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 CUT CARBS,
CUT HEADACHES
Ketogenic diet could
help migraines
MELDING MINDS
Artificial intelligence is
making humans smarter
ELECTRIC PLANTS
China’s high-tech plan
to boost crop yields
WEEKLY August 24 – 30, 2019

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UNIVERSE THE WRONG
WAY ROUND? A radical rethink of quantum theory

By Lee Smolin

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HOW CLIMATE CHANGE IS AFFECTING AIR TRAVEL • IS GAMING BAD FOR US?
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FIXING THE PLASTIC WASTE PROBLEM • AIR QUALITY • THE TRUTH ABOUT DIETS
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This week’s issue

On the 14 Cut carbs, cut headaches

Ketogenic diet could
New
cover help migraines Scientist
Live
34 Have we got the 38 Melding minds
universe the wrong Artificial intelligence is
way round? making humans smarter
A radical rethink of
quantum theory 42 Electric plants
China’s high-tech plan
12 Elephants, antelopes… to boost crop yields
mammoths?
Summit debates big Christiana Figueres
mammal protection talks about next steps
on climate change.
6 Miraculous moss 8 Alien biofluorescence 20 Marketing in space For more information,
7 More quantum weirdness see: newscientistlive.com

Vol 243 No 3244

Cover image: Oska

News Features
7 Entangled worlds 34 Have we got the universe
Quantum theorem may prove News the wrong way round?
there are parallel universes Lee Smolin on the theory lurking
beyond quantum physics
9 Hi-tech healthcare
Can artificial intelligence really 38 Melding minds
transform hospitals? AI is changing the way we think

15 Smart weapons 42 Electric plants

The US Army is developing Can electricity boost crop yields?
AI missiles that find their
own targets 46 Fighting malaria
Brian Gitta’s new test could save
millions of lives
Views
23 Comment The back pages
VICTOR TYAKHT/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

The warring Brexit sides

must compromise, says 51 Maker
Andre Geim How to create a rain alarm

24 The columnist 52 Puzzles

Annalee Newitz calls for
the demise of YouTube
26 Letters
We need to talk about the
natural pesticides in our food
28 Aperture
The transient beauty of
iridescent bubbles captured
30 Culture
Jennifer Gunter on why she
wrote The Vagina Bible
Cryptic crossword, a moon
problem and the quick quiz
12 Protecting wildlife Global summit considers bans on saiga trade
53 Feedback
Nature on the attack and unusual
Picture of the week Share your photos units: the week in weird
on the theme of ‘discovery’
We’d like to feature your photos of the wonders of science and technology 54 Almost the last word
in our upcoming picture of the week slot. The first theme will be “discovery”. A safari guide’s visual skills, and
Send us your discovery-themed photos, with a short (25 words maximum) sneezing – readers respond
description, to readerpics@newscientist.com by 10am on Tuesday
27 August. We’ll publish our favourite in the 7 September issue of 56 The Q&A
New Scientist and share it on Instagram the following week. Catherine Lubetzki, multiple
(Terms and conditions at newscientist.com/pictureoftheweek-terms) sclerosis research pioneer

24 August 2019 | New Scientist | 1

 SECOND EDITION OF
BEING HUMAN

BEING
HUMAN
Take a step back from the everyday
chores of being human to tackle the
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The leader

Humanity’s greatest scourge

Malaria is a distant problem for most of us. We shouldn’t ignore it

IN ROME 1500 years ago, a mysterious
plague swept through the city. Of the
hundreds of children killed, one was
buried in a cemetery on the outskirts of
the city. In 2001, her body was exhumed
and autopsied using modern genetic
techniques. The tests showed she had
died of malaria – the earliest confirmed
case of a disease that has been with us
since time immemorial.
Malaria may have killed perhaps half
of all the people who have ever lived. For
most readers of this magazine, however,
DR TONY BRAIN/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
The Plasmodium
parasites that
cause malaria
may have killed
half of all humans
Africa. But almost half of the world’s
population is at risk. Climate change is
likely to increase that number, as
conditions change to allow malarial
resistance and bounced back.
One of the most promising
methods to defeat malaria looks to
be one of the newest. Lab tests of gene-
drive technology, which manipulates
the DNA of mosquitoes to make them
infertile, has seen populations driven to
extinction. The technique also seems
immune to the evolution of resistance.
But the deployment of such a
powerful weapon in the wild brings
with it worries of unintended
consequences and the potential for

it is a distant scourge, perhaps recalled
only when ordering medication for an
exotic holiday.
Such forgetfulness is neither justified
nor wise. In 2018, malaria infected
219 million people, and killed around
435,000. Most of those who die are
children under 5, mostly in sub-Saharan
mosquitoes to thrive in new areas.
Over the years we have made many
attempts to eradicate malaria, targeting
either mosquitoes or Plasmodium, the
parasitic microorganisms the insects
carry that are ultimately responsible for
the disease. Each time, either parasite or
insect – or both – have clung on, evolved
misuse that shouldn’t be ignored. Less
problematic are practical interventions
that quickly get existing medication to
the people who need it (see page 46). If
we are able to rapidly target areas where
malaria is rife, we will have a greater
chance of wiping it out. Let’s give it
all we’ve got. ❚

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 News
Cleaning the air Fast radio bursts Drinking and cancer Joys of parenthood Interstellar dust
Walls of moss could We’ve spotted eight Alcohol may not Having kids makes Radioactive iron
help fight traffic more mysterious be linked to breast you happier – when tells of interstellar
pollution p6 repeating blasts p8 cancer after all p10 they move out p12 clouds p14
MEDIC PIX/ALAMY

Measles resurgent in UK
Three years after the virus was eliminated from the country,
the UK has lost its “measles-free” status
FOLLOWING 231 confirmed cases
of infection in the first three
months of the year, the UK has
lost its measles-free status with
the World Health Organization.
Prime minister Boris Johnson
has called for health leaders to
renew their efforts to ensure that
95 per cent of people have had
two doses of the measles, mumps
and rubella (MMR) vaccine.
The World Health Organization
recommends that 95 per cent
of people need to be vaccinated
against measles to achieve herd
immunity, which stops the
infection spreading through
populations. Recent figures
suggest that only 87.2 per cent
of UK children have received
the second dose.
“Measles is one of the most
infectious diseases known to
man – only one person travelling
back to an area with lower
vaccination rates can lead to an
outbreak,” says Mary Ramsay of
government agency Public Health
England. “Anyone who has not
received two doses of MMR
vaccine is always at risk.”
To improve vaccination rates,
NHS England will write to all
family doctors urging them to
promote “catch-up” vaccination
programmes. There are also
plans to update advice on the UK
National Health Service website
More on vaccines online
The latest on preventing deadly infectious diseases
newscientist.com/article-topic/vaccines
to specifically address misleading
information about vaccines. Social
media companies are expected
to be called to a summit to discuss
how they can promote accurate
information about vaccination.
Amid an increasing focus on
digitising the NHS (see page 9),
a strategy being developed by the
Department of Health and Social
Care is likely to ask the NHS to
find technological solutions to
identify those who have missed a
vaccination, and to make it easier
to book vaccine appointments.
“From reassuring parents about
the safety of vaccines, to making
sure people are attending
follow-up appointments, we can
and must do more to halt the
spread of infectious, treatable
diseases in modern-day Britain,”
Johnson said on Monday.
Junior health minister Jo
Churchill told BBC Radio 4 that the
NHS and UK government need to
work with social media companies
so that “misinformation is taken
down, and that we give people the
correct information that they can
help keep their children safe”.
She said the government is
working to make sure there would
be no shortages of drugs following
Brexit. “On the measles vaccine,
there are buffer stocks in place and
I don’t see any issue with supply.” ❚
Staff and agency

24 August 2019 | New Scientist | 5

 News
Pollution
Moss-covered walls
installed to clean city air
Ruby Prosser Scully
WALLS blanketed in moss are
popping up in major cities,
along with promises that they
can help reduce air pollution –
but can a few square metres
of plant matter really tackle
the smog?
Berlin-based Green City
Solutions believes so. Its moss
walls, called CityTrees, are about
4 square metres in size. It says
they can filter up to 80 per cent
of pollution particles out of
the air, including the tiny
ones linked to respiratory
and cardiovascular diseases.
The walls collect rainwater,
which is pumped through an
irrigation system to the plants,
powered by solar panels. These
also drive fans to increase
airflow through the plants. As a
result, the firm says its product
filters 3500 cubic metres of air
an hour, which is equivalent to
the total volume of air breathed
by 7000 people in that time.
Around 50 CityTrees have
A moss-cloaked
CityTree being fitted
in a Berlin street
SEAN GALLUP/GETTY
6 | New Scientist | 24 August 2019
been installed in European cities
in bus stops and busy streets
where people are exposed to
harmful particles emitted from
passing traffic – one of the
biggest sources of air pollution. Technology in Australia. In a
The European Commission is
interested in the idea and is
funding a dozen moss walls in
Berlin over the next year. Each
CityTree costs about $60,000.
Alison Haynes at the
University of Wollongong in
Australia and her colleagues
recently looked at how
effectively moss and trees
absorb pollution. They found
that moss was up to four times
better at trapping particles
than the native Australian tree,
Pittosporum undulatum.
“Mosses are like a ragged
carpet, so there are lots of little researchers at the Netherlands
spots where little particles
can get caught and trapped,”
says Haynes. Because moss
lacks roots, it gets minerals
through its leaves, absorbing
them from the air. As it does
so, it also traps particles of
pollution, such as heavy
metals, in its tissue.
But this doesn’t mean moss
walls will necessarily protect
people from pollution at busy
bus stops, says Zoran Ristovski
at the Queensland University of
small room, a moss wall only
needs to filter a fraction of
new air each hour, but tens or
hundreds of times this volume
of air is pushed past by buses,
he says. Consequently, a moss
wall in a street is unlikely to
make any difference, he says.
80%
Moss walls are said to remove this
proportion of pollution particles
This view is supported
by a study of CityTrees by
Organisation for Applied
Scientific Research. They found
that eight walls installed in a
busy street in Amsterdam failed
to reduce the concentration of
particulate matter and nitrogen
dioxide. Their report concluded
that even doubling the number
of moss walls would do little to
improve their effectiveness.
Different solutions will be
needed depending on an area’s
layout, says Ruby Michael at
Griffith University in Australia.
Where streets are flanked by
tall buildings to create urban
canyons, she says, tree planting
can backfire because trees can
reduce airflow – and so moss
walls may be a better option.
Cities are unlikely to rush
to replace their trees just yet.
“It’s important to remember
that street trees provide a
whole host of other benefits,
including refuge and habitat
for urban wildlife, shade and
cooling for people on the
street, and reduction of urban
heat islands,” says Michael. ❚
Organ transplants
Suspicious organ
studies retracted
by journals
Clare Wilson
FIFTEEN studies about transplanted
organs by researchers in China have
been retracted due to concerns the
work may have used organs from
executed prisoners, according to
the website Retraction Watch,
which monitors questions raised
over published research.
China’s government said in 2015
that the nation had stopped using
organs from executed prisoners,
which is illegal under international
conventions. But campaign groups
and some doctors suspect the
practice continues, particularly
involving prisoners of conscience.
Some claim that targeted groups
include Uighurs, a Muslim ethnic
minority in China, and practitioners
of Falun Gong, a belief system
similar to Buddhism that has
been outlawed.
Various journals that publish
research into organ transplants
have previously said that, for ethical
reasons, they won’t publish any
work that used prisoners’ organs.
Yet earlier this year, campaigners
highlighted 400 published papers
that they suspect may have
involved organs taken from
prisoners (BMJ Open, doi.org/c2ks).
Many came from work done
before 2010, when China didn’t
have the systems in place to get
donor organs from people who are
brain dead, as happens in other
countries. Now some of the journals
involved seem to be taking action.
The journal Transplantation has
retracted seven papers, saying in
an editorial that “it is clear, with
the benefit of hindsight… that
most deceased donors were
from executed people”.
Jacob Lavee, an Israeli heart
surgeon who is a member of
campaign group Doctors Against
Forced Organ Harvesting, welcomes
the news but says politicians also
need to act. “Chinese transplant
physicians are committing a crime
against humanity,” he says. ❚
Quantum theory
Proof of parallel universes?
A classic quantum theorem may prove that many worlds exist
Leah Crane
SOME ideas about the quantum
world seem to suggest that there
are many versions of you spread
out across parallel universes.
Now, two researchers have
formulated a proof that attempts
to show this is really true.
The proof involves a
fundamental construct in
quantum mechanics called
Bell’s theorem, which deals with
situations in which particles
DETLEV VAN RAVENSWAAY/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
interact with each other, become
entangled and then go their
separate ways. It is what is called a
“no-go theorem”, one designed to
show that some assumption about
how the world works isn’t true.
Bell’s theorem rests on three
assumptions. First, that there
is local causality, meaning that
objects can only affect what is
near them and an effect must
happen after its cause. Next,
events aren’t all predetermined
by some external force. The
last assumption is that every
measurement has only one
outcome, a stipulation that is
simply called “one world”.
Tests of Bell’s theorem have
already shown that all of these
assumptions can’t be true at
once. Measuring one of a pair
of entangled particles always
seems to affect the other. That is
true when the two are separated
by vast distances and the
measurements are made too
quickly for any signal, even
moving at the speed of light,
to have travelled between them.
Conventionally, physicists say
that this means local causality
is violated, and it proves that
entangled particles can change
one another’s measured states.
But Mordecai Waegell and
Kelvin McQueen at Chapman
University in California interpret
it differently. They argue in a paper
submitted to the British Journal for
the Philosophy of Science that local
causality can be preserved – but
only if there are many worlds.
“Everyone agrees that there’s
a contradiction if you accept all
three axioms of Bell’s theorem
and the experimental results, so
you’ve got to reject at least one,”
says McQueen. Rather than
doing away with local causality, it
actually makes most sense to get
rid of the requirement for a single
world, say McQueen and Waegell.
“It starts as an
entanglement of particles,
but then it becomes an
entanglement of worlds”
They worked through a classic
thought experiment in which
three entangled particles are sent
to three detectors that are far away
from one another. There are
people taking measurements at
each detector, called Alice, Bob and
Charlie. First, Alice measures a
quantum property of her particle
called spin. Then Bob measures
the same thing for his particle,
followed by Charlie for her
particle. Each measurement will
either return a spin of up or down.
Based on the rules of
entanglement, if we know what
Alice measured, it narrows down
the possible results from Bob
and Charlie’s measurements.
If we know what both Alice and
Bob measured, we can predict
the exact result of Charlie’s
measurement. In the particular
set-up that McQueen and
Waegell consider, if Alice and
Bob both get spin-up, Charlie
must get spin-down.
But when the researchers
calculated every possible outcome
in a scenario including local
causality, they found that Alice
would have to get two different
results from one measurement.
Alice’s particle must be both
spin-up and spin-down when
she measures it.
“We get a contradiction in what
Alice measured: she must have
gotten one result, and also must
have gotten the other result,” says
McQueen. “That’s not possible –
not unless you have two Alices.”
Reality may split into
many worlds, which
can merge again later
The solution, they say, is a
hypothesis called semi-local
worlds. In this scenario, when
Alice makes a measurement,
she splits into multiple Alices
who get different results. The
same goes for Bob and Charlie.
The worlds of each of the
measurers continue separately
until they compare their results,
at which point their worlds merge.
“The Bob that obtains a
particular measurement is only
going to meet an Alice that obtains
a corresponding measurement,”
says Mateus Araújo at the
University of Cologne in Germany.
“It starts as entanglement of
particles, but then when you do
the measurement, it becomes an
entanglement of worlds.”
Many physicists are sceptical
of the idea because it is difficult to
test empirically. McQueen admits
as much. “I don’t think I could ever
experimentally confirm that you
have bifurcated into two versions
of yourself,” he says.
Waegell, however, says there
may be a way to test it by taking
extremely fast measurements
of systems in the process of
splitting into different worlds.
But he isn’t sure we will ever
have the equipment to do so.
Many worlds might also make
it easier to reconcile quantum
mechanics with Einstein’s
theory of general relativity,
says Waegell. The mismatch
between these is one of the
biggest problems in physics.
“I think Einstein probably
would have hated this,” says
Araújo. Nevertheless, he says, it is
just as plausible for the incorrect
assumption in Bell’s theorem to be
the one stating there is only one
world as it is to be local causality. ❚
24 August 2019 | New Scientist | 7
News Are we alone? Hear Avi Loeb talk about the
hunt for alien messages from outer space
newscientistlive.com
Cosmology

More clues in radio burst mystery

A haul of fast radio bursts that are easier to study could help us work out their cause
Leah Crane

WEIRD blasts from space called That is why the first repeater we “This demonstrates that there These new bursts may help
fast radio bursts are among the saw, FRB 121102, was also the first is a vast diversity even in what astronomers unravel those
most mysterious phenomena in burst that was traced to its home the repeaters are,” says Tendulkar. origins. One, which CHIME
the universe. Now astronomers galaxy. Most of our ideas to “Maybe some of them are older, saw repeating 10 times over four
have spotted eight particularly explain repeaters are based on it. some of them have stronger months, appears to be the closest
unusual ones – including one that These new bursts seem to be magnetic fields, they’re in FRB we have yet seen. We may
may be the closest to us we have different to FRB 121102. Their radio different environments.” be able to work out this burst’s
spotted so far. waves don’t show signs of being It has been suggested that there location accurately and so
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are scrambled by their environment are two ways to produce FRBs, for understand its environment
flashes of radio waves from distant like those from FRB 121102. Also, repeaters and for non-repeaters, better than has been possible
space that last a few milliseconds. that burst is in the same spot as but maybe there are more. for other FRBs.
Many hypotheses have been another source of radio waves that “You want to be able to
suggested for what causes glows constantly. None of the new The CHIME telescope characterise the galaxy and
them, but none is a perfect fit. repeaters are like that (arxiv.org/ has spotted eight more pinpoint exactly where these
What makes FRBs so puzzling abs/1908.03507). fast radio bursts bursts are coming from, and that’s
is that there seem to be two types: impossible if the galaxy is halfway
some that happen once, and across the universe,” says Gregg
others that repeat. Until now, we Hallinan at the California Institute
had only detected two so-called of Technology.
repeaters, but the Canadian If we can tell exactly where
Hydrogen Intensity Mapping bursts come from, that helps
Experiment (CHIME) has found narrow down the possible
eight more. causes. For example, one idea
Bursts that repeat are easier is that FRBs are caused by highly
to study than those that occur magnetised neutron stars, which
once. “Repeaters are nice because we expect to mainly exist in
you can follow them up and star-forming regions of relatively
JAMES SMITH/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

observe the source for a long time young galaxies.

and see if there are any changes, “Getting a precise location is
which can give us clues about really the future of the FRB science
what the emission mechanism game,” says Hallinan. Teams have
could be,” says CHIME team already started tracking down
member Shriharsh Tendulkar the home galaxies of CHIME’s
at McGill University in Montreal. eight repeaters. ❚

Exoplanets

We might find alien life can survive near these stars.
If it can, Lisa Kaltenegger and Jack
life by searching for O’Malley-James at Cornell University
its luminous glow in Ithaca, New York, have an idea
about what it might look like.
PLANETS that glow could be a They realised that there are some
telltale sign they are home to life. species of coral that have adapted
Most of the nearest potentially to deal with UV light. These coral
habitable planets we have found are get their energy from algae, and to
orbiting a type of star called a red protect the algae from UV damage,
dwarf. When these stars are young, the coral absorbs the light and
they tend to blast out ultraviolet re-emits it at a lower, safer
(UV) light that can be deadly to life wavelength. This gives the coral
as we know it. That has made some an ethereal glow.
astronomers question whether On a planet subjected to far more
UV radiation, this sort of adaptation
might be more common, says
Kaltenegger. The glow would be
tied to the star’s activity, making
it easier to disentangle from other
factors that might make a planet
appear brighter than expected but
wouldn’t indicate life (Monthly
Notices of the Royal Astronomical
Society, doi.org/c9mp). Depending
“If we had evolved on such a
planet, we would probably
glow too. There would be
survival advantages”
on factors like whether the planet
has clouds, the glowing could make
the planet more than 100 times
brighter, says Kaltenegger.
“If you and I would have evolved
on such a world, we would probably
glow too, as that would have had
advantages in survival,” she says.
That means that planets around
red dwarfs are more likely to glow,
and we might see it someday. “This
counterintuitively makes highly
active flaring stars good places to
look [for life],” says Kaltenegger. ❚
Leah Crane

8 | New Scientist | 24 August 2019

Interview: Indra Joshi
High-tech plans for the NHS
What can artificial intelligence really bring to healthcare?
A lot, Indra Joshi tells Clare Wilson
THE UK is “on the cusp of a
huge health tech revolution
that could transform patient
experience”, said health
minister Matt Hancock when he
announced £250 million to fund
a new AI Lab for the National
Health Service earlier this
month. The lab has been set
up to bring together academics
and technology companies to
NHS
work on some of the biggest
challenges in health and care.
But the AI sector has a
reputation for overpromising
on what it can deliver – as do
politicians. I met with Indra
Joshi, head of digital health and
AI at the newly established
NHSX – an organisation tasked
with digitally transforming the
NHS and running the AI Lab –
to ask her how it is going to
achieve these aims.
A former medic, Joshi says
she still knows what it is like
at medicine’s coalface. She
recounts a time her ward ran
out of pillowcases, so staff had
to wrap up pillows in sheets
instead. “As much as in my day
job we feel that we are going to
solve the world, we can’t lose
sight that these are some of the
issues that staff face,” she says.
How is AI going to make a
difference? Joshi tells me about
efforts to develop software
to look at scans, such as
mammograms for breast
cancer screening, and measure
the size of any lump and flag it
for a radiologist’s attention if
necessary. “The more mundane
tasks are taken away, leaving
time to do more complicated
ones,” she says.
Also in the works is a
computer-based check-in
system for emergency
departments. At the moment,
people initially speak to a
receptionist and then a triage
Profile
Indra Joshi is a former junior
doctor in emergency medicine.
She is now head of digital health
and AI at NHSX
nurse, before seeing a doctor.
Instead of those first two steps,
it is hoped people could record
their symptoms through a
touchscreen device that could
also take some of their vital
signs such as heart rate.
One advantage would be that
every person’s data is digitised,
so patterns can be spotted more
quickly. “That allows a hospital
to understand what’s happening
on the ground,” says Joshi.
At a more basic level, her
team is also investigating the
potential for phone apps to let
people book and rearrange
hospital appointments, and
even find out test results.
These kinds of initiatives
may sound promising but some
doctors have responded with
scepticism, pointing to the
recent explosion of commercial
apps making various health
claims without evidence.
Joshi says her team is tackling
this by laying the groundwork
for ensuring all future health
tech is ethical and supported by
evidence. It has drawn up a code
of conduct and has worked with
the National Institute for Health
and Care Excellence (NICE) on
setting the standards for the
levels of evidence required for
different types of technology.
“We need to help the market
understand that when you’re
developing [technology]
you claim is diagnostic or
therapeutic, you need to
go through the same peer-
reviewed process as with any
other product that’s therapeutic
or diagnostic,” she says.
Another criticism from
frontline staff is that the NHS
shouldn’t be working on new
tech without first fixing existing
IT infrastructure problems.
Dominic Pimenta, a cardiologist
in London, has complained that
his computer can take half an
hour just to get going in the
morning. To run his clinic,
he says he must log in to
10 different software packages –
to see someone’s notes, scan
results, ECG and so on. “The
other day it was taking so long
I just gave up and started again
in a different room,” he tells me.
Other problems include a
lack of tech support out of hours
and different hospitals using
incompatible software. I ask
Joshi if founding the AI Lab is
like trying to build an extension
onto a house whose walls are
“We need to make sure
technology goes through
the same peer-reviewed
process as other products”
about to fall down. “This isn’t
an ‘either-or’,” she says. NHSX,
which only launched last
month, is taking measures
to address these problems.
Joshi says she understands
people’s frustrations. “What we
want to do is build frameworks
to ensure we can deploy
[technology] and it works
where we say it will work.” ❚
Climate change
Global warming will
drive extreme wet
weather in summer
Adam Vaughan
SUMMER extremes of heat and rain
are likely to last longer in Europe,
North America and Asia if the world
warms by more than 2°C, with
serious effects for agriculture and
human health.
Climate change is expected to
bring more frequent and intense
extreme weather events. How long
they will last isn’t well understood.
Carl-Friedrich Schleussner at
Climate Analytics in Germany
and his colleagues modelled the
persistence of such events across
the northern hemisphere if
temperatures rise by more than 2°C.
They found that countries will, on
average, face a 26 per cent greater
probability of heavy rainfall lasting
for at least a week in summer. That
could lead to devastating floods.
Heavy
flooding hit
MARCEL KUSCH/AFP/GETTY Duisburg,
Germany, in
May 2018
The northern hemisphere faces
the prospect of more persistent
heatwaves, with the probability
of warm periods lasting a fortnight
increasing by 4 per cent on average.
Jet stream weakening, driven by
a warming Arctic, is one factor
behind this (Nature Climate Change,
doi.org/c9mn). Heatwaves can
result in a reduced harvest:
Germany saw a 15 per cent
decrease in wheat production
after a heatwave in 2018.
The good news is the increased
likelihood of these extremes can be
avoided – if temperature rises are
kept to 1.5°C or less, the tougher
goal of the UN’s Paris climate deal.
“We can make a difference by
limiting global warming and taking
action now,” says Hannah Cloke at
the University of Reading, UK. ❚
24 August 2019 | New Scientist | 9
 News
Chemistry Health

Tiny magnets
dissolve away
Alcohol may not increase
microplastics your risk of breast cancer
Chris Stokel-Walker Clare Wilson

AN ARMY of tiny magnetic coils COULD the health risks from warned that there was “no safe Those with more copies
could one day dissolve the booze be overblown? A study level of drinking” and said unsurprisingly tend to
microplastics lurking in our has found that drinking low whenever women had a glass drink less.
waterways and oceans. levels of alcohol doesn’t appear of wine they should weigh Drenos’s team looked at
Microplastics from cosmetics to cause cancer, and even heavy up whether it was worth the about 300,000 people taking
and household products can end drinking doesn’t cause breast raised risk of breast cancer. part in the UK Biobank study,
up in the ocean, where they are cancer – contrary to official But the studies that showed which has sequenced people’s
ingested by marine life. Fishing UK warnings. these risks looked only at genes and periodically surveys
the particles out of water is The question of how much their health and behaviour.
difficult, because they are so small. alcohol it is safe to drink has “Women genetically It has now tracked participants
Now Xiaoguang Duan at the long been debated. Heavy predisposed to drink for up to 13 years.
University of Adelaide in Australia drinkers are more prone to more didn’t have higher Women who were genetically
and his colleagues have tested mouth and throat cancers, and rates of breast cancer” predisposed to drink more,
a way to turn microplastics cirrhosis, where the liver starts because of a lower amount of
into carbon dioxide and water. failing, but it was thought that correlations between drinking the liver enzyme, didn’t have
light drinking was safe or levels and cancer rates, and a higher rate of breast cancer.
Microplastic possibly even good for you. couldn’t determine if alcohol is In fact, there was no correlation
ANGEL FITOR/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

particles are A growing number of studies, the cause. Something else could between genes and the
much trickier though, have suggested that be responsible, because people likelihood of cancer studied
to remove from even low levels of alcohol who drink more also tend to when looking at those who
water than larger consumption are linked with a smoke more, have lower drink less than 14 units a week
plastic pollution higher risk of cancer, including incomes and have unhealthy (medRxiv, doi.org/c9j3). The
that of the breast, oesophagus lifestyles in various other ways. team studied breast cancer
and colon. In 2016, the UK Fotios Drenos at Brunel in women and tumours of
updated its alcohol guidelines, University London and his the mouth, throat and the
The method may help avoid some cutting the maximum that men colleagues got around this rest of the digestive system.
of the damage plastic does to the should drink from 21 units a problem by analysing which It isn’t a clean bill of health:
environment, but it would emit CO2. week to 14, the same as that for variants of genes people in people who went over
The team put microscopic women – equivalent to six pints have. This is determined the 14-unit threshold, those
metal coils into water along of beer or just under one and at conception and can’t be genetically predisposed to
with peroxymonosulphate ions. a half bottles of wine. affected by lifestyle and habits. drink more did have a higher
A chemical reaction between the At the time, the UK’s chief They focused on a gene rate of throat cancer. “It’s more
two creates compounds called medical officer, Sally Davies, variant of an enzyme made in biologically plausible that heavy
radicals that break down the plastic. the liver that leaves people sick drinking causes these tumours
Because the coils are magnetic, Links between alcohol and dizzy after relatively little as alcohol comes into contact
they can then be removed by and breast cancer may alcohol. People can have two, with the throat,” says Drenos.
waving a larger magnet over the be overturned one or no copies of this variant. The team also confirmed the
water. “They can be used multiple lack of a link to breast tumours
times without significantly losing in another study of genes and
their reactability,” says Duan. cancer, called COGS.
He and his team put 80 millilitres The findings aren’t the final
of water containing microplastics word, says Frank Dudbridge at
from cosmetic products in a the University of Leicester, UK,
pressurised container along with because cancer risks could be
the coils and peroxymonosulphate, too low to be revealed this way.
and heated the water to 120°C. “It’s difficult to find a small
After 8 hours, the mass of effect unless you have really
microplastics had halved (Matter, big data sets,” he says.
doi.org/c9hv). Emmert Roberts at King’s
KLAUS VEDFELT/GETTY

Duan hopes the process could College London points out that
clean the outflows from water drinking can cause harms apart
treatment plants. This would stop from cancer, such as increased
microplastics entering the ocean. ❚ risk of depression and anxiety. ❚

10 | New Scientist | 24 August 2019

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News
CITES summit
Ban on saiga trade?
Stronger laws considered to protect antelopes and elephants
Adam Vaughan
THE US and Mongolia are backing
a ban on the trade of a critically
endangered species of antelope
that has seen its numbers in the
central Asian steppes devastated
by hunting and disease.
The saiga antelope (Saiga
tatarica) once lived across Europe
and Asia but is today confined to
Russia, Kazakhstan and Mongolia.
165,000
Estimated population of the
endangered saiga antelope
In 2015, the species was hit by an
outbreak of a bacterial infection
that killed more than half of its
population. There are now only
165,000 individuals left.
Governments are deciding
whether to ban all trade of
parts from the antelope at the
international conference of the
Convention on International
Trade in Endangered Species
of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES)
taking place in Geneva,
Switzerland, this week. “The saiga
is a big one: their population is
critically endangered by poaching
Mental health
Having kids makes
you happy… once
they move out
WHEN it comes to who is happier,
people with kids or those without,
most research points to the latter.
Now it seems that parents are
happier than their peers later in
life – when their children move out.
Most surveys of parental
happiness have focused on those
whose children still live at home.
These tend to show that people
with kids are less happy than their
child-free peers because they have
12 | New Scientist | 24 August 2019
and the die-offs,” says Sue
Lieberman of the US-based
Wildlife Conservation Society.
The proposal is likely to face
opposition from Kazakhstan.
The saiga’s numbers are slowly
starting to rise in the country,
ROSTISLAV MASHIN/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
leading those with trade interests
to say it has recovered, says
Lieberman. Two Kazakh rangers
have been killed this year by
antelope poachers. The saiga
is predominantly killed for
its horns, which are used in
traditional medicine in Singapore
and other countries.
Lieberman is hopeful that the
proposal will pass. It is one of 53 on
the table at the summit. Among
others are competing proposals
for African elephants. Moves to
ban all trade involving African
elephants and their tusks were
defeated at the last CITES summit
in 2016 but are being pushed again.
However, countries including
Zambia and Botswana are leading
proposals that would weaken
protections for their populations of
elephant, known as downlisting.
“There is a possibility Zambia
might get its downlisting but
less free time, sleep and money.
Christoph Becker at Heidelberg
University in Germany and his
colleagues wondered if the story
might be different for parents
whose kids have left home.
To find out, they analysed data
from a European survey that asked
55,000 people aged 50 and older
about their emotional well-being.
They found that those with
children had greater life satisfaction
and fewer symptoms of depression
than people without children, but
only if their kids had left home
(PLoS One, doi.org/c9mr).
This may be because when
The latest on biodiversity
Keep up to date with the world’s threatened wildlife
newscientist.com/article-topic/biodiversity
with zero quota [for trading],”
says Mary Rice of the campaign
group Environmental
Investigation Agency.
An unusual proposal is Israel’s
suggestion of giving protections
to the woolly mammoth.
Restricting trade in an extinct
animal might seem odd, but the
intent is to limit laundering of
elephant ivory as mammoth ivory,
which is collected in Siberia from
melting permafrost. Rice expects
the proposal will fail to get enough
backing, despite having merit.
More likely to pass are proposals
children grow up and move out they
provide social enrichment to their
parents minus the day-to-day stress
of looking after them, says Becker.
They may also give something back
by providing care and financial
support to their parents, he says.
The picture is similar in the US,
says Nicholas Wolfinger at the
University of Utah. He recently
analysed 40 years of data and
found that empty-nest parents aged
“People with children who
had left home had greater
life satisfaction and fewer
symptoms of depression”
An infection killed more
than half of all saiga
antelopes in 2015
to limit the trade in guitarfish,
wedgefish, sea cucumbers and
the mako shark.
The summit, which comes in
the wake of a UN report that found
humanity is threatening a million
species, will also discuss the
strategic future of CITES and how
it will mesh with international
biodiversity goals to be thrashed
out at a UN conference in Beijing
next year. ❚
50 to 70 were 5 to 6 per cent more
likely to report being very happy
than those with kids still at home.
If parents baulk at the idea of
waiting for their kids to move out to
maximise their potential happiness,
they could move to a country with
better childcare support, says
Wolfinger. A 2016 study found that
parents with children at home were
slightly happier than their child-free
peers if they lived in places that
have paid parental leave, generous
childcare subsidies and holiday
and sick leave, like Norway, Portugal
and Sweden. ❚
Alice Klein
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News
Nutrition

Ketogenic diet for migraines

The body seems to adapt to a low-carb regime in a way that curbs the condition
Alice Klein

CUTTING carbohydrates has meals had the same amounts of migraine prevention drugs, Melbourne in Australia. “There
been shown to reduce migraines, calories and fat but different ratios known as CGRP monoclonal are many migraine treatments
perhaps by changing the type of of carbohydrates and protein. antibodies, cut migraine-affected that seem to work well initially
fuel that enters the brain. Weight loss was similar for the days by half or more for between but then are ultimately
The ketogenic diet is a very two regimes, but the ketogenic 30 and 48 per cent of users. disappointing,” she says.
low carb diet that makes the diet appeared to be far better at The results are compelling, but Di Lorenzo thinks that forcing
body burn fat for energy instead reducing migraines. About 74 per larger and longer studies are the body to burn fat rather than
of carbs. Aside from aiding cent of people had less than half needed before the ketogenic diet carbohydrates prevents migraines
weight loss, it also seems to ease the number of migraine-affected can be recommended for migraine because the brain adapts by using
conditions like epilepsy and days as normal while on the prevention, says Christina Sun- compounds called ketone bodies.
schizophrenia in some people. low-carb ketogenic diet. This Edelstein at the University of These are produced when fatty
Cherubino Di Lorenzo at the compares with just 9 per cent acids are broken down for fuel
Don Carlo Gnocchi Foundation on the high-carb, non-ketogenic A low-carb diet halved instead of glucose. In animal
in Italy and his colleagues diet (Nutrients, doi.org/c9hw). the number of days studies, ketone bodies dampen
wondered if the diet might In comparison, the best people had migraines brain inflammation and stop
also help to prevent migraines. the spread of electrical activity
Previous studies have hinted that associated with migraines, he says.
it does, but haven’t been able to The diet might also work
figure out whether this is due to because lower carbohydrate intake
general weight loss or something reduces the production of insulin,
specific about reducing carbs. a hormone thought to play a role
To find out, the researchers in migraines, says Di Lorenzo.
compared the effects of two very The diet sounds gruelling,
low calorie diets – one ketogenic but people with migraines are
and one not – in 35 overweight often desperate for relief, says
or obese men and women who Sun-Edelstein. Very low calorie
YULIA GUSTERINA/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

experience migraines. Each diets can usually be tolerated for

person was randomly assigned only about 12 weeks, so there is a
a diet that they followed for four risk migraines could come back
weeks, before swapping to the afterwards, says Di Lorenzo.
other for the same duration. He and his colleagues are now
The two diets used prepared planning to test whether the diet
meals, such as smoothies and cuts migraine incidence in people
soups, that looked identical. The of ideal weight. ❚

Space

Interstellar dust of Antarctic snow, melted it and
studied its composition. They
found locked found it contained iron-60, a rare
in Antarctic snow radioactive form of the element.
Koll and his team ruled out
RADIOACTIVE iron buried in terrestrial sources of iron-60, such
Antarctic snow must have come as nuclear power plants. The only
from a cloud of interstellar dust other source would be the explosion
that Earth has passed through. The of a star. A supernova could have
finding suggests that such snow littered space with particles
could tell us more about the clouds containing iron-60, which then
of dust our planet has encountered.
Dominik Koll at the Australian
National University in Canberra and
fell on Earth as it passed through
a cloud of stardust. “I was very
excited when I saw the first counts
his team collected 500 kilograms of iron-60,” says Koll.
The snow Koll studied was less
than 20 years old. Studying snow
formed at different times could
tell us more about the dust Earth
has travelled through in the past.
At the moment, the solar system
is passing through part of the Milky
Way called the local interstellar
cloud. It has been doing so for
about 45,000 years. We know
30 light years
Width of the cloud of interstellar
dust that Earth is traversing
this cloud is 30 light years across
but we don’t know much about its
shape or the way its density varies.
Some parts of the cloud might
be more dense than others if they
had material injected into them,
for example by exploding stars.
Looking at dust in older snow
might help us learn more about this.
“I like this idea of using layers of
Antarctic ice to get a tree-ring like
history of deposits of interstellar
grains,” says Angela Speck at the
University of Missouri. ❚
Abigail Beall

14 | New Scientist | 24 August 2019

Biofuel Military technology

Jet fuel made

cheaply from plant
US Army wants AI missiles
waste, not coal that find their own targets
Alice Klein David Hambling

A POWERFUL military jet fuel ARTIFICIAL intelligence may

normally made from coal tar can
be made more cheaply from plants.
A team led by Guangyi Li at the
Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics
in China have come up with a way of
producing the JP-10 superfuel from
a chemical called furfuryl alcohol
that is extracted from plant waste
such as cotton stalks, forestry
offcuts and sugar cane residue.
The process to convert furfuryl
soon decide who lives or dies.
The US Army wants to build
cannon-fired missiles that will
use AI to hunt their targets, out
of reach of human oversight.
The project has raised concerns
that the missiles will be a form
of lethal autonomous weapon.
The project is called Cannon-
Delivered Area Effects Munition

CAPT. BRIAN HARRIS, 16TH COMBAT AVIATION BRIGADE

alcohol into the fuel uses catalysts
and temperatures of up to 250°C.
JP-10 is prized because it is
stable at a range of temperatures
and has a low freezing point. It also
has a high energy density, which
means a small volume can propel
an aircraft a long distance.
The downside is that it costs
about $7000 per tonne, more
than 10 times as much as ordinary
jet fuel. This limits its use to
missiles and high-performance
military aircraft.
The new way of making JP-10
brings the cost down to below
$5600 per tonne. It could drop to
half that again as it becomes easier
to extract furfuryl alcohol from
plant matter, the researchers write
(Angewandte Chemie International
Edition, doi.org/c9k9).
This would still mean it was
about four times as expensive as
commercial jet fuel. But the reduced
cost could expand its military uses.
Making JP-10 from green waste
should be more environmentally
friendly than the usual way of
producing it from coal tar, says Ian
O’Hara at the Queensland University
of Technology in Australia. “Fuels
from bio-based sources tend
to have significant greenhouse
gas reductions compared with
conventional fossil fuels,” he says.
There is mounting interest
in using biofuels to cut aviation
emissions, says O’Hara. That is
largely because, in contrast to cars,
it is hard to make planes electric. ❚
“The weapons will
attack without human
intervention. These are
effectively killer robots”
(C-DAEM). Companies will bid for
the contract to build the weapon,
and prototype demonstrations
are due to take place in 2021.
Requirements state that it
should be able to hit “moving
and imprecisely located
armoured targets” whose “exact
position has high uncertainty”.
Unlike laser-guided weapons,
which strike a target highlighted
by a human operator, C-DAEM
will find targets for itself. To
achieve this, a parallel project
will aim to develop algorithms
for the weapons. These will
be similar to face-recognition
algorithms, but will use
infrared cameras instead of
traditional ones as they are
more accurate at identifying
targets, such as tanks.
The weapons will have a range
of up to 60 kilometres, taking
more than a minute to arrive,
and will be able to search an
area of more than 28 square
kilometres for targets. They will
have a way to slow down, such
as a parachute or small wings,
which will be used while
scanning objects below.
The weapons will hunt for
targets autonomously, deciding
when they have found one and
attacking without human
intervention, says Mark Gubrud
at the University of North
Carolina. They are effectively
killer robots, he says.
“It moves us from the current
situation, in which a human
operator needs to be reasonably
sure that the target is legitimate,
to one in which the human
operator need only have a vague
intuition that somewhere in a
10-square-mile area there might
be a bad person,” says Stuart
Russell at the University of
California, Berkeley.
The new weapon is meant to
replace cluster warheads, which
scatter dozens of grenades over
a wide area. These are effective
against armoured vehicles, but
have a high dud rate, meaning
that dangerous, unexploded
grenades remain after an attack.
Smart weapons ought to
be safer than indiscriminate
bombs, but Russell says that
may not be the case. “It seems
likely that less care would be
taken in target selection by
the operator and attacks would
New autonomous rounds
are being developed for
155 mm guns like this
take place with less reliable
intelligence,” he says.
Some may see this as an
autonomous weapon, but
it would technically comply
with the US Army’s rule that
a human operator must select
each target. “The word ‘select’,
as it is used in the US policy,
is very slippery,” says Gubrud.
“A human can ‘select’ a target
before it has even been seen.”
Select may just mean providing
a description of the target and
its general area, he says.
The US Army said by email:
“This is not an autonomous
weapon, nor is it intended to be.
We seek an advanced capability
for a round – once fired – to
continue pursuing a target
despite the types of interference
that might cause it to pursue
something else. This would
improve our capabilities to
avoid collateral damage.” ❚

24 August 2019 | New Scientist | 15

 News In brief
STEFAN DILLER/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
Geology
Gems point to chunk
of original Earth rock
A UNIQUE haul of diamonds that
formed very deep in our planet
has been found in Brazil. They
contain evidence that suggests a
piece of primordial Earth rock has
survived more than 4 billion years
of violent geological activity.
Several diamonds found in
the Juína area of Brazil were
analysed by Suzette Timmerman
at the Australian National
University and her colleagues.
They found high levels of an
ancient helium isotope called
helium-3 that was incorporated
into Earth’s first rocks.
This suggests the “super-deep”
diamonds, which are themselves
thought to be less than
500 million years old, formed in
or above a remnant of the first
rocks that formed on Earth. As
the diamonds took shape, they
encapsulated some of the ancient
helium-3 that is slowly diffusing
16 | New Scientist | 24 August 2019
Environment
Plant growth suffers widely
as atmospheric changes bite
A LACK of water vapour in the
atmosphere has caused a global
decline in plant growth rates over
the past two decades. Growth
rates fell in 59 per cent of all
vegetated areas.
Wenping Yuan at Sun Yat-sen
University in Zhuhai, China, and
his colleagues made the discovery
using four global climate data sets
and satellite images. They found
the decline in plant growth is
correlated with a vapour pressure
deficit in the atmosphere, which
has increased sharply in many
areas since the late 1990s.
Vapour pressure deficit (VPD) is
the difference between the pressure
exerted by water vapour if the
air were fully saturated and the
pressure it actually exerts. When
this deficit increases, the pores on
leaves (pictured) that let in carbon
Technology
upwards from this primordial
rock, says Timmerman. This Powered shorts help
makes these diamonds unique you to walk and run
time capsules to study such rock.
The diamonds also contain SPORTSWEAR is getting a robotic
a mineral called breyite that is upgrade. An exosuit worn like a
formed at ultra-high pressures, pair of shorts makes walking and
suggesting they originated about running more energy efficient.
410 to 660 kilometres down. Philippe Malcolm at the
Normally, diamonds form less University of Nebraska Omaha
than 230 km underground. and his team developed the suit
The gems were transported (pictured), which reduces energy
by upwellings of hot rock and use when walking by 9 per cent
volcanic eruptions about and when running by 4 per cent.
93 million years ago, finally This exosuit isn’t the first to cut
ending up in the Juína mines the energy spent moving – others
(Science, doi.org/c9hn).
The researchers are now hoping
to work out where the preserved
primordial rock is and its size.
Timmerman’s best guess is that
WYSS INSTITUTE AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY
it is a very dense structure close
to Earth’s core.
It won’t be possible to access
the rock directly because it is
far too deep underground, but
further studies of super-deep
diamonds may help us to
understand it better. Alice Klein
dioxide close up, resulting in lower
photosynthesis rates.
Climate change may be to blame,
says Yuan. There has been a fall in
wind speeds over oceans, which
means water vapour doesn’t blow
over land as readily. Warming
also has a role. As temperatures
increase, the upper limit on the
amount of water vapour the
atmosphere can hold also rises,
adding to the VPD, he says.
When the researchers analysed
satellite images, they found a
corresponding drop in the growth
rates of global vegetation and leaf
coverage since 1998. There was
also a decrease in average tree
ring width, a measure of growth,
at more than 100 of 171 sites.
The team projects that VPD will
continue to rise (Science Advances,
doi.org/gf6gm5). Donna Lu
have been able to make either
walking or running alone more
energy efficient – but Malcolm
and his colleagues say their device
is the first that can do both.
The exosuit weighs 5 kilograms
and consists of two fabric wraps
around the thighs connected to a
fabric waist-belt. Cables that run
from the belt pull on the thigh
wraps to assist with movement.
The suit uses a sensor on
the torso to detect whether the
wearer is walking or running,
while sensors on the thighs detect
changes in leg position. A motor
unit on the back of the suit
begins pulling a cable just before
a wearer’s front foot hits the
ground, aiding the body and
reducing the amount of energy
spent to generate the same force.
Malcolm and his team tested
the suit on nine people on
treadmills. Each walked
450 metres over 5 minutes and
ran 750 metres over 5 minutes,
with the suit switched both on
and off (Science, doi.org/c9hm). DL
 New Scientist Daily
Get the latest scientific discoveries in your inbox
newscientist.com/sign-up
Ancient humans
Really brief
growths in the ear canals found diverse forms of evidence: that the
Neanderthals took in people who spend a lot of time Neanderthals were capable and
to life by the water in cold, wet and windy places, a flexible, and not the benighted
condition known as “surfer’s ear”. deficients that some persist in
SHEILA TERRY/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

GROWTHS in Neanderthals’ ears
indicate that aquatic foraging was
a big part of their life. The finding
suggests that they were adaptable
and could live in a range of
environments.
Erik Trinkaus at Washington
University in St Louis, Missouri,
Humans helped to and his colleagues investigated the
wipe out cave bears ear remains of 77 ancient humans
that lived in western Eurasia in the
Cave bears roamed Europe mid-to-late Pleistocene period.
for 100,000 years in large They looked for dense, bony
numbers. Now an analysis
of the DNA of the extinct Solar system
animals shows they began
to decline 40,000 years
ago – as modern humans
arrived in their habitat
(Scientific Reports, doi.org/
c9g3). Our ancestors may
NASA/JPL-CALTECH/SWRI/MSSS/GERALD EICHSTAD/SEAN DORAN
The researchers were surprised
to find that around half of the
23 Neanderthals they studied
had signs of these growths. They
were at least twice as prevalent as
in any of the other ancient human
groups the team looked at. This
suggests Neanderthals foraged
in water, something that wasn’t
obvious from other archaeological
clues (PLoS One, doi.org/c9hq).
“It all reinforces what is
becoming increasingly clear from
calling them,” says Trinkaus.
It is possible Neanderthals had
a greater risk of developing the
growths due to genetics, but the
different landscapes they lived in
and proximity to water may also
explain why they had more than
other groups, says Trinkaus.
We know from modern surfers
that the growths normally cause
little or no discomfort, but they
can result in partial deafness.
Ruby Prosser Scully
Health
Immune cells help
gallstones to grow
WE KNOW that gallstones grow

have occupied the caves from crystals in the gallbladder,

the bears relied on. but it has been unclear how these
stick together. Now it seems
Sleep loss worse immune cells are to blame – a
than social media finding that could lead to new
treatments for the condition.
Girls aged 13 and 14 who Martin Herrmann at the
use social media frequently Friedrich-Alexander University
tend to be less happy and Erlangen-Nürnberg in Germany
more anxious than those and his colleagues made this
who use it less. But taking discovery while studying small
into account sleep, physical stones in the bile of people
activity and cyberbullying, undergoing operations to treat
the effect of frequent social Jupiter’s weird innards may their gallstones.
media use was found to be On the small stones were telltale
insignificant (The Lancet be due to ancient collision signs of neutrophil extracellular
Child & Adolescent Health, traps – sticky webs of DNA released
doi.org/c9gz). A GIANT impact 4.5 billion years To investigate, Shang-Fei Liu of by immune cells to catch invading
ago could explain why Jupiter’s Sun Yat-sen University in Zhuhai, microbes. The presence of large
Mystery methane core is stranger than expected. China, and his team modelled a clumps of DNA and an enzyme
pinned on fracking Astronomers thought that Jupiter scenario where, 4.5 billion years used by neutrophil immune
began as a rocky and icy planetary ago, a big planetary embryo cells suggested that these cells
Levels of the greenhouse embryo that later formed its smacked into Jupiter. “Jupiter’s had been targeting bile crystals.
gas methane have been massive gaseous envelope by primordial compact core was To test this, researchers mixed
rising since 2008, but the drawing in hydrogen and helium destroyed, and a dilute core-like cholesterol crystals, which are a
cause has been unclear. from material swirling around the structure formed,” says Liu. The component of many gallstones,
A study suggests fracking sun. This would mean there was a simulations show the effects would with human neutrophils. The
for shale gas is largely to relatively clear delineation between remain within Jupiter until this day, neutrophils shot DNA at the
blame (Biogeosciences, the solid core and the gas around it. fitting what has been observed by crystals. When exposed to
doi.org/c9hs). If fracking However, that doesn’t appear to Juno (Nature, doi.org/c9g2). neutrophils, gallstone surfaces
continues to grow, it will be the case. Over the past few years, These sorts of collisions weren’t quickly collected neutrophil DNA.
endanger the goals of the measurements by NASA’s Juno rare at the time, says Vincent Eke These sticky webs pulled
UN’s Paris climate deal, the probe of Jupiter’s gravitational field at Durham University, UK. However, cholesterol and calcium crystals
researchers warn. suggest the solid core is mixed with Liu’s hypothesis will be hard to together to form larger stones
hydrogen through a lot of its radius. test directly. Abigail Beall (Immunity, doi.org/c9hk). RPS

24 August 2019 | New Scientist | 17

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News Insight
Space privatisation

The new economy in orbit

Companies that have no business being in space are starting to operate there.
Look beyond the marketing spiel and this could be welcome, says Leah Crane
IN LATE June, a SpaceX rocket been only a few simple attempts
blasted off from Cape Canaveral at cooking raw ingredients.
in Florida. As well as the usual Cooking could be useful – and
supplies and a few satellites, comforting – on longer missions,
it was carrying some curious such as trips to Mars.
items. Among the payload were The slime was sent to orbit
a football, six bags of green slime because, as a non-Newtonian
and an oven designed for baking fluid that behaves like something
cookies. A hodgepodge of objects, between a liquid and a solid, its
to be sure, but they have one thing behaviour in microgravity will be
in common: all were sent up by unintuitive. Astronauts will film
companies that seemingly have
no business in space, from sports “Why exactly a company
brands to hotel chains. So what’s would want to bake
going on? a cookie in space isn’t
For decades after the first entirely obvious”
SPACEX/PLANET PIX VIA ZUMA WIRE/SHUTTERSTOCK

astronauts went into orbit, space

was the domain of governments. themselves playing with the
It is only much more recently slime – hitting it back and forth
that companies have got involved. with ping-pong paddles, or
A firm called NanoRacks, for blowing it into bubbles. It is an
example, helps package up educational opportunity, says
payloads and facilitate Michael Roberts, deputy chief
experiments on the International scientist for the ISS National
Space Station (ISS). Then there are Laboratory, where the
the likes of SpaceX and Blue Origin experiments will be performed.
that make spacecraft. In truth, though, the main lure
These firms are exceptional. Sending products into that allows companies to buy time of these experiments is the PR.
They were explicitly set up to orbit on SpaceX rockets and space on the ISS to produce, “I think we would be naive not to
go into space, are backed by may be a good PR move test and market their products. assume that the long-term goal is
billionaires and often poached Privately funded astronauts will probably more on the marketing
their first staff from NASA. makes sense because a rover is a even be able to visit the space side,” says Roberts.
The only other companies that sort of car. The marketing benefit station from 2020 – for $35,000 What’s in it for NASA? The
previously went to space were for the company is also clear. plus substantial launch costs. short answer is money. Past
those involved in fundamental “If a Toyota can work on the moon, But why exactly a company interactions with companies such
research, of which there has been then obviously it’s going to work would want to bake a cookie in as pharmaceutical firms were
plenty aboard the ISS (see “The on Earth,” says independent space isn’t entirely obvious. mainly about making the most of
most interesting experiments in anthropologist and business The companies claim there what could be done research-wise
space”, right). Take pharmaceutical consultant Patricia Sunderland. are good reasons for dispatching on the ISS. The further opening
firms, which do experiments Now, however, a new era seems these objects. The cookies will be up announced in June is a step
on the space station because to be beginning, one in which the first items baked in space, in an towards facilitating a space-based
microgravity offers a novel brands without any obvious link oven developed especially for that economy that brings in cash for
environment for chemistry. with space go into orbit – hence purpose. If it works, it could be a the agency.
Crystals grow differently in space, the seemingly random objects significant step towards cooking That is particularly important
which can result in new or better on that SpaceX rocket. in orbit. Astronauts normally eat right now. Funding for the ISS
drug properties. The football was sent by Adidas, rehydrated food and there have comes from several countries,
Now, more companies are the green slime by children’s TV including Russia, and it is unclear

$35k
getting in on the act. In March, network Nickelodeon and the how long each will keep the taps
the Japan Aerospace Exploration cookie oven by the DoubleTree on. US funding is set to end in
Agency announced that car-maker hotel chain. The payload also 2025. NASA officials have talked
Toyota would help it build a included objects from other firms. about handing over their side to
moon rover. Toyota isn’t a space This is possible because of a Cost for private individuals to visit companies at that point. Then, the
company, but the decision still NASA directive published in June the International Space Station agency could still rent out parts of

20 | New Scientist | 24 August 2019

 More Insight online
Your guide to a rapidly changing world
newscientist.com/insight
a laboratory in space while using
the lion’s share of the money it
currently spends on the ISS on
bigger and better things. Like
going back to the moon, and then
on to Mars.
“This is all an experiment,
but it is an absolutely necessary
one,” says Mary Lynne Dittmar
at the Coalition for Deep Space
Exploration advocacy group.
“If there is to be any possibility
of sustained economic activity in
low Earth orbit, the ISS is the only
INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION U.S. NATIONAL LABORATORY
means at present to explore this.”
There are potential downsides
to the further privatisation of
space. It may mean less stringent
regulation. Earlier this month,
news emerged that the Israel-
made Beresheet spacecraft
brought thousands of tiny
organisms called tardigrades with
it when it crash-landed on the
moon in April. These creatures can
The most interesting experiments in space
SPHERICAL FLAMES
On Earth, hot gas tends to rise.
Not so in space, with interesting
implications for fire. NASA studied
this in its Flame Extinguishment
Experiment aboard the
International Space Station
(ISS) in 2009. One part of the
experiment tested how liquid
fuels burn in a sealed chamber.
It confirmed that droplets did so
in a sphere, with flames pointing
in all directions. It also found that
combustion happens more slowly
and at cooler temperatures in
microgravity, and that more
material is needed to put fires out.
DARK MATTER HUNTER
The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer
is a doughnut-shaped detector
strapped to the ISS that measures
particles hitting it from space. In
Slime ping-
pong anyone?
If kids see
familiar
products in
space, it could
feel more
accessible
survive in space and so may now
be living, more or less, on the
moon. Agencies like NASA take
great care to sterilise spacecraft
so that other places are shielded
from Earth’s living things.
The marketing plans could
also backfire on the companies.
“A failing Toyota part on a critical
piece of equipment or slime
gumming up a piece of equipment
on the ISS would create negative
publicity,” says Drew Martin,
who studies marketing at the
University of South Carolina.
2013, it spotted an unexpected
number of antimatter particles
called positrons. These may
have been created by dark matter
particles annihilating one another,
meaning that studying the
positrons more closely could tell us
more about dark matter. There are
more mundane explanations for
the positrons, however, such as
spinning stars called pulsars. The
detector could operate for years
yet and not provide a firm answer.
SPACE GARDEN
It would be useful to grow plants
in space as a source of food and
oxygen. For a long time, it was
unclear how they would perform
in low gravity. That’s one reason
why astronauts have been
growing plants in the ISS’s Lada
greenhouse since 2002. The
Working
hypothesis
Sorting the week’s
supernovae from
the absolute zeros
Longer term, having the brands
we encounter all the time in space
could make it feel less cold and
sterile, and more familiar. If a
Toyota is driving around on
the moon, we might be able to ▲ Mice
imagine a city there. If astronauts A new mouse for your PC.
can play with the same slime as Researchers say that mice
children’s entertainers, kids might (yup rodents) could help
imagine themselves doing so in spot AI-made fake videos.
orbit, too. Having brands in space
could normalise human activity ▲ Albums
up there. It’s a long way to the top…
“It’s about making what we
except for hit albums. Hits
know to be the human experience no longer climb through
translatable to space,” says space the charts. Instead they
consultant Laura Forczyk. reach number 1 in the
In principle, then, the brands first week or not at all.
in space could benefit everyone.
Brands get good PR, NASA gets ▲ Speedy bikes
paid and the rest of us get an Neil Campbell smashed
opportunity to dream about a the men’s cycling speed
home far from home. If the space world record by reaching
economy continues to grow, that 280 kilometres per hour.
dream may someday come true. ❚ His secret? Being tugged
by a Porsche just before
the speed gun clocked him.
▼ Bolsonaro
research has been remarkably Brazil’s president, Jair
successful, showing that plants Bolsonaro, says we should
don’t need gravity to thrive. In “poop every other day”
2015, astronauts ate lettuce to save the planet, an idea
grown and harvested in space that should be quickly
for the first time. We have even flushed down the toilet.
sprouted cotton seeds on the
moon, aboard China’s Chang’e 4 ▼ Fridge tweets
lander, although the plants died Cold off the press. A story
almost immediately. that went viral of a teen
using a smart fridge to
SQUID THAT REALLY FLOAT tweet about her phone
It isn’t just dogs that have been being confiscated turns
put in space. In 2014, a group out not to be true.
GRASSETTO/GETTY; TOP: RUDMER ZWERVER/ALAMY
from the University of Florida sent
three squid to the ISS along with
luminescent bacteria to test how
microgravity affects the way
beneficial microbes interact with
living tissue. The bacteria were
able to colonise the squid, but we
don’t yet know what this might
mean for human health.
24 August 2019 | New Scientist | 21
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 Views
The columnist Letters Aperture Culture Culture columnist
Annalee Newitz We need to talk about The transient beauty Jennifer Gunter on Space stations make
calls for the demise the natural pesticides of iridescent bubbles why she wrote The great games settings,
of YouTube p24 in our food p26 captured p28 Vagina Bible p30 says Jacob Aron p32

Comment

With regret, we must leave

For the sake of science and the country, the UK’s warring Brexit sides
must compromise – even if it means leaving the EU, says Andre Geim

T
HE UK is at war, a cold civil
war. We live inside our
bubbles, supporting or
loathing Brexit. Compromise
has become a dirty word, even
for the very people who praise
their flexibility and openness.
We need to snap out of this
mindset. If we don’t, things will
get worse, above all for UK science.
I voted remain in the 2016
Brexit referendum. I have lived
and worked in many European
countries, and feel European. As a
scientist, I cannot appreciate the
importance of the imperial units
some backward-looking Brexiteer
“Mogglodytes” treasure. I have
been derided by some of them as
an “ungrateful immigrant”. But I
cannot support calls for a second
in/out referendum either. That has
led some Remainers to express
their “deep discontent with my
lack of vision”.
Why is my personal
compromise so hard to
understand? I am no longer
against Brexit, only because I am
against the disorderly version of
it we’re sleepwalking into. Maybe
I am too much of a scientist for
my own good, analysing things
logically rather than emotionally.
Here is the logic bit. Imagine
that the new UK prime minister
Boris Johnson and the fanatic
fringe push through a no-deal or
similar Brexit on 31 October. The
48 per cent on the losing side of
the referendum will continue to
feel that their views and rights
JOSIE FORD
prisoners of war. The likely
economic hardship that will
follow a no-deal Brexit would be a
disaster for science, exacerbating
the loss of EU funding.
You can appreciate how bad
things will become with the recent
government announcement of
speedy visas for top foreign
scientists. Some university vice
chancellors welcomed the move.
I got the chills. It was never hard
for high-flying scientists to get
work permits anywhere. Countries
that offer the best research
possibilities and funding win the
So why focus on this? Because
it is a promise that requires only
hot air and not a penny. Spurring
truly innovative research that will
contribute to the UK’s economic
well-being requires a more far-
sighted immigration policy and,
most importantly, continuous
funding at a level comparable
to that in the US, Germany and
other developed nations.
Imagine now that a divided
Parliament blocks Brexit, calls a
second referendum and Remain
wins, as many of my colleagues
hope. What a nightmare. Even
Andre Geim is a physicist at the
University of Manchester, UK.
He was a recipient of the 2010
Nobel prize in physics for his
discovery of graphene
become hotter: as big a disaster
for the economy, and hence
science, as any no-deal scenario.
We are at a terrible impasse.
The lack of smart people in our
populist government listening
to the needs of the country, let
alone science, terrifies me even
more. Three years ago, the then
prime minister Theresa May
could have called a truce, offering
to leave the EU, as the referendum
required, but also to hold a
follow-up vote on leaving the
common market or the customs
union, options never voted on.
Enacting this compromise now
could lead to an orderly Brexit,
whatever the outcome of the vote.
The economy could adjust, and
science and universities would
be better prepared, too. This isn’t
my ideal: it is a compromise in
the search for a better outcome
for science and the country.
Parliament returns from its
summer recess on 3 September,
with barely eight weeks to find a
workable compromise. It seems
that only when the economy is in
ruins and everyone is worn down
will they be ready to – the way civil
wars tend to end. The sooner we
realise there will be no winners,
the better. Baseless optimism
helps only political careers.

have been tossed aside, that they global race for the best minds, not moderate Brexiteers will feel Compromises and U-turns are
are being treated by the victors as those who offer the easiest visas. utterly betrayed. The cold war will decried, but get things sorted. ❚

24 August 2019 | New Scientist | 23

Views Columnist
This changes everything
Let’s shut down YouTube Some modest proposals for making
the internet a better place, courtesy of Annalee Newitz
A
FEW years ago, the biggest
complaint about YouTube
was that if you left it
running, you would eventually
find yourself watching Psy’s
Gangnam Style music video for
the 40,000th time. How I long
for the days when all we had to
worry about was too much bouncy
Annalee Newitz is a science K-pop. Now, YouTube’s algorithm
journalist and author. Her leads us in the opposite direction,
novel Autonomous won autoplaying ever more marginal
the Lambda Literary Award videos rather than more popular
and she is the co-host of the ones. As a result, according to a
Hugo-nominated podcast two-year investigation by the
Our Opinions Are Correct. New York Times, YouTube has been
You can follow her one of the major forces pulling
@annaleen and her website fringe politics and conspiracy
is techsploitation.com theories into the mainstream.
To make matters worse,
allegations that children were
forced to perform for camera has
led to the closure of at least two
Annalee’s week popular YouTube channels in the
What I’m reading US. And this is on top of recent
Tropical Forests in accusations from YouTube
Prehistory, History, and employees, denied by the
Modernity by Patrick company, that it won’t enforce
Roberts, about how its content rules for prominent
human civilisation began YouTubers, allowing some
in the tropics. channels to get out of control.
Put simply, YouTube is a
What I’m watching garbage fire and it is high time
John Wick 3: Parabellum, to throw the whole thing away.
an inexplicably wonderful Let me make one thing clear.
Keanu Reeves movie. I love DIY video. Nothing is more
delightful than watching people
What I’m working on yell about anime, explain the
A short story about how origins of the universe, melt
hacker drama causes the giant cubes of cheddar with red
robot uprising. hot nickel balls (look it up) and
dance to, well, anything.
The problem is that YouTube,
which is owned by Google, is
doing more than allowing people
to share fun stuff. It is working
hard to sculpt its users into the
ideal audience for video adverts.
And the ideal audience is one that
REUTERS/DADO RUVIC
can’t look away. Ever.
This column appears This is where the algorithm that
monthly. Up next week: chooses your next video comes in.
James Wong Sometime in 2016, someone
24 | New Scientist | 24 August 2019
seems to have realised that the
average human would spend more
time on YouTube if the platform
could recreate the psychological
experience of seeing a horrific
auto accident. When the video
you want to watch is over,
YouTube will autoplay another
that is the same, just more so.
And so on, until you are watching
somebody in a hockey mask
explaining how aliens are
controlling the cheese economy,
and Brexit is the only defence.
Meanwhile, the quest to make
money encourages YouTubers
themselves to become more
extreme to garner more views.
“Put simply, YouTube
is a garbage fire and
it is high time to
throw the whole
thing away”
One popular YouTuber, Logan
Paul, filmed himself making jokes
next to the body of a man who
had hanged himself in a forest.
A recent Washington Post
investigation reported that
YouTube moderators allege they
are given one set of rules for top-
grossing YouTubers, and another
for smaller ones. It cited cases
such as that of popular YouTuber
Steven Crowder who was allowed
to remain on the platform after
what seemed to be clear violations
of its terms of service by posting
homophobic and racist abuse
about journalist Carlos Maza.
Maza received death threats from
followers of Crowder. YouTube
denies applying double standards,
but as a private company it isn’t
regulated by US free speech laws,
so there is no legal obligation for
it to allow Crowder to remain.
So how do we clean up this
mess? I have some modest
proposals. One is that we shut
down YouTube altogether. Some
US lawyers have argued that
YouTube is violating child labour
laws by making money on
YouTube channels featuring
children. These laws exist to
prevent backstage parents and
producers from abusing kids,
which is exactly what is alleged
to have happened in some cases.
Making YouTube liable for
violating these laws and others
would probably bring the
company to a standstill.
A more interesting possibility
would be to split YouTube into two
companies: a video-sharing site
for people who have no more than
a few thousand followers and a
professional video production
company that must abide by
child labour laws and follow the
Hollywood studio model, with
unionised actors and writers.
The video-sharing site wouldn’t
allow advertising and would cap
audiences at, say, 10,000 followers.
YouTubers who amassed a bigger
following could apply to work at
the YouTube Studio, and follow
labour laws accordingly.
And finally, what if we turned
YouTube into true public
broadcasting? Chop it up, hand
it over to PBS, the BBC, the CBC
or any number of other public
broadcasting corporations, and let
governments regulate the content
in their countries. The private
sector has failed, and it is time to
try a new model for video sharing.
When YouTube as we know it
goes away, I guarantee you won’t
miss it. And maybe we will get
something better. ❚
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Views Your letters

Editor’s pick
We need to talk about
natural pesticides in food
Letters, 3 August
From Anthony Trewavas,
Penicuik, Midlothian, UK
Cathy Cook suggests reasons to
prefer organic food other than its
alleged nutritional superiority, and
mentions pesticide residues. All
fruit and vegetables contain large
numbers of naturally occurring
pesticides. These are the result of
an arms race with insect herbivores.
If we tested for these, we
would find that they are just as
nasty as synthetic pesticides, but
present in food in higher amounts.
However, they don’t affect us when
we consume them because their
concentration is only effective
against insects, not anything large.
The real problem with organic
farming is low yield. You need much
more land to obtain similar yields felt the lure of green spaces. mostly invasive and introduced procedure addresses all stages,
to other forms of farming. I think Lawton made me realise that species. That’s true – and the harm from seed collection in “Hundred
we should be returning farmland I associate London as strongly caused is incalculable. More than Acre Wood” in Sussex and
to nature, not increasing its area. with birdwatching and strolling half of honeycreepers, a group of elsewhere (25 May, p 13) to storage
around Hyde Park as I do with its bird species endemic to Hawaii, conditions and monitoring,
landmarks. Breaking up the urban have gone extinct since humans with the aim of maximising
Remember the carbon
landscape isn’t just beneficial for reached the islands and almost the longevity of the collections.
footprint of kitchen kit the environment, it also offers city all the rest are now threatened. Importantly, we receive the
3 August, p 24 dwellers the opportunity to step More than 100 species of seeds within three to four days
From Wiebina Heesterman, away from the hustle and bustle to Hawaiian plants are already of collection and place them into
Birmingham, UK connect with nature, with all the extinct and hundreds more are long-term storage within 14 days
According to James Wong, a US health and well-being implications vulnerable. Lawton claims most of arrival. This ensures the initial
study of the food system’s carbon New Scientist has previously invasive species don’t pose a viability of the collection is as high
footprint says kitchen appliances reported (22 June, p 18). threat to native biodiversity. as possible at the time of banking.
generate nearly seven times as Most don’t, but the ones that We also do germination tests
many emissions as food transport. From Anders Jansson, do cause immense damage. on the seeds, both on arrival at
Pointing out that eating vegan Helsinki, Finland the bank and after storage at -20°C
food benefits the climate is now Lawton praises London as the and at -186°C. We will monitor
Taking care of the willow
common, but the burden of meal world’s first National Park City. the viability of each collection
preparation is rarely mentioned. In Finland, we have nine National seeds that we collect of seeds in the long-term. Our
Recipes are full of instructions to Urban Parks, created under the Letters, 13 July initial results are promising, with
blitz this and blend that – who has Land Use and Building Act of 1999. From Ian Willey, Fieldwork successful germination occurring
heard of a hand whisk these days? At present, Helsinki is in the long officer, Royal Botanic Gardens after storage for two to three years.
and tedious process of trying Millennium Seed Bank,
to decide whether to join places Wakehurst, West Sussex, UK
The importance of being I suggest it’s better to rebut
such as Turku, Forssa and Kuopio. Vijay Koul’s experience makes
earnest about urban parks him concerned about the viability errors than retract them
20 July, p 24 From Ben Haller, of willow seeds. Indeed, they 27 July, p 14
From Rachel Mckeown, Ithaca, New York, US are generally very short-lived From Scott McNeil,
Aberfan, Mid Glamorgan, UK I was shocked by Lawton’s claim in natural situations. For several Banstead, Surrey, UK
Graham Lawton praises London’s that the artificiality of ecosystems years, we have been developing Astrophysicist Ken Rice and
self-declared status as a National dominated by invasive species a protocol for long-term storage climate scientist Gavin Schmidt
Park City. Born and raised in the doesn’t matter. He notes that of Salicaceae species at the are calling for a paper in Scientific
South Wales valleys, I have always Hawaii is now a hotchpotch of Millennium Seed Bank. This Reports to be withdrawn. It claims

26 | New Scientist | 24 August 2019


that the rise in Earth’s temperature
is due to changes in the distance
between Earth and the sun, which
they point out is wrong.
If Rice and Schmidt succeed,
climate change deniers will surely
claim this as proof that evidence
contradicting climate change is
suppressed, despite the paper’s
error. Surely a better approach
would be to write a rebuttal and
demand that the journal link to
this from the original paper.
Better ways to reduce
your carbon flightprint
Leader, 20 July
From Crispin Piney,
Mougins, France
You recommend that people who
have to fly shun business class
because it has higher emissions
per passenger. This is because
these seats occupy more space
on the plane, on average, than
those in economy.
But consider a case in which you
have booked economy and find at
check in you have been upgraded
to business class. Are you suddenly
less environmentally friendly?
Should you refuse the upgrade?
Should you refuse that flight?
The solution is to place an
additional constraint on your
booking. Certainly, book economy
class, but select the flight with the
lowest average level of emissions
per seat on your chosen route.
This depends on a number of
factors under the airline’s control,
including the space devoted to
non-economy passengers and
the type of aircraft. This approach,
if generalised, would pressure the
airlines to clean up their act.
From Dominic Prior,
Cambridge, UK
You say we should cut out short-
haul flights because most aircraft
emissions are associated with
take-off and landing. But fuel
Want to get in touch?
Send letters to New Scientist, 25 Bedford Street, London
WC2E 9ES or letters@newscientist.com; see terms at
newscientist.com/letters
consumption per passenger
kilometre is greater for flights
that go further than about
4000 kilometres, not least
because of the mass of fuel the
plane needs to get into the air.
Your point that ground-based
alternatives are more readily
available for short distances is
true, of course. It is great that you
raise awareness of climate change.
Keep up the good work.
Responding to sound
when in a coma
29 June, p 38
From Ruth Shapiro, Glasgow, UK
I found Helen Thomson’s report
of findings that one in 10 people in
vegetative states may be conscious
very interesting. On 30 December
1990, I experienced a severe head
injury in a car crash. I was placed
in an induced coma, so I was more
deeply unconscious for the most
part than the states described.
When I regained consciousness,
I knew where I was and why. I
presumed I had been asleep – until
I saw the calendar. It was February.
A dream I had while in the
coma involved my brother flying
an aeroplane. I now think that was
because he came to see me from
Glasgow and those around me
may have said that he flew down.
Thomson says people in such
states are unresponsive to sound
and pain. I don’t know about pain,
thankfully, but I think I must have
been responsive to sound in some
way – how else would I have
dreamed that my brother was
flying his own plane?  ❚
For the record
❚ Count on it: the formula for the
distribution of Mersenne primes
along the number line predicted
that there would be fewer than
four between 220,000,000 and 285,000,000
(10 August, p 38).
Views From the archives
50 years ago, New Scientist
praised Richard Nixon’s response
to the challenges of automation
NEIL ARMSTRONG, Buzz Aldrin
and Michael Collins returned
from humanity’s first visit to
the moon on 24 July 1969.
Two weeks later, US president
Richard Nixon took another
giant leap by proposing a wholly
new way of organising society,
one adapted to a world without
scarcity, in which citizens were
guaranteed regular cash payments.
Through a blizzard of competing headlines about
the moon landing, the civil rights movement and the
war in Vietnam, few people noticed. But writing
in New Scientist on 28 August 1969, technology
journalist Rex Malik called the idea a historic move
comparable to the moon landing and expressed
astonishment that it came from “a man not
usually noted for his powers of imagination”.
The spur for this innovation was a new arrival in
the workplace: the computer. “The computer of the
next decade can already be foreseen, and so can the
distinct ‘jumps’ in its development which will make
drastic change possible and likely,” Malik wrote.
That would have far-reaching consequences. “Full
automation could already sweep away most manual
and clerical jobs, and as work becomes scarcer wages
will become divorced from the job done.”
At the heart of Nixon’s address was a proposal by
the economist Milton Friedman that higher earners
should pay taxes to the government, while the
government pays money out to those who earn
less. Thus, the fruits of automation could be shared
and the job of government made quicker and cheaper.
Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan was “hedged in by
qualifications and assured of a stony reception in
Congress”, Malik wrote. Indeed, the plan was quashed
by Democrats opposed to Nixon in the Senate in 1971.
Today, we are engaged in another bout of soul-
searching about the effect of automation on jobs.
The idea of a universal basic income has seen a revival,
championed by the likes of former US presidential
candidate Hillary Clinton and tech titans Mark
Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Eric Schmidt.
“The first steps towards a society in which
large numbers can materially exist without working
for gain or possession have already been taken,”
Malik observed in 1969. Fifty years later, we
continue to tiptoe, with painful slowness, towards
a wageless future. Simon Ings
To find more from the archives, visit
newscientist.com/old-scientist
24 August 2019 | New Scientist | 27
Views Aperture

28 | New Scientist | 24 August 2019

Nuts about nanotech?
Watch Jamie Gallagher shrink the world
newscientistlive.com

Bubbling over

Photographer Kym Cox/RPS

“HOW can you not be fascinated

by bubbles once you know what
they can do?” asks photographer
Kym Cox. She has been working
with bubbles since 2009 and finds
they still give her something new
to shoot. The image opposite
is the result of a collaboration
with Stefan Hutzler, a physicist at
Trinity College, Dublin. It is one of
three of her pictures shortlisted
by the Royal Photographic Society
for its first Science Photographer
of the Year competition.
The life cycles of several
bubbles were photographed
over 10 minutes, allowing Cox to
capture the way light reflects and
refracts as it passes through the
bubble walls. The spectrum of
colour changes over time because
light rays are reflected from both
the front and back of each bubble
wall. As the liquid drains under
gravity, they get thinner and these
reflections change. “You see the
same patterns in all bubbles.
They’re consistent – that’s the
beauty of their science,” says Cox.
Research into the science of
bubbles, soap films and foams
has led to a range of products and
applications, from cleaning up
oil spills to understanding global
weather systems.
As a self-described practitioner
of sci-art, Cox designs and builds
studio sets and lighting rigs, and
creates the liquid formulations for
the bubbles she photographs. “I’m
constantly testing equipment and
learning how to light the images,”
she says. “I spend hours just
watching. I’ve got mixtures that
can take months – even a year –
to achieve the right consistency.”
Seventy images from the
competition will feature at an
exhibition at the Science Museum
in London from 7 October until
5 January 2020.  ❚

Lilian Anekwe

24 August 2019 | New Scientist | 29

Views Culture

The Twitter gynaecologist

Jennifer Gunter has made it her mission to attack bad science and the ignorance
she believes bedevils women’s sexual health. Interview by Wendy Glauser

FOR more than 10 years, Jennifer
Gunter has been fact-checking
claims about women’s bodies and
writing about it all – sometimes
humorously, at other times using
expletives. She has been called
Twitter’s resident gynaecologist
and her Twitter fans (she has
over 200,000 followers) describe
those she has admonished for
their ignorance as having
been “guntered”.
Now, she is poised to reach
out to many more when her book
The Vagina Bible is published this
month. The book offers scientific
information on everything from
reproductive health to vaginal
steaming. At a time when women’s
sexual health seems to have been
taken over by zealots and jade
egg sellers, the book is filled with
answers to questions that women
feel far too embarrassed to ask
their gynaecologists.
Gunter is also wielding her
1970 classic Our Bodies, Ourselves.
It was written by women trying to
do their best because doctors were
ignoring them, but it is full of
misinformation. Meanwhile,
companies sell products based
on false tropes about the vagina
being dirty or impure. If the vagina
is this filth-ridden space, how on
earth do we use it to reproduce?
Wouldn’t it just kill the sperm?
In addition to dispelling myths,
you want women to feel
comfortable discussing sexual
health issues with their doctors.
How did your own experiences
as a gynaecologist and patient
inform the book?
My sons were born very
prematurely. One of my triplets
died at birth and my other two
sons were born with many
serious health concerns. Various
specialists would say: “It’s so easy
to get a history from you because
JASON LECRAS/THE NEW YORK TIMES/ EYEVINE

“lasso of truth”, as she likes you’re a doctor and you know

to describe it, in a column for
The New York Times and in a
forthcoming TV show called
Jensplaining with Canada’s public
broadcaster CBC.
We caught up with Gunter and
asked her about her motivation,
what she really thinks about the
term pro-choice – and why there
is a big need for her book.
What made you write The Vagina
Bible?
I wanted to give women a manual
for their sexual health. There isn’t
much accurate information out
there, from the mechanics of how
women enjoy sex to the medical
consequences of pubic hair
removal to why yeast infections
occur. The medical community
is hopelessly patriarchal. There
aren’t a lot of good studies, but
there is a lot of gossip.
Take the still commonly read
what to say and the right words
to use.” I thought: “Why can’t
we open up the exam room
doors and share more of the
information we have as doctors?”
Much of the science isn’t that hard.
When I see patients who have
had access to quality information,
they get more out of their visit and
I can advance their care so much
faster. Whereas with someone who
has read snake oil and believes it,
I have to spend visit upon visit
forging a connection and undoing
that information. That is part of
my job and I’m happy to do any
part of my job, but I just got
obsessed with this idea: what if no
one ever fell down that rabbit hole?
I really believe we can bring
everybody up to this level where
they can make better decisions
about their health and advocate
for themselves better with
their doctors.
“I’m pro-abortion
the same way I’m
pro-appendectomy. If
you need a procedure,
you need it”
Book
The Vagina Bible: The vulva
and the vagina – separating
the myth from the medicine
Jennifer Gunter
Little, Brown
You’re an outspoken critic of
anti-abortion laws. What are
your biggest concerns with the
laws recently passed in places
like Alabama?
These lawmakers are playing
politics with women’s health.
I don’t believe the people that
write them care one way or
another, but claiming to have the
most restrictive abortion policy
obviously works for fundraising
and getting votes.
We know how to reduce
abortion, if that is your goal.
The contraceptive CHOICE study

30 | New Scientist | 24 August 2019


in the US showed that free and
easily available contraception
reduces unplanned pregnancies
and abortions. None of these
politicians is trying to do that.
The laws, by and large, don’t
reduce abortion. They just make
abortion unsafe or they make
women seek abortion later,
when it costs more money to
do the procedure.
One of the biggest concerns is
abortions that are conducted for
sex-selection purposes. Why do
you think neither politicians nor
doctors should try to prohibit these
abortions?
I think it is important to look at
the whole picture of sex selection.
Most people only think about the
fetus, and as I wrote in my blog,
that means that you think the
only time a woman has value is
when she is a fetus. Everybody
forgets the woman who has seven,
eight, nine girls and is trying to
have a boy.
That isn’t something that is
confined to any culture. I know
someone who is the sixth or
seventh girl of 11. Her parents
kept trying for a boy and they have
been in the US for generations.
Multiple pregnancies and births
are extremely dangerous for
women, compared with abortion.
The way to reduce multiple
pregnancies in the quest for a
boy – because that is the real
issue – is to work on creating a
more equal society. And one of the
ways to do that is to let a woman
choose what she wants to do with
her own body.
You want to change the narrative
on abortion and do away with terms
like pro-choice and pro-life. Why?
The political right has long
profited from the use of
euphemisms. I’m trying to move
away from saying I’m pro-choice.
Instead, I’m saying I’m pro-
abortion or I’m against forced
birth. I’m pro-abortion the
same way I’m pro-appendectomy.
If you need a procedure, you
need it.
Choice isn’t really part of it.
When you say “choice” or “elective
abortion” that implies that
women can easily choose not to
have an abortion. Well, no. It’s not
a choice to be pregnant or not,
it’s not like choosing between a
Toyota or a Honda, it’s a need.
And pro-life, that is obviously
false. We know these people
don’t care about fetuses’ lives.
They aren’t advocating for free
prenatal care, which would reduce
stillbirth and neonatal death. And
they certainly don’t care about
women’s lives.
Recent data from the Turnaway
study [which looks at the effects
of unintended pregnancy on
women’s lives] showed that
women who didn’t get the
abortion they needed were
more likely to have worse health
outcomes, including severe
complications in pregnancy,
such as eclampsia and death.
The hatred that is directed
against women who dare to
be sexual is stunning. Forced
birtherism is a way to keep
people in poverty – or to force
them there.
What do you find rewarding about
writing about evidence-based
healthcare?
I like to think I’m improving
people’s quality of life, beyond
my immediate patients. I wrote
a blog post many years ago about
an intrauterine device and later
a woman sent me an email
thanking me. Her doctor had told
her she shouldn’t have an IUD
because she had never been
pregnant and her uterus wasn’t
large enough. She printed out my
post and when she saw her doctor,
she slammed it down, and she got
her IUD.
What about your personal rewards?
I know I need to find a better
balance – I’m taking most of the
summer off to be with my kids.
But I derive a lot of pleasure out
of reading and writing. I always
said in medical school that my
dream job would be to read about
new medical therapies and write
about them. ❚
24 August 2019 | New Scientist | 31
Don’t miss
Last chance
Broken Nature is the
theme of the 22nd Milan
Triennial, an international
show hosted by the
Italian city that ends on
1 September. It invites us
to design a decent future
for (or plan a dignified exit
from) a world that can
barely sustain us now.
Read
Fraud in the Lab
(Harvard University
Press) sees journalist
Nicolas Chevassus-
au-Louis, a former lab
researcher, investigate
cases of deception in
science, from made-up
data and manipulated
results to retouching
and plagiarism.
Watch
The Science of Magic
Association holds its
summer seminar at
London’s Wellcome
Collection on 31 August,
showing how magic
can drive research into
perception, cognition
and psychological
well-being.
Views Culture
The games column
Alien meets 2001 Space stations make ideal settings for games: they are self-
contained worlds where you can explore every nook and cranny without running
into artificial barriers. They can also be completely terrifying, finds Jacob Aron
Jacob Aron is New Scientist’s
deputy news editor. He has
been playing video games
ARKANE STUDIOS, BETHESDA SOFTWORKS
for 25 years, but still isn’t
very good at them. Follow
him on Twitter @jjaron
SPACE stations have been in the air
a lot recently – literally in the case
Games of China’s Tiangong-2, which
Alien: Isolation ended its mission by crashing
Creative Assembly through the atmosphere last
On PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox month. Plans for new stations are
One and Nintendo Switch also afoot. NASA aims to build an
outpost orbiting the moon, while
Prey billionaire Amazon boss Jeff Bezos
Arkane Studios has the wild idea of moving all of
On PC, PlayStation 4 humanity to Earth orbit.
and Xbox One It got me thinking about some
of my favourite space stations in
Observation video games. They make ideal
No Code settings: being self-contained,
On PC and PlayStation 4 you can roam without running
into artificial barriers that mark
the limits of some game worlds;
the cold vacuum of space provides
developers with a handy excuse
not to build an entire world.
Space stations also lend
themselves to horror. Take Alien:
Isolation, which is set aboard the
vast Sevastopol station and has
you playing as Amanda Ripley, the
daughter of Sigourney Weaver’s
character from Alien. It oozes
retro-futuristic style, aping the
pre-digital designs of the 1979 film,
but there is little time to take in
the sights – you spend most of the
32 | New Scientist | 24 August 2019
game hiding under tables as an
alien stalks you.
Prey, released in 2017, also
features a space station with
a retro aesthetic. The game’s
backstory involves US president
John F. Kennedy surviving the
assassination that in reality killed
him, then teaming up with the
Soviets Union in a massively
“Playing as an AI may
be a bit passive, but it
is the closest I’ll ever
get to being on a real
space station”
expanded space programme to
combat a mysterious alien threat.
The station is Talos I, which looks
like an art deco skyscraper, in orbit
near the moon. You can explore,
crawl through vents, hack open
locked doors or take a trip through
an airlock for a spacewalk shortcut.
Both titles owe a heavy debt to
the System Shock games, a pair of
1990s releases that are some of the
first examples of the “immersive
sim” genre, in which players get a
wide range of choices and tools,
Exploring Talos I, the
skyscraper-like space
station from Prey
making you feel like you are really
present and have agency in the
game world. By today’s standards
those earlier versions are a little
rough, but a modern, third System
Shock is coming. I can’t wait.
I also have to give a shout-out
to BioShock, the spiritual sequel
to the System Shock games. It is set
in an underwater city rather than
a space station, and is possibly one
of the best games ever.
And while it isn’t immersive
sim, Observation, which came
out earlier this year and is made
by some of the same people who
made Alien: Isolation, puts its own
twist on System Shock. It features
an artificial intelligence, in the
style of HAL from the story 2001:
A Space Odyssey, called SAM
(Systems, Administration and
Maintenance), but flips things by
having you play as the AI. You can
explore the Observation station
by inhabiting video cameras and
spherical robots capable of jetting
through its cramped modules.
It is like being on a more advanced
version of the International Space
Station: the robots are seemingly
inspired by Cimon, a mobile
platform on the ISS.
At first, things seem ordinary, or
as ordinary as they can be in orbit.
But the station is in trouble and
you have to help astronaut Emma
Fisher (think Sandra Bullock’s
Ryan Stone in the film Gravity) get
systems back online. Then an early
twist (and a great reveal) push the
story into 2001 territory.
Playing as an AI does make the
experience a bit passive, taking
orders from Fisher, but as a space
nerd, for me the game’s grounding
in science is a real thrill. It is the
closest I’ll ever get to being on a
real space station, Bezos or no. ❚
 WHAT IF TIME STARTED
FLOWING BACKWARDS?

WHAT
IF THE
RUSSIANS
GOT TO
THE MOON
FIRST?

WHAT IF DINOSAURS
STILL RULED THE EARTH?
AVAILABLE NOW
newscientist.com/books

Beyond weird
Quantum theory is our most successful theory of material
reality – but we might already have the outline of something
better, says physicist Lee Smolin
Q UANTUM mechanics is often called
a theory of the very small. In reality,
it explains phenomena on a vast range
of scales – from elementary particles and their
interactions, through atoms and molecules, all
the way to neutron stars and the supernovae
that spawn them. So far, essentially all
its predictions have been confirmed by
experiments. It is the most successful theory
of material reality we have ever had.
So why have so many physicists, from
Albert Einstein onwards, taken the view
that quantum theory is wrong?
The reasons lie in its mysterious nature,
in the phenomena it doesn’t explain and the
answers it doesn’t give. That is reason enough
NATALIE NICKLIN
to seek what might lie beyond it. I believe we
already have the outline of what this deeper
answer looks like. We are only at the start
of this work, but by digging down into the
fundamental principles that underlie reality,
and weeding out what is right and what is
wrong about our current ideas, we can see
glimpses of a truly unifying picture of physics.
It comes at a price: to go beyond quantum,
we must totally upend long-held ideas of how
the universe hangs together.
It is easy to state the basic problem of
quantum mechanics as a theory of reality:
it doesn’t tell us what is happening in reality.
It has two different laws to describe how
things and events evolve. The first applies
most of the time, and describes quantum
objects as wave-like entities embodied in a
mathematical construction known as a wave
function. These objects evolve smoothly
in time, exploring alternative realities in
“superpositions” in which they aren’t
restricted to being in any one place at any one
time. That, to any intuitive understanding of
how the world works, is distinctly odd.
Curiouser and curiouser
The second law applies only under special
circumstances called measurements, in which
a quantum object interacts with a much larger,
macroscopic system – you or me observing
it, for example. This law says that a single
measurement outcome manifests itself.
The alternative realities that the wave function
says existed up to that point suddenly dissolve.
These two laws exist in parallel, in apparent
contradiction of one another – a fundamental
failure of our understanding known as the
measurement problem. Attempts to do the
obvious, and derive the second law from the
first, have so far failed. We are left with only
statistical predictions of what is going on in
the quantum world before it is measured.
Features Cover story
The mysteries don’t end there. Quantum
theory also seems to violate the principle of
locality, which says that objects or events must
be near one another to interact. In classical
physics, for example, the gravitational or
electrical force between two objects depends
on their distance: the closer they are in
space, the stronger the force between them.
Quantum theory, meanwhile, introduces
entanglement, a phenomenon that allows
objects to seemingly influence each other
instantaneously over any distance.
Einstein notably believed that these
blemishes indicated that quantum theory
was wrong, and that a truer, deeper description
of nature was out there. He wasn’t the only
quantum pioneer to express doubts. Louis
de Broglie, who first predicted the wave-like
aspects of matter, was another sceptic, as was
Erwin Schrödinger, whose famous thought
experiment of the dead-and-alive cat was
designed to highlight the absurdity of
quantum theory’s prediction of alternative
realities. In the present day, quantum
dissidents include notable physicists such as
Roger Penrose and the Nobel-prizewinning
theorist Gerard ’t Hooft.
Arguments about whether quantum
mechanics is a complete theory of reality
have usually been carried out in isolation. But
the route to a deeper and truer understanding
of nature may lie in connecting the problems
of quantum theory with other big, open
problems in fundamental physics.
The most obvious one is how to develop a
quantum theory of gravity. Gravity is the only
one of nature’s four fundamental forces not
to have a quantum-mechanical description.
It is described by Einstein’s general theory of
relativity as an effect resulting from massive
objects warping space-time around them.
General relativity and quantum theory seem
to be fundamentally incompatible, not least in
the way the former describes a smooth, >
24 August 2019 | New Scientist | 35
malleable space-time. By contrast, quantum
theory suggests that it must at some level
come in discrete chunks, or quanta, of space
or space-time.
We have at least half a dozen ways to get
part of the way across this divide, among
them string theory and loop quantum gravity.
Indeed, the latter idea gives precise predictions
for what the quanta of space-time must look
like. But we have no idea whether any of the
suggested routes are the right one because
none predicts an experimental test we can
perform with current technology.
Quantum theory and general relativity
clash in other ways, too, notably over the
nature of time. Relativity makes it impossible
to establish one objective “flow” of time of
the sort we perceive, with a past and a future
separated by a universally defined now.
Quantum theory, meanwhile, characterises
time as a metronomic “beat” set somewhere
outside the universe. So is our perception of
a flowing time real, or an illusion?

Back to basics
There are other deep questions. The quantum
descriptions of the other three fundamental
forces – electromagnetism and the weak
and strong nuclear forces – can be bundled
together into the so-called standard model of
particle physics. But why do these three forces
have such very different strengths within the
standard model? Then there is the nature of
the dark matter and dark energy that dominate
the cosmos on a large scale, but which the
standard model doesn’t mention. These
questions and others concern how our
universe came to be, out of a vast number
of seemingly equally probable universes
allowed by the laws of physics.
To solve all these issues, we need to wipe
the slate clean, go back to the first principles
of quantum theory and general relativity,
decide which are necessary and which are
open to question, and see what new principles
we might need. Do that, and an alternative
description of physics becomes possible, one
that explains things not in terms of objects
situated in a pre-existing space, as we do now,
but in terms of events and the relationships
between them.
This endeavour starts with a few basic
hypotheses about the nature of space and
time. First, that the history of the universe
consists of events and the relationships
between them. Second, that time – in the
sense of causation, the process by which
future events are produced from present
events – is fundamental. Third, that time is
irreversible: causation can’t go backwards,
“To solve the
and once an event has happened, it can’t
be made to unhappen. Fourth, that space
problems of
emerges from this description: events cause
other events, creating a network of causal
physics, we
relationships. The geometry of space-time
arises as a coarse-grained and approximate
need to decide
description of this network. which of its
A fifth hypothesis is that energy and
momentum are fundamental features of principles are
the universe, and are conserved in causal
processes. These five hypotheses define a class open to question”
of models called energetic causal set models
that my collaborator Marina Cortês of the
Royal Observatory in Edinburgh, UK, and
I introduced in 2013. I have since added a
sixth hypothesis, a version of the holographic
principle first stated by ’t Hooft. This says that
when two-dimensional surfaces are defined
in the emerging geometry of space-time,
their area gives the maximum rate by which
information can flow through them.
In this picture, every event is distinguished
by the information available to it about its
causal past. We call this the event’s sky because
it functions rather like the sky above us does.
The sky – or the horizon of our sight more

36 | New Scientist | 24 August 2019

generally – is a snapshot of what we see at
any one instant, a two-dimensional surface
formed by photons of different colours,
informing us of our relationships with the
things around us. Because nothing travels
faster than the speed of light, only things
within an event’s sky can influence it,
so the sky is also a view of its causal past.
Sky’s the limit
This picture allows us to describe how
information and energy flow through
events as the universe evolves. Ted Jacobson
at the University of Maryland in the US and
Thanu Padmanabhan at the Inter-University
Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics in
Pune, India, have independently shown that
the sixth hypothesis, together with the first
law of thermodynamics, which governs
the amount of useful energy available to a
process, can be used to derive the equations
of general relativity, and hence gravity.
Their work assumes that space-time is
always smooth. By marrying their reasoning
with the picture of a prototypical discrete,
quantum space-time in our models, we can
derive both general relativity and smooth
space-time as emerging from a dynamically
evolving causal network.
As well as providing the seed of a quantum
picture of gravity, this immediately solves
the problem of the flow of time in Einstein’s
cosmos. In a causally defined universe, the
most basic interaction is the creation of an
event when two “parent” events come together
to make something new happen. At each stage
in the construction of a space-time history,
the future doesn’t exist. But we can postulate
a limit to the number of events any parent
event can give birth to. Events that have had
their full allotment of progeny cannot have
any further direct influence on the future,
and are relegated to the past: time flows.
The most exciting prospect, which Cortês
and I have been exploring over the past few
years, is that quantum theory might also
emerge from this picture. That comes from
building energetic causal set models to answer
the key question of which events interact.
Events differ from one another in that each
has a different sky, a different view of its causal
past. We can define a measure of how similar
two events’ views are, and pick the pair with
the most similar views to be the parents of the
next event. The idea is that the similarity of
views can play the role that distance in space
does in conventional classical and relativistic
physics. The more similar the views of two
events, the more likely they are to interact.
The overall effect of choosing the pair with
the most similar views as parents pushes
both out of the present and into the past.
Removing two very similar views and creating
a new view that is a synthesis of both – and
hence different from both – has the effect of
increasing the total diversity of the views of
all events in the universe. A measure of the
total diversity of an ensemble of views is a
quantity we invented in the late 1980s with
Julian Barbour at the University of Oxford.
We called it the variety of the system.
All this has intriguing consequences.
The views are chosen and evolve precisely so
that the total variety evolves to its maximum –
and it turns out that this exactly reproduces
the dynamics of quantum theory.
You can begin to see how this works.
Similarity of views only implies nearness
in emergent space-time for large, complex
events. If an event has a very simple recent
causal past, there may be other simple events
with similar pasts that aren’t necessarily
nearby in the emergent space-time. Yet by
the principle of similarity, they have a high
probability of interacting with each other.
Einstein and others since have proposed
that quantum wave functions describe
collections, or “ensembles”, of systems
defined by properties they share, but it has
never been clear whether these ensembles
truly exist. In this “real ensemble” picture,
they do. The continual, brazenly non-local
interactions between simple, causally related
objects widely distributed in space explain all
A MANIFESTO FOR
A NEW REALITY
Six hypotheses are needed to begin to
rewrite physics with causation at its core –
and perhaps solve the problems of quantum
theory and relativity (see main story).
1. The history of the universe consists of events
2. Time causation is fundamental
3. Causation doesn’t go backwards: events
don’t “unhappen”
4. Space is constructed from the web of
causation between events
5. Energy and momentum are conserved when
events cause other events
6. The amount of information that can flow
between events through emerging space
is determined by that space’s area
Lee Smolin is a theoretical physicist
at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo,
Canada. He is author of Einstein’s
Unfinished Revolution: The search for
what lies beyond the quantum
the probabilities, uncertainties and spooky
interactions of quantum physics. They only
ever occur between simple systems such as
single particles on a microscopic scale because
only these can have similar views. Large,
complex systems with many degrees of
freedom – you, me, Schrödinger’s cat – will have
a unique causal past. For us, the closer we are
in space or space-time, the more similar our
view will be. Proximity matters at the classical
scale in a way it doesn’t at a quantum scale.
In a series of recent papers, my collaborators
and I have also shown how to describe an
interaction among the members of each
ensemble that results in the ensemble’s
quantum state evolving in time according
to the laws specified in quantum mechanics.
That gives a simple and elegant solution to
the measurement problem.
There remains the question of what
happens with systems of an intermediate size,
whose causal pasts aren’t unique, but which
might have an intermediate degree of causal
relationship with things far away in space.
These, I predict, should be described by
a tweaked version of quantum physics in
which the superposition principle fails to hold
exactly. It is possible that experimentalists
can construct such systems, and test this
prediction, using the tools of quantum
information. If we can create sufficiently large
and complex entangled states, which would
have no or only a few natural copies within
the universe, our picture predicts that their
evolution in time will deviate from that
predicted by quantum mechanics.
More details need to be filled in. This is just
a sketch of how we might go beyond today’s
quantum picture and construct a unified
physics that sidesteps the fundamental
problems we currently see ourselves facing,
while preserving the best of what we have.
No doubt it isn’t correct in every detail, and
others may come along with other, entirely
different ideas. But the current impasse in
physics suggests that it is only through bold
ideas that we will move forward. ❚
24 August 2019 | New Scientist | 37
Features
Two minds are
better than one
Artificial intelligence is evolving,
says Douglas Heaven, and it will
soon change the way we think
L
IKE other human champions facing
a machine opponent, Grzegorz “MaNa”
Komincz rated his chances. “A realistic
goal would be 4-1 in my favour,” he told
an interviewer before the match.
One of the world’s best players of video
game StarCraft II, Komincz was at the height
of a successful esports career. Artificial
intelligence company DeepMind invited
him to face its latest AI, a StarCraft II-playing
bot called AlphaStar, on 19 December 2018.
Komincz was expected to be a tough
opponent. He wasn’t. After being thrashed
5-0, he was less cocky. “I wasn’t expecting
the AI to be that good,” he said. “I felt like
I was learning something.”
It was just the latest in a series of
unexpected victories for machines that
stretch back to chess champion Garry
Kasparov’s 1997 defeat by IBM’s Deep Blue.
In 2017, another of DeepMind’s AIs, AlphaGo
Master, beat the world number one Go player
a decade before most researchers predicted
it would be possible. The company’s AIs then
mastered chess and StarCraft – a game played
with dozens of different pieces with hundreds
of moves a minute.
38 | New Scientist | 24 August 2019
But this isn’t just a case of humans being
humbled by superhuman AI. The real story
is that each win gives us a glimpse of how AIs
will make us superhuman too. That’s because
thinking is set to become a double act. Working
together, humans and AIs will bounce ideas
back and forth, each guiding the other to
better solutions than would be possible alone.
The potential goes far beyond games.
The hope is that this teamwork will help
us make vital breakthroughs in energy
use, healthcare and more.
This is a vision promoted by DeepMind
co-founder Demis Hassabis. Many others
agree. “It will be an amazing extension of
thought,” says Anders Sandberg from the
Future of Humanity Institute at the
University of Oxford.
Komincz felt his defeat was instructive.
Another StarCraft II professional, Dario
“TLO” Wünsch, also beaten 5-0, felt the same.
“AlphaStar takes well-known strategies and
turns them on their head,” said Wünsch.
MICHAL BEDNARSKI
“There may still be new ways of playing the
game that we haven’t fully explored yet.”
Their comments echo those of a growing
number of defeated humans. Many are startled
by the ability of DeepMind’s AIs to make
winning moves no human player would
dream up, rewriting centuries-old playbooks.
Tapping into these AIs can take players to a
new level. After losing to AlphaGo, European
Go champion Fan Hui trained against the
AI and boosted his global ranking from 600
to 300 in just a few months.
Computers have been far better than people
at chess for decades. For most players, that
was true even before Kasparov’s historic loss
to Deep Blue hammered the point home.

“Tapping into world-

beating AIs can take
human players to
a new level”
All professional players now practice with
chess computers. These tend to play defensive
games, so the style of top players has become
more defensive too.
A further development of DeepMind’s game-
playing AIs, AlphaZero, has shaken up the
chess world again. In a series of games in 2017
and 2018, AlphaZero beat Stockfish, one of the
best chess computers in the world. Unlike
Stockfish, AlphaZero plays an aggressive game,
often sacrificing pieces early on if this helps it
achieve its goals. “AlphaZero just goes for the
attack straight away,” says Natasha Regan, who
has represented the UK at both Go and chess.
Regan and grandmaster Matthew
Sadler have co-authored a book called
Game Changer, which explores AlphaZero’s
groundbreaking chess strategies and offers
advice for would-be challengers. The AI is
more like a maverick human player than
a typical chess computer, they say, which
makes it a more fascinating tutor.
Creative aggression may be a common
trait. Good StarCraft players usually build
defences in the early stage of a game. But
Regan and Sadler noticed that AlphaStar
didn’t bother. They recognised some of the >

24 August 2019 | New Scientist | 39

same tactics used by AlphaZero in chess.
“It really struck a chord,” says Sadler.
“It makes sense millions of times, to become the best Go player
and then the best chess player ever. “AlphaZero
“You really do start thinking there’s an AI
style shared across these different challenges.”
that we should solve discovers thousands of concepts that lead to
winning more games,” says Silver. “To begin
The result is a new kind of software that
displays what looks very much like creativity
problems in tandem with, these steps are quite elementary, but
eventually this same process can discover
and – whisper it – intuition. David Silver at
DeepMind is also struck by these thoughts.
with machines” knowledge that is surprising even to top
human players.”
“The professional Go players who competed Silver and his colleagues focused on games
with AlphaGo repeatedly remarked on the because they are excellent test beds, offering
creativity of the system,” he says. “They a wide range of challenges that are familiar to
expected it to play in a way that was perhaps humans. But the end goal of AI development
dull but efficient and instead there was real is far more ambitious. “In terms of what’s
beauty and inventiveness to the games.” large amounts of data. In a process of trial next, we think our approaches could be
So why do these AIs surprise us more than and error, successes, such as winning a game applicable to some fundamental problems
earlier software? The most likely reason is their of Go, are rewarded, reinforcing a particular in science,” says Silver.
lack of human bias. As good as previous chess behaviour. An early glimpse of what might be possible
computers are, they have human strategies AlphaGo and AlphaStar learned by came last year with AlphaFold, a DeepMind
built in. DeepMind’s AIs learn by playing against themselves, following human examples. But AI that predicts the intricate structures of
themselves. Their algorithms may be different, AlphaZero uses only the rules of the game – the proteins. A better understanding of how
but their general approach is the same. “zero” stands for zero input. Instead, it is given proteins work will help us control everything
All use a machine-learning technique the rules and a goal, then left to its own devices. from disease to food production. But a
called deep reinforcement learning. This boils Starting randomly, it plays itself over and over protein’s function is determined by its unique
down to building a neural network – software again until it figures it all out. On the way, it structure. And that structure, which usually
loosely modelled on the brain and capable of picks up its own method of doing things. In looks a bit like a tangled rope, is hard to predict
performing a particular task – by training it on just a few hours, AlphaZero played itself tens of from the sequence of its constituent amino
acids. Researchers rely on laborious, expensive
structure-determination methods that don’t
work for many proteins. Cracking how a protein
folds based on its amino acid sequence is a very
Alien thinking desirable goal, but despite people pursuing this
for 70-odd years, it is still largely elusive.
The ability of AIs to who we want in a decision-making. In July 2018, AlphaFold won the Critical
think outside the usual government, we asked In principle, testing Assessment of Protein Structure Prediction
boxes could provide an AI to assess the ideas to figure out what challenge, the gold standard for assessing
the breakthroughs we strengths of the various works best and then software that aims to predict how proteins
need in tackling some candidates and pick for basing policy on those fold. The hope is that AlphaFold will bring
of the world’s biggest us. If its choices didn’t results makes lots of to future efforts to predict protein structure
problems. Yet will we fit our expectations or sense. But Sandberg what related AIs bring to games. So where
be happy with what the preferences, would we thinks this approach do we go from here? How far are we from
machines come up with? go along with them? won’t work for issues realising bigger goals?
Sometimes, an AI’s It might be the that evoke strong “Sure, we’ve made great progress but I don’t
solution to a puzzle is same for moral issues. feelings in us – how our
no help, but even when “If an AI that was always children are taught, for
it makes sense, we may right about stuff started example. This is why
feel uncomfortable. For giving me moral advice, attempts to run policy
technical problems such I might think twice about trials in schools have
as curbing energy use following it even if proved controversial.
or designing chemical intellectually I know I It is likely to be even
reactions, people will ought to,” says Anders harder to accept an AI’s
probably go along with Sandberg at the recommendations in
an AI. But when it comes University of Oxford. such circumstances,
to social problems, it “I might just want to especially if they seem
might be hard to shrug decide myself.” Or strange. “AI will probably
off the feeling that we maybe not – it would be be able to tell us how
know better. fascinating, if somewhat to educate children,
For example, imagine dystopian, if people but will we want it to?”
DEEPMIND

that instead of voting for absolved themselves of asks Sandberg.

40 | New Scientist | 24 August 2019


DEEPMIND
think anybody really thinks they’re inches
away from the human level,” says Ken Stanley
at the University of Central Florida, who is
the founder of the AI lab at Uber. Although
AlphaZero used the same algorithm to teach
itself to play Go and chess, its chess-playing
neural net can’t play Go and its Go-playing one
can’t play chess. AlphaZero isn’t able to apply
lessons learned in one game to another.
For deep learning to reach the next level
on the long climb to human-like intelligence,
neural networks need to become generalists.
These may involve wholly new kinds of
interconnectivity or new rules for activating
the software neurons of the network. “We don’t
just want complexity for its own sake,” says
Stanley. “We want it because it produces things
that are amazing.”
Stanley hopes to reach generalisation
through neuroevolution: neural networks that
Above: DeepMind’s
AlphaStar AI learned
from thousands of
games of StarCraft II
Left: Chess-playing
AIs are strong
enough to develop
new strategies
improve themselves using techniques inspired
by nature. The basic way of using evolutionary
techniques in computing is to start with
random solutions, select the best ones, mix
them together and try again. Repeat this
millions of times and the system will converge
on a successful AI design on its own.
Assuming such techniques work and we
can build ever better AIs, the most promising
possibility is that they will become our
collaborators. “It is inevitable that humans
will be interacting with AI to accomplish tasks,”
says Devi Parikh at the Georgia Institute of
Technology in Atlanta.
My other brain is a computer
For successful collaboration, we require
trust, which for Parikh means we need to
develop an AI theory of mind. In humans
and some other animals, a theory of mind
lets individuals ascribe mental states to others.
It lets someone see another’s point of view,
their beliefs and intentions.
The more aware people are of what is
going on in a colleague’s head, the more
effective they are at working together
and adapting to each other’s strengths and
weaknesses, says Parikh. Why shouldn’t the
same apply to teams made up of humans
and AIs? (See “Alien thinking”, left).
Part of this will come from making AIs
more interpretable and transparent. But the
most fruitful collaborations may arise from
partnering up and thinking alongside them.
Everyone knows that Kasparov lost to Deep
Blue. What is less well known is that Kasparov
then went on to invent advanced chess, also
known as centaur chess, in which humans
and computers team up and play in pairs.
As expected, amateur players with
computers can beat grandmasters playing
alone. But even when both use computers,
amateur players can beat grandmasters.
When this happens, it is typically because
the amateur is a better team player than
the expert, who is more likely to disregard
the machine’s suggestions.
Of course, there are situations where we
should expect human judgement to beat an
AI’s. Matters of aesthetics or ethics are the most
obvious candidates. Take generative design,
where AIs are already being used to create
thousands of blueprints for potential parts of
aircraft and cars. The program whittles down
many potential options to a few strong
candidates that a human then chooses from.
There are good reasons to keep humans in the
loop with autonomous weapons systems, too.
If we can work out when an AI should ask a
human for help, the combined thinking could
be far more powerful than that of the AI alone.
For Sandberg, the trick would be to have an AI
that does a lot of our thinking for us but which
only makes decisions that we are comfortable
with. Owain Evans, a colleague of Sandberg’s at
the University of Oxford, is trying to teach an
AI about human values. By asking questions
about potential decisions, the system is
learning what it should do in different moral
situations. AIs might check in with our values
every now and then. Would you disapprove
of this action? Would this outcome be OK?
“It might be smarter than me, but it’s still only
doing things that I would do,” says Sandberg.
Stanley agrees about the value of human
input. He says he was blown away by
experiments he conducted with a neural
network evolved to guide a robot through
a maze. With occasional human input, the
AI got much better. It makes sense that we
should begin to solve problems in tandem
with machines. We can’t beat them at
individual tasks, so let’s join them.
“If we play things right, we are going
to broaden the way we can think about
problems,” says Sandberg. “We know that
problem-solving is helped by having different
perspectives. Soon, we could have perspectives
that are different from any we’ve had before.”  ❚
Douglas Heaven is a writer
based in London, specialising
in technology and AI. Follow
him on Twitter @strwbilly
24 August 2019 | New Scientist | 41
Features
Electric
fields
Can you really boost crop yields by
exposing plants to electricity? Donna Lu
and David Hambling investigate
A
T FIRST blush, the huge commercial
greenhouse on the outskirts of Beijing
doesn’t seem unusual. Inside, lettuces
sit in neat rows and light pours in through the
glass above. But there is a soft hum and an
intense feeling in the air, almost as if a
thunderstorm is on the way. The most obvious
sign that this is no ordinary growing space is
the high-voltage electrical wiring strung over
the crops.
This place may be different, but it is far from
unique. Over the past few years, greenhouses
like this have sprouted up across China, part of
a government-backed project to boost the yield
of crops by bathing them in the invisible
electric fields that radiate from power cables.
From cucumbers to radishes, the results are,
apparently, incredible. “The overall quality is
excellent,” says Liu Binjiang, the lead scientist
on the project. “We’re really entering a golden
age for this technology.”
42 | New Scientist | 24 August 2019
Using electricity to boost plant growth –
not by powering heaters or sprinkler systems,
but simply by exposing plants to an electric
field – is an old idea. It is also controversial.
Electroculture was tested in Europe many
decades ago and found wanting, with the
results too inconsistent to be any use. The
mechanism was also mysterious: no one knew
how or why electric fields might boost growth.
So what exactly is going on in China’s new
greenhouses? Can you really improve
agriculture through the power of electric
fields – and if so, how?
It was Finnish physicist Karl Selim Lemström
who introduced the world to the idea of
electroculture in the 1880s. He was studying
the northern lights in Lapland when he noticed
that trees grew well there in spite of the short
growing season. He suggested it might be
because of the electrical field produced by
charged particles rushing into Earth’s
atmosphere to create the aurora. Lemström
carried out tests with plants growing under
electric wires and achieved mixed results.
In one experiment conducted in a field in
Burgundy, France, he saw that “carrots gave an
increase of 125 per cent and peas 75 per cent”.
In 1896, a reporter for the North American
Review breathlessly described Lemström’s
work and that of rivals in France and Russia,
writing: “Gardens that have been stimulated
by the atmospheric electricity… have increased
their growth and products by fifty per cent.
Vineyards have been experimented upon, and
the grapes produced have not only been larger
in size and quantity, but richer in sugar and
alcohol. The flowers have attained a richer
perfume and more brilliant colours.”
Before long the results were replicated in
the UK. The botanist J. H. Priestley reported a
17 per cent increased yield of cucumbers with
Lemström’s technique, while physicist Oliver
 think the effect was real, if erratic.
The US Department of Agriculture
conducted some experiments at Arlington
Experimental Farm, near Washington DC,
but these, too, were difficult to interpret.
Many patents were taken out, but the
technique never took off in the US either.
Research in electroculture slowed to a trickle
for some 50 years. Then, in the 1980s, Liu began
looking into the technique as a researcher at
the Inner Mongolia Agricultural University in
Hohhot, China. He says he had been fascinated
by the effect of lightning on soil nutrients, and
began looking into whether electricity boosted
the growth of wheat and barley. Around this
time, the Chinese government began giving
out grants in agricultural science, allowing him
to expand his study.

Power plants
Liu began developing what he calls the
“space electric field” method. There is usually
a natural vertical electric potential gradient in
the air of about 100 volts per metre. Liu began
setting up experiments in greenhouses where
that was increased to between 700 and 20,000
volts per metre. Electrical wires were strung
above the crops and the field emanated from
these. He began seeing impressive
improvements in crop yields: increases in
lettuce and cucumber by up to 40 per cent,
and similar improvements for potato, radish
and fennel. Liu worked with a company in the
southern Chinese city of Shenzhen to develop
GETTY

a commercial generator to power the wires in

Lodge cultivated a large field of wheat with
wires strung above it and saw a 24 per cent
“Plants may take
boost in the grain harvest. The words in the
North American Review seemed to ring true:
applied electric
“It is difficult to explain why the electric fields as a signal
current so marvellously affects the growth
of plants, but the fact that such stimulation of impending
does occur cannot be denied.”
At the end of the first world war in 1918,
rainfall”
the UK set up the Electro-Culture Committee,
a group of scientists and farmers, and asked it
to find out whether electroculture was worth
pursuing. The committee experimented
through the 1920s with wheat, oats, peas and
potatoes, but the results were frustratingly
inconsistent. This, together with the cost of
electricity, eventually doomed electroculture.
“Increases of 20 per cent can hardly be
considered economic even if obtained in most
years,” said the committee’s final report in
1936. Nevertheless, the scientists seemed to
2000. Within a few years, electroculture
greenhouses were being set up in Beijing,
Dalian and Tianjin.
The motivation wasn’t just to increase
yields, though. In China, there is widespread
public wariness about food safety, following
several high-profile incidents in which illegal
pesticides were found on produce. Fruit and
vegetables are almost never eaten raw or
unpeeled out of concern over harmful
chemicals. Because of this, there was interest
in electroculture as a possible alternative to
pesticides. “There’s a big focus on eco-friendly
farming right now,” says Liu. “We are looking at
how to combine physics-based and biological
techniques to reduce pesticide use, while still
maintaining crop yield.”
In 2013, Liu, now based at the Dalian City
Academy of Agricultural Sciences, introduced
a second electroculture technique called
“charged cultivation”. This involves overhead
wires again, but this time the current they
generate runs through the plants, says Tong >

24 August 2019 | New Scientist | 43

Yuxin at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural
Sciences (CAS), which is supporting Liu’s work.
Touch the plants, and you would get a mild
shock. This effect drives insects away, says Liu.
The electric field also removes microorganisms
from the greenhouse air, he says, because
when an electric field is discharged, it produces
radicals, chemical species that can kill airborne
bacteria. A report from CAS this year looking
at electroculture says the yields of crops are
generally increased by 30 per cent.
It isn’t easy to assess the scientific validity
of Liu’s work. He and his colleagues haven’t
published much of their research in
international journals, though he has
COURTESY OF LIU BINJIANG
published more than 100 papers in China.
New Scientist asked several Chinese-speaking
plant scientists to look at these. They found
the research unconvincing. “The statistics
were generally weak and replications were not
clear,” says plant scientist Yang Aijun at CSIRO,
Australia’s national science agency.
Yet Liu isn’t the only researcher working on
electroculture. Erika Bustos at the Centre of
Research and Technological Development in
Electrochemistry in Querataro state, Mexico,
has been exploring its effects on Arabidopsis
thaliana. This small flowering plant is a
member of the same family as cabbages and is
often used as a botanical guinea pig. In a 2016
study, Bustos set up trays of the plants and
stuck electrodes in the soil at either end to
create an electrical circuit. It was a small trial
and a different method to Liu’s, but the plants
did grow faster and thicker, as long as the
current wasn’t cranked up too high. Bustos
says she and her colleagues also have
unpublished results showing that electrodes
in the soil can increase the yield of wheat
and maize by up to 85 per cent.
Grow with the flow
Let’s assume something is going on. How could
this effect work? We know that plants make
use of electricity. Some plant cells build up
and release electric charge by moving ions like
calcium and magnesium around their cells.
It is thought that this plays a role in signalling
throughout the plant, and some people even
suggest that electrical signals could form the
basis of plant memories. We have recently
also discovered that tomato plants pass
electrical signals to each other through the
soil via their roots. This shows the flow of
electricity is important to plants. It is harder
to see how an external electric field would
boost their growth.
There is one good reason why it might,
44 | New Scientist | 24 August 2019
“Lettuce and
cucumber yields
increased by up
to 40 per cent”
at least according to ideas developed in the
1990s by Andrew Goldsworthy, a now-retired
plant scientist who worked at Imperial College
London. His suggestion was that it would be
beneficial for plants to ramp up their growth
following a thunderstorm when there is a lot
of rain. Rather than the standard 100 volts
per metre electrical field gradient in the
atmosphere, a storm can produce a gradient
of several hundred volts per metre or more.
Goldsworthy reasoned that plants might
have evolved to sense the change in field. He
conducted experiments with tobacco plants
in 1991 in which he showed that applying a
weak external field changed the pattern of
calcium ion currents in the plants. He reckoned
this might be how they sensed electric fields.
If he was right, it might explain why the
electroculture experiments in the early
20th century were so mixed. The plants would
have taken the applied electric fields as a signal
of impending rain, and when it didn’t come,
that might have affected them negatively.
Still, this is all conjecture. Biophysicist Ellard
Hunting at the University of Bristol, UK, says
In China, scientists
are exposing crops
to electric fields
there is no detailed understanding of how
growth might be enhanced by electric fields.
“The mechanisms that underpin these
observations remain largely elusive,” he says.
“But there is definitely a very interesting
interaction between plants and their electrical
environment – time will tell how this might
actually benefit agriculture.”
Jean Yong at the Swedish University of
Agricultural Sciences in Uppsala takes a
more optimistic view. “In a nutshell, plants do
respond to electrical fields,” he says. It is logical,
he says, that an electric field could speed up
the flow of crucial nutrient ions like nitrate or
calcium. “But there is no concrete or published
data to prove the phenomenon.”
Although economics did for electroculture
in the early 20th century, electricity is now far
cheaper and less polluting. Yet even with that
stumbling block removed, there are plenty of
other ways to boost crop yields, from adding
more fertiliser to increasing the carbon
dioxide in greenhouses. How electroculture
compares is unclear for the moment. If it does
turn out to be a good option, the evidence
might well come from those greenhouses
scattered across China, where the charged
air quietly hums above the greenery. ❚
Donna Lu is a reporter for New Scientist.
David Hambling is a freelance journalist
based in London
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24 August 2019 | New Scientist | 45

Features Interview
Without
a drop
of blood
Malaria is a daily threat for
millions of people, one that
inspired Brian Gitta to create a
test that could change how we
treat the disease on a global scale,
as he tells Helen Thomson
A
9-YEAR-OLD child is locked between
his mother’s legs, refusing to have the
blood test that could save his life. That
is a regular sight at Brian Gitta’s nearest clinic
in Kampala, Uganda, where people wait for
hours in long queues to learn if they have
malaria, one of the leading causes of death
in the country.
Worldwide, 219 million people get malaria
each year and 435,000 people die of the
disease. More than 90 per cent of those
deaths are in Africa, according to the World
Health Organization.
We can treat malaria, but accurate
diagnosis is essential: the drugs targeting
the mosquito-borne parasite that causes the
disease can harm people who don’t have it.
Diagnostic tests take time and, worse still,
they are invasive. The most widely used
method involves analysing a blood sample
under a microscope, a process that can
take up to an hour. Rapid diagnostic tests
are becoming more widespread, but they
46 | New Scientist | 24 August 2019
still require people to give a blood sample.
Gitta thought there must be an easier way
and when he started studying at Makerere
University in Uganda 2012, he set out to find it.
Now he and his team are running a clinical trial
for a portable, non-invasive device that uses
light to identify malaria in the bloodstream in
just 2 minutes. He hopes it won’t only save
precious time for people with the disease, but
also help us to track malaria around the world.
Why did you take on such a huge problem?
Growing up in Uganda, I went to a traditional
primary school and got involved in a
computer club. I was 9 years old and I was
meant to be learning Microsoft Word, but
also ended up playing games. I liked it so
much, I kept wanting to come back and
complete the next level. I eventually became
head of the computing club at high school
and then went on to study computer science
at university. I was in my first year when I
thought, “how can I use all of these software
developments and skills that I’ve learned to
solve the problem of malaria?”
Why focus on malaria and not another disease?
Malaria is something that people where I live
are fighting every day. My friends and I all
experienced a lot of malaria growing up.
How many times have you had it?
I can’t even count how many times I had it as
a child; at least once a year. It’s tough – you’re
hospitalised, you’re throwing up, you’ve got a
high temperature, you can’t eat.
Is the situation still as bad?
Things have improved: we’ve got better
medication and free mosquito nets. But we
haven’t seen much change in the diagnosis.
I asked myself, “Why is it that people are still
dying when we have the medication? Why are
people still suffering, just to get a simple
diagnostic test done?” When I first started
looking into it, we didn’t really have an
 understanding of how malaria affects the
body. We needed to understand the mechanics
of malaria, and we needed to understand a lot
of things in microbiology and parasitology.
Tell us more about the problems with the
current diagnostic tests.
Doctors use a blood test and it takes time
to get a diagnosis. People can be queuing
for hours. It takes a skilled doctor to do the
analysis and they can be sitting there all day
staring down a microscope. I wanted to figure
out how we can make that process easier,
how we can take the patients’ pain away and
how to do it quickly. It isn’t just the diagnosis:
while people are queuing, they aren’t going
to school, they aren’t going to work, they
aren’t earning money.
What was your solution?
We did lots of research and found that
when a person is infected with malaria, the
parasite that causes the disease changes
the physical and chemical composition of
their blood cells. It also creates a crystal-like
structure in the bloodstream. Our solution
uses the principles of light scattering and
ALL PHOTOS: ROLEX/JOAN BARDELETTI
magnetism to map out the differences
between malaria-infected and normal blood
cells. We use this information together with
a light beam that is shone onto the finger to
detect whether malaria is in the blood or not.
Did you have an “aha” moment when you
figured it all out?
Our device had to go through lots of iterations.
“While people wait for a The first few prototypes failed completely.
There were lots of things that interfered with
malaria diagnosis, they the light beam, like the temperature of the
skin, which changes when you have a fever.
aren’t going to school, There was never really an “aha” moment,
they aren’t going to work” more like constant research that gradually
moved towards the solution. Once we got
there, we started a company called Matibabu,
which means “treatment” in Swahili. We are
now starting a clinical trial and looking at
improving consistency. We’re testing it on
500 people and then, if the outcomes are good,
we will start a trial of 10,000 people, so that
we can get verification before we roll it out.
How expensive will your approach be
compared with standard blood tests?
We are still working out the costs, but our
plan was always for it to be cheaper than a
A prototype of the microscope. And in terms of value for the
diagnostic tool that community and the time it takes to get a
could help people get diagnosis, its worth is more than just the
treatment more easily cost of the test itself.
Brian Gitta is co-founder with Joshua
Businge Muleesi, Josiah Kavuma and
Simon Lubambo of Matibabu, a
Uganda-based company that aims
to develop new technology to improve
community health. He is a 2019
recipient of the Rolex Awards for
Enterprise, which recognise
entrepreneurs whose work
addresses major global challenges
You have a bigger vision for how it can be
used, though, right?
Yes. The device also collects data in real time,
and we can use this to look at the geographical
distribution and evolution of malaria cases.
This data is passed on to organisations
involved in malaria control programmes.
We’re also looking at letting pharmaceutical
companies use the data so they can provide
the right medications to the communities
that need it most.
Have you come across any unexpected
challenges during development?
When we did some test cases, a mother came
in to have a diagnosis for her child who had
a high fever. Her kid was malaria negative.
The mother wasn’t convinced, so she went
next door and had the blood drawn as well.
This made us understand that we also have
to change the way that people think about
new technologies.
You’re 27, but you have already created this
potentially game-changing technology.
What will you do next?
I want to grow the company in order to close
the gaps between communities and their
rightful access to healthcare. I would like to
build more technologies that offer better
diagnoses. This definitely won’t be the last
device we develop.  ❚
Helen Thomson is a consultant for New Scientist and
author of Unthinkable: An extraordinary journey
through the world’s strangest brains
24 August 2019 | New Scientist | 47
Recruitment
Assistant Professor of Chemistry
The University of Chicago: Physical Sciences Division: Department of
Chemistry
Location
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The Department of Chemistry at The University of Chicago invites applications
newscientistjobs.com for the position of Assistant Professor of Chemistry in all areas of chemistry.
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At the time of hire the successful candidate must have completed all
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Sign up, create your own job alerts
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48 | New Scientist | 24 August 2019 newscientistjobs.com

Fellowships for Postdoctoral Scholars
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ƒBiology
ƒGeology & Geophysics
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primary emphasis placed on research promise. Scholarships
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bring in the washing or anything
else left in the garden. We can do
this with a digital rain sensor.
Grab a CD case and some
copper tape – useful stuff that
both conducts electricity and
sticks to a surface. Start by fixing
strips of tape to two opposite sides
of the case, extending one end of

DAVID STOCK FOR NEW SCIENTIST

on Twitter @hannahmakes
New stuff you need
Old CD case
Copper tape (ideally with
conductive adhesive)
For next week
Second micro:bit
and battery
DHT11 environmental
sensor
Next in
the series
1 Moisture-sensing plant
2 Moisture and temperature-
sensing plant
3 Plant auto-waterer
4 Tweeting wildlife cam
5 Pest scarer
6 BBQ thermometer
7 Rain alarm
8 Mini weather station
Is it warm and how’s
the humidity outside?
9 & 10 Remote controlled
pest-proof bird feeder
parts 1&2
each strip beyond the edge of the
case and folding them over on
themselves to make two tabs. We
will attach crocodile clips to these
to connect to a BBC micro:bit later.
Next, stick strips perpendicular
to the initial ones. These should
have a narrow gap between them
lengthways, and each should
overlap with just one of the two
initial strips. Alternate which of
the side strips overlaps to create a
pattern that looks like two combs
with interlocking teeth.
By the way, if your tape’s
adhesive isn’t conductive, you
will need to fold the ends of the
overlapping parts to ensure each
strip’s copper side is in contact.
Connect one tab from the case
to micro:bit’s pin 0 and the other
to ground. The idea is that if a
raindrop falls on your sensor, it
will bridge the gap between two
strips that lead to opposite sides,
completing a circuit between pin 0
and ground. We have essentially
made a rain button. The large
surface area of the CD case
increases the chance of detecting
raindrops, however sporadic.
Now for the code to tell your
phone when rain is detected.
CD CASE
Make online
Projects so far and a full list of kit required are at
newscientist.com/maker Email: maker@newscientist.com
In the MakeCode editor, go to
“Advanced” then “Extensions” and
click on “devices”. This will add a
new set of blocks. These ones let
you interact with another device,
such as a smartphone.
Grab an “if” from “Logic”, then
slot in place of “true” a “pin p0 is
pressed” from “Input” – this
checks if the circuit between p0
and ground is complete. Slot the
whole thing into “forever”. Next,
go to the “Devices” menu and
grab “raise alert to”. Add this to
“forever”, then use the drop-down
menu to select vibrate or a
ringtone, whichever you prefer.
Now pair the micro:bit with
your phone to get the notification.
897.584+(455*79&5*
Download the micro:bit app to
your phone, open it and follow the
directions for pairing a micro:bit.
You can even send the code from
your phone to the micro:bit via
Bluetooth. This can be useful if
you have trouble connecting. If
you do, try pairing the micro:bit
again and “flashing” the code
from your phone within the app.
Put the rain sensor outside
and either stash the micro:bit in
a waterproof box or keep it inside
and run long cables to it. Now
you can relax indoors, at least
until the first drop of rain. With
your spare kit, you could test the
theory that copper tape protects
plants from slugs too.  ❚

24 August 2019 | New Scientist | 51

The back pages Puzzles
Cryptic crossword #13 Set by Sparticle
   
 Moon Colonisation Programme
 


 
 
 
ACROSS
1 Larger Reiki club overturned
and vacuous cognoscenti
expelled (7)
5 Succumb rapidly to reveal
inner darkness (5)
8 Incorrectly opening a great
gulf between X and Y? (10,3)
9 Indicating more than
one unbreakable piece
of glass (5)
10 Vehicle used to promote
a movie (7)
12 Admen I excite with
middling value (6)
DOWN
1 Swampland American is
insincere (5)
2 Some non-zero quantity of
fat surrounding item of
conference attire (7)
3 Let aid arrive from the
south, partly to give an
X-ray (9)
4 Inappropriate to rate spin (6)
5 How unpleasantness
begins: with initial focus
on alien craft (3)
6 Bread roll to grow old in the
British Library (5)
7 Polish mothers besieging
French fathers for electrical
units (7)
Answers and the next quick crossword next week.
52 | New Scientist | 24 August 2019
   discovery are the names of

 
  volcanic peak Chimborazo in
13 Emphasise mental strain (6)
16 In the years after Christ’s
birth, the Lord God was
a monster (7)
18 Requires detective
sergeant to refer to one’s
birth name first (5)
20 Curiously, a tidal quarrel
has four sides (13)
22 Depot contents: a pair of
axes and some glue (5)
23 Play low card, leading to
45 years of subdued
hostility (4,3)
11 Natalie lost two extremities
after ascending Etna during
pregnancy (9)
12 Monkey micturates a little
following sound of
anti-aircraft fire (7)
14 Boy, were doctors raised
on Roger Moore! (7)
15 Sugar licensee has a string
of clove suppliers? (6)
17 As far as I’m concerned,
having a silver filling
designates a complete
louse (5)
19 Fly around lower west side to
get connected with a star (5)
21 Ignore the odd greasy fish (3)
Quick quiz #17 Puzzle set by Zoe Mensch
1 With which cosmological
#18 Cable on the moon
Vera Rubin and Fritz Zwicky
particularly associated? It is the year 2100, and the
2 What is the name given is well-advanced.
to materials engineered to A power cable is being laid all the
bend light waves in particular way around the moon’s equator. The
ways in their interior, leading original plan was to put the cable on the
to potential applications moon’s surface, but it has been suggested
such as Harry Potter-style that instead it should be buried in a trench
“invisibility cloaks”? that is 1-metre deep. This will make it
safer and will also save on the amount
3 What distinction does the
of cable needed.
How much shorter will the cable be if
Ecuador hold, one that puts
it is buried in this way?
Mount Everest in the shade?
4 A complete or partial Answer next week
third copy of which
chromosome is the cause
of Down’s syndrome?
#17 Which flipping year?
5 With a maximum air
Solution
speed approaching
400 kilometres per hour
when diving, what is the
world’s fastest bird?
Answers below
The date with the biggest flipping difference
Quick since the Romans conquered Britain was,
Crossword #38 fittingly, 1066, the year of another invasion.
Answers
9901 – 1066 = 8835.
ACROSS 8 JUST, 9 Eigenvalue,
10 Lorenz, 11 Shinbone, The digits that are flippable on an old-style
12 Muon, 13 Double Bond,
17 Rust, 18 Image, 19 Hard, calculator display are 0, 1, 2, 5, 6, 8 and 9.
20 Perihelion, 22 Moon,
23 Red Dwarf, 27 Isomer,
28 Vacuum Seal, 29 Dust
DOWN 1 Sudoku Cube,
2 Ethernet, 3 Benzedrine,
4 Eggs, 5 Anti, 6 Baobab,
7 Quin, 14 Umami, 15 Lee-
Enfield, 16 Narcolepsy,
19 Humboldt, 21 Indium,
24 Et al, 25 Acme, 26 Feet
Quick quiz #17
Answers
Falco peregrinus
5 The peregrine falcon,
4 Chromosome 21
equatorial bulge
centre, thanks to our planet’s
surface measured from its Get in touch
3 It is the highest point on Earth’s Email us at
2 Metamaterials
crossword@newscientist.com
1 Dark matter
puzzles@newscientist.com
The back pages Feedback
Fire in the hole
Nature continues its fightback
against human depredations by
attacking a home in Florida with
an improvised explosive device.
Florida’s WINK News reports that
a couple in Port Charlotte were
watching TV when their home was
shaken by a loud bang. They soon
discovered their toilet had exploded,
scattering fragments of porcelain
throughout the bathroom.
A plumber concluded that their
outdoor septic tank had been struck
by lightning, igniting a pocket of
methane gas trapped inside and
culminating in an explosion that
destroyed their toilet. Feedback
shares the sentiment Marylou Ward
expressed to reporters: “I’m just
glad none of us were on the toilet.”
Given the usual direction of travel
of greenhouse gas emissions under
such circumstances, we can think
of no more appropriate context in
which to use the term “blowback”.
But we also think increased
vigilance is necessary. Readers of
a certain age will remember being
told not to use the telephone during
thunderstorms for fear of electrical
surges up the copper cables causing
singed ears and worse. With the
shift to wireless technologies,
is nature’s strategy evolving?
Kiss of the octopus
In a possibly related fightback
incident – or maybe we have just
crossed the fine line between bad
luck and brazen stupidity – a
participant in a fishing contest
near the Tacoma Narrows bridge
in Washington state needed
hospital treatment after putting
a recently caught octopus on her
face to win the competition’s
photographic prize.
Jamie Bisceglia’s only reward
was to have her chin chewed by
the irate cephalopod, leading to
swelling and paralysis down one
side of her face. “This was not a
good idea,” she told reporters.
“I will never do it again.”
As with toilet blowback,
Feedback is relieved the outcome
wasn’t worse. We recall incidents
when dolphins have been
Liana Finck for New Scientist
suffocated by octopuses or
seen with them clamped to their
genitalia. Feedback’s golden rule:
if it has more limbs than you,
don’t mess with it.
Heavy water
In the UK, meanwhile, nature’s
tactical bombardment with rain –
ever a feature of the great British
summer – pushed the Toddbrook
Reservoir dam in Derbyshire to
breaking point.
“BBC News has repeatedly
reported that the dam has
protected the town of Whaley
Bridge for 200 years,” writes Perry
Bebbington. “Protected it from
what? From the water behind the
dam? The water that wouldn’t
be there at all if the dam hadn’t
been built?”
Perry, you aren’t wrong –
though whether residents prefer
to risk small annual floods or a
1-in-200-years deluge thanks to for a viable post-Brexit industrial on that classic of moral
a dam collapse will surely depend strategy, Feedback wonders philosophy, the trolley problem.
on which year they happen to be whether this could be why fusion In this game, developed by
living there. resonates so strongly with the Skybound Games and internet
UK’s political class. comic creators Cyanide and
Happiness, opposing teams
Political power must draw random cards – each
In an address to the nation
Clean calculation containing innocent or not-so-
streamed live on Facebook, Talking of spin: more unusual innocent victims – to build a
the new UK prime minister units, this time courtesy of length of track and then argue why
announced the easing of visa 41 Action News in Kansas City, their runaway trolley should be
restrictions for scientists coming Missouri. It reports the appearance sent down their opponent’s branch
to the country. One reason why, of a sinkhole “roughly the size of six line to squash all in its path.
we are told, is that during a visit to seven washing machines” in the This is probably not the
to Culham Science Centre near northbound lanes of the State Line outcome Philippa Foot had in
Oxford, enterprising physicists Road. Would that be front-loading mind when she came up with the
assured Boris Johnson that they or the other kind? trolley problem in 1967, but how
were “literally only a few years better to engage the public with
away from being able to provide philosophy than through friendly
UK-made fusion reactors for sale
Game theory competition and point-scoring?
around the world”. Ah, the weekend: a chance to catch Feedback is looking forward to
Ah yes, “literally”. Feedback up with friends, drink a few beers the chance to weigh up some
notes that progress on fusion and discuss the merits of killing interesting combinations. Which
energy follows the trajectory of your childhood pet versus the owl would you value more: a team
Zeno’s arrow: with every advance, carrying your acceptance letter to with a working nuclear fusion
success edges a little further away. Hogwarts. That is the premise of reactor or one that claimed to have
Working fusion has been a few Trial by Trolley, a card game based a lightning-proof septic tank?  ❚
years away for half a century.
The billions spent so far
on fusion power has generated Got a story for Feedback?
ample promises, but little in the Send it to New Scientist, 25 Bedford Street,
way of concrete success. While we London WC2E 9ES or you can email us at
doubt that fusion can form a basis feedback@newscientist.com
24 August 2019 | New Scientist | 53
The back pages Almost the last word
Far-sighted
On a safari holiday in Kenya, I
was stunned by our local guide’s
ability to see wildlife at a great
distance and spot things that I
could barely see with binoculars.
Does visual acuity vary between
human peoples?
Stephen Rowe
Shepperton, Surrey, UK
I have witnessed the fantastic
visual abilities of safari guides
myself and I think there are other
factors at play than differences
between human peoples.
Firstly, the guides usually
know their patch intimately, so
are familiar with the favourite
spots of particular animals and
look for them there. Secondly,
the presence of an animal may
register as a visual anomaly in
an otherwise familiar scene.
I also believe that our visual
processing systems can be trained
through experience to respond
to particular shapes and colour
combinations. After many trips
to the Masai Mara wildlife reserve
in Kenya, I am much better at
spotting distant animals than
I was when I first visited.
Lauren McMahon
Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, UK
Guides are likely to know where
animals are usually found at
certain times of the day. They also
look for characteristic movements
or signs that give away an animal’s
location, such as how fresh their
tracks are or the presence of birds
near kills. Their vision has become
accustomed to looking for slight
movements when scanning an
area slowly, whereas most people
would do a fast scan.
Jane Monroe
Arcata, California, US
The guide has probably spent a
lot of time focusing on outdoor
scenes, while visitors are more
likely to be people who spend their
lives in front of computer screens
or with their noses in books.
Their eyes don’t consistently
need to focus on objects at great
54 | New Scientist | 24 August 2019
Does placing a fingertip on a
bike’s handlebars actually
provide support?
Stephen Jorgenson-Murray
Frankfurt, Germany
Like the guide, experienced
birdwatchers use cues such as
size, movement, shape, behaviour,
habitat and even the time of day to
identify a species without needing
ENRIQUE DÍAZ/7CERO/GETTY
a clear view. The term that they
and other wildlife spotters use
for this collection of subtle clues
is the “jizz” of the animal.
Richard Kerr
This week’s new questions Newton Mearns,
East Renfrewshire, UK
Freewheeling I rapidly lose my balance if I try to ride my In Zambia, a Zulu friend once
bike with no hands, but I can easily ride it when the tip of just pointed out an utterly still brown
one finger is lightly touching the handlebars. Is that finger crocodile on a brown mudbank
providing significant support or do I just believe that I can’t nearly a kilometre away. He drew
ride a bike no-handed? Richard Webb, London, UK our attention to it not because it
was there, but to explain why its
Good consumers Which is better for the environment, mouth was open. I suspect that his
online shopping or traditional high-street shopping? eyes were able to easily recognise
Martin Cox, Hong Kong, China things that were more common
in his life than they were in mine.
He also had a good eye for the
distances, unlike the guide’s. other game at a great distance. best ways to take his car between
Perhaps the questioner is short- I struggled to develop this tree trunks to avoid the roots and
sighted. Myopia is increasingly skill. Finally, a young man told me for which parts of ditches were
common in developed countries I was trying too hard and that I safer to drive in than the dirt road.
as greater numbers of people needed to “look through the trees”. Again, I think it was because of
spend more and more time The way I understood this was that what his eyes were accustomed
working at desks and are I should engage my peripheral to assessing.
therefore focusing their vision vision to see the animals rather
on objects less than an arm’s than use determined staring – Sneeze blindness
length from their eyes. In fact, and when I did this, hey presto,
short-sightedness increases there they were. Why do our eyelids involuntarily
in populations as they adopt During a night drive close when we sneeze? Is it to
urban lifestyles and stop using across remote sand tracks at stop our eyes from popping out?
their long-distance vision. 80 kilometres per hour, the same
A safari guide presumably man – who had been nodding off Andrew Gould
spends relatively little time at in the passenger seat – suddenly Canberra, ACT, Australia
a desk, while the eyes of those yelled “Stop!”, jumped from the As a photic sneezer – someone
who largely work indoors have vehicle and ran off into the dunes. who sneezes at bright light – I
adjusted to that lifestyle. For He returned with a 3-metre-long sneeze a lot and I have done some
an in-depth look at this issue, woma, or sand python. experiments on this. I can assure
read Daniel Lieberman’s book When I asked him how he saw you that it is entirely possible
The Story of the Human Body: it, he replied, “I didn’t. I saw its to sneeze with your eyes wide
Evolution, health, and disease. tracks and knew it had just crossed open and not have your eyeballs
the road.” It made a nice lunch. pop out.  ❚
Keith Noble
Townsville, Queensland, Australia
When working with Ngaanyatjarra Want to send us a question or answer?
people in Australia’s Western Email us at lastword@newscientist.com
desert, I was amazed by their Questions should be about everyday science phenomena
ability to spot kangaroos and Full terms and conditions at newscientist.com/lw-terms
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The back pages The Q&A
As a child, what did you want
to do when you grew up?
I didn’t know. I just knew I wanted
to work with people.
Explain what you do in one easy paragraph.
I divide my time between working with patients
and coordinating research. Multiple sclerosis
occurs when the immune system mistakenly
attacks the fatty myelin coating around
nerve fibres. Our research tries to figure out
how we can repair this protective coating. We
also want to understand how MS progresses.
What do you love most about what you do?
The best part of my job is listening to the
all-important information that patients tell us
about their lived experience of MS. But I also like
discussing research projects with the team.
Were you good at science at school?
I loved biology, but hated maths. I was also
(and still am) an avid reader, so I was very
into literature and poetry.
If you could send a message back to
yourself as a kid, what would you say?
In France, students always shy away from asking
questions. My advice would be, “Don’t be afraid
to ask. No question is a stupid one.”
What’s the most exciting thing
you’re working on right now?
I’m very excited about a trial that my team is
developing on optic neuritis – inflammation of
the optic nerve. We will test how the stimulation
of electrical activity in the nerve can repair
myelin. It could lead to extremely important
discoveries about ways of remyelinating nerves
and possibly halting the progression of MS.
If you could have a long conversation
with any scientist, living or dead,
who would it be?
Jean-Baptiste Charcot – the son of Jean-Martin
Charcot, who made the first diagnosis of MS in
1868. Jean-Baptiste studied neurology, but after
his father’s death he travelled the world in a boat
called Pourquoi-Pas? (“why not?”) and explored
the Antarctic. I would love to hear his adventures.
56 | New Scientist | 24 August 2019
Multiple sclerosis research pioneer
Catherine Lubetzki has just won the
Charcot Award for work that could one
day halt the progression of the disease
What discovery are you most proud of?
A special moment was when our team discovered
that it is electrical activity in the nerves that gives
the signal for the myelination process to begin.
How has your field of study changed in
the time you have been working in it?
Twenty years ago, I was part of a global meeting
where, for three days, we focused on myelination
in MS. At the end, a number of MS experts
concluded that there was no future for myelin
repair in MS. I was unbelievably disappointed.
But today, there are several trials looking into
exactly this, and research is very much dedicated
to finding answers to the repair process in MS.
Do you have an unexpected hobby, and
if so, please will you tell us about it?
I love to hike in the Alps. Last month, I was on a
pass that reached 3300 metres.
What’s the best thing you’ve read or seen
in the past 12 months?
Myelin: The brain’s supercharger by Florence
Rosier and Bernard Zalc, a colleague who also
happens to be my husband.
“The trial we
How useful will your skills be after
the apocalypse?
are developing
I’m agnostic on a potential apocalypse, but I could lead to
ways of halting
am very conscious of the growing threat that
global warming poses for us all. It’s something
we desperately need to address.
the progression
OK, one last thing: tell us something that
will blow our minds…
of multiple
So many of the secrets to understanding MS lie sclerosis”
in the patients themselves. The way that people
with MS and other conditions know their disease
is fundamental to us in our research. I find the
courage, energy and determination of many
of my patients to be mind-blowing – lessons
in life for us all.  ❚
Catherine Lubetzki is professor of neurology at
Sorbonne University and heads the neurology
department at Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, Paris.
PORTRAIT: FREDIMAGE, COURTESY OF CATHERINE LUBETZKI