New Scientist - 11.07.2020

FOCUS ON

CORONAVIRUS

Europe locks down again as
second-wave cases surge

What went wrong in Germany?
How antibodies from

survivors could help save lives

WEEKLY November 7–13, 2020

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This week’s issue

On the Focus on coronavirus 44 Features
cover 7 Europe locks down again
as second-wave cases surge “Choosing
34 The true purpose software or a
of our dreams 10 What went wrong programming
in Germany? language
An intriguing new theory is a bet on
about what goes on inside 12 How antibodies from how long
our heads at night, and why survivors could help save lives it will stay
in fashion”
44 Forgotten codes 19 Viruses that make energy
The computer systems 32 Truth Seekers reviewed
that underpin our lives are 14 Nuclear fusion but cooler
built on legacy software. 22 Comet with ice like candyfloss
What happens when it fails?

Vol 248 No 3307
Cover image: Manuel Šumberac

News News ALEX MUSTARD/NATURE PICTURE LIBRARY/ALAMY Features

15 Video call snooping 15 Geological big bangs Earth’s tectonic plates sped up in the past 34 Why we dream
Software can guess what you The fictions we conjure while
are typing during video calls asleep may do something more
profound than reinforce learning
18 Coral evolution
Animals found passing on 39 Seabed grab
mutations outside sex cells We are on the verge of a new
for the first time era of marine exploitation

19 Titan’s weird molecule 44 Forgotten codes
Saturn’s moon Titan may Outdated computer software
have building blocks for life underpins the modern world
and it is leading us into disaster
Views
The back pages
23 Comment
The big problem with 51 Science of cooking
online learning How to pair flavours like a pro

24 The columnist 52 Puzzles
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein Try our quick crossword,
peers into space-time quiz and brain-teaser

26 Aperture 54 Almost the last word
Spectacular red palm weevil Sneezing in succession
scoops top award and triple rainbows

28 Letters 56 Feedback
Surely automation will Measuring buildings with
lead to fewer jobs? smartphones in 61 ways

30 Culture 56 Twisteddoodles
An exhibition unlocking for New Scientist
the Arctic’s hope Picturing the lighter side of life

7 November 2020 | New Scientist | 1

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The leader

Realism needed

Beware those who promise you that this will all be over soon

AS THE coronavirus began spreading Lawton writes on page 12, the results government failure and ultimately do
through Europe in the spring, many are still too early to equate to a panacea. nothing to stop the virus spreading if
scientists warned that worse could An actual vaccine may become available, the pause isn’t used to build testing and
come in winter. Now, it seems they but if so it will only be available to some contact tracing capacity. Brief, planned
were right. The continent’s wave of at first. It may also fail to deliver on any lockdowns, rather than the emergency
second lockdowns (see page 7) has number of other counts, for example, ones being introduced now, could be a
brought gloom, anger, fear and, in requiring repeated booster injections. useful tool to keep infections under
some countries, protests. In the UK, the control, but really we need what we have
prime minister, Boris Johnson, has tried A vaccine, as we have said before always needed: working test, trace and
to offer his citizens some hope, telling in these pages, was never going to be a isolate systems.
them that everything will look much quick or easy way out. Meanwhile, in the
cheerier come 2021. UK at least, testing for coronavirus and Finally, for test and trace systems to
tracing the contacts of those who test work, we need easy-to-access tests, quick
Such offerings of hope should be positive is patchy at best. results and to give those infected the
treated with caution. Perhaps things financial and practical help they need
will be better when spring returns to So what next for those countries to isolate. Such systems involve a huge
the northern hemisphere. But it isn’t hardest hit? First, we need to stop economic hit – but then so do lockdowns.
immediately clear why that should thinking short term. The pandemic They also require something that is in
be the case. could well continue to significantly short supply in places like the UK: trust
affect our lives for years. It would be in the government. Perhaps some
It is possible that by then we will have wise to plan accordingly. realism from leaders, rather than offers
a stopgap therapy to create immunity of false hope, is a good place to start. ❚
without a vaccine, but as Graham Second, we must admit that
lockdowns are an indication of

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News Coronavirus

PIPPA FOWLES/NO 10 DOWNING STREET

Europe’s second wave

Lockdowns across Europe

Many countries are starting new lockdowns, but it may already be too late to stop
the second wave of coronavirus from eclipsing the first, reports Michael Le Page

ENGLAND has begun a second “I think probably we will Since then, Wales, Spain, France, UK prime minister Boris
national lockdown, after weeks ultimately see more deaths over Germany (see page 10), Belgium, Johnson announcing the
of regional restrictions failed to the next six months,” he says. the Netherlands, Italy and other latest English lockdown
curb the spread of the coronavirus. countries have also announced
The UK government didn’t follow A sharp rise in cases has also new lockdowns or restrictions hospital with covid-19 than during
suggestions made by scientific been seen across Europe in recent with varying degrees of severity. the first wave, and there are 16
advisers in September to institute months, and many countries are deaths per million people per day
a shorter lockdown weeks earlier, being forced to ramp up covid-19 In England, where a three-tier compared with just one per million
intended to halt the exponential control measures and introduce system of regional restrictions people per day in the first wave.
growth of coronavirus cases. lockdowns. Northern Ireland has been in place since 12 October,
increased restrictions on a four-week lockdown will begin The second-hardest-hit country
This new lockdown is needed to 16 October, stopping short of a on 5 November, while a five-tier is Belgium, which had a big first
stop the spread of the virus, but it full lockdown, while the Czech system began in Scotland on wave. Belgium is reporting more
and similar efforts across Europe Republic was the first to impose 2 November. than 1200 cases per million people
may be too late to prevent the a second lockdown, on 22 October, per day – the highest rate in
second wave of covid-19 being despite the government having In the Czech Republic, which Europe. So far there are only a
worse than the first. stated that it wouldn’t do so. did better at limiting the first wave third as many people in hospital
than many other countries in with covid-19 as during the first
“It’s pretty bleak,” says Paul “We have no time to wait,” Europe, the second wave is already wave, and seven deaths per million
Hunter at the University of East said Prime Minister Andrej Babiš. far worse on every measure. There people per day compared with 25
Anglia in the UK. He thinks the “The surge is enormous.” are six times as many people in earlier in the year. However,
second wave will be more drawn government health spokesperson
out but will eventually lead to Daily coronavirus news round-up Yves Van Laethem has warned that
more deaths in the UK than the all available intensive care beds >
44,000 seen in the first wave. Online every weekday at 6pm GMT
newscientist.com/coronavirus-latest

7 November 2020 | New Scientist | 7

News Coronavirus

in the country could be full by 50,000 during the first wave. surveys in which a random How does this compare with the
selection of people are tested first wave? We don’t know for sure,
mid-November. However, in many countries, the regardless of symptoms, and the because these surveys didn’t start
results are extrapolated to the until the end of April. However, a
The skyrocketing numbers of actual number of people being entire population. The latest modelling study by Nick Davies at
survey by the Office for National the London School of Hygiene &
coronavirus cases happening in infected probably hasn’t yet Statistics (ONS) suggests that Tropical Medicine suggests that
52,000 people were infected every in England there were 200,000
Europe now were predicted by exceeded the levels in the first day between 17 and 23 October. infections per day on average over
a two-week period during the peak
epidemiologists months ago. wave. The reason is that little Another survey, by the REACT 1 in March. At the very peak of the
team at Imperial College London, first wave, there were 250,000
“No government can claim they testing was done early on in the put the figure even higher. It infections on just one day.
suggests that around 96,000
have been ‘taken by surprise by people in England were being “It is quite high compared to
infected every day between 16 and other estimates,” says Davies. But
virulence of second wave’,” wrote “No matter what we do 25 October. That is more than four it is based on the number of deaths
times the number of confirmed and hospital admissions, so he is
Jeremy Farrar, director of the now, infections and daily cases that have been confident in the finding. This work
reported by the UK government. hasn’t yet been published.
Wellcome Trust in the UK, in a deaths will go up over

tweet. The trajectory has been the next few weeks”

clear since at least the start of

September in Europe, though pandemic, so most cases were

it could be seen as far back as missed – only 1 in 50 cases were

mid-July, he said. detected in the first wave,

After lockdowns during the first compared with around 1 in 4 now.

wave greatly reduced the spread In England, researchers get an

of the coronavirus, most European idea of infection rates from

countries opened their borders

and relaxed restrictions. At first,

case numbers continued to fall,

but they started to creep up again

in July and August.

Exponential growth means

cases are now rising fast in most

countries – including in Sweden,

where the majority of measures

to control the coronavirus are

voluntary and where infection

rates have been much higher than

those of neighbouring countries.

Underestimated cases REUTERS/YVES HERMAN

“Increased contact levels are at the
heart of this,” says Anne Johnson
at University College London.

As people went on holiday
in August, or returned to fully
reopening schools and universities,
they came into contact with more
people, she says. And with more
of life moving indoors as the
weather gets colder, the risk of
being infected has increased too.

Across Europe, daily case
numbers reached nearly 250,000
last week, compared with under

People with covid-19
being treated in a hospital
in Belgium

8 | New Scientist | 7 November 2020

Coronavirus Essential Guide

All you need to know about coronavirus and covid-19
Available now in the New Scientist app

If these estimates are right, MARTIN DIVISEK/EPA-EFE/SHUTTERSTOCK Prevention and Control (ECDC). advised a month ago by a SAGE
the number of new infections In the UK, there are only half subcommittee that the number
in England could surpass the of infections and hospital
number during the first wave as many people in hospital with admissions in England was
within days. The REACT 1 results covid-19 as there were in the first already higher than those in this
suggest cases are doubling at wave. This might seem at odds worst-case scenario, and that the
least every nine days. “The rate with the idea that the infection number of deaths would also soon
of growth is really quite rapid,” rate is about to surpass the earlier exceed this scenario. “Were the
says Steven Riley at Imperial peak. However, it is because of the number of new infections to fall
College London. lag between people being infected in the very near future, this
and becoming severely ill. exceedance of the reasonable
Hospital admissions rise “Admissions to hospital are going worst case scenario could be
up later but in parallel with the modest and short-lived,” states
It is clear that the three-tier system Police patrol a bridge number of cases,” says Johnson. a 7 October document made
of regional restrictions introduced after curfew in Prague, public last week.
in England on 12 October didn’t go Czech Republic What’s more, the first ONS
far enough. Davies has been using survey of England back in May England is far from alone. By
data from Google indicating how 250k found the highest rate of January, the daily mortality rate
much people are moving around infections among people aged in Europe as a whole could be five
to assess the system’s impact, and Highest reported daily rate of between 50 and 69. Now, the times higher than in April unless
his team’s modelling suggests that coronavirus cases across Europe highest rate is among people countries reverse course, said
the measures only slowed the in their twenties, who are much Hans Kluge at the World Health
spread of the virus, instead of 1 in 4 less likely to become severely ill. Organization in a statement
halting it completely. on 15 October.
Cases detected now, compared Unfortunately, infection rates
It will take several weeks for it with 1 in 50 during the first wave are starting to rise in older age “In January, the death rate in
to become clear what effect the groups too, says Johnson. She was Europe could be five times
various new measures introduced 20-29 one of the authors of a July report higher than in April unless
across Europe are having, due that warned there could be a countries reverse course”
to the delay between people Age group with the highest current protracted second wave, with
becoming infected, developing rate of covid-19 in England 120,000 deaths in the UK between While many countries have
symptoms, getting tested and, September and June 2021 – more tightened restrictions since then,
in some cases, being hospitalised 120k than double the number in the most haven’t imposed measures
or dying. first wave. “It was a reasonable as strict as the lockdowns put in
Potential number of coronavirus worst-case scenario, not a place during the first wave. For
“No matter what we do now, deaths in the UK between prediction,” says Johnson. instance, in England, schools and
infections and deaths will go September 2020 and June 2021 “But we are not far off it really.” universities will remain open,
up over the next few weeks,” unlike in March.
says Duncan Robertson at Harder to contain
Loughborough University in the A tendency to stay indoors
UK. “These deaths are already The figure of 120,000 deaths in winter might make it harder
baked into the system.” didn’t account for the availability to contain an outbreak than in
of better treatments than we spring, especially if actual case
There are already some had in the first wave, such as numbers are already surpassing
ominous warning signs. By the steroid dexamethasone, those from earlier in the year. The
18 October, there were more which has been shown to reduce higher the number of cases, the
people hospitalised than in deaths from covid-19. However, harder it is to contain an outbreak,
the first wave in at least seven another, more recent, reasonable says Johnson, because the odds of
countries: Bulgaria, Poland, worst-case planning scenario people coming into contact with
Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Latvia in a leaked report from the UK’s an infected person are higher.
and the Czech Republic. This list Scientific Advisory Group for
may be incomplete as some Emergencies (SAGE) is similar: “This is a serious situation,”
countries, including Germany, the 85,000 deaths in the UK directly she says. “We have already baked
Netherlands and Sweden, don’t due to covid-19, plus another ourselves into a lot more trouble,
report hospital admissions data 27,000 indirect deaths. just because of the number of
to the European Centre for Disease people infected.” ❚
The UK government was

7 November 2020 | New Scientist | 9

News Coronavirus

Europe

Germany hit hard by second wave

Though relatively unscathed by its first wave, the country is now faring worse

Layal Liverpool

HAILED as an example to follow 13.88 in the UK, 13.59 in Italy, to restrictions, she says. regards. The first wave was driven
for its initial coronavirus response, 16.87 in France and 18.57 in Spain, Cases have been climbing by relatively few introductions of
Germany is now struggling to according to data from the the virus into the community –
curb surging infections amid European Centre for Disease rapidly in Germany, and the returning travellers from ski trips
Europe’s second wave. Prevention and Control. country has been reporting record in the Alps were responsible for
daily increases in new infections many of the cases. This made
“We are now at a point where, Yet Germany’s success in recently. Its contact tracers are tracing of the cases relatively
on average nationally, we no containing its first wave and its also having a much harder time straightforward,” says Ciesek.
longer know where 75 per cent low death rate from covid-19 may keeping up this time around.
of infections come from,” be the reasons why it is now finding In an effort to regain control
German chancellor Angela it difficult to prevent infections. “One of the very few things we of this second surge of infections,
Merkel said during a press have to manage the epidemic in Merkel announced a partial
conference on 28 October. “We have been living with the country is contact tracing,”
the pandemic for many months says Ralf Reintjes at Hamburg “Germany’s contact
Unlike many nations, Germany now, and most people have not University of Applied Sciences. tracers are having a much
didn’t have to build up its testing yet seen friends or family fall But contact tracing stops working harder time keeping up
and contact-tracing infrastructure very ill or even die from covid-19,” above a certain threshold of this time around”
from scratch when the pandemic says Sandra Ciesek at Goethe cases and contacts, he says.
hit. During its first wave in the University Frankfurt. This The relaxation of rules over the nationwide lockdown for a month,
spring, the country’s 400 or so makes the threat of the virus summer has meant that each which started on 2 November.
local health authorities facilitated seem abstract and may be coronavirus case now probably Under the new restrictions,
rapid identification of source responsible for a drop in adherence has more contacts on average, nicknamed “lockdown light”
cases and tracing of their contacts. compared with the cases in the by the German media, bars and
People wear face spring, says Reintjes. restaurants are only allowed to
Ahead of a gradual easing of coverings as they leave serve takeaway items, and public
restrictions in early May, Merkel a subway in Frankfurt “The second wave in Germany recreation centres – such as
and German state leaders focused is distinct from the first in many gyms, swimming pools and
on expanding the country’s saunas – are closed.
tracing capacity further, agreeing MICHAEL PROBST/AP/SHUTTERSTOCK
in April that local health authorities People are also being advised
should each have at least five to work from home where possible
contact tracers for every 20,000 and restrictions on meetings have
citizens. Combined with Germany’s been tightened. However, schools
large testing capacity and its use and nurseries remain open.
of localised restrictions to quash
emerging hotspots, this worked “I think Germany is acting quite
to keep cases and deaths low fast, because the number of cases
through the summer months. is still not as bad as other countries
that are also implementing
“I think also the fact that measures at the moment, like Italy
Germany had a high number of or Spain,” says Muñoz-Fontela.
beds in ICU [intensive care units] The goal of the new restrictions
really helped to control the is to bring infections back down
situation,” says César Muñoz- to levels that are controllable
Fontela at the Bernhard Nocht with contact tracing, he says.
Institute for Tropical Medicine
in Hamburg. “The system was If the new restrictions in
never really overwhelmed.” Germany aren’t successful,
the only alternative will be to
Germany has the most bring back tougher measures,
hospital beds per 1000 people says Stefan Kaufmann at the
in the European Union and has Max Planck Institute for
had a much lower death rate Infection Biology in Berlin.
from covid-19 than other European “This is the light version. If it
countries with a similar population doesn’t work, then we have
size. During the first wave, deaths to immediately respond to
in Germany peaked at 2.78 per introduce a stricter response.”  ❚
million people, compared with

10 | New Scientist | 7 November 2020

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News Coronavirus

Convalescent plasma

The stopgap before a vaccine

Antibodies in the blood of people who have had covid-19 could be just what
we need to tide us over until we have a vaccine, reports Graham Lawton

FOR people who have survived GUILLERMO LEGARIA/GETTY IMAGES
covid-19, there is an opportunity
to add another chapter to their A nurse checks plasma blood, and donating it is similar regulatory hoops. More than
recovery story: they could help donated by a covid-19 to blood donation. Blood is 50 clinical trials are under way,
save other people’s lives by survivor in Bogota, Colombia siphoned from a vein in the arm, some looking at it as a vaccine.
donating blood. but then separated using a process
called plasmapheresis. The plasma As yet “there is only limited
The plasma of people who is retained but the red and white data”, says Diana Gabriela Iacob at
have recovered from the disease blood cells are infused back into the National Institute of Infectious
contains precious antibodies that the donor. Plasma infusions are Diseases in Bucharest, Romania,
helped them fight off the virus, similar to blood transfusions. The who has published a review of
and could help others do the same, plasma is screened for pathogens, potential covid-19 treatments.
or even make them temporarily tissue-matched, then infused Some side effects have been
immune. Such antibodies are an into the bloodstream. reported, including risk of lung
increasing focus of research efforts injury. However, Sturek says it
to treat and prevent covid-19. There are no approved is no more risky than a routine
According to senior US health convalescent plasma therapies for plasma transfusion.
official Anthony Fauci, antibody covid-19 yet, but some small-scale
therapies could be a “bridge to pilot studies have reported “We’re hopeful,” he says. “We
a vaccine” – a stopgap to carry benefits for very ill people. do lack the level of evidence from
us safely to the promised land. In August, the US Food and Drug a randomised controlled trial,
Administration (FDA) granted but what’s the harm? It may be
The use of antibody-laden blood the therapy an emergency use helpful and it’s probably safe.”
plasma was developed more than authorisation (EUA), which means
100 years ago to treat diphtheria. it can be given to patients despite But it may also fail. On
It fell out of favour with the not having jumped through all the 22 October, researchers from
introduction of antibiotics, but the largest clinical trial to date,
was revived in 2002 during the which involved 464 moderately ill
SARS epidemic, and has since
been used against Ebola and
H1N1 flu. Another reason for
plasma injection is to provide
“passive” immunity, effectively
a short-term vaccine for diseases
such as hepatitis B.

Ready-made therapy

The research for using several “We do lack randomised
types of plasma to treat covid-19 controlled trials, but what’s
is still in its early stages. The the harm? It may be helpful
most basic antibody therapy is and it’s probably safe”
convalescent plasma. The idea
is simple: transfuse plasma from
a recovered patient into a sick
person’s bloodstream to give
them an instant immune
response. “It’s appealing because
it’s a ready-made potential
therapeutic,” says Jeffrey Sturek
at the University of Virginia, who
is running a convalescent plasma
trial. “You can also borrow
immunity from other people.”

Plasma is the liquid part of

12 | New Scientist | 7 November 2020

Coronavirus Essential Guide

All you need to know about coronavirus and covid-19
Available now in the New Scientist app

people in India, announced that need several donors to make to US president Donald Trump. University of Birmingham, UK,
there was no clinical benefit. who assessed Regeneron’s drug
However, that was just one small one dose, but in return “you It is a cocktail of two monoclonal for the UK’s Centre for Evidence-
treatment trial and the plasma Based Medicine. He says a similar
levels of antibody used were low. get a more consistent antibody antibodies selected for their ability approach was tested on Ebola
in 2018 and worked “somewhat”.
“There may be ways to refine it potency and more antibody to block the virus from entering
as a treatment and deliver solid, However, monoclonal
demonstrable benefits,” said in a smaller volume”, says Lutz cells, and is in clinical trials both antibodies aren’t a sure-fire
Simon Clarke at the University success. Despite the production
of Reading, UK, in a statement. Bonacker at CSL Behring in as a therapy and a prophylactic. method not relying on donors,
making large quantities is a
There is also the issue Hattersheim am Main, Germany, Regeneron has said that people challenge. Regeneron says it has
of antibody-dependent enough of one of its monoclonal
enhancement, where an one of the companies in the with confirmed cases who are antibodies to treat just 50,000
antibody backfires and makes the people. “Costs are likely to be
disease worse. However, this is a alliance. All four H-Igs are being given the antibody cocktail have eye-watering,” says Ferner.
“somewhat theoretical risk”, says
Sturek. It is very rare in other tested in a single trial as therapy There are also likely to be other
infectious diseases and hasn’t yet roadblocks. Days after asking for
been seen in covid-19. The therapy for hospitalised patients in 18 “Not everyone will respond an EUA, Eli Lilly halted recruitment
also depends on a steady supply for one of its clinical trials on
of convalescent donors, but they countries. The trial is in phase III, well to a vaccine. For some, the advice of a safety monitoring
aren’t hard to persuade, he says. assessing effectiveness, and could antibodies may be the board. But the company has
“There is a sense of gratitude finish before the end of the year. only route to immunity” three other ongoing trials.
and wanting to give back.”
The next level up is monoclonal On 28 October, it published
Turbo-charged plasma positive interim results from
antibodies. The principle is the a lower viral load, get better faster one of these, in people with
Another approach called mild or moderate covid-19 who
hyperimmune globulin (H-Ig) same, but the production method and need less medical attention. hadn’t been admitted to hospital.
is also showing promise. This Those who had the treatment were
is essentially turbo-charged is different. The antibodies aren’t It hasn’t revealed results from less likely to end up in hospital
convalescent plasma that has been (NEJM, doi.org/fgtm). The results
pooled, purified and concentrated. extracted directly from plasma, the prevention side of the trial. have been peer-reviewed.
H-Ig is already used against
numerous conditions including they are pumped out by Two days after Trump left Aside from the Regeneron
flu and other respiratory viruses. and Eli Lilly ones, at least two
genetically modified cells. hospital in October having other monoclonal antibody
There are four covid-19 H-Igs trials are under way.
in development, two from a The first step is to screen extolled Regeneron’s virtues, the
consortium of companies called If antibody therapies succeed,
the Plasma Alliance. convalescent plasma to find the firm and its main rival, Eli Lilly, the analogy of them being a bridge
to a vaccine is a good one, says
This approach is attractive most potent antibodies, and then asked the FDA for an EUA for Sturek. But even when a vaccine
because “it’s cleaner and more is available, that bridge will still
consistent; you have a better idea engineer cells to produce them monoclonal antibody treatments. be needed. “Not everyone will
what you’re giving the patient”, respond well to a vaccine,” says
says Sturek. This is because in large quantities. Monoclonal The FDA hasn’t yet responded. Sturek. For those people who don’t
standard convalescent plasma get protection from vaccines,
contains a variable amount of the antibodies are already used for Results of monoclonal antibody antibodies could be their only
desired antibodies, and might also route to immunity. ❚
contain toxins or other nasties. hundreds of diseases, including trials released so far, which are

But whereas convalescent cancers, autoimmune diseases mostly in animals, look good, and
plasma can be dispensed
immediately, H-Ig takes time and some infectious diseases. it is “plausible” that it will work in
to prepare and scale up. You also
The leading player for covid-19 humans, says Robin Ferner at the

is biotech company Regeneron in

New York, which hit the headlines A covid-19 patient in

after its experimental therapy Turkey is discharged

REGN-COV2 was administered after plasma therapy

ILYAS GUN/ANADOLU AGENCY VIA GETTY IMAGES If you have had covid-19 and would
like to donate plasma, please visit
nhsbt.nhs.uk (to find UK sites);
thefightisinus.org (US); or lifeblood.
com.au/convalescent-plasma (Aus)

7 November 2020 | New Scientist | 13

News

Energy

Fusion energy but cooler

A spherical nuclear fusion reactor in the UK is testing a new heat-reducing design

Adam Vaughan

RESEARCHERS have successfully the exhaust every three years or Energy Agency, the project’s parent shaped, but this one is spherical
tested a new £55 million nuclear so, an unacceptable interruption
fusion machine in the UK, which and cost for a commercial plant. body, says the design could reduce with a thin column in the
could provide vital insights for a
future prototype power station. The MAST Upgrade team hopes the heat by 10 times, akin to taking middle, producing a plasma
to crack this by using a new type of
The Mega Amp Spherical exhaust called a “super-X diverter”. temperatures facing a spacecraft shaped like a cored apple.
Tokamak (MAST) Upgrade at the It works by sending the plasma a
Culham Centre for Fusion Energy long distance around the machine entering Earth’s atmosphere down Around 90 per cent of the
in Oxfordshire took seven years and across a wider area than usual,
to build. Last week, the machine reducing the heat density so it to that of a car’s engine. Culham machine is new. The rest –
produced its first plasma, the state cools before being extracted.
hydrogen reaches when heated Juan Matthews at the University primarily the building and steel
to extremely high temperatures. Ian Chapman at the UK Atomic
of Manchester, UK, says designing
Our understanding of how A computer simulation of
stars are powered by hydrogen the MAST nuclear fusion an exhaust that doesn’t need “The new facility
fusing into helium dates back reactor in Oxfordshire, UK
around a century, but efforts to regular replacement is a big issue, will operate at 50 to
harness clean energy from the
reaction in a commercial power but only one of many. “It’s just 100 million °C, which
station still face many barriers –
not least how to extract more one of the huge number of is hotter than the sun”
energy than we put in.
problems that are going to have
One key problem is the heat
from the plasma, which reaches to be solved before a [fusion] “vaccum vessels” that contain
millions of degrees Celsius. This
means it gradually burns away the power system is built.” the plasma – was salvaged from
exhaust system that extracts heat
from the tokamak, the machine in Most tokamaks are doughnut- the original MAST, which ran
which the fusion reaction occurs
with the plasma held in place by an from 1997 to 2013. The first plasma
electromagnetic field. In a power
station, that could mean replacing produced is about two years later

than planned and the machine is

over budget, but Chapman says

that is unsurprising given how

hard the technical challenge is.

The new facility will operate

at “near fusion” conditions

of 50 to 100 million °C, which

is hotter than the sun. By contrast,

the world’s biggest fusion project,

ITER in southern France, aims

to produce plasma in 2025 at

150 million °C. In July, ITER

UKAEA entered the assembly phase

of its construction.  ❚

Biodiversity

Saving forests could these industries aren’t properly treatment costs and economic and disease came from an animal,
help prevent future regulated. The more people cut productivity losses. says Daszak. Covid-19 may have
pandemics down forests for farmland, for come from bats in China. “HIV
example, the more they are pushing “It’s a really incredible, efficient emerged from the hunting of
WE COULD avoid future pandemics into animals’ habitats and thus economic return on investment chimpanzees,” he says, and recent
if unsustainable practices such as coming into regular contact with we’re going to see if we can do Ebola outbreaks came from the
deforestation and the industrial- disease-carrying wildlife. this right,” says report author Peter hunting of wild primates.
scale wildlife trade are halted, Daszak at EcoHealth Alliance in New
according to a global biodiversity Controlling the global wildlife York. The report was published by The report will feed into the next
report. The cost of doing so would trade and reducing land-use change the Intergovernmental Science- major meeting of the Convention
be paid back many times over, would cost $40-58 billion per year, Policy Platform on Biodiversity on Biological Diversity, which is
simply because it reduces the the report says. That is a lot, but the and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). taking place in China in 2021 after
chances of another pandemic. covid-19 pandemic is estimated having been postponed due to the
to have cost the global economy Almost every known pandemic pandemic, says Anne Larigauderie,
Millions of people are living or $8-16 trillion by July. Before the executive secretary of IPBES. The
working in close contact with wild covid-19 crisis, pandemics such $1 trillion meeting will set global biodiversity
animals that carry diseases, and as the HIV and influenza ones cost a goals for the next decade. ❚
total of $1 trillion per year, including The annual cost of pandemics in Michael Marshall
treatment and economic losses

14 | New Scientist | 7 November 2020

Technology Geology

Software can guess Earth may have had three
what you are typing geological ‘big bangs’
during video calls
Colin Barras
Chris Stokel-Walker
The San Andreas fault is
SOMEONE who types while on a where the Pacific and North
video call may be giving away more American tectonic plates meet
than they realise. A computer model
can work out the words that the DAVID PARKER/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY up, some slabs of Earth’s crust
person is typing just by tracking sink down into the mantle – the
the movement of their shoulders AT THREE moments in the past, more intriguing, pattern. At thick layer of hot rock between
and arms in the video stream. the crust and the core. Condie
Earth’s geological activity picked three points in Earth’s distant says the slabs take 100 to 200
“There are significant movements million years to drift down to
that occur when typing,” says up the pace. Its tectonic plates past – 600, 1100 and 1850 the bottom of the mantle. When
Murtuza Jadliwala at the University they arrive, the temperatures
of Texas at San Antonio. “We moved faster than normal million years ago – the tectonic and pressures turn the former
thought if we are able to model crust into a plume of hot rock,
them scientifically, we should be and there were bursts of plates sped up for a few tens of which rises back to the surface.
able to infer different keystrokes
by looking at the video data.” volcanic activity and mountain millions of years, so that the “When that hot plume
hits the bottom of the
Jadliwala and his colleagues building that helped to create global average speed was 30 to tectonic plates, it increases
developed a model to do just that. plate speed, which in turn
They mapped the movements onto supercontinents. These three 50 per cent faster than normal. increases orogenic [mountain
a keyboard and cross-referenced building] activity,” says
the results against a dictionary of geological big bangs may have At the same time, there Condie, who presented the
commonly typed words, finding work at an online meeting
they could correctly identify the played a role in the evolution were peaks in volcanic activity of the Geological Society
word being typed 75 per cent of of America last week.
the time. Their experiments were of life on Earth. and mountain building,
conducted both in lab conditions “The notion that the deep
and using real-life video call data. In 2014, Kent Condie at heralding the formation mantle is controlling the speed
of Earth’s tectonic plates just
The computer model removes the New Mexico Institute of of supercontinents – Nuna before supercontinent assembly
the background information from a is fascinating,” says Hugo
frame of a video call. It then detects Mining and Technology and his at about 1850 million years, Olierook at Curtin University,
the outer edges of the shoulder Australia. Earlier this year,
by analysing each frame using an colleagues found that Earth’s Rodinia some 1100 million years Olierook and his colleagues
image-processing technique called presented evidence that,
optical flow, which traces how gigantic tectonic plates are ago and the coalescence of land 110 million years ago during the
pixels change in a video and maps Cretaceous period, all of Earth’s
arm movements onto a keyboard. moving faster now than they tectonic plates suddenly slowed
down by 25 to 50 per cent,
Touch typers are more difficult were a billion or so years ago. “A hot plume hitting the which they also linked to the
to discern than those who “peck” return of crust to the mantle.
at their keyboard, for whom the That conclusion came from bottom of tectonic plates
model could recover 83 per cent Condie says it might be no
of words correctly. Those who analysing several types of data, increases plate speed coincidence that two of the
wore clothing with some sort of three geological big bangs
sleeve were also less susceptible including magnetic signals and mountain building” roughly coincide with eventful
to being analysed accurately episodes in life’s history: the
(arxiv.org/abs/2010.12078). locked in ancient rock that appearance of complex cells
about 1.7 billion years ago and
Jadliwala says pixellating suggest where on Earth’s masses some 600 million the emergence of animals
the shoulders would mitigate about 600 million years ago.
the issue, but Alan Woodward at surface the plates were at a years ago that would lead to “Plume events pump carbon
the University of Surrey, UK, argues dioxide into the atmosphere,”
such a solution defeats the purpose particular time in the past. This the formation of Pangaea. says Condie. “I think there
of video calling. “The whole point would be an effect on life.” ❚
of a video call is to see people,” he can help establish how fast the “Something dramatic was
says, adding that it is alarming that
video calls can reveal so much.  ❚ plates were moving at the time. happening at those periods

Now, Condie and his team of time that was affecting all

have analysed more data. of these systems,” says Condie.

They say there is no longer a The researchers think this

signal suggesting the plates is evidence of a vast geological

have accelerated through time. cycle that begins with the death

In its place is another, even of a supercontinent. As it breaks

7 November 2020 | New Scientist | 15

Advertising feature

Can the UK government’s plans to dramatically increase spending on
research and development keep British science at the top of its game?
New Scientist asks the experts

Unleashing innovation

B  ritain has long considered itself a when it assumes such a large input from number of ambitious “moonshot”
powerhouse for science and technology. industry. “It’s a stretch,” says PeterWilliams, programmes with inspirational goals that can
It takes pride in being the place where GroupTechnology Director of INEOS and a attract talent and create payoffs far more
the structure of DNA was discovered, where member of the UK’s Engineering and Physical beneficial than a business-as-usual approach.
the jet engine and the steam engine were Sciences Research Council. “But it is
invented, home to the originator of the web worthwhile setting a target.” Precisely what those moonshots should be
browser and the world’s first test tube baby. is yet to be decided but one potential focus for
On the other hand, the 2.4 percent inspiration is the UK’s commitment to
But Britain hasn’t always been able to turn assumes a healthy growing economy. achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2050.
its scientific prowess into profitable enterprise. “Ironically, a post-Covid economy may mean
For example, the country was a computing we reach the 2.4 per cent by having a relatively AndyWright, StrategicTechnology Director
pioneer but today plays a relatively minor role flat public increase in spending,” says Chris at BAE Systems, likes the goal of building an
in the global computer industry. Skidmore, MP and former Minister of State for airliner that can fly across the Atlantic with
Universities, Research, Innovation and Skills. zero net carbon emissions, a project called
Now the UK government is aiming to Jet Zero. “It’s a fantastic project to bring
change that with a huge increase in the One idea from the Roadmap is to run a enthusiastic individuals into engineering,”
amount it invests in research and
development. In March, the Chancellor THEADVANCED RESEARCH 3D-printed model of
Rushi Sunak unveiled plans to increase R&D PROJECTS AGENCY theTempest, the UK’s
spending from 1.7 per cent of GDP in 2017 proposed next-generation
to 2.4 per cent by 2027. The plans include In the 1950s, the US created theAdvanced fighter aircraft, undergoing
significant increases in spending from both Research ProjectsAgency (ARPA) to build wind tunnel tests
the government and the private sector. a technological lead for the country
during the ColdWar. Famously, it went on
That raises some important questions to develop the internet and other hi-tech
about how the money should be spent, how breakthroughs.
it can unlock investment from industry and
whether the approach will ultimately create Now the UK government wants to
jobs and wealth while solving the most take a similar approach with its own
pressing problems facing society. ARPA that is oriented towards specific
goals with pre-agreed milestones to
Spending roadmap check progress. But how would this work
in the UK?
Last month, these questions took centre stage
at an online New Scientist Debate sponsored “I think it’s quite an exciting
by BAE Systems. A panel of experts from proposition,” saysAndyWright from BAE
industry, academia and government Systems.And Frances Saunders agrees.
discussed how the new money might best be She has seen how it works in the US and
used and what else might be needed to points out that anARPA-style approach
achieve the government’s goals. would need to be more brutal than UK
researchers are used to. “The key is to
Under the new scheme, public funding for have a portfolio of projects – some of
UK research and development will rise from which can be very high risk – and a good
£11 billion per year to £22 billion per year by programme manager with the authority
2024 to 2025. If all goes to plan, total R&D to make the decisions to cut programmes
spending – including inputs from industry – that are not performing,” she says.That
will rise to £65 billion, or 2.4 per cent of the money can then be reallocated to
UK’s GDP, by 2027. In July, the government set programmes that look more promising.
out its ambition for this new spending in its “It’s a very different culture from the
“Research and Development Roadmap”. research culture we’ve tended to use in
the UK up until now,” she says.
An important question is whether 2.4 per
cent is an achievable target, particularly

Sponsored by

he says. “That would put the UK at the activities either in industry or academia,”
forefront of aerospace.We’re already a strong Skidmore says. “It doesn’t matter how much
aerospace nation and this would allow us money we throw at this if we haven’t got
to maintain that position.” the people on the ground.”

Skidmore was also the energy minister While Brexit makes this a more complex
who signed the net zero agreement into law. prospect in the short-term, the UK has long
He agrees that it provides a useful focus for been part of the European Union’s research
future R&D. “It’s a huge task, and we don’t yet and innovation programme. To maintain
have the technologies to achieve it, but we access to the same level of international
have a process in place,” he says. financial investment, the government hopes
to continue this after leaving, much like
Making sure talented people are able to Switzerland and Israel do now.
work in the UK will be of paramount
importance to the success of the whole effort. Williams also stresses the importance of
“We’re going to need around 50,000 extra working together. “Collaborations are of
individuals performing research-related fundamental importance. Being competitive
means being able to participate in international
The Unleashing Innovation panel (clockwise from top left): collaborations, so it’s very important to pay
Andy Wright, BAE Systems; Frances Saunders, Science and attention to this in the measures we take.”
Technology Facilities Council; Justin Mullins, New Scientist;
Chris Skidmore, MP, former Minister for Universities, The private sector will be important too.
Research, Innovation and Skills ; Peter Williams, INEOS “All international companies have a choice
about where to place their research and
development activities, so we need to carefully
examine what makes the UK attractive,” says
Williams.This is where the government needs
to make the UK R&D friendly using tools like a
beneficial taxation regime and R&D credits.

Frances Saunders is a former Chief
Executive of Dstl, the UK Ministry of Defence’s
Science andTechnology Laboratory.This
background in the defence sector gives her
some optimism that UK-based researchers
will avoid becoming isolated. Britain has
traditionally been good at defence-related
collaborations with the US, Canada, Australia
and New Zealand, she points out. And
Williams is optimistic too. “Ultimately, if a
strong collaboration makes sense, a way will
be found to make it happen,” he says. “We all
share the same objectives in terms of health
and wellbeing, technology and growing the
digital economy.”

Wright is similarly optimistic about
industry’s proposed role in the new research
plan. He says it asks a lot for industry to inject
such a significant proportion of the cash, but
BAE Systems’ role in developing theTempest
combat aircraft shows that industry and
government can work well together for
mutual benefit.

“Most of what we rely on in society
depends upon technology,” he says. “For the
UK to maintain jobs and prosperity, we have
to invest in the science that will underpin the
technology we need in the future.” ❚

Watch the full debate for

free at https://bit.ly/35TDsJt

News

Biology

Corals evolve in an unusual way

These are the first animals seen to pass on mutations found outside sex cells

Michael Marshall

CORALS have an evolutionary

superpower. Adult corals can

pass on mutations they have

acquired during their lives to

their offspring, overturning

a long-standing belief that

no animals can hand down such

mutations – although most can’t.

“Juvenile corals inherited

mutations that were acquired

during the parents’ lifespan,”

says Iliana Baums at Pennsylvania

State University. “It has not been

observed before in animals, but

it has been observed in plants.”

Corals belong to one of the ALEX MUSTARD/NATUREPL

oldest animal groups. They are

similar to plants in many ways,

such as spending most of their

lives fixed in one place, in their

case on reefs, says Baums. One

way that corals and their relatives

differ from mammals or birds is (Acropora palmata) from Florida many years, and some of the A diver approaching a
polyps had acquired mutations large colony of Elkhorn
in their germ line, the cells in their and Curaçao. These live in colonies during their lives that weren’t coral in the Caribbean Sea
there in the founding individual.
bodies that form eggs or sperm. of genetically identical polyps biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck.
The analysis revealed that some However, in Lamarckism,
In most animals, including that divide asexually, allowing of these mutations were present
in the larvae (bioRxiv, doi.org/fgf5). mutations are driven by an
humans, the germ-line cells are the colony to grow. They also The finding indicates that corals animal’s actions, so the creature
can pass on new genetic variants, has some control over which
strictly separated from the rest of release sperm and eggs into the and evolve, in a way that no other genes it passes on. In reality,
animal is known to do so. mutations arise randomly and any
the body. This limits which genetic water that were thought to need that benefit an animal may help it
“They ran all thinkable survive and produce offspring –
mutations can be passed on. For to encounter sperm or eggs from controls, therefore I think and that seems to be just as true of
technically it’s absolutely sound,” the corals. “It doesn’t reintroduce
example, a gene might mutate in another colony to develop. says Thorsten Reusch at the Lamarck,” says Reusch.
GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for
one cell of a person’s body and The study began with a peculiar Ocean Research Kiel in Germany. But it means corals have a way
of creating genetic diversity even
change that cell’s behaviour – observation: some eggs developed Baums and Reusch both say it is when reproducing asexually. In
important not to misinterpret the this, they again resemble plants.
perhaps turning it cancerous – but into larvae without being fertilised. finding. One possible misreading
concerns the long-disproved Reusch and his colleagues
the mutation won’t be passed to To confirm this, the team collected idea that acquired traits can be showed in a recent study that
inherited and that this explains colonies of seagrass can undergo
their children. Only mutations in more larvae and compared their how new species evolve. For a similar process, in which clones
example, the long necks of giraffes pass on acquired mutations.
germ-line cells can be inherited. genes with the parent colony. were imagined to have arisen Beneficial ones can spread to
because early giraffes stretched to dominate entire seagrass colonies.
Biologists already knew that reach tall trees, making their necks
longer, and they passed this to their Baums and her team have yet to
coral germ lines aren’t like this. “Corals have a way of offspring. The idea is sometimes find evidence that any of the coral
known as Lamarckism, after mutations are beneficial, but they
Adult corals have groups of creating genetic diversity plan to investigate this next. ❚

primordial stem cells that can give even when reproducing

rise to both germ-line cells and asexually, like plants”

body cells. Body cells sometimes

change back into stem cells, The larvae only contained genes

and then into germ-line cells. from the colony, albeit reshuffled.

This blurs the line between the “There was no input of foreign

germ line and the rest of the body. sperm,” says Baums. The team still

Baums and her colleagues isn’t quite sure what happened.

have now found evidence that However, there was an even

mutations that arise during bigger surprise lurking. The team

a coral’s lifespan can enter the knew that individual polyps in the

germ line and be passed on. colony weren’t quite genetically

They studied elkhorn corals identical. It has been there for

18 | New Scientist | 7 November 2020

Biology

Viruses shown to produce energy
on their own for the first time

Michael Le Page

A FEW giant viruses appear to copy DNA into RNA on their own, by transferring it to a bacterium. not all had membrane potentials.
generate their own energy, which which is unusual for viruses. They “This suggests an active energy La Scola thinks the discovery
viruses aren’t supposed to be able can get attacked by smaller viruses
to do. The finding will fuel an and have a kind of immune metabolism in viral particles, adds to the evidence that giant
already fierce debate about system. “Twenty years after the similar to that of cells,” says viruses should be regarded as a
whether giant viruses really are discovery of the mimivirus, all Gustavo Caetano-Anollés at group separate from both normal
viruses, and if they are alive or not. the definitions of a virus are no the University of Illinois at viruses and from prokaryotes –
longer true,” says La Scola. Urbana-Champaign. organisms with simple cells.
“It is really incredible to have
energy in a virus,” says Bernard La He and his colleagues have But David Wessner at Davidson Even if they generate energy,
Scola at Aix-Marseille University now found that some giant College in North Carolina isn’t they are still viruses, says Grieg
in France. Why any virus needs to viruses called pandoraviruses convinced. The team looked Steward at the University of
produce its own energy remains generate a membrane potential – only at viruses that had just been Hawai’i at Manoa. “Pandoraviruses
a mystery, he says. an electrical gradient – across released from cells, he says, and are viruses because they replicate
their outer membrane (bioRxiv, by an assembly process inside
Up until 2003, all known viruses doi.org/fggb). It takes energy to Pandoraviruses seem to of a host cell,” he says. La Scola
consisted of nothing more than generate a membrane potential, produce energy, raising the previously saw viruses as living
RNA or DNA wrapped in a protein and since these are present in question: are they alive? inside cells. But if a pandoravirus
coat or membrane. These have no isolated viruses as well as in those makes energy outside cells,
working machinery inside them inside cells, that energy must come GIOVANNI CANCEMI/SHUTTERSTOCK it is even “more living”, he says.
and are reliant on cells they infect from the virus itself, says La Scola. “So yes, it is alive, I think.”
to copy themselves. Under many
definitions of life, they aren’t alive. Why they have membrane Frank Aylward at Virginia Tech
potentials is still unclear. In most recently reported finding genes
But in 2003, La Scola reported cells, these drive the production involved in energy production in
the discovery of the first giant of a molecule called ATP, but giant virus genomes, which may
virus, called mimivirus. Since the viruses don’t make ATP. be used to manipulate a host’s
then, hundreds more giant viruses metabolism. Giant viruses are
have been discovered and the The researchers also found turning out to be widespread,
division between viruses and that a virus called Pandoravirus which suggests they have a huge
living cells has become blurred. massiliensis has many genes that impact on the planet.
code for enzymes resembling
Some giant viruses are bigger those needed to generate energy. “It does not matter whether
than some bacterial cells, and have They confirmed that at least one they are alive or not, they are
large genomes with lots of genes. of these enzymes has this function out there and doing all these
They have some machinery to important things,” says Aylward. ❚

Solar system

Ring molecule found in Titan’s thick atmosphere using building block, but you can build oxygen. Studying its potential for
in Titan’s sky may be life could help us learn about the
building block of life the Atacama Large Millimeter/ bigger and bigger things with it,” beginnings of life here as well.

A CIRCULAR molecule spotted on submillimeter Array in Chile. says Nixon. “I don’t think anyone Titan has the biggest variety of
Saturn’s moon Titan may help form molecules on any moon or planet
precursors to life. This compound Finding this molecule on Titan necessarily believes that there’s we have investigated, says Nixon.
hasn’t been seen in the atmosphere ”It’s sort of this happy hunting
of any planet or moon before. was a surprise. It is extremely microbes on Titan, but the fact that ground for new things,” he says.
“Molecules like this are almost an
The molecule is called reactive – if it bumps into any other we can form complex molecules like early warning sign that there’s more
cyclopropenylidene and is made exciting chemistry to be found.”
up of three carbon atoms in a ring particles, it tends to be quick to this on Titan could help tell us things
with two hydrogen atoms attached. Right now, we can only look for
Conor Nixon at NASA’s Goddard chemically react with them to form like how life got started on Earth.” that from Earth, but the Dragonfly
Space Flight Center in Maryland and spacecraft, planned to launch in
his colleagues spotted it floating new compounds. Because of this, it Conditions on Titan now may be 2027, will examine Titan’s surface
up close. ❚
had previously only ever been seen similar to those on Earth early in the Leah Crane

in tenuous clouds of gas and dust in planet’s history, when the air was

interstellar space. Somehow, it lasts dominated by methane instead of

in the upper layers of Titan’s skies.

Ring-shaped molecules like this “This is a really small

tend to act as the building blocks of building block, but you

molecules necessary for life, such as can build bigger and

DNA and RNA. “This is a really small bigger things with it”

7 November 2020 | New Scientist | 19

News Climate change

Animals China’s climate goal needs
negative emissions tech
Endangered
possums take refuge Donna Lu
in back gardens
CHINA’S pledge to reach carbon is the only country to achieve year from the atmosphere
Jake Buehler neutrality by 2060 may depend net zero by 2060; a global (arxiv.org/abs/2010.06723).
on extracting greenhouse gases net-zero scenario in which
IN WESTERN Australian residential from the air at massive scales. all nations achieve overall They say that there will be
neighbourhoods, endangered carbon neutrality by 2060; a heavy reliance on “direct air
marsupials have made themselves President Xi Jinping and a final scenario that limits capture” that removes CO2
at home in private gardens. announced the target in global warming to 1.5°C by 2100. from the atmosphere, an option
September at the UN general that isn’t currently available
Western ringtail possums assembly, saying that China’s The researchers predicted commercially. Direct air capture
(Pseudocheirus occidentalis) are aim was “to have CO2 emissions that the global net-zero scenario may prove to be expensive to
nocturnal, cat-sized creatures that peak before 2030”. will result in about 1.8°C of operate. It may never become
live in trees and shrubs. They once warming by 2100. a commercial option.
ranged over much of south-western To do so would require
Australia, but habitat loss and significant use of negative 2.5 “There is a risk of doing
predation by invasive red foxes emissions technologies, such things with the expectation
have dramatically reduced their as capturing carbon dioxide gigatonnes of CO2 that China that negative emissions
range to three small enclaves. directly from the air and may have to remove annually technologies will be realised
the planting of new forests, from the atmosphere in future,” says Pradhan.
These last remaining pockets according to an analysis led
overlap with the urban areas of by Shreekar Pradhan at the Although China is now the The priority should be to take
Busselton, Manjimup and Albany University of Virginia. world’s biggest carbon emitter, immediate steps to overhaul
in Western Australia. The possums the modelling suggests that if China’s energy system, instead of
frequently turn up in back gardens The researchers used a it is alone in achieving net-zero relying on the promise of future
in these places, dining on roses and model that includes projections emissions by 2060, the planet carbon-sucking technologies,
the leaves and fruit from trees. of future changes to global will remain on course for more says Li Shuo at Greenpeace
temperature and atmospheric than 3°C of warming over East Asia in China. At present,
“We wanted to know if the carbon concentrations. pre-industrial levels by 2100. two-thirds of China’s power
habitat within gardens is sufficient consumption is coal-based.
for these animals to live exclusively They simulated four potential The researchers also looked
in these areas, or whether they are trajectories of emissions cuts: at China’s path to net zero. “There’s no way to reconcile
still dependent on some natural a scenario with no climate They concluded that the nation a zero-carbon future… with
habitat to survive,” says Bronte mitigation policy, used as a will need to make significant new coal-fired power plants,”
Van Helden at the University of reference; one in which China use of negative emissions says Li. “When we talk about
Western Australia in Albany. technologies in order to remove offsets [such as direct air
A man tends to up to 2.5 gigatonnes of CO2 per capture], we are actually talking
She and her team caught possums a crop near a coal about the very last few miles in
from 16 private gardens in Albany power plant in China a very long journey.”
by exploiting their sweet tooth –
they baited traps with almond meal QILAI SHEN/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES Frank Jotzo at the Australian
soaked in strawberry essence. The National University says that at
researchers fitted 20 possums with least a modest level of negative
radio-transmitter collars before emissions approaches will be
releasing them. For the next three necessary to reach net zero,
months, the team tracked signals both in China and globally.
from the collars to work out where
the animals were moving and how “There will be some activities
much they were using the gardens and processes that will have
versus nearby bushland. greenhouse gas emissions even
in a world where we devote very
Surprisingly, none of the possums great efforts to cut emissions,”
ever left the private gardens. They he says.
hopped between multiple gardens,
feeding primarily on non-native Jotzo estimates that
plants like avocado trees, which employing negative emissions
made up the bulk of the garden flora technologies to remove about
(Animal Conservation, doi.org/fggf). 2.5 gigatonnes of carbon a year
might cost China hundreds
Van Helden says “gardens may of billions of dollars annually.
contain sufficient resources to “That’s within the realm of
support wildlife” like possums, the affordable,” he says. ❚
and that such areas shouldn’t be
overlooked as valuable habitat.  ❚

20 | New Scientist | 7 November 2020

News In brief

Climate change

Arctic ice loss could trigger
huge extra global warming

MJ PHOTOGRAPHY/ALAMY IF ARCTIC sea ice vanishes in the event of the world holding
summers by the middle of the temperature rises to 1.5°C.
century as expected, the world
could see a vicious circle that However, Arctic feedbacks
drives an extra 0.43°C of warming. could bring some warming much
sooner. Summers in the region are
Ice losses in frozen regions expected to be ice-free before
trigger “climate feedback” loops. 2050. That means the Arctic alone
For instance, white ice reflects could account for an extra 0.19°C
much of the sun’s energy, and if it of global warming around
is replaced by dark open water that mid-century, on top of the 1.5°C.
absorbs heat, more warming occurs.
The models indicated that
Now Ricarda Winkelmann at changes in reflectivity, or albedo,
the Potsdam Institute for Climate accounted for 55 per cent of the
Impact Research in Germany and 0.43°C. Water vapour contributed
her colleagues have modelled 30 per cent, because warmer air
what these feedbacks would lead can hold more water and trap more
to if ice disappeared from mountain heat, and clouds 15 per cent (Nature
glaciers, the Greenland and West Communications, doi.org/fgjt).
Antarctica ice sheets, and the Arctic
in summer. They found that the loss Winkelmann says emissions are
of ice in all four places would, over pushing ice sheets to irreversible
centuries to millennia, contribute an tipping points, so what we do in the
extra 0.43°C of warming globally in next years can determine the fate of
Earth’s ice masses. Adam Vaughan

Human behaviour Zoology

The wrong way to via letters or texts, while those Spider listens with its says Ronald Hoy at Cornell
tweak human actions using labelling on products legs to grab flying prey University, New York. By day, it
made up 12 per cent. Methods camouflages itself as a stick, but
A STUDY of the interventions that relied on defaults, such SOME species of spider can grab at night it becomes a stealthy
used to change people’s behaviour as opt-in or opt-out strategies, prey out of the air at night without hunter that casts a pre-spun
suggests that the methods that accounted for 15 per cent of the seeing it, and now we know how. net over prey passing below.
fail have common features. failed interventions (Trends in The spiders use their legs to pick
Cognitive Sciences, doi.org/fgjw). up the sound of flying insects, Jay Stafstrom, also at Cornell,
Magda Osman at Queen Mary then throw a net-like web over noticed that the spiders could also
University of London and her The team also categorised the unsuspecting animal. perform backflips to catch insects
colleagues analysed 65 scientific the various ways in which flying above them, even though
papers published between 2008 methods failed, such as The ogre-faced net-casting these insects were probably
and 2019 that identified failed by producing no effect or by spider (Deinopis spinosa), native outside their’ field of vision.
behavioural interventions, backfiring and producing an to the southern US and parts of
including nudges, which are unwanted effect. Considering the Caribbean and South America, Stafstrom, Hoy and their
subtle suggestions aimed at both the type of intervention and is a Jekyll and Hyde-like creature, colleagues found that the spiders
influencing people’s behaviour. ways it may fail could assist with flipped backwards to cast their
the design of more successful JAY STAFSTROM nets when they heard recordings
The group found that programmes, says Osman. that resemble flying insect
behavioural interventions that sounds, and even isolated spider
relied on social comparisons She and her team are developing legs showed nerve reactions
and social norming – such as models that could help predict to a wide range of frequencies,
encouraging people to adopt a how a given behavioural from 100 to 10,000 hertz
behaviour by indicating that it is intervention might perform, (Current Biology, doi.org/fgjv).
common or normal in society – based on their analysis of failed
accounted for 40 per cent of the methods. “You can simulate Despite these superpowers,
failed interventions studied. different outcomes before you with bodies up to 25 millimetres
start running a behavioural in length, net-casting spiders are
Twenty four per cent of the intervention that might fail”, relatively harmless to humans.
failed interventions studied were which could save time and money, “I’ve only been bitten once,” says
strategies that delivered messages says Osman. Layal Liverpool Stafstrom. “It only itched for a few
minutes.” Christa Lesté-Lasserre

7 November 2020 | New Scientist | 21

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Really brief Conservation

MATHIEU MEUR/STOCKTREK IMAGES/ALAMY Suckerfish surf Biobank will house says Dean Miller, director Cairns until a purpose-built facility
across whales’ skin corals to restore reefs of the project. to house them is finished around
2025. Corals will also be stored in
Remora fish use a suction AN AUSTRALIAN conservation The Great Barrier Reef has public and private aquariums
disc on their heads to hitch team is compiling a living biobank experienced three mass bleaching around the world.
a ride on blue whales. By of coral species, in case we need to events in the past five years,
attaching cameras to the rebuild the world’s reefs in future. and has lost more than half Under favourable conditions,
larger animal, researchers of its coral colonies since 1995. corals can live for thousands
found that the fish, also The Living Coral Biobank plans of years, says Miller. They can
known as suckerfish, can to collect and house more than Starting on 6 November, the produce both sexually and
detach themselves and 800 species of the world’s hard team will collect living fragments, asexually, and under asexual
skim along the surface of corals in a dedicated facility tissue and DNA samples of corals reproduction, they bud and
a whale’s skin in the rapidly in Port Douglas, Australia. from the Great Barrier Reef. On produce clones of themselves.
moving water produced its first expedition, the team will “We anticipate that the corals
by the whale swimming “We’re keeping this living identify and gather specimens of will double in size every six
(Journal of Experimental stock of corals alive should we 20 coral species – 5 per cent of the months, so effectively the biobank
Biology, doi.org/fgdv). need to use them for restoration Great Barrier Reef’s 400 species. collection will double every six
and rehabilitation activities,” months,” says Miller. Donna Lu
Hawk-like drone The coral samples will be kept
is an efficient flyer in holding tanks in nearby city

A robot with wings can Space Marine biology
glide like a hawk to fly
more efficiently. Motors Octopuses taste
allow the robot’s wings food with their arms
to fold in so that, when
travelling at optimum ESA/ATG MEDIALAB OCTOPUSES can taste their prey
speed, it uses 55 per cent before eating it by using their
less power than would Subsurface ice on comet 67P arms to “lick” it, which adds to
be required with its is softer than candyfloss evidence that the appendages
wings fully open (Science are analogous to tongues with
Robotics, doi.org/fgdw). WHEN the Philae lander arrived second bounce site by analysing “hands” and “brains”.
on comet 67P/Churyumov- Rosetta’s pictures from before
Distracting gadgets Gerasimenko in 2014, it bounced and after Philae’s landing. Octopus arms are lined with
affect memory twice before reaching its final suckers that include cells for
resting place. The second bounce They found a bright streak across neural processing of touch and
People who report frequent exposed some very strange ice. a pair of boulders. “It was like a taste signals. These allow them
media multitasking – such chainsaw sliced through the ice,” to determine if an animal is good
as texting while watching The European Space Agency’s says O’Rourke. Philae appears to eat or is toxic, says Nicholas
TV or reading while listening Philae lander was carried to comet to have bounced between the Bellono at Harvard University.
to music – perform worse 67P aboard the Rosetta orbiter. boulders, revealing the primitive That is useful because octopuses
on memory tests than When Philae was dropped to the ice beneath the comet’s surface tend to “blindly” hunt, sticking
those who don’t. Media surface, the harpoons designed dust (Nature, doi.org/fgjx). their limbs into holes and
multitasking was also to hold it in place didn’t fire, so crevices to find hidden prey.
associated with lapses the lander bounced. Analysing the marks revealed
in attention (Nature, that the strength of the ice Bellono and his colleagues
doi.org/ghg7j9). The location of the first bounce was weaker than candyfloss. found that some of the sucker cells
and the lander’s final resting place of California two-spot octopuses
22 | New Scientist | 7 November 2020 were both found. Now Laurence “This ice that’s 4.5 billion years (Octopus bimaculoides) respond
O’Rourke and his colleagues in the old is as soft as the foam that’s to touch and others to the
Rosetta team have located the on top of your cappuccino,” “taste” of chemicals in the water.
says O’Rourke. Leah Crane The suckers’ taste and touch
receptors reacted to water-soluble
chemicals, like bitter chloroquine,
as well as to chemicals that don’t
dissolve well in water, such as
those emitted by toxic prey,
says Bellono (Cell, doi.org/fgjz).

Octopuses do possess a
tongue-like organ in their
mouths called the radula,
but it doesn’t seem capable
of taste. The radula acts “more
like teeth”, says Bellono. CL-L

Views Aperture Letters Culture Culture columnist
Spectacular red Surely automation An exhibition Emily Wilson warms
The columnist palm weevil scoops will lead to fewer unlocking the to ghost comedy
Chanda Prescod- top award p26 jobs? p28 Arctic’s hope p30 Truth Seekers p32
Weinstein peers
into space-time p24

Comment

Online learning’s big issue

Now is the time for educational technology to shine, but it simply
isn’t good enough and is unlikely to be so soon, says Justin Reich

MICHELLE D’URBANO PROPONENTS of education to transcend typical classroom to be developed and disseminated. to calculate how far a tectonic
technology have made boundaries, but in practice, Assessments are also a thorny plate might move given a certain
remarkable promises many online students struggle speed and time and computers
over the past two decades: that by to stay focused. challenge. In some domains, can instantly evaluate a correct
2019, half of all secondary school like mathematics and computer numerical answer. But if we ask
courses would be online; videos The second challenge is that science, education technology can students to write a paragraph that
and practice problems can let curricula are complex. On any instantly detect when a student explains how plate tectonics work,
students learn mathematics at given day in a school, one teacher solves a problem or creates a computers can’t reliably identify
their own pace; in 50 years only may introduce a new sound-letter correctly functioning computer correct, partially correct and
10 mega-institutions of higher mapping in phonics, another program. We can reward students incorrect responses. Computers
education would be left; or that finish a unit on plate tectonics, for getting answers correct, nudge cannot reliably evaluate how
typical students left alone with and a third facilitate a seminar them towards resources when humans reason from evidence,
internet-connected computers on Don Quixote. Many teachers they get things wrong, and create and reasoning from evidence
can learn anything without the can walk down the hall into a the feedback loops of instruction, is the very core of schooling.
help of schools or teachers. new lesson to teach different assessment and iteration that
subject material. But for every good learning requires. Education technology has long
Then in 2020, people around new curriculum area for education promised to transform education,
the world were forced to turn to technology, new content, tools, Unfortunately, the same but at best, the field has developed
online learning as the coronavirus resources and assessments need approach doesn’t work so well in individual tools for niches of the
pandemic shut down schools other areas. We can ask students curriculum. For large swathes
serving more than 1 billion of school learning, we don’t have
students. It was education online tools or resources that are
technology’s big moment, but any better than a printed textbook.
for many students and families,
remote learning has been a Every technological solution
disappointment. When the world is also a human capital problem:
needs it most, why has education integrating technologies into
technology seemed so lacklustre? learning requires giving teachers
and students time to play with
Educational software has a long and get acclimated to new tools,
history, but throughout there have routines and pedagogies.
been two major challenges. The
first is that most people depend For most teachers, the road
on human connection to maintain to more effective teaching with
their motivation. When a student technology looks less like a
closes their laptop in frustration transformation, and more like
in a classroom, someone can see tinkering: a slow and steady
it and respond. When the same process towards identifying
thing happens while using an the right tool or approach
education technology product, for particular students in
human connections are shut a particular context. ❚
down with it.
Justin Reich is director
Well-designed online learning of the MIT Teaching
environments can encourage Systems Lab, and author
meaningful relationships, and of Failure to Disrupt
online learning has the potential

7 November 2020 | New Scientist | 23

Views Columnist

Field notes from space-time

Inside the nothingness Space-time may seem empty, but
the expanse between stars is filled with more interesting stuff
than you may think, writes Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

S PACE-TIME is mostly empty. a star. He noticed that rather These variations are part of
Though there are at least than being a temperature of what makes the CMB so important
100 billion galaxies – each absolute zero on a Kelvin scale, as a tool. Our theories tell us that
the CMB originates from a time
home to around 100 billion stars – which is what you might expect when the universe was so hot that
it was filled with a plasma of light
and lots of galactic dust, the from empty space, it was about and matter particles. This plasma
was so dense that light couldn’t
universe is so vast that there are 2.3 Kelvin, or -271°C. About a travel very far without colliding
with a particle. As the universe
huge tracts of space-time between decade later, theoretical physics cooled, the light and particles
decoupled and the universe
every star and more still between caught up, using simple became transparent to the light.

every galaxy. Even the nearest cosmological models to predict The CMB is that light, stretched
over time, providing us with
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein star to Earth (the sun) is nearly the existence of a radiation that information about what the
is an assistant professor of universe was like when it was
physics and astronomy, and 150 million kilometres away, is everywhere in the universe. only 400,000 years old. The little
a core faculty member in variations in the temperature are
women’s studies at the meaning the fastest thing in the Then, in the 1960s, Arno Penzias evidence of quantum fluctuations
University of New Hampshire. that we expect to be the source of
Her research in theoretical universe (light) still takes 8 minutes and Robert Wilson were taking how structures – dust clouds, stars
physics focuses on cosmology, and then galaxies – began to form.
neutron stars and particles to get from there to here, some measurements using
beyond the standard model Since COBE became operational
despite travelling at 300,000 a radio telescope when they in 1989, NASA has launched the
Chanda’s week Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy
kilometres per second. noticed a background noise in Probe (WMAP), which studied
What I’m reading those small fluctuations in more
Cosmology’s Century: It seems like most of what is the signal that wouldn’t go away. detail until 2010. Most recently,
An inside history of our NASA supported the European
modern understanding between Earth and the sun is two The structure of the signal meant Space Agency’s Planck space
of the universe by Nobel observatory, which shared
laureate P.J.E. Peebles. other planets – other than that, WMAP’s mission but completed it
with more sensitive instruments.
What I’m watching there isn’t much else that we “Once quantum
I am an LA Dodgers fan, Today, CMB measurements are
and hopefully by the can see. But is space actually effects are taken important evidence that confirms
time this is published, completely empty? Not really. into account, there our theoretical models about the
they will have won the is no such thing as history and timeline of structure
US’s World Series! There are a few senses in which completely empty formation. The measurements are
❚ Editor’s note: we can think of space-time as consistent with our observations
They did. 4-2 being teeming with stuff. One is of the presence of dark matter
and the mysterious dark energy
What I’m working on quantum-mechanical in nature. space-time” phenomenon too. Importantly,
A paper on simulations Planck information is also playing
of a hypothetical dark Quantum field theory, the tool a role in the debate about the
matter particle. measurement of the Hubble-
we use to study particle physics, that its wavelength could be Lemaître constant that I
This column appears mentioned a few columns ago.
monthly. Up next week: says particles flicker in and out associated with a temperature.
Graham Lawton As such, it is a good thing that
of existence, even in a vacuum. In They found the temperature while the universe looks mostly
24 | New Scientist | 7 November 2020 empty to the human eye, it is, in
other words, once quantum effects to be about 3.5 Kelvin, in effect some basic sense, teeming with
light – and useful light at that!  ❚
are taken into account, there is no rediscovering McKellar’s original

such thing as completely empty measurement. In the decades

space-time. Importantly, these since that moment, we have

random particles pop in and launched multiple space telescopes

out of existence quickly and to measure this radio signal more

are unable to have a meaningful closely, and the CMB has become

impact on phenomena that we an incredibly important tool in

might notice. And they aren’t observational cosmology.

something big, like a star suddenly These instruments include

appearing and then disappearing. the NASA Cosmic Background

There is another way in which Explorer, or COBE, which found

the universe is fundamentally that the CMB’s temperature is

full of things. For almost 80 years, about 2.73 Kelvin and is around

we have been getting to know the same temperature everywhere

an all-pervasive type of light in the sky no matter what

that we scientists call the cosmic direction we look in. In other

microwave background radiation, words, the universe is filled with

or CMB. Like many things in photons from the CMB. COBE

science, the CMB was first detected also first verified an idea from

by accident. The first hint was cosmological theories suggesting

from Andrew McKellar’s 1941 there would be extremely small

observations of the region around variations in the temperature.

Signal Boost

Welcome to our Signal Boost project – a weekly page for charitable
organisations to get their message out to a global audience, free of charge.
Today, a message from Estuarine & Coastal Sciences Association

ECSA promotes estuarine and coastal sciences, Australia, Germany and China). A joint meeting awards to support members’ attendance at our
and celebrates it 50th anniversary in 2021. with EMECS (the International Center for conferences. For our most recent international
We are an international society and our mission Environmental Management of Enclosed meeting in Australia we awarded 32 grants to
is to promote and advance multidisciplinary Coastal Seas) due to be held in Hull, UK this year cover travel and fees. We can support research
research into all aspects of estuarine and has been postponed to 2021 because of work where individuals need small grants to
coastal environments, and to support the covid-19. We have run many workshops, and support their work, for example en-abling the
application of science and technology for their also produce handbooks and other publications. purchase of sampling equipment.
sustainable environmental management. ECSA members, and members of ECSA Council,
To achieve this our main aims are: come from a wide range of academic, We have a student/early career representative
regulatory, consultancy and other backgrounds. on ECSA Council, and are actively engaging with
• To promote excellence in estuarine The covid-19 crisis is likely to mean changes to student members.
and coastal marine science, technology how we all operate, and we are further
and management developing our website to extend online The world needs to address major threats
communications and resources. to marine and coastal ecosystems – climate
• To focus on promoting young scientists change, sea-level rise, ocean acidification,
and early-career academics We are keen to encourage the next ecosystem shifts, plastic pollution, mineral
generation of scientists in a range of disciplines resource exploitation, biodiversity loss and
• To actively engage in global outreach with and career areas, particularly workers in more. To help do this we need to share
an emphasis on developing countries developing countries. To do this we have a knowledge and ideas, and ECSA actively
range of membership fees. We have a range of promotes this type of knowledge gathering and
We run science meetings at local and exchange. We all need to rise to the challenge.
international scales to promote knowledge
dissemination, and to provide young scientists Want to help?
with opportunities to present their work, and to
network with more established scientists. We Join the ECSA community to help understand and protect
hope to have an international meeting in India in our coastal and estuarine ecosystems for a better world.
the next few years (recent ones have been in To find out more, please visit ecsa.international

Views Aperture

26 | New Scientist | 7 November 2020

Red monster

Photographer Mofeed Abu Shalwa/
Luminar Bug Photography
Awards 2020

THIS spectacular but terrifying
close-up of a red palm weevil
exposes every detail of the
insect’s rusty-coloured exterior,
which is usually hard to spot
by eye.

Mofeed Abu Shalwa, who
took the image, says he began
photographing insects partly as
a way to overcome his childhood
fear of them. He spotted this
weevil (Rhynchophorus
ferrugineus) next to a date
palm tree in the forests of Qatif
in eastern Saudi Arabia. The
image won him Luminar Bug
Photographer of the Year 2020
in the inaugural Luminar Bug
Photography Awards.

At between 2 and 4 centimetres
long, red palm weevils are
relatively large insects. Originally
from South-East Asia, they have
spread to parts of Africa and
Europe, including the UK.

While the weevils pose no
direct threat to humans or
animals, how they act on
young palm trees makes them a
formidable pest. They have been
estimated to cost growers in the
Middle East millions every year
due to their destruction of date
palms cultivated for their fruit,
for example.

So far, 26 species of palm tree
are known to be targeted by the
red palm weevil, whose larvae
bore holes up to a metre deep
into the trees after hatching,
weakening and sometimes killing
the plant. Insecticide and traps
keep some of the insects at bay,
but more sustainable and
comprehensive measures are
needed to fully control this pest.

The winners of the Luminar Bug
Photography Awards can be found
at photocrowd.com/bugs. ❚

Gege Li

7 November 2020 | New Scientist | 27

Views Your letters

Editor’s pick causing local heat effects. These no predictive or determinative Let’s talk about
are difficult to measure, but value whatsoever. If you have an quantum computing
Trudeau must take note undoubtedly contribute to why “equation” that is fundamentally
of the Gettysburg Address the region around Seville is called a chain of unknown terms 10 October, p 17
“the frying pan of Europe”. multiplied together, you don’t
17 October, p 45 have a scientific tool, you have From Alan Baratz,
From Martin Jenkins, London, UK Polycultures can be very a science-flavoured Ouija board. CEO of D-Wave,
As a linguist, I, er, found David productive – perhaps they don’t Bellevue, Washington, US
Robson’s article quite, uh, match industrial monocultures, For a slice of what life in There are several points that
interesting. But, mmm, maybe but they are more labour intensive. 4D could be like, try this I would like to address in your
starting from Justin Trudeau was, In many rural areas, there are few coverage, both in your magazine
like, not a good idea. jobs, so young people leave. A 17 October, p 40 and online, of D-Wave’s claim that
more people-intensive agriculture From John Spivey, it has the world’s most powerful
Language has evolved with a that is actually good for the planet Thorverton, Devon, UK quantum computer.
range of expectations. We expect can’t really be a bad thing. You write about complex electric
private conversations to be circuits used to represent a fourth It is wrong to characterise
punctuated with meaningless Surely automation physical dimension. For a lighter quantum annealing as being
sounds, as they are an indication will lead to fewer jobs take on a fourth dimension, read limited to optimisation. With
that we are taking the other person “–And He Built a Crooked House–” more than 250 early applications,
seriously. They are saying: “I am 10 October, p 44 by Robert A. Heinlein. It is a story D-Wave’s systems are also well-
processing what you said. In From Sam Edge, about a house built in the shape suited for material simulation,
responding to it, I do so with some Ringwood, Hampshire, UK of a 4D cube, or a tesseract. quantum chemistry and a broad
hesitation because I am still thinking Having worked in automation all array of computational challenges
about it.” On the other hand, we my life, I hoped for a little more This gives an entertaining – but known as NP-hard problems.
expect public figures standing up evidence and less speculation not necessarily scientific – view of
to speak on a major issue to have from your article on it. problems when interacting with a Though not yet a universal
already reflected on it and to have physical fourth dimension. There computer, D-Wave’s Advantage
organised their thoughts into a If the interviewed experts are many video representations can, in principle, be programmed
coherent whole. There are no uhs think automation doesn’t reduce of the tesseract online, which to solve any classical problem.
or ers in the Gettysburg Address. the number of staff required to show how a cube can turn itself We are also progressing towards
produce a given amount of output, inside out by moving within the the universal annealer.
So Trudeau wasn’t, in fact, can they explain why businesses fourth dimension.
speaking like a pro. He was treating do it? Assembly-line workers are There are peer-reviewed papers
a public occasion like a private a lot cheaper than cryptographers Tabletop games trump in Physical Review X in 2014 and
conversation and using the wrong or drone operators. video games for choice Science in 2018 that demonstrate
linguistic register. the quantum-mechanical
Drake equation still just 10 October, p 32 effects of superposition and
Monoculture can create a guesstimate at best From Elizabeth Belben, entanglement in our quantum
a frying pan effect Nettlebridge, Somerset, UK systems. D-Wave has shown
3 October, p 36 Jacob Aron says “video games offer significant speed-up on important
3 October, p 24 From Phil Stracchino, something unique among media: physics problems. Researchers
From Miles Clapham, Gilford, New Hampshire, US choice”. I disagree. As he points have also published results
Mairena del Alcor, Spain In your article on the chances out, if you are playing a shooter in showing superior performance
James Wong rather gently argues of finding intelligent life beyond a video game, you can’t decide to of D-Wave quantum processors
for the necessity, at times, of Earth, you suggest that the error host a tea party instead – but in a compared with classical
monocultures, his argument bars on estimates of this produced tabletop role-playing game, you alternatives in the journals VLDB,
being designed to take the wind by the Drake equation are huge, can do precisely that. IOP Science, Journal of the Physical
out of the sails of those who rail that we are essentially plugging Society of Japan and others.
against them. best guesses into the equation and I speak as someone who, in my
have been doing so for decades. first ever Dungeons & Dragons It is time to move away from
The contribution of industrial session, derailed the dungeon antiquated perspectives and
monoculture agriculture to climate This is a very welcome master’s carefully plotted story work together to bring quantum
change, biodiversity loss, pollution admission – but it doesn’t go of demonic possession via a computing to waiting industries.
by agrochemicals and soil erosion far enough. I put it to you that magic ring by choosing to have
by wind and water is vast and the Drake equation is flimflam, my character chop her finger off. Life on two legs is
complex. Monocultures can also mummery and handwavium with for these birds, too
increase local heat. I write from
southern Spain, where an Want to get in touch? 10 October, p 34
enormous hectarage of land lies
bare in the summer awaiting Send letters to [email protected]; From John Humble,
autumn sowing, its topsoil blowing see terms at newscientist.com/letters Taroona, Tasmania, Australia
away in the wind, soil life dying Letters sent to New Scientist, 25 Bedford Street, You report that humans are the
and releasing carbon dioxide, and London WC2E 9ES will be delayed only species that uses bipedalism
as its primary mode of transport.
This must be worrying news to
ostriches and their ilk.  ❚

28 | New Scientist | 7 November 2020



Views Culture

Unlocking the Arctic’s hope

A new exhibition reveals exquisite artefacts from Indigenous people
who have thrived in the Arctic for millennia, says Shaoni Bhattacharya

Exhibition

Arctic: Culture and Climate

British Museum
Until 21 February 2021

AN ANIMATED globe on the wall

shows a lovely, generous white ice

cap over the North Pole and Arctic

in 1979 that shrinks and shrinks

again until, by 2100, it is a mere

fingerprint, skimming the top of

Greenland and the furthest tip of

the Canadian archipelago.

This apocalyptic introduction at THE TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM

the start of the British Museum’s

Arctic: Culture and Climate

exhibition is a sobering reminder

of the other emergency we face,

but the show is more about the

hope found in human resilience

and adaptation, and cultural

change in the face of disaster.

Nearly 400,000 Indigenous Arctic has lost 75 per cent of its sea Even one of the most beautiful Left: an Inughuit sledge
exhibits – a commissioned work made from bone, ivory,
people live within the Arctic. ice in the past 50 years, and the soil by Sakha artist Fedor Markow sealskin and driftwood;
showing the spring solstice right: a Sami woman’s
Over 30,000 years, their ancestors permafrost that acts as bedrock celebrations of the Sakha people of “horn hat”
north-east Russia – resonates with
survived extreme and fast- has started to melt. this theme. The miniature model sleeping whale to harpoon it.
is chiselled from mammoth ivory Arctic: Culture and Climate
changing conditions, including One photo shows an ice cellar (with special permission). Ivory
from mammoths is becoming is a great exhibition. For a few
the end of the last glacial deep in the permafrost, used by more available as the Arctic’s hours, I could feel something
frozen treasures are exposed of Arctic life, through the sounds
maximum and colonialism. the Inupiat of northern Alaska by the melting permafrost. of an ice-bound world, light like
nowhere else – and by marvelling
Amber Lincoln, the exhibition’s to preserve whale meat. Once the Most striking is the incredible at some incredibly clever clothes
sustainability and respect for fashioned from sealskin and fur.
lead curator, wants visitors to permafrost melts, such “fridges” nature of the communities.
While caribou, walruses, seals The exhibition has clear lessons
emerge with a fresh appreciation may no longer be available. and whales are still hunted, every about the mindset of people for
scrap of flesh, bone, baleen, skin whom everything, from animals
for the people who live in the and sinew is used. to the ice, is a living, connected
part of the daily world, not a
Arctic – beyond the statistics to the “Most striking A whaling suit that belonged to separated-off area mostly fit
lives affected by climate change. a Kalaallit hunter in Greenland in for exploitation.
The show’s historical artefacts, is the incredible the 19th century – the only one of
sustainability and its kind – shows what people could Such shows are the more
artworks, starkly beautiful photos do with sealskin. Waterproof and valuable for reminding us that
and immersive videos combine respect for nature of inflatable, it would have provided there is a real world out there
warmth and buoyancy to the to fight for. ❚
seamlessly to tell those stories. the communities” wearer as he jumped (according to
the caption) from his boat onto a Shaoni Bhattacharya is a consultant
All this is set against a light and for New Scientist, based in London

soundscape that recreates the Elsewhere, a 19th-century

changing light and sound of the belt, a knife and hanging bags for

Arctic year: each “month” lasts amulets and tobacco that would

2 minutes and fades into the next, have belonged to reindeer herders

producing a sense of flux. serve as springboards to talk

Indigenous communities are about the less expected effects on

found from the northern reaches shrinking Arctic ecosystems. For

of Scandinavia and Siberia to example, in 2016, 2350 reindeer

Greenland and the northern vistas on the Yamal peninsula in Siberia

of Canada and Alaska. Their way died after eating anthrax spores

of life faces upheaval because the released by melting permafrost.

30 | New Scientist | 7 November 2020

Don’t miss

The sound of solid science

While drowning in disinformation, how can children learn
about science? By listening to Tumble, says Simon Ings

Podcast There are also podcasts, of which David also volunteered for a study Read
Tumble is arguably the best: it is a that involved him collecting his own The Comedy of Error
Tumble series the whole family can get into. stool samples for a year. Not only has evolutionary ecologist
If gathering around the laptop that, he kept a diary in which he Jonathan Silvertown
Tumble Science Podcast for Kids sounds oddly old-fashioned, recorded around 300 data points sharing old jokes and
welcome to the strange world of concerning his health, activity, the latest science in his
SHOULD we teach our children podcasts – a form that, to everyone’s diet and well-being. Bit by bit, the account of how humour
scientific facts about the world, or surprise, revealed the lasting sniggering dies away and the sheer evolved, why laughter
should we teach them to do science? power of the spoken word and, to enormity of the effort emerges: is contagious and
everyone’s even greater surprise, all this to understand just one how being funny
The answer, obviously, is both. Yet is reinventing family listening. aspect of human biology. makes us sexier.
when physics, chemistry and biology
struggle for independent spaces in Lindsay Patterson’s podcast for Tumble entertains – that is how Visit
the school timetable, it may be too kids began in 2015 and has just it ended up with more than 70,000 Being Human, the
much to hope that, along with the launched its family-friendly sixth monthly listeners, as well as the University of London’s
facts, children are being given any season with an insightful and good will and funding to expand annual festival of the
real idea of what science is like. intermittently hilarious look at into online education. Tumble’s humanities, moves
the human microbiome. Patterson inaugural “The Wildlife of Your partly online this year
Teaching both the letter and spirit and her husband and co-presenter Home” pod-course is a 10-episode with digital exhibitions,
of science has always been difficult. Marshall Escamilla understand series that promises to “ train you workshops, quizzes,
I only acquired a love of physics and that facts can generally look after to become an indoor wildlife talks and debates from
chemistry from popular science themselves. The trick is to inspire investigator”. What’s more, 12 to 22 November.
books such as Freeman Dyson’s people to go looking for them in Tumble also inspires – last year, This year’s theme is
Disturbing the Universe and Gary the first place. the American Association for the “New Worlds”.
Zukav’s The Dancing Wu Li Masters. Advancement of Science awarded
The BBC’s Horizon and Tomorrow’s Enter, in the new season’s first it a children’s journalism prize. Listen
World programmes also helped me episode, Lawrence David from Duke The Seekers Podcast,
catch a glimpse of science in action. University in North Carolina. Here As scientific illiteracy scuppers a playful and interactive
is a man who knows more than is the world’s ability to act on our series from theatre group
While books in this genre healthy about how much it costs most pressing problems, it is vital The Wardrobe Ensemble,
continue to sell well, how does to mail human faeces around the that projects like Tumble succeed. lets children aged 3 to 8
science fare in the rest of today’s world (buying it a plane ticket is We desperately need a citizenry that and their families join
fractured media landscape? On the cheaper, since you ask). knows what science actually is.  ❚ explorers Alph, Betty and
internet, disinformation abounds. Gammo for an adventure
Vested interests sow doubt about through space, time
climate change. Demogogues stoke and beyond.
conspiracy theories around proven
medicine. The most outrageous 7 November 2020 | New Scientist | 31
nonsense sails under the false GETTY IMAGES/JOHNER RF
flag of spurious online journals. MIDDLE: BEING HUMAN

For children, though, the virtual
view is much brighter. Wikipedia,
which turns 20 this year, is still a
beacon of hope for an enlightened,
fact-based and democratic internet.
There is also YouTube, which – for
all its failings – hosts a staggering
amount of high-quality science
entertainment, produced by young
researchers desperate to engage
with the public, and mostly
directed at younger viewers.

Tumble is a science
podcast aimed at children,
but parents will enjoy it too

Views Culture

The TV column

Who you gonna call? Truth Seekers comes from the duo who mashed keenly
observed British comedy with horror to create cult hit Shaun of the Dead. Here’s
hoping the series rivals the success of the original Ghostbusters, says Emily Wilson

Elton (Samson Kayo,
left) and Gus (Nick Frost)
hunt ghosts

Emily Wilson is the editor COLIN HUTTON/STOLEN PICTURES/AMAZON STUDIOS genuinely funny, but Kayo pulls it
of New Scientist. You off. McDowell’s presence of course
can follow her on Twitter COMEDY duo Simon Pegg and be reviewed in a science magazine! adds extra class to the already
@emilyhwilson or email her classy ensemble, and there is a
at [email protected] Nick Frost have specialised at Our ghostbusters here are clever nod to A Clockwork Orange,
the genuinely harrowing
TV writing and starring in movies Gus (played by Frost), broadband dystopian flick of his youthful
career, in a plot line involving eyes.
Truth Seekers (Shaun of the Dead, The World’s installer by day, ghost-hunting
As with everything filmed
Jim Field Smith End) that stir together warm, vlogger by night, his nervous pre-pandemic, you will need
Amazon Prime Video to get used to how closely the
beautifully drawn British comedy new sidekick Elton (Samson Kayo) characters sit together (especially
Emily also when they have only just met)
recommends... and classic horror themes. Their and an extra sidekick Astrid and how often they unnecessarily
pat each other and take cups of
Film latest outing, a TV series called (Emma D’Arcy), whom they tea from the hands of strangers
with no apparent concern.
A Clockwork Orange Truth Seekers, arises from that pick up along the way.
My worries about Truth Seekers
Stanley Kubrick same delightful tradition. This triumvirate are variously are twofold. First, is it funny or
Kubrick’s 1971 retelling of scary enough, or both? For me, it
Anthony Burgess’s dystopian The truth seekers of the title are a supported and impeded in their was only mildly funny – although
novel is brilliant, visually I loved the gorgeous writing – and
stunning and very upsetting. gang who rove around England ghostbusting by Gus’s father it wasn’t in the least bit scary.
It deserves to be called a I wonder if that is enough,
classic, and I think Malcolm investigating the paranormal. although perhaps the show is
McDowell is superb in it, but aimed at a much younger
I can understand why – Given that, I queried with my “The series’ standout is audience than I represent.
because of the stylish and editors at New Scientist why I Kayo. It is hard to play
distanced way in which was being asked to review a show a cowardy custard and Second, the structure. Because
Kubrick delivers the horror about ghosts when I hadn’t been be genuinely funny, the show isn’t exactly densely
and violence – it has always allowed to review The Witcher plotted, the narrative arc advances
been controversial. little in each 30-minute episode.
on its release. Back then, I was but he pulls it off” So you end up getting not much
32 | New Scientist | 7 November 2020 comedy and certainly little
told: “There needs to be science woo-woo scary for your episode
buck, and then, on top of that,
in it. We’re a science mag. Witches Richard (Malcolm McDowell), not much new story either.

aren’t science.” This time, they Elton’s sister Helen (Susan Eventually, the plot does heat
up rather nicely, and I ended the
said: “Is it like Ghostbusters? Wokoma) and what really only eight-episode season intrigued
and ready for more. But will
Are there gadgets? Because if amounts to a cameo from Pegg, people still be watching? What I
hope is that this proves to be the
so, that counts. It’s technology.” playing Gus’s boss (in a very quiet first season, establishing
who our new pals are and why we
And indeed, this is a sort of strange wig) at a broadband should care about them, and that
this leads on to something a bit
amped down, English version company called Smyle. more unmissable – and potentially
as much a smash hit as the first
of Ghostbusters, complete with Frost, who co-wrote and is also Ghostbusters in 1984. ❚

home-made ghost-detecting a producer of the show, never puts

gadgets that flash and make a foot wrong, but for me the series’

noises whenever spectres draw standout is Kayo. It is hard to play

near. So, yes, of course it should a big cowardy custard and be

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Features Cover story

Dream power

The fictions we conjure while we sleep may do
something far more profound than reinforcing
learning, says neuroscientist Erik Hoel

HARDZIEJ STUDIO IF ALIENS ever visited Earth, they bookstore, and as a novelist, this question of
might notice something strange. the importance of fictions is especially dear
Nearly everyone, everywhere, spends a to me. I think the imaginary aliens are in the
significant part of their day paying attention same position as a scientist attempting to
to things that aren’t real. Humans often care explain the evolved purpose of dreams – and
fiercely about events that never happened, if we can identify the biological reason for
whether in TV shows, video games, novels, dreaming, we can ask if it applies to the
movies. Why care so much about fictions? artificial dreams we call fictions.

Perhaps, these aliens might hypothesise, As a neuroscientist, I’ve been working
humans are too stupid to distinguish on a hypothesis that draws on what we’ve
between truth and falsehood. Or perhaps learned about artificial neural networks
they pay attention to fake events for to cast dreaming as a way to improve our
the same reason that they eat too performance in waking life, just not in
much cheesecake: both are non-natural the way we might think. If correct, it may
outcomes of evolved interests. also explain some of this strange human
attraction to the unreal in our waking lives.
The aliens’ confusion might deepen
when they learned that humans fall asleep The study of dreams, also known as
and dream. For dreams are also fictions. oneirology, suffered something of a false
Dreaming takes time and energy, so start in the first decades of the 20th century,
presumably has an evolutionary purpose. when it was tainted by association with
The aliens might begin to wonder what Sigmund Freud’s ideas about psychosexual
they are missing about the importance of development. Freud argued that dreams are
experiencing things that never happened. an expression of repressed desires resulting
from traumatic experiences in early life.
As someone who grew up in my family’s

34 | New Scientist | 7 November 2020

These ideas have been discredited, but dream
research never quite shook the association.

Luckily, over recent decades, neuroimaging
and behavioural research have reinvigorated
the field by giving us insight into the
biological mechanisms underlying dreams.
We now know that dreams are the result of
localised firing of neurons that is probably
induced by the brain’s many feedback
connections and not dependent on
information from external stimuli. Dreaming
represents a unique physiological state in
which activity similar to that we see when
we are awake is promoted while behaviour
is essentially cut off by powerful chemical
systems that induce paralysis.

Yet although we now know a good amount
about the mechanisms of dreaming, we have
little insight into its function. Some argue
that we don’t need to understand what
dreams are for. Perhaps they are just a
by-product of sleep, which may have
evolved for some other reason, such as
to clear the metabolic detritus generated
by neuronal activity.

But this “null hypothesis” of dreams
has been challenged by a slew of ideas
about how dreams have an evolved purpose.
After all, we spend hours every night
dreaming in a distinct stage of sleep.

Making memories?

Generally, these dream hypotheses have
trouble accounting for the distinct
phenomenology of dreams: their unique,
highly specific nature, which is what sets
them apart from waking experience.
Dreams are sparse, in that they mostly don’t
contain the vivid sensory detail of waking
life. Dreams are hallucinatory, in that they
contain warped concepts and perceptions
that are biased or unrealistic. And dreams
are narrative, in that they are fabulist
versions of the kinds of events we might
encounter in real life, just rendered strange.

Consider the leading hypothesis, which
is that dreaming is somehow involved in
the process of memory storage. This idea
draws on the metaphor of the brain as a >

7 November 2020 | New Scientist | 35

computer: explicit memories are created TANG MING TUNG/GETTY IMAGES“Dreams may in one night and then demonstrate it in front
and then stored, the way one encodes data SCOTT MACBRIDE/GETTY IMAGESserve as ‘noiseof the class. I practised all evening, tossing
on a hard drive. Neuroscience has long drawn injections’ to tennis balls helplessly, but eventually fell
on such metaphors, even from before it was counteract the into bed, certain of embarrassment the next
called “neuroscience”, when the metaphors risk of learning day. On waking, I immediately jumped out
were pneumatic pressures or mechanical too narrowly” of bed, picked up the tennis balls, and found
clocks. But sometimes metaphors can lead I could juggle perfectly. It was an incredible
their proposers astray. In the case of sleep The purpose of lesson. It seemed that something had
and memory, it is well known that various dreaming remains happened in my sleep that had built on
improvements can occur after a good one of the great my waking experience.
night’s sleep, such as performance on mysteries of the brain
some tasks, but it is less clear that acts of Even so, I find it hard to accept that I had
pure memorisation, like lists of numbers, stored or replayed memories of my juggling
are actually significantly improved. during sleep. When I went to bed, I couldn’t
juggle. If I had replayed my failures, what
What would it even mean to help store would be the gain? Most importantly, it
a memory over a night? The clearest is doubtful I dreamed of precise juggling
hypothesis about memory storage and events. More probably, if I dreamed of
sleep is based on studies showing that juggling at all, it was of sparse and
memories, in the form of the specific hallucinatory fragments.
neural sequences of firing that are seen while
we are awake, are sometimes “replayed” This is backed up by studies that have had
during sleep in mammals. Perhaps dreams participants play games like Tetris, which
are just that: replays of memories. they were novices at, and found that they
reported Tetris-like dreams – imagine falling
While neurons that learn do seem to hallucinatory blocks – but no replays of
increase in their firing frequency during specific Tetris games. It seems that the
sleep, two facts suggest the idea falls short. best way to get someone to actually dream
The first is that replay has been more strongly
associated with non-REM sleep than the
REM stage, where the most intense narrative
dreaming occurs. The second is that it is
unclear whether memories are actually being
replayed during so-called “replay.” Indeed,
careful studies have demonstrated that
the brain more commonly produces never-
before-seen patterns during these periods
rather than previously seen waking patterns.

Behavioural evidence is also a problem
for the idea that dreams are somehow
replays of memories, or even just by-products
of the integration of memories. If this were
the case, we would expect to dream actual
memories, yet dreaming specific previous
memories is actually so rare that it is
considered pathological, often a sign
of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Yet there is no doubt that dreams do play
a role in memory and learning. Consider
how I learned to juggle. As an undergraduate,
I took a class on memory and as part of my
homework I was assigned to learn to juggle

36 | New Scientist | 7 November 2020

How can someone who
went to sleep failing
to learn to juggle wake
up the next morning
as a juggler?

about something is to have them learn the network’s connections are tweaked until the research company OpenAI trained a deep
a difficult and novel task, and then have it can parse the training data set effectively, neural network to learn how to manipulate
them overtrain on it, as with playing Tetris which would be things like classifying a robot hand to solve Rubik’s cubes.
for hours and hours. images, playing a game or driving a car.
There is good reason to think the brain
Deep lessons The hope is that the performance faces an identical challenge of overfitting.
generalises beyond the training data set Animals’ days are, after all, statistically pretty
A new and growing trend in neuroscience to new, unseen data sets. But it doesn’t self-similar. Their “training set” is limited
might help explain why this is the case, and always work so well because training data and highly biased. But still, an animal
offer a clear explanation for why dreams sets are often inherently biased in all sorts needs to generalise its abilities to new and
possess their distinct phenomenology. of impossible-to-notice ways. Often a unexpected circumstances, both in terms
This trend seeks to apply the lessons network gets so fine-tuned to the specifics of physical movement and reaction, and
of deep learning and the study of of the data set it is trained on that it fails cognition and understanding. It doesn’t
artificial neural networks to the brain. to generalise to new ones. need to remember everything perfectly;
These techniques are, after all, originally it needs to generalise from the limited
inspired by how the brain functions, This is called overfitting, and it is a things it has seen and done.
and remain the only set of techniques by ubiquitous problem in deep learning.
which machines can reach human-level A number of common techniques have This is the overfitted brain hypothesis
cognitive performance on complex tasks. been adopted to deal with this issue. Most (OBH): that animals, being so good at
involve exposing the network to some sort learning, are constantly in danger of
From a deep-learning perspective, learning of stochasticity, introducing noise and fitting themselves too well to their daily
isn’t like storing memories on a computer. randomness into the system. lives and tasks.
Instead, it is about fine-tuning a huge,
layered network of connections based on an One such strategy is “domain I’ve recently been working on developing
inherently limited set of example data – the randomisation”, wherein the inputs are the OBH, exploring how dreams could be a
“training” data set. With every example that warped in a highly biased way during way to beat back the tide of daily overfitting.
the system sees, the pattern and strength of learning, effectively inducing a hallucination Essentially, under the OBH, dreams are
in the network. This sort of thing has been “noise injections” that serve the purpose
found to be indispensable, for example, when not of enforcing what is learned when >

7 November 2020 | New Scientist | 37

awake, but rather counteracting the HARDZIEJ STUDIO
overfitting associated with that learning.
during sleep – are all still being investigated all help to stop our minds becoming too fixed
You can’t do domain randomisation on more generally. in their ways. They don’t just expand the
an awake brain because most organisms are “training set” that humans have access to, but
negotiating a high-wire act during daily life; But by viewing dreams through this new do so in ways that assist with generalisation
they would certainly hurt themselves in lens, we can at least move beyond computer and therefore cognition more broadly.
myriad ways. However, you can use an offline and storage metaphors and begin to think
period to do something similar by creating of learning as a set of trade-offs, where Perhaps the hypothetical aliens wouldn’t
sparse and hallucinatory inputs, driven by memorisation competes with generalisation, be so puzzled by our obsessions with
top-down activity, that resemble the events and learning the specifics of something too fictions once they figured this out. They
and actions an animal might encounter, well can be as bad as not learning at all. wouldn’t be shocked either that as human
but that are corrupted and biased away civilisation developed, daily life became
from the drudgery of daily life. If dreams have this functional purpose, more complex, and so it became easier
and the OBH is true, then the artificial dreams for us to overfit to it – until eventually we
According to the OBH then, dreams are we call fictions might satisfy some of that humans began to spend more time with
exactly this: self-generated corrupted inputs. same fundamental drive. I spent 10 years artificial dreams than we do with biological
And the act of dreaming has the effect of writing my first novel, The Revelations, ones. Just like how the invention of cooking
improving generalisation and performance which is about consciousness and murder. essentially allowed us to expand digestion
in waking life. This is how someone can I can give all the standard cultural reasons beyond our stomachs, maybe the invention
go to sleep failing on their training task for why fictions are important, entertaining, of fictions allowed us to get the benefits of
of juggling, and then wake up a juggler. revelatory – but the OBH implies there dreams when we are awake. ❚
is something more. Maybe art is also
The advantage of this hypothesis is that pleasurable for humans because we are Erik Hoel is a neuroscientist at Tufts
it takes the phenomenology of dreams constantly being overfitted to reality. University in Medford, Massachusetts.
seriously, rather than as some sort of His debut novel, The Revelations,
epiphenomenon or unexplained by-product In this view, the sparse, sometimes will be published in April 2021
of some other neural background process. hallucinatory, corrupted unreality put
Indeed, it is the strange phenomenology forward by authors, film-makers, and those
of dreams that makes them so effective at first early shamans around some campfire,
combating overfitting. While it may seem
weird, experiencing events that are related
to a task, but fundamentally different
from it, can actually help performance.
Dreaming of flying may help you keep your
balance while running. And deep-learning
practitioners should perhaps take a lesson
from the brain and make their efforts to
combat overfitting look as “dream-like”
as possible for their networks.

Waking dreams

Of course, this is still very much a
hypothesis – and an untested one at that.
There is much work that needs to be done
to assess what the behavioural benefits
of dreams are and whether they match
the sort of reductions in overfitting that
we might expect in humans and other
animals according to the OBH. Additionally,
dream physiology – how synapses change
during dreams and when dreaming occurs

38 | New Scientist | 7 November 2020

We are on the verge of a new era in deep-sea
exploitation. Marine biologist Jon Copley
considers the consequences

JASON FORD ON 2 AUGUST 2007, bright light shone We have come to a crucial moment for the
on the ocean floor beneath the North future of our blue planet. As international
Pole for the first time, as a van-sized bodies prepare to decide about the legitimacy
submarine settled on the seabed. Inside, of different mining ventures and how to
pilot Anatoly Sagalevich deployed a protect biodiversity in the waters beyond
mechanical arm to erect a Russian flag. That national boundaries, the race is on for deep-
act stirred up more than the yellow-tinged sea biologists like myself to understand how
polar sediments. these decisions will affect ecosystems on
the ocean floor.
“This isn’t the 15th century: you can’t go
around the world and just plant flags and say Working out who has rights to what is
we’re claiming this territory,” said Canada’s the easy part, at least in principle. The rules
foreign minister, Peter MacKay. Russia determining rights on the ocean floor are
countered that the flag-planting was merely collectively known as the United Nations
to celebrate their achievement – like taking a Convention on the Law of the Sea. UNCLOS
flag to the moon. “The goal of this expedition was agreed through conferences that
is not to stake out Russia’s rights, but to spanned decades, and has been signed
prove that our [continental] shelf stretches by 167 nations and the European Union.
up to the North Pole,” said Russia’s foreign It gives countries with a coastline a zone
minister, Sergey Lavrov. In 2015, Russia used of “territorial waters” extending 12 nautical
data from the expedition to support a claim miles (22 kilometres) offshore. They own the
to seabed resources in 1.3 million square resources within that area, such as fisheries
kilometres around the pole. and minerals, but ships of any other nation
have the right of peaceful passage.
This may look like a latter-day land
grab but it is actually a move in line with Coastal countries are also granted an
international laws built on a vision of the “exclusive economic zone” (EEZ), with
ocean floor being “common heritage”. Russia further rights to resources extending out
isn’t alone in claiming resources on the Arctic to 200 nautical miles (370 kilometres)
seabed, and nations are seeking to extend offshore. For both territorial waters and
their rights to ocean resources elsewhere. the EEZ, if there is an overlap with the zones
Meanwhile, commercial enterprises are for another country, the nations involved
gearing up to mine deep-sea mineral deposits. must agree a boundary. In practice, the >

7 November 2020 | New Scientist | 39

JASON FORD

area is usually divided down the middle. According to these rules, a country must the International Boundaries Research
All this helps explain disputes over the submit a case with geological evidence and Unit at Durham University, UK, “They are
detailed sea-floor maps showing that the area submitting the science that UNCLOS tells
sovereignty of specks of land such as the is an extension of its continental shelf. In the them to.”
Spratly Islands in the South China Sea. Any Arctic, a relatively shallow stretch of sea floor
country that can claim an island potentially called the Lomonosov Ridge runs across the The areas claimed by Russia, Canada
gets the territorial waters and EEZ around it – ocean basin. Russia, Canada and Denmark, and Denmark overlap, so they will have to
and may also reduce the zones of other by way of Greenland, can all claim that this negotiate boundaries between themselves.
countries if there is an overlap. feature extends their continental shelves into But that is a problem for the future. Claims
the central Arctic. All three have submitted over the Arctic may have been making the
It doesn’t explain what’s happening in their cases to the UN Commission on the headlines, but the same process is happening
the Arctic, though. Rights to that territory Limits of the Continental Shelf: Denmark around the globe and there is a backlog of
are determined by additional rules agreed in 2014, Russia in 2015 and Canada in 2018. cases waiting to be reviewed by the UN. “It
in UNCLOS. These allow countries to claim will be maybe 20 to 30 years before they get to
rights to sea-floor mineral resources out to “What looks at first glance like this all the submissions that are currently before
either 350 nautical miles (648 kilometres) acquisitive scramble for the Arctic, with them – and there are still more coming in,”
from their coast, or 100 nautical miles everyone just claiming what they can, is says Steinberg.
(185 kilometres) beyond the 2500 metre actually states doing what they’re supposed
depth contour where the sea floor slopes to do,” says Philip Steinberg, director of That still leaves a vast expanse of ocean
away from the land, whichever applies first. beyond the reach of individual nations. This
region, which covers about 46 per cent of
“Most resources on the sea floor are Earth’s surface, is known as the “high seas”
deemed ‘common heritage’ for all” or “the Area”. In the 1960s, the UN designated
the resources here as the “common heritage
of mankind”. This principle is the cornerstone
of its International Seabed Authority (ISA),

40 | New Scientist | 7 November 2020

created in 1994 to regulate deep-sea mining 21 seven for polymetallic sulphides and five for
and ensure that lower-income nations cobalt-rich ferromanganese crusts. Countries
benefit from it. “It is the only organisation billion tonnes of manganese nodules involved so far are Russia, South Korea,
that has such a broad mandate over a exist in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone China, France, Japan, Germany, the UK, India,
common property resource,” says Michael Poland, Brazil, Singapore, Tonga, Nauru
Lodge, secretary-general of the ISA, which Containing: and the Cook Islands. No deep-sea mining
has its headquarters in Kingston, Jamaica. has taken place yet, however. That will
5.88 billion tonnes of manganese require a new phase in which exploitation
Through the ISA, the UNCLOS signatories 273 million tonnes of nickel licences are issued.
have devised rules for the extraction of 231 million tonnes of copper
three different types of mineral deposits 42 million tonnes of cobalt Some scientists are already calling for a ban
in the deep ocean: polymetallic nodules 12 million tonnes of molybdenum on mining active hydrothermal vents – the
(manganese nodules scattered across sea “black smokers” of TV nature documentary
floor plains), polymetallic sulphides (deposits fame. Cindy Van Dover, director of Duke
rich in copper, formed by hydrothermal University’s Marine Laboratory in North
vents) and cobalt-rich ferromanganese Carolina, is one of them. In 2018, Van Dover
crusts (which form on undersea mountains). and her colleagues published research
Nations can sponsor applications by calculating that the total sea-floor area of all
contractors – either mining companies known active hydrothermal vents is about
or research institutions – for exploration 50 square kilometres – around half the size
licences to map and study the value of a of Disney World in Florida, or less than 1 per
particular type of deposit in an agreed area. cent of the size of Yellowstone National Park.
“It is a super-rare environment,” she says. Yet
The first exploration licences were issued that tiny global area is home to more than
in 2001. By last year, the tally had reached 30, 400 species of animal not found in any >
of which 18 were for manganese nodules,
7 November 2020 | New Scientist | 41

RALPH WHITE/GETTY IMAGES joined-up approach to manage the impacts of
UNCREDITED/AP/SHUTTERSTOCK activities such as mining. We still don’t know
CHARLES D. WINTERS / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARYexactly what organisms live where or how
Hydrothermal vents they might be disturbed by mining.
other habitat, which is why she says it needs (left) and seamounts
protection from mining. (above) could be For example, seven years ago, when
mined for minerals. researchers from the Natural History
The ISA is sympathetic. “If there is a Manganese nodules Museum (NHM) in London surveyed the
need established for protection of active (above right), found eastern CCZ, they noticed white sponges,
hydrothermal vents, I don’t think that’s a big in abyssal plains, are just a few millimetres across, on many of
problem,” says Lodge. “It’s something that also promising the manganese nodules. These turned out
we’re working on.” For every cluster of active to belong to a new genus and species, which
hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor, 21 they named Plenaster craigi. It is the most
gushing out mineral-rich fluid, there are abundant animal living on these nodules
several inactive ones, where venting has million tonnes in the eastern CCZ, and has since been found
naturally ceased and the vent animals have Annual global manganese across more than 1000 kilometres of the area.
moved on, but the mineral deposits remain consumption (2016) Being so widespread, it would probably not
for potential sulphide miners. be threatened by mining, but other
30 organisms are. Around hydrothermal vents
Most of the exploration licences aren’t for there are 27 species listed as vulnerable or
sulphides at hydrothermal vents, however. million tonnes endangered on the International Union
They are for manganese nodules: nuggets Total copper and zinc at all the for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of
the size of new potatoes that contain cobalt, world’s known hydrothermal vents Threatened Species. These include four
nickel and rare earth elements, as well as new species of snails, which I and colleagues
manganese, that form over thousands of 31 recently described in published work. It
years on the sea floor. Exploration activity is remains to be seen whether any nodule
primarily focused on the Clarion-Clipperton million tonnes zone species, whose populations cover
Zone (CCZ) of the eastern Pacific, which covers Annual global land-based much larger areas, will join them on that list.
4.5 million square kilometres of silty abyssal extraction of copper and zinc
plains, punctuated by rolling “abyssal hills”. “There has to be honesty and transparency
about what will be impacted,” says Adrian
The CCZ is 90,000 times the size of the Glover, who led the NHM survey team that
area of all the world’s active hydrothermal discovered P. craigi. He points out that
vents, which could make mining here a very large areas of the CCZ have already been
different prospect. Nevertheless, there is designated as reserves, protected from
still much we don’t know about it. Just as the any future mining. These total 1.44 million
environment changes over thousands of square kilometres, which is almost six times
kilometres across a continent, the huge area the size of the UK.
of the CCZ is a patchwork of varied sea-floor
environments. Different species flourish in Research into the effects of mining across
these different areas, which requires a the CCZ is ongoing. In the next few years,
Glover and Dan Jones of the UK’s National
42 | New Scientist | 7 November 2020 Oceanography Centre will lead a project –
in which I am also involved – to investigate
what happens when a company tests one
of its nodule-harvesting machines, which
is permitted under current exploration
licences. These machines work like a sort
of underwater vacuum cleaner, sucking up
nodules and stirring up sediment, which
can have effects at least 10 kilometres beyond
the mine site.

“No exploitation licences have been This would only apply to profits from research,” says Muriel Rabone at the
issued yet, so effectively deep-sea mining non-living resources, though: organisms in NHM, who has attended the preliminary
is banned until such time that we’ve worked the Area aren’t covered by the ISA. As well as negotiations. But, she adds, tracking could
out if it can be done environmentally, fisheries, governed by regional organisations, also help other researchers to continue using
economically and legally,” says Glover. these also include “marine genetic collections of deep-sea specimens to answer
Even if the ISA agrees the regulations for resources” – the gene pool of the oceans, new questions in the future.
exploitation licences in the coming months, which has huge potential for biotech and
would-be miners then have to submit their medical applications. This genetic resource Decades after it was proposed, the
licence applications for approval, which will is unregulated, but that is set to change. Next principle of common heritage could soon
include consideration of environmental year – following a postponement because of start to pay dividends. While that would be
impacts in each case. coronavirus – the UN is convening the final progressive, some scientists think the idea
session of an intergovernmental conference of the high seas as a resource to be exploited
Because deep-sea mining hasn’t yet begun, that began in 2018 to draw up a new treaty for is outdated. “The Law of the Sea Convention
the ISA also has time to consider how the biodiversity in the high seas. was drafted in the 80s, on the back of
benefits could be shared with the world’s negotiations that took place in the 60s
lower-income nations. One idea is to create Creatures of the deep and 70s,” says Harriet Harden-Davies at
a sovereign wealth fund for the ocean, using the University of Wollongong, Australia.
income from mining areas that each licensee Unlike deep-sea mining, exploiting marine “Looking to the future, I think it’s useful to
has to release back to the ISA for its “common genetic resources doesn’t involve large-scale draw some ideas from fresh inspirations.”
heritage” goal. “You could use it either to harvesting: a single specimen of an organism
support underfunded global public goods, can provide a genome for that species. So, In recent years, environmental legislation
which could, for example, be marine sharing any benefits will depend on tracking in some countries and US states has
scientific research,” says Lodge. “Or you could biological samples and data collected from recognised that nature itself has rights:
use it to combat global public bads – climate the high seas. “What you don’t want is a few countries, such as New Zealand and
change, for example, by putting it into a something that’s going to end up hampering India, have gone further and recognised
climate change adaptation fund.” rights for specific ecosystems such as rivers
In 2007, Russia and mountains, making them legal entities
planted a flag on akin to corporations or people. In June,
the seabed at the Harden-Davies and her colleagues published
North Pole a paper showing how this rights-of-nature
paradigm could be used in developing a new
treaty for ocean biodiversity.

“These laws wouldn’t preclude use of
ocean resources, but they would really
reinforce the principle of precaution,” says
Harden-Davies. They would also ensure that
some benefits of exploitation flow back into
ocean conservation. “And you could have
some kind of institutional mechanism, like
a Council of Ocean Custodians, that would
provide an opportunity for people to speak
on behalf of the ocean,” she says. In other
words, instead of debating our rights to
the oceans, the focus would be on our
responsibilities. ❚

REUTERS/REUTERS TV Jon Copley is Associate Professor
in Ocean Exploration and Public
Engagement at the University
of Southampton, UK

7 November 2020 | New Scientist | 43

ALEX WILLIAMSON Features

44 | New Scientist | 7 November 2020

Code red

Outdated computer software underpinning
much of the modern world is leading us into
disaster, says Edd Gent

AS THE coronavirus pandemic swept Thousands of different programming 1959, it was aimed at allowing corporations
across the US, it brought with it an languages exist, performing the same basic to program business software on large
unprecedented economic crisis. job: translating real-world commands such mainframe systems. It was wildly successful.
As firms shut down and people stayed home, as “import this data” or “run this calculation” “The staying power of COBOL is the fact
the country’s unemployment rate shot up into the strings of binary 1s and 0s that that it’s easy to use,” says Barry Baker at
from 4.4 per cent in March to 14.7 per cent encode information in computer processors IBM in New York.
in April, adding fuel to a political fire already and memory chips. Certain ones dominate
raging in a tumultuous election year. (see “Top five languages”, page 46), but new With the advent of personal computing
languages pop up as requirements change. and the internet, COBOL lost ground to
That much is well known. But the stories Google developed the Go language, for newer, more flexible general-purpose
of many of those who lost their livelihoods example, to streamline the development languages, but roughly 220 billion lines
and sought help exposed a slower-burn of massive applications running across of COBOL code still support the systems
technological crisis. Outdated computer hundreds of servers in the cloud. “There’s behind businesses and other institutions
systems simply fell over as they attempted still a rich space out there where people are worldwide. Perhaps most significantly,
to deal with the flood of people applying exploring new ideas and trying to make it underpins huge chunks of the world’s
for welfare benefits – and hardly anyone things better,” says Barbara Liskov at the financial sector. According to Reuters,
around knew how to fix things. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 43 per cent of the planet’s banking systems
run on COBOL and 95 per cent of ATM
It is far from an isolated problem. As new languages become favoured, transactions still rely on the language.
Tangled webs of computer code built up so others fall out of use or find a different
over decades, often written in programming purpose. Fortran, for example, was developed COBOL cowboys
languages now rarely taught or understood, by IBM in the 1950s for general business use.
underpin IT systems across the world, in It went out of favour in corporate circles, but is The extensive use of COBOL in welfare
government departments, banks, airlines, still prized by physicists for its mathematical processing systems was seemingly behind
hospitals and more. Coronavirus taught chops, thanks to its ability to run many the US unemployment benefit fiasco.
us a lot about how the systems we had operations in parallel at breakneck speeds. Universities have stopped teaching this
assumed would assist and protect us programming language, and when state
can fail in a crisis. As the fallout continues, Other languages stick around, governments needed to scale up their
it is becoming ever clearer that we need unfashionable, but too deeply embedded systems quickly to deal with the surge in
to revisit the computer code that in computing systems to get rid of. COBOL, demand, skilled labour was in short supply.
underpins many aspects of our or the common business-oriented language, New Jersey governor Phil Murphy made >
societies before disaster strikes. is a prime example. When first released in
7 November 2020 | New Scientist | 45

Top five an appeal for COBOL volunteers, and a group REUTERS/NICK OXFORD
languages of ageing coders dubbed the COBOL Cowboys
swung into action. IBM released a free COBOL A queue of people filing for
Software consultancy company training course. Despite this attempt to unemployment assistance in
TIOBE publishes a monthly index improve matters, a survey by the Economic Fort Smith, Arkansas, on 6 April
of the world’s most popular Policy Institute think tank in Washington DC
programming languages, based has found that reliance on COBOL caused real “Over time, dark
on factors including search engine problems. For every 10 successful applicants shadows start to
results mentioning the languages in the initial phase of the covid-induced US appear in tangled
and courses teaching them. jobs crisis, three or four others didn’t receive webs of code
This is October 2020’s top five. their benefits. Many people went months built up at large
without income. organisations”
C 16.95 PER CENT OF LISTINGS
Part of the problem is that, while most
The go-to for programs requiring programmers could learn COBOL in a few
speed and efficiency, such as weeks, picking up its vocabulary and
operating systems, robotics grammar is only part of the challenge.
controllers and trading algorithms, Mastering how a coding language is used in
C has been at number 1 or 2 of practice, and its common styles and patterns
the most prevalent programming or idioms, is no less important. Most
languages for at least the past computing languages have large libraries of
four decades. ready-made snippets of code that streamline
the programming process. Understanding
JAVA 12.56% how to draw on this literary canon is as much
a key to fluency in a programming language
The leading language for most of as it is in any spoken language. Opaque turns
the past two decades, Java is a child of phrase, plus coding conventions that can
of the world wide web, and is a vary significantly between domains or even
workhorse for mobile and web organisations, make deciphering a specific
applications and games. bit of software difficult for an outsider.

PYTHON 11.28% “You hear these stories of people rehiring
this old guy in his 70s who’s retired,” says
Listed as only the 21st most popular Daniel Kroening at the University of Oxford.
language as recently as 2000, “You’re not getting this guy back because he
Python’s versatile and easy-to-learn knows COBOL, you’re likely getting someone
vocabulary has seen it gain who has worked on that particular piece of
popularity lately for everything software in the past.”
from web applications to artificial
intelligence systems. Building complex software from
scratch is expensive and time-consuming,
C++ 6.94% so code is also frequently reused and
adapted. This means earlier decisions
An extension of C, used to code become deeply embedded in software
operating systems, browsers that runs present-day systems. Over time,
and games, C++ was for a period “dark shadows” start to appear in the
in the 1990s the number 1 labyrinths of code built up at large
language, but has since slipped organisations, says Bill Scherlis, director of
down the rankings. the Information Innovation Office at the US
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
C# 4.16% (DARPA). “There’s certain components that
the programmers dare not touch,” he says.
Pronounced “c-sharp”, this is “There’s fear and superstition.”
another extension of C, developed
to incorporate similar principles
to Java, and it has similar spheres
of application.

46 | New Scientist | 7 November 2020

A glitch in
the science?

“Legacy code” (see main story) Jay. “It’s really difficult to be an
is also a big problem in expert in both of those areas.”
academia, where old, poorly
maintained computer programs The tendency to repurpose
can be prone to bugs that code written by other
throw off results, says researchers can also cast a long
Caroline Jay, research director shadow. Last year, scientists
at the UK-based Software discovered a glitch in a tool
Sustainability Institute, to predict nuclear magnetic
which advocates for better resonance spectra, a key
programming training for method used to characterise
scientists. chemicals. The tool, published
in a 2014 paper, gave different
Researchers have to write results on different computer
software for everything from operating systems.
data analysis to modelling
natural processes, but most The software has been
learn these skills in an ad hoc cited by other researchers
way. They are perennially short more than 150 times. It isn’t
of money and time to properly clear how many of those
sustain their code. “Being a teams actually used the tool,
scientist is a full-time job,” says or how many results were
thrown out by the glitch.

And the strain is showing. A 2019 report 148 million consumers from credit rating Then there is the risk factor. When the UK’s
from the US Government Accountability agency Equifax. The company forked out TSB Bank attempted to upgrade to newer
Office (GAO) identified 10 ageing “legacy” $700 million in fines and settlements and a banking software in 2018, many customers
federal IT systems whose creaking code is US House of Representatives report accused were locked out of their accounts for a week,
expensive to maintain and increasingly it of relying on legacy systems with known costing the company £330 million and CEO
prone to serious failures or hacking. These security risks. Ancient, sprawling legacy Paul Pester his job. Often, too, important
include those that underpin the federal Social systems have caused regular IT failures at business rules that govern how a company
Security Administration, that keep the Air airlines in the US and elsewhere, too. operates are embedded in software and, if
Force’s planes battle-ready and even those not properly documented, can be forgotten
that operate major dams and power stations. Fake it till you make it as employees retire. “If you were to replace
“Think about how many people, how much the system you might actually lose that
infrastructure, how much capital is Fixing the problem isn’t easy. When the corporate memory that is embodied in
downriver from a dam,” says Carol Harris Commonwealth Bank of Australia replaced that code,” says Scherlis.
at the GAO, who wrote the report. “Imagine its core COBOL platform with software
if that were hacked or went offline and the developed by the German company SAP in its That is why most “modernisation” efforts
dam went through a catastrophic release.” ABAP language in 2012, the switch took five in corporate IT focus on surface details, says
years and cost $750 million. The GAO report Tom Winstanley at NTT Data UK, which helps
It isn’t just government bodies affected highlighted a US Internal Revenue Service upgrade legacy software. Rather than
by this. Last year, the UK Financial system in urgent need of modernisation. updating core systems, many businesses
Conduct Authority said it had received The upgrade would cost $1.6 billion, for adopt a “fake it till you make it” approach
853 notifications of IT outages at financial an operation normally requiring just of adding new features such as e-commerce
institutions in 2018/19 – a dramatic increase $5.5 million a year to run. “The payback websites or flashy web apps – like adding
on the previous year as banks, trying to period on that is just huge,” says Harris. “This new floors to a building that is crumbling
compete with finance start-ups, raced to is why, in many cases, you wind up with these rather than repairing the foundations.
add new features to their systems, some of systems that just sit in the corner quietly and
which have code dating back to the 1970s. In diligently doing their job until they break.” The coronavirus pandemic has laid bare
the US in 2017, cybercriminals stole data on the short-sightedness of that approach, says
Winstanley. As entire workforces shift to >

7 November 2020 | New Scientist | 47

Mass flight cancellations hit
Baltimore/Washington
International Thurgood Marshall
Airport on 15 August 2015,
in an incident attributed to
outdated computer systems

ROB CARR/GETTY IMAGES before they start coding. “You’re building
your safety net as you go,” says Ford. Open-
working from home, many of his clients “Choosing source principles, where developers share,
are scrambling to enable remote access software or a reuse and modify each other’s code, can give
to ageing office computer systems, and programming more people an incentive to maintain it.
dramatic shifts in business models are language is a
forcing painful overhauls. “It’s only when bet on how long Ford is part of a burgeoning movement of
you start needing to change fundamentally it will stay in “menders” that aims to change a prevailing
core policies that this stuff really comes fashion” culture that regards code maintenance as
to the surface,” he says. “It’s been hidden second-rate work. But there is only so hard
by a veneer of transformation.” understanding techniques”, which analyse you can fight decay. Even the act of choosing
software to tease out the assumptions a programming language or software
Some help is at hand. Owing to the and architectural decisions that went into product is tantamount to placing a bet
huge amounts of legacy software operating making it, and how individual modules are on how long it will stay in fashion. “As soon
on its hardware, IBM has built a way for interlinked. That allows developers to tweak as a developer pushes something out and
customers to map their sprawling systems, individual bits of a system without knock-on somebody else has to come along and
which spits out a visual diagram of effects that might otherwise bring down the maintain it... it is legacy,” says Baker.
how different software modules and whole house of cards.
components work together. It has also Any system in regular use will face
developed an AI-based tool that can Heading off the legacy problem doesn’t pressure to change, says Ford, sometimes in
recommend the most efficient strategy need fancy tools, though. Building software unpredictable and sudden ways, as with the
for modernising a company’s software. tests that check if later edits will introduce US unemployment systems. “They assume
errors is an effective, but often neglected that it was working yesterday, it’ll continue
Such tools can help new IT staff get up practice, says Scott Ford, founder of to work tomorrow,” says Ford. “But that
to speed and shine light on those dark Corgibytes, a company that specialises pressure is going to show up; so if you don’t
shadows in legacy code, says Baker. in remodelling legacy systems. An even have the human infrastructure in place to be
“It’s shown to be really valuable for more rigorous approach is test-driven able to respond to it, you can be caught by
these clients that have maybe atrophied development, where developers build tests surprise.”
in their ability to keep doing the care and
feeding of those applications,” he says. There are no silver bullets. Staying on
top of the legacy software problem means
DARPA, meanwhile, has launched a investing in maintenance and adopting
program called V-SPELLS to develop ways to best practices when building new systems.
recover lost code knowledge. It has called for IT managers will always face trade-offs
proposals for “advanced automated program between the robustness of their software,
its cost and how quickly they can deploy new
48 | New Scientist | 7 November 2020 services, says Winstanley. But every shortcut
makes it trickier to modify code later,
resulting in the build-up of “technical debt”.

“You need to find the space in your
planning to pay down that debt just like
any other debt that you’re taking on as a
business,” he says. “If you just let that pile
up, at some point, the debt is overwhelming
and you go bankrupt.” With our shaky
computer systems, it is increasingly looking
like payback time. ❚

Edd Gent is a freelance writer
based in Bangalore, India.
He tweets @eddythegent