for language as well as analytical and logical types of thinking, whereas the right half handles emotional processing and creativity. So women’s famed multitasking abilities and greater emotional awareness could be framed in terms of their enhanced and near-simultaneous access to both sides of their brain, thanks to their enlarged corpus callosum. The advent of brain imaging technology at the end of the 20th century, alongside sophisticated computer models of brain function and better systems for data analysis, finally made it possible to generate the evidence necessary to properly test the ways in which the brains of men and women differ. But as well as some thrilling and groundbreaking research, it unleashed something of a tidal wave of neuro-nonsense. The colour-coded maps of brain activity that researchers could now produce with such apparent ease were wonderfully seductive. Many people didn’t appreciate, however, that these weren’t real-time photographs of the brain in action, but the end product of a long chain of mathematical processing. The colour coding was chosen by the imaging software to make the most of the real but infinitesimal differences between activity averaged – that word again – across groups or tasks. With a large part of the agenda in brain research still being driven by the hunt for differences between men and women, assertions of the “Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus” type were one misleading end product. One study, published in 2014, illustrates the problems associated with this approach. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania measured brain connectivity pathways in a > 2 March 2019 | NewScientist | 29

large group of women and men. They reported running of predetermined internal software, stronger connections within each brain but also external inputs. One famous example hemisphere in men and stronger connections was reported in working London taxi drivers between hemispheres in women. This, they who have done The Knowledge, which claimed, showed that “male brains are requires memorising different routes through structured to facilitate connectivity between the 25,000 or so London streets within a perception and coordinated action, whereas 6-mile radius of Charing Cross. Their brains female brains are designed to facilitate communication between analytical and “Playing computer games is intuitive processing modes”. a better predictor of spatial But the study didn’t measure whether its skills than biological sex is” subjects actually showed these supposedly typical male and female traits. Measurements of brain connectivity were being filtered are different from those of trainee taxi drivers, through preconceived, stereotypical beliefs. retired taxi drivers and even bus drivers, who What’s more, many of the reported differences navigate fixed routes. were quite small, and there were many more Crucially, brain-changing experiences may possible pathway comparisons that didn’t differ for men and women. Perhaps it was this show any differences. The study only reported effect that early researchers, focusing solely on those that did. Yet the results were eagerly dividing their groups of participants into men reported in the popular press, with headlines and women, were actually tapping into. such as “The hardwired difference between Take one of the allegedly most robust male and female brains could explain why brain differences: in spatial thinking, the men are ‘better at map reading’ ”. skill underpinning navigational abilities or There are good reasons to think that such map-reading. In 2005, psychologists Melissa studies are chasing shadows. For a start, Terlecki of Cabrini College and Nora correcting the data for brain size can cause Newcombe of Temple University, both in the apparent differences in brain structures between women and men to disappear. The claimed difference in the size of the corpus callosum is one casualty of this rethink.

The fact is, bigger people have bigger brains, regardless of their gender. Bigger brains are different from smaller brains, in both their core structures and the connecting pathways between them. But there is no evidence to suggest that bigger brains are better brains. After all, humans are (on average) cognitively superior to species with far larger brains, including the sperm whale and the African elephant, to name just two. More crucially, the idea of distinct female and male brains depends on the adult endpoint of brain development being a fixed, predetermined destination. Scientists used to think that beyond the changes that occur during the highly plastic early years of the brain, and barring deviations caused by damage, disease or deprivation, you generally end up with the brain you were born with, only bigger and better connected. We now know that isn’t the case. Our brains are very much a product of the lives we have lived, the experiences we have had, and our education, occupations, sports and hobbies. The way we perform tasks reflects not just the 30 | NewScientist | 2 March 2019

DAN KITWOOD/GETTY IMAGES

Not born this way

Pennsylvania, showed that playing computer and video games is a better predictor of spatial skills than biological sex is. There were higher levels of such experience among male participants, but women with the same level of experience had equally good spatial skills. Any regular activity, be it playing Tetris or Super Mario, or learning juggling or origami, can change our brains. So if one group is more likely to engage in an activity than another, this will determine their ability, rather than any other characteristic. In addition, stereotypes about any group’s innate abilities can become self-fulfilling prophecies. If someone is made aware of a negative stereotype about the group to which they belong, this can impair their performance in a related task. For example, if a woman is told that women are poor at a particular mathematical skill, there is a consequent drop in performance in tests of that skill. Studies of this so-called stereotype threat have shown that if a task is presented in a positive context, then both the associated brain processes and how well someone performs the task will be different from when it is presented in a negative context. It isn’t

By learning routes, taxi drivers physically alter their brains

@JAMES WALLER

just experiences that can change our brains: attitudes, especially powerful social stereotypes, can too. And it may be that we need to challenge the assumptions behind the hunt for differences between male and female brains. Its origin is in the assumption that men and women are profoundly different in their abilities, behaviours and preferences. But what if these “well-known” differences aren’t as marked as has been claimed, and have changed over time or in different contexts or cultures? This would certainly challenge the notion that they are inevitable or based on fixed brain characteristics. Revisiting the evidence suggests that women and men are more similar than they are different. In 2015, a review of more than 20,000 studies into behavioural differences, comprising data from over 12 million people, found that, overall, the differences between men and women on a wide range of characteristics such as impulsivity, cooperativeness and emotionality were vanishingly small. Perhaps the final nail in the coffin of female and male brains as a scientific concept can

PROFILE Gina Rippon is a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Aston in Birmingham, UK, where she uses brain-imaging techniques to study conditions such as autism and dyslexia. She is the author of The Gendered Brain (Bodley Head)

be found in a 2015 study by Daphna Joel at of a brain-based condition as belonging solely Tel Aviv University in Israel and her to women or men may miss the clues offered colleagues. They examined the characteristics by, for example, brain size or body weight, of more than 100 brain structures in over 1400 or brain-changing life experiences. brain scans and found that it was impossible In some of my own team’s research on to divide these neatly into two sets of “female- autism, we are starting to realise that holding typical” or “male-typical” brains. Each brain to the belief that this is a “male” condition had a mosaic of different characteristics, means we are missing the many girls and some considered “female”, some “male”. women who clearly fit the diagnosis. Only around one in 20 of the brains even had Diagnostic tools are masculinised, with sets of characteristics that could be described examples of children’s unusual interests as predominantly one or the other. and obsessions slanted towards those more Applying similar analyses to data sets of commonly associated with boys. Not only psychological variables such as engagement does this mean that the undiagnosed girls in sports, impulsivity or scores on tests of aren’t getting the help they might need, but masculinity-femininity revealed the same research is losing a rich source of additional lack of binary grouping: no individual had evidence: many brain-imaging studies of all-female or all-male tendencies. More recently, using machine-learning techniques “It’s not just experiences on data from more than 2000 brains that change our brains – showed that none fitted into one of two neat, social stereotypes can too” non-overlapping sets that could be labelled “brains from women” or “brains from men”. Where does all this leave us? We find autism have only male participants. ourselves talking about average differences This isn’t just a question of importance between men and women that, in general, to individuals, however. Believing that only reflect a tiny difference between two closely one type of brain is capable of certain core overlapping sets of data. Not only that, but the skills may lead to an immense loss of human variability and range within each supposedly capital, to the detriment of wider society. Who homogenous set is usually far greater than knows how many more software engineers the differences between the sexes. You might global tech firms might find if we accepted start to wonder why we are still talking about that there is little reason to believe that this these differences at all. is a pursuit to which only men are suited. For sure, biological sex must be considered It is finally time to discard this old chestnut. as one of the variables in investigations into The concept of the female brain or the male brain differences, so we can understand brain is outdated and inaccurate. Every things such as responsiveness to different person’s brain is unique. The value comes medications, or susceptibilities to mental from knowing where these individual health problems such as depression, physical differences come from and what they might problems such as Alzheimer’s disease or mean for the brain’s owners. ■ immune disorders. This might also give Hear Gina Rippon and other neuroscientists at insights into the true reasons for women’s our Mysteries of the Mind event in London on 11 May under-representation in fields of science and newscientist.com/science-events technology. But a focus on biological sex as For links to the studies quoted, see the online version the sole source of such differences is at best incomplete and could be misleading. Thinking of this article 2 March 2019 | NewScientist | 31

2 8 . 0 8 6

THE PATTERN OF REALITY

Silicon 2 8 . 0 8 6

O

Krypton

ne hundred and fifty years ago this Friday, a Siberian chemist named Dmitri Mendeleev sent a manuscript to his publishers. It contained an outline of the periodic table, descendants of which would go on to grace the walls of schools the world over. It depicts the chemical elements that make up everything around us and, at a glance, conveys a sense of order to the building blocks of everything. But don’t be fooled. The periodic table didn’t appear complete and out of nowhere – it had a troubled birth (page 34). Neither is it as solid as it may appear. There’s still plenty of disagreement about exactly how the table is best set out (page 36). What is certain is that it remains unfinished, and that researchers are on the cusp of producing elements that exist beyond its bounds in quantities that we can actually study for the first time (page 39).

Neon Argon Lithium

MY FAVOURITE ELEMENT

Boron Yttrium Caesium

Si

Zinc Xenon

Silicon

Lead Fluorine

Frances Arnold is a chemist at the California Institute of Technology. She won the 2018 Nobel prize in chemistry for her work on evolved enzymes

Lutetium

~

Rubidium

Silicon is readily available on Earth in the form of sand. In the periodic table, it sits just below carbon, the element that nature uses to build DNA, proteins and other molecules of life. Why wasn’t silicon chosen? Can life build organosilicon compounds? We wanted to know, and discovered that enzymes that forge carbon-silicon bonds could be evolved in a test tube. We are just beginning to explore the possibilities that exist for life.

Copper

Flerovium Radon

1 0 . 8 1 1

Boron

2 March 2019 | NewScientist | 33

BRINGING ORDER TO CHAOS Mendeleev’s periodic table broke through the chemical haze. But it wasn’t a dream discovery, says Philip Ball

D

MITRI Mendeleev had a problem. As a professor at the University of St Petersburg in Russia, he was supposed to teach chemistry to students, and to guide him in that task he had arranged a contract with a Russian publisher to write a twovolume textbook. By January 1869, he had completed the first volume, but it covered only eight of the 63 chemical elements then known. How was he going to cram the remaining 55 into volume two? Clearly he couldn’t afford to take the same rambling stroll through the properties of the elements as he had in the first volume. He needed some system to organise the material. But was there any order to the building blocks of the physical world? When we retell stories of scientists pondering great questions like this, they are often made to seem romantic. There is the period of struggle and confusion that ends when a lone genius sees the light, perhaps in a reverie or dream. Then everything falls into place, the paradigm shifts, and nothing is ever the same. How much more noble this sounds than a desperate attempt to meet a publisher’s deadline. Some accounts of how Mendeleev devised the periodic table try to make it fit that romantic template. They allege that the Russian, originally from the remote town of Tobolsk in Siberia, was obsessed with finding structure among the elements and laid them out written on cards, like a game of solitaire. He tried all sorts of arrangements without

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MY FAVOURITE ELEMENT

Tc

Technetium

Lee Cronin is a chemist at the University of Glasgow, UK

~ Technetium is the lightest radioactive element and all of its isotopes are radioactive. It can be produced in any reasonable amount only in a nuclear reactor. That appeals to me because it means that if you found this element elsewhere in the cosmos it would be good evidence that intelligent alien life exists. Plus, it can be made from radioactive molybdenum, which is my next favourite element because I’m trying to make nanomachines using it.

success, the story goes, until he fell asleep, exhausted, in his study in February 1869. “I saw in a dream a table where all the elements fell into place as required,” he was later reported to have said. On waking, he hastily wrote down his vision, and two weeks later published his “Suggested System of the Elements”. At last, the steadily growing

list of elemental substances from hydrogen to lead had a logic to it. That logic, said Mendeleev, is essentially this: if you order the elements according to their atomic weight – how much a constant quantity of each element weighs relative to the lightest, hydrogen – their properties seem to repeat at regular intervals. You can therefore write the list of elements as a table, with columns of elements that share similar attributes. This pattern is still the basis of modern periodic tables, but the tale of how Mendeleev discovered it crumbles under examination. Take the dream. “I don’t believe it,” says historian of science Michael Gordin at Princeton University, an expert on Mendeleev’s life and work. “The sources are too iffy.” Mendeleev never made the dream claim himself; it came from a colleague 40 years later. Even then, he could easily have meant something like a daydream, says Gordin. Mendeleev himself emphasised that his discovery “was the product of insight and chemical knowledge”, he adds. But Gordin admits that “people seem to love this story, so I don’t think my historian’s fussiness is going to squelch it anytime soon”. At any rate, there was never a perfect arrangement of the table that made sense of all the available knowledge. For one thing, Mendeleev’s ranking of the elements by atomic weight isn’t what we use today. Atomic weights were deduced by experiment: by breaking chemical compounds into

Be2O3, to get beryllium into the same column as magnesium, with which it seemed to have similarities. Mendeleev would later be proved right about the formula. In this and other small ways, his table is an example of an idea asserting precedence over the available data, challenging the common view in science that if your hypothesis disagrees with the data then you must discard it, no matter how elegant it is. And even if Mendeleev’s table was a master stroke, it wasn’t a total revelation. The German chemist Johann Wolfgang Döbereiner had done something similar, by grouping chemically alike elements into groups of three, which he called “triads”, in the 1820s. Others, including William Odling and John Newlands in the UK, Alexandre-Émile Béguyer de Chancourtois in France, and Julius Lothar Meyer in Germany, sketched out

PICTORIAL PRESS LTD/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

“The steadily growing list of elemental substances finally had a logic to it”

their constituent elements and weighing how much of each they contained. But the more fundamental ranking comes from the atomic number of each element, the number of protons in nuclei of their atoms. In the middle of the 19th century, no one was sure if atoms were even real, and Mendeleev himself was sceptical. Even the atomic weights were disputed. For example, oxygen and hydrogen combined to make water in a ratio of eight parts to one, but did this mean water molecules contained equal numbers of hydrogen and

oxygen atoms, with the latter eight times heavier, or twice as many hydrogen atoms as oxygens, with the latter 16 times heavier? (It is actually the second of these, the molecular formula being H2O.) It was, in fact, growing support for the H2O formula of water that helped Mendeleev order the elements properly. But he needed to take some liberties to ensure that elements with similar chemical behaviour fell into the same group. For example, he decided to give beryllium oxide the formula BeO, rather than (as most people thought)

Mendeleev’s table of elements wasn’t the first, but it was the best

arrangements of the elements gathered into families in the 1850s and early 1860s. Meyer virtually had the periodic table sorted by 1868, but he didn’t publish it until a year after Mendeleev. This work was no secret, although Mendeleev insisted later that he had been unaware of it. “This seems a little odd,” says chemist Eric Scerri at the University of California, Los Angeles, a leading expert on the periodic table. Disputes about who got there first ensued, making you wonder if the dream was just a convenient device. Finally, the notion that, thanks to Mendeleev’s periodic table, the scales fell from the eyes of his peers doesn’t stack up. A few scientists, such as Russian chemist Julia Lermontova, did take note and tried to clarify the ordering of elements by improving methods of separation and characterisation. But there was no abrupt paradigm shift in chemistry. “At first, there wasn’t too much of a reaction to it,” says Gordin. Curiosity about Mendeleev’s table only began to grow six or seven years > 2 March 2019 | NewScientist | 35

F

18.998 Fluorine

after it was published, when the element gallium was discovered by French chemist Paul-Émile Lecoq. It fitted the prediction made by Mendeleev of a heavier element below aluminium with atomic weight 68, for which he had left a space in his table, giving it the provisional name eka-aluminium. Ostensibly, Lecoq named it patriotically after the old Latin form of his country, Gallia. But it is widely suspected that the name was also a bit of sly self-advertising, as the Latin word gallus means cockerel – le coq in French. Another of Mendeleev’s predicted elements, labelled eka-silicon, was discovered in 1886 and christened

“Curiosity about the table grew as some of the gaps were filled” germanium. This capacity to make predictions was what distinguished Mendeleev’s table from earlier ones. Still, recognition was a long time coming. That may have been partly due to Mendeleev’s eccentric demeanour: his long hair, unruly beard and allegedly bad temper. The British chemist William Ramsay, having met him in London in 1884, described him as peculiar, “every hair of whose head acted in independence of every other”. But having conversed with him in broken German, Ramsay – who augmented the periodic table with a whole column of noble gases at the end of the century – found Mendeleev “a nice sort of fellow”. Although the tales of Mendeleev’s invention of the periodic table can be more fiction than fact, that doesn’t detract from its significance. It was the most comprehensive ordering of the building blocks of matter and, unwittingly, it pointed the way to the underlying quantum rules that govern the composition and properties of atoms. It helped unite chemistry and physics, and revealed a deep aspect of nature’s design. Just don’t try to pretend that it arrived in a dream. Q Philip Ball is a science writer based in London

36 | NewScientist | 2 March 2019

RESETTING THE TABLE It is the iconic picture of nature’s basic substances, but are they arranged correctly, asks Joshua Howgego

R

UN your fingers over the white keys of a piano. The notes get higher and higher as your hand moves to the right. On the eighth key, something beautiful happens: a note hangs in the air that embodies something of the first, only with a different pitch. We began to twig that something

MY FAVOURITE ELEMENT

Mt

Meitnerium Helen Arney is a comedian who spent nine months learning a song that lists all 118 elements

~ On top of battling prejudice about her gender and Jewish background, physicist Lise Meitner was passed over for a share of the 1944 Nobel chemistry prize. She had worked with her friend Otto Hahn to discover nuclear fission in heavy elements – but Hahn alone got the prize. I like the fact that the periodic table recognises Meitner: there is no hahnium, but there is a meitnerium. And while there is a copy of the iconic element chart on my daughter’s bedroom wall, there isn’t a list of Nobel prizewinners.

similar was going on with the chemical elements more than 150 years ago. Scientists even called it the law of octaves. And it is this repetition in the properties of the elements that the periodic table captures so beautifully. Similar elements end up stacked in columns or groups. One group comprises noble gases like argon and neon that barely react with anything, another contains reactive metals, some of which, like francium, explode on contact with water. But there are doubts over whether the periodic table is in the best possible configuration. Just as notes can be arranged in various ways to produce music, so the essence of the relationships between the elements could be depicted differently. There is no easy way to judge which is better, or more “true”. So arguments over perceived flaws in the current arrangement rumble on, with some chemists arguing that certain elements should be relocated – and others working on more radical ways to recompose the table. At first, the elements were organised by atomic weight (see “Bringing order to chaos”, page 34). Now we order them by the number of protons in their nucleus. We also know that their properties are largely determined by the arrangement of the negatively charged electrons that orbit in successive shells around the nucleus. The lightest elements have just one shell, which can hold two of these particles. Heavier elements have more shells that can hold larger numbers of

18

Group 1

2

1

H

WHERE DOES HYDROGEN GO?

13

14

15

16

17

Atomic number

5

6

7

8

9

10

Symbol

B

C

N

O

F

Ne

Name

Boron

Carbon

Nitrogen

Oxygen

Fluorine

Neon

13

14

15

16

17

18

12

Al

Si

P

S

Cl

Ar

Aluminium

Silicon

Phosphorus

Sulphur

Chlorine

Argon

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

Ni

Cu

Zn

Ga

Ge

As

Se

Br

Kr

Cobalt

Nickel

Copper

Zinc

Gallium

Germanium

Arsenic

Selenium

Bromine

Krypton

45

46

47

48

49

50

51

52

53

54

Ru

Rh

Pd

Ag

Cd

In

Sn

Sb

Te

I

Xe

Technetium

Ruthenium

Rhodium

Palladium

Silver

Cadmium

Indium

Tin

Antimony

Tellurium

Iodine

Xenon

75

76

77

78

79

80

81

82

83

84

85

86

W

Re

Os

Ir

Pt

Au

Hg

Tl

Pb

Bi

Po

At

Rn

Tantalum

Tungsten

Rhenium

Osmium

Iridium

Platinum

Gold

Mercury

Thallium

Lead

Bismuth

Polonium

Astatine

Radon

105

106

107

108

109

110

111

112

113

114

115

116

117

118

Rf

Db

Sg

Bh

Hs

Mt

Ds

Rg

Cn

Nh

Fl

Mc

Lv

Ts

Og

Rutherfordium

Dubnium

Seaborgium

Bohrium

Hassium

Meitnerium

Copernicium

Nihonium

Flerovium

Moscovium

Livermorium

Tennessine

Oganesson

Hydrogen

2

3

4

Li

Be

Lithium

Beryllium

11

12

Na

Mg

Sodium

Magnesium

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

K

Ca

Sc

Ti

V

Cr

Mn

Fe

Co

Potassium

Calcium

Scandium

Titanium

Vanadium

Chromium

Manganese

Iron

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

Rb

Sr

Y

Zr

Nb

Mo

Tc

Rubidium

Strontium

Yttrium

Zirconium

Niobium

Molybdenum

55

56

57-71

72

73

74

Cs

Ba

Lanthanides

Hf

Ta

Caesium

Barium

Hafnium

87

88

89-103

104

Fr

Ra

Actinides

Francium

Radium

Key

Darmstadtium Roentgenium

THE F-BLOCK CONUNDRUM

57

He

58

La

Ce

Lanthanum

Cerium

89

90

59

60

Pr

Nd

Praseodymium Neodymium

91

92

61

62

WHY ARE MERCURY AND GOLD SO WEIRD?

63

64

65

66

67

68

69

70

71

Pm

Sm

Eu

Gd

Tb

Dy

Ho

Er

Tm

Yb

Lu

Promethium

Samarium

Europium

Gadolinium

Terbium

Dysprosium

Holmium

Erbium

Thulium

Ytterbium

Lutetium

93

94

95

96

97

98

99

100

101

102

103

Ac

Th

Pa

U

Np

Pu

Am

Cm

Bk

Cf

Es

Fm

Md

No

Lr

Actinium

Thorium

Protactinium

Uranium

Neptunium

Plutonium

Americium

Curium

Berkelium

Californium

Einsteinium

Fermium

Mendelevium

Nobelium

Lawrencium

electrons. What really matters for each element’s behaviour, however, is how many electrons it has in its outer shell. That number tends to fit nicely with the way the table is arranged, namely to place elements with similar properties in the same group. For instance, group 1 elements have one electron in their outer shell and those in group 2 have two. But it doesn’t always fit together quite as neatly as all that.

WHERE DOES HYDROGEN GO? Take the first element. Hydrogen has one electron in its outermost shell so you might assume it belongs exactly where it is, in group 1 above lithium and sodium, which also have one electron in their outermost shell. Yet hydrogen is a gas, not a metal, so its properties don’t fit. The complication arises because, with an outer shell that can only hold two electrons, hydrogen is one electron away from being full. Given that elements yearn for full outer shells, that makes it very reactive. In this sense, hydrogen resembles the

Helium

elements in group 17, namely the halogens like chlorine. Their outer shells need only gain one electron to achieve a full shell of eight, which makes them similarly reactive. In terms of its properties, then, hydrogen is closer to chlorine than lithium.

WHY ARE MERCURY AND GOLD SO WEIRD? Lower down the table there are no available spaces for misplaced elements. Even so, a couple of the incumbents look like outliers. Take mercury, also known as quicksilver because it is a liquid at room temperature. In that sense, it is quite different to the other members of group 12, including zinc and cadmium, which are all solid metals. What gives? The further down the table you go, the more of the positively charged protons an element’s nucleus contains. This creates a stronger pull on

23

V 5 0 . 9 4 2

Vanadium

the orbiting electrons, meaning they must travel faster and faster. By the time you reach mercury, the electrons are travelling at 58 per cent of the speed of light. According to Einstein’s special theory of relativity, this means their effective mass is significantly higher than an electron’s normal mass, which exacerbates the inward pull they feel. The upshot is that mercury’s electrons orbit so tightly that they can’t be shared to form bonds with other atoms, as is required to make a solid. The same thing explains why gold is gold, a unique colour among metals: relativistic effects change the way electrons absorb light.

THE F-BLOCK CONUNDRUM Group 3 holds two elements that might belong elsewhere. As we move across the upper rows of the table, electrons fill up shells in a sequence of so-called orbitals, waiting until the innermost shell is full before entering the next. By element 57, lanthanum, the electrons begin to enter a new type of orbital, an f-orbital. To account for > 2 March 2019 | NewScientist | 37

GOING LONG 1

2

H

He

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

Li

Be

B

C

N

O

F

Ne

13

14

15

16

17

18

Al

Si

P

S

Cl

Ar

11

12

Na

Mg

Atomic number

Key

Symbol

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

K

Ca

Sc

Ti

V

Cr

Mn

Fe

Co

Ni

Cu

Zn

Ga

Ge

As

Se

Br

Kr

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

45

46

47

48

49

50

51

52

53

54

Rb

Sr

Y

Zr

Nb

Mo

Tc

Ru

Rh

Pd

Ag

Cd

In

Sn

Sb

Te

I

Xe

55

56

57

58

59

60

61

62

63

64

65

66

67

68

69

70

71

72

73

74

75

76

77

78

79

80

81

82

83

84

85

86

Cs

Ba

La

Ce

Pr

Nd

Pm

Sm

Eu

Gd

Tb

Dy

Ho

Er

Tm

Yb

Lu

Hf

Ta

W

Re

Os

Ir

Pt

Au

Hg

Tl

Pb

Bi

Po

At

Rn

87

88

89

90

91

92

93

94

95

96

97

98

99

100

101

102

103

104

105

106

107

108

109

110

111

112

113

114

115

116

117

118

Fr

Ra

Ac

Th

Pa

U

Np

Pu

Am

Cm

Bk

Cf

Es

Fm

Md

No

Lr

Rf

Db

Sg

Bh

Hs

Mt

Ds

Rg

Cn

Nh

Fl

Mc

Lv

Ts

Og

STARTING OVER All these niggles have persuaded some chemists that we need to redraw the periodic table – and there is no shortage of ideas. Mark Leach at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK, keeps the internet database of periodic tables, which contains hundreds of versions. In an attempt to better represent the continuity where one row currently ends, retired Canadian chemist Fernando Dufour developed a 3D periodic system that looks like a Christmas tree, with the elements radiating from a trunk in circles that get larger closer to the bottom. An alternative is the spiral developed by Theodor Benfey, which allows the f-block to bulge outwards (see “Elemental cycle”, right). Eric Scerri at the University of

“One proposed redesign looks like a Christmas tree”

But Guillermo Restrepo at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, Germany, favours an alternative. He has explored whether chemical similarity of elements in the same columns still holds as well as it did 150 years ago, given our increased knowledge of chemical reactivity. His conclusion is that lanthanum belongs in group 3 – that is, out of sequence. Redesigning the periodic table might seem a quixotic quest, but it could soon take on a new urgency (see “The element factory”, right). We are already on the trail of element 119. Where it will go, and how the table will morph to make space for it, remains to be seen. ■

California, Los Angeles, is among those who has argued for more fundamental changes. He previously proposed that the table could be arranged to maximise the number of “triads”, sets of three elements that share similar properties and are related by their atomic weights. These days, he is backing an even more drastic approach: make the table not 18 but 32 columns by slotting all 30 f-block elements between the current groups 2 and 3 (see “Going long”, above). This allows the atomic number to run in an uninterrupted sequence.

Joshua Howgego is a features editor at New Scientist

ELEMENTAL CYCLE This reimagining of the periodic table, proposed by chemist Theodor Benfey in 1964, emphasises the continuity of the elements rather than imposing artificial breaks

Su pe ra ct in id es

this, most periodic tables hive off the elements making up this f-block, putting it below the table, leaving a gap in group 3. Fair enough. But there is debate over which of the elements in the f-block should come first. Some chemists maintain that the decision should come down to electron configuration, which would leave the table as it is, with lanthanum and actinium at the lefthand end of the f-block. Others point out that chemical properties such as atomic radius and melting point make lutetium and lawrencium, currently at the right end, a better bet. In 2016, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry assembled a task group to settle the argument. But no one expects a decision soon.

118

Og Rn Xe

116

Lv

93 92

54

Ts

94

Fr

86

117

96 95

87

55

88

Cs

Ra

91 90

Pa

U

Np 61

Pm

Pu

Am

64 63

62

Sm

Cm

Eu

Gd

97

Bk

65

Tb

37

56

Rb

Ba

89

Ac

Th

60

Nd

59

Ds

109

98

66

Dy Cf

67 Ho es 68 Er inid t c 100 Kr 69 Tm Pr da 58 85 38 19 Fm 101 18 s an 70 Yb e 57 d Ce 53 At Md Sr K ni 102 Ar La 71 tha I 35 10 11 No 20 Lan 103 Lr Lu Br 17 9 Ne 3Na 39 Ca 72 2 Cl 12 104 Rf He Li Y F Hf 4 40 Mg 21 105 Db 1 8 Be Zr 73 Ta 16 Sc H 5 106 O 41 34 22 7 S 74 52 Sg Nb B Se Ti N 6 13 23 42 84 W Te C 15 Tran V Al Mo Po sitio 14 24 P 31 nm 30 33 Si e Cr t als Ga Zn As 29 32 25 43 75 107 51 49 Cu Ge 48 Mn Tc Re Bh 28 Sb In Cd 27 50 Ni 26 47 83 Co Sn Fe 81 Ag 80 Bi 46 44 Tl 82 Hg 115 Pd 45 79 Ru Pb Mc 76 Rh Au 113 112 78 Os Nh 114 Cn 108 77 Pt 111 Fl Hs Ir Rg 110 36

Mt

38 | NewScientist | 2 March 2019

SOURCE: doi.org/c2w9

Some chemists think the periodic table should be extended to 32 columns to allow the atomic numbers, or the number of protons in the nucleus, to run in an uninterrupted sequence

99

Es

THE ELEMENT FACTORY A machine in Russia’s frozen north is about to begin pumping out the heaviest atoms in the universe. Kit Chapman pays a visit

MAX AGUILERA HELLWEG

Cyclotrons like this now retired one in Dubna, Russia, have been creating new elements for decades

N

ESTLED in thick pine forests north of Moscow, close to the Volga river, lies the town of Dubna. Not far from the centre is a leafy avenue of Soviet-era buildings. It is obvious when I visit that they have seen better days. The railway crossing on the approach is broken, its flashing lights constantly proclaiming the coming of a train that never passes. A few of the buildings have broken windows. In the street, there are liquid nitrogen containers with old baked bean cans acting as lids.

But there is one place within 1 9 6 . 9 6 7 this complex where something groundbreaking is happening. In a vast concrete hangar, workers in hard hats are busy assembling one of the most powerful research machines in the world. Next to me as I look on is the only living person to have an element named after him. Yuri Oganessian, Mr Element 118, is gazing almost lovingly at the 4-metre-wide metal disc in 79 the centre of the hangar. This is one of the first components

Gold

Au

of a machine that will soon begin churning out chemical elements – but not ordinary ones. These elements will be superheavy, with atoms so huge that they stick around barely long enough to be sure they exist. By forging these exotic atoms in quantities sufficient to study properly for the first time, Oganessian and his machine should be able to answer some big questions about how our universe formed, and possibly give us a staggeringly powerful source of energy. He might even disprove some of the rules underpinning the periodic table itself. The birth of the modern table traces back to another Russian city, St Petersburg. It was there that a scientific consultant named Dmitri Mendeleev helped cut through the chaos that was chemical science 150 years ago (see “Bringing order to chaos”, page 34). With Mendeleev’s table, the patterns of chemistry began to make more sense. The Russian organised the 63 known elements by atomic weight, which we now know is determined by the number of protons and neutrons in an atom’s nucleus. As he did this, he found that certain chemical properties were periodic, repeating every eight or so elements. Mendeleev arranged the table’s columns so that each contained elements with similar traits. The first group, for example, holds soft, fiercely reactive metals like lithium, sodium and potassium. The last group contains the noble gases, so called because they are almost completely inert. We now know that these patterns in the way elements react are governed by the electrons that orbit their nuclei. Every time we move one place along the table, an element gains a positively charged proton compared with its > 2 March 2019 | NewScientist | 39

“Elements on the ‘island of stability’ could be amazing fuels for nuclear power plants”

MY FAVOURITE ELEMENT

Na Sodium

Martyn Poliakoff is a chemist at the University of Nottingham, UK. He starred in a series of videos about the elements

~ My mother’s first name was Ina. As a little girl, she abbreviated it to ’Na, and when she became a grandmother she asked my children to call her that. So now, 27 years after her death, I still get a warm motherly feeling whenever I see Na in a chemical formula. I am also fond of hassium, element 108, because in our first video about it, I was recorded saying “I know nothing about hassium. Should we make something up?”. What’s your favourite element? Tell us at newscientist.com/my-favourite-element

predecessor, as well as a negatively charged electron to balance the charge. The electrons sit in a series of concentric shells, which are most stable when completely filled. The extent to which the different elements have their shells filled is what drives their reactivity – and all chemistry on Earth, from the signals of neurotransmitters to the synthesis of antibiotics. As time went on, chemists discovered more elements, filling some of the gaps Mendeleev had astutely left in the table. By the 1940s, we had created the first synthetic elements, such as technetium, which are too unstable to exist in any significant quantity on Earth. The reason for this instability boils down to an eternal rivalry between two of nature’s fundamental forces. The strong force holds protons and neutrons together in the atomic nucleus, but the electromagnetic force makes protons repel each other because they have the same charge. So 40 | NewScientist | 2 March 2019

the more protons an element has, the more likely it is that electromagnetism will win out and make it unstable. The heaviest elements we have made only last a fraction of a second. Nevertheless, we keep trying to create new elements by cramming more protons and neutrons into the atomic nucleus. For that, you need a particle accelerator. Work of this kind has been going on for years at that complex in Dubna, the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR), which was set up to rival the CERN particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, during the cold war. The jewel in the JINR’s crown is the Flerov laboratory, where an accelerator called a cyclotron flings positively charged ions – atoms with slightly too few electrons – around a spiral track using magnets. Once up to speed, the ions are fired down a track to collide with a target nucleus. Most collisions simply break the components to pieces, but on rare occasions they fuse to form a superheavy atom. In the past few years, accelerators in Japan, Germany and Russia have made a spate of new superheavy elements in this way, all the way up to number 118. But we know almost nothing about them. The most advanced experiment so far involves shooting the newly

EXTREME MATTER Superheavy elements might break the rules of the periodic table Rule takers For most elements, it is the arrangement of electrons that largely determines their properties. Those with a vacancy in their outer shell tend to be reactive. Elements in the same column of the periodic table have similar arrangements and therefore similar properties

Rule breakers Superheavy elements may buck these trends. Their electrons move so fast that they gain mass and so orbit more tightly, squeezing the atom’s size. This may change their properties, so they align with those above them in the column

Chlorine Nucleus

Vacant electron site

Flerovium

formed atoms across an array of gold pins with a temperature gradient, looking at how hot the gold must be for them to stick. For anything more involved, you would need a larger sample of atoms. Yet there are hints that superheavy elements don’t play by the same rules as the others. “We assume that the chemical properties in a group change systematically in some way,” says RolfDietmar Herzberg at the University of Liverpool, UK. But calculations suggest that several of the superheavy elements we have already created would behave like a noble gas, even though they don’t sit in that group. If so, he says, “you have to ask yourself if the periodic table as we know it is still valid”.

MAGNETS AND GUNSHOTS The calculations are rooted in Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity. One of its implications is that objects get heavier the faster they are travelling. This matters in the case of larger elements because their nuclei hold greater positive charge, meaning the electrons are whizzing around faster and so appear a little more massive. In turn, that extra mass means they orbit closer in than we would expect, altering the chemical properties of the atom. That’s the theory. And the new machine being built in that concrete hangar at JINR is where we should soon find out whether it is right. “Is 118 a noble gas or not? If not, it means that this is the end of periodicity,” says Oganessian. When I visited in 2016, the Flerov lab was still building its new cyclotron, known as the Superheavy Elements Factory or SHEF. It wasn’t easy, because this machine relies on a more intense ion beam, and that meant installing a much bigger magnet. There are only so many places that can make a 2000-tonne electromagnet. The Russian scientists chose a factory in eastern Ukraine. But just as the magnet was due to ship in 2014, war broke out. Staff from the JINR say that when they called the factory to check in, they could hear gunshots in the background. Fortunately, the magnet was winched safely onto a train – no

The periodic table looms over old parts and tools in a quiet corner at the Flerov laboratory in Dubna

MAX AGUILERA HELLWEG

road truck would be sturdy enough to carry it – and some days later it arrived, passing the same broken railway crossing I had seen on my way in. Now the SHEF is undergoing final tests, ready to begin running at full capacity this spring. The next best cyclotrons can produce one superheavy atom a week. The element factory should be 100 times more productive, so soon we should have enough superheavy atoms to start trying new experiments. “You can consider things like putting them in a trap, measuring their mass. You can do chemistry experiments,” says Mark Stoyer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, who contributed to the discovery of several superheavy elements. The atoms could, for example, be sent into a chamber containing a reactive element such as chlorine to see if they bond with it. If not, that is a hint that the atoms are unreactive like a noble gas. There may also be new hidden gems to discover among the superheavies. This is because elements come in different forms called isotopes, each with a different number of neutrons. Elements are defined by the number of protons in their nucleus: if there is one, it is hydrogen, if there are two, that is helium, and so on. But isotopes of a helium nucleus can contain either one, two or zero neutrons. It is a similar deal at the heavy end of the periodic table. Take element 114, flerovium, which, you guessed it, was first made at the Flerov lab. It has a variety of isotopes, but this time there is a chance that some of them may be stable for long periods of time. It turns out that particles in the nucleus come in shells just like electrons do. In 1963, physicists Maria Goeppert Mayer, Hans Jensen and Eugene Wigner won the Nobel prize in physics for suggesting that protons and neutrons in a nucleus can add up to “magic numbers”. These correspond to when the shells are full, whereupon the nucleus would be highly stable. According to this theory, there should be pockets of superheavy elements that are incredibly stable. Finding this long-fabled “island of stability” could be incredibly useful.

Any superheavies in it could last for thousands of years and would hold incredible amounts of energy because of their huge size. They would be an amazing fuel for nuclear power plants. The SHEF is our best shot at getting to the edge of island of stability. This is where flerovium comes in. It has 114 protons, which is a magic number. And one of its possible isotopes has 184 neutrons, which is also a magic number. If we could make this doubly magic isotope, it could be stable for days – nothing compared with the heart of the island, but still impressive. When researchers make flerovium in a cyclotron, each of the fusing nuclei typically ends up losing three or four neutrons as part of the way the impact energy is dissipated. That leaves an atom with up to eight fewer neutrons than the doubly magic isotope. At the SHEF, researchers can afford to set up collisions at lower energies that would lose fewer neutrons. With lower energies there will also be less chance of the nuclei merging, but there will be plenty of collisions to generate enough atoms to study. “If you have 100 times more production, you can put that into sensitivity, so making something that is 100 times

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harder to produce,” says Herzberg. If only one or two neutrons were lost in the collisions, we would produce a flerovium isotope that would hang around for perhaps a few hours. We would be on the shores of the island. Even if the SHEF doesn’t pull that off, it offers plenty of interest, says physicist Jon Billowes at the University of Manchester, UK. “It’s going to give us understanding of other areas of physics, such as supernovae,” he says. We know that the superheavy elements are created in supernovae and in neutron star collisions, which are complex cosmic events that even our best computers cannot model. But with more information about what these elements look like, we can build a better picture of how they might act. Supernovae may be light years away from the buildings nestled among the birch trees of Dubna. But this sleepy town might soon get us closer to them than ever before. Q Kit Chapman’s book Superheavy: Making and breaking the periodic table will be published by Bloomsbury Sigma in June Turn to page 55 for the Elements crossword, to celebrate 150 years of the periodic table 2 March 2019 | NewScientist | 41

INTERVIEW

Why I’m on a mission to save humanity’s ancient microbiome Eric Alm is racing to preserve the microbial heritage of our guts before it is too late. Elie Dolgin gets the scoop

HE bacteria in our gut are vital to our health, but urbanisation and antibiotics mean that the rich diversity of the traditional human microbiome is being lost. Eric Alm wants to change this. A biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he has set up the non-profit Global Microbiome Conservancy. The aim is to collect stool samples from indigenous and isolated peoples and build a repository of their intestinal inhabitants before they disappear.

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Why create a library of gut bacteria?

A lot of the biodiversity that is being lost today is housed within humans – in our gut 42 | NewScientist | 2 March 2019

microbiomes – and it could disappear altogether as more people living traditional lifestyles adopt industrialised ways of life. The time to act is now. What we are doing is taking a snapshot of the biodiversity of human gut microbes on Earth today, and then preserving that for future generations so that we always have the biodiversity that co-evolved with us stored somewhere. How much does the gut microbiome differ from one person to the next?

It depends where you look. Across industrialised nations, there are some regional differences but they are relatively small

compared with the differences between an urban North American, say, and someone living a non-industrialised lifestyle elsewhere in the world. When we look at some nonindustrialised populations, many organisms we find don’t exist in urban North Americans. Why do these differences matter?

We already know that there are many diseases of the modern world – inflammatory bowel disease, asthma, allergies, autoimmunity – that are linked to the loss of our microbial heritage. Considering that these conditions are now rising in the developing world, the health crisis has already begun.

Photographed for New Scientist by Ken Richardson

Collecting faeces is no laughing matter for Eric Alm

Just so we are clear: you are talking about collecting stool samples, right?

That is the first step. It isn’t the only step, though. We can’t just take poop, stick it in a freezer, and hope to get back the full picture of biodiversity if we thaw that out. We need to isolate the bacterial strains that are present, grow them up and then create master cell banks, for long-term storage, and working cell banks, for active research.

fact. This seemed like a really good idea to her, and she joked to us, “Hey, can you sign up my neighbour? He comes over every morning, walks across an entire field, and then he poops in front of my house.” This is in a village where people commonly poop outdoors, but usually in a secluded spot. So she asked, “Can you get him into your study, so he stops pooping in front of my house?” And did you?

How many bacterial strains are you looking to collect?

Ideally, we want the whole spectrum of human-associated microbial diversity, but we don’t know what that is yet. We have set an initial target of 100,000 strains for the first few years, representing a few thousand strains each from 34 different countries – but we would like to get a lot more. How is the collection going?

So far, we have collected samples from 19 distinct populations, including many indigenous populations living more traditional lifestyles, in Cameroon, Tanzania, Ghana, Rwanda, Arctic Canada, northern Finland and on a Northern Cheyenne reservation in Montana. We have isolated more than 4000 strains from those expeditions, and we anticipate getting many more. In addition, we have more than 7600 gut bacterial strains from people living in the Boston area whose stool we used to hone our methods of strain isolation. Are people generally willing to participate?

What will you do with the library once it has been built?

One of our foundational assumptions is that this biodiversity is quite valuable. The library is going to be valuable for indigenous peoples, who might want a reserve of their gut microbes that they can tap into and bring back if they need to, either for health reasons or for their traditional diets and lifestyles. It is also going to be valuable for medicine, because these organisms co-evolved with humans over very long periods of time and may have metabolic functions that can be transformed into new therapies.

We learned a lot on our very first trip, which was to the Northern Cheyenne reservation. We didn’t get as much enrolment as we had hoped. Then we went to the rainforests of south-eastern Cameroon, where we changed things logistically, spending time with the people while we were waiting for our supplies to arrive. Not in a structured way, we just hung out with them, chit-chatting, interacting. We realised this was key to gaining people’s trust. You talk about poop, and everyone thinks it is funny, but you also get to explain what you are doing. Only towards the end of the visit do we now ask people to sign up – and they generally do so, eagerly. They don’t find it strange that you want their faeces?

Well, they are almost always shocked that you want the entire stool sample! But there was this one woman, from the Baka people of Cameroon, who was very interested in that

No, unfortunately. We couldn’t sign him up because he wasn’t part of the Baka community that we were sampling at the time. Where are you off to next?

We’re going to Malaysia later this month to meet with different populations, including the Jahai people. They practice a huntergatherer lifestyle, which is pretty exciting

“People are almost always shocked that you want the entire stool sample!” because there aren’t that many isolated people that live this lifestyle anymore – and it may be that the hunter-gatherer lifestyle produces a microbiome that’s more closely adapted to the natural environment. Have you analysed the samples that have been collected so far?

We are starting to perform tests on some of the bacterial strains that have been isolated from the samples, and we do see that they have some metabolic functions that are really rare or entirely absent from the organisms that we have cultured from North America. Not only are we seeing new functional genes, but we are finding that the rate at which genes can jump from one bacterial species to another is very different in industrialised and non-industrialised populations. Who owns this collection of bacterial strains?

Every strain we isolate is owned by the people who contributed the stool samples. And although we don’t restrict who can work on those strains, we do have a clause that the material can’t be made into a commercial product. It is specifically disallowed. If a company takes a strain and wants to use that organism as a therapeutic agent, they need to go back to the owners of that organism and obtain a licence from the community. ■ Elie Dolgin is a science writer in Massachusetts 2 March 2019 | NewScientist | 43

CULTURE

Can artificial intelligence ever make music as wonderful as that of our greatest human composers? Simon Ings talks to the creative minds behind an experiment to find out

The Eternal Golden Braid: Gödel, Escher, Bach, with Marcus du Sautoy, Mahan Esfahani and Robert Thomas, Barbican, London, 9 March

CAN you tell when a piece of music has been written by a machine? Back in 1979, cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter was the first to ask that question in his classic book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An eternal golden braid. Forty years on, I thought it was a rather tired question. Of course we cannot tell. Of course we can be fooled. Why worry? After all, no one stopped playing chess or Go when computers proved they could trounce the best players. If anything, the machines inspired people to play more, and better. Pitting yourself against a human adversary is the whole point of these games. And if the point of music is that it conveys emotion, it is only interesting if there is a human doing the conveying. A concert on 9 March should shake up my assumptions. London’s Barbican is bringing together harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani, mathematician Marcus du Sautoy and composer Robert Thomas for a performance lecture – called The Eternal Golden Braid: Gödel, Escher, Bach – that uses an algorithm trained on the music of J. S. Bach. Bach’s compositions have been fed through a machine-learning process created by computational artist Parag K. Mital. It will use what it has learned to create its pieces. Harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani will play music created by an AI 44 | NewScientist | 2 March 2019

The audience will listen to Contemporary Orchestra will also Esfahani playing a piece that work with the audience. But you interlaces real Bach with Bach will need to be there to find out generated by AI – and be asked to how it will work. look for the joins. When people “My feeling is that people find think they have spotted one, they themselves stuck in a particular can flip a card that is a different way of doing things, and that’s colour on each side. They will also “As we search for new listen to new pieces by Thomas musical territories, must and another AI-savvy composer we confront ever stranger Robert Laidlow. sound worlds?” The point isn’t to fool anyone into misattributing music created by AI to a composer regarded by when we start behaving like many as the greatest who ever machines,” says du Sautoy. “My lived. Instead, audience responses hope is that artificial intelligence will be used to create new music may free us from behaving that explores Bach’s sound world mechanically, by showing us and vocabulary. that there are new places to go.” Musicians from the London He cites the work of computer

MARK ALLAN/BARBICAN

AI takes on Bach

scientist François Pachet, director of the Spotify Creator Technology Research Lab. His Flow Machine program jams with jazz musicians in real time, leading them into improvisations that feel natural – and rightly so, since they are derived from a deep learning of the musicians’ output. How does Esfahani feel about such technology? I expected him to be either enthused or threatened. I didn’t think he would regard it as business as usual. “Every innovation has unintended consequences,” he says. “But these include positive consequences.” For Esfahani, the world of classical and contemporary music is anything but a stable environment – it has been in a state of reinvention for centuries. “From Mozart’s birth in 1756 to Schubert’s death in 1828 is no more than a single lifespan,” he says. “Yet in that one generation, the instruments of the orchestra became unrecognisable – sometimes literally so.” It is true that AI threatens to decentre much of human life,

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

Dieter Helm’s Green and Prosperous Land: A blueprint for rescuing the British countryside (William Collins) delivers handsomely on the promise in its title.

Visit Craft & Graft: Making science happen, an exhibition (pictured) at the Francis Crick Institute in London, will take visitors behind the scenes to see what is needed to support the research carried out there, including the thousands of flasks and test tubes that need cleaning. From 1 March.

Watch H is for Harry is in some UK cinemas for World Book Day on 7 March. It is a powerful coming-of-age film about the state of education in the UK. A key claim is that one in five English 11-year-olds can’t read well.

Play Vectronom, a hypnotic video game about music, geometry and being in the moment, lands on Steam this month and seals the reputation of developers Ludopium for combining edgy music, art and experimentation.

Listen Particle physicists John Womersley and Harry Cliff will talk about The Next Mega-Collider at London’s Royal Institution at 7pm GMT on 7 March. The Future Circular Collider would be many times more powerful than CERN’s current collider, the LHC.

THE FRANCIS CRICK INSTITUTE

Dangerous light

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but this continuing reinvention of music means it is relatively safe. Feelings will run high, though. In the 19th century, for example, the German composer Richard Wagner caused great outrage with his radical style. Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche went as far as to say: “He contaminates everything he touches – he has made music sick.” In fact, Wagner exploited and exhausted contemporary harmonic and chromatic possibilities to the point where, at the turn of the 20th century, younger composers had no choice but to abandon tonal music in a search for a Physicist Jim Al-Khalili reveals why he wanted sound of their own. Will the algorithm used during his first novel to be true to science the upcoming concert reveal compositions that are easier to NEAR-future, science-fiction been weakening for decades. swallow? Or, as we search for new It is also long overdue a flip: territories, must we confront ever thrillers are what Hollywood does best, but the science can when magnetic north and south stranger sound worlds? poles switch. And it is possible, As a mathematician, du Sautoy often be flaky. I have never got angry about that: the key though unlikely, that Earth’s thinks he has an answer. “When word is “fiction”, after all. magnetic field will die one day – I make the mathematics-music My enjoyment of the latest as Mars’s did billions of years ago. connection, people worry that Marvel movies isn’t spoiled The 2041 tech is what I’m taking the emotion out of when physics laws get broken. New Scientist readers might music and making it very cold, My preference, however, is expect: quantum computing, clinical and logical,” he says. for sci-fi to paint a picture of AI, minds controlling cities, “What they don’t realise is that perovskite-crystal technology mathematics is highly emotional. what really could be. So I set my first book, Sunfall, in 2041, far for solar power, and so on. It’s a response to the play of enough from today that tech As for the science of dark extraordinary, surprising based on current developments matter, it is possible that it is patterns. I get the same buzz will have been realised, but not made up of as-yet-undiscovered reading mathematics as I do elementary particles called when I’m listening to Bach.” neutralinos. And while I Music isn’t an arbitrary jumble “Sunfall is meant to be overstress the importance of notes. It is iterative, generative, a page-turner: a fastpaced, race-against-time of dark matter self-interacting algorithmic. Music can be easy techno-thriller” in the book, the physics on and banal, just as mathematics neutralino decay and the role can be, and for the same reason: so far that my predictions of the bending magnets in structurally, easy music isn’t lose reliability. Over the past sending dark matter beams particularly interesting. seven years, I have interviewed to Earth’s core is possible. For both mathematics and 200 of the most brilliant But in the end, Sunfall is music, the point isn’t to hunt scientific minds in their field, meant to be a page-turner: a fastfor novelty for novelty’s sake, which has imbued me with paced, race-against-time technobut to look for results that are a broad understanding of thriller. I have enjoyed building interesting and surprising, and where the world is heading. a “could be” world and found it that lead to further discoveries. The book’s premise is that tremendously satisfying that the Such results are always rare, science is correct. I hope people and the limits of human cognition Earth’s magnetic field is dying, leaving us vulnerable to the sun’s find it a great story too. ■ set a hard barrier beyond which radiation. It isn’t an original idea, the search becomes pointless. By Jim Al-Khalili presents The Life applying AI and machine learning but it is something that could Scientific on BBC Radio 4. Sunfall happen. We know, for instance, to the problem, beautiful (Bantam Press) is out on 18 April that the magnetic field has surprises may await us. ■

DON’T MISS

2 March 2019 | NewScientist | 45

CULTURE

Trapped in the multiverse How do you stop dying over and over at your own party? Chelsea Whyte binges on new drama

THE latest hit on Netflix turns out to be a magic trick in eight parts. As Russian Doll begins, everything looks fairly ordinary for a TV drama – a party, a woman floundering in her mid-30s, death – then, with a single twist, it becomes extraordinary. This dark comedy stars Natasha Lyonne as Nadia, a foul-mouthed New Yorker who we soon learn is stuck in a time loop, repeatedly living through the night of her 36th birthday. She dies, only to be resurrected in the bathroom at her party, but in a new branch of the multiverse. This plays on the “many worlds” concept in physics, the idea the cosmos is constantly splitting into alternate universes. Some of Nadia’s deaths are played for laughs, some are so graphic they are upsetting and some leave her so alone and frantic that it is heartbreaking. But Russian Doll isn’t painful to watch. Each episode is 30 minutes, a welcome change from the trend for prestige television shows to have much longer instalments. Best of all, Lyonne infuses Nadia with almost inexplicable charm. The character is a fabulous dirtbag with the personality of a pit bull. Her unkempt hair has a bottle top stuck in it for most of one episode. Waking up, her first move is to light a cigarette. She did ketamine at a christening. Seemingly self-centred, in real life she would be horrible to know. But Lyonne’s sardonic humour makes Nadia likeable. When the show starts, Nadia has isolated herself from friends, Caught in a loop: Nadia (Natasha Lyonne) is reliving the same night 46 | NewScientist | 2 March 2019

her sad-sack ex and even her that. Nadia tells her drug dealer mother figure, a therapist named that every time she dies it hurts. Ruth, who took care of her during She has been hit by a cab, fallen and after the breakdowns and down the stairs, drowned, been death of Nadia’s actual mother. blown up, plummeted down an Which takes us to the heart of elevator shaft – and more. the series and, be warned, some Around her 14th death, Nadia unavoidable spoilers. To get out of finally realises that her friends her self-centred time loop, Nadia and her beloved Ruth grieve for has to convince someone that she her when she dies. This motivates is reliving the same night, and her to look for a way out, and so come to terms with intimacy and “There is a nod to Einstein abandonment issues. The first that reminds us of his key part is hard to do without getting tenet: there is no such sent to a psychiatric hospital – a fate she avoids only by dying once thing as absolute time” more in the ambulance ride there. Initially, Nadia thinks it may all she notices that after each death, be a drug-induced turn or some things around her die off. Fresh mystical retribution for having flowers wilt, and fruit in bowls a party in what was once a Jewish looks rotten. Nadia tells Alan. school. Then, she meets Alan, She cuts open an orange, and a perfectionist and her opposite though the outside is mouldy, in all ways but one: he too keeps inside it is still edible – just as dying and reliving the same day. their inner lives continue as one Alan sees their experience as a linear experience while their video game, but their trip through bodies keep dying. “Time is the multiverse isn’t as clear cut as relative to your experience.

We’ve been experiencing time differently in these loops, but this tells us that somewhere, linear time as we used to understand it still exists,” she says. This nod to Einstein’s theory of relativity may be a bit simplistic, but it does remind us of his key tenet: there is no such thing as absolute time. Our experience of time is dependent on our point of view. In the final moments of the series, we see two timelines side by side – two branches of the multiverse in which Nadia and Alan change their behaviour and save the other from their first death. The split-screen effect is almost gut-wrenching, as you don’t know whether these two people who have come to care about each other will ever reunite in the same timeline. It isn’t a great magic trick if you just saw the woman in half – you have to put her back together again. Fortunately, Russian Doll delivers on that. ■

RUSSIAN DOLL/COURTESY OF NETFLIX

Russian Doll, streaming on Netflix

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