REAL PALEO DIET

Our ancestors ate

meat and 55 veg
CAN COMPUTE
Breakthrough brings
quantum machines close

IDENTIKIT MEMORY
We all remember things
in exactly the same way
WEEKLY December 10 -16, 2016

THE OTHER CHERNOBYL Inside the USSRs secret nuclear disaster

YOU ARE... A GENIUS

A FANTASIST A MUTANT
A COPYCAT A SCAREDY-CAT
A MENAGERIE A JERK
A BELIEVER AN ATHLETE
A MIND READER...
THE TEN THINGS YOU
REALLY NEED TO KNOW
ABOUT YOURSELF No3103
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CONTENTS Volume 232 No 3103

This issue online

newscientist.com/issue/3103

News Leaders
3 Historical data obtained unethically

6 must be treated with extreme caution

News
Your memories 4 UPFRONT
arent special Oil pipeline route blocked. England expands
access to HIV drug. Virgin Galactic flies
Our brains remember
again. Nations fail on biodiversity pledges
BALLYSCANLON/PLAINPICTURE

things in exactly the 6 THIS WEEK

same way Real Paleo diet contained lots of veg.
Quantum computers without all the lasers.
Psychedelic drug helps people facing death.
Whales splash out messages. Microbes
make barnacles cry. Dark matter could get
chummy with itself
13 IN BRIEF
On the cover High-altitude plants. Nearby triple star.
Magnetic brain stimulation can turn you on

26 7 Real Paleo diet

Meat and 55 veg
7 Can compute
Analysis
16 Fertility Are experimental treatments
What you are Quantum breakthrough
helping patients or offering false hope?
6 Identikit memory
18 COMMENT
The 10 things you We all remember things
Why boardroom pay is such a toxic issue.
really need to know the same way
Can more research funding lift UK fortunes?
about yourself 36 The other Chernobyl
19 INSIGHT
Secret nuclear disaster
Teen sexting cant be stopped by tech alone
40 Workers of the
world despair
Your job is pointless Technology
20 Can face recognition software tell if youre a
criminal? Phone app detects earthquakes.
Robot plays noughts and crosses

Features
Aperture
36 24 Glowing, living catapults

The other Features

Chernobyl 26 What you are (see above left)
36 The other Chernobyl (see left)
Inside the USSRs 40 PEOPLE
secret nuclear disaster Andr Spicer talks pointless jobs

Culture
ALEXEY ZHENIN

42 Mapping lives Maps dont necessarily show

the real territory, an exhibition reminds us
44 Meaning of fuel What happens when we
pick a common word to pieces

Coming next week Regulars

52 LETTERS Visionary hallucinations
Bumper holiday special 55 MAKE A card that lights up the room
Miracle figs, a game theorists Christmas, why 56 FEEDBACK Save us from the web clean-up
hangovers are so bad and much, much more 57 THE LAST WORD French kisses

PLUS: 2017 before it happens

Ten things to look out for in the coming year

10 December 2016 | NewScientist | 1

EXPAND
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FKDQJLQJWKHODZVRISK\VLFVH[SORUHWKHPRVWLQFUHGLEOH
FRQFHSWVLQVFLHQFH

%X\\RXUFRS\IURPDOOJRRGPDJD]LQHUHWDLOHUVRUGLJLWDOO\
)LQGRXWPRUHDWnewscientist.com/theCollection
LEADER

DENIS SINYAKOV /REUTERS/ALAMY

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10 December 2016 | NewScientist | 3

UPFRONT

DAVID GOLDMAN/AP IMAGES

Pipeline halted for now
A BATTLE has been won, but the
victors could still lose the war.
Campaigners fighting against an oil
pipeline being built in North Dakota
are rejoicing after the companies
building it didnt get the permit
needed to join the completed
sections by drilling under Lake
Oahe on the Missouri river.
The US Army Corps of Engineering,
which manages the lake, delayed
issuing the permit, saying
alternatives routes should be
explored. However, the companies
building the pipeline say they expect
to complete it with no rerouting.
The plan is for the pipeline to
pass under the Missouri river some
800metres north of what the US
recognises as the boundary of the
Standing Rock Sioux Reservation.
The tribe says it will pass through
land that belongs to them according to
an 1851treaty, and that construction
willdamage sacred sites and could
contaminate their water.
An encampment near the planned
route has become a rallying point.
There, local tribes have been joined
byenvironmentalists and members
ofsome 200 other Native American
tribes, in what they describe as a
firstof its kind historic gathering of
Indigenous Nations. The protests have
garnered worldwide media attention,
not least because of police violence.
It is not clear the pipeline will
substantially increase carbon
emissions, unlike the halted Keystone
XL pipeline, which would have allowed
Canada to export more oil extracted
from tar sands.
Protests have paid off

EUs green muddle
THE European Unions proposed
revisions of its renewable energy
policies amount to greenwash
and dont solve serious flaws.
Thats the reaction of some
environmental groups following
last weeks unveiling of the
European Commissions draft
clean energy package for the
period up to 2030.
The EU gets 65 per cent of its
renewable energy from biofuels,
mainly wood. But critics say it is
failing to ensure this bioenergy is
sustainably sourced, and that its
for forest protection group Fern.
The evidence that its growing
use will increase emissions and
destroy forests in Europe and
elsewhere is overwhelming.
On the surface, the draft
proposals address some issues
with existing renewable energy
policies. But environmental
groups say the changes will make
little difference. Its almost worse
than doing nothing, says Sini
Erajaa, bioenergy policy officer
for BirdLife Europe & Central Asia.
A recent report by BirdLife and
other groups shows how EU
subsidies drive deforestation in
Sciences Oscars
AT THE fifth annual Breakthrough
prize ceremony last week, a
dozen scientists received a total
of $25 million for fundamental
contributions to human
knowledge.
The event, held at NASAs Ames
Research Center in California,
featured all the glitz and glam of
the Oscars: a red carpet, musical
guests such as Alicia Keys and
will.i.am, and Morgan Freeman
as host.
Winners included the physicists
behind the LIGO experiment,
who revealed the first detection
of Einsteins long-sought
gravitational waves in February.
Other prizes recognised research
into fundamental physics,
mathematics and life sciences.
This project is really mostly
about public outreach, says
billionaire internet investor Yuri
Milner, who co-founded the prize.
Thats why we have a televised
ceremony and everything around
it, because the founders want to
send a signal that fundamental
science is important.

Burning forest biomass

on an industrial scale for
power and heating has
proved disastrous
use lowers emissions compared
with fossil fuels. In some cases,
EU policies are leading to
deforestation and biodiversity
loss, and produce more emissions
than burning coal for energy.
Burning forest biomass on
an industrial scale for power and
heating has proved disastrous,
says Linde Zuidema, a campaigner
Europe and beyond. Supposedly
protected forests in Slovakia and
Italy are being cut down for fuel,
for instance. In the US and Russia,
whole trees are being turned
into wood pellets for export to
the EU. Campaigners want the
EU to abandon its drive to use
ever more bioenergy, particularly
that derived from forests.
Responding to these criticisms,
a European Commission
spokesperson told New Scientist
it is committed to making sure
the biomass used for energy
throughout the EU is sustainable.
Spacecraft makes first solo flight
ITS newest space plane has finally
flown the nest. VSS Unity, the
seconditeration of Virgin Galactics
SpaceShipTwo, has had five assisted
flights since September, but on
3December, pilots steered and
landed it alone for the first time.
VSS Unity spent 10 minutes
gliding above the Mojave desert after
being carried to 50,000 feet by its
mothership, WhiteKnightTwo.
During its descent, it reached a speed
of about 735 kilometres per hour.
After the crash of VSS Unitys
predecessor in October 2014, in
which one pilot was killed and the
other severely injured, Virgin Galactic
is placing extra emphasis on testing
and safety procedures.
This glide flight was the first of
many, the firm said in a statement.
After more rounds of glide flight
testing, the next step will be to turn
up the power and use VSS Unitys
rocket engine to take it higher into
the atmosphere.

4 | NewScientist | 10 December 2016

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

Zero energy water
A CITY in Denmark is about to
become the first in the world to
provide most of its citizens with
fresh water using only energy
made from domestic waste water
and sewage.
Surplus energy from
sewage can be used to
pump clean water to the
whole inner city area
The Marselisborg Wastewater
Treatment Plant in Aarhus has
undergone improvements that
mean it can make more than
150 per cent of the electricity
needed to run the plant, so the
surplus can be used to pump
drinking water around the city.
As well as powering the entire
water system for the 200,000
people living in the inner city
area, the excess electricity could
be sold into the local grid.
The plant generates energy
from the biogas it creates out of
household waste water, including
sewage. Carbon is extracted from
the waste water and pumped into
digesters kept at 38C, filled with
bacteria. These produce biogas
mostly methane that is then
burned to make heat and
electricity.
Upgrading the Marselisborg
facilities required an upfront
investment of nearly 3 million,
but Aarhus Water expect that to
be recouped in just five years.
VIRGIN GALACTIC
DAVID PIKE/NATUREPL.COM
Biodiversity fail
NATIONS around the world
are failing miserably to meet
internationally agreed targets
to halt the loss of biodiversity.
By now, individual countries
should have drafted detailed
plans to meet the global Aichi
biodiversity targets, set by
the UNs Strategic Plan for
Biodiversity 2011-2020. However,
only half have done so, says a
report by five major conservation
charities ahead of this weeks
Unless countries
significantly increase their
ambition the biodiversity
targets wont be met
meeting of the Convention on
Biological Diversity in Cancun,
Mexico.
A rare success story
all countries must play their
part, says Sarah Nelson, head of
international policy at the UKs
Royal Society for the Protection of
Birds, one of the five charities that
co-drafted the report. The results
from this study are therefore
extremely concerning. One of the
rare examples of success has been
saving the Seychelles warbler
(pictured above) from extinction.
Prepping for PrEP
MORE people in England are set
to get a preventive HIV treatment,
but it still wont be available to all
who want it.
PrEP involves taking a drug that
reduces the risk of contracting
HIV. The National Health Service
in England had argued that it is
unable to fund the drug as local
councils are responsible for HIV
Space salad day
NASA astronauts on the
International Space Station have
reaped their first harvest: red
romaine lettuce. They first ate space
lettuce in August 2015, but that was
just a taste. On 2 December, they cut
enough for a whole salad. The plants
grew in a microgravity farm system
called Veggie, installed in 2014.
ExoMars go-ahead
Despite the dramatic loss of the
Schiaparelli lander in October and
cost concerns, European Space
Agency member states have voted
to proceed with the next stage of
thelife-hunting ExoMars mission.
A rover equipped to drill should
launch in 2020.
Fizzy drinks to be taxed
The UKs sugar tax is on its way but
not for 16 months. From April 2018,
a tax will be imposed on sugary soft
drinks. It could boost their prices by
up to 24 pence a litre, if retailers pass
on the full cost. The tax is expected
to raise 520 million in its first year.
Wetlands reprieved
Some 4000 types of plants and
animals in the Doana National Park,
a UNESCO World Heritage Site in
southern Spain, can breathe more
easily. The Spanish government has
scrapped a major project to dredge
the Guadalquivir river on which
the parks wetlands rely in order to
allow in bigger commercial ships. But
the park, home to the Iberian lynx,
is still at risk from pollution and the

Worse still, 90 per cent of prevention services, but the

the plans fall short of 20 global
benchmarks on issues such as
halting habitat loss and saving
endangered species. Only 5 per
cent of countries are on track to
meet the benchmarks. A fifth of
countries have either made no
progress since 2010, or have seen
things get even worse. Unless
countries significantly increase
their ambition, the Aichi targets
will not be delivered, the report
says, citing especially the rich
nations.
Just gliding, at 735 kph For the Aichi targets to be met,
courts rejected that idea.
NHS England said this week
that it will now conduct a three-
year trial, involving 10,000
recipients, to find out how best
to make the drug available.
Evidence for the clinical
effectiveness of PrEP is
overwhelming, said Deborah
Gold of the National AIDS Trust,
the charity that took NHS England
to court. But the trial could answer
useful questions. Theres no
doubt that this is a step in the
right direction.
unauthorised extraction of water.
Shop and go
Amazon has opened a new type of
grocery shop that lets you pick what
you want and then walk out it
debits your account as you leave.
The Amazon Go system uses
machine vision to detect items being
taken from shelves, and logs them
with an app on your phone. The
store, in Seattle, is currently open
only to Amazon employees, but will
welcome the public early next year.

10 December 2016 | NewScientist | 5

 THIS WEEK
Your memories arent unique
Our brains recall events in remarkably similar ways, finds Andy Coghlan
YOU might think your memories
are special, but youre wrong.
For the first time, we have clear
evidence that we all use practically
the same brain activity to record
and recount shared experiences,
rather than remembering and
recalling events in random,
individual ways.
We feel our memories are
unique, but we see now that
theres a lot in common between
us in how we see and remember
the world, says Janice Chen at
Princeton University. Her teams
work also suggests that we can
implant these patterns into
someone elses brain by telling
them what we have seen.
Chens experiment involved
17 volunteers watching a
50-minute episode of the BBC
drama, Sherlock. Their brains were
scanned while they watched it and
BALLYSCANLON/PLAINPICTURE
6 | NewScientist | 10 December 2016
while they recalled the episode
immediately afterwards,
describing what they had seen.
We were very surprised how
good peoples memories were,
with many people speaking for
over 30 minutes, hitting most of
the scenes in mostly the right
order and giving lots of detail,
says Chen.
Incredibly, brain activity while You implant your thoughts
watching, and later recalling, each into another persons brain
scene was strikingly similar across easily, simply by telling
all 17 volunteers. Chris Bird at the them your memories
University of Sussex, UK, says
this discovery is extremely
surprising. The patterns for
particular sections of the drama
appear to create a common
signature across individuals.
The volunteers even seemed
to edit their memories in an
identical way. When verbally
recalling the episode, the
participants brain activity didnt
to interrogate memory circuitry
include some of the patterns have often relied on recall of
previously detected while they simple objects. Usually, memory
were watching it. experiments use single words or
Even though the volunteers static pictures, so were excited
used diverse words, sentences and to show its possible to do all this
recollections to articulate their during a much more realistic
accounts of what happened in the experience, watching an hour-
episode, remarkably, they mostly long movie and talking freely
about it for many minutes.
Could this commonality in
memory patterns be exploited?
Chen dismisses the idea that the
discovery could be used to
artificially implant memories into
seemed to have cut and retained peoples brains, as has been done
the same parts of brain activity in mice. However, we do in a sense
(Nature Neuroscience, doi.org/ implant our thoughts into others
bvgk). Its a kind of whittling minds all the time.
down to the gist of what In ongoing research in which
happened, says Bird. Once people who havent seen a
youve edited it, theres a clearer
movie listen to someone elses
thing to pass on. description of it, Chen and her
Chen says previous attempts colleagues have found that the
listeners brain activity looks
much like that of the describer.
I would say that you implant
your thoughts into another
persons brain quite easily, simply
by telling them what you are
thinking or remembering, says
Chen. You remember it and, at
the same time, they imagine it.
A key implication, says Chen,
is that for specific memories
we share distinct brain patterns,
almost like fingerprints. This
evolved to enable us and our
evolutionary ancestors to
instantly understand and
empathise with one another,
essentially implanting memories
in each others brains by
recounting stories and
information crucial to survival.
I think this is no accident,
because having a common
framework for remembering
makes it easier to communicate
our memories to others, and
thats a powerful thing human
More in common than meets the eye beings can do, says Chen.
 In this section
Dark matter could get chummy with itself, page 10
Are experimental fertility treatments offering false hope?, page 16
Can face recognition software tell if youre a criminal?, page 20
DAVID SILVERMAN/GETTY
Paleo diet was a veggie
feast with a side of meat
TODAYS Paleo diet cookbooks
might be missing a few pages.
It seems that our early ancestors
were more adventurous with their
plant foods than we might expect,
with roasted acorns, sedges and
water lily seeds all on the menu,
along with fish and meats.
Archaeologists tend to
emphasise the role of meat in
ancient human diets, largely
because the butchered bones
of animals are so likely to be
preserved at dig sites. Edible
plants may have been overlooked
simply because their remains
Quantum
computers ditch
all the lasers
THEY will be the ultimate
multitaskers but quantum
computers might take a bit of
juggling to operate. Now, a team
has simplified their inner workings.
Computers that take advantage of
quantum laws allowing particles to
exist in multiple states at the same
time promise to run millions of
calculations at once. One of the
dont survive so well.
Excavations at a Stone Age
site in northern Israel have now
revealed the best direct evidence
so far of what plants early
humans ate. The Gesher Benot
Yaaqov site was occupied
780,000 years ago, probably
by Homo erectus, and ancient
waterlogging helped preserve
traces of its inhabitants diets.
Yoel Melamed and Naama
Goren-Inbar at Bar-Ilan University
in Ramat Gan, Israel, and their
colleagues have compared the
diversity and abundance of plant
candidate technologies involves ion
traps, which hold and manipulate
charged particles, called ions, to
encode information.
But to make a processor that
worksfaster than a classical
computerwould require millions
ofsuch traps, each controlled by
itsown precisely aligned laser
making it extremely complicated.
Now, Winfried Hensinger at the
University of Sussex in the UK and his
colleagues have replaced the millions
of lasers with some static magnets
and a handful of electromagnetic
fields. Our invention has led to a
A prized food for literally ages Lafayetville. Human evolution
remains at the site during
periods with and without human in both time and space.
activity. It turns out that the
residents collected no fewer than
55 kinds of plant, harvesting their Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany,
nuts, fruits, seeds and tubers,
or eating them as vegetables
(PNAS, doi.org/bvgf).
The modern human diet is
clearly restricted when compared example, she says. Hominins
to the [early] hominin diet or
even to the early farmers diet,
says Goren-Inbar. Broad tastes
were probably essential, she
says they gave early humans a
good chance of finding palatable
food year round. It gives one a
substantial element of security
when particular sources become
rare or absent.
Many foods might seem
radical simplification of the
engineering required, which means
we are now able to construct a
large-scale device, he says.
In their scheme, each ion is
trappedby four permanent
magnets,with a controllable
voltageacross the trap. The entire
device is bathed in a set of tuned
microwave and radio-frequency
electromagnetic fields. Tweaking
A quantum computer
would need millions of
ion traps, each controlled
by its own laser
unusual choices, but they arent.
Many species that most of us no
longer recognise as food were
recorded as food sources during
the last few centuries somewhere
in the world, says Goren-Inbar.
And some Paleo foods are familiar
today: water chestnuts and olives
are still widely eaten.
Goren-Inbar and others have
previously found evidence for
the consumption of meats, fish
and even elephant brain at the
site. So did early humans prefer
meat or veg? There probably was
no single balance between meat
and plant, says Peter Ungar at
the University of Arkansas in
is a work in progress, and diets
likely varied along a continuum
But Amanda Henry at the Max
Planck Institute for Evolutionary
thinks early human diets tipped
towards being plant-rich. We
need plant-derived nutrients to
survive vitamin C and fibre, for
were probably predominantly
vegetarians.
Either way, the team now
suggest that a wide variety of
plants would have featured in
diets way before the dawn of
agriculture. Early humans knew
how to exploit plants seasonally,
potentially allowing them to
inhabit the same location all
year round. Colin Barras
thevoltage shifts the ions to a
different position in the magnetic
field, changing their state.
The researchers have already
usedthis idea to build and operate
a quantum logic gate, a building
block of a processor (Physical Review
Letters, doi.org/bvfm).
Manas Mukherjee at the National
University of Singapore is impressed.
Its a promising development, with
good potential for scaling up, he says.
Thats exactly what the team is
planning: they hope to have a trial
device containing tens of ions ready
within four years. Michael Brooks
10 December 2016 | NewScientist | 7
 THIS WEEK
MISHA KAMINSKY/GETTY
Psychedelic drug
helps depression
Kevin Franciotti
CAN a psychedelic trip change the
way people with life-threatening
cancer face death? It seems so.
Psilocybin, a hallucinogenic
compound in magic mushrooms,
was banned in the 1960s. But a
better understanding of the drug
has sparked a revival of research
into its potential benefits for
depression and anxiety.
Anywhere from 40 to 50 per
cent of cancer patients will
have diagnosable anxiety or
depression, says Stephen Ross at
NYU Langone Medical Center in
New York. Current treatments, like
antidepressants, dont work any
better than placebo, he says, but
some small studies suggest that
psilocybin could be an alternative.
To investigate, a team at Johns
Hopkins University in Baltimore,
Maryland, plus Rosss team,
carried out two trials involving
a total of 80 people with cancer
and symptoms of depression and
anxiety. In one trial, each person
had a psychotherapy session plus
8 | NewScientist | 10 December 2016
either a high or a very low dose of
psilocybin. Five to seven weeks
later, they had a second session
with the drug dose swapped. The
second trial was similar but used
vitamin B3 instead of the low dose.
During each session, the person
lay blindfolded on a couch,
listening to music. They were
asked to focus on their inner
experiences. Results from across
the trials showed that psilocybin
led to immediate and significant
falls in measures of depression,
anxiety and mood disturbance,
and rises in optimism, quality
of life and acceptance of death
(Journal of Psychopharmacology,
doi.org/bvd7 and doi.org/bvd8).
These benefits were still present
in 80 per cent of participants six
months later.
The core feature of a psilocybin
experience is a feeling that
everything is connected, says
Roland Griffiths, who led the
Hopkins trial. After this kind
of experience, people feel that
theyve learned something thats
of deep meaning to them, he
Changes your approach to life of the water and twist on to their
says. They attribute changes in
how they approach life, interact
with people and to their value
systems to that experience.
The results form the most
extensive trial of psilocybin for
treating depression and anxiety.
But Richard Shelton and Peter
Hendricks at the University of
Alabama in Birmingham have
questioned the design of the
trials, as participants werent
asked which drug they thought
they had received. This is usually
done to ensure a realistic placebo became more common just before
or pseudo-placebo in the case of
the low drug dose is used, and
that volunteers couldnt tell
which treatment they had
received. But in a commentary
article, the pair note that it may be despite not feeding
unfeasible to create a placebo that
is indistinguishable from the real members left (Marine Mammal
thing due to the hallucinogenic
effects of the drug.
Ross says the study must be
repeated on a larger scale. Even
though our two trials together
replicated the same study and
would lead one to think this is a
real effect, it needs to be done in a behaviours only give very simple
larger, nationally representative
cancer sample, he says. If the
findings were confirmed, then
psilocybin may be developed as
a drug for cancer-related anxiety
and depression, he says.
Sea-slapping is
whales little
messaging trick
THE sight of whales breaking the
surface and slapping their fins on the
water is a true spectacle but it isnt
just for show. Instead, all that splashing
appears to be for messaging other
whales, and the big splashes are
long-distance calls.
Ailbhe Kavanagh at the University
of Queensland in Gatton, Australia,
and her colleagues inferred this by
studying 94 groups of humpback
whales migrating south along the
Queensland coast in 2010 and 2011.
Humpbacks regularly leap out
backs behaviour known as
breaching. They also slap their tails
and fins repetitively. The team found
evidence that the resulting sounds,
travelling underwater, could be
conveying messages to other whales.
The animals were significantly
more likely to breach when their
nearest neighbours were more than
4kilometres away, suggesting that
the body-slapping sound of breaching
was used to signal to distant groups.
In contrast, repetitive tail and
pectoral-fin slapping appeared to be
for close-range communication: they
new whales joined, or group
Migrating whales engage
in energetic slapping and
breaching behaviours
Science, doi.org/bvdw).
Whales engage in these energetic
behaviours despite not feeding during
migration. The fact that these actions
are so regular and vigorous indicates
their importance, Kavanagh says.
Although surface-active
information like location, its possible
that a succession of these surface
sounds could convey a little more
information, says Joshua Smith at
Murdoch University in Perth, Western
Australia. Alice Klein
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THIS WEEK

Tweak dark matter

The team looked at 30 galaxies When galaxies form, cold dark
with strange rotation curves, matter falls to the centre and hot
and found that they could dark matter flows toward the

to explain galaxies better explain them using a

different type of dark matter:
the self-interacting sort.
outer edges. But if dark matter
is allowed to interact with itself,
then the particles will exchange
These particles do something energy and end up at the same
Shannon Hall alike before they reach that similar to how ordinary matter temperature, just like the air
characteristic plateau, some rise particles, like protons, interact molecules in a room. In some
DARK matter might talk to itself. gradually, and others rise rapidly. with one another via the cases, the cool dark matter
The mysterious substance that But WIMP models struggle to electromagnetic force. particles in the centre will grow
outweighs all visible matter in the explain this. Also, there has been Its a very minimal hotter and flow toward the outer
cosmos might be best explained no direct evidence of WIMPs, modification, says Manoj edges, building a centre less
if its able to interact with itself despite decades of searching. So Kaplinghat at the University dominated by dark matter
via an invisible force. Ayuki Kamada at the University of California, Irvine. But its explaining the rotation curves
Take a look at any image of a of California, Riverside, and his amazing how well it actually fits. that rise gradually (arxiv.org/
galaxy and you will see that the colleagues set about finding an You dont have to bend over abs/1611.02716).
centre is the brightest. With so alternative. backwards. Stacy McGaugh at Case
much light and therefore mass Western Reserve University in
concentrated there, astronomers Ohio is a critic of the standard
expected central objects to orbit dark matter paradigm, so he
faster than those on the outer rim. thinks all alternatives are worth
But in the early 20th century, exploring. However, adding
astronomers were surprised to new unseen forces to unseen
find that galaxies outer stars particles complicates the picture
appear to move about as fast as unnecessarily, he says.
their inner stars, suggesting that Its what the philosophers of
there is more matter that doesnt science would call an auxiliary
meet the eye. The name given to hypothesis on top of an auxiliary
the invisible stuff is dark matter, hypothesis, he says. Its already
and the standard paradigm ad hoc and were adding more.
suggests it is composed of weakly McGaughs favourite
interacting massive particles, or explanation is Modified
ROBERT GENDLER/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

WIMPs. Newtonian Dynamics (MOND), a

Now new research on galactic theory that doesnt add invisible
rotation curves graphs showing matter but tweaks our
the orbital speeds of stars versus understanding of gravity.
their distance from the centre of An answer might come with
the galaxy suggests the story direct detection of dark matter
might not be so simple. whether WIMPs or the self-
Not all rotation curves look Spinning puzzle interacting kind.

Microbes make how organisms slowly modify their

environment even if the environment
barnacles weep seems as solid as rock, says John
Buckeridge at RMIT University in
solidifying tears Melbourne, Victoria. What is cute
here is the relationship between the
ITS as if the rock is crying. Sandstone barnacle and the cyanobacteria that
blocks near Lakes Entrance on the allows this to happen.
coast of Victoria, south-east Australia, Buckeridge surveyed the site,
are covered with barnacles that look where barnacles sit higher out of
like they are spilling tears. It now the water than they normally do, and
seems that these tears of the Virgin, analysed samples in the lab. Working
as they are known locally, result from with William Newman from the
the first known mutualism between Scripps Institution of Oceanography
these crustaceans and cyanobacteria. in San Diego, California, he found
It is important because it shows that the barnacles are surrounded by
dark-coloured cyanobacteria, which
feed on the crustaceans nitrogen-rich
waste. This results in a rounded eye
shape, with the barnacle looking like
the iris and pupil at the centre, from
which the tears appear to fall.
The cyanobacteria excrete organic
acids that dissolve carbonate, a major
component of the sandstone. This
creates burrows that protect the
barnacles from the fierce sun and
These associations
between microbes
and their hosts form a
coherent biological entity
from material thrown up by waves.
Excess acid dribbles down the rock
surface and carves out tear-like
grooves. They can get to
17 centimetres long, and become
populated by additional cyanobacteria
(Integrative Zoology, doi.org/bvdv).
These associations between
microbes and their hosts form a
coherent biological entity, or
holobiont, says Ezequiel Marzinelli
at the University of New South Wales,
Australia. These components must
be studied together if we are to
have an understanding of biological
systems. Alice Klein

10 | NewScientist | 10 December 2016

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 IN BRIEF
MAXIMILIAN DEHLING

Quantum particles
act like a prism
ITS a kaleidoscope in the sky.
Weve just seen virtual particles in
space acting like prisms, polarising
light from a neutron star.
In the 1930s, physicists
suggested that a strong magnetic
field can polarise light, like glare
bouncing off a window provided
there are particles to nudge it.
The effect could happen in the
vacuum of space, because virtual
particles are constantly popping
in and out of existence thanks to
quantum uncertainty.
Roberto Mignani at the National
Institute for Astrophysics in Italy
and his colleagues used the Very
Large Telescope in Chile to probe
the idea. They looked at light from
a neutron star a dense stellar
corpse with a colossal magnetic
field through a series of filters.
They found that the light
had been polarised to about
Aerial lizard unfurls and grips spreading it forward. This is a very rapid movement,
says Dehling. The lizard continued holding its wing until
16 per cent, demonstrating this
phenomenon for the first time
its wings for a unique glide the last moment of the flight. (MNRAS, doi.org/bvcw).
To grab their wings, the lizards must rotate their
THE dragons in the Harry Potter movies fly using wings wrists forward about 90 degrees. By examining museum
made from modified forelimbs, just as birds and bats do. specimens, Dehling found that while Draco lizards can
Copying plants for
But real dragons gliding lizards of the genus Draco do this, their relatives cannota (bioRxiv, doi.org/bvdx).
form their wings from flaps of skin stretched over This suggests that their limbs have evolved for the better solar cells
elongated ribs. Their forelimbs have a different role: task. Besides helping to spread the flaps of skin, the
to help spread the wings and maybe even steer. lizards grip could also let the animal bend it to steer its THE next wave of solar cells
Maximilian Dehling at the University of Koblenz, flight path, says Dehling. If so, it would make the lizard might be green literally.
Germany, photographed about 50 flights as Draco lizards unique among modern flying vertebrates in controlling A big problem in solar power is
glided from tree to tree in southern India. In every case, flight with something other than the flight surface itself. that if solar cells get too much or
the lizard would launch itself and then immediately reach Some fossil reptiles could have used a similar control too little light, they dont work
back with its forelimbs, grabbing the unfolding wing and method, he speculates based on previous finds. efficiently. This should affect
plants, too, but they manage to
make the most of what they get.
A brainwave for Alzheimers therapy plaques and tau tangles, which Nathan Gabor at the University
are hallmarks of the disease. The of California, Riverside, was trying
COULD the answer to fighting Institute of Technology and light seemed to boost the activity to design a solar cell to do the
Alzheimers disease be as simple his team exposed mice to a of cells that clear amyloid, and same thing. Using quantum
as a flickering light? light flickering at 40 hertz. cut amyloid production (Nature, mechanics, he found that plants
An hour a day of light therapy This triggered brain cells to DOI: 10.1038/nature20587). green colour may be an advantage
has been found to break down oscillate together, creating These changes happened (NanoLetters, doi.org/bvcx).
brain deposits in mice with gamma waves a type of brain only in the animals visual The sun emits more green light
Alzheimers-like symptoms. activity that is often weaker cortex, not in the memory areas than any other colour, but that
Thats a long way from it working in people with Alzheimers. that the disease damages first. may make it the hardest to absorb
in people, but because it seems After they had been exposed But Boyden still plans to try light efficiently. Reflecting green light,
a safe therapy, it could move to the light for an hour a day therapy in people, as well as to and absorbing two other colours
quickly into humans trials. for a week, the rodents brains induce gamma waves in other instead, could be the key to
Ed Boyden at the Massachusetts contained fewer amyloid areas using electrodes. efficiency, Gabor says.

10 December 2016 | NewScientist | 13

 IN BRIEF
Nearest stars to
the sun are a trio
THEYRE a happy family, after all.
The three closest stars to our solar
system do indeed all revolve around
one another, a finding that resolves
a century-old debate.
The nearest of the three, Proxima
Centauri, is a red dwarf 4.24 light
years away. In August, we learned
that it hosts an Earth-mass planet
where temperatures might be right
for liquid water to exist.
Just beyond, 4.37 light years
away, are two bright stars named
Alpha Centauri A and B. They orbit
each other every 80 years, blending
to the naked eye to appear as the
third brightest star in the night sky.
Proxima Centauri is too dim to
see without a telescope, so it was
only discovered in 1915. Ever since,
astronomers have thought it might
revolve around Alpha Centauri A
and B but no one could prove it.
Now, Pierre Kervella at the Paris
Observatory in France and his
colleagues have measured Proxima
Centauris velocity precisely enough
to show that it is genuinely bound
to the other two.
The team found that Proxima
Centauris velocity differs from
that of its bright partners by just
270 metres per second half the
speed it would need to escape
their gravitational grasp (arxiv.org/
abs/1611.03495). The little star
orbits its companions every
550,000 years.
DIGITIZED SKY SURVEY 2/ DAVIDE DE MARTIN/MAHDI ZAMANI
14 | NewScientist | 10 December 2016
Magnetic brain stimulation can turn you on (or off)
TALK about good vibrations: a
brain zap could alter your libido.
Nicole Prause at the University
of California, Los Angeles, and
her team wondered whether
transcranial magnetic
stimulation (TMS) applying
a magnetic field to the brain to
boost or lower the activity in
a particular spot could alter
someones sex drive.
Asking someone how aroused
they feel is too subjective a way
of measuring sex drive. Instead,
the team asked 20 volunteers to
wear a vibrator on their genitals.
Tiny crustaceans
are bees of the sea
SEAGRASS pollen swirls around
on currents and tides, but it turns
out that the grains can also hitch a
ride on minute marine creatures.
Underwater invertebrates can
ferry pollen between flowers, just
as animals pollinate plants on
land, say Brigitta van Tussenbroek
at the National Autonomous
University of Mexico in Puerto
Morelos and her colleagues.
The team had noticed hundreds
of invertebrates, mostly small
crustaceans, visiting turtle-grass
flowers. We saw all of these
animals coming in, and then
we saw some of them carrying
pollen, says van Tussenbroek.
To see if they can act as
pollinators, the team added them
to lab aquariums containing
turtle-grass flowers, some of
which already bore pollen grains.
Within 15 minutes, several extra
grains appeared on the female
blooms, something that did not
happen in control tanks lacking
invertebrates.
With the water kept still, the
turtle-grass often produced
grain indicating pollination
when marine invertebrates were
present, but rarely or never
did so without them (Nature
Communications, doi.org/bvcm).
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These people received 2 minutes
of TMS to excite or inhibit the
dorsolateral prefrontal cortex,
a brain area involved in reward.
Electrodes were then placed on
participants heads to measure
their alpha brainwaves, which
have been shown to weaken with
sexual arousal.
The participants then waited
to be given genital buzzes lasting
between 0.5 and 5 seconds. They
know theyre about to be sexually
stimulated, but it hasnt actually
happened yet, says Prause.
Measuring their alpha waves
Worlds highest plants come to light
PLANTS have been found growing at
6150 metres above sea level for the
first time. The six species of cushion
plants cling to a gravelly patch, no
bigger than a football pitch, in the
Himalayas.
Its a record for vascular plants
those with special tissues to
transport water and carbohydrates
although algae and mosses can grow
even higher because they are more
drought and frost-tolerant.
A team led by Jiri Dolezal, of the
Institute of Botany at the Czech
Academy of Sciences in Pruhonice,
found the plants had features to
during this time is the closest
analogue for measuring desire
in the lab, she says.
As expected, the volunteers
appeared more aroused after
excitatory TMS than inhibitory
TMS. Peoples overall sexual
responsiveness, as gauged by
their brainwaves, also correlated
with the number of orgasms
they had over the next three
days (PLoS One, doi.org/bvb4).
If it works there would be a
huge market for it, says Cicely
Marston at the London School
of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.
JIRI DOLEZAL
withstand the long, bitter winters
and lack of water. Each was no bigger
than a coin, contained a high-sugar
antifreeze, and had leaves arranged
as rosettes that help them to enfold
warmer air.
The team was able to make out
20 growth rings in a 1-millimetre
root, implying that one of the plants
had been there for two decades.
As the climate warms, the number
of frost-free days is increasing. That
could allow plants to establish even
higher up the dizzying peaks over the
coming decades (Microbial Ecology,
doi.org/bvcc).
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ANALYSIS FERTILITY CLINICS
Regulating reproduction
Are fertility clinics that offer experimental treatments helping those who
want to become parents or offering false hope, asks Jessica Hamzelou
WHEN it comes to making babies,
help is at hand. As the age of first-
time parents continues to rise,
so does the range of fertility
treatments on offer and we
arent just talking IVF.
Theres a clinic in New York
that aims to rejuvenate womens
ovaries by injecting their own
blood plasma directly into them.
One in Greece claims its similar
treatment has reversed the
menopause in some women.
Others go even further. Earlier
this year, New Scientist revealed
that a couple had given birth to a
healthy boy after undergoing a
controversial three-parent baby
technique by a US clinic in Mexico
designed to prevent people passing
genetic disorders to their children.
In Ukraine, the method is already
being used to treat infertility
rather than prevent hereditary
A lot of these treatments
havent been through
clinical trials. We dont
know if they even work
disease. As private clinics push
back the frontiers of reproduction,
academics and regulators seem to
be struggling to keep up.
Given that one in eight couples
have fertility problems, and that
IVF only works around a third of
the time, this rapid progress is
welcome. But is it OK to expect
people to pay for experimental
(though likely safe) treatments?
Are clinicians that offer them
providing desperate patients
with a last stab at parenthood,
or offering false hope? And can
we hold the industry to a higher
standard?
One problem is that a lot of new
treatments havent undergone
clinical trials or even been tried in
16 | NewScientist | 10 December 2016
animals before being offered to
people. In other words, we dont
know if they even work. Just last
week, a review of the websites of
74 UK-based fertility clinics found
that 60 made claims for specific
fertility treatments, but only
13 gave evidence to support these
claims (BMJ Open, doi.org/bt86).
Very few practices in
reproductive medicine are
considered established,
says Arianna DAngelo, who
coordinates a group on safety and
quality in assisted reproduction
for the European Society of
Human Reproduction and
Embryology. Most are considered
innovative or experimental, and
havent gone through trials.
Instead, treatments are offered
in clinics soon after they are
developed. Only later do the
clinical trials catch up, either
to confirm the benefits of a
treatment or find it is useless.
When you work in this field,
you see trends, says DAngelo.
Things become fashionable,
reach a peak and then disappear.
Take metformin, for example.
This diabetes drug, previously
linked to longevity, was thought
to assist women undergoing IVF
treatments, particularly those
with polycystic ovaries. As interest
picked up, the number of clinics
offering the drug increased. It was
only years later that trial results
came out suggesting that
metformin had no real impact on
fertility. Women had been taking
the drug, and putting up with its
horrible side effects, for no reason.
The latest pricey fertility
treatment add-on is time-lapse
imaging. This involves placing
fertilised embryos under video
surveillance while they develop
in the lab. In theory, it helps
embryologists select the
healthiest developing embryo
to implant into the uterus.
Except were still not really sure
what healthy embryos look like,
says Rita Vassena, scientific
director at a fertility clinic in
Barcelona and head of a group
supporting evidence-based
assisted reproduction technology
(EBART). Time-lapse imaging has
been talked about a lot, but, as far
as I know, there has not been a
single prospective randomised
trial to support it, she says.
EMMANUEL PIERROT/AGENCE VU/CAMERA PRESS
Untested but OK?
Vassena thinks that treatments
should be put through clinical
trials before being offered in
fertility clinics. This would mean
people could only access them as
part of a trial so some would be
given a placebo but no one would
have to pay. When people fund consultant at Imperial College
their own treatment, the study Healthcare in London. But just
is already been distorted, she says. because someone is desperate,
For example, those that can afford doesnt mean they cant be
it may already be healthier. informed.
DAngelo agrees that trials are Things get more complicated
vital, but doesnt condemn clinics when it comes to more
offering unsupported treatments. controversial techniques, such
I wouldnt say its wrong, she as that which led to the birth of a
says. Many patients are desperate baby with, technically, three
and would be willing to try parents. These have a greater
treatments that are experimental. chance of causing harm and need
In fact, most of the legal oversight, say clinicians.
embryologists and clinicians Treatments involving injecting
contacted by New Scientist say blood plasma into womens
they support the use of untested ovaries, with the aim of reversing
treatments in fertility clinics, the menopause and producing
provided that they are unlikely to fertile eggs, use a womans own
cause harm and that patients are blood products and so dont need
aware that they are experimental regulation in the US. But there are
and may have no benefit. still worries about health effects.
We have to understand that Hugh Melnick runs a clinic
patients are vulnerable, and we in New York and has given
cant exploit that vulnerability, ovarian rejuvenation injections
says Stuart Lavery, a fertility to 41 women. Weve had no
For daily news stories, visit newscientist.com/news
complications, he says. The only growing. IVF usage has risen in
conclusion I can make so far is that recent years, and as infertility
it is safe and has no side effects.
The concern is that, until
long-term trials of experimental
treatments take place, it is
difficult to know if there are
consequences for the embryo,
fetus or baby. There are no fool-
proof tests for the quality of eggs
and embryos, and any problems
with a babys development may
not be evident for years. Most
private clinics dont follow-up
their patients in the long term.
Other areas of medicine tend to clinics compete to offer the best
offer well-trialled interventions,
so why does the field of
reproductive medicine run on
experimental treatments? For a
start, the field is young. IVF itself a brand new treatment with a
is only a few decades old, and
many treatments, such as egg
freezing, are much younger.
At the same time, demand is
rates increase, this trend will
continue. Despite this, assisted
reproduction technologies are
still not that effective. Labs and
clinics around the world are
Many patients are
desperate and would be
willing to try treatments
that are experimental
trying to improve the success
rates, particularly as private
services to customers.
How can we hold the industry
to account? Education, says
Vassena. When doctors hear about
glowing testimonial, they cant
help but want to offer it to their
own patients, she says. But they
need to be aware of the
Piecing together fertility- anaesthesia and inject the blood into
importance of clinical trials, and
to apply for funding to run them.
When it comes to regulation,
however, a delicate balance will
need to be struck, says Lavery.
He believes that tight controls on
approving research have slowed
down progress in the UK, for
example. But at the same time,
he thinks that the years of debate
by clinicians, ethicists and
politicians that led to the UKs
approval of the three-parent
baby technique was the right
one, because of the risks involved. and hasnt been put through clinical
For now, the best ways to know
whether a procedure is backed by
evidence is to speak to your doctor, injection last year and is planning to
and look for Cochrane reviews,
which analyse all the evidence on
a range of treatments and provide mewho have gone through early
easy-to-understand summaries
of the results. Even then, though,
you are likely to be essentially
part of an experiment.
Why I had ovarian
rejuvenation
therapy
Sarah* started experiencing
symptoms of the menopause five
years ago, when she was 38, more
than a decade earlier than the average
woman. I felt so young, she says.
Her mother also went through the
menopause early, at 40, so Sarah
went straight to a fertility clinic. The
doctor told me to freeze my eggs,
she says. He said I was running out.
In the time since, Sarah has
experienced a disrupted menstrual
cycle, hot flushes and a low libido.
Butshe isnt ready to go through
themenopause yet, she says.
An online search directed her to
apotential solution: Hugh Melnicks
fertility clinic in New York, which
offers ovarian rejuvenation
treatment (see main story). I was
hopeful, says Sarah. Im pretty
optimistic about new technologies.
Sarah had her first treatment at 41.
I go in, they take my blood and spin
it, she says. After about 15 or
20minutes, they put me under
my ovaries. The whole procedure
takes about 10 to 15 minutes its not
long at all.
After some cramping immediately
after the injection, Sarah says she
starts to see a difference within about
a month or two. A lot of hassles go
away, she says. I sleep better at
night, my libido is higher, my periods
go back to normal I just feel young
again. Sarah hopes to be able to
conceive naturally in the next year,
but has a few eggs on ice, too.
Sarah is aware that the procedure
which costs $2500 is experimental,
trials. But she says it works for her, at
least temporarily. She had a second
have another this week.
Its wonderful for people like
menopause, she says. But when it
comes to scientific evidence and full
clinical trials, the jury is still out.
*Not her real name
10 December 2016 | NewScientist | 17
COMMENT
Immoral earnings
Probe public perceptions, and its soon clear why the salaries of
corporate chief executives are a toxic issue, says Michael Norton
AMONG the issues fuelling
political upheaval at the moment
is the gap between bosses and
workers pay. Leaders, including
the UKs prime minister Theresa
May, are busy grappling with this.
The past five years have seen
concern in many parts of the
world over the divide between
rich and poor. Examples
include the Spanish Indignados
movement and Occupy Wall
Street in 2011, a 2013 Swiss
referendum on capping CEO pay
at 12 times that of the lowest paid
(it was voted down), and ongoing
protests in various countries that
the system is rigged in favour
of the wealthy.
So how big should the gap be?
There are many ways to explore
this, from how wage gaps affect
productivity and economic
growth to how larger gaps affect
general trust in government and
financial institutions.
Mission possible?
Will more state-funded R&D lift the UKs post-
Brexit economy, asks Mariana Mazzucato
SIGNALS matter. When UK
chancellor Philip Hammond
pledged an extra 2 billion of
public money a year for research
and development by 2020, he
was indicating a shift beyond
ramping up spending amid
fears of a 59 billion Brexit hit.
The R&D pledge was part of a
23 billion package to improve the
18 | NewScientist | 10 December 2016
extra R&D money will be used is
significant. A share will go to a
new Industrial Strategy Challenge
Fund. Instead of developing
technologies as an end in
themselves, the fund encourages
purposeful, collaborative
innovation by setting challenges
for UK researchers to tackle.
UKs productivity. It was also the This is promising. The US
down payment on prime minister defence agency DARPA has
Theresa Mays intent to shape specialised in such problem
growth via industrial strategy. solving since 1958, often with
After years of, at best, beingbig civilian spin-off applications.
protected in the budget and
thus experiencing a real (inflation We need to overcome the
adjusted) cut of about 15 per cent, idea government enables
UK science could be on a new path. progress, while business
The choice of how part of that dictates its direction
My colleague Sorapop
Kiatpongsan and I took a
different approach, one rooted
in psychology: we wanted to find
out what people felt the ideal pay
gap should be. This would give
us a sense of how they weigh up
what is morally acceptable, and
perhaps explain public anger.
We used data from the
International Social Survey
Programme, which involves more
than 55,000 respondents from
40 countries, including Australia,
China, Russia, Turkey, the US and
the UK. Key questions included:
How much do you think a chief
executive of a large national
company makes in your country?
How much do you think an
unskilled factory worker makes?
Averaged across all 40 countries,
those two questions produced
an estimated pay ratio of 10:1,
meaning that people believed
that bosses made 10 times more
Done well, and linked with
procurement policy that allows
initiatives to scale up, this can
spur private investment and
generate higher productivity and
innovation-led growth. As I detail
in my book, The Entrepreneurial
State: Debunking public vs. private
sector myths, public agencies like
DARPA play a role in developing
breakthrough technologies, and
indeed entire new sectors, as they
strive to meet public missions
such as putting people on the
moon. And mission-oriented
policies can have a catalytic
effect across many sectors.
Growth has a rate, but also a
direction. Missions guided by
For more opinion articles, visit newscientist.com/opinion
than unskilled workers. In the UK,
it was 13.5:1.
Now consider two more
questions: How much do you
think a CEO should make in your
country? How much do you
think an unskilled factory worker
should make? Averaged again
across all the countries, the
answers produced an ideal ratio
of 4.6:1 (in the UK, it was 5.3:1).
Around the world, people would
prefer the distribution of pay to
be more equitable than their
estimate of reality.
MARTIN-DM/GETTY
Now compare these ratios with
the actual UK pay gap. It is 84:1.
Whats more, wage gaps have
been rising dramatically in
recent decades. In the US, for
Under18ssextingban?
example, the boss-to-worker
pay ratio was roughly 20:1 in the
1960s and 30:1 in the 1970s
Nothanks,MrHunt
before ballooning to roughly
300:1 in recent years.
While both 20:1 and 30:1 are
larger than the ideal of roughly
5:1 that people describe, it is not
difficult to understand why this is
now a critical issue: todays gaps
are a huge deviation from our
universal sense of what is right.
Michael Norton is the Harold Brierley
professor at Harvard Business School
and the co-author of Happy Money:
The Science of Happier Spending
(Simon & Schuster/Oneworld)
todays big challenges such as
climate change, inequality or
ageing can help set direction and
in so doing get business to invest
more in R&D. At present, the level
in the UK is below the average for
OECD countries. Meeting such
missions means overcoming the
idea that government enables,
while business dictates direction.
To make this work, Hammond
must ensure the entire innovation
chain is lined up, and provide a
clear sense of direction of where
the opportunities lie.
Mariana Mazzucato is a professor in
theeconomics of innovation at the
University of Sussex, UK
INSIGHT Web filtering
Frank Swain
UK HEALTH secretary Jeremy Hunt
has called on social media giants to
do more to tackle sexting among the
nations teens, which he blames for
rising cases of mental illness. Yet his
proposals for smart locks that stop
teenagers sharing sexually explicit
images are just the latest example
of government demanding magical
fixes for complex societal problems.
Giving evidence as part of a House
of Commons inquiry into suicide
prevention, Hunt singled out social
media as a key platform for abuse,
telling the panel, I ask myself the
simple question as to why you cant
prevent the texting of sexually explicit images refuse to engage
images by people under the age of 18.
He also asked why word pattern
recognition couldnt be used to
identify and stop cyberbullying.
Hunts tech proposals are easy
to suggest, but much harder to
implement. Artificial intelligences can
flag abusive keywords and recognise
explicit images, but these are crude
tools that often fail to understand
context and are easy to circumvent.
Most practical filters, like those
protecting the comments sections
of a website, rely on feedback from
thousands of viewers who can flag
objectionable content, which isnt
much use in a two-way chat dialogue.
And similar content filters on Facebook
have resulted in women having their
accounts suspended for sharing
photos of breastfeeding.
How can we hope to build AI that
recognises porn, when even US
Supreme Court judges have failed
to pin down what counts as obscene,
only concluding, I know it when I see
it? Even if we could, we shouldnt.
In the light of the pervasive powers
Demands to block explicit
with how teens and the
rest of us use the net
granted by the UK Investigatory
Powers Act and porn blockers
proposed by the Digital Economy
Bill, we should be wary of yet more
infrastructure to filter the internet.
What Hunt is proposing is real-time
processing of every image shared
digitally, says Tom Crick at Cardiff
Metropolitan University, UK.
Teen sexting: tech cant fix it
Hunts plea will play well with
concerned parents, but Crick, who has
been working to reform UK computer
education, views tighter controls as
not just technically unfeasible, but
strategically wrong. Were trying to
create competent and capable young
people who can confidently navigate
the internet, he says, not just trying
to protect them by shutting them out.
Excluding them could backfire,
shifting teen activity onto less
regulated services. While protecting
children online is clearly desirable,
its less obvious why tech firms, not
parents, should be responsible. If your
child is aged under 12, should they
have unsupervised access to the
internet? says Crick.
The health secretarys comments
betray our uneasiness about sexual
awareness in young teens. Theres no
doubt that were seeing a dramatic
change in norms around sex and
sharing sexual content, which comes
hand in hand with the potential for
abuse through revenge porn and
extortion. But sexting isnt going away,
and demands to block explicit images
refuse to engage with how teens
and the rest of us use the internet.
If the minister really wants to tackle
problems around sexual activity and
mental health in young people, he
ought to spend less time demanding
magical fixes and more time ensuring
Britains youth can access high-quality
sex education and well-funded mental
health services.
10 December 2016 | NewScientist | 19
 TECHNOLOGY
MAIKID/GETTY

profiles belonging to Chinese

citizens. That means the system
could have picked up on
differences between the two
sources rather than in peoples
faces. Wu and Zhang tried to
counteract this by standardising
the images, for example making
them the same size and turning
them greyscale.

AIs often share biases with

humans they are tools
forged using our own
beliefs and observations

But Jonathan Frankle from

the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology says thats not
enough. The fact that the data
comes from two different places
is a fundamental flaw. Any
differences will be picked up,
Who has that guilty look? he says.
Its not a problem to ask a

A mugs game
controversial question, says
Franois Chollet, a deep learning
researcher at Google, but the
science has to be well founded.
It is not ethical to make a bad
An attempt to link peoples appearance with criminality highlights the science argument, he says.
Mike Cook at Falmouth
technical and ethical limits of face recognition, finds Timothy Revell University, UK, says that this kind
of research risks turning machine
WHAT can your face say about set out to disprove the idea that It eventually learned to tell the learning into the phrenology of
you? Face recognition systems can there could be a link between difference, achieving an accuracy the 21st century, like deducing a
pick up on things like age, gender someones face and criminality of up to 90 per cent, they say persons traits from the bumps on
and maybe even your mood. so we were very surprised by (arxiv.org/abs/1611.04135v2). their head. Seemingly impartial
Now, two researchers say it the result, says Wu. However, other face recognition computer programs give an air
could even tell whether youre The researchers exploited experts have questioned their of legitimacy to inaccurate or
a criminal. They are claiming to machine learning, asking face methodology. One issue is that controversial interpretations.
have developed a system that, recognition software to guess the images of criminals came Suddenly, the conclusions
when shown a series of faces it has whether a person in an ID-style from a Chinese database of ID drawn by an algorithm have
never encountered before, is able picture was a criminal or not, and photos, whereas the non-criminal been cleaned up and made to
to pick out the ones belonging to then feeding it the correct answer. images were from internet look scientific, he says.
those with criminal convictions. In fact, these systems are not
Other researchers have objective and are often subject
criticised the soundness of the AI CAN TELL IT FROM YOUR FACE to the same biases as humans.
work, and say it raises important Working in real time, face faces of Chinese, Japanese and [They] are tools that are forged
ethical questions over what face recognition systems can already Korean people with an accuracy of by being hammered with our
recognition technology can and outdo us in some ways. They are 75 per cent again, better than us. own beliefs and observations,
should be used to detect. capable of identifying demographic Other systems can distinguish says Cook.
Its clearly an emotionally information such as someones between expressions associated Thats not to say computers
charged subject, says Xiaolin gender and age more accurately with emotions such as anger, cant make accurate observations
Wu at McMaster University in than a human can, for starters. disgust or happiness by analysing about a persons face, sometimes
Hamilton, Canada, who co- Analgorithm developed at the facial features. One has learned to more skilfully than humans. Face
authored the study. He and his University of Rochester, New York, recognise if someone is tired with recognition software can already
colleague Xi Zhang at Shanghai can even differentiate between the over 95 per cent accuracy. easily pick up on things like the
Jiao Tong University, China, had shape of a persons nose or

20 | NewScientist | 10 December 2016

For more technology stories, visit newscientist.com/technology

App turns phones

whether they are smiling, and This can give people up to a minutes
much more (see AI can tell it notice that an earthquake is on its
from your face, below left). way. That might not sound like

into seismic sensors

But even where the science is much,but its enough to get under a
sound, ethical questions arise table and to stop moving trains.
over how these algorithms Kong believes MyShake could
should be applied in the real offersimilar warnings anywhere in
world. Detecting someones AN APP is revolutionising earthquake At the moment, the app just records the world with just a few hundred
ethnicity, for example, could be detection. Called MyShake, it turns data, but Kong plans to add an alert phones per 100 square kilometres.
used to better target services, but anyones smartphone into a feature to future versions that can One of the biggest challenges
it could also be used todiscriminate. seismology tool, and the projects warn users of earthquakes and give of using smartphones to detect
And when considering firstresults show it is surprisingly them a chance to reach safety. earthquakes is distinguishing the
more complex or abstract effective. He hopes that MyShake will shakes from other activity. A normal
characteristics than nose shape We found that MyShake could take off in places that cant afford earthquake sensor doesnt have to
or age, its important to know detect large earthquakes, but expensive dense networks of cope with being put on a selfie stick,
the limits of what the technology alsosmall ones, which we never earthquake sensors. There are not
can tell us. thought would be possible, says many sensors in Nepal, for example, A normal earthquake
Alexander Todorov at Qingkai Kong from the University despite the number of earthquakes sensor doesnt have
Princeton University says you ofCalifornia, Berkeley, who is a that hit the country but many tocope with being put
simply cant glean someones co-creator of the app. Since launching people have smartphones. If enough onaselfie stick
general personality or behaviour in February, it has detected more residents of Nepal started using
from a snapshot of their face. Its than200 seismic events across MyShake, it should be possible to usestuffed into a pocket or carried in
super easy to tell if a person is theworld using data captured by the data to give the kind of warningsa rucksack, so any wobbles that it
sleep-deprived based on paler 200,000people. that are currently only possible in feels can be attributed to possible
skin and droopy eyes, he says There are many teams that have wealthier countries with more earthquakes. Not so with a
and this could even be used to tried this before, but the MyShake app established sensing systems. smartphone.
prevent someone engaging in is the first that has actually worked. In Japan, a dense network of To solve this problem, the My
a task that requires alertness, Its a great result, says Rmy Bossu earthquake sensors means residents Shake team trained a neural network
such as operating dangerous from the European-Mediterranean can be sent a notification as soon asto distinguish between earthquake
machinery. But if it is used to Seismological Centre in France. approaching rumbles are detected. shakes and regular shakes recorded
predict what the person is like by a smartphone. They then coded
in general, this is wrong. this information into the app,
Researchers do not always have so whenever MyShake detects
control over how their work is movement it can quickly determine
used. Making findings public, as whether its from an earthquake or
Wu and Zhang have done, means just someone jostling their device.
that anyone can scrutinise their The team ran simulations and
validity, but it doesnt have to experiments, but they couldnt be
be that way. What would scare sure it would work until the app was
me more would be if a private released and used.
company did this and sold it to The network of smartphone
a police department. Theres detectors has proved to be quite
nothing to stop that from sensitive. It is often able to record both
happening, says Frankle. the initial P-wave from an earthquake,
Earlier this year, Frankle and which travels fast but doesnt tend to
his colleagues found that the cause much damage, as well as the
majority of US police departments S-wave, which travels more slowly but
using face recognition do little is far more damaging. By recording the
to ensure that the software is difference between the wave arrival
accurate. As the technology times, its possible to calculate the
becomes more widely used, location of the earthquakes epicentre.
so does the urgency of weighing The team will present their results at
up the ethics of its use. the American Geophysical Unions
REUTERS/NAVESH CHITRAKAR

Computer scientists are gaining meeting later this month.

increasing power over peoples Im positively impressed by the
lives, says Chollet, but they dont quality of the records they present,
have the ethical education to says Bossu. Smartphones are going
support that role. This is to be key in the future of earthquake
something we have to fix. Any warning is valuable detection. Timothy Revell

10 December 2016 | NewScientist | 21

 TECHNOLOGY ONE PER CENT

Tic-tac-toebot
Robots need multiple skills to play simple games, says Aviva Rutkin

YOUR move, human. This robot
is preparing to deal with the
world by learning to play noughts it needed to figure out how to
and crosses.
Also known as tic-tac-toe, the
game requires players to take
turns drawing Xs or Os on a grid
in a race to get three of their
markers in a row. Its a simple
affair compared with other games
mastered by artificial intelligence A robot must be able to
in recent years, such as Go and
Jeopardy. But teaching a physical
robot to play is trickier.
Heriberto Cuayahuitl at the
University of Lincoln in the
UK and his colleagues saw the
paper-and-pencil puzzle as an
opportunity to train a humanoid
robot in multiple skills at once
using deep learning.
The robot wasnt
preprogrammed to make the
decisions or actions needed to
win the game. To play successfully,
perceive its surroundings,
understand verbal instructions
and interact appropriately with its
environment. Essentially, it had to
use different senses to make a
judgement about how it should
make appropriate choices
if it is to work alongside
humans in daily life
behave and then act accordingly.
For a robot to learn what to do
and say, based on what was heard
and seen, is not a trivial task,
says Cuayahuitl.
These skills arent just for fun.
Any robot destined to work
alongside humans in daily life
will need to be able to take in
different types of information
and make appropriate choices
based on what it learns.
The team worked with
humanoid robot Baxter, developed
by Rethink Robotics in Boston.
They equipped Baxter with
software and sensors so it could
see its surroundings, recognise Android app attack
speech, move its head to follow
Malware has breached more than
the gaze of the other player and
a million Google accounts and
move its arm to draw its own
counting. The Gooligan attack,
noughts or crosses in the grid.
which infects Android devices
The robot could also serve
when users download dodgy apps,
up a handful of preprogrammed
was discovered by security firm
comments at appropriate
Check Point. The malware makes
moments, such as I take this
the device install and rate apps
one when it claimed a box on
promoted in adverts, netting
the grid, and Yes, I won!
the attacker money from the
Seven humans took turns
advertising network. Google
playing with Baxter, which always
is working with Check Point
selected to play noughts over
to investigate the issue and
crosses when it started a round.
is notifying affected users.
Deep learning algorithms helped

it improve its game, as it figured
out how to better perceive and
respond to the humans actions.
In the end, it won or tied 98 per
cent of the time.
The work is being presented
this week at the conference on
Neural Information Processing
Systems in Barcelona, Spain.
Down the line, Cuayahuitls
team thinks their system can
help efficiently train interactive
robots. Future versions of their
experiment may attempt
broader conversations with
humans, or take on more
complicated games. The team is
also planning to teach the robot
to take its opponents emotions
into account, so instead of
30
trillion tonnes: the weight of the
technosphere, the entire material
outputofhumans(TheAnthropocene
Review, doi.org/bt9k).
Predicting drug recalls
Could internet searches identify
faulty medicines? Elad Yom-Tov
atMicrosoft has trained an
algorithm to predict drug recalls
based on queries made to the
Bingsearch engine. The system
predicted recalls of specific drugs
KIM KULISH/CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES

winning every time, it could aim aday before they happened by

to perform in a way that makes identifying spikes in searches
its opponent happiest. about them (arxiv.org/
CLEMENT OLALAINTY

The idea is to endow robots abs/1611.08848). The approach

with the ability to develop and/or could help find bad batches, says
improve their own behaviours Yom-Tov.
Your turn, Baxter over time, says Cuayahuitl.

22 | NewScientist | 10 December 2016

APERTURE

24 | NewScientist | 10 December 2016

Glowing, living catapults
THESE glowing orbs harbour the progeny of
a strange life form. Their goal? To propel that
progeny as far away as possible so it can conquer
new habitats. An explosive launch will eventually
help them disperse their contents.
They are the sporangia of fern plants, found
on the underside of their leaves, or fronds.
These sporangia grow in clusters called sori and
are seen here under a fluorescence microscope,
which uses a higher-intensity light source
than conventional microscopes and labels the
specimens with a fluorescent substance . This
results in beautiful images that enhance the
3D features of small specimens: the sporangia
dont normally glow like this.
Inside them grow the plants spores, which
appear as brown blobs in this image. The spores
are so tiny that propelling them any distance is
quite a challenge.
To achieve this, the sporangia function as an
ingenious biomechanical catapult. As they dry,
the cells of the annuli the green spines down
the middle shrink. This causes the annuli to
bend outwards, opening up the sporangia.
The spores cling to the inner surface of the
sporangia. As the annulus cells lose more water to
evaporation, dissolved air or water vapour forms
gas bubbles inside. Once one bubble has formed,
it sparks a chain reaction, creating bubbles in
neighbouring cells. The bubbles make the cells
snap back into their earlier positions, flinging
spores in all directions. Sam Wong

Photographer
Rogelio Moreno
Science Photo Library

10 December 2016 | NewScientist | 25

 You are a mind reader who doesnt know your own mind. A maths genius who
doesnt understand risk. Biased and prejudiced, yet a member of
the most supremely cooperative species on the planet. As a human
being, you are a mass of contradictions
and all the more amazing for it.

Read on to find out how to harness the

best and avoid the worst of what you are

OU ARE... AN ASSHOLE
YOU ARE... AN ASSHOLE

We are wired to be prejudiced and a bit racist but our

instinct for collaboration can trump our worst instincts

ROM Brexit to President Trump, recent political quiet. Volunteers seemed to be processing

F events have let some nasty cats out of the bag.

Racists and xenophobes are on the march.
But perhaps that shouldnt be so surprising: after
all, that is what we are.
Heres the unpalatable truth: we are biased,
prejudiced and quite possibly a little bit racist.
Psychologists have long known that we put people
into little mental boxes marked us and them. We quickly disappeared when participants were
implicitly like, respect and trust people who are the
most similar to us, and feel uncomfortable around
everybody else. And before you deny it, this tendency
towards in-group favouritism is so ingrained we often
dont realise we are doing it. It is an evolutionary
hangover affecting how the human brain responds
to people it perceives as different.
In one study from 2000, just showing participants
brief flashes of faces of people of a different race was
enough to activate the amygdala, part of the brains
fear circuitry, even though the participants felt no
conscious fear. According to more recent research,
however, the amygdala doesnt just control fear; it
responds to many things, calling on other brain areas
to pay attention. So although were not automatically
scared of people different from us, we are hardwired to
flag them. Evolutionarily, that makes sense: it paid to
notice when someone from another tribe dropped by.
Were also prone to dehumanisation. When Susan
Fiske at Princeton University scanned volunteers
brains as they looked at pictures of homeless people,
she found that the medial prefrontal cortex, which is
activated when we think about other people, stayed
the homeless people as subhuman.
The bad news is how fast this automated
us and them response is, and how wired in it
is, says Fiske. The good news is that it can be
overcome depending on context. In both the
homeless study and a rerun of the amygdala
study, Fiske found that fear or indifference
asked questions about what kind of food the
other person might enjoy. As soon as you have
a basis for dealing with a person as an individual,
the effect is not there, says Fiske.
Whats more, what we put in the them and us
boxes is remarkably flexible. When Jay Van Bavel at
New York University created in-groups including
people from various races, volunteers still preferred
people in their own group, regardless of race. All
you have to do to head off prejudice, it seems, is
to convince people they are on the same team.
We are also instinctively cooperative, at least when
we dont have time to think about it. Yale University
psychologist David Rand asked volunteers to play
gambling games in which they could choose to be
selfish, or cooperate with other players for a slightly
lower, but shared, payoff. When pressed to make a
snap decision, people were much more likely to
cooperate than when given time to mull it over.
So perhaps youre not an asshole after all if you
know when to stop to think about it and when to go
with your gut. Maybe, just maybe, there is hope for
the world. Caroline Williams

26 | NewScientist | 10 December 2016

WHAT

YOU

ARE
SKIZZOMAT

10 December 2016 | NewScientist | 27

OU ARE... A PHYSICS GENIUS
YOU ARE... A PHYSICS GENIUS
You perform fiendishly complex calculations
every second of the day
HE washing-up pile wobbles
precariously as you balance
another saucepan at its summit.
For a second, it looks like the whole
stack will come down. But it doesnt.
Swiftly, instinctively, you save it.
Congratulations not just on another
domestic disaster averted, but also on
showing a peculiarly human genius.
Octopuses rival our dexterity, New
Caledonian crows have a frighteningly
clever way with tools and chimps beat
us in tests of short-term memory. But
no other species can perform complex,
real-time calculations of their physical
environment and generate specific,
actionable predictions quite like the
ones that rescued your crockery.
Its kind of amazing, says artificial forcing them to engage their motor
intelligence researcher Peter Battaglia
from Google DeepMind in London. To
me it defies my ability to understand.
In 2013, Battaglia and two colleagues
showed that our inbuilt physics
engine works in a similar way to a
graphics engine, software used in video
games to generate a realistic playing
environment. It is programmed with
rules about objects physical behaviour,
and uses limited real-time inputs (from
a player in a game, from our senses in
reality) plus probabilistic inference to
generate a picture of what comes next.
What you have in your head is some
means for running a simulation, says
Battaglia. You make a 3D model of
whats around you and press the run
button, it tells you what will happen.
Its a way to predict the future.
Earlier this year, Jason Fischer at
Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore,
Maryland, and his colleagues scanned
the brains of people doing a task
involving physics intuition predicting
how a tower of stacked wooden blocks
would fall and showed that the
physics engine sits in specific brain
regions. Areas of the motor cortex
associated with the initiation of bodily
28 | NewScientist | 10 December 2016
movement consistently lit up during
MOMENT OPEN/GETTY
the first task, but not on a second,
purely mathematical task, estimating
the number of different coloured
blocks in the tower.
That was surprising at first, says
Fischer. But on the other hand it
makes perfect sense: you dont execute
any action without mental models.
So our inbuilt genius wont necessarily
help us with physics as an academic
discipline, which relies on different
brain circuits. That much is clear in
experiments where researchers get
people to draw the predicted path of
a falling object, says Fischer: their
intuitions are completely off. But have
them catch the same falling object,
system, and theyre spot on.
Theres still a lot to learn about
how we generate our simulations
not least given that our devices power
consumption, at around 20 watts, is
less than a tenth that of a medium-
range graphics card. The type of
processing we use is clearly vastly
more efficient, says Battaglia.
What you have in your
EFENZI/GETTY
head is a method to
predict the future
But we should be aware of our
limitations, too. Our physics engine is
programmed with the equations of
classical mechanics, which describe
the visible world around us things
like falling plates. It does not work so
well on less obvious layers of reality.
Understanding electromagnetism and
quantum mechanics, our instincts are
not going to be so useful, says Fischer.
There, things dont stack up so easily.
Richard Webb
 YOU ARE... A BELIEV
YOU ARE... A BELIEVER

Think youre an atheist? Heaven forfend! Your default is to believe

in the supernatural, and there is no manual override

ingers crossed, touch wood. By the One is the suite of cognitive abilities learned reference guide to what is

F time you finish this, youll believe

you believe in the supernatural.
For most of us, that is a given. The
vast majority of people are religious,
which generally entails belief in a
supernatural entity or three. And yet
amid the oceans of religiosity are
archipelagos of non-belief. Accurate
numbers are hard to come by, but even
conservative estimates suggest that
half a billion people around the world
(and counting) are non-religious.
But are they, really? Among the
scientists who study the cognitive
foundations of religious belief, there is
a widespread consensus that atheism is
only skin-deep. Scratch the surface of a
non-believer and youll find a writhing
nest of superstition and quasi-religion.
Thats because evolution has
endowed us with cognitive
tendencies that, while useful for
survival, also make us very receptive
to religious concepts. There are
some core intuitions that make
supernatural belief easy for our
brains, says psychologist Ara
Norenzayan at the University of
British Columbia in Canada.
known as theory of mind (see You are a
mind reader, page 30), which enable us
to think about and intuit other peoples
thoughts. Thats damn useful for a
social species like us, but also tricks us
into believing in disembodied minds
with mental states of their own. The
idea that mind and body are distinct
entities also seems to come instinctively
to us. Throw in teleology the tendency
to seek cause and effect everywhere,
and see purpose where there is none
and you can see why the human brain
is a sitting duck.
The same thought processes
probably underlie belief in other
supernatural phenomena such as
ghosts, spiritual healing, reincarnation,
telepathy, astrology, lucky numbers
and Ouija boards. These are almost as
common as official religious beliefs;
three-quarters of Americans admit to
holding at least one of ten common
supernatural beliefs.
With all this supernatural equipment
filling our heads, atheism and scientific
materialism are hard work. Overriding
inbuilt thought patterns requires
deliberate and constant effort, plus a
factually correct and what is right and
wrong. Just like a dieter tempted by a
doughnut, willpower often fails us.
Many experiments have shown
that supernatural thoughts are easy
to invoke even in people who consider
themselves sceptics. Asked if a man
who dies instantly in a car crash is
aware of his own death, large numbers
instinctively answer yes. Similarly,
people who experience setbacks in
their lives routinely invoke fate, and
uncanny experiences are widely
attributed to paranormal phenomena.
Obviously, it is impossible to
prove that everyone falls prey to
supernatural instincts. There is
no more evidence than a few studies,
and even they do not provide
enough support for the argument,
says Marjaana Lindeman, who
studies belief in the supernatural
at the University of Helsinki, Finland.
Nonetheless, the supernatural
exerts a pull on us that is hard to
resist. If youre still under the
illusion that you are a rational
creature, that really is wishful
thinking. Graham Lawton

ets begin with the obvious. You

L are the product of billions of years

of evolution, the accumulation of
trillions of gene-copying errors. Thats
what led single cells to evolve into
YOU ARE... A MUTANT jellyfish, ferns, warthogs and humans.
Without mutations, life would never
Genes from other species, and cells from your have evolved into Darwins endless
relatives, live inside your body and they forms most beautiful, and you would
hint at how we can improve ourselves never have seen the light of day.
Today, while most of our genes are
undeniably Homo sapiens, many of us
also carry DNA from other species. We
have known for a decade that people of
non-African descent inherit between
2 and 4 per cent of their DNA from
Neanderthals. And we now know that
DNA from several other extinct >

10 December 2016 | NewScientist | 29

 YOU ARE... A MIND R
human species is also still in circulation, YOU ARE... A MIND READER
on every continent including Africa.
Not only do you carry DNA from other Our ability to guess what other people are thinking
species, you probably also play host to is the secret sauce of human society
other peoples cells. Before you were born,
your mothers cells crossed the placenta
into your bloodstream. Decades later,
some of these migrants are still there in
your blood, heart, skin and other tissues.
This microchimeric exchange was
mutual: if you are a mother, your children
may still be inside you in the form of their
embryonic stem cells.
You may even be carrying cells from
your grandmother and any older siblings.
Because microchimeric cells persist for a
long time, there is a chance that during
pregnancy, your mother was still carrying
cells from any previous children she had,
as well as cells from her own mother and
she may have shared some with you.
Maternal microchimerism is extensive,
says Lee Nelson at the University of
Washington in Seattle, and probably
useful too. There are so many examples
in biology where organisms thrive as a
result of exchange why wouldnt it also
be useful for humans to exchange cellular
material? Fetal cells may help to repair a
mothers damaged heart tissue and lower
her risk of cancer. Other research shows
that mothers can end up with their childs
DNA in their brains, something that may eet Sally and her flatmate Andy. compelling TV soaps, sculptures or
even be linked to a reduced risk of the
mother developing Alzheimers.
In future, we could become mutants by
M Sally has made a birthday cake
for Andy, and leaves it in the
fridge while she pops out to buy some
books. Some think William Shakespeare
must have had a particularly well-
developed theory of mind to create
design. Gene-editing tools like CRISPR candles. While shes gone, Andy sneaks such rich, complex characters.
should allow genetic diseases to be into the kitchen, takes the cake and Mind reading is also crucial for
treated by injecting genes into the body. hides it on a shelf to consume at leisure. societal norms. People not only
For example, a small number of people When Sally comes back, where does she respond to what you do, but to what
with a mutation in the CCR5 gene, which think the cake will be? you intend to do, says Call. If you hit
supplies a protein to the surface of white If you answered the fridge then someone with your car, the difference
blood cells, are resistant to HIV. CRISPR congratulations: you understand that, between a verdict of murder or
opens the possibility of inserting that based on what they know, people can manslaughter depends on your intent.
mutation into the DNA of others, giving have different views from you. You Yet we cant all read minds equally
them a genetic vaccine against the virus. possess a theory of mind something well, says Rory Devine, a psychologist
From there, its only a baby-step to that informs your every waking moment, at the University of Cambridge. Most
genetic superpowers. Ethical questions says Josep Call, a psychologist at the of us come a cropper when attempting
notwithstanding, future generations University of St Andrews, UK. When nested levels of mind reading. Think
could be enhanced with genes for extra- we get dressed in the morning, were of Sally hunting for her cake again,
strong bones, lean muscles and a lower constantly thinking about what other but imagine where she might look if
risk of cardiovascular disease and cancer. people think about us. No other we take into account what she thinks
A mutation in the ABCC11 gene currently animal can match our ability, making it about how Andys mind works. The
found in about 1 in 50 Europeans even the essential lubricant for the social more recursive steps we add, the
renders underarms odourless. Think of interactions that set humans apart. more we stumble. When you go
the savings on deodorant. Be warned, Take the arts. Artists must be able beyond five levels, people get really,
however: this mutation also makes your to imagine what their audiences will really bad, says Call.
ear wax dry up. Swings and roundabouts. think of their characters. Without a Being a good mind reader pays.
Sean ONeill theory of mind, there would be no Children who are relatively proficient

30 | NewScientist | 10 December 2016

 YOU ARE... A MENAGERIE
later report being less lonely, and their
teachers rate them as more sociable.
We may be able to improve our skills.
We know our mind reading apparatus
mostly develops before the age of 5, and
the principal factor that determines its
development is whether our families
and friends talk much about the
emotions and motivations of others.
The ability to read minds is something
we might learn gradually from the
guidance of others, says Devine.
This suggests that it could help
to just think about what its like to
be in other peoples shoes. Recently,
Devine and his colleagues showed that
this learning can continue far beyond
early childhood. When they asked 9
and 10-year-old children to read and
discuss short vignettes about social
situations, the team found they
developed better mind-reading
skills than children in a control group.
Last night, legions of
Similar improvements have also been
seen in people over the age of 60.
Youre never too old be a better mind
reader. Gilead Amit
YOU ARE... A MENAGERIE
Other creatures inhabit your every crevice. Take care of
the right ones and theyll take care of you
ast night, while you were sleeping,
L legions of eight-legged creatures
had an orgy between your eyebrows.
No, you havent suddenly been invaded
by sex tourists. Demodex mites, close
relatives of ticks and spiders, are
permanent and mostly harmless
residents of the human face.
Every person weve looked at, weve
found evidence of face mites, says
Megan Thoemmes at North Carolina
State University in Raleigh. You can
have thousands living on you and
never even know theyre there.
Growing up to 0.4 millimetres long,
these beasts spend their days buried
head-down in hair follicles gorging on
who-knows-what and crawling out
under cover of darkness to copulate.
They have no anus, so on death disgorge
a lifetime of faeces into your pores.
Before you lunge for the exfoliating
brush: Demodex mites are far from
your only microscopic residents. You
host astonishing biodiversity, from
anus-less arthropods to pubic lice to
all manner of bacteria and fungi, and
without it you wouldnt be who you
are. Each of us is really a complex
consortium of different organisms,
one of which is human, says Justin
Sonnenburg at Stanford University
in California.
Our resident aliens arent all benign.
There are big beasts like parasitic
worms: roundworm, hookworm
and whipworm are prevalent in the
developing world, and pinworm still
eight-legged creatures
had an orgy on your face
infects kids in the West. Then there are
hidden viruses such as Herpes simplex,
which lies dormant inside the nerve
cells of two-thirds of people until it
mistakes your sniffles for a deadly fever
and attempts to save itself by rushing
outwards, causing cold sores.
By far the dominant group, however,
are bacteria. You have at least as many
bacterial cells as human cells, perhaps
10 times more. Only recently have we
begun to grasp the extent of their
diversity, and theres plenty left to
discover. This year we found the first
bacteria that survive by parasitising
other bacteria. They live in your spit.
Similar battles play out across your
many habitats, from the caves of your
nostrils and your anal-genital badlands
to the crevices between your toes where
the fungus Trichophyton rubrum can
flare up as athletes foot. All of these
critters are constantly shedding from
your skin and lungs, forming your own
unique cloud of airborne bacteria that
follows you everywhere.
But the densest microbial gathering
is in our gut, a community that affects
aspects of health from digestion and
immune defences to possibly even
mood and behaviour. In mice, seeding
the gut with Lactobacillus rhamnosus
bacteria has been shown to alleviate
anxiety, perhaps by producing
molecules that alter brain chemistry.
The balance of gut microbiota can
shift rapidly in response to diet and
lifestyle. To tend it you need to feed it
right. Your best bet isnt much-hyped
probiotics or live bacteria, but simply
to eat more fibre, the preferred meal
for a group of bacteria with potent anti-
inflammatory powers. It has been
known for a long time that plant-based
fibre is associated with good health,
says Sonnenburg. Now we know why.
Daniel Cossins
10 December 2016 | NewScientist | 31
OU ARE... A FANTASIST
YOU ARE... A FANTASIST
Think youre saner, smarter and better-looking than
the average? Well so does everyone else
ver had the sense that everyone
E else is an idiot? Maybe thats a tad
overblown, but when it comes to
smarts, looks, charisma and general
psychological adjustment, theres no
denying you are a cut above the average
person in the street. Or on the road:
have you seen how those jerks drive?
Well, heres the bad news. Pretty
much everyone else is thinking the
same thing.
The phenomenon of self-
enhancement viewing ourselves as
above average applies across human
ages, professions and cultures, and to
capabilities from driving to playing
chess. It does have advantages.
People who are more impressed with
themselves tend to make better first
impressions, be generally happier and
may even be more resilient in the face
of trauma. High self-estimation might
also let you get ahead by deceiving
others: anthropologist Robert Trivers at
Rutgers University in New Brunswick,
MIKE POWELL/GETTY
32 | NewScientist | 10 December 2016
New Jersey, argues that when weve
tricked ourselves, we dont have to
work so hard to trick others, too.
Confidence also helps in finding
a romantic partner, and so in
reproduction. When it comes to
overestimating our looks, were all at
Men have a frog prince
delusion: persisting in a
positive self-perception
it although men are on average
worse offenders than women.
According to a study earlier this year
by Marcel Yoder of the University
of Illinois in Springfield and his
colleagues, men seem to suffer from a
frog prince delusion: they accurately
assess other peoples lesser perception
of them, while persisting in a more
positive perception of themselves.
The real downsides come when
youre less aware of how others perceive
you. If you are self-confident without
being self-aware, you are likely to be
seen as a jerk. Its hard to come off as
humble or modest when youre clueless
about how other
people see you,
says Yoder. Plus
we may make bad
decisions on the
basis of an inflated
sense of expertise
or understanding.
Particularly
in the political arena, our bias blind
spot a belief that our world view
is based on objective truth, while
everyone else is a deluded fool can
become problematic, especially as the
echo chamber of social media exposes
us to fewer contrary views. It can
make opposing parties feel that the
other side is too irrational to be
reasoned with, says Wenjie Yan, who
studies communication at Washington
State University in Pullman.
So how can we preserve the good
while avoiding the downsides?
Different strategies and training
programmes do exist for overcoming
D LEGAKIS/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
our inbuilt biases. Most begin by simply
making people aware of them and how
they can affect our decision-making.
At home, we can use an exercise that
psychologists call perspective-taking.
This amounts to trying to see a dispute
from the other persons point of view,
says Irene Scopelliti, who studies
decision-making at City University of
London. She also points out that acting
when youre all riled up in a state of
high emotion only entrenches your
bias. We know how to make unbiased
decisions, but often emotion pushes
us, or we arent willing to put in the
effort, she says. But then comes the
good news: practice can make us
better. Tiffany OCallaghan
 YOU ARE... AN ATHLET
YOU ARE... AN ATHLETE

No creature can run faster, further than humans can.

And yes, that includes you

couple of months ago, Daniel have a high proportion of slow-twitch

A Lieberman set out on the race of

a lifetime. A 25-mile slog in the
Arizona heat, climbing a mountain
more than 2000 metres tall. To top it
all, 53 of his competitors had four legs.
This was the 33rd annual Man Against
Horse Race.
Lieberman, by his own admission
not a great runner, outran all but
13 horses and so could you.
Lieberman studies human
evolutionary biology at Harvard
University, and part of his work over
the past 15 years has focused on a
unique set of adaptations that suggest
modern humans evolved not just to
walk, but to run long distances.
One is our cooling equipment. The
fact we have sweat glands all over our
body and weve lost our fur enables us to
dump heat extremely effectively, says
Lieberman. This is crucial when running
for long periods. It helps to explain why
animals struggle to beat us in the heat,
even though sled dogs can run more
than 100 kilometres a day pulling
humans in cold climates. Hence also
Liebermans success in Arizona. The
hotter it is, the better humans are able
to run compared with horses, he says.
Then there are adaptations that
offset our clumsy, inefficient bipedal
frames. Short toes and large gluteal
muscles assist with balance and
stability. The Achilles tendon and other
springs in the feet and legs help us to
store and release energy. We tend to
Born to run
Human long distance running speeds compare favourably with animals over a similar distance
SOURCE: DOI: 10.1038/nature03052
muscle fibres, which produce less
power but take longer to tire than the
short burst, fast-twitch fibres needed
for sprinting.
The nuchal ligament at the base of
the skull also helps to keep our heads,
and therefore our gaze, steady when we
run. Other decent runners such as dogs
and horses have one, but theyre not
found in poor runners such as pigs
and non-human primates or early
hominids like Australopithecus. Many
of these adaptations are specific to
running, suggesting were not just
good at it because we are good walkers.
One theory is that we began running
as scavengers, where an ability to
outrun other carnivores to reach
fresh meat was to our advantage. As we
improved, we became better hunters,
able to track and outrun our prey over
large distances before we had spears
and arrows. This all helped to provide
us with the extra protein we needed
to acquire our greatest advantage: a
bigger brain. The features that we see
in the fossil record that are involved in
running appear about when we start
to see evidence for hunting. And soon
thereafter their brains start to get
bigger, says Lieberman.
So can you unleash your inner
marathon runner? In a word, yes.
Genetics is important but training is
key, says sports scientist Chris Easton at
the University of the West of Scotland
in Hamilton, UK. Youll need stronger
leg and bum muscles, to be sure, but
you can get these simply by starting
to run. You will find it hard to increase
the proportion of slow-twitch muscle
fibres you have, but if you find yourself

LOWEST HUMAN RECREATIONAL ELITE MARATHON flagging, take your time and take
SPEED RUNNER RUNNERS comfort in the fact we evolved to jog,
rather than sprint, over the finish line.
8.3 11.5 15.1 23.4
Millions of people run marathons
Speed (km/h) 10 15 20 and people tell us we are crazy, says
Trotting Cantering Wildebeest Postal horses Lieberman. Actually, its part of who
pony pony (historical) we are. Catherine de Lange

10 December 2016 | NewScientist | 33

YOU ARE... SCARED
YOU ARE... SCARED
Dont panic! Your inbuilt fear factory means you
falsely assess risk but you can get savvier
n the aftermath of 11 September 2001,
I most people in the US believed that
they or their families were highly
likely to become victims of terrorist
attacks. Which is just off the charts
crazy when you think about it for even a
minute, says Dan Gardner, an author
and risk consultant based in Canada.
Instead of boarding planes, people
in the US got in their cars. Over the
following five years, the annual death
toll on the road was on average 1100
higher than it had been in the five
preceding years.
We are, in general, appalling at
assessing risk: driving is inherently
riskier than flying, terrorists or no
terrorists. We also underestimate
our chance of divorce, and spend more
than is rational on lottery tickets and
less than is rational on climate change.
We fear our kids being abducted, so
drive them to school, ignoring the
greater risks that poses to their health
and well-being.
How to do better? First, switch off
your gut. Psychologists characterise
our risk problem as a clash between
system 1 and system 2 thinking. System
1 is the product of evolved biases shaped
over thousands of years. If you saw a
shadow in the grass and it was a lion
and you lived to tell the tale, youd
make sure to run the next time you saw
a shadow in the grass, says Gardner.
This inbuilt fear factory is highly
susceptible to immediate experience,
vivid images and personal stories.
Security companies, political
campaigns, tabloid newspapers and ad
agencies prey on it. System 1 is good at
catastrophic risk, but less good at risks
that build up slowly over time hence
our lassitude in the face of climate
change or our expanding waistlines.
So when your risk judgement is
motivated by fear, stop and think:
what other, less obvious risks might I
be missing? This amounts to engaging
the more rigorous, analytical system 2.
34 | NewScientist | 10 December 2016
People who deal with probability and
risk professionally have been found
to use system 2 more, among them
bookies, professional card players and
weather forecasters. Meteorologists
get a bad rap, says Gardner, but they
tend to be highly calibrated, unlike
most of us.
These people receive precise,
near-immediate feedback about
their predictions abuse for a false
weather forecast, or a crucial card trick
lost which helps them constantly
recalibrate their risk thermometer.
Thats something we can all do.
Choose something specific you want
to improve your risk intelligence for,
says Dylan Evans, a risk researcher.
What time will your spouse be home
tonight? Make bets with yourself.
Were you right? Keep track.
That sounds trivial in the home,
but its crucial in business. Part of the
problem in the run-up to the financial
collapse of 2008 was that individuals
were no longer accountable for their
own actions, says Andre Spicer, who
studies organisational behaviour at City
University of London. At banks, there
was no direct relationship between what
you did and the outcome, says Spicer.
That produced irrational decisions.
Theres one feature you see over
and over in people with good risk
intelligence, says Gardner. I think it
wouldnt be too grandiose to call it the
universal trait of risk intelligence
humility. The world is complex be
humble about what you know, and
youll come out better. Sally Adee
We spend more than
is rational on lottery
tickets and less on
climate change

YOU ARE... A COPYCAT
Work out what controls how you behave and you can curb
bad habits and encourage good
ou wouldnt stand facing the
Y back of the lift or sit out front
in the garden, would you? Well
there you are. Proof positive that
youre not in control of your actions
the people around you are. And not
just them. Your environment controls
you, as do habits you dont even know
you have. But realise whats really
pulling your strings, and you can work
out how to manipulate yourself for
the better.
US social scientist Roger Barker
was the first to notice this sort of
environmental control. Back in the
YOU ARE... A COPYC
1950s, he observed the population of
a small US town, and realised that the
best predictor of a persons behaviour
was not personality or individual
preferences, but their surroundings.
People in a shop behaved as people in
shops do. Ditto for libraries, churches,
bars, music classes, everything.
More recently, Wendy Wood of the
University of Southern California
and her colleagues have shown how
almost half of the behaviours we adopt
in any given situation are habitual an
automated action learned by repetition
until we do it without thinking. These
were a wide range of behaviours,
says Wood, including eating, napping,
watching TV, exercising and talking
with others.
Social control bubbles up from
beneath, too. Reputations are so
important in the social world, says Val
Curtis, who studies behaviour change
at the London School of Hygiene and
Tropical Medicine. Society is founded
on cooperation, and we cant benefit
from it unless we gain acceptance by
adhering to the unwritten rules. So we
face front in the lift.
We work this way because
neurons are expensive to run. If we
had to do everything consciously,
we would have no energy for anything
else automation frees up processing
power. We notice that when we lose
the comfort blanket of subconscious
control. If you have ever walked into a
restaurant in a foreign country, you are
almost paralysed until you work out
what everyone else is doing and then
copy them, says Curtis.
Identifying your unconscious
workings provides you with ways
to fine-tune your behaviour. For a
start, if you want to change bad
habits, have a look at where and
how you enact them, and then try to
disrupt that pattern. If you want to
stop smoking, avoid the places where
you are likely to spark up, or move
your cigarettes out of sight. If you want
to start eating more healthily, stop
meeting friends for lunch at a burger
restaurant. Yes, you think now that
youll order the salad, but when you
get there, the cues and smells will be
hard to resist, says Wood.
Curtis has used such insights
to develop ways to encourage
handwashing with soap in India and
to modify the tendency for mothers
in Indonesia to feed their children
unhealthy snacks. She suggests we
can all prime ourselves in similar
ways. If you think you ought to do some
exercise but dont really feel like it, just
put your running gear on anyway, and
wait and see what happens, she says.
The kit takes you for a run. You let it
control your behaviour. Julia Brown
10 December 2016 | NewScientist | 35
 HE village of Satlykovo, just east of the
T Ural mountains in Russia, is no more.
The main street is knee-high in nettles,
its houses bulldozed. All around, the land is
blooming. Nearby forests harbour elk and
wild boar. The lake is home to radioactive carp.
One morning 59 years ago, soldiers came
and ordered the villagers to leave. Their cattle
were destroyed and buried, and they could not
even take with them the clothes they stood up
in, says Islam Bagautdinov, who has driven
me here through military checkpoints.
There were no explanations. The troops
didnt say that there had been an explosion
at a factory a few kilometres away; or that
the blast had propelled radioactive dust into
the air, forming a deadly plume that rained
out across Satlykovo and the surrounding
countryside. The very existence of the Mayak
complex, where weapons-grade plutonium
was made, was a military secret.
Over the next 600 days, thousands of
bemused people from Satlykovo and 22 nearby
Fred Pearce goes into the
exclusion zone of one of the
biggest and the most hidden
nuclear disasters ever
ZONE OF
SECRETS
36 | NewScientist | 10 December 2016
villages were evacuated, 20,000 hectares of
farmland was put out of use and a permanent
exclusion zone was created. Barring a few in
the CIA, nobody in the outside world would
know of it for two decades.
Through this long period of secrecy, Soviet
researchers surreptitiously collected data on
the villagers and their children. Now under
analysis by Western and Russian researchers,
this data is offering new insights into the ways
chronic exposure to radiation affects health.
In November 1976, Soviet dissident Zhores
Medvedev wrote about the Mayak disaster
in New Scientist and the secret was out, to
the Western world at least. The Soviet public
wasnt told until the era of glasnost, or
openness, in the late 1980s. Only then did
the evacuees, by now spread across the Soviet
Union, learn about their radiation exposure.
This summer, I became the first Western
journalist to visit the Mayak evacuation zone,
a fenced-off 100-square-kilometre area known
as the East Ural State Reserve. These days,
ALEXEY ZHENIN
Waste was just thrown in
[the river]. We were in a
race to make bombs
radiation in the air is barely above background
levels in most areas, but higher concentrations
lurk in the soil and vegetation. The only way
to get a significant dose here now would be to
eat large amounts of berries and mushrooms,
says Oleg Tarasov, chief wildlife researcher
in the reserve.
The ban on people living in the exclusion
zone is likely to remain for at least another
hundred years, says Yuri Mokrov, ecology
chief at the state-owned Mayak Production
Association, which still runs the complex.
Mayak remains a central part of the Russian
nuclear industry, these days focused on waste
management and reprocessing.
Nature has prospered in the absence of
humans, much as it has in the exclusion zone
around the Chernobyl disaster site in Ukraine.
The reserve contains more than 200 species
of birds and 455 species of plants, including
locally rare species like ladys slipper orchids.
The biodiversity is better than in other
reserves in the Urals, Tarasov told me as we
drove down bumpy tracks. There are lots of
elk, boars, foxes and hares. They understand
they wont be hunted, so they come and they
reproduce much better than elsewhere. Small
mammals like moles and voles that are closely
connected to the ground get much higher
radiation doses and are more affected. We
find some genetic abnormalities.
The 1957 accident was just one of a series of
major radioactive releases from Mayak at the
height of the cold war (see A catalogue of
calamities, right). The most damaging of these
wasnt even an accident. For years after the
plant opened in 1949, waste water was poured
The Techa was the most radioactive river in
the world yet thousands used it daily
into the Techa river, which became easily the
most radioactive in the world. Waste was just
thrown in. We were in a race to build bombs
there was no time to do anything else,
says Sergey Romanov of the Southern Urals
Biophysics Institute, based in the closed town
of Ozersk a few kilometres from the plant.
Official estimates put the total release
into the river between 1949 and 1956 at 100
petabecquerels, making it the third largest
nuclear disaster after Chernobyl and
Fukushima. About a quarter of this was
strontium-90 and caesium-137, isotopes
with half-lives of around 30 years. William
Standring of the Norwegian Radiation
Protection Authority, who has reviewed the
data, says it caused severe contamination
down the entire length of the Techa river,
including its extensive floodplain.
Thousands of villagers downstream drank
the rivers water, ate its fish and wildfowl,
swam in its waters and let their cattle graze
its meadows. In 1951, restrictions were
introduced. Given no explanation, local
people mostly ignored them. Fences went up
along the floodplain in 1956, and little by little
some 10,000 people living in 19 riverside
villages some of them 100 kilometres
downstream of the plant were evacuated.
Homes were bulldozed to prevent anyone
returning, and the villages were removed
from official maps. These removals would
later become a model for emptying villages
hit by the 1957 explosion.
Later, there was a third major release
of radioactivity. Starting in the late 1950s,
engineers had begun building a cascade of
dams on the Techa. Radioactive waste was
dumped into swampy reservoirs upstream
of the dams and allowed to settle out into
the sediment instead of flowing downstream.
In 1967, one of the reservoirs, Lake Karachay,
briefly dried out. The radioactive sediments
on its exposed bed were whipped up by
strong winds and fell to earth downwind.
The lake remained the most radioactive >
A CATALOGUE OF CALAMITIES
1949 Mayak Production Association
opens. Operators begin pouring
waste into the Techa river.
1951 Villagers are told not to use
the river, but many still do.
Medical teams start searching
for signs of radiation sickness.
1953 First riverside village is evacuated.
1956 Techa floodplain fenced off.
10,000 people in 19 villages
are moved.
1957 29 September: explosion
at Mayak nuclear plant.
Evacuation of 22 additional
villages begins.
1958 Exclusion zone is created.
1967 Lake Karachay reservoir dries
up. Radioactive sediments are
blown out over the region.
1976 Zhores Medvedev writes about the
1957 explosion in New Scientist.
1989 Local people are told what
has happened.
2006 Vitaly Sadovnikov leaves Mayak
Production Association following
the revelation that strontium-90
was discharged into the Techa river
in the early 2000s.
10 December 2016 | NewScientist | 37
Top to bottom: Entering the exclusion zone;
encephalitis-bearing ticks call for protective
clothing; Satlykovo village is now grassland;
Muslyomovo wasnt evacuated until 2010
body of water in the world until late last year,
when it was finally emptied and concreted over.
Now an underground plume of radioactive
water extends for 10 square kilometres.
The catalogue of disasters at Mayak is
testimony to the sacrifice of human life as
Soviet bomb-makers sought to keep up with
the US in the cold war arms race. But the story
also reveals the remarkable and chilling ability
of Soviet medical researchers to secretly
monitor the tens of thousands of people who
had unwittingly been exposed to very high
doses of radioactivity. Starting in 1951, teams
headed out to villages to find signs of radiation-
related sickness. Later, they tracked down
evacuees to log their illnesses and deaths.
Alexander Akleyev is director of the Urals
Research Centre for Radiation Medicine
(URCRM) in Chelyabinsk, the regional capital.
His organisation has been monitoring the
people affected by the events at Mayak since
the early 1950s. He says that initially, even
scientists only dimly appreciated the dangers
posed by the contamination of the Techa river.
In the 1950s, humanity did not know about
possible effects of chronic radiation
exposure, he told me. No emergency
programmes were developed that could allow
quick decisions to protect the population.
Over the decades, researchers at the URCRM
have followed two main groups of villagers:
30,000 people exposed to radioactivity in the
Techa river, and 22,000 exposed to the fallout
from the 1957 explosion. Around 1500 people
fall into both groups: evacuated from the river
in 1956, they once again came into harms way
beneath the 1957 fallout.
If children drank milk from cows grazed on
the river floodplain, the URCRM knew about it.
If villages hunted waterfowl, that too was
recorded. At the URCRMs Chelyabinsk
headquarters, I spoke to Ludmila Krestinina,
who leads its epidemiologists. She said the
villagers exposure has been calculated in
detail and correlated with their health data.
According to Krestininas colleague
Dmitriy Burmistrov, one hour wandering
near the river was at times enough to
provide a radiation dose comparable with the
maximum annual allowable dose for radiation
workers. This kind of sustained exposure
was unprecedented, and has had severe
consequences. The villagers downstream of
Mayak are the only people in the world outside
nuclear plants ever to be diagnosed with
ALEXEY ZHENIN
chronic radiation sickness. Like everything
else, that diagnosis was kept hidden from
them until the 1990s.
38 | NewScientist | 10 December 2016
The condition is less severe than acute
radiation sickness, which affects people
immediately after exposure to a massive
burst of radiation, but can cause long-term
illness. It is characterised by extremely low
haemoglobin levels in the blood, a range of
neurological and immune-system disorders,
fatigue, sleep disorders, loss of muscle control,
disturbances to the digestive system and bone
pain. The long-term data show that cases
peaked in 1955 and 1956. By 1960, some 940
people had been diagnosed, some in villages
100 kilometres downstream. They included
almost two-thirds of Metlino villagers, who
lived on the Techa before their village was
moved to a new location within the 1957
fallout zone.
People began to recover from many, if not
all, of their symptoms between three months
and a year after they moved out of the zone.
But the data also suggest that chronic
exposure to higher doses of radioactivity can
lead to some irreversible damage. Bone disease,
particularly of the spine, was a common long-
term symptom.
Long-term cancer risk
Typically, chronic radiation sickness declared
itself around five years after first exposure.
Other consequences emerged later: during
the 1970s, an excess of leukaemia and cancer
started to show up among the evacuated
villagers. In 2013, a team of epidemiologists
led by Krestinina and Faith Davis at the
University of Alberta in Canada concluded
that radiation had nearly doubled the risk of
leukaemia among Techa riverside residents.
Krestinina is now following more than
30,000 children born to villagers who were
exposed to radiation. She is looking for genetic
effects cascading down the generations, and
the impact of radiation received while still
in the womb. Reassuringly, similar studies
have so far found no sign of such effects, but
Krestinina says it is too soon to say for certain.
Within 10 or 15 years, we should know if we
can see an effect in causes of death among
this next generation, she told me.
Recently, Western epidemiologists have
begun studying the data and findings
are feeding into the rules for running
nuclear facilities. Dale Preston is a US-based
biostatistician who has studied radiation and
health data for over three decades. He says
nuclear industry researchers have begun
arguing that low doses of radiation received
over long periods may cause much less illness
Triple disaster that he had allowed strontium-90 into the
river in the early 2000s. He wasnt convicted,
Radioactive waste from the Mayak nuclear factory was dumped into the Techa river from
thanks to an amnesty, but a court document
the early 1950s. Then, in 1957, an explosion released a plume of airborne radioactive dust over
the region. In 1967, another such plume was whipped up from the dried-up Lake Karachay reveals that the discharges raised radioactivity
in the river beyond legal limits at several
Strontium-90 contamination 1957 plume villages downstream.
(petabecquerels per km2) Explosion at Mayak Some of the radioactivity that flowed down
3.7 10- 2 nuclear facility the Techa in the 1950s still remains on its bed,
7.4 10-3 smeared across its extensive floodplain and
7.4 10-4 secreted in marshes, ready to be washed
1.85 10-4
back into the river by floods and carried
3.7 10-5 1967 plume downstream. The contamination is
1.85 10-5
rom Lake K
3.7 10-6 redistributing all the time, says Svetlana

50 km The health of 52,000

Mayak people was tracked for
nuclear
facility
Techa river
decades, secretly at first
Kostina, the deputy-head of environmental
matters for the Chelyabinsk region. She says
the restrictions on access to the floodplain are
being reassessed but many will have to remain
for generations to come.
People do now understand that they are
East Ural State Reserve
inhabiting a contaminated area, but still fish
(exclusion zone) and swim in the river and have ducks and
geese for food, wrote Galina Tryapitsyna
Satlykovo of the URCRM in a report to an international
workshop last year. Some communities drink
New Metlino contaminated water and milk from cattle that
Ozersk Old Metlino eat hay mowed from the floodplain. Even
far downstream, anglers may be hooking
Mayak
nuclear contaminated fish that have migrated from
Muslyumovo
facility near the plant.
Techa river
Lake Just a few hundred metres from the gates
Karachay to the exclusion zone, one house remains
Ozersk closed occupied. It belongs to the family of Tarasov,
SOURCE: D. PRESTON

administrative and our party picnicked there before heading

region
than equivalent doses in a short burst. As a
result, the industry has called for occupational
exposure limits to be relaxed. The Mayak
records undermine that theory, says Preston.
There is, he says, no evidence of a reduction in
effect at low doses. On the contrary, he argues
that the findings unequivocally show for the
first time that being exposed to low doses of
radioactivity increases your risk of a variety
of cancers, including leukaemia. Moreover,
the increased risk of cancer doesnt go away
if chronic exposure is reduced or eliminated.
Other researchers are re-examining the data
on thyroid cancers resulting from releases of
50 km
radioactive iodine at Mayak. This work could
help resolve a huge debate in Japan over
whether an apparent surge in thyroid cancers
around the Fukushima nuclear plant is a result
of radiation from the 2011 accident, or whether
doctors have simply documented cases that
would otherwise have gone unnoticed.
About 4000 people still live along the
Techa. Many of the fences erected to keep
them away from the river are down, and
warning signs have disappeared. There have
been further radioactive discharges. In 2006,
Mayaks chief executive Vitaly Sadovnikov
left the company after a local court learned
into the forbidden area. This place is quite
safe in terms of radiation, despite its closeness
to the exclusion zone, insists Tarasov. The
fruit and vegetables that we grow in the
garden do not contain an increased number
of radionuclides. Nor do the mushrooms
and berries in the forest around the house.
They can be eaten without any limitations.
This has been verified by our laboratory.
He has no fears for his family as a result of
the radiation next door. Provided they remain
outside the exclusion zone itself, they are safe,
he says. The main actual danger here is not
radiation but the ticks. They carry encephalitis
and their bite can cause severe illness. But the
radiation we dont worry about.
Fred Pearce is a consultant for New Scientist

10 December 2016 | NewScientist | 39

PEOPLE
The road to hell is paved
with corporate wellness
Our knowledge economy jobs are disappearing, and now theyre
coming for our bodies. Andr Spicer explains how the brave new
world of work is giving us a collective nervous breakdown
So what is this obsession in corporate culture
with enhancing health and happiness?
Theres always been debate over whether a
happy worker is more productive, but a more
interesting question is how employers are
now intervening to make things better. In
the last decade or so, theyve suddenly become
interested in employee happiness and are
designing workplaces to make the physical
space itself increase happiness. One company
built a workplace to look like a pirate ship.
But most interventions involve the
employees themselves. BP gave each employee
a Fitbit. It was a gift and using it was optional,
but increasing numbers of companies are now
insisting you use these things. At a hedge fund
in London, the traders have to wear them, plus
record things such as their diet and sleeping
habits, and then the employer correlates that
with their trading activities. At one Swedish
utility company, if you dont go to the gym as
part of your working week, you get paid less.
Does the research on any of these
interventions stand up?
There is a lot of research showing that if you
exercise regularly, youre likely to be happier,
or that after doing exercise you might find
certain cognitive tasks a bit easier. But does
it actually make employees more productive
and efficient? Theres not much good data
to answer that question. The measures that
employers use to assess such things are rarely
what youd call scientifically robust. Theyll
often use employee satisfaction measures.
The beatings will continue until morale
increases. That sort of thing?
Exactly. A study about employer health
interventions showed they have very low
take-up, and that even when people do adopt
40 | NewScientist | 10 December 2016
them, they dont work that well. In particular,
corporate weight-loss programmes arent
effective. The truth is that we dont really
know what happiness does or doesnt do for
us in the workplace, nor are we quite sure how
to define it. Nevertheless, to make us happier
and more productive, companies want to
monetise happiness using untested research
with untested results, and with methods that
might actually make us less happy.
If health interventions are not particularly
effective, why are firms introducing them?
One of the big trends weve seen over the
last couple of decades has been the extension
of workplace control from the traditional
nine-to-five to the 5 am to 9 pm because
of smartphones and extended informal
working hours. Management wants to
understand whats happening in the rest
of their employees lives and begin to
track and control it. Health is part of that.
So this is all about companies squeezing
everything they can from their staff?
Thats one aspect. The second part is a cultural
shift what psychologists or philosophers
would call category mistakes. Employers
are starting to equate physical fitness with
corporate competence. Its this idea that if
youre slim and running marathons, youre
going to be a fantastic CEO. From 2001 to 2011,
the proportion of CEOs in the US who ran
marathons doubled, and you can be sure
those marathons are featuring on their
CVs. Give employers a choice of two CEOs
with exactly the same skills and theyll
almost always choose the slimmer one.
Your hobby can no longer be the community
garden or whatever youve been doing.
You have to be running marathons.
PROFILE
Andr Spicer is
aprofessor of
organisational behaviour
at City, University of
Londons Cass Business
School. His latest book is
The Stupidity Paradox:
The power and pitfalls
of functional stupidity
at work, co-authored
with Mats Alvesson
What about the job prospects for the rest of us?
Theres a lot of nervousness around what jobs
might be replaced by computers especially
in so-called knowledge work. We have this
myth of the knowledge economy that arose
following the decline in manufacturing in
Western nations. Manufacturing jobs needed
to be replaced with something else, so we
had the rise of the knowledge worker:
insurance jobs, auditing, any job in which
intellectual labour replaced physical labour.
But theres a mismatch in the economy

between what is actually needed and what
people want from their knowledge job. The
reality is that most jobs in these so-called
knowledge companies consultancies and
that sort of thing are routine and boring.
You can learn the skills in a few days. You
didnt need to spend years at university.
These jobs have been dubbed bullshit jobs.
Is that the academic term?
In a sense. In 2013, anthropologist David
Graeber wrote a short article titled On the
phenomenon of bullshit jobs. It struck a
nerve and was shared by millions of people
around the world. Graeber says a bullshit job
is one that the employee thinks is meaningless
and the world would be better off if it didnt
exist. Off the back of that article, YouGov did
a survey of British adults last year, in which
37 per cent of respondents said their job did
not make a meaningful contribution to
the world. The article chimed with a lot of
people who really think, Whats the point
of what Im doing here?
Photographed for New Scientist by Marc Schlossman
Was there a link between the rise of the
knowledge economy and the rise of such jobs?
Absolutely. So many knowledge economy jobs
are bullshit jobs. And, crucially, these are also
the ones that are now being automated away.
A University of Oxford report on artificial
intelligence and jobs estimated that 47 per
cent of current jobs in the US are at risk of
becoming automated, and most of those likely
to be replaced are things like auditing and
insurance jobs classic knowledge roles. The
ones that wont be computerised are jobs like
masseuse, life coach and personal trainer.
So that explains this new economy built around
self-enhancement, happiness and the body?
Yes, thats one way of creating new forms of
employment when knowledge-economy work
is in decline. We are transitioning to the body
economy. Its also simply capitalism: what do
you do when all other sources of growth have
been exhausted? You turn to peoples private
lives and you begin looking into their bodies
When people are asked to
attend to their happiness,
they just end up feeling
more anxious
and psychologies. You turn their minds and
bodies into something you can sell.
Another factor here is that the major
employment and societal trends we are seeing
make people feel very vulnerable, like they
lack control. But they still feel they can make
a tangible difference to their body. This
vulnerability is symptomatic of a collective,
culture-wide nervous breakdown.
Are things at work really that bad?
Think about it. The jobs are disappearing, the
ones that are left dont feel rewarding, and our
performance is increasingly being measured
using things that arent in our job description.
And were encouraged to constantly monitor
our own happiness, by employers asking that
question or monitoring it on a regular basis.
This actually makes it likely we will start feeling
less happy. A lot of the happiness literature has
been ignored on this: studies show that when
people are asked to attend to their happiness,
they just end up feeling more anxious.
Well, Im a bit depressed now.
Sorry.
Interview by Sally Adee
10 December 2016 | NewScientist | 41
CULTURE

Where we map the

line of human lives
From Donald Trumps proposed Mexican wall to the horror of two
world wars, a new exhibition reminds that us that the map isnt
necessarily the territory, says Boyd Tonkin

four-million strong map and trenches, exposure as that

Maps and the 20th Century: Drawing
chart collection for exhibitions required imagination rather than a
the line, British Library, London, to
that warn us not to treat the clear sight of the charts. The map
1 March 2017
cartographic orthodoxy of the day was not the territory: countless
OUT of the scores of maps on as gospel truth be it the Mercator thousands died as a result.
display at the British Library, Projection, Ordnance Survey or The art of Biography, rhymed
one in particular should snare Google Maps. One 2001 show the English humorist Edmund
the attention of President-elect had the sternly didactic title Lie Clerihew Bentley, Is different
Trump. It shows how in 1864 a of the Land. The latest exhibition from Geography. Geography is
section of the Rio Grande that confines itself to the 20th century, about maps, But Biography is
marks the US-Mexico border with an especially strong sample about chaps. From the Nazi map
changed course due to flooding, of the maps that provoked and of the US that identifies states
pushing the 600-acre Chamizal accompanied two world wars with high German immigration
tract and its people into another and the cold war that ensued. as propaganda targets to the early
country. Where to build that wall? infographic that plots income-
Eventually, Mexico got its land Maps of Icelands receding distribution in 1966 Los Angeles
and people back. But most visitors Breiamerkurjkull glacier by neighbourhood, we never
to Maps and the 20th Century will helped sound the alarm forget that chaps make maps
readily agree that the map is not on climate change for and about other chaps.
the territory a dictum coined by Within their folds, or across
the engineer-philosopher Alfred Inspect the beautifully crafted, their pixels, human and physical
Korzybski. We know that history, 3D relief maps of the Western geography converge. Advances in
ideology and changing scientific Front that Haigs staff pored over technology will never banish the
norms have always shaped those during the first world war and you shaping spirit of the cartographer.
deceptive but indispensable shudder. Back in their chateaux, A 1990 satellite-generated
charts that frame space and staff officers sought to bypass depiction of Earth from Space
freeze time. gradients, slopes and woods while consists of thousands of separate
The Chamizal dispute, however, missing the perils of level open images woven into an artificial
suggests another, more unsettling ground barbed wire, mud, tapestry: just as much a fiction,
HEINRICH BERANN ATLANTIC FLOOR NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE JUNE 1968

variable: one that exists not just arguably, as the Navy League
in cartographers heads but on world map of 1901 that coats most
the shifting earth. Maps of the of the planet in imperial scarlet.
receding Breiamerkurjkull Curator Tom Harpers selection
glacier in Iceland helped sound reminds us that the satellite and
the alarm on climate change as digital imaging behind the maps
human agency (unless youre in cars and phones now has a
Donald Trump) began to modify decades-long history. GPS began
the mappable terrain. These days, in 1973. Its early documents can
even the territory itself may not look quainter than any medieval
JON ELLIS THE BRITISH LIBRARY

count as solid ground. fantasy: the frail lines of Bell

This isnt the first time the Labss 1995 map of global internet
British Library has plundered its traffic on one day are as lonely as
the course of Columbuss caravels.
During the first world war, maps When maps advance the
depicted Britain as an evil spider propaganda aims of corporations

42 | NewScientist | 10 December 2016

For more books and arts coverage, visit newscientist.com/culture
Atlantic Ocean floor: home to part
of Earths longest mountain range
or of states, decoding them is a
relatively simple task. We quickly
get the point, even before an evil
giant spider straddles Europe in
both British (1915) and German
(1941) colours. More nuanced,
and troubling, thoughts arise
when a genuine quest for as much
accuracy as instruments and
techniques permitted drives map-
makers to either flatter power or
stiffen resistance to it.
No item at the show moved me
more than the minutely detailed
plan of the Auschwitz-Birkenau
concentration camp sent by
the Jewish Agency and Polish
government-in-exile to the UKs
Foreign Office in 1944. It was
created in support of the vain
effort to secure Allied bombing
raids on the railway lines that fed
the extermination camps. This
was topographical exactitude
in the service of humanity.
Less nobly, the Abadan oil-
refinery map of 1949 with the
Iranian plant plotted down to its
last fence and tree was created
not to win a political argument
but the cold war itself. Pretty often insistence on maps as agents
in the exhibition, cartographers
are shown to yoke science (sound
for the time) to selfish ends. Take
a Rwandan mineral-deposit map
from 1963, with land carefully
punctuated by symbols of the
wealth beneath: from Fe and Sn,
even some Au, down to the Co that And whatever happened to those
powers the phone that stores your projected major airports in
maps and stoked the wars of
Central Africa.
Inevitably, the categories
can overlap. Better, perhaps,
to get lost amid the cartographic
cornucopia than try to follow a
fixed path like the earnest pipe-
puffing ramblers on the covers
of inter-war OS maps. The leaps
between culture and context yield neighbour. Under Soviet eyes,
mind-stretching views, as when
Harry Becks electrical circuit
diagram of the 1931 London
Underground shares a space with Boyd Tonkin is a writer and critic. He
a mattang, a navigational stick
chart from the Marshall Islands.
This time-honoured seafarers aid
not only locates islands with a
schematic audacity to rival Beck,
but even indicates ocean swell.
Just like the European traders
and commanders who landed on
their palm-fringed shores, Pacific
islanders took a strictly practical
view of mapping the seas. The
features that mattered either
helped people cross them, or
threatened to shipwreck their
craft. Only towards the end of the
19th century did the emerging
science of oceanography allow us
to pore over the submarine world
with the same awe inspired by a
The minutely detailed plan
of Auschwitz-Birkenau was
topographical exactitude
in the service of humanity
contoured map of the Himalayas
or the Alps. A 1960s chart of the
Atlantic Ocean sea floor shows the
spine of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge
snaking along the seabed from
Iceland to the sub-Antarctic
Bouvet Island at about 15,000
kilometres, it is part of Earths
longest mountain range.
Closer to home, Harpers
of change and vectors of power
allows startling glimpses of
ourselves as others see us.
Luftwaffe bombing charts
of Liverpool may seem fairly
familiar; less so a map of the post-
war Abercrombie Plan for London.
Romford and Orpington?
As late as 1990, authorities
in the Soviet Union compiled
classified military maps of the UK
based on their standardised grid,
Sistem 42. The section devoted
to the UKs south coast supplies
another, stranger identity for the
resort of Brightons posher
sedate Hove has mutated into
glamorous and sinister KOB.
was chair of the judges for the 2016
Man Booker International Prize
10 December 2016 | NewScientist | 43
CULTURE

The meaning of fuel

Blowing up common words is messy, says Paul Graham Raven

Fuel: A speculative dictionary
by Karen Pinkus, University of
Minnesota Press, $25
WE ALL know what
the word fuel
means. We must
do the word
litters our
discourse around
climate change,
green energy and
sustainable development goals.
We surely couldnt spend that
much time and effort using a
word we didnt fully understand?
Academic Karen Pinkus would
have it otherwise, and her book
Fuel: A speculative dictionary is
her attempt to (re)define this
crucial term of debate. She is
interested in the current futurist
rhetoric around fuel, but rather
than focusing on todays much-
hyped energy solutions, she
reaches instead for the fiction
shelf, bending and stretching
the term in order to capture a
surprising array of candidates
for fuelhood.
It is this sense of potential that
particularly exercises Pinkus:
whether a substance can be
articulated as a potential fuel
of the future through narrative
means. The ill-defined distinction
between fuels and energy, which
petroleum companies, among
others, have every reason to
blur, is why genuine future
fuels never actually come to be,
for their time is never any precise
moment of political-technical
cooperation.
As I know from personal
energy discourse isnt a popular
strategy, and recommending that does need to be read front to
demand be reduced is anathema.
Bring hope, say the policymakers, Even then, the line of argument
or stay at home.
The trouble is that hope is
inherently speculative: to hope
that X will work is to be implicitly
uncertain that X will work. And
so Pinkus is interested in the
persistent metanarrative of
the myth of future fuels
that mobilises our collective
aspiration to avoid having to
address our energy consumption.
If that sounds like a lot of
thinking for a fairly thin book,
well, thats not even the half of it. wood, coal, oil, uranium through
Pinkus totes a toolbox packed
with allegory and alchemy,
theories and thinkers with which
to prod her materials, and theres
too much going on to allow for
easy summary.
And thats without even talking
about the formal strategy of Fuel,
which is laid out like a dictionary,
with the terms to define in
alphabetical order. Unlike a
dictionary, however, it really
back for the argument to emerge.
has to work against the stop-start
of the dictionary structure. This
charming structural conceit
might well also be the books
greatest flaw.
The fuels catalogued range
from the (seemingly) obvious
Reducing the demand for
energy is anathema. Bring
hope, say policymakers,
orstay at home
the more fictional-imaginative
the philosophers stone, dilithium
crystals to the (seemingly)
absurd albatrosses, goats, the
arrow of Eros, patriotism. The
idea of, say, an engine fuelled
by patriotism is, outside some
rightish political circles, patently
preposterous. Nonetheless,
patriotism is often portrayed
as a motivating force that drives
men its almost always men
to action. Ditto Eross arrow.
Any project that multiplies
or makes new distinctions
between contested categories
is unavoidably a project of
complication. As such, I mean
no insult to Pinkus when I say
that Fuel left me with far more
questions than answers, and that
enthusiasts for simple statements
and clear conclusions should look
for enlightenment elsewhere.
But therein lies the rub,
because it is precisely that
impulse towards simplicity and
solutions that Pinkus would
like to squelch. No civil engineer
or infrastructure policy wonk
is going to make it through the
first five pages of Fuel its too
ambiguous, too touchy-feely-
thinky, too messy. In other words,
its too much like the world
outside the laboratory walls.
Paul Graham Raven is an
infrastructures futurist based
inSheffield, UK
TONY HOPEWELL/GETTY

experience, calling into question

the definition of key terms in

You may think you know what

a petrol station is...

44 | NewScientist | 10 December 2016

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

And where does belly-button fluff come from?

Find the answers in our latest book. On sale now.

Introduction by Professor Stephen Hawking

LETTERS
letters@newscientist.com @newscientist newscientist

EDITORS PICK
Reassuring news on hallucinations
From Dawn Wild,
Bristol, UK
I was interested to read about Charles
Bonnet syndrome, in which people
who are losing their vision experience
hallucinations (5 November, p 28).
At 92, my father had been losing his
sight due to macular degeneration for
some time. Travelling on a train from
Andover to visit us in Bristol he
became convinced that the other
passengers were growing green
beards and had green hair and very
ugly faces.
On entering our lounge he saw
little fires all over the floor and tried to
put them out with his walking stick.
I too was, he said, sprouting green hair
and a beard (and I am hisdaughter).
We took him to hospital, where
the doctor initially thought he had a
urinary tract infection: but his mind
was clear. She looked up his symptoms
and diagnosed Charles Bonnet
syndrome, while he saw birds and
monkeys flying through the hospital.
Having been assured he was not
mad he was able to cope with the
hallucinations. It is reassuring to
knowof this research, since the
manifestations were frightening.
So what is this clean
energy then?
From Teo Leyssen,
Crouzet, France
Martin van Raay says wood is not
a good fuel source, and that we
should use only clean energy
(Letters, 5 November). I am all
for using renewable energy,
even if we are still miles away
from producing all we need.
The term clean energy,
however, has no meaning. It
is a concept used for political
reasons. The writer does not
mention which form of energy
he is thinking of, but often
clean energy is taken to be
a combination of wind, solar
and water power.
All these, while cleaner than
coal and oil, have their own
problems. Water power changes
the aquatic environment, kills
fish and pollutes rivers with
lubrication oil. Wind power kills
birds. Solar power uses a lot of
energy in producing the panels.
We do not have a recycling system
for solar panels, so used solar cells
will end up in landfill.
Wood, used responsibly, is not
any worse than these. The only
clean energy is the energy we
dont use. Reducing energy use
is the only green option.
Report the true scale of
the energy mountain
From Paul Younger,
Glasgow, UK
I enjoyed the article by Mark
Harris on how batteries might
be made much more agile by
coupling them to ultracapacitors
(12 November, p 28). But in
casually equating energy supply
to electricity power generation he
makes a common but large error.
In Ireland, as in neighbouring

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52 | NewScientist | 10 December 2016

 A counter to the assumption that poor health
in deprived areas is always due to lifestyle
Anna Baatz draws a conclusion from a report that low social status
damages rhesus monkeys immune systems (3 December, p 15)

countries, electrical consumption
accounts for only about 20 per
cent of total energy consumption.
The remaining 80 per cent is
split roughly equally between
heating and transport fuels. So
the claim that in Ireland, wind
power now accounts for almost a
quarter of energy supply is off by
a factor of five. Exaggerating the
achievements of renewables
(wittingly or not) does nobody any
favours: it masks the scale of the
mountain we have to ascend to
thoroughly decarbonise energy.
Cold fusion just isnt
happening
From Nick Canning
Coleraine, County Londonderry, UK
I was surprised to read that cold
fusion research is still attracting
considerable funds from private
investors (17 September, p 34).
Most schemes seem to involve
transient heat produced in
electrochemical cells using heavy
water and palladium electrodes.
All plausible mechanisms
for fusion of the heavy waters
deuterium nuclei in these
experiments suggest that their
absorption into the palladium
lattice is essential. If cold fusion
were possible by this mechanism,
then it would also occur in
deuterium gas diffusing through
a single palladium crystal into a
vacuum. Such experiments have
never detected fusion. They may
detect transient heat until a
steady state of adsorption and
absorption of deuterium into
the palladium lattice is reached.
I conclude that the transient
heat is not due to fusion
reactions, but to this adsorption
and absorption. It will never
exceed the work done on the
electrochemical cell by the
external power source.
Do we really solve
puzzles while we sleep?
From Alwyn Eades,
Hellertown, Pennsylvania, US
Over the years I have seen
descriptions of problems solved
on waking up or after an extended
period of thinking about other
things, most recently by Peter
Robbins (Letters, 22 October).
The claim is that the problem
was solved, during sleep, for
example, by the subconscious.
I have often experienced the
phenomenon but have a different
interpretation. When faced with
a problem or puzzle, it sometimes
happens that I fail to solve it
because I set out down a path
which does not lead to the
solution but am unable to let go of
these initial thoughts. I get stuck:
repeating those unhelpful steps
over and over again. After sleep or
distraction, it seems to me that
the false steps have been deleted
from my memory and that
starting afresh the solution
becomes clear instantly.
The subconscious has not
solved the problem, the problem
was solved by restarting with an
unbiased mind.
What makes us
conscious?
From Nick Godwin,
Edinburgh, UK
I write in opposition to the view
that consciousness somehow of
necessity arises from matter,
rather than being intrinsic to it.
That view is implied several times
in Anil Ananthaswamys review of
Susan Greenfields book A Day in
the Life of the Brain (29 October,
p 44). He says, for example, that
objective neural activity turns
into the wine of subjective
conscious experience. The >

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10 December 2016 | NewScientist | 53

LETTERS
statement that we fade into
unconsciousness during
anaesthesia reflects the error. In
my experience, anaesthesia acts
with the immediacy of a switch:
the only way I could detect that
I had been under was that the
anaesthetist appeared suddenly
to flip to the other side of my
hospital bed.
It seems to me more likely that
the essence of consciousness
(albeit in a simplified state) forms
part of the primary substance of
material reality. The part played
by neural activity would then be
not to give rise to consciousness,
but to create a path of connection
to an innate subjectivity existing
behind all of material reality.
Dont misunderstand me, this
is not a call for belief in some kind
of mystical being. Rather, it is a
call to consider the possibility of
something intrinsic to reality that
takes the form of subjective
perception. After all, what would
be the substance of a universe
with no subjectivity, unable to
experience its own existence?
How could such a universe ever be
shown to exist, and by and to
whom?
TOM GAULD
54 | NewScientist | 10 December 2016
Show me the interesting
jobs, James Dyson
From Chris deSilva,
Dianella, Western Australia
James Dyson has said that
automation increases the
number of more interesting jobs
for people (12 November, p 24).
I challenge him to produce a list
of such jobs and estimates of how
many people will be employed in
them in the future.
A spin in the simulator
for learner drivers
From Andrea Stevenson,
Benalla, Australia
Timothy Revell writes of robots
learning to drive using virtual
reality (29 October, p 24). I have
long thought VR would be an
excellent tool for teaching
humans to drive.
Learners could encounter many
driving scenarios before going
onto real roads, experienced
drivers could prepare for unusual
conditions, and mistakes could be
quickly improved upon. The
computer could record the
drivers strengths and weaknesses.
letters@newscientist.com
So when drivers encounter a
dog in front of their car on a gravel
road for the first time, they will
know what to do.
Lives or the planet? You
choose wisely...
From Guy Cox,
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Which is more important, saving
lives or saving the planet? Clearly,
reducing the number of humans
can only be good for the planet,
but most of us are humane
enough to want to strike
a balance.
But Michael Le Page doesnt
seem to be interested in such a
balance when he advises us to
swap diesel cars for petrol ones
(29 October, p 16).
Diesel cars use much less fuel
than petrol cars and so produce
much less carbon dioxide. They
are also more fuel-efficient than
hybrids, by a smaller amount.
What is the good of improving
Londons air quality if London
goes under water? Whether
electric cars are better depends on
where the electricity comes from.
The alternative Le Page doesnt
@newscientist newscientist
mention is ethanol, a renewable
fuel. Cars that can use it are
available in many countries:
here in Australia it is even used
in V8 Supercar racing, countering
claims that motor racing is
environmentally irresponsible.
The importance of early
chefs, or of seafood
From Mike Sands,
Hart Village, County Durham, UK
Graham Lawton suggests that
cooking dates back a million years
and explains that the process is
highly cognitively demanding
and thus very time-consuming
(5 November, p 36).
Surely, this would lead to a
specialisation of labour, perhaps
more than other professions
such as knapper or nut-gatherer.
Perhaps chef should be accepted
as the new oldest profession.
From Bob Lister,
Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, UK
Lawton mentions the thesis
that cooking supplied critical
nutrients for brain development.
Chief among these is a ready
supply of fatty acids, particularly
omega -3, rather than calories.
These are readily supplied by a
marine diet that can be eaten raw
and without cooking and does not
require powerful chewing.
David Attenborough revisited
the Waterside Ape hypothesis
in two BBC radio programmes.
He cited recent evidence from the
Pinnacle Point caves in Mossel
Bay (Mussel Bay in English),
South Africa.
From about 160,000 years ago
people there enjoyed a diet of
seafood, including molluscs,
crustacea and algae.
Letters should be sent to:
Letters to the Editor, New Scientist,
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Email: letters@newscientist.com
Include your full postal address and telephone
number, and a reference (issue, page number, title) to
articles. We reserve the right to edit letters.
Reed Business Information reserves the right to
use any submissions sent to the letters column of
New Scientist magazine, in any other format.
MAKE
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DAVID STOCK
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Dont let the legs touch each
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10 December 2016 | NewScientist | 55
 FEEDBACK
THE UK government may have the
most pervasive surveillance laws
inthe Western world, allowing it
unprecedented scope to watch
citizens online (26 November, p6).
Atthe same time, its also in the grip
ofapuritanical fervour, trying to
limit what British web users can see.
The Digital Economy Bill proposes
that any site not approved by censors
would be blocked in the UK, while
health secretary Jeremy Hunt has
called on social media giants to
prevent teens sharing explicit photos.
Foremost in the campaign to think
of the children is MP Claire Perry.
During the debate over the recent
bill,she boasted that the automated
internet filters she helped implement
had made the UK one of the most
family-friendly places in the world
toaccess the internet.
Readers will note that as well as
blocking outreach websites such as
Childline and sex education portals,
these automated filters also decided
PAUL MCDEVITT
to protect Brits from such deleterious
material as, er, Claire Perrys own
website.
Spotted by Kevin Lee: What it required was
all ofus putting our heads together. Surgeon
Oren Tepper describes how his team separated
a pair of twins conjoined at the skull.
56 | NewScientist | 10 December 2016
WHO will save us from these
modern day Mary Whitehouses
and Anthony Comstocks
attempting to clean up the web?
Step forward LUSH cosmetics,
which is showing its support for
internet freedom with the Error
404 bath bomb. Sales will raise
money for campaigners fighting
internet shutdown across the
globe. So if you cant wait for the
next election, know you can fight
the power from the warmth of
your tub, and bask in the glow
of your own soapy slactivism.
Feedback wonders what other
bathroom goods might be co-
opted for political campaigns.
Free speech mouthwash? Rubber
duckies to raise awareness of
plastic in the oceans? Or perhaps
a combined shampoo/
conditioner supporting the
Middle East peace process
named Two State Solution?
THE strange confection of food and
politics that has gripped the UK
post-Brexit continues to find its way
For more feedback, visit newscientist.com/feedback
onto our plate. The nation was thrown
into spasms over threats to the supply
of Marmite, and the Department for
International Trade made bizarre
pleas for an ambassador to market
innovative jams to continental
Europe. What does it all mean?
We can only look to Chancellor
Philip Hammonds Autumn Budget
speech, in which he expressed
concern for Britains jams. Not fruity
breakfast spreads in this case, but
those citizens Just About Managing.
Sadly, the odd acronym was the
only sweetener to be found among
gloomy economic forecasts that
promise the squeezed middle will
hear its pips squeak before Brexit is
over, as will everyone else.
PREVIOUSLY Feedback presided
over concerns that a surplus of
words for things scatological was
fragmenting research papers on
the topic, as there was no agreed
definitive word for dung to search
for (27 August).
Linda Losito writes to say that
as a biology teacher, this caused
serious problems for foreign
students doing exams. Everyday
terms such as cowpat were not
in their vocabulary, sometimes
preventing them from answering
an entire exam question.
Consequently, Linda created a
list entitled They say the English
have 50 different words for poo.
She tells us this dictionary of
doody has now grown to include
59 words, from big job to FINALLY, after discovering that
whoopsie, and is used as a
resource by my English
department.
Thats one pile of muck you can
leave in the staff room without
complaints from colleagues.
ON A recent trip to South Africa,
Brian King discovered an unlikely
measurement for birthday cakes.
Stopping at a supermarket to buy one,
he was asked what size he wanted:
beer box or half beer box?
Apparently the cardboard trays
that hold 24 cans of beer were once
used to bake cakes in, says Brian.
The size description has remained,
as everybody here knows exactly
how big a box of beer is. Feedback
wonders if you need at least 18
candles on the cake to buy one.
THE publication of the Oxford
Dictionary of Family Names in
Britain and Ireland has renewed
appetites for nominative
determinism.
Luke McGuinness writes in to
say I had a chuckle when I saw
that the president of the Western
Australian Apiarists Society is
none other than Ian Beeson.
READER Avery Emery is still thinking
about the charming news related by
our colleagues that communities of
tiny creatures make their homes in
elephant footprints. I began to
wonder if some enormous creature
had made a similar footprint which
became our world, she says. If so,
one can only hope that he hasnt got
an offspring which is, literally,
following in fathers footsteps!
those working in science are the
most likely to want to leave a
status update after they die
(5 November), weve been fielding
readers suggestions. Having
survived a 440 volt shock in the
British Aircraft Corps Filton Wind
Tunnel, while testing Concorde,
says Roger Redman, I would like
to announce my passing with
Resistance was futile.
You can send stories to Feedback by
email at feedback@newscientist.com.
Please include your home address.
This weeks and past Feedbacks can
be seen on our website.

THE LAST WORD
French kisses
When visiting France, it became
obvious that French people kiss each
other in social situations much more
frequently than British people do.
Does this mean that the French
pass on more colds and flu, or does
this help children build up a better
immunity so they are less likely to
catch them in later life?
This is not kissing as such,
but more of a mutual touching
of cheeks known as faire la bise.
The etiquette is more than a
little complicated, however, and
theres lots of room for confusion.
As I understand from New
Scientist, handshaking is one of
the key ways of passing on cold
and flu viruses, along with
touching handrails and surfaces
previously touched by sufferers.
Hence cheek-kissing would seem
to be a safer way of greeting
someone without passing on
a contagion.
But despite the prevalence of
kissing, handshaking is also
more common in France than
in the UK. You cant walk into
the office in the morning without
going round shaking hands with
everybody.
When it comes to colds and flus,
I havent noticed any particular
difference in their spread in any
country Ive lived in. But then
again, in France, anyone who has
a cold almost religiously excuses
themselves from kissing.
I would say there is absolutely
no basis to the questions
hypothesis everything points
The writers of answers that are published
in the magazine will receive a cheque for
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items for clarity and style. Please include a
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published content.
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reserves all rights to reuse all question
and answer material that has been
Last words past and present at newscientist.com/lastword
to the culprit being handshaking. can survive for hours in fluids nights and enjoyed a tipple
Terence Hollingworth that would drown a human in with my dad. Sadly, on the third
Blagnac, France minutes. Your fly may have night it died, unnoticed, in his
swallowed a sip while grooming, beer glass.
but would not have gulped I would be happy to receive
Fly fishing (hic) enough to affect its ability to verification from your readers
stay on a chalk line. that grasshoppers might enjoy
The other day I fished a fly out of my Jon Richfield alcohol because this story is
Chardonnay. In its struggle, it must Somerset West, South Africa usually met with disbelief
have absorbed some of my wine. and derision.
Sitting on my finger, it cleaned The natural inclination for a Whether flies have similar
itself carefully and I expected it to flying insect is to fly in an erratic tastes to us and to each other
fly off somewhat erratically. It flew, path. This helps it to avoid is a mystery to me, however.
however, straight and true for as far being eaten by a bird. However, Sue Macpherson
as I could see it. So does alcohol not when it is drunk it has trouble By email, no address supplied
affect insects in the same way as it doing this and tends to fly in a
affects mammals? straight line. Some insects do react to
To test if the insect has had alcohol, or at least seem to. About
Alcohol affects most animals too much to drink, put it on a 50 years ago I was in a village pub
similarly, including insects, piece of paper and draw a straight in Kent with some friends and we
although their sensitivity varies line out from its nose. If it can spilled beer on the table. A large
greatly. The answer lies with how moth landed and began sucking
our mammalian morphology The natural inclination for up the beer. When it had finished,
differs from that of typical insects. an insect is to fly an erratic it described an ever-wider spiral
Mammals have a distinctly path. This helps it to avoid on the table-top and fell off on
perverse arrangement of being eaten by a bird to the floor. This may not be
breathing and swallowing conclusive evidence, but it gave
mechanisms. Whenever we follow the line without wavering, a very convincing impression
swallow, our survival rests on it is drunk and should not be of being extremely drunk.
a complicated arrangement of permitted to fly for its own safety. Ian Stewart
sensors, reflexes and valves that Hugh Roberts University of Warwick
marshal the traffic so that we Nelson, New Zealand Coventry, West Midlands, UK
may eat, drink, breathe and be
merry, with only the occasional In the 1950s, while I was living
life-threatening slug going down in the tropics, an emerald green This weeks question
the wrong way. grasshopper flew into the ceiling
A flys respiratory system, fan and landed, stunned, next to CLONING TO THE RESCUE
on the other hand, has its own my fathers beer glass. My dad Having cloned sheep and who
complications, but it inhales only carefully put a few drops of beer knows what else, wouldnt it be a
through spiracles that are totally into a bottle cap and balanced the good idea for scientists to begin
separate from the alimentary grasshopper on the rim. It had cloning the worlds endangered
tract. So when struggling for a drink, staggered around and species? Is there any reason
survival in wine, none of its finally flew away. not to?
reflexes cause it to swallow. Amazingly, the grasshoppper Stefan Badham
Many non-aquatic insects came back the following two Portsmouth, Hampshire, UK
submitted by readers in any medium
or in any format and at any time in the
future.
Send questions and answers to
The Last Word, New Scientist, 110 High
Holborn, London WC1V 6EU, UK, by email
to lastword@newscientist.com or visit
www.newscientist.com/topic/lastword
(please include a postal address in order
to receive payment for answers).
Unanswered questions can also be found
at this URL.
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