May 18 –24, 2019 New Scientist

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OVERSTRETCHED

Why we’re running out of rubber

THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS RACE By Angela Saini

LIFE’S HOT TUB

Did cells evolve in bubbling springs? WEEKLY May 18–24, 2019

50 years on from the moon landings, billionaires and space agencies are vying to send humans to other worlds once more. Are you ready for lift-off? No3230 US$6.99 CAN$7.99 2 0

PLUS MICROBIOME FORENSICS / KNOW YOUR AXIONS / URANIUM SPONGES / THE DEATH OF COAL / DREAMS ON PS4 Science and technology news www.newscientist.com US jobs in science

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It will take humans nine months to get to Mars The biggest danger on the way? Boredom

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We’re looking for the best ideas in the world. The Ryman Prize is an international award aimed at encouraging the best and brightest thinkers in the world to focus on ways to improve the health of older people. The world’s ageing population means that in some parts of the globe – including much of the Western world – the population aged 75+ is set to almost triple in the next 30 years. The burden of chronic diseases including Alzheimers and diabetes is set to grow at the same time. In order to stimulate fresh efforts to tackle the problems of old age, we’re offering a $250,000 annual prize for the world’s best discovery, development, advance or achievement that enhances quality of life for older people.

The Ryman Prize was first awarded in 2015 to Gabi Hollows, co-founder of the Hollows Foundation, for her tireless work to restore sight for millions of older people in the developing world. World-leading researchers Professor Henry Brodaty and Professor Peter St George-Hyslop won the prize in 2016 and 2017 respectively for their pioneering work into Alzheimer’s Disease. The 2018 Ryman Prize went to inventor Professor Takanori Shibata for his 25 years of research into robotics and artificial intelligence. If you have a great idea or have achieved something remarkable like Gabi, Henry, Peter and Takanori, we’d love to hear from you. Entries for the 2019 Ryman Prize close on Friday, June 28, 2019.

Go to www.rymanprize.com for more information

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern with 2018 Ryman Prize winner Professor Takanori Shibata.

www.rymanprize.com

This week’s issue

44 Overstretched Why we’re running out of rubber

On the cover

Coming next week

40 There’s no such thing as race By Angela Saini

36 The new space age 50 years on from the moon landings, billionaires and space agencies are vying to send humans to other worlds once more.

14 Life’s hot tub Did cells evolve in bubbling springs?

Are you ready for lift-off? Jupiter’s jewels How the giant planet and its moons could explain the solar system’s deepest secrets – and why there’s life on Earth

11 Microbiome forensics 26 Know your axions 19 Uranium sponges 15 The death of coal 32 Dreams on PS4 Vol 242 No 3230 Cover image: NASA

News

Features

9 Organ swap World’s first non-identical organ exchange

36 The new space age Between billionaires and nation states, space exploration is lifting off

News

12 How machines see Why AIs are easily confused by simple images

40 There’s no such thing as race Studying human variation is possible without outdated concepts, argues Angela Saini

20 Opioids in the UK Do measures to prevent an addiction epidemic go too far?

44 Overstretched Rubber is essential to modern life, but the world’s supply is at risk

Views

The back pages

25 Comment We need to rediscover the wonder of space exploration

51 Maker How to make a toast alarm 52 Puzzles Quick crossword, a cube puzzle and quiz

28 Aperture Killer air pollution illuminated

53 Feedback Dog DNA and parrot police

30 Letters Climate change is political

54 Almost the last word Spacecraft gravity and kissing hazards

32 Culture How to build your own video-game world, with no tricky coding

KIERAN STONE/GETTY

26 The columnist Are physicists making things up, asks Chanda PrescodWeinstein

14 Hot tub time machine Recreating life’s origins in hydrothermal pools

56 Me and my telescope Kate Shaw on Higgs bosons and Emmy Noether

18 May 2019 | New Scientist | 3

The leader

The dawn of a new space age

NASA

Let’s go about our renewed exploration beyond Earth in the right way THE plan looks ambitious, perhaps overambitious. But then they said that in 1961, when President John F. Kennedy announced that the US would put a human on the moon by the decade’s end. And the lunar lander that Amazon boss Jeff Bezos hopes will return humans to the moon by 2024 (see page 7) is just one tune in a cacophony of new space exploration initiatives. New Scientist’s story is entwined with that of space exploration: we launched in November 1956, less than a year before Sputnik 1, the Soviet satellite that kicked off the cold-war space race. Now the 50th anniversary of the successful Apollo 11 moon landing – the end product of Kennedy’s ambition – is near. To mark it, we will have a special series of articles on what seems to be a new golden age of solar-system exploration.

The upcoming Apollo 11 moon landing anniversary gives a chance to look afresh at space exploration

That starts this week with Leah Crane’s analysis of the space renaissance (see page 36). Next week, we will focus on Jupiter, the solar system’s largest planet, as well as previewing cultural events around the moon landing anniversary. Look out too for a special edition of New Scientist: The Collection called The Quest for Space. On sale from 5 June, it brings together the very best of our latest space coverage and the cream of our cold-war archive.

Space matters – not least, as Richard Webb argues on page 25, for the perspective it gives us on Earth. But that perspective also sounds alarms. In Leah’s feature, European Space Agency boss Johann-Dietrich Wörner rightly warns of national rivalries endangering the peaceable use of space. And human expansionism and resource hunger bring with them moral perils. In a paper last month, astrophysicist Martin Elvis and philosopher Tony Mulligan asked: “How much of the solar system should we leave as wilderness?” As we enter a new space age, answers to questions like this become pressing, especially if we share the solar system with other life, for example on Jupiter’s moon Europa (see page 12). Let’s see to it that our sins on Earth are not repeated in the heavens. ❚

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18 May 2019 | New Scientist | 5

Where did we come from? How did it all begin?

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

News

New Scientist: The new quest for space For the latest news on crewed missions visit www.newscientist.com/space

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Space exploration

Crewed missions to the moon Amazon’s founder and NASA both have ambitions to take humans back to the moon in 2024, reports Leah Crane NASA and Jeff Bezos’s company Blue Origin both want to land humans on the moon in five years’ time. Separate announcements from each organisation have come in the past week, but could they end up working together? Blue Origin was first to hit the headlines by revealing a mock-up of Blue Moon (pictured), a lunar lander that the firm hopes will return humans to the moon’s surface by 2024. “It’s time to go back to the moon, this time to stay,” Bezos said at the unveiling on 9 May. The lander is designed to launch on Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket,

which is currently in development. Blue Moon should be able to land up to 6.5 tonnes on the lunar surface. It will be able to carry rovers, vehicles that can launch off the surface of the moon, and maybe even mining equipment, said Bezos. The lander will run on hydrogen, which could, in theory, be extracted from water deposits on the moon’s surface. Bezos also alluded to the idea of mining water from lunar ice deposits, as well as harvesting solar power. On 13 May, US president Donald Trump announced $1.6 billion for NASA’s Artemis mission to take

humans to the moon in 2024. The mission is named after an ancient Greek moon goddess. Officials say the mission will be the first to put a female astronaut on the moon’s surface. The budget applies to the financial year 2020 and includes $1 billion for the development of a commercial lunar lander, which NASA will purchase from a private company. Most of the remaining money will go towards NASA’s Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft. They are intended to carry crew members to the planned Lunar Orbital Platform-

Gateway, from which the lander will take them to the surface. The nature of space travel today means the mission will involve collaboration with private firms (see page 36). Blue Origin, Elon Musk’s SpaceX and the United Launch Alliance will all probably vie for this business. The budget request will need to be approved by the US Congress. Some experts question whether it will be enough. “We will need additional funds, but this is a good amount that gets us out of the gate in a very strong fashion,” NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine told the press. ❚ 18 May 2019 | New Scientist | 7

News Environment

Free-floating DNA to reveal the health of river and lake ecosystems THE mix of DNA floating in rivers and lakes will finally be used to monitor the state of aquatic ecosystems, after years of tests to show that the technique works. Conventionally, aquatic life is monitored by capturing organisms, either by using nets or scraping under boulders, for examination. These techniques are time-consuming, can harm species and require skilled ecologists. Monitoring fish typically involves using electricity to stun them, which can sometimes prove fatal. But these techniques could be replaced by simply taking a water sample and analysing the DNA in it. This environmental DNA (eDNA) comes from the cells, waste and blood of organisms. Thanks to advances in cheap, fast genetic sequencing and in our ability to identify which species the DNA comes from, England’s Environment Agency plans to start using eDNA to monitor fish next year. “eDNA is no longer a concept,” says Kerry Walsh at the Environment Agency.

LINDA PITKIN/2020VISION/NATUREPL.COM

Adam Vaughan

The DNA of pike (Esox lucius) has been detected in water

The agency has a responsibility to monitor the health of rivers and lakes, and the number of species living in these environments can indicate this. The agency began exploring the use of eDNA seven years ago in a bid to make efficiency savings, and now its proof of concept tests suggest that eDNA can be more accurate than established techniques.

In a recent study at Lake Windermere in Cumbria, eDNA analysis identified DNA from 14 of the 16 species of fish that have ever been recorded there. This is about three times as many species as are usually detected using conventional measures, and included pike and eel. “Some fish become aware of nets and stay away. Whereas with eDNA it’s in the water, it’s mixed. Fish are great because they are slimy and releasing eDNA all the time,” says Walsh.

The Environment Agency also hopes eDNA will provide an early warning system for the invasive species that rising temperatures are expected to help spread through UK waters. The group is developing procedures, expected to be ready by 2020, to spot four priority non-native species: the quagga mussel, zebra mussel, killer shrimp and demon shrimp. “If we’ve got the tools to detect them early before they’re established, it’s much easier to deal with them,” says Walsh. However, there are limitations to using eDNA for monitoring lakes and rivers, says François Edwards at the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology. While it is good at reflecting the diversity of species present, it is not so good at indicating their abundance. It is also hard to know whether eDNA shows that an organism is present in a lake now, or was there a year ago but has since died off. And in rivers, the eDNA may have travelled a long way from where the species actually is. Nevertheless, eDNA holds potential, says Edwards. ❚

Industrial chemistry

Can we make our plastics from captured carbon? THE really hard part of reducing greenhouse gas emissions could be even more difficult than we thought. Most chemicals we use, including plastics, contain carbon, which is currently taken from fossil fuels. In theory, the global chemicals industry could switch to using carbon dioxide captured from the air as a feedstock. But a study suggests that this would require vast amounts of clean electricity. 8 | New Scientist | 18 May 2019

There has been a lot of talk about greening the chemicals industry, says André Bardow of RWTH Aachen University in Germany, but no one has worked out what it would take to do it. So he and his team created a bottom-up model of the industry, looking at what is needed to create the key feedstocks. They calculated that using carbon captured from the air for this could remove 3.5 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases by 2030. However, this would require 18.1 petawatt hours of electricity per year (PNAS, doi.org/c5qc). That

isn’t much less than the 26 PWh of electricity a year produced by the entire world in 2018, according to the International Energy Agency. Only a third of global electricity currently comes from clean sources. Even by optimistic projections of growth, the total amount of renewable electricity available in 2030 is predicted to be less than 18 PWh. The reason the electricity

“Greening the chemicals industry could take more than half the electricity in the world”

demand is so massive comes down to the laws of thermodynamics, says Bardow. “What you are doing is inverting combustion.” For now, he says, it makes more sense to use the renewable electricity we have to decarbonise heating and transport. But the chemicals industry will have to be decarbonised in the coming decades if the world is to limit global warming. And this industry is far from the only tricky sector. Reducing emissions from farming, for instance, will also be difficult. ❚ Michael Le Page

Organ transplants

Kidney-for-liver swap World’s first non-identical organ exchange between living donors Clare Wilson

research describing the idea of trading a kidney for the only other organ generally taken from a living donor – the liver. People can donate up to 60 per cent of their liver. It is one of the few organs that can regenerate, so the donor eventually regrows a full-sized liver, as does the recipient. Aliana says she suggested the idea to many hospitals, but got nowhere. “They didn’t know what I was talking about. They didn’t know which hospital department to transfer me to. One transferred me to the morgue.” Eventually, when she contacted Roberts, he saw the idea’s potential. Aliana was assessed and judged to be in good enough health to donate part of her liver. It then took 18 months to find (Left to right) Connie Saragoza de Salinas got half a liver from Aliana Deveza; Nancy Ascher and John Roberts carried out the surgeries; Annie Simmons donated a kidney to Erosalyn Deveza

JESSICA BERNSTEIN-WAX/UCSF HEALTH

“IT WAS heartbreaking for me to see what my mom was going through – dialysis was getting to be really painful for her,” says Aliana Deveza from Santa Cruz, California. “I had to help.” Her mother, Erosalyn Deveza, was on the waiting list for a kidney transplant. Aliana wanted to give one of her own kidneys to her mother, but she was turned down because she might develop the same health problems in later life. So Aliana came up with a different plan. In 2017, she instigated the world’s first paired exchange of different organs between living donors, swapping half her liver for someone else’s kidney. A case study of the organ swap has now been published (American Journal of Transplantation, doi.org/c5nz), and the surgeons involved are calling for more exchanges like this. “You can imagine the enormous impact for mixed organ extended chains,” says John Roberts, a surgeon at the University of California, San Francisco. Most organ transplants come from people who have died, but there are never enough organs for those who need them. Most people can get by with just one of their kidneys, so people with kidney failure are increasingly receiving donated organs from relatives or friends. However, some people who want to donate can’t, because their immune system is incompatible with that of the would-be recipient. In such cases, doctors can try to find pairs of donors who can each give a kidney to the other’s relative. Sometimes there can be long chains of such transfers, usually started by someone happy to donate their kidney to a stranger. When Aliana was looking into such chains, she came across

Annie Simmons, in Boise, Idaho, whose liver was unsuitable to use as a transplant for her own sister, Connie Saragoza de Salinas, who had severe liver disease. They drew up a plan: Simmons would donate a kidney to Erosalyn Deveza, and in return, Aliana would give half her liver to Connie. The proposal was reviewed by the hospital’s head of ethics, and the would-be donors were given the usual health assessments. A possible sticking point was whether this was a fair swap. In theory, a liver is worth more than a kidney, because people with kidney failure can survive for many years on dialysis, but there is no equivalent for liver failure. Liver donation also has a higher rate of complications. But Aliana had no doubts. “I was losing hope and I really wanted to do something.” One factor that swayed the ethicists was that people are allowed to altruistically donate part of their liver to a stranger. While not an equivalent swap, at least Aliana would be getting

some recompense in the form of helping her mother. The hospital gave the go-ahead and the four operations required by the swap took place on the same day. In the following weeks, Aliana noticed how tired she felt, which she had been

10%

The increase in living-donor transplants that could occur as a result of direct swaps

warned would happen as her body put all its energy into regrowing her liver. “It was like bad jet lag,” she says. But an ultrasound scan two months later showed that her liver was almost back to normal. “Regeneration probably starts within hours,” says Roberts. The team hopes that the groundbreaking case will inspire more people to consider doing the same. Roberts says that direct swaps involving two donors could enable 30 extra living-donor liver transplants a year in the US, on top of the roughly 300 a year that already happen. Kidney transplants from live donors are more common, with several thousand a year taking place. For Aliana, an increase would be very welcome. “I set out to do this for my mom and I’m glad that in the process I was able to help other people too. I hope to set a precedent.” However, such exchanges aren’t being considered in the UK, said a spokesperson for the country’s National Health Service Blood and Transplant authority. “The uptake is likely to be low and so it is difficult to justify setting up such a scheme which is more complex and confers greater risk on the living liver donor.” ❚ 18 May 2019 | New Scientist | 9

News Genetic healthcare

NHS trials genetic analysis Can DNA data improve the health of people with hypertension? Adam Vaughan

variants someone has. If a person is told they have a high genetic risk for hypertension, for instance, will they be better at taking their medicine? It is also hoped that the programme could help clinicians provide more tailored treatment. Although the trial is small, the team wants to see if the approach Volunteers will be sought at a blood pressure clinic

could scale up to work in a hospital that sees more than a million patients a year. One important benefit of doing genetic testing in a hospital in an ethnically diverse city such as London is that it could start to address the fact that populationwide genetic studies have largely involved people who are white and of European descent. To keep costs down, the trial will only look at specific gene variants,

an approach that is cheaper than sequencing and analysing the whole genome. But the NHS is also looking into offering full genome sequencing for volunteers, providing they agree to share their data with researchers. The UK isn’t the only country exploring the use of genetic analysis for health. In Finland, around 3400 volunteers will soon be told via a secure web portal if they have a greaterthan-average risk of developing heart disease, type 2 diabetes or venous thromboembolism – the formation of a blood clot in a vein. “We selected these three diseases because they are preventable and actionable,” says Heidi Marjonen at the National Institute for Health and Welfare in Helsinki. Estonia is running two trials on polygenic risk scores, which are percentages that indicate a person’s chance of developing a condition compared with the population average. The country is exploring how they can be used to build a national programme of personalised medicine. ❚

In a live test on Taobao’s iFashion designer clothes app, the suggested outfits were clicked on about 25 per cent of the time, compared with a 15 per cent click-through rate from other approaches. The system can also develop fashion profiles for customers based on their clicks, which could potentially be used to target

other items at them (arxiv.org/ abs/1905.01866). Online shoppers are often faced with a “tyranny of choice” that can be overwhelming, says retail adviser Doug Stephens. Offering suggestions of outfits that genuinely look good would therefore be welcome. “It’s a great problem to solve, given that one of the consumer’s most significant apparel challenges is the coordination of items, particularly online where there’s an absence of human assistance,” says Stephens. ❚ Chris Baraniuk

MATTHEW HORWOOD/GETTY

A HUNDRED people undergoing treatment at a UK hospital are to get their DNA analysed in a pioneering trial. Around 85,000 people with rare disorders in the UK have already had their genomes sequenced through the National Health Service as part of the 100,000 Genomes Project. Now, University College Hospital in London plans to invite around 100 people attending its blood pressure clinic to undergo genetic analysis. The trial aims to test how useful such analysis might be in a busy, hospital environment, says Reecha Sofat of University College London. The data may also inform future drug development. Sofat says that, currently, she can rarely tell her hypertension patients why they have high blood pressure, but genomics might one day change this. More than 500 individual genetic variants have previously been pinpointed as contributing to high blood pressure. A big part of the trial will be seeing whether it makes any difference to know what combination of these

Machine learning

AI recommends ‘fashionable’ outfits to millions of people WHAT shoes go with that dress? Or these jeans? Artificial intelligence is now answering those questions automatically for online shoppers in China, thanks to an algorithm developed by web giant Alibaba. The system recommends entire personalised outfits to people as they browse, mixing ensembles from recently viewed items and other pieces judged to coordinate well with them. 10 | New Scientist | 18 May 2019

As part of a live trial, the tool has already recommended outfits to more than 5 million people. The aim is to enhance customer experience by encouraging more fashionable shopping behaviour, says Wen Chen at Alibaba. To build the system, Chen and her colleagues trained an AI on a collection of more than 1 million outfits created manually by staff at Alibaba’s shopping site Taobao. The AI was then able to select compatible clothing for items that users had recently clicked on. Endless combinations can be created as the customer shops.

1 million

The number of outfits the AI fashion guru was trained on

Forensics

Analysis Nuclear weapons

Bacterial signature could identify suspicious stains

Iran steps towards nuclear weapons US hostility has put Iran back on a path to the bomb, which could put its activities out of sight of inspectors, says Debora MacKenzie

Clare Wilson

ABEDIN TAHERKENAREH/EPA-EFE/SHUTTERSTOCK

Iranian president Hassan Rouhani and US president Donald Trump “eyes to eyes” in a Persian newspaper

THE most ambitious effort ever to peacefully stop a country getting a nuclear bomb hangs by a thread. On 8 May, Iranian president Hassan Rouhani announced that his country would start stockpiling low-enriched uranium and heavy water – a potential step towards building nuclear weapons. MAJID ASGARIPOUR/AP/SHUTTERSTOCK

SMALL splatters and stains at crime scenes can sometimes be hard to identify, but the unique combination of bacteria they contain may help. Large splashes of blood at a crime scene can be self-evident, but investigators sometimes need to work out if tiny stains are significant. “If you see something that looks like a trace, you want to know if it’s important,” says Natasha Arora at the Zurich Institute of Forensic Medicine in Switzerland. Now Arora and her colleagues have found that the microbes in small traces of body fluids can persist in a room for at least 30 days. This could lead to new ways to tell if crime scene stains are blood or faeces, for instance, says Arora. Previous work has shown that different parts of the body have distinctive communities of bacteria, viruses and fungi. So Arora’s team swabbed different body fluids and skin, to see if their microbial mix would still be distinguishable after being exposed to air for a month. “If you go to a crime scene and you find traces, they’re not generally completely fresh,” says Arora. The researchers took multiple samples of blood, menstrual blood, semen, vaginal fluid, saliva and skin, and placed the swabs on a high shelf in a frequently used room in their lab. To identify the bacteria present, they analysed the genetic material on the swabs at the beginning and end of the month. The ordinary blood sample yielded little usable data, probably because blood doesn’t normally contain many bacteria. The team also couldn’t tell the difference between vaginal fluid and menstrual blood on the basis of microbes. But the other swabs could mostly be distinguished, whether the sample was fresh or a month old (Forensic Science International: Genetics, doi.org/c5pb). ❚

The reactor building at Iran’s Bushehr nuclear power plant

The move was in response to US sanctions, which were levelled despite Iran’s compliance with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), agreed in 2015 to limit its potential to make nuclear weapons. The US, the EU, Russia and China were signatories. The JCPOA imposed an unprecedented inspections regime on Iranian nuclear plants. This included novel monitoring technology that could severely limit the spread of the bomb. The deal doesn’t stop Iran making enriched uranium to fuel its nuclear power plant, near the

city of Bushehr, or heavy water for a nuclear reactor it was building in the city of Arak. But it prevents it stockpiling either or enriching uranium to weapons-grade levels. It also says the reactor at Arak must be redesigned to produce less of another bomb fuel, plutonium. The incentive for Iran was a lifting of trade sanctions, imposed after it was found to have covertly enriched uranium in the 2000s. Since the deal, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has judged Iran to have complied with its constraints. But a year ago, US president Donald Trump pulled out of the JCPOA, saying he was unhappy with it. The US reimposed trade sanctions and threatened severe trade penalties for countries that did business with Iran. Iran’s oil exports have since fallen from 2.5 million barrels a day to 1 million. Now, Rouhani’s announcement means Iran will stop exporting low-enriched uranium and heavy water. This export was mandated by the JCPOA, so Iran could continue production without exceeding caps on stockpiles. The build-up of the materials won’t immediately violate the JCPOA. But Rouhani added that if after 60 days EU countries hadn’t

found a way for its banks and importers to do business with Iran without suffering US sanctions, Iran will start enriching uranium further towards weapons grade – and build Arak to existing plans. That will be the end of the JCPOA, as Iran resumes its path to a bomb. We may not even know if it does. The JCPOA provides three levels of safeguards in Iran. It gets the standard inspections the IAEA does in all countries with nuclear plants; additional inspections agreed in 1997 and voluntary for IAEA member states; and extra, unprecedented inspections, including continuous monitoring using novel technology. James Acton of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington DC says that without the JCPOA, Iran gets only the basic inspections – which it has successfully evaded in the past. Without extra inspections, the IAEA cannot draw credible conclusions about the absence of undeclared activities in Iran, says Acton.

“Donald Trump pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal a year ago, saying he was unhappy with it” In theory, inspectors outside Iran could watch for krypton-85, a telltale gas emitted when plutonium is extracted from heavy water reactors, such as the one in Arak. But Acton isn’t even sure Iran would attempt to keep that secret. The idea of having nuclear weapons is to deter attack – and as Dr. Strangelove observed, it isn’t much of a deterrent if no one knows you have it. ❚ 18 May 2019 | New Scientist | 11

News Artificial intelligence

A simple experiment could help find alien life on Europa Jonathan O’Callaghan FINDING amino acids on other worlds could be a sign of life there, but only if we can be sure they were produced by living things. The subsurface oceans of icy moons such as Jupiter’s Europa and Saturn’s Enceladus might contain amino acids. But they can also be made non-biologically. How can we tell them apart? One thing that would help is to rule out the presence of primordial amino acids created when the solar system formed, when life wasn’t around. These have been found on comets. “Amino acids are the building blocks of protein, and the chemistry of life as we know it,” says Ngoc Truong at Cornell University in New York. “If amino acids can be found in the ocean of Europa, could they be the relics of primordial synthesis processes?”

NASA

Warm oceans lurk under the icy surface of moons like Europa

In laboratory experiments, Truong and his colleagues found some amino acids, aspartic acid and threonine in particular, could only be in warm, hydrothermally active oceans of icy moons if they were produced in the past million years (Icarus, doi.org/c5mt). This means that if any are detected, they would probably have been produced recently, cosmically speaking, which means a biological origin is possible. “This helps us understand which biosignatures we may wish to target for missions to Enceladus or Europa,” says Morgan Cable at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. ❚ 12 | New Scientist | 18 May 2019

Machines see differently We are beginning to grasp why AI is so easily fooled and how to stop it from happening, finds Linda Geddes WHY did the machine think the turtle was a rifle? No, this isn’t a bad joke, but one of many recent examples of machines being tricked into seeing things that aren’t there. Artificial intelligence can be easily confused by so-called adversarial images, which contain seemingly innocuous changes that don’t affect what people see. Like many others, Aleksander Mądry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology thought this was a bug that would vanish with better algorithms or ways to train these systems. But he and his colleagues have discovered that adversarial images seem to arise from features that we can’t perceive, but machines can. Early indications are that, by understanding these features, it may be possible to stop such alterations causing havoc. Most examples of adversarial images can seem baffling to an onlooker, with two pictures that look identical being interpreted in different ways by an AI. For instance, with two apparently identical images of a cat, an AI will insist one of them is a dog. As a research experiment, fooling AIs can be amusing, but if a medical AI misses a clearly obvious tumour in a medical scan, the results could be tragic. Now Mądry and his team appear to have confirmed a long-held suspicion that AIs don’t view images in a similar way to humans. Rather than relying on details like ear shape or nose length to classify images of animals, say, they use features that are imperceptible to us. “We don’t actually know what these features are – they may be big, or small – but the human brain doesn’t pick up on them,”

ANDREI SPIRACHE/GETTY

Astrobiology

says Mądry. The team calls them non-robust features because they seem to leave AIs particularly vulnerable to adversarial images, in which these features have presumably been disrupted to some degree. To identify that non-robust features were part of the problem, Mądry’s team took a standard collection of images of cats and dogs and generated a series of adversarial examples, which involves tweaking pixels

“With two apparently identical images of a cat, an AI will insist one of them is a dog” in each picture. They used these to train an AI. Rather than resulting in something completely useless, when the AI was shown nonadversarial examples, it got them right, meaning the nonrobust features did help it to correctly identify cats and dogs, just not in adversarial images.

Where we see a cat and a dog, an AI may not

The researchers then used an AI to point out which parts of an image it would focus on. They then took these out of images before training another AI on these altered pictures, in effect forcing it to use more humanlike methods to make its choice. The result of this was an AI with improved resistance to adversarial images, reaching a level usually only seen when painstaking effort is used to correct an AI’s mistakes (arxiv. org/abs/1905.02175). Understanding this is a good step towards AIs that can be safely deployed in the real world, says Pushmeet Kohli at research firm DeepMind. “The concept of these features is helpful, and it goes some way towards explaining the phenomenon,” says Marta Kwiatkowska at the University of Oxford. ❚

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

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

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

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

AVAILABLE NOW newscientist.com/howtobehuman

News Biochemistry

The search for life’s cradle Scientists are taking the hunt for life’s origins out into the open air

NEARLY 4 billion years after life first arose on Earth, researchers have been trying to recreate the first steps towards life in steamy, bubbling pools in New Zealand. One of the big questions in understanding life’s origins is how small molecules such as fatty acids, nucleotides or amino acids first formed long, polymer chains like lipids, RNA or proteins. Previous lab experiments by David Deamer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and his colleagues have found that

“These hot springs in New Zealand are like a chemistry experiment that nature is carrying out” basic, cell-like structures called protocells can form in the conditions seen in hot springs: temperatures of 80°C to 90°C and repeated cycles of drying and rehydration. These conditions can bring simple molecules together and encourage them to form the long, polymer chains essential for life. If lipid molecules are present

too, the simulated environment can cause the polymers to become encapsulated inside fatty membranes similar to those seen on the outside of all cells today. To find out if similar results could occur in real-world conditions, Deamer’s colleague Bruce Damer travelled to a geothermal area near Rotorua in New Zealand. The acidic hot springs there are “like a chemistry experiment that nature is carrying out”, says Damer. He placed glass vials holding a “prebiotic soup” into a nearboiling pool. This mix contained fatty acids and glyceride, another component of lipids. It also included two components of the building blocks of RNA, which is widely believed to have been life’s first genetic material. The pool heated the soup to around 90°C. When it dried out, Damer repeatedly wetted it with highly acidic water from a nearby pool that had been filtered to remove any microorganisms. The idea was to mimic water splashes from geyser eruptions, but on a faster timescale and without

JANETTE HILL/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Alison George

contamination from existing life. Dried films became visible on the glass of the vial and subsequent tests revealed that long, RNA-like molecules had formed within these fatty layers. Deamer believes this is the first time anyone has tested laboratory results out in a real environment similar to the kinds of places that would have existed when life began. He says the results are due to be published soon. But John Sutherland of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, warns that the

Rotorua’s hot springs are strongly acidic

magnetic field,” says Gaensler. He and his colleagues used 317 of these pairs to calculate the strength of the magnetic field in those spots. Some of the magnetism we see in that light comes from the matter in the galaxy itself, but some is added as the light travels to us through the intergalactic medium. To separate out this element, the team compared

5111 other pairs of polarised light sources that were both coming from the same direction, but with one that was double to triple the distance from us of the nearer source (arxiv.org/abs/1905.02410). The longer that light travels through space, the bigger the Faraday effect. So the team subtracted the magnetic field readings from the nearer sources to calculate the input from the intergalactic medium. The upper limit of the universe’s magnetism was found to be 40 nanogauss – a fridge magnet is about 100 gauss. ❚ Chelsea Whyte

experiment did not make RNA itself, and says he doesn’t think that the “RNA-like” polymers that formed are relevant to origins-oflife chemistry. “It’s quite neat work, but needs replicating,” says Nick Lane of University College London. The problem is that there is no obvious path from these results to cells that have a metabolism and can reproduce themselves, he says. ❚

Cosmology

The magnetism of the universe is very, very weak THE magnetism of the entire universe is 2.5 billion times less strong than that of a fridge magnet, according to an analysis. “The magnetic field is weak by that standard, but it’s a lot of energy. There’s as much energy in the Milky Way in magnetism as there is in starlight,” says Bryan Gaensler at the University of Toronto in Canada. As light passes through a 14 | New Scientist | 18 May 2019

magnetic field, the Faraday effect causes the light’s orientation, or polarisation, to rotate. Gaensler and his colleagues used this to measure the strength of the field in the intergalactic medium, the parts of space between the galaxies. They searched through a catalogue of polarised light sources in the universe. Conveniently, these frequently occur in pairs because galaxies often have a supermassive black hole at their centre shooting out twin jets of radiation in opposite directions, making them easy to identify. “They’re like two searchlights that light up the

40

The strength of the universe’s magnetic field, in nanogauss

Speech recognition

Analysis Energy

Voice assistants may be less likely to understand women

The renewables revolution is stalling The UK has seen the longest coal-free period since 1882, but don’t celebrate just yet, says Michael Le Page

Nicole Kobe

SHOULD we be thrilled that, for the first time in a century, the UK went more than a week without using any coal to make electricity? While some are welcoming this as a sign that the UK is going green, the bigger picture is less encouraging. For one thing, renewables supplied only 23 per cent of electricity during this coal-free period, with 45 per cent coming from natural gas. What is more, the UK is veering off-track when it comes to meeting its long-term targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions – as is the entire world. Generating electricity without burning fossil fuels is relatively easy. It is much harder to heat homes, make cement and steel, grow food and power cars, ships and planes without producing any greenhouse gases. So if we are struggling with the easy part, what chance do we have of doing the hard stuff? Let us start with the UK. In the past decade, the country has gone from getting a third of its electricity from coal to obtaining more than a third from renewables, on

average. Coal is expected to provide only 1 per cent of electricity this year, and should be phased out by 2025. That isn’t quite as brilliant as it seems. The UK now gets 11 per cent of its electricity from “renewable” biomass, much of it using imported wood. Forest campaigners say swapping coal for wood isn’t truly renewable and is doing huge damage to the environment. Even the UK’s Committee on Climate Change says large-scale electricity generation from biomass is a bad idea. Wood should be used for things like building, it says, so its carbon remains locked away. The UK has now stopped most of the subsidies that drove its renewables revolution, and is still vetoing the cheapest form of renewable power, onshore wind. While renewables could provide half of the UK’s electricity within a decade, growth is expected to slow to a near halt over this time. The global renewables revolution also seems to

Coal-free week The UK went over a week without using coal, but only a small amount of power came from renewable sources such as wind, solar and biomass Nuclear Wind

Biomass Gas

Large hydro Storage

Imports Solar

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Electricity generation (GW)

MANY people who use devices with voice assistants, such as Amazon Echo or Google Home, have endured them not fully grasping commands. But it appears they may be worse at understanding women than men. Polling company YouGov asked 1000 people in the UK about voice assistants. Around two-thirds of the female participants said the software failed to respond to their voice commands some of the time, compared with half of the men. This is ironic, given that most smart speakers are designed to have female voices, says Russell Feldman at YouGov. As the survey was self-reported, it may not entirely match reality, says Trevor Cox at the University of Salford, UK. To confirm the results, tests should be run with different voices and different speechrecognition systems, he says. Earlier studies have suggested gender does affect the accuracy of speech recognition. Rachael Tatman, while at the University of Washington, found that YouTube’s captioning system, which uses similar technology, was less accurate for women than men. She later discovered that much of the difference disappeared when controlling for sound quality, suggesting that it may work less well for women in noisy situations. Separate research found that analysing speech from men and women differently could increase accuracy. Similar accuracy gaps are seen with dialect and ethnicity. If a speech-recognition system is trained on fewer examples of female voices or other dialects, it may be worse at processing them, says Muneera Bano at the Swinburne University of Technology, Australia. Most big technology companies have not publicly revealed the range of voices that they use to develop such tools. ❚

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be stalling. The International Energy Agency (IEA) recently announced that the world added 180 gigawatts of capacity of solar, wind, hydropower and bioenergy in 2018, the same as in 2017. It says we must add 300 gigawatts a year to have a chance of limiting warming to under 2°C by 2100. “These 2018 data are deeply worrying, but smart and determined policies can get renewable capacity additions back on an upward trend,” said IEA director Fatih Birol in a statement.

“Most renewables subsidies have stopped, and onshore wind continues to be vetoed” There is some debate about the IEA figures. They include only new power production that has been verified and confirmed. By contrast, research service BloombergNEF’s figures include estimates of unconfirmed additions, and it says that solar grew 10 per cent globally in 2018. Yet that is still a slowdown compared with the 30 per cent growth seen in the past, says Jenny Chase, head of solar at BloombergNEF. “But it’s harder to grow a big number,” she says. This follows a separate report last year that said investment in renewables was falling in most countries, except for China. Now China, too, is cutting back. Many climate activists have promoted the idea that the falling costs of renewables will mean they inevitably take over from fossil fuels, even without government help. But if electricity prices don’t stay high enough, investors will take their money elsewhere. So we should cheer the end of coal – but continue to worry about how it will be replaced. ❚ 18 May 2019 | New Scientist | 15

News Virtual reality

The perfect shot Headsets are letting directors test unlikely camera angles on set Andrew Rosenblum

Similar methods were used for the recent remake of The Jungle Book and the upcoming new version of The Lion King. The technology can reduce the bill for visual effects by 15

“Steven Spielberg was crawling around on the floor to frame shots in VR for Ready Player One”

Rather than placing an order for effects to be added after shooting a scene, directors “are serving it up for themselves”, says John Brennan at the University of Southern California. The technique is increasingly common in visual effects-heavy films. Steven Spielberg was an early adopter for Ready Player One. “Steven was crawling around on the ground to frame shots in VR,” says Joe Henderson at Technicolor.

to 20 per cent, says independent film-maker Kevin Margo. Margo cobbled together his own virtual production system with a flat-panel screen in front of his face to shoot Construct, a short film about humanoid robots. He says the method can make directors more creative because they can see visual effects immediately. High-powered VR headsets are still mostly a niche product as they are pricey, says Nancy Richardson at the University of California, Los Angeles. The cost of a high-end system can easily reach $10,000, out of reach for low budget films, but a relatively minor expense for a blockbuster. ❚

changes of up to 13 per cent in some measurements. Compared with native range specimens, two species had significantly shorter legs, and most had larger, thicker bills, shorter wings and longer tails

(Evolution, doi.org/c5k5). The four species studied were introduced between 50 and 90 years ago. “Evolution is typically thought to occur over millennia,” says Gleditsch. “We’re talking about 10 to 20 generations at most.” But statistical analysis suggests that the birds’ evolution is probably only partially shaped by adapting to life on the island. “Founder effects” may also have been at work. These evolutionary phenomena involve the genetic mix of a small starting population prompting a species to evolve changes that aren’t necessarily beneficial or adaptive. ❚ Jake Buehler

TECHNICOLOR

WEARING a virtual reality headset, I am immersed in a speakeasy bar of the 1920s. A strange-looking wooden protagonist, played by a human actor whose footage has just been recorded, chit-chats with computer-generated patrons. The technology I am testing has been created by media company Technicolor. It allows film directors to instantly see what a scene will look like with computergenerated imagery added in. With the touch of a joystick, I can “fly” around the set to get a different point of view for the perfect shot, or shrink myself relative to the scene, Alice in Wonderland-style. Where a jazz band in the corner of the bar seemed quaint when viewed from above, its bass player now fills the entire frame. Viewed from below, he looks huge and intimidating. In the past, directors had to send footage to special effects studios with collections of powerful computers, known as render farms. These would add in graphical elements, in a process taking hours or days.

A digital scene can give film-makers ultimate control

Now directors can put on a VR headset, powered by a stack of chips originally designed for video gaming, and immediately see how a scene will look with effects added in. The system means the director can be immersed in the 3D world of the virtual scene and seek out the most arresting camera angles.

Birds introduced to Hawaii evolve in mere decades NON-NATIVE birds are adapting to life in Hawaii at a blistering pace. Most native fruit-eating birds in the Hawaiian archipelago have gone extinct. These birds were important for dispersing fruit seeds. On the island of Oahu, this is mostly now done by non-native birds. Jason Gleditsch at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and his colleagues have been studying how these changes have affected the island. They have found that, 16 | New Scientist | 18 May 2019

despite the loss of native fruiteaters, Oahu still has complex, functioning ecosystems – possibly thanks to the rapid evolution of non-native birds to fill the niches vacated by the lost endemic species. To see whether the introduced birds have been evolving on Oahu, Gleditsch and his colleague Jinelle Sperry compared four non-native songbird species on the island, including the red-billed leiothrix (Leiothrix lutea, pictured), with museum specimens collected from their native range. They measured the birds’ bills, tails, legs and wings. They found that, in Hawaii, these birds have undergone physical

YI-CHEN CHIANG/GETTY

Evolution

WHAT IF TIME STARTED FLOWING BACKWARDS?

WHAT IF THE RUSSIANS GOT TO THE MOON

FIRST?

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

News Environment

Damming of rivers has left precious few in natural state

SHAN.SHIHAN/GETTY

NEARLY two-thirds of the world’s longest rivers have had their flow impeded by humans in the form of dams, reservoirs and other water engineering. A boom in hydropower is partly to blame, suggesting the pursuit of renewable energy may be putting fragile habitats at risk. Günther Grill of McGill University in Canada and his colleagues spent a decade analysing over 300,000 water courses, producing the most detailed global assessment yet of long, free-flowing rivers. They found that they have become increasingly rare, confined to remote regions such as the Arctic and the Congo basin. Of the 246 rivers that are 1000 kilometres long or longer, they found that just 90 are still free-flowing. Eight of these are in the Amazon basin. The big driver of this has been Marine biology

SOME animals living in the deep ocean have evolved highly-sensitive eyes that can see a range of colour hues in the near-blackness. “It’s a big surprise,” says Zuzana Musilova at the University of Basel in Switzerland, who made the finding with her colleagues. “They have more sensitive eyes and can see way better than humans in lower light.” Musilova and her team collected DNA from 26 species of fish that live more than 200 metres below the surface. Analysing this DNA, the team found that six species carried additional genes for rod opsin – the light-sensitive protein that enables the retina’s rod cells to detect light. Vertebrate animals use rod opsin to detect light in dim environments, but most species, including humans, only have one 18 | New Scientist | 18 May 2019

Animal cognition

rod opsin gene. However, adult silver spiny fins (Diretmus argenteus) – a flat fish that lives at depths down to 2000 metres– has 38 of them. The team translated these genes into proteins in a dish and shone lights of different wavelengths onto them, to see how they would respond. They found that these opsins detect a wide range of colours, and are especially sensitive to green and blue light (Science, doi.org/c5mc). “We believe they can detect more shades of blue and green than us,” Musilova says. She says having highly sensitive eyes may be useful for detecting the glowing bioluminescence emitted by many deep-sea creatures. These bioluminescent lights are mostly blue and green in colour. Being able to tell colours apart could help fish distinguish whether a flash comes from a predator or prey, Musilova says. Yvaine Ye

Wasps are first insect logicians LOGICAL reasoning is complex behaviour, and has often been thought to be limited to animals that have complex nervous systems. But it appears wasps can use a kind of logical deduction, the first such finding in invertebrates. The type of reasoning is called transitive inference and it is something people do easily: if you know that A is bigger than B, and B is bigger than C, then you

WILLIAM ATTARD MCCARTHY/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Dark depths look full of colour to fish eyes

tapping rivers for electricity generation, a strategy many Asian countries have pursued recently. Hydropower booms are expected in both the Amazon and Balkans. In all, we have interrupted and diverted the flow of rivers by constructing about 2.8 million dams, as well as building irrigation and water-diversion schemes (Nature, doi.org/c5k8). We should care about freeflowing rivers because of the benefits they provide to humans and wildlife, by allowing the exchange of nutrients, sediment and species, says Grill. “They are among the most biodiverse habitats in the world, given their relatively small habitat space, and are very fragile to human alterations,” he says. Adam Vaughan

can reason that A is bigger than C. Elizabeth Tibbetts at the University of Michigan and her team put 40 paper wasps individually into a shallow rectangular container. These boxes had a different colour at each end, and five colours were used in total, each corresponding to a letter from A to E. In any combination, the colour that was linked to the later letter in the alphabet was rigged to give wasps an electric shock if they stood on it. After 10 trials of encountering the four colour pairs that corresponded to adjacent letters – A/B, B/C, C/D and D/E – the wasps were then tested on B/D and A/E. In these scenarios, they would have to use logic to work out the order of the letters and avoid getting an electric shock. Overall, 65 per cent of the wasps managed to correctly choose B over D, which is better than chance (Royal Society Biology Letters, doi.org/c5mf). Chelsea Whyte

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Really brief

Taking an Uber may worsen traffic jams

FATCAMERA/GETTY

RIDE-HAILING services Uber and Lyft don’t seem to have lived up to claims of reducing traffic delays. In San Francisco, use of these services increased congestion by 40 per cent between 2010 and 2016, according to a study. Greg Erhardt at the University of Kentucky and his colleagues were able to work out how many Uber and Lyft trips were taken there and their start and finish points. To find out the effect of these

Meditation linked to anxiety and fear

Benefits of dung spread far and wide Penguin and seal faeces can help organisms that are kilometres away. An analysis of vegetation in the Antarctic found that nitrogen from penguin and seal waste could spread to areas up to 240 times the size of the colony, providing vital nutrients to plants and small creatures. (Current Biology, doi.org/c5mn).

Progesterone boosts birth rate A hormone may increase live births among women who have previously had a miscarriage and bleeding during early pregnancy. A study linked progesterone treatment to a 5.5 per cent increase in live births among such women (New England Journal of Medicine, doi.org/c5mm).

Design

San Francisco between 2010 and 2016. Extra cars and disruption from curbside pick-ups and dropoffs increased total hours of road delays in the city by 62 per cent. Without Uber and Lyft in the simulation, that delay grew by only 22 per cent, meaning the services accounted for the other 40 per cent, says the team (Science Advances, doi.org/c5k2). Both services questioned the finding. “It overlooks notable contributors to congestion,” says Lyft. Rival service Uber points out that studies disagree on the causes of congestion. CW Materials

There’s plenty more uranium in the sea

MORPHING MATTER LAB, HCII/ SCHOOL OF COMPUTER SCIENCE, CARNEGIE MELLON

In a survey of 1232 people who regularly meditate, over a quarter said they had experienced negative mental states as a result of the practice. People were more likely to report this if they used only types of deconstructive meditation, which typically involve contemplating the nature of conscious experience (PLoS One, doi.org/c5mk).

trips on traffic in the city, the team turned to a simulation used by transport planners to forecast road use by taking into account population growth, employment rates, construction of new roadways and public transit. The version they used was calibrated to 2010, before Uber and Lyft were widely in use, which offered a chance to forecast what traffic would have been like without these services and then compare it with real world data. They found that Uber and Lyft were the largest contributors to increases in traffic congestion in

It’s a great yarn: knitted creations that can move CUDDLY soft toys and furnishings are getting an upgrade to make them more like robots. Lea Albaugh at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and her colleagues have used knitting machines to create moving children’s toys and other objects. These include a toy rabbit that gives hugs when pressed, a jumper with a self-moving sleeve, and a lampshade that changes shape when given a tug (pictured). Silk strands are knitted into the fabric as part of the process. These strands function as tendons, enabling the objects to move in certain ways when they are pulled,

such as curving or forming an S-shaped bend. The team call the approach 4D knitting. This technique could be used to make cost-effective wearables. It is also an ideal approach for making soft robots, says Albaugh, because of the wide availability of fabrics and colours. The researchers have also experimented with conductive yarn, which could be knitted into objects to add smart sensors that can detect stretching or being touched. Their work was presented at the Human Factors in Computing Systems conference in Glasgow, UK. Donna Lu

A SPONGE could harvest the metal used to fuel nuclear power plants from ocean water. The easiest way to get uranium now is to mine it. There are about 7.6 million tonnes of it that should be relatively simple to dig up, enough to cover global needs for about a century. But seawater holds more than 4.5 billion tonnes of uranium, making it a potential backup source. Dong Wang at Hainan University in China and his colleagues have created a sponge that sucks up uranium. It is made of melamine foam. This is dipped in chemicals that easily bond to uranium and then dried. After eight weeks in a 5-tonne tank of seawater, the sponge had absorbed about 1.9 milligrams of uranium per gram of sponge (Advanced Functional Materials, doi.org/c5k6). This is a similar yield to other methods of harvesting uranium from the ocean, says Sheng Dai at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. But the sponge is more eco-friendly as it biodegrades better than plastics used in many of those other methods, he says. Getting uranium from the sea is more costly than mining it, but that may change. Leah Crane 18 May 2019 | New Scientist | 19

News Insight Opioid crisis

A problem born in the USA Doctors in the UK are concerned about following the US into an opioid crisis, but are preventive measures going too far, asks Clare Wilson

SPENCER PLATT/GETTY

The US opioid crisis has lowered average life expectancy

“Being on opioids for long enough changes brain chemistry so you need more for the same effect” so has the number of people getting hooked on them and graduating to illegal opioids such as heroin. Deaths from opioid overdoses have lowered the country’s life expectancy. But pain specialists warn that restricting opioid use too much also has risks, as some people have a real need for these powerful medicines. Will the UK be able to avoid following the US down the 20 | New Scientist | 18 May 2019

road to a new addiction epidemic, without leaving people in unnecessary pain? Opioids have always been our most potent pain relievers. They are excellent for helping people in severe but short-lasting pain, such as from broken bones or surgery. Because of the potential for addiction, though, doctors tended to be cautious about prescribing them outside hospital, apart from for people with terminal cancer. Attitudes started changing in the 1990s. Pressure was building among doctors to do more to keep people free from pain. Several US medical bodies said it should become the “fifth vital sign”, along with pulse, temperature, breathing and blood pressure. At the same time, US pharmaceutical companies began creating new formulations of existing drugs, and heavily promoting these to doctors. The best known is OxyContin, a slowrelease opioid the manufacturer

claimed had less than a 1 per cent risk of addiction. “The message was that if you’re enlightened, you’re going to be different from those stingy, puritanical doctors in the past,” says Andrew Kolodny of Brandeis University in Boston. Doctors began prescribing more opioids after surgery and upped the use of these drugs outside hospital for conditions such as arthritis, back pain or nerve damage from diabetes. When someone is on opioids for long enough, their brain chemistry changes and they need to take more to get the same effect. If they try to cut back, the pain amplifies. At higher doses,

MARK RICHARDSON/ALAMY

PRESCRIPTION painkillers containing opioids will soon come with a warning in the UK: “can cause addiction”. The decision, announced last month, is part of a range of measures the UK is taking in reaction to the opioid crisis gripping the US. As medical use of these painkillers in the US has risen,

Morphine is a powerful opioid – very useful if used properly

opioids also cause sedation and feelings of pleasure, so people in withdrawal feel highly agitated. As a result, many in the US began asking their doctor for everhigher doses. If they reached one doctor’s limit, they might try other clinicians or topping up from illicit sources. More liberal prescribing meant people had spare pills to sell, fuelling the black market. “It was in everybody’s medicine chest,” says Kolodny. Deaths from opioid overdoses started to climb. Once people are buying pills illegally, there can be a temptation to switch to heroin because it is cheaper. Making things worse, there has recently been an influx of newer synthetic opioids such as fentanyl, which are much more potent and easier to overdose on. Drug dealers began spiking their heroin with fentanyl to make it go further. “It has led to a public health catastrophe,” says Kolodny. There have been similar trends in Canada and, to some extent, Australia. But the picture is very different in the UK and most other European countries. That is partly down to culture. In North America, people have more control over their medical care. The US is also one of the few nations where drug firms can advertise prescription medicines directly to the public. The way the UK’s National Health Service is set up has helped. Everyone registers with a single primary care physician who acts as gatekeeper, so people can’t juggle multiple prescriptions. “You don’t doctor shop,” says Clare Gerada, a family doctor in London who specialises in addiction. There has been a rise in opioid use in the UK: in England, prescriptions have more than

Working hypothesis

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“Everyone’s saying you must not use opioids for chronic pain, [but] there is a group of people where they work reasonably well.” Even people on too high a dose shouldn’t be made to quit unduly fast or they will get withdrawal, says Colvin. “If you’re in horrible pain, that’s fairly terrifying.”

118%

Increase in opioid prescriptions in England from 2000 to 2016

The risk is that people in pain turn to illegal drugs. When some US states clamped down on opioid prescribing, fatal heroin overdoses surged. “The prescribing was just stopped,” says Colvin. “There was no additional support.” Stannard, who advises clinicians on pain management, says a few family doctors have tried to ban long-term opioid use. “I’ve had people saying to me: ‘We are going to take everyone off opioids’.” Emma Scott-Smith, an artist in Stirling, UK, who is on opioid painkillers for spinal pain, experienced this when she saw

Drugged up Opioid prescriptions in the US have surged ahead of those in England

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a different doctor to her usual one a few years ago. He told her she needed to come off medication because she was an addict, she says. “I was fearful because I knew my life depended on it.” Without painkillers, she says, “just moving is almost unbearable”. She was referred to a specialist who overruled her doctor and she is now on a long-term programme to slowly lower her dose, although she believes she will always need some painkillers to be able to get out of her house and go to work. Stannard has also had to talk hospital doctors out of ditching opioids for pain after surgery. “That’s a ridiculous, knee-jerk response,” she says. “Opioids are absolutely the best thing for postoperative pain.” She says these drugs can be used safely after surgery, as long as people get just a few days’ supply and are told how to reduce the dose over that time. UK doctors will soon get more help to tread the fine line between being too strict and too liberal with these medicines because various UK bodies are working on inquiries or guidelines on opioid use. A report from Public Health England is due out in a couple of months, while a spokesperson for the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency says it is considering further moves “to minimise the risk of inappropriate use while ensuring these medicines are available for those who need them”, but declined to give specific details. Kolodny says Europe should learn lessons about opioids from the US. “We have known for millennia that these are highly addictive, so it makes sense to be as cautious as possible,” he says. “You need to tread very carefully to avoid following in our footsteps. For us the genie’s out of the bottle.” ❚

▲ Salvador Dalí The Dali Museum in St Petersburg, Florida, got an AI to study archive footage of the great artist and recreate him as a deepfake. How surreal. ▲ Spellcheck Microsoft will help you mind your Ps and LGBTQs with a version of Office that checks documents for inclusive language, such as changing “housewives” to “homemakers”. ▼ Robot butlers People are coming for robot jobs. Japanese start-up Mira Robotics will soon sell a robot butler – the catch is it is controlled remotely by a human. ▼ Space art The Orbital Reflector, a piece of “space art” in the form of a shimmering balloon, has failed in orbit. Everyone’s a critic. ▼ Toothpaste Charcoal-based toothpastes, which are black, don’t whiten teeth, according to the British Dental Journal.

TOP: GETTY; BOTTOM: ALAMY

doubled since 2000 (see graph, below). But doctors seem to have taken heed of what is happening across the Atlantic. In both 2017 and 2018, there was a slight fall in the number of prescriptions. Now, though, the UK risks running into the opposite problem: of doctors being too reluctant to give opioids, says Cathy Stannard, a pain specialist at the NHS Gloucestershire Clinical Commissioning Group. For people in long-term pain, there are no simple alternatives to opioids. For a while, it seemed the answer was a newer class of painkillers such as pregabalin, but then people began getting addicted to those too. This means opioids can be valuable for people who can take a low dose for a long time without developing a tolerance, says Stannard. “There are a small number of people for whom these drugs are life-transforming.” The proportion of people like this is unclear, but Stannard estimates it to be about 10 per cent. Yet some doctors are so alarmed at the prospect of the UK having its own addiction epidemic that they try to stop opioids for such individuals, says Lesley Colvin at the University of Dundee, UK.

Sorting the week’s supernovae from the absolute zeros

18 May 2019 | New Scientist | 21

Conventional wisdom has been around for ages, but people forget to challenge what it means. Or why we continue to repeat it. At Orbis, we’ve always questioned common thinking to avoid sleepwalking into common results. Watched pots do eventually boil, and they’ve served our clients well. Ask your financial adviser for details or visit Orbis.com

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Watched pots do boil

Views The columnist Are physicists making things up, asks Chanda Prescod-Weinstein p26

Aperture Killer air pollution illuminated in beautiful lights p28

Letters Climate change is deeply political and needs action p30

Culture How to build your own video-game world, with no tricky coding p32

Culture columnist Simon Ings on how to get the science right for time travel in film p34

Comment

Space is us For the sake of our own planet, we need to rediscover the wonder of space exploration, writes Richard Webb

JOSIE FORD

Richard Webb is New Scientist’s executive editor

F

IFTY years ago, almost to the day, Snoopy nearly made it to the moon. Not the canine wannabe pilot: Snoopy was also the call sign of the Apollo 10 lunar landing module (the service module was Charlie Brown, naturally). On 22 May 1969, in the dry run for the Apollo 11 landing two months later, it transported astronauts Eugene Cernan and Thomas Stafford to within 15 kilometres of the moon’s surface. New Scientist’s attitude at the time was notably sniffy. Putting a man on the moon, we wrote just before that event, required courage, organisation and ingenuity, but was “a matter of no greater moment than just peering

into the high recesses of the Big Top and there witnessing the most incredible trapeze act ever performed, from the comfort of our ringside armchairs”. The money would be better spent on the world’s poor, we said. A half-century on, the Apollo moon programme is often dismissed in similar terms (assuming you don’t believe it all played out on a film lot in Los Angeles). Neil Armstrong’s small-yet-giant step of 20 July 1969 was an iconic achievement, but also a costly, dangerous, ideologically driven boondoggle. Boundless tech optimism of the sort that hailed “the space age” had all but burned out by the time

of the 1986 Challenger space shuttle disaster. Those horrific images of the darker side of space certainly seared themselves on my 7-year-old mind. The moon landing anniversary is a moment to reclaim a little optimism, and recalibrate our attitude towards today’s space renaissance (see page 36). Sure, China’s current desire to make its mark in space is geopolitical muscle flexing, too. US vicepresident Mike Pence’s demand that NASA recreate a totemic moment of US primacy by putting an astronaut on the moon again by 2024 is a logical end point of a “Make America Great Again” agenda. As for the billionaire

slugfest between Amazon founder Jeff Bezos (see page 7) and Tesla boss Elon Musk about who has the biggest rocket – well, its motivation speaks for itself. Not all of that cynicism is well placed. To leave Earth is still a supreme technological endeavour, albeit not such a trapeze act now as when the Apollo missions were launched on little more computing power than is found inside a smartphone today. And while national and, increasingly, commercial rivalries will play a part in the second space age, space is one of the few things that truly belongs to all of us. Think of advances such as satellite communications that have bound humanity closer together, or space telescopes that have allowed us to look further into the cosmos. Space invites us to consider our position as the dominant species on a fragile planet with humility. On 24 December 1968, Apollo 8 astronauts took perhaps the most influential photo ever. “Earthrise” showed a beautiful blue orb emerging from the moon’s shadow. It is often credited with kick-starting the environmental movement. Earth-monitoring satellites have since helped expose our effects on the planet’s climate and ecosystems. To attempt to transcend Earth’s boundaries is to understand the value of what we have within them – and how hard we must fight for it. ❚ 18 May 2019 | New Scientist | 25

Views Columnist Field notes from space-time

Are we just making things up? Everything theoretical physicists do is speculative, and likely wrong, except for the things we get right, says Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

R

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is an assistant professor of physics and astronomy, and a core faculty member in women’s studies at the University of New Hampshire. Her research in theoretical physics focuses on cosmology, neutron stars and particles beyond the standard model

Chanda’s week What are you reading? I am enjoying Cosmological Koans by Anthony Aguirre, which comes out in the US later this month. What are you watching? The Desus & Mero talk show is making me laugh so hard. What are you working on? I am doing my usual: worrying about what axions get up to.

This column will appear monthly. Up next week: Graham Lawton on the environment 26 | New Scientist | 18 May 2019

ECENTLY, I visited a prestigious physics department and gave a presentation about my research on a particle called the axion. Fifteen minutes in, a member of the department interrupted me to insist, “Isn’t the axion just a matter of speculation? Shouldn’t you say that?” I had been warned by the graduate students to beware this particular professor, who has a habit of rudely interrupting talks to ask female speakers unnecessary questions. “Yes,” I responded. “I have no idea if the axion is real. Everything theoretical physicists do is speculative, and likely wrong, except for the things we get right.” I continued by reminding the audience of something that I had already noted: the axion is a particle that may be produced during what researchers like me call “the early universe”, when space-time as we traditionally speak of it was less than 1 second old. The existence of the axion was originally hypothesised with a far from frivolous purpose: to prevent particles that we know to be real from developing properties that we are pretty sure they don’t have. It originates in the Peccei-Quinn mechanism, named after its inventors Roberto Peccei and Helen Quinn. Here, it exists to stop the standard model of particle physics – our best stab yet at explaining how material reality works – from endowing a particle in the centre of all atoms, the neutron, with properties that are inconsistent with our laboratory observations. As its name suggests, the neutron has no overall electric charge. But it is made of smaller fundamental particles, called quarks, that do have a charge. The mystery that the standard model

is hard-pressed to explain, and that the axion clears up, is why the distribution of positive and negative charges seems to be exactly the same – why it has precisely zero electric dipole moment, to use the jargon. Professor Sceptic was right. This is all hypothetical. First of all, the neutron may have an electric dipole moment – just one so small we can’t detect it. But, as I told my audience, this would create new problems to address: why have a property that exists, but is so unnaturally small? Even if the electric dipole moment is zero, it is entirely possible that the axion

“Much like detectives in a mystery novel, we develop theories about what happened, then refine or alter them”

still doesn’t exist. Maybe the Peccei-Quinn mechanism is a nice idea that doesn’t reflect how the universe works, so we need a different way of clearing up the mystery. In other words, I told the gathering, I wasn’t worried about running out of things to work on. Professor Sceptic’s concern goes to the heart of what theoretical physicists who study the origins and evolution of the cosmos do: we ask questions about the nature of the evolution of space and time and everything that exists in the

universe, starting billions of years before humans showed up asking questions. This type of scientific work presents us with unique challenges. Unlike chemists in a laboratory, we can’t rerun the experiment. We have exactly one sample universe to work with, and it operates entirely beyond our control. The best we can do is collect information, by taking images of distant stars and galaxies with telescopes, by testing ideas about how particles interact with each other at facilities like the Large Hadron Collider and by detecting vibrations in the fabric of spacetime, aka gravitational waves. To interpret this data, we make some mathematical assumptions, and we simultaneously use the data to hone our mathematical assumptions. Much like detectives in a mystery novel, we develop ideas about what happened, and then we refine or radically alter those ideas, based on new evidence. Then, we try to convince ourselves and each other that our ideas are good, realistic models of the universe. There is much we don’t know. The universe certainly doesn’t care if we figure it out. At the same time, it is a great pleasure to do the work of pairing speculative imagination with hard-won data to get to know the universe in this way. I came to study the axion not for its role in the dipole problem, but because it may also be a good candidate to solve a problem of missing, transparent matter – what has historically been called the “dark matter problem”. Axions still might not exist. But their demise would raise so many questions that it is hard to feel worried about that possibility. I say, bring it on. ❚

SECOND EDITION OF OUR PLANET

THE ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO EARTH It’s the place we call home, but there is much about Earth that remains frustratingly unknown. Explore our planet’s b seven biggest mysteries, how continents form and why the weather’s getting wild. Plus much more Order you copy today at neZsFientistFomtheFolleFtion

Views Aperture

28 | New Scientist | 18 May 2019

Interested in air quality? Listen to air pollution expert Benjamin Barratt at New Scientist Live newscientist.com/speakers/benjamin-barratt

Deadly beauty Photographer Robin Price robinprice.net

THESE luminous specks floating in the half-light look like delightful fireflies. In fact, they are potent markers of air pollution. To tell how many dirty particles linger, you usually need data (or to blow your nose). Artist Robin Price and environmental researcher Francis Pope at the University of Birmingham, UK, have devised a way to depict pollution levels in Earth’s dirtiest and cleanest places. Price walked through this street behind Port Talbot’s steelworks in Wales, UK, with a pole covered in LEDs and a particle sensor. The probability of the LEDs flashing is based on the particle readings: more particles means more lights, revealing the invisible pollution, he says. “I’m carrying a 3-metre pole, taking a long exposure,” says Price. “Only things that are very bright or still appear in the image." Price disappears because he moves too fast for the exposure. This photo revealed there were 20 to 30 micrograms of particles less than 2.5 micrometres across per cubic metre of air. This is at the top end of the World Health Organization’s recommended maximum average daily exposure to particulate matter. Inhaling pollutants is linked to shortened lives and mental health problems. The steelworks probably create much of the pollution, but they are the major local employer so nobody wants them to close. Price says this uneasy balance between economics, environmental degradation and chronic health problems plays out in the other locations he photographed, from Mexico City to Delhi. ❚ Chris Simms

18 May 2019 | New Scientist | 29

Views Your letters Climate change is deeply political and needs action Leader, 27 April From Bryn Glover, Kirkby Malzeard, North Yorkshire, UK You say that “climate change is, emphatically, not a political issue”. While agreeing with everything else you wrote, I must disagree with this. We humans have devised numerous economic models by which to conduct our affairs. They can be divided between two broad headings: market forces and planning for need. In practice, the vast bulk of our activities since the industrial revolution have followed the former model, supposedly steered by the “invisible hand” that economist Adam Smith proposes guides markets. In fact, it is almost exclusively devoted to the creation of return on capital investment. To do so, this model must treat Earth as an unlimited resource, and as a bottomless sewer and rubbish dump. What the planet needs to now experience isn’t simply a standstill, but an actual diminution in current activities. The only fair and humane way to achieve that is by planning global production strictly according to need. There can be no doubt that to embark on the radical, revolutionary course of switching economic models, as humanity surely must, is a profoundly political matter. From Derek Langley, Cambridge, UK In view of your exemplary recent coverage on the depth and urgency of the climate crisis, I was shocked by your dismissive comments on the recent Extinction Rebellion protests. To put the record straight: 1130 supporters were arrested, with many, many thousands on the streets, and the protests were entirely peaceful and respectful. The protests have achieved unprecedented coverage, as well as declarations of emergency by 30 | New Scientist | 18 May 2019

the UK parliament and the Scottish and Welsh governments. Given the scale of the task, Extinction Rebellion can only succeed if it continues to grow into a huge mass movement. Whatever your circumstances, you can play a vital role. Your planet needs you. The editor writes: ❚ We had no intention of being dismissive of Extinction Rebellion.

Another view on the sounds of the aurora

night, I heard an aurora. I told some scientists from the Swedish Institute of Space Physics. They later told me they had found an answer. Earth’s magnetic field is modified in synchrony with the aurora. I wear metalframed glasses and the arms were catching these changes in the magnetic field, creating the noise I was hearing. To me, the sound was like ice crystals fluttering on the surface of the snow, and it wasn’t coming from above as suggested in the article. The synchrony with the aurora was perfect, so I knew that the sound was being created near me and not at aurora level.

knee-jerk reactions that aren’t long-term solutions. If they slow growth, this will hurt the poorest. The solution to global warming will be technological. There is a huge amount of research into renewable energy, and investment is increasing rapidly. Once we have clean energy, we can perhaps consider climate engineering to reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.

Please don’t call drive assist an autopilot

Panic over the climate is counterproductive Letters, 20 April 6 April, p 40 From François Danis, Palaiseau, France David Hambling reports a proposal that auroral sounds come from corona discharges at an altitude of less than 100 metres. In the 90s, I was at Esrange Space Center, near Kiruna in the north of Sweden. One quiet, wind-free

From Mary Rose, Goolwa, South Australia David Flint suggests that what is missing from efforts to reduce climate change is panic. But panic is rarely helpful. It leads to short-term thinking and stopgap measures that can be counterproductive in the long run. Restriction and abstinence are

6 April, p 6 From Sam Edge, Ringwood, Hampshire, UK You mention the limitations of the drive-assist feature in Tesla cars. My biggest concern is that the company calls it an autopilot. This will inevitably give people an incorrect impression of its capabilities. If someone is

Views From the archives concentrating on reading, for example, then it would take them several seconds to re-engage and assess what needed to be done if the car tried to hand back control or, worse, if it made a mistake but did not announce it. By this time, on most highways, the pending accident would already have happened.

Credit where credit’s due for cell culture work

glasses. A significant proportion of my career involved analysing 3D seismic data using interpretation and mapping software. This often came with default colour scales involving a blue-white-red colour bar. With astigmatism, I can’t focus red and blue in the same plane. I used to wonder why I got headaches, until I changed the colour bar to something more amenable, which, fortunately, these tools allowed me to do. Later, I attended an ergonomics course by a company whose corporate colour scheme and visual aids were bright red and blue, which was horrendous for me to look at.

No human traders need that kind of speed

20 April, p 24 From Gil Domingue, Edinburgh, UK Colin Garner makes some good points regarding the need to educate doctors about prescribing antibiotics. But he does us microbiologists a disservice by stating that medical doctors culture bacterial samples to identify infections. Microbiologists are the ones who do that. We can troubleshoot when doctors unwittingly choose the wrong antibiotic.

Colour discomfort affects many more people Letters, 13 April From Jeff Dickens, Strachan, Aberdeenshire, UK Graham Cox raises the issue of how people whose perception of colour is different to the average for the population can be poorly served ergonomically. This isn’t limited to colour blindness. I have astigmatism. I lived with it uncorrected for many years, until my near sight deteriorated enough to require

4 May, p 44 From Eric Kvaalen, Les Essarts-le-Roi, France Mark Harris asks us to imagine a trader in London wanting to access data from New York: if it were routed via SpaceX’s planned constellation of satellites, it might reach her in 45 milliseconds. If that kind of speed were needed, the trader would be neither a “she” nor a “he”, but an “it” – an algorithm. ❚

For the record ❚ Strictly speaking, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared measles to be eliminated in the US (20 April, p 22). ❚ It is bacteria associated with fungi and other organisms that do nitrogen fixation (27 April, p 8).

40 years ago, New Scientist was captivated by a confirmation of Einstein’s general relativity WE DIDN’T hold back with the superlatives on 17 May 1979, when describing observations made with the Multiple Mirror Telescope (MMT) just installed at the Mount Hopkins Observatory in Arizona. “The instrument’s design represents the century’s most radical innovation in optical telescopes,” we enthused, “a carefully coordinated combination of six 1.8 metre telescopes, whose light-collecting power is equivalent to a single 4.5 metre mirror.” That made it the third most powerful optical instrument in the world. Despite only having operated for six nights, it had already come up with the goods: “the most spectacular demonstration yet of light being deflected by gravity, as Einstein predicted in his theory of general relativity”, we said. That story began in 1919, when two teams, promoted by astronomer Arthur Eddington, observed the positions of distant stars changing during a total solar eclipse, just as predicted by Einstein’s new theory. In 1933, Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky predicted that a sufficiently massive body, such as a galaxy, would bend light around itself to the point that objects behind it would appear twice in the sky when observed from Earth. This was what, almost half a century on, the MMT saw for the first time. Analysis of the spectrographic signatures of two quasars 8.7 billion light years away, QSO 0957+561 A and QSO 0957+561 B, showed that they weren’t just suspiciously similar – they were identical. “That forces us to conclude that the images come from the same object,” Smithsonian astronomer Fred Chaffee told us. The same light had bent two ways around an intervening object. The pair have proved a gift that keeps on giving. In 1995, Johannes Pelt at the Tartu Observatory in Estonia and his colleagues at the Hamburg Observatory in Germany used the time lag between modulations in A and B’s brightness to calculate how fast the universe is expanding. From this, they determined that it is a couple of billion years older than previously thought. The following year, Rudy Schild at the HarvardSmithsonian Center for Astrophysics and his colleagues spotted a momentary dip in the brightness of one quasar image. That is perhaps induced by the passing of the most distant planet we have yet detected, 4 billion light years away. Simon Ings

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To find more from the archives, visit newscientist.com/old-scientist

18 May 2019 | New Scientist | 31

Views Culture

How to build your own world Dreams lets everyone create a video game realm – but without the tricky coding. Douglas Heaven goes exploring games and more from scratch? Both, kind of. “It’s a fantastic creative engine disguised as a game,” says Beech. Since Dreams launched on 16 April in “early access” mode, in which keen players buy an unfinished version and Media Molecule uses their feedback to tweak the final release, things have become clearer. So far, around 58,000 player creations have been shared online. But that’s just the start: over several years, millions of examples are expected to follow. In the full release later this year, Dreams will be packaged with a more recognisable game – an adventure with quests, milestones and levels. Many players will probably just play that, says Beech. But what is clear is that those who do dive in will bring a lot of very weird and wonderful things to the surface. Browsing through what players have made and uploaded already is like scrolling through society’s subconscious. “It’s a bit like YouTube for games,” says Beech. “You’ve no idea what you’re going to get.” Player-made contributions have been a big part of Media Molecule’s output for some time. Its LittleBigPlanet game series was marketed with the tag line “Play,

Game Dreams

“WE’RE going to make a hedgearoo? Sounds good!” With that, John Beech is off. Wielding two PlayStation motion controllers with great precision, he tugs and teases a brown blob on screen into a hedgehog shape. The wand-like controllers are used to pull tufty prickles from its back. Four more blobs become kangaroo legs that are stretched, toned and prodded into place. Beech is a designer at Media Molecule, a game studio in Guildford, UK. The company is known for its quirky, creative games and the demo of its new release Dreams at Rezzed, a videogame event in London, is more improv workshop than tech showcase. “Be prepared to be imaginative,” we are told before Beech bounds on stage. He asks the crowd what he should make and runs with it. With a few more casual flicks and clicks, he animates his hedge-aroo’s head and legs to make it dance. He then makes an underground station, complete with train, disco ball and confetti. He adjusts the colours and angles of the lighting. Opening up a multitrack music editor, he chops out the middle section of a jaunty tune and sets it playing in his hedge-aroo’s underground disco. Dreams is a masterclass in how much can be done with so little. Yet people have been confused about what exactly Dreams is since it was announced several years ago. Is it a video game or a powerful design tool that lets you craft your own music, films, 32 | New Scientist | 18 May 2019

BOTH IMAGES: MEDIA MOLECULE/SONY INTERACTIVE ENTERTAINMENT

Media Molecule For PlayStation 4

create, share”. In many ways, Dreams is a natural progression, but taken to an extreme. Where LittleBigPlanet invited players to design their own levels for an existing game using pre-made props, Dreams pretty much invites you to do anything. Players can take the images in their head and bring them to life. The usual stuff crops up, of course: spooky woods, kooky houses, robots, unicorns. Then there’s a giant T. rex stomping on skyscrapers and a cactus that wants a hug. One person has made stunningly detailed fried eggs. Another has recreated the surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa. There is also an animated story about a pea trying to cook itself, narrated by the protagonist. Then there’s an amazing reproduction of a scene from Dead Space – a 2008 survival horror video game made by a team of hundreds. This recreation has been made by just one player – Quinn Barnett. It is more or less accurate apart from the giant yellow banana amid the mutant apocalypse. People have also uploaded dozens of original games, from first-person shooters to racing games to platformers. Beech is thrilled: “Oh, wow, it’s such a mix, it’s unbelievable.” One that caught his eye introduces you to different

designs of Roman column. “There is a test at the end, but it’s done in a really fun way,” he says. He now thinks that teachers should use Dreams in their lessons. Beech even used Dreams to plan his wedding. He made a replica of the venue and his girlfriend walked around it in virtual reality and pointed to where she thought they should put the balloons and flowers. “Everyone from work who came to my wedding was familiar with the venue because they’d seen it on my screen,” he says. My first go with Dreams is a little overwhelming. The motion controls are easy but there are so many options at every turn that I freeze, wondering what to do. Beech admits that it is a steep learning curve, but he’s convinced reaching the top will be worth it. “Dreams is very intuitive and slick,” says Barnett. He’s dabbled in game-making before but says he can already do more in Dreams than with other design tools. He remade Dead Space to get to grips

Don’t miss Listen

with Dreams and now wants to use it to make original games. “I expect this will demystify game development for a lot of people,” he says. “It’s a gateway for creative people who might have been daunted by conventional programming and 3D graphics systems.” That’s what Beech hopes, too. He got his job at Media Molecule by creating levels in LittleBigPlanet that became popular with other players. Migraines had made it hard for him to take exams and he left school with few qualifications, working as a builder for 11 years. When he started playing LittleBigPlanet at 26, he drew on his job to build things in the game. “I’d see what other people had done and thought I could do it better,” he says. One day he was nearly killed at work when he was buried at the bottom of a trench. He came home covered in mud and started playing the game to relax and he

Fantastical beasts and other creatures (above and below left) – some of them made by players of Dreams

“People who dive in will bring weird things to the surface. It’s already like trawling through society’s subconscious”

found messages from other players telling him he should get a job at Media Molecule. “It suddenly clicked and I thought, now that’s a good idea,” he says. “I went up there wearing a backpack with my PlayStation in it and they told me I could start the following week,” he says. That was 10 years ago. For the last eight he has been working on Dreams. To make Dreams possible, Media Molecule has had to reinvent how games are made. Most games construct their worlds out of millions of interconnected polygons, which give everything you see its shape. These are then given more detail by covering them with what are known in the game design industry as textures. It’s a little like making structures out of millions of odd-shaped boxes and then wallpapering over them. Working with polygons and textures is hard, though. “In most games you have very skilled artists who have learned how to optimise this,” says Beech. “We can’t give that to someone and expect them to be able to do it.” So Dreams does without polygons and uses what the studio calls “flecks” instead – virtual objects that can be given both shape and detail, like the brown blob that sprouts hedgehog spines. “I don't think anyone has done it before,” says Beech. “We can have almost infinite detail.” The result is an amazing creation tool that combines the power of professional-grade design software with the handling of a video game. “Someone asked me – do you think it’s going to put game artists out of a job?” says Beech. “I don’t. I think it’s going to create the next generation.” ❚ Douglas Heaven is a technology writer based in London

13 Minutes to the Moon is Kevin Fong’s BBC podcast trailing the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing in July. It features new interviews with Apollo astronauts Michael Collins and Jim Lovell. Read

Finding Our Place in the Universe (MIT Press) by French astrophysicist Hélène Courtois, recounts her 20-year effort to identify Laniakea, a supercluster of galaxies to which the Milky Way belongs. Play

Observation (No Code/ Devolver Digital) casts you as the resident AI on a space station that’s gone badly wrong. You can operate control systems, cameras and tools to unravel the mystery. Out on 21 May for PC and PS4.

18 May 2019 | New Scientist | 33

Views Culture The science of film

When smaller matters Blockbuster franchises like the Avengers often want to create alternative time frames or mess with different outcomes. One of the best escape routes is to delve into the quantum realm, finds Simon Ings

Ant-Man has no clue about the science of the time machine

MARVEL STUDIOS/DISNEY

Simon Ings is a culture editor at New Scientist. His latest novel is The Smoke (Gollancz)

Film

Avengers: End Game directed by Anthony and Joe Russo

Simon also recommends... Film

The Incredible Shrinking Man directed by Jack Arnold

In this 1957 sci-fi movie, a man starts shrinking after exposure to radioactive pesticides. A heartbreaker. Book

The Order of Time Carlo Rovelli Allen Lane

“The events of the world do not form an orderly queue, like the English,” writes this most erudite theoretical physicist. “They crowd around chaotically, like Italians.”

34 | New Scientist | 18 May 2019

HALFWAY through Anthony and Joe Russo’s Avengers: End Game, Tony Stark knocks together a time machine. He is out to stop Thanos, a villain whose solution to the universe’s resource shortages has been to wipe out half of all life. Stopping Thanos won’t be easy, since the film – the capstone to 21 interconnected movies in the Marvel cinematic universe – opens with him having already achieved his goal. Many favourite characters are already dead. Resetting past narratives is a hard trick to pull off, as the deceased Bobby Ewing discovered when he stepped out of his shower in 1986, erasing two whole seasons of Dallas’s soapy story arc. On the face of it, you would think sci-fi franchises ought to have an easier time of it. The world of the X-Men draws to a close this year with two films, Dark Phoenix and The New Mutants. The  franchise’s constant, piecemeal reinventions have been sloppy, though surprisingly faithful to the even sloppier logic of the comic books. By way of compensation,

we have had the ravages of passing time embodied by the unageing, unkillable and ever more lonely figure of Wolverine, played with true pathos by Hugh Jackman. From the BBC’s intermittently mind-bending Doctor Who to the gobsmackingly weird last act of the Battlestar Galactica retread, it is clear that you can tell truths

“End Game’s hokey time travel works better by colliding two chunks of utter nonsense at high narrative speed” about time, age, mortality, loss and regret in playful ways without ever resorting to a science book. I wish someone had pointed this out to Star Trek, notorious for being the franchise where overblown pop-science goes to die. Since The Next Generation, Star Trek has been saddled with a science bible that almost makes sense. Einstein’s equations do allow for time machines. Physicist Kip Thorne’s space-time wormholes do permit the

retrograde transmission of information. Still, the time machines aren’t remotely buildable, the messages you can send from the future say virtually nothing, and the more you cite real science, the more you invite responses that begin “Yes, but…” or “I think you’ll find…” Avengers: End Game’s hokey time travel works far better, I reckon, by colliding two chunks of utter nonsense at high narrative speed. Take one master thief (the always affable Paul Rudd as Ant-Man), give him a suit that lets him shrink small enough to enter “the quantum realm”, point out (correctly) that at this scale time and space don’t mean a whole lot, and hey presto, you have yourself a franchise-sized Get Out of Jail Free machine powered entirely by flimflam. Viewers can’t cavil, because there is no science to be had here – not since 1899, anyway. That was the year physicist Max Planck evolved a model of the physical universe that relied upon ratios (which are timeless and universally true) rather than measurements (which depend upon who is making the ruler). In Planck’s universe, the speed of light, the electromagnetic wave function and the gravitational constant all have a value of 1. From this, you can work out the shortest distance imaginable – the point at which the terms “here” or “there” cease to have meaning. In a space smaller than the Planck length squared, information can’t exist. This is why a single photon entering a black hole increases the area of the hole’s event horizon by 10-66 square centimetres – as the evermodest Ant-Man doesn’t say. ❚

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Features Cover story

A new golden space age Whether it’s billionaires vying to build the biggest rocket or the US and China competing to return to the moon, space exploration is lifting off again, says Leah Crane

“I’m on the surface, and, as I take man’s last step from the surface, back home for some time to come – but we believe not too long into the future – I’d like to just [say] what I believe history will record. That America’s challenge of today has forged man’s destiny of tomorrow. And as we leave the moon at Taurus-Littrow, we leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind. Godspeed the crew of Apollo 17.”

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HOSE words, spoken by astronaut Gene Cernan on 14 December 1972, aren’t nearly as famous as Neil Armstrong’s “giant leap for mankind”. But as we gear up to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing this July, they have a certain pathos. The last words spoken on the moon came just three-and-a-bit years after the first. Since they were uttered, humanity hasn’t ventured beyond near-Earth orbit. Our aspiration to reach for the stars – or at least the nearer bits of outer space – was over almost as soon as it began. Just lately, however, space is looking a little crowded again. National space agencies and private companies in the US, China, Japan, India, Israel and elsewhere are vying to send uncrewed missions to the moon, Mars and beyond. In the US, one of the two original space powers, the stated aim is to send humans back to the moon by 2024. Other countries are making serious noises about permanent space bases, too. So why this space boom, and why now? And crucially – are we ready for it? The original space race was simple to fathom: it was a straight fight between the two

main parties to the cold war, fought largely for propaganda purposes. “The Soviet Union was suffering from poverty and corruption and it still cemented itself as a huge power by what it could accomplish in space,” says Laura Forczyk of the space consultancy firm Astralytical in Atlanta, Georgia. The Soviets made the early running, too, launching the first artificial satellite in 1957 and putting the first man, and woman, into space in the early 1960s. That stung the US into action. Its Apollo programme ensured that it pulled off the ultimate coup of that one small step onto the moon on 20 July 1969. But after that, the increasing cost and decreasing propaganda

“China has established itself as a space superpower, with capabilities like the original two” value of crewed space flight meant dreams of moon bases or settling on Mars remained just that – dreams. We never gave up entirely on space, of course. Earth’s immediate environment has become increasingly packed with satellites surveying the planet and beaming messages around it, plus a whole load of associated junk. Then there is the International Space Station (ISS), a symbol of a new era of post-cold war space cooperation since its first component blasted into orbit in 1998. It is jointly operated by NASA, the Russian space agency Roscosmos, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency

(JAXA), the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency. Since Cernan’s return, its orbit 400 kilometres up is the furthest humans have strayed from Earth. The times they are a’changing, however. Most notably, China has rapidly established itself as a third space superpower, with capabilities approaching those of the original two. The China National Space Administration sent its first “taikonaut” into space in 2003, and has now landed uncrewed craft on the moon twice, including Chang’e 4, which made the first controlled landing on the far side of the moon in January. After short-lived successes, it plans to have its own permanent space station up and running by the early 2020s. In total, 13 nations plus an additional 22 that collaborate in ESA have rocket launch capabilities, and there are 72 separate national space agencies. Former NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver explains this boom with science communicator Neil deGrasse Tyson’s sentiment that the only motivations that drive big things are fear, greed and glory. “Apollo was a combination of fear and glory,” she says. “I think this renaissance is about greed, and I’m fine with that.” That is true at least of some commercial interests, who want to get in early on what they see as an industry that will one day boom. With smaller nations, glory is still in play. “For the new countries in space flight, they haven’t gotten their glory yet,” says Garver. As for the “why now?”, the basic story is simple. “When there’s sort of a sea change, it’s usually because there’s tonnes going on underneath the surface,” says Mary Lynne Dittmar of the Coalition for Deep Space > 18 May 2019 | New Scientist | 37

New Scientist: The new quest for space Next week, read how the solar system’s most mysterious planet may have enabled life on Earth

Exploration, a space-industry advocacy group based in Washington DC. The jump may seem sudden, but humanity has been slowly building towards this for decades. Take the “new” space power, India: it has been launching satellites with its own rockets since 1980. An Indian Space Research Organisation probe that entered orbit around Mars in September 2014 brought it into the spotlight as the fourth space agency to get there after NASA, Roscosmos and the ESA. Similarly, Japan launched Hayabusa, the first mission to bring back samples of dust from an asteroid, as far back as 2003. Its successor, Hayabusa 2, blasted a cannonball at another asteroid to take samples last month. The Hayabusa missions are part of a conscious softly-softly approach on Japan’s part. “Frequent small missions would be the path for us to pursue, and this should allow new players to participate in our missions,” says Masaki Fujimoto, deputy director of JAXA’s Institute of Space and Astronautical Science. That illustrates a key factor in the new space race: the willingness of smaller nations to work with industry. Nowhere was that more apparent than with the Beresheet mission that, after successfully reaching orbit around the moon, crash-landed on its surface on 11 April. It was run by SpaceIL, an Israeli company founded to participate in the Google Lunar X Prize, which offered $20 million to the first privately funded venture to land on the moon. Although mostly backed by private donors, it got some funding from the Israeli government and displayed an Israeli flag. Despite the ultimate failure to touch down, owing to an engine problem in the final stages of landing, “Beresheet is a great testament to show that you don’t have to be a superpower

to land on the moon”, says John Thornton, CEO of US space robotics company Astrobotic. “That same thing can be repeated all around the world.” The Mexican Space Agency, which was only founded in 2010, is planning to send a scientific instrument to the moon aboard an Astrobotic lander sometime this year.

Ready-made rockets Dig deeper, and you find the developments reflect different strands of progress coming together to give us more ways to play in space. Decades of miniaturising electronics and other components, plus advances in 3D printing and robotics, means that spacecraft parts are cheaper and easier than ever to make. “Back in the Apollo era, they were inventing technology for the first time and using the very first of everything,” says Thornton. “Now you can just go buy the parts you need and it’s making it possible to build spacecraft very, very quickly.” Space technology companies are springing up to fill a multitude of niches, so would-be space adventurers don’t have to go through years of research and development on their own as larger companies did in the early 2000s. “They’re able to get start-up cash, do development and get their product to market in a very short amount of time, and I think that’s where the renaissance is coming from,” says Eric Stallmer of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation in Washington DC. Underpinning all of this is a revolution in the launch market. Getting the NASA space shuttle into orbit cost about $1.5 billion per trip by the time it was retired in 2011. A launch with ESA’s Ariane 5 rocket today will set you back around $200 million. But SpaceX, the

REUTERS/SPACE IL

The Israeli Beresheet probe crash-landed on the moon in April – but it shows how far start-ups can get in space

38 | New Scientist | 18 May 2019

company founded by the entrepreneur Elon Musk, has been launching large rockets into orbit since 2010. One of its Falcon 9 rockets can now get your mission there for $62 million. If you are willing to ride-share – to launch your spacecraft in a bundle with other satellites aboard the same rocket – the costs get even lower. If you have a satellite that is under 100 kilograms, one of US company Rocket Lab’s smaller Electron rockets could launch it from its New Zealand facility for just $5 million. In 2018, there were 114 rocket launches using 25 different types of rocket. “There’s this cycle of goodness: the more they can launch, the more the cost is reduced, therefore the more people come up with things to launch because they can afford to,” says Garver. The true new space race may be more between the large private launch providers than between nations. SpaceX, the United Launch Alliance and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin are all working on new heavy-lift rockets to take cargo into deep space, although SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy is the only one that has flown as yet. So far, so non-human. But along with the big rocket companies, smaller firms are working on the tech for human space flight, from budget lunar landers to habitats that inflate or that are 3D printed from Martian dust. For now, the customers for commercial firms big and small are mainly governments, particularly the US government, through NASA. More than half of SpaceX’s launches have carried payloads from US government agencies. “NASA is providing a backbone,” says Dittmar. “I see it as a natural evolution: money flowing from government into business ventures, ventures furthering this technology and government eventually moving on.” The US government is certainly not moving on yet. In March, vice president Mike Pence announced that the president would direct NASA to send astronauts to the moon by 2024 “by any means necessary”. That is a tall order: ideally, NASA would use its own Space Launch System rocket, but it has been mired in schedule and budget overruns since the agency contracted Boeing to start building it in 2012. NASA could use a rocket from SpaceX or Blue Origin, but it would require an overhaul of how payloads are put on those rockets, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said last month. Such an ambitious deadline will require additional funding. If NASA gets it, that could be a game changer for the wider space-flight industry. “If that’s an enduring statement,

Moon Village is a multi-partner open concept. ESA’s role is something like a broker to bring together the different players,” he says.

Rules of the road

“The new jump into space may seem sudden, but humanity has been building to this for decades” that’s going to push everybody hard and really be the deliverance on this renaissance,” says Andrew Rush, the CEO of in-space manufacturing company Made In Space. NASA’s plans, which include a moonorbiting space station, are far from the only ones – after all, the moon is an obvious first step in our second attempt to reach for space. “I think of the moon as our practice ground as a species,” says Thornton. “If you can learn to really live off the land and use the resources of another planetary body, that’s when we can become true explorers of our solar system.” In 2017, Musk announced that SpaceX would aim to enable the creation of a lunar base. Last week, Bezos announced Blue Origin’s plans for developing a crewed lander to go to the moon’s south pole by Pence’s 2024 deadline. That would be a prelude to setting up a permanent settlement there, eventually

moving industry from Earth into space. Nine other companies, including Astrobotic, have been awarded NASA contracts to work on moon landers. Meanwhile, in the wake of its successful moon landings, China is turning its sights towards crewed missions and eventually a lunar research station. ESA has ambitious plans for many robotic missions and crewed flights to Mars in the 2030s, and has developed a concept for a moon base. Roscosmos has announced plans to establish a lunar settlement by 2040, although experts have questioned its ability to do so, given that Russia has done no planetary exploration since the Soviet Union was dissolved. Not everyone is entirely at ease with the direction of space travel. ESA director-general Johann-Dietrich Wörner is worried about a return of the “space race” framing, seeing it as counter to the collaboration that has been fruitful in projects like the ISS. “I hope that we are not back into the race,” he says. “If we do this together beyond Earthly borders, beyond Earthly politics, beyond any Earthly crisis, then we do a service for all humankind.” ESA’s own moon base concept follows this collaborative principle, says Wörner. “The

If we don’t do it together, we might not be able to do it at all, says Wörner. In March, India tested its new anti-satellite missile system, the fourth country to do so, blasting one of its satellites into pieces. “India registered its name as a space power,” said Indian prime minister Narendra Modi in a statement after the test. That registration came with a cost: hundreds of bits of fastmoving debris, putting other satellites and even the ISS in danger. “Especially in light of this anti-satellite test, it’s clear that there need to be rules of the road,” says Stallmer. The more satellites and other spacecraft we send up, the more difficult it is to keep an eye on everything. Tracking capabilities and international laws need to catch up with the boom in commercial space flight. “You can’t just expand the space industry by orders of magnitude and manage it as business as usual,” says Laura Grego of the Union of Concerned Scientists in Massachusetts. But get it right, and we can all benefit. Having more satellites has given us better internet and communications, and more accurate weather forecasting and GPS. Testing on the ISS has led to the development of water purification systems that are more compact and efficient than ever before. Building spacecraft has enabled innumerable advances in material science. “Space is a team sport,” says Rush. “The more folks that are thinking about utilisation in space to help their populations or their customers or their industry, the better it is for everyone.” So what is behind the new space race? Glory – certainly. Greed – undoubtedly. But it is also about dreaming, and a genuine desire to push the boundaries of science and technology in space once more. “All of the people who are coming to the table right now, they’re being drawn to the big idea – the big idea that we’re going out and exploring again,” says Dittmar. Fifty years after the culmination of the first space race, we are listening out again for those next words from the moon. ❚ Leah Crane is New Scientist’s space reporter, based in Boston, Massachusetts. Follow her on Twitter @DownHereOnEarth 18 May 2019 | New Scientist | 39

Features

Studying human variation is possible without resorting to race, argues Angela Saini in this extract from her new book

The long reach of race science

ANGÉLICA DASS / HUMANAE - WORK IN PROGRESS

T

HE end of the second world war was meant to have spelled the death of race science. Until the 1930s, it had been relatively acceptable for biologists and anthropologists to believe in innate differences between races. Many assumed that certain groups were superior to others. It was only after the war and the Holocaust that the world finally turned its back on this dangerous field of research. People thought about race differently following the war. Anthropologists showed that most of what we think of as racial difference is in fact cultural and linguistic difference. Geneticists, starting with Richard Lewontin in 1972, have shown that more than 90 per cent of the genetic variation we see between humans lies within the racial categories we use. Being of the same race doesn’t necessarily make two people more genetically similar to each other than either 40 | New Scientist | 18 May 2019

“We assume that race has been purged from science. But has it?”

of them would be to someone of another race. Race is today described as a social construct, its study confined to the social sciences so we can understand the effects of historical and modern-day discrimination. The handful of scientists who have continued to insist publicly on the existence of biological races have often been on the margins of respectability. There was William Shockley, the Nobel prize-winning physicist at Stanford University in California who wanted black women in the US to be voluntarily sterilised. Then there was Arthur Jensen, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who claimed that black people had innately lower intelligence levels than white people. We think of Jensen and Shockley as exceptions. We assume that race has been purged from science. But has it? In truth, it never completely disappeared. There remains a suspicion among some scientists that there could be something tangible to race, that genetics could someday uncover unpalatable truths. Last year, Harvard population geneticist David Reich wrote in The New York Times, “it is simply no longer possible to ignore average genetic differences among ‘races’”. Reich told me in an interview a month later that he doesn’t believe these differences will be large, and genetics will continue to shatter racial myths, but even so, “there are differences amongst people. We don’t know what they are so we have to deal with uncertainty.” This uncertainty reflects how even wellintentioned, politically neutral researchers such as Reich can’t help but resort to race when thinking about human difference. The field of population genetics is a case in point. One of its former leading lights, the late Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza was a staunch anti-racist. In 1973, he publicly debated race with Shockley at Stanford, where he was also a professor. Yet even Cavalli-Sforza, whose work focused on understanding how genetic variation is distributed among humans, clung to the belief that race isn’t a completely redundant concept in genetics. In his book Genes, Peoples and Languages, published in 2000, Cavalli-Sforza wrote: “A race is a group of individuals that we can recognize as biologically different from others.” His was a statistical definition of race, based on the concept that there are clusters of people who share certain gene frequencies. So while our common racial categories may have little meaning, suggested Cavalli-Sforza, certain populations – especially tight-knit ones – could be considered races, even if only statistically.

There are no distinct racial “types” with hard boundaries, only statistical similarities between whichever groups we want to identify. Philosopher Lisa Gannett, at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Canada, has warned of the ethical repercussions of thinking about race in this clustered way. The problem lies in the need to group in the first place, to separate people even when that means having to zoom in on the tiniest bits of the genome that might differ. Even then, those tiny differences are only on average, not applicable to every person in that group. Gannett calls it “statistical racism”. While scientists may feel they have left race behind, she argues, in reality it is only their language and parameters that have changed. They may not call them races, but researchers today still refer to European and African “populations”.

Population trap This clustered way of thinking about race culminated in the early 1990s with the Human Genome Diversity Project, spearheaded by Cavalli-Sforza himself. He and colleagues based mainly in the US wanted to take DNA samples from what they saw as distinct, isolated indigenous groups around the world – including the Basques of Europe, the Kurds of eastern Turkey and Native Americans – and use them to build a picture of the past as well as of human evolutionary change. This new perspective, they announced in the journal Genomics in 1991, would “supplement and strengthen findings from archaeology, linguistics, and history”. Could this be called race science? Those behind the Human Genome Diversity Project didn’t see what they were doing as race science, but it was hard not to see how the project bore some of its hallmarks. One scientist, for example, “talked about the need to sample ‘isolates of historical interest’, a term that indigenous populations did not care for”, says Henry Greely at Stanford Law School, who was brought in to navigate the ethical issues around the project. “It struck me that that was not likely to be well received because it’s a very clinical, bloodless way of referring to people who are alive, and cultures that are living now. Historical interest is something you find in a museum. It was tone-deaf.” Politically anti-racist though the scientists behind the project were, they fell into the trap of treating some populations as biologically special and distinct. They forced people into categories that did not necessarily make > 18 May 2019 | New Scientist | 41

How real is race? Hear Angela Saini speak at New Scientist Live www.newscientistlive.com

evolutionary sense, in the same way that race scientists did in the 18th and 19th centuries when coming up with the racial categories we use today. These populations were sometimes defined by little more than cultural or linguistic boundaries. “The idea that [the people in] these groups are somehow truly genetically similar is a huge assumption,” says sociologist Catherine Bliss at the University of California, San Francisco. Just because communities appear to be tight-knit and ancient doesn’t mean there has never been any mixing between them and others. There has always been mixing between all human populations, which is why we are so similar today. Even at the outset of the Human Genome Diversity Project, concerns were raised. Before it was launched, an alternative was mooted. Rather than sampling the DNA of population groups thought to be isolated, scientists could instead study people at regularly spaced geographical intervals across the globe.

Culturally loaded This “grid sampling” approach was championed by Allan Wilson, a biochemist based at the University of California, Berkeley, known for the Mitochondrial Eve hypothesis, placing our most recent common ancestor in Africa around 200,000 years ago. Wilson believed that grid sampling would document human variation as it really was rather than imposing possibly incorrect assumptions on existing groups. “If you were to grid sample,” says Bliss, “you’re not going to get tidy and neat similarities.” This is because there aren’t any: human variation doesn’t sit along precise boundaries. It is messier than any racial model, with each neighbouring population blending into the next. While some populations may have slightly different gene frequencies to others, there is no gene that appears in all the members of one race and not in another. “Wilson’s approach would’ve gotten us closer to actual similarities,” says Bliss. “It would have been more accurate.” But Wilson died aged 56, just before the first planning meetings for the Human Genome Diversity Project began. Without him, his grid sampling proposal was shelved. The project went on to become mired in ethical controversy and protests from indigenous groups. It never secured the funding it needed to get off the ground. For geneticist Mark Jobling at the University of Leicester, UK, the way the project was 42 | New Scientist | 18 May 2019

structured – deliberately targeting particular populations rather than looking at the DNA of people wherever they happened to be in the world – was what ultimately undermined it. “How you define the population in the first place, these are culturally loaded things in themselves,” he says. “So there was a lot of cultural discrimination in the original aims.” It is perfectly possible to study global human variation without grouping people, says Jobling. Our genomes have so much in common, the physical variations so subtle, that humans can theoretically be grouped any way we like. The genetic variants associated with light skin, for instance, are common not only in Europe and parts of east Asia, but also in the San hunter-gatherers of southern Africa. You could do a thought experiment where you grouped everyone on Earth based on three nationalities: Kenyan, Swede or Japanese, he says. Theoretically everyone could be placed in one of these groups as we are all genetically connected to the average Kenyan, Swede or Japanese person, either directly or by historical migration. “You could say that you were so many per cent Kenyan, so many per cent Swedish and so many per cent Japanese,” says Jobling. This may seem bizarre, and of course he’s not suggesting we do it, but it is no more bizarre than dividing the world into black, brown, yellow, red and white – as race scientists once did. And it is only a little less arbitrary than the racial categories we use today. Medical researchers have noticed how poor a proxy for human variation these racial categories can be. Even the gene that causes sickle cell disease, which people often think of as being mainly associated with those of African ancestry, is actually found in all ethnic groups, as the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence points out. This isn’t to say that those behind the project were racist. “Racism is born of ignorance, fear of the stranger and desire for power: it has to be fought, first by showing its nonsense and its real roots,” Cavalli-Sforza wrote in an email interview with me six months before he died in August 2018. He was a force for good, a scientist who fought publicly against racism and fascism in the full understanding of what this meant, having lived in Italy during the second world war. Yet in the same exchange, he also referred to the “children of partners coming from genetically distant groups” – commonly known as mixed-race or mixedheritage children – as “hybrids”, a term that many might see as both morally

Measuring human diversity Geneticists typically sample from discrete populations, but a potentially much better approach is to do so based on a regularly spaced geographical grid

Population clusters

HUMANAE PROJECT These images by photographer Angélica Dass match skin tones to the Pantone colour system. “Humanae is an ongoing, unusually direct reflection on the colour of the skin that challenges the concept of race,” she says.

Grid sampling

Angela Saini is a science writer and broadcaster based in London. Follow her on Twitter @AngelaDSaini

and scientifically inappropriate. “Cavalli-Sforza was an old school anthropologist,” says Jobling. “He would show old slides of him collecting DNA, blood samples in Africa from pygmy groups and offering glass beads and cigarettes in return.” Cavalli-Sforza wasn’t a racist. At the same time, it may be impossible to expect anyone, especially a biologist born in 1922, to completely shed the ideas of race prevalent in the early 20th century, particularly when society in general still lives with them today – racial discrimination is still widespread in education and employment, for example. This is the heart of the problem. It is difficult to be convinced that mainstream scientists fully abandoned race science after the second world war – not because they were racists, but because they were human. They were living in a world that was still ridden with racism, segregation and apartheid. The old ideas about race that had been a firm part of everyday science wouldn’t simply vanish. “What happens is that you’ve got a large community of very well-meaning, selfdescribed anti-racist scientists seeking to find a way to move beyond race into population

genetics, which seems to be incredibly neutral. It’s numbers, it’s statistical, it’s objective,” says historian Joanna Radin at Yale University. But “population genetics is a science done by people, working with the assumptions and the ideas that are available at the time”.

Race is useless According to geneticist Mark Thomas at University College London, who has collaborated with Reich, race is a useless way to think about human variation. “There is no categorical imperative in biology, and no need or value in placing people in biological boxes,” he says. “Unfortunately, that doesn’t stop people ‘racialising’ others, and perhaps that reflects our desire to categorise.” The recent discovery that other, now-extinct humans such as Neanderthals and Denisovans bred with Homo sapiens has reignited the racial debate, prompting some to wonder if the greater proportion of Neanderthal DNA shared by Europeans, for instance, gives meaning to our racial categories. But as anthropologist John Shea at Stony Brook University in New York

“A pernicious assumption is that specific races have specific genes”

notes, “the interbreeding thing is more like a symbolic thing for us than it is of evolutionary consequence”. Even now, scientists struggle to accept that they may still be working within the frameworks of the past. There remains a tendency to treat population groups as if they are genetically distinct. The Center for the Study of Human Polymorphisms in Paris, France, keeps a bank of DNA samples from populations all over the world. And in 2015, the University of Oxford launched a project to make a genetic map of the people within the UK, named People of the British Isles. While no members of these projects would see themselves as race scientists, it could be argued that this grouping of people harks back to the same methods. Population genetics also fuels the trend for consumer ancestry testing. In 2018, AncestryDNA announced that it had sold around 10 million kits. “The Human Genome Diversity Project had these ethnic groupings, and all these ancestry testing firms have their ethnic groupings, which are the same groupings,” says Bliss. “They collect DNA and have reference populations, and they’re interchangeable. The way they communicate those results and map people’s ancestry is in a completely ethno-racialised way.” Among the public, the tests may reinforce a belief that race has deeper biological meaning. In 2017, it was reported that white supremacists in the US were using them to prove how “white” they were, brandishing their results as proof of shared European ancestry. These tests are based on the belief that there are distinct ancient populations from which each of us hail, says Bliss. The answer, perhaps, is for researchers to stop thinking about people in clusters. “One of the most pernicious assumptions that we still hold when it comes to human genetics and genomics is that specific races have specific genes or specific genetic material that’s unique to them,” says Bliss. This assumption is false. But we will never be free of the fallacy, she says, “if we keep on sampling by racial categories or ethnolinguistic categories, and write the data through the software, and then slap the categories back on afterwards”. ❚ This piece is an edited extract from Angela Saini’s new book Superior: The return of race science (4th Estate), published on 30 May. Watch a video interview with her on race at newscientist.com/angelainterview 18 May 2019 | New Scientist | 43

Features

A world without rubber? The stretchy stuff is essential to modern life, but the world’s supply is worryingly vulnerable. A solution is urgently needed, finds Graham Lawton

44 | New Scientist | 18 May 2019

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I

N A classic episode of The Simpsons, Bart and his schoolmates watch an educational film called A World Without Zinc. For reasons unexplained, a man called Jimmy wants to live without zinc. His wish is granted, but he soon regrets it: he can’t go on a date because his car won’t start, and he can’t call his girlfriend because his telephone won’t work. Horrified at what he has done, he tries to shoot himself. But his gun won’t fire, because the firing pin is made of zinc. A real-life world without zinc would probably be survivable. But there are some commodities we would struggle without. Many are obvious: steel, oil, aluminium. But others are less so. In A World Without Zinc, Jimmy wakes up to find it was all a bad dream. In A World Without Rubber, however, the nightmare threatens to become all too real. Rubber is one of industrial civilisation’s great unsung heroes. Apart from its obvious uses in tyres, wellies, condoms and underwear elastic, it is a crucial ingredient in some 40,000 products, including shock absorbers, transmission belts, gaskets, hoses, medical devices, sports equipment, cement, paints, plastics and pharmaceuticals. According to agricultural scientist K.P. Prabhakaran Nair, rubber is “essential to the enjoyment of the conveniences and amenities of modern life”. Unfortunately, the prospect of a rubber crisis isn’t the stuff of fiction. Demand keeps growing, but supply isn’t keeping pace. With a deadly fungus threatening to wipe out rubber trees, and the rubber industry, the hunt is on for new sources of the stuff. Right now, the world has two of those sources: oil and trees. For many applications, the tree version – called natural rubber – is considered superior to the synthetic version made from petrochemicals. It is stronger, more elastic, better at absorbing impacts and more resistant to heat and friction. In other words, rubberier. To connoisseurs, the

“The supply of natural rubber is a security issue. A shortage could destabilise global trade”

BLOOMBERG/GETTY

Natural rubber is used for everything from surgical gloves (left) to heavy vehicle tyres (bottom)

“Up until the recession of 2008, the price of natural rubber went up about tenfold over a decade because of the expanding economies in Asia,” says David Wolyn, a plant breeder and geneticist at the University of Guelph in Canada. “The recession tempered that increase, but people are still very concerned about future supply,” he says.

Black death But as countries in South-East Asia develop economically, landowners are shifting away from rubber. “They cut down their rubber trees and put oil palm in instead, which is less labour-intensive and you get your harvest sooner,” says Cornish. The shift to palm oil is a threat to supply, but it isn’t the worst. A much bigger one is the lack of genetic diversity of the Pará tree crop, which makes it frighteningly susceptible to disease – especially a fungus called South American leaf blight, the “black death” of rubber. It can’t be treated: it killed off the rubber industry in South America in the 1930s. As yet, it hasn’t spread to Asia thanks to strict quarantine measures, but if it does, the world economy is in big trouble. “If the blight ever got to South-East Asia, it would wreak havoc on our

rubber supply,” says Wolyn. The industry could be wiped out in a year, says Cornish. Because of this, leading agronomists have warned that the supply of natural rubber is an international security issue. A sudden shortage of aircraft tyres, for example, could destabilise global trade. The threat is so great that the United Nations lists the leaf blight as a potential biological weapon. All of which has spurred a decades-long, global search for alternative sources of natural rubber. Dozens of plants have been tried, yet most have failed. The Panama rubber tree, Castilla elastica, for example, produces good rubber, but usually dies after being tapped, while the India rubber plant, Ficus elastica, is hardy, but produces poor-quality rubber. Now, however, two unlikely candidates – a feeble northern weed and a scrubby desert shrub – may put the spring back into the rubber industry’s step. It is rarely possible to pinpoint the exact time and place of a crop’s domestication, but the Pará rubber tree is an exception: 1876, where the Amazon and Tapajós rivers meet in Pará state. That was where British explorer Henry Wickham collected some 70,000 H. brasiliensis seeds, which he took back to Kew Gardens in London on a falsified export >

AVIATION IMAGES/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

difference is like that between Madagascar vanilla and its synthetic substitute. The key to good rubber is very long polymer molecules and a property called “spontaneous self-reinforcement” – reversible stiffening under mechanical stress. Think of a car cornering: the tyre deforms a bit, which causes it to stiffen in response. What enables natural rubber to be either elastic or hard is a process mediated by proteins and fats at the end of its long, polymer molecules. These have proved hard to create in the synthetic form. For some applications – everything from engine parts to silicone cooking utensils – synthetic rubber, or a blend of synthetic and natural, is superior. But for many, natural rubber is indispensable. For instance, aircraft tyres must be 100 per cent natural rubber or the heat and friction would make them explode on landing, says Katrina Cornish, a rubber expert at Ohio State University. For the past 70 years or so, the world’s major source of natural rubber has been the Pará rubber tree (Hevea brasiliensis), a native of Brazil that is now grown all over the tropics. It is tapped for its latex, a white gunk that oozes out after the tree’s bark has been carefully sliced. This is processed to make rubber as we know it. The total area under cultivation is about 100,000 square kilometres, mostly in South-East Asia. The Pará produces excellent rubber, but grows slowly and is extremely fussy about temperature, rainfall, altitude and soil, which restricts its range to just a few degrees north and south of the equator. Extracting the latex is labour-intensive and scaling up production almost impossible, meaning that supply is extremely – and ironically – inelastic. Recycling is notoriously difficult too (see “Reclaimed rubber”, page 46). In 2017, global demand for rubber was close to 30 million tonnes. The natural rubber industry could only satisfy about 45 per cent of that. And that proportion will only diminish.

18 May 2019 | New Scientist | 45

Beating the blockade Although the world as a whole has yet to endure a rubber famine, it has happened in some regions. One was the Soviet Union during the second world war, when South-East Asian exports were blockaded by the Japanese. Luckily, the USSR had already sown the seeds of a domestic rubber industry. In the early 1930s, Soviet agronomists tested more than 1000 species of indigenous plant as sources of rubber. The rubberiest was the Siberian dandelion, a native of the Tian Shan mountains of Kazakhstan. This close relative of the common-or-garden patio weed produces large amounts of high-quality rubber in its roots. Local people had long used it as a kind of chewing gum and the second half of its scientific name, Taraxacum kok-saghyz, means “root rubber” in Kazakh. Throughout the decade, the Soviets developed ways to cultivate and process the dandelion. By the time of the Nazi invasion in 1941, the USSR had 67,000 hectares of it, and domestic rubber was meeting 30 per cent of its needs. Production continued after the war, but was halted in 1951 as cheaper South-East Asian rubber bounced back onto the market. The Japanese blockade also hit the US. In 1942, it set up the Emergency Rubber Project, employing more than 1000 scientists to find alternatives. They too experimented with 46 | New Scientist | 18 May 2019

Rubber trees are threatened by the rise of palm oil and by a deadly fungus

ADAM DEAN/PANOS

licence. Kew germinated the seeds and dispatched seedlings to parts of what are now Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia, where they were used to establish plantations. These quickly outcompeted the South American industry, which relied on smallholders tapping latex from wild trees. Today, about 90 per cent of all natural rubber comes from the descendants of Wickham’s contraband trees, mostly in Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia. According to Nair, every tree in these nations is a clone of one of just 1919 seedlings. “Some of the largest rubber-producing countries have miles of virtually genetically identical trees with their roots and canopies intermingled,” says Cornish. That is a blight epidemic waiting to happen. The industry has tried to increase genetic diversity by cross-breeding with other strains, but none appears to be resistant to the black death. It is only a matter of time before the fungus makes landfall in Asia and rips through the plantations. Two small outbreaks are rumoured to have happened already. On both occasions, it took a scorched earth policy to stop the spread.

Siberian dandelions, and also a desert shrub, Parthenium argentatum, better known as guayule (pronounced why-oolie). This had already been commercialised as a rubber crop in the early 20th century, although that industry died out in the Great Depression. The project cultivated wild guayule plants from Mexico and Texas, but the war ended before it could make much headway. Now, however, both plants are back in the frame. “They would go a long way to solving our problems,” says Cornish. On the dandelion side, German tyre giant Continental has set up a research centre with the Fraunhofer Institute for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology in Münster. Its US competitor Bridgestone runs a pilot plant in Arizona that makes guayule rubber. Both firms recently unveiled demonstration

RECLAIMED RUBBER It is extremely difficult to recycle rubber. To be reused as a raw material it has to be “devulcanised”, which means reversing the chemical process used to strengthen it. Various methods exist, but they degrade a key polymer, so the quality of the recycled rubber is low. Consequently, about half of the 1.6 billion tyres made every year – accounting for 70 per cent of global rubber consumption – aren’t recycled or repurposed. Those that are mostly end up being shredded for applications such as flooring, road surfaces and insulation.

tyres proving that the alternative rubber is high-enough quality, although neither is yet commercially available. Dandelion rubber is also being developed in China, India and the US and there are guayule projects in Spain, Australia and South Africa. Team dandelion recently stole a march on the competition when a team at the Chinese Academy of Sciences published the T. kok-saghyz genome, a critical step towards rapid crop improvement. “It helps tremendously to understand the genetic traits the breeders are after,” says plant geneticist Kenneth Olsen of Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. “That allows you to have a more informed breeding strategy.” There are still hurdles to overcome, says Cornish, who has commercial interests in both plants. The dandelion isn’t a strong plant, she says. “It grows slowly to start with and we don’t have chemical weed control. It’s not going to be a commercially viable crop until that is achieved.” There is also the challenge of scaling up to the millions of hectares needed to meet demand – a problem for both contenders. Ultimately, the world needs all three crops, says Cornish. Demand for natural rubber is so high that nobody is going to put anyone else out of business. “We could have the rubber tree in the tropics, dandelion in northern temperate regions and guayule in semi-arid areas. They complement each other,” she says. For now, maybe we should show more appreciation for this essential stuff – and hope we don’t live to see a world without rubber. ❚ Graham Lawton is a staff writer and columnist at New Scientist specialising in environment and biomedicine. Follow him @GrahamLawton

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University of Alabama at Birmingham Radiation Oncologists The Department of Radiation Oncology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham is currently recruiting for Radiation Oncologists at the level of Assistant/Associate Professor. We are interested in clinical trialists or physician scientists and experience with proton therapy would be helpful. We plan to open a proton facility in approximately one and a half years. These are tenure-earning positions. Applicants must be Board Certified or Board Eligible. Our goal is the delivery of technically advanced radiotherapy in combination with new agents developed in the laboratory to enhance cancer care and provide treatment in a pleasing and educational environment. Current recruiting activities are focused on individuals with an interest in translational and clinical research in addition to patient care. Laboratory resources are available for qualified candidates. We have an exciting group of physician scientists who work in our very collaborative cancer center. New recruits will have the opportunity to interface with a collaborative group of clinical faculty and laboratory scientists. Potential candidates should possess an MD degree. Candidates should be Board Eligible or Board Certified in radiation oncology. For more information please email your questions to Dr. James A. Bonner at [email protected] Interested applicants please follow this link to apply: http://uab.peopleadmin.com/postings/3796 UAB is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer committed to fostering a diverse, equitable and family-friendly environment in which all faculty and staff can excel and achieve work/life balance irrespective of, race, national origin, age, genetic or family medical history, gender, faith, gender identity and expression as well as sexual orientation. UAB also encourages applications from individuals with disabilities and veterans. A pre-employment background check investigation is performed on candidates selected for employment. In addition, physicians and other clinical faculty candidates who will be employed by the University of Alabama Health Services Foundation (UAHSF) or other UAB Medicine entities, must successfully complete a pre-employment drug and nicotine screen to be hired.



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Postdoctoral Research Fellowship Position Dr. Holoshitz’ laboratory seeks applications from talented candidates for a post-doctoral position in the Departments of Internal Medicine at the University of Michigan School of Medicine. The individual will carry out funded research projects related to new mechanism of MHC-disease association. Approaches include transcriptomics, immunology, cell biology, proteomics, biochemistry, mouse models. The selected FDQGLGDWHVZLOOKDYHRSSRUWXQLW\WRGHYHORSVSHFL¿FSURMHFWVDFTXLUHQHZVNLOOV participate in seminars and other academic activities, including presenting at national conferences.

Representative publications: Arthritis Rheumatol. 67:2061-70, 2015 Arthritis Res Ther. 18:161, 2016 Rheumatic and Musculoskeletal Dis. 2 (2), 2016 Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. (USA) 15:4755, 2018

4XDOL¿FDWLRQV ‡3K'DQGRU0'LQPROHFXODUELRORJ\FHOOELRORJ\LPPXQRORJ\JHQHWLFVRUUHODWHG¿HOG • Working knowledge of immunology, arthritis models, signal transduction, transcriptomics and protein chemistry • Ability to work collaboratively with individuals from different backgrounds • Excellent verbal and written communication skills

Contact: Please forward a cover letter, an updated CV, and the names and contact information of 3 references to:

Joseph Holoshitz, MD, Professor of Internal Medicine, University of Michigan School of Medicine, 5520 MSRB1 1150 W. Medical Center Drive, Ann Arbor, MI , 48109-5680 Shell is an Equal Opportunity Employer - Minorities/Females/Veterans/Disability

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The back pages Puzzles Quick crossword, a cube puzzle and quiz p52

Feedback Dog DNA and parrot police: the week in weirdness p53

What does… Liana Finck? A cartoonist’s take on the world p53

Almost the last word Spacecraft gravity, and kissing hazards: readers respond p54

Me and my telescope Kate Shaw on Higgs bosons and Emmy Noether p56

How to be a maker Week 3

Switch to hot buttered toast

Hannah Joshua is a science writer and maker based in London. You can follow her on Twitter @hannahmakes

What you need As last week, plus: Piezo buzzer Tinfoil Cardboard Chopsticks

For next week Jumper cables An electronics breadboard

Next in the series 1 Introduction 2 Electric candle 3 Toast notifier 4 Desktop traffic light Use a “breadboard” to build a complex circuit 5 Propeller car 6 Magic eight ball 7 Theremin 8 Sound-sensitive disco ball 9 Rubbish sweeper 10 Biscuit bot

LAST time, we gained mastery over light and the basics of circuits. As your devices get more complex, it will make life a lot easier if you can turn the circuit on and off without dismantling it. That means adding a switch. Switches come in many flavours, depending on what you want them to do. But what they all have in common is that they make or break a circuit, letting you control how electricity flows. For our purposes, we need look no further than tinfoil. Like last week, make a circuit with an LED, resistor and 9-volt battery. Then disconnect a crocodile-clip wire from one leg of the LED, and clip it to a piece of tinfoil. Take another crocodile lead and give it a second piece of tinfoil to grip. Connect the other end of that lead to the LED where you just broke the connection. Touch the pieces of foil together to complete the circuit. Suddenly, turning the light on and off is easy. But that isn’t all you can do. To illustrate this, I built a device that tells me when my toast is ready. This requires something that makes a sound when the toast pops up. I used a piezo buzzer, so called because it harnesses piezoelectricity. When you apply electricity to a piezoelectric material, it deforms. The buzzer is designed so that this makes the material vibrate, producing sound. Most hobby electronics operates in the 3 to 12-volt range, meaning your piezo can handle

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The ability to turn a device on and off creates myriad possibilities. That is where switches come in, as Hannah Joshua demonstrates

Make online Projects will be posted each week at newscientist.com/maker Email: [email protected]

the 9-volt battery with no need for a resistor. If you are ever in doubt, you can usually find specifications written on the packet. Assemble the battery, buzzer and wires on cardboard, then find some sticks. Anything about the height of your toaster will do. I used a pair of chopsticks. Now tape a tinfoil switch pad to the end of each stick. Glue the sticks upright on the cardboard, ensuring the foil pads are the same height as the toaster’s lever when it pops up. Leave a small gap between the pads. If we cover the toaster lever with tinfoil, this will touch both pads when the lever springs up. In other words, the moment the toast is ready, the buzzer will sound.

Piping hot toast every time. With only a basic circuit and a switch, the possibilities are already vast. Try sticking foil on the edge of a door and on its frame for a “do not disturb” light that comes on when you close it. Or make a flashing bike light, with one part of the switch on the wheel and the other on the frame, so the circuit is briefly complete once per rotation. Or how about a fairground steady hand game, where you guide a wire loop over a shape without letting them touch. If the buzzer sounds, it is your turn to make the toast. ❚ Thanks to Imperial College Advanced Hackspace for use of their facilities 18 May 2019 | New Scientist | 51

The back pages Puzzles Quick quiz #03

Puzzle set by Hugh Hunt

1 What name is given to different physical forms of the same chemical element, for example diamond and graphite in the case of carbon?

#03 CUBE SHADOW

2 “Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds.” With which physicist, wartime head of Los Alamos National Laboratory, is this quotation associated as he watched the first nuclear bomb detonate in July 1945? 3 Clocking just 1268 hours of sun in 2016 – 3.5 hours a day - what is Europe’s least sunny capital city?

Across 1 Ge (9) 6 1895 discovery by Wilhelm Röntgen (1-4) 9 Distilling apparatus (7) 10 City in which the first nuclear reactor was built (7) 11 Willow (5) 12 Type of tissue transplant (4,5) 13 Home to the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics (9)

Down Bird excrement (5) Re (7) Whale gut secretion (9) Bone of the middle ear (5) Workings (9) Star Wars spaceship (1-4) Hawaiian honeycreeper (7) ___ radio, broadcast at around 1.7–30 MHz (5,4) 13 Emissions levy (6,3) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

4 Which Tanzanian gorge is famed for its many discoveries of hominin fossils? 15é 16 Puzzle in which pictures represent words (5) 18 Supply with O (9) 20 Subunit within a cell (9) 23 Head; top; peridium (in fungi) (5) 25 1958 sci-fi horror film (3,4) 26 Ga (7) 27 Xe (5) 28 Storage container for natural gas (9)

14 V-1 flying bomb (9) 15 Anatomical structure resembling a lid (9) 17 Wetland plant (3,4) 19 Of a baby bird, to form an attachment (7) 21 Synthetic polymer (5) 22 A cube has 12 of them (5) 24 Stopwatch or hourglass, perhaps (5)

5 When an Italian astronomer gave a Dutch polymath a ride in 1997, where did the two end up eight years later? Answers below

Cryptic Crossword #06 Answers Across 1 Marconi, 5 Colic, 8 Denisovan, 9 Nan, 10 Mimic, 12 Rosehip, 13 Pink elephants, 15 Integer, 17 Comet, 19 Age, 20 Anthelion, 22 Yield, 23 Suspend Down 1 Modem, 2 Ran, 3 Ossicle, 4 Invertebrates, 5 Cones, 6 Lanthanum, 7 Canapés, 11 Monotreme, 13 Privacy, 14 Hackers, 16 Gland, 18 Toned 21 Ice

Quick quiz #03 Answers

52 | New Scientist | 18 May 2019

1 Allotropes 2 J. Robert Oppenheimer 3 Reykjavik, Iceland 4 Olduvai 5 Saturn and Titan. The Cassini probe, named after Giovanni Domenico Cassini, orbited the ringed planet, while the piggybacking Huygens lander, named after Christiaan Huygens, descended to its largest icy moon.

Answers and the next cryptic crossword next week.

At midday at her home in Ecuador, Natalia holds a solid cube 1 metre above the ground and it casts a shadow. She rotates the cube a bit and finds that the smallest shadow she can create is a square. What is the shape of the largest shadow she can produce with the cube at noon and how much bigger is it than the square shadow? Answer next week

#02 Getting past the freight train Solution Last week we asked how a long passenger train could get past a freight train pulling three wagons on a single track line with a siding that holds two wagons.

The freight train (FT) detaches the back two trucks, then drives into the siding. The passenger train (PT) now pushes the two trucks beyond the siding, and the FT with one truck reverses out of the siding and out of the way so that the PT can pull the two trucks back and then push them into the siding before heading down the line again. Next, the FT pulls the trucks out of the siding and pushes them behind the PT. The FT then reverses and goes into the siding with its one truck. The PT pushes the other two trucks back up the line, and can then head off down the track unimpeded. The FT reverses out of the siding to pick up its other two trucks. Incidentally, it is always possible for the PT to pass the FT however many trucks the FT has – but the number of steps increases. PASSENGER

Crossword #31 set by Richard Smyth

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The back pages Feedback What does Liana Finck? Dog days Feedback is displeased. Returning from our morning constitutional, we discover the cause of the suspect pong that has been following us, in the form of a sizable patty of dog dirt attached to our shoe. Considering our immediate instinct – to release the hounds in search of the culprit – to be counterproductive, we turn to forensic science. PooPrints is a US company that offers a “DNA solution for dog waste”. It promises to get on the scent of dog owners who don’t clean up after their pets by matching poo to pooch. There is a catch: all suspects need to be in a doggie DNA database. This is mostly workable for pets in apartment and housing complexes, where a management company can request all dogs on the property be registered. (The company suggests kicking off with a “Dog Day” to “make swabbing fun” in order to collect the necessary genetic data.) Feedback is conflicted. Do we risk dog-walking into a surveillance state here? Not answered, for example, is just how long a dog’s DNA will be kept on file when it hasn’t been charged with a crime. Should privacy campaigners be up in arms – or legs even – demanding due canine process? Don’t say: “Roll over.” Do say: “Who’s a good boy, until proven otherwise by a jury of his peers?”

Brown gold Talking of matters scatological, for those of you seeking a $200 jar of horse manure from 1997 Kentucky Derby winner Silver Charm, this is your lucky day. US artist Coleman Larkin is offering that and more in his series of “Dixieland Preserves”, nuggets of thoroughbred dung lovingly immortalised in epoxy resin in mason jars. You might never be able to own a racehorse, but at least you can admire the fortitude of its digestive system with one of these handsome collectibles, the perfect dinner-party conversation starter. Profits from the sale of the preserves will go

towards Old Friends Farm in Georgetown, Kentucky, a facility for retired racehorses. “The most difficult step,” Larkin told the Associated Press, “is probably the one where I have to ask the type of people that own million-dollar thoroughbreds if I can please have some horse turds to put in jars.” That, and assuring would-be purchasers of the turds’ elevated origin, rather than being something that Feedback just wiped off our shoe. One for the DNA testers?

A view to die for For those uncompromising in their pursuit of the perfect Instagram moment, a cautionary tale from Hawaii. A US man has survived falling 21 metres into the caldera of Kilauea, the most active of the five volcanoes on the state’s biggest island, after climbing over a safety rail to get a better view. Were the name of the location – Steaming Bluff – not warning enough, Kilauea spent much of last year destroying homes and forcing the evacuation of thousands of people. With saintly patience, park authorities reminded the public that guard rails cordoning off the unstable lip of one of the world’s most active volcanoes are there for a reason.

Not a stool pigeon A PARROT has been taken into police custody in Brazil – but he isn’t squawking. The unnamed bird is accused of acting as a lookout for a pair of local drug dealers. The parrot shrieked, “Mum, the police!” as narcotics officers closed in on their den during a raid. After refusing to say a word to the authorities while in detention, the parrot has been passed to a local zoo, presumably to swagger around the exercise yard in an orange jumpsuit, plotting its next move.

Water way to live The English county of Suffolk is generally thought of as a quiet, bucolic sort of place. Its popularity

as a weekend bolthole for wealthy Londoners might have something to do with evidence that has emerged of a never-ending drug-fuelled party going on beneath its surface, among its freshwater shrimp. A study published in Environment International found that specimens of the amphipod Gammarus pulex fished from the county’s waters tested positive for cocaine, ketamine, MDMA, tramadol and much more. Proof positive that drugs don’t just affect you, but all those around you. Perhaps this could be the basis for a new anti-drug campaign. “Choose pond life”, Feedback suggests, or maybe “Just say newt”.

A hard shell Talking of pond life: reader Gavan Schneider spies “turtle cookies” in a canteen in Wentworth Falls, west of Sydney. These are, the label assures him, “gluten & vegan free”.

Simply offal And while we are on the subject of cannibalism, doctors in Canada are asking women to please stop eating human placentas, often freezedried and put into pills. The practice has been praised by celebrities such as Kim Kardashian, Chrissy Teigen and January Jones, hailed as a tonic that replaces iron and lifts mood. But a review by the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada found no evidence that the post-partum provender has any health benefits – while coming with a significant risk of food poisoning if the organ isn’t appropriately prepared. For those convinced that bodily recycling is good for you and the planet, Feedback suggests some less problematic alternatives. Chew your nails to reclaim zinc that would otherwise go in the bin. Bottle your sweat to top up on essential salts. You get the idea. ❚

Want to get in touch? Send your stories to New Scientist, 25 Bedford Street, London WC2E 9ES or you can email us at [email protected] 18 May 2019 | New Scientist | 53

The back pages Almost the last word Clouds gather in Kenya. But why does the air smell fresher before a storm?

Lighter Earth We have sent a large number of spacecraft and satellites into space. This must reduce the mass of the planet, albeit by a small amount. Does this reduction affect Earth’s gravity with respect to the sun and moon?

Herman D’Hondt Sydney, Australia Most of a launched rocket falls back to Earth, and the used fuel also stays within the atmosphere. Only a small part of the rocket actually makes it into orbit. For example, the 2800-tonne Saturn V (still the most powerful rocket ever) was able to put 118 tonnes into orbit – just over 4 per cent of its launch mass. Also, spacecraft in orbit are still part of Earth. Even in geosynchronous orbit at an altitude of 37,000 kilometres, they contribute to the planet’s gravity just as much as they did when they were standing on the launch pad. The main point, though, is that all of these figures are so small compared with the mass of Earth itself that the effect is almost completely irrelevant to the planet’s gravity. 54 | New Scientist | 18 May 2019

IAN FORSYTH/GETTY

Anthony Roberts Rushden, Northamptonshire, UK Bearing in mind that much of the stuff we send into space falls back down again, only a few hundred tonnes of spacecraft have actually escaped Earth’s gravity since the first space programmes began. This is tiny compared with the quantity of hydrogen and other gases that escape continuously into space from the upper atmosphere. This has been estimated at between 30,000 and 65,000 tonnes per year. Earth also gains about 40,000 tonnes per year in the form of meteorites and space dust. Overall, though, the planet gets slightly lighter each year. But this only amounts to around a trillionth of a per cent, as Earth is very, very heavy at 5.97 × 1024 kilograms.

expected between family and close friends, but even then, I just give a hug. I am not about to find out whether being licked by an animal or kissed by a human is more dangerous. I will keep my distance, and keep washing my hands.

This week’s new questions: What causes the fresh smell we experience just before the onset of a storm or shower of rain, which is especially noticeable after an extended dry spell? Colin Francombe, Nanyuki, Kenya Why is it that the same foods or drinks taste pleasant to some people and horrible to others? Rachel Mckeown, Aberfan, Merthyr Tydfil, UK

Jamie Barrett Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire, UK Although the mass of Earth itself decreases slightly when a satellite is sent into orbit, the total mass of Earth and its satellites stays the same. Assuming satellites are distributed more or less evenly around any given orbit, this also means the position of the centre of mass of Earth and its satellites doesn’t change, so Earth’s gravity with respect to the sun and moon isn’t affected. Sending spacecraft to other planets or beyond this solar system does reduce the mass of Earth and its satellites, but this is probably too small to have any effect.

Intimate contact From a pathogenic perspective, which is more dangerous, to be licked by an animal or kissed by a human?

Anna Butcher Brookton, Western Australia I was once told that “germs don’t fly, they hitch-hike”.

Many animals can carry pathogens that are transmissible to humans, so I am not at all keen on being licked by any animal. The dogs that work on our farm – two hard-working, affectionate kelpies – are washed and wormed regularly, but they aren’t allowed to lick me. I still can’t get over the fact that they see animal remains as attractive and are possible carriers of the hydatid tapeworm (Echinococcus granulosus), which can cause serious illness. Sheep, cattle and goats can be infected with the bacteria that cause Q fever (Coxiella burnetii ) and cats can be infected with Toxoplasma gondii. Both are transmissible to humans, though by means other than licking or kissing. As for humans, I am averse to being kissed by strangers. My Italian heritage means that an informal hug and kiss greeting is

Henry O’Regan Harpenden, Hertfordshire, UK It depends on personal hygiene. Animals, of course, lick and eat items that have been exposed to a wider variety of pathogens. Humans are usually much more hygienic when it comes to these things. However, some of us are more strict with hygiene than others. The question of whether it is more dangerous to be licked by an animal or kissed by a human must be taken on a case-by-case basis.

Getting ahead My fringe seems to grow faster than the rest of my hair. Is this just because I notice it more, or does hair grow at different rates on different parts of the head?

Jackie Jones Brighton, UK I have had a fringe for most of my life. It is very noticeable when it grows by 10 millimetres, and I have to cut it. But I don’t notice the rest of my hair so much, so I think it is a question of perception, rather than different growth rates. Incidentally, my hair hasn’t grown more slowly with age (I am now 70), but each hair follicle dies after a shorter time than it did when I was younger. The hair on the rest of my head, which is waist length, is now about 150 millimetres shorter than it was about 10 years ago.

Want to send us a question or answer? Email us at [email protected] Questions should be about everyday science phenomena Full terms and conditions at newscientist.com/lw-terms

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The back pages Me and my telescope

Kate Shaw is a physicist at the University of Sussex, UK, who studies fundamental particles at CERN’s ATLAS detector in Geneva and works to promote physics research around the world First up, do you have a telescope? I have a very big telescope called the ATLAS detector. It looks at quarks, leptons and Higgs bosons – the debris from colliding protons accelerated by the Large Hadron Collider.

As a child, what did you want to do when you grew up? When I was around 10 years old I read Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time and fell in love with physics. As I finished the last page, I made a decision I never questioned again: that I wanted to study the universe and everything it is made of.

Explain what you do in one easy paragraph. I work on the ATLAS experiment studying top quarks, and running the detector. I also work with UNESCO to promote particle physics worldwide, specifically in nations that have few science resources.

What does a typical day involve? Sometimes I’m at CERN in Geneva, where I do my research. Other times I’m in places such as Afghanistan, Gaza or Kathmandu in Nepal, working to build physics research.

What do you love most about what you do? Well, I simply love physics. It’s amazing how 25 years after reading A Brief History of Time, my love hasn’t faded one bit. I love that I am always learning, every day, exploring new ideas and concepts.

What’s the most exciting thing you’ve worked on recently? The Physics Without Frontiers project. We hope to be a driving force in the expansion of physics research worldwide. At CERN, I am working on the Open Data project, so that everyone can analyse the ATLAS data and see what a Higgs boson looks like.

Were you good at science at school? Yes, but I was especially good at making things, and with computers. I was interested in the things they didn’t teach at school. Stuff I had to read in books and in New Scientist. 56 | New Scientist | 18 May 2019

If you could send a message back to yourself as a kid, what would you say? Have more confidence, and believe in yourself.

What’s the best piece of advice anyone ever gave you? Stop messing around and focus! I still give myself that advice, daily.

If you could have a long conversation with any scientist, living or dead, who would it be? I would love to talk with Emmy Noether, to discuss how she saw the connection between symmetry and conservation laws, something that still blows my mind. I’d want to know what she thinks it means about the universe, and what she thinks mathematics means: if it is something intrinsic to the universe or only for humans to use as a tool to understand.

What’s the best thing you’ve read or seen in the past 12 months? I love the book Sapiens by Yuval Harari. He has not only understood our journey as humans, he has communicated it excellently to a very wide audience.

How useful will your skills be after the apocalypse? Particle physics itself won’t help me much, but I like to think my skills in making things, fixing things and basic understanding of science will help me to survive.

OK, one last thing: tell us something that will blow our minds…

“We never really touch anything. Our whole interaction with the outside world is an illusion”

We never really touch anything. The atoms of our fingers exchange particles with the atoms of what we touch and we experience a force. Our whole interaction with the outside world is an illusion. Everything we experience is pictures made up by and inside our brains, using information from electrical signals from our totally numb bodies. ❚ Kate Shaw is founder of the ICTP Physics Without Frontiers programme PORTRAIT: OXFORD UNIVERSITY IMAGES/JOBY SESSIONS, MARK GARLICK/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

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