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 NO PLACE LIKE HOME
Exoplanets aren’t looking
very friendly for life
CSI BOTANY
Meet the plant expert
who solves murders
GIANT T. REX
Dinosaurs were even
bigger than we thought
WEEKLY March 30–April 5, 2019

THE TRIBE THAT

REWROTE HISTORY DNA reveals the untold story
of the ultimate Stone Age conquerors

ARE BLACK HOLES REAL? No3223 US$6.99 CAN$7.99

And four other questions gravitational waves will answer 1 3

PLUS BILLION-VOLT THUNDERSTORM / SUN BEARS PULL FACES /

YOUR GUIDE TO SPACE JUNK / THE HUNT FOR WATER ON MARS
Science and technology news www.newscientist.com US jobs in science 0 72440 30690 5
 WHAT IF TIME STARTED
FLOWING BACKWARDS?

WHAT
IF THE
RUSSIANS
GOT TO
THE MOON
FIRST?

WHAT IF DINOSAURS
STILL RULED THE EARTH?
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 newscientist.com/issue/3223
CONTENTS

Management
Executive chairman Bernard Gray
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14 No place like home
Exoplanets aren’t looking very
friendly for life
38 CSI botany
Meet the plant expert who
solves murders
7 Giant T. rex
Dinosaurs were even bigger
than we thought
29 The tribe that rewrote history
DNA reveals the untold story of the
ultimate Stone Age conquerors
13 Are black holes real?
And four other questions
gravitational waves will answer
Plus Billion-volt thunderstorm (18).
Sun bears pull faces (18).
Your guide to space junk (26).
The hunt for water on Mars (6)
3 Our most pressing space challenge
is to clean up orbit. Healthcare
technology must be shown to work
News
4 THIS WEEK Thousands of
vulnerabilities found on UK
government websites. Boeing 737
glitch. British pollinators in crisis
6 NEWS & TECHNOLOGY AIs take
on animals. Hunting water on
Mars. Arctic warming worsens city
smog. World’s largest T. rex fossil.
Space rock mysteries revealed.
Can genetic predictions improve
healthcare? Google gets into
video games. LIGO returns to hunt
black holes. Pollution may reduce
sperm quality. No life-friendly
exoplanets. Child abuse brain link
to depression.
17 IN BRIEF Exploding star shoots
through space. Robot swarms.
Skin pigment turned into electrical
wires. Anaesthetic may help PTSD
Analysis
20 INSIGHT UK’s online
pornography block could be a
privacy nightmare
22 COMMENT Genetic studies are
too white. Media must do more
to prevent suicides
23 ANALYSIS We need to stop
travelling to cut climate emissions
26 Your guide to space junk
Cleaning up the skies overhead
will be crucial for future launches
29 History of violence
The devastating conquest
written in ancient DNA
34 Life’s other code Deciphering
the sugars on our cells could lead
to a whole new type of medicine
38 CSI botany Jane Bock is a
crime-fighting plant scientist
Culture
42 The inventor HBO’s new
documentary explores the rise and
fall of medical company Theranos
PLUS: This week’s cultural picks
44 “The body is a spaceship”
Artist Antony Gormley takes us
skiing on the moon
Regulars
24 APERTURE
Idai’s trail of destruction
52 LETTERS
A significant source of earned
dogmatism
55 CRYPTIC CROSSWORD
56 FEEDBACK
Unusual solution to knife crime
57 THE LAST WORD
Many ridges to cross

30 March 2019 | NewScientist | 1

INSTANT EXPERT:
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Our most pressing space challenge is to clean up orbit
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Subeditors WHEN the Soviet probe Sputnik 1 travelling at speeds that would With fresh rubbish being
Chief subeditor Eleanor Parsons
Tom Campbell, Chris Simms, Jon White
started circling Earth on 4 October make even the tiniest collision thrown on the heap all the time,
1957, it was the only artificial disastrous. Left unchecked, the responsible orbit management
Design
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satellite our planet had. That situation could jeopardise the will involve finding ways to
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flecks of paint to bits of old were sent into orbit in 2018, promising results (see page 26).
Contact us
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General & media enquiries heads are turning into a massive, longer timescales, Elon Musk’s they remove.
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210 Broadway #201
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communications satellites have to Other companies have similarly priority is getting them back
Tel +44 (0)20 7611 1200 navigate this minefield every day, lofty ambitions. down again. ■
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the AI might actually be far worse.

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High-tech Hancock
HEALTH minister Matt Hancock
wants to transform the UK’s
National Health Service into a
cutting-edge healthcare machine,
and his current obsession is
using genetic tests to assess
people’s risks of developing
a range of diseases (see page 10).
His own test showed an elevated
risk of prostate cancer, he said –
although experts pointed out
that it was pretty ordinary.
It isn’t the first time Hancock
has been distracted by something
shiny, new and of uncertain value.
The politician is a keen supporter
of Babylon, which says its artificial
intelligence can provide health
advice on a par with human
doctors. A review published in The
Lancet says there is no convincing
evidence that this is the case, and
That said, Hancock doesn’t like
all technology. He has repeatedly
railed against children’s use
of smartphones and called for
official limits on screen time,
despite a lack of clear evidence to
suggest such devices are harmful.
We all want healthcare
providers to make use of modern
technology when appropriate.
But would it be too much to ask
that the technology first be shown
to work as advertised? ■

30 March 2019 | NewScientist | 3

 THIS WEEK

Energy emissions rise

GLOBAL carbon emissions from
energy use climbed to a record high
last year, as demand for energy grew
at its fastest pace this decade.
The International Energy Agency
(IEA) said this week that emissions
from energy use in 2018 rose by
1.7 per cent to a high of 33 gigatonnes.
The increase is equivalent to the
carbon released from all air travel
doubling in a single year.
This is the first official confirmation
that energy-related emissions have
risen two years in a row. It now seems
that a plateau between 2014 and
2016 was a blip.
“One could take a negative stance
and say we’re doing everything
VCG/VCG VIA GETTY
Overall, the world’s appetite for
energy was up 2.3 per cent, the
biggest rise this decade. But switching
from coal to gas power stations, which
emit less carbon, helped damp down
emissions growth to some extent,
while nuclear power also had a good
year, as new plants came online in
China. And there was strong growth
in renewable energy sources, which
met 45 per cent of the increase in
electricity generation in 2018.
But the speed of change isn’t
enough, says Cozzi. “We are putting
the accent on the right policies, but
they are not going strongly enough.”
Glen Peters at the Centre for
International Climate Research in

wrong. I think it’s not as bad as the Norway estimates that, based on
absolute number suggests. It could economic growth predictions, total
have been higher,” says Laura Cozzi, carbon emissions will rise again in
the IEA’s chief energy modeller. 2019 by around 1.5 per cent.

down 38 per cent. By contrast, the

Crashed jets lacked Tough times for common carder bee (below right)
First all-women
safety upgrades Britain’s insects increased its range by 82 per cent. spacewalk axed
The assessment found that the key
MORE details have emerged about A THIRD of wild bee and hoverfly group of 22 wild bees and hoverflies THE first all-women spacewalk has
the two recent Boeing 737 Max 8 species are in decline across Great for crop pollination had been doing been cancelled. NASA astronauts
jet crashes. Both planes lacked two Britain, raising concerns about relatively well. Overall, 11 per cent of Christina Koch and Anne McClain were
optional safety upgrades that could decreasing biodiversity and the the species studied increased their scheduled to perform repairs outside
have warned the pilots of problems potential loss of pollinators. range between 1980 and 2013 the International Space Station on
contributing to the crashes, The New An analysis of 700,000 naturalist (Nature Communications, DOI: 29 March. Now Nick Hague will replace
York Times reported last week. records going back to 1980 has found 10.1038/s41467-019-08974-9). McClain, as there wasn’t time to put
The upgrades were linked to the that about 33 per cent of 353 species That is no reason for complacency together a spacesuit that fits her.
Max 8’s Maneuvering Characteristics studied had declined in the extent though, says Gary Powney at the UK Spacesuits are modular, with
Augmentation System (MCAS), which of their range across the island. The Centre for Ecology and Hydrology. the torso, legs and arms all sized
was introduced to help avoid the plane grey-banded mining bee (pictured “It’s a risky pollination strategy to rely separately and then fitted together
pointing too far upwards and entering below left) is among the losers, on just 22 species.” for each astronaut. According to NASA
a mid-air stall. A report on the Lion Air spokesperson Stephanie Schierholz,
crash, the first of the two crashes, McClain trained on Earth using both
suggested pilots had to repeatedly medium and large-sized torsos. After
fight against MCAS as the plane a spacewalk on 22 March wearing a
pitched its nose into a dive 26 times. large-sized torso, she realised that
A part recovered from the Ethiopian the medium one was a better fit.
Airlines flight, the second crash, hints This may partially be due to
MCAS may also have been involved. physical changes that happen in
LEFT: MIKE EDWARDS; RIGHT: LUCY HULMES

Additionally, the original safety space. McClain tweeted earlier

analysis that Boeing delivered to the this month that she had gained
national regulator to certify the plane 5 centimetres in height in orbit.
was safe to fly had several crucial It takes time to fit together and
flaws, according to an investigation test a full spacesuit, so only one with
by The Seattle Times. Official reports a medium torso will be available by
on the Ethiopian Airlines crash won’t 29 March. Rather than delay, NASA
be released for several months. switched out one of the astronauts.

4 | NewScientist | 30 March 2019

For new stories every day, visit newscientist.com/news
Security flaws in government sites
Hundreds of official UK websites found to have vulnerabilities. Chris Stokel-Walker reports
MORE than 500 UK government
websites have serious security
vulnerabilities, putting them at
risk of being hacked, according
to an investigation by a team
of security researchers.
Of the 3220 domain names
registered under the .gov.uk
domain ending, 524 have
unpatched vulnerabilities.
The sites encompass everything
from central government
departments to local and district
councils. In total, the 524 insecure
websites, including the National
Archives, the Scottish prosecution
service and the Health and Safety
Executive, have about 7200
vulnerabilities between them.
A team of security researchers
working for IT companies in
the private sector scanned all
public-facing government domain
names and looked at the servers
hosting each of the websites.
They found a hotchpotch of
security issues, which they
described as “severely unsafe”.
PLACEIT.NET
Because many government
services are increasingly delivered
digitally, there is often little
choice but to use these systems.
HMRC, the UK’s tax collector, was
not flagged as having any issues.
The vulnerable domains each
had at least one unresolved
problem from the Common
Vulnerabilities and Exposures
(CVE) system, a list of publicly
known software issues. The
system rates vulnerabilities on
a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the have been known for more than
most dangerous, based on how
easy they are to exploit and the
consequences of such an attack.
The most commonly found
vulnerability across the
government websites, CVE-2018-
17199, is rated a 7.5. Web servers
with this vulnerability sometimes with the .gov.uk ending,
store cookies, which are used to
verify who is accessing a website,
longer than they should. This
means that if an attacker steals
someone’s cookie, which is a
relatively easy task, they can
access their account.
This vulnerability was posted
on the CVE system in late January,
but is still found 128 times across
different .gov.uk domains. Some
of the .gov.uk vulnerabilities
a decade. EU data protection rules
say vulnerabilities should be
patched in a timely manner.
The analysis shows there are
significant weaknesses in the UK
“Of the 3220 domain names
524 have unpatched
vulnerabilities”
The Health and Safety Executive
website is flagged as having an issue
government’s IT infrastructure,
says Daniel Abbott, a security
engineer at IT firm Node4, and
part of the team. Many machines
are using very old versions of
software. “This demonstrates
a lack of reasonable care and
attention,” he says.
The domain with the most CVE
issues – 266 vulnerabilities – is
run by a parish council. However,
some central government
services also have large numbers
of unpatched holes. The former
website of the Criminal Records
Bureau, crb.gov.uk, which now
forwards to the government’s
Disclosure and Barring
Service (DBS), an organisation
that handles millions of criminal
record checks for employers, has
133 vulnerabilities.
Many issues seem related to
the fact that the website appears
to use versions of server software
that are nine years out of date.
If the crb.gov.uk host is
compromised, an attacker
could divert users, such as those
seeking a criminal-record check to
give to employers, to a third-party
website and masquerade as the
DBS, accessing personal details,
potentially including past
criminal convictions.
“Poorly managed services can
allow hackers to gain back doors
into secure government
networks,” says James Sawyer,
part of the team. That allows
hackers to then launch attacks.
Unpatched vulnerabilities
made the WannaCry attack in 2017
possible, in which ransomware hit
more than 300,000 computers
worldwide, including thousands
used by the NHS. Microsoft had
already released a fix for the
vulnerability exploited by
WannaCry, but it had yet to be
installed on many computers.
“It seems that there is a
problem,” says Robert Baptiste
at French security company
fsecurity, who wasn’t involved
in the investigation. But until
there is evidence of these
vulnerabilities being exploited,
it is difficult to say how much
of an issue they are, he says.
The UK government told New
Scientist it takes cybersecurity
seriously and will investigate
thoroughly. It added that
departments routinely test their
own sites for vulnerabilities and
fix any that are found. “The public
should remain confident that all
details held on gov.uk are safe and
secure,” said the Cabinet Office. ■
30 March 2019 | NewScientist | 5
NEWS & TECHNOLOGY

to persevere with cup A, but A leader board will be provided

AI vs animals in a others, such as macaques,
instantly switch to cup B.
during the competition, which
runs until November.

battle of smarts The variety of tasks in the

competition will challenge one
key limitation of many AIs: once
The big hurdle will be to build
AIs with general intelligence:
systems with common sense
they learn something, it is very and the ability to do a wide range
Donna Lu Although it won’t be in the difficult for them to adapt that of tasks based on limited data,
competition, the A-not-B task is knowledge to a similar but says Chris Summerfield at the
SOME artificial intelligences can one such test of this ability. In different situation. For example, University of Oxford.
perform tasks with superhuman the task, an animal is repeatedly one AI can outperform humans Many AI algorithms mimic
ability, but just how clever are presented with two cups, A and B. at the video game StarCraft and certain functions in animal
they overall? As smart as a For the first few iterations, cup A another beats us at the board brains, such as the visual system
honeybee? A Labrador? Or a always contains a piece of food. game Go, but they are both in primates, he says. This is why
chimp? A competition called the However, once the animal is useless at most other tasks image-recognition software, such
Animal-AI Olympics will pit AIs trained to understand this, the unless completely retrained. as used by Google’s reverse image
against tests normally used to experimenter switches the food search, has been so successful.
study animal intelligence. to cup B in plain sight. Some Can AIs succeed at versions of tests But AIs lack many other brain
From April, AIs will battle it animals, such as dogs, continue that African grey parrots ace? features that contribute to
out in a virtual playground for a cognitive ability, including
$10,000 prize pool. All the tasks short-term memory or future
involve retrieving a piece of food, planning. This may explain why
but the skills needed to succeed AIs are good at specific tasks,
vary in complexity. This mimics but struggle to adapt to others.
real-life experiments used to Testing AI systems in
measure animal intelligence. unfamiliar environments is an
Entrants will complete tasks important step to creating AIs
they haven’t seen before to that can solve a wide range of
eliminate the opportunity to swot problems beyond those they were
up beforehand, says Matthew initially designed for, says Crosby.
Crosby at the Leverhulme Centre “We expect this to be a hard
for the Future of Intelligence, UK. challenge,” he says. “A perfect
JUNIORS BILDARCHIV GMBH/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

The Animal-AI Olympics will score will require a breakthrough

test a range of cognitive skills, in AI, well beyond current
such as the ability to reason, capabilities. However, even
navigate and learn from past small successes will show that
experiences. “One key concept it is possible, not just to find
is object permanence, the useful patterns in data, but to
understanding that objects extrapolate from these to an
continue to exist even when understanding of how the
they’re out of sight,” says Crosby. world works.” ■

Magnetism instrument, a seismometer, hasn’t

detected any Marsquakes. The
aids search for lander’s heat probe is designed to
burrow 3 metres below the surface
Mars water before it starts gathering data, but
it has hit a rock and become stuck.
NASA’s InSight lander is meant to be Enter the magnetometer, which
busy measuring seismic activity and isn’t even designed to study Mars
underground heat flow on Mars. That directly. “It’s there to measure
isn’t going to plan, but it is using one anything that might affect what the
of its less important sensors to make seismometer measures,” says InSight
the very first measurements of the scientist Catherine Johnson. “But
planet’s magnetic field from the we’re using it for science anyway.”
surface, which may help us find water. The first results were presented at
Since InSight’s arrival on the the Lunar and Planetary Science
Red Planet in November, its main Conference in Texas last week.
Unlike Earth, Mars lacks a global
magnetic field, but it probably
had one in the past, which led to
magnetised rocks in its crust. Electric
currents created by charged particles
from the sun generate small magnetic
fields in those rocks, which InSight’s
magnetometer picks up. “We can use
it to probe how much water is locked
up in those rocks,” says Johnson.
We have been unable to do this
“Unlike Earth, Mars lacks
a global magnetic field,
but it probably had one
in the past”
before because orbiting spacecraft
can only detect magnetic fields that
make it all the way off the surface
into space. That doesn’t tell us what
is happening on the ground. Because
of this, we thought the small magnetic
fields on the surface would be
10 times weaker than InSight found.
As the lander’s magnetometer
continues collecting data, we may
learn how much water there is inside
minerals underground and how strong
Mars’s primordial magnetic field was.
This could help us understand why the
planet is now so different from Earth.
Leah Crane ■

6 | NewScientist | 30 March 2019

For daily news stories, visit newscientist.com/news
Polar warming
may make smog
pollution worse
MILDER conditions in the Arctic could
be weakening winds in China and
India, making winter smogs worse.
Burning fossil fuels can result in
severe clouds of pollution in many
cities in Asia, including Beijing and
Delhi. These smogs – aerosols of fine
particles – are worse in winter, when
more fuel is used for heating and
weather patterns that can cause
dirty air to linger tend to take hold.
Chuanfeng Zhao at Beijing Normal
University in China and his colleagues
wondered if rising temperatures in
the Arctic affect this. Going as far back
as 1980, they compared the monthly
AMANDA KELLEY
average temperature of the Arctic
with atmospheric aerosol levels of the
northern hemisphere’s mid-latitude
regions, where many industrialised
cities are. They found that, when
the Arctic had a particularly warm
summer, aerosol concentrations in
east Asia and north India tended to be
higher than usual the following winter
(Climate Dynamics, doi.org/c3tj).
This could be because warmer
conditions in the Arctic reduce
temperature differences in the
northern hemisphere. The result
may be a weakening of high-speed
winds that normally blow eastwards.
Less pollution could then get
dispersed, causing aerosols to build
up in some areas. Big mountain
ranges, including the Himalayas and
central China’s Qingling peaks, may
block air flow further.
Zhao says his team’s work should
enable governments to predict smog
levels based on Arctic temperatures,
“so they can come up with better
mitigation plans”. But Tim Garrett at
the University of Utah says the study
only shows that Arctic warming and
smogs are associated – it is unclear if
one leads to the other.
Meanwhile, Arctic sea ice probably
reached its maximum extent for 2019
on 13 March. Initial measurements put
this at 14.8 million square kilometres,
the joint-seventh lowest figure in the
past 40 years. Yvaine Ye ■
Introducing Scotty: the
world’s heaviest T. rex
AS IF Tyrannosaurus rex wasn’t
scary enough, along comes Scotty. way, Scotty was a couple of adult
This specimen, dug up in Canada, male lions heavier than Sue.
turns out to be bulkier than any
known T. rex, making Scotty the
heftiest land predator on record.
The finding means we may have particularly hard rock, freeing
underestimated how massive
predatory dinosaurs could grow.
T. rex was one of the last non-
bird dinosaurs to evolve, and has
long been considered a contender “One mystery is why these
for the largest of all the predatory creatures could grow to be
dinosaur species. That case was
made even stronger following the
discovery of Sue in South Dakota,
a 90-per-cent-complete T. rex
skeleton unearthed in 1990.
This was described as the largest
animal of its kind in the world
Scotty has now stolen the title.
“We’re talking about basically a
400-kilogram difference,” says
Scott Persons at the University of
Alberta, Canada. According to his
team’s calculations, Sue weighed
an impressive 8460 kilograms,
but Scotty tipped the scales at
8870 kilograms. To put it another
Scotty was actually discovered
at about the same time as Sue, but
because its bones were encased in
them took decades.
“It wasn’t until now that we’ve
been able to take a step back and
so large when they had to
hunt fast-moving prey”
look at the specimen as a whole,”
says Persons. “There was an ‘oh
gosh’ moment, because the
specimen really is enormous.”
Strictly speaking, it isn’t the
longest or tallest T. rex found,
but it is the heftiest. Persons and
his colleagues used a few methods
to work out how heavy Scotty
would have been, including using
the circumference of its thigh
bones to calculate how much
Scott Persons measures a toe bone
from the heftiest ever land predator
weight the legs were capable of
supporting (Anatomical Record,
doi.org/c3tm).
The researcher think they know
why Scotty was so heavy. Its bones
suggest it was an exceptionally
old individual, probably in its
early 30s. So T. rex might have
reached its maximum body
length and height earlier in
adulthood, but then bulked up
as it became older.
The idea has big implications.
Other members of this group of
meat-eating dinosaurs, known as
theropods, might have followed
the same trend, bulking out only
after many years.
But given that life for these
animals was pretty tough, few
individuals will have reached that
full potential, meaning fossils of
the oldest and bulkiest theropods
will be very rare.
Many palaeontologists have
been waiting a long time for a
full description of Scotty, says
Stephen Brusatte at the University
of Edinburgh in the UK. “It is
probably our best look yet at
what one of the largest, oldest,
most fully grown adults would
have looked like.”
That Scotty seems to be the
heaviest T. rex ever found is a
reminder that the numbers of
samples of giant theropods are
small, says Brusatte. “New
discoveries can reveal even
bigger or weirder individuals.”
One mystery is why T. rex
could grow to be so large. For
other gigantic theropods, there
are mitigating factors that might
explain how they survived: for
instance, living in water to
support their body weight or
hunting very slow-moving
dinosaurs that weren’t difficult
for a heavy predator to catch.
But T. rex lived on land, hunting
fast-moving dinosaurs. “So why
do tyrannosaurs go down this
road of gigantism? We don’t know
the answer to that,” says Persons.
Colin Barras ■
30 March 2019 | NewScientist | 7
NEWS & TECHNOLOGY

minerals that have water locked Earth in 2023. Because Bennu

Space rocks reveal into their molecular structure.
So there is a chance it also has ice
is a relic from the age of planet
formation in the early solar

surprises galore under its rocky surface, in which

case heat from the sun could be
turning the ice into gas and
system, material from it may help
us understand how planets like
Earth formed and where Earth got
blowing rocks away, says Rivkin. its water and complex chemistry.
Leah Crane The lumps seen ejected from Efforts to learn more about Finally, Japan’s Hayabusa 2
it range from a few centimetres Bennu may be hampered by spacecraft has sent back its first
THREE missions have been to tens of centimetres in size. another surprise: its surface is data on the near-Earth asteroid
gathering a treasure trove of data At least four appear to have covered in large boulders, which Ryugu, revealing another
on the nature of space rocks in the ended up in orbit around Bennu, could make it more difficult for surprise: it appears to have
solar system, making unexpected forming what are essentially OSIRIS-REx to descend and grab virtually no water at all.
findings that may shed new light miniature moons around the a sample from it. The asteroid’s surface is
on how Earth formed. asteroid. “We have had spacecraft Instead of smooth areas coated
Earlier this year, NASA’s New around other asteroids, and in dust, the surface has thousands “Asteroid Bennu has been
Horizons probe flew by MU69, nothing like this was ever of small boulders and more than spotted spewing out rocks,
the most distant rock we have reported,” says Andrew Rivkin 200 that are in excess of 10 metres forming what are in effect
visited. This tiny world is made at Johns Hopkins University in across. We only expected one rock miniature moons”
up of two lobes, and looks a bit Maryland. “The question is, why this big from images taken before
like two pancakes stuck edge is this asteroid different?” the spacecraft orbited Bennu. extremely dark, reflecting less
to edge. Results presented at One major distinction is that, The mission was designed to than 2 per cent of the light that
the Lunar and Planetary Science unlike the other asteroids we have pick up samples from dusty hits it. Comparisons with
Conference in Texas last week been to, Bennu is full of hydrated regions, not rocky ones. The team meteorites we have collected on
show that both lobes are covered has found only a few areas that Earth – which were heated as they
in organic compounds that give Clockwise from top left: Bennu is will work, but it is confident it will passed through our atmosphere –
them a red hue. bumpy, Ryugu is dry, while MU69 still be able to get a sample of dust. show the colours match. This
Their surfaces also show signs resulted from a slow collision OSIRIS-REx is set to return to suggests the asteroid was heated
of water ice and methanol, a in the past, perhaps when it was
compound of methane and chipped off from a larger object.
oxygen. The shape of the final That could also explain why
object, with both lobes in the there seems to be very little water
same plane, suggests that they on the asteroid. Given Ryugu
were separate rocks that orbited probably formed in the water-rich
one another closely in a slow asteroid belt, it is unlikely that it
dance before merging. was dry from the start, says team
A lack of large cracks or rubble member Seiji Sugita at the
on MU69 suggests that when University of Tokyo. “Our
the two objects merged, they preferred scenario is that the
probably hit each other at just 2 or parent body acquired water and
3 metres per second. “If you take a then subsequently re-expelled
brisk walk into a wall, you will find most of the water,” he says.
out what that [sort of collision] Because Ryugu’s surface is so
is like,” says team member Bill homogeneous, this indicates its
McKinnon at Washington parent body may have lost its
University in Missouri. water through heating from
NASA/GODDARD/UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA, JAXA, NASA/JHU-APL/SWRI

Elsewhere, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx radioactive materials rather than

spacecraft has spotted the near- being hit by other objects, as
Earth asteroid Bennu spewing collisions wouldn’t affect the
out dust and rocks on 11 separate entire asteroid equally.
occasions in just a few weeks, Researchers have long thought
which took us by surprise. For that asteroids like Ryugu may
the most part, Bennu is as we have brought water and other
predicted before OSIRIS-REx essential ingredients for life to
arrived in December: shaped Earth in the distant past. If it
like a spinning top and rotating turns out that many of them, like
once every 4.3 hours. It isn’t very Ryugu, don’t have much water, we
dense and its surface is one of may have to think again and look
the darkest in the solar system. for these things elsewhere. ■

8 | NewScientist | 30 March 2019

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NEWS & TECHNOLOGY

Gene screening
for disease risk
Adam Vaughan
ANALYSING the genetic data
of millions of people can help
predict a person’s risk for
common diseases and could allow
the UK’s National Health Service
to save lives and money, according
to Genomics plc.
The firm, which was spun out
from the University of Oxford,
announced on 20 March that it has
produced “polygenic risk scores”
for heart disease, breast cancer and
“We must get predictive testing
into the NHS as soon as we
possibly can,” he said.
Genetic testing is already used
in the NHS to look for diseases
caused by a single gene, such
as cystic fibrosis. But many
common health problems involve
multiple genes that each have
a small effect, making it more
difficult to screen for them.
Polygenic risk scores compare
a subset of genetic variants in
someone’s genome with large
PKEVIN CURTIS/GETTY

14 other diseases by examining analyses of genetic data to

more than 3 million people’s
genetic data. Half a million
genomes came from the UK
Biobank, while the rest were from
more than 200 other institutions.
Such scores could help the NHS
take preventative action and target
scarce resources better, says the
firm’s co-founder, Peter Donnelly.
For example, women whose genes
indicate they have a higher risk
of breast cancer could be screened
earlier than their 50th birthday,
when checks usually start.
The same day as Genomics plc’s
announcement, the UK health
minister Matt Hancock gave a
speech on increasing the use
of such techniques in the UK.
estimate how likely that person is
to develop a particular condition.
Anneke Lucassen at the
University of Southampton, UK,
thinks these risk scores could help Genetic sequencing can help arrives at, for instance, may differ
identify high-risk groups and play predict future health problems from those of another company,
a role in targeting screening for meaning the NHS would have
diseases. But she says it is unclear the best polygenic risk scores do to choose which one to use.
what people given such a score not perform well enough to be of On top of that, genetic research
should do with the information. practical use,” says Doug Speed at has largely focused on people
“We tend to assume that picking Aarhus University in Denmark. of white European ancestry (see
up something early makes it David Curtis at University Comment, page 22). Polygenic
more treatable, but sometimes College London shares that view. risk scores are currently less
there is little evidence for that Polygenic risk scores may not be accurate for anyone with
assumption and the downside of as useful as they seem, he says. non-white ancestry, as they are
overdiagnosis is often ignored.” Another problem is that there under-represented in the genetic
Other researchers are also is no single, definitive polygenic databases the scores are derived
sceptical about the technique’s risk score for any given disease. from. “I think that’s a deal-
accuracy. “For most diseases, The scores that Genomics plc breaker,” says Curtis. ■

Google to the gameplay will be streamed to

launch video
game service
ANYONE will be able to play video
games without the need for dedicated
consoles or high-end computers with
a service on the way from Google.
Stadia will be a cloud gaming
service, meaning that any
heavyweight processing and graphics
rendering will be performed at
Google’s data centres. As a player
moves around in a game, video of
their device. Providing the internet
connection is good enough, this will
happen seamlessly.
The platform, which will launch
later this year, will let users
immediately play any game available
on the service, without needing
to buy it individually or download
a copy. “Stadia offers instant access
to play,” said Google’s Phil Harrison
at the Game Developers Conference
in San Francisco.
Stadia can be used with existing
USB controllers, but Google also
unveiled a purpose-built one. This will
connect via Wi-Fi to the game in the
cloud and includes a button that
allows people to share video of their
gameplay to YouTube.
The release of Stadia comes as
the industry shifts towards cloud
gaming. Competitors in this field
include Microsoft’s Project xCloud,
Sony’s PlayStation Now and Nvidia’s
GeForce Now.
One problem that cloud gaming
“Heavyweight processing
and graphics rendering
will be performed at
Google’s data centres”
platforms have faced is latency, a lag
between a player pressing a button
and an action occurring on screen.
At launch, Stadia will aim to stream
games in up to 4K resolution at
60 frames per second. A further,
simultaneous, stream can be shared
to YouTube, also at 4K. This will be
increased to an 8K resolution later on.
Stadia is likely to spark a rise in
metrics-driven game design, says
Tanya Krzywinska at Falmouth
University, UK. “They will be able to
gather huge amounts of data about
when people are playing and what
they’re playing,” she says. Donna Lu ■

10 | NewScientist | 30 March 2019

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 NEWS & TECHNOLOGY
NUTSINEE KIJBUNCHOO/ANU/LIGO HANFORD
LIGO returns to
probe black holes
Daniel Cossins
THE search for gravitational
waves is back on, and this time
we are expecting a deluge.
The Laser Interferometer
Gravitational-Wave Observatory
(LIGO) in the US made a huge
splash in 2016, when it announced
the detection of faint ripples in
space-time produced by the
collision of a pair of black holes.
It has since spotted 10 more
gravitational-wave events.
Now, following upgrades, LIGO
should see one a week when it
starts up again on 1 April.
“We’re making the transition
from having a slow drip of events
to opening the faucet,” says
Luis Lehner at the Perimeter
Institute for Theoretical Physics
in Waterloo, Canada. “It’s going to
be amazing.” Astrophysicists are
hoping this torrent will give us
answers to these five questions:
How do black holes pair up?
We still don’t know what brings
black holes together. Either the
stars that collapse to create them
start out in a pair – a binary
system – or mature black holes
are somehow pushed together by
interactions with other objects. Or
maybe both. The only way to find
out is to see whether the spins of
merging behemoths are aligned.
What is inside a neutron star?
Neutron stars are the city-sized
remnants of massive stars,
squeezed to densities greater
than that inside the nucleus of
an atom. We have felt the ripples
from collisions between them
once. More detections will let
us better probe their innards.
Can we see inside a supernova?
Core-collapse supernovae are
the universe’s most spectacular
fireworks display – dramatic
explosions of dying giant stars that
give birth to neutron stars and
black holes. So far, we know them
only from the light they emit, but
they should produce gravitational
waves too. Glimpsing these waves
should let us peer inside.
Do black holes have a wall of fire?
In 2016, a team led by Niayesh
Afshordi at the Perimeter
An extensive upgrade has made
LIGO more sensitive than ever
Institute claimed that the first
gravitational wave ever detected
was echoing. That was a big
surprise, because it would
indicate the presence of a ring
of high-energy particles around
a black hole, known as a firewall.
This would contradict Einstein’s
theory of general relativity. LIGO’s
third run should settle the matter.
Are black holes even real?
A black hole’s whole shtick is
that you can’t see it. The only ways
we know they are out there are
that we see gas, dust and stars
“We’re making the
transition from having
a slow drip of events
to opening the faucet”
falling in, and we can detect
gravitational waves from them.
Then again, it is possible that at
least some of the things we think
are black holes are in fact exotic,
hypothetical objects called boson
stars. Their strange form prevents
them collapsing to become a
black hole, but they would
distort space-time in much the
same way. The only way to find
out if boson stars are real is to
search gravitational wave signals
for a distinct frequency. ■
Air pollution
may reduce
sperm quality
DIRTY air in urban areas may be
having an impact on human sperm. A
study shows that mice exposed to tiny
pollution particles have worse sperm
quality and make less of it than mice
that don’t breathe these particles in.
Many health problems are linked to
pollution emitted by petrol and diesel
cars, including respiratory issues,
cancer and stunted development in
childhood. However, whether the
smallest of these air pollutants, those
less than 2.5 micrometres across
known as PM2.5, could also contribute
to increasing male infertility rates
around the world is still unclear.
Elaine Costa at the University of
Sao Paulo in Brazil and her colleagues
studied four groups of mice. The
team exposed three of the groups
to PM2.5 for different proportions
of their lives. The fourth was exposed
to filtered air.
Costa’s team analysed sperm
development when the mice became
adults. There was a deterioration in
the tubes in the testes that produce
sperm in mice that had been exposed
to PM2.5 compared with those
breathing filtered air. And the quality
of sperm was worse in mice exposed
to pollution before and after birth.
Exposure to air pollution after birth
seemed to have the biggest effect
on sperm. DNA tests also showed
changes in the activity of genes
related to testicular cell function.
“These findings provide more
evidence that governments need
to implement public policies to control
air pollution in big cities,” said Costa
in a press release. The work was
presented at a conference of the
Endocrine Society in New Orleans.
More work is needed to understand
any link between poor air quality and
infertility in men, says Frank Kelly at
King’s College London. While animal
studies are useful in examining any
underlying mechanisms, the results
seen in mice don’t necessarily translate
to the same effects in humans, he says.
Adam Vaughan. ■
30 March 2019 | NewScientist | 13
NEWS & TECHNOLOGY

Puerto Rico at Arecibo applied the Bigger planets tend to accrete

Exoplanets for life requirements for the abiogenesis
zone to a list of known exoplanets
gas as they grow, becoming gas
giants like Neptune or Jupiter

in short supply in the habitable zone, of which we

have found 49. Only eight worlds
matched the criteria.
instead of rocky worlds like
Earth or Mars. Previous work
has suggested that planets larger
“Even these eight are bad than 1.7 times Earth’s radius are
Leah Crane the planet would be sterilised. because they have a large radius, likely to be gassy.
Because one is based on which means they might not be “If the planet is too big, it’d be
WE HAVE found more than 4000 temperature and the other on the rocky,” says Jusino-Maldonado, hard to think how life as we know
planets orbiting distant stars, but strength of certain wavelengths who presented the work last it could evolve,” says Ramses
it turns out that probably none of of light, the habitable zone and week at the Lunar and Planetary Ramirez at the Tokyo Institute of
them have the right conditions for the abiogenesis zone around any Science Conference in Texas. Technology. Of the eight planets
life to evolve, making Earth even star don’t always overlap. inside both zones, only one has a
more special than we thought. Marcos Jusino-Maldonado and Kepler-452b is the only known radius less than 1.7 times Earth’s:
We normally consider a planet Abel Méndez at the University of exoplanet that might host life a planet called Kepler-452b, which
to be capable of hosting life if its orbits a sun-like star 1400 light
surface is the right temperature years away. Its radius is 1.63 Earth
for liquid water. This depends on radii, so it is right on the edge.
how close it orbits its star – too That means that out of more
far and any water will freeze, but than 4000 exoplanets, we may
too close and it will boil away. have found only one where life
The area around each star where could evolve – or perhaps none,
these water-friendly orbits lie is if Kepler-452b turns out to be a
called the habitable zone. gas planet. The only two planets
But just being technically we know for sure to be rocky
habitable doesn’t mean that a and in both the habitable and
world has the right conditions abiogenesis zones are Earth and
for life to arise. One of the leading Mars. As far as we can tell, Mars
explanations for life’s emergence doesn’t have any life.
on Earth is that ultraviolet light This shows just how difficult
from the sun played a role. The it probably is for life to arise.
idea is that UV light hitting simple “If our goal is to find life, we
molecules gave them enough need to be finding a lot more
energy to react and form the more exoplanets than we can see
complicated compounds required with the technology we have
to make a living organism. now,” says Ramirez.
In line with this idea, Plus, there is no guarantee
NASA AMES/JPL-CALTECH/T. PYLE

researchers last year introduced that a planet where life could

a concept called the abiogenesis arise will actually have anything
zone: the area around a star living on it. “It’s getting harder
where a planet could get enough to find origins of life,” says
UV light to start this prebiotic Jusino-Maldonado. “It seems
chemistry, but not so much that very unlikely.” ■

Child abuse scanned the brains of 110 adults

hospitalised for major depressive
brain link to disorder. The team also asked about
the severity of their depression and
depression whether they had experienced
neglect or emotional, sexual or
A STUDY of more than 100 people’s physical abuse during childhood.
brains suggests that abuse during Statistical analysis revealed that
childhood is linked to changes in brain those who had experienced childhood
structure that may make depression abuse were more likely to have a
more severe in later life. smaller insular cortex, a brain region
Nils Opel at the University of involved in emotional awareness.
Münster, Germany, and his colleagues Over the following two years,
75 of the adults experienced another
bout of depression. The team found
that those who had both a history of
childhood abuse and a smaller insular
cortex were more likely to have a
relapse (The Lancet Psychiatry,
doi.org/c3r9).
“This is pointing to a mechanism:
“Childhood trauma may lead
to altered brain structures
and these may lead to the
recurrence of depression”
that childhood trauma leads to brain
structure alterations, and these lead
to recurrence of depression and worse
outcomes,” says Opel.
The findings suggest that people
with depression who experienced
abuse as children could need
specialised treatment, he says.
Brain changes can be reversible,
says Opel, and the team is planning
to test which types of therapies
might work best for this group.
Ruby Prosser Scully ■

14 | NewScientist | 30 March 2019

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 IN BRIEF

AI docs are easily

duped into errors
COMPOSITE , JAYANNE ENGLISH, UNIVERSITY OF MANITOBA; F. SCHINZEL ET AL.; NRAO/AUI/NSF; DRAO/CGPS; AND NASA/IRAS

MEDICAL artificial intelligence

systems that analyse scans can
be easily fooled.
Sam Finlayson at Harvard
Medical School and his colleagues
duped three AIs designed for
looking at medical images into
misclassifying them by simply
altering a few pixels.
In one example, the team ever-
so-slightly altered a picture of a
mole that had been classified by
one AI as benign with 99 per cent
confidence. It then classified the
altered image as malignant with
100 per cent confidence, despite
changes indistinguishable to the
human eye. The other two duped
AIs were for detecting eye damage
from diabetes in retina scans and
spotting a collapsed lung from
an X-ray (Science, doi.org/c3rf).
Even if the chance of images
being altered in a way that fools
such systems is low, if medical AIs
Exploding star shoots pulsar us to see this,” said Frank Schinzel, at the National Radio
Astronomy Observatory in Virginia, in a statement. He become widespread, it could lead
into space like a cannonball and his colleagues observed the incredible scene with to many cases of misclassification.
a radio telescope in New Mexico called the Very Large
NEED a push? You would be hard-pressed to find a more Array. They reported their results at a meeting of the
powerful one than that from a supernova – an explosion American Astronomical Society in California.
Skin pigment may
in which a dying star ejects most of its mass to leave a The pulsar is 6500 light years from Earth. It is speeding
compact core behind called a pulsar. In the image above, away from the supernova at more than 1100 kilometres make better bionics
the blast has happened and the pulsar is racing away. per second, fast enough to let it escape the Milky Way.
It is seen with a streak of particles and magnetic The expanding debris of the supernova initially ELECTRONIC human implants
energy stretching behind it for 13 light years. The outpaced the pulsar, but slowed as it met dust and gas in could one day be built with
pulsar is at the left end of the yellow tail, heading surrounding space. After 5000 years, the pulsar caught melanin, the pigment in skin
away from the big bubble, which is made up of the up with the edge of this debris bubble and burst free. It and hair, thanks to a process that
debris from the supernova. has been another 5000 years since then, and the pulsar makes it a better conductor.
“It’s very rare for a pulsar to get enough of a kick for is now 53 light years away from the centre of the bubble. Clumps of eumelanin, a type
of melanin, are typically made up
of disordered sheets on top of one
Sedative may ease harmful memories Straight after the procedure, another. By heating samples in
half the people were tested on a vacuum, Paolo Tassini at the
A DRUG used for anaesthesia can Studies in animals suggest that, recall of the stories. This group Laboratory for Nanomaterials and
make upsetting memories less when we retrieve a memory, there remembered both equally well. Devices in Italy and his colleagues
vivid. It may one day be used is a short window afterwards in The rest were tested 24 hours found that the sheets reordered
to help some people with post- which it is possible to modify that after having propofol. These themselves into a parallel state.
traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). memory. To see if drugs may play people were 12 per cent worse This improved its conductivity.
Bryan Strange at the Technical a role, the team asked 50 people on average at remembering If modified eumelanin replaced
University of Madrid in Spain and to memorise two stories with emotional bits of the recalled metals in bioelectronics, it would
his colleagues found that when upsetting content a week before story compared with the one that have the advantage of avoiding
people had the sedative propofol they were due to be sedated for wasn’t recalled. However, they an immune reaction. However,
straight after recalling a story, medical reasons. Just before being remembered emotionally neutral it is still a lot less conductive than
they remembered its distressing sedated, they were prompted to parts of both stories equally well copper (Frontiers in Chemistry,
elements less well 24 hours later. recall memories of one story. (Science Advances, doi.org/c3rg). DOI: 10.3389/fchem.2019.00162).

30 March 2019 | NewScientist | 17


IN BRIEF
Crop waste could
power jet engines
JET fuel made from plant waste
could pack more of a punch than
standard fuel. It may eventually
help to power greener aviation.
Flying produces 2 per cent of
global carbon emissions, a figure
projected to soar to in excess of
10 per cent by 2050. So numerous
groups are working on ways of
limiting fossil fuel use in aviation.
Ning Li at the Dalian Institute of
Chemical Physics in China and his
team have found a relatively simple
and efficient way to turn cellulose
into polycycloalkanes, compounds
which should make an ideal jet fuel.
To avoid causing environmental
damage, cellulose could come from
non-edible parts of many crops.
Although the team has yet to test
the fuel in an aircraft, its properties
suggest it will be good for the job.
Jet fuels need to pack as much
energy into the space of aircraft fuel
tanks as possible, yet still have a low
freezing point so it won’t freeze at
high altitude. Standard, oil-derived
Jet A-1 fuel freezes at -47°C and has
an energy density of 35 megajoules
per litre. Li says his mix freezes at
-48°C and should have an energy
density of more than 37 megajoules
per litre (Joule, doi.org/c3r4).
There are hitches, though. One is
the use of dichloromethane, which
is hazardous, in the process. An
alternative would have to be found.
And crop waste is a finite resource.
CHRIS PEARSALL/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
18 | NewScientist | 30 March 2019
Highly charged cloud may hold clue to atmospheric mystery
A STORM over India produced
an electric potential of 1.3 billion
volts – 10 times the highest cloud
voltage previously recorded.
The finding could help explain
a puzzle: how gamma rays are
produced during storms.
Inside a storm cloud, positively
charged water droplets rise while
negatively charged hail falls. This
creates a difference in charge
between the top and bottom of
the cloud – a vertical electric field.
That is what happened when
the record-breaking voltage was
generated in a storm in 2014 over
Pack of bots slither
and change shape
A SWARM of robots inspired by
living cells can squeeze through
gaps and keep moving even if
some of its bots fail.
Cells gather and collectively
migrate under certain conditions,
such as when inflammatory cells
travel through the blood to a
wound to help heal it. To mimic
this, Hod Lipson at Columbia
University in New York and his
colleagues created 25 disc-shaped
robots that can join together.
Individually, the bots can’t
move, but once stuck together,
the swarm can slither around by
making individual bots expand
and contract at different times.
It can use this process to travel
or to surround an object and
transport it. Many biologically
inspired robots look like animals,
but are constructed from complex
components that make it difficult
for them to heal or adapt their
shape, says Lipson. Robotic
swarms have the potential to self-
assemble, and can change in scale.
The swarm was still able to
move even when 20 per cent of
individual bots weren’t working.
The team also tested computer
simulations of much bigger
swarms of up to 100,000 bots
(Nature, doi.org/gfw833).
For new stories every day, visit newscientist.com/news
Ooty in India. Its magnitude
has only just come to light after
researchers re-examined old data.
Sunil Gupta at the Tata Institute
of Fundamental Research in India
and his team made the finding
while going over detections from
2014 of muons – subatomic
particles generated by cosmic rays
hitting the atmosphere. As muons
pass through an electric field,
they gain energy and more make
it to ground level than usual. This
allowed the team to simulate the
storm’s voltage (Physical Review
Letters, doi.org/gfw36h).
Bears use mimicry to send a message
SUN bears copy facial expressions to
communicate, something we usually
associate with people and great apes.
A team at the University of
Portsmouth, UK, studied 22 sun
bears at the Bornean Sun Bear
Conservation Centre in Malaysia. In
total, 21 matched the open-mouthed
expressions of playmates during
face-to-face interactions, with
13 doing so within 1 second
(Scientific Reports, doi.org/c3rz).
“Mimicking the facial expressions
of others in exact ways is one of the
pillars of human communication,”
says Marina Davila-Ross, who was
Such high voltages in a cloud
may explain how thunderstorms
initiate terrestrial gamma
ray flashes (TGFs), which can
temporarily blind satellites.
Gupta suggests electrons with
an energy of 1.3 billion volts
could easily produce TGFs.
But Maribeth Stolzenburg
at the University of Mississippi
questions that. She points to
the lack of lightning detected in
the Ooty storm and the present
understanding of TGFs, which ties
their production to the initiation
stage of intracloud lightning.
DANIELA HARTMANN/PA WIRE
part of the team. “Other primates and
dogs are known to mimic each other,
but only great apes and humans were
previously known to show such
complexity in their facial mimicry.”
Sun bears have no special
evolutionary link to humans, unlike
monkeys or apes, nor are they
domesticated like dogs. The team
believes this means the behaviour
must also be present in other species.
While the bears prefer a solitary
life, the team says that they engage
in gentle and rough play and may
use mimicry to indicate which type
of play they are interested in.
 INSIGHT PORNOGRAPHY BLOCK
PLAINPICTURE/DANIEL K SCHWEITZER
No porn please, we’re British
The UK is set to go ahead with restrictions on online pornography
that could end up being a privacy nightmare, says James Ball
A LONG-PLANNED change to
the way people in the UK access
online pornography may finally
take place in April. The move,
which has been pushed back by
the UK government a number
of times and could face further
delays, will see users blocked
from virtually all websites
hosting pornography unless
they prove they are over 18.
The regulation will apply
whenever someone in the UK
visits a site, hosted anywhere in
the world, whose main aim is the
distribution of pornography. The
system will be overseen by the
British Board of Film Classification
(BBFC), which is in charge of film
and television age ratings.
20 | NewScientist | 30 March 2019
The BBFC will certify age- clear whether the restrictions to have accessed pornographic
verification schemes run by other will achieve the desired goal material: 59 per cent of 11 to
entities. So far, the only major of preventing children from 16-year-old boys reported having
provider looks to be MindGeek, accessing pornography. actively searched for it, compared
a private company that owns A 2016 report by Elena with 25 per cent of girls.
many of the world’s largest Martellozzo and Andrew However, the report also noted
producers of pornography, as Monaghan at Middlesex that young people were as likely
well as many of the most popular University found that 65 per to have accidentally seen such
pornography streaming sites. cent of 15-year-olds had seen content through pop-ups or
It has set up a company, AgeID, pornographic content on the similar as through seeking out
to operate its verification scheme, internet. It also found that sites offering this content. One
which looks likely to become the 42 per cent of 15-year-olds wanted in four reported having been sent
industry standard (see “How the to emulate something they had pornographic material. Neither
block will work”, right). seen in such content. In general, of these would be affected by the
Privacy campaigners are boys were more likely than girls proposed block.
concerned that placing the details Martellozzo and Monaghan
of millions of pornography users “Almost 60 per cent of 11 to have been conducting further
in the hands of a single company 16-year-old boys reported research on children’s use of
could create a huge hacking target having actively searched online pornography and its
for blackmailers. But it also isn’t for pornographic content” potential harms, but the analysis
For daily news stories, visit newscientist.com/news
Internet users may use anonymity
software to avoid the porn block
of their data isn’t complete and
won’t be finished until later in
the year, they told New Scientist.
Figures from the UK’s National
Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Children (NSPCC),
which has advocated for the
block, suggest that children
themselves are worried about
online pornography.
Children at risk
The charity says its Childline
service, which offers anonymous
counselling, was contacted by
more than 2000 children between
April 2014 and March 2017 who
had concerns after viewing
pornographic material online,
including about addiction.
Around 200 of those counselling
sessions were for children aged
under 12. But the NSPCC says it is
unaware of any research showing
that reducing access to such
material mitigates harm.
If the evidence base for the
effectiveness of the new policy
is limited, the same is true of its
potential downsides.
Campaigners characterise
the AgeID verification process as
creating a UK-wide database of
adults accessing pornography,
with no additional legal
safeguards against it being used
for other purposes and with the
potential for misuse by hackers
or rogue employees.
Advocates of the scheme deny
such a database will be created,
saying only the minimum
necessary data will be recorded.
It is difficult to say who is right,
given that neither AgeID nor the
BBFC has provided a public
explanation of the technical
details behind the system.
For example, suppose the
system records when particular
sites look up a user in the age-
verification database – which
is legitimate data needed to
operate such a system. It could
be highly embarrassing if these
records were leaked, revealing,
for example, that someone had
visited niche sites, or sites with
gay content for an individual
who presented as heterosexual.
“I don’t know why any
pornography consumers would
sign up for AgeID given the
obvious concerns,” says
cybersecurity consultant Graham
Cluley. “I – like many others – am
advising internet users that they
might be wiser to put their trust
elsewhere if they’re concerned
about keeping their pornography-
viewing habit private.”
One way of doing that is to turn
to the dark web, which can only
be accessed through software that
the averagely tech-savvy teenager
should have no problem using
to get around the block. This
unregulated area of the internet
could, in turn, expose people to
more extreme pornography or
illegal activities, the exact
opposite goal of the age-
verification scheme.
There are also simpler ways to
avoid the block: using a virtual
private network (VPN) allows a
user to pretend to be accessing
the internet from another
country, which would bypass
AgeID altogether. It isn’t without
risks: unscrupulous VPNs could
exploit records of people’s
pornography usage or even place
malware on the user’s computer.
Additionally, there has been
no attempt to restrict access to
pornographic material on social
HOW THE BLOCK WILL WORK
The day-to-day implementation of
the UK’s age-verification scheme is
being managed by AgeID, a subsidiary verification via text message is also
of MindGeek, which operates some
of the pornography industry’s most
recognisable brands.
The scheme will have a single
sign-on for sites operated by
MindGeek and by pornography
producers. Once someone has created privacy – though not embarrassed
an account and had their age verified, in person – there is an option to buy
they shouldn’t need to do so again.
Users can choose to verify
themselves using their driver’s licence anonymously online.
A YouGov survey conducted in March
found that few people in the UK had
heard of the coming pornography block,
though more frequent users were more
likely to be aware
Yes I was aware No I was not aware
General population
24
76
Use pornography every or most days
47
53
1-3 times a week
48
52
Once or twice a month
33
67
Less than once a month
33
67
Never
15
Per cent
SOURCE: yougov.co.uk
networks, as the scope of the
regulation is restricted to sites
focused on the distribution of
such content. While networks
such as Facebook and Tumblr have
policies banning this material,
Twitter, Reddit and other sites
permit it under their terms of use. embarrassing if records
Private messaging services such
as WhatsApp have no means of
blocking pornographic content.
AgeID itself has expressed
concerns about this legal
loophole. “If such platforms
contain pornographic material,
then not requiring them to age
verify their users is contradictory area before the age-verification
or by paying a small refundable charge internet users if they take effect
on a credit card. An option involving
reportedly available. However,
as these are available to under-18s,
it isn’t clear what extra checks will be including 53 per cent of users
used, and won’t be until the scheme
is under way.
For those conscious about
a £4.99 pass in local shops, which
will offer a code to verify their age
to child protection laws,” the firm
said in a consultation document
produced in October 2018.
Aside from these practical
considerations, there are
questions over the legality of
the scheme. Campaigners are
considering a legal challenge.
“It could be open to challenge,
either on privacy grounds,
or on free expression,” says
Jim Killock, director of the
Open Rights Group. “There are
questions about market access
and competition also. These are
being actively considered.”
Killock’s immediate worry
is privacy safeguards for the
companies operating age-
verification schemes. In response
to concerns from the Open Rights
85
Group and others, the BBFC has
set up a voluntary privacy code of
conduct, which AgeID has signed
up to. But Killock fears that won’t
be enough to prevent people’s
data being used for marketing
or advertising purposes.
When contacted by New
Scientist, a spokesperson for
“It could be highly
of people’s pornography
use were publicly leaked”
MindGeek, responding on behalf
of AgeID, asked that questions
be directed to the BBFC. The BBFC
told New Scientist that it was
unable to discuss its role in this
scheme comes into force.
As it stands, the new rules are
set to come as a shock to many
in the next month. A recent
survey by YouGov found that
76 per cent of the UK population
were unaware of the block,
willing to tell the pollster they
regularly accessed such content
(see graph, above).
The debate around the plan
has, to date, been muted. Will it
remain so when the public –
quite suddenly, in some cases –
find out about it? ■
30 March 2019 | NewScientist | 21
COMMENT
Genetic diversity matters
Too many participants in research studies are of white European
descent – and that is skewing the science, says Scott Williams
WE ARE at the beginning of a
revolution in medicine. Our
burgeoning knowledge of disease
genetics promises treatments
tailored to individual needs. But
there is a big obstacle in the way:
our failure to incorporate diverse,
representative populations in
studies. That is not only affecting
treatment outcomes, but also
hampering our understanding
of the basic science.
Genome-wide association
studies (GWAS), which use data
sets comparing millions of
genetic variants in people with a
specific disease to people without
it, have come to play a central part
in genetic research, successfully
identifying many variants that
correlate with the likelihood of
disease or treatment efficacy and
safety. But GWAS findings often
aren’t replicated across all ethnic
groups, making representative
sampling crucial.
A duty of care
Media coverage of suicides must do more to
protect those at risk, says Rory O’Connor
THE apparent suicide last week
of Mike Thalassitis, a former
contestant on the UK reality TV
show Love Island, has once again
thrust into the spotlight what we
can do to protect the vulnerable.
Any such death is one too many.
It is encouraging to see ITV, Love
Island’s broadcaster, promising
to provide access to psychological
22 | NewScientist | 30 March 2019
JOSIE FORD
not only those at risk, but also
when they are suicidal. That is
why keeping people safe, and
mitigating suicide risk when
people are vulnerable, is vital.
This duty of care applies not
just to producers of reality TV
shows, but the wider news media.
We know that coverage of high-
support before, during and after profile suicides can increase
contestants appear on the show. the risk of suicidal behaviour.
Other broadcasters and But too often, that coverage fails
production companies must now to highlight the complexity of
make the same commitments. each case. Suicide rarely has a
Suicide is statistically a rare
event. In the UK, of every 100,000 “We know that coverage of
people, 10 will die by their own high-profile suicides can
hand in a given year. This makes increase the risk of suicidal
it nigh-on impossible to identify behaviour”
In a paper published with my
colleagues Giorgio Sirugo and
Sarah Tishkoff at the University
of Pennsylvania, I analysed ethnic
diversity in studies held in the
GWAS Catalog maintained by the
US National Human Genome
Research Institute and the
European Bioinformatics
Institute (Cell, vol 177, p 26).
Over half of the GWAS had
been conducted in populations of
white European descent, far more
than the proportion of the world’s
population this group represents.
When we looked at the numbers
of individuals from different
ethnicities within the studies, the
findings were even more stark:
more than 78 per cent were white
European. Just 2 per cent were
African and 1 per cent Hispanic.
There are many specific
examples illustrating how this
pattern fails to serve both basic
science and clinical care. With
single cause. It is generally the
product of a complex set of
circumstances, often beginning
with early life trauma, later
mental health problems, fear
of failure and a belief that loved
ones would be better off if they
were dead.
In the UK, the charity
Samaritans maintains guidelines
on how to report celebrity
suicides. The basic message is
simple: avoid speculation about
causes, don’t report explicit
details about methods and don’t
offer simplistic explanations. Do
offer messages of compassion,
hope and recovery.
These guidelines should be
For more opinion articles, visit newscientist.com/opinion
the blood thinner warfarin, for
instance, a set of genetic tests
may be used to adjust dose. But
how warfarin is metabolised
varies across individuals and
between ethnic groups. Dosing
recommendations based on
European-derived data may have
grave treatment consequences
for people of a different ethnicity.
What are the solutions?
Researchers, as well as funders,
need to allocate the resources
necessary to include diverse
populations in their studies.
MASKOT/PLAINPICTURE
That will require outreach and
education among populations
that historically have been
underserved by medical research
to help people understand how
their data are used and to allay
concerns about research ethics
and personal privacy.
We will also need to broaden
and strengthen collaborations
around the world to develop
the scientific and intellectual
resources needed to increase
inclusion in human genetic
studies. The falling cost of
genome sequencing is allowing
us to become truly inclusive in
genetic studies. The reality on
the ground must now catch up. ■
Scott Williams is a geneticist at Case
Western Reserve University’s School
of Medicine in Ohio
adhered to. This isn’t about
censorship, but about keeping
people alive. Suicidal thoughts
wax and wane, and despite the
unbearable pain, things can and
do get better. Every life matters:
we must work together to ensure
that we protect everyone who is
vulnerable, whatever degree of
fame they achieve in life. ■
Rory O’Connor is professor of health
psychology and director of the Suicidal
Behaviour Research Lab at the
University of Glasgow, UK.
Need a listening ear? UK Samaritans:
116123 (samaritans.org). Visit
bit.ly/SuicideHelplines for hotlines
and websites for other countries
ANALYSIS Transport emissions
We must travel less to
stop climate change
Adam Vaughan
EVERYONE knows that changing
the way we get around could reduce
climate emissions: cycle and walk
rather than drive, take the train, not
the plane, and if you use a car make it
an electric one. Now a European Union
body is pushing a more controversial
solution: travelling less.
The EU’s position since 2011 has
been that “curbing mobility is not an
option”. Last week, the European
Academies’ Science Advisory Council
(EASAC), which represents the EU’s
national science academies, published
a major report on transport emissions,
urging the EU to reverse its stance.
It is high time we at least started
the discussion. In 2016, the transport
sector overtook energy as the UK’s
biggest source of greenhouse gas
emissions, a milestone the rest of
the EU could hit in the 2020s.
It is increasingly clear that even a
rapid switch to electric vehicles won’t
be enough to meet the goals of the
Paris climate agreement, which aims
to limit global warming to 2°C above
pre-industrial levels. “Even if you did
all the good things, there is still no way
to meet the targets, particularly in
freight,” says William Gillett, director
of EASAC’s energy programme.
In the EU, almost three-quarters of
transport emissions come from cars,
buses and heavy goods vehicles. The
bloc supports electric cars, which are
getting cheaper but still accounted for
just 1.5 per cent of the EU’s new car
sales in 2017.
Transport can’t be decarbonised in
time to meet the more ambitious 1.5°C
warming target outlined by the UN
climate science panel last year, says
Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre
for Climate Change Research in
“Even a rapid switch to
electric vehicles won’t
meet the goals of the
Paris climate agreement”
Manchester, UK. “There is a very clear
message: if we are serious about Paris,
we have to reduce the demand for
transport too.”
But how? Anderson says ride-
sharing apps are helping, and believes
electric bicycles could be a game
changer for short journeys.
Simply putting up taxes on transport
is unlikely to help, says Gillett. Instead,
he believes we need ideas that don’t
hamper trade and damage economic
growth. The carbon footprint of
electric cars could be reduced, he says,
by building more battery factories
in Europe, rather than importing
batteries from Asian countries with
fossil fuel-heavy power supplies.
Personal carbon allowances, where
everyone has a fixed quota for how
much they can emit, could be an idea
worth considering, says Tina Fawcett
of the Environmental Change Institute
at the University of Oxford.
Capping travel on a per person basis
would be the fairest way to address
the problem, as it is the wealthiest
who travel and pollute the most.
“We already have demand
management, it’s called the cost of
public transport, the price of petrol.
A small cohort travel as much as they
want [because they can afford to],”
says Anderson. In a world where
transport emissions were rationed,
the wealthiest would see the largest
reduction in their mobility.
Political challenges mean any curb
in transport is likely to be a long way
off. Children are striking for action
on climate change and tens of
thousands of people took part in a
climate protest in Paris on 16 March.
But it was the ongoing, months-long
backlash against France’s plans for a
fuel tax to cut carbon emissions that
dominated the nation’s news coverage
that weekend. ■
30 March 2019 | NewScientist | 23
APERTURE

Clockwise from top floods outside Beira, carrying sacks of rice;

left: A family looks for Mozambique; people schoolchildren in
a missing boy; a man on wade along a flooded Zimbabwe pass a
the remains of a bridge street in central recent mudslide
in Zimbabwe; Cyclone Mozambique; a column
Idai circles above of people in Beira
south-east Africa; seek safety, some

24 | NewScientist | 30 March 2019

Idai’s trail of destruction
IN ZIMBABWE, a family is forced to dig in search
of a boy buried in the mud (pictured, top left).
This grim scene is one of many playing out
across south-east Africa in the wake of the
devastation wrought by Cyclone Idai.
The extreme storm burst riverbanks, ripped
down power lines and destroyed roads and
farmland, forcing hundreds of thousands of
people from their homes and affecting millions.
Winds reached 170 kilometres per hour.
The UN has confirmed that hundreds
of people have been killed in Mozambique,
Zimbabwe and Malawi in one of the worst
storms on record to affect Africa, and maybe
the entire southern hemisphere.
But the death toll is predicted to rise much
higher. Mozambique’s president Filipe Nyusi
estimated that at least 1000 might have lost
their lives in that country alone.
Aid groups say 90 per cent of the city of Beira,
the port hit when Cyclone Idai made landfall on
14 or 15 March, has been destroyed. There are
reports of hundreds of bodies washing up on
the sides of a flooded road outside the city.
The storm first made landfall in Mozambique
on 4 March, bringing heavy rainfalls and flooding
to Malawi. It then returned to the Mozambique
Channel between the mainland and Madagascar
before developing into a cyclone. It made a
second landfall, this time near Beira, before
pushing inland to Zimbabwe’s eastern border,
hitting the mountainous Chimanimani district
the hardest. Ruby Prosser Scully

Photographers
Clockwise from top left: Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi/AP/
REX/Shutterstock; Reuters/Philimon Bulawayo;
Eumetsat; Adrien Barbier/AFP/Getty Images
(two images); Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP/Getty Images;
Zinyange Auntony/AFP/Getty Images

30 March 2019 | NewScientist | 25

WA S T E O F S PA C E
Earth’s orbit is crammed with junk. Since the launch of Soviet satellite Sputnik 1 in 1957, the skies
over our heads have become increasingly crowded with the objects and debris we have placed or
dumped up there. The more of this space refuse there is, the more likely it is there will be potentially
catastrophic collisions with working satellites or spacecraft. Here is our guide to what’s circling our
world and the best ways to deal with it. By Madeleine Finlay

SPACE JUNK LOW

How it breaks down EARTH
ORBIT

43%
160km to 2000km

Around 15,900
fragments from artificial objects
explosions and are being tracked
collisions in this orbit

Notable objects:

21%
International
Space Station
ORBIT: 408km
old spacecraft
Hubble Space
Telescope

17%
540km

SpaceX comms
rocket upper stages satellites
625km

13%
mission-related debris
MEDIUM
EARTH ORBIT
2000km to 35,000km

6%
Around 1500
tracked artificial
objects in this orbit
operational
satellites of which: Notable objects:
Westford Needles
59% Communication 480 million tiny
9% Earth observation antennae placed
8% Navigation in orbit in 1963
7% Military surveillance 3500-3800km
7% Other
5% Astrophysics Vanguard 1
4% Earth science and Oldest satellite still
meteorology in orbit – launched
SOURCE: ESA/SWFOUND.ORG
in 1958
<3840km

Constellations for
navigation, e.g. GPS
~23,000km

26 | NewScientist | 30 March 2019

1. REDUCE, REUSE, RECYCLE
The pollution of outer space is rapidly approaching a crisis
point. Preventing orbits from becoming unusable will require
the same approaches we have been using on Earth
“The situation is critical,” says Luisa
Innocenti, head of the European Space
Agency’s Clean Space Programme.
If we keep throwing junk into outer
space, she says, whole orbits could be
rendered unusable for satellites. The
nightmare scenario is the onset of the
Kessler effect, in which debris from one
collision cascades into further impacts,
creating a self-sustaining effect that
endangers satellites and threatens
the future of space flight. Getting rid
of what is up there already is a start
(see “Cosmic clean-up”, page 28), but
to keep the environment above our
heads in a usable condition, we need to
adopt some good Earth-based wisdom:
reduce, reuse, recycle.
Reducing the number of satellites
will be tricky. More than 390 objects
were launched into orbit in 2018, and
the number is likely to keep on rising.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX has recently
received permission to launch 12,000
satellites into orbit to provide internet
coverage from space, and the OneWeb
satellite constellation hopes to do the
same thing with about 900 more.
For Innocenti, that makes debris
mitigation vital. “There is no point in
cleaning up if the day after someone
launches a satellite and abandons
it there,” she says. She advocates
“designing for demise”, programming
satellites to self-destruct within
25 years of their missions ending.
This can mean either blasting a craft to
a nearby “graveyard orbit” or ensuring
it safely burns up in the atmosphere.
The Clean Space Programme is
investigating foldable satellites that
open up on re-entry to ensure they
fully burn up, and sails for lower-orbit
satellites that could produce enough
drag to send them gliding down.
RemoveDEBRIS, the team behind a
number of recent debris-removal
experiments, has developed its own
version, a dragsail, to bring its test
spacecraft out of orbit.
GETTING CROWDED
The number of tracked objects in
orbit continues to grow
1962 500 objects
Finding ways to empty fuel tanks
and disconnect batteries when
decommissioning satellites would
also reduce the risk of explosions, but
more experiments are needed before
these technologies can be trusted not 1972 3500 objects
to destroy spacecraft prematurely.
Reuse might be a more appealing
option for craft owners. SpaceX and Blue
Origin, founded by Amazon's Jeff Bezos,
have already pioneered reusable rockets,
promising a shift to green space flight.
But they probably won’t be eco-friendly
“If we keep throwing junk 1982 6000 objects
into outer space, whole
orbits could be unusable”
in the long run: by lowering the cost of
lift-off, they are also likely to increase
the amount of stuff we send into space.
Another option for reuse may come
from robotic capture arms of the kind 1992 8000 objects
proposed for debris disposal. These could
be used to service satellites or bring dead
ones back to life. Altius Space Machines,
a company based in Colorado, is working
on a magnetic connector called a MagTag
that could be attached to satellites,
allowing a service craft to latch on and
transfer data, power or even provide
software updates. This could all mean 2002 10,000 objects
that spacecraft might soon be getting
breakdown cover.
Fully fledged recycling, however, is
some way off. US defence agency DARPA
has considered employing robotic
systems to grab old bits of debris and
turn them into new satellites, but has
abandoned this in favour of developing
in-orbit servicing for spacecraft. Some 2012 15,000 objects
firms have even contemplated building
craft from space junk for missions
further afield, such as to colonise Mars.
But with most capture mechanisms
still in development, and the difficulty
of building something while in orbit,
SOURCE: ESA
the odds of Frankensteining a satellite
together are still pretty low. >
30 March 2019 | NewScientist | 27
 2. COSMIC CLEAN-UP
With a sea of debris in orbit posing an
increasingly serious problem for space-faring
nations, engineers are busy coming up with
solutions. Here are some of the most creative
TETHERS
In space: 2017
Think of it as space-fishing. Get close to a
piece of debris, hook it on a line and haul
it back into the atmosphere. Sounds
simple, but plenty can go wrong. In 2017,
the Japanese Aerospace Exploration
Agency tested its Kounotori Integrated
Tether Experiment (KITE), which was
supposed to deploy a 720-metre-long
electrified tether with a grabbing
mechanism on the end. The interaction
between the tether and Earth’s magnetic
field would then generate a force large
enough to drag any hooked debris into a
doomed orbit. Unfortunately, the tether
never unfurled and KITE was sent to its
own fiery death not long after.
NETS
In space: 2018
If a rod won’t do it, try another way to fish.
RemoveDEBRIS, a consortium of space
companies and research institutes funded
by the European Commission, plans to
catch debris in a net. Performing a test in
orbit earlier this year, the team slung its
5×5-metre Kevlar web at a small CubeSat
released for the experiment. Masses in
the corners helped the net wrap around
the dummy junk while a motorised winch
acted as a drawstring to pull it tight. In
the future, nets would be tethered to
spacecraft, which could then reel in the
debris or tow it out of orbit.
HARPOONS (pictured)
In space: 2019
Piercing a defunct satellite is a risky
business – you could hit a fuel tank or
battery, causing an explosion that would
send even more debris hurtling through
space, or break off a weaker section such
as a solar panel. But Guglielmo Aglietti,
director of Surrey Space Centre in the
UK, has reason to be confident. He has
AIRBUS UK
overseen pioneering harpoon tests on
Earth and in orbit over the past few
28 | NewScientist | 30 March 2019
months that successfully demonstrate the
idea's potential. “We haven’t really detected
fragments and so on flying away,” he says.
GECKO GRIPPERS
In space: 2023
For finer control than nets and harpoons,
scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion
Laboratory in Pasadena, California, have
been designing sticky robotic arms capable
of grasping and manipulating debris,
inspired by hair-like structures on the
underside of geckos’ feet. The structures
stick with electrostatic forces, and luckily
for the lizards, the effect doesn’t wear off
with use. Tests on the International Space
Station have shown that the grippers can
capture and release different objects, but
a trial in outer space has yet to come.
PARTICLE BEAMS
In space: 2028
Grabbing onto debris can be downright
dangerous, making removing junk from
afar an appealing prospect. Thankfully, in
the vacuum of space, it doesn’t take much
force to get something moving. Beams
of charged particles shot from a distance,
known as ion beam shepherds, could
decelerate debris and send it tumbling
THE HOLE STORY
Even the smallest specks
of space junk can cause
significant damage
29,000
objects 100mm wide or bigger
Collision could
destroy a satellite
250,000
objects 10mm wide or bigger
Collision could
disable a spacecraft
166 million
objects 1mm wide or bigger
Collision could destroy
vital hardware
SOURCE: ESA
into the atmosphere to safely burn up.
Unfortunately, the imparted momentum
would also push the clean-up spacecraft
in the opposite direction. That has led
scientists at Tohoku University in Japan
to devise a system capable of ejecting
beams in opposite directions. Known
as a helicon thruster, this would allow
a spacecraft to blast junk while staying
a constant distance away, out of danger.
LASERS
In space: ~2038
With recent talk of a US Space Force,
putting lasers into orbit might seem a
terrible idea. But what if they stayed safely
in scientists' hands? “Space-based lasers
already exist,” says Massimiliano Vasile at
the University of Strathclyde, UK, though
not terribly powerful ones. Much stronger
lasers would be needed to get rid of debris,
vaporising small pieces or pushing larger
objects into doomed orbits. For Vasile,
the risk is that we end up creating even
more junk or send something into an
unpredictable orbit. “There are all these
what ifs, and very few answers,” he says.
So, there is still some way to go before
we can play space invaders for real. ■
Madeleine Finlay is a writer based in the UK
 COVER STORY

HISTORY OF
V IOLE NCE
SIMON PEMBERTON

Neolithic Europe was subjected to a

devastating conquest. Colin Barras discovers
the untold story hidden in ancient DNA

HE iconic sarsen stones at Stonehenge people who replaced them is emerging.

T were erected some 4500 years ago.

Although the monument’s original
purpose is still disputed, we now know that
within a few centuries it became a memorial
to a vanished people. By then, almost every
Briton, from the south coast of England to the
north-east tip of Scotland, had been wiped out
by incomers. It isn’t clear exactly why they
disappeared so rapidly. But a picture of the
The migrants’ ultimate source was a group
of livestock herders called the Yamnaya who
occupied the Eurasian steppe north of the
Black Sea and the Caucasus mountains.
Britain wasn’t their only destination. Between
5000 and 4000 years ago, the Yamnaya and
their descendants colonised swathes of
Europe, leaving a genetic legacy that persists
to this day. Their arrival coincided with >

30 March 2019 | NewScientist | 29

 Ancient DNA
analysis reveals
that Corded Ware
people, who made
these pots, were
Yamnayan in origin
G. DAGLI ORTI/DEA
Kristiansen calls “mega-settlements”
with populations of up to 15,000 people.
In other words, Neolithic Europe appears to
have been prosperous, community-minded
and relatively peaceful. Then everything
changed.
Starting about 5000 years ago in south-east
Europe – a region bounded today by Ukraine
in the east and Hungary in the west – a new
style of burial custom appeared. The dead
were interred alone in what archaeologists
call “pit graves” rather than in communal
structures. The body was decorated with a red
pigment called ochre, and the grave chamber
covered with wooden beams and marked by
a mound of earth a few metres tall, dubbed

a kurgan. This distinctive burial custom

profound social and cultural changes. Burial
practices shifted dramatically, a warrior class
appeared, and there seems to have been a
sharp upsurge in lethal violence. “I’ve become
increasingly convinced there must have been
a kind of genocide,” says Kristian Kristiansen
at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
As he and others piece together the story,
one question resounds: were the Yamnaya
the most murderous people in history?
Before about 5000 years ago, Neolithic
Europe was inhabited by people much like
those who raised Stonehenge. They were
farmers with an urge to work together and
build large stone structures. “It looks like
these people were quite communal,” says
Kristiansen. And that community spirit
continued into the afterlife: many of their
megalithic monuments served as shared
graves – some containing the remains of
up to 200 people.
They were also innovators. Patterns of
wear on ancient cattle bones suggest they had
worked out how to use livestock to pull heavy
loads. They probably had wheeled vehicles
and there may even have been proto-roads
connecting communities. It looks like
they were coming together to live in what
originated on the Eurasian steppe where it
was associated in particular with the Yamnaya.
According to archaeologist Volker Heyd at the
University of Helsinki, Finland, its appearance
in Europe indicates a traumatic shift that
disrupted existing social patterns.
The disruption soon spread. In subsequent
decades, Yamnaya-like artefacts and
behaviour started popping up elsewhere on
the continent. By 4900 years ago, the Corded
Ware people – named after their distinctive
pottery and adopting many Yamnaya
customs – began to appear in central and
northern Europe. The big question is: how
and why did Yamnaya practices spread so
far and so fast?
Until about five years ago, most
archaeologists were convinced that this

EUROPE IS NOT ENOUGH

Almost all people of European
descent can trace their
paternal origins back to
inhabitants of the Eurasian
steppe. In recent years, it
has become clear that these
people, known as the Yamnaya,
and their descendants
travelled across the continent
during the Neolithic replacing
locals – particularly the men –
as they went (see main story).
Now we have discovered the
Yamnaya also migrated east.
A study by David Reich at
Harvard Medical School and
his colleagues posted to the
bioRxiv preprint server in 2018
gives us an idea of when and
how this happened. Using
DNA samples from the remains
of hundreds of people who
lived across south Asia
between about 7000 and
3000 years ago, the team
found evidence that Yamnaya-
related DNA began appearing
there between 4000 and
3000 years ago.
Those steppe pastoralists
mingled with people who
may have been related to the
inhabitants of the famous
Indus Valley Civilisation. In
doing so, they formed an
“Ancient North Indian”
population, one of the two
ancestral populations that
define the ancestry of most
people living in the Indian
subcontinent today. What’s
more, incomers from the
steppe may have brought
major cultural changes.
Speaking at New Scientist Live
in September, Reich pointed
out that people in the Indian
subcontinent today who carry
the largest amounts of Ancient
North Indian ancestry tend to
speak similar languages to one
another, and often (but not
always) belong to upper castes.
As in Europe, it looks like the
steppe migrants were largely
young, male and violent. A
study by Martin Richards at
the University of Huddersfield,
UK, and his colleagues found
that maternally inherited
mitochondrial DNA sequences
changed relatively little when
they arrived. By contrast,
between 60 and 90 per cent of
men now living in the area can
trace their paternally inherited
Y chromosome to Yamnaya-
related migrants.
“Indigenous males seem to
have been marginalised by the
new arrivals much more than
the women and were unable
to have children to the same
extent,” says Richards. “This
seems unlikely to have been
a wholly benign process.”

30 | NewScientist | 30 March 2019

largely reflected the movement of ideas and
technology while people stayed put – in much
the same way that Nokia mobile phones swept
across Europe in the late 1990s and early
2000s. But, in 2015, geneticists suggested
an alternative. Teams led by David Reich at
Harvard Medical School and Eske Willerslev
at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark
announced, independently, that occupants
of Corded Ware graves in Germany could
trace about three-quarters of their genetic
ancestry to the Yamnaya. It seemed that
Corded Ware people weren’t simply copying
the Yamnaya; to a large degree they actually
were Yamnayan in origin.
Disease, warfare and death
Many archaeologists found the idea
implausible. It is one thing to accept that the
Yamnaya migrated from the Eurasian steppe
to the steppe-like environments of south-east
Europe, says Heyd, but quite another to argue
for onward migrations into the heavily
forested central and northern Europe. This
implies that they spread into an environment
they didn’t have experience exploiting,
that they somehow displaced large numbers
of people who were adapted to that
environment – and that they did all of this
in a just a few generations. To this day,
Heyd struggles to understand how and why
such rapid migrations could have occurred.
Kristiansen, however, believes it is now
possible to reconstruct a likely scenario. His
model involves disease, warfare and death.
The first thing to appreciate, says
Kristiansen, is that Neolithic Europe was
in crisis just before the Yamnaya’s arrival.
Using the pollen record from archaeological
sites as a proxy for levels of agricultural
activity, archaeologists have concluded that
populations in northern and central Europe
began shrinking about 5300 years ago.
In December 2018, Kristiansen and his
geneticist colleagues suggested an
explanation. Examining the teeth of Neolithic
people who lived in what is now Sweden about
5000 years ago, they found plague-causing
bacteria – the earliest known relative of the
Black Death. Further analysis suggested the
disease began spreading across Europe
perhaps as early as 5700 years ago.
Kristiansen thinks it is no coincidence that
this is also when the settlements of south-east
Europe reached their greatest size. Within
those settlements, thousands of people
lived in unhygienic conditions and in close
contact with livestock, providing a perfect
How the Yamnaya spread
A mixture of archaeological and genetic evidence reveals that it took just a few hundred
years for the Yamnaya people from north of the Black Sea and the Caucasus mountains to
spread through Europe
DNA evidence of Yamnaya takeover
spread of Bell Beaker culture (but not people)
spread of people
6
4
2
1
5 Black Sea
3
Caucasus mountains
Bell Beaker culture spreads eastwards, and
1 Yamnaya arrive in south-east 4
Europe ~5000 years BP some Yamnaya-descended Corded Ware
people become Beakers ~4600-4500 BP
2 Some Corded Ware people
5 ‘Yamnaya’ Beakers reach
have substantial Yamnaya Iberia ~4500 BP
ancestry ~4900 BP
3 First Bell Beaker people 6 ‘Yamnaya’ Beakers reach
appear ~4700 BP Britain ~4400 BP
environment for plague to emerge. From so rapidly, morphing to become the Corded
there, the disease could have spread rapidly Ware people. He thinks the sheer speed of
into central and northern Europe via the this change hints that the Yamnaya migrants
wheeled vehicles and proto-roads appearing were dynamic and aggressive. This might
at this time. “These mega-settlements were suggest they were mainly young male
beginning to be abandoned and burned down warriors, riding into new territory. Most
a little after 5700 years ago,” says Kristiansen, Yamnaya women don’t seem to have joined
which would make sense if they were the migration until later.
becoming centres of death and disease. In line with this idea, a controversial 2017
“By 5400 years ago, they were gone.” genetics study concluded that the DNA signal
This means that when the Yamnaya arrived left in ancient European bones from the time
a few centuries later, they were entering a is easiest to explain if there were between
Europe with a small and weakened indigenous five and 14 male migrants for every female
population that could offer little resistance. migrant. Archaeological evidence also points
Even so, says Kristiansen, this on its own to most immigrants being men. For instance,
cannot explain why the Yamnaya spread a 2017 analysis of Corded Ware burials across
a vast region from north-west Denmark to
south-east Czech Republic concluded that
“The sheer speed of male graves were very similar in style to one
change hints that the another – but female graves showed local
variation. That would fit with the idea of male
Yamnaya were aggressive” migrants with a shared sense of identity >
30 March 2019 | NewScientist | 31
“The genetic analysis
showed that the
Britons who built
Stonehenge all-but
disappeared within
a few generations of
the Yamnaya’s arrival”
SIMON PEMBERTON
having children with Neolithic women
who still retained some local traditions.
If the Yamnaya migrants did behave as
Kristiansen suggests, Neolithic Europe’s men
are likely to have objected, setting the stage for
violent encounters. Some evidence that this
was the case comes from a remarkable Corded
Ware site called Eulau in Germany. Here,
a handful of unusual graves each contain
between two and four bodies – mostly women
and their children. Analysis of isotopes in the
women’s teeth reveals that they did not grow
up locally. And injuries on five of the 13 bodies
indicate that they met a violent end.
Kristiansen interprets this as evidence of a
brutal raid by Neolithic men taking revenge
on migrants who had stolen “their” women.
The absence of male burials suggests they
waited until the village’s men were out
tending their cattle before making the attack.
This sort of mass killing wasn’t unheard of
in Neolithic Europe, says Christian Meyer at
the OsteoArchaeological Research Centre,
Germany, who was involved in the Eulau
32 | NewScientist | 30 March 2019
analysis. Nevertheless, it hints at an upsurge
in violence about 5000 years ago. And there
are other signs. “We do see a rather high
number of trepanations [holes drilled in
skulls],” he says – people may have undergone
this procedure as a therapeutic measure after
bad head injuries.
Axe-wielding warriors
However, if Eulau is an example of the
violence that accompanied an influx of
Yamnaya and their descendants, it is arguably
not particularly representative. Kristiansen
suspects it was the migrants who usually came
out on top, judging by the fact that Corded
Ware groups quickly multiplied and spread.
There may have been good reasons for this.
Some archaeologists argue that the Yamnaya
were accomplished horse riders. Even before
they left the Eurasian steppe, some had
become axe-wielding warriors – as depicted
on ancient standing stones in the steppe
landscape. They were also probably in better
shape to fight too. Ancient DNA suggests they
were unusually tall for the time. And they
had a highly nutritious diet. “It looks like
they lived mostly on meat and milk products,”
says Kristiansen. “They were healthier and
probably physically quite strong.”
This scenario of young warriors moving
through the landscape makes sense to Heyd.
However, he cautions that it is based on
evidence snatched from a few isolated sites.
It is still far from clear, he says, that such a
simple model can explain the spread of the
Yamnaya and the rise of the Corded Ware
people in its entirety.
Indeed, many archaeologists think the
wider narrative emerging from genetic studies
oversimplifies things. The trouble, according
to Martin Furholt at the University of Oslo,
Norway, is that geneticists divide prehistoric
Europe into a series of large cultural blocks –
Yamnaya in the south-east, Corded Ware in
the north and so on – each of which represents
a population with a shared sense of self.
“The idea that archaeological units of
classification represent human groups of a
shared social, or ethnic identity has been
proven wrong many times during the history
of research,” says Furholt. Ethnicity is founded
on shared ancestry, whereas identity is more
about culture. “Geneticists are basically
looking at ethnicity. But archaeologists are
foremost looking at identity,” says Heyd.
A striking example of this distinction is a
discovery made near the town of Valencina
de la Concepción in southern Spain.
Archaeologists working there found a
Yamnaya-like kurgan, below which was
the body of a man buried with a dagger and
Yamnaya-like sandals, and decorated with
red pigment just as Yamnaya dead were.
But the burial is 4875 years old and genetic
information suggests Yamnaya-related
people didn’t reach that far west until perhaps
4500 years ago. “Genetically, I’m pretty
sure this burial has nothing to do with the
Yamnaya or the Corded Ware,” says Heyd. “But
culturally – identity-wise – there is an aspect
that can be clearly linked with them.” It would
appear that the ideology, lifestyle and death
rituals of the Yamnaya could sometimes run
far ahead of the migrants.
Geneticists are now beginning to realise just
how complex things were, says Heyd. This was
highlighted in a study published last year – the
one that suggested the ancient Britons who
built Stonehenge disappeared, as few of their
genes survive to the present day – which
brought together an enormous group of
geneticists and archaeologists including
Reich, Willerslev, Kristiansen and Heyd.
There has been talk in the popular press
recently about geneticists marginalising their
archaeological collaborators in such studies.
This wasn’t Heyd’s experience. “David [Reich]
listened. He is listening,” he says.
The collaboration was an attempt to shed
light on another group, the enigmatic Bell
Beaker people, who emerged in Europe
slightly later than the Corded Ware people. In
some ways, they were similar to the Yamnaya:
they buried their dead in single graves, had
recognisable warriors and celebrated these
warriors by occasionally carving their
images on standing stones. As a result, the
geneticists suspected that Bell Beaker people
descended from the Yamnaya. However, the
archaeologists convinced them this was only
partially true.
The collaboration revealed that the origin
and initial spread of Bell Beaker culture had
little to do – at least genetically – with the
expansion of the Yamnaya or Corded Ware
people into central Europe. “It started in
NATALIA SHISHLINA/ UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN
Individual graves containing a body
decorated with ochre are a hallmark
of Yamnayan culture
western Iberia,” says Heyd. It is in that region
that the earliest Bell Beaker objects – including
arrowheads, copper daggers and distinctive
Bell-shaped pots – have been found, in
archaeological sites carbon-dated to
4700 years ago. Then, Bell Beaker culture
began to spread east, although the people
more or less stayed put. By about 4600 years
ago, it reached the most westerly Corded Ware
people around where the Netherlands now
lies. For reasons still unclear, the Corded Ware
people fully embraced it. “They simply take
on part of the Bell Beaker package and become
Beaker people,” says Kristiansen.
Genetic wipeout
In other words, there were now two types of
Bell Beaker people: one with roots in Iberia
and one with Corded Ware (and ultimately
Yamnaya) roots. Kristiansen thinks the
Yamnaya Beakers then took advantage of the
maritime know-how of their Iberian friends
and voyaged to Britain some 4400 years ago
(see map, page 31). The fact that the genetic
analysis showed the Britons then all-but
disappeared within a couple of generations
might be significant. It suggests the capacity
for violence that emerged when the Yamnaya
lived on the Eurasia steppe remained even as
these people moved into Europe, switched
identity from Yamnaya to Corded Ware,
and then switched again from Corded Ware
to Bell Beaker.
In fact, there is much stronger evidence that
these Yamnaya Beakers were ruthless. By about
4500 years ago, they had pushed westwards
into the Iberian Peninsula, where the Bell
Beaker culture originated a few centuries
earlier. Within a few generations, about
40 per cent of the DNA of people in the region
could be traced back to the incoming Yamnaya
Beakers, according to research by a large team
including Reich that was published this month.
More strikingly, the ancient DNA analysis
reveals that essentially all the men have Y
chromosomes characteristic of the Yamnaya,
suggesting only Yamnaya men had children.
“The collision of these two populations was
not a friendly one, not an equal one, but one
where the males from outside were displacing
local males and did so almost completely,”
Reich told New Scientist Live in September.
This supports Kristiansen’s view of the
Yamnaya and their descendants as an almost
unimaginably violent people. Indeed, he is
about to publish a paper in which he argues
that they were responsible for the genocide
of Neolithic Europe’s men. “It’s the only way
to explain that no male Neolithic lines
survived,” he says.
Surprisingly, this isn’t a new idea. Some
prominent 20th century archaeologists were
convinced that migrants from the steppe
arrived in Europe about 5000 years ago. One
of them, Marija Gimbutas, even argued that
they were exceptionally aggressive individuals
who brought violence and social change to the
continent. Her ideas were deeply controversial
in her lifetime. “But ironically, the geneticists
are now coming quite close to what Gimbutas
was writing about in the 1960s,” says Heyd.
What’s more, it is now emerging that the
Yamnaya didn’t limit their sights to Europe.
The latest genetic evidence reveals that they
also went east into the Indian subcontinent
(see “Europe is not enough”, page 30).
Even if they weren’t the most murderous
people in history, there is no doubting that
they spread far and wide. This may be another
reason the Yamnaya story is gaining traction
now. A few decades ago, mass migration was
far from our minds, says Heyd, but the present
social and political environment has changed
that. Now we are acutely aware of the many
forces that can spur huge groups of people
to traverse the globe. ■
Colin Barras is a writer based in Ann Arbor, Michigan
To see David Reich’s talk “The truth
about us, and where we come from”
go to newscientist.com/David-Reich
30 March 2019 | NewScientist | 33
34 | NewScientist | 30 March 2019
Life is sweet As we decipher the code written in sugars on the
surface of our cells, we are opening up a whole new
type of medicine. Hayley Bennett reports
OT a lot of people know this, but babies
N are made with a handshake. True, that
isn’t all that is involved. Often it starts
with two people falling in love. But at some
point biology takes over and a sperm must
burrow its way into an egg. There is, however,
more to the story.
On reaching the egg, the sperm meets the
zona pellucida, a thick jacket of sugars that
only sperm cells have the right biochemical
tools to grab hold of. That “molecular
handshake”, as Kamil Godula at the
University of California, San Diego, puts it,
is the most crucial step in the process that
gets human life started.
Sugary handshakes aren’t just involved in
baby-making. It turns out that every type of
cell in our bodies has a unique sugar coating.
And whenever anything interacts with a cell,
it must recognise that sugar code and use the
appropriate secret handshake. It happens
when bacteria and viruses infect us, when
a growing brain cell feels its way past its
neighbours, and when our stem cells receive
the marching orders that will define what
CHRIS COLLINS/GETTY
type of tissue they will develop into.
Learn to read and write this sugary
language, then, and we would have a powerful
new way of intervening in cells’ activities to
control disease and plenty besides. It won’t
be easy. Unlike DNA, this code is fiendishly
complex. But we are finally beginning to
master the language of our cells.
To see why the sugar code is so important,
try imagining you are a bacterium, says
Bruce Turnbull, a chemist at the University
of Leeds, UK. You are approaching a host cell,
parachuting down over a forest of biomolecules
on its surface. The first things you will meet
are the branches of sugars, which are connected
to the cell membrane by protein trunks. “This
is like the canopy of your forest,” says Turnbull.
Anything wanting to get inside must have a
grip shape that matches the branches to use
them as handholds.
That is a tall order, because the branches
are complex in shape. The genetic code has
just four biochemical letters strung together
in lines. But the sugar code, known as the
glycome, contains tens of different sugars that
fit together in branched strings called glycans
(see diagram, page 37). Reading the sugar code
isn’t just a case of decoding it letter by letter,
but recognising the shape of each sugar and
understanding what it means. That is hard. “It
was so much easier to build on the DNA code,
to develop tools for genomics,” says Godula.
The things that latch on to cell surface
sugars in nature – the hands that do the
grabbing – are proteins called lectins, which
have internal cavities that fit snugly around
specific sugars. We have known lectins existed
for well over 100 years and recently began to
make artificial versions of them (see “Beating
diabetes”, page 36). But simply cataloguing
the different lectins didn’t in itself advance
our understanding of the sugar code much.
We learned more as chemists isolated
particular sugars and worked out their
structures. As they are so bewilderingly large
and complex, the best way to do that is to
run them through a machine called a mass
spectrometer. This breaks them into small
fragments, giving a series of pieces from which
we can reconstruct the parent molecule with
the help of algorithms.
By the early 2000s we had identified a few
of the sugars decorating some types of cell.
Things got more interesting as we began to
map out which lectins they paired with. In
2002, Ten Feizi at Imperial College London
and her colleagues came up with the idea of
fixing hundreds of individual sugars to a plate,
then washing all sorts of lectins and other
molecules over them to see which would bind.
These microarrays marked the start of an
automated approach to understanding the >
30 March 2019 | NewScientist | 35

Beating diabetes
For the 422 million people worldwide who
have diabetes, sugar is dangerous. Too
much glucose in the blood and the risks of
long-term health problems are heightened.
Too little, and you could pass out.
To guard against that, scientists have
long dreamed of creating a replacement for
insulin, the natural enzyme that regulates
sugar metabolism. One of the most crucial
parts of the challenge is to design a receptor
molecule with an internal cavity that can
recognise glucose. That is devilishly tricky,
partly because there are other sugars
that look like glucose, and partly because
clusters of water molecules do too.
Nevertheless, a couple of decades ago,
chemist Anthony Davis at the University
of Bristol, UK, set himself the challenge
DANIEL DAY/GETTY
of making a glucose receptor. In 2012,
after years of toil, his team finally built
one that bound glucose with excellent
selectivity. But when they tested it in
36 | NewScientist | 30 March 2019
“Each organ has its own
set of sugars. Mapping
these differences is a
huge task, like making
a sugar atlas of the
human body”
blood, it also bound to fragments of DNA,
rendering it useless.
Davis soon came up with a better design
using computer modelling. “As soon as I
saw this thing on the computer, I thought,
‘this is going to work’,” he says. He was right.
When his team tested the new design,
the snug fit of glucose into the receptor
excluded everything else.
They rushed to patent it and in August
2018 struck a £620 million deal with the
healthcare company Novo Nordisk, which
specialises in diabetes. The company hopes
to use it to make glucose-responsive insulin
that would help avoid dangerous dips in
blood sugar.
The chemical details are yet to be
worked out, but the idea is that Davis’s
receptor would switch insulin on and off,
depending on the concentration of glucose
in the blood. For many people living with
diabetes, it could be life-changing.
glycome. Before long, people were using them
to find out which sugars on the surfaces of
human cells the HIV and the H1N1 swine flu
viruses grab hold of during infection.
We still don’t have all the answers though. It
is thought that more than half of the proteins
in our bodies have sugary appendages, but we
don’t know exactly what they look like. That is
why the Human Glycome Project was
launched in late 2018. Founded by biochemists
Richard Cummings at Harvard Medical School
and Gordon Lauc at the University of Zagreb
in Croatia, it is an umbrella organisation for
many individually funded projects and will
attempt to sequence all human sugars.
That is a truly colossal task. There is one
human genome, but the glycome differs from
one organ to the next. You can think of it like a
sugar atlas of the body, says Cummings. “You’d
flip through the chapters of this atlas and one
would be on the human brain, another would
be on the human spleen, and so on.”
Total rewrite
A few chapters are already near complete.
For example, we know most of the sugars in
human breast milk – the fact that they are
free-floating makes them easier to analyse –
and this is already influencing the recipe for
baby formula. Cummings is hoping better
algorithms for sorting through mass
spectrometry data could speed things up, and
these are now being developed. “We could
keep saying the technology’s not quite ready,”
says Cummings. But he insists that sugar
mapping is a job we have to get on with.
Reading the glycome is all well and good,
but how about writing it, or rewriting it? That
means stitching together individual sugar
building blocks into glycans, a job that is
carried out by enzymes in the body. We have
been aping this in the lab for years, but it was
painstaking work that involved laboriously
priming each and every sugar to chemically
react in the correct way.
In 2001, Peter Seeberger, now director of the
Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces
in Potsdam, Germany, came up with a better
way, which involved sticking a growing glycan
chain to a solid surface and sequentially
washing solutions of sugar over it to extend
the chain. It worked, but only a small number
of sugars were commercially available then.
Now GlycoUniverse, a firm co-founded by
Seeberger, is providing 80 ready-to-use sugar
building blocks and has invented a machine
called the Glyconeer that fits them together as
the user desires. Making a six-sugar glycan by
hand in the lab takes several weeks, but with
the machine “you program it and start it, you
go home – and the next morning it’s done”,
says GlycoUniverse CEO Mario Salwiczek.
Eventually, anyone with one of these
machines could write their own sugar codes.
One reason that could be useful is to make
vaccines. The glycans on the coats of disease-
causing microbes are “good starting points
for developing vaccines”, says Turnbull. Such
vaccines prime the immune system to spot
these glycans and kill the microbes. Some
vaccines for flu and meningitis already
contain sugar components and, if the sugars
can be made easily enough, there are hopes
the approach could be effective for other
diseases, including malaria.
At the same time, we are beginning to bring
all this knowledge together to show how
understanding and manipulating the sugar
code can be medically useful in other ways.
Take cancer. We have known for decades
that sugars on cancer cells change and this can
make the cells less recognisable, for example
to medicines. This might explain why some
people with breast cancer who should respond
to the drug trastuzumab, sold as Herceptin,
see no benefits, says Miriam Dwek at the
University of Westminster in London.
Dwek’s team has dosed cancer cells with a
chemical that impedes the growth of the sugar
forest and then introduced Herceptin. In test
tubes, it was effective: stripping back some of
the sugar led to better Herceptin binding. The
chemical they used in these proof-of-concept
studies was pretty toxic, so Dwek is looking for
alternatives to test in people. She says that if
she can get it working in breast cancer “then
hopefully it should be applicable to all sorts
of other tumour types”. The team is running a
clinical trial to test the approach in dogs with
tumours that don’t respond to treatment.
Cancer could be just the start. Winfried
Römer at the University of Freiburg in
Germany studies the molecular handshakes
that occur between human cells and the
microbes that invade them. Previously, it was
thought that the sugar-binding lectins of
viruses and bacteria were just the glue sticking
them to our cells. But by incorporating natural
glycans and lectins into synthetic membranes
that can be easily studied, Römer’s group
showed that the handshakes actually trigger
a physical reaction in the cell membrane,
causing it to bend and wrap around the
invader, swallowing it.
Römer realised that if he could find ways to
block these sugar-lectin interactions, and stop
microbes clawing their way into our cells, he
The sugar code
Cells recognise each other using a code written in sugars. It is far more sophisticated
than the genetic code of DNA
DNA is composed of just four biochemical “letters” that can be connected end to end in a line
ATC G
But there are more than 100 different sugars, and they can usually be linked to one another in at least five
different ways. When many sugars are strung together to form chains, they create a bewildering array of
shapes, which act as identifying markers for cells
could have powerful alternatives to antibiotics
on his hands. He and his team looked for lectin
blockers for Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a
hospital infection that is resistant to multiple
antibiotics. To jam up the bacterium’s lectin
and stop it binding to human cells, they had to
find something that it would mistake for its
natural glycan target. So they took some of
the important molecular components of that
glycan, built them into 625 different glycans
in various permutations, then tested them.
One glycan bound the bacterial lectin really
well, and when the team added it into a mix of
human cells and P. aeruginosa, it blocked entry
by the bacterium 90 per cent of the time. “You
can’t imagine: there were physicians all over
the world who asked for this compound,” says
Römer. Clinical trials are the next step.
Shake on it
The most exciting work involving the sugar
code has to do with stem-cell therapies. Stem
cells are blank canvases that can become any
type of cell, giving them huge potential in
regenerative medicine. But getting them to
develop in a particular direction is tricky.
Scientists have often simply plied stem cells
with proteins called growth factors that direct
their development along a certain route. But
in the body, sugars on cells’ surfaces have to
shake hands with these growth factors in order
for them to have an effect. So now Godula is
trying to copy that.
His approach is inspired by the work of
Carolyn Bertozzi at Stanford University in
California, who in the 1990s fed cells unnatural
sugars and found that they incorporated them
on their surfaces.
Godula does the same, but bathes his cells in
sugars designed to shake hands with specific
growth factors. It only takes an hour for the
sugars to stick to the cells’ surface and they
soon wash off. “But we do see long-term
effects,” says Godula. In mouse stem cells, his
team recently showed that even after a short
programming bath, the cells were still on their
intended track towards the tissues that make
up muscles and red blood cells 10 days later.
Tailoring stem cells’ sugary canopies to greet
specific growth factors should give scientists
greater control over how they develop. The
dream is to get this working inside a living
person, where the stem cells could be
instructed to regenerate muscles, organs
or in principle almost anything else.
We have known for years that sugars are
as fundamental a part of our biology as DNA
and proteins. But only recently has the sugary
language of cells been getting the attention
it deserves. “There’s a lot of interest now in
bringing sugars back into the mainstream
of science, where they’ve been missing for a
long time,” says Godula. Small wonder, when
medicine has so much to gain. Q
Hayley Bennett is a science writer based in
Bristol, UK
30 March 2019 | NewScientist | 37
The plant sleuth
How do you go from loving botany to fighting crime?
Forensic botanist Jane Bock explains all to Ute Eberle
rowing up on her family’s farm in rural
G Indiana, Jane Bock fell in love with
plants. But she never dreamed that a
career in botany would lead her to investigate
homicides. Yet over the past decades, Bock –
now at the University of Colorado, Boulder –
has used “forensic botany” in about 100 crime
cases, and has helped to develop the science
of using vegetation in police investigations.
What was your first case?
I taught a class on plant anatomy and out of
the blue a Ben Galloway called. He said, “I’m
an assistant coroner in Denver and I have a
question: if I had plant cells from somebody’s
stomach contents, could you tell me what
plants might have been in that person’s last
meal before they were killed?”. The victim
was a young woman who had been stabbed to
death. He asked if I could look at her stomach
contents. I quickly told him no. I said it’ll smell
bad and it’ll probably look disgusting and I’m
a botanist, I’m not used to that kind of stuff.
He said he would send me prepared slides, if
I would just put them under my microscope.
Well, that hooked me. I thought about how
distinctive the cells of things like celery and
pears are. And after a bit of extra work, I saw
that in the last meal of this victim there were
cells of kidney beans and cabbage. Galloway
said that was useful, because her last known
meal had been at McDonald’s. This was in the
1980s, when McDonald’s was just straight
hamburgers and French fries. He said that
means she ate again.
38 | NewScientist | 30 March 2019
This cleared the victim’s boyfriend?
Yes, it did. He had eaten lunch with her at
McDonald’s, but had an alibi for later in the
day. Eventually, it turned out to have been
a serial killer. And this set me on the course,
because Galloway told everybody: “I have
this gal at Boulder that can do this stuff.”
Forensic botany is good at narrowing down
“The coroner said,
the time of death. Why?
My colleague, David Norris, is an could you tell me
endocrinologist. He taught me how, in what plants might
digestion, you chew up something and
swallow it and it’s put into an acid bath in have been in their
your stomach and wiggled around. And in last meal before
a couple of hours, a valve opens and things
move more or less en masse to your small
they were killed?”
intestine. Animal cells don’t hold up in that.
But plant cells have these wonderful cellulose
walls that are virtually indestructible by
human digestion. There was one case,
where these three children had eaten pizza
and it was so recent that we could still smell
the oregano.
Why did that matter?
The father claimed that he’d fed the kids at
5.30 pm, let them play outside and put them
to bed at 6.30. Then at midnight, after his wife
got home, he’d left for his job as a salesman –
loaded up his car with samples and took off.
But the stomach contents showed that the
children had just eaten before they were killed.
His wife was murdered too. The man was
found guilty of killing them. But he was >
Photographed for New Scientist by Theo Stroomer

30 March 2019 | NewScientist | 39

CASE STUDIES

GOLF COURSE KILLING

After a night of heavy rain in late 1999,
the body of Samantha Forbes was
found on a golf course in Freeport in
the Bahamas. Her throat had been cut.
However, the storm had washed away
any footprints, clothing fibres or other
evidence that might have helped
identify her killer.
But investigators discovered bits of
grass on the socks and shoes of one of
the two men who had been seen leaving
a bar with Forbes the night before. Jane
Bock identified the grass as almond
Bermuda, which grew only on one of
the island’s three golf courses — the one
where Forbes was killed. This helped
put one of the suspects at the scene
and led to the conviction of both men.

HASH BROWNS
Jill Coit married 11 times. She had
separated again – and moved in with
a new boyfriend – when previous
husband Gerard Boggs was found
clubbed, tasered and shot in his home.
Initially, it wasn’t clear when Boggs
had died. But he always ate the same
breakfast at a local diner: coffee, hash
browns, toast and eggs. Bock and David
Norris found traces of hash browns in
Boggs’s stomach, indicating that he
had died after breakfast. Coit and her
boyfriend didn’t have an alibi for that
time. Armed with Bock’s information,
authorities obtained a search warrant
for the couple’s home, where they found
the murder weapons. Coit was arrested
and convicted.
FOREST FORENSICS
Natalie Mirabal had been decapitated
and her body left in the mountains of
Colorado. Her husband claimed never
to have been to that area in his truck.
Police collected plant materials from
inside the vehicle and sent them to
Bock, who matched some of it to plants
that only grow in upper elevation
forests. The husband’s lie, combined
with other evidence, led to his conviction
for the murder.
retried and found innocent the second
time. That’s the only major case I can
think of where our evidence didn’t work.
A horrible experience.
Is it true that you often bought vegetables in
the early years and chewed them up yourself,
so that you could compare that to what you
found in a victim’s stomach?
That’s right. Or we’d trick a grad student into
chewing stuff and then submerge it into an
acid bath and put it on a shaker to imitate the
stomach movements. Our colleagues felt that
this work was weird.
Can forensic botany also tie a person to a place?
Yes. For example, the vegetation of the tundra
above the treeline here in Colorado is different
from what’s in the foothills of the Colorado
Rockies. So, if somebody claims to not have
been up above the treeline, but we find tundra
vegetation on the vehicle or the clothing,
that’s powerful evidence that the person is
lying (see “Case studies”, left).
Do you think about the crime when you look
at the cells under the microscope?
When we get the samples, we can spend some
time talking about the case and feel pretty
bad about it. Then we start to work and it’s like
anything else a scientist does, and we get really
“When you’re doing forensic
stuff, it’s easy to answer
what your work is good for”
interested. We just love that we have a problem
to solve. The next part comes when we hand
in our report. And then the trial. That’s rough.
If it’s a homicide, you usually look at the
surviving members of the victim’s family
in the courtroom. Then there’s the suspect,
sitting there. And you know that if a verdict
is reached, lives are going to be upside down
and backwards. I find that very difficult.
Yet you keep doing this work?
It’s so interesting. And Dave Norris and I are
both Midwesterners. All our lives we’ve dealt
with family and fellows in our home towns
who asked, “What you’re doing – what is it
good for?” And, boy, is that easy to answer
when you’re doing forensic stuff. As Dave
says, sometimes our evidence is a waste of
time, it doesn’t help. Sometimes it adds to
other evidence, suggesting a possible solution
to the case. And sometimes it’s spot on, it’s
the most important clue. Q
Ute Eberle is a freelance writer based in
Baltimore, Maryland

40 | NewScientist | 30 March 2019

 SECOND EDITION OF
OUR PLANET

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GUIDE TO EARTH
It’s the place we call home, but there is much about Earth
that remains frustratingly unknown. Explore our planet’s
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CULTURE
The woman who
would be Edison
The awful tale of tech guru Elizabeth Holmes
makes riveting viewing, finds Douglas Heaven
The Inventor: Out for blood in Silicon
Valley, directed by Alex Gibney, HBO
ONE of the first things you notice
about Elizabeth Holmes is that
she rarely blinks. As she reels off
pat answers to warm-up questions
in the first few minutes of HBO’s
new documentary The Inventor,
it is hard to look away from her
wide open eyes.
What do you dream will happen
by 2025? “That less people will
have to say goodbye too soon to
people that they love.” Holmes
nods when she speaks. You find
yourself nodding with her.
Which makes what happens
next more striking. “Can you tell
us a secret?” asks the interviewer.
The eyes break away from the
camera. Blink, blink, blink. It is
7 seconds before Holmes answers,
eyes down. “I don’t have many
secrets, um...”
The rise and fall of her company
Theranos (a mash-up of “therapy”
and “diagnosis”) can be told in
numbers. She founded it in 2003
aged 19, dropping out of Stanford
University in California. Over the
next decade, she raised nearly
$900 million from investors. At
its peak, Theranos was valued at
nearly $10 billion, and Holmes, in
her 20s, owned more than half.
The company claimed to have
invented blood-testing tech that
could diagnose 200 conditions
in a few minutes from a pinprick
of blood from a finger tip.
Walgreens, the second-largest
pharmacy chain in the US,
42 | NewScientist | 30 March 2019
installed Theranos blood-testing
booths in about 40 of its stores.
But most tests never worked.
A former employee said that if
100 people had syphilis, only
65 tested positive. In the end, only
one of the 200 tests was cleared by
US regulators for use. When a Wall
Street Journal reporter exposed
the gap between the claims and
reality, Theranos unleashed its
lawyers. One whistle-blower’s
family faced having to sell their
home to cover legal fees.
Holmes couldn’t outrun the
COURTESY OF HBO
truth, though. By 2017, Theranos
had burned through nearly a
billion dollars, a third on lawyers,
settling lawsuits with investors
and refunding every person who Elizabeth Holmes: did she really convincing people. In a bravura
took one of its blood tests. In 2018, believe Theranos could succeed? performance at a Wall Street
Holmes and company president Journal conference, she defended
Sunny Balwani were indicted on member. Her board of directors her company against the paper’s
nine counts of fraud. They say they included Henry Kissinger, and she allegations. Theranos seemed to
aren’t guilty, the trial is pending made friends with Bill Clinton. be collapsing, yet most investors
and Theranos has shut down. Journalist Ken Auletta talked and advisors stood by her.
to many of these people for a New The Inventor places Holmes
“At its peak, Theranos was Yorker profile of Holmes. He was in a line of entrepreneurs who
valued at nearly $10 billion struck by how they spoke of her: wanted to change the world,
and Holmes, in her 20s, “It was quite amazing to spend suggesting little more than that
owned more than half” time with these people. They were she may have drunk too much of
talking about her as if she was her own Kool-Aid. True, Holmes
How could so many smart Beethoven.” Kissinger told Auletta located her start-up in a corner
people have been duped for so that Holmes had an ethereal of Silicon Valley where Steve Jobs,
long? From the outset, Holmes quality, and compared her to Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk
signed impressive investors, a member of a monastic order. made their names. She even wore
including media mogul Rupert Holmes certainly presented Jobs-style black turtlenecks.
Murdoch and the founder of herself as an ascetic, telling But the film also traces her
computer giant Oracle, despite journalists her apartment was the lineage to Thomas Edison (the
having nothing to show them. size of a mattress, that her fridge other “inventor” in the film’s
Channing Robertson, head of contained only bottled water and title), presenting him as “the first
science at Stanford, was recruited she slept for just 4 hours a night. celebrity businessman”. Eerily,
as an advisor and the first board But she was just very good at Holmes named her prototype
For more books and arts coverage, visit newscientist.com/culture
DON’T MISS

facing a legal battle involving the

blood-testing machine “Edison”.
The real Edison also pretended film, it would have found broken
things worked when they didn’t.
He sold people on his light bulb
before he had made one, faking
demos and giving sceptical
journalists shares in his company. volunteers, scared of hepatitis.
The film cites one of his most
famous quotes: “Our greatest
weakness lies in giving up. The
most certain way to succeed is
always to try just one more time.” of physics. You can’t just have a
It is the stuff of bad posters, but great marketing campaign and
among Silicon Valley’s wannabe
billionaires, such self-belief
borders on the delusional.
Did Edison know he was going
to succeed and was buying time
until he did? Is this what Holmes
as employees explain in the
parts, exploded centrifuges and
mechanisms gummed with
sticky blood, and people working
mostly with blood from untested
Many employees knew
Holmes’s machine couldn’t be
built. As one says: “You can’t just
bend your way around the laws
get around these things.” If they
told senior management, they
would be told: “Maybe you’re
not a Silicon Valley person.”
Ian Gibbons, Theranos’s chief
scientist, was pushed out. While
company, he took his own life.
According to his widow, the only
time the company contacted her
after his death was to request she
return his confidential files.
The film shows how Holmes
and Balwani created a culture of
paranoia. Holmes had bulletproof
glass installed in her office and
hired personal bodyguards.
Employees realised their emails
were being read when they didn’t
copy in Balwani or Holmes, and
still got a response from Balwani.
Holmes said the high security
was to protect trade secrets. But
it was probably justified for other
reasons. Employees quoted in the
film say Theranos was engaging in
dubious practices, including using
commercially available machines
to analyse people’s blood.
To stall for time, Theranos
flooded investigators from the
US Food and Drug Administration
with information, and sent the
US agency in charge of clinical labs
only data from the commercially
available machines.
We still don’t know what
Holmes was thinking. It wasn’t
a cold-blooded scam, says one
whistle-blower. “It started off
as one lie and snowballed.”
Perhaps the film’s best insight
comes from Dan Ariely at Duke
University in North Carolina. He
describes an experiment in which
he asks people to roll dice, telling
them they will get paid what the
die face shows if it is the number
they were thinking of. Of course,
people lie – as playing hooked up
to a lie detector confirms. If the
money is going to charity, players
still lie but defeat the lie detector.
“If it’s for a good cause, you can
still think of yourself as a good
person,” says Ariely.
But can a dice game really
explain a decade of deceit?
Holmes’s secrets may emerge
in court. But for all its insight,
Listen
Women once made up 80 per cent
of the computer industry. The
figure is now less than 20 per cent.
Mary Ann Sieghart explores the
consequences of not having
women at the heart of the tech
industry in A Job For The Boys on
BBC Radio 4, 1 April at 11am BST.
Listen
How did a metal that is chemically
unresponsive and not even that
rare come to haunt our dreams and
dominate our thinking? Find out at
Gold: Unreactive and underrated
at 7.30pm on 2 April at the Royal
Institution in London
Subscribe
Originally called Fringe FM, future-
facing podcast The Disruptors nears
its 100th edition. Recent guests
include Ben Hammersley of Wired UK,
exploring the effects of the internet
on business, politics and society.
Stream
Starting 5 April, David Attenborough
voices Netflix’s ambitious eight-part
documentary series Our Planet,
filmed in 50 countries across all
continents by the makers of the
original Planet Earth and Blue Planet.
Watch
Also on 5 April, the British Film
Institute re-releases Stanley
Kubrick’s 1971 film A Clockwork
Orange (pictured), based on Anthony
Burgess’s classic novel of nihilistic
violence and social control.
PICTORIAL PRESS LTD/ALAMY

did – or thought she was doing? The Inventor leaves us with the
Her self-belief must have been “Holmes had bulletproof same questions it started with. ■
catching. Walgreens signed with glass installed in
Theranos before it had any results. her office and hired Douglas Heaven is a technology writer
Had Walgreens visited Theranos, personal bodyguards” based in London

30 March 2019 | NewScientist | 43

CULTURE
Let’s go skiing on the moon
An artist best known for work on human bodies is now going into space. Simon Ings explores
Lunatick by Antony Gormley and
Priyamvada Natarajan, from Acute Art,
The Store X, London, 5–25 April
VISIT The Store X, a venue for art
and design in London’s West End,
and you are in for quite a journey.
Wearing an HTC Vive headset,
you are given an island to explore
in Lunatick, a glossy, game-like
virtual-reality experience that
starts at Kiribati in Micronesia.
For a while, you have the run
of the place by means of hand
controllers, although producers
Acute Art plans to use EEG to let
you control it with your thoughts.
Don’t get too comfortable.
Wandering past a stone platform
triggers the space elevator.
It lifts you gently off your feet,
then propels you through the
stratosphere. This long, beautiful
and increasingly uncanny transit
carries you into the void between
the moon and Earth.
Take a breath. Look around
you. The geometrical relationship
between the sun, Earth and its
moon unwinds around you as
time skews and the moon swells.
Before you know it, you are
skating around lunar crater rims,
plummeting into craters, flying
high, until, losing control again,
you are flung into the sun.
Lunatick is the first joint work
by British artist Antony Gormley
and astrophysicist Priyamvada
Natarajan from Yale University.
Natarajan visualises the accretion
history of black holes, and maps
the granularity of dark matter by
studying the way it bends light – a
phenomenon called gravitational
lensing. But she couldn’t resist
the idea of giving space a sensual
Amazing voyage: skate round lunar
crater rims or crash into craters
44 | NewScientist | 30 March 2019
dimension by making the
vastness and loneliness of the
cosmos tangible.
Artist and scientist bonded over moving and funny about skating
their early love of science fiction.
H.G. Wells’s 1901 novel The First
Men in the Moon was Natarajan’s
contribution: a fictional journey
powered by the mysterious
gravity-less mineral cavorite.
Gormley, in his turn, recalled
C.S. Lewis’s space trilogy that
began with Out of the Silent
Planet, in which a man travels the
solar system pinned in a coffin.
Both influences emerge clearly
enough in Lunatick, but the real
star of the show isn’t fictional: it is Never mind the cosmological
the flyable lunar terrain wrestled
into shape by Rodrigo Marques,
Acute Art’s chief technology
officer, from data sent back by building blocks of our lives.
NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Gormley has been making
Orbiter. “There’s something both sculptural art out of wireframes
and voxels (three-dimensional
over the surface of the moon,” pixels), even as architects and
says Gormley. “I’ve got very fond games designers having been
of skiing along the ridges then moving away from model-making
down into the crater bottoms.” into a purely virtual 3D design
space. “Until recently, I had no
“Virtual reality, says idea what a voxel was,” says
Antony Gormley, is ‘bloody Gormley, who has spent more
useless at objects and than five years making oddly
bloody brilliant at space’ “ expressive low-resolution
sculptures assembled from cubes
Gormley’s art is popular and cuboids. His wireframe
globally, not least because experiments (assembled from
people find it easy to grasp. real wires and rods) are older
still, dating back to the late 1990s.
and philosophical dimensions: Why has Gormley chosen to
what strikes the viewer is how enter the virtual realm now? First,
he renders, in solid matter, the Lunatick was a chance to explore
a medium that, he says, is “bloody
useless at objects and bloody
brilliant at space”. Objects,
ultimately, are bodies: VR is
hobbled because it can’t convey
their mass and tactility. But space
is different. We perceive space
primarily through seeing, which
means VR can convey scale and
ANTONY GORMLEY, STILLS FROM LUNATICK, 2019, COURTESY OF ANTONY GORMLEY STUDIO AND ACUTE ART
immensity to a sublime degree.
But why should an artist
best known for exploring the
sculptural possibilities of the
human body (particularly his
own) be keen on disembodied
space? The image of body-as-
spaceship crops up intermittently
in Gormley’s work, but rarely so
urgently. He says he is haunted
by an image of long-haul flight,
where the shutters are down and
everyone is watching movies:
virtual versions of human life.
“I want this piece to say to
people, ‘Break out!’,” he says. “Of
course we get very obsessed with
human matters. But there are
bigger affairs out there. Recognise
your cosmic identity!” ■

Gender pay gap grows
On average, female scientists and engineers earn less than their male counterparts, and
the difference is getting bigger, according to the 2019 New Scientist/SRG salary survey
he gender pay gap for UK scientists has
T widened. The average female scientist or
engineer now earns £35,600, while the
average for men is £45,800 – a 22 per cent
difference. That’s according to the 2019 edition
of the annual salary survey carried out by New
Scientist and science recruitment specialists
SRG. The gender difference is greater than last
year, by £2000.
Our survey asked 2750 scientists, engineers,
academics and people working in clinical trials
across the UK about their salaries, experience
and location. We surveyed roughly equal
numbers of women and men. The results reveal
that the stark difference in pay between men
and women applies across their entire careers.
The gender pay gap is the difference
between the average wage of all men and of
all women. (By contrast, unequal pay occurs
when women are paid less than men for the
same work, which is discriminatory and
illegal.) The gender gap can reflect a number
of factors, including organisations employing
more woman at lower levels of the hierarchy,
or cultural or systemic biases against women
that prevent them progressing in the same
way as men. Another factor is that many
women interrupt their careers to have
children and may return to work part-time
instead of full-time. According to our survey,
women working in UK science are twice as
likely as men to work part time.
Legal action
There’s a growing cultural awareness of the
pay gap issue. Since 2017, for example, UK
employers with more than 250 employees
have been obliged by law to report pay
differences between male and female
employees. “The new legislation seems to have
made little difference so far within science,”
says Richard Acton, a director at SRG. “While it
has raised awareness around the gender pay
gap, specific positive-discrimination
campaigns to increase diversity and pay
balance are rarely seen in the UK.”
The senior deputy general secretary of the
union Prospect, Sue Ferns, urges employers of
Average current salary – by length in industry (UK) 2018
Years
Women Men
£22,829
<1
£26,122
£27,698
1-3
£33,373
3-6
£30,752
£34,660
£36,146
6-9
£39,088
£39,503
9-14
14-20
20+
Base: All respondents in the UK (2763)
SOURCE: NEW SCIENTIST/SRG 2019 SALARY SURVEY
scientists and engineers to “embrace gender
pay gap reporting in order to identify the
barriers to progress in their own organisations
and put in place an action plan”.
The new scientific administrative body,
UK Research and Innovation, is taking steps
to address the gap. Its executive champion for
equality, diversity and inclusion, Jennifer
Rubin, told New Scientist: “We have
commissioned two reviews to establish the
key challenges and to help us develop an
understanding of which approaches help
improve outcomes for these challenges.”
Such understanding is needed urgently. Our
survey has found that men are paid more than
women from the get-go. Male scientists and
engineers have an average salary of £26,100 in
their first year of employment compared with
£22,800 for women. How this gap emerges isn’t
clear but it persists for the first decade or so of
their careers and then widens (see diagram).
Indeed, among survey respondents who
had been in the scientific industry for 20 years
or more, men outnumbered women two to
In association with
Average
salary:
Overall £40,925
Men £45,804
Women £35,600
£48,249
£46,182
£48,456
£50,226
£60,553
one, and were paid considerably more. In this
group the pay gap is greatest of all, with men
earning an average of £60,553 and women on
£50,226 – a gap of over £10K.
Despite the problems at the top of the
science hierarchy, there are some positive
changes at the grass roots level. In a speech last
year, John Kingman, the chair of UK Research
and Innovation, pointed out that girls
represented 48 per cent of STEM entries at
GCSE in 2017 – 4 per cent more than the year
before – half of STEM undergraduates are
female and there are more women
postgraduates in STEM than men.
And yet women still make up less than 15 per
cent of the UK’s STEM workforce. For Kingman
that represents a huge opportunity: “If we
could find a way to close this gender gap, that
might be the single biggest thing that anyone
could do to transform UK R&D.” ■ Sean O’Neill
More at: jobs.newscientist.com
This article was written and edited
independently by New Scientist
30 March 2019 | NewScientist | 45
 IN
 SEARCH OF

REMARKABLE SCIENTISTS
Researcher BioDomain

Shell Graduate Program
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;bh_n^elK^l^Zk\a'Ma^khe^bl_h\nl^]hg]^ebo^kbg`ehp Postdoctoral Fellow - Cancer Biologist
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 ibehml\Ze^" Additional Information
Apply

Bghk]^kmh[^\hglb]^k^]_hkZgbgm^kob^p%\Zg]b]Zm^lfnlm Please note, this is one of three Postdoctoral
Ziierhgebg^Zmhnkp^[lbm^%ppp'la^ee'nl(`kZ]nZm^l%Zg] Fellowships available in Dr. Williams’ lab. Other
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La^ee@kZ]nZm^Ikh`kZf'

Methods may be found on our main vacancy page.

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k^lnf^%Zg]Zgngh_Û\bZe\hirh_rhnkmkZgl\kbiml(`kZ]^ City of Hope is committed to creating a diverse
k^ihkmikbhkmhma^bgm^kob^p'
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religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation,
gender identity, age, status as a protected veteran, or
DISCOVER WHAT YOU CAN VWDWXVDVDTXDOLƬHGLQGLYLGXDOZLWKGLVDELOLW\
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Shell is an Equal Opportunity Employer - Minorities/Females/Veterans/Disability postdoctoral-fellow-cancer-biologist/

46 | NewScientist | 30 March 2019

 newscientistjobs.com

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NRC Research Associateship Programs

The National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine offers postdoctoral and senior research awards on
behalf of 23 U.S. federal research agencies and affiliated institutions with facilities at over 100 locations throughout the
U.S. and abroad.
We are actively seeking highly qualified candidates including recent doctoral recipients and senior researchers.
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Interested candidates should apply online http://sites.nationalacademies.org/PGA/RAP/PGA_046398

Awardees have the opportunity to:

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• devote full-time effort to research and publication
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• collaborate with leading scientists and engineers at the sponsoring laboratories

Benefits of an NRC Research Associateship award include:

• 1 year award, renewable for up to 3 years
• Stipend ranging from $45,000 to $80,000, higher for senior researchers
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DESIRED SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE

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The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Fellowships Office has conducted the NRC Research
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30 March 2019 NewScientist | 47

 2019
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50 | NewScientist | 30 March 2019

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 letters@newscientist.com @newscientist newscientist
LETTERS

EDITOR’S PICK Pension divestment can By taking action in schools to

A significant source of earned dogmatism
From Allan Reese,
Forston, Dorset, UK
David Robson describes “earned
dogmatism” as the tendency of a
person to overestimate their expertise
based on past training (23 February,
p 30). I used to advise PhD candidates
as a statistician, and was particularly
aware of examiners from many
disciplines who claimed sweeping
knowledge of statistical methods,
apparently based on an introductory
course in the subject taken a long time
ago or on having analysed their own
data for years.
A particularly memorable example
was a PhD student who was told after
their oral “viva” examination that their
thesis was sound but their statistics
must be reworked using a different
kind of method. The student accepted
it was easier and quicker to comply
than to challenge this verdict. The
reworking changed no results.
Scientific papers, refereed by
experts in their field of science, get
published with glaring statistical flaws.
I have yet to find a journal editor who
admits that the statistical treatment
of data should probably be refereed
by a competent statistician.
combat climate change
From Gabriel Carlyle, St Leonards-
on-Sea, East Sussex, UK
Students in over 100 towns and
cities in the UK took part in the
global Youth Strike for Climate
on 15 March, inspired by Greta
Thunberg (16 March, p 7). Many
may not be aware that their
schools and sixth-form colleges
may be funding businesses linked
to climate change through their
payments to pension schemes.
Pension schemes run by local
government are estimated to have
£16 billion invested in oil, coal and
gas companies. In East Sussex,
a Freedom of Information Act
request revealed that in excess
of 40 local schools and colleges
together contribute at least
£9.8 million a year to the East
Sussex Pension Fund, which has
investments in fossil fuel firms.
get pension schemes to support
divestment from fossil fuel
companies, students, parents,
teachers and staff can help to
break the hold that these firms
currently have on economies and
governments around the world,
and make way for a transition to
renewable energy.
How male and female
brains may differ
From Janita Cunnington, Point
Lookout, Queensland, Australia
Gina Rippon makes the points
that men and women are more
similar than they are different
and that every person’s brain
is unique (2 March, p 28). She
concedes that the sexes differ
statistically in preferences,
behaviour and abilities.
How can these slight but
observable differences be

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52 | NewScientist | 30 March 2019

 “I generally recommend you breathe in
every once in a while”
Sabine Hossenfelder drily concurs with a finding that breathing in
before doing something may make you better at it (16 March, p 8)

explained? Rippon entertains
only two possibilities – genotype
and the influence of stereotype –
and implies that these are in
opposition, thereby perpetrating
a neat binary division of her own.
Surely the boundary between
the two is fuzzy, and surely there
are other contributing factors.
Two spring to mind. One is
the impact of childbearing on
women’s lives. The other is the
fork-in-the-road effect, in which
a marginal initial preference is
amplified by vocational choice
into a life-determining result.
Multiply this scenario many times
over, and you can get a divergence
that is statistically significant.
From Lawrence Bernstein,
Menlo Park, California, US
When considering sex differences,
we must take into account the
brain being bathed in hormones,
including testosterone and
oestradiol, which occur in very
different amounts in most men
and women.
Cases of surgical and chemical
castration, and of testosterone
supplementation, show that
testosterone levels affect
behaviour, emotion, personality
and cognition. In addition, the
brain is constantly exchanging
signals with parts of the body,
including those specific to our
sex. Tiny differences in brain
structure or connectivity could
produce significant differences
in function. I think we need to
keep an open mind regarding sex
differences of embodied brains.
Some particles may be
more equal than others
From Roy Harrison,
Verwood, Dorset, UK
Brian Pollard reminds us that
atmospheric particulate pollution
from cars comes from the tyres
and brakes as well as exhausts
(Letters, 2 March). Particles are
responsible for most of the loss
of life expectancy associated with
air pollution. What concerns me
is that the word “particle” is being
used to cover a multitude of sins.
Petrol cars produce a lot of
exceedingly small (30 nanometre)
carbon-based particles. Diesel cars
made since 2011 release mostly
droplets of engine oil and nitrate
particles. All car brakes release
particles of iron, iron oxide and
resins; and tyres emit particles
of rubber, carbon and silica.
It seems unlikely, given the
huge range in both size and
nature of particles, that the
standard measurement of air
pollution – weight of particles per
cubic metre – is a meaningful
guide to their harmfulness to us.
One might guess that smaller
particles will be more harmful
because there are more of them
per gram and they will be able
to enter the human body more
easily. What data do we need to
make meaningful decisions?
Great goblets of fire in
several ages past
From Lucy Wills,
London, UK
You report a 3D-printed dichroic
goblet that looks brown when
reflecting light and purple when
light shines through it (9 March,
p 12). Such effects have long
been treasured. Some Victorians
were obsessed by jewellery with
dichroic “saphiret”, made by
mixing molten gold and glass. Its
production ended when gold got
too costly, and is now sought after.
From Joe Oldaker,
Nuneaton, Warwickshire, UK
The makers of the plastic goblet >

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30 March 2019 | NewScientist | 53


LETTERS
are a bit behind the curve. The
colour of the 4th-century Roman
glass “Lycurgus cup” in the British
Museum shifts from red to green.
The editor writes:
Q The researchers do mention
the Lycurgus cup in their paper
(doi.org/c27r). They suggest that
since only it and six other broken
pieces found worldwide show
the dichroic effect, this may have
been due to serendipity rather
than to mastery.
Spotting black leopards
in Kenya in 1956
From Nick Blackstock,
Wilsden, West Yorkshire, UK
You published a photo of a black
leopard in Kenya, saying it may
be the only image of a fully wild
black leopard in Africa in a
century (23 February, p 28). I was a
national service conscript posted
to Kenya between 1954 and 1956.
We became very familiar with all
the local wildlife, sometimes
more familiar than comfortable
in the circumstances.
Early in 1956, I was one of a
dozen squaddies who disturbed
54 | NewScientist | 30 March 2019
a pair of black leopards high in the
Aberdare mountains. They made
off quickly, but we were sure they
were black leopards, not serval
cats. That a military patrol could,
by sheer accident, come across a
pair of these animals seems to
suggest sightings weren’t too rare.
Another approach to milk
production is possible
From David Clarke,
Seaford, East Sussex, UK
You report the idea of CRISPR gene
editing to limit the number of
unwanted male calves born to
dairy cows (9 February, p 13).
Surely it isn’t beyond us to
develop a breed of cattle that
lactates without giving birth? I do
accept that there may be ethical
or moral issues with this proposal.
How to hack many cars
at once and jam a city
From Sam Edge,
Ringwood, Hampshire, UK
You quote Simon Parkinson
suggesting that a coordinated
cyberattack on smart cars
would take a lot of resources, so
letters@newscientist.com
problems with such vehicles that
result in gridlock may be more
likely to result from a botched
software update (9 March, p 8).
But cars have a lot of hardware
and software in common – for
example “smart” alarms. Flaws
are likely to be present in models
from different manufacturers.
A weakness that gave remote
access to cars’ on-board control
networks could allow a person to
disable many vehicles using only
an internet-connected computer.
Perhaps they could use satnav
systems to select cars in a given
area for maximum disruption.
It is Scotland’s water,
fatbergs or no
From Susan Forde, Scotlandwell,
Perth and Kinross, UK
Kelly Oakes gives a fascinating
and worrying account of fatbergs
(26 January, p 22). But she claims
that remedial action isn’t easy
because UK water companies are
privately owned.
In England and Wales they are.
However, the water companies in
Scotland and Northern Ireland
are public.
@newscientist newscientist
Papillomavirus is also
involved in penile cancer
From Guy Cox, St Albans,
New South Wales, Australia
Jonathan R. Goodman’s report on
the causes of cancer is interesting
and valuable (9 February, p 34).
It mentions the link between
human papillomavirus and
cervical cancer – but not penile
cancer, which the virus may also
cause. In Bali, penile carcinoma
was the most common cancer in
men in 2013. Male circumcision
may help prevent both cancers.
A share in the credit for
stomach ulcer research
From Ron Painter,
Claremont, Western Australia
You report possible links between
mouth bacteria and Alzheimer’s,
and note doctor Barry Marshall
won a Nobel prize for linking
Helicobacter pylori and stomach
ulcers (2 February, p 6). Robin
Warren initiated that idea, began
the research and shared the prize.
For the record
Q A spacecraft that slingshots around
Jupiter gains energy by slowing the
planet in its orbit (16 March, p 10).
Q The SPF rating of standard
sunscreen is primarily a measure
of protection against UVB rays
(16 March, p 28).
Q The “Düsseldorf patient” seems to
be cleared of reproducing HIV virus,
though a few tests gave positive
signals. These may be false positives,
non-infectious virus fragments, or
whole virus that couldn’t reproduce
because of a lack of susceptible
immune cells (9 March, p 12).
Letters should be sent to:
Letters to the Editor, New Scientist,
25 Bedford Street, London, WC2E 9ES
Email: letters@newscientist.com
Include your full postal address and telephone
number, and a reference (issue, page number, title) to
articles. We reserve the right to edit letters.
New Scientist Ltd reserves the right to
use any submissions sent to the letters column of
New Scientist magazine, in any other format.
CRYPTIC CROSSWORD No4
Set by Wingding

Spectacular wall art from astro photographer Chris Baker

Available as frameless acrylic or framed backlit

up to 1.2 metres wide. All limited editions

Tell us what you think at crossword@newscientist.com

ACROSS
7 Inaccurate articles now OK in
online community (6,7)
8 Herbs absorb potassium, oxygen
and uranium in exercises (8)
9 Summit’s tenth primate? (4)
10 Sign of goodness shown by
short piece of DNA – one from
group 17 (7)
12 Topless comedian makes organic
compound (5)
www.galaxyonglass.com
14 Injection of energy that’s all +44 (0) 7814 181647 Chris@galaxyonglass.com
around (5)
16 Analyse what used to be an
organic compound? (7)
19 Snakes like a little time (4)
20 Journalist in food store has
excessive concern for details (8)
22 Psychoactive fungus in space
behind wise men, around soft
substance (5,8)

DOWN
1 Mint merchant (4) 11 Someone who doesn’t remember
2 Some writing ink going in a cinema’s construction (8)
tree (6) 13 Team in cricket match almost look
3 White record starts to entertain to become rusty (7)
neighbours (7) 15 Piece of samosa I consider an
4 Breadmaker in unknown artwork (6)
direction (5) 17 We run a mile, partly backwards,
5 Work in chairs is getting in dung (6)
nervous (6) 18 After bath, woman sends
6 Seabird swallows coral and large unwanted emails (5)
plant (4,4) 21 Source of potato, perhaps (4)

Answers to quick crossword No28

ACROSS: 8 PARABOLA, 9 OSMIUM, 10 TERESHKOVA, 11 ALGA, 12 ANOXIA, 14 KINETICS,
15 FOURIER, 17 FISSILE, 20 RED GIANT, 22 OSSIFY, 24 IDEA, 25 AXON REFLEX, 27 ASTHMA,
28 HAPLOIDY.
DOWN: 1 BALEEN, 2 YALE, 3 COCHRANE, 4 BAZOOKA, 5 DOMAIN, 6 SMEAR TESTS,
7 SURGICAL, 13 XEROGRAPHY, 16 OVERDOSE, 18 ISOTROPY, 19 ATROPHY, 21 AVATAR,
23 FIELDS, 26 FLOC
Answers and the next Quick crossword in the 13 April issue

30 March 2019 | NewScientist | 55


FEEDBACK
A PARLIAMENTARIAN has come
up with an incisive solution to the
pressing issue of knife crime in
the UK. Scott Mann, MP for North
Cornwall, shared his suggestion
on Twitter: “Every knife sold in
the UK should have a GPS tracker
fitted in the handle. It’s time we
had a national database like we
do with guns. If you’re carrying
it around you had better have a
bloody good explanation, obvious
exemptions for fishing etc.”
Thousands of Twitter users
immediately began skewering the
idea. Would existing knives need
to be retrofitted with tracking
systems, they wanted to know,
and if so, with what power source?
“Sorry, I forgot to charge the
knife” isn’t likely to cut it with
the family sat waiting for dinner.
Feedback can’t help wondering
where it could all lead. To address
the power problem, perhaps
knives might be taped to vehicle
satnav sets as a stopgap solution.
Simply carve Sunday’s roast
PAUL MCDEVITT
dinner in your car before dashing
back inside, or better yet, host
your dinner parties in its stylishly
“Florida newspaper The Villages Daily Sun
informs Andrew Doble that ‘researchers in
southern California have recaptured a female
mountain, and treated it for mange’.”
56 | NewScientist | 30 March 2019
upholstered interior. Then on to
the next dilemma: is a geo-linked
knife dishwasher-safe?
Cornwall has an historically
important fishing industry,
which might explain why Mann
says fishing ought to get a free
pass. But Feedback worries that
this exemption is just the kind of
oversight that could lead to errant
youths donning sou’westers and
cable-knit jumpers, shrugging
off the double edged “pilchard
knives” in their tackle boxes.
Trackable knives would at least
be a boon in university halls of
residence, allowing students to
know which washing-up dodger
had accumulated the communal
cutlery in their room. That makes
us think that, if we are adding
GPS trackers to the silverware, we
really should start with teaspoons.
EIGHT-POINTED snowflakes are a
familiar design crime to Feedback
readers. But what to make of Colgate’s
use, in advertising material spotted by
reader Izzy Hanson, of a pair of carbon
rings to illustrate the science packed
into every tube of toothpaste? Is it
For more feedback, visit newscientist.com/feedback
perhaps naphthalene? “The company
ought to know better than to signify
its scientific expertise with a diagram
of a notoriously toxic polycyclic
aromatic,” says Izzy.
OPIUM-addicted parakeets are
plaguing poppy farmers in India.
The Asian News International
news agency shared footage of
the feathered bandits attacking
the swollen poppy heads, and
even flying off with them after
chewing through the stem.
The plantations in Madhya
Pradesh are licensed to grow
poppies as a source of opiates for
pharmaceutical use. But local
parrots have taken a shine to the
crop, and farmers are worried
that the plant’s addictive qualities
keep them coming back for more.
“We have tried making loud
sounds and even use firecrackers
to scare the birds. But nothing
has helped,” opined one farmer.
IN THE US, a bill introduced to the
Georgia state legislature would require
men over 55 to report to the nearest
authorities every time they ejaculate.
HB 604 also proposes a ban on
vasectomies, requires men to obtain
permission from their partner before
prescriptions for erectile dysfunction
medicine can be fulfilled, introduces
a 24-hour waiting period for men
wanting to buy pornography and
makes sex without a condom
punishable as aggravated assault.
Not expected to pass, the bill
aims to highlight attempts to tighten
abortion laws in the state. Dar’shun
Kendrick, a politician in the Georgia
House of Representatives, is one of
the bill’s co-authors. She posted her
“testicular bill of rights” on Twitter,
declaring: “You want some regulation
of bodies and choice? Done!”.
MEANWHILE, Lorna Cox was
shocked to read the following
admission from our colleagues:
“Despite making up most of the
universe, we still haven’t detected
dark matter” (9 March, p 37). “I
didn’t realise New Scientist had
made it all up,” says Lorna. Well,
somebody has to.
OUR call for scientifically sensible
nursery rhymes has produced some
sparkling entries – albeit perhaps
also showing the ability of science to
make the wondrous distinctly prosaic.
When Butch Dalrymple Smith was
a child, he would chant:
Twinkle Twinkle little star,
I don’t wonder what you are.
You’re the cooling down of
gases,
Turning into solid masses.
In much the same vein, Galen Ives
shares a verse dedicated to the first
artificial satellites:
Twinkle, twinkle little star
I don’t wonder what you are.
I surveyed your spot in space
Before you left the missile base,
And I shudder when I think
What you’re costing us per
twink!
BBC News, responding to
revelations of how much plastic
the drinks company Coca-Cola
uses, points out: “It’s hard to
visualise what three million
tonnes looks like. But everyone
can picture a blue whale. Now
picture 15,000 of them. That’s
roughly three million tonnes.”
Much clearer – and at last
with the blue whale we have
an appropriate unit for ocean
pollution, says Bob Willis, who
spotted this gem.
You can send stories to Feedback by
email at feedback@newscientist.com.
Please include your home address.
This week’s and past Feedbacks can
be seen on our website.

THE LAST WORD
Many ridges to cross
Back roads in Australia often have
hundreds of metres of gravel
corrugations, or ridges. They are
always a few centimetres high,
spaced about 30 centimetres apart…
and annoying for vehicle occupants.
What causes them?
Q When a vehicle is driven over
an unsurfaced road, its weight
indents the material under the
tyre. The loose particles ahead
of the tyre tend to be pushed
forwards, creating a small ridge.
Each passing vehicle gradually
raises the ridge, until the rate of
material removal from the crest
due to abrasion and impact stop it
getting any taller. The maximum
height of the ridge depends on the in South Australia. I know this
material used for the road.
The surface of a newly levelled
road generally stays more or less
smooth until it rains. After this, it Australia
corrugates rapidly, presumably
because indentation can occur
more easily with wet materials.
Such ridges also occasionally
occur on bitumen roads. I used
to pass a bus stop on a downhill
slope in Sydney that developed
impressive corrugations due to
heavy buses halting there.
Tony Cooke
Macgregor, ACT, Australia
Q Gravel and dirt roads are
maintained to try to keep the
surface in good condition, for
example by scraping them with
a wide blade mounted under a
heavy vehicle. The blade bounces
slightly, creating undulations.
We pay £25 for every answer
published in New Scientist. To answer
a question or ask a new one please
email lastword@newscientist.com.
Questions should be scientific
enquiries about everyday phenomena,
and both questions and answers
should be concise. We reserve the right
to edit items for clarity and style. Please
include a postal address, daytime
telephone number and email address.
You can also send questions and
Over time, these undulations are
exacerbated by bouncing truck
and car tyres. Wind and rain
remove loose dirt between ridges,
accentuating them.
If your vehicle has feeble city
tyres, not big, boofy, four-wheel-
drive ones, go slowly. With either
type, you can minimise the
jarring by reducing tyre pressure,
especially if the corrugations
combine with the angular rocks
of the gibber plains – the desert
landscape encountered on the
“Some people drive on the
wrong side of corrugated
roads, as it feels smoother
that way”
unsurfaced Oodnadatta Track
from personal experience.
Bonita Ely
Marrickville, New South Wales,
Q I live by a gravel road in rural
Western Australia. Corrugations
are common and aren’t restricted
to back roads. They start small and
increase in size over time, until
you are unsure whether to slow
down and feel each bump or just
go faster and ride across the tops
of the ridges.
Corrugations form across the
road, and are steeper on the side
facing traffic flow. That is why
some people drive on the wrong
side of the road when they can,
as it feels smoother that way.
The material used for the road
is an important factor in the
corrugations. The road we live on
answers to The Last Word, New Scientist,
25 Bedford Street, London, WC2E 9ES.
New Scientist Ltd retains
total editorial control over the
published content and reserves all
rights to reuse question and answer
material that has been submitted by
readers in any medium or in any format
and at any time in the future. All
unanswered questions and previous
questions and answers are at
newscientist.com/lastword/
Last words past and present at newscientist.com/lastword
has two sections: the part covered of different sizes to make the
with sand and gravel is corrugated, road surface, as this prevents the
while the other, made with gravel material from moving as easily.
and some clay, sets hard and is Lewis O’Shaughnessy
always in excellent condition. London, UK
If motorists slow down, the
likelihood of ridges forming is cut.
Anna Butcher This week’s questions
Brookton, Western Australia
Q The amplitude of the ridges
depends on the size of wheels,
the speed of vehicles and to some
extent vehicle length. Larger
wheels yield deeper corrugations.
Higher speeds produce longer
spaces between corrugations. So
small vehicles using roads more
usually frequented by larger,
slow vehicles are worst affected.
Australia’s unsealed roads are
much used by large vehicles, so
they develop long stretches of
corrugations. Cars can minimise
the bumpiness by going faster
and essentially riding along the
tops of the corrugations. But this
is dangerous because the vehicle ARACHNID APPETITE
isn’t in contact with the ground I was impressed by the size of
for significant periods of time, the prey captured by this crab
meaning it is easy to lose control spider (see photo), seeing
of the steering. as they don’t use webs to catch
Brian King food. How much of it would the
Barton on Sea, Hampshire, UK spider eat and is there a “best
before” date?
Q The ridging effect is known as Hugh Meteyard
washboarding. It occurs on all Theydon Bois, Essex, UK
loose surfaces, including sand
and snow. It is caused by a force FEELING FLY
acting in one direction on a Do insects have emotions in the
movable surface, much like same way humans and mammals
ripples on a lake caused by the do? For example, would a fly feel
wind. The ridges are essentially sad if it saw its brother die?
very slow waves. Jake Jackson
It helps to use a mix of particles Guisborough, North Yorkshire, UK
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