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 A BRIDGE TOO FAR
Lessons from Genoa
FIRST LIFE
It happened much, much
earlier than we thought
THE END OF MONEY
Hidden costs of
a cash-free world
WEEKLY August 25 – 31, 2018

HALF NEANDERTHAL, HALF DENISOVAN Astounding ancient hybrid discovered

Slimmer. Fitter.
Less stressed.
How a positive mind really can create a healthier body

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CONTENTS
newscientist.com/issue/3192

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On the cover
4 A bridge too far
Lessons from Genoa
5 First life
It happened much, much earlier
than we thought
36 The end of money
Hidden costs of a cash-free world
7 Half Neanderthal,
half Denisovan
Astounding ancient hybrid
discovered
28 Slimmer. Fitter. Less stressed
How a positive mind really can
create a healthier body
Plus Russia’s mystery satellite (6).
Organs in space (14). Glyphosate
and cancer (23). Scientific African
(22). Lucid dreaming (10).
Reversing ageing (26). Oldest
galaxies (13)
Leaders
3 The poorest will suffer if the
cashless dream fails. All bridges
should have structural redundancy
News
4 THIS WEEK Genoan bridge
collapse. Life began earlier than
we thought. Measles outbreak
6 NEWS & TECHNOLOGY
Is Russian satellite a weapon?
Huge ancient monument in Kenya.
Making universal blood. Half-
Neanderthal, half-Denisovan
teenager. AI finds hazardous lead
pipes in Flint. The galaxy’s many
water worlds. Drug boosts lucid
dreaming. Batteries made with
bacteria. Autism linked to lingering
insecticide. Old galaxies
discovered next door. Organs in
space. Psychedelic brew mimics
near-death experiences
16 IN BRIEF How to break spaghetti
in two. Fish eat their eggs to have
better babies. Mean robot overlord
Analysis
20 INSIGHT Gains in life expectancy
in the UK are faltering – here are
six possible reasons why
22 COMMENT Keep population
control out of the climate change
fight. All hail Africa’s mega-journal
23 ANALYSIS Does a commonly
used weedkiller cause cancer?
Features
26 The maverick putting
ageing in reverse Geneticist
George Church on how to turn
back the clock
28 Mind over matter How a
positive mind really can create
a healthier body
34 Ice sage The unschooled
Scotsman who first explained
Earth’s recurrent cold spells
36 The end of money Hidden
costs of a cash-free world
Culture
42 Ocean plastic Eye-popping
show of marine anatomy
43 Emotional ignorance Why we
need a road map of the emotions.
PLUS: This week’s cultural picks
44 Seeking Sandra What happens
when AI isn’t really artificial?
Regulars
24 APERTURE
A helping hand for lemurs
52 LETTERS
Ice giant mission
55 MAKE
Slam dunk the junk
56 FEEDBACK
Jobs lost to avian intelligence
57 THE LAST WORD
Load of rubbish

25 August 2018 | NewScientist | 1

 SECOND EDITION OF
THE BIG QUESTIONS

21 GREAT
MYSTERIES OF
THE UNIVERSE
Explore the big bang, dark energy,
the multiverse, black holes and more

%X\\RXUFRS\IURPDOOJRRGPDJD]LQH
UHWDLOHUVRUGLJLWDOO\)LQGRXWPRUHDW
newscientist.com/thecollection
LEADERS

Editorial
Editor Emily Wilson
Managing editor Rowan Hooper
Art editor Craig Mackie
Editor at large Jeremy Webb

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News
News editor Penny Sarchet
Editors Jacob Aron, Timothy Revell, Jon White
Reporters (UK) Andy Coghlan, Alison George,
Jessica Hamzelou, Michael Le Page,
Clare Wilson, Sam Wong
(US) Leah Crane, Chelsea Whyte
(Aus) Alice Klein

Features
Chief features editor Richard Webb
Editors Catherine de Lange, Gilead Amit,
Julia Brown, Daniel Cossins,
Kate Douglas, Joshua Howgego,
Tiffany O’Callaghan, Sean O’Neill
Feature writer Graham Lawton

Culture and Community

Editors Liz Else, Mike Holderness, Simon Ings,
Frank Swain
Out of pocket
Subeditors
Chief subeditor Eleanor Parsons
If the cashless dream goes sour, it will hurt poor people most
Tom Campbell, Hannah Joshua, Chris Simms

Design ON THE same day that Donald could exchange, criminals sociologists documented how
Kathryn Brazier, Joe Hetzel,
Dave Johnston, Ryan Wills
Trump was elected US president, would struggle to launder it was poor people who were
Indian prime minister Narendra suitcases of banknotes. disproportionately affected.
Picture desk
Chief picture editor Adam Goff
Modi took to national TV to make Plenty of people around the Replacement notes turned out
Kirstin Kidd, David Stock a stunning announcement. world think having less cash to be in short supply and poor
Production From midnight, the country’s two would benefit society. After all, people found it hardest to get to
Mick O’Hare, Melanie Green , highest denomination banknotes counterfeiting aside, cash can be banks and trade in old for new.
Alan Blagrove, Anne Marie Conlon
would no longer be legal tender. unsafe – in terms of being easily The trend towards less-cash
Contact us
The 500 and 1000 rupee notes stolen – and it also results in societies keeps spreading and
newscientist.com/contact
accounted for 86 per cent of transactions that are hard to strengthening, especially in richer
General & media enquiries
enquiries@newscientist.com currency supply in a country keep track of, which can lead to countries. A few central banks are
US where roughly 90 per cent of the oiling of corruption. The considering whether they should
210 Broadway #201
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transactions are done in cash. Better Than Cash Alliance, a issue digital analogues of cash
Tel +1 617 283 3213 Modi’s stated intention was UN-based partnership of some (see page 36). But as India’s
UK to curb what he called “black 60 governments, companies experiment hints, this tech
25 Bedford Street, London, WC2E 9ES
Tel +44 (0)20 7611 1200
money”. People had 50 days to and international organisations, trend presents risks as well as
AUSTRALIA swap their old cash for new at is pushing this line. opportunities. Unless the phasing
PO Box 2315, Strawberry Hills, NSW 2012 banks. It was hoped that by Yet in the aftermath of Modi’s out of cash is done carefully, it is
capping how much each person overnight demonetisation, the poorest who will suffer. ■

Undoubtedly, signs the bridge

© 2018 New Scientist Ltd, England.
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A bridge too far
AUTHORITIES in Italy are
investigating what went wrong to
make Genoa’s Morandi motorway
bridge collapse last week, killing
43 people (see page 4).
Bridges rarely just give way.
They normally show signs of
wear and tear, such as cracks or
corrosion, long before they fall
apart. Even then a collapse doesn’t
normally follow and there is
plenty of time to organise a fix.
Most suspension bridges, such
as San Francisco’s Golden Gate
Bridge, use cables to support them,
but the few on the Morandi bridge
were encased in concrete. This
contributes to a lack of structural
redundancy, and if one component
fails, it can have a disproportionate
effect on the bridge if other parts
can’t take the strain.
was in need of repair were either
ignored or missed, but a better
bridge would probably have lasted
longer. The design turned out
to be an architectural dead end,
and luckily few other bridges
were ever built like it.
Modern bridges have greater
structural redundancy, which is a
good thing. Even components in
more recent structures fail, but
this redundancy keeps a failure
from becoming a disaster. ■

25 August 2018 | NewScientist | 3

THIS WEEK
Genoan bridge collapse
ITALY is still reeling from the collapse
of a large portion of a bridge in Genoa
last week, killing at least 43 people.
Italian prime minister Giuseppe Conte
declared a state of emergency in the
region and has made €5 million
available to help with the aftermath.
“These are unacceptable tragedies
that should not happen in a modern
society. This government will do
everything to prevent such tragedies
from happening again,” said Conte in
a press conference.
Harrowing footage and tales
from survivors are at odds with the
precision and reliability we have come
to expect from modern engineering.
It has left many asking what went
wrong – and if the same thing could
happen to other bridges.
Completed in 1967, the Genoese
bridge was made primarily of
pre-stressed concrete, which is
strengthened by high-tension steel
cables running through it. It is part of
a motorway that connects the city to
local ports and hooks up the Italian
and French rivieras. On 14 August,
a massive tower and a 200-metre
section of road collapsed onto
railway lines, a river and a warehouse
45 metres below, taking dozens of
vehicles with them.
More than 400 people were
evacuated, including those who live
in housing blocks under one of the
pillars. Firefighters have been
searching for survivors and bodies.
It is not yet known why the bridge
collapsed. At the time, work was
under way to firm up the bridge’s
foundations, and there was
torrential rain. Some engineers
have suggested that the maintenance
work may have been a factor in the
collapse, whereas others are
CARLO ALBERTO ALESSI/SPUTNIK/CAMERA PRESS
suggesting there were fundamental
design or construction flaws.
“Concrete is a fantastic material
that can last for many years, but if
it’s poor quality it becomes porous,
and the tensioning steel corrodes,”
says Michael Byfield at the University
of Southampton, UK.
High-strength concrete normally
4 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018
has a pH of about 12. At this highly
alkali level, steel embedded in the
concrete won’t corrode. However,
if the concrete mix contains too much
water, or drainage doesn’t function
properly, it can become porous, which
results in the pH dropping over time.
Below a pH level of 9, the steel can
corrode, weakening the structure
of the bridge. This can also happen
if cracks allow water to seep in.
“The bridge doesn’t have a lot of
redundancies, so if one cable goes,
“Concrete is fantastic and
can last many years, but
if it’s poor quality, the
tensioning steel corrodes”
it could be enough to take the whole
bridge down,” says Paul Jackson at
engineering firm Ramboll, who helped
to refurbish the bridge in the 1990s.
It is hard to tell if the steel inside
concrete is corroding and there is
always an element of judgement,
says Jackson. “The Genoa bridge is
unusual because bridges tend to give
more warning before collapsing, such
as revealing cracks,” he says.
During a recent project on the
Hammersmith Flyover, a similar bridge
in London, Jackson and his colleagues
attached acoustic sensors to the
bridge that detected when strands
from the steel cable later broke.
“Normally this happens so rarely you
can’t be sure if your sensor is working,
but with Hammersmith they kept
pinging a lot,” says Jackson. This
meant that extra steel cables had to
be added to the exterior, resulting
in a lengthy and costly repair job.
Around Europe, many bridges
are in a poor state. A report in France
from earlier this year said that a third
of the country’s road bridges are in
need of repair, with about 7 per cent
being at risk of eventual collapse.
And a report from Germany’s Federal
Highway Research Institute last
year found that more than 12 per
cent of Germany’s road bridges
were in bad condition.
In the US, a recent report
determined that 54,000 of the
613,000 bridges surveyed were
structurally deficient. These
bridges are crossed 174 million
times each day. Timothy Revell
Record measles
outbreak in Europe
THE failure of parents to vaccinate
their children has contributed to the
biggest surge in measles cases Europe
has seen in a decade, according to
the World Health Organization.
Across the 53 countries in the
region, there have been at least
37 deaths and more than 41,000
cases in the first half of this year,
already nearly twice the 23,927
cases recorded in the whole of 2016.
More than half this year’s cases
have been in Ukraine, where measles
vaccination coverage has been
plummeting over the past decade.
In 2016, vaccination rates dropped
to 50 per cent. The WHO warns that
as soon as fewer than 95 per cent of
eligible children receive vaccination,
measles can spread rapidly.
England has seen 807 cases
this year, 281 of them in London.
Before vaccination began in 1968,
the UK reported roughly half a
million cases a year.
Floods kill 350
people in Kerala
HUNDREDS of people have died as
a result of flooding in the southern
Indian state of Kerala.
Since monsoon season began in
June, more than 200,000 people have
had to abandon their homes and move
to emergency relief camps. “We’re
witnessing something that has never
happened before in the history of
Kerala,” Pinarayi Vijayan, the chief
minister for the region, told local news.
More than 930 people have died
across India this monsoon season.
Kerala has been hit particularly hard,
with more than 350 killed. Officials
say many of the deaths were in
landslides triggered by the floods.
Kerala has 44 rivers running
through it, and the state authorities
have been criticised for not gradually
releasing water from 80 local dams.
Instead, water was only discharged
once the reservoirs were full,
exacerbating the situation.
For new stories every day, visit newscientist.com/news
Born on a battered Earth
Life’s crucial early steps are being rewritten, finds Michael Marshall
THE shared ancestor of every
organism now on the planet lived
at least 3.9 billion years ago –
adding weight to theories that life
started 100 million years earlier
than we thought, at a time when
Earth was still being pummelled
by meteorites.
That’s according to a study
that has combined genetic and
fossil evidence to build a timeline
of crucial shifts in the early
evolution of life. The study also
sheds new light on the birth of
complex cells, which today
make up all animals and plants.
For the first few billion years
ARCTIC-IMAGES/GETTY
of Earth’s history, the only life
present was single-celled
microorganisms. Unlike the large
plants and animals that arose
in the past 600 million years,
such as trilobites and dinosaurs,
these microbes left few fossils –
so understanding life’s early
history has been tricky.
To find out more, Holly Betts
at the University of Bristol, UK,
and her colleagues combined
two sources of evidence. They
compared the sequences of
29 genes across 102 species to
build a family tree that showed
how they were all related, and the
order in which new groups split
away from their relatives.
The researchers then added
some dates to this tree, taken
from the geological record. This
enabled them to estimate when
the various groups evolved and
parted company. For instance,
they knew that life could be no
older than 4.52 billion years
because that is when a rock the
size of Mars slammed into Earth,
forming the moon. The impact
was so severe that the planet’s
entire surface melted. “Nothing
could have survived it,” says team existed this early in our planet’s
member Davide Pisani, also at the history. Some have suggested that
University of Bristol.
The result is a timeline of the
first 3 billion years of life, from
the ancestor of all modern life
to the first complex animals
(Nature Ecology & Evolution,
doi.org/cs5q). “We can go very
“This is the best attempt
yet to actually get a
coherent picture of the
history of life on Earth”
deep in time, which we never
thought was possible,” says Pisani.
“I think they’ve really made
the most sincere and honest effort
yet to actually get a coherent
picture of the history of life,”
says Bill Martin at the University
of Düsseldorf in Germany.
One major finding is that the
most recent organism that all
existing life is related to – known
as the last universal common
ancestor, or LUCA – lived at least
3.9 billion years ago. There is
tentative support for life to have
traces of carbon in 4.1-billion-
year-old rocks are signs of early
life. Similar traces were found in
3.95-billion-year-old rocks in 2017.
And another 2017 study claimed
to have found fossilised single-
celled organisms from 3.77 billion
years ago. But all these findings
are disputed.
Nevertheless, Greg Fournier at
the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology says the new date for
LUCA is reasonable. This means
life probably formed relatively
quickly, within 600 million years
of the moon-creating impact,
when big meteorites were still
battering the planet.
Supercharged life
LUCA gave rise to two groups of
single-celled microorganisms
called bacteria and archaea. This
split happened at least 3.4 billion
years ago, the study finds.
Later on, more-complex cells
evolved – one of the most crucial
evolutionary events ever.
Compared with bacteria and
archaea, these “eukaryote” cells
Early Earth may not have been
as inhospitable as we thought
are larger, with membrane-bound
compartments and tiny, energy-
supplying mitochondria.
All animals, plants and fungi
are eukaryotes, and if these cells
had not evolved, we could never
have existed. The timeline
suggests these cells first appeared
at least 1.84 billion years ago.
It was thought that eukaryotes
evolved in response to rising
oxygen levels, but this finding
suggests this might not have been
the case, as the first atmospheric
oxygen turned up much earlier –
2.4 billion years ago. However,
it does not rule out a link, as there
was little oxygen at first and levels
later rose in fits and starts.
The timing of the eukaryotes’
origin is curious because it took
place almost exactly when the
study found that microbes called
alphaproteobacteria evolved.
The mitochondria inside
eukaryotic cells were once free-
living alphaproteobacteria,
which were somehow swallowed
by an archaean that then gave
rise to the first eukaryotes.
The implication is that
acquiring mitochondria was the
key step in eukaryote evolution,
says Pisani. This then spurred a
massive evolution of diversity
among eukaryotic cells, he says.
Martin and his colleagues
have made a similar argument
on physical grounds, suggesting
that the first eukaryotes could
only have evolved large, complex
cells once they had mitochondria
to supercharge them.
However, Fournier suspects
the timings might be off. He says
mitochondria are quite different
from their alphaproteobacteria
ancestors, “so they should be
substantially younger”. ■
25 August 2018 | NewScientist | 5
NEWS & TECHNOLOGY

but they might also be trialling of the satellites was observing

US fears over techniques for monitoring other
satellites in low orbit. “It could
the other and that test is now
complete, so they have been

Russian satellite be for that kind of spying,” says

McDowell. “It could also be testing
out Earth-observing cameras
put into lower orbits to speed
up their eventual re-entry into
Earth’s atmosphere.
from different heights. That “We just have to wait and see.
Chelsea Whyte The satellite in question, seems like a weird thing to do, We’ve got the popcorn out and
Kosmos-2519, launched in October but who knows?” we’re checking the orbital data
UNUSUAL manoeuvres by a 2017 and then deployed two The day after the satellite every day,” says McDowell.
Russian satellite have sparked smaller satellites. Since then, lowered its orbit, one of the The lowering of orbits is a much
fears in the US. On 14 August, Kosmos-2519 has made a series smaller satellites did so too. less provocative manoeuvre than
Yleem Poblete at the US of orbital adjustments, including That isn’t a coincidence, says attempting to move one satellite
Department of State expressed a rendezvous with those smaller McDowell, but the connection close to another, says Laura Grego,
concerns at a UN conference on satellites in December. A further between the two is puzzling. It a space security expert at the
disarmament held in Switzerland. flurry of activity began in late may be that Russia simply decided Union of Concerned Scientists
“We are concerned with what June, when it entered an orbit to move the satellites one after in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
appears to be very abnormal closer to Earth. the other. Or it could be that one A satellite able to close in on
behaviour by a declared ‘space The Russian satellite operators another could potentially carry a
apparatus inspector’. We don’t could simply be testing their Kosmos-2519 launched on the weapon, but it could also perform
know for certain what it is, and ability to identify space debris, Russian rocket Soyuz 2-1v– more benign tasks like inspection,
there is no way to verify it,” refuelling or repair, she says.
she told the conference. Without knowing how the
Poblete referenced previous Russian satellite is equipped, it is
statements by Russian officials fair to say the US can’t rule out the
about programmes to develop possibility it carries a test weapon.
anti-satellite systems, and said the Poblete said that these manoeuvres
US has no way to tell if the satellite are “inconsistent with anything
in question is a weapon. A Russian seen before from on-orbit
delegate at the conference said inspection or space situational
Poblete’s remarks were unfounded, awareness capabilities”, but
MINISTRY OF DEFENCE OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION

according to Reuters. McDowell says they are merely

Based on the satellite’s orbital unusual, not unprecedented.
changes – which are tracked Russian officials haven’t
by the US and made publicly announced why this satellite
available – it is hard to tell moved, but US officials may be
whether the manoeuvres have jumping to the worst-case
an innocuous explanation, scenario. “At some level, that’s
says Jonathan McDowell at the their job. But they’ve jumped
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for from ‘we don’t know’ to rampant
Astrophysics in Massachusetts. paranoia,” says McDowell. ■

vast 700-square-metre raised
Vast ancient platform, together with the remains
site built by of at least 580 people.
Researchers tend to think such
equal society large structures were the work of
stable, complex, hierarchical societies
EXCAVATIONS at eastern Africa’s with surplus resources, arguing that
oldest and biggest cemetery offer they were often a way for a chief to
a new perspective on why ancient advertise their power.
humans built large monuments. But excavations at the Lothagam
The Lothagam North Pillar site is North Pillar site suggest this wasn’t
a communal cemetery built about the case here. The burials include
5000 years ago near Lake Turkana, people of both sexes and all ages, and
Kenya, by the region’s first herders. there is little evidence that anyone at
At the site, there are 1.5-metre-tall the site was treated differently after
stone pillars, nine stone circles and a death. Most skeletons were adorned
with ornaments such as ostrich shell
beads and rings made from hippo
ivory (PNAS, doi.org/cs58).
“There is no evidence that anyone
was more important than anyone else,
that there was a chief,” says Katherine
Grillo at the University of Florida in
Gainesville, who co-directed the
excavation.
It seems that the builders were
small groups of mobile herders who
“There is no evidence
that anyone buried at the
site was more important
than anyone else”
came together to undertake the huge
task of digging out the cemetery site.
“This is clearly beyond the scale of
something constructed by an
extended family,” says Grillo.
So why did the herders go to such
lengths to build the cemetery?
They had moved into the region at a
time of great environmental change –
water levels in Lake Turkana had
dropped by 55 metres, for example.
Grillo and her colleagues think the
herders built the cemetery as a place
to interact and strengthen social
networks in the face of challenging
conditions. Alison George ■

6 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018

For daily news stories, visit newscientist.com/news

The tiny sliver of bone (seen from

Bacteria hold many angles) from “Denny”
key to universal DNA comes in paired strands
donor blood called chromosomes, one from
each parent. In Denny’s case, each
COULD blood shortages become a pair had one Neanderthal and one
thing of the past? Bacterial enzymes Denisovan chromosome, with
from the human gut turn type A blood very little mixing. She was the
into the type universally accepted daughter of parents from different
for transfusions, and do it more species (Nature, doi.org/cs64).
efficiently than current methods. Denny’s mitochondrial DNA,
Our blood comes in four main which is inherited only from
varieties: A, B, AB and O. The red blood mothers, is Neanderthal.
cells in each type are similar in shape, Therefore, her mother was
but they have different sugars on Neanderthal and her father
their surfaces. Red blood cells in Denisovan.
BROWN, S. ET AL/CC BY 4.0

type A host a particular set of these Only 23 ancient hominins have

sugars, with type B having a different had their genomes sequenced.
set. AB blood cells carry both A and B Yet Denny is not the first with
sugars, and type O cells have none. recent shared ancestry. There is
These sugars can act as antigens, also “Oase 1”, a member of our
triggering an immune response. For species who lived 37,000 years
instance, transfusing type B blood
into someone with type A can be Prehistoric teenager was ago in what is now Romania. They
had a Neanderthal ancestor just
fatal. That is what makes anyone with
type O blood a universal donor: there offspring of two species four to six generations earlier.
If interbreeding were rare,
are none of these antigens. So being we should not have found
able to strip these sugars from A, B A SLIVER of bone from a cave in were thought to be rare. “The these individuals so easily, says
and AB type blood would be helpful, Russia is at the centre of what likelihood of actually finding Svante Pääbo, also of the Max
effectively making it usable in may be the biggest archaeological a [first-generation] hybrid Planck Institute for Evolutionary
transfusions for all. story of the year. The bone has always been considered Anthropology. “It suggests
“We knew that those same sugars belonged to an ancient human infinitesimally low,” says Katerina that these groups, when they
that are on our red blood cells are who had a Neanderthal mother Harvati-Papatheodorou at the met, mixed quite freely with
also produced on the lining of the and a Denisovan father. “Denny” University of Tübingen, Germany. each other.”
gut wall,” says Steve Withers at the is the only first-generation hybrid A few years ago, archaeologists This doesn’t mean
University of British Columbia, hominin ever found. found a 90,000-year-old bone Neanderthals and Denisovans
Canada. So he and his colleagues “My first reaction was fragment in Denisova cave. were constantly interbreeding.
started searching for bacteria in disbelief,” says Viviane Slon Their genomes show they were
human faeces that might make of the Max Planck Institute for “The likelihood of finding a “quite distinct populations”, says
enzymes that let them feed on  Evolutionary Anthropology in first-generation hybrid has Pääbo. They controlled separate
and break down gut wall sugars. Leipzig, Germany. always been considered territories – the Neanderthals in
Analysing bacterial genes, they The find is either a stunning infinitesimally low” Europe, the Denisovans in east
found a family of enzymes that help stroke of luck or a hint that Asia – and occasionally met at the
gut bacteria harvest the sugars. When hominins interbred more often Samantha Brown, then at the boundaries. He says the Denisova
the team combined the enzymes than we thought. It may even University of Oxford, discovered cave was “a unique area where
with type A blood, the sugars were suggest that extinct groups like that it came from a hominin by they met, and then they had no
removed from the blood cells, Neanderthals did not die out, examining the proteins preserved prejudices against each other”.
resulting in type O blood. The process but were absorbed by our species. inside it. Her team nicknamed the Pääbo argues that when
is 30 times more efficient than an In prehistory, members of our hominin “Denny”. Based on the modern humans expanded from
existing one involving other enzymes. species interbred with at least structure of the bone, Denny died Africa into Europe and Asia, they
The bacterial enzymes will have to two other ancient humans: the at about 13 years of age. often interbred with Neanderthals
go through more safety testing before Neanderthals and the mysterious Slon and her colleagues have and Denisovans. This could be
they can be used in blood destined Denisovans, who are known only now examined Denny’s DNA, why these groups vanished.
for human transfusions, but it is a from fragments of bone and discovering that Denny was “Neanderthals and Denisovans
promising step, says Withers. He teeth discovered in Denisova female – and she had astonishing may not have become violently
presented the work at a meeting of cave, Russia. Neanderthals and parentage. Her DNA was almost extinct, but may have become
the American Chemical Society in Denisovans interbred too. 50:50 Neanderthal and Denisovan, absorbed into modern human
Boston this week. Chelsea Whyte ■ These interbreeding events arranged in a tell-tale way. Our populations.” Michael Marshall ■

25 August 2018 | NewScientist | 7

 NEWS & TECHNOLOGY
JIM WEST/ZUMA WIRE/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK
AI hunts down
lead pipes in Flint
Frank Swain
EFFORTS are under way to replace
the lead pipes that have been
contaminating the water supply
in the city of Flint, Michigan.
Nobody knows which of the
55,000 properties are directly
affected, but an artificially
intelligent algorithm can make
accurate guesses.
The Flint water crisis began
in 2014 when city officials began
sourcing water from the local
Water worlds
are everywhere
in the galaxy
PLANETS rich in water, with
atmospheres of steam, oceans
of liquid water and cores of rock
surrounded by solid ice, may be
abundant around distant stars.
An analysis of the almost
4000 known exoplanets estimates
that about 1400 are water-rich
worlds, potentially increasing the
chances that some harbour life.
8 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018
river instead of the Detroit water
system. The water wasn’t treated
properly and corroded lead pipes,
causing the heavy metal to leach
into drinking water.
Residents complained of foul
smelling, discoloured water that
caused rashes, and were advised
to boil tap water before drinking.
Paediatrician Mona Hanna-
Attisha raised the alarm in 2015
when she found herself treating
children with abnormally high
levels of lead in their blood. A state
“Life could develop in certain
near-surface layers on these water
worlds, if the pressures, temperatures
and chemical conditions are
appropriate,” says Li Zeng of Harvard
University, who presented his results
at the Goldschmidt geochemistry
conference in Boston last week.
Only a few exoplanets have been
identified as water worlds. Zeng and
his colleagues worked out the likely
compositions of others by analysing
measurements of the radius and
mass of each, and modelling how
they might have evolved.
They relied on a well-established
Pipework below the city of Flint,
Michigan, is being upgraded
of emergency was declared and
millions of litres of bottled water
shipped in.
The water supply has now been
reconnected to the Detroit water
system, but the lead pipes remain.
At the height of the crisis,
Google funded a project to help
map the affected homes. A team
of scientists from various fields
and institutions volunteered to
help, but quickly realised there
was little information available,
as many records were missing,
incomplete or outdated.
Jacob Abernethy at Georgia
Tech and his colleagues built an AI
to predict which homes are likely
to be connected to a lead pipe.
They drew on work by a separate
team that digitised old city
plans and more than 140,000
handwritten records of building
work in the city.
The system catalogues 71
different pieces of information
for every property in Flint, such
as the age, value and location of
the home. By training itself on
properties where lead levels had
been measured, the algorithm
could predict other homes that
were likely to have lead pipes.
Before the AI was developed,
homes were selected for pipe
replacement based on educated
guesses and around 20 per cent
of the pipes dug up turned out not
theory of how planets evolve from the
disc of gas and material that forms
around new stars.
Small rocky planets like Mercury,
Venus, Earth and Mars form in the hot,
“terrestrial” zone closest to the star.
Further out from the star, beyond
a “frost-line”, temperatures are low
enough for water vapour to condense
into ice grains and clump together
into icy planets. Some then become
“Life could develop in
certain near-surface layers
on these water worlds, if
conditions are appropriate” Andy Coghlan ■
to be made of lead, wasting time
and money. “We had no good way
of doing it, frankly,” says Michael
McDaniel, who was in charge of
the initial pipe replacement
programme.
Now, the AI system can produce
a list of properties suspected to
have lead pipes with a 97 per cent
success rate. This amounts to
a saving of $10 million, enough
to make safe an additional
2000 homes.
The team’s AI also revealed
that the number of homes
affected had been grossly
underestimated. A couple of years
into the crisis there was a big
argument in Congress about
how much more money would be
needed, says Abernethy. The city
had estimated that no more than
10 per cent of homes would be
connected to lead pipes, but
Abernethy and colleagues found
it to be about 40 per cent. This was
first predicted by the AI and since
then has been supported by
ongoing replacements. The
revelation helped to secure a
further $100 million of federal
funding to clean up Flint.
The team has made its data
available to the firm now
managing Flint’s clean up. It has
also created an app that allows
engineers to log the results of
their surveys to improve the
predictions. The model can be
applied to other cities as well,
says the team. ■
shrouded by huge quantities of gas,
mostly hydrogen, and end up as giant
planets like Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus
and Neptune.
Around 35 per cent of the known
exoplanets don’t evolve fast enough
and rebound closer to their host
star to form water worlds, the
researchers found. Oceans form from
the melting core, with atmospheres
of steam billowing from the oceans.
On many of the worlds, water may
account for more than half the mass
of the planet, compared with just
0.02 per cent on Earth, says Zeng.
 NEW
SCIENTIST
DgS CO VE RY

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NEWS & TECHNOLOGY
Drug lets you
control dreams
Alice Klein
EVER wanted to fly? A drug that
helps people take charge of their
dreams could let you try it from
the comfort of your own bed.
A few people have lucid
dreams, in which they recognise
they are dreaming and steer
the path they take. Some others
can learn to induce them using
cognitive techniques.
The practice is most commonly
used to pursue fantasies, but it
may also help with nightmares,
says Benjamin Baird at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison.
However, its therapeutic potential
has been limited by it often being
so hard to achieve.
Now, Baird and his colleagues
have developed the most effective
method yet for promoting lucid
dreams, by combining cognitive
training with a drug.
The researchers taught 121
adults aged 19 to 75 a cognitive
technique for stimulating lucid
dreams. It involves picking a
feature of a previous dream called
a “dreamsign” that can serve as a
reminder to become lucid when
encountered again.
The volunteers were then
Paper batteries
use bacteria to
make electricity
A PAPER battery powered by
electron-harvesting bacteria could
one day power environmentally
friendly disposable devices.
Researchers have been working
on paper sensors and circuit boards
for years, but they have mostly been
powered by traditional batteries or
simple chemical reactions. Yang Gao
and Seokheun Choi at Binghamton
10 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018
handed capsules of galantamine,
which is used to treat mild to
moderate Alzheimer’s disease.
This drug boosts the brain
chemical acetylcholine, which
boosts memory, but also
promotes rapid eye movement
(REM) sleep, the phase in which
MILLENNIUM IMAGES
dreams are most common.
Each person got a high-dose
capsule, a low-dose capsule and
a placebo capsule, but they
couldn’t tell which was which.
On three occasions, they woke
in the middle of the night,
took a capsule, visualised their
dreamsign and went back to sleep.
The high dose was most
effective, inducing lucid dreams
in 42 per cent of participants.
About 27 per cent reported lucid
dreams with the low dose and 14
per cent after taking the placebo
capsule (PLoS One, doi.org/cs38).
The galantamine-induced
dreams varied widely. One
participant became lucid while
dreaming about falling donkeys
and actively flew out of their way.
Another fulfilled her fantasy of
rollerblading through a shopping
centre after realising she was in a
dream. The lucid dreams were
rated as being more vivid,
University in New York created a
paper battery powered by bacteria
to do the job instead.
The battery is made of waxed
paper, with thin layers of metals
and polymers printed on top to
hold bacteria and harvest electrons.
The type of bacteria used, called
exoelectrogens, pull electrons from
the molecules they eat and transfer
them outside their cells.
The battery is freeze-dried to place
the bacteria in a dormant state. It is
packaged with a small pouch of liquid
bacterial food. When the device is
squeezed, the liquid revives the
Lucid dreams were rated as being
more vivid than the regular sort
complex and emotionally
positive than regular dreams.
Common side effects of
galantamine in people with
Alzheimer’s disease include
stomach upsets and tiredness.
In the study, 4 per cent of
participants reported nausea,
6 per cent experienced insomnia
and 2 per cent felt fatigued.
Baird has experimented with
galantamine himself. One time he
took it, he dreamed about being
in an unfamiliar house. As he
inspected different objects, he was
astonished at how real they felt.
“As I ran my hand along a brick
wall, for example, I could feel the
bacteria and they start eating the
organic material from the pouch.
Through a series of reactions,
electrons from the food are moved
through the bacteria, eventually
being absorbed into the battery,
where they can be used to power
small devices. The batteries have a
shelf life of about four months and
can provide power for up to two days.
The researchers presented their
“The batteries have a shelf
life of about four months
and can provide power
for up to two days”
coarse texture and the outline of
individual bricks,” he says.
The potential therapeutic
applications are exciting, says
Denholm Aspy at the University
of Adelaide in Australia.
“This new method finally has
the success rate we need to be
able to properly do research on
lucid dreaming,” he says.
Small studies have already
shown that lucid dreaming can
be used to treat nightmares, says
Aspy. “If you know you’re having
a nightmare, it automatically
becomes less distressing because
you know it’s not real,” he says.
“But more than that, you might
be able to escape the situation, fly
away, confront the threat or even
just make yourself wake up.” ■
work on 19 August at a meeting of the
American Chemical Society in Boston.
For now, says Gao, the battery can
only be used to fuel fairly low-power
devices, like a small calculator or an
LED light. But he and Choi hope that
it will someday be used in medical
technologies, like pregnancy tests,
that currently require traditional
batteries and can be hard to dispose
of in a green way.
“If we can provide power without
using conventional batteries, those
devices could be cheaper and more
disposable and environmentally
friendly,” says Gao. Leah Crane ■
 Humanity will need the
equivalent of 2 Earths to People lying down
support itself by 2030. solve anagrams in
10% less time
than people
standing up.

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

60% of us
experience
‘inner speech’
where everyday
thoughts take a
back-and-forth
conversational style.

We spend 50% of our

lives daydreaming.

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NEWS & TECHNOLOGY
Autism linked to
lingering insecticide
Andy Coghlan
ALTHOUGH it has been banned
for decades in many countries,
the insecticide DDT may still be
influencing whether babies
develop autism. A study in Finland
has found that pregnant women
who show signs of high DDT
exposure in their blood seem more
likely to have children with autism.
DDT was sprayed in large
amounts from the 1940s
onwards, to kill disease-carrying
mosquitoes. But it was widely
banned in Western nations in the
1970s and 1980s, after evidence
mounted that it caused cancers in
laboratory animals and impaired
reproduction in wildlife.
However, the insecticide takes
decades to break down, so people
are still absorbing it from
contaminated water and food. It
lodges in the body’s fat, circulates
in the blood and is known to pass
across the placenta to fetuses
during pregnancy.
To see if DDT might be linked to
autism, Alan Brown of Columbia
BETTMANN/GETTY
University in New York and his
colleagues analysed blood
samples taken in Finland between
1983 and 2005 from more than a
Oldest galaxies
in the universe
are next door
MEET the Milky Way’s elderly
neighbours. It turns out that the
faint galaxies orbiting our own are
among the oldest in our universe.
These satellite galaxies, including
Ursa Major and Boötes I, are thought
to be more than 13 billion years old.
The closest is probably Segue-1,
some 75,000 light-years away,
says Sownak Bose of the Harvard-
million women during the early
stages of pregnancy. Like in the
UK and US, DDT was used widely
in Finland before it was banned.
The team screened the samples
for DDE – a breakdown product
of DDT that persists in the body
for a long time – and found that,
on average, DDE levels were
higher in women who went
on to have autistic children.
Women whose children didn’t
develop autism had, on average,
811 picograms of DDE present in
Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Most attempts to find old galaxies
have looked deep into the universe.
Because light takes a long time to
travel to us from the far reaches of
the cosmos, this is equivalent to
looking back in time. Now it turns
out that some of the oldest galaxies
are right on our doorstep (The
Astrophysical Journal, doi.org/cs3w).
“The nice thing about that is that,
because they are relatively near,
we can actually see them,” says Bose.
“Theoretical models predict that very,
very old galaxies should be sprinkled
throughout the cosmos.”
each millilitre of their blood,
but the average was 1032
picograms in those with autistic
children (American Journal of
Psychiatry, DOI: 10.1176/appi.
ajp.2018.17101129).
Comparing women with
and without autistic children
who had the highest levels of
DDE, the team calculated that
high exposure to DDT raises
the likelihood of having a child
with autism by around a third.
The team also screened the
samples for other long-lived
pollutants called polychlorinated
biphenyls, or PCBs, which were
formerly used as insulation in
DDT was sprayed widely from
the 1940s to kill insects
The discovery was made as part of
research into how galaxies grew from
very small ones to the large ones we
see today. These old galaxies formed
in the “cosmic dark ages”, a period
about 380,000 years after the big
bang in which the early, hot universe
had cooled down and become
transparent for the first time.
As part of this, the team studied
satellite galaxies orbiting the Milky
“Theoretical models predict
that very, very old galaxies
should be sprinkled
throughout the cosmos”
electrical transformers. But they
found no association between
these and autism.
Brown says this tallies with
previous research showing
that DDE, but not PCBs, have
been linked with low birth weight
and prematurity – two well-
established factors in autism.
However, Brown says the
team’s findings shouldn’t
concern people. “I would argue
against worrying, because even
among those with high levels,
most won’t have children with
autism,” he says.
Further work is needed to
determine if DDT really is linked
to autism, and whether DDT itself
is a cause, or if the two are linked
by some other, causative factor.
“Ideally, we’d like to see the
same finding replicated in at least
three studies to feel confident
about the association,” says
Kristen Lyall of the A. J. Drexel
Autism Institute in Philadelphia.
“I wouldn’t dismiss it as
unlikely,” says Rosa Hoekstra of
King’s College London. But she
says any effect of DDT is very
small compared with the genetic
factors that contribute to autism.
DDT levels in the countries
that have banned it are slowly
declining, so pregnant women
today are likely to have slightly
lower levels of DDE in their blood.
But it will be a long time before
the DDT used in the 1970s will
have fully broken down. ■
Way. They found two different
populations: very faint ones, which
they think are among the first that
formed, and brighter ones, which
formed later. The Milky Way itself
formed later, because the smaller,
earlier galaxies inhibited the growth
of our larger galaxy.
The observation of these very faint
galaxies has been possible only in the
past decade, thanks to increasingly
sophisticated sky maps from the
Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the
Dark Energy Survey, which have so far
detected 54 satellite galaxies around
the Milky Way. Alison George ■
25 August 2018 | NewScientist | 13
 NEWS & TECHNOLOGY
Human tissue to
be grown in space
Adam Mann
MUSCLE fibres and liver tissue
are set to be grown on board the
International Space Station (ISS).
If successful, we could one day
see full human organs grown
in space.
Researchers have studied
the effects of microgravity
on different types of cells for
decades, but two projects in the
pipeline would be the first to
attempt to cultivate large
volumes of human tissue in space.
The first will grow muscle in
a nutrient-rich chamber called a
bioreactor in order to assess new
drugs for muscle loss. Such loss is
part of the natural ageing process,
and starts to occur in physically
inactive people in their 30s and
can worsen over time.
“The degree of muscle loss can
be so significant that it creates a
risk of frailty and can lead to poor
health outcomes,” says Ngan
Huang of Stanford University in
California. While diet and exercise
NASA
14 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018
can alleviate some of these effects, promise. These liver cells are able
doctors have long sought drugs
to complement such practices.
People who spend extended
periods in microgravity also
experience muscle loss, which
is why astronauts must exercise
rigorously while in space. Huang’s
team intends to launch the
experiment to the ISS next year
and assess whether microgravity
mimics an accelerated version of
muscle loss. If so, the team hopes
to test treatments in space.
The second experiment will
attempt to grow a 3D structure
made from functional liver tissue. organs develop”
Biomedical engineers have
produced thin bits of tissue such
as cartilage or skin on Earth in the University of California, San
past, but a complex organ like
the liver is more challenging.
Part of the problem is that
organs inside the body develop in tissues and blood vessels of the
a soft and buoyant environment,
whereas artificial scaffolding to
Sunita Williams exercising on
the ISS to prevent muscle loss
grow organs in the lab tends to
be made of hard plastic and cells
settle to the bottom of a container
under the influence of gravity.
Liver tissue grown in a rotating
bioreactor, mimicking the effects
of microgravity, has shown some
to metabolise more drugs than
those grown in static containers.
But as cell clusters grow, the
bioreactors need to spin faster
in order to keep them suspended
and eventually the cylinder begins
turning so quickly that the tissue
is pinned against the walls.
Microgravity might more easily
mimic the natural environment
where organs develop. In the next
“Microgravity might more
easily mimic the natural
environment where
few years, Tammy Chang at the
Francisco, and her colleagues
hope to send different stem cells
that can give rise to the various
liver to the ISS. The cells will be
filmed as they grow inside a
bioreactor and the resulting tissue
will be brought back to Earth.
Chang says the eventual goal is
to transplant some of the tissue
into a rat and see if it functions
properly. This could potentially
open up a way to produce livers
for people on organ donor lists.
“Imagine if we show that we
can generate life-saving tissues in
orbit, and there’s no other way to
do that,” says Chang. It might spur
rocket technology to access low
Earth orbit more cheaply, she says.
Testing tissue growth in
reduced gravity could reveal
some unknowns, says bioengineer
Jordan Miller of Rice University
in Houston, Texas. “If we can
validate that microgravity has a
positive effect, maybe some of the
biochemical pathways activated
in a microgravity setting could be
identified and those could be
directly stimulated here on the
ground,” he says. ■
Brew induces
near-death
experiences
A PSYCHEDELIC drug taken as part
of the South American plant brew
ayahuasca produces effects that
are strikingly similar to near-death
experiences.
Some people who narrowly escape
dying report having had feelings
of leaving the body or of sudden
inner peace. Such phenomena are
described as near-death experiences.
The ayahuasca study suggests these
may be explained by changes in how
the brain works, and aren’t evidence
of paranormal phenomena, say the
researchers behind the finding.
DMT is the main psychoactive
ingredient in ayahuasca, used by
some indigenous peoples in the
Amazon. People who take it often
describe feeling that they transcend
their body and enter another realm.
Chris Timmermann and his
colleagues at Imperial College
London gave DMT intravenously to
13 volunteers and afterwards asked
them to fill in a questionnaire that
assesses near-death experiences.
The same volunteers had previously
been given an intravenous placebo,
and weren’t told which session
involved the real drug.
During the DMT session, all
13 participants met the criteria for
a near-death experience (Frontiers
in Psychology, doi.org/gdz665).
They reported feeling as though they
entered an “unearthly environment”,
feeling “incredible peace” and having
heightened senses and a feeling of
unity with the universe.
There were no statistically
significant differences between the
questionnaire responses of those
who took DMT and 13 people who
had reported actual near-death
experiences.
Little is known about what
happens in the brain when someone
has a near-death experience. The
subjective similarity with taking DMT
suggests that psychedelics could shed
some light on the phenomenon, says
Timmermann. Sam Wong ■
 WHAT IF TIME STARTED
FLOWING BACKWARDS?

WHAT
IF THE
RUSSIANS
GOT TO
THE MOON
FIRST?

WHAT IF DINOSAURS
STILL RULED THE EARTH?
AVAILABLE NOW
newscientist.com/books
 IN BRIEF
ALEX WILD

Doubts over organ

donation shake-up
AN IMPENDING “opt-out” system
for organ donation in England
may fail to boost transplant rates
and could even lead to a fall.
From 2020, people in England
will be presumed to consent to
donation unless they have signed
a register to object. The country
currently has an opt-in approach,
where people sign up to give
consent. Under both systems,
families can veto donation.
To gauge the effect of the
opt-out system, Magda Osman
at Queen Mary University of
London and colleagues asked
nearly 1300 people to imagine
they were a family member
being asked to make this decision
under different rules.
They found people felt more
certain that a relative wanted to
donate if they had signed up under
the opt-in system, than if they had
exiting them hundreds of times to extend the network. been presumed to consent under
Slacker ants take a back seat But surprisingly only 30 per cent of the ants did around opt-out (Journal of Experimental
to get the job done faster 70 per cent of the work. “Only a few… would do the Psychology: Applied, doi.org/cs3s).
majority of the work, with the rest just hanging out
TOO many cooks spoil the broth, and the same goes for trying to avoid clogging up the tunnel,” says Goldman.
ants. A study into how these insects cooperate during a To further understand the process, Goldman and his
Infected plankton
task has found that the optimum strategy is for most of team tested out different strategies with four excavation
them not to do any work. The findings may prove useful robots. “One dug OK. Two dug OK. Three was kind of make it cloudier
for programming how large swarms of robots cooperate. good. But with four, the robots just couldn’t get
Ants create networks of narrow underground tunnels anywhere,” he says. WHEN clouds cast a shadow over
by excavating soil bit by bit as a team. To understand the However smart the team made the robots, they kept a day out, tiny, sick sea creatures
strategies they use, Daniel Goldman at Georgia Tech causing clogs unless some took a back seat. The results may be partly to blame.
and his colleagues placed 30 ants into a transparent suggest that when groups of individuals work together, The phytoplankton Emiliania
container filled with soil-like particles made of glass. the best strategy may be for some to hang back, says huxleyi (Ehux) is a single cell
For 48 hours, ants created tunnels, entering and Goldman (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.aan3891). encased in calcite discs. When
infected with a virus known as
EhV, it sheds this exoskeleton.
Mean robot can help you solve tricky task negatively or all positively, which Sea spray can fling the discs into
led to them being seen as mean the air as an aerosol and water
CRUEL robot overlords get more must identify the colour, ignoring or friendly. Those who had mean vapour can condense around
out of their human subjects than the word itself. People are usually robots were faster at the task and them to form cloud droplets.
nice ones. The mere presence worse at this when the colour and made fewer mistakes than those Miri Trainic at the Weizmann
of an unkind robot seems to word clash, like when the word with friendly ones or no robot Institute of Science in Israel and
improve some cognitive abilities, “blue” is printed in green letters. (Science Robotics, doi.org/cs3r). her team tested the effect of the
more so than being watched by a Nicolas Spatola at the It seems participants give more virus on calcite aerosol release.
friendly robot or none at all. University of Clermont Auvergne attention to the “bad” robot. That They found it was 10 times higher
The effect of a robot observer on in France and his colleagues makes them focus only on the for infected Ehux. These discs
human performance was tested paired volunteers with a small colour of a word, not on reading it. may contribute more to cloud
using the Stroop task, in which humanoid robot they could chat While cruel robots make us better formation than sea salt because
words printed in different colours to. The robots were programmed at the Stroop task, they probably their shape keeps them aloft
appear on a screen and volunteers to either answer all questions won’t work in every situation. longer (iScience, doi.org/cs3t).

16 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018

 For new stories every day, visit newscientist.com/news
Honey, I ate
the kids again
RAISING kids is hard, even for fish.
Male blennies sometimes eat their
eggs if they think they aren’t worth
the effort and want a better batch.
After female barred-chin
blennies (Rhabdoblennius nitidus)
lay eggs, they leave their male
partners in sole charge of caring
for them until they hatch. This
arrangement usually works well.
But if the female leaves less than
a thousand or so eggs, the male
typically eats them instead of
looking after them.
It was thought this was because
the nutritional value of eating the
eggs outweighed the benefits of
protecting only a few offspring.
But Yukio Matsumoto at Nagasaki
University in Japan and his
colleagues found that the
motivation was actually to enable
them to breed again as soon as
possible to get a larger, healthier
batch of young.
They showed that the breeding
cycle of male R. nitidus, found in
Asia, is tightly controlled by the
presence or absence of eggs.
When eggs are laid in their nests,
testosterone levels in the male
fish drop and they cannot mate –
perhaps to make them stick to
parenting. When the eggs hatch
about a week later, their
testosterone levels rise and
they can court females again
(Current Biology, doi.org/cs3p).
AFLO/NATUREPL.COM
Low-carb, high-meat diets could cut years of life
DIETS low in carbohydrates have
been linked to reduced longevity
unless they are dominated by
plant-based foods.
An analysis of data from
15,400 people in the US found that
those who lived longest tended
to get about 50 to 55 per cent of
their energy from carbohydrates.
At the age of 50, such people could
expect to live a further 33 years.
This is one year longer than
people who obtain 70 per cent or
more of their energy from carbs,
and four years longer than people
who get less than 30 per cent of
4D printer creates
complex ceramics
POTTERY has had a futuristic
makeover. It is now possible to
4D print ceramics, which could be
used for strong, complex parts in
rockets and electronic devices.
4D printing involves making
structures that change shape
in response to stimuli such as
heat, light or elastic forces. This
is useful for creating complex
objects, but has mostly been
limited to flexible materials like
metals and plastics.
Now, Jian Lu at City University
of Hong Kong and his colleagues
have used ceramics, which have
the advantage of being extremely
strong and able to cope with
extreme temperatures.
The researchers developed a
ceramic “ink” by mixing ceramic
nanoparticles and silicone rubber,
which they then used to print
stretchy sheets.
To create 4D structures, the
researchers stretched the sheets
and attached joints in various
patterns. Once released, the
elastic forces and pattern of joints
made the sheets contract and
change into bent or helical shapes.
Finally, heating at 1000°C caused
them to react with air and form
hard, rigid ceramics (Science
Advances, doi.org/cs5j).
calories from this food group.
Sara Seidelmann at Brigham
and Women’s Hospital in Boston
and her colleagues wondered if
the types of fat and protein people
eat on low-carb diets might
contribute to reduced longevity.
Diving into the data, they found
that when people replaced carbs
with meat such as lamb, pork,
beef and chicken – typical for
low-carb dieters in Europe and
the US – their mortality rose.
But the opposite was true for
those who ate plant-based sources
of fat and protein such as nuts,
To snap spaghetti in two, add a twist
IT IS a puzzle that has perplexed
physicists for decades: hold a strand
of dry spaghetti at both ends, bend
it until it snaps, and you will always
end up with three or more pieces.
In 2005, researchers in France
finally discovered why: after the
initial break, the brittle spaghetti
flexes back in the opposite direction,
snapping itself again. Yet a lingering
question still hovered over the
culinary conundrum: was it possible,
with the right technique, to snap a
strand of spaghetti into just two?
Mathematicians led by Jörn Dunkel
at the Massachusetts Institute of
legumes and vegetables. The team
thinks that the higher mortality of
a low-carb, high-meat diet is due
to lower intake of vegetables and
fruit, as well as the harmful effects
of animal proteins and fats on the
body’s systems that counter
inflammation and oxidative
stress, when cells are threatened
by a surge in reactive molecules.
For those who eat a lot of
carbohydrates, death rates may be
higher due to metabolic problems
associated with large quantities of
refined carbs (The Lancet Public
Health, doi.org/cs5h).
CASARSAGURU/GETTY
Technology have concluded you
can, provided you add a twist into
the mix. Using a pair of clamps, they
twisted strands of spaghetti almost
360 degrees before bringing the
two clamps together until the strand
broke. With this method, they could
reliably snap spaghetti in two.
Using a high-speed camera,
they found the twist prevented the
two remnants flexing back quite as
forcefully as an untwisted strand.
The untwisting motion also released
some of the stored energy, further
reducing the likelihood of a second
fracture (PNAS, doi.org/cs3v).
25 August 2018 | NewScientist | 17
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INSIGHT LIFE EXPECTANCY

The big slowdown

Growth in UK life expectancy is starting to ease off – and no one
knows why. Clare Wilson and Andy Coghlan explore the possibilities

THE past century saw rapid growth mortality figures are now being
in life expectancy, a key measure classed as a real change. They
SICK AT HEART
of progress. But no longer. mean that although life For a long time we have been
UK figures released this month expectancy was previously successfully reducing death rates
show that the life expectancy of climbing by about three months a from heart disease and stroke,
people in the country, currently year in women and four months a but now the knock-on effects
79 for men and 83 for women, has year in men, it is now two weeks are a major factor behind the
started to rise more slowly. The and one month a year respectively unexpected backsliding in life
change isn’t something to panic (see graphs, below). expectancy, says the ONS.
about – life expectancy isn’t Similar trends have been seen Death rates for these conditions
falling, it’s just not rising as fast as in other countries, such as the US, plunged by 70 per cent in the past
it was. But it will have an impact. Australia and Germany, the ONS three decades, thanks in part to
“Potentially, it’s a really big reported. However, that doesn’t improvements in heart surgery.
societal, cultural and economic mean this lower growth in life Anti-smoking campaigns and the

B&M NOSKOWSKI/GETTY
change that we are seeing,” says expectancy will become the introduction of drugs to lower
Nick Stripe at the UK’s Office for norm. Some other countries, such blood pressure also both
National Statistics (ONS), which as Japan, Denmark and Italy, have prevented heart attacks and
produced the figures. previously seen a slowdown in life stroke. Now many of those who
Life expectancy is calculated expectancy increases, but then benefited may be starting to die.
from the proportion of deaths of reverted to the old, higher rate. One factor could be that the
people at each age. This death rate “The trend could reassert hearts of those saved by surgery cause of death because of
has been falling in all Western itself,” says Stripe. “We do not eventually give out through heart increased awareness and reduced
countries for decades, thanks to a have enough data yet to say.” failure, for which there is no stigma. But there is also a real rise
raft of improvements in medicine What happens next will have effective treatment. Shifts to in this condition. As more people
and nutrition. The fall started to tremendous importance for the unhealthier habits could be survive heart attacks and cancer,
slow down in 2011 in the UK. future of the UK. So what are the another. Although smokers in the they live long enough to get
At first it could have been a possible explanations for the UK continue to quit – the biggest Alzheimer’s disease and other
statistical fluke, but the latest slowdown? help to avoiding heart trouble – kinds of dementia. This in turn
gains are now potentially being can cause pneumonia: people
lost through poor diet and lack of with dementia often have
In the UK and US, the average annual increase in life expectancy at birth
has fallen, although this isn’t the case with all rich nations exercise, says Rory Collins at the difficulty swallowing, which
University of Oxford. leads to food entering the airways,
Most recent six years Preceding six years triggering infections.
Increase in life expectancy (weeks)

20 The rise in dementia cases is

Males Females DEADLY DEMENTIA likely to persist because, unlike
SOURCE: OFFICE FOR NATIONAL STATISTICS

15 More than two-thirds of deaths heart disease and cancer, we have

in the UK are in people over the no effective therapies for it.
age of 75, so most of the recent “These numbers will continue
10 slowdown in life expectancy to rise in the absence of a new
improvements is likely to stem treatment,” says Matthew Norton
5 from changes to death rates in of Alzheimer’s Research UK.
this age group.
The most obvious factor is
0 an increasing number of deaths
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20 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018

For daily news stories, visit newscientist.com/news
among those aged 15 to 55 have
also been increasing, mostly
through accidents, assault or
suicide. Although the number
of deaths in this age group is too
small to have much impact on
headline life expectancy figures,
the trend could be a sign of
something larger.
One worry is that cuts in social
support and healthcare resulting
from the UK’s austerity drive,
allied to poor job prospects, could
lead to “deaths of despair”, like
those seen in white, middle-aged
Americans. There are parallels
with the US, says Stripe, but he
thinks the jury’s out on whether
austerity is to blame for the
slowdown in the UK’s life
expectancy. “All we can say is
that the data corresponds to an
interesting period politically and
economically. But correlation is
not causation,” he says.
What’s not in doubt is that
the UK’s economy is stagnating.
In 2017, its economic growth was
the fifth lowest in Europe at
just 1.7 per cent. We know that
economic collapses elsewhere
have shortened lives. The most
well known occurred following
the fall of the Soviet Union,
which saw life expectancy for
men plunge from 63.8 to 57.7
between 1990 and 1994.
“Deteriorating health among
working-age men is a type of
canary in the coal mine for
something going deeply wrong
with our labour markets,” says
David Stuckler at the University
of Bocconi in Milan, Italy.
GOLDEN OLDIES
While the slowdown in life
expectancy rises is recent, some
of the factors responsible may
have happened decades ago.
One could be the dwindling
of the so-called golden cohort: a
group of people who were born in
How much time do you have left?
It all depends...
the decade that followed 1925.
For unclear reasons, they have
long been experiencing higher
rates of improvements in life
expectancy than those born
before and after.
There were several beneficial
changes in the 1920s that could
have helped kick this off, such
as improved nutrition, better
sanitation and the advent of
“Potentially, it’s a really
big societal, cultural and
economic change that we
are seeing”
vaccines for diphtheria and
tetanus. But this doesn’t explain
why rises in life expectancy
slowed for those born later. One
theory is that the golden cohort
benefited from eating more fruit
and vegetables in their childhood
and adolescence because food
rationing, which began in the
second world war and was phased
out in the 1950s, restricted access
to unhealthier foods.
Whatever the reasons, this
group are now in their 80s and
90s and their numbers are
falling – so they make less of a
contribution to overall death
rates. The health advantages
of that group are beginning to
fade from the overall figures,
says Stripe.
HEROIN HIKE
Another possible reason for a
slowdown in life expectancy
improvements in under-55s
could be escalating drug deaths.
A National Health Service report
published in February revealed
that 2593 people died from drug
misuse in England and Wales in
2016, 58 per cent more than in
2006 and the highest toll since
records began in 1993. Deaths
from drug misuse are now the
third most common killer in
15 to 49-year-olds, it said.
Increased availability and
purity of heroin has been blamed
for a doubling in heroin-related
deaths between 2012 and 2016,
with many of those dying aged
40 or above, according to a report
released by Public Health England
in September.
“People who became addicted
to heroin in their teenage years
and 20s back in the 1980s and
1990s are now older, less resilient
and therefore more susceptible
to overdosing,” says Johnathan
Watkins of the PILAR Research
Network, a think-tank in
Cambridge, UK, that analyses
public health issues. Austerity-
related cutbacks in support
systems for drug users may also
have contributed, he says.
OBESITY TIME BOMB
Doctors have long been predicting
that today’s children will be some
of the first in history to have
shorter lives than their parents
thanks to the obesity epidemic.
But it may be premature to
assume that it is behind the recent
slowdown in the rate of increase
of our life expectancy.
Most of the levelling off stems
from changes to death rates in
people who are in their 70s or
older – where there hasn’t been
so much of a rise in obesity in the
UK. Changes to death rates in
younger age groups are mainly
due to other causes.
In fact, it takes fairly severe
obesity to have much of an effect
on lifespan, and the impact
declines as people get older. For
instance, people in their 60s and
70s who are classed as obese lose
just one extra year of life on
average. “Being mildly overweight
doesn’t cause a huge difference in
mortality figures,” says Steven
Grover of McGill University in
Montreal, Canada.
But David Ludwig of Harvard
Medical School predicts that
obesity will have more of an effect
on life expectancy over the next
couple of decades. “The impacts
are still flowing through the
pipeline,” he says. ■
25 August 2018 | NewScientist | 21
COMMENT
Lives in the balance
Making population control part of the fight against
climate change would be very wrong, says Ian Angus
SHOULD we confront population
growth as part of efforts to tackle
climate change? That question is
raised by US environmentalists
this week. They argue that
population control ought to be
seen as a potential “policy lever”.
To their credit, they advocate
only voluntary fertility-reducing
measures such as education and
access to family planning (Science,
DOI: 10.1126/science.aat8680).
Unfortunately, history shows that
good intentions aren’t enough
to prevent abuses, and that
voluntary programmes
frequently turn into the opposite.
In Bangladesh, hailed by
population lobbyists as a success
story for voluntary birth control
programmes, poorer women were
paid to “accept” sterilisation, and
the number who accepted soared
when unemployment was high. In
Peru, 350,000 chiefly Quechuan
and Aymaran indigenous
Maximum impact
A “mega” science journal for Africa will be a big
boost to research there, says Curtis Abraham
THE wait is nearly over for Africa’s
scientists. Very soon, they won’t
have to rely on collaboration
with Western academics and
institutions to get work published
in a high-profile journal.
The first edition of Scientific
African, the continent’s new
“mega” journal backed by a major
publisher, is due in September.
22 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018
It could be a game changer. Lack
of access to prominent Western
journals represents a catch-22 for
many African scientists. Without
it, their work can suffer and
become less publishable.
A generation ago, sub-Saharan
Africa’s share of the world’s
scientific papers was 1 per cent,
but by 1996 it had dropped to
about 0.7 per cent, where it stayed
for almost a decade with no sign
of recovery, according to Robert
Tijssen at Leiden University in the
Netherlands.
Scientific African will give a
welcome added incentive for
research into regional challenges
that might not be prominent on a
Western agenda: malnutrition,
conflict, adaptation to climate
change, unproductive agriculture
and haemorrhagic disease.
The new journal will, of course,
“This will give an added
incentive for work on
challenges not prominent
on a Western agenda”
minority women were sterilised
against their will in the 1990s.
Such abominations result from
treating fertility control not as a
human right, but as a means to an
end. When birth control policies
are motivated by demographic,
economic or environmental goals,
the focus easily shifts away from
supporting women’s right to
choose, to pressuring them to
make the “right” choice.
That’s especially true in nations
divided along ethnic, class and
racial lines, and in which those in
power see “others” as disposable.
These kinds of societies are more
likely to use population control in
the name of climate change.
In the past, we were told that
reducing birth rates in developing
countries would end hunger and
poverty. It didn’t. Now we are told
it will slow climate change, not
because poorer people are high
carbon dioxide emitters – they
publish on broader topics. South
Africa is co-host of the Square
Kilometer Array, an effort to build
the world’s largest radio telescope.
Robotics engineer Ashitey Trebi-
Ollennu, a Ghanaian-born NASA
scientist who worked on the
robotic craft that found water on
Mars, has established the Ghana
Robotics Academy Foundation.
But the hope is that work that
has remained in the shadows will
get exposure, aiding African
research careers. This could
rebalance partnerships. As it
stands, collaboration is pretty
much skewed towards Western
nations, who have largely
conceptualised and designed
For more opinion articles, visit newscientist.com/opinion

aren’t – but because emissions

from poorer countries might rise.
ANALYSIS Cancer risk
Never mind that nations with
high birth rates have low per
capita emissions or that economic
development in those places is
controlled by corporate entities,
not population. Never mind that
most industries in poorer nations
produce goods for wealthier ones,
that poorer people have no
influence over which technologies
JOSH EDELSON/POOL VIA REUTERS

firms use, get little benefit from

polluting industries and are the
main victims of global warming.
As the Science authors say, safe,
affordable contraception should
be available to all, so women can
choose whether and when to bear
children. But linking birth control

Glyphosate ruling at
to climate change risks eroding glyphosate’s safety by the European
women’s right to choose. If rich Food Safety Authority, the European
countries treat women’s rights Chemicals Agency and the US

odds with evidence

instrumentally, as a means to Environmental Protection Agency
achieve environmental ends, they found no increased risk of cancer.
will strengthen repressive elites Another review by a different
and deter the poorest people from branch of the WHO also found that
backing environmental causes. glyphosate isn’t carcinogenic in rats,
Climate policies must Tom Chivers simply don’t know if glyphosate was although it couldn’t rule out that it
incorporate the deepest respect a relevant cause of cancer in this might be in mice, in very high doses.
for human rights and social DOES weedkiller cause cancer? case or any other, he says. Cancer Research UK says there is a
justice. Population control According to a ruling by a Californian In 2015, the International Agency “small amount of evidence” that
campaigns do not qualify. ■ court last week, yes. Monsanto, the for Research on Cancer (IARC), people exposed to very high doses
agricultural chemicals company, a branch of the World Health might have increased risk, but no
Ian Angus edits online journal Climate has been ordered to pay $289 million Organization (WHO), said that evidence of risk at normal levels.
& Capitalism and co-authored Too Many to Dewayne Johnson (pictured), a glyphosate is “probably carcinogenic”, There is also a problem in that
People? Population, Immigration, and groundskeeper who says his terminal having reviewed the evidence. there is no plausible mechanism.
the Environmental Crisis (Haymarket) cancer was caused by their products But Pharoah says this decision Cancer is usually the result of
Roundup and RangerPro, which is controversial. The IARC found no DNA damage, which glyphosate
contain the chemical glyphosate. evidence at all from human studies, doesn’t cause.
projects without much, if any, The ruling has led to Greenpeace and its evidence from animal studies Pharoah adds that the jury’s
input from African colleagues. calling for sales of the weedkiller to is unconvincing: some studies in rats wariness is understandable. Major
That could bring us closer to the be restricted and shares in Monsanto’s corporations have a long and inglorious
ideal of local solutions to local parent company Bayer to drop. “We simply don’t know if history of obfuscating evidence that
challenges, as championed by Meanwhile, Thérèse Coffey, an glyphosate was a relevant would make their product seem
William Easterly, an economist at environment minister in the UK cause of cancer in this harmful – the manufactured doubt
New York University. He sees this government, is under fire for her case or any other” over the links between tobacco and
as a more effective way for poorer tacit support of the products, having cancer, or fossil fuels and global
nations to achieve prosperity than tweeted that she was about to and mice found evidence of a raised warming, are obvious examples.
the grand schemes of the West “deploy the amazing Roundup!”. risk of certain tumours at very high But there is no evidence that has
that, by and large, have failed to But while the jury ruled that doses, while other studies found happened here. There have been
deliver socio-economic benefits. Johnson’s cancer, a non-Hodgkin no association. several independent studies finding
Change won’t come overnight, lymphoma, was probably caused by In particular, there was no evidence no link. It is OK to be cautious about
but Scientific African’s debut will glyphosate, the evidence for a link of a raised risk of the non-Hodgkin big companies selling chemicals and
be an important moment, one is extremely thin. lymphoma that Johnson developed. claiming that they are harmless,
with an outsize impact. ■ “I don’t think there’s any good “It’s bizarre,” says Pharoah. “You can’t but in the specific case of glyphosate,
scientific evidence,” says Paul Pharoah, tell a coherent story.” the likelihood of it causing cancer is
Curtis Abraham is a writer based who studies cancer epidemiology at The IARC’s finding stands out somewhere between zero and
in Kampala, Uganda the University of Cambridge. We further because separate reviews of negligible. ■

25 August 2018 | NewScientist | 23

APERTURE

24 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018

Helping hand
THIS is an indri, the largest of Madagascar’s
endemic lemurs – and it really does need all the
help it can get.
Almost all members of this iconic group of
primates, which range from mouse-sized
animals up to the indri, which is as big as a small
child, are on the brink of extinction. This month,
an assessment for the International Union for
Conservation of Nature said that 95 per cent
of lemur species are at risk, making this the
most threatened mammal group anywhere on
the planet.
The indri is known for its stunningly loud call.
Like other lemurs, it is a victim of hunting and
habitat loss to slash-and-burn agriculture. Its
larger size – it weighs 9 kilograms – makes it a
prime target for hunters and means it requires
a bigger territory to survive.
Conserving it will be a challenge. Because it
has never bred in captivity, preserving it in its
wild habitat is its best hope. Well-managed
protected areas offer the greatest chance of
success, and ecotourism provides vital incomes
in an impoverished nation.
Christoph Schwitzer, a lemur expert at Bristol
Zoological Society in the UK, says there is still
time to save these animals. “I am an unfaltering
optimist and remain hopeful that all 107 lemur
species will survive the current extinction crisis in
Madagascar,” he says. “We haven’t yet lost a single
lemur species in modern times and even though
the rarest one – the northern sportive lemur – is
now down to just 60 individuals in the wild, these
populations can bounce back to larger numbers if
the conditions are right for them.” Jon White

Photographer
Nick Garbutt
naturepl.com

25 August 2018 | NewScientist | 25

 The maverick putting
ageing in reverse
KEN RICHARDSON

26 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018


Geneticist George Church
tells Catherine de Lange
why we should all get our
genome sequenced, why
sperm editing mustn’t be
sidelined and how dogs
will lead us to age reversal
H
E MADE his name as a pioneer of
gene sequencing in the 90s. Since
then, however, George Church has
also gained a reputation as something of a
maverick, with his often-controversial ideas
on how to apply gene editing, most notably
his project to bring back the woolly mammoth.
Church is a professor of genetics at Harvard
Medical School and a prolific entrepreneur.
He has also worked for decades to get more
people to have their genome sequenced,
and with his latest company, he hopes he
has hit on a way to do just that.
Why have you set up Nebula Genomics?
It’s not the first time I’ve tried to figure out a
way to get affordable genomes to the people
of Earth. I’ve tried many models. I think this
one is the best as it addresses several issues.
One of those is trust, because we’re using
secure encryption. The other is price. I used
to think there would be some magic price that
would trigger everybody to get their genome
sequenced. Now I have concluded that even
zero is not low enough. We are going to pay
people to have it done.
Why do you think people are so resistant to
getting their genome sequenced?
One reason is there’s poor communication
of its value by the press, and even by my
colleagues. As a result, most people imagine
that they are not at risk of having a child with
a genetic disease if no one in their family
has ever had one. That’s far from the facts.
Most infants that are born severely affected
are the first in their family history, as far as
the parents know.
It’s like seat belts. For years, people wouldn’t
install seat belts, and once they were installed,
they wouldn’t buckle them, even though it
was clearly good for them and does no harm.
The same is true of getting your genome
sequenced. It could help prevent a proportion
of tragic birth defects, which also cost upwards
of $1 million each. You can save the healthcare
system trillions of dollars.
So you think everyone should get their
genome sequenced?
I don’t think everyone should do any
particular thing other than breathe and
eat, but probably yes, it’s good public health.
Ninety-five per cent of people will find there
was no point in sequencing their genome,
but they don’t know that in advance. Imagine
you are coming to the end of your life and
sitting in the hospital and you say to yourself,
why did I bother getting seat belts and airbags?
That would be a very weird way to think about
seat belts, but it’s not a weird way to think
about genetics, apparently.
You are also working on gene editing in sperm.
Why is this important?
If you have a couple that are both unaffected
carriers of a genetic condition, they have a
high chance of their children being affected
very seriously. As an alternative to standard
practice right now – which is abortion and
IVF – you could edit the sperm to remove
the faulty gene. Procreation would then be
indistinguishable from the usual, except
up front you engineered some of the cells
in the testes.
I have been one of the people making sure
that this is in the conversation, because the
gene-editing conversation has a tendency
to go to embryos rather than to sperm.
And I think there’s a huge difference, certainly
in how acceptable they are to certain groups.
For example, in 2004 a Vatican commission
imagined a scenario in which editing sperm
would be acceptable: it could avoid the
unnaturalness of in vitro fertilisation
and abortion.
But any gene editing with results that would
be passed on to the next generation faces
regulatory obstacles, right?
The US Congress voted for legislation that
prevents the Food and Drug Administration
(FDA) from evaluating the safety and efficacy
of germline gene editing. They didn’t
explicitly ban sperm editing, but it’s implicitly
banned. I don’t think they thought that
through. The people who promoted that
aspect of the bill were probably anti-abortion,
but ironically that bill is delaying the arrival of
technology that would reduce the number of
abortions on medical grounds.
INTERVIEW
Do you have another commercial venture
brewing?
That’s a complicated one: we have 13 start-ups
coming out of my lab alone. One of them,
Rejuvenate Bio, is working on ageing reversal –
in dogs, initially.
Why work on ageing reversal in dogs first?
One of the reasons is we can make the cost
much lower. The FDA approval for veterinary
products is a lot faster and cheaper, and
I want the world to get used to the idea that
gene therapies can be inexpensive. Dogs are
a really good product target, but they are also
a good segue to humans because they are
similar in size, they live in our environment,
they eat our food, we are responsive to their
emotional state. In many ways, they are
like children.
We want to do this in dogs that are at least
11 years old. We have tested ageing reversal in
mice that are at least 2 years old, mice almost
dead with ageing.
What do you really mean by ageing reversal?
Well, there are acute diseases where the
recovery is faster in young animals: for
example, heart problems in which there is
essentially no recovery when you’re old,
“Sperm editing would
result in fewer abortions
on medical grounds”
but it is very fast when you’re young. So, we
are looking at things like how gene therapy
can aid recovery from cardiac damage, kidney
problems, obesity, diabetes – a lot of things
that really only kill old people, only kill dogs
that are over 10 years old.
Ageing reversal is a much better target
than longevity. It’s very difficult to get the FDA
to approve a drug that will make you live 20,
30 years longer. The FDA requires you to prove
exactly what you want to put on the label,
so if you want to put 30 years of added
longevity, you have to do a 30-year study.
We’re saying we can achieve ageing reversal
in maybe a couple of months, so then our
study can be that short.
Do the animals you are treating look the
same afterwards?
The mice look the same. Perhaps a little
friskier. ■
Catherine de Lange is New Scientist ’s deputy
features editor
25 August 2018 | NewScientist | 27
MATT CHASE

28 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018


MIND
OVER
MATTER
Simply changing your attitude could make you itter, slimmer,
less stressed and even younger, inds David Robson
O
“ UR minds aren’t passive observers
simply observing reality as it is;
our minds actually change reality.
The reality we experience tomorrow is partly
the product of the mindsets we hold today.”
That’s what Alia Crum told global movers and
shakers at this year’s World Economic Forum
in Davos, Switzerland. It may sound like New
Age nonsense, but Crum, who heads the Mind
& Body lab at Stanford University in California,
can back up her claims with hard evidence
showing the mysterious influence the mind
has over our health and well-being.
Crum’s pioneering research was inspired by
her own experiences as a child gymnast and
college ice hockey player. “You can be the same
physical being from one day to the next,” she
says, “but your mindset can have a dramatic
effect on performance and physiological
capabilities.” She often wondered why.
Then, as a psychology student, she read
about the placebo effect and had a eureka
moment: if our expectations can influence
the effectiveness of a drug, perhaps something
similar can happen in other situations, too.
Pursuing that idea, Crum and others have
discovered that your mindset affects
everything from your weight and fitness
to the physical toll of insomnia and stress –
even how well you age. The upshot is that two
people could have identical genes and lifestyles
but one can end up healthier than the other,
thanks solely to their different thoughts.
Placebos are inert pills used in most clinical
drug trials. The participants are divided
randomly into two groups: half take the drug
COVER STORY
being tested, the rest, for comparison, take
an identical-looking sugar pill. With no active
ingredient, the placebo shouldn’t have any
effects. Yet it often brings about measurable
changes, triggering the release of natural
painkillers and lowering blood pressure,
for example – all because of people’s
expectations. Patients sometimes reap these
benefits even when they know they are taking
the placebo (see “Everyday placebos”, page 30).
On the downside, our expectations of a pill
can also produce side effects, including nausea
and skin rashes. This is the placebo effect’s
“evil” twin, the nocebo effect (see “The science
of voodoo”, page 32).
Crum was “blown away” when she learned
how powerful these effects can be. “But what
surprised me most was the fact that we’ve
done relatively little to understand and
harness them to improve health and well-
being,” she says. Governments spend huge
amounts of money encouraging us to adopt
healthier lifestyles. What if our efforts could
be boosted, or undermined, by the very
psychological processes that influence a
drug’s efficacy through the placebo and
nocebo effects, Crum wondered. She has spent
the past decade investigating that possibility.
One of Crum’s first experiments examined
the fitness of 84 hotel cleaners. She suspected
that few of them would be aware of the sheer
amount of exercise their job entails, and that
this might prevent them from gaining the full
benefits of that workout. To manipulate their
mindsets, she gave half of them detailed
information about the physical demands of >
25 August 2018 | NewScientist | 29
EVERYDAY PLACEBOS
CAFFEINE: If a strong espresso sets
your nerves jangling, that may be
largely due to your expectations.
Even pure water increased alertness
and raised blood pressure in
volunteers who were told it contained
caffeine. As for those withdrawal
symptoms when you can’t get your
morning cup of joe, they might be all
in your head, too.
SPORTS SUPPLEMENTS: There is
little scientific backing for many of
these products, but studies show
that people only have to believe they
are taking performance enhancers
or energy drinks to show greater
stamina and strength. Even the
effects of steroids may be boosted
by a placebo response.
DESIGNER BRANDS: Are they really
better than generics? Not necessarily.
People tricked into thinking they were
wearing designer sunglasses could
more easily decipher small writing
through the glare of bright light than
those who thought they were wearing
less prestigious brands.
BOOZE: Drinking culture is full of
urban myths, including the idea that
adding Red Bull to vodka “gives you
wings”. Studies reveal that the power
of expectation is what really increases
feelings of drunkenness.
LUCKY CHARMS: They work
because we believe they will.
Golfers who thought they were using
a professional’s putter perceived the
hole to be larger and easier to putt
– and were more accurate as a result.
30 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018
their work – such as the fact that hoovering
burns 200 calories an hour – and told them
that their activity met the US surgeon
general’s exercise recommendations.
One month later, despite reporting no
change to their diet or activity outside work,
the cleaners who received the information had
lost about a kilogram each, and their average
blood pressure had dropped from elevated
to normal. The others showed no difference.
It was, admittedly, a small study and Crum
didn’t record actual behaviour. “It could be
that they were putting slightly more oomph
into making the beds,” she says.
However, a follow-up study with her
colleague, Octavia Zahrt, bolstered the idea
that people’s expectations directly influence
their body’s response to exercise. That study
used data from health surveys monitoring
more than 60,000 people for up to 21 years.
Zahrt found that the “perceived fitness” of the
participants – how they felt compared with
the average person – was a better predictor
of their risk of mortality than the amount of
time they said they spent exercising. Crucially,
some of them wore accelerometers for part influence everyday fitness, but argues that
of the survey period – yet, after taking their “we can learn a lot about the mechanisms,
actual physicial activity into account, the implications and applications” of the
influence of their perceived fitness remained. mind-body connection from such studies.
Overall, people who took a more pessimistic Crum has now documented many other
view of their fitness were up to 71 per cent ways in which our mindset could be harming
more likely to die during the survey, compared our health. A nocebo effect may undermine
with those who thought they were more active efforts to lose weight by dieting, for instance.
than average – whatever their exercise routine. In 2011, Crum offered volunteers a milkshake
How this works is still a bit of a mystery. at her lab, then measured their levels of the
We do know that the brain can directly control “hunger hormone” ghrelin, which normally
blood pressure through the autonomic drops after a meal. Although everyone
nervous system. In addition, Crum suspects received the same shake, some were told it
that a poor perception of your fitness could was healthy while others were led to believe
be triggering inflammation and the release
of hormones such as cortisol, which might “Understanding that stress
help determine how the body responds to
exercise. Her team is investigating possible needn’t be damaging can
mechanisms but, she says, it’s not too early to help your body cope with it”
take advantage of these effects. Crum’s advice,
which she follows herself, is not to deceive they were having an indulgent treat. The
yourself about your fitness, but to make sure impact was striking. Those who thought
that you don’t undervalue the exercise you they had drunk a low-calorie shake showed
do either. You should also avoid comparing markedly higher levels of ghrelin afterwards,
yourself critically with your peers, particularly which left them feeling less full.
if they are exceptionally sporty. Ghrelin doesn’t affect appetite alone.
Fabrizio Benedetti at the University of Turin By signalling food deprivation, the hormone
Medical School, Italy, who has pioneered work also slows down metabolism, tipping the body
on the placebo and nocebo effects, praises the towards storing fat rather than burning it.
findings. “Crum’s work is very interesting and It makes evolutionary sense to reduce energy
her approach to health is important from both consumption when resources are scarce, but it
a medical and psychological point of view,” is bad news when we are trying to lose weight.
says Benedetti. He stresses the need for “When people think they are eating healthily,
caution, given the many variables that that’s associated with the sense of

deprivation,” says Crum. “And that mindset
matters in shaping our physiological
response.” Instead, she suggests, dieters
should cultivate a “mindset of indulgence”,
savouring the textures and flavours of
whatever they are eating.
Non-dieters could be falling prey to this
effect, too. When we drink a sugary beverage,
our brain doesn’t seem to recognise the
liquid as a source of energy, and fails to adjust
digestion accordingly so that we tend to eat
more afterwards than if we had eaten solid
food containing the same number of calories.
However, it is possible to subvert this effect by
changing our expectations. Richard Mattes at
Purdue University in Indiana primed people
to believe that an energy drink would solidify
once it reached their stomach. As well as
lowering ghrelin levels, this increased their
insulin response after consumption, and
the drink stayed in their stomach longer –
all of which left them feeling fuller. “That
was followed by a decrease in the daily
energy they consumed,” says Mattes.
Crum has also been investigating the
influence of our expectations on stress.
It is well known that chronic stress can lead
to reduced cognitive performance, high blood
pressure and a compromised immune system.
But can the fear of stress itself worsen its
harmful effects? To find out, Crum first
Fizzy drinks trick your brain, which is why
they don’t fill you up as much as solid foods
You don’t need to go actually improve health, triggering the
to the gym to get the production of hormones necessary for cell
benefits of a workout growth, among other things. “There’s a lot of
public health messaging that warns us about
the effects of stress, but it’s one-sided, and
builds the mindset that stress is debilitating,
when in fact there are many enhancing
qualities,” says Crum. What’s more, simply
understanding that stress needn’t be
damaging can help our bodies cope with it.
After watching a video on the ways that
stress can boost focus and creativity, Crum’s
participants showed more optimal hormonal
responses under stress, marked by moderate
levels of cortisol and raised levels of growth-
promoting hormones.
MICHAEL LOEWA/LAIF/CAMERAPRESS
Tired all the time?
The dangers of stressing about stress might
help explain some insomnia too. About a
quarter of people’s perceptions of how well
they sleep don’t correlate with the sleep
they actually get, with potentially significant
repercussions. “Complaining good sleepers” –
assessed students’ attitudes by getting them people who believe they are insomniacs, even
to rate statements such as “experiencing though monitoring of their night-time brain
stress depletes my health and vitality” activity suggests otherwise – are most likely
and “experiencing stress enhances my to experience symptoms such as daytime
performance and productivity”. Then she told fatigue, high blood pressure, depression and
them that they had to give a short presentation. anxiety. “Non-complaining bad sleepers”,
Faced with this prospect, those who considered by contrast, are remarkably free of ill effects.
stress to be debilitating rather than enhancing “Worry about poor sleep is a stronger
showed the largest physiological reactions, pathogen than poor sleep,” says Kenneth
including greater fluctuations in levels of the Lichstein at the University of Alabama,
stress hormone cortisol. who made this discovery.
Such reactions are thought to underpin It is possible that constant daytime fatigue
the most damaging health effects of stress. leads people to identify as insomniac, rather
However, moderate stress responses can than insomnia causing the fatigue. But, at least
one study supports the idea that a placebo
effect is partly responsible. It found that
simply priming participants to think they had
slept poorly or unusually deeply influenced
their cognitive functioning the next day.
All these findings give us plenty of reasons
to reassess our mindsets. But perhaps the
most provocative research concerns ageing –
with some strong evidence that negative
beliefs could knock decades off your life.
PLAINPICTURE/BLEND IMAGES/MOXIE PRODUCTIONS
The first clues emerged in the early 1980s.
Ellen Langer at Harvard University – who
later collaborated with Crum on the hotel
cleaner study – took a group of pensioners
to a monastery in New Hampshire and told
them to act as if they were 22 years younger
for the duration of their stay. The retreat was
decorated as if the year were 1959, and filled
with music, films, magazines and books from
that era. Their rooms contained no mirrors, >
25 August 2018 | NewScientist | 31
THE SCIENCE OF VOODOO
When anthropologists first heard
reports of witch doctors killing
people with a curse, they looked for
rational explanations. These were
undermined, however, by the
discovery that Western doctors have
similar powers. In the 1970s, for
example, a man died just months after
doctors told him he had end-stage
liver cancer – despite the autopsy
revealing that the diagnosis had been
mistaken. He hadn’t died from cancer
but from believing he had cancer.
We now know what lies behind
these strange goings-on: the nocebo
effect. The “evil” twin of the placebo
effect, it is when putting someone in
a negative frame of mind has adverse
consequences for their health or
well-being. Tell people that a medical
procedure will be extremely painful,
for example, and they will experience
more pain than they would otherwise.
Similarly, warning about the possible
side effects of a drug makes it more
likely that patients will report
experiencing those effects.
The nocebo effect is widespread:
about a quarter of participants in
clinical trials experience side effects
even though they have been given a
placebo, a sugar pill. Recent research
indicates that it can be even stronger
than the placebo effect, particularly
when people are anxious or feel that
their doctor doesn’t understand or
believe them. And the nocebo effect
is not just a problem in healthcare.
It could also be undermining your
efforts to lose weight, shape up,
cope with stress, and more
(see main story).
32 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018
A positive attitude to ageing will keep you
healthier and more active for longer
only pictures of their younger selves. After
just five days, the pensioners’ arthritis had
improved, their posture was more upright,
and their thinking – as measured by an IQ
test – was sharper.
Inspired by this study, other teams have
since shown that our attitudes really can
influence how our bodies fare over time.
Overall, people who view ageing positively
live 7.5 years longer than those who associate it surpassed those from a six-month physical
with frailty and senility. Negative perceptions
of ageing are not merely the result of poor
health; they can foreshadow symptoms by
as much as 38 years.
Admittedly, people with a pessimistic
view of ageing are less active and less likely to “It’s about being empowered
seek healthcare when they need it. However,
many studies find this cannot fully explain
the effect on health. So, what’s going on?
It seems that people with rosier beliefs
about ageing react less to stress and are less
likely to develop inflammation – both of
which would mean that they age more
slowly. Becca Levy at the Yale School of
Public Health has found that they tend to
have longer telomeres – the protective caps
at the ends of chromosomes. This matters
because telomeres wear away with time,
so are a yardstick of age. Such people are
also less likely to develop brain changes
associated with Alzheimer’s disease than
those who view ageing negatively.
Ageism is deeply engrained. “We know
that children as young as 3 or 4 have already
DAVID ALAN HARVEY/MAGNUM
assimilated the age stereotypes of their
culture,” says Levy. But her latest studies
suggest that attitudes can be changed.
In one, participants aged between 61 and
99 played a computer game while positive
age-related words such as “wise”, “mature”
and “experienced” flashed briefly on the
screen. Although they did not consciously
register the words, their perceptions of ageing
had significantly improved after four sessions,
as had their physical well-being. Amazingly,
the benefits, including increased mobility,
exercise regime.
No wonder some researchers are calling
for campaigns that educate people about the
dangers of ageism. “Being aware of these
by the possibility that we
can choose better mindsets”
stereotypes, and questioning them, and
developing a resistance to them – that’s a good
skill people can learn at any age,” says Levy.
Of course, a positive mindset is not a
panacea. But these findings could help us all
benefit more from our efforts to achieve a
healthy lifestyle through exercise, a balanced
diet, relaxation and getting a good night’s sleep.
“It’s about being mindful of the fact that we
have mindsets and that they matter, and being
empowered by the possibility that we can
choose more useful mindsets,” says Crum. ■
David Robson is a freelance journalist in London
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UNTOLD STORY
Ice sage
It took a singular Scot, the unschooled James Croll,
to explain Earth’s recurrent cold spells, inds Fred Pearce
H
E WAS the janitor who unlocked the
secret of how ice ages happen. The sickly
son of a poor Scottish farmer, James
Croll left school at 13 and became an itinerant
labourer and failed salesman. But decades of
private reading and an astonishing capacity
for original thought saw him soar to scientific
stardom. Croll became the father of climate-
change research, and corresponded as an
equal with the science heavyweights of the
day, including Charles Darwin, Lord Kelvin,
Arctic explorer Fridtjof Nansen and geologist
Charles Lyell. Yet you have probably never
heard of him.
His star waned, and his insights about the
cosmological causes of the great glaciations
sank from view, until revived half a century
later by Serbian mathematician Milutin
Milankovitch, who took the plaudits. Croll
died in penury, a footnote even on his own
gravestone. Was he a victim of Victorian
snobbishness? Or might he have fared
even worse had he lived in the modern age?
Croll was born in 1821 and raised on a
smallholding on moorland in rural east
Scotland, land he worked from a young age.
His sporadic schooling ended at 13, but by
then he had stumbled across a copy of The
Penny Magazine, the New Scientist of its day.
He became hooked on science. By 14, he was
reading the great science texts of the time.
“At first I became bewildered, but soon the
beauty and simplicity of the conceptions
filled me with delight and astonishment,”
he later wrote in an autobiographical
J. CAMPBELL IRONS
sketch. “I studied pneumatics, hydrostatics,
light, heat, electricity and magnetism.
I obtained assistance from no one.”
34 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018
His head was full of ideas, but Croll had
no qualifications and no money. At 16, he was
a travelling millwright, sleeping in rat-infested
barns. Later he became a joiner, before a
damaged elbow left him unable to do manual
work. He was also, as his step-nephew James
Campbell Irons wrote in a biographical
appreciation, “heavy and ungainly” as well
as “modest, shy, dry and with an almost
speechless manner”.
Not surprisingly, then, Croll also failed as a
tea merchant and an insurance salesman, and
went bankrupt as the landlord of a temperance
hotel in a town of 3500 people and 16 taverns.
By luck, he eventually found himself a
A genius who worked out the choreography of
glaciers, James Croll was not a people person
neighbour of the head of Anderson’s
University, the forerunner of Strathclyde
University. Croll became its caretaker. There,
duties done, he would hole up in the library,
pursuing the great scientific issues of the day.
One of those was the cause of the ice ages.
Geologists had deduced that large parts
of Europe had been repeatedly covered in ice,
but nobody knew what caused this waxing
and waning. There were some theories rooted
in astronomical phenomena, but it was Croll’s
untutored, free-ranging mind that would
crack the conundrum.
By painstaking calculation, he showed
that over more than a million years, the
glaciations appeared to coincide with the
periodic extremes of what astronomers call
eccentricity. This variation in the elliptical
shape of Earth’s orbit around the sun has
only a tiny effect on the total amount of solar
radiation reaching the planet. In his greatest
insight, Croll proposed that it was enough to
trigger substantial indirect cooling of the
Arctic – in particular by the diversion of the
Gulf Stream, reducing heat reaching the pole.
As more ice formed, more sunlight was
reflected, causing more cooling. Such
amplifying feedbacks underpin estimates
of the impact of human-made climate
change today.
His ideas were published in 1864 in the
Philosophical Magazine, a top UK science
journal of the day. The paper was attributed to
“James Croll, Anderson’s University”. Whether
the editors knew Croll was a janitor is not
recorded, but soon it didn’t matter. As Croll
put it, “the paper excited a considerable
amount of attention”.
THOMAS GÜNTHER/PLAINPICTURE
He was soon corresponding with the
great and the good of science. Darwin wrote:
“I have never, I think, in my life, been so deeply
interested by any geological discussion.”
Croll’s paper had, he said, “cleared so much
mist from before my eyes”.
In 1867, Croll became secretary of the
Scottish Geological Survey in Edinburgh. It
allowed him time, despite growing bouts of
poor health, to produce a book on his thinking.
Published in 1875, Climate and Time appeared
to seal his reputation as one of the era’s great
scientists. Within months, he had an honorary
degree from the University of St Andrews, and
fellowships at the Royal Society in London and
the New York Academy of Sciences.
Croll published more groundbreaking
research: on how glaciers moved, the causes
of ocean circulation, and the thickness of
Antarctic ice – at a time when scarcely anyone
had even set foot on the continent. He also
persuaded Darwin that rivers were important
agents of erosion.
The high waters of Croll’s fame retreated
as he became ever more reclusive. Turning
down an invitation to lecture at the British
Association (today the British Science
Association), he wrote: “I dislike all such
public displays… there is a cold materialistic
atmosphere around scientific men in general
that I don’t like. I mix but little with them.”
His health worsening, he retired in 1880,
aged 59. Prime ministers William Gladstone
and Lord Salisbury both rebuffed pleas from
Darwin, Lord Kelvin and others to give Croll
a full civil-service pension. He ended up
penurious in rented lodgings in Perth, just
streets away from where he bought his first
Penny Magazine. He died a decade later.
He was buried in what is now an abandoned
churchyard in Cargill. A worn gravestone
“An astonishing capacity for
original thought saw him
soar to scientific stardom”
lists 14 of his forebears, with Croll and his
wife Isabella mentioned last, in the smallest
letters, as space on the stone ran out.
One obituary called him “among the
foremost, if not the first [investigator] of the
physical cause of climatic change”. But by
then, the salons of science had tired of this
testy recluse. Soon, his name and his theories
were largely forgotten.
Only in the 1930s were they revived
by Milankovitch, who corrected some
inaccuracies in what he called Croll’s “most
remarkable” work. Even so, when ocean-
sediment cores taken in the 1970s confirmed
the causal links deduced by Croll, the Scot was
so forgotten that Earth’s periodic coolings
became known as Milankovitch cycles.
In the past decade, a handful of Scottish
academics have tried to rescue Croll’s name.
There is now a memorial to him outside the
Royal Scottish Geographical Society in Perth.
Croll’s fall is usually painted as the result of
Victorian sniffiness at the untutored working
class. Maybe so. But what is remarkable, says
Andrew Dlugolecki at the University of East
Anglia, UK, is how much respect he did receive
in his heyday, despite his lack of formal
qualifications. “Leading scientists
corresponded with Croll as an equal. That
would probably be impossible nowadays,
given the huge emphasis placed on papers
in the scientific literature,” says Dlugolecki.
And what journal today would publish
a paper, whatever its merits, from a janitor
with no formal education? New Scientist asked
Nature whether its editors could think of
such an upstart in their recent archives.
They could not. ■
Fred Pearce is a consultant for New Scientist
25 August 2018 | NewScientist | 35
 Goodbye, cash?
Banks and governments are toying with killing off physical money.
That might not be such a good idea, says Joshua Howgego
W
HEN Marco Polo visited Kublai Khan
at the end of the 13th century, little
seems to have impressed him more
than that the Khan used paper money. “In this
city of Kanbalu is the mint of the Great Khan,
who may truly be said to possess the secret of
alchemists, as he has the art of producing
money,” he wrote.
It isn’t hard to see why it seemed that way.
To a European of the time, money consisted
of things such as silver and gold coins that had
intrinsic, tradable worth. The Khan simply
took common old bark from mulberry trees,
pulped it into paper and, with an array of
signatures and seals, declared that it had
value. No one in the Mongol empire dared
refuse it as a means of payment.
Today this idea is so central to our lives
that we hardly spare it a thought. But cash –
physical money in the form of notes or coins –
is losing its lustre. The rise of internet
shopping and the increasing convenience
of card payments, plus the extra costs for
governments and central banks associated
with cash, means all the talk is of taking
money fully digital.
The necessary technology already exists.
But as the dash away from cash gathers
36 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018
momentum, there are increasing rumblings
about the downsides. Digital money might not
solve all the problems of cash, and will bring a
whole slew of new ones too. So do we want it?
Victoria Cleland knows a thing or two about
cash. Currently the Bank of England’s
executive director for banking, payments and
financial resilience, she was until recently its
chief cashier, meaning her signature appeared
on all banknotes issued in England. Cash
fulfils three crucial functions in modern
87%
OF PAYMENTS IN SWEDEN
ARE ALREADY CASHLESS
SOURCE: SWEDISH RIKSBANK
economies, she says. It is easily exchangeable
from person to person; everyone knows
precisely what it is worth; and in normal
economic circumstances, its value barely
changes from day to day.
There are plenty of other tradable assets
around, from gold bullion to diamonds to
houses, but none fulfils all these functions as
neatly as cash does. A whole complex financial
system including central banks has built up
around it (see “The rise of the bank”, page 38).
But the use of cash is in free fall. According
to trade association UK Finance, fewer
payments will be made with cash than by
debit card in the UK for the first time in 2018.
The proportion of cash payments in the UK
dropped from 62 per cent of transactions in
2006 to 40 per cent in 2016, and is projected
to fall to just 21 per cent in 2026 (see “Money
down the drain”, page 38). It is a similar story
of “demonetisation” around the world,
as cards and mobile payment apps take over
the functions of cash.
That change has largely been driven by
consumer convenience, but governments and
central banks have their own reasons to think
beyond cash. Coins and notes must be minted
or printed – and in far greater quantities
than are in use at any one time, to keep shops,
retail banks and cash machines in stock. That
leads to a paradox of cash. “We are seeing a
slowdown in cash used for transactions, but
we are still seeing an increase in demand for
cash,” says Cleland.
Part of the problem is rock-bottom interest
rates, and the fear of bank runs generated by
the financial crisis a decade ago, which have >
ANDREA UCINI

28 August 2018 | NewScientist | 37

Money down the drain
In the UK, as in many parts of the world, the use of cash is falling precipitously
25
20
Number of payments (billions)
15
10
5 other remote banking
0 Cheque
2006 2011
SOURCE: UK FINANCE
THE RISE OF
THE BANK
Modern finance began with institutions
such as the London goldsmith bankers of
the 17th century, who accepted chunks
of gold, recorded its value in ledgers and
issued a receipt or IOU.
Gradually people began to pay each
other for goods by exchanging these
notes. But holders could only redeem the
gold at the bank that issued it, and had
to physically move the gold to their own
bank to realise its value. So banks came
to accept each other’s notes, and to take
care of moving the gold around.
As the number of banks and the
complexity of transactions increased,
it became hard to keep track of where
the gold should be. The solution was for
a “clearing bank” to sit at the centre of
the system and keep a single,
trustworthy register of transactions.
That clearing role is carried out by
central banks like the Bank of England
or the US Federal Reserve, which
now issue the standard IOUs everyone
uses, and generally ensure that no
one attempts to spend the same money
twice. By controlling the supply of
money, and twiddling associated knobs
such as the base interest rate, central
banks have become central to a
well-greased economy.
38 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018
PROJECTED
Debit card
Cash
Direct debit
Credit/charge/
purchasing card
Faster payments and
Bacs direct credit
Standing order
2016 2021 2026
led many people to opt for stashing cash
under the mattress. A survey commissioned
by the Bank of England in 2014 found that
18 per cent of people in the UK hoarded cash,
an average of £345 each.
Beyond that, though, there is a steady
flow of cash across borders and into criminal
enterprise and the untaxed shadow economy.
Economists Friedrich Schneider and Colin
Williams have estimated that the shadow
economy accounts for between 8 and 24
per cent of GDP in the rich-world OECD
countries, representing a serious drain on
government coffers.
49%
OF GDP IN KENYA IS
TRANSACTED THROUGH
MOBILE DIGITAL PAYMENTS
SOURCE: CENTRAL BANK OF KENYA
Ending cash would help combat crime,
while also giving central banks more power
to keep the economy moving, for example
by introducing negative interest rates. This
de facto tax on money in banks is already
in effect in Japan, Sweden, Denmark and
Switzerland, and Bank of England chief
economist Andy Haldane has called it
an “interesting solution”. The idea is to
encourage people to spend money when
the economy is stagnating. Hoarding cash
allows people to sidestep this stick.
Oddly enough, it is a movement originally
designed to topple conventional finance
that has spurred talk of government-issued
digital money. Digital cryptocurrencies
such as Bitcoin were motivated by a desire
to escape the whole banking system and its
centralised accounting and control. Instead,
they use a distributed, supposedly
unfalsifiable online ledger known as the
blockchain, which relies on rigid
mathematical rules to securely record
transactions in the currency. This generates
the same kind of trust in a transaction that
cash issued and backed by a central bank does.
Now central banks are considering how
they might co-opt such a system for their
own purposes. One of the furthest along the
road is the Swedish Riksbank, which floated
the idea of a state-issued digital currency,
e-krona, in 2016. Despite negative interest
rates, cash use is falling unusually rapidly in
Sweden: the proportion of cash payments
declined from 39 per cent in 2010 to 13 per cent
in 2018. About 60 per cent of Swedes already
use a mobile app called Swish that allows
people to instantly transfer money between
different bank accounts just by tapping in a
phone number.
This is really just a user-friendly interface
with the Swedish banking system’s existing
payment infrastructure. E-krona would be
a whole new currency. In a report issued
in late 2017, the Riksbank identified two
possible ways of doing things. The first
would be to provide bank accounts at the
central bank in which people could keep
digital currency, then have a centralised
register of transactions between them,
not unlike the databases already used to
process debit card transactions.
The second would be a system by which
encrypted digital files are exchanged
between users, where the files themselves
are declared to have value. “Other Swedish
authorities are very interested,” says Björn
Segendorf, a policy analyst at the Riksbank,
seeing a way also to reach people without
bank accounts. “It seems one of their main
headaches is making payments to unbanked
people, and this might offer a solution.”
The bank asked for proposals from tech
companies for how to build the e-krona
and, having received 33 ideas, is continuing
to discuss the options this year.
Sweden isn’t alone. In November 2017,
Uruguay published details of a small test of
digital pesos issued by the country’s central
bank. Venezuela has launched the petro,

a cryptocurrency run by the state, although
the scheme is widely derided. South Korea,
too, plans to be cashless by 2020 and has
been mulling launching a digital currency.
But the latest signs are that it will not,
at least for now. One concern cited by the
country’s central bank is how it would
radically transform the banking system,
potentially destabilising it. The reason is the
subtle difference between cash backed by a
central bank and the non-physical money
that sits in your bank account, or that you
use when you pay with plastic. “When you’re
using a credit or debit card, you are using
money that’s created by a commercial bank,”
says Garrick Hileman at the Cambridge
Centre for Alternative Finance in the UK.
This money is either created by interest on
loans made by that institution, or by you when
you make a deposit. Unlike with central-bank
cash, there is no hard-and-fast guarantee that
you will get this money back. Commercial
banks work on the assumption that not
everyone will withdraw their money at once.
If this happens, it can run out, as for example
happened with the collapsed UK bank
Northern Rock in 2008.
The fear is that digital currencies could
make this sort of thing more likely. In times
of crisis, people would pull their money
from commercial banks and buy safe
digital currency backed by a central bank –
a potentially quicker way to undermine the
banking system than withdrawing your
money in the form of physical cash. As the
Bank of England’s Marilyne Tolle suggested in
a paper in 2016, that could precipitate chaos:
if commercial banks went out of business,
there would be no one to provide loans.
34%
OF PEOPLE IN THE US
SAY THEY CARRY CASH
RARELY OR NEVER
SOURCE: ING INTERNATIONAL SURVEY MOBILE BANKING 2017
There may be ways around that, such as
allowing commercial banks to offer better
interest rates than central banks. But this is
uncharted territory, and the Bank of England’s
researchers are still trying to work out what
the effects might be. “This is the big reason
why the Bank has backed away from issuing
a central bank digital currency to everyday
people,” says Hileman. Cleland confirms that,
although the Bank is monitoring the situation,
it has no immediate plans to introduce a
digital currency. It is, however, testing whether
the technology that underlies it could be
used to speed up international financial
transactions (see “Really swift”, page 40).
There are other reasons for scepticism
about digital money, too. While a cashless
economy might stop people stuffing cash
under mattresses, hoarding hard currency
isn’t in itself morally wrong, and stopping it
undermines honest people’s right to choose
what they do with their money. Critics suggest
that criminals would simply switch to another
cash currency, or a tradable asset such as gold.
Brett Scott, author of The Heretic’s Guide to
Global Finance, has written about the time
he was due to speak at a conference on
reinventing money, and went to get a drink
from a card-only vending machine only to
have his plastic denied. His point is that cash
transactions take place between two parties,
whereas digital transactions inevitably involve
third-party payment facilitators. Currently >
25 August 2018 | NewScientist | 39
Phasing out large-value banknotes
could make criminal activity harder

these are private credit and debit card firms

such as Visa and Mastercard. Not only do
those firms make a profit on the back of your
payments, they can also choose not to offer
their services to certain clients.
If we were to totally replace physical cash
with digital cash, we would be giving a similar
power to a state authority or any other third
party they might franchise the operation out
to. And whoever controls your digital currency
potentially has access to a huge amount of
information about you, your finances and
your habits.

Questionable transactions

GP KIDD/GETTY
That doesn’t have to be a bad thing, says
Tom Blomfield, founder of Monzo, a recently
founded mobile-only bank in the UK. Monzo
already crunches data to offer its customers “Whoever controls your digital currency has access
insights into their spending habits, for
example automatically labelling payments to a huge amount of information about you”
made on one of the bank’s debit cards
“groceries” or “eating out” and flashing F-word – Facebook,” says Blomfield. the question is whether having a lot more
them up on the customer’s phone. “But they didn’t do enough proactive stuff.” sensitive data sloshing around in the digital
He says there are about 30 financial issues, Others are less sanguine. If one driver of realm can ever be a good thing. “There has
from switching energy providers to renewing the end of cash is a desire to control the flow been a lot said about the decline of cash, but
insurance policies, where such a data-driven of money more and reduce questionable there’s not been nearly as much discussion
approach could help – with the proviso that transactions, that implies a degree of insight of the data privacy and what it would mean,
people are clear what they are getting into into the nature of transactions. Even with the potentially, to go to a world of completely
when they sign up. “I don’t want to use the best of intentions and safeguards in place, known transactions where there’s no
anonymity, no privacy,” says Hileman.
Then there are questions of infrastructure
REALLY SWIFT reliability. “Imagine a completely electronic
International money transfers bank will accept the transfer, between two simulated payment system, no cash. Imagine there’s
are a pain. Say someone in or of how much it will cost. accounts in different a cyberattack and people can’t transact.
London wants to send money To pay the money in countries using the That would be catastrophic, there would be
to someone in Singapore. Singapore dollars, the Interledger Protocol, an open chaos in the streets.”
Unlike within a country, recipient bank must take source shared ledger system Such problems exist to be solved – but
there is no central money- this from a holding place invented by a firm named mean that we probably shouldn’t anticipate
issuing authority to ensure known as a nostro account. Ripple. Instead of three days, the end of cash soon. Even critics baulk at
that all the funds are there Not just any bank can afford the necessary checks and that suggestion. Kenneth Rogoff is a Harvard
and can be used. to maintain a well-stocked payments happened in economist who wrote the 2016 book The Curse
The UK bank must first nostro account, so not just seconds. “We’re really excited of Cash, which among other things strongly
send digital messages to the any bank can take care of about this,” says Ripple’s argues that cash oils the wheels of the criminal
bank in Singapore, instructing international transfers. Even Marcus Treacher, adding that underworld. “I don’t make the case for going
it that the transfer is going to so, there is about $5 trillion he is talking to other central cashless,” says Rogoff. There is inestimable
happen using a system set up sitting in these accounts banks, too. “None is using the value in being able to use cash in certain
by the Belgium-based Society worldwide, which could be technology for real yet, but situations, including emergencies.
for Worldwide Interbank put to better use. we believe it’s very close.” Instead, he suggests phasing out only the
Financial Telecommunication, Shared ledger technology Treacher thinks payments most valuable banknotes, the £50 note in the
or SWIFT. Generally it is of the sort cryptocurrencies systems are in an era akin UK, say, or the US $100 bill. Perhaps that’s what
anything but, taking at least use could be the answer. In to how business was the immediate future looks like – not cashless,
three days to go through, 2017, the Bank of England set pre-internet: connect things just less cash. ■
because the first bank has up an experiment in which up and it opens up new
no guarantee that the second money was transferred opportunities. Joshua Howgego is a feature editor at New Scientist

40 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018

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SCIENTIST
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CULTURE
The deep blue, greyed out
It’s an eye-popping show of marine anatomy, but Sumit Paul-Choudhury longs to dive deeper
Sea Creatures, at the RHS Lawrence
Hall, London, to 30 August; then to
Edinburgh, Harrogate and Belfast
THE 3-tonne corpse of Hai Hai
the baby minke whale, beached
on a Chinese island in 2009,
was rotting by the time scientists
reached it. Undeterred, a team of
around 30 anatomists swung into
action, labouring for nearly two
years to preserve, dehydrate and
plastinate it, before reassembling
it to reveal muscles on one side,
and bones, nerves and organs
on the other.
Now Hai Hai, the world’s
largest plastinated marine
animal, is the star of Sea
Creatures, an exhibition of
more than 50 similarly preserved
aquatic animals that will be
touring the UK over the next few
months. His companions include
sharks, a manta ray, a porpoise
and a giant squid. Ocean dwellers
ranging from crabs to cuttlefish
are also represented, as well as
some 150 individual body parts.
Any fish market serves up a
visual banquet of aquatic viscera – specimen whose provenance
fresh from the sea, to boot.
But when the sea’s charismatic
megafauna are presented for our
delectation, we seek assurances
that they are being served up with sailfish) and the humble
respect, and not merely to sate
our more ghoulish appetites –
a concern that has lingered over
plastination spectaculars for
decades, largely thanks to the
exhibitions of human cadavers
staged by the technique’s
inventor, Gunther von Hagens.
Educational value is the usual
fig leaf held up against charges
of indecency.
Sea Creatures, presented
by a former associate of von
Hagens, stresses that its exhibits
42 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018
SEA CREATURES
have been “ethically sourced” –
although Hai Hai is the only
is described.
The curation is generally
sound, with sections devoted
to the flamboyant (a staring
(a cabinet of shellfish). There
are idiosyncrasies: a salami-sliced
“Ocean dwellers from
crabs to cuttlefish are
here, as well as some 150
individual body parts”
penguin is a non sequitur in
an area otherwise devoted to
invertebrates. And the show’s few
wince-worthy grotesques seem
inadvertent, rather than designed:
another penguin grinning
Ocean plastics: a sunfish preserved
using a plastination technique
manically as it opens its skin;
a porpoise split like a banana.
Credibility comes from a
partnership with the Scottish
Association for Marine Science,
which has provided crisply
informative labels describing
the anatomies and behaviours
of the animals on display.
The presentation of body parts
works well. The material fact of
the crucian carp’s pea-sized brain
makes its ability to learn from
experience all the more striking.
Everyone knows what gills look
like from the outside, but their
corsetry, winnowed free from
flesh, is a different matter. And
a shark’s stomach turns out to be
surprisingly small but densely
corrugated, as it is surface area,
not volume, that counts when it
comes to digestion.
With the complete specimens,
however, there is little to help
viewers understand what they
are looking at. There aren’t any
explanatory diagrams, or even
illustrations of the animals as
they might have appeared in
life. (The show’s companion
smartphone app does offer some
media, but it is more entertaining
than informative.)
Plastination can use colours to
add visual appeal and highlight
certain tissues. It also allows for
poses both naturalistic and
contrived – attributes used to
spectacular effect at the Animal
Inside Out exhibition at London’s
Natural History Museum in
2012, for example. Here, though,
the subjects’ stiff poses and
bleached appearance give no
hint of the elegant motion or
vibrant colours we associate
with marine life.
Once the initial shock and awe
of seeing a whale shark’s innards
had passed, my reaction to the
parade of bloodless guts was
mounting ennui. Without
contextual information – age,
sex, locale, distinguishing
features, circumstances of death
and collection – I found it hard to
remember that this monochrome
tableau is made up of remarkable
animals, remarkably preserved,
rather than waxworks in a slightly
past-it museum.
Sea Creatures may offer
sufficient gawping opportunities
to satisfy those who just want
to graze the surface of marine
biology. But it is likely to frustrate
those who would like to dive
more deeply. ■

For more books and arts coverage, visit newscientist.com/culture
Emotional beings
We know little about how emotions are made, says Helen Thomson
The Neuroscience of Emotion: A new
synthesis by Ralph Adolphs and David J.
Anderson, Princeton University Press
IF YOU struggle
to define your
innermost feelings
of love, lust, anger
and jealousy, you
are not alone –
scientists are
especially sloppy,
sometimes referring to emotions
as feelings, at other times referring
to internal states or behaviours.
Which is just one of the reasons be cumulative since we
why Ralph Adolphs and David
Anderson have created a new
framework for the study of
emotion across species. In The
Neuroscience of Emotion, the two
Caltech professors sift through
current studies of emotion, and
provide a road map for the future. Phineas Gage, the railroad worker
Their analysis is authoritative
and unsurpassed in its intricate
examination of the field. It is also
fluent, but don’t expect a frolic:
this is a commanding textbook
for scientists and students. The
book may interest lay readers,
but most will struggle – unless
Understanding human emotion is
incredibly complex work
multivariate analyses or It ends by evaluating current
representational geometry are theories and running through
your thing. the questions still to be answered.
The early chapters are about It is clear that understanding
what we don’t know and what emotions will take a group effort.
we consistently get wrong, an Emotion is an emergent property
in-depth view of our ignorance in of a complex system of molecules,
which the authors imply we know cells, circuits, networks and entire
almost nothing about how the brains, say the authors. Since we
brain produces emotion. This don’t yet know the best level at
criticism continues throughout which to understand it, a science
the book. I can imagine scientists of emotion must be cumulative,
despairing, overcome by the with all levels studied in parallel.
Part of the problem is that
“A science of emotion must emotions are not material
phenomena. The amygdala, for
don’t know the best level example, is often associated with
at which to understand it” fear: we can cut it out and impair
some forms of fear. But put one
futility of their past work and the in a dish, stimulate it as much as
enormity of future endeavours. you like – and it would still be
Light relief comes through absurd to claim you are causing
famous historical cases, including a state of fear. As the authors
say: “Insofar as the amygdala
whose behaviour changed after an generates fear, it can do so only
iron pole was blasted through his within a complex network of
brain, and SM, a woman whose other brain structures.”
rare brain lesion left her with little The book is at its best with
or no capacity to experience fear. thought experiments. Try
As the book progresses, it gets decoupling the word “emotion”
easier to read, with Adolphs and from the “conscious experience
Anderson moving from how to of emotion”. Our everyday usage
understand the basic properties assumes conscious experience,
of emotion to the tools used to but the science of emotion need
study animals and humans. not: is non-conscious emotion
possible, in animals, humans,
even robots?
Antonio Damasio, one of the
foremost scientists in the field,
calls this an “indispensable book”.
For students and scientists willing
to invest serious effort, I agree.
But readers who want to learn
how we use feelings to construct
ourselves might feel more at
DELIA BAUM/PLAINPICTURE
home with Damasio’s book,
The Strange Order of Things. ■
Helen Thomson is a consultant for
New Scientist
DON’T MISS
Read
Neurology and psychiatry come
together in The Disordered Mind:
What unusual brains tell us
about ourselves (Little, Brown),
a masterful summary of the field
by Nobel prizewinner Eric Kandel.
Visit
Roll up to London’s Science
Museum at 6.45 pm BST on 29
August to celebrate 250 years
of the circus and uncover the
technical skills and science behind
the thrills of the big top.
Subscribe
In her podcast People Behind the
Science, Marie McNeely gets
scientists to share their stories.
The most recent episode features
Michael Levin of Tufts University,
Massachusetts, who studies the
decisions and computations that
occur in living systems.
Play
E-Line Media’s The Endless Mission
(pictured) puts the tools of game
creation on your screen. Use
templates and assets from other
built-in games, share creations
with other players or dip into theirs
via a central hub.
Listen
In BBC Radio 4’s Hotspot (1.45 pm
BST, 27 August), Jenny Kleeman
explores the stories behind some
startling place-based statistics.
Who knew the UK capital of
personal debt was Plymouth?
25 August 2018 | NewScientist | 43
CULTURE
Searching for Sandra
What if AI assistants aren’t as artificial as they seem? Sarah Leach enjoys a new podcast
Sandra, Gimlet Media,
gimletmedia.com/sandra
HOW do we really know who is
on the other end of conversations
with digital assistants like Siri
and Alexa? Just who is listening
to our requests and questions,
or accessing the vast troves of
personal information we have
given over to these companies?
And does that kind of access affect
both those handing over their
details and the employees on
the other end?
The podcast Sandra weaves
these debates about ethics in
technology into an engaging
audio drama. The premise of
the show is that a woman, Helen
(played by Alia Shawkat), takes a
job in which she pretends to be
a virtual assistant named Sandra
(voiced mechanically by Kristen
Wiig), which has been created by
a tech company called Orbital
Teledynamics.
All the “Sandras”, as the
company names the humans it
pays to pretend to be artificial
intelligences, are assigned a
specialised topic to cover. To
Helen’s confusion, she is assigned
birds, but other Sandras she meets
specialise in everything from the
Enlightenment philosophers to
movies starring Morgan Freeman.
She quickly finds that, while
her personal life is a mess, as
Sandra she can solve any problem,
from buying doves for a pagan
wedding to picking canary
wallpaper for a nursery.
Early on, she and her supervisor
Dustin (played by Ethan Hawke)
bond over their love of being
Sandra, describing it as a
Just shut up! Many of us are
abusive to our digital assistants
44 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018
“superpower”. Yet as is fairly usual frustrated, to the point of saying
when superpowers are involved,
wielding them is nothing like as
simple as it first appears. Dustin
tells Helen to “trust the system”,
reassuring her that Orbital
wouldn’t put her in a situation it
didn’t think she could handle, but talking to a human or a machine.
she hits both highs and lows as
she answers the questions put to
her by users.
While the idea of a human
pretending to be an AI may
sound like a bit of a stretch, it
is actually a real phenomenon.
From start-ups to established
outfits, companies have rolled out
“AI” tools that later turn out to be acceptable to roll out unfinished
powered by human intelligence,
where people did everything
from chatting with customers
to transcribing personal
information, such as receipts.
The humans performing
these tasks are often bored and
millions of dollars from investors.
they are looking forward to being Sandra also picks up on another
replaced by machines. And the interesting trend in AI, something
humans interacting with this that is one of the attractions of the
pseudo-AI have had to resort to technology: people interact with
developing their own tests to it very differently than they do
figure out whether they really are with other people. For example,
when the US military used an AI
All this is part of a bigger therapist to screen homecoming
picture among tech companies. service personnel for post-
For many years it has been traumatic stress disorder, they
found that it was more effective
“The customers ask the at getting people to discuss their
Sandras questions they symptoms honestly than either
probably wouldn’t dream a human interview or a written
of asking another person” questionnaire.
The customers in the show
ask Helen and her fellow Sandras
products and reel in investors questions they probably wouldn’t
by overstating a product’s dream of asking another person,
capabilities. This is a strategy that like whether it is possible to get
has been seen in companies like an allergy just by thinking about
Theranos, which made false a food. But they also contact her
claims about its blood-testing just to have someone to talk to
technology in order to raise (or, in one case, to have someone
for their parrot to talk to).
Unsurprisingly, some of
the humans that Helen talks
to as Sandra aren’t being
straightforward about who they
are and what they want either.
Some do it to abuse her, a pattern
we see when humans interact
with AI in the real world. Others
turn out to be doing it for more
duplicitous reasons with more
serious consequences.
What does Sandra have to say
about a world that is full of AIs
pretending to be human and
humans pretending to be AIs?
Well, you will have to listen to
JENS MORTENSEN/NYT/REDUX/EYEVINE
the whole show to find out, but
it comes down to this: sooner or
later, your lies will catch up with
you, whether you are a human,
an AI or something in between. ■
Sarah Leach is a freelance writer
based in London
 TENURE-TRACK ASSISTANT PROFESSOR
PHYSICAL CHEMISTRY
Faculty of Arts and Sciences Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology
Position Description: Candidates are invited to apply for a tenure-track assistant
professorship in physical chemistry, broadly defined, including experimental and
theoretical research in areas such as but not limited to atomic and molecular physics,
biophysical chemistry, condensed matter, quantum science and ultrafast spectroscopy.
The appointment is expected to begin on July 1, 2019. The tenure-track professor will
be responsible for teaching at the undergraduate and graduate levels. We are seeking
candidates who have an outstanding research record and a strong commitment to
undergraduate and graduate teaching.
Basic Qualifications: Doctorate or terminal degree in chemistry or related discipline
required by the time the appointment begins.
Additional Qualifications: Demonstrated experience in teaching is desired.
Special Instructions: Please submit the following materials through the ARIeS portal
(https://academicpositions.harvard.edu/8371). Applications must be submitted no later
than October 15, 2018.
1. Cover letter
2. Curriculum Vitae with publications list
3. Teaching statement (describing teaching approach and philosophy)
4. Outline of future research plans
5. Names and contact information of 3-5 references. Three letters of
recommendation are required, and the application is complete only when all
three letters have been received.
6. Selected publications
Contact Information:
Susan M. Kinsella, Search Administrator, Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology,
Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University, 12 Oxford St., Cambridge, MA 02138.
Phone: 617-496-4088. kinsella@chemistry.harvard.edu
Harvard is an equal opportunity employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration
for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability status,
protected veteran status, gender identity, sexual orientation, pregnancy and pregnancy-related
conditions, or any other characteristic protected by law.have been submitted.
Principal
Investigator
Department of Pathology
Boston Children's Hospital
The Department of Pathology, Boston Children's Hospital, an
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Position Title: Assistant Professor of Chemistry
Req # 03779
The Department of Chemistry at The University of Chicago
invites applications for the position of Assistant Professor of
Chemistry in all areas of chemistry. Applicants must apply
online to the University of Chicago Academic Career website
at http://tinyurl.com/y9yhvxg9 and upload a cover letter, a
curriculum vitae with a list of publications, a succinct outline
of research plans, and a one page teaching statement. In
your cover letter, please specify one sub-discipline that best
represents your research interests (inorganic, materials,
organic, physical, and theoretical chemistry or chemical
biology). In addition, three reference letters are required. At the
time of hire the successful candidate must have completed
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Joint appointments with other departments are possible.
Review of applications will begin on October 08, 2018 and
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http://www.uchicago.edu/about/non_discrimination_statement/
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WYVJLZZZOV\SKJHSSVYLTHPSACOppAdministrator@uchicago.edu
^P[O[OLPYYLX\LZ[
Academic Fellowships
The ZĂĚĐůŝīĞInstitute Fellowship Program at Harvard University
welcomes fellowship applications in natural sciences and
mathematics. The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study
provides scientists the time and space to pursue their career’s
best work. At Radcliffe you will have the opportunity to
challenge yourself, meet and explore the work of colleagues in
other fields, and take advantage of Harvard’s many resources,
including the extensive library system. The Radcliffe Institute
Fellowship Program invites applications from people of all
genders, and from all countries. We seek to build a diverse
fellowship program.
Scientists in any field who have a doctorate in the area of the
proposed project (by December 201ϳ) and at least two
published articles or monographs are eligible to apply for a
Radcliffe Institute fellowship. The stipend amount of $77,500 is
meant to complement sabbatical leave salaries of faculty
members. Residence in the Boston area and participation in the
Institute community are required during the fellowship year.
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Fellowships for Postdoctoral Scholars
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research on topics of general interest to one or more of the
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research is also encouraged. The Departments are:
ƒApplied Ocean Physics & Engineering
ƒBiology
ƒGeology & Geophysics
ƒMarine Chemistry & Geochemistry
ƒPhysical Oceanography
A joint USGS/WHOI award will be given to a postdoc
whose research is in an area of common interest between
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environment including the study of their sources and fate or
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20, 2018 for the 2019/2020 appointments. Awards will be
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techniques in marine science radiocarbon studies.

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well as the Marine Policy Center.
 Picture yourself among one of the largest communities of
underrepresented minorities in STEM during the Annual
Biomedical Research Conference for Minority Students (ABRCMS)

2018
NOVEMBER 14-17, 2018

Computational & Biochemistry &

Systems Biology Molecular Biology
4% 15%
Be a Part of ABRCMS to: Unspecified
6%
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• Present your scientific research in one of 11%
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Health
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7%
Judge Travel Award Deadline: July 20 Physics &
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Student Travel Award Deadline: August 22 4%

Abstract Submission Deadline: September 7

Judges needed. If you know a postdoctoral scientist or faculty member who

is active in research, encourage them to participate as an ABRCMS poster and oral
presentation judge. Travel awards available. Learn more at www.abrcms.org/judges.

www.abrcms.org
Funded by
 newscientistjobs.com

The Department of Psychology anticipates making a tenure-track appointment The Department of Psychology anticipates making a tenure-track appointment at the
at the assistant professor level to begin July 1, 2019. assistant professor level to begin July 1, 2019.

We seek candidates with core expertise in clinical psychology/clinical science
whose research programs also bridge to other domains in psychology,
neuroscience, or related disciplines. Our interest is less in specific areas than it
is in innovation and excellence. The appointment is expected to begin on July 1,
2019. Candidates at all levels are encouraged to apply.
Candidates must have a strong doctoral record and have completed their Ph.D.
Candidates should have demonstrated a promise of excellence in both research
and teaching. Teaching duties will include offerings at both undergraduate and
graduate levels.
Please submit a cover letter, curriculum vitae, research and teaching statements,
up to three representative reprints, and names and contact information
of three to five references. In addition, please arrange for three letters of
recommendation to be submitted to http://academicpositions.harvard.edu/
postings/8335. The application will be complete only when all three letters
have been submitted.
Questions regarding this position can be addressed to Jill Hooley at
jmh@wjh.harvard.edu. The committee will consider completed applications
starting immediately on a rolling basis through October 1. We expect to begin
conducting Interviews in October and November.
We seek candidates with expertise in developmental cognitive science, broadly
conceived. Our interest is less in specific topic areas or methods than in innovation and
excellence in the applicant’s research program. For instance, in addition to experimental
behavioral research on human children, successful candidates might employ cognitive
neuroscience, animal cognition, cross-cultural ethnographic work or computational
modeling, among approaches. Topics of study might include perception, action
planning, conceptual representation, social cognition, reasoning, decision-making
or language, among other topics. We seek candidates whose research complements
research already going on in the Department, taking it in clearly new directions.
The appointment is expected to begin on July 1, 2019. Candidates at all levels are
encouraged to apply.
Candidates must have a strong doctoral record and have completed their Ph.D.
Candidates should have demonstrated a promise of excellence in both research and
teaching. Teaching duties will include offerings at both undergraduate and graduate
levels.
Please submit a cover letter, curriculum vitae, research and teaching statements, up
to three representative reprints, and names and contact information of three to five
references (three letters of recommendation are required, and the application is
complete only when all three letters have been submitted) to
http://academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/8336.
Questions regarding this position can be addressed to spelke@wjh.harvard.edu.
The committee will consider completed applications starting immediately and on a
rolling basis until September 15. Interviews will be conducted in October and November.

We are an equal opportunity employer and all qualified applicants will receive
consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex,
national origin, disability status, protected veteran status, gender identity, sexual
orientation, pregnancy and pregnancy-related conditions or any other character-
istic protected by law.
We are an equal opportunity employer and all qualified applicants will
receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion,
sex, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status, gender identity,
sexual orientation, pregnancy and pregnancy-related conditions or any other
characteristic protected by law.

NRC Research Associateship Programs

The National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine offers postdoctoral and senior research awards on
behalf of 23 U.S. federal research agencies and affiliated institutions with facilities at over 100 locations throughout the
U.S. and abroad.
We are actively seeking highly qualified candidates including recent doctoral recipients and senior researchers.
Applications are accepted during 4 annual review cycles (with deadlines of February 1, May 1, August 1, November 1).

Interested candidates should apply online http://sites.nationalacademies.org/PGA/RAP/PGA_046398

Awardees have the opportunity to:

• conduct independent research in an area compatible with the interests of the sponsoring laboratory
• devote full-time effort to research and publication
• access the excellent and often unique facilities of the federal research enterprise
• collaborate with leading scientists and engineers at the sponsoring laboratories

Benefits of an NRC Research Associateship award include:

• 1 year award, renewable for up to 3 years
• Stipend ranging from $45,000 to $80,000, higher for senior researchers
• Health insurance, relocation benefits, and professional travel allowance

DESIRED SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE

Applicants should hold, or anticipate receiving, an earned doctorate in science or engineering. Degrees from universities
abroad should be equivalent in training and research experience to a degree from a U.S. institution. Some awards are
open to foreign nationals as well as to U.S. citizens and permanent residents.

ABOUT THE EMPLOYER

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Fellowships Office has conducted the NRC Research
Associateship Programs in cooperation with sponsoring federal laboratories and other research organizations approved
for participation since 1954. Through national competitions, the Fellowships Office recommends and makes NRC
Research Associateship awards to outstanding postdoctoral and senior scientists and engineers for tenure as guest
researchers at participating laboratories. A limited number of opportunities are available for support of graduate
students in select fields.

25 August 2018 | NewScientist | 49

newscientistjobs.com

50 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018

 newscientistjobs.com

School of Medicine-Open Rank-Radiation Oncology

The Department of Radiation Oncology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham is seeking one or two
Ph.D. level scientists with expertise in immune-oncology or DNA repair at the level of Assistant/Associate
Professor. This is a tenure earning position. Our goal is the delivery of technically advanced radiotherapy
in combination with anew agents developed in the laboratory to enhance cancer care and provide
treatment in a pleasing and educational environment.
Current recruiting activities are focused on individuals with interest in translational and clinical research.
They will have the opportunity to interface with a collaborative group of clinical faculty and laboratory
scientists. The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) is a comprehensive urban university with
DVWURQJPHGLFDOFHQWHU7RGD\8$%·VFDPSXVFRPSULVHVFLW\EORFNVDQGWKHXQLYHUVLW\LVNQRZQ
worldwide for its outstanding research and patient care as well as its innovative educational programs.

To learn more about UAB and Birmingham, Alabama, please visit www.uab.edu or www.uab.edu/radonc.

You will join 23 other faculty members in the Department of Radiation Oncology.
The Department is part of the UAB Comprehensive Cancer Center, a NCI designated
Comprehensive Cancer Center. Salary to be commensurate with experience and ability.

Please contact Dr. James A. Bonner at gesims@uabmc.edu for more information.

Interested applicants are encouraged to apply online:

uab.peopleadmin.com/postings/1826

View details online at:

jobs.newscientist.com/job/1401650756

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25 August 2018 | NewScientist | 51

LETTERS
letters@newscientist.com @newscientist newscientist

EDITOR’S PICK
A cool proposal to fund an ice giant mission
2050 to get close-up images and data
from these far-flung icy orbs.
As Crane notes, this would require
a quick decision on funding if such
probes are to be designed, built and
launched in time. How can we best
make the case for the cash? Well,
there is nothing like a snappy brand
name for a project. Usually these seem
to be cute and appropriate acronyms
to sell a mission concept.
In 2027, we will celebrate the 200th
anniversary of the death of Pierre-
From Pat Sheil, Simon Laplace who – among many
Sydney, Australia other achievements – proposed the
Leah Crane informs us that if we nebula hypothesis of the origins of the
want to send probes to Uranus and planets. This occasion happens to fall
Neptune, we had best get a wriggle during the launch window. Let’s call
on to make the next launch window the spacecraft the Ice Giants Laplace
in the late 2020s and early 2030s Orbiting Observatories.
(28 July, p 40). If we miss this Ah! IGLOO – what member of
opportunity, we have to wait until Congress could resist funding that?
When and where is an
infection a bad thing?
From Steve Dalton,
Chipstead, Kent, UK
Stephanie Woodcock responds to
your review of Edward Bullmore’s
The Inflamed Mind by suggesting
we should consider the role of
infection when looking at the
link between inflammation and
depression (Letters, 28 July). This
prompted me to consider the
natural state for humans.
Have we adapted to be most
healthy when dealing with a
typical background of non-life-
threatening infections? Perhaps
an infection-free body would
compromise our health in ways
we can’t predict.
It is clear that there are many
interrelated areas where better
knowledge could help: the
make-up and function of our
microbiome; which bacteria
are friends and which foes; the
role of the enteric nervous system
in the gut and serotonin; the
relationship between these things
and anxiety and between anxiety
and depression, exercise and
lifestyle; other environmental
and social factors; the immune
system... and so it goes on.
I wonder how much an implicit
assumption that any and all
infections are bad might colour
infection-related research.
From Denise Taylor,
London, UK
Woodcock asks for consideration
of infection, as well as mental
adversity, causing inflammation
leading to depression. Bullmore
does contend that underlying
inflammatory physical conditions
could trigger some depression. He
suspects too many practitioners
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52 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018

 “Autism does give some of us amazing abilities
but for most autistic folk it is debilitating”
kevin responds to the proposition that autism can bring extra
abilities – and Anna Remington is finding out why (14 July, p 32).

cause for depression. So he does
include infection as a cause of
inflammation and depression.
Mixed messages about
biodiversity can do harm
From Sally Johnson,
Hinksey Hill, Oxfordshire, UK
Graham Lawton rightly sets about
unpicking some assertions about
loss of biodiversity (28 July, p 28).
But he bases the discussion on
whether biodiversity really is
in a crisis largely on extinction
rates and on whether planetary
boundaries have been exceeded.
He pays little attention to the
loss and degradation of natural
habitat. Only by sustaining large
areas of habitat will saving a range
of species be possible.
Current threats – population
growth, illegal wildlife trade
and uncontrolled conversion of
natural areas – are challenging.
If biodiversity loss is to be halted,
change is desperately needed.
It is not about saving the odd
endangered species from the
brink. It requires a dramatic shift
from traditional to sustainable
investments, better land use
planning, the protection of large
landscapes and intact habitats,
and better management of
natural resources. There are
challenging conversations to be
had about how we realistically
achieve this without affecting
the rights of others.
Stories of conservation
successes are welcome, but
questioning whether there are
enough data to assess the current
state of biodiversity can engender
complacency.
It also risks sowing the seeds
of doubt and preventing the loss
of biodiversity becoming a
burning issue for governments
and the private sector.
Bread was a treat in what In some places, Aboriginal people
is now Australia long ago did live in towns, notably in
From Steven Johns,
Axedale, Victoria, Australia
You report Amaia Arranz-
Otaegui’s discovery of bread
crumbs that predate farming by
a few millennia at Shubayqa in
Jordan (21 July, p 6). You find it
curious that bread doesn’t seem
to have become a staple food in
the Stone Age.
Aboriginal Australian people
were harvesting grass seeds,
native rice and nardoo fern
“seeds”, grinding them into flour
and baking unleavened “bread”
for, probably, tens of thousands
of years before this.
It is unsurprising that this
wasn’t a staple food in a hunter-
gatherer society. Making it
would require a large surplus of
a seasonal resource and storage
facilities – thus a settled existence.
western Victoria, where eels were
farmed, smoked and traded, and
people lived in stone-walled huts.
In more arid areas settling
down wasn’t an attractive option
and in the tropics there was
no need.
Can mobile phone masts
back up GPS satellites?
From Perry Bebbington,
Kimberley, Nottinghamshire, UK
Stephen Battersby discusses
proposals to prevent or detect
spoofing of GPS signals (7 July,
p 32). What about using mobile
phone cell sites? Of course they
are only of use on land, but they
are numerous and fixed.
A system using them would
be very difficult to effectively
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25 August 2018 | NewScientist | 53

LETTERS
sites around the area you wanted
to affect. One signal indicating a
position that didn’t fit in with the
others from the same area would
stand out as obviously wrong.
Beyond belief and also
beyond cash measures
From Patrick Davey,
Dublin, Ireland
I was intrigued by Gregory Paul’s
discussion of the relationship
between religion and economic
development (28 July, p 24). But
economics can be used to measure
well-being up to a relatively low
level of income (28 July 2012, p 40)
As countries or communities
become more unequal in wealth
distribution, measures of well-
being such as health decline
(24 October 2015, p 26).
Anecdotally, caring and
mutual support decline as wealth
increases, possibly because they
are no longer seen as necessary or
because we become more isolated
and less aware of the needs of
others. Money is nothing more
than a lubricant facilitating
complex exchange systems not
possible with barter.
TOM GAULD
54 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018
From John Cantellow, Derby, UK
Paul asks why non-theistic
countries are more successful.
But how should we measure
“success”? Finland, for example,
is ranked top in the 2018 World
Happiness report but 42nd by
gross domestic product. The US is
ranked top by GDP but only 18th
for happiness.
Religions value compassion,
which promotes happiness. In
contrast, economic success comes
through valuing money, which
promotes competition, a source
of unhappiness.
Resist the stinky call
of the metropolis!
From Christopher Connell,
Meols, Wirral, UK
You mention the somewhat toxic
site you have chosen for your
head office (Leader, 21 July). You
say that the congestion and air
pollution is replicated across the
country. It’s quite nice where I am.
You use authors from all over
the world, so why insist on being
in London, the dirtiest part of the
UK? You might also consider
holding your New Scientist Live
letters@newscientist.com
events at a central location –
London is not central, unless
you live there.
The true odds of getting
to a very advanced age
From Steven Goldberg,
New York, US
Tom Kirkwood points out that
105 is the first age at which the
probability of reaching the next
birthday falls below 50 per cent
and illustrates the odds of living
beyond this to the record age of
122 by asking who has ever tossed
17 heads in a row (7 July, p 24). This
is a satisfactory rough-and-ready
estimate, but it is far less likely
than that, because each year the
chance of reaching the next
birthday drops dramatically.
A call for clarity in
reporting visual acuity
From Alex McDowell, London, UK
Catherine de Lange reports a
virtual reality headset improving
users’ vision “to 20/30, which is
pretty close to 20/20 vision”
(4 August, p 4). In the UK, doctors
and opticians now use a metric
@newscientist newscientist
measure of visual acuity: “6/9
vision” means being able to read
at 6 metres what one should,
nominally, be able to read at
9 metres; “20/30” is the
equivalent when distances are
measured in feet.
Several binds that follow
from wearing ties
From Eric Clow,
Grimsby, Lincolnshire, UK
Brian Horton mentions doctors’
ties carrying germs (Letters,
28 July). When I was a medical
student in the 1950s, I noticed that
gastroenterologists, obstetricians
and gynaecologists tended to
wear bow ties rather than knotted
ties to protect themselves, rather
than the patient.
From Gordon Drennan,
Burton, South Australia
Someone say it: we all know what
a tie is. Just look at it sticking up
from the top of trousers with a
knot on the end. It says “I have a
penis so I get to give the orders.”
I find it laughable that the people
who wear them can’t see that this
is what they’re saying. If you point
it out they take it very badly.
For the record
QCold fact: the amount of carbon
dioxide needed to make a Martian
atmosphere is about a million cubes
of dry ice each 1 kilometre across
(4 August, p 6).
QAlfred Russel Wallace was racked
by yellow fever during his South
American expedition of 1848–1852
and studied birds of paradise in the
Malay archipelago in 1854-1862
(28 July, p 44).
Letters should be sent to:
Letters to the Editor, New Scientist,
25 Bedford Street, London, WC2E 9ES
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.
New Scientist Ltd reserves the right to
use any submissions sent to the letters column of
New Scientist magazine, in any other format.
MAKE
Do try this at home
Slam dunk the junk
Lousy aim? Hone your trash-throwing arm with the
help of a team of friendly robots
“The World Cup may be over
for another four years, but that
doesn’t stop my wife yelling
‘goal!’ every time she throws
something in the bin. Except
she’s a worse shot than Nicolai
Jørgensen,” says Will Junker.
“We end up with mounds of
wayward rubbish – definitely a
foul situation, and the penalty
is mine: I have to pick it up.
Can tech referee this match?”
England fans may have cheered
“football’s coming home”, but I
don’t think they meant turning
their kitchens into playing
fields. You might not be able
to break your wife out of this
habit, but you can move the
goalposts to give her the best
chance of a winning shot.
A net atop your bin is no
good – teabags and other
soggy missiles could get stuck.
My next thought was a big
target and funnel, like the
oversized bins you find at fast
food drive-throughs. But that
leaves your rubbish uncovered
and free to waft – more suited
to car parks than kitchens.
What’s needed is a helping
hand. A sheet of heat-
mouldable plastic can easily be
fashioned into a makeshift mitt.
This covers the bin when not in
For more Makes, visit newscientist.com/make
RUSSELL COBB
use, and can lift up to act as a
large backboard when scoring.
I added a couple of servo motors
flanking the hinges – attack and
defence. One pulls a string that
winches up the lid, the second
gives it a kick in the other
direction so it swings closed.
Now for a way to signal that
you are ready to shoot. Like the
best team players, I opted to
rely on shouting to my nearest
teammate – in this case, Alexa.
Recruiting Alexa required a
bit of tinkering. I turned to a
web service called IFTTT,
which links internet-connected
devices. Now when I tell Alexa
to open the bin, she relays
this instruction to a website.
A Wi-Fi-connected
microcontroller attached to the
servos constantly checks that
site to see if Alexa has left it
any messages and, if so, tells
the motors to get moving. The Perfect Gift
You are limited in part by
how fast your internet is. On for Anyone Interested in Space!
slower connections you might Launch them into the worldwide space community with the
want to shout for the bin British Interplanetary Society. Membership includes our
before you have finished PRQWKO\PDJD]LQH¶6SDFHÁLJKW·DQGDFFHVVWRWDONVE\
brewing your tea. astronauts, space scientists and thought leaders. Join in
Just one bug remains: when with one of our technical projects and help design the future
I sink a winning shot, I’ve still of space exploration!
not convinced Alexa to join
in my goal celebrations. From £20/year (Under 22) and £70/year (Standard)
Hannah Joshua ■
www.bis-space.com
Telephone +44 (0)20 7735 3160
25 August 2018 | NewScientist | 55
 FEEDBACK
MORE human jobs lost to AI – that is,
Avian Intelligence. The Puy du Fou
theme park in the west of France has
hired six corvids to pick up litter. The
rooks have been trained to retrieve
cigarette butts and other small bits
of detritus, which they can deposit
in a box to earn a food reward.
So far, so good. But Feedback
suspects the site owners may be
underestimating their feathered
employees. How long before the
six birds grow tired of working for
chicken feed and decide to unionise?
Or will the canny corvids begin
subcontracting the work to sparrows,
taking a cut for themselves? A paper
on the economic policies of the bird
kingdom is surely not far away.
GOING down like a lead balloon:
PAUL MCDEVITT
a suspicious package attached to
a red parachute fell from the skies
over New Jersey causing alarm,
Reader Joanne Wheeler finds herself puzzled
by the many jigsaws available to buy on
Amazon that are marked by the website as
“no assembly required”. “They must be very
boring puzzles,” she says
56 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018
thanks to a note stuck to it with
a message for US President
Donald Trump. The note read:
“NASA Atmospheric Research
Instrument NOT A BOMB!… If this
lands near the President, we at
NASA wish him a great round of
golf.” The president was indeed
staying at a golf resort nearby.
Police intercepted the package,
which they say was making a
hissing sound.
NASA confirmed that the device
was one of six weather balloons
launched to measure ozone. The
note was a “misguided attempt
to be lighthearted” by a student
researcher, who has since been
removed from the project.
DO YOU struggle to get out of bed
in the morning? Spare a thought for
Homo erectus, an early species of
human that researchers claim went
For more feedback, visit newscientist.com/feedback
extinct through laziness. (It’s lucky
you can’t libel the dead – or extinct
species.) Ceri Shipton of the
Australian National University found
stone tools were typically made by
H. erectus with whatever rocks were
to hand, despite there being better
stone available nearby.
From this, Shipton reaches the
conclusion that H. erectus followed
“a least-effort” strategy. Twinned
with an inability to adapt to a
changing environment, this sealed
their demise. “The environment
around them was changing, but they
were doing the exact same things
with their tools,” says Shipton. Thank
goodness Homo sapiens would never
make such a foolish mistake…
WHEN is a lake not a lake?
When it is the Caspian Sea.
The world’s largest enclosed
body of water has seen decades
of wrangling between the five
countries lying on its shores.
Russia, Kazakhstan,
Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan and
Iran are all keen to exploit the oil
and gas deposits beneath the body
of water. If the Caspian is a sea,
territorial claims only extend
a certain distance from the
shoreline. But if the Caspian is
a lake, no such rules hold, and
the countries are free to divide
up the oil fields.
Now the nations have reached
an agreement. The wet bit of the
Caspian will be treated as a sea,
available for common use, while
the land underneath is a lake
bed, which will be carved up.
This means these five nations
will be the first you can reach
from international waters by
swimming straight downwards.
BROWSING a copy of BBC Focus
magazine, Don Dennis was alarmed
to read about a hospital sanitation
robot that “can eliminate virtually all
organisms in just 10 minutes, using
the power of ultraviolet radiation”.
There’s only one metal monster
we know of capable of that level of
extermination, Don. Are you sure you
weren’t reading that other fine BBC
title, Doctor Who Magazine?
WITH much of Australia in
drought, Tim McCulloch is
informed by the Australian
Broadcasting Network that “the
official forecast is that there is a
50 per cent chance the rainfall
over the next 12 months will be
less than the median”. Isn’t that
a given, he says. Well, they’re not
wrong. Who said long-term
forecasts were unpredictable?
WEARING clothes made of fur and
leather is so passé, darling. Why not
instead wear a garment made from
an extinct animal? Vladimir Ammosov,
from Yakutsk, Siberia, acquired a bag
of woolly mammoth hair, had it
verified at the local mammoth
museum, and hired a hat maker to
crochet it into a Yakutian style hat.
It’s basically a beanie made of the
most itchy material you can imagine.
“I kept looking at the bag, wondering
what to do with the hair, and then
thought why not try to make a hat?”
says Ammosov. Better than a G-string,
we suppose.
AND finally, cows in Sweden are
celebrating the ruling that they
are allowed to visit nudist
beaches. Vaxjo’s Culture and
Leisure Department ruled the
cows “have just as much right to
be there as the human visitors”.
A representative from the Vaxjo
herd confirmed to Feedback that
the bovids are looking forward to
mooving in.
You can send stories to Feedback by
email at feedback@newscientist.com.
Please include your home address.
This week’s and past Feedbacks can
be seen on our website.
THE LAST WORD
Last words past and present at newscientist.com/lastword

Load of rubbish
Rubbish collection seems complicated
these days. Where I live, I use five
different bins and the collections are
fortnightly. Unlike many people I
observe, I squash things like aluminium
cans and plastic milk bottles. It seems
logical and reduces the volume of
rubbish stored in the house – but does
doing so help collection and recycling?
■ Most material recovery
facilities use conveyor belts.
First, magnets detect metal,
but the remaining materials
are processed by shape. Flat
things are considered to be
cardboard; 3D objects are glass
(which smashes), plastic or
aluminium. This metal isn’t
magnetic but can be separated
using electric eddy currents
induced by a magnetic field.
Very flat items will not make it
to this sorting stage.
So flattening cans and plastic
bottles can lead to them being
processed as cardboard, rather
than the materials they are.
Sophisticated material recovery
facilities use lasers, weights and
buoyancy to separate materials,
but these are not commonplace.
More beneficial is to wash your
items. Any smell in the bin is
likely to be food remnants, not
aluminium or plastic. And never
put plastic bags in recycling,
unless you live in one of the few
areas that can deal with them.
Marty Middlebrook
Planet Ark Environmental
Foundation
Sydney, Australia
■ In the 1970s, I worked in a
large hospital. In order to reduce
the space that waste took up, the
management bought a compactor It contracts quickly on exposure
to reduce it to bales. But the idea to bright light but expands slowly
was short-lived because the first
collection was declined. The
refuse firm also had compactors.
Already-compacted waste gave
its compactors indigestion.
Roger Miles
St Albans, Hertfordshire, UK
■ Most collection vehicles
compress the rubbish as they
go along.
Alastair Mouat
By email, no address supplied
Dazzle hassle?
Are the bright lights that cyclists now
use safe for the eyes of onlookers?
■ Many people permanently
damage their eyesight by looking
at the sun through binoculars.
The damage is done not by the
light, but by the heat from the
infrared radiation in the sun’s
rays. The lens in the eye focuses
both the visible light and the
invisible heat on to the light-
sensitive cells at the back of the
eye. The heat is so strong that cells
can overheat and be damaged in
only a second.
The bright lights used by
cyclists are LEDs, which produce
a lot of light but almost no heat,
so having one shine in your eyes
won’t damage the cells in the eye.
However, that doesn’t mean the
experience is risk-free.
The iris expands and contracts
to alter the amount of light
entering the eye through the pupil.
if the light is removed.
Night vision in humans occurs
when the iris is dilated and the
cells at the back of the eye have
“Night vision can take a
long time to be established
but can be lost in a second
with a flash of light”
adapted to the low light. It can
take a long time to establish, but
can be suddenly lost with a flash of
bright light. If this happens, visible
things become invisible, and the
risk of bumping into things grows.
This effect is sometimes
manipulated in night-time
orienteering, where it is important
to retain night vision for running
and reading a compass and map.
Incidents suggest people try to
secure an unfair advantage by
switching on their LED headband
15 seconds before the start and
turning around, dazzling as
many competitors as possible.
To combat this, some people
wear dark glasses with side shields
and only take them off after
the start, or carry a mirror!
Andrew Carruthers
Beaconsfield, Quebec, Canada
■ When you step outdoors on
a bright, sunny day, you often
experience discomfort and partial
blindness until your eyes adapt to
the illumination. Temporary
blindness also occurs when you
walk indoors on a sunny day.
Using the exposure reading on
my digital camera, I compared the
illumination of a room with large
windows on a shady side of my
house with the outdoors on a
bright sunny day. The outdoors
scene is 400 times brighter (or
400 times as many lumens).
Looking directly at an LED
reflector light bulb, probably
brighter than a bicycle’s, at a
distance of 1 metre, it is just eight
times brighter than my room
on a bright day, or a 50th of the
brightness of my outdoor scene.
Your eyes are in no danger from
even the brightest bicycle light.
It might appear painfully bright,
but this is because you are usually
looking at it with dark-adapted
eyes. In daylight, it would not be
so bright. In fact, I can barely make
out the spot of light my powerful
LED torch makes on a sunny wall.
Peter Bursztyn
Barrie, Ontario, Canada
This week’s question
COUNTED OUT
I remember being told that when
you see a flash of lightning and
start counting until you hear the
thunderclap, the number you
have counted to will amount to
the number of miles distant the
storm is. Is this true? If not, is
there any way of calculating the
distance based on the observed
time difference between lightning
and thunder?
Alice Catling
London, UK

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