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A BLACK HOLE IS BORN
First observation of total stellar collapse
ROOT OF ALL ILLS
Does one common bug cause dozens of diseases?
COLD FUSION COMEBACK
Why the ridiculed energy technology won’t go away
WEEKLY September 17-23, 2016
TEST-TUBE TESTICLE Lab-grown sperm reaches a climax
UTOPIA
The quest for the perfect society, and the lost civilization that found it
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Science and technology news www.newscientist.com Insight into academia 2016
NIGHTMARE OVER New treatments for post-traumatic stress
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CONTENTS
Volume 231 No 3091
This issue online newscientist.com/issue/3091
Leaders
News
5
8
News
Do blood bugs trigger disease?
6
UPFRONT Protest against Dakota pipeline. Nations to protect 30 per cent of ocean. Rosetta’s final resting place. 9/11’s growing health crisis 8 THIS WEEK Black hole’s birth seen for first time. Earthquakes linked to moon phases. First lab-grown sperm? Star party at the galactic centre. Push for forensics in wildlife crime 14 IN BRIEF White orcas spreading. Fish that sound like windscreen wipers. Static storms on the moon. Hair prints identify people
KATERYNA KON/SPL
When bacteria multiply in our blood, disease seems to follow
Utopia is unattainable, but worth pursuing. Should cold fusion come in from the cold?
On the cover
30 & 44
9
A black hole is born Stellar collapse observed 8 Root of all ills One common bug, dozens of diseases 34 Cold fusion comeback Why the ridiculed energy tech won’t go away 10 Test-tube testicle Lab-grown sperm 38 Nightmare over New treatments for PTSD
Utopia The quest for the perfect society – and the lost civilisation that found it
Cover image Simon Pemberton
Analysis 18 Drugs in the water How worried should we be about drinking other people’s medicine? 20 COMMENT Want prisons that work? Just ask Norway. Kuwait must ditch mass DNA database 21 INSIGHT The rise of intolerance of gluten intolerance
Technology 22 Faking it on Facebook makes you stressed. Anti-laser lasers. Apps offer a shoulder to cry on. Bots find treasure in your trash
Aperture
Features
34
28 Upside-down clouds in the Kansas sky
Cold fusion comeback
30 Lost utopia (see above left) 34 Cold fusion comeback (see left) 38 Nightmare over New treatments for post-traumatic stress 42 PEOPLE Peter Wadhams and the Arctic death spiral
Features
Why the ridiculed energy technology won’t go away JULIAN PACAUD
Culture 44 Utopia’s impossible truth Five hundred years after Thomas More’s Utopia, we still love the idea of creating fresh worlds
Coming next week… Six principles, six problems
The ultimate guide to physics’s greatest theories
Regulars 52 LETTERS Take us from your leader 56 FEEDBACK Unnaturally natural beer 57 THE LAST WORD Blob of the gaps
Not what it used to be
How nostalgia primes us for the future
17 September 2016 | NewScientist | 3
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Future perfect Don’t hark back to the past for utopia ABUNDANCE. Freedom. Peace. Our model of a perfect society has been continually updated over the five centuries since Thomas More wrote Utopia, but those three elements are always central. It’s a tall order to achieve it, and small wonder no large society has done so for any length of time. Or has it? Those studying the Bronze Age Indus civilisation say it met these conditions for 800 years, making it our best candidate for a real-life utopia (see page 30). There’s nothing new about seeking utopia in a bygone age. More recently, though, we’ve looked to the future, first through science fiction, now via visionary business plans and talks that promise to “change the world”.
Abundance, freedom and peace are also the rallying cries of techno-utopians, be they internet libertarians, Silicon Valley mavens or those who hope humans and machines will eventually fuse in a godlike technological singularity. Automation offers abundance and digital life offers freedom; benevolent AIs could help us avoid accident and strife. So is utopia within our grasp? Imaginary utopias are often isolated, found at the frontiers of the known world (see page 44). That’s also true of many technoutopian visions today, from Martian colonies to seasteading. Utopia is easier to imagine when you can cast off from the real world and leave its problems behind.
While utopian fantasies play out among the privileged – and innovation skews towards their “first world problems” – popular culture is dominated by dystopias. Perhaps that reflects fears of being left behind to languish in a world that seems increasingly chaotic. In the long view, such fears are wide of the mark. Over the past five centuries, we’ve lived lives of increasing plenty and liberty, while a good case can be made that peace has increased. Through advances in science and society, we’ve inched towards utopia. We won’t ever arrive at it; after all, one reading of the word is “no place”. But with enough wit and will, we can keep making the world ever more utopian. ■
a few do, and so it has never really gone away. Private funding, mostly from investors, has now reached millions of dollars. Alerted, the US Congress has asked for a report on the case for public funding. Is there one? Our investigation finds a murky world of claims and counterclaims, whose denizens worry that too much openness will jeopardise the fortunes they hope to make (see page 34).
Taxpayer money could provide credibility and ensure that results are properly reported, rather than just rumoured. And if there is anything to cold fusion, it would be in the public interest for it to be investigated properly. But that’s an enormous if. There’s still no compelling reason to think cold fusion will work. Let those with money to burn take the risk and, if proven right, the rewards for their chutzpah too. For the rest of us, cold fusion is better off left out in the cold. ■
Cold comfort HAVE we unfairly given cold fusion the cold shoulder? Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons caused a sensation when they reported in 1989 that they had fused atomic nuclei at room pressure and temperature, producing a burst of energy. But the results weren’t replicable, and the field sank into ignominy. Not many respectable scientists would touch cold fusion today. But
17 September 2016 | NewScientist | 5
ROBYN BECK/AFP/GETTY
UPFRONT
US oil pipeline paused PIPELINE down. US officials have halted the building of part of a contentious oil pipeline in North Dakota, following protests and a lawsuit led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. Native Americans and other groups have raised concerns that the pipeline will disturb culturally significant sites and threaten water supplies. “All pipelines leak eventually,” says Wayde Schafer of the North Dakota branch of the Sierra Club environmental group. “We want to leave clean water for our great-great-grandchildren.” The Dakota Access pipeline, if completed, would link the oilfields of North Dakota to an existing pipeline in Illinois. At nearly 1900 kilometres, it would be about the same length as the Keystone XL pipeline, which was
intended to carry Canadian oil through the US but was cancelled last year amid protests from environmentalists. However, Dakota Access has a smaller diameter, so it would shift about 470,000 barrels of crude oil per day – just over half what Keystone XL would have carried. In a joint statement last week, several federal departments announced that, for now, they would not permit construction of a segment underneath Lake Oahe, less than 1 kilometre from the Standing Rock Sioux reservation. The halt will allow the government a chance to see whether it will need to reconsider any of its previous environmental permits for this part of the pipeline, according to the statement.
Vaccine fears
“It’s striking that Europe stands out as the region most sceptical about vaccine safety,” says Heidi Larson at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. “In a world where the internet means concerns about vaccines can be shared in an instant, we should not underestimate the influence this can have on other countries around the world.” Of the 1000 people surveyed in the UK, 9 per cent disagreed that vaccines were safe – and in the US, 14 per cent did (EBioMedicine, DOI: 10.1016/j.ebiom.2016.08.042).
–Don’t send oil through here–
Big lifter for space
moon. It will come in two-stage and three-stage versions. To lift all that, New Glenn will have 17 million newtons of thrust from seven engines, about half the lifting power of the Saturn V. That makes it competitive with other planned heavy-lift rockets, although not the biggest. SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy will have a third more thrust, while NASA’s Space Launch System will boast just over twice the thrust of New Glenn. None of these heavy lifters have flown yet, however. Bezos says he plans to launch the New Glenn rocket by the end of the decade.
BLUE ORIGIN, the rocket firm owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has announced its next venture: the New Glenn rocket. After reaching space, New Glenn can return to Earth and
land vertically on its boosters, which are reusable. It builds on the New Shepard rocket and capsule, which launched and landed for the first time in November 2015, and has flown repeatedly since then. The rocket – named after John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth – is “designed to launch commercial satellites and to fly humans into space”, wrote Bezos in a statement. The rocket will be 7 metres in diameter, and between 82 and 95 metres tall. That makes it larger than any current rockets and nearly as big as the Saturn V rocket that took humans to the 6 | NewScientist | 17 September 2016
ESA/ROSETTA/NAVCAM- CC BY-SA IGO 3.0
“New Glenn will have about half the lifting power of the Saturn V rocket that took humans to the moon”
EUROPE is the world centre for vaccine scepticism. That’s according to a survey on the views of 66,000 people in 67 countries on the importance and safety of vaccines. People in France showed the least confidence, with 41 per cent disagreeing that vaccines are safe, against a global average of 12 per cent. Those in South-East Asia had most confidence in vaccine safety: just 1 per cent of people in Bangladesh expressed doubts, for example.
Rosetta’s cave dive ROSETTA’S final order is in: go caving. After two years orbiting 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, the European Space Agency craft will crash into a cave on the comet’s surface on 30 September. Its target is a once-active pit nicknamed Deir el-Medina, after a village where pottery shards that provided detailed records of life in ancient Egypt were discovered in a similar-looking well. The cave sits –Final destination– in an area of deep pits, some of
For new stories every day, visit newscientist.com/news
9/11’s rising toll
which occasionally erupt with spectacular dust jets. From orbit, Rosetta has spotted blocky structures called goosebumps on the pit walls, that seem to be the fused remnants of lumps that formed the comet. These pieces probably originated in the solar system’s earliest days, so could provide vital information about its dawn. The spacecraft will free-fall from 20 kilometres to reach the pit, snapping close-ups and recording data about the surface before sharing the fate of its companion, the Philae lander, which crashed in 2014.
FIFTEEN years have passed, and the agony goes on for those who survived the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US. More than 1000 people may have died from health problems linked to the attacks. The latest official figures released by the World Trade Center Health Program reveal a sharp rise in the number of people diagnosed with cancers that have been linked to dust generated when New York’s Twin Towers collapsed. To date, some 50,000 people have been certified sick as a probable consequence of the
North Korea’s blast
60 SECONDS
attacks and 1140 have died – which is more than a third of the 2977 deaths on 9/11 itself. Respiratory and digestive disorders reached 32,291 as of 30 June 2016. But cancer cases are rising fastest, tripling from 1822 in January 2014 to 5441 in June 2016. Some health professionals now predict that by 2020, more people will have died through fallout from the attacks than died on 9/11. “It’s not based on hard numbers, but on the growing number of people who are going down with cancers,” says Ben Chevat, a spokesman for the support group 9/11 Health Watch.
Good news for ocean protection
IMAGEBROKER/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK
NORTH KOREA says it carried out THINGS are looking up for the world’s oceans. A major environmental a “higher-level” nuclear warhead conference of governments and test explosion last week, and that NGOs has called on nations to set this would enable it to build an aside at least 30 per cent of them as array of smaller, lighter and “highly protected” areas by 2030. more powerful nuclear weapons And, in a separate move, a global “at will”. convention to halt the spread of The atomic test is Pyongyang’s invasive marine creatures that hitch fifth, and the second in eight a ride in ships’ ballast water will soon months. State media there enter into force. claimed the test has improved its The motion to protect 30 per cent technology of mounting nuclear of seas was passed at the World warheads on ballistic rockets. Conservation Congress, held in South Korea reckons the Honolulu, Hawaii, last week by the detonation was its neighbour’s International Union for Conservation biggest ever. The South Korean of Nature; 129 states and government president Park Geun-hye called agencies were in favour, and 16 it an act of “fanatic recklessness”. against. The snag is that opposition North Korea’s boast of a gamefrom China, Japan and South Africa, changing nuclear test defies both tough international sanctions and long-standing diplomatic pressure to curb its nuclear ambitions. It will raise serious concerns in many world capitals that Pyongyang has moved another step closer to its goal of a nuclear missile that could one day be capable of striking the US mainland. South Korea’s weather agency said the explosive yield of the blast would have been 10 to 12 kilotons, or 70 to 80 per cent of the force of the 15-kiloton atomic bomb that the US dropped –Invasive creatures will face a hurdle– on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945.
which felt it was too ambitious, may undermine the motion’s chances of being implemented effectively as it is not legally binding, said delegates. Meanwhile, Finland’s accession to the International Convention for the Control and Management of Ships’ Ballast Water and Sediments has triggered it into force. It will compel many of the world’s 70,000 or so registered cargo ships to install equipment to kill off any wildlife in seawater taken on board for stability. But putting it into practice will take time. “There aren’t enough facilities around the world to immediately fit all the world’s ships with the necessary sterilisation equipment,” says David Smith of Plymouth Marine Laboratory, UK.
Presidential parasite A newly identified parasitic worm has been named in honour of US president Barack Obama. The thread-like blood fluke, called Baracktrema obamai, infects freshwater turtles. Its discoverers say they admire Obama, and that, to the people that study them, parasites are beautiful (Journal of Parasitology, doi.org/bqfk).
Virgin reborn Two years after a test flight ended in tragedy, private space flight firm Virgin Galactic is back in the sky. The second SpaceShipTwo craft, called VSS Unity, went on a nearly 4-hourlong flight over the California desert on 8 September. Last time the firm tested a space plane, it broke up in mid-air, killing pilot Michael Alsbury and injuring pilot Peter Siebold. The crash was attributed to human error.
Time’s up How does the body know it’s time to give birth? Some researchers in the US think they have the answer: the membranes surrounding the fetus act as an alarm clock. As this sac ages, it becomes inflamed – which may set off a chain reaction, starting contractions (Human Reproduction Update, doi.org/bp52).
Wild no more Say goodbye to Earth’s wild lands. An analysis has found that the world’s wilderness – areas mostly free from human disturbance – has shrunk from 33 to 23 per cent of land since the early 1990s (Current Biology, doi.org/bqh4). Without strong measures, what’s left could disappear by the end of the century.
Fishy nanobots What’s 100 times smaller than a grain of sand and can swim like a fish? Engineers have created metallic nanofish that move in response to a changing magnetic field (Small, doi.org/f3rc85). They hope to develop them to conduct surgery or deliver drugs in the body.
17 September 2016 | NewScientist | 7
THIS WEEK
Debora MacKenzie
COULD bacteria be to blame for a host of conditions we thought had nothing to do with infection? A molecule made only by bacteria has been found to change blood proteins in a way that is common to a score of “non-infectious” conditions, from heart attacks to Alzheimer’s disease. All involve inflammation, abnormal blood clotting, excessive iron in the blood and sheets of abnormally folded
“The role of infection in neurodegenerative disorders has been underexplored” proteins. If bacteria really link all these observations, we might find that it’s possible to fight these “non-infectious” illnesses by attacking the microbes. Healthy blood has always been considered sterile, because bacteria don’t grow when blood is put in a culture dish. But recent DNA sequencing methods reveal that each millilitre of blood in fact contains around 1000 bacteria. These bacteria are usually dormant, says Douglas Kell at the University of Manchester, UK. They need iron ions to grow, and iron is bound up by proteins that keep free ions at vanishingly low levels in our blood. But the bacteria can be revived when iron levels climb for some reason, whereupon they secrete molecules on their cell walls called lipopolysaccharides (LPS). These are recognised by the immune system and stimulate inflammation – a general activation of the immune system that normally helps fight infection, but can get out of control and cause damage. 8 | NewScientist | 17 September 2016
Kell and his colleague Resia Pretorius at the University of Pretoria in South Africa wondered if LPS might be involved with the abnormal blood clotting often seen in diseases involving inflammation. Most bacteria in our blood come from our gut. So they mixed LPS from Escherichia coli gut bacteria with fibrinogen, the blood protein that forms the fibrin scaffolds of clots. The LPS bound to fibrinogen, and made it form abnormal, matted clots. Just one molecule of LPS mixed with 100 million fibrinogen molecules was enough to trigger these changes (Journal of the Royal Society Interface, doi.org/bqh5). Kell thinks LPS makes the protein take on a sheet structure rather than a helix, and this deformation then spreads between fibrinogens, in a similar way to how the deformation in prion proteins spreads to cause BSE. The abnormal clots closely resembled the ones that cause
KATERYNA KON/SPL
Do blood bacteria cause many ills?
–Not so sterile–
heart attacks and strokes – but they are also seen in other inflammatory diseases that don’t obviously involve clotting (see “From heart attacks to diabetes”). “In all inflammatory conditions we have noted a matted, denser fibrin structure, without the
FROM HEART ATTACKS TO DIABETES Microbes in the blood – and the inflammation they can cause when the immune system fights back – could be a contributing factor in all sorts of conditions not usually linked with bacteria (see main story). The risk of heart attack, diabetes, stroke and rheumatoid arthritis is higher in people with gum disease – which provides bacteria with an easy route into the blood. These conditions all share the hallmarks of bacteria. There is evidence that bacteria help form “amyloid” mats in the brain, like those in people with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. Injecting bacteria directly into mouse brains causes amyloid plaques to form
overnight, for example. And the more bacteria-nourishing iron in your brain, the more likely you are to get Alzheimer’s. Conversely, people with lower levels of iron in their blood have a lower risk of heart attack. There could potentially be a link to cancer, too. Inflammation is seen in cancer and the anti-inflammatory drug aspirin is known to lower cancer rates. The pill is also reported to bind free iron, which together may suggest bacteria have a hidden role in this disease too. In the past few years, inflammation has been tantalisingly linked to mental health disorders, such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and depression.
typical ‘spaghetti structure’ found in healthy individuals,” says Pretorius. “We think bugs are involved in all these diseases,” says Kell. The work “certainly merits further investigation”, says Joanna Collingwood at the University of Warwick in the UK, who studies metals in Alzheimer’s disease. “The role of infection in neurodegenerative disorders has been underexplored in the past.” It is an “interesting new development” if LPS can cause clot structures similar to those seen in chronic diseases, says Mike Barer at the University of Leicester, UK. What needs further investigation, he says, is whether dormant bacteria in blood really play a role. If they do, though, drugs that stop the effects of these bacteria might prove useful against major killers like heart attacks, strokes and even Alzheimer’s. Just giving patients drugs that mop up free iron might help. Kell wants to try such “chelators” in people at risk of stroke. ■
In this section ■ Push for forensics to combat wildlife crime, page 12 ■ How worried should we be about drugs in drinking water?, page 18 ■ Faking it on Facebook makes you stressed, page 22
Black hole’s messy birth glimpsed for first time
ANDRZEJ WOJCICKI/SPL/GETTY
WE’VE received a birth in the same spot is detectable in announcement from 20 million the infrared, as a warm afterglow. light years away, in the form of These observations mesh with our first glimpse of what seems what theory predicts should to be the creation of a black hole. happen when a star that size When massive stars run out of crumples into a black hole. fuel, they die in a huge explosion, First, the star spews out so many shooting out high-speed jets of neutrinos that it loses mass. The matter and radiation. What’s left star then lacks enough gravity to behind collapses into a black hole, “This may be the first direct which is so dense and has such clue to how the collapse strong gravity that not even light of a star can lead to the can escape it. formation of a black hole” Or so the theory goes. Now, a team led by Christopher Kochanek at Ohio State University hold on to the cloud of hydrogen in Columbus has aimed the ions loosely bound around it. Hubble Space Telescope at the As this cloud floats away, it cools, red supergiant star N6946-BH1, allowing the detached electrons which is about 20 million light to reattach to the hydrogen. This years from Earth. causes a roughly year-long bright This star, first observed in 2004, flare. When it fades, only the black was once about 25 times the mass hole remains. of our sun. Kochanek and his There are two other potential colleagues found that for some explanations for the star’s months in 2009, the star briefly disappearing act: it could have flared a million times brighter merged with another star, or be than our sun, then steadily faded hidden by dust. But they don’t fit away. New Hubble images show the data: a merger would shine that it has disappeared in visible more brightly than the original wavelengths, but a fainter source star for much longer than a
few months, and dust wouldn’t hide it for so long (arxiv.org/ abs/1609.01283). “This may be the first direct clue to how the collapse of a star can lead to the formation of a black hole,” says Avi Loeb at Harvard University. Further confirmation may not be far off. Material falling into the black hole would emit X-rays in a particular spectrum, which could be spotted by the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Kochanek says his group will receive new data from Chandra in two months or so. If Chandra sees nothing, that doesn’t rule out a black hole. In any case, the team will continue to look with Hubble – the longer the star isn’t there, the more likely it is we’ve spotted a black hole. “Patience proves it no matter what,” says Kochanek. This data will help inform simulations of how black holes form and what makes a massive star form a neutron star rather than a black hole. Despite calling himself a “nasty pessimist”, Kochanek thinks it’s quite likely this is indeed the formation of a black hole. “I’m not quite at ‘I’d bet my life on it’ yet,” he says, “but I’m willing to go for your life.” Anna Nowogrodzki ■
Size of quakes linked to moon phases
FULL and new moons seem to make the largest, most devastating earthquakes more likely. Although the effect is too small to make much difference in preparing for earthquakes in the short term, the discovery could one day provide insights into the ways that they develop and grow. During full and new moons, the sun, moon and Earth align, so gravity tugs more strongly on the planet’s crustal plates. The resulting “Earth tides” and increased tidal movements in the oceans can add to the stresses on earthquake faults. Satoshi Ide and his colleagues at the University of Tokyo, Japan, analysed the size of tidal stresses in the two weeks before earthquakes with a magnitude of 5.5 or greater over the past two decades. The team found that of the 12 largest recorded quakes – those with a magnitude of 8.2 or more – nine occurred on days near new or full moons, when the tidal pull caused high stress across the fault. Smaller quakes showed no tendency to cluster at these times (Nature Geoscience, doi.org/bqjk). This may be because the increased stress gives an extra boost to slipping faults, allowing a small slip to spread into a larger rupture, the researchers suggest. Other seismologists are cautiously excited about the results. “It’s a very interesting and intriguing observation,” says Emily Brodsky, an earthquake physicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “If it’s right, it’s a very big deal.” The finding may help seismologists understand how small ruptures progress into larger earthquakes, she says — which could eventually pay off in terms of better predictions. However, Brodsky notes that the sample size of just a dozen earthquakes is tiny. We may have to wait for more great quakes to see whether the –A bright flare may cloak its arrival– pattern holds, she says. Bob Holmes ■ 17 September 2016 | NewScientist | 9
THIS WEEK
Doubts over first lab-grown sperm enough to represent the boys who would benefit from the technique. They have also worked with donated tissue from people undergoing hormone therapy that makes testicular tissue regress to a prepubescent state.
IS THIS the first human sperm to be made in a lab? A French team claims it is – and they think their paper will convince sceptics. But doubts remain. Through a 20-year project, the researchers say they have made both human and rat sperm, starting with testicular cells called spermatogonia. A team in Japan made mouse sperm in 2011, as did researchers in China earlier this year, but the French group is the first to claim the step of making human spermatozoa. “It’s the final 20 per cent of the process,” says Philippe Durand of Kallistem, the company in Lyon, France, pursuing the project. Kallistem says the aim is to help men who are unable to make sperm after having cancer treatment as children. By taking and freezing biopsies containing spermatogonia before boys begin treatment, the technique could make sperm from these cells later. Durand and his colleagues say they have demonstrated the idea’s feasibility by making sperm using testicular tissue from rats young
Elusive stellar cusp spotted in galaxy’s centre PARTY in the galactic centre. We may have found the first solid evidence of a dense conference of stars around the Milky Way’s heart, which may one day help us observe the supermassive black hole there. The structure is known as a stellar cusp, and it has played hide-and-seek with astronomers for more than a decade. It was first proposed in the 1970s, when models predicted that 10 | NewScientist | 17 September 2016
VINCENT MONTCORGE/EURELIOS/LOOK AT SCIENCES/SPL
Andy Coghlan
stars orbiting a supermassive black hole would jostle around every time one was devoured. Over the course of a galaxy’s lifetime, this should leave an arrangement with many stars near the black hole and exponentially fewer as you move farther away. But it has been hard to prove this happens. Other galaxies are too far away for us to see their centres as anything more than fuzzy blobs. Observations in the early 2000s seemed to support a cusp in the Milky Way, but better data showed that we had been tricked by obscuring dust. Now, Rainer Schödel at the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia
The key, says Durand, is a bioreactor in which bundles of seminiferous tubules – the structures in the testes that contain spermatogonia – are packaged into tiny cylinders of a watery gel called chitosan. The gel is porous and allows air to diffuse in and out of cells. The gel also keeps bacteria in check, he says. The researchers immerse the cylinders in a dish containing a precise blend of nutrients, vitamins, hormones and growth
factors that diffuse through to the cells and coax them to mature, a process that takes 72 days. Durand says the system works because the tubules allow the spermatogonia to remain in constant contact with special testicular cells that help to nourish and mature sperm (Biology of Reproduction, doi.org/bqgv). Last year, Kallistem earned a patent for the technique, but this failed to convince sceptics. The company hopes the peerreviewed paper might. But it still falls short for some. “This study is encouraging, but the cells isolated are not even closely similar to mature or immature sperm,” says Jacob Hanna of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, who is part of another team attempting to grow human sperm in the lab. “While I think the study is important, the claim for complete human spermatogenesis outside the body is completely not proven in this study,” he says. To make “unimpeachable claims”, Hanna says the team would have to prove that the sperm were able to fertilise eggs, which could have been attempted with the lab-grown rat sperm. Durand says that tests to do exactly that are currently under way. Kallistem is already in preliminary talks about beginning –Under scrutiny– clinical trials in France, he adds. ■
in Granada, Spain, and his colleagues have looked for one by combining images of the galaxy’s centre to map faint old stars, which have had time to settle into a cusp. They also studied the total light emitted by all stars at varying distances from our galaxy’s central black hole, and compared the results with simulations. These methods point to the same conclusion: the cusp exists. Around the black hole, the density of stars is
“The stellar cusp has played hide-and-seek with astronomers for more than a decade”
10 million times that in our local area, says Schödel, who presented the work on 7 September at the LISA Symposium in Zurich, Switzerland. Many of those stars will eventually explode as supernovae, leaving behind black holes with masses comparable to that of our sun. If one of these merges with the black hole in the galactic centre, it will emit telltale gravitational waves that can be picked up by future observatories, like the proposed LISA space observatory. “These stellar-mass black holes would be perfect probes of spacetime around the supermassive black hole,” Schödel says. Adam Mann ■
Professor Dame Carol Robinson 2015 Laureate for United Kingdom
By Brigitte Lacombe
Science needs women
L’ORÉAL UNESCO AWARDS
Dame Carol Robinson, Professor of Chemistry at Oxford University, invented a ground-breaking method for studying how membrane proteins function, which play a critical role in the human body. Throughout the world, exceptional women are at the heart of major scientific advances. For 17 years, L’Oréal has been running the L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women In Science programme, honouring exceptional women from around the world. Over 2000 women from over 100 countries have received our support to continue to move science forward and inspire future generations. JOIN US ON FACEBOOK.COM/FORWOMENINSCIENCE
THIS WEEK
Aisling Irwin
WITH wildlife crime escalating, maybe it’s time to revamp the international treaty aimed at combatting it. Forensic scientists are proposing a series of changes to the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) to allow new technologies to be unleashed on the problem. Later this month, the CITES meeting in Johannesburg, South Africa, will hear of growing
“We’re starting from scratch. The big challenge is that you need to make progress at all levels” desperation over the rise in poaching and the illicit wildlife trade, thought to be the fourth largest illegal trade in the world. For example, rhino killings in Africa have risen for the last six years, with more than 1300 killed in 2015. Some CITES-listed plant species have become more valuable than ever. A 1-kilogram piece of resinous agarwood, used in pricey perfumes and traditional Chinese medicine, sold for $3 million earlier this year, says Ed Espinoza, deputy director of the US Fish and Wildlife Services Forensics Laboratory in Ashland, Oregon. And yet forensic tools that could help fight such crime have been hampered by different national protocols and legal or financial obstacles (see “Lots of promise, shame about resources”, right). There is growing evidence that the various parties involved in tackling the trade do not work to the same standards when taking samples, and speak different technical languages. “A lot of the techniques we’re 12 | NewScientist | 17 September 2016
working on right now could be quite game-changing provided these things are standardised,” says Nick Ahlers at the wildlife trade monitoring network TRAFFIC. “We’re hoping that some real, practical things will come out of [this month’s meeting].” One problem is that researchers trying to get reference samples of horn, pangolin scales, wood and other CITES-listed materials can face delays of months or years. This has slowed down the uptake of a pioneering technique that can identify timber species and point to their geographical origin without tricky DNA analysis. “Just getting the permits is horrendous, and you can’t develop tests if you can’t get samples,” says Eleanor Dormontt at the University of Adelaide in Australia. At the meeting, her group will propose putting more responsibility on countries to supply researchers and lawenforcers with samples of tree species being illegally harvested
EPA/SALYM FAYAD/CAMERA PRESS
Forensic push to curb wildlife crime
–Animal DNA may finger poachers–
within their borders. They also want a global map of reference samples and a push to expand existing collections. Sharing of samples is a problem with rhino material, too. Tech exists that can link a poacher caught with rhino horn – or even
LOTS OF PROMISE, SHAME ABOUT RESOURCES Forensic technology is coming of age, even as its implementation lags. For example, Ed Espinoza at the US Fish and Wildlife Services Forensics Laboratory has developed a way to determine the origins of wooden products in seconds. Known as DART-TOFMS, it involves bombarding a sample with helium ions at 450°C, vaporising chemicals at and near the surface. Mass spectrometry can then quickly reveal its chemical signature. The approach is far faster than the usual method of boiling a sample for days, then attempting to extract DNA, says Espinoza. But although it has been used on seized timber in the US, the technique has so far failed to be a game-changer, partly because
the equipment costs around $200,000. It also requires reference samples from around the globe, which are often just not available.
SKILLS GAP Also potentially useful for identifying trafficked species in the field is MinION, a portable DNA sequencer. But its adoption is an uphill battle because of lack of forensic science expertise in parts of Africa. “It has absolutely humongous promise,” says Jon Wetton at the University of Leicester, UK. But presenting it to “someone who has not even had the technology for fingerprinting – it’s like giving them a Star Trek tricorder”, he says.
dust from a horn they have already sold – with the corpse of a specific animal. The RhODIS database of rhino DNA held at the University of Pretoria has already contributed to successful prosecutions in South Africa. The sad truth is, however, that most rhino horn finds its way out of Africa to places where the authorities have little knowledge of RhODIS. Rhino conservationists are now proposing to CITES that any country where rhino horn is seized should automatically collect samples and follow a new, standard procedure that means researchers worldwide can use the DNA data. Other proposals call for better wildlife protection laws and the setting up of forensic hubs that could help analyse materials from countries lacking the expertise. “We’re starting from scratch,” says Kathryn Jeffery, scientific adviser to Gabon’s National Parks Agency, who is part of a project to set up an elephant DNA testing lab. “The big challenge is that you need to make progress at all levels.” ■
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Beautiful ivory gulls are disappearing from the Arctic AS ARCTIC sea ice dwindles, a gull that depends on it for finding food is disappearing from the ocean around Greenland. Ivory gulls range throughout the Arctic, living on or near pack ice in the far north. The Canadian population is known to be in steep decline: numbers in the early 2000s were about 80 per cent lower than in the 1980s. To find out whether the gulls living near the Greenland Sea are also declining, Claude Joiris of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels examined data he collected aboard an icebreaker travelling between
Greenland and Svalbard between 1988 and 2014. Joiris found a sevenfold fall in the ivory gull number after 2007. But it’s not clear what caused that “drastic decrease” (Polar Biology, doi.org/bqfr). Of all the Arctic seabirds, ivory gulls are most closely associated with sea ice, says Nina Karnovsky at Pomona College in Claremont, California. That makes them particularly vulnerable to its loss. If ice doesn’t form near where they’re breeding, for example, they might not be able to feed their chicks. Tracking survival and migration patterns could help researchers figure out what’s going on before it’s too late, says Kyle Elliott at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. “If that Arctic ecosystem disappears – if the ice disappears – they’re not going to be able to survive.”
Little static storms erupt on the moon MINI-LIGHTNING may flash in the coldest craters on the moon, melting and disturbing the dust. We already knew that meteoroid impacts stir up the fine layer of dust and ground-up rock that covers the lunar surface. Now Andrew Jordan at the University of New Hampshire and his colleagues suggest keeping an eye out for another rabble-rouser: electrical sparks. 14 | NewScientist | 17 September 2016
Lunar dust normally can’t conduct much current. But if high-energy particles thrown off by the sun collect in cold patches of dust, they open up vapourfilled channels within the grains, transforming it into a conductor. That would set off tiny jolts, each one like the spark you might get from touching a metal car door on a dry winter day. Jordan and his colleagues
calculated how much charge might build up in permanently shadowed regions. They estimate that over the past 1 million years, it would have been enough to blast between 10 and 25 per cent of the top 1 millimetre of dust with tiny lightning bolts (Icarus, doi.org/bqgt). Impacts stir up a similar amount of dust, so this sparking could be an important, overlooked means of beating up the surface of the moon, Jordan says.
GOOD news for those equally at home on a treadmill as in a bar. Regular exercise seems to cancel out some of the risk of death linked to alcohol. High alcohol intake is associated with heart disease, stroke and at least seven types of cancer. But people over the age of 40 who do the recommended amount of physical activity – 150 minutes of moderate aerobic exercise – and also drink more than 35 units of alcohol a week are less likely to die from related conditions than people who drink the same amount but exercise less (British Journal of Sports Medicine, doi.org/bqd7). However, drinking so much is still risky. The UK government updated its advice on alcohol consumption at the start of 2016. It now recommends that both men and women drink no more than 14 units – and stay off alcohol for a few days a week.
X-rays at Pluto raise solar wind puzzle NEW HORIZONS has uncovered another Plutonian mystery – this time with the solar wind. When charged particles from the sun hit a planet’s atmosphere, they usually create radiation such as X-rays. This was known to happen as far out as Saturn. But when Carey Lisse at Johns Hopkins University, Maryland, viewed Pluto using the Chandra X-ray Observatory in 2013, he saw far fewer X-rays than anticipated. During last year’s visit, the New Horizons probe solved half the mystery: it found that Pluto’s atmosphere is more compact than expected and so less exposed to the solar wind. But it also found that the wind there is surprisingly placid, and no one yet knows why (Icarus, doi.org/bqf3).
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HE WAS just the tip of the iceberg. Several rare white killer whales, or orcas, have been spotted in the western North Pacific since one nicknamed Iceberg was encountered six years ago. Researchers have discovered no fewer than five – and perhaps as many as eight – white orcas there. They are almost unheard of elsewhere in the world’s oceans, but their abundance in this region could be worrying evidence of inbreeding (Aquatic Mammals, doi.org/bqfn). “What we are seeing is strange. It’s a very high rate of occurrence,” says Erich Hoyt at Whale and Dolphin Conservation in Bridport, UK, who co-directs the Far East Russia Orca Project. It’s not clear why so many orcas there are white. They may be albinos, a condition that is often more common when populations are small and inbred. But the killer whales here are estimated to have large populations. Instead, the orcas’ unique cultural background may be behind their isolation, as they live in groups with a distinct cultural identity tied to their hunting style. “Often these populations are reproductively isolated from neighbouring populations,” says Andrew Foote at the University of Bern, Switzerland, This could lead to the populations being relatively inbred, he says.
Hair print can identify people when DNA analysis fails NEVER before has splitting hairs been so useful. Analysing the proteins in hair could provide a way to identify people when DNA sequencing fails. DNA molecules break down quickly when exposed to water, light or heat, so sometimes analysis of DNA found at a crime scene won’t work. Glendon Parker at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and his team say hair can help in some circumstances. Hairs are made of proteins that are pieced together according to
the instructions in the genetic material of our DNA. When mutations occur in genes, it can lead to slight changes in the sequence of amino acid molecules that make up hair proteins. To use such changes to identify people, the team broke down a hair’s proteins and separated out the chunks to analyse their sequences. Comparing these results to a database of hair proteins can identify places where unexpected amino acids have been inserted. Using this approach, the team
was able to identify dozens of sequence changes in the hair of 76 living people, and hair from people who died around 1750 to 1850. They say some of the changes they found may occur in only one in 12,500 people, making them powerful markers for linking someone to the hairs left at the scene of a crime (PLoS One, doi.org/bqfq). The technique could be invaluable. “Protein is more abundant and more robust than DNA,” says Andrew Wilson at the University of Bradford, UK. NATHAN SMITH/UA AND NASA
Iceberg the white orca is not alone
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Squeaky love song makes fish heard SAY what? Coral reefs are notoriously noisy. So if you’re struggling to be heard, you might need to try something different. Damselfish are renowned marine chatterboxes, and several species are known to make noises. But until now, we only knew about two types of call: single pulse sounds or “pops” made when damselfish snap their teeth together, and “chirps” formed of multiple pulses joined up. Now it appears that the Ambon damselfish (Pomacentrus amboinensis) has developed a third call to help it shout above the racket. Likened to a windscreen wiper on dry glass, this sound was recorded at a reef in Taiwan (Journal of Zoology, doi. org/bqft). “It’s almost like it’s learned a new trick,” says Steve Simpson, a marine biologist at the University of Exeter, UK. He suggests that after a few fish learn to do it, the behaviour may spread socially. This new call, used during courtship and chasing rivals, is thought to help damselfish identify others of their own species in the reef environment, though it’s not yet clear exactly how they make it.
Gassy clue to violent star’s past rages IN 1843, a star called Eta Carinae erupted like a supernova yet managed to survive. A trail of gas filaments now suggests it may have had two prior outbursts hundreds of years earlier. Located 7500 light years away, Eta Carinae is actually two stars spinning tightly around each another. The smaller star is between 30 and 50 times the sun’s mass, the other between 100 and 150 times our star’s mass. This behemoth star is literally tearing itself apart, blasting photons outwards with so much
pressure that they carry away the star’s outer layers. Now that shed skin is helping to reconstruct the stars’ violent past. Using photos from the Hubble Space Telescope taken two years apart, Megan Kiminki at the University of Arizona in Tucson and her colleagues traced more than 800 gas blobs from Eta Carinae back through time. Their speeds and positions suggest that Eta Carinae had a major eruption around 1250 and a slightly less dramatic one in about 1550 (arxiv.org/abs/1609.00362).
17 September 2016 | NewScientist | 17
ANALYSIS DRUGS IN THE WATER
Drink up, dose up Water reuse means we are all consuming a cocktail of other people’s medicine leftovers. Should we be worried, asks Anthony King PICK up a glass, fill it from the tap and take a sip. You have just had a tiny dose of the pill your neighbour took days before. Excreted and flushed through our sewage works and waterways, drug molecules are all around us. A recent analysis of streams in the US detected an entire pharmacy: diabetic meds, muscle relaxants, opioids, antibiotics, antidepressants and more. Drugs have even been found in crops irrigated by treated waste water. The amounts that end up in your glass are minuscule, and won’t lay you low tomorrow. However, someone prescribed multiple drugs is more likely to experience side effects, and risks rise exponentially with each drug taken by a person over 65. So could tiny doses of dozens of drugs have an impact on your health? “We don’t know what it means if you have a lifelong uptake of drugs at very low concentrations,” says Klaus Kümmerer at the University of Lüneburg, Germany. “These drugs have been individually approved, but we haven’t studied what it means when they’re together in the same soup,” says Mae Wu at the National Resources Defense Council, a US advocacy group.
came to a head earlier this year when researchers were taken aback by the discovery of some drug residues in crops irrigated with treated waste water in Israel (Environmental Science & Technology, doi.org/bqdd). To see if these residues passed into the body, Benny Chefetz at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and his colleagues focused on an epilepsy drug called carbamazepine, which they detected in cucumbers, lettuce and other produce. Volunteers
who consumed an irrigated crop had a dramatic spike in the drug’s levels in their urine, which took over a week to clear. Those who ate crops irrigated by fresh water saw no effect. “This was a big surprise,” says Chefetz, who plans to study at-risk groups such as pregnant women and children. We shouldn’t worry about an instant effect in healthy adults, says Chefetz, as the levels were 10,000 times lower than from a 400 milligram pill. “But we don’t know what will happen with
small children exposed to low levels of pharmaceuticals for a generation,” he says, and it’s not practical or ethical to run a clinical trial. “There’s no data about that.” Half of all irrigation water in Israel comes from recycled waste water, a process more countries are looking to use as water scarcities become more widespread. California plans to increase its use for crops in response to drought, for example. This suggests drug residues in our drinking water are set to rise. But
Thirty years ago, no one paid attention to endocrine disruptors, artificial chemicals found in a variety of materials. These environmental contaminants are now linked to breast cancer and abnormal development in children. The cocktail in our water involves many more compounds, so this time we can’t afford to wait for negative effects to emerge. The issue of drugs in our water 18 | NewScientist | 17 September 2016
AGNIESZKA RAYSS/ANZENBERGER/EYEVINE
Learn from history
–What’s in the water?-
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fresh water isn’t immune either. Paul Bradley of the US Geological Survey and his team checked streams in the eastern US for 108 chemicals, a drop in the bucket of the 3000 drug compounds in use. One river alone had 45. And even though two-thirds of the streams weren’t fed by treated waste water, 95 per cent of them had the anti-diabetic drug metformin, probably from street run-off or leaky sewage pipes (Environmental Science & Technology, doi.org/bqdb). “The number of chemicals we are exposed to is very, very large, and we don’t understand those impacts,” says Bradley. That’s perhaps unsurprising, given the level of drug use in the US (see “We know what you took last summer”, below). Recent stats show one in five Americans had used three or more prescription drugs in the past 30 days.
Unknown cocktail The big unknown is how these low-dose drug cocktails affect people. Usually, researchers assess risk by varying doses of one drug. They ask what dose causes a specific result, like mortality in a lab animal or signs of cancer. But you cannot assess multiple drugs in small doses over a long time period, says Kümmerer. “Industry says we need sound science, but what does that mean?” he says. “If it’s a clear dose-effect relation, then we cannot establish this.” “We’ve got hundreds of chemicals circulating in our blood that our grandparents did not have,” says John Sumpter at Brunel University London. “We can test each of these chemicals in turn and not see any adverse effect, but I’m not sure the whole mixture doesn’t do anything.” Some say the industry could do more. “Once drugs are on the market, they claim they have no responsibility,” says Chefetz. Bodies like the European Federation of Pharmaceutical
Something in the water Drug molecules aren’t fully absorbed by the body and don’t entirely break down in water, meaning small doses of other people’s medicine can find their way into you
TREATED WASTE WATER PILL
PATIENT
CROPS RIVERS
TOILET RAW SEWAGE
Industries and Associations Another issue is that treatment disagree. A spokesperson points doesn’t remove all unwanted to efforts like a collaboration compounds and can transform within the Innovative Medicines some into new and unknown Initiative to generate reliable ways chemicals, says Kümmerer. He of judging potential risk for argued against the approach last pharmaceuticals. week at the Risk Assessment of Maybe we should accept we Pharmaceuticals in the don’t know what is going on and Environment conference in Paris. take action to minimise the risks: Instead, he is calling for greener a precautionary approach. There “We don’t know what it are two possible solutions. means if you have a One is to upgrade water treatment facilities. It’s an option lifelong uptake of drugs at very low concentrations” Switzerland has gone for, but it isn’t cheap – it will cost the country over $1 billion. In pharmaceuticals that degrade England, it is estimated that just readily in the environment. removing the hormone estradiol Traditionally, pharma firms from sewage plants would cost have focused on the stability of billions of pounds. drugs, ensuring their products “The public needs to decide have a long shelf life. Kümmerer if reducing these compounds is believes it’s time for a rethink. important enough to pay for,” Existing drugs can be made to says Bradley. react and break down under
WE KNOW WHAT YOU TOOK LAST SUMMER Drugs in the water are so prevalent that you can actually tell who’s in town by analysing their waste. Patrick Phillips at the US Geological Survey and his team wanted to find out if drug residues are caused by people flushing away unwanted pills. His team decided to test the waste water before and after University of Vermont students, who make up at least 25 per cent of the town of Burlington, left for summer. In a survey, students reported having leftover antibiotics, and birth control and pain medicines. The team collected samples at the town’s waste water treatment plant every 15 minutes to sniff out these and over 100 other compounds.
They found no evidence of pill dumping, but they did see a sharp increase in drug concentrations after the students vacated the town.
CLEAN LIVING The increased drugs were largely antidepressants, along with diabetes and ulcer meds. The college kids, it turned out, had been diluting the far druggier waste water of the older generation (Science of the Total Environment, doi.org/bqfm). What’s more, concentrations of caffeine and cotinine (a metabolite of nicotine) had dropped off a cliff. “Some things never change,” says Phillips. “College is still coffee and cigarettes.” Sally Adee
TAP
YOU
conditions not found in the body, such as light or a specific pH. He has shown it’s possible to redesign drugs for heart disease so that they degrade faster in the environment (RSC Advances, doi. org/bqdg), though these molecules require testing before clinical use. But if the companies won’t play ball, perhaps we need to hit them where it hurts – the bottom line. Drugs are assessed for their environmental impact but results cannot prevent them being sold. Doing so could shift thinking, but it is a big stick. Would blocking a cancer drug on environmental grounds really be acceptable? Still, a ban could encourage firms to produce greener drugs. “This could create revenue for innovative companies,” says Kümmerer. It’s thought some are already active in this area, but keeping the research under their hats, says John Warner of the Warner Babcock Institute for Green Chemistry in Wilmington, Massachusetts. “Drugs in the environment is a serious issue, but current regulations work against solving the problem by looking for stable drugs,” he says. “The fact you don’t hear about all these great things pharma is doing in this space doesn’t mean they are not doing it.” However we decide to deal with the drugs in our water, the lessons of the endocrine disruptors suggest we should start soon, even in the face of uncertainty about their effects. “This hasn’t been getting enough attention,” says Wu. “The problem hasn’t been getting better because we are just ignoring it.” ■ 17 September 2016 | NewScientist | 19
COMMENT
Punish with dignity Prison reform is rising up the agenda in many nations, but success requires an open mindset, says Arne Kvernvik Nilsen LOCK them up and throw away the key. When it comes to prison, that’s a common attitude in many places, including the UK and US. Politicians have long focused on “being tough on crime” – to ensure that those who are jailed are not just unable to escape their confinement, but also “feel” the punishment. Yet if we want prisoners to rehabilitate, the evidence says this strategy does not work. Such punishment usually fails to deter reoffending. On the contrary, much crime is committed by those who “go in and out” of prisons. In some UK jails, 75 per cent reoffend. There is another way. At Norway’s Bastøy prison on an island south of the capital Oslo, it is different. Reoffending rates are a fraction of those in the UK: 16 per cent at Bastøy, and less than 30 per cent in the country overall. This is despite some 65 to 70 per
cent of Norway’s inmates having drug and alcohol problems. Personality disorders and antisocial behaviour are also common, and in that sense the prison population is like the UK’s. So why such different outcomes? I am proud to say that while a prison sentence in my country means loss of freedom, it is not a regime that harms offenders mentally or physically. To make prison a place for rehabilitation requires finding a way to ensure that inmates are kept in jail while at the same time being treated as humans and keeping their civil rights – such as the right to vote. This means changing security methods, with fewer walls, fences and locked doors. There must be a focus on culture and ensuring that staff hold high qualifications and ethical standards. Bastøy runs as a community, with most of the services,
In the name of security Kuwait’s mass DNA sampling to fight terrorism could backfire in so many ways, says Olaf Rieß COMPULSORY DNA testing of all citizens and visitors? It sounds like an Orwellian nightmare, but this is the reality in Kuwait, the first nation to order such sampling. It is a worry on many fronts. What happens if the database is hacked? And even if the present rulers manage to keep the database secure, what if 20 | NewScientist | 17 September 2016
home-grown. And who ever heard of a suicide bomber worrying about being identified after blowing themselves up? Kuwait also says the database could help identify victims. But if a bomb kills many, DNA will not help much in distinguishing attacker from victims. The terrorism argument is spurious. If you try to imagine potential misuses, worrying examples spring easily to mind: checking paternity in a country with severe
there is a change of regime? The Gulf State says the move, reportedly due to begin within weeks, is for security reasons; it acted after a bombing killed 27 there last year. But while the “Initiatives that begin with need to have a swab taken may put off foreign would-be attackers the best of intentions can from entering the country, bear in end up being used for nefarious purposes” mind that a lot of terrorism is
adultery laws or trying to uncover a person’s ethnic origin in order to discriminate. And we know from history that many initiatives that start with the best intentions end up used for nefarious purposes. Kuwait could cause irreparable harm to its reputation and economy. Some tourists will stay away, while foreign firms and institutes will think twice about opening facilities there. Scientists from abroad may avoid Kuwait, damaging its role as a conference host and hindering joint research. I also worry that if sampling is linked to coercion in the public eye, it might affect willingness elsewhere to share genetic data to
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Arne Kvernvik Nilsen was a governor of Bastøy and now advises on prison reform
support vital research into diseases and treatments. Kuwait has invested heavily in genetic technology, so collecting DNA on this scale would probably be feasible, at least in the first instance. But the question is not whether it is feasible, rather whether it is desirable. The answer is clear: mass DNA sampling is neither appropriate nor helpful in tackling the risks it is meant to confront, and the downside of misuse is alarming. ■ Olaf Rieß is president of the European Society of Human Genetics, which has called on Kuwait to abandon its intention to begin blanket sampling
INSIGHT Dietary trends
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opportunities and challenges of a small Norwegian village. It is a place where inmates can learn and develop responsibility for the way they think and act. Developing respect and self-esteem is a priority. This starts with making each prisoner aware of what they think of themselves. All staff are trained to treat and socialise with inmates in a respectful way. Dignity and humanity are central. Countries such as the UK should make more use of low-security and open-prison regimes. These cause less damage to mental health than high-security ones. UK justice secretary Liz Truss’s reform proposals are due to be revealed next month. To anyone who is still wedded to the primitive idea that retribution is essential, I always say that the person they would like to see suffer in prison might one day return to their neighbourhood as a bigger threat. We need politicians who heed research, best practice and experience, and are prepared to say “enough is enough”. A change is needed now, or some societies and countries may lose the fight against crime. ■
–May be healthier for some–
Isditchingglutenjust afad?It’s hardtosay Clare Wilson
can only eat gluten-free food are really just fussy eaters. To me, the only real surprise was that the number of people on glutenfree diets is so low. Other surveys have suggested that up to 20 per cent of people in the US are at least trying to reduce their gluten intake. But the latest findings do not mean that all those people are acting irrationally. In fact, most who avoid gluten do not claim to have coeliac disease, but a less severe condition sometimes called gluten intolerance. They say that after eating wheat they get stomach pains and bloating. We
A CAFE owner in Dublin, Ireland, sparked internet outrage last week when they said anyone wanting gluten-free food would have to show a doctor’s note. Although they later admitted it was just a joke, the commotion reflects the rise of what might be called “gluten intolerance intolerance”. Many people see going gluten-free as just another fad, but researchers are still trying to figure out what science might underlie it. Now a US study has found that while the number of people with coeliac disease “Some people think that if has dipped slightly in the past five the experts can’t agree, years, staying at just under 1 per cent then why not take dietary of the population, those who avoid advice from celebrities?” gluten without having a diagnosis has more than tripled, to 1.7 per cent (JAMA Internal Medicine, doi.org/bqdj). may or may not believe them, but stats The main medical reason for on coeliac disease tell us nothing. avoiding gluten is coeliac disease, There are reputable researchers which arises when the immune who believe that gluten intolerance system reacts to gluten in wheat and exists in some people. Some think that damages the gut lining as a result. “gluten” intolerance is actually caused Some view the finding that coeliac by other substances in wheat. disease is not on the rise as proof that The incidence of a genuine gluten those annoying people who say they problem is probably low. Various
studies have tried to measure this by eliminating gluten from people’s diet and then reintroducing it in a way that meant people didn’t know if they were getting it or not. They found that 7 to 30 per cent of those who believe they have a problem with gluten really do have one. So at least some of those who claim to be suffering from “wheat belly” are right. The popularity of going gluten-free may also be explained by its overlap with another controversial food trend: avoiding not just bread but all starchy food as part of a low-carb diet. This is the diametrical opposite of most official guidelines on healthy eating – and yet studies suggest it can help people lose weight, and even help those with type 2 diabetes reduce their blood sugar level. You can understand some people thinking that if the experts can’t agree among themselves, then why shouldn’t they take dietary advice from celebrities – or just go with their own gut instinct? And some people with coeliac disease report that the glutenavoiding craze has a major benefit: it is now much easier to get glutenfree processed foods, from pasta to birthday cake. Conversely, they also say that other people may not take their gluten avoidance as seriously as before, lumping them in with those fussy eaters. Maybe doctor’s notes aren’t such a crazy idea after all. ■ 17 September 2016 | NewScientist | 21
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TECHNOLOGY emotional and mental toll – just as it would offline. The pair asked 164 people with ages ranging between 18 and 55 to take two personality tests, one as their true selves and one as the person they thought they presented on Facebook. Your “true self” encapsulates fundamental aspects of your identity, says Grieve. “This could be something as light-hearted as confessing a secret love of daggy music or a celebrity crush,” she says – or more serious confessions about panic attacks or bullying. They found that the more people’s true selves diverged from the persona they presented online, the less social connectedness they reported – and the more stress. The findings are intriguing –Put your best face forward– because they show established principles in psychology playing out on the web, says Michal Kosinski at Stanford University in California. For example, selfverification theory says that we would rather other people had an accurate view of who we really are It’s often said you can be who you want online – but faking it could than an overly positive one. cause you more stress than it’s worth, says Sally Adee William Swann of the University of Texas at Austin was ON THE internet, nobody knows the version of ourselves we that our true colours just can’t the first to show this in 1997. He you’re a dog. It’s a joke that’s present on social networks. help shining through. For found that employees are more almost as old as the web itself – Previous research suggested that example, several studies found but one that perfectly captures we tailor our online interactions that Facebook behaviours are an “We would rather other people had an accurate the prevailing idea that you can be to hide aspects of our personality accurate reflection of our whoever you want to be online. we don’t like – or don’t want to personality. For instance, constant view of who we really are than a positive one” However, it turns out that share. In other words, we curate updates about our gym habits faking it may be causing us our digital selves to highlight reveal a genuine narcissistic streak. problems. Rachel Grieve and only the best bits. Now Grieve and Watkinson may likely to leave a company after Jarrah Watkinson at the University But that picture may need have found out why: trying to be getting a pay rise if they have low of Tasmania in Hobart, Australia, redrawing. Recent work suggests someone you’re not carries an self-esteem, because it conflicted have found that when your selfwith their view of the world. In presentation diverges too much general, studies have shown that from who you really are it can lead SOCIAL FEEDBACK we tend to be healthier and more Online social networks let people of that is accelerating the acceptance to stress and feelings of social productive when those around us all stripes find a community. They let of gay people into mainstream disconnection (Cyberpsychology, reflect how we see ourselves, even us escape what Michal Kosinski at society around the world. Behavior, and Social Networking, if some of those traits are not Stanford University in California But it’s a double-edged sword. doi.org/bqdm). positive. calls the “small prisons” of The need to validate our sense of Understanding our internet Kosinski says none of this geographical circumstance. self is also likely to be a driver of the persona is important to should work any differently And the positive effects may spill filter bubble problem – we tend to researchers, advertisers and online versus in real life. Social into our offline lives. Kosinski thinks surround ourselves with likegovernments alike, keen to mine media is just another layer on the support from online communities minded people, making it harder to insights from our online offline social world – it doesn’t may have created a feedback loop encounter differing opinions. activities. But it is often not clear change us or our interactions in how our real-life identity maps to any fundamental way. Research
Relax, just be yourself
22 | NewScientist | 17 September 2016
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Yet if the study can be replicated, then the finding that selfverification theory applies online has implications for anonymity. There are good reasons people hide their identity on the internet. For a start, it lets you express yourself without consequence – whether you are an internet troll or gay person in Saudi Arabia (see “Social feedback”, below left). Grieve’s work suggests anonymity comes with a cost. When nobody knows you’re a dog, you get none of the positive validation of others seeing you for who you really are. “You can’t link that secret self to your public identity,” says Grieve. Of course, it’s also good news for the many people now mining our social media profiles for deep truths about our innermost selves – marketers, potential employers, landlords, credit agencies and researchers for whom social media has opened an unprecedented window into who we really are. ■
LASERS have entered the arms race. As more nations equip their militaries with high-energy laser weapons, new defences are needed. Enter Helios, an anti-laser laser that aims to protect drones and other vehicles. Laser weapons have been around for a few decades, but they are becoming more widely used. The US military has large numbers of lasers that it can use to dazzle the enemy, for example. And its warship USS Ponce now carries lasers powerful enough to shoot drones out of the sky. It is not just the US military that has lasers. In July, the Ukrainian border guard service claimed that three of its guards received retinal burns while observing separatist activity through binoculars. They believe that a laser was used against them. This followed an earlier incident in which one of the service’s reconnaissance aircraft was apparently targeted by a Russian soldier with a hand-held laser in Crimea. “If this trend continues, it is an escalation of the conflict,” says California-based defence analyst Robert Bunker. To defend against military lasers, Adsys Controls of Irvine, California, has created Helios, which can be carried on drones. To do significant damage, an offensive laser needs to remain focused on its target for several seconds. Helios stops a laser
from doing this by disrupting the systems controlling the beam – the Achilles’ heel for all such weapons. “Beam control is a critical function of high-energy lasers,” says Adsys CEO Brian Goldberg. Helios can detect an incoming laser beam and identify key properties such as power, wavelength and its source. It then interferes with the beam control – possibly by firing back a laser of its own – so the attacking laser
Fighting future fires There’s no smoke with data. Working with the Atlanta fire department, a team at the Georgia Institute of Technology has built an algorithm that predicts the risk of fire for the city’s commercial property. Called Firebird, it uses crime statistics, fire permits and nearby liquor licences to flag highrisk buildings. A similar approach has also been used in New York.
“The Ukrainian border guard service says that three guards have received retinal burns from lasers” cannot fix on the target. “It provides permanent protection,” he says. “It’s not just buying time.” Goldberg won’t say exactly how the interference is done, but it may involve fooling the control system into thinking it is hitting its target despite the laser actually pointing a few metres to the side. But Helios could be susceptible to the same trick, says Roland Smith, a plasma physicist at Imperial College London. “If it puts out enough power to disrupt targeting, that makes it visible and a target itself,” he says. “If the laser weapon knows it is being jammed, it could engage the jammer.” David Hambling ■
9
The number of pages in a closed book that can be read by a new computer imaging technique. Made by a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the system uses terahertz radiation to penetrate several layers of paper and detect what’s printed on them
Bots in the trunk All robots need a mother ship. Last week, German car-maker Mercedes announced that it is building a customised van to carry fleets of six-wheeled delivery robots made by Starship Technologies in Tallinn, Estonia. Starship’s robots can carry parcels, groceries or takeaway food weighing up to 10 kilograms. Hitching a ride in the van means the bots can make deliveries further afield.
–Still on target?17 September 2016 | NewScientist | 23
EPA / ALAMY
Secret selves
Drones to get anti-laser laser to stop attacks
JOHN F. WILLIAMS/U.S. NAVY
like Grieve’s backs this up. In fact, it may be even harder to be someone you’re not when you’re online. In our offline interactions, there are more social inhibitions. What’s more, happier and less stressed people are not curating themselves, says Kosinski, they have curated their social network, probably to shape a less diverse audience. Zorana Ivcevic Pringle at Yale University offers a note of caution. She points out that the new study relied heavily on selfreporting. The “true” and Facebook persona were both assessed via a standard personality test, with participants simply told to think about how they present themselves online. “I think this is quite difficult to answer,” says Pringle. Some of the questions asked people to exhibit a level of self-awareness that they may not have possessed, she says.
ONE PER CENT
ZENROBOTICS
TECHNOLOGY Sympathetic apps can offer virtual shoulder to cry on
HERO IMAGES/GETTY
SOME people always know how to offer comfort. Now computers are learning the knack too, assisted by an algorithm that aims to deliver the right words at the right time. “There’s a lot of need for emotional support at the moment,” says Judith Masthoff at the University of Aberdeen, UK. “We have increased rates of mental health issues, and this has led to increased rates of informal care.” Masthoff suggests that people could soon be turning to apps. Masthoff and her colleagues ran experiments to figure out how a computer should offer support. Participants had to imagine different stressful situations and then choose the messages they would find most helpful. For example, a person recovering from injury would get a message combining emotional reassurance and praise: “I know this is hard but you are doing a great job.” The responses were then automated. “A lot of people already have apps that help them to increase their daily walking activity or to eat more healthily,” says Masthoff. “I would like people to have their own guardian angel that could support them emotionally throughout the day.” Aneesha Singh at University College London agrees: “The most successful virtual assistants will be the ones that can offer some kind of emotional support.” Timothy Revell ■
– An eye for value–
Robots learn to mine trash for treasure
WOOD, concrete, metal, plastic robots to do more. Giving them and glass – everything rumbles more dexterous hands and arms into the maw of a million-dollar would let them dismantle items robot. As it passes along a to get at parts inside them, for conveyor, the rubble is scanned example. Apple has developed and anything of value plucked a phone recycling robot called from the trash by a mechanical Liam, which can pull apart a arm. It’s a painstaking job – but a discarded phone in seconds, simple one. Now such robots are “With each success and about to get a lot smarter. In the recycling industry, waste failure the robots improve their ability over time, with materials are typically crushed no human intervention” and torn into tiny pieces to make them easier to sort. The mixture is then dumped into a pool where preparing the device for recycling. wood and plastic float, and metal Zen Robotics wants a Liam for all and rock sink. kinds of waste. Salvage robots like those made But Liam only recycles by Zen Robotics in Helsinki, iPhones – a relatively simple task. Finland, are making this process A robot that can cope with obsolete. The robots can spot anything that might come its way items of value – like pieces of is too hard to program by hand. hardwood or copper – and pick “There’s this jungle of parameters,” them out as they pass by. This is says Zen Robotics head of quicker and larger items may be technology Harri Holopainen. worth more whole than in pieces. For Holopainen and colleagues, In the last two years, Zen the answer is to use machine Robotics has installed its robots at learning so that their robots can 14 sites around the world. So far, teach themselves and acquire the they have collected 4200 tonnes ability to monitor their own of valuable material. performance, adjusting their -Lean on meBut the company wants its behaviour accordingly. The idea is
24 | NewScientist | 17 September 2016
that faced with a conveyor belt of unfamiliar electrical items, say, the robots might do a poor job of taking them apart to extract the copper initially, but through trial and error they would learn to complete the task efficiently without human intervention. In their prototype, the robot drops salvaged items on to a second conveyor belt. Overhead cameras monitor what the robot has grabbed and essentially grade its performance. Each success and failure is used to tweak the algorithm controlling the robot, improving its performance over time. Once the machine learning system is in place, the robots can be given more advanced hardware. With a flexible arm they could learn to pick up and throw trash far more effectively, says Holopainen. “It would be able to throw things with quite frightening accuracy and force.” Machine learning has reached a point where it really is beginning to solve control problems that traditional approaches to programming cannot, says Jeremy Wyatt, a professor of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Birmingham, UK. “This is a set of problems that everyone is trying to solve,” he says. Hal Hodson ■
Alan Turing is arguably one of the greatest scientists of the modern age. Join us as we explore his life, work and greatest achievements and learn more about this fascinating figure in 20th century science
DAVIDE CIOFFI/ FINE ART IMAGES /GETTY IMAGES
4 – 8 NOVEMBER 2016
(OTHER
DATES AVAILABLE)
STUDENT DAYS
CODE BREAKERS
TORTURED GENIUS
Cambridge
Bletchley Park
Manchester
Visit King’s College where Turing studied mathematics and went on to lay the theoretical foundations for modern computers. Marvel at the chapel’s famous Gothic architecture and medieval stained glass. Our guided tour of the city includes the American Cambridge cemetery and the Eagle pub, where Francis Crick first announced that he and James Watson had discovered DNA. After dinner, enjoy a talk by intelligence expert Mark Baldwin and a demonstration of a rare fourwheel Enigma machine.
Soak up the atmosphere of the huts where Enigma messages sent by the Germany military were decrypted. Visit Turing’s office to see how it would have looked during the second world war. Discover the ingenious mathematical techniques and devices that Turing and his colleagues designed to crack the Enigma code. At the nearby National Museum of Computing, see a rebuild of Colossus the world’s first electronic computer. Reminisce over the museum’s collection of home computers from the 1970s and 1980s.
After the war, Turing became deputy director of the computing laboratory at the University of Manchester. Here he worked on software for one of the earliest computers, the Manchester Ferranti Mark 1 and conducted pioneering work into artificial intelligence. He also turned his attention to pattern formation in biology, though his life was cut short in 1954. Our guided tour of Manchester takes in key locations associated with Turing, from the university and Museum of Science and Industry to the old cinema where a liaison led to tragic consequences.
WHAT’S INCLUDED ❭ Four nights’ bed and breakfast ❭ Welcome reception, dinner and lecture ❭ Second night dinner with wine and talk ❭ Private coach ❭ Local expert guides ❭ All talks, admissions and guided tours
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IMAGES ON RIGHT: NASA; LORIAN REED-DRAKE
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These days we watch films online or log on to massively multiplayer online role-playing games without a second thought. To keep us happy, data flies across the internet at rates of up to 100 thousand million bits per second. So it’s sobering to realise that telecommunications – in the shape of the electric telegraph – are only 179 years old. The first transatlantic telephone call took place only in 1926. Tim Whitley is one of the people charged with making sure that telecoms keep ahead of demand. His job is to make and implement technological leaps that will profoundly change our lives without anyone noticing. Whitley, who is managing director of research and innovation for BT, will tell New Scientist Live what to expect from telecoms in the future. Traffic is growing at 50 per cent per year, and he doesn’t expect it to slow down soon. He is bracing for growth in online virtual reality and the internet of things, in which light switches, washing machines and even street bins will be reachable via the web. Video already gobbles up bandwidth, but VR will consume far more because of its 360-degree view. Response times too will have to be shorter if surgeons really are to conduct remote surgery. The internet of things presents another challenge: reliably handling billions of sporadic connections. The secret, says Whitley, is to ensure we have the right blend of technologies to handle all eventualities. Whitley will discuss the latest optical innovations that will ensure the internet does not suffer “capacity crunch” and a novel way to transmit ultra-fast broadband over copper cables. And let’s not forget quantum key distribution, which should provide us with absolute security for our telecommunications. You can see a demonstration of quantum key distribution on BT’s stand. You’ll also find a Williams Formula 1 racing car there, and a Ben Ainslie Racing catamaran: BT works closely with both teams on mobile telemetry.
MORE THAN 100 INSPIRATIONAL SPEAKERS
TIM PEAKE • ALICE ROBERTS • DARA Ó BRIAIN JIM AL-KHALILI • MARTIN REES • MARCUS DU SAUTOY ANIL SETH • HANNAH FRY • MARK MIODOWNIK • MARCUS CHOWN JO MARCHANT • RICHARD WISEMAN • LEWIS DARTNELL • HELEN CZERSKI • ROBIN LOVELL-BADGE DAVID TONG • BERNARD CARR • BETH HEALEY • FREYA HARRISON • MYLES ALLEN • DARREN NAISH GAIA VINCE • KEITH COWING • NIGEL ACKLAND • TARA SHEARS • SRIVAS CHENNU • WARREN ELLIS FESTIVAL OF THE SPOKEN NERD • Plus many more…
MORE THAN 100 TALKS ACROSS FIVE THEATRES
WE FOUND THE HIGGS BOSON: WHAT NEXT?
HOW OLYMPIC ATHLETES GO FASTER • TEST YOUR OWN DNA HOW TO HACK A SATELLITE • ARE THERE THINGS WE CAN NEVER KNOW? HOW ARABIC SCIENCE CHANGED THE WORLD • JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE OF THE SUN WHAT ARE OUR DOGS AND CATS REALLY THINKING? • HOW THE OCEANS SHAPED HUMANITY THE 2000-YEAR-OLD COMPUTER • CAN YOU THINK YOURSELF HEALTHY? • ANTARCTICA’S HIDDEN WORLD WHO’S AFRAID OF THE FUTURE? • FOLD ME A SPACECRAFT • HOW WE BECAME HUMAN • Plus many more…
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THE EUROPEAN SPACE AGENCY THE BLOODHOUND PROJECT • NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM IMPERIAL COLLEGE LONDON ROBOTICS AND DRONES • MARS ROVER BACKFACE 3D SELFIE BOOTH • BRITISH ANTARCTIC SURVEY • LAB RATS BY GUERILLA SCIENCE INDOOR TORNADO BY ALISTAIR MCCLYMONT • RENTOKIL PESTAURANT • CONTROL ROOM DOOMSDAY SCENARIOS Plus Meet the New Scientist team • Visit the New Scientist gift shop • Book signings
APERTURE
28 | NewScientist | 17 September 2016
Upside-down clouds AFTER chasing a severe storm across the Kansas plains for several hours, photographer Mitch Dobrowner was rewarded with this shot of the scalloped clouds that developed in its aftermath. “The interesting part about photographing storms is that you never know what’s going to appear,” Dobrowner says. “The scenery, the composition, the lighting is constantly changing.” These are mammatus clouds, created when moist air drops into dry air below in a reversal of the usual upwards cloud formation – they are essentially upside-down clouds. In this case, they appeared just in time to catch the dramatic early evening light, then dissipated over the next few hours. Though the clouds were formed by violent, vertical draughts, Dobrowner says the air where he stood to take the photo was eerily still and quiet. When he’s shooting landscapes instead of storms, Dobrowner can afford to wait for the lighting he’s looking for because the rocks stay where they are. “Photographing storms, I have to be much more fleet-footed,” he says. “I just go to wherever the weather is.” Immersing himself in the environment allows him to capture the essence of storms, which he views almost as living organisms. “I’m trying to take a portrait of these storms before they die,” Dobrowner says. “They’ll never be like that again.” Emily Benson
Photographer Mitch Dobrowner mitchdobrowner.com
17 September 2016 | NewScientist | 29
COVER STORY
Forgotten Utopia It thrived for 700 years without war or conflict. What was the Indus civilisation’s secret? asks Andrew Robinson
ICTURE a peace-loving Atlantic island ruled by reason. Its 54 cities are governed by educated officials and an elected-forlife prince. Although war hasn’t been abolished, it is used only as a last resort. People see no glory in fighting, and capture enemies rather than kill them. This is the original Utopia – the pagan, communist and pacifist world sketched out exactly 500 years ago in Thomas More’s eponymous work of fiction. More’s book has exerted a powerful pull on our imaginations – not least through utopian science fiction. But in a world of autocracy, fanaticism and terrorism, it seems as far from reality as ever. Indeed, arguments still rage about his true intention. His title, derived from the ancient Greek ou-topos – meaning “no place” – is a pun on eu-topos, “good place”. Was More proposing a blueprint of an ideal society or satirising the self-interest, greed and military exploits of the hereditary monarchies of his time? On one thing nearly everyone agrees: no utopia has ever existed. Large human societies tend to be governed by coercion. The instinct for warfare has been a driving force in nearly every civilisation of the last five millennia, from ancient Mesopotamia to the British Empire. Or has it? One mysterious, ancient society might give the lie to that. The civilisation of the Indus valley is the most enigmatic of the four great early civilisations. But while Mesopotamia, ancient Egypt and ancient China gloried in warfare, it seems absent from the Indus valley. Was this a real, functioning utopia? If so, how did it survive, and why did it eventually disappear?
RICHARD WILKINSON
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The Indus civilisation flourished from about 2600 to 1900 BC. More than a thousand settlements have been found covering at least 800,000 square kilometres of what is now Pakistan, India and Afghanistan (see map, page 32), yet its remains were only discovered in the 1920s. It is now regarded as the beginning of Indian civilisation and possibly the origin of Hinduism. All signs point to a prosperous and advanced society – one of history’s greatest. It had a vigorous maritime export trade via the Arabian Sea, and archaeologists have found objects made in the Indus valley in Mesopotamian cities such as Ur and Akkad. The two largest Indus cities, Harappa and
“In a century of excavations, we have found just one depiction of fighting” Mohenjo-daro, boasted street planning and sewage worthy of modern times, including the world’s earliest known toilets and an impressive brick water tank known as the Great Bath. Indus craftsmen created complex stone weights for commerce and long, precisiondrilled carnelian beads for jewellery. Thousands of small sealstones have also been found; worn around the neck, merchants would have used them to stamp their identity on clay tags. Each one is carved with an exquisite but mysterious script (see example, page 32), which has provoked more than a hundred published attempts to decipher its language – with little consensus.
Other aspects of the civilisation are even more perplexing. The chief cities show no clear signs of being fortified. No armour and no indisputably military weapon – as opposed to knives, spears and arrows designed for hunting animals – has been found. Nor is there evidence of the horse, an animal well suited to raiding parties, which later became common in the region. In nearly a century of excavations, archaeologists have uncovered just one depiction of humans fighting, and it is a partly mythical scene showing a female deity with the horns of a goat and the body of a tiger (shown on page 33). There is a total absence of conspicuous royal palaces and grand temples, no monumental depiction of kings and other rulers, not much difference between the homes of rich and poor, no sign of differing diets in the bones of buried skeletons and no evidence of slavery. All this stands in stark contrast with the ziggurats of Mesopotamia and pharaohs of ancient Egypt. “What’s left of these great Indus cities gives us no indication of a society engaged with, or threatened by, war,” says Neil MacGregor, former director of the British Museum in London. The Indus people, he argues, offer a novel model of an urban civilisation, without celebration of violence or extreme concentration of individual power: “Is it going too far to see these Indus cities as an early, urban Utopia?” There are some who find a complete absence of war and conflict not credible. “There has never been a society without conflict of greater or lesser scale,” says Richard Meadow at Harvard University’s Peabody > 17 September 2016 | NewScientist | 31
RANDY OLSON/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CREATIVE
Museum. He argues that knives, spears and the like could have been used on humans as well as animals, and points out that the ancient Maya were once thought to be exceptionally peace-loving – until their hieroglyphs were deciphered, revealing stories of exceptionally bloody battles, sacrifice and torture. Who knows what the Indus script might reveal if it is deciphered? Then again, even the Maya had fortifications around some of their cities and widespread depictions of warrior kings, so Meadow’s views are currently in the minority. Most large societies lean on centralised governments to enforce the rule of law. Yet the only Indus sculpture that might conceivably depict a ruler is a small meditative bust of a bearded and cloaked man with partly closed eyes. Generally dubbed a “priest-king” – because he wears a cloak over his left shoulder, much like Buddhist monks and Hindu priests, with a trefoil design that resembles one worn by Mesopotamian priests – his identity is in fact totally obscure. Nonetheless, big engineering projects in the Indus valley would suggest some guiding authority existed to mobilise, direct and provision the workforce. Take the vast stone platforms that underlie various cities. They were built to raise buildings and streets above
the level of the annual floods of the Indus river. Additional platforms were sometimes built on top, to further raise individual structures. At Mohenjo-daro, the foundational platform is 200 metres wide, 400 metres long and 5 metres tall. Indus excavator and scholar Gregory Possehl of the University of Pennsylvania calculated that it would have taken 10,000 men just over a year to build. This would have required some kind of central authority to mobilise and direct labourers. Of course, More made allowances for slavery in his Utopia, so perhaps this is just one more parallel between the fictional and real worlds.
Paradise lost The peaceful Indus civilisation flourished from about 2600 to 1900 BC. More than 1000 settlements covered at least 800,000 square kilometres, though only a fraction of them have been excavated Mohenjo-daro and Harappa The two largest Indus cities boasted complex street planning and sewage
Ind us riv er
Chief cities Archaeological sites
AFGHANISTAN
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CHINA
“Who knows what the Indus script might reveal if it is deciphered?”
Harap
BALOCHISTAN Rakhgarhi
Mohenjo-daro
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32 | NewScientist | 17 September 2016
m lli
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Ganweriwala (unexcavated) Trade route to Mesopotamia
Commercial networks spread over a vast area are another indication of a centralised authority. Lapis lazuli mined close to the trading post of Shortugai in what is now Afghanistan is found as far afield as Egypt. Goods were undoubtedly shipped via the Indus river and its tributaries, but many must have travelled overland. Such networks couldn’t have developed and operated for seven centuries without basic roads between settlements, presumably maintained by centrally directed taxation, plus some kind of regulatory framework to enforce the validity of long-distance commercial agreements. And then there are the stone weights. They were standardised for commerce throughout the Indus valley and clearly worked well: the system survived long after the civilisation disappeared. Not only did it provide the weight standards for the earliest Indian coins, issued in the 7th century BC, the system is still used today for weighing small quantities in some traditional markets of both Pakistan and India. It seems inconceivable that such a wealthy society could have survived for centuries
nt
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INDIA
without falling victim to aggressive invaders or embracing internal strongmen – Indus equivalents of Ramesses the Great in Egypt and Hammurabi in Babylon. How was this possible? Part of the answer seems to have been geographical luck. The Indus civilisation had extensive lands ranging from river plains and coastlines to hills and mountains. Copious water flowed year-round down the Indus river
SM RAFIQ PHOTOGRAPHY/GETTY
ERJA LAHDENPERÄ/ COURTESY ARCHAEOLOGICAL SURVEY OF INDIA
Left to right: A sealstone with the Indus script; Mohenjo-daro; the Indus civilisation’s only depiction of humans fighting
Eventual decline As a result, the Indus peoples had no economic need to invade foreign lands, hence no need for militaristic leaders. As for invaders, who were the likely candidates? To the west, political and commercial relations were good, judging from the discovery of Indus settlements at Mehrgarh and Sutkagen-dor in neighbouring Balochistan. The same probably applied to Afghanistan to the north and northwest, on the basis of the settlement at Shortugai. To the east, in Rajasthan, there was only the inhospitable and sparsely populated Thar desert and the Aravalli mountain range. Only in the south, on the Arabian Sea coast, might the Indus dwellers have faced attack. It’s perhaps no coincidence that this is where the only fortified settlements have been found. As for a possible attack from distant Mesopotamia, there would have been little motivation, given the value of the Indus trade, plus the fact that Mesopotamian rulers were preoccupied with internal battles. So what eventually happened to the Indus civilisation? In the late 1920s, a group of 14 skeletons was unearthed in Mohenjo-daro, apparently caught in the act of fleeing the city. The discovery led to theories that migrants from Central Asia had attacked the Indus civilisation and initiated its decline: after flourishing for seven centuries, the peaceloving people met a violent end. But forensic
study in the 1980s revealed that these victims died from malaria or other diseases, rather than massacre. While major migrations from Central Asia between 1900 and 1500 BC are still thought to have played a role in the Indus’ endgame, changes to the environment may also have contributed. Climate change – an agent in the downfall of so many other civilisations – has been fingered: the archaeological record suggests the monsoon weakened around 2100 BC. And there are strong indications that the course of the Indus river and its tributaries shifted. A reconstruction of its course based on historical sources, past landforms and aerial photography shows major changes between 4000 and 2000 BC. The shift led to a growing flood threat to Mohenjo-daro, which could have caused the city’s eventual
JAMES P. BLAIR/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CREATIVE
and its four main tributaries, unlike the unreliable annual Nile inundation in Egypt. Raw materials were plentiful, including timber, semi-precious stones, and copper and other metals. And two growing seasons, arising from its winter cyclonic system and its summer monsoon system, would have provided abundant food. Egypt and Mesopotamia weren’t so lucky.
The “priest-king”, arguably the only plausible depiction of an Indus leader
abandonment. All this could have been triggered by tectonic activity in the Himalayas: the region is prone to earthquakes; one damaged an Indus settlement at Dholavira in about 2200 BC. It’s most likely that the decline of the Indus civilisation involved environmental and human factors operating in tandem. According to India’s leading Indus scholar, Iravatham Mahadevan, the very thing that made the Indus civilisation so special could have brought about its ruin. “The civilisation seems to have declined and collapsed due to natural causes and also probably due to the failure of the ideology which bound the people together,” he says. Possehl agrees. “The Indus ideology ultimately had feet of clay,” he writes in his book The Indus Civilization: A contemporary perspective. “In the end their ideology made the Indus people who they were, but it may have proved to be their undoing as well.” In Possehl’s view, the lack of conflict and militarism endemic in the civilisation encouraged its original growth before 2600 BC and its relatively short flourishing, compared with Mesopotamia, Egypt and China. But it also accelerated the civilisation’s decline after 1900 BC. Indus egalitarianism and pacifism, though productive for a while, eventually led to stagnancy and inflexibility in the face of change. There is, admittedly, limited evidence to confirm or deny Possehl’s hypothesis. It’s likely that we will remain in the dark until the tantalising Indus script is cracked. This should shed light on whether some degree of conflict, if not outright war, is vital to the survival of a civilisation – and whether Utopia really is “no place”. ■ Andrew Robinson is the author of The Indus: Lost civilizations (Reaktion Books, 2015) 17 September 2016 | NewScientist | 33
IN FROM
THE COLD CIENCE has had its share of embarrassing moments. Take Piltdown man, the missing link in human evolution exposed as a fraud after 40 years. Or the Allan Hills meteorite, hailed by US president Bill Clinton in a televised announcement in 1996 because it seemed to contain evidence of life on Mars – only it probably doesn’t. But few scientific embarrassments raised temperatures quite as much as cold fusion. In 1989, University of Utah chemists Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann announced that they had, at room temperature in the lab, tamed the process that powers the sun: nuclear fusion. This would have been an almost unimaginable technological leap. But no one could reproduce the result, at least not provably, reliably, or to general satisfaction. With no convincing theory to back up the observations either, Pons and Fleischmann were ostracised. Cold fusion – and anyone still willing to work on it – was frozen out. Fast forward 25 years, and thaw is in the air. You won’t hear the words “cold fusion”, but substantial sums of money are quietly pouring into a field now known as low-energy nuclear reactions, or LENRs. Earlier this year, the US House of Representatives Committee on Armed Services declared it was “aware of recent positive developments” in developing LENRs and noted their potential to “produce ultra-clean, low-cost renewable energy” and their “strong national security implications”. Highlighting too the interest of Russia, China, Israel and India, it suggested the US could not afford to be left behind, and requested that the Secretary of Defense provide a briefing on the science by 22 September. Cold fusion seems to be coming in from the cold – but why?
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34 | NewScientist | 17 September 2016
The claim to have tamed the sun’s power in the lab was mocked 25 years ago. So why is cold fusion making a comeback, asks Michael Brooks
Mainstream physics has long had a simple answer for cold fusion believers: no-can-do. Nuclear fusion means overcoming the hugely powerful electrostatic repulsion between atomic nuclei and forcing them to merge into heavier nuclei. That needs humongous temperatures and pressures. The dream of hot fusion is being pursued with vigour by the scientific establishment: at the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) in the south of France, for example, and in a host of smaller projects. But a small band of believers has never lost faith in cold fusion. Researchers at the US Naval Research Lab (NRL) in Washington DC, have long put small budgets and spare time into seeing whether nuclear reactions really can happen at room temperature. Graham Hubler started there, and is now director of the Sidney Kimmel Institute for Nuclear Renaissance at the University of Missouri in Columbia, a cold-fusion lab established in 2012 with $5.5 million of philanthropic funding. “We’re convinced there’s some sort of energy source here,” he says. “I wouldn’t have taken this job if I didn’t feel that way.” That energy source lies in deuterium, a form of heavy hydrogen found naturally in seawater, with nuclei composed of a proton and a neutron. Most incarnations of cold fusion are some variant on Pons and Fleischmann’s original: you take a rod of palladium metal, dunk it into a beaker of water enriched in deuterium, and pass a low current through a platinum wire coil also held in the beaker. The idea is that somehow this current loads deuterium on to the lattice of palladium atoms so forcefully that the deuterium nuclei begin to fuse together, releasing energy. >
JULIAN PACAUD
17 September 2016 | NewScientist | 35
Do this right, and a cubic metre of seawater would release the energy of 10 barrels of crude oil. Ask David Nagel, another former NRL scientist, whether the sort of roomtemperature “heat anomalies” that Pons, Fleishmann and others claim to have seen in experiments are real, and he doesn’t mince his words. “Yes – as in hell, yes,” he says. Nagel now works at George Washington University in Washington DC, and recently set up a nonprofit LENR lobbying association, called LENRIA. “I wouldn’t have done that if I didn’t think this was both real and important,” he says. “The results are out there, and people are ignoring them.”
Credibility and acrimony A cynic might say they are all too easy to ignore. “At NRL we did 120 experiments in the first two years and got absolutely nothing,” says Hubler. In the past year, however, the NRL team has made some experimental changes and produced six anomalous heat events. The overall success rate of just 5 per cent might be seen as a “black eye”, Hubler admits, but he insists he knows researchers with much better reproducibility rates. Such claims are mostly unverifiable: perceived commercial sensitivity means most replication attempts take place behind closed doors. “Most of the people working on this have dollar signs in their eyes,” says Hubler. That is not without consequence, and if acrimony is a measure of research credibility, there is something in cold fusion’s new wave. Take Italian LENR researcher Andrea Rossi and his Leonardo corporation. For some years, Rossi has been testing a device he calls the Energy Catalyzer or “E-Cat”, latterly with heavyweight financial backing. Tom Darden, CEO of the $2.2 billion private equity fund Cherokee Investment Partners, put more than $10 million into Leonardo through a subsidiary, Industrial Heat, that has interests in a suite of LENR technologies. In April this year, things turned sour. Rossi filed a lawsuit in a Florida court against Industrial Heat, complaining that Darden and various other business associates had “meticulously and systematically defrauded” him and his company in an effort to “misappropriate” his intellectual property rights. Industrial Heat has since brought a counterclaim, alleging that one of Rossi’s E-cat tests had been a “carefully scripted effort to deceive”. Both sides deny any wrongdoing. The saga has given renewed ammunition 36 | NewScientist | 17 September 2016
to cold fusion’s critics in the US and Europe. In Japan, however, things have been proceeding more quietly – initially with a rather different end in mind than generating energy. In 2002, researchers from Japan’s multinational Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) claimed to have used LENR techniques to “transmute” toxic, radioactive elements, such as those produced in conventional nuclear fission reactors, into other, less dangerous elements. That work is still going on. “MHI wants to develop the technique to clean up nuclear waste,” says Jirohta Kasagi of Tohoku University’s Clean Energy Research Lab. In 2013, researchers from Toyota Central Research and Development Laboratories reported successfully replicating the original experiment. In a technical review published in December last year, Mitsubishi claims that “transmutation from cesium (Cs) to praseodymium (Pr), from barium (Ba) to samarium (Sm), from strontium (Sr) to molybdenum (Mo), etc., has been observed”. The processes have, of course, been patented. The Japanese government, keen to decontaminate the site of the Fukushima nuclear reactor meltdown, is now providing some funding for academic LENR research. A decade ago, researchers at the NRL tried to reproduce the Mitsubishi results, and sent a team to Japan to learn how to transmute elements first hand. NRL’s David Kidwell, who carried out tests on the Mitsubishi lab equipment, was not given permission to talk to New Scientist directly, but NRL documents
THE NUCLEAR FAMILY NUCLEAR FISSION involves splitting up heavy atomic nuclei into smaller ones. The energy this releases powers all nuclear power stations in operation today NUCLEAR FUSION releases energy by joining up light atomic nuclei such as hydrogen and helium, the process that at huge temperatures powers the sun. So far fusion has only been achieved on any scale on Earth in the uncontrolled environment of the hydrogen bomb COLD FUSION is the controversial idea that high temperatures are not required for nuclear fusion: it can be achieved at or close to room temperature
JULIAN PACAUD
“In Japan, they want to develop the technique to clean up nuclear waste”
authorised for public release suggest another explanation for the results: contamination. They declare that “environmental surveys at MHI by NRL and MHI found praseodymium in key areas of laboratory” and the “presence of praseodymium may have other explanations than transmutation of Cs”. Yasuhiro Iwamura, who led the Mitsubishi team, rebuts the NRL explanation and sticks by his claims for the experiments. Post-Fukushima, Japan has also seen a wave of interest in LENR for energy generation, with Mitsubishi, Toyota and Nissan all investing money. Last year, the Japanese government’s New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization announced a programme called “Energy and the Environment New Leading Technology” that called, among other things, for research into technologies that induce heat reactions between metals and hydrogen. Hideki Yoshino, a language schools magnate, has set up a company called Clean Planet to research “cleaner, safer, and more abundant resources such as solar, geothermal, LENR (also known as cold fusion), and wind to supply our energy needs”. Clean Planet is the driving force behind the Tohuku Clean Energy Research Lab, where Kasagi works. Kasagi’s aim is to bring a device producing anomalous heat to market by the Tokyo Olympics in 2020. “Expected heat output might be up to several tens of watts or
more,” he says. As yet, he doesn’t know how reliably this heat will be produced, but he is working on theories that might help improve reproducibility. “My deep interest is to clarify how the nuclear reaction can occur,” he says. That remains perhaps the biggest stumbling block: explaining how LENR is supposed to work when physics says it can’t. “I dismiss most of the theories out of hand,” Hubler says. Nagel feels similarly. “When it comes to the crunch, there’s no theory that overlaps sufficiently with experimental data,” he says. Some ideas have not been entirely quashed. Peter Hagelstein of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has suggested that a deuterium-loaded palladium lattice contains vacancies where two deuterium atoms can become squeezed together, sometimes resulting in fusion. Another idea was the work of Allan Widom, a theoretical physicist at Northeastern University in Boston, and Lewis Larsen, a theoretical physicist and now CEO of Lattice Energy, a company aiming to create a functioning LENR device. Widom-Larsen theory, as it is known, makes an interesting statement about cold fusion: it isn’t fusion. Instead, the anomalous heat generation comes about because, when infused with deuterium and possibly other contaminants, a palladium surface generates a varying electromagnetic field that shifts electrons about, in turn releasing neutrons. These are
absorbed by other nearby atoms, transmuting them and causing them to release gamma-ray photons that are absorbed by other electrons, which radiate the extra energy as heat. Joseph Zawodny at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia thinks the theory is a “rich concept” that could prove extremely fruitful. “LENR is only one of its applications,” he says. It doesn’t rely on new physics, and makes some very specific predictions – not that those predictions have been properly tested yet. Zawodny made his own attempts, but they were “brief and low budget”, he admits. The ongoing controversy surrounding Rossi’s E-Cat has made getting funding for further experiments difficult, he says. Besides Zawodny’s inconclusive results, Widom and Larsen have graphs that purport to show a match between their theoretical predictions and experimental observations of how quickly various transmutation products are created. But this isn’t terribly convincing to critics, because it is “after-the-fact” fitting to data from controversial experiments carried out years ago. George Miley of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign did those experiments. Now emeritus, he is still active. He had a patent granted in 2012 for a process called “dislocation site formation”, which describes loading and unloading of isotopes of hydrogen into thin films in order to provide, among other things, “nuclear reaction processes”. Miley claims to have a working LENR technology that produces hundreds of watts of energy, but doesn’t want to say any more than that. “It is premature to discuss this new work in any detail,” he says.
No risk, no reward Such reluctance to share doesn’t help to dispel scepticism, Zawodny laments. “The cold fusion stigma still remains, albeit in a weakened form,” he says. “We’re frustrated,” says Hubler. “If we had just one-thousandth of the money going into hot fusion…” That comparison is somewhat problematic. It’s true that hot fusion isn’t going anywhere fast either. ITER is beset by delays and cost overruns, and won’t be working fully until the 2030s, while other projects are hardly out of the starting blocks. But at least we know why and how hot fusion works – it’s what powers the sun, after all. Making it work on Earth is simply a monumental engineering problem. Hubler’s unspoken hope is for a funded fundamental physics programme that would methodically dissect cold fusion experiments
to work out what is going on in the interesting 5 per cent. At the moment, he admits, there is too much trial-and-error experimentation coupled with wild speculation by theorists who often tend to ignore the details of experiments carried out so far – and indeed sometimes the known laws of physics. Zawodny sees three vital tasks ahead. First, independent validation of existing methods for producing anomalous heat. Second, theoretical work to explain as much of the body of observations as is possible with one theory. Third, experimental testing of what a suitable theory predicts. “I think you must have all three,” he says. The sticking point, as he sees it, is that most people want hard, reproducible proof that the effect is real before they stump up any cash for research. “There are few rewards without risk,” he says. Some think it is worth a punt. Despite
“One theory makes an interesting statement about cold fusion: it isn’t fusion” Cherokee’s aborted investment in Rossi’s technology, Woodford Investment Management in Oxford, UK, has recently funnelled £35 million into Industrial Heat. The company acknowledges that this is a “high risk area”, but says it has done two years of due diligence and wants to build a suite of LENR technologies from what it sees as the most highly regarded people in the field. “We analysed numerous reports from a variety of scientists as well as data on investigations that had been undertaken by several government departments around the world,” a spokesman told New Scientist. Woodford’s strategy is to take candidates showing real evidence of success, develop and optimise them, and then gain independent third-party verification of their findings. “It is an area that has been met with much scepticism and we are certainly not blind to this,” the spokesman says. “However, the evidence we have seen to date, coupled with the potential market opportunity, suggests to us that it is an area that is worthy of further investigation.” Clearly, the House Committee on Armed Services feels the same way, but the latest signs are that the Secretary of Defense’s report is delayed and won’t now be presented next week as planned. We must wait a little longer to hear how warm his words will be. ■ Michael Brooks is a consultant for New Scientist 17 September 2016 | NewScientist | 37
THE AFTERMATH We think of PTSD primarily as something caused by the horrors of war. The reality is very different, finds Jessica Hamzelou
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HINK of the most scared you’ve ever been, and imagine that happening all the time,” says Kerry Ressler. “You have intrusive terror and nightmares, and the threat of imminent death starts to take over your life.” That is the horrific reality of post-traumatic stress disorder. But while we tend to think of PTSD primarily as a condition that afflicts soldiers – most of whom are men – more than two-thirds of people with the condition are women. So what puts women at greater risk? Now, by looking at genetics, hormones, early childhood experiences and even the type of trauma, we are starting to find some answers. These insights are not only shedding light on how PTSD affects everyone, but opening avenues to better treatment – and even ways to prevent it. As many as 24 million adults in the US have PTSD at any one time. Most people will face trauma at some point, but for roughly one in 13 of us that will lead to PTSD. These types of events tend to be unpredictable and uncontrollable, and the person often feels their life is threatened. But Ressler, who studies the condition at Harvard Medical School, says there is no precise formula. “Anything horrible can trigger PTSD.” People with PTSD often have intrusive thoughts, as memories come back to haunt them during waking hours and in nightmares. They tend to start avoiding people, places and things that remind them of the trauma. They
T
can feel anxious, stressed, depressed, isolated or even dissociated from reality. Many are prone to panic attacks. But not all people with PTSD have the same symptoms. Some may feel nothing at all, just numb. It is normal to experience some of these symptoms after an ordeal. But in PTSD, they persist for at least a month, and with chronic PTSD they go on for many months, sometimes years. “You’re imprisoned by your memories,” says Karestan Koenen, who studies PTSD at Harvard University. “The horrible event may be over, but you’re held hostage by what happened to you.” Chronic PTSD has been linked to a range of physical maladies, from a higher risk of heart attack, stroke and type 2 diabetes to chronic pain and dementia. And people with PTSD are at higher risk of suicide: 20 US veterans with PTSD take their own lives each day. For many, though, the trauma that leads to PTSD doesn’t happen on a battlefield. Psychiatrists commonly see the condition in people who have been subjected to violence, especially at the hands of someone they know. “As humans, so much of our lives is based on being able to trust other people,” says Koenen. “If another human attacks you, it violates your trust in humanity.” Not everyone is equally vulnerable. Though men are more likely to experience trauma during their lives, women are more than twice as likely to get PTSD when they do. In part, that’s due to the types of trauma >
ESTELLE LAGARDE/MILLENNIUM IMAGES, UK
experienced. Sexual violence is more likely to cause PTSD than many other types of trauma. Both men and women face a similar risk of developing PTSD after such crimes, and men may actually be more vulnerable: one study found 65 per cent of men who experienced sexual violence developed PTSD, compared with 46 per cent of women. But women are much more likely to be raped or sexually assaulted. Around the world,
“The horrible event may be over, but you’re held hostage by what happened to you” one-third of women have experienced physical or sexual violence. In the US, one in six women has been raped or experienced attempted rape, compared with one in 33 men. Women are also more likely to have been sexually abused during childhood: worldwide, one in five women and one in 13 men report child sexual abuse. All of these figures make a stark point about the types of violence girls and women face. Koenen understands this grim reality too well. She developed PTSD after being raped. “My research career came completely from my own experience,” she says. But the nature of trauma isn’t the whole story. Even in cases of accidents, physical assaults, disaster or fire, women are more prone to PTSD than men. This could be because pre-existing anxiety and depression can increase the risk of developing PTSD, and more women than men are diagnosed with either or both of these conditions. But there could be a genetic component too. Several genes have been linked to PTSD, and the condition runs in families. Research in identical twins suggests that about 30 per cent of the variance in risk is down to genetics. Pinning down which genes are behind this effect is proving difficult, however. One line of enquiry is into the genes that code for neurotransmitters, which enable our brain cells to communicate. For instance, PTSD may be more prevalent in people with certain variations of a receptor gene for serotonin – a neurotransmitter important for mood and stress. But so far, no major differences have been found between men and women. Attention has also turned to a protein known as PACAP, which regulates our response to stress, influencing everything from pain 40 | NewScientist | 17 September 2016
sensitivity to blood pressure and metabolism. Ressler and his colleagues found that women with higher levels of the protein in their blood had more symptoms of PTSD, such as being easily startled and struggling to distinguish between signals of fear and safety. But surprisingly, this wasn’t seen in men. Ressler also found that women with one variant of the gene that codes for the PACAP receptor on cells were more vulnerable to PTSD, but those with another seemed to be protected. In fact, even after experiencing similar types of trauma, women with the protective variant showed fewer symptoms of PTSD than men. The difference seems to be down to oestrogen: the bit of DNA that the hormone can bind to is different in the vulnerable gene variant. “It kind of links stress to oestrogen,” says Vasiliki Michopoulos, who studies genetics and PTSD at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. That may help explain why women with PTSD report feeling more anxious when they have low levels of the hormone, such as just before a period. Oestrogen could also influence PTSD recovery. Many people with the condition learn to fear objects, smells and sounds they associate with the traumatic events – a car backfiring can trigger memories of gunfire, for example, while the smell of grass might remind someone of an outdoor assault. Treatment often involves re-imagining aspects of the traumatic environment in a safe space to “extinguish” fear memories by learning that, on their own, those sounds and smells are safe. But women are less able to do this when they have low levels of oestrogen. Further evidence for the hormone’s role comes from the finding that women who take an oestrogen-containing emergency
Primed for PTSD Women are more than twice as likely to get post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as men. In part, that is down to a greater chance of experiencing sexual violence 13.6
Sexual violence
13.3
Assault
11.5
Motor vehicle crash
7.6
Tragic death
7.3
Any trauma
6.4
Fire Robbery Combat
6.0 2.2 Risk for PTSD by trauma type
SOURCE: WWW.NCBI.NLM.NIH.GOV/PUBMED/1619095
contraceptive after rape go on to develop fewer PTSD symptoms than those who don’t. What’s going on? It seems this powerful hormone may actually be reshaping the brain – specifically the hippocampus, thought to be involved in learning, memory and anxiety. Having a large hippocampus appears to protect both men and women from PTSD, and is linked to a better chance of recovery. Its response to oestrogen can be seen in how the brain changes during a woman’s menstrual cycle. Brain scans of 21 women taken just after their period – when oestrogen levels are high – show that the hippocampus is larger compared with just before their period, when levels are at their lowest. Similar changes have been seen in other areas of the brain, including the amygdala, thought to be important in shaping our emotional responses. One small study showed that a woman’s oestrogen levels can affect how strongly the amygdala is connected to other parts of the brain; when levels are high, for instance, connections to the part of the brain responsible for decision-making increase. Testosterone might also play a role in PTSD and anxiety more generally. Injections of the hormone seem to reduce anxiety in rats, and men with high levels appear to be better able to extinguish fearful memories. It may be that testosterone has similarly protective effects in men as oestrogen appears to have in women.
TIM WILKINSON/MILLENNIUM IMAGES, UK
Sex hormones may also help explain why PTSD can look different in men and women. While both sexes can develop any of the symptoms, men are more likely to be irritable, angry and drink to excess and women are more likely to be jumpy. “At the biological level, some risk factors interact with oestrogen and others interact with testosterone,” says Ressler. “We’re just at the tip of the iceberg.” As well as genetics and hormones, epigenetics – the study of how our environment and experiences can modify the way our genes work – could hold clues to why some people have a higher risk of PTSD. Childhood abuse seems to prime adults for the condition in this way. In a study of people who developed PTSD after several traumatic experiences as adults, those who were abused in childhood had more epigenetic changes related to immune regulation and central nervous system development. They also had more changes overall: 12 times as many as those who faced trauma only as adults. Other research supports the idea that preexisting changes to how our genes work could set us up for PTSD. Michopoulos and colleagues took blood samples from 39 women in hospital just after a traumatic event and looked for modifications to genes that have been linked to PTSD, including one thought to help control the way we respond to stress. Women who developed a PTSD-like
condition one month later had a different pattern of changes to those who didn’t experience any lasting stress. PTSD can also modify the expression of genes involved in cognition and immune function, which may underlie symptoms such as difficulty concentrating and poor health. Now Michopoulos is following people for several months after they have experienced a trauma, with the aim of pinpointing biomarkers associated with increased risk for PTSD, and also tracking changes caused by the condition itself. Together, these threads of research are changing the way we see PTSD. As we discover how the condition differs between people, there is a growing realisation that our approaches to treatment should differ too. “Our job now is not to think of PTSD as a monolithic disorder, but to figure out what kinds of different responses there are so we can personalise treatments,” says Rachel Yehuda at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City. Once we have uncovered mechanisms by which trauma leads to PTSD, we could develop genetic tests to help identify the most effective treatments. “We have a number of different psychotherapies, but we don’t know which is the best for each person,” says Koenen. “In the next five or 10 years we’ll get closer to that.” She is running the largest ever study into the genetics of PTSD, and is halfway to her goal of getting data from at least 50,000 people. The ultimate goal is to find a way to prevent PTSD. For soldiers, who know they may face a traumatic incident, playing video games to promote hyper-awareness before combat has been shown to reduce the risk of PTSD. Few people can anticipate traumatic events, however. So preventing the condition from
SEEKING FOR PTSD
P
Two-thirds of people with PTSD will recover with treatment – even if they have had the condition for years. To get help, talking to a doctor is a good first step, but there are also online resources available: The International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies istss.org The Association for Behavioural and Cognitive Therapies (US) findcbt.org Assist Trauma Care (UK) assisttraumacare. org.uk
developing means interception after an ordeal – which may be most effective within about six hours. For most people, the first port of call after an assault or accident is a hospital. That provides a unique opportunity: “Because of this contact with the health service, we could in theory prevent PTSD,” says Koenen. If further research confirms that oestrogen and testosterone can help mitigate the harms of PTSD, one strategy for prevention could be
“As we discover how PTSD differs between people, we realise treatments should differ too” to administer these in the immediate aftermath of a trauma – much as emergency contraception is currently given to women who have been raped. But understanding the influence of hormones won’t be straightforward. Paradoxically, there is also some evidence that giving drugs that mimic the effects of stress hormones shortly after trauma could reduce the risk of PTSD. Another strategy is to try to disrupt the memory consolidation process. Giving people a blood pressure drug called propranolol may enable them to disentangle the memories of the trauma from the associated feelings, and other medications are being investigated with similar aims. “In the future, we will probably have drugs that more specifically target the fear system or the threat system,” says Ressler. For the time being, it is important to remember that PTSD is treatable (see “Seeking help for PTSD”, left). Don’t shut yourself off from normal life activities, says Ressler. “Although the instinct is to stay at home and avoid everything you’re afraid of, that avoidance is often the first step in having more problems,” he says. “For recovery, it’s critical to re-engage.” It is also vital to seek help. With existing treatments – which include medications for certain symptoms and cognitive behavioural therapies – more than two-thirds of people with PTSD will recover. Even after a long time, there is still hope for improvement. “I’ve seen people who have had PTSD for decades,” says Koenen. “With treatment, they got better.” ■ Jessica Hamzelou is a reporter for New Scientist. Links to the studies mentioned in this article are included in the online version 17 September 2016 | NewScientist | 41
PEOPLE
On the top of the world, looking down on disaster A veteran of 50 expeditions to the Arctic, Peter Wadhams has watched the ice disappear and now fears the region is trapped in a death spiral
Do you feel an emotional connection to sea ice?
Measuring the depth of an ice floe with Greenpeace
Yes, there is a mysterious attraction. You are at sea and you know there are thousands of metres of water underneath you, but the ice is like a landscape. It’s beautiful. Besides, there’s the wildlife – polar bears, seals and whales. There is nothing there except nature and that is very, very attractive.
I was on a Canadian oceanographic ship, the Hudson, which is still in operation. It was September and we encountered heavy ice all the way through. Our ship was icestrengthened but still got stuck. We had to be rescued by a proper icebreaker. I really got a good feel for the thickness of the ice in 1972 when I started working with Royal Navy submarines in the Arctic. We sailed underneath the ice for the first big surveys of its thickness. In those days, nearly all of it was multi-year ice, which can grow to 3 to 4 metres thick. You also got ridges up to 50 metres thick, where the ice piled up because of the wind. It’s a very, very rugged surface, and it seemed that was how it would be forever. Now that multi-year ice is nearly all gone. Most of the ice that forms in the winter melts again in the summer, so it is mostly only 1 to 1.5 metres thick, and it has lots of openings. A completely different landscape. What was it like under thick ice in a submarine?
The very first submarine I went was on was diesel. It had to surface every day to charge batteries, so it was quite daring to go under the ice. My subsequent voyages were on nuclear submarines. Working under the ice was really exciting at first. But as I got older, I got 42 | NewScientist | 17 September 2016
ALEX YALLOP/GREENPEACE
You first traversed the North-West Passage in 1970. How does today’s ice compare with what you experienced back then?
claustrophobic – there isn’t very much space in a submarine. We never had anything go wrong except for the last voyage in 2007, where we had a very serious accident. What happened?
There was an explosion and fire in the submarine while we were underneath the ice. An air purification system blew up. Two sailors were killed, and the entire submarine was very nearly lost. We had to spend about 3 hours wearing breathing masks, because there was smoke throughout the submarine. The captain finally got us up through the ice. Fortunately for us, we were very close to an American camp. Were you scared?
When the explosion happened I was pretty sure I was going to die in the next few seconds – if you are in a submarine underwater and an explosion happens,
generally speaking, that’s it. Amazingly, I didn’t feel frightened at all. When we talk of an ice-free Arctic, it’s not as if the entire Arctic will be devoid of ice, is it?
Ice-free means that there will be less than a million square kilometres of sea ice remaining in September, which is the month of least ice cover. You’d expect the ice to withdraw from the centre of the Arctic, towards the coastlines of Ellesmere Island and Greenland. The North Pole will likely be without ice. What is the expectation for this year?
Looks like it’s heading for a record low, but there will be enough ice left that you can’t really say it’s ice-free. But the trend is so strongly downwards that in one, two or three more years, I expect an ice-free September. A few years ago oceanographer Wiesław Masłowski predicted we’d be ice-free by now
PROFILE Peter Wadhams was a professor of ocean physics at the University of Cambridge from 1992 to 2015 and is on the steering committee of the European Union’s Arctic project ICEARC. His new book is A Farewell to Ice (Allen Lane)
ALEX YALLOP/GREENPEACE
that heat gets down to the seabed. There has been permafrost there since the last ice age, but now it’s thawing. And underneath the permafrost, in the sediments, are huge amounts of methane in the form of methane hydrates. As that protective cap of permafrost thaws, they turn into methane, bubble up to the surface and are emitted into the atmosphere.
and you agreed with him. Do you worry about crying wolf?
I’ve been accused of that, but I’d refute it very strongly. If you look at the trend of ice volume in September it points to us being ice-free around this year, but annual wiggles and random variability will always occur. It’s only that random variability that is keeping some ice at the moment. What happens once the Arctic is ice-free?
It could lead to what Mark Serreze at the University of Colorado in Boulder called the Arctic death spiral. The retreat of sea ice drives feedback warming effects which are actually more serious than the retreat itself. Besides the decreasing extent of sea ice, the snow line on land is also retreating. The snow cover in the northern hemisphere has gone down by about 6 million square kilometres in the last few years, which is comparable to the loss of sea-ice cover. All this is replacing a white
surface with a dark surface, which absorbs more sunlight instead of reflecting it. This means we are on the way towards runaway global warming – the feedback will result in greater warming than is caused directly by greenhouse gases. That’s really worrying. Another serious impact that’s not being considered properly is the possibility of offshore methane bursts from the continental shelves. Methane is a very powerful greenhouse gas. How might a methane release happen?
In the last 10 years, the sea ice has retreated from the shallow Arctic shelves. That means the sun heats this coastal water for three or four months. Because the water is shallow,
“The disappearance of sea ice is like people blowing up statues of the Buddha”
The amount of methane stored in Arctic permafrost is hotly contested. How can we get at the truth?
I’m hoping to go out myself next year. The Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California has an electromagnetic instrument that is towed behind a ship to detect methane hydrates in sediments and estimate the quantity. So, we will directly measure how much methane hydrate there is and that will help to resolve this question. In your book, you wrote that losing the Arctic ice is akin to a “spiritual impoverishment of Earth”. What did you mean?
The disappearance of Arctic sea ice is the disappearance of something very beautiful. It’s like people blowing up statues of the Buddha. We have already lost the kind of magnificent landscapes of sea ice that existed when I was young. When it goes completely, the world will be a sadder place. And it will affect people’s mentality. So long as sea ice existed in the Arctic, it connected all the inhabited parts of the northern hemisphere. But when it goes, there will be an ocean between Siberia and North America and Greenland. It will take away a source of unity. ■ Interview by Anil Ananthaswamy 17 September 2016 | NewScientist | 43
CULTURE
Living in worlds that never were Paths to Utopia runs until 2 October, curated by King’s College London at Somerset House
Stoppard’s 2002 play trilogy The Coast of Utopia – appropriated utopian imagery to express his vision of collective anarchism. Revolutionary libertarianism would scarcely have appealed to More’s hierarchical Tudor society – Reformation radicals in Münster tried something like it in the 1530s, and it ended badly. All the same, a sense of optimistic freedom characterises the way
COLLECTION PRIVEE, MIGNY/KHARBINE-TAPABOR
ON AN island off the coast of the New World – then still a place remote and enticing – sat an ideal city state called Utopia, the fictional creation of English statesman and philosopher Thomas More in 1516. Inspired by Plato’s Republic (c.380 BC), More was interested in devising the perfect state: one “These early utopias are also stiflingly conformist without conflict, corruption or and sound more creepy and hardship. His Utopia is a highly cultish than idyllic today” structured society with mayors, councils, district controllers and slaves. Its citizens work six hours a most of us think about utopia day, and spend most of their free today, and certainly informs the time on self-improvement. Paths to Utopia exhibition now As a quasi-socialist system running in London. Part of a year(apart from the slavery), it won long programme of events called accolades from Marx, Engels and Utopia 2016, it marks the 500th Lenin. By then, however, utopia anniversary of the publication of had come to mean different More’s foundational account. things for different people. The The organisers say the events, 19th-century Russian radical talks and exhibition create “a Mikhail Bakunin – central to Tom space of possibility, participation
and imagination… where positive visions are nurtured, supported and celebrated, and where anything is possible”. The collection of installations is tucked away in a corner of Somerset House operated by King’s College London. Here you can watch quasi-Attenborough footage of whales in We Account the Whale Immortal by Jessica Sarah Rinland, Edward Sugden and Philip Hoare. You can sit in what looks like a cross between a cafe and a nursery school to see a video about the anarchist planet Anarres by Onkar Kular, Noam Toran, Simon Coffey and Martin Edwardes. Or you can explore the occult monochrome wall art of In Our Hands by Richard Howells and Le Gun Collective. Since utopia has come to mean pretty much whatever we want it to, it’s neither surprising nor cause for complaint that this is something of a random assortment. You might come away thinking you have seen some interesting things but wondering what it was all about and why it was utopian. It was important for the early utopias that they were far away – unaffected by the depredations of European society, and less apt to be read as criticism of its monarchs and priests. More cast his account of Utopia as a description given to him by a traveller, Raphael Hythlodaeus, who sailed to Utopia from Brazil. This fictional voyage set the template for several Renaissance Wish you were here: Thomas More’s Utopia was sited in the New World
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ATHERTON-CHIELLINO, COPYRIGHT: KING’S COLLEGE LONDON
In his pursuit of the good life, Philip Ball learns to mistrust perfection
fantasies of idealised societies, such as Tommaso Campanella’s The City of the Sun (1602), Johann Valentin Andreae’s Christianopolis (1619) and Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627). They are typically humanist and progressive, aspiring to advance human potential. In Campanella’s city, people learn from childhood about the natural world from paintings on the concentric city walls. Bacon’s utopia Bensalem is
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A mock-up of the anarchist utopia created by SF writer Ursula Le Guin
run by scientist-priests who devise wondrous technologies for making artificial substances and breeding new animals and plants. But these early utopias are also stiflingly conformist and sound more creepy and cultish than idyllic today. More’s citizens all rise and sleep at the same time, wear the same drab clothes and need permits to travel. And there is virtually no privacy – everyone is watching, so you’re forced to get
on with your job. Women must kneel each month before their husbands and confess to what they did and failed to do. You don’t have to tweak More’s Utopia very much to end up with Aldous Huxley’s dystopia in Brave New World (1932). Huxley’s technocratic dictatorship was a response to the scientific utopianism of his generation, most notably that of H. G. Wells. Huxley admitted that he set out to
Zamyatin’s We (written in 1921). Orwell suspected that We was also the inspiration for Brave New World, although Huxley denied it. Zamyatin’s novel is set in a totalitarian future in which people have numbers, not names, and live in glass buildings monitored by the secret police. It was banned by the Soviet state. And yet, with its subplot about building an interstellar spaceship,
“pull his leg”, but Wells saw nothing funny in Brave New World, declaring it a betrayal of the future in its denial that science would be our salvation. Worse, it was a disturbingly plausible technocracy, for Huxley took the idea of in vitro cloning of a society graded by intelligence from the speculations of his “Despite warnings they may brother, the biologist Julian turn dark, we still look for Huxley, and his colleague J. B. S. utopias because of the Haldane. Unlike George Orwell’s promise of a fresh start” explicitly Stalinist dystopia 1984, Huxley’s state maintains a benign We was also in the tradition of the veneer, pacifying citizens with early 20th-century Russian taste sex, drugs and “feelie” cinema. It for fantasies of space travel that was based as much on the US as included authors such as Aleksey the Soviet Union. Tolstoy (a distant relative of the The need for utopias to be far author of War and Peace) and away has meant that they have Alexander Belyaev, dubbed “the become mostly science-fictional Russian Jules Verne”. It was today. In fact, writers began dreams of this type, not just Cold setting them on other planets War belligerence, that fed the almost as soon as it became clear early Soviet space programme. that they were worlds like ours: And here, surely, is a clue to why Johannes Kepler’s Somnium we still look for utopias – despite (written around 1611), Francis all the literary warnings that they Godwin’s The Man in the Moone may turn dark and oppressive. For (written in 1628) and Cyrano de they offer the promise of a fresh Bergerac’s The Other World: start. They are never places Comical history of the states and evolved from the here and now, empires of the moon (published 1657) all describe the customs and but fantasies conjured from traits of societies on other worlds. scratch, pristine and unsullied, out of sheer yearning. At some In that regard, Aldous Huxley’s level we know they are an last novel, Island (1962), in which impossible dream – no more or this genuinely utopian (but still less so than a colony on Mars. drug-fuelled) paradise is reached In short, they are as magical as by shipwreck, was something of a fairyland. And I say that not to throwback. The fashionable way dismiss them but to place them in to reach utopia was now by their proper context. After all, the spaceship, as in Wells’s The First Men in the moon (1901), or by time function of magic, according to the great anthropologist travel – Brave New World is set in Bronislaw Malinowski, is that it 2540, while Wells’s time traveller “ritualises man’s optimism”. It is, invents a craft to take him to the future in The Time Machine (1895). he said, “the embodiment of the sublime folly of hope”. And Science fiction is also an whether utopia means “good inspiration in Paths to Utopia: place” or “no place”, we need to the Anarres installation takes its hope that it is some place. ■ name from the planet in Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), Philip Ball is based in London. His latest a portrayal of a failed anarchist book is The Water Kingdom: A secret society that was itself influenced history of China by Russian writer Yevgeny 17 September 2016 | NewScientist | 45
INSIDER / ACADEMIA
Going for tenure As a PhD student at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, Beth Sullivan trained in a human genetics laboratory, where she and other students were being groomed for careers in clinical genetics. But her experiences doing clinical rotations in the neonatal and paediatric genetics wards were heart-wrenching, and she didn’t think she had the emotional reserves for a clinical career. “I wanted to understand the mechanisms that led to those disorders, rather than being exposed to them day to day,” she says. From there, Sullivan pursued an academic career single-mindedly, she says. She did two three-year postdocs—the second, at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, was especially rewarding, in large
Picture yourself post-postdoc In a highly competitive academic job market, navigating the postdoc career landscape can be tough. Kelly Chi learns from the experiences of four postdoc scientists aining a tenure-track position at a university is the career focus of many postdoctoral scientists, but it’s not the only option. For postdocs considering their next step, either inside or outside of academia, there is lots to consider: what new skills will I need? How transferable is my experience? How do I go about securing my next position? That’s where scientist career panels come in. They allow you to hear from people working across diverse roles and, more importantly, to learn
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46 | NewScientist | 17 September 2016
about their career paths, which may be surprisingly circuitous. New Scientist asked four scientists—an associate professor at a university, a patent lawyer, a consumer health scientist and an immunologist working at a pharmaceutical company—about their paths following postdoctoral research positions. Every story contains its own kernels of advice for those considering what to do next and how. Kelly Chi is a freelance science writer
part because of the mentorship she received. She and her mentor “often talked about how I was going to pitch myself on the job market,” she recalls. After three years, she had the publications she needed to land a tenure-track position in academia. She restricted her job search to cities, because she wanted the city life. Sullivan landed at the Boston University School of Medicine. “I also wanted to be there because MIT is there, Harvard is there, and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute is there, and I thought there would be good opportunities to collaborate,” she says. Two Boston winters later, she was recruited by Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, where she is currently an associate professor of molecular genetics and microbiology. Starting your own lab as a new professor— writing grants, keeping track of budgets, managing people and equipment, as well as teaching—is a big change, of course. “You come in, and you know how to do science,” she says. On the other hand, “no one has taught you to be a good teacher or to run a business.” She had always worked in well endowed labs until running her own. In addition, handling different personality types in the lab—and managing students, who can sometimes bring their personal problems into the workplace— was another unexpected challenge.
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“Starting your own lab as a new professor is a big change”
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Transformed chemist Change is constant. “For your entire career you’re continuing to reinvent yourself,” says Denise Pohlhaus. In fact, that’s exactly what she is doing. She is deep in consumer data from toothpaste, over-the-counter medicines and other consumer health products in her new role as a scientist at GlaxoSmithKline Consumer Health R&D in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. Less than a year ago, she was mining small-molecule data as a computational chemist in Pharma R&D at GSK. The move she made to the consumer side may in some ways be a bigger change
Industry freedom As a staff scientist at Regeneron Pharmaceuticals in Tarrytown, New York, David DiLillo studies basic immunology and biology questions raised by the drug discovery and development process. Less than a year into his job, he had set up a lab space, got results and expanded from one project to several. His goal is to improve drug candidates—and scientists are encouraged to propose targets— but the details of the work are up to him. DiLillo’s postdoc at the Rockefeller University in New York gave him a taste of intellectual independence, and he wanted more. “I wanted to stay in research and do
From lab to law During his postdoc in the lab of Nobel laureate Roger Tsien at the University of California, San Diego, Dominic Yee decided to search for a career outside of academia. He first applied for research scientist positions at about 100 companies. “As with a lot of academics, my résumé was very diverse – broader than industry would like to see it. I was a chemical biologist, which works well for publications in academia.” In contrast, industry positions tended to care about specific technical skills, for example the ability to run a high-performance liquid chromatography machine.
than it was moving from a postdoc into industry. Then again, industry scientists can count on change, she says. A productive two-year postdoc at the University of California, San Francisco, helped kick-start Pohlhaus’s career. She worked in a laboratory with a good track record for preparing industry scientists. (That worked out well, because she knew academic life was not for her.) She moved to a second postdoc at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to rejoin her now-husband, and continued to build her CV. When a position for a computational chemistry investigator became available at GlaxoSmithKline in nearby Research Triangle Park, she applied and got it, partly
because she had maintained a professional contact she had made at the company after a talk she had given years before. “You never know which conversations will lead to the next job,” she says. She later transferred to the GSK in King of Prussia. Although her postdoctoral training prepared her well for her new industry role, she had to relearn everything—from the industry software packages to the style of thinking. At the same time, she began to realize that data analytics skills she was building were powerful and translatable across a wide range of scientific problems. “The more you can keep those mental— and, in a sense, emotional—muscles flexible, the better off you’ll be,” she says.
basic and translational research,” he says. “I was considering multiple career paths.” As he applied for faculty positions at universities, DiLillo was also being recruited for positions in pharmaceutical companies. Interviewing at Regeneron, DiLillo “fell in love with the atmosphere,” he says. “The position and company just seemed like a perfect fit. I could come in, carve out my own niche, and at the same time have the resources to be able to do that and not worry about grant funding.” DiLillo says that his postdoc prepared him for the position in that it fostered independent thinking. As a postdoc, he had also initiated a collaboration with researchers at another institution, which was a valuable experience for his current role. “When you
“Not only do you have to be a great scientist, you have to be a great collaborator”
With Tsien’s help, Yee finally landed a job working in formulation development at Vertex Pharmaceuticals in Boston. The first few weeks, he went in to work at the weekends—as he was used to doing as a postdoc—only to find the laboratory pitch black. Vertex treated him well, and he enjoyed the healthier work-life balance, but after two years he started seeking a career that would cultivate a different skillset and provide more opportunities for advancement. He contacted a few colleagues and acquaintances and asked them about their jobs, and advises others to do the same. “You should talk to a lot of people, including people you’re connected with on LinkedIn,” he says. After speaking with about a dozen patent lawyers, he decided to take the leap.
come to a position like this, not only do you have to be a great scientist, but you have to be a great communicator and collaborator,” he explains. For those seeking a job, there’s no reason to rule out industry. “Certainly, do the best postdoc you can because it’s important to demonstrate your abilities,” he says. “One of the most crucial parts of the interview process is the job talk. Put together a nice presentation and practice it, but also be able to discuss your work.”
Patent law stood out to Yee for practical reasons, including stability and respect. He was drawn to the value placed on a lawyer’s time. In addition, firms are plentiful in cities—and Yee, like Sullivan, wanted the city life. After gaining a scholarship and attending law school, Yee landed his first job as a technology advisor at Lando & Anastasi. He enjoys problem-solving and learning about a range of technologies that he would not otherwise be exposed to as an industry scientist. Yee might have continued to work as a patent agent, a satisfying career path for scientists who wish to forgo the law degree. On the other hand, without the degree your salary cap is lower, you can’t advance to partner, and you can’t give legal advice. Q 17 September 2016 | NewScientist | 47
LETTERS EDITOR’S PICK
Take us from your Leader, Earthlings From Ynda, Head of all the Grnffff News of your Leader entitled “Hello neighbour” (27 August, p 5) arrives at Gnrffff (or as you call it, a “rocky planet orbiting our nearest star”). I protest the sheer vanity of this. You assume Gnrffff is not inhabited. Here, we use our Improbably Large And Very Expensive Telescope (ILAVET) to monitor all your frequencies. We’ve been following your primitive progress with interest since you started broadcasting I Love Lucy and alerted us to your presence on what we call “a rocky planet orbiting our nearest star”. The most troubling aspect of your Leader is this: “If humans or our descendants are still around, we will need somewhere to move to... The discovery of Proxima b might be our first glimpse of an out-of-this-world future.” We are here and intend to stay. Forget about terra nullius and manifest destiny. It won’t work with us. We have figured out gravity and time, and have a bloody good understanding of that two-slit experiment that’s driving you nuts. We know who really killed Kennedy. If you send your people, we know you’re not sending the best. You’ll be sending people who bring drugs. They’ll be bringing crime. They’ll be rapists. And some, we assume, are good people. Here’s our basic plan. We will build a great, great wall around our planet and we will make you pay for that wall. Don’t misunderestimate us. c/o Andy Johnson-Laird, Portland, Oregon, US 52 | NewScientist | 17 September 2016
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Talking to the climatically deaf From Andrew Collins Although I’m not a gambler, in particularly pertinent situations I am prepared to change my ways. Quentin Macilray asks what we should say to someone who denies climate change (Letters, 27 August). I say, “Put your money where your mouth is!” I will bet $1000 that the global mean temperature will exceed the record 2015 temperature within the next 10 years. And I will place that bet repeatedly, if I can find an appropriate person to hold my stake for the next decade. If thousands of us offered this opportunity to the sceptics, would they take us up on it? Dromana, Victoria, Australia From Roy Harrison It is simply undeniable that the greenhouse effect exists and causes the planet to warm. A calculation as far back as 1937 concluded that doubling the CO2 content of the atmosphere would raise global temperatures by 2 °C – a result that still stands. We may have to wait a few years for an obvious natural indicator… £1,000,000 sea-front properties being demolished by the ocean should make good television. Verwood, Dorset, England From Tony Richardson I suspect that Macilray really knows the answer to his question. There are no simple, unarguable indicators of anthropogenic climate change. Earth’s climate is subject to a wide range of influences, and the way they interact makes for a very complex picture. Similarly to Macilray, I have often had to work hard to get an individual to even consider anthropogenic climate change. Otherwise well-informed people provide tempting counterarguments, often arising from commercial and broadcast media
that are clearly supporting particular business interests. Such people may hear arguments based on considerations they respect – economic ones. Robert Solow won a Nobel prize for showing the influence of technological advance on economic growth. Developing new green technologies is a powerful driver of wealthcreation. It is satisfying to make the point that the Chinese certainly seem to have realised this, with a significant move from fossil-based to green technologies. A final motherhood-and-applepie point is that we can leave resources in the ground for future generations to make better use of than we do. As the one-time Saudi oil minister Sheikh Yamani said: “the Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stones” and “oil is too precious to burn”. Ironbridge, Shropshire, UK
Generosity and reciprocity, or not From Ted Webber Bob Holmes presents a rosy view of altruism (13 August, p 26). He does not give sufficient weight to the mores of status and prestige. The New Guinea highland peoples, for example, generally have no hierarchical chieftain system and could be described as more communist than any Marxist. This does not rule out an ambition to be a “big man”, the first among equals. To achieve this, a young man may prove himself, as a warrior in tribal fights and by displays of wealth made by giving things away. The biggest man is the one who contributes the most pigs and cassowaries to a sing-sing feast. Wealth is measured by how much you can afford to give away to your wantoks or clan members, and by the same token how much you can realise from them later if the need arises. What may look at first like altruism is here more like
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putting something in the bank for a rainy day. Buderim, Queensland, Australia From Constance Lever-Tracy In 2000 we interviewed 44 people who had come to Australia from northern and southern Italy, mainly in the 1950s, about their experiences of sponsorship, chain migration and settlement help by earlier migrants. Sponsorship often involved considerable generosity, freely given and nonreciprocal. It was based on an expansive sense of solidarity with kinsfolk, friends and paesani from the same small-town community. Repayment later was neither feasible nor expected (doi.org/ fvfspw). We did not see evidence of “amoral familism” – the inability to act together for any end beyond the immediate interest of the nuclear family, which has been controversially attributed to southern Italians. Eden Hills, South Australia
Déjà vu comes back to haunt us From Brian Evans Jessica Hamzelou suggests that déjà vu occurs when our frontal brain regions check memories for discrepancies between what we think we have experienced and what we have experienced (20 August, p 9). How does the brain know what we have actually experienced? Some form of memory, I presume. If that is reliable enough to be a reference, then why isn’t it the main – or only – memory of the event? Feniton, Devon, UK From Patrick Kuun You suggest that déjà vu is a sign your brain’s memory checking system is working well. My experience of déjà vu is during the “auras” that sometimes precede a generalised epileptic seizure. Before my temporal lobe epilepsy advanced to what it is
“Are there concentrations of Alzheimer’s disease with hotspots along major routes?” Sarah Hawkes outlines a follow-up to reports of air pollution sending tiny magnetic particles into our brains (10 September, p 10)
today, I regularly experienced overwhelming déjà vu, with an incredible sense of peacefulness. But I was unable to contextualise at the time what it was that I was remembering so vividly. People with epilepsy also commonly experience memory difficulties. Now, at age 51, this is a far greater problem for me than the seizures themselves. Pavel Vlasov of Moscow State University of Medicine and Dentistry and colleagues observe that while up to 97 per cent of the general population experience déjà vu, it can also “be a sign of certain psychoneurological diseases”. They suggest that the type of déjà vu experienced by epileptics might be different to that of healthy people. Southampton, Hampshire, UK
Psychology may need more analysis From Ritchie McGladdery Kayt Sukel gives a list of 10 major reversals in medical advice (27 August, p 34). This was in a TOM GAULD
sense reassuring, in that these matters are now being addressed. I was, however, alarmed that all the reversals concerned treatments for physical ailments, and none for psychological conditions. Should doctors treating such conditions now undergo similar analysis? London, UK The editor writes: ■ We recently discussed the evidence crisis in psychology (16 April, p 38).
Our ancestor in some warm pore From Justin Jackson Penny Sarchet writes that the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) “was packaged inside a membrane which created a microenvironment for building complex proteins” (20 August, p 26). The problem with this is that bacteria and archaea have very different cell membranes (among other striking differences) and it is not clear that either could
have evolved from the other. In his book The Vital Question – Why Is Life The Way It Is? (reviewed 25 April 2015, p 46) Nick Lane convincingly argues that bacteria and archaea evolved their cell membranes independently, and that LUCA was a set of replicating macromolecules in a pore of an alkaline hydrothermal vent. Godalming, Surrey, UK
At last, a reason for yawning, maybe From David Gullen Clare Wilson reports that breathing in helps draw waste fluid from our brains down through the glymphatic system (13 August, p 7). It thus seems reasonable that an exaggerated inhalation would have a bigger effect. Have we finally discovered the true reason for yawning? Might it offer a boost to the wasteextraction system, keeping the brain functioning properly for a little longer? Sutton, Surrey, UK
Naval colours will help us read better From Hilary Perry If only designers of leaflets and posters knew what makers of naval signalling flags have long understood – that from a distance white and yellow look identical, as do red and magenta or blue and black (Last Word, 27 August). Why do we still have to struggle to read blue/black or yellow/white? Dinas Powys, Glamorgan, UK
A herpes cure test case is at flipper From Mike Egan I am intrigued by the conjunction of two items in one edition of New Scientist. The first reports a herpes outbreak in turtles on the Great Barrier Reef (9 July, p 7); the second suggests that gene editing could destroy herpes viruses living inside you (9 July, p 14). Could one provide a useful test case for the other? Ballivor, County Meath, Ireland
For the record ■ The “gross tonnage” of a ship is a measure of its volume, not its weight (27 August, p 7). ■ The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation will come into force in all member states on 25 May 2018 (3 September, p 16). ■ Put a safety pin on our right sleeve. The Juan de Fuca tectonic plate is in the north-east Pacific ocean (For the record, 20 August).
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17 September 2016 | NewScientist | 53
FEEDBACK
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“I devoted a full chapter to this subject in my book The Origin of Feces,” writes David Waltner-Toews. “The problem is that to lump frass, spraints, manure and excrement into one category, while useful in some circumstances, is problematic in others.” We’re glad that serious thought is being given to the matter. David adds that the words science and shit “share the same Proto-Indo-European root”. Whatever is he suggesting?
PAUL MCDEVITT
LIKE many, Feedback plans to secure a long life by steadily pickling ourselves in alcohol until we resemble a specimen in the Hunterian Museum. But some deny the preservative qualities of booze. Kate Lee notes that the Samuel Smith brewery claims to produce beers “solely from authentic natural ingredients without any chemical additives, raw material adjuncts, artificial sweeteners, colourings, flavourings or preservatives”. Setting aside what counts as authentic, Kate wonders what deadly dihydrogen monoxide is if not a chemical, why hops are added if not for flavouring and if “all their products are alcohol-free, too?”
A MUCH-trumpeted online beauty contest judged by artificial intelligence has turned out some ugly results. You would be forgiven for thinking that a machine mind could not eliminate the intrinsic bias in what is a subjective judgement of
human beings – and in this case you would be right. When Beauty.AI, a collaboration between Youth Laboratories and Insilico Medicine, selected its selfie victors, onlookers were quick to point out that the winners in each category had more in common than good looks. Despite having entrants from more than 100 countries, the competition’s finalists all had notably pale skin. One researcher involved in the contest blamed the bias on a skewed set of training images and technological limitations on handling darker skin tones. If only there were someone who could adjust the algorithms to account for this. A MUCKY problem is fouling up attempts by scientists to research scatological matters: the plethora of words for poo means that a search using one term fails to unearth papers that use another (27 August).
“I’m a bit dismayed to find Friends of the Earth campaigning for a Fossil Free Scotland,” writes Nuala Lonie. “Have they got a grudge against palaeontologists?” 56 | NewScientist | 17 September 2016
A WAR on cleanliness is in effect, as the UK announces that it will ban plastic microbeads, the exfoliating grit added to liquid soaps that tends to reappear in the oceanic food chain. Across the pond, the Food and Drug Administration ordered soap manufacturers to scrub any reference to antibacterial properties from their wares, after no company was able to justify the claim. Perhaps beleaguered grime-fighters can take direction from less-regulated parts of the personal health sector to create new useless cleansers: might we see “detox” detergents and homeopathic body wash?
that the back might be a more practised entry point for sticking the knife in (20 August). This may have unintended consequences, however, says Dick Hadfield. “There have been a number of prime ministers who would have happily started a nuclear war if it gave them a legitimate excuse to carve up one of their colleagues,” he says. “Much better to make every candidate agree to have the codes injected deep into their own flesh.”
THE instructions on a bag of Aldi frozen oven chips have left Guy Cox paralysed with indecision. “Product must be cooked before consumption,” they declare. “Do not thaw before cooking. If product becomes thawed consume within 24 hours.” If anyone has advice on how to cook frozen French fries without thawing them, a hungry Guy is waiting.
A WARNING sign on an electricity pylon near the University of Arizona in Tucson warns maintenance staff to avoid operating it “while energized”. David Yetman, who spotted it, wonders if operators “must be apathetic, fatigued or dispirited”.
LUKE O’SULLIVAN spies a higher plane of theatrical experience on offer in Camel Creek Adventure Park in Cornwall. The venue boasts a “5D simulator experience”. If that sounds too mind-bending to endure, writes Luke, take heart in the knowledge that booking 24 hours in advance nets a 20 per cent discount, “thankfully placing you back in 4D”.
CHRIS SMITH sends word of a great deal offered to Daily Mail readers on Oxford lace-up brogues. The coupon printed in the paper boasts “Buy one, get one free.” Judging from the accompanying picture, Chris writes, “you get a black left and a brown right. This means that no matter how many pairs you order, you will never receive a pair of matching colour!”
PREVIOUSLY Feedback mused on Roger Fisher’s proposition that nuclear launch codes ought to be implanted in the chest cavities of a senior political aide, and suggested
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THE LAST WORD Blob of the gaps I live near Lake Clifton in Western Australia, home of these rare round thrombolites (see photo). I have always wondered what the grey “rocks” in between the thrombolites are. The one in the centre of the photo has the appearance of a fracture face on a piece of shale. I clambered down to get one of them only to find they were soft and almost jelly-like in consistency. They were just about floating, bobbing with the water action, although some were submerged. Can someone identify them?
This explains why muddy coastlines, like those around Lyme Regis in the UK, are not choked by lumps of shale that have fallen into the sea during landslides. Instead the chunks of shale are quickly broken down into fine particles and washed out to deeper waters, where they are deposited as mud on the seabed. Jon Noad Calgary, Alberta, Canada
Green genome If we could somehow splice the recipe that plants use for making chlorophyll into our genes, could we then satisfy some of our energy needs by photosynthesising?
would be toxic to us unless we also copied plants in making special proteins that envelop its molecules. The last of the three stages, known as the Calvin-Benson cycle, requires genes for 11 enzymes, nine of which we already have. The two missing enzymes are Ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase (otherwise known as RuBisCO) and phosphoribulokinase. The middle stage is the trickiest because, although we already have the enzymes needed to make ATP and NADPH, we don’t have a way of allowing them to soak up light energy in the way plants do. Plants achieve this using ingenious proteins and lipids, structurally organised within chloroplast membranes. Before you try to engineer these botanical feats into your own chromosomes, be warned that you would be able to
■ The grey blobs in the photograph certainly look like lumps of grey shale. Shale can be more than 20 per cent porous in some cases, and this allows it to soak up water, particularly when the rock is fractured. Extended immersion can lead to the shale becoming saturated, and eventually it crumbles to leave a pile of mud particles on the lake or seabed. Salt water appears to exacerbate the process.
■ There are three main hurdles to overcome. First, you would need to make the chlorophyll. Then you’d have to deploy it to harness energy from light, allowing you to synthesise adenosine triphosphate (ATP) and “If we had enough surface area to photosynthesise nicotine adenine dinucleotide well, we’d have great phosphate (NADPH). Finally, you difficulty moving around” would use these metabolites to convert carbon dioxide into sugar. Surprisingly, we already have photosynthesise only minute many of the genes needed for amounts of carbohydrate the first and last stages. Plants use compared with what you’d get 16 metabolic reactions to create from, say, a slice of bread. chlorophyll, nine of which are The problem is that your body shared with the pathway we use would need a huge surface area for making haem, a constituent of relative to its volume in order to red blood cells. So inserting genes absorb useful amounts of light. for seven extra steps could, in Obviously, the chlorophyll would principle, allow us to make need to be in your skin because chlorophyll. your liver, lungs and brain are not Unfortunately, the chlorophyll well placed to absorb light.
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I weigh 85 kilograms and I have a surface area of under 2 square metres. In contrast, an 85-kilogram plant typically presents an area of over 200 square metres to the sun, thanks to its thin, expansive leaves. With an area-to-volume ratio like that, we would have great difficulty moving around – in fact, we’d have to be vegetative. Steve Fry Professor of Plant Biochemistry University of Edinburgh, UK
This week’s questions ROUND AND ABOUT
People of my generation (I am 75) can remember when hens’ eggs used to have a rounded end and a pointy end. Now the ends seem much more alike. Have eggs changed over the years, and if so, why? John Ripley Leeds, West Yorkshire, UK NO STONE UNTHROWN
Personal experience suggests that if you put human males beside a body of water with a supply of stones to hand, they will soon start throwing them into the water. What drives them to do this, and is the same true of human females? Is this unique to humans, or has it been observed in other primates? What purpose can it possibly serve? Jane Dards Caersws, Powys, UK
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