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every subscription that you can put towards your holiday
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newscientist.com/13817
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What is consciousness?
What is intelligence?
Why do we sleep and dream?
What causes cognitive decline?
Where do our personalities come from?
and many more

MYSTERIES OF
THE HUMAN BR AIN
Explore the intricacies of the most complex object in the known
universe with the latest issue of New Scientist: The Collection

Buy your copy from all good

magazine retailers or digitally.
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This week’s issue

On the 16 When plants cry

Sounds made by stressed
34 Features
cover tomatoes revealed “The big
34 How to think about... 8 The first story bang isn’t
The self Earliest hunting scene found
Dark energy in Indonesian cave something
Information
Species 11 Pig-monkey chimera that happened
The big bang
Privacy
What it means for the future
of organ transplants
somewhere,
Quantum uncertainty
Alien life
it happened
Extinction everywhere”
Nature and nurture
Intelligence 16 AI mathematician 15 Dark matter
Altruism Vol 244 No 3260 black holes 20 Messing up Mars
Evolution Cover image: iStock/Gremlin 19 Liquid heavy metal loudspeaker

News Features
12 Forgetting nature 34 How to think about...
How changing perceptions News everything
of “normal” threaten Cutting-edge science throws
conservation efforts up all sorts of mind-bending
concepts. We guide you
16 AI mathematician through 13 of the fiddliest
Can artificial intelligence solve
a fiendishly hard problem?
The back pages
20 Pristine planets
Rethinking the rules on 51 Stargazing from home
space contamination See the Andromeda galaxy

52 Puzzles
Views Quick crossword, an
ant-hunting riddle and the quiz
23 Comment
Conservationists must respect 53 Feedback
indigenous peoples The salaries of Disney
princesses: the week in weird
24 The columnist
Who can use smart doorbell 54 Almost the last word
data, asks Annalee Newitz Spider travel and sport’s
emissions: readers respond
26 Letters
Practical steps to take back 56 The Q&A
control of our deaths Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka
on saving Ugandan gorillas
PAUL STAROSTA/GETTY IMAGES

28 Aperture
Meet the garbage gobbler
that cleans rivers

30 Culture
A new book explores the
beautiful art of creative AIs 16 Secret squeals Cacti have been found to make ultrasonic sounds

14 December 2019 | New Scientist | 3

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SECOND EDITION OF
BEING HUMAN

BEING
HUMAN
Take a step back from the everyday
chores of being human to tackle the
big – and small – questions about our
nature, behaviour and existence.

Buy your copy from all good magazine

retailers or digitally.
Find out more at newscientist.com/TheCollection
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The leader

The truth isn’t out there

There is no such thing as scientific truth, only successive attempts to get nearer to it

IF THE Platonic ideal of science is that
it guides us towards truth by extracting
simplicity from a complex world, then
the messy reality is that it often just
ends up adding to the confusion – and
sending us down the odd rabbit hole.
It isn’t science’s fault: the world is
complex. Our 13 mini-articles in this
issue on some of the fiddliest concepts
in contemporary science and technology
give a flavour of the difficulties (see page
34). Even physics, the branch of science
with the greatest drive to simplify and
reduce to fundamental statements of
universal validity, rapidly introduces
ideas beyond common comprehension:
quantum uncertainty, dark energy and
the big bang singularity, to name three
we highlight.
They are at least just challenges to
our understanding – cosmic mysteries
uncovered by science, and into
which further scientific investigation
may bring us more insight. The real
messiness can come when we attempt
to understand the complexities of life,
and by extension ourselves.
Evolution provides a simple, powerful
framework to understand much
“Philosopher Immanuel Kant
floated the idea that there is
the world as it is and the world
as we represent it to ourselves”
about the living world, but in its very
simplicity is prone to misrepresentation.
Meanwhile, concepts we build on top
of it to aid our understanding – species,
intelligence, the self and the power
of nature versus nurture – turn out
to have deep flaws.
On the back of the first wave of
modern scientific investigation, the
philosopher Immanuel Kant floated
the idea that there is the world as it
is and the world as we represent it to
ourselves, and we shouldn’t necessarily
assume they have much in common.
That doesn’t mean we should cease
our attempts to categorise the world,
only that we should realise it might
sometimes resist our categorisation.
When we ran a similar “how to think
about” feature back in 2018, with
13 entirely different concepts, one of
them was scientific truth itself – the
point being there is no such thing, only
successive attempts to get closer to it.
Scientific concepts are powerful, but
only as powerful as our continuing
desire to question, refine and, where
necessary, discard them. ❚

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Where did we come from?

How did it all begin?

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

Introduction by Professor Stephen Hawking


News
Static fantastic Unlucky chymists
We finally know how The unsuccessful
tiny clumps of dust scientists of a colonial
form planets p9 US settlement p10
AUCKLAND RESCUE HELICOPTER TRUST/HANDOUT/EPA-EFE/SHUTTERSTOCK
Deadly eruption
A sudden eruption on the volcanic White Island, also known as
Whakaari, in New Zealand has killed and injured dozens of people
SIX people are confirmed dead
and eight are missing and
presumed dead after a volcanic
island in New Zealand erupted.
Police said that 47 people were
on the island when the volcano
erupted on Monday at 2.11 pm
local time. Of those, 34 were
evacuated and 31 had been or were
being treated in hospital when
New Scientist went to press.
A camera set up by GeoNet, an
agency that monitors volcanoes
and earthquakes in New Zealand,
captured pictures of people at the
crater just seconds before it
erupted and the feed went dark.
A police statement on Tuesday
said there were “no signs of life”
on White Island, also known as
Whakaari, following visits by
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Oxygen alarm
Our oceans are
dangerously
deoxygenated p11
rescue teams. “Police believe that
anyone who could have been taken
from the island alive was rescued at
the time of the evacuation,” it said.
The death toll is expected to rise
as most of those hospitalised have
burns to more than 30 per cent
of their body, and many have
inhalation burns.
Brad Scott, a volcanologist with
research group GNS Science, says
the eruption sent a plume of steam
and ash about 3700 metres into
the air. He says it had affected the
entire White Island crater floor.
GeoNet initially raised its
volcanic alert level to four, on a
scale where five represents a major
eruption. It later dropped the alert
level to three. Scott says that was
because the eruption wasn’t
TikTok data
Concerns over
the blockbuster
Chinese app p14
sustained beyond a single blast.
The privately owned island is
home to the country’s most active
cone volcano, which had its last
major eruption in 2001.
An unheralded eruption could
happen at any time, Shane Cronin,
a volcanologist at the University
of Auckland, said in a statement.
“Magma is close to the surface,
and the heat and gases from this
heat the surface and ground
waters to form vigorous
hydrothermal systems,” he said.
The result is a “violent ejection
of hot blocks and ash, and the
formation of ‘hurricane-like’
currents of wet ash and coarse
particles that radiate from the
explosion vent”, he said. ❚
Ruby Prosser Scully and agency
Number crunching
The largest
encryption key
ever cracked p15
Genetic privacy
DNA site sold to
firm aiding police
ONE of the world’s biggest
genetic genealogy websites
has been bought by a
company that aids law
enforcement agencies
with forensic DNA work.
More than 1.2 million
people have added the
results of their DNA tests
to GEDmatch, a site that
US police used to find a
suspected serial killer
via genetic information
from a relative.
Now forensic genetics
firm Verogen in San Diego,
California, has announced
that it has bought GEDmatch.
Brett Williams, Verogen’s
CEO, said GEDmatch’s
users would continue
to retain the ability to opt
out from searches by law
enforcement agencies.
But he also indicated
a vision for the site that
focuses on solving crimes,
not just connecting family
members via DNA.
The amount that Verogen
paid for GEDmatch hasn’t
been disclosed. BuzzFeed
News reported that Verogen
hopes to monetise the site
by charging for access.
“More than 1.2 million
people have added
their DNA data
to GEDmatch”
GEDmatch users logging
in on Tuesday had to accept
the site’s new terms and
conditions – including the
service now being operated
by Verogen – if they wanted
to access their data. They
were also given the option
of deleting the data. ❚
Adam Vaughan
14 December 2019 | New Scientist | 7

News
Ancient humans
The earliest storytellers
Cave paintings reveal ancient artists were conjuring imagined scenes
20,000 years earlier than we thought, reports Alison George
RATNO SARDI
A STUNNING cave painting
discovered in Indonesia may
be the earliest evidence of
storytelling. The artwork is at least
43,900 years old, and shows that
humans were depicting scenes
tens of thousands of years earlier
than previously thought.
The painting is a 4.5-metre-wide
hunting scene, discovered in the
limestone cave of Leang Bulu’
Sipong 4 in Sulawesi in 2017
by Maxime Aubert of Griffith
University, Australia, and his
colleagues. Painted in a dark red
pigment, it depicts at least eight
small human-like figures hunting
two pigs and four dwarf buffaloes
with spears or ropes. “It’s a
narrative scene,” says Aubert.
He and his colleagues calculated
the painting’s age by measuring
8 | New Scientist | 14 December 2019
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the levels of uranium in calcite
layers that cover the images
(Nature, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-
1806-y). At 43,900 years old, it
could be the oldest figurative cave
painting that has yet been found –
although we don’t know what
type of human made them.
“We can’t say whether
the paintings were made
by modern humans or
our extinct cousins”
Until this discovery, the oldest
known artworks depicting visual
“stories”, with humans and
animals interacting in a
recognisable scene, dated from
around 20,000 years ago and
was found in Europe, such as the
famous Lascaux paintings in
France. “Now we show that at least
44,000 years ago, in South-East
Asia, humans were telling stories
and they were depicting them in
rock art,” says Aubert.
“It’s a really exciting discovery,”
says Genevieve von Petzinger at
the University of Victoria, Canada.
“It shows an alternative timeline
of how art developed. When you
get a scene like this one, it opens
the door a little further.”
The human-like figures appear
to have animal characteristics, as
seen in the detail pictured above.
“They are half human, half animal.
If you look closely, one has a tail
and another seems to have a bird
head,” says Aubert.
Such depictions are known
as therianthropes. The oldest
previously known example was
Small figures attacking
an anoa, a buffalo native
to Sulawesi, Indonesia
the Lion Man statue found in
Germany’s Hohlenstein-Stadel
cave. Carved around 40,000 years
ago, it combines a lion’s head and
human body. Until now, it was the
earliest evidence of the ability of
humans to conceive of things that
don’t exist in nature – a capacity
linked to imagination and
spirituality. “Now it seems
the same thing was happening in
South-East Asia, but even earlier,”
says Aubert.
The cave painting gives us
a glimpse into the minds of
the people who created the
Indonesian art, but we don’t yet
know whether they were modern
humans or one of our extinct
cousins. The team hasn’t found
human remains in the Sulawesi
cave, says Aubert, so it isn’t
possible to be sure of the identity
of the artists.
One possible group is the
Denisovans, who may also have
lived in Asia at this time. Earlier
this year, while studying a site
in China thought to have been
home to Denisovans, a team of
researchers based in China, France
and Norway revealed artistic
engravings on a piece of bone
rubbed with red ochre.
“We can’t completely exclude
Denisovans or another species,”
says Aubert of the Indonesian
cave art. “There were probably at
least two other species that lived
in this region at the same time
as modern humans.”
The discovery comes as
archaeologists increasingly turn
their attentions towards Asia.
“People should stay tuned to Asia,”
says von Petzinger. “In the next
decade there will be many exciting
announcements coming from this
part of the world.” ❚

Privacy
Concerns raised over India’s
facial recognition plan
Edd Gent
INDIA’S government wants to
build one of the largest facial
recognition systems in the world.
But critics warn it could be a blow
to citizens’ rights.
The country’s National Crime
Records Bureau (NCRB) has invited
bids to develop a nationwide facial
recognition system that can
automatically identify people
from CCTV feeds and images
uploaded through a mobile app.
The NCRB says it will help police
catch criminals, find missing
people and identify dead bodies.
The technology works by
scanning the structure of people’s
faces and comparing the results
with images in a database. But
various trials have shown that it
can be very inaccurate. A recent
review of facial recognition use
by police in London found that it
made correct matches less than
20 per cent of the time, which
the authors say hampered
police effectiveness and led to
unwarranted searches of people.
India has no explicit data
India’s government
wants a national facial
recognition system
Space
Static electricity may
pull dust together
to make planets
ELECTRICITY may be more
important to making planets than
we thought. We aren’t sure how
tiny particles come together to build
planets, but dropping beads from a
tower has shown that it may be with
some help from static electricity.
The very first seeds of planets are
made of micrometre-sized grains of
dust, which bump into one another
as they orbit a star and stick together
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protection laws that would restrict
use of face recognition or prevent
its expansion, says Apar Gupta,
who leads the Internet Freedom
Foundation in New Delhi. He is
concerned the system could be
misused. “We do not have the best
rule of law framework and such
systems can actually be used for
purposes of social control as well
as political targeting,” says Gupta.
The Ministry of Home Affairs
(MHA) – the parent department of
the NCRB – told New Scientist that
the system would only be used in
conjunction with the Crime and
Criminal Tracking Network and
in fluffy clumps. As more and more
tiny grains coalesce, the clumps
begin to compact, until they are no
longer fluffy and start to bounce off
one another like billiard balls instead
of sticking. This happens when the
clumps are millimetres across and
is called the bouncing barrier.
To build a planet, those dust
balls have to overcome the
bouncing barrier and get bigger.
It has previously been suggested
that this may be enabled by static
electricity: as the dust particles
collide and rub together, they
gain electric charges that can
Systems database, which holds links citizens’ photographs,
images of wanted suspects, fingerprints and iris scans to a
prisoners, missing people unique number. The database
and unidentified bodies. has suffered leaks and a 2017
But the NCRB’s tender legal challenge against the
document states the system scheme led to the Supreme Court
should be able to match against limiting its use and establishing
a database of photographs pulled a constitutional right to privacy.
from various agencies “or any The MHA has previously said the
other image database available facial recognition system won’t be
with police/other entity”. The integrated with Aadhaar, but the
MHA didn’t respond to further NCRB tender document calls for
questions from New Scientist. the system to be compatible with
The government has already other biometric solutions, such as
courted controversy over an iris and fingerprint identification.
expansive biometric identity Maya Wang at Human Rights
scheme called Aadhaar, which Watch says India’s pursuit of both
biometrics and facial recognition
mirrors aspects of China’s mass
surveillance system, which
combines facial recognition with
mass collection of DNA, voice
patterns and behavioural data
to monitor citizens.
The proposed system won’t
just affect privacy, she says,
it will have a chilling effect on
HELEN E CANADA/GETTY IMAGES
people’s willingness to exercise
other rights, such as freedom of
assembly or expression. “Privacy
is a gateway right,” she adds. “Once
you lose that, you basically lose all
your rights.” ❚
encourage them to stick together. found that the beads gained
Tobias Steinpilz at the University charge from static electricity
of Duisburg-Essen in Germany and and stuck together in clumps up
his colleagues investigated using to several centimetres across
the Bremen drop tower, a hollow (Nature Physics, doi.org/dgrt).
turret about 120 metres high that “When you have charged
acts as a vacuum chamber. In it, particles and they form centimetre-
falling objects behave like they sized clusters like we observed in our
would in the microgravity of space. experiments and our simulations,
They used the tower’s built-in we can close this gap in size caused
catapult to throw a container by the bouncing barrier,” says
holding 0.4-millimetre glass Steinpilz. The particles are then
beads up towards the top of the free to clump together even more
structure, then allowed it to fall, with the help of gravity and
watching with a high-speed camera eventually become planets.  ❚
installed within the chamber. They Leah Crane
14 December 2019 | New Scientist | 9
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News
Food Archaeology

African swine fever

contributes to rise
North American settlers
in food prices were unlucky scientists
Adam Vaughan Colin Barras

THE loss of half of China’s pigs due

to a virus raging across Asia and
Europe has helped drive world
food prices to a two-year high.
The United Nations said last
week that global food prices rose
significantly in November, up
9.5 per cent on the same month last
year, pushed up by a combination of
JT VINTAGE/GLASSHOUSE IMAGES/GETTY IMAGES

rising meat and vegetable oil prices.

Between October and November
this year, meat prices jumped by
4.6 per cent on the meat price index
of the UN Food and Agriculture
Organization (FAO), the biggest
month-on-month rise for more
than a decade.
One reason is that China has
increased its imports of meat other
than pork to fill the gap left after THE first English people to settle can be heated and melted This 17th-century painting
many of its domestically produced permanently in the Americas to analyse their chemistry shows the English colony
pigs were killed due to African swine included early scientists, known and reveal valuable metals of Jamestown, Virginia
fever. World food prices rose the as “chymists”, who battled and minerals – and examined
most for beef and mutton, the FAO hunger and disease in an ill- the residues stuck to the Jamestown Rediscovery project.
said, buoyed by strong demand for fated bid to find and mine gold. interior walls. “It’s one of the myths we’ve
imports, particularly from China as In the early 17th century, the It found a number of busted over the past 25 years
end-of-year festivities approach. English were eager to explore different chemicals, suggesting of research here,” he says.
“African swine fever is obviously and exploit North America. that the Jamestown chymists “No matter how good you are
a huge reality in the world. It has It had been just over 100 years studied a variety of rocks and at your task, if you’re thrown
pushed up the meat index over the since Christopher Columbus’s experimented with different into a situation where it’s almost
course of the year. And it has led first transatlantic voyages, and chemical additives in an effort impossible to accomplish, you’re
during that time, the Spanish to work out how to extract going to fail.”

9.5%
Global rise in food prices since
had mined large quantities
of gold and silver from South
and Central America.
November 2018 The English failed to
find gold – but while this has
to China importing a lot of other previously been attributed
meat, also pushing up prices,” to a lack of skill, it turns out
says a spokesperson for the FAO. geology was to blame.
Between January and October, A team led by Umberto
pork imports to China were up Veronesi at University College
49 per cent and beef imports London and Marcos Martinón-
54 per cent. However, while this Torres at the University of
has contributed to the food price Cambridge has completed
rises announced last week, the an analysis of 400-year-old
effect is limited by the fact that scientific equipment unearthed
Chinese imports are dwarfed by at Jamestown, Virginia, the first
the country’s domestic production. permanent English settlement
Some of the gap in pig production in the Americas.
due to African swine fever has been The team studied fragments
filled by ramped-up domestic that came from crucibles –
poultry production. ❚ vessels in which rock samples
the maximum amount of
gold or silver.
The crucible residues
also suggest that the settlers
might have succeeded in
making brass, a useful copper
and tin alloy (Archaeological
and Anthropological Sciences,
doi.org/dgpv).
But there were no rich
mineral deposits near
Jamestown, and the small
quantities of precious metals
and alloys that the chymists did
recover failed to impress their
financial backers in England.
They were accused of idleness
and incompetence – labels
that stuck even into the 20th
century, says David Givens,
director of archaeology at the
The accusations of indolence
are particularly unfair given
the conditions in which the
chymists were working. “The
colony failed to produce enough
food to sustain itself,” says
David Killick at the University
of Arizona. “Many of the
colonists died of starvation.”
Early scientific experiments
by Europeans in North America
probably weren’t confined to
geology, says Matthew Eddy
at Durham University, UK.
“Much of the evidence
has been lost, particularly for
sites in farming communities
that were doing experiments
on plant-based substances
such as dyes, alcohol or
fertilisers,” he says.  ❚

10 | New Scientist | 14 December 2019


Developmental biology
Pigs with monkey cells born in China
Experiment suggests it may not be feasible to grow transplant organs in animals
Michael Le Page
PIG-PRIMATE chimeras have
been born live for the first time,
but died within a week, New
Scientist exclusively revealed
on 6 December. The two piglets,
created by a team in China, looked
normal despite a small proportion
of their cells being derived from
cynomolgus monkeys.
“This is the first report of
full-term, pig-monkey chimeras,”
says Tang Hai at the State Key
Laboratory of Stem Cell and
Reproductive Biology in Beijing.
The ultimate aim of the work is
to grow human organs in animals
for transplant. But the results
show there is still a long way to
go to achieve this, the team says.
Hai and his colleagues created
embryonic stem cells from
genetically modified monkey
cells and injected them into
pig embryos five days after
fertilisation. They then implanted
more than 4000 of these embryos
in sows. Ten piglets were born
as a result, of which two were
chimeras. All died within a week.
In the chimeric piglets, multiple
tissues – including in the heart,
liver, spleen, lung and skin – partly
TANG HAI
consisted of monkey cells, but
the proportion was low: between
Climate change
Global warming
is causing oceans
to lose oxygen
THE world’s oceans have lost
around 2 per cent of their oxygen,
on average, over half a century,
alarming scientists who have
warned of the trend’s impact on
fisheries and endangered species.
The number of low-oxygen sites
along coasts globally has spiralled
from 45 in the 1960s to around
700 now, according to a peer-
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one in 1000 and one in 10,000
(Protein & Cell, doi.org/dgpt).
It is unclear why the piglets
died, says Hai, but because the
non-chimeric pigs died as well,
the team suspects it is to do with
the IVF process rather than the
chimerism. IVF doesn’t work as
well in pigs as it does in humans
and some other animals.
The team is now trying to create
healthy animals with a higher
proportion of monkey cells, says
reviewed report by 67 researchers
for the International Union for
Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
In places, the oxygen loss is
severe: some areas off the coast
of California have lost 30 to 40 per
cent, says Dan Laffoley at the IUCN.
Presented at the UN climate
talks in Madrid on 7 December,
the research predicts the oceans will
lose 3 to 4 per cent of their oxygen
globally by the end of the century
if carbon emissions are unchecked.
Climate change makes
deoxygenation worse by warming
Hai. If that is successful, the next
step would be to try to create pigs
in which one organ is composed
almost entirely of primate cells.
Something like this has already
been achieved in rodents. In 2010,
Hiromitsu Nakauchi, now at
Stanford University in California,
created mice with rat pancreases
This piglet was one of
two with primate cells,
but neither lived long
the oceans and changing ocean
circulation patterns.
“We’ve managed to successfully
[raise awareness of] acidification
and ocean heating, but
deoxygenation is the ultimate
wake-up call,” says Laffoley.
Low-oxygen zones leave fish
vulnerable to suffocation. One near
Australia killed a million reef fish.
“We’ve managed to raise
awareness of ocean
acidification and heating,
but not deoxygenation”
by genetically modifying the
mice so their own cells couldn’t
develop into a pancreas.
In 2017, Juan Carlos Izpisua
Belmonte’s team at the Salk
Institute in California created
pig-human chimeras, but only
around one in 100,000 cells were
human and, for ethical reasons,
the embryos were only allowed
to develop for a month. The
concern is that a chimera’s brain
could be partly human.
This is why Hai and his team
used monkey rather than human
cells. While the proportion of
monkey cells in their chimeras
is higher than the proportion
of human cells in Belmonte’s
chimeras, it is still very low.
“Given the extremely low
chimeric efficiency and the
deaths of all the animals, I actually
see this as fairly discouraging,”
says Paul Knoepfler at the
University of California, Davis.
He isn’t convinced that it
will ever be possible to grow
organs suitable for transplant
by creating animal-human
chimeras. However, it makes
sense to continue researching this
approach along with others such
as tissue engineering, he says. ❚
Alongside ocean warming, the
other big driver for deoxygenation
is the run-off of polluting nutrients
from agriculture into rivers and then
coastal waters. The nutrients fuel
algal growth, and when bacteria
eventually break down the algae,
they use up the oxygen in the water.
Laffoley says the good news
is we know how to solve the
problem of oxygen loss: radically
reduce the carbon emissions
released into the atmosphere
and cut nutrient run-off. ❚
Adam Vaughan
14 December 2019 | New Scientist | 11

News
Biodiversity loss
Forgetting past wildlife
Younger people are less likely to realise how much species have declined
Adam Vaughan
WALKING in England’s New
Forest in 1892, butterfly collector
S. G. Castle Russell encountered
such numbers of the insects that
they “were so thick that I could
hardly see ahead”. On another
occasion, he “captured a hundred
purple hairstreaks” with two
sweeps of his net.
Patrick Barkham, who recounts
these riots of nature in his 2010
book on butterflies, laments never
seeing such a sight. However, new
research suggests Barkham is a
rarity, because a lot of people are
forgetting, or just don’t appreciate,
how much wildlife there was.
To gauge this effect, Lizzie Jones
at Royal Holloway, University of
London, compared population
records dating back to 1966 of
10 UK bird species against public
perceptions of those birds.
More than 900 people told her
how abundant they thought the
species – including declining ones
such as house sparrows – were
today and when they were aged 18.
Although, of course, younger
people were 18 more recently
than older participants, they were
generally worse at describing how
Space
NASA helps some
firms avoid satellite
collisions – for a fee
NASA has been quietly helping
select satellite companies avoid
collisions in orbit, at a cheaper
price than some tracking firms.
Documents obtained by New
Scientist show that, in September,
NASA renewed an agreement with
satellite imagery company Maxar
Technologies to help protect four of
the firm’s WorldView satellites. The
spacecraft collect high-resolution
images for customers including
12 | New Scientist | 14 December 2019
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many more birds there were at this
age. “You’d expect younger people
would be better,” says Jones, who
on Friday is presenting her work
at the British Ecological Society
conference in Belfast, UK.
The problem of forgetting past
natural abundance, or of new
generations not knowing about
it, is known as shifting baseline
syndrome, an idea coined in 1995
by Daniel Pauly at the University
of British Columbia in Canada,
the US Department of Defense
and Google Earth.
According to the documents,
NASA analysts will predict close
approaches with other spacecraft
or orbital debris, and provide Maxar
with timely warnings to move its
satellites out of the way.
A NASA official confirmed that
the agency had been safeguarding
Maxar satellites since 2013,
after being asked to help by the
Department of Defense. Some
Boeing satellites have enjoyed
similar protection, although that
deal expired in early 2018.
Until now, it was thought that
Meadow pipits, here near a
lighthouse in the Channel
Islands, are in decline
Naturalist Chris Packham
describes the syndrome as a curse
for conservation. “We all think
the world was perfect when we
first encountered it, i.e. when
we were young.” He recalls turtle
doves nesting in the grounds
of his Hampshire school in 1970,
ALAN LAGADU/GETTY IMAGES
a species that has long since
vanished from the county. But he
says good records are important
so that we aren’t reliant on such
subjective anecdotes.
For Jones, tackling the syndrome
is simple: get older generations to
but which is only slowly being describe how things were. “All we
backed up with evidence. Photos need to do is get grandparents to
of fishermen in Florida, who, over talk to grandchildren about
generations, pose equally proudly environmental things,” she says.
with ever-shrinking catches, The alternative is people losing
famously illustrate the concept. connections to wildlife and the
Jones says her work is the most will to care about stopping its loss,
conclusive empirical evidence of she says. “If we don’t learn about
shifting baseline syndrome so far. nature from an early age, and we
The biggest problem, she says, is don’t go and experience it and
that current generations are likely recognise species, then [our
to view what they see around collective amnesia] could just
them as completely normal. get worse and worse.” ❚
NASA had only been watching out saying, ‘This object is coming close
for around 70 government-owned to an object that you own’. If you
satellites. Most commercial want advice on the best course of
operators have been largely reliant action, they’re not able to help.”
on free, automated alerts from Maxar also pays space-mapping
the Combined Space Operations start-up LeoLabs for tracking data
Center (CSpOC), a US military unit. and alerts about close approaches
“What the CSpOC provides is that are provided using its own
very basic,” says Brian Weeden radar systems. Under the new
at the Secure World Foundation, agreement, Maxar is paying NASA
a private organisation promoting $73,130 a year, working out at
sustainability in space. “It’s an email around $1500 per month per
satellite. That is lower than the
“It was thought that $2500 per month per satellite that
NASA had only been LeoLabs charges, meaning NASA
watching out for around is undercutting the competition. ❚
70 government satellites” Mark Harris
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News
Analysis Online security
Chinese app TikTok may be leaking users’ data But some
of the privacy concerns also apply to apps developed in Silicon
Valley, finds Chris Stokel-Walker
M4OS PHOTOS/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
TIKTOK has become one of
the hottest apps in the world,
surpassing Instagram in
popularity, as measured by
the number of downloads of
the app in the past 12 months.
More than 1.5 billion people
use it to upload and watch quirky
short videos performed to music.
But court cases and
investigations are raising concerns
about how the app shares
people’s data. The fact that the
app is owned by China-based
tech giant ByteDance seems
to be heightening the alarm.
Last week, a student in
California filed a lawsuit against
TikTok for allegedly transferring
“vast quantities of private and
personally-identifiable user data”
to servers in China.
The student, Misty Hong,
claims that TikTok surreptitiously
transfers data about users’
phone use, including websites
visited outside the app, to
Chinese servers.
Hong claims that this was
done despite her never creating an
account, and that the information
secretly transmitted to China
14 | New Scientist | 14 December 2019
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included videos she had made
using the app but never posted.
The lawsuit comes as a
German journalist and educator,
Matthias Eberl, analysed the
way the app handles and moves
data. Eberl found that information
about the device and search
terms entered into the app were
1.5bn
The number of people
using TikTok
sent to advertising company
Appsflyer and to Facebook.
Eberl believes that private
identifying information is
transferred to an unsecured
country outside the European
Union too, which may contravene
European data rules.
The app is also being
investigated by the US over
national security concerns and
censorship of politically sensitive
content. US politicians, including
Senate minority leader Chuck
Schumer, are concerned that
the app will siphon off data,
which can be sent on to the
TikTok is filled with
quirky short videos
often set to music
Chinese government if requested.
TikTok is the first platform
since the advent of social media
that is popular worldwide but
was developed in China, which
seems to be driving many of the
concerns. The firm’s chief has
agreed to meet with law-makers
in Washington DC this week.
There are substantial differences
in data norms between the US,
the EU and China. In China, for
example, information from the
apps that people use is fed into
the country’s social credit system,
which is linked to “privileges”,
such as being able to book a
flight. The US and the EU have
stricter rules on when data sharing
can occur.
The fact the app is aimed at
young people also stokes moral
panic, says Rowenna Fielding
at data protection consultants
Protecture.
However, she says the way
data flows from TikTok is
extremely common.“The discipline
of privacy by design and default
is not yet widely embedded in
the app development industry,”  Office says the project has been
says Fielding.
“People are absolutely right
with their intuitive mistrust,”
says Eberl. But the problems
aren’t unique to Chinese firms,
he says. Many of the practices
that TikTok uses are standard
in tech firms, including those
based in Silicon Valley.
TikTok told New Scientist:
“Protecting our users’ data is
critical to us and we take our
responsibility incredibly seriously.”
The firm says that information
about where it sends data is in
the app’s privacy policy, and that
it tracks some things to prevent
malicious behaviour on its app. ❚
Climate change
Vital ocean current
monitoring system
saved – for now
Adam Vaughan
AN UNDER-THREAT flagship science
project that monitors an ocean
current crucial to weather on both
sides of the Atlantic Ocean has been
given a reprieve after funding was
secured for its short-term future.
New Scientist revealed in May
that a string of moorings used to
record the slowing of the Atlantic
meridional overturning circulation
(AMOC), called the RAPID array,
faced closure due to a funding crisis.
Researchers feared the end of
RAPID would stop efforts to study
the long-term trend of the current
as the climate changes.
“The continuity of long-term
ocean observations is critical to
understanding the role of the
oceans in climate, especially at
present in light of the discussions
at COP25,” says Meric Srokosz at
the UK’s National Oceanography
Centre, referring to the UN climate
talks under way in Madrid.
The funding for the project was
due to run out next year, but will
now continue until at least 2021.
The £1 million funding needed
for the year came from several
sources, including the UK’s National
Oceanography Centre and the
US National Science Foundation.
Laura Jackson at the UK’s Met
critical for monitoring the AMOC and
helps inform climate change models.
“We have seen how changes
measured by the RAPID array affect
the ocean temperatures in the North
Atlantic, and that these can impact
weather patterns,” she says. Collapse
of the AMOC – as heavily dramatised
in the film The Day After Tomorrow –
is considered unlikely this century,
but RAPID would be key for
detecting the start of such an event.
The slowing of the AMOC was
raised by a group of influential
scientists last week as one of a
series of dangerous tipping points
in Earth’s systems that may be close
because of human activities. ❚
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Space

Dark matter black holes may lurk

within the hearts of dead stars
Chelsea Whyte

DEAD stars are exploding all electrons held apart by the rules If enough of it clumps together, a function of how big the black
around the universe and we aren’t of quantum physics, and a dwarf it will collapse under its own hole is,” says Bramante.
sure why – but now a pair of this large should have enough gravity into a tiny black hole If Hawking radiation wins, it
researchers think that minuscule internal pressure that a black nestled within the heart of the could destroy the star. As the black
black holes made from dark hole could form within it. star. Depending on the size of the hole shrinks, it would heat up as
matter might be to blame. Bramante and Acevedo suggest black hole and of the white dwarf, emitted particles collide with the
Burnt out stars known as that when dark matter falls into the it could suck in the star’s material surrounding star’s matter. After
white dwarfs can ignite into a white dwarf at about 1 per cent of within a millisecond (Physical about 3 billion years, fusion takes
type Ia supernova when they the speed of light, it is much hotter Review D, doi.org/dgkh). over and the white dwarf explodes.
gather matter from a nearby than the material that makes up Or it could begin to evaporate “Once it reaches a high-enough
star or merge with other the star. As the dark matter cools, and send out particles of Hawking temperature, we have no idea what
astronomical objects. How this it gathers at the centre. radiation – energy thought to leak it would do,” says Bramante. To
works is still an open question. out of a black hole, making it work it out, we need to meld the
“The dirty secret of supernovae A black hole in a white slowly shrink. “It’s a competition rules of quantum physics and
is that in the computer models, dwarf star might prompt between Hawking radiation and general relativity into a theory
we can’t ever actually get them to it to explode like this accretion. Which one wins out is of quantum gravity – one of the
do the final ignition. There always biggest challenges in physics.
has to be an injected trigger,” says “Although it would be hidden
Ashley Pagnotta at the College inside a white dwarf, this could
of Charleston in South Carolina, be one probe of a quantum gravity
who wasn’t involved in the work. process. Though, we would have
Joseph Bramante and Javier to figure out what to observe in an
Acevedo at Queen’s University exploding white dwarf that would
in Canada say dark matter – the come out as a result of this final
CHANDRA X-RAY OBSERVATORY CENTER

invisible stuff thought to make up ignition phase,” he says.

80 per cent of the matter in the Observing it would be hard, says
universe – could be that trigger. Pagnotta. It would be interesting
The pair modelled what could to put constraints on dark matter
happen when dark matter meets and begin to pin it down, she says,
a white dwarf that is between but the signature of dark matter
1 and 1.4 times the mass of the sun. may not be visible in the light we
White dwarfs are mostly made of observe from supernovae. ❚

Cryptography

Number crunchers keys and challenged people to find
the original primes, as a way of
set record for tracking how secure the encryption
cracking encryption is against modern computers.
Now Emmanuel Thomé at the
A NEW record has been set for the National Institute for Research in
largest encryption key ever cracked, Computer Science and Automation
but your secrets remain safe. in France and his colleagues have
Long strings of numbers broken the record for the largest
are essential for protecting our key cracked so far.
online data. One common form of The team factored RSA-240, an
encryption called RSA cryptography RSA key that is 795 bits in size, with
relies on how hard it is to find 240 decimal digits. The previous
the prime numbers that multiply record was set in 2010, with a key
together to yield huge numbers. of 768 bits and 232 decimal digits.
The inventors of the RSA “We were actually faster than
algorithm published a list of RSA the previous record, even though we
computed something larger,” says
Thomé. Thomé and his colleagues
ran computations across clusters
of computers in France, Germany
and the US. The total computing
time was the equivalent of a single
computer core running for 8 million
hours, or more than 900 years.
The RSA keys most commonly
used by computers today are about
2048 bits long, so the calculation
isn’t a threat to computer security.
“We were actually faster
than the previous record,
even though we computed
something larger”
People should crack larger and
larger RSA keys as computing power 
improves, says Thomé. He adds that
a rule-of-thumb, known as Moore’s
law, predicts that computing power
doubles roughly every 18 months
and can be used to determine
when large keys should be broken,
given the time it took for previous
records to be set.
This time, the team managed to
do it faster than expected, he says.
“We provided a new data point to
make people able to determine how
hard it should be now and, in the
future, to compute things.” ❚
Donna Lu

14 December 2019 | New Scientist | 15


News
Botany
Stressed plants let out
ultrasonic squeals
Adam Vaughan
JOSE A. BERNAT/GETTY IMAGES
WE USUALLY think of plants as
silent. But now, for the first time,
they have been recorded making
airborne sounds when stressed.
Itzhak Khait and his colleagues
at Tel Aviv University in Israel
found that tomato and tobacco
plants made sounds at frequencies
humans can’t hear when their
stem is cut or they lack water.
Microphones 10 centimetres
from the plants picked up
noises in the ultrasonic range
of 20 to 100 kilohertz, which
the team says insects and some
mammals would be capable of
hearing as far as 5 metres away.
35
Drought-stressed tomato plants
made this many sounds an hour
“These findings can alter the
way we think about the Plant
Kingdom, which has been
considered to be almost silent
until now,” the team writes in its
study (bioRxiv, doi.org/dgkq).
Previously, devices have been
attached to plants to record the
vibrations caused by air bubbles
forming and exploding – a process
known as cavitation – inside their
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Spiny pincushion cacti
make high-frequency
sounds we can’t hear
water transport tubes. But this is
the first time sounds from plants
have been measured at a distance.
On average, drought-stressed
tomato plants made 35 sounds
an hour, and tobacco plants 11.
When plant stems were cut,
tomato plants made 25 sounds
on average in the following hour,
and tobacco plants 15. Unstressed
plants tended to produce fewer
than one sound per hour.
The team also recorded some
ultrasonic sounds from a spiny
pincushion cactus.
In most cases, a machine-
learning model was able to
correctly identify the cause of
a plant’s stress from the sounds
it made. Water-hungry tobacco
appears to make louder noises
than cut tobacco, for example.
If plants are making sounds
when stressed, cavitation is the
most likely mechanism, says
Edward Farmer at the University
of Lausanne, Switzerland. But
he is sceptical of the findings,
and would like to see more in
the way of controls. ❚
Mathematics
AI takes on one
of maths’ hardest
problems
Donna Lu
ARTIFICIAL intelligence’s ability
to sift through large amounts
of data is helping us tackle one
of the most difficult unsolved
problems in mathematics.
Yang-Hui He at City,
University of London, and his
colleagues are using machine
learning to better understand
the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer
conjecture. This is one of the
seven fiendish Millennium Prize
Problems, each of which has a
$1 million reward on offer for
the first correct solution.
The conjecture describes
solutions to equations known
as elliptic curves that take the
form of y2 = x3 + ax + b, where
x and y are variables and a and b
are fixed constants.
Elliptic curves were essential
in cracking the long-standing
Fermat’s last theorem, which
was solved by mathematician
Andrew Wiles in the 1990s, and
are also used in cryptography.
To study the behaviour of
elliptic curves, mathematicians
also use an equation called the
L-series. The conjecture, first
stated by mathematicians Bryan
Birch and Peter Swinnerton-
Dyer in the 1960s, says that if
an elliptic curve has an infinite
number of solutions, its L-series
should equal 0 at certain points.
“It turns out to be a very,
very difficult problem to find a
set of integer solutions on such
equations,” says He, meaning
solutions only involving whole
numbers. “This is part of the
biggest problem in number
theory: how do you find integer
solutions to polynomials?”
Finding integer solutions
or showing they can’t exist
has previously proved crucial.
“For example, Fermat’s last
theorem is reduced completely
to the statement of whether
you can find certain properties
of elliptic curves,” says He.
He and his colleagues used an
AI to analyse close to 2.5 million
elliptic curves that had been
compiled in a database by John
Cremona at the University of
Warwick, UK. The rationale was
to search the equations to see if
any statistical patterns emerged
(arxiv.org/abs/1911.02008).
Plugging different values
into the elliptic curve equation
and plotting the results on a
graph produced a distribution
in the shape of a cross, which
mathematicians hadn’t
previously observed.
“The distribution of elliptic
curves seems to be symmetric
from left to right, and up and
down,” says He. “If you spot any
interesting patterns, then you
can raise a conjecture which may
later lead to an important result.”
“Elliptic curves were
essential in cracking
the long-standing
Fermat’s last theorem”
To see whether a theoretical
explanation exists for the
cross-shaped distribution,
He consulted various number
theorists. “Apparently, nobody
knows,” says He.
“Machine learning hasn’t
yet been applied very much to
problems in pure maths,” says
Andrew Booker at the University
of Bristol, UK. “Elliptic curves are
a natural place to start.”
“Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer
made their conjecture based
on patterns that they observed
in numerical data in the
1960s, and I could imagine
applications of machine
learning that tried to detect
those patterns efficiently,” says
Booker. However, the approach
so far is too simple to turn up
any deep patterns, he says. ❚
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News In brief
ARTIST’S IMPRESSION: NASA/JOHN HOPKINS APL/STEVE GRIBBEN
Contraception
Monthly pill
on the horizon
AN ORAL contraceptive capsule
may only need to be taken once
a month. In tests in pigs, it slowly
released a contraceptive that
persisted in the blood for weeks.
Giovanni Traverso at the
Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, who helped develop
the innovation, believes it is the
first example of a capsule to deliver
a drug over such a time span.
The delivery system was
designed so that it would stick
around in the stomach. Within
the capsule is a structure made
up of six arms attached to a central
body. Each arm is loaded with the
contraceptive levonorgestrel.
While inside the capsule, the
structure is folded up, but once
the capsule reaches the stomach
it starts to degrade. This releases
the structure, allowing the arms to
unfold and create a star that opens
to such a size that it can’t exit the
18 | New Scientist | 14 December 2019
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Space
Probe closes on sun to study
mysteries of the solar wind
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has sent
back its first detailed measurements
from closer to the sun’s surface than
we have ever ventured before.
We already knew that the solar
wind, a flood of energetic particles
constantly flowing from the sun,
speeds up as it leaves the star’s
outermost layer. Measurements
from the probe, have now shown
that the wind is even faster than
expected, and strange features
spotted in the sun’s magnetic
field might help explain why.
These S-shaped kinks, and the
hot plasma flowing along them,
move far faster than anything in
their surroundings. They carry
significant energy, says Parker Solar
Probe team member Jasper Halekas
at the University of Iowa, so they
could be connected to the larger
mysteries of how the solar wind is
Evolution
stomach. Over the next few weeks,
the hormone is gradually released, How mammals got
before the arms eventually fall off to be good listeners
and the pieces pass through the
body, says Traverso. FOSSILS of shrew-like animals that
So far, Traverso and his lived some 120 million years ago
colleagues have only tested have revealed the earliest evidence
their contraceptive in pigs. Three of the middle ear bones separating
animals were given the capsule from the jaw, a key step in the
and had similar blood levels of the evolution of hearing.
contraceptive to five female pigs Three tiny bones in the middle
MAO ET AL., SCIENCE (2019)
that were given the daily version ear – called the incus, malleus and
of the oral contraceptive, although stapes – are responsible for the
the levels of levonorgestrel did sharp hearing of many mammals.
drop over the course of a month Biologists think this complex
(Science Translational Medicine, architecture gradually evolved as
doi.org/dgkp).
The researchers plan to add
oestrogen to the capsule before
they try it in people, as this is
the more common format for
long-acting contraceptives, says
Traverso. He hopes to start human
trials within the next five years.
Traverso imagines the
once-a-month contraceptive
being especially useful in low-
to-middle income countries.
5mm
Jessica Hamzelou
accelerated to high speeds and
why the corona – the sun’s tenuous
outer layer – is so anomalously hot.
While that probably has
something to do with the fast solar
wind, which blows at up to 750
kilometres per second, the sun also
has a slower wind moving at less
than 500 kilometres per second.
The fast wind emerges via “holes” in
the corona where the sun’s magnetic
field points straight out, but we
hadn’t been able to nail down
where the slow wind comes from.
Measurements have now revealed
that it also comes from a hole in
the corona (Nature, doi.org/dgkg).
The probe has already passed
nearly twice as close to the sun as
any other craft, allowing it to look at
the star in ways that are impossible
further out. It is set to move in for
an even better look. Leah Crane
the bones behind the back teeth
of the lower jaw shrank and were
pushed back. But fossil evidence
of this transition is rare.
Now, Jin Meng at the American
Museum of Natural History and
his team have seen it in nearly
complete skeletons (pictured) of
a previously unknown mammal,
Origolestes lii, found in China.
The middle ear bones in this
mole-sized animal sit behind and
at the base of its jawbone, but are
completely separate from the
jaw, as in modern mammals. In
particular, O. lii’s middle ear bones
weren’t connected to the jaw
through a bridge called Meckel’s
cartilage – a feature found in a
relative that lived at around the
same time (Science, doi.org/dgkn).
Meng says this is “a snapshot of
the moment when the two organs
separated in evolutionary time”.
All living mammals have a
separate middle ear, but reptiles,
birds and frogs don’t – which
means they lose hearing when
eating. Ruby Prosser Scully
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New Scientist Daily

Evolution
Really brief
Face gene clue to our
self-domestication
A SINGLE gene controls much
of the development of our faces
and provides some evidence for
the idea that we domesticated
GETTY IMAGES
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the genes that control the neural
crest, some biologists hope to
show that the same kinds of
genetic changes are behind both
dog and human domestication.
Giuseppe Testa at the European
Institute of Oncology in Milan,
Italy, and his colleagues have
the neural crest was slow to form
and didn’t develop properly.
The team found that 448 genes
were affected, suggesting BAZ1B
controls them all (Science
Advances, doi.org/dgkr).
Many of the genes regulated by
BAZ1B had already been identified

ourselves as a species. studied a gene called BAZ1B. as significant in recent human

Self-domestication is the idea It is known to be involved in evolution, because our versions
that we pushed ourselves to evolve controlling the neural crest and of them are different to those
less aggressive behaviour and is vital for the development of carried by Neanderthals.
Dogs have a keen looks. All the parts of the body our faces. The dog version of the That the genes only evolved
ear for language implicated in our domestication gene is thought to have played recently and are involved in
are derived from a single cluster a role in their domestication. controlling face shape adds
Playing 70 pet dogs of cells in the developing embryo The team knocked out the gene to evidence that we self-
recordings of words that called the neural crest. By studying in developing embryos. As a result, domesticated. Michael Marshall
differ only by a vowel
sound has revealed that Pollution Technology
most can tell that such
similar words are different.
They can even distinguish Speakers made out
the sound of such words of heavy metal
when they are spoken by
someone new (Biology FLEXIBLE speakers made of liquid
Letters, doi.org/dgg6). heavy metal may be key to better,
wearable music listening devices.
Dead star hosts Jeong Sook Ha of Korea
University in Seoul and her
MEDIAWORLDIMAGES/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

vast world
colleagues have developed a
A giant planet is orbiting loudspeaker that plays a range
the remnants of an of sounds, from piano notes to
exploded star – called a human voices, even when bent.
white dwarf – 1200 light The device is made from two strips
years away from Earth. of a liquid gallium alloy encased
The discovery is the first in a liquid electrolyte. Because
time an entire planet has gallium is a heavy metal, it has a
been found orbiting a high density. Running beneath the
white dwarf (Nature, Cleaner air rapidly brings metal are two strips of copper that
doi.org/dgg7). transmit an alternating current.
major health benefits When current flows through
Hermit crabs perish the copper, it distorts the shape of
in plastic pollution CURBING dirty air can have a obstructive pulmonary disease. the gallium alloy, expanding and
dramatic effect on health almost Such health gains can lead to big contracting the liquid strips. These
An estimated 570,000 immediately, and the benefits can cost savings. Benefits of the 1970 rapid vibrations generate sound.
hermit crabs have been far outweigh costs, says a review Clean Air Act in the US exceeded the The device produced around
killed by being trapped of evidence from around the world. costs of implementing it by a factor 45 decibels at 1 centimetre away,
in plastic debris on two Dean Schraufnagel at the of 32, the US Environmental the equivalent to the background
remote island groups. University of Illinois and his Protection Agency has estimated. sound in a library or conversation
Researchers calculated the colleagues collated existing Reducing indoor pollution also at home. It even worked when
toll by surveying strawberry studies to work out the upsides makes a difference. Replacing bent into an arc with a radius of
hermit crab populations of cleaner air. The extent of the polluting forms of heating, such 3 millimetres. Bending it caused
on the Cocos (Keeling) gains was surprising, he says. as wood-burning stoves, with no damage (Small, doi.org/dgks).
Islands in the Indian Ocean For instance, when Ireland cleaner forms, such as heat pumps, The findings suggest that this
and on Henderson Island, banned smoking in workplaces in has a variety of upsides, including liquid loudspeaker could be a
one of the Pitcairn Islands 2004, the number of people dying fewer days off school, according to prototype for future wearable
in the South Pacific (Journal from any cause fell by 13 per cent studies in the US, Australia and New audio devices, says Ha. It could
of Hazardous Materials, after just a week. There were also Zealand (Annals of the American also be worn on the skin to hear
doi.org/dgk3). big falls in heart disease, strokes Thoracic Society, doi.org/ggdmnx). physiological signals such as
and a lung condition called chronic Michael Le Page heartbeats. RPS

14 December 2019 | New Scientist | 19

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News Insight
Solar system

Space invaders
The rise of the private space industry may well mean allowing Earth
microbes to contaminate other worlds. Is it worth the risk, asks Leah Crane
NEXT July, a trio of spacecraft
will begin their journeys to Mars.
The US, Europe and China are all
taking advantage of a favourable
planetary alignment to launch
rovers to the Red Planet and
search for signs of current and
past life. But what happens if a
stray Earth microbe hitches a ride?
That is where the principle of
planetary protection comes in.
The idea is to make sure that
microorganisms from Earth don’t
end up on other worlds – and vice
versa. This is both to avoid killing
off any extant life that might be on
another planet and to make sure
that we can still study those worlds
in a relatively pristine state.
“It’s really easy to find life

on Mars or anywhere else,” says
Catharine Conley, who was
NASA’s planetary protection
officer from 2006 until 2018.
“Just bring it with you.”
In an effort to avoid this,
international planetary protection
rules have been in place since
the 1950s, but the rise of the
private space-flight industry has
prompted a rethink. If we end up
in a future where SpaceX regularly
lands humans on Mars, we want
to avoid contamination as much
as possible. At the same time,
onerous regulations could restrict
the growing industry.
That is why, in mid-2019, NASA
convened an independent board
of researchers and space-flight
firms to review its planetary
protection policies and suggest
ways to modernise the process.
The board presented its final
report to the international
Committee on Space Research
(COSPAR) last week, with a view
to the protocols being adopted
worldwide. SpaceX took part in the
review, but didn’t respond to New
Scientist’s request for comment.
Some of the existing rules are a
bit of a mess, says Lisa Pratt, NASA’s
current planetary protection
officer. “You have requirements
that are impossible to verify
or measure,” she says. “Some
things are written in terms of the
probability of introducing a single
viable organism into a body of
water, and we have no reliable
or precise method to determine
how many viable spores there
are on a spacecraft.”
The report doesn’t suggest
how NASA’s protocols should
change to deal with this, but it
3
The number of Mars rovers
due to launch in 2020
does suggest that they might not
be nuanced enough. For example,
when a spacecraft is en route to its
destination, the cold and radiation
of space will kill many onboard
microorganisms. That might
mean we could let spacecraft
launch with more of these sorts
of microorganisms than we do
currently, the report says.
It also calls for a smarter
consideration of a spacecraft’s
destination, because different
areas on the same world have
different potential for biology.
This principle is already in use
today – for example, rovers are
free to visit most of Mars, but
areas that might have liquid
water are deemed by COSPAR to
be “special regions” that nobody
can visit for fear of contamination.
“When planetary protection
got started, Mars was a point
of light in the sky, and now
it’s a real world with countless
different places on it,” says Alan
Stern at the Southwest Research
Institute in Texas, chair of the
review board. “We don’t have to
protect them all equally.” (See
diagram, right.)
The board recommends that
this system of “special regions”
be expanded to other worlds
besides Mars. For example, right
now missions to land on Europa or
Enceladus, two moons with water
oceans beneath their icy shells,
must have essentially no chance
of bringing microorganisms to
SPACEX
Imagined Mars settlements
may make it harder to find
the planet’s native microbes
the surface. The report says that
might be unnecessarily strict.
“One would think that Earth life
would be easily distinguishable
from life that came about there,”
because of the huge differences
in the conditions under which it
evolved, says Amanda Hendrix at
the Planetary Science Institute in
Arizona, who was also a member
of the review board. Even if we did
contaminate these worlds, the
chance that it would ruin future
science seems small, she says.
To quantify this, the report calls
for NASA to study how microbes
could survive, reproduce and
move around each ocean world.
Understanding whether microbes
could be transported by winds,
ice flowing and melting, and
other climate patterns will be key
to deciding how different areas
need to be protected, says Pratt.
Those transport mechanisms
could be a sticking point for
planetary protection when it

20 | New Scientist | 14 December 2019


More Insight online
Your guide to a rapidly changing world
newscientist.com/insight
comes to sending humans to
Mars. We understand more about
the Red Planet than we ever have
before, but there are constant
new discoveries about the surface,
the subsurface and water on Mars.
Sending humans there, which
is one of NASA’s explicit goals,
will require breaking just about
every planetary protection
guideline there is.
“The minute we send humans
to Mars, and they start pooing
on Mars, forget about baking the
spacecraft in cleanrooms to get rid
of the microbes,” says Paul Byrne,
a planetary scientist at North
Carolina State University. Humans
are overflowing with microbes
of all sorts and it is inevitable that
some will end up on the Martian
surface, even though people will
be wearing spacesuits.
We can’t be sure that those
microbes won’t spread around
the Red Planet and obliterate
any signs of past or present life
there, but Stern says that the
Martian environment is
poisonous enough to Earth life
that we shouldn’t worry too much.
“Having humans on the surface
will allow us to do science that
we cannot do efficiently with
robots,” he says. “It’s a little bit
of downside and a lot of upside.”
Guidelines from the International Committee on Space Research classify space missions
in one of five categories according to the risk of contaminating other worlds or Earth
RY
CU
S
NU
RT
AR
ER
N
SU
EA
VE
JU
M
Moon
Callisto
I. Little to no chance of helping
to understand the origins of life,
so contamination poses no risk
II. Remote chance of Earth
microbes thriving
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Of course, NASA isn’t the only
agency with its sights set on the
moon, Mars and maybe even
other destinations in the solar
system. The whole thing is made
more complicated – and more
urgent – by the increasing
accessibility of space flight.
Many countries with smaller
space programmes are aiming
for solar system exploration,
as are private companies like
SpaceX, and NASA’s policies
don’t necessarily apply to them.
“It’s sort of an honour system,”
says Hendrix. There are some
international requirements
through COSPAR and the Outer
Space Treaty of 1967, but those
requirements tend to be more
lenient than NASA’s.
Expensive burden
One rationale for the report was
to make it easier for industry to
comply with planetary protection
protocols. Adhering to strict rules
could make things prohibitively
expensive, especially for relatively
small missions.
“We want to take planetary
protection seriously, yet we
don’t want to burden missions
more than necessary,” says
Hendrix. “We want to encourage
US
RN
R
TE
AN
PT
TU
PI
UR
NE
SA
Io Enceladus
Europa Titan
Ganymede
III/IV. Significant chance of contamination
from spacecraft that orbit or fly past (III)
or land (IV)
V. Sample return missions with a risk of
contaminating Earth
Working
hypothesis
Sorting the week’s
supernovae from
the absolute zeros
exploration – that’s what
NASA is all about. So if it’s
too burdensome, we’re not
doing our job.”
Conley takes a stricter approach.
She describes the idea of loosening ▲ Avocados
planetary protection constraints Millennials, rejoice!
Supermarkets in Germany
“We’re going to go out and and Denmark are stocking
explore, so we need to avocados sprayed with an
make sure that we don’t edible coating that keeps
do something truly stupid” them fresh for longer.
as “penny wise, pound foolish” ▲ Climate models
and says that it risks harming Models have accurately
future exploration for the sake predicted the past
of speeding it up now. 50 years’ global warming,
“You don’t know that you’ve according to a review.
loosened them too much until Now, what do they say will
you make a mistake,” says Conley. happen next? Oh. Oh dear.
Such a mistake was narrowly
avoided in the search for life- ▲ Renewables
friendly regions on the Martian UK renewable energy
surface, she says. Restrictions firm Octopus had so much
were relatively loose, because it excess electricity that it
seemed there was little chance paid people to use it – but
of finding life on Mars, and they only in the early hours.
were tightened in 2003 after Mars
Global Surveyor saw apparent ▼ AI gaming
signs of flowing liquid water. A text adventure called
Unless everybody with space AI Dungeon 2 that lets you
flight capabilities buys in to do pretty much anything
planetary protection, it won’t has wowed the internet,
matter – one dirty spacecraft could but is costing its maker
potentially destroy any chance $10,000 a day to run.
of finding life on an entire world.
As such, further study of these ▼ Russian sports
alien worlds will be crucial, says Even performance-
Byrne. It could be time to loosen enhancing drugs can’t
protections on the moon and help Russia dodge a
Mars – explorers are raring to go –
E
four-year international
UN
but it might be better to wait to sports ban from the World
decide how we treat complex Anti-Doping Agency.
bodies like Europa and Titan
until we understand them better.
Triton
“We’re going to go out and
explore, so we need a framework
in place to make sure that we
don’t do something truly stupid,”
ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
says Byrne. Contamination will
happen, but we protect the future
of space exploration by doing our
best to minimise it. ❚
14 December 2019 | New Scientist | 21
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Views
The columnist
Who can use smart
doorbell data, asks
Annalee Newitz  p24
Letters Aperture Culture Culture columnist
Practical steps to Meet Mr Trash Wheel, A new book explores Jacob Aron tries life
take back control the garbage gobbler the beautiful art of as a delivery guy in
of our deaths  p26 that cleans rivers  p28 creative AIs  p30 Death Stranding  p32

Comment

Guarding the guardians

The international conservation movement must learn to respect
the rights of indigenous peoples, says Curtis Abraham

T
HE murder of “guardian
of the forest” Paulo Paulino
Guajajara by armed loggers
in the Brazilian Amazon reserve
he called home garnered headlines
around the world last month.
It threw a spotlight on the
contribution of indigenous
communities to conserving
ecosystems and biodiversity.
Too often, that contribution is
overlooked and even belittled by
the wider conservation movement.
A default assumption is that
indigenous rights conflict with
the demands of conservation –
an attitude sometimes enforced
at the barrel of a gun.
The past year, for example, saw
evidence uncovered by Buzzfeed
News that armed anti-poaching
units working with the
conservation charity WWF shot,
sexually assaulted and killed
members of indigenous
communities around wildlife
parks in Asia and Africa. The
human rights charity Survival
International has alleged that
WWF worked with Cameroon’s
government in evicting Baka
people from their forest home
in the name of conservation.
WWF has disputed these
claims and commissioned an
independent review into its
activities, the results of which are
not yet known. But mistreatment
of indigenous communities in the
conservation sphere is part of a
wider pattern of marginalisation.
It is the result of a toxic mix of
JOSIE FORD
over land rights and ignorance
and arrogance from governments
and international bodies.
The planet’s 370 million
indigenous people inhabit and
manage lands that are home to an
estimated 80 per cent of the world’s
remaining forest biodiversity.
The idea that they are often better
stewards of that biodiversity is
more than just a romantic notion
of “peoples at one with nature”.
Scientists have recently woken
up to the fact, for example, that the
activities of nomadic pastoralists
desertification, may in fact be
beneficial. In Australia, traditional
burning practices rejuvenate lands
by promoting biodiversity and
reduce the risk of larger wildfires.
According to this year’s landmark
report by the Intergovernmental
Science-Policy Platform on
Biodiversity and Ecosystem
Services (IPBES), the decline
in flora and fauna caused by
human activities such as mining,
logging, overfishing and poaching
is happening more slowly on
indigenous lands.
dwelling Ogiek hunter-gatherer
community in Kenya successfully
challenged their eviction from
their home, ostensibly in aid of
conservation, in the African Court
on Human and Peoples’ Rights.
The ruling, although yet to
be implemented, explicitly
recognised that the Ogiek,
and by extension many other
indigenous peoples in Africa,
have a leading part to play as
guardians of local ecosystems
and in conserving land and
natural resources. International
bodies such as IPBES and the
International Union for
Conservation of Nature have
adopted resolutions to facilitate
indigenous participation in
environmental decision-making.
But true change means
tackling the marginalisation of
indigenous communities at its
source. What is needed is clearly
set out in the IPBES report:
“national recognition of land
tenure, access and resource rights
in accordance with national
legislation, the application of
free, prior and informed consent,
and improved collaboration, fair
and equitable sharing of benefits
arising from the use, and co-
management arrangements with
local communities”. Respecting
nature’s rights means also
respecting the rights of those
who live in harmony with it.  ❚
Curtis Abraham is
a writer based in

racism, discrimination, lack of on marginal land, often blamed There are signs that attitudes Kampala, Uganda
political representation, struggles for land degradation and are changing. In 2017, the forest-

14 December 2019 | New Scientist | 23


Views Columnist
Annalee Newitz is a science
journalist and author. Their
novel Autonomous won
the Lambda Literary Award
and they are the co-host
of the Hugo-nominated
podcast Our Opinions
Are Correct. You can
follow them @annaleen
and their website is
techsploitation.com
Annalee’s week
What I’m reading
James C. Scott’s
fascinating book Against
the Grain: A deep history
of the earliest states.
What I’m watching
The amazing and
disturbing His Dark
Materials TV series.
What I’m working on
I just started writing my
next novel, which is about
terraformers who can
control plate tectonics.
24 | New Scientist | 14 December 2019
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This changes everything
Who owns your face? Smart doorbells containing cameras can
be fun, but we can’t be sure what pictures of our faces are used for –
and that’s just the tip of the iceberg, writes Annalee Newitz
I
AM one of millions of people
around the globe who have a
smart doorbell with a hidden
camera, controlled through an
app. Now I can’t stop watching
videos of my porch and the street
beyond. I have a Google Nest
smart home system, and it sends
alerts to my phone that say things
like: “Your doorbell camera thinks
it has spotted a person.” Who
wouldn’t be curious after receiving
that? Is the person on my porch
a suspicious lurker? Someone
delivering a package? An old
friend? In my case, the answer has,
so far, been none of these. Usually,
the people my camera has spotted
are my neighbours’ children
racing out the door to school, or a
person walking by with their dog.
It doesn’t feel like surveillance,
exactly. There is something almost
fun about peering out of your
front door without anyone
knowing. Yet hundreds of police
departments in the US are using
footage from Amazon’s Ring
doorbells to snoop on streets.
They ask residents to install Ring
to create a “neighborhood watch”
of street cameras that law
enforcement can access. Amazon
even offers discounts and freebies
to people buying Ring through
the police.
Officers need user consent to
access footage through Ring’s
social app, Neighbors, but they
don’t need a warrant. That means
I could spy on my neighbours and
passersby for the police without
any court oversight. My Google
Nest system doesn’t currently
have an app like Neighbors, nor
partnerships with police, but it is
still easy to share footage. Though
some cities like San Francisco have
banned police from using facial
recognition, many places and
organisations are embracing it.
There is a big difference
between smart doorbells and
traditional CCTV. For one thing,
they are privately owned. In the
US, that means police can get all
kinds of surveillance data just by
asking nicely through apps like
Neighbors.
I am constantly uploading
data about people’s faces and
whereabouts to the cloud. Each
time a person rings my bell, my
app takes a snapshot and asks
whether I know them. I can
choose to label friends’ faces
with their names, or simply say
that I recognise them so Nest can
alert me when a “known person”
arrives. My camera also captures
images of cars driving on my
“Facial recognition
algorithms are
notoriously
unreliable –
especially for
people of colour”
street and the junction nearby,
which means my doorbell could
be logging number plates too.
Where is all that data going?
We can be sure that at least some
of it is used to train algorithms to
recognise people. Companies are
desperate for this kind of face data.
A Google contractor was recently
busted for paying homeless
people if they agreed to pose for
selfies in a “game”. That game
turned out to be facial recognition
software for the new Google Pixel
phone. And there are other sneaky
ways to harvest faces. Security at a
Taylor Swift concert in 2018 set up
a kiosk that secretly scanned the
faces of her fans to check for her
known stalkers. Several concert
venues and airports have similar
technologies in place.
What’s more, facial recognition
algorithms are notoriously
unreliable – especially when it
comes to people of colour. Due to
biased data sets and other
technical problems, they
misidentify people of colour far
more often than white people.
This means police often nab the
wrong person. But tech companies
are working to close the face
divide. One reason why Google
hired that contractor to take
pictures of the homeless was
reportedly to get more people
of colour into its database.
Chinese companies who make
surveillance software are taking
things to the next level. In 2018,
China-based company CloudWalk
Technology cut a deal with the
government of Zimbabwe
to do mass surveillance of
its population to improve
algorithmic recognition of the
faces of Zimbabweans. Recently,
Chinese authorities have taken
genetic samples from Uighurs, a
primarily Muslim minority group,
in the hopes that they will learn
how to recreate Uighur facial
features from DNA. The Chinese
government has put roughly a
million Uighurs into “reeducation
camps”. It hopes to simplify the
process by using DNA to identify
Uighurs in surveillance footage.
I just had a conversation with
my partner through the doorbell.
He was fixing the lock on our door,
and my phone alerted me to a
“familiar face”. When I saw him
on camera, I turned on its speaker
and yelled “EXTERMINATE!
EXTERMINATE!” Somehow, he
guessed it was me. It’s harmless
footage, but who knows what
else was captured behind him?
I have no idea what will happen
to my Dalek impression video if
Google sells Nest to a surveillance
company, and I can’t control who
might be targeted inadvertently
by my doorbell’s constant
vigilance. Even when I tell my
app to delete footage weekly,
I’ll never feel completely sure.  ❚
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Views Your letters

Editor’s pick
But what would a ‘climate
CERN’ institution do?
Leader, 23 November
From Steve Snow,
Edale, Derbyshire, UK
You ask whether it is “dewy-eyed
idealism” to imagine international
research institutions dedicated to
climate change, modelled on CERN.
It would indeed be dewy-eyed
to suggest that scientists are
inherently more tolerant and
cooperative than anyone else.
Accelerators large enough to
push the frontiers of physics are
fantastically expensive. Particle
physicists desperately want to
reach those frontiers, so they are
forced to pool their resources and
collaborate on an international
scale. The spirit of tolerance and
cooperation that prevails at CERN
is real, but it is a learned behaviour
based on economic necessities. inevitable, when the time does more expensive than woodland likely to crash or lock up than
Now that the era of accelerator- come, our wishes won’t be known burial. No self-respecting a phone. I would highlight the
based discoveries is coming to an and therefore can’t be respected. churchyard would accept my debacle of the UK government’s
end, it could make sense to redirect corpse. I guess, reluctantly, Emergency Services Network
CERN itself towards the problem From Bryn Glover, Kirkby Malzeard, cremation it will have to be. project, which is trying to provide
of climate change. To preserve the North Yorkshire, UK the features and reliability of the
collaborative spirit, the objectives Your feature on The End was very existing low-tech Airwave system
Old systems aren’t
of “climate CERN” would need to entertaining. I hadn’t heard of over the public mobile network
be picked carefully. alkaline hydrolysis before, and perforce obsolete things infrastructure. It shows how
The Intergovernmental Panel would have liked to learn more. 9 November, p 19 unwise it is to think that newer
on Climate Change is successful My long-preferred funerary From Sam Edge, technology is always better than
at reaching a consensus on climate option, cremation, has recently Ringwood, Hampshire, UK older methods.
science and doesn’t need to be been shown to be somewhat You observe that “pagers used
duplicated. Big engineering ecologically irresponsible. by the UK’s National Health
A way to see a meteor
projects are the obvious choice. A woodland burial in a cardboard Service are leaking medical data
Maybe climate CERN should develop box had previously seemed like over radio waves, possibly to the shower come sun or cloud
modular fission reactors, grid-scale the best choice. But have you 1980s, where pagers belong”. 16 November, p 51
battery storage or geoengineering. seen the fees expected? On a plot- I appreciate that this was in jest, but From Ian Shardlow,
by-plot basis, the price of land that I wouldn’t like my hospital to use, Lichfield, Staffordshire, UK
is otherwise fairly unusable is for example, SMS text messages Abigail Beall offers tips for
Practical steps to take back
positively extortionate. to contact staff in an emergency. observing meteor showers.
control of our deaths Why wouldn’t it be possible Although these usually appear I would like to share an alternative
23 November, p 38 to legislate to permit families to almost instantly, they offer no way to see them that works when
From Ellie Ball and Usha Grieve, reclaim properly certified dead guaranteed level of service, either it is cloudy and even in daylight.
Compassion in Dying, London, UK relatives for burial in private for timeliness or for delivery at There is a very powerful
Daniel Cossins describes the gardens, under a sapling of choice? all. The same goes for messages space surveillance radar station
complex, sometimes surprising This is accepted when the body has including multimedia, email and in France called GRAVES. When a
things that we should think about been reduced to ashes – why not all internet messaging services. meteor burns up, the trail it leaves
before we die. Compassion in just cut out the burning bit? Pager systems can be designed behind reflects radio waves. It is
Dying is a charity that offers free Alternatively, we could allow to ensure reliable, timely message possible to pick up these reflected
advice and help with living wills local authorities to establish delivery at quite a modest cost, signals across most of Europe.
and lasting powers of attorney. If civic disposal facilities as a and the devices can be very low- To see them, I use a wide-band
we put off the practical steps that communal recycling service. powered. The software in them is discone antenna on the roof of
go along with thinking about the Alkaline hydrolysis sounds much simpler, so they are far less my garden shed, with a software-

26 | New Scientist | 14 December 2019


defined radio (SDR) inside the
shed, controlled by a computer in
the comfort of my house. You do
need a bit of technical know-how
to set things up, because the SDR
software lets you change just
about everything, and that
can be quite confusing.
If artificial intelligence
could explain itself…
16 November, p 19
From Paul Bowden,
Nottingham, UK
Donna Lu describes an artificial
intelligence system that can detect
problems in electrocardiograms
and predict early death. The
system can do this despite there
being no clues in the data that
cardiologists can pick up on.
This situation highlights a
major problem with deep-learning
neural net systems. They may be
practically useful, but they are
deeply unsatisfactory from a
scientific point of view. We
need explainable AI. If we can’t
understand how such systems
make their decisions, perhaps
we need to go back to thorough
human investigation, possibly
supplemented by good old-
fashioned AI.
From Paul Whiteley,
Bittaford, Devon, UK
A reflex will pull your hand
away from a flame. It is our ability
to know this has happened that
means we know we are conscious.
When an artificial intelligence
system makes a prediction that
someone will die in the next
12 months, but neither it nor
its programmers knows how
it has come to that verdict, we
can say that it is making an
unconscious decision. If it could
explain or demonstrate how it
arrived at that decision, surely
that would be indicative of
consciousness.
Want to get in touch?
Send letters to New Scientist, 25 Bedford Street, London
WC2E 9ES or letters@newscientist.com; see terms at
newscientist.com/letters
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Views From the archives
Another hazard of using
mosquito nets in fisheries
16 November, p 9
From Peter Nettleton,
Edinburgh, UK
The use of mosquito nets for
fishing can have destructive
consequences for food security
and coastal ecosystems by the
removal of juvenile fish, as Brian
Owens reports. The pyrethroid
insecticides that are often used to
treat the nets pose a further threat.
They are highly toxic to aquatic
insects, crustaceans and fish.
Treated nets have been a boon to
malaria prevention, but their safe
disposal must be afforded higher
priority if unintended outcomes
are to be avoided.
The real odds on winning
various games of solitaire
23 November, p 12
From Eric Kvaalen,
Les Essarts-le-Roi, France
As Dana Mackenzie notes,
a renowned mathematician once
played 2000 games of solitaire
and “won only 36.6 per cent. Later,
computers won more than 80 per
cent.” But the computers used the
variant in which they knew the
location of all the cards that were
face down or still in the deck. When
people play, they don’t have that
information. So the result says
that you can win 82 per cent of
the time if you are both good and
lucky, whereas 18 per cent of the
time, there is no way you can win.
Your important package
has been in a bit of a scrape
9 November, p 14
From Bob Packwood,
Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, UK
Edd Gent reports on parcel
delivery drones piggybacking on
buses. Low bridges would cause
untold hiccups to this system. ❚
40 years ago, New Scientist
warned that Soviet agriculture
could accelerate global warming
“Serious attention is now
being paid to the possibility
that man’s activities may be
affecting, or about to affect,
the Earth’s climate.”
So began a piece in the
6 December 1979 issue of
New Scientist. Yes, we have
been sounding the alarm
about climate change for
decades. Prophets that we were, we went on to
introduce the “so-called ‘carbon dioxide greenhouse
effect’ ”. Carbon dioxide threatens long-term “global
warming”, we wrote – though we can’t claim credit
for that phrase. It was popularised by the late climate
scientist Wallace Broecker in 1975.
Forty years ago, the debate wasn’t so much over
whether human activities were affecting the climate,
but instead whether burning fossil fuels or destroying
rainforests was worse for “climatic change” (the
snappier “climate change” wasn’t yet in vogue).
In this case, our fears stemmed from a plan by
the Soviet Union to divert major Siberian rivers away
from their discharge points in the Arctic Ocean in order
to supply agricultural lands. Our concern, shared by
scientists from the now legendary Climatic Research
Unit at the University of East Anglia, founded in 1972,
was that the change in salinity and freshwater flow into
the Arctic Ocean could melt the Arctic ice. “One day,” we
warned, “the ice will disappear and the Earth will have
many millions of years of a warmer climatic regime.”
The reality differed in a couple of ways. First,
the Soviets didn’t divert the rivers – though Russia
did revisit the plan years later, after the Union had
broken up. Second, the melting of the Arctic wouldn’t
be caused by changes in salinity, but by warming
temperatures. What we did get right, however, was
the dramatic impact an ice-free Arctic could have on
the climate of the northern hemisphere. So much so
that earlier this year, I found myself writing about
ideas to refreeze the Arctic and restore the dwindling
ice cover. Rowan Hooper
To find more from the archives, visit
newscientist.com/old-scientist
14 December 2019 | New Scientist | 27
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Views Aperture

28 | New Scientist | 14 December 2019

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Cute clean-up

Photographer Courtesy of
Waterfront Partnership

MEET the amazing Mr Trash

Wheel, a machine that collects
floating rubbish from rivers
flowing into Baltimore harbour on
the US east coast. Getting people
excited about clean-ups is tricky,
but few communities have the
charisma of Mr Trash Wheel at
their disposal. The machine has
its own Twitter account, has
had a profile in The New Yorker
magazine and local-brewed beers
have been named after it. Some
residents even have tattoos of it.
The aerial image shows Mr
Trash Wheel’s booms collecting
rubbish and raking it onto a
conveyor belt before it is dropped
into a barge. There are two other
machines, Captain and Professor
Trash Wheel, and another is on
its way. To date, the three have
removed over 12.47 million
cigarette butts, 1.33 million plastic
bottles and 673,000 plastic bags.
As yet, that plastic can’t be
separated into reusables, so it is
incinerated to generate electricity.
With over 8 million tonnes of
plastic reaching the oceans each
year, removing it before it causes
harm is key. This year, a whale was
found dead in the Philippines
because its stomach had over
40 kilograms of plastic in it.
Capturing plastics in the open
sea is even harder than in a river.
Recently, the Ocean Cleanup, a
Dutch experiment, reported a
proof of concept floating boom
to trap waste. It will need to be
scaled up, and will do little to
address microplastics, the most
prolific type of plastic pollution. ❚

Jason Arunn Murugesu

14 December 2019 | New Scientist | 29


Views Culture
Pure genius… but is it art?
The pursuit of machine creativity may be divisive, but there is
no denying it can have beautiful results, says Douglas Heaven
Book
The Artist in the
Machine: The world of
AI-powered creativity
Arthur I. Miller
MIT Press
BEAUTY was in the eye of the
technician who ran down the
corridors of Bell Labs in New York
one day in 1965 shouting that a
computer had created art. The
machine in question, the room-
sized IBM 7094, was set up to send
numbers to a plotter, a device that
turned them into precise line
graphs. But thanks to an error in
the plotter that day, the numbers
produced a random-looking
scrawl instead.
A Bell Labs scientist called
A. Michael Noll was intrigued. He
started to call the result “computer
art” and set about trying to get
IBM 7094 to reproduce the
accidental scribble on purpose.
After a few coding experiments,
he got it to output pleasing zigzag
patterns on demand.
Noll said that the results
reminded him of Picasso’s 1911-12
painting Ma Jolie (pictured right),
and ended up exhibiting some
of the images in a gallery in
New York. When Noll sought to
copyright the work, however,the
US Library of Congress was less
impressed by marks made by a
machine. When Noll presented
the images as the specific results
of a computer program he had
written, the library relented.
That distinction, between
art made by a computer versus
art made with a computer, has
been at the heart of the debate
swirling around creative
machines ever since. Created
30 | New Scientist | 14 December 2019
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by a machine? It isn’t art. Created background in physics and
by a human? It isn’t machine art. cognitive science and believes
In The Artist in the Machine, that images are the primary
Arthur Miller does a good job objects of creative thinking. If
of showing how that fuzzy brains are like computers (a claim
distinction has only grown fuzzier. we are to take on trust), then why
And in the space where human can’t computers be creative?
and machine creativity merges, After a whistle-stop tour of
there are big questions to explore. what various thinkers think about
Will machines ever be considered creativity, we get to the strongest
truly creative? What would that section of the book. Through a
mean for our understanding of series of meetings with artists
artificial intelligence? And how and researchers exploring the
would it change how we think frontiers of computer creativity,
of creativity in general? Miller gives us a relatively
Miller, a historian and comprehensive survey of
philosopher of science at the artificial painters, poets,
University College London, adopts composers and storytellers that
a creator-agnostic definition of have been developed over the past
creativity, one based simply on the few decades. What is clear is just
ability to produce new knowledge how broad and mature this field is.
from old ingredients. “How can a There is a nice mix of scientists
system produce results that go far teaching machines new tricks and
beyond the material it has to work artists experimenting with a new that neither would have been able
with?” he writes. “This is the medium. We meet Simon Colton, to create on their own.
problem of creativity.” a computer researcher who has Some of the projects lean more
This is Miller’s third book been building an AI painter called to the side of “art made with a
mining the intersection of art The Painting Fool for most of his computer” than others. But with
and science for interesting ideas. career. It can produce portraits the advances in AI in the past few
He comes at the topic via a in styles that reflect its “mood”, years, we are increasingly seeing
which changes depending on what examples of machines creating
is in the news that day, and then music or images or stories
critique its own efforts. Mark Riedl without, or with very little,
at Georgia Tech teaches computers human guidance. For now, these
how to invent and tell stories, solo efforts won’t win any awards.
giving them a sense of characters, But why shouldn’t they in future?
motivations and plots. “In this day and age, we are going
Then there are artists to have to rethink what we mean
such as Anna Ridler and Mario by thinking and what we mean by
Klingemann, who have turned creativity,” writes Miller.
machine-learning software into It is when Miller does just that,
SUCCESSION PICASSO/DACS, BRIDGEMAN IMAGES
a medium-cum-muse, feeding and mulls over the significance of
images into a computer and then what he has been writing about,
reworking the machine-twisted that I have less confidence in him
results into strange new forms. For as a guide. For a start, he wants to
now at least, the most promising separate “everyday creativity, like
art produced by machines comes discovering a new route to work”
from this kind of collaboration in from “the big, domain-breaking
which human and machine riff off feats of creativity, such as
one another, making something discovering the theory of

relativity”. He is interested in the
big stuff and dwells quite a bit on
genius, at times invoking the likes
of Beethoven, Picasso and Einstein
with near-mystical reverence.
But what about all the muddle
in the middle? The bad poetry, a
toddler’s painting? A computer
that could independently produce
the equivalent of a doodle you
might make while on the phone
would still be doing something
creative. Most art isn’t high art.
What is more, what if discovering
the theory of relativity is in fact
akin to coming up with lots of new
routes to work, rather than some
indivisible flash of genius?
Then there is the odd way Miller
talks about AI. In one example, he
writes: “And all this means that
computers are now finally
beginning to create art, literature,
and music in ways that exhibit
not only their creativity but their
inner lives.” It isn’t at all clear what
a computer’s inner life might be.
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Don’t miss
Left: Mario Klingemann’s
Memories of Passersby
Below: Picasso’s Ma Jolie
This strange idea crops up more
than once. Here he is discussing
the overall aim of the book: “This
will involve looking into the ‘lives’ Visit
of computers, exploring their Primordial Cities
creativity, their innermost Initiative. Artist Jonathon
thoughts, to what extent they Keats and the Fraunhofer
may be similar to ours and to Institute look to ancient
what extent different.” stromatolite pillars (built
Miller also jumps on a quip by by bacteria) to add
David Ferrucci, the lead on IBM’s resilience to coastal city
Watson AI, a machine that took design. At STATE Studio,
part in, and won, the TV quiz show Berlin, until 29 February.
Jeopardy!. When asked whether
Watson could really think, Ferrucci
replied: “Can a submarine swim?”
Miller seems to miss the point. “Of
course, a submarine swims – not
like a fish, but better,” he writes.
“It’s an apt analogy.”
But I suspect that isn’t what
Ferrucci meant at all. He was
probably alluding to an aphorism
ELLIOTT FRANKS /EYEVINE
by the pioneering computer Watch
scientist Edsger Dijkstra: “The Star Wars: The rise of
question of whether machines can Skywalker, directed by
think is about as relevant as the J. J. Abrams , is billed as
question of whether submarines the final part of the Star
can swim.” Miller misses this – or Wars saga. It promises to
misses it out – completely. bring the ancient conflict
Still, the questions that Miller between the Jedi and
pursues in his book are some of the Sith to a shattering
the most exciting ones you can ask climax. In cinemas from
about artificial intelligence today. 19 December.
“The most Computers that surprise us – that
promising art, for make things we haven’t imagined
now, comes from or find solutions to problems we
collaborations have overlooked – will change the
world. And there is good reason
between human to think that computers will do
and machine” these things in ways that will feel
alien to us.
Miller asks whether computers
will develop the qualities we see
in creative people, or develop Read
their own form of autonomous The Power of Bad: And
DAVID HOLT, DIDIER DESCOUENS AND JONATHON KEATS
creativity, “not as replica people how to overcome it
but as an altogether different and (Allen Lane) finds science
independent form of intelligence”. writer John Tierney and
It is one of the big questions and social psychologist Roy
Miller gives us a taste of what is Baumeister unpicking
possible. It goes down even better negativity bias, a mental
taken with a pinch of salt. ❚ glitch that makes it easy
for us to see things in a
Douglas Heaven is a consultant gloomy light.
for New Scientist
14 December 2019 | New Scientist | 31
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Views Culture
The games column

Bringing it back home Parking my morality about using polluting or

dubious delivery services is easy when they bring me essential goods next day.
But Death Stranding makes it harder to look away, finds Jacob Aron

Death Stranding has you

connecting up bunkers
and dodging enemies

random internet strangers? But

making my way through the game,
I found myself hammering the like
button with abandon. You see,
delivery is hard – one wrong move
Jacob Aron is New Scientist’s can send you down a crevasse, or
deputy news editor. He has your electric car battery can run
been playing video games out halfway through a journey.
for 25 years, but still isn’t Desperation mounts: you won’t
very good at them. Follow make it in time. Turning a corner
him on Twitter @jjaron to find someone has placed a
bridge or recharging station in just
SONY PLAYSTATION

the right place never failed to lift

I HAVE a confession: I am an
Amazon Prime addict. With two
Games young children, ordering nappies
Death Stranding and household items that turn up
PlayStation 4 the next day is a lifesaver. It is so
Kojima Productions easy, it is practically magic.
Of course, I am aware that my
Jacob also convenience comes at a cost.
recommends... Amazon has been accused of bad
working practices by unions, and
Star Wars Jedi: the rise of other online delivery
Fallen order services is clogging up our streets
PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and increasing air pollution. I just
Respawn Entertainment try not to think too much about
Step into the shoes of Cal the morality of the gig economy.
Kestis, a young Jedi, in an Playing Death Stranding, I got a
adventure set shortly after slight idea about life on the other
the Star Wars prequel films. side of the letterbox. The game is
set in a post-apocalyptic version
Detroit: Become of the US, where a cataclysmic
human event known as the Death
PC, PlayStation 4 Stranding has relegated people to
Quantic Dream living in bunkers to avoid ghostly
A choose-your-own creatures that infest the landscape.
adventure in a future full You play as Sam Porter Bridges
of androids. I enjoyed (depicted by Walking Dead actor
failing to rebel against Norman Reedus), essentially a
my programming, despite delivery guy and cable repairer
the game’s intentions. in one. Tasked with ferrying cargo
between locations, you trudge
across the landscape, on foot
and in a variety of vehicles, while
dodging human and spectral
enemies. On arrival, you hook up
locales to the chiral network, a
kind of successor to the internet.
It might sound dull, but it isn’t.
I was hooked. Getting from A to B
involves carefully planning your
route and managing your load,
because overburdening Sam sends
him tumbling. Ladders and ropes
“What takes the game to
another level is when I
place a ladder, it shows
in the same location in
other people’s games”
assist in mountainous areas, and
later you get access to other kit
that helps you get around.
What takes the game to another
level is that when I place a ladder,
it not only appears in my version
of the game, but can also show
up in the same location in other
people’s games. Players can “like”
each other’s equipment, just as on
a social network, by way of thanks,
though you never interact directly.
At first I thought this liking was
pointless – why should I care about
my spirits, as did receiving likes
back. It felt good to work together.
In the real world, I rarely bother
rating Uber drivers or Deliveroo
riders, telling myself I am feeding
a tech giant’s algorithm or, worse,
risking someone’s job with a
low rating. I always try to say
“thank you” to people I have
summoned via apps, but after
Death Stranding, I wonder if a
five-star rating would deliver
a swifter dopamine hit.
Deliveries aside, the game brims
with ideas. “Death Stranding” is
an obvious analogy for climate
change, with ghostly creatures
that can take the form of tentacled
beached whales, slick with an oil-
like substance. My first encounter
with one triggered eco-anxiety.
One of the game’s antagonists
seems to take inspiration from
the Higgs boson, and characters
discuss how everything from
Neanderthals to AI play a role
in the current state of the world.
There is a lot to get your teeth
into, but (spoiler alert) it never
quite comes together. The finale
is a barely interactive 2-hour film
that collapses under the weight
of its pretension. Don’t let that
put you off: it is a cliché, but
Death Stranding really is about
the journey, not the destination. ❚

32 | New Scientist | 14 December 2019

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Discovery
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CZECH REPUBLIC Departing:

6 days from $2,479
14 April 2020

Kepler’s Prague: 14 September 2020

Music of the spheres

Unearth the connection between music and the
orbits of planets in the city of a hundred spires
Accompanied by author, broadcaster and Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, Jane
Green, guests will discover what remains of the legacy of astronomers Johannes Kepler
and Tycho Brahe, and explore the medieval centre of Prague and its surrounding regions

Tour highlights include

k A guided walking tour of Prague’s
medieval Old Town
k A day devoted to the Castle District of Prague
k A trip to the village of Nelahozeves,
birthplace of the composer Antonin Dvorak
and home to the fine Renaissance palace
of the Lobkowicz family
k Exploring Benatky Castle,
where Tycho Brahe lived
k A visit to the National Technical Museum
and its fascinating astronomical section,
as well as Tyn Church where Kepler’s
mentor Tycho Brahe is buried.

To book call +1 516 226 7913

(UK opening hours Mon to Fri 9am-6pm GMT Sat 9am-4pm GMT) In partnership with Kirker Holidays

Or email culturaltours@kirkerholidays.com

newscientist.com/tours
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HOW TO THINK ABOUT…

EVERYTHING
We live in a world of uncertainty, and not just the quantum
variety. Thank goodness for science, with its crystal-clear
lines of thought and precisely defined concepts that give
us a universal framework for analysing the world.
If only it were that simple. Cutting-edge science throws up
all sorts of controversial, nebulous and plain mind-bending
concepts. So in this special issue, let us be your guide to
how to think about 13 of the fiddliest of them, starting with –
well, you guessed it…

QUANTUM
01 UNCERTAINTY

02 EVOLUTION

03 INFORMATION

04 THE SELF

05 SPECIES

06 THE BIG BANG

07 PRIVACY

08 INTELLIGENCE

09 EXTINCTION

10 ALTRUISM

11 ALIEN LIFE

12 NATURE VS NURTURE

13 DARK ENERGY

34 | New Scientist | 14 December 2019

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HOW TO THINK ABOUT…

01
QUANTUM
UNCERTAINTY
The quantum world is
notoriously fuzzy, allowing
us only partial knowledge
of what’s going on at any
one time. But what that truly
means is a matter of belief

H
EISENBERG is speeding down the
autobahn when a police officer
pulls him over. “Do you know how
fast you were going? 150 kilometres an hour!”
the cop tells him. “Great,” Heisenberg replies,
“now I’m completely lost.”
The joke is a pretty fair summary of Werner
Heisenberg’s notorious quantum uncertainty
principle. This says that certain pairs of
properties in the quantum world can never be
known simultaneously with perfect accuracy –
the speed (or momentum) of something and
its position, say. Measure one precisely and
you know nothing about the other.
The uncertainty principle is more than
a curiosity. Among other things, it allows
a latitude in particles’ states and positions
that explains the radioactivity that ultimately
powers the sun and the fluctuations that gave
rise to all matter in the early universe (see
“How to think about… the big bang”, page 39).
What it isn’t, however, is a principle: a
fundamental truth on which other theories
MARIE EMMERMANN

can be based. “It is actually a consequence

of something more fundamental, and that
something is quantum mechanics,” says
Howard Wiseman at Griffith University
in Brisbane, Australia.
Quantum mechanics neatly explains >

14 December 2019 | New Scientist | 35

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how atoms and particles work. But it isn’t
like the classical mechanics that governs
our macroscopic world, where one thing
definitely leads to another and objects have
set properties. Quantum objects are described
by probabilistic mathematical entities known
as wave functions that only give you the odds
on what you might find when you make a
measurement. At this point, a definite answer
for a particle’s position or momentum, for
instance, “collapses” out from its wave function.
This odd behaviour explains how Schrödinger’s
quantum cat can be simultaneously dead and
alive before you measure its state – at least
according to the mathematics.
Whether that means quantum cats are really
dead and alive is a matter of taste, and what
philosophical interpretation of quantum
mechanics you subscribe to. The “many
worlds” interpretation, for instance, says all
feasible quantum states are objectively real:
the possibilities encoded in the wave function
do exist, just in different universes that split off
every time a measurement is made.
The Copenhagen interpretation – often
called the “shut up and calculate” approach –
says on the other hand that uncertainty
is inherent, and you simply can’t know
anything about quantum realities before
you measure them. “We can be agnostic
about the quantum world independent
of our interactions with it,” says Wiseman.
Quantum Bayesianism, or QBism, takes
things further: wave function collapse is down
“In quantum
theory, the only
certain thing is
uncertainty”
to observers updating their beliefs about
what is behind the quantum curtain. As such,
quantum theory isn’t about objective reality,
just our subjective estimation of it. “I would
say QBism views quantum theory as much
more deeply indeterministic than any other
interpretation,” says Christopher Fuchs
at the University of Massachusetts,
an originator of this variant.
If all that leaves you scratching your head,
you aren’t alone. Feel free to come up with
your own interpretation: when it comes to
quantum mechanics, the only thing that is
certain is uncertainty itself. Daniel Cossins
36 | New Scientist | 14 December 2019
HOW TO THINK ABOUT…
EVOLUTION
Evolution naturally selects for biological
complexity, creating ever-more sophisticated
creatures and ultimately things like human
beings. If that’s what you think, read on...
F
EW scientific concepts are as
misunderstood as evolution.
That isn’t just because of
cultural resistance from religious
fundamentalists. It has acquired all
sorts of pseudoscientific baggage
too, like the belief that it is about
climbing a ladder of ever-increasing
biological sophistication.
Evolution can be that, but the
reality is usually much less
grandiose. “Evolution is changed
gene frequencies in populations,”
says evolutionary biologist Richard
Dawkins. That is it. If, for some
reason, a given gene in a patch of
weeds, say, gets slightly more or less
common from one generation to the
next, evolution has happened.
The gene doesn’t have to confer a
survival advantage, or be “adaptive”
or make the weed “fitter”. It doesn’t
have to be “selected for” or increase
biological complexity. It simply has
to change in frequency, maybe by
chance. That is all.
After many generations, says
Dawkins, we may notice this as a
change in an organism’s phenotype:
its observable characteristics and
traits. But changes in gene frequency
happen all the time, often randomly,
with the appearance of a new
mutation or the chance death
of an individual. Under certain
circumstances, a certain set of genes
expressed in a certain environment
can give that organism a slightly
better-than-average chance of
survival and reproduction.
These genes are more likely
to be passed on. Gene frequency
has changed, and evolution has
happened. But something else
has taken place too: adaptation
through natural selection. This
special case of evolution renders
a population fitter – as in a better
fit, not physically fitter – for its
environment.
No goal, no direction
This doesn’t imply progress towards
some higher state of biological
perfection. Evolution has no goal
and no direction, it simply acts on
what is in front of it. As the late
evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay
Gould pointed out in his book Life’s
Grandeur, adaptation most often
leads to a loss of complexity as
organisms take the path of least
resistance and become parasites.
But, occasionally, evolution
increases biological complexity
or leads to a biological novelty. The
profound, almost unbelievable magic
happens when this process goes
on for long enough with sufficient
genetic variation to act on. Then you
end up with a biosphere teeming with
life forms of every conceivable kind
occupying almost every conceivable
niche (and lots of parasites).
How do we know? Because
intelligent, questioning life forms
that we are, we are part of that
biosphere. There is no other
explanation for our existence,
and that of our fellow travellers,
that makes sense. But forget any
hubristic notion that we are the
pinnacle of evolution – there is
no such thing. Graham Lawton
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HOW TO THINK ABOUT… INFORMATION
Information is a tricky concept to define. But get it right, and many physicists
believe it could hold the secret to life, the universe and, yes, everything
A
S THE messages ping, notifications
buzz and headlines scream for your
attention, it is easy to think you
could do with a little less information.
That’s bog-standard “semantic” information.
It encapsulates a nugget of knowledge:
a friend’s status, a place and time to meet,
or the fact that the sky is blue.
Over the past century, though, physicists
have dug deep into what information truly
means, and uncovered deep links between
it and the fabric of reality. We’re likely to be
hearing a lot more of this type of information.
This all started with studies of the second
law of thermodynamics, the uniquely
powerful rule that describes the
fundamental direction of processes in
the universe. It says that stars always burn
out, ice cream always melts, warm air always
escapes out of a window left ajar. These
processes are encapsulated by a rise in the
quantity known as entropy, which measures
how disordered something is on the atomic
scale. More disorder means higher entropy.
What does this have to do with
information? Well, the more ordered
something is, the less information you
need to fully describe it: compare describing
“Deep connections
exist between
information and
reality’s fabric”
03
a box of identical buttons with one filled
with buttons in 20 different colours. In 1948,
the US engineer Claude Shannon used this
thermodynamic connection to come up
with a new, more abstract definition of
information, divorcing it from having to
actually be about anything.
Abstract – and yet very real, as recent
experiments have shown. In 2015, for
example, Jonne Koski, then at Aalto
University in Finland, and his colleagues
built a tiny electronic “fridge” powered by
information. “By using the information,
a device that would normally heat up is
actually cooled down,” says Koski. “It has
a physical meaning, for sure.”
Chiara Marletto at the University of
Oxford even thinks information could be
the building block of a new, more powerful
theory of nature. Unlike current theories
that take things as they are now and predict
what will happen next, it would tell us what
is possible regardless of any specifics. “There
are hints it could be as good if not maybe
better than anything we have now,” she says.
The motivation for this comes partly
from quantum entanglement, the strange
way in which two remote particles can be
intertwined so that observations made on
one can seemingly influence the results of
observations on the other. It turns out that
this can be described using information
theory in a way that is highly general – the
specifics of what is entangled don’t matter.
Marletto’s framework, derived with her
colleague David Deutsch, is known as
constructor theory. She is now trying to
apply it to situations where our current best
theories of physics are no good, for example
at the intersection of quantum physics and
gravity. Physicist Paul Davies at Arizona State
University, meanwhile, has proposed that
information could help us define what life is.
He says the sophisticated manipulation of
information is the thing that distinguishes
living beings from inert matter.
One way or another, then, information
seems likely to be our ultimate window on the
universe. “The everyday appearance of things
is a bit deceptive,” says Marletto. “You’ve got
to put on some glasses to look at reality in a
way that’s deeper.” Joshua Howgego
14 December 2019 | New Scientist | 37
HOW TO THINK ABOUT…
THE SELF
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Most of us are convinced that we’re coherent individuals who are continuous in
04
time. But this sense of self is a slippery customer, and has an intriguing origin

L “Ironically, the
ET’S be honest, it is what we brain areas involved in our have an above average sense of
think about the most: ourselves. experience of the self don’t fully humour, above average intelligence.
What we want to eat or do, how
we feel and whom we love. It is the
mature until we become adults.
The continuity of our sense of
self’s main We can’t all be above average.”
So why have a self at all?
essence of being.
This selfhood generally feels
self seems to have something to
do with autobiographical memory.
advantage Because it is the interface between
a complex outer world and a
like a continuous “me” sitting
somewhere in our heads: a me that
Very young children have little
sense of self and also very limited
might not be complex inner world, says Hood.
Without it, we would be bombarded
is the same today as yesterday.
“Most people feel that they are
autobiographical memory, while the
experience of people with amnesia
for ourselves” with conflicting information.
Ironically, the self’s main
a coherent, integrated individual. lays bare the role of memory in advantage might not be directly
They have free will, they are making selfhood. “If we suffer amnesia, for ourselves. “Having your ‘self’
their choices and they’re looking the self becomes frozen in time means you can behave as an
out through their eyes at the world because it can’t form new individual and be part of a group,”
around them,” says Bruce Hood memories,” says Martin Conway says Conway. “But not just a
at the University of Bristol, UK, at City University in London. mindless part of a group like an
author of The Self Illusion. The unreliability of memory ant is, rather an individual who is
And that is just what selfhood might help explain why even in a group and can make their own
seems to be – an illusion. “You are our illusory self isn’t very, well, individual contributions or walk
actually a collection of conflicting self-aware. “Most of us have away.” That ultimately allows us to
messages and signals and thought distorted self-images,” says Hood. form our complex human societies –
processes,” says Hood. “And these “Most people think that people are making the self, if it is an illusion, an
are somehow brought together more interested in us than they extremely useful one indeed.
to experience as unified self.” really are. Most people think they Catherine de Lange
Fine, so your self is just the “you”
experiencing that, right? That
becomes a Russian doll problem,
says Hood. “There’s someone
inside the head who’s having these
experiences taking place inside
their head and so on,” he says.
Neuroscience tells us that our
subjective sense of self must be a
distributed experience, involving
various bits of the brain. Although
experiments have taught us much
about the brain areas involved in
creating it, how exactly it is conjured
up still eludes us.
We do know that a sophisticated
sense of self and others only comes
on us gradually. “Understanding
that your thoughts are different
from someone else’s and being
able to reflect on your own thinking,
that’s a higher order skill and it
doesn’t emerge until you are 3 or 4,”
says Megan McClelland at Oregon
State University. Even then, the

38 | New Scientist | 14 December 2019

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HOW TO THINK ABOUT… SPECIES

Attempts to divide nature into neat units throw up intractable controversies,
05
including possibly in our own evolutionary history

OMO SAPIENS likes to categorise.

H
Putting things in boxes helps us
understand the complexities of the
world around us – until it doesn’t.
Take the apparently simple organising
principle of a species. You might have
learned at school that a species is a group of
individuals that can breed to produce fertile
offspring. But this is just one of at least 34
competing definitions concocted over the
past century by researchers working in
different fields. Ecologists tend to categorise
based on lifestyle. Palaeontologists focus on
form. Geneticists sequence genomes and
then create family trees based on shared,
genetically encoded characteristics.
At some point, they become so distinct that the critically endangered Chinese giant
we classify them as separate species. It just salamander, revealed it was actually three
isn’t easy to pin down exactly when. species, not one, each requiring different
We could just accept that “species” is conservation interventions.
a fluid, imperfect concept that helps us Traditional species concepts are further
understand and conserve the diversity of undermined by high levels of hybridisation
the natural world. Unfortunately, it doesn’t in nature. One prominent example is the
always. This year, for example, genetic critically endangered red wolf found in the
analysis of the world’s largest amphibian, south-east US, which is now thought to be
a cross between a coyote and a grey wolf.
Our species isn’t immune to these
confusions. In recent years, we have
discovered that our ancestors interbred with
other hominins, including Neanderthals,
Denisovans and a mysterious “species X”.
Does this make us hybrids, or does it mean

EYE VISION/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

The problem is that evolution – the
origin of species – is intrinsically about
gradual, random change (see “How to
think about... evolution”, page 36). Charles
Darwin recognised that organisms live in
populations that can diverge and evolve
in different directions, especially if they
face different environmental challenges.
SPECIES
those hominins weren’t separate species,
but simply different versions of us?
There probably isn’t a clear answer to such
questions. In the end, the whole idea of fixed
SPECIES species appeals to ideas of immutability
in nature that now seem rather outdated.
The Chinese giant salamander: Biology is messy, and doesn’t bend to our
one species or three? desire for clean classifications. Kate Douglas

HOW TO THINK ABOUT… THE BIG BANG 06

It certainly wasn’t
big, and it probably
didn’t bang – and
the surprising twists
in the story of how
it all began don’t
end there
W
HATEVER you do, don’t ask
where it happened. “The
most common misconception
is that the big bang was an
explosion in a particular place,” says
William Kinney, a cosmologist at the
University at Buffalo in New York.
“That’s just completely wrong.”
The best evidence for the big
bang is all around us in the cosmic
microwave background, the
radiation released once the universe
had cooled sufficiently for atoms
to form, when it was about
380,000 years old. And that is
the point: everywhere in today’s
universe was where the big bang
was. “It’s not something that
happened somewhere, but backwards and not stopping
something that happened until we get to a beginning. But,
everywhere, including the space you unfortunately, our current theories
happen to be occupying now,” says of physics can’t deal with space
Dan Hooper at Fermilab in Illinois. and time on such unfathomably
When cosmologists talk about small scales. So we can say nothing
the big bang, they are talking about sensible about the moment when
an extremely dense, hot state that the universe was a single point, if
existed around 13.8 billion years ago indeed it ever happened. “We may
and which has since expanded and just have to come to terms with
cooled to make the universe we that,” says Kinney.
know today. Extremely dense and However it all started, the big
hot – but not infinitely so. bang that followed wasn’t so much
The idea that the universe was an explosion, which implies stuff
created from an infinitesimal speck, flying off randomly, but a perfectly
known as the big bang “singularity”, uniform expansion – albeit one
comes from winding the showreel that seems to have been, in its
of an expanding, cooling universe first throes at least, unimaginably >

14 December 2019 | New Scientist | 39

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fast. We have suspected this since
the 1980s, when we realised that the
temperature and density of stuff in
the universe – as seen for instance
in maps of the cosmic microwave
background – are incredibly smooth.
We would naively expect quantum
fluctuations to have produced
regions with differing densities
and temperatures in the universe
as it spread out. To explain the
observations, physicists invented
a split-second growth burst called
inflation that stretched the universe
so fast the kinks were smoothed out.
Standard timelines of the
universe’s first instants have
inflation coming after the big bang.
But for Kinney, it makes more sense
to think of inflation coming first,
creating the hot, dense soup from
which today’s universe, with its
atoms and stars and planets,
emerged through a slower process
of cooling and expansion. “What
we think was the beginning of the
universe – this hot equilibrium state
“The big bang
didn’t happen
somewhere,
it happened
everywhere”
13.8 billion years ago – was in fact
the end of inflation,” says Kinney. If
that jars, then Hooper recommends
thinking of inflation’s “big stretch”
not as something separate, but as
part and parcel of the big bang.
Then again, not everyone buys
the inflation story, not least because
it isn’t clear what did the inflating.
Some cosmologists prefer to think
that the universe began with a
bounce, when a previous universe
contracted to an extremely hot,
dense point where it could contract
no more. This would not only do
away with the singularity, but also
answer another inevitable, yet
largely inscrutable question about
the big bang: what came before it.
Daniel Cossins
40 | New Scientist | 14 December 2019
HOW TO THINK ABOUT…
PRIVACY
Governments and companies are using the internet
to spy on us. Are we sleepwalking into a Big Brother
society or are our concepts of privacy just outmoded?
R
EPORTS of the death of privacy are
nothing new. In 1890, prompted by
the “deep-seated abhorrence of the
invasions of social privacy” made possible
by Kodak cameras, US lawyers Louis
Brandeis and Samuel Warren wrote an
influential tract called The Right to Privacy
that attempted to delineate the boundary
between personal and public spheres.
For most of us, a degree of privacy is
important, even if we may struggle to say
why. “Privacy is far from being dead,” says
digital anthropologist Jennifer Krueckeberg
at the University of Hamburg in Germany.
“It is an existential need, a condition in
which we feel safe, comfortable and secure.”
In the internet era, invasions of privacy
come from two main directions. First, large
parts of the web have been engineered by
commercial companies to monitor our every
online move in the name of profit: Google,
Facebook and the like make their billions
by selling advertising targeted to desires
we may not even be aware we have. Second,
governments and other public bodies have
begun to take advantage of the tools of mass
surveillance the internet provides in the
name of better public security.
In the first instance, we can arguably all
choose whether to buy in to surveillance or
not. If we do, our reward is better services,
whether improved search results or more
relevant recommendations. In practice,
however, the near-monopoly positions of
certain big tech firms make it very difficult
for you to avoid giving them your personal
data, and we have only very rudimentary
control over how it is used.
Similar trade-offs exist in government
monitoring of our online activities. The
internet has become our main channel of
communication. The end-to-end encryption
of messaging services such as WhatsApp or
Telegram, for example, is a boon also to the
privacy of those who would do society harm –
and leads to the desire of security services to
find “back doors” into such services.
Finding the correct balance between
personal privacy and public security isn’t
a new challenge, but the existence of large
amounts of data about all of us online
has tipped that balance. In November, for
example, a judge in Florida issued a warrant
for police to search personal genetic profiles
that more than a million people had
uploaded to GEDmatch, a site used to trace
ancestry, for matches to DNA from a crime
scene. The law wouldn’t allow police to take
a million DNA swabs of random people on
the street without reasonable grounds to
believe they were implicated in a crime.
Something to hide?
Such new invasions of privacy are often
justified by the “nothing to hide” argument:
if you are doing nothing wrong, you have
nothing to fear from surveillance and
everything to gain through increased
protection against criminals, extremists and
terrorists. But that argument is valid only as
long as your definition of what constitutes
a criminal, extremist or terrorist coincides
with the state’s: just ask those involved in
the recent street protests in Hong Kong.
Public disquiet about privacy seems
to be growing. A recent survey in the US
conducted by the Pew Research Center, a
think tank based in Washington DC, found
that 81 per cent of people thought that the
risks and downsides of companies collecting
personal data outweighed the potential
benefits; 66 per cent said the same about
government data collection.
Some imbalance is perhaps to be expected
as established norms and boundaries
shift in the online world. Rules such as the
European Union’s General Data Protection
Regulation, implemented last year, represent
an attempt to reset the dial, at least in the
commercial sphere. “We’re in the middle
of renegotiating what privacy means ,”
says Krueckeberg. She is confident that
we can regain at least some control. “People
are not helpless victims of the internet.”
Douglas Heaven

HOW TO THINK ABOUT...
INTELLIGENCE
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I
NTELLIGENCE has enabled
humans to reach for the moon,
cure disease and generally
dominate this small blue dot of
a planet. Arriving at a working
definition of intelligence still
defeats it, however.
It certainly isn’t just IQ. Tests of
pattern finding and word matching
capture many of the mental skills
that correlate with performance
in academic exams and in many
workplaces. But they fail on other
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measures such as wisdom, social
sensitivity and practical sense.
“No single number captures the rich
complexity of what it means to be
intelligent,” says Rosalind Arden,
an intelligence researcher at the
London School of Economics.
There are things we can say.
Intelligence “reflects a broader
and deeper capability for
comprehending our surroundings –
‘catching on’, ‘making sense’ of
things, or ‘figuring out’ what to do”,
is one oft-quoted attempt to define
it. It puts the ability to learn from
experience and change behaviour
accordingly at the heart of a quality
called general intelligence.
This isn’t an exclusively human
trait: an octopus’s ability to solve
puzzles or an antelope’s talent
for assessing the most nutritious
grasses is also intelligent behaviour.
“Intelligence is the capacity to solve
problems relevant to that species,”
says Arden.
In our unusually big and
well-connected brains, general
intelligence has morphed into
special talents for abstract thinking,
detailed forward planning,
understanding the minds of others
and insight – those “aha!” moments
when we connect cause and effect.
But we shouldn’t get blown
away by our supposedly superior
abilities: we share virtually all our
intelligence skills with close animal
relatives. “Humans are limited by
our size, our evolutionary history,”
says Arden. “Actually we have the
sort of intelligence that would have
evolved for a species like us.”
It follows that our intelligence is
unlikely to be the last word in grand,
dot-joining thinking. Unfettered by
biology’s constraints, the next big
strides in intelligence are likely to
be made by intelligences we create.
Machine-learning systems are
already beating humans in complex
games of strategy such as Go
and the video game StarCraft II,
which involves weighing up many
potential choices and deciding
between short-term pay-offs
and long-term gains.
Impressive as such feats
are, however, these artificial
intelligences focus on one specific
goal. They are a long way from the
broad array of human cognitive
skills – or indeed the sort of general
intelligence that characterises an
octopus or antelope.
There is no reason to think they
can’t get there, however. Once they
do, we could see an intelligence
explosion. Without the need to
rely on firing neurons, such
“superintelligences”, as philosopher
Nick Bostrom at the University
of Oxford has called them, could
compute much faster than our
own brains. Linking many of them
together might result in cognitive
capabilities far beyond our own.
As for what that means for the
future of intelligence – well, that
strains even the most intelligent
minds today. Alison George
14 December 2019 | New Scientist | 41
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09
HOW TO THINK ABOUT… EXTINCTION
The fossil record tells us that species go extinct all the time. The big problems
come in pinning down how and when that happens – and the part we play in it

W
HEN what is now the iconic emblem
of extinction finally kicked the
bucket, nobody noticed. At that
time – around 1662, probably the year a
dodo was last seen in the wild – the idea
that entire species could be wiped out had
never occurred to anyone. Pre-Darwinian
biology was in thrall to the idea that
animals and plants were perfect and
eternal designs of the Creator.
Disbelief certainly greeted French
naturalist Georges Cuvier in 1796 when he
suggested that mammoth, mastodon and
giant sloth bones were remains of animals
that had died out. Nonsense, snorted the
establishment: they were simply living
animals that had moved elsewhere. It took
time for Cuvier’s killer argument – that if
these huge beasts were still around,
someone would have seen them – to win out.
Where there is life, there is extinction.
The fossil record tells us that more than
99 per cent of species that have ever lived
are no longer with us. Biologists estimate a
“background rate” of about one extinction
per million species per year, caused by
disease, predation, environmental change
and things simply evolving into other things.
More dramatic are five mass extinctions
documented in the fossil record. During each,
more than three-quarters of the planet’s
species were lost in just a million years or
so – most recently around 66 million years
ago, in the event that did for the dinosaurs.
Documenting extinction today is trickier.
The International Union for Conservation of
Nature defines a species as extinct when
there is no reasonable doubt it is no longer
alive. The most recent recipient of this
dubious honour is the Bramble Cay mosaic-
tailed rat (Melomys rubicola), a rodent
endemic to a tiny dot of land in the Torres
Strait just off Papua New Guinea. Last seen
in 2009, it was declared extinct in 2015 after
three fruitless surveys of a flat, featureless
island about the size of five football pitches.
It is still possible it isn’t dead, just hiding,
perhaps somewhere on the Papua New
Guinean mainland. Numerous “Lazarus”
species thought extinct exist. The most
famous is the coelacanth, a fish thought
to have died out with the dinosaurs. It was
rediscovered in 1938 swimming around off
the east African coast.

HOW TO THINK ABOUT… ALTRUISM individuals to reproduce, which

passes their own genes on too.
Some form of this was probably
at play with the humpback whale:
by automatically chasing away
If only the fittest survive, why would someone do good deeds orcas, regardless of what they
for no payback? This enduring mystery goes to the heart of how were attacking, the humpback
evolution does – and doesn’t – work increased the survival chances
of individuals in its pod.
David Sloan Wilson at
Binghamton University in New

T
HERE was no doubt that the
humpback whale saved the
seal’s life, carrying it away on
its chest and protecting it with its
flipper from the onslaught of the
killer whales. It was odd behaviour
that marine ecologist Robert Pitman
observed in the frigid Antarctic seas
back in 2009 – but, it turned out, not
uncommon. How you interpret it
goes to the heart of an intense
evolutionary debate: can any
creature ever be truly altruistic?
A basic reading of evolution
says no, because survival of the
fittest means maximising your
own reproductive success. Altruism,
defined by philosopher Auguste
Comte in 1851 as “intentional action,
ultimately for the welfare of others,
that entails at least the possibility
of either no benefit or a loss to the
actor”, is simply not a thing.
Things that look like it are
widespread. Many animals act
in ways that reduce their own
reproductive success but benefit
others. Some social insects, for
example, give up reproduction
entirely to support the colony.
One proposed explanation is kin
selection: altruism persists because
it helps the close relatives of nicer
York champions a different idea:
group selection. This emphasises
the reproductive success not of
individuals, but of a whole group.
“All you have to do is go up a little bit
in scale, and there you have your
evolutionary advantage,” he says.
Wilson and his colleagues have
done experiments with groups of
insects called pond skaters that he
says back up this idea. Male pond

42 | New Scientist | 14 December 2019

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The difficulties mean biologists have

created categories of quasi-extinction that
HOW TO THINK ABOUT…

ALIEN LIFE
11
precede (or not, if conservation succeeds) the
final curtain. One is extinct in the wild, when Crunching the numbers suggests that Earth’s
individuals still exist in captivity. Another is life isn’t a one-off. But our wildest imaginings
functional extinction, when so few members
of a species exist it is doomed to extinction. probably don’t encompass what aliens look like
Human activities have certainly hugely
increased the background rate of extinction,
by as much as 1000 times. But is what’s
gone gone? The concept of “de-extinction”
has been doing the rounds lately: using
LIFE

ALIEN
molecular biology to bring a species back.
No one has come close yet. “People speculate
about a lot of things: dinosaurs, mammoths,
dodos. But de-extinction is complicated,”
says Beth Shapiro
at the University of
California, Santa “Early scientists

ALLSTAR PICTURE LIBRARY/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Cruz. If they
succeed, extinction thought the
may well itself be
declared extinct. mammoth
Graham Lawton
wasn’t extinct, ALIEN LIFE
it had just moved
elsewhere”

skaters are either aggressive sexual
predators that hound females with
such ferocity that they can barely
feed, or so docile they hardly bother
trying to father offspring. The team
showed that, although docile males
fathered fewer offspring, groups
that contained a higher proportion
of such males were more productive
overall, largely because the females
were allowed a bit of space.
The debate has often been fierce,
but Ashleigh Griffin at the University
of Oxford says there is now broad
agreement that kin selection and
group selection are basically saying
the same thing using different
language. Both explain away
altruism: being nice always comes
with some form of payback.
How about the human animal?
It might seem that our species
has a unique capacity for doing
good. We have theory of mind –
the ability to understand others’
points of view, including their
pain (see “How to think about…
the self”, page 38) – and we have
sophisticated systems of ethics and
religious beliefs. All this drives some
to make extreme sacrifices for
others. Yet boil it all down, and it is
hard to show that we aren’t doing
things because we expect a quid pro
quo. “I think altruism can exist, for
example in humans. It’s just very
difficult to prove,” says Griffin.
Of course, such questions of
motivation matter less than
outcomes. So if you are driven by
a desire to do good, don’t stop –
whether it is helping the homeless
or, indeed, saving the whales.
Joshua Howgego
L
ET’S get one thing out of the way: aliens
are almost definitely out there. On
average, every star in the Milky Way has
a planet orbiting it. Fully one-fifth of those
stars have a planet that could be temperate
and conducive to life as we imagine it. That’s
50 billion potentially habitable planets just
in our own galaxy – which is one of billions
in the universe.
“If you’re going to say that there’s no
chance we’re going to find any life elsewhere,
you must think there’s something really
miraculous about Earth,” says Seth Shostak
at the SETI Institute in Mountain View,
California. “And that’s a suspicious point of
view, that we’re just miraculously better than
all the other planets.”
That doesn’t mean intelligent life is close
by. We have been exploring our solar system
for a long time, so if it contained intelligent
life forms we would probably know about
it by now. With simple, microbial life, it is
a different story. The best places to look are
the icy outer solar system moons Europa,
Enceladus and Titan because we know they
have liquids that could support life, says >

14 December 2019 | New Scientist | 43

 12
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HOW TO THINK ABOUT…

Lisa Kaltenegger, director of the Carl Sagan
Institute at Cornell University in New York. NATURE VS NURTURE
For anything bigger, we must peer further
afield – and, as yet, our technology for spying
life at a distance is rudimentary. Our best How much of our personalities and health is
bet is to study the atmospheres of alien predetermined by our genes, and how much
planets for signatures of gases like oxygen
and methane that only coexist if some
by our environment? As we attempt to answer
thermodynamically implausible process – call that, bear in mind – it’s the wrong question
it life – is constantly replenishing them. We
can’t do that quite yet, but with the imminent
launch of the James Webb Space Telescope

I
T IS an age-old debate that
and construction of the Extremely Large crops up everywhere from
Telescope in Chile, we should soon be able to. discussions of gender identity
to our propensity to conditions such
as obesity. How much is hardwired
I don’t want to be alone inside, the inescapable product of
Remotely sensing just one other world with our genes, and how much is down
alien life would tell us that we aren’t alone to external factors?
in the universe, and that life is probably Trouble is, this nature vs nurture
widespread. But it won’t tell us what that debate is fundamentally wrong-
life is like. We naturally tend to think of any headed. Even before conception,
advanced life as human-like, but we don’t

ROBIN HAMMOND/PANOS PICTURES

our make-up is influenced by
even know what future humans will be “epigenetic” factors: choices our
like. “If someone had written this article parents make, chemicals they are
100 million years ago and asked what aliens exposed to, infections they get.
would be like, they probably would have These don’t alter our genetic code,
heard from a triceratops or a brontosaurus but just how the instructions it
that aliens are probably small at one end, contains are carried out – how it is
big in the middle, and small again at the expressed. Environmental factors
other end,” says Shostak. continue to change how our genes
Even assumptions such as life being make us tick throughout life.
carbon-based and requiring liquid water For developmental psychologist
are based on a sample of one planet. Life Alison Gopnik at the University of
on Titan could use liquid hydrocarbons in California, Berkeley, this constant
the way we use water. Some scientists have interplay makes even asking how
speculated that life could be silicon-based. much we are nature and how much
Given computing’s rapid progress, advanced nurture meaningless. “People often
alien life could even consist of artificially think about it as if there’s some kind
intelligent machines, says Shostak. of formula you could use,” she says. 100 per cent nature, in another it’s
It is probably just as well not to think of life “That’s fundamentally misguided.” 100 per cent nurture,” says Gopnik.
as one thing. “When I look around the Earth, In some cases, identical twins That isn’t to say genes mean
I see so many forms of life that I could never grow up to have dramatically nothing. With very large data sets,
have imagined,” says Kaltenegger. “I think different personalities, while in we do see trends between our DNA
whatever we can imagine, the diversity of life others identical siblings separated and particular characteristics and
if it exists out there is going to just blow our at birth turn out to have strikingly behaviours: certain genetic profiles
minds.” Leah Crane similar personalities, mannerisms give you a higher risk of being
and more. Even some genetic obese, for example, or affect
disorders can be thought of as your musical ability or even your
“Our most basic environmental. Phenylketonuria,
for example, inhibits a body’s ability
likelihood of practising hard to
realise your musical talent.
assumptions to break down the amino acid
phenylalanine, and can cause
Behavioural geneticist Robert
Plomin of King’s College London is
about life are devastating brain damage. But if
the disorder is identified at birth,
a proponent of this “genome-wide
polygenic sequencing” technique.
from a sample children can go on to live happy,
healthy lives, by taking supplements
His group’s research has suggested
that more than 50 per cent of
of one planet” and adopting a low protein diet.
“In one sense, this syndrome is
children’s performance at school
is down to genetics, for instance.

44 | New Scientist | 14 December 2019


“Educational achievement is highly
heritable,” he says.
Gopnik is more circumspect about
such general conclusions. Genetic
determinism has been used to
justify campaigns of eugenics
during some of the darkest chapters
of history. That is why Plomin is also
clear. “Heritability does not mean
immutability, it does not mean
innate, it does not mean
determinism,” he says. “It’s
probabilistic, it increases your risk
for something.”
Miriam Mosing at the Karolinska
Institute in Stockholm, Sweden,
echoes the point. A particular
gene profile represents at most a
predisposition, she says. “It’s not
a determinant, it’s not a pregnancy
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HOW TO THINK ABOUT…
DARK ENERGY
It’s the biggest mystery in the universe, making up
over two-thirds of it - and perhaps pushing it towards
a cold and bleak conclusion
D
ARK energy is everywhere – and
when we say everywhere, we mean
everywhere. It suffuses every corner
of the cosmos, absolutely dominating
everything in it. It dictates how the universe
behaves now and how it will end. What a pity,
then, that we have no clue what it is.
It exploded onto the scene in 1998, when
two competing groups made the same
observation of distant supernovae. These
massive stellar explosions were further away
than their brightness suggested they should
be, indicating not just that the universe is
expanding, which was expected, but that its
expansion is accelerating, which wasn’t.
About the best we can do is say that
dark energy acts as a kind of antigravity,
pushing things apart where gravity pulls
“Dark energy
is a weird
perpetual
motion
test – it would be like machine”
telling you that you’re
40 per cent likely to
be pregnant.”
Having even bigger data sets will
allow us to unpick these complex
interplays with more certainty.
More than 26 million people have
now done at-home genetic tests.
The UK government recently
proposed plans to sequence every
British child’s genome at birth, and
Finland is working to sequence its
entire population.
That’s an ethical and privacy
minefield, but with the insights
gleaned, we might end up
beating both nature and nurture
to live healthier, longer lives.
Tiffany O’Callaghan
them together. Dark energy’s inscrutability
earned it its name, but Catherine Heymans
at the University of Edinburgh, UK, isn’t a
fan. “When most people think of something
as being dark, they think of it as absorbing
light,” she says. “Dark energy doesn’t absorb
or emit light.”
Be that as it may, it makes up a whopping
68 per cent of all the universe’s matter and
energy. Regular matter makes up less than
5 per cent. The remainder is almost equally
inscrutable, but gravitating, dark matter.
Most cosmologists think dark energy is
spread out across the universe with equal
density, like butter perfectly smeared on
a slice of toast. That would mean more of
it is created to fill new space as the universe
expands, says Heymans. “It’s a weird
perpetual motion machine.” That suggests a
bleak future for the universe if dark energy’s
dominance continues: pushed ever further
apart, galaxies will eventually lose sight of
one another, lost in uniform dull blackness.
One popular way to explain where dark
energy comes from is to invoke quantum
theory. Random, small-scale quantum
effects create energy even in the vacuum of
empty space – so the more space, the more
energy. But when you calculate the amount
of this quantum dark energy there should
be, “you get it wrong”, says Elisa Chisari
at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.
And not just by a little – by a factor of 10120.
Maybe. Recent observations of the
universe’s expansion have shown that,
when you use standard cosmic models to
extrapolate the early universe’s expansion
rate to the present day, the predicted value
falls far short of what we actually measure.
One explanation could be that dark energy is
more complicated than we thought. “You get
into all kinds of exciting, glorious models,”
says Heymans – ones where dark energy
evolves with time, for example, or interacts
with dark matter in mysterious ways.
Or maybe not – with dark energy, we just
can’t tell, says Heymans. “It could be that
we’ve got everything wrong.” Gilead Amit ❚
14 December 2019 | New Scientist | 45
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Recruitment

Postdoctoral Associate in Chemogenomics

Trudeau Institute – Saranac Lake, NY
newscientistjobs.com As a part of Trudeau Chemogenomic research, we are recruiting an
innovative, highly motivated computational chemist/biochemist/biologist
Recruitment advertising to help develop and apply breakthrough methods for efficient identification
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Qualifications: PhD or MD/PhD with evidence of innovation, diligence,
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- Expertise in one or several and working knowledge of most of the following
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Kelly Stanyon, Human Resource Office Trudeau Institute, Inc.
154 Algonquin Avenue Saranac Lake, NY 12983 Fax (518) 891-5126
hr@trudeauinstitute.org

Bring your
career to life Department of Biological Science
Assistant Professor, 9 Month Salaried (Cell Biology)
Sign up, create your own job alerts The Department of Biological Science at Florida State University invites outstanding
and discover the latest opportunities applications for a tenure-track ASSISTANT PROFESSOR in the EURDGO\GH¿QHG DUHD RI
Cellular Biology. The Department is interested in individuals using any experimental system,
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Successful candidates for an Assistant Professor rank will possess at a minimum a doctoral
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Questions about the position should be directed to Prof. Hank W. Bass:

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See details at:

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9-month-salaried-biological-science-/
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HMRI Postdoctoral Fellowship Program

Pasadena, CA
Huntington Medical Research Institutes’ (HMRI) Postdoctoral Fellowship
Program provides MDs, PhDs, and MD/PhDs rigorous scientific training,
mentoring, and a rich research environment supplemented by close
interactions with colleagues at nearby universities, including Caltech, USC,
and others.
Fellows will obtain hands-on experience carrying out studies in HMRI’s
four major areas of research:
• Brain research with focus on Alzheimer’s disease and Migraine
• Imaging and spectroscopy of the brain, blood vessels, and heart
• The study of heart attack and ways to reduce cell death during heart
attack, models of heart failure, models of cardiogenic shock, studies of
cardio-toxic substances, e-cigarettes.
• Studies specifically focused on the connection between the brain and
heart disease
ELIGIBILITY:
Applicants for the HMRI Postdoctoral Fellowship Program must have
completed a PhD, an MD, or an MD, PhD program and have proof of
completion and degree by June 30, 2019.
MULTIPLE FACULTY POSITIONS
California University of Pennsylvania invites applications for the faculty positions
below, to begin August 2020. A comprehensive regional institution and a member
of Pennsylvania’s State System of Higher Education, California University is a
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preparation, liberal arts, science and technology, and professional studies. The
University enrolls approximately 6,800 students in graduate and undergraduate
programs taught by 256 full-time faculty members. Visit www.calu.edu for more
information about California University of Pennsylvania.
Tenure-Track Positions - 2020 Fall Semester start
Director, Veterinary Technology Program
Computer Science/Cybersecurity
Psychology Generalist
To Apply: Applications are accepted online only at https://careers.calu.edu/
Physical resumes are not accepted.
Veterans claiming preference should submit a copy of their DD214 to the Office of
Social Equity, 250 University Ave., Box 9, California, PA 15419.

At the time of acceptance into the fellowship program, the applicant may
have no more than five (5) years of research training or experience since
obtaining a post-baccalaureate doctoral-level degree.
Applications are accepted on a rolling basis. Find out more at https://jobs.
newscientist.com/job/1401678395/hmri-postdoctoral-fellowship-program-/
“Don’t settle for someone else’s vision of your life. Build your career at California
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NRC Research Associateship Programs

The National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine offers postdoctoral and senior research awards on
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We are actively seeking highly qualified candidates including recent doctoral recipients and senior researchers.
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Interested candidates should apply online http://sites.nationalacademies.org/PGA/RAP/PGA_046398

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Applicants should hold, or anticipate receiving, an earned doctorate in science or engineering. Degrees from universities
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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.

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Changing
the face of
science
starts
with you.

Join our inclusive organization

to access opportunity,
community, and inspiration.
Pictured is Dr. Semarhy Quinones:
SACNAS Member, Chapter Advisor,
Leadership Alumnus

Join us at sacnas.org
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10th Anniversary
Great minds come together at Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany
What’s in it for me?
If you are a post graduate student with an interest in
the pharmaceutical and chemical industry, the
Innovation Cup is your chance to gain in-depth
knowledge about research and development, to net-
work with top students from around the world and
to build a business case together with experienced
professionals.
Who can apply:
Advanced students and post docs in the fields of life
science, material science, data science and business
administration from all over the world can apply:
• Sciences: Post graduate students on their way
towards a PhD in biology, medicine, biotech,
bioinformatics, data sciences, biochemistry,
chemistry, pharmacy, physics or engineering.
• Business: Advanced MBA students and re-
cent MBA graduates with an interest in the
pharmaceutical and chemical business and a
science background.
The Innovation Cup will comprise the following team
topics: oncology, immuno-oncology, autoimmunity,
drug discovery technologies, digitalization,
electroceuticals, lithography.
How it works:
During a one-week Summer Camp, 50 selected
students will attend in-depth presentations about
the pharmaceutical and chemical industry given by
researchers and managers at Merck KGaA, Darmstadt,
Germany. The participants will be divided into teams,
-
work together to develop a business plan and present
it to a grand jury, who will award the Innovation Cup
for the best plan along with a cash prize of EUR 20,000
plus EUR 5,000 for the runner-up.
A conference with alumni of previous Innovation Cup
editions will be held on the first day of the Summer
Camp.
Further information about the program and how to
apply online from November 1, 2019, until January
31, 2020:
http://innovationcup.emdgroup.com
Location:
Near Frankfurt, Germany, June 20–26, 2020.
Travel, accommodation and food expenses will be
paid by Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany.
Merck KGaA
Darmstadt, Germany
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Discovery
Tours

S W I T Z E RL A ND / F R A N C E Departing:
6 days from $3,295
18 May 2020

Explore dark & frozen 17 September 2020

matter: CERN & Mont Blanc

Particle physicist Dr Darren Price and science journalist Laura Spinney will lead a fascinating
and insightful tour focusing on CERN, home to the famous Large Hadron Collider, and Mont
Blanc to investigate receding glaciers. Fall in love with the charming lakeside city of Geneva,
famous for its watch-making, high quality chocolate and enchanting old town.

Tour highlights include:

k Evening talks and walking seminars with
Dr Darren Price and Laura Spinney
k CERN guided tour to learn about the
groundbreaking work being carried out
k Walking tour of Geneva’s old town centre
and beautiful cruise on Lake Geneva
k Cable-car trip to the top of the Auguille du
Midi overlooking Mont Blanc
k The stunning botanical gardens
k Visit the beautiful small town of
Chamonix and then on to Mer de Glace
to witness an ice cave carved into the
glacier itself
k Trip to Geneva’s Museum of the History
of Science, which features astronomy,
microscopy and meteorology exhibits

No single supplements for the first two solo travellers on each departure.
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The back pages

Puzzles Feedback Twisteddoodles Almost the last word The Q&A
Quick crossword, an The salaries of for New Scientist Spider travel and Gladys Kalema-
ant-hunting riddle Disney princesses: A cartoonist’s take on sport’s emissions: Zikusoka on saving
and the quiz p52 the week in weird p53 the world p53 readers respond p54 Ugandan gorillas p56

Stargazing at home 2 Week 6

See the Andromeda galaxy

Although it is 2.5 million light years away, you can observe
this spiral galaxy with the naked eye, says Abigail Beall

THIS week, we are taking

stargazing to the extreme to
spot the most distant object it
is possible to see with the naked CAPH
eye: the Andromeda galaxy.
This spiral galaxy is named ALPHERATZ
after the nearby constellation of ANDROMEDA GALAXY
Andromeda. Also called Messier 31,

Abigail Beall is a science writer

in Leeds, UK. This series is
M31 or NGC 224, it is between
2.2 and 2.5 million light years from
CASSIOPEIA
Earth. This makes it the closest
ANDROMEDA

MIKE CAVAROC, FREE ROAMING PHOTOGRAPHY

based on her book The Art of major galaxy, and the closest
Urban Astronomy @abbybeall spiral galaxy, to our own. It is the
biggest galaxy in the local group,
a collection of just over 30 galaxies
What you need that includes the Milky Way, and it
Binoculars is made up of about 1 trillion stars.
You can see the Andromeda
For next week galaxy with the naked eye on a
A clear night clear night with no moon, even in
One or more children (optional) places with a little light pollution.
It has an apparent magnitude
of 3.44. If you tested the light
pollution in your area earlier
in the series (see New Scientist,
5 October, p 51), you will know if
it is possible to see something
with that magnitude in your area.
Next in the series To identify Andromeda from
1 Mercury transits the sun the northern hemisphere, first
2 How to watch the find the Great Square of Pegasus.
Leonid meteor shower Use the Plough or the Big Dipper
3 Venus and Jupiter to find the North Star, or Polaris
in conjunction (New Scientist, 28 September, p 51).
4 Mercury at its Then imagine a line from any
greatest elongation star in the handle of the Plough,
5 How to see the through the North Star, to get to
Northern Lights W-shaped Cassiopeia. Continue
6 Find the Andromeda the line through the Caph star,
galaxy which is the top right of the W
7 How to see Santa (the of Cassiopeia. This line will take
ISS) on Christmas Eve you to the four bright stars of
Is it a satellite, or a the Great Square of Pegasus.
sleigh delivering In the south, Cassiopeia and
presents? Pegasus will be visible to the north
Stargazing at Home online
Projects will be posted online each week at
newscientist.com/maker Email: maker@newscientist.com
just after sunset. Look near the
horizon, and you will see the
M-shape of Cassiopeia. Pegasus
is slightly higher and to the left.
The star at the bottom right of
the Great Square in the south, or
top left in the north, is Alpheratz.
It is also the brightest star in the
constellation of Andromeda.
The galaxy sits between it and
Cassiopeia. Through binoculars,
or looking through a telescope,
you can see the spiral arms
of the Andromeda galaxy.
This amazing sight makes it
one of the most popular targets
for astrophotographers.
In the northern hemisphere,
Andromeda can be seen from
August to February. It will appear
low on the north-eastern horizon
at about 10 pm, then it will climb
higher, reaching overhead before
day breaks.
In the south, the constellation
can be viewed from October to
December. This month, it will
appear at around 10 pm then fall
below the north-western horizon
by about 1 am. The exception
is places more than 40 degrees
south, where Andromeda isn’t
visible because it sits at 41 degrees.
Next week, for the final
instalment of this series, I will
be showing you how to find
Santa’s sleigh – aka the
International Space Station.  ❚

14 December 2019 | New Scientist | 51

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The back pages Puzzles

Quick crossword #47 Set by Richard Smyth Quick quiz #32 Puzzle supplied by
1 What initially attracts Odds and Evenings
       mosquitoes to us?
   #34 Ant on a tetrahedron
2 What little green men
announced their presence
  in a field outside Cambridge,
UK, on 28 November 1967?

    3 On certain dessert wine

grapes, the fungus Botrytis
cinerea sucks out water to
    give a sweeter, more intense
 flavour. What is the mould’s
more PR-friendly name?
   
Three short-sighted spiders are clustered
at the vertex of a wire frame in the shape
4 How many members of
of a tetrahedron. The spiders know that
the Curie family have won
    there is an ant walking around the frame,
Nobel prizes?
but they have no idea where it is. They
5 Knismesis and gargalesis will only be able to spot it when they are
  
are two distinct types of practically on top of it. The ant, on the
what sensation? other hand, has excellent eyesight and
can plan its route accordingly to avoid the
Answers below spiders. Given that the ant walks slightly
ACROSS slower than the spiders, is there a way for
8 Hook-and-loop fastener (6) 18 Regular quadrilaterals (7) the ant to escape the spiders indefinitely?
9 Ș (3) 22 Volcanic glass (8) Cryptic Or can the spiders find a strategy to be
10 Mountain goat (4) 25 ___ acid, CH3COOH (6) Crossword #20 certain of catching the ant?
11 Student of heredity 26 Genus of tropical trees (4)
in organisms (10) 27 Cancer specialist (10)
Answers Answer next week
12 Sea fog (4) 30 László ___ , pen inventor (4)
13 Transient software fault (6) 31 Vision organ (3) ACROSS 1 Intakes, 5 Asset,
16 Long-eared owl (4,4) 32 Sense that a situation 8 Parallelogram, 9 Tan, #33 The mountain pass
10 Whalebone, 12 Stoats,
17 Helen ___ , British physicist has been experienced 13 Offset, 15 Transmute, Solution
and broadcaster (7) before (4,2) 16 Its, 18 April Fools’ Day,
20 Sassy, 21 Residue The two hikers set off at 6am.
DOWN
DOWN 1 Input,
1 Transmissible cultural 15 Fictional android – perhaps 2 Tyrannosaurus, They pass each other at midday after X
unit (4) T-800 or T-1000 (10) 3 Kilowatts, 4 Seesaw, 5 Ado, hours of walking. Bonnie has 4 more hours
2 Skin condition (4) 19 Brand name for the 6 Serious-minded, 7 Tempest, to go and Aaron has 9. The distance Bonnie
3 Nerve agent developed sedative methaqualone (8) 11 Enfeebles, 12 Satraps, has travelled is equal to the distance that
14 Tumour, 17 Style, 19 Lay
in Russia (8) 20 Environmental Aaron is yet to travel.
4 Online seminar (7) performance index (3)
5 Eye corners (6) 21 Turn a bolt anticlockwise (7) Assuming constant walking speeds for both
6 Salt containing Cr2O72- (10) 23 See 14 Down Quick quiz #32 hikers, then the time Bonnie has travelled
7 Sense that a situation 24 Molecule with the Answers divided by the time she has left to travel is
has been experienced same formula but heavy kinds X/4. For Aaron, the time he has yet to travel
5 Tickle, the light and
before (4,2) different structure (6) Frédéric (chemistry, 1935) divided by the time he has travelled is 9/X.
14/23 Irish biologist and 28 Boxthorn berry (4) won jointly with her husband
broadcaster (3,6) 29 Ctrl+S (4) their daughter Irène Joliot-Curie These two are equal, hence X2 = 9 x 4 = 36,
with her husband Pierre, and so X = 6.
1911), sharing the physics prize
(physics 1903, chemistry
4 Four: Marie Curie won twice
3 Noble rot
regular radio signal
Bell Burnell to its strangely
playful name given by Jocelyn
“little green men 1”, was the
2 The first pulsar. LGM-1, or Our crosswords are
Next week: a bumper spread, including a celestial cryptic 50 metres away now solvable online
crossword and a selection of fun and festive puzzles. They can smell it up to
Available at
1 Carbon dioxide in our breath.
newscientist.com/crosswords

52 | New Scientist | 14 December 2019


The back pages Feedback
Subjection line
Is there another real-world
phenomenon that so perfectly
illustrates the concept of
exponential growth as emails?
Take, by comparison, the story of
the chessboard and the rice. In this
well-worn fable, an emperor is so
grateful for the services of an IT
consultant that he accedes to her
unusual request for payment.
Instead of cash in hand, the canny
coder would like a chessboard with
a single grain of rice on the first
square, two on the second, four on
the third and so on until square 64.
Sounds cheap; is expensive. The
final square contains a hill of rice so
big that it would tower over Everest.
The hapless emperor, however,
doesn’t earn Feedback’s sympathy.
At least he only needed to
communicate with the paddy fields
by messenger. Imagine managing
such a rice-growing project with the
help of email. “Re:Fw:Re:Re:Rice
Payment – Maybe we could meet
off-grid to ideate how best to
interface with future freelancers”,
“Re:Re:Legal advice – I am out
of the office right now. For any
rice-related queries please email
Martha in HR.” It’s enough to make
one abdicate.
It now turns out that keeping a
lid on unnecessary emails wouldn’t
only be good for our mental health,
but could actually save the planet.
Energy company OVO reckons that
people in the UK send more than
64 million unnecessary emails every
day, mostly to say thanks to one
another for having thanked them
for thanking whoever it was that
had the role before them for
thanking them for something
that nobody remembers doing.
If every sender in the country
cut back on just one of these
superfluous missives, OVO reckons
it would reduce the UK’s annual
carbon footprint by 16,433 tonnes.
What a brilliant idea. We know just
who to forward it on to.
Sweet prints
Technology brings other perils,
too. Who among us hasn’t saved
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for a prized bit of kit only to find,
Twisteddoodles for New Scientist
upon purchasing, that the cable
doesn’t fit or the batteries are the
wrong size or the voltage isn’t
compatible or the instruction
manuals have been put through
a shredder and reassembled in
the wrong order?
It is with forgiveness in our
heart, therefore, that Feedback
casts its gaze to the Irish
parliament. In May 2018, it
seems, the parliament purchased
a Komori GL-429 printer. We hope
it was able to take advantage of a
sizeable Amazon voucher because,
at €808,000, that is one eye-
watering piece of machinery.
It doesn’t even appear capable
of printing money, which is the
only way Feedback could imagine
justifying such a purchase.
The situation rapidly worsened
when, according to The Irish Times,
the printer turned out to be too
big to fit in its appointed nook.
Instead of returning to sender
and investing in something a little
more sensible (like, say, a fleet of
typesetting rhinoceroses), the plight while boarding flights to In it, theknowledgeacademy.
parliament decided to spend Chlorinated Chicken, US. com informs us of the salaries that
another €236,000 on tearing The heartbreaking detail is Disney princesses would be likely
down walls and adding steel that Asbestos is an overwhelmingly to earn based on their respective
reinforcement to the floor. White Francophone town, which means areas of expertise. Ariel from
elephants Feedback has heard of – that its residents are being punished The Little Mermaid, for example,
but CMYK elephants? This may for a name that they themselves “could put her love of exploring
well be the first. find unobjectionable. As the town’s and collecting curiosities to the
mayor told Bloomberg, potential test in a Marine Biologist role”,
investors even refused to take a which may come with a salary
Asbestos we can tell business card with the fateful of up to £35,867.
Welcome to Asbestos, population: name written on it. Looking into the question
dissatisfied. A small Canadian A new name is on the cards – or further, Feedback has learned that
town with this unfortunate name will be – sometime next year. Here’s this is actually the average pay for
is looking to refresh its identity. hoping that it treats them better. a female scientist or engineer in
According to a Facebook post by the the UK. What the press release
municipal government, “the word
Princess and pauper doesn’t mention is that Ariel’s
‘asbestos’ unfortunately doesn’t male friend Flounder could expect
have a good connotation”. This is If we can return to emails for a to earn £45,800 in the same role.
the same wording Feedback’s estate moment, we would like to thank It’s enough to inspire Sebastian
agents used the last time we tried theknowledgeacademy.com for to sing a protest song. “Even the
selling our house. sending us a press release that sturgeon and the ray, they gotta
Asbestos, Quebec, is an old perfectly illustrates the need for fight for equal pay. We got the
mining town named for its most one less email a day. Preferably spirit, you got to hear it, under
important export. This leads to a that one. the sea.” ❚
lot of unattractive finger-pointing
that would be far more restrained
if the same principle were Got a story for Feedback?
employed elsewhere. Residents Send it to New Scientist, 25 Bedford Street,
of Colonialism, UK, for instance, London WC2E 9ES or you can email us at
might sympathise with Asbestos’s feedback@newscientist.com
14 December 2019 | New Scientist | 53

The back pages Almost the last word
Playing dirty
In view of the need to reduce
emissions because of climate
change, which sport has the
highest carbon footprint after
considering all factors?
Bryn Glover
Kirkby Malzeard,
North Yorkshire, UK
Accounting for “all factors” is
difficult, but considering only
participants and their activities,
the obvious choice would be
Formula 1 racing. Skydiving’s
carbon footprint should probably
include the fuel consumed in the
carrier aircraft, and other sports
that require complex apparatus
should factor in the carbon costs
of making that equipment.
But I suspect that the
real villain is either soccer or
American football because they
have the largest followings. Fans
travel vast distances to support
their teams. The air miles clocked
up during a soccer World Cup
must be phenomenal.
Adam Vaughan
Lewes, East Sussex, UK
There aren’t many studies
comparing different sports,
but it is clear that transporting
spectators accounts for a big
chunk of emissions. That would
suggest soccer, as the world’s most
popular sport, has the highest
emissions. Efforts are under
way to make sport greener. The
Olympics adopted concern for the
environment as one of its “pillars”
in 1994. In soccer, Newcastle United
encourages fans to travel via
public transport. Even Formula 1
has pledged to cut emissions.
Michael Le Page
London, UK
Per participant, I would guess air
racing. Accounting for the crowds,
I would say soccer – but if you
count e-sports as sport, then
gaming might be even higher.
Alan Beasley
by email, no address supplied
Grand Prix motor racing must
54 | New Scientist | 14 December 2019
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How did water-averse cats
learn to love fish before they
were domesticated?
Mike Follows
Sutton Coldfield,
West Midlands, UK
Spiders have microscopic hairs
on adhesive pads at the ends of
their legs, which maximise the
contact area with the surface
and the force of adhesion. To
JORDAN LYE/GETTY IMAGES
understand how they move, put
a glass beaker on a glass surface.
It is easy to lift the beaker – until
the glass surface is wetted and
water fills the microscopic
indentations in the glass. Try
This week’s new questions lifting it directly up now. Tilting
the beaker breaks this adhesion.
Fish dish Cats love to eat fish yet seem to hate getting wet. In the same way, a spider
How would they catch a fish, never mind get to eat one, before pulling its legs towards itself
they were domesticated? Geoffrey Clark, Douglas, Isle of Man enhances adhesion and pushing
them away weakens adhesion.
Going viral I had my flu vaccination this year, then promptly This allows it to move quickly
came down with a really bad case of flu three weeks later. How but still remain on a surface.
can that happen? Nicole Barry, Sydney, Australia Webs themselves are fascinating
structures made up of different
silks that are produced by different
surely have the highest carbon Web sense glands in the spider’s body. Each
footprint. Emissions from the cars silk has its own properties and
are only the start. What about the How are spiders able to move so they are combined to create a web
development and manufacture of quickly along their webs without that maximises the chances that
the cars, and the construction of getting their legs entangled? suitable prey will be captured for
the tracks? Drivers and fans fly to the minimum outlay of resources.
scores of events around the world, Jane Monroe A sticky coating produced
with each team carrying two cars Arcata, California, US by the aggregate silk gland found
and tonnes of spare parts and In a web spun by an orb weaver in some spiders is only applied
other equipment. They also use spider, the silk comes in sticky to parts of certain threads. The
and discard hundreds of tyres and non-sticky versions, so the spider avoids these in the same
during the season. spider can just walk along the way that soldiers avoid their own
smooth “spokes” of the orb and booby traps.
Keith Ross avoid the sticky strands that make
Villembits, France up the spirals and are meant for Luce Gilmore
Undoubtedly, soccer is the culprit. snagging prey. Cambridge, UK
The inexcusably high salaries To run on the web when chasing Spiders can spin at least six
paid to footballers and indecent down prey, an orb weaver moves different kinds of silk. The radial
fees paid by TV companies lead on its “tiptoes”, which greatly strands of a web are smooth and
to lavish lifestyles and huge reduces contact with the web only the spiral strands are sticky.
stadiums – all costing the earth. threads. Of course, spiders don’t Other varieties include prey-
actually have tiptoes: the body binding silk, which is sometimes
The Carbon Trust part that touches the web isn’t the used to gift-wrap offerings for
via Twitter tip of the spider’s foot, but instead potential mates, and egg-
A few years ago, The Carbon small bristles called setae. protecting silk.  ❚
Trust did some work on low-
carbon ways for spectators
to watch soccer. It suggests Want to send us a question or answer?
that transport emissions are Email us at lastword@newscientist.com
significant, but we don’t have Questions should be about everyday science phenomena
a sport-by-sport comparison. Full terms and conditions at newscientist.com/lw-terms
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UFAW APPEAL
IS FLIGHT IMPORTANT
TO THE WELFARE OF CAPTIVE
BIRDS?
Can you help us to find the answer?
This proposed study will cost £50,000 but has the potential to improve the welfare of
Study will test theory that
millions of birds. Can you help us to fund this study or others with a donation?
restricting flight leads to
Universities Federation For Animal Welfare (UFAW) is an animal welfare charity but one with welfare problems in caged
birds
a difference, using science in the service of animal welfare. Established in 1926, the charity
works globally in a variety of ways, including funding quality projects which have the Flight is one of the most
capacity to help large numbers of animals and to really make a difference, and by constrained natural
disseminating the information learned. As a charity, UFAW relies on member subscriptions, behaviours for captive
donations and legacies to continue its vital work. birds and restricting or
preventing flight is
therefore a welfare
To find out more about the study and donate please see our website concern
www.ufaw.org.uk/captivebird Findings have the potential
Established 1926 to improve wellbeing in
Tel: +44 (0)1582 831818 Registered Charity No 207996 millions of birds from a
variety of species
:OV\SKM\UKZL_JLLK[OLHTV\U[YLX\PYLKMVY[OPZZ[\K`<-(>^PSSHWWS`M\UKZ[VV[OLYWYVQLJ[Z[VILULÄ[HUPTHS^LSMHYL

14 December 2019 | New Scientist | 55

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The back pages Q&A
When veterinarian
Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka
discovered mountain gorillas in
Uganda were contracting disease from
humans, she founded an organisation
to promote healthcare in both
As a child, what did you want to be
when you grew up?
The cats and dogs in my home were my
playmates as a child, and at the age of 12,
I decided that I wanted to be a veterinarian.
Explain your work in one easy paragraph.
We started Conservation Through Public Health
(CTPH) in 2003 because I was concerned about
disease transmission to the estimated 650 critically
endangered mountain gorillas in existence. I led a
team that traced a fatal outbreak of scabies in
the gorillas to people living around Bwindi
Impenetrable National Park. CTPH was one of
the first NGOs in the world to address human,
animal and ecosystem health together – now
known as the “One Health” approach.
Why did you choose this field?
As a student, I worked with captive chimpanzees
and then wild chimps in Budongo Forest and
mountain gorillas in Bwindi. I was then hired as
the first wildlife veterinarian in Uganda.
Did you have to overcome any particular
challenges to get where you are today?
The main barriers were challenging society’s norms.
Veterinary medicine was not seen as a viable career
in Uganda because people did not want to spend
money on pets or food animals. And for wildlife,
it was thought natural selection should take
precedence over welfare. Thirdly, wildlife
veterinary medicine was not considered a
suitable career for a woman because it involves
dangerous animals and challenging conditions.
Were you good at science at school?
I won the school science prize, in an era when
there were few women in science. This made me
see that a career in science was worth pursuing.
56 | New Scientist | 14 December 2019
What’s the most exciting thing you’ve
worked on in your career?
I have had many exciting moments pioneering the
first translocations in Uganda. In 1997, Kidepo Valley
National Park had just six giraffes. We translocated
three infants and, from that, the population grew
to 35 giraffes and is still growing.
Is there a discovery you wish you’d
made yourself?
Seeing the first self-medication by non-human
great apes. We now know chimps swallow hairy
Aspilia leaves when they have intestinal worms,
which are then expelled in their faeces.
What scientific development do you hope to
see in your lifetime?
I am fascinated by how gorillas medicate themselves
and whether they share medicines with humans.
I have now started work on this.
Do you have an unexpected hobby, and if so,
please will you tell us about it?
I enjoy martial arts and got as far as a yellow belt
in karate until the teacher left Uganda!
What achievement or discovery are you
most proud of?
I am most proud of discovering the cause of the
scabies outbreak, and setting up CTPH. We are
proud to have contributed to the growth of the
mountain gorilla population. There are now just
over 1000, changing their IUCN conservation
status from critically endangered to endangered.
If you could have a conversation with any
scientist, living or dead, who would it be?
Dian Fossey, who pioneered the long-term study of
mountain gorillas. My conservation work has built
on her legacy by involving local communities more.
What’s the best thing you’ve read or seen
in the past 12 months?
Becoming by Michelle Obama, because she
describes her life so vividly that you feel you “I set up one
are in Chicago living all the challenges she
faced to become a first lady in the US.
of the first
NGOs in the
OK, one last thing: tell us something that will
world to address
blow our minds…
Gorillas have babies once every four to five years.
By the time the new infant is born, the older one can
human, animal
build its own night nest and transfer life skills to the
infant. My husband and I spaced our two boys four
and ecosystem
and a half years apart for that reason.  ❚ health together”
Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka is co-founder of
Conservation Through Public Health, based
in Entebbe and Bwindi, Uganda
IVANA TACIKOVA/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; JO-ANNE MCARTHUR
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THE STAR THAT KEEPS EXPLODING
…and our galaxy’s other odd inhabitants
PAN-GALACTIC GARGLE BLASTED
Recipes for science fiction’s top cocktails
OCTOPOSSE
Eight legs, three hearts and a lot of friends
WHO SHOT THE LAST DODO?
The unsolved murder of history’s deadest bird
SUPERSIZE YOUR SMALL TALK
How to have the perfect conversation
RUDOLPH THE SUPER-REINDEER
He fights jet lag. He beats cancer
DEADLY BUT DELICIOUS
The secret sex lives of truffles

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